note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) food guide for war service at home prepared under the direction of the united states food administration in co-operation with the united states department of agriculture and the bureau of education with a preface by herbert hoover united states food administrator [illustration: reproduced by courtesy of national geographic society] announcement in the spring of the collegiate section of the united states food administration was called upon to prepare a simple statement of the food situation as affected by the war, suitable for elementary and high school teachers, high-school pupils, and the general public. the demand arose because of the wide adoption of the three courses on this subject then being sent out weekly to universities, colleges, and normal schools throughout the country. this little volume is the response to that request. it was written by katharine blunt, of the university of chicago, frances l. swain, of the chicago normal school, and florence powdermaker, of the united states department of agriculture. the records of the food administration have been open to the writers and they have had the advice and criticism of its officials and specialists. no effort has been spared to secure accuracy of statement in the text. olin templin, director of the collegiate section. july , . preface the long war has brought hunger to europe; some of her peoples stand constantly face to face with starvation. all agriculture has been seriously interfered with. food production has been lessened to the point of danger. millions of men who had given all their time and energy to raising food have been killed; more millions are still fighting; other millions have gone from the farms into the great war-factories. women, too, have been drafted from the fields and home gardens into the factories and to replace the absent men in a host of occupations. great stretches of once fertile land have been temporarily ruined by the scourge of war; some are still under falling shot and shell. belgium and france have lost millions of acres of productive land to the enemy. the fertilizers necessary for keeping up the production of the land still available are lacking. all this means that the allies have to rely on the outside for the maintenance of their food-supply. but because ships are fewer than they were, and because many of them must carry troops and munitions exclusively, these ships cannot be sent on voyages longer than absolutely necessary to find and bring back the needed food. they cannot afford to go the long time-consuming way to australia and back; but few of them can be let go to india and the argentine. they must carry food by the shortest routes. the shortest is from north america to england and france. therefore by far the greater part of the food provided for the allies from the outside must come from us. as a matter of fact more than per cent of this outside food for the allies does now come from north america. and that is a great deal. it is very much more than we ever sent them before. also we are sending more and more food overseas for our own growing armies in france and our growing fleets in european waters. to meet all this great food need in europe--and meeting it is an imperative military necessity--we must be very careful and economical in our food use here at home. we must eat less; we must waste nothing; we must equalize the distribution of what food we may retain for ourselves; we must prevent extortion and profiteering which make prices so high that the poor cannot buy the food they actually need; and we must try to produce more food by planting more wheat and other grain, raising more cattle and swine and sheep, and making gardens everywhere. to help the people of america do all these things, and to coordinate their efforts, the president and congress created the united states food administration. the food administration, therefore, asks all the people to help feed the allies that they may continue to fight, to help feed the hungry in belgium and other starving lands that they may continue to live, and to help feed our own sailors and soldiers so that they may want nothing. it asks help, also, in its great task of preventing prices from going too high and of stabilizing them, and of keeping the flow of distribution even, so that all our people, rich and poor alike, may be able to obtain the food they need. for all this there is needed a "food education" of all our people. every home in our broad land must be reached. one of the most effective ways of accomplishing this is by getting information to the children of the nation about food and the possibilities and methods of its most wise and economical use. to obtain this result we must get this information into the hands of parents and teachers. for the purpose of diffusing this information this little book has been prepared under the direction of the food administration. by following the suggestions for food conservation herein contained every one can render his country an important war service. i am sure that all will be glad to do this. herbert hoover. contents chapter i. the wheat situation the world's supply of wheat--wheat in the united states--meeting the wheat shortage chapter ii. the war-time importance of wheat and other cereals the significance of different kinds of food--the social importance of cereals, especially wheat--wheat flour in war-time--the - rule. another way to cut the consumption of wheat--substitutes for wheat flour chapter iii. war bread the bakers' regulations. victory bread--the individual's answer to the bread cry--flour and bread in the allied countries--why we in the united states do not have bread cards chapter iv. the meat situation where europe's meat has been produced--the war and the european meat-supply--the meat rations of europe--the part of the united states--meat conservation--meat and other protein foods--the meat substitutes chapter v. fats the situation abroad--the situation in the united states chapter vi. sugar why is there a sugar shortage?--the effect of the shortage--in place of sugar--the price of sugar--to cut down on sugar chapter vii. milk--for the nation's health the valuable constituents of milk--our milk problem--our milk abroad chapter viii. vegetables and fruits in the war diet--canning and drying vegetables and fruits conclusion a few references index chapter i the wheat situation wheat is as much a war necessity as ammunition--wheat is a war weapon. to produce it and distribute it where it is needed and in sufficient quantities is the most serious food problem of the allied world. the continent of europe, with her devastated fields, can raise but a small fraction of the wheat she needs, and ships are so few that she cannot import it from many of the usual sources. not one of the warring european countries has escaped serious suffering, and the neutral countries have suffered with them. the world's supply of wheat france, always an agricultural nation, was the most nearly self-sustaining of the western allies. now one-third of her wheat-fields are barren. thousands of her acres have been taken by the enemy, or are in no man's land. much of the land that has been fought over these past four years is now hopeless for farming, and will be for years to come. even the territory still under cultivation cannot be expected to yield large returns, for laborers, tools, and fertilizers are lacking. the men who have left the fields to fight have been replaced chiefly by women, children, and old men, while furloughed soldiers at times help to bring in the crops. to get adequate return from the soil which has been tilled for centuries, tons of fertilizer are necessary. fertilizers are an absolute necessity, and nitrates, one of the most important of them, can no longer be imported from chile. the work-animals have been driven off by the enemy or slaughtered for want of food, and mechanics are lacking to repair and replace the worn-out farm-machinery. as a result of this, in france raised only enough wheat to supply per cent of her need, instead of per cent, as in pre-war years. in england the situation is not much better. unlike france, england has always imported far more wheat than she raised. but now through vigorous effort she alone of all the european countries has increased her cereal production so that it has actually been doubled. being free from the devastation of war at home, she has been able to convert the great lawns of her parks and country estates into grain-fields. english women of all classes, an army of half a million, are working on the land. at the same time the consumption of wheat has been reduced. even yet, however, the home-grown supply in england is only one-fourth of the wheat required. in belgium the devastation is so complete that the women, children, and old people left there would die of famine if food were not sent to them. two and a half million belgians daily stand in line waiting for food to be doled out to them. the united states must supply three-fourths of the wheat contained in their meagre bread ration. in italy, too, the condition is serious, for she produces far less than she needs, despite every effort of her government to stimulate production. [illustration: wheat fields of the world] germany and austria-hungary have not escaped universal suffering from lack of wheat. germany before the war was a wheat-importing country, and austria-hungary was able to supply herself with wheat, but had none to export. their war crops have been below normal, and even the wheat taken from conquered territory has not been sufficient to prevent severe shortage, resulting in bread riots in industrial centres. the imports of wheat into both the allied and enemy european countries to supplement the wheat of their own raising came in peace-times from seven countries--russia, roumania, australia, the united states, canada, argentina, and india. most of these have now failed as a source of supply. russia and roumania were the great wheat-bins of europe. they produced as much wheat as the united states, and sometimes more, and they were always able to make up or nearly make up the deficiencies of western europe. russia and roumania are now themselves on the verge of famine. even before their own situation became so desperate, they could get little wheat to the western allies, because the enemy territory and the battle-lines made a great wall of separation. australia and india both continue to grow large crops of wheat, and have a surplus in storage, but it cannot be sent to europe because of lack of ships. australia has wheat stored from her last three crops. the argentine had very poor crops in and , and although the crop is good, it is scarcely more available to europe than australia's wheat. so the wheat scarcity is not a question only of the amount of wheat in the world. it is a problem of getting it where it is needed--wheat plus ships. not a single ship must go farther than is absolutely necessary. a glance at the map shows why wheat for europe should come from north america rather than from australia or india, or even the argentine. the trip from australia is three times as long as from north america, so it takes only one-third as many ships to carry food to europe from the united states as from australia. the argentine is twice as far from europe as the united states, and therefore twice as many ships are needed to carry an equal amount of argentine food to europe. if this continent could produce and save enough next year to provide the whole of the allied food necessities, we could save , , tons of world shipping to be used for other purposes. every ship saved is a ship built to carry more men and more ammunition to france. wheat in the united states the united states has never had a large wheat surplus to export, and the last few years it has had an unusually low supply to meet the extraordinary demand. the crop was small. the crop was only four-fifths of normal, little more than we ordinarily consume ourselves. we entered the last harvest with our stocks of wheat and other cereals practically exhausted. hence to feed the allies until the harvest, we had to send wheat which we should ordinarily have eaten. all that we could send under normal conditions from july, , to july, , has usually been estimated at about , , bushels, but in the first eleven months of this time we actually did send , , bushels, six times as much as we could have shipped without conservation. one-half of the total output of our flour-mills in the month of may, , went abroad. this achievement in feeding the allies has been made possible and will continue to be possible, through the measures of economy and substitution established by the food administration, and the constant and continued personal sacrifice of each one of us. even the wheat crop, successful as it promises to be, will not mean freedom from saving. throughout the war there can be no relaxation. we must build up a great national reserve in years of good harvest for the greater and greater demands of europe. never again must we let ourselves and the world face the danger that was before us in the spring of . meeting the wheat shortage to keep wheat constantly going over to our allies and sufficient stores in the united states at the same time, is one of the big problems of the food administration. production has had to be increased and consumption decreased. the price has had to be kept down, for in a time of shortage prices always tend to go up. it is true that high prices furnish one method of decreasing the consumption of food, but it is a method that means enforced conservation by the poor and no conservation by the rich. the burden thus falls on those least able to bear it. to meet this situation the food administration has gone into the wheat business itself. practically entire control of the buying and selling of wheat is in the hands of the great united states food administration grain corporation. through this organization all wheat sales are made to the army and navy, to our allies, and to the neutrals. the price which it pays for these huge quantities sets the price for the entire country. the food administration also makes the movement of wheat from the farmer to the miller and to the wholesaler as simple and direct as possible. it prevents hoarding and speculation. "i am convinced," said mr. hoover, in april, , "that at no time in the last three years has there been as little speculation in the nation's food as there is to-day." [illustration: cost of a pound loaf of bread] as a result of this business management of wheat, the consumer pays less for flour, although the farmer gets more for his wheat. in may, , the difference between the price of the farmer's wheat and of the flour made from it was $ . per barrel of pounds. fifteen months later the difference was cents. in february, , before the united states went into the war, flour sold at wholesale for $ . a barrel. in may, , the war, with no food control, had driven the price up to $ . but in february, , after six months of the food administration, it had gone down to $ . wholesale, and this in spite of unprecedented demand for our very short supply. without control, flour would undoubtedly be selling for $ a barrel. during the civil war, with no world wheat shortage, but without food control, the price of wheat increased per cent over the price in . the milling and sale of flour, the baking of bread, and the purchases of the individual are all regulated to a greater extent than would have scarcely been thought possible before the war. every effort has been made to produce a great wheat-crop. congress, at the time the food control bill was passed, fixed the price of the wheat at a minimum of $ per bushel, and the president later fixed the price at $ . . this has been high enough to encourage the farmer to increase his crop and not too high to be fair to the consumer. the department of agriculture, during the winter of - , had for its slogan, "a billion-bushel crop for ." it has worked intensively to help the farmer in selecting and testing seed and in fighting destructive insects and plant-diseases, and in every way to help him grow more wheat. constant reliance has been placed on the individual's intelligence and patriotism in wheat-saving. one of the unusual aspects of the food administration is its confidence in the co-operation of the country and the response which this confidence has met. wheatless meals are now a commonplace occurrence. wheatless days are being observed in many hotels and homes. people all over the country have pledged themselves to do entirely without wheat until the harvest is available. about , barrels of flour were returned by individuals and companies during the spring of , to be shipped to the allies and the army and navy. the individual all over the country, consumer, dealer, miller, or farmer, has risen to the occasion to do his share toward the fulfilment of the government's promise to europe. chapter ii the war-time importance of wheat and other cereals when the united states was called on to supply the allies with much of its wheat and flour, we fortunately found at hand a plentiful supply of a great variety of other cereals. the use of corn was, of course, not an experiment--generations of southerners have flourished on it. but we also had oats, rice, barley, rye, buckwheat, and such local products as the grain sorghums, which are grown in the south and west. all of them are cereals and all can be used interchangeably with wheat in our diet. to understand clearly the value of cereals in the diet to-day, it is well to review the part played by food in general. europe to-day is eating to live. she therefore thinks of food not in terms of menus but as a means of keeping up bodily functions, as sources of protein, carbohydrate and fat--terms seldom heard outside of the university a few years ago. the significance of different kinds of food we need food first of all to burn as fuel for all the activities of the body, just as any other machine needs fuel. the fuel value of food, or its energy, is measured in _calories_. a calorie measures the amount of heat or energy given off when anything burns, whether it is coal in a stove or food in the body. practically all foods give this fuel or energy, but some give much more than others. fats give more fuel than an equal weight of any other food. sugar and foods rich in starch like flour and corn meal are fuel foods. this is one of the reasons why they are chosen to be shipped abroad. the cereals always supply an important part of the fuel of the diet. watery foods, like many vegetables and fruits, normally give less fuel. a person could not live on lettuce any better than a house could be heated with tissue paper. if the food does not supply enough energy, a person will burn up part of his own body for fuel and will grow emaciated. far too often we find children of the very poor who are undernourished because of lack of food fuel. sometimes even well-to-do young people half starve themselves because they get "notions" about food. one of the terrible tragedies abroad is the hundreds and thousands of men and women and children who are worn and thin and sick for lack of food. we need food, too, to keep the organs of the body running smoothly. abroad, people are suffering not only because they have not enough food, but because they have not the right kinds of food. milk and vegetables and fruits are especially useful. they are the chief sources of the much-needed _mineral salts_ and the two _vitamines_. the vitamines are substances of great importance about which has centred much discussion lately and which scientists do not yet fully understand, though they realize that they are essential for the growth of children and for health in adults. the _protein_ of food is used to build the body if we are young, and to restore the daily wear and tear if we are older. the mineral salts are also necessary for this purpose. protein will be discussed further in the chapter on meat and meat substitutes, but it should be realized here that the protein we eat comes not only from these foods, but also from the cereals. cereals supply a full half of the protein of many diets. cereals are therefore important for their fuel since they are rich in starch, and for their protein, and, if we eat the entire kernel, for their mineral matter and vitamines. they also have the pleasant flavor and texture which we have grown to like. wheat is no better than any of the other cereals. it possesses absolutely no nutritional advantage for man or beast over oats, corn, and rye. it has no more protein, and no better protein. it has no more fat and no better fat. it has no better mineral salts and in no larger amounts. it has no more fuel or better fuel. it is just _one_ of the cereals, and there is not the slightest evidence that it is the best one. it has merely become one of our habits. corn and wheat and the other cereals are just as well digested if equally well prepared. a soggy piece of wheat bread may, of course, be less readily digestible than a well-made piece of corn-bread, but that is a question of skill in cooking, not of difference in cereals. complaints have been heard in england about the war bread. it is true that it may be hard on those of frail digestive powers to change their food habits in any way, but hutchison, an eminent london physician, in tracing down complaints, found that frequently people laid to the new bread ailments from which they had suffered before the war. "when in doubt, blame the war bread," seemed to be the motto. the social importance of cereals, especially wheat the world eats more cereals than any other kind of food. they are so widely available, so cheap and nutritious, that they are a main reliance of the human race. a shortage is always extremely serious. not only is an abundance important, but an abundance of the accustomed kind. in parts of india, the inhabitants use rice as almost the only cereal. when the rice-crop failed some years ago, thousands of people died of starvation with a supply of wheat available. they did not know the use of wheat as food. countries like france, which use their cereals chiefly for bread, are the most dependent on wheat, since wheat is the most easily made into bread. in the united states cereals make up almost one-third of our food. although wheat in most parts of the country has been the main dependence, we have used a much greater variety of cereals than most people, so that it is comparatively simple for the majority to make increased use of them. the very poor must depend largely upon cereals because they can get more for their money from them than from other foods. cereals, to most of them, mean bread. it is such a large part of their diet that doing without it means a far more fundamental and difficult change in their food habits than for the well-to-do with greater freedom of choice. besides, the already overburdened working woman must get her bread in the easiest possible way--a ready-made loaf from the baker. the burden of scarcity or high prices falls on those least able to bear it. europeans eat even larger amounts of wheat than we. over half the food of the french is bread, so if the wheat shortage were near the danger-line, it might lead to a serious weakening of the marvellous courage of the french people. wheat flour in war-time to use this country's share of the short supply of wheat to the greatest advantage the food administration has changed the making of flour to include more of the wheat-kernel. the difference between peace and war time flour is easily understood if the structure of grains is considered. wheat and other cereals have kernels much alike; all have three principal parts: the outer covering, called _bran_, is made up of several layers. this is rich in important mineral salts, and the rest is largely cellulose, or woody fibre. the _germ_ is the small part from which the new plant will develop. here the small amount of fat in the kernel is stored. the largest part of the kernel, called the _endosperm_, contains the nourishment to be used by the plant as it begins to develop. this is mostly starch, with some protein. it is the part of the wheat, for instance, which is chiefly used to make our white flour. the kind of flour made depends on how much and what parts of the kernel are used. graham flour is manufactured by grinding practically all of the wheat-kernel--a -per-cent use of the grain, called -per-cent extraction. some people still fail to realize that graham flour and graham bread are wheat, perhaps because of the different name and brown color. the so-called "whole-wheat" flour is often per cent of the kernel only, but may be as little as per cent, depending on the amount of the bran and germ removed in the making. ordinary white flour contains the endosperm alone, with practically none of the bran and germ. some brands before the war used up as little as per cent of the wheat, leaving the rest of it to be turned into lower-grade flours and cattle-feed. white flour thus uses less of the wheat for human food than graham or whole-wheat flour. yet to convert all the country's wheat into graham flour would not be a wheat-saving measure, because it is not so well suited to our trade conditions. graham flour, for one thing, does not keep so well as flour of lower extractions, as the fat in the germ may become rancid in a comparatively short time. flour in this country is often thirty days or longer in transit and may be months in warehouses, stores, and homes. a flour to be satisfactory under extreme conditions here or for shipment abroad must keep at least six months--too long to be sure that graham flour will keep. in small countries like england, where flour is used up more promptly, a high extraction is more practicable than in the united states. moreover, while graham and whole-wheat flours with their larger quantities of mineral salts are a more desirable food for some people than white flour, they are occasionally irritating to people with weak digestions, so that it would be unfortunate to have only these flours on the market. the food administration, therefore, has considered that the most effective use of our wheat could be obtained by forbidding the manufacture of fancy flours of low extraction and making all flour contain at least per cent of the wheat. this still gives a fine white flour that keeps well and is difficult to distinguish from that on the market before the war. to help in the enforcement of its flour rulings, the food administration has licensed all mills and elevators which handle over barrels of flour a day. if the rulings of the food administration are not obeyed the license may be taken away, and the business closed. the hoarding of flour has been stopped by prohibiting mills, elevators, and bakers from having more than days' supply on hand. the - rule. another way to cut the consumption of wheat not only must the miller manufacture flour in accordance with new regulations, but the individual consumer must buy it under restrictions. to many people the first realization that war and food difficulties are necessarily associated, came with the announcement in the spring of of the now familiar rules for the purchase of flour. with every pound of white wheat flour, the purchaser must buy a pound of some other cereal; with every pound of graham flour, three-fifths of a pound of other cereal. the purpose of this regulation is, of course, to lessen the use of wheat by increasing the use of the substitutes. the housekeeper who through lack of initiative or ingenuity fails to feed the family the substitutes and lets them accumulate on her shelf has just so far failed to co-operate with the food administration. many a housewife has learned the value of these cereals and will continue to use them long after the war and the food administration have passed into history. a little thought will show the absence of any real burden in the - rule. a housekeeper for her family of four buys five pounds of wheat flour and five pounds of other cereals. she may use ¼ pounds of the substitutes with the pounds of wheat flour to make about pounds of victory bread--sufficient to give each member of her family pounds of bread during the week. she may serve an ounce of oatmeal as the breakfast cereal and an ounce of rice, hominy, or other cereal for each person daily and will then have used all the substitutes. these cereals can be made into an endless variety of quick breads, cakes, and pastry, or combined with other foods as the main dish of the meal. substitutes for wheat flour the cereals on the market are varied enough to suit any taste. remember that as far as nutritional value is concerned, it makes practically no difference whether we eat wheat or oats, rye or barley. the quantities of starch, protein, mineral matter, and fat are so nearly the same that any one of them can take the place of another. oatmeal has a slight advantage over wheat both in protein and fat, and since oats is an abundant crop in our country it is an excellent substitute. rice has a very little more starch and less protein than the others. there is just one advantage that wheat flour has over the other cereals--it can be made into lighter and more durable bread. the reason for this is given in the next chapter. _corn, the most abundant substitute._ indian corn is native to the united states. since it carried the pilgrims through their year of famine, it has always been considered our national grain. other countries have adopted it to some extent, but more than three quarters of the world's corn is grown here. in our corn crop was , , , bushels, four times as large as our wheat crop. most of the crop has always been used as a feed-grain, with only a small percentage for human food. the south has always used much more corn than the north, actually eating more corn than wheat. the foods from corn and the ways of using them are more numerous than is often appreciated. corn meal and corn flour are the most important. we are making almost as much corn meal as wheat flour. the yellow and white corn meals, milled from different kinds of corn, are practically the same in composition, though slightly different in flavor. the method of milling corn meal makes more difference in the composition than the kind of corn used. the old "water-ground" meal was simply crushed between millstones and only the coarsest particles of bran bolted out. this ranks with graham as a product of per cent extraction and like graham, it may not keep well, because the germ is left in. the new process, more like modern flour-milling, removes some of the bran and germ. the product is a granulated corn meal which keeps better than the other, and has practically the same composition, though to some people a less desirable flavor. if corn meal is further ground and bolted, we have corn flour. some of this has been put on the market lately and is proving a good substitute for wheat flour; but the amount available is only a small fraction of the amount of corn meal. other important corn products are hominy of different kinds, hulled corn, and popcorn. the latter, usually eaten as an "extra," is really a valuable part of the diet. corn is the same satisfactory food whether it is eaten as mush in new england, _polenta_ in italy, or _tamales_ in mexico. many of the people of mexico and central america live on corn and beans to a surprising extent. in portions of italy the rural population have adopted the grain as their main food. our corn-meal mush is their _polenta_, which is served sometimes with cheese, sometimes with tomato sauce or meat gravy. _oats_. an englishman once taunted a scotchman with the fact that while england used oats only for her horses, scotland fed it to her men. "ah!" said sandy; "but where will you find such horses as you raise in england and such men as in scotland!" the united states, more like england than scotland, has used oats mostly for feed. the crop is second only to the corn-crop. oats are eaten in the form of oatmeal, which is a finely granulated meal, and as the common rolled oats which have been steamed and put through rollers. there is little oat flour on the market at present. a successful and palatable home-made flour may be prepared by putting rolled oats through a food-chopper. any of the forms of oats can be used in breads of all kinds, but the more finely ground flour can be substituted in larger proportion. the demand for oat products has grown so rapidly the last year that mills are running to their limit. special machinery is required for its manufacture, so that a great increase in the supply is not feasible in a short time. _barley and rye_. in using barley and rye for bread we are only going back to the methods of our forefathers. barley is supposed to be one of the first cereals used by man. good barley flour is a very acceptable substitute for wheat, but if too large a proportion of the kernel is included, it may be bitter in flavor. _rye_, of all the cereals, makes bread nearest like wheat, though the rye bread formerly made usually contained from per cent to per cent wheat flour. the supply is far below what we could well use. for this reason it is not included among the cereals which the housekeeper is allowed to buy on the - plan, and since march , , bakers have not been allowed to use it as a substitute in baking on the same basis as the other substitutes. _rice_. rice forms the chief food of hundreds of millions of people, and in many oriental countries is the staple cereal, like wheat with us. as a wheat substitute we may use it cooked whole or ground into a flour. the rice flour may be mixed with other cereals in making bread and cakes. the rice polish, which is a by-product secured by rubbing off with brushes the outside coating of the brown rice, is much cheaper. it has been sold chiefly for stock-feed, but it has possibilities as a flour substitute. the rice-growers of the south are doing their best to supply the country with rice in quantity and to make known the possibilities of this cereal. the rice flour supply, though not large now, will doubtless be much increased by next year. one louisiana mill, for example, is increasing its output from to , barrels a day. _other cereal substitutes_. besides the substitutes which are common all over the country, there are products produced in too small amounts to make them universal substitutes, such as buckwheat, cottonseed meal, and peanut flour, any of which can be used with other flours for baking. the southwest produces both flour and meal from milo, kaffir, and feterita. flours are made from the irish and sweet potato, from tapioca, from soy beans, and bananas, but they are manufactured in such small amounts that they do not take the place of wheat to any great extent. potato flour comes nearest to doing this. it has always been used to some extent in europe and it is being widely used in germany now. potato itself can be used instead of wheat. an extra potato at a meal will take the place of a large slice of bread. many of the substitute cereals do not keep so well as wheat, especially if they contain more than a minimum of moisture and fat. the housekeeper and the baker should therefore buy them in small enough quantities to use them up promptly and should keep them in a cool, well-ventilated place. may and june and the summer months are the time when most care is needed. it is the free use of these many wholesome substitutes that is making possible the necessary saving of wheat. we who appreciate their wholesomeness and their value can well break away from our wheat habit and gladly make the little effort sometimes necessary to begin using newer foods. chapter iii war bread bread is the staff of life for all nations. but "bread" does not necessarily mean the wheat loaf. at one time and place it has been barley cake, at another oaten cake, and at another corn pone. bread has always been whatever cereal happened to be convenient. even such unbreadlike food as rice is to some races what bread is to us. why, then, have we developed our wheat-bread habit? partly because wheat bread has been easy to get and we have grown to like the taste, but chiefly because wheat flour gives the lightest loaf. to understand why, make a dough with a little white flour and water and then gently knead it in cold water. the consistency changes, the starch is washed out and a rubbery, sticky ball is left--the _gluten_, which is the protein of the wheat. it is this gluten in the flour that stretches when bread rises and then stiffens when it is baked, making a light, porous loaf. wheat is the only one of the cereals that has much gluten; rye has a little and the others practically none. gluten seems to be essential to the making of a light, yeast-raised loaf. products raised with baking-powder, for which our standard of lightness is different--"quick breads" like biscuits and muffins and cakes--do not require the gluten and can easily be made from substitute cereals. but for our ordinary loaf of bread, at least some wheat seems to be almost essential, though with skill in the making, rye can be made to serve in its place. patriotic bakers and housewives all over the country have been trying to produce a wheatless loaf which is light, palatable, and sufficiently durable to stand transportation. the durability is a very important consideration; crumbly corn bread cannot be distributed by bakers nor served to armies. corn bread and the other quick breads are chiefly home-made products. our present problem, therefore, is to make the most effective possible use of our wheat gluten, to make it go as far as possible in our breads. both bakers and private individuals have their share in solving the problem. the bakers' regulations. victory bread the bakers have co-operated loyally. probably no other food industry has been more vitally affected by the war. all bakers using three or more barrels of flour a month have been licensed and so are under the control of the food administration. this means practically all the commercial bakers of the country, and many hotels, clubs, and institutions. about two-fifths of the bread in the united states is made in bakeries and three-fifths in the home. the bakeries have used , , barrels of flour each year, so the importance of this field for conservation is plain. the amount of wheat flour they are now permitted to have has been reduced: at present per cent of their last year's quantity, or, if they are pastry and cracker bakers, per cent. they must make no bread wholly of wheat flour. some substitute must be mixed with the wheat. when the regulation went into effect in february, , per cent was required and later, per cent. in pies and cakes there must be at least one-third substitute. the amounts of sugar and fat used are limited. even the sizes of the loaves are fixed, so that the extravagance of making and handling all sorts of fancy shapes and sizes may be avoided. bread must not be sold to the retailer at unreasonable prices. victory bread is bread made in accordance with these regulations. the name "victory" was chosen as representing the idea underlying the conservation of wheat. the name is really a present to the food administration, having been used by two large firms who gave up all rights to their trade-mark. hotels and restaurants are required to make or serve bread containing at least as much of the wheat substitutes as victory bread. they may not serve more than two ounces of bread and other wheat products to a guest at a meal. many of them have recently promised to use no wheat at all till the next harvest. that means, of course, that only through intelligent effort can they serve yeast bread. the individual's answer to the bread cry until the wheat-supply increases and the food administration lessens restrictions, use no wheat at all if you can possibly do without. remember that you can make delicious muffins and other quick breads from the substitute flours. and you need no bread at all at some meals. an extra potato or a serving of rice can be eaten instead of the usual two slices of bread and the body will be supplied with the same amount of energy. do not be the slave of old food habits. when all europe is eating to keep alive, fastidiousness and food "notions" must play no part in the dietary. some people find it is almost impossible to do without the baker's loaf. hundreds in crowded city quarters have no facilities of their own for baking. women doing their share in factories and workshops cannot get up earlier to make corn bread for breakfast. victory bread must be saved for them. for households which must use wheat, the food administration has fixed a voluntary ration of ½ pounds of wheat per week for each person. this includes wheat in the form of bread, pastry, macaroni, crackers, noodles, and breakfast foods. all who can should do more than their share--they must do their utmost to make up for those whose circumstances prevent them from doing it. the interests and desires of each of us in this war can be translated into service in no more effective way than by conforming our food habits to the needs of the hour. flour and bread in the allied countries all the allied countries have been stretching their meagre wheat-supply to the limit and are enforcing the most stringent regulations. the flour is required to be of high extraction--ordinarily from per cent to per cent, decidedly higher than our per cent. even with this coarse, gray flour a large percentage of substitute must be mixed, usually per cent. in england there are local regulations on the use of mashed potato in bread. their bread must be twelve hours old before it is sold, so that people will not be tempted to eat too much. the result is seldom palatable. in france no flour at all may be used to make the delectable pastries and cakes which have long been the delight of the french people and their guests. in italy, macaroni, which in many regions is as much the "staff of life" as bread, must contain per cent substitute, and in some places may not be manufactured at all. both england and france have subsidized bread; the government has set a price below cost and itself makes up the difference to the baker. england has appropriated $ , , for the purpose. bread rations are in force in both france and italy. france has recently put her whole people on a rigorous ration which limits them to two-thirds of the amount of bread that they have been accustomed to. remember that bread is a far more important part of the french diet than of ours. even children under three have bread cards allowing them ½ ounces a day. rations are not a guarantee that the amount mentioned will be forthcoming; they only permit one to have it if it can be obtained. one interesting result of the stringency, according to an american officer writing from paris, is that guests even at formal dinners, may be asked to bring their own bread, finding this postscript on their invitations: "apportez un peu de pain si vous le voulez."[ ] in italy the very limited bread rations are fixed locally. [footnote : "bring a little bread if you wish it."] england has compulsory rations for meat and butter or margarine and sugar, but not for bread. her bread system is voluntary like ours, but much more detailed. the voluntary ration allows one-half pound of bread a day for sedentary and unoccupied women and larger allowances up to a little over a pound for men doing heavy labor. waste of any kind is very heavily punished--one woman was fined $ for throwing away stale bread. "why not send corn abroad?" one hears the question over and over again. the answers are many. in the first place, we _are_ sending corn over--our exports of corn during march, , increased per cent and of corn meal per cent over the pre-war average. this they are using as we are using it in our victory bread. but they must have enough wheat to make a durable loaf of bread at the bakeshops, where for generations all the baking has been done. the french housewife has no facilities for bread-making and the french woman does not know how and has not the time to learn. she is doing a man's work and her own woman's labor besides, and the extra unaccustomed labor of bread-making cannot be added to her burdens. why we in the united states do not have bread cards some people, disturbed either selfishly or patriotically by the failure of a neighbor to conserve wheat, have asked why the food administration trusts to voluntary methods, why it does not ration the country. rationing may come yet, but any such system bristles with difficulties. the cost to the government has been variously estimated all the way from $ , , to $ , , a year. fifty per cent of the population could not be restrained in their consumption by rationing, for they are either producers or live in intimate contact with the producer. a wheat ration which would be fair for the north might actually increase the consumption in the south. finally, the burden of a bread card would fall largely not on the well-to-do, who eat less wheat already and can easily cut down further, but on those with little to spend, who might have to change their whole food habits. the success that is meeting our method of voluntary reduction of consumption "will be one of the remembered glories of the american people in this titanic struggle." chapter iv the meat situation meat shortage is not a war problem only. we had begun to talk of it long before the war, and we shall find it with us after peace is declared. great production of beef can take place only in sparse settlements. as the tide of increasing population flows over a country, the great cattle-ranges are crowded out, giving place to cultivated fields. more people means less room for cattle--a relative or even absolute decrease in the herds. where europe's meat has been produced in spite of their crowded territory, the majority of european countries have raised most of their meat themselves, though usually they have had to import fodder to keep up their herds. they have been less dependent on import for meat than for wheat. great britain is the only country which has imported much meat--almost one-half her supply. her imports, and to a lesser extent those of other european countries, have come chiefly from denmark and russia in europe, and from six countries outside--the united states, canada, argentina, uruguay, australia, and new zealand. the war and the european meat-supply imports of both animals and fodder are interrupted. with meat as with wheat, the great shortage is due to lack of ships. australia and new zealand, and to a lesser extent south america, are cut off. fodder such as cottonseed press-cake cannot be shipped in large amounts as it takes three times as much shipping to transport feed as it does the meat made by the animals from it. denmark's supply of animals to great britain has practically stopped, because of her own shortage, and because much of what she has goes to germany. the european herds have been cut down. every one of the warring countries has fewer meat animals now than before the war. there were roughly , , animals less in europe at the end of than in . many of those left are in very poor condition, so that the shortage is even more serious than is indicated by the falling off in numbers. belgium, serbia, and roumania are in the worst condition. practically all the animals in those countries have been killed or confiscated by the invading german and austrian armies. this is one cause of their terrible famine conditions. the united kingdom, france, and italy have also lost seriously. france is the greatest loser of the three, with more than one-fifth of her herds gone. the enemy has driven off large numbers of her cattle. she, like the others, is in difficulty not only for meat, but for milk. her situation is complicated by the fact that she has no great cold-storage plants like ours, and so must get meat-supplies at frequent intervals. before the war germany was much better prepared than the allies in that she had many more animals in proportion to her population than they. but she was more dependent upon imports of feed, and as her commerce has been cut off, she has had to kill her animals faster. counting up all her animals in terms of cattle according to the amount of meat they would yield, shows a loss of over one-third. for austria, there are no available figures, but her decrease has probably been larger than germany's. meat shortage is not a problem by itself, but is closely connected with the shortage of available grain. when cereals are short, they must be fed to human beings rather than to animals. feeding grain to animals and then eating the animals is not nearly so economical as eating grain directly. for example, when grain is fed to a cow, only ½ per cent of the energy of the grain is turned into meat or fat, and per cent is burned up by the cow in its own daily living. when a man eats the grain directly, he uses at least per cent of its energy. thus ½ per cent more of the grain is actually used for human food. so europe to-day has to sacrifice her herds, and uses grain for bread instead of turning it into meat. alongside this shortage has come an increased demand for meat for the great armies. the soldier's ration always contains more meat than is eaten by the civilian population. the meat rations of europe the shortage has compelled vigorous control of consumption in order to make the distribution as nearly fair as possible. compulsory meat rations are enforced in all the warring countries. they vary, of course, from time to time as the amount of available meat changes, but the following statements give a picture of how limited the allowances are in periods of shortage. england did not suffer for lack of meat at the outset of the war. her voluntary ration (november, ) was generous, pounds per week. in the beginning of the supply was very low, and by the end of february london was put on meat rations, and in april the rest of the country. the rationing system has made distribution easier and more fair and greatly lessened the distressing "queues" of people waiting before butchers' shops for their allowance. the regulations allow each person coupons a week. children under are on half-rations. at first, of these coupons could buy pence' worth of beef, pork, or mutton, and one had to be used for a limited amount of bacon, ham, poultry, or game. the total amounted to about ¼ pounds of meat a week. because of the increased amount of bacon and ham which the united states was able to send in the late spring, heavy workers were permitted in may extra coupons, for which they might buy a pound of bacon. boys between and years were allowed extra coupon for bacon, poultry, or game. but at the same time only instead of coupons were to be used for fresh meat, so as to cut down further the slaughtering of cattle. heavy fines are imposed for wasting food or profiteering. in the restaurants the meat portions are about a fifth of the size of those served in an american hotel. an american staying in london said recently that he could eat two meals in succession in a london restaurant, and leave the table still minus that self-satisfied feeling that a meal in america gives. at first france used meatless days instead of rations, and in the spring of went back to meatless days. high prices also keep down consumption. in july, , there were meatless days, and cattle could not be slaughtered on the preceding days. though this order was abolished in october, , meat had gone up so high in price that consumption went away down. the paris letter of the london _daily news_ and _leader_ on february , , says that rump steak was selling for shillings pence--$ per pound. since may , days a week must be meatless--wednesday, thursday, and friday. on these days all butchers' shops are closed. horse meat may be sold, but no poultry or game. fish is scarce and very expensive. italy has meatless days, formerly , and since may, , . the ration and the number of cattle to be slaughtered are decided locally and strictly regulated. the central powers probably have the lowest meat ration. the quantities allowed vary in different parts of the country, but the average in germany has been about ounces a week per person. it was reported that this was reduced to ounces in the middle of may--barely two small servings each week. the part of the united states as with wheat, meat for europe must come chiefly from the united states and canada, since ships are few and the atlantic the shortest route. the extra demand upon us is to offset the loss from inaccessible markets and the depleted herds in europe. the united states is now exporting far larger quantities than it has ever exported before. in march, , we sent over , , pounds of beef. ordinarily we export between , , and , , pounds a month. of pork we sent , , pounds--six times more than usual. it is roughly estimated that it is necessary to send , , pounds of meat and meat products of all kinds abroad weekly to the allies and our army. to buy and sell this huge and unusual quantity of meat, a careful organization has been necessary. at first the allied nations bought meat in this country as best they could in competition with the domestic market and each other, often feverishly to meet emergencies. last december a commission was formed to buy for all the allies. the prices to be paid are settled by experts, after careful study, so that packers, storage warehouses, and producers shall all have adequate, but not excessive return for their labor. the buying is planned ahead so that we can ship at times when we have plenty. the meat which we are shipping now is coming in part from an increased slaughter of cattle and hogs, a condition which may have serious consequences in reducing our reserve. the need for conservation is constant, though at times the situation becomes easier in one kind of meat or another. in the summer of we were short on hogs. in the spring of , thanks to the "keep-a-pig" movement and vigorous conservation, as well as high prices, we temporarily had hogs in plenty. beef is short for the summer season. policies must change frequently with fluctuating supplies and varying demands from europe. however, the export demand for our forces and the allies is limited only by shipping capacity, and it may be that we shall have a still larger demand at the war's end which will tax any reserve which we can possibly accumulate. meat conservation meat does not play nearly so important a part in the world's dietary as we are accustomed to think. there is no comparison, in the quantity consumed, between meat and bread, or even meat and sugar or potatoes. half of the people of the earth eat little or none of it. only in two kinds of communities is meat used largely--new and thinly populated countries with much grazing-land, or wealthy industrial countries. australia and new zealand are of the first type, consuming more meat per person than any other country in the world-- pounds a week in australia and pounds in new zealand. the united states, parts of which may be considered in both classes, eats about ¼ pounds per person weekly. this is much less than some years ago, when there was more grazing-land. great britain, because it could afford to import it, used about ¼ pounds a week before the war. germany's consumption was slightly lower. france, denmark, switzerland, with fewer animals or less wealth, are small meat-eaters, the average amount being about ½ pounds a week--about half as much as our consumption. meat and other protein foods meat is eaten partly because of its pleasant flavor and partly because it is a source of protein which is necessary to build or renew the various parts of the body. every cell in the body contains it and needs a steady supply. meat is a valuable protein food, but so are plenty of others--fish, cheese, eggs, milk, dried beans, dried peas, nuts, cereals. cottage-cheese is the most nearly pure protein of anything that we eat. we can get protein just as satisfactorily from cheese and the other animal protein foods as from meat, and almost as satisfactorily from the vegetable protein foods. the old idea that meat is especially "strengthening" has no foundation. neither is one kind of meat less thoroughly digested than another. there is little danger in this country that our diet will fall too low in protein. many of us eat considerably more than we need. even those who must spend a dangerously limited amount on their diet, are not apt to be low in protein, for they often err on the side of spending an unwise proportion of their money on meat. most scientists now consider three ounces of carefully chosen protein per day a safe allowance for an average man. an average woman needs less. it is not at all difficult for an interested person to count up roughly whether he is eating more or less than this quantity. a small serving of lean meat or fish, about two inches square and three-quarters of an inch thick, contains about one-half ounce of protein. two eggs, a pint of milk, a quarter of a cup of cottage-cheese, an inch-and-a-quarter cube of american cheese, each have about this same amount. so does a cup and a half of baked beans or two and a half cups of cooked cereal or six half-inch slices of bread ( x ½ inches). a person eating six of these portions daily will of course have his three ounces of protein. a man moderate in his eating and patriotic in his saving of meat will probably find his consumption not far from this quantity. the meat substitutes _fish_. the possible supply of fish is practically unlimited, and much of it is little appreciated by us. we eat on the average only pounds apiece per year, though our meat consumption is pounds. the british and canadians use much more fish than we do-- and pounds respectively. the united states bureau of fisheries and many state colleges are constantly introducing new varieties, from shark down. we should learn to value the many kinds which are available, fresh, dried, and canned, not merely the few we happen to be used to. _eggs_ form a very valuable food not only for protein, but for mineral salts and vitamines as well. it is unfortunate that the price is often high, but it should be realized that expenditure for eggs makes expenditure for meat unnecessary. _poultry_ is not now listed as a meat substitute by the food administration because the supply has become very limited. _cheese_ is one of the best substitutes for meat. it represents most of the food value of a much greater bulk of milk, and its protein, fat, and mineral salts make it an important food. we in america are very slow to appreciate it. we are apt to use it in small quantity for its flavor rather than as a real food. we could well eat more of it, to the advantage both of the palatability and nutritive quality of our diet. _milk_, one of the most easily digested and simplest sources of protein in our diet and the most valuable of our foods, is discussed in chapter vii. _nuts_ are usually thought of as a luxury, but the amount of protein and fat they contain makes them really an important food. peanuts are usually classed with the nuts and are considered the most valuable nut-crop of the united states. they are growing so fast in importance that the acreage was increased per cent in . they are used for oil and for fodder as well as for human food. peanut-butter or a bag of peanuts is a good investment, but it should be counted as part of the necessary food, not eaten as an extra. the occasional indigestion following injudicious eating of cheese and nuts is probably often due to forgetting that they are very substantial foods and eating them at the end of an already sufficient meal. _peas and beans_ are taken up with the other vegetables in chapter viii. why do not the allies use these substitutes? mainly because they haven't them. dairy products are as scarce as meat. all the fish and beans and peas that they can get are being used. but it is not enough. their small meat ration must be maintained, and their armies as well as ours must have meat. keep it going over! chapter v fats to a person who has been in europe since the war began the question of the importance of fats is no longer debatable. having practically gone without them, he knows they are important. in germany it is the lack of fat that is the cause, perhaps, of the most discomfort and makes the german most dissatisfied with his rations. even when the diet was sufficient, it was not satisfactory if low in fat. this dependence on fat in the diet is due to several reasons, both physiological and psychological. some people, the japanese for example, habitually eat but little. but it is the habit of both europeans and americans to use considerable fat both on the table and in cooking. the taste of food is not so pleasing without it. their recipes almost all use fat in one form or another, so that when little or none is available, a change must be made in most of the methods of cooking. practically all food must be boiled, and is lacking in the flavor and texture to which we are accustomed. the food, no matter how nutritious it may be, will not taste good. fats are very concentrated food, a fact which gives them added value in war-time, making them the most economical food to ship. a pound of any fat gives ¼ times as much energy as a pound of sugar--the reason for the slogan "fats are fuel for fighters." soldiers engaged in the most strenuous physical activities need fuel for all the energy they expend. bacon, butter, all the forms of fat give them the most energy in the smallest weight of food. fats stave off the feeling of hunger longer than other foods because they pass more slowly from the stomach and delay the passage of foods eaten with them. a slice of bread and butter will "satisfy" one for a much longer time than a slice of bread and jelly, even though there is enough jelly to give exactly the same amount of fuel. in the countries in which there is a fat shortage, the appetite does not stay satisfied during the usual period between meals, even when the previous meal contained the customary amount of calories. the feeling of hunger is sometimes almost constant. certain fats are valuable for an entirely different reason. milk fat, either in the milk or as butter, beef fat which is a constituent of oleomargarine, the fat in the yolk of egg, all contain one of the vitamines needed by children in order to grow properly, and by grown people to keep in good health. lard and the vegetable fats and oils, like nut or vegetable margarine and cottonseed-oil, do not contain this substance, but if there is sufficient milk in the diet, there will be plenty of this "fat-soluble vitamine." in all other respects the fats are alike from a nutritional standpoint. one fat can replace another without harm. until the war came there was little need of knowing or bothering as to what kind of fats we ate, or of concerning ourselves with the fact that many more varieties were available than most of us used. now it does make a decided difference. our armies and those of the allies need fat, a great deal of it, and we must ship them the kind most suited to their purposes. we can use what the allies and the army do not need. the situation abroad there is a shortage of the animal fats, lard, butter, and oleomargarine for the same reasons, of course, that cause the meat shortage. england, particularly recently, has had very little, less even than the french and italians, who are not accustomed to using much. england was the largest butter importer in the world, getting her supply mostly from northwestern europe, denmark, russia, sweden, and holland. russia can no longer supply her. neither can the neutrals, who have been supplying germany under pressure; they need germany's coal. although the united states has increased her butter exports to the united kingdom, if our entire exports went to them, it would supply only per cent of the amount needed. to help the situation, england has greatly increased her manufacture of oleomargarine. oleo oil and vegetable oils are being imported in large quantities and now england uses twice as much margarine as butter. but even with the margarine to help out, there is but little to go around. the weekly ration of butter and margarine is one-fourth of a pound per person, and at times even that amount has not been available. in april an american newspaper man in london reported that he had forgotten what butter tasted like. it could only be obtained on the farms, and even those who made it were strictly limited in the amount that they could keep themselves. not even margarine could be served at luncheon or dinner. there were long queues in front of the shops before the distribution was better systematized. at present the total amount of fat in the diet is increased somewhat by the allowance of bacon and ham. in germany the fat shortage, has been so severe that, combined with the bread shortage, it has been the greatest cause of food riots. before the war the germans imported about half their supply, most of which is now cut off. of course, the vegetable oils from the united states and the tropics are not available. the neutrals have had to lessen their exports because of their own shortage, and the embargo which the united states laid on its exports of fats to neutrals. germany's inability to feed her animals has greatly curtailed her supply of animal fats. as a result the rations have been decreasing steadily in spite of every effort. bones are collected and the fat extracted. seeds, such as those of the sunflower, and the kernels of fruit have the oil pressed from them. during - the rations varied from ¼ ounces to ounces of table fat a week. by december, , it had been decreased, so that the average total fat ration was a little under ounces a week, some communities receiving a little more, and others none at all. the local newspapers give interesting side-lights showing the results of this shortage. an owner of a boot-shop was prosecuted by the police for having pairs of good shoes which he would sell only in exchange for butter or bacon. (_brunswick volksfreund_, january , .) the situation in the united states the united states has great resources of vegetable oils, cottonseed, peanut, corn, and olive oil. it is this apparent plenty that makes it so difficult for many to visualize the shortage abroad. we are shipping about one-third of the lard which we produce, and large quantities of oleo oil for oleomargarine. although the exports of butter in have almost been doubled since the preceding fiscal year, it is relatively unimportant, representing only about per cent of the production. we are shipping cottonseed oil also, but this requires tank-steamers, which are scarce. in general, as the oils are much more difficult to handle and impossible for the armies to use, we must ship the solid animal fats. _the individual's part in fat conservation_. although at present there is butter and lard on the market, the need for conserving it is important, just as in the case of meat. waste of any kind should be abhorrent to all of us at this time. there probably has been a greater waste of fat than of any other commodity, but it is encouraging to note that this waste has been decreased by conservation. the amount of fat in city garbage has gone down all over the country. in columbus, ohio, the fat in the garbage was almost per cent less in than in . in fourteen large cities with a total population of over , , nearly per cent less fat was recovered in march, , than in march, . not only can fat be saved by carefully avoiding every bit of waste, but less can actually be used. fry food less, and bake, broil, or boil them more. use vegetable oils. in a long view of the food situation, it is the animal fats that cause gravest concern, because of the years necessary to build up a herd. we must send as much fat abroad as possible, and create reserves for periods of shortage with a minimum depletion of our herds. chapter vi sugar of all the foods which it is necessary to conserve, sugar is the easiest to do without. if the war and what it means has become part of a person's consciousness, he wishes only the bare essentials. sugar is a luxury of former times which has become a commonplace to-day. the average use in the united states was pounds per person last year-- - / pounds a week--less than one hundred years ago the yearly consumption was pounds. sugar was a rare luxury. it will do no harm to regard it so again. why is there a sugar shortage? sugar is scarce for two reasons--much less beet-sugar is actually being grown, and some of the cane-sugar is too far away to be available. the sugar-beet, grown in temperate climates, and the sugar-cane, native in tropical and semitropical regions, are the only two sources of sugar large enough to be of more than local importance. before the war, per cent of the entire world crop of beet-sugar was grown in europe. the industry was started by napoleon in the early nineteenth century when he was at war with most of europe, and france was shut off from her supply of cane-sugar from the west indies. the industry spread over the great plain of central europe, from the north of france over belgium, germany, austria-hungary to central russia. in all of these countries were producing enough sugar for their own needs. england produced none at all, but the continent, especially germany and austria, supplied her with about per cent of what she needed. [illustration: map showing location of european beet sugar factories--also battle lines at close of estimated that one-third of world's proouction before the war was produced within battle lines] the beet-sugar industry in the united states started in and has grown rapidly since . in it supplied per cent of the consumption. sugar-cane is grown in tropical and semitropical countries all over the globe. cuba leads in the amount produced, and consumes only a small fraction of her production herself. java, too, is a large exporter. india raises millions of tons but has to import some to fill all her needs. in the united states, louisiana, texas, and some parts of florida produce about per cent of what we use, but our dependencies, porto rico, the hawaiian islands and the philippines all export to us, and together with cuba, make up the deficiency. the war has changed entirely the peace-time distribution. the map shows what the battle-lines have done to the beetfields of europe. belgium and the northern part of france, in which practically all the beets were grown, are in german hands. in the battle-line eliminated of the french sugar-factories. in - the falling back of the germans had returned factories to the french, but now again some of these have fallen into the enemy's hands. the french crop in - was only one-fifth of the crop before the war and the following year it was only a fourth. italy's crop was per cent less in - than before the war and the estimated yield for this year is per cent less. england, of course, can no longer get sugar from the continent. so the allied world must import cane-sugar or have almost no sugar at all. the cane-sugar supply is largely dependent on shipping. ships cannot be spared to go to the east. therefore the sugar of cuba and the rest of the west indies, our main source of supply, must be shared with the allies. it is to the credit of all involved that every effort is being made to see that the division is a fair one. a commission representing the allies, the united states, and cuba apportioned the - cuban crop and fixed its price. competitive bidding by the many purchasers, with the danger of forcing up the price of the limited supply, was in this way prevented. the effect of the shortage the rations of europe are the most convincing evidence of the extent of the sugar shortage. in england ½ pound a week is allowed for each person, half the average amount used in their households before the war. france had sugar cards long before she had any other ration. seven ounces a week were allowed, and later in the year only one-quarter of a pound. germany and austria-hungary in had an average household ration of ounces a week. the united states in accordance with its usual method is asking the individual for voluntary conservation of sugar. each household is asked to observe a voluntary weekly ration of not more than three-quarters of a pound per person. extra amounts of sugar for home canning may be secured by making a certified declaration to the dealer that it is to be used only for canning and preserving. food manufacturers using sugar are dealt with more strictly than private individuals. every business using sugar may purchase it only on certificates obtained from the federal food administrators. at present manufacturers of essential products such as canned vegetables and fruits may get the amount needed to fill their necessary requirements. manufacturers of less essential products get a percentage of what they used before--at present soft-drink and candy manufacturers get per cent and ice-cream makers per cent. the decreased use of sugar has resulted in the release of the ships which had been used to bring cuban sugar to this country-- , tons freed to carry men and munitions and food to the western front in the spring of . in place of sugar the united states is much more fortunate than europe in having sweets other than sugar at its disposal. as our corn-crop is immense, the supply of corn-syrup is limited only by the ability of the manufacturers to turn it out. it is a wholesome, palatable syrup and can often take the place of sugar both in cooking and on the table. although it is not as sweet as ordinary sugar, it serves the body for fuel in the same way. we have cane-syrup, and also molasses and refiner's syrup, by-products of sugar-making, and in some parts of the country, local products such as honey, maple sugar and syrup, and sorghum syrup. sweet fruits, both fresh and dried, contain considerable amounts of sugar, some of the dried fruits being over two-thirds sugar, and when added to cereals, for example, take the place of part or all of the sugar. the price of sugar in spite of the short supply, the food administration has kept down the price of sugar by an agreement with the sugar-refineries that the wholesale price must not be more than the cost of the raw sugar plus a fixed amount to cover costs of refining. even during december, , when there was a severe shortage in the east, the price remained stable. refiners say that without regulation by the food administration the price would have gone to cents a pound or higher. at times the food administration has had to use compulsion to keep the price level and has not hesitated to do so where necessary. licenses have been withdrawn for failure to comply with regulations, and businesses closed for longer or shorter times. one dealer who was charging cents a pound for sugar had his store closed for weeks; another paid $ to the red cross for overcharging; another, for selling sugar and flour without regard to regulations, was closed indefinitely. to cut down on sugar use fewer sweets of any kind and use sugar substitutes. sugar does serve a desirable purpose in making certain of our foods more palatable, but the quantity necessary for this is small, and for much of it other sweets can be used instead. the household consumption uses by far the largest percentage of the sugar-supply. its economical use also helps to provide a reserve for preserving surplus fruits. such "extras" as candy and cakes can be entirely dispensed with. of course, sugar is a food, as it is burned in the body for fuel. but there are two good physiological reasons for avoiding excessive amounts. if we eat a large quantity in candy after already sufficient meals, we are overeating and may suffer from digestive disturbances in consequence. eating sweets instead of other food is also bad and a cause of undernourishment. sugar is pure carbohydrate, and although we may eat enough to satisfy the feeling of hunger the body will lack minerals, protein, and other substances absolutely necessary for its well-being. the person may feel satisfied, but he will be undernourished nevertheless. the conservation of sugar will not only permit a fair distribution to our associates in the war, but insure a sufficient amount for our own men. it is especially valuable for them because it burns so rapidly in the body that it gives energy more quickly than other foods. chapter vii milk--for the nation's health in war-time there is constant danger of letting down the health standard. food is high in price, demands on incomes are many and insistent, worst of all, life is being expended so freely abroad that we become careless about it at home. but while we are fighting to make the world a decent place to live in, we must keep up our health and vigor at home. milk is vital to national health and efficiency. we can conserve wheat and meat, sugar and fats, and be none the worse for it, but we must use milk. the children of to-day must have it for the sake of a vigorous, hardy manhood to-morrow. a quart for every child, a pint for every adult is not too high an ideal. there is no lack of evidence that children suffer if they do not have enough. in new york in this past winter, two things were observed which are undoubtedly closely connected--increased undernutrition among school children, and decreased use of milk. the mayor's milk committee in the fall of reported that the city as a whole had cut down its milk consumption per cent, and certain tenement districts per cent. the majority of the families who had reduced the milk to little or none were giving their children tea and coffee instead--substituting drinks actually harmful to children for the most valuable food they could have. about the same time as the milk investigation, a count was made of the number of new york children who were seriously undernourished-- half-starved. twelve were found in every children, twice as many as the year before. the warring nations in europe fully realize the value of milk. in the face of a serious shortage they are making every effort to get to the children as much milk as can be produced or imported. until children, mothers, and invalids are supplied, no one else may buy any. for adults, milk is an almost unknown luxury. all the countries have definite milk rations for their children. these rations would be adequate if they could be obtained, but many times they fall short. every effort is made to treat all children, rich and poor, alike. the price of milk is regulated, but parents who cannot afford to buy it are given it free or at cost. dried and condensed milk are used where they can be obtained and fresh milk cannot. thousands of tons of condensed milk have been sent over from america. there has been scarcely a child born in the north of france and none in belgium whose continued life during all that period has not been dependent upon american condensed milk. at one time the ministry of food in great britain, anticipating a milk shortage in the winter bought large quantities of dried milk for distribution by local health committees and infant welfare societies. in belgium, in spite of the misery of the people, fewer young children are dying than before the war, because of the milk and bread and care that they get at the "soupes" and children's canteens. but in poland, roumania, and serbia, thousands and tens of thousands of babies and young children have died since the war for lack of milk and other food. grown people should use milk and appreciate that it is far more than a beverage. comparing it with tea and coffee is not sensible. the idea that food is "something to chew" breaks down completely when milk is considered. "milk is both meat and drink." the valuable constituents of milk what gives milk its unique value? it must contain especially valuable substances, since it is an adequate food for the young for several months after birth and is one of the most important constituents of a grown person's diet. it contains protein of a kind more valuable, especially for growing children, than that of most other foods. milk protein separates out when milk sours and is the familiar cottage-cheese. because of it, milk, whole or skim, is a valuable meat substitute. when we drink milk, therefore, we need less meat. it contains fat. a pint of milk has a little more than half an ounce--the same amount as an ordinary serving of butter. by drinking milk we can save fat as well as meat. milk-sugar is also present, more or less like ordinary sugar, but not so sweet. the sugar, the fat, and part of the protein burn in the body, giving the energy needed for the body's activities. a pint gives as much fuel as eggs, or half a pound of meat, or or large slices of bread. although bread is cheaper fuel than milk, its economy compared with meat or eggs is obvious. the pint of milk costs usually about cents, while the eggs and meat cost at least two or three times as much. the economy of substituting milk for at least part of the meat in the diet is plain. it is the advice of an expert to "let no family of buy meat till it has bought quarts of milk." but this is not the whole story of milk. milk is extraordinarily rich in calcium, commonly called lime, necessary for the growth of the bones and teeth and also important in the diet of adults, even though they have stopped growing. no other food has nearly as much. a pint has almost enough calcium for one entire day's supply. it takes ¼ pounds of carrots to give the same amount, or pounds of white bread or the impossible quantity of pounds of beef! a diet without milk (or cheese) is in great danger of being too low in calcium, especially a meat-and-bread diet without vegetables. among the most necessary constituents of milk are the two vitamines. one is present chiefly in the fat and the other in the watery part of the milk. without milk fat, in whole milk or in butter, we run considerable risk of having too little of the fat-soluble vitamine. the other vitamine is more widely distributed in our foods, so that with our varied diet there is little danger of not getting enough. milk, therefore, fills all the needs of the child, except, perhaps, for iron, and is one of the best foods in the diet of grown people. there is no other food that has all the virtues of milk; it therefore has no substitute. "the regular use of milk is the greatest single factor of safety in the human diet." our milk problem we have not nearly enough milk in the united states to give every child the quart and every adult the pint which they should have. although we actually produce about a quart per person, more than half of this is used for butter, cheese, and cream, and only about two-thirds of a pint is drunk directly as milk or used in cooking. this spring we have slightly more than this amount because of the dairymen's response to the patriotic appeal to maintain production, but our supply and consumption of milk are still far below what they should be. to increase the quantity in the country the price of milk must be low enough for people to afford it, but high enough to keep the producer and distributer in the business. the question of a fair price is a difficult one. the cost of feed has gone up, labor is scarce and dear, but further economies in both production and distribution are still possible. this past winter the food administration and the dairy division of the department of agriculture have assisted many local commissions in determining fair milk prices and pointing out economies all along the line of the milk business. it is most unfortunate that ignorance of the value of milk makes people particularly sensitive to a change in its price. when it goes up even a cent a quart, many cut down their consumption, while a considerably larger advance in the price of meat will make little difference in the amount bought. if diminished use of milk continues, dairymen may go out of business and permanent harm be done, both to us and to those dependent on us abroad. a factory may close down and when the need comes reopen immediately, but if a cow is killed it takes practically three years to replace her. the milk we have should be used as effectively as possible. the most economical way for a nation to use its milk so as to get the benefit of all the food in it, is, of course, as whole milk, or evaporated or dried whole milk. the next most economical way is in the form of whole-milk cheese, since all but the whey is used in it. cream and butter are much less economical unless all the skim milk is used. as per cent of our milk-supply goes to make butter, we have large quantities of skim milk containing as much protein, it is estimated, as all the beef we eat. at present we feed the largest part of this to animals or actually throw it away. since the cottage-cheese drive of the department of agriculture, an increasing amount of it is being made into cottage-cheese--a palatable and useful meat substitute. it can, of course, be used as a beverage or in cooking. whey also has many food uses. buttermilk, too, is justly popular and healthful. skim milk is not a substitute for whole milk for children. cream, valuable food though it is, is also extravagant in its use of milk. it takes five quarts of milk to produce a quart of cream. buying whole milk is, therefore, better policy than buying cream and no milk. the sale of cream is now forbidden in great britain for this reason. our milk abroad it is our supply of milk that is helping to meet the milk shortage abroad. before the war we exported very little. by our export of evaporated, condensed, and dried milk had gone up twentyfold. in the spring of we sent over the equivalent in whole milk of almost , , pounds a month, and should probably have sent much more were it not for the lack of ships. after the war, when ships are released, the demand for it will be enormous. it will take years to build up the dairy-herds of europe again, so we shall continue to be their main source of supply. learn and teach the unique value and economy of milk. do everything to prevent in this country the tragic results which are following the cutting down of milk consumption abroad. chapter viii vegetables and fruits vegetables and fruits represent a different and happier phase of the food situation than our short supplies of wheat and meat. the vegetables especially are a great potential reserve of food, for they can be produced in quantity in three or four months on unused land by labor that otherwise might not be used. abroad every resource for vegetable-raising is being utilized to the utmost. france and belgium have long made the most of all their land. now england has made it compulsory to leave no ground uncultivated. golf-courses are now potato-patches. parks and every bit of back yard all grow their quota of vegetables. the boys in the old english public schools work with the hoe where before they played football. we in america have no more than touched our capacity for raising gardens. what we have done is merely a beginning. as the war goes on we shall realize more and more the necessity for seizing every opportunity for active service. the accomplishments of the summer of showed the possibilities of the work, and placed it beyond the purely experimental stage. they have given experience and emphasized the value of expert advice and the economy of community efforts. not only is the "plant a garden" a civilian movement, but it has taken hold in the armies as well. the american army garden service is planning truck-gardens in france to supply our troops. the woman's auxiliary army corps of england plants gardens back of the british lines. last summer the french fed , of their men from similar gardens. every pound of food grown in these home and community gardens relieves the railroad congestion and gives more space for transporting munitions and coal. every pound of food grown releases staples for europe. extra production of food of any kind, anywhere, takes on a new significance in the presence of half a world hungry. if you cannot grow vegetables, use them in abundance anyway. they are too perishable to ship abroad and too bulky, containing so much water that it would be an uneconomical use of shipping to export them. but the more america eats of almost any kind of vegetable or fruit, the less of the more durable, concentrated foods will she require. the products are so varied in kind and composition that they can be used to serve almost any purpose--beans and peas to save meat; potatoes and others to save wheat; sweet fruits to save sugar; jams, even, when spread on bread, to save fat. all will improve the health and therefore increase human energies for winning the war. in the war diet _to save meat_. beans and peas and peanuts are the only vegetables with much protein, so that they are the ones thought of primarily as meat substitutes. there are many kinds of them, fresh or dried, more than most of us realize. it is worth while to add to the diet not only the ordinary white or navy beans, but kidney, lima, black or soy beans, cow-peas, the many colored beans such as the pinto, frijoles, and the california pinks. it is these latter kinds that are used by the mexicans as their chief standby. the army and navy use huge quantities of the white beans, and the allied governments are also buying tons of the pintos. the bean-crop, in response to the patriotic appeal, was per cent higher than the normal. nearly all this increase was in the colored beans, chiefly pintos. the food administration, fearing that some of this unusual surplus might be wasted and the farmer discouraged from producing a large output in , bought up the extra crop and distributed it for sale at the different markets. though soy beans and peanuts at least are exceptions, the protein in beans and peas is not so satisfactory as a bodybuilder as that in animal foods, so that a diet in which they are a large part should contain also some milk or eggs or a little meat. two cups (half a pound) of shelled green peas or beans, or one cup with a cup of skim milk gives as much protein as a quarter of a pound of beef. dried beans and peas are, of course, cheaper than the canned with their larger amount of water. at the usual market prices as much fuel can be bought for cents spent for dried peas as for cents for canned peas. meat-savers do not all have to be high-protein foods, since the diet of most of us contains considerably more protein than is necessary. any vegetable can be a "meat extender." the pleasant flavor of meat can be obtained in meat stews, such as the delicious french "pot-au-feu." stews can easily be made with less meat and more vegetables than usual. the meat allowance is now so very small in france and the vegetables so scarce in the cities, that the ingenuity of even the french woman is taxed to get a meal. _to save wheat_. potatoes to save wheat! the great potato drive to utilize the surplus of our huge potato-crop, , , bushels above normal, has fixed in every one's mind the interchangeableness of these two foods. potatoes are one-fifth starch--almost the same quantity as in cooked breakfast cereals. because of this starch, they give as satisfactory a fuel as wheat or corn or any other cereal. one medium-sized potato supplies the same number of calories as a large slice of bread, and contains more mineral salts than white bread. europe has learned to eat potatoes instead of wheat. when bread has been short potatoes have been the mainstay in every country. they are to-day the largest single element, in terms of energy, in the german war ration. sweet potatoes are also first-class wheat-savers. so to a lesser extent are most vegetables and fruits. very few except white and sweet potatoes contain much starch, but many of them have considerable sugar, which serves as fuel just as starch does--carrots, beets, onions, parsnips, and practically all fruits such as bananas, oranges, and grapes. _to save sugar_. we want sugar, of course, both for fuel and flavor. the vegetables and some fruits have their sugar so covered up by other tastes that it does not help to make the food sweet. it does, of course, serve for fuel. bananas especially are fuel foods, containing much starch when green, which changes to sugar as the fruit ripens. the sweetest fruits are the dried ones--dates, figs, raisins, prunes. they have so much sugar that they can well be used in place of candy. _to save fat_, although few common fruits and vegetables contain fat, jam is a real fat-saver. it is of high fuel value, and has the advantage of being a "spreading material" so that it can replace butter with bread and cereals. jam is of great importance in europe to-day and all the governments have taken steps to keep up the supply. it is a regular part of the english army ration. _to keep the nation well_. an increase in the use of vegetables and fruits is practically sure to mean an increase in health. many of us, especially city-dwellers, do not eat enough of them. many a young girl who "does not like vegetables" probably owes part of her languor to inadequate diet. the old-fashioned "touch of scurvy" formerly noticed at the end of the winter and even now not an unknown thing, was probably due to lack of vegetables in the winter diet. the constipation which is so disturbingly prevalent can usually be cured or prevented by eating vegetables and fruits in sufficient quantities. one of the most serious limitations in the diet of many of the very poor is the lack of vegetables as well as milk and the unduly large proportion of meat and bread. in a community in new york city with high mortality rate, mothers whose diet was observed, ate vegetables on the average only twice a week, and fruit about the same number of times. it is not difficult to understand why vegetables and fruits are so important. only a few are especially valuable as fuel or as a source of protein, but almost all are high in mineral salts and can supply the "roughage" desirable in the diet. some also contain the vitamines, the leafy vegetables being especially valuable because, like milk, they contain the two kinds. the "greens," leafy vegetables like spinach, cabbage, brussels sprouts, asparagus, and lettuce, are the ones that help most in these last ways--"protective foods," they have been called. they are rich in the iron, calcium, and other minerals that some of the other foods lack. the use of plenty of these vegetables should go far toward keeping up health. canning and drying vegetables and fruits the value of these foods both for the nation's health and for saving staples applies just as much in winter as in summer. in war-time, a winter supply, either stored, dried, or canned, takes on special significance because of their substitute value if the supply of staples runs critically low. the canning industry, because it makes vegetables obtainable at all times and places, has been of great importance in the health and development of the country. smith, in his "commercial geography," says that "canning, more than any other invention since the introduction of steam, has made possible the building up of towns and communities beyond the bounds of varied production." a century or two ago, sailors after a voyage of a year or two, almost always came home with scurvy. recently nansen and his men drifted in the arctic ice for years and remained in good health, because of their supply of canned vegetables, fruits, and meats. the government has not been slow in appreciating the need of canned vegetables for the army and navy. it has commandeered about per cent of the canned beans, per cent of the corn, and per cent of the tomatoes of the pack. large amounts will be needed this year also. much of the - supply for our troops in france is to be canned in france, by arrangement with the french government, thus saving valuable shipping space. drying, or dehydrating, has long been known for beans, peas, and corn, and for dates, prunes, figs, and raisins. but dried potatoes, beets, carrots, and "soup mixtures" are more or less new. the drying, of course, merely removes most of the water from the vegetable, and if the process is properly carried out, soaking the vegetable in water restores its original freshness. the war, with the need for every ounce of food and the increasing transportation difficulties, has brought the process into prominence. the dehydrated products, if properly stored, seem to keep a long time. their saving in freight and shipping is plain, when it is remembered that the fresh vegetables and fruits often contain over per cent water, and the dried from per cent to per cent. ships are too precious to be used for carrying unnecessary water. our government has placed orders for several thousand tons of dehydrated potatoes for the army and may use other dried products as they can be obtained. canada has sent abroad within the past years over million pounds of dehydrated vegetables, about two-thirds of which was the vegetable-soup mixture and one-third dried sliced potatoes. when reconstituted this would make about , , pounds of vegetables. germany has been drying her vegetables and fruits far more than we. in she had over , commercial plants, and an elaborate system of distributing all the available fresh material to the different plants to avoid waste. individuals and communities with gardens or wherever fresh products can be obtained should not be dependent upon commercial agencies. as far as possible every family and every neighborhood should be self-supporting. home and community canning and drying are important duties. can and dry the surplus. store up enough to carry through the next winter. follow expert advice as to methods. use the greatest care to prevent spoilage. wherever possible unite with your neighbors in community canneries and dryers so that every one can have the benefit of the best equipment and the most skilled supervision. a great deal was done in ; millions of cans were put up and great waste prevented. but in more must be done. more vegetables must be raised and more must be canned. a great reserve for the winter is more necessary than ever. conclusion almost a year of food control in this country has passed and the great new experiment in democratic administration of the nation's food is succeeding. the method of well-directed voluntary co-operation, much more characteristic of our food control than of any other country's, can be judged by its results to date. we have sent abroad six times the wheat that we had believed was in the country for export. we have exported vastly increased shipments of the other cereals, of beef and pork, of fats and condensed milk. with canada, we are supplying per cent of the allies' food, instead of barely per cent, as before the war. meanwhile our own population has been taken care of. no one has gone hungry because of the shipments of food out of the country. the price of the most important food, bread, has been kept stable--a new experience in time of war. these and others are great accomplishments, brought about through the co-operation of the nation, but they are slight in comparison with what must still be done. the huge resources for extra food production and conservation have hardly been touched. the imagination is just beginning to be stirred by the immensity of the whole undertaking and the sacrifice required to win the war. men, ammunition and food, in a steadily increasing stream, must go across. "our duty, if we are to do this great thing and show america to be what we believe her to be--the greatest hope and energy of the world--is to stand together night and day until the job is finished."--president wilson. a few references american academy of political and social science. "world's food." philadelphia, . (_annals of the american academy_, november, .) carter, howe and mason. "nutrition and clinical dietetics." philadelphia, lea & febiger, . holmes, a.d., and lang, h.l. "fats and their economical use in the home." washington, . (department of agriculture bulletin .) kellogg, vernon, and taylor, alonzo e. "food problems." new york, macmillan, . langworthy, c.f. "potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other starchy roots as food." washington, . (department of agriculture bulletin .) langworthy, c.f. "eggs and their value as food." washington, . (department of agriculture bulletin .) lusk, graham. "food in war time." philadelphia, saunders, . lusk, graham. "fundamental basis of nutrition." new haven, yale university press, . mendel, lafayette b. "changes in food supply and their relation to nutrition." new haven, yale university press, . mendenhall, dorothy r. "milk." washington, . (_children's bureau_, publication .) rose, mary swartz. "everyday foods in war time." new york, macmillan, . rose, mary swartz. "feeding the family." new york, macmillan, . sherman, henry c. "chemistry of food and nutrition." new york, macmillan, . sherman, henry c. "food products." new york, macmillan, . taylor, alonzo e. "war bread." new york, macmillan, . the publications of the united states department of agriculture and the united states food administration. the united states food leaflets. united states department of agriculture: farmers' bulletin . "cheese and its economical uses in the diet." c.f. langworthy and caroline l. hunt. . farmers' bulletin . "corn as a food and ways of using it." c.f. langworthy and caroline l. hunt, . farmers' bulletin . "food for young children." caroline l. hunt, . farmers' bulletin . "what the body needs." caroline l. hunt and helen w. atwater, . farmers' bulletin . "cereal foods." caroline l. hunt and helen w. atwater, . farmers' bulletin . "foods rich in protein." caroline l. hunt and helen w. atwater, . farmers' bulletin . "home canning by the one-period cold-pack method." o.h. benson, . farmers' bulletin . "drying fruits and vegetables in the home." farmers' bulletin . "home canning of fruits and vegetables." m.e. cresswell and ola powell, . farmers' bulletin . "fresh fruits and vegetables as conservers of other staple foods." caroline l. hunt, . farmers' bulletin . "preservation of vegetables by fermentation and salting." l.a. round and h.l. lang, . index agriculture, department of.--aids wheat production, ; campaign for increased use of milk, . austria.--wheat-supply, ; meat-supply, - ; sugar-supply, . banana flour as wheat substitute, . barley as wheat substitute, . beans.--varieties, ; as meat substitute, . belgium.--wheat-supply, ; meat-supply, ; sugar-supply, ; milk supplied to children, . bread.--advantages of wheat loaf, - ; bakers' bread regulated, ; conservation of, by housewives, - ; restrictions on use in europe, - ; rationing not necessary in united states, . buckwheat as wheat substitute, . butter.--consumption in england, ; uneconomical way to use milk, . calorie defined, . candy.--manufacturers restricted in use of sugar, . canning.--sugar allowed for, - ; importance of industry, ; urged upon housewives for conservation, . cereals.--defined, ; food value, , ; wide consumption of, - . cheese.--valuable protein food, ; as meat substitute, - ; a use for skim milk, . corn as wheat substitute, - ; why allies can not use, - . corn-syrup as sugar substitute, . cottonseed meal as wheat substitute, . cream.--extravagant use of milk, . drying.--process, ; importance of, . eggs as meat substitute, . england.--wheat-supply, ; restrictions concerning bread, - ; meat-supply, ; meat restrictions, - ; fat shortage, ; sugar-supply, ; milk regulations, , ; cultivation of soil, - . fats.--food value, - ; shortage in europe, ; resources and exports of united states, - ; necessity for conservation, . feterita as wheat substitute, . fifty-fifty rule, - . fish as meat substitute, . flour.--manufacture of, - ; per cent extraction allowed, ; consumption cut by licensing millers, ; by fifty-fifty rule, - . food administration.--takes control of wheat business, , ; licenses millers, ; licenses bakers, - ; regulates sugar prices, - ; aids increased use of milk, ; achievements in year of existence, . foods.--importance of different kinds, - . france.--wheat-supply, - ; bread regulations, ; meat-supply, ; meat regulations, - ; sugar-supply, ; sugar restrictions, ; production of fruit and vegetables, . fruit.--as sugar substitute, , ; food value, - ; conservation of, by canning and drying, - . garbage conservation, . gardens.--see production. germany.--wheat-supply, - ; meat-supply, - ; meat restrictions, ; fat shortage, ; sugar restrictions, ; conservation of food by drying, . gluten.--importance in bread, - . graham flour.--manufacture, ; inferiority to wheat, . grain corporation, controls wheat trade, , . honey as sugar substitute, . hotels and restaurants.--regulations in use of bread, . ice-cream.--manufacturers restricted in use of sugar, . italy.--restrictions on macaroni, ; bread rations, ; meat-supply, ; sugar-supply, . jam as substitute for butter, . kaffir as wheat substitute, . legumes.--see beans, peanuts, peas. macaroni.--restrictions in manufacture of in italy, ; not a wheat substitute, . maple-syrup as sugar substitute, . margarine.--use in england, . meat.--shortage in europe, - ; exports from united states, - ; consumption, - ; food value, - . meat extenders, vegetables as, . meat substitutes, - ; vegetables as, . milk.--as meat substitute, ; necessity for children, - ; shortage in europe, ; food value, - ; supply in united states, - ; economical uses of, - . milk, condensed.--use in europe, ; amount exported from united states, . milo as wheat substitute, . molasses as sugar substitute, . nuts as meat substitutes, . oats as wheat substitute, . oils, vegetable.--use in germany, ; supply in united states, - ; as substitute for animal fats, . peanut flour as wheat substitute, . peanuts as meat substitute, . peas as meat substitute, . potato flour as wheat substitute, . potatoes as wheat substitute, , - . poultry as meat substitute, . production.--decreased in france, - ; of cereals doubled in england, ; of vegetables in england and america, . protein.--defined, ; amount necessary in diet, - . rationing: austria.--sugar, . rationing: england.--bread not rationed, ; meat, - ; fats, ; sugar, . rationing: france.--bread, ; meat, ; sugar, . rationing: germany.--meat, ; fats, ; sugar, . rationing: italy.--bread, ; meat, . rationing: u.s.--voluntary wheat ration, ; reasons for not introducing system, . rice.--chief diet in india, ; as wheat substitute, - . roumania.--wheat-supply, ; meat-supply, . russia.--wheat-supply, . rye, as wheat substitute, . shipping.--necessity for saving, ; released by decreased use of sugar, . soy bean flour as wheat substitute, . substitutes.--see meat, sugar, wheat substitutes. sugar.--consumption in united states, ; shortage, , - ; restrictions on, - ; price regulated, - ; conservation of, - . sugar substitutes, , . tapioca flour as wheat substitute, . united states: exports.--wheat, - ; meat, ; fat, - ; sugar, - ; milk, . vegetables.--importance in conservation, ; production of, ; as meat substitute, , - ; as wheat substitute, , - ; as sugar substitute, ; food value, - ; conservation of by canning and drying, - . victory bread, . vitamines.--defined, ; in fats, ; in milk, ; in fruit and vegetables, . war bread.--see flour, victory bread, wheat substitutes. wheat.--necessity in war, ; shortage in europe, - ; distribution a problem, - ; supply and exports of united states, - ; controlled by united states grain corporation, , ; conservation of by individuals, - . wheat substitutes.--corn, - ; oats, ; barley, ; rye, ; rice, ; miscellaneous, ; keeping quality, - ; vegetables, - . [illustration: mrs. john van vorst as "esther kelly" wearing the costume of the pickle factory] [illustration: miss marie van vorst as "bell ballard" at work in a shoe factory] * * * * * the woman who toils _being the experiences of two gentlewomen as factory girls_ by mrs. john van vorst and marie van vorst _illustrated_ new york: doubleday, page & company * * * * * dedication to mark twain in loving tribute to his genius, and to his human sympathy, which in pathos and seriousness, as well as in mirth and humour, have made him kin with the whole world:-- this book is inscribed by bessie and marie van vorst. * * * * * prefatory letter from theodore roosevelt _written after reading chapter iii. when published serially_ white house, washington, october , . _my dear mrs. van vorst_: _i must write you a line to say how much i have appreciated your article, "the woman who toils." but to me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country--that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial_. _an easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be "independent"--that is, to live one's life purely according to one's own desires--are in no sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong, racial qualities without which there can be no strong races--the qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be provided the end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry. i do not know whether i most pity or most despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. if a man or woman, through no fault of his or hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which spring only from home life, from the having and bringing up of many healthy children, i feel for them deep and respectful sympathy--the sympathy one extends to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of a campaign, or the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the fault of others. but the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people_. _of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one quality will save a nation. but there are certain great qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in the nation just as much if they are produced by selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in the rich. if the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future_. _there is no physical trouble among us americans. the trouble with the situation you set forth is one of character, and therefore we can conquer it if we only will._ _very sincerely yours,_ _theodore roosevelt._ * * * * * prefatory note a portion of the material in this book appeared serially under the same title in _everybody's magazine_. nearly a third of the volume has not been published in any form. * * * * * contents by mrs. john van vorst chapter page i. introductory ii. in a pittsburg factory iii. perry, a new york mill town iv. making clothing in chicago v. the meaning of it all by marie van vorst chapter page vi. introductory vii. a maker of shoes at lynn viii. the southern cotton mills the mill village the mill ix. the child in the southern mills * * * * * list of illustrations miss marie and mrs. john van vorst in their factory costumes, _frontispiece_ facing page "the streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning," "waving arms of smoke and steam, a symbol of spent energy, of the lives consumed, and vanishing again," "they trifle with love," after saturday night's shopping, sunday evening at silver lake, "the breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards," in a chicago theatrical costume factory, chicago types, the rear of a chicago tenement, a delicate type of beauty at work in a lynn shoe factory, one of the swells of the factory: a very expert "vamper," an irish girl, earning from $ to $ a week, "learning" a new hand, the window side of miss k.'s parlour at lynn, mass., "fancy gumming," an all-round, experienced hand, "mighty mill--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate," "the southern mill-hand's face is unique, a fearful type," * * * * * the woman who toils chapter i--introductory by mrs. john van vorst * * * * * chapter i introductory any journey into the world, any research in literature, any study of society, demonstrates the existence of two distinct classes designated as the rich and the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the upper and the lower, the educated and the uneducated--and a further variety of opposing epithets. few of us who belong to the former category have come into more than brief contact with the labourers who, in the factories or elsewhere, gain from day to day a livelihood frequently insufficient for their needs. yet all of us are troubled by their struggle, all of us recognize the misery of their surroundings, the paucity of their moral and esthetic inspiration, their lack of opportunity for physical development. all of us have a longing, pronounced or latent, to help them, to alleviate their distress, to better their condition in some, in every way. now concerning this unknown class whose oppression we deplore we have two sources of information: the financiers who, for their own material advancement, use the labourer as a means, and the philanthropists who consider the poor as objects of charity, to be treated sentimentally, or as economic cases to be studied theoretically. it is not by economics nor by the distribution of bread alone that we can find a solution for the social problem. more important for the happiness of man is the hope we cherish of eventually bringing about a reign of justice and equality upon earth. it is evident that, in order to render practical aid to this class, we must live among them, understand their needs, acquaint ourselves with their desires, their hopes, their aspirations, their fears. we must discover and adopt their point of view, put ourselves in their surroundings, assume their burdens, unite with them in their daily effort. in this way alone, and not by forcing upon them a preconceived ideal, can we do them real good, can we help them to find a moral, spiritual, esthetic standard suited to their condition of life. such an undertaking is impossible for most. sure of its utility, inspired by its practical importance, i determined to make the sacrifice it entailed and to learn by experience and observation what these could teach. i set out to surmount physical fatigue and revulsion, to place my intellect and sympathy in contact as a medium between the working girl who wants help and the more fortunately situated who wish to help her. in the papers which follow i have endeavoured to give a faithful picture of things as they exist, both in and out of the factory, and to suggest remedies that occurred to me as practical. my desire is to act as a mouthpiece for the woman labourer. i assumed her mode of existence with the hope that i might put into words her cry for help. it has been my purpose to find out what her capacity is for suffering and for joy as compared with ours; what tastes she has, what ambitions, what the equipment of woman is as compared to that of man: her equipment as determined, st. by nature, d. by family life, d. by social laws; what her strength is and what her weaknesses are as compared with the woman of leisure; and finally, to discern the tendencies of a new society as manifested by its working girls. after many weeks spent among them as one of them i have come away convinced that no earnest effort for their betterment is fruitless. i am hopeful that my faithful descriptions will perhaps suggest, to the hearts of those who read, some ways of rendering personal and general help to that class who, through the sordidness and squalour of their material surroundings, the limitation of their opportunities, are condemned to slow death--mental, moral, physical death! if into their prison's midst, after the reading of these lines, a single death pardon should be carried, my work shall not have been in vain. * * * * * in a pittsburg factory * * * * * chapter ii in a pittsburg factory in choosing the scene for my first experiences, i decided upon pittsburg, as being an industrial centre whose character was determined by its working population. it exceeds all other cities of the country in the variety and extent of its manufacturing products. of its , inhabitants, , are labouring men employed in the mills. add to these the great number of women and girls who work in the factories and clothing shops, and the character of the place becomes apparent at a glance. there is, moreover, another reason which guided me toward this middle west town without its like. this land which we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots are the employers--the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose serfs are the labouring men and women. the rulers are invested with an authority and a power not unlike those possessed by the early barons, the feudal lords, the lorenzo de medicis, the cheops; but with this difference, that whereas pharaoh by his unique will controlled a thousand slaves, the steel magnate uses, for his own ends also, thousands of separate wills. it was a submissive throng who built the pyramids. the mills which produce half the steel the world requires are run by a collection of individuals. civilization has undergone a change. the multitudes once worked for one; now each man works for himself first and for a master secondarily. in our new society where tradition plays no part, where the useful is paramount, where business asserts itself over art and beauty, where material needs are the first to be satisfied, and where the country's unclaimed riches are our chief incentive to effort, it is not uninteresting to find an analogy with the society in italy which produced the renaissance. diametrically opposed in their ideals, they have a common spirit. in italy the rebirth was of the love of art, and of classic forms, the desire to embellish--all that was inspired by culture of the beautiful; the renaissance in america is the rebirth of man's originality in the invention of the useful, the virgin power of man's wits as quickened in the crude struggle for life. florence is _par excellence_ the place where we can study the italian renaissance; pittsburg appealed to me as a most favourable spot to watch the american renaissance, the enlivening of energies which give value to a man devoid of education, energies which in their daily exercise with experience generate a new force, a force that makes our country what it is, industrially and economically. so it was toward pittsburg that i first directed my steps, but before leaving new york i assumed my disguise. in the parisian clothes i am accustomed to wear i present the familiar outline of any woman of the world. with the aid of coarse woolen garments, a shabby felt sailor hat, a cheap piece of fur, a knitted shawl and gloves i am transformed into a working girl of the ordinary type. i was born and bred and brought up in the world of the fortunate--i am going over now into the world of the unfortunate. i am to share their burdens, to lead their lives, to be present as one of them at the spectacle of their sufferings and joys, their ambitions and sorrows. i get no farther than the depot when i observe that i am being treated as though i were ignorant and lacking in experience. as a rule the gateman says a respectful "to the right" or "to the left," and trusts to his well-dressed hearer's intelligence. a word is all that a moment's hesitation calls forth. to the working girl he explains as follows: "now you take your ticket, do you understand, and i'll pick up your money for you; you don't need to pay anything for your ferry--just put those three cents back in your pocket-book and go down there to where that gentleman is standing and he'll direct you to your train." this without my having asked a question. i had divested myself of a certain authority along with my good clothes, and i had become one of a class which, as the gateman had found out, and as i find out later myself, are devoid of all knowledge of the world and, aside from their manual training, ignorant on all subjects. my train is three hours late, which brings me at about noon to pittsburg. i have not a friend or an acquaintance within hundreds of miles. with my bag in my hand i make my way through the dark, busy streets to the young women's christian association. it is down near a frozen river. the wind blows sharp and biting over the icy water; the streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning. there is almost no traffic. innumerable tramways ring their way up and down wire-lined avenues; occasionally a train of freight cars announces itself with a warning bell in the city's midst. it is a black town of toil, one man in every three a labourer. they have no need for vehicles of pleasure. the trolleys take them to their work, the trains transport the products of the mills. i hear all languages spoken: this prodigious town is a western bazaar where the nations assemble not to buy but to be employed. the stagnant scum of other countries floats hither to be purified in the fierce bouillon of live opportunity. it is a cosmopolitan procession that passes me: the dusky easterner with a fez of astrakhan, the gentle-eyed italian with a shawl of gay colours, the loose-lipped hungarian, the pale, mystic swede, the german with wife and children hanging on his arm. [illustration: "the streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning"] in this giant bureau of labour all nationalities gather, united by a common bond of hope, animated by a common chance of prosperity, kindred through a common effort, fellow-citizens in a new land of freedom. at the central office of the young women's christian association i receive what attention a busy secretary can spare me. she questions and i answer as best i can. "what is it you want?" "board and work in a factory." "have you ever worked in a factory?" "no, ma'am." "have you ever done any housework?" she talks in the low, confidential tone of those accustomed to reforming prisoners and reasoning with the poor. "yes, ma'am, i have done housework." "what did you make?" "twelve dollars a month." "i can get you a place where you will have a room to yourself and fourteen dollars a month. do you want it?" "no, ma'am." "are you making anything now?" "no, ma'am." "can you afford to pay board?" "yes, as i hope to get work at once." she directs me to a boarding place which is at the same time a refuge for the friendless and a shelter for waifs. the newly arrived population of the fast-growing city seems unfamiliar with the address i carry written on a card. i wait on cold street corners, i travel over miles of half-settled country, long stretches of shanties and saloons huddled close to the trolley line. the thermometer is at zero. toward three o'clock i find the waif boarding-house. the matron is in the parlour hovering over a gas stove. she has false hair, false teeth, false jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive manner of the idle who are entrusted with authority. she is there to direct others and do nothing herself, to be cross and make herself dreaded. in the distance i can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of children's voices. i am cold and hungry. i have as yet no job. the noise, the sordidness, the witchlike matron annoy me. i have a sudden impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter--to snap my fingers at experience and be grateful i was born among the fortunate. something within me calls _courage_! i take a room at three dollars a week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with cold i start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron tells me, is run by a christian gentleman. i have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life, but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt letters: "_women employees_." the cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes. he sits in a glass cage and about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a thousand. each number means a workman--each tick of the clock a moment of his life gone in the service of the pickle company. i rap on the window of the glass cage. it opens. "do you need any girls?" i ask, trying not to show my emotion. "ever worked in a factory?" "no, sir; but i'm very handy." "what have you done?" "housework," i respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself. "well," he says, looking at me, "they need help up in the bottling department; but i don't know as it would pay you--they don't give more than sixty or seventy cents a day." "i am awfully anxious for work," i say. "couldn't i begin and get raised, perhaps?" "surely--there is always room for those who show the right spirit. you come in to-morrow morning at a quarter before seven. you can try it, and you mustn't get discouraged; there's plenty of work for good workers." the blood tingles through my cold hands. my heart is lighter. i have not come in vain. i have a place! when i get back to the boarding-house it is twilight. the voices i had heard and been annoyed by have materialized. before the gas stove there are nine small individuals dressed in a strange combination of uniform checked aprons and patent leather boots worn out and discarded by the babies of the fortunate. the small feet they encase are crossed, and the freshly washed faces are demure, as the matron with the wig frowns down into a newspaper from which she now and then hisses a command to order. three miniature members are rocking violently in tiny rocking chairs. "_quit rocking_!" the false mother cries at them. "you make my head ache. most of 'em have no parents," she explains to me. "none of 'em have homes." here they are, a small kingdom, not wanted, unwelcome, unprovided for, growled at and grumbled over. yet each is developing in spite of chance; each is determining hour by hour his heritage from unknown parents. the matron leaves us; the rocking begins again. conversation is animated. the three-year-old baby bears the name of a three-year-old hero. this "dewey" complains in a plaintive voice of a too long absent mother. his rosy lips are pursed out even with his nose. again and again he reiterates the refrain: "my mamma don't never come to see me. she don't bring me no toys." and then with pride, "my mamma buys rice and tea and lots of things," and dashing to the window as a trolley rattles by, "my mamma comes in the street cars, only," sadly, "she don't never come." not one of them has forgotten what fate has willed them to do without. at first they look shrinkingly toward my outstretched hand. is it coming to administer some punishment? little by little they are reassured, and, gaining in confidence, they sketch for me in disconnected chapters the short outlines of their lives. "i've been to the hospital," says one, "and so's lily. i drank a lot of washing soda and it made me sick." lily begins her hospital reminiscences. "i had typhoy fever--i was in the childun's ward awful long, and one night they turned down the lights--it was just evening--and a man came in and he took one of the babies up in his arms, and we all said, 'what's the row? what's the row?' and he says 'hush, the baby's dead.' and out in the hall there was something white, and he carried the baby and put it in the white thing, and the baby had a doll that could talk, and he put that in the white thing too, right alongside o' the dead baby. another time," lily goes on, "there was a baby in a crib alongside of mine, and one day he was takin' his bottle, and all of a suddint he choked; and he kept on chokin' and then he died, and he was still takin' his bottle." lily is five. i see in her and in her companions a familiarity not only with the mysteries but with the stern realities of life. they have an understanding look at the mention of death, drunkenness and all domestic difficulties or irregularities. their vocabulary and conversation image the violent and brutal side of existence--the only one with which they are acquainted. at bedtime i find my way upward through dark and narrow stairs that open into a long room with a slanting roof. it serves as nursery and parlour. in the dull light of a stove and an oil lamp four or five women are seated with babies on their knees. they have the meek look of those who doom themselves to acceptance of misfortune, the flat, resigned figures of the overworked. their loose woolen jackets hang over their gaunt shoulders; their straight hair is brushed hard and smooth against high foreheads. one baby lies a comfortable bundle in its mother's arms; one is black in the face after a spasm of coughing; one howls its woes through a scarlet mask. the corners of the room are filled with the drones--those who "work for a bite of grub." the cook, her washing done, has piled her aching bones in a heap; her drawn face waits like an indicator for some fresh signal to a new fatigue. mary, the woman-of-all-work, who has spent more than one night within a prison's walls, has long ago been brutalized by the persistence of life in spite of crime; her gray hair ripples like sand under receding waves; her profile is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of misery over them--dull and silent, they deaden her face. and jennie, the charwoman, is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? her arms, long and withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and her head bowed toward earth. a stranger to rest, she seems a mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a task. what could be hoped for in such surroundings? with every effort to be clean the dirt accumulates faster than it can be washed away. it was impossible, i found by my own experience, to be really clean. there was a total absence of beauty in everything--not a line of grace, not a pleasing sound, not an agreeable odour anywhere. one could get used to this ugliness, become unconscious even of the acrid smells that pervade the tenement. it was probable my comrades felt at no time the discomfort i did, but the harm done them is not the physical suffering their condition causes, but the moral and spiritual bondage in which it holds them. they are not a class of drones made differently from us. i saw nothing to indicate that they were not born with like _capacities_ to ours. as our bodies accustom themselves to luxury and cleanliness, theirs grow hardened to deprivation and filth. as our souls develop with the advantages of all that constitutes an ideal--an intellectual, esthetic and moral ideal--their souls diminish under the oppression of a constant physical effort to meet material demands. the fact that they become physically callous to what we consider unbearable is used as an argument for their emotional insensibility. i hold such an argument as false. from all i saw i am convinced that, _given their relative preparation_ for suffering and for pleasure, their griefs and their joys are the same as ours in kind and in degree. * * * * * when one is accustomed to days begun at will by the summons of a tidy maid, waking oneself at half-past five means to be guardian of the hours until this time arrives. once up, the toilet i made in the nocturnal darkness of my room can best be described by the matron's remark to me as i went to bed: "if you want to wash," she said, "you'd better wash now; you can't have no water in your room, and there won't be nobody up when you leave in the morning." my evening bath is supplemented by a whisk of the sponge at five. without it is black--a more intense black than night's beginning, when all is astir. the streets are silent, an occasional train whirls past, groups of men hurry hither and thither swinging their arms, rubbing their ears in the freezing air. many of them have neither overcoats nor gloves. now and then a woman sweeps along. her skirts have the same swing as my own short ones; under her arm she carries a newspaper bundle whose meaning i have grown to know. my own contains a midday meal: two cold fried oysters, two dried preserve sandwiches, a pickle and an orange. my way lies across a bridge. in the first gray of dawn the river shows black under its burden of ice. along its troubled banks innumerable chimneys send forth their hot activity, clouds of seething flames, waving arms of smoke and steam--a symbol of spent energy, of the lives consumed and vanishing again, the sparks that shine an instant against the dark sky and are spent forever. as i draw nearer the factory i move with a stream of fellow workers pouring toward the glass cage of the timekeeper. he greets me and starts me on my upward journey with a wish that i shall not get discouraged, a reminder that the earnest worker always makes a way for herself. "what will you do about your name?" "what will you do with your hair and your hands?" "how can you deceive people?" these are some of the questions i had been asked by my friends. before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one i had ever had. as to hair and hands, a half-day's work suffices for their undoing. and my disguise is so successful i have deceived not only others but myself. i have become with desperate reality a factory girl, alone, inexperienced, friendless. i am making $ . a week and spending $ of this for board alone, and i dread not being strong enough to keep my job. i climb endless stairs, am given a white cap and an apron, and my life as a factory girl begins. i become part of the ceaseless, unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor. the factory i have chosen has been built contemporaneously with reforms and sanitary inspection. there are clean, well-aired rooms, hot and cold water with which to wash, places to put one's hat and coat, an obligatory uniform for regular employees, hygienic and moral advantages of all kinds, ample space for work without crowding. side by side in rows of tens or twenties we stand before our tables waiting for the seven o'clock whistle to blow. in their white caps and blue frocks and aprons, the girls in my department, like any unfamiliar class, all look alike. my first task is an easy one; anybody could do it. on the stroke of seven my fingers fly. i place a lid of paper in a tin jar-top, over it a cork; this i press down with both hands, tossing the cover, when done, into a pan. in spite of myself i hurry; i cannot work fast enough--i outdo my companions. how can they be so slow? i have finished three dozen while they are doing two. every nerve, every muscle is offering some of its energy. over in one corner the machinery for sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of filling, washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager ears as an accompaniment for the simple work assigned to me. one hour passes, two, three hours; i fit ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy keeps up. the forewoman is a pretty girl of twenty. her restless eyes, her metallic voice are the messengers who would know all. i am afraid of her. i long to please her. i am sure she must be saying "_how well the new girl works_." conversation is possible among those whose work has become mechanical. twice i am sent to the storeroom for more caps. in these brief moments my companions volunteer a word of themselves. "i was out to a ball last night," the youngest one says. "i stayed so late i didn't feel a bit like getting up this morning." "that's nothing," another retorts. "there's hardly an evening we don't have company at the house, music or somethin'; i never get enough rest." and on my second trip the pale creature with me says: "i'm in deep mourning. my mother died last friday week. it's awful lonely without her. seems as though i'd never get over missing her. i miss her _dreadful_. perhaps by and by i'll get used to it." "oh, no, you won't," the answer comes from a girl with short skirts. "you'll never get used to it. my ma's been dead eight years next month and i dreamt about her all last night. i can't get her out o' me mind." born into dirt and ugliness, disfigured by effort, they have the same heritage as we: joys and sorrows, grief and laughter. with them as with us gaiety is up to its old tricks, tempting from graver rivals, making duty an alien. grief is doing her ugly work: hollowing round cheeks, blackening bright eyes, putting her weight of leaden loneliness in hearts heretofore light with youth. when i have fitted dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my job. she tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle jars. i am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o'clock whistle blows. up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a part of it. with the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to life. it is hungry; it has friends and favourites--news to tell. we herd down to a big dining-room and take our places, five hundred of us in all. the newspaper bundles are unfolded. the ménu varies little: bread and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a piece of stringy cold meat. in ten minutes the repast is over. the dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and "sociables." at : sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given. i return to my job. my shoulders are beginning to ache. my hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered. the enthusiasm i had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness. i look at my companions now in amazement. how can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? cases are emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. oh! the monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! now and then some one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard machine broke--and still the work goes on, on, on! new girls like myself, who had worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to loiter. out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be plunged again into hot dirty water. would the whistle never blow? once i pause an instant, my head dazed and weary, my ears strained to bursting with the deafening noise. quickly a voice whispers in my ear: "you'd better not stand there doin' nothin'. if _she_ catches you she'll give it to you." on! on! bundle of pains! for you this is one day's work in a thousand of peace and beauty. for those about you this is the whole of daylight, this is the winter dawn and twilight, this is the glorious summer noon, this is all day, this is every day, this is _life_. rest is only a bit of a dream, snatched when the sleeper's aching body lets her close her eyes for a moment in oblivion. out beyond the chimney tops the snowfields and the river turn from gray to pink, and still the work goes on. each crate i lift grows heavier, each bottle weighs an added pound. now and then some one lends a helping hand. "tired, ain't you? this is your first day, ain't it?" the acid smell of vinegar and mustard penetrates everywhere. my ankles cry out pity. oh! to sit down an instant! "tidy up the table," some one tells me; "we're soon goin' home." home! i think of the stifling fumes of fried food, the dim haze in the kitchen where my supper waits me; the children, the band of drifting workers, the shrill, complaining voice of the hired mother. this is home. i sweep and set to rights, limping, lurching along. at last the whistle blows! in a swarm we report; we put on our things and get away into the cool night air. i have stood ten hours; i have fitted , corks; i have hauled and loaded , jars of pickles. my pay is seventy cents. the impressions of my first day crowd pell-mell upon my mind. the sound of the machinery dins in my ears. i can hear the sharp, nasal voices of the forewoman and the girls shouting questions and answers. a sudden recollection comes to me of a dahomayan family i had watched at work in their hut during the paris exhibition. there was a magic spell in their voices as they talked together; the sounds they made had the cadence of the wind in the trees, the running of water, the song of birds: they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies of nature. my factory companions drew their vocal inspiration from the bedlam of civilization, the rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which they must out-din to be heard. for the two days following my first experience i am unable to resume work. fatigue has swept through my blood like a fever. every bone and joint has a clamouring ache. i pass the time visiting other factories and hunting for a place to board in the neighbourhood of the pickling house. at the cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker company i can get a job, but the hours are longer, the advantages less than where i am; at the broom factory they employ only men. i decide to continue with tin caps and pickle jars. my whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house. i start out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling. i wander and ask, wander and ask. up and down the black streets running parallel and at right angles with the factory i tap and ring at one after another of the two-story red-brick houses. more than half of them are empty, tenantless during the working hours. what hope is there for family life near the hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? the sociableness, the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a dangerous rival to domestic care. there is something in the modern conditions of labour which act magnetically upon american girls, impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery as well. each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes: sport, college education, machinery--each is a factor in the gradual transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the home. i pursue my search. it is the dinner hour. at last a narrow door opens, letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as i stand in the vestibule questioning: "do you take boarders?" the woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and sputters. "come in," she says, "and get warm." i walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves domestic as well as social purposes. there is a profusion of white knitted tidies and portieres that exude an odour of cooking. before the fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls. fresh from the barber's hands, he has a clean mask marked by the razor's edge. already i feel at home. "want board, do you?" the woman asks. "well, we ain't got no place; we're always right full up." my disappointment is keen. regretfully i leave the fire and start on again. "i guess you'll have some trouble in finding what you want," the woman calls to me on her way back to the kitchen, as i go out. the answer is everywhere the same, with slight variations. some take "mealers" only, some only "roomers," some "only gentlemen." i begin to understand it. among the thousands of families who live in the city on account of the work provided by the mills, there are girls enough to fill the factories. there is no influx such as creates in a small town the necessity for working-girl boarding-houses. there is an ample supply of hands from the existing homes. there is the same difference between city and country factory life that there is between university life in a capital and in a country town. a sign on a neat-looking corner house attracts me. i rap and continue to rap; the door is opened at length by a tall good-looking young woman. her hair curls prettily, catching the light; her eyes are stupid and beautiful. she has on a black skirt and a bright purple waist. "do you take boarders?" "why, yes. i don't generally like to take ladies, they give so much trouble. you can come in if you like. here's the room," she continues, opening a door near the vestibule. she brushes her hand over her forehead and stares at me; and then, as though she can no longer silence the knell that is ringing in her heart, she says to me, always staring: "my husband was killed on the railroad last week. he lived three hours. they took him to the hospital--a boy come running down and told me. i went up as fast as i could, but it was too late; he never spoke again. i guess he didn't know what struck him; his head was all smashed. he was awful good to me--so easy-going. i ain't got my mind down to work yet. if you don't like this here room," she goes on listlessly, "maybe you could get suited across the way." thompson seton tells us in his book on wild animals that not one among them ever dies a natural death. as the opposite extreme of vital persistence we have the man whose life, in spite of acute disease, is prolonged against reason by science; and midway comes the labourer, who takes his chances unarmed by any understanding of physical law, whose only safeguards are his wits and his presence of mind. the violent death, the accidents, the illnesses to which he falls victim might be often warded off by proper knowledge. nature is a zealous enemy; ignorance and inexperience keep a whole class defenseless. the next day is saturday. i feel a fresh excitement at going back to my job; the factory draws me toward it magnetically. i long to be in the hum and whir of the busy workroom. two days of leisure without resources or amusement make clear to me how the sociability of factory life, the freedom from personal demands, the escape from self can prove a distraction to those who have no mental occupation, no money to spend on diversion. it is easier to submit to factory government which commands five hundred girls with one law valid for all, than to undergo the arbitrary discipline of parental authority. i speed across the snow-covered courtyard. in a moment my cap and apron are on and i am sent to report to the head forewoman. "we thought you'd quit," she says. "lots of girls come in here and quit after one day, especially saturday. to-day is scrubbing day," she smiles at me. "now we'll do right by you if you do right by us. what did the timekeeper say he'd give you?" "sixty or seventy a day." "we'll give you seventy," she says. "of course, we can judge girls a good deal by their looks, and we can see that you're above the average." she wears her cap close against her head. her front hair is rolled up in crimping-pins. she has false teeth and is a widow. her pale, parched face shows what a great share of life has been taken by daily over-effort repeated during years. as she talks she touches my arm in a kindly fashion and looks at me with blue eyes that float about under weary lids. "you are only at the beginning," they seem to say. "your youth and vigour are at full tide, but drop by drop they will be sapped from you, to swell the great flood of human effort that supplies the world's material needs. you will gain in experience," the weary lids flutter at me, "but you will pay _with your life_ the living you make." there is no variety in my morning's work. next to me is a bright, pretty girl jamming chopped pickles into bottles. "how long have you been here?" i ask, attracted by her capable appearance. she does her work easily and well. "about five months." "how much do you make?" "from cents to $ . . i'm doing piece-work," she explains. "i get seven-eighths of a cent for every dozen bottles i fill. i have to fill eight dozen to make seven cents. downstairs in the corking-room you can make as high as $ . to $ . . they won't let you make any more than that. me and them two girls over there are the only ones in this room doing piece-work. i was here three weeks as a day-worker." "do you live at home?" i ask. "yes; i don't have to work. i don't pay no board. my father and my brothers supports me and my mother. but," and her eyes twinkle, "i couldn't have the clothes i do if i didn't work." "do you spend your money all on yourself?" "yes." i am amazed at the cheerfulness of my companions. they complain of fatigue, of cold, but never at any time is there a suggestion of ill-humour. their suppressed animal spirits reassert themselves when the forewoman's back is turned. companionship is the great stimulus. i am confident that without the social _entrain_, the encouragement of example, it would be impossible to obtain as much from each individual girl as is obtained from them in groups of tens, fifties, hundreds working together. when lunch is over we are set to scrubbing. every table and stand, every inch of the factory floor must be scrubbed in the next four hours. the whistle on saturday blows an hour earlier. any girl who has not finished her work when the day is done, so that she can leave things in perfect order, is kept overtime, for which she is paid at the rate of six or seven cents an hour. a pail of hot water, a dirty rag and a scrubbing-brush are thrust into my hands. i touch them gingerly. i get a broom and for some time make sweeping a necessity, but the forewoman is watching me. i am afraid of her. there is no escape. i begin to scrub. my hands go into the brown, slimy water and come out brown and slimy. i slop the soap-suds around and move on to a fresh place. it appears there are a right and a wrong way of scrubbing. the forewoman is at my side. "have you ever scrubbed before?" she asks sharply. this is humiliating. "yes," i answer; "i have scrubbed ... oilcloth." the forewoman knows how to do everything. she drops down on her knees and, with her strong arms and short-thumbed, brutal hands, she shows me how to scrub. the grumbling is general. there is but one opinion among the girls: it is not right that they should be made to do this work. they all echo the same resentment, but their complaints are made in whispers; not one has the courage to openly rebel. what, i wonder to myself, do the men do on scrubbing day. i try to picture one of them on his hands and knees in a sea of brown mud. it is impossible. the next time i go for a supply of soft soap in a department where the men are working i take a look at the masculine interpretation of house cleaning. one man is playing a hose on the floor and the rest are rubbing the boards down with long-handled brooms and rubber mops. "you take it easy," i say to the boss. "i won't have no scrubbing in my place," he answers emphatically. "the first scrubbing day, they says to me 'get down on your hands and knees,' and i says--'just pay me my money, will you; i'm goin' home. what scrubbing can't be done with mops ain't going to be done by me.' the women wouldn't have to scrub, either, if they had enough spirit all of 'em to say so." i determined to find out if possible, during my stay in the factory, what it is that clogs this mainspring of "spirit" in the women. i hear fragmentary conversations about fancy dress balls, valentine parties, church sociables, flirtations and clothes. almost all of the girls wear shoes with patent leather and some or much cheap jewelry, brooches, bangles and rings. a few draw their corsets in; the majority are not laced. here and there i see a new girl whose back is flat, whose chest is well developed. among the older hands who have begun work early there is not a straight pair of shoulders. much of the bottle washing and filling is done by children from twelve to fourteen years of age. on their slight, frail bodies toil weighs heavily; the delicate child form gives way to the iron hand of labour pressed too soon upon it. backs bend earthward, chests recede, never to be sound again. * * * * * after a sunday of rest i arrive somewhat ahead of time on monday morning, which leaves me a few moments for conversation with a piece-worker who is pasting labels on mustard jars. she is fifteen. "do you like your job?" i ask. "yes, i do," she answers, pleased to tell her little history. "i began in a clothing shop. i only made $ . a week, but i didn't have to stand. i felt awful when papa made me quit. when i came in here, bein' on my feet tired me so i cried every night for two months. now i've got used to it. i don't feel no more tired when i get home than i did when i started out." there are two sharp blue lines that drag themselves down from her eyes to her white cheeks. "why, you know, at christmas they give us two weeks," she goes on in the sociable tone of a woman whose hands are occupied. "i just didn't know what to do with myself." "does your mother work?" "oh, my, no. i don't have to work, only if i didn't i couldn't have the clothes i do. i save some of my money and spend the rest on myself. i make $ to $ a week." the girl next us volunteers a share in the conversation. "i bet you can't guess how old i am." i look at her. her face and throat are wrinkled, her hands broad, and scrawny; she is tall and has short skirts. what shall be my clue? if i judge by pleasure, "unborn" would be my answer; if by effort, then "a thousand years." "twenty," i hazard as a safe medium. "fourteen," she laughs. "i don't like it at home, the kids bother me so. mamma's people are well-to-do. i'm working for my own pleasure." "indeed, i wish i was," says a new girl with a red waist. "we three girls supports mamma and runs the house. we have $ rent to pay and a load of coal every month and groceries. it's no joke, i can tell you." the whistle blows; i go back to my monotonous task. the old aches begin again, first gently, then more and more sharply. the work itself is growing more mechanical. i can watch the girls around me. what is it that determines superiority in this class? why was the girl filling pickle jars put on piece-work after three weeks, when others older than she are doing day-work at fifty and sixty cents after a year in the factory? what quality decides that four shall direct four hundred? intelligence i put first; intelligence of any kind, from the natural penetration that needs no teaching to the common sense that every one relies upon. judgment is not far behind in the list, and it is soon matured by experience. a strong will and a moral steadiness stand guardians over the other two. the little pickle girl is winning in the race by her intelligence. the forewomen have all four qualities, sometimes one, sometimes another predominating. pretty clara is smarter than lottie. lottie is more steady. old mrs. minns' will has kept her at it until her judgment has become infallible and can command a good price. annie is an evenly balanced mixture of all, and the five hundred who are working under the five lack these qualities somewhat, totally, or have them in useless proportions. monday is a hard day. there is more complaining, more shirking, more gossip than in the middle of the week. most of the girls have been to dances on saturday night, to church on sunday evening with some young man. their conversation is vulgar and prosaic; there is nothing in the language they use that suggests an ideal or any conception of the abstract. they make jokes, state facts about the work, tease each other, but in all they say there is not a word of value--nothing that would interest if repeated out of its class. they have none of the sagaciousness of the low-born italian, none of the wit and penetration of the french _ouvriere_. the old world generations ago divided itself into classes; the lower class watched the upper and grew observant and appreciative, wise and discriminating, through the study of a master's will. here in the land of freedom, where no class line is rigid, the precious chance is not to serve but to live for oneself; not to watch a superior, but to find out by experience. the ideal plays no part, stern realities alone count, and thus we have a progressive, practical, independent people, the expression of whose personality is interesting not through their words but by their deeds. when the monday noon whistle blows i follow the hundreds down into the dining-room. each wears her cap in a way that speaks for her temperament. there is the indifferent, the untidy, the prim, the vain, the coquettish; and the faces under them, which all looked alike at first, are becoming familiar. i have begun to make friends. i speak bad english, but do not attempt to change my voice and inflection nor to adopt the twang. no allusion is made to my pronunciation except by one girl, who says: "i knew you was from the east. my sister spent a year in boston and when she come back she talked just like you do, but she lost it all again. i'd give anything if i could talk _aristocratic_." i am beginning to understand why the meager lunches of preserve-sandwiches and pickles more than satisfy the girls whom i was prepared to accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather than on nourishment. it is fatigue that steals the appetite. i can hardly taste what i put in my mouth; the food sticks in my throat. the girls who complain most of being tired are the ones who roll up their newspaper bundles half full. they should be given an hour at noon. the first half of it should be spent in rest and recreation before a bite is touched. the good that such a regulation would work upon their faulty skins and pale faces, their lasting strength and health, would be incalculable. i did not want wholesome food, exhausted as i was. i craved sours and sweets, pickles, cake, anything to excite my numb taste. so long as i remain in the bottling department there is little variety in my days. rising at : every morning, i make my way through black streets to offer my sacrifice of energy on the altar of toil. all is done without a fresh incident. accumulated weariness forces me to take a day off. when i return i am sent for in the corking-room. the forewoman lends me a blue gingham dress and tells me i am to do "piece"-work. there are three who work together at every corking-table. my two companions are a woman with goggles and a one-eyed boy. we are not a brilliant trio. the job consists in evening the vinegar in the bottles, driving the cork in, first with a machine, then with a hammer, letting out the air with a knife stuck under the cork, capping the corks, sealing the caps, counting and distributing the bottles. these operations are paid for at the rate of one-half a cent for the dozen bottles, which sum is divided among us. my two companions are earning a living, so i must work in dead earnest or take bread out of their mouths. at every blow of the hammer there is danger. again and again bottles fly to pieces in my hand. the boy who runs the corking-machine smashes a glass to fragments. "are you hurt?" i ask, my own fingers crimson stained. "that ain't nothin'," he answers. "cuts is common; my hands is full of 'em." the woman directs us; she is fussy and loses her head, the work accumulates, i am slow, the boy is clumsy. there is a stimulus unsuspected in working to get a job done. before this i had worked to make the time pass. then no one took account of how much i did; the factory clock had a weighted pendulum; now ambition outdoes physical strength. the hours and my purpose are running a race together. but, hurry as i may, as we do, when twelve blows its signal we have corked only dozen bottles! this is no more than day-work at seventy cents. with an ache in every muscle, i redouble my energy after lunch. the girl with the goggles looks at me blindly and says: "ain't it just awful hard work? you can make good money, but you've got to hustle." she is a forlorn specimen of humanity, ugly, old, dirty, condemned to the slow death of the overworked. i am a green hand. i make mistakes; i have no experience in the fierce sustained effort of the bread-winners. over and over i turn to her, over and over she is obliged to correct me. during the ten hours we work side by side not one murmur of impatience escapes her. when she sees that i am getting discouraged she calls out across the deafening din, "that's all right; you can't expect to learn in a day; just keep on steady." as i go about distributing bottles to the labelers i notice a strange little elf, not more than twelve years old, hauling loaded crates; her face and chest are depressed, she is pale to blueness, her eyes have indigo circles, her pupils are unnaturally dilated, her brows contracted; she has the appearance of a cave-bred creature. she seems scarcely human. when the time for cleaning up arrives toward five my boss sends me for a bucket of water to wash up the floor. i go to the sink, turn on the cold water and with it the steam which takes the place of hot water. the valve slips; in an instant i am enveloped in a scalding cloud. before it has cleared away the elf is by my side. "did you hurt yourself?" she asks. her inhuman form is the vehicle of a human heart, warm and tender. she lifts her wide-pupiled eyes to mine; her expression does not change from that of habitual scrutiny cast early in a rigid mould, but her voice carries sympathy from its purest source. there is more honour than courtesy in the code of etiquette. commands are given curtly; the slightest injustice is resented; each man for himself in work, but in trouble all for the one who is suffering. no bruise or cut or burn is too familiar a sight to pass uncared for. it is their common sufferings, their common effort that unites them. when i have become expert in the corking art i am raised to a better table, with a bright boy, and a girl who is dignified and indifferent with the indifference of those who have had too much responsibility. she never hurries; the work slips easily through her fingers. she keeps a steady bearing over the morning's ups and downs. under her load of trials there is something big in the steady way she sails. "used to hard work?" she asks me. "not much," i answer; "are you?" "oh, yes. i began at thirteen in a bakery. i had a place near the oven and the heat overcame me." her shoulders are bowed, her chest is hollow. "looking for a boarding place near the factory, i hear," she continues. "yes. you live at home, i suppose." "yes. there's four of us: mamma, papa, my sister and myself. papa's blind." "can't he work?" "oh, yes, he creeps to his job every morning, and he's got so much experience he kind o' does things by instinct." "does your mother work?" "oh, my, no. my sister's an invalid. she hasn't been out o' the door for three years. she's got enlargement of the heart and consumption, too, i guess; she 'takes' hemorrhages. sometimes she has twelve in one night. every time she coughs the blood comes foaming out of her mouth. she can't lie down. i guess she'd die if she lay down, and she gets so tired sittin' up all night. she used to be a tailoress, but i guess her job didn't agree with her." "how many checks have we got," i ask toward the close of the day. "thirteen," ella answers. "an unlucky number," i venture, hoping to arouse an opinion. "are you superstitious?" she asks, continuing to twist tin caps on the pickle jars. "i am. if anything's going to happen i can't help having presentiments, and they come true, too." here is a mystic, i thought; so i continued: "and what about dreams?" "oh!" she cried. "dreams! i have the queerest of anybody!" i was all attention. "why, last night," she drew near to me, and spoke slowly, "i dreamed that mamma was drunk, and that she was stealing chickens!" such is the imagination of this weary worker. the whole problem in mechanical labour rests upon economy of force. the purpose of each, i learned by experience, was to accomplish as much as possible with one single stroke. in this respect the machine is superior to man, and man to woman. sometimes i tried original ways of doing the work given me. i soon found in every case that the methods proposed by the forewoman were in the end those whereby i could do the greatest amount of work with the least effort. a mustard machine had recently been introduced to the factory. it replaced three girls; it filled as many bottles with a single stroke as the girls could fill with twelve. this machine and all the others used were run by boys or men; the girls had not strength enough to manipulate them methodically. the power of the machine, the physical force of the man were simplifying their tasks. while the boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of things, complicated and fussy, left to our lot because we had not physical force for the simpler but greater effort. the boy at the corking-table had soon become an expert; he was fourteen and he made from $ to $ . a day. he worked ten hours at one job, whereas ella and i had a dozen little jobs almost impossible to systematize: we hammered and cut and capped the corks and washed and wiped the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned out, and once a day scrubbed up our own precincts. when i asked the boy if he was tired he laughed at me. he was superior to us; he was stronger; he could do more with one stroke than we could do with three; he was by _nature_ a more valuable aid than we. we were forced through physical inferiority to abandon the choicest task to this young male competitor. nature had given us a handicap at the start. for a few days there is no vacancy at the corking-tables. i am sent back to the bottling department. the oppressive monotony is one day varied by a summons to the men's dining-room. i go eagerly, glad of any change. in the kitchen i find a girl with skin disease peeling potatoes, and a coloured man making soup in a wash-boiler. the girl gives me a stool to sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes. the dinner under preparation is for the men of the factory. there are two hundred of them. they are paid from $ . up to $ a day. their wages begin above the highest limit given to women. the dinner costs each man ten cents. the $ paid in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids and the dinner, which consists of meat, bread and butter, vegetables and coffee, sometimes soup, sometimes dessert. if this can pay for two hundred there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not be given the women. they don't demand it, so they are left to make themselves ill on pickles and preserves. the coloured cook is full of song and verse. he quotes from the bible freely, and gives us snatches of popular melodies. we have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who brings us ice and various provisions. both men, i notice, take their work easily. during the morning a busy irish woman comes hurrying into our precincts. "say," she yells in a shrill voice, "my cauliflowers ain't here, are they? i ordered 'em early and they ain't came yet." without properly waiting for an answer she hurries away again. the coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly: "just like a woman! why, before i'd _make a fuss_ about cauliflowers or anything else!" about eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and milk. while i am cutting bread for the two hundred i hear her say to the cook in a gossipy tone: "how do you like the new girl? she's here all alone." i am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. when i return the cook lectures me in this way: "here alone, are you?" "yes." "well, i see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill yourself with work either. just stick at it and they'll do right by you. lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. now i like everybody to have a good time, and i hope you'll have a good time, too, but you mustn't carry it too far." my mind went back as he said this to a conversation i had had the night before with a working-girl at my boarding-house. "where is your home?" i asked. she had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to take a rest. she looked at me skeptically. "we don't have no homes," was her answer. "we just get up and get whenever they send us along." and almost as a sequel to this i thought of two sad cases that had come close to my notice as fellow boarders. i was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. the matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." the bell rang and i opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and sleet about on the winter air. a young girl came in; she was seeking a lodging. her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. she took off her things slowly in a dazed manner. her short, quick breathing showed how excited she was. when she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her eyes moved about restlessly. she stopped abruptly now and then and contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she continued in the same broken, husky voice: "i suppose i'm not the only one in trouble. i've thought a thousand times over that i would kill myself. i suppose i loved him--but i _hate_ him now." these two sentences, recurring, were the story's all. the impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was pleasure had been shared--these were the thoughts and feelings breeding hatred. she had spent the day in a fruitless search for her lover. she had been to his boss and to his rooms. he had paid his debts and gone, nobody knew where. she was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to bear the responsibility she had not been alone to incur. she could not shirk it as the man had done. they had both disregarded the law. on whom were the consequences weighing more heavily? on the woman. she is the sufferer; she is the first to miss the law's protection. she is the weaker member whom, for the sake of the race, society protects. nature has made her man's physical inferior; society is obliged to recognize this in the giving of a marriage law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman, since she can least afford to disregard it. another evening when the matron was out i sat for a time with a young working woman and her baby. there is a comradeship among the poor that makes light of indiscreet questions. i felt only sympathy in asking: "are you alone to bring up your child?" "yes, ma'am," was the answer. "i'll never go home with _him_." i looked at _him_: a wizened, four-months-old infant with a huge flat nose, and two dull black eyes fixed upon the gas jet. the girl had the grace of a forest-born creature; she moved with the mysterious strength and suppleness of a tree's branch. she was proud; she felt herself disgraced. for four months she had not left the house. i talked on, proposing different things. "i don't know what to do," she said. "i can't never go home with _him_, and if i went home without him i'd never be the same. i don't know what i'd do if anything happened to _him_." her head bowed over the child; she held him close to her breast. but to return to the coloured cook and my day in the kitchen. i had ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. we set the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks that must be begun again the following day. at twelve the two hundred troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. they pass like locusts, leaving us sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. this takes us four hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over the next morning with peculiar monotony. in the factory there is stimulus in feeling that the material which passes through one's hands will never be seen or heard of again. on saturday the owner of the factory comes at lunch time with several friends and talks to us with an amazing _camaraderie_. he is kindly, humourous and tactful. one or two missionaries speak after him, but their conversation is too abstract for us. we want something dramatic, imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. tell us about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. the longing for flowers has often come to me as i work, and a rose seems of all things the most desirable. in my present condition i do not hark back to civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country places i have seen in the fields and forests. if i had a holiday i would spend it seeing not what man but what god has made. these are the things to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who are no more prepared than i felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal of art or ethics. the omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and "stock," leave the mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused by something natural. as an initial remedy for the ills i voluntarily assumed i would propose amusement. of all the people who spoke to us that saturday, we liked best the one who made us laugh. it was a relief to hear something funny. in working as an outsider in a factory girls' club i had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor something beautiful to look at and think about--a photograph or copy of some _chef d'oeuvre_, an _objet d'art_, lessons in literature and art which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their surroundings. three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs. if the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to the poor in the slums about shakespeare and italian art would instead offer diversion first--a play, a farce, a humourous recitation--they would make much more rapid progress in winning the confidence of those whom they want to help. the working woman who has had a good laugh is more ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than the woman who has been forced to listen silently to an abstract lesson. in society when we wish to make friends with people we begin by entertaining them. it should be the same way with the poor. next to amusement as a means of giving temporary relief and bringing about relations which will be helpful to all, i put instruction, in the form of narrative, about the people of other countries, our fellow man, how he lives and works; and, third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants, the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista. my first experience is drawing to its close. i have surmounted the discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the strain of hard manual labour. i have confined my observations to life and conditions in the factory. owing, as i have before explained, to the absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in her family and social life. i have pointed out as they appeared to me woman's relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic advancement. i have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative dependence on the law. she appeared to me not as the equal of man either physically or legally. it remained to study her socially. in the factory where i worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. the women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. both were working as hard as they possibly could. the women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. the men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. why was this? it is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. i can only relate the conclusions i drew from what i saw myself. the wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. this level and its accompanying conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of labourers taking part in the competition. in the masculine category i met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. in the feminine category i found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. this inevitably drags the wage level. the self-supporting girl is in competition with the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. it is this division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a class. there will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is not equally vital to them all. it is not only nature and the law which demand protection for women, but society as well. in every case of the number i investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the family, the mother was not allowed to work. she was wholly protected. in the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread and butter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely. there is no law which regulates this social protection: it is voluntary, and it would seem to indicate that civilized woman is meant to be an economic dependent. yet, on the other hand, what is the new force which impels girls from their homes into the factories to work when they do not actually need the money paid them for their effort and sacrifice? is it a move toward some far distant civilization when women shall have become man's physical equal, a "free, economic, social factor, making possible the full social combination of individuals in collective industry"? this is a matter for speculation only. what occurred to me as a possible remedy both for the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also as a betterment for the girl who wants to work though she does not need the money, was this: the establishment of schools where the esthetic branches of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by their material independence could give some leisure to acquiring a profession useful to themselves and to society in general. the whole country would be benefited by the opening of such schools as the empress of russia has patronized for the maintenance of the "petites industries," or those which queen margherita has established for the revival of lace-making in italy. if there was such a counter-attraction to machine labour, the bread-winner would have a freer field and the non-bread-winner might still work for luxury and at the same time better herself morally, mentally and esthetically. she could aid in forming an intermediate class of labourers which as yet does not exist in america: the hand-workers, the _main d'oeuvre_ who produce the luxurious objects of industrial art for which we are obliged to send to europe when we wish to beautify our homes. the american people are lively, intelligent, capable of learning anything. the schools of which i speak, founded, not for the manufacturing of the useful but of the beautiful, could be started informally as classes and by individual effort. such labour would be paid more than the mechanical factory work; the immense importation from abroad of objects of industrial art sufficiently proves the demand for them in this country; there would be no material disadvantage for the girl who gave up her job in a pickle factory. her faculties would be well employed, and she could, without leaving her home, do work which would be of esthetic and, indirectly, of moral value. i was discouraged at first to see how difficult it was to help the working girls as individuals and how still more difficult to help them as a class. there is perhaps no surer way of doing this than by giving opportunities to those who have a purpose and a will. no amount of openings will help the girl who has not both of these. i watched many girls with intelligence and energy who were unable to develop for the lack of a chance a start in the right direction. aside from the few remedies i have been able to suggest, i would like to make an appeal for persistent sympathy in behalf of those whose misery i have shared. until some marvelous advancement has been made toward the reign of justice upon earth, every man, woman and child should have constantly in his heart the sufferings of the poorest. on the evening when i left the factory for the last time, i heard in the streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides: the mental food of the overworked. it is saturday night. i mingle with a crowd of labourers homeward bound, and with women and girls returning from a saturday sale in the big shops. they hurry along delighted at the cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human effort that has produced it, the cost of life and energy it represents. as they pass, they draw their skirts aside from us, the labourers who have made their bargains cheap; from us, the coöperators who enable them to have the luxuries they do; from us, the multitude who stand between them and the monster toil that must be fed with human lives. think of us, as we herd to our work in the winter dawn; think of us as we bend over our task all the daylight without rest; think of us at the end of the day as we resume suffering and anxiety in homes of squalour and ugliness; think of us as we make our wretched try for merriment; think of us as we stand protectors between you and the labour that must be done to satisfy your material demands; think of us--be merciful. [illustration: "waving arms of smoke and steam, a symbol of spent energy, of the lives consumed, and vanishing again" factories on the alleghany river at the th street bridge, just below the pickle works] * * * * * perry, a new york mill town * * * * * chapter iii perry, a new york mill town no place in america could have afforded better than pittsburg a chance to study the factory life of american girls, the stimulus of a new country upon the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy of a people animated by hope and stirred to activity by the boundless opportunities for making money. it is the labourers' city _par excellence_; and in my preceding chapters i have tried to give a clear picture of factory life between the hours of seven and six, of the economic conditions, of the natural social and legal equipment of woman as a working entity, of her physical, moral and esthetic development. now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to that which gives release at night is not half the day, and only two-thirds of the working hours, my second purpose has been to find a place where the factory girl's own life could best be studied: her domestic, religious and sentimental life. somewhere in the western part of new york state, one of my comrades at the pickle works had told me, there was a town whose population was chiefly composed of mill-hands. the name of the place was perry, and i decided upon it as offering the typical american civilization among the working classes. new england is too free of grafts to give more than a single aspect; pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations of perry are laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held together by a strong american cement. ignorant of perry further than as it exists, a black spot on a branch of a small road near buffalo, i set out from new york toward my destination on the empire state express. there was barely time to descend with my baggage at rochester before the engine had started onward again, trailing behind it with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers who, for a few hours under the car's roof, are united by no other common interest than that of journeying quickly from one spot to another, where they disperse never to meet again. my perry train had an altogether different character. i was late for it, but the brakeman saw me coming and waved to the engineer not to start until my trunk was checked and safely boarded like myself. then we bumped our way through meadows quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was indulgently considered by the occupants of the train. my companions, chiefly women, were of the homely american type whose new england drawl has been modified by a mingling of foreign accents. they took advantage of this time for "visiting" with neighbours whom the winter snows and illnesses had rendered inaccessible. their inquiries for each other were all kindliness and sympathy, and the peaceful, tolerant, uneventful way in which we journeyed from rochester to perry was a symbol of the way in which these good people had journeyed across life. perry, the terminus of the line, was a frame station lodged on stilts in a sea of surrounding mud. when the engine had come to a standstill and ceased to pant, when the last truck had been unloaded, the baggage room closed, there were no noises to be heard except those that came from a neighbouring country upon whose peace the small town had not far encroached; the splash of a horse and buggy through the mud, a monotonous voice mingling with the steady tick of the telegraph machine, some distant barnyard chatter, and the mysterious, invisible stir of spring shaking out upon the air damp sweet odours calling the earth to colour and life. descending the staircase which connected the railroad station with the hill road on which it was perched, i joined a man who was swinging along in rubber boots, with several farming tools, rakes and hoes, slung over his shoulder. a repugnance i had felt in resuming my toil-worn clothes had led me to make certain modifications which i feared in so small a town as perry might relegate me to the class i had voluntarily abandoned. the man in rubber boots looked me over as i approached, bag in hand, and to my salutation he replied: "going down to the mill, i suppose. there's lots o' ladies comes in the train every day now." he was the perfection of tact; he placed me in one sentence as a mill-hand and a lady. "i'll take you down as far as main street," he volunteered, giving me at once a feeling of kindly interest which "city folks" have not time to show. we found our way by improvised crossings through broad, soft beds of mud. among the branches of the sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved streets transparent balls of glass were suspended, from which, as twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial light shot its rays, the perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little town of perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity and progress. "there's a lot of the girls left the mill yesterday," my companion volunteered. "they cut the wages, and some of the oldest hands got right out. there's more than a thousand of 'em on the pay-roll, but i guess you can make good money if you're ready to work." we had reached main street, which, owing to the absence of a trolley, had retained a certain individuality. the rivers of mud broadened out into a sea, flanked by a double row of two-story, flat-roofed frame stores, whose monotony was interrupted by a hotel and a town hall. my guide stopped at a corner butcher shop. its signboard was a couple of mild-eyed animals hanging head downward, presented informally, with their skins untouched, and having more the appearance of some ill-treated pets than future beef and bouillon for the perry population. "follow the boardwalk!" was the simple command i received. "keep right along until you come to the mill." i presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank walk. she had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a side bag with a lace handkerchief. she was not young and she wore spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or the hope of it. the boardwalk, leading inevitably to the mill, announced our common purpose and saved us an introduction. "going down to get work?" was the question we simultaneously asked of each other. my companion, all eagerness, shook out the lace handkerchief in her side bag and explained: "i don't have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but i always heard so much about perry i thought i'd like to come up, and," she sighed, with a flirt of the lace handkerchief and a contented glance around at the rows of white frame houses, "i'm up now." "want board?" the drayman called to me. "you kin count on me for a good place. there's doctor meadows, now; he's got a nice home and he just wants two boarders." the middle-aged woman with the glasses glanced up quickly. "doctor meadows of tittihute?" she asked. "i wont go there; he's too strict. he's a methodist minister. you couldn't have any fun at all." i followed suit, denouncing doctor killjoy as she had, hoping that her nervous, frisky step would lead me toward the adventure she was evidently seeking. "well," the drayman responded indulgently, "i guess mr. norse will know the best place for you folks." we had come at once to the factory and the end of the boardwalk. it was but a few minutes before mr. norse had revealed himself as the pivot, the human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism of the mill revolved and clung, sure of finding its proper balance. tall, lank and meager, with a wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, mr. norse made his rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in the other and a black cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive to hear and overhear. his manner was professional. he looked at us, placed us, told us to return at one o'clock, recommended a boarding-house, and, on his way to some other case, sent a small boy to accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our lodgings. the street we followed ended in a rolling hillside, and beyond was the mysterious blue that holds something of the infinite in its mingling of clouds and shadows. the geneseo valley lay near us like a lake under the sky, and silhouetted against it were the factory chimney and buildings. the wood's edge came close to the town, whose yards prolong themselves into green meadows and farming lands. we knocked at a rusty screen door and were welcomed with the cordiality of the country woman to whom all folks are neighbours, all strangers possible boarders. the house, built without mantelpiece or chimney, atoned for this cheerlessness with a large parlour stove, whose black arms carried warmth through floor and ceiling. a table was spread in the dining-room. a loud-ticking clock with a rusty bell marked the hour from a shelf on the wall, and out of the kitchen, seen in vista, came a spluttering sound of frying food. our hostess took us into the parlour. several family pictures of stony-eyed women and men with chin beards, and a life-sized frances willard in chromo, looked down at our ensuing interview. board, lodging, heat and light we could have at $ . a week. before the husky clock had struck twelve, i was installed in a small room with the middle-aged woman from batavia and a second unknown roommate. now what, i asked myself, is the mill's attraction and what is the power of this small town? its population is , . of these, , work in the knitting-mill, more in a cutlery factory and in various flour, butter, barrel, planing mills and salt blocks. half the inhabitants are young hands. not one in a hundred has a home in perry; they have come from all western parts of the state to work. there are scarcely any children, few married couples and almost no old people. it is a town of youthful contemporaries, stung with the american's ambition for independence and adventure, charmed by the gaiety of being boys and girls together, with an ever possible touch of romance which makes the hardest work seem easy. within the four board walls of each house, whose type is repeated up and down perry streets, there is a group of factory employees boarding and working at the mill. their names suggest a foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their diverse energies in a common effort which makes americans of them. as i lived for several weeks among a group of this kind, who were fairly representative, i shall try to give, through a description of their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics, their occupations out of working hours, a general idea of these unknown toilers, who are so amazingly like their more fortunate sisters that i became convinced the difference is only superficial--not one of kind but merely of variety. the perry factory girl is separated from the new york society girl, not by a few generations, but by a few years of culture and training. in america, where tradition and family play an unimportant part, the great educator is the spending of money. it is through the purchase of possessions that the americans develop their taste, declare themselves, and show their inherent capacity for culture. give to the perry mill-hands a free chance for growth, transplant them, care for them, and they will readily show how slight and how merely a thing of culture the difference is between the wild rose and the american beauty. what were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality? were they a band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation? were they making the pitiful exchange of their total vitality for insufficient nourishment? did life mean to them merely the diminishing of their forces? on the contrary, they entered gay, laughing young, a youth guarded intact by freedom and hope. what were the subjects of conversation pursued at dinner? love, labour, the price paid for it, the advantages of town over country life, the neighbour and her conduct. what was the appearance of my companions? there was nothing in it to shock good taste. their hands and feet were somewhat broadened by work, their skins were imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses were of coarse material; but in small things the differences were superficial only. was it, then, in big things that the divergence began which places them as a lower class? was it money alone that kept them from the places of authority? what were their ambitions, their perplexities? what part does self-respect play? how well satisfied are they, or how restless? what can we learn from them? what can we teach them? we ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie and all started back in good time for a one o'clock beginning at the mill. for the space of several hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined the street, implacable, silent. within all hummed to the collective activity of a throng, each working with all his force for a common end. machines roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air--a cloud of lint sent forth from the friction of thousands of busy hands in perpetual contact with the shapeless anonymous garments they were fashioning. there were, on their way between the cutting-and the finishing-rooms, , dozen shirts. they were to pass by innumerable hands; they were to be held and touched by innumerable individuals; they were to be begun and finished by innumerable human beings with distinct tastes and likings, abilities and failings; and when the , dozen shirts were complete they were to look alike, and they were to look as though made by a machine; they were to show no trace whatever of the men and the women who had made them. here we were, , souls hurrying from morning until night, working from seven until six, with as little personality as we could, with the effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as nearly as possible identical one to the other, and all to the machine itself. [illustration: "they trifle with love"] what could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic mechanical activity devoid of thought? it was this for which i sought an answer; it is for this i propose a remedy. at the threshold of the mill door my roommate and i encountered mr. norse. there was irony in the fates allotted us. she was eager to make money; i was indifferent. mr. norse felt her in his power; i felt him in mine. she was given a job at twenty-five cents a day and all she could make; i was offered the favourite work in the mill--shirt finishing, at thirty cents a day and all i could make; and when i shook my head to see how far i could exploit my indifference and said, "thirty cents is too little," mr. norse's answer was: "well, i suppose you, like the rest of us, are trying to earn a living. i will guarantee you seventy-five cents a day for the first two weeks, and all you can make over it is yours." my apprenticeship began under the guidance of an "old girl" who had been five years in the mill. a dozen at a time the woolen shirts were brought to us, complete all but the adding of the linen strips in front where the buttons and buttonholes are stitched. the price of this operation is paid for the dozen shirts five, five and a half and six cents, according to the complexity of the finish. my instructress had done as many as forty dozen in one day; she averaged $ . a day all the year around. while she was teaching me the factory paid her at the rate of ten cents an hour. a touch of the machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. a second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. for the five hours of my first afternoon session there was not an instant's harmony between what i did and what i intended to do. i sewed frantically into the middle of shirts. i watched my needle, impotent as it flew up and down, and when by chance i made a straight seam i brought it to so sudden a stop that the thread raveled back before my weary eyes. when my back and fingers ached so that i could no longer bend over the work, i watched my comrades with amazement. the machine was not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument that responded with niceness to their guidance. above the incessant roar and burring din they called gaily to each other, gossiping, chatting, telling stories. what did they talk about? everything, except domestic cares. the management of an interior, housekeeping, cooking were things i never once heard mentioned. what were the favourite topics, those returned to most frequently and with surest interest? dress and men. two girls in the seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over a packer, a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow who had touched the hearts of both and awakened in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend. the quarrel began lightly with an exchange of unpleasant comment; it soon took the proportions of a dispute which could not give itself the desired vent in words alone. the boss was called in. he made no attempt to control what lay beyond his power, but applying factory legislation to the case, he ordered the two amazons to "register out" until the squabble was settled, as the factory did not propose to pay its hands for the time spent in fights. so the two girls "rang out" past the timekeeper and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand, fist to fist, which, as it happens to man, had its calming effect. we stitched our way industriously over the , dozen. except for the moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation, there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing, pounding of the machinery. the body was shaken with it; the ears strained. the little girl opposite me was a new hand. her rosy cheeks and straight shoulders announced this fact. she had been five months in the mill; the other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years. there were of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room. by the windows the light and air were fairly good. at the centre tables the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon. the wood's edge ran within a few yards of the factory windows. between it and us lay the stream, the water force, the power that had called men to perry. there, as everywhere in america, for an individual as for a place, the attraction was industrial possibilities. as niagara has become more an industrial than a picturesque landscape, so perry, in spite of its serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the worshipers of gain. my _vis-à -vis_ was talkative. "say," she said to her neighbour, "jim weston is the worst flirt i ever seen." "who's jim weston?" the other responded, diving into the box by her side for a handful of gray woolen shirts. "why, he's the one who made my teeth--he made teeth for all of us up home," and her smile reveals the handiwork of weston. "if i had false teeth," is the comment made upon this, "i wouldn't tell anybody." "i thought some," continues the implacable new girl, unruffled, "of having a gold filling put in one of my front teeth. i think gold fillings are so pretty," she concludes, looking toward me for a response. this primitive love of ornament i found manifest in the same medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eye-glasses. the nicety of certain operations in the mill, performed not always in the brightest of lights, is a fatal strain upon the eyes. there are no oculists in perry, but a buffalo member of the profession makes a monthly visit to treat a new harvest of patients. their daily effort toward the monthly finishing of , garments permanently diminishes their powers of vision. every thirty days a new set of girls appears with glasses. they wear them as they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace, bracelet or a hoop through the nose. when the six o'clock whistle blew on the first night i had finished only two dozen shirts. "you've got a good job," my teacher said, as we came out together in the cool evening air. "you seem to be taking to it." they size a girl up the minute she comes in. if she has quick motions she'll get on all right. "i guess you'll make a good finisher." once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax. after a moment by the kitchen pump we took our places at table. our hostess waited upon us. "it takes some grit," she explained, "and more grace to keep boarders." except on sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight of the lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished. she passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal--potatoes, bread and butter and cake--and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite direction, as if to say, "i'm not looking; take the biggest piece." it was with my roommates i became the soonest acquainted. the butcher's widow from batavia was a grumbler. "how do you like your job?" i asked her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room. "oh, lordy," was the answer, "i didn't think it would be like this. i'd rather do housework any day. i bet you won't stay two weeks." she was ugly and stupid. she had been married young to a butcher. left alone to battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness, but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality, casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance. she had the monotony of an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age when learning is possible. the butcher's death had opened new possibilities. after a period of respectful mourning, she had set out, against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new, crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one o'clock to finish the night before she left home. it was inevitable that the butcher's widow should be disappointed. there was too much grim reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to romance. she grumbled and complained. secret dissatisfaction preyed upon her. she was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily and with no _arrière pensée_. at the end of the first week the picture hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. she had gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more than sixty cents a day. she left us and went back to do housework in batavia. my other roommate was of the madonna type. in our class she would have been called an invalid. her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain, and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of bromide. we found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called us to her aid. it was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. we fixed her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. she had been a school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the geneseo normal school. she could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try factory work. her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the genesee valley. she might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a dependent. she was of the mystic, sentimental type. she had a broad forehead, straight auburn hair, a clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves gave it sweetness. though her large frame indicated clearly an anglo-saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport about her. she had never learned to skate or swim, but she could sit and watch the hills all day long. her clothes had an esthetic touch. mingled with her nervous determination there was a sentimental yearning. she was an idealist, impelled by some controlling emotion which was the mainspring of her life. little by little we became friends. our common weariness brought us often together after supper in a listless, confidential mood before the parlour stove. we let the conversation drift inevitably toward the strong current that was marking her with a touch of melancholy, like all those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror, reflecting visions that have no place in reality. we talked about blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man's name; and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. her voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related the story. it was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like herself. nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. she slipped a gold locket from a chain on her throat. it framed her hero's picture, the source of her courage, the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking, refined, a personage in real life who resembled the inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. in the story she told there were stars and twilight, summer evenings, walks, talks, hopes and vague projects. any practical questions i felt ready to ask would have sounded coarse. the little school-teacher with shattered nerves embodied a hope that was more to her than meat and drink and money. she was of those who do not live by bread alone. among the working population of perry there are all manner of american characteristics manifest. in a country where conditions change with such rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the one which preceded it, it is inevitable that the family and the state should be secondary to the individual. we live with our own generation, with our contemporaries. we substitute experience for tradition. each generation lives for itself during its prime. as soon as its powers begin to decline it makes way with resignation for the next: "we have had our day; now you can have yours." thus in the important decisions of life, the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average american is much more influenced by his contemporaries than by his elders, much more stimulated or determined by the friends of his own age than by the older members of his family. this detaching of generations through the evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new civilization; it is part of the country's freedom. it adds fervour and zest and originality to the effort of each. but it means a youth without the peace of protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation. the man in such a battle as life becomes under these circumstances is better equipped than the woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle. the american woman is restless, dissatisfied. society, whether among the highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not normal. the factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centres are full of old maids. for natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs, meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a thousand unwomanly occupations. i cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes who have not a direct bearing on our subject, but the analogy is striking between them and the factory elements of which i wish to speak. i cannot dwell upon details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the present point, but i want to state a fact, the origin of whose ugly consequences is in all classes and therefore concerns every living american woman. among the american born women of this country the sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other nation in the world, unless it be france, whose anxiety regarding her depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the foreign immigration to the united states, which counteracts the degeneracy of the american.[ ] the original causes for this increasing sterility are moral and not physical. when this is known, does not the philosophy of the american working woman become a subject of vital interest? among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes: the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury. america is not a democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does not exist. men were too long in a majority. women have become autocrats or rivals. a phrase which i heard often repeated at the factory speaks by itself for a condition: "she must be married, because she don't work." and another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the younger girls: "i don't have to work; my father gives me all the money i need, but not all the money i _want_. i like to be independent and spend my money as i please." [footnote : george engelman, m.d., "the increasing sterility of american women," from the journal of the american medical association, october , .] what are the conclusions to be drawn? the american-born girl is an egoist. her whole effort (and she makes and sustains one in the life of mill drudgery) is for herself. she works for luxury until the day when a proper husband presents himself. then, she stops working and lets him toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall not be diminished by increasing family demands. in those cases where the woman continues to work after marriage, she chooses invariably a kind of occupation which is inconsistent with child-bearing. she returns to the mill with her husband. there were a number of married couples at the knitting factory at perry. they boarded, like the rest of us. i never saw a baby nor heard of a baby while i was in the town. i can think of no better way to present this love of luxury, this triumph of individualism, this passion for independence than to continue my account of the daily life at perry. on saturday night we drew our pay and got out at half-past four. this extra hour and a half was not given to us; we had saved it up by beginning each day at fifteen minutes before seven. in reality we worked ten and a quarter hours five days in the week in order to work eight and a half on the sixth. by five o'clock on saturdays the village street was animated with shoppers--the stores were crowded. at supper each girl had a collection of purchases to show: stockings, lace, fancy buckles, velvet ribbons, elaborate hairpins. many of them, when their board was paid, had less than a dollar left of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn. "i am not working to save," was the claim of one girl for all. "i'm working for pleasure." this same girl called me into her room one evening when she was packing to move to another boarding-house where were more young men and better food. i watched her as she put her things into the trunk. she had a quantity of dresses, underclothes with lace and tucks, ribbons, fancy hair ornaments, lace boleros, handkerchiefs. the bottom of her trunk was full of letters from her beau. the mail was always the source of great excitement for her, and having noticed that she seemed especially hilarious over a letter received that night, i made this the pretext for a confidence. "you got a letter to-night, didn't you?" i asked innocently. "was it the one you wanted?" "my, yes," she answered, tossing up a heap of missives from the depths of her trunk. "it was from the same one that wrote me these. i've been going with him three years. i met him up in the grape country where i went to pick grapes. they give you your board and you can make twenty-seven or thirty dollars in a fall. he made up his mind as soon as he saw me that i was about right. now he wants me to marry him. that's what his letter said to-night. he is making three dollars a day and he owns a farm and a horse and wagon. he bought his sister a $ piano this fall." "well, of course," i said eagerly, "you will accept him?" she looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised. "no, my! no," she answered, shaking her head. "i don't want to be married." "but why not? don't you think you are foolish? it's a good chance and you have already been 'going with him' three years." "yes, i know that, but i ain't ready to marry him yet. twenty-five is time enough. i'm only twenty-three. i can have a good time just as i am. he didn't want me to come away and neither did my parents. i thought it would 'most kill my father. he looked like he'd been sick the day i left, but he let me come 'cause he knew i'd never be satisfied until i got my independence." what part did the love of humanity play in this young egoist's heart? she was living, as she had so well explained it, "not to save, but to give herself pleasure"; not to spare others, but to exercise her will in spite of them. tenderness, reverence, gratitude, protection are the feelings which one generation awakens for another. among the thousand contemporaries at perry, from the sameness of their ambitions, there was inevitable rivalry and selfishness. the closer the age and capacity the keener the struggle. [illustration: after saturday night's shopping] there are seven churches in perry of seven different denominations. in this small town of , inhabitants there are seven different forms of worship. the church plays an important part in the social life of the mill hands. there are gatherings of all sorts from one sunday to another, and on sunday there are almost continuous services. there are frequent conversions. when the presbyterian form fails they "try" the baptist. there is no moral instruction; it is all purely religious; and they join one church or another more as they would a social club than an ordained religious organization. friday was "social" night at the church. sometimes there was a "poverty" social, when every one put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit of the church. pound socials were another variety of diversion, where all the attendants were weighed on arriving and charged a cent admission for every pound of avoirdupois. the most popular socials, however, were box socials, and it was to one of these i decided to go with two girls boarding in the house. each of us packed a box with lunch as good as we could afford--eggs, sandwiches, cakes, pickles, oranges--and arrived with these, we proceeded to the vestry-room, where we found an improvised auctioneer's table and a pile of boxes like our own, which were marked and presently put up for sale. the youths of the party bid cautiously or recklessly, according as their inward conviction told them that the box was packed by friend or foe. my box, which, like the rest, had supper for two, was bid in by a tall, nice-looking mill hand, and we installed ourselves in a corner to eat and talk. he was full of reminiscence and had had a checkered career. his first experience had been at night work in a paper mill. he worked eleven hours a night one week, thirteen hours a night the next week, in and out of doors, drenched to the skin. he had lost twenty-five pounds in less than a year, and his face was a mere mask drawn over the irregular bones of the skull. "i always like whatever i am doing," he responded at my protestation of sympathy. "i think that's the only way to be. i never had much appetite at night. they packed me an elegant pail, but somehow all cold food didn't relish much. i never did like a pail.... how would you like to take a dead man's place?" he asked, looking at me grimly. i begged him to explain. "one of my best friends," he began, "was working alongside of me, and i guess he got dizzy or something, for he leaned up against the big belt that ran all the machinery and he was lifted right up in the air and tore to pieces before he ever knew what struck him. the boss came in and seen it, and the second question he asked, he says, 'say, is the machinery running all right?' it wasn't ten minutes before there was another man in there doing the dead man's work." i began to undo the lunch-box, feeling very little inclined to eat. we divided the contents, and my friend, seeing perhaps that i was depressed, told me about the "shows" he had been to in his wanderings. "now, i don't care as much for comedy as some folks," he explained. "i like 'puddin' head wilson' first rate, but the finest thing i ever seen was two of shakespeare's: 'the merchant of venice' and 'julius cæsar.' if you ever get a chance i advise you to go and hear them; they're great." i responded cordially, and when we had exhausted shakespeare i asked him how he liked perry people. "oh, first rate," he said. "i've been here only a month, but i think there's too much formality. it seems to me that when you work alongside of a girl day after day you might speak to her without an introduction, but they won't let you here. i never seen such a formal place." i said very little. the boy talked on of his life and experiences. his english was good except for certain grammatical errors. his words were well chosen. there was between him and the fortunate boys of a superior class only a few years of training. the box social was the beginning of a round of gaieties. the following night i went with my box-social friend to a ball. neither of us danced, but we arrived early and took good places for looking on. the barren hall was dimly lighted. in the corner there was a stove; at one end a stage. an old man with a chin beard was scattering sand over the floor with a springtime gesture of seed sowing. he had his hat on and his coat collar turned up, as though to indicate that the party had not begun. by and by the stage curtain rolled up and the musicians came out and unpacked a violin, a trombone, a flute and a drum. they sat down in the medieval street painted on the scenery back of them, crossed their legs and asked for _sol la_ from an esthetic young lady pianist, with whom they seemed on very familiar terms. the old man with the chin beard made an official _entrée_ from the wing, picked up the drum and became a part of the orchestra. the subscribers had begun to arrive, and when the first two-step struck up there were eight or ten couples on the floor. they held on to each other closely, with no outstretched arms as is the usual form, and they revolved very slowly around and around the room. the young men had smooth faces, patent leather boots, very smart cravats and a sheepish, self-conscious look. the girls had elaborate constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black trailing skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats, light-coloured blouses and fancy belts. they seemed to be having a very good time. on the way home we passed a brightly lighted grocery shop. my friend looked in with interest. "goodness," he said, "but those saratoga chips look good. now, what would you order," he went on, "if you could have anything you liked?" we began to compose a ménu with oysters and chicken and all the things we never saw, but it was not long before my friend cried "mercy! oh, stop; i can't stand it. it makes me too hungry." the moon had gone under a cloud. the wooden sidewalks were rough and irregular, and as we walked along toward home i tripped once or twice. presently i felt a strong arm put through mine, with this assurance: "now if you fall we'll both fall together." after four or five days' experience with a machine i began to work with more ease and with less pain between my shoulders. the girls were kind and sympathetic, stopping to help and encourage the "new girl." one of the shirt finishers, who had not been long in the mill herself, came across from her table one day when i was hard at work with a pain like a sword stab in my back. "i know how you ache," she said. "it just makes me feel like crying when i see how you keep at it and i can guess how tired you are." nothing was so fatiguing as the noise. in certain places near the eyelet and buttonhole machines it was impossible to make one's neighbour hear without shouting. my teacher, whose nerves, i took it, were less sensitive than mine, expressed her sensations in this way: "it's just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking all by yourself and hustling from morning until night. lots of the girls have nervous prostration. my sister had it and i guess i'm getting it. i hear the noise all night. quite a few have consumption, too, from the dust and the lint." the butcher's widow, the school-teacher and i started in at about the same time. at the end of two weeks the butcher's widow had long been gone. the school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents a day and i had averaged eighty-nine. my best day i finished sixteen dozen shirts and netted $ . . my board and washing cost me three dollars, so that from the first i had a living insured. there was one negress in the factory. she worked in a corner quite by herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up scraps. a great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. the purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them. they are restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom i have already spoken. one of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back. she was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn't look for her. some one was sent in search. she was found sitting at the lake's edge, weeping. she did not speak. we all talked about it in our leisure moments, but the work was not interrupted. there were various explanations: she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her work; she was nervous. no one suggested that an unfortunate love affair be the cause of her desperate act. there was not a word breathed against her reputation. i would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed most probable. the mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit. the average girls are self-respecting. they trifle with love. the attraction they wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation. the sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance. they have superstitions of all kinds: to sneeze on saturday means the arrival of a beau on sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short caller, and so on. there is a book of dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal reveries. they are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless. the accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding as one would a funeral. there is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks and knocks about town with the boys. she is known as a "bum," has sacrificed name and reputation and cannot remain in the mill. we discussed one night the suitable age for a girl to become mistress of herself. the boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl could marry, but that she must be twenty-one before she could have her own way. all the girls insisted that they could and did boss themselves and had even before they were eighteen. two chums who boarded in my house gave a charming illustration of the carelessness and the extravagance, the independence and love of it which characterizes feminine america. one of these was a _deracinee_, a child with a foreign touch in her twang; a legend of other climes in the dexterity of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile from france in her name: lorraine. her friend was a _mondaine_. she had the social gift, a subtle understanding of things worldly, the _glissey mortel n'appuyez jamais_ attitude toward life. by a touch of flippancy, an adroit turn of mind, she kept the knowing mastery over people which has mystified and delighted in all great hostesses since the days of esther. when the other girls waited feverishly for love letters, she was opening a pile of invitations to socials and theatre parties. discreet and condescending, she received more than she gave. as soon as the posters were out for a tuesday performance of "faust," preparations began in the household to attend. saturday shopping and supper were hurried through and by six o'clock lorraine was at the sewing machine tucking chiffon for hats and bodices. after ten hours' work in the mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the spring twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon. there was a sudden, belated gust of snow; in the blue mist each white frame house glowed with a warm, pink light from its parlour stove. lorraine's fingers flew. a hat took form and grew from a heap of stuff into a parisian creation; a bolero was cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and stitched and pressed; a shirt-waist was started and finished. for two nights the girls worked until twelve o'clock so that when the "show" came they might have something new to wear that nobody had seen. this must have been the unanimous intention of the perry populace, for the peanut gallery was a bower of fashion. styles, which i had thought were new in paris, were familiarly worn in perry by the mill hands. white kid gloves were _en regle_. the play was "faust." all allusions to the triumph of religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of mephistopheles in regard to the enviable escape of martha's husband and of husbands in general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. between the acts there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though they had nothing to talk about. i heard only one hearty comment about the play: "that devil," said lorraine, as we walked home together, "was a corker!" i have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in the household: the farmer and his wife, the old people of another generation with whom we boarded. they had begun life together forty years ago. they lived on neighbouring farms. there was dissension between the families such as we read of in "pyramus and thisbe," "romeo and juliet." the young people contrived a means of corresponding. an old coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office. truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his louisa. they fixed a day for the elopement. a fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white, but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far behind. side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had traversed forty years together. ill health had broken up their farm home. when truman could no longer work they came in to perry to take boarders, having no children. the old man never spoke. he did chores about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove; he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than driftwood has with the tree's new shoots. he had lived his life on a farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth's secrets as a ship's captain knows the sea's. he paced the mild wooden pavements of perry, booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical elements a pioneer might meet with. his new false teeth seemed to shine from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a rough natural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted. tempted to know what his silence hid, i spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one sunday afternoon. his memory went easily back to the days when there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. he was of a speculative turn of mind: "i don't see," he said, "what makes men so crazy after gold. they're getting worse all the time. gold ain't got no real value. you take all the gold out of the world and it wouldn't make no difference whatever. you can't even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just do away with the iron, and where would you be?" and again, he volunteered: "i think mr. carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his men a little more straight along. he wouldn't have had such a name for himself. but don't you believe it would have been better to have paid those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to give pensions to their families? i know what i think about the matter." [illustration: sunday evening at silver lake the mill girls' excursion resort. a special train and 'busses run on sundays, and "everybody" goes.] i asked him how he liked city life. "give me a farm every time," was his answer. "once you've seen a town you know it all. it's the same over and over again. but the country's changing every day in the year. it's a terrible thing, being sick," he went on. "it seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces when i walk across the floor. i wasn't no good on the farm any more, so my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders." thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier she took on more ballast and swung even with him. she had the quick adaptability common to american women. during the years of farm life religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the outside world. the church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm; the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few faithful neighbours. she had retained her activity and sympathy because she was intelligent, because she lived with the _young_. the man could not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone. he had lost his companions, the "cow kind and the sheep kind"; he had lost control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he suffered; he pined. but as they sat together side by side at table, his look toward her was one of trust and comfort. his glance traveled back over a long vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to those about--years that had glorified confidence in this life as it passed and transfigured it into the promise of another life to come. * * * * * making clothing in chicago * * * * * chapter iv making clothing in chicago on arriving in chicago i addressed myself to the ladies of hull house, asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board. i intended starting out without money to see at least how far i could go before putting my hand into the depths where an emergency fund was pinned in a black silk bag. it was the first day of may. a hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house behind it. down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the neighbourhood. the sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and wooden boards. the sunshine was hot and gloomy. there were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and needed repainting. it was already late in the afternoon: i had but an hour or two before dark to find a lodging. the miserable, overcrowded tenement houses repelled me, yet i dreaded that there should not be room among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. i hailed a cluster of children in the gutter: "say," i said, "do you know where mrs. hicks lives to?" they crowded around, eager. the tallest boy, with curly red hair and freckles, pointed out mrs. hicks' residence, the upper windows of a brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall. after i had rung and waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed italian woman with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was sitting that i must go down a side alley to find mrs. hicks. out of a promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row of green blinds and a screen door. somebody's housekeeping was scattered around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans. the screen door opened to my knock and the hicks family gushed at me--ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an under-waist and petticoat. the interior was neat; the wooden floors were scrubbed spotless. i congratulated myself. mrs. hicks clucked to the family group, smiled at me, and said: "i never took a boarder in my life. i ain't got room enough for my own young ones, let alone strangers." [illustration: "the breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards"] there were two more names on my list. i proceded to the nearest and found an irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo picture cards. she had rheumatism in her "limbs" and moved with difficulty. she was glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention of taking me. from my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as a cot in mrs. flannagan's front parlour. i even offered in my eagerness to sleep on the horsehair sofa. womanlike, she gave twenty little reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was this: "well, to tell you the truth, i wouldn't mind having you myself, but i've got three sons, and you know _boys is queer_." it was late, the sun had set and only the twilight remained for my search before night would be upon me and i would be driven to some charity refuge. i had one more name, and climbed to find its owner in a tenement flat. she was a german woman with a clubfoot. two half-naked children incrusted with dirt were playing on the floor. they waddled toward me as i asked what my chances were for finding a room and board. the mother struck first one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell into two little heaps, both wailing. from a hole back of the kitchen came the sympathetic response of a half-starved shaggy dog. he howled and the babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment. there was one room rented to a day lodger who worked nights, and one room without a window where the german family slept. she proposed that i share the bed with her that night until she could get an extra cot. her husband and the children could sleep on the parlour lounge. she was hideous and dirty. her loose lips and half-toothless mouth were the slipshod note of an entire existence. there was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging on a peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging to the tearful twins. "i'll come back in an hour, thank you," i said. "don't expect me if i am not here in an hour," and i fled down the stairs. before the hour was up i had found, through the guidance of the irish lady with rheumatism, a clean room in one street and board in another. this was inconvenient, but safe and comparatively healthy. my meals were thirty-five cents a day, payable at the end of the week; my room was $ . a week, total $ . a week. my first introduction to chicago tenement life was supper at mrs. wood's. i could hear the meal sputtering on the kitchen stove as i opened the wood front door. mrs. wood, combining duties as cook and hostess, called to me to make myself at home in the front parlour. i seated myself on the sofa, which exuded the familiar acrid odour of the poor. opposite me there was a door half open leading into a room where a lamp was lighted. i could see a young girl and a man talking together. he was sitting and had his hat on. she had a halo of blond hair, through which the lamplight was shining, and she stood near the man, who seemed to be teasing her. their conversation was low, but there was a familiar cry now and then, half vulgar, half affectionate. when we had taken our places at the table, mrs. wood presented us. "this is miss ida," she said, pointing to the blonde girl; "she's been boarding over a year with me, and this," turning to the young man who sat near by with one arm hanging listlessly over the back of a chair, "this is miss ida's intended." the other members of the household were a fox terrier, a canary and "wood"--wood was a man over sixty. he and mrs. wood had the same devoted understanding that i have observed so often among the poor couples of the older generation. this good little woman occupied herself with the things that no longer satisfy. she took tender care of her husband, following him to the door with one hand on his shoulder and calling after him as he went on his way: "good-by; take care of yourself." she had a few pets, her children were married and gone, she had a miniature patch of garden, a trust in the church guild--which took some time and attention for charitable works, and she did her own cooking and housework. "and," she explained to me in the course of our conversation at supper, "i never felt the need of joining these university settlement clubs to get into society." wood and his wife were a good sort. miss ida was kind in her inquiries about my plans. "have you ever operated a power machine?" she asked. "yes," i responded--with what pride she little dreamed. "i've run an electric singer." "i guess i can get you a job, then, all right, at my place. it's piece-work; you get off at five, but you can make good money." i thanked her, not adding that my chicago career was to be a checkered one, and that i was determined to see how many things i could do that i had never done before. but social life was beginning to wear on miss ida's intended. he took up his hat and swung along toward the door. i was struggling to extract with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. mrs. wood encouraged me in a motherly tone: "oh, my, don't be so formal; take your knife." "say," called a voice from the door, "say, come on, ida, i'm waiting for you." and the blonde fiancée hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to join her lover. she was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean. the man's smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity. "he's had appendicitis," mrs. wood explained when we were alone. "he's been out of work a long time. as soon as he goes to his job his side bursts out again where they operated on him. he ain't a bit strong." "when are they going to be married?" i asked. "oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're in no hurry." "will miss ida work after she's married?" "no, indeed." did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable surroundings? i returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose shutters i could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. the thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. the wail of a newly born baby came from the room under mine. the heat was stifling. outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. the breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards. shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude. the following morning i put ten cents in my pocket and started out to get a job before this sum should be used up. how huge the city seemed when i thought of the small space i could cover on foot, looking for work! i walked toward the river, as the commercial activity expressed itself in that direction by fifteen-and twenty-story buildings and streams of velvet smoke. blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank response. there was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging. after i had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the river front i felt that it was a hopeless quest. i should never get work unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. my collar was wilted in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against the sun's rays; my hands were gloveless; and as i passed the plate glass windows i could see the despondent droop of my skirt, the stray locks of hair that blew about free of comb or veil. a sign out: "manglers wanted!" attracted my attention in the window of a large steam laundry. i was not a "mangler," but i went in and asked to see the boss. "ever done any mangling?" was his first question. "no," i answered, "but i am sure i could learn." i put so much ardour into my response that the boss at once took an interest. "we might give you a place as shaker; you could start in and work up." "what do you pay?" "four dollars a week until you learn. then you would work up to five, five and a half." better than nothing, was all i could think, but i can't live on four a week. "how often do you pay?" "every tuesday night." this meant no money for ten days. "if you think you'd like to try shaking come round monday morning at seven o'clock." which i took as my dismissal until monday. at least i had a job, however poor, and strengthened by this thought i determined to find something better before monday. the ten-cent piece lay an inviting fortune in my hand. i was to part with one-tenth of it in exchange for a morning newspaper. this investment seemed a reckless plunge, but "nothing venture, nothing have," my pioneer spirit prompted, and soon deep in the list of _wanted, females_, i felt repaid. even in my destitute condition i had a choice in mind. if possible i wanted to work without machinery in a shop where the girls used their hands alone as power. here seemed to be my heart's content--a short, concise advertisement, "wanted, hand sewers." after a consultation with a policeman as to the whereabouts of my future employer, it became evident that i must part with another of my ten cents, as the hand sewers worked on the opposite side of the city from the neighbourhood whither i had strayed in my morning's wanderings. i took a car and alighted at a busy street in the fashionable shopping centre of chicago. the number i looked for was over a steep flight of dirty wooden stairs. if there is such a thing as luck it was now to dwell a moment with one of the poorest. i pushed open a swinging door and let myself into the office of a clothing manufacturer. the owner, mr. f., got up from his desk and came toward me. "i seen your advertisement in the morning paper." "yes," he answered in a kindly voice. "are you a tailoress?" "no, sir; i've never done much sewing except on a machine." "well, we have machines here." "but," i almost interrupted, beginning to fear that my training at perry was to limit all further experience to an electric singer, "i'd rather work with my hands. i like the hand-work." he looked at me and gave me an answer which exactly coincided with my theories. he said this, and it was just what i wanted him to say. "if you do hand-work you'll have to use your mind. lots of girls come in here with an idea they can let their thoughts wander; but you've got to pay strict attention. you can't do hand-work mechanically." "all right, sir," i responded. "what do you pay?" "i'll give you six dollars a week while you're learning." i could hardly control a movement of delight. six dollars a week! a dollar a day for an apprentice! "but"--my next question i made as dismal as possible--"when do you pay?" "generally not till the end of the second week," the kindly voice said; "but we could arrange to pay you at the end of the first if you needed the money." "shall i come in monday?" "come in this afternoon at : if you're ready." "i'm ready," i said, "but i ain't brought no lunch with me, and it's too late now to get home and back again." the man put his hand in his pocket and laid down before me a fifty-cent piece, advanced on my pay. "take that," he said, with courtesy; "get yourself a lunch in the neighbourhood and come back at half-past twelve." i went to the nearest restaurant. it was an immense bakery patronized by office girls and men, hard workers who came for their only free moment of the day into this eating-place. everything that could be swallowed quickly was spread out on a long counter, behind which there were steaming tanks of tea, coffee and chocolate. the men took their food downstairs and the ladies climbed to the floor above. i watched them. they were self-supporting women--independent; they could use their money as they liked. they came in groups--a rustling frou-frou announced silk underfittings; feathers, garlands of flowers, masses of trimming weighed down their broad-brimmed picture hats, fancy veils, kid gloves, silver side-bags, embroidered blouses and elaborate belt buckles completed the detail of their showy costumes, the whole worn with the air of a manikin. what did these busy women order for lunch? tea and buns, ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, apple pie _a la mode_ and chocolate were the most serious ménus. this nourishing food they ate with great nicety and daintiness, talking the while about clothes. they were in a hurry, as all of them had some shopping to do before returning to work, and they each spent a prinking five minutes before the mirror, adjusting the trash with which they had bedecked themselves exteriorly while their poor hard-working systems went ungarnished and hungry within. this is the wound in american society whereby its strength sloughs away. it is in this class that campaigns can be made, directly and indirectly, by preaching and by example. what sort of women are those who sacrifice all on the altar of luxury? it is a prostitution to sell the body's health and strength for gewgaws. what harmony can there be between the elaborate get-up of these young women and the miserable homes where they live? the idolizing of material things is a religion nurtured by this class of whom i speak. in their humble surroundings the love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. they are but one manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried american woman. for what and for whom do they work? is their fundamental thought to be of benefit to a family or to some member of a family? is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty members of society? no. their parents are secondary, their health is secondary to the consuming vanity that drives them toward a ruinous goal. they scorn the hand-workers; they feel themselves a _noblesse_ by comparison. they are the american snobs whose coat of arms marks not a well-remembered family but prospective luxuries.... married, they bring as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which more than one business man has wrecked his career. they work like men; why should they not live as men do, with similar responsibilities? what should we think of a class of masculine clerks and employees who spent all their money on clothes? the boss was busy when i got back to the clothing establishment. from the bench where i waited for orders i could take an inventory of the shop's productions. arrayed in rows behind glass cases there were all manner of uniforms: serious uniforms going to the colonies to be shot to pieces, militia uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats under a fair head; drum-majors' hats that would never get farther than the peaceful lawn of a military post; fireman's hats; the dark-blue coat of a lonely lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of a "buttons." all that meant parade and glory, the uniforms that make men identical by making each proud of himself for his brass buttons and gold lace. even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop's rear, though they appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished, they had their undeniable charm, and i thought with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain serge suits. [illustration: in a chicago theatrical costume factory] as soon as the boss saw me, the generous mr. f. who advanced me the fifty cents smiled at the skeptical mr. f. who had never expected to see me again. one self said to the other: "i told you so!" and all the kindly lines in the man's face showed that he had looked for the best even in his inferiors and that he had found mankind worth trusting. he was the most generous employer i met with anywhere; i also took him to be the least businesslike. but, as though quickly to establish the law of averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his mercies by her ferocious crossness. she terrorized everybody, even mr. f. it was to her, i concluded, that we owed our $ a week. no girl would stay for less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees; the proud american spirit would not stand the lash of frances' tongue. she had been ten years in the place whose mad confusion was order to her. mr. f. did not dare to send her away; he preferred keeping a perpetual advertisement in the papers and changing hands every few days. the workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on the street at one end and on a court at the other. the middle of the room was lighted by gas. the air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at every corner and was piled up under the centre tables. it was less like a workshop than an old attic. there was the long-accumulated disorder of hasty preparation for the vanities of life. it had not at all the aspect of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things. there were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about--swords, crowns, belts and badges. under the sewing machines' swift needles flew the scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier's heads; the ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands. in the midst of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for marguerite, a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl counters brought home from a first trip abroad. the trunk maker wears a sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe. he is very handsome with dark eyes and fine features, and he has the "average figure," so that he serves as manikin for the atelier; and i find him alternately a workman in overalls and a turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. it is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that i am initiated as a hand sewer. something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers themselves. below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises. messengers arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of disappointed customers. down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after him follows the kindly mr. f. in an usher's jacket. "if you don't start now," he calls, "that order'll be left on our hands." amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful, consoling. i have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only polish, on the other side a seamstress who speaks only german. across the frontier i thus become they communicate with signs, and i get my share of work planned out by each. every woman in the place is cross except the girl next to me. she has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman has not yet stung her into ill nature. she is, like all the foreigners, neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material. the few americans in the shop have on elaborate shirt-waists in light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars. we are well paid, there is no doubt of it. we begin work at a.m. and have a generous half-hour at noon. most of the girls are germans and poles, and they have all received training as tailoresses in their native countries. to the sharp onslaught of frances' tongue they make no response except in dogged silent obedience, whereas the dressy americans with their proper spirit of independence touch the limit of insubordination at every new command. insults are freely exchanged; threats ring out on the tired ears. frances is ubiquitous. she scolds the tailors with a torrent of abuse, she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she bewilders the kindly mr. f., and before three days have passed she has dismissed the neat little polish girl, in tears. this latter comes to me, her face wrought with emotion. she was receiving nine dollars a week; it is her first place in america. this sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation. she cannot speak a word of english and asks me to put my poor german at her service as interpreter. mr. f. is clearly a man who advocates everything for peace, and as there is for him no peace when frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our appeal to him except a promise that he will attend later to the troubles of the polish girl. but later, as earlier, frances triumphs, and i soon bid good-by to my seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear down the dingy hallway. she was a skilled tailoress, but she could not cut out men's garments, so frances dismissed her. i wonder when my turn will come, for i am a green hand and yet determined to keep the american spirit. for the sake of justice i will not be downed by frances. it is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare not converse lest a fresh insult be hurled at us. for every mistake i receive a loud, severe correction. when night comes i am exhausted. the work is easy, yet the moral atmosphere is more wearing than the noise of many machines. my job is often changed during the week. i do everything as a greenhorn, but i work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me. "i am only staying here between jobs," the girl next me volunteers at lunch. "my regular place burnt out. you couldn't get _me_ to work under _her_. i wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." she is an american. "you're lucky to be so independent," says a german woman whose dull silence i had hitherto taken for ill nature. "i'm glad enough to get the money. i was up this morning at five, working. there's myself and my mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what i make. my husband is sick. he's in arizona." "what were you doing at five?" i asked. "i have a trade," she answers. "i work on hair goods. it don't bring me much, but i get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some. there's so much to pay." she was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. hardships had chased every vestige of _jeunesse_ from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown eyes. like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of hope. she was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified. added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. the old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. put up in newspaper by mrs. wood, at my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a composite meal in which i can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich and apple pie. the work, however, does not seem hard to me. i sew on buttons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves--i do all sorts of odd jobs from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any great physical fatigue which ten minutes' brisk walk does not shake off. but never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. each night i come to a firm decision to leave the following day, but weakly i return, sure of my dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work. about four one afternoon, well on in the week, frances brings me a pair of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be ripped off. i go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one piece of cloth from the other. apparently frances is exasperated that i should do the job in an easy way. it is the only way i know to rip, but frances knows another way that breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out, that makes you tired and behindhand and sure of a scolding. she shows me how to rip her way. the two threads of the machine, one from above and one from below, which make the stitch, must be separated. the work must be turned first on the wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift first the upper, then the under thread. i begin by cutting a long hole in the trousers, which i hide so frances will not see it. she has frightened me into dishonesty. arrived at the middle of the stripe i am obliged to turn the trousers wrong side out and right side out again every other stitch. while i was working in this way, getting more enraged every moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam between my fingers. i killed it. it was full of blood and made a wet red spot on the table. then i put down the trousers and drew away my chair. it was useless saying anything to the girl next me. she was a pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word; but the two women beyond had told me once that they pitied frances' husband, so i looked to them for support in what i was about to do. "there's bedbugs in them clothes," i said. "i won't work on 'em. no, sir, not if she sends me away this very minute." in a great hurry frances passed me twice. she called out angrily both times without waiting for an answer: "why don't you finish them pants?" frances was a german. she wore two rhinestone combs in her frizzes, which held also dust and burnt odds and ends of hair. she had no lips whatever. her mouth shut completely over them after each tirade. her eyes were separated by two deep scowls and her voice was shrill and nasal. on her third round she faced me with the same question: "why don't you finish them pants?" "because," i answered this time, "there's bedbugs in 'em and i ain't goin' to touch 'em!" "oh! my!" she taunted me, in a sneering voice, "that's dreadful, ain't it? bedbugs! why, you need only just look on the floor to see 'em running around anywhere!" i said nothing more, and this remark was the last frances ever addressed to me. "mike!" she called to the presser in the corner, "will you have this _young lady's_ card made out." she gave me no further work to do, but, too humiliated to sit idle, i joined a group of girls who were sewing badges. we had made up all description of political badges--badges for the court, for processions, school badges, military badges, flimsy bits of coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the world, rallying men to glory. in the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with black-and-silver "in memoriam" badges, to be worn as a last tribute to some dead member of a coterie who would follow him to the grave under the emblem that had united them. we were behindhand for the dead as well as for the living. at six the power was turned off, the machine hands went home, there was still an unfinished heap of black badges. i got up and put on my things in the dark closet that served for dressing-room. frances called to the hand sewers in her rasping voice: "you darsn't leave till you've finished them badges." how could i feel the slavery they felt? my nerves were sensitive; i was unaccustomed to their familiar hardships. but on the other hand, my prison had an escape; they were bound within four walls; i dared to rebel knowing the resources of the black silk emergency bag, money lined. they for their living must pay with moral submission as well as physical fatigue. there was nothing between them and starvation except the success of their daily effort. what opposition could the german woman place, what could she risk, knowing that two hungry mouths waited to be fed beside her own? with a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn room, the high, grimy windows, the group of hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing darkness, i started down the stairs. a hand was laid on my arm, and i looked up and saw mike's broad irish face and sandy head bending toward me. "i suppose you understand," he said, "that there'll be no more work for you." "yes," i answered, "i understand," and we exchanged a glance that meant we both agreed it was frances' fault. in the shop below i found mr. f. and returned the fifty cents he had advanced me. he seemed surprised at this. "i'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, "that we couldn't arrange things." "i'm sorry, too," i said. but i dared not add a word against frances. she had terrorized me like the rest, and though i knew i never would see her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. i remembered a remark the german woman had made when frances dismissed the polish girl: "people ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living." at the end of this somewhat agitating day i returned to my tenement lodgings as to a haven of rest. there was one other lodger besides myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a lesson. obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the young women with whom i had lunched at the bakery. nothing that a rich society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed money seemed as good as any for making a splurge. miss arnold was something of a snob, intellectual and otherwise. it was evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that i was not accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from sparing me, she humiliated me with all sorts of questions. "i'm tired of taffeta jackets, aren't you?" she would ask, apropos of my flimsy ulster. "i had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this winter; but i don't know what i'll get yet this summer." after supper, on my return, i found her sitting in the parlour with mrs. brown. they never lighted the gas, as there was an electric lamp which sent its rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of the window curtains all over mrs. brown's face and hands. drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa, miss arnold, in a purple velvet blouse, chatted to mrs. brown and me. "i'm from jacksonville," she volunteered, patting her masses of curly hair. "do you know anybody from jacksonville? it's an elegant town, so much wealth, so many retired farmers, and it's such an educational centre. do you like reading?" she asked me. "i don't get time," is my response. "oh, my!" she rattles on. "i'm crazy about reading. i do love blank verse--it makes the language so choice, like in shakespeare." mrs. brown and i, being in the majority as opposed to this autocrat, remain placid. a current of understanding exists between us. miss arnold, on the other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering background for her learning and adventures. she is so obviously a woman of the world on the tenement horsehair sofa. "in case you don't like your work," she lady bountifuls me, "i can get you a stylish place as maid with some society people just out of chicago--friends of mine, an elegant family." "i don't care to live out," i respond, thanking her. "i like my sundays and my evenings off." mrs. brown pricks up her ears at this, and i notice that thereafter she keeps close inquiry as to how my sundays and evenings are spent. but the bell rings. miss arnold is called for by friends to play on the piano at an evening entertainment. mrs. brown and i, being left alone, begin a conversation of the personal kind, which is the only resource among the poor. if she had had any infirmity--a wooden leg or a glass eye--she would naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as she had been spared intact she chose second best. "i've had lots of shocks," she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky rocking-chair. the light from over the way flickered and gleamed. mrs. brown's broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber, as she rocked in and out of the silver rays. her voice was a metallic whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat. married at sixteen, her whole life had been brown on earth below and god in his heaven above. childless, she and brown had spent over fifty years together. it was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about was brown's death. the story began with "a breakfast one sunday morning at nine o'clock.... brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes, set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called me. and that wasn't one morning, mind you--it was every morning for fifty years. but this particular morning i noticed him speaking strange; his tongue was kind o' thick. he didn't hardly eat nothing, and as soon as i'd done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump 'em. when he come up he seemed dizzy. i says to him, 'don't you feel good?' but he didn't seem able to answer. he made like he was going to undress. he put his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in--he couldn't move it no more; it was dead and cold when i touched it. he leaned up against the wall, and i tried to get him over on to the sofa. when i looked into his eyes i see that he was gone. he couldn't stand, but i held on to him with all my force; i didn't let his head strike as he went down. _when he fell we fell together_." her voice was choked; even now after three years as she told the story she could not believe it herself. presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her shocks--three times struck by lightning and once run over. her simple descriptions are straightforward and dramatic. as she talks the wind blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china knob, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor. tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it. "brown put that up," she says; "there hasn't no hand touched it since his'n." proprietor of this house in which she lives, mrs. brown is fairly well off. she rents one floor to an italian family, one to some labourers, and one to an irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling. she has a way of disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account of herself. relations are strained, and mrs. brown in speaking of her says: "i don't care what trouble i was in, i wouldn't call in that irish woman. i don't have anything to do with her. i'd rather get the dago next door." and hereafter follows a mild tirade against the italians--the same sentiments i have heard expressed before in the labouring centres. [illustration: chicago types] "they're kind folks and good neighbours," mrs. brown explains, "but they're different from us. they eat what the rest of us throw away, and there's no work they won't do. they're putting money aside fast; most of 'em owns their own houses; but since they've moved into this neighbourhood the price of property's gone down. i don't have nothing to do with 'em. we don't any of us. they're not like us; they're different." without letting a day elapse i started early the following morning in search of a new job. the paper was full of advertisements, but there was some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a place, as i was an unskilled hand. there was, however, one simple "girls wanted!" which i answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing machine. the address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for eyes long used to poverty's quarters. like a sea, it rolled white-capped waves toward the shore from its far-away emerald surface where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind's will. free from man's disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a veil of morning mist. and at its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of america's giant industries. in less than an hour i am receiving wages from a large picture frame company in east lake street. once more i have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses than women. the woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like frances, is always annoying. she bothers and nags; things must be done her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people's business. aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. provided you get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what methods you take in doing it. for the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not, you must do it her way. the overseer at j.'s picture frame manufactory is courteous, friendly, considerate. i have a feeling that he wishes me to coöperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him. my spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and i desire his approval. the work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling me the different prices. the girls work generally in teams of three, dividing profits. nothing could be more modern, more middle-class, more popular, more philistine than the production of j.'s workrooms. they are the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance of it. nothing is genuine in the entire shop. water colours are imitated in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are imitated in applications of pressed brass. great works of art are belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest pocket. framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby's crib in a harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the piano in the front parlour. the range of subjects covers a familiar list of comedies or tragedies--the partings before war, the interior behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc. my job is easy, but slow. with a hammer and tacks i fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. twenty-five cents for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this many; but my comrades don't allow me to get discouraged. "you're doing well," a red-haired _vis-a-vis_ calls to me across the table. and the foreman, who comes often to see how i am getting along, tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much better. the hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead of half an hour. the extra five minutes a day mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on saturdays. the conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere with happiness. they have in their favour the most blessed of all gifts--youth. the tragic faces one meets with are of the women breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure. my present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are americans between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours. the profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and dirty, but we net $ . each. there is a mechanical roller which passes before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured paper covered with glue. my _vis-à -vis_ and i lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. the boss of the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she manipulates skilfully. we are making in this way the stiff backs which hold the pictures into their frames. when we have fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. we could work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. the subjects are the same as elsewhere--dress, young men, entertainments. the girls have "beaux" and "steady beaux." the expression, "who is she going with?" means who is her steady beau. "i've got jim smith _now_, but i don't know whether i'll keep him," means that jim smith is on trial as a beau and may become a "steady." they go to sunday night subscription dances and arrive monday morning looking years older than on saturday, after having danced until early morning. "there's nothing so smart for a ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk waist." about ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve. the light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and cheerful; one can make $ to $ a week. the conditions at j.'s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having no excuse to leave, i disappear one day at lunch time and never return to get my apron or my wages. i shall be obliged to draw upon the resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural condition of life i wish to try one more place: a printing job. there are quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls needed to run presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my self-dismissal i start through the hot summer streets in search of a situation. on the day when my appearance is most forlorn i find policemen always as officially polite as when i am dressed in my best. other people of whom i inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. poor old women to whom i speak often call me "dear" in answering. under the trellis of the elevated road the "cables" clang their way. trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge over the rough pavements. the sidewalks are crowded with people who are dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke. the orderly rush of busy people, among whom i move toward an address given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles, followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses' hoofs have died away. excitement for a moment supersedes business. the fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed against policemen's arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the perpetual veil of soot. i compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger. decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. the numbers correspond. but there are other addresses and i collect a series of replies. the employer in a box factory on the west side takes my address and promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. another boss printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the following monday at three dollars a week. a kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on wabash avenue sends me away because she wants only trained workers. "i'm real sorry," she says. "you're from the east, aren't you? i notice you speak with an accent." by this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. there is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a gordon press. i have never heard of a gordon press, but i make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. the stairway is dingy and irregular. my spirits are not buoyant as i open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. i go timidly up to the fattest of the three. he is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the heat painfully. he pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when i say: "i seen your ad. in the paper this morning." "you're rather late," is his answer. "i've got two girls engaged already." "too late!" i say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me. i profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, i ask: "say, are you sure those girls'll come? you can't always count on us, you know." he laughs at this. "have you ever run a gordon press?" "no, sir; but i'm awful handy." "where have you been working?" "at j.'s in lake street." "what did you make?" "a dollar a day." "well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and i'll tell you then whether i can give you anything to do." "can't you be sure now?" truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness i feel. "well," the fat man says indulgently, "you come in to-morrow morning at eight and i'll give you a job." the following day i begin my last and by far my most trying apprenticeship. the noise of a single press is deafening. in the room where i work there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing machines back of them. on one side of the room only are there windows. the air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer's ink and cheap paper. a fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing coloured advertisements. the work is all done standing; the hours are from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty on saturdays. it is to _feed_ a machine that i am paid three dollars a week. the expression is admirably chosen. the machine's iron jaws yawn for food; they devour all i give, and when by chance i am slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did i not snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch. it is nervous work. each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; , circulars or bill-heads mean , gestures for the printer, and this is an afternoon's work. into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its place before the machine closes again. what a master to serve is this noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! it gives not a moment's respite to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. the girls are pale. their complexions without exception are bad. we are bossed by men. my boss is kind, and, seeing that i am ambitious, he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. there is some complaining _sotto voce_ of the other boss, who, it appears, is a hard taskmaster. both are very young, both chew tobacco and expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor. while waiting for new type i get into conversation with the boss of ill-repute. he has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. he is communicative. "do you like your job?" he asks. "yes, first rate." "they don't pay enough. i give notice last week and got a raise. i guess i'll stay on here until about august." "then where are you going?" "going home," he answers. "i've been away from home for seven years. i run away when i was thirteen and i've been knocking around ever since, takin' care of myself, makin' a livin' one way or another. my folks lives in california. i've been from coast to coast--and i tell you i'll be mighty glad to get back." "ever been sick?" "yes, twice. it's no fun. no matter how much licking a boy gets he ought never to leave home. the first year or so you don't mind it so much, but when you've been among strangers two years, three years, all alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you must get back to your own folks." "are you saving up?" i ask. he nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco juice. "i'll be able to leave here in august," he explains, when he has finished spitting, "for omaha. in three months i can save up enough to get on as far as salt lake, and in another three months i can move on to san francisco. i tell you," he adds, returning to his work, "a person ought never to leave home." he had nine months of work and privation before reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning for years. with what patience he appears possessed compared to our fretfulness at the fast express trains, which seem to crawl when they carry us full speed homeward toward those we love! nine months, two hundred and seventy days, ten-hour working days, to wait. he was manly. he had the spirit of adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge of men extended; he had managed to take care of himself in one way or another for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy's life. he had not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound. his history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a nonentity--a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without individual brilliancy, added to the general luster. the first day i had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new girl who started in when i did. from my machine i could see only the back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made and had to make over again. she had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back. if not actually stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their patience and would readily give up the job. i was pleased at being included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch time when the old girls, the habitués, came after me to eat with them. the girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self. without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch. my moment of vanity had passed. i went over to her, not knowing whether her appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty. as we were both new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question: "like your job?" i could not understand what she answered, so i continued: "ever worked before?" she opened her hands and held them out to me. in the palm of one there was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger. two nails had been worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle. the whole was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black. "does that look like work?" was her response. it was almost impossible to hear what she said. without a palate, she forced the words from her mouth in a strange monotone. she was one of nature's monstrous failures. her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose; her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double scar. she kept her hand over her mouth when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. her eyes in their dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp's midst reflecting blue sky. "what was you doing to get your hands like that?" i asked. "tipping shoe-laces. i had to quit, 'cause they cut the pay down. i could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o'clock, and i didn't care how hard i worked so long as i got good pay--$ a week. but the employer'd been a workman himself, and they're the worst kind. he cut me down to $ a week, so i quit." "do you live home?" "yes. i give all i make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and board. almost anywhere i can make $ a week, and i feel when i earn that much like i was doing right. but it's hard to work and make nothing. i'm slow to learn," she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, "but i'll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only i'm not very strong." "what's the matter with you?" "heart disease for one thing, and then i'm so nervous. it's kind of hard to have to work when you're not able. to-day i can hardly stand, my head's aching so. they make the poor work for just as little as they can, don't they? it's not the work i mind, but if i can't give in my seven a week at home i get to worrying." now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her. the machines began to roar and vibrate again. the noon recess was over. she went back to her job. her broad, heavy hands began once more to serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her daily bread. her silhouette against the window where she stood was no longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of superiority. i could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice, pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. she was one of nature's failures--one of god's triumphs. saturday night my fellow lodger, miss arnold, and i made an expedition to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of mrs. brown's. i felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed money alone can give. but she encouraged me, and we started together for the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its show-case windows. pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the poor. there was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as though the little people of the quarter were nearer heaven and more suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. the spotless tiny coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal, mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach, it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed. the silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public. groups of italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an extravagant choice; the german women looked and priced and bought nothing; the hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving. from the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted with envy and admiration. did she not plainly say to them "for $ you can look as i do"? the store was apparently flourishing, and except for such few useful articles as stockings and shirts it was stocked with trash. patronized entirely by labouring men and women, it was an indication to their needs. here, for example, was a stand hung with silk dress skirts, trimmed with lace and velvet. they were made after models of expensive dress-makers and were attempts at the sort of thing a mme. de rothschild might wear at the grand prix de paris. varying from $ to $ , there was not one of the skirts made of material sufficiently solid to wear for more than a few sunday outings. on another counter there were hats with extravagant garlands of flowers, exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps with ruffles of lace and long pendant bows; silk boleros; a choice of things never meant to be imitated in cheap quality. [illustration: the rear of a chicago tenement] i watched the customers trying on. possessed of grace and charm in their native costumes, hatless, with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders, the italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry garb of the luxury-loving labourer, were common like the rest. in becoming prosperous americans, animated by the desire for material possession which is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the character that pleases us, the beauty we must go abroad to find. miss arnold priced everything, compared quality and make with jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed the effect any purchase could have made. sunday morning mrs. brown asked me to join her and miss arnold for breakfast they were both in slippers and dressing-gowns. we boiled the coffee and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes, which miss arnold kept in a paper bag in her room. "i hardly ever eat, except between meals," she explained. "a nibble of cake or candy is as much as i can manage, my digestion is so poor." "ever since brown died," the widow responded, "i've had my meals just the same as though he were here. all i want," she went on, as we seated ourselves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread and butter, "all i want is somebody to be kind to me. i've got a young niece that i've tried to have with me. i wrote to her and says: 'your auntie's heart's just crying out for you!' and i told her i'd leave her all i've got. but she said she didn't feel like she could come." as soon as breakfast is over the mundane member of the household starts off on a day's round of visits. when the screen door has shut upon her slender silhouette, mrs. brown settles down for a chat. she takes out the brush and comb, unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while she talks. "miss arnold's always on the go; she's awful nervous. these society people aren't happy. life's not all pleasure for them. you can be sure they have their ups and downs like the rest of us." "i guess that's likely," is my response. "they don't tell the truth always, in the first place. they say there's got to be deceit in society, and that these stylish people pretend all sorts of things. well, then, all i say is," and she pricks the comb into the brush with emphasis, "all i say is, you better keep out of society." she had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the back of her head, and dish-washing is now the order of the day. as we splash and wipe, mrs. brown looks at me rather closely. she is getting ready to speak. i can feel this by a preliminary rattle of her teeth. "you're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't been long in chicago. i just thought i'd tell you about a girl who was workin' here in the general electric factory. she was sixteen--a real nice-lookin' girl from the south. she left her mother and come up here alone. it wasn't long before she got to foolin' round with one of the young men over to the factory. they were both young; they didn't mean no harm; but one day she come an' told me, cryin' like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her young man had slipped off up to michigan." here mrs. brown stopped to see if i was interested, and as i responded with a heartfelt "oh, my!" she went on: "well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin', her loneliness for her mother. i'd come in her room sometimes at midnight--the very room you have now--and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart out. i want to tell you never to get discouraged. just you listen to what happened. the gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn't by kindness. well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin' to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the weddin' without tellin' her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin' right there," she pointed to the rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when he come in. he was carryin' a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long white ribbons. he offered 'em to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor at him. after awhile they went together into her room and talked for half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. he was real kind. he kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin' me for takin' care of her. they were married, and when the weddin' was over she didn't want to stay with him. she said she wanted her mother, but we talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up between them." she had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird and his cage. she put them on the table and prepared to give the bird his bath and fresh seed. "you see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's what good employers will do for you. if you're working in a good place they'll do right by you, and it don't pay to get down-hearted." i thanked her and showed the interest i truly felt in the story. evidently i must account for my sundays! it was with the bird now that mrs. brown continued her conversation. he was a rip van winkle in plumage. his claws trailed over the sand of the cage. except when mrs. brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing in her part of the tenement. "i've had him twenty-five years," she said to me. "brown give him to me. i guess i'd miss him if he died." and presently she repeated again: "i don't believe i even know how much i'd miss him." on the last evening of my tenement residence i was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from mrs. wood's, whose friday fish dinner had poisoned me. my hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and i was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours' work. my back was turned to the door, which i knew must be open, as i felt a cold wind. the lake brought capricious changes of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from seventy to thirty. i turned to see who the newcomer might be. the sight of him set my heart beating faster. the restaurant keeper was questioning the man to find out who he was.... he was evidently nobody--a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into _debris_ upon the edge of a city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for himself; the type _par excellence_ who has worn out charity organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there were none of it left in the world. he was asking for food. the proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him away. he pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed, letting in a fresh gale of icy air. the man was gone. i turned back to my supper. scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him. but he was cold and hungry and penniless, and i knew it. i went as swiftly as i could to overtake him. he had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when i came up to him. one of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident. they were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed all his feelings. across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar, pale like the rest of his face. he was small and had sandy hair. the directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air over his scraggly red beard. through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was visible. "it's a cold night!" i began. "are you out of a job?" with his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance. "i've been sick. there's a sharp pain right in through here." he showed me a spot under his arm. "they thought at the hospital that i 'ad consumption. but," his face brightened, "i haven't got it." he showed in his smile the life-warrant that kept him from suicide. _he wanted to live._ "where did you sleep last night?" i asked. "it was a cold night." "to tell you the truth," he responded in his strong scotch accent, "i slept in a wagon." i proposed that we do some shopping together; he looked at me gratefully and limped along to a cheap clothing store, kept by an italian. the warmth within was agreeable; there was a display of garments hung across the ceiling under the gas-light. my companion waited, leaning against the glass counter, while i priced the flannel shirts. to be sure, my own costume promised little bounty. the price of the shirt was seventy-five cents, and as soon as he heard this the poor man said: "oh, you mustn't spend as much as that." looking first at the pauper, then at me, the italian leaned over and whispered to me, "i think i understand. you can have the shirt for sixty, and i'll put in a pair of socks, too." thus we had become a fraternity; all were poor, the stronger woe helping the weaker.... when his toilet was complete the poor man looked half a head taller. "shall i wrap up your old cap for you?" the salesman asked, and the other laughed a broken, long-disused laugh. "i guess i won't need it any more," he said, turning to me. his face had changed like the children's valentines that grow at a touch from a blank card to a glimpse of paradise. once in the street again we shook hands. i was going back to my supper. he was going, the charity directors would say, to pawn his shirt and coat. the man had evidently not more than a few months to live; i was leaving chicago the following day. we would undoubtedly never meet again. as his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked straight at me. "thank you," he said, and his last words were these: "i'll stand by you." it was a pledge of fraternity at parting. there was no material substance to promise. i took it to mean that he would stand by any generous impulses i might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability are linked together in humanity. * * * * * the meaning of it all * * * * * chapter v the meaning of it all before concluding the recital of my experiences as a working girl, i want to sum up the general conclusions at which i arrived and to trace in a few words the history of my impressions. what, first of all, was my purpose in going to live and work among the american factory hands? it was not to gratify simple curiosity; it was not to get material for a novel; it was not to pave the way for new philanthropic associations; it was not to obtain crude data, such as fill the reports of labour commissioners. my purpose was to _help_ the working girl--to help her mentally, morally, physically. i considered this purpose visionary and unpractical, i considered it pretentious even, and i cannot say that i had any hope of accomplishing it. what did i mean by _help_? did i mean a superficial remedy, a palliative? a variety of such remedies occurred to me as i worked, and i have offered them gladly for the possible aid of charitable people who have time and money to carry temporary relief to the poor. it was not relief of this kind that i meant by _help_. i meant an _amelioration in natural conditions_. i was not hopeful of discovering any plan to bring about this amelioration, because i believed that the conditions, deplorable as they appear to us, of the working poor, were natural, the outcome of laws which it is useless to resist. i adopted the only method possible for putting my belief to the test. i did what had never been done. i was a skeptic and something of a sentimentalist when i started. i have become convinced, as i worked, that certain of the most unfortunate conditions are not natural, and that they can therefore be corrected. it is with hope for the material betterment of the breadwinning woman, for the moral advancement of the semi-breadwinner and the esthetic improvement of the country, that i submit what seems a rational plan. for the first three weeks of my life as a factory girl i saw among my companions only one vast class of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to dirt, ugliness and overwork from birth until death. my own physical sufferings were acute. my heart was torn with pity. i revolted against a society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds and bodies. labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on human lives. to every new impression i responded with indiscriminate compassion. it is impossible for the imagination to sustain for more than a moment at a time the terrible fatigue which a new hand like myself is obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at foul smells, the revulsion at miserable food soaked in grease, the misery of a straw mattress, a sheetless bed with blankets whose acrid odour is stifling. the mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that has stood near one all day long. yet it is not until the system has become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one can judge without bias. when i had grown so accustomed to the work that i was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when i had become so saturated with the tenement smell that i no longer noticed it; when any bed seemed good enough for the healthy sleep of a working girl, and any food good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and then only i began to see that in the great unknown class there were a multitude of classes which, aside from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings and the intellectual inactivity which the nature of their occupation imposes, are not all to be pitied: they are a collection of human individuals with like capacities to our own. the surroundings into which they are born furnish little chance for them to develop their minds and their tastes, but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalour and sordidness. certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in the poverty-stricken wretches i met on my way, as the sun shines glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some rich man's fields. my observations were confined chiefly to the women. two things, however, regarding the men i noticed as fixed rules. they were all breadwinners; they worked because they needed the money to live; they supported entirely the woman, wife or mother, of the household who did not work. in many cases they contributed to the support of even the wage-earning females of the family: the woman who does not work when she does not need to work is provided for. the women were divided into two general classes: those who worked because they needed to earn their living, and those who came to the factories to be more independent than at home, to exercise their coquetry and amuse themselves, to make pin money for luxuries. the men formed a united class. they had a purpose in common. the women were in a class with boys and with children. they had nothing in common but their physical inferiority to man. the children were working from necessity, the boys were working from necessity; the only industrial unit complicating the problem were the girls who worked without being obliged to--the girls who had "all the money they needed, but not all the money they wanted." to them the question of wages was not vital. they could afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient. they were better fed, better equipped than the self-supporting hand; they were independent about staying away from the factory when they were tired or ill, and they alone determined the reputation for irregularity in which the breadwinners were included. here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance to offer help. the self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other self-supporting industrial units. the problem for her class will settle itself, according to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this class is equally vital to all concerned. relief, it seemed to me, could be brought to the breadwinner by separating from her the girl who works for luxuries. how could this be done? there is, i believe, a way in which it can be accomplished naturally. the non-self-supporting girls must be attracted into some field of work which requires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalizing machine labour. this field of work is industrial art: lace-making, hand-weaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries, gold-smithery, bookbinding, rug-weaving, woodcarving and inlaying, all the branches of industrial art which could be executed by woman in her home, all the manual labour which does not require physical strength, which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in competition with man, but would call forth her taste and skill, her training and individuality, at the same time being consistent with her destiny as a woman. the american factory girl has endless ambition. she has a hunger for knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world, to improve. there is ample material in the factories as they exist for forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers. there is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of comparative freedom--freedom of thought, taste and personality. classes in industrial art already exist at the simmons school in boston and columbia university in new york. new classes should be formed. individual enterprise should start the ball and keep it rolling until it is large enough to be held in governmental hands. it is not sufficient merely to form classes. the right sort of pupils should be attracted. there is not a factory which would not furnish some material. the recompense for apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual advancement dear to every true american's heart. the question of wages would be self-regulating. at hull house, chicago, in the industrial art school it has been proved that, provided the models be simple in proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work can be sold as fast as it is turned out. the public is ready to buy the produce of hand-workers. the girls i speak of are fit for advancement. it is not a plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural conditions. who will act as mediator? i make an appeal to all those whose interests and leisure permit them to help in this double emancipation of the woman who toils for bread and the girl who works for luxuries. * * * * * marie van vorst introductory vii. a maker of shoes at lynn viii. the southern cotton mills ix. the child in the southern mills * * * * * chapter vi introductory there are no words too noble to extol the courage of mankind in its brave, uncomplaining struggle for existence. idealism and estheticism have always had much to say in praise of the "beauty of toil." carlyle has honoured it as a cult; epics have been written in its glory. when one has turned to and performed, day in and day out, this labour from ten to thirteen hours out of the twenty-four, with sundays and legal holidays as the sole respite--to find at the month's end that the only possible economics are pleasures--one is at least better fitted to comprehend the standpoint of the worker; and one realizes that part of the universe is pursuing means to sustain an existence which, by reason of its hardship, they perforce cling to with indifference. i laid aside for a time everything pertaining to the class in which i was born and bred and became an american working-woman. i intended, in as far as was possible, to live as she lived, work as she worked. in thus approaching her i believed that i could share her ambitions, her pleasures, her privations. working by her side day after day, i hoped to be a mirror that should reflect the woman who toils, and later, when once again in my proper sphere of life, to be her expositor in an humble way--to be a mouthpiece for her to those who know little of the realities of everlasting labour. i have in the following pages attempted to solve no problem--i have advanced no sociologic schemes. conclusions must be drawn by those who read the simple, faithful description of the woman who toils as i saw her, as i worked beside her, grew to understand in a measure her point of view and to sympathize with her struggle. marie van vorst. riverdale-on-hudson, . * * * * * a maker of shoes at lynn * * * * * chapter vii a maker of shoes at lynn "those who work neither with their brains nor their hands are a menace to the public safety."--roosevelt. well and good! in the great mobs and riots of history, what class is it which forms the brawn and muscle and sinew of the disturbance? the workmen and workwomen in whom discontent has bred the disease of riot, the abnormality, the abortion known as anarchy, socialism. the hem of the uprising is composed of idlers and loungers, indeed, but it is _the labourer's head_ upon which the red cap of protest is seen above the vortex of the crowd. _that those who labour with their hands may have no cause to menace society, those who labour with their brains shall strive to encompass._ evils in any system american progress is sure to cure. shops such as the plant shoe factory in boston, with its eight-hour labour, ample provision for escape in case of fire, its model ventilating, lavish employment of new machinery--tells on the great manufacturing world. reason, human sympathy, throughout history have been enemies to slavery or its likeness: reason and sympathy suggest that time and place be given for the operative man and woman to rest, to benefit by physical culture, that the bowed figures might uplift the flabby muscles. time is securely past when the manufacturers' greed may sweat the labourers' souls through the bodies' pores in order that more stuff may be turned out at cheaper cost. the people through social corporations, through labour unions, have made their demands for shorter hours and better pay. * * * * * lynn luxuries to me are what necessities are to another. a boot too heavy, a dress ill-hung, a stocking too thick, are annoyances which to the self-indulgent woman of the world are absolute discomforts. to omit the daily bath is a little less than a crime in the calendar; an odour bordering on the foul creates nausea to nostrils ultra-refined; undue noises are nerve exhausting. if any three things are more unendurable to me than others, they are noises, bad smells and close air. i am in no wise unique, but represent a class as real as the other class whose sweat, bone and fiber make up a vast human machine turning out necessities and luxuries for the market. [illustration: a delicate type of beauty--at work in a lynn shoe factory] [illustration: one of the swells of the factory: a very expert "vamper," an irish girl, earning from $ to $ a week] the clothes i laid aside on december , , were as follows: hat $ sealskin coat black cloth dress silk underskirt kid gloves underwear ---- $ the clothes i put on were as follows: small felt hat $ . woolen gloves . flannel shirt-waist . gray serge coat . black skirt . underwear . tippet . ---- $ . * * * * * when i outlined to my friends my scheme of presenting myself for work in a strange town with no introduction, however humble, and no friends to back me, i was assured that the chances were that i would in the end get nothing. i was told that it would be impossible to disguise my class, my speech; that i would be suspected, arouse curiosity and mistrust. * * * * * one bitter december morning in i left boston for lynn, mass. the route of my train ran close to marshes; frozen hard ice many feet thick covered the rocks and hillocks of earth, and on the dazzling winter scene the sun shone brilliantly. no sooner had i taken my place in my plain attire than my former personality slipped from me as absolutely as did the garments i had discarded. i was bell ballard. people from whose contact i had hitherto pulled my skirts away became my companions as i took my place shoulder to shoulder with the crowd of breadwinners. lynn in winter is ugly. the very town itself seemed numbed and blue in the intense cold well below zero. even the christmas-time greens in the streets and holly in the store windows could not impart festivity to this city of workers. the thoroughfares are trolley lined, of course, and a little beyond the town's centre is a common, a white wooden church stamping the place new england. lynn is made up of factories--great masses of ugliness, red brick, many-windowed buildings. the general electric has a concern in this town, but the industry is chiefly the making of shoes. the shoe trade in our country is one of the highest paying manufactures, and in it there are more women employed than in any other trade. lynn's population is , ; of these , work in shoe-shops. the night must not find me homeless, houseless. i went first to a directory and found the address of the young women's christian association: a room upstairs in a building on one of the principal streets. here two women faced me as i made my appeal, and i saw at once displayed the sentiments of kindness thenceforth to greet me throughout my first experience--qualities of exquisite sympathy, rare hospitality and human interest. "i am looking for work. i want to get a room in a safe place for the night." i had not for a moment supposed that anything in my attire of simple decorous work-clothes could awaken pity. yet pity it was and nothing less in the older woman's face. "work in the shops?" "yes, ma'am." the simple fact that i was undoubtedly to make my own living and my own way in the hard hand-to-hand struggle in the shops aroused her sympathy. she said earnestly: "you must not go anywhere to sleep that you don't know about, child." she wrote an address for me on a slip of paper. "go there; i know the woman. if she can't take you, why, come back here. i'll take you to my own house. i won't have you sleep in a strange town just _anywheres_! you might get into trouble." she was not a matron; she was not even one of the staff of managers or directors. she was only a woman who had come in to ask some question, receive some information; and thus in marvelous friendliness she turned and outstretched her hand--i was a stranger and this was her welcome. i had proved a point at the first step; help had been extended. if i myself failed to find shelter i could go to her for protection. i intended to find my lodging place if possible without any reference or any aid. out of the town proper in a quiet side street i saw a little wooden tenement set back from the road. "furnished room to rent," read the sign in the window. a sweet-faced woman responded to the bell i had rung. one glance at me and she said: "ve only got a 'sheep' room." at the compliment i was ill-pleased and told her i was looking for a _cheap_ room: i had come to lynn to work. oh! that was all right. that was the kind of people she received. i followed her into the house. i must excuse her broken english. she was french. ah! was she? that made my way easier. i told her i was from paris and a stranger in this part of the country, and thenceforth our understanding was complete. in viger street we spoke french always. my room in the attic was blue-and-white papered; a little, clean, agreeable room. madam begged that i would pardon the fact that my bed had no sheets. she would try to arrange later. she also insinuated that the "young ladies" who boarded with her spoiled all her floor and her furniture by slopping the water around. i assured her that she should not have to complain of me--i would take care. the room was $ . a week. could i pay her in advance? i did so, of course. i would have to carry up my water for washing from the first floor morning and night and care for my room. on the landing below i made arrangements with the tenant for board at ten cents a meal. madame courier was also a french canadian, a mammoth creature with engaging manners. "mademoiselle ballard has work?" "not yet." "well, if you don't get a job my husband will speak for you. i have here three other young ladies who work in the shops; they'll speak for you!" before the door of the first factory i failed miserably. i could have slunk down the street and gladly taken the first train away from lynn! my garments were heavy; my skirt, lined with a sagging cotton goods, weighed a ton; the woolen gloves irritated. the shop fronted the street, and the very sight through the window of the individuals representing power, the men whom i saw behind the desks, frightened me. i could not go in. i fairly ran through the streets, but stopped finally before a humbler shop--where a sign swung at the door: "hands wanted." i went in here and opened a door on the third floor into a small office. i was before a lank yankee manufacturer. leaning against his desk, twisting from side to side in his mouth a toothpick, he nodded to me as i entered. his wife, a grim, spectacled new englander, sat in the revolving desk-chair. "i want work. got any?" "waal, thet's jist what we hev got! ain't we, mary?" (i felt a flashing sensation of triumph.) "take your tippet off, set right down, ef you're in earnest." "oh, i am in earnest; but what sort of work is it?" "it's gluein' suspender straps." "suspenders! i want to work in a shoe-shop!" he smiled, indulgent of this whim. "they all does! don't they, mary?" (she acquiesced.) "then they get sick of the shop, and they come back to me. you will!" "let me try the shoe-shop first; then if i can't get a job i'll come back." he was anxious to close with me, however, and took up a pile of the suspender straps, tempting me with them. "what you ever done?" "nothing. i'm green!" "that don't make no difference; they're all green, ain't they, mary?" "yes," mary said; "i have to learn them all." "now, to preston's you can get in all right, but you won't make over four dollars a week, and here if you're smart you'll make six dollars in no time." ... preston's! that was the first name i had heard, and to preston's i was asking my way, stimulated by the fact, though i had been in lynn not an hour and a half, a job was mine did i care to glue suspender straps! i afterward learned that preston's, a little factory on the town's outskirts, is a model shoe-shop in its way. i did not work there, and neither of the factories in which i was employed was "model" to my judgment. a preamble at the office, where they suggested taking me in as office help: "but i am green; i can't do office work." then mr. preston himself, working-director in drilling-coat, sat before me in his private office. i told him: "i want work badly--" he had nothing--was, indeed, turning away hands; my evident disappointment had apparently impressed a man who was in the habit of refusing applicants for work. "look here"--he mitigated his refusal--"come to-morrow at nine. i'm getting in a whole bale of cloth for cutting linings." "you'll give me a chance, then?" "yes, i will!" it was then proven that i could not starve in lynn, nor wander houseless. with these evidences of success, pride stirred. i determined before nightfall to be at work in a lynn shoe-shop. it was now noon, streets filled with files and lines of freed operatives. into a restaurant i wandered with part of the throng, and, with excitement and ambition for sauce, ate a good meal. factories had received back their workers when i applied anew. this time the largest building, one of the most important shops in lynn, was my goal. at the door of parsons' was a sign reading: "_wanted, vampers_." a vamper i was not, but if any help was wanted there was hope. my demand for work was greeted at the office this time with--"any signs out?" "yes." (what they were i didn't deem it needful to say!) the stenographer nodded: "go upstairs, then; ask the forelady on the fifth floor." through the big building and the shipping-room, where cases of shoes were were being crated for the market, i went, at length really within a factory's walls. from the first to the fifth floor i went in an elevator--a freight elevator; there are no others, of course. this lift was a terrifying affair; it shook and rattled in its shaft, shook and rattled in pitch darkness as it rose between "safety doors"--continuations of the building's floors. these doors open to receive the ascending elevator, then slowly close, in order that the shaft may be covered and the operatives in no danger of stepping inadvertently to sudden death. i reached the fifth floor and entered into pandemonium. the workroom was in full working swing. at least five hundred machines were in operation and the noise was startling and deafening. i made my way to a high desk where a woman stood writing. i knew her for the forelady by her "air"; nothing else distinguished her from the employees. no one looked up as i entered. i was nowhere a figure to attract attention; evidently nothing in my voice or manner or aspect aroused supposition that i was not of the class i simulated. now, into my tone, as i spoke to the forelady bending over her account book, i put all the force i knew. i determined she should give me something to do! work was everywhere: some of it should fall to my hand. "say, i've got to work. give me anything, anything; i'm green." she didn't even look at me, but called--shrieked, rather--above the machine din to her colleagues: "got anything for a green hand?" the person addressed gave me one glance, the sole and only look i got from any one in authority in parsons'. "ever worked in a shoe-shop before?" "no, ma'am." "i'll have you learned _pressin'_; we need a _presser_. go take your things off, then get right down over there." i tore off my outside garment in the cloak-room, jammed full of hats and coats. i was obliged to stack my belongings in a pile on the dirty floor. now hatless, shirt-waisted, i was ready to labour amongst the two hundred bond-women around me. excitement quite new ran through me as i went to the long table indicated and took my seat. my object was gained. i had been in lynn two hours and a half and was a working-woman. on my left the seat was vacant; on my right maggie mcgowan smiled at me, although, poor thing, she had small cause to welcome the green hand who demanded her time and patience. she was to "learn me pressin'," and she did. before me was a board, black with stains of leather, an awl, a hammer, a pot of foulest-smelling glue, and a package of piece-work, ticketed. the branch of the trade i learned at parsons' was as follows: before me was outspread a pile of bits of leather foxings, back straps, vamps, etc. dipping my brush in the glue, i gummed all the extreme outer edges. when the "case" had been gummed, the first bits were dry, then the fingers turned down the gummed edges of the leather into fine little seams; these seams are then plaited with the awl and the ruffled hem flattened with the hammer--this is "pressing." the case goes from presser to the seaming machine. the instruments turn in my awkward fingers. i spread glue where it should not be: edges designated for its reception remain innocent. all this means double work later. "_twict the work_!" my teacher remarks. little by little, however, the simplicity of the manual action, the uniformity, the mechanical movement declare themselves. i glance from time to time at my expert neighbours, compare our work; in an hour i have mastered the method--skill and rapidity can be mine only after many days; but i worked alone, unaided. as raw edges, at first defying my clumsiness, fell to fascinating rounds, as the awl creased the leather into the fluting folds, as the hammer mashed the gummed seam down, i enjoyed the process; it was kindergarten and feminine toil combined, not too hard; but it was only the beginning! meanwhile my teacher, patient-faced, lightning-fingered, sat close to me, reeking perspiration, tired with the ordeal of instructing a greenhorn. with no sign of exhausted patience, however, she gummed my vamps with the ill-smelling glue. "this glue makes lots of girls sick! in the other shops where i worked they just got sick, one by one, and quit. i stuck it out. the forelady said to me when i left: 'my! i never thought anybody could stand it's long's you have.'" i asked, "what would you rather do than this?" she didn't seem to know. "i don't do this for fun, though! nor do you--i bet you!" (i didn't--but not quite for her reason.) as i had yet my room to make sure of, i decided to leave early. i told maggie mcgowan i was going home. "tired already?" there was still an hour to dark. as i explained to her my reasons she looked at my amateur accomplishment spread on the board before us. i had only pressed a case of shoes--three dozen pairs. "i guess i'll have to put it on my card," she soliloquized, "'cause i learned you." "do--do----" "it's only about seven cents, anyway." "three hours' work and that's all i've made?"[ ] [footnote : an expert presser can do as many as shoes a day. this is rare and maximum.] she regarded me curiously, to see how the amount tallied with my hope of gain and wealth. "yet you tell me i'm not stupid. how long have you been at it?" [illustration: "learning" a new hand miss p., an experienced "gummer" on vamp linings, is a new england girl, and makes $ or $ a week. the new hand makes from $ . to $ a week at the same work] "ten years." "and you make?" "well, i don't want to discourage you." ... (if maggie used this expression once she used it a dozen times; it was her pat on the shoulder, her word of cheer before coming ill news.) "... i don't want to discourage you, but it's slow! i make about twelve dollars a week." "then i will make four!" (four? could it be possible i dreamed of such sums at this stage of ignorance!) "_i don't want to discourage you_, but i guess you'd better do housework!" it was clear, then, that for weeks i was to drop in with the lot of women wage-earners who make under five dollars a week for ten hours a day labour. "why don't _you_ do housework, maggie?" "i do. i get up at five and do all the work of our house, cook breakfast, and clean up before i come to the shop. i eat dinner here. when i go home at night i get supper and tidy up!" my expression as i fell to gumming foxings was not pity for my own fate, as she, generous creature, took it to be. "after you've been here a few years," she said, "you'll make more than i do. i'm not smart. you'll beat me." thus with tact she told me bald truth, and yet had not discouraged! novel situations, long walks hither and thither through lynn, stairs climbed, and three hours of intense application to work unusual were tiring indeed. nevertheless, as i got into my jacket and put on my hat in the suffocation of the cloak-room i was still under an exhilarating spell. i belonged, for time never so little, to the giant machine of which the fifth floor of parsons' is only an infinitesimal humming, singing part. i had earned seven cents! seven cents of the $ , , paid to lynn shoe employees were mine. i had bought the right to one piece of bread by the toil of my unskilled labour. as i fastened my tippet of common black fur and drew on my woolen gloves, the odour from my glue-and leather-stained hands came pungent to my nostrils. friends had said to me: "your hands will betray you!" if the girls at my side in parsons' thought anything about the matter they made no such sign as they watched my fingers swiftly lose resemblance to those of the leisure class under the use of instruments and materials damning softness and beauty from a woman's hands. yet maggie had her sensitiveness on this subject. i remarked once to her: "i don't see how you manage to keep your hands so clean. mine are twice as black." she coloured, was silent for a time, then said: "i never want anybody to speak to me of my hands. i'm ashamed of 'em; they used to be real nice, though." she held the blunted ends up. "they're awful! i do love a nice hand." the cold struck sharp as a knife as i came out of the factory. fresh air, insolent with purity, cleanness, unusedness, smiting nostrils, sought lungs filled too long with unwholesome atmosphere.[ ] [footnote : at plant's, boston, fresh air cylinders ventilate the shop.] heated by a brisk walk home, i climbed the stairs to my attic room, as cold as greenland. it was nearly six thirty, supper hour, and i made a shift at a toilet. into the kitchen i was the last comer. all of the supper not on the table was on the stove, and between this red-hot buffet and the supper table was just enough room for the landlady to pass to and fro as she waited upon her nine guests. no sooner did i open the door into the smoky atmosphere, into the midst of the little world here assembled, than i felt the quick kindness of welcome. my place was at the table's end, before the irish stew. "miss ballard!" the landlady put her arm about my waist and introduced me, mentioning the names of every one present. there were four women besides myself and four men. "i don't want miss ballard to feel strange," said my hostess in her pretty canadian _patois_. "i want her to be at home here." i sat down. "oh, she'll be at home all right!" a frowzy-headed, pretty brunette from the table's other end raised kind eyes to me and nodded a smiling good-fellowship. "come to work in the shops?" "yes." "ever been to lynn before?" "no; live in paris--stranger." "my, but that's hard--all alone here! got a job?" "yes." and i explained to the attentive interest of all. from the irish stew before me they helped themselves, or passed to me the plates from the distance. if excitement had not taken from me every shred of appetite, the kitchen odours, smoke and frying, the room's stifling heat would have dulled hunger. let it go! i was far too interested to eat. the table was crowded with all manner of substances passing for food--cheese, preserves, onion pickles, cake and irish stew, all eaten at one time and at will; the drink was tea. at my left sat a well-dressed man who would pass anywhere for a business man of certain distinction. he was a common operator. next him was a bridal couple, very young and good looking; then came the sisters, mika and nannette, their brother, a packer at a shop, then mademoiselle frances, expert hand at fourteen dollars a week (a heavy swell indeed), then maurice. although i was evidently an object of interest, although countless questions were put to me, let me say that curiosity was markedly absent. their attitude was humane, courteous, sympathetic, agreeable, which qualities i firmly believe are supreme in those who know hardship, who suffer privation, who labour. great surprise was evinced that i had so soon found a job. mika and nannette, brunette canadians, with voices sweet and carrying, talked in good english and mediocre french. "it's wonderful you got a job right off! ain't she in luck! why, most has to get spoken of weeks in advance--introduced by friends, too!" mika said: "my name's been up two months at my sister's shop. the landlady told us about your coming, miss ballard. we was going to speak for you to our foreladies." here my huge hostess, who during my stay stood close to my side as though she thought i needed her motherliness, put her hand on my shoulder. "yes, _mon enfant_, we didn't want you to get discouraged in a strange place. _ici nous sommes toute une famille_". "all one family?" oh, no, no, kind creature, hospitable receiver of a stranger, not all one family! i belong to the class of the woman who, one day by chance out of her carriage, did she happen to sit by your side in a cable car, would pull her dress from the contact of your clothes, heavy with tenement odours; draw back as you crushed your huge form down too close to her; turn no look of sisterhood to your face, brow-bound by the beads of sweat, its signet of labour. not one family! i am one with the hostess, capable even of greeting her guest with insolent discourtesy did such a one chance to intrude at an hour when her presence might imperil the next step of the social climber's ladder. not one family, but part of the class whose tongues turn the _truffle_ buried in _pate de foie gras_; whose lips are reddened with burgundies and cooled with iced champagnes; who discuss the quality of a _canard a la presse_ throughout a meal; who have no leisure, because they have no labour such as you know the term to mean; who create disease by feeding bodies unstimulated by toil, whilst you, honestly tired, really hungry, eat irish stew in the atmosphere of your kitchen dining-hall. not one family, i blush to say! god will not have it so. the irish stew had all disappeared, every vestige. "but mademoiselle eats nothing--a bird's appetite." and here was displayed the first hint of vulgarity we are taught to look for in the other class. she put her hands about my arms. "_tiens! un bras tout de meme!_" and she looked at maurice, the young man on my right. "_maurice c'est toi qui devrait t'informer des bras d'mademoiselle."_ ("maurice, it is you who should inform yourself of mademoiselle's arms.") maurice laughed with appreciation, as did the others. he was the sole american at table; out of courtesy for him we talked english from time to time, although he assured us he understood all we said in "the jargon." * * * * * to maurice a master pen could do justice; none other. his _type_ is seen stealing around corners in london's whitechapel and in the lowest quarters of new york: a lounger, indolent, usually drunk. maurice was the type, with the qualities absent. tall, lank, loosely hung together, made for muscular effort, he wore a dark flannel shirt, thick with grease and oil stains, redolent with tobacco, a checked waistcoat, no collar or cravat. from the collarless circle of his shirt rose his strong young neck and bullet head; his forehead was heavy and square below the heavy brows; his black eyes shone deep sunken in their caverns. his black hair, stiff as a brush, came low on his forehead; his mouth was large and sensual, his teeth brilliant. but his hands! never to be forgotten! scrubbed till flesh might well have parted from the bones! clean, even if black and mutilated with toil; fingers forever darkened; stained ingrained ridges rising around the nails, hard and ink-black as leather. maurice was labour--its symbol--its epitome. at the landlady's remark he had blushed and addressed me frankly: "say, i work to de 'lights.'" (lights! can such a word be expressive of the factory which has daily blackened and scarred and dulled this human instrument?) "to the 'lights,' and it ain't no _cinch_, i can tell you! i got to keep movin'. every minute i'm late i get docked for wages--it's a day's work to the 'lights.' when _she_ calls me at six--why, i don't turn over and snooze another! i just turn right out. i walk two miles to my shop--and every man in his place at : ! don't you forgit it!" he cleaned his plate of food. "i jest keep movin' all de time." he wiped his mouth--rose unceremoniously, put on his pot-like derby ajaunt, lit a vile cigar, slipped into a miserable old coat, and was gone, the odour of his weed blending its new smell with kitchen fumes. he is one of the absolutely real creatures i have ever seen. of his likeness types of crime are drawn. maurice--blade keen-edged, hidden in its battered sheath, its ugly case--terrible yet attractive specimen of strength and endurance--youth and manhood in you are bound to labour as on the rack, and in the ordeal you keep (as does the mass of humanity) silence! eat by this man's side, heap his plate with coarse victuals, feel the touch of his flannel sleeve against your own flannel blouse, see his look of brotherhood as he says: "say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, i guess i kin get yer in to the 'lights'!" these are sensations facts alone can give. * * * * * after dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the general living-room: carpet-covered sofa, big table, few chairs--that's all. we talk an hour--and on what? we discuss bernhardt, the divine sarah. "good shows don't come to lynn much; it don't pay them. you can't get more than fifty cents a seat. now bernhardt don't like to act for fifty-cent houses! but the theatres are crowded if ever there's a good show. we get tired of the awful poor shows to the opera house." maude adams was a favourite. réjane had been seen. of course, the vital american interest--money--is touched upon, let me say lightly, and passed. the packer at rigger's, intelligent and well-informed and well-read, discoursed in good french about english and french politics and on the pleasure it would be to travel and see the world. at nine, friendly handshaking. "good-night. you're tired. you'll like it all right to the shops, see if you don't! you'll make money, too. the forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious. why, to my shop when a new hand applies for a job the foreman asks: 'what does he look like? ambitious lookin'? well, then--there's room." ambitious to make shoes! to grind out all you can above the average five dollars a week, all you may by conscientious, unflagging work during hours out of a month. good-night to the working world! landlady and friendly co-labourers. "_il ne faut pas vous gener, mademoiselle; nous sommes toute une famille_." upstairs in my room the excitement died quite out of me. i lay wakeful in the hard, sheetless bed. it was cold, my window-pane freezing rapidly. i could not sleep. on either side, through the thin walls of the house, i could hear my neighbours settling to repose. maurice's room was next to mine. he whistled a short snatch of a topical song as he undressed. on the other side slept the landlady's children; opposite, the packer from rigger's. the girls' room was downstairs. when maurice's song had reached its close he heaved a profound sigh, and then followed silence, as slumber claimed the sole period of his existence not devoted to work. the tenement soon passed to stillness complete. before six the next morning--black as night--the call: "mau--rice! mau--_rice_!" rang through the hall. summons to us all, given through him on whom the exigencies of life fell the heaviest. maurice worked by day system--the rest of us were freed men and women by comparison. the night before, timid and reluctant to descend the two flights of pitch dark stairs with a heavy water-pitcher in my hand, i had brought up no water! it is interesting to wonder how scrupulous we would all be if our baths were carried up and down two flights of stairs pitcher by pitcher. a little water nearly frozen was at hand for my toilet. by six i was dressed and my bed made; by : in the kitchen, dense with smoke from the frying breakfast. through the haze the figures of my friends declared themselves. codfish balls, bread and butter and coffee formed the repast. maurice is the first to finish, standing a moment to light his pipe, his hat acock; then he is gone. the sisters wash at the sink, mika combing her mass of frowzy dark hair, talking meanwhile. the sisters' toilet, summary and limited, is frankly displayed. at my right the bride consumes five enormous fish balls, as well as much bread. her husband, a young, handsome, gentle creature, eats sparingly. his hand is strapped up at the wrist. "what's wrong?" "strained tendons. doctor says they'd be all right if i could just hold up a little. they don't get no chance to rest." "but why not 'hold up' awhile?" he regards me sympathetically as one who says to an equal, a fellow: "you know why!--for the same reason that you yourself will work sick or well." "_on fait ce que l'on peut_!" ("one does one's best!") when the young couple had left the room our landlady said: "the little woman eats well, doesn't she! she needs no tonic! all day long she sits in my parlour and rocks--and rocks." "she does nothing?" madame shrugged. "but yes! she reads novels!" it was half-past six when i got into the streets. the midwinter sky is slowly breaking to dawn. the whole town white with fresh snow, and still half-wedded to night, is nevertheless stirring to life. i become, after a block or two, one of a hurrying throng of labour-bound fellows--dark forms appear from streets and avenues, going in divers directions toward their homes. homes? where one passes most of one's life, is it not _home_? these figures to-day bend head and shoulders against the wind as it blows neck-coverings about, forces bare hands into coat pockets. by the time the town has been traversed, railroad track crossed, and parsons' in sight, day has nearly broken. pink clouds float over factory roofs in a sky growing bluer, flushing to day. [illustration: the window side of miss k.'s parlour at lynn, mass] from now on the day is shut out for those who here and there enter the red-brick factories. an hour at noon? of course, this magnificent hour is theirs! time to eat, time to feed the human machine. one hour in which to stretch limbs, to pull to upright posture the bent body. meanwhile daylight progresses from glowing beauty to high noon, and there the acme of brilliance seems to pause, as freed humanity stares half-blinded at god's midday rest. all the remaining hours of daylight are for the leisure world. not till night claims lynn shall the factory girl be free. ascending the five flights of dirty stairs, my steps fell side by side those of a young workman in drilling coat. he gave me a good-morning in a cheery tone. "working here? got it good?" "i guess so." "that's all right. good-day." therefore i began my first labour day with a good wish from my new class! on the fifth floor i was one of the very first arrivals. if in the long, low-ceiled room windows had been opened, the flagging air gave no sign to the effect. it was fetid and cold. daylight had not fully found the workshop, gas was lit, and no work prepared. i was eager to begin, but was forced to wait before idle tools till work was given me--hard ordeal for ambitious piece-worker. at the tick of seven, however, i had begun my branch of the shoe-making trade. one by one my mates arrived; the seats beyond me and on either side were filled. opposite me sat a ghost of girlhood. a tall, slender creature, cheeks like paper, eyes sunken. she, too, had the smile of good-fellowship--coin freely passed from workwoman to workwoman. this girl's job was filthy. she inked edges of the shoes with a brush dipped in a pot of thick black fluid. pile after pile of piece-work was massed in front of her; pile by pile disappeared. she worked like lightning. "do you like your job?" i ventured. this seemed to be the open sesame to all conversations in the shops. she shrugged her narrow shoulders but made no direct reply. "i used to have what you're doing; it's awful. that glue made me sick. i was in bed. so when i came back i got _this_." she was separated from my glue-pot by a table's length only. "but don't you smell it from here?" "not so bad; this here" (pointing to her black fluid) "smells stronger; it _drownds_ it. "i make my wages clear," she announced to me a few minutes later. "how do you mean?" "why, at noon i wait in a restaurant; they give me my dinner afterward. i go back there and wait on the table at supper, too. my vittles don't cost me anything!" so that is where your golden noon hour is spent, standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant i shall name later; and not your dinner hour alone, but the long day's fag end! "i ain't from these parts," she continued, confidentially, "i'm down east. i used to run a machine, but it hurts my side." my job went well for an amateur. i finished one case of shoes (thirty-six pairs) in little more than an hour. by ten o'clock the room grew stifling hot. i was obliged to discard my dress skirt and necktie, loosen collar, roll up my sleeves. my warmer blooded companions did the like. it was singular to watch the clock mark out the morning hours, and at ten, already early, very early in the forenoon, feel tired because one had been three hours at work. a man came along with nuts and apples in a basket to sell. i bought an apple for five cents. it was regarded by my teacher, maggie, as a prodigal expenditure! i shared it with her, and she in turn shared her half with her neighbours, advising me wisely. "say, you'd better _earn_ an apple before you buy one!" my companion on the other side was a pretty country girl. she regarded her work with good-humoured indifference; indeed, her labour was of very indifferent quality. i don't believe she was ever intended to make shoes. in a cheerful "undertone she sang topical songs the morning long. it drove maggie mcgowan "mad," so she said. "say, why don't some of _youse_ sing?" said the little creature, looking down our busy line. "i never hear no singing in the shops." maggie said, "sing! well, i don't come here to sing." the other laughed sweetly. "well, i jest have to sing." "you seem happy; are you?" she looked at me out of her pretty blue eyes. "you bet! that's the way to be!" then after a little, in an aside to me alone, she whispered: "not always. sometimes i cry all to myself. "see the sun?" she exclaimed, lifting her head. (it shone golden through the window's dirty, cloudy pane.) "he's peekin' at me! he'll find _you_ soon. looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!" sun, friend, light, air, seek them--seek them! pour what tide of pure gold you may in through the sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads at the clicking machines! shine on the dusty, untidy hair! on the bowed shoulders! on the flying hands! at noon i made a reluctant concession to wisdom and habit. unwilling to thwart my purposes and collapse from sheer fatigue, at the dinner hour i went to a restaurant and ordered a meal in keeping with my appetite. i had never been so hungry. i almost wept with joy when the chicken and cranberry and potato appeared. never was sauce more poignant than that which seasoned the only real repast i had in lynn. the hours, from one to three went fairly well, but by : i was tired out, my fingers had grown wooden with fatigue, glue-pot and folding-line, board, hammer and awl had grown indistinct. it was hard-to continue. the air stifled. odours conspired together. oil, leather, glue (oh, that to-heaven-smelling glue!), tobacco smoke, humanity. * * * * * maggie asked me, "how old do i look?" i gave her thirty. twenty-five it seemed she was. in guessing the next girl's age no better luck. "it's this," maggie nodded to the workroom; "it takes it out of you! just you wait till you've worked ten years in lynn." ten years! heaven forbid! already i could have rushed from the factory, shaken its dust from my feet, and with hands over ears shut out the horrid din that inexorably cried louder than human speech. everything we said was shrieked in the friendly ear bent close. although maggie mcgowan was curious about me, in posing her questions she was courtesy itself. "say," to her neighbour, "where do you think miss ballard's from? paris!" my neighbour once-removed leaned forward to stare at me. "my, but that's a change to lynn! ain't it? now don't you think you'll miss it?" she fell to work again, and said after a little: "paris! why, that's like a dream. is it like real places? i can't never guess what it is like!" the girl at the machine next mine had an ear like a sea-shell, a skin of satin. her youth was bound, strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast narrowing. at a.m. she came: albeit fresh, pale still and wan; rest of the night too short a preparation for the day's work. by three in the afternoon she was flushed, by five crimson. she threw her hands up over her head and exclaimed: "my back's broke, and i've only made thirty-five cents to-day." maggie mcgowan (indicating me): "here's a girl who's had the misfortune never to work in a shoe-shop." "_misfortune?_ you don't mean that!" maggie: "well, i guess i don't! if i didn't make a joke now and then i'd jump into the river!" she sat close to me patiently directing my clumsy fingers. "why do you speak so strongly? 'jump into the river!' that's saying a lot!" "i am sick of the shoe-shops." "how long have you been at this work?" "ten years. when you have worked ten years in lynn you will be sick of the shops." i was sick of the shops, and i had not worked ten years. and for my hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, i could see that she pitied me. once, supposing that since i am so green and so ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best i knew, she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood: "say, are you hungry?" "no, no, no." "you'll be all right! no american girl need to starve in america." in the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise. all conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one lifts one's eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of toil. * * * * * i gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room. they worked at a trade uncongenial. not one had a good word to say for shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of generous pay. each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer. housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure. by four the gas was lit here and there where burners were available. over our heads was no arrangement for lighting. we bent lower in semi-obscurity. in the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor. figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred. the exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in misty circles. unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the chopping, pounding of the machinery, the long soughing of the power-engine. here and there a woman stops to rest a second, her head sunk in her hand; or she rises, stretches limbs and body. a man wanders in from the next room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing by one of the pale operators, whose space of rest is done, he flings down in front of her a new pile of piece-work from the cutting machines. we are up five flights of stairs. there are at least two hundred girls. machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor--such _dèbris_ as only awaits a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. despite laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof. there is no fire-escape. a cry of fire, and great heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from this mountain height, level with roofs of the distant town! thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour: life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread. i rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first time after five hours of steady work. the pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last hours' painful effort. i get into my clothes--skirt, jacket and hat, all impregnated now with factory and tenement odours, and stumble downstairs and out into the street. i have earned fifty cents to-day--but then, i am green! when once more in the cool, fresh air, released, i draw in a long and grateful breath. lynn on this winter night is a snow-bound, midwinter village. in the heavens is the moon's ghost, a mist-shrouded, far-away disk. but it is the christmas moon, shining on the sleeping thousands in the town, where night alone is free. the giant factories are silent, the machines at last quiet, the long workrooms moon-invaded. labour is holy, but serfdom is accursed, and toil which demands that every hour of daylight should be spent in the race for existence--all of the daylight--is kin to slavery! there is no time for mental or physical upright-standing, no time for pleasure. * * * * * one day i decided to consider myself dismissed from parsons'. they had taught me all they could, unless i changed my trade, in that shop; i wished to learn a new one in another. therefore, one morning i applied at another factory, again one of the largest in lynn. the sign read: "_cleaner wanted_!" "cleaner" sounded easy to learn. my experience this time was with a foreman instead of a forelady. the workroom i sought was on the second floor, a room filled with men, all of them standing. far down the room's centre i saw the single figure of a woman at her job. by her side i was soon to be, and we two the sole women on the second floor. the foreman was distinctly a personage. small, kind, alive, he wore a straw hat and eye-glasses. he had decided in a moment that my short application for "something to do" was not to be gainsaid. "ever worked before?" this time i had a branch of a trade at my fingers' ends. "yes, sir; presser." i was proud of my trade. i did not even know, as i do now, that "cleaning" is the filthiest job the trade possesses. it is in bad repute and difficult to secure a woman to do the unpleasant work. "you come with me," he said cheerfully; "i'll teach you." the forelady at parsons' did not know whether i worked well or not. she never came to see. the foreman in marches' taught me himself. two high desks, like old-time school desks, rose in the workshop's centre. behind one of these i stood, whilst the foreman in front of me instructed my ignorance. the room was filled with high crates rolled hither and thither on casters. these crates contained anywhere from thirty-two to fifty pairs of boots. the cases are moved from operator to operator as each man selects the shoes to apply to them the especial branch of his trade. from the crate of boots rolled to my side i took four boots and placed them on the desk before me. with the heel of one pressed against my breast, i dipped my forefinger in a glass of hot soap and water, water which soon became black as ink. i passed my wet, soapy finger all around the boot's edges, from toe to heel. this loosened, in the space between the sole and vamp, the sticky dye substance on the leather and particles so-called "dirt." then with a bit of wood covered with turkish toweling i scraped the shoe between the sole and vamp and with a third cloth polished and rubbed the boot clean. in an hour's time i did one-third as well as my companion. i cleaned a case in an hour, whilst she cleaned three. when my employer had left me i observed the woman at my side: an untidy, degraded-looking creature, long past youth. her hands beggared description; their covering resembled skin not at all, but a dark-blue substance, leatherlike, bruised, ingrained, indigo-hued. her nails looked as though they had been beaten severely. one of her thumbs was bandaged. "i lost one nail; rotted off." "horrible! how, pray?" "that there water: it's poison from the shoe-dye." swiftly my hands were changing to a faint likeness of my companion's. "don't tell him," she said, "that i told you that. he'll be mad; he'll think i am discouraging you. but you'll lose your forefinger nail, all right!" then she gave a little laugh as she turned her boot around to polish it. "once i tried to clean my hands up. lord! it's no good! i scrub 'em with a scrubbin'-brush on sundays." "how long have you been at this job?" "ten months." they called her "bobby"; the men from their machines nodded to her now and then, bantering her across the noise of their wheels. she was ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in sport or in earnest! the men themselves worked in their flannel shirts. not far from us was a wretchedly ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood. i observed that once he cast toward us a look of interest. under my feet was a raised platform on which i stood, bending to my work. during the morning the consumptive man strolled over and whispered something to "bobby." he made her dullness understand. when he had gone back to his job she said to me: "say, w'y don't yer push that platform away and stand down on the floor? you're too tall to need that. it makes yer bend." "did that man come over to tell you this?" "yes. he said it made you tired." from my work, across the room, i silently blessed the pale old man, bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe he held, obscured from me by the cloud of sawdust-like flying leather that spun scattered from the sole he held to the flying wheel. * * * * * i don't believe the shoe-dye really to be poisonous. i suppose it is scarcely possible that it can be so; but the constant pressure against forefinger nail is enough to induce disease. my fingers were swollen sore. the effects of the work did not leave my hands for weeks. "bobby" was not talkative or communicative simply because she had nothing to say. over and over again she repeated the one single question to me during the time i worked by her side: "do you like your job?" and although i varied my replies as well as i could with the not too exhausting topic she offered, i could not induce her to converse. she took no interest in my work, absorbed in her own. every now and then she would compute the sum she had made, finally deciding that the day was to be a red-bean day and she would make a dollar and fifty cents. during the time we worked together she had cleaned seventeen cases of shoes. in this shop it was hotter than in parsons'. we sweltered at our work. once a case of shoes was cleaned, i wrote my initial "b" on the tag and rolled the crate across the floor to the man next me, who took it into his active charge. the foreman came to me many times to inspect, approve and encourage. he was a model teacher and an indefatigable superintendent. just how far personal, and just how far human, his kindness, who can say? "you've been a presser long at the shoe-shops?" "no." "i like your pluck. when a girl has never had to work, and takes hold the way you do, i admire it. you will get along all right." "thank you; perhaps i won't, though." "now, don't get nervous. i am nervous myself," he said; "i know how that is." on his next visit he asked me: "where you goin'; to when you get out of here to-night?" i told him that i was all right--that i had a place to stay. "if you're hard up, don't get discouraged; come to me." [illustration: "fancy gumming." mrs. t earns $ or $ a week. her husband also works in a factory, and between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage] [illustration: an all-around, experienced hand. mrs. f., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a forewoman, now earns only $ or $ a week] i thanked him again and said that i could not take charity. "nonsense! i don't call it charity! if i was hard put, don't you s'pose i'd go to the next man if he offered me what i offer you? the world owes you a livin'." when the foreman had left me i turned to look at "bobby." she was in the act of lifting to her lips a glass of what was supposed to be water. "you're not going to drink that!" i gasped, horrified. "where did you get it?" "oh, i drawed it awhile ago," she said. it had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for a scum had formed on the glass that looked like stagnant oil. she blew the stuff back and drank long. her accent was so bad and her english so limited i took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt. she proved to be an american. she had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight years old, and her brain was stunted. at dinner time, when i left marches', i had stood, without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to bobby's computation i had made the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than one hundred shoes. to all intents, at least for the moment, my hands were ruined. at weyman's restaurant i went in with my fellow workwomen and men. weyman's restaurant smells very like the steerage in a vessel. the top floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and filthy. the place was so close and foul-smelling that eating was an ordeal. if i had not been so famished, it would have been impossible for me to swallow a mouthful. i bought soup and beans, and ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner fifteen cents. most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup. i rose half-satisfied, dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. i am safe in saying that i never smelled anything like to weyman's, and i hope never to again. never again shall i hear food and drink discussed by the _gourmet_--discuss, indeed, with him over his repast--but there shall rise before me weyman's restaurant, low-ceiled, foul, crowded to overflowing. i shall see the diners bend edged appetites to the unpalatable food. these weyman patrons, mark well, are the rich ones, the swells of labour--able to squander fifteen to twenty cents on their stew and tea. there are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired fourth and fifth stories--at "lunching" over their sandwiches. far more vivid, more poignant even must be to me the vision of "bobby." i shall see her eat her filthy sandwich with her blackened hands, see her stoop to blow the scum of deadly matter from her typhoid-breeding glass. in lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl's living costs her at best $ . a week. if she be of the average[ ] her month's earnings are $ . reduce this by general expenses and living and her surplus is $ , to earn which she has toiled hours. you will recall that there are, out of the , operatives in massachusetts, , who make under $ a week. i leave the reader to compute from this the luxuries and possible pleasures consistent with this income. [footnote : lynn's average wages are $ per week.] a word for the swells of the trade, for swells exist. one of my companions at viger street made $ a week. her expenses were $ ; she therefore had at her disposition about $ a month. she had no family--_every cent of her surplus she spent on her clothes_. "i like to look down and see myself dressed nice," she said; "it makes me feel good. i don't like myself in poor clothes." she _was_ well-dressed--her furs good, her hat charming. we walked to work side by side, she the lady of us. of course she belongs to the union. her possible illness is provided for; her death will bring $ to a distant cousin. she is only tired out, thin, undeveloped, pale, that's all. she is almost a capitalist, and extremely well dressed. poor attire, if i can judge by the reception i met with in lynn, influences only those who by reason of birth, breeding and education should be above such things. in viger street i was more simply clad than my companions. my aspect called forth only sisterhood and kindness. fellowship from first to last, fellowship from their eyes to mine, a spark kindled never to be extinguished. the morning i left my tenement lodging mika took my hand at the door. "good-by." her eyes actually filled. "i'm awful sorry you're going. if the world don't treat you good come back to us." i must qualify a little. one member of the working class there was on whom my cheap clothes had a chilling effect--the spoiled creature of the traveling rich, a pullman car porter on the train from boston to new york! although i called him first and purposely gave him my order in time, he viewed me askance and served me the last of all. as i watched my companions in their furs and handsome attire eat, whilst i sat and waited, my woolen gloves folded in my lap, i wondered if any one of the favoured was as hungry, as famished as the presser from parsons', the cleaner from marches'. * * * * * the southern cotton mills * * * * * chapter viii the southern cotton mills the mill village columbia, south carolina, of course is conscious that there are mills without its city precincts. it is proud of the manufacture that gives the city precedence and commercial value all over the world. the trolley runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after the union depot is passed. frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty suburbs? entry to the mills themselves is difficult, if not absolutely impossible. and that which forms the background for the vast buildings, the mill village, is a section to be shunned like the plague. plague is not too strong a word to apply to the pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where in this part of the country the mill-hand lives, moves and has his being, horrible honeycomb of lives, shocking morals and decency. around columbia there lie five mills and their respective settlements--excelsior, the granton, calcutta, the richland and the capital city. each of these mills boasts its own so-called town. when these people are free on saturday afternoon and sunday they are too exhausted to do anything but turn into their hovels to sleep. at most on saturday afternoons or sundays they board a trolley and betake themselves to a distant park which, in the picturesque descriptions of columbia, reads like an arcadia and is in reality desolation. the mill-hands are not from the direct section of columbia. they are strangers brought in from "the hills" by the agents of the company, who go hither and thither through the different parts of the country describing to the poor whites and the hill dwellers work in the mills as a way to riches and success. filled with dreams of gain and possessions, with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their children, they leave their distant communities and troop to the mills. these immigrants are picturesque, touching to see. they come with all they own in the world on their backs or in their hands; penniless; burrs and twigs often in the hair of the young girls. they are hatless, barefooted, ignorant; innocent for the most part--and hopeful! what the condition of these labourers is after they have tested the promises of the manufacturer and found them empty bubbles can only be understood and imagined when one has seen their life, lived among them, worked by their side, and comprehended the tragedy of this population--a floating population, going from granton to excelsior, from excelsior to richland, hither and thither, seeking--seeking better conditions. they have no affiliation with the people of the town; they are looked down upon as scum: and in good sooth, for good reason, scum they are! it is spring, warm, gracious. this part of the world seems to be well-nigh treeless! there is no generous foliage, but wherever there are branches to bear it the first green has started out, delicate, tender and beautiful. in my simple work garb i leave columbia and take a trolley to the mill district. i have chosen excelsior as best for my purpose. its reputation is most at stake; its prospectus dazzling; its annals effective. if such things are done in gath...! i cannot say with what timidity i descend from the tram in this strange country, foreign to my northern habitation and filled with classes whose likeness i have never seen and around which the southern negro makes a tad and gloomy background. before the trolley has arrived at the corporation stores excelsior has spoken--roared, clicked forth so vibrantly, so loudly, i am prepared to feel the earth shake. this is the largest mill in the world and looks it! a model, too, in point of view of architecture. i have read in the prospectus that it represents $ , , capital, possesses , spindles, employs , hands, and can, with crowding, employ , . surely it will have place for one more, then! i am impressed with its grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward its centre--impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. at one side christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second one is building. on the other side, at a little distance, lies granton, second largest mill. all this i take in as i make my way excelsiorward. between me and the vast mill itself there is not a soul. a thick, sandy road winds to the right; in the distance i can see a black trestle over which the freight cars take the cotton manufactures to the distant railroad and ship them to all parts of the world. beyond the trestle are visible the first shanties of the mill town. work first and lodgings afterward are my goals. at the door of excelsior i am more than overwhelmed by its magnificence and its loud voice that makes itself so far-reachingly heard. there is no entry for me at the front of the mill, and i toil around to the side; not a creature to be seen. i venture upon the landing and make my way along a line of freight cars--between the track and the mill. a kind-faced man wanders out from an unobserved doorway; a gust of roar follows him! he sees me, and lifts his hat with the ready southern courtesy not yet extinct. i hasten to ask for work. [illustration: "mighty mill--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate" "charnel house, destroyer of homes, of all that mankind calls hallowed; breeder of strife, of strike, of immorality of sedition and riot"] "well, thar's jest plenty of work, i reckon! go in that do'; the overseer will tell you." through the door open behind him i catch glimpses of a room enormous in dimensions. cotton bales lie on the floor, stand around the walls and are piled in the centre. leaning on them, handling them, lying on them, outstretched, or slipping like shadows into shadow, are the dusky shapes of the black negro of true southern blood. i have been told there is no negro labour in the mills. i take advantage of my guide's kind face to ask him if he knows where i can lodge. "hed the measles? well, my gyrl got 'em. thar's a powerful sight of measles hyar. i'd take you-all to bo'd at my house ef you ain't 'fraid of measles. thar's the hotel." (he points to what at the north would be known as a brick shanty.) "a gyrl can bo'd thar for $ . a week. you won't make that at first." with extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring mill past picturesque black men and cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." i am told that carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! this is chaos before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the machinery. here the cotton cloth is woven. excelsior is so vast that from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. i decide instantly that the weave-room shall not be my destination! an overseer comes up to me. he talks with me politely and kindly--that is, as well as he can, he talks! it is almost impossible to hear what he says. he asks me simple and few questions and engages me promptly to work that "_evening_" as the southerner calls the hours after midday. "you can see all the work and choose a sitting or a standing job." this is an improvement on pittsburg and lynn. i have been told there is always work in the mills for the worker. it is not strange that every inducement consistent with corporation rules should be made to entice the labouring girl! the difficulty is that no effort is made to keep her! the ease with which, in all these experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely to prove that there is a demand everywhere for labourers. _organize labour, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her task may be able to continue it and keep her health and her self-respect_. with excelsior as my future workshop i leave the mill to seek lodging in the mill village. the houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill proper. to reach them i plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay dust. the sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme. the mill houses are all built exactly alike. painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil. here the architect has catered to the different families, different individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of rooms: they are known as "four-or six-room cottages." in one of the first cottages to the right a wholesome sight--the single wholesome sight i see during my experience--meets my eye. human kindness has transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten--"kindergarten" is over the door. a pretty southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her little flock. the handful of half a dozen emancipated children who are not in the mills is refreshing to see. there are very few; the kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars. i accost her. "can you tell me any decent place to board?" she is sorry, regards me kindly with the expression i have grown to know--the look the eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower range. "i am a stranger come out to work in the mills." but the young lady takes little interest in me. children are her care. they surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so gently by the womanly hand. she turns from the working-woman to them, but not before indicating a shanty opposite: "mrs. green lives there in that four-room cottage. she is a good woman." through the door's crack i interview mrs. green, a pallid, sickly creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all in one piece. she permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room. here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. the tumbled, dirty bed fills up one-half the room. in it is a little child, shaking with chills. on the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty utensils of all sorts of domestic description. the house has a sickening odour. the woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep boarders. we do not strike a bargain. "i am only here four months," she said. "sick ever since i come, and my little girl has fevernaygu." i wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real bo'din'-house." i attack it and thus discover the dwelling where i make my home in excelsior. from the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. within its shadow i see a negro washing dishes. a tall woman, taller than most men, angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age, greets me: she is the landlady. at her skirts, catching them and staring at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto presented me. the room beyond me is clean. i draw a breath of gratitude. "mrs. jones?" "yes, this is jones' bo'din'-house." the old woman has a comb in her hand; she has "jest ben com'in' letty's hair." letty smiles delightedly. "this yere's the child of the lady upstairs. the mother's a pore sick thing." mrs. jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the stranger's child. "and grandmaw keeps letty clean, don't she, letty? she don't never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her." "can i find lodging here?" she looks at me. "yes, ma'am, you kin. i'm full up; got a lot of gentlemen bo'ders, but not many ladies. i got one bed up aloft; you can't have it alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there, too. nuthin' ketchin'. she come here a stranger; the mill was too hard on her; she's ben sick fo' days." i had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed. i would return at noon. "stranger hyar, i reckon?" "yes; from massachusetts. a shoe-hand." she shakes her head: "you wont like the mills." she draws letty between her old stiff knees, seats herself on a straight chair, and combs the child's hair on either side its pathetic, gentle little face. so i leave her for the present to return to columbia and fetch back with me my bundle of clothes. * * * * * when i return at noon it is dinner time. i enter and am introduced, with positive grace and courtesy, by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law, "tommy jones," a widower, a man in decent store clothes and a derby hat surrounded by a majestic crape sash. he is nonchalantly loading a large revolver, and thrusts it in his trousers pocket: "always carry it," he explains; "comes handy!" then i am presented to the gentlemen boarders. i beg to go upstairs, with my bundles, and i see for the first time my dwelling part of this shanty. a ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen takes me into the loft. heavens! the sight of that sleeping apartment! there are three beds in it, sagging beds, covered by calico comforters. the floor is bare; the walls are bare. i have grown to know that "jones'" is the cleanliest place in the excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it lacks perfection. around the bare walls hang the garments of the other women who share the room with me. what humble and pathetic decorations! poor, miserable clothes--a shawl or two, a coat or two, a cotton wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature clothes of letty--a little night-dress and a tiny blue cotton dress. i put my bundle down by the side of my bed which i am to share with another woman, and descend, for mrs. jones' voice summons me to the midday meal. the nourishment provided for these thirteen-hour-a-day labourers is as follows: on a tin saucepan there was a little salt pork and on another dish a pile of grease-swimming spinach. a ragged negro hovered over these articles of diet; the room was full of the smell of frying. after the excitement of my search for work, and the success, if success it can be called that so far had met me, i could not eat; i did not even sit down. i made my excuse. i said that i had had something to eat in columbia, and started out to the mill. by the time the mill-hand has reached his home a good fifteen minutes out of the three-quarters of an hour recreation is gone: his food is quickly bolted, and by the time i have reached the little brick hotel pointed out to me that morning and descended to its cellar restaurant, forced myself to drink a cup of sassafras tea, and mounted again into the air, the troop of workers is on the march millward. i join them. although the student of philanthropy and the statistician would find difficulty in forcing the countersign of the manufactories, the worker may go everywhere. i do not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the "weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but i discover, after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial charge. he consigns to me a standing job. a set of revolving spools is designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who comes cheerfully forward and consents to "learn" me. spooling is not disagreeable, and the room is the quietest part of the mill--noisy enough, but calm compared to the others. in excelsior this room is, of course, enormous, light and well ventilated, although the temperature, on account of some quality of the yarn, is kept at a point of humidity far from wholesome. "spooling" is hard on the left arm and the side. heart disease is a frequent complaint amongst the older spoolers. it is not dirty compared to shoe-making, and whereas one stands to "spool," when one is not waiting for yarn it is constant movement up and down the line. the fact that there are more children than young girls, more young girls than women, proves the simplicity of this task. the cotton comes from the spinning-room to the spool-room, and as the girl stands before her "side," as it is called, she sees on a raised ledge, whirling in rapid vibration, some one hundred huge spools full of yarn; whilst below her, each in its little case, lies a second bobbin of yarn wound like a distaff. her task controls machinery in constant motion, that never stops except in case of accident. with one finger of her right hand she detaches the yarn from the distaff that lies inert in the little iron rut before her. with her left hand she seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in front of her, holding this spool steady, overcoming the machinery for the moment not as strong as her grasp. this demands a certain effort. still controlling the agitated spool with her left hand, she detaches the end of yarn with the same hand from the spool, and by means of a patent knotter harnessed around her palm she joins together the two loosened ends, one from the little distaff and one from this large spool, so that the two objects are set whirling in unison and the spool receives all the yarn from the distaff. up and down this line the spooler must walk all day long, replenishing the iron grooves with fresh yarn and reknitting broken strands. this is all that there is of "spooling." it demands alertness, quickness and a certain amount of strength from the left arm, and that is all! to conceive of a woman of intelligence pursuing this task from the age of eight years to twenty-two on down through incredible hours is not salutary. you will say to me, that if she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing more. i cannot think it. the little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and cheerful and jolly; i grant her all this. she lives at home. i am told by my subsequent friends that she thinks herself better than anybody. this pride and ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and a sprightliness of manner that is refreshing. she does not hesitate to evince her superiority by making sport of me. she takes no pains to teach me well. instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would have simplified my job enormously, she teaches me what she expresses "the old-fashioned way"--knotting the yarn with the fingers. i have mastered this slow process by the time that the overseer discovers her trick and brings me the harness for my left hand. she is full of curiosity about me, asking me every sort of question, to which i give the best answers that i can. by and by she slips away from me. i turn to find her; she has vanished, leaving me under the care of a truly kind, sad little creature in a wrapper dress. this little maggie has a heart of gold. "don't you-all fret," she consoles. "that's like jeannie: she's so _mean_. when you git to be a remarkable fine spooler she'll want you on her side, you bet." she assists my awkwardness gently. "i'll learn you all right. you-all kin stan' hyar by me all day. jeannie clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. whar you come from?" "lynn, massachusetts." "did you-all git _worried_ with the train? i only bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days!" she tells me her simple annals with no question: "my paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care for me; so one day i sez to paw, 'i'm goin' to work in the mills'--an' i lef home all alone and come here." after a little--"when i sayd good-by to my father peard like _he_ didn't care neither. i'm all alone here. i bo'ds with that girl's mother." i wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron. so did maggie, but mine was from wanamaker's in new york, and had, i suppose, a certain style, for the child said: "i suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty apron: where'd you git it?" "where i came from," i answered, and, i am sorry to say, it sounded brusque. for the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet....(oh, i assure you the qualities of good breeding are there! some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which i move lessons salutary!) "i didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "i only meant it warn't from these parts." * * * * * during the afternoon the gay jeannie returns and presents to me a tin box. it is filled with a black powder. "want some?" well, what is it? she greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. in a trice half a dozen girls have left their spooling and cluster around me. "she ain't never _seen_ it!" and the little creature fills her mouth with the powder which she keeps under her tongue. "it is _snuff_!" they all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. their mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it. they take it and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black wad, spitting it all over the floor. others "dip," going about with the long sticks in their mouths. the air of the room is white with cotton, although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. these little particles are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. lung disease and pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the mill village. the girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at it. over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to stand on a box to reach her side. only the very young girls show any trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less complaint the limitation of their horizons. they are drawn from the hill district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. they are illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses, where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. as soon as a girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "do you like the mills?" without exception the answer is, "i _hate them_." absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly. yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from : to : seems interminable! even when the whistle blows we are not all free--excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom extra pay can beguile stay on. maggie, my little teacher, walks with me toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine. neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did i take precaution to change my way of speaking--and not once had it been commented upon. to-day maggie says to me: "i reckon you-all is 'piscopal?" "why?" "why, you-all _talks_ 'piscopal." so much for a tribute to the culture of the church. * * * * * at jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of the room--a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards again, a little lower in height. they sag in the middle threateningly. one plate is piled high with fish--bones, skin and flesh all together in one odourous mass. salt pork graces another platter and hominy another. i am alone in the supper room. the guests, landlord and landlady are all absent. some one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the desertion: "they've all gone to see the fight; all the white fellers is after a nigger." through the window i can see the fleeing forms of the settlers--women, sunbonnets in hand, the men hatless. it appears that all the world has turned out to see what lawless excitement may be in store. the whirling dust and sand in the distance denote the group formed by the negro and his pursuers. this, standing on the little porch of my lodging-house, i see and am glad to find that the chase is fruitless. the black man, tortured to distraction, dared at length to rebel, and from the moment that he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing, but his legs were, and he got clear of excelsior. the lodgers troop back. molly, my landlady's niece, breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the procession and is voluble over the affair. "they-all pester a po'r nigger's life out 'er him, ye'es, they dew so! ef a nigger wants ter show his manners to me, why, i show mine to him," she said generously, "and ef he's a mannerly nigger, why, i ain't got nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, i suttenly ain't!" it is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous and unusual this poor mill girl's standpoint is contrasted with the sentiment of the people with which she moves. i slip into my seat at the table in the centre of the sagging board and find molly beside me, the girl from excelsior with the pretty hair on the other side. the host, mr. jones, honours the head of the table, and "grandmaw" waits upon us. opposite are the three men operatives, flannel-shirted and dirty. the men are silent for the most part, and bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff before them. i feel convinced that if they were not so terribly hungry they could not eat it. jones discourses affably on the mill question, advising me to learn "speeding," as it pays better and is the only advanced work in the mill. molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up the whole broad seat, she is so big and so pervading; and her close proximity--unwashed, heavy with perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appetite. she is full of news and chatter and becomes the leading spirit of the meal. "i reckon you-all never did see anything like the fight to the mill to-day." she arouses at once the interest of even the dull men opposite, who pause, in the applying of their knives and forks, to hear. "amanda wilcox she dun tol' ida jacobs that she'd _do her_ at noon, and ida she sarst her back. it was all about a _sport_[ ]--bill james. he's been spo'tin' ida jacobs these three weeks, i reckon, and amanda got crazy over it and 'clared she'd spile her game. and she tol' ida jacobs a lie about bill--sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the park on sunday. [footnote : a beau.] "well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to see what they-all'd do at noon, and they jest resh'd for each other like's they was crazy; and one man he got between 'em and sayd, 'now the gyrl what spits over my hand first can begin the fight.' "they both them spit right, into each other's faces, they did so; and arter that yer couldn't get them apart. ida jacobs grabbed amanda by the ha'r and amanda hit her plump in the chest with her fist. they was suttenly like to kill each other ef the men hadn't just parted them; it took three men to part 'em." her story was much appreciated. "ida was dun fer, i can tell ye; she suttenly was. she can't git back to work fer days." the spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill. after supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to the sitting-room, where molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. she made a lap, a generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, letty. mrs. white had disappeared. "you-all come here to me, letty." she held out her large dirty hands to the blue-eyed waif. in its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, letty stood for a moment motionless and on the verge of tears. "you-all come to molly and go by-o." there was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the eighteen-months'-old baby. she toddled across the floor to the mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. the big, awkward girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly gained a dignity and a grace maternal--not too much to say it, she had charm. letty leaned her head against molly's breast and smiled contentedly, whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro. "shall molly sing by-o?" she should. the little face, lifted, declared its request. "letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "sing by-o! we'll all sing it together." letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two words sweetly, "by-o! by-o!" and molly joined her. thus they rocked and hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see. one of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown woman had faded out of existence. the other--who can say how to her maternity would come! * * * * * in the room where we sit jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin' kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[ ] [footnote : there are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this state; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.] in one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. they are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $ for the organ in monthly payments of $ at a time. the mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ. jones is a courteous host. his lodgers occupy the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. i feel convinced that jones thinks that massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social scale than south carolina mill-girls! because, after being witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said: "now, i am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; i'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft." this is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly shiftlessness of the southern settlement. again: "you-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. why, i'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if i met her at the north pole--salla, pale, sickly." i might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. but i listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst mrs. white glides in from the kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the sewing machine behind jones. her baby rocks contentedly in molly's arms. jones continues: "i worked in the mill fifteen years. i have done a little of all jobs, i reckon, and i ain't got no use for mill-work. if they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' i'd _go_ in fer an hour or two now and then. why, i sell sewing machines and organs to the mill-hands all over the country. i make $ a month, and _i touch all my money_," he said significantly. "it's the way to do. a man don't feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents or ten dollars." he then explains the corporation's methods of paying its slaves. some of the hands never touch their money from month's end to month's end. once in two weeks is pay-day. a woman has then worked hours. the corporation furnishes her house. there is the rent to be paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase. there is a book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are as good as gold. it is good at the stores, good for the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative currency. this is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it. when the people are ill, jones says, they are docked for wages. when, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms. jones himself, mark you, is emancipated! he has set himself free; but he is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the corporation. [illustration: "the southern mill hand's face is unique, a fearful type"] "i think," he says, "that the mill-hand is _meaner_ to the corporation than the corporation is to the mill-hand." "why?" "why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay." unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause. "what's the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin' to fight corporations? why, excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its capital is over a million; it has , spindles. the men that run these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've got piles of money. what do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers? they can shut down and not feel it. why, these hyar people might just as well fight against a stone wall." the wages of these people, remember, pay jones for the organs upon which they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use. his home is a mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands. he has fetched down from the hills molly, his own niece, to work for him. he perforce _will_ speak well. i do not blame him. he is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony. he wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and washed. "don't you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill. any of 'em would be jealous of you-all." then he warns, again forced to plead for another side: "you-all won't come out as you go in, i tell you! you're the picture of health. why," he continues, a little later, "you ain't got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is. why, in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall they've got down to ---- and dance there till four o'clock--come home just in time to get into the mills at : ." which fact convinces me of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human beings (thank god, for it is a prophecy for their future!) _not yet crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts_. rather early i bid them all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my loft. there the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me. old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark, suggesting pendant sinister figures. windows are large, thank heaven! in the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the night is warm and stifling. close to an old trunk i sit down with a slip of paper on my knee and try to take a few notes. but no sooner have i begun to write than a step on the stair below announces another comer. before annoyance can deepen too profoundly the big, awkward form of the landlady's niece slouches into sight. sheepishly she comes across the room to me--sits down on the nearest bed. molly's costume is typical: a dark cotton wrapper whose colours have become indistinct in the stains of machinery oil and perspiration. the mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to feminine vanity! compactly screwed curl papers, dozens of them, accentuate the hard, unlovely lines of her face and brow. her features are coarse, heavy and square, but her eyes are clear, frank and kind. she has an appealing, friendly expression; molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature. one elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her crimped head in her large, dirty hand. "my, ef i could write as fast as you-all i'd write some letters, i reckon. ust ter write; like it good enough, tew; but i ain't wrote in months. i was thinkin' th' other day ef i didn't take out the _pencile_ i'd dun forgit how to spell." without the window through which she gazes is seen the pale night sky and in the heavens hangs the thread of a moon. its light is unavailing alongside of the artificial moon--an enormous electric light. this lifts its brilliant, dazzling circumference high in the centre of the mill street. i have but to move a trifle aside from the window coping's shelter to receive a blinding blaze. but molly has been subtle enough to discover the natural beauty of the night. she sees, curiously enough, past this modern illumination: the young moon has charm for her. "ain't it a pretty night?" she asks me. its beauty has not much chance to enhance this room and the crude forms, but it has awakened something akin to sentiment in the breast of this young savage. "i don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing _sweet music_[ ], does you-all?" [footnote : the southern term for stringed instruments.] "what is the nicest music you have ever heard, molly?" "why, a gui-taar an' a mandolin. it's so sweet! i could sit for hours an' hyar 'em pick." her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm. "up to the hills, from whar i cum, i ust ter hyar 'em a serenadin' of some gyrl an' i ust ter set up in bed and lis'en tel it died out; it warn't for _me_, tho'!" "didn't they ever serenade you?" "no, _ma'am_; i don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'." without, the moon's slender thread holds in a silvery circle the half-defined misty ball that shall soon be full moon. thank heavens i shall not see this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town, forgotten of gods and men! but the woman at my side must see it mark its seasons; she is inscrutably part of the colony devoted to unending toil! here all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and perish; womanly sentiment be crushed; die out in sterility; or worse, coarsen to the animal like to those whose companion she is forced to be. "i live to the rockies, an' uncle tom he come up after me and carried me down hyar. my auntie died two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had catchin' pneumonia. i tuk care of her all through her sickness, did every mite for her, and there was bo'ders, tew--i guess half a dozen of 'em--and i cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. when she died i went to work in the mill. say, i reckon you-all didn't see my new hat?" it was fetched, done up with care in paper. she displayed it, a white straw round hat, covered with roses. at praise of it and admiration the girl flushed with pleasure. "my, you _dew_ like it? why, i didn't think it _pretty, much_. uncle tom dun buy it for me." she gives all her wages to uncle tom, who in turn brings her from time to time such stimulus to labour as some pretty feminine thing like this. _this_ shall crown molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the one day of the week, sunday, comes! not from sunday till sunday again are those hair crimpers unloosed. despite uncle tom's opposition to mill work for women, despite his cognizance of the unhealthfulness of the mills, he knew a thing or two when he put his strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a day and pocketed himself the spoils. "i can't go to bade awful early, because i don't sleep ef i do; i'm too tired to sleep. when i feel real sick i tries to stay home a day, and then the overseer he rides around and _worries_ me to git up. i declare ef i wouldn't near as soon git up as to be roused up. they don't give you no peace, rousing you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. i suttenly dew feel bade to-night; i suttenly can't scarcely get to bed!" here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes the pale mother and her little child. this ghost of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called herself mrs. white, could scarcely crawl to her bed. she was whiter than the moon and as slender. molly's bed is close to mine. the night toilet of this girl consisted of her divesting herself of her shoes, stockings and her cotton wrapper, then in all the other garments she wore during the day she turned herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed. mrs. white undressed her child, giving it very good care. it was a tiny creature, small-boned and meager. every time i looked over at it it smiled appealingly, touchingly. finally when she went downstairs to the pump to get a drink of water for it, i went over and in her absence stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand and such an infinitesimal arm! unused to attention and the touch, but not in the least frightened, letty extended her miniature member and looked up at me in marvel. mrs. white on her return made herself ready for the night. she said in her frail voice: "letty's a powerful hand for vegetubbles, and she eats everything." memory of the ham and the putrid fish i had seen this eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind. mrs. white let down her hair--a nonchalance that molly had not been guilty of. this woman's hair was no more than a wisp. it stood out thin, wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. this was the extent of her toilet. she slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her dress. then she turned in by her child. she was very ill; it was plain to be seen. death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had resistance for so long. her languor was slow and indicative, her gray, ashen face like death itself. "lie still, letty," she whispers to the baby; "don't touch mother--she can't stand it to-night." my mattress was straw and billowy, the bed sheetless, and under the weight of the cotton comforter i tried to compose myself. there were five of us in the little loft. my bedfellow was peaceful and lay still, too tired to do anything else. in front of me was the open window, through which shone the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind this, the clock of excelsior--brightly lit and incandescent--glared in upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn and frightening sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours which the working-woman might claim for repose. it was well on to nine o 'clock and the mills were working overtime. molly turned restlessly on her bed and murmured, "i suttenly dew feel bad to-night." a little later i heard her say over to herself: "my, i forgot to say my prayers." she was the sole member of the loft to whom sleep came; it came to her soon. i lay sleepless, watching the clock of excelsior. the ladder staircase openly led to the kitchen: there was no door, no privacy possible to our quarters, and the house was full of men. a little later letty cries: "a drink, a drink!" and the tone of the mother, who replies, is full of patience, but fuller still of suffering. "hush, letty, hush! mother's too sick to get it." but the child continues to fret and plead. finally with a groan mrs. white stretches out her hand and gets the tin mug of water, of that vile and dirty water which has brought death to so many in the mill village. the child drinks it greedily. i can hear it suck the fluid. then the woman herself staggers to her feet, rises with dreadful illness upon her, and all through the hot stuffy night in the close air of the loft growing momentarily more fetid, unwholesome, intolerable--she rises to be violently sick over and over again. it seems an indefinite number of times to one who lies awake listening, and must seem unceasing to the poor wretch who returns to her bed only to rise again. she groans and suffers and bites her exclamations short. twice she goes to the window and by the light of the electric lamp pours laudanum into a glass and takes it to still her pain and her need. the odours become so nauseous that i am fain to cover my face and head. the child fed on salt ham and pork is restless and thirsty all night and begs for water at short intervals. at last the demand is too much for the poor agonized mother--she takes refuge in silencing unworthy, and to which one feels her gentleness must be forced. "hark! the cat will get you, letty! see that cat?" and the feline horror in nameless form, evoked in an awe-inspiring whisper, controls the little creature, who murmurs, sobs and subsides. what spirit deeper than her character has hitherto displayed stirs the mill-girl in the bed next to me? possibly the tragedy in the other bed; possibly the tragedy of her own youth. at all events, whatever burden is on her, her cross is heavy! she murmurs in her dreams, in a voice more mature, more serious than any tone of hers has indicated: "oh, my god!" it is a strange cry--call--appeal. it rings solemn to me as i lie and watch and pity. hours of night which should be to the labourer peaceful, full of repose after the day, drag along from nine o'clock, when we went to bed, till three. at three mrs. white falls into a doze. i envy her. over me the vermin have run riot; i have killed them on my neck and my arms. when it seemed that flesh and blood must succumb, and sleep, through sheer pity, take hold of us, a stirring begins in the kitchen below which in its proximity seems a part of the very room we occupy. the landlady, mrs. jones, has arisen; she is making her fire. at a quarter to four mrs. jones begins her frying; at four a deep, blue, ugly smoke has ascended the stairway to us. this smoke is thick with odours--the odour of bad grease and bad meat. its cloud conceals the beds from me and i can scarcely pierce its curtain to look through the window. it settles down over the beds like a creature; it insinuates itself into the clothes that hang upon the wall. so permeating is it that the odour of fried food clings to everything i wear and haunts me all day. i can hear the sputtering of the saucepan and the fall and flap of the pieces of meat as she drops them in to fry. _i know what they are_, for i have seen them the night before--great crimson bits of flesh torn to pieces and arranged in rows by the fingers of a ragged negro as he crouched by the kitchen table. this preparation continues for an hour: it takes an abnormally long time to cook abnormally bad food! long before five the clock of excelsior rings and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever might be lucky enough to be asleep. mrs. jones calls molly. "molly!" the girl murmurs and turns. "come, you-all git up; you take so powerful long to dress yo'self!" long to dress! it is difficult to see how that would be possible. she rises reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and the dirty wrapper. her hair is untouched, her face unwashed, but she is ready for the day! mrs. white has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby, curled up close to her back. molly's summons is mine as well. i am a mill-hand with her. i rise and repeat my ablutions of the evening before. unhooking the tin basin, possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen stairs, i wash my face and hands. although the water is dipped from the pail on which a scum has formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and stimulating than anything that has come in contact with me for hours that it is a positive pleasure. * * * * * the mill by this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty environment. at : excelsior has shrieked every settler awake. at half-past five we have breakfasted and i pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our doors. we fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions from each tenement as we pass. beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. he is so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. he has a slender visage of the frailness i have learned to know and distinguish: it represents the pure american type of people known as "poor white trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign element. a painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is the face of a martyr. his hat of brown felt slouches over bright red hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. his attitude and gait express his defrauded existence. cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. i greet him; he is shy and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. he is "from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. he boards with a lot of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him, for, as he is alone this day, i see him always alone. he works from : to : , with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and has his saturday afternoons and his sundays free. he is destitute of the quality we call joy and has never known comfort. he makes fifty cents a day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost a man, crippled and condemned. at my exclamation when he tells me the sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes about his thin lips: "_it keeps me in existence_!" he says in a slow drawl. he used just those words. at the different doors of the mill we part. he is not unconscious of my fellowship with him, that i feel and know. a kindling light has come across his face. "good luck to you!" i bid him, and he lifts his head and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "i hope you-all will have good luck, tew." as we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill seems cold. i go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the floors and sit down, waiting for work. on this day i am to have my own "side"--i am a full-fledged spooler. excelsior has gotten us all out of our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "thar ain't likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," maggie tells me. she is no less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind. "i reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable spooler," she cheers me on. "you'll get tired out at first, but then i gets tired, tew, right along, only it ain't the same _kind_--it's not so _sharp_." her distinction is clever. across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames" i see the figure of an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair. she bends to her job in front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that work with which women of another--oh, of _quite_ another class--amuse their leisure, with which they kill their time. "drawing-in,"[ ] although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker. the girls are ambitious at this work; they make good wages. they sit close to their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day. this girl whom i see across the floor of the excelsior is an object to rest the eyes upon; she is a beauty. there is not much beauty of any kind or description in sight. maggie has noticed her esthetic effect. "you-all seen that girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am _peart_." [footnote : a good drawer-in makes $ . a day.] she is a new hand from a distance. this is her first day. what miserable chance has brought her here? if she stays the mill will claim her body and soul. the overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the room where she works. she has colour and her difference to her pale companions is marked. excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. i can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks and the red forever goes. there are no red cheeks here, not one. she has chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. i saw her lean back, put her hands around her waist and rest, or try to, after she has bent four hours over her close task. i go over to her. "they say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that i'll be a remarkable fine hand." i saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's face as he looked at her when she asked: "got any work?" "we've got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you," he said with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight. the yarn has come in, and i return to my part of the mill; maggie flies to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her. i set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses herself of my hand-harness. mine was a new one, and the one she leaves for me is broken. this delays, naturally, and the overseer, after proving to his satisfaction that i am hampered, gets me a new one and i set to work. many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin pails or paper parcels appear. these operatives crouch down in a turkish fashion at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful of their unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more like animals than human beings. by eight the full steam power is on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. not one of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to approach. these creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the byre. as for the children, i must pass them by in this recital. the tiny, tiny children! the girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed. there is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes. to protect the hair from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the eyes. the cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation through the air--spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and lungs. i repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning is constant. over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each others' shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale. maggie wanders over to me to see "how you-all is gettin' on." "tired?" "well, i reckon i am. thank god we get out in a little while now." * * * * * one afternoon i went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going to the mill. mrs. white was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the blue-checked wrapper she always wore. her head was close to the window, her silhouette in the light, pale and slender. "i wa'n't sick when i come hyar, but them mills! they's suttinly tew hyard on a woman! weave-room killed me, i guess. i couldn't hyar at all when i come out and scarcely could stan' on ma feet when i got home. tew tyred to eat, tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it? it's all colours. doctor done come to see me; ain't helpin' me any; 'pears like he-all ain't goin' to come no mo'!" "if you have a husband, why don't you go to him and let him care for you?" she was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her lap: the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of the earth. "seems like a woman ought to help a man--some," she murmured. downstairs mrs. jones sums her up in a few words. "she-all suttinly ain't no _'mrs'_ in the world! calls herself _'white.'_" (the intonation is not to be mistaken.) "pore thing's dyin'--knows it, tew! come hyar to die, i reckon. she'll die right up thar in that baed, tew. doctor don't come no mo'. know she cayn't pay him nothin'. you-all come hyar to grandmaw, letty!" the child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more intricate than any woof or warp of the great mills goes confidingly to the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. with every word she speaks this aged creature draws her own picture. to these types no pen save tolstoi's could do justice. mine can do no more than display them by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech. "i am sixty-four years old, an' played out. worked too hyard. worked every day since i was a child, and when i wasn't workin' had the fevar. come from the hills las' month. when his wife dyde, the son he come an' fetched me cross the river to help him." how has she lived so long and so well, with life "so hyard on her"? "i loved my husban', yes, ma'am, i regularly loved him; reckon no woman didn't ever love a man mo', and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. seems tho' god couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy--couldn't las'; he dyde." mrs. jones' figure is a case of bones covered with a brown substance--you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned hide; nothing more. this human statue, ever responsive to the eternal moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument, labour: struggle, disease, want. but this hill woman has known love. it has transfigured her, illumined her. this poor deformed body is a torch only for an immortal flame. i know now why it seems good to be near her, why her eyes are inspired.... i rise to leave her and she comes forward to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me and kisses me. in speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the word sanitation. in the mill district, as far as my observation reached, there is none. refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the middle of the streets in front of the houses. the general drainage is performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one's own door one breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties. decaying vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the decorations of their miserable garden patches. to walk through granton (which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to _inhabit_ granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its severity. these settlers, habitants of dwellings built by finance solely for the purpose of renting, are celebrated for their immorals--"a rough, lying, bad lot." "oh, the mill-hands!" ... sufficient, expressive designation. nevertheless, these people, simple, direct and innocent, display qualities that we have been taught are enviable--a lack of curiosity, for the most part, in the affairs of others, a warm southern courtesy, a human kindliness. i found these people degraded because of their habits and not of their tendencies, which statement i can justify; whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of poverty and degradation. they have seen nothing with which to compare their existences; they have no time, no means to be clean, and no stimulus to be decent. a job at granton was no more difficult to secure than was "spoolin'" at the other mill. i applied one saturday noon, when granton was silent and the operatives within their doors asleep, for the most part, leaving the village as deserted as it is on a workday. a like desolation pervades the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. i was so lucky as to meet a shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway. preceding him were two ill-clad, pale children of nine and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with which their task was to sweep the cotton from the floors--cotton that resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. the superintendent regarded me curiously, i thought penetratingly, and for the first time in my experience i feared detection. my dread was enhanced by the loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my venture. by this i was most thoroughly a mill-girl in appearance, at least; my clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. i had not heard the southern dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. i told him i had been a "spooler" and did not like it--"wanted to spin." he listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what i trembled to fear was disbelief. i desperately pushed back my sunbonnet and in southern drawl begged for work. "spinnin'?" he asked. "what do you want to spin for?" he was a yankee, his accent sharp and keen. how clean and decent and capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty, downtrodden, beside him! i told him that i was tired of spooling and knew i could make more by something else. he thrust his hands into his pockets. "to-night is saturday; alone here?" "yes." "where you going to stay in granton?" "i don't know yet." "don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "i am head of the _speedin'-room_. i'll give you a job in my room on monday morning." my relief was immense. his subsequent questions i parried, thanked him, and withdrew to keep secret from excelsior that i had deserted for granton. although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the villagers do not associate. the workings of granton are unknown to excelsior and vice versa. the speeding-room in granton is second only in noise to the weave-room. conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! the speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control. my teacher, bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. to the lay mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. this girl made from $ . to $ . a day. she controlled in all speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the mechanism. the girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand mashed to a jelly. the speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top and back of the line. the ropers are refilled and their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. the yarn from the ropers is wound off on to the speeders. when the speeders are full of yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls themselves. speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and cleaning is only fit for a man to do. the girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered the factory at eight. she was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and capable, and, as far as i could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly respectable. there are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. on tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather contrive to make ourselves heard. she has a sweet, gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself. "what do you think about all day?" "why, i couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts." "tell me some." "why, i think about books, i reckon. do you-all like readin'?" "yes." "ain't nuthin' i like so good when i ain't tyrd." "are you often tired?" and this question surprises her. she looks up at me and smiles. "why, i'm _always_ tyrd! i read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel." (for one short moment please consider: this hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after year. it is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so patiently; it is her life. the forms she sees are warped and scarred; the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. all they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. the children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. the dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the men? if she does not feed the passion of the overseer, she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which will give her children to give in time to the mill. this is the realism of her love story: she reads books that you, too, may have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture them--scenes that you have sought and wearied of. a tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her salvation!... her happiness? _that_ question who can answer for her or for you?) she continues: "i'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only i ain't never had much occasion for it." this pathos and humour keep me silent. a few ropers have run out; she rises. i rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line taut and complete again. ten years! ten years! all her girlhood and youth has been given to keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. during this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness at which i marvel. her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear. "i hate the mills!" she says simply. "what would you be if you could choose?" i venture to ask. she has no hesitation in answering. "i'd love to be a trained nurse." then, turn about is fair play in her mind, i suppose, for she asks: "what would _you-all_ be?" and ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness i frankly respond: "i'd like to write a book." "i _dee_-clare." she stares at me. "why, you-all _is_ ambitious. did you ever write anything?" "a letter or two." she is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "i suttenly ain't so high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "wish you'd write a love story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my snowy flying speeders. "look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on writin' hyar? ef you don't mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an' i'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills than a loud sound. i thanked her and said: "do you think that you'd know?" "well, i guess i would!" she said confidently. "i ain't read all my life sense i was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. can you-all sing?" "no." "play sweet music?" "no." "i jest love it." she enthuses. "every saturday afternoon i take of a music teacher on the gee-tar. it costs me a quarter." i could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the eagerness--all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the slaves of toil. "they ain't much flowers here in granton," she said again. "'tain't no use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor gardens, nuther." musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says: "i dew love flowers, don't you?" * * * * * over and over again i am asked by those whose wish i suppose is to prove to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to respond: "the working people are happy? the factory girls are happy, are they not? don't you find them so?" is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, _is happy_? do you _wish_ her to be so? is the existence _ideal_? i can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of lynn and for the southern mill-hand. i thank heaven that i can say truthfully, that of all who came under my observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy. i repeat, the working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time stretch toward it. they have no time to think, even if they knew how. all that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find under their hand. we have never realized, they have never known, that their great need--given the work that is wrung from them and the degradation in which they are forced to live--is a craving for amusement and relaxation. amusements for this class are not provided; they _can_ laugh, they rarely do. the thing that they seek--let me repeat: i cannot repeat it too often--in the minimum of time that remains to them, is distraction. they do not want to read; they do not want to study; they are too tired to concentrate. how can you expect it? i heard a manufacturer say: "we gave our mill-hands everything that we could to elevate them--a natatorium, a reading library--and these halls fell into disuse." i ask him now, through these pages, the questions which i did not put to him then as i listened in silence to his complaint. he said he thought too much was done for the mill-hands. what time would he suggest that they should spend in the reading-room, even if they have learned to read? they rise at four; at a quarter before six they are at work. the day in winter is not born when they start their tasks; the night has fallen long before they cease. in summer they are worked long into their evenings. they tell me that they are too tired to eat; that all they want to do is to turn their aching bones on to their miserable mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked awake by the mill summons. therefore they solve their own questions. nothing is provided for them that they can use, and they turn to the only thing that is within their reach--animal enjoyment, human intercourse and companionship. they are animals, as are their betters, and with it, let us believe, more excuse. the mill marriage is a farce, and yet they choose to call their unions now and again a marriage. many a woman has been a wife several times in the same town, in the same house. the bond-tying is a form, and, of course, mostly ignored. the settlements swarm with illegitimate children. next to me work two young girls, both under seventeen, both ringless and with child. * * * * * let me picture the foster household, where i used to call saturday evenings. mrs. foster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy mass, hugs her fireside. although the day is warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin, poor blood exhausted by disease and fevers. two flatirons lie in a dirty heap on the floor. as usual, the room is a nest of filth and untidiness. mrs. foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is free. she talks fluently in her soft southern drawl, more negro than white as to speech and tone. up to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four. "this yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's wild to go; yes, ser, he is so. las' night he come to me en say, 'auntie, you-all wake me up at fo' 'clock sure; i got ter go ter the mill.'" here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a pewter spoon dripping over with hominy, grins appreciatively. he throws back his white and delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close to her, caresses him and continues: "yes, ma'am, to-day he dun wake up after they-all had gone and he sayd, 'my goodness, i dun oversleep mase'f!' he sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, "not ef we can help it. why, i don't never let him outen my sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill children would git at him." thus she sheltered him with what care she knew--care that unfortunately _could not go far enough back to protect him_! his mother came in at the noon hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. she was a straight, slender creature, not without grace in her shirt-waist and her low-pulled felt hat that shadowed her sullen face. she was very young, not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative and tragic. with a word only and a nod she passes us; she has now too many vital things and incidents in her own career to be curious regarding a strange mill-hand. she goes with her comrade--and cousin--mamie, into the kitchen to devour in as short a time as possible the noon dinner, served by the grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "they don't have time 'nough to eat," the aunt says; "no sooner then they-all come in and bolt their dinner then it is time to go back." her child has followed her. minnie was married at thirteen; in less than a year she was a grass widow. "my goodness, there's lots of grass widows!" my frowsled hostess nods. "why, in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's left by her husband. one day a new gyrl come for to run a loom and they yells out at her, 'is you-all a grass widow? yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.'" but it was after her grass widowhood that minnie's tragedy began. the mill was her ruin. so much grace and good looks could not go, cannot go, _does not_ go unchallenged by the attentions of the men who are put there to run these women's work. the overseer was father of her child, and when she tried to force from him recognition and aid he threw over his position and left columbia and this behind him. this, one instance under my own eyes observed. there are many. "mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other girl)--"makes more money. my, but she hates the mills! says she ain't ever known a restful minute sence she left the hills." my hostess has drawn the same conclusion from my northern appearance that the joneses drew. "you-all must eat good where you come from! you look so healthy.' do you-all know the banks girl over to calcutta?" "no." "they give her nine months." (calcutta is the roughest settlement round here.) "why, that gyrl wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts like a man. she drew her knife on a man last week--cut his face all up and into his side through his lung. tried to pass as she was his wife, but when they had her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three men's wives and he four gyrl's husbands. he liked to died of the cut. they've given her nine months, but he ain't the only man that bears her marks. over to calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a wink. this yere was an awful pretty gyrl. my min seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in the weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: 'who's that yere pretty boy peekin' at me?' and that gyrl told min that she couldn't help knife the men, they all worried on her so! 'won't never leave me alone; i jest have to draw on 'em; there ain't no other way.'"... for the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful account and picture the cotton-mill village. you will not find it in these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into your ears. under the walls of calcutta negroes are engaged in laying prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out from time to time and see the forms of flowers. on the other side rise some twenty shanties. these houses of calcutta village are very small, built from the roughest unpainted boards. here it is, in this little settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word--that the women shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly. * * * * * "richmond aint so bad as the other!" i can hear mrs. foster drawl out this recommendation to us. "they ain't so much chills here. we dun move up from town first; had to--too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay hyar. why, some of the gyrls and boys works to granton and bo'ds hyar; seems like it's mo' healthy." moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling, bitter existence--pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter what the burden's weight must be, _one must live_! it takes a great deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of interest. at what should they rejoice? i have made the destitution of beauty clear. i believe there is an absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake. there is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour. there should be a complete readjustment of this system. i have been interested in reading in the new york _sun_ of april th of the visit of the bishops to the model factories in ohio. i am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of south carolina and their tenement population. it is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings. they tell us in this same prospectus, which i have read with interest after my personal experience, that these villages are "_picturesque_." this is the only reference i find to the people and their conditions. i have seen nothing but horror, and yet i went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's existence. the ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction before the scales swing even. * * * * * the child in southern mills * * * * * chapter ix the child in the southern mills in the week before i left for the south i dined in ---- with a very charming woman and her husband. before a table exquisite in its appointments, laden with the best the market could offer and good taste display, sat the mistress, a graceful, intelligent young woman, full of philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom i know to be devoted to the care and benefiting of little children in her city. during the meal i said to her casually: "do you know that in your mills in south carolina to-night, as we sit here, little children are working at the looms and frames--little children, some of them not more than six years old?" she said, in astonishment, "i don't know it; and i can't believe it." i told her i should soon see just how true the reports were, and when i returned to new york i would tell her the facts. she is not alone in her ignorance. not one person, man or woman, to whom i told the facts of the cases i observed "_dreamed that children worked in any mills in the united states_!" after my experience amongst the working class, i am safe in saying that i consider their grievances to be the outcome of the ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer. there is nothing more conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. the comfort in which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to action in the cause of others. i will be delighted to meet an accusation of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with the children, lived with them in their homes. it is defamation to use the word "home" in connection with the unwholesome shanty in the pest-ridden district where the remnant of the children's lives not lived in the mill is passed. this handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts from the soil, fever-ridden and malarious; this blank, ugly line of sun-blistered shanties, along a road, yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. the word _village_ has a cheerful sound. it summons a country scene, with the charms of home, however simple and unpretentious. there is nothing to charm or please in the villages i have already, in these pages, drawn for you to see and which with veritable sick reluctance i summon again before your eyes. every house is like unto its neighbour--a shelter put up rapidly and filled to the best advantage. there is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree. arid, desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the state of south carolina nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub--no more. at the foot of the shanties' black line rises the cotton mill. new, enormous, sanitary (!!). its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its pay-roll mysterious. you will not be able to say how many of the fifteen hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children. in the state of south carolina there are statistics of neither births, marriages nor deaths. what can you expect of a mill village! at : we have breakfasted--the twelve of us who live in one small shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the right of the kitchen, women and children on the left. to leave the pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is blessed, even if the stroke that summons is the mill whistle. as we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and infirmity--but the mill is alive! we have given up, in order to satisfy its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel between its merciless jaws is the little child. so long as i am part of its food and triumph i will study the mill. leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, i lean against the green box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room. it is a wonderful sight. the mill itself, a model of careful, well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most advantageous manufacture of textiles. the fine frames of the intricate "warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in" all along the window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames. great piles of stuff lie here and there in the room. it is early--"all the yarn ain't come yet." two children whose work has not been apportioned lie asleep against a cotton bale. the terrible noise, the grinding, whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen. by my side works a little girl of eight. her brutal face, already bespeaking knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest of yellow hair. she goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly. she walks well on her bare, filthy feet. her hands and arms are no longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with dirt. around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make a sort of aureole. (her nimbus of labour, if you will!) there is nothing saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews. "she's a mean girl," my little companion says; "we-all don't hev nothin' to say to her." "why?" "her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want to go--no, sir--so she's mad most the time." thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her impotent childhood. the nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there are other heads than saints--there are martyrs! let the child wear her crown. through the looms i catch sight of upton's, my landlord's, little child. she is seven; so small that they have a box for her to stand upon. she is a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler--"a good spooler, tew!" through the frames on the other side i can only see her fingers as they clutch at the flying spools; her head is not high enough, even with the box, to be visible. her hands are fairy hands, fine-boned, well-made, only they are so thin and dirty, and her nails--claws; she would do well to have them cut. a nail can be torn from the finger, _is_ torn from the finger frequently,[ ] by this flying spool. i go over to upton's little girl. her spindles are not thinner nor her spools whiter. [footnote : in huntsville, alabama, a child of eight lost her index and middle fingers of the right hand in january, . one doctor told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a hundred babies. a merchant told me he had _frequently_ seen children whose hands had been cut off by the machinery.--_american federationist_.] "how old are you?" "ten." she looks six. it is impossible to know if what she says is true. the children are commanded both by parents and bosses to advance their ages when asked. "tired?" she nods, without stopping. she is a "remarkable fine hand." she makes forty cents a day. see the value of this labour to the manufacturer--cheap, yet skilled; to the parent it represents $ . per week. i must not think that as i work beside them i will gain their confidence! they have no time to talk. indeed, conversation is not well looked upon by the bosses, and i soon see that unless i want to entail a sharp reproof for myself and them i must stick to my "side." and at noon i have no heart to take their leisure. at twelve o'clock, minnie, a little spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her hands above her head and exclaims: _"thank god, there's the whistle!"_ i watched them disperse: some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch the dinner-pail for mother or father who work in the mill and who choose to spend these little legs and spare their own. it takes ten minutes to go, ten to return, and the little labourer has ten to devote to its own food, which, half the time, he is too exhausted to eat. i watch the children crouch on the floor by the frames; some fall asleep between the mouthfuls of food, and so lie asleep with food in their mouths until the overseer rouses them to their tasks again. here and there totters a little child just learning to walk; it runs and crawls the length of the mill. mothers who have no one with whom to leave their babies bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin, continue and end in the horrible pandemonium. one little boy passes by with his broom; he is whistling. i look up at the cheery sound that pierces fresh but faint and natural above the machines' noise. his eyes are bright; his good spirits surprise me: here is an argument for my comfortable friends who wish to prove that the children "are happy!" i stop him. "you seem very jolly!" he grins. "how long have you been working?" "two or three days." the gay creature has just _begun_ his servitude and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should fill childhood. i think it will be granted that it takes a great deal to discourage and dishearten a child. the hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just those elements that overwork in the adult and that child labour will ultimately destroy. when hope is gone in the adult he must wreak some vengeance on the bitter fate that has robbed him. there is no more tragic thing than the hopeless child. the adult who grows hopeless can affiliate with the malcontents and find in the insanity of anarchy what he calls revenge. it seems folly to insult the common sense of the public by asking them whether they think that thirteen hours a day, with a half to three-quarters of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount of night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with odours, humid with unhealthfulness, filled with the particles of flying cotton, a pandemonium of noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss of hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing always dulled ... whether the atmosphere combined with the association of men and women whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over the world, is good for a growing child? is it conducive to progressive development, to the making of decent manhood or womanhood? what kind of citizen can this child--if he is fit enough in the economic struggle of the world to survive--turn out to be? not citizens at all: creatures scarcely fit to be called human beings. i asked the little girl who teaches me to spool who the man is whom i have seen riding around on horseback through the town. "why, he goes roun' rousin' up the hands who ain't in their places. sometimes he takes the children outen thayre bades an' brings 'em back to the mill." and if the child can stand, it spins and spools until it drops, till constitution rebels, and death, the only friend it has ever known, sets it free. besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the children sweep the cotton-strewed floors. scarcely has the miserable little object, ragged and odourous, passed me with his long broom, which he drags half-heartedly along, than the space he has swept up is cotton-strewn again. it settles with discouraging rapidity; it has also settled on the child's hair and clothes, and his eyelashes, and this atmosphere he breathes and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased. pneumonia--fatal in nearly all cases here--and lung fever had been a pestilence, "a regular plague," before i came. there were four cases in the village where i, lived, and fever and ague, malaria and grippe did their parts. "why, thar ain't never a haouse but's got somebody sick," my little teacher informed me in her soft southern dialect. "i suttinly never did see a place like this for dyin' in winter time. i reckon et's funerals every day." here is a little child, not more than seven years old. the land is a hot enough country, we will concede, but not a savage south sea island! she has on one garment, if a tattered sacking dress can so be termed. her bones are nearly through her skin, but her stomach is an unhealthy pouch, abnormal. _she has dropsy._ she works in _a new mill_--in one of the largest mills in south carolina. here is a slender little boy--a birch rod (good old simile) is not more slender, but the birch has the advantage: it is elastic--it bends, has youth in it. this boy looks ninety. he is a dwarf; twelve years old, he appears seven, no more. he sweeps the cotton off the floor of "the baby mill." (how tenderly and proudly the owners speak of their brick and mortar.) he sweeps the cotton and lint from the mill aisles from p.m. to a.m. without a break in the night's routine. he stops of his own accord, however, to cough and expectorate--he has advanced tuberculosis. at night the shanties receive us. on a pine board is spread our food--can you call it nourishment? the hominy and molasses is the best part; salt pork and ham are the strong victuals. it is eight o'clock when the children reach their homes--later if the mill work is behindhand and they are kept over hours. they are usually beyond speech. they fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep: "what do you do on sundays?" i asked one little girl. "why, thare ain't nothing much to dew. i go to the park sometimes." this park is at the end of a trolley line; it is their arcadia. picture it! a few yellow sand hills with clusters of pine trees and some scrubby undergrowth; a more desolate, arid, gloomy pleasure ground cannot be conceived. on sundays the trolleys bring those who are not too tired to so spend the day. on sundays the mill shanties are full of sleepers. the park has a limited number of devotees. through the beautyless paths and walks the figures pass like shadows. there come three mill girls arm in arm; their curl papers, screwed tight all the week, are out on sunday, in greasy, abundant curls. sunday clothes are displayed in all their superbness. three or four young men, town fellows, follow them; they are all strangers, but they will go home arm in arm. several little children, who have no clothes but those, they wear, cling close to the side of a gaunt, pale-faced man, who carries in his arms the youngest. the little girl has become a weight to be carried on sundays; she has worked six days of the week--shall she not rest on the seventh? she shall; she claims this, and lies inert on the man's arm, her face already seared with the scars of toil. i ran such risk taking pictures that i relinquished the task, and it was only the last day at the mill, while still in my working clothes with a camera concealed in my pocket, that i contrived to get a picture or two. i ventured to ask two little boys who swept the mill to stand for their pictures. "i don't kyar to," the older one said. i explained that it would not hurt them, as i thought he was afraid; but his little companion vouchsafed: "we-all ain't got no nickel." when they understood it was a free picture they were as delighted as possible and posed with alacrity, making touching apologies for their greasy, dirty condition. when i asked one of them if he was ever clean, he said: "on sunday i wash my hands." it was noon, on the day i chose to leave ----, turning my back on the mill that had allured me to its doors and labour. in south carolina early april is torrid, flies and mosquitoes are rampant. what must this settlement be in midsummer heat? there is no colour in the southern scene; the clothes of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one tone--and, more strange, there is not one line of red, one dash of life, in the faces of the hundreds of women and children that pass me on their way back to work. under the existing circumstances they have no outlook, these people, no hope; their appearance expresses accurately the changeless routine of an existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil. from their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the whistle, piercing, inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate and intelligent beings. i pause by the trestle over which rumble the cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth whose perfection has made this southern mill justly famous. the file of humanity that passes me i shall never forget! the blank mill claims , of these labourers; at least are children. the little things run and keep step with the older men and women; their shaggy, frowzled heads are bent, their hands protrude pitifully from their sleeves; they are barefooted, bareheaded. with these little figures the elements wanton; they can never know the fullness of summer or the proper maturity of autumn. suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon them, as unprotected through storms they go to their work. the winter winds have penetrated the tatters with blades like knives; gray and dusty and earth-coloured the line passes. these are children? no, they are wraiths of childhood--they are effigies of youth! what can hope work in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest? they can curse and swear; they chew tobacco and take snuff. when they speak at all their voices are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill are no longer keen to sound; their speech is low and scarcely audible. over sallow cheeks where the skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look of childhood. as the long afternoon goes by in its hours of leisure for us fatigue settles like a blight over their features, their expressions darken to elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be eradicated, mark the distinctive visages of these children of labour. at certain seasons of the year they actually die off like flies. they fall subject, not to children's diseases exactly--nothing really natural seems to come into the course of these little existences--they fall a prey to the maladies that are the outcomes of their conditions. they are always half-clad in the winter time; their clothes differ nothing at all from their summer clothes; they have no overcoats or coats; many of them go barefoot all winter long. they come out from the hot mills into cold, raw winds and fall an easy prey to pneumonia, scourge of the mill-town. their general health is bad all the year round; their skins and complexions have taken the tone of the sandy soil of the southern country in which they are bred and in which their martyrdom is accomplished. i never saw a rosy cheek nor a clear skin: these are the parchment editions of childhood on which tragedy is written indelibly. you can there read the eternal condemnation of those who have employed them for the sake of gain. it is a melancholy satisfaction to believe that mill labour will kill off little spinners and spoolers. unfortunately, this is not entirely true. there are constitutions that survive all the horrors of existence. i have worked both in massachusetts and the south beside women who entered the mill service at eight years of age. one of these was still in her girlhood when i knew her. she was very strong, very good and still had some illusions left. i do not know what it goes to prove, when i say that at twenty, in spite of twelve years of labour, she still dreamed, still hoped, still longed and prayed _for something that was not a mill_. if this means content in servitude, if this means that the poor white trash are born slaves, or if, on the contrary, it means that there is something inherent in a woman that will carry her past suicide and past idiocy and degradation, all of which is around her, i think it argues well for the working women. the other woman was forty. she had no illusions left--please remember she had worked since eight; she had reached, if you like, the idiot stage. she had nothing to offer during all the time i knew her but a few sentences directly in connection with her toil. it is useless to advance the plea that spooling is not difficult. no child (we will cancel under twelve!) should work at all. no human creature should work thirteen hours a day. no baby of six, seven or eight should be seen in the mills. it is also useless to say that these children tell you that they "like the mill." they are beaten by their parents if they do not tell you this, and, granted that they do not like their servitude, when was it thought expedient that a child should direct its existence? if they do not pass the early years of their lives in study, when should they learn? at what period of their lives should the children of the southern mill-hand be educated? long before they reach their teens their habits are formed--ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them. are these little american children, then, to have no books but labour? no recreation? to be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers? whatever else we are, we are financiers _per se_. the fact that to-day, as for years past, southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender age--employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under twelve--can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain. this gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands of dollars less in the south than a like mill can be run in the north, and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the northern manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit. the attractiveness of the figures is fallacious. what i imply is self-evident. the infant population (its numbers give it a right to this dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. i mean to say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman. the fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated. early death carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled maturity attained by a creature whose life has been passed in this labour is not fit to propagate the species. the excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. it is a crying pity that children are equal to the task imposed upon them. it is a crying pity that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended, all-absorbing power) should not do all! particularly in the southern states do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their inadequacy. when babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil. not only is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle signs of the times. but there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a consideration. no one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in times past) would be an advantage. and yet the march of the child up and down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal--of the dog hitched to the belgian milk cart; of the horse on the mill-tread--than another analogy. contrast this pallid automaton with the children of the poor in a new york kindergarten, where the six-or seven-year-old child of the german, the hungarian, the polish emigrant, may have its imagination stimulated, its creative and individual faculties employed as it is taught to _make things_--construct, combine, weave, sew, mould. every power latent is cajoled to expression, every talent encouraged. thus work in its first form is rendered attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged. in the south of this american country whose signet is individualism, whose strength (despite our motto, "united we stand") is in the individual freedom and vast play of original thought, here in the south our purest born, the most unmixed blood of us, is being converted into machines of labour when the forms of little children are bound in youth to the spindle and loom. in a certain mill in alabama there are seventy-five child-labourers who work twelve hours out of the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon for luncheon. there is a night school in connection with this mill corporation. fancy it, a night school for the day-long child labourer! fifty out of seventy-five troop to it. although they are so tired they cannot keep awake on the benches, and the littlest of them falls asleep over its letters, although they weep with fatigue, they are eager to learn! is there a more conclusive testimony to the quality of the material that is being lost to the states and the country by the martyrdom of intelligent children? one hears two points of view expressed on this subject. the capitalist advances that the greed of the parents forces the children into the mills; the people themselves tell you that unless they are willing to let their available children work, their own lives are made impossible by the overseers. a widow who has children stands a fair chance of having her rent free; if she refuses this tithe of flesh and blood she is too often thrust into the street. so i am told. now, which of these facts is the truth? it seems to be clearly too much left to the decision of private enterprise or parental incapability. the legislature is the only school in which to decide the question. during my stay in south carolina i never heard one woman advocate the mills for children. one mother, holding to her breast her illegitimate child, her face dark with dislike, said: "_them mills!_ i would not let _my_ little boy work in 'em! no, sir! he would go over my dead body." another woman said: "_my_ little girl work? no, ma'am; she goes to school!" and the child came in even as she spoke--let me say the only cheerful specimen of childhood, with the exception of the few little creatures in the kindergarten, that i saw in the mill district. south carolina has become very haughty on this topic and has reached a point when she tells us she is to cure the sore in her own body without aid or interference. at a late session of the legislature the bill for the restriction of child labour--we must call it this, since it legislates only for the child under ten--this bill was defeated by only two dissenting voices. a humane gentleman who laid claim to one of these voices was heard to ejaculate as the bill failed to pass: "thank god!" just why, it is not easy to understand. when i was so arrogant as to say to the editor of _the state_, the leading paper in south carolina, that i hoped my article might aid the cause, i made an error clearly, for he replied: "we need no aid. the people of south carolina are aroused to the horror and will cure it themselves." georgia is not roused to the horror; alabama is stirring actively; but the northerners who own these mills--the capitalists, the manufacturers, the men who are building up a reputation for the wealth of south carolina and alabama mills, are the least aroused of all. we must believe that many directors of these mills are ignorant of the state of affairs, and that those who are enlightened willingly blind their eyes. the mill prospectuses are humourous when read by the investigator. we are told "labour-unions cut no figure here!" go at night through the mills with the head of the labour federation and with the instigator of the first strikes in this district--with men who are the brain and fiber of the labour organization, and see the friendly looks flash forth, see the understanding with which they are greeted all through certain mills. consider that not miles away at the moment are , labourers on strike. then greet these statements with a smile! * * * * * on my return to the north i made an especial effort to see my new england friend. we lunched together this time, and at the end of the meal her three little children fluttered in to say a friendly word. i looked at them, jealous for their little defrauded fellows, whose twelve-hour daily labour served to purchase these exquisite clothes and to heap with dainties the table before us. but i was nevertheless rejoiced to see once again the forms of real childhood for whom air and freedom and wealth were doing blessed tasks. when we were alone i drew for my friend as well as i could pictures of what i had seen. she leaned forward, took a brandied cherry from the dish in front of her, ate it delicately and dipped her fingers in the finger-bowl; then she said: "dear friend, i am going to surprise you very much." i waited, and felt that it would be difficult to surprise me with a tale of a southern mill. "those little children--_love the mill!_ they _like_ to work. it's a great deal better for them to be employed than for them to run the streets!" she smiled over her argument, and i waited. "do you know," she continued, "that i believe they are really very happy." she had well presented her argument. she had said she would surprise me--and she did. "you will not feel it a breach of affection and hospitality if i print what you say?" i asked her. "it's only fair that the capitalist's view should be given here and there first hand. you own one-half the mill in ----, carolina?" "yes." "what do you think of a model mill with only nine hours a day labour, holidays and all nights free, schools, where education is enforced by the state; reading-rooms open as well as churches--amusement halls, music, recreation and pleasure, as well as education and religion?" "i think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us to try it alone would mean ruin." "not ruin," i amended; "a reduction of income." "ruin," she said, firing. "we couldn't compete. to compete," she said with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, "i must have my sixty-six hours a week!" the spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist. its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone--humanity--when reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance between capital and labour. we must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in considering the presence of the child in the southern mills. there is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social economist. the question should not be left to the decision of the private citizen. this stuff is worth saving. there is the making in these children of first-class citizens. i quote from the illustrated supplement of the south carolina _state_ that you may see what the mill manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor white trash": "the operatives in the south carolina mills are the common people--the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the negroes. they are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity which are essential to good citizenship." if such things are true of the mill-hands of south carolina, it is worth while to save their children. * * * * * henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the southern mill-hands: an earth-hued line of humanity--a stream that divides not. here there are no stragglers. at noon and night the pace is quick, eager. steady as a prison gang, it goes to food, rest and freedom. but this alacrity is absent in the morning. on the hem of night, the fringe of day, the march is slow and lifeless. many of the heads are bent and downcast; some of the faces peer forward, and sallow masks of human countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill--toward who can say what vain horizon! the stream wanders slowly toward the houses of labour, although whipped by invisible scourge of need. without this incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward _thirteen hours of toil_, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in its rank the women, the young girl and the little child? the tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. many of the faces are pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and yet not all unintelligent. those who are familiar with the healthy type of the decent workmen of the west and east must draw their distinctions as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class. the southern mill-hand's face is unique--a fearful type, whose perusal is not pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity or to the prophet of the future. thus they defile: men with felt hats drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. unwashed these labourers have gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen. to their garments cling the bits of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of their trade, brand of their especial toil. as they pass over the red clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval--"by the sweat of thy brow"--earth-born! in the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its ponderous might to life, movement and sound. hear it roar, shudder, shattering the stillness for half a mile! it is full now of flesh and blood, of human life and brain and fiber: it is content! triumphantly during the long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and soul. behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the bedridden and the sick--of which last there are plenty. mighty mills--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and riot--buildings tremendous--you give your immutable faces, myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand. when south carolina shall have taken from you (as its honour and wisdom and citizenship is bound to do) the youngest of the children, do you think that you shall inevitably continue to devour what remains? there is too much resistance yet left in the mass of human beings. youth will then rebel at a servitude beginning _at ten years of age_: and the women will lift their arms above their heads one day in desperate gesture of appeal and cry out--not for the millionaire's surplus; not a tirade anarchistic against capital.... what is this woman of the hills and woman of the mills that she should so demand? she will call for hours short enough to permit her to bear her children; for requital commensurate with the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages equal to her faithful toil. this is not too fantastic a demand or too ideal a state to be divinely hoped for, believed in and brought to pass.[ ] [footnote : of the , , spindles in the united states, the south has , , . $ , , of carolina's wealth is in cotton mills. note. i have seen, in aragon, georgia, hope for the future of the mill-hands. the aragon cotton mills are an improvement on the south carolina mills and are under the direct supervision of an owner whose sole god is not gain. mr. walcott is an agitator of the nine-hours-a-day movement; he is opposed to child labour, and in all his relations with his hands he is humane and kindly. i look to the time when aragon shall set a perfect pattern of what a mill-town should be. it is already quite the best i have seen. its healthfulness is far above the average, and its situation most fortunate.] * * * * * not inapt here is the pagan idea of _nous_, moving upon chaos, stirring the stagnant, unresponsive forces into motion; agitating these forces into action; the individual elements separate and go forth, each one on its definitely inspired mission. some inevitable hour shall see the universal agitation of the vast body known as the "labouring class." for the welfare of the whole world, may it not come whilst they are so ignorant and so down-pressed. proofreading team. women wage-earners: _their past, their present, and their future_. by helen campbell, author of "prisoners of poverty," "prisoners of poverty abroad," "the problem of the poor," "mrs. herndon's income," etc. with an introduction by richard t. ely, ph.d., ll.d. _professor of political economy and director of the school of economics, university of wisconsin, madison, wis._ boston: roberts brothers. . _copyright, _, by helen campbell. university press: john wilson and son, cambridge, u.s.a. a book for alice, friend, helper, and comrade. introduction by richard t. ely, director of school of economics, political science, and history, university of wisconsin, madison. the importance of the subject with which the present work deals cannot well be over-estimated. our age may properly be called the era of woman, because everything which affects her receives consideration quite unknown in past centuries. this is well. the motive is twofold: first, woman is valued as never before; and, second, it is perceived that the welfare of the other half of the human race depends more largely upon the position enjoyed by woman than was previously understood. the earlier agitation for an enlarged sphere and greater rights for woman was to a considerable extent merely negative. the aim was to remove barriers and to open the way. it is characteristic of the earlier days of agitation for the removal of wrongs affecting any class, that the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas ample to secure desired rights. further agitation, however, and more mature reflection always show that what looks like a simple social problem is a complex one. "if women's wages are small, open new careers to them." as simple as this did the problem of women's wages once appear; but when new avenues of employment were rendered accessible to women, it was found, in some instances, that the wages of men were lowered. a consequence which can be seen in different industrial centres is that a man and a wife working together secure no greater wages than the man alone in industries in which women are not employed. now, if the result of opening new employments to women is to force all members of the family to work for the wages which the head of the family alone once received, it is manifest that we have a complicated problem. another result of wage-earning by women, which has been observed here and there, is the scattering of the members of the family and the break-down of the home. a recent and careful observer among the chief industrial centres of saxony, germany, has told us that factory work has there resulted in the dissolution of the family, and that family life, as we understand it, scarcely exists. we have demoralization seen in the young; and in addition to that, we discover that the employment of married women outside the home results in the impaired health and strength of future generations. the conclusion by no means follows that we should go backward, and try to restrict the industrial sphere of woman. it has been well said that revolutions do not go backward; we have to go farther forward to keep the advantages which have been attained, and at the same time lessen the evils which the new order has brought with it. further action is required; but in order that this action may bring desired results, it must be based upon ample knowledge. the natural impulse when we see an evil is to adopt direct methods looking to an immediate cure; but such direct methods which at once suggest themselves generally fail to bring relief. the effective remedies are those which use indirect methods based upon scientific knowledge. if a sympathetic man takes to heart physical suffering, which he can see on every side, he must feel inclined to relieve the distressed at once, and feel impatient if he is hindered in his benevolent impulses; yet we know that he will accomplish far more in the end, if he patiently devotes years to study in medical schools and practice in hospitals before he attempts to give relief to the diseased. we need study quite as much to cure the ills of the social body; and the present work gives us a welcome addition to the positive information upon which wise action must depend. mrs. campbell has been favorably known for years on account of her valuable contributions to the literature of social science, and it gives the present writer great pleasure to have the privilege of introducing this book to the public with a word of commendation. madison, wisconsin, _august , ._ author's preface. the pages which follow were prepared originally as a prize monograph for the american economic association, receiving an award from it in . the restriction of the subject to a fixed number of words hampered the treatment, and it was thought best to enlarge many points which in the allotted space could have hardly more than mention. acting on this wish, the monograph has been nearly doubled in size, but still must be counted only an imperfect summary, since facts in these lines are in most cases very nearly unobtainable, and, aside from the few reports of labor bureaus, there are as yet almost no sources of full information. but as there is no existing manual of reference on this topic, the student of social questions will accept this attempt to meet the need, till more facts enable a fuller and better presentation of the difficult subject. new york, _august, ._ contents. page introduction chapter i. a look backward ii. employments for women during the colonial period, and the development of the factory iii. early aspects of factory labor for women iv. rise and growth of trades up to the present time v. labor bureaus and their work in relation to women vi. present wage-rates in the united states vii. general conditions for english workers viii. general conditions for continental workers ix. general conditions among wage-earning women in the united states x. general conditions in the western states xi. specific evils and abuses in factory life and in general trades xii. remedies and suggestions appendix. factory inspection law authorities consulted in preparing this book bibliography of woman's labor and of the woman question index women wage-earners; their past, their present, and their future. introduction the one great question that to-day agitates the whole civilized world is an economic question. it is not the production but the distribution of wealth; in other words, the wages question,--the wages of men and women. nowhere do we find any suggestion that capital and the landlord do not receive a _quid pro quo_. instead, the whole labor world cries out that the capitalist and the landlord are enslaving the rest of the world, and absorbing the lion's share of the joint production. so long as it is a question of production only, there is perfect harmony. both unite in agreeing that to produce as much as possible is for the interest of each. the conflict begins with distribution. it is no longer a war of one nation with another; it is internecine war, destroying the foundations of our own defences, and making enemies of those who should be brothers. it is impossible for even the most dispassionate or indifferent observer to blink these facts. proclaim as we may that there is no antagonism between capital and labor,--that their interests are one, and that conditions and opportunities for the worker are always better and better,--practical thinkers and workers deny this conclusion. wealth has enormously increased, in a far greater ratio than population. does the laborer receive his due proportion of this increase? one must unhesitatingly answer no. in a country whose life began in the search for freedom, and which professes to give equal opportunity to all, more startling inequality exists than in any other in the civilized world. one of our ablest lawyers, thomas g. shearman, has lately written:-- "our old equality is gone. so far from being the most equal people on the face of the earth, as we once boasted that we were, ours is now the most unequal of civilized nations. we talk about the wealth of the british aristocracy and about the poverty of the british poor. there is not in the whole of great britain and ireland so striking a contrast, so wide a chasm, between rich and poor as in these united states of america. there is no man in the whole of great britain and ireland who is as wealthy as one of some half-a-dozen men who could be named in this country; and there are few there who could be poorer than some that could be found in this country. it is true that there is a larger number of the extremely poor in great britain and ireland than there is in this country, but it is not true that there is any more desperate poverty in any civilized country than ours; and it is unquestionably not true that there is any greater mass of riches concentrated in a few hands in any country than this." this for america. for england the tale is much the same. "the bitter cry of outcast london," with its passionate demand that the rich open their eyes to see the misery, degradation, and want seething in london slums, is but another putting of the words of the serious, scientific observer of facts, huxley himself, who has described an east end parish in which he spent some of his earliest years. over that parish, he says, might have been written dante's inscription over the entrance to the inferno: "all hope abandon, ye who enter here." after speaking of its physical misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation; and he writes:-- "i assure you i found nothing worse, nothing more degrading, nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so intolerably dull and miserable as the life i left behind me in the east end of london. were the alternative presented to me, i would deliberately prefer the life of the savage to that of those people in christian london. nothing would please me better--not even to discover a new truth--than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will tend to become worse, and to create something worse than savagery,--a great serbonian bog, which in the long run will swallow up the surface crust of civilization." in a year and more of continuous observation and study of working conditions in england and on the continent, some of which will find place later, my own conclusion was the same. the young emperor of germany, hotheaded, obstinate, and self-willed as he may be, is working it would seem from as radical a conviction of deep wrong in the distributive system. the berlin labor conference, whose chief effort seems to have been against child-labor and in favor of excluding women from the mines, or at least reducing hours, and forbidding certain of the heavier forms of labor, is but an echo of the great dock-strikes of london and the cry of all workers the world over for a better chance. the capitalist seeks to hold his own, the laborer demands larger share of the product; and how to render unto each his due is the great politico-economic question,--the absorbing question of our time. we have found, then, that the problem is economic, and concerns distribution only. there is no complaint that the capitalist fails to secure his share. on the contrary, even among the well-to-do, deep-seated alarm is evidenced at the rise and progress of innumerable trusts and syndicates, eliminating competition, which restricts production and raises prices. they make their own conditions; drive from the field small tradesmen and petty industries, or absorb them on their own terms. rings of every description in the political and the working world combine for general spoliation, and the honest worker's money jingles in every pocket but his own. granting all that may be urged as to the capitalists' investment of brain-power and acquired skill, as well as of money with all the risks involved, they are the inactive rather than the active factors in production. they give of their store, while labor gives of its life. their view is to be reconstructed, and profit-sharing become as much a part of any industry as profit-making. this is a growing conviction; nor can we wonder that realization of its justice and its possibilities has been a matter of very recent consideration. an often repeated formula becomes at last ingrained in the mental constitution, and any question as to its truth is a sharp shock to the whole structure. we have been so certain of the surpassing advantages of our own country, so certain that liberty and a chance were the portion of all, that to confront the real conditions in our great cities is to most as unreal as a nightmare. we have conceded at last, forced to it by the concessions of all students of our economic problems, that the laborer does not yet receive his fair share of the world's wealth; and the economic thought of the whole world is now devoted to the devising of means by which he may receive his due. there is no longer much question as to facts; they are only too palpable. distribution must be reorganized, and haste must be made to discover how. it is the wages problem, then, with which we are to deal,--the wages of men and women; and we must look at it in its largest, most universal aspects. we must dismiss at once any prejudice born of the ignorance, incompetency, or untrustworthiness of many workers. character is a plant of slow growth; and given the same conditions of birth, education, and general environment it is quite possible we should have made no better showing. we have to-day three questions to be answered:-- . why do men not receive a just wage? . why are women in like case? . why do men receive a greater wage than women? first, why do not men receive a greater wage than they do? can be answered only suggestively, since volumes may be and have been written on all the points involved. for skilled and unskilled labor alike, the differences in industrial efficiency go far toward regulating the wage, and have been grouped under six heads by general frances a. walker, whose volume on the wages question is a thoughtful and careful study of the problem from the beginning. these heads are-- . "peculiarities of stock and breeding. . the meagreness or liberality of diet. . habits voluntarily or involuntarily formed respecting cleanliness of the person, and purity of the air and water. . the general intelligence of the laborer. . technical education and industrial environment. . cheerfulness and hopefulness in labor, growing out of self-respect and social ambition and the laborer's interest in his work." with this in mind, we must accept the fact that the value of the laborer's services to the employer is the net result of two elements,--one positive, one negative; namely, work and waste. under this head of waste come breakage, undue wear and tear of implements, destruction or injury of materials, the cost of supervision of idle or blundering men, and often the hindrance of many by the fault of one. modern processes involve so much of this order of waste that often there is doubt if work is worth having or not, and the unskilled laborer is either rejected or receives only a boy's wage. the various schools of political economists differ widely as to the facts which have formulated themselves in what is known as the iron law of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a minimum which will give but a bare living. for skilled labor the law may be regarded as elastic rather than iron. for unskilled, it is as certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so intensified, would end as law. many standard economists regard it as already fixed; and writers like lasalle, proudhon, bakunin, and marx heap every denunciation upon it. were the fact actually established, no words could be too strong or too bitter to define this new form of slavery. the standard of life and comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make the wage correspond to this standard. it is an unending and often bitter struggle, nowhere better summed up than by thorold rogers in his "six centuries of work and wages,"--a work upon which economists, however different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures. we must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum, especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such culmination. take now, in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by adam smith in his summary of causes for differences in wages: . "the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves. . the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. . the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. . the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them. . the probability or improbability of success in them." these are conditions which affect the man's right to large or small wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,--they presuppose the perfect mobility of labor. let us see what this means. the theoretical mobility of labor rests upon the assumption that laborers of every order will in all ways and at all times pursue their economic interests; but the actual fact is that so far from seeking labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of all humankind are "bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and ineptitude and inertia, which practically exclude them from the competitions of the world's industry." "man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported," was written by adam smith long ago; and this stands in the way of really free and unhampered competition. mr. frederick harrison, one of the clearest thinkers of the day, has well defined the difference between the seller and the producer of a commodity. he says:-- "in most cases the seller of a commodity can send it or carry it from place to place, and market to market, with perfect ease. he need not be on the spot; he generally can send a sample; he usually treats by correspondence. a merchant sits in his counting-room, and by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent. in other cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing multitudes supplies the want of locomotion for him. this is a true market. here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, fairly. it is totally otherwise with a day laborer who has no commodity to sell. he must himself be present at every market, which means costly, personal locomotion. he cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send a sample of his strength, nor do employers knock at his cottage door." it is plain, then, that many causes are at work to depress the wages even of skilled workers, far more than can be enumerated here. if this is true for men, how much more strongly can limitations be stated for women, as we ask, "why do not women receive a better wage?" many of the reasons are historical, and must be considered in their origin and growth. taking her as worker to-day, precisely the same general causes are in operation that govern the wages of men, with the added disability of sex, always in the way of equal mobility of labor. wherever for any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. the trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. they focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the united states by general walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent of the entire population. eagerly as they seek work, it is far more difficult for them to obtain it than for men. they require to be much more mobile and active in their move toward the labor market, yet are disabled by timidity, by physical weakness, and by their liability to insult or outrage arising from the fact of sex. men who would secure a place tramp from town to town, from street to street, or shop to shop, persisting through all rebuffs, till their end is accomplished. they go into suspicious and doubtful localities, encounter strangers, and sleep among casual companions. in this fashion they relieve the pressure at congested points, and keep the mass fluid. for women, save in the slight degree included in the country girl's journey to town or city where cotton or woollen mills offer an opening for work, this course is impossible. ignorant, fearful, poor, and unprotected, the lions in her way are these very facts. added to this natural disqualification, comes another,--in the lack of sympathy for her needs, and in the prejudice which hedges about all her movements. in every trade she has sought to enter, men have barred the way. in a speech made before the house of commons in , henry fawcett drew attention to the persistent resistance of men to any admission of women on the same terms with themselves. he said:-- "we cannot forget that some years ago certain trade-unionists in the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm which they found almost essential to their work should not be used by women engaged in the same employment. not long since, the london tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the remunerative employment which was offered them in consequence of the strike. but this jealousy of woman's labor has not been entirely confined to workmen. the same feeling has extended itself through every class of society. last autumn a large number of post-office clerks objected to the employment of women in the post-office." driven by want, they had pressed into agricultural labor as well, and found equal opposition there also. mr. fawcett in the same speech calls attention to the fact of the non-admission of women to the agricultural laborers' union, on the ground that "the agricultural laborers of the country do not wish to recognize the labor of women." there is more or less reason for such feeling. it arises in part from the newness of the occasion, since in the story of labor as a whole, soon to be considered by us in detail, it is only the last fifty years that have seen women taking an active part. we have already seen that mobility of labor is one of the first essentials, and that women are far more limited in this respect than men. this brings us to the final question,--why do men receive a larger wage than women? the conditions already outlined are in part responsible, but with them is bound up another even more formidable. custom, the law of many centuries, has so ingrained its thought in the constitution of men that it is naturally and inevitably taken for granted that every woman who seeks work is the appendage of some man, and therefore, partially at least, supported. other facts bias the employer against the payment of the same wage. the girl's education is usually less practical than the boy's; and as most, at least among the less intelligent class, regard a trade as a makeshift to be used as a crutch till a husband appears, the work involved is often done carelessly and with little or no interest. with unintelligent labor wastage is greater, and wages proportionately lower; and here we have one chief reason for the difference. others will disclose themselves as we go on. unskilled labor then, it is plain, must be in evil case, and it is unskilled laborers that are in the majority. for men this means pick and spade at such rates as may be fixed; for women the needle, and its myriad forms of cheap production; and within these ranks is no sense of real economic interest, but the fiercest and blindest competition among themselves. mere existence is to a large extent all that is possible, and it is fought for with a fury in strange contrast to the apparent worth of the thing itself. it is this battle with which we have to do; and we must go back to the dawn of the struggle, and discover what has been its course from the beginning, before any future outlook can be determined. the theoretical political economist settles the matter at once. whatever stress of want or wrong may arise is met by the formula, "law of supply and demand." if labor is in excess, it has simply to mobilize and seek fresh channels. that hard immovable facts are in the way, that moral difficulties face one at every turn, and that the ethical side of the problem is a matter of comparatively recent consideration, makes no difference. let us discover what show of right is on the economist's side, and how far present conditions are a necessity of the time. it is women on whom the facts weigh most heavily, and whose fortunes are most tangled in this web woven from the beginning of time, and from that beginning drenched with the tears and stained by the blood of workers in all climes and in every age. as women we are bound, by every law of justice, to aid all other women in their struggle. we are equally bound to define the nature, the necessities, and the limits of such struggle; and it is to this end that we seek now to discover, through such light as past and present may cast, the future for women workers the world over. i. a look backward. the history of women as wage-earners is actually comprised within the limits of a few centuries; but her history as a worker runs much farther back, and if given in full, would mean the whole history of working humanity. the position of working women all over the civilized world is still affected not only by the traditions but by the direct inheritance of the past, and thus the nature of that inheritance must be understood before passing to any detailed consideration of the subject under its various divisions. it is the conditions underlying history and rooted in the facts of human life itself which we must know, since from the beginning life and work have been practically synonymous, and in the nature of things remain so. in the shadows of that far remote infancy of the world where from cave-dweller and mere predatory animal man by slow degrees moved toward a higher development, the story of woman goes side by side with his. for neither is there record beyond the scattered implements of the stone age and the rude drawings of the cave-dwellers, from which one may see that warfare was the chief life of both. the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger is the story of all time; the "survival of the fittest," the modern summary of that struggle. naturally, slavery was the first result, and servitude for one side the outcome of all struggle. physical facts worked with man's will in the matter, and early rendered woman subordinate physically and dependent economically. the origin of this dependence is given with admirable force and fulness by professor lester f. ward in his "dynamic sociology":[ ]-- in the struggle for supremacy, "woman at once became property, since anything that affords its possessor gratification is property. woman was capable of affording man the highest of gratifications, and therefore became property of the highest value. marriage, under the prevailing form, became the symbol of transfer of ownership, in the same manner as the formal seizing of lands. the passage from sexual service to manual service on the part of women was perfectly natural.... and thus we find that the women of most savage tribes perform the manual and servile labor of the camp." "the basis of all oppression is economic dependence on the oppressor," is the word of a very keen thinker and worker in the german reichstag to-day; and he adds: "this has been the condition of women in the past, and it still is so. woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. woman was a slave before the slave existed." science has demonstrated that in all rude races the size and weight of the brain differ far less according to sex than is the case in civilized nations. physical strength is the same, with the advantage at times on the side of the woman, as in certain african tribes to-day, over which tribes this fact has given them the mastery. primeval woman, all attainable evidence goes to show, started more nearly equal in the race, but became the inferior of man, when periods of child-bearing rendered her helpless and forced her to look to him for assistance, support, and protection. when the struggle for existence was in its lowest and most brutal form, and man respected nothing but force, the disabled member of society, if man, was disposed of by stab or blow; if woman, and valuable as breeder of fresh fighters, simply reduced to slavery and passive obedience. marriage in any modern sense was unknown. a large proportion of female infants were killed at birth. battle, with its recurring periods of flight or victory, made it essential that every tribe should free itself from all _impedimenta_. it was easier to capture women by force than to bring them up from infancy, and thus the childhood of the world meant a state in which the child had little place, save as a small, fierce animal, whose development meant only a change from infancy and its helplessness to boyhood and its capacity for fight. out of this chaos of discordant elements, struggling unconsciously toward social form, emerged by slow degrees the tribe and the nation, the suggestions of institutions and laws and the first principles of the social state. master and servant, employer and employed, became facts; and dim suspicions as to economic laws were penetrating the minds of the early thinkers. the earliest coherent thought on economic problems comes to us from the greeks, among whom economic speculation had begun almost a thousand years before christ. the problem of work and wages was even then forming,--the sharply accented difference between theirs and ours lying in the fact that for greek and roman and the earlier peoples in the indies economic life was based upon slavery, accepted then as the foundation stone of the economic social system. up to the day when greek thought on economic questions formulated, in aristotle's "politics" and "economics," the first logical statement of principles, knowledge as to actual conditions for women is chiefly inferential. when a slave, she was like other slaves, regarded as soulless; and she still is, under mohammedanism. as lawful wife she was physically restrained and repressed, and mentally far more so. a greek matron was one degree higher than her servants; but her own sons were her masters, to whom she owed obedience. a striking illustration of this is given in the odyssey. telemachus, feeling that he has come to man's estate, invades the ranks of the suitors who had for years pressed about penelope, and orders her to retire to her own apartments, which she does in silence. yet she was honored above most, passive and prompt obedience being one of her chief charms. deep pondering brought about for aristotle a view which verges toward breadth and understanding, but is perpetually vitiated by the fact that he regards woman as in no sense an individual existence. if all goes well and prosperously, women deserve no credit; if ill, they may gain renown through their husbands, the philosopher remarking: "neither would alcestis have gained such renown, nor penelope have been deemed worthy of such praise, had they respectively lived with their husbands in prosperous circumstances; and it is the sufferings of admetus and ulysses which have given them everlasting fame." this is aristotle's view of women's share in the life they lived; yet gleams of something higher more than once came to him, and in the eighth chapter of the "economics," he adds: "justly to love her husband with reverence and respect, and to be loved in turn, is that which befits a wife of gentle birth, as to her intercourse with her own husband." ulysses, in his address to nausicaa, says:-- "there is no fairer thing than when the lord and lady with one soul one home possess." aristotle, charmed at the picture, dilates on this "mutual concord of husband and wife, ... not the mere agreement upon servile matters, but that which is justly and harmoniously based on intellect and prudence."[ ] side by side with this picture of a state known to a few only among the noblest, must be placed the lament of "iphigenia in tauris": "the condition of women is worse than that of all human beings. if man is favored by fortune, he becomes a ruler, and wins fame on the battlefield; and if the gods have ordained him his fortune, he is the first to die a fair death among his people. but the joys of woman are narrowly compassed: she is given unasked, in marriage, by others, often to strangers; and when she is dragged away by the victor through the smoking ruins, there is none to rescue her." thucydides, who had already expressed the opinion quoted by many a modern philistine,--"the wife who deserves the highest praise is she of whom one hears neither good nor evil outside her own house,"--anticipates a later verdict, in words that might have been the foundation of iphigenia's lament:-- "woman is more evil than the storm-tossed waves, than the heat of fire, than the fall of the wild cataract! if it was a god who created woman, wherever he may be, let him know that he is the unhappy author of the greatest ills." this was a summary of the greek view as a whole. sparta trained her girls and boys alike in childhood; but the theories of lycurgus, admirable at some points, were brutal and short-sighted at others, and sparta demonstrated that the extinction of all desire for beauty or ease or culture brings with it as disastrous results as its extreme opposite. it is athens that sums up the highest product of greek thought, and that represents a civilization which from the purely intellectual side has had no successor. yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage of the masses. "the people," as spoken of by their historians and philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which owned at least one slave. the slaves themselves, the real "masses," had no political or social existence more than the horses with which they were sent to the river to drink. in any scheme of political economy aristotle's words, in the first book of the "politics," were the keynote: "the science of the master reduces itself to knowing how to make use of the slave. he is the master, not because he is the owner of the man, but because he knows how to make use of his property." in fact, according to this chivalrous philosopher, the man was the head of the family in three distinct capacities; for he says: "now a freeman governs his slave in the manner the male governs the female, and in another manner the father governs his child; and these have the different parts of the soul within them, but in a different manner. thus a slave can have no deliberative faculty; a woman but a weak one, a child an imperfect one." that liberty could be their right appears to have been not even suspected. yet out from these dumb masses of humanity, regarded less than brutes, toiling naked under summer sun or in winter cold, chained in mines, men and women alike, and when the whim came, massacred in troops, sounded at intervals a voice demanding the liberty denied. it was quickly stifled. the record is there for all to read; stifled again and again, from drimakos the chian slave to spartacus at rome, yet each protest from this unknown army of martyrs was one step onward toward the emancipation to come. in each revolution, however small, two parties confronted each other,--the people who wished to live by the labor of others, the people who wished to live by their own labor,--the former denying in word and deed the claim of the latter. such conditions, as we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place, woman, the slave of the slave, had even less. her wage had never been fixed. that she had right to one had entered no imagination. to the end of greek civilization a wage remained the right of free labor only. the slave, save by special permit of the master, had right only to bare subsistence; and though men and women toiled side by side, in mine or field or quarry, there was, even with the abolition of slavery, small betterment of the condition of women. the degradation of labor was so complete, even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class. plato abhorred a sophist who would work for wages. a gift was legitimate, but pay ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor. the abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. a curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and retrogression, it lingers still. the ancients were, in the nature of things, all fighters. even when slavery for both the aryan and semitic races ended, two orders still faced each other: aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and forming secret unions for his own protection,--the beginning of the co-operative principle in action. thus much for the greek. turn now to the second great civilization, the roman. during the first centuries after the founding of rome the roman woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of the grecian. with the growth of riches and of power in the state, more social but still no legal freedom was accorded. the elder cato complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun. under the empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the consent of her guardian. sir henry maine[ ] calls attention to the institution known to the oldest roman law as the "perpetual tutelage of women," under which a female, though relieved from her parent's authority by his decease, continues subject through life. various schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their theory of "natural law," the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity. few more significant words or words more teeming with importance on the actual economic condition of women have ever been written than those of the great jurist whose name counts as almost final authority. "ancient law," he writes, "subordinates the woman to her blood relations, while a prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her subordination to her husband." under the modified laws as to marriage, he goes on to state, there came a time "when the situation of the roman female, unmarried or married, became one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of the later law, as already hinted, was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority." these were the final conditions for the roman, whose power, sapped by long excesses, was even then trembling to its fall. already the barbarians threatened them, and at various points had penetrated the empire, showing to the amazed romans morals absolutely opposed to their own. the german races contented themselves with one wife; and tacitus wrote of them: "their marriages are very strict. no one laughs at vice, nor is immorality regarded as a sign of good breeding. the young men marry late,--they marry equal in years and in health, and the strength of the parent is transmitted to the children." this has a rosier aspect than facts warrant. for the germans, as for other barbarians of that epoch, the patriarchal family was the social order, and the head of the family the lord of the community. wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law were excluded from leadership, though in spite of this there is record of a woman as being occasionally at the head of a tribe,--a circumstance chronicled by tacitus with much disgust. while from the west this gigantic wave of powerful but uncultured life was flowing in, from the east had come another. early christianity had already established itself, and its ascetic teachings made another element in the contradictions of the time. up to this date slavery had been the foundation of society, and any amelioration in the condition of women had applied only to the patrician class. the carpenter of nazareth set his seal upon the sacredness of labor, and taught first not only the rights but the immeasurable value of even the weakest human soul. women were ardent converts to the new gospel. hoping with all the wretched for redemption and deliverance from present evils, they became eager and devoted adherents. their missionary zeal was a powerful agent in the early days of christianity. "in the first enthusiasm of the christian movement," says principal donaldson, in his notable article on "women among the early christians," in the "fortnightly review," "women were allowed to do whatever they were fitted to do." all this within a few generations came to an end. widows of sixty and over retained the power which had been given, and a new order arose,--deaconesses who were not allowed marriage. neither widows nor deaconesses could teach, the church being especially jealous in this respect and in substantial agreement with sophocles, who said, "silence is a woman's ornament." tertullian waxes furious over the thought of a woman learning much, and still more, venturing to use such acquirement; but heretical christians insisted that the respect which romans had paid to the vestal virgin was her right, and each founder of a new sect had some woman as helper. but as a rule, her highest post during the first three centuries of christianity was that of doorkeeper or message-woman, her economic dependence upon man being absolute. social problems remained chiefly untouched. no objection was made to the existence of slavery. in this gospel of love the christian slave became the brother of all, and kindliness was his right; but their faith demanded contentment with all present ills, since a glorious future was to compensate them. a christian slave-woman was the property of her master, who had absolute power over her; but no objection seems to have been made to this. in the mean time many doubts as to marriage seem to have arisen. paul had set his seal on the subjection of women, and peter followed suit. antagonism to marriage grew and intensified, till hardly a father of the early church but fulminated against it. fiercest, loudest, and most heeded of all, the voice of tertullian still sounds down the ages. this is his address to women: "do you not know that each one of you is an eve? the sentence of god on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. you are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. you destroyed so easily god's image, man. on account of your desert, that is, death, even the son of god had to die." clement of alexandria supplemented this verdict with one as bitter, and cyprian and the rest echoed the general anathema. as marriage grew thus more and more degraded, the number of the women in the world steadily increased, and posterity in like ratio deteriorated. the summary of principal donaldson, in the article already referred to, is the keynote to the whole situation. "the less spiritual classes of the people, the laymen, being taught that marriage might be licentious, and that it implied an inferior state of sanctity, were rather inclined to neglect matrimony for more loose connections; and it was these people alone that then peopled the world. it was the survival of the unfittest. the noble men and women, on the other hand, who were dominated by the loftiest aspirations and exhibited the greatest temperance, self-control, and virtue, left no children." sir henry maine comes to the same conclusion, and deplores the fact of the loss of liberty for women, adding: "the prevalent state of religious sentiment may explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the furnace of barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of roman jurisprudence with patriarchal usage, has absorbed among its rudiments much more than usual of those rules concerning the position of women which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization." and he adds words which come from a man who is a good christian as well as a profound student: "no society which preserves any tincture of christian institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle roman law." passing now to the middle ages, we find conditions curiously involved. the exaltation of celibacy as the true condition for the religious, and the consequent enormous increase of convents, placed fresh barriers in the way of marriage; and the church having attracted the gentle and devoted among the women and the more intelligent among the men, the reproduction of the species was for the most part still left to the brutal and ignorant, thus leading to a survival of the unfittest to aid in any advancement of the race. the number of women far exceeded that of men, who died not only from constant feuds and struggles, but from many pestilences, which naturally, in a day when sanitary laws were unknown, ravaged the country. dr. karl bücher, commenting on the relation of this fact to the life of women at that time, notes that from to thirty-two years of plague occurred, forty-two between and , and thirty between and . in addition to the convents, which received the well-to-do, many towns established bettina institutions, houses of god, where destitute women were cared for; but it was impossible for all who sought admittance to be provided for. the feudal system, with its absolute power over its serfs, had driven thousands into open revolt; and beggars, highwaymen, and robbers made life perilous and trade impossible. the towns banded together for protection of life and industry, and thus developed the guild of the middle ages. relieved from the fear of free-booting barons, no less dangerous than the hordes of organized robbers, these guilds grew populous and powerful. licentiousness did not, however, lessen. luther thundered against it, before his own revolt came; and the reformation demanded marriage as the right and privilege of a people falsely taught its debasing and unholy nature. we count the days of chivalry as the paradise of women. chivalry was for the few, not the many; for the mass of women was still the utter degradation of a barbarous past, and the burden of grinding laws resulting from it. with the reformation, germany ceased to be the centre of european traffic; and spain, portugal, holland, and england took the lead in quick succession, england retaining it to the present time. german commerce and trade steadily declined; and as the guilds saw their importance and profits lessen, they made fresh and more stringent regulations against all new-comers. competitors of every order were refused admission. heavy taxes on settlement, costly master-examinations, limitations of every trade to a certain number of masters and journeymen, forced thousands into dependence from which there was no escape. looking at the time as a whole, one sees clearly how old distinctions had become obliterated. wealth found new definitions. the church had made poverty the highest state, and insisted, as she does in part to-day, that the suffering and deprivation of one class were ordained of god to draw out the sympathies of the other. the rich must save their souls by alms and endowments, and contentment and acquiescence were to be the virtues of the poor. insensibly this view was modified. charlemagne, whose extraordinary personal power and common-sense moulded men at will, set an example no monarch had ever set before. he ordered the sale of eggs from his hens and the vegetables from his gardens; and, scorn it as they might, his sneering nobles insensibly modified their own thought and action. commerce brought the people and products of new countries face to face. the lines of caste, as sharply defined within the labor world as without, were gradually dimmed or obliterated. the practice of credit and exchange, largely the creation of the persecuted jews, made easy the interchange of commodities. saint louis himself organized industry, and divided the trades into brotherhoods, put under the protection of the saints from the tyranny of the barons and of the feudal system which had weighted all industry. reform began in the year , in the "institutions" of saint louis,--a set of clear and definite rules for the development of public wealth and the general good of the people. in their first joy at this escape from long-continued oppression, many of the towns of the middle ages had admitted women to citizenship on an equal footing with men. in louis le jeune, of france, granted to theci, wife of yves, and to her heirs, the grand-mastership of the five trades of cobblers, belt-makers, sweaters, leather-dressers, and purse-makers. in frankfort and the silesian towns there were female furriers; along the middle rhine many female bakers were at work. cologne and strasburg had female saddlers and embroiderers of coats-of-arms. frankfort had female tailors, nuremburg female tanners, and in cologne were several skilled female goldsmiths. twelve hundred years of struggle toward some sort of justice seemed likely at this point to be lost, for with the opening of the thirteenth century each and all of the guilds proceeded to expel every woman in the trades. it is a curious fact in the story of all societies approaching dissolution, that its defenders adopt the very means best adapted to hasten this end. each corporation dreaded an increase of numbers, and restricted marriages, and reduced the number of independent citizens. many towns placed themselves voluntarily under the rule of princes who in turn were trying to subjugate the nobility, and so protected the towns and accorded all sorts of rights and privileges. the thirty years' war, from to , decimated the german population, and reduced still further the possibility of marriage for many. forced out of trades, women had only the lowest, most menial forms of trade labor as resort, and their position was to all appearance nearly hopeless. in spite of this, certain trades were practically woman's. embroidery of church vestments and hangings had been brought to the highest perfection. lace-making had been known from the most ancient times; and colbert, the famous financier and minister for louis xiv., gave a privilege to madame gilbert, of alençon, to introduce into france the manufacture of both flemish and venetian point, and placed in her hands for the first expenses , francs. the manufacture spread over every country of europe, though in the parliament of toulouse sought to drive out women from the employment, on the plea that the domestic were her only legitimate occupations. a monk came to the rescue, and demonstrated that spinning, weaving, and all forms of preparing and decorating stuffs had been hers from the beginning of time, and thus for a season averted further action. the monk had learned his lesson better than most of the workmen who sought to curtail woman's opportunities. in the chronicles of that time there is full description of the workshops which formed part of every great estate, that known as the _gynæceum_ being devoted to the women and children, who spun, wove, made up, and embroidered stuffs of every order. the abbey of niederalteich had such a _gynæceum_, in which twenty-two women and children worked, while that of stephenswert employed twenty-four; co-operation in such labor having been found more advantageous than isolated work. before the tenth century these workshops had been established at many points. if part of a feudal manor, the wife of its lord acted often as overseer; if attached to some abbey, a general overlooker filled the same place. in the convents manual labor came into favor; and the spinning, weaving, and dyeing of stuffs occupied a large part of the life. apprenticeship for both male and female was finally well established, and many women became the successful heads of prosperous industries. the wage was, as it is to-day, the merest pittance; but any wage whatever was an advance upon the conditions of earlier servitude. life had small joy for women in those days we call the "good old times." take the married woman, the house-mother of that period. she not only lived in the strictest retirement, but her duties were so complex and manifold that, to quote bebel, "a conscientious housewife had to be at her post from early in the morning till late at night in order to fulfil them. it was not only a question of the daily household duties that still fall to the lot of the middle-class housekeeper, but of many others from which she has been entirely freed by the modern development of industry, and the extension of means of transport. she had to spin, weave, and bleach; to make all the linen and clothes, to boil soap, to make candles and brew beer. in addition to these occupations, she frequently had to work in the field or garden and to attend to the poultry and cattle. in short, she was a veritable cinderella, and her solitary recreation was going to church on sunday. marriages only took place within the same social circles; the most rigid and absurd spirit of caste ruled everything, and brooked no transgression of its law. the daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order, and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. and all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and especially that of a woman, a perfect treadmill of labor." how was it possible that a condition as joyless and fruitless as this should be the accepted ideal of womanhood? already the question is answered. for ages her identity had been merged in that of the man by whose side she worked with no thought of recompense. she toiled early and late, filling the office of general helper on the same terms; and even to-day, under our own eyes, the wife of many a farmer goes through her married life often not touching five dollars in cash in an entire year. submissiveness, clinging affection, humility, all the traits accounted distinctively feminine, and the natural and ever-increasing result of steady suppression of all stronger ones stood in the way of any resistance. intellectual qualities, forever at a discount, repressed development save in rarest cases. the mass of women had neither power nor wish to protest; and thus the few traces we find of their earliest connection with labor show us that they accepted bare subsistence as all to which they were entitled, and were grateful if they escaped the beating which the lower order of englishman still regards it as his right to give. even in our own country and our own time this theory is not altogether extinct. the papers only recently contained an account of the brutal beating of a woman by a man. the woman in remonstrating cried, "you have no right to beat me! i am not your wife!" during the middle ages, and indeed well into the nineteenth century, possession of property by women was confined to the unmarried, the entire control and practical ownership passing to the husband upon marriage. change comes at last to even the most fossilized thought. one by one, social institutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away. barbaric independence had followed greek and roman slavery, which in turn was succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the affranchised communes. each experiment had its season, and sunk into the darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit to posterity the principal and interest of all preceding ones. but though progress when taken in the mass is plain, the individual years in each generation show small trace of it. even as late as the sixteenth century, the workman fared little better than the brutes. erasmus tells us that their houses had no chimneys, and their floors were bare ground; while fortescue, who travelled in france at the same time, reports a misery and degradation which have had vivid portraiture in taine's "ancien régime." a flood of wealth poured in on the discovery of the new world. the invention of gunpowder put a new face upon warfare, and that of printing made possible the cheap and wide dissemination of long-smouldering ideas. economic problems perplexed every country, and on all sides methods of solving them were put in action. sully, who found in henry iv. of france an ardent supporter of his wishes for her prosperity, had altered and systematized taxes, and introduced a multitude of reforms in general administration; and later, colbert did even more notable work. the italian republics had made their noble code of commercial rules and maxims. the dutch had given to the world one of the most wonderful examples of what man may accomplish by sheer pluck and persistent hard work, and commercial institutions founded on a principle of liberty; and neither the terror of the spanish rule nor the jealousy of england had destroyed her power. credit, banking, all modern forms of exchange were coming into use; and agriculture, which the feudal system had kept in a state of torpor, awakened and became a productive power. side by side with this were gigantic speculations, like that of john law and the east india company, with the helpless ruin of its collapse. the time was ripe for the formulation of some system of economic laws; and two men who had long pondered them, de gournay and quesnay, made the first attempt to explain the meaning of wealth and its distribution. after quesnay and his system, still holding honorable place, came turgot; after turgot, adam smith; and thenceforward halt is impossible, and economic science marches on with giant strides. in all this progress woman had shared many of the material benefits, but her industrial position had altered but slightly. driven from the trades, she had passed into the ranks of agricultural laborers; and thorold rogers, in his "work and wages," records her early work in this direction. france held the most enlightened view, and even then women took active part in business, and had a position unknown in any other country; but they had no place in any system of the economists, nor did their labor count as a force to be enumerated. slowly machinery was making its way, feared and hated by the lower order of workers, eyed distrustfully and uncertainly by the higher. men and women struggling for bare subsistence had become active competitors, till, in , a general petition entitled "petition of women of the third estate to the king" was signed by hundreds of french workers, who, made desperate by starvation and underpay, demanded that every business which included spinning, weaving, sewing, or knitting should be given to women exclusively. side by side with the wave of political revolution, strongest for france and america, came the industrial revolution; and the opening of the nineteenth century brought with it the myriad changes we are now to face. footnotes: [ ] dynamic sociology, or applied social science as based upon statical sociology and the less complex sciences. by lester f. ward, a.m., vol. i. p. . [ ] economics, book i. chap. ix. [ ] ancient law, p. . ii. employments for women during the colonial period, and the development of the factory. for nearly a century and a half, dating from the landing of the pilgrims on plymouth rock, the condition of laboring women was that of the same class in all struggling colonies. there were practically no women wage-earners, save in domestic service, where a home and from thirty to a hundred dollars a year was accounted wealth, the latter sum being given in a few instances to the housekeepers in great houses. each family represented a commonwealth, and its women gave every energy to the crowding duties of a daily life filled with manifold occupations. the farmer--for all were farmers--was often blacksmith, shoemaker, and carpenter, and more or less proficient in every trade whose offices were called for in the family life. the farmer's wife spun and wove the cloth he wore and the linen that made his household furnishing, and was dyer and dresser, brewer and baker, seamstress, milliner, and dressmaker. the quickness, adaptiveness to new conditions, and the fertility of resource which are recognized as distinguishing the american, were born of the colonial struggle, especially of the final one which separated us forever from english rule. the wage of the few women found in labor outside the home was gauged by that which had ruled in england. for unskilled labor, as that employed occasionally in agriculture, this had been from one shilling and sixpence for ordinary field work to two shillings a week paid in haying and harvest time. for hoeing corn or rough weeding there is record of one shilling per week, and this is the usual wage for old women. to this were added various allowances which have gradually fallen into disuse. a full record of these and of rates in general will be found in "six centuries of work and wages."[ ] unskilled labor during the whole colonial period--meaning by this such labor as that of the men who sawed wood, dug ditches, or mended roads, mixed mortar for the mason, carried boards to the carpenter, or cut hay in harvest time--brought a wage of seldom more than two shillings a day, fifteen shillings a week making a man the envy of his fellows, while six or seven was the utmost limit for women of the same order. on this pittance they lived as they could. sand did duty as carpet for the floor. the cupboard knew no china, and the table no glass. coal and matches were unknown; they had never seen a stove. the meals of coarsest food were eaten from wooden or pewter dishes. fresh meat was seldom eaten more than once a week. a pound of salt pork was tenpence, and corn three shillings a bushel. clothing was as coarse as the food, and imprisonment for the slightest debt was the shadow hanging over every family where illness or any other cause had hindered earning. boys and girls in the poorer families were employed by the owners of cattle to watch and keep them within bounds, countless troubles arising from their roaming over the unfenced fields. andover, mass., being from the beginning of a thrifty turn of mind, passed, soon after the founding of the town, an ordinance which still stands on the town records:-- "the court did herupon order and decree that in every towne the chosen men are to take care of such as are sett to keep cattle, that they may be sett to some other employment withall, as spinning upon the rock, knitting and weaving tape, &c." spinning-classes were also formed; the general court of massachusetts ordering these in , this being part of the general effort to begin some form of manufactures. but fishing to load ships, and shipbuilding to carry cured fish absorbed the energies of the growing population; and these vessels brought textiles and manufactured goods from the cheapest markets everywhere and anywhere.[ ] these "homespun" industries soon showed a tendency toward division. by much weaving was done outside the home as custom work; and there is record of one gabriel harris who died in leaving four looms and tacklings and a silk loom as part of the small fortune he had accumulated in this way.[ ] his six children and some hired women assisted in the work. in joseph, the son of roger williams, entered in an account book now extant,[ ] a credit to "sarah badkuk [babcock], for weven and coaming wisted." this work was, however, chiefly in the hands of men. the records of pepperell, mass., show that many women saved their pin money, and sent out little ventures in the ships built at home and sailing to all ports with fish. these ventures included articles of clothing, embroideries, and anything that it seemed might be made to yield some return. there were also women of affairs, some of whom took charge of large industries. thus weeden, in his "economic and social history of new england," quotes from an interesting memorandum left by madam martha smith, a widow of st. george's manor, long island,[ ] which shows her practical ability. in january, , "my company" killed a yearling whale, and made twenty-seven barrels of oil. the record gives her success for the year, and the tax she paid to the authorities at new york,--fifteen pounds and fifteen shillings, a twentieth part of her year's gains. other women oversaw the curing of the fish; but there is no record of the wage beyond the general one which for the earliest days of the colony gives rates for women as from four to eight pence a day without food. these rates followed almost literally those of england at that time. half of the day's earnings were accounted an equivalent for diet, and contractors for feeding gangs in agriculture, among sailors, or wherever the system was adopted, allowed seven and one-half pence per day a head for men and women alike. women servants received ten shillings a year wages, and an allowance of four shillings additional for clothing. the working day still remained as fixed by the law late in the fifteenth century,--from five a.m. to eight p.m., from march to september, with half an hour for breakfast, and an hour and a half for dinner. these rates gradually altered, but for women hardly at all, the wages during the eighteenth century ranging from four to six pounds a year. the colony, however, gave opportunities unknown to the mother country, and gardening and the cultivation of small vegetables seem to have fallen much into the hands of women.[ ] they had studied the best methods for hotbeds, and grew early vegetables in these, the first record of this being in . gloves were by this time made at home, buttons covered, and many small industries conducted, all connected with the manufacture and making up of clothing. patriotic spinning occupied many; and the "boston news-letter" has it that often seventy linen-wheels were employed at one gathering. the agitation caused by the stamp act turned the attention of all women to the production of cloth as a domestic business. worcester, mass., in formed an association for the spinning and weaving of cotton, and a jenny was bought by subscription.[ ] prices by this time had risen, and in the andover records mention that a miss holt was paid eighteen shillings for spinning seventy-two skeins, and seven shillings eleven pence for weaving nineteen yards of cloth. women generally could spin two skeins of linen yarn a day; but there is record of one, a miss eleanor fry of east greenwich, r.i., who spun seven skeins and one knot in one day,--an amount sufficient to make twelve large lawn handkerchiefs such as were then imported from england. within four years another rhode island family of newport are recorded in as having "manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen cloth, besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the stocking yarn of the family." the council of east greenwich fixed prices at that time at rates which seem purely arbitrary and are certainly incomprehensible. thus for spinning linen or worsted, five or six skeins to the pound, the price was not to exceed sixpence per skein of fifteen knots, with finer work in proportion. carded woollen yarn was the same per skein. weaving plain flannel or tow or linen brought fivepence per yard; common worsted and linen, one penny a yard; and other linens in like proportion.[ ] silk growing and weaving had been the result of the silkworm cocoons sent over by james the first, who offered bounties of money and tobacco for spun and woven silk according to weight. three women were famous before the revolution as silk growers and weavers,--mrs. pinckney, grace fisher, and susanna wright; and at all points where the mulberry-tree was indigenous or could be made to grow, fortune was regarded as assured. the project failed; but the efforts then made paved the way for present experiment, and even better success than that already attained. the manufacture of straw goods, amounting now to many million dollars yearly, owes its origin to a woman,--miss betsey metcalf, who in , when hardly more than a child, discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadow grass of dedham, her native town. others were taught, and a regular business of supplying the want for summer hats and bonnets was organized, and has grown to its present large proportions. at this period women widowed by the fortune of war or forced by the absence of all the male members of the family on the field, were often found in business. the mother of thomas perkins of salem, one of the great american merchants, left widowed in , took her husband's place in the counting-house, managed business, despatched ships, sold merchandise, wrote letters, all with such commanding energy that the solid hollanders wrote to her as to a man.[ ] the record of one day's work of mary moody emerson, born in , reads:-- "rose before light every morn; read butler's analogy; commented on the scriptures; read in a little book cicero's letters--a few touches of shakespeare--washed, carded, cleaned house and baked."[ ] there is another woman no less busy, a member of the distinguished nott family, who did work in her house and helped her boys in the fields. in midwinter, with neither money nor wool in the house, one of the boys required a new suit. the mother sheared the half-grown fleece from a sheep, and in a week had spun, wove, and made it into clothing, the sheep being protected from cold by a wrappage made of braided straw. details like this would be out of place here did they not serve to accent the fact of the concentration of industries under the home roof, and the necessity that existed for this. but a change was near at hand, and it dates from the first bale of cotton grown in the country. in the early years of the eighteenth century not a manufacturing town existed in new england, and for the whole country it was much the same. a few paper-mills turned out paper hardly better in quality than that which comes to us to-day about our grocery packages. in a foundry or two iron was melted into pigs or beaten into bars and nails. cocked hats and felts were made in one factory. cotton was hardly known.[ ] de bow, in his "industrial resources of the united states," tells us that a little had been sent to liverpool just before the battle of lexington; but linen took the place of all cotton fabrics, and was spun at every hearth in new england. in the eight bales of cotton, grown on a georgia plantation, sent over to liverpool in , and seized at the custom house on the ground that so much cotton could not be produced in america, but must come from some foreign country, lay the seed of a new movement in labor, in which, from the beginning, women have taken larger part than men. by cotton had proved itself a staple for the southern states, and even the second war with england hardly hindered the planters. in two million pounds had been raised; in forty-eight million; the invention of the cotton-gin, in , stimulating to the utmost the enthusiasm of the south over this new road to fortune. it is with the birth of the cotton industry that the work and wages of women begin to take coherent shape; and the history of the new occupation divides itself roughly into three periods. the first includes the ten or fifteen years prior to , and may be called the experimental period; the second covers the time from to , in which the spinning-system was established and perfected; and the third the years immediately following , in which came the introduction of the power loom and the growth of the modern factory system. the experimental stage found an enthusiastic worker in the person of tench coxe, known often as the "father of american industries," whose interest in the beginning was philanthropic rather than commercial. bent upon employment for idle and destitute workmen, he exhibited in philadelphia in the first spinning-jenny seen in america. he had already incorporated the "united company of philadelphia for promoting american manufactures," and they at once secured the machine and made ready to operate it. four hundred women were very speedily at work at hand spinning and weaving; and though the company presently turned its attention to woollen fabrics, a large proportion of women was still employed. till the building of the great mill at waltham, mass., in which every form of the improved machinery found place, spinning was the only work of the factories. all the yarn was sent out among the farmers to be woven into cloth, the current prices paid for this being from six to twelve cents a yard. american cotton was poor, and the product of a quality inferior to the coarsest and heaviest-unbleached of to-day; but experiment soon altered all this. to manufacture the raw product in this country was a necessity. for england this had begun in ; but she guarded so jealously all inventions bearing upon it that none found their way to us. our machinery was therefore of the most imperfect order, the work chiefly of two young scotch mechanics. in a company was formed at providence, r.i., for making "homespun cloth," their machinery being made in part from drawings from english models. carding and roving were all done by hand labor; and the spinning-frame, with thirty-two spindles, differed little from a common jenny, and was worked by a crank turned by hand. even at this stage england was determined that america should have neither machinery nor tools, and still held to the act passed in which enforced a penalty of five hundred pounds for any one who exported, or tried to export, "blocks, plates, engines, tools, or utensils used in or which are proper for the preparing or finishing of the calico, cotton, muslin, or linen printing manufacture, or any part thereof." nothing could have more stimulated american invention; but there were many struggles before the thought finally came to all interested, that it might be possible to condense the whole operation with all its details under one roof,--a project soon carried out. thus far all had been tentative; but the building in at pawtucket, r.i., of the first large factory with improved machinery gave the industry permanent place. another mill was erected in the same state in , and two more in massachusetts in and . in the three succeeding years ten more were built in rhode island and one in connecticut, altogether fifteen in number, working about , spindles and producing in a year some , pounds of yarn. at the end of the year eighty-seven additional mills had been put up, making about , spindles in operation. eight hundred spindles employed forty persons,--five men and thirty-five women and children. the first authoritative record as to the progress of the manufacture, numbers employed, etc., was made in a report to the house of representatives in the spring session of . in the previous year , bales had been manufactured as against , in . the capital invested was $ , , and the relative number of males and females employed is also recorded,-- males employed from the age of and upward , women and female children , boys under years of age , for these women spinning was the only work. hand-looms still did all the weaving, nor was it possible to obtain any plan of the power looms,--then in use in england, and a recent invention. another mill had been built in ; and thus the first definite and profitable occupation for women in this country dates back to the close of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, the history of its phases having been written by tench coxe. the village tailoress had long gone from house to house, earning in the beginning but a shilling a day, and this sometimes paid in kind; and in towns a dressmaker or milliner was secure of a livelihood. but work for the many was unknown outside of household life; and thus wage rates vary with locality, and are in most cases inferential rather than matter of record. cotton would seem, from the beginning of manufacturing interests, to have monopolized new england; but other industries had been very early suggested. in may, , the general court of massachusetts made an order for the encouragement by bounties of the manufacture of linen and woollen as well as cotton. in a company of yorkshiremen came over and settled in rowley, mass., where they built the first fulling-mill in the united states. fustians and the ordinary homespun cloth were woven; but few women were employed, the work being far heavier than the weaving of cotton. it was hoped that broadcloths as good as those imported could be made; but american wool proved less susceptible of high finish, though of better wearing quality than the english. various grades of cloth, with shawls, were manufactured; but the growth of the industry was slow, and constantly hampered by heavy duties and much interference. in the entire graduating class at harvard college were dressed in black broadcloth made in this country, the weaving of which had been done in families. yarn was sent to these after the wool had been made ready in the mills, and the census of the united states for gives the number of yards woven in this way as , , . what proportion of women were engaged we have no means of knowing; but the census of shows that new england had per cent of the total number then at work. the cotton manufacture had but per cent of males as against per cent of females; while in woollen, males were per cent. in new england , women were in woollen-mills; in the middle states, , ; and in the south, . for the west no returns are given. many more would be included in the southern returns were it not that most of the weaving is still a home industry, this resulting from the sparseness and scattered nature of the population. knitting formed one of the earliest means of earning for women, the demand for hose of every description being beyond the power of the family to supply. knitting-machines of various orders were in use on the continent, and had been brought into england; but any attempt to employ them here was for a long time unsuccessful. yarn was spun especially for this purpose, usually with a double thread, and in the year martha's vineyard exported , pairs. the german and english settlers of pennsylvania brought many handknitting machines with them, and were rivals of new england; but virginia led, and the census of credits her with over half of the hand-knit pairs exported, connecticut coming next. in pennsylvania the women earned half a crown a pair for the long hose, and this in the opening of the eighteenth century; and the state still retains it as a household industry. the percentage for the united states of women engaged in it by the last census is , . the early stages of the industry employed very few women, the processes involving too heavy labor; and out of workers in the first mills, only eight were women, these being employed in carding and fulling. according to our last census, , are employed in new england mills alone; but the proportion remains far below that of the cotton-mills, and at many points in the south and remote territories it is still a household industry in which all share. until well on in the nineteenth century the factory and the domestic system were still interwoven, nor had there been intelligent definition of the actual meaning of this system until ure formulated one:-- "the factory system in technology is simply the combined operation of many orders of work-people in tending with assiduous skill a series of productive machines, continuously impelled by a central power."[ ] a central power controlling an army of workers had been the dream of all mechanicians; and ure formulated this also:-- "it is the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object,--all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force." this was the result brought about by the gradual extension of the factory system. the objections made from the beginning, and still made, with such answers as experience has suggested, find place later on. footnotes: [ ] by thorold rogers. [ ] weeden's economic and social history of new england, vol. i. p. . [ ] caulkins, p. . [ ] rider's book notes, vol. ii. p. . [ ] boston news-letter, jan. , . [ ] boston news-letter, jan. , . [ ] barry's massachusetts, vol. xi. p. . [ ] weeden's social and economic history of new england, vol. ii. p. . [ ] proceedings of the massachusetts historical society, - , p. . [ ] atlantic monthly, december, , p. . [ ] for further detail, see mcmaster's history of the united states, vol. i. p. . [ ] philosophy of manufactures, by andrew ure, m.d., p. . iii. early aspects of factory labor for women. lack not only of machinery but of any facilities for its manufacture hampered and delayed the progress of the factory movement in the united states; but these difficulties were at last overcome, and in waltham, mass., saw what is probably the first factory in the world that combined under one roof every process for converting raw cotton into finished cloth. manufacturing, even when most hampered by the burden of taxation then imposed and the heavy duties and other restrictions following the long war, began under happier conditions than have ever been known elsewhere. unskilled labor had smallest place, and of this class new england had for long next to no knowledge. her workers in the beginning were recruited from the outlying country; and the women and girls who flocked into lowell, as in the earliest years they had flocked into pawtucket, were new-englanders by birth and training. this meant not only quickness and deftness of handling, but the conscientious filling of every hour with the utmost work it could be made to hold. the life of the lowell factory-girls has full record in the little magazine called the "lowell offering," published by them for many years. lucy larcom has also lately given her "recollections," one of the most valuable and characteristic pictures of the life from year to year, and it tallies with the summary made by dickens in his "american notes." beginning as a child of eleven, whose business was simply to change bobbins, she received a wage of one dollar a week, with one dollar and a quarter for board, the allowance made by most of the corporations while the system of boarding-houses in connection with the factories lasted. the oldest corporation, known as the merrimack, introduced this system, and for many years retained oversight of all in its employ. with increasing competition and the increase of the foreign element, alteration of methods began, and lowell lost its characteristic features. in the beginning the conditions of factory labor for new england at the point where work was initiated, were, as compared with those of england, almost idyllic. the lowell workers came from new england farms, many of them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing larger opportunities for self-culture. the agricultural class then outranked merchants and mechanics. there were no class distinctions, and the workers shared in the best social life of lowell. the factory was an episode rather than a career; and the buildings themselves were kept as clean as the nature of the work admitted, growing plants filling the windows; and the swift-flowing merrimac turning the wheels. in the girls had to their credit in the savings-banks established by the corporations over one hundred thousand dollars; and many of them shared their earnings with brothers who sought a college education, or lifted the mortgages on the home farms. at the international council of women, held in washington in , mrs. h.h. robinson, after telling how she entered the lowell mills as a "doffer," when a child, gave a brilliant description of the intellectual life and interests of the workers. she remained in the mill till married, and said: "i consider the lowell mills as my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most girls of the colleges in which they have been educated." with the growth of the factory system under very different conditions from that of lowell, there were as different results. factories had risen, at every available point in new england, all of them thronged by women and girls. but great cities were still unknown; and the first census, that for , showed that hardly four per cent of the people were in them. the tide set toward the factory towns as strongly as it now does toward the cities, though factory labor for the most part was of almost incredible severity. the length of a day's labor varied from twelve to fifteen hours, the mills of new england running generally thirteen hours a day the year round. several mills are on record, the day in one of which was fourteen hours, and in the other fifteen hours and ten minutes, this latter being the eagle mill at griswold, conn.; and previous to there were many others where hours were equally long. work began at five in the morning, or at some points a little later; and there is a known instance of a mill in paterson, n.j., in which women and children were required to be at work by half-past four in the morning. in most of the new england factories, the operatives were taxed for the support of religion. the lowell company dismissed them if often absent from church, and their lives without and within the factory were regulated as minutely as if in the cloister. women and children were urged on by the cowhide; and the first inspection of the factories, notably in connecticut, revealed a state of things hardly less harrowing than that which had brought about the passage of the first factory acts in england. at the same time wages were very inadequate. in twelve hours' daily labor the weavers of baltimore were able to earn from sixty to seventy cents a day, the wage of the women being half or a third this amount; and they declared it not enough to pay the expenses of schooling for the children. with the increase of production and the growing competition of manufacturers, wages were steadily forced downward. less and less attention was paid to the comfort or well-being of the operatives, and many factories were unfit working-places for human beings. overseers, whose duty it was to keep up the utmost rate of speed, flogged children brutally; and the treatment was so barbarous that a boy of twelve at mendon, mass., drowned himself to escape factory labor. windows were often nailed down, and their raising forbidden even in the hottest weather. the most formidable and trustworthy arraignment of these conditions is to be found in a pamphlet printed in , the full title of which is as follows: "an address to the working-men of new england, on the state of education, and on the condition of the producing classes in europe and america." the author of this pamphlet, a mechanic of some education, stirred to the heart by the abuses he saw, made an exhaustive examination of the new england mills; and he gives many details of the hours of labor, the wages of employees, and the abuses of power which he found everywhere among unscrupulous manufacturers. the principal value of his work lies in this, and in his reprint of original documents like the "general rules of the lowell manufacturing company," and "the conditions on which help is hired by the cocheco manufacturing company, dover, n.h." these conditions were so oppressive that in several cases revolt took place,--usually unsuccessful, as no organization existed among the women, and they were powerless to effect any marked change for the better. by chiefly the poorer order of workers filled the mills, but even skilled labor made constant complaint of cruelties and injustices. not only were there distressing cases of cruelty to children, but outrage of every kind had been found to exist among the women workers, whose wage had been lowered till nearly at the point known to-day as the subsistence point. parents then, as now, gave false returns of age, and caught greedily at the prospect of any earning by their children; and any specific enactments as to schooling, etc., were still delayed. these evils were not confined to new england, but existed at every point where manufacturing was carried on. but new england was first to decide on the necessity for some organized remonstrance and resistance, and the first meeting to this end was held in february, . of this there is no record; but the second, held in september, , is given in the first "report of the massachusetts bureau of labor," issued in . boston sent thirty delegates, and the workingmen of new york city addressed a letter to the workers of the united states, showing that the same causes of unrest and agitation existed at all points. "these evils," they said, "arise from the moral obliquity of the fastidious, and the cupidity of the avaricious. they consist in an illiberal opinion of the worth and rights of the laboring classes, an unjust estimation of their moral, physical, and intellectual powers, and unwise misapprehension of the effects which would result from the cultivation of their minds and the improvement of their condition, and an avaricious propensity to avail of their laborious services, at the lowest possible rate of wages for which they can be induced to work." the evils protested against here did not lessen as time went on. irish emigration had begun in , and speedily drove out american labor, which was in any case insufficient for the need. a lowered wage was the immediate consequence, the foreigner having no standard of living that included more than bare necessaries. at this distance from the struggle it is easy to see that the new life was educational for the emigrant, and also forced the american worker into new and often broader channels. but for those involved such perception was impossible, and the new-comers were regarded with something like hatred. english and german emigrants followed, to give place in their turn to the french-canadian, who at present in great degree monopolizes the mills. in the beginning little or no effort was made toward healthful conditions of work and life, or more than the merest hint of education. england, in which far worse conditions had existed, had, early in the century, seen the necessity of remedial legislation. but though the first english factory act was passed in , it was not till that women and children were brought under its provisions. the first one, known as the health and morals act, was the result of the discovery made first by voluntary, then by appointed inspectors, that neither health nor morals remained for factory-workers, and that hopeless deterioration would result unless government interfered at once. hideous epidemic diseases, an extinction of any small natural endowment of moral sense, and a daily life far below that of the brutes, had showed themselves as industries and the attendant competition developed; and the story in all its horror may be read in english bluebooks and the record of government inspectors, and made accessible in the works of giffen, toynbee, engels, and other names identified with reform. the bearing of these acts upon legislation in our country is so strong that a summary of the chief points must find mention here. in the act of the hours of work, which had been from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, were fixed at twelve. all factories were required to be frequently whitewashed, and to have a sufficient number of windows, though these provisions applied only to apprenticed operatives. in an act forbade the employment of any child under nine years of age, and in saturday was made a half-holiday. night work was forbidden in , and for all under eighteen the working day was made twelve hours, with nine for saturday. by public opinion demanded still more change for the better, and the day was made ten hours for working women and young persons between thirteen and eighteen years, though they were allowed to work between six a.m. and six p.m., with an allowance of an hour and a half at mealtime. our own evils, while in many points far less, still were in the same direction. here and there a like evasion of responsibility and of the provisions of the law was to be found. even when a corps of inspectors were appointed, they were bribed, hoodwinked, and generally put off the track, while the provisions in regard to the shielding of dangerous machinery, cleanliness, etc., were ignored by every possible method. were law obeyed and its provisions thoroughly carried out, english factory operatives would be better protected than those of any other country, america not accepted. sanitary conditions are required to be good. all factories are to be kept clean, as any effluvia arising from closets, etc., renders the owners liable to a fine. the generation of gas, dust, etc., must be neutralized by the inventions for this purpose, so that operatives may not be harmed thereby. any manufacturer allowing machinery to remain unprotected is to be prosecuted; and there are minute regulations forbidding any child or young person to clean or walk between the fixed and traversing part of any self-acting machine while in motion. at least two hours must be allowed for meals, nor are these to be taken in any room where manufacturing is going on. for this country such provisions were long delayed, nor have we even now the necessary regulations as to the protection of machinery. in the early days, though many mills were built by men who sought honestly to provide their employees with as many alleviations as the nature of the work admitted, many more were absolutely blind to anything but their own interest. with the disabilities resulting we are to deal at another point. it is sufficient to say here, that the struggle for factory-workers became more and more severe, and has remained so to the present day. the increase of women workers in this field had been steady. in women operatives in the factories of massachusetts were , , or nineteen per cent of men operatives. in they were , , or twenty-six per cent; and the increase since that date has been in like proportion. from the time of their first employment in mills the increase has been on themselves over three hundred per cent. in massachusetts mills women and children are from two thirds to five sixths of all employed, and the proportion in all the manufacturing portions of new england is nearly the same. in judging the factory system as a whole, it is necessary to glance at the conditions of home work preceding it. these are given in full detail in historical and economical treatises, notably in lecky's "history of the eighteenth century," and in dr. kay's "moral and physical condition of the working classes." a list of the more important authorities on the subject will be found in the general bibliography at the end. the conditions that prevailed in other countries were less strenuous with us, but the same objections to the domestic system held good at many points. in weaving, the looms occupied large part of the family living space, and overcrowding and all its evils were inevitable. drunkenness was more common, as well as the stealing of materials by dishonest workers. time was lost in going for material and in returning it, and only half as much was accomplished. homes were uncared for and often filthy, and the work was done in half-lighted, airless rooms. these conditions are often reproduced in part even to-day in buildings not adapted to their present use; but as a whole it is certain that the homes of factory-workers are cleaner, that regulation has proved beneficial, that light and air are furnished in better measure, and that overcrowding has become impossible. this applies only to textile manufactures, where machines must have room. in an admirable chapter on the "factory system," prepared by colonel carroll d. wright for the tenth census of the united states, he takes up in detail the objections urged against it. these are as follows:-- a. the factory system necessitates the employment of women and children to an injurious extent, and consequently its tendency is to destroy family life and ties and domestic habits, and ultimately the home. b. factory employments are injurious to health. c. the factory system is productive of intemperance, unthrift, and poverty. d. it feeds prostitution, and swells the criminal list. e. it tends to intellectual degeneracy. under "a" there is small defence to be made. the employment of married women is fruitful of evil, and the proportion of these in massachusetts is . per cent. wherever this per cent is high, infant mortality is very great, being . per cent for massachusetts and per cent for connecticut and new hampshire. the "labor bureau reports" for new jersey treat the subject in detail, and are strongly opposed to the employment of mothers of young children outside the home; and the conclusion is the same at other points. in the matter of general injury to health, under "b," it is stated that many factories are far better ventilated and lighted than the homes of the operatives. ignorant employees cannot be impressed with the need of care on these points, and the air in their homes is foul and productive of disease. a cotton-mill is often better ventilated than a court-room or a lecture-room. a well-built factory allows not less than six hundred cubic feet of air space to a person, thirty to sixty cubic feet a minute being required. ranke, in his "elements of physiology," makes it thirty-five a minute. the homes of operatives have steadily improved in character; and wherever there is an intelligent class of operatives, regulations are obeyed, and sanitary conditions are fair and often perfect, while the tendency is toward more and more care in every respect. operatives' homes are often better guarded against sanitary evils than those of farmers or the ordinary laborer. under "c" it is shown conclusively that the factory has diminished intemperance,--reybaud's "history of the factory movement" giving full statistics on this point, as well as in regard to the growth of banks and benefit societies. the standard of living is higher here, but there are countless evidences of thrift and a general rise in condition. in the matter of prostitution, under "d," it is shown that but eight per cent of this class come from the factory, twenty-nine per cent being from domestic service. in lynn, mass., a town chosen for illustration because of the large percentage of factory operatives, it was found that but seven per cent of those arrested were from this class; and this is true of all points where the foreign-born element is not largely in the majority. last comes the question of intellectual degeneracy, under "e." on this point it is hardly fair to make comparison of the present worker with the lowell girl of the first period of factory labor, since she came from an educated class, and was distinctively american. taking workers as a whole, a vast advance shows itself. regularity and fixed rule have often been the first education in this direction; and the life, even with all its drawbacks, has the right to be regarded as an educational force, and the first step in this direction for a large proportion of the workers in it. there are points where the arraignment of alfred, in his "history of the factory movement," is still true.[ ] he speaks of it as a "system which jested with civilization, laughed at humanity, and made a mockery of every law of physical and moral health and of the principles of natural and social order." the "report of the new york bureau of labor for " shows that the charge might still be righteously brought; and mr. bishop gives the same testimony in his reports for new jersey. evil is still part of the system, and well-nigh inseparable from the methods of production and the conditions of competition; but that there are evils is recognized at all points, and thus their continuance will not and cannot be perpetuated. footnote: [ ] alfred's history of the factory movement, vol. i. p. . iv. rise and growth of trades up to the present time. defeat and discouragement attend well-nigh every step of the attempt to reach any conclusions regarding women workers in the early years of the century. it is true that witnessed an attempt at an investigation into their status, but the results were of slight value, actual figures being almost unattainable. the census of gave more, and that of showed still larger gain. in that of the number of women and children in the silk industry was taken; but while the same is true of the later one, there is apparently no record of them in any printed form. the new york state census for the years and gave some space to the work of women and children, but there is nothing of marked value till another decade had passed. it is to the united states census for that we must look for the first really definite statements as to the occupations of women and children. scattered returns of an earlier date had shown that the percentage of those employed in factories was a steadily increasing one, but in what ratio was considered as unimportant. in fact, statistics of any order had small place, nor was their need seriously felt, save here and there, in the mind of the student. to comprehend the blankness of this period in all matters relating to social and economic questions, it is necessary to recall the fact that no such needs as those of the mother country pressed upon us. to those who looked below the surface and watched the growing tide of emigration, it was plain that they were, in no distant day, to arise; but for the most part, even for those compelled to severest toil, it was taken for granted that full support was a certainty, and that the men or women who did not earn a comfortable living could blame no one but themselves. there were other reasons why any enumeration of women workers seemed not only superfluous but undesirable. for the better order, prejudice was still strong enough against all who deviated from custom or tradition to make each new candidate for a living shrink from any publicity that could be avoided. society frowned upon the woman who dared to strike out in new paths, and thus made them even more thorny than necessity had already done. it is impossible for the present, with its full freedom of opportunity, to realize, or credit even, the difficulties of the past, or even of a period hardly more than a generation ago. it was of this time that dr. emily blackwell, one of the pioneers in higher work for women, wrote:-- "women were hindered at every turn by endless restraint in endless minor detail of habit, custom, tradition, etc.... most women who have been engaged in any new departure would testify that the difficulties of the undertaking lay far more in these artificial hindrances and burdens than in their own health, or in the nature of the work itself." it was this shrinking from publicity, among all save the most ordinary workers, by this time largely foreign, that made one difficulty in the way of census enumerators. by it had become plain that an enormous increase in their numbers was taking place, and that no just idea of this increase could be formed so long as industrial statistics were made up with no distinction as to sex. the spread of the factory system and the constant invention of new machinery had long ago removed from homes the few branches of the work that could be carried on within them. processes had divided and subdivided. the mill-worker knew no longer every phase of the work implied in the production of her web, but became more and more a part of the machine itself. this was especially true of all textile industries,--cotton or woollen, with their many ramifications,--and becomes more so with each year of progress. cotton and woollen manufactures, with the constantly increasing subdivisions of all the processes involved, counted their thousands upon thousands of women workers. another industry had been one of the first opened to women, much of its work being done at home. shoemaking, with all its processes of binding and finishing, had its origin for this country in massachusetts, to the ingenuity and enterprise of whose mechanics is due the fact that the united states has attained the highest perfection in this branch. lynn, mass., as far back as , had become famous for its women's shoes, the making of which was carried on in the families of the manufacturers. at first no especial skill was shown; but in a welsh shoemaker, named john adam dagyr, settled there and acquired great fame for himself and the town for his superior workmanship. in the exports of women's shoes from lynn were one hundred thousand pairs, while in over three hundred thousand pairs were sent out, and by the number had reached eleven million. beginning with the employment of a few dozen women, twenty other towns took up the same industry, and furnish their quota of the general return. the massachusetts bureau of labor gives, in its report for , the number of women employed as , , with some six hundred female children. maine and new hampshire followed, and both have a small proportion of women workers engaged in the industry, while it has gradually extended, new england always retaining the lead, till new york, philadelphia, and many western and southern towns rank high in the list of producers. as in every other trade, processes have divided and subdivided. sewing-machines did away with the tedious binding by hand, which had its compensations, however, in the fact that it was done at home. there is only incidental record of the numbers employed in this industry till the later census returns; but the percentage outside of massachusetts remained a very small one, as even in maine the total number given in the report of the bureau of labor for is but , an almost inappreciable per cent of the population. the returns of the census of give the total number of women in this employment as , , the proportion still remaining largest for new england. straw-braiding was another of the early trades, and the first straw bonnet braided in the united states was made by miss betsey metcalf, of providence, r.i., in . for many years straw-plaiting was done at home; but the quality of our material was always inferior to that grown abroad, our climate making it much more brittle and difficult to handle. the wage at first was from two to three dollars a week; but as factories were established where imported braid was made up, the sum sometimes reached five dollars. the census of gave the total number of women employed as , . according to the census of , nine states had taken up this industry, massachusetts employing the largest number, and vermont the least, the total number being , ; while in the number had risen to , . up to the time of the civil war, aside from factory employments, the trades open to women were limited, and the majority of their occupations were still carried on at home, or with but few in numbers, as in dressmaking-establishments, millinery, and the like. with the new conditions brought about at this time, and the vast number of women thrown upon their own resources, came the flocking into trades for which there had been no training, and which had been considered as the exclusive property of men. a surplus of untrained workers at once appeared, and this and general financial depression brought the wage to its lowest terms; but when this had in part ended, the trades still remained open. at the close of the war some hundred were regarded as practicable. ten years later the number had more than doubled, and to-day we find over four hundred occupations; while, as new inventions arise, the number of possibilities in this direction steadily increases. the many considerations involved in these facts will be met later on. general conditions of trades as a whole are given in the census returns, though even there hardly more than approximately, little work of much real value being accomplished till the formation of the labor bureaus, with which we are soon to deal. every allowance, however, is to be made for the census bureau, which found itself almost incapable of overcoming many of the lions in the way. the tone of the remarks on this point in that for is almost plaintive, nor is it less so in the next; but methods have clarified, and the work is far more authoritative than for long seemed possible. innumerable difficulties hedged about the enumerators for . rooted objection to answering the questions in detail was not one of the least. unfamiliarity with the newer phases of the work was another, and thus it happened that the volume when issued was full of discrepancies. the tables of occupations, for example, characterized but a little over two thousand persons as connected with woollen and worsted manufacture; while the tables of manufactures showed that considerably more than forty thousand persons were engaged, upon the average, in these branches of manufacturing industry. the returns gave the number of women employed in various branches of manufacture as two hundred and eighty-five thousand, but stated that the figures were approximate merely, it being impossible to secure full returns. it was found that three and a half per cent of the population of massachusetts were in the factories, and nearly the same proportion in connecticut and rhode island; but details were of the most meagre description, and conclusions based upon them were likely to err at every point. its value was chiefly educative, since the failure it represents pointed to a change in methods, and more preparation than had at any time been considered necessary in the officials who had the matter in charge. the census for reaped the benefits of the new determination; yet even of this general walker was forced to write: "this census concludes that from one to two hundred thousand workers are not accounted for, from the difficulty experienced in getting proper returns. the nice distinctions of foreign statisticians are impossible." and he adds:-- "whoever will consider the almost utter want of apprenticeship in this country, the facility with which pursuits are taken up and abandoned, and the variety and, indeed, seeming incongruity of the numerous industrial offices that are frequently united in one person, will appreciate the force of this argument.... the organization of domestic service in the united states is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained. a census of occupations in which the attempt should be made to reach anything like european completeness in this matter would result in the return of tens of thousands of 'housekeepers' and hundreds of thousands of 'cooks,' who were simply 'maids of all work,' being the single servants of the families in which they are employed."[ ] this census gives the total number of women workers, so far as it could be determined, as , , . of these, , were from ten to fifteen years of age; , , , from sixteen to fifty-nine; and , , sixty years and over, the larger proportion of the latter division being given as engaged in agricultural employments. in the first period of age, females pursuing gainful occupations are to males as one to three; in the second, one to six; and in the third, one to twelve. the actual increase over the numbers given in the census for is , , . the reasons for this almost incredible variation have already been suggested; and their operation became even stronger in the interval between that of and . by this time methods were far more skilful and returns more minute, and thus the figures are to be accepted with more confidence than was possible with the earlier ones. the factory system, extending into almost every trade, brought about more and more differentiation of occupations, some two hundred of which were by open to women. comparing the rates of increase during the period between and , women wage-earners had increased per cent, the increase for men being but / . among the women, . per cent were engaged in agriculture, . in personal service, . in trade and transportation, and . in manufactures. in women engaged in gainful occupations formed . of the total population, and . of females over ten years of age. the present rate is not yet[ ] determined; but while figures will not be accessible for some months to come, it is stated definitely that the increase will indicate nearer ten than five per cent. the total number employed is given for this census as , , . the occupations are divided into four classes: first, agriculture; second, professional and personal services; third, trade and transportation; fourth, manufactures, mechanical and mining industries. in agriculture, , women were at work; in professional and personal services, this including domestic service, , , ; trade and transportation, this including shop-girls, etc., had , ; while , were engaged in the last division of manufacturing, etc. of girls from ten to fifteen years of age, agriculture had , ; professional and personal services, , ; trade, , ; and manufacturing, etc., , . from sixteen to fifty-nine years of age there were in agriculture , ; in professional and personal services, , , ; trade and transportation, , ; and manufacturing, etc., , . from sixty years and upward the four classes were divided as follows: agriculture, , ; professional, etc., , ; trade, etc., , ; and manufacturing, etc., , . even for this record numbers must be added, since many women work at home and make no return of the trade they have chosen, while many others are held by pride from admitting that they work at all. but the addition of a hundred thousand for the entire country would undoubtedly cover this discrepancy in full; nor are these numbers too large, though it is impossible to more than approximate them. suggestive as these figures are, they are still more so when we come to their apportionment to states. they become then a history of the progress of trades, and women's share in them; and a glance enables one to determine the proportion employed in each. in the table which follows, industries are condensed under a general head, no mention being made of the many subdivisions, each ranking as a trade, but going to make up the business as a whole. it is the result of statistics taken in fifty of the principal cities, and includes only those industries in which women have the largest share.[ ] =================================================================== | total |per cent |per cent | | number. |of males.| of |children. | | |females. | ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------- book-binding | , | , | , | carpet-weaving | , | , | , | men's clothing | , | , | , | women's clothing | , | , | , | cotton goods | , | , | , | , men's furnishing goods | , | , | , | hosiery and knitting | , | , | , | , millinery and lace | , | , | , | shirts | , | , | , | silk and silk goods | , | , | , | , straw goods | , | , | , | tobacco | , | , | , | , umbrellas and canes | , | , | , | woollen goods | , | , | , | , worsted goods | , | , | , | , =================================================================== in obtaining these averages, it was found necessary to equalize the returns of pittsburg and philadelphia, the former having but . per cent of women workers, while philadelphia had . this resulted from the fact that the industries of philadelphia are the manufacturing of textiles and other goods, which employ women chiefly; while pittsburg has principally iron and steel mills. new york was found to have per cent of women workers; lowell, mass., had . , and manchester, n.h., ; pittsburg and wilmington, del., having the lowest percentage. the gain of women in trades over the census of was sixty-four per cent, the total percentage of women workers for the whole country being forty-nine. the ten years just ended show a still larger percentage; and many of the trades which a decade since still hesitated to admit women, are now open, those regarded as most peculiarly the province of men having received many feminine recruits. these isolated or scattered instances hardly belong here, and are mentioned simply as indications of the general trend. wise or unwise, experiment is the order of the day, its principal service in many cases being to test untried powers, and break down barriers, built up often by mere tradition, and not again to rise till women themselves decide when and where. taking states in their alphabetical order, the census of gives the number of working-women for each as follows:[ ]-- alabama, , . arizona, . arkansas, , . california, , . colorado, , . connecticut, , . dakota, , . delaware, , . district of columbia, , . florida, , . georgia, , . idaho, . illinois, , . indiana, , . iowa, , . kansas, , . louisiana, , . maine, , . massachusetts, , . michigan, , . minnesota, , . mississippi, , . missouri, , . montana, . nebraska, , . nevada, . new hampshire, , . new jersey, , . new mexico, , . new york, , . north carolina, , . ohio, , . oregon, , . pennsylvania, , . rhode island, , . south carolina, , . tennessee, , . texas, , . utah, , . vermont, , . washington territory, , . west virginia, , . wisconsin, , . wyoming, . footnotes: [ ] remarks on tables of occupations, ninth census of the united states, population and social statistics, p. . [ ] june, . [ ] the table is copied with minute care from that given in the last census; and while it shows one or two deficiencies, the writer is in no sense responsible for them, its accuracy, as a whole, not being affected by the slight discrepancy referred to. [ ] the tables in this department of the census for are not yet ready for the public; but the department states that the increase in women wage-earners averages about ten per cent. v. labor bureaus and their work in relation to women. the difficulties encountered by the enumerators of the united states census, and the growing conviction that much more minute and organized effort must be given if the real status of women workers was to be obtained, had already been matter of grave discussion. the labor question pressed upon all who looked below the surface of affairs; and very shortly after the census of a proposition was made in boston to establish there a formal bureau of labor, whose business should be to fill in all the blanks that in the general work were passed over. many facts, all pointing to the necessity of some such organization, lay before the men who pondered the matter,--factory abuses of many orders, the startling increase of pauperism and crime, with other causes which can find small space here. with difficulty consent was obtained to establish a bureau which should inquire into the causes of all this; and the first report was given to the public in . it was descriptive rather than statistical, and necessarily so. methods were still a matter of question and experiment. the public had small interest in the project, and it was essential to outline, not only the work to be done, but the reasons for its need. naturally, then, the volume touched upon many abuses,--children in factories, and the factory system as a whole; the homes of workers, and their needs in sanitary and other directions; and toward the end a few pages of special comment on the hard lives of working-women as a whole. the report for followed the same lines, giving more detail to each. that for took up various phases of women's work,[ ] with some of the general conditions then existing. for the following year elaborate tables of the cost of living were given, and are invaluable as matters of reference; and in came a no less important contribution to social science in the report on the "homes of working-people." those of working-women were of course included, but there was still no description of many of the conditions known to hedge them about. each inquiry, however, turned attention more and more in this direction, and emphasized the need of some work given exclusively to women workers. in attention was directed to the health of working-women, and a portion of the report was devoted to the special effects of certain forms of employment upon the health of women,[ ] the education of children, the conditions of families, etc. that for discussed the question of wives' earnings, and gave tables of what proportion they made; and that for took up "pauperism and crime," in the growing amount of which it was claimed by many that the worker had large share. in large space was given to education and the work of the young, for whom the half-time system was urged. the conjugal condition of wives and mothers was also considered, and the bearing of their work upon the home. the financial distress of the period had affected wages, and the report for considered the effect of this, with the condition of the "unemployed," the tramp question, and other phases of the problem. with and the ending of the first decade of work in this direction came a fuller report on the social life of workingmen and the divorces in massachusetts; made a plea for uniform hours, and was devoted to wages, prices, and profits, and further details of the life of operatives within their homes; and found reason again to go over the question of wages and prices. i have given this detail because, when one views the work of the bureau as a whole, it will be seen that each year formed one step toward the final result, which has been of most vital bearing upon all since accomplished in the same direction for women. until the appearance of the report for , on the "working-girls of boston," there had been no absolute and authoritative knowledge as to their lives, their earnings, and their status as a whole. their numbers were equally unknown, nor was there interest in their condition, save here and there among special students of social science. on the other hand there was a popular impression that the ranks of prostitution were recruited from the manufactory, and that a certain stigma necessarily rested upon the factory-worker and indeed upon working-girls as a class. six divisions had been found essential to the thorough handling of the subject; and these divisions have formed the basis of all work since done in the same lines, whether in state bureaus or in that of the united states, soon to find mention here. it was under the direction of colonel carroll d. wright that the massachusetts bureau did its careful and scientific work; and he represents the most valuable labor in this direction that the country has had, deserving to rank in this matter, as tench coxe still does in the manufacturing system, as the "father" of the labor-bureau system. the six divisions settled upon as essential to any general system of reports were as follows:-- . social condition. . occupations, places in which employed. . hours of labor, time lost, etc. . physical and sanitary condition. . economic condition. . moral condition. the tenth census of the united states gave the number of women employed in the city of boston as , , , of whom were in occupations other than domestic service. each year, as we have already seen, had touched more and more nearly upon the facts bound up in their lives, but it had become necessary to determine with an accuracy that could not be brought in question precisely the facts given under the six headings. to the surprise of the special agents detailed for this work, who had anticipated disagreeables of every order, the girls themselves took the liveliest interest in the matter, answered questions freely, and gave every facility for the fullest searching into each phase involved. american girls were found to form but . per cent of the whole number of working-women in massachusetts, of whom but . per cent had been born in that state. the results reached in this report may be regarded as a summary, not only of conditions for boston, but for all the large manufacturing towns of new england, later inquiry justifying this conclusion. the average age of working-girls was found to be . years, and the average at which they began work, . ; the average time actually at work, . years, and the average number of occupations followed , the time spent in each being . years. of the whole, per cent were found to do their own housework and sewing, either wholly or in part. but per cent were allowed any vacation, and but . per cent received pay during that time, the average vacation being . weeks. a little over per cent worked the full year without loss of time, while an average of . weeks was lost by per cent. the average time worked by all during the year was . weeks. in personal service . per cent worked more than ten hours a day; in trade, . per cent were so employed, and in manufactures . per cent. in all occupations . per cent worked more than ten hours a day, and . per cent more than sixty hours a week. in the matter of health . per cent of the whole number employed were in good health. the average weekly earnings for the average time employed, . weeks, was $ . , and the average weekly earnings of all the working-girls of boston for a whole year were $ . . the average weekly income, including earnings, assistance, and income from extra work done by many, was $ . a year. the average yearly income from all sources was $ . , and the average yearly expenses for positive needs $ . , leaving but $ . , on the average, as a margin for books, amusements, etc. those making savings are per cent of the whole, their average savings being $ . per year. a few run in debt, the average debt being $ . for the less than per cent incurring debt. of the total average yearly expenses, these percentages being based upon the law laid down by dr. engels of prussia, as to percentage of expenses belonging to subsistence, per cent must be expended for food and lodging, and per cent for clothing,--a total of per cent of total expenses for subsistence and clothing, leaving but per cent of total expense to be distributed to the other needs of living. these are, briefly summed up, the results of the investigation, in which the single workers constituted . of the whole, and the married but per cent, widows making up the number. it is impossible in these limits to give further detail on these points, all readers being referred to the report itself. the same questions that had first sought answer in new england were even more pressing in new york. as in most subjects of deep popular or scientific importance, the sense of need for more data by which to judge seemed in the air; and already the labor bureau of the state of new york, under the efficient guidance of mr. charles f. peck, had begun a course of inquiries of the same nature. for years, beginning with the new york "tribune," in the days when margaret fuller worked for it and touched at times upon social questions,--always in the mind of horace greeley, its founder,--there had been periodical stirs of feeling in behalf of sewing-women. it was known that the enormous influx of foreign labor naturally massed at this point, more than could ever be possible elsewhere, had brought with it evils suspected, but still not yet defined in any sense to be trusted. indications on the surface were seriously bad, but actual investigation had never tested their nature or degree. the report of the bureau for , which was given to the public in , met with a degree of interest and study not usually accorded these volumes, and roused public feeling to an unexpected extent. mr. peck brought to the work much the same order of interest that had marked that of colonel wright, and wrote in his introduction to the report the summary of the situation for new york city:-- "by reason of its immense population, its numerous and extensive manufactures, its wealth, its poverty, and general cosmopolitan character, new york city presents a field for investigation into the subject of 'working-women, their trades, wages, home and social conditions,' unequalled by any other centre of population in america. it opens up a wider and more diversified field for inquiry, study, and classification of the various industries in which women seek employment, than can be found even in european cities, with but few if any exceptions. it is for such reasons that the inquiry of the bureau into this special subject has been largely confined to the city named." two hundred and forty-seven trades are given in this report, in which some two hundred thousand women were found to be engaged, this being exclusive of domestic service. the divisions of the subject were substantially those adopted by the massachusetts bureau; but the numbers and complexity of conditions made the inquiry far more difficult. its results and their bearings will find place later on. it is sufficient now to say that the two may be regarded as summarizing all phases of work for women, and as an index to the difficulties at all other points in the country. the bureau of labor for connecticut sent out its first report in the same year ( ), and included investigations and statistics in the same lines, though, for reasons specified, in much more limited degree. that for for the same state took up in detail some points in regard to the work of both women and children, which, for want of both time and space, had been omitted in the first, their returns coinciding in all important particulars with those of the other bureaus. in the california bureau of labor touched the same points, but only incidentally, in its general analysis of the labor question. in the following year, however, the report covering the years and took up the question under the same aspects as those handled in the special reports on this topic, and gave full treatment of the wages, lives, and general conditions for working-women. it included, also, the facts, so far as they could be ascertained, of the nature, wages, and conditions of domestic service in california,--the first attempt at treating this difficult subject with any accuracy. the apprentice system, and an important chapter on manual training and its bearings make this report one of the most valuable, from the social point of view, that has been given, though where all are invaluable it is hard to characterize one above another. mr. tobin, for california, and mr. hutchins, for iowa, seemed moved at the same time in much the same way,--the iowa report for treating the many questions involved with that largeness which has thus far distinguished work in this direction. kansas, in the report for , gave general conditions, women being treated incidentally; and minnesota, in the report for the years and , gave a chapter on working-women, wages, etc. colorado followed, giving in the report for and , under the management of commissioner rice, a chapter on women wage-workers, in which space is given to certified complaints of the women themselves, as to what they consider the disabilities of their special trades. domestic service, with some of its abuses, was also considered, and is of much value. these reports sum up the work so far done in the west, where labor bureaus are of recent growth. the spirit of inquiry is, however, equally alive; and each year will see minuter detail and a deeper scientific spirit. maine, in the report for , took up many questions of general interest, with their incidental bearings on the work of women; and in came another report from kansas, in which the labor commissioner, mr. frank betton, gave large space to an investigation conducted under many difficulties, but covering the ground very fully. a very full report from michigan, under commissioner henry a. robinson, was issued in , nearly two hundred pages being given to an exhaustive examination into the conditions of women wage-earners in the state, its methods owing much to the work which had preceded it. with this background of admirable work always, no matter what might be the limitations, making each report a little broader in purpose and minuter in detail, the way was plain for something even more comprehensive. this was furnished by the bureau of labor of the united states, which had changed its name, and become, in june, , the department of labor, a part of the department of the interior. this report--the fourth from the bureau, and issued in --was entitled "working-women in large cities," and included investigations made in twenty-two cities, from boston to san francisco and san josé. all that long experience had demonstrated as most important in such work was brought to bear. the investigation covered manual labor in cities, excluding textile industries, save incidentally as these had already been treated, as well as domestic service. textile factories are usually outside of large cities, and it was the object to discover the opportunities of employment in the way of manual labor in cities themselves. three hundred and forty-three distinct industries showed themselves, and others were found which were not included, it being safe to say that some four hundred may be considered open to women. as before stated, many are simply subdivisions, made by the constantly increasing complexity of machinery. the agents of the department carried their work into the lowest and worst places in the cities named, because in such places are to be found women who are struggling for a livelihood in most respectable callings,--living in them as a matter of necessity, since they cannot afford to live otherwise, but leaving them whenever wages are sufficient to admit of change. it is this report which forms the summary of all the work that has preceded it, and that gives the truest exponent of all present conditions. it is only necessary to add to it the summaries of the state reports at other points, to see the aspect of the question as a whole; and thus we are ready to consider by its aid the general rates of wages and of the status of the trades of every nature in which women are now engaged. footnotes: [ ] report for , pp. - . [ ] report for , pp. - . vi. present wage-rates in the united states. under this heading it is proposed to include, not only the trades just specified as coming under the investigations recorded in "working-women in large cities," but also such data as can be gleaned from all the labor reports which have given any attention to this phase of the labor question. naturally, then, we turn to the report of the massachusetts bureau for , the first statement of these points, and compare it with the results obtained in the last report from washington, as well as with the returns from the various states where investigation of the question has been made. exceptionally favorable conditions would seem to belong to the year in which the report for appeared. the financial distress of , with its results, had passed. new industries of many orders had opened up for women, and trade in all its forms called for workers and gave almost constant employ, save in the few occupations which have a distinct season, and oblige those engaged in them to divide their time between two if a living is assured. a distinction must at once be made in the definition of earnings. in speaking of them, there are necessarily three designations,--wages, earnings, and income. wages represent the actual pay per week at the time employed, with no reference to the number of weeks' employment during the year. earnings are the total receipts for any year from wages. thus, for example, a girl is paid $ a week wages, and works forty weeks of her year. her earnings would then be for the year $ , though her wages of $ per week would indicate that she earned $ a year; while in fact her average weekly earnings would be for the whole year $ . . income is her total receipts for the year from all sources: wages, extra work, help from friends or from investments; in fact, any receipts from which expenses can be paid. in preparing the tables of these reports, the highest, the lowest, the average, and the general average were brought into a final comparison. often but one wage is given, and it then becomes naturally both highest and lowest; but all figures are made to indicate an entire occupation or branch of industry, and not a few high or low paid employees in that branch. it is only with the final comparison that we are able to deal, the reader being referred to the reports themselves for the invaluable details given at full length and including many hundred pages. the divisions of occupations are the same as those of the tenth census, and the tables are made on the same system. to determine the general conditions for the twenty thousand at work, it was necessary to have accurate detail as to one thousand; and, in fact, , were interviewed. directly after the work in this direction had ended, and before the report was ready for publication, a general reduction of ten per cent in wages took place, and this must be kept in mind in dealing with the returns recorded. in this, recapitulation is given in full, and, as will be seen, includes all occupations open to women. recapitulation. ======================================================================== | boston. |other parts of mass.| other states. |----------------+--------------------+---------------- | number|average | number | average | number| average | | weekly | | weekly | | weekly | |earnings| | earnings | |earnings |-------+--------+---------+----------+-------+-------- government and | | | | | | professional | | $ | | $ | | $ domestic and | | | | | | personal office | | | | | | trade and | | | | | | transportation | | | | | | manufactures and | | | | | | mechanical | | | | | | industries | , | | | | | |-------+--------+---------+----------+-------+-------- all occupations | , | $ | | $ | | $ ======================================================================== the commissioners of the new york state bureau of labor followed a slightly different method. the returns are no less minute, but are given under the heading of each trade, two hundred and forty-seven of which were investigated. the wages of workwomen for the entire year run from $ . to $ a week, the general average not being given, though later returns make it $ . . this is, however, for skilled labor; and as a vast proportion of women workers in new york city are engaged in sewing, the poorest paid of all industries, we must accept the first figures as nearer the truth. an expert on shirts receives as high as $ a week, in some cases $ ; but in slop work, and under the sweating-system, wages fall to $ . or $ per week, and at times less. mr. peck found cloakmakers working on the most expensive and perfectly finished garments for cents a day, a full day's pay being from to cents.[ ] in other cases a day's work brought in but cents, and seventeen overalls of blue denim gave a return of cents. two and a half cents each is paid for the making of boys' gingham waists, with trimming on neck and sleeves, including the button-holes; and the women who made these sat sixteen hours at the sewing-machine, with a result of cents.[ ] this was for irregular work. women employed on clothing in general, working for reputable firms, receive from $ . to $ per week. in the tobacco manufacture, in which great numbers are employed, $ is the lowest actual earnings, and $ the highest per week. in cigarettes, the pay ranges from $ to $ per week. in dry-goods, with ten divisions of employment,--cashiers, bundle-girls, saleswomen, floor-walkers, seamstresses, cloakmakers, cash-girls, stock-girls, milliners, and sewing-girls,--the lowest sum per week is $ . , paid to cash-girls, and the highest paid to floor-walkers, $ . on the east side of the city, shop girls receive often as low as $ per week; in a few cases specified, $ . per week.[ ] in laundry-work, which includes several divisions, wages weekly range from $ . to $ , though ironers of special excellence sometimes make from $ to $ per week. in millinery the wages are from $ to $ per week. in preserving and fruit-canning wages are from $ . to $ , the average worker earning about $ per week. mr. peck states that in fashion trades the two distinct seasons bring the year's earnings to about six months. "learners" in the trades coming under this head receive $ . per week. saleswomen suffer also from season trade, as it necessitates reduction of force. the better class of workers receive from $ to $ per week, while heads of departments range from $ to $ , or even higher, for exceptional merit. these cases are of the rarest, however, the wage as an average falling below that of boston. but three state reports cover the same dates as these already quoted ( and ),--connecticut, new jersey, and california, the former being for . in this, women's wages are given incidentally in general tables, and must be disentangled to find any average. in artificial flowers the highest wage is given as $ , and the lowest $ , the average being $ . in blankets and woollen goods the highest is $ . and the lowest $ , an average of $ per week. in factory work of all orders, wages range from $ to $ . per week, the average paid to women and girls being $ . per week. in clothing, including underwear, wages are from $ to $ per week, and the average annual income of women in these trades is given as $ per year. in cloakmaking the lowest wage is $ , the highest $ , and the average $ . . the average wage for san francisco is given as $ . , and that for the whole state is about $ . the connecticut report for gives simply the yearly wage in various trades. reason for this is found in the fact that it was the first, and could thus deal with the subject only tentatively. clothing is given as producing for women a yearly average of $ , and shirts $ . factory work gave $ , paper boxes $ , and woollen goods $ . in the report for , the lowest average wage is reported as found in the making of wearing apparel; but the average for the state was found to be a trifle over $ . per week. the report from new jersey makes the lowest wages $ per week, and the highest $ , the average being $ . this report covers ground more fully and in more varied directions than any one of the same period, though there is only incidental reference to the work of women as a whole, the returns being given in the general tables of wages. wages and the cost of living are compared, and the chapter under this head is one of the most valuable in the summary of reports as a whole. the report for gives the same general average of wages for the state, but adds an exhaustive treatment of "earnings, cost of living, and prices." maine sent out its first annual report in , and gives the wages of women workers as $ . for the lowest, and $ . for the highest, the annual earnings ranging from $ to $ . the report from the same state for takes up the subject of working-women in detail, giving their home or boarding conditions, sanitary conditions, their own remarks on trades, wages, etc., and the aspect of their labor as a whole. the average wage remains the same. rhode island, in its third annual report for , under the direction of commissioner almon k. goodwin, gives the average wage for the state as $ . , and devotes the bulk of its space to working-women, with full returns from the entire state. for the same year california, by its labor commissioner, mr. john j. tobin, gives an equally exhaustive statement of the conditions of women wage-earners in that state. the lowest weekly wage given is $ , and the highest $ . plain cooks receive from $ to $ a month with board and lodging, and domestic servants from $ to $ with board. in cloak-making the lowest wage is $ , and the highest $ . ; and in shirt-making the lowest is $ . , and the highest $ . general clothing and underwear range from $ . to $ , and other trades average a trifle higher wage than in new england. the chapter on domestic service is suggestive and important, and the whole treatment makes the report a necessity to all who would understand the situation in detail. this, however, is so true of all that have touched upon the subject that it appears invidious to single out any one alone. they must be taken together. with each year the scientific value of each increases, and there appears to be distinct emulation among the commissioners as to which shall embody the most in the returns made and the general treatment of the whole. the first report from colorado, issued in , mr. james rice commissioner, devotes a chapter to women wage-earners, with an additional one on domestic service and its drawbacks. the average wage for the state is given as $ ; and the commissioner states that notwithstanding the general impression that higher wages are paid in colorado than at any other point save california, actual returns show that the average sums in several occupations are less than that paid to persons similarly employed in cities along the atlantic seaboard. kansas, in its fifth annual report issued in , gives a section to working-women. the commissioner, mr. frank betton, considers the returns imperfect, great difficulty having been experienced in securing them. the average weekly wage is given as $ . . expenses are carefully analyzed, and there is a report of the remarks of employers, as well as from a number of those employed. in the report from iowa for , commissioner hutchins laments that so few women have been willing to fill out blanks of returns. the wage returns given range from $ . to $ . the report for makes mention of continued difficulties in securing returns, and gives the annual earnings of women as from $ to $ . the tables include cost of living and many other essential particulars. wisconsin, in the report for , has a chapter on working-girls. it gives the average weekly income in personal services as $ . ; in trade, $ . ; in manufactures, $ . , and the general average for the year as $ . . minnesota, whose first report, under the supervision of commissioner john lamb, appeared in for the years and , found little or no room for statistics, but included a chapter on working-women, with a few admirable tables of age, nativity, home and working conditions, etc. minute inquiry was made as to cost of living, clothing, etc.; and the results form a chapter of painful interest, that on domestic service being equally suggestive. clothing, as usual, represents the lowest average wage, $ . per week, the highest being $ . , and the general average a trifle over $ . michigan, in , under its labor commissioner, mr. henry a. robinson, added to the list one of the most thorough studies yet made of general conditions. the agents of the bureau, trained for the work, made personal visits to working-women and girls to the number of , , this representing one hundred and thirty-seven distinct industries and three hundred and seventy-eight occupations. the blanks prepared for filling out contained one hundred and twenty-nine questions, classified as follows: social, ; industrial, ; hours of labor, ; economic, ; sanitary, , with seven others as to dress, societies, church attendance, with remarks and suggestions from the workers themselves. as usual, in such cases, employers here and there objected to any investigation, fearing labor organizations were at the bottom of it; but the majority allowed free examination. the report is very full, and gives a clear and full view of the individual lives of this body of women workers. the average wage proved to be $ . per week, the average income for the year being $ . . the average income of teachers and those in public positions was $ . . this is the showing, state by state, so far as bureaus have reported. many states have made no move in this direction; but interest is now thoroughly aroused, and the subject is likely to find treatment in all, this depending somewhat, however, on the character of the state industries and the numbers at work in each. manufacturing necessarily brings with it conditions that in the end compel inquiry; and for most of the southern states such industries are still new, while the west has not yet found the same occasion as the east for full knowledge of the problems involved in woman's work and wages. we come now to the most elaborate and far-reaching inquiry yet made,--the work of the united states bureau of labor under commissioner wright, entitled "working-women in large cities." twenty-two of these are reported upon after one of the most rigorous examinations ever undertaken; and the average wage of each tallies with the rates given in the states to which they belong. taken alphabetically, the list is as follows:-- average weekly earnings, by cities. atlanta $ . | new orleans $ . baltimore . | new york . boston . | philadelphia . brooklyn . | providence . buffalo . | richmond . charleston, s.c. . | st. louis . chicago . | st. paul . cincinnati . | san francisco . cleveland . | san josé . indianapolis . | savannah . louisville . | ---- newark . | all cities . in addition to these figures, it seems well to give the average yearly earnings of women in some of the most profitable industries, those being chosen which are seldom affected by "seasons":-- artificial flowers, $ . ; awnings and tents, $ . ; bookbinding, $ . ; boots and shoes, $ . ; candy, $ . ; carpets, $ . ; cigar boxes, $ . ; cigar factory, $ . ; cigarette factory, $ . ; cloak factory, $ . ; clothing factory, $ . ; cotton-mills, $ . ; dressmaking, $ . ; dry-goods stores, $ . ; jewelry factory, $ . ; men's furnishing-goods factory, $ . ; millinery, $ . ; paper-box factory, $ . ; plug-tobacco factory, $ . ; printing-office, $ ; skirt factory, $ . ; smoking-tobacco factory, $ . . these, so far as they have been collected and tabulated by the various labor bureaus, are the returns for the united states as a whole. the reports for the following years of and were expected to be far more general, but this has not proved to be the case. average wage per state. maine $ . massachusetts . connecticut . rhode island . new york . new jersey . california . colorado . kansas . wisconsin . minnesota . all cities . footnotes: [ ] third annual report of new york bureau of labor, p. . these are mr. peck's figures; but the united states report gives the average for skilled labor as $ . per week, and adds that the unskilled earns far less. [ ] ibid. p. . [ ] new york bureau of statistics of labor, third annual report, p. . vii. general conditions for english workers. so far as opportunity is concerned, it is the united states only that offers a practically unlimited field to women workers, to whom some four hundred trades and occupations are now open. comparison with other countries is, however, essential, if we would judge fairly of conditions as a whole; and thus we turn first to that other english-speaking race, and the english worker at home. at once we are faced with the impossibility of gathering much more than surface indications, since in no other country is there any counterpart to our admirable system of investigation and tabulation, each year more and more systematic and thorough. in spite of the fact that factory laws had their birth in england, and that the whole system of child labor--the early horrors of which find record in thousands of pages of special reports from inspectors appointed by government--has been through their means modified and improved, there are, even now, no sources of information as to numbers at work or the characteristics of special industries. the census must be the chief dependence; and here we find the enormous proportions to which the employment of women has attained. in these returns gave for england and wales , , women at work. twenty years later the number had doubled, half a million being found in london alone. this does not include all, since, as mr. charles booth notes in his recent "labor and life of the people," many employed women do not return their employments. mr. booth's work is a purely private enterprise, assisted by devoted co-workers, and by trained experts employed at his own expense. for the final estimate must be added general census returns, and the recent reports on the sweating-system in london and other english cities. beginning with factory operatives and their interests, nothing is easier than to follow the course of legislation on their behalf. the "life of lord shaftesbury" is, in itself, the history of the movement for the protection of women and children,--a movement begun early in the present century, and made imperative by the hideous disclosures of oppression and outrage, not only among factory operatives, but the women and children in mining and other industries. active as were his efforts and those of his colleagues, it is only within a generation that the fruit of their labor is plainly seen. as late as , at the time engel's notable book on "the condition of the working-class in england" appeared, the labor of children of four and five years was still permitted; and women and children alike worked in mines, in brickyards, and other exposed and dangerous employments for the merest pittance. the pages of engel's book swarm with incidents of individual and class misery; and while he admits fully, in the appendix prepared in , that many of the evils enumerated have disappeared, he adds that for the mass of workers "the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, perhaps lower." year by year, in spite of constant agitation and the unceasing effort of lord shaftesbury to alter the worst abuses, these evils remained, and faced the examiner into social problems, slight ameliorations here and there serving chiefly to throw into darker relief the misery of the situation. not only the philanthropist but officials joined hands; and in the proceedings of the british association for the advancement of science, each year added to the number and importance of the protests against an iniquitous system. chief among these protests ranked that against the overwork of pregnant mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing evils, w. stanley jevons, wrote, "infinite, irreparable wrong is done to helpless children," adding that the appalling infant mortality of the manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the public mind than the death of a single murderer. at nearly the same time mr. f.w. lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before the british association for the advancement of science, entitled "the destruction of infancy;"[ ] and this was supplemented by testimony from experts, the statistical society adding weighty testimony to the same effect.[ ] from these and other official testimony it was found that in nineteen manufacturing towns,[ ] out of , , children [forty-first report of the registrar-general, p. ] born, , died in infancy. the rate of mortality varied from . in portsmouth through an ascending scale, being in london . and in liverpool the almost incredible proportion of . per thousand. in a rural country infant mortality does not exceed from thirty-five to forty per thousand. the report of the select committee on the protection of infant life was filled with details so horrible that only the sworn testimony of experts made them credited at all.[ ] dr. hunter's report on rural mortality shows that when mothers are employed in what are known as "field gangs" for out-of-door work, leaving their children in the charge of old women too weak for such labor as their own, that infants died like sheep. godfrey's cordial was the chief engine of destruction; the corps of inspectors who reported to the government finding infants in all stages of prostration, from the overdoses of the popular specific warranted to render any attention from nurse or mother quite unnecessary. as to the direct effects of factory or out-door labor on pregnant mothers, out of , births among factory mothers, there died from - of children under one year of age, in portsmouth , , liverpool , , london , , and other towns with textile industries , . statistics taken in germany and at other points all went to show that in the matter of out-door labor at the harvest season, when all women-workers are in the fields, the deaths of nursing infants were three times as great as in the other nine months. for details and deduction from these facts the reader is referred to the reports themselves. "i go so far," wrote mr. jevons, "as to advocate the ultimate complete exclusion of mothers of children under the age of three years from factories and workshops;" and his conviction voiced that of every examiner into the situation as it stood at that time. the factory and workshop act came as partial solution to the many problems; and though regarded by the working-class as a mass of arbitrary restrictions whose usefulness they denied and in whose benefits they had no faith, it has actually proved the great charter of the working-classes. there are points still to be altered,--modifications made necessary by the constant change in methods of production, as well as in the enlarging sense of the ethical principles involved. but our own legislation is still far behind it at many points, and its work is done efficiently and thoroughly. laws had been made, one by one, fifteen standing on the statute books in , when all were abrogated, their essential features being codified in the act as it stands to-day,--a genuine industrial code in one hundred and seven sections. up to this date violation of its provisions had been incessant; but determined enforcement brought about a uniform working day, protection of dangerous machinery, proper ventilation, improved sanitary conditions, an interdict on sunday labor, and many other reforms in administration. fourteen years have seen next to no change in the act, and the condition of women and child workers in factories and workshops has come to be regarded as the best that modern systems of production admit. these workers, whose numbers now mount to hundreds of thousands, are a class apart, and for them legislation has accomplished all that legislation seems able to do in alleviating social miseries. content with the results achieved, need of further effort in other directions failed of recognition, and apathy became the general condition. it was during this season of repose that the public mind received first one shock and then another. "the bitter cry of outcast london" appalled all who read; and leaf by leaf the new book of revelations disclosed always deeper depths of misery and want among all workers with the needle,--from the days of the fig-leaf the symbol of grinding toil and often hopeless misery. not alone from professional agitators, so called, but from philanthropists of every order, came the cry for help. the factory and workshop act had not touched home labor. the sweating-system, born of modern conditions, had risen unsuspected, and ran riot, not only in east london, but even in back alleys of the sacred west, and in the swarming southwest region beyond london bridge. the london "lancet," the most authoritative medical journal of the world, conservative as it has always been, has at last found that it must join hands with socialist and anarchist, "scientific" or otherwise, with philanthropists of every order, against the new evil and its horrors. rich and poor alike were involved. the virus of the deadly conditions under which the garments took shape was implanted in every stitch that held them together, and transferred itself to the wearer. not only from london, but from every city of england, came the same cry; and the public faced suddenly an abyss of misery whose existence had been unknown and unsuspected, and the causes of which seemed inexplicable. for many months of the year just ended ( ) parliamentary investigation has gone on. report after report has been made to its committees; and as testimony from accredited sources poured in, incidentally a flood of light has been let in upon many forms of work outside the clothing-manufacturer. to-day, in four huge volumes of some thousand pages each, one may read the testimony, heart-sickening in every detail,--a noted french political economist, the comte d'haussonville, describing it, in a recent article in "la revue des deux mondes" as "the martyrology of english industries." in such conditions inspection is inoperative. an army of inspectors would not suffice where every house represents from one to a dozen workshops under its roof, in each of which sanitary conditions are defied, and the working day made more often fourteen and sixteen hours than twelve. even for this day a starvation wage is the rule; the sewing-machine operative, for example, while earning a wage of fifteen or eighteen pence, furnishing her own thread and being forced to pay rental on the machine. a portion of a wage table is given here as illustrative of rates, and used as a reference table before the preparation of mr. booth's book, which gives much the same figures:-- making paper bags, - / d. to - / d. per thousand; possible earnings, s. to s. per week. button-holes, d. a dozen; possible earnings, s. a week. shirts, d. each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done between a.m. and p.m. sack sewing, d. for twenty-five; d. to s. d. per hundred. possible earnings, s. per week. pill-box making, s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, s. per week. shirt button-hole making, d. a dozen; can do three or four dozen a day. whip-making, s. a dozen; can do a dozen a day. trousers finishing, d. to d. each, finding one's own cotton; can do four a day. shirt-finishing, d. to d. a dozen; possible earnings, s. a week. outside of the cities, where the needle is almost the sole refuge of the unskilled worker, every industry is invaded. a recent report as to english nail and chain workers shows hours and general conditions to be almost intolerable, while the wage averages eightpence a day. in the mines, despite steady action concerning them, women are working by hundreds for the same rate. in short, from every quarter comes in repeated testimony that the majority of working englishwomen are struggling for a livelihood; that a pound a week is a fortune, and that the majority live on a wage below subsistence point. the enormous influx of foreign population is partly responsible for these conditions, but far less than is popularly supposed; since the jews, most often accused, are in many cases juster employers than the christians, and suffer from the same causes. for all alike, legislation is powerless to reach certain ingrained evils, and the recent sweating-commission ended its report with the words:-- "we express the firm hope that the faithful exposure of the evils that we have been called upon to unveil, will have the effect of leading capitalists to lend greater attention to the conditions under which work is done, which furnishes the merchandise they demand. when legislation has attained the limit beyond which it can no longer be useful, the amelioration of the condition of workers can result only from the increasing moral sense of those who employ them." this conclusion, it may be added, is in full accord with that given in the encyclical of pope leo xiii., as well as with that of our most serious workers at home; our own government examination into the sweating-system, now embodied in a congressional report accessible to all, being simply confirmation of every point made in that for england. as a summary of many working conditions in london, i add part of a report made by an indefatigable student of social conditions, margaret harkness, associated now with mr. charles booth, and as able an observer as her cousin and co-worker, miss beatrice potter, whose report on the sweating-system makes part of mr. booth's first volume:[ ]-- "i have, for the last six months, been attempting to find out something about the hours and wages of girls who work at various trades in the city. had i known how difficult the task would be, i should probably never have attempted it. last time i heard of mr. besant he was sitting in his office, overwhelmed with figures and facts. he said then that he did not expect to publish anything about the work of girls and women in the united kingdom under a year or eighteen months. i do not wonder at it. apart from the method of his inquiry, i know how exceedingly difficult it is to arrive at the truth; the tact and patience it needs to make such investigations. employees and employers take very different views of the same circumstances; one must listen to both, and then split the difference. "there are at the present time absolutely no figures to go upon if one wishes to learn something about the hours and wages of girls who follow certain occupations in the city. the factory inspectors (admirable men, but very much overworked) come, with the most naive delight, to visit any person who has information to give about the people over whose interests they are supposed to watch with fatherly interest. clergymen shake their heads, or refer one to homes and charities. one has to find out the truth for one's self. both employers and employees must be visited. even then one must wait days and weeks to inspire them with confidence, for thus alone can one obtain a thorough knowledge of things as they really are, and arrive at facts unbiassed by prejudice. "so far i have found that there are, at least, two hundred trades at which girls work in the city. some employ hundreds of hands, and some only fifty or sixty. printers give the greatest amount of work, perhaps; but there are at least two hundred other occupations in which girls earn a living; namely, brush-makers, button-makers, cigarette-makers, electric-light fitters, fur-workers, india-rubber-stamp machinist, magic-lantern-slide makers, perfumers, portmanteau-makers, spectacle-makers, surgical-instrument makers, tie-makers, etc. these girls can be roughly divided into two classes,--those who earn from s. to s., and those who earn from s. to s. per week. taking slack time into consideration, it is, i think, safe to say that s. is the average weekly wage of the first class, and s. d. that of the second class. their weekly wage often falls below this, and sometimes rises above it. the hours are almost invariably from a.m. to p.m., with one hour for dinner and a half-holiday on saturday. i know few cases in which such girls work less; a good many in which over-time reaches to ten or eleven at night; a few in which over-time means all night. there is little to choose between the two classes. the second are allowed by their employers to wear old clothes and boots; the first must make 'a genteel appearance.' "i often hear rich women say, 'oh, working-girls cannot be very poor; they wear such smart feathers.' if these women knew how the girls have to stint in underclothing and food in order to make what their employers call 'a genteel appearance,' i think they would pass quite another verdict. i will give two typical cases: a girl living just over blackfriars bridge, in one small room, for which she pays s., earns s. a week in a printer's business. she works from a.m. to p.m., then returns home to do all the washing, cleaning, cooking, etc., that is necessary in a one-room establishment. she has an invalid mother dependent on her efforts, and is out-patient herself at one of the london hospitals. she was sixteen last christmas. another girl, who lives in two cellars near lisson grove, with father, mother, and six brothers and sisters, earns s. d. a week in a well-known factory. she is seventeen years old, but does not look more than ten or eleven. every morning she walks a mile to her work, arriving at eight o'clock; every evening she walks a mile back, reaching home about seven o'clock. if she arrives at the factory five minutes late, she is fined d. if she stays away a whole day, she is 'drilled,'--that is, kept without work a whole week. her father has been out of employment for six months; so her weekly s. d. goes into the family purse. her food consists of three slices of bread and butter, which she takes to the factory for dinner; one slice of bread and butter and some weak tea for supper and breakfast. these cases are not picked. they are to be found scattered all over london. many and many a family is at the present time being kept by the labor of one or two such girls, who can at the most earn a few shillings. when one thinks what the life of a young girl is in happy families, all the joyousness of which she is capable, until sorrow sets its seal on her, one's heart aches for the sad lives of these girls in the city. 'and still her voice comes ringing across the soft still air, and still i hear her singing, "oh, life, thou art most fair!"' "a young girl is capable of feeling in one brief hour more intense delight than a boy of her age experiences in a fortnight. yet all this joyousness is ruthlessly stamped upon by competition, and thousands of girls in london have no enjoyment except to gaze at monstrosities in penny gaffs, or to dance on dirty pavements; and generally these poor things are too tired even to do that. it is strange that the public take so little interest in these girls, considering they must become mothers of future citizens. 'the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.' what sort of daughters are these girls with their pinched faces and stunted bodies likely to give england? what will posterity say of the girl labor that now goes on in the city? i have seen strong men weeping because they have no bread to give their children; i know at the london docks chains have been replaced by wooden barriers, because starving men behind pressed so hard on starving men in front, that the latter were nearly cut in two by the iron railings; i have watched a contractor mauled when he had no work to give, and have myself been nearly killed by a brick-bat that was hurled at a contractor's head by a man whose family was starving: but i deliberately say of all the victims of our present competitive system i pity these girls the most. they are so fragile. honest work is made for them almost impossible; and if they slip, no one gives them a second chance, they are kicked and spat upon by the public. i know that the girl-labor question is but a portion of the larger labor question, that nothing can be done for them at present; but i wish that they were not the victims of the _laissez-faire_ policy in two ways instead of one; i wish that their richer sisters were not so terribly apathetic about them." for scotland, industries, wages, and general conditions are much the same as those of england. factory life has been at many points improved, and the superior thrift and education of the working-class shows in the large amount of their savings. but glasgow has faced conditions almost as terrible as those given in "the bitter cry of outcast london," with a result not yet attained by the latter city, having destroyed hundreds of foul tenements to make room for improved dwellings. for ireland, though irish linen, poplins, and woollens are the synonym of excellence, the proportion of women workers in these industries is comparatively small. in a few counties in the south irish lace is made, but the women are chiefly agricultural laborers. thanks to the efforts of parnell, in , there was formed "the association for the promotion of irish industries," then chiefly destroyed by the "act of union" which permitted england to levy protective tariffs on all irish manufactures. statistics on these points are hidden in english blue-books, and we have no very reliable data as to the number of women and children employed. the efforts of the countess of aberdeen, during the term of her husband as viceroy of ireland, and of the countess of dunraven on the dunraven estates in the county of limerick, have done much to re-establish the lace industry,--with such success that the work compares favorably with that of some of the french convents. in wales, as in the north of england, women and children are employed in the mines, and there is constant evasion of the laws regulating hours, with a wage as inadequate as the work is heavy. heavy woollens and corduroy employ a small proportion in their manufacture, wage and hours being the same as those of england. footnotes: [ ] "the destruction of infants," by mr. f.w. lowndes, m.r.c.s., british association for the advancement of science, report for , p. . [ ] journal of the statistical society, sept., , vol. xxxiii. pp. - . [ ] parliamentary paper, no. , july , : collected series, vol. vii. p. . [ ] sixth report of the medical officer of the privy council, , pp. - . parliamentary paper, , no. , , vol. xxviii. [ ] labor and life of the people, vol. i.: east london. edited by charles booth, p. . viii. general conditions for continental workers. for france the census of showed a list of women workers in paris earning sixty centimes a day; , earning from sixty centimes to three francs, and earning over three francs. that for showed , , earning from fifty centimes to one franc twenty-five centimes daily; , of these workers being furnished lodging, food, and washing. of the entire number , earned from one franc fifty centimes to four francs a day; earned from four francs fifty centimes to ten francs daily, most of the latter class being heads of work rooms or shops. the rise in wages affected the better orders of worker, but left the sewing-woman's wage nearly unchanged. levasseur[ ] tells us that toward the end of the reign of louis philippe the wage of a woman varied ordinarily from twelve to twenty-five sous, exceptionally from twenty to forty; that of children being from six to fifteen sous; of men from thirty sous for ordinary laborers, to forty or forty-five for skilled work. the census for gave for paris , workwomen, , of whom were sewers. convent sewing, that of the prisons and reformatories, and the competition of women who had homes and worked simply for pin-money, kept the wage at a minimum; and these conditions still operate toward that end, precisely as they do for all countries where the needle is a means of support, the evil being felt most severely in our cities. the facts in the life of a french seamstress are much the same as those of the englishwoman. to earn two francs a day she must make eight chemises, working from fourteen to sixteen hours daily to accomplish this. the income of the average sewer does not exceed, at the best, five hundred francs, and most usually falls below. rents are so high that a garret requires not less than one hundred francs a year. in his researches into conditions, jules simon[ ] found that this sum compelled deprivations of every order. expenses were as follows: rent, francs; clothing, bedding, etc., francs; washing, francs; heat and light, francs. these sums amounted to . francs, the amount remaining for food being . or a little less than twelve sous a day,--the amount expended by two of our own seamstresses in new york in , the items being given by the earner.[ ] existence on french soil, whether in paris, the manufacturing towns, or the provinces, has come to mean something very different from the facts of a generation ago. then, with wages hardly above "subsistence point," the thrifty frenchwoman not only lived, but managed to put by a trifle each month. wages have risen, but prices have at the same time advanced. every article of daily need is at the highest point,--sugar, which the london workwoman buys at a penny a pound, being twelve cents a pound in paris; and flour, milk, eggs, equally high. fuel is so dear that shivering is the law for all save the wealthy; and rents are no less dear, with no "improved dwellings" system to give the most for the scant sum at disposal. bread and coffee, chiefly chiccory, make one meal; bread alone is the staple of the others, with a bit of meat for sunday. hours are frightfully long, the disabilities of the french needleworker being in many points the same as those of her english sister. in short, even skilled labor has many disabilities, the saving fact being that unskilled is in far less proportion than across the channel, the present system of education including many forms of industrial training. generations of freer life than that of england, and many traditions in her favor give certain advantages to the woman born on french soil. it is taken for granted that she will after marriage share her husband's work or continue her own, and her keen intelligence is relied upon to a degree unknown to other nations. repeated wars, and the enrolment of all her men for fixed periods of service, have developed the capacity of women in business directions, and they fill every known occupation. the light-heartedness of her nation is in her favor, and she has learned thoroughly how to extract the most from every centime. there is none of the hopeless dowdiness and dejection that characterize the lower order of englishwoman. trim, tidy, and thrifty, the frenchwoman faces poverty with a smiling courage that is part of her strength, this look changing often for the older ones into a patience which still holds courage. thus far there is no official report of the industries in which they are engaged, and figures must be drawn from unofficial sources. m. paul leroy-beaulieu, the noted political economist, in his history of "the labor of women in the nineteenth century," computes the number of women at work in the manufactories of textile fabrics, cotton, woollen, linen, and silk, as nearly one million; and outside of this is the enormous number of lace-makers and general workers in all occupations. there are over a quarter of a million of these lace-workers, whose wages run from eighty and ninety centimes to two francs a day; and the rate of payment for swiss lace-workers is the same. during the congrès féministe held in the autumn of , madame vincent, an ardent champion of women wage-earners, presented statistics, chiefly from private sources, showing that out of , , artisans in france, there are , , women who receive in wages or dividends nearly $ , , a year. their wage is much less in proportion to the work they do than that of men, yet they draw thirty-five per cent of the entire sum spent in wages. in paris alone, over , women are doing business on an independent footing; and of , suits judged in by the workingman's council, , concerned women. in spite of these numbers and the abuses known to exist, the chamber of deputies has refused practically to extend to women workers the law for the regulation of the conditions of work in workshops. the refusal is disguised under the form of adjournment of the matter, the reason assigned being that the grievances of women are by no means ripe enough for discussion. women themselves are not at all of the same mind; and the result has already been a move toward definite organization of trades, and united action for all women engaged in them,--a step hitherto regarded as impossible. the first effect of this has been a protest from paris shopgirls against the action of the chamber of deputies, and the formation of committees whose business will be to enlist the interest and co-operation of women throughout the entire country,--a slow process, but one that will mean both education and final release from some at least of the worst disabilities now weighting all women workers. "la femme devenue ouvrière, n'est plus une femme," wrote jules simon in a burst of despair at the conditions of the paris workwoman; and he repeated the word as his investigations extended to manufacturing france, and he found everywhere the home in many cases abolished, the _crèche_ taking its place till the child, vitally dependent upon a care that included love, gave up the struggle for existence, rendering its tiny quota to the long list of infant mortality. m. leroy-beaulieu had described years before the practical extinction of the family and the government interference[ ] brought about by the discoveries made by the government inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child's needs or the simplest demands of a home. appalled at these conditions, france set about the organization of industrial schools, and these have altered the whole face of affairs. generations of abuses had made, up to the time of the investigation, the history of the working-class in france. one of their best-known scientific observers, the statistician villermé, examined in person, and as one of the government inspecting committee reported on the condition of dwellings in lille, amiens, and other manufacturing towns of france. the weavers and spinners of lille lived in caves, of which thirty-six hundred were found occupied by families,--father, mother, and children as soon as old enough, employed in the mills, and returning at night to these dens, where filth and darkness periodically did their work of decimation, and where infant mortality had reached the maximum. horrified at the discoveries made, three thousand of these dwellings were at once destroyed. but for unknown and quite inscrutable reasons six hundred were allowed to remain and receive double the original number of tenants.[ ] years passed before the last cave was filled up, the children born in them providing an enormous percentage for prison and galleys. at douai, rouen, roubaix, and many other points, such hideous filth marked the homes of the working-class that villermé reported: "the walls are covered with a thousand layers of ordure." the women, exhausted and depleted by a day's labor of from twelve to fourteen hours, had no time to think of cleanliness. in fact, its meaning had never been taught; and though industrial schools increase, hours are now shortened, and inspection is active, it remains true that almost the same conditions perpetuate themselves at many points,--the descriptions given by the great realist, zola, of women and children in the mines, and the hideousness of their home life, being very literal and unexaggerated fact. as to conditions of the work itself, many trades and occupations require for their proper carrying on methods and surroundings absolutely destructive to health. in all preparation of hemp and oakum dust is excessive; far beyond that of the cotton-mill, which itself breeds consumption. in the spinning of flax great heat and water are both necessities. "nothing is more wretched," writes jules simon, "than a linen-spinner's surroundings. water covers the brick floor. the odor of the linen and a temperature often exceeding twenty-five reaumur fill the workroom with an intolerable stench. the majority of the workwomen, obliged to put off most of their garments, are huddled together in this pestilential atmosphere, imprisoned in the machines, pressed one against the other, their bodies streaming with sweat, their feet bare to the ankle; and when a day, nominally of twelve hours but really of thirteen and a half, is over, they quit the workroom for home, the rags they wear barely protecting them from cold and damp." details of the same order abound in the work of the political economist m. leroy-beaulieu,[ ] who seeks at all points to give the most favorable impression possible. in each and every case the great authorities appear to be of one mind as to the disastrous effects upon the children born to these mothers. that the _crèche_ is now practically a part of every factory makes little or no difference. "the _crèche_," writes jules simon, "abolishes maternity in all save its pains. the working mother is defrauded of her own means of growth, bound up in the training of the child; and the child loses its right to be loved and guarded by love." in short, for all continental countries, as well as for england and our women, the question of child labor and the destiny of the child are inextricably bound up in that of the working mother, and are vital factors in working out the problem of woman as a wage-earner. what proportion of wage-earning women recruit the ranks of prostitution, is a question often asked. in paris, which is in one sense the focus of french labor, its many opportunities drawing to it a large contingent from the provinces, it is popularly supposed that the ranks of the sewing-women give large proportion to houses of prostitution. this opinion is the prevailing one for all large cities, whether in europe or america, yet is disproved on all sides. for paris parent-duchalet states that in the statistics given by the prefecture of police, in a table including forty-one categories, women with no occupation had first rank as prostitutes, domestic service giving the second, and sewing-women the smallest proportion. this is the more surprising when one considers that their wage is often below the point of subsistence, and that temptation of every order waits upon them. at the best the wage falls far below that of men, even when both engage in the same work. the present movement toward organization is the first step toward a general bettering of all trades and their wage; and for fullest details of this, and work in connection with the admirable bourse du travail, one of its most important features of working life to-day in paris, the reader must turn to the reports themselves, beginning with the first one, issued in - .[ ] the same facts may be said to form the story of labor in belgium, in switzerland, in italy, and at all points where women or children are at work, whether in factory or mine or workshop. for belgium the situation is summed up in a very important and minute report of the government inquiry commission into the labor of women and children,--the first made in and followed by one in , the latest having been made in .[ ] a comprehensive law, promulgated nov. , , and regulating the labor of women and children in factories and mines, was amended in may, , by the addition of very specific regulations as to all employments affecting health and morals. the presidential decree consists of two parts,--the first dealing with the employment of women and children in connection with machinery when in motion, or in which the dangerous parts are not fully protected, in glass-blowing and in carrying weights. the second part of the decree consists of three tables, of which a enumerates certain industries, chiefly the manufacture of acids, dyes, chemicals, etc., also manures and glass, crystal, and metal polishing, in which female and child labor are prohibited; b those in which children under eighteen must not work, chiefly the manufacture of explosives; and c, a large variety of other industries in which female and child labor is only allowed conditionally. the great majority of these are industries involving special risk through the disengagement of dust-particles or vapors; while a few are ranked as dangerous, owing to risk of fire and the contraction of special diseases, etc. belgium, french in feeling and in methods, has known some of the worst abuses discoverable on continental soil, thousands of women and children in her mines having toiled from twelve to sixteen hours a day, with often no sunday rest, for a wage at bare subsistence point. in "germinal," zola, who spent months observing every phase of their life, has given a picture, unsurpassed in any literature, of the misery and degradation of the worker. an investigation in , and indignation at some of the conditions then discovered, brought about modifications of the law. that of the general congress of accomplished much more; but work must still be done before any very marked advance becomes discernible. passing to germany, a good two-thirds of the women are at work in field or shop or home, the proportion of women in agriculture being larger than in any other country of europe. her schools furnish better training than those of any other nation. in all these points prussia leads, though till recently legislation has been in behalf of child-workers, and women have been practically ignored. but factory regulations are minute and extended; and the questions involved in the labor of women, and its bearing on health, longevity, etc., are now coming under consideration. in silesia, as early as , women were excluded from the salt-mines; and the labor congress of brought about many changes of the laws on this point for belgium and germany. in italy, in which country industrial education is now receiving much attention, the labor of women, continuous, severe, and underpaid, as it is known to be, finds small mention, save among special students of social questions. russia has practically no data from which judgment can be formed. in short, it is only in english-speaking countries that really efficient action as to the labor of women has taken place; while even for them the work has but begun, and new and more radical forms will be necessary for any real progress toward final betterment. toward such end the labor bureaus of our own country are working diligently; and it is with them that we have next to do, the investigations already made and incorporated in their reports being full of suggestion for future workers. the census of gave for germany, in a population of , , persons, , , women, of whom , , were widows, and , , unmarried, a large proportion of both these classes being self-supporting. an immense number of these were agricultural laborers. in prussia in the census gave the number of women agricultural laborers as , , . woman's wage for a day's labor, always twelve and often fourteen hours, is from twenty to twenty-five cents, about a third of that received by men doing the same work. brassey, the great railroad contractor, found throughout germany that her wage was always a third and often a quarter less than that of men. for united germany the description given by villermé in is still true for many points. "the misery in which the cotton spinners and weavers of the upper rhine live," he writes, "is so profound that it produces the saddest results. in the families of manufacturers, drapers, merchants, etc., half the children born attain their nineteenth year, this same half ceasing to exist before the age of two years in the families of weavers and workers at cotton-spinning." as to numbers employed in trades and industries, it is difficult to secure them with exactness. the census of reported three tenths of the population as agricultural, the males employed in agriculture being , , , and the females , , . household service had , women on its rolls. in the cotton-mills employed in weaving and spinning , women; the woollen manufacture, nearly , ; linen, hemp, and jute, , . the labor of women and children was hardly recognized, and statistics had to be disentangled as best they might be from general tables of occupations. through the persistent efforts of the centre in the german reichstag, a gradual betterment of the working-classes has been brought about, and thus indirectly that of women and children,--the first combined and determined effort being made in , when three bills were brought up for discussion. the first made the working-day not to exceed eleven hours; the second demanded the suspension of industrial labor on sunday, save in exceptional cases, when five hours' labor was to be allowed; the third concerned the labor of women and children, and with some modifications is practically the law to-day. night and sunday labor in mines, smelting-works, rolling-mills, and dockyards is entirely forbidden, nor can married women work more than ten hours a day. the federal council has the right also to forbid the employment of women and children in all factories and establishments where health and morals are exposed to exceptional dangers. at the period at which the investigations which brought about the agitation of the question were made, the number of child laborers had increased in two years from , to , , children hardly more than babies being in the factories. at present the law forbids the employment of any child under twelve, and not less than three hours' schooling daily is compulsory. abuses exist at all points, women workers in mines faring, even with shortened day, in very evil case,--the wage at or below subsistence point and the general conditions of the most hopeless order. constant agitation goes on in the reichstag, and organization among the women themselves will in time bring about needed reforms; but as a whole the german woman is in many points less considered than the women of any other civilized nation. though italy is pre-eminently an agricultural country, and men, women, and children are alike employed in agricultural pursuits, there has been no trustworthy record of numbers engaged. in manufacturing there are more statistics, but interest in the woman's share in labor is of recent date. in the silk manufacture, in which italy ranks second only to china, and far beyond all other competitors, , women and , children were employed in , chiefly in unwinding cocoons, the number at present having increased nearly ten per cent. in the cotton industry there were employed, at the time of the same census, , women and , children; and a proportionate increase in numbers has taken place. in the flax and hemp industries nearly seventy thousand workers used hand-looms at home, the larger proportion of these being women. in the factories it was found that , women and , children were at work as spinners, and , women and , children as weavers. women are steadily employed in the manufacture of straw hats and bonnets, in jute in many forms, in cigar and cigarette making, and in many other industries, cheap clothing leading. of the thirty millions and more of population, not quite half are women; and of these nearly half are wage-earners, the majority in unrecorded forms of labor,--chiefly household service or the care of their own homes, with some petty industry adding its mite to the yearly income. but industrial training has but begun for italy. the wage is pitiably low, the conditions of living hard and full of privation; nor can these facts alter till better education and organization have been brought about. the latest italian census is not yet published; but proofs of tables of the comparative wage for twenty years in some of the principal industries have been sent me through the courtesy of signor luigi bodio, the minister of agriculture, commerce, and general statistics. from these tables it is found that the daily wage of women cotton-spinners has risen from sixty centimes, in , to one franc twenty-six centimes in , this being the equivalent of one lire twenty-six centissimi. the wage for weaving has risen from eighty centimes, in , to one franc twenty-six centimes in . spoolers in received eighty-eight centimes as against one franc thirty centimes in . in hemp-spinning the wage has fallen from ninety to eighty centimes, but has risen from ninety-eight centimes to one franc thirty centimes for twisting; the wage in the cases cited being a little more than a third that of men. in paper-making experienced workers now receive one franc fifty-two centimes as against sixty-six centimes in ; and in making of stearine candles one franc as against seventy-eight centimes in . running through the tables of every industry, the average is about the same,--the wage for women, even when doing the same work, hardly more than a third that for men, and the amount for either at bare subsistence point. in russia the woman's wage is but a fifth that of men, with working conditions, save at a few points where the work of professor janzhul and his confrères has told, at the very worst,--the day being from twelve to sixteen hours long even in the best-managed factories, while in the village industries, which, owing to the peculiar conditions of russian life, make up the larger proportion of her industries, it is for many workers almost unending, the merest respite being given for sleep. as yet but few authentic figures as to the numbers employed are given, though on the first investigation into domestic industries made a few years since it was found that over , were engaged in them, and also at the same time in agriculture. manufacturing in russia concentrates about moscow and st. petersburg, which represent more than two fifths of the whole production of the empire. the requirements of nine tenths of the russian people are met by domestic manufacture in the villages, and home-weaving for the market employs over two hundred thousand workers, other textiles, leather, etc., being dealt with in the same way. in the other northern countries of europe,--norway, sweden, and denmark,--manufactures are at a minimum, fisheries and agriculture being the chief industries. women are employed in both; and in the few factories there is a small proportion of women and children, working at a wage much less than that given to men. sweden has a most admirable system of industrial education; and norway and denmark, though far less in population, have adopted the same methods. but the limitations of all wage-earning women are felt here in the same manner as elsewhere, the summary for all countries being much the same. the northern workwoman has the advantage of training and of as keen a sense of economy as the frenchwoman; but her wage is most usually at or below subsistence point, and her difficulties are those of the worker in general,--long hours, insufficient pay, and fierce competition. as to the present laws concerning the length of the working-day, a general abstract is found in a return issued in reply to an address from the house of commons, an abstract of which was given in "st. james' gazette":-- "in france the hours of adult labor are regulated by a series of decrees, of which the earliest, promulgated september, , enacts that the workingman's day in manufactories and mills shall not exceed twelve hours of 'effective' or actual labor. a decree issued in may, , made exceptions, so that more hours might be worked in certain trades. in a circular was issued stating that the limit of twelve hours _per diem_ was not to be imposed where hand-power was employed, but was to be confined to manufactories and mills in which the motive power was machinery. no workshops were to come under the clauses of the act that did not employ more than twenty hands in any one shed. the report says: 'it is likewise to be borne in mind that there is in france no compulsory observance of sunday, and no day of habitual rest.' "the reports of the french inspectors of labor appear to show that the act of is very loosely interpreted. it is even doubtful whether the section limiting the actual working-day to twelve hours was intended to include or exclude hours of rest. practically the legal time is made to exclude rest. this makes the working-day so much the longer. thus one of the french inspectors states that the hours of attendance in factories under the act of are from five in the morning until seven in the evening, or a total of fourteen hours, out of which there are twelve hours of 'effective labor.' but the same authority also states that 'effective' time often extends to thirteen and fourteen hours in many weaving-establishments. finally, we are told that, as a rule, it may be taken that frenchmen employed in factories are present in the shops at least fourteen hours out of every twenty four. "among the countries having no laws affecting the hours of adult labor, germany is conspicuous. employers, however, cannot force their servants to work on sundays and feast-days. employment of youthful or female labor in certain kinds of factories, which is attended with special danger to health or morals, is forbidden, or made conditional on certain regulations, by which night labor for female work-people is especially forbidden. in germany, as in other countries also, women may not be employed in factories for a certain time after childbirth. in hesse-darmstadt the medium duration of labor is from ten to twelve hours,--the cases in which the latter time is exceeded being, however, more frequent than those in which the former is not exceeded. the normal work-day throughout saxony in all the principal branches of industry is from a.m. to p.m., with half an hour for breakfast, an hour for dinner, and half an hour for supper. in the manufacturing industry there are departures from these hours, the period of work in spinning and weaving mills not infrequently being twelve hours. "in austria the law provides that the duration of work for factory hands shall not exceed eleven hours out of the twenty-four, 'exclusive' of the periods of rest. these are not to be less in the aggregate than an hour and a half. the rule can be modified by the minister of commerce, in conjunction with the minister of the interior, allowing longer hours. the hours have been so extended to twelve hours in certain industries, such as spinning-mills, and even to thirteen in silk manufactories. sunday rest is enforced. in hungary there is no limit laid down by law, but the hours are not generally longer than in austria. "concerning the actual hours of adult labor in belgium, some difficulty is said to be experienced in getting at the facts. the evidence given before a belgian royal commission showed that railway guards are sometimes on duty for fifteen and even nineteen and a half hours at a stretch; and the brussels tram-way-drivers are at work from fifteen to seventeen hours daily, with a rest of only an hour and a half at noon. brick-makers work during the summer months sixteen hours a day. in the sugar refineries the average hours are from twelve to thirteen for men and from nine to ten for women. the cabinetmakers, both at ghent and brussels, assert that they have often to work seventeen hours a day. "in switzerland the law provides that a normal working-day shall not exceed eleven hours, reduced on saturdays and public holidays to ten. power is reserved for prolonging the working-day in certain circumstances. except in cases of absolute necessity sunday labor is prohibited, and in establishments where uninterrupted labor is required, each working hand must have one free sunday out of two. women cannot under any circumstances be employed in night or sunday labor. italy has not legislated for adults, but has made regulations for child labor. sweden is in the same position. spain and portugal have done nothing. the general rule in the latter country, applying to old and young, is to work from sunrise to sunset, an hour and a half being allowed for meals. in the netherlands a law was recently promulgated to prevent excessive and dangerous work by grown-up women and young persons. in turkey the working-day lasts from sunrise to sunset, with certain intervals for repose and refreshment. in russia, where there are no laws affecting the hours of adult labor, the normal working-day in industrial establishments averages twelve hours, though it is often extended to fourteen and even sixteen." footnotes: [ ] histoire des classes ouvriers en france depuis jusqu'à nos jours, par e. levasseur. [ ] l'ouvrière, par jules simon. [ ] prisoners of poverty, p. . [ ] le travail des femmes au xix. siècle, par paul leroy-beaulieu. [ ] l'ouvrière, p. . [ ] le travail des femmes aux xix. siècle. [ ] annuaire de la bourse du travail. volumes from to inclusive. [ ] rapport sur l'enquête faite au nom de l'académie royale de médecine de belgique, par la commission chargée d'étudier la question de l'emploi des femmes dans les travaux souterrain des mines, bruxelles, . documents nouveaux relatifs au travail des femmes et des enfants, dans les manufactures, les mines, etc, etc. bruxelles, . chapter ix. general conditions among wage-earning women in the united states. the summary already made of the work of bureaus of labor and their bearing upon women wage-earners includes some points belonging under this head which it still seemed advisable to leave where they stand. the work of the massachusetts bureau gave the keynote, followed by all successors, and thus required full outlining; and it is from that, as well as successors, that general conditions are to be determined. a brief summary of such facts as each state has investigated and reported upon will be given, with the final showing of the latest and most general report,--that from the united states bureau of labor for . beginning with new england and taking state by state in the usual geographical order, that of maine for leads. work here was done by a special commissioner appointed for the purpose, and the chief towns and cities in the state were visited. no occupation was excluded. the foreign element of the state is comparatively small. there is no city in which overcrowding and its results in the tenement-house system are to be found. factories are numerous, and the bulk of maine working-women are found in them; the canning industry employs hundreds, and all trades have their proportion of workers. for all of them conditions are better in many ways than at almost any other point in new england, many of them living at home and paying but a small proportion of their wages toward the family support. a large proportion of the factories have boarding-houses attached, which are run by a contractor. a full inspection of these was made, and the report pronounces them to be better kept than the ordinary boarding-house, with liberal dietary and comfortable rooms. many of the women owned their furniture, and had made "homes" out of the narrow quarters. these were the better-paid class of workers. several of the factories have "relief associations," in which the employees pay a small sum weekly, which secures them a fixed sum during illness or disability. the conditions, as a whole, in factory are more nearly those of massachusetts during the early days of the lowell mills than can be found elsewhere. taking the state as a whole, though the average wage is nearly a dollar less a week than that of massachusetts, its buying power is somewhat more, from the fact that rents are lower and the conditions of living simpler, though this is true only of remote towns. massachusetts follows; and here, as in maine, there is general complaint that many of the girls live at home, pay little or no board, and thus can take a lower wage than the self-supporting worker. in the large stores employees are hired at the lowest possible figure; and many girls who are working for from four to five dollars per week state that it is impossible to pay for room and board with even tolerably decent clothing. hundreds who want pin-money do work at a price impossible to the self-supporting worker, many married women coming under this head; and bitter complaint is made on this point. at the best the wage is at a minimum, and only the most rigid economy renders it possible for the earner to live on it. that there is not greater suffering reflects all honor on the army of hard-working women, pronounced by the commissioner to be as industrious, moral, and virtuous a class as the community owns. "homes" of every order have been established in boston and in other large towns in the state; and as they give board at the lowest rate, they are filled with girls. they are rigid as to rules and regulations, and not in favor, as a rule, with the majority. a very slight relaxing of lines and more effort to make them cheerful would result in bringing many who now remain outside; but in any case they can reach but a small proportion. in unskilled labor there is little difference among the workers. all alike are half starved, half clothed, overworked to a frightful degree; the report specifying numbers whose day's work runs from fourteen to sixteen hours, and with neither time to learn some better method of earning a living, nor hope enough to spur them on in any new path. this class is found chiefly among sewing-women on cheap clothing, bags, etc.; and there is no present means of reaching them or altering the conditions which surround them. connecticut factories are subject to the same general laws as those governing like work in maine and massachusetts. over thirty thousand women and girls are engaged in factory work, and ten thousand children,--chiefly girls, women being twenty-five per cent of all employed in factories. legislation has lessened or abolished altogether some of the worst features of this life, and there are special mills which have won the highest reputation for just dealing and care of every interest of their employees. but the same reasons that affect general conditions for all workers exist here also, and produce the same results, not only in factory labor, but in all other industries open to women. the fact that there are no large cities, and thus little overcrowding in tenements, and that there is home life for a large proportion of the workers, tells in their favor. factory boarding-houses fairly well kept abound; but the average wage, $ . , is a trifle lower than that of massachusetts, and implies more difficulty in making ends meet. many of the worst abuses in child labor arose in connecticut, and the reports for both and state that for both women and children much remains to be done. clothing here, as elsewhere, is synonymous with overwork and underpay, the wage being below subsistence point; and want of training is often found to be a portion of the reason for these conditions. in rhode island, as in all the new england states, the majority of the factories are in excellent condition, the older ones alone being open to the objections justly made both by employees and the reports of the labor bureau. the wage falls below that of connecticut, while the general conditions of living are practically the same, the statements made as to the first applying with equal force to the last. manufactures are the chief employment, the largest number of women workers being found in these. of all of them the commissioner reports: "they work harder and more hours than men, and receive much less pay."[ ] the fact of no large cities, and thus no slums, is in the worker's favor; but limitations are in all other points sharp and continuous. new york follows, and for the state at large the same remarks apply at every point. it is new york city in which focuses every evil that hedges about women workers, and in a degree not to be found at any other portion of the country. these will be dealt with in the proper place. the average wage, so far as the state is concerned, gives the same result as those already mentioned. manufacturing gives large employment; and this is under as favorable conditions as in new england, though the average wage is nearly a dollar less than that of massachusetts, while expenses are in some ways higher. the incessant tide of foreign labor tends steadily to lower the wage-rate, and the struggle for mere subsistence is the fact for most. in new york city, while there is a large proportion of successful workers, there is an enormous mass of the lowest order. no other city offers so varied a range of employment, and there is none where so large a number are found earning a wage far below the "life limit." the better-paying trades are filled with women who have had some form of training in school or home, or have passed from one occupation to another, till that for which they had most aptitude has been determined. that, however, to which all the more helpless turn at once, as the one thing about the doing of which there can be no doubt or difficulty, is the one most over-crowded, most underpaid, and with its scale of payments lessening year by year. the girl too ignorant to reckon figures, too dull-witted to learn by observation, takes refuge in sewing in one of its many forms as the one thing possible to all grades of intelligence; often the need of work for older women arises from the death or evil habits of the natural head of the family, and fortunes have sunk to so low an ebb that at times the only clothing left is on the back of the worker in the last stages of demoralization. employment in a respectable place thus becomes impossible, and the sole method of securing work is through the middlemen or sweaters, who ask no questions and require no reference, but make as large a profit as can be wrung from the helplessness and bitter need of those with whom they reckon. the difficulties to be faced by the woman whose only way of self-support is limited to the needle, whether in machine or handwork, are fourfold: first, her own incompetency must very often head the list, and prevent her from securing first-class work; second, middlemen or sweaters lower the price to starvation point; third, contract work done in prisons or reformatories brings about the same result; and fourth, she is underbid from still another quarter,--that of the countrywoman living at home, who takes the work at any price offered. the report of the new york bureau of labor for contains a mass of evidence so fearful in its character, and demonstrating conditions of life so tragic for the worker, and so shameful on the part of the employer, that general attention was for the time aroused. it is impossible here to make more than this general statement referring all readers to the report itself for full detail. thousands herded together in tenement houses and received a daily wage of from twenty-five to sixty cents, the day's labor being often sixteen hours long. "the bitter cry of outcast london" found its parallel here, nor has there been any diminution of the numbers involved, though at some points conditions have been improved. but the facts recorded in the report are practically the same to-day; and the income of many workers falls below two dollars a week, from which sum food, clothing, light, fuel, and rent are to be provided for. the sum and essence of every wrong and injustice that can hedge about the worker is found at this point, and remains a problem to every worker among the poor, the solving of which will mean the solution of the whole labor question. new jersey reports have from the beginning followed the phases of the labor movement with a keen intelligence and interest. they give general conditions as much the same as those of new york state. the wage-rate is but $ ; and newark especially, a city which is filled with manufacturing establishments of every order, reproduces some of the evil conditions of new york city, though in far less degree. taking the state as a whole, legislation has done much to protect the worker, and other reforms are persistently urged by the bureau. they are needed. in the official report of conditions among the linen-thread spinners of paterson we find: "in one branch of this industry women are compelled to stand on a stone floor in water the year round, most of the time barefoot, with a spray of water from a revolving cylinder flying constantly against the breast; and the coldest night in winter, as well as the warmest in summer, these poor creatures must go to their homes with water dripping from their underclothing along their path, because there could not be space or a few moments allowed them wherein to change their clothing."[ ] thus much for the east; and we turn to the west, where some of the most practical and suggestive forms of investigation are now in full operation. footnotes: [ ] third annual report of the commissioner of industrial statistics of rhode island, , p. . [ ] report of the bureau of labor for the state of new jersey, . x. general conditions in the western states. the reports from kansas and wisconsin give a wage but slightly above that of new jersey, the weekly average being $ . . of the , women at work in ,--the number having now nearly doubled,--but , were engaged in manufacturing, the larger portion being in domestic service. save in one or two of the larger towns and cities, there is no overcrowding, and few of the conditions that go with a denser population and sharper competition. kansas gives large space to general conditions, and, while urging better pay, finds that her working-women are, as a whole, honest, self-respecting, moral members of the community. factory workers are few in proportion to those in other occupations; and this is true of most of the western states, where general industries are found rather than manufactures. the report from colorado for includes in its own returns certain facts discovered on investigation in ohio and indiana, and matched by some of the same nature in colorado. the methods of eastern competition had been adopted, and commissioner rice reports:-- "in one of the large cities of ohio the labor commissioners of that state discovered that shirts were being made for cents a dozen; and that the rules of one establishment paying such wages employing a large number of females, required that the day's labor should commence and terminate with prayer and thanksgiving." in indiana matters appear even worse. by personal investigation, it was found that the following rates of wages were being paid in manufacturing establishments in indianapolis: for making shirts, to cents a dozen; overalls, to cents a dozen pairs; pants, cents to $ . per dozen pairs. "in our own state," writes the commissioner, "owing to eastern competition on the starvation wage plan, are found women and girls working for mere subsistence, though the prices paid here are a shade higher. it is found that shirts are made at cents a dozen, and summer dresses from cents upward." prices are higher here than at almost any other portion of the united states, and thus the wage gives less return. in spite of the general impression that women fare well at this point, the report gives various details which seem to prove abuses of many orders. it made special investigation into the conditions of domestic service, that in hotels and large boarding-houses being found to be full of abuses, though conditions as a whole were favorable. in so new a state there are few manufacturing interests; and the factories investigated are many of them reported as showing an almost criminal disregard of the comfort and interests of the employees. aside from this, the report indicates much the same general conditions as prevail in other states. in minnesota, with its average wage of $ per week, there are few factories,--manufacturing being confined to clothing, boots and shoes, and a few other forms. domestic service has the largest number of women employed, and stores and trades absorb the remainder. there is no overcrowding save here and there in the cities, as in st. paul or minneapolis, where girls often club together in rooming. while many of the workers are scandinavian, many are native born; and for the latter there is often much thrift and a comfortable standard of living. the same complaints as to lowness of wage, resulting from much the same causes as those specified elsewhere, are heard; and in the clothing manufacture wages are kept at the lowest possible point as a whole, the returns indicate more comfort than in colorado, but leave full room for betterment. the chapter on "domestic service" shows many strong reasons why girls prefer factory or general work to this; and as the views of heads of employment agencies are also given, unusual opportunity is afforded for forming just judgment in the matter. next on the list comes the report from california for and . the resources of the bureau were so limited that it was impossible to obtain returns for the whole state, and the commissioner therefore limited his inquiry to a thorough investigation of the working-women of san francisco, in number about twenty thousand. the state has but one cotton-mill, but there are silk, jute, woollen, corset, and shirt factories, with many minor industries. home and general sanitary conditions were all investigated, the bureau following the general lines pursued by all. wages are considered at length; and commissioner tobin states that the rate paid to women in california "does not compare favorably with the rates paid to women in the eastern states, as do the wages of men, for the reason that chinese come more into competition with women than with men. this is especially the case among seamstresses, and in nearly all our factories ... in other lines of labor the wages paid to females in this state are generally higher than elsewhere." rent, food, and clothing cost more in california than in the eastern states. the wage-tables show that the tendency is to limit a woman's wage to a dollar a day, even in the best paid trades, and as much below this as labor can be obtained. in shirt-making, commissioner tobin states that she is worse off than in any of the eastern states. clothing of all orders pays as little as possible, the best workwomen often making not over $ . per week. even at these starvation rates, girls prefer factory work to domestic service; and as this phase was also investigated, we have another chapter of most valuable and suggestive information. in spite of low wages and all the hardship resulting, working women and girls as a whole are found to be precisely what the reports state them to be,--hard-working, honest, and moral members of the community. general conditions are much the same as those of colorado, the summary for all the states from which reports have come being that the average wage is insufficient to allow of much more than mere subsistence. the labor reports for the state of missouri for and do not deal directly with the question of women wage-earners; but indirectly much light is thrown by the investigation, in that for , into the cost of living and the home conditions of many miners and workers in general trades; while that for covers a wider field, and gives, with general conditions for all workers, detailed information as to many frauds practised upon them. the commissioner, lee merriweather, is so identified with the interests of the worker, whether man or woman, that a formal report from him on women wage-earners would have had especial value. last on the list of state reports comes an admirable one from michigan, prepared by labor commissioner henry a. robinson, issued in february, , which devotes nearly two hundred pages to women wage-earners, and gives careful statistics of different trades and occupations. personal visits were made to , women and girls living in the most important manufacturing towns and cities of the state; and the blanks, which were prepared in the light of the experience gained by the work of other bureaus, contained questions, classified as follows: social, ; industrial, ; hours of labor, ; economic, ; sanitary, ; and seven other questions as to dress, societies, church attendance, with remarks and suggestions by the women workers. the result is a very minute knowledge of general conditions, the series of tables given being admirably prepared. in those on the hours of labor it is found that domestic service exacts the greatest number of hours; one class returning fourteen hours as the rule. in this lies a hint of the increasing objection to domestic service,--longer hours and less freedom being the chief counts against it. the final summary gives the average wage for the state as $ . ; the highest weekly average for women workers employed as teachers or in public positions being $ . . the remarks and suggestions of the women themselves are extraordinarily helpful. outside the cities organization among them is unknown; but it is found that those trades which are organized furnish the best paid and most intelligent class of girls, who conceived at once the benefits of a labor bureau, and answered fully and promptly. the hours of work in all industries ranged from nine to ten, and the wage paid was found to be a little more than fifty per cent less than that of men engaged in the same work. a large proportion supported relatives, and general conditions as to living were of much the same order of comfort and discomfort as those given in other reports. the fact that this report is the latest on this subject, and more minute in detail than has before been possible, makes it invaluable to the student of social conditions; and it is entertaining reading, even for the average reader. we come now to the final report, in some ways a summary of all,--that of the united states labor department at washington, and the work for . in the twenty-two cities investigated by the agents of this bureau, the average age at which girls began work was found to be years and months. charleston, s.c., gives the highest average, it being there years and months, and newark, n.j., the lowest,-- years and months. the average period in which all had been engaged in their present occupations is shown to be years and months; while of the total number interviewed, , were engaged in their first attempt to earn a living. as against the opinion often expressed that foreign workers are in the majority, we find that of the whole number given, , were native born. of the foreign born, ireland is most largely represented, having ; and germany comes next, with . in the matter of parentage, , had foreign-born mothers. the number of single women included in the report is , ; were married, and , widowed, from which it is evident that, as a rule, it is single women who are fighting the industrial fight alone. they are not only supporting themselves, but are giving their earnings largely to the support of others at home. more than half-- , --do this; and , , besides their occupation, help in the home housekeeping. of the total number, , live at home, but only of them receive aid or board from their families. the average number in these families is . , and each contains . workers. concerning education, church attendance, home and shop conditions, , reported. of these, , were educated in american public schools, and , in other schools; , attend protestant churches; , the catholic, and the hebrew. a very large percentage, comprehending , , do not attend church at all. in home conditions , report themselves as "comfortable," while , give home conditions as "poor." "poor," to the ordinary observer, is to be interpreted as wretched, including overcrowding, and all the numberless evils of tenement-house life, which is the portion of many. a side light is thrown on personal characteristics of the workers, in the tables of earnings and lost time. out of , who reported, earn less than $ a year, and this class has an average of . lost days for the year covered by the investigation. with the increase of earnings, the lost time decreases, the , who earn from $ to $ losing but . ; while , earning from $ to $ a year, lost but . days. deliberate cruelty and injustice on the part of the employer are encountered only now and then; but competition forces the working in as inexpensive a manner as possible, and thus often makes what must sum up as cruelty and injustice necessary to the continued existence of the employer as an industrial factor. home conditions are seldom beyond tolerable, and very often intolerable. inspection,--the efficiency of which has greatly increased,--the demand by the organized charities at all points for women inspectors, and the gradual growth of popular interest are bringing about a few improvements, and will bring more; but the mass everywhere are as stated. ignorance and the vices that accompany ignorance--want of thoroughness, unpunctuality, thriftlessness, and improvidence--are all in the count against the lowest order of worker; but the better class, and indeed the large proportion of the lower, are living honest, self-respecting, infinitely dreary lives. it is a popular belief, already referred to elsewhere, that the working-women form a large proportion of the numbers who fill houses of prostitution; and that "night-walkers" are made up chiefly from the same class. nothing could be further from the truth,--the testimony of the fifteenth annual report of the massachusetts bureau of labor being in the same line as that of all in which investigation of the subject has been made, and all confirming the opinion given. the investigation of the massachusetts bureau in fourteen cities showed clearly that a very small proportion among working-women entered this life. the largest number, classed by occupations, came from the lowest order of worker, those employed in housework and hotels; and the next largest was found among seamstresses, employees of shirt-factories, and cloak-makers, all of these industries in which under pay is proverbial. the great majority, receiving not more than five dollars a week, earn it by seldom less than ten hours a day of hard labor, and not only live on the sum, but assist friends, contribute to general household expenses, dress so as to appear fairly well, and have learned every art of doing without. more than this, since the deepening interest in their lives, and the formation of working-girls' clubs and societies of many orders, they contribute from this scanty sum enough to rent meeting-rooms, pay for instruction in many classes, and provide a relief fund for sick and disabled members. this is the summary of conditions as a whole, and we pass now to the specific evils and abuses in trades and general industries. xi. specific evils and abuses in factory life and in general trades. "has civilization civilized?" is the involuntary question, as one by one the fearful conditions hedging about workers on either side of the sea become apparent. at once, in any specific investigation, we face abuses for which the system of production rather than the employer is often responsible, and for which science has as yet found either none or but a partial remedy. alike in england and on the continent work and torture become synonyms, and flesh and blood the cheapest of all nineteenth-century products. the best factory system swarms with problems yet unsolved; the worst, as it may be found in many a remote district of the continent and even in england itself, is appalling in both daily fact and final result. it would seem at times as if the workshop meant only a form of preparation for the hospital, the workhouse, and the prison, since the workers therein become inoculated with trade diseases, mutilated by trade appliances, and corrupted by trade associates, till no healthy fibre, mental, moral, or physical, remains. in the nail and chain making districts of england, sundays are often abolished where these furnaces flame, and such rest as can be stolen comes on the cinder-heaps. but these workers are few compared with the myriads who must battle with the most insidious and most potent of enemies,--the dust of modern manufacture. there is dust of heckling flax, with an average of only fourteen years of work for the strongest; dust of emery powder, that has been known to destroy in a month; dust of pottery and sand and flint, so penetrating that the medical returns give cases of "stone" for new-born babes; dust of rags foul with dirt and breeding fever in the picker; dust of wools from diseased animals, striking down the sorter. wood, coal, flour, each has its own, penetrating where it can never be dislodged; and a less tangible enemy lurks in poisonous paints for flowers or wall-paper, and in white lead, the foundation of other paints,--blotching the skin of children, and ending for many in blindness, paralysis, and hideous sores. this is one form; and side by side with it comes another, dealt with here and there, but as a rule ignored,--vapors as deadly as dust; vapors of muriatic acid from pickling tins; of choking chlorine from bleaching-rooms; of gas and phosphorus, which even now, where strongest preventives are used, still pull away both teeth and jaws from many a worker in match-factories; while acids used in cleaning, bleaching-powders, and many an industry where women and children chiefly are employed, eat into hands and clothing, and make each hour a torture. with the countless forms of machinery for stamping and rolling and cutting and sawing, there is yet, in spite of all the safeguards the law compels, the saying still heard in these shops: "it takes three fingers to make a stamper." carelessness often; but where two must work together, as is necessary in tending many of these machines, the partner's inattention is often responsible, and mutilation comes through no fault of one's own. add to all these the suffering of little children taught lace-making at four, sewing on buttons or picking threads far into the night, and driven through the long hours that they may add sixpence to the week's wage, and we have a hint of the grewsome catalogue of the human woe born of human need and human greed. for the united states there is a steadily lessening proportion of these evils, and we shall deal chiefly with those found in existence by the respective bureaus of labor at the time when their investigations were made. private and public investigation made before their organization had brought to light in connecticut, and at many points in new england, gross abuses both in child labor and that of woman and girl workers. it is sufficient, however, for our purpose to refer the reader to the mention of these contained in the first report of the massachusetts bureau of labor, as well as to dr. richard t. ely's "history of the labor movement in america," and to pass at once to the facts contained in the fifteenth report from massachusetts. the ventilation of factories and of workrooms in general is one of the first points considered. naturally, facts of this order would be found in the testimony only of the more intelligent. where factories are new and built expressly for their own purposes, ventilation is considered, and in many is excellent. but in smaller ones and in many industries the structures used were not intended for this purpose. closely built buildings shut off both light and air, which must come wholly from above, thus preventing circulation, and producing an effect both depressing and wearing. the agents in a number of cases found employees packed "like sardines in a box;" thirty-five persons, for example, in a small attic without ventilation of any kind. some were in very low-studded rooms, with no ventilation save from windows, causing bad draughts and much sickness, and others in basements where dampness was added to cold and bad air. in many cases the nature of the trade compelled closed windows, and no provision was made for ventilation in any other way. in one case girls were working in "little pens all shelved over, without sufficient light or air, windows not being open, for fear of cooling wax thread used on sewing-machines."[ ] for a large proportion of the workrooms visited or reported upon was a condition ranging from dirty to filthy. in some where men and women were employed together in tailoring, the report reads: "their shop is filthy and unfit to work in. there are no conveniences for women; and men and women use the same closets, wash-basins, and drinking-cups, etc."[ ] in another a water-closet in the centre of the room filled it with a sickening stench; yet forty hands were at work here, and there are many cases in which the location of these closets and the neglect of proper disinfectants make not only workrooms but factories breeding-grounds of disease. lack of ventilation in almost all industries is the first evil, and one of the most insidious. other points affecting health are found in the nature of certain of the trades and the conditions under which they must be carried on. feather-sorters, fur-workers, cotton-sorters, all workers on any material that gives off dust, are subject to lung and bronchial troubles. in soap-factories the girls' hands are eaten by the caustic soda, and by the end of the day the fingers are often raw and bleeding. in making buttons, pins, and other manufactures of this nature, there is always liability of getting the fingers jammed or caught. for the first three times the wounds are dressed without charge. after that the person injured must pay expenses. in these and many other trades work must be so closely watched that it brings on weakness of the eyes, so that many girls are under treatment for this. in bakeries the girls stand from ten to sixteen hours a day, and break down after a short time. boots and shoes oblige being on the feet all day; and this is the case for saleswomen, cash-girls, and all factory-workers. in type-founderies the air is always filled with a fine dust produced by rubbing, and the girls employed have no color in their faces. in paper-box making constant standing brings on the same difficulties found among all workers who stand all day; and they complain also of the poison often resulting from the coloring matter used in making the boxes. in book-binderies, brush-manufactories, etc., the work soon breaks down the girls. in the clothing-business, where the running of heavy sewing-machines is done by foot-power, there is a fruitful source of disease; and even where steam is used, the work is exhausting, and soon produces weakness and various difficulties. in food preparations girls who clean and pack fish get blistered hands and fingers from the saltpetre employed by the fishermen. others in "working-stalls" stand in cold water all day, and have the hands in cold water; and in laundries, confectionery establishments, etc., excessive heat and standing in steam make workers especially liable to throat and lung diseases, as well as those induced by continuous standing. straw goods produce a fine dust, and cause a constant hacking among the girls at work upon them; and the acids used in setting the colors often produce "acid sores" upon the ends of the fingers. in match-factories, as already mentioned, even with the usual precautions, necrosis often attacks the worker, and the jaw is eaten away. sores, ulcerations, and suffering of many orders are the portion of workers in chemicals. in many cases a little expenditure on the part of the employer would prevent this; but unless brought up by an inspector, no precautions are taken. the question of seats for saleswomen comes up periodically, has been at some points legislated upon, and is in most stores ignored or evaded. "the girls look better,--more as if they were ready for work," is the word of one employer, who frankly admitted that he did not mean they should sit; and this is the opinion acted upon by most. insufficient time for meals is a universal complaint; and nine times out of ten, the conveniences provided are insufficient for the numbers who must use them, and thus throw off offensive and dangerous effluvia. it is one of the worst evils in shop life, not only for massachusetts, but for the entire united states, that in all large stores, where fixed rules must necessarily be adopted, girls are forced to ask men for permission to go to closets, and often must run the gauntlet of men and boys. all physicians who treat this class testify to the fact that many become seriously diseased as the result of unwillingness to subject themselves to this ordeal. one of the ablest factory-inspectors in this country, or indeed in any country, mrs. fanny b. ames of boston, reports this as one of the least regarded points in a large proportion of the factories and manufacturing establishments visited, but adds that it arises often from pure ignorance and carelessness, and is remedied as soon as attention is called to it. taking up the other new england reports in which reference to these evils is found, the testimony is the same. law is often evaded or wholly set aside,--at times through carelessness, at others wilfully. the most exhaustive treatment of this subject in all its bearings is found in the report of the new jersey bureau of labor for , the larger portion of it being devoted to the fullest consideration of the hygiene of occupation, the diseases peculiar to special trades, and general sanitary condition and methods of working, not only in "dangerous, unhealthy, or noxious trades," but in all. commissioner bishop, from whose report quotations have already been made (p. ), gives many instances of working under fearful conditions, absolutely destructive to health and often to morals; and the report may be regarded as one of the most authoritative words yet spoken in this direction. the factory inspection law for the state of new york, in detail much the same as that of massachusetts, is sufficiently full and explicit to secure to all workers better conditions than any as yet attained save in isolated cases. there is, however, constant violation of its most vital points; and this must remain true for all states, until the number of inspectors is made in some degree adequate to the demand. at present they are not only seriously overworked, but find it impossible to cover the required ground. the law which stands at present as the demand to be made by all factory-workers and all interested in intelligent legislation, will be found in the appendix. destructive to health and morals as are often the factories and workshops in which women must work, they play far less part in their lives than the homes afforded by the great cities, where the poor herd in quarters,--at their best only tolerable shelters, at their worst unfit for man or beast. it is the tenement-house question that in these words presents itself for consideration, and that makes part of the general problem. taking new york as illustrative of some of the worst forms of over-crowding, though boston and chicago are not far behind, we turn to the work of one of the closest and most competent of observers, dr. annie s. daniel, for many years physician in charge of out-practice for the new york infirmary for women and children. the report of this practice for includes a series of facts bearing vitally on every phase of woman's labor. known as an expert in these directions, her testimony was called for in the examination of into the sweating-system of new york, made by a congressional committee and now on record in a report to be had on application to the new york congressmen at washington.[ ] for years she has watched the effects of child-labor, taking hundreds of measurements of special cases, and studying the effects of the life mothers and children alike were compelled to live. "the medical problems," she writes, "which present themselves to the physician are so closely connected with the social problems that it is impossible to study one alone. the people are sick because of insufficient food and clothing and unsanitary surroundings, and these conditions exist because the people are poor. they are often poor _because they have no work_." at another point, commenting on drinking among the poor, she writes: "drinking among the women is increasing. in the majority of cases we have studied, it has been the effect of poverty, not the cause." in the region between houston street and canal street, known now to be the most thickly populated portion of the inhabited globe, every house is a factory; that is, some form of manufacture is going on in every room. the average family of five adds to itself from two to ten more, often a sewing-machine to each person; and from six or seven in the morning till far into the night work goes on,--usually the manufacture of clothing. here contagious diseases pass from one to another. here babies are born and babies die, the work never pausing save for death and hardly for that. in one of these homes dr. daniel found a family of five making cigars, the mother included. "two of the children were ill of diphtheria. both parents attended to these children; they would syringe the nose of each child, and without washing their hands return to their cigars. we have repeatedly observed the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and undergarments to be bought as well by the rich as by the poor. hand-sewed shoes, made for a fashionable broadway shoe-store, were sewed at home by a man in whose family were three children sick with scarlet-fever. and such instances are common. only death or lack of work closes tenement-house manufactories ... when we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be expected to impress the people." farther on in the report, she adds: "the people can neither be moral nor healthy until they have decent homes." yet the present wage-rate makes decent homes impossible; and though brooklyn and boston have a few model tenement-houses, new york has none, the experiment of making over in part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. into these homes respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to go. that they live decent lives speaks worlds for the intrinsic goodness and purity of nature which in the midst of conditions intolerable to every sense still preserves these characteristics. that they must live in such surroundings is one of the deepest disgraces of civilization. as to wages, concerning which there seems to be a general opinion that steady rise has gone on, we find dr. daniel giving the rates for many years. she writes:-- "wages have steadily decreased. among the women who earned the whole or part of the income, finishing pantaloons was the most common occupation. for this work, in , they received ten to fifteen cents a pair; for the same work in , three to five, at the most ten cents a pair. the women doing this work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of italian women, but few italian women do the poor quality of trousers. while we are glad to note some excellent sanitary changes in the tenement-house construction, the people we believe to be just as poor, just as overcrowded and wretched to-day, as in and , the only difference being that there are a greater number of people who are poor now." these statements apply in great part to unskilled labor; but there is always in these houses a large proportion of skilled labor disabled by sickness or other causes and out of work for the time being. the wage at best for skilled labor is given by the labor commissioner as $ . . let any one study the possibilities of this sum per week, and the wonder will arise, not why living is not easier, but how it goes on at all. specific evils speak for themselves, and are gradually being eliminated. they are before the eyes, and the least experienced student may gauge their bearing and judge their effects. but wider-reaching than any or all the worst abuses of the worst trades is the wrong done to the child and to family life as a whole, by the continuous labor of married women in factories, or at any occupation which demands, for ten hours or more a day, unremitting toil. at all points where scientific observation has been made the expert lifts up a warning voice. it is the future of the race that is in question. child labor, while not entering directly into our present examination, is, as has already been said, inextricably bound up with the question of woman's work and wages. the two must be studied together; and for our own country there are already admirable monographs on this subject,[ ] two authoritative ones coming from the american economic association, and one hardly less so from a close and keen observer whose scientific training gives her equal right to form conclusions.[ ] a dispassionate observer, mr. w. stanley jevons, whose conclusions are founded on long investigation and deduction, years ago wrote words which he has at various times emphasized and repeated, and which sum up the evils to which the infancy of the children of overworked mothers is subject, as well as the consequences to the state in which they are born, and which faces the results of the system which produces them. he writes as follows:-- "we can help evolution by the aid of its own highest and latest product,--science. when all the teaching of medical and social science lead us to look upon the absence of the mother from the home as the cause of the gravest possible evils, can we be warranted in standing passively by, allowing this evil to work itself out to the bitter end, by the process of natural selection? something might perhaps be said in favor of the present apathetic mode of viewing this question, if natural selection were really securing the survival of the fittest, so that only the weakly babes were killed off, and the strong ones well brought up. but it is much to be feared that no infants ever really recover from the test of virtual starvation to which they are so ruthlessly exposed. the vital powers are irreparably crippled, and the infant grows up a stunted, miserable specimen of humanity, the prey to every physical and moral evil."[ ] it is hardly necessary to go on specifying special violations of sanitary law or special illustrative cases. the report of the new york bureau of labor for is a magazine of such cases,--a summary of all the horrors that the worst conditions can include. aside from the revolting pictures of the life lived from day to day by the workers themselves, it gives in detail case after case of rapacity and over-reaching on the part of the employers; and parallel ones may be found in every labor report which has touched upon the subject. in new york a "working woman's protective union," formed more than twenty-five years ago, has done unceasing work in settling disputed claims and collecting wages unjustly withheld. no case is entered on their books which has not been examined by their lawyer, and thus only well grounded complaints find record; but with even these precautions the records show nearly fifty thousand adjudicated since they began work. many cities have special committees, in the organized charities, who seek to cover the same ground, but who find it impossible to do all that is required. from east and west alike, complaints are practically the same. it is not only women in trades, but those in domestic service, who are recorded as suffering every form of oppression and injustice. colorado and california, kansas and wisconsin, speak the same word. with varying industries wrongs vary, but the general summary is the same. the system of fines, while on general principles often just, has been used by unscrupulous employers to such a degree as to bring the week's wages down a third or even half. it is impossible to give illustrative instances in detail; but all who deal with girls, in clubs and elsewhere, report that the system requires modification. on the side of the employers, and as bearing also on the evils which are most marked among women workers, we may quote from the government report, "working women in large cities":-- "actual ill-treatment by employers seems to be infrequent.... foreigners are often found to be more considerate of their help than native-born men, and the kindest proprietor in the world is a jew of the better class. in some shops week-workers are locked out for the half-day if late, or docked for every minute of time lost, an extra fine being often added. piece workers have great freedom as to hours, and employers complain much of tardiness and absenteeism. the mere existence of health and labor laws insures privileges formerly unheard of; half-holidays in summer, vacation with pay, and shorter hours are becoming every year more frequent, better workshops are constructed, and more comfortable accommodations are being furnished." this is most certainly true, but more light shows the shadows even more clearly; and the fact remains that every force must be brought to bear, to remedy the evils depicted in the reports of the bureaus quoted here. the general conditions of working-women in new york retail stores were reported upon, in , by a committee from the working-woman's society, at clinton place, new york. the report was read at a mass meeting held at chickering hall, may , ; and its statements represent general conditions in all the large cities of the united states. it is impossible to give more than the principal points of the report; but readers can obtain it on application to the secretary of the association.[ ] these are as follows:-- hours are often excessive, and employees are not paid for over-time. many stores give no half-holiday, and keep open on saturdays till ten and eleven o'clock in the evening, and at the holiday season do this for three or four weeks nightly. sanitary conditions are usually bad, and include bad ventilation, unsanitary arrangements, and indifference to the considerations of decency. toilet arrangements in many stores are horrible, and closets for male and female are often side by side, with only slight partition between. one hand-basin and towel serve for all. often water for drink can be obtained only from the attic. numbers of children under age are employed for excessive hours, and at work far beyond their strength, an investigation having shown that over one hundred thousand children under the legal age of fourteen were at work in factories, workshops, and stores. service for a number of years often meets with no consideration, but is regarded as a reason for dismissal. it is the rule in some stores to keep no one over five years, lest they come to feel that they have some claim on the firm; and when a saleswoman is dismissed from one house, she finds it almost impossible to obtain employment in another. the wages are reduced by excessive fines, employers placing a value upon time lost that is not given to services rendered. the fines run from five to thirty cents for a few minutes' tardiness. in some stores the fines are divided at the end of the year between the timekeeper and the superintendent, and there is thus every temptation to injustice. the report concludes:-- "we find that, through low wages, long hours, unwholesome sanitary conditions, and the discouraging effect of excessive fines, not only is the physical condition injured, but the tendency is to injure the moral well-being. it is simply impossible for a woman to live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns, without depriving herself of real necessities." these were the conditions which, in , led to the formation of the little society which, though limited in numbers, has done admirable and efficient work, its latest effort being to secure from the assembly at albany a bill making inspection of stores and shops as obligatory as that of factories. it was through the concerted effort of its members that the factory inspection act became a law, though not without violent opposition. the bill originated in the working-woman's society, was drawn up there, sent to albany by its delegates, and passed without the aid of money. there are eleven thousand factories in new york state, and only one inspector to investigate their condition; while in england, scarce larger in territory, forty-one inspectors are appointed by the government. the andrus bill, adding to the power of factory inspectors, raising the working age of children to fourteen years, and prohibiting night work for girls under twenty-one and boys under eighteen, was sent with the factory bill to the central labor union, and the women were largely instrumental in obtaining the passage of the measure. why such determined opposition still meets every attempt to bring about the same inspection for mercantile establishments cannot be determined; but thus far, though admitted to be necessary, the act has at each reading been laid upon the table. another effort will be made in the coming winter of - . in spite, however, of much agitation of all phases of woman's work, it is only some wrong as startling as that involved in the sweating-system that seems able to arouse more than a temporary interest. one of the most able and experienced women inspectors of the united states bureau of labor, miss de grafenried, has lately written:-- "it is an open question whether woman's pay is not falling, cost and standards of living considered. could partly supported labor and children be eliminated, shop employees would get higher rates. still there are other economic anomalies that affect women's wages. 'wholesalers' and manufacturers shut up their factories and 'give out' everything--umbrellas, coats, hair-wigs, and shrouds--to be made,--they know not in what den, or wrung they care not from what misery ... again, wages are depressed by over-stimulating piece-work; and its unscrupulous use by proprietors who hesitate to confess to paying women only $ or $ a week, yet who scale prices so that only experts can earn that sum. many employers cut rates as soon as, by desperate exertions, operatives clear $ a week. then, underbidding from the unemployed is a fruitful source of low wages. massachusetts has per cent of her workers unemployed." these conditions, while varying as to numbers, are practically the same for the work of women in all parts of the united states, and are matters of increasing perplexity and sorrow to every searcher into these problems. at its best, woman's work in industries is intermittent, since it is only textile work that continues the year round; dress and cloak making, shoe and umbrella making, fur-sewing and millinery, have specific seasons, in the intervals between which the worker waits and starves, or, if too desperate, goes upon the streets, driven there by the wretched competitive system, the evils of which increase in direct ratio to the longing for speedy wealth. in short, matters are at that point where only radical change of methods can better the situation, even the most conservative observer, relying most thoroughly upon evolution, feeling something more than evolution must work if justice is to have place in the present social scheme. it is at this point that some consideration of domestic service naturally presents itself. though regarded often as no part of the labor question, there can be no other head under which to range it, since the last census gives over a million persons engaged in this occupation, the lowest rough estimate of wages being $ , , and the support included forming a sum at least as large. it is through the hands of the domestic servant that a large part of the finished products of other forms of labor must pass, and the economic aspects of the question grow in importance with every year of the changing conditions of american life. in no other occupation is a just consideration of the points involved so difficult a task, since the mistress who faces the incompetence, insubordination, and all the other trials involved in the relation, suffers too keenly from the sense of individual wrong to treat the matter in the large. till it is so treated, however, understanding for both sides is impossible, and to bring about such understanding is the first necessity for all. from the employer's standpoint the advantages to be stated are as follows: first and most obvious is the fact that wages are not only relatively but absolutely high; for aside from the actual cash there are also board, lodging, fuel, light, and laundry, all of which the worker in trades must provide for herself. there is no capital required, as for type-writer, sewing-machine, or any appliances for work, nor is the girl forced to expend anything in preparation, since under the present system housekeepers take her untrained fresh from castle garden, and willingly give the needed instruction, at the same time paying the same wage as that given to competent service. professor lucy salmon, of vassar, who has devoted much time to this subject, reports that, on examination of testimony from three thousand employees, it is found that on a wage of $ . a week it is possible to save annually nearly $ "in an occupation involving no outlay, no investment of capital, and few or no personal expenses." the wages received are relatively higher than those of other occupations; for in professor salmon's comparison of wages received by three thousand country and the same number of city employees it was found that of six thousand teachers in the public schools the average salary actually paid is less than that paid to the average cook in a large city. the second advantage lies in the healthfulness of the work, which includes not only regularity but variety; the third, that a home, at least in all externals, is insured; the fourth, that a training which makes the worker more fit for married life is certain; and a fifth, that the work is congenial and easy for those whose tastes lie in this direction. these are the facts that are constantly urged upon the army of under-paid, half-starving needlewomen in our great cities, and no less upon another army of girls in shops and factories, who are implored to consider the advantages of domestic service and to give up their unnecessary battle with the limitations hedging in every other form of labor. astonishment that the girls prefer the factory and shop is unending, nor is it regarded as possible that substantial reason may and must exist for such choice. as a means of arriving at some solution of the problem, some six hundred employees of every order were interviewed, under circumstances which made their replies perfectly free and full; and the results tallied exactly with others obtained by an inquiry in the philadelphia working-woman's guild, a society then representing seventy-two distinct occupations. a report of this inquiry was made by mrs. eliza s. turner, the president of the guild, and is given as the most suggestive view of the whole subject yet secured. she writes as follows:-- "why do not intelligent, refined girls more frequently choose house service as a support?" the replies here given are as nearly as possible _verbatim_: . loss of freedom. this is as dear to women as to men, although we don't get so much of it. the day of a saleswoman or a factory hand may be long, but when it is done she is her own mistress; but in service, except when she is actually out of the house, she has no hour, no minute, when her soul is her own. . hurts to self-respect. one thing that makes housework unpleasant--chamber-work, for instance, and waiting on table--is that it is a kind of personal service, one human being waiting on another. the very thing you would do without a thought in your own home for your own family seems menial when it is demanded by a stranger. . the very words, "service" and "servant," are hateful. it is all well enough to talk about service being divine, but that is not the way the world looks at it. . say that a young woman well brought up undertakes to do chamber-work; she is obliged to associate with the other girls, no matter how uncongenial they may be, what may be their language or personal habits or table manners. if she tries to keep to herself, the rest think she is taking airs, and combine to make her life unbearable. . or say she takes a place for general housework; to be alone in the midst of others is crushing,--quite different from being alone in one's own lodgings. . i suppose a soldier doesn't mind being ordered around by his captain; but in a family the mistress and maid are so mixed up that it is much harder to keep the lines from tangling. it takes a very superior person, on both sides, to do it. . i knew an educated woman--a lady--who tried it as a sort of upper housemaid. the work was easy, the pay good, and she never had a harsh word; but they just seemed unconscious of her existence. she said the gentlemen of the house, father and son, would come in and stand before her to have her take their umbrellas or help them off with their coats, and sometimes without speaking to her or even looking at her. there was something so humiliating about it that she couldn't stand it, but went back to slop shop sewing. . many mistresses have no standard of the amount of work a girl ought to do. they know nothing about housework themselves. if a girl is deliberate and saves herself, they call her slow; if she is ambitious, and gets her work done early, and they see her sitting down in working-hours, they conclude that she is not earning her wages, and hunt up some extra job for her. no matter if you can't find anything undone, if she is found sitting about she _must_ be lazy. . some employers think that after the more violent work is done, it is only a rest for the girl to look after the child awhile. they don't seem to realize that if the mother finds it such a relief to get rid of her own child for an hour or so, it is likely to be still less interesting to take care of somebody else's child. . many people think the position of a child's nurse is very light work indeed,--mostly just sitting around; so they don't hesitate to give her the care of one or two children all day, not even arranging for her to get her meals without the oversight of them; and then most likely put the baby to sleep with her at night. any one minute of such a day may not be heavy, but to have it for twenty-four hours is enough to wear out the strongest human being ever made. . i knew a school-teacher who thought more active occupation would better suit her health; she took a place as child's nurse. she loved children, and found no objection to the work; but soon the employer concluded to put her in a _bonne's_ cap and apron. my friend would have worn and liked a nurse's uniform, but she objected to a family livery. on this question they parted; and her employer hired an uncouth, ignorant woman to be her child's companion and to give it its first impressions. . in most houses, however elegant, the girls have no home privacy; they must sleep, not only in the same room, but most frequently in the same bed; it is rarely thought necessary to make that room pleasant or even warm for them to dress by or to sit in to do their own sewing. the little tastes and notions of each member of the family, down to the youngest, are provided for; but a "girl" is not supposed to have any. she is just a "girl," as a gridiron is a gridiron, an article bought for the convenience of the family. if she suits, use her till she is worn out and then throw her away. . to go into house service, even from the most wretched slop or factory work, is to lose caste in our own world; it may be a very narrow world, but it is all to us. a saleswoman or cashier or teacher is ashamed to associate with servants. . the very words, "no followers," would keep us out of such occupation. no self-respecting young woman is going to put herself in a position where she is not allowed to entertain her friends, both male and female; nor where, if allowed, the only place thought fit for them is the kitchen. now, the above is not theory, but testimony, taken by the present writer from the lips of intelligent working-girls, many of whom would be better off at housework than at their present occupations, except for the objections. and from a consideration thereof results this query: given a certain number of young women of a class superior to the imported, willing to take service under the following conditions, how many housekeepers would agree to the conditions?-- . the heaviest work, as washing, carrying coal, scrubbing pavements, and the like, to be provided for, if this be asked, with consequent deduction in wages. . in families, where practicable, certain hours of absolute freedom while in the house, especially with the child's nurse. . such a way of speaking, both to and of your house help, as testifies to the world that you really do consider housework as respectable as other occupations. . a well-warmed, well-furnished room, with separate beds when desired; and the use of a decent place and appointments at meals. . the privilege of seeing friends, whether male or female; of a better part of the house than the kitchen in which to receive them; and security from espionage during their visits,--this accompanied by proper restrictions as to evening hours, and under the condition that the work is not neglected. . no livery, if objected to. turning from this informal examination of the subject to the few labor reports which have taken up the matter, it becomes plain that domestic service is in many points more undesirable than any other occupation open to women. the labor commissioner of minnesota reports, while stating all the advantages of the domestic servant over the general worker, that "only a fifth of those who employ them are fit to deal with any worker, injustice and oppression characterizing their methods." figures and detailed statements bear him out in this conclusion. the colorado commissioner gives even more details, and comes to the same conclusion; and though other reports do not take up the subject in detail, their indications are the same. the first general and rational presentation of the subject in all its bearings, both for employed and employer, has lately been made during the woman's congress at chicago, may, , in which the domestic science section discussed every phase of wrongs and remedies.[ ] the latter sum up in the formation of bureaus of employment in every large city, fixed rates, and full preparatory training. a keen observer of social facts has stated: the intelligence offices of new york alone receive from servants yearly over three million dollars, and are notoriously inefficient. this, or even half of it, would provide a great centre with training-schools, lodgings for all who needed them, and a system by which fixed rates were made according to the grade of efficiency of the worker. till household service comes under the laws determining value, as well as hours and all other points involved in the wage for a working-day, it will remain in the disorganized and hopeless state which at present baffles the housekeeper, and deters self-respecting women and girls from undertaking it. to bring about some such organization as that suggested will most quickly accomplish this; and there seems already hope that the time is not distant when every city will have its agency corresponding to the great bourse du travail in paris, but even more comprehensive in scope. co-operation within certain limited degrees, so that private home life will not be infringed upon, must necessarily make part of such a scheme, and has already been tried with success at various points in the west; but details can hardly be given here. it is sufficient to add that with such new basis for this form of occupation the "servant question" will cease to be a terror, and the most natural occupation for women will have countless recruits from ranks now closed against it. footnotes: [ ] fifteenth annual report of the massachusetts bureau of labor, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] house of representatives report no. : report of the committee on manufactures on the sweating-system, house of representatives, january, . [ ] child labor. by william f. willoughby, a.b. child labor. by miss clare de grafenried, publications of the american economic association, vol. v. no. . [ ] our toiling children. by florence kelley, w.c.t.u. publishing association, chicago. [ ] married women in factories. by w. stanley jevons, contemporary review, vol. xli. pp. - . [ ] miss alice woodbridge, secretary of the working-woman's society, clinton place, new york. [ ] the association then formed, and from which much is hoped, made the following summary of its objects:-- "the objects of this association shall be: . to awaken the public mind to the importance of establishing a bureau of information where there can be an exchange of wants and needs between employer and employed in every department of home and social life. . to promote among members of the association a more scientific knowledge of the economic value of various foods and fuels; a more intelligent understanding of correct plumbing and drainage in our homes, as well as need for pure water and good light in a sanitarily built house. . to secure skilled labor in every department of women's work in our homes,--not only to demand better trained cooks and waitresses, but to consider the importance of meeting the increasing demand for those competent to do plain sewing and mending." xii. remedies and suggestions. the student of social problems who faces the misery of the lowest order of worker, and the sharp privation endured by many even of the better class, is apt, in the first fever of amazement and indignation, to feel that some instant force must be brought to bear, and justice secured, though the heavens fall. it is this sense of the struggle of humanity out of which have been born utopias of every order, from the "republic" of plato to the dream in "looking backward." not one of these can be spared; and that they exist and find a following larger and larger, is the surest evidence of the soul at the bottom of each. but for those who take the question as a whole, who see how slow has been the process of evolution, and how impossible it is to hasten one step of the unfolding that humankind is still to know, it is the ethical side that comes uppermost, and that first demands consideration. taking the mass of the lowest order of workers at all points, the first aim of any effort intended for their benefit is to disentangle the individual from the mass. it is not charity that is to do this. "homes" of every variety open their doors; but in all of them still lurks the suspicion of charity; and even when this has no active formulation in the worker's mind, there is still the underlying sense of the essential injustice of withholding with one hand just pay, and with the other proffering a substitute, in a charity which is to reflect credit on the giver and demand gratitude from the receiver. here and there this is recognized, and within a short time has been emphasized by a woman whose name is associated with the work of organized charities throughout the country,--mrs. josephine shaw lowell. it is doubtful if there is any woman in the country better fitted, by long experience and almost matchless common-sense, to speak authoritatively. she writes:-- "so far from assuming that the well-to-do portion of society have discharged all their obligations to men and god by supporting charitable institutions, i regard just this expenditure as one of the prime causes of the suffering and crime that exist in our midst.... i am inclined, in general, to look upon what is called charity as the insult added to the injury done to the mass of the people, by insufficient payment for work." just pay, then, heads the list of remedies. the difficulty of fixing this is necessarily enormous, nor can it come at once; since education for not only the employer but the public as a whole is demanded. to bring this about is a slow process. it is a transition period in which we live. material conditions born of phenomenal material progress have deadened the sense as to what constitutes real progress; and the working-woman of to-day contends not only with visible but invisible obstacles, the nature of which we are but just beginning to discern. twenty years ago m. paul leroy-beaulieu wrote of women wage-earners:-- "from the economic point of view, woman, who has next to no material force, and whose arms are advantageously replaced by the least machine, can have useful place and obtain a fair remuneration only by the development of the best qualities of her intelligence. it is the inexorable law of our civilization,--the principle and formula even of social progress,--that mechanical engines are to perform every operation of human labor which does not proceed directly from the mind. the hand of man is each day deprived of a portion of its original task; but this general gain is a loss for the particular, and for the classes whose only instrument of labor is a pair of feeble arms." take the fact here stated, and add to it all that is implied in modern competitive conditions, and we see the true nature of the task that awaits us. to do away with this competition would not accomplish the end desired. to guide it and bring it into intelligent lines is part of the general education. profit-sharing is an indispensable portion of the justice to be done; and this, too, implies education for both sides, and would go far toward lessening burdens. we cannot abolish the factory, but hours can be shortened; the labor of married women with young children forbidden, as well as that of children below a fixed age. industrial education will prevent the possibility of another generation owning so many incompetent and untrained workers, and technical schools in general are already raising the standard and helping to secure the same end. our present methods mean waste in every direction, and trusts and syndicates have already demonstrated how much may be saved to the producer if intelligent combination can be brought about. competition can never wholly be set aside, since within reasonable limits it is the spur of invention and a part of evolution itself. but if wise co-operation be once adopted, the enormous friction and waste of present methods ceases,--the waste of human life as well as of material. one cheering token of progress is the increased discussion as to methods of training and the necessity of organization among women themselves. ten years ago only a voice here and there suggested the need of either. in , at the meeting of the british association for the advancement of science, miss sarah harland, lecturer on mathematics at newnham college, insisted that educated gentlewomen must have larger opportunity for paying work. the three qualifications in all work she stated to be: ( ) organization on a large scale; ( ) permanency; ( ) giving returns that will enable the salaries paid to compete with those of teachers. she regarded dressmaking as the trade which could most readily organize and meet the other conditions specified, and millinery as the trade which would come next. until such organization and its results have gradually altered present conditions, it will be true for all workers, on both sides of the sea, that not health alone but life itself are continuously endangered by the facts hedging about all labor. dr. stevens, the head of st. luke's insane asylum in london, in a paper read before the social science association, said:-- "it may be stated with great confidence that a prolific cause for the rapid and extensive increase of insanity in this country is to be found in the unceasing toil and anxiety to which the working-classes are subjected, this cause developing the disease in the existing generation, or, what is quite as frequently the case, transmitting to the offspring idiocy, insanity, or some imperfectly developed sensorium or nervous system. the agitated, overworked, and harassed parent is not in a condition to transmit a healthy brain to his child."[ ] accepted as true in , the words are not less so to-day, when cheap labor swarms, and the unemployed number their millions. how best to combine and to what ends, is the lesson taught in every form of the new movement for organization among women. to learn how to work together and what power lies in combination, has been the lesson of all clubs. among men it has counted as one of the chief educating forces, but for women every circumstance has fostered the distrust of each other which belongs to all undeveloped natures. for the lowest order of worker even, the "working-woman's journal," published in london and the organ of the working-woman's protective union, has for the last year recorded, from month to month, the gradual progress of the idea of combination, and the new hope it has brought to all who have gone into trades unions. with us there has been equal need and equal ignorance of all that such combinations have to give. they mean arbitration rather than strikes, and the compelling of ignorant and unjust employers to consider the situation from other points of view than their own. they compel also the same attitude from men in the same trades, who often are as strong opponents of a better chance for their associates among women workers in the same branches, as the most prejudiced employer. six points are urged by the working-woman's society of new york, all in the lines indicated here. its purposes and aims, as given in the prospectus, are as follows:-- . to encourage women in the various trades to protect their mutual interests by organization. . to use all possible means to enforce the existing laws relating to the protection of women and children in factories and shops, investigating all reported violations of such laws; also to promote, by all suitable means, further legislation in this direction. . to work for the abolition of tenement-house manufacture, especially in the cigar and clothing trades. . to investigate all reported cases of cruel treatment on the part of employers and their managers to their women and children employees, in withholding money due, in imposing fines, or in docking wages without sufficient reason. . to found a labor bureau for the purpose of facilitating the exchanging of labor between city and country, thus relieving the over-crowded occupations now filled by women. . to publish a journal in the interests of working-women. . to secure equal pay for both sexes for equal work. these points are the same as those made by the few clubs which have taken up the question of woman's work and wages; but thus far only this society has formulated them definitely. working-girls' clubs, friendly societies, and guilds are giving to the worker new thoughts and new purposes. the convention of working-girls' clubs held in new york in april, , showed the wide-reaching influence they had attained, and the new ideals opening before the worker. it showed also with equal force the roused sense of responsibility toward them, and the eager interest and desire for their betterment in all ways. where they themselves touched upon their needs, there were direct statements in the same line as many already quoted, which called for better pay, better conditions, shorter hours, and fewer fines. following the points given above came another presentation, the result of still further and long-continued investigation; and as the methods of the search and its results are practicable for all towns and cities where women are at work, the statement prepared for the society is given in full:-- "we would call your attention to the condition of the women and children in the large retail houses in this city,--conditions which tend to injure both physically and morally, not only these women and children, but working-women in general. the general idea is that saleswomen are employed from eight a.m. to six p.m., but they are really engaged in the majority of stores for such a time as the firm requires them; which means in the grand street stores, until ten, eleven, and twelve o'clock on saturday night _all the year round_, the saturday half-holiday not being observed in summer; and in the majority of houses that stock must be arranged after six p.m., the time varying, according to season, from fifteen minutes to five hours, _and this without supper or extra pay_; thus compelling women and children to go long distances late at night, and rendering them liable to insult and immoral influences. "excessive fines are imposed in many stores,--fines varying from ten to thirty cents for ten minutes' tardiness in the morning or lunch hour, and for all mistakes. cases are known of girls who have been fined a full week's pay at the end of the week. in one store the fines amounted to $ , in a year, and the sum was divided between the superintendent and timekeeper; and the superintendent was heard to charge the timekeeper with not being strict enough in his duties. "bad sanitary conditions, bad ventilation and toilet arrangements are common, and the sanitary laws are not observed. children under age are employed at work far beyond their strength, often far into the night. the average wages do not exceed $ . ; and in one of our largest stores the average wage is $ . , in another $ . . the tendency in all stores is to secure the cheapest help; for this reason school-girls just graduated are much sought for, as they, having homes, can afford to work for less. but a large proportion of the saleswomen either pay board or help support a family; and how can this be done on $ . per week? the cheapest board in dark stuffy attics or tenement houses is $ . , fuel and washing extra; and no woman can pay doctor's bills and maintain a respectable appearance on what remains. how then does she live? there are two ways of answering: the story of a woman who worked in one of our large houses is one way. this woman earned $ . per week; she paid $ . for her room; her breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee; she had no lunch; she had but one meal a day. many saleswomen must be in this condition. the other answer is that given by more than one employer, who when saleswomen complain of the low wages offered, reply: 'oh, well, get yourself a gentleman friend; _most of our girls have them_.' not long since a member of our society received a letter from a salesman in a certain house which read thus: 'in the name of god cannot something be done for the saleswomen? i am a salesman in----, and i have walked in disguise at night upon certain streets to be accosted by girls in my own department,--girls whose salaries are so low it was impossible to live upon them." a painter told us that in working in the houses of ill-repute in the vicinity of twenty-third street, he was astonished at the number of women whom he recognized as saleswomen in different stores who frequented these houses. but what are they to do? they are women without trade or profession, thrown upon their own resources, obliged to make a good appearance, and unable to do so and yet have sufficient food. we must all concede that virtue and honor in woman are natural, and very few women resort to such ways unless forced to do so; certainly not, when they yet have sufficient pride to wish to maintain the appearance of respectability. if men's wages fall below a certain limit, they become tramps, thieves, and robbers; but woman's wages _have no limit_, since she can always work for less than she can subsist upon, the _paths of shame being open to her_. and the beggarly pittance for which one class of women work becomes the standard of wages for all women, and throws them out upon the world, there to find a sure market. but we do not wish to insinuate, in stating these facts, that the majority of saleswomen resort to evil ways; on the contrary, they are the exception who do so. we know the majority of women prefer to suffer, and do suffer, rather than do so. but can we allow a few to fall? we of the working-women's society believe that we are so far our sisters' keepers that we are responsible for their position. "we believe that the payment and condition of those who work (through their employers) for us is our affair, and we have no right to remain in an ignorance that involves or may involve their misery. we believe we have no right, having obtained such knowledge, to refrain from seeking to remedy it, and urging all to assist us to do so. "in this belief we call your attention to the proposed 'consumers' league,' the members of which shall pledge themselves to deal at those stores where just conditions exist. "we have gotten together a number of facts which we shall be glad to present to you with our estimate of a fair house, or one which under existing conditions is eligible to admission to a white list." preceding this appeal and the public meetings which ensued, came, in , the formation of the consumers' league, mrs. josephine shaw lowell its president. quiet and inconspicuous as its work has been, the best retail mercantile houses in new york have accepted its prospectus as just, and stand now upon the "white list," which numbers all merchants who seek to deal justly and fairly with their employees. "what constitutes a fair house" expresses all the needs and formulates the most vital demands of the working-woman; and the results already accomplished speak for themselves. as a guide to other workers, it is given here in full:-- standard of a fair house. +wages.+ a fair house is one in which equal pay is given for work of equal value, irrespective of sex. in the departments where women only are employed, in which the minimum wages are six dollars per week for experienced adult workers, and fall in few instances below eight dollars. in which wages are paid by the week. in which fines, if imposed, are paid into a fund for the benefit of the employees. in which the minimum wages of cash-girls are two dollars per week, with the same conditions regarding weekly payments and fines. +hours.+ a fair house is one in which the hours from eight a.m. to six p.m. (with three quarters of an hour for lunch) constitute the working-day, and a general half-holiday is given on one day of each week during at least two summer months. in which a vacation of not less than one week is given with pay during the summer season. in which all over-time is compensated for. +physical conditions.+ a fair house is one in which work, lunch, and retiring rooms are apart from each other, and conform in all respects to the present sanitary laws. in which the present law regarding the providing of seats for saleswomen is observed, and the use of seats permitted. +other conditions.+ a fair house is one in which humane and considerate behavior toward employees is the rule. in which fidelity and length of service meet with the consideration which is their due. in which no children under fourteen years of age are employed. +membership.+ the condition of membership shall be the approval by signature of the object of the consumers' league; and all persons shall be eligible for membership excepting such as are engaged in the retail business in this city, either as employer or employee. the members shall not be bound never to buy at other shops. the names of the members of the consumers' league shall not be made public. later, one of the ablest workers in this field, mrs. florence kelley, formulated a basis for every society of working-women, as follows: i. to bring out of the chaos of competition the order of co-operation. ii. to organize all wages-earning women. iii. to disseminate the literature of labor and co-operation. iv. to institute a label which shall enable the purchaser to discriminate in favor of goods produced under healthful conditions. v. . abolition of child labor to the age of sixteen. . compulsory education to the age of sixteen. . prohibition of employment of minors more than eight hours daily. . prohibition of employment of minors at dangerous occupations. . appointment of women inspectors, one for every thousand women and children employed. . healthful conditions of work for women and children. the foregoing to be obtained by legislation. the following to be obtained by organization:-- . equal pay for equal work with men. . a minimal rate which will enable the least paid to live upon her earnings. a little later, the statement which follows, became necessary:-- "certain abuses exist in the dry-goods houses affecting the well-being of the saleswomen and children employed, which we believe can be remedied. in fact, in different stores some of them have been remedied, which gives us courage to bring these matters to your attention. "we find the hours are often excessive, and that these women and children are not paid for over-time. "we find that in many houses the saleswomen work under unwholesome conditions; these comprise bad ventilation, unsanitary toilet arrangements, and an indifference to considerations of decency. "the wages, which are low, we find are often reduced by excessive fines; that employers place a value on time lost that they fail to give for service rendered. "we find that numbers of children under age are employed for excessive hours, and at work far beyond their strength. "we find that long and faithful service does not meet with the consideration that is its due; on the contrary, having served a certain number of years is a reason for dismissal. "because of the foregoing low wages, the discouraging result of excessive fines, long hours, and unwholesome sanitary conditions, not only the physical system is injured, but--the result we most deplore, and of which we have incontrovertible proof--the tendency _is to injure the moral well-being_. "we believe that to call attention to these evils is to go far toward remedying them, and that the power to do this lies largely in the hands of the purchasing classes. "we think that 'the payment and condition of those who work--through their employers--for us, is our affair, and that we have no right to remain in ignorance of the conditions that involve or may involve their misery.'" two points still remain untouched, both of them vital elements in the just working of the social scheme,--profit-sharing, and a board of conciliation and arbitration for the adjustment of all difficulties between employer and employed. for every detail bearing upon the education bound up in even the attempt at profit-sharing, as well as for the actual and successful results in this direction, the reader is referred to an excellent little monograph on the subject, "sharing the profits," by miss mary whiton calkins, a.m., and for very full and elaborate treatment of the question, to the invaluable volume by n.p. gilman, "profit-sharing between employer and employed." in all cases where the experiment has had fair trial, it has resulted in a marked increase of interest in the work itself; an actual lessening of the cost of production, and of general wear and tear, because of this increased interest; and a far more friendly feeling between employer and employed. it is certain that justice requires immediate attention to every phase of this question, and that its adoption is the first step in the right direction. for the second point, we have as yet in this country only an occasional attempt at arbitration, yet its need becomes more and more apparent with every fresh difficulty in the field of labor. a little volume by mrs. josephine shaw lowell, at the time of writing,[ ] going through the press, who has given much time to a study of the question, contains the latest results of english and french legislation, and of special action in this direction. any history of the movement as a whole, hardly has place in these pages. it is sufficient to say that the system had practically no consideration till , when the first board of arbitration was formed in england, owing its existence to the determined efforts of two men. mr. rupert kettle, lawyer and judge, approached it from the legal side; mr. murdella, a manufacturer, and himself sprung from the working-classes, went straight "to the practical and moral end implied by the word 'conciliation,' ... both routes of this noble emulation converging, each affording strength to the common conclusions." the nottingham lace manufacture, in which numbers of women and children as well as men are employed, has, for thirty years and more, been governed by a board of arbitration, the result being an end of strikes and all difficulties of like nature. if no more were accomplished than the bringing about a better understanding between employer and employed, it would mean much, since mutual suspicion and distrust rule for both. organization among women, and the sense of mutual dependence given by it, lead naturally to the formation of a board able to judge dispassionately and disinterestedly of the questions naturally arising, many of which, however, are at once dissipated on the adoption of the system of profit-sharing. the practical steps already taken sum up in the forms just given; and there remains only the question constantly asked as to the final effect upon wages of woman's entrance into public life, this question usually shaping itself under three heads:-- . why are they in the field? . how does their work compare in efficiency with that of men? . what is likely to be the final effect on wage of their entrance into active life? the first phase has already had full answer in the general survey of trades and their rise and growth. as to the second, personal observation, long continued and minute, added to the very full knowledge to be obtained from the reports of the various state bureaus of labor, goes to prove beyond question that, given the same grade of intelligence, the work of women is fully equal to that of men. descending in the scale to untrained labor in all its forms, the woman is at times of less value than the man. the knights of labor, however, settled definitely that this was seldom the case, and in their constitution demanded equal pay for equal work. for both sexes machinery is more and more superseding the labor of each; and as women and children are quite capable of running much of it, this fact, of course, brings the general wage to their standard. this, added to various physiological and social reasons, makes woman often a less dependable worker than man, and tends to keep wages at a minimum. as to the final effect on wages, i regard the whole aspect of things as purely transitional, and must answer from personal conviction in the matter. the entire movement appears to me a part of the natural evolution from barbaric law and restriction, and a necessary demonstration of the spiritual equality of the sexes. i regard it also as the nurse and developer of many small virtues in which women are especially deficient,--punctuality, unvarying quality of work, a sense of business honor and of personal fidelity, each to all and all to each. but i cannot feel that it is a permanent state, or that when the essential has been accomplished women will have the same need or the same desire that now rules. i believe that wages must necessarily fluctuate and tend to the mere point of subsistence when either child labor or the lowest grade of woman's labor exists, and that the only way out of the complications we face is in an alteration of ideals. statistics and general reports show the demoralization of family life where such work goes on, and the fact that in the long run the workman loses rather than gains where his family share his labor. the lowering of wage may be considered, then, as in one sense remedial, and the present state of things as in part the mere action of inevitable and inescapable law. but it is impossible to make this plain in present limits. having passed through every stage of feeling,--sick pity, burning indignation, and tempestuous desire for instant action,--i have come at last to regard all as our education in justice and a demand for training in such wise as shall render unskilled labor more and more impossible. so long as it exists, however, i see no outlook but the fluctuating and uncertain wage, the natural result of the existence of the lowest order of workers. for them as for us it is the development of the individual from the mass that is the chief end of any real civilization. no utopias of any past or present can bring this at once. "each man to himself and each woman to herself, such is the word of the past and the present, and the true word of immortality." "no one can acquire for another, not one; no one can grow for another, not one." despair might easily be the outcome of a first glance at these conditions; but the stir at all points is assurance of a better day to come. legislation can do much. the appointment of women inspectors, lately brought about for new york, is imperative at all points, since women will tell women the evils they would never mention to men. law can also demand decent sanitary conditions, and affix a penalty for every violation. beyond this, and the awakening of the public conscience as to what is owed the honest worker, little can be said. enlightenment, a better chance at every point for the struggling mass,--that is the work for each and all of them, and for those who would aid the constant demand, and labor for justice in its largest sense and its most rigorous application. with justice on both sides, abuses die of pure inanition. the tenement-house system, every evil that hedges about special trades, every wrong born of cupidity and ignorance, and all base features of trade at its worst, end once for all, and we see the end and aim of the social life, whether for employer or employed. a generation ago mazzini wrote:-- "the human soul, not the body, should be the starting-point of all our efforts, since the body without the soul is only a carcass, whilst the soul, wherever it is found free and holy, is sure to mould for itself such a body as its wants and vocation require." it is this soul-moulding that is given chiefly into the hands of women. it is through them that the higher ideal of life, its purpose and its demands, is to be made known. no present scheme of general philanthropy can touch this need. it is growth in the human soul itself that will mean justice from the employer to each and every worker, and from the worker in equal measure to the employer; and this justice can be implanted in the child as certainly as many another virtue, into the knowledge and love of which we grow but slowly. never has deeper interest followed every movement for the understanding and bettering of conditions. never was there stronger ground for hope that, in spite of the worst abuses existing, man's will is to join hands at last with natural evolution toward higher forms. faith and hope alike find their assurance in the increasing sense of the solidarity of human kind, and the spirit of brotherhood more and more discernible, which, as it grows, must end all oppression, conscious and unconscious. the old days of darkness are dying. man knows at last that-- "laying hands on another, to coin his labor and sweat, he goes in pawn to his victim for eternal years in debt;" and in knowing it, the first step is taken in the new life wherein all are brothers; and the law of love, slowly as it may work, ends forever the long conflict between employer and employed. footnotes: [ ] transactions of the national association for the promotion of social science, , p. . [ ] july, . appendix. * * * * * factory inspection law. passed may , ; amended may , ; amended june , ; amended may , ; amended may , . * * * * * chapter , laws of (as amended by chapter , laws of ). an act to regulate the employment of women and children in manufacturing establishments, and to provide for the appointment of inspectors to enforce the same. * * * * * _the people of the state of new york, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows_: section i. no person under eighteen years of age, and no woman under twenty-one years or age, employed in any manufacturing establishment, shall be required, permitted, or suffered to work therein more than sixty hours in any one week, or more than ten hours in any one day, unless for the purpose of making a shorter work-day on the last day of the week, nor more hours in any one week than will make an average of ten hours per day for the whole number of days in which such person or such woman shall so work during such week; and in no case shall any person under eighteen years of age, or any woman under twenty-one years of age, work in any such establishment after nine o'clock in the evening or before six o'clock in the morning of any day. every person, firm, corporation, or company employing any person under eighteen years of age, or any woman under twenty-one years of age, in any manufacturing establishment, shall post and keep posted in a conspicuous place in every room where such help is employed, a printed notice stating the number of hours of labor per day required of such persons for each day of the week, and the number of hours of labor exacted or permitted to be performed by such persons shall not exceed the number of hours of labor so posted as being required. the time of beginning and ending the day's labor shall be the time stated in such notice; provided that such women under twenty-one and persons under eighteen years of age may begin after the time set for beginning, and stop before the time set in such notice for the stopping of the day's labor; but they shall not be permitted or required to perform any labor before the time stated on the notices as the time for beginning the day's labor, nor after the time stated upon the notices as the hour for ending the day's labor. the terms of the notice stating the hours of labor required shall not be changed after the beginning of labor on the first day of the week without the consent of the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector. when, in order to make a shorter work-day on the last day of the week, women under twenty-one and youths under eighteen years of age are to be required, permitted, or suffered to work more than ten hours in any one day, in a manufacturing establishment, it shall be the duty of the proprietor, agent, foreman, superintendent, or other person employing such persons, to notify the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector, in charge of the district, in writing, of such intention, stating the number of hours of labor per day which it is proposed to permit or require, and the date upon which the necessity for such lengthened day's labor shall cease, and also again forward such notification when it shall actually have ceased. a record of the amount of over-time so worked, and of the days upon which it was performed, with the names of the employees who were thus required or permitted to work more than ten hours in any one day, shall be kept in the office of the manufacturing establishment, and produced upon the demand of any officer appointed to enforce the provisions of this act. § . no child under fourteen years of age shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment within this state. it shall be the duty of every person employing children to keep a register, in which shall be recorded the name, birthplace, age and place of residence of every person employed by him under the age of sixteen years; and it shall be unlawful for any proprietor, agent, foreman, or other person in or connected with a manufacturing establishment to hire or employ any child under the age of sixteen years to work therein without there is first provided and placed on file in the orifice an affidavit made by the parent or guardian, stating the age, date, and place of birth of said child; if said child have no parent or guardian, then such affidavit shall be made by the child, which affidavit shall be kept on file by the employer, and which said register and affidavit shall be produced for inspection on demand made by the inspector, assistant inspector, or any of the deputies appointed under this act. there shall be posted conspicuously in every room where children under sixteen years of age are employed, a list of their names with their ages respectively. no child under the age of sixteen years shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment who cannot read and write simple sentences in the english language, except during the vacation of the public schools in the city or town where such minor lives. the factory inspector, assistant inspector, and deputy inspectors shall have power to demand a certificate of physical fitness from some regular physician, in the case of children who may seem physically unable to perform the labor at which they may be employed, and shall have power to prohibit the employment of any minor that cannot obtain such a certificate. § . no person, firm, or corporation shall employ or permit any child under the age of fifteen years to have the care, custody, management of, or to operate any elevator, or shall employ or permit any person under the age of eighteen years to have the care, custody, management, or operation of any elevator running at a speed of over two hundred feet a minute. § . it shall be the duty of the owner, agent, or lessee of any manufacturing establishment where there is any elevator, hoisting-shaft, or well-hole, to cause the same to be properly and substantially inclosed or secured, if in the opinion of the factory inspector, or of the assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector, unless disapproved by the factory inspector, it is necessary to protect the lives or limbs of those employed in such establishment. it shall also be the duty of the owner, agent, or lessee of each of such establishments to provide or cause to be provided, if, in the opinion of the inspector, the safety of persons in or about the premises should require it, such proper trap or automatic doors, so fastened in or at all elevator ways as to form a substantial surface when closed, and so constructed as to open and close by action of the elevator in its passage, either ascending or descending, but the requirements of this section shall not apply to passenger elevators that are closed on all sides. the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, and deputy factory inspectors may inspect the cables, gearing, or other apparatus of elevators in manufacturing establishments, and require that the same be kept in a safe condition. § . proper and substantial hand-rails shall be provided on all stairways in manufacturing establishments, and where, in the opinion of the factory inspector, or of the assistant factory inspector, or deputy factory inspector, unless disapproved by the factory inspector, it is necessary, the steps of said stairs in all such establishments shall be substantially covered with rubber, securely fastened thereon, for the better safety of persons employed in said establishments. the stairs shall be properly screened at the sides and bottom, and all doors leading in or to such factory shall be so constructed as to open outwardly where practicable, and shall be neither locked, bolted, nor fastened during working-hours. § . if, in the opinion of the factory inspector, or of the assistant factory inspector, or of a deputy factory inspector, it is necessary to insure the safety of the persons employed in any manufacturing establishment, three or more stories in height, one or more fire-escapes, as may be deemed by the factory inspector as necessary and sufficient therefor, shall be provided on the outside of such establishment, connecting with each floor above the first, well fastened and secured and of sufficient strength, each of which fire-escapes shall have landings or balconies, not less than six feet in length and three feet in width, guarded by iron railings not less than three feet in height, and embracing at least two windows at each story and connecting with the interior by easily accessible and unobstructed openings, and the balconies or landings shall be connected by iron stairs, not less than eighteen inches wide, the steps not to be less than six inches tread, placed at a proper slant, and protected by a well-secured hand-rail on both sides with a twelve-inch-wide drop-ladder from the lower platform reaching to the ground. any other plan or style of fire-escape shall be sufficient, if approved by the factory inspector; but if not so approved, the factory inspector may notify the owner, proprietor, or lessee of such establishment or of the building in which such establishment is conducted, or the agent or superintendent or either of them, in writing, that any such other plan or style of fire-escape is not sufficient, and may, by an order in writing, served in like manner, require one or more fire-escapes, as he shall deem necessary and sufficient, to be provided for such establishment, at such locations and of such plan and style as shall be specified in such written order. within twenty days after the service of such order, the number of fire-escapes required in such order for such establishment shall be provided therefor, each of which shall be either of the plan and style and in accordance with the specifications in said order required, or of the plan and style in this section above described and declared to be sufficient. the windows or doors to each fire-escape shall be of sufficient size, and be located as far as possible consistent with accessibility, from the stairways and elevator hatchways or openings, and the ladder thereof shall extend to the roof. stationary stairs or ladders shall be provided on the inside of such establishment from the upper story to the roof, as a means of escape in case of fire. § . it shall be the duty of the owner, agent, superintendent, or other person having charge of such manufacturing establishment, or of any floor or part thereof, to report in writing to the factory inspector all accidents or injury done to any person in such factory, within forty-eight hours of the time of the accident, stating as fully as possible the extent and cause of such injury, and the place where the injured person has been sent, with such other information relative thereto as may be required by the factory inspector. the factory inspector or assistant factory inspector and deputy factory inspectors under the supervision of the factory inspector, are hereby authorized and empowered to fully investigate the causes of such accidents, and to require such precautions to be taken as will in their judgment prevent the recurrence of similar accidents. § . it shall be the duty of the owner of any manufacturing establishment, or his agents, superintendent, or other person in charge of the same, to furnish and supply, or cause to be furnished and supplied therein, in the discretion of the factory inspector, or of the assistant factory inspector, or of a deputy factory inspector, unless disapproved by the factory inspector, where machinery is used, belt-shifters or other safe mechanical contrivances, for the purpose of throwing on or off belts or pulleys; and wherever possible machinery therein shall be provided with loose pulleys; all vats, pans, saws, planers, cogs, gearing, belting, shafting, set-screws, and machinery of every description therein shall be properly guarded, and no person shall remove or make ineffective any safeguard around or attached to any planer, saw, belting, shafting or other machinery, or around any vat or pan, while the same is in use, unless for the purpose of immediately making repairs thereto, and all such safeguards shall be promptly replaced. by attaching thereto a notice to that effect, the use of any machinery may be prohibited by the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or by a deputy factory inspector, unless such notice is disapproved by the factory inspector, should such machinery be regarded as dangerous. such notice must be signed by the inspector who issues it, and shall only be removed after the required safeguards are provided, and the unsafe or dangerous machine shall not be used in the mean time. exhaust fans of sufficient power shall be provided for the purpose of carrying off dust from emery wheels and grindstones, and dust-creating machinery therein. no person under eighteen years of age and no woman under twenty-one years of age shall be allowed to clean machinery while in motion. § . a suitable and proper washroom and water-closets shall be provided in each manufacturing establishment, and such water-closets shall be properly screened and ventilated, and be kept at all times in a clean condition; and if women or girls are employed in any such establishment, the water-closets used by them shall have separate approaches and be separate and apart from those used by men. all water-closets shall be kept free of obscene writing and marking. a dressing-room shall be provided for women and girls, when required by the factory inspector, in any manufacturing establishment in which women and girls are employed. § . not less than sixty minutes shall be allowed for the noonday meal in any manufacturing establishment in this state. the factory inspector, the assistant factory inspector, or any deputy factory inspector shall have power to issue written permits in special cases, allowing shorter meal-time at noon, and such permit must be conspicuously posted in the main entrance of the establishment, and such permit may be revoked at any time the factory inspector deems necessary, and shall only be given where good cause can be shown. § . the walls and ceilings of each workroom in every manufacturing establishment shall be lime-washed or painted, when in the opinion of the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or of a deputy factory inspector, unless disapproved of by the factory inspector, it shall be conducive to the health or cleanliness of the persons working therein. § . any officer of the factory inspection department, or other competent person designated for such purpose by the factory inspector, shall inspect any building used as a workshop or manufacturing establishment or anything attached thereto, located therein or connected therewith, outside of the cities of new york and brooklyn, which has been represented to be unsafe or dangerous to life or limb. if it appears upon such inspection that the building or anything attached thereto, located therein or connected therewith is unsafe or dangerous to life or limb, the factory inspector shall order the same to be removed or rendered safe and secure; and if such notification be not complied with within a reasonable time, he shall prosecute whoever may be responsible for such delinquency. § . no room or rooms, apartment or apartments, in any tenement or dwelling-house, shall be used for the manufacture of coats, vests, trousers, knee-pants, overalls, cloaks, furs, fur-trimmings, fur-garments, shirts, purses, feathers, artificial flowers, or cigars, excepting by the immediate members of the family living therein. no person, firm, or corporation shall hire or employ any person to work in any one room or rooms, apartment or apartments, in any tenement or dwelling-house, or building in the rear of a tenement or dwelling-house, at making in whole or in part any coats, vests, trousers, knee-pants, fur, fur-trimmings, fur-garments, shirts, purses, feathers, artificial flowers, or cigars, without first obtaining a written permit from the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector, which permit may be revoked at any time the health of the community or of those employed therein may require it, and which permit shall not be granted until an inspection of such premises is made by the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector, and the maximum number of persons allowed to be employed therein shall be stated in such permit. such permit shall be framed and posted in a conspicuous place in the room or in one of the rooms to which it relates. § . not less than two hundred and fifty cubic feet of air space shall be allowed for each person in any workroom where persons are employed during the hours between six o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, and not less than four hundred cubic feet of air space shall be provided for each person in any workroom where persons are employed between six o'clock in the evening and six o'clock in the morning. by a written permit the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or a deputy factory inspector, with the consent of the factory inspector, may allow persons to be employed in a room where there are less than four hundred cubic feet of air space for each person employed between six o'clock in the evening and six o'clock in the morning, provided such room is lighted by electricity at all times during such hours while persons are employed therein. there shall be sufficient means of ventilation provided in each workroom of every manufacturing establishment; and the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, and deputy factory inspectors, under the direction of the factory inspector, shall notify the owner, agent, or lessee, in writing, to provide, or cause to be provided, ample and proper means of ventilating such workroom, and shall prosecute such owner, agent, or lessee, if such notification be not complied with within twenty days of the service of such notice. § . upon the expiration of the term of office of the present factory inspector, and upon the expiration of the term of office of each of his successors, the governor shall, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, appoint a factory inspector; and upon the expiration of the term of office of the present assistant factory inspector, and upon the expiration of the term of office of each of his successors, the governor shall, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, appoint an assistant factory inspector. each factory inspector and assistant factory inspector shall hold over and continue in office, after the expiration of his term of office, until his successor shall be appointed and qualified. the factory inspector is hereby authorized to appoint from time to time not exceeding sixteen persons to be deputy factory inspectors, not more than eight of whom shall be women; and he shall have power to remove the same at any time. the term of office of the factory inspector and of the assistant factory inspector shall be three years each. annual salaries shall be paid in equal monthly instalments, as follows: to the factory inspector, three thousand dollars; to the assistant factory inspector, two thousand five hundred dollars; to each deputy factory inspector, one thousand two hundred dollars. all necessary travelling and other expenses incurred by the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, and the deputy factory inspectors in the discharge of their duties shall be paid monthly by the treasurer upon the warrant of the comptroller, issued upon proper vouchers therefor. a sub-office may be opened in the city of new york at an expense of not more than one thousand five hundred dollars a year. the reasonable necessary travelling and other expenses of the deputy factory inspectors while engaged in the performance of their duties shall be paid upon vouchers approved by the factory inspector and audited by the comptroller. § . it shall be the duty of the factory inspector, and the assistant factory inspector, and of each of the deputy factory inspectors under the supervision and direction of the factory inspector, to cause this act to be enforced, and to cause all violators of this act to be prosecuted; and for that purpose they and each of them are hereby empowered to visit and inspect at all reasonable hours, and as often as shall be practicable and necessary, all manufacturing establishments in this state. it shall be unlawful for any person to interfere with, obstruct, or hinder, by force or otherwise, any officer appointed to enforce the provisions of this act, while in the performance of his or her duties, or to refuse to properly answer questions asked by such officer with reference to any of the provisions hereof. the factory inspector may divide the state into districts, and assign one or more deputy factory inspectors to each district, and transfer them from one district to another as the best interests of the state may, in his judgment, require. any deputy factory inspector may be appointed to act as clerk in the main office of the factory inspector, which shall be furnished in the capitol, and set apart for the use of the factory inspector. the assistant factory inspector and deputy factory inspectors shall make reports to the factory inspector from time to time, as may be required by the factory inspector, and the factory inspector shall make an annual report to the legislature during the month of january of each year. the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, and each deputy factory inspector shall have the same powers as a notary public to administer oaths and take affidavits in matters connected with the enforcement of the provisions of this act. § . the district attorney of any county of this state is hereby authorized, upon the request of the factory inspector, assistant factory inspector, or of a deputy factory inspector, or of any other person of full age, to commence and prosecute to termination before any recorder, police justice, or court of record, in the name of the people of the state, actions or proceedings against any person or persons reported to him to have violated the provisions of this act. § . the words "manufacturing establishment," wherever used in this act, shall be construed to mean any mill, factory, or workshop, where one or more persons are employed at labor. § . a copy of this act shall be conspicuously posted and kept posted in each workroom of every manufacturing establishment in this state. § . any person who violates or omits to comply with any of the provisions of this act, or who suffers or permits any child to be employed in violation of its provisions, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty nor more than fifty dollars for the first offence, and not more than one hundred dollars for the second offence, or imprisonment for not more than ten days, and for the third offence a fine of not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and not more than thirty days' imprisonment. § . all acts and parts of acts inconsistent with the provisions of this act are hereby repealed. § . this act shall take effect immediately. authorities consulted in preparing this book. * * * * * united states census, from to inclusive. reports of the state bureaus of labor statistics as follows:-- maine, . massachusetts, to inclusive. connecticut, . rhode island, . new york, . new jersey, , , and . iowa, and . kansas, . wisconsin, - and . colorado, . minnesota, . california, . nebraska, - . michigan, . reports of the factory inspectors for various states. working women in large cities: report of the united states department of labor, washington, d.c., . the labor movement in america. by richard t. ely. thomas y. crowell & co., new york. the wages question: a treatise on wages and the wages class. by francis a. walker. henry holt & co., new york. the labor problem. edited by w.e. barnes. harper & brothers, new york. on labor. by w.t. thornton. macmillan & co., london, . profit-sharing between employer and employed. by n.p. gilman. houghton, mifflin, & co., boston. sharing the profits. by mary whiton calkins, a.m. ginn & co., boston. artisans and machinery. by p. gaskell. london, . condition of the laboring classes in england. by f. engel. leipzig and new york. ansichten der volkswirthschaft aus dem geschicht. standpunkte. by wilhelm roscher. various reports of commissioners appointed to inquire into the working of the factory acts in england. le travail des femmes au xix. siècle. by paul leroy-beaulieu. paris, . london labor and the london poor. by henry mayhew. charles griffen & co., london. the industrial revolution. by arnold toynbee. london. the philosophy of wealth. by john b. clark. ginn & co., boston. economic writings of emil de lavelaye. lalor's cyclopedia of political science. various treatises on political economy. adam smith, john stuart mill, senior, cairnes, ely, perry, walker, etc. prisoners of poverty. by helen campbell. roberts bros., boston. applied christianity. by washington gladden. houghton, mifflin, & co., boston. life and work of the earl of shaftesbury, london. read for factory inspection and legislation. problems of to-day. by richard t. ely. t.y. crowell & co., new york. social studies. by the rev. r. heber newton. g.p. putnam's son, new york. social problems. by henry george. studies in modern socialism. by edwin brown, d.d. appleton & co., new york. dynamic sociology. by lester f. ward. d. appleton & co., new york. labor and life of the people. vols. & : east london. by charles booth. williams & norgate, london, & . thirty years of labor: to . by t.v. powderly. das kapital. by karl marx. how the other half live. by jacob riis. charles scribner's sons, new york. general reports and review articles on the questions involved. bibliography of woman's labor and of the woman question. * * * * * germany. ausser den amtlichen veröffentlichungen der verschiedenen länder, über berufs-und bevölkerungstatistik vgl g. schmoller, thatsachen der arbeitsteilung, jahrb. f. ges. und berw. bd , . buchsenschutz, besitz und erwerb in griechischen alterthum. halle, . franz bernhoft, ueber die stellung der frauen in alterthum, nord und süd. bd. , . k. weinhold, die deutschen frauen im mittelalter, auflage. wien, . norrenberg, frauenarbeit und arbeiterinnenziehung in deutscher vorzeit. köln, . stahl, das deutsche handwerk. giessen, . carl bücher, die frauenfrage im mittelalter. tübingen, . stieda, litteratur, heutige zustände und entstehung der deutschen hausindustrie. leipzig, . [schr. d. ver. f. soz. bd. .] ad. held, zwei bücher zur socialen geschichte englands. leipzig, . fr. engels, die lage der arbeitenden klasse in england. ausgabe. leipzig, . karl marx, das kapital, band , auflage. hamburg, . max schippel, das moderne elend und die moderne uebervölkerung. stuttgart, . von scherzer, weltindustrien. leipzig, . ettore friedlander, die frage der frauen-und kinderarbeit, deutsch von fleischer. forbach, . ergebnisse der über die frauen-und kinderarbeit in den fabriken auf beschluss des bundesraths angestellten erhebungen, zusammengestellt im reichskanzleramt. berlin, . w. stieda, deutschlands sozialstatistische erhebungen im jahre . jahrb. f. ges. und verw. r.f. bd. , . eine enquete über frauen-und kinderarbeit in der deutsche flachs-und leinenindustrie. arbeiterfreund, jahrg. , . reichsenquete über die baumwoll-und leinenindustrie, - . stenograph, protokolle des bundesrathes, - . worishoffer, die soziale lage der cigarrenarbeiter im grossherzogthum baden. karlsruhe, . amtliche mittheilungen aus den jahresberichten der mit beaufsichtigung der fabriken betrauten beamten, jahrg. - . berlin, - . elster, die fabrikinspektionsberichte, und die arbeiterschutzgesetzgebung in deutschland. jahrb. f. nat. r.f. bd. . . p. kollmann, die gewerbliche entfaltung im deutschen reiche. jahrb. f. ges. und verw. r.f., bd. und . - . kuno frankenstein, die lage der arbeiterinnen in den deutschen grossstadten, ebenda bd. . . eug. kämpfe, die lage der industriellthätigen arbeiterinnen in deutschland. leipzig, . o. pache, unsere arbeiterfrauen. leipzig, . bericht der gewerbeordnungscommission des reichstages, legislaturperiode, session, - , sammlung d. drucksachen des reichstages, legislaturperiode, session , bd. , berlin, , nr. . karl kaerger, die sachsgangerei, landw. jahrb. bd. . . hirschberg, lohne der arbeiterinnen in berlin. jahrb. f. nat. bd. . . herkner, die belgische arbeiterenquete und ihre sozialpolitischen resultate. archiv f. soz. ges. und staat, bd. . . derselbe, die oberelsassische baumwollindustrie und ihre arbeiter. strassburg, . ruhland, der achtstundige arbeitstag und die arbeitschutzgesetzgebung australiens. zeitschr. f.d. ges. staatsgewissenschaft, bd. . . v. studnitz, amerikanische arbeitverhältnisse. leipzig, . douai, die lage der lohnarbeiter in amerika, in tenner, amerika. berlin und new york, . hirt, die gewerbliche thätigkeit der frauen von hygienischen standpunkte aus. breslau und leipzig, . derselbe, frauenarbeit in fabriken, in hirth's ann. . schuler und burkhardt, untersuchungen über die gesundheitsverhältnisse der fabrikbevölkerung in der schweiz. aarau, . schonlank, die further quecksilber-spiegelbelege. stuttgart, . pfieffer, die proletarische und criminelle säuglingssterblichkeit jahrb. f. nat. n.f. bd. . . john stuart mill, the subjection of women. london, ; aufl., , übersetzt von jenny hirsch, v.d. hörigkeit der frau, aufl., berlin , nebst einem vorbericht über den stand der frauenfrage, übersetzt von ludwig stockman, aufl. stuttgart, . die frau und die sozialismus, aufl. stuttgart, . v. raumer, die frau und die sozialdemokratie. berlin, . georg hannsen, die drei bevölkerungsstufen, [ , : das weib im bevölkerungsstrom]. münchen, . karoline norton, die frauen in england unter dem gesetz unseres jahrhunderts. a.d. engl. berlin, . rubinu und westergaard, statistik der ehen auf grund der sozialen gliederung. jena, . lette, denkschrift über die eröffnung neuer und die verbesserung bisheriger erwerbsquellen für das weibliche geschlecht. arbeiterfreund, jahrb. . auszug aus dem protokoll der sitzung des vorstandes und ausschusses des zent.-ver. in preussen für das wohl der arbeitenden klasse, nebst lettes votum und promemoria und andere materialen, ebenda. gust. eberty, geschichte der bestrebungen für das wohl der arbeitenden frauen in england, ebenda. luisa otto, das recht der frauen auf erwerb. hamburg, . otto august, die soziale lage auf dem gebiete der frauen. hamburg, . v. sybel, ueber die emanzipation der frauen. bonn, . karl thomas richter, das recht der frauen auf arbeit and die organization der frauenarbeit, aufl. wien, . schönberg, die frauenfrage. basel, . phil. v. nathusius, zur frauenfrage. halle, . rob. könig, zur charakteristik der frauenfrage. leipzig und bielefeld, . hedwig dohm, der frauen natur und recht. berlin, . dieselbe, die wissenschaftliche emancipation der frau. berlin, . fanny lewald, für und wider die frauen, aufl. berlin, . franz von holzendorff, die verbesserung in der gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen stellung der frauen, aufl. berlin, . luisa büchner, ueber die frauenemanzipation. dorpat, . j. pierstorff, frauenfrage und frauenbewegung. göttingen, . sophie v. hardenburg, zur frauenfrage. leipzig, . laas, zur frauenfrage. berlin, . lor. v. stein, die frau auf dem gebiete der nationalökonomie, aufl. stuttgart, . derselbe, die frau auf dem sozialen gebiete. stuttgart, . mathilde reichart stromberg, frauenrecht und frauenpflicht, aufl. leipzig, . f.l. warneck, ehret die frauen, aufl. leipzig, . dorothea christina erxleben, [geb. leporin,] gründliche untersuchen der ursachen, die das weibliche geschlecht von studieren abhalten, darin deren unerheblichkeit gezeiget, und wie möglich, nöthig und nützlich es sei, dieses geschlecht der gelehrtheit sich befleissige, umständlich dargelegt we wird. berlin, . dieselbe, vernünftige gedanken vom studieren des schönen geschlechts. frankfurt und leipzig, . victor böhmert, das studium der frauen in besonderer rücksicht auf das studium der medizin. leipzig, . derselbe, das frauenstudium nach den erfahrungen an der züricher universität. arbeiterfreund, bd. . . hermann, die frauenstudien und die interessen der hochschule zurich. zurich, . gneist, ueber gemeinschaftliche schulen für knaben und mädchen und über die universitätsbildung der frauen nach den neueren erfahrungen in den nordamerikanischen freistaaten. arbeiterfreund, jahrg. . . v. scheel, frauenfrage und frauenstudium. jahrb. f. nat., bd. , . eug. dühring, weg zur höheren berufsbildung der frauen, aufl. leipzig, . helene lange, frauen bildung. berlin, . zehender, ueber den beruf der frauen zum studium und zur praktischen ausübung der medezin durch die frauen. münchen, . ludwig schwerin, die zulassung der frauen zur ausübung des artzlichen berufs. berlin, . mathilde weber, aerztinnen für frauenkrankheiten, eine ethische und sanitäre nothwendigkeit, aufl. tübingen, . waldeyer, das studium der medizin und die frauen. tagebl. der . versammlung deutscher naturforscher und artzerei in köln, v. , , no. , wissenschaftl. theil. köln, . o. heyfelder, die medizinischen frauenkurse von petersburg. unsere zeit, , . karl breul, die frauencolleges der universität cambridge, england. preuss. jahrb., jahrg. , heft . die entstehung und entwickelung der gewerblichen fortbildungsschulen und frauenarbeitsschulen in würtemberg; herausgegeben von der königlichen commission für die gewerblichen fortbildungsschulen, aufl. stuttgart, . galle und kamp, die hauswirthschaftliche unterweisung armer mädchen. wiesbaden, ; neue folge, wiesbaden, . die hauswirthschaftliche unterricht armer mädchen in deutschland. schr. d. ver. f. armenpflege und wohlthätigkeit, heft . leipzig, . lina morgenstern, allgemeiner frauenkalender für , , und . berlin. luise otto peters, das erste vierteljahrhundert des allgemeinen deutschen frauenvereins. leipzig, . jenny hirsch, geschichte der -jahrigen wirksamkeit [ - ] des lettevereins. [festschrift.] berlin, . amelie sohr, frauenarbeit in der armen-und krankenpflege daheim und im auslande. berlin, . ed. gauer, die höhere mädchenschule und die lehrerinnenfrage. berlin, . spyri, die betheiligung des weiblichen geschlechts am öffentlichen unterricht in der schweiz. sep.-abdr. der schweizer. zeitschrift f. gemeinnützigkeit, jahrg. , zurich. rüdinger, vorläufige mittheilung über die unterschiede der grosshirnwindungen nach dem geschlecht, beiträge zur anthropologie und urgeschichte bayerns, bd. , . j. pierstorff, litteratur zur frauenfrage. jahrb. f. nat. n.f. bd. . . während des druckes erschienen: ed. von hartmann, die jungfernfrage, gegenwart , nr. und . w. stieda, frauenarbeit. jahrb. f. nat., dritte folge, , , . bibliography of french literature on the woman question and that of woman's labor. levasseur, histoire des classes ouvrières depuis . paris, . paul leroy-beaulieu, le travail des femmes au xix. siècle. paris, . jules simon, l'ouvrière, ^me édition. paris, . villermé, tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie. paris, . kuborn, rapport sur l'enquête faite au nom de l'académie royale de medicine de belgique par la commission chargée d'étudier la question de l'emploi des femmes dans les travaux souterrains des mines. bruxelles, . documents nouveaux relatifs au travail des femmes et des enfants dans les manufactures, les mines, etc., etc. bruxelles, . condorcet, lettres d'un bourgeois de new haven à un citoyen de virginie, . oeuvres complètes, brunswick, . the same, sur l'admission des femmes au droit de cité. journal de la société de , v. , vii. . laboulaye, recherches sur la condition civile et politique des femmes depuis les romains jusqu'à nos jours. paris, . legouvé, histoire morale de la femme. paris, ; ^me édition, . michelet, la femme. paris, . proudhon, la justice dans l'église et dans la révolution, . oeuvres anciennes, paris, - . tome - . jenny d'hericourt, la femme affranchie. bruxelles, . juliette lamber, idées antiproudhoniennes sur l'amour, la femme et le mariage, ^me édition. paris, . leon giraud, essai sur la condition de la femme en europe et en amérique. paris, . eugène pelletan, la famille. la mère. paris, . actes du congrès international des droits des femmes. paris, . comte de franqueville, les droits des femmes en angleterre, compte rendu de l'académie des sciences morales et politiques. paris, . english bibliography. working women in large cities, th annual report of the commission of labor. washington, . theodore stanton, the woman question in europe. london, . helen campbell, prisoners of poverty, . prisoners of poverty abroad, . woman's work in america, edited by annie nathan meyer. new york, . sophia jex-blake, medical women. edinburgh, . a. huntley, women and medicine. london, . john stuart mill, subjection of women. london, . eliza w. farnham, woman and her era. new york, . lester f. ward, dynamic sociology, vol. i. pp. - . maria s. child, history and condition of women in various ages and nations. boston, . index. abuses, in factories, ; in dry-goods stores, . (_see_ also fines, factories, hours.) age, average, of working-women in massachusetts, . agricultural labor, women press into, . agricultural laborers' union, women denied admission to, . alabama, women workers in, . alfred's "history of the factory movement," . american girls, percentage of, employed in massachusetts, . andover ordinances, . appendix, . apprentices, , . arbitration, . aristotle, "politics" and "economics," ; views of women, . arizona, working-women in, . arkansas, working-women in, . atlanta, ga., weekly wage in, austria, hours of labor in, . authorities consulted, . bakeries, girls in, . baltimore, md., weekly wage in, . beating, . beaulieu, paul leroy, , , . belgium, inquiry commission, ; hours of labor in, . berlin labor conference, . betton, frank, investigation of conditions in kansas, . bibliography, . bishop, commissioner, . "bitter cry of outcast london," , . blackwell, dr. emily, on restraints on women workers, . book-binding, women and children employed in, . boston, weekly wage in, ; establishment of labor bureau in, ; report on working-girls of, ; women employed in, . brain, relative sizes and weights of man's and woman's, . brassey, lord, . broadcloth, weaving of, by women, . brooklyn, n.y., weekly wage in, . bücher, dr. carl, . buffalo, n.y., weekly wage in, . california, average wage in, ; women workers in, ; first labor-bureau report, . calkins, mary w., on profit-sharing, . capital has no complaint, , . capitalist, and landlord absorb lion's share, ; investment of skill and risk, . carpet-weaving, women employed in, . celibacy, . census bureau, difficulties in work of, ; discrepancies in reports, . charity adds insult to injury, . charlemagne, . charleston, s.c., weekly wage in, . chicago, weekly wage in, . child labor, efforts against, ; in prussia, , . chivalry, . cigar-making, women and children employed in, . cincinnati, weekly wage in, . cities, women's trades focussed in, . clement of alexandria, on women, . cleveland, o., weekly wage in, . clothing-trade, women employed in, . colbert, . colorado, women workers in, ; labor-bureau reports, ; weekly wage in, . commodity, labor as a, . competition, among needle-workers, ; should be controlled, , . conciliation, arbitration and, . conditions, general, in maine, ; massachusetts, ; connecticut, ; rhode island, ; new jersey, ; kansas, ; wisconsin, ; colorado, ; indiana, ; minnesota, ; california, ; missouri, ; michigan, ; in new york stores, . congrès féministe, . connecticut, women workers in, ; labor bureau organized, ; average wage, . cotton, first bale of, ; industry, ; in italy, ; machinery and mills, , . cotton-goods trade, women in, . coxe, tench, , , . credit, . crime and pauperism in labor reports, . criminal list fed by factory system, . custom hampers women workers, . cyprian, . dakota, working-women in, . daniel, dr. annie s., , , . deaconesses, . de gournay, . delaware, women workers in, . diet, effect oil industrial efficiency, . distribution of wealth, conflict over, , . district of columbia, working-women in, . divorces in massachusetts labor reports, . domestic service, , ; in california, ; in colorado, ; advantages of, ; disadvantages, ; employers of, ; woman's congress on, . donaldson, principal, . dress-making, . drimakos, . dry-goods houses, abuses in, . dust in modern manufacture, , , . dynamic sociology, . earnings, definition of, ; average of working-women in massachusetts, . economic question, the question of the day, ; dependence, ; greek thought, . education, technical, as affecting efficiency, ; of girls less practical than of boys, ; industrial, in italy, ; in sweden, ; compulsory, ; demanded for the employer and the public, . efficiency, differences in, regulate wages, ; affected by education, . embroidery, . emerson, mary moody, . emigration, irish, ; increase of, . employment, fluctuation in, affects wages, . encyclical of pope leo xiii., . engels, dr., on proportion of subsistence to total expenses, . evils recognized, . evolution, woman's industrial activity in harmony with, . expenses, average of working-women in massachusetts, . factory, system, , ; girls, ; lowell girls, ; laws, , , , ; conditions, , ; hours, ; women in, ; employments, effects of, ; ventilation, ; inspection, , ; married women in, ; movement, , . fair house, standard of, . families, condition of, . family life, demoralization of, . fawcett, henry, opposition to women in trades, . fines, system of, , ; in stores, . florida, women workers in, . fortescue, . france, hours of labor in, . fry, eleanor, . fuller, margaret, . furriers, . georgia, women workers in, . germany, attitude of emperor william, ; hours of labor in, . "germinal," . gilman, n.p., on profit-sharing, . gloves, home manufacture of, . godfrey's cordial in infant mortality, . greeley, horace, . guilds, ; expulsion of women from, . habits, personal, as affecting efficiency, . half-time system for children, . harkness, margaret, . harland, sarah, on work for uneducated women, . harrison, frederick, , . health, in factory employments, ; of working-women in massachusetts, . homes, of working-people, ; for girls, ; in cities, , , . hosiery and knitting, women employed in, . hours of labor, in massachusetts, ; in michigan, ; in stores, . huxley, thomas, description of london parish, , . idaho, working-women in, . ideals, alteration of, called for, . illinois, women workers in, . immobility of labor, , . income, defined, ; average, in massachusetts, . indiana, women workers in, . indianapolis, average wage in, . individual development, . industrial, education, ; efficiency, . industries open to women in the united states, . infant mortality, . insanity among workers, . intellectual degeneracy of factory operatives, , . intelligence, effect on efficiency, ; effect of factory system on, . intemperance produced by factory system, . iowa, women workers in, ; labor bureau, . "iphigenia in tauris," . irish, emigration, ; industries, . iron law of wages, defined and denounced, ; applicable to unskilled labor, . jevons, w.s., . justice, education in, ; a soul-growth, , . kansas, women workers in, ; labor bureau, ; average wage in, . kay, dr., . kelley, florence, . kettle, rupert, on arbitration, . knights of labor, on women's work, . knitting, ; and hosiery trades, women in, . labor, degradation of, ; unskilled in colonies, ; child, ; effect of out-door, on pregnant mothers, ; unskilled, a cause of low wages, ; bureaus, their work in relation to women, (_see_ also under each state); father of, ; mobility of, ; congress in belgium, ; hours of, in germany, , in france, , in austria, , in belgium, , in switzerland, . laborer does not receive his share, . lace-making, women employed in, , ; in ireland, ; in nottingham, . lecky, w.h., . leroy-beaulieu, paul, , , . levasseur, e., . lille, cave-dwellers in, . "london, bitter cry of outcast," , ; poverty, , . louis le jeune, . louis, saint, "institutions" of, . louisiana, women workers in, . louisville, ky., weekly wage in, . love, law of, ends conflict, . lowell factory-girl, . lowell, josephine shaw, . luther, . lynn, mass., shoe-making industry of, . machinery, effects on woman's labor, . maine, sir henry, . maine, women employed in, ; in shoe-making, ; labor bureau, ; average wages, . manual training, in california, . (_see_ also education.) marriage, , . married women in factories, , . massachusetts, bureau of labor reports, , , ; census of women workers in, , ; average wages in, . match-making dangers, . mazzini on freedom, . men oppose admission of women to trades, . men's furnishing-goods, women employed in, . michigan, women workers in, . millinery, women employed in, ; readily organized trade, . mines, women in, . minnesota, women employed in, ; labor bureau, ; average wage, . mississippi, working-women in, . missouri, women workers in, . mobility of labor, . modern processes involve risk, . montana, working-women in, . mundella, arthur, on arbitration, . nebraska, working-women in, . needle, resource of unskilled woman laborers, . nevada, women workers in, . newark, average wage in, . new england, shoe operatives in, . new hampshire, women in shoe-making industry in, ; total women workers, . new jersey, factory evils in, ; women workers employed, ; average wage, . new mexico, working-women in, . new orleans, average wages in, . new york, labor bureau reports, , ; factory evils, ; total women workers in state, ; average wage in, . new york city, average wage in, ; percentage of women workers in, ; "tribune" stirs in sewing-women's behalf, . north carolina, total women employed in, . nott, mrs., . nottingham lace manufacture, . offices, intelligence, . ohio, women employed in, . oregon, working-women in, . organization among women, in france, ; in cities, ; in england, , . parent-duchalet, . pauperism and crime in labor reports, . pay, just, the first remedy, ; equal for both sexes, . peck, charles f., work in new york, . pennsylvania, working-women in, . perkins, mrs. thomas, . philadelphia, average weekly wage in, . plato, . post-office, employment of women in, objected to, . potter, beatrice, . poverty, no more desperate in europe than in the united states, , in london, , ; produced by factory system, . prejudice, born of ignorance, etc., to be dismissed, . profit-sharing between employer and employed, . prostitution, fed by factory system, , ; by domestic service, ; statistics in, , ; recruited from factories, . providence, average weekly wage in, . quesnay, . question of the day, the economic one, . questions, three, to be answered, . ranke, on air required, . remedies, just pay the first, . reports, labor, six divisions of, . (_see_ also under various states.) reybaud's "history of the factory movement," . rhode island, working-women in, ; average wage in, . rice, commissioner, deals with women wage-earners in colorado report, , . richmond, va., average weekly wage in, . robinson, henry a., michigan labor bureau work, . robinson, mrs. h.h., . rogers, thorold, ; value of his work, , . saleswomen, . san francisco, average weekly wage in, . sanitary conditions of factories and of operatives' homes, . san josé, average weekly wage in, . savannah, average weekly wage in, . savings of massachusetts working-women, . seamstresses, in paris, ; in new york, . seats in shops, . sewing-women, feeling stirred in behalf of, . sex, disability of, in the way of mobility of labor, . "sharing the profits," by mary w. calkins, . shearman, t.g., on irregularity of conditions in the united states, . shirt-making, women in, . shoe-making, women in, , . silk-growing, , . silk industry, women and children in, , . silk manufactory, women and children in, in italy, . simon, jules, . single and married, proportion of, among working-women, . smith, adam, ; summary of causes for difference in wages, . social life of working-people, . society, women workers frowned on by, . solidarity of humanity, . soul-moulding, mazzini on, . south carolina, working-women in, . spinning-classes, ; patriotic, . statistics inadequate as to early conditions, . stevens, dr., on increase of insanity, . stores, condition of women and children in, . st. louis, average weekly wage in, . st. paul, average weekly wage in, . straw-braiding in new england, , , ; straw-goods trade, women in, . sully, . supply and demand, . sweating-system, , ; parliamentary investigation of, end of report on, . tacitus, . technical education, as affecting efficiency, . tenement-house manufacture, . tennessee, working-women in, . tertullian, . texas, working-women in, . textile industries, women in, . thucydides, opinion of, . tobacco trade, women in, . trades, admission of women to, barred by men, ; women employed in, . tramp question, in labor reports, . trusts, alarm caused by growth of, . turgot, . tutelage, perpetual, of women, . umbrellas and canes, women employed in, . unemployed, condition of, . union, working-women's protective, . united states, labor bureau reports on working-women, . unskilled labor, in majority, ; fierce competition in, ; surplus of, following civil war, . utah, working-women in, . vacations of working-women in massachusetts, . value of laborer's service to employer, elements of, . vapors, dangers of, in manufacture, . vegetables, cultivation of, by women, . vermont, working-women in, . vincent, madame, . villermé, , . wage rates, present, in united states, . wages, why men receive more than women, , ; effect of industrial efficiency on, ; iron law of, ; effort to make standard of life conform to, ; tendency to a minimum, ; adam smith for causes of difference in, ; in stores, ; final effect of woman's work on, ; not fixed, ; field, ; eighteenth-century, ; in france, ; in russia, ; new york, ; decrease in, ; in clothing, ; in connecticut, ; in italy, ; in california, ; colorado, ; iowa, ; kansas, ; maine, ; minnesota, ; michigan, ; rhode island, ; average, per state, ; average, for all cities, ; average, by cities, ; definition of, . wages question the question of the day, . wales, women in industries in, . walker, gen. f.a., on differences in efficiency, ; difficulties of census enumeration, . ward, lester f., . wealth, ratio of increase greater than that of population, ; greater aggregation of, in the united states than in great britain, . weavers of baltimore, . weaving, colonial, . west virginia, working-women in, . widows, proportion of, among other workers, . windows, nailing down of, . wisconsin, average wage in, ; working-women in, . wives' earnings, . woman, primeval, ; roman, ; property of, ; petition of, in france, ; international council of, . women-workers, percentage of, in philadelphia, pittsburg, new york, lowell, manchester, wilmington, del., , ; according to states, ; of boston, , ; industries open to, in large cities, ; development of her intelligence necessary, ; in german mines, ; why their wages are less than men's, ; their trades highly localized, ; entrance into trades barred by men, ; increase of, in the united states, ; total numbers of, in the united states, in , ; in , ; in , ; occupations according to census of , . woollen and cotton industries, , . working-girls' clubs, conditions of, . working-woman's journal, . working-women's protective union, . working-women's society of new york, its aims, . worsted and woollen trades, women and children in, . wright, carroll d., . wyoming, working-women in, . wanted, a young woman to do housework business principles applied to housework by c. hÉlÈne barker author of _automobile french_ new york moffat, yard & company preface this little book is not a treatise on domestic science. the vacuum cleaner and the fireless cooker are not even mentioned. the efficient kitchen devised in such an interesting and clever way has no place in it. its exclusive object is to suggest a satisfactory and workable solution along modern lines of how to get one's housework efficiently performed without doing it one's self. if the propositions that she advances seem at first startling, the writer begs only for a patient hearing, for she is convinced by strong reasons and abundant experience, that liberty in the household, like social and political liberty, can never come except from obedience to just law. c.h.b. contents part i causes of the present unsatisfactory condition of domestic labor ignorance and inefficiency in the home difficulty of obtaining women to do housework the disadvantages of housework compared with work in factories, stores, and offices part ii business principles applied to housework living outside place of employment housework limited to hours a day housework limited to days a week the observance of legal holidays extra pay for overtime part iii eight hour schedules in the home eight hour schedules for one employee eight hour schedules for two employees eight hour schedules for three employees part i causes of the present unsatisfactory condition of domestic labor ignorance and inefficiency in the home. difficulty of obtaining women to do housework. the disadvantages connected with housework compared with work in factories, stores, and offices. ignorance and inefficiency in the home the twentieth-century woman, in spite of her progressive and ambitious theories about woman's sphere of activity, has allowed her housekeeping methods to remain almost stationary, while other professions and industries have moved forward with gigantic strides. she does not hesitate to blazon abroad with banners and pennants her desire to share with man the responsibility for the administration of the state, but she overlooks the disquieting fact that in the management of her own household, where her authority is absolute, she has failed to convince the world of her power to govern. when confronted with this accusation, she asserts that the maintenance of a home is neither a business nor a profession, and that in consequence it ought not to be compared with them nor be judged by the same standards. is it not due perhaps to this erroneous idea that housekeeping is a failure to-day? for the fact that it is a failure cannot be hidden, and that it has been a failure for many years past is equally true. recent inventions, and labor saving utensils, have greatly facilitated housework, yet housekeeping is still accompanied with much dissatisfaction on the part of the employer and the employee. there are only a few women to-day who regard domestic science in the light of a profession, or a business, although in reality it is both. for what is a profession if it be not the application of science to life? and does not work which one follows regularly constitute a business? many women, however, do not regard housekeeping even as a serious occupation, and few have devoted as much time, thought, and energy to mastering the principles of domestic economy as of late years women of all classes of society have willingly given to the study of the rules and ever changing intricacies of auction bridge. some consider their time too valuable to devote to domestic and culinary matters, and openly boast of their ignorance. outside engagements, pleasures, philanthropic schemes, or work, monopolize their days, and the conduct of the house devolves upon their employees. the result is rarely satisfactory. it is essential that the woman who is at the head of any concern, be it a business, a profession, or a home, should not only thoroughly understand its every detail, but in order to make it a success she must give it her personal attention each day for at least a portion of her time. it is a popular impression that the knowledge of good housekeeping, and of the proper care of children, comes naturally to a woman, who, though she had no previous training or preparation for these duties, suddenly finds them thrust upon her. but how many women can really look back with joy to the first years of their housekeeping? do they not remember them more with a feeling of dismay than pleasure? how many foolish mistakes occurred entailing repentance and discomfort! and how many heart-burnings were caused, and even tears shed, because in spite of the best intentions, everything seemed to go wrong? and why? simply because of ignorance and inefficiency in the home, not only of the employee, but of the employer also. that an employee is ignorant and unskilled in her work is often excusable, but there is absolutely no excuse for a woman who has time and money at her command, to be ignorant of domestic science, when of her own free will she undertakes the responsibilities of housekeeping. nearly all women take interest in the furnishing of their homes, and give their personal attention to it with the result that as a rule they excel in household decoration, and often produce marvels of beauty and taste with the expenditure of relatively small amounts of money. marketing is also very generally attended to in person by the housewife, but she is using the telephone more and more frequently as a substitute for a personal visit to butcher and grocer, and this is greatly to her disadvantage. the telephone is a very convenient instrument, especially in emergency, or for ordering things that do not vary in price. but when prices depend upon the fluctuations of the market, or when the articles to be purchased are of a perishable nature, it must be remembered that the telephone is also a very convenient instrument for the merchant who is anxious to get rid of his bad stock. the remaining branches of housekeeping apparently do not interest the modern housewife. she entrusts them very generally to her employees, upon whose skill and knowledge she blindly relies. unfortunately skill and knowledge are very rare qualities, and if the housewife herself be ignorant of the proper way of doing the work in her own home, how can she be fitted to direct those she places in charge of it, or to make a wise choice when she has to select a new employee? too often she engages women and young girls without investigating their references of character or capability, and when time proves what an imprudent proceeding she has been party to, she simply attributes the consequent troubles to causes beyond her control. if the housewife were really worthy of her name she would be able not only to pick out better employees, but to insist upon their work being properly done. to-day she is almost afraid to ask her cook to prepare all the dishes for the family meals, nor does she always find some one willing to do the family washing. she is obliged to buy food already cooked from the caterer or baker, because her so-called "cook" was not accustomed to bake bread and rolls, or to make pies and cakes, or ice cream, for previous employers, from whom nevertheless she received an excellent reference as cook. of course in cities it is easy to buy food already cooked or canned and to send all the washing to the laundry, but it helps to raise the "high cost of living" to alarming proportions, and it also encourages ignorance in the most important branches of domestic economy. in spite of the "rush of modern life," a woman who has a home ought to be willing to give some part of her time to its daily supervision. eternal vigilance is the price of everything worth having. if she gave this she would not have so many tales of woe to relate about the laziness, neglectfulness, and stupidity of her cook and housemaids. there is not a single housewife to-day who has not had many bitter experiences. one who desires information upon this subject has only to call on the nearest friend. to the uninterested person, to the onlooker, the helplessness of the woman who is at the head of the home, her inability to cope with her domestic difficulties, is often comic, sometimes pathetic, sometimes almost tragic. the publications of the day have caricatured the situation until it has become an outworn jest. the present system of housekeeping can no longer stand. one of two things must occur. either the housewife must adopt business principles in ruling her household, or she will find before many more years elapse there will be no longer any woman willing to place her neck under the domestic yoke. if the principles set forth in the following pages can be popularized in a comprehensive plan of which all the parts can be thoroughly understood both by the housewife and her employee, ignorance and inefficiency in the home will be presently abolished. difficulty of obtaining women to do housework the present unsatisfactory condition of domestic labor in private houses is not confined to any special city or country; it is universal. each year the difficulty of obtaining women to do housework seems to increase and the demand is so much greater than the supply, that ignorant and inefficient employees are retained simply because it is impossible to find others more competent to replace them. there is hardly a home to-day where, at one time or another, the housewife has not gone through the unenviable experience of being financially able and perfectly willing to pay for the services of some one to help her in her housekeeping duties, and yet found it almost impossible to get a really competent and intelligent employee. as a rule, those who apply for positions in housework are grossly ignorant of the duties they profess to perform, and the well trained, clever, and experienced workers are sadly in the minority. women and young girls who face the necessity of self support, or who wish to lead a life of independence, no longer choose housework as a means of earning a livelihood. it is evident that there is a reason, and a very potent one, that decides them to accept any kind of employment in preference to the work offered them in a private home. wages, apparently, have little to do with their decision, nor other considerations which must add very much to their material welfare, such as good food in abundance, and clean, well ventilated sleeping accommodations, for these two important items are generally included at present in the salaries of household employees. concessions, too, are frequently made, and favors bestowed upon them by many of their employers, yet few young girls, and still fewer women are content to work in private families. it is a deplorable state of affairs, and women seem to be gradually losing their courage to battle with this increasingly difficult question: how to obtain and retain one's domestic employees? the peace of the family and the joy and comfort of one's home should be a great enough incentive to awaken the housewife to the realization that something must be wrong in her present methods. it is in vain that she complains bitterly, on all occasions, of the scarcity of good servants, asserting that it is beyond her comprehension why work in factories, stores, and offices, should be preferred to the work she offers. is it beyond her comprehension? or has she never considered in what way the work she offers differs from the work so eagerly accepted? does she not realize that the present laws of labor adopted in business are very different from those she still enforces in her own home? why does she not compare housework with all other work in which women are employed, and find out why housework is disdained by nearly all self supporting women? instead of doing this, she sometimes avoids the trouble of trying to keep house with incompetent employees by living in hotels, or non-housekeeping apartments; but for the housewife who does not possess the financial means to indulge herself thus, or who still prefers home life with all its trials to hotel life, the only alternative is to submit to pay high wages for very poor work or to do a great part of the housework herself. in both cases the result is bad, for in neither does the family enjoy the full benefit of home, nor is the vexatious problem, so often designated as the "servant question," brought any nearer to a solution. the careful study of any form of labor invariably reveals some need of amelioration, but in none is there a more urgent need of reform than in domestic labor in private homes. it is more for the sake of the housewife than for her employee that a reform is to be desired. the latter is solving her problem by finding work outside the home, while the former is still unduly harassed by household troubles. with a few notable exceptions, only those who are unqualified to compete with the business woman are left to help the householder, and the problem confronting her to-day is not so much how to change inefficient to efficient help, but how to obtain any help at all. the spirit of independence has so deeply entered into the lives of women of all classes, that until housework be regulated in such a way as to give to those engaged in it the same rights and privileges as are granted to them in other forms of labor, the best workers will naturally seek employment elsewhere. the disadvantages of housework compared with work in factories, stores, and offices housework, when carefully compared with work performed by women in factories, stores, and offices, shows to a remarkable degree how many old fashioned ways of conducting her household still cling to the modern housewife. the methods that made housekeeping a success in the time of our ancestors are not adapted to the present needs of a society in which women who earn their own living are occupying so much more important positions than formerly. large stores and factories, requiring the coöperation of many employees, have done more to open new avenues of work for women than could have been dreamed of in former times, when it was the custom for each family to produce at home as much as possible, if not all, that was necessary for its own consumption. women, as a rule, are not taught self reliance, and many who hesitate to leave their homes to earn a livelihood, find that by doing work in stores, factories, or offices, they are not utterly separated from their families. the work may be harder than they anticipated and the pay small, but there is always the hope of promotion and of a corresponding increase of wages. business hours are frequently long, but they are limited, and after the day's work is over, the remainder of the twenty-four hours is at the disposal of the employees, who can still enjoy the happiness and freedom associated with the life of their own social circle. besides they have one day out of seven as a day of rest, and many legal holidays come annually to relieve the overstrain. with housework it is very different. the woman who accepts the position of a household employee in a private home must usually make up her mind to leave her family, to detach herself from all home ties, and to take up her abode in her employer's house. it is only occasionally, about once a week for a few hours at a time, that she is allowed to make her escape. it is a recognized fact that a change of environment has a beneficial effect upon every one, but a domestic employee must forego this daily renewal of thought and atmosphere. even if she does not know that she needs it in order to keep her mental activities alive, the result is inevitable: to one who does nothing but the same work from early morning until late at night and who never comes in contact with the outside world except four times a month, the work soon sinks to mere drudgery. as to promotion in housework it seems to be almost unknown. considering the many responsible positions waiting to be filled in private families, nothing could be more desirable than to instil into one's employees the ambition to rise. an employee who has passed through all the different branches of domestic science, from the lowest to the highest in one family, must be far better fitted to occupy the highest position in that family than one who applies for the position with the training and experience gained only in other families where the mode of living may be very different. since there is no chance of promotion and in consequence of receiving better pay, the domestic employee is often tempted to seek higher wages elsewhere, and thus the desire "to make a change," so disastrous to the peace of mind of the housewife, is engendered in her employees. in domestic labor the hours of work are longer than in any other form of employment, for they are unlimited. moreover, instead of having one day out of seven as a day of rest, only half a day is granted beginning usually about three o'clock in the afternoon, or even later. and legal holidays bring no relief, for they are practically unknown to the household employee. the only way women engaged in housework in private families can obtain a real holiday is by being suddenly called away "to take care of a sick aunt." there is an old saying containing certain words of wisdom about "all work and no play" that perhaps explains the dullness so often met with in domestic help. the hardest thing to submit to, however, from the point of view of the woman employed in housework, is the lack of freedom outside of working hours. this prevents her from taking part in her former social life. she is not allowed to go out even for an hour or two every day to see her relatives and friends. to ask them to visit her in her employer's kitchen is not a very agreeable alternative either to herself or her employer, and even then she is obliged to be on duty, for she must still wear her uniform and hold herself in readiness to answer the bell until the family for whom she works retires for the night. with such restrictions it is not surprising that the majority of women feel that they are losing "caste" if they accept positions in private families. there are two more causes to which this feeling of the loss of caste may be attributed. one is the habit of calling household employees by their first name or by their surname without the prefix of "miss"; the other is the custom of making them eat in their employer's kitchen. these are minor details, perhaps, but nevertheless they count for much in the lives of women who earn their own living, and anything, however small, that tends to raise one's self respect, is worthy of consideration. perhaps, too, while the word "servant" (a noble word enough in its history and its moral connotation) carries with it a stigma, a sense of degradation, among the working women, it should be avoided. briefly summed up, then, the present disadvantages of housework compared with work in factories, stores, and offices, are as follows: enforced separation from one's family. loss of personal freedom. lack of promotion. unlimited hours of work. no day of rest each week. non-observance of legal holidays. loss of caste. in the present comparison of housework with work in factories, stores, and offices, a recital of the advantages of domestic service, even under the present method of housekeeping, must not be omitted, for such advantages are important, although unfortunately they do not outweigh the present disadvantages. to the woman whose home ties have been disrupted by death or discord, and to the newly arrived immigrant especially, housework is a great boon, inasmuch as besides good wages, all meals and a room to sleep in are given her. moreover housework is the only form of labor where unskilled work can command high wages. this, however, is much more fortunate for the employee than for her employer. housework in itself is certainly _not worse_ than any other kind of manual work in which women are engaged; it is often more interesting and less fatiguing. it also helps a woman more than any other occupation to prepare herself for her natural sphere of life:--that of the home maker. a girl who has spent several years in a well ordered family helping to do the housework, is far better fitted to run her own home intelligently and on economic lines than a girl who has spent the same number of years behind a counter, or working in a factory or an office. again, work in a private house is infinitely more desirable, from the point of view of the influence of one's surroundings, than daily labor in a factory or store. the variety of domestic duties, the freedom of moving about from one room to another, of sitting or standing to do one's work, are much to be preferred to the work that compels the worker to stand or sit in one place all day long. if it be admitted, then, that housework is in itself a desirable and suitable occupation for women who must earn their living by manual labor, it can not be the work itself, but the conditions surrounding it that make it so distasteful to the modern working woman. part ii business principles applied to housework living outside place of employment. housework limited to eight hours a day. housework limited to six days a week. the observance of legal holidays. extra pay for overtime. living outside place of employment there are many housewives who are very much opposed to the adoption of a plan enabling household employees to live outside their place of employment. they claim that it is wiser to keep them under constant supervision day and night in order to prevent the introduction of disease or the acquisition of bad habits. there is more risk of disease being introduced into the home, and of bad habits being contracted by allowing one's children to associate with other children in schools, public or private, and by letting them play in the streets and public parks, where they mingle with more or less undesirable companions, than by having the housework performed by employees who come each day to their work and return to their homes at night when their duties are over. nevertheless no sensible parents would keep their children shut up in the house, only allowing them to go out of doors for a few hours once a week, for fear of contagion or contamination, and yet this is just what the housewife has been doing for years with her household employees under the firm impression that she was protecting them as well as herself. present statistics, however, upon the morality and immorality of women who belong to what is at present termed the "servant class," prove only too clearly that the "protection" provided by the employer's home does not protect. the shelter thus given serves too often to encourage a life of deception, especially as in reality the housewife knows but little of what takes place "below stairs." the "servants' quarters" are, as a rule, far enough away from the other rooms of the house for much to transpire there without the knowledge of the "mistress of the house," but who has not heard her complain of the misconduct of her employees? startling discoveries have been made at the most unexpected times and from the most unexpected quarters. one lady found her maid was in the habit of going out at night after the family had retired, and leaving the front door unlocked in order to regain admittance in the early morning without arousing the family. another housewife discovered one day that her cook's husband, whose existence until then was unknown, had been coming for several months to her house for his dinner. every householder finds that in the late evening her "servants" entertain their numerous "cousins" and friends at her expense. moreover, they do not hesitate to use the best china, glass, and silver for special parties and draw upon the household supplies for the choicest meats and wines. and because they cannot go out in the day time, it is not unusual to find some friend or relative comes to spend the entire day with them, and in consequence the housewife not only feeds her "help" but a string of hangers-on as well. why should she be surprised that she does not get an adequate return for the amount of money she spends? and these things take place, not only during the temporary absence of the employer, but even while she is sitting peacefully in the library and listening to a parlor lecture on the relations of capital and labor. women say tearfully or bravely on such occasions: "what can be done to make servants better? they are getting worse every day." and the housewife (one might almost call her by samuel pepys's pleasing phrase, "the poor wretch") then pours out to any sympathetic ear endless recitals of aggravating, worrying, nerve-racking experiences. instead of putting an end to such a regrettable state of affairs that would never be tolerated by any business employer, she seems content to bewail her fate and clings still more steadfastly to obsolete methods. why does she not adopt the methods of the business man in dealing with his employees? the advisability of having household employees live outside their place of employment is so apparent that it ought to appeal to every one. there would be no longer the necessity of putting aside and of furnishing certain rooms of the house for their accommodation: a practice which in the majority of families is quite a serious inconvenience and always an expense. in small homes where only one maid is kept, it may not make much difference to give up one room to her, but where several employees are needed, it means very often that many rooms must be used as sleeping apartments for them, frequently too a sitting room or a special dining room is given them. this is not all, for the rooms must be furnished and kept clean and warm, and supplied with an unlimited amount of gas and electricity. in many families the boarding and lodging of household employees cause as much anxiety and expense to the housewife as to provide for her own family. and why does she do it? why does she consent to take upon herself so much extra trouble for nothing? for, although she offers good food and a bed besides excellent wages to all who work for her, she is the most poorly served of all employers to-day. in the great feudal castles of the middle ages it was not deemed safe for women to venture forth alone, even in the daytime, and so those engaged in housework were naturally compelled to live under their master's roof, eating at his table and sitting "below the salt." but the master and the serf of feudal times disappeared long ago, only the mistress and her "servants" remain. to-day, however, "servants" no longer sit at their employer's table; they remain in the kitchen, where as a rule they are given to eat what is left from the family meals. some housewives, from motives of kindness and consideration for the welfare of those in their employ, have special meals prepared for them and served in a dining-room of their own at hours which do not conflict with the meals of the family. but this does not always meet with gratitude or even due appreciation; the disdainful way in which bridget often complains of the food too generously provided for her is well known. a chambermaid came one day to her employer and said she did not wish to complain but thought it better to say frankly that she was not satisfied with what she was getting to eat in her house: she wanted to have roast beef for dinner more often, at least three or four times a week, for she did not care to eat mutton, nor steak, and never ate pork, nor could she, to quote her own words "fill up on bread and vegetables as the other girls did in the kitchen." then, and only then, did her employer wake up with a start to the realization of the true position every housewife occupies in the eyes of her household employees. they evidently regard her in the light of a caterer; she does the marketing not only for her family but for them too. she pays a cook high wages, not only to cook meals for herself and family, but for her employees also. for the first time in her life, this housewife asked herself the following questions: why should she allow her household employees to live in her house? why should she consent to board them at her expense? why should she continue to place at their disposal a bedroom each, a private bathroom, a sitting room or a dining room? why should she allow them to make use of her kitchen and laundry to do their own personal washing, even providing them with soap and starch, irons and an ironing board, fuel and gas? why should she do all this for them when no business employer, man or woman, ever does it? was it simply because her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother had been in the habit of doing it? this awakening was the beginning of the end of all the trouble and expense which she had endured for so many years in connection with the boarding and lodging of her "servants." to-day she has no "servants"; she has household employees who come to her house each day, just as other employees go each day to their place of employment. they take no meals in her house, and her housekeeping expenses have diminished as much as her own comfort has increased. her employees are better and more efficient than any she ever had under the old régime, and nothing could persuade her to return to her former methods of housekeeping. the cost of providing meals for domestic employees varies according to the mode of living of each individual family, and of late it has been the subject of much discussion. some important details, however, seem to be generally overlooked, for the cost of the food is the only thing usually considered by the average housewife. to this first expense must be added the cost of pots and pans for cooking purposes; even under careful management, kitchen utensils are bound to wear out and must be replaced. then there is the cost of the extra fuel or gas or electricity required to cook the food, nor must one forget to count the extra work of the cook to prepare the meals, and of the kitchen maid or of some other maid to wash up the dishes after each meal served to employees. there is also the expense of buying kitchen plates and dishes, glasses, cups and saucers, knives and forks, etc. every housewife is in the habit of providing kitchenware for the use of her employees. the total sum of all these items would astonish those who think that the actual expense of giving meals to household employees is not a very great one and is limited to the cost of the food they eat; even this last expense is considerably augmented by the careless and wasteful way in which provisions are generally handled by those who do not have to pay for them. when ways and means are discussed among housewives to reduce the present "high cost of living," it would be well to advise all women to try the experiment of having their household employees live outside their place of employment. the result from an economic point of view alone is amazing, and the relief it brings the housewife who is no longer obliged to provide food and sleeping accommodations for her employees is so great that one wonders why she has been willing to burden herself with these responsibilities for so many years. there was once a time when women did not go out alone to eat in a restaurant, but to-day one sees about as many women as men eating their midday meal in public. if women engaged in general business prove themselves thus capable of self care, there seems to be no reason why household employees, who often receive higher wages than shop girls and stenographers, should not be able to do the same. they would enjoy their meals more outside, albeit the food given them in their employer's house is undoubtedly of a better quality; the change of surroundings and the opportunity of meeting friends, of leaving their work behind them, would compensate them. in any event, it is clearly proved by the scarcity of women applying for positions in private houses that these two advantages only to be obtained in domestic labor--board and lodging--do not attract the working woman of the present day. the joy of eating the bread of independence is an old and deeply rooted feeling. there is an ancient fable of Æsop about the dog and the wolf which portrays this sentiment in a very quaint and delightful manner. (sir roger l'estrange's translation.) the dog and the wolf there was a hagged carrion of a _wolf_, and a jolly sort of a gentile _dog_, with good flesh upon's back, that fell into company together upon the king's high-way. the _wolf_ was wonderfully pleas'd with his companion, and as inquisitive to learn how be brought himself to that blessed state of body. why, says the _dog_, i keep my master's house from thieves, and i have very good meat, drink, and lodging for my pains. now if you'll go along with me, and do as i do, you may fare as i fare. the _wolf_ struck up the bargain, and so away they trotted together: but as they were jogging on, the _wolf_ spy'd a bare place about the _dog's_ neck where the hair was worn off. brother (says he) how comes this i prethee? oh, that's nothing, says the _dog_, but the fretting of my _collar_ a little. nay, says t'other, if there be a _collar_ in the case, i know better things than to sell my liberty for a crust. the moral ...'tis a comfort to have good meat and drink at command, and warm lodging: but he that sells his freedom for the cramming of his belly, has but a hard bargain of it. in modern business enterprises, there is hardly a single instance of an employer who is willing to board his employees, nor would he consider for a moment the proposition of allowing them to remain at their place of employment all night and of providing sleeping accommodations for them. neither in consideration of benefiting them, nor with the view of benefiting himself by thus making sure of having them on hand for work early the next morning, would he ever consent to such an arrangement. when he needs some one to watch over his interests in the night time, he engages a night watchman, a very much more economical plan than to provide lodging for all his employees. why should the housewife be the only employer to assume the burden of a double responsibility toward her employees? perhaps in the country, where it might be impossible for them to live outside her home, such a necessity might arise, but in cities and suburban towns, there is absolutely no valid reason why household employees should sleep, eat, and live under their employer's roof. it is a custom only, and truly a custom that would be "more honored in the breach than in the observance." housework limited to eight hours a day in the home woman's work is said to be never ended. if this be true, it is the fault of the woman who plans the work, for in all the positions of life, work can be carried on indefinitely if badly planned. it is the essential thesis of this little volume that the domestic labor of women should be limited to a fixed number of hours per day in private houses. it is not unusual at the present day for a woman to work twelve, or fourteen hours a day, or even longer, when she earns her living as a household employee. a man's mental and physical forces begin to wane at the end of eight, nine, or ten hours of constant application to the same work, and a woman's strength is not greater than a man's. the truth of the proposition, abstractly considered, has been long acknowledged and nowadays requires no argument. when a woman accepts a position in business, she is told exactly how many hours a day she must work, but when a woman is engaged to fill a domestic position in a family, the number of hours she is expected to give her employer is never specified. she is simply told that she must be on duty early in the morning before the family arises, and that she may consider herself off duty as soon as the family for whom she is working has withdrawn for the night. is it surprising that under such conditions working women are not very enthusiastic over the domestic proposition to-day? a household employee ought to have her hours of work as clearly defined as if she were a business employee, and there is no reason why the eight-hour labor law could not be applied as successfully to housework as to any other enterprise. work in business is generally divided into two periods. yet this division can not always be effected, and in railroad and steamship positions, in post offices, upon trolley lines, in hotels, in hospitals, and in other cases too numerous to mention, where work must follow a continuous round, the working hours are divided into more than two periods, according to the nature of the work and the interests of the employer, not however exceeding a fixed number of hours per day or per week. it would be far better for the housewife as well as for her employees, if the housework were limited in a similar way. but with the introduction of the eight-hour law in the home, certain new conditions would have to be rigidly enforced in order to ensure success. firstly, the employee should be made to understand that during the eight hours of work agreed upon, she must be engaged in actual work for her employer. secondly, when an employee is off duty, she should not be allowed to remain with or to talk to the other employee or employees who are still on duty. when her work is finished, she ought to leave her employer's house. the non-observance of either of these two points produces a demoralizing effect. thirdly, a general knowledge of cooking, and serving meals, of cleaning and taking proper care of the rooms of a house, of attending correctly to the telephone and the door bell, of sewing, of washing and ironing, and of taking care of children, should be insisted upon from all household employees. there are many housewives who will state that this last condition is impossible, that it is asking too much from one employee; and since it is hard to-day to find a good cook, it will be still harder to find one who understands other household work as well. but those who jump to these conclusions have never tried the experiment. it is not only possible but practicable. judging from the ordinary intelligence displayed by the average cook and housemaid in the majority of private homes to-day, it ought not to seem incredible that the duties of both could be easily mastered by young women of ordinary ability. a woman who knows how to prepare and cook a meal, may easily learn the correct way of serving it, and the possession of this knowledge ought not to prevent her from being capable of sweeping a room, or making a bed, or taking care of children. it is above all in families where only a few employees are kept, that the housewife will quickly realize how much it is to her immediate advantage to employ women who know how to do all kinds of housework, instead of having those who make a specialty of one particular branch. the specialization of work in private houses has been carried to such an extreme that it has become one of the greatest drawbacks to successful housekeeping in small families. under this system of specialization, a household employee is not capable in emergency of taking up satisfactorily the work of another. even if she be able to do it, she often professes ignorance for fear it may prolong her own hours of labor, or because, as she sometimes frankly admits, she does not consider it "her place." the chambermaid does not know how to cook, the cook does not know how to do the chamberwork, the waitress, in her turn, can do neither cooking nor chamberwork, and the annoyance to the whole family caused by the temporary absence of one of its regular employees is enough to spoil for the time being all the traditional comforts of home. in hotels and public institutions, and in large private establishments, where the work demands a numerous staff of employees, the specialization of the work is the only means for its successful accomplishment, but in the average home requiring from one to four or five employees no system could be worse from an economic point of view, nor less conducive to the comfort of the family. specialization produces another bad effect, for it prevents the existence of the feeling of equality among employees in the same house. each "specialist" speaks rather disparagingly of the other's work, regardless of the relative position her own special "art" may occupy to the unprejudiced mind. an amusing instance of this was recently shown at a country place near new york, when "the lady of the manor" asked a friend to send some one down from the city to help with the housework during the temporary absence of her maid. the friend could not find any one at the domestic employment agencies willing to go, but at last through the charity organization society, she heard of a woman temporarily out of employment, who had been frequently employed as scrubwoman on the vacation piers. when the work was offered her, she accepted it immediately. arriving at her new employer's house, she began at once to scrub the floors, and when the work was completed, she sat on a chair and took no further notice of anything. the next day, having no more floors to scrub, the same general lack of interest was manifested. she was asked to wash the dishes after dinner. she replied that she was not used to "dishwashing," and did not know how to do it. she was persuaded, however, to make the attempt, but performed her new task very reluctantly. the following morning she said she felt "lonely" and would return at once to the city. as the train came in sight to bear her back to her accustomed surroundings, she gave a snort of relief, and exclaimed: "i'm a scrubwoman, i am. i ain't going to do no fancy dishwashing, no, not for no one; i'm a scrubwoman." and she clambered up into the train with the alacrity of a woman whose dignity had received a hard blow. the above illustration is typical of the spirit subjected to the system of specialization, and shows how unwise it is to encourage it in the home where all branches of housework could be easily made interchangeable. under the new system of limiting housework to eight hours a day, the housewife must insist that all applicants be willing and able to perform any part of the housework she may assign, and their duties ought not to be specified otherwise than by the term housework. the employee who refuses to wait on the table during the absence of the waitress, or to cook, or to do the laundry work, or to answer the telephone, or to carry packages from her employer's automobile to the library, because she does not consider it "her place to do these things," should be instantly discharged. these very important conditions being understood and conceded, the choice and arrangement of the eight hours' work must necessarily lie with each individual housewife. each family is different and has different claims upon its time. the "rush hours" of social life are sometimes in the evening, and sometimes in the afternoon, and again in some families, especially where there are small children, the breakfast hour seems the most complicated of the day. all these details have to be carefully thought of when making an eight hour schedule. at the end of this book a set of schedules is placed. any intelligent housewife can understand them, imitate them, and in many instances improve them. they are merely given as elementary examples. according to the number of employees she engages, the housewife will have eight, sixteen, or twenty-four hours of work to distribute among them, and to meet her peculiar needs she will find it necessary at the outset to devote some hours to a satisfactory scheme. after testing several, she will probably have to begin all over again before she finally succeeds in evolving one that is available. but the problem is interesting in itself, and always admits of a solution. it may not be amiss to make this final suggestion for the woman who is willing to give the new plan a fair trial: she should follow the example of the business man when he is in need of new employees, and advertise for help, stating hours of work, and requesting that all applications be made by letter. this disposes rapidly of the illiterate, and in the majority of cases, a woman who writes a good, legible, and accurate hand, is more apt to be efficient in her work than one who sends in a dirty, careless, ill-expressed and badly spelled application. through advertising one comes into touch with many women it would be impossible to reach otherwise. it is also the most advantageous way of bringing the employer and employee together, inasmuch as it dispenses entirely with the services of a third person, who, naturally can not be expected to offer gratuitous service. the plan of limiting housework to eight hours a day is not an idle theory; it has been in successful operation for several years. yet it is not easy to change the habit of years. there are many housewives who would loudly declare it impossible to conform to such business rules in the household; and many of the older generation of cooks and housemaids would agree. but when such a plan has been generally adopted, the domestic labor problem will be solved, and it does not appear that in the present state of social organization, it can be solved in any other way. housework limited to six days a week under the present system of housekeeping, there is not one day out of the three hundred and sixty-five that a domestic employee has the right to claim as a day of rest, not even a legal holiday. it is remarkable that this fact, showing so forcibly one of the greatest disadvantages connected with housework, should attract so little attention. no one seems to care about the fate of the "servant girl," as she is so often disdainfully called. during six days of the week she works on the average fourteen hours a day, but no one stops to notice that she is tired. on the seventh day, instead of resting as every other employee has the right to do, her work is merely reduced to nine, eight, or perhaps seven hours; and yet she needs a day of rest as much as every other woman who earns her bread. the rights of the domestic employee are ignored on all sides apparently. in public demonstrations of dissatisfaction between employers and employees the most oppressed class of the working people--the women who do housework--has never yet been represented. this is probably due to two causes: the first is because women dissatisfied with housework are rapidly finding positions in business where they enjoy rights and privileges denied them in domestic labor; and the second is because the great majority of women engaged in housework are foreign-born. these women learn quickly to understand and speak english, but they do not often read and write it, and as they are kept in close confinement in their employer's house, they have rarely the opportunity of hearing about the emancipation of the modern working woman. most of them are of a very humble origin, and being debarred from business positions on account of their ignorance and inexperience, they are thankful to earn money in any kind of employment regardless of the length of working hours. their children, however, who are american born and enjoy better educational advantages, do not follow in their footsteps when the time comes for them to earn their living. they become stenographers, typewriters, dressmakers, milliners, shirt waist makers, cash-girls, saleswomen, etc.; in fact any occupation where work is limited to a fixed number of hours a day and confined to six days a week, is considered more desirable than housework. the result is that the housewife is compelled to take for her employees only those who are rejected by every other employer; the capable, independent, intelligent american woman is hardly ever seen in domestic service. in washington, d.c., a law (the la follette eight hour law for women in the district of columbia) was recently passed limiting to eight hours a day and six days a week practically all work in which women are industrially employed; "hotel servants" are included under the provisions of this law, but "domestic servants in private homes" are expressly excluded. if this new law be considered a just and humane measure for women who are business employees, and if business houses be compelled to observe it, one naturally wonders why it should not prove to be an equally just and humane law for women who work in private families, and why should not the home be compelled to observe it too? instead of being a barrier to progress, the home ought to coöperate with the state in the enforcement of laws for the amelioration of the condition of working women. the home, being presided over by a woman, presumably of some education and intelligence, should be a most fitting place in which to apply a law designed to protect women against excessive hours of labor. why should housework in private homes be an exception to all other work? is it because some housewives say, in self justification and frequently without an accurate knowledge of what it is to do housework week after week without one day's release, that housework is easier than other work? is it easier? is it not sometimes harder? however, it is not a question of housework being harder or easier than other work, but of the desirability of having it limited to eight hours a day and six days a week. why should the housewife be allowed to remain in such a state of apathy in regard to the physical welfare of her household employees? "six days shalt thou labor" has all the sanction of scripture, of morals, and of common experience. it is only fair that women who work in private families should have one day out of seven as a day of rest, even as their more fortunate sisters in the business world. if by adopting such a law in the home the housewife found that her work was performed far more efficiently and willingly than at present, would it not be as much to her advantage as to the advantage of those she employs to limit the hours of household labor to six days a week? many housewives may object to this proposition inasmuch as the work in a home can not be suspended even for a day. but when two or more employees work in a private home, it is very easy to plan the housework so that each employee may have a different day of the week as a "day of rest," without the comfort of the family being disturbed by the temporary absence of one of the employees. it is only in families where one employee is kept that it may make a very serious difference to the housewife when her "maid-of-all-work" is away for one entire day each week. nevertheless the comfort of an employer ought not to outweigh justice to an employee. there are many ways of regulating the housework, as will be seen in the schedules at the end of this book, in order to give one day of freedom each week to household employees without causing much inconvenience to the housewife. by continuing to refuse this privilege to women employed in domestic labor, housekeeping is becoming more and more complicated. already it is such a common occurrence in some cities and in many parts of the country, not to find any woman willing to do housework, that many housewives are beginning to think that their future comfort in all household matters will depend entirely upon new labor saving devices and upon the help of the community rather than upon the increased knowledge and skill of domestic employees. there exists a prevailing impression, too, that housework has lost its dignity, and that at this period of the world's social history, it is impossible to restore it for women have stepped above it. but this is not true. the fact is that housework has remained stationary while other work has gained in freedom and dignity. without noisy protestations, or indignant speeches delivered in public, women have slowly and silently, one by one, deserted housework as a career on account of the narrowing, servile, and unjust conditions inseparable from it at the present day. let these conditions be removed and new regulations based upon modern business principles take their place, and then it will be seen that housework has never lost its dignity, and the very women who abandoned it will be the first to choose it again as a means of earning their livelihood. as a proof of this, the following experience may be cited of a new work woman who wished to obtain a domestic employee for general housework. she went to several employment agencies and at the end of a week she had seen four applicants; three were foreigners and spoke english so brokenly that they could never have been left in charge of a telephone. not one of the four was worth considering after investigating their references, and these were the only women she could find willing to do general housework. upon the advice of a friend, the perplexed housewife advertised in one of the daily newspapers, but only a few women applied for the position and these were far from being satisfactory. she then inserted another advertisement expressed in the following words: "wanted: a young woman to help with housework, eight hours a day, six days a week, sleep home. apply by letter only." this last clause was added to prevent any one from applying for the position who could not write english, as it was absolutely necessary that the person engaged to do the housework should be capable of attending correctly to the telephone. on the same day the advertisement appeared, eighty-five applications by letter were received, and twenty more came the following day. all who wrote expressed their willingness to fill the position of a domestic employee and to do anything in the way of housework under the new conditions specified in the advertisement. only one stated she would do no washing. many who replied to this advertisement had occupied positions, which according to the present standard, were far superior to housework; many, too, were married women, experienced in all household work, and most anxious to accept a position in a private family, a position that did not break up their own home life. the housewife was bewildered by the unexpected result of her advertisement: the tables were turned at last. instead of being one of many looking in vain for a good domestic employee, she found that she had now the advantage of being able to choose from more than a hundred applicants one who would best suit her own peculiar needs. the same advertisement has been inserted at different times and has always brought the same remarkable result: from one hundred to one hundred and sixty answers each time. it is true that all who present themselves may not be efficient, but efficiency speedily comes to the front when upon it alone depends a desirable position. two very important facts came to light through the help of this advertisement; one was to find so many women eager to do housework when it was limited to eight hours a day and six days a week, and the other was to hear that they were willing to board and lodge themselves, as well as work, for the same wages that "servants" are accustomed to receive, although to the latter the housewife invariably gives gratis all food and sleeping accommodations. these two facts alone prove beyond a doubt that by applying business principles to housework all objections to it as a means of earning a livelihood are removed. it is quite likely that for a time the old fashioned "mistress," and the old fashioned "servant" will continue to cling to past customs; but once it is proved that domestic labor limited to eight hours a day and six days a week, brings a better, more intelligent, more efficient class of employees to the home, the most obdurate employer will change her mind. no legislation is needed. if all who are trying to solve the "servant question" will begin to practice the new plan in their own homes, the future will take care of itself and the old ways will die a natural death. the observance of legal holidays in the home the pleasure brought by the advent of a holiday into the lives of the working people can hardly be overestimated, and it is doubtful if holidays would ever have become legalized had they not proved of distinct value to the masses. to have one day each week free from the steady grind of one's dally work is a great relief, but to have a holiday is something still better, for it usually means a day set apart for general rejoicing. why do all housewives persistently disregard the right of the household employee to have legal holidays? the reason generally brought forward is that many families need their employees more on a holiday than on any other day. in many cases this is quite true on account of family reunions or the entertaining of friends, but very often the housewife could easily dispense with the services of her employees on a holiday. she does not do it, however, or only occasionally, because it is not the custom to grant holidays to women who work in private homes. if it be impossible, on account of the exigencies of home life, to grant all legal holidays to household employees, there are many different ways of planning the housework so that other days may be given instead. sometimes the day before or the day after a holiday will give as much pleasure as the day itself. a woman who is at the head of a home has many opportunities of coming into close contact with her employees; she can easily ascertain their wishes in this respect and act accordingly. it is more the fact of being entitled to a holiday than to have it on a certain day that ought to be emphasized. domestic employees would be benefited by having these extra days of liberty, just as much as all other employees. a trial is all that is necessary to show how much better a household employee will work after having a holiday. she returns to her duties with renewed strength and the knowledge that she is no longer forced to play the rôle of cinderella gives her a fresh interest in life. unfortunately the housewife has been accustomed for so many years to have her "servants" work for her all day long on every day of the week, with only a few hours off duty "on every other sunday and on every other thursday," that she is rather inclined to resent such an innovation as the observance of legal holidays in domestic labor. she fails to perceive that by her present attitude she shows herself in a very unfavorable light as an employer, for the lack of holidays is decidedly one of the reasons for which housework is shunned to-day. business men have evolved a satisfactory and workable plan by which their employees are neither overworked nor deprived of all legal holidays, although frequently the work they are engaged in can not be suspended day or night even for an hour. it remains for women of the leisure class, and to this class belong all those who can afford to pay to have their housework done for them, to adopt a similar plan in their homes. extra pay for overtime when the plan for limiting housework to eight hours a day is discussed for the first time, the following question invariably arises: what is to be done when anything unusual happens to break the routine of the regular work, as for instance, when sickness occurs, when friends arrive unexpectedly, when a dinner party is given? sickness, of course, is unavoidable, but as a rule a trained nurse or an extra household assistant is called in to help. many times, however, this is not absolutely necessary, or perhaps the family can not afford to have outside help, and the extra work caused by sickness usually falls upon the domestic employee whose hours of labor are more or less prolonged in consequence. what ought to be done in such an event? there is but one answer: work that can not be accomplished within the regular working hours already agreed upon should be paid for as "overtime." when it is a question of work being prolonged beyond the eight hours a day by the entertaining of friends, one can only say that this ought not to happen if the housewife planned her working schedule carefully. she alone is responsible for her social engagements; she alone can make a schedule that will enable her to have her friends come to luncheon or dinner without prolonging the day's work beyond the hours agreed upon between herself and her employees. when friends arrive unexpectedly, however, or when a dinner party or a big social function takes place in the home, an eight hour schedule may be the cause of great inconvenience, unless a previous agreement has been made to meet just such occasions. it is certain that some compensation is due to all domestic employees for the extra long hours of work caused by unusual events in the home life of their employers, and many ways have been devised already to remunerate them. in modern social life a custom of long standing still exists which makes it almost compulsory for this remuneration to come out of the pocket, not of the hostess, but of her guests. the unfortunate custom of giving "tips" is not generally criticised very openly, but when viewed in the light of reason and justice, it seems to be a very poor way of trying to remove one of the present hardships connected with domestic labor. why should the housewife depend upon the generosity of her guests to help her pay her household employees? she never demurs at the extra expense entailed in giving luncheons and dinners in her friends' honor, nor in taking them to places of interest and amusement. why then should she object to giving a little more money to her household employees upon whose work the success of her hospitality so largely depends? there are many women who entertain extensively, but they never recompense a household employee for any extra work that may be demanded from her on that account. they consider themselves fully justified in exacting extra long hours of work because of the high wages they pay, especially as it frequently happens that while the work is more on some days, it is less on others, and they think in consequence that their employees have no cause for complaint. it is a mistake, however, to think that an employee who is obliged to be on duty and has little or nothing to do on one day, is really compensated for the extra hours of work she has been compelled to give on other days. a saleswoman who on certain days has no customers or only a few, is just as much "on duty" as if her work filled all her time, and it is the same with a domestic employee. indeed it is generally conceded to be more irksome to remain idle at one's post than to be actively engaged in work. but on the other hand, there are many housewives who feel that they ought to give their employees more pay for extra work especially when it is connected with the entertaining of friends, and the following ways of rewarding them have been tried with more or less success. one plan that gained favor with several families was to give ten cents to the cook and ten cents to the waitress every time a guest was invited to a meal: ten cents for each guest. at the end of a month the ten cent pieces had amounted to quite a sum of money. another plan that was tried in a small family was to give fifty cents to the cook and fifty cents to each of the two waitresses for every dinner party that took place, regardless of the number of guests. still another plan was to give at the end of the month, a two dollar, five dollar, or ten dollar bill to an employee who had given many extra hours of satisfactory work to her employer. all these plans are good in a certain sense, inasmuch as they show that women are awakening to the realization that some compensation is due to household employees for the extra long hours of work frequently unavoidable in family life. but unfortunately these plans lack stability, for they depend altogether upon the generosity and kindness of different employers, instead of upon a just and firmly established business principle. and now comes the question: what method of payment for overtime will produce a permanently satisfactory result? the only one that appears just and is applicable to all cases is to pay each employee one and a half times as much per hour for extra work as for regular work. in this way each employee is paid for overtime in just proportion to the value of her regular services. for instance, when a household employee receives $ , $ , or $ per month, that is to say $ , $ . , or $ per week, for working eight hours a day and six days a week, she is receiving approximately , , or cents per hour for her regular work. by giving her one and one half times as much for extra work, she ought to receive , - / , or cents per hour for every hour she works for her employer after the completion of her regular eight hours' work. this plan has never failed to bring satisfaction, and it has the advantage of placing the employer and the employee on an equally delightful footing of independence. the performance of extra work is no longer regarded as a matter of obligation on one side, and of concession on the other, but as a purely business transaction. some housewives fear that the regular work would be intentionally prolonged beyond all measure if it became an established rule to pay extra for work performed overtime. this could be easily checked, however, by paying extra only for work that was necessitated by unusual events in the family life. in families where only one employee is kept, naturally the occasions for asking her to work overtime arise more frequently than in families where there are two or more employees, especially if there be small children in the family. yet these occasions need not come very often, if the housewife bears in mind that even with only one employee, she has eight hours every day at her own disposal; she ought to plan her outside engagements accordingly. her liberty from household cares during these eight hours can only be gained though by having efficient and trustworthy assistants in her home, and she can never obtain these unless she abandons her old fashioned methods of housekeeping. she must grant to household employees the same rights and privileges given to business employees; she must apply business principles to housework. a great power lies in the hands of the modern housewife, a power as yet only suspected by a few, which, if properly wielded, can raise housework from its present undignified position to the place it ought to occupy, and that is in the foremost rank of manual labor for women. part iii eight hour schedules in the home eight hour schedules for one employee. eight hour schedules for two employees. eight hour schedules for three employees. eight hour schedules for one employee the schedules given in the following pages have been in actual practice for a sufficient length of time to prove that they can be relied on to produce satisfactory results, although no doubt many housewives will find that some of them must be modified to meet special requirements in their homes. two very important points must always be borne in mind in order to obtain the greatest advantage from an eight hour schedule, especially in families where only one employee is engaged to do the housework. the first point is this: the housewife ought only to make her working schedule _after_ she has carefully studied her own comfort and convenience in regard to the hours she considers the most important of the day for her to have help in her housework. the second point is for the housewife to reserve for herself the entire freedom of the eight hours during which her employee is on duty, for then she can place, or she ought to be able to, the full responsibility of the housekeeping upon her employee. by adhering strictly to these two points, the housewife will soon perceive that she can dispense with the services of her employee for the remaining hours of the day without much inconvenience to herself or her family. she may even find it more pleasant than otherwise to be relieved from the sight and sound of household work, for at least a few hours a day, when she is in her own home. possibly the housewife who has but one employee will not accept with alacrity the proposition of allowing her to be off duty for an entire day once a week, for unless she be willing to do the necessary work herself on that day, she must engage a special person to take the place of her regular employee. but many families engage a woman to come once a week to help with the washing and house-cleaning, especially when they have only one household employee. if this woman came on the day the regular employee was away, she could relieve the housewife of all the housework that could not be postponed until the next day. schedule no. i when only one employee is engaged in a private home, her services are needed more at meal time than at any other time of the day, especially if small children are in the family. as the hours for the three principal meals are about the same everywhere, the following schedule is a very useful one. from a.m. to a.m. hours from m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours in the morning from seven to ten o'clock, the employee had ample time to prepare and serve breakfast and wash up the dishes afterwards, and do the chamberwork. the three hours from noon until three o'clock were filled with duties that varied considerably each day. luncheon was served at one o'clock; it was but a light meal easy to cook and easy to serve, therefore the time from two to three o'clock was usually devoted to ironing, or mending, or cleaning silver, or polishing brasses, or preparing some of the dishes in advance either for dinner that evening or for luncheon the next day. two hours were sufficient to cook and serve dinner and wash up the dishes afterwards. a woman came once a week, on the day the employee was off duty, to do the family washing and assist with the general housework. she also did some of the ironing; the rest of the ironing was done the next day by the regular employee. this schedule has been tested, not merely once for a few months, but several times, and not with the same employee, but with different employees, and it has always been most satisfactory. it may seem doubtful to those who have never had their housework done on schedule time that the work can be completed in the time stated, but the greatest incentive that an employee can have to work quickly and well, is to know that her position is as good as any she can find elsewhere, and that when her work is over she is free to do exactly as she pleases with the remainder of her time. schedule no. ii the following schedule is very different from the preceding one, inasmuch as the housewife did not consider it necessary for her employee to be on duty in the middle of the day. there were no children in this family and as the housewife was alone in the day time, she very frequently went out for luncheon. she concluded therefore that it was the best time of the day for her to dispense with the services of her employee, whose working hours were arranged thus: from : a.m. to : a.m. hours from : p.m. to : p.m. hours ------- hours by half past eleven in the morning, all the usual housework was finished, and the employee went home; she returned at half past four in the afternoon, in time to attend to five o'clock tea and dinner. once a week, on alternate saturdays and sundays, she had a "day of rest." on these days the housewife got breakfast ready herself, after which she did as much or as little of the regular work as she chose. it is not difficult to reduce housework to a minimum on special occasions. the family, which was a small one, consisting of three adults, usually went out to dinner on these alternate saturdays and sundays. schedule no. iii in this schedule, the employee's work is divided into two periods, with one hour for rest between. the family consisted of a man and his wife, who lived in an apartment. the hours of work were as follows: from m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours the housewife was very fond of entertaining, and she chose an employee who was an excellent cook and a very good waitress. in consequence she was able to place the entire responsibility of luncheons and dinners on her, and on days when no guests were present all the house-cleaning was done. as the employee did not report on duty before noon, the housewife was obliged to get breakfast herself. however this was a very simple matter, for her employee always set the table for breakfast the night before. the next morning it was very easy for the housewife, with the aid of an electric heater on the breakfast table, to heat the cereal, boil the water for the coffee, and broil the bacon or scramble the eggs, or indeed to prepare any of the usual breakfast dishes. the employee did all the washing, ironing and mending each week, and although she came to her work only at noon, she accomplished as much work during her eight hours as if she began earlier in the day. schedule no. iv many schedules were tried before a really satisfactory one was finally chosen for a family of six: mother, father, four small children. the eldest child was seven years old, and there was only one household employee to help with the work. they lived in the country, and breakfast had to be served promptly at : a.m., on account of taking the early morning train to town. naturally, with only one employee, the housewife was compelled to do some of the housework herself, and until the following schedule was adopted, she had been in the habit of rising early, dressing the children, and getting breakfast ready herself. her employee arrived later in the day and remained until after dinner at night. the comfort and general welfare of the mother were increased to such a remarkable degree by the new schedule, however, that it is well worth special attention. the hours were as follows: from : a.m. to : a.m. hours from : a.m. to : p.m. hours ------- hours immediately upon arriving at the house, the employee went to the children and took complete charge of all of them. the two oldest dressed themselves, but of course the other two required help. after dressing them, she prepared breakfast. the cereal was always cooked the day before, and as a gas stove was used for cooking purposes, it was not hard to have breakfast ready promptly every morning at : . then the employee, having had her own breakfast before leaving her home, worked steadily until : a.m. during this time, the only work the mother felt she ought to do was to go out with her two youngest children; the other two went to school. she was always home again by : , when her employee stopped working. the employee lived too far away to go home for lunch, and as there was no place in the neighborhood where she could go for lunch, she always brought it with her and ate it in her employer's house. during the hour she was off duty, the mother attended to some household duties herself, and she also bathed the two children, and put them to bed for their morning nap. at : , her employee reappeared on duty, and took full charge of the house and children until : p.m.; her work for the day was then over and she went home. this schedule makes the mother stay home after half past three, but by that time all the real housework had been done by her employee. to give the children their supper and to put them to bed leisurely, was much easier work than to rise early and dress them hurriedly in the morning, and to get breakfast ready for the entire family. it was not much trouble to get dinner herself in the evening for her husband and herself only. the house was quiet, the children asleep, and there was no necessity of hurrying as in the morning. when she wished to give a dinner party, or to receive her friends, or to go to any entertainment in the afternoon after : , she asked her employee to give her extra hours of work for which she paid extra. once a week her employee had a "day of rest," and on this day another woman was engaged to take her place. this schedule enabled the mother to have many hours each day absolutely free from the children and household cares. eight hour schedules for two employees it is much easier to plan an eight hour schedule for two employees than for one, and there is no limit to the number of different ways in which the sixteen hours of work may be divided, subdivided, and arranged to please the individual housewife. with two employees, it is no longer necessary for the housewife to remain at home while one is off duty, even for an hour, for one relieves the other without any cessation of work. even on the seventh day, "the day of rest," the housewife can always arrange to have her work done without doing it herself, in spite of the absence of one of her employees. when a schedule is finally agreed upon, however, it must be rigidly enforced, for it is more important to keep to the hours specified when there are two employees than when there is only one. although the housewife may be tempted to claim the privilege of changing her hours very often to please herself, since she is the employer, if she value her peace of mind, she will refrain from doing it. only when the inevitable, the unforeseen, occurs should she make a change in her regular schedule. when one employee is off duty all day, the other employee can remain on duty the entire day; naturally this plan necessitates more than eight hours of work on that day, probably two or three more hours, but if on the day after or the day before, the employee be allowed to work two or three hours less than eight hours, the average of eight hours a day and six days a week is maintained. another example of what the housewife can do when one of her employees is off duty the entire day, is to make her other employee follow schedule no. . this enables her to keep to eight hours a day and at the same time the housewife does none of the housework herself. schedule no. v with two employees it is a wise plan to arrange a schedule that makes the work of one employee commence the moment the work of the other ceases. this tends to promote punctuality without requiring special supervision on the part of the housewife. the following schedule is admirably adapted to the every day life of the average family with two employees: _first employee_ from a.m. to a.m. hours from m. to p.m. hours ------- hours _second employee_ from a.m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours all the washing, ironing, and mending of the family were done by the two employees, and they also took care of the children when necessary. besides being good cooks, they were both excellent waitresses; in consequence it made no difference which one was on duty at meal time. one employee only was in charge of breakfast; she came at seven o'clock in the morning, and worked steadily until eleven o'clock, when the second employee arrived. she then went out for her lunch, returning at twelve, and remaining on duty until four o'clock in the afternoon. she was then free for the remainder of the day. the second employee, as soon as she arrived at a.m., went through the house and finished any work that was not completed by the first employee. she worked without stopping until p.m., then went away for her lunch; she returned at p.m. to relieve the first employee whose work was over at four o'clock. the second employee remained on duty until p.m.; she cooked and served dinner so quickly and efficiently that the housewife who had always been accustomed to have two employees, a "cook" and a "waitress," on duty for dinner every night, found to her great surprise that one efficient household employee, working on schedule time, accomplished in the same time the work of two of her former "servants." schedule no. vi in this schedule the housewife wanted both her employees to help her with her two children. with this end in view, she made all the work of the house interchange with the care of the children; in consequence when one employee was off duty, the other could always be relied on to help with the children. this proved to be a very successful schedule, for it relieved the mother from being obliged to sit in the nursery as she was compelled to do every time her former "nurse" went downstairs to her meals, or had her "afternoon off." but when the mother wished to be with her children, and that was very often, the employee who was in the nursery at the time, left the room immediately to attend to other household duties. both employees were on duty at a.m., a most necessary arrangement where there are small children in a family. the first employee prepared and served breakfast for the family, while the other employee took full charge of the children, giving them their breakfast in the nursery, and taking them out afterwards for a walk. at a.m., she returned with the children, and she was then off duty for two hours. the mother generally chose this time to be with her children; if however, she had any other engagement, the first employee was on duty until noon and could be called upon to look after them. _first employee_ from a.m. to m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours _second employee_ from a.m. to a.m. hours from m. to p.m. hours ------- hours schedule no. vii there are many families who may object to all the preceding schedules on account of the early hour in the evening for household employees to be off duty. when the housewife has never had her housework done on schedule time by an efficient employee, she may well think it impossible to have the dinner dishes washed up and everything put away in order by p.m. however some families do not begin dinner before half past seven, or eight o'clock, or even later, but in these families, it is not unusual for the breakfast hour to be very late also. in consequence nothing is easier than to make a schedule for the day's work begin late and end late, without making any other alteration in it. the following schedule, however, combines an early breakfast and a late dinner, in a family where only two employees were kept: _first employee_ from a.m. to m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours _second employee_ from m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours (or from to p.m.) ------- hours eight hour schedules for three employees the greater the number of household employees, the easier it is to make a satisfactory working schedule. but the temptation to specialize the work is greater, and should be carefully guarded against. it is just as necessary with three employees as with one for the housewife to insist that each one be capable and willing to do all kinds of work in the home, including sewing and taking care of children. with three employees, the housewife ought to make them take turns in cooking and serving one of the three meals each day. this enables them to become familiar with the dining room and with the different dishes for each course; it also removes any feeling of embarrassment which naturally might be felt by an employee who is rarely called upon to cook or serve a meal. to have an expert needlewoman in the house is a great boon to the housewife, and when she has three employees who can sew in her home, she ought to insist upon a great deal of sewing and mending being done by each one of them. it is rare that the "servant" of to-day is a good sewer; in fact the housewife would hesitate to ask her to do even the ordinary mending, but when one engages household employees on an eight hour schedule, and when there are a hundred women to choose from, it is not hard to find several who sew well. schedule no. viii it is so easy to plan the housework for three employees that one schedule as an example seems quite sufficient, and the only thing that the housewife must remember is to make all the work interchangeable. _first employee_ from a.m. to a.m. hours from m. to p.m. hours ------- hours _second employee_ from a.m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours _third employee_ from p.m. to p.m. hours from p.m. to p.m. hours ------- hours conclusion in conclusion it seems that a few words are necessary about families who need the services of an employee at night as well as in the day time. there are many mothers who do not wish or who are not able to take care of their children at night, and in consequence it is absolutely necessary to have an attendant. the present custom is to have the nurse or maid sleep in the same room as the baby, or in a room adjoining the children's bedroom, so as to be within call. but a woman who has worked all day, or even eight hours a day, should not have her sleep disturbed at night by taking care of children. no woman can be fit for her work the next day if she has not been able to secure the average amount of sleep necessary to health. in many cases it has been proved that when a child does not sleep well at night, the nurse has taken upon herself the responsibility of giving it "soothing syrup" so as to keep it quiet. this is hardly to be wondered at when one considers the strain under which the nurse is kept day and night by taking care of a small child; besides the average nurse is generally ignorant of the harm caused by so-called "soothing syrups." if a child be sick, the mother should call in a trained nurse, that is if she can afford it, and when she has several employees, she can usually afford this extra expense. if the child or children be well, and the mother desires some one to attend to them at night, she should engage a woman who has no occupation during the day and who is willing to work at night. she should make a point of choosing one who sews well, so that the services of a seamstress might be combined with the duties of a night nurse. there is always some mending to do in all families and a woman who is clever with her needle might make herself very useful to her employer. thousands of women sew by artificial light in dressmaking establishments and factories; in all probability just as many women could be found to sew by artificial light in private homes. perhaps at first the novelty of working at night might deter women from taking a position similar to the one suggested above, but a woman who was really in need of work would not let the unusual hours prevent her from accepting it, many men work at night and it is not unlikely that many women would be willing to do it too. women are not as timid as they were reputed to be in former years; they would neither scream nor faint nowadays at the sight of a little mouse scampering across the floor. indeed quite recently the newspapers reported that a woman whose husband had just died had accepted the position of a night watchman, and she filled her new rôle so successfully that on one occasion she managed to seize a burglar and handed him over to a policeman. this proposition of engaging a woman to work at night is only a suggestion, however, offered to those who find it absolutely necessary to have a domestic employee in their house at night. it remains to be proved if it could be carried out successfully. but the great changes in housekeeping described in the preceding chapters are not mere suggestions nor theories of what might be done: each reform has already been put into actual practice. the result has been so extraordinary that one is impelled to believe that the only way to solve the servant problem is to apply business principles to housework in private homes. naturally such a revolution from methods now in vogue can not be wrought in a day, and the transitional period may be one of some difficulty and confusion for employer and employee alike who have spent a large portion of their lives under the old régime. but the revolution is imperative, and the ultimate benefit beyond calculation. proofreading team the land-war in ireland a history for the times by james godkin author of 'ireland and her churches' late irish correspondent of 'the times' london macmillan and co. london: printed by spottiswoode and co., new-street square and parliament street preface. it would be difficult to name any subject so much discussed during the last half century as 'the condition of ireland.' there was an endless diversity of opinion; but in one thing all writers and speakers agreed: the condition was morbid. ireland was always sick, always under medical treatment, always subject to enquiries as to the nature of her maladies, and the remedies likely to effect a cure. the royal commissions and parliamentary committees that sat upon her case were innumerable, and their reports would fill a library. still the nature of the disease, or the complication of diseases, was a mystery. sundry 'boons' were prescribed, by way of experiment; but, though recommended as perfect cures, they did the patient no good. she was either very low and weak, or so dangerously strong and violent that she had to be put under restraint. whenever this crisis arrived, she arrested the special attention of the state doctors. consultations were held, and it was solemnly determined that something should be done. another effort should be made to discover the _fons malorum_, and dry it up if possible. a diseased nation, subject to paroxysms of insanity, and requiring , keepers, was a dangerous neighbour, as well as a serious financial burden. yet many contended that all such attempts were useless. it was like trying different kinds of soap to whiten the skin of a negro. the patient was incurable. her ailment was nothing but natural perversity, aggravated by religious delusions; and the root of her disorder could never be known till she was subjected to a _post mortem_ examination, for which it was hoped emigration, and the help of improving landlords, would soon afford an opportunity. in the meantime, the strait waistcoat must be put on, to keep the patient from doing mischief. but at length a great physician arose, who declared that this state of things should not continue; the honour, if not the safety, of england demanded that the treatment should be reversed. mr. gladstone understands the case of ireland, and he has courage to apply the proper remedies. yet the british public do not understand it so well; and he will need all the force of public opinion to sustain him and his cabinet in the work of national regeneration which they have undertaken. it is not enough for a good physician to examine the symptoms of his patient. he must have a full and faithful history of the case. he must know how the disease originated, and how it was treated. if injuries were inflicted, he must know under what circumstances, how they affected the nervous system, and whether there may not be surrounding influences which prevent the restoration of health, or some nuisance that poisons the atmosphere. such a history of the case of ireland the author has endeavoured to give in the following pages. it it is no perfunctory service. he resolved to do it years ago, when he finished his work on the irish church establishment, and it has been delayed only in consequence of illness and other engagements. he does not boast of any extraordinary qualifications for the work. but he claims the advantage of having studied the subject long and earnestly, as one in which he has been interested from his youth. he has written the history of the country more or less fully three times. during his thirty years' connexion with the press, it has been his duty to examine and discuss everything that appeared before the public upon irish questions, and it has always been his habit to bring the light of history to bear upon the topics of the day. twenty years ago he was an active member of the irish tenant league, which held great county meetings in most parts of the island; and was enthusiastically supported by the tenant farmers, adopting resolutions and petitions on the land question almost identical with those passed by similar meetings at the present time. then mr. sharman crawford was the only landlord who joined in the movement; now many of the largest proprietors take their stand on the tenant-right platform. and after a generation of sectarian division and religious dissension in ulster, stimulated by the landed gentry, for political purposes, the catholic priests and the presbyterian clergy have again united to advocate the demands of the people for the legal protection of their industry and their property. there is scarcely a county in ireland which the author of this volume has not traversed more than once, having always an eye to the condition of the population, their mode of living, and the relations of the different classes. during the past year, as special commissioner of the _irish times_, he went through the greater part of ulster, and portions of the south, in order to ascertain the feelings of the farmers and the working classes, on the great question which is about to engage the attention of parliament. the result of his historical studies and personal enquiries is this:--all the maladies of ireland, which perplex statesmen and economists, have arisen from injuries inflicted by england in the wars which she waged to get possession of the irish land. ireland has been irreconcilable, not because she was conquered by england, not even because she was persecuted, but because she was robbed of her inheritance. if england had done everything she has done against the irish nation, omitting the _confiscations_, the past would have been forgotten and condoned long ago, and the two nations would have been one people. even the religious wars resolve themselves into efforts to retain the land, or to recover the forfeited estates. and the banished chiefs never could have rallied the nation to arms, as they so often did against overwhelming odds, if the people had not been involved in the ruin of their lords. all that is really important in the history of the country for the last three centuries is, the fighting of the two nations for the possession of the soil. the reformation was in reality nothing but a special form of the land war. the oath of supremacy was simply a lever for evicting the owners of the land. the process was simple. the king demanded spiritual allegiance; refusal was high treason; the punishment of high treason was forfeiture of estates, with death or banishment to the recusants. any other law they might have obeyed, and retained their inheritance. this law fixed its iron grapples in the conscience, and made obedience impossible, without a degree of baseness that rendered life intolerable. hence protestantism was detested, not so much as a religion, as an instrument of spoliation. the agrarian wars were kept up from generation to generation, ireland always making desperate efforts to get back her inheritance, but always crushed to the earth, a victim of famine and the sword, by the power of england. the history of these wars, then, is the history of the case of the irish patient. its main facts are embodied in the general history of the country. but they have recently been brought out more distinctly by authors who have devoted years to the examination of the original state papers, in which the actors themselves described their exploits and recorded their motives and feelings with startling frankness. when a task of this kind has been performed by a capable and conscientious historian, it would be a work of supererogation for another enquirer to undergo the wearisome toil, even if he could. i have, therefore, for the purpose of my argument, freely availed myself of the materials given to the public by mr. froude, the rev. c.p. meehan, and mr. prendergast, not, however, without asking their permission, which was in each case most readily and kindly granted. the ancient state of ireland, and especially of ulster, is so little known in england, that i was glad to have the facts vouched for by so high an authority as mr. froude, and a writer so full of the instinctive pride of the dominant nation; the more so as i have often been obliged to dissent from his views, and to appeal against his judgments. beguiled by the beauty of his descriptions, i am afraid i have drawn too largely on his pages, in proving and illustrating my case; but i feel confident that no one will read these extracts without more eagerly desiring to possess the volumes of his great work from which they are taken. i have similar acknowledgments to make to father meehan and mr. prendergast, both of whom are preparing new editions of their most valuable works. the royal charters, and other documents connected with the plantation of ulster, are printed in the 'concise view of the irish society,' compiled from their records, and published by their authority in . whenever i have been indebted to other writers, i have acknowledged my obligation in the course of the work. in preparing it, i have had but one object constantly in view: to present to the public a careful collection and an impartial statement of facts on the state of ireland, for the right government of which the british people are now more than ever responsible. i shall be thankful if my labours should contribute in any measure, however humble, to the new conquest of ireland 'by justice' of which mr. bright has spoken. his language is suggestive. it is late (happily not 'too late') to commence the reign of justice. but the nation is not to be despised which requires nothing more than _that_ to win its heart, while its spirit could not be conquered by centuries of injustice. nor should it be forgotten by the people of england that some atonement is due for past wrongs, not the least of which is the vilification and distrust from which the irish people have suffered so much. 'the spirit of a man may sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?' some manifestation of christian magnanimity just now would greatly help the work of national reconciliation. the time is favourable. the government enjoys the prestige of an unparalleled success. the only prime minister that ever dared to do full justice to ireland, is the most powerful that england has had for nearly a century. he has in his cabinet the only chief secretary of ireland that ever thoroughly sympathised with the nation, not excepting lord morpeth; the great tribune of the english people, who has been one of the most eloquent advocates of ireland; an ex-viceroy who has pronounced it felony for the irish landlords to avail themselves of their legal rights, although he put down a rebellion which that felony mainly provoked; another ex-governor, who was one of the most earnest and conscientious that ever filled the viceregal throne, and who returned to parliament to be one of the ablest champions of the country he had ruled so well; not to mention other members of commanding ability, who are solemnly pledged to the policy of justice. in these facts there is great promise. he understands little of 'the signs of the times,' who does not see the dangers that hang on the non-fulfilment of this promise. j.g. london: _january _, . contents. i. introduction ii. the rule of the o'neills iii. shane o'neill, sovereign of ulster iv. exterminating wars v. an irish crusade vi. the last of the irish princes vii. government appeals to the people viii. the case of the fugitive earls ix. the confiscation of ulster x. the plantation of ulster xi. the rebellion of xii. the puritan plantation xiii. the penal code. a new system of land war xiv. ulster in the eighteenth century xv. poverty and coercion xvi. the famine xvii. tenant-right in ulster xviii. tenant-right in down xix. tenant-right in antrim xx. tenant-right in armagh xxi. fakney--mr. trench's 'realities' xxii. belfast and perpetuity xxiii. lease-breaking--geashill xxiv. the land system and the working classes xxv. conclusion--an appeal to englishmen xviii. tenant-right in down xix. tenant-right in antrim xx. tenant-right in armagh xxi. fakney--mr. trench's 'realities' xxii. belfast and perpetuity xxiii. lease-breaking--geashill xxiv. the land system and the working classes xxv. conclusion--an appeal to englishmen the land-war in ireland. chapter i. introduction. as the hour approaches when the legislature must deal with the irish land question, and settle it, like the irish church question, once for all, attempts are redoubled to frighten the public with the difficulties of the task. the alarmists conjure up gigantic apparitions more formidable than those which encountered bunyan's pilgrim. monstrous figures frown along the gloomy avenue that, leads up to the egyptian temple in which the divinity, property, dwells in mysterious darkness. to enter the sanctuary, we are solemnly assured, requires all the cardinal virtues in their highest state of development--the firmest faith, the most vivid hope, and the charity that never faileth. but this is not the only country that has had a land question to settle. almost every nation in europe has done for itself what england is now palled upon to do for ireland. in fact, it is a necessary process in the transition from feudalism to constitutional self-government. feudalism gave the land to a few whom it made princes and lords, having forcibly taken it from the many, whom it made subjects and serfs. the land is the natural basis of society. the normans made it the artificial basis of a class. society in nearly every other country has reverted back to its original foundations, and so remains firm and strong without dangerous rents or fissures. no doubt, the operation is difficult and critical. but what has been done once may be done again; and as it was england that kept irish society so long rocking on its smaller end, it is her duty now to lend all her strength to help to seat it on its own broad foundations. giving up the viceroy's dreams that the glorious mission of ireland was to be a kitchen garden, a dairy, a larder for england, we must come frankly to the conclusion that the national life of the irish people, without distinction of creed or party, increases in vigour with their intelligence, and is now invincible. let the imperial legislature put an end for ever to such an unnatural state of things--thus only can they secure the harmonious working and cordial union of the two nations united together in one state--thus only can they insure for the landlords themselves all the power and all the influence that can be retained by them in consistency with the industrial rights and political freedom of the cultivators of the soil. these now complain of their abject dependence, and hopeless bondage, under grinding injustice. they are alleged to be full of discontent, which must grow with the intelligence and manhood of the people who writhe under the system. their advocates affirm that their discontent must increase in volume and angry force every year, and that, owing to the connection of ireland with the united states, it may at any time be suddenly swollen with the fury of a mountain torrent, deeply discoloured by a republican element. it must be granted, i fear, that the celts of ireland feel pretty much as the britons felt under the ascendency of the saxons, and as the saxons in their turn felt under the ascendency of the normans. in the estimation of the christian britons, their saxon conquerors, even after the conversion of the latter, were 'an accursed race, the children of robbers and murderers, possessing the fruits of their fathers' crimes.' 'with them,' says dr. lingard, 'the saxon was no better than a pagan bearing the name of a christian. they refused to return his salutation, to join in prayer with him in the church, to sit with him at the same table, to abide with him under the same roof. the remnant of his meals and the food over which he had made the sign of the cross they threw to their dogs or swine; the cup out of which he had drunk they scoured with sand, as if it had contracted defilement from his lips.' it is not the celtic memory only that is tenacious of national wrong. the saxon was doomed to drink to the dregs the same bitter cup which he administered so unmercifully to the briton. his teutonic blood saved him from no humiliation or insult. the normans seized all the lands, all the castles, all the pleasant mansions, all the churches and monasteries. even the saxon saints were flung down out of their shrines and trampled in the dust under the iron heel of the christian conqueror. everything saxon was vile, and the word 'englishry' implied as much contempt and scorn as the word 'irishry' in a later age. in fact, the subjugated saxons gradually became infected with all the vices and addicted to all the social disorders that prevailed among the irish in the same age; only in ireland the anarchy endured much longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and antagonistic. perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading effects of conquest on the noble saxon race to be found in history, is the language in which giraldus cambrensis, the reviler of the irish celt, contrasts them with his countrymen, the welsh. 'who dare,' he says, 'compare the english, the most degraded of all races under heaven, with the welsh? in their own country they are the serfs, the veriest slaves of the normans. in ours whom else have we for our herdsmen, shepherds, cobblers, skinners, cleaners of our dog kennels, ay, even of our privies, but englishmen? not to mention their original treachery to the britons, that hired by them to defend them they turned upon them in spite of their oaths and engagements, they are to this day given to treachery and murder.' the lying saxon was, according to this authority, a proverbial expression. the saxon writers lamented their miserable subjection in a monotonous wail for many generations. so late as the seventeenth century an english author speaks in terms of compassion of the disinherited and despoiled families who had sunk into the condition of artisans, peasants, and paupers. 'this,' says m. thierry, 'is the last sorrowful glance cast back through the mist of ages on that great event which established in england a race of kings, nobles, and warriors of foreign extraction. the reader must figure to himself, not a mere change of political rule, not the triumph of one of two competitors, but the intrusion of a nation into the bosom of another people which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained as an integral portion of the new system of society, in the _status_ merely of personal property, or, to use the stronger language of records and deeds, _a clothing of the soil_. he must not picture to himself on the one hand the king and despot; on the other simply his subjects, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting england, and consequently all english. he must bear in mind that there were two distinct nations--the old anglo-saxon race and the norman invaders, dwelling intermingled on the same soil; or, rather, he might contemplate two countries--the one possessed by the normans, wealthy and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed with a land tax--the former full of spacious mansions, of walled towns, and moated castles--the latter occupied with thatched cabins, and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation. this peopled with the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and nobles--that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and artisans. on the one side he beholds luxury and insolence, on the other poverty and envy--not the envy of the poor at the sight of opulence and men born to opulence, but that malignant envy, although justice be on its side, which the despoiled cannot but entertain on looking upon the spoilers. lastly, to complete the picture, these two countries are in some sort interwoven with each other--they meet at every point, and yet they are more distinct, more completely separated, than if the ocean rolled between them.' does not this picture look very like ireland? to make it more like, let us imagine that the norman king had lived in paris, and kept a viceroy in london--that the english parliament were subordinate to the french parliament, composed exclusively of normans, and governed by norman undertakers for the benefit of the dominant state--that the whole of the english land was held by ten thousand norman proprietors, many of them absentees--that all the offices of the government, in every department, were in the hands of normans--that, differing in religion with the english nation, the french, being only a tenth of the population, had got possession of all the national churches and church property, while the poor natives supported a numerous hierarchy by voluntary contributions--that the anglo-norman parliament was bribed and coerced to abolish itself, forming a union of england with france, in which the english members were as one to six. imagine that in consequence of rebellions the land of england had been confiscated three or four times, after desolating wars and famines, so that all the native proprietors were expelled, and the land was parcelled out to french soldiers and adventurers on condition that the foreign 'planters' should assist in keeping down 'the mere english' by force of arms. imagine that the english, being crushed by a cruel penal code for a century, were allowed to reoccupy the soil as mere tenants-at-will, under the absolute power of their french landlords. if all this be imagined by english legislators and english writers, they will be better able to understand the irish land question, and to comprehend the nature of 'irish difficulties,' as well as the justice of feeble, insincere, and baffled statesmen in casting the blame of irish misery and disorder on the unruly and barbarous nature of irishmen. they will recollect that the aristocracy of ireland are the high-spirited descendants of conquerors, with the instinct of conquest still in their blood. the parliament which enacted the irish land laws was a parliament composed almost exclusively of men of this dominant race. they made all political power dependent on the ownership of land, thus creating for themselves a monopoly which it is not in human nature to surrender without a struggle. the possession of this monopoly, however, fully accounts for two things--the difficulty which the landlords feel in admitting the justice of the tenant's claims for the legal recognition of the value which his labour has added to the soil, and the extreme repugnance with which they regard any legislation on the subject. besides, the want of sympathy with the people, of earnestness and courage in meeting the realities of the case, is conspicuous in all attempts of the kind during the last half-century. those attempts have been evasive, feeble, abortive--concessions to the demand that _something_ must be done, but so managed that nothing should be done to weaken the power of the eight thousand proprietors over the mass of the nation dependent on the land for their existence. hence has arisen a great amount of jealousy, distrust, and irritability in the landlord class towards the tenantry and their advocates. the irish race, to adopt thierry's language, are full of 'malignant envy' towards the lords of the soil; not because they are rich, but because they have the people so completely in their power, so entirely at their mercy for all that man holds most dear. the tenants feel bitterly when they think that they have no legal right to live on their native land. they have read the history of our dreadful civil wars, famines, and confiscations. they know that by the old law of ireland, and by custom from times far beyond the reach of authentic history, the clans and tribes of the celtic people occupied certain districts with which their names are still associated, and that the land was inalienably theirs. rent or tribute they paid, indeed, to their princes, and if they failed the chiefs came with armed followers and helped themselves, driving away cows, sheep, and horses sufficient to meet their demand, or more if they were unscrupulous, which was 'distress' with a vengeance. but the eviction of the people even for non-payment of rent, and putting other people in their place, were things never heard of among the irish under their own rulers. the chief had his own mensal lands, as well as his tribute, and these he might forfeit. but as the clansmen could not control his acts, they could never see the justice of being punished for his misdeeds by the confiscation of their lands, and driven from the homes of their ancestors often made doubly sacred by religious associations. history, moreover, teaches them that, as a matter of fact, the government in the reign of james i.--and james himself in repeated proclamations--assured the people who occupied the lands of o'neill and o'donnell at the time of their flight that they would be protected in all their rights if they remained quiet and loyal, which they did. yet they were nearly all removed to make way for the english and scotch settlers. thus, historical investigators have been digging around the foundations of irish landlordism. they declare that those foundations were cemented with blood, and they point to the many wounds still open from which that blood issued so profusely. the facts of the conquest and confiscation were hinted at by the devon commissioners as accounting for the peculiar difficulties of the irish land question, and writers on it timidly allude to 'the historic past' as originating influences still powerful in alienating landlords and tenants, and fostering mutual distrust between them. but the time for evasion and timidity has passed. we must now honestly and courageously face the stern realities of this case. among these realities is a firm conviction in the minds of many landlords that they are in no sense trustees for the community, but that they have an absolute power over their estates--that they can, if they like, strip the land clean of its human clothing, and clothe it with sheep or cattle instead, or lay it bare and desolate, let it lapse into a wilderness, or sow it with salt. that is in reality the terrific power secured to them by the present land code, to be executed through the queen's writ and by the queen's troops--a power which could not stand a day if england did not sustain it by overwhelming military force. another of the realities of the question is the no less inveterate conviction in the tenants' mind that the absolute power of the landlord was originally a usurpation effected by the sword. right or wrong, they believe that the confiscations were the palpable violation of the natural rights of the people whom providence placed in this country. with bitter emphasis they assert that no set of men has any divine right to root a nation out of its own land. painful as this state of feeling is, there is no use in denying that it exists. here, then, is the deep radical difference that is to be removed. here are the two conflicting forces which are to be reconciled. this is the real irish land question. all other points are minor and of easy adjustment. the people say, and, i believe, sincerely, that they are willing to pay a fair rent, according to a public valuation--not a rent imposed arbitrarily by one of the interested parties, which might be raised so as to ruin the occupier. the feelings of these two parties often clash so violently, there is such instinctive distrust between them, the peace and prosperity of the country depend so much on their coming to terms and putting an end to their long-standing feud, that it is still more imperatively necessary than in the church question, that a third party, independent, impartial, and authoritative, should intervene and heal the breach. there was one phrase constantly ringing in the ears of the devon commissioners, and now, after nearly a generation has passed away, it is ringing in the ears of the nation louder than ever--'_the want of tenure_.' all the evidence went to show that the want of security paralysed industry and impeded social progress. it seems strange that any evidence should be thought necesary to prove that a man will not sow if he does not hope to reap, and that he will not build houses for strangers to enjoy. this would be taken as an axiom anywhere out of ireland. of all the people in europe, the irish have suffered most from the oppression of those who, from age to age, had power in the country. whoever fought or conquered, they were always the victims; and it is a singular fact that their sufferings are scarcely ever noticed by the contemporary annalists, even when those annalists were ecclesiastics. the extent to which they were slaughtered in the perpetual wars between the native chiefs, and in the wars between those chiefs and the english, is something awful to contemplate, not to speak of the wholesale destruction of life by the famines which those wars entailed. on several occasions the celtic race seemed very nearly extinct. the penal code, with all its malign influence, had one good effect. it subdued to a great extent the fighting propensities of the people, and fused the clans into one nation, purified by suffering. since that time, in spite of occasional visitations of calamity, they have been steadily rising in the social scale, and they are now better off than ever they were in their whole history. when we review the stages by which they have risen, we cannot but feel at times grieved and indignant at the opportunities for tranquillising and enriching the country which were lost through the ignorance, apathy, bigotry, and selfishness of the legislature. there was no end of commissions and select committees to inquire into the condition of the agricultural population, whenever parliament was roused by the prevalence of agrarian outrages. they reported, and there the matter ended. there were always insuperable difficulties when the natives were to be put in a better position. between and , for example, a commission reported four times on the condition of the irish bogs. they expressed their entire conviction of the practicability of cultivating with profit an immense extent of land lying waste. in , in , in , and in , select committees inquired into and reported on drainage, reclamation of bogs and marshes, on roads, fisheries, emigration, and other schemes for giving employment to the redundant population that had been encouraged to increase and multiply in the most reckless manner, while 'war prices' were obtained for agricultural produce, and the votes of the forty-shilling freeholders were wanted by the landlords. when, by the emancipation act in , the forty-shilling franchise was abolished, the peasant lost his political value. after the war, when the price of corn fell very low, and, consequently, tillage gave place to grazing, labourers became to the middleman an encumbrance and a nuisance that must be cleared off the land, just as weeds are plucked up and flung out to wither on the highway. then came lord devon's land commission, which inquired on the eve of the potato failure and the great famine. the irish population was now at its highest figure--between eight and nine millions. yet, though there had been three bad seasons, it was clearly proved at that time that by measures which a wise and willing legislature would have promptly passed, the whole surplus population could have been profitably employed. in this great land controversy, on which side lies the truth? is it the fault of the people, or the fault of the law, that the country is but half cultivated, while the best of the peasantry are emigrating with hostile feelings and purposes of vengeance towards england? as to the landlords, as a class, they use their powers with as much moderation and mercy as any other class of men in any country ever used power so vast and so little restrained. the best and most indulgent landlords, the most genial and generous, are unquestionably the old nobility, the descendants of the normans and saxons, those very conquerors of whom we have heard so much. the worst, the most harsh and exacting, are those who have purchased under the landed estates court--strangers to the people, who think only of the percentage on their capital. we had heard much of the necessity of capital to develope the resources of the land. the capital came, but the development consists in turning tillage lands into pasture, clearing out the labouring population and sending them to the poorhouse, or shipping them off at a few pounds per head to keep down the rates. and yet is it not possible to set all our peasantry to work at the profitable cultivation of their native land? is it not possible to establish by law what many landlords act upon as the rule of their estates--namely, the principle that no man is to be evicted so long as he pays a fair rent, and the other principle, that whenever he fails, he is entitled to the market value by public sale of all the property in his holding beyond that fair rent? the hereditary principle, rightly cherished among the landlords, so conservative in its influence, ought to be equally encouraged among the tenants. the man of industry, as well as the man of rank, should be able to feel that he is providing for his children, that his farm is at once a bank and an insurance office, in which all his minute daily deposits of toil and care and skill will be safe and productive. this is the way to enrich and strengthen the state, and to multiply guarantees against revolution--not by consolidation of farms and the abandonment of tillage, not by degrading small holders into day labourers, levelling the cottages and filling the workhouses. if the legislature were guided by the spirit that animates lord erne in his dealings with his tenantry, the land question would soon be settled to the satisfaction of all parties. 'i think,' said his lordship, 'as far as possible, every tenant on my estate may call his farm his castle, as long as he conducts himself honestly, quietly, and industriously; and, should he wish to leave in order to find a better landlord, i allow him to sell his farm, provided he pleases me in a tenant. therefore, if a man lays out money on his farm judiciously, he is certain to receive back the money, should he wish to go elsewhere.' he mentioned three cases of sale which occurred last year. one tenant sold a farm of seventy acres in bad order for l., another thirty acres for l., and a third the same number of acres in worse condition for l. the landlord lost nothing by these changes. his rent was paid up, and in each case he got a good tenant for a bad one. lord erne is a just man, and puts on no more than a fair rent. but all landlords are not just, as all tenants are not honest. even where tenant-right is admitted in name, it is obvious that the rent may be raised so high as to make the farm worth nothing in the market. to give to the tenant throughout the country generally the pleasant feeling that his farm is his castle, which he can make worth more money every day he rises, there must be a public letting valuation, and this the state could easily provide. and then there should be the right of sale to the highest solvent bidder. this might be one way of securing permanent tenure, or stimulating the industry and sustaining the thrift of the farmer. but the nature of the different tenures, and the effect of each in bracing up or relaxing the nerves of industry, will be the object of deliberation with the government and the legislature. it is said that, in the hands of small farmers, proprietorship leads to endless subdivision; that long leases generally cause bad husbandry; that tenants-at-will often feel themselves more secure and safe than a contract could make them; that families have lived on the same farm for generations without a scrape of a pen except the receipt for rent. on the other hand, there is the general cry of 'want of tenure;' there is the custom of serving notices to quit, sometimes for other reasons than non-payment of rent; there are occasional barbarities in the levelling of villages, and dragging the aged and the sick from the old roof-tree, the parting from which rends their heart-strings; and, above all, there is the feeling among the peasantry which makes them look without horror on the murder of a landlord or an agent who was a kind and benevolent neighbour; and, lastly, the paramount consideration for the legislature, that a large portion of the people are disaffected to the state, and ready to join its enemies, and this almost solely on account of the state of the law relating to land. hence the necessity of settling the question as speedily as possible, and the duty of all who have the means to contribute something towards that most desirable consummation, which seems to be all that is wanted to make irishmen of every class work together earnestly for the welfare of their country. it is admitted that no class of men in the world has improved more than the irish landlords during the last twenty years. let the legislature restore confidence between them and the people by taking away all ground for the suspicion that they wish to extirpate the celtic race. nor was this suspicion without cause, as the following history will too clearly prove. a very able english writer has said: 'the policy of all the successive swarms of settlers was to extirpate the native celtic race, but every effort made to break up the old framework of society failed, for the new-comers soon became blended with and undistinguishable from the mass of the people--being obliged to ally themselves with the native chieftains, rather than live hemmed in by a fiery ring of angry septs and exposed to perpetual war with everything around them. merged in the great celtic mass, they adopted irish manners and names, yet proscribed and insulted the native inhabitants as an inferior race. everything liberal towards them is intercepted in its progress. 'the past history of ulster is but a portion of scottish history inserted into that of ireland--a stone in the irish mosaic of an entirely different quality and colour from the pieces that surround it. 'thus it came to pass that, through the confiscation of their lands and the proscription of their religion, popery was worked by a most vehement process into the blood and brain of the irish nation.' it has been often said that the irish must be an inferior race, since they allowed themselves to be subjugated by some thousands of english invaders. but it should be recollected, first, that the conquest, commenced by henry ii. in the twelfth century, was not completed till the seventeenth century, when the king's writ ran for the first time through the province of ulster, the ancient kingdom of the o'neills; in the second place, the weakness of the celtic communities was not so much the fault of the men as of their institutions, brought with them from the east and clung to with wonderful tenacity. so long as they had boundless territory for their flocks and herds, and could always move on 'to pastures new,' they increased and multiplied, and allowed the sword and the battle-axe to rest, unless when a newly elected chief found it necessary to give his followers 'a hosting'--which means an expedition for plunder. down to the seventeenth century, after five hundred years' contact with the teutonic race, they were essentially the same people as they were when the ancient greeks and romans knew them. they are thus described by dr. mommsen in his 'history of rome:'--'such qualities--those of good soldiers and of bad citizens--explain the historical fact that the celts have shaken all states and have _founded none_. everywhere we find them ready to rove, or, in other words, to march, preferring movable property to landed estate, and gold to everything else; following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage, or even as a trade for hire, and with such success that even the roman historian, sallust, acknowledges that the celts bore off the prize from the romans in feats of arms. they were the true 'soldiers of fortune' of antiquity, as pictures and descriptions represent them, with big but sinewy bodies, with shaggy hair and long moustaches--quite a contrast to the greeks and romans, who shaved the upper lip--in the variegated embroidered dresses which in combat were not unfrequently thrown off, with a broad gold ring round their neck, wearing no helmets and without missile weapons of any sort, but furnished instead with an immense shield, a long ill-tempered sword, a dagger and a lance, all ornamented with gold, for they were not unskilful in working in metals. everything was made subservient to ostentation--even wounds, which were often enlarged for the purpose of boasting a broader scar. usually they fought on foot, but certain tribes on horseback, in which case every free man was followed by two attendants, likewise mounted. war-chariots were early in use, as they were among the libyans and hellenes in the earliest times. many a trait reminds us of the chivalry of the middle ages, particularly the custom of single combat, which was foreign to the greeks and romans. not only were they accustomed in war to challenge a single enemy to fight, after having previously insulted him by words and gestures; in peace also they fought with each other in splendid equipments, as for life or death. after such feats carousals followed in due course. in this way they led, whether under their own or a foreign banner, a restless soldier life, constantly occupied in fighting and in their so-called feats of heroism. they were dispersed from _ireland_ and spain to asia minor, but all their enterprises melted away like snow in spring, and they nowhere created a great state or developed a distinctive culture of their own.' such were the people who once almost terminated the existence of rome, and were afterwards with difficulty repulsed from greece, who became masters of the most fertile part of italy and of a fair province in the heart of asia minor, who, after their italian province had been subdued, inflicted disastrous blows on successive roman generals, and were only at last subjugated by cæsar himself in nine critical and sometimes most dangerous campaigns, b.c. . niebuhr observes that at that time the form of government was everywhere an hereditary monarchy, which, when cæsar went into gaul, had been swallowed up, as had the authority of the senate, in the anarchy of the nobles. their freedom was lawlessness; an inherent incapacity of living under the dominion of laws distinguishes them as barbarians from the greeks and italians. as individuals had to procure the protection of some magnate in order to live in safety, so the weaker tribes took shelter under the patronage of a more powerful one. for they were a disjointed multitude; and when any people had in this manner acquired an extensive sovereignty, they exercised it arbitrarily until its abuses became intolerable, or their subjects were urged by blind hatred of their power to fall off from them, and gather round some new centre. the sole bond of union was the druidical hierarchy which, at least in cæsar's time, was common to both nations. both of them paid obedience to its tribunal, which administered justice once a year--an institution which probably was not introduced till long after the age of migrations, when the expulsion of the vanquished had ceased to be regarded as the end of war, and which must have been fostered by the constant growth of lawlessness in particular states--being upheld by the _ban_, which excluded the contumacious from all intercourse in divine worship and in daily life with the faithful. the huge bodies, wild features, and long shaggy hair of the men, gave a ghastliness to their aspect. this, along with their fierce courage, their countless numbers, and the noise made by an enormous multitude of horns and trumpets, struck the armies arrayed against them with fear and amazement. if these, however, did not allow their terror to overpower them, the want of order, discipline, and perseverance would often enable an inferior number to vanquish a vast host of the barbarians. besides, they were but ill equipped. few of them wore any armour; their narrow shields, which were of the same height with their bodies, were weak and clumsy; they rushed upon their enemies with broad thin battle-swords of bad steel, which the first blow upon iron often notched and rendered useless. like true savages, they destroyed the inhabitants, the towns, and the agriculture of the countries they conquered. they cut off the heads of the slain, and tied them by the hair to the manes of their horses. if a skull belonged to a person of rank, they nailed it up in their houses and preserved it as an heirloom for their posterity, as the nobles in rude ages do stag-horns. towns were rare amongst them; the houses and the villages, which were very numerous, were mean, the furniture wretched--a heap of straw covered with skins served both for a bed and a seat. they did not cultivate corn save for a very limited consumption, for the main part of their food was the milk and the flesh of their cattle. these formed their wealth. gold, too, they had in abundance, derived partly from the sandy beds of their rivers, partly from some mines which these had led them to discover. it was worn in ornaments by every gaul of rank. in battle he bore gold chains on his arms and heavy gold collars round his neck, even when the upper part of his body was in other respects quite naked. for they often threw off their parti-coloured chequered cloaks, which shone with all the hues of the rainbow, like the picturesque dress of their kinspeople the highlanders, who have laid aside the trousers of the ancient gauls. their duels and gross revels are an image of the rudest part of the middle ages. their debauches were mostly committed with beer and mead; for vines and all the plants of southern regions were as yet total strangers to the north of the alps, where the climate in those ages was extremely severe; so that wine was rare, though of all the commodities imported it was the most greedily bought up. ulster was known in ancient times as one of the five irish 'kingdoms,' and remained unconquered by the english till the reign of james i., when the last prince of the great house of o'neill, then earl of tyrone, fled to the continent in company with o'donel, earl of tyrconnel, head of another very ancient sept. up to that period the men of ulster proudly regarded themselves as 'irish of the irish and catholic of the catholics.' the inhabitants were of mixed blood, but, as in the other provinces of the island, the great mass of the people, as well as the ruling classes, were of celtic origin. those whom ethnologists still recognise as aborigines, in parts of connaught and in some mountainous regions, an inferior race, are said to be the descendants of the firbolgs, or belgae, who formed the third immigration. they were followed and subdued by the tuatha de danans--men famed for their gigantic power and supernatural skill--a race of demigods, who still live in the national superstitions. the last of the ancient invasions was by the gael or celt, known as the milesians and scoti. the institutions and customs of this people were established over the whole island, and were so deeply rooted in the soil that their remnants to this day present the greatest obstacles to the settlement of the land question according to the english model, and on the principles of political economy, which run directly counter to irish instincts. it is truly wonderful how distinctly the present descendants of this race preserve the leading features of their primitive character. in france and england the celtic character was moulded by the power and discipline of the roman empire. to ireland this modifying influence never extended; and we find the ulster chiefs who fought for their territories with english viceroys years ago very little different from the men who followed brennus to the sack of home, and encountered the legions of julius cæsar on the plains of gaul. mr. prendergast observes, in the introduction to his 'cromwellian settlement' that when the companions of strongbow landed in the reign of henry ii. they found a country such as cæsar had found in gaul years before. a thousand years had passed over the island without producing the slightest social progress--'the inhabitants divided into tribes on the system of the clansmen and chiefs, without a common government, suddenly confederating, suddenly dissolving, with brehons, shaunahs, minstrels, bards, and harpers, in all unchanged, except that for their ancient druids they had got christian priests. had the irish remained honest pagans, ireland perhaps had remained unconquered still. round the coast strangers had built seaport towns, either traders from the carthaginian settlements in spain, or outcasts from their own country, like the greeks that built marseilles. at the time of the arrival of the french and flemish adventurers from wales, they were occupied by a mixed danish and french population, who supplied the irish with groceries, including the wines of poitou, the latter in such abundance that they had no need of vineyards.' if vineyards had been needed, we may be sure they would not have been planted, for the irish celts planted nothing. neither did they build, except in the simplest and rudest way, improving their architecture from age to age no more than the beaver or the bee. mr. prendergast is an able, honest, and frank writer; yet there is something amusingly celtic in the flourish with which he excuses the style of palaces in which the irish princes delighted to dwell. 'unlike england,' he says, 'then covered with castles on the heights, where the french gentlemen secured themselves and their families against the hatred of the churls and villains, as the english peasantry were called, the dwellings of the irish chiefs were of wattles or clay. it is for robbers and foreigners to take to rocks and precipices for security; for native rulers, there is no such fortress _as justice and humanity_.' this is very fine, but surely mr. prendergast cannot mean that the irish chiefs were distinguished by their justice and humanity. the following touch is still grander:--'the irish, like the wealthiest and highest of the present day, loved detached houses surrounded by fields and woods. towns and their walls they looked upon as tombs or sepulchres, &c.' as to fields, there were none, because the irish never made fences, their patches of cultivated land being divided by narrow strips of green sod. besides, they lived in villages, which were certainly surrounded by woods, because the woods were everywhere, and they furnished the inhabitants with fuel and shelter, as well as materials for building their huts. but further on this able author expresses himself much more in accordance with the truth of history, when he states that the 'irish enemy' was no _nation_ in the modern sense of the word, but a race divided into many nations or tribes, _separately_ defending their lands from the english barons in the immediate neighbourhood. there had been no ancient national government displaced, no dynasty overthrown; the irish had _no national flag_, nor any capital city as the metropolis of their common country, nor any common administration of law.' he might have added that they had no _mint_. there never was an irish king who had his face stamped on a coin of his realm. some stray pieces of money found their way into the country from abroad, but up to the close of the sixteenth century the rudest form of barter prevailed in ulster, and accounts were paid not in coins but in cows. even the mechanical arts which had flourished in the country before the arrival of the celts had gradually perished, and had disappeared at the time of the english invasion. any handy men could build a house of mud and wattles. masons, carpenters, smiths, painters, glaziers, &c., were not wanted by a people who despised stone buildings as prisons, and abhorred walled towns as sepulchres. spinning and weaving were arts cultivated by the women, each household providing materials for clothing, which was little used in warm weather, and thrown off when fighting or any other serious work was to be done. i should be sorry to disparage the celtic race, or any other race, by exaggerating their bad qualities or suppressing any reliable testimony to their merits. but with me the truth of history is sacred. both sides of every case should be fairly stated. nothing can be gained by striving to hide facts which may be known to every person who takes the trouble to study the subject. i write in the interest of the people--of the toiling masses; and i find that they were oppressed and degraded by the ruling classes long before the norman invader took the place of the celtic chief. and it is a curious fact that when the cromwellians turned the catholic population out of their homes and drove them into connaught, they were but following the example set them by the milesian lords of the soil centuries before. the late mr. darcy magee, a real lover of his country, in his irish history points out this fact. the normans found the population divided into two great classes--the free tribes, chiefly if not exclusively celtic, and the unfree tribes, consisting of the descendants of the subjugated races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the sword, and the offspring of foreign mercenary soldiers. 'the unfree tribes,' says mr. darcy magee, 'have left no history. under the despotism of the milesian kings, it was high treason to record the actions of the conquered race, so that the irish belgae fared as badly in this respect at the hands of the milesian historians as the latter fared in after times from the chroniclers of the normans. we only know that such tribes were, and that their numbers and physical force more than once excited the apprehension of the children of the conquerors. one thing is certain--the jealous policy of the superior race never permitted them to reascend the plane of equality from which they had been hurled at the very commencement of the milesian ascendency.' mr. haverty, another catholic historian, learned, accurate, and candid, laments the oppression of the people by their native rulers. 'those who boasted descent from the scytho-spanish hero would have considered themselves degraded were they to devote themselves to any less honourable profession than those of soldiers, _ollavs_, or physicians; and hence the cultivation of the soil and the exercise of the mechanic arts were left almost exclusively to the _firbolgs_ and the _tuatha-de-danans_--the former people, in particular, being still very numerous, and forming the great mass of the population in the west. these were ground down by high rents and the exorbitant exactions of the dominant race, _in order to support their unbounded hospitality_ and defray the expenses of costly assemblies; but this oppression must have caused perpetual discontent, and the hard-working plebeians, as they were called, easily perceived that their masters were running headlong to destruction, and that it only required a bold effort to shake off their yoke.' then follows an account of a civil war, one of the leaders of the revolution being elected king at its termination. carbry reigned five years, during which time there was no rule or order, and the country was a prey to every misfortune. 'evil was the state of ireland during his reign; fruitless her corn, for there used to be but one grain on the stalk; and fruitless her rivers; her cattle without milk; her fruit without plenty, for there used to be but one acorn on the oak.' dr. lynch, author of _cambrensis eversus_, expresses his astonishment at the great number of ancient irish kings, most of whom were cut off by a violent death, each hewing his way to the throne over the body of his predecessor. but upon applying his mind to the more profound consideration of the matter, he found nothing more wonderful in the phenomenon 'than that the human family should proceed from one man--the overflowing harvest from a few grains of seed, &c.' his learned translator, the rev. matthew kelly, of maynooth, sees proof of amendment in the fact that between and twelve irish kings died a natural death. this candid and judicious writer observes in a note--'it appears from the irish and english annals that there was perpetual war in ireland during more than years after the invasion. it could not be called a war of races, except perhaps during the first century, for english and irish are constantly found fighting under the same banner, according to the varying interests of the rival lords and princes of both nations. this was the case even from the commencement.'[ ] [footnote : vol. i. p. .] many persons have wondered at the success of small bands of english invaders. why did not the irish nation rise _en masse_, and drive them into the sea? the answer is easy. there was no irish nation. about half a million of people were scattered over the island in villages, divided into tribes generally at war with one another, each chief ready to accept foreign aid against his adversary--some, perhaps, hoping thereby to attain supremacy in their clans, and others, who were pretenders, burning to be avenged of those who had supplanted them. it was religion that first gave the irish race a common cause. in the very year of the english invasion ( ) there were no fewer than twenty predatory excursions or battles among the irish chiefs themselves, exclusive of contests with the invaders. hence the pope said--'_gens se interimit mutua cæde_.' the pope was right. the clergy exerted themselves to the utmost in trying to exorcise the demon of destruction and to arrest the work of extermination. not only the _bashall isa_, or 'the staff of jesus,' but many other relics were used with the most solemn rites, to impress the people with a sense of the wickedness of their clan-fights, and to induce them to keep the peace, but in vain. the king of connaught once broke a truce entered into under every possible sanction of this kind, trampling upon all, that he might get the king of meath into his clutches. hence the rev. mr. kelly is constrained to say--'it is now generally admitted by catholic writers that however great the efforts of the irish clergy to reform their distracted country in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the picture of anarchy drawn by pope adrian is hardly overcharged.' indeed, some catholic writers have confessed that the anarchy would never have been terminated except by foreign conquest establishing a strong central government. this, however, was not accomplished till after a struggle of centuries, during which, except in brief intervals, when a strong prince was able to protect his people, the national demoralisation grew worse and worse. an oxford priest, who kept a school at limerick, writing so late as of the irish nobles, says--'of late they spare neither churches nor hallowed places, but thence also they fill their hands with spoil--yea, and sometimes they set them on fire and kill the men that there lie hidden.' mr. froude, following the irish mss. in the rolls house, has presented graphic pictures of the disorders of the irishry in the reign of queen mary. 'the english garrison,' he says, 'harassed and pillaged the farmers of meath and dublin; the chiefs made forays upon each other, killing, robbing, and burning. when the war broke out between england and france, there were the usual conspiracies and uprisings of nationality; the young earl of kildare, in reward to the queen who had restored him to his rank, appearing as the natural leader of the patriots. ireland was thus happy in the gratification of all its natural tendencies. the brehon law readvanced upon the narrow limits to which, by the exertions of henry viii., the circuits of the judges had been extended. and with the brehon law came anarchy as its inseparable attendant.' the correctness of this view is too well attested by the records which the learned historian brings to light, adopting the quaint and expressive phraseology of the old writers whom he quotes. for example:-- 'the lords and gentiles of the irish pale that were not governed under the queen's laws were compelled to keep and maintain a great number of idle men of war to rule their people at home, and exact from their neighbours abroad--working everyone his own wilful will for a law--to the spoil of his country, and decay and waste of the common weal of the same. the idle men of war ate up altogether; the lord and his men took what they pleased, destroying their tenants, and themselves never the better. the common people, having nothing left to lose, became as idle and careless in their behaviour as the rest, stealing by day and robbing by night. yet it was a state of things which they seemed all equally to enjoy, and high and low alike were always ready to bury their own quarrels, to join against the queen and the english.' at the time when the crown passed to elizabeth the qualities of the people were thus described by a correspondent of the council, who presents the english view of the irishry at that time:-- 'the appearance and outward behaviour of the irish showeth them to be fruits of no good tree, for they exercise no virtue and refrain and forbear from no vice, but think it lawful to do every man what him listeth. they neither love nor dread god, nor yet hate the devil. they are worshippers of images and open idolaters. their common oath they swear is by books, bells, and other ornaments which they do use as holy religion. their chief and solemnest oath is by their lord or master's hand, which whoso forsweareth is sure to pay a fine or sustain a worse turn. the sabbath-day they rest from all honest exercises, and the week days they are not idle, but worse occupied. they do not honour their father and mother as much as they do reverence strangers. for every murder that they commit they do not so soon repent, for whose blood they once shed, they lightly never cease killing all that name. they do not so commonly commit adultery; not for that they profess or keep chastity, but for that they seldom or never marry, and therefore few of them are lawful heirs, by the law of the realm, to the lands they possess. they steal but from the strong, and take by violence from the poor and weak. they know not so well who is their neighbour as who they favour; with him they will witness in right and wrong. they covet not their neighbours' good, but command all that is their neighbours' as their own. thus they live and die, and there is none to teach them better. there are no ministers. ministers will not take pains where there is no living to be had, neither church nor parish, but all decayed. people will not come to inhabit where there is no defence of law.' after six years of _discipline and improvement_ sir henry sidney, in , described the state of the four shires, the irish inhabitants, and the english garrison, in the following terms:--'the _english pale_ is overwhelmed with vagabonds--stealth and spoil daily carried out of it--the people miserable--not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend l. they have neither horse nor armour, nor apparel, nor victual. the soldiers be so beggerlike as it would abhor a general to look on them; yet so insolent as to be intolerable to the people, so rooted in idleness as there is no hope by correction to amend them, yet so allied with the irish, i dare not trust them in a forte, or in any dangerous service.' a sort of 'special correspondent' or 'commissioner,' as we should call him now, furnished to cecil a detailed account of the social condition of the people, which of course he viewed with english eyes. he found existing among them a general organisation wherever the irish language was spoken--the remnants of a civilisation very ancient, but now fast tending to ruin. next to the chiefs were the priesthood, and after them came a kind of intellectual hierarchy, consisting of four classes of spiritual leaders and teachers, which were thus described. the first was called the brehon, or the judge. these judges took 'pawns' of both the parties, and then judged according to their own discretion. their property was neutral, and the irishmen would not prey upon them. they had great plenty of cattle, and they harboured many vagabonds and idle persons. they were the chief maintainers of rebels, but when the english army came to their neighbourhood they fled to the mountains and woods 'because they would not succour them with victuals and other necessaries.' the next sort was called _shankee_, who had also great plenty of cattle wherewith they succoured the rebels. they made the ignorant men of the country believe that they were descended from alexander the great, or darius, or cæsar, 'or some other notable prince, which made the ignorant people run mad, and care not what they did.' this, the correspondent remarked, 'was very hurtful to the realm.' not less hurtful were the third sort called _denisdan_, who not only maintained the rebels, but caused those that would be true to become rebellious--'thieves, extortioners, murderers, raveners, yea, and worse if it was possible.' these seem to have been the historians or chroniclers of the tribe. if they saw a young man, the descendant of an o' or a mac, with half a dozen followers, they forthwith made a rhyme about his father and his ancestors, numbering how many heads they had cut off, how many towns they had burned, how many virgins they had deflowered, how many notable murders they had done, comparing them to hannibal, or scipio, or hercules, or some other famous person--'wherewithal the poor fool runs mad, and thinks indeed it is so.' then he will gather a lot of rascals about him, and get a fortune-teller to prophesy how he is to speed. after these preliminaries he betakes himself with his followers at night to the side of a wood, where they lurk till morning. and when it is daylight, then will they go to the poor villages, not sparing to destroy young infants and aged people; and if a woman be ever so great with child, her will they kill, burning the houses and corn, and ransacking the poor cots; then will they drive away all the kine and plough-horses, with all the other cattle. then must they have a bagpipe blowing before them, and if any of the cattle fortune to wax weary or faint they will kill them rather than it should do the owner good; and if they go by any house of friars, or religious house, they will give them two or three beeves, and they will take them and pray for them, yea, and praise their doings, and say, 'his father was accustomed so to do, wherein he will rejoice.' the fourth class consisted of 'poets.' these men had great store of cattle, and 'used all the trade of the others with an addition of prophecies. they were maintainers of witches and other vile matters, to the blasphemy of god, and to the impoverishing of the commonwealth.' these four septs were divided in all places of the four quarters of ireland, and some of the islands beyond ireland, as aran, the land of the saints, innisbuffen, innisturk, innismain, and innisclare. these islands, he added, were under the rule of o'neill, and they were 'very pleasant and fertile, plenty of wood, water, and arable ground, pastures, and fish, and a very temperate air.' on this description mr. froude remarks in a note--'at present they are barren heaps of treeless moors and mountains. they yield nothing but scanty oat crops and potatoes, and though the seas are full of fish as ever, there are no hands to catch them. _the change is a singular commentary upon modern improvements_.' there were many branches belonging to the four septs, continues the credulous reporter, who was evidently imposed upon, like many of his countrymen in modern times with better means of information. for example, 'there was the branch of gogath, the glutton, of which one man would eat half a sheep at a sitting. there was another called the carrow, a gambler, who generally went about naked, carrying dice and cards, and he would play the hair off his head. then there was a set of women called goyng women, blasphemers of god, who ran from country to country, sowing sedition among the people.'[ ] [footnote : froude's history, of england, vol. viii. chap. vii.] mr. froude says that this 'picture of ireland' was given by some half anglicised, half protestantised celt, who wrote what he had seen around him, careless of political philosophy, or of fine phrases with which to embellish his diction. but if he was a celt, i think his description clearly proves that he must have been a celt of some other country than the one upon whose state he reports. judging from internal evidence, i should say that he could not be a native; for an irishman, even though a convert to anglicanism, and anxious to please his new masters, could scarcely betray so much ignorance of the history of his country, so much bigotry, such a want of candour and discrimination. if mr. froude's great work has any fault, it is his unconscious prejudice against ireland. he knows as well as anyone the working of the feudal system and the clan system in scotland in the same age. he knows with what treachery and cruelty murders were perpetrated by chiefs and lairds, pretenders and usurpers--how anarchy, violence, and barbarism reigned in that land; yet, when he is dealing with a similar state of things in ireland, he uniformly takes it as proof of an incurable national idiosyncrasy, and too often generalises from a few cases. for example, in speaking of shane o'neill, who killed his half-brother, matthew kelly, baron of dungannon, in order to secure the succession for himself, he says--'_they manage things strangely in ireland._ the old o'neill, instead of being irritated, saw in this exploit a proof of commendable energy. he at once took shane into favour, and, had he been able, would have given him his dead brother's rights.' chapter ii. the rule of the o'neills. shane o'neill was a man of extraordinary ability and tremendous energy, as the english found to their cost. he was guilty of atrocious deeds; but he had too many examples in those lawless times encouraging him to sacrifice the most sacred ties to his ambition. he resolved to seize the chieftainship by deposing his father and banishing him to the pale, where, after passing some years in captivity, he died. he was, no doubt, urged to do this, lest by some chance the son of the baron of dungannon should be adopted by england as the rightful heir, and made earl of tyrone. this title he spurned, and proclaimed himself the o'neill, the true representative of the ancient kings of ulster, to which office he was elected by his people, taking the usual oath with his foot upon the sacred stone. this was an open defiance of english power, and he prepared to abide the consequences. he thought the opportunity a favourable one to recover the supremacy of his ancestors over the o'donels. he accordingly mustered a numerous army, and marched into tyrconnel, where he was joined by hugh o'donel, brother of calvagh, the chief, with other disaffected persons of the same clan. o'donel had recourse to stratagem. having caused his cattle to be driven out of harm's way, he sent a spy into the enemy's camp, who mixed with the soldiers, and returning undiscovered, he undertook to guide o'donel's army to o'neill's tent, which was distinguished by a great watch-fire, and guarded by six galloglasses on one side and as many scots on the other. the camp, however, was taken by surprise in the dead of night, and o'neill's forces, careless or asleep, were slaughtered and routed without resistance. shane himself fled for his life, and, swimming across three rivers, succeeded in reaching his own territory. this occurred the year before he cast off his allegiance to england. he was required to appear before elizabeth in person to explain the grounds on which he had claimed the chieftainship. he consented, on condition that he got a safe-conduct and money for the expenses of his journey. at the same time he sent a long letter to the queen, complaining of the treatment he had received, and defending his pretensions. the letter is characteristic of the man and of the times. he said: 'the deputy has much ill-used me, your majesty; and now that i am going over to see you, i hope you will consider that i am but rude and uncivil, and do not know my duty to your highness, nor yet your majesty's laws, but am one brought up in wildness, far from all civility. yet have i a good will to the commonwealth of my country; and please your majesty to send over two commissioners that you can trust, that will take no bribes, nor otherwise be imposed on, to observe what i have done to improve the country, and hear what my accusers have to say; and then let them go into the pale, and hear what the people say of your soldiers, with their horses, and their dogs, and their concubines. within this year and a half, three hundred farmers are come from the english pale to live in my country, where they can be safe. 'please your majesty, your majesty's money here is not so good as your money in england, and will not pass current there. please your majesty to send me three thousand pounds in english money to pay my expenses in going over to you, and when i come back i will pay your deputy three thousand pounds irish, such as you are pleased to have current here. also i will ask your majesty to marry me to some gentlewoman of noble blood meet for my vocation. i will make ireland all that your majesty wishes for you. i am very sorry your majesty is put to such expense. if you will trust it to me, i will undertake that in three years you will have a revenue, where now you have continual loss.' shane suspected evil designs on the part of the english, and not without reason. the object of the summons to england was to detain him there with 'gentle talk' till sussex could return to his command with an english army powerful enough to subjugate ulster. for this purpose such preparations were made by the english government in men and money, 'that rebellion should have no chance; and,' says mr. froude, 'so careful was the secresy which was observed, to prevent shane from taking alarm, that a detachment of troops sent from portsmouth sailed with sealed orders, and neither men nor officers knew that ireland was their destination till they had rounded the land's end.' the english plans were well laid. kildare, whom elizabeth most feared, had accepted her invitation to go to london, and thus prevented any movement in the south, while o'donel was prepared to join the english army on its advance into ulster; and the scots, notwithstanding their predilection for mary stuart, were expected to act as argyle and his sister should direct. but shane had a genius for intrigue as well as elizabeth, and he was far more rapid than her generals in the execution of his plans. by a master-stroke of policy he disconcerted their arrangements. he had previously asked the earl of argyle to give him his daughter in marriage, in order that he might strengthen his alliance with the ulster scots. it is true that she had been already married to his rival, o'donel; but that was a small difficulty in his way. the knot was tied, but he had no hesitation in cutting it with his sword. 'the countess' was well educated for her time. she was also a protestant, and the government had hopes that her influence would be favourable to 'civility and the reformation' among the barbarians of the north. but whatever advantages the presence of the fair scottish missionary might bring, shane o'neill did not see why they should not be all his own, especially as he had managed somehow to produce a favourable impression on her heart. accordingly he made a dash into tyrconnel, and carried off both the lady and her husband to his stronghold, shane's castle, on the banks of lough neagh. her scotch guard, though fifteen hundred strong, had offered no resistance. o'donel was shut up in a prison, and his wife became the willing paramour of the captor. 'the affront to mcconnell was forgiven or atoned for by private arrangement, and the sister of the earl of argyle--an educated woman for her time, not unlearned in latin, speaking french and italian, counted sober, wise, and no less subtle--had betrayed herself and her husband. the o'neills, by this last manoeuvre, became supreme in ulster. deprived of their head, the o'donels sank into helplessness. the whole force of the province, such as it was, with the more serious addition of several thousand scotch marauders, was at shane's disposal, and thus provided, he thought himself safe in defying england to do its worst.'[ ] [footnote : froude, ibid.] meantime, sussex had arrived in dublin preceded by his english forces. he made a rapid preliminary movement to the north, and seized the cathedral of armagh, in order to make it a fortified depôt for his stores. he then fell back into meath, where he was joined by ormond with flying companies of galloglasses. soon after a singular attack was made on the english garrison at armagh. seeing a number of kernes scattered about the town, the officer in command sallied out upon them, when o'neill suddenly appeared, accompanied by the catholic archbishop, on a hill outside the walls. 'the english had but time to recover their defences when the whole irish army, led by a procession of monks, and every man carrying a fagot, came on to burn the cathedral over their heads. the monks sang a mass; the primate walked three times up and down the lines, willing the rebels to go forward, for god was on their side. shane swore a great oath not to turn his back while an englishman was alive; and with scream and yell his men came on. _fortunately there were no scots among them._ the english, though out-numbered ten to one, stood steady in the churchyard, and, after a sharp hand-to-hand fight, drove back the howling crowd. the irish retired into the friars' houses outside the cathedral close, set them on fire, and ran for their lives.' 'so far,' adds mr. froude, 'all was well. after this there was no more talk of treating, and by the th, sussex and ormond were themselves at armagh with a force--had there been skill to direct it--sufficient to have swept tyrone from border to border.' the english historian exults in the valour of the small garrison of his countrymen, well-disciplined and sheltered behind a strong wall, in resisting the assault of a howling multitude of mere irish, and he observes significantly, that 'fortunately there were no _scots_ among them.' but he is obliged immediately after to record an irish victory so signal that, according to the lord deputy himself, 'the fame of the english army so hardly gotten, was now vanished.' yet mr. froude does not, in this, lay the blame of defeat upon the _nationality_ of the vanquished. it is only the irish nation that is made the scape-goat in such cases. it was july, but the weather was wet, the rivers were high, ormond was ill, sussex would not leave his friend, and so the english army stayed in town doing nothing till the end of the month, when their failing provisions admonished them that an irish hosting would be desirable. o'neill, who seems to have been aware of the state of things, presented the appropriate temptation. spies brought the lord deputy word that in the direction of cavan there were herds of cows, which an active party might easily capture. these spies, with ardent professions of loyalty, offered to guide the english troops to the place where the booty would be found, their object being to draw them among bogs and rivers where they might be destroyed. the lord deputy did not think it necessary to accompany this host, which consisted of horse, men-at-arms, and some hundreds of the loyal irish of the pale. shane intended to attack them the first night while resting on their march. but they escaped by an alteration of the route. next morning they were marching on the open plain, miles from any shelter of hill or wood, when the irish chief, with less than half their number, pursued them, and fell upon the cavalry in the rear, with the cry, '_laundarg aboo_--the bloody hand--strike for o'neill!' the english cavalry commanded by wingfield, seized with terror, galloped into the ranks of their own men-at-arms, rode them down, and extricated themselves only to fly panic-stricken from the field to the crest of an adjoining hill. meantime, shane's troopers rode through the broken ranks, cutting down the footmen on all sides. the yells and cries were heard far off through the misty morning air. fitzwilliam, who had the chief command, was about a mile in advance at the head of another body of cavalry, when a horseman was observed by him, galloping wildly in the distance and waving his handkerchief as a signal. he returned instantly, followed by his men, and flung himself into the _mêleé_. shane receiving such a charge of those few men, and seeing more coming after, ran no farther risk, blew a recall note, and withdrew unpursued. fitzwilliam's courage alone prevented the army from being annihilated. out of english lay dead, and more were badly wounded. the survivors fell back to armagh 'so _dismayed_ as to be unfit for farther service.' pitiable were the lamentations of the lord deputy to cecil on this catastrophe. it was, said he, 'by cowardice the dreadfullest beginning that ever was seen in ireland. ah! mr. secretary, what unfortunate star hung over me that day to draw me, that never could be persuaded to be absent from the army at any time--to be then absent for a little disease of another man? _the rearward was the best and picked soldiers in all this land._ if i or any stout man had been that day with them, we had made an end of shane--which is now farther off than ever it was. never before durst scot or irishman look on englishmen in plain or wood since i was here; and now shane, in a plain three miles away from any wood, and where i would have asked of god to have had him, hath, with horse, and a few scots and galloglasse, _scarce half in numbers_, charged our whole army, and by the cowardice of one wretch whom i hold dear to me as my own brother, was like in one hour to have left not one man of that army alive, and after to have taken me and the rest at armagh. the fame of the english army, so hardly gotten, is now vanished, and i, wretched and dishonoured, by the vileness of other men's deeds.' this is real history that mr. froude has given us. it places the actors before us, enables us to discern their characters, tells us who they are and what they have done. it shows also the value and the necessity of documentary evidence for establishing the truth of history. how different from the vague, uncertain, shadowy representations derived from oral tradition, or mere reports, though contemporary, circulated from mouth to mouth, and exaggerated according to the interests of one party or the other. let us for illustration compare mr. froude's vivid picture of this battle, so disastrous to the english, with the account given of the same event by the annalists called the four masters. these writers had taken great pains to collect the most authentic records of the various irish tribes from the invasion by henry ii. to the period of which we are writing. they were intensely irish, and of course glad of any opportunity of recording events creditable to the valour of their countrymen. they lived in donegal, under the protection of o'donel, but they showed themselves quite willing to do full justice to his great rival o'neill. the presence of the lord deputy, the earl of ormond, and other great men at armagh, with a select english army, would naturally have roused their attention, and when that army was encountered and vanquished in the open field by the irish general, we should have expected that the details of such a glorious event would have been collected with the greatest care from the accounts of eye-witnesses. the bards and historiographers should have been on the alert to do justice to their country on so great an occasion. they were on the spot, they were beside the victors, and they had no excuse whatever for ignorance. yet here is the miserably cold, _jejune_, feeble, and imperfect record which we find in the annals of the four masters:--'the lord justice of ireland, namely thomas fitzwalter (sussex), marched into tyrone to take revenge for the capture of caloach o'donel, and also for his own quarrels with the country. he encamped with a great army at armagh, and constructed deep entrenchments and impregnable ramparts about the great church of armagh, which he intended to keep constantly guarded. o'neill, i.e. john, having received intelligence of this, sent a party of his faithful men and friends with caloach o'donel to guard and keep him from the lord justice, and they conveyed him from one island to another, in the recesses and sequestered places of tyrone. after some time the lord justice sent out from the camp at armagh, a number of his captains with men to take some prey and plunder in oriel. o'neill, having received private information and intelligence of those great troops marching into oriel, proceeded privately and silently to where they were, and came up to them after they had collected their prey; a battle ensued in which many were slain on both sides; and finally the preys were abandoned, and fell into the hands of their original possessors on that occasion.' that is the whole account of the most signal victory over the english that had crowned the arms of ulster during those wars! not a word of the disparity of the forces, or the flight of the english cavalry, or the slaughter of the englishmen-at-arms, or the humiliation and disabled condition of the garrison at armagh. equally unsatisfactory is the record of the subsequent march through tyrone by sussex, in the course of which his army slaughtered head of cattle, which they could not drive away. of this tremendous destruction of property the four masters do not say a word. such omissions often occur in their annals, even when dealing with contemporary events. uncritical as they were and extremely credulous, how can we trust the records which they give of remote ages? chapter iii. o'neill, sovereign of ulster. the moral atmosphere of elizabeth's court was not favourable to public virtue. strange to say at this time lord pembroke seemed to be the only nobleman connected with it whose patriotism could be depended on; and, according to cecil, there was not another person, 'no not one' who did not either wish well to shane o'neill, or so ill to the earl of sussex as 'rather to welcome the news than regret the english loss!' it would be difficult to find 'intriguing factiousness' baser than this even in barbarous ireland. the success of o'neill, however, had raised him high in the opinion of the queen, who proposed, through the earl of kildare, to leave him in possession of all his territories, and let him govern the irish 'according to irish ideas' if he would only become her vassal. sussex had returned to dublin with the remnant of his army, while fitzwilliam was dispatched to london to explain the disaster, bearing with him a petition from the irish council, that the troops who had been living in free quarters on the tenants of the pale should be recalled or disbanded. 'useless in the field and tyrannical to the farmer, they were a burden on the english exchequer, and answered no purpose but to make the english name detested.' to o'neill the queen sent a pardon, with a safe conduct to england, if he could be prevailed on to go. in the meantime shane sent a message to the lord deputy, demanding the removal of the garrison from armagh. one of his messengers, neill grey communicated secretly with lord sussex, affecting to dislike rebellion, and intimating that he might help the english to get rid of his master. the lord deputy, without the least scruple or apparent consciousness of the criminality or disgrace of the proceeding, actually proposed to this man that he should murder o'neill. this villanous purpose he avows in his letter to the queen. 'in fine,' said he, 'i breake with him to kill shane; and bound myself by my oath to see him have a hundred marcs of land by the year to him, and to his heirs, for his reward. he seemed desirous to serve your highness, and to have the land; but fearful to do it, doubting his own escape after with safety, which he confessed and promised to do by any means he might, escaping with his life. what he will do i know not, but i assure your highness he may do it without danger if he will. and if he will not do that he may in your service, there will be done _to him_ what others may. god send your highness a good end.' this english nobleman was, it seems, pious as well as honourable, and could mingle prayers with his plots for assassination. mr. froude suggests extenuating circumstances: 'lord sussex, it appears, regarded shane as a kind of wolf, whom having failed to capture in fair chase he might destroy by the first expedient that came to his hand.' and 'english honour, like english coin, lost something of its purity in the sister island.' of course; it was the irish atmosphere that did it all. but sussex was not singular in this mode of illustrating english honour. a greater than he, the chivalrous sir walter raleigh, wrote to a friend in munster, recommending the treacherous assassination of the earl of desmond, as perfectly justifiable. and this crime, for which an ignorant irishman would be hanged, was deliberately suggested by the illustrious knight whilst sitting quietly in his english study.[ ] but what perplexes the historian most of all is that the queen of england showed no resentment at the infamous proposal of sussex. 'it is most sadly certain, however, that sussex was continued in office, and inasmuch as it will be seen that he repeated the experiment a few months later, his letter could not have been received with any marked condemnation.' yet elizabeth was never in ireland. [footnote : see life of sir walter raleigh.] fitzwilliam, however, returned with reinforcements of troops from berwick, with which the deputy resolved to repair the credit of the english arms, and to set the irish an example of civilised warfare. how did he do this? dispatching provisions by sea to lough foyle, he succeeded this time in marching through tyrone, 'and in destroying on his way , cattle, which he was unable to carry away. he had left shane's cows to rot where he had killed them; and thus being without food, and sententiously and characteristically concluding that man by his policy might propose, but god at his will did dispose; lord sussex fell back by the upper waters of lough erne, sweeping the country before him.' when the irish peasantry saw the carcasses of their cattle rotting along the roads, while their children were famished for want of milk, they must have been most favourably impressed with the blessings of british rule! shane, instead of encountering the deputy on his own territory, amused himself burning villages in meath. neither of those rulers--those chief protectors of the people--seems to have been conscious that he was doing anything wrong in destroying the homes and the food of the wretched inhabitants, whom they alternately scourged. on the contrary, the extent of devastation which they were able to effect was supposed to put them in a better position for meeting together, and treating as honourable and gallant representatives of their respective nations. in accordance with the desire of the queen, shane, fresh from the work of destruction in the pale, was invited to a conference with kildare. they met at dundalk, and the irish chief consented to wait upon elizabeth in london, being allowed to name his own conditions. in doing so he implied 'that he was rather conferring a favour than receiving one, and that he was going to england as a victorious enemy permitting himself to be conciliated.' he demanded a safe-conduct so clearly worded that, whatever was the result of his visit, he should be free to return; he required 'a complete amnesty for his past misdeeds, and he stipulated that elizabeth should pay all expenses for himself and his retinue; the earls of ormond, desmond, and kildare must receive him in state at dundalk, and escort him to dublin; kildare must accompany him to england; and, most important of all, armagh cathedral must be evacuated. he did not anticipate treachery; and either he would persuade elizabeth to recognise him, and thus prove to the irish that rebellion was the surest road to prosperity and power, or, at worst, by venturing into england, and returning unscathed, he would show them that the government might be defied with more than impunity.'[ ] [footnote : froude.] these terms, so humiliating to english pride, were advocated in the council 'for certain secret respects;' and even sir william cecil was not ashamed to say, 'that, in shane's absence from ireland,' _something might be cavilled against him or his_, for non-observing the covenants on his side; and so the pact being infringed, the matter might be used as should be thought fit. with this understanding elizabeth wrote, making all the ignominious concessions demanded, save one, the evacuation of the cathedral. shane replied in lofty terms that, although for the earl of sussex he would not mollify one iota of his agreement, yet he would consent at the request of her majesty. 'thus,' says mr. froude, 'with the earl of kildare in attendance, a train of galloglasse, , l. in hand, and a second , l. awaiting for him in london, the champion of irish freedom sailed from dublin, and appeared on the second of january at the english court.' it is stated that cecil, pembroke, and bacon, received him privately on his arrival, instructed him how to behave in the royal presence, gave him the promised money, and endeavoured to impress upon him the enormity of his offences. but, to every appeal made to his conscience, shane answered by a counter appeal about money; , l. was a poor present from so great a queen; he was sure their honours would give him a few more hundreds. he agreed, however, to make a general confession of his sins in irish and english; and, thus tutored, elizabeth received him in state on january , , attended by the council, the peers, the foreign ambassadors, bishops, aldermen, dignitaries of all kinds, who gazed 'as if at the exhibition of some wild animal of the desert.' the scene is very graphically described by mr. froude: 'o'neill stalked in, his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him, his hair curling on his back, and clipped short below the eyes, which gleamed from under it with a grey lustre, frowning, fierce, and cruel. behind him followed his galloglasse, bare-headed and fair-haired, with shirts of mail which reached their knees, a wolf-skin flung across their shoulders, and short broad battle-axes in their hands. at the foot of the throne the chief paused, bent forward, threw himself on his face upon the ground, and then, rising upon his knees, spoke aloud in irish!' camden says he 'confessed his crime and rebellion with howling,' and mr. froude adds that, to his hearers, the sound of the words 'was as the howling of a dog.' he said:-- 'oh! my most dread sovereign lady and queen, like as i shane o'neill, your majesty's subject of your realm of ireland, have of long time desired to come into the presence of your majesty to acknowledge my humble and bounden subjection, so am i now here upon my knees by your gracious permission, and do most humbly acknowledge your majesty to be my sovereign lady and queen of england, france, and ireland; and i do confess that, for lack of civil education, i have offended your majesty and your laws, for the which i have required and obtained your majesty's pardon. and for that i most humbly, from the bottom of my heart, thank your majesty, and still do with all humbleness require the continuance of the same; and i faithfully promise here before almighty god and your majesty, and in presence of all these your nobles, that i intend, by god's grace, to live hereafter in the obedience of your majesty as a subject of your land of ireland. 'and because this my speech, being irish, is not well understanded, i have caused this my submission to be written in english and irish, and thereto have set my hand and seal; and to these gentlemen, my kinsmen and friends, i most humbly beseech your majesty to be merciful and gracious.' camden remarks that the bare-headed galloglasse, with long dishevelled hair, crocus-dyed shirts, wide sleeves, short jackets, shaggy cloaks, &c., were objects of great wonder to the londoners; while the hauteur of the irish prince excited the merriment of the courtiers, who styled him 'o'neill the great, cousin to st. patrick, friend to the queen of england, enemy to all the world besides.' notwithstanding shane's precautions with respect to the safe-conduct, english artifice outdid irish cunning. with all their horror of the jesuits, elizabeth's ministers in this case practised mental reservation. true, the government had promised to permit him to return to ireland, but then the time of his stay had not been specified. various pretexts were invented to detain him. he must be recognised as his father's heir; the cause must be pleaded before the english judges; the young baron of dungannon must come over and be heard on the other side. o'neill was told that he had been sent for, while cecil wrote privately to fitzwilliam to keep him safe in ireland. while the prince was thus humoured with vain excuses, he was occupied in pleading his own cause by flattering communications to the queen, 'whose fame was spoken of throughout the world.' he wished to study the wisdom of her government, that he might know better how to order himself in civil polity. he was most urgent that her majesty would give him 'some noble english lady for a wife, with augmentation of living suitable.' if she would give him his father's earldom, he would make her the undisputed sovereign of willing subjects in ulster; he would drive away all her enemies, save her from all further expense, and secure for her a great increase of revenue. he begged in the meantime, that he might be allowed to attend her favourite, lord robert cecil, in order to learn 'to ride after the english fashion, to run at the tilt, to hawk, to shoot, and use such other good exercises as the said good lord was most apt unto.' thus month after month passed away, and shane was still virtually a prisoner. 'at length,' says mr. froude, 'the false dealing produced its cruel fruit, the murder of the boy who was used as the pretext for the delay. sent for to england, yet prevented from obeying the command, the young baron of dungannon was waylaid at the beginning of april in a wood near carlingford by turlogh o'neill. he fled for his life, with the murderers behind him, till he reached the bank of a deep river, which he could not swim, and there he was killed.' this event brought matters to a crisis, and shane's cause was triumphant. by articles entered into between him and the queen it was agreed that he was to be constituted captain or governor of tyrone 'in the same manner as other captains of the said nation called o'nele's had rightfully executed that office in the time of king henry viii. and, moreover, he was to enjoy and have the name and title of o'nele, with the like authority as any other of his ancestors, with the service and homage of all the lords and captains called _urraughts_, and other nobles of the said nation of o'nele.' all this was upon the condition 'that he and his said nobles should truly and faithfully, from time to time, serve her majesty, and, where necessary, wage war against all her enemies in such manner as the lord lieutenant for the time being should direct.' the title of o'neill, however, was to be contingent on the decision of parliament as to the validity of the letters-patent of henry viii. should that decision be unfavourable, he was to enjoy his powers and prerogatives under the style and title of the earl of tyrone, with feudal jurisdiction over the northern counties. the pale was to be no shelter to any person whom he might demand as a malefactor. if any irish lord or chief did him wrong, and the deputy failed within twenty-one days to exact reparation, shane might raise an army and levy war on his private account. an exception was made on behalf of the loyal o'donel, whose cause was to be submitted to the arbitration of the irish earls. the 'indenture' between the queen and o'neill was signed by the high contracting parties, and bears date april , . the english historian indignantly remarks: 'a rebel subject treating as an equal with his sovereign for the terms on which he would remain in his allegiance was an inglorious spectacle; and the admission of shane's pretensions to sovereignty was one more evidence to the small ulster chiefs that no service was worse requited in ireland than fidelity to the english crown. the maguires, the o'reillys, the o'donels--all the clans who had stood by sussex in the preceding summer--were given over to their enemy bound hand and foot. but elizabeth was weary of the expense, and sick of efforts which were profitless as the cultivation of a quicksand. true it was that she was placing half ireland in the hands of an adulterous, murdering scoundrel, but the irish liked to have it so, and she forced herself to hope that he would restrain himself for the future within the bounds of decency.'[ ] [footnote : froude.] in that hope she was soon disappointed. shane with his galloglasse returned in glory, his purse lined with money and honour wreathed about his brows. he told the northern chiefs that he had gone to england not to lose but to win, and that they must henceforth submit to his authority, or feel his power. the o'donels, relying on english promises, dared to refuse allegiance to the o'neill, whereupon, without consulting the lord deputy, 'he called his men to arms and marched into tyrconnel, killing, robbing, and burning in the old style through farm and castle.' the irish historians, however, make excuses for o'neill, affirming that he was released from his obligations by the bad faith of the lord deputy. he it was who gave him a safe conduct to dublin, that he might take the oath of allegiance according to promise; but the document was so ingeniously worded that its meaning might be twisted so as to make him a prisoner. he was informed of this treachery, and, as mr. froude remarks, 'shane was too cunning a fish, and had been too lately in the meshes, to be caught again in so poor a snare.' a most attractive bait was provided by sussex in the person of his sister, who had been brought over to dublin, and who might be won by the great northern chief if he would only come up to the viceregal court to woo her. 'shane glanced at the tempting morsel with wistful eyes. had he trusted himself in the hands of sussex he would have had a short shrift for a blessing and a rough nuptial knot about his neck. at the last moment a little bird carried the tale to his ear. he had been advertized out of the pale that the lady was brought over only to entrap him, and if he came to the deputy he should never return.' he therefore excused himself by alleging that his duty to the queen forbade him to leave the province while it was in such a disturbed condition, the disturbance being caused chiefly by his own predatory excursions into the territories of the o'donels and maguires. shane took charge of the affairs of the church as well as of the state. the catholic primate refusing to acknowledge elizabeth as the head of the church, the see was declared vacant, and a _congé d'élire_ was sent down for the appointment of 'mr. adam loftus,' an englishman, who came over as the lord deputy's chaplain. the answer returned and reported by sussex to the queen was 'that the chapter there, whereof the greater part were shane o'neill's horsemen, were so sparkled and out of order that they could by no means be assembled for the election. in the meantime the lord deputy began to apprehend that o'neill aspired, not without some hope of success, to the sovereignty of the whole island. it was found that he was in correspondence with the pope, and the queen of scots, and the king of spain. no greater danger, wrote sussex, had ever been in ireland. he implored the queen not to trifle with it, declaring that he wished some abler general to take the command, not from any want of will, 'for he would spend his last penny and his last drop of blood for her majesty.' right and left shane was crushing the petty chiefs, who implored the protection of the government. maguire requested the deputy to write to him in english, not in latin, because the latter language was well known, and but few of the irish had any knowledge of the former, in which therefore the secrets of their correspondence would be more safe. here is a specimen of his english: 'i know well that within these four days the sayed shan will come to dystroy me contrey except your lordshypp will sette some remedy in the matter.' he did indeed go down into fermanagh with 'a great hoste.' as maguire refused to submit, shane 'bygan to wax mad, and to cawsse his men to bran all his corn and howsses.' he spared neither church nor sanctuary; three hundred women and children were piteously murdered, and maguire himself, clean banished, as he described it, took refuge with the remnant of his people in the islands on the lake, whither shane was making boats to pursue him. 'help me, your lordship,' the hunted wretch cried, in his despair, to sussex. 'ye are lyke to make hym the strongest man of all erlond, for every man wyll take an exampull by the gratte lostys; take hyd to yourself by thymes, for he is lyke to have all the power from this place thill he come to the wallys of gallway to rysse against you.'[ ] [footnote : wright's elizabeth, vol. i. p. .] it is the boast of the irish that when shane had subdued all his opponents, he ruled tyrone for some time with such order, 'that if a robbery was committed within his territory, he either caused the property to be restored, or reimbursed the loser out of his own treasury.'[ ] [footnote : haverty's history of ireland, p. .] the perplexity of the government in this critical emergency is vividly described by mr. froude: 'elizabeth knew not which way to turn. force, treachery, conciliation had been tried successively, and the irish problem was more hopeless than ever. in the dense darkness of the prospects of ulster there was a solitary gleam of light. grown insolent with prosperity, shane had been dealing too peremptorily with the scots; his countess, though compelled to live with him, and to be the mother of his children, had felt his brutality and repented of her folly, and perhaps attempted to escape. in the daytime, when he was abroad marauding, she was coupled like a hound to a page or a horse-boy, and only released at night when he returned to his evening orgies. the fierce campbells were not men to bear tamely these outrages from a drunken savage on the sister of their chief, and sussex conceived that if the scots, by any contrivance, were separated from shane, they might be used as a whip to scourge him.' at length sussex, determined to crush the arch-rebel, marched northward in april, , with a mixed force of english and irish, ill-armed, ill-supplied, dispirited and almost disloyal. the diary of the commander-in-chief is, perhaps, the funniest on record: 'april : the army arrived at armagh. april : the army marches back to newry to bring up stores and ammunition left behind. april : the army advances again to armagh, where it waits for galloglasse and kerne from the pale. april : the commander-in-chief answers a letter from james m'connell. april : the army goes upon shane's cattle, of which it takes enough to serve it, but would have taken more if it had had galloglasse.' next day it returns to armagh. there it waits three days for the galloglasse, and then sends back for them to dublin. on april , again writes m'connell, because he did not come according to promise. april : the army surveys the trough mountains. april : the pious commander winds up the glorious record in these words: 'to armagh with the spoil taken which would have been much more if we had had galloglasse, and because st. george even forced me, her majesty's lieutenant, to return to divine service that night. april : divine service.' subsequently his lordship's extreme piety caused him the loss of horses, which he naïvely confesses thus: 'being easter time, and he having travelled the week before, and easter day till night, thought fit to give easter monday to prayer, and in this time certain churls stole off with the horses.' to this mr. froude adds the pertinent remark: 'the piety which could neglect practical duty for the outward service of devotion, yet at the same time could make overtures to neil greg to assassinate his master, requires no very lenient consideration.' in connexion with the irish church disestablishment bill lord elcho proposed solomon's plan of settling the dispute of the two mother churches about ireland. he would cut the country in two, establishing protestantism in the north and catholicism in the south. when an experienced member of the house of commons makes such a proposition in this age, we should not be surprised that sir thomas cusack in the year proposed to queen elizabeth that ireland should be divided into four provinces, each with a separate president, either elected by the people or chosen in compliance with their wishes. o'neill was to have the north, the clanrickards the west, the o'briens or desmonds the south, and thus the english might be allowed the undisturbed enjoyment of the pale. this notable scheme for settling the irish question was actually adopted by the queen, and she wrote to sussex, stating that, as his expedition to the north had resulted only in giving fresh strength to the enemy, she 'had decided to come to an end of the war of ulster by agreement rather than by force.' to shane she was all compliance. he had but to prove himself a good subject, and he might have any pre-eminence which her majesty could grant without doing any other person wrong. 'if he desired to have a council established at armagh, he should himself be the president of that council; if he wished to drive the scots out of antrim, her own troops would assist in the expulsion; if he was offended with the garrison in the cathedral, she would gladly see peace maintained in a manner less expensive to herself. to the primacy he might name the person most agreeable to himself, and with the primacy, as a matter of course, even the form of maintaining the protestant church would be abandoned also. in return for these concessions the queen demanded only that shane, to save her honour, should sue for them as a favour instead of demanding them as a right. the rebel chief consented without difficulty to conditions which cost him nothing, and after an interview with cusack, o'neill wrote a formal apology to elizabeth, and promised for the future to be her majesty's true and faithful subject. indentures were drawn up on december , in which the ulster sovereignty was transferred to him in everything but the name, and the treaty required only elizabeth's signature, when a second dark effort was made to cut the knot of the irish difficulty.'[ ] [footnote : froude, vol. viii. p. .] this second 'dark effort' was nothing less than an attempt to murder o'neill by means of poison. he could not be conquered; he could not be out-manoeuvred; he could not be assassinated in the ordinary way. but the resources of dublin castle, and of english ingenuity, were not exhausted. the lord deputy was of course delighted with the reconciliation which had been effected with the ulster prince. what could be more natural than to send him a present of the choicest wine from the viceregal cellars? certainly few presents could be more agreeable. shane and his household quaffed the delicious beverage freely enough we may be sure, without the slightest suspicion that there was death in the cup. but the wine was mingled with poison. those who drank it were quickly at the point of death. o'neill might thank his good constitution for his recovery from an illness almost mortal. the crime was traced to an englishman named smith, who, if employed by lord sussex, did not betray the guilty secret. mr. froude admits that the suspicion cannot but cling to him that this second attempt at murder was not made without his connivance; 'nor,' he adds, 'can elizabeth herself be wholly acquitted of responsibility. she professed the loudest indignation, but she ventured no allusion to his previous communication with her, and no hint transpires of any previous displeasure when the proposal had been made openly to herself. the treachery of an english nobleman, the conduct of the inquiry, and the anomalous termination of it, would have been incredible even in ireland, were not the original correspondence extant, in which the facts are not denied.' o'neill of course complained loudly to the queen, whereupon she directed that a strict investigation should take place, in order that the guilty parties should be found out and punished, 'of what condition soever the same should be.' in writing to the lord deputy she assumed that smith had been committed to prison and would be brought to condign punishment. that person, after many denials, at length confessed his guilt, and said that his object was to rid his country of a dangerous enemy. this motive was so good in the eye of the government that it saved the life of the culprit. sir thomas cusack, writing to cecil, march , , says, 'i persuaded o'neill to forget the matter, whereby no more talk should grow of it; seeing there is no law to punish the offender other than by discretion and imprisonment, which o'neill would little regard except the party might be executed by death, and that the law doth not suffer. so as the matter be wisely pacified, it were well done to leave it.' shane was probably aware that smith was but an instrument, who would be readily sacrificed as a peace-offering. the sketch which mr. froude gives of ulster and its wild sovereign at this time is admirably picturesque. 'here then, for the present, the story will leave shane safely planted on the first step of his ambition, in all but the title, sole monarch of the north. he built himself a fort on an island in lough neagh, which he called _foogh-ni-gall_, or, hate of englishmen, and grew rich on the spoils of his enemies, the only strong man in ireland. he administered justice after a paternal fashion, permitting no robbers but himself; when wrong was done he compelled restitution, or at his own cost redeemed the harm "to the loser's contentation." two hundred pipes of wine were stored in his cellars; men-at-arms fed at his table, as it were his janissaries; and daily he feasted the beggars at his gate, saying, it was meet to serve christ first. half wolf, half fox, he lay couched in his castle of malepartuis, with his emissaries at rome, at paris, and at edinburgh. in the morning he was the subtle pretender to the irish throne; in the afternoon, when the wine was in him, he was a dissolute savage, revelling in sensuality with his unhappy countess, uncoupled from her horseboy to wait upon his pleasure. he broke loose from time to time to keep his hand in practice. at carlingford, for example, he swept off one day sheep and oxen, while his men violated sixty women in the town; but elizabeth looked away and endeavoured not to see. the english government had resolved to stir no sleeping dogs in ireland till a staff was provided to chastise them if they would bite. terence daniel, the dean of those rough-riding canons of armagh, was installed as primate; the earl of sussex was recalled to england; and the new archbishop, unable to contain his exultation at the blessed day which had dawned upon his country, wrote to cecil to say how the millennium had come at last, glory be to god!' as a picture of irish savage life this is very good. but the historian has presented a companion picture of english civilised life, which is not at all inferior. sir thomas wroth and sir nicholas arnold were sent over to reform the pale. they were stern englishmen, impatient of abuses among their own countrymen, and having no more sympathy for irishmen than for wolves. in the pale they found that peculation had grown into a custom; the most barefaced frauds had been converted by habit into rights: and a captain's commission was thought ill-handled if it did not yield, beyond the pay, l. a year. they received pay for each hundred men, when only sixty were on the roll. the soldiers, following the example of their leaders, robbed and ground the peasantry. in fact, the pale was 'a weltering sea of corruption--the captains out of credit, the soldiers mutinous, the english government hated; every man seeking his own, and none that which was christ's.' the purification of the pale was left to arnold, 'a hard, iron, pitiless man, careful of things and careless of phrases, untroubled with delicacy, and impervious to irish enchantments. the account books were dragged to light, where iniquity in high places was registered in inexorable figures. the hands of sir henry ratcliffe, the brother of sussex, were not found clean. arnold sent him to the castle with the rest of the offenders. deep, leading drains were cut through the corrupting mass. the shaking ground grew firm, and honest healthy human life was again made possible. with the provinces beyond the pale, arnold meddled little, save where, taking a rough view of the necessities of the case, he could help the irish chiefs to destroy each other.' to cecil, arnold wrote thus: 'i am with all the wild irish at the same point i am at with bears and ban-dogs; when i see them fight, so they fight earnestly indeed, and tug each other well, i care not who has the worst.' 'why not, indeed?' asks mr. froude; 'better so than hire assassins! cecil, with the modesty of genius, confessed his ignorance of the country, and his inability to judge; yet, in every opinion which he allowed himself to give, there was always a certain nobility of tone and sentiment.' nobility was scarcely necessary to induce a statesman to revolt against the policy of arnold. a little christianity, nay a slight touch of humanity, would have sufficed for that purpose. sussex was a nobleman, and considered himself, no doubt, a very godly man, but everyone must admit that, in all heroic qualities, he was incomparably beneath the uncultured shane o'neill, while in baseness and wickedness he was not far behind his northern foe, 'half wolf, half fox.' cecil, however, was a man of a very different stamp from sussex. evidently shocked at the prevailing english notions about the value of irish life, he wrote to arnold: 'you be of that opinion which many wise men are of, from which i do not dissent, being an englishman; but being, as i am, a christian man, i am not without some perplexity, to enjoy of such cruelties.' the work of reform, however, did not prove so easy a task. arnold's vigour was limited by his powers. the paymasters continued to cheat the government by false returns. the government allowed the pay to run in arrear, the soldiers revenged themselves by oppressing and plundering the people; and 'so came to pass this wonderful phenomenon, that _in o'neill's country_ alone in ireland--defended as it was from attacks from without, and enriched with the plunder of the pale--_were the peasantry prosperous, or life or property secure_.' this fact might suggest to the english historian that the evils of ireland do not all proceed from blood or race; and that the saxon may be placed in circumstances which make him as false, as dishonest, as lazy, as disordered, as worthless as the celt, and that even men of 'gentle blood' may become as base as their most plebeian servants. nor did zeal for religious reformation redeem the defects of the anglo-irish rulers. the protestant bishops were chiefly agitated by the vestment controversy. 'adam loftus, the titular primate, to whom,' says mr. froude, 'sacked villages, ravished women, and famine-stricken skeletons crawling about the fields, were matters of everyday indifference, shook with terror at the mention of a surplice.' robert daly wrote in anguish to cecil, in dismay at the countenance to 'papistry,' and at his own inability to prolong a persecution which he had happily commenced. an abortive 'devise for the better government of ireland' gives us some insight into the condition of the people. 'no poor persons should be _compelled_ any more to work or labour by the day, or otherwise, without meat, drink, wages, or some other allowance during the time of their labour; no earth tillers, nor any others inhabiting a dwelling, under any lord, should be distrained or punished, in body or goods, for the faults of their landlord; nor any honest man lose life or lands without fair trial by parliamentary attainder, according to the ancient laws of england and ireland.' surely it was no proof of incurable perversity of nature, that the irish peasantry were discontented and disaffected, under the horrid system of oppression and slavery here laid before the english government. as remedial measures, it was proposed that a true servant of god should be placed in every parish, from cape clear to the giant's causeway; that the children should be taught the new testament and the psalms in latin, 'that they, being infants, might savour of the same in age as an old cask doth;' that there should be a university for the education of the clergy, 'and such godly discipline among them that there should be no more pluralities, no more abuse of patronage, no more neglect, or idleness, or profligacy.' mr. froude's reflection upon this projected policy is highly characteristic:-- 'here was an ideal ireland painted on the retina of some worthy english minister; but the real ireland was still the old place. as it was in the days of brian boroihme and the danes, so it was in the days of shane o'neill and sir nicholas arnold; and the queen, who was to found all these fine institutions, cared chiefly to burden her exchequer no further in the vain effort _to drain the black irish morass_, fed as it was from the perennial fountains of irish nature.'[ ] [footnote : vol. viii. p. .] the queen, however, thought it more prudent to let shane have his way in ulster. to oblige him, she would remove the protestant primate, loftus, to dublin, and appoint his own nominee and friend, terence daniel. the pope had sent a third archbishop for the same see, named creagh; but, when passing through london, he was arrested, and incarcerated in the tower, 'where he lay in great misery, cold, and hunger, without a penny, without the means of getting his single shirt washed, and without gown or hose.' at last he made his escape by gliding over the walls into the thames. the events of made the english government more than ever anxious to come to terms with the chieftain 'whom they were powerless to crush.' since the defeat of the earl of sussex, continues mr. froude, 'shane's influence and strength had been steadily growing. his return unscathed from london, and the fierce attitude which he assumed on the instant of his reappearance in ulster, convinced the petty leaders that to resist him longer would only ensure their ruin. o'donel was an exile in england, and there remained unsubdued in the north only the scottish colonies of antrim, which were soon to follow with the rest. o'neill lay quiet through the winter. with the spring and the fine weather, when the rivers fell and the ground dried, he roused himself out of his lair, and with his galloglasse and kerne, and a few hundred harquebussmen, he dashed suddenly down upon the red-shanks, and broke them utterly to pieces. six or seven hundred were killed in the field, james m'connell and his brother, sorleyboy, were taken prisoners, and, for the moment, the whole colony was swept away. james m'connell, himself badly wounded in the action, died a few months later, and shane was left undisputed sovereign of ulster.' primate daniel announced to the queen this 'glorious victory over a malicious and dangerous people' who were gradually fastening on the country; and sir thomas cusack urged that now was the time to make o'neill a friend for ever, an advice which was backed up by the stern arnold. 'for what else could be done? the pale,' he pleaded, 'is poor and unable to defend itself. if he do fall out before the beginning of next summer, there is neither outlaw, rebel, murderer, thief, nor any lewd nor evil-disposed person--of whom god knoweth there is plenty swarming in every quarter among the wild irish, yea and in our own border too--which would not join to do what mischief they might.' but shane did not wait for further royal overtures. he saw that with the english government might was right, and that the justice of his cause shone out more brightly in proportion to the increase of his power. thus encouraged in his course of aggression and conquest, he seized the queen's castles of newry and dundrum. he then marched into connaught, demanding the tribute due of old time 'to them that were kings in that realm.' he exacted pledges of obedience from the western chiefs, and spoiled o'rourke's country, and returned to tyrone driving before him , head of cattle. while proceeding at this rate he wrote soothing and flattering words to the queen. it was for her majesty he was fighting; he was chastising her enemies and breaking stiff-necked chiefs into her yoke; and he begged that she would not credit any stories which his ill-willers might spread abroad against him. on the contrary he hoped she would determine his title and rule without delay, and grant him, in consideration of his good services, some augmentation of living in the pale. elizabeth, however, excused his conduct, saying 'we must allow something for his wild bringing-up, and not expect from him what we should expect from a perfect subject. if he mean well he shall have all his reasonable requests granted.' but there was among elizabeth's advisers a statesman who felt that this sort of policy would never do. sir henry sidney, on being requested to take charge of the government of ireland, urged the absolute necessity of a radical change. the power of o'neill, and such rulers as he, must be utterly broken, and that by force, at whatever cost. and this, he argued, would not only be sound policy but true economy. the condition of ireland was unexampled; free from foreign invasion, the sovereignty of the queen not denied, yet the revenue so mean and scanty that 'great yearly treasures were carried out of the realm of england to satisfy the stipends of the officers and soldiers required for the governance of the same.' he must have , l. or , l. to pay out-standing debts and put the army in proper condition. as for his own remuneration, the new viceroy, as he could expect nothing from the queen, would be content with permission to export six thousand kerseys and clothes, free of duty. sir henry sidney struck out the only line of policy by which the english government of ireland could be made successful or even possible. he said: 'to go to work by force will be chargeable, it is true; but if you will give the people justice and minister law among them, and exercise the sword of the sovereign, and put away the sword of the subject, _omnia hæc adjicientur vobis_--you shall drive the now man of war to be an husbandman, and he that now liveth like a lord to live like a servant, and the money now spent in buying armour, and horses, and waging of war, shall be bestowed in building of towns and houses. by ending these incessant wars ere they be aware, you shall bereave them both of force and beggary, and make them weak and wealthy. then you can convert the military service due from the lords into money; then you can take up the fisheries now left to the french and the spaniards; then you can open and work your mines, and the people will be able to grant you subsidies.'[ ] when the lord deputy arrived in ireland he found a state of things in the pale far worse than he could have imagined. it was 'as it were overwhelmed with vagabonds; plunder and spoils daily carried out of it; the people miserable; not two gentlemen in the whole of it able to lend l.; without horse, armour, apparel, or victual. the soldiers were worse than the people: so beggarlike as it would abhor a general to look on them; never a married wife among them, and therefore so allied with irishwomen that they betrayed secrets, and could not be trusted on dangerous service; so insolent as to be intolerable; so rooted in idleness as there was no hope by correction to amend them.' in munster a man might ride twenty or thirty miles and find no houses standing in a country which he had known as well inhabited as many counties in england. 'in ulster,' sidney wrote, 'there tyrannizeth the prince of pride; lucifer was never more puffed up with pride and ambition than that o'neill is; he is at present the only strong and rich man in ireland, and he is the dangerest man and most like to bring the whole estate of this land to subversion and subjugation either to him or to some foreign prince, that ever was in ireland.' he invited this lucifer to come into the pale to see him, and shane at first agreed to meet him at dundalk, but on second thoughts he politely declined, on the ground that the earl of sussex had twice attempted to assassinate him, and but for the earl of kildare would have put a lock upon his hands when he was passing through dublin to england. hence his 'timorous and mistrustful people' would not trust him any more in english hands. in fact o'neill despised any honours the queen could confer upon him. 'when the wine was in him he boasted that he was in blood and power better than the best of their earls, and he would give place to none but his cousin of kildare, because he was of his own house. they had made a wise earl of m'carthymore, but shane kept as good a man as he. whom was he to trust? sussex gave him a safe-conduct and then offered him the courtesy of a handlock. the queen had told him herself that, though he had got a safe-conduct to come and go, the document did not say when he was to go; and, in order to get away from london, he was obliged to agree to things against his honour and profit, and he would never perform them while he lived.' that treachery drove him into war. 'my ancestors,' he said, 'were kings of ulster; and ulster is mine, and shall be mine. o'donel shall never come into his country, nor bagenal into newry, nor kildare into dundrum, or lecale. they are now mine. with this sword i won them, with this sword i will keep them.' sidney, indignant at these pretensions, wrote thus to leicester: 'no atila nor yotila, no vandal nor goth that ever was, was more to be dreaded for over-running any part of christendom, than this man is for over-running and spoiling of ireland. if it be an angel of heaven that will say that ever o'neill will be a good subject till he be thoroughly chastised, believe him not, but think him a spirit of error. surely if the queen do not chastise him in ulster, he will chase all hers out of ireland. her majesty must make up her mind to the expense, and chastise this cannibal.' he therefore demanded money that he might pay the garrison and get rid of the idle, treacherous, incorrigible soldiers which were worse than none. ireland, he said, would be no small loss to the english crown. it was never so likely to be lost as then, and he would rather die than that it should be lost during his government. the queen, however, sent money with the greatest possible reluctance, and was strangely dissatisfied with this able and faithful servant, even when his measures were attended with signal success. [footnote : opinions of sir h. sidney, irish mss., rolls house; froude, p. .] in the meantime o'neill zealously espoused the cause of mary queen of scots. his friendship with argyle grew closer, and he proposed that it should be cemented by a marriage. 'the countess' was to be sent away, and shane was to be united to the widow of james m'connell, whom he had killed--who was another half-sister of argyle, and whose daughter he had married already and divorced. sidney wrote, that was said to be the earl's practice; and mr. froude, who has celebrated the virtues of henry viii., takes occasion from this facility of divorce to have another fling at 'irish nature.' he says:--'the irish chiefs, it seemed, three thousand years behind the world, retained the habits and the moralities of the greek princes in the tale of troy, when the bride of the slaughtered husband was the willing prize of the conqueror; and when only a rare andromache was found to envy the fate of a sister who had escaped the bed of some victorious lord.' after a brief and brilliant campaign, in which shane 'swept round by lough erne, swooped on the remaining cattle of maguire, and struck terror and admiration into the irishry,' he wrote a letter to charles ix. of france, inviting his co-operation in expelling the heretics, and bringing back the country to the holy roman see. the heretic saxons, he said, were the enemies of almighty god, the enemies of the holy church of rome, the king's enemies, and his. 'the time is come when we all are confederates in a common bond to drive the invader from our shores, and we now beseech your majesty to send us , well-armed men. if you will grant our request there will soon be no englishmen left alive among us, and we will be your majesty's subjects ever more.' this letter was intercepted, and is now preserved among the irish mss. sidney resolved to adopt a new plan of warfare. his campaigns would not be mere summer forays, mere inroads of devastation during the few dry weeks of august and september. he would wait till the harvest was gathered in, place troops in fortresses, and continue hostilities through the winter. he adopted this course because 'in the cold irish springs, the fields were bare, the cattle were lean, and the weather was so uncertain that neither man nor horse could bear it, whereas in august _food everywhere was abundant_, and the soldiers would have time to become hardened to their work.' they could winter somewhere on the bann; harry tyrone night and day without remission, and so break shane to the ground and ruin him. there was no time to be lost. maguire had come into dublin, reporting that his last cottage was in ashes, and his last cow driven over the hill into shane's country; while argyle, with the whole disposable force of the western isles, was expected to join him in summer. o'neill himself, after an abortive attempt to entrap sidney at dundalk, made a sudden attack on that town in july; but his men were beaten back, 'and eighteen heads were left behind to grin hideously over the gates.' he then returned to armagh and burned the cathedral to the ground, to prevent its being again occupied by an english garrison. he next sent a swift messenger to desmond, calling for a rising in munster. 'now was the time or never' to set upon the enemies of ireland. if desmond failed, or turned against his country, god would avenge it on him. but desmond's reply was an offer to the deputy 'to go against the rebel with all his power. the scots also held back.' shane offered them all antrim to join him, all the cattle in the country, and the release of sorleyboy from captivity; but antrim and its cattle they believed that they could recover for themselves, and james m'connell had left a brother allaster, who was watching with eager eyes for an opportunity to revenge the death of his kinsman, and the dishonour with which shane had stained his race. in the meantime troops and money came over from england, and on september , colonel randolph was at the head of an army in lough foyle; and the lord deputy took the field accompanied by kildare, the old o'donel, shane maguire, and o'dogherty. so that this war against o'neill was waged for the dispossessed irish chiefs as well as for england. armagh city they found a mere heap of blackened stones. marching without obstruction to ben brook, one of o'neill's best and largest houses, which they found 'utterly burned and razed to the ground,' thence they went on towards clogher, 'through pleasant fields, and villages so well inhabited as no irish county in the realm was like it.' the bishop of clogher was out with shane in the field. 'his well-fattened flock were devoured by sidney's men as by a flight of egyptian locusts.' 'there we stayed,' said sidney, 'to destroy the corn; we burned the country for miles compass, and we found by experience that now was the time of the year to do the rebel most harm.' but he says not a word of the harm he was doing to the poor innocent peasantry, whose industry had produced the crops, to the terrified women and children whom he was thus consigning to a horrible lingering death by famine. this was a strange commencement of his own programme to treat the people with justice. the lord deputy expected to meet randolph at lifford; but struck with the singular advantages presented by derry, then an island, for a military position, he pitched his tents there, and set the troops to work in erecting fortifications. nothing then stood on the site of the present city, save a decrepid and deserted monastery of augustine monks, which was said to have been built in the time of st. columba. sidney stayed a few days at derry, and then, leaving randolph with men, pioneers, and provisions for two months, he marched on to donegal. this was once a thriving town, inhabited by english colonists. at the time of sidney's arrival it was a pile of ruins, 'in the midst of which, like a wild beast's den, strewed round with mangled bones, rose the largest and strongest castle which he had seen in ireland. it was held by one of o'donel's kinsmen, to whom shane, to attach him to his cause, had given his sister to wife. at the appearance of the old chief with the english army, it was immediately surrendered. o'donel was at last rewarded for his fidelity and sufferings; and the whole tribe, with eager protestations of allegiance, gave sureties for their future loyalty.' sidney next directed his march to ballyshannon, and on by the coast of sligo. passing over the bogs and mountains of mayo, they came into roscommon, and then, 'leaving behind them as fruitful a country as was in england or ireland all utterly waste,' the army crossed the shannon at athlone, swimming 'for lack of a bridge.' the results of this progress are thus summed up by mr. froude. 'twenty castles had been taken as they went along and left in hands that could be trusted. in all that long and painful journey sidney was able to say that there had not died of sickness but three persons; men and horses were brought back in full health and strength, while her majesty's honour was re-established among the irishry, and grown to no small veneration--"an expedition comparable only to alexander's journey into bactria," wrote an admirer of sidney to cecil--revealing what to irish eyes appeared the magnitude of the difficulty, and forming a measure of the effect which it produced. the english deputy had bearded shane in his stronghold, burned his houses, pillaged his people, and had fastened a body of police in the midst of them, to keep them waking in the winter nights. he had penetrated the hitherto impregnable fortresses of mountain and morass; the irish who had been faithful to england were again in safe possession of their lands and homes. the weakest, maddest, and wildest celts were made aware that, when the english were once roused to effort, they could crush them as the lion crushes the jackal.'[ ] [footnote : vol. viii. p. .] o'neill had followed the lord deputy to lifford, and then marched on to the pale, expecting to retaliate upon the invaders with impunity. but he was encountered by warren st. leger, lost men, and was at first hunted back over the border. he again returned, however, with 'a main army,' burned several villages, and in a second fight with st. leger, compelled the english to retire, 'for lack of more aid;' but they held together in good order, and shane, with the derry garrison in his rear, durst not follow far from home in pursuit. 'before he could revenge himself on sidney, before he could stir against the scots, before he could strike a blow at o'donel, he must pluck out the barbed dart which was fastened in his unguarded side.' in order to accomplish this object, he hovered cautiously about the foyle, watching for an opportunity to attack the garrison. but randolph fell upon him by surprise, and after a short sharp action, the o'neills gave way. o'dogherty with his irish horse chased the flying crowd of his countrymen, killing every person he caught; and shane lost men, the bravest of his warriors. the english success was dearly bought, for randolph leading the pursuit, was struck by a random shot, and fell dead from his horse. before the irish chief could recover from this great disaster, sidney 'struck in again beyond dundalk, burning his farms and capturing his castles. the scots came in over the bann, wasting the country all along the river side. allaster m'connell, like some chief of sioux indians, sent to the captain of knockfergus an account of the cattle that he had driven, and _the wives and bairns_ that he had slain. like swarms of angry hornets, these avenging savages drove their stings in the now maddened and desperate shane on every point where they could fasten; while in december the old o'donel came out over the mountains from donegal, and paid back o'neill with interest for his stolen wife, his pillaged country, and his own long imprisonment and exile. the tide of fortune had turned too late for his own revenge: worn out with his long sufferings, he fell from his horse, at the head of his people, with the stroke of death upon him; but before he died, he called his kinsmen about him, and prayed them to be true to england and their queen, and hugh o'donel, who succeeded to his father's command, went straight to derry, and swore allegiance to the english crown. 'tyrone was now smitten in all its borders. magennis was the last powerful chief who still adhered to shane's fortunes; the last week in the year sidney carried fire and sword through his country, and left him not a hoof remaining. it was to no purpose that shane, bewildered by the rapidity with which disasters were piling themselves upon him, cried out now for pardon and peace; the deputy would not answer his letter, and nothing was talked of but his extirpation by war only.'[ ] [footnote : froude, p. .] the war, however, was interrupted by a singular calamity that befel the derry garrison. by the death of their commander left 'a headless people,' they suffered from want of food and clothing. they also became the prey of a mysterious disease, against which no precautions could guard, which no medicine could cure, and by which strong men were suddenly struck dead. by the middle of november 'the flux was reigning among them wonderfully;' many of the best men went away because there was none to stay them. the secret of the dreadful malady--something like the cholera--was discovered in the fact that the soldiers had built their sleeping quarters over the burial-ground of the abbey, 'and the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and poisoned them.' the officer who succeeded to the command applied the most effectual remedy. he led the men at once into the pure air of the enemies' country, and they returned after a few days driving before them horses and , cattle. he assured sidney, that with additional men, he could so hunt the rebel, that ere may was passed, he should not show his face in ulster. but the 'black death' returned after a brief respite; and, says mr. froude, in the reeking vapour of the charnel-house, it was indifferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. by the middle of march there were left out of , but available to fight. reinforcements had been raised at liverpool, but they were countermanded when on the point of sailing. the english council was discussing the propriety of removing the colony to the bann, when accident finished the work which the plague had begun, and spared them the trouble of deliberation. the huts and sheds round the monastery had been huddled together for the convenience of fortification. at the end of april, probably after a drying east wind, a fire broke out in a blacksmith's forge, which spread irresistibly through the entire range of buildings. the flames at last reached the powder magazine: thirty men were blown to pieces by the explosion, and the rest, paralysed by this last addition to their misfortunes, made no more effort to extinguish the conflagration. st. loo, with all that remained of that ill-fated party, watched from their provision boats in the river the utter destruction of the settlement which had begun so happily, and then sailed drearily away to find a refuge in knockfergus. such was the fate of the first efforts for the building of londonderry; and below its later glories, as so often happens in this world, lay the bones of many a hundred gallant men who lost their lives in laying its foundations. elizabeth, who in the immediate pressure of calamity resumed at once her noble nature, 'perceiving the misfortune not to come of treason, but of god's ordinance,' bore it well; she was willing to do that should be wanting to repair the loss; and cecil was able to write cheerfully to sidney, telling him to make the best of the accident and let it stimulate him to fresh exertions.'[ ] [footnote : page .] in the meantime shane o'neill, hard pressed on every side, earnestly implored the cardinals of lorraine and guise, in the name of their great brother the duke, to bring the _fleur-de-lys_ to the rescue of ireland from the grasp of the ungodly english. 'help us,' he cried, blending _irish-like_ flattery with entreaty: 'when i was in england, i saw your noble brother, the marquis d'elboeuf, transfix two stags with a single arrow. if the most christian king will not help us, move the pope to help us. i alone in this land sustain his cause.' to propitiate his holiness, primate daniel was dismissed to the ranks of the army, and creagh received his crosier, and was taken into o'neill's household. 'all was done,' says the english historian, 'to deserve favour in earth and heaven, but all was useless. the pope sat silent or muttering his anathemas with bated breath. the guises had work enough on hand at home to heed the _irish wolf_, whom the english, having in vain attempted to trap or poison, were driving to bay with more lawful weapons.' his own people, divided and dispirited, began now to desert the failing cause. in may, by a concerted movement, the deputy with the light horse of the pale overran tyrone, and robbed the farmers of , cattle, while the o'donels mustered their forces for a great contest with shane, now struggling, almost hopelessly, to maintain his supremacy. the o'neills and o'donels met on the banks of the foyle near lifford. the former were superior in number, being about , men. after a brief fight 'the o'neills broke and fled; the enemy was behind them, the river was in front; and when the irish battle cries had died away over moor and mountain, but survived of those fierce troopers, who were to have cleared ireland for ever from the presence of the saxons. for the rest, the wolves were snarling over their bodies, and the seagulls whirling over them with scream and cry, as they floated down to their last resting-place beneath the quiet waters of lough foyle. shane's foster-brethren, faithful to the last, were all killed; he himself with half-a-dozen comrades rode for his life, pursued by the avenging furies. his first desperate intention was to throw himself at sidney's feet, _with a slave's collar upon his neck_; but his secretary, neil m'kevin, persuaded him that his cause was not yet absolutely without hope. sorleyboy was still a prisoner in the castle at lough neagh, the countess of argyle had remained with her ravisher through his shifting fortunes, had continued to bear him children, and notwithstanding his many infidelities, was still attached to him. m'kevin told him that for their sakes, or at their intercession, he might find shelter and perhaps help among the kindred of the m'connells.' acting on this advice, o'neill took his prisoner, 'the countess, his secretary, and fifty men to the camp of allaster m'connell, in the far extremity of antrim. he was received with dissembled gratulatory words.' for two days all went on well, and an alliance was talked of. but the vengeance of his hosts was with difficulty suppressed. the great chief who was now in their power, had slain their leaders in the field, had divorced james m'connell's daughter, had kept a high-born scottish lady as his mistress, and had asked argyle to give him for a wife m'connell's widow, who, to escape the dishonour, had remained in concealment at edinburgh. on the third evening, monday june , when the wine and the whiskey had gone freely round, and the blood in shane's veins had warmed, gilespie m'connell, who had watched him from the first with an ill-boding eye, turned round upon m'kevin, and asked scornfully, 'whether it was he who had bruited abroad that the lady his aunt did offer to come from scotland to ireland to marry with his master?' m'kevin meeting scorn with scorn said, that if his aunt was queen of scotland she might be proud to match with the o'neill. 'it is false,' the fierce scot shouted; 'my aunt is too honest a woman to match with her husband's murderer.' 'shane, who was perhaps drunk, heard the words, and forgetting where he was, flung back the lie in gilespie's throat. gilespie sprung to his feet, ran out of the tent, and raised the slogan of the isles. a hundred dirks flashed into the moonlight, and the irish, wherever they could be found, were struck down and stabbed. some two or three found their horses and escaped, all the rest were murdered; and shane himself, gashed with fifty wounds, was wrapped in a kern's old shirt, and flung into a pit, dug hastily among the ruined arches of glenarm. even there, what was left of him was not allowed to rest. four days later, piers, the captain of knockfergus, hacked the head from the body, and carried it on a spear's point through drogheda to dublin, where, staked upon a pike, it bleached on the battlements of the castle, a symbol to the irish world of the fate of celtic heroes.'[ ] [footnote : froude, p. , &c.] mr. froude might have added: celtic heroes struck down by celtic hands. no lord deputy could boast of a victory over shane o'neill in the field. irish traitors in english pay, irish clans moved by vengeance, did the work of england in the destruction of the great principality of the o'neills, and it was by _their_ swords, not by english valour, that sidney 'recovered ireland for the crown of elizabeth.' whatever may have been the faults of shane o'neill, and no doubt they were very great, though not to be judged of by the morality of the nineteenth century, his talents, his force of character, his courage and capacity as a general, deserved more favourable notice from mr. froude, who, in almost every sentence of his graphic and splendid descriptions, betrays an animosity to the celtic race, very strange in an author so enlightened, and evincing, with this exception, such generous sympathies. after so often reviling the great irish champion by comparing him to all sorts of wild beasts, the historian thus concludes:-- 'so died shane o'neill, one of those champions of irish nationality, who under varying features have repeated themselves in the history of that country with periodic regularity. at once a _drunken ruffian_, and a keen and fiery patriot, the representative in his birth of the line of the ancient kings, the ideal in his character of all which irishmen most admired, regardless in his actions of the laws of god and man, yet the devoted subject in his creed of the holy catholic church; with an eye which could see far beyond the limits of his own island, and a tongue which could touch the most passionate chords of the irish heart; the like of him has been seen many times in that island, and the like of him may be seen many times again till the ethiopian has changed his skin, and the leopard his spots. numbers of his letters remain, to the queen, to sussex, to sidney, to cecil, and to foreign princes; far-reaching, full of pleasant flattery and promises which cost him nothing, but showing true ability and insight. sinner though he was, he too in his turn was sinned against; in the stained page of irish misrule there is no second instance in which an english ruler stooped to treachery, or to the infamy of attempted assassination; and it is not to be forgotten that lord sussex, who has left under his own hand the evidence of his own baseness, continued a trusted and favoured councillor of elizabeth, while sidney, who fought shane and conquered him in the open field, found only suspicion and hard words.' chapter iv. exterminating wars. mr. froude's magnificent chapter on ireland, in the eleventh volume of his history, just published, ought to be studied by every member of the legislature before parliament meets. if a nation has a conscience, england must feel remorse for the deeds done in her name in ireland; and ought to make amends for them, if possible. the historian has well described the policy of queen elizabeth. she was at times disposed to forbearance, but 'she made impossible the obedience she enjoined. her deputies and her presidents, too short-sighted to rule with justice, were driven to cruelty in spite of themselves. it was easier to kill than to restrain. death was the only gaoler which their finances could support, while the irish in turn lay in wait to retaliate upon their oppressors, and atrocity begat atrocity in hopeless continuity.' whenever there was a failing in any enterprise, the queen conceived 'a great misliking of the whole matter;' but success covered a multitude of sins. when the irish were powerful, and the colony was in danger, she thought it 'a hard matter to subvert the customs of the people which they had enjoyed, to be ruled by the captains of their own nation. let the chiefs sue for pardon, and submit to her authority, and she would let them have their seignories, their captaincies, their body-guards, and all the rest of their dignities, with power of life and death over their people. but,' says mr. froude, 'it was the curse of the english rule that it never could adhere consistently to any definite principle. it threatened, and failed to execute its threats. it fell back on conciliation, and yet immediately, by some injustice or cruelty, made reliance on its good faith impossible.' essex seemed to understand well the nature and motive of the queen's professions, and he resolved to make some bold attempts to win back her favour. he had made a sudden attack on sir brian o'neill of clandeboye, with troops trained in the wars of the low countries, and in a week he brought him to abject submission, which he expressed by saying that 'he had gone wickedly astray, wandering in the wilderness like a blind beast.' but it was the misfortune of sir brian, or m'phelim, that he still held his own territory, which had been granted by the queen to essex. 'the attempt to deprive him had been relinquished. he had surrendered his lands, and the queen, at essex's own intercession, had reinstated him as tenant under the crown. it seems, however, as if essex had his eye still upon the property.' under such circumstances, it was easy to assume that o'neill was still playing false. so he resolved that he should not be able to do so any longer. 'he determined to make sure work with so fickle a people.' he returned to clandeboye, as if on a friendly visit. sir brian and lady o'neill received him with all hospitality. the irish annalists say that they gave him a banquet. they not only let him off safe, but they accompanied him to his castle at belfast. there he was very gracious. a high feast was held in the hall; and it was late in the night when the noble guest and his wife retired to their lodging outside the walls. when they were supposed to be asleep, a company of soldiers surrounded the house and prepared to break the door. 'the o'neills flew to arms. the cry rang through the village, and the people swarmed out to defend their chief; but surprised, half-armed, and outnumbered, they were overpowered and cut to pieces. two hundred men were killed. the four masters add that the women were slain. the chieftain's wife had female attendants with her, and no one was knowingly spared. the tide being out, a squadron of horse was sent at daybreak over the water into the "ardes," from which, in a few hours, they returned with , of sir brian's cattle, and with a drove of stud mares, of which the choicest were sent to fitzwilliam. sir brian himself, his brother, and lady o'neill, were carried as prisoners to dublin, where they were soon after executed.'[ ] [footnote : froude, vol. xi. p. .] essex did not miscalculate the probable effect of this exploit. it raised him high in the estimation of the anglo-irish of the pale. 'the taint of the country was upon him; he had made himself no better than themselves, and was the hero of the hour.' the effect of such conduct and such a spirit in the rulers, may be imagined. a few weeks later, sir edward fitton wrote: 'i may say of ireland, that it is quiet; but if universal oppression of the mean sort by the great; if murder, robberies, burnings make an ill commonwealth, then i cannot say we are in a good case ... public sentiment in dublin, however, was unanimous in its approbation. essex was the man who would cauterize the long-standing sores. there was a soldier in ireland at last who understood the work that was to be done, and the way to set about it. beloved by the soldiers, admirable alike for religion, nobility, and courtesy, altogether the queen's, and not bewitched by the factions of the realm, the governor of ulster had but to be armed with supreme power, and the long-wished-for conquest of ireland would be easily and instantly achieved.' these feelings were not unnatural to the party in dublin, now represented by the men who recently declared that they rejoiced in the election of a fenian convict in tipperary, and declared that they would vote for such a candidate in preference to a loyal man. but how did queen elizabeth receive the news of the treacherous and atrocious massacre at belfast? she was not displeased. 'her occasional disapprobation of severities of this kind,' says mr. froude, 'was confined to cases to which the attention of europe happened to be especially directed. she told essex that he was a great ornament of her nobility, she wished she had many as ready as he to spend their lives for the benefit of their country.' thus encouraged by his sovereign, and smarting under the reproach of cowardice cast on him by leicester, essex determined to render his name illustrious by a still more signal deed of heroism. after an unprovoked raid on the territories of o'neill in tyrone, carrying off cattle and slaughtering great numbers of innocent people whom his soldiers hunted down, he perpetrated another massacre, which is certainly one of the most infamous recorded in history. a great number of women and children, aged and sick persons, had fled from the horrors that reigned on the mainland, and taken refuge in the island of rathlin. the story of their tragic fate is admirably told by mr. froude:--'the situation and the difficulty of access had thus long marked rathlin as a place of refuge for scotch or irish fugitives, and, besides its natural strength, it was respected as a sanctuary, having been the abode at one time of st. columba. a mass of broken masonry, on a cliff overhanging the sea, is a remnant of the castle in which robert bruce watched the leap of the legendary spider. to this island, when essex entered antrim, m'connell and other scots had sent their wives and children, their aged and their sick, for safety. on his way through carrickfergus, when returning to dublin, the earl ascertained that they had not yet been brought back to their homes. the officer in command of the english garrison (it is painful to mention the name either of him, or of any man concerned in what ensued) was john norris, lord norris's second son, so famous afterwards in the low countries, grandson of sir henry norris, executed for adultery with anne boleyn. three small frigates were in the harbour. the summer had been hot and windless; the sea was smooth, there was a light and favourable air from the east; and essex directed norris to take a company of soldiers with him, cross over, and--' what? bring those women and children, those sick and aged folk, back to their homes? essex had made peace by treaty with the o'neill. he had killed or chased away every man that could disturb the peace; and an act of humanity like this would have had a most conciliatory effect, and ought to recommend the hero to the queen, who should be supposed to have the heart as well as the form of a woman. no; the order was, to go over '_and kill whatever he could find!_' mr. froude resumes: 'the run of the antrim coast was rapidly and quietly accomplished. before an alarm could be given, the english had landed, close to the ruins of the church which bears st. columba's name. bruce's castle was then standing, and was occupied by a score or two of scots, who were in charge of the women. but norris had brought cannon with him. the weak defences were speedily destroyed, and after a severe assault, in which several of the garrison were killed, the chief who was in command offered to surrender, if he and his people were allowed to return to scotland. the conditions were rejected. the scots yielded at discretion, and every living creature in the place, except the chief and his family (who were probably reserved for ransom), was immediately put to the sword. two hundred were killed in the castle. it was then discovered that several hundred more, chiefly mothers and their little ones, were hidden in the caves about the shore. there was no remorse, nor even the faintest shadow of perception that the occasion called for it. they were hunted out as if they had been seals or otters, and all destroyed. sorleyboy and other chiefs, essex coolly wrote, had sent their wives and children into the island, "which be all taken and executed to the number of six hundred. sorleyboy himself," he continued, "stood upon the mainland of the glynnes and saw the taking of the island, and was likely to have run mad for sorrow, tearing and tormenting himself, and saying that he there lost all that he ever had!" the impression left upon the mind by this horrible story, is increased by the composure with which even the news of it was received. "yellow-haired charley," wrote essex to the queen, "might tear himself for his pretty little ones and their _dam_," but in ireland itself the massacre was not specially distinguished in the general system of atrocity. essex described it himself as one of the exploits with which he was most satisfied; and elizabeth, in answer to his letters, bade him tell john norris, "the executioner of his well-designed enterprise, that she would not be unmindful of his services."' i have transcribed this narrative partly for the sake of the reflection with which mr. froude concludes. he says: 'but though passed over and unheeded at the time, and lying buried for three hundred years, the bloody stain comes back to the light again, not in myth or legend, but in the original account of the nobleman by whose command the deed was done; and when the history of england's dealings with ireland settles at last into its final shape, that hunt among the caves at rathlin will not be forgotten.'[ ] it was for services like these that essex got the barony of farney, in the county monaghan. he had mortgaged his english estates to the queen for , l.,and after his plundering expeditions in ireland he went home to pay his debts. [footnote : history of england, vol. xi. p. .] further on mr. froude has another reflection connected with the death of essex, supposed to have been poisoned, as his widow immediately after married leicester. he says: 'notwithstanding rathlin, essex was one of the noblest of living englishmen, and that such a man could have ordered such a deed, being totally unconscious of the horror of it, is not the least instructive feature in the dreadful story.' it is certainly a strange fact that nearly all the official murderers who ruled in ireland in those times were intensely religious, setting to their own class a most edifying example of piety. thus, from the first, protestantism was presented to the irish in close connexion with brutal inhumanity and remorseless cruelty. essex, when dying, was described by the bystanders as acting 'more like a divine preacher or heavenly prophet than a man.' his opinion of the religious character of his countrymen was most unfavourable. 'the gospel had been preached to them,' he said, 'but they were neither papists nor protestants--of no religion, but full of pride and iniquity. there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity!--atheism, atheism!--no religion, no religion!' what such tiger-like slaughterers of women and children, such ruthless destroyers, could have meant by religion is a puzzle for philosophers. sidney reluctantly resumed the office of viceroy in . tirlogh o'neill congratulated the government on his appointment, 'wretched ireland needing not the sword, but sober, temperate, and humane administration.' though it was winter, the new deputy immediately commenced a progress through the provinces. going first to ulster, he saw sorleyboy, and gave him back rathlin. he paid a friendly visit to the o'neill, who gave him an assurance of his loyalty. leinster he found for the most part 'waste, burnt up and destroyed.' he proceeded by waterford to cork. he was received everywhere with acclamation. 'the wretched people,' says mr. froude, how truly!--'sanguine then, as ever, in the midst of sorrow, looked on his coming as the inauguration of a new and happier era.' so, in later times, they looked on the coming of chesterfield, and fitzwilliam, and anglesey. but the good angel was quickly chased away by the evil demon--invoked under the name of the 'protestant interest.' the munster and the connaught chiefs all thronged to sidney's levées, weary of disaffection, and willing to be loyal, if their religion were not interfered with, 'detesting their barbarous lives,'--promising rent and service for their lands. 'the past was wiped out. confiscation on the one hand, and rebellion on the other, were to be heard of no more. a clean page was turned.' even the catholic bishops were tractable, and the viceroy got 'good and honest juries in cork, and with their help twenty-four malefactors were honourably condemned and hanged.' enjoying an ovation as he passed on to limerick and galway, he found many grievances to be redressed--'plenty of burnings, rapes, murders, besides such spoil in goods and cattle as in number might be counted infinite, and in quantity innumerable.' sir william drury was appointed president of munster; and he was determined that in his case the magistrate should not bear the sword in vain. going round the counties as an itinerant judge, he gleaned the malefactors sidney had left, and hanged forty-three of them in cork. one he pressed to death for declining to plead to his indictment. two m'sweenys, from kerry, were drawn and quartered. at limerick he hanged forty-two, and at kilkenny thirty-six, among which he said were 'some good ones,' as a sportsman might say, bagging his game. he had a difficulty with 'a blackamoor and two witches,' against whom he found no statute of the realm, so he dispatched them 'by natural law.' although jeffreys, at the bloody assizes, did not come near drury, the latter found it necessary to apologise to the english government for the paucity of his victims, saying, 'i have chosen rather with the snail tenderly to creep, than with the hare swiftly to run.' with the government in ireland, as mr. froude has well remarked, 'the gallows is the only preacher of righteousness.' but the gallows was far too slow, as an instrument of reform and civilisation, for malby, president of connaught; and as modern evictors in that province and elsewhere have chosen christmas as the most appropriate season for pulling down dwellings, extinguishing domestic fires, and unhousing women and children, so malby chose the same blessed season for his 'improvements' in . it is such a model for dealing with the fenians and tenants on the tory plan, that i transcribe his own report, which mr. froude has found among the irish mss. 'at christmas,' he wrote, 'i marched into their territory, and finding courteous dealing with them had like to have cut my throat, i thought good to take another course; and so with determination _to consume them with fire and sword, sparing neither old nor young_, i entered their mountains. i burnt all their corn and houses, and committed to the sword all that could be found, where were slain at that time above sixty of their best men, and among them the best leaders they had. this was shan burke's country. then i burnt ulick burke's country. in like manner i assaulted a castle where the garrison surrendered. i put them to the misericordia of my soldiers. they were all slain. thence i went on, sparing none which came in my way, which cruelty did so amaze their followers, that they could not tell where to bestow themselves. shan burke made means to me to pardon him and forbear killing of his people. i would not hearken, but went on my way. the gentlemen of clanrickard came to me. i found it was but dallying to win time, so i left ulick as little corn and as few houses standing as i left his brother; and what people was found had as little favour as the other had. _it was all done in rain and frost and storm_, journeys in such weather bringing them the sooner to submission. they are humble enough now, and will yield to any terms we like to offer them.' and so malby and his soldiers enjoyed a merry christmas; and when walsingham read his letters, giving an account of his civilising progress, to the queen, she, too, must have enjoyed a fresh sensation, a new pleasure amidst the festivities and gallantries of her brilliant court. mr. froude has rendered a timely service in this christmas time to the coercionists, the martial law men, and the habeas corpus suspension men of our own day. he has shown them their principles at work and carried out with a vengeance, and with what results! he has admirably sketched the progress of english rule in ireland up to that time--a rule unchanged in principle to the present hour, though restrained in its operation by the spirit of the age. mr. froude says: 'when the people were quiet, there was the rope for the malefactors, and death by the natural law for those whom the law written could not touch. when they broke out, there was the blazing homestead, and death by the sword for all, not for the armed kerne only, but for the aged and infirm, the nursing mother and the baby at her breast. these, with ruined churches, and irish rogues for ministers,--these, and so far _only_ these were the symbols of the advance of english rule; yet even sidney could not order more and more severity, and the president of munster was lost in wonder at the detestation with which the english name was everywhere regarded. clanrickard was sent to dublin, and the deputy wished to hang him, but he dared not execute an earl without consulting his mistress, and elizabeth's leniency in ireland, as well as england, was alive and active towards the great, although it was dead towards the poor. she could hear without emotion of the massacres at rathlin or slievh broughty; but the blood of the nobles, who had betrayed their wretched followers into the rebellion for which they suffered, was for ever precious in her sight. she forbade sidney to touch him.'[ ] [footnote : vol. xi, p. .] next came the great desmond rebellion, by which munster was desolated. the pope had encouraged an expedition against the heretics in ireland, and some spanish forces joined in the enterprise. it was organised by an english ecclesiastic, named sanders, and an exiled geraldine, named fitzmaurice of kerry, both able and energetic men. the spaniards landed at dingle in . in a few days all kerry and limerick were up, and the woods between mallow and the shannon 'were swarming with howling kerne.' 'the rebellion,' wrote waterhouse, 'is the most perilous that ever began in ireland. nothing is to be looked for but a general revolt.' malby took the command against them, joined by one of the burkes, theobald, who when he saw fitzmaurice struck by a ball and staggering in his saddle, rode at him and cut him down. the papal standard was unfolded in this battle. malby then burnt the desmonds' country, killing all the human beings he met, up to the walls of askeaton. when opportunity offered, desmond retaliated by sacking and burning youghal. for two days the geraldines revelled in plunder; they violated the women and murdered all who could not escape. at length elizabeth was roused to the greatness of the danger, her parsimony was overcome. a larger force was drawn into ireland than had ever been assembled there for a century. ormond, the hereditary enemy of desmond, was appointed commander-in-chief; and burghley, writing to him in the name of the queen, concluded thus: 'so now i will merely say, butler aboo, against all that cry in the new language--papa aboo, and god send your hearts' desire to banish and vanquish those cankered desmonds!' the war now raged, and, as usual, the innocent people, the cultivators of the soil, were the first victims. 'we passed through the rebel countries,' wrote pelham, 'in two companies, burning with fire _all habitations, and executing the people_ wherever we found them.' mr. froude says: '_alone_ of all the english commanders he expressed remorse at the work.' well, if the creatures they destroyed were horses, dogs, or cats, we should expect a man of ordinary human feelings to be shocked at the wholesale butchery. but the beings slaughtered were men and women and children--christians found unarmed and defenceless in their dwellings. let the english imagine such a war carried on in kent or yorkshire, by irish invaders, killing in the name of the pope. the irish annalists say that pelham and ormond killed the blind and the aged, women and children, sick and idiots, sparing none. the english, as usual, had help from an irish chief in the work of destruction. ormond had in his train m'carthymore, 'who, believing desmond's day to be done, hoped, by making himself useful, to secure a share of the plunder.' dividing their forces, pelham marched on to dingle, 'destroying as he went, with ormond parallel to him on the opposite side of the bay, the two parties watching each other's course at night across the water by the flames of the burning cottages!' the fleet was waiting at dingle. there was a merry meeting of the officers. 'here,' says sir nicholas white, 'my lord justice and i gathered cockles for our supper.'[ ] the several hunting parties compared notes in the evening. sometimes the sport was bad. on one occasion pelham reported that his party had hanged a priest in the spanish dress. 'otherwise,' he says, 'we took small prey, and killed less people, though we reached many places in our travel!' at killarney they found the lakes full of salmon. in one of the islands there was an abbey, in another a parish church, in another a castle, 'out of which there came to them a fair lady, the rejected wife of lord fitzmaurice.' even the soldiers were struck with the singular loveliness of the scene. 'a fairer land,' one of them said, 'the sun did never shine upon--pity to see it lying waste in the hands of traitors.' mr. froude, who deals more justly by the irish in his last volumes, replies: 'yet it was by those traitors that the woods whose beauty they so admired had been planted and fostered. irish hands, unaided by english art or english wealth, had built muckross and innisfallen and aghadoe, and had raised the castles on whose walls the modern poet watched the splendour of the sunset.' [footnote : carew papers; froude, vol. xi. p. .] ormond was the arch-destroyer of his countrymen. in a report of his services he stated that in this one year , he had put to the sword 'forty-six captains and leaders, with notorious traitors and malefactors, _and above_ , other people.'[ ] in that year the great desmond wrote to philip of spain that he was a homeless wanderer. 'every town, castle, village, farm-house belonging to him or his people had been destroyed. there was no longer a roof standing in munster to shelter him.' hunted like a wolf through the mountains, he was at last found sleeping in a hut and killed. in vain his wife pleaded with ormond, and threw herself on his protection. even she was not spared. mr. froude gives an interesting account of desmond's last hours. he was hunted down into the mountains between tralee and the atlantic. m'sweeny had sheltered him and fed him through the summer, though a large price was set on his head; and when m'sweeny was gone, killed by an irish dagger, the earl's turn could not be distant. donell m'donell moriarty had been received to grace by ormond, and had promised to deserve his pardon. this man came to the captain of castlemayne, gave information of the hiding-place, a band was sent--half-a-dozen english soldiers and a few irish kerne, who stole in the darkness along the path which followed the stream--the door was dashed in, and the last earl of desmond was killed in his bed. [footnote : carew papers; froude, vol. xi. p. .] ormond had recourse to a horrible device to extinguish the embers of the rebellion. it was carrying out to a diabolical extent the policy of setting one irishman against another. if the terror-stricken wretches hoped for pardon, they must deserve it, by murdering their relations. accordingly sacks full of the heads of reputed rebels were brought in daily. yet concerning him mr. froude makes this singular remark: 'to ormond the irish were human beings with human rights. to the english they were _vermin, to be cleared from off the earth_ by any means that offered.' consequently, when it was proposed to make ormond viceroy, the pale was in a ferment. how could any man be fit to represent english power in dublin castle, who regarded the irish as human beings! not less curious is the testimony which the historian bears to the character of the english exterminators. he says, 'they were honourable, high-minded men, full of natural tenderness and gentleness, to every one with whom they were placed in _human relations_. the irish, unfortunately, they looked upon as savages who had refused peace and protection when it was offered to them, and were now therefore to be _rooted out and destroyed_.' a reformer in , however, suggested a milder policy. he recommended that 'all brehons, carraghs, bards, rhymers, friars, monks, jesuits, pardoners, nuns, and such-like should be executed by martial law, and that with this clean sweep the work of death might end, and a new era be ushered in with universities and schools, a fixed police, and agriculture, and good government.' when the english had destroyed all the houses and churches, burnt all the corn, and driven away all the cattle, they were disgusted at the savage state in which the remnant of the peasantry lived. a gentleman named andrew trollope gave expression to this feeling thus: 'the common people ate flesh if they could steal it, if not they lived on shamrock and carrion. they never served god or went to church; they had no religion and no manners, but were in all things more barbarous and beast-like than any other people. no governor shall do good here,' he said, 'except he show himself a tamerlane. if hell were open and all the evil spirits abroad, they could never be worse than these irish rogues--rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity.'[ ] [footnote : froude, vol. xi. p. .] the population of ireland was then by slaughter and famine reduced to about , , one-eighth of the population of england; but far too many, in the estimation of their english rulers. brabason succeeded malby in connaught, and surpassed him in cruelty. the four masters say: 'neither the sanctuary of the saint, neither the wood nor the forest valley, the town nor the lawn, was a shelter from this captain and his people, till the whole territory was destroyed by him.' in the spring of st. leger wrote from cork: 'this country is so ruined as it is well near unpeopled by the murders and spoils done by the traitors on the one side, and by the killing and spoil done by the soldiers on the other side, together with the great mortality in town and country, which is such as the like hath never been seen. there has died by famine only not so few as , in this province in less than half a year, besides others that are hanged and killed.' at length the world began to cry shame on england; and lord burghley was obliged to admit that the english in ireland had outdone the spaniards in ferocious and blood-thirsty persecution. remonstrating with sir h. wallop, ancestor of lord portsmouth, he said that the 'flemings had not such cause to rebel against the oppression of the spaniards, as the irish against the tyranny of england.' wallop defended the government; the causes of the rebellion were not to be laid at the door of england at all. they were these, 'the great affection they generally bear to the popish religion, which agreeth with their humour, that having committed murder, incest, thefts, with all other execrable offences, by hearing a mass, confessing themselves to a priest, or obtaining the pope's pardon, they persuade themselves that they are forgiven, and, hearing mass on sunday or holyday, they think all the week after they may do what heinous offence soever and it is dispensed withal.' trollope said they had no religion. wallop said they had too much religion. but their nationality was worse than their creed. wallop adds, 'they also much hate our nation, partly through the general mislike or disdain one nation hath to be governed by another; partly that we are contrary to them in religion; and lastly, they seek to have the government among themselves.' the last was the worst of all. elizabeth wished to heal the wounds of the irish nation by appointing ormond lord deputy. he was a nobleman of norman descent. his family had been true to england for centuries. he had commanded her armies during this exterminating war, and, being a native of the country, he would be best fitted to carry on the work of conciliation after so much slaughter. but, says mr. froude, 'from every english officer serving in the country, every english settler, every bishop of the anglo-irish church, there rose one chorus of remonstrance and indignation; to them it appeared as a proposal now would appear in calcutta to make the nizam viceroy of india.'[ ] wallop wrote that if he were appointed, there would be 'no dwelling in the country for any englishman.' [footnote : ibid. p. .] the fear that a merciful policy might be adopted towards ireland sorely troubled wallop and archbishop loftus; but they were comforted by a great prize--an archbishop fell into their hands. dr. hurley refused to give information against others. walsingham suggested that he should be put to the torture. to him archbishop loftus wrote with unction. 'not finding that easy method of examination do any good, we made command to mr. waterhouse and mr. secretary fenton to put him to the torture, such as your honour advised us, which was to _toast his feet_ against the fire with hot boots.' he confessed something. they asked permission to execute him by martial law. the queen took a month to consider. she recommended an ordinary trial for high treason, and if the jury did not do its duty, they might take the shorter way. she wished for no more torture, but 'for what was past her majesty accepted in good part their careful travail, and greatly commended their doings.' the irish judges had repeatedly decided that there was no case against archbishop hurley; but on june , , loftus and wallop wrote to walsingham, 'we gave warrant to the knight-marshal to do execution upon him, which accordingly was performed, and thereby the realm rid of a most pestilent member.'[ ] [footnote : froude, vol. xi. p. .] this was the last act of these two lords justices. sir john perrot, the new viceroy, made a speech which sent a ray of hope athwart the national gloom. it was simply that the people might thenceforth expect a little justice and protection. he told the natives that 'as natural-born subjects of her majesty she loved them as her own people. he wished to be suppressed and universally abolished throughout the realm the name of a churle and the crushing of a churle; affirming that, however the former barbarous times had desired it and nourished it, yet he held it tyrannous both in name and manner, and therefore would extirpate it, and use in place of it the titles used in england, namely, husbandmen, franklins or yeomen.' 'this was so plausible,' wrote sir g. fenton, 'that it was carried throughout the whole realm, in less time than might be thought credible, if expressed.' the extirpation of the munster geraldines, in the right line, according to the theory of the 'undertakers' and the law of england in general, vested in the queen the , acres belonging to the late earl. proclamation was accordingly made throughout england, inviting 'younger brothers of good families' to undertake the plantation of desmond--each planter to obtain a certain scope of land, on condition of settling thereupon so many families--'none of the native irish to be admitted' under these conditions, sir christopher hatton took up , acres in waterford; sir walter raleigh , acres, partly in waterford and partly in cork; sir william harbart, or herbert, , acres in kerry; sir edward denny , in the same county; sir warren st. leger, and sir thomas norris, , acres each in cork; sir william courtney , acres in limerick; sir edward fitton , acres in tipperary and waterford, and edmund spenser , acres in cork, on the beautiful blackwater. the other notable undertakers were the hides, butchers, wirths, berkleys, trenchards, thorntons, bourchers, billingsleys, &c. some of these grants, especially raleigh's, fell in the next reign to richard boyle, the so-called '_great_ earl of cork '--probably the most pious hypocrite to be found in the long roll of the 'munster undertakers.' chapter v. an irish crusade. in , the lord deputy mountjoy, in obedience to instructions from the government in london, marched to the borders of ulster with a considerable force, to effect, if he could, the arrest of hugh o'neill, earl of tyrone, or to bring him to terms. since the defeat of the irish and spanish confederacy at kinsale, o'neill comforted himself with the assurance that philip iii. would send another expedition to ireland to retrieve the honour of his flag, and avenge the humiliation it had sustained, owing to the incompetency or treachery of don juan d'aquila. that the king was inclined to aid the irish there can be no question; 'for clement viii., then reigning in the vatican, pressed it upon him as a sacred duty, which he owed to his co-religionists in ireland, whose efforts to free themselves from elizabeth's tyranny, the pontiff pronounced to be a _crusade_ against the most implacable heretic of the day.'[ ] [footnote : fate and fortunes of the earls of tyrone and tyrconnell. by the rev. p.c. meehan, m.r.i.a.] if mr. meehan's authorities may be relied upon, queen elizabeth was, in intention at least, a murderer as well as a heretic. he states that while she was gasping on her cushions at richmond, gazing on the haggard features of death, and vainly striving to penetrate the opaque veil of the future, she commanded secretary cecil to charge mountjoy to entrap tyrone into a submission, on diminished rank as baron of dungannon, and with lessened territory; or if possible, to have his head, before engaging the royal word. it was to accomplish either of these objects, that mountjoy marched to the frontier of the north. 'among those employed to murder o'neill in cold blood, were sir geoffry fenton, lord dunsany, and _henry oge o'neill._ mountjoy bribed one walker, an englishman, and a ruffian calling himself richard combus, to make the attempt, but they all failed.'[ ] finding it impossible to procure the assassination of 'the sacred person of o'neill, who had so many eyes of jealousy about him,' he wrote to cecil from drogheda, that nothing prevented tyrone from making his submission but mistrust of his personal safety and guarantee for maintenance commensurate to his princely rank. the lords of elizabeth's privy council empowered mountjoy to treat with o'neill on these terms, and to give him the required securities. sir garret moore and sir william godolphin were entrusted with a commission to effect this object. but while the lord deputy, with a brilliant retinue, was feasting at mellifont, a monastery bestowed by henry viii. on an ancestor of sir garret moore, by whom it was transformed into a 'fair mansion,' half palace, half fortress, a courier arrived from england, announcing the death of the queen. nevertheless the negotiations were pressed on in her name, the fact of her decease being carefully concealed from the irish. tyrone had already sent his secretary, henry o'hagan, to announce to the lord deputy that he was about to come to his presence. accordingly on march , he surrendered himself to the two commissioners at tougher, within five miles of dungannon. on the following evening he reached mellifont, when, being admitted to the lord deputy's presence, 'he knelt, as was usual on such occasions;' and made penitent submission to her majesty. then, being invited to come nearer to the deputy, he repeated the ceremony, if we may credit fynes moryson, in the same humiliating attitude, thus:-- 'i, hugh o'neill, earl of tyrone, do absolutely submit myself to the queen's mercy, imploring her gracious commiseration, imploring her majesty to mitigate her just indignation against me. i do avow that the first motives of my rebellion were neither malice nor ambition; but that i was induced by fear of my life, to stand upon my guard. i do therefore most humbly sue her majesty, that she will vouchsafe to restore to me my former dignity and living. in which state of a subject, i vow to continue for ever hereafter loyal, in all true obedience to her royal person, crown, and prerogatives, and to be in all things as dutifully conformable thereunto as i or any other nobleman of this realm is bound by the duty of a subject to his sovereign, utterly renouncing the name and title of o'neill, or any other claim which hath not been granted to me by her majesty. i abjure all foreign power, and all dependency upon any other potentate but her majesty. i renounce all manner of dependency upon the king of spain, or treaty with him or any of his confederates, and shall be ready to serve her majesty against him or any of his forces or confederates. i do renounce all challenge or intermeddling with the uriaghts, or fostering with them or other neighbour lords or gentlemen outside my country, or exacting black-rents of any uriaghts or bordering lords. i resign all claim and title to any lands but such as shall now be granted to me by her majesty's letters patent. lastly, i will be content to be advised by her majesty's magistrates here, and will assist them in anything that may tend to the advancement of her service, and the peaceable government of this kingdom, the abolishing of barbarous customs, the clearing of difficult passes, wherein i will employ the labours of the people of my country in such places as i shall be directed by her majesty, or the lord deputy in her name; and i will endeavour for myself and the people of my country, to erect civil habitations such as shall be of greater effect to preserve us against thieves, and any force but the power of the state.' [footnote : see life and letters of florence m'carthy. by d. m'carthy, esq.] to this act of submission tyrone affixed his sign manual, and handed it to the deputy, who told him he must write to philip iii. of spain, to send home his son henry, who had gone with father m'cawell to complete his studies in salamanca. the deputy also insisted that he should reveal all his negotiations with the spanish court, or any other foreign sovereign with whom he maintained correspondence; and when the earl assured him that all these requirements should be duly discharged, the lord deputy in the queen's name promised him her majesty's pardon to himself and followers, to himself the restoration of his earldom and blood with new letters patent of all his lands, excepting the country possessed by henry oge o'neill, and the fews belonging to tirlough mac henry o'neill, both of whom had recently taken grants of their lands, to be holden immediately from the queen. it was further covenanted that tyrone should give acres of his land to the fort of charlmont, and more to that of mountjoy, as long as it pleased her majesty to garrison said forts. tyrone assented to all these conditions, and then received the accolade from the lord deputy, who, a few months before, had written to queen elizabeth, that he hoped to be able to send her that ghastliest of all trophies--her great rebel's head! on april , the lord deputy returned to dublin accompanied by the great vassal whom he fancied he had bound in inviolable loyalty to the english throne. to make assurance doubly sure, the day after james was proclaimed, tyrone repeated the absolute submission made at mellifont, the name of the sovereign only being changed. he also despatched a letter to the king of spain stating that he had held out as long as he could, in the vain hope of being succoured by him, and finally when deserted by his nearest kinsmen and followers, he was enforced as in duty bound to declare his allegiance to james i., in whose service and obedience he meant to live and die. the importance of this act of submission will appear from a manifesto issued by o'neill three years before, dated dungannon, november , , and subscribed 'o'neill.' this remarkable document has been published for the first time by father meehan. '_to the catholics of the towns in ireland._ 'using hitherto more than ordinary favour towards all my countrymen, who generally by profession are catholics, and that naturally i am inclined to affect [esteem] you, i have for these and other considerations abstained my forces from tempting to do you hindrance, and because i did expect that you would enter into consideration of the lamentable state of our poor country, most tyrannically oppressed, and of your own gentle consciences, in maintaining, relieving and helping the enemies of god and our country in wars infallibly tending to the promotion of heresy: but now seeing you are so obstinate in that which hereunto you continued of necessity, i must use severity against you (whom otherwise i most entirely love) in reclaiming you by compulsion. my tolerance and happy victories by god's particular favour doubtless obtained could work no alteration in your consciences, notwithstanding the great calamity and misery, whereunto you are most likely to fall by persevering in that damnable state in which hereunto you have lived. having commiseration on you i thought it good to forewarn you, requesting every of you to come and join with me against the enemies of god and our poor country. if the same you do not, i will use means to spoil you of all your goods, but according to the utmost of my power shall work what i may to dispossess you of all your lands, because you are the means whereby wars are maintained against the exaltation of the catholic faith. contrariwise, whosoever it shall be that shall join with me, upon my conscience, and as to the contrary i shall answer before god, i will employ myself to the utmost of my power in their defence and for the extirpation of heresy, the planting of the catholic religion, the delivery of our country of infinite murders, wicked and detestable policies by which this kingdom was hitherto governed, nourished in obscurity and ignorance, maintained in barbarity and incivility, and consequently of infinite evils which were too lamentable to be rehearsed. and seeing these are motives most laudable before any men of consideration, and before the almighty most meritorious, which is chiefly to be expected, i thought myself in conscience bound, seeing god hath given me some power to use all means for the reduction of this our poor afflicted country into the catholic faith, which can never be brought to any good pass without either your destruction or helping hand; hereby protesting that i neither seek your lands or goods, neither do i purpose to plant any in your places, if you will adjoin with me; but will extend what liberties and privileges that heretofore you have had if it shall stand in my power, giving you to understand upon my salvation that chiefly and principally i fight for the catholic faith to be planted throughout all our poor country, as well in cities as elsewhere, as manifestly might appear by that i rejected all other conditions proffered to me this not being granted. i have already by word of mouth protested, and do now hereby protest, that if i had to be king of ireland without having the catholic religion which before i mentioned, i would not the same accept. take your example by that most catholic country, france, whose subjects for defect of catholic faith did go against their most natural king, and maintained wars till he was constrained to profess the catholic religion, duly submitting himself to the apostolic see of rome, to the which doubtless we may bring our country, you putting your helping hand with me to the same. as for myself i protest before god and upon my salvation i have been proffered oftentimes such conditions as no man seeking his own private commodity could refuse; but i seeking the public utility of my native country will prosecute these wars until that generally religion be planted throughout all ireland. so i rest, praying the almighty to move your flinty hearts to prefer the commodity and profit of our country, before your own private ends.' as a crusader, the o'neill was a worthy disciple of the king of spain. the catholics of the south had no wish to engage in a religious war, but the northern chief aspiring to the sovereignty of the whole island, resolved to reclaim them by compulsion, seeing that his tolerance and happy victories had worked no change in their consciences, and they still persevered in that 'damnable state' in which they had lived. from his entire love and commiseration he forewarned them that if they did not come and join him against the enemies of god and 'our poor country,' he would not only despoil them of all their goods, but dispossess them of all their lands. the extirpation of heresy, the planting of the catholic religion, he declared could never be brought to any good pass without either the destruction or the help of the catholics in the towns of the south and west. he did not want their lands or goods, nor did he intend to plant others in their places _if they would adjoin with him_. pointing to the example of france, he vowed that he would prosecute those wars until the catholic religion should be planted throughout all ireland, praying that god would move their flinty hearts to join him in this pious and humane enterprise. in those times when religious wars had been raging on the continent, when the whole power of spain was persistently employed to exterminate protestants with fire and sword and every species of cruelty, it is not at all surprising that a chief like o'neill, leading such a wild warlike life in ulster, should persuade himself that he would be glorifying god and serving his country by destroying the catholic inhabitants of the towns, that is all the most civilised portion of the community, because they would not join him in robbing and killing the protestants. but it is not a little surprising that an enlightened, learned, and liberal catholic priest, writing in dublin in the year , should give his deliberate sanction to this unchristian and barbarous policy. yet father meehan writes: 'but no; not even the dint of that manifesto, _with the ring of true steel in its every line_, could strike a spark out of their hearts, for they were chalky.'[ ] [footnote : page .] it was very natural that the english government should act upon the same principle of intolerance, especially when they had the plea of state necessity. they did not yet go the length of exterminating catholicity by the means with which the o'neill threatened his peaceable and industrious co-religionists in the towns. all they required was that the catholics should cease to harbour their priests, and that they should attend the protestant churches. remarking upon the proclamation of chichester to this effect mr. meehan says:--'apart from the folly of the king, who had taken into his head that an entire nation should, at his bidding, apostatise from the creed of their forefathers, the publishing such a manifesto in dungannon, in donegal, and elsewhere was a bitter insult to the northern chieftains, whose wars were _crusades_,--the natural consequence of faith,--stimulated by the roman pontiffs, assisted by spain, then the most catholic kingdom in the world.' does not mr. meehan see that crusading is a game at which two can play? and if wars which were crusades were the natural consequence of the catholic faith, were stimulated by the roman pontiffs, and assisted by spain, for the purpose of destroying the power of england, everywhere as well as in ireland, and abolishing the reformation,--does it not follow as a necessary consequence that the english government must in sheer self-defence have waged a war of extermination against the catholic religion, and have regarded its priests as mortal enemies? no better plea for the english policy in ireland was ever offered by any protestant writer than this language, intended as a condemnation, by a very able priest in our own day. it was no doubt extreme folly for king james i. to expect that a nation, or a single individual, should apostatise at his bidding; but it was equal folly in the king of spain to expect protestants to apostatise at his bidding; and if possible still greater folly for o'neill to expect the catholic citizens of munster to join him in the bloody work of persecution. it was, then, the spanish policy stimulated by the sovereign pontiff that was the standing excuse of the cruel intolerance and rancorous religious animosity which have continued to distract irish society down to our own time. persecution is alien to the irish race. the malignant _virus_ imported from spain poisoned the national blood, maddened the national brain, and provoked the terrible system of retaliation that was embodied in the penal code, and which, surviving to our own time, still defends itself by the old plea--the intrusion of a foreign power attempting to overrule the government of the country. chapter vi. the last of the irish princes. the accession of james i. produced a delirium of joy in the catholics of the south. their bards had sung that the blood of the old celtic monarchs circulated in his veins, their clergy told them that as james vi. of scotland he had received supplies of money from the roman court, and above all clement viii. then reigning, had sent to congratulate him on his accession, having been solicited by him to favour his title to the crown of england, which the pope guaranteed to do on condition that james promised not to persecute the catholics. the consequence was that the inhabitants of the southern towns rose _en masse_ without waiting for authority, forced open the gates of the ancient churches, re-erected the altars and used them for the public celebration of worship. the lord deputy was startled by intelligence to this effect from waterford, limerick, cork, lismore, kilkenny, clonmel, wexford, &c. the cathedrals, churches, and oratories were seized by the people and clergy, father white, vicar-apostolic of waterford, being the leader in this movement, going about from city to city for the purpose of 'hallowing and purifying' the temples which protestantism had desecrated. the mayors of the cities were rebuked by mountjoy as seditious and mutinous in setting up 'the public exercise of the popish religion,' and he threatened to encamp speedily before waterford, 'to suppress insolences and see peace and obedience maintained.' the deputy kept his word, and on may , , he appeared before waterford at the head of , men, officered by sir r. wingfield, and others who had distinguished themselves during tyrone's war. 'there is among the family pictures at powerscourt,' says mr. meehan, 'a portrait of this distinguished old warrior, whose lineal descendant, the present noble lord, has always proved most generous to his catholic tenantry.' the reverend gentleman gives an amusing sketch of a theological encounter between the old warrior and father white and a dominican friar, who came forth to the camp under a safe-conduct, both wearing their clerical habits and preceded by a cross-bearer. the soldiers jeered at the sacred symbol, and called it an idol. father white indignantly resented the outrage, when sir richard wingfield threatened to put an end to the controversy by running his sword through the vicar-apostolic. 'the deputy however was a bookish man, at one period of his life inclined to catholicity, and he listened patiently to father white on the right of resisting or disobeying the natural prince; but when the latter quoted some passage thereanent in the works of st. augustine, mountjoy caused to be brought to him out of his tent the identical volume, and showed to the amazement of the bystanders, that the context explained away all the priest had asserted.' the noble theologian told father white that he was a traitor, worthy of condign punishment for bringing an idol into a christian camp and for opening the churches by the pope's authority. father white appeared in the camp a second time that day, making a most reasonable request. he fell on his knees before the deputy, begging liberty of conscience, free and open exercise of religion, protesting that the people would be ready to resist all foreign invasion were that granted; and finally beseeching that some of the ruined churches might be given to the catholics, who were ready to rebuild them, and pay for them a yearly rent into his majesty's exchequer. but the deputy was inexorable, and all he would grant was leave to wear clerical clothes, and celebrate mass in private houses. mountjoy entered waterford, received from the citizens the oath of allegiance, and made over the city churches to the small section of protestants. at the same time he sent despatches to other towns ordering the authorities to evict the roman catholics from the places of worship. and then proceeding to cork, and thence through cashel to dublin, he undid all that the clergy had done with respect to the churches, 'leaving perhaps to future statesmen,' writes father meehan, 'living above the atmosphere of effete prejudices, the duty of restoring to the catholics of ireland those grand old temples, which were never meant to accommodate a fragment of its people.'[ ] [footnote : page .] when mountjoy returned to dublin he found that he had been created lord lieutenant of ireland with two-thirds of the deputy's allowance, sir george carew, appointed deputy during his absence in england, receiving the other third together with his own pay as treasurer-at-war. mountjoy was also informed that the royal pardon had been granted to tyrone under the great seal, and that all other grants made to him by the lord deputy had been confirmed. the king concluded by requesting that he would induce tyrone to go with him to london, adding, 'as we think it very convenient for our service, and require you so to do; and if not that at least you bring his son.' along with these instructions came a protection for o'neill and his retinue. it was supposed that james felt grateful to the ulster chieftain for the services he had rendered him during the late queen's reign; and it is stated by craik that after the victory of the blackwater, he sent his secretary o'hagan to holyrood, to signify to his majesty that if he supplied him with money and munitions he would instantly march on dublin, proclaim him king of ireland, and set the crown upon his head. in compliance with the sovereign's request, mountjoy, with a brilliant suite, accompanied by tyrone and rory o'donel, embarked in may , and sailed for holyhead. but when they had sighted the coast of wales, the pinnace was driven back by adverse winds, and nearly wrecked in a fog at the skerries. they landed safe, however, at beaumaris, whence they rode rapidly to chester, where they stopped for the night, and were entertained by the mayor. the king's protection for the o'neill was not uncalled for. whenever he was recognised in city or hamlet, the populace, notwithstanding their respect for mountjoy, the hero of the hour, pursued the earl with bitter insults, and stoned him as he passed along. throughout the whole journey to london, the welsh and english women assailed him with their invectives. not unnaturally, for 'there was not one among them but could name some friend or kinsman whose bones lay buried far away in some wild pass or glen of ulster, where the object of their maledictions was more often victor than vanquished.'[ ] the king, however, gave the irish chiefs a gracious reception, having issued a proclamation that he had restored them to his favour, and that they should be 'of all men honourably received.' this excited intense disgust amongst english officers who had been engaged in the irish wars. thus sir john harrington, writing to a bishop, said: 'i have lived to see that damnable rebel, tyrone, brought to england, honoured and well liked. oh, what is there that does not prove the inconstancy of worldly matters! how i did labour after that knave's destruction! i adventured perils by sea and land, was near starving, eat horseflesh in munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those who did hazard their lives to destroy him; and now doeth tyrone dare us old commanders with his presence and protection.' [footnote : father meehan.] in fact the favour of the king went to an excess fatal to its object, by conceding powers incompatible with his own sovereignty, leading to disorders and violence, and exciting jealousy and mortal enmity in those who were charged with the government in ireland. the lords of the privy council, with the king's consent, gave o'neill authority for martial law, 'to be executed upon any offenders that shall live under him, the better to keep them in obedience.' it was ordered that the king's garrisons should not meddle with him or his people. the king also invested o'donel with all the lands and rights of ancient time belonging to his house, excepting abbeys and other spiritual livings, the castle and town of ballyshannon, and , acres adjoining the fishing there. he also received the style and title of earl of tyrconnel, with remainder to his brother caffar, the heirs male apparent being created barons of donegal. he was formally installed in christ church cathedral on the th of september following, in presence of archbishop loftus and a number of high officials. tyrone, however, was dogged by spies while he was in london, and one atkinson swore informations to the effect that he was in the habit of entertaining a jesuit named archer, who was intriguing with the foreign enemies of england, and who was held by irish royalists for 'the most bloody and treacherous traitor, who could divert tyrone and all the rest from the king, and thrust them again into actual rebellion.' in the meantime, sir george carew was pursuing a policy in ireland which must of necessity involve the north in fresh troubles. in his letters to england, he complained that the country 'so swarmed with priests, jesuits, seminarists, friars, and romish bishops, that if speedy means were not used to free the kingdom of this wicked rabble, which laboured to draw the subjects' hearts from their due obedience to their prince, much mischief would burst forth in very short time. for,' he said, 'there are here so many of this wicked crew, that are able to disquiet four of the greatest kingdoms in christendom. it is high time they were banished from hence, and none to receive, or aid, or relieve them. let the judges and officers be sworn to the supremacy; let the lawyers go to the church and show conformity, or not plead at the bar; and then the rest by degrees will shortly follow.' carew was succeeded as deputy by sir arthur chichester, descended from a family of great antiquity in devon. he had served in ireland as governor of carrickfergus, admiral of lough neagh, and commander of the fort of mountjoy. father meehan describes him as malignant and cruel, with a physiognomy repulsive and petrifying; a puritan of the most rigid character, utterly devoid of sympathy, solely bent on his own aggrandisement, and seeking it through the plunder and persecution of the irish chieftains. that is the irish view of his character. how far he deserved it the reader will be able to judge by his acts. he was evidently a man of strong will, an able administrator and organiser; and he set himself at once, and earnestly, to the establishment of law and order in the conquered territories of the irish princes. he sent justices of assize throughout munster and connaught, reducing the 'countries or regions' into shire-ground, abolishing cuttings, cosheries, spendings, and other customary exactions of the chiefs, by which a complete revolution was effected. he issued a proclamation, by the king's order, commanding all the catholics, under penalties, to assist at the church of england service; proscribing priests, and other ecclesiastical persons ordained by authority from the see of home; forbidding parents to send their children to seminaries beyond the seas, or to keep as private tutors other than those licensed by the protestant archbishop or bishop. if any priest dared to celebrate mass, he was liable to a fine of marks, and a year's imprisonment; while to join the _romish_ church was to become a traitor, and to be subject to a like penalty. churchwardens were to make a monthly report of persons absent from church, and to whet the zeal of wardens and constables, for each conviction of offending parties, they were to have a reward of forty shillings, to be levied out of the recusant's estate and goods. catholics might escape these penalties by quitting the country, and taking the oath of abjuration, by which they bound themselves to abjure the land and realm of james, king of england, scotland, france, and ireland, to hasten towards a certain port by the most direct highway, to diligently seek a passage, and tarry there but one flood and ebb. according to one form, quoted by mr. meehan, the oath concluded thus: 'and, unless i can have it (a passage) in such a place, i will go every day into the sea up to my knees, essaying to pass over, so god me help and his holy judgment.' the deputy found some difficulty in bending the consciences of the dublin people to the will of the sovereign in matters of faith; but the said will was to be enforced _circa sacra_ at all hazards; so he summoned sixteen of the chief citizens and aldermen before the privy council, and censured them for their recusancy, imprisoned them in the castle during pleasure, inflicting upon six a fine of l. each, and upon three l. each. the king was delighted with this evangelical method of extending reformed religion in ireland. congratulating his deputy, he expressed a hope that many, by such means, would be brought to conformity in religion, who would hereafter 'give thanks to god for being drawn by so gentle a constraint to their own good.' the 'gentle constraint' was imposed in all directions. the privy council decreed that none but a member of the church of england could hold any office under the crown. the old catholic families of the pale humbly remonstrated, and their chief men were flung into prison. sir patrick barnwell, their agent, was sent to london by order of the king, and was forthwith committed to the tower for contempt. henry usher, then archbishop of armagh, carried out the system of exclusion in his own diocese, which included the territories of tyrone. all 'papists' were forbidden to assist at mass, on pain of forfeiture of their goods and imprisonment. in a like manner, the catholic worship was prohibited even in the residence of the earl of tyrconnel. he and tyrone strongly remonstrated against this violation of the royal word, that they and their people might have liberty for their worship in private houses. the answer was decided. his majesty had made up his mind to disallow liberty of worship, and his people, whether they liked it or not, should repair to their parish churches. in addition to this religious grievance, which excited the bitterest feelings of discontent, the two earls were subjected to the most irritating annoyances. they complained that their people were plundered by sheriffs, under-sheriffs, officers, and soldiers; and that even their domestic privacy was hourly violated, that their remonstrances were unheeded, and their attempts to obtain legal remedies were frustrated. at the same time their vassals were encouraged to repudiate their demands for tribute and rent. bishop montgomery of derry was a dangerous neighbour to o'neill. meeting him one day at dungannon, the earl said: 'my lord, you have two or three bishopricks, and yet you are not content with them, but seek the lands of my earldom.' 'my lord,' replied the bishop, 'your earldom is swollen so big with the lands of the church, that it will burst if it be not vented.' if he had confined his venting operations to the chiefs, and abstained from bleeding the poor people, it would have been better for protestantism. for we read that he sent bailiffs through the diocese of raphoe, to levy contributions for the church. 'for every cow and plough-horse, d.; as much out of every colt and calf, to be paid twice a year; and half-a-crown a quarter of every shoemaker, carpenter, smith, and weaver in the whole country; and d. a year for every married couple.' this bishop seems to have been greatly impressed with the 'commodities' of o'cahan's country, which he describes with much unction in a letter to the earl of salisbury. he said that the country was 'large, pleasant, and fruitful; twenty-four miles in length between lough foyle and the bann; and in breadth, from the sea-coast towards the lower parts of tyrone, miles.' he states that o'cahan was able to assist the earl of tyrone, during his war, with , foot and horse, the ablest men that ulster yielded; and, by the confession of gentlemen of the first plantation, had oftener put them to their defence than any enemy they had to do with, not suffering them to cut a bough or build a cabin without blows. when tyrone was driven to his fastness, glenconkeine, o'cahan sent him horse and foot, and yet made good his own country against the army lying round about him, adding, that his defection 'did undo the earl, who, as he had his country sure behind him, cared little for anything the army could do to him.' the bishop was, therefore, very anxious that tyrone should not have any estate in o'cahan's country, 'since he was of great power to offend or benefit the poor infant city of derry, its new bishop and people, cast out far from the heart and head into the remotest part of ireland, where life would be unsafe until the whole region was well settled with civil subjects. if this be not brought to pass, we may say: "_fuimus troes,--fuit ilium_."'[ ] [footnote : meehan, p. .] the defection of o'cahan was, no doubt, a very serious matter to o'neill. their case was referred for adjudication to the lord deputy, chichester, before whom they personally pleaded. their contradictory statements, and the eagerness of each for the support of a ruler whom they regarded as a common enemy, accounts for the facility with which their power was ultimately destroyed. they at the same time throw much light on the condition of ulster before the confiscation of james i., proving that it was by no means so poor and wild and barren a region as it is generally represented by modern writers. the two chiefs had a personal altercation at the council table, and o'neill so far lost his temper as to snatch a paper out of the hand of o'cahan. whereupon sir john davis remarked: 'i rest assured, in my own conceit, that i shall live to see ulster the best reformed province in this kingdom; and as for yourself, my lord, i hope to live to see you the best reformed subject in ireland.' to this the haughty chief replied with warmth, that he hoped 'the attorney-general would never see the day when injustice should be done him by transferring his lands to the crown, and thence to the bishop, who was intent on converting the whole territory into his own pocket.' acting under the advice of the bishop, o'cahan employed a skilful hand to draw up a statement of his case, which was presented on may , , in the form of 'the humble petition of donald ballagh o'cahan, chief of his name,' addressed to the lord deputy and council. he declared that for , years and upwards, he and his ancestors had been possessed of a country called 'o'cahan's country,' lying between the river bann and lough foyle, without paying any rent, or other acknowledgment thereof to o'neill, saving that his ancestors were wont to aid o'neill twice a year if he had need, with risings of horse and foot, for which o'cahan had in return o'neill's whole suit of apparel, the horse that he rode upon, and cows in winter. he also paid cows every year in the name of _cios'righ_, the king's rent, or the king's rent-cess. he alleged that queen elizabeth had granted him his country to be held immediately from her majesty at the accustomed rent, by virtue of which he enjoyed it for one whole year without paying, or being craved payment, of any rent or duty, until the earl of tyrone, on his return from england, alleged that he had got o'cahan's country by patent, from the king, who had made him vassal to tyrone and his heirs for ever, imposing the annual payment of cows, with the yearly rent of l. he had also claimed the fishing of the bann; he preyed yearly upon other parts of his country, and drew from him his best tenants. he therefore prayed for the protection of the lord deputy against these unjust demands and usurpations. on the rd of the same month, o'neill made a counter statement to the following effect: o'cahan had no estate in the territory that was by a corruption of speech called o'cahan's country; nor did he or any of his ancestors ever hold the said lands but as tenants at sufferance, servants and followers to the defendant and his ancestors. his grandfather con o'neill was seised in fee of those lands before he surrendered to henry viii., 'and received yearly, and had thereout, as much rents, cutting, spending and all other duties as of any other lands which he had in demesne,' within the province of ulster and territory of tyrone, and that after con's surrender the territories were all re-granted with the rents, customs, duties, &c. as before. he was ready to prove that the ancestors of o'cahan never enjoyed the premises at any time, but at the will and sufferance of o'neill and his ancestors. a few days after, he despatched a memorial to the king setting forth his grievances, in which he stated that there were so many that sought to deprive him of the greatest part of the residue of his territory that without his majesty's special consideration he should in the end have nothing to support his 'estate' or rank. for the lord bishop of derry, not content with the great living the king had bestowed upon him, sought to have the greater part of the earl's lands, to which none of his predecessors had ever laid claim. and he also set on others to question his titles which had never before before doubted. he therefore humbly besought the king to direct that new letters patent should be made out re-conveying to him and his heirs the lands in dispute, being, he said, 'such a favour as is appointed by your majesty to be extended to such of your subjects of this kingdom as should be suitors for the same, amongst whom i will during my life endeavour to deserve to be in the number of the most faithful, whereunto not only duty, but also your majesty's great bounty, hath ever obliged me.' this was dated at mellifont on may , . it does not appear that any answer was received to his appeals to the king, nor is it likely that it served his cause, for it is seldom safe to appeal from an agent or deputy to the supreme authority. the privy council in dublin, however, made a report confirming to some extent the claims put forth by tyrone. a jury had been appointed to inquire into the boundaries and limits of the lands granted by queen elizabeth, and they found that they extended from the river fuin to lough foyle, and from lough foyle by the sea-shore to the bann, and thence to the east of lough neagh. within these limits they found that there existed the territory called o'cahan's, glenconkeine and killetragh, which were not the lands of the o'neills, '_but held by tenants having estates in them equivalent to estates of freehold_.' the jury could not determine what rents the tenants of said lands were accustomed to pay, but they found generally that all lands within the limits of tyrone, except the lands of the church, rendered to o'neill bonnaght or free quarters for armed retainers, 'rising out, cutting and spending.' the parties, however, did not abide by the decision of the privy council, but kept up their contention in the courts of law. it was quite clear that matters could not remain long in that unsettled state, with so many adventurers thirsting for the possession of land, which was lying comparatively idle. it was thought desirable to appoint a president of ulster, as there had been a president of munster. the earl of tyrone applied to the king for the office, evidently fearing that if chichester were appointed, he must share the fate of the earl of desmond. on the other hand, it was felt that with his hereditary pretensions, impracticable temper, and vast influence with the people, it would be impossible to establish the english power on a permanent basis until he was got out of the way. this was not difficult, with unprincipled adventurers who were watching for opportunities to make their fortunes in those revolutionary times. among these was a person named st. lawrence, baron of howth. this man worked cunningly on the mind of the lord deputy, insinuating that o'neill was plotting treason and preparing for a spanish invasion. he even went so far as to write an anonymous letter, revealing an alleged plot of o'neill's to assassinate the lord deputy. it was addressed to sir william usher, clerk of the council, and the writer began by saying that it would show him, though far severed from him in religion, how near he came home to him in honesty. he was a catholic, and professed to reveal what he had heard among catholic gentlemen, 'after the strictest conditions of secresy.' the conspirators were, in the first place, to murder or poison the lord deputy when he came to drogheda, 'a place thought apt and secure to act the same.' they thought it well to begin with him, because his authority, wisdom, and valour stood only in the way of their first attempts. next after him they were to cut off sir oliver lambert, whom for his own judgment in the wars, his sudden resolution, and undertaking spirit, they would not suffer to live. these two lights thus put out, they would neither fear nor value any opposite in the kingdom. the small dispersed garrisons must either through hunger submit themselves to their mercy, or be penned up as sheep to the shambles. they held the castle of dublin for their own, neither manned nor victualled, and readily surprised. the towns were for them, the country with them, the great ones abroad prepared to answer the first alarm. the jesuits warranted from the pope and the catholic king would do their parts effectually, and spanish succours would not be wanting. these secrets greatly troubled the sensitive conscience of lord howth. from the time he was entrusted with them, he said, 'till i resolved to give you this caveat, my eyelids never closed, my heart was a fire, my soul suffered a thousand thousand torments; yet i could not, nor cannot persuade my conscience, in honesty, to betray my friends, or spill their bloods, when this timely warning may prevent the mischief.' in conclusion, he said, 'though i reverence the mass and the catholic religion equal with the devoutest of them, i will make the leaders of this dance know that i prefer my country's good before their busy and ambitious humours.' it is related of this twenty-second baron of howth, known as sir christopher st. lawrence, that having served in ulster under essex, and accompanied him in his flight to england, he proposed to murder lord grey de wilton, lest he should prejudice the queen's mind against her former favourite, if he got access to her presence before him; that he had commanded a regiment of infantry under mountjoy, and that when that regiment was disbanded, he became discontented, not having got either pension or employment; that having gone as a free lance to the low countries, and failed to advance himself there as he expected, through the interest of irish ecclesiastics, he returned to england, and skulked about the ante-chambers of lord salisbury, waiting upon providence, when he hit upon the happy idea of the revelations which he conveyed under the signature of' a.b.'[ ] [footnote : meehan, p. .] after some time he acknowledged the authorship of the letter privately, but refused to come forth publicly as an informer, nor was he able to produce any corroboration of the improbable story. ultimately, however, when pressed by chichester, he induced his friend baron devlin to swear an information to the same effect, revealing certain alleged conversations of o'neill. in the meantime st. lawrence cunningly worked upon the fears of the earl, giving him to understand that his ruin was determined on, and that he had better consult his safety, by leaving the country. it appears that he received intimations to the same effect from his correspondents in spain and in london. at all events, he lost heart, became silent, moody, and low-spirited, suspecting foul play on the part of the king, who was very urgent that he should be brought over to london, in which case tyrone was led to believe that he would certainly be sent to the tower, and probably lose his head. with such apprehensions, he came to the conclusion that it was idle to struggle any longer against the stream. he had for some weeks been engaged quietly making preparations for his flight. he had given directions to his steward to collect in advance one half of his michaelmas rents, leading the lord deputy to think that he did so either to provide funds for his journey to london, or to defray the expenses of his son's projected marriage with the daughter of lord argyle. meanwhile a vessel had been purchased by cu-connaught maguire, and bath, the captain of this vessel, assured the earl of tyrconnel, whom he met at ballyshannon, that he also would lose his life or liberty if he did not abandon the country with o'neill. on september , tyrone took leave of the lord deputy, and then spent a day and night at mellifont with his friend sir garret moore, who was specially dear to him as the fosterer of his son john. the earl took his leave with unusual emotion, and after giving his blessing according to the irish fashion to every member of his friend's household, he and his suite took horse and rode rapidly by dundalk, over the fews to armagh, where he rested a few hours, and then proceeded to creeve, one of his crannoges or island habitations, where he was joined by his wife and other members of his family. sir oliver lambert in a communication to the irish government, relating to the affairs of ulster, made some interesting allusions to o'neill. he states that he had apologised for having appealed to the king in the case between him and o'cahan, and said that he felt much grieved in being called upon so suddenly to go to england, when on account of his poverty he was not able to furnish himself as became him for such a journey and for such a presence. in all things else, said sir oliver, 'he seemed very moderate and reasonable, albeit he never gave over to be a general solicitor in all causes concerning his country and people however criminal.' he thought the earl had been much abused by persons who had cunningly terrified, and diverted him from going to the king; 'or else he had within him a thousand witnesses testifying that he was as deeply engaged in these secret treasons as any of the rest, whom they knew or suspected.' at all events he had received information on the previous day from his own brother sir cormac o'neill, from the primate, from sir toby caulfield and others, that the earl had taken shipping with his lady, the baron of dungannon, his eldest son, and two others of his children, john and brien, both under seven years old, the earl of tyrconnel, and his son and heir, an infant, not yet a year old, his brother caffar o'donel, and his son an infant two years old, 'with divers others of their nearest and trusted followers and servants, as well men as women, to the number of between thirty and forty persons.' the rev. mr. meehan gives graphic details of the flight of his two heroes. arrived at rathmullen they found maguire and captain bath laying stores of provisions on board the ship that had come into lough swilly under french colours. here they were joined by rory, earl of tyrconnel. at noon on friday they all went on board and lifted anchor, but kept close to the shore waiting for the boats' crews, who were procuring water and fuel; but they had to wait till long after sunset, when the boats came with only a small quantity of wood and water. according to a fatality which makes one irishman's extremity another irishman's opportunity, the foraging party was set upon by m'sweeny of fanad, who churlishly prevented them getting a sufficient supply of these necessaries. this barbarous conduct is accounted for by mr. meehan, from the fact, that this m'sweeny had recently taken a grant of his lands from the crown. at midnight, september , , they spread all sail and made for the open sea, intending, however, to land on the island of arran, off the coast of donegal, to provide themselves with more water and fuel. the entire number of souls on board this small vessel, says o'keenan in his narrative, was ninety-nine, having little sea store, and being otherwise miserably accommodated. unable to make the island of arran, owing to a gale then blowing off the land, and fearing to be crossed by the king's cruisers, they steered for the harbour of corunna in spain. but for thirteen days, continues o'keenan, 'the sea was angry, and the tempest left us no rest; and the only brief interval of calm we enjoyed, was when o'neill took from his neck a golden crucifix containing a relic of the true cross, and trailed it in the wake of the ship. at that moment, two poor merlins with wearied pinions sought refuge in the rigging of our vessel, and were captured for the noble ladies, who nursed them with tenderest affection.' after being tempest-tossed for three weeks, they dropped anchor in the harbour of quilleboeuf in france, having narrowly escaped shipwreck, their only remaining provisions being one gallon of beer and a cask of water. they proceeded to brussels and thence to louvain, where splendid accommodation was provided for them. in several of the cities through which they passed they received ovations, their countrymen clerical and military having prepared for their reception with the greatest zeal and devotion. the king of spain was of course friendly, but to avoid giving offence to king james he discouraged the stay of the exiles in his dominions, and they found their final resting-place at rome, where the two earls were placed upon the pope's civil list, which, however, they did not long continue to burden. tyrconnel fell a victim to the malaria, and died on july , . 'sorrowful it was,' say the four masters, 'to contemplate his early eclipse, for he was a generous and hospitable lord, to whom the patrimony of his ancestors seemed nothing for his feastings and spending.' his widow received a pension of l. a year out of his forfeited estates. o'neill survived his brother earl eight years, having made various attempts to induce the king of spain to aid him in the recovery of his patrimony. he died in , in the seventy-sixth year of his age. sir francis cottington, announcing the event from madrid, said, 'the earl of tyrone is dead at rome; by whose death this king saves ducats every month, for so much pension he had from here, well paid him. upon the news of his death, i observed that all the principal irish entertained in several parts of this kingdom are repaired unto this court.' chapter vii. government appeals to the people. the flight of the earls caused great consternation to the irish government. letters were immediately despatched to the local authorities at every port to have a sharp look out for the fugitives, and to send out vessels to intercept them, should they be driven back by bad weather to any part of the coast. at the same time the lord deputy sent a despatch to the government in london, deprecating censure for an occurrence so unexpected, and so much to be regretted, because of the possibility of its leading to an invasion by the spaniards. in other respects it was regarded by the principal members of the irish government, and especially by the officials in ulster, as a most fortunate occurrence. for example, sir oliver lambert, in his report to the lords of the council, already referred to, said:--'but now these things are fallen out thus, contrary to all expectation or likelihood, by the providence of god i hope, over this miserable people, for whose sake it may be he hath sent his majesty this rare and unlocked for occasion: whereby he may now at length, with good apprehension and prudent handling, repair an error which was committed in making these men proprietary lords of so large a territory, without regard of the poor freeholders' rights, or of his majesty's service, and the commonwealth's, that are so much interested in the honest liberty of that sort of men, which now, in time, i commend unto your lordships' grave consideration and wisdom, and will come to that which nearest concerns ourselves and the whole.' according to sir john davis, in his letter to the first minister, lord salisbury, tyrone could not be reconciled in his heart to the english government, because 'he ever lived like a free prince, or, rather, like an absolute tyrant, there. the law of england, and the ministers thereof, were shackles and handlocks unto him.' he states that _after the irish manner_, he made all the tenants of his land _villeins_. 'therefore to evict any part of that land from him was as grievous unto him as to pinch away the quick flesh from his body ... besides,' the attorney-general added, 'as for us that are here, we are glad to see the day wherein the countenance and majesty of the law, as civil government, hath banished tyrone out of ireland, which the best army in europe, and the expense of two millions of sterling pounds did not bring to pass. and we hope his majesty's happy government will work a greater miracle in this kingdom, than ever st. patrick did; for st. patrick did only banish the poisonous worms, but suffered the men full of poison to inhabit the land still; but his majesty's blessed genius will banish all that generation of vipers out of it, and make it, ere it be long, a right fortunate island.' again, sir geoffry fenton, writing to salisbury on the same subject, says, 'and now i am to put your lordship in mind what a door is open to the king, if the opportunity be taken, and well converted, not only to pull down for ever these two proud houses of o'neill and o'donel, but also to bring in colonies to plant both countries, to a great increasing of his majesty's revenues, and to establish and settle the countries perpetually in the crown; besides that many well-deserving servitors may be recompensed in the distribution; a matter to be taken to heart, for that it reaches somewhat to his majesty's conscience and honour to see these poor servitors relieved, whom time and the wars have spent, even unto their later years, and now, by this commodity, may be stayed and comforted without charges to his majesty.' this advice was quite in accordance with the views of the prime minister, who in a letter to chichester said, 'i do think it of great necessity that those countries be made the king's by this accident; that there be a mixture in the plantation, the _natives_ made his majesty's tenants of part, but the rest to be divided among those that will _inhabit_; and in no case any man is suffered to embrace more than is visible he can and will _manure_. that was an oversight in the plantation of munster, where , acres were commonly allotted to bankrupts and country gentlemen, that never knew the disposition of the irish; so as god forbid that those who have spent their blood in the service should not of all others be preferred.' it was because this idea of manuring, i.e. residence and cultivation, was carried out in ulster, that the plantation has proved so successful. but davis would allow but small space comparatively to the natives, whom he compared to weeds which, if too numerous, would choke the wheat. with him the old inhabitants were simply a nuisance from the highest to the lowest; and if there were no other way of getting rid of them, he would no doubt have adopted the plan recommended by lord bacon, who said, 'some of the chiefest of the irish families should be transported to england, and have recompense there for their possessions in ireland, till they were cleansed from their blood, incontinency, and theft, which were not the lapses of particular persons, but the very laws of the nation.' the lord deputy chichester, however, agreed thoroughly with his attorney-general, for he certainly made no more account of rooting out the 'mere irish' from their homes than if they were the most noxious kinds of weeds or vermin. 'if,' said he, writing to lord salisbury, 'i have observed anything during my stay in this kingdom, i may say it is not _lenity_ and good works that will reclaim the irish, but _an iron rod_, and severity of justice, for the restraint and punishment of those firebrands of sedition, _the priests_; nor can we think of any other remedy but to proclaim _them, and their relievers and harbourers, traitors_.' considering that those englishmen were professedly christian rulers, engaged in establishing the reformed religion, the accounts which they give with perfect coolness of their operations in this line, are among the most appalling passages to be met with in the world's history. for instance, the lord deputy writes: 'i have often said and written, it is _famine that must consume the irish_, as our _swords_ and other endeavours worked not that, speedy effect which is expected; _hunger_ would be a better, because a speedier, weapon to employ against them than the sword.' he spared no means of destruction, but combined all the most fearful scourges for the purpose of putting out of existence the race of people whom god in his anger subjected to his power. surely the spirit of cruelty, the genius of destruction, must have been incarnate in the man who wrote thus: 'i burned all along the lough (neagh) within four miles of dungannon, and killed people, sparing none, of what quality, age, or sex soever, besides _many burned to death_. we killed man, _woman and child_, horse, beast, and whatsoever we could find.' at the time of the flight of the earls, however, he was very anxious about the safety of the kingdom. he was aware that the people were universally discontented, he had but few troops in the country, and little or no money in the treasury, so that in case of a sudden invasion, it was quite possible that the maddened population would rise and act in their own way upon his own merciless policy of extermination. he therefore hastened to issue a proclamation for the purpose of reassuring the inhabitants of ulster, and persuading them that they would not suffer in any way by the desertion of their chiefs. in this proclamation, headed by 'the _lord deputy and counsell_,' it was stated that tyrone and tyrconnel and their companions had lately embarked themselves at lough swilly and had secretly and suddenly departed out of this realm without license or notice. the government was as yet uncertain about their purpose or destination. but inasmuch as the manner of their departure, considering the quality of their persons, might raise many doubts in the minds of his majesty's loving subjects in those parts, and especially the common sort of people inhabiting the counties of tyrone and tyrconnel, who might suppose they were in danger to suffer prejudice in their _lands_ and goods for the contempt or offence of the earls,--they were solemnly assured that they had nothing whatever to fear. the words of the proclamation on this point are: 'we do therefore in his majesty's name declare, proclaim, and publish that all and every his majesty's good and loyal subjects inhabiting those countries of tyrone and tyrconnel shall and may quietly and securely possess and enjoy all and singular _their lands and goods_ without the trouble or molestation of any of his majesty's officers or ministers or any other person or persons whatsoever as long as they disturb not his majesty's peace, but live as dutiful and obedient subjects. and forasmuch as the said earls to whom his majesty, reposing special trust in their loyalty, had committed the government of the said several countries are now undutifully departed, therefore his majesty doth graciously receive all and every of his said loyal subjects into his own immediate safeguard and protection, giving them full assurance to defend them and every of them by his kingly power from all violence or wrong, which any loose persons among themselves or any foreign force shall attempt against them. and to that end, we the lord deputy and council have made choice of certain commissioners as well irish as english, residing in the said several countries, not only to preserve the public peace there, but also to administer speedy and indifferent justice to all his majesty's loving subjects in those parts, which shall have any cause of complaint before them.' all governors, mayors, sheriffs, justices of peace, provost-marshals, bailiffs, constables, and all other his majesty's ministers whatsoever were strictly charged to use their utmost endeavours faithfully and diligently to keep the people in their duty and obedience to his majesty and the laws of the realm. the assurance thus given that the subjects and tenants of the absconding princes should securely possess and enjoy their lands and be protected from all oppression under the sceptre of king james would have been very satisfactory had the royal promise been realised, but conciliation was then absolutely necessary, for the lord deputy himself stated that 'the kingdom had not been in the like danger these hundred years, as we have but few friends and no means of getting more.' the foregoing proclamation was issued from rathfarnham on september . on november following, another proclamation of a general nature was published and widely circulated in order to justify the course the government adopted. according to this document it was known to all the world 'how infinitely' the fugitive earls had been obliged to the king for his singular grace and mercy in giving them free pardon for many heinous and execrable treasons, above all hope that they could in reason conceive, and also in restoring the one to his lands and honours justly forfeited, and in raising the other 'from a very mean estate to the degree and title of an earl, giving him withal large possessions for the support of that honour, before either of them had given any proof of loyalty, or merited the least favour.' even in the point of religion, which served as a cloak for all their treasons, they got no provocation or cause of grievance. for these and other causes it was announced that his majesty would seize and take into his hands all the lands and goods of the said fugitives. but he would, notwithstanding, extend such grace and favour to the loyal inhabitants of their territories that none of them should be 'impeached, troubled, or molested in _their own lands_, goods, or bodies, they continuing in their loyalty, _and yielding unto his majesty such rents and duties as shall be agreeable to justice and equity_.' this assurance was repeated again emphatically in these words: 'his most excellent majesty doth take all the good and loyal inhabitants of the said countries, together with their wives and children, land and goods, into his own immediate protection, to defend them in general against all rebellions and invasions, and to right them in all their wrongs and oppressions, offered or to be offered unto them by any person whatsoever, etc.' chapter viii. the case of the fugitive earls. before proceeding to notice the manner in which these promises of justice, equity, and protection to the occupiers of the land were fulfilled, it is well to record here the efforts made by king james and his ambassador to discredit the fugitive earls on the continent, and the case which they made out for themselves in the statement of wrongs and grievances which they addressed to the king soon after. there was great alarm in england when news arrived of the friendly reception accorded to the irish chiefs by the continental sovereigns through whose dominions they passed, and especially by the king of spain, who was suspected of intending another invasion of ireland. consequently the most active preparations were made to meet the danger. in every street of the metropolis drums were beating for recruits, and large detachments were sent in all possible haste to reinforce the irish garrisons. sir charles cornwallis was then english ambassador at madrid; and lest his diplomatic skill should not be up to the mark, james himself sent him special and minute instructions as to the manner in which he should handle the delicate subjects he had to bring before the spanish sovereign. there has been seldom a better illustration of the saying, that the use of speech is to conceal thought, than in the representations which the ambassador was instructed to make about irish affairs. indeed cornwallis had already shown that he scarcely needed to be tutored by his sovereign. in a preliminary despatch he had sent an account of his conversation with philip iii.'s secretary of state about the fugitive earls. he told him that though they had been guilty of rebellions and treasons they had not only been pardoned, but loaded with dignities such as few or none of the king's ancestors had ever bestowed on any of the irish nation. he had conferred upon them an absolute and, 'in a manner, unlimited government in their own countries, nothing wanting to their ambitions but the name of kings, and neither crossed in anything concerning their civil government, nor so much as in act or imagination molested, or in any sort questioned with, for their consciences and religion.' he thought therefore that they would never have fled in such a way, unless they had been drawn to spain by large promises in the hope of serving some future turns. the secretary listened to this insinuation with much impatience, and declared solemnly, laying his hand on his breast with an oath, that of the departure and intention of the earls there was no more knowledge given to the king or any of his state than to the ambassador himself. he added that there had been much consumption of spanish treasure by supporting strangers who had come from all parts. in particular they had a bitter taste of those who had come from james's dominions; and they would have suffered much more, 'if they had not made a resolute and determined stop to the running of that fountain and refused to give ear to many overtures.' the ambassador expressed his satisfaction at this assurance, and then endeavoured to show how unworthy those irish princes were of the least encouragement. their flight was the result of madness, they departed without any occasion of 'earthly distaste' or offence given them by their sovereign, whose position towards the irish was very different from that of the late queen. elizabeth had employed against their revolts and rebellions only her own subjects of england, who were not accustomed either to the diet of that savage country, or to the bogs, and other retreats which that wild people used. but now, the king his master, being possessed of scotland, had in that country, 'near adjoining to the north part of ireland, a people of their own fashion, diet, and disposition, that could walk their bogs as well as themselves, live with their food, and were so well practised and accustomed in their own country to the like, that they were as apt to pull them out of their dens and withdrawing places, as ferrets to draw rabbits out of their burrows.' moreover all other parts of ireland were now reduced to such obedience, and so civil a course, and so well planted with a mixture of english, that there was not a man that showed a forehead likely to give a frown against his majesty, or his government. cornwallis went on to plead the incomparable virtues of the king his master, among which liberality and magnificence were not the least. but if he had given largely, it was upon a good exchange, for he had sowed money, which of itself can do nothing, and had reaped hearts that can do all. as for the alleged number of 'groaning catholics,' he assured the secretary that there were hardly as many hundreds as the fugitives reckoned thousands. according to his report the minister heard him with great attention, and at the conclusion protested, that he joined with him in opinion that those fugitives were dangerous people and that the jesuits were turbulent and busy men. he assured him on the word of a caballero, that his majesty and council had fully determined never to receive or treat any more of those 'straying people;' as they had been put to great inconvenience and cost, how to deliver themselves from those irish vagabonds, and continual begging pretenders. this despatch, dated october , , was crossed on the way by one from the english minister salisbury, dated the th, giving the king's instructions 'concerning those men that are fled into spain.' cornwallis was directed not to make matters worse than they really were, because the end must be good, 'what insolencies soever the jesuits and pack of fugitives there might put on. king james knew that this remnant of the northern irish traitors had been as full of malice as flesh and blood could be, no way reformed by the grace received, but rather sucking poison out of the honey thereof.' he knew also that they had absolutely given commission to their priests and others to abandon their sovereign if spain would entertain their cause. but this he could not demonstrably prove _in foro judicii_, though clear _in foro conscientiæ_, and therefore punishment would savour of rigour. so long as things were in that state his majesty was obliged to suffer adders in his bosom, and give them means to gather strength to his own prejudice, whereas now the whole country which they had possessed would be made of great use both for strength and profit to the king. what follows should be given in his majesty's own words:-- 'those poor creatures who knew no kings but those petty lords, under the burden of whose tyranny they have ever groaned, do now with great applause desire to be protected by the immediate power, and to receive correction only from himself, so as if the council of spain shall conceive that they have now some great advantage over this state, where it shall appear what a party their king may have if he shall like to support it, there may be this answer: that those irish without the king of spain are poor worms upon earth; and that when the king of spain shall think it time to begin with ireland, the king my master is more like than queen elizabeth was, to find a wholesomer place of the king of spain's, where he would be loath to hear of the english, and to show the spaniards who shall be sent into ireland as fair a way as they were taught before. in which time the more you speak of the base, insulting, discoursing fugitives, the more proper it will be for you. in the meantime upon their departure, not a man hath moved, neither was there these thirty years more universal obedience than there is now. amongst the rest of their barbarous lies i doubt not but they will pretend protection for religion, and breach of promise with them; wherein you may safely protest this, that for any, of all those that are gone, there never was so much as an offer made to search their consciences.' not content with the labours of his ambassadors at the various continental courts, to damage the cause of the irish earls, the king issued a proclamation, which was widely dispersed abroad. his majesty said he thought it better to clear men's judgments concerning the fugitives, 'not in respect of any worth or value in these men's persons, being base and rude in their original,' but to prevent any breach of friendship with other princes. for this purpose he declared that tyrone and tyrconnel had not their creation or possessions in regard of any lineal or lawful descent from ancestors of blood or virtue, but were only conferred by the late queen and himself for some reasons of state. therefore, he judged it needless to seek for many arguments 'to confirm whatsoever should be said of these men's corruption and falsehood, whose heinous offences remained so fresh in memory since they declared themselves so very monsters in nature, as they did not only withdraw themselves from their personal obedience to their sovereign, but were content to sell over their native country, to those who stood at that time in the highest terms of hostility with the crowns of england and ireland.' 'yet,' adds the king, 'to make the absurdity and ingratitude of the allegation above mentioned so much the more clear to all men of equal judgment, we do hereby profess in word of a king that there was never so much as any shadow of molestation, nor purpose of proceeding in any degree against them for matter concerning religion:--such being their condition and profession, to think murder no fault, marriage of no use, nor any man worthy to be esteemed valiant that did not glory in rapine and oppression, as we should have thought it an unreasonable thing to trouble them for any different point in religion, before any man could perceive by their conversation that they made truly conscience of any religion. the king thought these declarations sufficient to disperse and to discredit all such untruths as these contemptible creatures, so full of infidelity and ingratitude, should discharge against him and his just and moderate proceedings, and which should procure unto them no better usage than they would wish should be afforded to any such pack of rebels born their subjects and bound unto them in so many and so great obligations.' such was the case of the english government presented to the world by the king and his ministers. let us now hear what the personages so heartily reviled by them had to say for themselves. the rev. c.p. meehan has brought to light the categorical narratives, which the earls dictated, and which had lain unpublished among the 'old historic rolls,' in the public record office, london. these documents are of great historic interest, as are many other state-papers now first published in his valuable work.[ ] o'neill's defence is headed, 'articles exhibited by the earl of tyrone to the king's most excellent majesty, declaring certain causes of discontent offered him, by which he took occasion to depart his country.' the statement is divided into twenty items, of which the following is the substance: it was proclaimed by public authority in his manor of dungannon, that none should hear mass upon pain of losing his goods and imprisonment, and that no ecclesiastical person should enjoy any cure or dignity without swearing the oath of supremacy and embracing the contrary religion, and those who refused so to do were actually deprived of their benefices and dignities, in proof of which the earl referred to the lord deputy's answer to his own petition, and to the lord primate of ireland, who put the persecuting decree into execution. the earl of devon, then lord-lieutenant, had taken from him the lands of his ancestors called the fews, in armagh, and given them to other persons. he was deprived of the annual tribute of sixty cows from sir cahir o'dogherty's country called inishowen, which tribute had never been brought into question till james's reign. the same lord-lieutenant had taken from him the fishings of the bann, which always belonged to his ancestors, and which he was forced to purchase again. portions of his territory had been taken 'under colour of church-lands, a thing never in any man's memory heard of before.' one robert leicester an attorney had got some more of the earl's land, which he transferred to captain leigh. 'so as any captain or clerk had wanted means, and had no other means or device to live, might bring the earl in trouble for some part or parcel of his living, falsely inventing the same, to be concealed or church-land.' the archbishop of armagh and the bishop of derry and clogher claimed the best part of the earl's whole estate, as appertaining to their bishoprics, 'which was never moved by any other predecessors before, other than that they had some _chiefry_ due to them, in most part of all his living, and would now have the whole land to themselves as their domain lands, not content with the benefit of their ancient registers, which the earl always offered, and was willing to give without further question. o'cahan, 'one of the chiefest and principalest of the earl's tenants, was set upon by certain of his majesty's privy council, as also by his highness's counsel-at-law, to withdraw himself and the lands called _iraght-i-cahan_ from the earl, being a great substance of his living;' and this although o'cahan had no right to the property except as his _tenant at will_, yielding and paying all such rents, dues, and reservations as the other tenants did. he complained that at the council table in dublin it was determined to take two-thirds of o'cahan's country from him; and he perceived by what sir john davis said, that they had determined to take the other third also. they further made claim in his majesty's behalf to four other parcels of the earl's land, which he named, being the substance of all that was left, and began their suit for the same in the court of exchequer. in fine he felt that he could not assure himself of anything by the letters patent he had from the king. whenever he had recourse to law his proceedings were frustrated by the government; so that he could not get the benefit of his majesty's laws, or the possession of his lands; 'and yet any man, of what degree soever, obtained the extremity of the law with favour against him, in any suit.' although the king had allowed him to be lieutenant of his country, yet he had no more command there than his boy; the worst man that belonged to the sheriff could command more than he, and that even in the earl's own house. if they wanted to arrest any one in the house they would not wait till he came out, but burst open the doors, and 'never do the earl so much honour in any respect as once to acquaint him therewith, or to send to himself for the party, though he had been within the house when they would attempt these things; and if any of the earl's officers would by his direction order or execute any matter betwixt his own tenants, with their own mutual consent, they would be driven not only to restore the same again, but also be first amerced by the sheriff, and after indicated as felons, and so brought to trial for their lives for the same; so as the earl in the end could scarce get any of his servants that would undertake to levy his rents.' according to law the sheriff should be a resident in the county, have property there, and be elected by the nobility and chief gentlemen belonging to it; but the law was set aside by the lord deputy, who appointed as sheriffs for the counties tyrone and armagh captain edmund leigh and one marmaduke whitechurch, dwelling in the county of louth, both being retainers, and very dear friends to the knight-marshal bagenal, who was the only man that urged the earl to his last troubles. of all these things 'the earl did eftsoons complain to the lord deputy, and could get no redress, but did rather fare the worse for his complaints, in respect they were so little regarded.' [footnote : page .] the earl understanding that earnest suit had been made to his majesty for the presidentship of ulster, made bold to write to the king, humbly beseeching him not to grant any such office to any person over himself, 'suspecting it would be his overthrow, as by plain experience he knew the like office to be the utter overthrow of others of his rank in other provinces within the realm of ireland.' he also wrote to the earl of salisbury, who replied that the earl was not to tie his majesty to place or displace officers at his (the earl's) pleasure in any of his majesty's kingdoms. this was not the earl's meaning, but it indicated to him pretty plainly that he had no favour to expect from that quarter. the office was intended for sir arthur chichester, and he much feared that it would be used for his destruction without his majesty's privity. therefore, seeing himself envied by those who should be his protectors, considering the misery sustained by others through the oppression of the like government, he resolved to sacrifice all rather than live under that yoke. the next item is very characteristic. the earl's nephew brian m'art happened to be in the house of turlough m'henry, having two men in his company. being in a merry humour, some dispute arose between him and a kinsman of his own, who 'gave the earl's nephew a blow of a club on the head, and tumbled him to the ground; whereupon, one of his men standing by and seeing his master down, did step up with the fellow and gave him some three or four stabs of a knife, having no other weapon, and the master himself, as it was said, gave him another, through which means the man came to his death. thereupon, the earl's nephew and his two men were taken and kept in prison till the next sessions holden in the county armagh, where his men were tried by a jury of four innocent and mere ignorant people, having little or no substance, most of them being bare soldiers and not fit, as well by the institution of law in matters of that kind as also through their own insufficiency, to be permitted or elected to the like charge; and the rest foster-brethren, followers, and very dear friends to the party slain, that would not spare to spend their lives and goods to revenge his death. yet all that notwithstanding were they allowed, and the trial of these two gentlemen committed to them, through which means, and the vigorous threatening and earnest enticements of the judges, they most shamefully condemned to die, and the jury in a manner forced to find the matter murder in each of them, and that, not so much for their own offences, as thinking to make it an evidence against the master, who was in prison in the castle of dublin, attending to be tried the last michaelmas term, whose death, were it right or wrong, was much desired by the lord deputy. again, the earl had given his daughter in marriage to o'cahan with a portion of goods. after they had lived together for eight years, o'cahan was induced to withdraw himself from the earl, and at the same time, by the procurement of his setters on, he turned off the earl's daughter, kept her fortune to himself, and married another. the father appealed to the lord deputy for justice in vain. he then took proceedings against o'cahan, at the assizes in dungannon. but the defendant produced a warrant from the lord deputy, forbidding the judges to entertain the question, as it was one for the lord bishop of derry. the bishop of derry, however, was the chief instigator of the divorce, and therefore no indifferent judge in the case. thus the earl's cause was frustrated, and he could get no manner of justice therein, no more than he obtained in many other weighty matters that concerned him. the next complaint is about outrages committed by one henry oge o'neill, one henry m'felemey and others, who at the instigation of the lord deputy, 'farther to trouble the earl,' went out as a wood-kerne to rob and spoil the earl and his nephew, and their tenants. they committed many murders, burnings, and other mischievous acts, and were always maintained and manifestly relieved amongst the deputy's tenants and their friends in clandeboye, to whom they openly sold the spoils. they went on so for the space of two years, and the earl could get no justice, till at length they murdered one of the deputy's own tenants. then he saw them prosecuted, and the result was, that the earl cut them all off within a quarter of a year after. but the lord deputy was not at all pleased with this. therefore he picked up 'a poor rascally knave' and brought him to dublin, where he persuaded him to accuse above threescore of the earl's tenants of relieving rebels with meat, although it was taken from them by force. for the rebels killed their cattle in the fields, and left them dead there, not being able to carry them away; burnt their houses, took what they could of their household stuff, killed and mangled themselves. 'yet were they, upon report of that poor knave, who was himself foremost in doing these mischiefs, all taken and brought to their trial by law, where they were, through their innocency, acquitted, to their no small cost; so as betwixt the professed enemy, and the private envy of our governors, seeking thereby to advance themselves, there was no way left for the poor subject to live.' one joice geverard, a dutchman, belonging to the deputy, was taken prisoner on his way from carrickfergus to toome, and he was compelled to pay to his captors a ransom of l. for this the lord deputy assessed l. on the county, and appointed one-half of it to be taken from o'neil's tenants, being of another county, and at least twelve miles distant from the scene of the outrage, perpetrated by a wood-kerne, 'and themselves being daily killed and spoiled by the said wood-kerne, and never no redress had to them.' several outrages and murders perpetrated by the soldiers are enumerated; but they were such as might have been expected in a state bordering on civil war, which was then the condition of the province. if, however, tyrone is to be believed, the rulers themselves set the example of disorder. sir henry folliott, governor of ballyshannon, in the second year of his majesty's reign, came with force of arms, and drove away cows from the earl's tenants, 'and killed a good gentleman, with many other poor men, women, and children; and besides that, there died of them above persons with very famine, for want of their goods; whereof the earl never had redress, although the said sir henry could show no reasonable cause for doing the same.' finally the earl saw that the lord deputy was very earnest to aggravate and search out matters against him, touching the staining of his honour and dignity, scheming to come upon him with some forged treason, and thereby to bereave him of both his life and living. the better to compass this he placed his 'whispering companion,' captain leigh, as sheriff in the county, 'so as to be lurking after the earl, to spy if he might have any hole in his coat.' seeing then that the lord deputy, who should be indifferent, not only to him but to the whole realm, having the rod in his own power, did seek his destruction, he esteemed it a strife against the stream for him to seek to live secure in that kingdom, and therefore of both evils he did choose the least, and thought it better rather to forego his country and lands, till he had further known his majesty's pleasure--to make an honourable escape with his life and liberty only, than by staying with dishonour and indignation to lose both life, liberty, and country, which much in very deed he feared. indeed the many abuses 'offered' him by sir john davis, 'a man more fit to be a stage player than a counsel,' and other inferior officers, might be sufficient causes to provoke any human creature, not only to forego a country, were it ever so dear to him, but also the whole world, to eschew the like government. and thus he concludes his appeal to his 'most dread sovereign:' 'and so referring himself, and the due consideration of these, and all other his causes, to your majesty's most royal and princely censure, as his only protector and defender, against all his adversaries, he most humbly taketh his leave, and will always, as in bounden duty, pray.' the earl of tyrconnel's statement contains no less than forty-four items under the following heading: 'a note, or brief collection of the several exactions, wrongs, and grievances, as well spiritual as temporal, wherewith the earl of tyrconnel particularly doth find himself grieved and abused by the king's law ministers in ireland, from the first year of his majesty's reign until this present year of : to be presented to the king's most excellent majesty.' _imprimis_, all the priests and religious persons dwelling within the said earl's territories were daily pursued and persecuted by his majesty's officers. sir arthur chichester told him, in the presence of divers noblemen and gentlemen, that he must resolve to go to church, or he would be forced to go. this was contrary to the toleration which had been till then enjoyed, and he resolved rather to abandon lands and living, yea, all the kingdoms of the earth, with the loss of his life, than to be forced utterly against his conscience to any such practice. when sir george carew was lord deputy, captain nicholas pynnar and captain basil brook, officers of the king's forces at lifford, plundered the earl's tenants there, taking from them cows, besides as many sheep and swine as they pleased. not satisfied with this spoil, they most tyrannically stripped persons of all their apparel. these outrages the earl complained of 'in humble wise' to the lord deputy, and could find no remedy; for the same year the garrisons of lough foyle, and ballyshannon took from the earl's tenants cows for the victualling of the soldiers; and although the english council wrote to the lord deputy, requiring him to pay for the cattle in english money, the payment was never made. when, in pursuance of a promise made to him by the lord deputy, he appeared before the king, to get new letters patent of his territories, &c., his property, in sligo, tyrawly, moylurg, dartry, sir cahir o'dogherty's country, and all sir nial o'donel's lands, were excepted and kept from him, together with the castle of ballyshannon and , acres of land, and the whole salmon-fishing of the river erne, worth l. a year, 'the same castle being one of the earl's chieftest mansion houses.' they also took from him , acres of his best land, and joined it to the garrison of lifford for the king's use, without any compensation. there were seven sheriffs sent into tyrconnel, by each of which there was taken out of every cow and plough-horse d., and as much out of every colt and calf twice a year, and half-a-crown a quarter of every shoemaker, carpenter, smith, and weaver in the whole country, and eight pence a year for every married couple.' sir nial o'donel was committed to prison by tyrconnel, for usurping the title of o'donel and taking his herds and tenants. 'he broke loose from prison and killed some of his majesty's subjects. for this the earl prosecuted him under a special warrant from the lord deputy; but notwithstanding all this, carew gave warrants to captains pynnar, brook, and bingley, to make reprisals upon the earl's tenants for the pretender's use. accordingly three english companies joining with nine score of sir nial's men, seized and carried away cows, mares, plough-horses, horses, besides food and drink to support the assailants for six weeks. they were guilty of many other extortions, the country being extremely poor after the wars, and of the earl's tenants were hindered from ploughing that season. a certain horse-boy, who was sentenced to be hanged for killing one cusack, was promised his life by sir george carew, if he accused tyrconnel as having employed him to commit the murder. the boy did make the accusation, which served no purpose 'but to accelerate his hanging.' thus betrayed, he declared at the gallows, and in the presence of persons, the sheriff of the county, and the portreve of trim, he retracted the false confession. a similar attempt was made with an englishman, who was kept a close prisoner without food, drink, or light, in order to get him to accuse the earl of cusack's murder. all such, with many other of the said carew's cruel and tyrannical proceedings, the earl showed to the council in england, which promised to give satisfaction by punishing the said carew, who at his arrival in england did rather obtain greater favours than any reprehension or check of his doings, so as the earl was constrained to take _patience_ for a full satisfaction of his wrongs. sir henry docwra, governor of derry, levied l. off tyrconnel's tenants for the building of a church in that city, but the money was applied by sir henry to his own use. carew ordered the troops under sir h. docwra, sir h. folliott, sir ralph constable, sir thomas roper, and captain doddington, to be quartered for three months upon tyrconnel's people, 'where they committed many rapes, and used many extortions, which the earl showed, and could neither get payment for their victuals nor obtain that they should be punished for their sundry rapes and extortions.' indeed there was never a garrison in tyrconnel that did not send at their pleasure private soldiers into the country to fetch, now three beeves, now four, as often as they liked, until they had taken all; and when the earl complained, carew seemed rather to flout him than any way to right him. sir h. folliott's company on one occasion took from his tenants thirty-eight plough-horses, which were never restored or paid for; at another time they took twenty-one, and again fourteen. this being done in the spring of the year the tenants were hindered from ploughing as before. during a whole year folliott took for the use of his own house, regularly every month, six beeves and six muttons, without any manner of payment. captain doddington and captain cole made free with the people's property in the same manner. 'all these injuries he laid in a very humble manner before the lord deputy, but instead of obtaining redress he was dismissed by him in a scoffing manner, and even a lawyer whom he employed was threatened by carew in the following terms:--that he and his posterity should smart for his doings until the seventh generation; so that all the earl's business was ever since left at random, and no lawyer dared plead in his cause.' tyrconnel killed some rebels, and captured their chief, whom his men carried to sir h. folliott to be executed. sir henry offered to spare his life if he could accuse the earl of any crime that might work his overthrow. he could not, and he was hanged. in order to settle a dispute between the earl and sir nial, the english _protégé_ and pretender to the chieftainship, twelve tenants of each were summoned to be examined by the king's officers in the neighbourhood. 'the earl's men were not examined, but locked up in a room; and the vice-governor, upon the false deposition of sir nial's men, directed warrants, and sent soldiers to the number of , to bring all the earl's tenants unto sir nial, to the number of persons, who paid half-a-crown a piece, and d. for every cow and garron, as a fee unto the captains, whereby they lost their ploughing for the space of twenty-eight days, the soldiers being in the country all the while. one captain henry vaughan, being sheriff in the year , got a warrant to levy l. to build a sessions house. he built the house of timber and wattles. it was not worth _l_, and it fell in three months. nevertheless he levied every penny of the money, and the people had to meet a similar demand the next year, to build another house. it was a rule with the governors of the local garrisons to offer his life to every convict about to be executed, and also a large reward, if he could accuse the earl of some detestable crime. no less than twenty-seven persons hanged in connaught and tyrone were offered pardon on this condition. he was at the same sessions called to the bar for hanging some wood-kerne, although he had authority from the king to execute martial law. shortly after, by the lord deputy's orders, the horse and foot soldiers under docwra and folliott were cessed upon the country, where they for four months remained, and paid nothing for their charges of horse-meat or man's meat.' in the year the lord deputy came to ballyshannon, where, being at supper, he demanded of the earl what right he had to the several territories he claimed. he replied that his ancestors had possessed them for , years, and that the duties, rents, and homages were duly paid during that time. whereupon the lord deputy said, 'the earl was unworthy to have them, he should never enjoy them, the state was sorry to have left so much in his possession, and he should take heed to himself or else the deputy would make his pate ache.' the matters in dispute between him and sir nial being referred on that occasion to the lord deputy, both parties having submitted their papers for examination, every case was decided against tyrconnel, all his challenges frustrated, l. damages imposed, and his papers burned; while sir nial's papers were privately given back to him. the result was that at the next sessions sir nial had the benefit of all his papers, his opponent having nothing to show to the contrary. the fishery of killybegs, worth l. a season, had belonged to tyrconnel's ancestors for , years. but it was taken from him without compensation, by sir henry folliott and the bishop of derry, with the ultimate sanction of the lord deputy, who confirmed the bishop in possession 'both for that season and for all times ensuing.' sir h. folliott on one occasion took away for his carriage the horses that served the earl's house with fuel and wood for fire, 'and the soldiers, scorning to feed the horses themselves, went into the earl's house, and forcibly took out one of his boys to lead them, and ran another in the thigh with a pike for refusing to go with him.' he had a number of tenants, who held their lands 'by lease of years for certain rents.' yet the lord deputy sent warrants to them, directing them to pay no rents, and requiring the governor of derry 'to raise the country from time to time, and resist and hinder the earl from taking up his rents.' to crown all, when tyrconnel made a journey into the pale to know the reason why he was debarred from his rents, he lodged on his way in the abbey of boyle. he had scarcely arrived there when the constable of the town, accompanied by twenty soldiers, and all the churls of the place, surrounded and set fire to the house where he lay, he having no company within but his page and two other serving men. 'but it befell, through the singular providence of almighty god, whose fatherly care he hath ever found vigilant over him, that he defended himself and his house against them all the whole night long, they using on the other side all their industry and might to fire it, and throwing in of stones and staves in the earl's face, and running their pikes at him and swords until they had wounded him, besides his other bruisings, with stones and staves in six places; they menacing to kill him, affirming that he was a traitor to the king, and that it was the best service that could be rendered to his majesty to kill him. and that all this is true, sir donough o'conor, who was taken prisoner by the same men, because he would not assist them in their _facinorous_ and wicked design of killing the earl, will justify; but in the morning the earl was rescued by the country folk, which conveyed him safely out of the town. and when the earl complained, and showed his wounds unto the lord deputy, he promised to hang the constable and ensign, but afterwards did not once deign so much as to examine the matter or call the delinquents to account, by reason whereof the earl doth verily persuade himself--which his surmise was afterwards confirmed in time, by the credible report of many--that some of the state were sorry for his escape, but specially sir oliver lambert, who had purposely drawn the plot of the earl's ruin.' [transcriber's note: marker for following footnote is missing in the original] [footnote: meehan's earls of tyrone and tyrconnel, pp. - .] chapter ix. the confiscation of ulster. sir toby caulfield, accompanied by the sheriffs of tyrone and tyrconnel, followed quickly the proclamation of the lord deputy to the people of ulster, and took possession of the houses, goods, and chattels of the fugitive earls. sir toby was further empowered to act as receiver over the estates, taking up the rents according to the irish usage until other arrangements could be made. his inventory of the effects of o'neill in the castle of dungannon is a curious document, showing that according to the ideas of those times in the matter of furniture 'man wants but little here below.' the following is a copy of the document taken from the memorandum roll of the exchequer by the late mr. ferguson. it is headed, '_the earl of tyrone's goods, viz._' the spelling is, however, modernised, and ordinary figures substituted for roman numerals. _the earl of tyrone's goods, viz._ £. s. d. small steers, at s. hogs, at s. d. long tables, s. long forms, s.; an old bedstead, s. an old trunk, s.; a long stool, d. hogsheads of salt, s. d.; all valued at a silk jacket vessels of butter, containing - / barrels iron spikes a powdering tub old chests a frying-pan and a dripping-pan pewter dishes a casket, d.; a comb and comb case, d. dozen of trenchers and a basket eighteen-bar ferris a box and drinking glasses a trunk ; a pair of red taffeta curtains ; other pair of green satin curtains a brass kettle 'a payer of covyrons' baskets with certain broken earthen dishes and some waste spices half a pound of white and blue starch a vessel with gallons of vinegar pewter dishes glass bottles stone jugs, whereof broken a little iron pot a great spit garrons at s. apiece stud mares, whereof [some] were claimed by nicholas weston, which were restored to him by warrant, l. s. being proved to be his own, and so remaineth with respect to rents, sir toby caulfield left a memorandum, stating that there was no certain portion of tyrone's land let to any of his tenants that paid him rent, and that such rents as he received were paid to him partly in money and partly in victuals, as oats, oatmeal, butter, hogs, and sheep. the money-rents were chargeable on all the cows, milch or in calf, which grazed on his lands, at the rate of a shilling a quarter each. the cows were to be numbered in may and november by the earl's officers, and 'so the rents were taken up at said rate for all the cows that were so numbered, except only the heads and principal men of the _creaghts_, as they enabled them to live better than the common multitude under them, whom they caused to pay the said rents, which amounted to about twelve hundred sterling irish a year. 'the butter and other provisions were usually paid by those styled horsemen--o'hagans, o'quins, the o'donnillys, o'devolins, and others.' these were a sort of middle men, and to some of them an allowance was made by the government. 'thus for example, loughlin o'hagan, formerly constable of the castle of dungannon, received in lieu thereof a portion of his brother henry's goods, and henry o'hagan's wife and her children had all her husband's goods, at the suit of her father sir g. o'ghy o'hanlon, who had made a surrender of all his lands to the crown.' the cattle were to be all numbered over the whole territory in one day, a duty which must have required a great number of men, and sharp men too; for, if the owners were dishonestly inclined, and were as active in that kind of work as the peasantry were during the anti-tithe war in our own time, the cattle could be driven off into the woods or on to the lands of a neighbouring lord. however, during the three years that caulfield was receiver, the rental amounted to , l. a year, a remarkable fact considering the enormous destruction of property that had taken place during the late wars, and the value of money at that time. a similar process was adopted with regard to the property of o'donel, and guards were placed in all the castles of the two chiefs. in order that their territories might pass into the king's possession by due form of law, the attorney-general, sir john davis, was instructed to draw up a bill of indictment for treason against the fugitive earls and their adherents. with this bill he proceeded to lifford, accompanied by a number of commissioners, clerks, sheriffs, and a strong detachment of horse and foot. at lifford, the county town of donegal, a jury was empanelled for the trial of o'donel, consisting of twenty-three irishmen and ten englishmen. of this jury sir cahir o'dogherty was foreman. he was the lord of inishowen, having the largest territories in the county next to the earl of tyrconnel. the bill being read in english and irish, evidence was given, wrote the attorney-general, 'that their guilty consciences, and fear of losing their heads, was the cause of their flight.' the jury, however, had exactly the same sort of difficulty that troubled the juries in our late fenian trials about finding the accused guilty of compassing the death of the sovereign. but sir john laboured to remove their scruples by explaining the legal technicality, and arguing that, 'whoso would take the king's crown from his head would likewise, if he could, take his head from his shoulders; and whoever would not suffer the king to reign, if it lay in his power, would not suffer the king to live.' the argument was successful with the jury. in all the conflicts between the two races, whether on the field of battle or in the courts of law, the work of england was zealously done by celtic agents, who became the eager accusers, the perfidious betrayers, and sometimes the voluntary assassins of men of their own name, kindred, and tribe. the commissioners next sat at strabane, a town within two or three miles of lifford, where a similar jury was empanelled for the county tyrone, to try o'neill. one of the counts against him was that he had treasonably taken upon him the name of o'neill. in proof of this a document was produced: 'o'neill bids m'tuin to pay l.' it was also alleged that he had committed a number of murders; but his victims, it was alleged, were criminals ordered for execution in virtue of the power of life and death with which he had been invested by the queen. he was found guilty, however; and henry oge o'neill, his kinsman, who was foreman of the jury, was complimented for his civility and loyalty, although he belonged to that class concerning which sir john afterwards wrote, 'it is as natural for an irish lord to be a thief as it is for the devil to be a liar, of whom it was written, he was a liar and a murderer from the beginning.' true bills having been found by the grand juries, proceedings were taken in the court of king's bench to have the fugitive earls and their followers attainted of high treason. the names were:--'hugh earl of tyrone, rory earl of tyrconnel, caffar o'donel, cu connaught maguire, donel oge o'donel, art oge, cormack o'neill, henry o'neill, henry hovenden, henry o'hagan, moriarty o'quinn, john bath, christopher plunket, john o'punty o'hagan, hugh o'galagher, carragh o'galagher, john and edmund m'davitt, maurie o'multully, donogh o'brien, m'mahon, george cashel, teigue o'keenen, and many other false traitors, who, by the instigation of the devil, did conspire and plot the destruction and death of the king, sir arthur chichester, &c.; and did also conspire to seize by force of arms the castles of athlone, ballyshannon, duncannon, co. wexford, lifford, co. donegal, and with that intent did sail away in a ship, to bring in an army composed of foreigners to invade the kingdom of ireland, to put the king to death, and to dispose him from the style, title, power, and government of the imperial crown.' the lord deputy and his officers, able, energetic, farseeing men, working together persistently for the accomplishment of a well-defined purpose, were drawing the great net of english law closer and closer around the heads of the irish clans, who struggled gallantly and wildly in its fatal meshes. the episode of sir cahir o'dogherty is a romance. on the death of sir john o'dogherty, the o'donel, in accordance with irish custom, caused his brother phelim oge to be inaugurated prince of inishowen, because cahir, his son, was then only thirteen years of age, too young to command the sept. but this arrangement did not please his foster brothers, the m'davitts, who proposed to sir henry docwra, governor of derry, that their youthful chief should be adopted as the queen's o'dogherty; and on this condition they promised that he and they would devote themselves to her majesty's service. the terms were gladly accepted. sir cahir was trained by docwra in martial exercises, in the arts of civility, and in english literature. he was an apt pupil. he grew up strong and comely; and he so distinguished himself before he was sixteen years of age in skirmishes with his father's allies, that sir henry wrote of him in the following terms: 'the country was overgrown with ancient oak and coppice. o'dogherty was with me, alighted when i did, kept me company in the greatest heat of the fight, behaved himself bravely, and with a great deal of love and affection; so much so, that i recommended him at my next meeting with the lord deputy mountjoy, for the honour of knighthood, which was accordingly conferred upon him.' the young knight went to london, was well received at court, and obtained a new grant of a large portion of the o'dogherty's country. he married a daughter of lord gormanstown, a catholic peer of the pale, distinguished for loyalty to the english throne, resided with his bride at his castle of elagh, or at burt, or buncranna, keeping princely state, not in the old irish fashion, but in the manner of an english nobleman of the period; hunting the red deer in his forest, hawking, or fishing in the teeming waters of lough foyle, lough swilly, and the atlantic, which poured their treasures around the promontory of which he was the lord. his intimate associates were officers and favourites of the king. docwra had given up the government of derry and retired to england. he was succeeded by sir george paulet, a man of violent temper. sir cahir had sold , acres of land, which was to be planted with english; and, in order to perfect the deed of sale, it was necessary to have the document signed before the governor of derry. it had been reported to the lord deputy that sir cahir, not content with his position, intended to leave the country, probably with the design of joining the fugitive earls in an attempt to destroy the english power in ireland. he was therefore summoned before the lord deputy; and lord gormanstown, thomas fitzwilliam of merrion, and himself, were obliged to give security that he should not quit ireland without due notice and express permission. this restraint had probably irritated his hot impetuous spirit, and made it difficult for him to exercise due self-control when he came in contact with the english governor of derry, with whom his relations were not improved by the suspicions now attaching to his loyalty. accordingly, while the legal forms of the transfer were being gone through, the young chief made a remark extremely offensive to paulet, which was resented by a blow in the face with his clenched fist. instead of returning the blow, young o'dogherty hurried away to consult the m'davitts, whose advice was that the insult he received must be avenged by blood. the affair having been immediately reported to the lord deputy, who apprehended that mischief would come of it, he sent a peremptory summons to sir cahir, requiring him to appear in dublin, 'to free himself of certain rumours and reports touching disloyal courses into which he had entered, contrary to his allegiance to the king, and threatening the overthrow of many of his majesty's subjects.' his two sureties were also written to, and required to 'bring in his body.' but o'dogherty utterly disregarded the lord deputy's order. taking counsel with nial garve o'donel, he resolved to seize culmore fort, castle doe, and other strong places; and then march on derry, and massacre the english settlers in the market square. towards the close of april, sir cahir invited captain harte, governor of culmore castle, on the banks of the foyle, about four miles from derry, with his wife and infant child, of which he was the godfather, to dine with him at his castle of elagh. the entertainment was sumptuous, and the pleasures of the table protracted to a late hour. after dinner the host took his guest into a private apartment, and told him that the blow he had received from paulet demanded a bloody revenge. harte remonstrated; o'dogherty's retainers rushed in, and, drawing their swords and skeines, declared that they would kill his wife and child in his presence, unless he delivered up the castle of culmore. the governor was terrified, but he refused to betray his trust. sir cahir, commanding the armed men to retire, locked the chamber door, and kept his guest imprisoned there for two hours, hoping that he would yield when he had time for reflection. but finding him still inflexible, o'dogherty grew furious, and vented his rage in loud and angry words. mrs. harte, hearing the altercation, and suspecting foul play, rushed into the room, and found sir cahir enforcing his appeal with a naked sword pointed at her husband's throat. she fell on the floor in a swoon. lady o'dogherty ran to her assistance, raised her up, and assured her that she knew nothing of her husband's rash design. the latter then thrust the whole party down-stairs, giving orders to his men to seize captain harte. meantime, lady harte fell on her knees, imploring mercy, but the only response was an oath that she and her husband and child should be instantly butchered if culmore were not surrendered. what followed shall be related in the words of father meehan: 'horrified by this menace, she consented to accompany him and his men to the fort, where they arrived about midnight. on giving the pass word the gate was thrown open by the warder, whose suspicions were lulled when lady harte told him that her husband had broken his arm and was then lying in sir cahir's house. the parley was short, and the followers of sir cahir, rushing in to the tower, fell on the sleeping garrison, slaughtered them in their beds, and then made their way to an upper apartment where lady harte's brother, recently come from england, was fast asleep. fearing that he might get a bloody blanket for his shroud, lady harte followed them into the room, and implored the young man to offer no resistance to the irish, who broke open trunks, presses and other furniture, and seized whatever valuables they could clutch. her thoughtfulness saved the lives of her children and her brother; for as soon as sir cahir had armed his followers with matchlocks and powder out of the magazine, he left a small detachment to garrison culmore, and then marched rapidly on derry, where he arrived about two o'clock in the morning. totally unprepared for such an irruption, the townsfolk were roused from their sleep by the bagpipes and war-shout of the clan o'dogherty, who rushed into the streets, and made their way to paulet's house, where sir cahir, still smarting under the indignity of the angry blow, satisfied his vow of vengeance by causing that unhappy gentleman to be hacked to death with the pikes and skeines of owen o'dogherty and others of his kindred. after plundering the houses of the more opulent inhabitants, seizing such arms as they could find, and reducing the young town to a heap of ashes, sir cahir led his followers to the palace of montgomery the bishop, who fortunately for himself was then absent in dublin. not finding him, they captured his wife, and sent her, under escort, to burt castle, whither lady o'dogherty, her sister-in-law and infant daughter, had gone without warders for their protection. it was on this occasion that phelim m'davitt got into montgomery's library and set fire to it, thus destroying hundreds of valuable volumes, printed and manuscript, a feat for which he is not censured--we are sorry to have to acknowledge it--by philip o'sullivan in his account of the fact. elated by this successful raid, sir cahir called off his followers and proceeded to beleaguer lifford, where there was a small garrison of english who could not be induced to surrender, although suffering severely from want of provisions. finding all his attempts to reduce the place ineffectual, he sent for the small force he had left in culmore to join the main body of his partisans, and then marched into m'swyne doe's country.' meantime news of these atrocities reached dublin, and the lord deputy immediately sent a force of , men, commanded by sir richard wingfield, sir thomas roper, and sir toby caulfield, with instructions to pursue the revolted irish into their fastnesses and deal with them summarily. he himself set out to act with the troops, and on reaching dundalk published a proclamation, in which he offered pardon to all who laid down their arms, or would use them in killing their associates. he took care, however, to except phelim m'davitt from all hope of mercy, consigning him to be dealt with by a military tribunal. the english force in the interval had made their way into o'dogherty's country, and coming before culmore, found it abandoned by the irish, who, unable to carry off the heavy guns, took the precaution of burying them in the sea. burt castle surrendered without a blow. wingfield immediately liberated the inmates, and sent bishop montgomery's wife to her husband, and lady o'dogherty, her infant daughter and sister-in-law, to dublin castle. as for sir cahir, instead of going to castle doe, he resolved to cross the path of the english on their march to that place, and coming up with them in the vicinity of kilmacrenan, he was shot dead by a soldier. the death of the young chieftain spread panic among his followers, most of whom flung away their arms, betook themselves to flight, and were unmercifully cut down. sir cahir's head was immediately struck off and sent to dublin, where it was struck upon a pole at the east gate of the city. o'dogherty's country was now confiscated, and the lord deputy, chichester, was rewarded with the greatest portion of his lands. but what was to be done with the people? in the first instance they were driven from the rich lowlands along the borders of lough foyle and lough swilly, and compelled to take refuge in the mountain fastnesses which stretched to a vast extent from moville westward along the atlantic coast. but could those 'idle kerne and swordsmen,' thus punished with loss of lands and home for the crimes of their chief, be safely trusted to remain anywhere in the neighbourhood of the new english settlers? sir john davis and sir toby caulfield thought of a plan by which they could get rid of the danger. the illustrious gustavus adolphus was then fighting the battles of protestantism against the house of austria. in his gallant efforts to sustain the cause of the reformation every true irish protestant sympathised, and none more than the members of the irish government. to what better use, then, could the 'loose irish kerne and swordsmen' of donegal be turned than to send them to fight in the army of the king of sweden? accordingly , of the able-bodied peasantry of inishown were shipped off for this service. sir toby caulfield, founder of the house of charlemont, was commissioned to muster the men and have them transported to their destination, being paid for their keep in the meantime. a portion of his account ran thus: 'for the dyett of of said soldiers for daies, during which tyme they were kept in prison in dungannon till they were sent away, at iiiid le peece per diem; allso for dyett of of said men kept in prison at armagh till they were sent away to swethen, at iiiid le peece per diem,' &c., &c. caulfield was well rewarded for these services; and captain sandford, married to the niece of the first earl of charlemont, obtained a large grant of land on the same score. this system of clearing out the righting men among the irish was continued till , when the lord deputy, falkland, wrote that sir george hamilton, a papist, then impressing soldiers in tyrone and antrim, was opposed by one o'cullinan, a priest, who was rash enough to advise the people to stay at home and have nothing to do with the danish wars. for this he was arrested, committed to dublin castle, tortured and then hanged. with regard to the immediate followers of o'dogherty in his insane course, many of the most prominent leaders were tried by court-martial and executed. others were found guilty by ordinary course of law. among these was o'hanlon, sir cahir's brother-in-law. pie was hanged at armagh; and his youthful wife was found by a soldier, 'stripped of her apparel, in a wood, where she perished of cold and hunger, being lately before delivered of a child.' m'davitt, the firebrand of the rebellion, was convicted and executed at derry. at dungannon shane, carragh o'cahan was found guilty by 'a jury of his _kinsmen_' and executed in the camp, his head being stuck upon the castle of that place--the castle from which his brother was mainly instrumental in driving its once potent lord into exile. at the same place a monk, who was a chief adviser of the arch-rebel, saved his life and liberty by tearing off his religious habit, and renouncing his allegiance to the pope. father meehan states that many of the clergy, secular and regular, of inishown might have saved their lives by taking the oath of supremacy. it was a terrible time in donegal. no day passed without the killing and taking of some of the dispersed rebels, one betraying another to get his own pardon, and the goods of the party betrayed, according to a proviso in the deputy's proclamation. among the informers was a noble lady, the mother of hugh roe o'donel and rory earl of tyronnel, who accused nial garve, her own son-in-law, of complicity in o'dogherty's revolt, for which she got a grant of some hundreds of acres in the neighbourhood of kilmacrenan. the insurgent leaders and the dangerous kerne having been effectually cleared off in various ways, the whole territory of inishown was overrun by the king's troops. the lord deputy, sir arthur chichester, with a numerous retinue, including the attorney-general, sheriffs, lawyers, provosts-martial, engineers, and 'geographers,' made a grand 'progress,' and penetrated for the first time the region which was to become the property of his family. it was a strange sight to the poor irish that were suffered to remain. 'as we passed through the glens and forests,' wrote sir john davis, 'the wild inhabitants did as much wonder to see the king's deputy as the ghosts in virgil did to see �neas alive in hell.' in this exploring tour a thorough knowledge of the country was for the first time obtained, and the attorney-general could report that 'before michaelmas he would be ready to present to his majesty a perfect survey of six whole counties which he now hath in actual possession in the province of ulster, of greater extent of land than any prince in europe hath in his own hands to dispose of.' a vast field for plantation! but sir john davis cautioned the government against the mistakes that caused the failure of former settlements, saying, that if the number of the scotch and english who were to come to ireland did not much exceed that of the natives, the latter would quickly 'overgrow them, as weeds overgrow corn.' o'cahan, who was charged with complicity in o'dogherty's outbreak, or with being at least a sympathiser, had been arrested, and was kept, with nial garve, a close prisoner in dublin castle. an anonymous pamphleteer celebrated the victories that had been achieved by the lord deputy, giving to his work the title, 'the overthrow of an irish rebel,' having for its frontispiece a tower with portcullis, and the o'dogherty's head impaled in the central embrazure. the spirit of the narrative may be inferred from the following passage: 'as for tyrone and co., or tyrconnel, they are already fled from their coverts, and i hope they will never return; and for other false hearts, the chief of note is o'cahan, sir nial garve, and his two brothers, with others of their condition. they have holes provided for them in the castle of dublin, where i hope they are safe enough from breeding any cubs to disquiet and prey upon the flock of honest subjects.' o'cahan and his companion, however, tried to get out of the hole, although the lord deputy kept twenty men every night to guard the castle, in addition to the ordinary ward, and two or three of the guards lay in the same rooms with the prisoners. their horses had arrived in town, and all things were in readiness. but their escape was hindered by the fact that shane o'carolan, who had been acquitted of three indictments, cast himself out of a window at the top of the castle by the help of his mantle, which broke before he was half way down; and though he was presently discovered, yet he escaped about supper time. 'surely,' exclaimed the lord deputy, 'these men do go beyond all nations in the world for desperate escapes!' the prisoners were subsequently conveyed to the tower, where they remained many years closely confined, and where they ended their days. sir allen apsley, in , made a report of the prisoners then in his custody, in which he said, 'there is here sir nial garve o'donel, a man that was a good subject during the late queen's time, and did as great service to the state as any man of his nation. he has been a prisoner here about thirteen years. his offence is known specially to the lord chichester. naghtan, his son, was taken from oxford and committed with his father. i never heard any offence he did.' while o'cahan was in prison, commissioners sat in his mansion at limavaddy, including the primate usher, bishop montgomery of derry, and sir john davis. they decided that by the statute of elizabeth, which it was supposed had been cancelled by the king's pardon, all his territory had been granted to the earl of tyrone, and forfeited by his flight. it was, therefore, confiscated. although sundry royal and viceregal proclamations had assured the tenants that they would not be disturbed in their possessions, on account of the offences of their chiefs, it was now declared that all o'cahan's country belonged to the crown, and that neither he nor those who lived under him had any estate whatever in the lands. certain portions of the territory were set apart for the church, and handed over to bishop montgomery. 'of all the fair territory which once was his, donald balagh had not now as much as would afford him a last resting-place near the sculptured tomb of cooey-na-gall. o'cahan got no sympathy, and he deserved none; for he might have foreseen that the government to which he sold himself would cast him off as an outworn tool, when he could no longer subserve their wicked purposes.'[ ] 'thus were the o'cahans dispossessed by the colonists of derry, to whom their broad lands and teeming rivers were passed, _mayhap_ for ever. towards the close of the cromwellian war in ireland, the duchess of buckingham, passing through limavaddy, visited its ancient castle, then sadly dilapidated, and, entering one of the apartments, saw an aged woman wrapped in a blanket, and crouching over a peat fire, which filled the room with reeking smoke. after gazing at this pitiful spectacle, the duchess asked the miserable individual her name; when the latter, rising and drawing herself up to her full height, replied, "i am the wife of the o'cahan."'[father meehan dedicates his valuable work to the lord chancellor of ireland, the right hon. thomas o'hagan,--the first catholic chancellor since the revolution. descended from the o'hagans, who were hereditary justiciaries and secretaries to the o'neill, he is, by universal consent, one of the ablest and most accomplished judges that ever adorned the irish bench. his ancestors were involved in the fortunes of tyrone. how strange that the representative of the judicial and literary clan of ancient ulster should now be the head of the irish magistracy!] [footnote : meehan, p. .] chapter x. the plantation of ulster. in the account which the lord deputy gave of the flight of tyrone and tyrconnel, he referred to the mistake that had been committed in making these men proprietary lords of so large a territory, '_without regard to the poor freeholders' rights, or of his majesty's service, or the commonwealths, that are so much interested in the honest liberty of that sort of men_.' and he considered it a providential circumstance that the king had now an opportunity of repairing that error, and of relieving the natives from the exactions and tyranny of their former barbarous lords. how far this change was a benefit to the honest freeholders and the labouring classes may be seen from the reports of sir toby caulfield to the lord deputy, as to his dealings with those people. he complains of his ill success in the prosecution of the wood-kerne. he had done his best, and all had turned to nothing. when the news of the plantation came, he had no hope at all, for the people then said it would be many of their cases to become wood-kerne themselves out of necessity, 'no other means being left for them to keep being in this world than to live as long as they could by scrambling.' they hoped, however, that so much of the summer being spent before the commissioners came down, 'so great cruelty would not be showed as to remove them upon the edge of winter from their houses, and in the very season when they were employed in making their harvest. they held discourse among themselves, that if this course had been taken with them in war time, it had had some colour of justice; but being pardoned, and their land given them, and they having lived under law ever since, and being ready to submit themselves to the mercy of the law, for any offence they can be charged withal, since their pardoning, they conclude it to be the greatest cruelty that was ever inflicted upon any people.' it is no wonder that sir toby was obliged to add to his report this assurance: 'there is not a more discontented people in christendom.' it is difficult to conceive how any people in christendom could be contented, treated as they were, according to this account, which the officer of the government did not deny; for surely no people, in any christian country, were ever the victims of such flagrant injustice, inflicted by a government which promised to relieve them from the cruel exactions of their barbarous chiefs--a government, too, solemnly pledged to protect them in the unmolested enjoyment of their houses and lands. how little this policy tended to strengthen the government appears from a confession made about the same time by the lord deputy himself. he wrote: 'the hearts of the irish are against us: we have only a handful of men in entertainment so ill paid, that everyone is out of heart, and our resources so discredited, by borrowing and not repaying, that we cannot take up , l. in twenty days, if the safety of the kingdom depended upon it. the irish are hopeful of the return of the fugitives, or invasion from foreign parts.' but the safety of england, do what she might in the way of oppression, lay then, as it lay often since, and ever will lie, in the tendency to division, and the instability of the celtic character. the rev. mr. meehan, with all his zeal for irish nationality, admits this failing of the people with his usual candour. he says: 'these traits, so peculiar to the celtic character, have been justly stigmatised by a friendly and observant italian (the nuncio rinuccini) who, some thirty years after the period of which we are writing, tells us that the native irish were behind the rest of europe in the knowledge of those things that tended to their material improvement--indifferent agriculturists, living from hand to mouth--caring more for the sword than the plough--good catholics, though by nature barbarous--and placing their hopes of deliverance from english rule on foreign intervention. for this they were constantly straining their eyes towards france or spain, and, no matter whence the ally came, were ever ready to rise in revolt. one virtue, however--intensest love of country--more or less redeemed these vices, for so they deserve to be called; but to establish anything like strict military discipline or organisation among themselves, it must be avowed they had no aptitude.' this, says mr. meehan, 'to some extent, will account for the apathy of the northern catholics, while the undertakers were carrying on the gigantic eviction known as the plantation of ulster; for, since sir cahir o'dogherty's rebellion till , there was only one attempt to resist the intruders, an abortive raid on the city of derry, for which the meagre annals of that year tell us, six of the earl of tyrone's nearest kinsmen were put to death. withal the people of ulster were full of hope that o'neill would return with forces to evict the evicters, but the farther they advanced into this agreeable perspective, the more rapidly did its charms disappear. the proclamations against wood-kerne present a curious picture of these 'plantation' times. the lord deputy, in council, understood that 'many idle kerne, loose and masterless men, and other disordered persons, did range up and down in sundry parts of this kingdom, being armed with swords, targets, pikes, shot, head-pieces, horsemen's staves, and other warlike weapons, to the great terror of his majesty's well-disposed subjects, upon whom they had committed many extortions, murders, robberies, and other outrages. hence divers proclamations had been published in his majesty's name, commanding that no person of what condition soever, travelling on horseback, should presume to carry more arms than one sword or rapier and dagger; and that no person travelling on foot should carry any weapons at all. twenty days were allowed for giving the arms to the proper officers. if the proclamation was not obeyed within that time, the arms were to be seized for the king's use, and the bearers of them committed to prison. on july , , a commission was issued by the crown to make inquisition concerning the forfeited lands in ulster after the flight of the earls of tyrone and tyrconnel. the commissioners included the lord-deputy chichester, the archbishops of armagh and dublin, sir john davis, attorney-general; sir william parsons, surveyor-general, and several other public functionaries. this work done, king james, acting on the advice of his prime minister, the earl of salisbury, took measures for the plantation of ulster, a project earnestly recommended by statesmen connected with ireland, and for which the flight of o'neill and o'donel furnished the desired opportunity. the city of london was thought to be the best quarter to look to for funds to carry on the plantation. accordingly, lord salisbury had a conference with the lord mayor, humphry weld, sir john jolles, and sir w. cockaine, who were well acquainted with irish affairs. the result was the publication of 'motives and reasons to induce the city of london to undertake the plantation in the north of ireland.' the inducements were of the most tempting character. it is customary to speak of ulster, before the plantation, as something like a desert, out of which the planters created an eden. but the picture presented to the londoners was more like the land which the israelitish spies found beyond jordan--a land flowing with milk and honey. among 'the land commodities which the north of ireland produceth' were these:--the country was well watered generally by abundance of springs, brooks, and rivers. there was plenty of fuel--either wood, or 'good and wholesome turf.' the land yielded 'store of all necessary for man's sustenance, in such a measure as may not only maintain itself, but also furnish the city of london yearly with manifold provision, especially for their fleets--namely, with beef, pork, fish, rye, bere, peas, and beans.' it was not only fit for all sorts of husbandry, but it excelled for the breeding of mares and the increase of cattle; whence the londoners might expect 'plenty of butter, cheese, hides, and tallow,' while english sheep would breed abundantly there. it was also held to be good in many places for madder, hops, and woad. it afforded 'fells of all sorts in great quantity, red deer, foxes, sheep, lambs, rabbits, martins and squirrels,' &c. hemp and flax grew more naturally there than elsewhere, which, being well regarded, would give provision for canvas, cables, cording, besides thread, linen cloth, and all stuffs made of linen yarn, 'which are more fine and plentiful there than in all the rest of the kingdom.' then there were the best materials of all sorts for building, with 'the goodliest and largest timber, that might compare with any in his majesty's dominions;' and, moreover, the country was 'very plentiful in honey and wax.' the sea and the rivers vied with the land in the richness of their produce. 'the sea fishing of that coast was very plentiful of all manner of usual sea fish--there being yearly, after michaelmas, for taking of herrings, above seven or eight score sail of his majesty's subjects and strangers for lading, besides an infinite number of boats for fishing and killing.' the corporation were willing to undertake the work of plantation if the account given of its advantages should prove to be correct. with the caution of men of business, they wished to put the glowing representations of the government to the test of an investigation by agents of their own. so they sent over 'four wise, grave, and discreet citizens, to view the situation proposed for the new colony.' the men selected were john broad, goldsmith; robert treswell, painter-stainer; john rowley, draper; and john munns, mercer. on their return from their irish mission they presented a report to the court of common council, which was openly read. the report was favourable. a company was to be formed in london for conducting the plantation. corporations were to be founded in derry and coleraine, everything concerning the colony to be managed and performed in ireland by the advice and direction of the company in london. it was agreed between the privy council and the city that the sum of , l. should be levied, , l. for the intended plantation, and , l. 'for the clearing of private men's interest in the things demanded.' that houses should be built in derry, and room left for more. 'that , acres lying on the derry side, next adjacent to the wherry, should be laid thereunto--bog and barren mountain to be no part thereof, but to go as waste for the city; the same to be done by indifferent commissioners.' the royal charters and letters clearly set forth the objects of the plantation. james i., in the preamble of the charter to the town of coleraine, thus described his intentions in disposing of the forfeited lands to english undertakers: 'whereas there can be nothing more worthy of a king to perform than to establish the true religion of christ among men hitherto depraved and almost lost in superstition; to improve and cultivate by art and industry countries and lands uncultivated and almost desert, and not only to stock them with honest citizens and inhabitants, but also to strengthen them with good institutions and ordinances, whereby they might be more safely defended not only from the corruption of their morals but from their intestine and domestic plots and conspiracies, and also from foreign violence: and whereas the province of ulster in our realm of ireland, for many years past, hath grossly erred from the true religion of christ and divine grace, and hath abounded with superstition, insomuch that for a long time it hath not only been harassed, torn, and wasted by private and domestic broils but also by foreign arms: we therefore, deeply and heartily commiserating the wretched state of the said province, have esteemed it to be a work worthy of a christian prince, and of our royal office, to stir up and recal the same province from superstition, rebellion, calamity, and poverty, which heretofore have horribly raged therein, to religion, obedience, strength, and prosperity. and whereas our beloved and faithful subjects the mayor and commonalty and citizens of our city of london, burning with a flagrant zeal to promote such our pious intention in this behalf, have undertaken a considerable part of the said plantation in ulster, and are making progress therein'. king james, having heard very unsatisfactory reports of the progress of the plantation, wrote a letter to the lord deputy in , strongly complaining of the neglect of the 'londoners' to fulfil the obligations they had voluntarily undertaken. he had made 'liberal donations of great proportions of those lands to divers british undertakers and servitors, with favourable tenures and reservations for their better encouragement; but hitherto neither the safety of that country, nor the planting of religion and civility among those rude and barbarous people, which were the principal motives of that project, and which he expected as the only fruits and returns of his bounty, had been as yet any whit materially effected. he was not ignorant how much the real accomplishment of the plantation concerned the future peace and safety of that kingdom; but if there was no reason of state to press it forward, he would yet pursue and effect that object with the same earnestness, 'merely for the goodness and morality of it; esteeming the settling of religion, the introducing of civility, order, and government among a barbarous and unsubjected people, to be acts of piety and glory, and worthy also a christian prince to endeavour.' the king therefore ordered that there should be a strict inquiry into the work done, because 'the londoners pretended the expense of great sums of money in that service, and yet the outward appearance of it was very small.' the lord deputy was solemnly charged to give him a faithful account without care or fear to displease any of his subjects, english or scottish, of what quality soever.' sir josias bodley was the commissioner appointed for this purpose. he reported very unfavourably, in consequence of which his majesty called upon the irish society and the several companies to give him an account of their stewardship. he also wrote again to the lord deputy in . the language the king uses is remarkable, as proving the _trusteeship_ of the companies. referring to bodley's report he said:-- 'we have examined, viewed, and reviewed, with our own eye, every part thereof, and find greatly to our discontentment the slow progression of that plantation; some few only of our british undertakers, servitors, and natives having as yet proceeded effectually by the accomplishment of such things in all points as are required of them by the articles of the plantation; the rest, and by much the greatest part, having either done nothing at all, or so little, or, by reason of the slightness thereof, to so little purpose, that the work seems rather to us to be forgotten by them, and to perish under their hand, than any whit to be advanced by them; some having begun to build and not planted, others begun to plant and not built, and all of them, in general, retaining the irish still upon their lands, the avoiding of which was the fundamental reason of that plantation. we have made a collection of their names, as we found their endeavours and negligences noted in the service, which we will retain as a memorial with us, and they shall be sure to feel the effects of our favour and disfavour, as there shall be occasion. it is well known to you that if we had intended only (as it seems most of them over-greedily have done) our present profit, we might have converted those large territories to our escheated lands, to the great improvement of the revenue of our crown there; but we chose rather, for the safety of that country and the civilizing of that people, to part with the inheritance of them at extreme undervalues, and to make a plantation of them; and since we were merely induced thereunto out of reason of state, we think we may without any breach of justice make bold with their rights who have neglected their duties in a service of so much importance unto us, and by the same law and reason of state resume into our hands their lands who have failed to perform, according to our original intention, the articles of plantation, and bestow them upon some other men more active and worthy of them than themselves: and the time is long since expired within which they were bound to have finished to all purposes their plantation, so that we want not just provocation to proceed presently with all rigour against them.' he gave them a year to pull up their arrears of work, and in conclusion said to chichester: 'my lord, in this service i expect that zeal and uprightness from you, that you will spare no flesh, english or scottish; for no private man's worth is able to counterbalance the particular safety of a kingdom, which this plantation, well accomplished, will procure.' two or three years later, captain pynnar was sent to survey the lands that had been granted to the undertakers, and to report upon the improvements they had effected. a few notices from his report will give an idea of the state of ulster at the commencement of this great social revolution:-- armagh was one of the six counties confiscated by james i. the territory had belonged to the o'neills, the o'hanlons, the o'carrols, and m'kanes, whose people were all involved more or less in the fortunes of the earl of tyrone, who wielded sovereign power over this portion of ulster. the plantation scheme was said to be the work of the privy council of ireland, and submitted by them for the adoption of the english government. it was part of the plan that all the lands escheated in each county should be divided into four parts, whereof two should be subdivided into proportions consisting of about , acres a piece; a third part into proportions of , acres; and the fourth in proportions of , acres. every proportion was to be made into a parish, a church was to be erected on it, and the minister endowed with glebe land. if an incumbent of a parish of , acres he was to have sixty; if of , acres, ninety; and if , acres, he was to have acres; and the whole tithes and duties of every parish should be allotted to the incumbent as well as the glebe. the undertakers were to be of several sorts. st, english and scotch, who were to plant their proportions with english and scotch tenants; nd, servitors in ireland, who might take english or scotch tenants at their choice; rd, natives of the county, who were to be freeholders. with respect to the disposal of the natives, it was arranged that the same course should be adopted as in the county of tyrone, which was this: some were to be planted upon two of the small proportions, and upon the glebes; others upon the land of sir art o'neill's sons and sir henry oge o'neill's sons, 'and of such other irish as shall be thought fit to have any _freeholds_; some others upon the portions of such servitors as are not able to inhabit these lands with english or scotch tenants, especially of _such as best know how to rule and order the irish_. but the swordsmen (that is, the armed retainers or soldiers of the chiefs) are to be transplanted into such other parts of the kingdom as, by reason of the wastes therein, are fittest to receive them, namely, into connaught and some parts of munster, where they are to be dispersed, and not planted together in one place; and such swordsmen, who have not followers or cattle of their own, to be disposed of in his majesty's service.' this provision about planting the swordsmen, however, was not carried out. the whole county of armagh was found to contain , acres of arable and pasture land, which would make proportions. that county, as well as other parts of ancient ireland, was divided into ballyboes, or townlands, tracts of tillage land surrounding the native villages unenclosed, and held in _rundale_, having ranges of pasture for their cattle, which were herded in common, each owner being entitled to a certain number of 'collops' in proportion to his arable land. as these ballyboes were not of equal extent, the english made the division of land by acres, and erected boundary fences. the primate's share in this county was , acres. the glebes comprised , acres; the college of dublin got , , and the free school at armagh ; sir turlough m'henry possessed , acres, and , had been granted to sir henry oge o'neill. after these deductions, there were for the undertakers , acres, making in all forty-two proportions. number one in the survey is the estate of william brownlow, esq., which contained two proportions, making together , acres. pynar reported as follows: 'upon the proportion of ballenemony there is a strong stone house within a good island; and at dowcoran there is a very fair house of stone and brick, with good lyme, and hath a strong bawne of timber and earth with a pallizado about it. there is now laid in readiness both lyme and stone, to make a bawne thereof, the which is promised to be done this summer. he hath made a very fair town, consisting of forty-two houses, all which are inhabited with english families, and the streets all paved clean through; also two water-mills and a wind-mill, all for corn, and he hath store of arms in his house.' pynar found 'planted and estated' on this territory families altogether, who were able to furnish men with arms, there not being one irish family upon all the land. there was, however, a number of sub-tenants, which accounts for the fact that there was 'good store of tillage.' five of the english settlers were freeholders, having acres each; and there were leaseholders, whose farms varied in size from acres to ; six of them holding acres and upwards. this was the foundation of the flourishing town of lurgan. mr. obens had , acres obtained from william powell, the first patentee. he had built a bawne of sods with a pallizado of boards ditched about. within this there was a 'good fair house of brick and lyme,' and near it he had built four houses, inhabited by english families. there were twenty settlers, who with their under-tenants were able to furnish forty-six armed men. this was the beginning of portadown. the fourth lot was obtained from the first patentee by mr. cope, who had , acres. 'he built a bawne of lyme and stone feet square, feet high, with four flankers; and in three of them he had built very good lodgings, which were three stories high.' he erected two water-mills and one wind-mill, and near the bawne he had built fourteen houses of timber, which were inhabited by english families. this is now the rich district of lough gall. it should be observed here that, in all these crown grants, the patentees were charged crown rents only for the _arable_ lands conveyed by their title-deeds, bogs, wastes, mountain, and unreclaimed lands of every description being thrown in gratuitously; amounting probably to ten or fifteen times the quantity of demised ground set down in acres. lord lurgan's agent, mr. hancock, at the commencement of his evidence before the devon commission, stated that 'lord lurgan is owner of about , acres, with a population of , , under the census of '--that is, by means of original reclamation, drainage, and other works of agricultural improvement, mr. brownlow's , acres of the year , had silently grown up to , acres, and his hundred swordsmen, or pikemen, the representatives of families, with a few subordinates, had multiplied to , souls. now mr. hancock founds the tenant-right custom upon the fact that few, if any, of the 'patentees were wealthy;' we may therefore fairly presume that the _settlers built their own houses, and made their own improvements at their own expense_, contrary to the english practice.' as the population increased, and 'arable' land became valuable, bogs, wastes, and barren land were gradually reclaimed and cultivated, through the hard labour and at the cost of the occupying tenantry, until the possessions of his descendants have spread over ten times the area nominally demised by the crown to their progenitor. this process went on all over the province. sixteen years passed away, and in the opinion of the government the london companies and the irish society, instead of reforming as irish planters, went on from bad to worse. accordingly, in , charles i. found it necessary to bring them into the star chamber. in a letter to the lords justices he said:-- 'our father, of blessed memory, in his wisdom and singular care, both to fortify and preserve that country of ireland from foreign and inward forces, and also for the better establishment of true religion, justice, civility, and commerce, found it most necessary to erect british plantations there; and, to that end, ordained and published many politic and good orders, and for the encouragement of planters gave them large proportions and privileges. above the rest, his grace and favour was most enlarged to the londoners, who undertook the plantation of a considerable part of ulster, and were specially chosen for their ability and professed zeal to public works; and yet advertisements have been given from time to time, not only by private men, but by all succeeding deputies, and by commissioners sent from hence and chosen there, and being many of them of our council, that the _londoners for private lucre_ have broken and neglected both their general printed ordinances and other particular directions given by us and our council here, so as if they hall escape unpunished all others will be heartened to do the like, and in the end expose that our kingdom to former confusions and dangers; for prevention whereof we have, upon mature advice of our councillors for those causes, caused them to be questioned in our high court of star-chamber here, whence commission is now sent to examine witnesses, upon interrogatories, for discovery of the truth; and because we understand that the londoners heretofore prevailed with some, from whom we expected better service, that in the return of the last commission many things agreed under the hands of most commissioners were not accordingly certified: now that our service may not surfer by like partiality, we will and require you to have an especial eye to this business; and take care that this commission be faithfully executed, and that no practice or indirect means be used, either to delay the return or to frustrate the ends of truth in every interrogatory.' this proceeding on the part of the crown was ascribed to the influence of bishop bramhall, who had come over with lord strafford as his chaplain. the result was, that in the whole county of londonderry was sequestrated, and the rents levied for the king's use, the bishop of derry being appointed receiver and authorised to make leases. the lord chancellor, with the concurrence of the other judges, decreed that the letters patent should be surrendered and cancelled. this decree was duly executed. cromwell reinstated the companies in their possessions, and charles ii., instead of reversing the forfeiture, granted a new charter. this charter founded a system of protection and corporate exclusiveness, the most perfect perhaps that ever existed in the three kingdoms. he began by constituting londonderry a county, and derry city a corporation--to be called londonderry. he named the aldermen and burgesses, who were to hold their offices during their natural lives. he placed both the county and city under the control of 'the irish society,' which was then definitely formed. he appointed sir thomas adams first governor, and john saunders, deputy governor. he also appointed the twenty-four assistants, all citizens of london. he invested the society with full power 'to send orders and directions from, this kingdom of england into the said realm of ireland, by letters or otherwise, for the ordering, directing, and disposing of all and all manner of matters and things whatsoever of and concerning the same plantation, or the disposition or government thereof. the grant of property was most comprehensive:-- 'we also will, and, by these presents for us, our heirs and successors, do give, grant, and confirm to the said society of the governor and assistants [london] of the new plantation in ulster within the realm of ireland, and their successors: 'all that the city, fort, and town of derry, and all edifices and structures thereof, with the appurtenances, in the county of the city of derry aforesaid, in the province of ulster, in our realm of ireland; and also the whole island of derry, with the appurtenances, and all lands and the whole ground within the island of derry aforesaid, in the said county of the city of derry, otherwise londonderry, within the province of ulster, in our aforesaid realm of ireland. and also all those lands next adjacent to the said city or town of derry, lying and being on or towards the west part of the river of loughfoyle, containing by estimation four thousand acres, besides bog and barren mountains, which said bog and barren mountains may be had and used as waste to the same city belonging. and also all that portion and proportion of land by the general survey of all the lands in the aforesaid late county of coleraine, now londonderry, heretofore taken, called the great proportion of boughtbegg, lying and being in the barony or precinct of coleraine, now londonderry, within the province of ulster aforesaid, in our said realm of ireland; that is to say, all lands, tenements, and other hereditaments, called and known by the names, and situate, lying, and being in or within the several towns, villages, hamlets, places, balliboes, or parcels of land following, that is to say: hacketbegg, being two balliboes of land; aglakightagh, being two balliboes of land; altybryan, being one balliboe of land; bratbooly, being one balliboe of land; hackmoore, being one balliboe of land; tirecurrin, being one balliboe of land; edermale, being one balliboe of land; lennagorran, being one balliboe of land; knockmult, being one balliboe of land; boughtmore, being one balliboe of land; boughtbegg, being one balliboe of land, &c. 'we will also, and by these presents for us, our heirs and successors, do grant and confirm to the said society of the governor and assistants [london] of the new plantation in ulster, and their successors, that they and their successors, and also all their assigns, deputies, ministers, and servants shall and may have full liberty of fishing, hawking, and fowling in all the places, tenements, shores, and coasts aforesaid, at their will and pleasure. 'and that it shall and may be lawful to and for them and every of them to draw and dry their nets, and pack the fishes there taken upon any part of the shores and coasts aforesaid where they shall fish; and the salmons and other fishes there taken to take thence and carry away without any impediment, contradiction, or molestation of us or others whomsoever, wheresoever it shall happen to be done. 'and that in like manner they may have the several fishings and fowlings within the city of londonderry aforesaid, and in all lands and tenements before mentioned to be granted and confirmed to the said society of the governor and assistants [london] of the new plantation in ulster and their successors, and in the river and water of loughfoile, to the ebb of the sea, and in the river or water of bann to loughneagh.' the grants were made without any reservation in favour of the tenants or the old inhabitants, saving some portions of land given by letters patent by his grandfather to 'certain _irish gentlemen_ in the said county of londonderry, heretofore inhabiting and residing, and who were heretofore made freeholders, and their successors, under a small yearly rent,' which was to be paid to the irish society. even the irish gentlemen were not allowed to hold their ancient inheritance directly under the crown. i am informed that there is but one roman catholic landed gentleman now remaining in the whole province of ulster. the londoners had extraordinary privileges as traders. they had free quarters in every port throughout the kingdom, while they treated all but the members of their own body as 'foreigners.' they knew nothing of reciprocity:--'and further we will, and, by these presents for us, our heirs and successors, do grant and confirm to the said mayor and commonalty and citizens of our city of londonderry aforesaid, that all citizens of the said city of londonderry and liberty of the same (as much as in us is) be for ever quit and free, and all their things throughout all ireland, of all tolls, wharfage, murage, anchorage, beaconage, pavage, pontage, piccage, stallage, passage, and lestage, and of all other tolls and duties.' the 'foreigners,' including all his majesty's subjects but the favoured few within the walls of derry, were forbidden to buy or sell, or practise any trade in this sanctuary of freedom and head-centre of 'civility.' 'and that merchants and others which are not of the freedom of the city of londonderry aforesaid shall not sell by retail any wines or other wares whatsoever within the same city of londonderry, the suburbs, liberties, or franchises of the same, upon pain of forfeiture for the things so bought, or the value thereof, to the use of the mayor and commonalty and citizens of the city of londonderry aforesaid. and also that no person being a foreigner from the freedom of the city aforesaid shall use or exercise within the same city, liberties or suburbs of the same, any art, mystery, or manual occupation whatsoever, to make his gain and profit thereof, upon pain of forfeiture of forty shillings for every time wherein such person shall use or exercise within the said city of londonderry, liberties, and suburbs of the same, any art, mystery, or manual occupation as aforesaid.' foreigners were not allowed to buy from or sell to foreigners, and there was to be no market for the accommodation of the unprivileged inhabitants within seven miles of the city. similar exclusive privileges were conferred upon the corporation of coleraine. such was the system established by the city of london in its model communities in ireland--normal schools of freedom, fountains of civilising and christianising influences which were to reclaim and convert the barbarous and superstitious natives into loyal subjects and enlightened protestants! what the natives beheld in londonderry was, in fact, a royal organisation of selfishness, bigotry, and monopoly, of the most intensely exclusive and repulsive character. in one sense the londoners in derry showed that they peculiarly prized the blessings of civilisation, for they kept them all to themselves. the fountain was flowing in the most tempting manner before the thirsty irish, but let them dare to drink of it at their peril! a fine which no irishman was then able to pay must be the penalty for every attempt at civilisation! the representatives of derry and coleraine were not only elected without cost, but paid for their attendance in parliament. from the very beginning, the greatest possible care was taken to keep out the irish. the society, in , sent precepts to all the companies requiring each of them to send one or two artisans, with their families, into ulster, to settle there; and directions were also given, in order that derry might not in future be peopled with irish, that twelve christ's hospital and other poor children should be sent there as apprentices and servants, and the inhabitants were to be prohibited from taking irish apprentices. directions were also given to the companies, to repair the churches on their several proportions, and furnish the ministers with a bible, common-prayer book, and a communion cup. the trades which the society recommended as proper to introduce into ulster were, weavers of common cloth, fustians, and new stuffs, felt-makers and trimmers of hats, and hat-band makers, locksmiths and farriers, tanners and fellmongers, iron makers, glass-makers, pewterers, coast fishermen, turners, basket-makers, tallow-chandlers, dyers, and curriers. the christ's hospital children arrived safe, and became the precious seed of the 'prentice boys. in the following return was made of the total disbursements by the londoners in derry from january , , to this year:-- £ for - / houses at l. a house , for houses at l. a house , for the lord bishop's house for the walls and fortifications , for digging the ditch and filling earth for the rampire , for levelling earth to lay the rampire for building a faggot quay at the water-gate for two quays at the lime kilns for the building of the town house for the quays at the ferry for carriage and mounting the ordnance for arms for a guardhouse for the platforms for bulwarks for some work done at the old church for some work done at the town pike for sinking cellars, and sundry of the houses not done at first, at s. cellar, one with another for the building of lime kilns ______ , ______ sum total, as given in the commissioners' account , the exclusive and protective system utterly failed to accomplish its purpose in keeping out the irish. sir thomas phillips made a muster-roll in , in which he gives as the number of settlers in the city of derry capable of bearing arms. there are but two irish names in the list--ermine m'swine, and james doherty. the first, from his christian name, seemed to have been of mixed blood, the son of a judge, which would account for his orthodoxy. but his presence might have reminded the citizens unpleasantly of the irish battle-axes. never were greater pains taken to keep a community pure than within the sacred precincts of the derry walls; and never was protestantism more tenderly fostered by the state--so far as secular advantages could do it. the natives were treated as 'foreigners.' no trade was permitted except by the chartered british. they were free of tolls all over the land, and for their sake restrictions were placed on everybody that could in any way interfere with their worldly interests. so complete was the system of exclusion kept up by the english government and the london corporation, in this grand experiment for planting religion and civility among a barbarous people, that, so late as the year , the derry corporation considered itself nothing more or less than _a branch of the city of london_! in that year they sent an address to the irish society, to be presented through them to the queen. 'in this address they stated themselves to be a branch of the city of london. the secretary was ordered to wait upon the lord lieutenant of ireland with the address and entreat the favour of his lordship's advice concerning the presenting of the same to her majesty.' a few days after it was announced that the address had been graciously received, and published in the _gazette_. the irish were kept out of the enclosed part of the city till a late period. in the memory of the present generation there was no catholic house within the walls, and i believe it is not much longer since the catholic servants within the sacred enclosure were obliged to go outside at night to sleep among their kinsfolk. the english garrison did not multiply very fast. in there were only families in the city, of which five were families of soldiers liable to be removed. archbishop king stated that in the whole of the population of the parish, including the donegal part, was about . but the irrepressible irish increased and multiplied around the walls with alarming rapidity. the tide of native population rose steadily against the ramparts of exclusion, and could no more be kept back than the tide in the foyle. in the general census of there were no returns from derry. but in it was stated in a report by the deputation from the irish society, that the population amounted at that time to , persons. this must have included the suburbs. in the census of the city was found to have , inhabitants. the city and suburbs together contained , . the report of the commissioners of public instruction in made a startling disclosure as to the effect of the system of exclusion in this 'branch of the city of london.' in the parish of templemore (part of) there were-- members of the established church , presbyterians , roman catholics , the report of gave the roman catholics, , ; the presbyterians, , ; and the church only , . the figures now are--catholics , protestants of all denominations , majority of irish and catholics in this 'branch of the city of london' , this majority is about equal to the whole number which the exclusive system, with all its 'protection' and 'bounties,' could produce for the established church in the course of two centuries! if the irish had been admitted to the pale of english civilisation, and instructed in the industrial arts by the settlers, the results with respect to religion might have been very different. in the long run the church of rome has been the greatest gainer by coercion. derry has been a miniature representation of the establishment. the 'prentice boys, like their betters, must yield to the spirit of the age, and submit with the best grace they can to the rule of religious equality. the plantation was, however, wonderfully successful on the whole. in thirty years, towns, fortresses, factories, arose, pastures, ploughed up, were converted into broad corn-fields, orchards, gardens, hedges, &c. were planted. how did this happen? 'the answer is that it sprang from the security of tenure which the plantation settlement supplied. the landlords were in every case bound to make fixed estates to their tenants at the risk of sequestration and forfeiture. hence their power of selling their plantation rights and improvements. this is the origin of ulster tenant-right.' yet the work went on slowly enough in some districts. the viceroy, chichester, was not neglected in the distribution of the spoils. he not only got the o'dogherty's country, innishown, but a large tract in antrim, including the towns of carrickfergus and belfast. an english tourist travelling that way in gives a quaint description of the country in that transition period:-- on july he landed at carrickfergus, where he found that lord chichester had a stately house, 'or rather like a prince's palace.' in belfast, he said, my lord chichester had another _daintie_, stately palace, which, indeed, was the glory and beauty of the town. and there were also _daintie_ orchards, gardens, and walks planted. the bishop of dromore, to whom the town of dromore entirely belonged, lived there in a 'little timber house.' he was not given to hospitality, for though his chaplain was a manchester man, named leigh, he allowed his english visitor to stop at an inn over the way. 'this,' wrote the tourist, 'is a very dear house, d. ordinary for ourselves, d. for our servants, and we were overcharged in _beere_.' the way thence to newry was most difficult for a stranger to find out. 'therein he wandered, and, being lost, fell among the irish _touns_.' the irish houses were the poorest cabins he had seen, erected in the middle of fields and grounds which they farmed and rented. 'this,' he added, 'is a wild country, not inhabited, planted, nor enclosed.' he gave an irishman 'a groat' to bring him into the way, yet he led him, like a villein, directly out of the way, and so left him in the lurch. leaving belfast, this englishman said: 'near hereunto, mr. arthur hill, son and heir of sir moyses hill, hath a brave plantation, which he holds by lease, and which has still forty years to come. the plantation, it is said, doth yield him , l. per annum. many lancashire and cheshire men are here planted. they sit upon a rack-rent, and pay s. or s. for good ploughing land, which now is clothed with excellent good _corne_.' according to the down survey, made twenty-two years later, dromore had not improved: 'there are no buildings in this parish; only dromore, it being a market town, hath some old thatched houses and a ruined church standing in it. what other buildings are in the parish are nothing but removeable _creaghts_.' to the economist and the legislator, the most interesting portions of the state papers of the th and th centuries are, undoubtedly, those which tell us how the people lived, how they were employed, housed, and fed, what measure of happiness fell to their lot, and what were the causes that affected their welfare, that made them contented and loyal, or miserable and disaffected. contemporary authors, who deal with social phenomena, are also read with special interest for the same reason. they present pictures of society in their own time, and enable us to conceive the sort of life our forefathers led, and to estimate, at least in a rough way, what they did for posterity. harris was moved to write his 'history of down' by indignation at the misrepresentations of the english press of his day. they had the audacity to say that 'the irish people were uncivilised, rude, and barbarous; that they delighted in butter _tempered_ with oatmeal, and sometimes flesh without bread, which they ate raw, having first pressed the blood out of it; and drank down large draughts of usquebaugh for digestion, reserving their little corn for the horses; that their dress and habits were no less barbarous; that cattle was their chief wealth; that they counted it no infamy to commit robberies, and that in their view violence and murder were in no way displeasing to god; that the country was overgrown with woods, which abounded in wolves and other voracious animals,' &c. it was, no doubt, very provoking that such stories should be repeated years after the plantation of ulster, and harris undertook, with laudable patriotism, to show 'how far this description of ireland was removed from the truth, from the present state of only one county in the kingdom.' the information which the well-informed writer gives is most valuable, and very much to the purpose of our present inquiry. more than half the arable ground was then (in ) under tillage, affording great quantities of oats, some rye and wheat, and 'plenty of barley,' commonly called english or spring barley, making excellent malt liquor, which of late, by means of drying the grain with kilkenny coals, was exceedingly improved. the ale made in the county was distinguished for its fine colour and flavour. the people found the benefit of '_a sufficient tillage_, being not obliged to take up with the poor unwholesome diet which the commonalty of munster and connaught had been forced to in the late years of scarcity; and sickness and mortality were not near so great as in other provinces of the kingdom.' yet the county down seemed very unfavourable for tillage. the economists of our time, perhaps our viceroys too, would say it was only fit for bullocks and sheep. it was 'naturally coarse, and full of hills; the air was sharp and cold in winter, with earlier frosts than in the south, the soil inclined to _wood_, unless constantly ploughed and kept open, and the low grounds degenerated into morass or bog where the drains were neglected. yet, by the constant labour and industry of the inhabitants, the morass grounds had of late, by burning and proper management, produced surprisingly large crops of rye and oats. coarse lands, manured with lime, had answered the farmers' views in wheat, and yielded a great produce, and wherever marl was found there was great store of barley. the staple commodity of the county was linen, due care of which manufacture brought great wealth among the people. consequently the county was observed to be 'populous and flourishing, though it did not become amenable to the laws till the reign of queen elizabeth, nor fully till the reign of james i.' the english habit, language, and manners almost universally prevailed. 'irish,' says harris, 'can be heard only among the inferior rank of _irish papists_, and even that little diminishes every day, by the great desire the poor natives have that their children should be taught to read and write in the english tongue in the charter, or other english protestant schools, to which they willingly send them.' the author exults in the progress of protestantism. there were but two catholic gentlemen in the county who had estates, and their income was very moderate. when the priests were registered in there were but thirty in the county. in the books of the hearth-money collectors showed-- protestant families in the county down , catholic families , total protestants, reckoning five a family , total catholics , ______ protestant majority , our author, who was an excellent protestant of the th century type, with boundless faith in the moral influence of the charter schools, would be greatly distressed if he could have lived in these degenerate days, and seen the last religious census, which gives the following figures for the county of down:-- protestants of all denominations , catholics , _______ total population , the total number of souls in the county in the year was , . these figures show that the population was more than trebled in years, and that the catholics have increased nearly fourfold. the history of the hertfort estate illustrates every phase of the tenant-right question. it contains , acres, and comprises the barony of upper massereene, part of the barony of upper belfast, in the county of antrim, and part of the baronies of castlereagh and lower iveagh, in the county of down; consisting altogether of no less than townlands. it extends from dunmurry to lough neagh, a distance of about fourteen miles as the crow flies. when the devon commission made its inquiry, the population upon this estate amounted to about , . it contains mountain land, and the mountains are particularly wet, because, unlike the mountains in other parts of the country, the substratum is a stiff retentive clay. at that time there was not a spot of mountain or bog upon lord hertfort's estate that was not let by the acre. about one-third of the land is of first-rate quality; there are , or , acres of mountain, and about the same quantity of land of medium quality. in the early part of elizabeth's reign this property formed a section of the immense territory ruled over by the o'neills. one of these princes was called the captain of _kill-ultagh_. in those times, when might was right, this redoubtable chief levied heavy contributions on the settlers, partly in retaliation for aggressions and outrages perpetrated by the english upon his own people. the queen, with the view of effecting a reconciliation, requested the lord deputy, sir h. sidney, to pay the irish chief a visit. he did so, but his welcome was by no means gratifying. in fact, o'neill would not condescend to receive him at all. his reason for exhibiting a want of hospitality so un-irish was this:--he said his 'home had been pillaged, his lands swept of their cattle, and his vassals shot like wild animals.' the lord deputy, in his notes of the northern tour, written in october, , says:--'i came to kill-ultagh, which i found rich and plentiful, after the manner of these countries. but the captain was proud and insolent; he would not come to me, nor have i apt reason to visit him as i would. but he shall be paid for this before long; i will not remain in his debt.' the 'apt reason' for carrying out this threat soon occurred. tyrone had once more taken the field against the queen; the captain joined his relative; all his property was consequently forfeited, and handed over to sir fulke conway, a welsh soldier of some celebrity. sir fulke died in , and his brother, who was a favourite of charles i., succeeded to the estate, to which his royal patron added the lands of derryvolgie, thus making him lord of nearly , statute acres of the broad lands of down and antrim. the conways brought over a number of english and welsh families, who settled on the estate, and intermarrying with the natives, a race of sturdy yeomen soon sprang up. the conways were good landlords, and greatly beloved by the people. with the addition made to the property the king conferred upon the fortunate recipient of his bounty the title of baron. at the close of , lord conway began the erection of a castle (finished in ) on a picturesque mount overlooking the lagan, and commanding a view of the hills of down. during the struggles of the castle was burned down, together with the greater part of the town, which up to this time was called lisnagarvah, but thenceforth it received the name of lisburn. very little, however, had been done by the settlers when the outbreak occurred, for an english traveller in remarked that 'neither the town nor the country thereabouts was _planted_, being almost all woods and moorish.' about a month after the breaking out of the rebellion the king's forces, under sir george rawdon, obtained a signal victory over the irish commanded by sir phelim o'neill, sir con m'guinness, and general plunket. in the town obtained a charter of incorporation from charles ii., and sent two members to the irish parliament, the church being at the same time made the cathedral for down and connor. the conway estates passed to the seymours in this way. popham seymour, esq., was the son of sir edward seymour, fourth baronet, described by bishop burnet as 'the ablest man of his party, the first speaker of the house of commons that was not bred to the law; a graceful man, bold and quick, and of high birth, being the elder branch of the seymour family.' popham seymour inherited the estates of the earl of conway, who was his cousin, under a will dated august , , and assumed in consequence the surname of conway. this gentleman died unmarried, and was succeeded by his brother francis, who was raised to the peerage in by the title of baron conway, of kill-ultagh, county antrim. his eldest son, the second baron, was created viscount beauchamp and earl of hertfort in . in he was viceroy of ireland, and in he was created marquis of hertfort. the present peer, born in the year , is the fourth marquis, having succeeded his father in . lisburn is classic ground. it represents all sorts of historic interest. on this hill, now called the castle gardens, the captain of kill-ultagh mustered his galloglasse. here, amid the flames of the burning town, was fought a decisive battle between the english and the irish, one of the irish chiefs in that encounter being the ancestor of the restorer of st. patrick's cathedral. the battle lasted till near midnight, when the irish were put to flight, leaving behind them dead and wounded thrice the number of the entire garrison. here, on this mount, stood william iii. in june, . i saw in the church the monument of jeremy taylor, and the pulpit from which the most eloquent of bishops delivered his immortal sermons. i saw the tablet erected by his mother to the memory of nicholson, the young hero of delhi, and those of several other natives of lisburn who have contributed, by their genius and courage, to promote the fame and power of england. among the rest lieutenant dobbs, who was killed in an encounter with paul jones, the american pirate, in carrickfergus bay. i received a hospitable welcome from a loyal gentleman in the house which was the residence of general munroe, the hero of ' , and saw the spot in the square where he was hanged in view of his own windows. but i confess that none of the monuments of the past excited so much interest in my mind as the house of louis crommelin, the huguenot refugee, who founded the linen manufacture at lisburn. that house is now occupied by mr. hugh m'call, author of 'our staple manufactures,' who worthily represents the intelligence, the public spirit, and patriotism of the english and french settlers, with a dash of the irish ardour, a combination of elements which perhaps produces the best 'staple' of character. i stood upon the identical oak floor upon which old crommelin planned and worked, and in the grave-yard mr. m'call deciphered for me the almost obliterated inscriptions, recording the deaths of various members of the crommelin family. their leader, louis himself, died in july, , aged years. the revocation of the edict of nantes drove three quarters of a million of protestants out of france. a great number settled in london, where they established the arts of silk-weaving in spitalfields and of fancy jewellery in st. giles's. about , fled to ireland, of whom many settled in dublin, where they commenced the silk manufacture, and where one of them, la touche, opened the first banking establishment. wherever they settled they were missionaries of industry, and examples of perseverance and success in skilled labour, as well as integrity in commerce. many of those exiles settled in lisburn, and the colony was subsequently joined by louis crommelin, a native of armandcourt near st. quentin, where for several centuries his forefathers had carried on the flaxen manufacture on their own extensive possessions in the province of picardy. foreseeing the storm of persecution, the family had removed to holland, and, at the personal request of the prince of orange, louis came over to take charge of the colonies of his countrymen, which had been established in different parts of ireland. the linen trade had flourished in this country from the earliest times. linen formed, down to the reign of elizabeth, almost the only dress of the population, from the king down--saffron-coloured, and worn in immense flowing robes, occasionally wrapped in various forms round the body. lord stafford had exerted himself strenuously to improve the fabric by the forcible introduction of better looms; but little had been done in this direction till the huguenots came and brought their own looms, suited for the manufacture of fine fabrics. mark dupre, nicholas de la cherois, obre, rochet, bouchoir, st. clair, and others, whose ashes lie beside the lisburn cathedral and in the neighbouring churchyards, and many of whose descendants still survive among the gentry and manufacturers of down and antrim, were, with crommelin, the chief promoters of the linen trade which has wrought such wonders in the province of ulster. lord conway granted the lisburn colonists a site for a place of worship, which was known as the french church, and stood on the ground now occupied by the court-house in castle street. the government paid l. a year to their first minister, charles de la valade, who was succeeded by his relative, the rev. saumarez du bourdieu, distinguished as a divine and a historian. his father was chaplain to the famous schomberg, and when he fell from his horse mortally wounded the reverend gentleman carried him in his arms to the spot on which he died a short time after. talent was hereditary in this family, the rev. john du bourdieu, rector of annahilt, was author of the statistical surveys of down and antrim, published by the royal dublin society. referring to his ancestors he says that his father had been fifty-six years minister of the french church in lisburn. mr. m'call states that, for some time before his death in , he held the living of lambeg, the members of the french church having by that time merged into union with the congregation of the lisburn cathedral. a similar process took place in dublin, portarlington, and elsewhere, the descendants of the huguenots becoming zealous members of the established church. du bourdieu informs us that louis crommelin obtained a patent for carrying on and improving the linen manufacture, with a grant of l. per annum, as interest of , l., to be advanced by him as a capital for carrying on the same; l. per annum for his trouble; l. per annum for three assistants; and l. for the support of the chaplain. mr. m'call, in his book, copies the following note of payments made by the government from to :-- £ s. d. louis crommelin, as overseer of linen manufacture w. crommelin, salary and rent of kilkenny factory louis crommelin, to repay him for sums advanced to flax dressers and reed makers, and for services of french ministers , louis crommelin, for individual expenses and for sums paid thomas turner, of lurgan, for buying flax-seed and printing reports louis crommelin, three years' pension french minister's two years' pension _______________ total £ , it should be mentioned, that when the owner of lisburn, then earl of hertfort, held the office of lord lieutenant in , with his son, viscount beauchamp, as chief secretary, he rendered very valuable services to the linen trade, and was a liberal patron of the damask manufacture, which arrived at a degree of perfection hitherto unequalled, in the hands of mr. william coulson, founder of the great establishment of that name which still flourishes in lisburn, and from whom not only the court of st. james's but foreign courts also received their table linen. du bourdieu mentions that lisburn and lurgan were the great markets for cambrics--the name given to cloth of this description, which was then above five shillings a yard; under that price it was called lawn. in that neighbourhood cambric had been made which sold for l. s. d. a yard unbleached. the principal manufacturing establishments in addition to messrs. coulsons' are those of the messrs. richardson and co. and the messrs. barbour. lord dufferin has written the ablest defence of the irish landlords that has ever appeared. in that masterly work he says: 'but though a dealer in land and a payer of wages, i am above all things an irishman, and as an irishman i rejoice in any circumstance which tends to strengthen the independence of the tenant farmer, or to add to the comfort of the labourer's existence.' if titles and possessions implied the inheritance of religion and blood, lord dufferin ought indeed to be 'irish of the irish' as the men of ulster in the olden times proudly called themselves. on the railroad from belfast to bangor there is a station constructed with singular beauty, like the castellated entrance to a baronial hall, and on the elaborately chiselled stone we read 'clandeboye.' under the railway from graypoint on belfast lough runs a carriage-drive two miles long, to the famous seat of the o'neills, where his lordship's mansion is situated, enclosed among aged trees, remembrancers of the past. perhaps, there is no combination of names in the kingdom more suggestive of the barbaric power of the middle ages and the most refined culture of modern civilisation. the avenue, kept like a garden walk, with a flourishing plantation on each side, was cut through some of the best farms on the estate, and must have been a work of great expense. taking this in connection with other costly improvements, among which are several picturesque buildings for the residence of workmen--model lodging-houses resembling fancy villas at the seaside--we can understand how his lordship, within the last fifteen years, has paid away in wages of labour the immense sum of , l., at the rate of , l. a year. the abbot of bangor never gave employment like that. william o'donnon, the last of the line, was found in the thirty-second year of henry viii. to be possessed of thirty-one townlands in ards and upper clandeboye, the grange of earbeg in the county antrim, the two copeland islands, the tithes of the island of raghery, three rectories in antrim, three in down, and a townland in the isle of man. the abbey, some of the walls of which still remain, adjoining the parish church, was built early in the twelfth century. we are informed by archdall, that it had so gone to ruin in through the neglect of the abbot, that he was evicted by order of pope paul ii., who commanded that the friars of the third order of st. francis should immediately take possession of it, which was accordingly done, says wadding, by father nicholas of that order. the whole of the possessions were granted by james i. to james viscount clandeboye. bangor was one of the most celebrated schools in ireland when this island was said to have been 'the _quiet_ abode of learning and sanctity.' as to the quiet, i could never make out at what period it existed, nor how the 'thousands' of students at bangor could have been supported. the danes came occasionally up the lough and murdered the monks _en masse_, plundering the shrines. but the greatest scourges of the monasteries in down and elsewhere were, not the foreign pagans and pirates, but the professedly christian chiefs of their own country. it appears, therefore, that neither the irish clergy nor the people have much reason to regret the flight of the celtic princes and nobles, who were utterly unable to fulfil the duties of a government; and who did little or nothing but consume what the industry of the peasants, under unparalleled difficulties, produced. the people of clandeboye and dufferin might have been proud that their chief received l. a year as a tribute or blackmail from lecale, that he might abstain from visiting the settlers there with his galloglasse; but lord dufferin, the successor of the o'neill of clandeboye, spends among the peasantry of the present day , l. a year in wages. and how different is the lot of the people! not dwelling in wattled huts under the oaks of the primeval forest, but in neat slated houses, with whitewashed walls, looking so bright and pretty in the sunshine, like snowdrops in the distant landscape. on the hill between bangor and newtownards, lord dufferin has erected a beautiful tower, from which, reclining on his couch, he can see the country to an immense extent, from the mountains of antrim to the mountains of mourne, strangford lough, belfast lough, the antrim coast, and portpatrick at the other side of the channel, all spread out before him like a coloured map. chapter xi. the rebellion of . the rebellion of --generally called a 'massacre'--was undoubtedly a struggle on the part of the exiled nobles and clergy and the evicted peasants to get possession of their estates and farms, which had been occupied by the british settlers for nearly a generation. they might probably have continued to occupy them in peace, but for the fanaticism of the lords justices, sir john parsons and sir john borlace. it was reported and believed that, at a public entertainment in dublin, parsons declared that in twelve months no more catholics should be seen in that country. the english puritans and scottish covenanters were determined never to lay down their arms till they had made an end of popery. pym, the celebrated puritan leader, avowed that the policy of his party was not to leave a priest alive in the land. meantime, the irish chiefs were busy intriguing at rome, madrid, paris, and other continental capitals, clamouring for an invasion of ireland, to restore monarchy and catholicity--to expel the english planters from the forfeited lands. philip iii. of spain encouraged these aspirations. he had an irish legion under the command of henry o'neill, son of the fugitive earl of tyrone. it was reported that, in there were in the service of the archduchess, in the spanish netherlands alone, irish officers able to command companies, and fit to be colonels. there were many others at lisbon, florence, milan, and naples. they had in readiness , or , stand of arms laid up at antwerp, bought out of the deduction of their monthly pay. the banished ecclesiastics formed at every court a most efficient diplomatic corps, the chief of these intriguers being the celebrated luke wadding. religious wars were popular in those times, and the invasion of ireland would be like a crusade against heresy. but with the irish chiefs the ruling passion was to get possession of their homes and their lands. the most active spirit among these was roger, or rory o'moore, a man of high character, great ability, handsome person, and fascinating manners. with him were associated conor maguire, costelloe m'mahon, and thorlough o'neill, sir phelim o'neill, sir con magennis, colonel hugh m'mahon, and the rev. dr. heber m'mahon. o'moore visited the country, went through the several provinces, and, by communicating with the chiefs personally, organised the conspiracy to expel the british and recover the kingdom for charles ii. and the pope. the plan agreed upon by the confederates was this:--a rising when the harvest was gathered in; a simultaneous attack on all the english fortresses; the surprise of dublin castle, said to contain arms for , men; and to obtain for these objects all possible aid, in officers, men, and arms, from the continent. the rising took place on the night of october , . it might have been completely successful if the castle of dublin had been seized. it seemed an easy prey, for it was guarded only by a few pensioners and forty halberdiers, who would be quickly overpowered. but the plot was made known to the lords justices by an informer when on the eve of execution. sir phelim o'neill was one of those 'irish gentlemen' who, by royal favour, were permitted to retain some portions of their ancient patrimonies. at this time he was in possession of thirty-eight townlands in the barony of dungannon, county tyrone, containing , acres, then estimated to be worth , l. a-year, equal to some , l. of our money. charles boulton held by lease from the same chief acres, at a yearly rent of l. for sixty years, in consideration of a fine of , l. in this property yielded a profit rent of l. a year. three townlands in the same barony were claimed by george rawden of lisnagarvagh, as leased to him by sir phelim under the rent of l., estimated to be worth l. per annum. sir phelim might, therefore, have been content, so far as property was concerned. but, setting aside patriotism, religion, and ambition, it is likely enough that he distrusted the government, and feared the doom pronounced in dublin castle against all the gentlemen of his creed and race. at all events he put himself at the head of the insurrection in ulster. he and the officers under his command, on the night of the nd, surprised and captured the forts of charlemont and mountjoy. the towns of dungannon, newry, carrickmacross, castleblaney, tandragee fell into the hands of the insurgents, while the o'reillys and maguires overran cavan and fermanagh. sir conor magennis wrote from newry to the government officers in down: 'we are for our lives and liberties. we desire no blood to be shed; but, if you mean to shed our blood, be sure we shall be as ready as you for that purpose.' and sir phelim o'neill issued the following proclamation:-- 'these are to intimate and make known unto all persons whatsoever, in and through the whole country, the true intent and meaning of us whose names are hereunto subscribed: . that the first assembling of us is nowise intended against our sovereign lord the king, nor hurt of any of his subjects, either english or scotch; but only for the defence and libertie of ourselves and the irish natives of this kingdom. and we further declare that whatsoever hurt hitherto hath been done to any person shall be presently repaired; and we will that every person forthwith, after proclamation hereof, make their speedy repaire unto their own houses, under paine of death, that no further hurt be done unto any one under the like paine, and that this be proclaimed in all places. 'phelim o'neill. 'at dungannon, the rd october, .' it is easy for an insurgent chief to give such orders to a tumultuous mass of excited, vindictive, and drunken men, but not so easy to enforce them. the common notion among protestants, however, that a midnight massacre of all the protestant settlers was intended, or attempted, is certainly unfounded. though horrible outrages were committed on both sides, the number of them has been greatly exaggerated. mr. prendergast quotes some contemporary authorities, which seem to be decisive on this point. in the same year was published by 'g.s., minister of god's word in ireland,' 'a brief declaration of the barbarous and inhuman dealings of the northern irish rebels ...; written to excite the english nation to relieve our poor wives and children that have escaped the rebels' savage cruelties.' this author says, it was the intention of the irish to massacre all the english. on saturday they were to disarm them; on sunday to seize all their cattle and goods; on monday, at the watchword 'skeane,' they were to cut all the english throats. the former they executed; the third only (that is the massacre) they failed in. that the massacre rested hitherto in intention only is further evident from the proclamation of the lords justices of february , ; for, while offering large sums for the heads of the chief northern gentlemen in arms (sir phelim o'neill's name heading the list with a thousand pounds), the lords justices state that the massacre had failed. many thousands had been robbed and spoiled, dispossessed of house and lands, many murdered on the spot; but the chief part of their plots (so the proclamation states), and amongst them a universal massacre, had been disappointed. but, says mr. prendergast, after lord ormond and sir simon harcourt, with the english forces, in the month of april, , had burned the houses of the gentry in the pale, and committed slaughters of unarmed men, and the scotch forces, in the same month, after beating off sir phelim o'neill's army at newry, drowned and shot men, women, and priests, in that town, who had surrendered on condition of mercy, then it was that some of sir phelim o'neill's wild followers in revenge, and in fear of the advancing army, massacred their prisoners in some of the towns in tyrone. the subsequent cruelties were not on one side only, and were magnified to render the irish detestable, so as to make it impossible for the king to seek their aid without ruining his cause utterly in england. the story of the massacre, invented to serve the politics of the hour, has been since kept up for the purposes of interest. no inventions could be too monstrous that served to strengthen the possession of irish confiscated lands. 'a true relation of the proceedings of the scots and english forces in the north of ireland,' published in , states that on monday, may , the common soldiers, without direction from the general-major, took some eighteen of the irish women of the town [newry], stripped them naked, threw them into the river, and drowned them, shooting some in the water. more had suffered so, but that some of the common soldiers were made examples of. 'a levite's lamentation,' published at the same time, thus refers to those atrocities: 'mr. griffin, mr. bartly, mr. starkey, all of ardmagh, and murdered by these bloudsuckers on the sixth of may. for, about the fourth of may, as i take it, we put neare fourty of them to death upon the bridge of the newry, amongst which were two of the pope's pedlers, two seminary priests, in return of which they slaughtered many prisoners in their custody.' a curious illustration of the spirit of that age is given in the fact that an english officer threw up his commission in disgust, because the bishop of meath, in a sermon delivered in christ church, dublin, in , pleaded for mercy to irish women and children. the unfortunate settlers fled panic-stricken from their homes, leaving behind their goods, and, in many cases, their clothes; delicate women with little children, weary and footsore, hurried on to some place of refuge. in cavan they crowded the house of the illustrious bishop bedell, at kilmore. enniskillen, derry, lisburn, belfast, carrickfergus, with some isolated castles, were still held by the english garrisons, and in these the protestant fugitives found succour and protection. before their flight they were in such terror that, according to the rev. dr. maxwell, rector of tynan, for three nights no cock was heard to crow, no dog to bark. the city of london sent four ships to londonderry with all kinds of provisions, clothing, and accoutrements for several companies of foot, and abundance of ammunition. the twelve chief companies sent each two pieces of ordnance. no doubt these liberal and seasonable supplies contributed materially to keep the city from yielding to the insurgent forces by which it was besieged. meantime the government in dublin lost not a moment in taking the most effectual measures for crushing the rebellion. lord ormond, as lieutenant-general, had soon at his disposal , men, with a fine train of field artillery, provided by strafford for his campaign in the north of england. the king, who was in scotland, procured the dispatch of , men to ulster; and authorised lords chichester and clandeboye to raise regiments among their tenants. thus the 'scottish army' was increased to about , foot, with cavalry in proportion. the irish, on the other hand, were ill-provided with arms and ammunition. they were not even provided with pikes, for they had not time to make them. the military officers counted upon did not appear, though they had promised to be on the field at fourteen days' notice. rory o'moore, like 'meagher of the sword' in , had never seen service; and sir phelim o'neill, like smith o'brien, was only a civilian when he assumed the high-sounding title of 'lord general of the catholic army in ulster.' he also took the title of 'the o'neill.' the massacre of a large number of catholics by the carrickfergus garrison, driving them over the cliffs into the sea at the point of the bayonet, madly excited the irish thirst for blood. mr. darcy magee admits that, from this date forward till the arrival of owen roe o'neill, the war assumed a ferocity of character foreign to the nature of o'moore, o'reilly, and magennis. 'that sir phelim permitted, if he did not in his gusts of stormy passion instigate, those acts of cruelty which have stained his otherwise honourable conduct, is too true; but he stood alone among his confederates in that crime, and that crime stands alone in his character. brave to rashness and disinterested to excess, few rebel chiefs ever made a more heroic end out of a more deplorable beginning.' the same eulogy would equally apply to many of the english generals. cruelty was their only crime. the irish rulers of those times, if not taken by surprise, felt at the outbreak of open rebellion much as the army feels at the breaking out of a war, in some country where plenty of prize money can be won, where the looting will be rich and the promotion rapid. relying with confidence on the power of england and the force of discipline, they knew that the active defenders of the government would be victorious in the end, and that their rewards would be estates. the more rebellions, the more forfeited territory, the more opportunities to implicate, ruin, and despoil the principal men of the hated race. the most sober writer, dealing with such facts, cannot help stirring men's blood while recording the deeds of the heroes who founded the english system of government in ireland, and secured to themselves immense tracts of its most fertile soil. what then must be the effect of the eloquent and impassioned denunciations of such writers as mr. butt, mr. a.m. sullivan, and mr. john mitchell, not to speak of the 'national press'? yet the most fiery patriot utters nothing stronger on the english rule in ireland than what the irish may read in the works of the greatest statesmen and most profound thinkers in england. the evil is in the facts, and the facts cannot be suppressed because they are the roots of our present difficulties. mr. darcy magee, one of the most moderate of irish historians, writing far away from his native land, not long before he fell by the bullet of the assassin--a martyr to his loyalty--sketches the preliminaries of confiscation at the commencement of this civil war. in munster, their chief instruments were the aged earl of cork, still insatiable as ever for other men's possessions, and the president, st. leger: in leinster, sir charles coote. lord cork prepared , indictments against men of property in his province, which he sent to the speaker of the long parliament, with an urgent request that they might be returned to him, with authority to proceed against the parties named as outlaws. in leinster, , similar indictments were found in the course of two days by the free use of the rack with witnesses. sir john read, an officer of the king's bedchamber, and mr. barnwall of kilbrue, a gentleman of threescore and six, were among those who underwent the torture. when these were the proceedings of the tribunals in peaceable cities, we may imagine what must have been the excesses of the soldiery in the open country. in the south, sir william st. leger directed a series of murderous raids upon the peasantry of cork, which at length produced their natural effect. lord muskerry and other leading recusants, who had offered their services to maintain the peace of the province, were driven by an insulting refusal to combine for their own protection. the , indictments of lord cork soon swelled their ranks, and the capture of the ancient city of cashel, by philip o'dwyer, announced the insurrection of the south. waterford soon after opened its gates to colonel edmund butler; wexford declared for the catholic cause, and kilkenny surrendered to lord mountgarret. in wicklow, coote's troopers committed murders such as had not been equalled since the days of the pagan northmen. little children were carried aloft writhing on the pikes of these barbarians, whose worthy commander confessed that 'he liked such frolics.' neither age nor sex was spared, and an ecclesiastic was especially certain of instant death. fathers higgins and white of naas, in kildare, were given up by coote to these 'lambs,' though, each had been granted a safe-conduct by his superior officer, lord ormond. and these murders were taking place at the very time when the franciscans and jesuits of cashel were protecting dr. pullen, the protestant chancellor of that cathedral and other protestant prisoners; while also the castle of cloughouter, in cavan, the residence of bishop bedell, was crowded with protestant fugitives, all of whom were carefully guarded by the chivalrous philip o'reilly. in ulster, by the end of april, there were , troops, regulars and volunteers, in the garrison or in the field. newry was taken by monroe and chichester. magennis was obliged to abandon down, and mcmahon monaghan; sir phelim was driven to burn armagh and dungannon and to take his last stand at charlemont. in a severe action with sir robert and sir william stewart, he had displayed his usual courage with better than his usual fortune, which, perhaps, we may attribute to the presence with him of sir alexander mcdonnell, brother to lord antrim, the famous _colkitto_ of the irish and scottish wars. but the severest defeat which the confederates had was in the heart of leinster, at the hamlet of kilrush, within four miles of athy. lord ormond, returning from a second reinforcement of naas and other kildare forts, at the head, by english account, of , men, found on april the catholics of the midland counties, under lords mountgarrett, ikerrin, and dunboyne, sir morgan cavenagh, rory o'moore, and hugh o'byrne, drawn up, by his report , strong, to dispute his passage. with ormond were the lord dillon, lord brabazon, sir richard grenville, sir charles coote, and sir t. lucas. the combat was short but murderous. the confederates left men, including sir morgan cavenagh and some other officers, dead on the field; the remainder retreated in disorder, and ormond, with an inconsiderable diminution of numbers, returned in triumph to dublin. for this victory the long parliament, in a moment of enthusiasm, voted the lieutenant-general a jewel worth l. if any satisfaction could be derived from such an incident, the violent death of their most ruthless enemy, sir charles coote, might have afforded the catholics some consolation. that merciless soldier, after the combat at kilrush, had been employed in reinforcing birr and relieving the castle of geashill, which the lady letitia of offally held against the neighbouring tribe of o'dempsey. on his return from this service he made a foray against a catholic force, which had mustered in the neighbourhood of trim; here, on the night of the th of may, heading a sally of his troop, he fell by a musket shot--not without suspicion of being fired from his own ranks. his son and namesake, who imitated him in all things, was ennobled at the restoration by the title of the earl of mountrath. the long parliament would not trust the king with an army in ireland. they consequently took the work of subjugation into their own hands. having confiscated , , acres of irish land, they offered it as security to 'adventurers' who would advance money to meet the cost of the war. in february, , the house of commons received a petition 'of divers well affected' to it, offering to raise and maintain forces at their own charge 'against the rebels of ireland, and afterwards to receive their recompense out of the rebels' estates.' under the act 'for the speedy reducing of the rebels' the adventurers were to carry over a brigade of , foot and horse, and to have the right of appointing their own officers. and they were to have estates given to them at the following rates: , acres for l. in ulster, for l. in connaught, for l. in munster, and l. in leinster. the rates per acre were s., s., s., and s. in those provinces respectively. the nature of the war, and the spirit in which it was conducted, may be inferred from the sort of weapons issued from the military stores. these included scythes with handles and rings, reaping-hooks, whetstones, and rubstones. they were intended for cutting down the growing corn, that the people might be starved into submission, or forced to quit the country. the commissary of stores was ordered to issue bibles to the troops, one bible for every file, that they might learn from the old testament the sin and danger of sparing idolaters. the rebellion in ulster had almost collapsed before the end of the year. the tens of thousands who had rushed to the standard of sir p. o'neill were now reduced to a number of weak and disorganised collections of armed men taking shelter in the woods. the english garrisons scoured the neighbouring counties with little opposition, and where they met any they gave no quarter. sir william cole, ancestor of the earl of enniskillen, proudly boasted of his achievement in having , of the rebels famished to death within a circuit of a few miles of his garrison. lord enniskillen is an excellent landlord, but the descendants of the remnant of the natives on his estate do not forget how the family obtained its wealth and honours. the government, however, seemed to have good reason to congratulate itself that the war was over with the irish. to these sir phelim o'neill had shown that there is something in a name: but if the name does not represent real worth and fitness for the work undertaken, it is but a shadow. it was so in sir phelim's o'neill's case. though he had courage, he was a poor general. but another hero of the same name soon appeared to redeem the honour of his race, and to show what the right man can do. at a moment when the national cause seemed to be lost, when the celtic population in ulster were meditating a wholesale emigration to the scottish highlands--'a word of magic effect was whispered from the sea-coast to the interior.' colonel owen roe o'neill had arrived off donegal with a single ship, a single company of veterans, officers, and a quantity of ammunition. he landed at doe castle, proceeded to the fort of charlemont, met the heads of the clans at clones in monaghan, was elected general-in-chief of the catholic forces, and at once set about organising an army. the catholics of the whole kingdom had joined a confederation, which held its meetings at kilkenny. a general assembly was convened for october , . the peerage was represented by fourteen lords and eleven bishops. generals were appointed for each of the other provinces, preston for leinster, barry for munster, and burke for connaught. with the anglo-irish portion of the confederacy the war was catholic, and the object religious liberty. with them there was no antipathy or animosity to the english. there was the pope's nuncio and his party, thinking most of papal interests, and there was the national party, who had been, or were likely to be, made landless. the king, then at oxford, was importuned by the confederation on the one side and the puritans on the other; one petitioning for freedom of worship, the other for the suppression of popery. pending these appeals there was a long cessation between the irish belligerents. ormond had amused the confederates with negotiations for a permanent peace and settlement, from spring till midsummer, when charles, dissatisfied with these endless delays, dispatched to ireland a more hopeful ambassador. this was herbert, earl of glamorgan, one of the few catholics remaining among the english nobility, son and heir to the marquis of worcester, and son-in-law to henry o'brien, earl of thomond. of a family devoutly attached to the royal cause, to which it is said they had contributed not less than , l., glamorgan's religion, his rank, his irish connections, the intimate confidence of the king which he was known to possess, all marked out his embassy as one of the utmost importance. the earl arrived in dublin about august , and, after an interview with ormond, proceeded to kilkenny. on the th of that month, preliminary articles were agreed to and signed by the earl on behalf of the king, and by lords montgarrett and muskerry on behalf of the confederates. it was necessary, it seems, to get the concurrence of the viceroy to these terms, and accordingly the negotiators on both sides repaired to dublin. here ormond contrived to detain them ten long weeks in discussions on the articles relating to religion; it was the th of november when they returned to kilkenny, with a much modified treaty. on the next day, the th, the new papal nuncio, a prelate who, by his rank, his eloquence, and his imprudence, was destined to exercise a powerful influence on the catholic councils, made his public entry into that city. this personage was john baptist rinuccini, archbishop of fermo in the marches of ancona, which see he had preferred to the more exalted dignity of florence. from limerick, borne along on his litter, such was the feebleness of his health, he advanced by slow stages to kilkenny, escorted by a guard of honour, despatched on that duty by the supreme council. the pomp and splendour of his public entry into the catholic capital was a striking spectacle. the previous night he slept at a village three miles from the city, for which he set out early on the morning of november , escorted by his guard and a vast multitude of the people. five delegates from the supreme council accompanied him. a band of fifty students, mounted on horseback, met him on the way, and their leader, crowned with laurel, recited some congratulatory latin verses. at the city gate he left the litter and mounted a horse richly housed; here the procession of the clergy and the city guilds awaited him: at the market cross, a latin oration was delivered in his honour, to which he graciously replied in the same language. from the cross he was escorted to the cathedral, at the door of which he was received by the aged bishop, dr. david rothe. at the high altar he intonated the _te deum_, and gave the multitude the apostolic benediction. then he was conducted to his lodgings, where he was soon waited upon by lord muskerry and general preston, who brought him to kilkenny castle, where, in the great gallery, which elicited even a florentine's admiration, he was received in stately formality by the president of the council--lord mountgarrett. another latin oration on the nature of his embassy was delivered by the nuncio, responded to by heber, bishop of clogher, and so the ceremony of reception ended.[ ] [footnote : darcy magee, vol. ii. p. .] after a long time spent in negotiations, the celebrated glamorgan treaty was signed by ormond for the king, and lord muskerry and the other commissioners for the confederates. it conceded, in fact, all the most essential claims of the irish--equal rights as to property, in the army, in the universities, and at the bar; gave them seats in both houses and on the bench; authorised a special commission of oyer and terminer, composed wholly of confederates; and declared that 'the independency of the parliament of ireland on that of england' should be decided by declaration of both houses 'agreeably to the laws of the kingdom of ireland.' in short, this final form of glamorgan's treaty gave the irish catholics, in , all that was subsequently obtained, either for the church or the country, in , , or . 'though some conditions were omitted, to which rinuccini and a majority of the prelates attached importance, glamorgan's treaty was, upon the whole, a charter upon which a free church and a free people might well have stood, as the fundamental law of their religious and civil liberties.' general o'neill was greatly annoyed at these delays. political events in england swayed the destiny of ireland then as now. the poor vacillating, double-dealing king was delivered to the puritans, tried, and executed. but before cromwell came to smash the confederation and everything papal in ireland, the irish chief gladdened the hearts of his countrymen by the glorious victory of benburb, one of the most memorable in irish history. in a naturally strong position, the irish, for four hours, received and repulsed the various charges of the puritan horse. then as the sun began to descend, pouring its rays upon the enemy, o'neill led his whole force--five thousand men against eight--to the attack. one terrible onset swept away every trace of resistance. there were counted on the field , of the covenanters, and of the catholics but killed and wounded. lord ardes, and scottish officers, standards, , draught horses, and all the guns and tents, were captured. monroe fled to lisburn and thence to carrickfergus, where he shut himself up till he could obtain reinforcements. o'neill forwarded the captured colours to the nuncio at limerick, by whom they were solemnly placed in the choir of st. mary's cathedral, and afterwards, at the request of pope innocent, sent to rome. the _te deum_ was chanted in the confederate capital; penitential psalms were sung in the northern fortresses. 'the lord of hosts,' wrote monroe, 'has rubbed shame on our faces till once we are humbled.' o'neill emblazoned the cross and keys on his banner with the red hand of ulster, and openly resumed the title originally chosen by his adherents at clones, 'the catholic army.' the stage of irish politics now presented the most extraordinary complications political and military. the confederation was occupied with endless debates and dissensions. commanders changed positions so rapidly, the several causes for which men had been fighting became so confused in the unaccountable scene-shifting, giving glimpses now of the king, now of the commonwealth, and now of the pope, that no one knew what to do, or what was to be the end. the nuncio went home in disgust that his blessings and his curses, which he dispensed with equal liberality, had so little effect. at length appeared an actor who gave a terrible unity to the drama of irish politics. cromwell left london in july , 'in a coach drawn by six gallant flanders mares,' and made a grand progress to bristol. he landed at ring's end, near dublin, on august . he entered the city in procession and addressed the people from 'a convenient place,' accompanied by his son henry, blake, jones, ireton, ludlow, hardress, waller, and others. the history of cromwell's military exploits in ireland is well known. i pass on, therefore, to notice the effects of the war on the condition of the people. as usual, in such cases, the destruction of the crops and other provisions by the soldiers, brought evil to the conquerors as well as to their victims. there had been a fifteen years' war in ulster, when james i. ascended the throne, and it left the country waste and desolate. sir john davis, his attorney-general, asserted the unquestionable fact that perpetual war had been continued between the two nations for 'four hundred and odd years,' and had always for its object to 'root out the irish.' james was to put an end to this war, and, as we have seen, the lord deputy promised the people 'estates' in their holdings. the effect of this promise, as recorded by davis, is remarkable. 'he thus made it a year of jubilee to the poor inhabitants, because every man was to return to his own house, and be restored to his ancient possessions, and they all went home rejoicing.' poor people! they soon saw the folly of putting their trust in princes. now, after a seven years' war, the nation was again visited with famine, and the country converted into a wilderness. three-fourths of the cattle had been destroyed; and the commissioners for ireland reported to the council in england in , that four parts in five of the best and most fertile land in ireland lay waste and uninhabited, stating that they had encouraged the irish to till the land, promising them the enjoyment of the crops. they had also given orders 'for enforcing those that were removed to the mountains to return.' the soldiers were employed to till the lands round their posts. corn had to be imported to dublin from wales. so scarce was meat that a widow was obliged to petition the authorities for permission to kill a lamb; and she was 'permitted and lycensed to kill and dresse so much lambe as shall be necessary for her own eating, not exceeding three lambes for this whole year, notwithstanding any declaration of the said commissioners of parliament to the contrary.'[a] this privilege was granted to mrs. buckley in consideration of 'her old age and weakness of body.' in the irish revenue from all sources was only , l., while the cost of the army was , l. a sort of conditional amnesty was granted from necessity, pending the decision of parliament, and on may , , the leinster army of the irish surrendered on terms signed at kilkenny, which were adopted successively by the other principal armies between that time and the september following, when the ulster forces surrendered. by these kilkenny articles, all except those who were guilty of the first blood were received into protection on laying down their arms; those who should not be satisfied with the conclusions the parliament might come to concerning the irish nation, and should desire to transport themselves with their men to serve any foreign state in amity with the parliament, should have liberty to treat with their agents for that purpose. but the commissioners undertook faithfully to mediate with the parliament that they might enjoy such a remnant of their lands as might make their lives comfortable at home, or be enabled to emigrate. [footnote : prendergast, the cromwellian settlement, p. .] the cromwellian administration in ireland effected a revolution unparalleled in history. its proceedings have been well summarised by mr. darcy magee:-- the long parliament, still dragging out its days under the shadow of cromwell's great name, declared in its session of the rebellion in ireland 'subdued and ended,' and proceeded to legislate for that kingdom as a conquered country. on august they passed their act of settlement, the authorship of which was attributed to lord orrery, in this respect the worthy son of the first earl of cork. under this act there were four chief descriptions of persons whose status was thus settled: . all ecclesiastics and royalist proprietors were exempted from pardon of life or estate. . all royalist commissioned officers were condemned to banishment, and the forfeit of two-thirds of their property, one-third being retained for the support of their wives and children. . those who had not been in arms, but could be shown, by a parliamentary commission, to have manifested 'a constant, good affection' to the war, were to forfeit one-third of their estates, and receive 'an equivalent' for the remaining two-thirds west of the shannon. . all husbandmen and others of the inferior sort, 'not possessed of lands or goods exceeding the value of l.,' were to have a free pardon, on condition also of transporting themselves across the shannon. this last condition of the cromwellian settlement distinguished it, in our annals, from every other proscription of the native population formerly attempted. the great river of ireland, rising in the mountains of leitrim, nearly severs the five western counties from the rest of the kingdom. the province thus set apart, though one of the largest in superficial extent, had also the largest proportion of waste and water, mountain and moorland. the new inhabitants were there to congregate from all the other provinces before the first day of may, , under penalty of outlawry and all its consequences; and when there, they were not to appear within two miles of the shannon, or four miles of the sea. a rigorous passport system, to evade which was death without form of trial, completed this settlement, the design of which was to shut up the remaining catholic inhabitants from all intercourse with mankind, and all communion with the other inhabitants of their own country. a new survey of the whole kingdom was also ordered, under the direction of dr. william petty, the fortunate economist who founded the house of lansdowne. by him the surface of the kingdom was estimated at , , plantation acres, three of which were deducted for waste and water. of the remainder, above , , were in catholic hands, in ; , were church and college lands; and , , were in possession of the protestant settlers of the reigns of james and elizabeth. under the protectorate, , , acres were confiscated; this enormous spoil, two-thirds of the whole island, went to the soldiers and adventurers who had served against the irish, or had contributed to the military chest, since --except , acres given in 'exchange' to the banished in clare and connaught; and , , confirmed to 'innocent papists.' such was the complete uprooting of the ancient tenantry or clansmen from their original holdings, that, during the survey, orders of parliament were issued to bring back individuals from connaught to point out the boundaries of parishes in munster. it cannot be imputed among the sins so freely laid to the historical account of the native legislature, that an irish parliament had any share in sanctioning this universal spoliation. cromwell anticipated the union of the kingdoms by years, when he summoned, in , that assembly over which 'praise-god barebones' presided; members for ireland and scotland sat on the same benches with the commons of england. oliver's first deputy in the government of ireland was his son-in-law fleetwood, who had married the widow of ireton; but his real representative was his fourth son henry cromwell, commander-in-chief of the army. in , the title of lord deputy was transferred from fleetwood to henry, who united the supreme civil and military authority in his own person until the eve of the restoration, of which he became an active partisan. we may thus properly embrace the five years of the protectorate as a period of henry cromwell's administration. in the absence of a parliament, the government of ireland was vested in the deputy, the commander-in-chief, and four commissioners, ludlow, corbett, jones, and weaver. there was, moreover, a high court of justice, which perambulated the kingdom, and exercised an absolute authority over life and property greater than even strafford's court of star chamber had pretended to. over this court presided lord lowther, assisted by mr. justice donnellan, by cooke, solicitor to the parliament on the trial of king charles, and the regicide reynolds. by this court, sir phelim o'neill, viscount mayo, and colonels o'toole and bagnall were condemned and executed; children of both sexes were captured by thousands, and sold as slaves to the tobacco-planters of virginia and the west indies. sir william petty states that , boys and girls were sent to those islands. the number, of all ages, thus transported, was estimated at , souls. as to the 'swordsmen' who had been trained to fighting, petty, in his _political anatomy_, records that 'the chiefest and most eminentest of the nobility and many of the gentry had taken conditions from the king of spain, and had transported , of the most active, spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war.' the chief commissioners in dublin had despatched assistant commissioners to the provinces. the distribution which they made of the soil was nearly as complete as that of canaan among the israelites; and this was the model which the puritans had always before their minds. where a miserable residue of the population was required to till the land for its new owners, they were tolerated as the gibeonites had been by joshua. irish gentlemen who had obtained pardons were obliged to wear a distinctive mark on their dress on pain of death. persons of inferior rank were distinguished by a black spot on the right cheek. wanting this, their punishment was the branding-iron or the gallows. no vestige of the catholic religion was allowed to exist. catholic lawyers and schoolmasters were silenced. all ecclesiastics were slain like the priests of baal. three bishops and of the inferior clergy thus perished. the bedridden bishop of kilmore was the only native clergyman permitted to survive. if, in mountain recesses or caves, a few peasants were detected at mass, they were smoked out and shot. thus england got rid of a race concerning which mr. prendergast found this contemporary testimony in a ms. in trinity college library, dublin, dated :-- 'there lives not a people more hardy, active, and painful ... neither is there any will endure the miseries of warre, as famine, watching, heat, cold, wet, travel, and the like, so naturally and with such facility and courage that they do. the prince of orange's excellency uses often publiquely to deliver that the irish are souldiers the first day of their birth. the famous henry iv., late king of france, said there would prove no nation so resolute martial men as they, would they be ruly and not too headstrong. and sir john norris was wont to ascribe this particular to that nation above others, that he never beheld so few of any country as of irish that were idiots and cowards, which is very notable.' at the end of , the parliament made a division of the spoil among the conquerors and the adventurers; and, on september , an act was passed for the new planting of ireland by english. the government reserved for itself the towns, the church lands, and the tithes, the established church, hierarchy and all, having been utterly abolished. the four counties of dublin, kildare, carlow, and cork were also reserved. the amount due to the adventurers was , l. this they divided into three lots, of which , l. was to be satisfied in munster, , l. in leinster, and , l. in ulster, and the moiety of ten counties was charged with their payment--waterford, limerick, and tipperary, in munster; meath, westmeath, king's and queen's counties, in leinster; and antrim, down, and armagh, in ulster. but, as all was required by the adventurers act to be done by lot, a lottery was appointed to be held in grocers' hall, london, for july , , to begin at o'clock in the morning, when lots should be first drawn in which province each adventurer was to be satisfied, not exceeding the specified amounts in any province; lots were to be drawn, secondly, to ascertain in which of the ten counties each adventurer was to receive his land--the lots not to exceed in westmeath , l., in tipperary , l., in meath , l., in king's and queen's counties , l. each, in limerick , l., in waterford , l., in antrim, down, and armagh , l. each. and, as it was thought it would be a great encouragement to the adventurers (who were for the most part merchants and tradesmen), about to plant in so wild and dangerous a country, not yet subdued, to have soldier planters near them, these ten counties, when surveyed (which was directed to be done immediately, and returned to the committee for the lottery at grocers' hall), were to be divided, each county by baronies, into two moieties, as equally as might be, without dividing any barony. a lot was then to be drawn by the adventurers, and by some officer appointed by the lord general cromwell on behalf of the soldiery, to ascertain which baronies in the ten counties should be for the adventurers, and which for the soldiers. the rest of ireland, except connaught, was to be set out amongst the officers and soldiers for their arrears, amounting to , , l., and to satisfy debts of money or provisions due for supplies advanced to the army of the commonwealth amounting to , , l. connaught being by the parliament reserved and appointed for the habitation of the irish nation, all english and protestants having lands there, who should desire to remove out of connaught into the provinces inhabited by the english, were to receive estates in the english parts, of equal value, in exchange. the next thing was to clear out the remnant of the inhabitants, and the overture to this performance was the following merciful proclamation:-- 'the parliament of the commonwealth of england having by one act lately passed (entitled an act for the settling of ireland) declared that _it is not their intention to extirpate this whole nation_, but that mercy and pardon for life and estate be extended to all husbandmen, plowmen, labourers, artificers, and others of the inferior sort, in such manner as in and by the said act is set forth: for the better execution of the said act, and that timely notice may be given to all persons therein concerned, it is ordered that the governor and commissioners of revenue, or any two or more of them, within every precinct in this nation, do cause the said act of parliament with this present declaration to be published and proclaimed in their respective precincts _by beat of drumme and sound of trumpett_, on some markett day, within tenn days after the same shall come unto them within their respective precincts. 'dated at the castle of kilkenny, this th october, . 'edmund ludlow, miles corbet, 'john jones, r. weaver.' a letter from dublin, dated december , , four days before christmas, says the 'transplantation is now far advanced, the men being gone to prepare their new habitations in connaught. their wives and children and dependants have been, and are, packing away after them apace, and all are to be gone by the st of march next.' in another letter the writer _naïvely_ remarks, 'it is the nature of this people to be rebellious, and they have been so much the more disposed to it, having been highly exasperated to it by the transplanting work.' the temper of the settlers towards the natives may be inferred from a petition to the lord deputy and council of ireland, praying for the enforcement of the original order requiring the removal of all the irish nation into connaught, except boys of fourteen and girls of twelve. 'for we humbly conceive,' say the petitioners, 'that the proclamation for transplanting only the proprietors, and such as have been in arms, will neither answer the end of safety nor what else is aimed at thereby. for the first purpose of the transplantation is to prevent those of natural principles' (i.e. of natural affections) 'becoming one with these irish, as well in affinity as idolatry, as many thousands did who came over in elizabeth's time, many of which have had a deep hand in all the late murders and massacres. and shall we join in affinity,' they ask, 'with a people of these abominations? would not the lord be angry with us till he consumes us, having said--"the land which ye go to possess is an unclean land, because of the filthiness of the people who dwell therein. ye shall not, therefore, give your sons to their daughters, nor take their daughters to your sons," as it is in ezra ix. , , . "nay, ye shall surely root them out, lest they cause you to forsake the lord your god." deut. c. vii. &c.' in this way they hoped that 'honest men' would be encouraged to come and live amongst them, because the other three provinces (that is, all the island but connaught) would be free of 'tories,' when there was none left to harbour or relieve them. they would have made a clean sweep of munster, leinster, and ulster, so that 'the saints' might inherit the land without molestation. if any protestant friends of the irish objected to this thorough mode of effecting the work of irish regeneration, colonel lawrence 'doubted not but god would enable that authority yet in being to let out that dram of rebellious bloud, and cure that fit of sullenness their advocate speaks of.' the commissioners appointed to effect the transplantation were painfully conscious of their unworthiness to perform so holy a work, and were overwhelmed with a sense of their weakness in the midst of such tremendous difficulties, so that they were constrained to say: 'the child is now come to the birth, and much is desired and expected, but there is no strength to bring forth.' they therefore fasted and humbled themselves before the lord, inviting the officers of the army to join them in lifting up prayers, 'with strong crying and tears, to him to whom nothing is too strong, that his servants, whom he had called forth in this day to act in these great transactions, might be made faithful, and carried on by his own outstretched arm, against all opposition and difficulty, to do what was pleasing in his sight.' it is true they had this consolation, 'that the chiefest and eminentest of the nobility and many of the gentry had taken conditions from the king of spain, and had transported , of the most active, spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war.' the priests were all banished. the remaining part of the whole nation was scarce one-sixth of what they were at the beginning of the war, so great a devastation had god and man brought upon that land; and that handful of natives left were poor labourers, simple creatures, whose sole design was to live and maintain their families.' of course there were many exceptions to this rule. there were some of the upper classes remaining, described in the certificates which all the emigrants were obliged to procure, like sir nicholas comyn, of limerick, 'who was numb at one side of his body of a dead palsy, accompanied only by his lady, catherine comyn, aged thirty-five years, flaxen-haired, middle stature; and one maid servant, honor m'namara, aged twenty years, brown hair, middle stature, having no substance,' &c. from tipperary went forth james, lord dunboyne, with followers, and having cows, garrons, and swine. dame catherine morris, followers, cows, garrons, goats, swine. lady mary hamilton, of roscrea, with persons, cows, garrons, sheep, goats. pierce, lord viscount ikerrin, with persons, having acres of winter corn, cows, garrons, sheep, swine, &c. there were other noblemen, lords of the pale, descended from illustrious english ancestors, the fitzgeralds, the butlers, the plunkets, the barnwells, the dillons, the cheevers, the cusacks, &c., who petitioned, praying that their flight might not be in the winter, or alleging that their wives and children were sick, that their cattle were unfit to drive, or that they had crops to get in. to them dispensations were granted, provided the husbands and parents were in connaught building huts, &c., and that not more than one or two servants remained behind to look after the respective herds and flocks, and to attend to the gathering in and threshing of the corn. and some few, such as john talbot de malahide, got a pass for safe travelling from connaught to come back, in order to dispose of their corn and goods, giving security to return within the time limited. if they did not return they got this warning in the month of march--that the officers had resolved to fill the jails with them, 'by which this bloody people will know that they (the officers) are not degenerated from english principles. though i presume we should be very tender of hanging any except leading men, yet we shall make no scruple of sending them to the west indies,' &c. accordingly when the time came, all the remaining crops were seized and sold; there was a general arrest of all 'transplantable persons. all over the three provinces, men and women were hauled out of their beds in the dead hour of night to prison, till the jails were choked.' in order to further expedite the removal of the nobility and gentry, a court-martial sat in st. patrick's cathedral, and ordered the lingering delinquents, who shrunk from going to connaught, to be hanged, with a placard on the breast and back of each victim--'_for not transplanting.'_ scully's conduct at ballycohy, was universally execrated. but what did he attempt to do? just what the cromwellian officers did at the end of a horrid civil war years ago, with this difference in favour of cromwell, that scully did not purpose to 'transplant,' he would simply uproot, leaving the uprooted to perish on the highway. his conduct was as barbarous as that of the cromwellian officers. but what of scully? he is nothing. the all-important fact is, that, in playing a part worse than cromwellian, he, _acting according to english law, was supported by all the power of the state_; and if the men who defended their homes against his attack had been arrested and convicted, irish judges would have consigned them to the gallows; and they might, as in the cromwellian case, have ordered a placard to be put on their persons:-- 'for not transplanting!' in fact the cromwellian commissioners did nothing more than carry out fully the _principles_ of our present land code. nine-tenths of the soil of ireland are held by tenants at will. it is constantly argued in the leading organs of english opinion, that the power of the landlords to resume possession of their estates, and turn them into pastures, evicting all the tenants, is _essential_ to the rights of property. this has been said in connection with the great absentee proprietors. according to this theory of proprietorship, the only one recognised by law, lord lansdowne may legally spread desolation over a large part of kerry; lord fitzwilliam may send the ploughshare of ruin through the hearths of half the county wicklow; lord digby, in the king's county, may restore to the bog of allen vast tracts reclaimed during many generations by the labour of his tenants; and lord hertfort may convert into a wilderness the district which the descendants of the english settlers have converted into the garden of ulster. if any or all of those noblemen took a fancy, like colonel bernard of kinnitty or mr. allen pollok, to become graziers and cattle-jobbers on a gigantic scale, the government would be compelled to place the military power of the state at their disposal, to evict the whole population in the queen's name, to drive all the families away from their homes, to demolish their dwellings, and turn them adrift on the highway, without one shilling compensation. villages, schools, churches would all disappear from the landscape; and, when the grouse season arrived, the noble owner might bring over a party of english friends to see his '_improvements!_' the right of conquest so cruelly exercised by the cromwellians is in this year of grace _a legal right_; and its exercise is a mere question of expediency and discretion. there is not a landlord in ireland who may not be a scully if he wishes. it is not law or justice, it is not british power, that prevents the enactment of cromwellian scenes of desolation in every county of that unfortunate country. it is self-interest, with humanity, in the hearts of good men, and the dread of assassination in the hearts of bad men, that prevent at the present moment the immolation of the irish people to the moloch of territorial despotism. it is the effort to render impossible those human sacrifices, those holocausts of christian households, that the priests of feudal landlordism denounce so frantically with loud cries of '_confiscation_.' the 'graces' promised by charles i. in demonstrate the real wretchedness of the country to which they were deceitfully offered, and from which they were treacherously withdrawn. from them we learn that the government soldiers were a terror to more than the king's enemies, that the king's rents were collected at the sword's point, and that numerous monopolies and oppressive taxes impoverished the country. there was little security for estates in any part of ireland, and none at all for estates in connaught. no man could sue out livery for his lands without first taking the oath of the royal supremacy. the soldiers enjoyed an immunity in the perpetration of even capital crimes, for the civil power could not touch them. those who were married, or had their children baptized, by roman catholic priests, were liable to fine and censure. the protestant bishops and clergy were in great favour and had enormous privileges. the patentees of dissolved religious houses claimed exemption from various assessments. the ministers of the established church were entitled to the aid of the government in exacting reparation for clandestine exercises of spiritual jurisdiction by roman catholic priests, and actually appear to have kept private prisons of their own. they exacted tithes from roman catholics of everything titheable. the eels of the rivers and lakes, the fishes of the sea paid them toll. the dead furnished the mortuary fees to the 'alien church' in the shape of the best clothes which the wardrobe of the defunct afforded. the government of wentworth, better known as the earl of strafford, is highly praised by high churchmen and admirers of laud, but was execrated by the irish, who failed to appreciate the mercies of his star-chamber court, or to recognise the justice of his fining juries who returned disagreeable verdicts. the list of grievances, transmitted by the irish house of peers in to the english government, cannot be regarded as altogether visionary, for it was vouched by the names of lords, spiritual and temporal, whose attachment to the english interest was undoubted. the lord chancellor (loftus), the archbishop of dublin (bulkeley), the bishops of meath, clogher, and killala were no rebels, and yet they protested against the grievances inflicted on ireland by the tyranny of strafford. according to these contemporary witnesses, the irish nobles had been taxed beyond all proportion to the english nobles; irish peers had been sent to prison although not impeached of treason or any capital offence; the deputy had managed to keep all proxies of peers in the hands of his creatures, and thus to sway the upper house to his will; the trade of the kingdom had been destroyed; and the 'graces' of had been denied to the nation, or clogged by provisoes which rendered them a mockery. and yet, in the face of such evidence of misery and misgovernment, the archbishop of dublin asserted in a charge to his clergy, that 'all contemporary writers agree in describing the flourishing condition of the island, and its rapid advance in civilisation and wealth, when all its improvement was brought to an end by the catastrophe of the irish rebellion of '--the very year in which the irish houses of lords and commons agreed in depicting the condition of ireland as utterly miserable! but archbishop trench not only contradicts the authentic contemporary records, in picturing as halcyon days one of the most wretched periods of irish history, but also wrongfully represents one of the saddest episodes of that history. he reminded his clergy 'that the number of protestants who were massacred by the roman catholics during the rebellion was, by the most moderate estimate, set down as , .' his grace seems to have been unacquainted with the contemporary evidence collected by the protestant historian warner, who examined the depositions of , on which the story of the massacre was based, and found the estimate of those who perished in the so-called massacre to have been enormously exaggerated. he calculated the number of those killed, 'upon evidence collected within two years after the rebellion broke out,' at , , besides , said to have perished through bad usage. the parliament commissioners in dublin, writing in to the commissioners in england, say that, 'besides families, there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned , . thus there were two estimates--one of , , the other of , --each of which was far lower than the estimate of , , which his grace calls 'the most moderate.' it turns out, moreover, that the argument based by archbishop trench on the false estimate of those said to have been massacred, is wholly worthless for the purpose intended by his grace. the disproportion of protestants to roman catholics, which appears by the census of , cannot be accounted for by the statistics of --be those statistics true or false. for the proportion of protestants to roman catholics was higher in --thirty years after the alleged massacre--than in . the protestants in , according to sir w. petty, numbered , , and the roman catholics , ; while in there were found in ireland only , , protestants of all denominations to , , roman catholics. it follows from these figures, as has been already remarked by dr. maziere brady, that there has been a relative decrease of protestants, as compared with roman catholics, of , persons. and this relative decrease was in no way affected--inasmuch as it took place since the year --by the alleged massacre of . chapter xii. the puritan plantation. it is a fearful thing to undertake the destruction of a nation by slaughter, starvation, and banishment. when we read of such enormities, perpetrated by some 'scourge of god,' in heathen lands and distant ages, we are horrified, and we thank providence that it is our lot to be born in a christian country. but what must the world think of our christianity when they read of the things that, in a most bible-reading age, englishmen did in ireland? the work of transplanting was slow, difficult, and intensely painful to the irish, for connaught was bleak, sterile, and desolate, and the weather was inclement. the natural protectors of many families had been killed or banished, and the women and children clung with frantic fondness to their old homes. but for the feelings of such afflicted ones the conquerors had no sympathy. on the contrary, they believed that god, angry at their lingering, sent his judgments as a punishment. mr. prendergast has published a number of letters, written at the time by the english authorities and others, from which some interesting matters may be gleaned. the town of cashel had got a dispensation to remain. 'but,' says the writer, 'the lord, who is a jealous god, and more knowing of, as well as jealous against their iniquity than we, by a fire on the rd inst. hath burned down the whole town in little less than a quarter of an hour, except a few houses that a few english lived in,' &c. in consequence of the delay, the irish began to break into 'torying' (plundering). 'the tories fly out and increase. what strange people, not to starve in peace.' to be inclined to plunder under such circumstances, with so gracious a government, must be held to be a proof of great natural depravity, as well as of a peculiar incapacity to respect, or even to understand, the rights of property. at length, however, the land was ready for the enjoyment of the officers and soldiers. on august , , the lord deputy, fleetwood, thus addressed one of the officers:-- 'sir,--in pursuance of his highness's command, the council here with myself and chief officers of the army having concluded about disbanding part of the army, in order to lessening the present charge, it is fit that your troope be one. and, accordingly, i desire you would march such as are willing to plant of them into the barony of shelmaliere, in the county of wexford, at or before the first day of september, where you shall be put into possession of your lands, for your arrears, according to the rates agreed on by the committee and agents. as also you shall have, upon the place wherein you are, so much money as shall answer the present three months' arrear due to you and your men, but to continue no longer the pay of the army than upon the muster of this august. the sooner you march your men the better; thereby you will be enabled to make provision for the winter.' after some sweetening hints that they will be perhaps paid hereafter as a militia he concludes:-- 'and great is your mercy, that after all your hardships and difficulties you may sit down, and, if the lord give his blessing, may reape some fruits of your past services. do not think it a blemish or underrating of your past services, that you are now disbanded; but look upon it as of the lord's appointing, and with cheerfulness submit thereunto; and the blessing of the lord be upon you all, and keep you in his fear, and give you hearts to observe your past experience of signal appearances. and that this fear may be seen in your hearts, and that you may be kept from the sins and pollutions which god hath so eminently witnessed against in those whose possessions you are to take up, is the desire of him who is 'your very affectionate friend, to love and serve you, 'charles fleetwood.' he congratulated them that, 'having by the blessing of god obtained their peace, they might sit down in the enjoyment of the enemies' fields and houses, which they planted not nor built not. they had no reason to repent their services, considering how great an issue god had given.' yet many refused to settle, and sold their debentures to their officers. what could they do with the farms? they had no horses or ploughs, no cattle to stock the land, no labourers to till it. above all, they had no women. flogging was the punishment for amours with irish girls, and marriage with the idolatrous race was forbidden under heavy penalties. hence the soldiers pretended that their wives were converted to protestantism. but this was to be tested by a strict examination of each as to the state of her soul, and the means by which she had been enlightened. if she did not stand the test, her husband was degraded in rank, and, if disbanded, he was liable to be sent to connaught with the fair seducer. the charms of the irish women, however, proved irresistible, and the hearts of the pious rulers were sorely troubled by this danger. 'in , amongst the first plans for paying the army their arrears in land, it was suggested there should be a law that any officers or soldiers marrying irishwomen should lose their commands, forfeit their arrears, and be made incapable of inheriting lands in ireland. no such provision, however, was introduced into the act, because it provided against this danger more effectually by ordering the women to transplant, together with the whole nation, to connaught. those in authority, however, ought never to have let the english officers and soldiers come in contact with the irishwomen, or should have ordered another army of young englishwomen over, if they did not intend this provision to be nugatory. planted in a wasted country, amongst the former owners and their families, with little to do but to make love, and no lips to make love to but irish, love or marriage must follow between them as necessarily as a geometrical conclusion follows from the premises. for there were but few who (in the language of a cromwellian patriot), ----'rather than turne from english principles, would sooner burne; and rather than marrie an irish wife, would batchellers remain for tearme of life.' about forty years after the cromwellian settlement, and just seven years after the battle of the boyne, the following was written: 'we cannot so much wonder at this [the quick "degenerating" of the english of ireland], when we consider how many there are of the children of oliver's soldiers in ireland who cannot speak one word of english. and (which is strange) the same may be said of some of the children of king william's soldiers who came but t'other day into the country. this misfortune is owing to the marrying irishwomen for want of english, who come not over in so great numbers as are requisite. 'tis sure that no englishman in ireland knows what his children may be as things are now; they cannot well live in the country without growing irish; for none take such care as sir jerome alexander [second justice of the common pleas in ireland from to his death in ], who left his estate to his daughter, but made the gift void if she married any irishman;' sir jerome including in this term 'any lord of ireland, any archbishop, bishop, prelate, any baronet, knight, esquire, or gentleman of irish extraction or descent, born and bred in ireland, or having his relations and means of subsistence there,' and expressly, of course, any 'papist.'--'true way to render ireland happy and secure; or, a discourse, wherein 'tis shown that 'tis the interest both of england and ireland to encourage foreign protestants to plant in ireland; in a letter to the hon. robert molesworth.'[ ] [footnote : cromwellian settlement, p. .] the impossibility of getting a sufficient number of settlers from england to cultivate the land, produce food, and render the estates worth holding, led to some fraudulent transactions for the benefit of the natives who were 'loath to leave.' the officers in various counties got general orders giving dispensations from the necessity of planting with english tenants, and liberty to take irish, provided they were not proprietors or swordsmen. but the proprietors who had established friendships with their conquerors secretly became tenants under them to parts of their former estates, ensuring thereby the connivance of their new landlords against their transplantation. on june , , the commissioners for the affairs of ireland (fleetwood, lord deputy, one of them), being then at limerick, discovered this fraud, and issued a peremptory order revoking all former dispensations for english proprietors to plant with irish tenants; and they enjoined upon the governor of limerick and all other officers the removing of the proprietors thus sheltered and their families into connaught, on or before that day three weeks. but, happily, says mr. prendergast, all penal laws against a nation are difficult of execution. the officers still connived with many of the poor irish gentry and sheltered them, which caused fleetwood, then commander of the parliament forces in ireland, upon his return to dublin, and within a fortnight after the prescribed limit for their removal was expired, to thunder forth from dublin castle a severe reprimand to all officers thus offending. their neglect to search for and apprehend the transplantable proprietors was denounced as a great dishonour and breach of discipline of the army; and their entertaining any of them as tenants was declared a hindrance to the planting of ireland with english protestants. 'i do therefore,' the order continued, 'hereby order and declare, that if any officer or soldier under my command shall offend by neglect of his duty in searching for and apprehending all such persons as by the declaration of november , , are to transplant themselves into connaught; or by entertaining them as tenants on his lands, or as servants under him, he shall be punished by the articles of war as negligent of his duty, according to the demerit of such his neglect.' the english parliament resolved to clear out the population of all the principal cities and seaport towns, though nearly all founded and inhabited by danes or english, and men of english descent. in order to raise funds for the war, the following towns were offered to english merchants for sale at the prices annexed:--limerick, with , acres contiguous, for , l., and a rent of l. payable to the state; waterford, with , acres contiguous, at the same rate; galway, with , acres, for , l., and a rent of l.; wexford, with , acres, for , l., and a rent of l. s. there were no bidders; but still the government adhered to its determination to clear out the irish, and supply their place with a new english population. artisans were excepted, but strictly limited in number, each case being particularly described and registered, while dispensations were granted to certain useful persons, on the petition of the settlers who needed their services. on july in the same year, the governor of clonmel was authorised to grant dispensations to forty-three persons in a list annexed, or as many of them as he should think fit, being artificers and workmen, to stay for such time as he might judge convenient, the whole time not to exceed march , . on june , , the governor of dublin was authorised to grant licences to such inhabitants to continue in the city (notwithstanding the declaration for all irish to quit) as he should judge convenient, the licences to contain the name, age, colour of hair, countenance, and stature of every such person; and the licence not to exceed twenty days, and the cause of their stay to be inserted in each licence. petitions went up from the old native inhabitants of limerick; from the fishermen of limerick; from the mayor and inhabitants of cashel, who were all ordered to transplant; but, notwithstanding these orders, many of them still clung about the towns, sheltered by the english, who found the benefit of their services. the deserted cities of course fell speedily into ruins. lord inchiquin, president of munster, put many artisans, menial servants, grooms, &c. in the houses, to take care of them in cork; still about , good houses in that city, and as many in youghal, out of which the owners had been driven, were destroyed by the soldiers, who used the timber for fuel. the council addressed the following letter to secretary thurloe:-- 'dublin castle, march , . 'right honourable,--the council, having lately taken into their most serious consideration what may be most for the security of this country, and the encouragement of the english to come over and plant here, did think fitt that all popish recusants, as wel proprietors as others, whose habitations are in any port-towns, walled-towns, or garrisons, and who did not before the th of september (being the time mentioned in the act of for the encouragement of adventurers and soldiers), and ever since profess the protestant religion, should remove themselves and their families out of all such places, and two miles at the least distant therefrom, before the th of may next; and being desirous that the english people may take notice, that by this means there will be both security and conveniency of habitation for such as shall be willing to come over as planters, they have commanded me to send you the enclosed declaration, and to desire you that you will take some course, whereby it may be made known unto the people for their encouragement to come over and plant in this country. 'your humble servant, 'thomas herbert, clerk of the council.' on july , , the inhabitants of galway were commanded to quit the town for ever by the st of november following, the owners of houses getting compensation at eight years' purchase. 'on october , this order was executed. all the inhabitants, except the sick and bedrid, were at once banished, to provide accommodation for english protestants, whose integrity to the state should entitle them to be trusted in a place of such importance; and sir charles coote, on november , received the thanks of the government for clearing the town, with a request that he would remove the sick and bedrid as soon as the season might permit, and take care that the houses while empty were not spoiled by the soldiery. the town was thus made ready for the english. there was a large debt of , l., due to liverpool for their loss and suffering for the good cause. the eminent deservings and losses of the city of gloucester also had induced the parliament to order them , l., to be satisfied in forfeited lands in ireland. the commissioners of ireland now offered forfeited houses in galway, rated at ten years' purchase, to the inhabitants of liverpool and gloucester, to satisfy their respective debts, and they were both to arrange about the planting of it with english protestants. to induce them to accept the proposal, the commissioners enlarged upon the advantages of galway. it lay open for trade with spain, the straits, the west indies, and other places; no town or port in the three nations, london excepted, was more considerable. it had many noble uniform buildings of marble, though many of the houses had become ruinous by reason of the war, and the waste done by the impoverished english dwelling there. no irish were permitted to live in the city, nor within three miles of it. if it were only properly inhabited by english, it might have a more hopeful gain by trade than when it was in the hands of the irish that lived there. there never was a better opportunity of undertaking a plantation and settling manufacturers there than the present, and they suggested that it might become another derry.'[ ] [footnote : the cromwellian settlement.] some writers, sickened with the state of things in ireland, and impatient of the inaction of our rulers, and of the tedious forms of constitutional government, have exclaimed: 'oh for one day of oliver cromwell!' well, ireland had him and his worthy officers for many years. they had opportunities, which never can be hoped for again, of rooting out the irish and their religion. '_thorough_' was their word. they dared everything, and shrunk from no consequences. they found dublin full of catholics; and on june , , mr. john hewson had the felicity of making the following report on the state of religion in the irish metropolis:-- 'mr. winter, a godly man, came with the commissioners, and they flock to hear him with great desire; besides, there is in dublin, since january last, about papists forsaken their priests and the masse, and attends the public ordinances, i having appointed mr. chambers, a minister, to instruct them at his own house once a week. they all repaire to him with much affection, and desireth satisfaction. and though dublin hath formerly swarmed with papists, i know none (now) there but one, who is a chirurgeon, and a peaceable man. it is much hoped the glad tidings of salvation will be acceptable in ireland, and that this savage people may see the salvation of god.' political economists tell us that when population is greatly thinned by war, or pestilence, or famine, nature hastens to fill up the void by the extraordinary fecundity of those who remain. the irish must have multiplied very fast in connaught during the commonwealth; and the mixture of saxon and celtic blood resulting from the union of the cromwellian soldiers with the daughters of the land must have produced a numerous as well as a very vigorous breed in wexford, kilkenny, tipperary, waterford, cork, east and west meath, king's and queen's counties, and tyrone. but these were not 'wholly a right seed.' this was to be found only in the union of english with english, newly arrived from the land of the free. the more precious this seed was, the more care there should be in bringing it into the field. this matter constituted one of the great difficulties of the plantation. there were plenty of irish midwives: they might have been affectionate and careful, possibly skilful; but if they had any good quality, the council could not see it. on the contrary, it gave them credit for many bad qualities, the worst of all being their idolatry and disloyalty. it was really dreadful to think of english mothers and their infants being at the mercy of irish nurses. consequently, after much deliberation, and 'laying the matter before the lord' in prayer, it was resolved to bring over a state nurse from england, and to her special care were to be entrusted all the _accouchements_ in the city of dublin. endowed with such a monopoly, it was natural enough that she should be an object of envy and dislike to those midwives whom she had supplanted. she was therefore annoyed and insulted while passing through the streets. to put a stop to these outrages, a proclamation was issued from dublin castle for her special protection, which began thus:-- _by the commissioners of parliament for the affairs of ireland_. 'whereas we are informed by divers persons of repute and godliness, that mrs. jane preswick hath, through the blessing of god, been very successful within dublin and parts about, through the carefull and skillfull discharge of her midwife's duty, and instrumental to helpe sundry poore women who needed her helpe, which bathe abounded to the comfourte and preservation of many english women, who (being come into a strange country) had otherwise been destitute of due helpe, and necessitated to expose their lives to the mercy of irish midwives, ignorant in the profession, and bearing little good will to any of the english nation, which being duly considered, we thought fitt to evidence this our acceptance thereof, and willingness that a person so eminently qualified for publique good and so well reported of for piety and knowledge in her art should receive encouragement and protection,' &c. cromwell and his ministers did not hesitate about applying heroic remedies for what they conceived to be grievances. the irish parliament was abolished, like the irish churches, the irish cities, and everything else that could be called irish, except the thing for which they fought--_the land_, which was to be irish no more. the new england which the protector established in the island of saints was represented, like scotland, in the united parliament at westminster--which first assembled in . in that parliament, major morgan represented the county of wicklow. in speaking against some proposed taxation for ireland, he said, among other things, the country was under very heavy charges for rewards paid for the destruction of three beasts--the wolf, the priest, and the tory. 'we have three beasts to destroy,' he said, 'that lay burdens upon us. the first is a wolf, on whom we lay l. a head if a dog, and l. if a bitch. the second beast is a priest, on whose head we lay l.; if he be eminent, more. the third beast is a tory, on whose head, if he be a public tory, we lay l.; and s. on a private tory. your army cannot catch them: the irish bring them in; brothers and cousins cut one another's throats.' in may, , the council issued the following printed declaration. 'upon serious consideration had of the great multitudes of poore swarming in all parts of this nacion, occasioned by the devastation of the country, and by the habits of licentiousness and idleness which the generality of the people have acquired in the time of this rebellion; insomuch that frequently some are found feeding on carrion and weeds,--some starved in the highways, and many times poor children who have lost their parents, or have been deserted by them, are found exposed to and some of them fed upon _by ravening wolves and other beasts and birds of prey._' no wonder the wolves multiplied and became very bold, when they fed upon such dainty fare as irish children! by what infatuation, by what diabolical fanaticism were those rulers persuaded that they were doing god a service, or discharging the functions of a government, in carrying out such a policy, and consigning human beings to such a fate! by a printed declaration of june , , published july , ,[ ] the commanders of the various districts were to appoint days and times for hunting the wolf; and persons destroying wolves and bringing their heads to the commissioners of the revenue of the precinct were to receive for the head of a bitch wolf, _l_; of a dog wolf, _l_; for the head of every cub that preyed by himself, s.; and for the head of every sucking cub, _s_: the assessments on several counties to reimburse the treasury for these advances became, as appears from major morgan's speech, a serious charge. in corroboration it appears that in march, , there was due from the precinct of galway l. s. d. for rewards paid on this account. but the most curious evidence of their numbers is that lands lying only nine miles north of dublin were leased by the state in the year , under conditions of keeping a hunting establishment with a pack of wolf hounds for killing the wolves, part of the rent to be discounted in wolves' heads, at the rate in the declaration of june , . under this lease captain edward piers was to have all the state lands in the barony of dunboyne in the county of meath, valued at l. s. d., at a rent greater by l. a year than they then yielded in rent and contribution, for five years from may following, on the terms of maintaining at dublin and dunboyne three wolf-dogs, two english mastiffs, a pack of hounds of sixteen couple (three whereof to hunt the wolf only), a knowing huntsman, and two men and one boy. captain piers was to bring to the commissioners of revenue at dublin a stipulated number of wolf-heads in the first year and a diminishing number every year; but for every wolf-head whereby he fell short of the stipulated number, l. was to be defalked from his salary.[ ] [footnote : a/ , p. . republished th july, .--'book of printed declarations of the commissioners for the affairs of ireland.' british museum.] [footnote : cromwellian settlement, p. .] twenty pounds was paid for the discovery of a priest, the second 'burdensome beast,' and to harbour him was death. again i avail myself of the researches of mr. prendergast, to give a few orders on this subject. '_august_ , .--ordered, on the petition of roger begs, priest, now prisoner in dublin, setting forth his miserable condition by being nine months in prison, and desiring liberty to go among his friends into the country for some relief; that he be released upon giving sufficient security that within four months he do transport himself to foreign parts, beyond the seas, never to return, and that during that time he do not exercise any part of his priestly functions, nor move from where he shall choose to reside my above five miles, without permission. ordered, same date, on the petition of william shiel, priest, that the said william shiel being old, lame, and weak, and not able to travel without crutches, he be permitted to reside in connaught where the governor of athlone shall see fitting, provided, however, he do not remove one mile beyond the appointed place without licence, nor use his priestly function.' at first the place of transportation was spain. thus:--'_february_ , . ordered that the governor of dublin take effectual course whereby the priests now in the several prisons of dublin be forthwith shipped with the party going for spain; and that they be delivered to the officers on shipboard for that purpose: care to be taken that, under the colour of exportation, they be not permitted to go into the country.' '_may_ , .--upon reading the petition of the popish priests now in the jails of dublin; ordered, that the governor of dublin take security of such persons as shall undertake the transportation of them, that they shall with the first opportunity be shipped for some parts in amity with the commonwealth, provided the five pounds for each of the said priests due to the persons that took them, pursuant to the tenor of a declaration dated january , , be first paid or secured.' the commissioners give reasons for this policy, which are identical with what we hear constantly repeated at the present day in ireland and england and in most of the newspapers conducted by protestants. for two centuries the burden of all comments on irish affairs is 'the country would be happy but for priests and agitators.' 'hang or banish the priests!' cry some very amiable and respectable persons, 'and then we shall have peace.' 'we can make nothing of those priests,' says the improving landlord, or agent, 'they will not look us straight in the face.' on december , , in a letter from the commissioners to the governor of barbadoes, advising him of the approach of a ship with a cargo of proprietors deprived of their lands, and then seized for not transplanting, or banished for having no visible means of support, they add that amongst them were three priests; and the commissioners particularly desire they may be so employed as they may not return again where that sort of people are able to do much mischief, having so great an influence over the popish irish, and alienating their affections from the present government. 'yet these penalties did not daunt them, or prevent their recourse to ireland. in consequence of the great increase of priests towards the close of the year , a general arrest by the justices of the peace was ordered, under which, in april, , the prisons in every part of ireland seem to have been filled to overflowing. on may , the governors of the respective precincts were ordered to send them with sufficient guards from garrison to garrison to carrickfergus, to be there put on board such ship as should sail with the first opportunity for the barbadoes. one may imagine the pains of this toilsome journey by the petition of one of them. paul cashin, an aged priest, apprehended at maryborough, and sent to philipstown on the way to carrickfergus, there fell desperately sick, and, being also extremely aged, was in danger of perishing in restraint for want of friends and means of relief. on august , , the commissioners, having ascertained the truth of his petition, ordered him sixpence a day during his sickness; and (in answer probably to this poor prisoner's prayer to be spared from transportation) their order directed that it should be continued to him in his travel thence (after his recovery) to carrickfergus, in order to his transportation to the barbadoes.' at carrickfergus the horrors of approaching exile seem to have shaken the firmness of some of them; for on september , , colonel cooper, who had the charge of the prison, reporting that several would under their hands renounce the pope's supremacy, and frequent the protestant meetings and no other, he was directed to dispense with the transportation, if they could give good protestant security for the sincerity of their professions. as for the third beast--the tory, the following extract gives an idea of the class to which he belonged, or, rather, from which he sprang. 'and whereas the children, grandchildren, brothers, nephews, uncles, and next pretended heirs of the persons attainted, do remain in the provinces of leinster, ulster, and munster, having little or no visible estates or subsistence, but living only and coshering upon the common sort of people who were tenants to or followers of the respective ancestors of such persons, waiting an opportunity, as may justly be supposed, to massacre and destroy the english who, as adventurers or souldiers, or their tenants, are set down to plant upon the several lands and estates of the persons so attainted,' they are to transplant or be transported to the english plantations in america.'[ ] [footnote : act for attainder of the rebels in ireland, passed . scobell's 'acts and ordinances.'] no wonder that mr. prendergast exclaims:-- 'but how must the feelings of national hatred have been heightened, by seeing every where crowds of such unfortunates, their brothers, cousins, kinsmen, and by beholding the whole country given up a prey to hungry insolent soldiers and adventurers from england, mocking their wrongs, and triumphing in their own irresistible power!' every possible mode of repression that has been devised at the present time as a remedy for ribbonism was then tried with unflinching determination. john symonds, an english settler, was murdered near the garrison town of timolin, in the county kildare. all the irish inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood were immediately transported to connaught as a punishment for the crime. a few months after two more settlers were murdered at lackagh. 'all the irish in the townland of lackagh were seized; four of them by sentence of court-martial were hanged for the murder, or for not preventing it; and all the rest, thirty-seven in number, including two priests, were on november delivered to the captain of the "wexford" frigate, to take to waterford, there to be handed over to mr. norton, a bristol merchant, to be sold as bond slaves to the sugar-planters in the barbadoes. among these were mrs. margery fitzgerald, of the age of fourscore years, and her husband, mr. henry fitzgerald of lackagh; although (as it afterwards appeared) the tories had by their frequent robberies much infested that gentleman and his tenants--discovery that seems to have been made only after the king's restoration.' the penalties against the tories themselves were to allow them no quarter when caught, and to set a price upon their heads. the ordinary price for the head of a tory was s.; for leaders of tories, or distinguished men, it varied from l. to l. 'but,' continues mr. prendergast, 'a more effective way of suppressing tories seems to have been to induce them, as already mentioned, to betray or murder one another--a measure continued after the restoration, during the absence of parliaments, by acts and orders of state, and re-enacted by the first parliament summoned after the revolution, when in that and the following reigns almost every provision of the rule of the parliament of england in ireland was re-enacted by the parliaments of ireland, composed of the soldiers and adventurers of cromwell's day, or new english and scotch capitalists. in any tory killing two other tories proclaimed and on their keeping was entitled to pardon--a measure which put such distrust and alarm among their bands on finding one of their number so killed, that it became difficult to kill a second. therefore, in , it was declared sufficient qualification for pardon for a tory to kill one of his fellow-tories. this law was continued in for twenty-one years, and only expired in . tory-hunting and tory-murdering thus became common pursuits. no wonder, therefore, after so lengthened an existence, to find traces of the tories in our household words. few, however, are now aware that the well-known irish nursery rhymes have so truly historical a foundation:-- 'ho! brother teig, what is your story?' 'i went to the wood and shot a tory:' 'i went to the wood, and shot another;' 'was it the same, or was it his brother?' 'i hunted him in, and i hunted him out, three times through the bog, and about and about; till out of a bush i spied his head, so i levelled my gun and shot him dead.' after the war of , the tories received fresh accessions, and, a great part of the kingdom being left waste and desolate, they betook themselves to these wilds, and greatly discouraged the replanting of the kingdom by their frequent murders of the new scotch and english planters; the irish 'choosing rather' (so runs the language of the act) 'to suffer strangers to be robbed and despoiled, than to apprehend or convict the offenders.' in order, therefore, for the better encouragement of strangers to plant and inhabit the kingdom, any persons presented as tories, by the gentlemen of a county, and proclaimed as such by the lord lieutenant, might be shot as outlaws and traitors; and any persons harbouring them were to be guilty of high treason.[ ] rewards were offered for the taking or killing of them; and the inhabitants of the barony, of the ancient native race, were to make satisfaction for all robberies and spoils. if persons were maimed or dismembered by tories, they were to be compensated by l.; and the families of persons murdered were to receive l.' [footnote : the cromwellian settlement, p. , &c.] the restoration at length brought relief and enlargement to the imprisoned irish nation. they rushed across the shannon to see their old homes; they returned to the desolated cities, full of hope that the king for whom they had suffered so much would reward their loyalty, by giving them back their inheritances--the 'just satisfaction' promised at breda to those who had been unfairly deprived of their estates. the ulster presbyterians also counted on his gratitude for their devotion to his cause, notwithstanding the wrongs inflicted on them by strafford and the bishops in the name of his father. but they were equally doomed to disappointment. coote and broghill reigned in dublin castle as lords justices. the first parliament assembled in dublin for twenty years, contained an overwhelming majority of undertakers, adventurers, and puritan representatives of boroughs, from which all the catholic electors had been excluded. 'the protestant interest,' a phrase of tremendous potency in the subsequent history of ireland, counted members against catholics in the commons, and in the lords against peers. a court was established under an act of parliament in dublin, to try the claims of 'nocent' and 'innocent' proprietors. the judges, who were englishmen, declared in their first session that were innocent to nocent. the protestant interest was alarmed; and, through the influence of ormond, then lord lieutenant, the duration of the court was limited, and when it was compelled to close its labours, only out of , cases had been decided. if the proportions of nocent and innocent were the same, an immense number of innocent persons were deprived of their property. in , fifteen years after the restoration, the english settlers were in possession of , , acres, while the old owners retained , , acres. by an act passed in , it was declared that no papist, who had not already been adjudged innocent, should ever be entitled to claim any lands or settlements.' any movement on the part of the roman catholics during this reign, and indeed, ever since, always raised an alarm of the 'protestant interest' in danger. while the panic lasted the catholics were subjected to cruel restrictions and privations. thus ormond, by proclamation, prohibited catholics from entering the castle of dublin, or any other fortress; from holding fairs or markets within the walls of fortified towns, and from carrying arms to such places. by another proclamation, he ordered all the _relatives_ of known 'tories' to be arrested and banished the kingdom, within fourteen days, unless such tories were killed or surrendered within that time. there was one tory for whose arrest all ordinary means failed. this was the celebrated redmond o'hanlon, still one of the most popular heroes with the irish peasantry. he was known on the continent as count o'hanlon, and was the brother of the owner of tandragee, now the pretty irish seat of the duke of manchester. as no one would betray this outlaw, who levied heavy contributions from the settlers in ulster, it was alleged and believed that the viceroy hired a relative to shoot him. 'count o'hanlon,' says mr. d. magee, 'a gentleman of ancient lineage, as accomplished as orrery, or ossory, was indeed an outlaw to the code then in force; but the stain of his cowardly assassination must for ever blot the princely escutcheon of james, duke of ormond.'[ ] [footnote : see 'the tory war of ulster,' by john p. prendergast, author of 'the cromwellian settlement.' this pamphlet abounds in the most curious information, collected from judicial records, descriptive of ireland from the restoration to the revolution--a.d. - .] chapter xiii. the penal code, a new system of land-war. the accession of james ii. was well calculated to have an intoxicating effect on the irish race. he was a catholic, he undertook to effect a counter-reformation. he would restore the national hierarchy to the position from which it had been dragged down and trampled under the feet of the cromwellians. he would give back to the irish gentry and nobility their estates; and to effect this glorious revolution, he relied upon the faith and valour of the irish. the protestant militia were disarmed, a catholic army was formed; the corporations were thrown open to catholics. dublin and other corporations, which refused to surrender their exclusive charters, were summarily deprived of their privileges; catholic mayors and sheriffs, escorted by troops, went in state to their places of worship. the protestant chancellor was dismissed to make way for a catholic, baron rice. the plate of trinity college was seized as public property. the protestants, thoroughly alarmed by these arbitrary proceedings, fled to england in thousands. many went to holland and joined the army of the prince of orange. dreadful stories were circulated of an intended invasion of england by wild irish regiments under tyrconnel. there was a rumour of another massacre of the english, and of the proposed repeal of the act of settlement. protestants who could not cross the channel fled to enniskillen and to derry, which closed its gates and prepared for its memorable siege. james, who had fled to france, plucked up courage to go to ireland, and make a stand there in defence of his crown. his progress from kinsale to dublin was an ovation. fifteen royal chaplains scattered blessings around him; gaelic songs and dances amused him; he was flattered in latin orations, and conducted to his capital under triumphal arches. in dublin the trades turned out with new banners; two harpers played at the gate by which he entered; the clergy in their robes chanted as they went: and forty young girls, dressed in white, danced the ancient _rinka_, scattering flowers on the newly sanded streets. tyrconnell, now a duke, the judges, the mayor and the corporation, completed the procession, which moved beneath arches of evergreens, and windows hung with 'tapestry and cloth of arras.' the recorder delivered to his majesty the keys of the city, and the catholic primate, dominick maguire, waited in his robes to conduct him to the royal chapel, where the _te deum_ was sung. on that day the green flag floated from the main tower of the castle, bearing the motto, 'now or never--now and for ever.' the followers of james, according to grattan, 'though papists, were not slaves. they wrung a constitution from king james before they accompanied him to the field.' a constitution wrung from such a man was not worth much. his parliament passed an act for establishing liberty of conscience, and ordering every man to pay tithes to his own clergy only, with some other measures of relief. but he began to play the despot very soon. the commons voted him the large subsidy of , l. he doubled the amount by his own mere motion. he established a bank, and by his own authority decreed a bank monopoly. he debased the coinage, and fixed the prices of merchandise by his own will. he appointed a provost and librarian in trinity college without the consent of the senate, and attempted to force fellows and scholars on the university contrary to the statutes. the events which followed are well known to all readers of english history. our concern is with their effects on the land question. one of the measures passed by this parliament was an act repealing the act of settlement. but, soon after the revolution, measures were taken to render that settlement firmer than ever. a commission was appointed to enquire into the forfeited estates; and the consequence was that , , acres were declared escheated to the crown. in king william, in his speech, read to the irish parliament, assured them that he was intent upon the firm settlement of ireland upon a protestant basis. he kept his word, for when he died there did not remain in the hands of catholics one-sixth of the land which their grandfathers held, even after the passing of the act of settlement. the acts passed for securing the protestant interest formed the series known as the penal code, which was in force for the whole of the eighteenth century. it answered its purpose effectually; it reduced the nation to a state of poverty, degradation, and slavishness of spirit unparalleled in the history of christendom, while it made the small dominant class a prodigy of political and religious tyranny. never was an aristocracy, as a body, more hardened in selfishness, more insolent in spirit; never was a church more negligent of duty, more intensely and ostentatiously secular. both church and state reeked with corruption. the plan adopted for degrading the catholics, and reducing all to one plebeian level, was most ingenious. the ingenuity indeed may be said to be satanic, for it debased its victims morally as well as socially and physically. it worked by means of treachery, covetousness, perfidy, and the perversion of all natural affections. the trail of the serpent was over the whole system. for example, when the last duke of ormond arrived as lord lieutenant in , the commons waited on him with a bill 'for discouraging the further growth of popery,' which became law, having met his decided approval. this act provided that if the son of a catholic became a protestant, the father should be incapable of selling or mortgaging his estate, or disposing of any portion of it by will. if a child ever so young professed to be a protestant, it was to be taken from its parents, and placed under the guardianship of the nearest protestant relation. the sixth clause renders papists incapable of purchasing any manors, tenements, hereditaments, or any rents or profits arising out of the same, or of holding any lease of lives, or other lease whatever, for any term exceeding thirty-one years. and with respect even to such limited leases, it further enacts, that if a papist should hold a farm producing a profit greater than _one-third of the amount of the rent_, his right to such should immediately cease, and pass over entirely to the first protestant who should discover the rate of profit. the seventh clause prohibits papists from succeeding to the properties or estates of their protestant relations. by the tenth clause, the estate of a papist, not having a protestant heir, is ordered to be gavelled, or divided in equal shares between _all_ his children. the sixteenth and twenty-fourth clauses impose the oath of abjuration, and the sacramental test, as a qualification for office, and for voting at elections. the twenty-third clause deprives the catholics of limerick and galway of the protection secured to them by the articles of the treaty of limerick. the twenty-fifth clause vests in the crown all advowsons possessed by papists. a further act was passed, in , imposing additional penalties. the first clause declares that no papist shall be capable of holding an annuity for life. the third provides, that the child of a papist, on conforming, shall at once receive an annuity from his father; and that the chancellor shall compel the father to discover, upon oath, the full value of his estate, real and personal, and thereupon make an order for the support of such conforming child or children, and for securing such a share of the property, after the father's death, as the court shall think fit. the fourteenth and fifteenth clauses secure jointures to popish wives who shall conform. the sixteenth prohibits a papist from teaching, even as assistant to a protestant master. the eighteenth gives a salary of l. per annum to popish priests who shall conform. the twentieth provides rewards for the discovery of popish prelates, priests, and teachers, according to the following whimsical scale:--for discovering an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other person, exercising any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, l.; for discovering each regular clergyman, and each secular clergyman, not registered, l.; and for discovering each popish schoolmaster or usher, l. in judging the irish peasantry, we should try to estimate the effects of such a system on any people for more than a century. it will account for the farmer's habit of concealing his prosperity, and keeping up the appearance of poverty, even if he had not reason for it in the felonious spirit of appropriation still subsisting under legal sanction. we are too apt to place to the account of race or religion the results of malignant or blundering legislation. we are not without examples of such results in england itself. in the winter of - , a very startling state of things was presented. in a period of great general prosperity, that portion of england in which the poor laws had their most extensive operation, and in which by much the largest expenditure of poor-rates had been made, was the scene of daily riot and nightly incendiarism. there were ninety-three parishes in four counties, of which the population was , , and the poor-law expenditure , l., or s. d. per head; and there were eighty parishes in three other counties, the population of which was , , and the poor-law expenditure , l., or s. d. a head. in the counties in which the poor-law expenditure was large, the industry and skill of the labourers were passing away, the connection between the master and servant had become precarious, the unmarried were defrauded of their fair earnings, and riots and incendiarism prevailed. in the counties where the expenditure was comparatively small, there was scarcely any instance of disorder; mutual attachment existed between the workman and his employer; the intelligence, skill, and good conduct of the labourers were unimpaired, or increased. this striking social contrast was only a specimen of what prevailed throughout large districts, and generally throughout the south and north of england, and it proved that, either through the inherent vice of the system, or gross mal-administration in the southern counties, the poor-law had the most demoralising effect upon the working classes, while it was rapidly eating up the capital upon which the employment of labour depended. this fact was placed beyond question by a commission of enquiry, which was composed of individuals distinguished by their interest in the subject, and their intimate knowledge of its principles and details. its labours were continued incessantly for two years. witnesses most competent to give information were summoned from different parts of the country. the commissioners had before them documentary evidence of every kind calculated to throw light on the subject. they personally visited localities, and examined the actual operation of the system on the spot; and when they could not go themselves, they called to their aid assistant commissioners, some of whom extended their enquiries into scotland, guernsey, france, and flanders; while they also collected a vast mass of interesting evidence from our ambassadors and diplomatic agents in different countries of europe and america. it was upon the report of this commission of enquiry that the act was founded for the amendment and better administration of the laws relating to the poor in england and wales ( and william iv., cap. ). a more solid foundation for a legislative enactment could scarcely be found. the importance of the subject fully warranted all the expense and labour by which it was obtained. one of the most astounding facts established by the enquiry was the wide-spread demoralisation which had developed itself in certain districts. home had lost its sanctity. the ties that bind parents and children were loosened, and natural affection gave place to intense selfishness, which often manifested itself in the most brutal manner. workmen grew lazy and dishonest. young women lost the virtue which is not only the point of honour with their sex, but the chief support of all other virtues. not only women of the working classes, but in some cases even substantial farmers' daughters, and sometimes those who were themselves the actual owners of property, had their illegitimate children as charges on the parish, regularly deducting the cost of their maintenance from their poor-rate, neither they nor their relatives feeling that to do so was any disgrace. the system must have been fearfully vicious that produced such depravation of moral feeling, and such a shocking want of self-respect. dr. burn has given a graphic sketch of the duties of an overseer under the old poor-law system in england. 'his office is to keep an extraordinary watch to prevent people from coming to inhabit without certificates; to fly to the justices to remove them. not to let anyone have a farm of l. a year. to warn the parishioners, if they would have servants, to hire them by the month, the week, or the day, rather than by any way that can give them a settlement; or if they do hire them for a year, then to endeavour to pick a quarrel with them before the year's end, and so to get rid of them. to maintain their poor as cheaply as they possibly can, and not to lay out twopence in prospect of any future good, but only to serve the present necessity. to bargain with some sturdy person to take them by the lump, who yet is not intended to take them, but to hang over them _in terrorem_, if they shall complain to the justices for want of maintenance. to send them out into the country a begging. to bind out poor children apprentices, no matter to whom, or to what trade; but to take special care that the master live in another parish. to move heaven and earth if any dispute happen about a settlement; and, in that particular, to invert the general rule, and stick at no expense. to pull down cottages: _to drive out as many inhabitants, and admit as few, as they possibly can; that is, to depopulate the parish, in order to lessen the poor's-rate_. to be generous, indeed, sometimes, in giving a portion with the mother of a bastard child to the reputed father, on condition that he will marry her, or with a poor widow, _always provided that the husband_ be settled elsewhere; or if a poor man with a large family happen to be industrious, they will charitably assist him in taking a farm in some neighbouring parish, and give him l. to pay his first year's rent with, that they may thus for ever get rid of him and his progeny.' the effect of this system was actually to depopulate many parishes. the author of a pamphlet on the subject, mr. alcock, stated that the gentlemen were led by this system to adopt all sorts of expedients to hinder the poor from marrying, to discharge servants in their last quarter, to evict small tenants, and pull down cottages; so that several parishes were in a manner depopulated, while england complained of a want of useful hands for agriculture, manufactories, for the land and sea service. 'when the minister marries a couple,' he said, 'he rightly prays that they may be fruitful in the procreation of children; but most of the parishioners pray for the very contrary, and perhaps complain of him for marrying persons, that, should they have a family of children, might likewise become chargeable.' arthur young also described the operation of the law in his time, in clearing off the people, and causing universally 'an open war against cottages.' gentlemen bought them up whenever they had an opportunity, and immediately levelled them with the ground, lest they should become 'nests of beggars' brats.' the removal of a cottage often drove the industrious labourer from a parish where he could earn s. a week, to one where he could earn but s. as many as thirty or forty families were sent off by removals in one day. thus, as among the scotch labourers of the present day, marriage was discouraged; the peasantry were cleared off the land, and increasing immorality was the necessary consequence. there was another change in the old system, by which the interests of the influential classes were made to run in favour of the 'beggars' nests,' which were soon at a premium. the labourer was to be paid, not for the value of his labour, but according to the number of his family; the prices of provisions being fixed by authority, and the guardians making up the difference between what the wages would buy and what the family required. the allowance scales issued from time to time were framed on the principle that every labourer should have a gallon loaf of standard wheaten bread weekly for every member of his family, and one over. the effect of this was, that a man with six children, who got s. a week wages, required nine gallon loaves, or s. d. a week, so that he had a pension of s. d. over his wages. another man, with a wife and five children, so idle and disorderly that no one would employ him, was entitled to eight gallon loaves for their maintenance, so that he had s. a week to support him. the increase of allowance according to the number of children acted as a direct bounty upon marriage. the report of the committee of the house of commons on labourers' wages, printed in , describes the effect of this allowance system in paralysing the industry of the poor. 'it is obvious,' remarked the committee, 'that a disinclination to work must be the consequence of so vicious a system. he whose subsistence is secure without work, and who cannot obtain more than a mere sufficiency by the hardest work, will naturally be an idle and careless labourer. frequently the work done by four or five such labourers does not amount to what might easily be performed by a single labourer at task work. a surplus population is encouraged: men who receive but a small pittance know that they have only to marry and that pittance will be increased proportionally to the number of their children. when complaining of their allowance, they frequently say, "we will marry, and then you must maintain us." this system secures subsistence to all; to the idle as well as the industrious; to the profligate as well as the sober; and, as far as human interests are concerned, all inducements to obtain a good character are taken away. the effects have corresponded with the cause: able-bodied men are found slovenly at their work, and dissolute in their hours of relaxation; a father is negligent of his children, the children do not think it necessary to contribute to the support of their parents; the employer and employed are engaged in personal quarrels; and the pauper, always relieved, is always discontented. crime advances with increasing boldness; and the parts of the country where this system prevails are, in spite of our gaols and our laws, filled with poachers and thieves.' mr. hodges, chairman of the west kent quarter sessions, in his evidence before the emigration committee, said, 'formerly, working people usually stayed in service till they were twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five years of age, before they married; whereas they now married frequently under age. formerly, these persons had saved l. and l. before they married, and they were never burdensome to the parish; now, they have not saved a shilling before their marriage, and become immediately burdensome.' the farmers were not so discontented with this allowance system as might be supposed, because a great part of the burden was cast upon other shoulders. the tax was laid indiscrimately upon all fixed property; so that the occupiers of villas, shopkeepers, merchants, and others who did not employ labourers, had to pay a portion of the wages for those that did. the farmers were in this way led to encourage a system which fraudently imposed a heavy burden upon others, and which, by degrading the labourers, and multiplying their numbers beyond the real demand for them, must, if allowed to run its full course, have ultimately overspread the whole country with the most abject poverty and wretchedness. there was another interest created which tended to increase the evil. in the counties of suffolk, sussex, kent, and generally through all the south of england, relief was given in the shape of house accommodation, or free dwellings for the poor. the parish officers were in the habit of paying the rent of the cottages; the rent was therefore high and sure, and consequently persons who had small pieces of ground were induced to cover them with those buildings. on this subject mr. hodges, the gentleman already referred to, remarks: 'i cannot forbear urging again that any measure having for its object the relief of the parishes from their over population, must of necessity become perfectly useless, unless the act of parliament contains some regulations with respect to the erecting and maintaining of cottages. i am quite satisfied that the erecting of cottages has been a most serious evil throughout the country. the getting of the cottage tempts young people of seventeen and eighteen years of age, and even younger, to marry. it is notorious that almost numberless cottages have been built by persons speculating on the parish rates for their rents.' the evils of this system had reached their height in the years - . that was a time when the public mind was bent upon reforms of all sorts, without waiting for the admission from the tories that the grievances of which the nation complained were 'proved abuses.' the reformers were determined no longer to tolerate the state of things, in which the discontent of the labouring classes was proportioned to the money disbursed in poor-rates, or in voluntary charities; in which the young were trained in idleness, ignorance, and vice--the able-bodied maintained in sluggish and sensual indolence--the aged and more respectable exposed to all the misery incident to dwelling in such society as that of a large workhouse without discipline or classification--the whole body of inmates subsisting on food far exceeding both in kind and amount, not merely the diet of the independent labourer, but that of the majority of the persons who contributed to their support. the farmer paid s. in the pound in poor-rates, and was in addition compelled to employ supernumerary labourers not required on his farm, at a cost of from l. to l. a year; the labourer had no need to hasten himself to seek work, or to please his master, or to put a restraint upon his temper, having all the slave's security for support, without the slave's liability to punishment. the parish paid parents for nursing their little children, and children for supporting their aged parents, thereby destroying in both parties all feelings of natural affection and all sense of christian duty. i hope i shall be excused in giving, from a former work of my own, these home illustrations to prove that bad laws can degrade and demoralize a people in a comparatively short time, in spite of race and creed and public opinion; and that, where class interests are involved, the most sacred rights of humanity are trampled in the mire of corruption. even now the pauperism resulting of necessity from the large-farm system is degrading the english people, and threatening to rot away the foundations of society. on this subject i am glad to find a complete corroboration of my own conclusions in a work by one of the ablest and most enlightened christian ministers in england, the rev. dr. rigg. he says:-- 'notwithstanding a basis of manly, honest, and often generous qualities, the common character of all the uneducated and unelevated classes of the english labouring population includes, as marked and obvious features, improvidence, distrust of their superiors, discontent at their social position, and a predominant passion for gross animal gratification. of this general character we regard the rude, heavy, unhopeful english peasant, who knows no indulgence or relaxation but that of the ale-house, and lives equally without content and without ambition, as affording the fundamental type, which, like all other things english, possesses a marked individuality. it differs decidedly from the irish type of peasant degradation. something of this may be due to the effect of race. the kelt and the saxon may be expected to differ. yet we think but little stress is to be laid upon this. there is, probably, much more keltic blood in the southern and western counties of england, and, also, more saxon blood in some of the southern and even western parts of ireland, than has been generally supposed. we apprehend that a saxon population, under the same conditions as the southern and western irish peasantry, would have grown up into very much the same sort of people as the irish have been; while a keltic population, exposed to the same influences, through successive generations, as the midland and southern peasantry of england, would not have been essentially different at the present day from the actual cultivators of the soil. 'the irish peasant is poorer and yet more reckless than the englishman; but he is not so sullen or so spiritless. his body is not so muscular or so strongly-set as that of the anglo-saxon husbandman, on whose frame the hard and unintermitted toil of thirty generations has stamped its unmistakable impress, and, correspondently, he is a less persevering and less vigorous labourer; but, as a general rule, his stature is taller and his step far more free and elastic than that of the sturdy but slow and stunted labourer of our southern counties. there are wild mountainous districts of the west, indeed, in which the lowest type of the irish peasantry is found, that must be taken as exceptions to our general statement; and as many from those regions cross the channel to tramp through england in the complex character of mendicant labourers, no doubt some have received from them an impression as to the irish peasantry very different from what our observations are intended to convey. but no one can have travelled through the south of ireland without having noticed what we state. the tipperary and kilkenny peasantry are proverbially tall; connemara has been famed for its "giants," and many of both sexes throughout the south, are, spite of their rags, fine figures, and graceful in their movements. while looking at them, we have ceased to wonder at what has been regarded as no better than the arch-agitator's blarney, when he spoke of the irish as the "finest pisantry in the world;" and we have even felt saddened as we mentally contrasted with what we saw before us the bearing and appearance of our own southern labourers. for the tattered irish peasant, living in a mud hovel, is, after all, a gentleman in his bearing; whereas there is generally either a cringing servility or a sullen doggedness in the demeanour of the south saxon labourer. the irishman is, besides, far more intelligent and ready-witted than the saxon husbandman. the fact is that the irishman, if underfed, has not been overworked. his life has not been one of unceasing and oppressive labour. nor has his condition been one of perpetual servitude. with all his poverty, he has been, to a considerable extent, his own master. half-starved, or satisfying his appetite on light and innutritious fare,--far worse housed and clad than the poorest english labourer, often, indeed, almost half-naked,--oppressed by middle-men, exactors of rack-rent; with all this the irish cottier has been, from father to son, and from generation to generation, _a tenant, and not merely a day labourer_.'[ ] [footnote : 'essays for the times, on ecclesiastical and social subjects,' by james h. rigg, d.d. london, .] chapter xiv. ulster in the eighteenth century. let us, then, endeavour to get rid of the pernicious delusions about race and religion in dealing with this irish land question. identity of race and substantial agreement in religion did not prevent the ulster landlords from uprooting their tenants when they fancied it was their interest to banish them--to substitute grazing for tillage, and cattle for a most industrious and orderly peasantry. the letters of primate boulter contain much valuable information on the state of ulster in the last century, and furnish apt illustrations of the land question, which, i fancy, will be new and startling to many readers. boulter was lord primate of ireland from to . he was thirteen times one of the lords justices. as an englishman and a good churchman, he took care of the english interests and of the establishment. the letters were written in confidence to sir robert walpole and other ministers of state, and were evidently not intended for publication. an address 'to the reader' from some friend, states truly that they give among other things an impartial account of 'the distressed state of the kingdom for want of _tillage_, the vast sums of money sent out of the nation for corn, flour, &c., the dismal calamities thereon, the want of trade and the regulation of the english and other coins, to the very great distress of all the manufacturers,' &c. they show that he was a man of sound judgment, public-spirited, and very moderate and impartial for the times in which he lived. his evidence with regard to the relations of landlord and tenant in ulster is exceedingly valuable at the present moment. lord dufferin could not have read the letters when he wrote his book; otherwise i should think his apology for the landlords of the last century would have been considerably modified. primate boulter repeatedly complained to walpole, the duke of newcastle, and other ministers, that the ulster farmers were deserting the country in large numbers, emigrating to the united states, then british colonies, to the west indies, or to any country where they hoped to get the means of living, in many cases binding themselves to work for a number of years _as slaves_ in payment of their passage out. the desire to quit the country of their birth is described by the primate as a mania. writing to the archbishop of canterbury in he says:--'we are under great trouble here about a frenzy that has taken hold of very great numbers to leave this country for the west indies, and we are endeavouring to learn what may be the reasons of it, and the proper remedies.' two or three weeks later he reported to the duke of newcastle that for several years past some agents from the colonies in america, and several masters of ships, had gone about the country 'and deluded the people with stories of great plenty and estates to be had for going for in those parts of the world.' during the previous summer more than , men, women, and children had been shipped for the west indies. of these, not more than one in ten were men of substance. the rest hired themselves for their passage, or contracted with masters of ships for four years' servitude, 'selling themselves as servants for their subsistence.' the whole north was in a ferment, people every day engaging one another to go next year to the west indies. 'the humour,' says the primate, 'has spread like a contagious distemper, and the people will hardly hear anybody that tries to cure them of their madness. the worst is that it affects only _protestants_, and reigns chiefly in the north, which is the seat of our linen manufacture.' as the protestant people, the descendants of the english and scotch who had settled in the country in the full assurance that they were building homes for their posterity, were thus deserting those homes in such multitudes, their pastors sent a memorial to the lord lieutenant, setting forth the grievances which they believed to be the cause of the desertion. on this memorial the primate wrote comments to the english government, and, in doing so, he stated some astounding facts as to the treatment of the people by their landlords. he was a cautious man, thoroughly acquainted with the facts, and writing under a sense of great responsibility. in order to understand some of those facts, we should bear in mind that the landlords had laid down large portions of their estates in pasture, to avoid the payment of tithes, and that this burden was thrown entirely upon the tenants who tilled the land. now, let my readers mark what the primate states as to their condition. he says:--'if a landlord takes too great a portion of the profits of a farm for his share by way of rent (as the tithe will light on the tenant's share), the tenant will be impoverished; but then it is not the tithe, but the increased rent that undoes the farmer. and, indeed, in this country, where i fear the tenant hardly ever has more than one-third of the profits he makes of his farm for his share, and too often but a _fourth_, or, perhaps, a _fifth part_, as the tenant's share is charged with the tithe, his case is, no doubt, hard, but it is plain from what side the hardship arises.' what the gentlemen wanted to be at, according to the primate, was, that they might go on raising their rents, and that the clergy should receive their old payments. he admits, however, that the tenants were sometimes cited to the ecclesiastical courts, and if they failed to appear there, they stood excommunicated; and he adds, 'possibly when a writ _de excommunicato capiendo_ is taken out, and they find they have l. or l. to pay, _they run away_, for the greatest part of the occupiers of the land here are so poor, that an extraordinary stroke of l. or l. falling on them is certain ruin to them.' he further states that, to his own knowledge, many of the clergy had chosen rather to lose their 'small dues' than to be at a certain great expense in getting them, 'and at an uncertainty whether the farmer would not at last _run away without paying anything_.' such was the condition of the protestants of ulster during the era of the penal code; and it is a curious fact that it was the presbyterians and not the catholics that were forced by the exactions of the protestant landlords and the clergy to run away from the country which their forefathers had been brought over to civilize. but there was another fact connected with the condition of ulster which i dare say will be almost incredible to many readers. the tenantry, so cruelly rack-rented and impoverished, were reduced by two or three bad seasons to a state bordering upon famine. there was little or no corn in the province. the primate set on foot a subscription in dublin, to which he himself contributed very liberally. the object was to buy food to supply the necessities of the north, and to put a stop to 'the great desertion' they had been threatened with. he hoped that the landlords would 'do _their_ part by remitting some arrears, or making some abatement of their rents.' as many of the tenants had eaten the oats they should have sowed their lands with, he expected the landlords would have the good sense to furnish them with seed; if not, a great deal of land would lie waste that year. and where were the provisions got? partly in munster, where corn was very cheap and abundant. but the people of cork, limerick, waterford, and clonmel objected to have their provisions sent away, although they were in some places 'as cheap again as in the north; but where dearest, at least one-third part cheaper.' riotous mobs broke open the store-houses and cellars, setting what price they pleased upon the provisions. and, what between those riots and the prevalence of easterly winds, three weeks elapsed before the , l. worth of oats, oatmeal, and potatoes could be got down to relieve the famishing people of the north, which then seemed black enough, even to its own inhabitants. hence the humane primate was obliged to write: 'the humour of going to america still continues, and the scarcity of provisions certainly makes many quit us. there are now seven ships at belfast that are carrying off , passengers thither, and if we knew how to stop them, as most of them can neither get victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it.' the presbyterian clergy suffered greatly from the impoverishment of their people. several of them who had been receiving a stipend of l. a year, had their incomes reduced to less than l. in their distress they appealed to the primate, and, staunch churchman as he was, they found in him a kind and earnest advocate. writing to sir robert walpole, on march , , he pleaded for the restoration of l. a year, which had been given to the non-conforming clergy of ireland from the privy purse, in addition to the , l. royal bounty, which, it appears, had been suspended for two years, owing to the death of the late king. 'they are sensible,' said his grace, 'there is nothing due to them, nor do they make any such claim; but as the calamities of this kingdom are at present very great, and by the desertion of many of their people to america, and the poverty of the greatest part of the rest, their contributions, particularly in the north, are very much fallen off, it would be a great instance of his majesty's goodness if he would consider their present distress.' in our own days a presbyterian minister would be considered to deserve well of his country if he emigrated to america, and took with him as many of the people as he could induce to forsake their native land. but what was the great plea which primate boulter urged on the english minister on behalf of the presbyterian clergy of his day? it was, that they had exerted their influence to prevent emigration. 'it is,' he said, 'but doing them justice to affirm that they are very well affected to his majesty and his royal family, and by the best enquiries i could make, do their best endeavours to keep their congregations from deserting the country, not more than one or two of the younger ministers having anyways encouraged the humour now prevailing here. and his majesty's goodness in giving them some extraordinary relief on this occasion of their present great distress would undoubtedly make them _more active to retain their people here_. i cannot help mentioning on this occasion that, what with scarceness of corn in the north, _and the loss of all credit there_, and by the numbers that go, or talk of going, to america, and with the disturbances in the south, this kingdom is at present in a deplorable condition.' in a statement previously made to the bishop of london, the irish primate earnestly solicited his correspondent to use his influence to prevent the irish landlords from passing a law to strip the established clergy of their rights with respect to the tithe of agistment. they had entered into a general combination, and formed a stock purse to resist the payment of tithe, except by the poor tenants who tilled the soil, a remarkable contrast to the zeal of the landlords of our own time in defending church property against 'spoliation' by the imperial legislature, and to the liberality with which many of them are now contributing to the sustentation fund. how shall we account for the change? is it that the landlords of the present day are more righteous than their grandfathers? or is it that the same principle of self-interest which led the proprietors of past times to grind the tenantry and rob the church, now operates in forms more consistent with piety and humanity, and by its subtle influence illustrates the maxim of the poet-- self-love and social is the same. however that may be, the primate contented himself in this letter with a defence of the church, in which he admitted matters of real grievance, merely alluding to other grievances, 'such as raising the rents unreasonably, the oppression by justices of the peace, seneschals, and other officers in the country.' from the pictures of the times he presents we should not be surprised at his statement to the duke of newcastle, that the people who went to america made great complaints of the oppressions they suffered, and said that those oppressions were one reason of their going. when he went on his visitation, in , he 'met all the roads full of whole families that had left their homes to beg abroad,' having consumed their stock of potatoes two months before the usual time. during the previous year many hundreds had perished of famine. what was the cause of this misery, this desolating process going on over the plains of ulster? the archbishop accounts for it by stating that many persons had let large tracts of land, from , to , acres, which were stocked with cattle, and had no other inhabitants on their land than so many cottiers as were necessary to look after their sheep and black cattle, '_so that, in some of the finest counties, in many places there is neither house nor cornfield to be seen in ten or fifteen miles' travelling_, and daily in some counties many gentlemen, as their leases fall into their hands, tie up their tenants from tillage; and this is one of the main causes why so many venture to go into foreign service at the hazard of their lives if taken, because they cannot get land to till at home.' my readers should remember that the industrious, law-abiding, bible-loving, god-fearing people, who were thus driven by oppression from the fair fields of ulster, which they had cultivated, and the dwellings which they had erected, to make way for sheep and cattle--because it was supposed by the landlords that sheep and cattle paid better--were the descendants of british settlers who came to the country under a royal guarantee _of freeholds and permanent tenures_. let them picture to their minds this fine race of honest, godly people, rack-rented, crushed, evicted, heart-broken--men, women, and children--protestants, saxons, cast out to perish as the refuse of the earth, by a set of landed proprietors of their own race and creed; and learn from this most instructive fact that, if any body of men has the power of making laws to promote its own interest, no instincts of humanity, no dictates of religion, no restraints of conscience can be relied upon to keep them from acting with ruthless barbarity, and doing more to ruin their country than a foreign invader could accomplish by letting loose upon it his brutal soldiers. how much more earnestly would boulter have pleaded with the prime minister of england on behalf of the wretched people of ulster if he could have foreseen that ere long those presbyterian emigrants, with the sense of injustice and cruel wrong burning in their hearts, would be found fighting under the banner of american independence--the bravest and fiercest soldiers of freedom which the british troops encountered in the american war. history is continually repeating itself, yet how vainly are its lessons taught! the same legal power of extermination is still possessed by the irish landlords after sixty-nine years of imperial legislation. our hardy, industrious people, naturally as well disposed to royalty as any people in the world, are still crowding emigrant ships in all our ports, deserting their country with the same bitter feelings that animated the ulster men a century ago, hating our government with a mortal hatred, and ready to fight against it under a foreign flag! we have no primate boulter now in the protestant hierarchy to plead the cause of an unprotected tenantry; but we have the press, which can concentrate upon the subject the irresistible force of public opinion. as a churchman, primate boulter naturally regarded the land question in its bearings on the interests of the establishment. writing to sir robert walpole in he said that he had in vain represented to the landlords that, by destroying the tithe of agistment, they naturally discouraged tillage, lessened the number of people, and raised the price of provisions. by running into cattle they caused the young men to enlist in foreign service for bread, there being no employment for them at home, 'where two or three hands can look after some hundreds of acres stocked with cattle.' and by this means, said the primate, 'a great part of our churches are neglected; in many places five, six, or seven parishes bestowed on one incumbent, who, perhaps, with all his tithes, scarce gets l. a year.' but there was at that time a member of the irish house of commons who was capable of taking a more enlarged view of the irish question. this was mr. arthur dobbs, who belonged to an old and honourable ulster family--the author of a book on the 'north-west passage to india,' and of a very valuable work on the 'trade of great britain and ireland.' he was intimately acquainted with the working of the irish land system, for he had been many years agent of the hertfort estate, one of the largest in ireland. there is among boulter's letters an introduction of mr. dobbs to sir robert walpole, recommending him as a person of good sense, who had applied himself to the improvement of trade, and to the making of our colonies in america of more advantage than they had hitherto been. he was afterwards made governor of north carolina. i have mentioned these facts in the hope of securing the attention of landlords and statesmen to the following passage from his book accounting for the deplorable condition of the province of ulster at that time, and the emigration of its industrious and wealth-producing inhabitants. in my humble opinion it furnishes irresistible arguments in favour of a measure which should settle the irish land question in such a manner that it would speak to the people of ireland in the words of holy writ: 'and they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. they shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.' mr. dobbs says:-- 'how can a tenant improve his land when he is convinced that, after all his care and toil, his improvements will be overrated, and he will be obliged to shift for himself? let us place ourselves in his situation and see if we should think it reasonable to improve for another, if those improvements would be the very cause of our being removed from the enjoyment of them. i believe we should not. industry and improvements go very heavily on when we think we are not to have the property in either. what can be expected, then, from covenants to improve and plant, when the person to do it knows he is to have _no property in them_? there will be no concern or care taken to preserve them, and they will run to ruin as fast as made or planted. what was it induced so many of the commonalty lately to go to america but high rents, bad seasons, and want of good tenures, or a permanent property in their land? this kept them poor and low, and they scarce had sufficient credit to procure necessaries to subsist or till their ground. they never had anything to store, all was from hand to mouth; so one or two bad crops broke them. others found their stock dwindling and decaying visibly, and so removed before all was gone, while they had as much left as would pay their passage, and had little more than what would carry them to the american shore. 'this, it may be allowed, was the occasion of the poor farmers going who had their rents lately raised. but it may be objected that was not the reason why rich farmers went, and those who had several years in beneficial leases still unexpired, who sold their bargains and removed with their effects. but it is plain they all went for the same reason; for these last, from _daily examples before them_, saw the present occupiers dispossessed of their lands at the expiration of their leases, and no preference given to them; so they expected it would soon be their own case, to avoid which, and make the most of the years still unexpired, they sold, and carried their assets with them to procure a settlement in a country where they had reason to expect a permanent property.' it is a curious fact that sentiments very similar were published by one of cromwell's officers about a century before. the plea which he put forth for the irish tenant in the dedication of his work on ireland to the protector, has been repeated ever since by the tenants, but repeated in vain: captain bligh, the officer alluded to, said: 'the first prejudice is, that if a tenant be at ever so great pains or cost for the improvement of his land, he doth thereby but occasion a greater rack-rent upon himself, or else invests his landlord with his cost and labour _gratis_, or at least lies at his landlord's mercy for requital; which occasions a neglect of all good husbandry, to his own, the land, the landlord, and the commonwealth's suffering.' now, this, i humbly conceive, might be removed, if there were a law enacted, by which every landlord should be obliged either to give him reasonable allowance for his clear improvement, or else suffer him _or his_ to enjoy it so much longer or till he hath had a proportionable requital.' but although primate boulter protested against the conduct of the landlords--all episcopalians--who were ruining the church as well as the country, the established clergy, as a body, were always on the side of the oppressors. the test act placed the presbyterians, like the papists, in the position of an inferior race. 'in the city of londonderry alone, which presbyterian valour had defended, ten out of twelve aldermen, and twenty out of twenty-four burgesses, were thrust out of the corporation by that act, which placed an odious mark of infamy upon at least one-half the inhabitants of the kingdom.' presbyterians could not legally keep a common school. the _edinburgh review_ says: 'all the settlements, from first to last, had the effect of making the cause of the church and the cause of the landlords really one. during the worst days of landlord oppression it never identified itself with the interests of the people, but uniformly sustained the power and privileges of the landlords.' it was vain to expect justice from the irish parliament. the people of ireland never were governed exclusively, or at all, by her own sovereign, her own lords, and her own commons. ireland was 'in the custody of england,' just as much before the union as during the last sixty-seven years. even during the few brief years of her spasmodic 'independence,' the mass of the nation formed no part of the 'commons of ireland.' it was still, as it always had been, a sham parliament--a body representing the colonial aristocracy--acting as undertakers for the government of england, for whose interest exclusively this island was to be ruled. provided this result was secured, it did not matter much, at the other side of the channel, how the irish people were treated. indeed, they were not recognised as the people of ireland, or any part thereof. even philosophic liberals, like lord charlemont, were shocked at the idea of a papist getting into the irish house of commons; and the volunteer system was shattered by this insane animosity of the ruling race against the subject nation. the antipathy was as strong as the antipathy between the whites and the negroes in the west indies and the united states. hence the remorseless spirit in which atrocities were perpetrated in . mr. daunt has shown that a large proportion of the irish house of lords consisted of men who were english to all intents and purposes--many of them by birth, and many by residence, and, no doubt, they always came over with reluctance to what lord chancellor clare called 'our damnable country.' it may be that in some years after the abolition of the establishment--after some experience of the _régime_ of religious equality--the two races in this island will learn to act together so harmoniously as to give a fair promise that they could be safely trusted with self-legislation. but the '_self_' must be one body animated by one spirit; not two bodies, chained together, irritated by the contact, fiercely struggling against one another, eternally reproaching one another about the mutual wrongs of the past, and not unfrequently coming to blows, like implacable duellists shut up in a small room, each determined to kill or be killed. if england were to let go her hold even now, something like this would be the irish 'situation.' the abiding force of this antipathy, in the full light of christianity, is awful. in his 'life, letters, and speeches of lord plunket,' the hon. david plunket states that, when his grandfather entered the irish parliament, 'the english government had nearly abandoned the _sham_ of treating the irish parliament as an independent legislature; the treasury benches were filled with placemen and pensioners. all efforts tending to reform of parliament or concession to the catholics had been given up as useless. grattan and some of his immediate followers had seceded from an assembly too degraded to appreciate their motives, or to be influenced by their example; and whatever remained of independence in the house of commons ministers still laboured to bring under their control. scarcely thirty votes appeared in opposition on the most important divisions, while government could at any time readily whip a majority of .' according to a government return made in , by pitt's direction, nomination seats were divided between some proprietors. lord shannon returned no less than members, and the great family of ponsonby returned ; lord hillsborough, , the duke of leinster, , and the castle itself . eighty-six seats were _let out_ by the owners, in consideration of titles, offices, and pensions. no less than seats were occupied by placemen, by gentlemen who had promises of pensions, by gentlemen who stood out for higher prices from government. the regular opposition appears to have been limited to votes, of which belonged to whig nominees, and the rest to the popular party. it is, then, easy to account for the state of public feeling which mr. plunket, with these facts and figures before him, so well describes. he says truly that if it were possible to appeal to the country under these circumstances, the people would not have responded. 'gloomy and desperate, they had lost all confidence in their parliament, and looked to other quarters for deliverance from the _intolerable tyranny_ under which they suffered. there can be no doubt that this anarchy and disgrace were in a great degree the result of a misgovernment, ancient and recent, _which seems to have been always adopted with a view to bring out strongly the worst elements of the irish character_; but it was at that time said, and no doubt believed by the opposition, that the ministry of the day had deliberately planned and accomplished the disorganisation of the irish people and their parliament, in order to enable them to carry out their favourite project of the union.' mr. plunket, after describing the classes of 'representatives' that his grandfather had to deal with in the irish house of commons, further says: 'it is true that this corrupt assembly cannot fairly be looked upon as the mirror of national character and national honour. the members of the majority who voted for the union _were not_ the representatives of the people, _but the hired servants of the minister, for the parliament had been packed for the purpose_.' towards the close of the century, however, the french revolution, the american war, and the volunteer movement, had begun to cause some faint stirring of national life in the inert mass of the roman catholic population, which the penal code had '_dis-boned_.' up to this time they were not even thought of in the calculations of politicians. according to dean swift, papists counted no more in politics than the women and children. macaulay uses a still more contemptuous comparison to express the estimate in which they were held in those times, saying, that their lords and masters would as soon have consulted their poultry and swine on any political question. nevertheless, during the excitement of the volunteer movement, some of the poor celts began to raise their heads, and presumed to put the question to the most liberal portion of the ruling race--'are we not men? have not we also some rights?' the appeal was responded to in the irish parliament, and in the elective franchise was conceded to roman catholics. it was the first concession, and the least that could be granted. but the bare proposal excited the utmost indignation in the tory party, and especially in the dublin corporation, where the orange spirit was rampant. that body adopted an address to the protestants of ireland, which bears a remarkable resemblance in its spirit and style to addresses lately issued by protestant defence associations. both speak in the kindest terms of their roman catholic fellow-subjects, disclaim all intention of depriving them of any advantages they enjoy under our glorious constitution, declaring that their objects are purely _defensive_, and that they want merely to guard that constitution against the aggressions of the papacy quite as much for the sake of roman catholics as for the sake of protestants. 'countrymen and friends,' said the dublin tories, seventy-five years ago, 'the firm and manly support which we received from you when we stood forward in defence of the protestant ascendancy, deserves our warmest thanks. we hoped that the sense of the protestants of ireland, declared upon that occasion, would have convinced our roman catholic fellow-subjects that the pursuit of political power was for them a vain pursuit; for, though the liberal and enlightened mind of the protestant receives pleasure at seeing the catholic exercise his religion with freedom, enjoy his property in security, and possess the highest degree of personal liberty, yet, experience has taught us that, without the ruin of the protestant establishment, the catholic cannot be allowed the smallest influence in the state.' those men were as thoroughly convinced as their descendants, who protest against concession to-day, that all our protestant institutions would go to perdition, if papists, although then mere serfs, were allowed to vote for members of parliament. they were equally puzzled to know why roman catholics were discontented, or what more their masters could reasonably do for them to add to the enviable happiness of their lot. 'we entreat you,' the dublin corporation said to their protestant brethren throughout the country--'we entreat you to join with us in using every honest means of persuading the roman catholics to rest content with the most perfect toleration of their religion, the fullest security of their property, and the most complete personal liberty; but, by no means, now or hereafter, to attempt any interference in the government of the kingdom, as such interference would be incompatible with the protestant ascendancy, which we have resolved with our lives and fortunes to maintain.' lest any doubt should exist as to what they meant by 'protestant ascendancy,' they expressly defined it. they resolved that it consisted in a protestant king of ireland; a protestant parliament, protestant electors and government; protestant benches of justice; a protestant hierarchy; the army and the revenue, through all their branches and details, protestant; and this system supported by a connection with the protestant realm of britain. the power of the political franchise to elevate a degraded people, to convert slaves into men, is exhibited before the eyes of the present generation in the southern states of america; even where differences of race and colour are most marked, and where the strongest natural antipathies are to be overcome. we may judge from this what must have been the effect of this concession on the irish celts. the forty-shilling freeholders very soon became objects of consideration with their landlords, who were anxious to extend their political influence in their respective counties, for the representation of which the great proprietors had many a fierce contest. the abolition of this franchise by the emancipation act made that measure a grievance instead of a relief to the peasantry, for the landlords were now as anxious to get rid of the small holders as they had been to increase them so long as they served their political purpose. it was one of the great drawbacks which deprived emancipation of the healing effect it would otherwise have produced. if--as pitt intended--that measure had formed part of the union arrangements; if the forty-shilling freeholders had been spared, and the priesthood had been endowed, we should never have had an agitation for repeal or even for the separation of the church from the state. pitt's plan of the union included the abolition of protestant ascendancy. edmund burke, in one of his letters on ireland, said: 'a word has been lately struck in the mint of the castle of dublin. thence it was conveyed to the tholsel, or city hall, where having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in parliament, and was carried back by the speaker of the house of commons, in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence it came. that word is ascendancy. the word is not absolutely new.' he then gives its various meanings, and first shows what it does _not_ signify in the new sense. not influence obtained by love or reverence, or by superior management and dexterity; not an authority derived from wisdom or virtue, promoting the happiness and freedom of the roman catholic people; not by flattering them, or by a skilful adaptation to their humours and passions. it means nothing of all these. burke then shows what it does mean. 'new ascendancy is old mastership. it is neither more nor less than the resolution of one sect of people in ireland to consider themselves the sole citizens in the commonwealth, and to keep a dominion over the rest, by reducing them to absolute slavery under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely among themselves. this ascendancy, by being a _protestant_ ascendancy, does not better it, from a combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. by the use that is frequently made of the term, and the policy that is grafted on it, the name protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men; for the patrons of this protestant ascendancy neither do nor can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word protestant.... the whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice. it is indeed a perfection in that kind, belonging to beings of a higher order than man, and to them we ought to leave it.... let three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading, and nothing more is required of them.... the word _protestant_ is the charm that locks up in a dungeon of servitude three millions of people. every thoughtful reader of the debates in parliament on the state of ireland, must have been struck with the difference of opinion between the liberals and the conservatives, as to the facts of the case. a still more violent difference was presented in the british parliament, in the year , when there were great debates in both houses on the subject, and when the facts were still more glaring, one of them being that the reign of terror established by the irish government prevented the press from reporting the maddening atrocities which the ruling faction was daily perpetrating against the mass of the king's subjects. the debate arose in the lords, on a motion by lord moira for an address to the king on the state of ireland. he described the horrors of which he had been recently a witness, but softened the recital, lest he should shock his hearers too much. orange loyalty was then licensed and let loose upon the defenceless roman catholic population in ulster. lord gosford's description of the scenes of desolation in his own county, armagh, is well known. he did what he could to prevent the burning of roman catholic houses, and the personal injuries inflicted upon the unfortunate inhabitants, while their orange neighbours chased them out of the country, giving them cromwell's alternative. but his mercy injured his reputation, and he felt obliged to protest solemnly that he was a loyal man, and that he wished to uphold protestant ascendancy in ireland as much as any of his accusers. he only asked that the poor catholic should be allowed to live in peace. in the debate referred to, lord moira declared that ninety-one householders had been banished from one of his own estates; and many of them wounded in their persons. the discontent, he said, was not confined to one sect. he ascribed the state of things to the recall of lord fitzwilliam, which crushed the hopes of the catholics, and gave unbounded licence to the yeomanry, who were empowered to act with a vigour beyond the law; to turn out, banish, or kill the king's subjects, on mere suspicion, often prompted by private malice, and having no better warrant than anonymous information. but for all this the irish parliament and the new reactionary viceroy freely granted acts of indemnity. according to earl fitzwilliam 'whole parishes, baronies, and even counties, were declared to be out of the king's peace.' mr. fox brought forward a similar motion in the house of commons, pleading the cause of justice and humanity in a noble speech, and boldly affirming principles of government for ireland, which mr. gladstone, mr. chichester fortescue, and mr. bright are now endeavouring to have carried out by the imperial parliament after seventy years of concession, extorted by three rebellions. mr. fox expressed his abhorrence of 'the truly diabolical maxim' of '_divide el impera_,' by which the government of ireland was conducted. he hoped that the discontent which threatened the separation of ireland would be dissipated without the necessity of war. 'but now,' he said, 'the extremity of rigour has been tried--the severity of despotism has been let loose--and the government is driven to that state when the laws are not to be put into execution, but to be superseded.' the motion was seconded by sir francis burdett, who said: 'whoever has seen ireland, has seen a country where the fields are desolated, and the prisons overflowing with the victims of oppression--has seen the shocking contrast between a profligate, extravagant government, and an enslaved and impoverished people.' the motion was rejected by a majority of . lord moira made a last and an almost despairing appeal on november , in the same year. in his speech he said: 'i have seen in that country a marked distinction made between the english and the irish. i have seen troops that have been sent full of this prejudice, that every inhabitant of that kingdom is a rebel to the british government. i have seen the most wanton insults practised upon men of all ranks and conditions. i have seen the most grievous oppression exercised, in consequence of a presumption that the person who was the unfortunate object of such oppression was in hostility to the government; and yet that has been done in a part of the country as quiet and as free from disturbance as the city of london. he who states these things should be prepared with proofs. i am prepared with them.' he then went into a number of horrifying details, and concluded as follows: 'you say that the irish are insensible to the benefits of the british constitution, and you withhold all these benefits from them. you goad them with harsh and cruel punishments, and a general infliction of insult is thrown upon the kingdom. i have seen, my lords, a conquered country held by military force; _but never did i see in any conquered country such a tone of insult as has been adopted by great britain towards ireland_. i have made a last effort. i acquit my conscience; i have done my duty.' in subsequent debates, the following sentiments were uttered by the leading whig statesmen of the day: 'the treatment of ireland,' said mr. fox, 'was such as to harrow up the soul. it was shocking to think that a nation of brothers was thus to be trampled on like the most remote colony of conquered strangers.... the irish people have been scourged by the iron hand of oppression, and subjected to the horrors of military execution, and are now in a situation too dreadful for the mind to contemplate without dismay. after the inhuman dragooning and horrible executions, the recital of which makes the blood run cold--after so much military cruelty, not in one, but in almost every part of the country--is it possible for this administration to procure unanimity in ireland?' on march , , the duke of bedford moved an address to the king, asking him to change his ministers, and alluding to the state of ireland, as it was before the breaking out of the rebellion. he said: 'were i to enter into a detail of the atrocities which have been committed in ireland, the picture would appal the stoutest heart. it could be proved that the most shocking cruelties have been perpetrated; but what could be expected if men kept in strict discipline were all at once allowed to give loose to their fury and their passions?' lord holland was persuaded that his majesty's ministers could not tranquillise ireland even by conciliation. 'how could they conciliate whose concessions are always known to be the concessions of weakness and of fear, and who never granted to the irish--the most generous people upon earth,--anything without a struggle or resistance?' lord william russell, in june following, said: 'a man's loyalty was to be estimated by the desire he testified to imbrue his hands in his brother's blood.' sheridan asked: 'after being betrayed, duped, insulted--disappointed in their dearest hopes, and again thrown into the hands of the rulers they detested and despised, was it impossible they should feel emotions of indignation? the struggle is not one of partial disaffection, but it is a contest between the people and the government.' mr. tierney said: 'it was certain the people were in arms against the government, nor was it easy to conceive how--having been scourged, burnt, and massacred--they could have any other feeling than aversion to that government.' every motion on the subject in both houses was rejected by overwhelming majorities. so little impression did the reports of the appalling facts which were of daily occurrence in ireland make upon that tory government, that the speeches of ministers read exactly like the speeches of mr. disraeli, mr. hardy, lord mayo, and mr. warren, in the past session. lord grenville, the home secretary, professed the most profound respect for the independence of the irish parliament, and he could not think of interfering in the least with its privileges, however the empire might suffer from its excesses. 'the motion of lord moira was not only unnecessary, it was highly mischievous.' he dwelt on the improved state of ireland, and the tranquillity of the people. if there were partial excesses on the part of the military, they were unavoidable, and could only be deplored. 'he was unable to discern what should alienate the affections of ireland. for the whole space of thirty years his majesty's government had been distinguished by the same uniform tenderness of regard, by the same undeviating adherence to the mild principles of a conciliatory system.... if any cruelties had been practised, they must have been resisted by a high-spirited people. were there no courts of justice? the conduct of the lord lieutenant was highly commendable. the system recommended by lord moira would only tend to villify the irish government.' then came the fatal announcement which sounded the death-knell of thousands of the irish people, and caused the destruction of millions' worth of property. the home secretary said: 'the contrary system must, therefore, be persevered in; and to the spirited exertions of the british military should we owe the preservation of irish laws, of irish property, and of irish lives!' to this the marquis of downshire added 'that he was not afraid of the effects of coercion. every concession had been made that could be made towards ireland. every catholic was as free as the safety of the state would admit. were the catholics to have an equal share in the government with the protestants, the government and the country would be lost.' i will conclude by quoting the remarks of mr. fox, referred to above: 'if you do not allay their discontent, there is no way but force to keep them in obedience. can you convince them by the musket that their principles are false? can you prove to them by the bayonet that their pretensions are unjust? can you demonstrate to them by martial law that they enjoy the blessings of a free constitution? no, it is said, but they may be deterred from the prosecution of the objects which you have determined to refuse. but on what is this founded? on the history of ireland itself? no; for the history of ireland proves that, though repeatedly subdued, it could not be kept in awe by force; and the late examples will prove the effect which severity may be expected to produce.... i would therefore concede; and if i found i had not conceded enough, i would concede more. i know of no way of governing mankind, but by conciliating them.... my wish is that the whole people of ireland should have the same principles, the same system, the same operation of government. ... i would have the whole irish government regulated by irish notions and irish prejudices; and i firmly believe, according to an irish expression, the more she is under irish government, the more she will be bound to english interests. ... i say, therefore, try conciliation, but do not have recourse to arms.' he warned and implored in vain. the union had been determined on; and it was thought that it could be effected only after the prostration of civil war, into which, therefore, the unfortunate people were goaded. chapter xv. poverty and coercion. we are now in the nineteenth century, without any relief for the irish peasantry. the rebellion of ' , so cruelly crushed, left an abiding sense of terror in the hearts of the roman catholic population. their condition was one of almost hopeless prostration. the union was effected without the promised relief from their religious disabilities which was to be one of its essential conditions. the established church was secured, the rights of property were secured, but there was no security for the mass of the people. domestic politics were almost forgotten in the gigantic struggle with napoleon, which exhausted the energies of the empire. any signs of political life that showed themselves in ireland were connected with catholic emancipation, and the visit of george iv., in , held forth promises of relief which excited unbounded joy. the king loved his irish subjects, and would never miss an opportunity of realising the good wishes for their happiness which he had so often and so fervently expressed to his whig friends, when he was prince regent. o'connell's agitation commenced soon after, and in nine years after the royal visit emancipation was extorted by the dread of civil war, frankly avowed by the duke of wellington and sir robert peel. but this boon left the masses nearly where they had been, only more conscious of their power, and more determined to use it, in the removal of their grievances. lord redesdale, writing to lord eldon in , said:--'in england the machine goes on almost of itself, and therefore a bad driver may manage it tolerably well. it is not so in ireland. the country requires great exertion to bring it into a state of order and submission to law. the whole population--high and low, rich and poor, catholic and protestant--must all be brought to obedience to law; all must be taught to look up to the law for protection. the gentry are ready enough to attend grand juries, to obtain presentments for their own benefit, but they desert the quarter-sessions of the peace. the first act of a constable in arresting must not be to knock down the prisoner; and many, many reforms must be made, which only can be effected by a judicious and able government _on the spot_. ireland, in its present state, cannot be governed in england. if insubordination compels you to give, how are you to retain by law what you propose to maintain while insubordination remains? it can only be by establishing completely the empire of the law.' sir archibald alison ascribed the unhappy relations of classes in ireland to what he calls 'the atrocious system of confiscation, which, in conformity with feudal usages, the victors introduced on every occasion of rebellion against their authority.' sir george nicholls has shown, in his valuable history of the irish poor law, that as early as the parliament assembled at kilkenny resolved that none should keep irish, or kern, in time of peace to live upon the poor of the country; 'but those which will have them shall keep them at their own charges, so that the free tenants and farmers be not charged with them.' and years afterwards, the parliament assembled in dublin declared that divers of the english were in the habit of maintaining sundry thieves, robbers, and rebels, and that they were to be adjudged traitors for so doing, and suffer accordingly. in , this class of depredators had increased very much, and by their 'thefts and manslaughters caused the land to fall into decay, poverty wasting it every day more and more; whereupon it was ordained that it should be lawful for every liege man to kill or take notorious thieves, and thieves found robbing, spoiling, or breaking houses; and that every man that kills or takes any such thieves shall have one penny of every plough, and one farthing of every cottage within the barony where the manslaughter is done, for every thief.' these extracts show a very barbarous state of society, but sir george nicholls remarks that at the same period the condition of england and scotland was very similar, save only that that of ireland was aggravated by the civil conflicts between the colonists and the natives. there were some efforts made in ireland, by various enactments, to put down this evil, and to provide employment for the large numbers that were disposed to prey upon the industry of their neighbours, by robbery, beggary, and destruction of property. but while there was a legal provision made for the poor in england, there was none in ireland, where the people were, _en masse_, deprived of the means of self-support by the action of the government. hence, so late as the year , the poor-law commissioners reported to the following effect:-- it appeared that in great britain the agricultural families constituted little more than a fourth, whilst in ireland they constituted about two-thirds, of the whole population; that there were in great britain, in , , , agricultural labourers; in ireland, , , , although the cultivated land of great britain amounted to about , , acres and that of ireland only to about , , . so that there were in ireland about five agricultural labourers for every two that there were for the same quantity of land in great britain. it further appeared that the agricultural progress of great britain was more than four times that of ireland; in which agricultural wages varied from sixpence to one shilling a day; the average of the country being about eightpence-halfpenny; and that the earnings of the labourers came, on an average of the whole class, to from two shillings to two and sixpence a week or thereabouts for the year round. thus circumstanced, the commissioners observed, 'it is impossible for the able-bodied in general to provide against sickness or the temporary absence of employment, or against old age, or the destitution of their widows and children in the contingent event of their own premature decease. a great portion of them are, it is said, insufficiently provided with the commonest necessaries of life. their habitations are wretched hovels, several of a family sleep together on straw, or upon the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes even without so much to cover them; their food commonly consists of dry potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day. there are even instances of persons being driven by hunger to seek sustenance in wild herbs. they sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at christmas, easter, and shrovetide. some go in search of employment to great britain, during the harvest; others wander through ireland with the same view. the wives and children of many are occasionally obliged to beg; but they do so reluctantly and with shame, and in general go to a distance from home, that they may not be known. mendicity, too, is the sole resource of the aged and impotent of the poorer classes in general, when children or relatives are unable to support them. to it, therefore, crowds are driven for the means of existence, and the knowledge that such is the fact leads to an indiscriminate giving of alms, which encourages idleness, imposture, and general crime.' such was the wretched condition of the great body of the labouring classes in ireland; 'and with these facts before us,' the commissioners say, 'we cannot hesitate to state that we consider remedial measures requisite to ameliorate the condition of the irish poor. what those measures should be is a question complicated, and involving considerations of the deepest importance to the whole body of the people, both in ireland and great britain.' sir george nicholls, who had been an english poor-law commissioner, was sent over to ireland to make preliminary enquiries. he found that the irish peasantry had generally an appearance of apathy and depression, seen in their mode of living, their habitations, their dress and conduct; they seemed to have no pride, no emulation, to be heedless of the present and careless of the future. they did not strive to improve their appearance or add to their comforts: their cabins were slovenly, smoky, dirty, almost without furniture, or any article of convenience or common decency. the woman and her children were seen seated on the floor, surrounded by pigs and poultry: the man lounging at the door, which could be approached only through mud and filth: the former too slatternly to sweep the dirt and offal from the door, the latter too lazy to make a dry footway, though the materials were close at hand. if the mother were asked why she did not keep herself and her children clean with a stream of water running near the cabin, her answer invariably was--sure, how can we help it? we are so poor.' the husband made the same reply, while smoking his pipe at the fire or basking in the sunshine. sir george nicholls rightly concluded that poverty was not the sole cause of this state of things. he found them also remarkable for their desultory and reckless habits. though their crops were rotting in the fields from excessive wet, and every moment of sunshine should be taken advantage of, yet if there was a market, a fair, or a funeral, a horse-race, a fight, or a wedding, forgetting everything else, they would hurry off to the scene of excitement. working for wages was rare and uncertain, and hence arose a disregard of the value of time, a desultory, sauntering habit, without industry or steadiness of application. 'such,' he proceeds, 'is too generally the character and such the habits of the irish peasantry; and it may not be uninstructive to mark the resemblance which these bear to the character and habits of the english peasantry in the pauperised districts, under the abuses of the old poor law. mendicancy and indiscriminate almsgiving have produced in ireland results similar to what indiscriminate relief produced in england--the like reckless disregard of the future, the like idle and disorderly conduct, and the same proneness to outrage having then characterised the english pauper labourer which are now too generally the characteristics of the irish peasant. an abuse of a good law caused the evil in the one case, and a removal of that abuse is now rapidly effecting a remedy. in the other case the evil appears to have arisen rather from the want than the abuse of a law; but the corrective for both will, i believe, be found to be essentially the same.' the expectation that such a neglected people, made wretched by bad land laws, should be loyal, was surely unreasonable. for them, it might be said, there was no government, no protection, no encouragement. there could not be more tempting materials for agitators to work upon. lord cloncurry vividly sketches the state of things resulting from the want of principle and earnestness among politicians in dealing with irish questions at that time. 'from the union up to the year , the type of british colonial government was the order of the day. the protestants were upheld as a superior caste, and paid in power and official emoluments for their services in the army of occupation. during the second viceroyalty of lord anglesea, an effort was made by him to evoke the energies of the whole nation for its own regeneration. that effort was defeated by the conjoint influence of the cowardice of the english cabinet, the petulance of mr. stanley, and the unseasonable violence and selfishness of the lately emancipated popular leaders. upon lord anglesea's recall the modern whig model of statemanship was set up and followed: popular grievances were allowed to remain unredressed; the discontent and violence engendered by those grievances were used from time to time for party purposes; the people were hung and bayoneted when their roused passions exceeded the due measure of factious requirement; and the state patronage was employed to stimulate and to reward a staff of demagogues, by whom the masses were alternately excited to madness, and betrayed, according to the necessities of the english factions. when russells and greys were out or in danger, there were free promises of equal laws and privileges and franchises for oppressed ireland; the minister expectant or trembling for his place, spoke loudly of justice and compensation, of fraternity and freedom. to these key-notes the place-hunting demagogue pitched his brawling. his talk was of pike-making, and sword-fleshing, and monster marching. the simple people were goaded into a madness, the end whereof was for them suspension of the habeas corpus act, the hulks, and the gallows; for their stimulators, silk gowns and commissionerships and seats on the bench. under this treatment the public mind became debauched; the lower classes, forced to bear the charges of agitation, as well as to suffer its penalties, lost all faith in their social future; they saw not and looked not beyond the momentary excitement of a procession or a monster meeting.' sir robert peel, when introducing the emancipation bill, had to confess the utter failure of the coercive policy which had been so persistently pursued. he showed that ireland had been governed, since the union, almost invariably by coercive acts. there was always some political organisation antagonistic to the british government. the catholic association had just been suppressed; but another would soon spring out of its ashes, if the catholic question were not settled. mr. o'connell had boasted that he could drive a coach-and-six through the former act for its suppression; and lord eldon had engaged to drive 'the meanest conveyance, even a donkey cart, through the act of .' the new member for oxford (sir robert inglis) also stated that twenty-three counties in ireland were prepared to follow the example of clare. 'what will you do,' asked sir robert peel, 'with that power, that tremendous power, which the elective franchise, exercised under the control of religion, at this moment confers upon the roman catholics? what will you do with the thirty or forty seats that will be claimed in ireland by the persevering efforts of the agitators, directed by the catholic association, and carried out by the agency of every priest and bishop in ireland?' if parliament began to recede there could be no limit to the retrogression. such a course would produce a reaction, violent in proportion to the hopes that had been excited. fresh rigours would become necessary; the re-enactment of the penal code would not be sufficient. they must abolish trial by jury, or, at least, incapacitate catholics from sitting on juries. , , of protestants must have a complete monopoly of power and privilege in a country which contained , , of catholics, who were in most of the country four to one--in some districts twenty to one--of the protestants. true, there were difficulties in the way of a settlement. 'but,' asked sir robert peel, 'what great measure, which has stamped its name upon the era, has ever been carried without difficulty? at the present moment there is a loud cry in the english press for the suspension of the habeas corpus act, and for the old remedy, coercion. those who raise the cry would do well to read mr. shiel's speech at the clare election in . he said:-- 'we have put a great engine into action, and applied the entire force of that powerful machinery which the law has placed under our control. we are masters of the passions of the people, and we have employed our dominion with a terrible effect. but, sir, do you, or does any man here, imagine that we could have acquired this formidable ability to sunder the strongest ties by which the different classes of society are fastened, unless we found the materials of excitement in the state of society itself? do you think that daniel o'connell has himself, and by the single powers of his own mind, unaided by any external co-operation, brought the country to this great crisis of agitation? mr. o'connell, with all his talent for excitation, would have been utterly powerless and incapable, unless he had been allied with a great conspirator against the public peace; and i will tell you who that confederate is--it is the law of the land itself that has been mr. o'connell's main associate, and that ought to be denounced as the mighty agitator of ireland. the rod of oppression is the wand of this enchanter, and the book of his spells is the penal code? break the wand of this political prospero, and take from him the volume of his magic, and he will evoke the spirits which are now under his control no longer. but why should i have recourse to illustration, which may be accounted fantastical, in order to elucidate what is in itself so plain and obvious? protestant gentlemen, who do me the honour to listen to me, look, i pray you, a little dispassionately at the real causes of the events which have taken place amongst you.... in no other country, except in this, would such a revolution have been effected. wherefore? because in no other country are the people divided by the law from their superiors, and cast into the hands of a set of men who are supplied with the means of national excitement by the system of government under which we live. surely, no man can believe that such an anomalous body as the catholic association could exist excepting in a community that has been alienated from the state by the state itself. the discontent and the resentment of , , of the population have generated that domestic government which sways public opinion, and uses the national passions as the instruments of its will. it would be utterly impossible, if there were no exasperating distinctions amongst us, to create any artificial causes of discontent. let men declaim for a century, and if they have no real grievance their harangues will be empty sound and idle air. but when what they tell the people is true--when they are sustained by substantial facts, effects are produced of which what has taken place at this election is only an example. the whole body of the people having been previously excited, the moment any incident such as this election occurs, all the popular passions start simultaneously up, and bear down every obstacle before them. do not, therefore, be surprised that the peasantry should throw off their allegiance when they are under the operation of emotions which it would be wonderful if they could resist. the feeling by which they are actuated would make them not only vote against their landlord, but would make them scale the batteries of a fortress, and mount the breach; and, gentlemen, give me leave to ask you whether, after due reflection upon the motives by which your vassals (for so they are accounted) are governed, you will be disposed to exercise any measure of severity in their regard?' the greatest warrior of the age rebuked the men who cried in that day that the sword should be the arbiter of the irish question; and sir robert peel, in his own vindication of the emancipation act, said:-- 'i well know that there are those upon whom such considerations as these to which i have been adverting will make but a faint impression. their answer to all such appeals is the short, in their opinion the conclusive, declaration--" the protestant constitution in church and state must be maintained at all hazards, and by any means; the maintenance of it is a question of principle, and every concession or compromise is the sacrifice of principle to a low and vulgar expediency." this is easily said; but how was ireland to be governed? how was the protestant constitution in church and state to be maintained in that part of the empire? again i can anticipate the reply--"by the overwhelming sense of the people of great britain; by the application, if necessary, of physical force for the maintenance of authority; by the employment of the organised strength of government, the police and the military, to enforce obedience to the law." i deliberately affirm that a minister of the crown, responsible at the time of which i am speaking for the public peace and the public welfare, would have grossly and scandalously neglected his duty if he had failed to consider whether it might not be possible that the fever of political and religious excitement which was quickening the pulse and fluttering the bosom of the whole catholic population--which had inspired the serf of clare with the resolution and energy of a free man--which had, in the twinkling of an eye, made all considerations of personal gratitude, ancient family connection, local preferences, the fear of worldly injury, the hope of worldly advantage, subordinate to the all-absorbing sense of religious obligation and public duty--whether, i say, it might not be possible that the contagion of that feverish excitement might spread beyond the barriers which, under ordinary circumstances, the habits of military obedience and the strictness of military discipline opposed to all such external influences.' the officer who commanded the military force in clare during the election, testified, as the result of his observation there, that, even in the constabulary and the army, the sympathies of a common cause, political and religious, could not be altogether repressed, and that implicit reliance could not long be placed on the effect of discipline and the duty of obedience. on july , lord anglesea wrote as follows:-- 'we hear occasionally of the catholic soldiers being ill-disposed, and entirely under the influence of the priests. one regiment of infantry is said to be divided into orange and catholic factions. it is certain that, on july , the guard at the castle had orange lilies about them.' on july , the viceroy wrote another letter, from which the following is an extract:--'the priests are using very inflammatory language, and are certainly working upon the catholics of the army. i think it important that the depôts of irish recruits should be gradually removed, under the appearance of being required to join their regiments, and that whatever regiments are sent here should be those of scotland, or, at all events, of men not recruited from the south of ireland. i desired sir john byng to convey this opinion to lord hill.' emancipation was carried, and the people were disaffected still. and why should they not be disaffected still? emancipation had done nothing for them. the farmers were still at the mercy of the landlords, whose pride they humbled at the hustings of clare and waterford. they were still tormented by the tithe-proctor seizing the tenth of all that their labour produced on the land. the labourers were still wretched, deprived of the forty-shilling freehold, which protected them from the horrors of eviction and of transportation in a floating hell across the atlantic. i well remember the celebrated anti-tithe war in , as well as the system by which it was provoked, and i can bear witness to the accuracy of the following description of the tithe-proctor by henry grattan. he said:-- 'the use of the tithe-farmer is to get from the parishioners what the parson would be ashamed to demand, and so enable the parson to absent himself from his duty. the powers of the tithe-farmer are summary laws and ecclesiastical courts; his livelihood is extortion; his rank in society is generally the lowest; and his occupation is to pounce on the poor in the name of the lord! he is a species of wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence.' a single tithe-proctor had on one occasion processed , persons for tithes, nearly all of the lower order of farmers or peasants, the expense of each process being about s. they had heard of opinions delivered in parliament, on the platform, and from the press by protestant statesmen of the highest consideration, that it was a cruel oppression to extort in that manner from the majority of the tillers of the soil the tenth of its produce, in order to support the clergy of another church, who, in many cases, had no flocks, or only a few followers, who were well able to pay for their own religious instruction. the system would be intolerable even were the state clergy the pastors of the majority; but as the proportion between the protestants and the roman catholics was in many parts as one to ten, and in some as one to twenty, the injustice necessarily involved in the mode of levying the impost was aggravated a hundredfold. it would be scarcely possible to devise any mode of levying an impost more exasperating, which came home to the bosoms of men with more irritating, humiliating, and maddening power, and which violated more recklessly men's natural sense of justice. if a plan were devised for the purpose of driving men into insurrection, nothing could be more effectual than the tithe-proctor system. besides, it tended directly to the impoverishment of the country, retarding agricultural improvement and limiting production. if a man kept all his land in pasture, he escaped the impost; but the moment he tilled it, he was subjected to a tax of ten per cent. on the gross produce. the valuation being made by the tithe-proctor--a man whose interest it was to defraud both the tenant and the parson--the consequence was, that the gentry and the large farmers, to a great extent, evaded the tax, and left the small occupiers to bear nearly the whole burden; they even avoided mowing the meadows in some cases, because then they should pay tithe for the hay. there was besides a tax called church cess, levied by protestants in vestry meetings upon roman catholics for cleaning the church, ringing the bell, washing the minister's surplice, purchasing bread and wine for the communion, and paying the salary of the parish clerk. this tax was felt to be a direct and flagrant violation of the rights of conscience, and of the principles of the british constitution; and against it there was a determined opposition, which manifested itself in tumultuous and violent assemblages at the parish churches all over the country on easter monday, when the rector or his curate, as chairman of the meeting, came into angry collision with flocks who disowned him, and denounced him as a tyrant, a persecutor, and a robber. but the tithe impost was the one most grievously felt, and at last the peasantry resolved to resist it by force. nothing could be more violent than the contrasts presented at this time in the social life of ireland. on the one side there was a rapid succession of atrocities and tragedies fearful to contemplate: the bailiffs, constabulary, and military driving away cattle, sheep, pigs, and geese to be sold by public auction, to pay the minister who had no congregation to whom he could preach the gospel; the cattle-prisons or 'pounds' surrounded by high walls, but uncovered, wet and dirty, crowded with all sorts of animals, cold and starved, and uttering doleful sounds; the driving away of the animals in the night from one farm to another to avoid seizures; the auctions without bidders, in the midst of groaning and jeering multitudes; the slaughter of policemen, and in some instances of clergymen, with fiendish expressions of hatred and yells of triumph; the mingling of fierce passions with the strongest natural affections; the exultation in murder as if it were a glorious deed of war; the roman catholic press and platform almost justifying those deeds of outrage and blood; the mass of the roman catholic population sustaining this insurrection against the law with their support and sympathy and prayers, as if it were a holy war, in which the victims were martyrs. on the other side were presented pictures which excited the deepest interest of the protestant community throughout the united kingdom. we behold the clergyman and his family in the glebe-house, lately the abode of plenty, comfort, and elegance, a model of domestic happiness and gentlemanly life; but the income of the rector fell off, till he was bereft of nearly all his means. in order to procure the necessaries of life for his family, he was obliged to part with the cows that gave milk for his household, the horse and car, which were necessary in the remote place where his glebe-house was situated, and everything that could be spared, till at length he was obliged to make his greatest sacrifice, and to send his books--the dear and valued companions of his life--to dublin, to be sold by auction. his boys could no longer be respectably clad, his wife and daughters were obliged to part with their jewellery and all their superfluities. there was no longer wine or medicine, that the mother was accustomed to dispense kindly and liberally to the poor around her, in their sickness and sorrow, without distinction of creed. the glebe, which once presented an aspect of so much comfort and ease and affluence, now looked bare and desolate and void of life. but for the contributions of christian friends at a distance, many of those once happy little centres of christian civilisation--those well-springs of consolation to the afflicted--must have been abandoned to the overwhelming sand of desolation swept upon them by the hurricane of the anti-tithe agitation. during this desperate struggle, force was employed on several occasions with fatal effect. at newtownbarry, in the county of wexford, some cattle were impounded by a tithe-proctor. the peasantry assembled in large numbers to rescue them, when they came into collision with the yeomanry, who fired, killing twelve persons. it was a market day, and a placard was posted on the walls: 'there will be an end of church plunder; your pot, blanket, and pig will not hereafter be sold by auction to support in luxury, idleness, and ease persons who endeavour to make it appear that it is essential to the peace and prosperity of the country and your eternal salvation, while the most of you are starving. attend to an auction of your neighbours' cattle.' at carrickshock there was a fearful tragedy. a number of writs against defaulters were issued by the court of exchequer, and entrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong body of police, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and dispatch. bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for their visitors. but the yeomanry pushed boldly on. suddenly an immense assemblage of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them. a terrible hand-to-hand struggle ensued, and in the course of a few moments eighteen of the police, including the commanding officer, were slaughtered. the remainder consulted safety and fled, marking the course of their retreat by the blood that trickled from their wounds. a coroner's jury pronounced this deed of death as 'wilful murder' against some persons unknown. a large government reward was offered, but it failed to produce a single conviction. at castlepollard, in westmeath, on the occasion of an attempted rescue, the chief constable was knocked down. the police fired, and nine or ten persons were killed. one of the most lamentable of these conflicts occurred at gurtroe, near rathcormac, in the county of cork. archdeacon ryder brought a number of the military to recover the tithes of a farm belonging to a widow named ryan. the assembled people resisted, the military were ordered to fire, eight persons were killed and thirteen wounded; and among the killed was the widow's son. these disorders appealed with irresistible force to the government and the legislature, to put an end to a system fraught with so much evil, and threatening the utter disruption of society in ireland. in the first place, something must be done to meet the wants of the destitute clergy and their families. accordingly, lord stanley brought in a bill, in may , authorising the lord lieutenant of ireland to advance , l. as a fund for the payment of the clergy, who were unable to collect their tithes for the year . this measure was designed to meet the present necessity, and was only a preliminary to the promised settlement of the tithe question. it was therefore passed quickly through both houses, and became law on june . but the money thus advanced was not placed on the consolidated fund. the government took upon itself the collection of the arrears of tithes for that one year. it was a maxim with lord stanley that the people should be made to respect the law; that they should not be allowed to trample upon it with impunity. the odious task thus assumed, produced a state of unparalleled excitement. the people were driven to frenzy, instead of being frightened by the chief secretary becoming tithe-collector-general, and the army being employed in its collection. they knew that the king's speech had recommended the settlement of the tithe question. they had heard of the evidence of bishop doyle and other champions, exposing what they believed to be the iniquity of the tithe system. they had seen the condemnation of it in the testimony of the protestant archbishop of dublin, who declared his conviction that it could not be collected except at the point of the bayonet, and by keeping up a chronic war between the government and the roman catholic people. they had been told that parliamentary committees had recommended the complete extinction of tithes, and their commutation into a rent-charge. their own leaders had everywhere resolved:-- 'that it was a glaring wrong to compel an impoverished catholic people to support in pampered luxury the richest clergy in the world--a clergy from whom, the catholics do not experience even the return of common gratitude--a clergy who, in times past, opposed to the last the political freedom of the irish people, and at the present day are opposed to reform and a liberal scheme of education for their countrymen. the ministers of the god of charity should not, by misapplication of all the tithes to their own private uses, thus deprive the poor of their patrimony; nor should ministers of peace adhere with such desperate tenacity to a system fraught with dissension, hatred, and ill-will.' the first proceeding of the government to recover the tithes, under the act of june , was therefore the signal for general war. bonfires blazed upon the hills, the rallying sounds of horns were heard along the valleys, and the mustering tread of thousands upon the roads, hurrying to the scene of a seizure or an auction. it was a bloody campaign; there was considerable loss of life, and the church and the government thus became more obnoxious to the people than ever. lord stanley being the commander-in-chief on one side, and mr. o'connell on the other, the contest was embittered by their personal antipathies. it was found that the amount of the arrears for the year was , l., and that the whole amount which the government was able to levy, after putting forth its strength in every possible way, was , l., the cost of collection being , l., so the government was not able to raise as much money as would pay the expenses of the campaign. this was how lord stanley illustrated his favourite sentiment that the people should be made to respect the law. but the liberal party among the protestants fully sympathised with the anti-tithe recusants. of course the government did not persevere in prosecutions from which no parties but the lawyers reaped any advantage; consequently, all processes under the existing law were abandoned. it was found that, after paying to the clergy the arrears of and , and what would be due in , about a million sterling would be required, and this sum was provided by an issue of exchequer bills. the reimbursement of the advance was to be effected by a land tax. together with these temporary arrangements to meet the exigency of the case, for the payment of the clergy and the pacification of ireland, an act was passed to render tithe composition in ireland compulsory and permanent. but ireland was not yet pacified.[ ] [footnote : the foregoing sketch of the tithe war was written by the author seven years ago for cassell's _history of england_, from which it is now extracted.] chapter xvi. the famine. it had often been predicted by writers on the state of ireland, that, owing to the rottenness at the foundation of the social fabric, it would come down with a crash some day. the facts reported by the census commissioners of showed that this consummation could not be far off. out of a population of , , , there were , , above the age of five years who could neither read nor write; while nearly three millions and a half lived in mud cabins, badly thatched with straw, having each but one room, and often without either a window or a chimney. these figures indicate a mass of ignorance and poverty, which could not be contemplated without alarm, and the subject was, therefore, constantly pressed upon the attention of parliament. as usual in cases of difficulty, the government, feeling that something should be done, and not knowing what to do, appointed in a commission to enquire into the relations between landlords and tenants, and the condition of the working classes. at the head of this commission was the earl of devon, a benevolent nobleman, whose sympathies were on the side of the people. captain kennedy, the secretary to the commissioners, published a digest of the report of the evidence, which presented the facts in a readable form, and was the means of diffusing a large amount of authentic information on the state of ireland. the commissioners travelled through the country, held courts of enquiry, and examined witnesses of all classes. as the result of their extensive intercourse with the farming classes, and their own observations, they were enabled to state that in almost every part of ireland unequivocal symptoms of improvement, in spite of many embarrassing and counteracting circumstances, continually presented themselves to the view, and that there existed a very general and increasing spirit and desire for the promotion of such improvement, from which the most beneficial results might fairly be expected. indeed, speaking of the country generally, they add: 'with some exceptions, which are unfortunately too notorious, we believe that at no former period did so active a spirit of improvement prevail; nor could well directed measures for the attainment of that object have been proposed with a better prospect of success than at the present moment.' but this improvement produced no sensible effect upon the condition of the labouring people. however brightly the sun of prosperity might gild the eminences of society, the darkness of misery and despair settled upon the masses below. the commissioners proceed: 'a reference to the evidence of most of the witnesses will show that the agricultural labourer of ireland continues to suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he continues to depend upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he is still badly housed, badly fed, badly clothed, and badly paid for his labour. our personal experience and observation during our enquiry have afforded us a melancholy confirmation of these statements; and we cannot forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have generally exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in europe have to sustain.' it was deeply felt that the well-being of the whole united kingdom depended upon the removal of the causes of this misery and degradation; for if the irish people were not elevated, the english working classes must be brought down to their level. the facility of travelling afforded by railways and steam-boats caused such constant intercourse between england and ireland, that irish ignorance, beggary, and disease, with all their contagion, physical and moral, would be found intermingling with the british population. it would be impossible to prevent the half-starved irish peasantry from crossing the channel, and seeking employment, even at low wages, and forming a pestiferous irish quarter in every town and city. the question, then, was felt to be one whose settlement would brook no further delay. it was found that the potato was almost the only food of the irish millions, and that it formed their chief means of obtaining the other necessaries of life. a large portion of this crop was grown under the system, to which the poorest of the peasantry were obliged to have recourse, notwithstanding the minute subdivision of land. there were in , , farms in ireland exceeding one acre in extent. nearly one half of these were under five acres each. the number of proprietors in fee was estimated at , --a smaller number, in proportion to the extent of territory, than in any other country of western europe except spain. in connaught, several proprietors had , acres each, the proportion of small farms being greater there than in the rest of ireland. the total number of farms in the province was , , and of these , consisted of from one to five acres. if all the proprietors were resident among their tenantry, and were in a position to encourage their industry and care for their welfare, matters would not have been so bad; but most of the large landowners were absentees. it frequently happened that the large estates were held in strict limitation, and they were nearly all heavily encumbered. the owners preferred living in england or on the continent, having let their lands on long leases, or in perpetuity to 'middlemen,' who sublet them for as high rents as they could get. their tenants again sublet, so that it frequently happened that two, three, or four landlords intervened between the proprietor and the occupying tenant, each deriving an interest from the land. the head landlord, therefore, though ever so well disposed, had no power whatever to help the occupying tenants generally, and of those who had the power very few felt disposed. there were extensive districts without a single resident proprietor. for a few weeks after the blight of the potato crop in the cottiers and small farmers managed to eke out a subsistence by the sale of their pigs and any little effects they had. but pigs, fowl, furniture, and clothing soon went, one after another, to satisfy the cravings of hunger. the better class of farmers lived upon their corn and cattle; but they were obliged to dismiss their servants, and this numerous class became the first victims of starvation; for when they were turned off, they were refused admission by their relations, who had not the means of feeding them. tailors, shoemakers, and other artisans who worked for the lower orders, lost their employment, and became destitute also. while the means of support failed upon every side, and food rose to such enormous prices that everything that could possibly be eaten was economised, so that the starving dogs were drowned from compassion, the famine steadily advanced from the west and south to the east and north, till it involved the whole population in its crushing grasp. it was painfully interesting to mark the progress of the visitation, even in those parts of the country where its ravages were least felt. the small farmer had only his corn, designed for rent and seed: he was obliged to take it to the mill to ward off starvation. the children of the poor, placed on short allowance, were suffering fearfully from hunger. mothers, heart-broken and worn down to skeletons, were seen on certain days proceeding in groups to some distant depôt, where indian meal was to be had at reduced prices, but still double that of the ordinary market. as they returned to their children, with their little bags on their heads, a faint joy lit up their famine-stricken features. when the visitors entered a village their first question was: 'how many deaths?' '_the hunger is upon us_,' was everywhere the cry; and involuntarily they found themselves regarding this hunger as they would an epidemic, looking upon starvation as a disease. in fact, as they passed along, their wonder was, not that the people died, but that they lived; and mr. w.g. forster, in his report, said: 'i have no doubt whatever, that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; and that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the irish peasant has been trained, and by that lovely, touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour. but the springs of this charity must be rapidly dried up. like a scourge of locusts, _the hunger_ daily sweeps over fresh districts, eating up all before it. one class after another is falling into the same abyss of ruin.'[ ] [footnote : transactions during the famine in ireland, appendix iii.] the same benevolent gentleman describes the domestic scenes he saw in connaught, where the poor celts were carried off in thousands:-- 'we entered a cabin. stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly; their little limbs, on removing a portion of the covering, perfectly emaciated; eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation. crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all but naked, scarcely human in appearance. it stirred not nor noticed us. on some straw, soddened upon the ground, moaning piteously, was a shrivelled old woman, imploring us to give her something, baring her limbs partly to show how the skin hung loose from her bones, as soon as she attracted our attention. above her, on something like a ledge, was a young woman with sunken cheeks, a mother, i have no doubt, who scarcely raised her eyes in answer to our enquiries; but pressed her hand upon her forehead, with a look of unutterable anguish and despair. many cases were widows, whose husbands had been recently taken off by the fever, and thus their only pittance obtained from the public works was entirely cut off. in many the husbands or sons were prostrate under that horrid disease--the result of long-continued famine and low living--in which first the limbs and then the body swell most frightfully, and finally burst. we entered upwards of fifty of these tenements. the scene was invariably the same, differing in little but the manner of the sufferers, or of the groups occupying the several corners within. the whole number was often not to be distinguished, until the eye having adapted itself to the darkness, they were pointed out, or were heard, or some filthy bundle of rags and straw was seen to move. perhaps the poor children presented the most piteous and heart-rending spectacle. many were too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation. every infantile expression had entirely departed; and, in some reason and intelligence had evidently flown. many were remnants of families, crowded together in one cabin; orphaned little relatives taken in by the equally destitute, and even strangers--for these poor people are kind to each other, even to the end. in one cabin was a sister, just dying, lying beside her little brother, just dead. i have worse than this to relate; but it is useless to multiply details, and they are, in fact, unfit.' in december, , father mathew wrote to mr. trevelyan, then secretary of the treasury, that men, women, and children were gradually wasting away. they filled their stomachs with cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops, &c., to appease the cravings of hunger. there were then more than , half-starved wretches from the country begging in the streets of cork. when utterly exhausted, they crawled to the workhouse to die. the average of deaths in that union was then over a hundred a week. from december , in , to the middle of april, in , the number of human beings that died in the cork workhouse was , ! and in the third week of the following month the free interments in the mathew cemetery had risen to --as many as sixty-seven having been buried in one day. the destruction of human life in other workhouses of ireland kept pace with the appalling mortality in the cork workhouse. according to official returns, it had reached in april the weekly average of twenty-five per , inmates; the actual number of deaths being , for the week ending april , and , in the following week. yet the number of inmates in the irish workhouses was but , on april . the size of the unions was a great impediment to the working of the poor law. they were three times the extent of the corresponding divisions in england. in munster and connaught, where there was the greatest amount of destitution, and the least amount of local agency available for its relief, the unions were much larger than in the more favoured provinces of ulster and leinster. the union of ballina comprised a region of upwards of half a million acres, and within its desert tracts the famine assumed its most appalling form, the workhouse being more than forty miles distant from some of the sufferers. as a measure of precaution, the government had secretly imported and stored a large quantity of indian corn, as a cheap substitute for the potato, which would have served the purpose much better had the people been instructed in the best modes of cooking it. it was placed in commissariat, along depôts the western coast of the island, where the people were not likely to be supplied on reasonable terms through the ordinary channels of trade. the public works consisted principally of roads, on which, the men were employed as a sort of supplement to the poor law. half the cost was a free grant from the treasury, and the other half was charged upon the barony in which the works were undertaken. the expense incurred under the 'labour rate act, and viet. c. ,' amounted to , , l. it was almost universally admitted, when the pressure was over, that the system of public works adopted was a great mistake; and it seems wonderful that such grievous blunders could have been made with so many able statesmen and political economists at the head of affairs and in the service of the government. the public works undertaken consisted in the breaking up of good roads to level hills and fill hollows, and the opening of new roads in places where they were not required--works which the people felt to be useless, and at which they laboured only under strong compulsion, being obliged to walk to them in all weathers for miles, in order to earn the price of a breakfast of indian meal. had the labour thus comparatively wasted been devoted to the draining, sub-soiling, and fencing of the farms, connected with a comprehensive system of arterial drainage, immense and lasting benefit to the country would have been the result, especially as works so well calculated to ameliorate the soil, and guard against the moisture of the climate, might have been connected with a system of instruction in agricultural matters of which the peasantry stood so much in need, and to the removal of the gross ignorance which had so largely contributed to bring about the famine. as it was, enormous sums were wasted. much needless hardship was inflicted on the starving people in compelling them to work in frost and rain when they were scarcely able to walk, and, after all the vast outlay, very few traces of it remained in permanent improvements on the face of the country. the system of government relief works failed chiefly through the same difficulty which impeded every mode of relief, whether public or private--namely, the want of machinery to work it. it was impossible suddenly to procure an efficient staff of officers for an undertaking of such enormous magnitude--the employment of a whole people. the overseers were necessarily selected in haste; many of them were corrupt, and encouraged the misconduct of the labourers. in many cases the relief committees, unable to prevent maladministration, yielded to the torrent of corruption, and individual members only sought to benefit their own dependants. the people everywhere flocked to the public works; labourers, cottiers, artisans, fishermen, farmers, men, women, and children--all, whether destitute or not, sought for a share of the public money. in such a crowd, it was almost impossible to discriminate properly. they congregated in masses on the roads, idling under the name of work, the really destitute often unheeded and unrelieved because they had no friend to recommend them. all the ordinary employments were neglected; there was no fishing, no gathering of sea-weed, no collecting of manure. the men who had employment feared to lose it by absenting themselves for any other object; those unemployed spent their time in seeking to obtain it. the whole industry of the country seemed to be engaged in road-making. it became absolutely necessary to put an end to it, or the cultivation of the land would be neglected. works undertaken on the spur of the moment, not because they were needful, but merely to employ the people, were in many cases ill chosen, and the execution equally defective. the labourers, desirous to protract their employment, were only anxious to give as little labour as possible, in which their overlookers or gangers in many cases heartily agreed. the favouritism, the intimidation, the wholesale jobbing practised in many cases were shockingly demoralising. in order to induce the people to attend to their ordinary spring work, and put in the crops, it was found necessary to adopt the plan of distributing free rations. on march , therefore, a reduction of twenty per cent. of the numbers employed on the works took place, and the process of reduction went on until the new system of gratuitous relief was brought into full operation. the authority under which this was administered was called the 'temporary relief act,' which came into full operation in the month of july, when the destitution was at its height, and three millions of people received their daily rations. sir john burgoyne truly describes this as 'the grandest attempt ever made to grapple with famine over a whole country.' never in the history of the world were so many persons fed in such a manner by the public bounty. it was a most anxious time--a time of tremendous labour and responsibility to those who had the direction of this vast machinery. a member of the board of works thus describes the feeling which no doubt pervaded most of those that were officially connected with the administration of relief: 'i hope never to see such a winter and spring again. i can truly say, in looking back upon it even now, that it appears to me not a succession of weeks and days, but one long continuous day, with occasional intervals of night-mare sleep. rest one could never have, when one felt that in every minute lost a score of men might die.' mr. trevelyan was then secretary of the treasury, and it was well that a man so enlightened, energetic, and benevolent occupied the post at such a time. he was indefatigable in his efforts to mitigate the calamity, and he wrote an interesting account of 'the irish crisis' in the _edinburgh review_. having presented the dark side of the picture in faithfully recording the abuses that had prevailed, it is right to give mr. trevelyan's testimony as to the conduct of the relief committees during this supreme hour of the nation's agony. 'it is a fact very honourable to ireland that among upwards of , local bodies to whom advances were made under this act, there is not one to which, so far as the government is informed, any suspicion of embezzlement attaches.' the following statement of the numbers receiving rations, and the total expenditure under the act in each of the four provinces, compared with the amount of population, and the annual value assessed for poor-rate, may serve to illustrate the comparative means and destitution of each province:-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | population | valuation | greatest | total | | | | | number of |expenditure | | | | | rations given | | | | | | out | | |---------|-------------|------------|----------------|------------| | | | £ | | £ | |ulster | , , | , , | , | , | |leinster | , , | , , | , | , | |munster | , , | , , | , , | , | |counaught| , , | , , | , | , | | |-------------|------------|----------------|------------| | | , , | , , | , , | , , | -------------------------------------------------------------------- private benevolence did wonders in this crisis. the british association raised and distributed , l. the queen's letter, ordering collections in the english churches, produced , l. but the bounty of the united states of america transcended everything. the supplies sent across the atlantic were on a scale unparalleled in the history of the world. meetings were held in philadelphia, washington, new york, and other cities, in quick succession, presided over by the first men in the country. all through the states the citizens evinced an intense interest, and a noble generosity worthy of the great republic. the railway companies carried free of charge all packages marked 'ireland.' public carriers undertook the gratuitous delivery of packages intended for the relief of irish distress. storage to any extent was offered on the same terms. ships of war, without their guns, came to the irish shores on a mission of peace and mercy, freighted with food for british subjects. cargo after cargo followed in rapid succession, until nearly separate shipments had arrived, our government having consented to pay the freight of all donations of food forwarded from america, which amounted in the whole to , l. the quantity of american food consigned to the care of the society of friends was nearly , tons, the value of which was about , l. in addition to all this, the americans remitted to the friends' committee , l. in money. they also sent packages of clothing, the precise value of which could not be ascertained. there was a very large amount of remittances sent to ireland, during the famine, by the irish in the united states. unfortunately, there are no records of those remittances prior to ; but since that time we are enabled to ascertain a large portion of them, though not the whole, and their amount is something astonishing. the following statement of sums remitted by emigrants in america to their families in ireland, was printed by order of parliament:--during the years , , l.; , , l.; , , l. , , l. the arrival of the american ships naturally excited great interest at the various ports. 'on monday, april ,' writes mr. maguire, 'a noble sight might be witnessed in cork harbour--the sun shining its welcome on the entrance of the unarmed war-ship jamieson, sailing in under a cloud of snowy canvas, her great hold laden with bread-stuffs for the starving people of ireland. it was a sight that brought tears to many an eye, and prayers of gratitude to many a heart. it was one of those things which one nation remembers of another long after the day of sorrow has passed. upon the warm and generous people to whom america literally broke bread and sent life, this act of fraternal charity, so gracefully and impressively offered, naturally produced a profound and lasting impression, the influence of which is felt at this moment.' the clergy, protestant and roman catholic, almost the only resident gentry in several of the destitute districts, worked together on the committees with commendable zeal, diligence, and unanimity. among the roman catholic clergy, father mathew was at that time by far the most influential and popular. the masses of the peasantry regarded him as almost an inspired apostle. during the famine months, he exerted himself with wonderful energy and prudence, first, in his correspondence with different members of the government, earnestly recommending and urging the speedy adoption of measures of relief; and next, in commending those measures to the people, dissuading the hungry from acts of violence, and preaching submission and resignation under that heavy dispensation of providence. of this there are ample proofs in the letters published by mr. maguire, m.p. 'it is not to harrow your feelings, dear mr. trevelyan,' he wrote, 'i tell this tale of woe. no; but to excite your sympathy in behalf of our miserable peasantry. it is rumoured that the capitalists in the corn and flour trade are endeavouring to induce the government not to protect the people from famine, but to leave them at their mercy. i consider this a cruel and unjustifiable interference. i am so unhappy at the prospect before us, and so horror-struck by the apprehension of our destitute people falling into the ruthless hands of the corn and flour traders, that i risk becoming troublesome, rather than not lay my humble opinions before you.' again: 'i hail with delight the humane, the admirable measures for relief announced by my lord john russell; they have given universal satisfaction. but of what avail will all this be, unless the wise precautions of government will enable the toiling workman, after exhausting his vigour during a long day to earn a shilling, to purchase with that shilling a sufficiency of daily food for his generally large and helpless family?' father mathew earnestly pleaded for out-door relief, in preference to the workhouse, foreseeing the danger of sundering the domestic bonds, which operate so powerfully as moral restraints in ireland. the beautiful picture which he drew of the irish peasant's home in his native land was not too highly coloured, as applied to the great majority of the people:--'the bonds of blood and affinity, dissoluble by death alone, associate in the cabins of the irish peasantry, not only the husband, wife, and children, but the aged parents and the married couple and their destitute relatives, even to the third and fourth degree of kindred. god forbid that political economists should dissolve these ties! should violate these beautiful charities of nature and the gospel! i have often found my heart throb with delight when i beheld three or four generations seated around the humble board and blazing hearth; and i offered a silent prayer to the great father of all that the gloomy gates of the workhouse should never separate those whom such tender social chains so fondly link together.' the following is a tabular view of the whole amount of voluntary contributions during the irish famine, which deserves a permanent record for the credit of our common humanity:-- £ s. d. £ s. d. local contributions officially reported in , local contributions officially reported in , british relief association, total received , say five-sixths for ireland , general central relief committee, college green , less received from british relief association , _____________ , irish relief association, sackville street , relief committee of the society of friends, london , central relief committee of the society of friends, dublin , less received from committee of the society of friends in london, and interest , _____________ , indian relief fund , national club, london , wesleyan methodist relief fund, london , irish evangelical society, london , baptists' relief fund, london , ladies' irish clothing society, london , less received from british association, &c. , _____________ , ladies' relief association for ireland , less received from irish relief association and for sales of manufactures , _____________ , ladies' industrial society for encouragement of labour among the peasantry , less received from irish relief association , _____________ belfast ladies' association for the relief of irish distress , belfast ladies' industrial association for connaught , there were also two collections in belfast for general purposes, the amount of which exceeded , chapter xvii. tenant-right in ulster. the earl of granard has taken a leading part in the movement for the settling of the land question, having presided at two great meetings in the counties in which he has large estates, wexford and longford, supported on each occasion by influential landlords. he was the first of his class to propose that the question should be settled on the basis of tenant-right, by legalising and extending the ulster custom. a reference to this custom has been frequently made recently, in discussions on the platform and in the press. i have studied the history of that province with care; and i have during the year gone through several of its counties with the special object of inquiring how the tenant-right operates, and whether, and to what extent, it affords the requisite security to the cultivators of the soil; and it may be of some service that i should give here the result of my enquiries. of the six counties confiscated and planted in ulster, londonderry, as i have already remarked, was allotted to the london companies. the aspect of their estates, is on the whole, very pleasing. in the midst of each there is a small town, built in the form of a square, with a market-house and a town-hall in the centre, and streets running off at each side. there are almost invariably three substantial and handsome places of worship--the parish church, always best and most prominent, the presbyterian meeting-house, and the catholic chapel, with nice manses for the ministers, all built wholly or in part by grants from the companies. complaints were constantly made against the irish society for its neglect of its trust, for refusing to give proper building leases, and for wasting the funds placed at its disposal for public purposes. the details are curious and interesting, throwing much light on the social history of the times. the whole subject of its duties and responsibilities, and of its anomalous powers, was fully discussed at a meeting of the principal citizens, most of them strongly conservative, on the th of may, . there had been a discussion on the subject in the house of commons, in which lord claud hamilton, then member for the borough, distinguished himself. mr. maguire brought the society before parliament in an able speech. the legislature, as well as the public, were then preoccupied with the church question. but, doubtless, the maiden city will make her voice heard next session, and insist on being released from a guardian who always acted the part of a stepmother. the irish society has been before three parliamentary tribunals, the commissioners of municipal corporations for england and wales, the royal commission of enquiry into the state of the corporation of london, and the irish municipal commissioners. the english commissioners say:--'we do not know of any pretext or argument for continuing this municipal supremacy of the irish society. a control of this kind maintained at the present day by the municipality of one town in england over another town in ireland, appears to us so indefensible in principle, that our opinion would not have been changed, even if it were found that hitherto it has been conducted with discretion and forbearance.' the irish commissioners affirmed 'that the irish society in their original institution were created for the purpose of forwarding the interests and objects of the plantation, and not for mere private gain; and that of the large income which they receive from their possessions in londonderry, a very inadequate and disproportionate share is applied for the public purposes, or other objects connected with the local interests of the districts from which the revenues of the society are drawn.' the corporation of derry cannot put a bye-law in force till it receives the approval of the irish society. and what is this tribunal whose fiat must stamp the decision of the derry corporation before it can operate in the smallest matter within the municipal boundary? the members are london traders, totally ignorant of ireland. they are elected for two years, so that they must go out by the time they acquire any information about their trust, to make way for another batch equally ignorant. having everything to learn during their term of office, if they have time or capacity to learn anything about the matter, they must submit to the guidance of the governor, who is elected virtually, though not formally, for life; and the members of the derry corporation believe him to be the autocrat of the society. mr. james p. hamilton, now the assistant-barrister for sligo, at the great meeting of the citizens of derry already mentioned, pronounced the governors to be 'the most ignorant, the most incompetent, and the most careless governors that ever were inflicted on a people.' mr. hamilton quoted from the answer of the corporation of london in to the privy council, which required them to convey , acres to the citizens of derry. the corporation replied that they had allotted , acres for the use of the mayor and other civil officers. that was either true or false. if true, by what right did they recall the grant, and re-possess themselves of those lands? by the articles they were bound to make quays, which were not made. they were bound to give bog and mountain for the city common, which they never gave. the corporation had a tract called the sheriffs mountain, but the city was robbed of it by her cruel stepmother, the irish society. the society was bound to give acres for a free school, and if this had been done derry might have had a rich foundation, rivalling westminster or the charter school. mr. hamilton, conservative as he is, with the heart of a true irishman, indignantly asks, 'why is this national grievance and insult continued for the profit of no one? their very name is an insult and a mockery--_the governor and assistants, london, of the new plantation in ulster_! what do they govern? they don't govern us in any sense of the word. they merely hold our property in a dead grip, without any profit to themselves, and to our great disadvantage.' the city is overwhelmed with debt--debt for the new quays, debt for the new bridge, debt for the public works of the corporation, which has struggled to improve the city under the incubus of this alien power, contending with debt, want of tenure, and other difficulties, which would all have been avoided if the city had the lands which these londoners hold in their possession and use as their own pleasure dictates, half the revenues being spent in the management. mr. william hazlett, a magistrate of derry, one of its ablest and most respected citizens, stated that from to the expenses of management were per cent. the royal commissioners set it down thus--total expenditure, , l.; management, , l. the law expenses were, during the same period, , l. 'this item of itself,' says mr. hazlett, 'must be considered an intolerable grievance, for it was laid out for the oppression of the people who should have benefited by the funds so squandered in opposing the very parties who supplied the money, with which they were themselves harassed. if a tenant applies for a lease, and the society consents to grant one, it is so hampered with obstructive clauses that his solicitor objects to his signing it, and says that from its nature it could not be made a negotiable instrument on which to raise money. the tenant remonstrates, but the reply of the city is--"that is our form of lease; you must comply with it or want!" if you go to law with them, they may take you into chancery, and fight you with your own money.' mr. hazlett gave a remarkable illustration of this, which shows the spirit in which this body thinks proper to fulfil its duties as steward of this property. the devon land commission recommended that leases of lives renewable for ever should be converted into fee-farm grants, which would be a valuable boon to the tenant without any loss to the owner. a bill founded on the recommendation was introduced to parliament. did the enlightened and liberal irish society hail with satisfaction this wise measure of reform? on the contrary, the governor went out of his way to oppose it. having striven in vain, with all the vast influence of the corporation, to have the bill thrown out, he endeavoured to get the society exempted from its operation. when, in spite of his efforts, the bill became law, the governor utterly refused to act on it, and brought the matter before the master of the rolls and the house of lords. from these renewable leases the society had an income of about , l. yearly. and what amount did they demand--these moderate and discreet gentleman, 'the governor and assistants, london, of the new plantation of ulster'--for their interest in the renewable leases? not less than , l., or about years' purchase. in the year , when the city of derry was fast hastening to decay under this london government, the society was induced by an increase of per cent. on the rent, to grant those renewable leases. 'and but for the granting of those leases,' said mr. hazlett, 'we should have no standing-ground in this city, nor should we even have the right to meet in this hall as we do to-day.' other striking facts illustrating the paternal nature of this foreign government of the 'new plantation' were produced by mr. thomas chambers, a solicitor who had defended the rev. j.m. staples in a suit brought by the society, and which cost them , l. of the public money to win, after dragging the reverend gentleman from one court to another, regardless of expense. originally, as we have seen, the city got a grant of , acres for the support of the corporation; but actually received only , , valued then at l., a year. this land was forfeited and transferred to the bishop in the reign of charles i. ultimately the bishop gave up the land and the fishery, for which the see received, and still receives, l. a year. the society got, hold of the , acres, and refused to give them back to the city, which, with the alienation of the sheriff's mountain, and the raising of the city rents (in ) from l. to l. a year, left it , l. a year worse than it had been previously. the result of this policy of a body which was established for promoting 'civility' in ireland, was, that the credit of the corporation went down rapidly. executions were lodged against them, and all their property in quays, markets, &c. was swept away, the bridge being saved only by the intervention of a special act of parliament. in , however, the society granted the corporation an allowance of l. when the reformed corporation came in, and found that they were so far emancipated from the thraldom of the london governor that they could go before parliament themselves, the society was constrained to increase its dole to , l. a year. mr. isaac colhoun, at the meeting referred to, produced from the accounts of the society for the previous year, published in the local papers, the following items:-- £ s. d. amount of the present increased income , ________________ incidental expenses as per general agents' account for - / law expenses salaries to general agent, deputy, vice-admiral, surveyor, and others pension to general agent visitation expenses, surveying expenses salary of clerk and porter's wages coal, gas, printing, stationery, advertisements salary to secretary and assistant governor, and 'assistants' for attendance at meetings ________________ , here, then, is a trust fund amounting to about , l. a year, and the trustees actually spend one-third in its management! and what is its management? what do they do with the money? mr. pitt skipton, d.l., a landed proprietor, who has nothing to gain or lose by the irish society, asks, 'where is our money laid out now? not on the estate of the irish society, but on the estates of the church and private individuals--on those of owners like myself who give their tenants perpetuity, because it is their interest to do so. we should wish to see the funds of the society so expended that we could see some memorial of them. but where is there in derry any monument wholly erected by the society which they were not specially forced to put up by charter, with the exception of a paltry piece of freestone within one of the bastions bearing their own arms.' let us only imagine what the corporation of derry could do in local improvements with this , l. a year, which is really their own property, or even with the , l. a-year squandered upon themselves by the trustees! some of these worthy london merchants, it seems, play the _rôle_ of irish landlords when travelling on the continent, on the strength of this derry estate, or their _assistantship_ in its management. 'i object,' says mr. j.p. hamilton, 'if i take a little run in the summer vacation to paris or brussels, to meet a greasy-looking gentleman from whitechapel or the minories, turned out sleek and shining from moses', and to be told by him that he has a large property in _hireland_, in a place called derry, and that his tenantry are an industrious, thriving set of fellows, quite remarkable for their intelligence, but that it is all owing to his excellent management of his property and his liberality.' mr. hazlett presented a still funnier picture of the irish 'visitations' of the members of the society, with their wives and daughters every summer. gentlemen in london regard it as a fine lark to get elected to serve in the irish society, as that includes a summer trip to ireland free of expense, with the jolliest entertainment. one gentleman, being asked by another whether he was ever in ireland, answered--'no, but i intend to get on the irish society next year and then i'll have a trip. what kind of people are they over there? do they all speak irish?' 'oh, no; they are a very decent, civilised people.' 'oh, i'm glad they don't speak irish; for none of us do, of course; but my daughter can speak french.' 'they had a great siege one time over there?' 'oh, yes; the derry people are proud of the siege.' 'ah, yes, i see; happened in the reign of king john, i believe.' but the heaviest charge laid at the door of the irish society is its persistent refusal to grant proper tenures for building. by this, even more than their reckless squandering of the revenues of a fine estate, which is not their own, they have obstructed the improvement of the city. they might possibly be compelled to refund the wasted property of their ward, but they could never compensate for stunting and crippling her as they have done. fortunately, there is a standard by which we are able to measure this iniquity with tolerable accuracy. dr. william brown, of derry, testified that it was the universal conviction of the people of derry, of all classes and denominations, that, by the mismanagement of their trust, the irish society had converted the crown grant from the blessing it was intended to be, and which it would have been under a just administration, into something more akin to a curse. for anything that saps the self-reliant and independent spirit of a community must always be a curse. within the last hundred years belfast was not in advance of derry in population, in trade, in capital, or in any other element constituting or conducing to prosperity. its river was not so navigable, and by no means so well adapted to foreign, especially transatlantic trade. the country surrounding it was not superior in soil, nor the inhabitants in intelligence and enterprise. it had no estate, as derry had, granted by the crown to assist in the development of civilisation, education, and commerce. its prospects, then, were inferior to those of derry. but belfast had the one thing, most needful of all, that derry had not. it had equitable building tenures. and of this one advantage, look at the result! 'belfast is now seven times the size of derry; and is in possession of a trade and a trade capital which derry can never hope to emulate, while smothered by the stick-in-the-mud policy of that miserable anachronism the irish society.' the london companies which have estates in the county derry claimed to be entitled to all the surplus revenue after the cost of management was deducted. this was the question raised by the celebrated 'skinners' case,' ultimately decided by the house of lords. the effect of the decision was, that the society was a trustee, not for the companies but for the public objects defined in the charter and the 'articles of agreement.' lord langdale's language on the subject is perfectly clear and explicit. he declared that the irish society have not, 'collectively or individually,' any beneficial interest in the estates. in a sense they are trustees. they have important duties to perform; but their powers and duties have all reference to the _plantation_, whose object was purely public and political. adverting to this judgment, it is not derry alone that is interested in the abolition of the irish society. its objects 'affected the general welfare of ireland and the whole realm.' the city of london, in its corporate capacity, had no beneficial interest in the estates. 'the money which it had advanced was early repaid, and the power which remained, or which was considered to remain, was, like that of the society, an entrusted power for the benefit of the plantation and those interested in it. the irish society seems to have been little, if anything, more than the representative or instrument of the city for the purposes of the plantation.' i subjoin the text of the concluding part of the judgment in the _skinners' case_, the report of which fills a very bulky volume:-- lord langdale said: 'the mistaken views which the society may have subsequently taken of its own situation and duties (and i think that such mistaken views have several times been taken) do not vary the conclusion to be deduced from the charter and the circumstances contemporary with the grant of the first charter. i am of opinion that the powers granted to the society and the trusts reposed in them were in part of a general and public nature, independent of the private benefit of the companies of london, and were intended by the crown to benefit ireland and the city of london, by connecting the city of londonderry and the town of coleraine and a considerable irish district with the city of london, and to promote the general purposes of the plantation, not only by securing the performance of the conditions imposed on ordinary undertakers, but also by the exercise of powers and the performance of trusts not within the scope of those conditions. the charter of charles ii. expressly recites that the property not actually divided was retained for the general operation of the plantation.' chapter xviii. tenant-right in down. if there are sermons in stones i ought to have learned something from the ruins of the castle built by sir arthur hill, the founder of the house of downshire, in which they show the chamber occupied by william iii. while his army was encamped at blaris moor. this was once a royal fort, and among the most interesting memorials of the past are the primitive gates, long laid aside from duty, the timber gradually mouldering away from the huge nails, which once added to their massive strength. hillsborough was incorporated by charles ii., and sent two members to parliament. the hills rose rapidly in rank and influence. in , trevor hill, esq., was created viscount of hillsborough and baron hill. in , wills, the second viscount, was made earl of hillsborough, and in he became marquis of downshire. hillsborough is the most perfect picture of a feudal establishment that i know. on one side of the little, quiet, tradeless town are the ruins of the old castle, with its park and its fine ancestral trees, through the thick foliage of which pierces the spire of the church, lofty and beautiful. on the other side, and quite close to the town, is 'the new castle'--an immense building of cut stone, in the greek style, two storeys high, shut in by high walls from the view of the townsfolk. then there is the small market-square, with the court-house in the centre, the hotel at the top, and other buildings of a better class on the opposite side. from the hill, which is crowned by these buildings, descend small streets, in which dwell the inhabitants, all more or less dependent on the lord of the manor, all cared for by him, and many of them pensioned when disabled by age or infirmity. there is a monument erected to the memory of the late marquis's father on a hill to the south of the town. the view from this point is glorious. belfast lies a little beyond, enveloped in the smoke emitted from its numerous tall chimneys. to the left is the range of the antrim highlands, continued along the coast of the lough towards carrickfergus, and from which the cave hill stands out in bold relief, looking down on the numerous pretty villas with which the taste of wealthy manufacturers and merchants has adorned those pleasant suburbs. westward towards lough neagh, swelling gradually--southward towards armagh, and round to newry, the whole surface of the country gently undulating, presents a vast picture of quiet beauty, fertility, and plenty that can be rivalled only in england. the tall crowded stocks along the ridges of the corn-fields attested the abundance of the crops--the rich greenness and warmth of the landscape showing how well the ground has been drained, manured, and cultivated. the neat, white-walled houses gleaming amidst the verdure of sheltering trees and trimmed hedges tell the thoughtful observer that the people who dwell in this land belong to it, are rooted in it, and ply their industry under the happy feeling that, so far as their old landlords are concerned, their lot is one of 'quietness and assurance for ever.' nowhere--even on the high ranges about newry, where the population is far too dense, where the patchwork cultivation creeps up the mountain side, and the hand of industry snatches a precarious return from a poor, cold, ungrateful soil, amidst desolating tempests and blighting fogs--not even there did i notice the least trace of evictions or clearances. no black remnant of a wall tells that where sheep now browze and lambs frisk there was once a fireside, where the family affections were cherished, and a home where happy children played in the sunshine. this is the field of capital and enterprise; here we have an aristocracy of wealth, chiefs of industry, each of whom maintains an army of 'hands' more numerous than the swordsmen of shane o'neill when he reigned in his castle yonder on the banks of lough neagh. but here also is the aristocracy of rank--lords of ancient lineage, descended from heroes--men who have left magnificent monuments of their creative genius. they have not only founded great houses, but they have laid deep and broad the foundations of a social system to whose strength and beauty every age has been adding something, and which now wants only one topmost stone to make it perfect. i read on the monument to lord downshire the expressive motto of the downshire family--_per deum et ferrum obtinui._ no family ever made better use of the power thus obtained. the inscription states that the third marquis was 'alike distinguished for patriotism, rectitude of principle, and honesty of purpose. upholding his station with becoming dignity, he was also mindful of the wants of others, and practised his duties with benevolence and humility, which won the regard of every virtuous mind, adding lustre to his exalted rank.' although these words were engraved upon a monument by the friends and admirers of their object, they are perfectly true, and they would be equally true of the late marquis. lord downshire is esteemed as the best of landlords. he charges per cent. less for his land than it is worth--than the tenants would be able to pay. tenant-right on his property sells for an enormous amount. he never evicts a tenant, nor even threatens to evict those who vote against him. what he has done for the contentment and prosperity of his tenants, with so much honour and happiness to himself, other landlords may do with like results. the late lord, his father, and his grandfather pursued the same course. they let their lands at a low valuation. they encouraged improvements--they allowed the free enjoyment of tenant-right; but they refused to allow sub-letting or subdivision of the land. they consolidated farms only when tenants, unable to retain small, worn-out holdings, wished to sell their tenant-right and depart. the consequence is that there is great competition for land on the downshire estates. the tenant-right sells easily for l. to l. an irish acre, the rent being on an average about s. if a tenant is not able to pay his way, he is let run on in arrears perhaps for two or three years. then he feels the necessity of selling; but the arrears are deducted, and also debts that he may owe to his neighbours, before he departs with the proceeds in his pocket. the late marquis seems to have been almost idolised by the tenants. on or off the estate, in town or country, i have heard nothing of him but praise of the warmest and most unqualified kind; and, what is more remarkable, his late agent, mr. filgate, was universally respected for his fairness in the discharge of his duties. the way in which i heard this spoken of by the people convinces me that there is nothing that wins their confidence so much as strict impartiality, and justice, calmly, kindly, but firmly administered. the people to whom i spoke laid stress on the fact that mr. filgate listened quietly to the statements of both sides, carefully enquired into the merits of each, and decided accordingly. there was no favouritism, they said, no partiality; no hasty decision in a fit of anger, or passion, or impatience; no refusal to listen to reason. i observed to one of the tenants, 'you admit that the rents are much lower than on other estates, much lower than the value of the lands, and that during the last twenty years the tenant-right has increased in value. suppose, then, that the marquis should raise the rents, say twenty-five per cent., what would be the consequence? would they pay the increase willingly?' 'willingly!' he exclaimed, 'no, there would be rebellion! the late lord could do anything with the people; he could raise the country. but you see when they bought the tenant-right they believed they could never be robbed of the value for which they paid by raising the rent.' what can be better than the social picture which harris presents of the state of society here years ago? 'the inhabitants are warm and well clad at church, fairs, and markets. tillage and the linen manufacture keep them in constant employment; a busy and laborious life prevents excess and breaches of the laws, which in no part of the kingdom are more reverenced. the people are regular in their attendance on public worship. few breaches of the peace, felonies, burglaries, or murders come before the judges at the assizes; convictions for capital offences seldom happen. men travel securely by day, and are afraid of little disturbance at night to keep them on their guard. every man sits down securely under his vine and his figtree, and enjoys with comfort the fruit of his honest labours.' he ascribes in the main this prosperity to what he calls '_the spirit of tillage_.' until that spirit arose in ulster, the irish had to send to america for their daily bread, 'which,' he says, 'to the astonishment of all europe, has been often our weakness.' viewing the whole social condition of the county, he exclaims, 'such are the happy effects of a well-peopled country, _extensive tillage, the linen manufacture, and the protestant religion_.' in the first year of the present century, the dublin society (not yet 'royal') employed 'land commissioners' to enquire into the condition of agriculture in the several counties of ireland. the rev. john dubourdieu, rector of annahilt, in this county, was their commissioner for down and antrim. he states that the rent was then on an average s. the _irish_ acre (three equal to five english), allowing for the mountains and bogs, which he computed at , acres. the rental of the county he sets down at , l. the net annual value of property assessed under the tenement valuation act is now , l. this is considerably under the letting value, it is supposed, per cent. if this be so, the county yields to the proprietors a revenue of about , , l. a year. if we add the value of the tenant-right, and of the fixtures of all sorts--houses, mills, roads, bridges--as well as the movable property and stock, we may get some idea of the enormous aggregate of wealth which the labour of man has created on this strip of wild wooded hills, swampy plains, and bogs. now, what has effected this marvellous change? the tenants, with one voice, exclaim, 'our labour, our capital, our skill, our care, and self-denial. it was we that cleared away the woods which it was so difficult to eradicate. it was we who drained away the bogs and morasses, and by the help of lime and marl converted them into rich land. it was we that built the dwelling-houses and offices. it was we that made the fences, and planted the hedge-rows and orchards. it was we that paid for the making of the roads and bridges. the landlords gave us the wild country to work upon; we have done the rest. our industry enabled them to build their stately mansions, and we have continued to pay to them their princely revenues. our forefathers came with them as settlers, that they might "plant" the country with a loyal and industrious race of people, and they came on the assurance that they and their children's children were to remain for ever rooted where they were planted. they did their duty faithfully and well by the land, by the landlords, and by the government. where the children that inherited their rights failed, their interest in their farms has been purchased dearly by others of the same race who have taken their places. by what right, then, can they be turned out?' it is not possible, if it were desirable, to introduce the 'high farming system' in this county. but if possible, would it be desirable? in the eye of a scientific agriculturist it might be better that all those comfortable farm-houses, with the innumerable fences crossing the landscape in every possible form, making all sorts of mathematical figures, presenting the appearance of an immense variegated patchwork--were levelled and removed so that the plough and all the modern machinery might range unobstructed over hill and vale. but assuredly it would not seem better to the philanthropist, the christian, or the statesman. to the chancellor of the exchequer it would make the most serious difference; for a few herds and ploughmen would consume but a very small portion indeed of the excisable articles now used by the tenant farmers of this county. i have taken some notes on the diet of this people which may be instructive. at the beginning of the present century the small farmers were generally weavers. there was an obvious incompatibility in the two occupations, and the farms were neglected. gradually this evil has been corrected, especially since the famine. the weavers have become cottiers, and the farmers have devoted themselves to their agricultural operations exclusively with the more energy since railroads have so facilitated the quick sale of produce, particularly that sort of produce which enables the occupiers to supply the markets with the smaller necessaries of life, and with which large farmers would not trouble themselves. daily labourers working from a.m., to p.m. in large fields with machinery cannot do the hundreds of little matters which the family of the small holder attends to every hour of the day, often in the night--and which give work to women and children as well as the men--work of the most healthful character and most free from demoralizing influences. on a farm of fifteen to thirty acres there is constant employment of a profitable kind for the members of a household, including women and children. the effect of good drainage is that farming operations can be carried on through winter, in preparing the ground and putting in wheat and other crops early to supply the markets, when prices are high. oats, barley, potatoes, flax, turnips claim attention in turn, and then come the weeding and thinning, the turf-making, the hay-making, and all the harvest operations. it is by the ceaseless activity of small farmers in watching over their pigs, poultry, lambs, &c., that the markets are kept so regularly supplied, and that towns grow up and prosper. if down and antrim had been divided into farms of thousands of acres each, like lincolnshire, what would belfast have become? little more than a port for the shipping of live stock to liverpool and glasgow. before the famine, the food of the small farmers was generally potatoes and milk three times a day, with a bit of meat occasionally. but salt herrings were the main reliance for giving a flavour to the potato, often 'wet' and bad. after the failure of the potatoes, their place was supplied by oatmeal in the form of 'stirabout.' indian meal was subsequently found cheaper and more wholesome. but of late years the diet of the farmers in these parts has undergone a complete revolution. there is such brisk demand for butter, eggs, potatoes, and other things that used to be consumed by the family, that they have got into the habit of taking tea, with cakes and other home-made bread twice, or even three times, a day. the demand for tea is, therefore, enormous. there is one grocer's establishment in belfast which has been able to produce a mixture that suits the taste of the people, and the quantity of tea sold by it is a ton a day. this is the business of but one out of many houses in belfast. then there is the brisk trade in such towns as newtownards, lisburn, ballymena, &c. in pastoral districts the towns languish, the people pine in poverty, and the workhouses are in request. in a financial point of view, therefore, it is manifestly the interest of the state to encourage 'the spirit of tillage.' it is thus that most will be got out of the ground, that most revenue will be raised, and that the other elements of national power will be most fully developed. how can this encouragement be most effectually given? security for the farmer is essential--of what nature should the security be? the phrase 'unexhausted improvements' is often used. but should the legislature contemplate, or make provision for the exhaustion of improvements? is the improving tenant to be told that his remedy is to retrograde--to undo what he has done--to take out of the land all the good he has put in it, and reduce it to the comparative sterility in which he, or those whom he represents, first received it? should not the policy of the legislature rather be to keep up improvements of the soil, and its productive power at the highest possible point, and make it the interest of the occupier never to relax in his exertions? the rower will not put forth all his strength unless he believes he will win. in other races, though many start, only one or two can receive the prize. in this race of agricultural improvement all competitors might win ample rewards. but will they put forth all their energies--is it in human nature that they should--was it ever done by any people, if the prizes are to be seized, enjoyed, and flaunted before their eyes by others, who may be strangers, and who never helped them by their sympathy in their toilsome course of training and self-denial? it is because the landlords of the county down have been so often in the same boat with their tenants, and with so much good faith, generous feeling, and cordial sympathy encouraged their exertions, and secured to them their just rewards, that this great county presents to the world such a splendid example of what industry, skill, and capital can accomplish. is it not possible to extend the same advantages through the whole island without wronging the landlord or degrading the tenant? the stranger is at first surprised to see so large a town as newtownards, with its handsome square, its town-hall, its wide, regular streets, its numerous places of worship, and a population of , , in a place without visible factories, and without communication with the sea, within eight miles of belfast, and three miles of bangor, which, though a seaport, is but one-fourth of the size. but although there are no great mills sending forth volumes of smoke, newtownards is really a manufacturing town. those clean, regular streets, with their two-storey houses, uniform as a district in the east of london, are inhabited by weavers. in each house there is one loom at least, in most two or three, and in some as many as six. the manufacture of woollen and cotton goods of finer qualities than can be produced by the power-loom is carried on extensively. i saw one man working at a piece of plaid of six colours, a colour on every shuttle, with the help of his wife, who assisted in winding, he was able to earn only s. a week by very diligent work from early morning till night. there is a general complaint of the depression of trade at present. agents, chiefly from glasgow houses, living in the town, supply the yarn and pay the wages. i was struck with the number of public-houses in all the leading streets. how far they are supported by the weavers i cannot say, but whether or not they can dispense with the glass, they must have their tobacco, and when this luxury is deducted, and a shilling a week for the rent of the cottage, it is hard to understand how a family of six or eight can be supported on the weekly wages. the trade of muslin embroidery once flourished here, and in the pretty little neighbouring town of comber; but it has so fallen off that now the best hands, plying the needle unceasingly during the long, long day, can earn only three or four shillings a week. before the invention of machinery for flax-spinning, the manufacture of fine thread by hand-labour was a most profitable employment. wonders were wrought in this way by female fingers. the author of 'our staple manufactures' states that in , out of a pound and a half of flax, costing s., a woman produced yarn of the value of l. s. d. miss m'quillan, of comber, spun hanks out of one pound of flax, splitting the fibre with her needles to give this degree of fineness. but alas! what a change to the cottage hearth! the song of the wheel's no more-- the song that gladdened with guileless mirth the hearths and homes of the poor! but here, and in all the small towns about, they have still the weaving, and it is carried on to a considerable extent by persons who hold a few acres of land, throwing aside the shuttle while putting in the crops and doing the harvest work. thus combining the two pursuits, these poor people are able, by extraordinary industry, to earn their daily bread; but they can do little more. the weavers, as a class, appear to be feeble and faded specimens of humanity, remarkably quiet, intelligent, and well-disposed--a law-abiding people, who shrink from violence and outrage, no matter what may be their grievances. it is cruel to load them too heavily with the burdens of life, and yet i am afraid it is sometimes done, even in this county, unnecessarily and wantonly. what i have said of the downshire and londonderry estates, holds good with respect to the estates of the other large proprietors, such as lord roden, the kindest of landlords, almost idolised, even by his catholic tenants; lord annesley; the trustees of lord kilmurray; sir thomas bateson, and others. but i am sorry to learn that even the great county down has a share of the two classes which supply the worst species of irish landlords--absentees who live extravagantly in england, and merchants who have purchased estates to make as large a percentage as possible out of the investment. it is chiefly, but not wholly, on the estates of these proprietors that cases of injustice and oppression are found. in the first class it is the agent that the tenants have to deal with; and whether he be humane or not matters little to them, for, whatever may be his feelings, the utmost penny must be exacted to keep up the expensive establishments of the landlord in england, to meet the cost of a new building, or the debt incurred by gambling on the turf and elsewhere. every transaction of the kind brings a fresh demand on the agent, and even if he be not unscrupulous or cruel, he must put on the screw, and get the money at all hazards. i have been assured that it is quite usual, on such estates, to find the tenantry paying the highest rent compatible with the maintenance of bare life. there is in the county of down a great number of small holders thus struggling for existence. as a specimen let us take the following case:--a man holds a dozen acres of land, for which he pays l. s. per acre. he labours as no slave could be made to work, in the summer time from five o'clock in the morning till six in the evening. he can hardly scrape together a pound beyond the rent and taxes. if a bad season comes, he is at starvation point: he falls into arrears with the landlord, and he is forced by the bailiff to sell off his small stock to pay the rent. without the excuse of pecuniary difficulties, the merchant landlord is not a whit less exacting, or more merciful. he looks upon the tenants as he would on so many head of cattle, and his sole consideration is what is the highest penny he can make out of them. not far from belfast lived a farmer who cultivated a few acres. sickness and the support of a widowed sister's family forced him into arrears of rent. ejectment proceedings were taken, and one day when he returned to his house, he found his furniture thrown out on the road, the sister and family evicted, and the door locked. he was offered as much money as would take him to america, but he would not be allowed to sell the tenant-right. here is another case illustrative of the manner in which that right is sometimes dealt with:--a respectable man purchased a farm at l. an acre. it was very poor land, much of it unfit for cultivation. immediately on getting possession a surveyor came and added two acres to the former measurement. the incoming tenant was at the same time informed that the rent was raised to an extent that caused the possession to be a dead loss. on threatening to throw up the concern, some reduction was made, which brought the rent as close as possible to the full letting value. i have been told by a well-informed gentleman, whose veracity i cannot doubt, that it is quite common in the county of down (and indeed i have been told the same thing in other counties) to find an _improving_ tenant paying l. to l. an acre for land, which he has at his own expense brought up to a good state of cultivation, while the adjoining land of his lazy neighbour--originally of equal value--yields only s. to s. an acre. the obvious tendency of this unjust and impolitic course on the part of landlords and agents, is to discourage improvements, to dishearten the industrious, and to fill the country with thriftless, desponding, and miserable occupiers, living from hand to mouth. there are circumstances under which even selfish men will toil hard, though others should share with them the benefit of their labours; but if they feel that this partnership in the profits of their industry is the result of a system of legalised injustice, which enables unscrupulous men to appropriate at will the whole of the profits, their moral sense so revolts against that system that they resolve to do as little as they possibly can. the consequence of these painful relations of landlord and tenant, even in this comparatively happy county, is a perceptible degeneracy in the manhood of the people. talk to an old inhabitant, who has been an attentive observer of his times, and he will tell you that the vigorous and energetic, the intelligent and enterprising, are departing to more favoured lands, and that this process has produced a marked deterioration in the population within his memory. he can distinctly recollect when there were more than double the present number of strong farmers in the country about belfast. he declares that, with many exceptions of course, the land is getting into the hands of a second or third class of farmers, who are little more than servants to the small landlords. even where there are leases, such intelligent observers affirm that they are so over-ridden with conditions that the farmer has no liberty or security to make any great improvements. were it otherwise he would not think a thirty-one years' lease sufficient for the building of a stone house, that would be as good at the end of a hundred years as at the end of thirty. all the information that i can gather from thoughtful men, who are really anxious for a change that would benefit the landlords as well as themselves, points to the remedy which lord granard has suggested, as the most simple, feasible, and satisfactory--the legalisation and extension of the tenant-right custom. they rejoice that such landlords now proclaim the injustice which the tenant class have so long bitterly felt--namely, the presumption of law that all the improvements and buildings on the farm belong to the lord of the soil, although the notorious fact is that they are all the work of the tenant. and here i will take the opportunity of remarking that the legislature were guilty of strange oversight, or deliberate injustice, in the passing of the incumbered estates act. taking advantage of an overwhelming national calamity, they forced numbers of gentlemen into a ruinous sale of their patrimonial estates, in order that men of capital might get possession of them. but they made no provision whatever for the protection of the tenants, or of the property which those tenants had created on these estates. many of those were tenants at will, who built and planted in perfect and well-grounded reliance on the honour and integrity of their old landlords. but in the advertisements for the sale of property under the landed estates court, it was regularly mentioned as an inducement to purchasers of the scully type that the tenants had no leases. the result of this combination of circumstances bearing against the cultivators of the soil--the chief producers of national wealth--is a deep, resentful sense of injustice pervading this class, and having for its immediate objects the landlords and their agents. the tenants don't speak out their feelings, because they dare not. they fear that to offend the _office_ in word or deed is to expose themselves and their children to the infliction of a fine in the shape of increased rent, perhaps at the rate of five or ten shillings an acre in perpetuity. one unfortunate effect of the distrust thus generated, is that when enlightened landlords, full of the spirit of improvement, like lord dufferin and lord lurgan, endeavour, from the most unselfish and patriotic motives, to make changes in the tenures and customs on their estates, they have to encounter an adverse current of popular opinion and feeling, which is really too strong to be effectually resisted. for example: in order to correct the evils resulting from the undue competition for land among the tenants, they limit the amount per acre which the outgoing tenant is permitted to receive; but the limitation is futile, because the tenants understand one another, and do what they believe to be right behind the landlord's back. the market price is, say, l. an acre. the landlord allows l.; the balance finds its way secretly into the pocket of the outgoing tenant before he gives up possession. as a gentleman expressed it to me emphatically, 'the outgoing tenant _must_ be satisfied, and he _is_ satisfied.' public opinion in his own class demands it; and on no other terms would it be considered lucky to take possession of the vacant farm. chapter xix. tenant-right in antrim. i find from the antrim survey, published in , that at that time leases were general on the hertfort estate. there were then about , farmers who held by that tenure, each holding, on an average, twenty english acres, but many farms contained acres or more. mr. hugh m'call, of lisburn, the able author of 'our staple manufactures,' gives the following estimates of the rental. in , it was , l.; in , it was , l.; and for , his estimate is , l. taking the estimate given by dean stannus, as l. or l. an acre, the tenant-right of the estate is worth , l. at the very least, probably , l. is the more correct figure. this vast amount of property created by the industry and capital of the tenants, is held at the will of an absentee landlord, who has on several occasions betrayed an utter want of sympathy with the people who lie thus at his mercy. there are tenant farmers on the estate who hold as much as to acres, with handsome houses built by themselves, whose interest, under the custom, should amount to , l. and , l. respectively, which might be legally swept away by a six months' notice to quit. the owners of this property might be regarded as very independent, but in reality, unless the spirit of martyrdom has raised them above the ordinary feelings of human nature, they will take care to be very humble and submissive towards lord hertfort's agents. if words were the same as deeds, if professions were always consistent with practice, the tenants would certainly have nothing to fear; for great pains have been taken from time to time, both by the landlord and agent, to inspire them with unbounded confidence. in the year , the tenants presented an address to lord hertfort, in which they said:--'it is a proud fact, worthy to be recorded, that the tenant-right of the honest and industrious man on your lordship's estate is a certain and valuable tenure to him, so long as he continues to pay his rent.' to this his lordship replied in the following terms:--'i am happy to find that the encouragement i have given to the improvement of the land generally has been found effectual, and i trust that the advantage to the tenant of the improved system of agriculture will be found to increase; and i beg to assure you that with me the right of the improving tenant shall continue to be as scrupulously respected as it has been hitherto by my ancestors. your kindness alone, independent of the natural interest which i must ever feel as to everything connected with this neighbourhood, affords a powerful inducement to my coming among you, and i hope to have the pleasure of often repeating my visit.' twenty-four years have since elapsed, and during all that time the marquis has never indulged himself in a repetition of the exquisite pleasure he then enjoyed. at a banquet given in his honour on that occasion, he used the following language, which was, no doubt, published in the _times_, and read with great interest in london and paris:--'this is one of the most delightful days i ever spent. trust me, i have your happiness and welfare at heart, and it shall ever be my endeavour to promote the one and contribute to the other.' the parting scene on this occasion must have been very touching; for, in tearing himself away, his lordship said: 'i have now come to the concluding toast. it is, "merry have we met, and merry may we _soon_ meet again!"' the tenants could scarcely doubt the genuineness of their landlord's feelings, for on the same occasion dean stannus said: 'i feel myself perfectly justified in using the term "a good landlord;" because his lordship's express wish to me often was, "i hope you will always keep me in such a position that i may be considered the friend of my tenants."' but as he did not return to them, a most respectable deputation waited upon him in london in the year , to present a memorial praying for a reduction of rent on account of the potato blight and other local calamities which had befallen the tenantry. the memorialists respectfully showed 'that under the encouraging auspices of the hertfort family, and on the faith of that just and equitable understanding which has always existed on this estate--that _no advantage would be taken of the tenant's improvements in adjusting the letting value of land_, they had invested large sums of money in buildings and other improvements on their farms, and that this, under the name of tenant-right, was a species of sunk capital that was formerly considered a safe repository for accumulated savings, which could be turned to account at any time of difficulty by its sale, or as a security for temporary advances.' in his reply, lord hertfort said, 'i seek not to disturb any interest, much less do i wish to interfere by any plan or arrangement of mine with the tenant-right which my tenants have hitherto enjoyed, and which it is my anxious wish to preserve to them.' the faith and hope inspired by these assurances of the landlord were repeatedly encouraged and strengthened by the public declarations of his very reverend agent, dean stannus. at a meeting of the killultagh and derryvolgie farming society, in , he stated that he had great pleasure in subscribing to almost everything said by mr. m'call. he had taken great pains to convince the late lord hertfort that tenant-right was one of the greatest possible boons, _as well to the landlords themselves_ as to the tenants. so advantageous did he regard it to the interest of lord hertfort and the tenants, that if it were not preserved he would not continue agent to the estate. tenant-right was his security for the marquis of hertfort's rent, and he would not ask a tenant to relinquish a single rood of land without paying him at the rate of l. to l. an acre for it. firmly believing in the statements thus emphatically and solemnly made to them from time to time, that on this estate tenant-right was as good as a lease, the tenants went on building houses, and making permanent improvements in lisburn and elsewhere, depending on this security. and, indeed, the value of such security could scarcely be presented under more favourable circumstances. the absentee landlord receiving such a princely revenue, and absorbed in his parisian pursuits, seemed to leave everything to his agent. the agent was rector of the parish of lisburn, a dignitary of the church, a gentleman of the highest social position, with many excellent points in his character, and pledged before the world, again and again, to respect rigidly and scrupulously the enormous property which a confiding tenantry had invested in this estate. if, under these circumstances, the security of tenant-right fails, where else can it be trusted? if it be proved, by open and public proceedings, that on the hertfort estate, the distinctly recognised property of the tenant is liable to be seized and wrested from him by the agent, it is clear to demonstration that such property absolutely requires the protection of law. this proof, i am sorry to say, is forthcoming. let my readers reflect for a moment on what might have been done for lisburn and the surrounding country if the marquis of hertfort had rebuilt his castle and resided among his people. what an impulse to improvement of every kind, what employment for tradesmen of every class, what business for shops might have resulted from the local expenditure of , l. or , l. a year! what public buildings would have been erected--how local institutions would have flourished! the proverb that 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' does not apply to the relations of landlord and tenant. but there is another proverb that applies well--'out of sight, out of mind.' of this i shall now give two or three illustrations. some years ago, it was discovered that no lease of the catholic chapel at lisburn could be found, and in the recollection of the oldest member of the congregation no rent had been paid. kent, however, was now demanded, and the parish priest agreed to pay a nominal amount, which places the congregation at the mercy of the office. ground was asked some time ago to build a presbyterian church, but it was absolutely refused. a sum of money was subscribed to build a literary institute, but, though a sort of promise was given for ground to build it on, it was never granted, and the project fell through. lord hertfort spends no portion of his vast income where it is earned. his estate is like a farm to which the produce is never returned in the shape of manure, but is all carted off and applied to the enrichment of a farm elsewhere. one might suppose that where such an exhausting process has been going on for so long a time an effort would be made at some sort of compensation, especially at periods of calamity. yet, when the weavers on his estate were starving, owing to the cotton famine during the american war, his lordship never replied to the repeated applications made to him for help to save alive those honest producers of his wealth. the noble example of lord derby and other proprietors in lancashire failed to kindle in his heart a spark of humanity, not to speak of generous emulation. the sum of , l. was raised in lisburn, and by friends in great britain and america, which was expended in saving the people from going _en masse_ to the workhouse. behold a contrast! while the great peer, whose family inherited a vast estate for which they never paid a shilling, was deaf to the cries of famishing christians, whom he was bound by every tie to commiserate and relieve, an american citizen, who owed nothing to ireland but his birth--mr. a.t. stewart, of new york--sent a ship loaded with provisions, which cost him , l. of his own money, to be distributed amongst lord hertfort's starving tenants, and on the return of the ship he took out as many emigrants as he could accommodate, free of charge. the tourist in ireland is charmed with the appearance of lisburn--the rich and nicely cultivated town parks, the fields white as snow with linen of the finest quality, the busy mills, the old trees, the clean streets, the look of comfort in the population, the pretty villas in the country about. mrs. s.c. hall says that there is, probably, no town in ireland where the happy effects of english taste and industry are more conspicuous than at lisburn. 'from drumbridge and the banks of the lagan on one side, to the shores of lough neagh on the other, the people are almost exclusively the descendants of english settlers. those in the immediate neighbourhood of the town were mostly welsh, but great numbers arrived from the northern english shires, and from the neighbourhood of the bristol channel. the english language is perhaps spoken more purely by the populace of this district than by the same class in any other part of ireland. the neatness of the cottages, and the good taste displayed in many of the farms, are little, if at all, inferior to aught that we find in england, and the tourist who visits lough neagh, passing through ballinderry, will consider it to have been justly designated _the garden of the north._ the multitude of pretty little villages, scattered over the landscape, each announcing itself by the tapering tower of a church, would almost beguile the traveller into believing that he was passing through a rural district in one of the midland counties of england.' we have seen that after general conway got this land, it was described by an english traveller as still uninhabited--'all woods and moor.' who made it the garden of the north? the british settlers and their descendants. and why did they transform this wilderness into fruitful fields? because they had permanent tenures and fair rents. the rental years ago was , l. per annum. allow that money was three times as valuable then as it is now, and the rental would have been about , l. it is now nearly six times that amount. by what means was the revenue of the landlord increased? was it by any expenditure of his own? did any portion of the capital annually abstracted from the estate return to it, to fructify and increase its value? did the landlord drain the swamps, reclaim the moors, build the dwellings and farmhouses, make the fences, and plant the orchards? he did nothing of the kind. nor was it agricultural industry alone that increased his revenue. he owes much of the beauty, fertility, and richness of his estate to the linen manufacture, to those weavers to the cries of distress from whose famishing children a few years ago the most noble marquis resolutely turned a deaf ear. but, passing from historical matters to the immediate purpose of our enquiry, let it suffice to remark that from lisburn as a centre the linen trade in all its branches--flax growing, scutching, spinning, weaving and bleaching--spread over the whole of the hertfort estate, giving profitable employment to the tenants, circulating money, enabling them to build and improve and work the estate into the rich and beautiful garden described by mrs. hall;--all this work of improvement has been carried on, all or nearly all the costly investments on the land have been made, without leases and in dependence on tenant-right. we have seen what efforts were made by landlord and agent to strengthen the faith of the tenants in this security. we have seen also from the historical facts i have adduced the sort of people that constitute the population of the borough of lisburn. if ever there was a population that could be safely entrusted with the free exercise of the franchise it is the population of this town--so enlightened, so loyal, so independent in means, such admirable producers of national wealth, so naturally attached to british connection. yet for generations lisburn has been a pocket borough, and the nominee of the landlord, often a total stranger, was returned as a matter of course. the marquis sent to his agent a _congé d'élire_, and that was as imperative as a similar order to a dean and chapter to elect a bishop. in the gentleman whom the lisburn electors were ordered to return was mr. inglis, the lord advocate of scotland. they, however, felt that the time was come when the borough should be opened, and they should be at liberty to exercise their constitutional rights. a meeting of the inhabitants was therefore held, at which mr. r. smith was nominated as the popular candidate. the contest was not political; it was simply the independence of the borough against the _office_. dean stannus, as agent to an absentee landlord, was the most powerful personage in the place, virtually the lord of the manor. before the election that gentleman published a letter in a belfast paper contradicting a statement that had appeared to the effect that lord hertfort took little interest in the approaching contest, in which letter he said: 'i have the best reason for knowing that his lordship views with intense interest what is passing here, and that he is most anxious for the return of mr. inglis, feeling that the election of such a representative (which i am now enabled to say is _certain_) will do much credit to the borough of lisburn, and that this _unmeaning_ contest will, at all events, among its other effects, prove to his lordship whom he may regard as his _true_ friends in his future relations with this town.' notwithstanding this warning, so significantly emphasized, the candidate whom the voters selected as their real representative was returned. now no one can blame the marquis or his agent for wishing that the choice had fallen upon mr. inglis. so far as politics were concerned, the contest _was_ unmeaning; but so far as the rights of the people and the loyal working of the british constitution were concerned, the contest was full of meaning, and if the landlord and his agent respected the constitution more than their own personal power they would have frankly acquiesced in the result, feeling that this protestant and conservative constituency had conscientiously done its duty to the state. but who could have imagined, after all the solemnly recorded pledges i have quoted, that they would have instantly resolved to punish the independent exercise of the franchise by inflicting an enormous and crushing fine amounting to nothing less than the whole tenant-right property of every adverse voter who had not a lease! immediately after the election 'notices to quit' were served upon every one of them. in consequence of this outrageous proceeding a public meeting was held, at which a letter from john millar, esq., a most respectable and wealthy man (who was unable to attend) was read by the secretary. he said: 'i have at various times purchased places held from year to year, relying on the custom of the country, and on the declared determination of the landlord and his agent to respect such customary rights of property, for the continued possession of it. i have besides taken under the same landlord several fields as town parks, which were in very bad order. these fields i have drained and very much improved. i have always punctually paid the rent charged for the several holdings, and, i think i may venture to say, performed all the duties of a good tenant. at the last election, however, i exercised my right as a citizen of a free country, by giving my votes at hillsborough and lisburn in favour of the tenant-right candidates, without reference to the desires or orders of those who have no legal or constitutional right to control the use of my franchise. i have since received from the office a notice to quit, desiring me to give up possession of all my holdings, as tenant from year to year, in the counties of down and antrim, without any intimation that i shall receive compensation, and without being able to obtain any explanation of this conduct towards me except by popular rumour.' at the same meeting mr. hugh m'call said that he had looked over some documents and found that the individuals in lisburn who had received notices to quit held property to the value of , l., property raised by themselves, or purchased by them with the sanction of the landlord. in one case the agent himself went into the premises where buildings were being erected, and suggested some changes. in fact the improvements were carried out under his inspection as an architect. yet he served upon that gentleman a notice to quit. some of the tenants paid the penalty for their votes by surrendering their holdings; others contested the right of eviction on technical points, and succeeded at the quarter sessions. one of the points was, as already mentioned, that a dean and rector could not be legally a land agent at the same time. it was, indeed, a very ugly fact that the rector of the parish should be thus officially engaged, not only in nullifying the political rights of his own protestant parishioners, but in destroying their tenant-right, evicting them from their holdings, which _they_ believed to be legal robbery and oppression, accompanied by such flagrant breach of faith as tended to destroy all confidence between man and man, and thus to dissolve the strongest bonds of society. sad work for a dignitary of the church to be engaged in! in april, , there was another contested election. on that occasion the marquis wrote to a gentleman in lisburn that he would not interfere 'directly or indirectly to influence anybody.' nevertheless, notices to quit, signed by mr. walter l. stannus, assistant and successor to his father, were extensively served upon tenants-at-will, though it was afterwards alleged that they were only served as matters of form. but what, then, did they mean? they meant that those who had voted against the office had, _ipso facto, forfeited their tenant-right property._ many other incidents in the management of the estate have been constantly occurring more recently, tending to show that the most valuable properties created by the tenants-at-will are at the mercy of the landlord, and that tenant-right, so called, is not regarded by him as a matter of _right_ at all, but merely as a _favour_, to be granted to those who are dutiful and submissive to the office in all matters, political and social. for instance, one farmer was refused permission to sell his tenant-right till he consented to sink l. or l. in the shares of the lisburn and antrim railway, so that, as he believed, he was obliged to throw away his money in order to get his right. the enormous power of an office which can deal with property amounting to more than half a million sterling, in such an arbitrary manner, necessarily generates a spirit of wanton and capricious despotism, except where the mind is very well regulated and the heart severely disciplined by christian duty. of this i feel bound to give the following illustration, which i would not do if the fact had not been made public, and if i had not the best evidence that it is undeniable. george beattie, jun., a grocer's assistant in lisburn, possessed a beautiful greyhound which he left in charge of george beattie, sen., his uncle, on departing for america. this uncle possessed a farm on the hertfort estate, the tenant-right of which he wanted to sell. having applied to mr. stannus for permission, the answer he received was that he would not be allowed to sell until the head of the greyhound was brought to the office. the tenant remonstrated and offered to send the dog away off the estate to relatives, but to no effect. he was obliged to kill the greyhound, and to send its head in a bag to lord hertfort's office. it was a great triumph for the agent. what a pretty sensational story he had to tell the young ladies in the refined circles in which he moves. how edifying the recital must have been to the peasantry around him! how it must have exalted their ideas of the civilising influence of land agency. 'it is quite a common thing,' says a gentleman well acquainted with the estate, 'when a tenant becomes insolvent, that his tenant-right is sold and employed to pay those of his creditors who may be in favour. i know a lady who made application to have a claim against a small farmer registered in the office, which was done, and she now possesses the security of the man's tenant-right for her money.' the case of the late captain bolton is the last illustration i shall give in connection with this estate. captain bolton resided in lisburn, and he was one of the most respected of its inhabitants. he was the owner of four houses in that town, a property which he acquired in this way:--the site of two of them was obtained by the late james hogg, in lieu of freehold property surrendered. on this ground, his son, captain bolton's uncle, built the two houses entirely at his own expense. two other houses, immediately adjoining, came into the market, and he purchased the out-going tenant's 'good-will' for a sum of about l. these houses were thatched, and in very bad condition. he repaired them and slated them, and thus formed a nice uniform block of four workers' houses. captain bolton inherited these from his uncle and retained uninterrupted possession till , when he voted for johnston smyth at the election of that date. immediately afterwards he received a notice to quit, an ejectment was brought in due time, the case was dismissed at the quarter sessions, an appeal was lodged, but it was again dismissed at the assizes. undaunted by these two defeats, the persistent agent served another notice to quit. the captain was a man of peace, whose nerves could not stand such perpetual worrying by litigation, and he was so disgusted with the whole affair that he tied up the keys, and sent them to lord hertfort's office. in his ledger that day he made the following entry:--'plundered, this th december , by our worthy agent to the marquis, because i voted for smyth and the independence of the borough.--j.b.' the houses remained in the hands of the agent till the next election, when captain bolton voted for mr. hogg, the office candidate. the conscientious old gentleman--as good a conservative as dean stannus--voted from principle in both cases and not to please the agent or anyone else. the agent, however, thought proper to regard it as a penitent act, and as the tenant had ceased to be naughty, and had, it was assumed, shown proper deference to his political superiors, he received his houses back again, retaining the possession of them till his death. the profit rent of the houses is l. a year. either this rent belonged to captain bolton or to lord hertfort. if to captain bolton, by what right did dean stannus take it from him and give it to the landlord? if to the landlord, by what right did dean stannus take it from lord hertfort and give it to captain bolton? however, the latter gentleman having no doubt whatever, first or last, that the property was his own, bequeathed the houses to trustees for the support of a school which he had established in lisburn. the school, it appears, had been placed in connection with the church education society, and as it did not go on to his satisfaction, he placed it in connection with the national board of education, having appointed as his trustees john campbell, esq., m.d., william coulson, esq., and the rev. w.j. clarke, presbyterian minister, all of lisburn. dr. campbell died soon after, and mr. coulson refused to act, so that the burden of the trust fell upon mr. clarke, who felt it to be his duty to carry it out to the best of his ability. dean stannus, however, was greatly dissatisfied with the last will and testament of captain bolton. yet the dying man had no reason to anticipate that his affectionate pastor would labour with all his might to abolish the trust. dean stannus paid the captain a visit on his deathbed, and while administering the consolations of religion he seemed moved even to tears. to a friend who subsequently expressed doubt, the simple-minded old christian said: 'i will trust the dean that he will do nothing in opposition to my will. he was here a few days ago and wept over me. he loves me, and will carry out my wishes.' the captain died in april, . he was scarcely cold in his grave when the agent of lord hertfort took proceedings to eject his trustees, and deprive the schools of the property bequeathed for their support. not content with this, he took proceedings to get possession of the schoolhouse also, deeming it a sufficient reason for this appropriation of another man's property, this setting aside of a will, this abolition of a trust, that, in his opinion, the schools ought to be under the patronage of the rector, and in connection with the church education society. he had a perfect right to think and say this, and it might be his conscientious conviction that the property would be thus better employed; but he ought to know that the end does not sanctify the means; that he had no right to substitute his own will for that of captain bolton, and that he had no right to take advantage of the absence of an act of parliament to possess himself of the rightful property of other people. unfortunately, too, he was a judge in his own case, and he did not find it easy to separate the rector of the parish from the agent of the estate. it is a significant fact that when his son, mr. stannus, handed his power of attorney to mr. otway, the assistant-barrister, that gentleman refused to look at it, saying, 'i have seen it one hundred times;' and the rev. mr. clarke, while waiting in the court for the case to come on, observed that all the ejectment processes were at the suit of the marquis of hertfort. the school-house was built by mr. bolton, at his own expense twenty-eight years ago, and he maintained it till his death. the rev. w.j. clarke, the acting trustee, bravely defended his trust and fought the battle of tenant-right in the courts till driven out by the sheriff. he was then called on to perform the same duty with regard to the school-house. he has done it faithfully and well, and deserves the sympathy of all the friends of freedom, justice, and fair dealing. 'i shall never accept a trust,' he says, in a letter to the _northern whig_--'i shall never accept a trust, and permit any man, whether nobleman, agent, or bailiff, to alienate that trust, without appealing to the laws of my country; and if the one-sidedness of such laws shall enable dean and mr. stannus to confiscate this property, and turn it from the purpose to which benevolence designed it, then, having defended it to the last, i shall retire from the field satisfied that i have done my duty to the memory of the dead and the educational interests of the living.' nor can we be surprised at the strong language that he uses when he says: 'the history of the case rivals, for blackness of persecution, anything that has happened in the north of ireland for many years. but such a course of conduct only recoils on the heads of those who are guilty of it, and it shall be so in this case. the marquis of hertfort will not live always, and the power of public opinion may be able to reach his successor, and be felt even in lisburn.' dean stannus, in his evidence before the devon commission, stated that only a small portion of the estate was held by lease. the leases were obtained in a curious way. in a system of fining commenced. if a tenant wanted a lease he was required to pay in cash a fine of l. an acre, which was equal to an addition of ten shillings an acre to the rent for twenty years, not counting the interest on the money thus sunk in the land. yet, such was the desire of the tenants to have a better security than the tenant-right custom, always acknowledged on the estate, that 'every man who had money took advantage of it.' mr. gregg, the seneschal of the manor, gave an illustration of the working of this fining system. a tenant sold his farm of fourteen acres for l., eight of the fourteen acres being held at will. the person who bought the farm was obliged to take a lease of the eight acres, and to pay a proportional fine in addition to the sum paid for the tenant-right. dean stannus said 'he would wish to see the tenant-right upheld upon the estate of lord hertfort, as it always had been. it is that,' he said, 'which has kept up the properties in the north over the properties in other parts of ireland. it is a security for the rent in the first instance, and reconciles the tenants to much of what are called grievances. if you go into a minute calculation of what they have expended, they are not more than paid for their expenditure.' it transpired in the course of the examination that a man who had purchased tenant-right, and paid a fine of l. an acre on getting a lease, would have to pay a similar fine over again when getting the lease renewed. the result of these heavy advances was that the middle-class farmers lived in constant pecuniary difficulties. they were obliged to borrow money at six per cent. to pay the rent, but they borrowed it under circumstances which made it nearly per cent., for it was lent by dealers in oatmeal and other things, from whom they were obliged to purchase large quantities of goods at such a high rate that they sold them again at a sacrifice of per cent. mr. joshua lamb, another witness, stated that the effect of the fining system had been to draw away a great deal of the accumulated capital out of the hands of the tenantry, as well as their anticipated savings for years to come, by which the carrying out of improved methods of agriculture was prevented. still, the existence of a lease for years doubled the value of the tenant-right. this witness made a remarkable statement. with respect to this custom he said: the 'effect of this arrangement, when duly observed, is to prevent all disputes, quarrels, burnings, and destruction of property, so common in those parts of ireland where this practice does not prevail. indeed, so fully are farmers aware of this, that very few, except the most reckless, would venture on taking a farm without obtaining the outgoing tenant's "good-will." such a proceeding as taking land "over a man's head," as it is termed, is regarded here as not merely dishonourable, but as little better than robbery, and as such held in the greatest detestation.' he added that the justice of this arrangement was obvious--'because all the buildings, planting, and other improvements, being entirely at the tenant's expense, he has a certain amount of capital sunk in the property, for which, if he parts with the place, he expects to be repaid by the sale of the tenant-right. he knew no case in the county in which the tenant, or those from whom he purchased, had made no improvements.' the first marquis occasionally visited the estate, and was proud of the troops of yeomanry and cavalry which had been raised from his tenantry. the second marquis, who died in , was only once in that part of ireland. the third marquis--he of prince regent notoriety--never set foot on the property; and the present, who has been reigning over townlands for nearly thirty years, has never been among his subjects except during a solitary visit of three weeks in october, , when, it is said, he came to qualify for his ribbon (k.g.) that he might be able to say to the prime minister that he was a resident landlord. he has resided almost entirely in paris, cultivating the friendship of napoleon instead of the welfare of the people who pay him a revenue of , l. a year. bagatelle, his paris residence, has, it is said, absorbed irish rents in its 'improvements', till it has been made worth three quarters of a million sterling. if the residence cost so much, fancy may try to conceive the amount of hard-earned money squandered on the luxuries and pleasures of which it is the temple--the most elysian spot in the elysian fields. the following curious narrative appeared in a belfast newspaper, and was founded on a speech made by dean stannus at a public meeting. the venerable dean of ross and his son, mr. w.t. stannus, had been deputed to go to paris to wait on lord hertfort, and urge him to assist in the expense of finishing the antrim junction railway. the dean is in his eighty-first year; fifty-one years of his life have been spent in the management of the hertfort estate, and whatever difference of opinion may exist as to his arrangements with the tenantry, every one who knows anything of the affair must admit that there never existed a more faithful representative of a landowner. on arriving in paris he found the marquis ill, so much so that neither the dean nor his son could get an interview. for three days the venerable gentleman danced attendance on his chief, and on monday the fourth attempt was made, the dean sent up his name, and had a reply that 'the marquis was too ill to see anyone.' next day, however, the marquis condescended to receive his agent, and the subject of the railway was introduced. the dean told him that lord erne had given , l. towards the railway projects on his property--that lords lucan, annesley, and lifford had contributed largely, and that lord downshire had been exceedingly liberal in promoting lines on his estate. but all was vain. the noble absentee, who drains about , l. a year from his irish property, and who often pays , l. for a picture, refused to lend , l. to aid in finishing a railway, which runs for three-fourths of the mileage through his own estate. during the interview mr. w.t. stannus urged on the marquis that the investment would be the best that could be made, as preference shares paying five per cent. would be allocated to him as security for the amount. all arguments and entreaties, however, were lost on the noble invalid. even the appeal of the old gentleman who, for more than half a century, had managed the estate so advantageously for the successive owners of that splendid property, was made in vain. 'you never refused me anything before,' urged the dean, 'and i go away in very bad spirits.' what a wonderful history lies in this episode of irish landlordism. here is an unmarried nobleman whose income from investments in british and french securities is said to exceed , l. a year, besides the immense revenue of his english and irish estates, and yet he refuses to part with , l. towards aiding in the construction of a railway on his own property. chapter xx. tenant-right in armagh. among the undertakers in the county of armagh were the two achesons, henry and archibald, ancestors of lord gosford, who founded market hill, richard houlston, john heron, william stanbowe, francis sacheverell, john dillon, john hamilton, sir john davis, lord moore, henry boucher, anthony smith, lieutenant poyntz, and henry m'shane o'neill. in connection with each of these settlements pynar uses the phrase, 'i find planted and estated.' what he means is more fully explained in his reference to the precinct of fews, allotted to scottish undertakers, where henry acheson had obtained , acres. the surveyor says: 'i find a great number of tenants on this land: but not any that have any estates but by promise, and yet they have been many years upon the land. there are nominated to me two freeholders and seventeen leaseholders, all which were with me, and took the oath of supremacy, and petitioned unto me that they might have their leases, the which mr. acheson seemed to be willing to perform it unto them presently. these are able to make thirty men with arms. here is great store of tillage.' the whole of the reports indicate that the crown required of the undertakers two things. first, that they should themselves reside on the land, that they should build strong houses, fortified with bawns, and keep a certain number of armed men for the defence of the settlement. secondly, that the english and scotch settlers who were expected to reclaim the land and build houses, were to have 'estates' in their farms, either as freeholders or lessees. the grants were made to the undertakers on these conditions--they should be resident, and they should have around them a number of independent yeomanry to defend the king when called upon to do so. everything connected with the plantation gives the idea of permanent tenures for the settlers. a curious fact is mentioned about sir john davis, who had been so active in bringing about the plantation. he obtained a grant for acres. 'upon this,' says pynar, 'there is nothing at all built, nor so much as an english tenant on the land.' it seems his tenants were all of the class for whose extirpation he pleaded, as weeds that would choke the saxon crop. henry m'shane o'neill got , acres at camlagh, 'but he being lately dead, it was in the hands of sir toby caulfield, who intended to do something upon it, for as yet there was nothing built.' sir toby was the ancestor of the earl of charlemont, always one of the best landlords in ulster. it is gratifying to find that both the undertakers and the original tenants are still fairly represented--a considerable number of the former having founded noble houses, and the latter having multiplied and enriched the land to such an extent that, though the population is dense and the farms are generally very small, they are the most prosperous and contented population in the kingdom. leases were common in this county at the close of the last century, but the terms were short--twenty-one years and one life. some had leases for thirty-one years or three lives, and there were some perpetuities. land was then so valuable that when a small estate came into the market--large estates hardly ever did--they brought from twenty-five to thirty years' purchase. the large tracts of church land, which are now among the richest and most desirable in the country, presented at the close of the last century, a melancholy contrast to the farms that surrounded them. the reason is given by sir charles coote. it is most instructive and suggestive at the present time. he says, 'it is very discouraging for a wealthy farmer to have anything to do with church lands, as his improvements cannot even be secured to him during his own life, or the life of his landlord, but he may at any time be deprived of the fruits of his industry, by the incumbent changing his living, as his interest then terminates.' this evil was remedied first by making the leases renewable, on the payment of fines, and, in our own time, an act was passed enabling the tenants to convert their leaseholds into perpetuities. the consequence is, that the church lands now present some of the finest features in the social landscape, occupied by a class of resident gentry, an essential link, in any well-organised society, between the people and the great proprietors. the board of trinity college felt so strongly the necessity of giving fixed tenures, if permanent improvements were to be effected on their estates, that, without waiting for a general measure of land reform, they obtained, in , a private act of parliament giving them power to grant leases for ninety-nine years. 'the legislature,' says dr. hancock, 'thus gave partial effect in the case of one institution to the recommendation which the land occupation commissioners intended to apply to all estates in the hands of public boards in ireland.' armagh was always free from middlemen. the landlord got what sir charles coote calls a rack rent from the occupying tenant, and it was his interest to divide rather than consolidate farms, because the linen trade enabled the small holder to give a high rent, while the custom of tenant-right furnished an unfailing security for its payment. the country, when seen from an elevation, is one continuous patchwork of corn, potatoes, clover, and other artificial grasses. wonders are wrought in the way of productiveness by rotation of crops and house-feeding. cattle are not only fattened much more rapidly than on the richest grazing land, but large quantities of the best manure are produced by the practice of house-feeding. the more northern portions of the county, bordering on down and lough neagh, and along the banks of the rivers bann and blackwater, are naturally rich, and have been improved to the highest degree by ages of skilful cultivation. but other parts, particularly the barony of fews, embracing the high lands stretching to the newry mountains, and bordering on the county monaghan, were, about the close of the last century, nearly all covered with heather, and absolutely waste. sir charles coote remarked, in , that it had been then undergoing reclamation. within the last fifteen years the land had doubled in value, and was set at the average rate of s. an acre. mr. tickell, referring to this county, remarked that the scotch and english settlers chiefly occupied the lowland districts, and that the natives retired to this poor region, retaining their old language and habits; and he was occasionally obliged to swear interpreters where witnesses or parties came from the fews, which were 'very wild, and very unlike other parts of the county of armagh.' now let us see what the industry of the people has done in that wild district. the farms are very small, say from three to ten english acres. they have been so well drained, cleared, sub-soiled, and manured, that the occupier is able to support on one acre as many cattle as on three acres when grazed; while affording profitable employment to the women and children. great labour has been bestowed in taking down crooked and broad fences. every foot of ground is cultivated with the greatest care, and in the mountain districts, patches of land among rocks, inaccessible to horses, are tilled by the hand. in many cases in the less exposed districts, two crops in the year are obtained from the same ground, viz., winter tares followed by turnips or cabbages, and rape followed by tares, potatoes, turnips, or cabbages. these crops are succeeded by grain or flax the next year, with which clover is sown for mowing and stall-feeding, yielding two or three cuttings. the green crops are so timed as to give a full supply for house-feeding throughout the year. nothing is neglected by those skilful and thrifty farmers; the county is famous for orchards, and when i was in the city of armagh, last autumn, i saw in the market square almost as many loads of apples as of potatoes. the connection of large grazing farms with pauperism, as cause and effect, has not received sufficient attention from the friends of social progress. i resolved last year to test this matter by a comparison. we have at present no check upon the legally enforced depopulation of this country except the _interest_ of the landlords, or what they imagine to be their interest. it is well that the question should be determined whether it is really for the benefit of the owners of the land that they should clear it of christians and occupy it with cattle--in other words, whether christians or cattle will pay more rent and taxes. i omit all higher considerations, because some of the most philanthropic and enlightened defenders of the present land system have defended it on this low ground. in order to make the test complete and unexceptionable, i have selected a comparatively poor district for tillage, and one of the richest i could find for grazing, giving all possible natural advantages to scullyism. but the test would not be fair unless the occupiers of the poorer land had a tolerably secure tenure so long as they paid the highest rent that a reasonable agent could impose. i thought also that possible objections would be obviated if the tenantry were destitute of 'the fostering care of a resident landlord.' therefore, instead of selecting the tenants of lord downshire, or lord roden, or lord dufferin, i have fixed upon the tenants of lord kilmorey, because he and the producers of the rents which he enjoys have never seen one another in the flesh, and they have never received one word of encouragement or instruction from him in the whole course of their lives. accordingly, with the union of kilkeel, which comprises the mourne district, i have compared the union of trim, which comprises some of the richest grazing land in ireland. travellers have noted that population always grows thick on rich lands, while it is sparse on poor lands. no one requires to be told the reason of this. the unions of kilkeel and trim have populations very nearly equal--viz., kilkeel, , ; trim, , . the total arable land in kilkeel is , statute acres, giving / acres on an average for each person, and acres for each holding. trim contains , statute acres, giving acres to each person, and to each holding. in mourne the area of land under crops is , acres (nearly half), giving one acre of tillage to each inhabitant, and acres to each holding of acres. in trim the area under crops is , acres, giving acres for each inhabitant, and for each holding of acres. the significance of these figures is shown by the government valuation in . the valuation of mourne union is , l., the average for each person being l. and for each holding l. the valuation of trim is , l., allowing l. for each person and l. for each holding. in other words, the capability of the land of trim to support population is as five to two when compared with mourne; but whereas in mourne / acres support one person, in trim it takes acres to support one person--about double the quantity. as the value of the land in meath is more than double what it is in mourne, each acre in meath ought to maintain its man. that is, if meath were cultivated like down, its population ought to be _five times as large as it is_! but this is not the whole case. the mourne population may be too large. with so many families crowded on such a small tract of poor land, the union must be overwhelmed with pauperism. if so, the case for tenant-right and tillage would fall to the ground, and scullyism would be triumphant. let us see, then, how stands this essential fact. the number of paupers in the workhouse and receiving outdoor relief in the union of trim, in , was , . this large amount of pauperism is not peculiar to trim. it belongs to other unions of this rich grazing district, which so fully realises the late lord carlisle's ideal of irish prosperity. navan union has , paupers, and kells has , . now, the population of trim and mourne being nearly the same, and trim being twice as rich as mourne, and not half as thickly peopled, it follows that mourne ought to have at least four times as many paupers as trim--that is, it ought to have , . but it actually has only persons receiving relief in and out of the workhouse! consequently, scullyism and grazing produce nearly twenty times the amount of poverty and misery produced by tenant-right and tillage. i have not overlooked the difference of race and religion. on the contrary, they were uppermost in my mind when rambling among the nice, clean, comfortable, orderly homesteads of mourne, reminding me strongly of forth and bargy in the county wexford. i said to the owner and driver of my car, who is a roman catholic, 'do the roman catholics here keep their houses and farms in as nice order as the presbyterians?' he answered, 'why should they not? are they not the same flesh and blood?' according to the census of , the roman catholics greatly outnumber the protestants in this union. the exact figures are:-- total population of mourne union , protestants of all denominations , roman catholics , the result of this comparison may perhaps make a better impression on the reader's mind if cast in the form of tables, as given on succeeding page. table headings: col a. population in col b. no. of holdings in col c. total area (in stat. acres) col d. area under crops, (in stat. acres) col e. valuation in (in £) col f. no. in workhouse and receiving out-door relief col g. protestants of all denominations col h. roman catholics ------------------------------------------------------------------------- tenant-right and tillage. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- names of unions | a. | b. | c. | d. | e. | f. | g. | h. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- kilkeel | , | , | , | , | , | | , | , average for each| | | | | | | | person | | | - / | | | | | average for each| | | | | | | | holding | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- large farms and grazing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- trim | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , average for each| | | | | | | | person | | | | | | | | average for each| | | | | | | | person | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- in kilkeel union there were , acres of flax in , which at l. an acre would produce , l., considerably more than the rental of the entire district. trim, in that year, produced only acres of flax. what everyone wants to know now is this--whether any measure can be devised that will satisfy the cultivators of the soil without wronging the landlords, or militating against the interests of the state. a measure that will not satisfy the tenants and put an end to their discontent, would be manifestly useless. it would be but adding to the numerous legislative abortions that have gone before it. a man engaged in such enquiries as this, is to ascertain what will satisfy the people. it is for the legislature to determine whether it can be rightly or safely granted. i have, therefore, directed my attention to this point in particular, and i have ascertained beyond question, from the best possible sources of information, that nothing will satisfy the people of this country but what they do not hesitate to name with the most determined emphasis--'fixity of tenure.' whether they are protestants or catholics, orangemen or liberals, presbyterians or churchmen, this is their unanimous demand, the cry in which they all join to a man. every case in which tenant-right is disregarded, or in which, while admitted nominally, an attempt is made to evade it, or to fritter it away, excites the bitterest feeling, in which the whole community sympathises. they deny, however, that the existing tenant-right is a sufficient security:-- because it depends on the option of the landlord, and cannot be enforced by law. because even the best disposed landlord may be influenced to alter his policy by the advice of an agent, by the influence of his family, or by the state of his finances. because a good landlord, who knows the tenants and cares for them, may be succeeded by a son who is a 'fast young man,' addicted to the turf and overwhelmed in debt, while the estate gets into the hands of usurers. because in such a case the law affords no protection to the property of the tenant, which his family may have been accumulating on the land since the first of them came over from england or scotland, and settled around their commander, after helping by their swords to conquer the country, and preserve it to the crown of england. because it is not in human nature to avoid encroaching on the rights and property of others, if it can be done at will--done legally, and done under the pretext that it is necessary for 'improvement,' and will be a benefit even to those who are despoiled. because the custom is no protection to a man's political rights as a british subject. no tenant farmer can vote against his landlord in obedience to his conscience without the risk of ruining his family. the greater his interest in the land, the larger his investments, the heavier his stake; the greater his accumulations in his bank--the farm--the greater will be his dependence, the more complete his political bondage. he has the more to lose. therefore, if a conservative, he must vote for a radical or a catholic, who would pull down the church establishment; or if a catholic, he must vote for a 'no-popery' candidate, who ignores tenant-right, and against a liberal statesman, whose life has been devoted to the interests of the country. it appears to me that the difficulty of settling this question is much aggravated by the importation of opinions from the united states hostile to the aristocracy; and as this source of discontent and distrust is likely to increase every year, the sooner the settlement is effected the better. what is the use of scolding and reviling the tenant's advocates? will that weaken one iota the tremendous force of social discontent--the bitter sense of legal injustice, with which the legislature must deal? and will the legislature deal with it more effectually by shutting its eyes to facts? chapter xxi. farney--mr. trench's 'realities.' when the six ulster counties were confiscated, and the natives were all deprived of their rights in the soil, the people of the county cavan resolved to appeal for justice to the english courts in dublin. the crown was defended by sir john davis. he argued that the irish could have no legal rights, no property in the land, because they did not enclose it with fences, or plant orchards. true, they had boundary marks for their tillage ground; but they followed the eastern custom in not building ditches or walls around their farms. they did not plant orchards, because they had too many trees already that grew without planting. the woods were common property, and the apples, if they had any, would be common property too, like the nuts and the acorns. the irish were obliged to submit to the terms imposed by the conquerors, glad in their destitution to be permitted to occupy their own lands as tenants at will. the english undertakers, as we have seen, were bound to deal differently with the english settlers; but their obligations resolved themselves into promises of freeholds and leases which were seldom granted, so that many persons threw up their farms in despair, and returned to their own country. in the border county of monaghan, we have a good illustration of the manner in which the natives struggled to live under their new masters. the successors of some of those masters have in modern times taken a strange fancy to the study of irish antiquities. among these is evelyn p. shirley, esq., who has published 'some account of the territory or dominion of farney.' the account is interesting, and, taken in connection with the sequel given to the public by his agent, mr. w. steuart trench, it furnishes an instructive chapter in the history of the land war. the whole barony of farney was granted by queen elizabeth to walter earl of essex in the year , in reward for the massacres already recorded. it was then an almost unenclosed plain, consisting chiefly of coarse pasturage, interspersed with low alder-scrub. when the primitive woods were cut down for fuel, charcoal, or other purposes, the stumps remained in the ground, and from these fresh shoots sprang up thickly. the clearing out of these stumps was difficult and laborious; but it had to be done before anything, but food for goats, could be got out of the land. this was 'the m'mahons' country,' and the tribe was not wholly subdued till , when the power of the ulster chiefs was finally broken. the lord deputy, the chancellor, and the lord chief justice passed through farney on their way to hold assizes for the first time in derry and donegal. they were protected by a guard of 'seven score foot, and fifty or three score horse, which,' wrote sir john davis, 'is an argument of a good time and a confident deputy; for in former times (when the state enjoyed the best peace and security) no lord deputy did ever venture himself into those parts, without an army of or men.' at this time lord essex had leased the barony of farney to evor m'mahon for a yearly rent of l. payable in dublin. after fourteen years the same territory was let to brian m'mahon for , l. in the year , the property yielded a yearly rent of l. s. d. paid by thirty-eight tenants. a map then taken gives the several townlands and denominations nearly as they are at present. robert earl of essex, dying in , his estates devolved on his sisters, lady frances and lady dorothy devereux, the former of whom married sir w. seymour, afterwards marquis of hertfort, and the latter sir henry shirley, bart., ancestor of the present proprietor of half the barony. ultimately the other half became the property of the marquis of bath. at the division in , each moiety was valued at l. s. - / d. gradually as the lands were reclaimed by the tenants, the rental rose. in the bath estate produced , l., and the shirley estate , l. the total of , l. per annum, from this once wild and barren tract, was paid by middlemen. the natives had not been rooted out, and during the eighteenth century these sub-tenants multiplied rapidly. according to the census in the population of the barony exceeded , souls, and they contributed by their industry, to the two absentee proprietors, the enormous annual revenue of , l., towards the production of which it does not appear that either of them, or any person for them, ever invested a shilling. mr. s. trench was amazed to find 'more than one human being for every irish acre of land in the barony, and nearly one human being for every l. valuation per annum of the land.' the two estates join in the town of carrickmacross. when mr. trench arrived there, march , , to commence his duties as mr. shirley's agent, he learned that the sudden death of the late agent in the court-house of monaghan had been celebrated that night by fires on almost every hill on the estate, 'and over a district of upwards of , acres there was scarcely a mile without a bonfire blazing in manifestation of joy at his decease.' mr. trench says, the tenants considered themselves ground down to the last point by the late agent. as he relates the circumstances, the people would seem to be a very savage race; and he gives other more startling illustrations to the same effect as he proceeds. but here, as elsewhere, he does not state all the facts, while those he does state are most artistically dressed up for sensational effect, mr. trench himself being always the hero, always acting magnificently, appearing at the right place and at the right moment to prevent some tremendous calamity, otherwise inevitable, and by some mysterious personal influence subduing lawless masses, so that by a sudden impulse, their murderous rage is converted into admiration, if not adoration. like the hearers of herod or of st. paul, when he flung the viper off his hand, they are ready to cry out, 'he is a god, and not a man.' of course he, as a christian gentleman, was always 'greatly shocked,' when these poor wretches offered him petitions on their knees. still he relates every case of the kind with extraordinary unction, and with a picturesqueness of situation and detail so stagey that it should make mr. boucicault's mouth water, and excite the envy of miss braddon. not even she can exceed the author of 'realities of irish life,' in prolonging painful suspense, in piling up the agony, in accumulating horrors, in throwing strong lights on one side of the picture and casting deep shade on the other. it is with the greatest reluctance that i thus allude to the work of mr. trench. i do so from a sense of duty, because i believe it is one of the most misleading books on ireland published for many years. it has made false impressions on the public mind in england, which will seriously interfere with a proper settlement of the land question. the mischief would not be so great if the author did not take so much pains to represent his stories as realities 'essentially characteristic of the country.' it is very difficult to account for the exaggeration and embellishment in which he has permitted himself to indulge, with so many professions of conscientious regard for truth. they must have arisen from the habit of reciting the adventures to his friends during a quarter of a century, naturally laying stress on the most sensational passages, while the facts less in keeping with startling effects dropped out of his memory. very few of the actors in the scenes he describes now survive. those who do, and who might have a more accurate memory, are either so lauded that it would be ungrateful of them to contradict--or so artfully discredited as 'virulent' and base that people would not be likely to believe them if their recollections were different. there is one peculiarity about mr. trench's dialogues. there were never any witnesses present. he always took the wild irishman, on whom he operated so magically, into his private office; or into a private room in the house of the 'subject;' or into a cell alone, if secrets were to be extracted from a ribbonman in gaol. even conversations with the gentler sex, who knelt before him as if he were a bishop, were not permitted to reach the ear of his chief clerk. on some matters, however, others have spoken since his book appeared. he is very precise about the trial for an agrarian murder in monaghan, giving details from his own actual observation. mr. butt, q.c., who was engaged in the case, has published a letter, stating that mr. trench was quite mistaken in his account. it seems strange that he did not refresh his memory by looking at a report of the trial in some newspaper file. mr. trench 'adds his testimony to the fact that ireland is not altogether unmanageable,' that 'justice fully and firmly administered is always appreciated in the end.' and at the conclusion of his volume he says:-- 'we can scarcely shut our eyes to the fact that the circumstances and feelings which have led to the terrible crime of murder in ireland, are usually very different from those which have led to murder elsewhere. the reader of the english newspaper is shocked at the list of children murdered by professional assassins, of wives murdered by their husbands, of men murdered for their gold. in ireland that dreadful crime may almost invariably be traced to a wild feeling of revenge for the national wrongs, to which so many of her sons believe that she has been subjected for centuries.' there is a mistake here. no murders are committed in ireland for 'national wrongs.' the author has gathered together, as in a chamber of horrors, all the cases of assassination that occurred during the years of distress, provoked by the extensive _evictions_ which succeeded the _famine_, and by the infliction of great hardships on tenants who, in consequence of that dreadful calamity, had fallen into arrears. people who had been industrious, peaceable, and well-conducted were thus driven to desperation; and hence the young men formed lawless combinations and committed atrocious murders. but every one of these murders was agrarian, not national. they were committed in the prosecution of _a war_, not against the government, but against the landlords and their agents and instruments. it was a war _pro aris et focis_, waged against local tyrants, and waged in the only way possible to the belligerents who fought for home and family. mr. trench always paints the people who sympathise with their champions as naturally wild, lawless, and savage. if he happens to be in good humour with them, he makes them ridiculous. his son, mr. townsend trench, who did the illustrations for the work, pictures the peasantry as gorillas, always flourishing shillelaghs, and grinning horribly. with rare exceptions, they appear as an inferior race, while the ruling class, and the trenches in particular, appear throughout the book as demigods, 'lords of the creation,' formed by nature to be the masters and guides and managers of such a silly, helpless people. nowhere is any censure pronounced upon a landlord, or an agent, with one exception, and this was the immediate predecessor of mr. trench at kenmare. to his gross neglect in allowing god to send so many human beings into the world, he ascribes the chaos of misery and pauperism, which he--a heaven-born agent--had to reduce to order and beauty. but there were other causes of the 'poetic turbulence' which he so gloriously quelled, that he might have brought to light, had he thought proper, for the information of english readers. he might have shown--for the evidence was before him in the report of the devon commission--with what hard toil and constant self-denial, amidst what domestic privations and difficulties, mr. shirley's tenants struggled to scrape up for him his , l. a year, and how bitterly they must have felt when the landlord sent an order to add one-third to their rack-rent. i will supply mr. trench's lack of service, and quote the evidence of one of those honest and worthy men, given before the devon commissioners. peter mohun, farmer, a tenant on the shirley estate, gave the following evidence:-- 'what family have you?--i am married, and have two daughters, and my wife, and a servant boy. 'what rent do you pay?--sometime ago i paid l. s. d. i was doing well at that time; and then my rent was raised to l. s. d., and sometimes l., and one year l. s. d. 'how do you account for the difference?--i do not know; perhaps by the bog rent. we had the bog free before, and we were doing well; and then we were cut down from the bog, and we were raised from l. s. d. to l. we are beaten down now quite. 'what does the county-cess come to?--sometimes we pay s. - / d. an acre, and oftener s. - / d., the half-year. 'have you paid your rent pretty punctually?--yes, i have done my best so far to pay the rent. 'how much do you owe now?--i believe i shall pay the rent directly after may; i am clear till may. i cannot pay it till harvest comes round. 'how do you get the money to pay the rent?--when i had my land cheap, and myself a youth, i was a good workman, and did work by the loom, and i would be mowing in the summer season, and earn a good deal, and make a little store for me, which has stood by me. i buy some oats and make meal of it, and i make money in that way. it was not by my land i was paying my rent, but from other sources. 'how much wheat have you now?--half an acre, rather above. 'how much oats have you?--half a rood. 'how much potato land shall you have?--three and a half roods besides the garden. 'have you any clover?--very near a rood of clover. 'what is the smallest quantity of land that you think a man who has no other means of support can subsist and pay rent upon?--i was paying rent well myself when i had three acres, when i was paying l. s. d. 'you weave a little?--yes, but very little; but there was a good price for the barrel of wheat, and for pigs, and so i made a little store. but as for any man to support himself out of a small farm, at the high price of land, and the price of labour that is going, it is impossible. 'what is the smallest farm upon which a man can support himself at the present rate of rent, taking a man with five or six children?--that is a hard question. 'supposing a man to pay s. an acre, and to have two acres, and to be obliged to live out of the farm, do you think he could do it and pay rent?--he could not; his land must be very good. unless he lived near a town, and had cheap land, it would be impossible. but a man with five acres, at a moderate rent, he could support his family upon it. 'what should you earn at weaving?--i only weave for my own family. i weave my own shirt. 'do your family ever spin any wool and weave it?--yes. 'do you live upon the shirley estate?--yes. 'how much bog do you require to keep your house in fuel?--half a rood, if it was good; but it is bad bog ground, red mossy turf, white and light; it requires more than the black turf. 'what do you pay for half a rood of turf?--it is s. d. for a rood--that is, s. d. for half a rood. there is s. d. paid for bad bog. 'do you pay anything for the ticket of leave to cut?--yes, i do; i have not a ticket unless i pay d. for it. 'that is over and above the s. d.?--yes. 'did you ever pay more than s. d. for the bog in the late agent's time?--he took the good bog off us; we were paying s. d. for it. they left us to the bad bog, and we do not pay so high for that. 'was the good bog dearer or cheaper than the bad bog at s. d.?--half a rood of the good bog was worth half an acre or an acre of the other. the bad bog smokes so we have often to leave the house: we cannot stay in it unless there is a good draught in the chimney.' the rev. thomas smollan, p.p., has published a letter to the earl of dunraven, a catholic peer, to whom mr. trench has dedicated his book. in this letter the parish priest of farney says:-- 'in pages and mr. trench tells his readers that on the very night the news of the late agent's sudden death, in the county courthouse of monaghan, reached carrickmacross, "fires blazed on almost every hill on the shirley estate, and over a district of more than , acres there was scarcely a mile without a bonfire blazing in manifestation of joy at his decease." this paragraph, my lord, taken by itself and unexplained in any way, would at once imply that the people were inhuman, almost savages, whom mr. trench was sent to tame--that they were insensible to the agent's sudden death, a death so sudden that it would make an enemy almost relent. mr. trench assigns no cause for this strange proceeding except what we read in page , and what he learned from the chief clerk, viz., "that the people were much excited, that they were ground down to the last point by the late agent, and they were threatening to rise in rebellion against him," &c. one would think that mr. trench having learned so much on such authority, would have set to work to try and find out the cause of the discontent and apply a remedy. he does not say in his book that he did so, but seems still unable to understand this to him incomprehensible proceeding. however, i am of opinion that mr. trench knew the whole of it, if not then at all events before "the realities" saw the light, for in a speech of his, when lord bath visited farney (page ), he said, "a dog could not bark on the estate without it coming to his knowledge." and therefore i say that a man so inquisitive as to find out the barking of a dog on the bath estate, who had so many sources of information close at hand, could not have been long without knowing the causes of the "excitement, threatened rebellion, bonfires, &c., on the shirley estate," if he had only wished for the information. either he knew the cause of all this when he wrote his book, or he did not. if he did, i say he was bound in fair play to tell it to the public; if he did not know it his self-laudation in his speech goes for nought. but, my lord, with your permission, i will inform your lordship, mr. trench, and the public, as to some of the causes of so remarkable an occurrence, which could not pass unobserved by mr. trench. at the memorable election of , evelyn john shirley, esq., and colonel leslie, father of the present m.p., contested the county of monaghan, and the former brought all his influence to bear on his tenants to vote for himself (shirley) and leslie, who coalesced against the late lord rossmore. the electors said "they would give one vote for their landlord, and the other they would give for their religion and their country;" the consequence was, shirley and westenra were returned, and leslie was beaten. up to this time mr. shirley was a good landlord, and admitted tenant-right to the fullest extent on the property, but after that election he never showed the same friendly feelings towards the people. soon after the election mr. humphrey evatt, the agent, died, and was succeeded in the agency by mr. sandy mitchell, who very soon set about surveying and revaluing the estate, of course at the instance of his master, evelyn john shirley, esq. he performed the work of revaluation, &c., and the result was that the rents were increased by one-third and in some cases more. the bog, too, which up to this time was free to the tenants, was taken from them and doled out to them in small patches of from twenty-five to forty perches each, at from l. to l. per acre. at the instance of the then parish priest, president reilly, mr. shirley gave l. per year to a few schools on his property, without interfering in any way with the religious principles of the catholics attending these schools; but the then agent insisted on having the authorised version of the bible, without note or comment, read in those schools by the catholic children. the bishop, the most rev. dr. kernan, could not tolerate such a barefaced attempt at proselytism, and insisted on the children being withdrawn from the schools. for obeying their bishop in this, the catholic parents were treated most unsparingly. i have before me just now a most remarkable instance of the length to which this gentleman carried his proselytising propensities, which i will mention. in the vestry, or sacristy, attached to corduff chapel, was a school taught by a man named rush, altogether independent of the schools aided by mr. shirley, and by largely subsidising the teacher, the then agent actually introduced his proselytism into that school too. the priests and people tried legal means to get rid of the teacher, but without success, and in the end the people came by night and knocked down the sacristy, so that in the morning when the teacher came he had no house to shelter him. the catholics were then without a school, and in order to provide the means of education for them the rev. f. keone, administrator, under the most rev. dr. kernan, applied for aid to the commissioners of national education, and obtained it; but where was he to procure building materials? the then agent, in his zeal for "converting" catholics, having issued an order forbidding the supplying of them from any part of the shirley estate, which extends over an area of fifteen miles by ten, father keone went on the next sunday to the neighbouring chapels outside the shirley estate, told his grievances, and on the next day the people came with their horses and carts and left sand, lime, and stones in sufficient quantities to build the house inside the chapel-yard. the priest and people thought it necessary to "thatch" their old chapel, and, though strange it may seem, the agent actually served an ejectment process on the father of the two boys who assisted the priest to make the collection at the chapel door for so absolutely necessary a work. i may add, this man owed no rent. lastly, the then agent was in the habit of arranging matrimonial alliances, pointing out this girl as a suitable match for that boy, and the boy must marry the girl or give up his farm. these facts being true, my lord, and more which i might state, but that i have trespassed too much already on your lordship's time, i ask you, my lord dunraven--i ask any impartial man, irishman or englishman--for whom mr. trench wrote his "book," is it strange or wonderful that the catholic people, so treated, would rejoice--would have bonfires on the hill tops at their deliverance from such conduct? i flatter myself that you, my lord--that the learned reading public--that the english people would sympathise with any people so treated for conscience' sake; and having pronounced the sentence of condemnation against mr. trench for not having noticed these facts, that you will direct your name to be erased from the "book." i have the honour to remain, my lord, with the most profound respect, your lordship's faithful servant.' 'thomas smollan, p.p. 'clones, feb. , .' the electors of monaghan, in their simplicity, thought they were fairly exercising the rights conferred by the constitution when they gave one vote for the landlord, and one for their religion and their country, thus securing the return of one liberal. but mr. shirley soon taught them that the blessings of our glorious constitution belong not to the tenant, but to the landlord; and so he punished their mistake by adding one-third to their rent, and depriving them of proper fuel. not content with this, he carried the war into their chapels and schools, and punished them for their religion. these facts may help to explain the scenes which mr. trench describes so poetically. the persecuting agent died suddenly in the court-house. the landlord and a new agent, mr. trench, arrived at carrickmacross; and the tenants presented a petition, imploring him to remove the new and intolerable burden that had been put on their shoulders. they were told to come back for an answer on the following monday:-- '"monday! monday!" was shouted on all sides. the most frenzied excitement ensued. hats were thrown in the air, sticks were flourished on all sides, and the men actually danced with wild delight. after a little time, however, the crowd cleared away, and the news flew like wildfire over the town and country, that the whole tenantry were told to come in on monday next, that they might know the amount of the reduction to be granted, and have all their grievances removed!' mr. shirley quickly repented having given the invitation, and sent out a circular countermanding it, and requesting the tenants to stay at home. on monday, however, a vast excited mass assembled to hear his _ultimatum_, which was announced by the new agent. 'he would not reduce their rents. they might give up their lands if they pleased; but they had little or no cause of complaint.' they insisted on his mounting a chair and making a speech. he softened the message as well as he could. when he had done there was a dead silence. in describing what follows mr. trench surpasses the wildest romancers in piling up the agony. i copy the description that the reader may see the difference between romance and history. 'there was a dead silence when i stopped speaking. it was broken by a stentorian voice. '"then you won't reduce our rents?" '"i have already given you mr. shirley's answer upon that point," said i. "stranger as i am, it is impossible for me to form any opinion as to whether they are too high or not." '"_down on your knees, boys!_" shouted the same voice; "we will ask him once more upon our knees!" and to my horror and amazement the vast crowd, almost all at least who were in my immediate vicinity, dropped suddenly on their knees, and another dead silence ensued. 'it was a dreadful spectacle. their hats were on their heads, and their sticks in their hands, some leaning upon them as they knelt, others balancing and grasping them. it was fearful to see the attitude of supplication, due only to a higher power, thus mingled with a wild defiance. '"_we ask you upon our knees, for god's sake, to get us a reduction of our rents!_" again the same voice cried aloud. 'i was greatly shocked. i instantly got down off the chair. i entreated them to rise. i told them that i was distressed beyond measure, but that i had given them the only message i was authorised to give; and quite overcome by such a scene, i endeavoured to move again across the crowded space from the office, in order to enter the house, and report proceedings to mr. shirley, intending to request that he would himself appear and address his excited tenantry. 'the moment i moved towards the door, the vast crowd leaped again to their feet; i was instantly surrounded, hustled, and prevented from getting near it. i bore this good-humouredly, and the door being quite close to me, i had no doubt they would ultimately let me in. but whilst this scene was going on, a shout was raised by those who were at a distance up the road leading to the town, and who had not heard what had been said. "bring him up--bring him up, and let us see him!" in a moment i was seized, and though i resisted to my utmost, i was dragged up the narrow road which led from shirley house to the town. i was kicked and beaten, and pushed and bruised, my hat knocked off, and my clothes torn; and in this state i was dragged into the main street of carrickmacross. 'here a scene of the wildest excitement took place, some cried one thing--some another. i was beaten again, my clothes torn off my back, and sticks whirled over my head. four or five policemen met me as i was being dragged along, but they might as well have attempted to stop the rushing of an atlantic wave, as to stern the crowd that had assembled around me; _and they only looked on and let me pass_.' if the sub-inspector, who was present, and his men acted in this manner, i venture to say it is the only instance in the whole history of the force in which the royal irish constabulary were guilty of such a cowardly neglect of duty. however, not only the police, but the best part of the crowd deserted this strange gentleman, and he was 'left in the hands of the vilest and most furious of the mob.' where was mr. shirley? where were the clergy and the respectable inhabitants of the town? the mob dragged him along towards loughfea castle--a mile and a half--whither they heard mr. shirley had fled, still beating, kicking, and strangling their victim, without any object; for how could they serve their cause by killing an agent who had never injured them? and how easy it was to kill him if they wished! but here comes the climax; he asked the murderous multitude to let him stop a few moments to breathe--he then proceeds: 'i shall never forget that moment. i was then about a mile from the town on the broad and open road leading to loughfea castle. i turned and looked around me, thinking my last hour was come, and anxious to see if there was one kind face, one countenance, i had ever seen before, who could at least tell my friends how i had died. but i looked in vain. the hills were crowded with people. the long line of road was one mass of human beings, whilst those immediately around me, mad with excitement, seemed only to thirst for my blood. 'having got a few moments' breathing-time, and seeing all appeal to be vain, i turned again on my way, determined, however, to hold out to the last, as i felt that to fall or to faint must be certain death. just then i became conscious of an able hand and a stout heart beside me, and i heard a whisper in my ear: "they are determined to have your blood, but hold up, they shall have mine first." the speaker grasped my arm firmly under his own, and walked on steadily by my side. 'by this time i was _completely naked with the exception of my trousers_. my coat, even my shirt, had been torn off, and i walked on, still beaten and ill-treated, like a man to execution; my head bare, and _without any clothes from my waist upwards_. to increase the misery of my situation, i found that my friend had been beaten and dragged away in spite of himself, and again i was left alone in the hands of those merciless men. i felt also i could now go no further, and that a last effort must be made before my senses left me from exhaustion. stopping therefore once more, i asked to be led towards a high bank at the roadside, and leaning against this i turned and faced those whom i now believed would soon become my murderers. '"i can go no further," said i; "what have you brought me here for? what do you want me to do?" again the same voice which i had first heard at the office, though i could not identify the speaker from the shouting and confusion around me, cried aloud, "we want a reduction of our rents, will you promise to get us that?" 'there are times of instant danger, when it is said that the whole of a man's past life rushes before him in the spaces of a single moment. if ever there be such a time, this was such to me. i stood there, exhausted, without one friendly face on which to rest, and surrounded by _the worst of ten thousand men who seemed determined to have a victim_. i knew and felt all this. so i said very quietly, as a last effort to save my life, and hoping they would name something i could promise to ask, '"and what reduction will you be content with?" 'again the same voice replied, '"we will never pay more than one-half our present rents." '"then," said i, "there ends the matter, _i never will promise that_." 'there was a pause, and a dead silence. i stood _naked and bareheaded before them_. they stood opposite to me, with their sticks clenched in their hands, ready to strike. i looked at them, and they at me. they hesitated; _no one would strike me first_. i saw that they wavered, and instinctively, in a moment i _felt_ that i had won. this sudden revulsion of feeling--though i was still externally motionless--sent the blood throbbing to my temples with a rush that became almost oppressive. but the strange pause continued--when at length a shout was raised from the old stentorian voice again, "stand off, boys--for your lives! no one shall harm him--he is a good man after all!" and in a moment i was surrounded by a new set of faces, who dashed furiously towards me. they raised me on their shoulders, swept my old enemies away from me, procured me some water to drink, and carried me, now completely overcome, exhausted, and almost fainting, into the demesne of loughfea. 'here again these suddenly converted friends desired me to get up on a chair, and speak to the crowd now assembled before the castle. i did so. a reaction for the moment had taken place within me, and i felt some return of strength. 'i told the people i had never injured them. that it was a shame, and a disgrace of which i had not believed any irishman to be capable, to treat a stranger as they had dealt with me that day. that in my own country i could have as many to fight for me as were now against me, and in short i abused them right heartily and soundly. they bore it without a murmur. my new friends cheered me vociferously, and i was carried, now quite unable to walk, into the castle of loughfea. mr. shirley's architect here appeared upon the scene, and perceiving that the people were much exasperated at not finding mr. shirley at the castle, and that some of the most violent were disposed in consequence to make a fresh attack upon me as i was being carried exhausted inside the gates, he promised to speak to mr. shirley in their favour, and in some degree calmed their feelings. the excitement was past. mr. shirley had not been there, and the people at last quietly dispersed. 'in the evening i was conveyed in a covered carriage to carrickmacross, blackened with bruises, stiff and sore, and scarcely able to stand--musing over the strange transactions which had happened that day--and wrapped in a countryman's frieze coat which had been borrowed to cover _my nakedness_.'[ ] [footnote : realities of irish life, chap. v.] when the reader recovers his breath after this. i will ask him to turn to the history of this transaction--bad enough in itself--and see what fancy and art can do in dressing up a skeleton so that it becomes 'beautiful for ever.' mr. trench himself shall be the historian, writing to the authorities when the occurrences were all fresh in his mind. the narrative was handed in to the devon commissioners as his _sworn evidence_: '_william steuart trench, esq., agent._ 'have there been any agrarian outrages, and in what have they originated?--there have been none, except _during a late short period of peculiar local excitement_. 'will you state the particulars of that excitement, and what then occurred?--i think my best mode of doing so will be by handing in the copy of a letter which i addressed to a local magistrate for the information of government.--[_the witness read the following letter_:--] 'dear sir--in reply to your communication, enclosing a letter from mr. lucas, requesting that i should give a statement of the particulars which occurred to me in carrickmacross, on monday last, i beg leave to lay before you the facts, as follows:-- 'mr. shirley has recently appointed me to the agency over his monaghan estate. we both arrived here on thursday, the th of march, and on the following morning we went together into the office; and having remained there about an hour, we were much surprised, on our return, to find an immense mass of people outside the door, who immediately presented a petition to mr. shirley, requesting a reduction of rent. 'mr. shirley declined giving an immediate answer to such an unexpected request; but having read the petition, he told them he would give an answer to it on the monday following. by saturday, however, he had arrived at a full conclusion upon the point, and, anxious to avoid any unpleasant altercation with his tenants, he thought it advisable to let his determination be known as soon as possible; and accordingly, on saturday, he issued and circulated a printed notice, stating the determination at which he had arrived, and declining any further communications upon the subject. i enclose a copy of the notice. 'notwithstanding this notice, the people came in on monday in immense numbers; and at about o'clock in the forenoon, the upper part of the street opposite to shirley house, where we were residing, was filled with dense masses of men. i then thought it my duty to go out, and repeat to them in my capacity as agent, the determination at which their landlord had arrived. i did so in the mildest terms. i told them i had been able to go over only a part of the estate; but that from what i had seen, i was of opinion that a better system of farming and of general management of their land, was in my judgment much more required than a reduction of the rent. that i knew mr. shirley had the kindest feeling towards them, and that i was myself quite prepared and willing to render them any assistance--to go to every man's farm, if possible, and to assist them by my counsel and advice. but that as mr. shirley had come to a determination to make no present reduction in his rental, i did expect that all who were able to pay their rents would come in and do so; that the utmost leniency would be extended towards those who could not pay; but that my duty was plain, and if those who really were able to pay, refused to come forward and do so, that i had no alternative left but to take advantage of the power which the law afforded for the recovery of the rent--and this i was fully prepared and determined to do, if driven to that unpleasant necessity. i also made some further observations, of less importance; but my manner towards them was quiet and calm, and i expressed myself most anxious to do everything in my power to promote their welfare and comfort. '_i then attempted to return to the house, across the street; but the mob closed in upon me, and prevented my doing so_, _and with much violence dragged me up into the town, where i was repeatedly struck and kicked, and nearly strangled, and my coat torn to pieces._ '_the mob continued thus to ill-treat me for about a mile along the road to lough fea, mr. shirley's residence, repeatedly kicking me, especially when i showed symptoms of exhaustion, and pressing their hands violently upon my throat, till i was almost overcome by fatigue, heat and pain._ '_all this appeared to be done for the purpose of forcing me to promise to induce mr. shirley to lower the rents to s. per acre (upwards of fifty per cent.). this i refused to do. they then brought me on to lough fea, where they thought mr. shirley was; and upon not finding him, they appeared much exasperated. mr. shirley's architect then appeared, and by promising to speak to mr. shirley in their favour, and by requesting them to send a deputation, instead of coming in a manner like the present, he induced them to desist from further injury to me._ 'believe me, dear sir, very truly yours, '(signed) 'william steuart trench. 'carrickmacross, april , . 'what has been the general demeanour of the people towards you since that time?--though they resisted my measures for the recovery of the rent, _to myself they have been perfectly civil; nor have i received any personal insult or unpleasantness, arising from the above cause since that period._ 'how long did this kind of combination exist?--for about six months.' setting aside the embellishments, let us note one or two differences as to facts. in the book the suddenly converted friends placed him on a chair and asked him to make a speech before the castle door. he did so, and there is a grand statuesque picture of the hero, naked to the waist, and standing on the chair as lofty pedestal. in the torn coat the artist could never have made him look like apollo. even the shirt would have been too commonplace; so off went the shirt. three or four times attention is directed to the fact of the nakedness by the hero himself, while the pencil of the filial illustrator has rendered him immortal in this primitive costume. in his speech he 'abused them heartily and soundly.' yet they cheered him vociferously, and then carried him into the castle, where he could get nothing to cover his nakedness but a countryman's frieze coat. it was when he had been cheered vociferously, and kindly carried in, that mr. shirley's architect appeared on the scene. mr. trench has not been just to that gentleman, for he really came to his rescue, and perhaps saved his life, by giving the people the only sensible advice they got that day. in his sworn statement, made twenty-five years ago, mr. trench said: 'mr. shirley's architect then appeared, and by promising to speak to mr. shirley in their favour, and by requesting them to send a deputation, instead of coming in a manner like the present, _he induced them to desist from further injury to me._' if we had contemporary accounts of all the other romantic scenes which have fascinated so many readers, the 'realities' would lose much of their gilding. indeed, in most cases the internal evidence is sufficient to convince us that the sensationalist has been laying on his colours pretty heavily. in the sketch of the farney rent campaign, however, i am willing to accept mr. trench as a faithful historian. it is a most suggestive narrative, because it shows what mischief could be done by driving the agricultural population to desperation. a general strike against the payment of rent would convulse society. if the war which raged in farney had spread all over the island, the landlords would be in serious difficulty. the british army might then have become rent collectors, as they had been tithe collectors in .' mr. shirley resolved, after much deliberation, to enforce his legal rights to the utmost. the bailiff was sent to warn the backward tenants to come in with the rent, and he everywhere received the same answer--'we will pay no rent till our grievances are redressed.' now all the missiles of the law were showered on the recusants--notices to quit, _latitats_, processes for arrears, &c. grippers, process-servers, keepers, drivers, were in full requisition. the grippers were to arrest all tenants against whom decrees had been obtained at the quarter-sessions; the keepers were employed to watch the crops that had been seized; and the drivers were to bring the cattle, sheep, horses, or pigs to pound. these constituted the landlord's army, having the police as a reserve, and the military if necessary. on the other hand, the tenants organised a body called the 'molly maguires'--stout young men dressed up in women's clothes, their faces disguised and besmeared in the most fantastic manner. these men waylaid and maltreated the officers of the law so severely, that in a short time no money could induce a gripper, process-server, driver or bailiff to show his nose on the estate. in this dilemma, mr. shirley, as commander-in-chief, ordered his lieutenant and his subordinates to go forth, with a body of police, and drive in all the cattle they could seize on the lands of the defaulting tenants. the expedition started one fine morning, led on by the mounted bailiff, a fat man, trembling like a hare at the thought of encountering the 'molly maguires.' mr. trench's description of this foray is very graphic:--'no sooner had this formidable party appeared upon the roads in the open country, than the people rushed to the tops of the numerous hills with which the district abounds; and as we moved forward, they ran from one hill to another shouting and cheering with wild defiant cries, and keeping a line parallel to that in which our party was travelling. 'the object of our expedition was clearly understood by the people; and the exact position of our company was indicated to those in the lowlands by the movements of the parties on the hills; and accordingly, as we advanced, every beast belonging to every tenant who owed rent was housed or locked up, or driven somewhere away. thus, as we had no legal right to break open any door, or take any cattle out of any house, but only to seize those we might find in the open fields and upon the lands of the defaulting tenants, we soon perceived (as we might have known before we started) that we were likely to return without success. the bailiff declared with a sigh, "that not a hoof nor a horn was left in the whole country-side." 'at length when about to return home, without having secured any booty whatever, we came unexpectedly upon a poor little heifer calf, browsing quietly on the long grass beside a hedge. the bailiff having ascertained that she was grazing on the land of a tenant who was a defaulter, we seized upon the unhappy little beast, and drove it ingloriously home to the pound at carrickmacross, a distance of about two miles, amidst the jeers and laughter of the populace, at the result of our formidable day's driving.' thus baffled, mr. shirley resolved to try another move. he applied to the authorities in dublin for an order for 'substitution of service.' that is, instead of delivering the legal notices at the houses of the parties, which was impracticable, they were to be posted up on the chapel-door. to effect this object, a large police force was necessary, and it was accompanied by a stipendiary magistrate. 'as soon as the party came near the chapel grounds a shout of defiance was raised by the peasantry, who began to crowd into the chapel yard, and with uplifted sticks and threatening gestures swore that they would never allow the walls of the chapel to be desecrated by such a notice. the bailiff, a most respectable and temperate man, did his utmost to pacify the excited mob. he reasoned with them as best he could; and assured them that no desecration was intended--that he was only carrying out the law, which required that the notice should be posted on the chapel walls. but his voice had no more power than if he had spoken to a storm of wind; they leaped and danced madly about, whirling their sticks over their heads, and shouting that they would never allow him to touch the sacred edifice. 'the stipendiary magistrate now ordered him to do his duty, and that he would be protected in doing it by the police, and he, trembling with fear, as well he might, at length approached with the notice in his hand to post it in due form. no sooner had he approached towards the chapel than a volley of stones sent him staggering back, though none actually struck him. the police were now ordered to advance. they did so amidst another shower of stones. the storm of missiles still continuing and several of the police having been struck and injured, they were at length ordered to fire. they aimed low, and directing their fire straight into the crowd of stone-throwers, they soon checked the vigour of the assault--six or seven men fell under the volley and rolled upon the ground. there was a short pause, a dead silence ensued--but it was only for a moment, and before the police could recover themselves and load again, a furious rush was made upon them by the enraged populace. stones were seen flying as thick as hail; and finally the police, apprehending that they must be annihilated if they remained, ran to their cars, which were waiting at a little distance, and drove into carrickmacross as fast as the horses could gallop, accompanied by the stipendiary magistrate! 'the field thus quickly won, remained in the possession of the insurgents. one of the rioters was killed upon the spot--shot through the body. the others who fell were only slightly injured; one had his ear taken off, another was wounded in the finger, another shot in the arm.' this was 'the battle of magheracloon.' mr. trench wisely recommended a cessation of hostilities till the harvest was gathered in, promising the landlord that he would then by quiet means, acting on the tenants individually and privately, induce them to pay their rents. he succeeded, but as mr. shirley declined to adopt his plans for the better management of the estate, he resigned. he came back, however, after some years, as agent to the marquess of bath--a post which he occupies still, being manager-in-chief at the same time of the large estates of the marquess of lansdowne, in kerry, and lord digby, in the king's county. in all these undertakings, ably assisted by his sons and his nephew, he has been pre-eminently successful. if the farney men had been driven off in , or swept away by the famine, it would have been said that their fate was inevitable, nothing could be made of them. they were by nature prone to disorder and rebellion. well, lord bath visited his estate in . on that occasion a banquet was given to the tenants, at which mr. trench made an eloquent speech. referring to the outbreak in , he said: 'and yet never, my lord, never even in the worst of times, did i bate one jot of heart or hope in the noble people of farney, never for one moment did i doubt their loyalty to their queen, their loyalty to their country, their respect for their landlord, and above all, that they would be true and loyal to themselves.' so much for the incurable perversity of the celtic race, for the 'black morass of irish nature' that can never be drained! the people of farney got justice, and they were contented and orderly. they got security, and they were industrious and thriving. they got protection under the constitution, and they were loyal. densely peopled as the estate is, the agent could not coax one of them to emigrate; and after his former experience at farney, he did not venture on eviction, though, no doubt, he would gladly repeat the kenmare experiment in thinning the masses with which he has had to deal. mr. horsman, a prophet of the same school of economists, says that providence sent the famine to relieve the landlords, by carrying away a third of the population, and he seems to think it desirable that another third should be got rid of somehow. chapter xxii. belfast and perpetuity. belfast, not being blessed with a cathedral like armagh and derry, is not called a 'city.' it is only a 'town;' but it is the capital of ulster, and surpasses all other places in ireland in the rapidity of its progress and in its prosperity. it can boast but little of its antiquity. there is probably not a house in the borough more than years old. the place is first noticed by history in , merely as the site of a fort of the o'neills, which was destroyed by john de courcy. it was only a poor village at the time of bruce's invasion, in , though spencer erroneously calls it 'a very good town.' it was so insignificant in that holinshed does not mention it among the towns and havens of down and antrim. whatever town existed there had been destroyed by the earl of kildare when lord-deputy. in it was repaired and garrisoned, and shortly after it was granted by the crown to hugh o'neill of clandeboye. in the castle, with a large portion of territory adjoining it, was bestowed upon sir thomas smith and his son. the latter was assassinated by the 'wicked, barbarous, and uncivil people;' and the former, not being able to fulfil the conditions of his tenure, the district reverted with the whole earldom of ulster to the crown in the reign of james i. belfast was then surrounded by extensive forests, abounding in fine timber for building. the best specimen--perhaps the only one in the kingdom--of a forest like what covered the country at that time, still exists at shane's castle, the magnificent demesne of lord o'neill, where may be seen enormous oaks decaying with age, under whose shade probably the famous shane marshalled his galloglasse. in the castle and manor of belfast were granted to sir arthur chichester, lord-deputy, ancestor of the marquis of donegal, who did so much to effect the final conquest of ulster. he may be said to be the founder of the town. from the estates of his family, in devonshire, and from scotland, many families came over and made a strong settlement here. ultimately it became a corporation sending two members to the irish parliament. the chief magistrate was called 'the sovereign;' and the first who held the office was thomas pottinger, ancestor of the celebrated sir henry pottinger. in the population was , ; in , it was , ; in , it was , ; in , it had increased to , ; in , it amounted to , ; and the last census shows it to be , . about , houses are built annually in the borough, and the present population is estimated at , . the rateable property is more than , l. the sum of , l. has been spent on the harbour improvements, to which is to be added , l. for building new docks. i remember the quays when they were small, irregular, inconvenient, dirty, and when the channel worked its doubtful course through shifting masses of liquid mud, at low water. now there are quays which extend in a line about a mile, covered with spacious sheds for the protection of the goods being shipped and unshipped. there are docks of all sorts, and great shipbuilding establishments standing on ground created out of the floating chaos of mud. 'year by year,' as one of its poets has said, 'belfast is changing its aspect and overstepping its former boundaries, climbing the hill-side, skirting the river margin, and even invading the sea's ancient domain. 'ambition's mistress of the fertile land, shuts out the ocean and usurps the strand.' among the 'usurpations' is queen's island, a beautiful people's park, standing in the midst of the lough. the people of belfast have effected all these vast improvements from their own resources, without a shilling from the lord of the soil, without any help from government, except a loan of , l. from the board of works. belfast is the 'linen capital' of the empire, as manchester is the 'cotton capital.' the linen trade was fostered in its infancy there by strafford, and encouraged by william iii., as a set-off against the abolition of the woollen trade. the first spinning of flax by steam power was commenced in , by the messrs. mulholland, who employ , hands, principally females. mills have sprung up in every direction, and it is estimated that they give employment to , persons. to supply the consumption of flax, in addition to the home produce, about , tons are imported every year. linen is the staple manufacture; but industrial arts of every kind flourish, with all the usual manifestations of wealth. we have seen in a former chapter that the people of londonderry, vexed that the maiden city has been left so far behind her younger sister, ascribe the difference to the fact that the belfast manufacturers were favoured with long building tenures. we hear it said often that the marquis of donegal gave his tenants perpetuity leases, implying that he acted very liberally in doing so. if, however, you speak to persons acquainted with the local history, they will ascribe this advantage to 'lord donegal's necessities.' if you ask an explanation of this phrase, you will be told that towards the end of last century, and later, lord donegal was obliged to adopt extraordinary methods for raising money, and that the perpetuity leases in question were purchased, and at a very high rate too. you will further learn that the tenants were compelled to take the leases, and pay heavy fines for them in lump sums, and that if unable to produce the money they were evicted, and their farms were given to others who were able to pay. it is alleged that his agent got leases in blank, ready to be filled up when the cash was forthcoming, and that all the cash did not reach the landlord's hands. at any rate, attempts have been made to break some of the leases. there has been long pending litigation on the subject. whatever may be the defects of title on the part of the landlord, the tenant must suffer. dr. hancock alludes to this fact in his first report. referring to sir john romilly's leasing powers bill, he says:-- 'the details of these bills it is not necessary now to refer to; but there was one principle provided for in them which has been neglected in subsequent measures. in the ordinary course of business a tenant does not investigate his landlord's title; the cost of doing so would be nearly always too great; besides, the landlord would not think of consenting to the investigation on every occasion of granting a lease. it follows from this that it is a great hardship, if a flaw should be discovered in a landlord's title, that leases granted before the tenants had any notice of the litigation should be bad. take the case of the estate which the late duke of wellington and mr. leslie recovered from lord dungannon after he had been for years in possession; or the case which is now pending for so many years between the marquis of donegal and viscount templemore. is it not a great hardship that leases which tenants took, trusting in the title of lord dungannon or viscount templemore, who were then visible owners of great estates, should afterwards turn out to be worthless on some point of law in title-deeds which they never had the opportunity of seeing; and which may be so subtle as to take courts of law years to decide?' dr. hancock says the principle that in such cases the tenant should be protected, was neglected in subsequent measures. now, what must the tenants think of legislation that subjects them to be robbed of their dearly-bought leases because of flaws, frauds or blunders with which they could have nothing to do? the leases granted to the tenants of lord donegal, however, in belfast and the neighbourhood were generally valid, and to these perpetuities we must undoubtedly ascribe the existence of a middle class of remarkable independence of character, and the accumulation of capital for manufactures and commerce. had lord donegal been able to hold the town in a state of tutelage and dependence--had he been an 'improving landlord' of the modern type, with an agent like mr. trench, so vigilant and curious that a dog could not bark on the estate without his knowledge and consent, belfast might have been far behind derry to-day--as stationary as bangor, hillsborough, antrim, or randalstown. under such paternal care as mr. trench bestows upon tenants, with his omnipresent surveillance, there could be no manly self-reliance, no freedom of speech or action, no enterprise. the agent would take care that no interests should grow up on the estate, which his chief could not control or knock down. it is not likely that lord donegal would have suffered the landscape to be spoiled, the atmosphere of the deer park and gardens to be darkened and tainted by the smoke of factory chimneys, which could add nothing to his rental, while crowding around him the race which his great progenitor did so much to extirpate. so belfast may well be thankful that the marquis of donegal, for some generations, could not afford to be 'an improving landlord,' fond of paternal intermeddling with other people's affairs, playing the part of providence to an inferior race. but there is one memorable fact connected with those perpetuity leases which applies more immediately to our purpose. the tenants who were evicted to make way for the men who had money to advance to the lord of the soil, feeling themselves seriously aggrieved, formed the first of the more modern agrarian combinations under the title of 'the hearts of oak;' which continued for a long time to disturb the peace in antrim and down. the farms being extensively turned into pasture by the landlords and large graziers, there was no employment for the houseless wanderers, no provision of any kind for their support. they consequently had no respect for the rights of property, in the vindication of which their homes had been demolished and their families sacrificed, because they were not able to purchase fixity of tenure. it was, however, very fortunate for belfast that the landlord was obliged to sell it; that the head of the great house founded by the conqueror of ulster, enriched with territory so vast, should have been under the necessity of giving a perpetual property in the soil to some of the sons of industry. by that simple concession he did more to advance the prosperity of the town, than could have been accomplished by centuries of fostering care, under the shadow of feudalism. belfast shows, on a grand scale, what might be done on many an estate in ireland, in many a town and village where the people are pining away in hopeless misery, if the iron bonds of primogeniture and entail which now cramp landed property were struck off. the greek philosopher declared that if he had a standing-place he could move the earth. give to capital the ground of perpetuity of tenure, whereon to plant its machinery, and it will soon lift this island from the slough of despond. then may it be said more truly than grattan said it in , that ireland had got nearer to the sun. chapter xxiii. lease-breaking--geashill. the history of the manor of geashill in the king's county furnishes another instructive illustration of the land question and of the effect upon the people of the system of management, under the new school of agents, of which mr. steuart trench may be regarded as the brightest ornament, if not the apostle. the epoch was favourable for his mission, and he was the man for the epoch; he had been quietly training himself for the restoration of disordered estates, and the critical emergencies of the times thrust him into the front rank of social reformers. when he describes the wonderful revolutions wrought by his instrumentality, the whirlwinds on which he rode, the storms which he directed and quelled, the chaos out of which he evoked order, he assumes that the hurricane and the chaos were the normal state of things. a mysterious pestilence had blighted the principal food of the people for two or three years, and brought on a desolating famine. millions perished by that visitation chiefly because the legislature had persistently refused up to that period to make any provision for the irish poor such as it had made centuries before for the english poor, and because no care had been taken to distribute the population over the waste lands which their labour would have reclaimed and fertilized; or to improve their position, so that they might not be wholly dependent on one sort of food, and that the most precarious and perishable. mr. sadler, in his work on population, had proved that, even in the case of ireland before the famine, there was really no 'surplus population;' that if the resources of the country had been developed by a wise government, sympathising with the people, the text which he adopted would have been applicable there: 'dwell in the land, and verily ye shall be fed.' there was hasty legislation to meet the emergency, but in all the haste, the heartless economists found time to devise clauses and provisions, by means of which, when the small farmers had consumed all their stock to keep their families alive, they were compelled to relinquish their holdings in order to get food for their famishing children. they must submit to the workhouse test, they must not hold more than a quarter of an acre of land, if they would get relief. under the dire instigation of hunger, in the stupor and recklessness of their misery, they accepted any terms the landlords chose to impose, and so whole villages disappeared from the landscape, swept off with the besom of destruction. the political economists (all the new school of land-agents are rigid political economists), taught by their prophet malthus, ascribed the famine and every other social evil to surplus population, and to the incurably lazy and thriftless habits of the celtic race. according to them the potato blight had only hastened an inevitable catastrophe. therefore they set to work with all their agencies and all their might to get rid of the too prolific race, and to supplant the native cultivators by british settlers and wealthy graziers. this has been done ever since by a quiet and gradual process, steadily, systematically, inexorably, propelled by many powerful tendencies of the age, and checked only by assassination. what are the agrarian outrages which have become so terribly rife of late, but the desperate struggles of a doomed race to break the instruments which pluck them out of their native soil? a generation of instruction in the national schools and a generation of intercourse with the free citizens of the united states, who call no man 'master' under heaven--have taught them that it is an enormous iniquity to sacrifice humanity to property, to make the happiness, the freedom, the very existence of human beings, secondary to the arbitrary power and self-interest of a small class called landlords. they regard the 'improving landlord' system as nothing but a legal and civilised continuation of the barbarous policy of extermination by fire and sword which we have seen pursued so ruthlessly in the seventeenth century. it is still the land-war, conducted according to modern tactics, aiming with deadly effect at the same object, the slow but sure destruction of a nuisance called the 'celtic race.' this may be a delusion on their part; but it is the deep-rooted conviction of priests and people, and hence the utter inadequacy of any enactment which will not render such a policy impossible, by making the tenure of the occupiers independent of the will of the landlords. until such time the peasantry will continue to offer a bloody resistance to the legal attempts to crush them out of the country. in this self-defensive war, they cannot cope with the armed power of england in the open field; and they are driven upon the criminal resource of the oppressed in all ages and all lands--secret combination and assassination. for this crime they feel no remorse; first, because it is _war_--just as the soldier feels no remorse for killing the enemy in a battle; and, secondly, because their conquerors, and the successors of those conquerors, have taught them too well by repeated examples the terrible lesson of making light of human life. poor ignorant creatures, they cannot see that, while the most illustrious noblemen in england won applause and honours by shooting down irish women and children like seals or otters, the survivors of the murdered people should be execrated as cruel, barbarous, and infamous for shooting the men that pull down the rooftrees over the heads of their helpless families and trample upon their household gods. these convictions of theirs are very revolting to our feelings, but they are facts; and as facts the legislature must deal with them. if there be a people, otherwise singularly free from crime, who regard the assassination of the members of a certain class with indifference, or approbation, the phenomenon is one which political philosophy ought to be able to explain, and one which cannot be got rid of by suspending the constitution and bringing railing accusations against the nation. mr. trench speaks with something like contempt or pity of 'good landlords,' a class which he contradistinguishes from 'improving landlords.' but it should be remembered that by this last phrase he always means agents of the trench stamp. for he observes that the landlord himself cannot possibly do much more than authorize his agent to do what he thinks best; and it is rather an advantage that the proprietor should be an absentee, otherwise his good nature might prompt him to interrupt the work of improvement. now there is this to be said of the good landlords, who may be counted by hundreds, and who are found in all the counties of ireland. their estates are free from the 'poetic turbulence' in which mr. trench is the 'stormy petrel.' they preserved their tenants through the years of famine, and have them still on their estates. nor should the fact be omitted that among those good landlords, who abhor the idea of evicting their tenants, are to be found the lineal descendants of some of the most cruel exterminators of the seventeenth century. their goodness has completely obliterated, among their people, the bitter memories of the past. the present race of celts would die for the men whose ancestors shot down their forefathers as vermin. but the improving landlords run their ploughshares through the ashes of old animosities, turning up embers which the winds of agitation blow into flames. we seldom hear of ribbonism till the improving agent comes upon the scene, warring against natural rights, warring against the natural affections, warring against humanity, warring against the soul. these remarks bring us to the case of the barony of geashill, the estate of lord digby, to which mr. trench became agent in . lord digby desired to obtain his services, but he did not communicate his desire to mr. trench himself, though nothing would seem easier. it was first conveyed by lieut.-general porter, the confidential friend of lord digby, and next by mr. brewster, afterwards lord chancellor of ireland. when the police received a notice that the new landlord of geashill would certainly meet with a 'bloody death' if he persisted in his threatened dealings with the tenants, there was no more time for diplomatic delicacy in approaching mr. trench. the landlord's extremity is mr. trench's opportunity. when leases are to be broken, when independent rights are to be extinguished, or 'contracted away,' when an overcrowded estate is to be thinned at the least possible cost to the owner, when a rebellious tenantry are to be subdued, and ribbonmen are to be banished or hanged, mr. trench is the man to do the work of improvement. he admits that he never had before him an uglier job than this at geashill, and he had the worst apprehensions as to the danger of the enterprise. it was nothing less than to break leases, which had been granted from time to time by the late lord digby during the sixty years that he had enjoyed the property. the value of these leases was , l., for the terms unexpired after his death. among those leaseholders were the descendants of english settlers, gentlemen farmers, one of them a magistrate, and a number of substantial yeomen, the sort of men the country so much wanted to form an independent middle class. but to an 'improving landlord,' the existence of such a class on his estate is intolerable. at all hazards they must be made tenants-at-will, and brought completely under his control. they had built houses and planted trees; they had reclaimed the deep bog and converted it into good arable land. they had employed the peasantry, and given them plots of ground, and, more than all, they had allowed a number of families to squat on bits of bog by the roadside, where they lived as well as they could; working when there was a demand for labour, cutting turf and selling it in the neighbouring town of tullamore, and perhaps carrying on some little dealings. at all events they had survived the famine; and there they were in with their huts standing on their 'estates,' for they had paid no rent for twenty years, and they had as good a title in law as lord digby himself. mr. trench seems to have been horrified at not finding the names of these householders in the rent-books of the estate! the idea!--that there should be within the four corners of the king's county, even on the bog of allen, a number of natives holding land, without a landlord! it was monstrous. but as they could not be evicted for non-title, they were all severally tempted by the offer of money, in sums varying from l. to l. each, to sell their freeholds to the landlord. pity they were not preserved as a remnant of the antediluvian period, ere the ancient tenures were merged in floods of blood. like a bit of primitive forest, they would be more interesting to some minds than the finest modern plantation. it was not so easy to deal with the leaseholders. to what extent they had improved their farms before they got the leases, mr. trench does not say. but as the absentee landlord had done nothing, and spent nothing, whatever increase to the value had been made was undoubtedly the work of the tenants; and after the leases were obtained, they would naturally feel more confidence in the investment of their savings in the land. however that may be, a professional man, employed by lord digby, estimated the value over and above the reserved rent at , l., which sum the new landlord proposed to put into his own pocket, by increasing the rent one-third. the plea for this sweeping confiscation was, that the late lord digby, cousin to the present, had only a life interest in the irish estate, and therefore, the leases were all illegal and worthless. accordingly the new lord commenced proceedings to evict the whole of the tenantry for non-title. they were astounded. they held meetings; they deliberated; they appealed to the landlord; they appealed to the executors of the late peer, who had large estates in england, and died worth a million sterling in the funds, all of which he willed away from the heir of his title and irish estates. says mr. trench:-- 'it may readily be supposed that circumstances so peculiar as these created considerable anxiety in the district. the tenantry, _many_ of them large and respectable land-holders, now learned, for the first time, that their leases were good for nothing in law. they had been duly 'signed, sealed, and delivered' to them under a full belief on their part that the contract was not only just and honourable, but also perfectly legal; and their feelings may be imagined when they found that they were suddenly threatened with a total loss of the property which they had always looked upon as secure.'[ ] [footnote : 'realities of irish life,' p. .] pending the ejectment proceedings, they were knocked about from post to pillar, without getting any satisfaction. the landlord referred them to the executors, although he knew well they had no legal claim on them whatever, and that to legal claims only could they pay any attention. the executors again referred them to their landlord, who was determined to break the leases, come what would. now, if the irish law regulating the relations of landlord and tenant were based upon justice and equity, the wrong done by the late earl, if any, was a wrong for which the tenants should in no way be held responsible. the wrong was done to the heir-at-law. to him, and not to the tenants, compensation should have been made by the executors. and after all, it was really to him that the money was advanced to buy up the leases, in order to save him from assassination, for the tenants had no legal claim upon them. the natural, proper, and honest course, then, for the landlord, was to have kept the , l. as compensation to himself for the mistake of his predecessor, and to let the leases stand. if he considered the peace of the country, if he wished to inspire in the minds of the people respect for the rights of property, or confidence in the government, he would not have adopted the desperate course of breaking contracts, kindling the flames of agitation, and planting ribbon lodges all over a district hitherto peaceful and tranquil. but he was bent on crushing the independent yeomanry into the abject condition of tenants-at-will. to carry out this purpose, mr. trench was indispensable. he knew how to tame the wild irish. and mr. trench was equal to the occasion. he went to reside a few weeks at tullamore, to reconnoitre the enemy's position. he writes as if this was the first time he made acquaintance with the estate. but his own residence was in the queen's county, not far off; and there is good reason to believe that he knew all about geashill long before; and all about every estate belonging to an english absentee in the four provinces; for he had, growing up around him, a young generation of land-agents, trained in all the arts of modern management, and one of the ablest of these, his son, mr. t.w. trench, became his partner in this agency. mr. trench's tactics are not new, though he excels all men in their skilful application. his plan, adopted on all occasions, is to divide and conquer. violent measures being dangerous and contrary to his own feelings, he trusts to diplomacy, dealing with individuals, taken separately into a private room, where his irresistible personal fascination invariably brings matters to a satisfactory issue. in this case, he went over to the english executors, and persuaded them to advance the , l. to be distributed among the tenants, under the guarantee of lord digby that this sum would cover all possible claims. thus provided with funds, he summoned the tenants, not all, but ten of the most influential, to meet him at geashill. he left this meeting, purposely, to the last day and the last hour, as a piece of generalship. he says:-- 'they appeared puzzled and anxious, and very uncertain what to do. at length one of them proposed that they should do nothing until they had had an opportunity of consulting the remainder of the leaseholders, of whom there were upwards of upon the estate. '"no," replied i, "you must come to a decision now; there is a messenger at the door on horseback, to ride to the telegraph station at portarlington to stop the english witnesses coming over. this must be done within an hour, or they will start for ireland, and _then_ it will be out of my power to stop the lawsuit. you must determine _now_, each man for himself, or the lawsuit must go on." '"will you state the amount of money you will give to each of us?" asked one of the party. '"certainly," replied i, "if you will _each come separately with me into another room_." 'they did so. i named to each an amount something less than the sum set down by the notary, partly as a reserve, lest any tenants holding under these leaseholders should afterwards require to be paid, and partly lest it might be supposed we were yielding to a legal claim already granted. after a little consideration, they all severally signed the consent for judgment.' the other leaseholders followed. the leases were all surrendered, and the holders became tenants-at-will. i had the pleasure of meeting one of the most influential of them a short time ago at geashill--a fine tall, patriarchal-looking gentleman, the representative of one of the english settlers. he was waiting about humbly and patiently for an opportunity of speaking to the young agent, who is as courteous and kind as he is efficient. but i could not help reflecting how different would be the bearing of the tenant if he had been still in possession of his lease! his dwelling-house was not as grand as the stylish villa which the landlord has erected beside it. but every stick and stone about the place were his own property. so also were the old timber trees, which his ancestors planted. but now every stick and stone and tree belong to lord digby, and as such the agent exhibits them to visitors--the buildings, the gardens, the trees, the hedges, the rich pasture fields, all having such a look of comfort and independence. i asked, 'did you ever know a place like this old home of yours to have been made by a tenant-at-will?' he answered in the negative. the tenant on an 'improved estate' must be very careful about his speech. an agent has a hundred eyes and a hundred ears. people who seek 'favours' at the office, find it useful to be spies upon their neighbours, to detect violations of the 'rules of the estate.' it is mainly through the spy-system that mr. steuart trench, according to his own avowal, won most of his victories over refractory tenants. for example, on this estate he had a woman acting as a spy at the meetings of the ribbonmen; and he boasted that a dog could not bark at farney without his knowledge. i refer to this matter here again for the purpose of saying that i cannot regard as an improvement of the country a system which establishes a despot on every estate, which degrades the tenant into a day-labourer, which--land being limited and scarce--substitutes the old, barbarous, pastoral system for tillage, which banishes the poor and enslaves the rich. lord digby levelled cottages, gardens, farms, manured the land, got an enormous crop, which in one year paid all the expenses; and then laid out the land in vast tracts of pasture, for which he gets from s. to s. an acre. that is improvement for _him_, but not for the people, not for the country, not for the state, not for the queen. it may crush ribbonism. but for every ribbonman crushed, a hundred fenians spring up; and disaffection becomes not a mere local plague, but an endemic. mr. trench gives a significant hint to other landlords to follow the example of lord digby, assuring them that it will '_pay_.' a still more flagrant case of lease-breaking occurred some years ago in the county of galway. dr. hancock has put the facts of this case before the government in his recent report:-- 'the plaintiff was the rev. dr. o'fay, parish priest of craughwell, in the county of galway, and the defendant the landlord on whose estate the priest resided. about ten years ago the priest was induced to take a farm that had been held by a former parish priest; the previous proprietor, the father of the defendant, promising a lease for three lives, or thirty-one years. after the priest entered into possession the landlord ascertained that he could not fulfil his promise. 'as he did not possess such a power under the terms of the estate settlement, he offered, instead, a lease for the priest's own life, and l. to aid in building a house. the priest continued in possession of the farm, and paid the rent agreed on, thus, as he alleged, accepting the arrangement proposed. he was on excellent terms with the landlord, and expended l. in permanent improvements, and did not ask for the l. which the landlord had promised. in the landlord died, and his son, the defendant, succeeded to the property. he gave notice to all his yearly tenants of an intention to raise their rents. the priest claimed to have a promise of a lease, and the agent of the property, during the landlord's absence abroad, admitted this claim, and did not raise the rent. the landlord said he had no notice of his father's promise; he, however, allowed the priest to remain in possession, and the priest expended l. in buildings, on the faith that he would not be disturbed. a dispute subsequently arose about trespass, and the fences on the boundary between the priest's farm and some land in the possession of the landlord. the landlord served notice to quit, and brought an ejectment. after some delay judgment was given in his favour, subject to an application to the court of chancery to compel him to fulfil his father's promise of a lease.' the master of the rolls thus characterised the law which justifies the robbery of the tenants by unscrupulous and vindictive landlords:-- 'even if the rev. dr. o'fay had no claim except as tenant from year to year, i have no hesitation in stating that, although in point of law on the authorities i have referred to, and particularly the case of felling _v._ armitage, the petitioner's suit could not be sustained, _yet noticing can be more repugnant to the principles of natural justice than that a landlord should look on at a great expenditure carried on by a tenant from year to year, without warning the tenant of his intention to turn him out of possession_. the defendant's offer to allow dr. o'fay to remove the buildings was a mockery. _i have no jurisdiction to administer equity in the natural sense of that term, or i should have no difficulty whatever in making a decree against the defendant._ i am bound to administer an artificial system, established by the decisions of eminent judges, such as lord eldon and sir william grant, and _being so bound, i regret much that i must administer injustice in this case, and dismiss the petition_, but i shall dismiss it without costs. _i should be very glad for the sake of justice that my decision should be reversed by the court of appeal._' lest it might be supposed that this was the opinion of a single judge, we find in the court of appeal equally strong views stated:--it was thrown out that it was a case for amicable settlement, but the respondent's counsel assured the court that his client 'had resolved to spend his fortune, if necessary, in resisting the claim of the rev. dr. o'fay.' lord justice blackburne pronounced this to be a very irrational determination, although he had to decide that the claim could not be sustained in law or equity. lord chancellor napier, in concluding his judgment, said:-- 'i think i am not overstepping my duty in suggesting to the respondent, that, under all the circumstances of this case, he will best maintain the character and honour of a british officer, satisfy the exigencies of justice, and uphold the rights of property, by making _such an arrangement_ with dr. o'fay, as to the possession of this farm, _as may leave him the full benefit of an expenditure made in good faith, and with the reasonable expectation of having the full benefit of it sufficiently secured by an undisturbed possession_.' it is a favourite theory with the new school of agents and improving landlords, that long leases cause bad cultivation; in other words, that industry prospers best where there is no security that you can reap what you have sown, except the honour of a man whose interest it is to appropriate the fruits of your labours, which he can _legally_ do. now, in every class and profession, there are failures,--persons that are good for nothing, indolent, improvident, and thriftless. if such a man has a long lease at a low rent, he may be overwhelmed in debt, and leave his land in very bad condition. others may imitate their aristocratic superiors in their contempt for labour and their habits of expenditure, and so get into a state of hopeless poverty on a good estate. if there are cases where industrious sober men are the worse for having an old lease, it should be remembered that the most insecure of all tenures is a lease dependent on a single bad life, which may drop at any hour. but there are other causes of the facts urged against long tenures, for which the legislature is responsible, not the unimproving tenant. dr. hancock explains this point very satisfactorily:-- 'instances of bad cultivation and neglect of improvements, where long leases exist, are sometimes brought forward to show the inutility of tenure as a security for capital, and the strange economic theory is propounded that a precarious interest is more favourable to the investment of capital than a secure one. as well might the state of landed property in ireland before the incumbered estates court was established be adduced as an argument against property in land. the remedy, however, which the legislature applied to incumbered estates of large proprietors was not to destroy property in land, but simply to secure its prompt, cheap, and effectual transfer to solvent hands. 'for tenants' interests under leases where the value is small, and where the interests have become complicated, the landed estates court is too expensive, and so these interests remain often for years untransferred, in the hands of some one who has a very limited and often uncertain interest in them. such a leaseholder is deterred from making improvements by the state of the law which deprives him of the entire value of his improvements if anyone should disturb him under a prior charge or claim, however obscure or unknown, affecting his interest. the remedy is to be found in an extension of the principle of the record of title act to the local registry of small leasehold interests, and in the providing for the local sale of such interests in a cheap manner, with an absolute title.' chapter xxiv. the land system and the working classes. we have been told over and over again that the business of ireland, and all its improvements, requiring education and integrity, are carried on 'by the protestants, by whose intelligence, and labour, mental and bodily, its prosperity, such as it is, has been produced.' this assertion has been made with great confidence, by many writers and speakers. it is a gross exaggeration, and absurd as it is gross. i say nothing of the unseemly egotism of a dominant caste, thus parading its own merits, flaunting its plumes, strutting and crowing over the common folk--of this pharisaic spirit of the ascendant protestant, standing close to the altar, reciting to god and the world the number of his resplendent virtues, and scornfully contrasting his excellent moral condition with the degraded catholic--the vile publican and sinner, overwhelmed with enormous guilt. these monopolising pharisees, who laboured at such a rate to assert their natural superiority, as the favourites of heaven, and members of the sovereign's church, over a race which england enabled them to subjugate and impoverish, have found no trumpeter so loud as master fitzgibbon, a chancery judge. in the same spirit the last census has been analysed by one of the ablest defenders of the irish establishment, the rev. dr. hume, of liverpool, in order to prove that everything good in ireland has been done by the protestants, and everything bad by the catholics. but he does not state fairly the conditions of the race. he does not state that one of the competitors had been master for centuries, well-fed, well-trained, possessed of all advantages which give strength, skill, courage, and confidence, while the other was ill-fed, untrained, enfeebled, and _over-weighted_, having to work out of himself the slavish spirit which oppression had produced, and to gain, by extra efforts, the skill which the law had forbidden him to acquire. nevertheless the catholics have acquired skill, and the extent to which the empire is dependent on their knowledge of the industrial arts is much greater than many people suppose. of the farming class in ireland, per cent. are roman catholics. but we are indebted to the obnoxious race in other respects than as producers of food. from the classification of occupations and professions, we learn that the roman catholics bear the following proportions to the protestants of all denominations. persons employed in the manufacture of: roman catholics. skin clothing . per cent. woollen do. . " flax do. . " cotton do. . " straw do. . " silk do. . " miscellaneous do. . " in producing furniture . " in unclassed industrial employments . " in amusements . " in architecture . " in making machinery . " in conveyance and travelling . " in literature and education . " in charity and benevolence . " in health . " in science and art . " in justice and government . " in banking and agency . " there are other suggestive figures in the census, bearing on this question. while three-fourths of the farmers are catholics, three-fourths of the land-agents are protestants, who, as a rule, have an unconquerable antipathy to the catholic clergy, as the only obstacle to their absolute power over the tenants, with whom they find it hard to sympathise. of farm labourers and domestic servants, nine out of ten belong to the race supposed by some to be incapable of virtue and loyalty. again, of the whole british army of all ranks, per cent. are irishmen, and of these irish soldiers, per cent. are catholics. more than three-fourths of the magistrates are protestants; and they bear about the same proportion on the grand juries. according to the theory and practice of the constitution, all power, legislative and administrative, must be based on the ownership of land. the rate-payers have a voice indeed, but it is generally nothing but an echo of the landlord's voice; what else can it be when they are tenants-at-will, depending on the mercy of the proprietor for the means of existence? in county offices, the protestants have an overwhelming majority. it is the same in all the offices filled by government patronage, except the judges of the superior courts. there catholics are in the majority, because they had obtained seats in the house of commons. on the boards of guardians the mass of the poor might expect that a majority of guardians would be prompted by national and religious feeling to sympathise with them, so that they would find in the master and matron, the doctor and the relieving officer, something like the natural tenderness which a common kindred and creed inspire. but half the guardians are _ex-officio_ members, as magistrates; nearly all landlords and protestants. they have in addition 'property votes,' and 'residence votes;' so that, with their influence over the elections, they are generally able to pack the board; and in that case the officials are almost invariably protestants and conservatives. i know a union in which three-fourths of the rate-payers are roman catholics; and yet, with the utmost efforts of the priests, they were not able to elect a single catholic guardian. to meet the landlord pressure, some of the rate-payers were required to sign their voting papers in presence of their pastors, yet so terrible was that pressure that they afterwards took them to the agent's office, and, to make assurance doubly sure, tore them up before his face. i have been told by a priest, that such is the mortal dread of eviction, or of a permanent fine in the form of increased rent, that he had known tenants who, when produced in the witness-box, denied on oath acts of oppression of which they had been bitterly complaining to himself, and which he well knew to be facts. thus the land-war rages at every board of guardians, in every dispensary, in every grand jury room, at every petty sessions, in every county court, in every public institution throughout the kingdom. the land-agent is the commanding officer, his office is a garrison, dominating the surrounding district. he is able, in most cases, to defy the confessional and the altar; because he wields an engine of terror generally more powerful over the mind of the peasantry than the terrors of the world to come. armed with the 'rules of the estate' and with a notice to quit, the agent may have almost anything he demands, short of possession of the farm and the home of the tenant. the notice to quit is like a death warrant to the family. it makes every member of it tremble and agonise, from the grey-headed grandfather and grandmother, to the bright little children, who read the advent of some impending calamity in the gloomy countenances and bitter words of their parents. the passion for the possession of land is the chord on which the agent plays, and at his touch it vibrates with 'the deepest notes of woe.' by the agent of an improving landlord it is generally touched so cunningly, that its most exquisite torture cannot easily be proved to be a grievance. he presents an alternative to the tenant; he does less than the law allows. he could strike a mortal blow, but he lends a helping hand. resistance entails ruin; compliance secures friendship. give up the old _status_, and accept a new one: cease to stand upon _right_, consent to hang upon _mercy_, and all may be well. passing a cottage by the road-side, one of the kindest and best of those agents said to me, 'see with what infatuation these people cling to their old places! there is a man in that dilapidated cabin, with only one acre of ground. it is an eyesore. i have offered him a nice new slated cottage with ten acres, within a short distance, and he obstinately refuses to quit.' why did he refuse? i suppose, because the place was _his own_. the house was probably built by his father; it is the house in which he was born, endeared to him, no doubt, by many powerful associations, little appreciated by those who never condescend to read the 'simple annals of the poor.' he felt, that if, like his neighbours, he moved into a house built by the landlord, he would cease to be a free man, and would pass under the yoke of a _master._ i was with some visitors in one of the new cottages. the wife of the cottier with smiles assented to all that was said as to the neatness and comfort of the place. i thought the smiles were forced. i was last in going out, and i heard her heave a heavy sigh. perhaps she longed for the old home and its freedom, envying the lot of the sturdy peasant to whom i have alluded. poor fellow! he must give way at last. but his proud manhood is the stuff of which hampdens are made. i have devoted much time and attention to personal enquiries from town to town, from village to village, and from house to house, seeking corroborative evidence from men of all ranks and professions, on the effect of the _improved land system_ on the working classes, and i will here faithfully record as briefly as possible the result of my enquiries. i must premise a few words as to the principles of the system which is called 'english.' . there is the principle of _contract_, by which alone any tenant is to be permitted to occupy land. there is to be no foothold in the island, from the centre all round to the sea, from the top of the highest mountain to the shore at low-water-mark, for any irishman in his native land, unless he obtains it by contract from a landlord and pays for it. . there is the principle of _compensation_ for unexhausted improvements at the rate of five or six per cent. on the outlay, provided the improvements have been made with the knowledge and consent of the landlord. a certain number of years is held to be sufficient to recoup the tenant for his outlay. if he is removed before that time he is entitled to the balance of his invested capital; just as if the relation were strictly commercial, and as if he had no further claim than his percentage. if the landlord makes the improvement--which he prefers doing, on the new system--he requires the tenant to pay at the rate of four to six per cent. in the form of rent--a clear gain to the landlord, who can borrow money on much lower terms, and can hardly invest his capital so profitably or so safely elsewhere. . _absenteeism_ is no disadvantage or loss to the country. this principle is in great favour with the agents. there is no theme on which they are so eloquent or so argumentative. in the absence of the landlord the agent is all-powerful. what the irish lord deputy was to the tudors and stuarts, the irish agent now is to the great absentee proprietor residing in london or paris. he will undertake to demonstrate that the west-end of london would be just as prosperous if the queen and her court resided constantly at balmoral or killarney; if the parliament met alternately in edinburgh and dublin, and if the government offices were all at liverpool. with the blessing of absenteeism, houses in london would be built as fast, and would bring as high rents; trade would be as brisk, artizans of all sorts as well paid, life as happy, and the londoners as well content. the irish, however, have, in their ignorance of political economy, conceived the idea, that if the millions sterling sent annually out of the country to london were spent among those by whose labour the money is made, there would be more employment for all sorts of tradesmen, more business for the shopkeepers, more opportunities of advancement for the farmers' sons, more houses built, more trees planted, more land reclaimed, more factories established, more money stirring, more wealth, more life, more enjoyment, an immense increase of national prosperity. the agents say that this is all a delusion. . the next principle of the new agents is this--and to carry it out is the aim of all their improvements--that their mission is to produce the greatest amount of rent from the smallest number of tenants. . to reduce the population by _emigration_ or other means until there is barely a sufficient number of labourers to attend the agricultural machines, and herd the cattle. . to discourage _marriage_ in every possible way, and to diminish pauperism till there shall be no further use of the workhouses but to serve as lying-in hospitals for the thrifty spinsters, as they do in cumberland and westmoreland--where the arrangement seems the most natural thing in the world. it is certainly not an unnatural consequence of the practice of men and women sleeping in the same apartment. now let us see the working of this new system in ireland; for it is at work more or less extensively in all the four provinces. the rules of the estate, when rigidly enforced, as they generally are by the improving agents, tend steadily, powerfully, to break down the small farmers. they are disappearing by thousands every year. some take their chance across the atlantic. others fall into the condition of labourers, and may earn s. a day on the estate. this will last for awhile until the land is drained, manured, and turned into permanent pasture. then their occupation is gone. there is nothing more for them to do. there is no place for them, no room, no support in their native land. the grass will grow without their labour, and the bullocks will fatten without their care. we are constantly hearing of the immense rise in wages since the famine. well, they are nominally higher, but in the old times the labourer could get more for d. or d. than he can now get for s. d. or s. fuel is now three times as dear as it was, because the 'rules of the estate' will not allow the tenants to sell turf even on the verge of extensive bogs. milk, which was formerly abundant and very cheap, is scarcely to be had at all now in the country towns and villages, because the land is devoted to feeding sheep and 'dry cattle.' under the old system, the cottiers in the small towns and villages, as well as on the roads in the country, were enabled to keep pigs. the pig paid the rent, and made manure which was put out on the ground of some neighbouring farmer, hired as 'conacre.' the crop of potatoes thus obtained was a great help in the winter months, when employment was rarely to be had. this practice still prevails in ulster. the farmer puts in the crop for the manure, the cottier paying the farmer's rent-- s. to s. a rood, or whatever it may be. with this help the family get over the winter, and feed the pig, without which help, they say, it would be impossible to exist, even with constant employment at a shilling a day. but on the estates of improving landlords in the other provinces, the rules forbid the tenant to give the use of any ground for conacre. he must not, on pain of eviction, take manure for such a purpose, though it would help to enrich his land for the ensuing year. the evicted cottiers and small farmers are forced to go to towns and villages, shut up in unwholesome rooms. when they have been thus so far got rid of, the most ingenious devices are resorted to in order to render it impossible for them to live. by the 'rules of the estate,' the supply of necessaries is cut off on every side. without fuel, without milk, without potatoes, unless bought at a high rate for ready money, how are they to live? the strong members of the poor man's family emigrate or go to service; the weak ones and the young children pine away in a state of semi-starvation, preferring that to the best fare in the hated workhouse. the people are fully sensible of the causes of these privations. they know that they have been forced into this condition by the landlords and their improving agents, induced in some cases by the temptation of a few pounds to surrender their little holdings. the lord lieutenant of the king's county has thus cleared an immense district, and has himself become a grazier and a cattle-dealer on a monster scale, attending the markets in person, and driving hard bargains with the farmers and jobbers. by such means the population of that county has been reduced one-third in the last twenty years. the moral aspect of this new system is worthy of consideration. it is thus presented by archdeacon redmond of arklow, one of the most moderate and respected parish-priests in ireland. when lately presenting an address to lord granard from his wexford tenantry, he said:-- 'i have always heard the house of forbes eulogised for its advocacy of civil and religious liberty, and the name of grogan morgan has become a household word through this county as one of the best landlords in ireland. he never broke down a rooftree during or since the terrible famine. under his fostering care they have all tided over the calamitous time, and are happy and prosperous in their homes. he did not think his estate overcrowded, nor did he avail himself of the mysterious destruction of the fruits of the earth, to clear off beings made in god's image, and to drive them to the poorhouse, the fever-shed, or the emigrant ship, to whiten the bottom of the sea with their bones, or to face the moral and physical perils of the transatlantic cities. he did not read his bible, like satan, backwards, nor did he turn out the son of god in the person of his poor. hence his name is in benediction, and his estates are more prosperous than the estates of those who forget god in their worldly wisdom, and would seem to have no belief in a judgment to come. what a happiness it is, my lord and lady granard, for you to have such a heritage, and to know that you live in the hearts of your tenantry, who would spill the last drop of their blood to shield you and your dear children from hurt and harm!' let it not be supposed that such sentiments are peculiar to the catholic clergy, or that their causes exist only in the south and west. the rev. dr. drew, a rector in the county down, an orange chaplain, a veteran champion of protestantism and toryism, but an honourable and humane man, wrote the following letter last autumn:-- if the magnificent lecture of mr. butt had done nothing more than elicit this letter from dr. drew, it would have been much. but will not the thoughts of many hearts be revealed in the same manner? what a number of plain-speaking drews we shall have denouncing tyranny when their consciences are relieved from the incubus of the establishment! _to isaac butt, esq., ll.d._ 'my dear butt--if every other man in the world entertained doubts of my sincerity, you, at least, would give me credit for honesty and just intentions. i write to you accordingly, because my mind has been stirred to its inmost depths by the perusal of your address in my native city of limerick. i do not regard the subject of your address as a political one. it ought to be regarded solely as a question of humanity, justice, common sense, and common honesty. i wish my lot had never been cast in rural places. as a clergyman i hear what neither landlords nor agents ever hear. i see the depression of the people; their sighs and groans are before me. they are brought so low as often to praise and glorify those who, in their secret hearts, are the objects of abhorrence. all this came out gradually before me. nor did i feel as i ought to feel in their behalf until, in my own person and purse, i became the victim of a system of tyranny which cries from earth to heaven for relief. were i to narrate my own story it would startle many of the protestants of ireland. there are good landlords--never a better than the late lord downshire, or the living and beloved lord roden. but there are too many of another state of feeling and action. there are estates in the north where the screw is never withdrawn from its circuitous and oppressive work. tenant-right is an unfortunate and delusive affair, simply because it is almost invariably used to the landlord's advantage. here we have an election in prospect, and in many counties no farmer will be permitted to think or act for himself. what right any one man has to demand the surrender of another's vote, i never could see. it is an act of sheer felony--a perfect "stand-and-deliver" affair. to hear a man slavishly and timorously say, "i must give my votes as the landlord wishes," is an admission that the legislature, which bestowed the right of voting on the tenant, should not see him robbed of his right, or subsequently scourged or banished from house and land, because he disregarded a landlord's nod, or the menace of a land agent. at no little hazard of losing the friendship of some who are high and good and kind, i write as i now do.--yours, my dear butt, very sincerely, 'thomas drew. 'dundrum, clough, county down, september , .' some resident landlords employ a considerable number of labourers, to each of whom they give an excellent cottage, an acre of land, and the grass of a cow, with work all the year round at seven shillings a week. the tenants are most comfortable and most grateful, while the praise of those landlords is in the mouths of the peasantry all round the country. but these considerate landlords are in a minority. as a rule, on the estates where the improvement system is going on, where farms are being consolidated, and grazing supersedes tillage, an iron pressure weighs upon the labouring classes, crushing them out of the country. it is a cold, hard, calculating, far-reaching system of inhumanity, which makes the peasant afraid to harbour his own flesh and blood. it compels the grandmother to shut the door in the face of the poor homeless orphan, lest the improving agent should hear of the act of sheltering him from the pitiless storm, not more pitiless than the agent himself. the system of terrorism established by the threats of eviction de-humanizes a people remarkable for their hospitality to the poor. mr. thomas crosbie, of cork, a gentleman whom i believe to be as truthful and honourable as any agent in ireland, gives appalling illustrations of this in his account of 'the lansdowne estates,' published in . mr. trench has given the english public several pretty little romances about these estates; but he omitted some realities that ought to have impressed themselves upon his memory as deeply as any of his adventures. mr. crosbie found that the 'rules of the estate,' which were rigidly enforced, forbid tenants to build houses for their labourers, 'the consequence of which was that men and women servants, no matter how great the number, must live under one roof.' the rules forbid marriage without the agent's permission. a young couple got married, and were chased away to america; and 'the two fathers-in-law were not merely warned; they were punished for harbouring their son and daughter, by a fine of a gale of rent.' it was a rule 'that no stranger be lodged or harboured in any house upon the estate, lest he should become sick or idle, or in some way chargeable upon the poor-rates.' 'several were warned and punished for giving lodging to a brother-in-law, a daughter,' &c. 'a poor widow got her daughter married without the necessary permission; she was served with a notice to quit, which was withdrawn on the payment of three gales of rent.' mr. crosbie gives a number of cases of the kind. the following are the most remarkable. a tenant, timothy sullivan, of derrynabrack, occasionally gave lodging to his sister-in-law, whilst her husband was seeking for work. he was afraid to lodge both or either; 'but the poor woman was in low fever, and approaching her confinement. even under such circumstances his terror was so great that he removed her to a temporary shed on jeremiah sullivan's land, where she gave birth to a child. she remained there for some time. when "the office" heard of it, jeremiah sullivan was sent for and compelled to pay a gale of rent (as fine), and to throw down the shed. thus driven out, and with every tenant on the estate afraid to afford her a refuge, the miserable woman went about two miles up the mountain, and, sick as she was, and so situated, took shelter in a dry _cavern_, in which she lived for several days. but her presence even there was a crime, and a mulct of another gale of rent was levied off jeremiah sullivan. thus, within three weeks he was compelled to pay two gales of l. s. d. each. it was declared also that the mountain being the joint property of jeremiah sullivan, timothy sullivan, and thady sullivan, timothy sullivan was a participator in the crime, and should be fined a gale of rent. the third, it appears, escaped.' 's.g.o.' narrated another horrifying case in the _times_, at the period of its occurrence, in . abridged, it runs thus:--'an order had gone forth on the estate (a common order in ireland) that no tenant was to admit any lodger into his house. this was a general order. it appears, however, that sometimes special orders were given; and one was promulgated that denis shea should not be harboured. this boy had no father living. he had lived with a grandmother, who had been turned out of her holding for harbouring him. he had stolen a shilling, a hen--done such things as a neglected twelve-year-old famishing child will do. one night he came to his aunt donoghue, who lodged with casey. the latter told the aunt and uncle not to allow him into the house, as the agent's drivers had given orders about him. the aunt beat him away with a pitchfork, the uncle tied his hands with cord behind his back. the poor child crawls to the door of a neighbour, and tries to get in. the uncle is called to take him away, and he does so. he yet returns with hands still tied behind, having been severely beaten. the child seeks refuge in other cabins; but all were forbidden to shelter him. he is brought back by some neighbours in the night, who try to force the sinking child in upon his relation. there is a struggle at the door. the child was heard asking some one to put him upright. in the morning there is blood upon the threshold. the child is stiff dead--a corpse, with its arms tied; around it every mark of a last fearful struggle for shelter--food--the common rights of humanity.' chief baron pigot tried the case, and gave a statement of the facts in his charge which mr. trench ought to have quoted, as a faithful recorder of 'realities.' 'on the western estate, that of cahirciveen, there was some difference in the rules. if a son or daughter married, the father was obliged to retire with an allowance of 'a cow's grass' or grazing for his support. 'only the newly married person will be left on the land, or any portion of it, even though the farm should contain acres, or even though there should be two farms. this arbitrary regulation operates injuriously in point of morality, and keeps the land uncultivated. the people have to go to nedeen, a distance of forty or fifty miles, to get leave to marry.'[ ] [footnote : see the 'north british review,' no. ci. p. .] the kenmare tenantry have recovered from the fearful shock of the famine, after thousands of deaths from hunger, and thousands shipped off to america at l. s. a head. mr. trench's son, mr. townshend trench, the pictorial illustrator of his father's book, is the acting agent, and an eloquent propagandist of his father's principles. the young marquis paid a visit to his tenantry in , and he was almost worshipped. it is gratifying to know that in a speech on that occasion he promised to see and judge for himself. 'i feel,' he said, 'that my visit to kenmare has taught me a valuable lesson. as you all know, i was called to my present position at a very young age, and i felt when i came in for my property that i had much to learn; and that is the reason why i was so anxious to travel through the country, and study the desires and comfort of the people. that will afford me occupation for many a year to come, and it will afford me an occupation not only interesting but pleasing. nothing will do me a more hearty pleasure than to see the marks of civilisation and progress in kenmare--and not alone in kenmare, but in the whole country; and i shall hail every manifestation of improvement with delight.' lord lansdowne's system is beautiful, but it is unfinished. let him 'crown the edifice with _liberty_.' he possesses a giant's power, and he uses it like an angel. when he comes to trouble the waters, the multitude gathers around the fountain to be healed. but his visits are, like angels' visits, few and far between. many of the sick and impotent folk, after long waiting, are not able to get near till the miracle-worker has departed. an absentee landlord, be he ever so good, must delegate his power to an agent. agents have good memories, and their servants, the bailiffs, are good lookers-on. there is a hierarchy in the heaven of landlordism--the under-bailiff, the head-bailiff, the chief-clerk in the office, the sub-agent, the head-agent. all these must be submissively approached and anxiously propitiated before the petitioner's prayers can reach the ears of jove himself, seated aloft on his remote olympian throne. he may be, and for the most part really is--if he belongs to the old stock of aristocratic divinities--generous and gracious, incapable of meanness, baseness, or cruelty. but the tenant has to do, not with the absentee divinity, but with his priest--not with the good spirit, but his medium; and this go-between is not always noble, or disinterested, or unexacting. to him power may be new--a small portion of it may intoxicate him, like alcohol on an empty stomach. he was not born to an inheritance of sycophancy; it comes like an _afflatus_ upon him, and it turns his head. it creates an appetite, like strong drink, which grows into a disease. this appetite is as capricious as it is insatiable. hence, the chief characteristic of landlord power, as felt by the tenant, is _arbitrariness_. the agent may make any rule he pleases, and as many exceptions to every rule as he pleases. he may allow rents to run in arrear; he may suddenly come down upon the defaulter with 'a fell swoop;' he may require the rents to be paid up to the day; he may, without reason assigned, call in 'the hanging gale;' he may abate or increase the rents at will; he may inflict fines for delay or give notices to quit for the sole purpose of bringing in fees to his friend or relative, the solicitor. but whatever he may choose to do, the tenant has nothing for it but to submit; and he must submit with a good grace. woe to him if the agony of his spirit is revealed in the working of his features, or in an audible groan! most of the poor fellows do submit, till their hearts are broken--till the hot iron has entered their souls and seared their consciences. when the _slave_ is thus finished, the agent and his journeymen are satisfied with their handiwork; their 'honours' can then count on any sort of services they may choose to exact--may bid defiance to the priest and the agitator, and boast of an orderly and deserving tenantry devoted to the best of landlords, who is their natural protector. it would be wicked to interfere with these amicable persons. why talk about leases? the tenants will not have them; they don't want security or independence by contract. so most of the agents report--but not all. there are noble exceptions which relieve the gloomy picture. there is certainly one disadvantage connected with a settlement of the land question which would abolish the arbitrary power of proprietors and their agents--it would put an end to the romance of irish landlordism. the edgeworths, the morgans, the banims, the carletons, and the levers would then be deprived of the best materials for their fictions. the fine old family, over-reached and ruined by a dishonest agent; the cruelly evicted farmer, with his wife and children fever-stricken, and his bedridden mother cast out on the roadside on christmas eve, exposed to the pelting of the hailstorm, while their home was unroofed and its walls levelled by the crowbar brigade; the once comfortable but now homeless father making his way to london, and trying day after day to present a petition in person to his landlord, repulsed from the gate of the great house, and laughed at for his frieze and brogue by pampered flunkeys. then he travels on foot to his lordship's country-seat, scores or hundreds of miles--is taken up, and brought before the magistrates as 'an irish rogue and vagabond.' at length he meets his lordship accidentally, and reveals to him the system of iniquity that prevails on his irish estate at castle squander: next we have the sudden and unexpected appearance of the god of the soil at his agent's office, sternly demanding an account of his stewardship. he gives ready audience to his tenants, and fires with indignation at bitter complaints from the parents of ruined daughters. investigation is followed by the ignominious eviction of the tyrannical and roguish agent and his accomplices, a disgorging of their ill-gotten wealth, compensation to plundered and outraged tenants, the liberal distribution of poetical justice right and left. many other agents have followed mr. trench's example in forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from hospitality and charity. an ejectment was lately obtained at the quarter sessions in a southern county against a widow who had married without leave, or married a different person from the one the agent selected. but it is supposed that the threat of assassination prevented a recourse to extremities in this and other cases. for the people seem with one consent to have made a desperate stand against this cruel tyranny. a landlord said to me, 'no one in this part of the country would _presume_ to evict a tenant now from fear of assassination. _that_ is the tenant's security.' the wretched outcasts, whom 'improvement' has swept off the estates, are crowded into cities and towns, without employment, without food. feeling bitterly their degradation and misery, and taught to blame the government, they become demoralized and desperately disaffected. from these fermenting masses issues the avenging scourge of fenianism--'the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and slayeth at noonday.' for my part, i cannot understand the meaning of improving a country by disinheriting and banishing its inhabitants. i do not understand men who say the population is too dense, and yet give to one family a tract of land large enough to support ten families, turning out the nine to make room for the one. a great deal has been said about the evils of small farms. but the most disturbed and impoverished parts of ireland are those in which the farms are largest; while the two most prosperous and best ordered counties--armagh and wexford--are the counties in which small farms most abound. i call a reluctant witness, master fitzgibbon, to testify that when the irish tenant, be his holding ever so small, gets common justice and is not subjected to caprice, he gives no trouble. that gentleman informs us that there are estates of all magnitudes, from l. to , l. a-year, under the control and management of the court of chancery; the total rents of these amount to , l. a-year payable by , tenants. these estates are in all parts of ireland, not only in all the provinces, but in all the counties, without exception; and, according to master fitzgibbon, they fairly represent the tenantry of the whole country. he has of the estates under his own jurisdiction, and the rents of these amount to , l., paid by , tenants. he has now been ten years in the office, during which 'the rents have been paid without murmuring or complaints worth noticing.' 'the pressure of legal remedies for these rents has been very little used; the number of evictions absolutely trifling; and of between and receivers, who collect these rents, _not one has ever been assailed_, or interfered with, or threatened in the discharge of his duty, as far as i have been able to discover; and i am the person to whom the receiver should apply for redress if anything of the kind occurred. it is very well known that my ears are open to any just complaint from any tenant, and yet i am very seldom appealed to, considering the great number of tenants; and whenever a complaint is well-founded, it is promptly and effectually redressed, at scarcely any expense of costs. i believe the other three masters would make substantially a similar report to this in respect of the estates under their jurisdiction.' master fitzgibbon proceeds to state that 'on one estate there are , tenants, paying , l.,--being an average of l. a-year. this estate has been sold, and three of the lots fetched over years' purchase of the yearly profit rents. the fourth lot is held by small cottiers, at rents which average only l., and this lot fetched years' purchase. this estate has been under a receiver for three years, and there has never been one complaint from a tenant. what is stated of this estate may be said of every one of them in all the four provinces.' he adds: 'clamour, agitation, or violence of any kind i have never had to deal with amongst the tenantry of any one of these estates since i came into office.' another witness of larger views, and free from unhappy prejudices against the majority of his countrymen--mr. marcus keane, agent to the marquis of conyngham--in a letter to colonel vandeleur, m.p., lately gave the result of his experience for thirty years as agent of several large estates, and as a landlord, on the irish land question. i submit his suggestions to my readers, as eminently worthy of the consideration of statesmen at the present time:-- 'the outline of measures submitted for your consideration combines the very unusual recommendation of meeting, on the one hand, with the approbation of some good landlords of the higher class (who, like yourself, have long been practically acknowledging the just claims of tenants), and, at the same time, of satisfying the claims of many of the warmest advocates of the tenant class. it is calculated to protect the farmers from selfish landlords, whose conduct has tended much to produce the serious disaffection that now prevails. 'i need not burthen you with a lengthened recital of the facts which render such legislation absolutely necessary to the tranquillity of society. in outline, however, they may be briefly stated-- '_first_--the great mass of irish tenantry have no better title to their holdings than the will of their landlords. '_second_--education is daily rendering the tenant class more impatient of the condition of dependence which their want of title necessitates. '_third_--every good tenant must improve his land more or less, in order to live in comparative comfort. '_fourth_--the rentals of ireland are steadily following the improvements of the tenants. some landlords suffer a considerable margin to exist between the actual value and the rent paid; while others lose no opportunity of forcing the rents to the highest amount that circumstances permit. '_fifth_--although good tenants must improve in order to live comfortably, their improvements are not one-fourth of what the condition of the country invites, and are far below what they would be if the occupiers were afforded equitable security. '_sixth_--trade, manufactures, and industrial occupations require local accumulations of surplus capital in order to their prosperity; and such accumulations are hindered by the general want of security of tenure. society at large is therefore deeply interested in the protection of the tenant class. '_seventh_--the increased expense of the governmental establishments, civil and military, which irish disaffection entails, renders it a matter of imperial importance that the irish land question should be satisfactorily settled. 'irish rentals have, in some counties, increased more than tenfold since the beginning of the eighteenth century.' the next witness shall be a landlord, one of the best and noblest of his class. at a tenant-right meeting of the county longford, the earl of granard said:--'the proposition commences by asserting that which has been acknowledged by successive administrations--that the present state of the land laws of ireland is highly unsatisfactory. the necessity for their reform has been urged upon parliament since the days of o'connell up to the present time. the want of reform upon the most vital question which affects the prosperity of ireland has been the fruitful source of agrarian disturbance, of poverty and of misfortune in every county in ireland. to take an example near home,--what rendered ballinamuck a by-word for deeds of violence? why, that system which permitted a landlord to treat the people of that district with high-handed injustice. and why is that district now amongst the most peaceable in the county? because it is now administered by its proprietor in a spirit of justice and fair play, and because that proprietor recognises the fact that property has its duties as well as its rights. i believe that similar results are to be obtained everywhere that the warm-hearted and kindly people of this country are treated with justice. in his evidence before mr. maguire's committee, mr. curling, the excellent agent of an equally excellent landlord--lord devon--speaking of his property in limerick, said that the most warm-hearted and grateful people he had ever met with were the irish. he was asked, "grateful for what?" and he replied, "even for fair play." that is to say, they were grateful for that which in every country save this would have been theirs by law. and it is to a people thus described by, mind you, not an irishman, but an english gentleman--to a people, i believe, the most religious and affectionate in europe, that the simple act of justice, of repealing unjust statutes, has been refused. i say it advisedly, that to the system of land laws, which we hope to alter--which at least we are here to protest against--are to be attributed those fearful agrarian outrages which disgrace the fair fame of our country. a celebrated minister of police in france, whenever he heard of a conspiracy, used to ask who was the woman, believing that there was always one mixed up with such organisations, and in a similar spirit, whenever i hear of an outrage in ireland, i am always inclined to enquire, "who is the landlord?" for i do not hear of such things occurring on estates where justice and fair play are the rule and not the exception. but brighter days are now in store for us. we have at the head of affairs the most earnest, the most conscientious minister that has ever sat on the treasury bench. he has promised to redress your grievances, and having as his able lieutenants mr. bright, who has ever a kindly word for ireland, and lord kimberley, whose first act after giving up the lord-lieutenancy was to say to the house of lords that until the church and land questions were settled there would be neither peace nor contentment in the land--he must be successful. as to what we want there can be no doubt. the five points of the irish charter are--fixity of tenure at reasonable rents; recognition of right of occupancy as distinct from right of ownership; standard valuation for letting purposes; retrospective compensation for years; and arbitration courts in cases of dispute between owner and occupier.' i cannot better express the conclusion of the whole matter than in the words of a writer in the _pall mall gazette_, who thoroughly understands the question. nothing can be more truthful and accurate than the way in which he puts the tenants' case:-- '"morally," they say, "we are part-owners. we have a moral right to live here. if a great landlord considered that he could make more of his estate by clearing it of its inhabitants, and accordingly proceeded to do so, he would do a cruel act. what we wish is to see our moral rights converted into legal rights. if you ask us precisely what it is that we wish, we reply that we wish to be able to live in moderate comfort in our native land, and to be able to make our plans upon the assumption that we shall not be interfered with. it is not for us ignorant peasants to draw an act of parliament upon this subject, or to say how our views are to be reconciled with your english law, which, on other accounts, we by no means love. you, the english government, must find out for yourselves how to do that. what we want is to be secure and live in reasonable comfort, and we shall never be at rest, and we will never leave you at peace, till this is arranged in some way or other." we do not say whether this feeling is right or wrong, we do not say how it is to be dealt with, but we do say that it is as intelligible, not to say as natural, a feeling as ever entered into human hearts, and we say, moreover, that it would be very difficult to exaggerate either its generality, its force, its extent, or the degree to which it has been excited by recent events. we are deeply convinced that to persist in regarding the relation between landlord and tenant as one of contract merely, to repeat again and again in every possible form that all that the irish peasants have a right to say is that they have made a hard bargain with their landlords which they wish the legislature to modify, is to shut our eyes to the feelings of the people, feelings which it will be difficult and also dangerous to disregard. the very gist and point of the whole claim of the tenants is that their moral right (as they regard it) is as sacred, and ought to be as much protected by law, as the landlords' legal right, and that it is a distinct grievance to a man to be prevented from living in ireland on that particular piece of land on which he was born and bred, and which was occupied by his ancestors before him.' the whole drift of this history bears on this point. the policy of the past must be reversed. the tenants must be rooted in the soil instead of being rooted out. 'improvement' must include the people as well as the land, and agents must no longer be permitted to arrogate to themselves the functions of divine providence. '_naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret._' one of the best pamphlets on the irish land question is by mr. william m'combie, of aberdeen. a practical farmer himself, his sagacity has penetrated the vitals of the subject. his observations, while travelling through the country last year, afford a remarkable corroboration of the conclusions at which i have arrived. of the new method of 'regenerating ireland,' he says:-- 'in it the resources of the soil--to get the most possible out of it by the most summary process--is the great object; the people are of little or no account, save as they can be made use of to accomplish this object. but, indeed, it is not alone by the promoters of the grand culture that the people have been disregarded, but by irish landlords, generally, of both classes. by the improving landlords--who are generally recent purchasers--they are regarded merely as labourers; by the leave-alone landlords as rent-producers. the one class have ejected the occupiers, the other have applied, harder and harder, the screw, until the "good landlord"--the landlord almost worshipped in ireland at this hour--is the landlord who neither evicts his tenants nor raises their rents. the consequences are inevitable, and, over a large portion of the island, they are patent to every eye--they obtrude themselves everywhere. the people are poor; they are despondent, broken-spirited. in the south of ireland decay is written on every town. in the poorer parts you may see every fifth or sixth house tenantless, roofless, allowed from year to year to moulder and moulder away, unremoved, unrepaired.... to make room for these large-scale operations, evictions must go on, and as the process proceeds the numbers must be augmented of those who are unfit to work for hire and unable to leave the country. the poor must be made poorer; many now self-supporting made dependent. pauperism must spread, and the burden of poor rates be vastly increased. if the greatest good of the greatest number be the fundamental principle of good government, this is not the direction in which the state should seek to accomplish the regeneration of ireland. the development of the resources of the land ought to be made compatible with the improvement of the condition of the people.' chapter xxv. conclusion--an appeal to englishmen. the difficulty of understanding the case of ireland is proverbial. its most enlightened friends in england and scotland are often charged with 'gross ignorance of the country.' they might excuse themselves by answering, that when they seek instruction from irishmen, one native instructor is sure to contradict the other. yet there must be some point of view from which all sides of the irish question can be seen, some light in which the colours are not confused, the picture is not exaggerated, the features are not distorted. every nation has its idiosyncrasy, proceeding from race, religion, laws, institutions, climate, and other circumstances; and this idiosyncrasy may be the key of its history. in ireland three or four nationalities are bound together in one body politic; and it is the conflict of their several idiosyncrasies which perplexes statesmen, and constitutes the main difficulty of the irish problem. the blood of different races is mingled, and no doubt greatly modified by ages of intercourse. but _religion_ is an abiding force. the establishment of religious equality in ireland is a glorious achievement, enough in itself to immortalise any statesman. it is a far greater revolution than was effected by the emancipation act, and more to the credit of the chief actor; because, while mr. gladstone did spontaneously what he firmly believed to be right in principle. sir robert peel did, from necessity, what he as firmly believed was wrong in principle. but no reasonable man expected that the disestablishment of the church would settle all irish questions; in fact, it but clears the way for the settlement of some of the most important and urgent. it makes it possible for irishmen of every creed to speak in one voice to the government. their respective clergy, hitherto so intent on ecclesiastical claims and pretensions, will no longer pass by on the other side, but turn samaritans to their bleeding country, fallen among the thieves of bigotry and faction. there are many high protestants--indeed, i may say all, except the aristocracy--who, while firmly believing in the vital importance of the union of the three kingdoms, earnestly wishing that union to be real and perpetual, cannot help expressing their conviction that ireland has been greatly wronged by england--wronged by the legislature, by the government, and most of all by the crown. in no country in the world has loyalty existed under greater difficulties, in none has it been so ill requited, in none has so much been done as if of set purpose to starve it to death. in the reign of elizabeth the capricious will of a despotic sovereign was exerted to crush the national religion, while the greatest military exploits of her ablest viceroys consisted of predatory excursions, in which they slaughtered or carried away the horses and cattle, burned the crops and houses, and laid the country waste and desolate, in order to create famines for the wholesale destruction of the population, thus spoiled and killed as a punishment for the treason of their chiefs, over whom they had no control. in the reigns of james i. and charles i. there was a disposition among the remnant of the people-- to fly from petty tyrants to the throne. but the stuarts appealed to irish loyalty merely for the support of their dynasty, and william iii. laid the laurels won on the banks of the boyne upon the altar of english monopoly. in the reigns of anne and the three georges, law was made to do the work of the sword, and the catholics of ireland, constituting the mass of the nation, knew their sovereign only as the head of an alien power, cruel and unrelenting in its oppression. they were required to love a german prince whom they had never seen. he called himself the father of his subjects; and he had millions of subjects on the other side of a narrow channel, whom he never knew, and never cared to know. when at length the dominant nation relented, and wished to strike the penal chains from the hands of her sister, the king forbade the act of mercy, pleading his conscience and his oath as a bar to justice and to freedom, but yielding at last to english state necessity, and robbing concession of its grace, of all its power to conciliate. from the battle of the boyne to catholic emancipation, the king of ireland had never set foot on irish soil, except in the case of george iv., whose visit was little better than a melodramatic exhibition, repaid by copious libations of flattery, which however failed to melt his bigotry, or to persuade him to redeem his solemn promises and pledges, until, nine years later, he was compelled to yield by the fear of impending civil war. ireland may get from her sister, england, everything but that for which the heart yearns--affection--that which alone 'can minister to a mind diseased, can pluck from the memory its rooted sorrow, and rase out the written troubles from the brain.' that is just what ireland needs above all things. she wants to be kept from brooding morbidly over the dismal past, and to be induced to apply herself in a cheerful spirit to the business of life. the prescriptions of state physicians cannot fully reach the root of the disease. say that it is a sentimental malady--a delusion. what is gained by saying _that_, if the sentiment or the delusion makes life wretched, unfits for business, produces suicidal propensities, and renders _keepers_ necessary? in theory, ireland is one with england; in practice, she is hourly made to feel the reverse. _the times_, and all the journals which express the instincts of the dominant nation, constantly speak of the irish people as '_the subjects of england_, whom englishmen have a right to control. they are the subjects of the queen only in a secondary sense--_as_ the queen of england, and reigning over them through england. every sovereign, from queen elizabeth to queen victoria, was sovereign of ireland merely in this subordinate sense, even when there was an irish parliament. the king of _ireland_ could speak to his irish parliament only as he was advised by his english ministers; and their advice was invariably prompted by english interests. her king was not _hers_ in the true sense. his _heart_ and his company were wholly given to another, to whose pride, power, and splendour she was made to minister. that state of things still continues in effect, and while it lasts ireland can never be contented. her heart will always be disquieted within her. something bitter will ever be bubbling up from the bottom of that troubled fountain. nor let it be supposed that this is due to a peculiar idiosyncrasy in ireland--to some unhappy congenital malformation, or some original taint in the blood. it has been often asked whether england would have submitted to similar treatment from ireland if their relations were reversed. englishmen have not answered that question because they cannot understand it. they find it difficult to apply the divine maxim, 'do as you would be done by.' in their dealings with other nations. but they can scarcely conceive its application to their dealings with ireland, any more than the american planter could have conceived the duty of fraternizing with his negroes. if we draw from this fact the logical inference, we shall be at a loss to discern whether the celt or the saxon suffers more from the moral perversity of his nature. the truth is, both are perverted by their unnatural relations, which are a standing outrage on the spirit of christianity. the emperor of austria long laboured to govern one nation through another and for another, in right of conquest, and we know the result in italy and hungary. lombardy, though well cultivated and materially prosperous, could never be reconciled to austrian rule. even the nobility could not be tempted to appear at court. venetia was more passionately and desperately hostile, and was consequently crushed by military repression, till the country was turned into a wilderness, and the capital once so famous for its commerce and splendour, became one of the most melancholy scenes of ruin and desolation to be found in the world. the austrians, and those who sympathised with austria as the great conservative power of the continent, ascribed all this to the perversity of the italian nature, and to the influence of agitators and conspirators. austria was bountiful to her italian subjects, and would be more lenient if she could, but their vices of character and innate propensity to rebellion, rendered necessary a system of coercion. hence the prisons were full of political offenders; the soldier and the executioner were constantly employed in maintaining law and order. all the emperor wanted was that his italian provinces should be so thoroughly amalgamated with austria, as to form one firmly united empire, and that the inhabitants should be content with their position as _austrian_ subjects, ruled by austrian officials. but this was precisely what they could not or would not be. 'they smiled at the drawn dagger and defied its point.' they would sacrifice their lives, but they would not sacrifice their nationality at the bidding of an alien power. this illustrates the force of the national sentiment, and the tremendous magnitude of the calamities to which its persistent violation leads. but the case of hungary is still more apposite as an illustration of the english policy in ireland. the hungarians had an ancient constitution and parliament of their own. the emperor of austria was their legitimate king, wearing the crown of hungary. in this capacity the hungarians were willing to yield to him the most devoted loyalty. but he wanted to weld his empire into a compact unity, and to centralise all political power at vienna, so that austria should be the head and heart of the system, and the other provinces her hands and her feet. hungary resisted, and revolted. the result was a desolating civil war, in which she was triumphant, till the czar came to the rescue of his brother despot, and poured his legions in overwhelming numbers into the devoted country. hungary was now at the feet of her sovereign, and austria, the dominant state, tried to be conciliatory, in order to bring about the desired amalgamation and consolidation of the empire. she did so, with every apparent prospect of success, and it was generally considered throughout europe that there was an end of the hungarian kingdom. but hungarian nationality survived, and still resisted austrian centralisation. the hungarians struggled for its recognition constitutionally, manfully, with admirable self-control, moderation, and wisdom, until at length they achieved a peaceful victory. their sovereign reigns over them as king of hungary; he and the empress dwell among them, without austrian guards. their children are born among them, and they are proud to call them natives of hungary. the hungarians, as subjects of _austria_, were discontented, miserable, incurably disaffected. as subjects of their own king (though he is also emperor of austria) they are intensely loyal. they are prosperous and happy, because they are free. and though they have their distinctions of race and religion, they are united. the magyars of hungary correspond very nearly to the protestants of ireland. though a minority, their energy, their education, their natural talent for organisation and government, their love of freedom, their frank recognition of the rights of conscience, enable them to lead without inspiring jealousy, just as the protestants of ireland were enabled to lead in , notwithstanding the existence of protestant ascendancy. religious equality is not a cause of tranquillity in itself. it tranquillises simply because it implies the absence of irritation. it takes a festering thorn out of the side of the unestablished community--a thorn which inflames the blood of every one of its members. let worldly interest, political power, and social precedence cease to be connected with the profession of religion, and religious differences would cease to produce animosity and intolerance. if the magyars had been the hungarian party of protestant ascendancy, and if the protestant interest had also been the austrian interest; if the mission of the magyars had been to act as a garrison, to keep down the roman catholic majority, their cause could never have triumphed till protestant ascendancy should be abolished. but hungarian protestantism did not need such support, although the pope has as much authority in hungary as in ireland. of course the cases of hungary and ireland are in many respects dissimilar. but they are alike in this: their respective histories establish the great fact that the most benevolent of sovereigns, and the wisest of legislatures, can never produce contentment or loyalty in a kingdom which is ruled _through_ and _for_ another kingdom. we can easily understand that when the light of royalty shines upon a country _through a conquering nation still dominant_, the medium is of necessity dense, cold, refracting, and discolouring. of this the best illustration is derived from the relations between austria and hungary, now so happily adjusted to the unspeakable advantage of both nations. austrian rule was unsympathetic, harsh, insolent, domineering, based upon the arrogant assumption that the hungarians were incapable of managing their own affairs without the guidance of austrian wisdom and the support of austrian steadiness. but the hungarians, united among themselves, putting their trust, not in boastful, vapouring, and self-seeking agitators, but in honest, truthful, high-minded, and capable statesmen, persevered in a course of firm, but temperate and constitutional, national self-assertion, until the austrians were compelled to put away from them their supercilious airs of natural superiority, and to concede the principle of international equality and the right of self-government. what sickens the reader of irish history most of all is the anarchy of the old clan system, the everlasting alternation of outrages and avenging reprisals. one faction, when it felt strong and had a favourable opportunity, made a sudden raid upon another faction, taken at a disadvantage, plundering and killing with reckless fury. the outraged party treasured up its anger till it had power to retaliate, and then glutted its vengeance without mercy in the same way. when this fatal propensity to mutual destruction was restrained by law, it broke out from time to time in other ways. what was wanted to cure it effectually was a strong, steady, central government, such as england enjoys herself. but the very system which is most calculated to foster factiousness is the one which has reigned for centuries in dublin castle. the british sovereign knows no party, and, whatever other sovereigns have done, queen victoria has never forgotten this constitutional principle. but the irish lord-lieutenant is always a party-man, and is always surrounded by party-men. they were whigs or tories, liberals or conservatives, often extreme in their views and violent in their temper. the vice of the old clan system was its tendency to unsettle, to undo, to upset, to smash and destroy. instead of counteracting that vice (which still lingers in the national blood), by a fixed, unchanging system of administration, based on principles of unswerving rectitude, which knows no distinction of party, no favouritism, england ruled by the alternate sway of factions. _the times_, referring to the debate on the irish church, remarked that the viceroyalty was more and more 'a mere ornament.' it is really nothing more. the viceroy has no actual power, and if he has statesmanship, it is felt to be out of place. he can scarcely give public expression to his sentiments on any political questions without offending one party or the other, whereas the estate of the realm which he represents is neutral and ought to keep strictly to neutral ground. as to the effect of the office in degrading the national spirit among the nobility and gentry, we could not have a better illustration than the fact that the amiable lord carlisle was accustomed, at the meeting of the royal dublin society, to tell its members that the true aim, interest, glory, and destiny of ireland was to be a pasture and a dairy for england,--a compliment which seemed to have been gratefully accepted, or was at all events allowed to pass. but even as an 'ornament' the viceregal system is a failure. the viceroy with his family ought to be the head of society in ireland, just as the queen is in england. the royal family are the same to all parties and classes, showing no partiality on the ground of politics, but smiling with equal favour and recognition upon all. in ireland, however, a liberal lord lieutenant is generally shunned by the conservative portion of the aristocracy, which forms the great majority of the class. on the other hand the conservatives flock in large numbers to the court of a tory viceroy, while liberals stand aloof. instead therefore of being a centre of union to all sections of the best society, and bringing them together, so that they may know one another, and enjoy the advantages due to their rank, the viceregal court operates as a source of jealousy and division. so that, looking at the institution as a mere ornament of society, as a centre of fashionable life and refining influences, facilitating intercourse between ranks and classes, bringing the owners of land and the men of commerce more in harmony, it is not worth preserving. on the other hand it produces some of the worst features of conventionalism. it cultivates flunkeyism and servility, while operating as a restraint upon the manly expression of opinion. it fosters a spirit of spurious aristocracy, which shows itself in contempt for men who prefer honest industry to place-hunting and insolvent gentility. but while i thus speak of the viceregal court as at present constituted, i still maintain that, like hungary, this country is so peculiarly situated, and is animated by so strong a spirit of nationality, that it ought to have a court of its own, and a sovereign of its own. the case of hungary shows how easily this great boon might be granted, and how gratifying the results would be to all the parties concerned. the queen ought to reside in ireland for some portion of the year. a suitable palace should be provided for the royal family. the prince of wales, during her majesty's reign, ought to be the permanent viceroy, with the necessary addition to his income. the office would afford an excellent training for his duties as king. the attraction of the princess of wales would make the irish court very brilliant. it would afford the opportunity of contact with real royalty, not the shadowy sort of thing we have had--reflected through viceroys very few of whom were ever _en rapport_ with the irish nation. not one of them could so speak to the people as to elicit a spark of enthusiasm. of course they could not have the true ring of royalty, for royalty was not in them. but they could not play the part well. one simple sentence from the queen or the prince of wales, or even from prince arthur, would be worth all the theatrical pomp they could display in a generation. those noblemen had no natural connection with the kingdom, fitting them to take the first place in it. they were not hereditary chiefs. they were not elected by the people. they were mere 'casual' chief-governors; and they formed no ties with the nation that could not be broken as easily as the spider's thread. the _hereditary principle_ has immense force in ireland. the landlords are now seeking to weaken it; or rather they are ignoring it altogether, and substituting the commercial principle in dealing with their tenants, preferring not the most devoted adherents of the family, but the man with most money. but i warn them that they are doing so at the peril of their order. a prince who was _heir presumptive to the throne as viceroy_, and who, when he ascended the throne, should be crowned king of _ireland_, as well as king of great britain, crowned in his own irish palace, and on the _lia fail_ or stone of destiny, preserved at westminster, would save many a million to the british exchequer, for it would be no longer necessary to support a large army of occupation to keep the country. if the throne of queen victoria stood in dublin, there is not a fenian in ireland who would not die in its defence. standing in westminster it is doubtful whether its attraction is sufficient to retain the hearts even of orangemen. there, it is the _english_ throne. so the _englishman_ regards it with instinctive jealousy. he feels it is his own; but, say what we may, the irish loyalist, when he approaches it, is made to feel, by a thousand signs, that he is a stranger and an intruder. he returns to his own bereaved country with a sad heart, and a bitter spirit. can he be _anglicised_? put this question to an english philosopher, and he will answer with mr. froude--'can the ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?' we can bridge the channel with fast steamers; but who will bridge the gulf, hitherto impassable, which separates the english dives from the irish lazarus? 'we have,' said canning, 'for many years been erecting a mound--not to assist or improve, but to thwart nature; we have raised it high above the waters, and it has stood there, frowning hostility and effecting separation. in the course of time, however, the necessities of man, and the silent workings of nature, have conspired to break down this mighty structure, till there remains of it only a narrow isthmus, standing between two kindred seas, which, mounting, viewed each other from afar, and longed to meet. what then, shall be our conduct? shall we attempt to repair the breaches, and fortify the ruins? a hopeless and ungracious undertaking! or shall we leave them to moulder away by time and accident--a sure but distant and thankless consummation; or, shall we not rather cut away at once the isthmus that remains, allow free course to the current which has been artificially impeded, and float upon the mingling waves the ark of our glorious constitution?' much has been done since canning's time to remove the narrow isthmus. emancipation cut deep into it. the disestablishment of the irish church submerged an immense portion of it. if mr. gladstone's land bill be equally effective, a breach will be made through which the two kindred seas will meet, and, in their commingling flux and reflux, will quickly sweep away all minor obstacles to their perfect union. a just settlement of the land question will reconcile the two races, and close the war of seven centuries. that is the rock against which the two nationalities have rushed in foaming breakers, lashed into fury by the storms of faction and bigotry. remove the obstruction, and the world would hear no more the roaring of the waters. then would float peacefully upon the commingling waves the ark of our common constitution, in which there would be neither saxon nor celt, neither english nor irish, neither protestant nor catholic, but one united, free, and mighty people. then might the emperor of the french mark the epoch with the announcement--'england has done justice to ireland!' london: printed by spottiswoode and co., new-street square and parliament street note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) +-------------------------------------------------------+ | | | other vocational | | guidance books | | | | j. adams puffer, editor | | | | _vocational guidance--the teacher as a counselor_ | | by j. adams puffer | | | | _a vocational reader_ | | by c. park pressey | | | | _vocational guidance for the professions_ | | by edwin tenney brewster | | | +-------------------------------------------------------+ "vocational guidance seeks the largest realization of the possibilities of every child and youth, measured in terms of worthy service." [illustration: photograph by brown bros. camp fire girls the lessons of patriotism, kindness, and industry taught by the camp fire girls' organization make it a power for good] vocational guidance for girls by marguerite stockman dickson author of _from the old world to the new_, _a hundred years of warfare. - _, _stories of camp and trail_, _pioneers and patriots in american history_ rand mcnally & company chicago new york the contents page a foreword ix part i. present-day ideals of womanhood chapter i. woman's place in society ii. the ideal home iii. establishing a home iv. running the domestic machinery part ii. guiding girls toward the ideal v. the educational agencies involved vi. training the little child vii. teaching the mechanics of housekeeping viii. the girl's inner life ix. the adolescent girl x. the girl's work xi. the girl's work (continued)--classification of occupations xii. the girl's work (continued)--vocations as affecting homemaking xiii. the girl's work (continued)--vocations determined by training xiv. marriage suggested readings the index a list of the portraits page louisa m. alcott ruth mcenery stuart louise homer and her family margaret junkin preston colonel and mrs. roosevelt with members of their family julia ward howe and her granddaughter caroline bartlett crane alice freeman palmer amelia e. barr a foreword fortunate are we to have from the pen of mrs. dickson a book on the vocational guidance of girls. mrs. dickson has the all-round life experiences which give her the kind of training needed for a broad and sympathetic approach to the delicate, intricate, and complex problems of woman's life in the swiftly changing social and industrial world. mrs. dickson was a teacher for seven years in the grades in the city of new york. she then became the partner of a superintendent of schools in the business of making a home. in these early homemaking years there came from the pen of mrs. dickson a series of historical books for the grades which have placed her among the leading educational writers of the country. during the long sickness of her husband she filled for a while two administrative positions--homemaker and superintendent of schools. her three children are now in high school and are beginning to plan for their own life work. with the broad training of homemaker, wife, mother, teacher, writer, and administrator, mrs. dickson has the combination of experiences to enable her to introduce teachers and mothers to the very difficult problems of planning wisely big life careers for our girls. the book is so plainly and guardedly written that it can also be used as a textbook for the girls themselves in connection with civic and vocational courses. the only difficulty with the book for a text is that it is so attractively written on such vital problems that the student will not stop reading at the end of the lesson. j. adams puffer "vocational guidance has for its ideal the granting to every individual of the chance to attain his highest efficiency under the best conditions it is humanly possible to provide." part i present-day ideals of womanhood "how to preserve to the individual his right to aspire, to make of himself what he will, and at the same time find himself early, accurately, and with certainty, is the problem of vocational guidance." vocational guidance for girls chapter i woman's place in society any scheme of education must be built upon answers to two basic questions: first, what do we desire those being educated to become? second, how shall we proceed to make them into that which we desire them to be? in our answers to these questions, plans for education fall naturally into two great divisions. one concerns itself with ideals; the other, with methods. no matter how complex plans and theories may become, we may always reach back to these fundamental ideas: what do we want to make? how shall we make it? applying this principle to the education of girls, we ask, first: what ought girls to be? and with this simple question we are plunged immediately into a vortex of differing opinions. girls ought to be--or ought to be in the way of becoming--whatever the women of the next generation should be. so far all are doubtless agreed. we therefore find ourselves under the necessity of restating the question, making it: what ought women to be? probably never in the world's history has this question occupied so large a place in thought as it does to-day. in familiar discussion, in the press, in the library, on the platform, the "woman question" is an all-absorbing topic. even the most cursory review of the literature of the subject leads to a realization of its importance. it leads also into the very heart of controversy. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. suffrage parade in washington. women will parade or even fight for their rights] it is safe to say that no woman, in our own country at least, escapes entirely the unrest which this controversy has brought. even the most conservative and "old-fashioned" of women know that their daughters are living in a world already changed from the days of their own young womanhood; and few indeed fail to see that these changes are but forerunners of others yet to come. they know little, perhaps, of the right or wrong of woman's industrial position, but "woman in industry" is all about them. they perhaps have never heard of ellen key's arraignment of existing marriage and sex relations, but they cannot fail to see unhappy marriages in their own circle. they may care little about the suffrage question, but they can hardly avoid hearing echoes of strife over the subject of "votes for women." and however much or little women are personally conscious of the significance of these questions, the questions are nevertheless of vital import to them all. the "uneasy woman" is undeniably with us. we may account for her presence in various ways. we may prophesy the outcome of her uneasiness as the signs seem to us to point. but in the meantime--she is here! naturally both radical and conservative have panaceas to suggest. the radicals would have us believe that the question of woman's status in the world requires an upheaval of society for its settlement. says one, the "man's world" must be transformed into a human world, with no baleful insistence on the femininity of women. it is the human qualities, shared by both man and woman, which must be emphasized. the work of the world--with the single exception of childbearing--is not man's work nor woman's work, but the work of the race. woman must be liberated from the overemphasized feminine. let women live and work as men live and work, with as little attention as may be to the accident of sex. says another, it is the ancient and dishonored institution of marriage which must feel the blow of the iconoclast. reform marriage, and the whole woman question will adjust itself. says still another, do away with marriage. "celibacy is the aristocracy of the future." let the woman be free forever from the drudgery of family life, free from the slavery of the marriage relation, free to "live," to "work," to have a "career." men and women were intended to be in all things the same, except for the slight difference of sex. let us throw away the cramping folly of the ages and let woman take her place beside man. not so, replies the conservative. in just so far as masculine and feminine types approach each other, we shall see degeneracy. men and women were never intended to be alike. thus we might go on. without the radicals there would of course be no progress. without the conservatives our social fabric would scarcely hold. between the two extremes, however, in this as in all things, stands the great middle class, believing and urging that not social upheaval, but better understanding of existing conditions, is the world remedy for unrest; that not new careers, but better adjustment of old ones, will bring peace; that not formal political power, even though that be their just due, but the better use of powers that women have long possessed, is most needed for the betterment of mankind. it is not the province of this book to enter into controversy with either radical or reactionary, but rather to search for truth which may be used for adjusting to fuller advantage the relation of woman to society. first of all must be recognized the fact that the "woman movement" deserves the thoughtful attention of every teacher or other social worker, and indeed of every thoughtful man or woman. the movement can no longer be considered in the light of isolated surface outbreaks. it is rather the result of deep industrial and social undercurrents which are stirring the whole world. in our study of the modern woman movement, which as teachers in any department of educational work we are bound to make, the fact is immediately impressed upon us that home life has undergone marked changes. conditions once favorable to the existence of the home as a sustaining economic unit are no longer to be found. new conditions have arisen, compelling the home, like other permanent institutions, to alter its mode of existence in order to meet them. briefly reviewing the causes which have brought about these changes in home life, we find, first, the industrial revolution. a large number of the activities once carried on in the home have removed to other quarters. in earlier times the mother of a family served as cook, housemaid, laundress, spinner, weaver, seamstress, dairymaid, nurse, and general caretaker. the father was about the house, at work in the field, or in his workshop close at hand. the children grew up naturally in the midst of the industries which provided for the maintenance of the home, and for which, in part, the home existed. the home, in those days, was the place where work was done. with the invention of labor-saving machinery came an entire revolution in the place and manner of work. the father of the family has been forced by this industrial change to follow his trade from the home workshop to the mechanically equipped factory. one by one, many of the housewife's tasks also have been taken from the home. to-day the processes of cloth making are practically unknown outside the factory. knitting has become largely a machine industry. ready-made clothing has largely reduced the sewing done in the home. in the matter of food, the housekeeper may, if she chooses, have a large part of her work performed by the baker, the canner, and the delicatessen shopkeeper. even the care of her children, after the years of infancy, has been partly assumed by the state. the home, as a place where work is done, has lost a large part of its excuse for being. among the poorer classes, women, like their husbands, being obliged to earn, and no longer able to do so in their homes, have followed the work to the factory. as a result we have many thousands of them away from their homes through long days of toil. among persons of larger income, removal of the home industries to the factory has resulted in increased leisure for the woman--with what results we shall later consider. practically the only constructive work left which the woman may not shift if she will to other shoulders, or shirk entirely, is the bearing of children and, to at least some degree, their care in early years. the interests once centered in the home are now scattered--the father goes to shop or office, the children to school, the mother either to work outside the home or in quest of other occupation and amusement to which leisure drives her. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. glove making. women, like their husbands, have followed work to the factories] a second change in the conditions affecting home life is found in the increased educational aspirations of women. once the accepted and frankly anticipated career for a woman was marriage and the making of a home. her education was centered upon this end. to-day all this is changed. a girl claims, and is quite free to obtain, an education in all points like her brother's, and the career she plans and prepares for may be almost anything he contemplates. she may, or may not, enter upon the career for which she prepares. marriage may--often does--interfere with the career, although nearly as often the career seems to interfere with marriage. under the new alignment of ideals, there is less interest shown in homemaking and more in "the world's work," with a decided feeling that the two are entirely incompatible. [illustration: keystone view co. employees leaving the elgin watch company factory. thousands of women are away from their homes through long days of toil] the girl, educated to earn her living in the market of the world, no longer marries simply because no other career is open to her; when she does marry, she is less likely than formerly, statistics tell us, to have children--the only remaining work which, in these days, definitely requires a home. marriage and homemaking, therefore, are no longer inseparably connected in the woman's mind. girls are willing to undertake matrimony, but often with the distinct understanding that their "careers" are not to be interfered with. to them, then, marriage becomes more and more an incident in life rather than a life work. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a typical tenement house. congestion means discomfort within the home and decreasing possibility for satisfying there either material or social needs] a third disintegrating influence as affecting home life is the great increase of city homes. urban conditions are almost without exception detrimental to home life. congestion means discomfort within the home and decreasing possibility for satisfying there either material or social needs; while on every hand are increasing possibilities for satisfying these needs outside the home. family life under such conditions often lacks, to an alarming degree, the quality of solidarity which makes the dwelling place a home. no longer the place where work is done, no longer the place where common interests are shared, the home becomes only "the place where i eat and sleep," or perhaps merely "where i sleep." the great increase of urban life during the last half century is thus a very real menace, and, since the agricultural communities constantly feed the towns, the menace concerns the country-as well as the city-dweller. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. in the cities there are increasing opportunities for satisfying material and social needs outside the home] believing that for the good of coming generations the true home spirit must be saved, we shall do well to admit at once that the old-time home was an institution suited to its own day, but that we cannot now call it back to being. nor would we wish to do so. there is no possible reason for wishing our women to spin, weave, knit, bake, brew, preserve, clean, _if_ the products she formerly made can be produced more cheaply and more efficiently outside the home. there is danger, however, of generalizing too soon in regard to these industries. there is little doubt that in some directions, at least, the factory method has not yet brought really satisfactory results. how many women can give you reasons _why_ they believe that it no longer "pays" to do this or that at home as they once did? do the factories always turn out as good a product as the housekeeper? if they do, does the housekeeper obtain that product with as little expenditure as when she made it? if she spends more, can she show that the leisure she has thus bought has been a wise purchase? is she justified in accepting vague generalizations to the effect that it is better economy to buy than to make, or should she test for herself, checking up her individual conditions and results? the fact is that the pendulum has swung away from the "homemade" article, and most of us have not taken the trouble to investigate whether we are benefited or harmed. it may be that investigation will show us that the pendulum has swung too far, and that, in spite of factories mechanically equipped to serve us, some work may be done much more advantageously at home. it is even possible, and in some lines of work we know that it is a fact, that homes may be mechanically equipped at very little cost to rival and even to outclass the factory in producing certain kinds of products for home consumption. spinning, weaving, and knitting are doubtless best left in the hands of the factory worker. but, under present conditions, buying ready made all the garments needed for a family may be an expensive and unsatisfactory method if the elements of worth, wear, finish, and individuality are worthy of consideration, just as buying practically all foodstuffs "ready made" presents a complex and disturbing problem to the fastidious and conscientious housewife. there is at least a possibility that it would be as well for the home of to-day to retain or resume, systematize, and perfect some of the industries that are slipping or have already slipped from its grasp. it is possible to reduce some processes to a too purely mechanical basis. [illustration: keystone view co. linen-mill workers. spinning and weaving, whether of cotton, linen, silk, or wool, are more satisfactorily done by factory workers than in the home] a woman lived in our town who wasn't very wise. she had a reputation for making homemade pies. and when she found her pies would sell, with all her might and main she opened up a factory, and spoiled it all again. nonsense? yes--but with a strong element of sense, nevertheless. entirely aside, however, from the industrial status of the home, unless we are to see a practical cessation of childbearing and rearing, homes must apparently continue to exist. no one has yet found a substitute place for this particular industry. it is a commonly accepted fact that young children do better, both mentally and physically, in even rather poor homes than in a perfectly planned and conducted institution. and we need go no farther than this in seeking a sufficient reason for saving the home. this one is enough to enlist our best service in aid of homemaking and home support. from earliest ages woman has been the homemaker. no plan for the preservation of the home or for its evolution into a satisfactory social factor can fail to recognize her vital and necessary connection with the problem. therefore in answer to the question "what ought woman to be?" we say boldly, "a homemaker." reduced to simplest terms, the conditions are these: if homes are to be made more serviceable tools for social betterment, women must make them what they ought to be. consequently homemaking must continue to be woman's business--_the_ business of woman, if you like--a considerable, recognized, and respected part of her "business of being a woman." nor may we overlook the fact that it is only in this work of making homes and rearing offspring that either men or women reach their highest development. motherhood and fatherhood are educative processes, greater and more vital than the artificial training that we call education. in teaching their children, even in merely living with their children, parents are themselves trained to lead fuller lives. "the central fact of the woman's life--nature's reason for her--is the child, his bearing and rearing. there is no escape from the divine order that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or privilege, as she may please to consider it."[ ] it is the fashion among some women to assume that it is time all this were changed, and that therefore it will be changed. they look forward to seeing womankind released from this "constraint, duty, or privilege," and yet see in their prophetic vision the race moving on to a future of achievement. the fact, however, ignore it as we may, cannot be gainsaid: no man-made or woman-made "emancipation" will change nature's law. it was well that after centuries of repression and subjection woman sought emancipation. she needed it. but the wildest flight of fancy cannot long conceal the ultimate fact. woman is the mother of the race. "the female not only typifies the race, but, metaphor aside, she _is_ the race."[ ] emancipation can never free her from this destiny. in the united states, where woman has the largest freedom to enter the industrial world and maintain herself in entire independence, the percentage of those who marry is higher than in the countries where woman is a slave. ninety per cent of the mature women in our country become homemakers for a certain period, and probably over per cent are assistant homemakers for another period of years before or after marriage. any vocational counselor who fails to reckon first with the homemaking career of girls is therefore blind to the facts of life. all education, all training, must be considered in its bearing on the one vocation, homemaking. the time will come when the occupations of boys and men must likewise be considered in relation to homemaking, but that problem is not the province of this book. women will bear and rear the children of the future, just as they have borne and reared the children of the past. but _under what conditions_--the best or those less worthy? and _what women_--again, the best or those less worthy? has woman been freed from subjection, from an inferior place in the scheme of life, only to become so intoxicated with a personal freedom, with her own personal ambition, that she fails to see what emancipation really means? will she be contented merely to imitate man rather than to work out a destiny of her own? we think not. when the first flush of freedom has passed, the pendulum will turn again and woman will find a truer place than she knows now or has known. two obstacles to the successful pursuit of her ultimate vocation stand prominently before the young woman of to-day: first, the instruction of the times has imbued her with too little respect for her calling; second, her education teaches her how to do almost everything except how to follow this calling in the scientific spirit of the day. she may scorn housework as drudgery, but no voice is raised to show her that it may be made something else. with the advent of vocational guidance, vocational training of necessity follows close behind. and with vocational training must come a proper appreciation, among the other businesses of life, of this "business of being a woman." must we then educate the girl to be a homemaker, and keep her out of the industrial life which has claimed her so swiftly and in which she has found so much of her emancipation? no, we could not, if we would, keep her from the outside life. we must rather recognize her double vocation and, difficult though it seem, must educate her for both phases of her "business." she will be not only the better woman, but the better worker, because of the very breadth of her vocational horizon. training for homemaking, then, must go hand in hand with training for some phase of industrial life. vocational guides must consider not only inclination and temperament, but physical condition and the supply and demand of the industrial world. they will consider the girl not merely as an industrial worker, but as a potential homemaker. they will, therefore, also study the effect of various vocations upon homemaking capabilities. how then shall the teaching of this double vocation be approached? how shall we, as teachers of girls, make them capable of becoming homemakers? how shall we make them see that homemaking and the world's work may go hand in hand, so that they will desire in time to turn from their industrial service to the later and better destiny of making a home? this book offers its contribution toward answering these questions. footnotes: [footnote : ida m. tarbell, _the business of being a woman_.] [footnote : lester f. ward, _pure sociology_.] chapter ii the ideal home that we may understand, and to some extent formulate, the problem which we would have girls trained to solve, we must of necessity study homes. what must girls know in order to be successful homemakers? a historical survey of the home leads us to the conclusion that although times have changed, and homes have changed, and indeed all outward conditions have changed, the spiritual ideal of home is no different from what it has always been. the home is the seat of family life. its one object is the making of healthy, wise, happy, satisfied, useful, and efficient people. the home is essentially a spiritual factory, whether or not it is to remain to any degree whatever a material one. "home will become an atmosphere, a 'condition in which,' rather than 'a place where,'" says nearing in his _woman and social progress_. "the home is a factory to make citizenship in," writes mrs. bruère. but although this spiritual significance of home has always existed, we are sometimes inclined to overlook the fact. because conditions have changed, and because our external ideals of home have changed and are still changing, we fail to see that the foundation of home life is still unchanged. "i sometimes think that many women don't consciously know _why_ they are running their homes," says mrs. frederick, author of _the new housekeeping_. we might add that many of those who do know, or think they know, are struggling to attain to purely trivial or fundamentally wrong ideals. it seems wise, then, for us to face at the outset the question "what is the ideal home?" [illustration: copyright by keystone view co. an attractive living room in which there is that atmosphere of peace so conducive to a happy family life] laying aside all preconceived notions, and remembering that changes are coming fast in these days, let us look for the ideals which may be common to all homes, in city or country, among rich or poor. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a well-arranged kitchen forms an important part of the smoothly running mechanism of the ideal home] first of all, the home must be comfortable, and its whole atmosphere must be that of peace. in no other way can the tension of modern life be overcome. this implies order and cleanliness, beauty, warmth, light, and air; but it implies far more. it means a home planned for the people who will occupy it, and so planned that father's needs, and mother's, and the children's, will all be met. what does each member of the family require of the house? a place to _live in_. and that means far more than eating and sleeping and having a place for one's clothes. there must be not only a place for everything, but a place for everybody in the ideal house. the boys who wish to dabble in electricity, the girls who wish to entertain their friends in their own way, the tired father who wishes to read his newspaper "in peace," the younger children who want to pop corn or blow bubbles or play games, all must be planned for. there will be no room too good for use, and no furnishings so delicate that mother worries over family contact with them. there will be a minimum of "keeping up appearances" and a maximum of comfort and cheer. there will be little formal entertaining, but many spontaneous good times. in addition to being comfortable, the ideal home must be convenient. there will be places for things, and every appliance for making work easy. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. contrast this old-fashioned kitchen with the modern one shown on the opposite page] the ideal mother, who is the mainspring of the smoothly running mechanism of the ideal home, will be scientifically trained for her position. her "domestic science" will no longer be open to the criticism that it is not science at all, nor will she feel that her business is unworthy of scientific treatment. always she will keep before her the object of her work--to make of her family, _including herself_, good, happy, efficient people. she will not be overburdened with housework, for overworked mothers have neither time nor strength for the higher aspects of their work. she will know how to feed bodies, but also how to develop souls. she will clothe her children hygienically, but she will teach them to value more the more important vestments of modesty and gentleness and courtesy. she will require obedience, but, as their years increase, the requirement will be less and less obedience to authority and more and more obedience to a right spirit within. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. the wise mother will teach her children the true value of work by making them wish to work with her] she will work for her children and will make them wish to work with her, teaching them the true value of work and sacrifice. she will play with them, for their pleasure and development, and she will also play, in her own way, for her own rejuvenation and her soul's good. she will study each member of her family as an individual problem, and, abandoning forever the idea of pressing any child's soul into the mold that she might choose, will rather strive to aid its growth toward its natural ideal. she will strive to hold and to be worthy of her children's confidence, that they may turn to her in those times that try their souls. but she will always respect the personal liberty of either child or husband to live his own life. she will interest herself in the interests of husband and children, that she may remain a vital factor in their lives; and she will make the home so delightful as to reduce to a minimum the scattering influences that tend to destroy home life. she will weave intangible but indestructible ties of affection, holding all together and to herself. she will keep her interest in the outside world, so that she may better prepare her children to live in it and may resist the narrowing influence of her enforced temporary withdrawal. she will take some part in civic work and social uplift, and, when her years of child rearing are ended, in the leisure of middle age she will return to the less circumscribed life of her youth, bending her matured energies to the world's work. the father of this ideal family will be first of all a man happy in his work. the plodding, weary slave to distasteful labor can be ideal neither as husband nor as father. overworked fathers are quite as impossible in our scheme as overburdened mothers. in ideal conditions the father will have time, strength, and willingness to be more of a factor in the home life than he sometimes is at the present time. more than that, his early education will have included definite preparation for homemaking, so that his coöperation will be intelligent and therefore helpful. he will know more than he does now about the cost of living and he will assist in making a preliminary division of the year's income upon an intelligent basis. he will recognize the necessity for equipment for the homemaking business and will contribute his share of thought and labor to improving the home plant. he will be a companion as well as adviser to his boys and girls and will retain their respect and love by his sympathetic understanding and his remembrance of the boy's point of view. in all his dealings with his children he will be careful that interference with his comfort and convenience or the wounding of his pride by their shortcomings does not obscure his sense of justice. he will be a student of child nature and will keep in view the ultimate good and usefulness of his child. he will regard his fatherhood as his greatest service to the state. [illustration: pals. the wise father will be companion as well as adviser to his children] the children reared by this ideal father and mother in their ideal home will grow as naturally as plants in a well-cared-for garden. with examples of courtesy and kindness, of cheerful work and health-producing play, ever before them in the lives of their parents, they may be led along the same paths to similar usefulness. their educational problems will be met by the combined effort of teachers and parents, and natural aptitude as well as community needs will dictate the choice of their life work. that this ideal family is far removed from many families of our acquaintance merely proves the necessity of training for more efficient homemaking, and indeed for a better conception of homemaking ideals and problems. if we are to teach our girls and our boys to be homemakers, we must consider carefully what they need to know. if we are to counteract the tendencies of the past two or three decades away from homemaking as a vocation, we must show the true value of the homemaker to the community, and the opportunities which domestic life presents to the scientifically trained mind. education for homemaking necessarily implies teachers who are trained for homemaking instruction; and we may pause here to notice that no homemaking course in normal school or college can be sufficient to give the teacher true knowledge of ideal homes. she must have seen such homes, or those which approximate the ideal. perhaps she has grown up in such a home. more probably she has not. if not, it must then necessarily follow that the lower have been the ideals in the home where the teacher had her training, the more she should see of other homes, and especially of good homes. her whole outlook may be changed by such contact; and with her outlook, her teaching; and with her teaching, her influence. if all girls grew up in ideal homes, it seems probable that homemaking would appeal to them quite naturally as the ultimate vocation. indeed, we know that many girls feel this natural drawing, in spite of most unlovely conditions in their childhood homes. the task of mother, teacher, and vocational counselor (who may be either) in this matter is a complicated one. some girls are not fitted by nature to be homemakers. some may with careful training overcome inherent defects which stand in the way of their success. some have the natural endowment, but have their eyes fixed on other careers. some have unhappy ideals to overcome. the fact, however, confronts us that at some time in their lives a very large majority of these girls will be homemakers. it is the part of those who have charge of them in their formative years to do two things for them: first, to train them so that they may understand the tasks of the homemaker and perform them creditably if they are called upon; second, to teach all those girls who seem fitted for this high vocation to desire it, and to choose it for at least part of their mature lives. chapter iii establishing a home certain very definite attempts are being made in these days to meet the evident lack of homemaking knowledge in the rising generation. and since definiteness of plan lends power to accomplishment, we cannot do better than to analyze as carefully as possible the various lines of knowledge required by the prospective homemaker in entering upon her life work. what are the problems of homemaking? and how far can we provide the girl with the necessary equipment to make her an efficient worker in her chosen vocation? country life and city life are apparently so far removed from each other as to present totally different problems to the homemaker and to the vocational educator of girls. and yet underlying the successful management of both urban and rural homes are the same principles of domestic economy and of social efficiency. the principles are there, however widely their application may differ. while we may wisely train country girls for country living, and city girls to face the problems of urban life, we must not lose sight of the fact that country girls often become homemakers in the city and that city girls are often found establishing homes in the country. nor should we overlook the truth that some study of home conditions in other than familiar surroundings will broaden the girl's knowledge and fit her in later life to make conditions subservient to that knowledge. both rural and urban homemakers must be taught to appreciate their advantages and to make the most of them. they must also learn to face their disadvantages and to work intelligently toward overcoming them. the country homemaker has no immediate need of studying the problems of congestion in population which menace the millions of city-dwellers. the country home has plenty of room and an abundance of pure air. yet it is often true that country homes are poorly ventilated and that much avoidable sickness results from this fact. the country home is often set in the midst of great natural beauty, yet misses its opportunity to satisfy the eye in an artistic sense. its very isolation is sometimes a cause of the lack of attention to its appearance to the passerby. the farmer's wife has an advantage in the matter of fresh vegetables, eggs, and poultry, but the city housekeeper has the near-by market and finds the question of sanitation, the preservation of food, and the disposal of waste far easier of solution. the city housewife is often troubled in regard to the source of her milk supply; the country-dweller has plenty of fresh milk, but frequently finds it difficult to be sure of pure water. the country homemaker often lacks the conveniences which make housekeeping easier; the city woman is often misled, by the ease of obtaining the ready-made article, into buying inferior products in order to avoid the labor of producing. the family in the farming community often has meager social life and lack of proper recreations; the city-dweller is made restless and improvident by an excess of opportunities for certain sorts of amusement. thus each type of community has its own problems. but practically all of these problems fall under certain general heads which both city and country homemakers should consider as part of their education. the present turning of thought toward training in these directions is most promising for the homes of the future. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a country home which, though set in the midst of natural beauty, yet fails to satisfy the eye in an artistic sense] [illustration: courtesy of mrs. joseph e. wing in contrast to the illustration above, this home shows what a few artistic touches may do to enhance the natural beauty of the surroundings] it is one of the misfortunes of existing conditions that the city and the country are not better acquainted with each other. scorn frequently takes the place of understanding. the town or village girl goes out to teach in the country school, knowing little of country living and less of country homes. it is difficult, if not impossible, for such a teacher to be an influence for good. especially as she approaches the homemaking problem is she without the knowledge which must underlie successful work. it is important that the city girl under such conditions should make a special effort to study country life and country homes in a sympathetic, helpful spirit. perhaps our analysis of homemaking problems can take no more practical form than to follow from its hypothetical beginning the making of an actual home. no more inspiring moment comes in the lives of most men and women than that in which the first step is taken toward making their first home. there is an instinctive recognition of the greatness of the occasion. but ignorance will dull the glow of inspiration and wrong standards will lead to wreck of highest hopes. let us, therefore, be practical and definite and face the facts. a home is to be established. the first question is: where? to a certain extent circumstances must answer this question. the character and place of employment of the breadwinner, the income, social relations already established, school, church, library, market, water and sanitary conditions, must all be considered. yet even these regulating conditions must receive intelligent treatment. how many young homemakers have any definite idea as to what proportion of the income may safely be expended for shelter? how many can tell the relative advantages of renting and owning? [illustration: copyright by keystone view co. a tenement district. one of the greatest disadvantages in urban life is the overcrowding in tenement houses] probably the first consideration in selection is likely to be whether the home is to be permanent or merely temporary. when the occupation is likely to be permanent, the greatest comfort and well-being will usually result from establishing early a permanent home; and this involves a long look ahead to justify the selection of a site. not only must health and convenience be considered, but future questions relative to the expanding requirements of the homemakers and to the education and proper upbringing of a family as well. then, too, young people must usually begin modestly from a financial standpoint, and they are therefore cut off from certain locations which they may perhaps desire and which they might hope to attain in later years. in the country, where the livelihood is often gained directly from the land, a new element enters into selection and must to some extent take precedence over others. soil considerations aside, however, we have health, beauty, social environment, educational advantages, and expense to consider; and we should establish certain standards in these directions for our young people to measure by. considerations of health must include not only climatic conditions, but questions of drainage, water supply, time and comfort of transportation to work, and the sanitary condition of the neighborhood. prospective homemakers must learn, too, the value of reposeful surroundings and of some degree of natural beauty. they must recognize the value also of desirable social environment--that is, of such moral and intellectual surroundings as will be uplifting for the homemakers and safe for the future family. they will, it is hoped, learn that a merely fashionable neighborhood is not necessarily a desirable environment. the church, the school, the library, and proper recreation centers are also to be considered in one's social outlook. they are all distinctly worth paying for, as also is a good road. with the site selected, the great problem of building next confronts the homemaker. here again the principles of selection should be sufficiently known to young people, boys and girls alike, to save them from the mistakes so commonly made and frequently so regretted. the people who can afford to employ an architect to design their homes are in a decided minority, and the only way to insure good houses for the less well-to-do majority is to see that the less well-to-do do not grow up without instruction as to what good houses are. the great tendency of the day in building is fortunately toward increased simplicity and toward a quality which we may call "livableness." this tendency we shall do well to fix in our teaching. in general, the good house is plain, substantial, convenient, and suited to its surroundings. efficient housekeeping is largely conditioned by such very practical details as closets and pantries, the relative positions of sink and stove, the height of work tables and shelves, the distance from range to dining table, the ease or difficulty of cleaning woodwork, laundry facilities, and the like. housekeeping is made up of accumulated details of work, and adequate preparation for comfort in working can be made only when the house is in process of construction. not less are the higher and more abstract duties of the homemaker served by the kind of house she lives and works in. in a hundred details the homemaker should be able to increase the efficiency of the "place to make citizens in." a common mistake in building produces a house which adds to, rather than lessens, the burdens of its inmates. more often than not this is the result of a misapprehension of what houses are for. there are many large mansions in our villages and cities built for show and display of wealth in which no one will live today. these houses are being torn down and sold for junk. the modern home is built for one purpose only, a home. we must therefore teach our boys and girls that houses are for shelter, work, comfort, and rest, and to satisfy our sense of beauty, not to serve as show places nor to establish for us a standing in the community proportionate to the size of our buildings. we must teach them to measure their house needs and to avoid the uselessly ornate as well as the hopelessly ugly. we must teach them to consider ease of upkeep a distinctly valuable factor in building. but most of all must the homemaker be taught that the comfort and well-being of the family come first in the making of plans. few persons possess sufficient originality to think out new and valuable arrangements for houses; therefore we must see that their minds are rendered alert to discover successful arrangements in the houses they are constantly seeing and to adapt these arrangements to their own needs. unless their minds are awakened in this direction, the majority will merely see the house problem in large units, overlooking the finer points of detail which mean comfort or the opposite. i recall spending a considerable number of drawing periods in my grammar-school days upon copying drawings of houses. i recall that we became sufficiently conversant with such terms as front elevation, side elevation, and floor plan to feel that we were deep in technical knowledge. but i do not recall that anyone suggested any question as to the suitability of these houses for homes, or opened our minds to consideration of the fact that house building was a proper concern for our minds. it was merely a case in which educative processes failed to function. they do things better now in many schools. but we should not rest until all of our prospective homemakers have opportunity to obtain practical instruction in home planning and building. matters pertaining to heating, ventilating, and plumbing are easily taught as resting upon certain definite, well-understood principles. here the personal element is less to be considered, and scientific knowledge may be passed on with some degree of authority. our courses in physics, chemistry, and hygiene can be made thoroughly practical without losing any of their scientific value. especially in our rural schools should matters of this sort receive careful and adequate treatment. in times past it was considered inevitable that the country-dweller should lack the advantages, found in most city houses, of a plentiful supply of water, radiated heat for the whole house, proper disposal of waste, and arrangements for cold storage. we know now that these things are obtainable at less cost than we had supposed; and we know also that it is not lack of means, but lack of knowledge, which forces many to do without them. in many a farm home the doctor's bills for one or two winters would pay for installing proper systems of heat and ventilation. everything that tends to increase the comfort and safety of home life must be taught, as well as everything that tends to lessen the labor of keeping a family clean, warm, and properly fed. accurate figures should be obtained to set before the boys and girls who will be homemakers, showing the cost, in time, labor, and money, of running a heating plant for the house as compared with several stoves scattered about in the dwelling. to accompany these we must have more figures, showing the comparative time spent in doing the necessary work incidental to the operation of each type of apparatus. we must consider the comparative cleanliness of both types of heating plants, with their effect, first, upon the health of the family, and secondly, upon the amount of cleaning necessary to keep the house in proper condition. we must compare types of stoves with one other, hot-air, steam, and hot-water plants with one another, and various kinds of fuels, both as to cost and as to efficacy. the water question is one of real interest to both city-and country-dweller, although the chances are that the country-dweller knows less about his source of supply than the city-dweller can know if he chooses to investigate. the city-dweller should know whence and by what means the water flows from his faucet, if for no other reason than that he may do his part in seeing that the money spent by his city or town brings adequate return to the taxpayer. for the rural homemaker, of course, the problem usually becomes an individual one. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a dangerous well. the rural homemaker must make sure that his water supply is at a safe distance from contaminating impurities] is the water supply adequate? is the water free from harmful bacteria? is the source a safe distance from contaminating impurities? are we obtaining the water for household and farm purposes without more labor than is compatible with good management? is not running water as important for the house as for the barn? how much water does an ordinary family need for all purposes in a day? how much time does it take to pump and carry this quantity by hand or to draw it from a well? how much strength and nerve force are thus expended that might be saved for more important work? does lack of time or strength cause the homekeeper to "get along" with less water in the house than is really needed? is there any natural means at hand for pumping the water--any "brook that may be put to work," any gravity system that may be installed? if not, are there mechanical means available that would really pay for themselves in increased water, time, and comfort for all the family? [illustration: photograph by brown bros. where water must be pumped and carried by hand much strength and nerve force are expended which might be kept for more important work] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a "brook put to work" may be utilized in supplying water to a farmhouse] from a consideration of water supply we pass naturally to questions of the disposal of waste, and here again is found a subject too often neglected both in town and in rural communities. in the city the problems are not individual ones in the main, but rather questions of the best management and use of the public utilities concerned. does the average city householder know what becomes of the waste removed from his door by the convenient arrival of the ash man, the garbage man, the rubbish man? does he know whether this waste is disposed of in the most sanitary way? does he consider whether it is removed in such a way as to be inoffensive and without danger to the people through whose streets it is carried? does he know anything of the cost to the city of waste disposal? is it merely an expense, and a heavy one, for him in common with other taxpayers to bear? or is the business made to pay for itself? if not, is it possible to make it pay? does any community make the waste account balance itself at the end of the year? [illustration: photograph by brown bros. an objectionable garbage wagon. disposal of waste is a subject too often neglected both in urban and in rural communities] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. this new covered garbage wagon subjects the public to no danger] in the country, once more we face the individual problem rather than that of the community. here proper provision for the disposal of waste often necessitates more knowledge of the subject than is possessed by the homemaker, or sometimes it requires the installation of apparatus whose cost seems prohibitive. a careful consideration of these matters will possibly disclose the fact that a smaller expenditure may accomplish the desired purpose. or, if this is not true, it may be found that the end accomplished is worth the expenditure of what seemed a prohibitive sum. a water closet, for instance, has not only a sanitary but a moral value. we must somehow educate people to understand and to believe that the basis of family health and usefulness is proper living conditions, and that some system of sewage and garbage disposal is a necessary step toward proper living conditions. with the urban population these matters are removed from personal and immediate consideration, but every rural homemaker must face his own problems, with the knowledge that since his conditions are individual his solution must be equally his own. in the matters pertaining to decoration within the house as well as beautifying its surroundings, the country-and the city-dweller meet on equal terms. their problems may differ in detail, but the principles to be studied are the same. here our art courses must be made to contribute their share to the homemaker's training. we must strike the keynote of simplicity, both within and without, and must teach girls especially the value of carefully thought-out color schemes and decorating plans, to be carried out by different people in the materials and workmanship suited to their purses. they must learn that expense is not necessarily a synonym for beauty; they must know the characteristics of fabrics and other decorative materials; and they must be trained to recognize the qualities for which expenditure of money and effort are worth while. in the designing of school buildings nowadays close attention is paid to beauty of architecture, symmetry of form, convenience of arrangement, and durable but artistic furnishings. all unwittingly the child receives an aesthetic training through his daily life in the midst of attractive surroundings. many of our rural schools are doing excellent work in teaching children to beautify the school grounds. some, of them go farther and interest their pupils in attacking the problem of improving outside conditions at home. every child whose mind is thus turned in the direction of attractive home grounds has unconsciously taken a step toward one branch of efficient homemaking. if it were possible to give pupils the foundation principles of landscape gardening, they might learn to see with a trained eye the problems they will otherwise attack blindly. [illustration: an example of the newer architecture. an artistic approach to a school has a daily effect on the mind of the child] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. rural school with flower bed. many of the rural schools are doing excellent work in teaching children to beautify the school grounds] with the house built and ready for its furniture, the selection of the latter becomes both part of the scheme of decoration and part also of the domestic plans for securing comfort and inspiring surroundings. the same principles of beauty and utility, restfulness, comfort, and suitability, are called into requisition. the trained housewife will have an eye toward future dusting and will choose the less ornate articles. the same person, in her capacity as the mother of citizens, will see that chairs are comfortable to sit in, that tables and desks are the right height for work, that book cases and cabinets are sufficient in number and size to take care of the family treasures. she will use pictures sparingly and choose them to inspire. perhaps, most of all, the woman with the trained mind will know how to avoid a superfluity of furniture in her rooms. she will be educated to the beauty of well-planned spaces and will not feel obliged to fill every nook and corner with chairs or tables or sofas or other pieces of furniture which merely "fill the space." [illustration: photograph by brown bros. an artistic living room. the principles of beauty and utility, restfulness, comfort, and suitability, must all be considered in the furnishing of a home] before furnishing is considered complete, the housekeeper must take into account the matter of operating apparatus. perhaps a large part of this important department of house equipment has been built into the house. the water system, the sewer connection or its substitute, and the lighting apparatus are already installed, so that the turn of a switch or a faucet, the pull of a chain, sets one or all to work for us. we are now to consider whether we shall buy a vacuum cleaner or a broom and dustpan; a washing machine and electric flatiron or the services of a washerwoman, or shall telephone the laundry to call for the wash. shall we invest in a "home steam-canning outfit" at ten dollars, or make up a list for the retailer of the products of the canning factory? shall we have a sewing machine, or plan to buy our clothing from "the store"? once upon a time practically the only labor-saving device possible to the housekeeping woman was another woman. to-day many devices are offered to take her place. our homemaker must know about them, and must compare their value with the older piece of operating machinery, the domestic servant. she must know what it costs to keep a servant, in money, in responsibility, and in all the various ways which cannot be reduced to figures. already the pros and cons of the "servant question" have caused much and long-continued agitation. the woman of the future should be taught to approach the matter with a scientific summing up of the facts and with a readiness to lift domestic service to a standardized vocation or to abandon it altogether in favor of the "labor-saving devices" and the "public utilities." certain of our home-efficiency experts assure us that all "industries in the home are doomed." if this is true, the domestic servant must of necessity cease to exist. most persons, however, cannot yet see how "public utilities" will be able to do all of our work. we may send the washing out, but we cannot send out the beds to be made, the eggs to be boiled, or the pictures, chairs, and window sills to be dusted. the table must be set at home, and the dishes washed there, until we approach the day of communal eating places, which, as we all know, will be difficult to utilize for infants and the aged, for invalids, and for the vast army of those who are averse to faring forth three times daily in search of food. for a long time yet the domestic servant, _or her substitute_, will be with us, doing the work that even so great a power as "public utilities" cannot remove from the home. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. contrast the bad taste displayed in the furnishing of this hopelessly inartistic room with the simplicity shown in that on page ] at present there is much to indicate that the servant's substitute, in the form of various labor-saving devices, will eventually fill the place of the already vanishing domestic worker. whether this proves to be the case will rest largely with these girls whom we are educating to-day. the pendulum is swinging rather wildly now, but by their day of deciding things it may have settled down to a steady motion so that their push will send it definitely in one direction or the other. there is no inherent reason why making cake should be a less honorable occupation than making underwear or shoes; why a well-kept kitchen should be a less desirable workroom than a crowded, noisy factory. but under existing conditions the comparison from the point of view of the worker is largely in favor of the factory. among the facts to be faced by the homemaker who wishes to intercept the flight of the housemaid and the cook are these: . hours for the domestic worker must be definite, as they are in shop or factory work. . the working day must be shortened. . time outside of working hours must be absolutely the worker's own. . the worker must either live outside the home in which she works, or must have privacy, convenience, comfort, and the opportunity to receive her friends, as she would at home. in short, the houseworker must have definite work, definite hours, and outside these must be free to live her own life, in her own way, and among her own friends, as the factory girl lives hers when her day's work is done. that women are already awaking to these responsibilities is shown by the increasing number who choose the labor-saving devices in place of the flesh-and-blood machine. many of these women will tell you that they make this choice to avoid the personal responsibility involved in having a resident worker in the house. there _is_ comfort in not having to consider "whether or not the vacuum cleaner likes to live in the country," or the bread mixer "has a backache," or the electric flatiron desires "an afternoon off to visit its aunt." it is the same satisfaction we feel in urging the automobile to greater speed regardless of the melting heat, the pouring rain, or the number of miles it has already traveled to-day. perhaps the future will see machines for household work so improved and multiplied that we can escape altogether this perplexing personal problem of "the woman who works for us." whether or not we escape this problem when we patronize the laundry, the bakeshop, the underwear factory, is a matter for further thought. to many it seems a simpler matter to face the problem of one cook, one laundress, than to investigate conditions in factory, bakery, and laundry, to agitate, to "use our influence," to urge legislation, to follow up inspectors and their reports, to boycott the bakery, to be driven into the establishment of a coöperative laundry whether we will or no, in order to fulfill our obligations to the "women who work for us" in these various places. true, our duty to womankind requires that we do all these things to a certain extent so long as the public utilities exist, but with the multiplication of utilities to a number sufficient to do a large portion of our work, it would seem that women would be left little time for anything else than their supervision and regulation. problems relating to the establishing of a home would once have been considered far from the province of the teacher in the public school. formerly we taught our children a little of everything except how to live. now we are realizing that the teacher should be a constructive social force. living is a more complicated thing than it once was, and the school must do its share in fitting the children for their task. all these matters we have been considering--the selection of a home site, building, decorating, furnishing, sanitation, and all the rest--represent constructive social work the teacher may do, which, if she passes it by, may not be done at all. college courses should prepare the teacher for such work, but even the girl who is not college-trained will find, if she seeks it, help sufficient for her training. and the work awaits her on every hand. chapter iv running the domestic machinery with a home established, the problems confronting the homemaker become those of administration. the "place for making citizens" is built and ready. the making of citizens must begin. one of the fundamental requisites for the efficient operation of the home plant is that the homemaker shall have a firm grasp upon the financial part of the business. to estimate the number of homes wrecked every year by lack of this economic knowledge is of course impossible; but you can call up without effort many cases in which this lack was at least a contributing element to the wreck. keeping expenditures within the income is only the _abc_ of the financial knowledge required, although, like other _abc_'s, it is essential to the acquirement of deeper knowledge. it is not enough that the housekeeper merely succeeds in keeping out of debt. she must know what to expect in return for the money that she spends, and she must know whether or not she gets it. she must have definitely in mind the results she expects, and she must know why she spends for certain objects rather than for others. in the days of famine and fear, the individual was fortunate who had food, shelter, and a skin to wrap about his shivering shoulders. in these days it is not enough to have merely these things. certain standards of civilized life must be met, and we shall find that it requires judgment and skill to apportion our funds properly. the common needs of civilized mankind are usually roughly classified as follows: food; shelter; clothing; operating expenses, including service, heat, light, water, repairs, refurnishing, and the general upkeep of the plant; advancement, including education, recreation, travel, charity, church, doctor, dentist, savings. the exact proportion of any income devoted to each of these is of course a matter conditioned by the needs of the particular family as well as by its tastes and desires. figures are obtainable which throw light upon proportions found advisable in what are considered typical cases. we may learn the minimum amount of money which will feed a man in new york or in various other cities and towns. we may find estimates as to the prices of a "decent living" in various parts of the country. home-economics experts will furnish us with figures which may be used as a basis for apportioning this amount among departments of household expenses. that the figures offered by these experts differ more or less widely need not disturb us. it is perhaps too early in such work for final authoritative estimates. the following apportionment is taken from chapin's _the standard of living among workingmen's families in new york city_ and has to do with the minimum income required for normal living for a family of father, mother, and three children on manhattan island: food $ . housing . fuel and light . clothing . carfare . health . insurance . sundry items . ------- $ . "families having from $ to $ , a year," concludes dr. chapin, "are able, in general, to get food enough to keep body and soul together, and clothing and shelter enough to meet the most urgent demands of decency." regarding incomes below $ , he says, "whether an income between $ and $ can be made to suffice is a question to which our data do not warrant a dogmatic answer." the two apportionments given below have been made by the federal government and concern the maintenance of a normal standard in two industrial sections of the country. in each case the family is assumed to be, as in dr. chapin's estimate,[ ] made up of father, mother, and three children. fall river, georgia and mass. north carolina food $ . $ . housing . . clothing . . fuel and light . . health . . insurance . . sundry items . . ------- ------- $ . $ . these estimates do no more than suggest the minimum upon which the various items of living expense can be met and the proportion to each account. people who can do more upon their incomes than merely live must look farther for help. mrs. bruère in her _increasing home efficiency_ offers the following as a minimum schedule[ ] for efficient living: food $ . shelter . clothing . operation . advancement . incidentals . ------- $ , . "when the income is over $ , ," mrs. bruère adds, "the family has passed the line of mere decency in living and entered the realm of choice. their budget need not show how the entire income _must_ be spent, but how it may be spent to gain whatever special end the family has in view." that any estimated schedule for any income will fit exactly the needs of any family of father, mother, and three children in any given town in the united states no one supposes, but it is at least a basis upon which to work. and perhaps the main point from an educational standpoint is that it is a schedule at all. the happy-go-lucky, spend-as-you-go style of housekeeping does not constitute efficiency. the homemaking expert we are training will have a better plan. she will have been long familiar with the idea of apportioning incomes. she will have applied the tests of efficient decision to her personal income before she has to attack the problem of spending for a family. the ideal homemaker of the future will be a woman who has had a personal income, and preferably one that she has earned herself and learned how to spend before she enters upon matrimony and motherhood. by the less scientific plan of merely recording what one has spent, when the spending is over, it is more than likely that some departments of home expenditure will gain at the expense of others. if we can afford only $ for rent, and we pay $ , it is evident that we must go without some portion of the food or clothing or advancement that we need. if we dress extravagantly, we must pay for our extravagance by sacrificing efficient living in some other direction. the budget is not entirely or even in large measure for the sake of saving, but rather for the sake of spending wisely. when women become as businesslike in the administration of home finances as they must be to succeed in business life, or as men usually are in their business relations, home administration will be placed upon a secure financial footing and will gain immeasurably in dignity thereby. feeding and clothing a family are perhaps the fundamentals of the homemaker's daily tasks. and upon neither of them will the application of scientific principles be wasted. it is not enough that we merely set food before our families in sufficient quantity to appease the clamoring appetite. children and adults may suffer from malnutrition even though their consumption of food is normal in quantity three times a day. no housewife is properly fitted for her task unless she has some knowledge of dietetics. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. teaching housewives food values. no housewife in these days need lack the knowledge of dietetics which will fit her for her task] many a notable housewife who has perhaps never even heard of dietetics has nevertheless a practical working knowledge of some or many of its principles. there are traditions among housewives that we should serve certain foods at the same meal or should cook certain foods together. often these time-honored combinations rest upon the soundest of dietetic principles. on the other hand, many cooks feed their families by a hit-or-miss method which as often as not violates all the laws of scientific feeding, and which farmers long ago discarded in the feeding of their cows. [illustration: blackburn college students preparing dinner. fortunately girls may study dietetics in the school that teaches them the law of gravity and the rules for forming french plurals] fortunately the girl who so desires may now learn something of these feeding laws in the same school that teaches her the law of gravitation or the rules for forming french plurals. fortunately, also, the girls of to-day seem inclined to undertake such study. it is not too much to expect that the girl of the future will be able to set before her family meals scientifically planned or food wisely and economically purchased, well cooked, and attractively served. nor is it too much to expect that teachers will be able to do these things and to instruct others how to do them. that this ideal requires considerable and varied knowledge is clear at the outset. the serving of a single meal involves: ( ) knowledge of food values, ( ) skill in making a "balanced ration," ( ) knowledge of market conditions, ( ) skill in buying, with special reference to personal tastes and financial conditions, ( ) knowledge of the chemistry of cooking, ( ) skill in applying chemical knowledge, ( ) skill in adapting knowledge of cooking to existing conditions, ( ) knowledge of serving a meal and practice in service. the fact that a large proportion of deaths is directly due to digestive troubles is certainly food for thought. such a statement alone would warrant action of some sort looking toward increased knowledge of food values and food preparation. it is not necessarily because people live upon homemade food that their digestions are impaired, as we so often hear stated nowadays, but because we have taken it for granted that, given a stove, a saucepan, and a spoon, any woman could instinctively combine flour, water, and yeast into food. there is little dependence upon instinct in producing the bread of commerce. bakers' bread is scientifically made, no doubt; but there is no reason why the homemade article may not also be a product of science. and there will always be this difference between the baker and the housewife: the baker's profit must be expressed in dollars and cents, while that of the housewife will be represented in increased force and efficiency in the family that she feeds. with such differing ends in view, the processes and results of each must continue to differ as widely as we know they do at present. it is now some years since charlotte perkins gilman wrote of woman's work: six hours a day the woman spends on food, six mortal hours! * * * * * till the slow finger of heredity writes on the forehead of each living man, strive as he may: "his mother was a cook!" [illustration: a blackburn college student mixing bread. there is no reason why homemade bread may not be the product of science] many women now doubtless spend less time on cooking than when mrs. gilman wrote; perhaps her scorn has borne fruit. but the implication that being a cook is unworthy loses all its force unless it can be shown that "his mother was _nothing but_ a cook." even so, there are worse things one might be. it is true that women should not spend six hours out of the working day on merely one department of their household work. yet the ill-fed family is out of the race for a place among the efficient. let us then teach the coming woman to use less time, more science, and all the labor-savers there are available, and still accomplish the same, or perhaps better, results. that the question of clothing is equally fundamental, perhaps few of us will acknowledge. yet we must not underrate its importance. food furnishes the fuel with which to support the fires of life. clothes, however, contribute not only to comfort and health, but to mental well-being and self-respect. so long as we mingle with our fellow men in civilized communities, raiment will continue to require "taking thought." that much of the feminine part of the population devotes an undue amount of thought to certain aspects of the clothing question we cannot deny. it is equally certain that many women, if not most women, devote too little thought to other phases of the problem. present conditions seem to indicate that the average woman, of any class of society, places the "prevailing mode" first in her personal clothing problems. how to be "in style" absorbs much attention and time. surely it is overshadowing other very important considerations relating to dress. when american women have awakened to the real importance of these considerations, we shall observe a better proportion in studying the clothes question. as a scientific foundation upon which to build her practical knowledge of how to clothe herself and her family, the girl of the future must be trained to an understanding of ( ) the hygiene of clothes, ( ) art expressed in clothes, ( ) the psychology of clothes, ( ) ethics as affected by clothes, ( ) personality as expressed by clothes. there is no stage of life in which hygiene, art, psychology, and ethics do not apply to clothes. the practical knowledge built upon these as a foundation will guide the girl in choosing clothes which are suitable to the occasion for which they are designed, are not extravagant in either price or style, give good value for the money expended, express the individuality of the wearer, and exert an influence uplifting rather than the reverse upon the community at large. [illustration: class in dressmaking at blackburn college. with women scientifically trained in the matter of clothing, we shall do away with much of the absurdity of dress] with such a girl, the fact that "they" are wearing this or that will be always a minor consideration. with women trained in matters of clothing, we shall no longer be confronted by the absurdity of identical styles for thick and thin, short and tall, middle-aged and young, rich and poor. we shall no longer see dress dominating, as it does to-day, the entire lives of thousands of women. from the woman of wealth who spends a fortune every season upon her wardrobe, all the way down the money scale to the young girl who strains every nerve and spends every cent she can earn to buy and wear "the latest style," slavery to fashion is an evil gigantic in its proportions and far-reaching in its results. we have no right to interfere with the woman's instinct to make herself beautiful. rather we should encourage it, and should carefully instruct her in her impressionable years as to what real beauty is. it is almost safe to say that at present the principle by which the modern woman is guided in deciding the great questions of feminine attire is imitation. incidentally, we may remark that nobody profits by such a mistaken foundation except the manufacturer, who moves the women of the world about like pawns on a chessboard merely to benefit his business. the society woman brings the latest thing "from paris." the large new york establishments sell to their patrons copies of "paris models." the middle-class shops and the middle-class women copy the copies. the cheap shops and the poor women copy the copy of the copy. every copy is made of less worthy material than its model, of gaudier colors, with cheaper trimmings, until we have the pitiful spectacle of girls who earn barely enough to keep body and soul together spending their money for garments neither suitable nor durable--sleazy, shabby after a single wearing, short-lived--yet for a few ephemeral minutes "up to date." how far this heartbreaking habit of imitation extends in the poor girl's life we can hardly say. she marries, and buys furniture, crockery, and lace curtains cheap and unsuitable, like her clothes, always imitations and soon gone, to be superseded by more of the same sort. what thoughtful woman desires to feel herself part of an influence which leads to so much that is insincere, uneconomical, wasteful both of raw material and of the infinitely more important material which makes women's souls? what teacher of young girls has a right to hold back from setting her hand against the formation of habits so undesirable? and what of the vast output of the factories which turn out cheap cloth, cheaper trimmings, imitations of silk, imitations of velvet, ribbons which will scarcely survive one tying, shoes with pasteboard soles, and all the other intrinsically worthless products which now find ready sale? when women have been educated to a standard of taste, of suitability, of quality, which will forbid the use of cheap imitations of elegant and costly articles, will not the world gain in bringing such factories to the making of products of real worth instead of their present output? the mother of the future will bring to bear upon the clothing question not only more knowledge, but more serious thought, than she does to-day. for the children she must provide comfortable, serviceable play clothes in generous quantity, that they may pursue their development unhampered in either body or mind. she must know the hygiene of childhood and the psychology of children's clothes. for the growing girls there must be a proper recognition of the growing interest in adornment, avoiding the scylla of vanity on one hand and the charybdis of unhappy consciousness of being "different from the other girls" on the other. for the sons there must be careful provision for the athletic life so dear to the boy, together with due recognition of the approaching dignities of manhood, with special care for the small details which mark the well-groomed man. as in the matter of the food supply, there must be knowledge of markets and skill in buying. and, as in that case, there should be knowledge of the process of transforming materials into the finished product. processes involving a great degree of technical skill, such as the tailor's art, the average woman will not attempt; but the simpler forms of garment making present no special difficulty to those who wish to try them or who find it expedient to do so. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. buying clothing ready made. the question of buying clothing ready made or of making it will find individual solution according to means, inclination, and ability] a wholesale assumption that it is only a question of a short time before all garment making will be done in the factory is probably without warrant. we read again and again of late, "the day of buying instead of making _is here_! we may like it or not like it, but the fact remains, _it is here_!" and then we look all about us, and find that the day is apparently not here for at least several thousands of people of whom we have personal knowledge. that discovery gives us courage to look farther. we find paper-pattern companies flourishing; dress goods selling in the retail departments as they have always sold; seamstresses fully occupied; and we conclude that for some time yet the question of buying or making will find individual solution, according to means, inclination, and ability. what we wish to guard against in the upbringing of our future mothers is the necessity of buying because of a lack of the ability to make. the woman trained to a knowledge of the making of garments is the only woman who can intelligently decide the question for her own household. the others are forced to a decision by their own limitations. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. in a community preserving kitchen questions of food supply may sometimes be solved and community interests unified] passing from the elemental needs, shelter, warmth, food, and clothing, we enter upon the most complex of woman's duties--adjustment of her home to community conditions and provision for her family's share in community life. that these more abstract problems frequently overlap the concrete ones already enumerated need not be said. it is impossible, even if we so desire, to live "to ourselves alone." we shall undoubtedly stand for something in the community, whether consciously or otherwise. if it were given us to know the extent of our influence, we should probably be appalled at the crossing and recrossing of the lines emanating from our daily lives. in some households there are definite aims in the direction of community life. these differ widely. in many the question seems to be entirely, "what can i get from the community?" in some, "what can i give?" in a few, "what can i share?" of the three, the last is without doubt the one which contributes most to community well-being. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a community christmas tree. even the younger children may be given the opportunity to take part in community work] the ordinary family of necessity touches community life at one time or another at certain well-defined points. the efficient homemaker must therefore make intelligent provision for these points of contact with the community. church and charity organizations have always been recognized in american life as community matters and have provided community meeting places and community work. through them, especially in earlier days, women often found their only common activities. the school furnished the same common ground for the children. in the present time of multiplied activity these organizations still stand in the foreground. in them, both young and old find perhaps their best opportunity for "team work." a parish in which all pull together is perhaps as rare as a school in which every child truly desires to learn. yet neither is beyond the possibilities. to keep each family in a proper attitude toward these community institutions is part of the homemaker's work--and a delicate task it often is. it is not enough for a mother to adopt a cast-iron policy of indiscriminate approval of pastor or teacher, although that is often recommended. do you remember your resentment as a child of the inflexible judgment "the teacher _must_ be right"? really there is no "must" about it, and the child knows that as well as we. the mother, therefore, who is able to review the matter in dispute calmly, justly, and withal sympathetically, and who indorses the teacher's action after such review, is a better conserver of the public peace than the prejudging mother. or suppose she fails to indorse the teacher's course. we have always been led to expect that this failure ruins forever the teacher's influence with the child. there are some of us, however, who doubt the immediate destruction of a wise influence, even if we should say, "no, i do not think i should have punished you in just that way. but perhaps you have not told me all that occurred. or perhaps you overlook the fact that you had annoyed miss ---- until, being human like the rest of us, she lost her temper. is it fair for you to treat your teacher in such a way that you cause her to lose her self-control?" it is usually possible for the wise mother to turn her fire upon the child's own error without outraging the childish sense of justice by indorsing something which does not really deserve indorsement. there is, perhaps, no way in which the mother of a family can do so much for the community institutions as by keeping up her own interest in them and thus stimulating the other members of the family to a willingness to do their part in the work of uplift. where everybody is really interested and working, the first great stumbling block in the way of public enterprises has already been surmounted. in the case of the school, however, the well-trained mother will find additional work to do. we who have been teachers know how vainly we have sought for intimate acquaintance on the part of parents with the school. and we who have been mothers know something of the difficulties in the way of gaining such intimate acquaintance. in spite of, or perhaps because of, my long years of schoolroom experience, i am quite unable to conquer my reluctance to knock at a classroom door. there is an aloofness about being a school visitor which most mothers feel and few enjoy. however, it is possible to gain so much of sympathetic understanding by persistent visiting that i have found it worth while to disregard my reluctance. so often we hear mothers say, "i try to visit school at least once each year." i wonder if they ever think of that one visit as an injustice to the teacher? suppose that, as is quite probable, the visitor arrives at an inopportune moment, finding the children in the midst of work which won't "show off," or the air heavy with the echoes of a disciplinary encounter, or the children restless as the session draws to a close, or dull and listless from the heat of an unusually hot day. what the visitor needs to do is not to visit once a year, but to get acquainted with the school as she does with her next-door neighbor or her mother-in-law. having done this, she may attend the meetings of the parent-teacher association with a consciousness of knowing something of the problems to be met and solved. until she has formed such acquaintance she deals with unknown quantities and is therefore in danger of erroneous conclusions. [illustration: mothers visiting a school garden. mothers need to visit the schools often in order to know something of the problems to be met and solved by the teachers] it is interesting to see how completely both teacher and pupils take to their hearts the mother who really does get acquainted them. how easy it is to appeal to her for advice and help; and what a sense of familiar ownership she comes to have in the school. it is no longer merely "what my child is learning" or whether "my children are getting what they ought to get in school," but rather "what _we_ are doing in our school." the activities of women in the church usually follow along well-worn paths. the women help as they have always helped by their attendance at service, by their ladies' aid society or guild, by their missionary society, and by their aid to the poor of the town. many struggling churches depend almost solely upon their women's work for support. that the woman whose problems we are studying should enter upon her church duties armed with wisdom is quite as necessary as that she should be earnest and enthusiastic. the church is not primarily a neighborhood social center. it is first of all a means for spiritual uplift. it must not, in a multiplicity of humanitarian activities, lose its character of spiritual guide. its women will therefore be animated by a spiritual conception of the church and will base their activities in church work upon such a conception. the church built upon such a foundation will be foremost among local forces devoted to community service and will be a true force in the individual lives of its people. the women of the church need to use the church as an effective instrument for community betterment--not merely material welfare, but actual increase in spiritual worth. perfunctory church attendance has little part in such a program. it calls rather for intelligent understanding of church problems and an application of spiritual ideals to everyday life. outside the organizations common to all communities the homekeeper finds that she must keep in touch with her particular neighborhood through its social life. it is here that her children are growing up, here that they find their friends, here that they give and take knowledge of themselves, of people, of ways to enjoy life and to meet its problems. here perhaps they will find their life mates and will start out to be homemakers themselves. the mother of a family must know her community thoroughly. she must do her share toward making it a safe place and a pleasant place in which her children and other children may grow up, and in which she and her husband, other women and their husbands, may spend their lives. the mother who knows her children's friends, who makes them welcome at her house, who "gets acquainted" with their qualities good and bad, who is a "big sister" to them all, will not find herself shut out from her children's social life. if all the mothers were "big sisters" and all the fathers were "big brothers," neighborhood society would be a safer thing than it sometimes is. nor should all the social life center about the young people. the woman's club, the village improvement society, the men's civic league, all have their places. club life will menace neither the man nor the woman whose first interest is the home; and every man and woman needs the stimulus of contact with other minds. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a road in dekalb, illinois, before improvements were made. through the agency of improvement societies, homemakers may often bring about community reforms] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. the same road after repairs were made through the efforts of members of the community] sometimes it will happen that the homemaker finds work to be done in the line of community reform. perhaps the roads are out of repair, or the cemetery is neglected, or the school building insanitary. perhaps the water supply is not properly guarded, or milk inspection not thoroughly looked after. perhaps industrial conditions in the town are not what they should be. perhaps laws are not being enforced. new conditions require new laws. there may be loafing places on streets and in stores which are dangerous. the billiard halls may need a thorough moral cleaning and a moral man placed in charge. the public dance halls may need proper chaperonage. the moving pictures need state and national censorship to eliminate the careless suggestions leading toward both vice and crime. the homemaker must know under such circumstances how to stir public opinion, how to make use of her existing organizations, how to set on foot the various movements necessary for reform. in connection with the subject of the homemaker's place in the community we must return to the thought of woman as the buyer for the home and of her consequent influence upon the economic standards of the community. it is not unusual in these days to read or hear such statements as the following: "the woman was no longer producer and consumer.... she became the consumer and her entire economic function changed.... the housewife is the buying agent for the home." like many statements in regard to woman and her function, this seems overdrawn, since woman in her capacity as homemaker is still a producer as well as a consumer in thousands of cases. that she will become, economically, _merely_ a buying agent, some of us not only doubt, but should consider a certain misfortune, should it occur. the fact remains, however, that as buyer of both raw materials and finished products the woman spends a very large percentage (some say nine-tenths) of the money taken in by the retail merchants of the country. this gives, or should give her, a commanding position in the producing world. if the women of america should definitely decide to-day that they would buy no more corn flakes, or mercerized crochet cotton, or silk elastic, the factories now so busy turning out these products would be shut down to-morrow until they could be converted to other uses. women often fail to realize their power in this direction. when they do realize it, they are able to accomplish quietly all sorts of reforms in the mercantile and industrial worlds. there need be no crusade against adulterated foods other than real education and the refusal of homemakers to buy from merchants who carry them in stock. the same remedy will apply to overworked and underpaid workers, to insanitary shops and factories. that it is the woman's duty to control these matters is a necessary conclusion when we consider her power as the "spender of the family income." who else has this power as she has it? we have already noted how this power might be used to regulate not only the quality but the character of products in the factories. if women merely passed by the outlandish hats, the high heels, the hobble skirts, of fashion, their stay would necessarily be short. the woman, therefore, _if she choose_, is absolutely the controller of production along most lines of food and raiment. that she shall use this controlling power wisely is one of her obligations. and to meet the obligation she must be wisely trained. it would seem that the homemaker, as we have conceived her, has a part in most of the concerns of the community. we speak of "woman and citizenship." to many this means, perhaps, "woman and suffrage." woman in politics is already an accomplished fact in fourteen western states. suffrage has been granted her in the state of new york. that her political influence will widen seems a foregone conclusion. she must therefore be prepared for real service in civic concerns. women have already applied their housecleaning knowledge and skill to the smaller near-by problems of civic life. as time goes on they must render the same service to state and nation. we shall soon see nation-wide "votes for women," in our own country, at least. but whether we do or not, or until we do, woman and citizenship are, as they have always been, closely linked together. in every community relation the homemaker is the good, or indifferent, or bad citizen; and in every home relation she is the citizen still, and, more than that, the mother of future citizens. in spite of the "uneasy women" who feel that the home offers insufficient scope for their intellectual powers, the executive ability required to run a home smoothly and well is of no mean order. "this being a mother is a complicated business," as one mother of my acquaintance expresses it. can we afford to have homemaking underrated as a vocation, to be avoided or entered into lightly, often with neither natural aptitude nor training to serve as guide to the "complications"? it would seem not. we must then consider "guidance toward homemaking" as a necessary part of a girl's education and as a possible solution of the home problems on every hand. we have thus far in this book concerned ourselves with making plain our ideal of girlhood and womanhood and with considering the problems which our girl and woman, when we have done our best to prepare her, will have to meet. we have thus far not concerned ourselves with the questions of how, when, and where the work of preparation is to be done. a clear vision of the end to be attained, not obscured by thought of the means used in reaching it, seems a necessity. from this we may pass on to careful, detailed consideration of agencies and methods. knowing what we desire our girls to be, we may enlist all the forces which react upon girls to make them into what we desire. footnotes: [footnote : no studies of present-day conditions are available. the proportion spent for food, clothing, etc., will remain nearly the same. it is safe to multiply the above estimates by two to obtain the actual cost of living in the year .] part ii guiding girls toward the ideal "a vocational guide is one who helps other people to find themselves. vocational guidance is the science of this self-discovery." chapter v the educational agencies involved the three agencies most vitally concerned in this problem of "woman making" are necessarily the home, the church, and the school--the home and the church, because of their vital interest in the personal result; the school, because, whatever public opinion has demanded, schools have never been able to turn out merely educated human beings, but always boys and girls, prospective men and women. and so they must continue to do. nature reasserts itself with every coming generation. this being so, we must continue to "make women." if we desire to make homemaking women, the most economical way to accomplish this is to use the already existing machinery for making women of some sort. we cannot begin too soon, nor continue our efforts too faithfully. the school cannot leave the whole matter to the home, nor can the home safely assume that the "domestic science" course or courses will do all that is needed for the girl. being a woman is a complex, many-sided business for which training must be broad and long-continued. the teacher has perhaps scarcely realized her responsibilities or her opportunities in this matter. for years, and in fact until very recently, the whole tendency in education for girls has been toward a training which ignores sex and ultimate destiny. the teachers themselves were so trained and are therefore the less prepared to see the necessity for any special teaching along these lines. they may even resent any demand for specialized instruction for girls. yet we are confronted by the fact that the majority of girls do marry, and that many of this majority are woefully lacking in the knowledge and training they should have. nor are these girls exclusively from the poor and ignorant classes. there is no question about the responsibility of the school in the matter. the state which "trains for citizenship" cannot logically ignore the necessity for training the mothers of future citizens. "while i sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill," says g. stanley hall in _adolescence_, "and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, i insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support; and matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for." this criticism, of existing educational conditions is quite as applicable to schools for younger girls as to those which dr. hall has in mind. there is no reason why both school and college may not fit girls for a broad and general usefulness, for "independence and self-support," and at the same time give them the training for that which, with the majority already mentioned, comes to be the great work of their lives. through all the lower grades of school life, and to a certain extent through the whole course, the methods of instruction used will be largely indirect. the child will-seldom be told, "this is to teach you how to keep house." i can think of no field in which this indirect method will produce greater results than the one we are considering. [illustration: montavilla school garden, portland, oregon, where boys and girls raise vegetables for serving in the lunchroom. here the science of growing things is taught as part of the "training for citizenship"] [illustration: lunchroom where vegetables grown in the montavilla school garden are prepared and eaten] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a model school home. one way of teaching children how to "keep house" is by means of the model home where they are given instruction in all the duties of the homemaker] the teacher, in most cases, must begin her homemaking training by realizing that her own example is by the very nature of things opposed to the homemaking principle, the unmarried teacher being the rule in most of our schools. her first care, then, must be to counteract her own example. her references to home life must be always of the most appreciative and even reverent sort. if, as is quite possible, she comes from unsatisfactory conditions in her own home, she must be doubly careful lest her prejudices be passed on to her pupils. she will find ways in which to let it be understood that her ideals of home life are not wanting, although she has not as yet--perhaps for some reason never will--become a homemaker. i have sometimes thought that teachers, in their effort to impress children in more direct ways, lose sight of the great effect of their unconscious influence. after all, it is what the teacher does, rather than what she says, that impresses; and what she _is_, regulates what she does. the teacher must, therefore, have the right attitude toward homemaking and domestic life. it may be of the greatest value in determining the force of her influence in this direction for the children to catch intimate little glimpses of her domestic accomplishments, of her sewing, or of her cooking, or of her quick knowledge and deft handling of emergency cases. the teacher whose influence is felt most and lasts longest is the one whose "motherliness" supplements her academic acquirements and supplies a sympathetic understanding of the child. [illustration: canning tomatoes at the montavilla school. in such a class the mothers of future citizens are given training in one of the fundamental needs of the home--scientific cooking] [illustration: lunchroom where children benefit by the scientific cooking of the vegetables they grow] with innate motherliness as a basis, the teacher must build up a careful understanding not only of child nature, but of man and woman nature as the developed product of child growth. she must be a student of the "woman question" as a vital problem, always recognizing that the whole social structure inevitably depends upon the status of woman in the world. she must face without flinching her responsibilities in sex matters. she may, or may not, be called upon to furnish sex instruction to the girls under her care, but no rules can free her from her moral responsibility in striving to keep the sex atmosphere clean and invigorating. the "conspiracy of silence" on these subjects is broken, and we must accept the fact that modesty does not require an assumed or a real ignorance of the most wonderful of nature's laws. "the idea that celibacy is the 'aristocracy of the future' is soundly based if the business of being a woman rests on a mystery so questionable that it cannot be frankly and truthfully explained by a girl's mother the moment her interest and curiosity seek satisfaction."[ ] and what the mother should tell, the teacher must know. practical use of the teacher's carefully worked-out theories will be made all along the line of the girl's, and to a certain degree the boy's, education. the indirect teaching of the primary grades will give place in the higher grades to more direct dealing with the science, or, better, sciences, upon which homemaking rests. the classroom becomes a "school of theory." the home stands in the equally vital position of a laboratory in which the girl sees the theory worked out and in time performs her own experiments. the finest teaching presupposes perfect coöperation between school and home. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. mothers' and daughters' meeting on sewing day. coöperation between the home and the school makes for the best teaching of domestic science] the first duty of the mother, like that of the teacher, is to preserve always a right attitude toward home life. the girl who grows up in an ideal home will be likely to look forward to making such a home some day. or, if the home is not in all respects ideal, the father or mother who nevertheless recognizes ideal homes as possible may show the girl directly or otherwise how to avoid the mischance of a less than perfect home. the prevalence of divorce places before young men and women sad examples of mismating, of incompetent homemakers, of wrecked homes. we can scarcely estimate the blow struck at ideals of marriage in the minds of girls and boys by these flaunted failures. nor can we even guess how many boys and girls are led to a cynical attitude toward all marriage by their daily suffering in families where parents have missed the real meaning of "home." however practical we may become, therefore--and we must be practical in this matter--we must never overlook the need for parents to give home life an atmosphere of charm. no one else can take their place in doing this. hence it is their first duty to make homemaking seem worth while. the home must take the lead also in giving the idea of homemaking as a definite and scientific profession. the school may teach the science, but unless the home shows practical application of the scientific principles, it would be much like teaching agriculture without showing results upon real soil. skillful teachers recognize the home as a valuable adjunct to their school equipment and are able by wise coöperation to use it to its full value. the home, in its character of laboratory for the school of domestic theory, must possess certain qualifications. like all laboratories, it should be well equipped. this does not mean necessarily with expensive outfit, but with at least the best that means will allow. it implies that the home shall be recognized as a teaching institution quite as much as the school. like other laboratories, it must be a place of experiment, not merely a preserver of tradition. the efficient laboratory presupposes an informed and open-minded presiding genius. [illustration: courtesy of l.a. alderman first crop of radishes and lettuce at the alameda park school, portland, oregon, june, . even in the primary grades children may learn much about the science of growing things] [illustration: bringing exhibits to a school fair in tacoma, washington. skillful teachers who recognize the home as a valuable adjunct to the school equipment encourage the children to make gardens at home] the greatest service that the home can render in the cause of training girls for homemaking is probably close, painstaking study of its own individual girl--her likes, dislikes, aptitudes, and limitations. home-mindedness shows itself nowhere so much as in the home; lack of home-mindedness shows there quite as much. the results of such study should throw great light upon the problem of the girl's future. combined with the observations recorded by her teacher during year after year of the girl's school life, this study offers the strongest arguments for or against this or that career. frequent and sympathetic conferences between parent and teacher become a necessity. there is then less likelihood of opposing counsel when the girl seeks guidance toward her life work. it is quite probable that, while the school undertakes to lay a general foundation for homemaking efficiency, the home, when it reaches the full measure of its power and responsibility, will be best fitted to help the girl to specialize in the direction most suited to her individual power. it can, if it will, _give_ the girl individual opportunities such as the mere fact of numbers forbids the school to give. the special work of the church in training the girl is necessarily that which has to do with her spiritual concept of life, the strengthening of her moral fiber. here school, home, and church must each contribute its share. none of them can undertake alone so important and delicate a task. any attempt to make arbitrary divisions in the work of these three agencies is bound to be at least a partial failure. conditions differ so widely that we can only say of much of the work, "at school or church or in the home," or, better, "at school and church and home in coöperation." each must supplement the efforts of the other, and where one fails, the other must take up the task. it really matters little where the work is done, provided that it _is_ done. the ensuing chapters of this book are written in the hope that they may bring the vital problems of girl training and girl guidance home to both teacher and parent; and especially that they may convince both of the value of coöperation in the inspiring work of helping our daughters to make the most of their lives. footnotes: [footnote : ida m. tarbell, _the business of being a woman_.] chapter vi training the little child "children are the home's highest product." that means at the outset that we have children because we believe in them, and that we train them, as the skilled workman shapes his wood and clay, to achieve the greatest result of which the human material is capable. a factory's output can be standardized. an engine's power can be measured. but he who trains a child can never fully know the mind he works with nor the result he attains. we do know, however, that if it is subject to certain influences, trained by certain laws, _the chances are_ that this mind which we cannot fully know will react in a certain way. to attempt in a chapter to outline a system of training for children would be an attempt doomed to certain failure. books are written on this subject, and the shelves of the child-study and child-training department in the libraries are rapidly filling. what i have in mind here is rather a single line of the child's development--that which leads toward making him a useful factor in the home life of which he forms a part. the boy or girl who fills successfully a place in the home of his childhood will be in a fair way to undertake successfully the greater task of founding a home of his own. in the days of infancy and early childhood, training for boys and girls may be more nearly identical than in later life. a large part of the differentiation in the work and play of little boys and girls would seem to be quite artificial. we give dolls to girls and drums to boys, but only because of some preconceived notion of our own. the girls will drum as loudly and the boys care for the baby quite as tenderly, until some one ridicules them and they learn to simulate a scorn for "boys' things" and "girls' things" which they do not really feel. throughout this chapter, therefore, it is to be assumed that the training suggested is quite as applicable and quite as necessary for one sex as for the other. young mothers sometimes ask the family doctor, "when shall i begin to train the baby to eat at regular intervals, to go to sleep without rocking, in general to accept the plan of life we outline for him?" the answer seldom varies: "before he is twenty-four hours old." it is therefore evident that all the basic principles of living, whether physical or mental, must have their foundations far back in the child's young life. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. helping with the housework. the boy or girl who successfully fills a place in the home of his childhood will be in a fair way to undertake successfully the greater task of founding a home of his or her own] as a basis for all the rest, we must work for health. a truly successful life, rounded and full, presupposes health. regular habits, nourishing food, plenty of sleep, are axiomatic in writings treating of the care of young children, yet it is surprising how often these rules are violated. "it is easier" to give the child what he wants or what the others are having; easier to let him sit up than to put him to bed; easier to regard the moment than the years ahead. [illustration: already well started on his education] aside from the physical foundation, the training that we are to give our little children will probably be based upon our conception of what they need to make them good sons and daughters, good brothers and sisters, good friends, good husbands and wives, and good fathers and mothers. in other words, it is the social aspect of life that we have in mind, and our social ideals. whatever the boy "wants to be when he grows up," he is sure to have social relations with his kind. whether the girl marries or remains single, she cannot entirely escape these relations. indeed they are thrust upon both boy and girl already. what then do they need to enable them to be successful in the human relations of living? we might enumerate here a long list of virtues that will help, but, since long lists shatter concentration, let us narrow them to four: ( ) sympathy, ( ) self-control, ( ) unselfishness, ( ) industry. i do not mean to say that, with these four qualities only, a man will make a successful merchant or farmer, or that a woman will become a good housekeeper or a skillful teacher. but i do mean that in family relations these four qualities are worth more than intellectual attainments or any sort of manual skill. it is really astonishing to see how much these four will cover. we desire thrift--what is thrift but self-control? tolerance--what but sympathy--the "put yourself in his place" feeling? courtesy--what but unselfishness? let us, then, in the child's early years concentrate upon sympathy, self-control, unselfishness, and industry. you will doubtless remember cabot's summary of the four requirements of man[ ]--work, play, love, and worship. suppose we could write on the wall of every nursery in the land: sympathy } { work self-control } in { play unselfishness } { love industry } { worship would not this writing on the wall be a fruitful reminder to the mothers? the period of early childhood is the one in which the home may act with least interference as the child's teacher. later, whether she will or no, the mother must share the work of training with the school, the church, and that indefinite influence we class vaguely as society. during these few early years, then, the mother must use her opportunity well. it will soon be gone. how shall she teach such abstract virtues as sympathy, unselfishness, self-control? recognizing the fact that the little child acts merely as his instinct and feelings prompt, she must make all training at this stage of his life take the form of developing the instincts. probably the strongest of these at this time is imitation. consequently most of the teaching must take advantage of the imitative instinct. the first care should be to surround the child with the qualities we desire him to possess. the mother who scolds, gives way to temper, or is unwilling or unable to control her own emotions and acts can hope for little self-control in her child. in the same way the father who kicks the dog or lashes his horse or is hard and cold in his dealings with his family may expect only that his child will begin life by imitating his undesirable qualities. this necessary supervision of the child's environment is a strong argument for direct oversight of little children by the mother. it is often difficult even for her to keep an ideal example before the child; and if she leaves it to hired caretakers, they seldom realize its necessity or are willing to take the pains she would herself. especially is this true of the young and ignorant girls who are often seen in sole charge of little children. this first step being merely passive education, it is not enough. we must not only set an example; we must go farther and strive to get from the child acts or attitudes of mind based upon these examples. let us take first the quality of sympathy, which is closely allied to reflex imitation. it is difficult to say just when the child merely reflects the emotions of those about him and when he consciously thinks of others as having feelings like his own. this conscious thought is, of course, the foundation of real sympathy, and it comes early in the child's life--probably before the fourth year. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood stories that broaden the child's conception of the lives and feelings of others are of value in training for sympathy] a little girl of three was greatly interested and pleased at the appearance of a roast chicken upon the family dinner table. she chattered about the "birdie" as she had done before on similar occasions. but when the carving knife was lifted over it, she astonished everyone by her terrified cry of "don't cut the birdie. hurt the birdie." no explanation or excuse satisfied her, and it was finally necessary to remove the platter and have the carving done out of her sight. most children are naturally sympathetic _when they have experienced or can imagine_ the feelings of others. the cruelty of children, is usually due to their absorption in their own feelings without a _realization_ of the pain they inflict. training for sympathy then must consist of enlargement of experience and cultivation of imagination. some mothers do not talk enough with their children. they talk _to_ them--that is, they reprimand or direct them, but do not carry on conversations, as they might do greatly to the child's advantage. telling stories is one of the most fruitful methods of training at this age. even "this little pig went to market" has possibilities in the hands of a skillful mother. the bedtime story is a definite institution in many families. it deserves to be so in all. beginning with the nursery rimes, the stories will gradually broaden in theme, and if their dramatic possibilities are at all realized by the story-teller, the children will broaden in their conception of the lives and feelings of others. sympathy will thus in most cases be a plant of natural and easy growth. intercourse with other children and with the older members of the child's family will also furnish constant material for the thoughtful mother. the baby bumps its head, and the mother soothes it with gentle, loving words. it is more than likely that the three-or four-year-old will express his sympathy also. surely he will if the mother says, "poor baby. see the great bump. how it must hurt!" or perhaps "big sister" is happy on her birthday. again, the three-year-old is likely to show happiness also, and the wise mother will help the child by a timely word to take the step from reflex imitation of happiness to true sympathy. nor must we overlook the occasions when some one in the nursery has been "naughty" and must be punished. "poor bobby! he is sad because he cannot play with us this morning. he feels the way you did when you were naughty and had to sit so still in your little chair. i am sorry for bobby--aren't you? we hope he will be good next time, don't we?" [illustration: photograph by brown bros. kindergarten games afford the intercourse with other children necessary to the child's development] teaching self-control is quite a different matter from the foregoing, and one which requires infinitely more work and patience. the first step is, however, the same. if you would have sympathy, show sympathy. if you would have self-control in a child, control yourself. remember the strength of the imitative instinct. next, strive to obtain control in the young child in some small matter where control is easy. any normal child will learn that control _pays_--_if you make it pay_. encourage the hungry child to stop crying while you prepare his food, but prepare it quickly, or he will begin to cry again to make you hurry. mothers usually work hard to teach control of bodily functions, but often far less to obtain control of mental and moral conditions. obedience, considered from time immemorial the chief virtue of childhood, is really only of value as it conduces to self-control in later life. the wise parent, therefore, while requiring obedience for the convenience of the family and the safety of the child, will lay far more stress upon teaching the child to control himself. the work must be done almost entirely by indirect methods during the early years. offering artificial rewards and dealing out artificial punishments are the crudest forms of encouraging effort. the natural reward and the inevitable natural punishment are far better when they can be employed. [illustration: courtesy of the united charities of chicago a group of children at the mary crane nursery, chicago. children acquire self-control by learning to help themselves] the child who overcomes his tendency to play before or during his dressing may be rewarded by some special morning privilege which will automatically regulate itself. in our family it is the joyful task of bringing in and distributing the morning mail. the child not dressed "on time" necessarily loses the privilege. we are not punishing, but "we can't wait." lack of control of temper presupposes solitude. "people can't have cross children about." quarrels inevitably bring cessation of group play or work--solitude again. the child's love of approbation may also be made of great assistance. always we must remember that doing _what we tell him to do_ is not after all the main thing. it is doing the right thing, being willing to do the right thing, and being able to hold back the impulse to do the wrong thing, that count. we are working "to train self-directed agents, not to make soldiers." unselfishness is a plant of slow growth. indeed it is properly not a childish trait at all, and the most we can probably get is its outward seeming. but it is important that we at least acquaint the child with ideals of unselfishness. we must find much in the child to appeal to, even though altruistic motives do not appear until much later than this. the love of approbation will prove a strong help again, also the sense of justice with which children seem endowed from the beginning. "help him because he helped you," or "give her some because she always gives you part of hers," is often effective. just as in the case of self-control, the child will learn to overcome his innate selfishness "if it pays" to do so. it may seem wrong to encourage any but the highest motive, but a habit of unselfish acts, resting upon a desire to win the approbation of others, is a better foundation upon which to build than no foundation at all. purely disinterested or altruistic motives do not appear in the normal child much before the age of adolescence, and by that time selfishness, which accords so well with the individualistic instincts of the child, will have hardened into a fixed habit if not vigorously checked. care must be taken to _lead_ the child toward unselfish acts, but not to _force_ them upon him. the common courtesies of life we may require, but, beyond that, example, tactful suggestion, wisely chosen stories, and judicious praise will do far more than force. the idea of kindness may be grasped by young children and, together with the great ideal of service, should be emphasized in their home life and in their intercourse with other children. the "only child" suffers most from lack of opportunity to learn these two great needs of his best self--kindness and service. occasions should be systematically made for such a child (indeed for all children) to meet other children on some common ground. playthings should be shared, help given and received, and the idea of interdependence brought out. "we must help each other" should be emphasized from early childhood. much must be made of the little helps the child is able to give in the home--bringing slippers for father, going on little errands about the house for mother, picking up his own playthings, hanging up his coat and hat, caring for the welfare of the family pets. careful provision should be made for the child's convenience in performing these little services. there must be places for the toys, low hooks for the wraps, and constant encouragement and recognition of the small helper. some day he may help you because he loves to help. now he loves to be praised for helping. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. helping the little sister. children will learn unselfishness and kindness if they are early taught to help one another] activity is a natural and absorbing part of a child's life. he is always doing something. it remains for the parent to direct this restless movement and to transform some of it into useful labor. work, in the sense of accomplishing results for the satisfaction and benefit of the parent, is quite foreign to our plan for training the young child. but work for the child's own satisfaction and for the formation of the habit of industry must occupy our attention in large measure. the child's playthings should from his earliest days be chosen in recognition of his desire to do things and make things. the shops are filled with showy toys, mechanical and otherwise, and children find the toyshop a veritable fairyland. but once satiated with the sight of any particular toy, however cunningly devised--and satiety comes soon--the child forsakes the gorgeous plaything for his blocks, or paper and a pair of scissors, or even his mother's clothespins. he can do something with these. the montessori materials are perhaps the most thoughtfully planned in this direction of anything now obtainable; and no one having the care of young children should be without some knowledge of this now famous method. all the materials have this advantage: they offer definite problems and consequently afford the child the joy of accomplishment. a few of the occupations of life afford us unending enjoyment at every stage of the doing, but not many. it is rather the achievement of our end, the "lust of finishing," which carries us through the tiresome details of our work. the child must therefore be early introduced to the joy of accomplishment. instead of unending toys, give him something to work with. he will appreciate your thoughtfulness, and he will find not only joy but real development in their use. at first the child's work will consist of fragmentary efforts, but at a remarkably early age he will show evidence of a power of concentration and persistence which will make possible the accomplishment of finished undertakings. he begins to know what he wants to do and to exhibit considerable ingenuity in finding and combining materials. most of all, he wants to imitate the activities he sees around him. in the strain of modern life a widespread restlessness seems to have seized mankind. whatever people do, they want to be doing something else, and the pathway of the average individual is strewn with crude beginnings, half-finished jobs, abandoned work. the child very easily falls into line with this tendency of his elders. hence he needs definite encouragement to see clearly what he has in hand and to bring his industrial attempts to a worth-while conclusion. avoid, even with a little child, that inconsiderate habit of "grown-ups" of calling the little worker away whenever you desire his attention or help, quite regardless of the damage you may do to his work by your untimely interruption. keep the child, as far as possible, too, from undertaking tasks too difficult or requiring too much time for completion. discourage aimless handling of tools. a cheerful "what are you making?" sometimes crystallizes hitherto rambling desires. a timely suggestion often meets with enthusiastic response. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. helping in the home tasks. wisely directed activity will teach the child both unselfishness and industry] the working outfit of a child under school age may or may not include kindergarten or montessori material. balls, blocks, pencils and paper, paste, colored crayons, scissors, a blackboard, a cart, a wheelbarrow, stout little garden tools, a sand tray or, better, in summer an outdoor sandpile, will furnish endless work and endless delight to a child or group of children. it is not so much what sort of material we use as the way in which we use it. even at this age the child longs to be a producer, to "make things"; and his best development requires that we train this inclination. there is a prevalent notion that women especially are no longer required to be producers and that all our energies should be bent toward the sole task of making them intelligent consumers. there is, however, a joy in producing without which no life is really complete. and no scheme of education can be a true success which ignores or neglects the necessity of producing. the joy of work, the delight in achievement, should be the keynote of all industrial training. this should be kept constantly in view. to most people there is something wonderfully appealing about the innocence of the little child. we watch with delight the marvelous development of the little mind keeping pace with the growth of bodily strength and dexterity. we are reluctant to see the day drawing near when the child must begin his long course of training in school. sometimes we fail to recognize the fact that before school days come the child has already received a considerable part of his education; that the habits which will make or mar his future are often firmly implanted and in a fair way to become masters of the young life. an elaborate plan for the little child's training would probably be abandoned even if undertaken, since elaborate plans involve endless work. if, however, we attempt no more than i have outlined in this chapter, we have some reasonable chance of success. given good health, with regular bodily habits, as a physical foundation, the child will have had much done for him if we have begun to build the habits of sympathy, self-control, industry, and service which will purify and sweeten the family relations of later years and make the one-time child worthy himself to undertake the important task of home building. it is naturally a matter for regret that the teacher into whose hands the child comes first at school usually knows so little of the home training he has had or failed to have. children whose parents have made little or no attempt to teach these fundamental qualities which we have had under discussion are sometimes forever handicapped unless the teacher can supply the deficiency. children who have made a good beginning may lose much of what they have been taught unless the teacher recognizes and holds them to the ideal. the kindergarten or primary teacher needs to know the homes of her pupils; and the time is not far distant when the school will recognize the home as after all the first grade in school life. then mothers will receive the inspiration of contact with the teachers and their ideals, not alone when their children reach school age, but from the time the first child arrives in the home. the sunday school has its "cradle roll." the day school may emulate its example. footnotes: [footnote : cabot, _what men live by_.] chapter vii teaching the mechanics of housekeeping going to school marks an epoch in every child's life. hitherto, however wide or narrow the child's contact with the world has been, the mother has been, at least nominally and in most cases actually, the controlling power. now she gives her child over for an increasingly large part of every day to outside influence. more and more we are coming to see that the evolution of a successful homemaker requires that the school as well as the home keep the homemaking ideal before it. and so the best schools of the country are doing. the greatest needs of the little girl's early school days would seem to be a definite understanding between teacher and mother of the share each should assume in the homemaking training. this necessitates personal conferences or mothers' meetings, or both. the little girl of primary-school age points the way for both teacher and mother by her adaptation and imitation of home activities in her play. in primary grades girls are approaching the height of the doll interest, which hall and others place at eight or nine years. a doll's house, therefore, may be made the source of almost infinite enjoyment and profit in these grades. indeed it is hardly too much to say that no primary room is complete without one. nor is there any reason why any school should remain without one, since its making is the simplest of processes. four wooden boxes, of the same size, obtained probably from the grocer, the dry-goods merchant, or the local shoe dealer, will make a most satisfactory house if placed in two tiers of two each, with the open sides toward the front. this gives four rooms, which may be furnished as kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom. windows may be cut in the ends or back, if the boys of the school are sufficiently expert with tools or if outside assistance can be secured for an hour or so. the best results with the doll's house are obtained if the children are allowed to furnish it themselves, with the teacher's advice and help, rather than to find it completely equipped and therefore merely a "plaything" of the sort that children have less use for because they can do little with it. an empty house presents exciting possibilities, and perhaps for the first time these little girls look with seeing eyes at the home furnishings, for they have wall paper to select, curtains and rugs to make, and indeed no end of things to do. [illustration: the little girl adapts and imitates home activities in play] it is perhaps scarcely necessary to call to mind the educational advantages possible in the planning and making of bedding, draperies, table linen, towels, couches and pillows, window seats, and other furnishings, as well as in the ingenuity brought into play in evolving kitchen utensils and in stocking the cupboards with the necessities for housekeeping. the free interchange of ideas should be encouraged, and the spirit of seeking the best fostered. the conspicuous results in this work are two: we secure the child's attention to details of housekeeping, and we build up a foundation ideal of what housekeeping equipment should be. children in poorly equipped homes may find the most practical of training in this way. my experience has been that teachers have only to begin this work in order to arouse enthusiasm in any class of little girls. once begun, it carries itself along. there should be no compulsion in this work. choice and not necessity must be the rule in all our training for homemaking. to compel a child's attention to that which she will later do voluntarily, if at all, will at the very outset defeat our purpose. [illustration: making furniture for a doll's house affords educational advantages in emphasizing the details of housekeeping] the finest sort of coöperation arises in this work when parents are led to provide the little girl at home with a doll's house fashioned like the one at school. perhaps they may go a step farther and find space for a larger scheme of housekeeping, in the attic or elsewhere. coöperation among the children means interchange of ideas, materials, and labor, most helpful to social ideals. from the furnishing of the doll's house it is easy to pass to plays involving the activities of home life. children delight in sweeping, dusting, washing dishes, arranging cupboards and pantries, and making beds in their miniature houses, and if their efforts are wisely directed, orderly habits easily begin to form. in all these varieties of work the children must be led to feel that there is a right way, and that only that way is good enough, even for play. the great result of all play housekeeping is the formation of ideals. it is just as easy to learn at seven or eight the most efficient way of washing dishes as it is to defer that knowledge until years of inefficient work harden into inefficient habits. the teacher will find abundant and interesting studies in household efficiency in recently published books to inspire her guidance of the children's activity. the step from washing play dishes at school to washing real dishes at home is easily taken, and children are delighted to take it. here again the school and home may--indeed must, for best results--work together. some schools are giving school credit for home work along domestic lines. that there are complex elements entering into the successful working out of such a plan one must admit. a school giving credit for work it does not see may put a premium upon quantity rather than quality. the teacher who asks her little pupils to wash the home dishes according to school methods may encounter adverse comment from certain parents who are quick to resent outside "management." nevertheless, home practice in accordance with school theory is the ideal of any coöperative education in the mechanics of housekeeping; therefore some scheme must be worked out whereby the girls will practice at home, and, having learned to do by doing, will continue to do in the families where their doing will be a help. let us consider for a moment the present condition of the school-credit-for-home-work idea. schemes are being worked out in various places, under one or the other of the following plans. _plan i_ (often known as the massachusetts plan). each pupil, with the advice of his teacher and the consent of his parents, selects some one definite piece of work to do at home regularly, under direction of the school and with some study at school of the practical problems involved. school credit depends upon approval by the teacher on the occasion of a visit of inspection to the home. _plan ii_ (sometimes called the oregon plan). this is more directly concerned with the cultivation of a helpful spirit than with perfect technique or broad knowledge. no attempt is made to correlate home and school work. credit is given merely for the fact that the dishes were washed, the table set, or the baby bathed, the fact being properly certified by the parent. whether the work was acceptably done or not rests entirely with the parent. in the carrying out of the latter plan blanks are usually issued to be filled out and handed in once a week or once a month. each task carries a certain value in school credit. that either of these plans possesses certain weaknesses doubtless even their makers would admit. but they are at least opening wedges. a plan might be worked out whereby little girls are taught one household task at a time, through their play housekeeping, after which credit may be given for satisfactory performance of the task at home. later another household duty may be taught, and put into practice, with credit, at home, thus building up a body of known duties for which the little house-helper has been duly trained. for its highest efficiency such a plan would require more than consent on the part of mothers. its success would depend upon coöperative leadership and its value upon the acceptance, for school credit, of only that work done in conformity with school ideals. but at all events, whether school credit be given or not, the stimulus of interest in home tasks may be given strength by the teacher's wise suggestion, and thoughtful consideration of the matter in teachers' and mothers' meetings will insure coöperation of the most helpful sort. the tactful teacher will find ways to suggest to mothers that children be held up at home to the ideals of efficiency she has been at pains to put before them at school. the suggestion has been recently made by several thoughtful educators that the noon hour, in schools where children do not go home for dinner, be made use of for the simplest of cooking lessons. the children who at seven are quite content to play house soon pass into the stage where they wish to see results from their work. they want to "make things," real things, that they or some one can use. children of nine or ten can learn to cook cereals and eggs in various ways, to make cocoa, and to prepare other simple dishes. their pride and delight in these accomplishments are intense. these activities are equally suited to the small rural school and to the consolidated schools which are happily taking the place of the one-room buildings. in both, the teacher may find the lunch hour a real educational force if it is used aright. if the teacher allows and guides these efforts in the schoolroom, she must keep in mind her "ideal of efficiency." accurate measurements, logical processes, elimination of awkward and unnecessary movements, care in following directions, neatness, and precision are the real lessons to be learned. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a school garden. the possibilities for good through school-garden work are numberless] school gardens are perhaps already too familiar to require more than a word. their possibilities for good are numberless. in them many children get their first insight into the joys of making things grow and are led by this joy to undertake the care of a home garden and to beautify the home surroundings as they had never thought of doing before. school-garden work leads to beautifying the school grounds, with resulting pride and interest in the school. accompanying the activities we have suggested, teachers will find a wide field in attractive stories of helpful coöperative home life. extracts from many of miss alcott's stories, the cratchits' christmas dinner from dickens' _christmas carol_, and many other delightful glimpses of home life can be read, or, better, dramatized, with little effort and with good results. it may seem that the homemaking training here suggested for younger children is too desultory, too slight, in fact, to affect the situation much. but let us consider. homemaking is an art, coming more and more to be based on a foundation of science. for it is undoubtedly true that, while the pessimists are telling us that the home is doomed, we who are optimists see coming toward us a great wave of homemaking knowledge which if seized upon will put the homemaker's art upon a surer foundation than it has ever been. the elements of housekeeping are the _abc_ of homemaking. we shall do well to teach them early, incidentally, and with no undue exaggeration of their place in the scheme of living. we simply familiarize the girl, by long and quiet contact, with the tools of the homemaker, for future scientific use, just as we teach the multiplication facts for later use in the science of mathematics. a definite list of the simple homemaking tasks suitable for little girls to undertake may not be out of place here: . setting the table. (a card list of table necessities is useful. such a list may be given each little girl when she undertakes home practice work.) . clearing the table. . washing the dishes. . sweeping the kitchen. sweeping the piazza. . dusting. . making beds and caring for bedrooms. . arranging her own bureau drawers and closets. . simple cooking. . hemming towels and table linen. . ironing handkerchiefs and napkins. as the child grows older, methods of teaching grow increasingly direct. even here we shall perhaps not talk a great deal about "preparing for homemaking." but we shall see that the tools grow increasingly familiar, and that ideals once taught are retained and added to. we shall see that our science, our mathematics, our art, all contribute to the acquirement of homemaking knowledge. we shall give a practical turn to these more or less abstract subjects. sewing and cooking classes are by this time a recognized part of grammar-school courses in many city schools. that they are not so firmly intrenched in the country schools is due usually to difficulties in the way of securing equipment and to the already crowded condition of the school program. the ideal remedy is the substitution of the consolidated school with its domestic science room and its specially trained teacher for the scattered one-room buildings. wherever the consolidated school has come, it has been enthusiastically received and supported. no one wishes to go back to the old way. but in many localities the consolidated school has not come and cannot be immediately looked for; and in these places the need of the homemaking work is just as great. the teacher must find the way to give these girls what they need. if no other way presents itself, the teacher will do well to ask the help of the mothers of the neighborhood. perhaps one who is an expert needlewoman will give an hour or two a week in the school or at her own home to carrying out the sewing course which the teacher cannot crowd into her own already overcrowded program. perhaps another will do the same for the cooking, making her own kitchen for one afternoon a week an annex of the school. it is important, however, when such arrangements are made that they be recognized as school work, and if possible the courses followed should be planned and supervised by the regular teacher of the school. thus only can they be held to standardized accomplishment. the inadequacy of the "one-portion" method of teaching girls to cook has aroused serious thought, and remedies of various sorts have been applied. you know, perhaps, the story of the chicago cooking-school student who "had to make seven omelets in succession at home last night" because one egg would not make enough omelet for the family. the first remedy tried was cooking for the school lunch room. this was, however, usually going from one extreme to the other, since the lunch room is as a rule maintained only in large schools. "institutional cooking," some one calls it. instead of one egg-cooking, it became one-hundred-egg cooking, and the difficulty of the average student in adapting school methods to family use was not by any means at an end. the central high school of newark, new jersey, has solved its problem by putting its girls to work, not at the task of providing the sandwiches, soups, and other luncheon dishes for its large lunch room, but at providing "family dinners" at twenty-five cents a plate for the faculty of the school. other schools follow similar plans. the grammar-school girls of leominster, massachusetts, serve luncheon to a limited number every day at their domestic science house. here the girls do the marketing, cook and serve the meal, and keep the various rooms of the house in order. in montclair, new jersey, work of this same sort is done. in each of these cases the cooking is done as it would have to be in the home, not for one person, nor for hundreds, but for approximately a family-sized group. sewing courses also grow more and more practical. in some schools the girls make their own graduating dresses as a final test of their ability. courses are definite, and girls completing them will have definite knowledge of everyday processes of hand sewing. the schools which add to their hand-sewing courses well-planned practice in the use of the sewing machine are further adding to the accomplishment of their girls. those which go farther still and teach garment planning and making may consider their sewing courses fairly complete. [illustration: teachers' luncheon cooked and served by pupils at the clinton kelly school, portland, oregon. other schools have adopted similar plans for teaching girls how to cook] the formation of ideals must go hand in hand with practice in manual processes. the girl must learn to know good work when she sees it, to know a properly constructed garment from one carelessly put together, and to value good work and construction. time was when domestic science meant sewing and cooking, and these alone. that time, however, is past. the care of a house is practically taught in many schools throughout the country by the maintenance of a model apartment in or near the school building. in public school no. , new york city, grammar-school girls, many of whom are of foreign parentage and tradition, are thus introduced to the american ideal of living. the school is thus establishing standards of equipment, of food, of service, of comfortable living, that tend to americanize quite as much as the establishment of standards of speech, of business methods, or of civic duties. the work done in this school is typical of that prevailing in hundreds of towns and cities. [illustration: a girls' sewing class. work in sewing offers unlimited possibilities] the question arises: how much of her housekeeping training should a girl receive before entering upon her high-school course? after careful consideration it seems wise to urge that the greater part of the practical household work be taught during the period from eleven to fourteen. this does not imply that homemaking training should cease at fourteen, but rather that after that age attention shall be centered upon the more difficult aspects of the subject--upon "household economics" rather than the skillful doing of household tasks. in view, however, of the fact that the majority of girls never reach the high school, every bit of household science which they can grasp should be given them in the elementary school. knowing how to do is only part of the housekeeper's work. knowing what and when to do is quite as important. elementary study of food values is quite as comprehensible as elementary algebra. home sanitation and decoration are no harder to understand than commercial geography. the principles of infant feeding and care may be grasped by any girl who can successfully study civil government or grammar. shall we then crowd out commercial geography or government or grammar to make room for these homemaking studies? not necessarily, although, if it came to a choice, much might be said for the practical studies in learning to live. fortunately it need not come to a choice. there is room for both. we must, however, learn to adapt existing courses to the requirements of girls. [illustration: courtesy of l.a. alderman a model school home where all the practical details of housekeeping are taught] [illustration: a domestic science class at work in the model school home shown above] there is arithmetic, for instance. most of us have already learned to skip judiciously the pages in the textbook which deal with compound proportion, averaging payments, partial payments, and cube root. now we must learn to insert the keeping of household accounts; the study of apportioning incomes; the scientific spending of a dollar in food or clothing value; the relative advantage of cash or credit systems of paying the running expenses of a home; the dangers of the "easy-payment plan"; the cost of running an automobile; comparison with the upkeep of a horse and wagon; comparison of the two from the point of view of their usefulness to a family; mortgaging homes, what it means, and what it costs to borrow; when borrowing is justified; the accumulation of interest in a savings account; the comparative financial advantage of renting and owning a home; the cost of building houses of various sorts; the cost of securing, under varying conditions, a water supply in the country home; and other locally important problems. we already have "applied science" in our courses, and we are making a strenuous effort to apply arithmetic; but we have not usually tried to apply it to the education of the prospective homemaker. take the one question of the "installment plan." where, if not in the public school, can we fight the menace offered to the inexperienced young people of the land by this method of doing business? and where in the public school if not in the arithmetic class? consider the possibility of lives spent in paying for shoes and hats already worn out, of furniture double-priced because payment is to be on the "easy plan," of families always in debt, with wages mortgaged for months in advance. the pure science of mathematics will be of little avail in fighting this possibility, but "applied arithmetic" can be a most effective weapon. in our geography classes we may find time for the study of food and clothing products, of their sources, their comparative usefulness, and their cost. we may learn whether it is best to buy american-made macaroni or the imported variety; whether french silks and gloves are superior to those made in america; what "shoddy" is, what we may expect from it if we buy it, how much it is worth in comparison with long-wool fabrics, how to know whether shoddy is being offered us when we buy. countless other matters concerning the markets and products of the world will repay the same sort of treatment. [illustration: one of the class exercises in the model school home shown on page ] [illustration: the correct serving of meals forms part of the class work in this same home] food questions are opened up by study of our meat, vegetable, and fruit supply. every town may make this a personal and immediate problem. from whom did mr. blank, the local grocer, obtain his canned tomatoes? it is sometimes possible to follow up those canned tomatoes to their source. in one investigation of this sort they were found to have passed through six hands. the arithmetic class may pass upon the question of profits and comparative cost between this and the "producer-to-consumer" method. the art work of the schools may also contribute generously to the body of homemaking knowledge. for the average girl the designing and making of christmas cards and book covers, or even the prolonged study of great paintings, is a less productive use of time than the designing of cushion covers, curtains, bureau scarfs, or candle shades. in a certain town in new england considerable effort was expended in bringing about the introduction of art work in the schools a few years ago. a normal-school art graduate took charge of the work. it has now been abandoned because "the children took so little interest." and really, if you knew the conditions, you could not blame them they studied art and copied art and tried to cultivate an artistic sense in ways as remote from their daily lives as could apparently be contrived. and the pity of it all is that here were girls whose homes, whose personal dress, were crying out for the application of art; whose artistic sense was growing of failing to grow according as their individual conditions would allow; and the public school has passed its opportunity by. art, as applied to school work, is divided usually into appreciative and creative work. we place before children the best in picture and sculpture and music. why do we not teach them also the foundation principles of good taste in matters less remote from the lives of many of them? why not teach the girl something of artistic color combination? why not apply the test of art to the lines of woman's attire? why not study the contour of heads and styles of hairdressing? happily, in these days, these things also are being done. we have "manual arts" rooms and teachers by whose aid girls are taught to use the principles of design they study in their everyday planning of everyday things. a visitor to the central school of auburn, washington, reports interesting work going on in such a room. on the blackboard was written: the general aim of design work--order and beauty. the three principles governing design are: balance--harmony--rhythm. balance: opposition of equal forms. rhythm: movement in direction--joint action--motion. harmony: similarity. in the room were girls doing various sorts of work--coloring designs on fabrics for curtains and pillow covers; making original designs for crocheted lace; hemstitching draperies; preparing color material for a primary room; while on a table in the center of the room were many finished articles, made by the girls and carrying out their principles of design--"not one of which," says the visitor, "but would serve a useful purpose in home or office." house building, interior decorating, and furnishing are all worthy of serious attention in the art course. simplicity, harmony, and suitability may well be taught as the principles of good taste. girls must learn these principles somewhere to make the most of their homes by and by. and again the public school, and probably the elementary school, must do the work. physiology and hygiene are already contributing to the knowledge which makes for human betterment, but they also can be made to contribute much more than they have sometimes done. the physiology of infancy must be widely and insistently taught. with proper education she [the young mother] would know the meaning of the words food and sleep; she would know something of their overwhelming importance upon the future being and career of her child, who in his turn is to be one of the world's citizens with full capacity for good or evil. knowing what were normal functions, she would be able to recognize and guard against deviations from them. no day would pass in which she would not find opportunity to exercise self-restraint, keen observation and sensible knowledge in furthering the normal and healthful evolution of her child.[ ] the "little mother" classes in settlement houses, in community social centers, and in some public schools are doing excellent work in beginning this knowledge of infancy. no elementary school can really afford to miss the opportunity such work holds out. have we any right to let a girl approach the care of her child with less than the best that modern science can offer in this most important and exacting work of her life? if not, it is again the public school which alone can be depended upon to do the work, and we must get at least the beginning of it done before the girl escapes us at the close of her elementary-school course. if you are impatient with a program which presupposes that practically all women will be homemakers and mothers, either trained or otherwise, let me remind you that the majority of women do marry, that most of these and many of the unmarried do become homemakers, and that it will be far safer for society to train the few--less than per cent--who never enter the career than to pursue the economically wasteful plan of assuming educationally that no women will be homemakers, or that if they are they can successfully undertake the most complicated, difficult, and most important profession open to women with no preparation at all, or with only what they have unconsciously absorbed at home in the brief pauses of the education which did not educate them for life. the education for homemaking will never lose sight of the fact that girls must really be prepared for a double vocation, since it is a question whether or not they will become homemakers, and they must at all events be prepared for the years intervening between school and home. on the contrary, the education which prepares the homemaker will exercise special care in training for those intervening years, or for life work if it should prove to be such. of all distinctly vocational training, it is only fair, however, that the homemaking training should come first, as a foundation for all later work. whether the girl thus trained ever presides over a home of her own or not, the training will have made her a broader woman and a better worker, with a finer understanding of the universal business of her sex. footnotes: [footnote : oppenheim.] chapter viii the girl's inner life while we are occupied in teaching the girl the "ways and means" by which she is later to carry on the business of homemaking, we must not overlook the fact that, although ways and means are vitally necessary, it is after all the spirit of the girl which will supply the motive power to make the home machinery run. with this in view we must so plan the girl's training as to secure not only the concrete knowledge of doing things, but also the more abstract qualities which will equip her for her work. false ideals and ignorance of housekeeping processes are responsible for thousands of homekeeping failures; but lack of fairness, of good temper, patience, humor, courage, courtesy, stability, perseverance, and initiative must be held accountable for thousands more. for these qualities, then, the girl must be definitely and painstakingly trained. in other words, we must work for the highest type of woman, spiritually as well as industrially. it may seem that definite instruction in such abstract qualities as good temper or stability or fairness is difficult or perhaps impossible to secure. since, however, all the girl's intercourse with her kind affords daily opportunity for practice of these qualities, instruction may easily accompany and become a part of her daily life. the lack of these qualities handicaps the girl even in her school life and shows there plainly the handicap that, unless help is given her, she will suffer for life. her school work offers ample opportunity for the cultivation of patience and perseverance. teachers must combat vigorously the "give-up" spirit, and the troublesome "changing her mind" which leads the girl along a straight path from "trying another" essay subject or embroidery stitch as soon as difficulties present themselves to trying another husband when the first domestic cloud arises. play hours as well as work hours are invaluable in teaching the girl the difficult art of getting along with the world. the educational value of games is largely found in their social training. experience teaches that children require long and patient instruction to enable them to play games. they have to learn fairness, courtesy, good temper; honesty, kindness, sympathy. they have to learn to be good losers and to consider the fun of playing a better end than winning the game. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. play hours as well as work hours are invaluable in teaching the girl the difficult art of getting on with the world] games must be carefully distinguished from the more general term play. all play not solitary has recognized social value; games, because the idea of contest is involved, have a special value of their own. close observation of young children in their games, especially when unsupervised, shows us self supreme. according to temperament, the child either pushes his way savagely to the goal or furtively seeks to win by cunning and craft. he must win, regardless of the process. how many of these unsupervised games end in "i sha'n't play," in angry bursts of tears, or even in blows! how many fail upon close scrutiny to show some less assertive child, who never wins, who is never "chosen," who might better not be playing at all than never to "have his turn"! [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood hunter high school girls playing hockey in central park, new york. the educational value of games lies in the fact that they teach fair play, self-control, and proper consideration of others] during the individualistic period games must be for the satisfaction of individualistic desires. team work must await a later development of child nature. but while each child may play to win, his future welfare demands that his efforts be in harmony with certain principles. . he must respect the rules of the game. . he must "play fair." . he must control anger, jealousy, boastfulness, and other of the more elemental emotions. . he must consider the handicaps suffered by some players, and see that they get a "square deal." girls' games and boys' games at this period happily show little differentiation. almost any game not prejudicial to health serves to call into action the moral forces we strive to cultivate. the game to a certain extent typifies the larger life--the life of effort, contest, striving to win. self-control and proper consideration of others in the one must serve as a help in fitting for the other. [illustration: courtesy of l.a. alderman drill work as well as games is beneficial to health and also teaches self-control] teachers are often inclined to overlook or undervalue the training of girls in games. the fact is that girls especially need this training as the woman's sphere in present-day life is widening. men have always had contact with the world. women have in times past had to content themselves with a single interest involving contest--the social game. how far we may safely go in utilizing the game element--that is, the contest or competition element--in school work is a question for thought. the "rules of the game" are less easy to enforce here; jealousies are harder to control; handicaps are more in evidence and less easy to make allowance for in contests; the discouragement of failure may have more serious results. the mere fact of class grouping involves a natural competition, healthful and beneficial and wisely preparatory for future living. more emphasis than this upon rivalry may produce feverish and unhealthful conditions, far removed from the mental poise we desire for our girls. the school can give the girl few things finer than the ability to attack work quietly and yet with determination and a sense of power to meet and overcome obstacles. the school and the playground form the growing girl's community life. in them she must learn to practice community virtues, to shun community evils, and to accept community responsibilities. for her the school and the playground are society. here she will take her first lessons in the pride of possessions, in the prestige accompanying them, in the struggle for social supremacy, in doubtful ideals brought from all sorts of doubtful sources. here she will find exaggerated notions of "style" and its value, impure english, whispered uncleanness in regard to sex matters, and surreptitious reading of forbidden books. here also she will find worthier examples--clean, pure thought, honesty and fair dealing, pride of achievement rather than of externals, fine ideals exemplified in the best homes. and no finer or more delicate task lies before teacher and mother than the guidance of the girl in her choice. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a school playground. the school and the playground form the growing girl's community life] [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a model playground. the model playgrounds in the parks are doing much to aid the playground movement] going to school is rightly considered an epoch in the child's life. no longer confined to the narrow circle of home and family friends, the child may lose all the tiny beginnings of desired virtues in this larger life. or, on the contrary, when the school recognizes and continues home training, or supplies what has not been given, these foundation virtues may be so applied to the old problems in new places as to form a foundation for the life conduct of the girl and the woman that is to be. take the question of sex knowledge, so widely agitated of late. we cannot guard our girls against contact with some who will exert a harmful influence. we can only forearm them by natural, gradual information on this subject as their young minds reach out for knowledge, so that sex knowledge comes, as other knowledge comes, without solemnity or sentimentality on the one hand or undue mystery and a hint of shame on the other. no course in sex hygiene can take the place of this early gradual teaching, answering each question as it comes, in a perfectly natural way, and with due regard for the child's wonder at all of nature's marvelous processes. the little girl _who knows_ presents no possibilities to the perverted mind which seeks to astonish and excite her. and if she knows because "my mother told me," the guard is as nearly perfect as can be devised. upon this foundation the formal course in sex hygiene may be built. such a course will then be a scientific summing up, with application to personal ideals and requirements. it can easily, safely, and wisely be deferred until the adolescent period. teachers and mothers can find scarcely any field more worthy of their thoughtful concentration than the cultivation of good temper in the girls under their care. the number of marriages rendered failures, the number of homes totally wrecked, by sulking or nagging or outbursts of ill-temper, can probably not be estimated. neither can we count the number of innocent people in homes not apparently wrecked whose lives are rendered more or less unhappy by association with the woman of uncertain temper. think of the families in which some undesirable trait of this sort seems to pass from generation to generation, accepted by each member calmly as an inheritance not to be thrown off. "it's my disposition," one will tell you with a sigh. "mother was just the same." surely the time to combat these undesirable traits is in childhood, and probably the first step is for the mother, who looks back to her mother as "being just the same," to stop talking or thinking about inherited traits and at least to present an outward show of good temper for the child to see. then there is the teacher, who is under a strain and who finds annoyances in every hour which tend to destroy her equanimity. her serenity, if she can accomplish it, will prove an excellent example. and little by little the mother and the teacher who have accomplished self-control for themselves may teach self-control and the beauties of good temper to the little girls who live in the atmosphere they create. chapter ix the adolescent girl adolescence, the critical period of the training of the boy and girl, presents a complexity of problems before which parents and teachers alike are often at a loss. the adolescent period, the growing-up stage of the girl's life, is physically the time of rapid and important bodily changes. new cells, new tissue, new glands, are forming. new functions are being established. the whole nervous system is keyed to higher pitch than at any previous time. excessive drain upon body or nerve force at this time must mean depletion either now or in the years of maturity. but, on the other hand, the keynote of the girl's adolescent mental life is _awakening_. her whole nature calls out for a larger, fuller, more intense life. home, school, society, dress, all take on new aspects under the transforming power of the new sex life stirring and perfecting itself within. the world is beckoning to the emerging woman, and her every instinct leads her to follow the beckoning hand. now, if ever, the girl needs the influence and guidance of some wise and sympathetic woman friend. it may be--let us hope it is--her mother; or, failing that, her teacher; or, better than either alone, both mother and teacher working in sympathetic harmony. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. camp fire girls. outdoor life is one of the best means of safeguarding the girl's health] the first care demanded for the maturing girl is the safeguarding of her health. school demands at this age are likely to be excessive under existing systems of instruction. in many ways the secondary school, in which we may assume our adolescent girl to be, merits the criticism constantly made, that it works its pupils too hard or, perhaps more accurately, that it works them too long. nothing but the closest coöperation between parents and teachers can afford either of them the necessary data for working out this problem. it can never be anything but an individual problem, since girls will always differ whether school courses do so or not, and adjustment of one to the other must be made every time the combination is effected. some schools content themselves with asking for a record of time spent on school work at home. many parents merely acquiesce in the girl's statement that she does or doesn't have to study to-night, and the matter rests. other schools and other parents go into the question with more or less detail, but usually quite independently of each other in the investigation. it is only very recently that anything like adequate knowledge of pupils has begun to be gathered and recorded to throw light upon the home-study question. school girls naturally divide into fairly well-defined classes: the girl who is overanxious or overconscientious about her work, the girl who intends to comply with rules but has no special anxiety about results, and the girl who habitually takes chances in evading the preparation of lessons. how many parents know at all definitely to which class their girl belongs? the same girls may be classified again with regard to activities outside the school. they may help at home much or little or not at all. they may have absorbing social interests or practically none. they may be in normal health or may already be nervous wrecks from causes over which the school has no control. there is no question about the value of definite information on all of these points gathered by home and school acting together for the best understanding of the child. the modern physician keeps a carefully tabulated record of his patient's history and condition. the school should do the same thing and should prescribe with due reference to such record. it frequently happens, however, that the schoolgirl's health is menaced less by her hours of school work than by misuse of the remaining portion of the twenty-four hours. no mother has a right to accuse the school of breaking down her daughter's health unless she is duly careful that the girl has a proper amount of sleep, exercise in the open air, and hygienic clothing, and that her life outside the school is not of the sort that we describe in these days as "strenuous." it is this strenuous life which our girls must be taught to avoid. any daily or weekly program which is crowded with activities is a dangerous program for developing girlhood. the very atmosphere of many modern homes is charged with the spirit of haste, and parents scarcely realize that the daughter's time is too full, because their own is too full also. they have no time to stop and realize anything. a quiet home is an essential help in preserving a girl's health and well-being. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood a mountain camp. good health is conserved by outdoor games and exercise] it need scarcely be said that the children of a family should be troubled as little as possible with the worries of their elders. parents are often unaware how much of the family burden their sons and daughters are secretly bearing, or how long sometimes they continue to struggle under the burden after it has mercifully slipped from father's or mother's shoulders. good health means buoyancy, a springing to meet the future with a tingle of joy in facing the unknown. the adolescent period is essentially an unfolding time, in which probably for the first time choice seems to present itself in a large way in ordering the girl's life. in school she is confronted with a choice of studies or of courses. to make these choices she must look farther ahead and ask herself many questions as to the future. what is she to be? nor is she loath to face this question. some of the very happiest of the girl's dreams at this time are concerned with that problematical future. there was a day when girls dreamed only of husbands, children, and homes. then, as the pendulum swung, they dreamed of careers, a hand in the "world's work." now they dream of either or both, or they halt confused by the wide outlook. but of one thing we may be sure--our girl is dreaming, and she seldom tells her dreams. it is during this period in a girl's life that she is most likely to chafe at restraint, to picture a wonderful life outside her home environment, and to demand the opportunity to make her own choice. as she goes on through high school, she longs more and more for "freedom," quite unconscious of the fact that what seems freedom in her elders is, in reality, often farthest removed from that elusive condition. her imagination is taking wild flights in these days. sometimes we catch fleeting glimpses of its often disordered fancies, although oftener we see only the most docile of exteriors standing guard over an inner self of which we do not dream. the wise mother and the wise teacher are they whose adolescent memories, longings, misapprehensions, and mistakes are not forgotten, but are being sympathetically and understandingly searched for light in guiding the girls whose guardians they are. they recognize once and for all that normal girls are filled with what seem abnormal notions, desires, and ideals. they recall how little they used to know of life, and the pitfalls they barely escaped, if they did escape. thus only can they keep close to the girl in spirit and help her as they once needed help. they respect her longing for freedom of choice and they teach her how to choose. it is of little use to attempt to clip the wings of the girl's imagination, however riotous. the wings are safely hidden from our profaning touch. instead we must teach her to dream true dreams and to choose real things rather than shams. [illustration: a study room. the life of the adolescent girl is by no means bounded by the schoolroom walls] at this time the girl's life often seems to the casual observer to be bounded by her schoolroom walls. as a matter of fact, however, school work appeals to her much less than it has probably done earlier or than it will do in her college days. dress is becoming an absorbing subject. "the boys," however little you may think it, are seldom far from her thoughts. intimate friendship with another adolescent girl perhaps affords an outlet, beneficial or otherwise, for the crowding life which is too precious to bear the unsympathetic touch of the world of her elders. or perhaps the girl becomes solitary in her habits, living in a world of romance found in books or in her own dreams, impatient with the world about her, feeling sure she is "misunderstood." what can home, school, and society in general do for the adolescent girl, that her awakening may be sweet and sane, that her future usefulness may not be impaired or her life embittered by wrong choice at the brink of womanhood? any wise plan for the training of girls "in their teens" must include provision for: . outdoor play and exercise. in the country this is much more easily accomplished. city problems bearing on this question are among the most acute of all concerning boys and girls. . systematic attention to the work of the schoolroom. thus the girl acquires habits of concentration and industry that she will need all her life. . some manual work in kitchen, garden, sewing room, or workshop. here the girl's natural tastes and inclination may be discovered and trained. . food for the imagination. books, music, pictures, inspiring plays. the campfire girls' movement is valuable in its imaginative aspect. . attention to dress. laying the foundation for wise lifelong habits. . healthful social intercourse under the best conditions with boys and with other girls, both at home and at school. croquet, tennis, skating, offer fine opportunities for such intercourse. "parties," dancing, present more difficulties, but have their value under right conditions. not all "fun" should include the boys. athletic contests between girls do much to develop a neglected side of girl nature. . companionship with her mother, or some other woman of experience. nothing can quite take the place of this. the girl is sailing out upon an uncharted sea. she needs the help of someone who has sailed that way before. [illustration: a botanical laboratory in portland, oregon. through systematic attention to the work of the schoolroom the girl acquires habits of concentration and industry] . preparation for marriage and motherhood. much that the girl should know can come to her through no other medium than that indicated in the preceding paragraph--confidential intercourse with the woman of mature years. for the sake of the girls who fail to find this woman elsewhere every school for adolescent girls should have on its faculty a woman who will "mother" its girls. . acquaintance with the lives of some of the great women of history, as well as of some who have lived inspiring lives in the girl's own country and time. a long list of such women might be made. . some unoccupied time. our girl must not be permitted to acquire the bad habit of rushing through life. . study of vocations and avocations for women. avocations--the work which serves as play--should be wisely studied, and some avocation adopted by every girl. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a quiet retreat. every girl needs some unoccupied time in order that she may not acquire the habit of rushing] part of this training girls everywhere in this country may get if the opportunities open to them are seized. the proportion of purely mental work and of handwork will vary according to the locality in which the girl finds herself. in general, however, such matters receive more consideration than the more complex ones of direct social bearing. how a girl shall dress, with whom and under what conditions she shall find her social life, what she shall know of herself, of woman in general, of the opposite sex, what her relations with her mother shall be--these things are more often than not left to chance or to the girl's untrained inclination. the dress question rests fundamentally upon the personal question, what do clothes mean to the girl? behind that we usually find what clothes mean to her mother, to her teachers, to the women who have a part in her social life. instinct teaches the girl to adorn her person. environment is largely responsible for the sort of adornment she will choose. to bring the matter at once to a practical basis, what standards shall we set up for our girls to see, to admire, and to adopt as their own? "well dressed" may be interpreted to mean simply, or serviceably, or conspicuously, or becomingly, or fashionably, or cheaply, or appropriately, according to the standard of the person who uses the term. it would necessarily be impossible to establish a common standard for any considerable group of women, since individual conditions must govern individual choice. a wise standard for girls and their mothers, however, will conform to certain principles, even though the application of the principles be widely different. these principles may be expressed somewhat as follows: . beauty in dress is expressed in line, color, and adaptation to personal appearance, not in expense. . fitness depends upon the occasion and upon the relation of cost to the wearer's income. . simplicity conduces to beauty, fitness, and to ease of upkeep. . upkeep, including durability and cleansing possibilities, is as important a consideration in selecting clothes as in selecting buildings and automobiles. freshness outranks elegance. . individuality should be the keynote of expression in dress. conformity to the foregoing principles in establishing a personal standard will of necessity prevent slavish imitation and the striving to reach some other woman's standard which bears again and again such bitter fruit. the erroneous notion fostered by thousands of american women, that if you can only look like the women of some social set to which you aspire you are like them for all social purposes, is a fallacy, in spite of its general acceptance. we might as well expect blue eyes, straight noses, or number three shoes to form the basis of a social group. the mother or the teacher who bases her instruction in this matter on the assumption that pretty clothes of necessity breed vanity and all its attendant evils is merely sowing the seed of her influence upon stony ground when once the girl discovers her belief. nature is telling the girl to make herself beautiful. it is not only useless but wrong to set ourselves against this instinct. instead we must show her what beauty in clothes means, and how to attain it without paying for it more than she can afford, in money, in time, or in sacrifice of her spiritual self. the school does its share when it teaches the general theory of beauty, with practical illustration in study of line and color schemes. the individual teacher and the mother have to impart the far more delicate lessons concerning influence and cost--mental, moral, and spiritual--in other words, the psychology of clothes. our girl must grow up fully cognizant of what her clothes cost. when she desires, as she doubtless will desire, silk petticoats, and an "up-to-date" hat, and high-heeled shoes, and an absurdly beruffled dress, and a wonderful array of ribbons, she must discover what each and every one of these things costs and whether it is worth the price. the high heels sometimes cost health; the conspicuous dress may cost the good opinion or the admiration of those who value modesty above style; the silk petticoat may be bought at the cost of mother's or father's sacrifice of something needed far more; the trimming on the hat may have cost the life of a beautiful mother bird and the slow starvation of her nestlings. nothing the girl wears costs money only. she must also learn that fine clothes are out of place on a girl whose body is not finely cared for; that money is better expended for quality than for show; and, most of all, that clothes are secondary matters, when all is said. wisdom and sympathy and tact are never more needed than in this sort of teaching. the principles of good dressing cannot be laid down baldly and coldly, like mathematical rules, for the guidance of a girl palpitating with youthful and beauty-loving instincts. the mother who says, merely, "certainly not. you don't need them. i never had silk stockings when i was a girl," is failing to meet her obligations quite as much as the mother who allows her daughter to appear at school in a costume suited only to some formal evening function. there are mothers of each of these sorts. the wise mother whose daughter has developed a sudden scorn for the stockings she has worn contentedly enough hitherto does not dismiss the subject in the "certainly not" way, however kindly spoken. she treats her daughter's request seriously, asks a few questions, in the answers to which "the other girls" will probably figure largely, and talks it over. "of course, there is the first cost to consider. the price of three or four pairs of silk stockings would give you a dozen pairs of fine cotton. yes, i know there are cheaper silk ones to be had, but their quality is poor. we should scarcely want you to wear coarse, poorly made ones. and of course you know silk ones do not last so long. they are pretty, and pleasant to wear, and cool, i know. how would it do to have silk ones to wear with your new party dress, and keep on with the cotton ones for school? we don't want to be overdressed in business hours, you know. then, it seems to me, it is a little hard on the really poor girls at school if the rest of you are inclined to overdress. they are so likely to get into the habit of spending their money for cheap imitations of what you other girls wear--or if they are too sensible for that they are probably unhappy because they have to look different. wouldn't it be kinder not to wear expensive things to school at all?" the object is not so much to keep the girl from having unsuitable garments as to teach her to see all sides of the clothes question, to realize her responsibilities, and to learn to choose wisely for herself. it is highly desirable that mothers keep up their own standards of dress as they approach middle life and their daughters enter the adolescent period. some women even make the mistake of dressing shabbily that they may gown their daughters resplendently. they are educating their daughters to a false standard and to a selfish life. teachers also probably seldom realize how wide an influence they may exercise upon their adolescent girl pupils in the matter of dress. many a girl forms her standard and her ideal from what her teacher wears. teachers must accept their responsibility and make good use of the opportunities it gives them. it is approximately at the time of her awakening to the beautifying instinct that the girl begins to take a special interest in social matters. here again she needs wise guidance, and usually more _guidance_ and less _direction_ than most girls get. the american mother is prone in social questions to trust her daughter too much, or not enough, and to train her very little. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood skating offers fine opportunity for healthful social intercourse] in many cases adolescent society centers about the school. there are the everyday walks and talks of the boys and girls, the games and meets and contests, with their attendant social features, the literary societies and debating clubs, the school parties and dances. the school thus comes to assume a considerable part in the boy's and girl's social training, much more than was the case twenty or even ten years ago; and the whole trend of educational movement in this matter is toward doing more even than it now does. in some cases schools have merely drifted into this social work, without definite aims and without conspicuously good results, just as some parents have drifted into acceptance of the situation, with little oversight and a comfortable shifting of responsibility. [illustration: games form an important part of the adolescent girl's life] when this sort of school and this sort of parent happen to be the joint guardians of a girl's social training, it usually happens that the girl discovers some things by a painful if not heartbreaking trial-and-error method, and other things she quite fails to discover at all. most of all, she needs her mother at this time--a wise, interested, companionable mother, who knows much about what goes on at school parties and at school generally, but who never forces confidences and, indeed, who never needs to; an elder sister sort of mother, who helps. and she needs also teachers who supervise and chaperon social affairs with a full realization that social training is in progress and that lives are being made or marred. there are schools and there are mothers who look upon every phase of school life as contributing to the educative process, and these find in the social affairs of the school their opportunities to teach some vital lessons. some schools are lengthening the free time between periods, merely for the purpose of adding to the informal social intercourse between pupils. wise teachers as well as wise mothers will see that the social phase of school life, especially in the evening, is not overdone. not only health but future usefulness and happiness suffer if the girl "goes out" so much that going out becomes the rule and staying at home the exception. it is not usually, however, the social affairs of the school alone which cause the girl to develop the habit of too many evenings away from home. it is the school party plus the church social, plus the moving pictures, plus the girls' club, plus the theater, plus choir practice, plus the informal evening at her chum's, plus a dozen other dissipations, that in the course of a few years change a quiet, home-loving little schoolgirl into a gadding, overwrought, uneasy woman. unless one has tried it, it is perhaps hard to realize how difficult it is for an individual mother to regulate social custom in her community even for her own daughter without causing the girl unhappiness and possibly destroying her delight in her home. no girl enjoys leaving the party at ten when "the other girls" stay until twelve. nor does she enjoy declining invitations when the other girls all go. but what the individual mother finds difficult, community sentiment can easily accomplish. the woman's club or the mothers' club or the parent-teacher association, or better yet all three, may profitably discuss the question, and may set about the creation of the sentiment required. quite as important as "how often shall she go?" is the question "with whom is she going?" there are two ways of approaching the problem here involved. one requires more knowledge for the girl herself, that she may better judge what constitutes a worthy companion. the other is reached by the better training of boys, that more of them may develop into the sort of young men with whom we may trust our daughters. parents who take the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the boys in their daughter's social circle will find themselves better able to aid the girl in her choice of friends. the very best place for this getting acquainted is the girl's own home, to which, therefore, young people should often be informally invited. nor should parents neglect occasional opportunities to observe their daughter's friends in other environment--at the church social or supper, at entertainments, at school, or on the street. fortunately the revolt against a dual standard of purity for men and women holds promise of a larger proportion of clean, controlled, trustworthy boys. it will never be quite safe, however, to trust either our boys or our girls to resist instincts implanted by nature and restrained only by the artificial barriers of society, unless we keep their imaginations busy, and unless we implant ideals of conduct high enough to make them desire self-control for ends which seem beautiful and good to themselves. the adolescent period is especially favorable for the formation of ideals, and a high conception of love and marriage will probably prove the truest safeguard our boys and girls can have. the reading of the period is of special importance. at no other time of life will altruism, self-sacrifice, high ideals of honor and of love, make so strong an appeal as now. adolescent reading must make the most of this fact. some of the great love stories of literature and biography should be read, especially one or two which involve the putting aside of desire at the call of a higher motive. at least one story involving the world-old theme of the betrayed woman--_the scarlet letter_, perhaps, or _adam bede_--should be "required reading" for every adolescent girl, and should after reading be the subject of thoughtful and loving discussion by the girl and her mother in one of the confidential chats which should be frequent between them. girls must learn from their mothers and teachers to distrust the boy who shows any inclination to take liberties, and they must also learn that girls, consciously or more often otherwise, daily put temptation in the way of boys who desire to do right, and invite liberties from the other sort. restraint, in dress, in carriage, in manners, and in conversation, _must be made to seem right and desirable to the girl_, for her own sake and no less for the good of the other sex. this of course means that teachers must set fine examples before the girl in their own dress and deportment. to counteract the dangerous tendencies which have become intensified by the wholesale breaking of social customs during the war, it is necessary that parents and teachers give very careful attention to the dress of girls and to the demeanor of boys and girls of the adolescent period. many teachers are improperly dressed and setting the wrong example. many parents are dressing carelessly and sending their girls to high school improperly dressed. the boys are tempted--yes, are forced--to observe the bodies of their girl classmates, in study-rooms, halls, laboratories, and on playgrounds. these girls who are immodestly dressed are not only exposing themselves to danger and inviting familiarities, but are tempting the boys to go wrong. many of the tragedies in our schools can be traced to this source. to handle this very serious and very difficult problem it is necessary that all mothers of high-school boys and girls organize and cooperate with principals and teachers. the task is gigantic, for the customs and suggestions which are responsible for present-day conditions are many and permeate our magazines, books, moving pictures, dances, and nearly all social gatherings. many superintendents, teachers, and parents have been very seriously studying these social and moral problems and making plans to start reforms at once in the public schools. the most practical method thus far presented appears to be the requirement of uniform dress for all girls in the upper grades and in high school. this custom is already established in some of our best private schools. uniform dress has a very democratic training which commends it. it is less expensive than the present varied styles. it is practical, for it avoids discrimination which would lead to many private difficulties. the girl has now reached the time when her bits of knowledge of sex matters, gained gradually since the first stirrings of curiosity in her little girlhood, should be gathered, summarized, and given practical application to the mature life she will soon enter upon. thoughtful investigation does not lead to the conclusion that girls need especially a detailed physiological presentation of the subject so much as a study of the psychological aspects of the sex life. personal purity is primarily a matter of mind. girls who all their lives have been familiar with the mystery of birth, who at puberty have been instructed in the delicacy of the sexual organs and processes and in the care they must exercise to bring them to normal development, are now ready to be taught the vital necessity of subordinating the animal to the spiritual in the sex life. it may seem unwise and unnecessary to put before young girls so dark and distressing a subject as the social evil. yet i know of no way to combat this evil without teaching all girls what must be avoided. when girls realize that the social evil . rests upon a foundation of purely unrestrained animal instinct; . that a single sexual misstep has ruined thousands upon thousands of girls' lives; . that ignorance or the one misstep has led thousands to a permanent life of shame; . that such a life means, sooner or later, sorrow, impaired or destroyed health, disgrace, and early death to its woman victims; . that the social evil destroys the efficiency and the moral worth of men; . that it sets free deadly disease germs to permeate society, causing untold misery among the innocent, then, and not until then, can they be taught . to recognize and fear animal instinct unrestrained by higher motive; . to guard their own instincts; . to hold men to a high standard of social purity and to help them attain it. nor does this teaching necessitate morbid consideration of the subject. it will, in fact, in many cases clear away the morbid curiosity and surreptitious seeking after information in which untaught girls indulge. skillfully and delicately taught this knowledge as an important and serious part of woman's work, girls will be sweeter and more womanly for the knowledge of their responsibility to society and to their unborn offspring. schools that attempt such a course for girls are finding their chief difficulty in discovering people properly endowed by nature and properly trained to teach it. to give such work into any but the wisest hands invites disaster. to make it a study of the physical basis of sexual life is disaster in itself. service, through making one's self a pure member of society, and through helping others to keep the same standard--this must be the keynote of the teaching, an education toward social efficiency and social uplift. chapter x the girl's work the adolescent girl, already the product of a general training which has aimed at all-round development of body, mind, and spirit, is now ready for the specializing which shall place her in tune with the world of industry and help her to make for herself a permanent and useful place in society. henceforward the girl's training must face her double possibilities. she must not be allowed to have an eye single to making an industrial place for herself; nor can those who educate her fail to see the double work she must do. any consideration of the subject of girls' work outside the home or work in the home for financial return must begin with a general survey of the field of industry, discovering what women have done and are doing, together with the effects of gainful occupation upon the character and efficiency of women. the united states census reports for give the following figures: number of females ten years and over year engaged in gainful occupations , , , , , , , , it is thus seen that gainful occupations for women have increased greatly in the thirty years covered by the report. at present . per cent of all females, or . of all over ten years of age, are engaged in work for wages. further tabulation brings out the fact that, whereas the age period from twenty-one to forty-four shows the largest percentage of men employed in gainful work, women show the largest proportion of their numbers so employed during the age period from sixteen to twenty. evidently the girls are at work. the figures follow: males ten years and over females ten years and over age period per cent age period per cent - . - . - . - . - . - . - . - . and over . and over . compare with these figures the following table: ages at which women marry[ ] . per cent, or / , of all women marry before . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " . " " " / " " " " " it will be observed that since the percentage of women at work decreases after twenty, the number of women who marry and presumably become homemakers is very largely increased. these figures would seem to indicate that girls go to work early, that as yet industry does not largely prevent marriage, and that marriage does in many or most cases stop women's industrial careers. inquiry as to what women are doing in the industrial world elicits important facts. it would seem that olive schreiner's "for the present we take all labor for our province" is very nearly a bare statement of attested fact. the census report includes closely classified occupations. women are found in all but . even allowing for the inaccuracy of such figures, and passing over the occupations which take in only an occasional woman, it is seen that "woman's sphere" can no longer be arbitrarily defined. the following facts and figures for women give us food for thought: farm laborers (working out) , iron and steel industries , chemical industries , clay, glass, and stone industries , electrical supply factories , lumber and furniture industries , steam railroad laborers , [illustration: photograph by c. park pressey the census showed over three hundred and thirty thousand women employed as farm laborers. this number did not include wives or daughters of farm-owners] the foregoing facts concern occupations which were once associated entirely with men. if we enter the ranks of more womanly work we shall find: dressmakers , milliners , sewers and sewing-machine operators , telephone operators , nurses , clerks and saleswomen in stores , stenographers and typists , bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants , cooks , laundresses (not in laundries) , teachers , these are of course merely a few among the four hundred and fifty kinds of work in which women are found. any survey of women's work comes close to a general survey of industry. we shall find that in some occupations the proportion of men is much larger than that of women. in others women have made rapid strides. the accompanying diagram shows that in professional service, in domestic and personal service, and in clerical occupations women are found in largest numbers. in domestic and personal service the women outnumber the men more than two to one. in professional service there are four women to five men, a large proportion of the women being teachers. in the clerical occupations we have one woman to each two men, in manufacturing one woman to six men, in agriculture one woman to seven men, and in trade one to eight. the occupations for women have been changed somewhat by the new industrial conditions forced upon us by the war, but it is very probable that in a few years the industrial world will return to its normal status before the war for both men and women. [illustration: proportions of men and women in the united states engaged in special occupations] [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood farmerettes. during the world war women at home and abroad rendered especially valuable services in agricultural work] if it is true that women are claiming and will continue to claim "all labor" for their province, the claim must rest upon one of two assumptions: either women are physically, mentally, and morally identical in their capabilities with men, or differences in physical, mental, and moral make-up must be considered as not affecting work. most of us are not yet ready to agree to either of these premises. we must therefore believe that some occupations are more suitable for one sex than for the other. the fact is, however, that only a small group of radical thinkers have made the opposite claim. women are found, it is true, in a large number of the occupations in which men are found. but they are there for some other reason than that they claim all labor as their sphere. some are driven by the stern necessity of doing whatever work is at hand; some by ignorance of their unfitness, or of the unfitness of the work for them; some by the spirit of the age which says, "come, be free. try these things that men do. see if they suit you. find your sphere." probably, however, this last reason for entering unsuitable occupations is the one least often underlying the choice. girls select vocations in the main as boys do. until very lately chance has been the ruling element far oftener than anything else. studies in industry are now for the first time giving us adequate information as to requirements for efficiency, working conditions, wages, living possibilities, and the effects, moral and physical, of various occupations upon both men and women. the problems arising out of the crossing and recrossing of these various elements are as yet but vaguely understood. the great gain lies in the fact that their solution is being sought. the community is of necessity interested in workingwomen as it is in workingmen. without these workers the community does not exist. when they are ill-paid, overworked, underfed, discontented, or inefficient, the community necessarily suffers. when they work under proper conditions, the community shares their prosperity. it is thus coming to be seen that the condition of workers is the concern of all the members of the community. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. factory workers. sewers and sewing-machine operators to the number of over , , according to the census, are employed in the united states] in the case of the woman worker, however, and especially of the young woman worker, the community has a further interest because of the service that women render as the mothers of the next and indeed of all future generations. if, then, it is shown that women are physically unfit for certain occupations that men may follow with safety, it becomes the business of the community to protect women, even against themselves if necessary, and to deter them from entering such lines of work. the community must make use of various agencies in bringing about the proper relations between women and their work. it may use legislation, thereby securing, for example, factory inspectors to improve the sanitary and moral conditions in the places where women and girls are employed. it may use the school, the library, and various civic improvement forces to inform both girls and their parents as to conditions under which girls should work. it may employ vocational guides to make proper connections between women and their work. for all these agencies to do satisfactory work, the first requisite is knowledge of conditions. this means skillful work upon a vast and rapidly increasing body of facts, and wide dissemination of the results of such work. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood unemployed utilizing their spare time to make themselves more efficient. the community may make use of the schools for such purposes] we may not stop here to consider what legislatures have done and are doing to improve conditions, other than to mention that the number of hours that women may work is restricted in some states, as is night work, and that a minimum wage is required in some. our question, however, is not so much what is forbidden women in the way of work, as what women and girls will choose to do of the work which is not forbidden. facts as to what women are doing concern us mainly as material from which to deduce information of value to the girls who have not yet chosen. a serious obstacle to wise choice on the part of young girls who are pushing into industrial occupations is the uncertainty of their continuing as workers outside the home. the average length of the girl's industrial life is computed to be only about five years. she enters upon work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether she will marry or remain single. she is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry. the great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. the work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions. many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon be over. a government report on the condition of woman and girl wage-earners in the united states gives the following facts concerning , women working in stores: average length of service . years average wage: first year $ . per week second year . " " tenth year . " " among , factory women investigated: average length of service . years average wage: first year $ . per week second year . " " tenth year . " " these stores and factories were presumably filled by girls who seized the most available source of a weekly wage regardless of all but the pay envelope. few of them remained more than five years, and those who did remain did not receive adequate increase in their pay by the tenth year for workers of ten years' experience. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a cotton-mill worker. unfortunately in the factories girls are too often influenced by the pay envelope rather than by any special fitness for the work they are to do] the whole industrial situation as it concerns women would indicate that women even more than men show lack of discrimination in seeking to place themselves, and that the sources of information for them have been few if not entirely lacking. happily these conditions are changing. we have now to teach girls to avail themselves of the information and the guidance at hand and to learn to discriminate in their choice of work. girls must realize that unskillful, mechanical work, done always with a mental reservation that it is merely a temporary expedient, keeps women's wages low, destroys confidence in female capacity, and has definite bearing not only on the individual woman's earning capacity, but on her character as well. girls must learn to choose in such a way that their work may be an opening into a life career or may be an enlightening prelude to marriage and the making of a home. some of the women who uphold the doctrine of equality between the sexes make the mistake of thinking and of teaching that there can be no equality without identical work. they take the attitude that unless women do all the sorts of work that men do, they are unjustly deprived of their rights. our contention is rather that women have higher rights than that of identical work with men. they, above all other workers, should have the right of intelligent choice of work which they can do to the advantage of themselves, their offspring, and the community. such a choice will ignore the question of sex as a drawback, accepting it, on the other hand, merely as a condition which, like other conditions, complicates but does not necessarily hamper choice. no girl need feel hampered by her sex because she chooses not to do work which fails either to utilize her peculiar gifts or to lead in what seems to her a profitable direction. no girl should feel that her industrial experience, however short, has nothing to contribute to the home life of which she dreams. no girl need waste the knowledge and skill gained in industrial life when she abandons gainful occupation for the home. homemaking education, with industrial experience, ought to make the ideal preparation for life work. this, however, can be true only when the girl's industrial experience is of the right sort. girls must therefore be led to choose the developing occupation. it is a part of the world's economy to lead them to this choice. footnotes: [footnote : from puffer, _vocational guidance_, based on census figures.] chapter xi the girl's work (continued)--classification of occupations it is well at the outset to recognize that vocation choosing is at best a complicated matter which, to be successfully carried out, demands not only much information, but information from different viewpoints. it is not enough to insure a living, even a good living, in the work a girl chooses. we must take into consideration the girl's effect upon society as a teacher, nurse, saleswoman, or office worker; and no less, in view of her evident destiny as mother of the race, must we consider society's effect upon her, as it finds her in the place she has chosen. in other words, will she serve society to the best of her ability, and will her service fit her to be a better homemaker than she would have been had no vocation outside the home intervened between her school training and her final settling in a home of her own making? this double question must find answer in consideration of vocations from each of several viewpoints. we may classify occupations open to girls ( ) from the standpoint of the girl's fitness, physical and psychological; ( ) from the standpoint of industrial conditions, the sanitary, mental, and moral atmosphere, and the rewards obtainable; ( ) as factors increasing, decreasing, or not affecting the girl's possible home efficiency or the likelihood of taking up home life; ( ) from the standpoint of the girl's education; ( ) from the standpoint of service to society. our first classification concerns the girl's fitness for this or that work. the everyday work of the world in which our girls are to find a part may be separated into three fairly well-marked classes: making things, distributing things, and service. the first question we must ask concerning a girl desirous of finding work is, then: toward which of these classes does her natural ability and therefore probably her inclination tend? natural handworkers make poor saleswomen; natural traders or saleswomen are likely to be uninterested and ineffective handworkers. the girl whose interests are all centered in people must not be condemned to spend her life in the production of things; nor, as is far more common, must the girl who can make things, and enjoys making them, spend her life in merely handling the things other people have made, as she strives to make connection between these things and the people who want them. then there is the girl who is efficient and who finds her pleasure in "doing things for people." service--and we must remember that service is a wide term, and that no stigma should attach to the class of workers which includes the teacher, the physician, and the minister--is clearly the direction in which such a girl's vocational ambition should be turned. it would be idle to assert that all women are suited to marriage, motherhood, and domestic life, although there is little doubt that early training may develop in some a suitability which would otherwise remain unsuspected. when, however, early training fails to bring out any inclination toward these things, we may well consider seriously before we exert the weight of our influence toward them. home-mindedness shows itself in many ways, and it should have been a matter of observation years before the girl faces the choice of a vocation. it is usually of little avail to attempt to turn the attention of the girl who is definitely not thus minded toward the domestic life. on the other hand, the girl who is naturally so minded will respond readily to suggestions leading toward the occupations which require and appeal to her domestic nature. the great majority of girls, however, are not definitely conscious of either home-mindedness or the opposite. they are in fact not yet definitely cognizant of any natural bent. it is these girls who are especially open to the influence of environment, of what may prove temporary inclination, or of false notions of the advantage of certain occupations in choosing a life work. these are the girls, too, who are likely to drift into marriage as they are likely to drift into any other occupation, and whose previous vocation may have added to or perfected their homemaking training or, on the other hand, may have developed in them habits and traits which will effectually kill their usefulness in the home life. these, then, are the girls who are most of all in need of wise assistance in choosing that which may prove to be a temporary vocation or may become a life work. the temporary idea must be combated vigorously in the girl's mind. many an unwise choice would have been avoided had the girl really faced the possibility of making the work she undertook a life work. the temporary idea makes inefficient workers and discontented women. there is in most cases, especially among the fairly well-to-do, no dearth of assistance offered to the young girl in making her choice. much of the advice, unfortunately, is not based on real knowledge either of vocations or of the girl. knowledge is absolutely necessary to successful judgment in this delicate matter. from a large number of letters written by high-school girls let me quote the following typical answers to the question: why have you chosen the vocation for which you are preparing? "ever since i could walk my uncle has been making plans for me in music." "my first ambition was to be a stenographer, but my father objected. my father's choice was for me to be a teacher, and before long it was mine too." "my ambition until my junior year in high school was to be a teacher. from that time until now my ambition is to be a good stenographer. my reason for changing is due partly to my friends and parents. my parents do not want me to be a teacher, as they consider it too hard a life." "i have been greatly influenced by my teacher, who thinks i have a chance [as a dramatic art teacher]. i am willing to take her word for it.". "mother says it is a very ladylike occupation" [stenography]. "my music instructor wishes for me to become a concert player, or at least a good music teacher, and i now think i wish the same." these answers all show the customary ease of throwing out advice, and also the undue significance attached by girls to these probably inexpert opinions. parents often fail in their attempts to launch their children successfully. sometimes they attempt unwisely to thrust a child into an occupation merely because "it is ladylike," or the "vacation is long," or "the pay is good," regardless of the child's aptitude or limitations. quite often they await inspiration in the form of some revelation of the child's desires, regardless of the demand of society for such service as the child may elect to supply or the effect of the vocation upon the child's health or character. undue sacrifice on the part of parents has without question swelled the ranks of mediocre physicians and lawyers and clergymen. it has doubtless produced thousands of teachers who cannot teach, nurses who are quite unsuited to the sick-room, and office workers who have not the rudiments of business ability. it would seem that truly successful guidance in a girl's search for a vocation can come, like much of her training, only from wise coöperation of school and home. teacher and parent see the girl from different angles. their combined judgment will consequently have double value. as the time of vocational choice approaches, school records should cover larger ground than before, and should be made with great care, with constant appeal to parents for confirmation and additional facts. the record should cover: . _physical characteristics_: height; weight; lung capacity; sight; hearing; condition of nasal passages; condition of teeth; bodily strength and endurance; nerve strength or weakness. . _health history_: time lost from school by illness; school work as affected by physical condition when the girl is in school; probable ability or inability to bear the confinement of an indoor occupation; any early illness, accident, or surgical operation which may affect health and therefore vocational possibilities. . _mental characteristics_: the quality of school work; studious or active in temperament; best suited for head work, handwork, or a combination; ability to work independently of teacher or other guide; studies most enjoyed; studies in which best work is done; evidences, if any, of special talent, and whether or not sufficient to form basis of life work. . _moral characteristics_: honesty; moral courage; stability; tact; combativeness; leader or follower. . _heredity_: physical statistics in regard to parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts; occupations followed by these, with success or otherwise; family traditions as to work; special abilities in family noted. . _vocational ambitions_. . _family resources for special training_. without some such record as this--and it need scarcely be said that the one given here is capable of wide adaptation to special needs--teachers, parents, or other friends of the girl are poorly equipped for giving advice as to the girl's future. and yet it is common enough for such advice to be thrown out in the most casual manner, with scarcely a thought of the ambitions awakened or of the future to which they may lead. "you certainly ought to go on the stage," chorus the admiring friends of the girl who excels in the work of the elocution class. and sometimes with no other counsel than this, from people who really know nothing about the matter, the girl struggles to enter the theatrical world, only to find that her talent, sufficient to excite admiring comment among her friends, has proved inadequate to make her a worth-while actress. "why don't you study art?" say the friends of another girl; or, "you like to take care of sick people. why don't you train for nursing?" or, "you're so fond of books. i should think you would be a librarian"--quite regardless of the fact that the girl advised to study art has neither the perseverance nor the health to study successfully; that the one advised to be a nurse lacks patience and repose to a considerable degree; or that the one advised to be a librarian is already suffering from strained eyes and should choose her vocation from the great outdoors. knowledge of the girl must, however, be supplemented by a wide knowledge of vocations to be of real value to the teacher or parent who is preparing to give vocational counsel. final choice may be reached only after the girl and the vocation are brought into comparative scrutiny, and their mutual fitness determined. in rare cases the choice may be made by the swift process of observing a great talent which, in the absence of serious objections, must govern the life work. oftener the process is one of elimination, or of building up from a general foundation of the girl's abilities and limitations, and her possibilities for training sufficient to make her an efficient worker in the line chosen. a knowledge of vocations presupposes, first of all, a grasp of the essentials of the work, and hence the characteristics required in the worker to perform it. what sort of girl is needed to make an efficient teacher, nurse, saleswoman, or office worker? how may we recognize this potential teacher without resorting to a clumsy, time-wasting, trial-and-error method? these are matters with which schools and vocational guides all over the country are occupying themselves. perhaps we cannot do better than to examine somewhat these requirements for some occupations toward which girls most often incline. the producing group the girl who is by nature a maker of things may be a factory worker, a needlewoman, a baker, a poultry farmer, a milliner, a photographer, or an artist with brush or with voice, or in dramatic work. she is still one who makes things. we see at once how wide a range of industry may open to her. how shall we know this type of girl? first of all, by her interest in things rather than in people. with the exception of, the singer and the dramatic artist, whose production is of an intangible sort, the girl who makes things is a handworker by choice. the extent to which her handwork is touched by the imaginative instinct of course measures the distance that she may make her way up the ladder of productive work. the girl's school record will usually show her best work with concrete materials. she draws or sews well, has excellent results in the cooking class, works well in the laboratory. at home she finds enjoyment in "making things" of one sort or another. she displays ingenuity, perhaps, in meeting constructive problems. if so, that must be considered in finding her place. handwork for women includes a wide range of occupations. let us now examine some of these kinds of work. [illustration: _in the packing room of a wholesale house. the untrained girl finds it easy to obtain factory work_] _factory work._ this term covers many departments of manufacturing industries. in the main, however, they may be classed together, since in practically all of them the worker contributes only one small portion of the work incidental to the making of candy, or artificial flowers, or coats, or pickles, or shoes, or corsets, or underwear, or anyone of a hundred different products, some one or several of which may be found in nearly every american town. the great advantage of factory work, as the untrained girl sees it, is that it is usually easy to obtain and that it promises some return even from the start. hence a large proportion of untrained girls who leave school as soon as the law allows enter the factories near their homes. the great disadvantages of factory work, laying aside for a moment many minor disadvantages, are that it not only requires no skill in the beginner, but that it produces little if any skill even with years of work and offers practically no advancement for a large proportion of the workers. it should therefore, be reserved for girls of less keen intelligence, and other girls should if possible be guided toward other occupations. teachers must make themselves thoroughly familiar with working conditions in local factories, since there will always be girls who, because of their own limitations or the limitations of their environment, will find themselves obliged to take up factory work. under the teacher's guidance girls should make definite studies and prepare detailed reports of local conditions with respect to working hours, character of work, wages, possible advancement, dangers to health, moral conditions, advantages over other occupations open to girls with no more training, and disadvantages. girls should at least go into factory work with their eyes open, that they may pass their days in the best surroundings available. _dressmaking_. the possibilities for the girl entering upon work connected with dressmaking with the ultimate object of becoming a dressmaker herself are far wider than in the case of the machine worker in shop or factory. the immediate return for the untrained girl is far less, but the farsighted girl must learn to look beyond the immediate present. not all girls, however, will make good dressmakers. not all, even of the producing type of girl, will do so. certain definite qualities are required. the girl who would succeed as a dressmaker must possess ingenuity, imagination, and the visualizing type of mind. she must see the end from the beginning, and must be able to find the way to produce that which she visualizes. she must be a keen observer. she must have confidence in her own power to create. she must possess manual dexterity, artistic ideas, and, if she aims at a business of her own, a pleasing personality and keen business sense. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a millinery class. millinery requires of the girl a certain degree of creative ability] _millinery_. millinery requires in its workers the same general type of mind required for dressmaking, and in addition a certain millinery faculty or creative ability. the girl who can make and trim hats usually discovers her own talent fairly early in life. _arts and crafts._ this somewhat elastic term we use to include a wide range of occupations which have to do with articles of use or ornament which are handmade and which require skill in designing or in carrying out designs. embroidery, lace making, rug and tapestry weaving, basketry, china painting, wood and leather work, handwork in metals, bookbinding, and the designing and painting of cards for various occasions are familiar examples of this kind of work. photography, map making, designing of wall paper and fabrics, costume designing and illustrating, making of signs, placards, diagrams, working drawings, advertising illustrations, book and magazine illustrating, landscape gardening and architecture, interior decorating, are other lines offering work to men and women alike. the range of work here is no greater than the range of qualities which may be happily and usefully employed in arts and crafts. all branches of the work, however, are alike in demanding a certain degree of artistic sense and deftness of manual touch. an accurate, observant eye is an absolute essential, and, for all but the lowest and most mechanical lines of work, imagination, originality, and an inventive habit of mind make the foundation of success. in some lines a fine sense of color values must underlie good work, in others the ability to draw easily. all work of this sort requires the ability to do careful, painstaking, and persevering work. given this ability and the artistic sense before mentioned, the girl's work may be determined by some special talent, by the special training possible for her, or by the openings possible in her chosen line of work within comparatively easy access. [illustration: photograph by c. park pressey a youthful farmer. the census figures for the year report one-fifth of all women employed in gainful occupations as engaged in the pursuit of agriculture and animal husbandry] _agriculture._ the census figures which report one-fifth of all women gainfully employed as engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry are somewhat startling until we observe that southern negro women make up a very large number of the farm workers reported. even aside from these, however, there are many women who are finding work in gardening, poultry raising, bee culture, dairying, and the like. the girl who is fitted to take up work of this sort is usually the girl who has grown up on the farm or at least in the country and who has a sympathy with growing things. she is essentially the "outdoor girl." she must be willing to study the science of making things grow. she must be able to keep accounts, that she may know what she is doing and what her profits are. above all, she must have no false pride about "dirty work." properly such a girl should have entered upon her career even before she has finished her formal education, so that "going to work" means merely enlarging her work to occupy her time more fully and to bring in as soon as possible a living income. in this sort of work the girl possessing initiative and an independent spirit will naturally do best, since there are comparatively few opportunities for such work under supervision. care must, however, be exercised by vocational guides in suggesting, and by girls in choosing, the independent career. usually it is the girl who has shown promise in independent work at school or at home that will make a success of such work later in life. the girl who relaxes when the pressure of compulsion is removed will not be a success as "her own boss." it goes without saying that the girl who does well as her own superior officer will be happier to do work upon her own initiative than merely to carry out the plans made by others. agricultural work will sometimes offer her exactly the conditions she desires. many successful farm-owners are women, and their work compares favorably with that of men. _food production_. it is common, in these days, to meet the assertion that the preparation of food, once woman's undisputed work, has been almost if not quite removed from her hands; and that, even where she may still contribute to this work, she must do so in the factory, the bakery, the packing house, or the delicatessen shop. there are, nevertheless, still many women who are fitted for cooking and kindred pursuits who will not find an outlet for their abilities in any of the places mentioned. in the main, factory production of food is like factory production of other things--a highly differentiated process, in which the individual worker finds little satisfaction for her desire to "make things" and little, if any, opportunity to contribute from her ability to the final result. in the canning factory she may sit all day before an ever-moving procession of beans or peas, from which she removes any unsuitable for cooking. or it may be an endless procession of cans, upon which she rapidly lays covers as they pass. in the pickle factory she may pack tiny cucumbers into bottles. in the packing house she may perform the task of painting cans. none of these occupations is more than mere unskilled labor. none is suitable for the girl who likes to cook, and who can cook. the number of such girls is already fairly large and will undoubtedly increase as the domestic science classes of our schools do more and better work. [illustration: an up-to-date factory. in the factory the work is necessarily routine, and the individual worker finds very little satisfaction for her desire to make things] opposed to the theoretical statement that food is or at least to-morrow will be prepared entirely in the public-utility plants outside the home is the practical fact that home-cooked food, home-preserved fruits and jellies, and home-canned vegetables and meats find ready sale and that women who can produce these things do find it profitable to do so. there is, consequently, a field for some girls in such work. [illustration: cooking class at benson polytechnic school for girls, portland, oregon. in spite of the statement that foods will be prepared in the public utility plants, the trained, accurate worker may find a ready sale for home-cooked foods] not all girls, on the other hand, who have taken the domestic science course are fitted to take up this work, even if a market could be found for their work. only the expert, that is, the precise, accurate, painstaking cook, can secure uniform results day after day. only the rapid worker can do enough to insure pay for her time. only the girl with a keen sense of taste can properly judge results and devise successful combinations. only a business woman can buy to advantage and compute ratios of expense and return. this combination, of course, is not to be found every day. the distributing group _salesmanship_. passing from the class of work which has to do with making things to that group of occupations which has to do with the distribution of various products to the consumer, we shall naturally consider, first of all, the saleswoman. in any given group of young and untrained girls drawn as in our schools from varying environment and heredity, the _natural_ saleswomen will probably be in the minority. i do not mean that girls may not often express a desire to "work in a store" as apparently the easiest and most immediate employment for the untrained girl. this may or may not indicate that the girl has a commercial mind. the girl who is really interested in commercial undertakings is easily distinguished from her fellow workers in any salesroom. she is not the girl who lingers in conversation with the girl next to her while a customer waits, or who gazes indifferently over the customer's head while the latter makes her choice from the goods laid before her. to the real saleswoman every customer is a possibility, every sale a victory, and every failure to sell distinctly a defeat. the fact that we see so few girls and women of this type behind the counters in our shopping centers is sufficient indication that many girls would have been better placed in other occupations. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. hardware section of a department store. salesmanship offers large opportunities to the real saleswoman, who considers every customer a possibility] we find, however, in , the number of saleswomen reported as , , together with , "clerks" in stores, many of whom the report states are "evidently saleswomen" under another name. there are also about , female proprietors, officials, managers, and floorwalkers in stores, and , commercial travelers. this gives us a large number of women who are engaged in the sale of goods. for the girl of the commercial mind, salesmanship in some form presents certain possibilities, although there is far less chance for her to rise in this work than for a boy. she must begin at the most rudimentary work, as cash or errand girl, and her progress will necessarily be slow. she will require an ability to handle with some skill elementary forms of arithmetic, an alert and observing mind, an interest in and some knowledge of human nature, and good health to endure the confinement of the long day. she will be fortunate if she finds a place in one of the stores in which a continuation school is conducted. at such a school in altman's department store in new york the girls pursue a regular course designed to be especially helpful in their work, and are graduated with all due formality, in which both public-school and store officials take part. such a school helps girls to feel a pride in their work and to feel that they are under observation by those who will recognize and reward real endeavor. filene's in boston and wanamaker's in new york and philadelphia are other notable examples of such schools. in a government report previously quoted we find interesting figures as to the possibility of advancement for the saleswoman. in a study of twenty-six of the largest department stores in new york, chicago, and philadelphia, employing more than , women, the workers were classed as follows: per cent cash girls, messengers, bundle girls, etc . saleswomen . buyers and assistant buyers . office and other employees . "it will be seen," adds the report, "that the opportunity for reaching the coveted position of buyer or assistant buyer is small." the disadvantages and dangers of salesmanship for girls, other than small pay and improbability of much advancement, we shall consider in a later chapter. we may say here, however, that these disadvantages and dangers, for the really commercially minded girl, are to a certain extent neutralized by her nature and possibilities. she is the girl whose mind is more or less concentrated on "the selling game." her nerves are less worn because of a certain exhilaration in her work. she is the girl who passes beyond the underpaid stage and is able to live decently and to rise to a position of some responsibility, partly because of her concentration and partly because she has been able to resist the influences about her which make for mediocrity or worse. _office work_. the girl emerging from high school and looking for work is usually on the lookout for what in a boy we call a "white-collar job." especially in the case where the girl has been kept in school at more or less sacrifice on the part of her parents, both they and the girl feel that the extra years of schooling entitle her to a "high-class" occupation of some kind. girls are far less willing than boys to "begin at the bottom" and work up through the various stages of apprenticeship to ultimate positions near the top. they resent being asked to take the "overall" job and fear mightily to soil their hands. [illustration: office girls at work. the successful office worker must be neat and accurate and have a temperament in which pleasure in arrangement takes precedence over joy in production] twenty-five years ago a large proportion of high-school graduates went at once into the teaching force, where they succeeded (or not) in "learning to do by doing," without professional training of any sort. now, however, teaching as a profession is in many places fortunately reserved for the girls who prepare in college or normal school; and a larger proportion of girls who cannot have this professional training are looking for other occupations. office work attracts a large number, and, with present-day business courses in high schools, many girls find employment as stenographers, typists, cashiers in small establishments, bookkeepers, or general office assistants. in any of these positions girls without special training or experience must begin at very low wages. whether they rise to higher ones depends to some extent at least upon the girls themselves. what sort of girl shall we encourage to enter office work? not the girl whose talent lies in making things, for to her the routine of the office will be a weary and endless treadmill entirely barren of results; nor the girl who requires the stimulus of people to keep her alert and keyed to her best work; nor the girl who cannot be happy at indoor work. office work seems to require a temperament in which pleasure in arrangement takes precedence over joy in production; in which neatness, accuracy, and precision afford satisfaction even in monotonous tasks. coupled with these a mathematical bent gives us the cashier or accountant or bookkeeper; mental alertness and manual dexterity, the stenographer; a talent for organization, the secretary. girls who enter upon office work directly from high school must be content with rudimentary tasks and must beware lest they remain at a low level in the office force. girls with more training may begin somewhat farther up, the best positions usually going to those whose general education and equipment are greatest. stenographers are more valuable in proportion as their knowledge of spelling, sentence formation, and letter writing is reinforced by a feeling for good english and an ability to relieve their superiors of details in outlining correspondence. it is not enough that bookkeepers know one or several systems of keeping business records, or that cashiers manipulate figures rapidly and well. more important than these fundamental requirements is the determination to grasp the details of the business as conducted in the office in which they find themselves and to adapt their work to the needs of the person whose work they do. general knowledge and the ability to think not only supplement, but easily become more valuable than, technical training. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. the successful secretary must have a talent for organization] a careful study of local conditions as they affect office positions will enable girls and their guides to have a better conception of requirements and rewards in this field. a valuable study of conditions among office girls in cleveland has recently been published which sheds considerable light on the ultimate industrial fate of the overyoung and poorly trained office worker. a more general study is found in the volume on _women in office service_ issued by the women's educational union of boston. the service group the third, or service, group of workingwomen covers without doubt the widest range of all. here we find the domestic helper (or servant, as she has usually been called), the telephone operator, the librarian, the teacher, the nurse, the physician, the lawyer, the social worker, the clergyman or minister. all degrees of training are represented, and many varieties of work, from the simplest to the most complex. strictly speaking, service has to do with personal attendance and help, but it is constantly overlapping other lines of work. the household assistant is not only a helper, but at times a producer; the telephone operator and the librarian are distributors as well as public helpers; the secretary is an office worker, although she is a personal assistant to her employer as well. for successful work in any of these lines, however, a girl must possess certain definite characteristics, to which her peculiar talent or tendency may give the determining direction as she chooses her work. in service of any sort the girl is brought into constant relation with people. hence she must be the sort of girl to whom people and not things are the chief interest of life. she should have an agreeable personality, that she may give pleasure with her service; she needs tact, that she may keep the atmosphere about her unruffled; she needs to find pleasure for herself in service, seeing always the end rather than merely the often wearisome details of work. beyond these general qualities we must begin at once to make subdivisions, since the additional traits necessary to make a girl successful in one line of service differ often widely from those required in any other line. we must therefore take up some of the lines of work in more or less detail. _domestic work_. the untrained girl who naturally falls into the service group has a rather poor outlook for congenial and successful work as conditions exist. with ability which she perhaps does not possess, and with training which she cannot afford, she would naturally become a teacher, a nurse, a private secretary, a librarian, or a social worker. without training, she finds little except domestic service open to her; and domestic service finds little favor with girls, or with students of vocational possibilities for girls. these are unfortunate facts. for the untrained girl of merely average abilities, with no pronounced talent or inclination, but with an interest in persons and a pleasure in doing things for people, helping in the tasks of homemaking ought to prove suitable work. it is, however, the one vocation for the untrained girl which requires her to live in the home of her employer, thus curtailing her independence, rendering her hours of work long and uncertain, and cutting off the natural social environment possible if she returned to her own home at the end of the day's work. the social position of girls in domestic service, especially in the towns and cities, is peculiarly hard for a self-respecting girl to bear. it is in large part a reflection upon her sacrifice of independence. the derisive slang term "slavey" expresses the generally prevalent public contempt. it is small wonder that a girl fears to brave such a sentiment and as a result avoids what is perhaps in itself congenial work in pleasanter surroundings than most noisy, ill-smelling factories. almost all the conditions surrounding the domestic worker are such that it is practically impossible to say except of each place considered by itself whether or not it is a suitable and desirable place for a girl, or whether work and wages are fair. practically no progress has been made in standardizing household work. the factory girl knows what she is to do and when she is to do it and how long her day is to be. the housework girl seldom knows any of these things with any degree of certainty. any plan which will make it possible to regulate these matters according to some recognized standard, and which will enable domestic workers to live at home, going to and from their work at regular hours as shop, factory, and office employees do, will help very materially to solve the problem of opening another desirable vocation to the untrained girl. the untrained girl who is willing to accept a difficult and trying position in a private kitchen with the idea of making her work serve her as a training school for better work in the future may make a success of her life after all. such a girl will have good observing powers and ability to follow directions and gauge the success of results. she will have adaptability, patience, and a very definite ambition. for domestic service may be a stepping stone. for the high-school girl a better opening may sometimes be found as a mother's helper. many women who find the ordinary household helper unsatisfactory give employment to girls of refinement and high-school training who are capable of assisting either with household tasks or with the care of children. girls in such positions are usually made "one of the family," and are sometimes very happily situated. their earnings are often more than those of other girls of their intelligence and training who are in offices or stores; but there is of course little chance of advancement, and there is still the prejudice against domestic work to be reckoned with. here, as with household assistants, the greatest drawback is probably lack of standardization of work and of working conditions. the girl who wishes to become a "mother's helper" must have a natural refinement and some knowledge of social usage if she is to be a sharer in the family life of her employer. she must use excellent english, must know how to dress quietly and suitably, and must not only _know how_ to keep herself in the background of family life, but must be _willing_ to remain somewhat in the shadows. probably no better field for the investigation of these trying questions could be found than the high school. the ranks of employers of domestic help are being constantly recruited from the girls who were the high-school students of yesterday and have now taken their places as housekeepers. the high school then, where the problem may be approached in an impersonal manner quite impossible later when the question has become a personal one, is the proper place in which to study the domestic service question and to attempt its standardization. the higher positions involving domestic work are more in the nature of supervisory employment. many women are employed as matrons in hospitals, boarding schools, and other institutions, as housekeepers in hotels, club buildings, or in large private establishments. these positions of course call for women who are not only thoroughly familiar with the work to be done, but are skilled in managing their subordinates who do the actual work. they require women who have administrative ability, knowledge of keeping accounts, proper standards of living and of service, and initiative. for the woman who has a desire to enter business for herself there are openings in the line of domestic work. from time immemorial women have managed lodging and boarding houses, sometimes with good returns. they are also the owners and managers of tea rooms, restaurants, laundries, dyeing and cleaning establishments, hairdressing and manicure shops, and day nurseries. all these occupations can be followed successfully only by the woman of business ability and some technical knowledge. they require not only knowledge but aptitude on the part of the worker. they are usually undertaken only by women of some experience, and are the result of some earlier choice rather than the choice of the vocation-seeking girl. [illustration: the true teacher represents a high type of social worker] _teaching_. the teacher differs from the person who has merely an interest in human kind in the abstract, because she has a special interest in one particular class of human beings--those who are most distinctly in the process of making. she is interested in children, or she should not be teaching. this, however, is not enough. the girl who wishes to teach must possess certain well-defined characteristics. her health must be good, and her nerve force stable. temperamentally she must be enthusiastic and optimistic, but capable of sustained effort even in the face of apparent failure. her outlook must be broad, and her patience unfailing. intellectually she must be a student, and if she possess considerable initiative and originality in her study, so much the better. she must not, however, become a student of mathematics or history or languages to the exclusion of the more absorbing study of her pupils, nor even to so great a degree as she studies them. the true teacher represents a high type of social worker. many girls enter upon the work of teaching badly handicapped by the lack of some of these essential qualities and are in consequence never able to rise to real understanding and accomplishment of their work. teaching in these days is a broad vocation, covering many different lines of work; probably no occupation for girls is so well known with both its conditions and rewards as this. in general, more girls than are by nature fitted for the work stand ready to undertake it. there is nevertheless difficulty for school officials in finding real teachers enough to fill their positions. for the right girl, teaching has much to offer. _library work_. the librarian in these modern days is a most important public servant, and many openings in library work are to be found. the services to be performed range from purely routine work to a very high type of constructive service for the community. in the small libraries an "all-round" type of worker is required. in the larger ones specialties may be followed. in these larger libraries there are to be found permanent places for the routine workers. in smaller ones each worker should be in line for even the highest type of constructive work. the routine worker in the library is merely an office worker, and the same girl who would do well at the mechanical tasks of an office will do well here. the real librarian is of a different sort. she must have the neatness, precision, and accuracy of the office worker, to be sure; but to these she must add a broad conception of the place of the library in the community, and must display initiative and originality in bringing it to occupy that place. she must know books; she must know people. she must be in touch with current history, and be alert to place library material bearing upon it at the disposal of the people. she must have quick sympathies, tact, the teaching spirit (carefully concealed), and much administrative ability. and she must be trained for her work. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a well-equipped library. the successful librarian must be scientifically trained for her work] _nursing_. the nurse is in many ways like the teacher, and the girl who has the right temperament for successful teaching will usually make a successful nurse, temperamentally considered. her mental traits, or perhaps more exactly her habits of thought, may be somewhat different. the teacher must be able to attend to many things; the nurse must be able to concentrate on one. originality and initiative are less to be desired, since the nurse is not usually in charge of her case directly, but rather subject to the doctor's orders. she must, nevertheless, be resourceful in emergencies, and of good judgment always. she should be calm as well as patient, quiet in speech and movement, a keen observer, and willing to accept responsibility. absolute obedience and loyalty to her superiors is expected, and a high conception of the ethics of her calling. underlying all these qualifications, the nurse must have not only good health but physical strength. [illustration: copyright by keystone view co. during the world war nursing offered to women perhaps the largest opportunities for service. here is shown princess mary of england in the great ormond street hospital, london] _social work_. this term covers many occupations which overlap the work of the teacher, the nurse, the secretary, the house mother or matron, and even that of the physician and lawyer. the field of work is a large one, including settlement leaders and assistants, workers in social and community centers and recreation centers, vacation playgrounds, public and private charities, district nurses and visiting nurses sent out by various agencies, deaconesses and other church visitors, young women's christian association leaders and helpers, missionaries, welfare workers in large manufacturing or mercantile establishments, probation officers, and many others. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. settlement work at greenwich house, new york. the settlement worker to succeed must be truly altruistic] the social worker must of course have the same suitability for teaching or nursing or any other of the various tasks that she may undertake as has the teacher or nurse or other person who works under different auspices. she must have in addition a truly altruistic spirit, a deep earnestness which will survive discouragement, and a real insight into the circumstances, handicaps, and possibilities of others. this insight presupposes maturity of thought; and the young girl must serve a long apprenticeship with life before she is at her best as a social worker. it sometimes seems as though no field was so exactly suited to the abilities of the married woman who has time for service, or the mother whose children are grown, leaving her free again to teach or nurse the sick or bring justice to the little child as she was trained to do in her youth. less common vocations for women--but still often chosen after all--are reserved for those whose abilities are so specialized and so striking that they compel a choice. singers, artists with brush or pen, the natural actress, the journalist or author, need usually no one to guide their choice. our great difficulty here is not to open the girl's eyes to her opportunity, but to restrain the one who has not measured her ability correctly from attempting that which she cannot perform. the same is true of girls who aspire to be physicians, lawyers, or ministers. some few succeed in all these vocations. many more have not the scientific habits of mind, the stability, or the endurance to make a successful fight for recognition against great odds. many girls mistake what may be a pleasant and satisfying avocation for a life work. for the girl who will not be held back, there may be a life of achievement ahead, with fame and all the other accompaniments of successful public life; or there may be the disappointments of unrealized ambition. we must see that girls face this possibility with the other. chapter xii the girl's work (continued)--vocations as affecting homemaking choice of vocation is far from being a simple matter for either boy or girl; but for the girl who recognizes homemaking as woman's work, double possibilities complicate her problem more than that of the boy. _the girl must prepare for life work in the home, or life work outside the home, or a period of either followed by the other, or perhaps a combination of both during some part or even all of her mature life_. it is the part of wisdom for us to study vocations in their relation to homemaking. will the girl who works in the factory, for instance, or who becomes a teacher or a lawyer or a physician, be as good a homemaker as she would have been had she chosen some other occupation? will she perhaps be a better homemaker for her vocational experience? or will her life in the industrial world unfit her for life in the home or turn her inclination away from the homemaker's work? these questions have somehow fallen into the background in the steady increase of girls as industrial workers. "good money" has usually come first, and after that other considerations of social advantage, working conditions, or local demand. marriage and motherhood are still recognized as normal conditions for most women, but we let their industrial life step in between their homemaking preparation in home and school, with the result that many lose physical fitness or mental aptitude or inclination for the home life. we treat marriage as an incident, even though it occurs often enough to be for most women the rule rather than the exception. at some time in their lives, . per cent of all women marry. the first broad classification of vocations in their relation to homemaking is: ( ) those which are favorable to homemaking, ( ) those which are unfavorable, ( ) those which are neutral. it must, however, be recognized at the outset that few hard-and-fast lines between these groups can be drawn, and that "the personal equation" is as important a factor here as in most personal questions. it is true, nevertheless, that helpful deductions may be drawn from facts which it is possible to gather concerning the physical, mental, and moral results of pursuing certain occupations as a prelude to marriage and the making of a home. in a general way, economic independence, that is, the earning of her own living by a girl for several years before marriage, tends to increase her knowledge of the value of money and to make her a better financial manager. probably this same independence makes a girl slightly less anxious to marry, especially since in most cases she has hitherto been expected to give up her personal income in exchange for an extremely uncertain system of sharing what the husband earns. independence of any sort is reluctantly laid aside by those who have possessed it. this very reluctance on the part of girls ought to be a force in the direction of economic independence of wives, a most desirable and necessary condition for society to bring about. gainful occupation has then much to recommend it and little to be said against it as part of the training for matrimony. certain occupations, however, are so essentially favorable to the girl's homemaking ability and to her probable inclination to make a home of her own that we do not hesitate to recommend them as the best directions for girls' vocational work to take, _other things being equal._ we have already said that the girl distinctly not home-minded is more safely left to her own inclinations. she would not be a success as a homemaker under any circumstances. other girls may be made or marred by the years which intervene between their school and home life. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood the value of domestic work of any sort as a preparation for homemaking is generally admitted without argument.] the value of domestic work of any sort as a preparation for homemaking is generally admitted without argument. closely in touch with a home throughout her maturing years, the girl may undertake her own housekeeping problems with ease and efficiency. conditions as they often exist, however, especially for the younger and untrained domestic worker, do not allow the girl to obtain other experience quite as necessary if she is to become not merely a housekeeper but a true homemaker. the untrained girl who enters upon domestic work at fourteen or fifteen should have opportunity--indeed the opportunity should be thrust upon her--of attending a continuation school, where the special aim should be to counteract the narrowing tendency of work which revolves about so small an orbit. ideals of home life are either lacking or distorted in the minds of many working girls, and when such girls become wives and mothers they strive for the wrong things or they fall back without striving at all, taking merely what comes. they fail to be forces for good in their family life. [illustration: demonstration by teacher in domestic science. teaching affords excellent preparation for the prospective homemaker.] teaching and nursing may be grouped together as excellent preparation for the prospective homemaker. it may be contended that the teacher and the hospital nurse spend years outside the home environment and that their minds are turned to other problems than those of housekeeping. this contention is undoubtedly true; and if we were striving merely to make housekeepers, it might be worthy of serious consideration. the home, however, as we have defined it, is a place in which to make people, and both the nurse and the teacher serve a long apprenticeship in this sort of manufacture. expert workers in either line concern themselves with the bodies and the minds of their pupils or patients. they, together with physicians, lawyers, and social workers, have opportunities which can scarcely be equaled for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes. they learn to be resourceful and to meet the emergencies of which life is full; they have the advantage of trained minds to set to work upon the administrative problems which underlie successful home life. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood women medical students. physicians and surgeons have unusual opportunities for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes] a question may arise as to the physical fitness for marriage and motherhood of the girl who has given her nerve force to the exacting and often depleting work of nurse, teacher, or physician. it is unquestionably true that nurses and teachers do often wear out after comparatively few years at their vocation, although of the majority the opposite is true. this merely means that conditions surrounding these vocations should be studied with a view to their improvement, if necessary, since we believe the vocations to be suited to women and women to the vocations. office work may prove an excellent training for certain phases of homemaking work. neatness, accuracy, precision, the doing again and again of constantly recurring tasks, all find their place and use in the housekeeper's routine. the calm atmosphere of the well-kept office even when typewriters and calculating machines are rattling is a better preparation for an orderly home than the rush of the department store or the factory. purely routine workers, who put little or no thought into their daily tasks, will enter upon homemaking lacking the initiative that homemakers need. but the able office worker is not merely a follower of routine. the greatest lack of office work as preparation for a homemaking career is that the girl's interests during so large a part of her day are led away from the home and all that pertains to it. she works neither with people nor with the things which go to make homes. probably, on the whole, office work in a general way may be classed as a neutral occupation, which neither adds to, nor reduces, in any great degree the girl's possibilities as a homemaker. salesmanship for girls, especially in the great department stores of the cities, is a vocation of at least doubtful advantage for the home-minded girl to pursue as a step in her training for managing her own home. in the quiet of the village store, with few associates in work, and with one's neighbors and fellow townsmen for customers, salesmanship takes on a somewhat different aspect. but the city store means usually hurry, excitement, nerve strain, a long day, with quite probably reaction to excessive gayety and hence more nerve strain at night. it means spending one's days among great collections of finery which tend to assume undue importance in the girl's eyes. it means constant association with people who spend, until spending seems the only end in life. it means almost always pay lower than is consistent with decent living if the girl must depend alone upon her own earnings. and none of these things tends toward steady, skillful, contented wifehood and motherhood in later years. this question of underpaid work is of course not found alone in the department store. but, wherever it is found, we may be sure that it tends on the one hand toward marriage as a way of escape from present want, and on the other toward inefficiency in the relation so lightly assumed. the factory girl is in many respects in a position parallel to that of the saleswoman. she earns too little to make comfortable living possible. she too must leave home early and return late, wearied by the monotony of a day in uninteresting surroundings, with neither energy nor inclination for anything other than complete relaxation and "fun." this desire for relaxation leads her often away from a crowded, ill-supported home in the evenings, until the habit settles into a confirmed disposition. this is a decided handicap for a homemaker. coupled with the mental inertia resulting from years of mechanical work without thought, it provides poor material from which to make steady, responsible, efficient women. we have already noted, however, that factories differ widely. it follows of necessity that the girls who work in them come from their work with all grades of ability. the actress, the artist, and the literary woman are usually spoken of as far removed from the true domestic type. this i cannot believe to be true, except in individual cases. all these women, as makers of finished products, stand far nearer to the traditional type of woman than many others we might name. the life of the actress tends more than the others perhaps to break home ties, but in the case of real talent in any direction ordinary rules do not apply. the actress, the artist, and the writer are much more likely to carry on their work after marriage than the teacher, the office worker, or even the factory woman. many of them succeed to a remarkable degree in doing two things well. many more, of course, are less successful, but we must not overlook the fact that the failures are more noised abroad than the successes. it is a matter for regret that most women, upon leaving an industrial career for marriage, drop so completely out of touch with their former work. in the case of the untrained woman, who has received little and given little in her work, it is a matter of no moment; but when years have been given to skilled labor, it is economic waste to have the skill lost and the process forgotten. many times the woman finds herself after a short life in the home obliged to earn a living once more for herself or it may be for a family. she returns to her teaching or her office work or a position in the library; but she is no longer, at least for a considerable time, the expert she once was. why should not the former teacher keep up her interest in educational literature and the new ideas in what might have been her life work? would it not be well for the one-time stenographer to keep a gentle hold upon the quirks and quirls which once brought to her her weekly salary? a young mother of my acquaintance who was a concert violinist of much ability has found no time for more than a year to practice, "since baby came," and thousands of dollars spent in making her a player are being thrown away. to some this might seem the right thing. she has found "the home her sphere." to others it seems a serious waste. we advocate often that the middle-aged woman who has reared her children should return in some way to the work of the world outside the home. in the case of the trained woman her training should be made of use in such return. she should, however, beware lest her tools are rusty from disuse. we may not perhaps leave the questions involved in a discussion of vocations as they affect homemaking without noticing that certain occupations are considered especially dangerous to the moral stability of girls. nursing, private secretaryship, and domestic service present dangers in direct proportion as they bring about isolated companionship for the girl and a male employer. girls must not enter these employments without the knowledge of how to protect themselves from lowering influences. chapter xiii the girl's work (continued)--vocations determined by training the question of vocation choosing begins to make itself felt far down in the grammar school, first among the retarded and backward children who are old for their grades and are merely waiting and marking time until the law will allow them to leave school and go to work. these children are usually either mentally subnormal or handicapped by foreign birth and so unable to grasp the education which is being offered them. as soon as they are released the girls go to the factory, to the store, or to help with some one's baby or with the housework. no other places are open to them, and their possibilities in any place are few. they cannot rise because they are mentally untrained. the upper grades of the grammar school lose annually many children who would be able to profit by the help the school offers to those who can remain. some drop out because they see no need of remaining when the factory will employ them without further knowledge. others chafe at spending time on what seems to them, and what sometimes is, quite unrelated to the life they will lead and the work they will do. some leave reluctantly, because their help is needed in financing a large family. many go gladly, because they will begin to earn and to have some of the things they ardently desire. and until yesterday the school paid little attention to their going, regarding it as one of the necessary evils. still less attention did it pay to what these pupils became after they left. the school's responsibility ended at its outer door. now that these conditions are being changed, the school is finding responsibilities and opportunities on every hand. the foreign-born are taken out of the regular grades where they cannot fit, and are taught english by themselves first of all. the subnormal children are studied for latent vocational possibilities, and where minds are deficient, hands are the more carefully trained for suitable work. courses are being revised with a view to holding in school the boy or girl who wants practical training for practical work. secondary schools have taken their eyes off college requirements long enough to consider fitting the majority of their pupils to face life without the college. studies of vocations are being made; vocational training is being offered; vocational guidance is at last coming to be considered the concern of the school. vocational work is sometimes concentrated in the high school, but this is reaching back scarcely far enough, since those who do not reach high school need help quite as much as the older ones, while those who expect to continue their training can do so better if they have some idea of the goal to be reached. what are the options that the grammar-school teacher may present to the girls under her care? first of all, as we have already said, the school records must be kept with care and discrimination, so that the teacher may know the girl to whom she speaks. with the records in hand, she will ask herself the following questions: . is further training at the expense of the girl's family possible? do the girl's abilities warrant effort on her parents' part to give her further opportunity? . could the girl's parents continue to pay her living expenses during further training if the training were furnished at the expense of the state? . could the girl obtain training in return for her personal service, either with or without pay? . would the girl be able to repay in skill acquired the expense of her training, whether borne by herself, her parents, or the state? [illustration: photograph by brown bros. a flower-making class for girls of various ages. there is no reason why vocational work should not begin in the grammar school] lines between obtainable work for the trained and the untrained girl are fairly sharply drawn, and the possibilities for each type must be clearly understood by the guide. if it is evident that training cannot be obtained before the girl must begin to earn, the choice is necessarily a narrow one. the factories in the neighborhood should be thoroughly studied, and, under the guidance of the teacher, girls should prepare detailed reports with respect to their working conditions. the "blind-alley" job should be plainly labeled, that it may not catch the girl unaware. girls who must take up factory work should at least be enabled to choose among factories intelligently, and if possible should be fortified with an avocation that will supply them with the interest their daily task fails to inspire and that will provide an anchor against the instability toward which the factory girl tends. [illustration: millinery class in a trade school. where trade schools do not offer such training, there are opportunities for apprentice work for girls] the possibilities for apprentice work with dressmakers or milliners or in other handwork should also be made known. girls begin here, as in the factory, at simple and monotonous tasks, but the possibilities of advancement are far greater and mental development is unquestionably more likely. the ability acquired by such workers, as they progress, to undertake and carry through a complete piece of work is not only satisfying to the workers themselves, but of value in later years. they learn to analyze their constructive problems and to work out the various steps of the work to its ultimate conclusion--a knowledge which the factory girl never attains. some few girls will need to be shown the possibilities which lie in independent productive work. for the girl who has talent or even merely deftness in manual work, coupled with initiative and some degree of originality, such work may bring a better return than working for others. most girls, however, lack courage to start upon independent work, especially if they are in immediate need of earning and are untrained. it often happens, however, that they do not appraise at its true value the training they have received. the grammar-school girl, under present methods of teaching, is often fully qualified to do either plain cooking or plain sewing, but since she does not desire to enter domestic service, she considers these accomplishments very little or not at all in counting her assets for earning. some girls have found ready employment and good returns in home baking, in canning fruit and vegetables, or in mending, making simple clothes for little children, or in making buttonholes and doing other "finishing work" for busy housewives. work of these sorts, undertaken in a small way, has often assumed the proportions of a business, requiring all of a young woman's time and paying her quite as well as and often better than less interesting work in shop or factory. a girl of my acquaintance earns a comfortable living at home with her crochet needle. another has paid her way through high school and college by raising sweet peas. the untrained girl who loves an outdoor life has fewer opportunities than other girls unless she is capable of independent work. if she is capable of this and has sufficient ability to study her work, gardening and poultry or bee culture may open the way for her to work and be happy. school gardens, poultry clubs, and canning clubs have shown many a girl what she may do in these ways. [illustration: courtesy of u.s. department of agriculture some girls have built up a good business canning fruits and vegetables at home] many times too little is realized of the possibilities of these grammar-school girls who are crowded by necessity into the working ranks. we cannot shirk our responsibilities in regard to them, however, although they escape from our school systems and bravely take up the burden of their own lives. quite as many of these girls as of more favored ones will marry and be among the mothers of the next generation. the work they do in the interval between school and home will leave its impress even more strongly than upon the girl whose school life lasts longer and who is therefore older as well as better equipped when she enters upon her work. few of these younger girls in times past can be said to have done anything other than drift into work which would make or spoil their lives and perhaps those of their children after them. it is well that the responsibility of the school toward them is being recognized and met. [illustration: a prosperous poultry farm. poultry farming opens the way for the girl who loves an outdoor life to work in the open and be happy] a distinct duty of the grammar-school teacher is to make known the facts concerning short cuts for grammar-school girls to office work. unscrupulous business "colleges" sometimes mislead these immature girls into believing that a short course taken in their school will enable the girls to fill office positions. facts are at hand which show the futility of attempting office work under such conditions, and teachers should be very careful to see that all the facts are in the possession of their pupils. in the early days of high schools usually the only distinction, if any, in courses was "general" and "classical." to-day we have many courses, or in the larger cities different schools fit boys and girls for varying paths in life. the college-preparatory course or the classical high school leads to college. the commercial course or school leads to office work. the manual training or industrial or practical arts course or high school leads to efficient handwork. the trade school leads to definite occupations. the difficulty now is to help girls choose intelligently which course or school will best meet their requirements. this involves vocation study in the grammar school. [illustration: benson polytechnic school for girls, portland, oregon. the trade school leads to definite occupations. the girl with mechanical ability may find her vocation in millinery, dressmaking, or the various sewing-machine trades] the girl who terminates her formal education with her graduation from high school may find herself not very much better placed, apparently, than the girl who has dropped out of school farther back. many openings into desirable occupations are still closed to her. often her opportunities, however, are much greater than they seem. all facts go to show that the high-school girl makes more rapid progress in efficiency, and therefore in pay, than the younger girl, even when she seems to begin at the same work. some fields, too, are open to her that are not usually possible for the grammar-school girl. in office work the high-school girl who has specialized in her training may make a very creditable showing. many thousands of high-school graduates are received into telephone exchanges where with a brief period of practice they become efficient workers. a very few high-school girls become teachers in country schools without further training, but the number is decreasing every year. if she meets the age requirement, the high-school girl may enter a training school for nurses, gaining her specialized training in return for her services to the hospital. the high-school girl who can spare time and money for some further training finds a larger field open; but, to make the most of what high school has to offer, her plans should be made as early as possible in the high-school course--at the very beginning if it can be managed. the girl must know what further training she is making ready for, must choose electives in high school to help her make ready, or possibly to offset the specializing of this later work by some general culture she may otherwise miss entirely. vocation study, therefore, and vocational guidance must be quite as much a part of the course for the girl who will "train" for her special work as for the girl who goes directly from the secondary school to her vocation. one high-school senior writes: "my special vocation has not yet been chosen, but if it becomes necessary for me to earn my own living i should like to be either a nurse, a teacher, milliner, or director of a cafeteria. i would probably choose the position that was open at the time." here we have the girl who is in no hurry to choose, and who probably has a more or less vague notion of the comparative conditions, requirements, and rewards of the four vocations she mentions. in contrast to this, listen to a high-school student who has been studying herself and her possible vocation in much detail in class work. she says: "i find that i have made good school records only in subjects where i had materials i could see and handle. i have never done well in arithmetic or mathematics, but in drawing, physics, elementary biology, and domestic science i made good marks. i do not like to sew, because it tires me to sit still. i enjoy cooking and marketing. "i like to plan meals and to make up new recipes. i hear that hospitals and institutions employ women at very good salaries to buy all the foodstuffs used in their kitchens. the expert dietitian also plans meals and arranges dietaries. i learn that teachers college, columbia, has courses of study leading to this profession, and i have written to ask for full information." in the class of which this girl is a member, each girl is considering her future as this one is doing. each gathers all available data in regard to the vocation she is studying. her reports become a part of the class records. she makes as full a report as possible as to the duties and responsibilities of the occupation, the schools or training classes that prepare for it, the length and cost of preparation, possibilities of employment, salaries paid, and other details. since training cannot alter fundamentals, but merely builds upon the girl's nature and heredity, the same classifications obtain in the choice of the girl who can have training as in that of the girl who goes untrained to her vocation. there are still the producers, the distributors, and those who serve; and it is still important that the girl should find a place in the right group. the producers will include the designers, the interior decorators, the expert dietitians, the municipal inspectors of food and housing, rural consulting housekeepers, state or country canning-club agents, the women who organize and carry on model laundries, either coöperative or otherwise, the managers of manufacturing enterprises, the farmers, the photographers, the artists, the journalists, and the authors. the distributors are chiefly represented by the higher type of office workers, who are the "idea thinkers" of the business world, since they neither make nor handle products, but merely manipulate the symbols which stand for the products they seldom if ever see. the women who manage buying and selling enterprises for themselves usually belong to the trained group. the service group among trained women is a large one, including nurses, teachers, doctors' and dentists' assistants, various social workers, librarians, secretaries and other confidential office assistants, directors or "house mothers" in school and college dormitories and in institutions, dentists, physicians, lawyers, ministers. within the group there is wide range of choice, differing qualifications are necessary, and varying training is to be undertaken. girls, with the help of a vocational expert, should analyze their physical and mental qualities and habits, and should study somewhat exhaustively the vocation for which they seem to find themselves fitted. "i should like to be a nurse, or a teacher, or a milliner, or the manager of a cafeteria" will not do, since those vocations presuppose some years of widely differing training. perhaps the girl will narrow the choice to nursing or teaching. then she must place over against each other the two professions--special qualifications required, length and cost of training, personal obstacles to be overcome, and especially the demand and supply of nurses and teachers in her locality. upon these depends the girl's chance to succeed when she is fitted and launched. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. the children's ward in a hospital. the nurse must be resourceful and possess good judgment] the student who takes up college work, not as a specialized training, but as a completion of her general education, stands somewhat by herself. such a girl may perhaps put off vocational decision until she is part way through her college years. the college sometimes awakens ambitions and brings to light abilities not hitherto discovered; and even when this does not occur, the choice may be made from the highest and most responsible positions filled by women. from the college girls we draw our high-school teachers and college instructors, our doctors, lawyers, and preachers, in so far as these professions are filled by women. [illustration: photograph by brown bros. among the many vocations belonging to the service group teaching is one of the most popular] we are confronted by the statement, made again and again and reinforced by formidable rows of figures, that the more training a girl receives, the less she is inclined to marry or, if she does marry, to have children. the fact seems undeniable that in our larger eastern women's colleges, at least, not more than half the graduates marry up to the age of forty, which we may accept as the probable limit of the marriage age for the average woman. the natural inference is that a college education in some way prevents or discourages marriage. this may or may not be true. to be quite fair, the statistics should cover the coeducational colleges as well as the colleges for women alone. also some attempt should be made to discover how the likelihood of marriage is affected by the age at which girls finish their college course. do the younger girls of a college class marry, while the older ones do not? are the younger married graduates more often mothers than the older ones, or do they have more children? [illustration: photograph by brown bros. the influence of the librarian extends far beyond the walls of the library] if it is true that training is interfering with marriage and motherhood for our girls, the next step is not necessarily, as some modern hysterical students of the question seem to suggest, that we immediately cut out the training which, in case they do marry, will make them far more valuable wives, mothers, and members of the community; but rather so to time and place the training, and if necessary so to alter its character, that any such tendency away from marriage will be removed and that the trained women of the college and professional school shall be available for the great work of mothering the nation of the future. a final word as to the place of the vocational guide in the choosing of vocations may not be amiss. that every teacher should consider himself or herself a helper in this most important work we must agree; but that any teacher must walk carefully, and use the guiding hand but sparingly, is equally true. the object of vocational help is not merely to keep the "square peg" out of the "round hole." the girl arbitrarily placed in a suitable occupation may never discover why she is there, and may be handicapped all her life by a deep conviction that she fits somewhere else. "know thyself" is a good old maxim yet. the teacher or vocational guide is fitted by the place of observation she holds to help the girl to study herself and the possibilities that life holds out to such as she thus finds herself to be. the final choice should be made by the girl. chapter xiv marriage marriage may, or may not, in these days, be the opening door into the homemaker's career. many a young woman is a homemaker before she marries. on the other hand, women sometimes marry without any thought of making a home. but, after all, it is safe to assume that marriage and homemaking do go hand in hand. the great majority of wives become managers of homes of one sort or another. shall we then frankly educate our girls for marriage--"dangle a wedding ring ever before their eyes"? or shall we regard marriages as "made in heaven" and keep our hands off the whole matter? the proportion of marriages in the united states which terminate in divorce was in one in twelve. divorce in this country is now three times as common as forty years ago. the success or failure of marriages cannot, however, be measured merely by the divorce test. we cannot avoid the knowledge that many other unhappy unions are endured until release comes with death. when we say unhappy marriages, we mean not only those which become unendurable, but all those in which marriage impedes the development and hence the efficiency of either party to the contract. unhappy marriages include not only the mismated, but also those whose unhappiness in married life is due to their own or their mate's misconception of what marriage really means. it is obviously impossible even to estimate the number of marriages which are happy or unhappy; but we are safe in saying that the processes of adjustment in many cases are far harder than they ought to be, and that many marriages which seemingly ought to bring happiness fail of real success. in view of the fact that so many marriages fall short of what they might be, it would seem that some sort of assistance to the girl in choosing a husband and to the young man in choosing a wife would be wise, such as the instruction we give boys and girls to enable them to be successful in the industrial world. in short, it is not enough to prepare girls for homemaking by making all our references to marriage indirect. young men and women are entitled to more knowledge of marriage, its rights, privileges, and duties; they need to realize that in these days of complex living marriage is a difficult relation which requires their best energies and wisest thought. the modern marriage differs from the marriage of earlier centuries in direct proportion as the status of woman has changed. the ancient marriage, and indeed the medieval one, and the marriage of our own grandmother's time began with submission and usually ended with subjection. but the modern marriage at its best is a spiritual and material partnership. it is the modern marriage at its best and otherwise with which we have to do. half a century ago girls married at eighteen or even earlier, took charge of their households, were mothers of good-sized families at twenty-eight or thirty, and were frequently grandmothers at forty. nowadays early marriage is the exception. for years the marriage age has been steadily rising, until some students profess to be alarmed at a prospect of marriage disappearing, the maternal instinct becoming lost by disuse, and the race finally becoming extinct. however, the maximum marriage age, at least for the present, seems to have been reached, and statistics show a slight dropping within the last two or three years. the forces operating to fix the marriage age are exceedingly complex. the higher education of girls has undoubtedly been a large factor in the postponement of marriage. its effect has been wrought in a variety of ways. the increasing years in schoolroom and lecture hall have been directly responsible in many cases. the ambitions aroused account for many more. the increased ability of girls to earn their own living and public acceptance of their doing so have practically removed "marriage as a trade" from the consideration of girls and their parents. girls no longer need to marry in order to transfer the burden of their support from father to husband. instead they may "go to work." and once at work they are often reluctant to give up a personal income for the uncertainties of sharing what a husband earns. then, too, the broadening effect of education makes marriage in the abstract a less absorbing, momentous subject for the girl's thoughts. also the rebound toward selfishness coincident with woman's "emancipation" leads girls to put off what they are sometimes led to consider a sacrifice of themselves. the tragedies of the divorce courts are directly responsible for many a girlish determination not to marry, a determination which is broken only when the first zest of mature life has passed and when the woman begins to long for the home ties she has resolved to deny herself and decides to take the risk. the increased cost of living and the ever-increasing responsibilities of rearing, educating, and launching a family of children lead many young people to postpone marriage until they can command a larger income. the strain of modern industrial life, with its fierce competitions and its early discard of the elderly and unfit, finds many girls who would otherwise marry burdened with the care of parents who can ill spare the daughter's help. [illustration: the halliday historic photograph co. louisa m. alcott miss alcott's lifelong devotion to the interests of her family is a well-known story. she made a happy home for them, and at the same time attained marked success in the literary field.] if all these obstacles to early marriage could be overcome, the question of the wisest time for marrying might be approached fairly and squarely on its merits. too early marriage means immaturity in choice, with the possibility always of unfortunate mistakes and sad awakening. too late marriage, on the other hand, means settled convictions which often result in that incompatibility which seeks relief in divorce. the plasticity of youth at least _promises_ adaptability. the mature judgment of later years ought to afford a wise choice. between extreme youth then and a too settled maturity is the wise time. in order to approach the ideal in the marriage relation, the time of marriage should be so placed that the girl is ( ) physically fit, ( ) fully educated, ( ) broadened by some experience with the world. she must not be too old to bear children safely, or to rear them sympathetically as they approach the difficult years. she must not be physically worn by excessive industrial service, nor with enthusiasms burned out by the same cause. probably between twenty-two and twenty-five the girl reaches the height of physical fitness. she may also by that time have completed a liberal education, and she may even have done that and also have put her training to useful service. it would be better if girls completed their college courses earlier than most do. however, since the great majority of girls do not have a college education, the generally increased age of marriage cannot rightfully be laid, as many seem to lay it, at the doors of the college women. schemes of education in the future will undoubtedly try to remedy the defect of present systems in this respect. if most girls could finish their training in college or professional school at twenty, as some do now, the world would be rewarded by earlier marriages and probably more of them. there would be more children, reared by younger and more enthusiastic mothers. the more difficult professions, which could not be successfully undertaken by the girl of twenty, would then be reserved, as they generally are now, for the women whose ambition is unusually strong and absorbing. attempts are frequently made to show that ambition is becoming an inordinately prominent quality in all women, but there are few facts to support so wide a contention. [illustration: photograph by paul thompson ruth mcenery stuart mrs. stuart was one of those in whom the talent for homemaking and the talent for creative literary work existed side by side. on her husband's plantation in arkansas she found many of the types for the characters in her stories] the girl graduate of twenty, reinforced by from two to five years of work in the vocation she has chosen, is usually fit, physically and mentally, for marriage. more than that, she may by that age, usually, be trusted to know what she wants, even in a husband, if she is ever going to know. in the day when girls married nearly always "in their teens," wise choice of a husband called for selection of a man considerably older than the girl herself. this disparity is less common in these days, and is really less desirable than it once was. the girl of the earlier time reached maturity of mind earlier than the girl of to-day with her prolonged education, and much earlier than the boy of her day did. he was still being educated in school or as an apprentice, and was hardly ready to undertake the responsibility of a family at an age when the girl's scanty education was long since completed and it was considered high time that her support was laid upon a husband's shoulders. it used to be said, "men keep their youth better than women," so that any disparity in age at the time of marriage was soon lost. this is no longer true as it was once. the early marriage, with early and excessive childbearing, overwork, and the numerous restrictions that custom laid upon her, were responsible for woman's loss of youth. these conditions no longer exist. the woman of forty or fifty can now usually hold her own with the man of her own age in point of youth. [illustration: louise homer and her family madame homer's great success in the difficult art of operatic singing has by no means interfered with her career as a homemaker.] another consideration in favor of more nearly equal age lies in the fact that formerly men did not look for wives who were their mental equals. they did not really desire mental equals as wives. to-day they do, or, if there still lingers in the minds of some of them the old notion that wives must be clinging vines, the lingering notion will soon be gone. the marriage of equality possesses too many advantages for both parties to be thrown aside. the wife who can think, who is mature enough to be capable of real partnership, is the wife surely of to-morrow, if not of to-day. among the forces that control marriage may be mentioned ( ) physical attraction, ( ) continued social relationships, ( ) dissimilarity, ( ) affection, ( ) barter. it is usually difficult to say of any marriage that any one of these forces alone caused the mating. it may have been physical attraction together with everyday companionship; or physical attraction and dissimilarity or strangeness, resulting in what we know as love at first sight. or it may have been affection of slow growth, or affection with an element of appreciation of worldly advantage, or it may have been a little physical attraction with a great deal of desire for social position or wealth, or, ugliest of all, it may have been pure barter, without personal attraction of any sort. for these worldy advantages you offer, i will sell you my body and my soul. to secure the finest marriages for girls we must insure three conditions: ( ) high ideals of marriage among our adolescents, ( ) better knowledge of men, and ( ) wise companionships during the years from fourteen to twenty-five. [illustration: margaret junkin preston the south is justly proud of this poet of no mean rank who gave herself unstintedly to her home duties and responsibilities] physical attraction on one or both sides is undoubtedly the greatest force in marriage selection. it is only when physical attraction exerts its influence upon a girl whose ideal of a husband is low or vague or incorrect that the danger is great. physical attraction is not love, but it may be--often it is--the basis of love when it exists between two who are suited to a life together. generally speaking, girls will find married life easier, and their husbands will find life more satisfactory, when the two have been reared with approximately the same ideals. the girl who falls in love with a man largely because he is "different" from the boys among whom she has grown up often finds that very difference a stumbling block to domestic happiness. marriages across such chasms where there should be common ground are more hazardous than between those whose education, social training, friends, and beliefs are of the same type. when they do succeed, they undoubtedly are the richer for the variety of experience husband and wife have to give each other; and, too, they show an adaptability on the part of one or both which argues well for continued happiness. commonly, however, they do not succeed. there are, also, deeper matters than these to be considered. is this man or this woman worthy of lifelong devotion? is the love he offers or she offers in return for the love you offer, the love that gives or the love that merely takes? has he been a success at something, anything, that counts? has he a sense of responsibility in marriage and the burdens it brings? does he desire a home? do his views as to children reflect man's natural desire to found a family or merely the selfish desire for the freedom and luxury which the absence of children may make possible? has he a right to approach fatherhood--is his body physically and morally clean? [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood colonel and mrs. roosevelt with members of their family colonel roosevelt's own family was preëminently one in which the father shared with the mother a keen sense of the responsibilities of marriage and the highest ideals of home life] these are serious questions with which to weight the wings of a young man's or a young woman's fancy. but the attraction which cannot stand before them is not safe as a basis for marriage. many a young man or woman has willfully turned closed eyes to the selfishness or the irresponsibility which will later wreck a home, because attraction blinded common sense. barter, the lowest form of marriage, exists and has always existed whenever the material benefits that either husband or wife expects to derive from the connection are the impelling forces in the union. the woman desires wealth, social position, a title--or perhaps nothing more than security from poverty or the necessity of work outside the home, or perhaps no more than the mere security of a home itself. the man in other cases desires wealth, or social position, or a wife who will grace his fine home, or some business connection which the marriage will afford. and upon these things men and women build, or attempt to build, the foundations of home life. it is not true of course that every girl of moderate means, or without means, who marries a man of wealth does so because of his money. nor is it always true when the cases are reversed. love may be as real between those two as between any others. but when it is true that the marriage is an exchange of commodities, it is no different from prostitution under other circumstances. in fact, it is prostitution under cover, without acceptance of the stigma which for centuries has been the portion of voluntary selling of the body to him who cares to buy. [illustration: copyright by underwood & underwood julia ward howe and her granddaughter in the life of mrs. howe was exemplified the identity of ideals of husband and wife. they worked side by side in the literary field and in their philanthropic and reform work] eugenics, a modern science which aims at race regeneration, lays down many laws and restrictions for those who are selecting their mates. by the following of these laws and restrictions in the selection of husbands and wives, undesirable traits in the offspring are to be weeded out and desirable; ones are to be fostered and increased. that these laws should be studied with the care used by breeders of plants and animals goes without saying. that if they are followed strictly the number of marriages would be materially reduced, at least for a considerable time, is doubtless true. that marriages in which eugenics has played the major part in selection will present new problems is probably equally true. if marriages were mere temporary unions, for the purpose of obtaining offspring, eugenic principles could not be too exactly nor too coldly applied to the selection of mates. but since marriage implies living together and becoming, or continuing to be, worthy members of the community, and since the offspring are fashioned no less by the conditions of their upbringing than by heredity, selection of mates must involve more than looking for eugenically perfect fathers and mothers for the generations yet unborn. eugenics, however, is in infancy as a science, and, like the human infants it would protect, must react to the environment in which it finds itself and must feel the chastening hand of time before its value can be known. agitation in the direction of allowing posterity to be "well born" can never be out of place. what being well born is and how it shall be attained is a worthy subject of research. as a cold, exact science, however, eugenics can never hope for application without some consideration of the personal equation which makes marriage at its best not a mating merely, but a joining of souls. choosing a husband or a wife is, after all, merely the beginning of the marriage problem. good husbands are not discovered, but made, from originally good or perhaps indifferent or in rare cases from even poor material, by the reaction of married life upon what was previously mere "man." even so with wives. [illustration: caroline bartlett crane mrs. crane, an expert on sanitation, has successfully applied the principles of good housekeeping to civic affairs in many cities, and has thus made women more of a factor in the community at large] the successful marriage presupposes unselfishness, even carried if necessary to the point of sacrifice, but it must be unselfishness for two, not for one alone. neither the "child wife" who must be carried as a burden, nor the complacent husband who forms the center of a smoothly revolving little world patiently turned by a silent wife, has any part in the marriage of equality--the only marriage worthy of the name. the successful marriage calls also for freedom--again for two. women sometimes hesitate to marry because the old idea of marriage involved loss of individuality, and they have little faith in men's readiness to accept any other idea. men, on the other hand, fear to marry because the "new woman" demands so much for herself--development, a career, a chance to work out her own ideals of life. the man sees little in this for himself but the "second fiddle" which woman for centuries played to his first. ideal marriages, however, do take place in which there is no sacrifice of personality--in which, indeed, each lives a fuller life than would have been possible without the marriage. for this to be realized, there must be full recognition of the responsibility of each for his or her own deeds, and a standing aside while each works out his destiny. this does not mean a separation of interests nor an abandonment of common counsel. it means merely that in individual matters each must have the freedom enjoyed before marriage took place. it must mean for women some sort of economic independence, and in addition a spiritual independence such as men enjoy. when this freedom is cheerfully given, and in return the wife gives a like liberty to the husband, the great incentive to concealments and deceptions or to nagging and controversy is removed. the petty annoyances of the day are lessened, trust is increased, and both man and woman find their strength increased rather than depleted by the relation. [illustration: courtesy of george herbert palmer alice freeman palmer mrs. palmer's was one of the ideal marriages in which husband and wife each lived a fuller life than would have been possible without the marriage. happy in her home life, mrs. palmer yet had time to achieve a brilliant success in administrative educational work] common interests are an almost certain safeguard in most marriages. common duties are more often than not a source of difficulty. an untold number of matrimonial ventures fail because of inadequate responsibility in adjustment of expenses to income. many more are rendered inharmonious by failure of parents to agree as to the management of children. in both these directions increased knowledge will do much to secure harmonious action. family traditions are more than likely to clash when they are adopted as principles of family discipline. "children must mind," says the father, in memory and emulation of his father's method with him. "children must not be coerced," says the mother, who has been reared by a different method. clearly a course in child psychology would have been of value to these parents in determining a common procedure. there is probably no subject upon which either father or mother finds it so hard to yield to the other's way as upon this. each feels, and rightly, that the material to be trained is so precious, and that failure, if it comes, will be so stupendous, that neither dares do what seems wrong to his own mind. nothing but common knowledge and a predetermined policy can solve this problem so near to the root of success or failure in marriage itself. girls are commonly taught too little of the duties of married women to their husbands. they look for a lifetime of unalloyed bliss. if they fail to realize their impossible dream, they turn their faces toward the divorce court. many girls have had too smooth a pathway, too little of responsibility, and too little of disappointment, before undertaking the serious duty of establishing and maintaining a lifelong partnership. there has been little in their lives to prepare them for long-continued relations of any sort. on the other hand, the same girls have equally little idea of what they have a right to expect of marriage for themselves. much of the necessary adjustment is left to chance. [illustration: photograph by paul thompson amelia e. barr far from interfering with her career, mrs. barr's home interests were the inspiration for it. thrown on her own resources by the death of her husband, who sacrificed himself in a yellow fever epidemic in texas, mrs. barr took up writing to make a living for her children] scarcely any phase of woman's part in marriage is arousing more attention at present than the question of childbearing. women, and especially educated women, are accused of sterility or of intentionally avoiding motherhood. they are said to believe that children interfere with their careers, that they can render greater service to the world in public work than in childbearing. they "prefer idleness and luxury to the care of a family." the "maternal instinct is fading." they threaten us with "race suicide," the "extinction of mankind," a silent world given over to dumb beasts who have not yet learned the principles of "birth control" and "family limitation." thus on the one hand. on the other: "the world is better served by the small family well reared than by the large one necessarily less well cared for." "women are not merely the instruments of nature for multiplying mankind. they have a right to some time for living their own lives." "the maternal instinct has not faded, but merely come under control of a wisdom which directs that it shall not bring forth what it cannot care for." and so on, with added arguments for either side. in all these discussions of birth control the fathers or the husbands who desire not to be fathers are usually left in the background. as a matter of fact, however, men as well as women desire luxury and freedom from the care of a family. it is a general sign of the times, not a characteristic of one sex alone. men as well as women fear for their ability to care for and educate large families. with the demands of our present complex existence bearing heavily upon them, one can scarcely wonder at the hesitation of either man or woman to add again and again to their already pressing cares. there is but one remedy--not to cut off education for women, as some suggest, but to learn the joys of a simpler life which will afford people time and strength and means to bear and rear their young. to this end let us teach our girls and our boys something of the essentials of a useful and a happy life, and teach them how to eliminate the non-essentials which waste their time and spirit. who can best instruct the girl in what we may call the ethics of marriage? her mother? usually the mother's viewpoint is too personal. her teacher? most of her teachers are unmarried and know little more about the subject than she does herself. a specially selected married teacher? perhaps, but only if she is a deep student of human nature and of marriage from a scientific standpoint. an ideal course for every girl somewhere before her education can be considered complete would cover "woman's life" as ( ) industrial worker, ( ) wife, ( ) mother, ( ) citizen, ( ) civic force. here, without undue "dangling of the wedding ring," girls might study marriage as an important phase of woman's life. such a course, simplified or elaborated to suit the circumstances of the girls who participate, might well be given in all girls' schools and colleges, in continuation schools, in settlement-house clubs and classes, in rural clubs and neighborhood centers. for, reduced to its simplest terms, marriage in the tenement rests upon the same principles as marriage in the mansion. happily married, or happy unmarried, with her life work stretching before her, the girl enters upon her heritage of work. we have trained her to be a homemaker, but we need feel no regret in regard to her training if she finds her life work in an office or a schoolroom or a hospital. she may never "keep house," although we hope that she will some time help to make a home. but, whether she becomes a homemaker or not, a true understanding and appreciation of the value of the home and a knowledge of the principles underlying its maintenance will make her a broader woman and a better worker than she could otherwise be. in the home, or wherever she may be, she cannot fail to show the girls who are growing up about her what home means to her and what it means to the race. and in her hands we may safely leave the future of the home. suggested readings general books which introduce the reader to the larger phases of the woman movement bruÃ�re, martha b. and robert w. _increasing home efficiency_. new york: macmillan. colquhoun, mrs. a. _the vocations of woman_. new york: macmillan. gilman, charlotte perkins. _women and economics_. boston: small, maynard & co. key, ellen. _love and marriage_. new york: putnam. schreiner, olive. _woman and labor_. new york: frederick a. stokes co. spencer, anna garlin. _the challenge of womanhood._ tarbell, ida m. _the business of being a woman_. new york: macmillan. some of these books are conservative, others very radical. they are recommended, not because the writer agrees with them, but because every mother and teacher who acts as a vocational counselor should know both conservative and radical points of view. more distinctly vocational books bloomfield, meyer. _readings in vocational guidance_. boston: ginn & co. the following articles in this book are especially recommended: "the value, during education, of the life-career motive." by charles w. eliot. "selecting young men for particular jobs." by herman schneider. "the permanence of interests and their relation to abilities." by edward l. thorndike. "survey of occupations open to the girl of fourteen to sixteen years of age." by harriet hazen dodge. brewer, j.m. _vocational-guidance movement_. new york: macmillan. brewster, edwin t. _vocational guidance for the professions._ chicago: rand mcnally & co. bureau of education, washington, d.c. _bulletin , no. ._ "a trade school for girls." _bulletin , no. ._ "the school and a start in life." _bulletin , no. ._ "vocational guidance association." papers presented at the organization meeting, october, . _annual reports_ of the commissioner of education: , chapter viii, "a school for homemakers." , chapter xiii, "education for the home." , chapter xii, "home economics." , chapter xiv, "home education." , chapter xvii, "education in the home." butler, elizabeth beardsley. _women and the trades._ new york: charities publication committee. ----. _saleswomen in mercantile stores._ new york: survey associates. davis, jesse buttrick. _vocational and moral guidance._ boston: ginn & co. department of commerce and labor, washington, d.c.: _twenty-fifth annual report of the commissioner of labor._ contains nineteen volumes on "condition of women and child wage-earners in the united states." the most comprehensive study of conditions of women in industry before the war. _bulletin no. ._ "summary of the report on the condition of women and child wage-earners in the united states." gives in condensed form the findings in the nineteen volumes. gowin and wheatley. _occupations._ boston: ginn & co. hollingworth, h.l. _vocational psychology: its problems and methods._ new york: d. appleton & co. laselle and wiley. _vocations for girls._ boston: houghton mifflin co. leake, albert h. _the vocational education of girls and women._ new york: macmillan. mckeever, a. _training the girl._ new york: macmillan. pressey, c. park. _a vocational reader._ chicago: rand mcnally & co. this book shows the teacher the kind of stories that can be used for inspiration for grade-school girls. puffer, j. adams. _vocational guidance_. chicago: rand mcnally.& co. women's educational and industrial union of boston: _vocations for the trained woman_. _the public schools and women in office service_. the index acting as a preparation for homemaking, adolescent girl, - . _see also_ girl agriculture, possibilities in and qualifications for, ff. arithmetic applied to household problems, ff. art courses as education for homemaking, , f. artist, work of, as a preparation for homemaking, arts and crafts, possibilities in and qualifications for, auburn, washington, central school, manual arts courses in, bibliography, f. bruère, martha b., quoted, , f. budgets, ff. building problems, ff. census, statistics regarding women in industry, , , , chapin, dr., quoted, f. child: imitative instinct as influencing training of, , training for habits of industry, ff. training for self-control, ff. training for sympathy, f. training for unselfishness, f. training the little, - church: as a means of betterment in the community, girl influenced by, f. homemaking as influenced by, f. women and the, citizenship, woman and, f. clothing (_see also_ dress): problems of, in the home, ff. problems of, for the adolescent girl, ff., f. community: church as a means of betterment in, home, relation between, and, ff. working women, relation to, ff. consolidated school, continuation schools, f. cooking classes in grammar schools, f. decoration of the home, department stores: continuation schools in, f. statistics concerning women employed in, dietetics, knowledge of, necessary to the homemaker, ff. divorce, dangers of, , , doll's house as a means of teaching the child mechanics of housekeeping, - domestic work: as a preparation for homemaking, f. as a vocation, possibilities in and qualifications for, f. dress (_see also_ clothing): principles of selection, for the adolescent girl, ff. problems of, for the adolescent girl, ff., f. dressmaking, possibilities in and qualifications for, f. education: for homemaking, f. of women, effect on home life, ff. educational agencies involved in "woman making," - eugenics as influencing marriage, factory work: as a preparation for homemaking, f. possibilities in and qualifications for, f. father, characteristics of the ideal, f. feeding problems in the home, ff. financial knowledge necessary for homemaking, ff. food production, possibilities in and qualifications for work in, ff. food questions, study of, in schools, frederick, mrs., quoted, furniture, principles governing selection of, games, training afforded by, ff. geography applied to household problems, gilman, charlotte perkins, quoted, girl: adolescent, - church's influence upon, ff. dress problems of the adolescent, ff., f. educational agencies involved in training the, - health of adolescent, methods of safeguarding, ff. inner life of, - plan for training adolescent, ff. school center of society of, ff., ff. teaching the mechanics of housekeeping to, - work of, - grammar school, part played in vocational guidance, ff. hall, g. stanley, quoted, handwork, classification of, ff. health of adolescent girl, methods of safeguarding, ff. heating apparatus, f. high school, part played in vocational guidance, ff. home: as a means of training for homemaking, ff. building problems in, ff. clothing problems in, ff. community, relation to, ff. decoration of, establishing a, - feeding problems in, ff. furniture, principles governing selection of, heating problems in, f. income in, apportionment of, ff. industrial revolution, effect of, on, ff. industries in, ff. labor-saving devices in, ff. running the domestic machinery, - servant question in, ff. site for, selection of, f. the ideal, - urban conditions as affecting, f. waste disposal in, ff. water supply in, f. women, effect of education of, on, ff. homemaking: community problems in country and city affecting, , dietetics, knowledge of, necessary to, ff. education for, f. educational agencies involved in training for, - financial knowledge necessary for, ff. home's influence in training for, ff. tasks suitable for the small child, teacher's responsibility in training for, , f. the real business of woman, ff. vocations as affecting, - (_see also_ the specific vocations) home work, school credit for, ff. housekeeping: tasks suitable for the small child, teaching the mechanics of, - hygiene, study of, as a preparation for homemaking, income, apportionment of, ff. industrial revolution, effects of, on home life, ff. industries (_see also_ vocations): in the home, ff. women in, census statistics concerning, , , , women's wage statistics, industry, teaching the child habits of, ff. imitation, evils of, f. imitative instinct, influence of, in training the child, , labor-saving devices in the home, ff. leominster, massachusetts, a school lunch room, library work, possibilities in and qualifications for, f. literary work as a preparation for homemaking, marriage, - age of, for women, , f. factors influencing, f. ideals of, f. massachusetts plan of school credit for home work, millinery, possibilities in and qualifications for, montclair, new jersey, school lunchroom, montessori materials as means of teaching habits of industry, mother (_see also_ woman): characteristics of the ideal, ff. community institutions, relation to, ff. school, duty to, ff. nearing, scott, quoted, newark, new jersey, central high school, lunch room in, new york city, public school no. , model school home, nursing: as a preparation for homemaking, ff. possibilities in and qualifications for, f. occupations. _see_ vocations; _see also_ the specific occupations office work: as a preparation for homemaking, possibilities in and qualifications for, ff. oppenheim, quoted, oregon plan of school credit for home work, physiology, study of, as preparation for homemaking, puffer, j. adams, quoted, , reading for the adolescent girl, f. reform, woman's opportunities in, , f. salesmanship: as a preparation for homemaking, possibilities in and qualifications for, ff. school: art courses contributing to homemaking knowledge, f. consolidated, continuation, f. cooking classes in, f. homemaking, duty to educate for, , f., ff. mothers' relation to, ff. sewing classes in grammar, , f. vocational guidance, responsibility in, ff., ff., ff. school credit for home work, ff. school gardens, schreiner, olive, quoted, servant question, ff. sewing classes in grammar schools, , f. sex knowledge, instruction in, , , ff. social work, possibilities in and qualifications for, ff. society: school and playground center of girls', ff., ff. woman's place in, - suffrage, tarbell, ida m., quoted, teacher: as a vocational guide, ff., ff., ff. homemaking, responsibility of, in training for, ff., , f. teaching: as a preparation for homemaking, ff. possibilities in and qualifications for, f. urban conditions as affecting home life, f. vocational guidance: considerations in, ff., ff. grammar school's part in, ff. high school's part in, ff. need for, f. object of, school's part in, ff., ff., ff. teacher's part in, ff., ff., ff. vocations (_see also_ the specific vocations): as affecting homemaking, - choice of, considerations in, ff., ff. classification of, - determined by training, - distributing group, - producing group, - service group, - wage statistics, ward, lester f., quoted, waste disposal, ff. water supply, f. womanhood, present-day ideals of, - woman (_see also_ mother): and citizenship, f. as buyer, f. church, relation to, community's relation to working, ff. education of, effect on home life, ff. in industry, census statistics, , , , marriage age , f. reform, opportunities in, , f. society, place in, - status of, views concerning, f. the real business of, ff. wage statistics, united states tariff commission washington men's sewed straw hats report of the united states tariff commission to the president of the united states investigation of the costs of production of men's sewed straw hats in the united states and in the principal competing foreign countries with appendix proclamation by the president washington government printing office united states tariff commission office: eighth and e streets nw., washington, d. c. commissioners thomas o. marvin, _chairman_. alfred p. dennis, _vice chairman_. edward p. costigan. henry h. glassie. a. h. baldwin. edgar b. brossard. john f. bethune, _secretary_. additional copies of this publication may be procured from the superintendent of documents government printing office washington, d. c. at cents per copy contents page introductory: reference to files rates of duty history of investigation scope of investigation information obtained in the investigation: domestic production kinds of hats produced organization labor conditions imports effect of imports principal competing country foreign production-- types of hats produced organization working hours and wages costs of production-- methods of obtaining cost data description of cost items-- material labor overhead selling expense-- (_a_) domestic (_b_) foreign tables showing cost comparisons competitive conditions-- transportation and marketing costs formal statement of conclusions summary of conclusions separate statement of commissioner costigan, in part concurring and in part dissenting, in the investigation of men's sewed straw hats: both higher and lower duties indicated by the commission's cost figures determining the dividing line for tariff purposes between higher and lower priced hats some omissions from and doubtful features in the commission's report representativeness of samples importers' selling expenses omitted deficiencies in comparative overhead data appendix: proclamation by the president letter of transmittal july , . the president, _the white house_, _washington, d. c._ my dear mr. president: herewith i have the honor to transmit the report of the tariff commission in the investigation, for the purposes of section of the tariff act of , of the costs of production in the united states and in the principal competing foreign country of men's sewed straw hats. included in the report is a "separate statement of commissioner costigan, in part concurring and in part dissenting, in the investigation of men's sewed straw hats." respectfully, thomas o. marvin, _chairman_. united states tariff commission washington men's sewed straw hats july , . _to the president_: the united states tariff commission respectfully submits the following report upon an investigation of the differences in costs of production of men's sewed straw hats in the united states and in competing foreign countries, for the purposes of section of title iii of the tariff act of . introductory _reference to files._--the basic documents in connection with the investigation on men's sewed straw hats are in the files of the tariff commission and are available to the president. they include the transcripts of the public hearings and the original cost schedules and other data. these include confidential data, the disclosure of which is forbidden by section of the revenue act of : sec. . it shall be unlawful for any member of the united states tariff commission, or for any employee, agent, or clerk of said commission, or any other officer or employee of the united states, to divulge, or to make known in any manner whatever not provided for by law, to any person, the trade secrets or processes of any person, firm, copartnership, corporation, or association embraced in any examination or investigation conducted by said commission, or by order of said commission, or by order of any member thereof. * * * _rates of duty:_ act of --not blocked or trimmed } per cent. } par. . blocked or trimmed } } act of --not blocked or trimmed } per cent. } par. . blocked or trimmed } per cent. } act of --not trimmed } per cent. } par. . trimmed } per cent. } _history of the investigation._--on may , , the commission ordered an investigation of men's sewed straw hats for the purposes of section of title iii of the tariff act of , and on the same date ordered a preliminary hearing for june , . an application was received from the national association of men's straw hat manufacturers of america requesting an investigation looking toward an increase in the rate of duty on men's sewed straw hats, now dutiable at per cent ad valorem under paragraph of the tariff act of . the domestic field work was carried on during the period august to october, , and the foreign work in italy and england during the period october, , to february, . after due notice, as prescribed by law, public hearings were held in the offices of the commission on june , , and on may , . the latter hearing was continued on may , , and , . oral argument was waived and the date for filing briefs was set for june , . _scope of the investigation._--costs of production were obtained for hats sold in the straw hat season of by companies whose fiscal years ended at or about june , . this period was the latest for which cost data could be obtained at the time the investigation was made. domestic costs were obtained from concerns in maryland, new york, connecticut, and massachusetts. the total production of these concerns amounted to , dozen hats. of this number, , dozen were men's sewed straw hats. the concerns produce approximately per cent of the men's sewed straw hats in the united states and include makers of cheap, medium, and high-priced hats. they include nonmembers as well as members of the national association. costs were obtained in italy from five concerns and in england from three concerns exporting men's sewed straw hats to the united states. both domestic and foreign straw hat factories are characterized by lack of standardization in production. variations exist in the quality of the hats manufactured by different establishments, because of variations in the type and quality of the braid, in the quality of the trimming materials, such as leather sweat and silk bands, and in the amount of hand labor employed in the finishing processes. because of these variations, it was considered inadvisable to compare the average costs of production of all hats of the domestic concerns with the average of all foreign hats. evidence submitted at the preliminary hearing and data in the possession of the commission indicated that competition between domestic and foreign straw hats centered chiefly on three types, split sennits of / millimeter braid, improved sennits of / millimeter braid, and flatfoot sennits of / millimeter braid. the commission's cost comparisons were therefore confined to hats of these specifications. information obtained in the investigation from the commission's investigation of men's sewed straw hats, conducted as indicated above, the following information has been obtained: domestic production the manufacture of men's straw hats has been conducted on a commercial scale in the united states for upward of years. the industry is centered in and around new york city, in a number of cities in massachusetts and connecticut, and in baltimore, md. statistics of production of men's sewed straw hats are not available, since the census of manufactures does not distinguish between men's and women's hats nor between sewed hats and woven hats. domestic manufacturers estimate that the value of the men's straw hats produced in was $ , , , or about per cent of the total production of all straw hats. in the value of the total production of men's straw hats was estimated at $ , , , of which about $ , , was men's sewed hats. at the preliminary hearing it was estimated that the average annual production of men's sewed straw hats in recent years amounted to , dozen. there are about manufacturers of men's sewed straw hats in the united states. the majority are well established firms. the production of men's sewed straw hats for the season - of factories for which costs were obtained was , dozen. the factories may be classified as follows: table .--_domestic straw-hat factories grouped according to annual production_ ------------------------------------+--------+------------+---------- | number | production | per cent | | | of total ------------------------------------+--------+------------+---------- | | _dozen_ | group i. factories with annual | | | production of | | | , dozen and over | | , | . group ii. factories with annual | | | production of | | | , - , dozen | | , | . group iii. factories with annual | | | production of less | | | than , dozen | | , | . +--------+------------+---------- total production | | , | . ------------------------------------+--------+------------+---------- _kinds of hats produced._--there are two general types of men's straw hats produced by the domestic manufacturers: ( ) woven hats, such as panamas, etc. the bodies of these hats are imported in the rough and are shaped, finished, and trimmed in this country. ( ) sewed hats. all of the operations necessary in the manufacture of a sewed straw hat, with the exception of plaiting the braids, are performed in the united states. this investigation relates to sewed hats only. _organization of production._--the manufacture of straw hats is essentially a factory business and with few exceptions each concern carries on all of the major operations connected with the production of hats in a single establishment. plaiting of straw braid is a separate industry, the domestic hat manufacturers being dependent upon foreign sources for their supply of braids. the bleaching of straw braids is performed by some of the hat manufacturers in their own establishments; others have the bleaching done by outside concerns which specialize in this class of work. some firms make the tips (the inside linings of the hats) in their own establishments; others buy the complete tip, or have certain operations, such as printing or stamping, performed by outside shops. _labor conditions._--the hours of labor of employees in domestic straw hat factories in - varied from to weekly. wages are based both on piece and time work. time wages ranged from $ to $ per week, according to the character of the work performed. the production of straw hats is to some extent seasonal. orders are received in the late summer for delivery in the following spring. production on these orders begins in september and the factories are usually busiest in the early months of the year. the summer is a slack season and factories operate with reduced labor force or close altogether for several weeks. the following table shows the monthly variations in the total number of employees of domestic factories in the season - : table .--_employees in domestic straw-hat factories, season of - _ ---------------+-----------++----------------+----------- | number of || | number of month | employees || month | employees ---------------+-----------++----------------+----------- | || | july | , || january | , august | , || february | , september | , || march | , october | , || april | , november | , || may | , december | , || june | , ---------------+-----------++----------------+----------- imports the quantities and values of sewed straw hats imported into the united states were not separately shown in official statistics prior to the tariff act of , in which sewed straw hats were given a separate classification. table shows the imports for consumption of sewed straw hats from the principal countries of origin, by months, for the calendar years and . total imports increased from , dozen in , valued at $ , , to , dozen in , valued at $ , , , a gain of approximately per cent in quantity and per cent in value. table .--_imports for consumption of men's sewed straw hats[ ] from italy, england, germany, and other countries, by months, calendar years and _ (source: foreign commerce and navigation of the united states) -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ | italy | england | germany | other | total | | | | countries| | | | | [ ] | +----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ month | | | | | -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ january | , | , | , | , | , february | , | , | | , | , march | , | , | , | , | , april | , | , | , | , | , may | , | , | | , | , june | , | , | , | , | , july | , | , | | , | , august | , | , | , | , | , september | | | , | | , october | , | | , | | , november | , | , | , | , | , december | , | , | , | , | , +----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ total number | , | , | , | , | , , dozen | , | , | , | , | , +==========+==========+==========+==========+============ | | | | | total value | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | | | | | average | | | | | value per | | | | | dozen | $ . | $ . | $ . | $ . | $ . +==========+==========+==========+==========+============ per cent | | | | | of hats | | | | | imported | | | | | from each | | | | | country | . | . | . | . | . -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ | italy | england | germany | other | total | | | | countries| | | | | [ ] | +----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ month | | | | | -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ january | , | , | , | , | , february | , | , | , | , | , march | , | , | , | , | , april | , | , | , | , | , may | , | , | , | , | , june | , | , | , | , | , july | , | , | | , | , august | , | | , | , | , september | | | , | , | , october | , | | , | , | , november | , | , | | , | , december | , | , | , | , | , +----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ total number | , | , | , | , | , , dozen | , | , | , | , | , +----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ | | | | | total value | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , , | | | | | average | | | | | value per | | | | | dozen | $ . | $ . | $ . | $ . | $ . +==========+==========+==========+==========+============ per cent | | | | | of hats | | | | | imported | | | | | from each | | | | | country | . | . | . | . | . -------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+------------ [ : including men's, women's, and children's.] [ : including withdrawals from warehouse.] a comparison of the imports for the first four months of with those for the corresponding period in is shown in table . a significant feature of this table is the increase in imports from italy and the decrease of imports from both the united kingdom and germany. it should be noted also that the average foreign[a] value per dozen of italian hats decreased while the average foreign[a] value of hats imported from england and other countries increased. [footnote a: values upon which duties were assessed as computed from data given in foreign commerce and navigation of the united states.] table .--_imports for consumption of men's sewed straw hats[ ] from italy, united kingdom, germany, and other countries, by months, january-april, inclusive, and ._ (source: foreign commerce and navigation of the united states) ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- | italy | united | germany | other | total | | kingdom | | countries | | | | | [ ] | +----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- month | | | | | ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ january | , | , | , | , | , february | , | , | , | , | , march | , | , | , | , | , april | , | , | , | , | , +----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- total number| , | , | , | , | , , dozen | , | , | , | , | , +==========+==========+==========+===========+=========== | | | | | total value | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | | | | | average | | | | | value | | | | | per dozen | . | . | . | . | . +==========+==========+==========+===========+=========== per cent | | | | | of hats | | | | | imported | | | | | from each | | | | | country | . | . | . | . | . ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- | italy | united | germany | other | total | | kingdom | | countries | | | | | [ ] | +----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- month | | | | | ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ | _number_ january | , | , | , | , | , february | , | , | , | , | , march | , | , | , | , | , april | , | , | , | , | , +----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- total number| , | , | , | , | , , dozen | , | , | , | , | , +==========+==========+==========+===========+=========== | | | | | total value | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | $ , | | | | | average | | | | | value | | | | | per dozen | . | . | . | . | . +==========+==========+==========+===========+=========== per cent | | | | | of hats | | | | | imported | | | | | from each | | | | | country | . | . | . | . | . ------------+----------+----------+----------+-----------+----------- [ : including men's, women's, and children's.] [ : including withdrawals from warehouse.] table .--_imports at the port of new york of men's sewed straw hats from italy[ ] classified according to foreign value, including packing january-june, _ [in dozens] ----------------+-------------------------+------------------------- | sennits[ ] | fancies[ ] value +-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- |trimmed|untrimmed| total |trimmed|untrimmed| total ----------------+-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- $ . and less | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | , | | , | | , | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | | | $ . -$ . | , | | , | | | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | | | $ . -$ . | , | | , | , | | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | | | , $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . and over | | | | | | +-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- total | , | | , | , | , | , ----------------+-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- [in dozens] ----------------+-------------------------+------------------------- | miscellaneous[ ] | grand total value +-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- |trimmed|untrimmed| total |trimmed|untrimmed| total ----------------+-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- $ . and less | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | , | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | , | | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | , | | , $ . -$ . | , | | , | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | , | | , $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . -$ . | | | | | | $ . and over | | | | | | +-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- total | , | | , | , | , | , ----------------+-------+---------+-------+-------+---------+------- [ : taken from original invoices. fractional dozen omitted in this table.] [ : split, improved, and flatfoot.] [ : fancy straw and sennit, fancy.] [ : including hats the type of which is not specified in the invoice. probably many sennits and fancies.] in table , imports of italian hats at the port of new york in the six months january-june, , have been classified according to foreign values shown on consular invoices. there is a marked concentration of imports in the value groups between $ and $ per dozen. about per cent of all the sennit hats and per cent of the total importations had foreign values of less than $ per dozen. table .--_percentage of men's sewed straw hats imported at the port of new york from italy with a foreign value less than that specified, january-june_, --------------+------------+------------+------------------+----------- foreign value | sennits[ ] | fancies[ ] | miscellaneous[ ] | total less than-- | | | | --------------+------------+------------+------------------+----------- | _per cent_ | _per cent_ | _per cent_ | _per cent_ $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . $ . | . | . | . | . --------------+------------+------------+------------------+----------- [ : split, improved, and flatfoot.] [ : fancy straw and sennit, fancy.] [ : including hats the type of which is not specified in the invoice.] the imports at the port of new york of hats from england are classified in table . it is evident that the bulk of the english importations are not competitive with italian hats. only per cent of the imports from england had a foreign value of less than $ per dozen. table .--_imports at the port of new york of men's sewed straw hats from england,[ ] classified according to foreign value, including packing, january-june_, ------------------+--------- foreign value | dozen ------------------+--------- $ . -$ . | , $ . -$ . | ... $ . -$ . | ... $ . -$ . | ... $ . -$ . | , $ . -$ . | , $ . -$ . | , $ . -$ . | $ . -$ . | ... $ . and up | | ===== total | , ------------------+--------- [ : these data cover , dozen hats out of a total of approximately , dozen imported from england, or per cent. they represent the larger invoices (several over , dozen) and hence are not so evenly distributed as are the italian hats.] _effect of imports._--the effect of the increasing imports of straw hats on the production and sales of domestic firms was discussed at the public hearings before the tariff commission. evidence was introduced showing that the production of factories decreased from , dozen in the eight months august, , to march, , to , dozen in the corresponding months of - . seventeen firms showed decreased production and two firms reported increases. meanwhile imports of foreign hats increased from , dozen to , dozen. imports from italy increased from , dozen to , ; imports from england decreased from , dozen to , . representatives of several domestic firms stated that their losses of business were directly attributable to inability to meet prices quoted by importers of italian hats.[ ] [footnote : see transcript of public hearings, may , , pp. , .] representatives of the importers, on the other hand, called attention to the increasing competition of small firms in and around new york city with larger and longer established firms located principally in baltimore. some of the new firms operate on small capital and specialize in cheap hats which are directly competitive with the cheapest italian hats. others produce a somewhat better hat, such as is sold by chain stores. the rate of business failure among the newer firms is unusually high. although the membership of the group of producers of cheap hats is fluctuating, its total output of hats each year is a factor in the competitive situation. a relatively new development in the distribution of straw hats is the chain stores. sales of such stores, estimated at , to , dozen straw hats yearly, include italian and english hats but are principally of domestic manufacture. in some cases a chain-store organization has established factories and thus has instituted direct competition with manufacturing firms already established. chain stores also have furnished capital to small manufacturers, contracting for the bulk of their output. thus the change in marketing methods has a bearing on the failure of the older establishments to keep pace in the volume of their sales with the national expansion in straw hat consumption. principal competing country table , on page , shows that in the calendar year imports of sewed straw hats from italy amounted to , dozen, or per cent of total imports. the average value per dozen of these italian hats was $ . . during this same period imports from england amounted to , dozen or per cent of total imports, at an average value of $ . per dozen. during the calendar year imports from italy amounted to , dozen, or per cent of the total, at an average value of $ . per dozen. imports from england were , dozen, or approximately per cent of the total, at an average value of $ . . total imports increased from , dozen in , valued at $ , , to , dozen in , valued at $ , , , a quantitative gain of approximately per cent. the latest available import data covering the months of january-april, , are shown in table , on page . for these four months imports from italy amounted to , dozen, or about per cent of the total, and the average value of italian hats imported declined from $ . per dozen, on the comparable four months' period in , to $ . per dozen in . imports from the united kingdom for this same period were , dozen, or about per cent of the total, and it should be noted that the average value increased from $ . to $ . per dozen. italy, is, therefore, for the purposes of section , the principal competing country. foreign production the center of production in italy is signa, near florence. it was estimated ( ) that , persons were employed in the signa district in establishments producing men's straw hats. the employees were about evenly divided between men and women. in england the principal centers of straw-hat production are st. albans and luton, towns near london. no estimate was obtained of the number of factories in operation, the volume of production, or the number of persons employed. the english manufacturers of men's straw hats in - were suffering a business depression, and some of them were changing over to the manufacture of women's hats. _types of hats produced in foreign factories._--neither the english nor the italian factories producing men's straw hats confine their business exclusively to men's sewed straw hats. some of them also block and trim woven-hat bodies, such as panamas; some make women's and children's hats, and others produce, or deal in, felt hats. nor is production of sewed straw hats confined to those made of sennit braids; hats are made of other braids as well. _organization of foreign production._--the sennit braids used in the italian straw hats exported to the united states are not made in italy but are of japanese origin, as are also the sennit braids used in the sewed straw hats made in the united states and in england.[ ] [footnote : milan and fancy braids are plaited by italian women in their homes, but this industry is not to be confused with the manufacture of sewed hats, the subject of this investigation.] in general, the foreign straw-hat factories do not bleach straw braids in their own establishments. in italy, however, one concern not only bleached its own braids but also bleached braids for other straw-hat manufacturers. with respect to hats, some of the unfinished bodies, usually leghorns, are made by women in their homes. but men's sewed straw hats, the subject of this investigation, are produced in factories or in small workshops. the latter generally operate on a contract basis for the larger manufacturers or shippers. the workshops which own their own equipment are organized to produce from to dozen sewed hats per week. in the making of the shell or body of the hat the contractors are paid on the basis of the number delivered to and accepted by the principal. the contractors furnish their own sewing cotton, gelatin, and other materials, except braid, used in making the shells or bodies of the hats. the trimming of straw hats is also to some extent performed on a contract basis. the establishments visited in england generally perform all the operations of making and trimming hats in their own establishments, although at times "outworkers" are employed. _working hours and wages._--the labor employed in the manufacture of sewed straw hats is well organized in both italy and england. the rates of wages and hours of labor, both of factory workers and of employees of contractors, are determined by collective bargaining. a minimum wage scale for both pieceworkers and timeworkers became effective in italy october , . the labor of women and children in italy is limited to hours per week (decree of march , ). the employment of children under years of age in shops and factories is prohibited. costs of production _methods of obtaining cost data._--costs of the domestic italian and english hats were obtained by representatives of the commission. in the united states they were given access to the books and records of the manufacturers. domestic costs of materials, labor, and overhead are based on actual records. in both italy and england representatives of the commission were given access to manufacturers' books showing estimates of their costs. the estimates of material and labor costs were verified from original records. estimates of general administrative and factory expense were expressed as percentages of the combined cost of labor and materials or of sales. access to records from which the latter estimates could be verified was not permitted. description of cost items _material._--material includes costs of braid, of bleaching, and of trimming materials and sundries, and also the cartons in which the hats are packed. _labor._--the amount charged to the individual hat for labor includes all labor costs connected with its manufacture. the amount of direct labor on each hat was first determined. the indirect labor charge for each hat was determined by applying to its direct labor charge the percentage which total indirect labor for the factory bore to the total direct labor. _overhead._--in each domestic factory the total overhead charges were obtained and the ratio of these charges to the total direct labor cost of the respective factory was computed. this ratio, expressed as a percentage of direct labor, was applied to the direct labor cost of individual hats to determine the overhead charge to be apportioned to each hat. selling expense (_a_) _domestic._--the ratio of total selling expense in each factory to total manufacturing cost (material, labor, and overhead) was first determined. this ratio (expressed as a percentage of total manufacturing cost) applied to the manufacturing cost of the selected hat determined its proper share of the total selling expense. firms organized to deal directly with retailers uniformly had higher selling expenses than those whose products were marketed chiefly through jobbers. the average selling expense of the selected hats was $ . per dozen, or . per cent of the average manufacturing cost. in selling expense is included the charge for cases and other packing material. (_b_) _foreign._--costs of selling hats to importers in the united states are included in the general overhead expenses reported by foreign companies, but are an inconsiderable item when compared with manufacturing costs. no expenses of the offices maintained in this country by foreign manufacturers have been included. tables showing cost comparisons in table are shown the costs of domestic and italian men's sewed straw hats, irrespective of the type of braid used in their manufacture. in table are shown similar cost data for domestic and english hats. in both tables costs are shown with and without transportation charges on foreign hats, and ad valorem rates of duty necessary to equalize differences in foreign and domestic costs have been computed. table .--_rates of duty necessary to equalize differences in costs of production of men's sewed straw hats in the united states and in italy, the principal competing country_ -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ item | domestic[ ] | italian[ ] -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ (_a_) cost (transportation not included): | _per dozen_ | _per dozen_ material cost | $ . | $ . labor | . | . overhead | . | . +-------------+------------ total manufacturing cost | . | . +=============+============ difference | | . foreign valuation[ ] | | . american selling price[ ] | . | | | ad valorem duty necessary to equalize | | on basis of-- | | _per cent_ foreign valuation | | american selling price | | +=============+============ | | (_b_) cost (transportation on italian | | hats to new york included): | | _per dozen_ total manufacturing cost | . | $ . transportation to new york--inland | | freight, ocean freight, marine | | insurance, consular fee | | . +-------------+------------ cost, including transportation to | | new york for italian hats | . | . difference | | . foreign valuation[ ] | | . | | ad valorem duty necessary to equalize | | on basis of-- | | _per cent_ foreign valuation | | -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ [ : average costs of domestic hats selling to jobbers at $ . to $ . .] [ : average cost of italian hats whose imported cost plus duty ranged from $ . to $ . .] [ : average of wholesale selling prices reported by foreign manufacturers.] [ : average of wholesale selling prices to jobbers reported by domestic manufacturers.] table .--_rates of duty necessary to equalize differences in costs of production of men's sewed straw hats in the united states and in england_ -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ item | domestic[ ] | english[ ] -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ (_a_) cost (transportation not included): | _per dozen_ | _per dozen_ material cost | $ . | $ . labor | . | . overhead | . | . +-------------+------------ total manufacturing cost | . | . +=============+============ difference | | . foreign valuation[ ] | | . ad valorem duty necessary to equalize | | on basis of-- | | _per cent_ foreign valuation | | +=============+============ (_b_) cost (transportation on english hats | | to new york included): | | _per dozen_ total manufacturing cost | . | $ . transportation to new york--inland | | freight, ocean freight, marine | | insurance, consular fee | | . +-------------+------------ cost, including transportation to new | | york for english hats | . | . difference | | . foreign valuation[ ] | | . | | ad valorem duty necessary to equalize | | on basis of-- | | _per cent_ foreign valuation | | -------------------------------------------+-------------+------------ [ : average costs of eight domestic hats selling to jobbers at $ . to $ . .] [ : average costs of eight english hats whose landed costs duty paid ranged from $ . to $ . .] [ : average of selling prices reported by foreign manufacturers.] competitive conditions styles for men's straw hats are set about one year in advance. sample hats are manufactured in may and june and orders are taken by manufacturers in july, august, and september for hats to be delivered the following spring. this custom of the trade makes it possible for foreign manufacturers to copy and offer in competition the same styles as those made by american manufacturers. imported hats have a wide range of styles and prices, including not only sewed hats of sennit braid but also those of fancy braids, and woven body hats such as leghorns. domestic hats also comprise a wide range of styles and prices. within this range there is a more or less definitely limited field in which imports compete directly with domestic merchandise. transportation and marketing costs before the italian or english hats enter into competition in the domestic wholesale market with hats of domestic manufacture expenses for transportation, marine insurance, and consular fees must be incurred. in the season - the charges specified amounted to approximately $ . per dozen for italian hats and $ . per dozen for english hats.[ ] such expenses are set forth in the lower half of tables and . [footnote : computed from consular invoices for hats imported at the port of new york in the six months, january-june, .] the methods of marketing foreign and domestic hats are similar, but because of minor differences in terms of sale, etc., it was not found practicable to institute a mathematical comparison of selling costs. some domestic firms deal only with jobbers, others only with retailers. a few of the largest firms sell to both jobbers and retailers. when the manufacturer dispenses with the services of jobbers his selling costs are, of course, increased. foreign straw hats are distributed principally by importing jobbers. such firms are usually engaged also in the marketing of domestic hats and in some instances are manufacturers or have financial interests in domestic factories. foreign factories occasionally deal directly with large retailers in this country. in such cases it is usual for the retailer's representative to travel abroad to inspect samples and place orders. one large italian factory maintains a new york office through which it deals directly with domestic retailers. formal statement of conclusions ( ) italy is the principal competing country. while commissioners costigan and dennis agree with this conclusion, they are also of opinion that, with respect to hats valued at more than $ . per dozen in the country of exportation, great britain is shown to be the principal competing country. ( ) the average cost of production in the united states, as shown by the cost data for the season - , of men's sewed straw hats sold to jobbers for $ . to $ . per unit of one dozen is $ . . the average cost of production, not including transportation costs, of imported men's sewed straw hats whose landed costs, duty paid, range from $ . to $ . per dozen, and which are like or similar to the domestic hats above described, is $ . per dozen. the difference in said costs of production, transportation costs not included, is $ . per dozen. the cost of production of the imported hats, including transportation costs from the foreign factory to the dock at new york, is $ . per dozen, and the difference in said costs is $ . per dozen. ( ) the average selling price of such imported men's sewed straw hats, in the country of exportation, as shown by said cost data, is $ . per dozen. the american selling price, as defined in subdivision (_f_) of section of the tariff act of , of similar competitive articles manufactured or produced in the united states, is $ . per dozen. ( ) if transportation costs be not included, the differences in costs of production in the united states and in said principal competing country are greater than the amount of the present duty of per cent ad valorem increased by the total maximum increase authorized under section , subdivision (_a_), of said act, and said differences in costs of production in the united states and in said principal competing country can not be equalized by proceeding under the provisions of said subdivision (_a_); that is to say, by increasing to the extent of per cent the existing ad valorem duty applied to the value of the imported article in the country of exportation. ( ) if transportation costs be included, the rate of duty shown by the differences in costs of production, necessary to equalize said differences, upon men's sewed straw hats valued at $ . or less per dozen in the country of exportation, is a rate of per cent ad valorem based on the valued in the country of exportation, as defined in section of said act. ( ) if transportation costs be not included, the rate of duty shown by the differences in said costs of production, necessary to equalize said differences, upon men's sewed straw hats valued at $ . or less per dozen in the country of exportation, is a rate of per cent ad valorem based upon the american selling price, as defined in said section , of similar competitive articles manufactured or produced in the united states. ( ) the average cost of production in the united states, as shown by the cost data for the season - , of men's sewed straw hats sold to jobbers for $ . to $ . per unit of one dozen is $ . . the average cost of production, not including transportation costs, of imported men's sewed straw hats whose landed costs, duty paid, range from $ . to $ . per dozen, and which are like or similar to the domestic hats above described, is $ . per dozen. the difference in said costs of production, transportation costs not included, is $ . per dozen. the cost of production of the imported hats, including transportation costs, is $ . per dozen, and the difference in said costs is $ . per dozen. ( ) the average selling price of such imported men's sewed straw hats, in the country of exportation, as shown by said cost data, is $ . per dozen. ( ) if transportation costs be included, the rate of duty shown by the differences in costs of production necessary to equalize said differences upon men's sewed straw hats valued at more than $ . per dozen in the country of exportation is a rate of per cent ad valorem based upon the value of such hats in the country of exportation. ( ) if transportation costs be not included, the rate of duty shown by the differences in costs of production necessary to equalize said differences upon men's sewed straw hats valued at more than $ . per dozen in the country of exportation is, according to a mathematical calculation, per cent ad valorem based upon the value of such hats in the country of exportation. commissioners marvin, glassie, and baldwin are, however, of the opinion that the existing rate of per cent ad valorem substantially equalizes differences in costs of production in respect of hats valued above $ . per dozen in the country of exportation. summary of conclusions on the basis of the facts presented the commission agrees that the data indicate an increase in tariff rates, if the differences in costs of production are to be equalized between lower-priced grades of foreign hats and comparable products of american factories. in respect of such hats, italy is the principal competing country. the commission further agrees that foreign hats sold in the united states on a basis of quality rather than price are the higher-priced hats which at this time are not keenly competitive with the products of the american industry. with respect to such higher-priced hats, commissioners costigan and dennis are of opinion that great britain is shown to be the principal competing county, and that under the law the data indicate that the duty should be reduced. the commission agrees that $ . per dozen, foreign valuation, represents a fair breaking point for customs purposes between lower-grade hats competing on a price basis and hats of superior material and workmanship competing on a quality basis. under section of the tariff act of there is an undetermined legal question with respect to including transportation expense in estimating foreign production costs. commissioners costigan, dennis, and baldwin agree that under subdivision (c) of section a fair estimate of foreign costs should include the expense of transporting the foreign product to the principal competitive market or markets in this country. for hats whose foreign value is not in excess of $ . per dozen the rate of per cent ad valorem is indicated as the correct duty for equalizing costs, with transportation included. chairman marvin and commissioner glassie agree that under the law costs of production do not include transportation costs on either side. if transportation costs be not included in the foreign costs of production shown by this investigation, the rate indicated by the cost data would be per cent on foreign valuation. this rate being in excess of the maximum permissible under subdivision (a) of section , resort must be had under subdivision (b) of section to the american selling price basis of valuation in order to equalize the differences in production costs. for hats whose foreign valuation is not in excess of $ . per dozen the rate of duty thus indicated by the cost difference is per cent on the american selling price. as to hats with a foreign valuation above $ . per dozen, if foreign transportation be included, the present duty of per cent on the basis of foreign valuation is in excess of the difference in cost of production and the rate of duty indicated is per cent on the basis of foreign valuation. if foreign transportation be not included, the rate of duty indicated is per cent on the basis of foreign valuation. the figures are shown in detail in table , on page . in the accompanying report the above conclusions will be found more formally stated for the purposes of a proclamation. respectfully submitted. thomas o. marvin, _chairman_. edward p. costigan, henry h. glassie, alfred p. dennis, a. h. baldwin, _commissioners_. separate statement of commissioner costigan, in part concurring and in part dissenting, in the investigation of men's sewed straw hats while i concur with my associates in transmitting the commission's data in the investigation of men's sewed straw hats, a differentiation of views must be expressed with respect to certain conclusions which may be drawn from such data. _both higher and lower duties indicated by the commission's cost figures._--under the provisions of section of the tariff act of , the information secured by the commission and summarized in this report points not only to an increased duty on lower-priced hats but also to a decreased duty on higher-priced hats. it is submitted that no satisfactory reason can be assigned under the present record for failing to recommend such a simultaneous upward and downward change in the present rate of duty by the use of the provisions for flexibility in the tariff act of . under the controlling statute all commissioners are agreed that a clear distinction exists between the bulk of the lower-priced hats coming from italy and the lesser but considerable quantity of higher-priced hats imported from great britain. this feature of the commission's summarized data is particularly presented in tables , , and , in which are shown the sources, volume, and foreign values of imported hats. table presents american and italian costs of lower-priced hats; table , cost data for higher-priced hats in the united states and great britain. table indicates that, in lieu of the present duty of per cent on foreign value, a duty of per cent on foreign value is required to equalize the costs incurred with respect to the lower-priced hats; and table , that a duty of per cent on foreign value will suffice to equalize such costs in the case of the higher-priced hats. in other words, the record establishes the need, if competitive costs are to be equalized under section , for creating two classes of men's sewed straw hats, with a different principal competing country and a separate rate of duty for each class. under the circumstances, to confine the findings of the commission to an increased duty on lower-priced hats is, in one important particular, to fall short of the statutory responsibility undertaken when the commission ordered an investigation of the adequacy of the present per cent ad valorem duty as a measure of equalized costs in the united states and foreign countries. a partial conclusion from the commission's data, where, as here, a comprehensive conclusion is clearly warranted, would appear to be discriminatory and fail to fulfill the scientific and impartial purposes of the provisions of section . _determining the dividing line for tariff purposes between higher and lower priced hats._--the above tables sufficiently demonstrate that the great bulk of men's sewed straw hats, imported at the port of new york during the period of investigation, came from italy and had a foreign value of $ or less per dozen, and much the larger part of the higher-priced hats came from england and had a foreign value of $ . or more per dozen. the separation into classes of lower and higher priced hats, with different duties for each class tends to result in an overstatement of the values of the lower-priced imports in order to obtain the benefit of the lower duty on high-priced imports. there is also a tendency of the higher-priced imports to increase in volume. to meet the changed situation a higher "breaking point" than the $ value is desirable. for example, with a per cent duty, a hat whose foreign value is $ per dozen would cost, landed, duty and transportation paid, $ . . if the rate of per cent remain on hats in the higher bracket, as certain commissioners suggest that it continue to do, instead of the $ hat it might be profitable to import a hat worth $ . per dozen, which would enter, duty paid and transportation included, for $ . . adopting and applying the same method to hats having an invoice value of $ . or less per dozen, a breaking point of approximately $ . would make it unprofitable to bring in higher-priced hats in order to obtain the benefit of a per cent rate of duty. a breaking point of approximately $ . would therefore appear to be safely calculated to prevent overvaluation with respect to the great bulk of low-priced men's sewed straw hats now being imported. _some omissions from and doubtful features in the commission's report._--although from the point of view of equalizing foreign and domestic costs under the provisions of section , the data of the commission on their face point to an increase from to per cent ad valorem, complete frankness compels the statement that the conclusion arrived at is not free from difficulties; that the record is not unequivocal; and that a strong case might be made for not advancing the duty to the full extent thus indicated. since the application of the cost-of-production standard under section is still in its experimental stages, it may promote accuracy and help to bring about scientific amendments of the present law to illustrate in this investigation the possible danger of using the commission's figures to fortify different and inconsistent conclusions. the data obtained by the commission in the straw-hat investigation are unsatisfactory in the following particulars: _representativeness of samples._--in selecting hats assumed to be representative of american production, it was found impracticable to determine the respective percentages of production of cheap, medium-priced, and high-priced hats. in consequence there is some reason to believe that the limited figures secured with respect to cheap american hats has tended to exaggerate american costs beyond what an exactly representative selection would have shown. figures were secured for only a few producers of cheap american hats, and while it is impossible to say what weight should be given to such cheap american production, expert opinion is not wanting in support of the view that because of the method of sampling employed, american costs as a whole have been unduly elevated for comparison with italian costs. while it is too late to make any exact mathematical adjustment on this account, it is only fair to urge distinct caution in accepting at their face value and following to their inexorable conclusions the comparisons based on the domestic and foreign data. probably the most important principle of sampling employed by the commission's agents when confronted with the problem of selecting for cost comparison a few types of hats from the many manufactured was the choice of those types of hats with respect to which the domestic industry has been suffering the keenest competition. it must be clear that the selection of such hats tended to show the widest cost divergence for the two countries, since it was to be expected that the severest competition would have been experienced when the relatively higher-cost hats of the united states met the relatively lower-cost hats of italy. nor could it be said that such hats as were chosen were the only "similar competitive articles," since the foreign manufacturers can and do produce all types and styles sold in the united states. the fact that the american industry earned approximately per cent on its invested capital (even after the payment of large salaries) must be chiefly explained by the profits earned on hats with respect to which there was no such acute competition. obviously such more profitable hats strengthened the domestic industry's competitive resistance. _importers' selling expenses omitted._--through inadvertence, but none the less unfortunately, the selling expenses of importers were not obtained by the commission. there was considerable testimony at the commission's public hearing to the effect that a relatively heavy burden rests on such importers in selling such straw hats in the united states. (see transcript of public hearing, pp. - .) the american manufacturers' costs of marketing their hats to the jobbers were secured by the commission's representatives, but the selling expenses of importers of foreign hats (without which italian hats could not reach american jobbers) were not secured: thus, the complete picture of the competitive cost situation is not presented in the commission's report. the significance of this omission is considerable. under the provisions of subdivision (c) of section the statutory mandate to consider much "advantages and disadvantages in competition" is unavoidable, and, while it is probably not reasonable to reject the commission's findings as a whole because of this record defect, some allowance would be reasonable falling short of the extreme conclusions to which the data would otherwise point. in answer to the argument that the domestic industry has so well withstood the competition offered by what seem to be extremely low-cost italian hats, it has been urged that the italian producers are far from their market and that jobbers prefer a source of supply more conveniently at hand. this statement involves the admission of a competitive disadvantage suffered by the foreign producer, which is clearly not capable of being measured. however, the one statistically measurable marketing disadvantage of the foreign producer, referred to, was unfortunately neglected when the commission's data were assembled. as has been suggested, costs secured, though not used, for the american producer included his expense of placing his hats in condition ready for delivery to the jobber, but only those italian costs were obtained which with transportation added bring the product to the docks at new york. importers must incur the expense of handling and reselling before the product is ready for the jobbers. in so far as such importers perform the jobbers' functions, the objections stated may not be valid, but any importers' costs of reselling to jobbers should undoubtedly have been collected and considered. it may further be noted that some american manufacturers actually sell their hats to retailers. such domestic selling expenses were secured by the commission on its schedules, and there is reason to believe that certain overhead items in the assembled costs are probably larger than they would otherwise be because of the imperfect allocation of selling and manufacturing expenses. _deficiencies in comparative overhead data._--more striking in some respects than the failure to secure importers' selling expenses is the contrast exhibited in the commission's report between overhead expenses in the united states and abroad. the foreign overhead expenses are mere estimates, since the commission's representatives were refused access to the original books and records by practically every foreign firm. it accordingly became necessary to resort to estimates based on flat percentages of prime costs or sales price. these were in fact submitted by italian manufacturers and used by the commission's representatives. it now develops that these percentages have never been analyzed or justified. indeed, there is no definite record of what expense items were included or neglected in such percentages. the overhead expenses in the united states include very considerable salaries paid to officers of the domestic manufacturing concerns, and the question is presented whether, as some accountants maintain, such salaries should not be charged exclusively to selling rather than manufacturing expenses, since such officers usually pay more attention to the selling end of the business. in the commission's records it appears that about per cent of the total officers' salaries was charged to manufacturing and about per cent to selling. the importance in cost investigations of scrutinizing high salaries should be evident, as they might easily be, although, in this instance it is not suggested that they have been, used to conceal profits. it is worthy of note that the average salaries allowed by the commission's representatives in the domestic costs of all the hats manufactured amounted to cents per dozen--nearly as much as the entire average italian overhead charge. it is to be remembered, as already stated, that this average amount does not include the additional item allowed in the selling expense for officers' salaries. it is of interest to note, further, that the american firms which complain most of italian competition showed the largest salary accounts. one firm, in fact, had a salary expense, included in manufacturing cost, of more than $ per dozen hats. nevertheless, even after the payment of such salaries, it has been shown that the industry as a whole earned approximately per cent on the invested capital during the period covered by the commission's investigation. it would be obviously difficult to determine what salaries should reasonably be allowed, but, in view of such a showing, it might be argued with force that, as has been done in other investigations when data unsatisfactory for a fair comparison have been secured, such data on both sides should be excluded from the final calculation. to illustrate, the commission in the present investigation has eliminated the item of interest here and in italy, since adequate data for the italian industry were unobtainable. if this principle were followed in the matter of overhead, a conclusion might reasonably be based on the comparison of material and labor costs here and in italy plus transportation from italy to our principal market or markets. to illustrate the possibility, already mentioned, of diverse conclusions from the commission's record, the difference between the material and labor costs here and in italy, with transportation included, is shown in the following table: ------------------------------------------------+--------+-------- |domestic|italian ------------------------------------------------+--------+-------- material costs | $ . | $ . labor | . | . +--------+-------- total | . | . +--------+-------- difference | $ . transportation to new york | . +----------------- final difference | . +================= foreign selling value | . +================= | _per cent_ ad valorem duty required to equalize | on basis of foreign selling value | present duty | ------------------------------------------------+----------------- the failure to consider interest on investment in the overhead introduces another difficulty of some importance. if rents actually paid are included in costs, equality of treatment demands that interest on capital invested in plants owned, and therefore not rented, should be considered. in the costs of of the american companies investigated the rent charge amounted to $ . per dozen for all styles of hats. it appears that there is no information to show that any one of the italian companies covered rented its factory; therefore, the failure to include interest on the capital invested in the italian factories may have overestimated the relative strength of italian competition. the failure to include interest on invested capital in the italian costs might justify the exclusion of the rent item from the american overhead costs. it will, of course, be argued that to disregard all overhead costs in both the foreign and domestic figures in the way suggested would fail to measure the domestic disadvantage arising from relatively higher overhead expenses. there are, however, two considerations, discussed in detail in this statement, which tend to compensate for any inaccuracy which the above findings might imply. they are ( ) the method of sampling employed by the commission; and ( ) the failure to consider certain of the italian industries' marketing expenses. _conclusions._--the principal significance of the foregoing discussion is to be found in the conclusion that, in recommending under the law an increase in the present rate of duty on lower-priced hats from to per cent on foreign value, the statute is being liberally construed from the point of view of the domestic industry, in the effort to arrive at an equalization of costs in the united states and abroad. regardless of the legal question as to whether transportation should or should not be included, any higher duty on any of the hats investigated than per cent on foreign value--particularly so high a duty as per cent, or the equivalent per cent on american selling price, which has been suggested by certain commissioners--involves such a grave departure from the economic purposes sought to be promoted by section as to make it highly desirable that the present investigation be reopened before any such increase in duty is proclaimed. reviewing, therefore, the whole record in this investigation and dismissing, though not without hesitation, the foregoing argument in favor of a lower rate of duty than per cent, foreign value, on the lower-priced hats, it is submitted that under the law the data collected by the commission in this investigation warrant formal findings of fact to the following effect: . the classification for men's sewed straw hats in paragraph of the tariff act of should be changed to provide separate rates of duty for imported hats of different foreign values. . the present rate of duty should be increased to per cent on imported hats having a foreign value of less than $ . per dozen. . the present rate of duty should be decreased to per cent on imported hats having a foreign value of $ . or more per dozen. edward p. costigan, _commissioner_. july , . appendix a proclamation by the president of the united states of america increasing the rate of duty on men's sewed straw hats whereas in and by section (a) of title iii of the act of congress approved september , , entitled "an act to provide revenue, to regulate commerce with foreign countries, to encourage the industries of the united states, and for other purposes," it is, among other things, provided that whenever the president, upon investigation of the differences in costs of production of articles wholly or in part the growth or product of the united states and of like or similar articles wholly or in part the growth or product of competing foreign countries, shall find it thereby shown that the duties fixed in this act do not equalize the said differences in costs of production in the united states and the principal competing country he shall, by such investigation, ascertain said differences and determine and proclaim the changes in classifications or increases or decreases in rates of duty provided in said act shown by said ascertained differences in such costs of production necessary to equalize the same; whereas in and by section (c) of said act it is further provided that in ascertaining the differences in costs of production, under the provisions of subdivisions (a) and (b) of said section, the president, in so far as he finds it practicable, shall take into consideration ( ) the differences in conditions in production, including wages, costs of material, and other items in costs of production of such or similar articles in the united states and in competing foreign countries; ( ) the differences in the wholesale selling prices of domestic and foreign articles in the principal markets of the united states; ( ) advantages granted to a foreign producer by a foreign government, or by a person, partnership, corporation, or association in a foreign country; and ( ) any other advantages or disadvantages in competition; whereas, under and by virtue of said section of said act, the united states tariff commission has made an investigation to assist the president in ascertaining the differences in costs of production of and of all other facts and conditions enumerated in said section with respect to the articles included within the class or kind of articles provided for in paragraph of title i of said tariff act of , namely, men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, being wholly or in part the growth or product of the united states, and of and with respect to like or similar articles wholly or in part the growth or product of competing foreign countries; whereas in the course of said investigation hearings were held, of which reasonable public notice was given and at which parties interested were given reasonable opportunity to be present, to produce evidence, and to be heard; whereas the president upon said investigation of said differences in costs of production of men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, wholly or in part the growth or product of the united states and of like or similar articles wholly or in part the growth or product of competing foreign countries, has thereby found-- that no change in the existing rate of duty is required to equalize differences in costs of production in the united states and in the principal competing country, with respect to men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, valued at more than $ . per dozen; that the principal competing country for men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, valued at $ . or less per dozen, is italy; and that the duty fixed in said title and act does nor equalize the differences in costs of production in the united states and in said principal competing country, namely, italy, in respect of such men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, valued at $ . or less per dozen, and has ascertained and determined the increased rate of duty necessary to equalize the same. now, therefore, i, calvin coolidge, president of the united states of america, do hereby determine and proclaim that the increase in the rate of duty provided in said act upon men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, valued at $ . or less per dozen, shown by said ascertained differences in said costs of production necessary to equalize the same is as follows: an increase in said duty on men's straw hats, whether wholly or partly manufactured, not blocked or blocked, not trimmed or trimmed, if sewed, valued at $ . or less per dozen from per cent ad valorem to per cent ad valorem. in witness whereof, i have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the united states to be affixed. done at the city of washington this twelfth day of february, in the year of our lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-six, and of the independence of the united states of america the one hundred and fiftieth. [seal.] calvin coolidge. by the president: frank b. kellogg, _secretary of state_. [transcriber's note: original tables presenting data for the years and in adjacent columns under each country header have been broken into two parts; one for each year, with headers and rows duplicated.] transcriber's note: extensive research indicates the copyright on this book was not renewed. _mother earth_-- land grants in virginia - by w. stitt robinson, jr. associate professor of history university of kansas virginia th anniversary celebration corporation williamsburg, virginia copyright©, by virginia th anniversary celebration corporation, williamsburg, virginia jamestown th anniversary historical booklet, number chapter one the land and the indian among the motives for english colonization of america in the seventeenth century, the desire for free land occupied a prominent place. the availability of land in the new world appealed to all classes and ranks in europe, particularly to the small landholder who sought to increase his landed estate and to the artisans and tenants who longed to enter the ranks of the freeholder. the desire for land and the opportunity to provide a home for one's family, according to professor c. m. andrews, "probably influenced the largest number of those who settled in north america." land also had its appeal as the gateway to freedom, contributing substantially to the shaping of the american character. when analyzing the factors that helped make this "new man, who acts upon new principles," de crèvecoeur in emphasized the opportunity to "become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal blessing is annexed!" formulation of a land policy confronted the officials of all the colonies in early america. its importance is reflected in the statement by c. l. raper in his study of english colonial government that the "system and policy concerning land determine to a very considerable extent the economic, social, and political life of the colonists." the existence of the american frontier with unoccupied land was a potent force in america, and frederick jackson turner stated in his famous essay in that the "most significant thing about the american frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land." before analyzing the nature of landholding and the land policy that was adopted in early virginia, let us examine first the problem that arose by virtue of the presence of the indians in north america. at the time of the settlement of jamestown in the area of present-day virginia was occupied by indians of three linguistic stocks: algonquin, siouan, and iroquoian. generally speaking, the algonquins which included the powhatan confederacy inhabited the tidewater, reaching from the potomac to the james river and extending to the eastern shore. the siouan tribes, including the monacans and the manahoacs, occupied the piedmont; while the iroquoian group, containing the independent nottoways and meherrins, partially surrounded the others in a rough semicircle reaching from the headwaters of the chesapeake through the western mountains and back to the coast in the region south of the james river. the presence of these tribes in the areas of proposed colonization confronted the colonizers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the same problem that has faced imperialists of a later date, the question of "right and title" to land. the british, like other european nations, did not recognize the sovereign right of the heathen natives but claimed a general title to the area by the prevailing doctrine of right by discovery and later by the generally accepted doctrine of effective occupation. as stated in the charter to sir walter raleigh in with essentially the same provision included in the first charter of virginia in , the colonizers were authorized to occupy land "not actually possessed of any christian prince, nor inhabited by christian people." over the indians the british maintained a "limited sovereignty"; and when acknowledging any claim, they recognized only the indian's right of occupation and asserted the "exclusive right" to extinguish this title which occupancy gave them. in the first years of the colony not even these tenure rights were recognized by the british. while a few gifts of land had been made by the natives and one of these confirmed by the london company, there was no admission, either direct or by inference, that the indians possessed a superior claim to the land. when such an implication was made in a land grant to barkham in , the company reacted with bitter resentment. governor yeardley, striving to maintain peace with the natives, made the grant conditional upon the consent of the indian chief opechancanough. according to stated practice under the company, the grant then had to be approved in england by a quarter court of the company's stockholders. when barkham's petition was presented for ratification, the members of the court held the provision concerning the indian chief to be "verie dishonorable and prejudiciall" for it infringed upon the company's title by acknowledging sovereignty in that "heathen infidell." disregard for the aboriginal occupants of virginia called forth anew the question of "right and title," a problem subject to discussion in england even before jamestown. to allay these attacks, several proponents of colonial expansion attempted to justify the policy of the crown and the london company. sir george peckham in _a true reporte of the late discoveries_ pointed out as early as , relating to the discoveries of sir humphrey gilbert, that it was "lawfull and necessary to trade and traficke with the savages." in a series of subsequent arguments, he then expounded the right of settlement among the natives and the mutual benefit to them and to england. this theme was later extended by the author of _nova britannia_, who maintained that the object of the english was to settle in the indian's country, "yet not to supplant and roote them out, but to bring them from their base condition to a farre better" by teaching them the "arts of civility." the author of _good speed to virginia_ added that the "savages have no particular propertie in any part or parcell of that countrey, but only a generall residencie there, as wild beasts have in the forests." this last opinion, according to philip a. bruce, prevailed to a great extent and was held by a majority of the members of the london company in regard to the appropriations of lands. in spite of these views entertained by the company, there were several instances in which the natives were compensated for their territory. this was done primarily through the initiative of local authorities, for they were usually better informed concerning indian affairs. they were in much closer contact with the natives than the company's council in london and realized that the goodwill of the aborigines could be cultivated by giving only minor considerations for the land occupied by the english. on other occasions the indians voluntarily gave up their land such as the present from opechancanough in of a large body of land at weyanoke. at still other times land was seized by force. when any attempt was made to justify the seizure, it was done on the basis of an indemnity for damage inflicted upon the colony or for violations of agreements by the natives. by settlements had been made along the banks of the lower james river and in accomac on the eastern shore, the land having been obtained by direct purchase, by gifts from the natives, or by conquest. any attempt to determine the extent of the areas acquired by purchase in virginia is hindered by the indefinite nature of the indian holdings and by the lack of complete records for the early periods. thomas jefferson thought much of the land had been purchased. writing to st. george tucker in , jefferson stated: at an early part of my life, from to , i passed much time in going through the public records in virginia, then in the secretary's office, and especially those of a very early date of our settlement. in these are abundant instances of purchases made by our first assemblies of the indi[ans] around them. the opinion i formed at the time was that if the records were complete & thoroughly searched, it would be found that nearly the whole of the lower country was covered by these contracts. jefferson overestimated the amount of land that was purchased by virginia during the early years. while the records now extant show that the colony often purchased lands, they likewise indicate that frequently land was appropriated without compensation. especially during the years following the first massacre of , "the indians were stripped of their inheritance without the shadow of justice." the greater part of the peninsula between the york and james rivers was taken by conquest; the right of possession was later confirmed by a treaty with necotowance in , without, however, any stipulation for compensating the natives for the land they relinquished. the treaty of with the successor of opechancanough inaugurated the policy of major historical significance of either setting aside areas reserved for indian tribes, or establishing a general boundary line between white and indian settlements. influenced by the desire of individual settlers to fortify their claims and by the opposition of the natives to white encroachment, the colony designated definite lands for the virginia indians and began to follow more closely the custom of purchasing all territory received from the natives. to see that this was done, the assembly passed numerous laws, pertaining in most cases only to the specific tribes of indians mentioned in each act. in the assembly ordered that the commissioners of york county remove any persons then seated upon the territory of the pamunkey or chickahominy indians. at the same time both lands and hunting grounds were assigned to the red men of gloucester and lancaster counties. the following year the indian tribes of northampton county on the eastern shore were granted the right to sell their land to the english provided a majority of the inhabitants of the indian town consented and provided the governor and council of the colony ratified the procedure. soon other tribes were given the same privilege. so anxious were they to dispose of their land when allowed to convey a legal title, that it became necessary for the colony to forbid further land transfers without the assembly's stamp of approval. such a step was taken in order to prevent the continual necessity of apportioning new lands to keep the natives satisfied. by the assembly had received from several indian tribes so many complaints of being deprived of their land, either by force or fraud, that measures were again adopted to protect the natives in their rights. no member of the colony was allowed to occupy lands claimed by the natives without consent from the governor and council or from the commissioners of the territory where the settlement was intended. to decrease the chances for cheating the indians, all sales were to be consummated at quarter courts where unfair purchases could be prevented. efforts to protect the indians in the possession of their lands were subject to modification from time to time. the treaty of designated the york river as the line to separate the settlements of the english and the natives. but the colony at that time was on the eve of a great period of expansion. with an estimated population of , in , the colony increased by to approximately , , and by to approximately , . to stem the tide of the advancing english settlement was apparently an impossibility. therefore, governor william berkeley and the council, upon representation from the burgesses, consented to the opening of the land north of the york and rappahannock rivers after . at the same time the provision making it a felony for the english to go north of the york was repealed. this turn in policy, based upon the assumption that some intermingling of the white and red men was inevitable, led to the effort to provide for an "equitable division" of land supplemented by attempts to modify the indian economy which had previously demanded vast areas of the country. endeavoring to provide for this "equitable division" of land, the assembly in forbade further grants of lands to any englishmen whatsoever until the indians had been allotted a proportion of fifty acres for each bowman. the land for each indian town was to lie together and to include all waste and unfenced land for the purpose of hunting. this provision did not relieve all pressure on indians' lands, partly because some of the natives never received their full proportion and partly because some had been accustomed to even larger areas. but it did serve as a basis for reservation of land for different tribes. [illustration: from a portrait reproduced in j. h. claiborne, _william claiborne of virginia_. photo by flournoy, virginia state chamber of commerce. william claiborne, surveyor for virginia, secretary of the colony of virginia] [illustration: _how to reduce all sorts of grounds into a square for the better measuring of it._ from john norden's "surveior's dialogue" photo by t. l. williams] two years later the assembly in took definite steps to relieve the pressure of english encroachments upon the territory of the accomac indians on the eastern shore. enough land was assigned to the natives of accomac to afford ample provisions for subsistence over and above the supplies that might be obtained through hunting and fishing. to insure a fair and just distribution of these lands, the assembly passed over surveyors of the eastern shore and required that the work be done by a resident of the mainland, who obviously would be less prejudiced against the aborigines because of personal interest. when once assigned to the natives, the land could not be alienated. by this last provision, forbidding the accomacs to alienate their lands, was extended to all indians in virginia. the assembly had realized that the chief cause of trouble was the encroachment by the whites upon indian territory. efforts, therefore, had been made to remove this cause of friction by permitting purchases from the natives provided each sale was publicly announced before a quarter court or the assembly. but the plan had not been a complete success. various members of the colony had employed all kinds of ingenious devices to persuade the natives to announce in public their willingness to part with their land. dishonest interpreters had rendered "them willing to surrender when indeed they intended to have received a confirmation of their owne rights." in view of these evil practices the assembly declared all future sales to be null and void. twenty-eight years later in the governor and council in accord with this restriction nullified several purchases made from the chickahominy indians. by order of the assembly in this tribe had received lands in pamunkey neck. since that time several colonists had either purchased a part of their land or encroached upon their territory without regard for compensation. in neither case were the white settlers allowed to remain. all leases, sales, and other exchanges were declared void by the governor and council, and all intruders were ordered to withdraw and burn the buildings that had been constructed. george pagitor, being one of the settlers affected by this order, had obtained about , acres in pamunkey neck from the natives. he had built a forty-foot tobacco barn and kept two workers there most of the year. when his purchase was declared void, he was ordered to return the land to the natives and to burn the barn that had been constructed. accompanying this executive decree was an order to the sheriff of new kent county authorizing him to carry out the will of the officials of the colony and to burn the barn himself, if necessary. commissioners were also employed for the supervision of indian lands. upon the recommendation of the committee appointed for indian affairs, the assembly in authorized the governor to appoint a commission "to enquire into and examine the severall claimes made to any part of our neighboring indian land, and confirme such persons who have justly invested themselves, and cause all others to remove." the english with rights to land within three miles of the natives were to assist in fencing the indian corn fields. this was done to prevent harm to the indian crops by hogs and cattle of the colony. commissioners appointed were to designate the time and number of english to aid in the construction. other commissioners were to view annually the boundaries separating the two people. the commissioners diligently enforced the provisions of these laws which underwent few changes until the outburst of hostilities in bacon's rebellion. in the additional expense of the indian war led the colony to modify temporarily its former provisions in order to obtain more revenue from land. all territory recently assigned to the indians but then abandoned and any land then occupied that should later be deserted were to be sold. the proceeds from the sale were to be used in the public interest to defray the expense of the war. this regulation applied only to land abandoned by the indians. the colony continued to protect the natives in other lands assigned them as is exemplified in the region south of the james river. in the indian boundary line for the area was designated to run from the southern branches of the blackwater river to the appomattox indian town, and from there to manakin town located only a few miles above the fall line. by some of the colonists had crossed this line and were settling on the territory of the nottoway indians. when the encroachment was called to the attention of the governor and council, they ordered the english to withdraw immediately, and in the next instructions to the surveyor of the colony they again forbade the location of new grants in the region designated as indian land. the number of the aborigines gradually dwindled in this section as in other parts of the colony, due mainly to wars, smallpox epidemics, spirituous liquors, migration, and the abridgement of territory of a people who lived principally on the "spontaneous productions of nature." because of the decrease the burgesses in appealed to governor howard for permission to allow grants to some of the land in the area. the governor failed to comply with their requests. later, in , an order was issued for the immediate removal of several persons who had obtained illegal patents to land south of the main blackwater swamp. all members of the colony were again forbidden to settle beyond the boundary line, and any who had already constructed houses were ordered not to repair them nor to finish any other uncompleted buildings. the sheriffs and justices of the peace of charles city, surry, isle of wight, and nansemond counties were instructed to be on the alert for violators of the order. however, the indians themselves, residing in the region on the south side of the blackwater river and in pamunkey neck had requested in that colonists be allowed to settle across the boundary line in the area now made vacant by the gradual dying out of their tribes. the basis for the request seems to have been a desire for relief in their precarious economic condition and the fear of invasion by hostile indians, whom they regarded with more apprehension than they did the english. by , the colony, influenced by the request from the natives revoked its former law regarding the indian boundary, permitting a limited number of white settlements in pamunkey neck and in the region south of the blackwater swamp and nottoway river. thus in the seventeenth century the pendulum moved from a position of the colony ignoring any indian rights in the land to a gradual recognition of the indian right of occupation. this sweep of the pendulum brought the establishment of boundary lines between the whites and the indians with reservations being designated for certain tribes. by the end of the century the diminution of the tribes found the pendulum swinging back to open the area to white settlement which had once been reserved to the natives, yet still retaining the recognition of the indian's right of occupation where tribes survived. with this survey of the problem of the red man's title to land, let us now turn to a consideration of the white man's title and how it was obtained in seventeenth-century virginia. chapter two the london company general boundaries for english settlement were designated in the charter of creating the london company and the plymouth company to settle the area in america known as virginia. the london company was authorized to settle a tract of land miles square in the southern part of the area extending from the thirty-fourth to the forty-first degrees north latitude, or from the cape fear river in present north carolina to new york city. the boundaries for the plymouth company were from the thirty-eighth to the forty-fifth degrees north latitude, or from approximately the mouth of the potomac river to a line just north of present bangor, maine. in the overlapping area between the thirty-eighth and forty-first degrees, which in effect created a neutral zone between the present location of washington, d.c., and new york city, provision was made for a distance of at least miles to separate the sites that might be selected by the two companies. as stated in the charter of , "all the lands, tenements, and hereditaments" were to be held "as of our manor at east-greenwich in the county of kent, in free and common soccage only, and not in capite." the "manor at east-greenwich" refers to the residence of king james i at the royal palace of greenwich and was used as a descriptive term in many grants to indicate that the land in america was also considered a part of the demesne of the king. the land was held not "in fee simple" with absolute ownership, a concept which was not a part of english law at the time; but it was granted "in free and common soccage" with the holder a tenant of the king with obligations of fealty and of the payment of a quitrent. the fixed rent replaced the service, military or personal, required under feudal law; and the socage tenure in effect did not subject the land to the rules of escheat or return of the land to the king if inherited by minors or widows. for englishmen in america, the "instructions for the government of the colonies" in were explicit in showing that their legal and tenurial rights were the same as residents of the mother country by stating that "all the lands, tenements, and hereditaments ... shal be had and inherited and enjoyed, according as in the like estates they be had and enjoyed by the lawes within this realme of england." government by the charter of provided for a strong exercise of control by the crown over the colonies of both companies. this was achieved through the establishment of the council for virginia that was appointed by the king, was resident in england, and answered to the king through the privy council for its actions. for local control of each company, authorization was made for a council in america with its initial membership determined by the council for virginia and with a president selected by the local group. few details were given either in the charter or "instructions" of about distribution of land. provisions did state that grants of land in the colony would be made in the name of the king to persons whom the local council "nominate and assign"; but no details were given of the method of land distribution. from the scant records that survive, it is evident that promises of land were made to individuals who were willing to hazard the dangers of the new country. from a bill of adventure that goes back to , the nature of the promise of land is revealed in the agreement between henry dawkes and richard atkinson, clerk of the virginia company. fortunately the bill of adventure of was recorded with the patent by governor john harvey in to william dawkes, son and heir of henry dawkes. the commitments in the bill of adventure were as follows: _whereas_ henry dawkes now bound on the intended voyage to virginia hath paid, in ready money, to sr. thomas smith kt. treasurer for virginia the some of twelve pounds tenn shillings for his adventure in the voyage to virginia. _it is agreed_ that for the same the said henry dawkes his heires, executors, admrs. and assignes shall have rateably according to his adventure his full pte. of all such lands tenemts and hereditamts. as shall from time to time bee there planted and inhabited, and of all such mines and minneralls of gould, silver, and other mettalls or treasures, pearles, pretious stoanes or any kinds of wares or merchandize, comodities or pfitts. whatsoever, which shal bee obtained or gotten in the said voyage, according to the portion of money by him imployed to that use, in as large and ample manner as any other adventurer therein shall receave for the like some. written this fowerteenth of july one thousand six hundred and eight. richard atkinson [clerk of the virginia company]. the first two years at jamestown brought disappointments, but the adventurers of the london company found grounds for new hope in the enlarged and expanded program that was inaugurated in . a new charter was sought from the king to make possible reforms in governmental organization both in england and virginia; and a broader base for financial support was laid by inviting the public to subscribe to a joint-stock fund. by the charter of the new organization was incorporated as the treasurer and company of adventurers and planters of the city of london for the first colony in virginia. in england the head of the reorganized company was designated as treasurer, and the major change in control was the transfer of authority over the colony from the crown to the company with the powers of government in the hands of the treasurer and council. this council in england, which continued for some time to be called the council for virginia, had its jurisdiction limited to the exploits of the london company; its membership came entirely from the company; and its members were in effect selected by the leading promoters of the company. one major governmental change occurred in the colony by the president and council being eliminated in favor of a strong governor to be advised by a council. the former provision for title to an area of land miles square was changed to give title to "all that space and circuit of land" lying miles north and miles south of point comfort from the sea coast "up into the land, throughout from sea to sea, west, and northwest" plus islands within miles of the coast. provisions relative to distribution of land were more specific in the charter and provided that land should be conveyed by majority vote of the company under its common seal. consideration in distribution of land was to be given both to the amount invested by adventurer as well as "special service, hazard, exploit, or merit of any person." in the third charter of no major changes were included relative to land. boundaries of the colony were extended from miles to leagues to include the newly discovered bermuda islands. and greater governmental authority was placed in the generality of the company by providing for quarterly court meetings of the company to handle "matters and affairs of greater weight and importance" than were resolved by lesser courts of a smaller portion of the company. no immediate grants of land to individuals were forthcoming with these charters. only promises were made to those who subscribed to the joint-stock undertaking. the adventurer invested only his money and remained in england with each unit of investment set at £ s. per share. the term planter was applied to one who went to the colony, and his personal adventure was equated to one unit of investment at the same rate as above. both adventurer and planter were promised a proportionate share of any dividends distributed, whether in land or in money. the joint-stock arrangement was originally set to continue seven years from its inception in , thus making as the terminal date. during this period monetary dividends might be declared, and at the end of the period the land suitable for cultivation was to be divided with at least acres to be given for each share of stock. the tract _nova britannia_ of , written by robert johnson as a part of the promotional campaign of the london company, outlined these major provisions concerning land and included the optimistic prediction that each share of £ s. would be worth acres at least. but an attempt fourteen years later by captain martin to justify a patent based on this figure of acres per share failed because the promise was held to be the work of a private individual and not a commitment by the court of the company. in the absence of private title to land in the early years of the virginia colony, the company relied upon a corporate form of management with the pooling of community effort to clear the land, construct buildings, develop agriculture, and engage in trade with the indians. this was not an experiment based on a theory of communism for the joint-stock claims were limited in time. most of the settlers were more in a position of contract laborers performing services for the company, and plans were devised for monetary dividends even before if the colony prospered. inadequate supplies from england, severe weather conditions, hostility of the indians, and the lack of willingness for industrious labor on the part of the early settlers depleted the common storehouse upon which the colonists were forced to rely, leading to the exercise of stern and autocratic measures by john smith and some of his successors as leaders in the colony. among the factors that contributed to the lack of zeal among the settlers was the absence of private ownership of land. prior to the promised distribution of land in , there was granted private use of land under a tenant-farm policy which most probably was first inaugurated in under sir thomas dale, although there is some uncertainty about the date. three acres of "cleare ground" were allotted to men of the old settlement. in effect they became tenants of the company and were obligated to render only one month's service to the colony at some period other than the planting and harvesting time and to contribute annually to the common magazine two barrels and a half of corn on the ear. this tenant-farm policy worked well and better conditions resulted with increased production of crops and stock. according to one account in : they sow and reape their corne in sufficient proportion, without want or impeachment; their kine multiply already to some hundreds, their swine to many thousands, their goates and poultry in great numbers, every man hath house and ground to his owne use.... in the same year this policy was extended to include eighty-one farmers or tenants in the colony's total population of . despite improvement in the supply of provisions, the company still had to face the harsh facts that in there were only persons alive in the colony, and funds were low in the treasury. there had been only a limited number of new subscribers; some of the earlier subscribers had defaulted on their second or third payments; and the use of lotteries had failed to provide adequate money. this was the year set for the end of the joint ownership of land with the declaration of land dividends. but the company could not provide the necessary funds to defray the administrative costs for the land divisions; and furthermore, many were of the opinion that not enough land in possession had been cleared of trees and surveyed. the arbitrary conduct of the deputy governor captain samuel argall, who arrived in virginia in may, , also contributed to the delay in carrying out the plan for land distribution. _in a briefe declaration of the present state of things in virginia_, adventurers were told that "this course of sending a governor with commissioners and a survayor, with men, ships, and sundry provisions" would be expensive, and plans were announced for only a preliminary or "first divident" of fifty acres with the expressed hope that a later division would bring at least acres for every share. but even for the preliminary division, more money was needed and shareholders were asked to subscribe another £ s. to help pay for the administrative cost. for each additional subscription of £ s., a fifty-acre grant would be made. here we have provisions for obtaining land by "treasury right," a method remaining in effect only until dissolution of the company in and not reappearing until . planters in the colony were also to receive a fifty-acre grant for their personal adventure. even new adventurers were invited to buy shares at £ s. and were promised fifty-acre grants with the same privileges of the old adventurers. but the response was poor. most of the grants that were made were either irregular in form or contained unreasonable provisions dictated by the exigency of the situation, thereby being later repudiated by the company. the financial embarrassment of the company and the need for further colonization led to grants of land in return for service to the company by officials or for promoting the transportation of colonists. for the services of sir thomas dale to the colony, the council for virginia awarded him the value of pounds sterling to be received in land distribution; to sir thomas smith for his noteworthy efforts as treasurer or chief official of the company, , acres; and to captain daniel tucker for his aiding the colony with his pinnace and for his service as vice-admiral, fifteen shares of land. similar rewards could be made under the company to ministers, physicians, and other government officials. as a further stimulus to expand the population of the colony and to enhance agricultural production, the company beginning in encouraged private or voluntary associations, organized on a joint-stock basis, to establish settlements in the area of the company's patent. these "societies of adventurers" were to send to virginia at their own expense, tenants, servants, and supplies; and the associates were given certain governmental powers over the settlement that approached the position of an independent colony. they were authorized "till a form of government is here settled over them" to issue orders and ordinances provided they were not contrary to the laws of england. in relation to the four original boroughs of james city, charles city, henrico, and kecoughtan (later elizabeth city), the hundreds or particular plantations in government were "co-ordinate and not subordinate"; and some of them sent representatives to the first assembly held in under governor yeardley. the amount of land in these sub-patents depended upon the number of shares of stock of the associates, and in effect the grants served as dividends to the shareholders. one hundred acres were granted for each share with the first division of land, and the promise was made for an equal amount upon a second division of land provided the first was "sufficiently peopled." there was to be some choice in location by the associates, although certain restrictions were imposed. no grant was to be located within five miles of the four original boroughs, and the plantation should be ten miles from other settlements unless on opposite sides of an important river. these provisions were designed to provide for expansion and at the same time avoid conflict among plantations, yet they tended to disperse the colony and complicate efforts to maintain adequate protection from the imminent threat of hostile natives. the term hundred was applied to some, but not all, of these particular plantations. the origin of this designation has sometimes been explained as a derivation from the english administrative system, but this seems valid only as it pertains to the name. there was no attempt to establish a system based on english counties and hundreds, rather the virginia hundreds were closer to the feudal manor with a degree of economic and political independence. in the light of these conditions, professor wesley frank craven suggested the possibility that the term might have been a "colloquial designation" applied to plantations with no definite name and related to the units of acres included in the grants or by the requirement to seat settlers on the land. there were three general types of particular plantations. the first of these represented the voluntary pooling of land and resources by several adventurers of the company, since few had adequate land or financial support to go it alone. the company granted a patent to contiguous areas of land according to the number of shares of stock possessed by the group. examples of this type include the society of smith's hundred and martin's hundred. smith's hundred, later called southampton hundred, was organized in and included among its adventurers sir thomas smith, sir edwin sandys, and the earl of southampton. the grant included , acres and was located on the north side of the james river in the area between "tanks weyanoke" and the chickahominy river. the society was administered by a treasurer and committees selected by a meeting of the adventurers. the associates settled at least colonists within their boundaries and reported in the expenditure of £ , on the settlement. martin's hundred, organized in , was named for richard martin and should be distinguished from (john) martin's brandon organized the previous year. the society of martin's hundred held patent to , acres and dispatched over colonists, but only a part of the tract was ever occupied. the second type of particular plantation involved an adventurer who combined with persons outside the company to obtain a grant. the title usually resided in the original adventurer, and the nature of government and special privileges was similar to grants of the first kind discussed above. the grant made to captain samuel argall was of this type. so was the grant of john martin's brandon in , a plantation of , acres situated seven miles upstream from jamestown. the third type of grant involved new adventurers whose major purpose in buying stock in the company was to organize a particular plantation. illustrative of this category was the plantation of christopher lawne, who transported settlers in to warrosquoik and established lawne's hundred. during the following year the hundred was dissolved and thereafter called isle of wight plantation. beginning with the election of sir edwin sandys as treasurer in and including the next four years, there were forty-four grants made for particular plantations; and the company declared six others to have been made prior to this time under sir thomas smith. all of the projected plantations, however, were never located; and few were settled to the extent planned by the company. historical records are scarce for these projects and this paucity of material has left much of the story incomplete. it is certain that the following additional plantations were actually established in virginia: archer's hope on the james river, bargrave's settlement, bennett's welcome, society of truelove's plantation, persey's or flowerdieu hundred, and berkeley town or hundred. for the last of these, berkeley hundred, there is an extensive set of records in the smyth of nibley papers that gives considerable insight into the organization and activities of the adventurers under the leadership of richard berkeley, george thorpe, william throckmorton, and john smyth of nibley. resembling its larger prototype, the london company, the berkeley hundred group had a governor and council. the adventurers were granted acres of land for each share of stock with the promise of an equal amount when the first grant was settled; likewise they were promised fifty acres without quitrent for every person transported at their expense who remained for three years or died within this period. for promoting both a church and school, the adventurers were also granted , acres. with these grants and with exemptions from both the company's trade rules and from taxation except by consent, the leaders of berkeley hundred inaugurated a vigorous campaign to provide the necessary provisions and personnel, including farmers, artisans, overseers, a minister, and a doctor. over ninety people were dispatched to the colony in and at a cost of approximately £ , . this settlement, however, did not thrive. many of the settlers died of disease and eleven were killed in the indian massacre of . by the adventurers had abandoned their plans to continue the settlement and sold their interests to london merchants. in addition to the stimulus to migration by the three foregoing types of grants for particular plantations, the company took steps in toward reorganization of its administration. sir thomas smith was still in control of the company as treasurer and contributed to the reforms, but the major contribution came from sir edwin sandys who succeeded to the position of treasurer in the spring of the following year. rules and by-laws were restated in the "orders and constitutions," which were largely prepared in although not formally adopted until june, . one additional document of was very significant because it outlined a uniform land policy. identified by the term "the greate charter," it is listed in the _records_ of the london company as "instructions to governor yeardly" under the date november , . this "charter" outlined plans for distribution of the land dividend and contained provisions for the headright system which became a basic feature of the colony's land policy. one hundred acres were promised as a first dividend to all adventurers for each paid-up share of stock at £ s., another acres as a second dividend when the first had been settled ("sufficiently peopled"). "ancient planters," that is, those who had come to the colony prior to the departure of sir thomas dale in , were to receive similar grants if they had come to the colony at their own expense. these foregoing grants were to be free of quitrent. "ancient planters" who came to the colony at the company's expense would receive the same amount of land after a seven-year term of service but would be required to pay a quitrent of two shillings for every acres. for settlers arriving after the departure of dale in or those migrating during the seven-year period following midsummer day of , separate regulations applied. if transported at company expense, the colonist was to serve as a half-share tenant for seven years with no promise of a land grant; if at his own expense, he was to receive as a headright fifty acres on the first dividend and the same amount on the second dividend. this provision for the fifty-acre headright was set up for the seven-year period prior to midsummer day of , but it continued beyond this date as the essential key to virginia's land policy of the seventeenth century. out of the number of people who purchased a share in the company and thereby received a bill of adventure, alexander brown in his _genesis of the united states_ estimated that about one-third came to virginia and took up their land claim; approximately one-third sent over agents, or in some cases heirs, to benefit by the grants; and the remaining one-third disposed of their shares to others who occupied the lands. provisions for special lands were also stated in "the greate charter." at each of the four focal points of settlement--james city, charles city, henrico, and kecoughtan, , acres were to be set aside as the company's land. half-share tenants were to cultivate the lands and half of the company's profits was to be used to support several of the colonial officials. for the governor, a special plot known as the governor's land was to be designated at jamestown, and half of the proceeds of the tenants was to go to the governor. for local government, additional provisions were made for support by setting aside , acres as "burroughs land" at the four points of settlement listed above. support of cultural activities, as well as governmental, was also provided by land. glebe lands were authorized at each borough, including acres for the minister with a supplement from church members to pay a total of £ per annum. for the promotion of education, "the greate charter" set aside , acres at henrico as an endowment for a "university and college." the primary aim of the college in was to serve as an indian mission, although the training of english students was probably a part of the plan. tenants were dispatched to virginia to work at henrico as "tenants at halves," one-half of the proceeds of their labor to go to the tenant, the other half to be used for the building of the college and for support of its tutors and students. one hundred and fifty tenants were sent over for the college land; and to improve the returns from this enterprise, sir edwin sandys engaged that "worthy religious gentleman" george thorpe as deputy to supervise the investment in the college land. patrick copland, projector of the first english free school in north america, was designated president-elect of the indian college; and richard downes, a scholar in england, came to virginia in with plans to work in the proposed college. all of these hopeful plans were suddenly blasted by the eruption of the indian massacre of . for all practical purposes the project was ended, although some efforts were made after by the company to have the remaining tenants cultivate the land and to hold the bricklayers to the obligations of their contract. the trace of these grants, including the company land, the governor's land, and the "burroughs land" fades out in the absence of complete records for this period of the colony. use of the glebe land as partial support for the minister was continued in later years, although details of the disposition of these early plots are missing. and the appropriation of lands for support of education and other public purposes was a recognized concept in later american history. the issuing of patents in fee simple to land promised under the general land dividend did not reach the extent planned by the company until the arrival of governor george yeardley in . there seems to be adequate evidence to prove, as bruce contended, that a few grants had been made prior to this time, even prior to ; but no record has been preserved in the virginia land office. however, even if such grants were authorized, it is unlikely that the proper surveys were made for many of them. as early as there were references by the company to send to virginia a surveyor who could lay out the lands to be distributed to the adventurers. it is probable that a surveyor accompanied captain samuel argall to the colony in , but the first name on record in this position seems to be that of richard norwood who had previously engaged in surveying in the somer isles. there is little to indicate that much was done by norwood. in william claiborne accompanied governor francis wyatt to virginia, and the arrival of these two men actuated the granting of many tracts. one of these grants by governor wyatt is the earliest extant form of the headright franchise. dated january , / , it conveyed to thomas hothersall acres of land at blunt point located in later warwick county. the grant read as follows: _by the governr and capt: generll: of virginia_ _to all to whome these prsents shall come_ greeting in our lord god everlasting. _know yee_ that i sr francis wyatt kt, governr and capt: generall of virginia, by vertue of the great charter of orders and lawes concluded on and dated at london in a generall quarter court the eighteenth day of november one thousand six hundred and eighteene by the treasurer counseil and company of adventurers for the first southerne colony of virginia, according to the authority graunted them from his matie under his great seale, the said charter being directed to the governr and counseil of state here resident, and by the rules of justice, equity & reason, doe wth the approbation and consent of the same counseil who are joyned in commission with mee, give and graunt unto mr. thomas hothersall of paspehay gent., and to his heires and assignes for ever, for his first generll: devident, to bee augumented and doubled by the said company to him and his said heires and assignes when hee or they shall once sufficiently have planted and peopled the same. two hundred acres of land scituate and being at blunt point, confining on the east the land of cornelius may, on the south upon the great river, on the north upon the maine land and on the west runing towards a small creek one hundred rod (at sixteene foote and a half the rod); fifty acres whereof is his owne psonall right and fifty acres is the psonall right of frances hothersall his wife, the other hundred acres in consideration of his transportacon of twoe of his children out of england at his owne cost & charges, viz: richard hothersall and mary hothersall, _to have and to hold_ the said twoe hundred acres of land with all and singular the apptennces, and with his due share of all mines & minneralls therein conteyned, and wth all rights and privileges of hunting, hawking and fowling and others within the prcincts and upon the borders of the said land, to the only pper use benifitt and behoofe of the said thomas hothersall, his heires and assignes for ever, in as large and ample manner to all intents and purposes as is specified in the said great charter or by consequences may justly bee collected out of the same, or out of his ma'ties letters patents whereon it is grounded. _yeilding and paying_ to the treasurer and company and to their successors for ever, yearely at the feast of st. michael the archangell [september ], for every fifty acres, the fee rent of one shilling. _in witness whereof_ i have to these presents sett my hand and the great seale of the colony, given at james citty the six and twentieth day of january one thousand six hundred twenty one [o.s.] and in the yeares of the raigne, of our soveraigne lord, james by the grace of god king of england, scotland, france and ireland, defender of the faith &c., vizt: of england, france and ireland the nineteenth and of scotland the five and fiftieth, and in the fifteenth yeare of this plantacon. claiborne supervised most of the surveys included on the list of patents that was drawn up by governor wyatt in . out of patents that were issued to individual planters, over seventy-five per cent included only acres or less with the most frequent grant being the -acre grant to the "ancient planter." for the remaining individual grants, approximately one-sixth were between and acres; four were between and , acres; and four exceeded , acres. in an analysis of the status of the virginia population with regard to landholding at the time of the dissolution of the company in , professor manning c. voorhis concluded that only about one-seventh of the , population obtained land from the company. this would leave the remainder of the settlers as indentured servants or tenant farmers who worked out their maintenance or transportation either for the company or for private individuals who financed their trip to america. the tenant farmers constituted the larger group. in the chapter that follows, some attention will be given to the status of these immigrants and the extent to which they were able to become independent landowners in the colony. chapter three virginia as a royal colony the nature and size of land grants a variety of reasons led the king to dissolve the london company and to assume royal control over the first experiment in colonization under an incorporated company. failure of the colony to thrive economically, the poor financial condition of the company, political differences between sir edwin sandys and the king, internal dissensions between the sandys faction and the smith-warwick group, the extremely high death rate in the colony, and the impact of the indian massacre of --all contributed in varying degrees of importance to the dissolution. the company rejected efforts of the crown to substitute a new charter drawn up in providing for the king to resume control of the colony by establishing a royal council in england and a governor and council in virginia. consequently the privy council obtained a writ of _quo warranto_ which terminated with a decision by the court of king's bench in may, , annulling the charter of the company. with the advent of royal control there was a significant continuity in practice in the colony, and the political framework was little changed. the governor and council were then appointed by the king, but the house of burgesses continued without major revision. in order to assure continued respect for public authority, a royal commission was dispatched to governor wyatt and an eleven-man council empowering them to act "as fully and ampley as anie governor and councell resident there at anie tyme within the space of five yeares now last past." a similar commission was issued to sir george yeardley in , and for the next sixteen years royal instructions to the governors reflected a striking resemblance. a similar continuity was evident in economic affairs as revealed in land policy. the london company as a corporate body in charge of the colony terminated in after eighteen years, and the following year after the death of king james i the colony of virginia by proclamation was made a part of the royal demesne. the landholder in virginia became then in effect a freehold tenant of the king. the rights and property of the company were taken over by the crown, but recognition was made of the private property right of the planter and of individual claims of those who had invested in the company. even land rights to planters and adventurers that had not been taken up were recognized, but few proceeded to effect settlement or to exercise the right of taking up acres per share of stock. the land rights of the private joint-stock associations also continued to be recognized, but there was less enthusiasm on the part of individual adventurers to promote the projects started some years earlier. this development was indicative of the major change in the economic life of the colony that resulted in the decline, if not disappearance, of absentee ownership. as previously noted, berkeley hundred had suffered the loss of many of its settlers in the massacre of ; and upon expiration of term of service of the few remaining servants, only the land and a few cattle were left in the settlement. by the adventurers had sold their claims to london merchants. in the case of martin's hundred located about seven miles from jamestown, the massacre doomed the active settlement and only the title to the land continued. eventually the title to this hundred was withdrawn to permit natural expansion of the colony, and the associates or adventurers were awarded claims to land allotments commensurate with the number of shares held in the joint stock. the tracts known as company land were maintained for a while under royal control. the role of the public estate, however, never assumed great significance, yet there is evidence of the continued practice during the seventeenth century of endowing an office such as governor or secretary with the proceeds of a land grant. theoretically tenants and contract laborers who were still alive at the time of the dissolution of the company were to continue their labor either on the public land or on private associations. in practice, however, it is likely that lax enforcement of the contracts resulted in a substantial diminution of the obligations of many workers. the scarcity of records for this period makes it impossible to trace all of this group, but there is enough evidence to indicate that some continued to serve out their term of labor. the general court in expressed concern about the approaching expiration of leases and indentures of persons for whom there were no provisions for lands; and action was taken to permit them to lease land for a period of ten to twenty-one years in return for which they were to render a stipulated amount of tobacco or corn for each acre, usually one pound of tobacco per acre. this lenient provision notwithstanding, only about sixty persons availed themselves of the opportunity, the remainder presumably either squatting on frontier land, working as laborers, or eventually obtaining title to land by purchase from an original patentee. with the dissolution of the company the issuing of land patents continued in the hands of the governor and council. the king and privy council assumed power over land distribution but apparently left the issuing of patents as it had been before. up until january, , governor wyatt issued patents in the name of the company. at that time news reached virginia that the writ of _quo warranto_ of june, , had dissolved the company and that king james i upon assumption of control of the colony had issued on august , , the first commission of a royal governor to wyatt. but the commission made no reference to land grants, and governor wyatt issued none after january, . charles i succeeded to the throne following the death of james i on march , . his proclamation stating policy relative to virginia professed protection of the interests of private planters and adventurers but made no direct reference to land grants. governor yeardley replaced wyatt by a commission of march , / and arrived in virginia in may, . there is no record extant to show that yeardley received direct instructions to start issuing grants; but it is certain that he did begin in february, / , interpreting his instructions and commission as authorizing the action. land patents during this period were to be issued on four main conditions: ( ) as a dividend in return for investment in the founding of the colony; ( ) as a reward for special service to the colony; ( ) as a stimulus to fortify the frontier by using land to induce settlement; and ( ) as a method of encouraging immigration by the headright. the first of these was simply an assurance by the king that the former stockholders in the company still had the right to take up land at the rate of acres for each share of stock owned. as late as this privilege was still being confirmed in instructions to the governor; but the stockholders appeared to be little interested at this time in coming to virginia, for very few took up their claim and apparently the shares bearing the holder's name could not be transferred after the dissolution. the plan for the distribution of the first dividend in also provided for a second allotment. as late as patents still included authorization for a second dividend when the first had been cultivated. but no second allotment was ever made. there are, however, examples to indicate that claims for the first dividend were upheld after the company was dissolved. in thomas graies obtained a patent as a dividend for his subscription of twenty-five pounds sterling; in captain john hobson was issued a patent covering a bill of adventure that went back to ; and on another occasion the land dividend due a deceased father was awarded to his son. the next condition of awarding patents for meritorious service to the colony was of long standing. used to award ministers, political officials, physicians, sea captains, and various other individuals under the company, the practice continued under royal control after . governor wyatt in was instructed to issue land patents for meritorious service according to provisions previously adopted for such cases. and a few years later charles ii awarded lands in virginia to servants or others who aided him, although it is not certain whether these individuals were ever able to take up the claim bestowed upon them. the third condition for a patent was practically a corollary to the second, for it involved rendering service to the colony by settling and fortifying the frontier. one example during this period may be found in securing the peninsula. following the massacre of governor wyatt and his council wrote to the earl of southampton about a plan for "winning the forest" by running a pale between martin's hundred on the james river and cheskiack on the york. again in the suggestion was made to the royal commissioners who were sent over by the king to determine the most suitable places for fortification. to effect the construction of this palisade, the general assembly in offered land as an inducement to settle between queen's creek and archer's hope creek, promising fifty acres and a period of tax exemption to freemen who would occupy the area of middle plantation, later williamsburg. in february, , the order was issued for a fortieth part of the men in the "compasse of the forest" between the two previously mentioned creeks and chesapeake bay to meet at dr. john pott's plantation at the head of archer's hope creek for the purpose of erecting houses to secure the neck of land known as the peninsula. with this encouragement by the assembly, a palisade six miles in length was completed, running from queen's creek to archer's hope creek and passing through middle plantation. houses were constructed at convenient distances, and a sufficient number of men were assigned to patrol the line of defense during times of imminent danger. by setting off a little less than , acres of land, this palisade provided defense for the new plantations between the york and james rivers and served as a restraining barrier for the cattle of the colony. granting of land was again used on a large scale for the establishment of forts after the indian massacre of . by order of the assembly in blockhouses or forts were established at strategic points: fort charles at the falls of the james river, fort royal at pamunkey, fort james on the ridge of chickahominy on the north side of the james, and in the next year fort henry at the falls of the appomattox river. the maintenance of these forts involved considerable expense, more than the officials of the colony wished to drain from the public treasury. therefore, they decided to grant the forts with adjoining lands to individuals who would accept the responsibility of their upkeep as well as the maintenance of an adequate force for defense. fort henry, located at present-day petersburg, was granted to captain abraham wood with acres of land plus all houses, edifices, boats, and ammunition belonging to the fort. wood was required to maintain and keep ten persons continuously at the fort for three years. during this time he was exempted from all public taxes for himself and the ten persons. upon similar terms lieutenant thomas rolfe, son of pocahontas and john rolfe, received fort james and acres of land; captain roger marshall, fort royal and acres. since there was no arable land adjoining fort charles at present-day richmond, other inducements were made for its maintenance. these forts served as the first line of defense against possible attacks by the natives. being the center of the varied activities of the frontier, they also were the starting point for expeditions against the indians and became the center of trade for the outlying regions. the fourth condition for granting of land--the headright--was by far the most important and became the principal basis for title to land in the seventeenth century. its origin goes back to "the greate charter" of in which the following provision was included: that for all persons ... which during the next seven years after midsummer day shall go into virginia with intent there to inhabite if they continue there three years or dye after they are shiped there shall be a grant made of fifty acres for every person upon a first division and as many more upon a second division (the first being peopled) which grants to be made respectively to such persons and their heirs at whose charges the said persons going to inhabite in virginia shall be transported with reservation of twelve pence yearly rent for every fifty acres to be answered to the said treasurer and company and their successors for ever after the first seven years of every such grant. under these provisions of "the greate charter," it is evident that not only was the headright grant of fifty acres per person open to shareholders who brought settlers to the colony, but also to anyone who had migrated to the colony at his own expense or who had financed the expedition of other persons. individuals paying their own transportation were entitled to fifty acres for themselves and for every member of the family, providing they fulfilled the residence requirement of three years. governors under the company issued patents based on the headright until dissolution by the crown in . beyond that time the status of the headright was uncertain. the "charter" of had specified a term for this right for seven years ending on midsummer day of . after this term expired, royal governors continued to honor headright claims based on immigration, although no direct authorization for such action had come from the crown. therefore, the issuance of these claims after was based primarily on custom, brief as it was, until more direct instructions were issued to governor john harvey in following the proprietary grant of maryland in . the maryland grant enhanced the concern of the virginia inhabitants about their title to land, and correspondence conducted by governor harvey finally brought forth a statement from the privy council. apprehension over maryland led to assurance of the headright for virginia as the privy council issued the following dispatch of july , , to the governor: we have thought fit to certify you that his majesty of his royal favor, and for the better encouragement of the planters there doth let you knowe that it is not intended that the interestes which men had settled when you were a corporation should be impeached; that for the present they may enjoy their estates and trades with the same freedom and privileges as they did before the recalling of their patents: to which purpose also in pursuance of his majesty's gracious intention, wee doe hereby authorize you to dispose of such proportions of lands to all those planters beeing freemen as you had power to doe before the yeare . with this explicit royal endorsement of land patent principles followed under the company and confirmation of the headright, governor harvey modified the wording in the patents and adopted the following form illustrated in a grant of , acres to captain hugh bullocke: _to all to whome these prsents. shall come_, i sr. john harvey kt. governr. and capt. generll. of virginia send greeting in our lord god everlasting. _whereas_ by letters pattents bearing date the twoe and twentieth of july one thousand six hundred thirtie fower from the rt. honble. the lords of his majties. most honoble. privie councell their lordshipps did authorize the governr. and councell of virginia to dispose of such pportions of land to all planters being freemen as they had power to doe before the yeare , whene according to divers orders & constitutions in that case provided and appointed all devidents of lands any waies due or belonging to any adventurers or planters of what condicon soever were to bee laid out and assigned unto them according to the severall condicons in the same menconed. _now know yee_ therefore that i the said sr. john harvey doe, with the consent of the councell of state give and graunt unto capt. hugh bullocke and to his heires and assignes for ever by these prsents twoe thousand five hundred and fiftie acres of land, scituate, lying & being from the runn that falleth downe by the eastern side of a peece of land knowne by the name of the woodyard and soe from that runn along the side of the pocoson (or great otter pond soe called) northwest and about the head of the said otter pond back southeast leaveing the otter pond in the middle. _to have and to hold_ the said twoe thousand five hundred and fiftie acres of land with his due share of all mines and minneralls therein conteyned and with all rights and priviledges of hunting, hawking, fishing and fowling, wth in the prcincts of the same to the sole and pper use benifitt and behoofe of him the said capt. bullocke his heires and assignes for ever. in as large and ample manner to all intents and purposes as is expressed in the said orders and constitutions, or by consequence may bee justly collected out of the same or out of his majties. letters pattents whereon they are grounded. _yielding and paying_ for every fiftie acres of land herein by these presents given and graunted yearely at the feast of st. michaell the archangell [september ], the fee rent of one shilling to his majties. use. _provided always_ that [if] the said capt. hugh bullock, his heires or assignes shall not plant or seate or cause to bee planted on the said twoe thousand five hundred & fiftie acres of land wth in the time and terms of three yeares now next ensuing the date hereof, that then it shall and may bee lawfull for any adventurer or planter to make choice and seate upon the same. _given_ at james citty under my hand and sealed with the seale of the colony the twelfth day of march one thousand six hundred thirtie fower [o.s.] & in the tenth year of our soveraigne lord king charles &c. use of the headright had been adopted by the company as an expedient to increase population of the colony and to encourage immigration without further expenditure from the company treasury. the practice continued with the fifty acres of land granted to the persons who financed the transportation of the immigrant, but the grant itself was not valuable enough to compensate for the expense involved. therefore, with increasing frequency the system of indentured servitude was used whereby the immigrant agreed to an indenture or contract to work a certain number of years as additional payment for his transportation. this system, in general, proved advantageous to both the master and the servant, to the colony by providing additional immigrants, and to england by serving as a vent for surplus population. indentured servants were not slaves but were servants during the specified period of the contract. while the laws of the time did make a distinction in the severity of the penal code as applied to servants and to freemen, still indentured servitude did not have the stigma of bondage or slavery; and many servants upon completion of their term of service rose to positions of social and political prominence in the history of the colony. in the lords of trade and plantations expressed concern over the use of the word "servitude" because of the implications of slavery, and they preferred "to use the word service, since those servants are only apprentices for years." at the expiration of the term of service, the servants usually received equipment and supplies necessary to start them as freemen. they received grain enough for one year, clothes, and in some cases a gun and a supply of tools. as to receipt of land, the policy varied from one colony to another, and at times there was uncertainty within one colony about obligations to freedmen. in virginia the indentured servant did not usually receive land at the end of service unless he had insisted, as john hammond in _leah and rachel_ had advised, that a specific provision be included in the contract to include the award of fifty acres as "freedom's dues." there are some cases in which the provision for land was included as illustrated in one of the earliest indentures known to exist for virginia. this indenture of september , , was made between robert coopy of north nibley in gloucestershire with the associates of berkeley hundred. coopy agreed to work three years in virginia and submit to the government of the hundred in return for which the owners were to transport him to virginia and "there to maintayne him with convenient diet and apparell meet for such a servant, and in the end of the said terme to make him a free man of the said cuntry theirby to enjoy all the liberties, freedomes, and priviledges of a freeman there, and to grant to the said robert thirty acres of land within their territory or hundred of barkley...." the confusion over the question whether the indentured servant was entitled to fifty acres of land upon expiration of his service extended to the mother country. there was a widespread belief in england that such was the case, and there were indefinite statements in commissions and instructions to the governors that left the matter in doubt. in practice in virginia, however, it is certain that the fifty acres under the headright claim went to the person transporting indentured servants, not to the servants themselves. only where the contract specifically stated that the servant was to receive fifty acres was he assured of this grant. under the company there had been definite provisions that the fifty acres went to the persons transporting servants, not to the servants themselves. after its dissolution, governors were instructed to follow the rules of the "late company," and this continued until there was a variation in sir francis wyatt's commission of authorizing the governor and the council to issue grants to adventurers and planters "according to the orders of the late company ... and likewise acres of land to every person transported thither ... until otherwise determined by his majesty." did "to every person" mean that the servant was entitled to land? such was the case across the potomac in maryland where the servant could claim fifty acres from his employer or master until ; after and until the proprietor provided land for the servant. if such were intended, it was not followed and the intentions were far from clear in the later commission to sir william berkeley in . in addition to assigning land for "adventurers of money" and "transportation of people," the commission authorized the governor and council to grant "fifty acres for every person transported thither since midsummer , and ... continue the same course to all persons transported thither until it shall otherwise be determined by his majesty." the loose use of the terminology "to" and "for" recurred in subsequent years and again reflected the lack of precision in this matter as well as the seeming misapprehension in england that the servant was entitled to a fifty-acre grant. under the articles of the treaty of between virginia and the commissioners of the commonwealth, the reversion to the term "for every person" was made and the policy of no land to servants was implicit in the sixth article of the agreement: "that the priviledge of haveing fiftie acres of land for every person transported in the collony shall continue as formerly granted." even though servants were not granted land by the colony at the expiration of their service, a substantial number soon became landowners. the exact proportion of servants that became landholders after cannot be determined in the absence of a complete census. however, an examination of the land patents and the list of headrights makes possible some estimate of the percentage of landholders that had once been indentured servants. the conclusions cannot be final and are subject to limitations. identification presents a problem because of the frequency of the same name as smith or davis and because of the omission of middle names. the problem is further complicated by the fact that headrights were often transferred by sale. a person entitled to a headright claim on the frontier may not have wished to settle there; rather he may have preferred to sell his headright claim and purchase land in an established county. as a result of the sale of his headright claim, his name may have appeared in the headright list as the basis for the claim for someone else even though he had not been an indentured servant. therefore, all persons so listed under the headright claim cannot be considered indentured servants. fully aware of the limitations just suggested and equally conscious that estimates in the absence of more complete records cannot be final, professor thomas j. wertenbaker in his _planters of colonial virginia_ summarized his analysis of patents and concluded that both before and in the following two or three decades, thirty to forty per cent of the landholders of virginia came to the colony as indentured servants. professor wertenbaker also indicated general agreement with conclusions drawn by william g. stanard about the proportion of immigrants that were indentured servants. from an analysis of the patent rolls from to july , , printed in the april, , issue of the _virginia magazine of history and biography_, stanard estimated that seventy-five per cent of immigrants from to were imported under term of the indenture. out of , names on the rolls, entered as freemen at their own cost and an additional persons were believed for the most part to be of the same status although there was some uncertainty about this group. transportation expenses were paid by others for , . from these numbers, the conclusion was reached that persons on the patent rolls were freemen, including women and children; the remaining , were servants and slaves, the latter in very small number at this time. thus the analysis roughly confirms the conclusion that three-fourths of the immigrants during this period were indentured servants. use of the headright system for distribution of land had a close correlation with expanding population, for it was hoped that the increase of population would keep pace with the acquisition of private title in the soil. as the seventeenth century progressed, there were many abuses and evasions of the system; and by the end of the period its significance declined in favor of acquisition of title by purchase, or the "treasury right." to understand the various deviations from the system, it will be helpful to review the steps by which title to land by headright was obtained. the first step involved the proving of the headright by the claimant appearing before either a county court or the governor and council and stating under oath that he had imported a certain number of persons whose names were listed. the clerk of the court issued a certificate which was validated in the secretary's office. authorization for the headright was then passed on to a commissioned surveyor who ran off fifty acres for each person imported and located the grant in the area selected by the claimant as long as the land had not already been patented and had not been barred for white settlement in order to maintain peace with the indians. upon completion of the survey and of marking the boundaries, a copy of the record along with the headright certificate was presented to the secretary's office where a patent was prepared and a notation made of those imported. the final step was the signing of the patent by the governor in the presence of, and with the approval of, the council. one deviation from the spirit of the law of the headright involved claims based upon the person being imported into the colony more than once. for example, john chew in received acres, using his own transportation in and as the basis for the claim to acres in the grant. carrying this practice to a greater extreme, sarah law received a grant for acres of land based upon the fact that she had imported john good, probably a sailor, six times. on a larger scale, ship masters submitted lists for headright claims which in actuality contained the roster of both the sailors of the ship and the passengers. in neither case should the right have been acknowledged, for the sailors were under agreement to continue service at sea and the passengers had paid their own transportation to the colony. but the lax administration of the system usually permitted approval of such applications, and the ship master therefore found himself with headright certificates which he could sell to others for whatever price he could wangle. this practice was sometimes repeated by the same unscrupulous ship master who was aided in the irregular procedure by the failure of the clerks of the secretary's office to make careful checks of lists submitted, and also by the fact that he could present his lists to a different county court when importing the same sailors for the third or fourth time. like the ship master, the sailor engaged in falsifying the record by swearing that he had imported himself and sometimes others at his own expense. patents were obtained on the basis of the headright. philip a. bruce concluded that the land obtained in virginia by mariners was "very extensive." to substantiate this general statement, he referred to powers of attorney found in the county court records, authorizing an agent in virginia to handle the estates of the mariner. in the records of rappahannock county for is an example of the practice, in which thomas sheppard of plymouth, england, designated william moseley to handle his interest in headrights which he claimed for importing people to virginia. it was likely in this case that duplicate claims were issued, either to the individual if he paid his own transportation or to some master if the immigrant became an indentured servant. in some instances, as many as three or four claims were made for one importation: one for the ship master, one for the merchant who acted as middle-man in purchasing the service of the immigrant, one for the planter who eventually purchased the indentured servant, and less often one for a second planter who may have joined with the first in obtaining the services of the imported person. as abuse of the system increased, headright lists sometimes included fictitious names or in some cases names copied from old record books. the final stage in irregular procedure was reached when the clerks in the office of the secretary of the colony sold the headright claim to persons who would simply pay from one to five shillings. the exact date at which this practice began has not been determined, but it was prevalent sometime before . francis nicholson reported to the board of trade that while serving as governor of virginia from to , he had "heard" that the sale of rights by the clerks in the secretary's office was "common practice." another report to the board in described the clerks as being "a constant mint of those rights." the combined variations in the operation of the headright system resulted in the distortion, if not destruction, of its original concepts. the system continued to bring immigrants into the colony which had been a very important purpose when inaugurated. but the abuses threw out of balance the relation between patented land and the number of people in the colony; and furthermore through perversion of the system, speculation in land was not prevented and there resulted large areas of wholly uncultivated and uninhabited lands to which title had been granted. the headright was also originally intended to apply to inhabitants of the british isles, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the names of persons imported from africa appeared occasionally as the basis for headright, and by the last decade of the century they were frequently found. the distortion of the headright system was done with considerable public approval and in some ways reflected the evolution of economic development that seemed to demand a more convenient and less expensive method for obtaining title to large areas of unoccupied land. as the population of the colony increased and as the labor supply became more plentiful, there was a rather widespread demand to be able to obtain additional land, particularly adjacent undeveloped tracts, without having to import an additional person for every fifty acres. partly through this demand, impetus was given to the custom, which was not at first sanctioned by law, to permit the granting of patents by simply paying a fee in the secretary's office. while the headright system was designed to maintain some proportion between the population of the colony and the amount of land patented, it was also designed to stimulate the migration of immigrants to the colony. therefore, under the system it was possible for individuals who would engage in transporting or financing the transportation of immigrants to obtain large areas of land. this trend was started under the company; and in the four years prior to , forty-four patents of , acres each were awarded to persons who were to transport at least immigrants to the colony. in , for example, , acres were granted to arthur swain and nathaniel basse and a similar grant to rowland truelove and "divers other patentees" each grant to be based on the transportation of persons; , acres were to go to sir george yeardley for engaging to transport persons. for the years following the dissolution of the company, valuable information of the nature and size of land grants can be found in the "virginia land patents" which fortunately have survived the usual hazards of fire and carelessness. the two following tables (tables i and ii) have been compiled from the analysis of the land patents by philip a. bruce and summarized in his _economic history of virginia_ (volume i, pages - ). i. table showing size of land grants from to based on the record of virginia land patents year or years average grant for largest grant for the period the period - - acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres acres acres acres , acres acres , acres acres acres acres , acres acres , acres acres acres acres , acres acres , acres acres , acres ii. table showing size of land grants from to based on the record of virginia land patents period of years average grant for number of largest grants the period for the period - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) - acres , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , - , acres ( ) , acres ( ) [note: in compiling this table, two changes have been made to correct what seems clearly to be errors in bruce's description. forty-one grants were listed for , - , acres from - rather than forty-one grants of , - , acres as noted by bruce. the date listed in bruce has been changed to to give the proper time period of - .] for the period from to included in table i, there were occasional grants of , acres, but the average size of the patents for the period was not over acres. it was possible, of course, for one individual to build up a large landed estate by putting together several smaller grants; and this was done by a limited number of persons during the seventeenth century in virginia as will be discussed later. there was also the possibility that grants of considerable size in the original patent might be broken up and distributed to others in smaller amounts. in any case, the second half of the century as reflected in the land patents saw a moderate increase in the size and number of large grants as the population increased, and the average size for the land patent of this period was acres, an increase of acres over the period prior to . while the second half of the century witnessed this increase, much of it came during the third quarter of the period. near the end of the century there was a definite trend to break up some of the larger patents into smaller landholdings by sales to servants completing their indenture, by distribution of land to children, or by sale because of an inadequate labor supply either of slaves, indentured servants, tenant farmers, or wage earners. the existence of the small farm and the small farmer as a major part of the socio-economic system of virginia at the end of the seventeenth century has been well established. professor wertenbaker suggested that "a full per cent of the freeholders" at the time the rent roll was compiled in / included the "sturdy, independent class of small farmers." through examination of land patents, land transfers, tax rolls, and a sampling of other county records, he found substantial evidence to corroborate the suggested trend of the breakup of a number of large patents and their distribution to small freeholders. illustrative of this development was the land known as button's ridge in essex county. originally including , acres, the tract was patented to thomas button in . the estate then passed first to the brother of button and later was sold to john baker. baker divided the large tract and sold small amounts to the following people: acres to captain william moseley, to john garnet, to robert foster, to william smither, to william howlett, to anthony samuell, and to william williams. professor susie m. ames in _studies of the virginia eastern shore in the seventeenth century_ found evidence of the same trend by which original land grants increased in size by the middle of the century and reached its peak in the third quarter of the century. near the end of the period many of the larger tracts were being divided by wills distributing them among children or by sales in smaller units. much of the land obtained by the first two generations on the eastern shore was broken up into small holdings by the third. as stated by professor ames, "it is the subtraction and division of acres, with only occasionally any marked addition, that seems to be the chief development in land tenure during the last quarter of the seventeenth century." even with the trend of dividing some of the large estates on the eastern shore, a small per cent of the population held a considerable part of the land. in / the average size of landholding in northampton county was acres, in accomack acres. when analyzed by use of the list of tithables, northampton county had twenty-one persons, only three per cent of the tithables, holding thirty-nine per cent of the land; accomack county had a total of forty-six persons, only four per cent of the tithables, holding forty-three per cent of the land. considering all of virginia of the seventeenth century, one cannot say that it was primarily a land of large plantations, of cavaliers, and of noble manors which have been romanticized by some writers. yet there was a significant number of prominent planters who took an active part in the social and political life of the colony and exerted an influence disproportionate to their ratio of the population. professor wertenbaker listed the following men among the prominent planters of the first half of seventeenth-century virginia--george menefie, richard bennett, and richard kinsman; for the second half of the century, a more extensive list--nathaniel bacon, sr., thomas ballard, robert beverley, giles brent, joseph bridger, william byrd i, john carter, john custis i, dudley digges, william fitzhugh, lewis burwell, philip ludwell i, william moseley, daniel parke, ralph wormeley, benjamin harrison, edward hill, edmund jennings, and matthew page. members of this group accumulated large landholdings, mostly by original patent through the headright system or by private purchase from holders of original patents. for example, william byrd i had obtained , acres of land at the time of his death; and william fitzhugh acquired during his lifetime , acres of land and left at the time of his death in a little over , acres in family "seats" to five sons. the land system and its administration that permitted the accumulation of a few of these substantial plantations came under detailed discussion by crown officials near the end of the seventeenth century. before examining this analysis of virginia land policy, it will be helpful to survey in the following chapter the major laws and the officials responsible for their administration. chapter four royal administration of land policy attempts at reform the issuing of land patents and the administration of laws concerning land involved a variety of officials during the seventeenth century. under the company the authority to convey title to land rested after with the treasurer, the council in london, and the association of adventurers in england. the governor and council in the colony were authorized as ministerial agents of the company to make grants, but final approval was to be made at sessions of the quarter court of the company in england. this last step, as previously noted, was seldom completed. after dissolution of the company, the process of issuing patents was simplified. most grants were made under the headright claim and followed the steps outlined in chapter three, involving the county court, the secretary of the colony, the governor and council, and the commissioned surveyors. the office of surveyor existed under the company and william claiborne, who came to the colony in , was the first to fill the position effectively. as surveyor, claiborne received the annual wage of thirty pounds sterling which was to be paid either in tobacco or some other comparable commodity with a good price on the english market. surveyor claiborne also had the use of a house constructed by the company as well as receiving the necessary equipment and books needed for his work. following the dissolution of the company in , the office of surveyor-general was established with a royal appointee who was charged with the responsibility of maintaining the survey records and issuing commissions to the surveyors of the colony. some difficulty was encountered in securing qualified and reliable men. this led during the interregnum to a law in march, / , calling for the dismissal of unqualified surveyors and placing the power of appointment in the hands of the county court. after the restoration of charles ii to the throne, the appointment of surveyors returned to the system of commissions from the surveyor-general. the amount for surveyors' fees was designated by the legislature at various times. ten pounds of tobacco for every acres was specified in ; in and again in the fee limit was raised to twenty pounds of tobacco for measuring acres of land with an additional allowance of twelve pounds of tobacco for each day that the task required the surveyor to be away from his home. if his transportation could be only by water, the person employing him was required to assume the expense of travel both to and from the location of the survey. in / the allowance for each day away from home was increased to thirty pounds of tobacco; and by the same law the surveyor was authorized the same limit of twenty pounds of tobacco for running off acres if the total was greater than , otherwise he was to receive a minimum of pounds of tobacco. efforts to obtain capable, honest, and conscientious appointees continued to be a problem. the need for better surveyors and the decline of the tobacco prices led the assembly to double the previous fees. in forty pounds of tobacco was stipulated for surveying acres if the total was for , acres. if less than , , the allowance was pounds of tobacco. commissioned surveyors were not at liberty to refuse reasonable requests for surveys to be made, except in cases involving sickness or some other impediment recognized as legal. the law of provided that anyone violating this requirement was subject to a fine of , pounds of tobacco; for charging excessive fees, the fine was pounds of tobacco that could be recovered in the virginia courts. gabriel hawley, robert evelyn, thomas loving, edmund scarborough, and alexander culpeper served as surveyor-general with the last named having philip ludwell as his deputy. upon the chartering of the college of william and mary surveyors were appointed by the institution, and the appointees were required to contribute to the trustees of the college one-sixth of the fees of the office. the trustees were permitted to delegate the appointments. consequently in they designated miles cary as surveyor-general, who was instructed to make the selection of surveyors with the aid of a committee named by the trustees. in addition to the fees of the surveyor, there were other charges that were made from time to time in obtaining a patent in virginia. under the company without a legal guide for the fees to be charged, the secretary of the colony apparently demanded at times as much as twenty pounds of tobacco or three pounds sterling when issuing a title for the individual dividends of fifty or acres. leaders of the company considered this fee unreasonable and took steps to prevent its collection. following the dissolution of the company, the assembly set the fees of the secretary regarding land patents along with other authorized charges. in the secretary collected thirty pounds of tobacco for issuing a patent plus two pounds for each sheet required to record the document. in the fee for patents by the secretary was designated as fifteen shillings which could be collected either in tobacco or corn according to current price. ten years later in the fee for a patent was again listed in terms of tobacco at fifty pounds with six pounds allowed for each recorded sheet. in lieu of four pounds of tobacco, the secretary was authorized to receive money at the rate of twelve pence for every four pounds of tobacco. at the march session of the legislature in / , the secretary's fees were further raised to eighty pounds of tobacco for issuing and recording a patent; thirty pounds was set as the fee for supplying a copy of the patent later; and fifteen pounds of tobacco was authorized for providing a certificate for land. these same fees of / were repeated by law in / . the stamp of the seal of the colony was required during much of the seventeenth century as the final step of approval for a patent, and during most of the time no fee was charged for this. however, under the governorship of lord howard which began in april, , a charge of pounds of tobacco was ordered for use of the seal for patents as well as all public documents such as commissions and proclamations. the proceeds from this fee were used by the governor and were estimated by william fitzhugh to equal , pounds of tobacco each year. however, such strong opposition was raised to the charge that it was dropped after . in addition to controversies over fees, there were many problems that arose in seventeenth-century virginia over surveys and the identification of boundaries. surveyors usually took the edge of a stream, either a river or creek, as the base line of the survey and then ran the boundaries for a specified distance along a line at right angle to the base. terminal points were laid out and witnessed by neighboring owners with some distinguishing mark as a large stone or a tree with three or four chops. in a question was called to the attention of the assembly as to the extent of the owner's rights along the water's edge. the case arose over the complaint of robert liny that part of his patent along the river had been cleared for fishing but the exercise of his fishing rights had been hampered by trespassing individuals who dragged their seines upon the river's edge, claiming that "the water was the kings majesties ... and therefore equally free to all his majesties subjects to fish in and hale their sceanes on shore...." in answer to this complaint, the assembly declared that the rights of the patent holder extended into the stream as far as the low water mark, and any person fishing or seining without permission within these bounds was guilty of trespass. more frequently problems arose as a result of defective surveys either in the first line along the edge of the stream or in a second and third line of patents that were laid out when all land along the streams had been occupied. some of the surveys were inaccurate because of the lack of graduation on the compass; others were distorted by careless surveyors selecting convenient terminal points such as a tree, a road, or another stream and ignoring the accurate measurement of the line. as early as / , the assembly ordered that individual land dividends be surveyed and the bounds recorded; and in case serious disputes arose over conflicting boundaries, appeal could be made to the governor and council. in an effort to prevent the holder of patents from having to pay for more than one survey of the same grant, the assembly in / stated that surveys made by commissioned surveyors were considered valid and bestowed full right of ownership without the necessity and expense of new surveys. such a provision did not, however, resolve the problem that arose over errors made by commissioned surveyors, errors that may have led a person in good faith to construct buildings on a plot that was later determined to be a part of the patent of his neighbor. several cases having arisen over this situation, the assembly in / and again in / and / provided that when one person had unknowingly erected constructions on another person's land, the original owner as shown by survey was to have the right to purchase the improvements at a price fixed by a twelve-man jury. if the amount proved too great for the original owner, then the person seating the land by mistake was to have the option of purchasing the land at a price set by the jury for its value before seating occurred. beginning with the / statement of the law, no consideration was to be given if construction had been made after legal warning had been given to desist. other legislation was designed to minimize the number of cases of this type that would arise. one provision made in required the person claiming to be the original owner of the land to file suit against his encroaching neighbor within five years for removal; otherwise possession of the land for five years without contest would prevent recovery by the original claimant. the law exempted orphans from the above provision and permitted them a five-year period after coming of age. a later enactment in / repeated the provision on orphans and added to the exemption married women and persons of unsound mind. a second provision designed to prevent quarrels among neighbors required a person holding patent to land adjacent to a proposed grant to show the boundaries of his property within twelve months; otherwise the latest grant as surveyed would be valid and would take precedence over the old patent. but these various laws did not prevent "contentious suites" from arising because of defective surveys when the lines were first run or because the restriction against resurveys did not resolve the boundary disputes. conflicts continued if the surveyor had been negligent in marking clearly the boundaries, or if lines had become indistinct by the chops in trees filling out, by piles of stones being scattered, or by trees being removed. to prevent "the inconvenience of clandestine surveigh," the assembly in / enacted the law of processioning. by this provision the members of each community were to "goe in procession" once every four years to examine and renew, if necessary, the boundary lines. boundaries acknowledged by the procession as correct were conclusive and prohibited later claims to change them. if controversy arose over the line, the two surveyors accompanying the party were to run the line anew, disputes were to be equitably settled, and the line so laid out to be final. for administration of processioning, the county court was to order the vestry to divide each parish into as many precincts as necessary, and the time set in / for processioning was between easter and whitsunday (seventh sunday or fiftieth day after easter). the time was changed in to the months from september to march as a more convenient period. to assure enforcement of the law, provisions for penalties were included-- , pounds of tobacco for any vestry not ordering the processioning and pounds of tobacco for individuals who failed to participate without good reason. still other problems concerning land patents related to two important conditions stipulated for perfection of the title to land--the first, "seating and planting," and the second, the collection of a quitrent. with the exception of some of the early grants, the patents of seventeenth-century virginia required "seating and planting" of the tract within three years. as shown in the form used by governor william berkeley during the 's, if the patentee "his heirs or assignes doe not seate or plant or cause to be planted or seated on the sayd land within three years next ensueing, then it shall be lawful for any adventurer or planter to make choyse or seate thereupon." the time limit was extended as the exigency demanded. because of losses from the indian massacre of , of the shortage of corn, and of the need for additional servants, the assembly ruled that persons affected by the massacre were permitted three additional years to comply with the requirement for "seating and planting." following the indian disturbances of bacon's rebellion, the time period for plantations that were attacked was extended to seven years from the date the assembly passed the act in / . generally speaking, however, the requirement for "seating and planting" was not carried out effectively, and there was little forfeiture because of noncompliance. in / the assembly recognized the right for patents to be issued on order of the governor and council for land "deserted for want of planting within the time of three yeeres." but even if such forfeiture did occur, the original patent holder was authorized to take up additional land elsewhere in the colony without complying with the headright requirement. and it was not until that the assembly gave a definition for "seating and planting" in the declaration that "building an house and keeping a stock one whole yeare upon the land shall be accounted seating; and that cleering, tending and planting an acre of ground shall be accounted planting." either one or the other fulfilled the condition for the patent, and throughout the seventeenth century there was no relation between the size of the tract and the amount of improvement required. the minimum performance satisfied the law. therefore, either the building of a small cabin, putting a few cattle or a few hogs on the tract for a year, or planting as little as an acre of ground--any one of the three protected the grant. for most of the patents issued, this requirement presented little problem because the owner was interested in settling and improving his holdings. violation of the provision was most likely to come in the case of land speculators who had taken up large tracts or in the case of landholders who were interested in acquiring adjacent tracts for the purpose of grazing or for forest supply. in the case of the latter, there was some question whether the requirement applied to adjacent tracts; but the assembly in declared that tracts added to an original patent must be seated and planted as the law provided for other grants. to a considerable extent there was the same attitude toward the requirement for "seating and planting" as has been noted previously for obtaining patent by headright. light regard for the spirit of the law and at times the letter of the law came in part as a result of the unlimited expanse of land that tempted the established settler as well as the newcomer. evasion of the law cast no stigma upon the offender, and some who were aware of their neighbor's dereliction winked at the action, thinking perhaps that they too might sometime engage in the same practice. furthermore, the necessity of the provision for "seating and planting" which was well founded for the early years of the colony decreased in significance as the population and occupied areas of virginia increased. the second condition for perfection of title to land--payment of a quitrent--likewise had a checkered career in the seventeenth century. under the company there is some question whether quitrents were due. it is clear that "the greate charter" of in order to encourage immigration exempted for seven years settlers who were taking up land by headright. for planters settled before at the expense of the company, it seems that they would have been free of paying the quitrent only for a seven-year period which would have required compliance before dissolution of the company. settlers who arrived in virginia after dale's departure in and before would most probably have been subject to the quitrent under the company since they were exempt for only seven years. whatever the case, there were rents to be collected before as shown by the duties of george sandys, younger brother of sir edwin sandys and first appointee to the office of treasurer in virginia. sandys was instructed to collect some £ , owed the company either as rent or as dues. when virginia became a royal colony in , the quitrents were then payable at the rate of one shilling for every fifty acres patented. for the estimate was made by the assembly that the quitrents would bring in as much as , pounds sterling, if paid. but little effort was being made to collect the rent and it was not until that jerome hawley was appointed treasurer. his arrival in the colony the following year initiated plans for collection. proceeds from this source of revenue were to be used for the treasurer's salary; any surplus amount was to be used at the discretion of the assembly. in order to determine who owed the rent, instructions were issued to landholders in virginia to show their land titles to the treasurer in order that he could compute the rents that were due. but little action was taken and it seems certain that not enough was collected to pay the salary of the treasurer. in additional provisions were stipulated by the assembly to tighten the quitrent collection by requiring landholders upon summon by warrant to reveal their title and the size of their estates to commissioners of the county courts. following the precedent of "the greate charter" of , no rents were to be paid until the expiration of seven years. this provision continued in effect under charles i and during the interregnum, but the time limit was retracted in the instructions to governor william berkeley under charles ii. the retraction was confirmed under james ii, the major reason being that it encouraged individuals to take up larger areas of land than they were able to cultivate. collection of quitrents, however, continued to lag and around no more than pounds sterling was being collected. the treasurer appealed to the assembly which acknowledged that "there is and hath been great neglect in the payment of the quitt rent." consequently the assembly in authorized the treasurer to levy a distress upon the property of delinquent taxpayers. the delinquent was permitted, if providing security, to retain his goods under replevin and to have a hearing before either a county court or the governor and council for final disposition of the case. such a measure, however, was not effective against land not seated and planted, for the land itself was not to be seized; and a similar handicap prevailed against absentee owners as far as action by the treasurer was concerned. assistance in collection of quitrents was provided by the sheriff who was designated as the recipient of payments for each county with the fee of ten per cent of the collections being allowed him. using the patent rolls of his office, both past and current, as a guide, the sheriff collected the rent and turned it over to the auditor of the colony. the rent was received either in coin or in tobacco as the law provided from time to time. in , for example, persons unable to pay in coin were permitted by law to pay in tobacco at the rate of two pence per pound. but there was considerable controversy over the nature of the payment, and king james ii ordered the repeal of the earlier act because of the poor quality of tobacco being submitted. after the overthrow of the king in / , the collection of quitrents continued for the most part in tobacco at the rate of one penny per pound. in the privilege of collecting and using the quitrents was granted to colonel henry norwood, who had supported faithfully the king and the royal cause during the civil war. two years later the quitrents were given to lords arlington and culpeper, including collections that might be made of rents in arrears. protests from virginia of these grants forced the revocation of the special gifts in , although culpeper retained the right to the quitrents in the northern neck. collection of quitrents at various times was farmed out to members of the council and to the governor, with the councilor concerned usually taking the counties near his own residence. in , for example, governor william berkeley assumed the collection in james city and surry counties; colonel miles cary, in warwick and elizabeth city counties; nathaniel bacon, sr., for york county, the isle of wight, and the southern part of new kent; and similar designations for other members of the council. in , however, the council ordered william byrd, auditor of the colony, to sell the quitrents of each county to any individual at the price of one penny per pound of tobacco and on the condition that the usual payment would be made to the sheriff for receiving the rent. while some improvement was made in the last half of the seventeenth century in the collection of quitrents, the sum was never very great; and according to one report in no land had been taken over by the colony because of failure to pay the rent. as to the amount being collected near the end of the century, the figure was not impressive. for the period of six years between and , the estimate has been made that receipts totalled £ , s. d. or a little over £ as an average for each year during this period. the figure was little changed near the end of the century, for it was reported in that the amount collected from quitrents did not total more than £ . these weaknesses and abuses of the virginia land system underwent a detailed analysis near the end of the seventeenth century by the newly created agency--the lords commissioners of trade and plantations which was commonly known as the board of trade. during the first year of its organization in the board received a report from edward randolph, sent from england to be surveyor-general of customs in america. randolph pondered the question as to why the colony of virginia was not more densely populated with all of the migration that had occurred. he attributed little importance to the imputation of "the unhealthiness of the place" and to the assertion that tobacco sales yielded little return in england after all fees were paid. in an incisive statement he concluded that ... the chief and only reason is that the inhabitants have been and still are discouraged and hindered from planting tobacco in that colony; and servants are not so willing to go there as formerly because the members of council and others who make an interest in the government have from time to time procured grants of very large tracts of land, so that for many years there has been no waste land to be taken up by those who bring with them servants, or by servants who have served their time. but the land has been taken up and engrossed beforehand, whereby such people are forced to hire and pay rent for lands or to go to the utmost bounds of the colony for land exposed to danger.... randolph then reviewed the steps by which a land patent was obtained and analyzed the conditions which a person was supposed to fulfill in order to obtain the land title in fee simple. the first of these was the requirement for the annual quitrent of one shilling for fifty acres; but according to randolph, the colonists "never pay a penny of quit-rent to the king for it, by which in strictness of law their land is forfeited." the second requirement was for seating the land within three years to prevent it from being relinquished as deserted land. the following description was given of this condition: by seating land is meant that they build a house upon and keep a good stock of hogs and cattle, and servants to take care of them and to improve and plant the land. but instead thereof, they cut down a few trees and make thereof a hut, covering it with the bark, and turn two or three hogs into the woods by it. or else they are to clear one acre of that land and plant and tend it for one year. but they fell twenty or thirty trees and put a little indian corn into the ground among them as they lie and sometimes make a beginning to serve it, but take no care of their crop, nor make any further use of the land. the third condition pertained to the keeping of "four able men well armed" on land that was situated on the frontier of the colony. again randolph reported that ... this law is never observed. these grants are procured upon such easy terms and very often upon false certificates of rights. many hold twenty or thirty thousand acres of land apiece, very largely surveyed, without paying one penny of quit-rent for it. in many patents there is double the quantity of land expressed in the patent, whereby some hundred thousand acres of land are taken up but not planted, which drives away the inhabitants and servants brought up only to planting to seek their fortunes in carolina and other places, which depopulates the country and prevents the making of many thousand hogsheads of tobacco, to the great diminution of the revenue. three proposals were submitted to the board of trade by randolph to correct the evils of the land system: first, order a survey in every virginia county of the lands in question; second, demand full payment of all quitrents in arrears and use legal compulsion to collect them; and third, limit grants to acres for one man and have them issued on "more certain terms." such requirements would produce threefold advantages to the crown and the colony. they would either bring in additional revenue by collection of the quitrent; or if payment were not made, approximately , acres of land would revert to the king and could be granted to new settlers. limitation of grants to acres would increase the number of planters, make settlements more compact, and produce more tobacco. and finally, both trade and the customs collection on tobacco would be enhanced. before concluding his report, randolph acknowledged both the awareness of the problem and the efforts of correction initiated by francis nicholson while lieutenant-governor of virginia from to . nicholson was ... very sensible of the damage and injustice done to the crown by their using and conniving at such unwarrantable practices in granting away the king's lands, and was resolved to reform them by suing some of the claimers for arrears of quit-rents; but finding that the council and many of the burgesses, among others, were concerned, and being uncertain of his continuing in the government, he ordered to begin with laurence smyth, who was seised of many thousand acres of land in different counties, and for one particular tract of land was indebted £ for arrears of quit-rents, which sum after the cause was ripe for judgment, was compounded for less than one half. before the year was out, the board of trade sought more information on this problem and directed a series of searching questions in october, , to randolph who had then returned to england. both the questions and the answers are recorded in the _calendar of state papers, colonial series, america and west indies_, - (pages , - ). out of the ten questions asked, the following seem most significant in revealing randolph's evaluation of the virginia land system. what proportion of land in virginia already taken up is now cultivated as near as you can judge? there is in virginia, at a moderate computation, about , acres granted by patents, of which not above , acres are cultivated and improved; besides many thousand acres of waste land high up in the country. why have not the prosecutions, neglected in colonel nicholson's time, been continued since? colonel nicholson was the first governor of virginia who directed prosecutions for arrears of quit-rents, beginning with colonel laurence smith. the case was ready for trial but the governor came to england, and the case was afterwards compounded for a small matter. have any parcels of land been seized for the king's use, for want of planting or failure to pay quit-rents? small parcels of land are granted away every court for not being planted or seated according to law, but no land has at any time been seized to the king's use for not paying of quit-rents. are negro servants included in the persons who, if imported, make "rights" to grant of land. [?] negro servants give a right to land to those who import them, who thereupon take up land, contrary to the true intention of seating the country; but the practice being general, to the advantage of certain persons, no notice is taken of it. have you ever known of false certificates of rights, and how have the parties guilty thereof been punished? i have heard of many false certificates of rights; the practice is common but little regarded, being of no prejudice to any private person. if your methods be followed, in what county should a beginning be made? ... if my proposals were adopted, i answer that the members of council have large tracts of land in most of the counties, for which they are in great arrears of quit-rent. it is advisable to make a beginning with some of them and to empower a person uninterested in the county to demand the arrears due to the king. these will amount to a considerable sum and will increase the king's revenue in virginia yearly. if the patentees refuse to pay the arrears, some hundred thousand acres of land will revert to the crown, to be more carefully disposed of in future. the board of trade continued the search for additional opinions about the land system in virginia. questions were asked individually of henry hartwell, a councilor of virginia, and edward chilton, attorney-general in virginia from to . then hartwell and chilton collaborated with james blair, councilor and commissary of the anglican church in virginia, in preparing a report that was received by the board in october, , under the title _an account of the present state & government of virginia_. the three authors of the report were english or scottish born and represented essentially the same point of view of royal appointees who became residents of the colony and who favored an extensive use of royal authority. all three had married into virginia families and had had numerous occasions for observation. the report reflected a greater concern for royal revenue than for the internal development of the colony, and it definitely displayed the bias of the three men, particularly blair, against governor andros. their comments on the land system confirmed some of the conditions as set forth by randolph's report. stating that the country was "ill peopled" despite the headright system, they explained that "the first great abuse of this design arose from the ignorance and knavery of surveyors, who often gave out drafts of surveys without even coming on the land. they gave their descripton [sic] by some natural bounds and were sure to allow large measure, that so the persons for whom they surveyed should enjoy much larger tracts than they paid quit-rents for." the issuing of certificates for rights by the courts and secretary's office had been abused, especially the latter "which was and still is a constant mint of those rights, where they may be purchased at from one shilling to five shillings _per_ right." and in another criticism of the land system, the authors concluded that the "fundamental error of letting the king's land run away to lie waste, together with another of not seating in townships, is the cause that virginia to-day is so ill peopled." the board of trade considered reforms to correct the existing evils of the land system. questions about these evils were posed to sir edmund andros, governor of virginia from to ; but his answers were either evasive or otherwise unsatisfactory. francis nicholson was then returned to the colony as governor in with instructions for a "new method of granting land in virginia." to prevent land from being patented without being cultivated, to encourage trade, and to increase royal revenue, land title was not to be obtained "by merely importing or buying of servants"; rather anyone who would seat and plant vacant lands was to receive acres for himself and the same amount for each laborer that was brought in or for whom arrangements were made for importation within three years. the annual quitrent was to be two shillings for acres provided the full number of laborers were brought in within the three-year period; if, however, full compliance had not been made, ten shillings was to be paid annually for each acres for which there was no worker or the size of the grant was to be reduced proportionally. on the other hand, if the number of laborers, including members of the family, was increased beyond the original number proposed, the owner was entitled to an additional acres for each extra worker. governor nicholson was instructed to "consider and advise with the council and assembly" about putting these proposals into effect and about overcoming any difficulties that might exist because of the current laws of the colony. but instructions to the royal governor was one thing; putting these instructions into effect was quite another. neither the council nor the burgesses were willing to grapple directly with land reform and no action was taken by the two bodies to implement the recommendations of the board of trade. governor nicholson on his own ordered that no more headrights be issued for the importation of negroes. as to the sale of headrights by the secretary's office which nicholson found to be still prevalent, the practice was not eliminated completely. as a substitute measure which arose over the problem of land taken up in pamunkey neck and on the south side of blackwater swamp, the governor and council in authorized the acquisition of land by "treasury right," stating that title to fifty acres of land would be granted for the payment of five shillings sterling to the auditor. thus during the terminal year of this study, we find the significant reappearance of sale of land by "treasury right" which increased in importance as the eighteenth century progressed. grant by headright continued immediately to account for the great majority of land patents issued, but after the first quarter of the eighteenth century it gradually fell into disuse. being unable to inaugurate the proposed plan for land reform of the board of trade, nicholson turned to the improvement of collection of quitrents as the most feasible means of achieving the approximate goal. payment of rent was an acknowledged requirement, even though frequently evaded in the seventeenth century; and nicholson proposed a stringent collection of quitrents in arrears in order to force the return of unused land to be patented by others who would actually occupy and cultivate the vacant areas. improvements were made in the sale of tobacco received as quitrents, and the rent roll of / was an improvement over previous ones. yet many loopholes still existed in the system, and nicholson's attempts to make further reforms were hindered by the arguments that ensued with leading councilors. his second term as executive for virginia came to an end in . chapter five the northern neck before completing this study of seventeenth-century land grants, a brief analysis will be made of the nature of the land system in the northern neck with some attention given to the major ways in which it differed from the remainder of virginia. the included area reached from the potomac river south to the rappahannock river and from the headwaters of these two streams in the western part of the colony to chesapeake bay. the separate provision for the area went back to the days of exile in france of charles ii following the execution of charles i in . as a reward to those cavaliers who had been faithful to the stuart regime, charles ii exercised his royal prerogative by making a grant of the portions of tidewater virginia that were not seated. in the year of the execution the northern neck was granted to the following seven supporters of the king: lord john culpeper, lord ralph horton, lord henry jermyn, sir john berkeley, sir william morton, sir dudley wyatt, and thomas culpeper. efforts of the representatives of this group were frustrated in virginia by the suspension of royal government, and therefore the proprietary charter was ineffective for a time. it had, however, been recorded in chancery in and was revived after the restoration of charles ii to the throne. in and again in charles ii ordered the governor and council of virginia to assist the proprietors in "settling the plantations and receiving the rents and profits thereof." but portions of the area had been seated since , and legal obstructions were brought forth by virginia planters and the council to defeat the efforts of the proprietors. a second appeal to the king led to a solution maneuvered in part by the virginia resident agent in london, francis moryson. the original patent of was surrendered and a new charter was issued on may , , to the earl of st. albans, lord john berkeley, sir william morton, and john trethewy. the new document required the recognition of grants in the northern neck made by the governor and council prior to september , , and it limited the title of the proprietors to that land which would be planted and inhabited within twenty-one years. the political jurisdiction of the area was still under the virginia government. the laws of the colony were to remain operative, and in effect the grant was "to create a subordinate fief or proprietorship within virginia." but considerable confusion prevailed over the retroactive recognition of grants, and many landholders sought confirmation of their ownership. "besides there are many other grants," stated governor william berkeley, "in that patent inconsistent with the settlednesse of this government which hath no barr to its prosperitie but proprieties on both hands, and therefore is it mightily wounded in this last, nor have i ever observed anything so much move the peoples' griefe or passion, or which doth more put a stop to theire industry than their uncertainty whether they should make a country for the king or other proprietors." the confusion that existed was further confounded by the grant of charles ii on february , / , of all of virginia for thirty-one years to lord arlington and to lord thomas culpeper, son of one of the original patentees of the northern neck by the same name. these two proprietors of the whole colony were to control all lands, collect rents, including all rents and profits in arrears since , and exercise authority that sprang from grants previously made. up until amid all the controversy over control of the northern neck, grants were regularly made by the local government on the basis of headrights as revealed in the land patent books. after that date the number decreased; and in march, / , the first land grant of , acres, later george washington's mount vernon, was issued to nicholas spencer and john washington of westmoreland in the name of the proprietors with the common seal being affixed to the grant by thomas culpeper and anthony trethewy. by this date thomas culpeper had obtained from the proprietors of recognition of one-sixth interest in the northern neck for him and his cousin on the basis of their fathers having been original patentees. opposition to the proprietary grant of the northern neck in virginia led to efforts of the assembly, encouraged by governor william berkeley, to buy out the rights of the proprietors. apparently the proprietors were willing to sell and set the price of £ each for the six shares then held in the charter. negotiations to complete the transaction were interrupted by the outbreak of bacon's rebellion, and the status of the proprietary grant hung in suspension. meanwhile, thomas, lord culpeper was appointed governor of virginia but did not arrive in the colony until . the next year culpeper bought up the proprietary rights in virginia, both the rights of the other proprietors in the northern neck and the rights of lord arlington for all of virginia. in , however, he gave up the arlington charter of to the crown in return for an annual pension of £ for twenty-one years. lord culpeper retained the northern neck charter and made efforts to encourage settlement of the area. but the terminal date of the twenty-one year period stipulated in the charter of was approaching, and he appealed for a renewal of the grant on the basis that the amount of land intended by charles ii had not been taken up. considering the restriction an impracticable one, king james ii issued a new charter in with lord culpeper as the sole proprietor and with no time limit specified. through changes and additions prompted by culpeper's knowledge of virginia's geography, the area of the grant included in the northern neck was substantially enlarged over the boundaries stated in the previous charters of and , the additions later being interpreted as extending culpeper's claim beyond the blue ridge mountains to the foot of the alleghenies. the area as outlined in was as follows with the additions to the former descriptions shown in italics: all that entire tract, territory or parcel of land situate, lying and being _in virginia_ in america and bounded by and within the _first_ heads or _springs_ of the rivers of tappanhannocke alias rappahanocke and quiriough alias patawomacke rivers, the courses of the said rivers, _from their said first heads or springs_, as they are commonly called and known by the inhabitants and descriptions of those parts, and the bay of chesapoyocke, together with the said rivers themselves and all the islands within the _outermost_ banks thereof, _and the soil of all and singular the premisses_. soon after receiving this third charter, lord culpeper died on january , / . despite efforts that were again made by the colony to eliminate the proprietary grant, it was confirmed to culpeper's survivors and passed by marriage to the fairfax family. after the charter, the proprietors opened an office in the colony and an agent was designated to handle land grants and collect fees. the scant records that survive indicate that from to , thomas kirton was agent in the land office in northumberland; from to , william aretkin was appointed the proprietor's "agent in virginia"; and from to , daniel parke and nicholas spencer were agents in the land office in westmoreland. beginning in land patents in the northern neck were entered separately and the grant books that have survived give a good account of the land policy under the proprietors. philip ludwell served as agent from to and began an orderly handling of the proprietor's interest at the land office in westmoreland. throughout his term as agent he used a form for land grants in establishing his authority which reviewed a part of the checkered history of the northern neck. the introductory portion of this form was as follows: _whereas_ king charles the seacond of ever blessed memory by his letters pattents under the broad seale of england beareing date at westminister the eighth day of may in the one and twentyeth yeare of his reigne annoqe dom. , his matie was gratiously pleased to give graunt and confirme unto henry then earle of st. albons, john lord berkley, sir william morton, knt., & john trethewy, esqr., there heires & assignes all that intire tract territory or parcell of land lyinge & being betweene the two rivers of rapah. and patomack and the courses of the said rivers and the bay of chesapeake, as by the said graunts, recourse beinge had there unto, will more at large appeare, and _whereas_ all the rite and title of in and to the said lands & premisses is by deed enrold and other suffentient conveyance in law conveyed and made over to thomas lord culpeper, eldest sonn & heire of john late lord culpeper, his heires & assignes for ever, who is thereby become sole owner and propriator of the said land in fee symple, and _whereas_ kinge james the seacond hath beene gratiously pleased by his letters pattents bearinge date at westminister the th day of september , and in the fourth yeare of his maties. reigne, to confirme the said graunt for the said tract or parcell of land to the said thomas lord culpeper his heires & assignes for ever, as by the said graunt, relation beinge there unto had, will more at large appeare _and_ the said thomas lord culpeper he beinge since deceased all the rite title and interest of in and to the said tract of land lawfully desendinge on the honorble. mrs. katherine culpeper sole daughter and heire of the said thomas late lord culpeper, and allexander culpeper esqr. who cometh in part propriator by lawfull conveyance from thomas late lord culpeper, and confirmed by the said mrs. katherine culpeper, who are thereby now become the true and lawfull propriators of the said tract or territory, and _whereas_ the said propriators have thought fitt under there hands & seales to depute me phillip ludwell esqr. with full power and authority to act in the prmisses. persuant to the powers granted by there said maties. as fully & amply to all intents & purposes as they the said propriators them selves might or could doe if they were personally present, now know yee therefore.... the provisions in the fourth paragraph above designating mrs. katherine culpeper and alexander culpeper as "the true and lawfull propriators" were obsolete after the former married lord fairfax while ludwell was still agent. by law the husband also became a proprietor and should have been added to the list. this omission was corrected by george brent and william fitzhugh, the two agents who succeeded ludwell in and continued to serve during the 's in the land office at woodstock in stafford county. in a much simplified form, brent and fitzhugh merely listed the proprietors including the husband as follows: margarett lady culpeper, thomas lord fairfax, katherine his wife and alexander culpeper esquire, proprietors of the northern neck of virginia.... the grants made by the various agents of the proprietors in the northern neck were not substantially different in nature from those held under a virginia land patent. both tenures reflected the feudal law of the manor. the proprietors held their land in free and common socage, and the planters in the northern neck paid quitrents and fees to the proprietors rather than to the crown. while the nature of the tenure was similar, there was a marked difference in the methods of obtaining a grant. instead of the headright which we have seen was the basis for virginia land grants during most of the seventeenth century, the proprietors turned to what they considered the more practical procedure--acquisition of title by purchase, or the "treasury right." to obtain title to land the individual paid a "composition" which was established at a uniform rate. for each acres in grants less than , the price was five shillings; for acres in grants more than , the price was increased to ten shillings. payment was permitted in tobacco which was valued at the rate of six shillings for every pounds in . such a provision could permit the acquisition of large holdings without the manipulations that were practiced under the headright system. in the provision for quitrents, the two areas were similar. the amount of the quitrent in the northern neck was the same as elsewhere in virginia--two shillings annually for acres. under agents brent and fitzhugh one exception occurred with the attempt in to double the quitrent and thereby maintain the same scale as was customary in maryland at the time. but few grants have been found to indicate the agents succeeded to any extent in establishing the higher rate. relative to requirements for seating to validate the claim, the two areas followed a different course as the seventeenth century progressed. we have previously noted the three-year "seating and planting" requirement for other virginia patents. similar provisions were included in the first proprietary grants as revealed in the earliest patent in . but beginning with the grant for brent town in , the seating requirement was omitted and this precedent was followed for all subsequent proprietary grants in the northern neck in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. for the seventeenth century under consideration in this study, there was considerable private and public animosity displayed toward the principles of the proprietary system. there was a distrust of the grants that were issued, and there was criticism of the proprietary system as it differed from the remainder of virginia. demand for land in the area was not as great; and with the exception of large holdings such as that of william fitzhugh, most of the patents were small. it was not until the eighteenth century that public antipathy toward the proprietors was for the most part dispelled and that demands on the northern neck land offices increased to equal other areas in virginia. retrospect the availability of land was a leading motive in the european colonization of america. although much of the country was inhabited by indians, european nations claimed sovereignty over the area and denied superior claims by the non-christian aborigines. the london company held essentially to this position, although gradually the colony of virginia, like other english colonies, recognized the indian's right of occupation and provided some compensation for relinquishment of territory. by the middle of the seventeenth century virginia had initiated the policy of laying out indian boundaries or creating reservations for neighboring tribes that were not open to white settlement. under the london company land was held in common until the provision for distribution to individual stockholders was carried out after . in addition to grants according to the number of shares of stock owned, the company rewarded individuals with land for special services rendered to the colony. and to stimulate immigration, grants were offered as dividends to voluntary associations or "societies of adventurers" for organizing and financing settlements such as the hundred or particular plantations. it was also possible to obtain patents by purchase or by "treasury right" under the company, but the most significant development was the provision for acquisition by headright as outlined in the instructions to governor george yeardley in . with the dissolution of the company in , the "treasury right" was discontinued in virginia and did not reappear other than in the northern neck until . the major method of obtaining title to land was the headright which attempted to maintain an appropriate balance between the size of the population and the area patented. however, its basic concept was distorted by irregular practices and fraudulent acts. other conditions for obtaining patents after were as a dividend for each share of stock invested in the company, as remuneration for special services, and as a means of encouraging frontier fortification. the size of land patents gradually increased during the seventeenth century with the peak being reached in the third quarter. during the last quarter of the period there was a definite trend toward the breakup of large estates by distribution to heirs and by sale of small segments of the larger patent. whatever the variation in size, the small landholder constituted the major group in seventeenth-century virginia and assumed a more important role in the socio-economic pattern of the colony than is evident from the descriptions of plantation life by romantic writers. by the end of the seventeenth century the use of the headright as the major means of land distribution began to give way to acquisition of title by purchase in all of virginia other than the northern neck. for the northern neck which was granted to various proprietors who were faithful to the king during the civil war, the headright never served as the basis of the land system. rather the distribution of land by the "treasury right" was employed in the seventeenth as well as the eighteenth century. the abuses of the land system and lax enforcement of its major principles brought forth a detailed discussion of its many facets by the board of trade near the end of the century. reforms were proposed that would enhance the royal revenue by collection of the quitrent and would prevent the accumulation of large estates. but the existence of vast areas of unoccupied land on the frontier militated against the restriction, and there was considerable opposition to feudal tenures and to the payment of rents to the crown. the proposed reforms did not prevent the acquisition of large landholdings; the few large estates of the seventeenth century increased both in number and size in the eighteenth century and from them were developed the large plantations of some of the well-known virginia leaders of the american revolution. bibliography i. manuscripts virginia land patents. forty-two volumes. records of the virginia state land office now in the custody of the virginia state library, richmond. indispensable source for the study of land grants in colonial virginia. nine volumes cover the period to with two additional volumes for the northern neck beginning in : northern neck grants no. , - and northern neck grants no. , - . thomas jefferson papers. alderman library, university of virginia, charlottesville. ii. printed primary sources brown, alexander, ed., _the genesis of the united states_, new york: houghton, mifflin and company, . vols. force, peter, ed., _tracts and other papers relating principally to the origin settlement and progress of the colonies in north america, from the discovery of the country to the year _, washington, d.c., - . vols. grant, william, munro (james) and fitzroy (a. w.), eds., _acts of the privy council of england, colonial series, - _, london, - . vols. hartwell, henry, blair (james) and chilton (edward), _the present state of virginia and the college_. edited by h. d. farish, williamsburg: colonial williamsburg, inc., . hening, w. w., ed., _statutes at large: being a collection of all the laws of virginia from the first session of the legislature in the year _ [to ]. richmond, . vols. kennedy, j. p. and mcilwaine, h. r., eds., _journals of the house of burgesses of virginia, - _, richmond: the colonial press, - . vols. kingsbury, s. m., ed., _the records of the virginia company of london_, washington, d.c.: government printing office, and . vols. labaree, l. w., ed., _royal instructions to british colonial governors_, - , new york: d. appleton-century company, . vols. mcilwaine, h. r. and hall, w. l., eds., _executive journals of the council of colonial virginia_, richmond: virginia state library, . mcilwaine, h. r., ed., _legislative journals of the council of colonial_ _virginia, - _, richmond: the colonial press, - . vols. ----, _minutes of the council and general court of colonial virginia, - , - _, richmond: the colonial press, . nugent, nell m., ed., _cavaliers and pioneers: abstracts of virginia land patents and grants_, richmond: the dietz printing company, . only volume i published covering the period from to . excellent source for study of seventeenth-century land grants. sainsbury, w. n. and others, eds., _calendar of state papers, colonial series, america and west indies_, london, -. iii. index and periodicals swem, e. g., comp., _virginia historical index_, roanoke: stone printing company, - . vols. valuable guide to material found in hening's _statutes_, _virginia magazine of history and biography_, _tyler's quarterly historical and genealogical magazine_, _william and mary college quarterly historical magazine_--first and second series, _calendar of virginia state papers ... preserved in the capitol at richmond_, _virginia historical register and literary adviser_, and _lower norfolk county virginia antiquary_. iv. secondary sources--books ames, susie m., _studies of the virginia eastern shore in the seventeenth century_, richmond: the dietz press, . andrews, c, m., _the colonial period of american history_, new haven: yale university press, - . vols. beverley, robert, _the history of virginia in four parts_. reprinted from the author's second revised edition, . richmond, . brown, alexander, _the first republic in america_, new york: houghton, mifflin and company, . bruce, p. a., _the economic history of virginia in the seventeenth century_, new york: macmillan and company, . vols. ----, _institutional history of virginia in the seventeenth century_, new york: g. p. putnam's sons, . vols. ----, _social life of virginia in the seventeenth century: an inquiry into the origin of the higher planting class, together with an account of the habits, customs, and diversions of the people_, richmond: whittet & shepperson, . craven, w. f., _dissolution of the virginia company: the failure of a colonial experiment_, new york: oxford university press, . ----, _the southern colonies in the seventeenth century, - _. volume i of _a history of the south_, baton rouge: louisiana state university press, . harrison, _fairfax, virginia land grants: a study of conveyancing in relation to colonial politics_, richmond: the old dominion press, . valuable for its emphasis upon the northern neck. osgood, h. l., _the american colonies in the seventeenth century_, new york: macmillan company, - . vols. voorhis, m. c., the land grant policy of colonial virginia, - , unpublished ph.d. dissertation, university of virginia. valuable study with emphasis upon analysis of land policy. does not include the northern neck. wertenbaker, t. j., _patrician and plebeian in virginia; or, the origin and development of the social classes of the old dominion_, charlottesville, . ----, _the planters of colonial virginia_, princeton: princeton university press, . ----, _virginia under the stuarts, - _, princeton: princeton university press, . wright, l. b., _the first gentlemen of virginia: intellectual qualities of the early colonial ruling class_, san marino: the huntington library, . virginia th anniversary commission _honorary chairman_ thomas b. stanley, governor lewis a. mcmurran, jr., _chairman of the commission_ _members of senate appointed by president of the senate_: lloyd c. bird, vice chairman harry f. byrd, jr. edward l. breeden, jr. w. marvin minter _members of the house of delegates appointed by the speaker of the house_: russell m. carneal felix e. edmunds hale collins lewis a. mcmurran, jr. john w. cooke w. tayloe murphy edmund t. dejarnette fred g. pollard _members appointed by the governor_: miss ellen bagby carlisle h. humelsine alvin d. chandler verbon e. kemp allen r. matthews parke rouse, jr., _executive director_ * * * * * the jamestown-williamsburg-yorktown celebration commission _appointed by the president of the united states_ robert v. hatcher, chairman samuel m. bemiss, vice chairman frank l. boyden bentley hite david e. finley winthrop rockefeller conrad l. wirth _appointed by the vice president of the united states_ harry f. byrd a. willis robertson _appointed by the speaker of the house of representatives_ edward j. robeson, jr. richard h. poff h. k. roberts, _administrative director_ _fevdigraphia._ the synopsis or epitome of svrveying methodized. anatomizing the whole corps of the facultie; _viz._ _the materiall, mathematicall, mechanicall and legall parts_, intimating all the incidents to fees and possessions, and whatsoeuer may be comprized vnder their matter, forme, proprietie, and valuation. _very pertinent to be perused of all those, whom the right, reuenewe, estimation, farming, occupation, manurance, subduing, preparing and imploying of arable, medow, pasture, and all other plots doe concerne._ and no lesse remarkable for all vnder-takers in the plantation of ireland or virginia, for all trauailers for discoueries of _forraine countries, and for purchasers, exchangers, or sellers_ of land, and for euery other interessee in the profits or practise deriued from the compleate svrvey _of manours, lands, tenements, edifices, woods, waters, titles, tenures, euidences, &c._ composed in a compendious digest by w. folkingham. g. qua prosunt singula, multaiuvant. london printed for _richard moore_, and are to be solde at his shop in saint _dunstanes_ church-yard in fleete-streete, . [photograph by t. l. williams] the svrveiors dialogve, very profitable for all men to pervse, but _especially for gentlemen, farmers, and husbandmen_, that shall either haue occasion, or be willing to buy, hire, or sell lands: as in the ready and perfect surueying of them, with the manner and method of keeping a court of suruey with many necessary rules, and familiar tables to that purpose. * * * * * _as also_, the vse of the manuring of some grounds, fit as well _for_ lords, _as for_ tennants. * * * * * now the third time imprinted. * * * * * _and by the same author inlarged, and a sixt booke newly_ added, of a familiar conference, betweene a pvrchaser, and a svrveyor of lands; of the true vse of both being very needfull for all such as are to purchase land, whether it be in fee simple, or by lease. _diuided into sixe bookes by_ i. n. * * * * * prov. . . _a discreate seruant shall haue rule ouer an vnthriftie sonne, and he shall deuide the heritage among the brethren._ voluntas pro facultate. * * * * * london: printed by thomas snodham. . [photograph by t. l. williams] prisoners of poverty abroad. by helen campbell, author of "prisoners of poverty," "the what-to-do-club," "mrs. herndon's income," "miss melinda's opportunity," "roger berkeley's probation." boston: roberts brothers. . _copyright, ,_ by helen campbell. university press: john wilson and son, cambridge. _"but laying hands on another_ _to coin his labor and sweat,_ _he goes in pawn to his victim_ _for eternal years in debt."_ to f. w. p. the friend in whom justice and truth are so deeply implanted that both are instincts, and whose manhood holds the promise of work that will go far toward fulfilling the deepest wish of the generation to which the maker of these pages belongs. preface. the studies which follow, the result of fifteen months' observation abroad, deal directly with the workers in all trades open to women, though, from causes explained in the opening chapter, less from the side of actual figures than the preceding volume, the material for which was gathered in new york. but as months have gone on, it has become plain that many minds are also at work, the majority on the statistical side of the question, and that the ethical one is that which demands no less attention. both are essential to understanding and to effort in any practical direction, and this is recognized more and more as organization brings together for consultation the women who, having long felt deeply, are now learning to think and act effectually. these pages are for them, and mean simply another side-light on the labor question,--the question in which all other modern problems are tangled, and whose solving waits only the larger light whose first gleams are already plain to see. helen campbell. heidelberg, germany, _october, ._ contents. chapter page i. both sides of the sea ii. in trafalgar square iii. the sweating system in general iv. among the sweaters v. child of the east end vi. among the dressmakers vii. nelly, a west end milliner's apprentice viii. london shirt makers ix. the tale of a barrow x. street trades among women xi. london shop-girls xii. from covent garden to the eel-soup man in the borough xiii. women in general trades xiv. french and english workers xv. french bargain counters xvi. the city of the sun xvii. dressmakers and milliners in paris xviii. a silk weaver of paris xix. in the rue jeanne d'arc xx. from france to italy xxi. present and future prisoners of poverty abroad. chapter i. both sides of the sea. with the ending of the set of studies among the working-women of new york, begun in the early autumn of and continued through several months of , came the desire to know something of comparative conditions abroad, and thus be better able to answer questions constantly put, as to the actual status of women as workers, and of their probable future in these directions. there were many additional reasons for continuing a search, in itself a heart-sickening and utterly repellant task. one by one, the trades open to women, over ninety in number, had given in their returns, some of the higher order meaning good wages, steady work and some chance of bettering conditions. but with the great mass of workers, the wages had, from many causes, fallen below the point of subsistence, or kept so near it that advance was impossible, and the worker, even when fairly well trained, faced a practically hopeless future. the search began with a bias against rather than for the worker, and the determination to do strictest justice to employer as well as employed. long experience had taught what was to be expected from untrained, unskilled laborers, with no ambition or power to rise. approaching the subject with the conviction that most of the evil admitted to exist must be the result of the worker's own defective training and inability to make the best and most of the wages received, it very soon became plain that, while this remained true, deeper causes were at work, and that unseen forces must be weighed and measured before just judgment could be possible. no denunciation of grasping employers answered the question why they grasped, and why men who in private relations showed warm hearts and the tenderest care for those nearest them became on the instant, when faced by this problem of labor, deaf and blind to the sorrow and struggle before them. that the system was full of evils was freely admitted whenever facts were brought home and attention compelled. but the easy-going american temperament is certain that the wrong of to-day will easily become righted by to-morrow, and is profoundly sceptical as to the existence of any evil of which this is not true. "it's pretty bad, yes, i know it's pretty bad," said one large employer of women, and his word was the word of many others. "but we're not to blame. i don't want to grind 'em down. it's the system that's wrong, and we are its victims. competition gets worse and worse. machinery is too much for humanity. i've been certain of that for a good while, and so, of course, these hands have to take the consequences." nothing better indicates the present status of the worker than this very phrase "hands." not heads with brains that can think and plan, nor souls born to grow into fulness of life, but hands only; hands that can hold needle or grasp tool, or follow the order of the brain to which they are bond-servants, each pulse moving to the throb of the great engine which drives all together, but never guided by any will of brain or joy of soul in the task of the day. there has been a time in the story of mankind when hand and brain worked together. in every monument of the past on this english soil, even at the topmost point of springing arch or lofty pillar, is tracery and carving as careful and cunning as if all eyes were to see and judge it as the central point and test of the labor done. has the nineteenth century, with its progress and its boast, no possibility of such work from any hand of man, and if not, where has the spirit that made it vanished, and what hope may men share of its return? not one, if the day's work must mean labor in its most exhausting form; for many women, fourteen to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit of bread eaten with it, the exhausted bodies falling at last on whatever may do duty for bed, with no hope that the rising sun will bring release from trial or any gleam of a better day. with each week of the long search the outlook became more hopeless. here was this army crowding into the great city, packed away in noisome tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre, and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. if this was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air, free movement and natural growth. what barbarism at its worst could hold such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more lingering deaths? admitting the almost impossibility of making them over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply another count against the social order which has accepted such results as part of its story, and now looks on, speculating, wondering what had better be done about it. the philanthropist has endeavored to answer the question, and sought out many devices for alleviation, struggling out at last to the conviction that prevention must be attempted, and pausing bewildered before the questions involved in prevention. for them there has been active and unceasing work, their brooms laboring as vainly as mrs. partington's against the rising tide of woe and want and fruitless toil, each wave only the forerunner of mightier and more destructive ones, while the world has gone its way, casting abundant contributions toward the workers, but denying that there was need for agitation or speculation as to where or how the next crest might break. there were men and women who sounded an alarm, and were in most cases either hooted for their pains, or set down as sentimentalists, newspaper philanthropists, fanatics, socialists,--any or all of the various titles bestowed freely by those who regard interference with any existing order of things as rank blasphemy. money has always been offered freely, but money always carries small power with it, save for temporary alleviation. the word of the poet who has sounded the depths of certain modern tendencies holds the truth for this also:-- "not that which we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare; who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three, himself, his hungering neighbor and me." yet it is the anglo-saxon conviction, owned by english and american in common, and unshaken though one should rise from the dead to arraign it, that what money would not do, cannot be done, and when money is rejected and the appeal made for personal consideration of the questions involved, there is impatient and instantaneous rejection of the responsibility. evolution is supposed to have the matter in charge, and to deal with men in the manner best suited to their needs. if the ancient creed is still held and the worshipper repeats on sunday: "i believe in one god, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth," he supplements it on monday and all other days, till sunday comes again, with the new version, the creed of to-day, formulated by a man who fights it from hour to hour: "i believe in father mud, the almighty plastic; and in father dollar, the almighty drastic." it is because these men and women must be made to understand; because they must be reached and made to see and know what life may be counted worth living, and how far they are responsible for failure to make better ideals the ideal of every soul nearest them, that the story of the worker must be told over and over again till it has struck home. to seek out all phases of wretchedness and want, and bring them face to face with those who deny that such want is anything but a temporary, passing state, due to a little over-production and soon to end, is not a cheerful task, and it is made less so by those who, having never looked for themselves, pronounce all such statements either sensational or the work of a morbid and excited imagination. the majority decline to take time to see for themselves. the few who have done so need no further argument, and are ready to admit that no words can exaggerate, or, indeed, ever really tell in full the real wretchedness that is plain for all who will look. but, even with them, the conviction remains that it is, after all, a temporary state of things, and that all must very shortly come right. day by day, the desire has grown stronger to make plain the fact that this is a world-wide question, and one that must be answered. it is not for a city here and there, chiefly those where emigrants pour in, and so often, the mass of unskilled labor, always underpaid, and always near starvation. it is for the cities everywhere in the world of civilization, and because london includes the greatest numbers, these lines are written in london after many months of observation among workers on this side of the sea, and as the prelude to some record of what has been seen and heard, and must still be before the record ends, not only here, but in one or two representative cities on the continent. london, however, deserves and demands chief consideration, not only because it leads in numbers, but because our own conditions are, in many points, an inheritance which crossed the sea with the pilgrims, and is in every drop of anglo-saxon blood. if the glint of the sovereign and its clink in the pocket are the dearest sight and sound to british eyes and ears, america has equal affection for her dollars, in both countries alike chink and glint standing with most, for the best things life holds. it remains for us to see whether counteracting influences are stronger here than with us, and if the worker's chance is hampered more or less by the conditions that hedge in all labor. the merely statistical side of the question is left, as in the previous year's work, chiefly to those who deal only with this phase, though drawn upon wherever available or necessary. there is, however, small supply. save in scattered trades-union reports, an occasional blue book, and here and there the work of a private investigator, like mr. charles booth, there is nothing which has the value of our own reports from the various bureaus of labor. the subject has until now excited little interest or attention, save with a few political economists, and the band of agitators who are the disciples, not of things as they are, but things as they ought to be. one of the most admirable and well-officered organizations in new york, "the workingwoman's protective union," which gave invaluable assistance last year, has only a small and feeble imitation in london, in the woman's protective union, founded by mrs. peterson, and now under the admirable management of miss black, but still struggling for place and recognition. thus it will be seen that the work to be done here is necessarily more sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every detail, the aim in both cases being the same,--to give, as far as possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well as by the eyes that may have larger interpretation for outward phases. the homes and daily lives of the workers are the best answers as to the comfort-producing power of wages, and in those homes we are to find what the wage can do, and what it fails to do, not alone for the east end, but for swarming lanes and courts in all this crowded london. the east end has by no means the monopoly, though novelists and writers of various orders have chosen it as the type of all wretchedness. but london wretchedness is very impartially distributed. under the shadow of the beautiful abbey, and the towers of archiepiscopal lambeth palace; appearing suddenly in the midst of the great warehouses, and the press of traffic in the city itself, and thronging the streets of that borough road, over which the canterbury pilgrims rode out on that immortal summer morning,--everywhere is the swarm of haggard, hungry humanity. no winter of any year london has known since the day when roman walls still shut it in, has ever held sharper want or more sorrowful need. trafalgar square has suddenly become a world-wide synonym for the saddest sights a great city can ever have to show; and in trafalgar square our search shall begin, following one of the unemployed to the refuge open to her when work failed. chapter ii. in trafalgar square. to the london mind nothing is more certain than that trafalgar square, which may be regarded as the real focus of the city, is unrivalled in situation and surroundings. "the finest site in europe," one hears on every side, and there is reason for the faith. in spite of the fact that the national gallery which it fronts is a singularly defective and unimpressive piece of architecture, it hardly weakens the impression, though the traveller facing it recalls inevitably a criticism made many years ago: "this unhappy structure may be said to have everything it ought not to have, and nothing which it ought to have. it possesses windows without glass, a cupola without size, a portico without height, pepper boxes without pepper, and the finest site in europe without anything to show upon it." in spite of all this, to which the pilgrim must at once agree, the square itself, with the nelson pillar and the noble lions at its base, nobler for their very simplicity; its fountains and its outlook on the beautiful portico of st. martin's, the busy strand and the great buildings rising all about, is all that is claimed for it, and the traveller welcomes any chance that takes him through it. treasures of art are at its back, and within short radius, every possibility of business or pleasure, embodied in magnificent hotels, theatres, warehouses, is for the throng that flows unceasingly through these main arteries of the city's life. this is one phase of what may be seen in trafalgar square. but with early autumn and the shortening days and the steadily increasing pressure of that undercurrent of want and misery through which strange flotsam and jetsam come to the surface, one saw, on the long benches or crouched on the asphalt pavement, lines of men and women sitting silently, making no appeal to passers-by, but, as night fell, crouching lower in their thin garments or wrapping old placards or any sack or semblance of covering about them, losing memory in fitful sleep and waking with dawn to a hopeless day. this was the sight that trafalgar square had for those who passed through it, and who at last began to question, "why is it? who are they? they don't seem to beg. what does it mean?" the square presently overflowed, and in any and every sheltered spot the same silent lines lay down at night along the thames embankment, in any covered court or passage, men rushing with early dawn to fight for places at the dock gates, breaking arms or dislocating shoulders often in the struggle, and turning away with pale faces, as they saw the hoped-for chance given to a neighbor, to carry their tale to the hungry women whose office was to wait. the beggars pursued their usual course, but it was quite plain that these men and women had no affinity with them save in rags. day by day the numbers swelled. "who are they? what does it mean?" still sounded, and at last the right phrase was found, and the answer came: "they are the 'unemployed.' there is no longer any work to be had, and these people can neither get away nor find any means of living here." for a time london would not believe its ears. there must be work, and so food for whoever was willing to work; but presently this cry silenced, and it became plain that somebody must do something. food was the first thought; and from the limehouse district, and a refuge known as the outcasts' home, a great van loaded with loaves of bread came in two or three times a week, taking back to the refuge in the empty cart such few as could be induced to try its mercies. coffee was also provided on a few occasions; and as the news spread by means of that mysterious telegraphy current in the begging fraternity, suddenly the square overflowed with their kind; and who wanted to work and could not, and who wanted no work on any consideration, no man could determine. with the story of this tangle, of the bewilderment and dismay for all alike, and the increasing despair of the unemployed, this chronicle has but indirectly to do. trafalgar square was emptied at last by means already familiar to all. beggars skulked back to their hiding-places like wharf-rats to the rotten piles that shelter them; the unemployed dispersed also, showing themselves once more in the files that registered when the census of the unemployed was decided upon; and then, for the most part, were lost to public sight in the mass of general, every-day, to-be-expected wretchedness which makes up london below the surface. scores of wretched figures crouched on the icy asphalt of the square on a pouring night early in november, before its clearing had been ordered. the great van was expected, but had not appeared, and men huddled in the most sheltered corners of this most unsheltered spot, cowering under any rag of covering they had been able to secure. in a corner by the lions a pair had taken refuge,--a boy of ten or so, wrapped in two newspaper placards, and his bare feet tucked into a horse's nose-bag, too old and rotten for any further service in its own line of duty; over him crouched a girl, whose bent figure might have belonged to eighty, but whose face as she looked up showed youth which even her misery could not wipe out. she had no beauty, save soft dark eyes and a delicate face, both filled with terror as she put one arm over the boy, who sprung to his feet. "i'll not go where nell can't," he said, the heavy sleep still in his eyes; "we're goin' to keep together, me an' nell is." "'tain't the van," the girl said, still holding him; "they tried to take him back to the refuge the other night, and he's afraid of 'em. they don't take any over sixteen, and so i can't go, an' he's afraid somehow they'll take him in spite of me. i'd be willin' enough, for there's no more i can do for him, and he's too little for this sort of life; but he won't go." the girl's thin clothing was soaked with rain; she shivered as she spoke, but sat there with the strange patience in look and manner that marks the better class of english poor. "but is there nobody to give you a shelter on such a night? you must have somebody. what does it mean?" "i had a bit of a place till last wednesday, but the rent was far behind and they turned me out. i was home then a day or two, but it's worse there than the streets. there was no work, and father drunk, and beating mother and all of us, and billy worst of all; so the streets were better. i've tried for work, but there's none to be had, and now i'm waiting. perhaps i shall die pretty soon, and then they can take billy into the refuge. i'm waiting for that." "but there must be work for any one as young and strong as you." the girl shook her head. "i've walked the soles off me shoes to find it. there's no work in all london. i can go on the streets, but i'd rather do this. my mother did her best for us all, but she's been knocked round till she's as near death as we. there's no work for man nor woman in all london." the boy had settled down at her feet again, satisfied that no attempt was to be made to separate them, and fell asleep instantly, one hand holding her dress. to leave the pair was impossible. other cases might be as desperate, but this was nearest; and presently a bargain had been made with an old woman who sells roasted chestnuts in st. martin's lane, close by, and the two were led away to her shelter in some rookery in the seven dials. a day or two later the full story was told, and has its place as the first and strongest illustration of the state of things in this great city of london, where, as the year opens, official registers hold the names of over seventeen thousand men who wish to work at any rate that may be paid, but for whom there is no work, their names representing a total of over fifty thousand who are slowly starving; and this mass known to be but a part of that which is still unregistered, and likely to remain so, unless private enterprise seeks it out in lane and alley where it hides. the father was a "coal whipper" on the docks near tower hill, this meaning that he spent his days in the hold of a collier or on the deck, guiding the coal basket which ascends from the hold through a "way" made of broken oars lashed together, and by means of a wheel and rope is sent on and emptied. whether in hold or on deck it is one of the most exhausting forms of labor, and the men, whose throats are lined with coal dust, wash them out with floods of beer. naturally they are all intemperate, and the wages taken home are small in proportion to their thirst. and as an evening solace, the father, who had once been footman in a good family, and married the lady's maid (which fact accounted for the unusual quality of nelly's english), beat them all around, weeping maudlin tears over them in the morning, and returning at night to duplicate the occasion for more. the mother had made constant fight for respectability. she did such dressmaking as the neighborhood offered, but they moved constantly as fortunes grew lower and lower, sheltering at last in two rooms in a rookery in tower hamlets. here came the final disablement. the father, a little drunker than usual, pushed the wife downstairs and their billy after her, the result being a broken hip for the first and a broken arm for the last. nelly, who had begun to stitch sacks not long before, filled her place as she could, and cared for the other seven, all not much more than babies, and most of them in time mercifully removed by death. she was but twelve when her responsibility began, and it did not end when the mother came home, to be chiefly bedridden for such days as remained. the three little boys were all "mud-larks," that is, prowled along the river shore, picking up any odds and ends that could be sold to the rag-shop or for firewood, and their backs were scored with the strap which the father carried in his pocket and took out for his evening's occupation when he came. the mother, sitting up in bed and knitting or crocheting for a small shop near by, fared no better than the rest, for billy, who tried to stand between them, only infuriated the brute the more. the crisis came when he one night stole the strap from his father's pocket and cut it into pieces. nelly, who was now earning fair wages, had long thought that her mother's life would be easier without them; and now, as billy announced that he had done for himself and must run, she decided to run too. "i told mother i'd have a bit of a room not far off," she said, "only where father wouldn't be likely to search us out, and i'd do for billy and for her too what i could. she cried, but she saw it was best. billy was just a bag of bones and all over strap marks. he'd have to mud-lark just the same, but he'd have more to eat and no beatings, and he'd always hung to me from the time he was born. so that is the way i did, and, bit by bit, i got a comfortable place, and had billy in school, and kept us both, and did well. but then the wages began to go down, and every week they got lower till, where i'd earned twelve shillings a week sometimes, i was down to half and less than half that. i tried stitching for the sweaters a while, but i'd no machine, and they had more hands than they wanted everywhere, and i went back to the sacks. and at last they dismissed a lot too, and i went here and there and everywhere for another chance, and not one,--not one anywhere. i pawned everything, bit by bit, till we'd nothing left but some rags and straw to sleep upon, and the rent far behind; and then i went home when we were turned out, and that father took for his chance, and was worse than ever. "and so, when there was no work anywhere, though i was ready for anything, i didn't care what, and i saw we were just taking the bread from mother's mouth (though it's little enough she wanted), then i told billy to stay with her, and i went out and to the square and sat down with the rest, and wondered if i ought to sit there and wait to be dead, or if i hadn't the right to do it quicker and just try the river. but i saw all those i was with just as bad off and worse, and some with babies, and so i didn't know what to do, but just to wait there. what can we do? they say the queen is going to order work so that the men can get wages; but they don't say if she is going to do anything for the women. she's a woman; but then i suppose a queen couldn't any way know, except by hearsay, that women really starve; and women do for men first anyhow. but i will work any way at anything, if only you'll find it for me to do--if only you will." for one of the fifty-three thousand work and place have been found. for the rest is still the cry: "i will work any way at anything, if only you'll find it for me to do; if only you will." chapter iii. the sweating system in general. "history repeats itself," is a very hackneyed phrase, yet, for want of any better or more expressive one, must lead such words as are to be said on an old yet ever new evil; for it is just forty years ago, since the winter of - showed among the working men and women of england conditions analogous to those of the present, though on a far smaller scale. acute distress prevailed then as now. revolution was in the air, and what it might mean being far less plain to apprehensive minds than it is to-day, a london newspaper, desirous of knowing just what dangers were to be faced, sent a commissioner to investigate the actual conditions of the working classes, and published his reports from day to day. then, for the first time, a new word came into circulation, and "sweating" became the synonym, which it has since remained, for a system of labor which means the maximum of profit for the employer and the minimum of wages for the employed. the term is hardly scientific, yet it is the only one recognized in the most scientific investigation thus far made. that of - did its work for the time, nor have its results wholly passed away. charles kingsley, young then and ardent, his soul stirred with longing to lighten all human suffering, took up the cause of the worker, and in his pamphlet "cheap clothes and nasty," and later, in the powerful novel "alton locke," showed every phase of the system, then in its infancy, and, practically, entirely unknown on the other side of the atlantic. the results of this agitation became visible at once. unions and associations of various sorts among tailors and the one or two other trades to which the sweating system had applied, were organized and from year to year extended and perfected till it had come to be the popular conviction that, save in isolated cases here and there, the evil was to be found only among the foreign population, and even there, hedged in and shorn of its worst possibilities. this conviction remained and made part of the estimate of any complaints that now and then arose, and though the work of the organized charities, and of independent investigations here and there, demonstrated from year to year that it had increased steadily, its real scope was still unbelieved. now, after forty years, the story tells itself again, this time in ways which cannot be set down as newspaper sensationalism or anybody's desire to make political capital. it is a blue book which holds the latest researches and conclusions, and blue books are not part of the popular reading, but are usually tucked away in government offices or libraries, to which the public has practically no access. a newspaper paragraph gives its readers the information that another report on this or that feature of public interest has been prepared and shelved for posterity, and there the matter ends. in the present case public feeling and interest have been so stirred by the condition of unexampled misery and want among masses eager to work but with no work to be had, that the report has been called for and read and discussed to a degree unknown to any of its predecessors. while it gives results only in the most compact form and by no means compares with work like that of mr. charles peck in his investigations for the new york bureau of statistics of labor, it still holds a mass of information invaluable to all who are seeking light on the cause of present evils. as with us the system is closely a part of the manufacture of cheap clothing of every order, tailoring leading, and various other trades being included, furniture makers, strange to say, being among the chief sufferers in these. with us the system is so clearly defined and so well known, at any rate in all our large centres of labor, that definition is hardly necessary. for england and america alike the sweater is simply a sub-contractor who, at home or in small workshops, undertakes to do work, which he in turn sublets to other contractors, or has done under his own eyes. the business had a simple and natural beginning, the journey-worker of fifty years ago taking home from his employers work to be done there either by himself or some member of his family. at this time it held decided advantages for both sides. the master-tailor was relieved from finding workshop accommodations with all the accompanying expense and from constant supervision of his work people, while good work was insured by the pride of the worker in his craft, as well as his desire not to lose a good connection. there was but the slightest subdivision of labor, each worker was able to make the garment from the beginning to the end, apprentices being employed on the least important parts. work of this order has no further place in the clothing trade, whether tailoring or general outfitting, save for the best order of clothing. increase of population cheapened material, the introduction of machinery and the tremendous growth of the ready-made clothing trade are all responsible for the change. the minutest system of subdivided labor now rules here as in all trades. when a coat is in question, it is no longer the master-tailor, journeyman and apprentices who prepare it, but a legion of cutters, basters, machinists, pressers, fellers, button-hole, and general workers, who find the learning of any one alone of the branches an easy matter, and so rush into the trade, the fiercest and most incessant competition being the instant result. in a census was taken in the east end of london which showed over fifteen thousand tailors at work, of whom more than nine thousand were women. the number of the latter at present is estimated to be about twelve thousand, much increase having been prevented by various causes, for which there is no room here. as the matter at present stands, every man and woman employed aims to become as fast as possible a sweater on his or her own account. for large employers this is not so easy; for the small ones nothing could be simpler, and here are the methods. if the trade is an unfamiliar one, there is first the initiation by employment in a sweater's shop, and a few months, or even weeks, gives all the necessary facility. then comes the question of workroom; and here it is only necessary to take the family room, and hire a sewing machine, which is for rent at two shillings and sixpence, or sixty cents, a week. to organize the establishment all that is necessary is a baster, a machinist, a presser, and two or three women-workers, one for button-holing, one for felling, and one for general work, carrying home, etc. the baster may be a skilled woman; the presser is always a man, the irons weighing from seven to eighteen pounds, and the work being of the most exhausting description, no man being able to continue it beyond eight or ten years at the utmost. the sweater-employer often begins by being his own presser, or his own baster; but as business increases his personal labor lessens. in the beginning his profits are extremely small, prices varying so that it is impossible to make any general table of rates. even in the same branch of trade hardly any two persons are employed at the same rate, and the range of ability appears to vary with the wage paid, subdivision of labor being thus carried to its utmost limit, and the sections of the divisions already mentioned being again subdivided beyond further possibility. so tremendous is the competition for work that the sweaters are played off against each other by the contractors and sub-contractors, the result upon the workers below being as disastrous as the general effect of the system as a whole. as one becomes familiar with the characteristics of the east end,--and this is only after long and persistent comings and goings in street and alley,--it is found that there are entire streets in whitechapel or st. george's-in-the-east, the points where the tailoring trade seems to focus, in which almost every house contains one, and sometimes several, sweating establishments, managed usually by men, but now and then in the hands of women, though only for the cheapest forms of clothing. here, precisely as in our own large cities, a room nine or ten feet square is heated by a coke fire for the presser's irons, and lighted at night by flaming gas-jets, six, eight, or even a dozen workers being crowded in this narrow space. but such crowding is worse here than with us, for reasons which affect also every form of cheap labor within doors. london, under its present arrangements, is simply an enormous smoke factory, and no quarter of its vast expanse is free from the plague of soot and smoke, forever flying, and leaving a coating of grime on every article owned or used, no matter how cared for. this is true for belgravia as for the east end, and "blacks," as the flakes of soot are known, are eaten and drunk and breathed by everything that walks in london streets or breathes london air. there is, then, not only the foulness engendered by human lungs breathing in the narrowest and most crowded of quarters, but the added foulness of dirt of every degree and order, overlaid and penetrated by this deposit of fine soot; the result a griminess that has no counterpart on the face of the earth. "cheap clothes and nasty" did not end with kingsley's time, and these garments, well made, and sold at a rate inconceivably low, are saturated with horrible emanations of every sort, and to the buyer who stops to think must carry an atmosphere that ends any satisfaction in the cheapness. setting aside this phase as an intangible and, in part, sentimental ground for complaint, the fact that the cheapness depends also upon the number of hours given by the worker--whose day is never less than fourteen, and often eighteen, hours--should be sufficient to ban the whole trade. even for this longest day there is no uniformity of price, and with articles identically the same the rate varies with different sweaters, the increasing competition accentuating these differences more and more. the sweater himself is more or less at the mercy of the contractor, who says to him: "here are so many coats, at so much a coat. if you won't do them at the price, there are plenty that will." already well aware of this fact, the sweater, if the rate falls at all below his expectation, has simply to pursue the same course with the waiting worker in his shop, a slight turn of the screw, half a penny off here and a farthing there, bringing his own profit back to the rate he assumes as essential. there is no pressure from below to compel justice. for any rebellious worker a dozen stand waiting to fill the vacant place; and thus the wrong perpetuates itself, and the sweater, whose personal relation with those he employs may be of the friendliest, becomes tyrant and oppressor, not of his own will, but through sheer force of circumstances. thus evils, which laws have not reached, increase from day to day. inspectors are practically powerless, and the shameful system, degrading alike to employer and employed, grows by what it feeds on, and hangs over the east end, a pall blacker and fouler than the cloud of smoke and soot, also the result of man's folly, not to be lifted till human eyes see clearer what makes life worth living, and human hands are less weary with labor that profiteth not, but that deadens sense and soul alike. this is the general view of the system as a whole. for the special there must still be a further word. chapter iv. among the sweaters. "'nine tailors to make a man,' they say. well, now if it takes that amount, and from some lots i've seen i should say it did, you've got to multiply by nine again if you count in the women. bless your 'art!" and here, in his excitement, the inspector began to drop the _h_'s, which the board school had taught him to hold to with painful tenacity. "bless your 'art! a woman can't make a coat, and every tailor knows it, and that's one reason 'e beats 'er down and beats 'er down till 'ow she keeps the breath of life in the lord only knows. take the cheapest coat going and there's a knack to every seam that a woman don't catch. she's good for trousers and finishing, and she can't be matched for button-holes when she gives her mind to it, but a coat's beyond her. i've wondered a good bit over it. the women don't see it themselves, but now and again there's one that's up to every dodge but a coat seam, and she wants more money and couldn't be persuaded, no, not if moses himself came to try it, that she isn't worth the same as the men. that's what i 'ear as i go, and i've been hup and down among 'em three years and over. their dodges is beyond belief, not the women's,--poor souls! they're too ground down to 'ave mind enough left for dodges,--but the sweaters; parliament's after 'em. there's enough, but ther's no man halive that i've seen that knows how to 'old a sweater to 'em. how's one or two inspectors to get through every sweating place in whitechapel alone, let alone hall the east end? it's hup an' down an' hin and hout, and where you find 'em fair and square in a reg'lar shop, or in rooms plain to see, you'll find 'em in basements and backyards, and washhouses, and underground,--anywheres like so many rats, though, i'm blessed if i don't think the rats has the hadvantage. now, the law says no working over hours, and i go along in the evening, about knocking-off time, and find everything all clear only a look in the sweater's heye that i know well enough. it means most likely that 'e's got 'is women locked up in a bedroom where the parliament won't let me go, and that when my back's turned 'e'll 'ave 'em out, and grin in his sleeve at me and parliament too. or else 'e's agreed with 'em to come at six in the morning instead of eight. it's a twelve-hour day 'e's a right to, from eight to eight, but that way he make it fourteen and more, if i or some other inspector don't appear along. "now, suppose i drop down unexpected,--an' that's the way,--before i've made three calls, and likely nailed every one in the house for violation, it's down the street like lightening that the hinspector's after 'em. then the women are 'ustled out anywhere, into the yard, or in a dust bin. lift up 'most anything and you'd find a woman under it. i've caught 'em with their thimbles on, hot with sewing, and now they drop 'em into their pockets or anywhere. they'd lose a job if they peeped, and so there's never much to be done for 'em. but why a woman can't make a coat is what i study over. did you ever think it out, ma'am? is it their 'ands or their heyes that isn't hup to it?" this position of the little inspector's problem must wait, though in it is involved that fatal want of training for either eye or hand which makes the lowest place the only one that the average needlewoman can fill. their endurance equals that of the men, and often, in sudden presses of work, as for a foreign order, work has begun at seven o'clock on a morning and continued right on through the night and up to four or five of the next afternoon. the law demands an hour for dinner and half an hour for tea, but the first is halved or quartered, and the last taken between the stitches, but with no more stop than is necessary for swallowing. the penalties for violation of these acts are heavy and the inspectors work very thoroughly, various convictions having been obtained in , the penalties varying from two pounds to ten pounds and costs. but the sweaters, though standing in terror of such possibility, have learned every device of evasion, and, as before stated, the women necessarily abet them for fear of losing work altogether. let us see now what the profit of the average sweater is likely to be, and then that of the workwoman, skilled and unskilled, taking our figures in every case from the blue book containing mr. burnett's report and confirmed by many workers. a small sweater in brunswick street employed a presser and a machinist, with two women for button-holes and felling, his business being the production of tunics for postmen. for each of these he received two shillings, or half a dollar a coat, which he considered a very good price. he paid his presser _s._ _d._ ($ . ) per day; his machinist _s._ ($ . ); his button-holer _s._ _d._ ( c.), from which she must find twist and thread; and the feller _s._ _d._ ( c.), a total of thirteen shillings threepence. for twelve coats he received twenty-four shillings, his own profit thus being ten shillings and ninepence ($ . ) for his own labor as baster and for finding thread, soap, coke, and machine. the hours were from seven in the morning to ten in the evening, less time not sufficing to finish the dozen coats, this bringing the rate of wages for the highest paid worker to ½_d._, or nine cents an hour. for the small sweater the profit is slight, but each additional machine sends it up, till four or five mean a handsome return. if work is slack, he has another method of lessening expenses, and thus increasing profits, arranging matters so that all the work is done the three last days of the week, starting on a thursday morning, for instance, and pressing the workers on for thirty-three to thirty-six hours at a stretch, calling this two days' work, and paying for it at this rate. if they work fractions of a day, eight hours is called a half and four a quarter day, and the men submit with the same patience as the women. for the former this is in part a question of nationality, the sweater's workmen being made up chiefly of german and polish jews and the poorer foreign element. an english worker has generally learned the trade as a whole, and is secure of better place and pay; but a polish jew, a carpenter at home, goes at once into a sweater's shop, and after a few weeks has learned one branch of the trade, and is enrolled on the list of workers. for the women, however, there is a smaller proportion comparatively of foreigners. the poor englishwoman, like the poor american, has no resource save her needle or some form of machine work. if ambitious, she learns button-holing, and in some cases makes as high as thirty shillings per week ($ . ). this, however, is only for the best paid work. out of this she must find her own materials, which can never be less than two and sixpence ( c.). a woman of this order would do in a day twelve coats with six button-holes each, for the best class of work getting a penny a hole, or two cents. for commoner kinds the prices are a descending scale: three-quarters of a penny a hole, half a penny, eight holes for threepence, and the commonest kinds three holes for a penny. these are the rates for coats. for waistcoats the price is usually a penny for four button-holes, a skilled worker making sixteen in an hour. many of these button-hole makers have become sweaters on their own account, and display quite as much ingenuity at cutting rates as the men at whose hands they may themselves have suffered. for the machinists and fellers the rates vary. a good machinist may earn five shillings a day ($ . ), but this only in the busy season; the feller, at the best, can seldom go beyond three or four, and at the worst earns but six or eight per week; while learners and general hands make from two to six shillings a week, much of their time being spent in carrying work between the shops and the warehouses. six shillings a week represents a purchasing power of about forty cents a day, half of which must be reserved for rent; and thus it will be seen that the english workwoman of the lower grade is in much the same condition as the american worker, hours, wages, and results being nearly identical. the jewish women and girls represent a formidable element to contend with, as they are now coming over in great numbers, and the question has so organized itself that each falls almost at once into her own place, and works with machine-like regularity and efficiency. in one of the houses in a narrow little street opening off from whitechapel, were three women whose cases may be cited as representative ones. the first was a trouser machinist, and took her work from another woman, a sweater, who had it from city and other houses. she was paid threepence ( c.) a pair, and could do ten pairs a day, if she got up at six and worked till ten or eleven, which was her usual custom. in the next room was a woman who stitched very thick large trousers, for which she received fourpence a pair. she also had them from a woman who took them from a sub-contractor. she could make six and sometimes seven shillings a week, her rent being two shillings and sixpence. on the floor above was a waistcoat maker, who, when work was brisk, could earn eight and sometimes nine shillings a week; but who now, as work was slack, seldom went beyond six or seven. out of this must be taken thread, which she got for eightpence a dozen. she worked for a small exporter in a street some ten minutes' walk away; but often had to spend two hours or more taking back her work and waiting for more to be given out. she fared better than some, however, as she knew women who many a time had had to lose five or six hours--"just so much bread out of their mouths." "the work has to be passed," she said, "and there's never any doubt about mine, because i was bound to the trade, and my mother paid a pound for premium, and i worked three months for nothing--two months of that was clear gain to them, for i took to it and learned quick. but it's a starvation trade now, whatever it used to be." "why don't some of the best workers among you combine and get your work direct from the city house?" "i've 'ad that in me mind, but there's never money enough. there's a deposit to be made for guarantee, and the machine-rent and all. no, there's never money enough. it's just keeping soul and body together, and barely that. we don't see butcher's meat half a dozen times a year; it's tea and bread, and you lose your relish for much of anything else, unless sprats maybe, or a taste of shrimps. i was in one workshop a while where there was over-hours always, and one night the inspector happened along after hours, and no word passed down, and the man turned me into the yard and turned off the gas; but i had to work two hours after he was gone. i'm better off than the woman in the next room. she makes children's suits--coats and knickerbockers--for ha'penny a piece, with tuppence for finishing, and her cotton to find; and, do 'er best, she won't make over four shillings and threepence a week, sometimes less. there's a mother and daughter next door that were bound to their trade for three months, and the daughter gave three months' work to learn it; but the most they make on children's suits is eight shillings and sixpence the two, and they work fifteen and sixteen hours a day." this record of a house or two in whitechapel is the record of street after street in working london. no trade into which the needle enters has escaped the system which has been perfected little by little till there is no loophole by which the lower order of worker can escape. the sweaters themselves are often kind-hearted men, ground by the system, but soon losing any sensitiveness; and the mass of eager applicants are constantly reinforced, not only by the steady pressure of emigrants of all nations, but by an influx from the country. in short, conditions are generally the same for london as new york, but intensified for the former by the enormous numbers, and the fact that outlying spaces do not mean a better chance. this problem of one great city is the problem of all; and in each and all the sweater stands as an integral part of modern civilization. often far less guilty than he is counted to be, and often as much a sufferer as his workers from those above him, his mission has legitimate place only where ignorant and incompetent workers must be kept in order, and may well give place to factory labor. with skill comes organization and the power to claim better wages; and with both skilled labor and co-operation the sweater has no further place, and is transformed to foreman or superintendent. till this is accomplished, the word must stand, as it does to-day, for all imaginable evil that can hedge about both worker and work. chapter v. child of the east end. "what is it to be a lady?" the voice was the voice of a small and exceedingly grimy child, who held in her arms one still smaller and even grimier, known to the neighborhood as "wemock's orlando." under ordinary circumstances, neither wemock's nor anybody's youngest could have excited the least attention in tower hamlets where every doorway and passage swarms with children. but orlando had the proud distinction of having spent three months of his short life in hospital, "summat wrong with his inside" having resulted from the kick of a drunken father who objected to the sight or sound of the children he had brought into the world, these at present numbering but seven, four having been mercifully removed from further dispensation of strap and fist and heavy boot. such sympathy as the over-worked drudges who constituted the wives of the neighborhood had to spare, had concentrated on orlando, whose "inside" still continued wrong, and who, though almost three, had never been able to bear his weight on his feet, but became livid at once, if the experiment was tried,--a fact of perennial interest to the entire alley. wemock's fury at this state of things was something indescribable. a "casual" at the docks, with the uncertainty of work which is the destruction of the casual laborer, he regarded the children as simply a species of investment, slow of making any return, but certain in the end. up to five, say, they must be fed and housed somehow, but from five on a boy of any spirit ought to begin a career as mud-lark to graduate from it in time into anything for which this foundation had fitted him. the girls were less available, and he blessed his stars that there were but three, and cursed them as he reflected that polly was tied hand and foot to orlando, who persisted in living, and equally persisted in clinging to polly, who mothered him more thoroughly than any previous wemock had been. not that the actual mother had not some gleams of tenderness, at least for the babies. but life weighed heavily against any demonstration. she was simply a beast of burden, patient, and making small complaint, and adding to the intermittent family income in any way she could,--charing, tailoring, or sack-making when the machine was not in pawn, and standing in deadly terror of wemock's fist. the casual, like most of the lower order of laborers, has small opinion of women as a class, and meets any remonstrance from them as to his habits with an unvarying formula. "i'm yer 'usban', ain't i?" is the reply to request or objection alike, and "husband" by the casual is defined as "a man with a right to knock his woman down when he likes." this simplifies responsibility, and, being accepted with little or no question by the women, allows great latitude of action. wemock had learned that the strap was safer than a knock-down, however, as a dose of it overnight did not hinder his wife from crawling out of bed to prepare the breakfast and get to work, whereas a kick such as he preferred, had been known to disable her for a week, with inconvenient results as to his own dinners and suppers. "it's the liquor as does it. 'e's peaceable enough when the liquor's out of 'im. but their 'ands comes so 'eavy. they don't know how 'eavy their 'ands comes." thus mrs. wemock, standing in the doorway, for the moment holding orlando, who resented his transfer with a subdued howl of grief, and looked anxiously down the alley toward polly's retreating figure. "'ush now an' ma'll give him a winkle. polly's gone for winkles. it's winkles we'll 'ave for supper, and a blessing it's there's one thing cheap and with some taste to it. a penny-'orth even, goes quite a way, but a penny-'orth ain't much when there's a child to each winkle an' may be two." "the churchyard's been a better friend to me than to you," said a thin and haggard-looking woman, who had come across the street for a look at orlando. "out of my seventeen, there ain't but six left an' one o' them is in the colonies. there's small call to wish 'em alive, when there's nought but sorrow ahead. if we was ladies i suppose it might all be different." it was at this point that polly's question was heard,--polly, who had rushed back with the winkles and put the dish into her mother's hand and caught orlando as if she had been separated from him hours instead of minutes. and orlando in turn put his skinny little arms about her neck. whatever might be wrong with his inside, the malady had not reached his heart, which beat only for polly, his great dark eyes, hollow with suffering, fixing themselves on her face with a sort of adoration. "a lady?" mrs. wemock said reflectively, eying her winkles, "there's more than one kind, polly. a lady's mostly one that has nought to do but what she likes, and goes in a carriage for fear she'll soil her feet. but i've seen real ladies that thought on the poor, and was in and out among 'em. that kind is 'ard to find, polly. i never knew but two an' they're both dead. it's them as has money, that's ladies, and them that hasn't--why they isn't." "then i can't be a lady," said polly. "i heard nelly anderson say she meant to be a lady." "lord keep you from that kind!" said the mother hastily, with a significant look at her neighbor, which polly did not fail to note and puzzle over. tending orlando gave her much time for puzzling. she was known as an "old fashioned" child, with ways quite her own, always to be depended upon, and confiding in no one but orlando, who answered her in a language of his own. "when i am a lady, we will go away somewhere together," polly said. "i think i shall be a lady sometime, orlando, and then we'll have good times. there are good times somewhere, only they don't get into the buildings," and with a look at the sooty walls and the dirty passage she followed her mother slowly up the stairs, and took her three winkles and the big slice of bread and dripping, which she and orlando were to share, into the corner. orlando must be coaxed to eat, which was always a work of time, and before her own share had been swallowed, her father's step was on the stairs, and her mother turned round from the machine. "keep out of the way, polly. 'e's taken too much, i know by the step of 'im, and 'e won't 'alf know what he's about." polly shrunk back. there was no time to get under the bed, which she often did, and she hugged orlando close and waited fearfully. both were silent, but she put her bread behind her. to see them eating sometimes enraged him, and he had been known to fling loaf and teapot both from the windows. both were on the table now, two or three slices spread with dripping for the younger boys who would presently come in. wemock sat down, his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out to their utmost length, and looked first at his wife who was stitching trousers, and then at polly, whose eyes were fixed upon him. "i'll teach you to look at me like that, you brat," he said, rising slowly. "for the lord's sake, wemock!" his wife cried, for there was deeper mischief than usual in his tone. "remember what you did to orlando." "i'll do for him again. i've 'ad enough of him always hunder foot. out o' the way, you fool." polly looked toward the door. a beating for herself could be taken, but never for orlando. her mother had come between, and she saw her father strike her heavily, and then push her into the chair. "go on with your trousers," he said. "there's no money at the docks, and these children eating me out of house and home. a man might be master of his own. come 'ere. you won't, won't you? then--" there were oaths and a shriek from orlando, on whom the strap had fallen; and then polly, still holding him, rushed for the door, only to be caught back and held, while the heavy fist came down with cruel weight. "wemock's a bit worse than common," they said in the next room as the sounds began; but the shrieks in another moment had drawn every one in the buildings, and the doorway filled with faces, no one volunteering, however, to interfere with the briton's right to deal with his own as he will. he had flung polly from him, and she lay on the floor unconscious and bleeding. orlando had crept under the bed, and lay there paralyzed with terror; and the mother shrieked so loudly that the brute slunk back and seated himself again with attempted indifference. "you've done for yourself this time," a neighbor said, and wemock sprang up, too late to escape the policemen who had been brought by the sounds, not usual in broad daylight, and who suddenly had their hands upon him, while another stooped doubtfully over the child. "she's alive," he said. "they take a deal to kill 'em, such do, but she'll need the 'ospital. her arm's broke." he lifted the arm as he spoke, and it fell limp, a cry of pain coming from the child, whose eyes had opened a moment and then closed with a look of death on the face. an ambulance was passing. some one had been hurt on the docks, where accidents are always happening, and was being carried to the hospital; and a neighbor ran down. "it's best to do it sudden," she said, "or orlando 'll never let her go or her mother either," and she hailed the ambulance driver, who objected to taking two, but agreed when he found it was only a child. polly came to herself at last, gasping with pain. a broken arm was the least of it. there was a broken rib as well, and bruises innumerable. but worse than any pain was the separation from orlando, for whom polly wailed, till, in despair, the nurse promised to speak to the surgeon and see if he might not be brought; and, satisfied with this hope, the child lay quiet and waited. she was in a clean bed,--such a bed as she had never seen, and her soft dark eyes examined the nurse and all the strange surroundings in the intervals of pain. but fever came soon, and in long days of unconscious murmurings and tossings, all that was left of polly's thin little frame wasted away. "it is a hopeless case," the doctor said, "though after all with children you can never tell." there came a day when polly opened her eyes, quite conscious, and looked up once more at the nurse with the old appeal. "i want orlando. where's orlando?" "he can't come," the nurse said, after a moment, in which she turned away. "you promised," polly said faintly. "i know it," the nurse said. "he should come if he could, but he can't." "is he sick?" polly said after a pause. "did father hurt him?" "yes, he hurt him. he hurt him very much, but he can never hurt him any more. orlando is dead." polly lay quite silent, nor did her face change as she heard the words; but a smile came presently, and her eyes lightened. "you didn't know," she said. "orlando has come. he is right here, and somebody is carrying him. he is putting out his arms." the child had raised herself, and looked eagerly toward the foot of the bed, "she is bringing him to me. she says, 'polly, you 're going to be a lady and never do what you don't want to any more.' i thought i should be a lady sometime, because i wanted to so much; but i didn't think it would be so soon. they won't know me in the buildings. i'm going to be a lady, and never--" polly's eyes had closed. she fell back. what she had seen no man could know, but the smile stayed. it was quite certain that something at least had come to her of what she wanted. chapter vi. among the dressmakers. "an englishman's house is his castle," and an englishwoman's no less, and both he and she ward off intruders with an energy inherited from the days when all men were fighters, and intensified by generations of practice. even a government inspector is looked upon with deep disfavor as one result of the demoralization brought about by liberal and other loose ways of viewing public rights. the private, self-constituted one, it may then be judged rightly, is regarded as a meddlesome and pestilent busybody seeking knowledge which nobody should wish to obtain, and another illustration of what the nineteenth century is coming to. various committees of inquiry, from the organized charities and from private bodies of workers, visit manufactories and industries in general, where women are employed, to make it evident that there is a desire to know how they fare. why this wish has arisen, and why things are not allowed to remain as the fathers left them, are two questions at present distracting the british employer's mind, and likely, before the inquiry is ended, to distract it more, as, day by day, the numbers increase of those who persist in believing that they are in some degree their brothers' keepers,--a doctrine questioned ever since the story of time began. obstacles of every nature are placed in the way of legalized inspection, and evasion and subterfuge, masterly enough to furnish a congress of diplomatists with ideas, are in daily practice. years of experience make the inspector no less astute, and so the war goes on. it will be seen then, what difficulties hedge about the private inquirer, who must go armed with every obtainable guarantee, and even then leave the field quite conscious that the informants are chuckling over a series of misleading statements, and that not much will be made of that case. so little organization exists among the workers themselves, and there is such deadly fear of losing a place that women and girls listen silently to statements, which they denounce afterwards as absolutely false. natural as this is,--and it is one of the inevitable results of the system,--it is one of the worst obstacles in the way, not only of inquiry but any statements of results. "of course he lied or she lied," they say, "but don't for anything in the world let them know that we said so or that you know anything about it." this injunction, which for the individual worker's sake must be scrupulously attended to, hampers not only inquiry but reform, and delays still further the attempts at organization made here and there. the system applied to dressmaking, our present topic, differs from anything known in america save in one of its phases, and merits some description, representing as it does some lingering remnant of the old apprentice system. for the west end there is generally but one method. and here it may be said that the west end ignores absolutely any knowledge of what the east end methods may be. between them there is a great gulf fixed, and the poorest apprentice of a west end house regards herself as infinitely superior to the mistress of an east end business. for this charmed region of the west, whether large or small, has spent years in building up a reputation, and this is a portion of the guarantee that goes with the worker, who has learned her trade under their auspices. it is a slow process,--so slow, that the system is not likely to be adopted by hasty americans. in a first-class house in the west end, oxford and regent streets having almost a monopoly of this title, the premium demanded for an apprentice is from forty to sixty pounds. this makes her what is known as an "indoor apprentice," and entitles her to board and lodgings for two years. numbers are taken at once, beds are set close together in the rooms provided, and board is made of the cheapest, to prevent loss. this would seem very small, but add to it the fact, that the apprentice gives from twelve to sixteen hours a day of time and a year of time as assistant after the first probation is past, and it will be seen, that, even with no fee, the house is hardly likely to lose much. the out-door apprentices pay usually ten pounds and board and lodge at home, but hours are the same; never less than twelve, and in the busy season, fourteen and sixteen. tea is furnished them once a day, but no food, nor is there definite time for meals. in the case of in-door apprentices, with any rush of work, a supper is provided at ten, but the "out-doors" must bring such food as is needed. for them there is, as for learners, no pay for over-time; and the strain often costs the life of the country girls unused to confinement, who fall into quick consumption, induced not only by long hours of sitting bent over work, but by breathing air foul with the vile gas and want of ventilation, as well as, in many cases, the worst possible sanitary conditions. if the initiatory period is safely past, the apprentice becomes an "improver;" that is, she is allowed larger choice of work, looks on or even tries her own hand when draping is to be done, and if quick is shortly ranked as an assistant. with this stage comes a small wage. an out-door apprentice now earns from four to five shillings ($ . ) a week. the in-door one still receives only board, but soon graduates from second to first assistant, though the whole process requires not less than four years and is often made to cover six. as first assistant she is likely to have quarters slightly more comfortable than those of the apprentices, and she receives one pound a week,--often less, but never more. in case of over-time, this meaning anything over the twelve hours which is regarded as a day's work, various rates are paid. in the mourning department of one of the best known oxford street establishments, fourpence an hour is allowed. this rate is exceptionally high, being given because of the objection to evening work on black. the same house pays in the colored-suit department two and a half pence ( c.) an hour, and provides tea for the hands. twopence an hour is given in several other houses, but for the majority nothing whatever. the forewoman of one of these establishments began as an apprentice something over thirty years ago, and in giving these details and many others not included, expressed her own surprise that the amount of agitation as to over-time had produced so little tangible result. "the houses are on the lookout, it's true," she said; "and each one is afraid of getting into the papers for violating the law, so the apprentice is looked out for a little better than she was in my time. i've worked many a time when there was a press of work--some sudden order to be filled--all night long. they gave us plenty of tea, a hot supper at ten, and something else at two, but they never paid a farthing, and it never came to one of us that we'd any right to ask it. there was one--a plucky little woman and a splendid hand. she was first assistant and we'd been going on like this a week one year. the girls fell fainting from their chairs. i did myself though i was used to it; and she stood up there at midnight, just before the manager came in and said, 'girls, you've no right to take another stitch without pay. who'll stand by me if i say so when mr. b. comes in.' not one spoke. 'oh, you cowards!' she said. 'not one? then i'll speak for you.' two rose up then and threw down their work. ''tis a burning shame,' says they. 'say what you like!' mr. b. was there before the words were out of their mouths, 'what's this? what's this?' he said. 'not at work and the order to go out at noon?' 'pay us then for double work, and not drive us like galley slaves,' said mrs. colman, standing very straight, 'i speak for myself and for the rest. we are going home.' "the manager got purple. 'the first one that leaves this room, by g--, she'll never come back. what do you mean getting up this row, damn you?' 'i mean we're earning double, and ought to have it. why shouldn't our pockets hold some of the profits on this order as well as yours?' 'will you hush?' he says with his hand up as if he'd strike. 'no; not now, nor ever,' she says, she white and he purple, and out she walked; but none followed her. she never came back, and she was marked from that time, so she found it hard to get work. but she married again and went out to the colonies, so she hadn't to fight longer. it's over-time now, as much as then, that is the greatest trouble. we had a mutual improvement society when i was young, but oh, what hard work it was to go to it after nine in the evening and try to work, and it's hard work now, though people think you can be as brisk and wide awake after sewing twelve hours as if you'd been enjoying yourself." in a few dressmakers, who had observed intelligently various organizations among men-tailors, boot-makers, etc., started an association of the "dressmakers, milliners, and mantua makers," designed for mutual benefit, a subscription of twopence per week being added to a small entrance fee. rules were drawn up, one or two of which are given illustratively. "each person on joining is required to pay _one penny_ for a copy of the rules, _one penny_ for a card on which her payments will be entered, and _one shilling_ entrance fee--but the last may be paid by instalments of fourpence each. after thirty years of age the entrance fee shall be _d._ extra for every additional ten years. "members not working in a business house, or not working in the above trades, can only claim sick benefits, but the usual death levy shall also be made for them. "in case of death each member will be called upon to contribute _sixpence_ to be expended as the deceased member may have directed. "when a member is disabled by sickness (excepting in confinements), a notice must be signed by two members as vouchers to the secretary, who shall appoint the member living nearest to the sick member, with one member of the committee, to visit her weekly, and report to the committee before the allowance is paid, unless special circumstances require a relaxation of this rule. the committee may require a medical certificate." excellent as every provision was, and admirable work as was accomplished, the women, as is too often the case with women, lost mutual confidence, or could not be made to see the advantage of paying punctually, and the association dwindled down to a mere handful. in it reorganized, and its secretary, a working dressmaker, who learned her trade in a west end house, has labored in unwearied fashion to bring about some _esprit du corps_ and though often baffled, speaks courageously still of the better time coming when women will have some sense of the value of organization. her word confirms the facts gathered at many points in both east and west end. the east has reduced wages to starvation limit. a pound a week can still be earned in some houses at the west end--though fourteen or sixteen shillings is more usual; but for the other side, fourteen is still the highest point, and the scale descends to five and six--in one case to three and sixpence. over hours, scanty food, exhaustion, wasting sickness, and death, the friend at last, when the weary days are done;--this is the day for most. the american worker has distinct advantages on her side, the long unpaid apprenticeship here having no counterpart there, and the frightfully long working day being also shortened. many other disabilities are the same, but in this trade the advantage thus far is wholly for the american worker. chapter vii. nelly, a west-end milliner's apprentice. what polly had heard, listening silently, with "wemock's orlando" held close in her small arms, was quite true. nelly sanderson had determined to be a lady, and though uncertain as yet as to how it was to be brought about, felt that it must come. this she had made up her mind to when not much older than polly, and the desire had grown with her. it was perfectly plain from the difference between her and jim that nature had meant her for something better than to stitch shirt-bodies endlessly. at twelve she had begun to do this, portions of two or three previous years having been spent in a board school. then her time for work and contribution to the family support had come. she was only a "feller," and took her weekly bundle of work from a woman, who, in turn, had it from another woman, who took it from a master-sweater, who dealt directly with the great city houses; and between them all, nelly's wage was kept at the lowest point. but she did her work well, and was quick to a marvel; and her hope for the future carried her on through the monotonous days, broken only by her mother's scolding and jim's insolence. jim was the typical east end loafer,--a bullet head, closely cropped; dull round eyes, and fat nose, also rounded; a thick neck, and fat cheeks, in which were plainly to be seen the overdoses of beer and spirits he had drunk since he was ten or twelve years old. his mother had tried to keep him respectable. she had been a lady's maid; but that portion of her life was buried in mystery. it was only known she had come to norwood street when nelly was a baby, and that very shortly judkins, a young omnibus conductor, had fallen in love with her; and they had married, and taken rooms, and lived very comfortably till jim was three or four years old. but the taste for liquor was too strong; and long days in fog and rain, chilled to the marrow under the swollen gray clouds of the london winter, were some excuse for the rush to the "public" at the end of each trip. the day's wages at last were all swallowed, and the wife, like a good proportion of workmen's wives, found herself chief bread-winner, and tried first one trade and then another, till nelly's quick fingers grew serviceable. nelly was pretty,--more than pretty. even jim had moments of admiration; and the buildings, in which several of her admirers lived, had seen unending fights as to who had the best right to take her out on sundays. her waving red-brown hair, her great eyes matching it in tint to a shade, her long black lashes and delicate brows, the low white forehead and clear pale cheeks,--anybody could see that these were far and away beyond any girl in the buildings. the lips were too full, and the nose no particular shape; but the quick-moving, slender figure, like her mother's, and the delicate hands, which nelly hated to soil, and kept as carefully as possible,--all these were indications over which the women, in conclave over tea and shrimps, shook their heads. "'er father was a gentleman, that's plain to see. she'll go the same way her mother did. i'd not 'ave one of my hown boys take up with her, not for no money." this seemed the general verdict in the buildings; and though nelly sewed steadily all day and every day, the women still held to it, the men hotly contesting it, and family quarrels over the subject confirming the impression. nelly worked on, however, unmoved by criticism or approval, spending all that could be saved from the housekeeping on the most stylish clothes to be found in petticoat lane market, and denying herself even in these for the sake of a little hoard, which accumulated, oh! so slowly since it had been broken into, once for a new feather for her little hat, once for a day's pleasuring at greenwich; and nelly resolved firmly it should never happen again. one ambition filled her. this hateful east end must be left somehow. somehow she must get to be the lady which she felt sure she ought to be. there were hints of this sometimes in her mother's talk; but it was plain that there was nobody to help her to this but herself. already jim drank more than his share. he was going the way of his father, dead years before in a drunken frolic; and the income made from the little shop her mother had opened, to teach him how to make a living, covered expenses, and not much more. whatever was done for nelly must be done by herself. the way had opened, or begun to open, at greenwich. a tall, delicate girl, who proved to be a milliner's apprentice, had taken a fancy to her, and given her her first real knowledge of the delights of west end life. she had nearly ended her apprenticeship, and would soon be a regular hand; and nelly listened entranced to the description of marvellous hats and bonnets, and the people who tried them on, and looked disgustingly at her own. "you've got a touch, i know," the new friend said approvingly. "you'd get on. isn't there anybody to pay the premium for you?" nelly shook her head sorrowfully. "they couldn't do without me," she said. "there's mother and jim, that won't try to earn anything, and i stitch now twelve hours a day. i'm off shirts, and on trousers. trousers pay better. i've made eighteen shillings a week sometimes, but you must keep at it steady ahead for that." "it's a pity," her companion said reflectively. "you'd learn quick. in three months you'd be an improver, and begin to earn, and then there's no knowing where you'd stop. you might get to be owner." nelly turned suddenly. she had felt for some time that some one was listening to them. they were on the boat, sitting on the central seat, back to back with a row of merry-makers; but this was some one different. "i beg your pardon," he said; and nelly flushed with pleasure at a tone no one had ever used before. "i have heard a little you were saying. i am interested in this question of wages, and very anxious to know more about it. i wish you would tell me what you know about this stitching." he had come round to their side--a tall blond man of thirty, dressed in light gray, and a note-book in his hand. he was so serious and gentle that it was impossible to take offence, and very soon nelly was telling him all she knew of prices in cheap clothing of every sort, and how the workers lived. she hated it all,--the grime and sordidness, the drunken men and screaming children; and her eyes flashed as she talked of it, and a flush came to her cheeks. "you ought to have something better," the young man said presently, his eyes fixed upon her. "we must try to find something better." nelly's companion smiled significantly, but he did not notice it. evidently he was unlike most of the gentlemen she had seen in the west end. yet he certainly was a gentleman. he took them to a small restaurant when nelly had answered all his questions, and they dined sumptuously, or so it seemed to them, and he sat by them and told stories, and entertained them generally all the way home. "i shall go down the river next sunday," he said low to nelly as they landed. "do you like to row? if you do, come to chelsea to the bridge, and we will try it from there." this was the beginning, and for many weeks it meant simply that he pleased his æsthetic sense, as well as convinced himself that he was doing a good and righteous deed in making life brighter for an east end toiler. he had given her the premium, and nelly, without any actual lie, had convinced her mother that the west end milliner was willing to take her for only two months of time given, and then begin wages. she brought out her own little fund, swollen by several shillings taken from one of the sovereigns given her, and proved that there was enough here to keep them till she began to earn wages again; and mrs. judkins allowed herself at last to be persuaded, feeling that a chance had come for the girl which must not be allowed to pass. so nelly's apprenticeship began. there was less rose-color than she had imagined. the hours were long, longer sometimes than her stitching had been, and many of the girls looked at her jealously. but maria, her first friend, remained her friend. the two sat side by side, and nelly caught the knack by instinct almost, and even in the first week or two caught a smile from madame, who paused to consider the twist of a bow, quite parisian in its effect, and said to herself that here was a hand who would prove valuable. nelly went home triumphant that night, and even her mother's sour face relaxed. she had taken up trouser-stitching again, forcing jim to mind the shop, and saying to herself that the family fortunes were going to mend, and that nelly would do it. sundays were always free. nobody questioned the girl. the young men in the buildings and the street gave up pursuit. plainly nelly was not for them, but had found her proper place in the west end. they bowed sarcastically, and said, "'ow's your royal 'ighness?" when they met; but nelly hardly heeded them. the long wish had taken shape at last,--she was going to be a lady. summer ended. there was no more boating, but there were still long walks and excursions. the apprenticeship was over, and nelly was now a regular hand, and farther advanced than many who had worked a year or two. she made good wages, often a pound a week. her dress was all that such a shop demanded; her manner quieter every day. "she's a lady, that's plain," maria said; and madame agreed with her, and took the girl more and more into favor. nelly had a little room of her own now, next to maria. she seldom went home, save to take money to her mother, and she never stayed long. "it's best not," mrs. judkins said. "you're bound for something better, and you'll get it. this isn't your place. you're a bit pale, nelly. it's the hours and the close room, i suppose?" "yes; it's the hours," nelly said. "when there's a press, we're often kept on till nine or ten; but it's a good place." she lingered to-day till jim came in. jim grew worse and worse, and she hurried away as she saw him swaggering toward the door; but there were tears in her eyes as she turned away. she passed her friend of the summer in regent street, and looked back for a moment. he had nodded, but was talking busily with a tall man, who eyed nelly sharply. she had found that he lived in chelsea, and was a literary man of some sort,--she hardly knew what,--and that his name was stanley; beyond this she knew nothing. some day he would make her a lady,--but when? there was need of haste. no one knew how great need. another month or two, the winter well upon them, and there came a day when madame, who, as nelly entered the workroom, had stopped for a moment and looked at her, first in surprise, then in furious anger, burst out upon her in words that scorched the ears to hear. no girl like that need sit down among decent girls. march, and never show her shameful face again. nelly rose silently, and took down her hat and shawl, and as silently went out, madame's shrill voice still sounding. what should she do? the end was near. she could not go home. she must find herbert, and tell him; but he would not be at home before night. she knew his number now, and how to find him. he must make it all right. she went into hyde park and walked about, and when she grew too cold, into a cocoa-room, and so the day wore away; and at five she took a chelsea omnibus, and leaned back in the corner thinking what to say. the place was easily found, and she knocked, with her heart beating heavily, and her voice trembling as a maid opened the door and looked at her a moment. "come this way," she said, certain it must be a lady,--a visitor from the country, perhaps; and nelly followed her into a back drawing-room, where a lady sat with a baby on her lap, and two or three children about her. a little boy ran forward, then stood still, his frightened, surprised eyes on nelly's eyes, which were fixed upon him in terror. "whose is he?--whose?" she stammered. "he is herbert stanley, junior," the lady said with a smile. "i'm mrs. stanley. good heaven! what is it?" nelly had stood for a moment, her hands reaching out blindly, the card with its name and number still in them. "i must go," she said. "i must look for the real herbert. this is another." she fell as the words ended, still holding the card tight; and when they had revived her, only shook her head as questions were asked. the boy stood looking at her with his father's eyes. there could be no doubt. nelly rose and looked around; then, with no word to tell who she might be, went out into the night. she crossed the street, and stood hesitating; and as she stood a figure came swiftly down the street on the other side, and ran up the steps of the house she had left. there was no doubt any more; and with a long, bitter cry nelly fled toward the river. there was no pause. she knew the way well, and if she had not, instinct would have led her, and did lead, through narrow alleys and turnings till the embankment was reached. no stop, even then. a policeman saw the flying figure, and a man who tried to hinder her heard the words, "i shall never be a lady now," but that was all; and when he saw her face again the river had done its work, and the story was plain, though for its inner pages only the man who was her murderer has the key. chapter viii. london shirt-makers. bloomsbury has a cheerful sound, and, like hop vine garden and violet lane, and other titles no less reassuring, seems to promise a breath of something better than the soot-laden atmosphere offered by a london winter. but hop vine garden is but a passage between a line of old buildings, and ends in a dark court and a small and dirty "public," the beer-pots of which hold the only suggestion of hops to be discovered. violet lane is given over to cat's-meat and sausage makers, the combination breeding painful suspicions in the seeker's mind, and bloomsbury has long since ceased to own sight or smell of any growing thing. but, in a gray and forlorn old group of houses known as clark's buildings, will be found, on certain evenings in the month, a little knot of women, each with open account-book, studying over small piles of pence and silver, and if their looks are any indication, drawing very little satisfaction from the operation. they are the secretaries of the little societies organized by the late mrs. patterson, who, like many other philanthropists, came to see that till the workers themselves were roused to the consciousness of necessity for union, but little could be accomplished for them. a few of the more intelligent, stirred by her deep earnestness, banded together twelve years ago, and organized a society known as "the society of women employed in shirt, collar, and under-linen making;" and here may be found the few who have, from long and sharp experience, discovered the chief needs of workers in these trades. when outward conditions as they show themselves at present have been studied, when homes and hours and wages and all the details of the various branches have become familiar, it is to this dim little hall that one comes for a final puzzle over all that is wrong. for it is all wrong; nor in any corner of working london, can any fact or figures make a right of the toil that is an old, old story; so old that there is even impatience if one tells it again. numbers are unknown, each one who investigates giving a different result; but it is quite safe to say that five hundred thousand women live by the industries named in the society's title, not one of whom has ever received, or ever will receive, under the present system, a wage which goes beyond bare subsistence. here, as in new york, or any other large city of the united states, the conditions governing the trade are much the same. the women, untrained and unskilled in every other direction, turn to these branches of sewing as the possibility for all, and scores wait for any and every chance of work from manufactory or small house. as with us, the work is chiefly put out, and necessarily at once arises the middle-man, or a gradation of middle-men, each of whom must have his profit, taken in every case--not from employer, but worker. the employer fixes his rates without reference to these. he is fighting, also, for subsistence, plus as many luxuries as can be added from the profits of his superior power over conditions. he may be, and often is, to those nearest him, kind, unselfish, eager for right. but the hands are "hands," and that is all; and the middle-man, of whom the very same statement may be true, deals with the hands with an equal obliviousness as to their connection with bodies and souls. the original price per dozen of the garments made may be the highest in the market, but before the woman who works is reached there are often five, and sometimes more, transfers. where workers are employed on the premises, they fare better, being paid by the piece. the minutest divisions of labor prevail, even more than with us--a shirt passing through many hands, the weekly wage differing for each. the "fitter," for instance, must be a skilled workwoman, the flatness and proper set of the shirt front depending upon correct fitting at the neck. for this fitting in west end houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, and can in a week fit twenty dozen--this meaning a pound a week. but slack seasons reduce the amount, so that often she earns but nine or ten shillings, her average for the year being about fourteen. for the grades below her the sum is proportionately less. the most thoroughly skilled hand in either shirt-making or under-linen has been known to make as high as twenty-eight shillings a week ($ . ), but this is phenomenal; nor, indeed, does any such possibility remain, prices having gone down steadily for some years. a pound a week for a woman, as has been stated elsewhere, is regarded even by just employers as all that can be required by the most exacting; and with this standard in mind, a fall of three or four shillings seems a matter of slight importance. taking the various industries in which women are employed, the needle, as usual, leading, and the shirt-makers being a large per cent of the number, there are in london nearly a million women, self-supporting and self-respecting, and often the sole dependence of a family. this excludes the numbers of thriftless and otherwise helpless poor whose work is variable, and who, at the best, can earn only the lowest possible wages as unskilled laborers. for the skilled ones, doing their best in long days of work, never less than twelve hours, the average earnings, after all chances of slack seasons and accidents have been taken into account, is never over ten shillings a week. it is worth while to consider what ten shillings can do. the allowance per head for rations for the old people in the whitechapel workhouse, one of the best of its class, is according to the authorities, three shillings eleven pence ( c.) per week, the quantity falling somewhat below the amount which physiologists regard as necessary for an able-bodied adult. these supplies are purchased by contract, and thus a full third lower than the single buyer can command. but she has learned that appetite is not a point to be considered, and for the most part confines herself to tea and bread and butter, with a cheap relish now and then. thus four shillings a week is made to cover food, and three shillings gives her a small back room. for such lights, fire, and washing as cannot be dispensed with, must be counted another shilling. out of the remaining two shillings must come her twopence a week, if she belongs to any trades-union, leaving one shilling and ten-pence for clothes, holidays, amusements, saving, and the possible doctor's bill, a sum for the year, at the utmost, of from four pounds fifteen shillings and ninepence, or a trifle under twenty dollars. these women are, every one of them, past-mistresses in the art of doing without; and they do without with a patient courage, and often a cheerfulness, that is one of the most pathetic facts in their story. it is the established order of things. why should they cry or make ado? yet, as the workshop has its own education for men, and gives us the order known as the "intelligent workman," so it gives us also the no less intelligent workwoman, possessing not only the natural womanly gift of many resources, but the added power of just so much technical training as she may have received in her apprenticeship to her trade. miss simcox, who has made a study of the whole question, comments on this, in an admirable article in one of the monthlies for , emphasizing the fact that these women, fitted by experience and long training for larger work, must live permanently, with absolutely no outlook or chance of change, on the border-land of poverty and want. they know all the needs, all the failings of their own class. many of them give time, after the long day's work is done, to attempts at organizing and to general missionary work among their order; and by such efforts the few and feeble unions among them have been kept alive. but vital statistics show what the end is where such double labor must be performed. these women who have character and intelligence, and unselfish desire to work for others, have an average "expectation of life" less by twenty years than that of the class who know the comfortable ease of middle-class life. it is one of these workers who said not long ago, her words being put into the mouth of one of mr. besant's characters: "ladies deliberately shut their eyes; they won't take trouble; they won't think; they like things about them to look smooth and comfortable; they will get things cheap if they can. _what do they care if the cheapness is got by starving women?_ who is killing this girl here? bad food and hard work. cheapness! what do the ladies care how many working girls are killed?" the individual woman brought face to face with the woman dying from overwork, would undoubtedly care. but the workers are out of sight, hidden away in attic and basement, or the upper rooms of great manufactories. the bargains are plain to see, every counter loaded, every window filled. and so society, which will have its bargains, is practically in a conspiracy against the worker. the woman who spends on her cheapest dress the utmost sum which her working sister has for dress, amusements, culture, and saving, preaches thrift, and it is certain the working classes would be better off if they had learned to save. small wonder that the workers doubt them and their professed friendship, and that the breach widens day by day between classes and masses, bridged only by the work of those who, like the workers in the women's provident league, know that it is to the rich that the need for industry must be preached, not to the poor. organization holds education for both, and it is now quite possible to know something of the methods of prominent firms with their workwomen, and to shun those which refuse to consider the questions of over-time, of unsanitary workrooms, of unjust fines and reductions, and the thousand ways of emptying some portion of the workwoman's purse into that of the employer. it is women who must do this, and till it is done, justice is mute, and the voice of our sisters' blood cries aloud from the ground. chapter ix. the tale of a barrow. if the west end knows not the east end, save as philanthropy and mr. walter besant have compelled it, much less does it know leather lane, a remnant of old london, now given over chiefly to italians, and thus a little more picturesquely dirty than in its primal state of pure english grime. the eager business man hurrying down "that part of holborn christened high," is as little aware of the neighborhood of leather lane and what it stands for, as the new yorker on broadway is of mulberry street and the great bend. for either or both, entrance is entrance into a world quite unknown to decorous respectability, and, if one looks aright, as full of wonders and discoveries as other unknown countries under our feet. out of leather lane, with its ancient houses swarming with inhabitants and in all stages of decay and foulness, open other lanes as unsavory, through which the costers drive their barrows, chaffering with dishevelled women, who bear a black eye or other token that the british husband has been exercising his rights, and who find bargaining for a bunch of turnips or a head of cabbage an exhilarating change. there were many costers and many barrows, but among them all hardly one so popular as "old widgeon," who had been in the business forty years; and as he had chosen to remain a bachelor, an absolutely unheard-of state of things, he was an object of deepest interest to every woman in leather lane and its purlieus. it was always possible that he might change his mind; and from the oldest inhabitant down to the child just beginning to ask questions, there was always a sense of expectation where widgeon was concerned. he, in the meantime, did his day's work contentedly, had a quick eye for all trouble, and in such cases was sure to give overweight, or even to let the heavy penny or two fall accidentally into the purchase. his donkey had something the same expression of patient good-humored receptivity. the children climbed over the barrow and even on the donkey's back, and though widgeon made great feint of driving them off with a very stubby whip, they knew well that it would always just miss them, and returned day after day undismayed. he "did for himself" in a garret in a dark little house, up a darker court; and here it was popularly supposed he had hidden the gains of all these forty years. they might be there or in the donkey's stable, but they were somewhere, and then came the question, who would have them when he died? to these speculations nan listened silently, in the pauses of the machines on which her mother and three other women stitched trousers. nothing was expected of her but to mind the baby, to see that the fire kept in, just smouldering, and that there was always hot water enough for the tea. on the days when they all stitched she fared well enough; but when she had carried home the work, and received the money, there was a day, sometimes two or three, in which gin ruled, and the women first shouted and sang songs, and at last lay about the floor in every stage of drunkenness. gradually chances for work slipped away; the machines were given up, and the partnership of workers dissolved, and at twelve, nan and the baby were beggars and the mother in prison for aggravated assault on a neighbor. she died there, and thus settled one problem, and now came the other, how was nan to live? old widgeon answered this question. they had always been good friends from the day he had seen her standing, holding the baby, crippled and hopelessly deformed from its birth. his barrow was almost empty, and the donkey pointing his long ears toward the stable. "get in," he said, "an' i'll give you a bit of a ride," and nan, speechless with joy, climbed in and was driven to the stable, and once there, watched the unharnessing and received some stray oranges as she finally turned away. from that day old widgeon became her patron saint. she had shot up into a tall girl, shrinking from those about her, and absorbed chiefly in the crooked little figure, still "the baby;" but tall as she might be, she was barely twelve, and how should she hire a machine and pay room rent and live? widgeon settled all that. "you know how to stitch away at them trousers?" he had said, and nan nodded. "then i'll see you through the first week or two," he said; "but, mind! don't you whisper it, or i'll 'ave hevery distressed female in the court down on me, and there's enough hof 'em now." nan nodded again, but he saw the tears in her eyes, and regarded words as quite unnecessary. the sweater asked no questions when she came for a bundle of work, nor did she tell him that she alone was now responsible. she had learned to stitch. skill came with practice, and she might as well have such slight advantage as arose from being her mother's messenger. so nan's independent life began, and so it went on. she grew no taller, but did grow older, her silent gravity making her seem older still. it was hard work. she had never liked tea, and she loathed the sight and smell of either beer or spirits, old experience having made them hateful. thus she had none of the nervous stimulant which keeps up the ordinary worker, and with small knowledge of any cookery but boiling potatoes and turnips, and frying bacon or sprats, fared worse than her companions. but she had learned to live on very little. she stitched steadily all day and every day, gaining more and more skill, but never able to earn more than fourteen shillings a week. prices went down steadily. at fourteen shillings she could live, and had managed even not only to pay widgeon but to pick up some "bits of things." she was like her father, the old people in the alley said. he had been a silent, decent, hard-working man, who died broken-hearted at the turn his wife took for drink. nan had his patience and his faithfulness; and johnny, who crawled about the room, and could light a fire and do some odds and ends of house-keeping, was like her, and saved her much time as he grew older, but hardly any bigger. he had even learned to fry sprats, and to sing, in a high, cracked, little voice, a song known throughout the alley:-- "oh, 'tis my delight of a friday night, when sprats they isn't dear, to fry a couple o' dozen or so upon a fire clear." there are many verses of this ditty, all ending with the chorus:-- "oh, 'tis my delight of a friday night!" and johnny varied the facts ingeniously, and shouted "bacon," or anything else that would fry, well pleased at his own ingenuity. "he was 'wanting.' nan might better put him away in some asylum," the neighbors said; but nan paid no attention. he was all she had, and he was much better worth working for than herself, and so she went on. old widgeon had been spending the evening with them. nan had stitched on as she must; for prices had gone down again, and she was earning but nine shillings a week. widgeon seldom said much. he held johnny on his knee, and now and then looked at nan. "it's a dog's life," he said at last. "it's far worse than a dog's. you'd be better off going with a barrow, nan. i'm a good mind to leave you mine, nan. you'd get a bit of air, then, and you'd make--well, a good bit more than you do now." widgeon had checked himself suddenly. nobody knew what the weekly gain might be, but people put it as high as three pounds; and this was fabulous wealth. "i've thought of it," nan said. "i've thought of it ever since that day you rode me and johnny in the barrow. do you mind? the donkey knows me now, i think. he's a wise one." "ay, he's a wise one," the old man said. "donkeys is wiser than folks think." he put johnny down suddenly, and sat looking at him strangely; but nan did not see. the machine whirred on, but it stopped suddenly as johnny cried out. widgeon had slipped silently from his chair; his eyes were open, but he did not seem to see her, and he was breathing heavily. nan ran into the passage and called an old neighbor, and the two together, using all their strength, managed to get him to the bed. "it's a stroke," the woman said. "lord love you, what'll you do? he can't stay here. he'd better be sent to 'ospital." "i'll be 'anged first," said old widgeon, who had opened his eyes suddenly and looked at them both. "i was a bit queer, but i'm right enough now. who talks about 'ospitals?" he tried to move and his face changed. "i'm a bit queer yet," he said, "but it'll pass; it'll pass. nan, you'll not mind my being in your way for a night. there's money in me pocket. maybe there's another room to be 'ad." "there's a bit of a one off me own that was me john's, an' him only gone yesterday," said the woman eagerly; "an' a bed an' all, an' openin' right off of this. the door's behind that press. it's one with this, an' the two belongs together, an' for two an' six a week without, an' three an' six with all that's in it, it's for anybody that wants it." "i'll take it a week," said old widgeon, "but i'll not want the use of it more than this night. i'm a bit queer now, but it'll pass; it'll pass." the week went, but old widgeon was still "a bit queer;" and the doctor, who was at last called in, said that he was likely to remain so. one side was paralyzed. it might lessen, but would never recover entirely. he would have to be looked out for. this was his daughter? she must understand that he needed care, and would not be able to work any more. old widgeon heard him in silence, and then turned his face to the wall, and for hours made no sign. when he spoke at last, it was in his usual tone. "i thought to end my days in the free air," he said, "but that ain't to be. and i'm thinking the stroke's come to do you a good turn, nan. there's the donkey and the barrow, and everybody knowing it as well as they know me. i'll send you to my man in covent garden. he's a fair 'un. he don't cheat. he'll do well by you, an' you shall drive the barrow and see what you make of it. we'll be partners, nan. you look out for me a bit, an' i'll teach you the business and 'ave an heye to johnny. what do you say? will you try it? it'll break me 'art if that donkey and barrow goes to hanybody that'll make light of 'em hand habuse 'em. there hain't such another donkey and barrow in all london, and you're one that knows it, nan." "yes, i know it," nan said. "you ought to know, if you think i could do it." "there's nought that can't be done if you sets your mind well to it," said old widgeon. "and now, nan, 'ere's the key, and you get billy just by the stable there to move my bits o' things over here. that court's no place for you, an' there's more light here. billy's a good 'un. he'll 'elp you when you need it." this is the story of the fresh-faced, serious young woman who drives a donkey-barrow through certain quiet streets in northwest london, and has a regular line of customers, who find her wares, straight from covent garden, exactly what she represents. health and strength have come with the new work, and though it has its hardships, they are as nothing compared with the deadly, monotonous labor at the machine. johnny, too, shares the benefit, and holds the reins or makes change, at least once or twice a week, while old widgeon, a little more helpless, but otherwise the same, regards his "stroke" as a providential interposition on nan's behalf, and nan herself as better than any daughter. "i've all the good of a child, and none o' the hups hand downs o' the married state," he chuckles; "hand so, whathever you think, i'm lucky to the hend." chapter x. street trades among women. "with hall the click there is to a woman's tongue you'd think she could 'patter' with the best of the men, but, lor' bless you! a woman can't 'patter' any more'n she can make a coat, or sweep a chimley. and why she can't beats me, and neither i nor nobody knows." "to patter" is a verb conjugated daily by the street seller of any pretensions. the coster needs less of it than most vendors, his wares speaking for themselves; but the general seller of small-wares, bootlaces, toys, children's books, and what not, must have a natural gift, or acquire it as fast as possible. to patter is to rattle off with incredible swiftness and fluency, not only recommendations of the goods themselves, but any side thoughts that occur; and often a street-seller is practically a humorous lecturer, a student of men and morals, and gives the result in shrewd sentences well worth listening to. half a dozen derivations are assigned to the word, one being that it comes from the rattled off _paternosters_ of the devout but hasty catholic, who says as many as possible in a given space of time. be this as it may, it is quite true that pattering is an essential feature of any specially successful street-calling, and equally true that no woman has yet appeared who possesses the gift. in spite of this nearly fatal deficiency, innumerable women pursue street trades, and, notwithstanding exposure and privation and the scantiest of earnings, have every advantage over their sisters of the needle. rheumatism, born of bad diet and the penetrating rawness and fogs of eight months of the english year, is their chief enemy; but as a whole they are a strong, hardy, and healthy set of workers, who shudder at the thought of bending all day over machine or needle, and thank the fate that first turned them toward a street-calling. so conservative, however, is working england, that the needlewoman, even at starvation point, feels herself superior to a street-seller; and the latter is quite conscious of this feeling, and resents it accordingly. with many the adoption of such employment is the result of accident, and the women in it divide naturally into four classes: ( ) the wives of street-sellers; ( ) mechanics, or laborers' wives who go out street-selling while their husbands are at work, in order to swell the family income; ( ) the widows of former street-sellers; ( ) single women. trades that necessitate pushing a heavy barrow, and, indeed, most of those involving the carrying of heavy weights, are in the hands of men, and also the more skilled trades, such as the selling of books or stationery,--in short, the business in which patter is demanded. occasionally there is a partnership, and man and wife carry on the same trade, she aiding him with his barrow, but for the most part they choose different occupations. in the case of one man in whitechapel who worked for a sweater; the wife sold water-cresses morning and evening, while the wife of a bobbin turner had taken to small-wares, shoe-laces, etc. as a help. both tailor and turner declared that, if things went on as they were at present, they should take to the streets also; for earnings were less and less, and they were "treated like dirt, and worse." the women whose trades have been noted are dealers in fish, shrimps, and winkles, and sometimes oysters, fruit, and vegetables,--fruit predominating, orange-women and girls being as much a feature of london street life as in the days of pretty nelly gwynne. sheep-trotters, too, are given over to women, with rice-milk, which is a favorite street-dainty, requiring a good deal of preparation; they sell curds and whey, and now and then, though very seldom, they have a coffee or elder-wine stand, the latter being sold hot and spiced, as a preventive of rheumatism and chill. to these sales they add fire-screens and ornaments (the english grate in summer being filled with every order of paper ornamentation), laces, millinery, cut flowers, boot and corset laces, and small-wares of every description, including wash-leathers, dressed and undressed dolls, and every variety of knitted articles, mittens, cuffs, socks, etc. it will be seen that the range in street trades is far wider for the english than for the american woman, to whom it would almost never occur as a possible means of livelihood. but london holds several thousands of these women, a large proportion irish, it is true, with a mixture of other nationalities, but english still predominating. the irishwoman is more fluent, and can even patter in slight degree, but has less intelligence, and confines herself to the lower order of trades. for both irish and english there is the same deep-seated horror of the workhouse. all winter a young irishwoman has sat at the corner of a little street opening from the commercial road, a basket of apples at her side, and her thin garments no protection against the fearful chill of fog and mist. she had come to london, hoping to find a brother and go over with him to america; but no trace of him could be discovered, and so she borrowed a shilling and became an apple-seller. "god knows," she said, "i'd be betther off in the house [workhouse], for it's half dead i am entirely; but i'd rather live on twopence a day than come to that." practically she was living on very little more. an aunt, also a street-seller, had taken her in. she rented a small room near by, for which they paid two shillings a week, their whole expenses averaging sixpence each a day. naturally they were half starved; but they preferred this to "the house," and no one who has examined these retreats can blame them. it is the poor who chiefly patronize these street-sellers, and they swarm where the poor are massed. the "borough," on the surrey side of the river, with its innumerable little streets and lanes, each more wretched than the last, has hundreds of them, no less than the better-known east end. leather lane, one of the most crowded and distinctive of the quarters of the poor, though comparatively little known, has also its network of alleys and courts opening from it, and is one of the most crowded markets in the city, rivalling even petticoat lane. the latter, whose time-honored name has foolishly been changed to middlesex street, is an old-clothes market, and presents one of the most extraordinary sights in london; but the trade is chiefly in the hands of men, though their wives usually act as assistants and determine the quality of a garment till the masculine sense has been educated up to the proper point. any very small, very old, and very dirty street at any point has its proportion of street-sellers, whose dark, grimy, comfortless rooms are their refuge at night. other rooms of a better order are occupied, it may be, by some relative or child to be supported; and higher still rank those that are counted homes, where husband and wife meet when the day's work is done. like the needlewomen, the diet of the majority is meagre and poor to a degree. the irishwoman is much more ready to try to make the meal hot and relishable than the englishwoman, though even she confines herself to cheap fish and potatoes, herring or plaice at two a penny. a quiet, very respectable looking woman, the widow of a coster, sold cakes of blacking and small-wares, and gave her view of this phase of the question. "it's cheaper, their way of doing. oh, yes, but not so livening. i could live cheaper on fish and potatoes than tea and bread and butter; but that ain't it. they're more trouble, an' when you've been on your legs all day, an' get to your bit of a home for a cup of tea, you want a bit of rest, and you can't be cooking and fussing with fish. there's always a neighbor to give you a jug of boiling water, if you've no time for fire, or it's summer, and tea livens you up a bit where a herring won't. i take mine without milk, and like it better without, and often i don't have butter on me bread. but i get along, and, please god, i'll be able to keep out of the 'house' to the end." the married women fare better. the men decline to be put off with bread and tea, and the cook-shops and cheap markets help them to what they call good living. they buy "good block ornaments," that is, small pieces of meat, discolored but not dirty nor tainted, which are set out for sale on the butcher's block. tripe and cowheel are regarded as dainties, and there is the whole range of mysterious english preparations of questionable meat, from sausage and polonies to saveloys and cheap pies. soup can be had, pea or eel, at two or three pence a pint, and beer, an essential to most of them, is "threepence a pot [quart] in your own jugs." a savory dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, and the english worker fares better in this respect than the american, for whom there is much less provision in the way of cheap food and cook-shops. in fact the last are almost unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no means taking their place. even with bread and tea alone, there is a good deal more nourishment, since english bread is never allowed to rise to the over-lightness which appears an essential to the american buyer. the law with english breads and cakes of whatever nature appears to be to work in all the flour the dough can hold, and pudding must be a slab, and bread compact and dense to satisfy the english palate. dripping is the substitute for butter, and the children eat the slice of bread and dripping contentedly. fat of any sort is in demand, the piercing rawness of an english winter seeming to call for heating food no less than that of the esquimaux for its rations of blubber and tallow. but the majority of the women leave dripping for the children, and if a scrap of butter cannot be had, rest contented with bread and tea, and an occasional pint of beer. for workingwomen as a class, however, there is much less indulgence in this than is supposed. to the men it is as essential as the daily meals, and the women regard it in the same way. "we do well enough with our tea, but a man must have his pint," they say; and this principle is applied to the children, the girls standing by while the boys take their turn at the "pot of mild." this for the best order of workers. below this line are all grades of indulgence ending with the woman who earns just enough for the measure of gin that will give her a day or an hour of unconsciousness and freedom from any human claim. but the pressure of numbers and of competing workers compels soberness, the steadiest and most capable being barely able to secure subsistence, while below them is every conceivable phase of want and struggle, more sharply defined and with less possibility of remedy than anything found in the approximate conditions on american soil. chapter xi. london shop-girls. "it's the ladies that's in the way, mum. once get a lady to think that a girl isn't idling because she's sitting down, and the battle's won. but a lady comes into a shop blacker 'n midnight if every soul in it isn't on their feet and springing to serve her. i've got seats, but, bless you! my trade 'd be ruined if the girls used them much. 'tisn't that i'm not willing, and me brother as well. it's the customers, the lady customers, that wouldn't stand it. its them that you've got to talk to." once more it is a woman who is apparently woman's worst enemy, and london sins far more heavily in this respect than new york, and for a very obvious reason, that of sharply defined lines of caste, and the necessity of emphasizing them felt by all whose position does not speak for itself. a "born lady" on entering a shop where women clerks were sitting, might realize that from eleven to fourteen hours' service daily might well be punctuated by a few moments on the bits of board pushed in between boxes, which do duty for seats, and be glad that an opportunity had been improved. not so the wife of the prosperous butcher or baker or candlestick maker, rejoicing, it may be, in the first appearance in plush and silk, and bent upon making it as impressive as possible. to her, obsequiousness is the first essential of any dealing with the order from which she is emerging; and her custom will go to the shop where its outward tokens are most profuse. a clerk found sitting is simply embodied impertinence, and the floor manager who allows it an offender against every law of propriety; and thus it happens that seats are slipped out of sight, and exhausted women smile and ask, as the purchase is made, "and what is the next pleasure?" in a tone that makes the american hearer cringe for the abject humility that is the first condition of success as seller. even the best shops are not exempt from this, and as one passes from west to east the ratio increases, culminating in the oily glibness of the bargain-loving jew, and his no less bargain-loving london brother of whitechapel, or any other district unknown to fashion. this, however, is a merely outward phase. the actual wrongs of the system lie deeper, but are soon as apparent. for the shop-girl, as for the needlewoman or general worker of any description whatsoever, over-time is the standing difficulty, and a grievance almost impossible to redress. that an act of parliament forbids the employment of any young person under eighteen more than eleven hours a day, makes small difference. inspectors cannot be everywhere at once, and violations are the rule. in fact, the law is a dead letter, and the employer who finds himself suddenly arraigned for violation is as indignant as if no responsibility rested upon him. a committee has for many months been doing self-elected work in this direction, registering the names of shops where over-hours are demanded, informing the clerks of the law and its bearings, and urging them to make formal complaint. the same difficulty confronts them here as in the attempts to reduce over-time for tailoresses and general needlewomen--the fear of the workers themselves that any complaint will involve the losing of the situation; and thus silent submission is the rule for all, any revolt bringing upon them instant discharge. in a prolonged inquiry into the condition of shop-girls in both the west and east end, the needs to be met first of all summed themselves up in four: ( ) more seats and far more liberty in the use of them; ( ) better arrangements for midday dinner--on the premises if possible, the girls now losing much of the hour in a hurried rush to the nearest eatinghouse; ( ) with this, some regularity as to time for dinner, this being left at present to the caprice of the manager, who both delays and shortens time; ( ) much greater care in the selection of managers. a fifth point might well be added, that of a free afternoon each week. this has been given by a few london firms, and has worked well in the added efficiency and interest of the girls, but by the majority, is regarded as a wild and very useless innovation. the first point is often considered as settled, yet for both sides of the sea is actually in much the same case. seats are kept out of sight, and for the majority of both sellers and buyers, there is the smallest comprehension of the strain of continuous standing, or its final effect. it is the popular conviction that women "get used to it," and to a certain extent this is true, the strong and robust adjusting themselves to the conditions required. but the majority must spend the larger portion of the week's earnings on the neat clothing required by the position, and to accomplish this they go underfed to a degree that is half starvation. it is this latter division of shop girls who suffer, not only from varicose veins brought on by long standing, but from many other diseases, the result of the same cause; yet, till women, who come as purchasers to the shops where women are employed, realize and remember this, reform under this head is practically impossible. the employer knows that, even if a few protest against the custom, his trade would suffer were it done away with; and thus buyer and seller form a combination against which revolt is impossible. the inquiry brought one fact to light, which, so far as i know, has as yet no counterpart in the united states, and this is, that in certain west end shops every girl must conform to a uniform size of waist, this varying from eighteen to twenty inches, but never above twenty. tall or short, fat or lean, nature must stand aside, and the hour-glass serve as model, the results simply adding one more factor of destruction to the number already ranged against the girl. the matter of regular meals has also far less attention than is necessary. dinner is a "movable feast." the girls are allowed to go out only two or three at once, and often it is three o'clock or even later before some have broken the fast. though there is often ample room for tea and coffee urns, the suggestion seems to be regarded as a dangerous innovation, holding under the innocent seeming, a possible social revolution. the thing that hath been shall be, and the obstinate hide-bound conservatism of the english shop-keeper is beyond belief till experience has made it certain. a few employers consider this matter. the majority ignore it as beneath consideration. the question of suitable floor managers is really the comprehensive one, including almost every evil and every good that can come to the shop girl, whether in the east or west end. here, as with us, the girl is absolutely in his power. he governs the whole system of fines, one uncomfortable but necessary feature of any large establishment, and injustice in these can have fullest possible play. "the fines are an awful nuisance, that they are," said a bright-faced girl in one of the best-known shops of london--a great bazar, much like macy's. "but then it all depends on the manager. some of them are real nasty, you know, and if they happen not to like a girl, they stick on fines just to spite her. you see we're in their power, and some of them just love to show it and bully the girls no end. and worse than that, they're impudent too if a girl is pretty, and often she doesn't dare complain, for fear of losing the place, and he has it all his own way. this department's got a very fair manager, and we all like him. he's careful about fines, and plans about our dinners and all that, so we're better off than most. the manager does what he pleases everywhere." these facts are for the west end, where dealings are nominally fair, and where wages may, in some exceptional case, run as high as eighteen shillings or even a pound a week. but the average falls far below this, from ten to fourteen being the usual figures, while seven and eight may be the sum. this, for the girl who lives at home, represents dress and pocket-money, but the great majority must support themselves entirely. we have already seen what this sum can do for the shirt-maker and general needlewoman, and it is easy to judge how the girl fares for whom the weekly wage is less. in the east end it falls sometimes as low as three shillings and sixpence ( c.). the girls club together, huddling in small back rooms, and spending all that can be saved on dress. naturally, unless with exceptionally keen consciences, they find what is called "sin" an easier fact than starvation; and so the story goes on, and out of greed is born the misery, which, at last, compels greed to heavier poor rates, and thus an approximation to the distribution of the profit which should have been the worker's. here, as in all cities, the place seems to beckon every girl ambitious of something beyond domestic service. there are cheap amusements, "penny-gaffs" and the like, the "penny-gaff" being the equivalent of our dime museum. there is the companionship of the fellow-worker; the late going home through brightly-lighted streets, and the crowding throng of people,--all that makes the alleviation of the east end life; and there is, too, the chance, always possible, of a lover and a husband, perhaps a grade above, or many grades above, their beginning or their present lives. this alone is impulse and hope. it is much the same story for both sides of the sea; and here, as in most cases where woman's work is involved, it is with women that any change lies, and from their efforts that something better must come. chapter xii. from covent garden to the eel-soup man in the borough. now and then, in the long search into the underlying causes of effects which are plain to all men's eyes, one pauses till the rush of impressions has ceased, and it is possible again to ignore this many-sided, demanding london, which makes a claim unknown to any other city of the earth save rome. but there is a certain justification in lingering at points where women and children congregate, since their life also is part of the quest, and nowhere can it better be seen than in and about covent garden market,--a thousand thoughts arising as the old square is entered from whatever point. it is not alone the first days of the pilgrim's wanderings in london that are filled with the curious sense of home coming that makes up the consciousness of many an american. it is as if an old story were told again, and the heir, stolen in childhood, returned, unrecognized by those about him, but recalling with more and more freshness and certainty the scenes of which he was once a part. the years slip away. two hundred and more of them lie between, it is true; but not two hundred nor ten times two hundred can blot out the lines of a record in which the struggle and the hope of all english-speaking people was one. for past or present alike, london stands as the fountain-head; and thus, whatever pain may come from the oppressive sense of crowded, swarming life pent up in these dull gray walls, whatever conviction that such a monster mass of human energy and human pain needs diffusion and not concentration, london holds and will hold a fascination that is quite apart from any outward aspect. to go to a point determined upon beforehand is good. to lose oneself in the labyrinth of lanes and alleys and come suddenly upon something quite as desirable, is even better; and this losing is as inevitable as the finding also becomes. the first perplexity arises from the fact that a london street is "everything by turns and nothing long," and that a solitary block of buildings owns often a name as long as itself. the line of street which, on the map, appears continuous, gives a dozen changes to the mile, and the pilgrim discovers quickly that he is always somewhere else than at or on the point determined upon. then the temptation to add to this complication by sudden excursions into shadowy courts and dark little passages is irresistible, not to mention the desire, equally pressing, of discovering at once if violet lane and hop vine alley and myrtle court have really any relation to their names, or are simply the reaching out of their inhabitants for some touch of nature's benefactions. violet lane may have had its hedgerows and violets in a day long dead, precisely as hop vines may have flung their pale green bells over cottage paling, for both are far outside the old city limits; but to-day they are simply the narrowest of passages between the grimiest of buildings, given over to trade in its most sordid form, with never a green leaf even to recall the country hedgerows long since only memory. it is a matter of no surprise, then, to find that covent garden holds no hint of its past save in name, though from the noisy strand one has passed into so many sheltered, quiet nooks unknown to nine tenths of the hurrying throng in that great artery of london, that one half expects to see the green trees and the box-bordered alleys of the old garden where the monks once walked. far back in the very beginning of the thirteenth century it was the convent garden of westminster, and its choice fruits and flowers rejoiced the soul of the growers, who planted and pruned with small thought of what the centuries were to bring. through all chances and changes it remained a garden up to , when much of the original ground had been swallowed up by royal grants, and one duke and another had built his town-house amid the spreading trees; for this "amorous and herbivorous parish," as sidney smith calls it, was one of the most fashionable quarters of london. the stuart kings and their courts delighted in it, and the square was filled with houses designed by inigo jones, the north and east side of the market having an arcade called the "portico walk," but soon changed to the name which it has long borne,--the "piazza." the market went on behind these pillars, but year by year, as london grew, pushed itself toward the centre of the square, till now not a foot of vacant space remains. at one of its stalls may still be found an ancient marketman, whose name, anthony piazza, is a memory of a parish custom which named after this favorite walk many of the foundling children born in the parish. there is nothing more curious in all london than the transformations known to this once quiet spot. drury lane is close at hand, and covent garden theatre is as well known as the market itself. the convent has become a play-house. "monks and nuns turn actors and actresses. the garden, formal and quiet, where a salad was cut for a lady abbess, and flowers were gathered to adorn images, becomes a market, noisy and full of life, distributing its thousands of fruits and flowers to a vicious metropolis." two quaint old inns are still here; two great national theatres, and a churchyard full of mouldy but still famous celebrities,--the church itself, bare and big, rising above them. in the days of the stuarts, people prayed to be buried here hardly less than in westminster abbey, and the lover of epitaph and monument will find occupation for many an hour. this strange, squat old building, under the shadow of the church, is the market, its hundred columns and chapel-looking fronts always knee-deep and more in baskets and fruits and vegetables, while its air still seems to breathe of old books, old painters, and old authors. "night and morning are at meeting," for covent garden makes small distinction between the two, and whether it is a late supper or an early breakfast that the coffee-rooms and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be determined by one who has elected to know how the market receives and how it distributes its supplies. in november fog and mist, or the blackness of early winter, with snow on the ground, or cold rain falling, resolution is needed for such an expedition, and still more, if one would see all that the deep night hides, and that comes to light as the dawn struggles through. this business of feeding a city of four million people seems the simplest and most natural of occupations; but the facts involved are staggering, not alone in the mere matter of quantities and the amazement at the first sight of them, but in the thousands of lives tangled with them. quantity is the first impression. every cellar runs over with green stuff, mountains of which come in on enormous wagons and fill up all spaces left vacant, heaving masses of basket stumbling from other wagons and filling with instant celerity. in the great vans pour, from every market garden and outlying district of london, from all england, from the united kingdom, from all the world, literally; for it is soon discovered that these enormous vehicles on high springs and with immense wheels, drawn by normandy horses of size and strength to match, are chiefly from the railway stations, and that the drivers, who seem to be built on the same plan as the horses and vans, have big limbs and big voices and a high color, and that the bulging pockets of their velveteen suits show invoices and receipt books. not alone from railway stations and trains, from which tons of cabbages, carrots, onions, and all the vegetable tribe issue, but from the docks where steamers from rotterdam and antwerp and india and america, and all that lie between, come the contributions, ranged presently in due order in stall and arcade. there is no hint of anything grosser than the great cabbages, which appear to be london's favorite vegetable. meat has its place at smithfield, and fish at billingsgate, but the old garden is, in one sense, true to its name, and gives us only the kindly fruits of the earth, with their transformations into butter and cheese. in the central arcade fruit has the honors, and no prettier picture can well be imagined. for once under these gray skies there is a sense of color and light, and there is no surprise in hearing that turner came here to study both, and that even the artist of to-day does not disdain the same method. it is the flower-market, however, to which one turns with a certainty gained at once that no disappointment follows intimate acquaintance with english flowers. there are exotics for those who will, but it is not with them that one lingers. it is to the hundreds upon hundreds of flower-pots, in which grow roses and geraniums and mignonette and a score with old-fashioned but forever beloved names. there are great bunches of mignonette for a penny, and lesser bunches of sweet odors for the same coin, while the violets have rows of baskets to themselves, as indeed they need, for scores of buyers flock about them,--little buyers chiefly, with tangled hair and bare feet and the purchase-money tied in some corner of their rags; for they buy to sell again, and having tramped miles it may be to this fountain-head, will tramp other miles before night comes, making their way into court and alley and under sunless doorways, crying "violets! sweet violets!" as they were cried in herrick's time. a ha'penny will buy one of the tiny bunches which they have made up with swift fingers, and they are bought even by the poorest; how, heaven only knows. but, in cracked jug or battered tin, the bunch of violets sweetens the foul air, or the bit of mignonette grows and even thrives, where human kind cannot. so, though covent garden has in winter "flowers at guineas apiece, pineapples at guineas a pound, and peas at guineas a quart,"--these for the rich only,--it has also its possibilities for the poor. they throng about it at all times, for there is always a chance of some stray orange or apple or rejected vegetable that will help out a meal. they throng above all in these terrible days when the "unemployed" are huddling under arches and in dark places where they lay their homeless heads, and where, in the hours between night and morning, the cocoa-rooms open for the hungry drivers of the big vans, who pour down great mugs of coffee and cocoa, and make away with mountains of bread and butter. a penny gives a small mug of cocoa and a slice of bread and butter, and the owner of a penny is rich. often it is shared, and the sharer, half drunk still, it may be, and foul with the mud and refuse into which he crawled, can hardly be known as human, save for this one gleam of something beyond the human. gaunt forms barely covered with rags, hollow eyes fierce with hunger, meet one at every turn in this early morning; and for many there is not even the penny, and they wait, sometimes with appeal, but as often silently, the chance gift of the buyer. food for all the world, it would seem, and yet london is not fed; and having once looked upon these waifs that are floated against the pillars of the old market, one fancies almost a curse on the piles of food that is not for them save as charity gives it, and the flowers that even on graves will never be theirs. men and women huddle here, and under the arches, children skulk away like young rats, feeding on offal, lying close in dark corners for warmth, and hunted about also like rats. it is a poverty desperate and horrible beyond that that any other civilized city can show; and who shall say who is responsible, or what the end will be? so the question lingers with one, as the market is left, and one passes on and out to the strand and its motley stream of life, lingering through fleet street and the winding ways into the city, past st. paul's, and still on till london bridge is reached and the borough is near. fare as one may, north or south, west or east, there is no escape from the sullen roar of the great city, a roar like the beat of a stormy sea against cliffs. an hour and more ago, that perplexed and baffled luminary the sun has struggled up through strange shapes and hues of morning cloud, and for a few minutes asserted his right to rule. but the gleam of gold and crimson brought with him has given way to the grays and black which make up chiefly what the londoners call sky, and over london bridge one passes on into the dim grayness merging into something darker and more cheerless. on the borough road there should be some escape,--that borough road on which the canterbury pilgrims rode out on a morning less complicated, it is certain, by fog and mist and smoke and soot than mornings that dawn for this generation. every foot of the way is history; the old tower at one's back, and the past as alive as the present. "merrie england" was at its best, they say, when the pages we know were making; but here as elsewhere, the name is a tradition, belied by every fact of the present. the old inns along the way still hold their promise of good cheer, and the great kitchens and tap-rooms have seen wild revelry enough; but even for them has been the sight of political or other martyr done to death in their court-yards, while no foot of playground, no matter how much the people's own, but has been steeped in blood and watered with tears of english matron and maid. if "merrie england" deserved its name, it must have come from a determination as fixed as mark tapley's, to be jolly under any and all circumstances, and certainly circumstances have done their best to favor such resolution. the peasant of the past, usually represented as dancing heavily about a maypole, or gazing contentedly at some procession of his lords and masters as it swept by, has no counterpart to-day, nor will his like come again. for here about the old borough, where every stone means history and the "making of the english people," there are faces of all types that england holds, but no face yet seen carries any sense of merriment, or any good thing that might bear its name. it is the burden of living that looks from dull eyes and stolid faces, and a hopelessness, unconscious it may be but always apparent, that better things may come. the typical englishman, as we know him, has but occasional place, and the mass, hurrying to and fro in the midst of this roar of traffic, are thin and eager and restless of countenance as any crowd of americans in the same type of surroundings. innumerable little streets, each dingier and more sordid than the last, open on either side. hot coffee and cocoa cans are at every corner, their shining brass presided over by men chiefly. here, as throughout east london, sellers of every sort of eatable and drinkable thing wander up and down. paris is credited with living most of its life under all men's eyes, and london certainly may share this reputation as far as eating goes. in fact, working london, taking the poorest class both in pay and rank, has small space at home for much cookery, and finds more satisfaction in the flavor of food prepared outside. the throats, tanned and parched by much beer, are sensitive only to something with the most distinct and defined taste of its own; and so it is that whelks and winkles and mussels and all forms of fish and flesh, that are to the american uneatably strong and unpleasant, make the luxuries of the english poor. they are conservative, also, like all the poor, and prefer old acquaintances to new; and the costers and sellers of all sorts realize this, and seldom go beyond an established list. it is always "somethin' 'ot" that the workman craves; and small wonder, when one has once tested london climate, and found that, nine months out of twelve, fog and mist creep chill into bones and marrow, and that a fire is comfortable even in july. november accents this fact sharply, and by november the pea-soup and eel-soup men are at their posts, and about market and dock, and in lane and alley, the trade is brisk. near petticoat lane, one of the oddest of london's odd corners, small newsboys rush up and take a cupful as critically as i have seen them take waffles from the old women purveyors of these delicacies about city hall park and park row, while hungry costers and workmen appear to find it the most satisfactory of meals. one must have watched the eel baskets at billingsgate, and then read the annual consumption, before it is possible to understand how street after street has its eel-pie house, and how the stacks of small pies in the windows are always disappearing and always being renewed. it would seem with eel pies as with oysters, of which sam weller stated his conviction that the surprising number of shops and stalls came from the fact that the moment a man found himself in difficulties he "rushed out and ate oysters in reg'lar desperation." it is certain that some of the eaters look desperate enough; but the seller is a middle-aged, quiet-looking man, who eyes his customers sharply, but serves them with generous cupfuls. the sharpness is evidently acquired, and not native, and he has need of it, the london newsboys, who are his best patrons, being ready to drive a bargain as keen as their fellows on the other side of the sea. his stand is opposite a cat's-meat market, a sausage shop in significant proximity, and he endures much chaffing as to the make-up of his pea soup, which he sells in its season. but it is eels for which the demand is heaviest and always certain, and the eel-soup man's day begins early and ends late, on saturdays lasting well into sunday morning. he is prosperous as such business goes, and buys four "draughts" of eels on a friday for the saturday's work, a "draught" being twenty pounds, while now and then he has been known to get rid of a hundred pounds. this stall, to which the newsboys flock as being more "stylish" than most of its kind, is fitted with a cast-iron fireplace holding two large kettles of four or five gallon capacity. a dozen pint bowls, or basins as the englishman prefers to call them, and an equal number of half-pint cups, with spoons for all, constitute the outfit; and even for the poorest establishment of the sort, a capital of not less than a pound is required. this stall has four lamps with "hot eels" painted on them, and one side of it is given to whelks, which are boiled at home and always eaten cold with abundance of vinegar, of which the newsboy is prodigal. at times fried fish are added to the stock, but eels lead, and mean the largest profit on the amount invested. dutch eels are preferred, and the large buyer likes to go directly to the eel boats at the billingsgate wharf and buy the squirming draughts, fresh from the tanks in which they have been brought. to dress and prepare a draught takes about three hours, and the daughter of the stall-owner stands at one side engaged in this operation, cleaning, washing, and cutting up the eels into small pieces from half an inch to an inch long. these are boiled, the liquor being made smooth and thick with flour, and flavored with chopped parsley and mixed spices, principally allspice. for half a penny, from five to seven pieces may be had, the cup being then filled up with the liquor, to which the buyer is allowed to add vinegar at discretion. there is a tradition of one customer so partial to hot eels that he used to come twice a day and take eight cupfuls a day, four at noon and four as a night-cap. the hot-eel season ends with early autumn, and pea soup takes its place, though a small proportion of eels is always to be had. split peas, celery, and beef bones are needed for this, and it is here that the cat's-meat man is supposed to be an active partner. in any case the smell is savory, and the hot steam a constant invitation to the shivering passers-by. this man has no cry of "hot eels!" like many of the sellers. "i touches up people's noses; 't ain't their heyes or their hears i'm hafter," he says, though the neat stall makes its own claim on the "heyes." in another alley is another pea-soup man, one-legged, but not at all depressed by this or any other circumstance of fate. he makes, or his wife makes, the pea soup at home, and he keeps it hot by means of a charcoal fire in two old tin saucepans. "hard work?" he says. "you wouldn't think so if you'd been on your back seven months and four days in middlesex orspital. i was a coal heaver, and going along easy and natural over the plank from one barge to another, and there come the swell from some steamers and throwed up the plank and chucked me off, and i broke my knee against the barge. it's bad now. i'd ought to 'ad it hoff, an' so the surgeons said; but i wouldn't, an' me wife wouldn't, and the bone keeps workin' out, and i've 'ad nineteen months all told in the 'orspital, and lord knows how me wife and the young uns got on. i was bad enough off, i was, till a neighbor o' mine, a master butcher, told me there was a man up in clare market, makin' a fortune at hot eels and pea soup, and he lent me ten shillings to start in that line. he and me wife's the best friends i've ever had in the world; for i've no memory of a mother, and me father died at sea. my oldest daughter, she's a good un, goes for the eels and cuts 'em up, and she an' me wife does all the hard work. i've only to sit at the stall and sell, and they do make 'em tasty. there's no better. but we're hard up. i'd do better if i'd a little more money to buy with. i can't get a draught like some of the men, and them that gets by the quantity can give more. the boys tells me there's one man gives 'em as much as eight pieces; that's what they calls a lumping ha'p'worth. and the liquor's richer when you boils up so many eels. what's my tin pot ag'in' his five-gallon one? there's even some that boils the 'eads, and sells 'em for a farthing a cupful; but i've not come to that. but we're badly off. the missus has a pair o' shoes, and she offs with 'em when my daughter goes to market, and my boy the youngest 's got no shoes; but we do very well, and would do better, only the cheap pie shop takes off a lot o' trade. i wouldn't eat them pies. it's the dead eels that goes into 'em, and we that handles eels knows well enough that they're rank poison if they ain't cut up alive, and the flesh of 'em squirming still when they goes into the boiling water. them pies is uncertain, anyway, whatever kind you buy. i've seen a man get off a lot a week old, just with the dodge of hot spiced gravy poured out of an oil can into a hole in the lid, and that gravy no more'n a little brown flour and water; but the spice did it. the cat's-meat men knows; oh, yes! they knows what becomes of what's left when saturday night comes, though i've naught to say ag'in' the cat's-meat men, for it's a respectable business enough. "i've thought of other ways. there's the baked-potato men, but the 'ansome can and fixin's for keeping 'em 'ot is what costs, you see. trotters is profitable, too, if you've a start, that is, though it's women mostly that 'andles trotters, blest if i know why! i've a cousin in the boiled pudding business--meat puddings and fruit, too;--but it's all going out, along of the bakers that don't give poor folks a chance. they has their big coppers, and boils up their puddings by the 'undred; but i dare say there's no more need o' street-sellers, for folks go to shops for most things now. she's in leather lane, this cousin o' mine, and makes plum-duff as isn't to be beat; but she sells saturday nights mostly, and for sunday dinners. ginger nuts goes off well, but there again the shops 'as you, and unless you can make a great show, with brass things shining to put your eyes out, and a stall that looks as well as a shop, you're nowhere. there's no chance for the poor anyhow, it seems to me; for even if you get a start, there's always some one with more money to do the thing better, and so take the bread out of your mouth. but 'better' 's only more show often, and me wife can't be beat for tastiness, whether it's hot eels or pea soup, and i'll say that long as i stand." so many small trades have been ruined by the larger shops taking them up, that the street-seller's case becomes daily a more complicated one, and the making a living by old-fashioned and time-honored methods almost impossible. it is all part of the general problem of the day, and the street-sellers, whether costers or those of lower degree, look forward apprehensively to changes which seem on the way, and puzzle their untaught minds as to why each avenue of livelihood seems more and more barred against them. for the poorest there seems only a helpless, dumb acquiescence in the order of things which they are powerless to change; but the looker-on, who watches the mass of misery crowding london streets or hiding away in attic and cellar, knows that out of such conditions sudden fury and revolt is born, and that, if the prosperous will not heed and help while they may, the time comes when help will be with no choice of theirs. it is plain that even the most conservative begin to feel this, and effort constantly takes more practical form; but this is but the beginning of what must be,--the inauguration of a social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization must come. chapter xiii. women in general trades. as investigation progresses, it becomes at times a question as to which of two great factors must dominate the present status of women as workers; competition, which blinds the eyes to anything but the surest way of obtaining the proper per cent, or the inherited anglo-saxon brutality, which, in its lowest form of manifestation, makes the english wife-beater. it is certain that the english workingwoman has not only the disabilities which her american sister also faces,--some inherent in herself, and as many arising from the press of the present system,--but added to this the apparent incapacity of the employer to see that they have rights of any description whatsoever. even the factory act and the various attempts to legislate in behalf of women and child workers strikes the average employer as a gross interference with his constitutional rights. where he can he evades. where he cannot he is apt to grow purple over the impertinence of meddling reformers who cannot let well-enough alone. such a representative of one class of english employers is to be found in a little street, not a stone's throw from fleet street, the great newspaper centre, where all day long one meets authors, editors, and journalists of every degree. toward eight in the morning, as at the same hour in the evening, another crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the countless printing establishments of every grade, which are to be found in every street and court opening from or near fleet street. it is not newspaper interests alone that are represented there. the temple, inner, outer, and middle, with the magnificent group of buildings, also a part of the temple's workings--the new courts of law, have each and all their quota of law printing, and a throng made up of every order of ability, from the reader of greek proof down to the folder of mother siegel's almanac, hurries through fleet street to the day's work. in a building devoted to the printing and sending out of a popular weekly of the cheaper order, the lower rooms met all requisitions as to space and proper ventilation. "we have nothing to hide," said the manager, "nothing at all. you may go from top to bottom if you will." this was said at what appeared to be the end of an hour or two of going from room to room, watching the girls at work at the multitudinous phases involved, and wondering how energy enough remained after twelve hours of it, for getting home. a flight of dark little stairs led up to a region even darker, and he changed color as we turned toward them. "this is all temporary," he said hastily. "we are very much crowded for space, and we are going to move soon. we do the best we can in the mean time. it's only temporary." this was the reason for the darkness. stumbling up the open stairs, hardly more than a ladder, one came into a half story added to the original building, and so low that the manager bowed his head as he entered; nor was there any point at which he could stand freely upright, this well-fed englishman nearly six feet tall. for the girls there was no such difficulty, and nearly two hundred were packed into the space, in which folding and stitching machines ran by steam, while at long tables other branches of the same work were going on by hand. the noise and the heat from gas-jets, steam, and the crowd of workers made the place hideous. the girls themselves appeared in no worse condition than many others seen that day, but were all alike, pale and anemic. their hours were from a. m. to p. m., with an hour for dinner, usually from one to two. the law also allows half an hour for tea, but in all cases investigated, this time is docked if the girl takes it. cheap "cocoa rooms" are all about, where a cup of tea or cocoa and a bun may be had for twopence; but even this is a heavy item to a girl who earns never more than ten shillings ($ . ) a week, and as often from four to seven or eight. no arrangement for making tea on the premises was to be found here or anywhere. "we mean to have a room," the employers said, "but we have so many expenses attendant on the growing business that there doesn't seem any chance yet." this employer brought his wage-book forward and showed with pride that several of his girls earned a pound a week ($ . ). but on turning back some pages, the record showed only fourteen and sixteen shillings for these same names, and after a pause the manager admitted that the pound had been earned by adding night work. this question of whether night work is ever done had been a most difficult one to determine. the girls themselves declared that it often was, and that they liked it because they got three shillings and their breakfast; but the managers had in more than one case denied the charge with fury. "it's over-work," the present one said, his eyes on the rows of figures. "when?" asked my companion quietly, and he burst into a laugh. "you've got me this time," he said. "you've given your word not to mention names, so i don't mind telling you. it's like this. there's a new firm to be floated, and they want two hundred thousand circulars on two days' notice. of course it has to be night-work, and we put it through, but we give the girls time for supper, and provide a good breakfast, and there's hundreds waiting for the chance. but you've seen for yourselves. some of them make a pound a week. what in reason does a woman want of more than a pound a week?" this remark is the stereotyped one of quite two-thirds the employers, whether men or women. the old delusion still holds that a man works for others, a woman solely for herself, and although each woman should appear with those dependent upon her in entire or partial degree arranged in line, it would make no difference in the conviction. it is quite true that many married women work for pocket-money, and having homes, can afford to underbid legitimate workers. but they are the smallest proportion of this vast army of london toilers, whose pitiful wage is earned by a day's labor which happily has no counterpart in length with us, save among the lowest grade of needlewomen. in the case under present consideration pay for over-time was allowed at the rate of fourpence an hour and a penny extra. if late five minutes the workwoman is fined twopence, and if not there by nine is "drilled," that is, sent away, or kept waiting near until two, when she goes on for half a day. if tardy, as must often happen with fogs and other causes, she is often "drilled" for a week, though "drilling" in this trade is used more often with men than with women, who are less liable to irregularities caused by drink. in some establishments the bait of sixpence a week for good conduct is offered, but this is deducted on the faintest pretext, and the worker fined as well, for any violation of regulations tacit or written. in another establishment piece-work alone was done, a popular almanac being folded at fourpence a thousand sheets. railway tickets brought in from eight to ten shillings a week, and prize packages of stationery, fourpence a score, the folding and packing of prize doubling the length of time required and thus lessening wages in the same ratio. i have given phases of this one trade in detail, because the same general rules govern all. the confectionery workers' wages are at about the same rate, although a pound a week is almost unknown, the girls making from three shillings and sixpence ( c.) to fourteen and sixteen shillings weekly. a large "butter-scotch" factory pays these rates and allows the weekly good-conduct sixpence which, however, few succeed in earning. this factory is managed by two brothers who take alternate weeks, and the younger one exacts from the girls an hour more a day than the older one. here the factory act applies, and inspectors appear periodically; but this does not hinder the carrying out of individual theories as to what constitutes a day. if five minutes late, sevenpence is deducted from the week's wages, which begin at three and sixpence and ascend to nine, the latter price being the utmost to be earned in this branch of the trade. in the cocoa rooms which are to be found everywhere in london where business of any sort is carried on, the pay ranges from ten to twelve shillings a week. the work is hard and incessant, although hours are often shorter. in both confectionery factories and the majority of factory trades, an hour is allowed for dinner, but the tea half hour refused or deducted from time. london in this respect, and indeed in most points affecting the comfort and well-being of operatives of every class, is far behind countries, the great manufacturing cities of which are doing much to lighten oppressive conditions and give some possibility of relaxation and improvement. some of the best reforms in a factory life have begun in england, and it is thus all the more puzzling to find that indifference, often to a brutal degree, characterizes the attitude of many london employers, who have reduced wages to the lowest, and brought profits to the highest, attainable point. it is true that he is driven by a force often quite beyond his control, foreign competition, french and german, being no less sharp than that on his own soil. he must study chances of profit to a farthing, and in such study there is naturally small thought of his workers, save as hands in which the farthings may be found. many a woman goes to her place of work, leaving behind her children who have breakfasted with her on "kettle broth," and will be happy if the same is certain at supper time. "there's six of us have had nought but kettle broth for a fortnight," said one. "you know what that is? it's half a quarter loaf, soaked in hot water with a hap'orth of dripping and a spoonful of salt. when you've lived on that night and morning for a week or two, you can't help but long for a change, though, god forgive me! there's them that fares worse. but it'll be the broth without the bread before we're through. there's no living to be had in old england any more, and yet the rich folks don't want less. do you know how it is, ma'am? is there any chance of better times, do you think? is it that they _want_ us to starve? i've heard that said, but somehow it seems as if there must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. oh, yes, they must be different." will they be different? it is unskilled workers who have just spoken, but do the skilled fare much better? i append a portion of a table of earnings, prepared a year or two since by the chaplain of the clerkenwell prison, a thoughtful and earnest worker among the poor, this table ranking as one of the best of the attempts to discover the actual position of the workingwoman at present:-- "making paper bags, ½_d._ to ½_d._ per thousand; possible earnings, _s._ to _s._ a week. button-holes, _d._ per dozen; possible earnings, _s._ per week. "shirts _d._ each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done between a. m. and p. m. "sack-sewing, _d._ for twenty-five, _d._ to _s._ _d._ per hundred; possible earnings, _s._ per week. "pill-box making, s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, _s._ _d._ a day. "button-hole making, _d._ per dozen; can do three or four dozen between a. m. and dark. "whip-making, _s._ per dozen; can do a dozen per day. "trousers-finishing, _d._ to _d._ each, finding own cotton; can do four per day. "shirt-finishing, _d._ to _d._ per dozen." so the list runs on through all the trades open to women. a pound a week is a fortune; half or a third of that amount the wages of two-thirds the women who earn in working london; nor are there indications that the scale will rise or that better days are in store for one of these toilers, patient, heavy-eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come, and yet saying among themselves the words already given:-- "there must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. oh, yes, they must be different." chapter xiv. french and english workers. it is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe that it understood the other. not only the nation as a whole, however, but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source of bewilderment to the other. that conditions on both sides of the channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is still unsolved for both england and the continent, remains a truth, though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that france has solved one or two phases of the equation over which england is still quite helpless. there is a famous chapter in the history of ireland, entitled "snakes in ireland," the contents of which are as follows:-- "there are no snakes in ireland." on the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the slums of paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "there are no slums in paris." in the english sense there certainly are none; and for the difference in visible conditions, several causes are responsible. the searcher for such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of london is absolutely unknown. one quarter alone is to be excepted in this statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. the seamstress in a london garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the east end lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward nor inward alleviation. soot is king of the great city, and his prime ministers, smoke and fog, work together to darken every haunt of man, and to shut out every glimpse of sun or moon. the flying flakes are in the air. every breath draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall and floor and person. the neatest and most determined fighter of dirt must still be bond slave to its power; and eating and drinking and breathing soot all day and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence in the consequences, and only an instinctive battle with the outward effects. for the average worker, at the needle at least, wages are too low to admit of much soap; hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken means just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens that london poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that the visitor in the house of the workers learns to wear a uniform which shows as little as possible of the results of rising up and sitting down in the soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire, works its will no less surely. fresh from such experience, and with the memory of home and work room, manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the cleanliness of paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at first a constant surprise. the french workwoman, even of the lowest order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and she shares also in the thrift which is equally a national possession, and the exercise of which has freed france from the largest portion of her enormous debt. the english workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or bag-maker, is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of dejection. she clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. the shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge of a condition from which emergence has become practically impossible. these lank figures carry no charm of womanhood,--nothing that can draw from sweater or general employer more than a sneer at the quality of the labor of those waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand, until for both the adjective comes to be "superfluous," and employer and employed alike wonder why the earth holds them, and what good there is in an existence made up simply of want and struggle. precisely the opposite condition holds for the french worker, who, in the midst of problems as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of her nation. she has learned to the minutest fraction what can be extracted from every centime, and though she too must shiver with cold, and go half-fed and half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable. she shares too the conviction, which has come to be part of the general faith concerning paris, which seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness and want are impossible. even her beggars, a good proportion of them laboriously made up for the parts they are to fill, find repression of cheerfulness their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on the sceptical observer of their methods, as if to make him a partner in the encouraging and satisfactory nature of things in general. the little seamstress who descends from her attic for the bread with its possible salad or bit of cheese which will form her day's ration, smiles also as she pauses to feel the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped out for paris as a whole everything that could by any chance be called slum. even in the narrowest street this stir of eager life penetrates, and every parisian shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily existence. if shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters along in _sabots_, congratulating herself that they are cheap and that they never wear out. custom, long-established and imperative, orders that she shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes the revelation bound up in the london worker's bonnet. inherited instinct and training from birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the needle. she makes her own dress, and wears it with an air which may in time transfer itself to something choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by the the cheapness of the material. it may be only a print or some woollen stuff of the poorest order; but it and every detail of her dress represent something to which the english woman has not attained, and which temperament and every fact of life will hinder her attaining. as i write, the charcoal-woman has climbed the long flights to the fifth floor, bending under the burden of an enormous sack of _charbon à terre_, but smiling as she puts it down. she is mistress of a little shop just round the corner, and she keeps the accounts of the wood and coal bought by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day. even she, black with the coal-dust which she wastes no time in scrubbing off save on sundays when she too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces the hard labor with light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a sou here and there for the _dot_ of the baby who shares in the distribution of coal-dust, and will presently trot by her side as assistant. in the laundry just beyond, the women are singing or chattering, the voices rising in that sudden fury of words which comes upon this people, and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs instantly and peacefully, to rise again on due occasion. long hours, exhausting labor, small wages, make no difference. the best worker counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity, and the rate has even fallen below this; yet they make no complaint, quite content with the sense of companionship, and with the satisfaction of making each article as perfect a specimen of skill as can be produced. here lies a difference deeper than that of temperament,--the fact that the french worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and counts its satisfactory appearance as a portion of the reward. slop work, with its demand for speedy turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the french workwoman; and thus it happens that even slop work on this side of the channel holds some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift it out of the depth to which it has fallen. but it is gaining ground, fierce competition producing this effect everywhere; and the always lessening ratio of wages which attends its production, must in time bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere, unless the tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative production takes its place. with the french worker in the higher forms of needle industry we shall deal in the next chapter, finding what differences are to be met here also between french and english methods. chapter xv. french bargain counters. "yes, it is the great shops that have done that, madame. once, you saw what was only well finished and a credit to the worker, and, even if the reward was small, she had pride in the work and her own skill, and did always her best. but now, what will you? the thing must be cheap, cheapest. the machine to sew hurries everything, and you find the workwoman sans ambition and busy only to hurry and be one with the machine. it is wrong, all wrong, but that is progress, and one must submit. when the small shops had place to live, and the great _magasins_ were not for ladies or any who wished the best, then it was different, but now all is changed, and work has no character. it is all the same; always the machine." more than once this plaint has been made, and the sewing-machine accused as the cause of depression in wages, of deterioration of all hand needlework, and of the originality that once distinguished french productions; and there is some truth in the charge, not only for paris, but for all cities to which needlewomen throng. machinery has gradually revolutionized all feminine industries in paris, and its effect is not only on the general system of wages, but upon the moral condition of the worker, and family life as a whole has become to the student of social questions one of gravest importance. on the one hand is the conviction, already quoted, that it has brought with it deterioration in every phase of the work; on the other, that it is an educating and beneficent agent, raising the general standard of wages, and putting three garments where once but one could be owned. it is an old story, and will give food for speculation in the future, quite as much as in the past. but in talking with skilled workers, from dressmakers to the needlewomen employed on trousseaux and the most delicate forms of this industry, each has expressed the same conviction, and this quite apart from the political economist's view that there must be a return to hand production, if the standard is not to remain hopelessly below its old place. such return would not necessarily exclude machinery, which must be regarded as an indispensable adjunct to the worker's life. it would simply put it in its proper place,--that of aid, but never master. it is the spirit of competition which is motive power to-day, and which drives the whirring wheels and crowds the counters of every shop with productions which have no merit but that of cheapness, and the price of which means no return to the worker beyond the barest subsistence. subsistence in paris has come to mean something far different from the facts of a generation ago. wages have always been fixed at a standard barely above subsistence; but, even under these conditions, french frugality has succeeded not only in living, but in putting by a trifle month by month. as the great manufactories have sprung up, possibilities have lessened and altered, till the workwoman, however cheerfully she may face conditions, knows that saving has become impossible. if, in some cases, wages have risen, prices have advanced with them till only necessities are possible, the useful having dropped away from the plan, and the agreeable ceased to have place even in thought. even before the long siege, and the semi-starvation that came to all within the walls of paris, prices had been rising, and no reduction has come which even approximates to the old figures. every article of daily need is at the highest point, sugar alone being an illustration of what the determination to protect an industry has brought about. the london workwoman buys a pound for one penny, or at the most twopence. the french workwoman must give eleven or twelve sous, and then have only beet sugar, which has not much over half the saccharine quality of cane sugar. flour, milk, eggs, all are equally high, meat alone being at nearly the same prices as in london. fruit is a nearly impossible luxury, and fuel so dear that shivering is the law for all but the rich, while rents are also far beyond london prices, with no "improved dwellings" system to give the utmost for the scanty sum at disposal. for the needlewoman the food question has resolved itself into bread alone, for at least one meal, with a little coffee, chiefly chicory, and possibly some vegetable for the others. but many a one lives on bread for six days in the week, reserving the few sous that can be saved for a sunday bit of meat, or bones for soup. even the system which allows of buying "portions," just enough for a single individual, is valueless for her, since the smallest and poorest portion is far beyond the sum which can never be made to stretch far enough for such indulgence. "i have tried it, madame," said the same speaker, who had mourned over the degeneration of finish among the workwomen. "it was the siege that compelled it in the beginning, and then there was no complaining, since it was the will of the good god for all. but there came a time when sickness had been with me long, and i found no work but to stitch in my little room far up under the roof, and all the long hours bringing so little,--never more than two and a half francs, and days when it was even less; and then i found how one must live. i was proud, and wished to tell no one; but there was an _ouvrière_ next me, in a little room, even smaller than mine, and she saw well that she could help, and that together some things might be possible that were not alone. she had her furnace for the fire, and we used it together on the days when we could make our soup, or the coffee that i missed more than all,--more, even, than wine, which is for us the same as water to you. it was months that i went not beyond fifty centimes a day for food, save the sundays, and then but little more, since one grows at last to care little, and a good meal for one day makes the next that is wanting harder, i think, than when one wants always. but i am glad that i know; so glad that i could even wish the same knowledge for many who say, 'why do they not live on what they earn? why do they not have thrift, and make ready for old age?' old age comes fast, it is true. such years as i have known are double, yes, and treble, and one knows that they have shortened life. but when i say now 'the poor,' i know what that word means, and have such compassion as never before. it is the workers who are the real poor, and for them there is little hope, since it is the system that must change. it is the middleman who makes the money, and there are so many of them, how can there be much left for the one who comes last, and is only the machine that works? "all that is true of england, and i have had two years there, and thus know well; all that is true, too, here, though we know better how we can live, and not be always so _triste_ and sombre. but each day, as i go by the great new shops that have killed all the little ones, and by the great factory where electricity makes the machines go, and the women too become machines,--each day i know that these counters, where one can buy for a song, are counters where flesh and blood are sold. for, madame, it is starvation for the one who has made these garments; and why must one woman starve that another may wear what her own hands could make if she would? everywhere it is _occasions_ [bargains] that the great shops advertise. everywhere they must be more and more, and so wages lessen, till there is no more hope of living; and, because they lessen, marriage waits, and all that the good god meant for us waits also." on the surface it is all well. there is less incompetency among french than english workers, and thus the class who furnish them need less arraignment for their lack of thoroughness. they contend, also, with one form of competition, which has its counterpart in america among the farmers' wives, who take the work at less than regular rates. this form is the convent work, which piles the counters, and is one of the most formidable obstacles to better rates for the worker. innumerable convents make the preparation of underwear one of their industries, and, in the classes of girls whom they train to the needle, find workers requiring no wages, the training being regarded as equivalent. naturally, their prices can be far below the ordinary market one, and thus the worker, benefited on the one hand, is defrauded on the other. in short, the evil is a universal one,--an integral portion of the present manufacturing system,--and its abolition can come only from roused public sentiment, and combination among the workers themselves. chapter xvi. the city of the sun. it is only with weeks of experience that the searcher into the under world of paris life comes to any sense of real conditions, or discovers in what directions to look for the misery which seldom floats to the surface, and which even wears the face of content. that there are no slums, and that acute suffering is in the nature of things impossible, is the first conviction, and it remains in degree even when both misery and its lurking-places have become familiar sights. paris itself, gay, bright, beautiful, beloved of every dweller within its walls, so dominates that shadows seem impossible, and as one watches the eager throng in boulevard or avenue, or the laughing, chattering groups before even the poorest café, other life than this sinks out of sight. the most meagrely paid needlewoman, the most overworked toiler in trades, indoors or out, seizes any stray moment for rest or small pleasures, and from a half-franc bottle of wine, or some pretence of lemonade or sugar water, extracts entertainment for half a dozen. the pressure in actual fact remains the same. always behind in the shadow lurks starvation, and there is one street, now very nearly wiped out, known to its inhabitants still as "_la rue où l'on ne meurt jamais_"--the street where one never dies, since every soul therein finds their last bed in the hospital. this is the _quartier_ mouffetard, where bits of old paris are still discernible, and where strange trades are in operation; industries which only a people so pinched and driven by sharp necessity could ever have invented. the descent to these is a gradual one, and most often the women who are found in them have known more than one occupation, and have been, in the beginning at least, needlewomen of greater or less degree of skill. depression of wages, which now are at the lowest limit of subsistence, drives them into experiments in other directions, and often failing sight or utter weariness of the monotonous employment is another cause. these form but a small proportion of such workers, who generally are a species of guild, a family having begun some small new industry and gradually drawn in others, till a body of workers in the same line is formed, strong enough to withstand any interlopers. "what becomes of the women who are too old to sew, and who have never gained skill enough to earn more than a bare living?" i asked one day of a seamstress whose own skill was unquestioned, but who, even with this in her favor, averages only three francs a day. "they do many things, madame. one who is my neighbor is now scrubber and cleaner, and is happily friends with a '_concierge_,' who allows her to aid him. that is a difficulty for all who would do that work. it is that the '_concierges_,' whether men or women, think that any pay from the '_locataires_' must be for them; and so they will never tell the tenant of a woman who seeks work, but will say always, 'it is i who can do it all. one cannot trust these from the outside.' but for her, as i say, there is opportunity, and at last she has food, when as '_couturière_' it was quite--yes, quite impossible. there was a child, an idiot--the child of her daughter who is dead, and from whom she refuses always to be separated, and she sews always on the sewing-machine, till sickness comes, and it is sold for rent and many things. she is proud. she has not wished to scrub and clean, but for such work is twenty-five centimes an hour, and often food that the tenant does not wish. at times they give her less, and in any case one calculates always the time and watches very closely, but for her, at least, is more money than for many years; sometimes even three francs, if a day has been good. but that is but seldom, and she must carry her own soap and brush, and pay for all. "that is one way, and there is another that fills me with terror, madame, lest i, too, may one day find myself in it. it is last and worst of all for women, i think. it is when they wear '_le cachemire d'osier_.' you do not know it, madame. it is the chiffonieress basket which she bears as a badge, and which she hangs at night, it may be, in the city of the sun. _voila_, madame. there are now two who are on their way. if madame has curiosity, it is easy to follow them." "but the city of the sun? what is that? do you mean paris?" "no, madame. it is a mockery like the '_cachemire d'osier_.' you will see." it is in this following that the polished veneer which makes the outward paris showed what may lie beneath. certainly, no one who walks through the avenue victor hugo, one of the twelve avenues radiating from the arc de triomphe, and including some of the gayest and most brilliant life of modern paris, the creation of napoleon iii. and of baron haussman, would dream that hint of corruption could enter in. the ancient rue de la révolte has changed form and title, and the beautiful avenue is no dishonor to its present name. but far down there opens nearly imperceptibly a narrow alley almost subterranean, and it is through this alley that the two figures which had moved silently down the avenue passed and went on; the man solid and compact, as if well-fed, his face as he turned, however, giving the lie to such impression, but his keen alert eyes seeing every shade of difference in the merest scrap of calico or tufts of hair. for the woman, it was plain to see why the needle had been of small service, her wandering, undecided blue eyes passing over everything to which the man's hook had not first directed her. through the narrow way the pair passed into a sombre court, closed at the end by a door of wood with rusty latch, which creaks and objects as one seeks to lift it. once within, and the door closed, the place has no reminder of the paris just without. on the contrary, it might be a bit from the beggars' quarter in a village of syria or palestine, for here is only a line of flat-roofed huts, the walls whitewashed, the floors level with the soil, and the sun of the warm spring day pouring down upon sleeping dogs, and heaps of refuse alternating with piles of rags, in the midst of which work two or three women, silent at present, and barely looking up as the new comers lay down their burdens. a fat yet acrid odor rises about these huts, drawn out from the rags by the afternoon heat; yet, repulsive as it is, there is more sense of cleanliness about it than in the hideous basements where the same trade is plied in london or new york. there is a space here not yet occupied by buildings. the line of huts faces the south; a fence encloses them; and so silent and alone seems the spot that it is easy to understand why it bears its own individual name, and to the colony of _chiffoniers_ who dwell here has long been known as the city of the sun. doors stand open freely; honesty is a tradition of this profession; and the police know that these delvers in dust heaps will bring to them any precious object found therein, and that he who should remove the slightest article from one of these dwellings would be banished ignominiously and deprived of all rights of association. these huts are all alike; two rooms, the larger reserved for the bed, the smaller for kitchen, and in both rags of every variety. in the corner is a heap chiefly of silk, wool, and linen. this is the pile from which rent is to come, and every precious bit goes to it, since rent here is paid in advance,--three francs a week for the hut alone, and twenty francs a month if a scrap of court is added in which the rags can be sorted. on a fixed day the proprietor appears, and, if the sum is not ready, simply carries off the door and windows, and expels the unlucky tenant with no further formality. how the stipulated amount is scraped together, only the half-starved _chiffoniers_ know, since prices have fallen so that the hundred kilogrammes (about two hundred pounds) of rags, which, before the war, sold for eighty francs, to-day bring precisely eight. "in a good day, madame," said the woman, "we can earn three francs. we are always together, i and my man, and we never cease. but the dead season comes, that is, the summer, when paris is in the country or at the sea; then we can earn never more than two francs, and often not more than thirty sous, when they clean the streets so much, and so carry away everything that little is left for us. it is five years that i have followed my man, and he is born to it, and works always, but the time is changed. there is no more a living in this, or in anything we can do. i have gone hungry when it is the sewing that i do, and i go hungry now, but i am not alone. it is so for all of us, and we care not if only the children are fed. they are not, and it is because of them that we suffer. see, madame, this is the child of my niece, who came with me here, and has also her man, but never has any one of them eaten to the full, even of crusts, which often are in what we gather." the child ran toward her,--a girl three or four years old, wearing a pair of women's shoes ten times too large, and the remainder of a chemise. other clothing had not been attempted, or was not considered necessary, and the child looked up with hollow eyes and a face pinched and sharpened by want, while the swollen belly of the meagre little figure showed how wretched had been the supply they called food. all day these children fare as they can, since all day the parents must range the streets collecting their harvest; but fortunately for such future as they can know, these little savages, fighting together like wild animals, have within the last twenty years been gradually gathered into free schools, the work beginning with a devoted woman, who, having seen the city of the sun, never rested till a school was opened for its children. all effort, however, was quite fruitless, till an old _chiffonier_, also once a seamstress, united with her, and persuaded the mothers that they must prepare their children, or, at least, not prevent them from going. at present the school stands as one of the wisest philanthropies of paris, but neither this, nor any other attempt to better conditions, alters the fact that twelve and fourteen hours of labor have for sole result from thirty to forty sous a day, and that this sum represents the earnings of the average women-workers of paris, the better class of trades and occupations being no less limited in possibilities. chapter xvii. dressmakers and milliners in paris. "if a revolution come again, i think well, madame, it will be the great shops that will fall, and that it is workwomen who will bear the torch and even consent to the name of terror, _pétroleuses_. for see a moment what thing they do, madame. everywhere, the girl who desires to learn as _modiste_, and who, in the day when i had learned, became one of the house that she served, and, if talent were there, could rise and in time be mistress herself, with a name that had fame even,--that girl must now attempt the great shop and bury her talent in always the same thing. no more invention, no more grace, but a hundred robes always the same, and with no mark of difference for her who wears it, or way to tell which may be mistress and which the servant. it is not well for one or the other, madame; it is ill for both. then, too, many must stand aside who would learn, since it is always the machine to sew that needs not many. it is true there are still houses that care for a name, and where one may be _artiste_, and have pride in an inspiration. but they are rare; and now one sits all day, and this one stitches sleeves, perhaps, or seams of waists or skirts, and knows not effects, or how to plan the whole, or any joy of composition or result. it is bad, and all bad, and i willingly would see the great shops go, and myself urge well their destruction." these words, and a flood of more in the same direction, came as hot protest against any visit to the magasins du louvre, an enormous establishment of the same order as the bon marché, but slightly higher in price, where hundreds are employed as saleswomen, and where, side by side with the most expensive productions of french skill, are to be found the _occasions_,--the bargains in which the foreigner delights even more than the native. "let them go there," pursued the little _modiste_, well on in middle life, whose eager face and sad dark eyes lighted with indignation as she spoke. "let those go there who have money, always money, but no taste, no perception, no feeling for a true combination. i know that if one orders a robe that one comes to regard to say, 'yes, so and so must be for madame,' but how shall she know well when she is blunted and dead with numbers? how shall she feel what is best? i, madame, when one comes to me, i study. there are many things that make the suitability of a confection; there is not only complexion and figure and age, but when i have said all these, the thought that blends the whole and sees arising what must be for the perfect robe. this was the method of madame desmoulins, and i have learned of her. when it is an important case, a trousseau perhaps, she has neither eaten nor slept till she has conceived her list and sees each design clear. and then what joy! she selects, she blends with tears of happiness; she cuts with solemnity even. is there such a spirit in your bon marché? is there such a spirit anywhere but here and there to one who remembers; who has an ideal and who refuses to make it less by selling it in the shops? again, madame, i tell you it is a debasement so to do. i will none of it." madame, who had clasped her hands and half risen in her excited protest, sank back in her chair and fixed her eyes on a robe just ready to send home,--a creation so simply elegant and so charming that her brow smoothed and she smiled, well pleased. but her words were simply the echo of others of the same order, spoken by others who had watched the course of women's occupations and who had actual love for the profession they had chosen. questions brought out a state of things much the same for both paris and london, where the system of learning the business had few differences. for both millinery and dressmaking, apprenticeship had been the rule, the more important houses taking an entrance fee and lessening the number of years required; the others demanding simply the full time of the learner, from two to four years. in these latter cases food and lodging were given, and after the first six months a small weekly wage, barely sufficient to provide the sunday food and lodging. if more was paid, the learner lived outside entirely; and the first year or two was a sharp struggle to make ends meet. but if any talent showed itself, promotion was rapid, and with it the prospect of independence in the end, the directress of a group of girls regarding such talent as developed by the house and a part of its reputation. in some cases such girls by the end of the third year received often five or six thousand francs, and in five were their own mistresses absolutely, with an income of ten or twelve thousand and often more. this for the exception; for the majority was the most rigid training,--with its result in what we know as french finish, which is simply delicate painstaking with every item of the work,--and a wage of from thirty to forty francs a week, often below but seldom above this sum. in the early stages of the apprenticeship there was simply an allowance of from six to ten francs per month for incidental expenses, and even when skill increased and services became valuable, five francs a week was considered an ample return. in all these cases the week passed under the roof of the employer, and sunday alone became the actual change of the worker. the excessive hours of the london apprentice had no counterpart here or had not until the great houses were founded and steam and electric power came with the sewing-machine. with this new regime over-time was often claimed, and two sous an hour allowed, these being given in special cases. but exhausting hours were left for the lower forms of needle-work. the food provided was abundant and good, and sharp overseer as madame might prove, she demanded some relaxation for herself and allowed it to her employés. the different conditions of life made over-work in paris a far different thing from over-work in london. for both milliners and _modistes_ was the keen ambition to develop a talent, and the workroom, as has already been stated, felt personal pride in any member of the force who showed special lightness of touch or skill in combination. "work, madame!" exclaimed little madame m., as she described a day's work under the system which had trained her. "but yes, i could not so work now, but then i saw always before me an end. i had the sentiment. it was always that the colors arranged themselves, and so with my sister, who is _modiste_ and whose compositions are a marvel. my back has ached, my eyes have burned, i have seen sparks before them and have felt that i could no more, when the days are long and the heat perhaps is great, or even in winter crowded together and the air so heavy. but we laughed and sang; we thought of a future; we watched for talent, and if there was envy or jealousy, it was well smothered. i remember one talented italian who would learn and who hated one other who had great gifts; hated her so, she has stabbed her suddenly with sharp scissors in the arm. but such things are not often. we french care always for genius, even if it be but to make a shoe most perfect, and we do not hate--no, we love well, whoever shows it. but to-day all is different, and once more i say, madame, that too much is made, and that thus talent will die and gifts be no more needed." there is something more in this feeling than the mere sense of rivalry or money loss from the new system represented by the bon marché and other great establishments of the same nature. but this is a question in one sense apart from actual conditions, save as the concentration of labor has had its effect on the general rate of wages. five francs a day is considered riches, and the ordinary worker or assistant in either dressmaking or millinery department receives from two and a half to three and a half francs, on which sum she must subsist as she can. with a home where earnings go into a common fund, or if the worker has no one dependent upon her, french thrift makes existence on this sum quite possible; but when it becomes a question of children to be fed and clothed, more than mere existence is impossible, and starvation stands always in the background. for the younger workers the great establishments, offer many advantages over the old system, and hours have been shortened and attempts made in a few cases to improve general conditions of those employed. but there is always a dull season, in which wages lessen, or even cease for a time, the actual number of working days averaging two hundred and eighty. where work is private and reputation is established, the year's earnings are a matter of individual ability, but the mass of workers in these directions drift naturally toward the great shops which may be found now in every important street of paris, and which have altered every feature of the old system. whether this alteration is a permanent one, is a question to which no answer can yet be made. wages have reached a point barely above subsistence, and the outlook for the worker is a very shadowy one; but the question as a whole has as yet small interest for any but the political economists, while the women themselves have no thought of organization or of any method of bettering general conditions, beyond the little societies to which some of the ordinary workers belong, and which are half religious, half educational, in their character. as a rule, these are for the lower ranks of needlewomen, but necessity will compel something more definite in form for the two classes we have been considering, as well as for those below them, and the time approaches when this will be plain to the workers themselves, and some positive action take the place of the present dumb acceptance of whatever comes. chapter xviii. a silk-weaver of paris. "no, madame, there is no more any old paris. the paris that i remember is gone, all gone, save here and there a corner that soon they will pull down as all the rest. all changes, manners no less than these streets that i know not in their new dress, and where i go seeking a trace of what is past. it is only in the churches that one feels that all is the same, and even with them one wonders why, if it is the same, fewer and fewer come, and that men smile often at those that enter the doors, and would close them to us who still must pray in the old places. is there that consolation for the worker in america, madame? can she forget her sorrow and want at a shrine that is holy, and feel the light resting on her, full of the glory of the painted windows and the color that is joy and rest? because, if there had not been the church, my st. etienne du mont, that i know from a child, if there had not been that, i must have died. and so i have wondered if your country had this gift also for the worker, and, if it has not bread enough, has at least something that feeds the soul. is it so, madame?" poor old rose, once weaver in silk and with cheeks like her name, looking at me now with her sad eyes, blue and clear still in spite of her almost seventy years, and full of the patience born of long struggle and acceptance! st. etienne had drawn me as it had drawn her, and it was in the apse, the light streaming from the ancient windows, each one a marvel of color whose secret no man to-day has penetrated, that i saw first the patient face and the clasped hands of this suppliant, who prayed there undisturbed by any thought of watching eyes, and who rose presently and went slowly down the aisles, with a face that might have taken its place beside the pictured saints to whom she had knelt. her _sabots_ clicked against the pavement worn by many generations of feet, and her old fingers still moved mechanically, telling the beads which she had slipped out of sight. "you love the little church," i said; and she answered instantly, with a smile that illumined the old face, "indeed, yes; and why not? it is home and all that is good, and it is so beautiful, madame. there is none like it. i go to the others sometimes, above all to nôtre dame, which also is venerable and dear, and where one may worship well. but always i return here; for the great church seems to carry my prayers away, and they are half lost in such bigness, and it is not so bright and so joyous as this. for here the color lifts the heart, and i seem to rise in my soul also, and i know every pillar and ornament, for my eyes study often when my lips pray; but it is all one worship, madame, else i should shut them close. but the good god and the saints know well that i am always praying, and that it is my st. etienne that helps, and that is so beautiful i must pray when i see it." this was the beginning of knowing rose, and in good time her whole story was told,--a very simple one, but a record that stands for many like it. there was neither discontent nor repining. born among workers, she had filled her place, content to fill it, and only wondering as years went on why there were not better days, and, if they were to mend for others, whether she had part in it or not. far up under the roof of an old house, clung to because it was old, rose climbed, well satisfied after the minutes in the little church in which she laid down the burden that long ago had become too heavy for her, and which, if it returned at all, could always be dropped again at the shrine which had heard her first prayer. "it is paris that i know best," she said, "and that i love always, but i am not born in it, nor none of mine. it is my father that desired much that we should gain more, and who is come here when i am so little that i can be carried on the back. he is a weaver, madame, a weaver of silk, and my mother knows silk also from the beginning. why not, when it is to her mother who also has known it, and she winds cocoons, too, when she is little? i have played with them for the first plaything, and indeed the only one, madame, since, when i learn what they are and how one must use them, i have knowledge enough to hold the threads, and so begin. it was work, yes, but not the work of to-day. we worked together. if my father brought us here, it was that all things might be better; for he loved us well. he sang as he wove, and we sang with him. if hands were tired, he said always: 'think how you are earning for us all, and for the _dot_ that some day you shall have when your blue eyes are older, and some one comes who will see that they are wise eyes that, if they laugh, know also all the ways that these threads must go.' that pleased me, for i was learning, too, and together we earned well, and had our _pot au feu_ and good wine and no lack of bread. "that was the hand-loom, and when at last is come another that goes with steam, the weavers have revolted and sworn to destroy them all, since one could do the work of many. i hear it all, and listen, and think how it is that a man's mind can think a thing that takes bread from other men. i am sixteen, then, and skilful and with good wages for every day, and it is then that armand is come,--armand, who was weaver, too, but who had been soldier with the great emperor, and seen the girls of all countries. but he cared for none of them till he saw me, for his thought was always on his work; and he, too, planned machines, and fretted that he had not education enough to make them with drawings and figures so that the masters would understand. when machines have come he has fretted more; for one at least had been clear in his own thought, and now he cannot have it as he will, since another's thought has been before him. he told me all this, believing i could understand; and so i could, madame, since love made me wise enough to see what he might mean, and if i had not words, at least i had ears, and always i have used them well. we are still one family when the time comes that i marry, and my father has good wages in spite of machines, and all are reconciled to them, save my brother. but the owners build factories. it is no longer at home that one can work; and in these the children go, yes, even little ones, and hours are longer, and there is no song to cheer them, and no mother who can speak sometimes or tell a tale as they wind, and all is different. and so my mother says always: 'it is not good for france that the loom is taken out of the houses;' and if she makes more money because of more silk, she loses things that are more precious than money, and it is all bad that it must be so. my father shakes his head. there are wages for every child; and he sees this, and does not so well see that they earned also at home, and had some things that the factory stops, for always. "for me, i am weaver of ribbons, and i love them well, all the bright, beautiful colors. i look at the windows of my st. etienne and feel the color like a song in my heart, and while i weave i see them always, and could even think that i spin them from my own mind. "that is a fancy that has rest when the days are long, and the sound of the mill in my ears, and the beat of the machines, that i feel sometimes are cruel, for one can never stop, but must go on always. i think in myself, as i see the children, that i shall never let mine stand with them, and indeed there is no need, since we are all earning, and there is money saved, and this is all true for long. the children are come. three boys are mine; two with armand's eyes, and one with mine, whom armand loves best because of this, but seeks well to make no difference, and we call him etienne for my saint and my church. and, madame, i think often that more heaven is in him than we often know, and perhaps because i have prayed always under the window where the lights are all at last one glory, and the color itself is a prayer, etienne is so born that he must have it, too. i take him there a baby, and he stretches his hands and smiles. he does not shout like the others, but his smile seems from heaven. he is an artist. he draws always with a bit of charcoal, with anything, and i think that he shall study, and, it may be, make other beautiful things that may live in a new st. etienne, or in some other place in this paris that i love; and i am happy. "then comes the time, madame, that one remembers and prays to forget, till one knows that it may be the good god's way of telling us how wrong we are and what we must learn. first it is armand, who has become revolutionary,--what you call to-day communist,--and who is found in what are called plots, and tried and imprisoned. it was not for long. he would have come to me again, but the fever comes and kills many; he dies and i cannot be with him,--no, nor even see him when they take him to burial. i go in a dream. i will not believe it; and then my father is hurt. he is caught in one of those machines that my mother so hates, and his hand is gone and his arm crushed. "now the children must earn. there is no other way. for armand and pierre i could bear it, since they are stronger, but for etienne, no. he comes from school that he loves, and must take his place behind the loom. he is patient; he says, even, he is glad to earn for us all; but he is pale, and the light in his eyes grows dim, save when, night and morning, he kneels with me under my window and feels it as i do. "then evil days are here, and always more and more evil. month by month wages are less and food is more. my mother is dead, too, and my father quite helpless, and my brother that has never been quite as others, and so cannot earn. we work always. my boys know well all that must be known, but at seventeen armand is tall and strong as a man, and he is taken for soldier, and he, too, never comes to us again. i work more and more, and if i earn two francs for the day am glad, but now etienne is sick and i see well that he cannot escape. 'it is the country he needs,' says the doctor. 'he must be taken to the country if he is to live;' but these are words. i pray,--i pray always that succor may come, but it comes not, nor can i even be with him in his pain, since i must work always. and so it is, madame, that one day when i return, my father lies on his bed weeping, and the priest is there and looks with pity upon me, and my etienne lies there still, and the smile that was his only is on his face. "that is all, madame. my life has ended there. but it goes on for others still and can. my father has lived till i too am almost old. my brother lives yet, and my boy, pierre, who was shot at balaklava, he has two children and his wife, who is _couturière_, and i must aid them. i remain weaver, and i earn always the same. wages stay as in the beginning, but all else is more and more. one may live, but that is all. many days we have only bread; sometimes not enough even of that. but the end comes. i have always my st. etienne, and often under the window i see my etienne's smile, and know well the good god has cared for him, and i need no more. i could wish only that the children might be saved, but i cannot tell. france needs them; but i think well she needs them more as souls than as hands that earn wages, though truly i am old and it may be that i do not know what is best. tell me, madame, must the children also work always with you, or do you care for other things than work, and is there time for one to live and grow as a plant in the sunshine? that is what i wish for the children; but paris knows no such life, nor can it, since we must live, and so i must wait, and that is all." chapter xix. in the rue jeanne d'arc. "no, madame, unless one has genius or much money in the beginning, it is only possible to live, and sometimes one believes that it is not living. if it were not that all in paris is so beautiful, how would i have borne much that i have known? but always, when even the hunger has been most sharp, has been the sky so blue and clear, and the sun shining down on the beautiful boulevards, and all so bright, so gay, why should i show a face of sorrow? "i have seen the war, it is true. i have known almost the starving, for in those days all go hungry; most of all, those who have little to buy with. but one bears the hunger better when one has been born to it, and that is what has been for me. "in the rue jeanne d'arc we are all hungry, and it is as true to-day, yes, more true, than in the days when i was young. the charitable, who give more and more each year in paris, will not believe there is such a quarter, but for us, we know. have you seen the rue jeanne d'arc, madame? do you know what can be for this paris that is so fair?" this question came in the square before old nôtre dame, still the church of the poor, its gray towers and carved portals dearer to them than to the paris which counts the madeleine a far better possession than this noblest of all french cathedrals. save for such reminder this quarter might have remained unvisited, since even philanthropic paris appears to have little or no knowledge of it, and it is far beyond the distance to which the most curious tourist is likely to penetrate. on by the halle aux vins, with its stifling, fermenting, alcoholic odors, and then by the jardin des plantes, and beyond, the blank walls of many manufactories stretching along the seine,--this for one shore. on the other lies la rapée, with the windows of innumerable wine shops flaming in the sun, and further on, bercy, the ship bank of the river, covered with wine-casks and a throng of drays and draymen; of _débardeurs_, whose business it is to unload wood or to break up old boats into material for kindling; and of the host whose business is on and about the river. they are of the same order as the london dock laborers, and, like the majority of this class there and here, know every extremity of want. but it is a pretty picture from which one turns from the right, passing up the noisy boulevard of the gare d'orléans, toward the quarter of the gobelins. this quarter has its independent name and place like the "city of the sun." like that it knows every depth of poverty, but, unlike that, sunshine and space are quite unknown. the buildings are piled together, great masses separated by blind alleys, some fifteen hundred lodgings in all, and the owner of many of them is a prominent philanthropist, whose name heads the list of directors for various charitable institutions, but whose feet, we must believe, can hardly be acquainted with those alleys and stairways, narrow, dark, and foul. the unpaved ways show gaping holes in which the greasy mud lies thick or mingles with the pools of standing water, fed from every house and fermenting with rottenness. the sidewalks, once asphalted, are cracked in long seams and holes, where the same water does its work, and where hideous exhalations poison the air. within it is still worse; filth trickles down the walls and mingles under foot, the corridors seeming rather sewers than passages for human beings, while the cellars are simply reservoirs for the same deposits. above in the narrow rooms huddle the dwellers in those lodgings; whole families in one room, its single window looking on a dark court where one sees swarms of half-naked children, massed together like so many maggots, their flabby flesh a dirty white, their faces prematurely aged and with a diabolical intelligence in their sharp eyes. the children are always old. the old have reached the extremity of hideous decrepitude. one would say that these veins had never held healthy human blood, and that for young and old pus had become its substitute. to these homes return many of the men who wait for work on the quays, and thus this population, born to crime and every foulness that human life can know, has its proportion also of honest workers, whose fortunes have ebbed till they have been left stranded in this slime, of a quality so tenacious that escape seems impossible. many of the lodgings are unoccupied, and at night they become simply dens of wild beasts,--men and boys who live by petty thieving climbing the walls, stealing along the passages and up the dark stairways, and sheltering themselves in every niche and corner. now and then, when the outrages become too evident, the police descend suddenly on the drinking, shouting tenants at will, and for a day or two there is peace for the rest. but the quarter is shut in and hedged about by streets of a general respectable appearance, and thus it is felt to be impossible that such a spot can exist. it is, however, the breeding-ground of criminals; and each year swells the quota, whose lives can have but one ending, and who cost the city in the end many times the amount that in the beginning would have insured decent homes and training in an industrial school. it is only the dregs of humanity that remain in such quarters. the better elements, unless compelled by starvation, flee from it, though with the tenacity of the parisian for his own _quartier_, they settle near it still. all about are strange trades, invented often by the followers of them, and unknown outside a country which has learned every method of not only turning an honest penny, but doing it in the most effective way. among them all not one can be stranger than that adopted by madame agathe, whose soft voice and plaintive intonations are in sharpest contrast with her huge proportions, and who began life as one of the great army of _couturières_. with failing eyesight and the terror of starvation upon her, she went one sunday, with her last two francs in her pocket, to share them with a sick cousin, who had been one of the workmen at the jardin des plantes. he, too, was in despair; for an accident had taken from him the use of his right arm, and there were two children who must be fed. "what to do! what to do!" he cried; and then, as he saw the tears running down madame agathe's cheeks, he in turn, with the ease of his nation, wept also. "that is what has determined me," said madame agathe, as not long ago she told of the day when she had given up hope. "tears are for women, and even for them it is not well to shed many. i say to myself, 'i am on the earth: the good god wills it. there must be something that i may do, and that will help these even more helpless ones.' and as i say it there comes in from the jardin des plantes a man who has been a companion to pierre, and who, as he sees him so despairing, first embraces him and then tells him this: 'pierre, it is true you cannot again hold spade or hoe, but here is something. there are never enough ants' eggs for the zoölogical gardens and for those that feed pheasants. i know already one woman who supplies them, and she will some day be rich. why not you also?' "'i have no hands for any work. this hand is useless,' said pierre; and then i spoke: 'but mine are here and are strong; you have eyes, which for me are well nigh gone. it shall be your eyes and my hands that will do this work if i may learn all the ways. it is only that ants have teeth and bite and we must fear that.' "then claude has laughed. 'teeth! yes, if you will, but they do not gnaw like hunger. come with me, madame agathe, and we will talk with her of whom i speak,--she who knows it all and has the good heart and will tell and help.' "that is how i begun, madame. it is blanche who has taught me, and i have lived with her a month and watched all her ways, and learned all that these ants can do. at first one must renounce thought to be anything but bitten, yes, bitten always. see me, i am tanned as leather. it is the skin of an apple that has dried that you see on me and with her it is the same. we wear pantaloons and gauntlets of leather. it is almost a coat of mail, but close it as one may, they are always underneath. she can sleep when hundreds run on her, but i, i am frantic at first till i am bitten everywhere; and then, at last, as with bee-keepers, i can be poisoned no longer, and they may gnaw as they will. they are very lively. they love the heat, and we must keep up great heat always and feed them very high, and then they lay many eggs, which we gather for the bird-breeders and others who want them. twice we have been forced to move, since our ants will wander, and the neighbors complain when their pantries are full, and justly. "now eight and even ten sacks of ants come to me from germany and many places. i am busy always, and there is money enough for all; but i have sent the children away, for they are girls, and for each i save a little _dot_, and i will not have them know this _métier_, and be so bitten that they, too, are tanned like me and have never more their pretty fresh skins. near us now, madame, is another woman, but her trade is less good than mine. she is a bait-breeder, '_une éleveure des asticots_.' all about her room hang old stockings. in them she puts bran and flour and bits of cork, and soon the red worms show themselves, and once there she has no more thought than to let them grow and to sell them for eight and sometimes ten sous a hundred. but i like better my ants, which are clean, and which, if they run everywhere, do not wriggle nor squirm nor make you think always of corruption and death. she breeds other worms for the fishermen, who buy them at the shops for fishing tackle; but often she also buys worms from others and feeds them a little time till plump, but i find them even more disgusting. "an ant has so much intelligence. i can watch mine, madame, as if they were people almost, and would even believe they know me. but that does not hinder them from biting me; no, never; and because they are always upon me the neighbors and all who know me have chosen to call me the 'sister-in-law of ants.' "it is not a trade for women, it is true, save for one only here and there. but it is better than sewing; yes, far better; and i wish all women might have something as good, since now i prosper when once i ate only bread. what shall be done, madame, to make it that more than bread becomes possible for these workers?" chapter xx. from france to italy. in paris, its fulness of brilliant life so dominates that all shadows seem to fly before it and poverty and pain to have no place, and the same feeling holds for the chief cities of the continent. it is paris that is the key-note of social life, and in less degree its influence makes itself felt even at remote distances, governing production and fixing the rate of wages paid. modern improvement has swept away slums, and it is only here and there, in cities like berlin or vienna, that one comes upon anything which deserves the name. the ghetto is still a part of rome, and likely to remain so, since the conservatism of the lowest order is stronger even in the italian than in the french or german worker. but if civilization does not abolish the effects of low wages and interminable hours of labor, it at least removes them from sight, and having made its avenues through what once were dens, is certain that all dens are done away with. the fact that the avenue is made, that sunshine enters dark courts and noisome alleys, and that often court and alley are swept away absolutely, is a step gained; yet, as is true of shaftesbury avenue in london cut through the old quarters of st. giles, the squalor and misery is condensed instead of destroyed, and the building that held one hundred holds now double or triple that number. for paris the rue jeanne d'arc already described is an illustration of what may lie within a stone's throw of quiet and reputable streets, and of what chances await the worker, whose scanty wages offer only existence, and for whom the laying up of any fund for old age is an impossibility. the chief misfortune, however, and one mourned by the few french political economists who have looked below the surface, is the gradual disappearance of family life and its absorption into that of the factory. with this absorption has come other vices, that follow where the family has no further place, and, recognizing this at last, the heads of various great manufactories--notably in lyons and other points where the silk industry centres--have sought to reorganize labor as much as possible on the family basis. in the old days, when the loom was a part of the furniture of every home, the various phases of weaving were learned one by one, and the child who began by filling bobbins, passed on gradually to the mastery of every branch involved, and became judge of qualities as well as maker of quantities. in this phase, if hours were long, there were at least the breaks of the ordinary family life,--the care of details taken by each in turn, and thus a knowledge acquired, which, with the development of the factory system on its earliest basis, was quite impossible. there were other alleviations, too, as the store of songs and of traditions testifies, both these possibilities ceasing when home labor was transferred to the factory. on the other hand, there were certain compensations, in the fixing of a definite number of hours, of the rate of wages, and at first in freeing the home from the workshop element, the loom having usurped the largest and best place in every household. but, as machinery developed, the time of mother and children was again absorbed, and so absolutely that any household knowledge ended then and there, with no further possibility of its acquisition. it was this state of things, with its accumulated results, which, a generation or so later, faced the few investigators who puzzled over the decadence of morals, the enfeebled physiques, the general helplessness of the young women who married, and the whole series of natural consequences. so startling were the facts developed, that it became at once evident that a change must be brought about, if only as a measure of wise political economy; and thus it has happened for lyons that the factory system has perfected itself, and matches or even goes beyond that of any other country, with the exception of isolated points like saltaire in england, or the chenney village in connecticut. when it became evident that the ordinary factory girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child's needs so well as the brute, the time for action had come; and schools of various orders, industrial and otherwise, have gradually risen and sought to undo the work of the years that made them necessary. perfect in many points as the system has become, however, competition has so followed and pressed upon the manufacturer that the wage standard has lowered to little more than subsistence point, this fact including all forms of woman's work, without the factory as well as within. leaving france and germany and looking at swiss and italian workers, much the same statements may be made, the lace-workers in switzerland, for instance, being an illustration of the very minimum of result for human labor. like the lace-workers of germany, the fabric must often grow in the dark almost, basements being chosen that dampness may make the thread follow more perfectly the will of the worker, whose day is never less than fifteen hours long, whose food seldom goes beyond black bread with occasional milk or cabbage soup, and whose average of life seldom exceeds forty years. there is not a thread in the exquisite designs that has not been spun from a human nerve stretched to its utmost tension, and the face of these workers once seen are a shadow forever on the lovely webs that every woman covets instinctively. why an industry demanding so many delicate qualities--patience, perfection of touch, and long practice--should represent a return barely removed from starvation, no man has told us; but so the facts are, and so they stand for every country of europe where the work is known. in germany and italy alike, the sewing-machine has found its way even to the remotest village, manufacturers in the large towns finding it often for their interest to send their work to points where the lowest rate possible in cities seems to the simple people far beyond what they would dream of asking. it is neither in attic nor basement that the italian worker runs her machine, but in the open doorway, or even the street itself, sunshine pouring upon her, neighbors chatting in the pauses for basting or other preparation, and the sense of human companionship and interest never for an instant lost. for the anglo-saxon such methods are alien to every instinct. for the italian they are as natural as the reverse would be unnatural; and thus, even with actual wage conditions at the worst, the privations and suffering, which are as inevitable for one as the other, are made bearable, and even sink out of sight almost. they are very tangible facts, but they have had to mean something very near starvation before the italian turned his face toward america,--the one point where, it is still believed, the worker can escape such fear. it is hard for the searcher into these places to realize that suffering in any form can have place under such sunshine, or with the apparent joyousness of italian life; and it is certain that this life holds a compensation unknown to the north. in genoa, late in may, i paused in one of the old streets leading up from the quays, where hundreds of sailors daily come and go, and where one of the chief industries for women is the making of various forms of sailor garments. every doorway opening on the street held its sewing-machine or the low table where cutters and basters were at work, fingers and tongues flying in concert, and a babel of happy sound issuing between the grand old walls of houses seven and eight stories high, flowers in every window, many-colored garments waving from lines stretched across the front, and, far above, a proud mother handing her _bambino_ across for examination by her opposite neighbor, a very simple operation where streets are but four or five feet wide. life here is reduced to its simplest elements. abstemious to a degree impossible in a more northern climate, the italian worker in town or village demands little beyond macaroni, polenta, or chestnuts, with oil or soup, and wine as the occasional luxury; and thus a woman who works fourteen or even fifteen hours a day for a lire and a half, and at times only a lire ( c.), still has enough for absolute needs, and barely looks beyond. it is only when the little bundle has ceased to be _bambino_ that she thinks of a larger life as possible, or wonders why women who work more hours than men, and often do a man's labor, are paid only half the men's rate. in rome, where these lines are written, the story is the same. there are few statistics from which one can glean any definite idea of numbers, or even of occupations. the army swallows all the young men, precisely as in france; but women slip less readily into responsible positions, and thus earn in less degree than in either france or germany. in the ghetto swarm the crowds that have filled it for hundreds of years, and its narrow ways hold every trade known to man's hands, as well as every form of drudgery which here reaches its climax. the church has decreed the relieving of poverty as one chief method of saving rich men's souls, and thus the few attempts made by the english colony to bring about some reconstruction of methods as well as thought have met with every possible opposition, till, within recent years, the necessity of industrial education has become apparent, and italy has inaugurated some of the best work in this direction. beyond italy there has been no attempt at experiment. the work at best has been chiefly from the outside; but whether in this form, or assisted by actual statistics or the general investigation of others, the conclusion is always the same, and sums up as the demand for every worker and every master the resurrection of the old ideal of work; the doing away of competition as it at present rules, and the substitution of co-operation, productive as well as distributive; industrial education for every child, rich or poor; and that and recognition of the interests of all as a portion of our personal charge and responsibility, which, if i name it socialism, will be scouted as a dream of an impossible future, but which none the less bears that name in its highest interpretation, and is the one solution for every problem on either side the great sea, between the eastern and western worker. chapter xxi. present and future. at the first glance, and even when longer survey has been made, both paris and berlin,--and these may stand as the representative continental cities,--seem to offer every possible facility for the work of women. everywhere, behind counter, in shop or café, in the markets, on the streets, wherever it is a question of any phase of the ordinary business of life, women are in the ascendant, and would seem to have conquered for themselves a larger place and better opportunities than either england or america have to show. but, as investigation goes on, this larger employment makes itself evident as obstacle rather than help to the better forms of work, and the woman's shoulders bear not only her natural burden, but that also belonging to the man. the army lays its hand on the boy at sixteen or seventeen. the companies and regiments perpetually moving from point to point in paris seem to be composed chiefly of boys; every student is enrolled, and the period of service must always be deducted in any plan for life made by the family. naturally, then, these gaps are filled by women,--not only in all ordinary avocations, but in the trades which are equally affected by this perpetual drain. in every town of france or germany where manufacturing is of old or present date, the story is the same, and women are the chief workers; but, in spite of this fact, the same inequalities in wages prevail that are found in england and america, while conditions include every form of the sharpest privation. for england and america as well is the fact that law regulates or seeks to regulate every detail, no matter how minute, and that the manufacturer or artisan of any description is subject to such laws. on the continent, save where gross wrongs have brought about some slight attempt at regulation by the state, the law is merely a matter of general principles, legislation simply indicating certain ends to be accomplished, but leaving the means entirely in the hands of the heads of industries. germany has a far more clearly defined code than france; but legislation, while it has touched upon child labor, has neglected that of women-workers entirely. within a year or two the report of the belgian commissioners has shown a state of things in the coal mines, pictured with tremendous power by zola in his novel "germinal," but in no sense a new story, since the conditions of belgian workers are practically identical with those of women-workers in silesia, or at any or all of the points on the continent where women are employed. philanthropists have cried out; political economists have shown the suicidal nature of non-interference, and demonstrated that if the state gains to-day a slight surplus in her treasury, she has, on the other hand, lost something for which no money equivalent can be given, and that the women who labor from twelve to sixteen hours in the mines, or at any industry equally confining, have no power left to shape the coming generations into men, but leave to the state an inheritance of weak-bodied and often weak-minded successors to the same toil. for france and germany, belgium, switzerland, at every point where women are employed, the story is the same; and the fact remains that, while in the better order of trades women may prosper, in the large proportion, constant and exhausting labor simply keeps off actual starvation, but has no margin for anything that can really be called living. for paris and berlin, but in greater degree for paris, a fact holds true which has almost equal place for new york. women-workers, whose only support is the needle, contend with an army of women for whom such work is not a support, but who follow it as a means of increasing an already certain income. for these women there is no pressing necessity, and in paris they are of the _bourgeoisie_, whose desires are always a little beyond their means, who have ungratified caprices, ardent wishes to shine like women in the rank above them, to dress, and to fascinate. they are the wives and daughters of petty clerks, or employés of one order and another, of small government functionaries and the like, who embroider or sew three or four hours a day, and sell the work for what it will bring. the money swells the housekeeping fund, gives a dinner perhaps, or aids in buying a shawl, or some coveted and otherwise unattainable bit of jewelry. the work is done secretly, since they have not the simplicity either of the real _ouvrière_ or of the _grande dame_, both of whom sew openly, the one for charity, the other for a living. but this middle class, despising the worker and aspiring always toward the luxurious side of life, feels that embroidery or tapestry of some description is the only suitable thing for their fingers, and busy on this, preserve the appearance of the dignity they covet. often their yearly gains are not more than one hundred francs, and they seldom exceed two hundred; for they accept whatever is offered them, and the merchants who deal with them know that they submit to any extortion so long as their secret is kept. this class is one of the obstacles in the way of the ordinary worker, and one that grows more numerous with every year of the growing love of luxury. there must be added to it another,--and in paris it is a very large one,--that that of women who have known better days, who are determined to keep up appearances and to hide their misery absolutely from former friends. they are timid to excess, and spend days of labor on a piece of work which, in the end, brings them hardly more than a morsel of bread. one who goes below the surface of paris industries is amazed to discover how large a proportion of women-workers come under this head; and their numbers have been one of the strongest arguments for industrial education, and some development of the sense of what value lies in good work of any order. in one industry alone,--that of bonnet-making in general, it was found a year or two since that over eight hundred women of this order were at work secretly, and though they are found in several other industries, embroidery is their chief source of income. thus they are in one sense a combination against other women, and one more reason given by merchants of every order for the unequal pay of men and women. it is only another confirmation of the fact that, so long as women are practically arrayed against women, any adjustment of the questions involved in all work is impossible. hours, wages, all the points at issue that make up the sum of wrong represented by many phases of modern industry, wait for the organization among women themselves; and such organization is impossible till the sense of kinship and mutual obligation has been born. with competition as the heart of every industry, men are driven apart by a force as inevitable and irresistible as its counterpart in the material world, and it is only when an experiment like that of guise has succeeded, and the patient work and waiting of père godin borne fruit that all men pronounce good, that we know what possibilities lie in industrial co-operation. such co-operation as has there proved itself not only possible but profitable for every member concerned, comes at last, to one who has faced women-workers in every trade they count their own, and under every phase of want and misery, born of ignorance first, and then of the essential conditions of competition, under-pay, and over-work, as one great hope for the future. the instant demand, if it is to become possible, is for an education sufficiently technical to give each member of society the hand-skill necessary to make a fair livelihood. such knowledge is impossible without perfectly equipped industrial schools; and the need of these has so demonstrated itself that further argument for their adoption is hardly necessary. the constant advance in invention and the fact that the worker, unless exceptionally skilled, is more and more the servant of machinery, is an appeal no less powerful in the same direction. twenty years ago one of the wisest thinkers in france, conservative, yet with the clearest sense of what the future must bring for all workers, wrote:-- "from the economic point of view, woman, who has next to no material force and whose arms are advantageously replaced by the least machine, can have useful place and obtain fair remuneration only by the development of the best qualities of her intelligence. it is the inexorable law of our civilization--the principle and formula even of social progress, that _mechanical engines are to accomplish every operation of human labor which does not proceed directly from the mind_. the hand of man is each day deprived of a portion of its original task, but this general gain is a loss for the particular, and for the classes whose only instrument of labor and of earning daily bread is a pair of feeble arms." the machine, the synonym for production at large, has refined and subtilized--even spiritualized itself to a degree almost inconceivable, nor is there any doubt but that the future has far greater surprises in store. but if metal has come to wellnigh its utmost power of service, the worker's capacity has had no equality of development, and the story of labor to-day for the whole working world is one of degradation. that men are becoming alive to this; that students of political economy solemnly warn the producer what responsibility is his; and that the certainty of some instant step as vital and inevitable is plain,--are gleams of light in this murky and sombre sky, from which it would seem at times only the thunderbolt could be certain. organization and its result in industrial co-operation is one goal, but even this must count in the end only as corrective and palliative unless with it are associated other reforms which this generation is hardly likely to see, yet which more and more outline themselves as a part of those better days for which we work and hope. as to america thus far, our great spaces, our sense of unlimited opportunity, of the chance for all which we still count as the portion of every one on american soil, and a hundred other standard and little-questioned beliefs, have all seemed testimony to the reality and certainty of our faith. but as one faces the same or worse industrial conditions in london or any great city, english or continental, with its congestion of labor and its mass of resultant misery, the same solution suggests itself and the cry comes from philanthropist and philistine alike, "send them into the country! give them homes and work there!" naturally this would seem the answer; but where? for when search is made for any bit of land on which a home may rise and food be given back from the soil, all england is found to be in the hands of a few thousand land-owners, while london itself practically belongs to less than a dozen, with rents at such rates that when paid no living wage remains. when once this land question is touched, it is found made up of immemorial injustices, absurdities, outrages, and for america no less than for the whole world of workers. it cannot be that man has right to air and sunshine, but never right to the earth under his feet. standing-place there must be for this long battle for existence, and in yielding this standing-place comes instant solution of a myriad problems. this is no place for extended argument as to the necessity of land nationalization, or the advantages or disadvantages of mr. george's scheme of a single tax on land values, with the consequent dropping of our whole complicated tariff. but believing that the experiment is at least worth trying, and trying patiently and thoroughly, the belief, slowly made plain and protested against till further protest became senseless and impossible, stands here, as one more phase of work to be done. in it are bound up many of the reforms, without which the mere fact of granted standing-room would be valueless. the day must come when no one can question that the natural opportunities of life can never rightfully be monopolized by individuals, and when the education that fits for earning, and the means of earning are under wise control, monopolies, combinations, "trusts,"--all the facts which represent organized injustice sink once for all to their own place. differ as we may, then, regarding methods and possibilities, one question rises always for every soul alike,--what part have i in this awakening, and what work with hands or head can i do to speed this time to which all men are born, and of which to-day they know only the promise? from lowest to highest, the material side has so dominated that other needs have slipped out of sight; and to-day, often, the hands that follow the machine in its almost human operations, are less human than it. matter is god, and for scientist and speculative philosopher, and too often for social reformer also, the place and need of another god ceases, and there is no hope for the toiler but to lie down at last in the dust and find it sweet to him. yet for him, and for each child of man, is something as certain. not the god of theology; not the god made the fetich and blindly worshipped; but the power whose essence is love and inward constraint to righteousness, and to whom all men must one day come, no matter through what dark ways or with what stumbling feet. the vision is plain and clear of what the state must one day mean and what the work of the world must be, when once more the devil of self-seeking and greed flees to his own place, and each man knows that his life is his own only as he gives it to high service, and to loving thought for every weaker soul. the co-operative commonwealth must come; and when it has come, all men will know that it is but the vision of every age in which high souls have seen what future is for every child of man, and have known that when the spirit of brotherhood rules once for all, the city of god has in very truth descended from the heavens, and men at last have found their own inheritance. this is the future, remote even when most ardently desired; impossible, unless with the dream is bound up the act that brings realization. and when the nature and method of such act comes as question, and the word is, what can be done to-day, in the hour that now is?--how shall unlearned, unthinking minds bend themselves to these problems, when the wisest have failed, and the world still struggles in bondage to custom, the accumulated force of long-tolerated wrong--what can the answer be? there is no enlightener like even the simplest act of real justice. it is impossible that the most limited mind should not feel expansion and know illumination in even the effort to comprehend what justice actually is and involves. instantly when its demand is heard and met, custom, tradition, old beliefs, everything that hampers progress, slip away, and actual values show themselves. the first step taken in such direction means always a second. it is the beginning of the real march onward; the ending of any blind drifting in the mass, with no consciousness of individual power to move. a deep conviction founded on eternal law is itself an education, and whoever has once determined what the personal demand in life is, has entered the wicket-gate and sees before him a plain public road, on which all humanity may journey to the end. here then lies the answer, no less than in these last words, the ending of one phase of work which still has only begun. for the day is coming when every child born will be taught the meaning of wealth, of capital, of labor. then there will be small need of any further schools of political economy, since wealth will be known to be only what the soul can earn,--that which adheres and passes on with it; and capital, all forces that the commonwealth can use to make the man develop to his utmost possibility every power of soul and body; and labor, the joyful, voluntary acceptance of all work to this end, whether with hands or head. till then, in the fearless and faithful acceptance of every consequence of a conviction, in personal consecration to the highest demand, in increasing effort to make happiness the portion of all, lies the task set for each one,--the securing to every soul the natural opportunity denied by the whole industrial system, both of land and labor, as it stands to-day. this is the goal for all; and by whatever path it is reached, to each and every walker in it, good cheer and unflagging courage, and a leaving the way smoother for feet that will follow, till all paths are at last made plain, and every face set toward the city we seek! * * * * * _messrs. roberts brothers' publications._ prisoners of poverty women wage-workers: their trades and their lives. by helen campbell, author of "the what-to-do club," "mrs. herndon's income," "miss melinda's opportunity," etc. mo. cloth. $ . . paper, cents. the author writes earnestly and warmly, but without prejudice, and her volume is an eloquent plea for the amelioration of the evils with which she deals. in the present importance into which the labor question generally has loomed, this volume is a timely and valuable contribution to its literature, and merits wide reading and careful thought.--_saturday evening gazette._ she has given us a most effective picture of the condition of new york working-women, because she has brought to the study of the subject not only great care but uncommon aptitude. she has made a close personal investigation, extending apparently over a long time; she has had the penetration to search many queer and dark corners which are not often thought of by similar explorers; and we suspect that, unlike too many philanthropists, she has the faculty of winning confidence and extracting the truth. she is sympathetic, but not a sentimentalist; she appreciates exactness in facts and figures; she can see both sides of a question, and she has abundant common sense.--_new york tribune._ helen campbell's "prisoners of poverty" is a striking example of the trite phrase that "truth is stranger than fiction." it is a series of pictures of the lives of women wage-workers in new york, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. no work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, indeed, if they occurred in a novel would at once be stamped as a figment of the brain.... altogether, mrs. campbell's book is a notable contribution to the labor literature of the day, and will undoubtedly enlist sympathy for the cause of the oppressed working-women whose stories do their own pleading.--_springfield union._ it is good to see a new book by helen campbell. she has written several for the cause of working-women, and now comes her latest and best work, called "prisoners of poverty," on women wage-workers and their lives. it is compiled from a series of papers written for the sunday edition of a new york paper. the author is well qualified to write on these topics, having personally investigated the horrible situation of a vast army of working-women in new york,--a reflection of the same conditions that exist in all large cities. it is glad tidings to hear that at last a voice is raised for the woman side of these great labor questions that are seething below the surface calm of society. and it is well that one so eloquent and sympathetic as helen campbell has spoken in behalf of the victims and against the horrors, the injustices, and the crimes that have forced them into conditions of living--if it can be called living--that are worse than death. it is painful to read of these terrors that exist so near our doors, but none the less necessary, for no person of mind or heart can thrust this knowledge aside. it is the first step towards a solution of the labor complications, some of which have assumed foul shapes and colossal proportions, through ignorance, weakness, and wickedness.--_hartford times._ _sold by all booksellers. mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston. * * * * * _messrs. roberts brothers' publications._ miss melinda's opportunity. a story. by helen campbell, author of "the what-to-do club," "mrs. herndon's income," "prisoners of poverty." mo. cloth. price, $ . . "mrs. helen campbell has written 'miss melinda's opportunity' with a definite purpose in view, and this purpose will reveal itself to the eyes of all of its philanthropic readers. the true aim of the story is to make life more real and pleasant to the young girls who spend the greater part of the day toiling in the busy stores of new york. just as in the 'what-to-do club' the social level of village life was lifted several grades higher, so are the little friendly circles of shop-girls made to enlarge and form clubs in 'miss melinda's opportunity.'"--_boston herald._ "'miss melinda's opportunity,' a story by helen campbell, is in a somewhat lighter vein than are the earlier books of this clever author; but it is none the less interesting and none the less realistic. the plot is unpretentious, and deals with the simplest and most conventional of themes; but the character-drawing is uncommonly strong, especially that of miss melinda, which is a remarkably vigorous and interesting transcript from real life, and highly finished to the slightest details. there is much quiet humor in the book, and it is handled with skill and reserve. those who have been attracted to mrs. campbell's other works will welcome the latest of them with pleasure and satisfaction."--_saturday gazette._ "the best book that helen campbell has yet produced is her latest story, 'miss melinda's opportunity,' which is especially strong in character-drawing, and its life sketches are realistic and full of vigor, with a rich vein of humor running through them. miss melinda is a dear lady of middle life, who has finally found her opportunity to do a great amount of good with her ample pecuniary means by helping those who have the disposition to help themselves. the story of how some bright and energetic girls who had gone to new york to earn their living put a portion of their earnings into a common treasury, and provided themselves with a comfortable home and good fare for a very small sum per week, is not only of lively interest, but furnishes hints for other girls in similar circumstances that may prove of great value. an unpretentious but well-sustained plot runs through the book, with a happy ending, in which miss melinda figures as the angel that she is."--_home journal._ _sold by all booksellers. mailed, post-paid on receipt of price, by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston. * * * * * _messrs. roberts brothers' publications._ mrs. herndon's income. a novel. by helen campbell. author of "the what-to-do club." one volume. mo. cloth. $ . "confirmed novel-leaders who have regarded fiction as created for amusement and luxury alone, lay down this book with a new and serious purpose in life. the social scientist reads it, and finds the solution of many a tangled problem; the philanthropist finds in it direction and counsel. a novel written with a purpose, of which never for an instant does the author lose sight, it is yet absorbing in its interest. it reveals the narrow motives and the intrinsic selfishness of certain grades of social life; the corruption of business methods; the 'false, fairy gold,' of fashionable charities, and 'advanced' thought. margaret wentworth is a typical new england girl, reflective, absorbed, full of passionate and repressed intensity under a quiet and apparently cold exterior. the events that group themselves about her life are the natural result of such a character brought into contact with real life. the book cannot be too widely read."--_boston traveller._ "if the 'what-to-do club' was clever, this is decidedly more so. it is a powerful story, and is evidently written in some degree, we cannot quite say how great a degree, from fact. the personages of the story are very well drawn,--indeed, 'amanda briggs' is as good as anything american fiction has produced. we fancy we could pencil on the margin the real names of at least half the characters. it is a book for the wealthy to read that they may know something that is required of them, because it does not ignore the difficulties in their way, and especially does not overlook the differences which social standing puts between class and class. it is a deeply interesting story considered as mere fiction, one of the best which has lately appeared. we hope the authoress will go on in a path where she has shown herself so capable."--_the churchman._ "in mrs. campbell's novel we have a work that is not to be judged by ordinary standards. the story holds the reader's interest by its realistic pictures of the local life around us, by its constant and progressive action, and by the striking dramatic quality of scenes and incidents, described in a style clear, connected, and harmonious. the novel-reader who is not taken up and made to share the author's enthusiasm before getting half-way through the book must possess a taste satiated and depraved by indulgence in exciting and sensational fiction. the earnestness of the author's presentation of essentially great purposes lends intensity to her narrative. succeeding as she does in impressing us strongly with her convictions, there is nothing of dogmatism in their preaching. but the suggestiveness of every chapter is backed by pictures of real life."--_new york world._ _sold by all booksellers. mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers_, roberts brothers, boston. * * * * * _messrs. roberts brothers' publications._ the what-to-do club. a story for girls. by helen campbell. mo. cloth. price $ . . "'the what-to-do club' is an unpretending story. it introduces us to a dozen or more village girls of varying ranks. one has had superior opportunities; another exceptional training; two or three have been 'away to school;' some are farmers' daughters; there is a teacher, two or three poor self-supporters,--in fact, about such an assemblage as any town between new york and chicago might give us. but while there is a large enough company to furnish a delightful coterie, there is absolutely no social life among them.... town and country need more improving, enthusiastic work to redeem them from barrenness and indolence. our girls need a chance to do independent work, to study practical business, to fill their minds with other thoughts than the petty doings of neighbors. a what-to-do club is one step toward higher village life. it is one step toward disinfecting a neighborhood of the poisonous gossip which floats like a pestilence around localities which ought to furnish the most desirable homes in our country."--_the chautauquan._ 'the what-to-do club' is a delightful story for girls, especially for new england girls, by helen campbell. the heroine of the story is sybil waite, the beautiful, resolute, and devoted daughter of a broken-down but highly educated vermont lawyer. the story shows how much it is possible for a well-trained and determined young woman to accomplish when she sets out to earn her own living, or help others. sybil begins with odd jobs of carpentering, and becomes an artist in woodwork. she is first jeered at, then admired, respected, and finally loved by a worthy man. the book closes pleasantly with john claiming sybil as his own. the labors of sybil and her friends and of the new jersey 'busy bodies,' which are said to be actual facts, ought to encourage many young women to more successful competition in the battles of life."--_golden rule._ "in the form of a story, this book suggests ways in which young women may make money at home, with practical directions for so doing. stories with a moral are not usually interesting, but this one is an exception to the rule. the narrative is lively, the incidents probable and amusing, the characters well-drawn, and the dialects various and characteristic. mrs. campbell is a natural storyteller, and has the gift of making a tale interesting. even the recipes for pickles and preserves, evaporating fruits, raising poultry, and keeping bees, are made poetic and invested with a certain ideal glamour, and we are thrilled and absorbed by an array of figures of receipts and expenditures, equally with the changeful incidents of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony. fun and pathos, sense and sentiment, are mingled throughout, and the combination has resulted in one of the brightest stories of the season."--_woman's journal._ _sold by all booksellers. mailed, post paid, by publishers_, roberts brothers. boston. note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original diagrams. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) the next step a plan for economic world federation by scott nearing author of _the american empire_ ridgewood, new jersey nellie seeds nearing * * * * * * _by the same author_ wages in the united states. financing the wage earner family. reducing the cost of living. anthracite. poverty and riches. social adjustment. social religion. women and social progress. (collaboration with nellie nearing) the super race. elements of economics. the new education. economics. community civics. (collaboration with jessie field) solution of the child labor problem. social sanity. the american empire. * * * * * * copyright, all rights reserved printed in the united states of america _this book is dedicated to the task of emancipating the human race from economic servitude_ "the community needs service first, regardless of who gets the profits, because its life depends on the service it gets." "organizing for work." h.l. gantt. "it is not common language, literature and tradition alone, nor yet clearly defined or strategic frontiers, that will in the future give stability to the boundary lines of europe, but rather such distribution of its supplies of coal and iron as will prevent any of the great nations of europe becoming strong enough to dominate or absorb all the others." "the economic basis of an enduring peace." c.w. macfarlane. "men cannot exist in their present numbers on the earth without world co-operation." "our social heritage." graham wallas. "the real way, surely, in which to organize the interests of producers is by working out a delimitation of industry, and confiding the care of its problems to those most concerned with them. this is, in fact, a kind of federalism in which the powers represented are not areas but functions." "foundations of sovereignty." h.j. laski. summary of the argument men progress in proportion as they are able to fit themselves for life, and to fit life to themselves. both processes go on unceasingly. recent economic changes have brought the remotest parts of the world into close contact with "civilization" at the same time that they have increased the dependence of one part of the world upon another part. oddly enough, this interdependence has been intensified under a system of society that deified competition. the conflicts, inevitably resulting from such a contradiction, have taken a terrible toll in life and well-being, and have left europe in chaos. the successful organization of the life of the world is impossible without the organization of its economic affairs. for the present plan of competition between groups, classes and nations there must be substituted a means of co-operative living. the organization of a producers society will provide that means. local initiative must be preserved; self-government in economic affairs must be assured, and the economic activities of the world must be federated in such a way that all economic problems of world concern will be brought under some central authority which is representative of the various interests involved at the same time that it controls the disposition of economic life. a world parliament composed of representatives elected by the workers in the various producing groups would provide such a central authority, and would furnish the means of directing the economic experiments of the race. economic emancipation is the objective. the means for its attainment is a society organized in terms of producers groups, and living in accordance with the highest known standards of intelligent social direction. table of contents chapter headings . _a world economic program_ chapter i. the new economic life chapter ii. the economic muddle . _world economic organization_ iii. economic foundations iv. economic self-government v. a world producers' federation vi. world administration . _economic progress_ chapter vii. trial and error in economic organization viii. economic liberation what to read section headings chapter i. the new economic life . the historic present. . economic needs. . worldizing economic activity. . the basis of a world program. . the league of nations failure. . axioms of economic reorganization. chapter ii. the economic muddle . bankruptcy and chaos. . localized problems. . world problems. . competition for economic advantage. . distribution of the world's wealth. . the livelihood struggle. . guaranteeing livelihood. . distribution and the social revolution. . a new order. . the basis of world reconstruction. chapter iii. economic foundations . the social structure. . specialization, association, co-operation. . three lines of economic organization. . economic forms. . limitations on capitalism. . the growth of capitalism. . effective economic units. . classes of economic units. . the ideal and the real. chapter iv. economic self-government . maximum advantage. . the essentials for maximum returns. . centralized authority. . an ideal economic unit. . rewarding energy. . the ownership of the economic machinery. . economic leadership. . the selection of leaders. . the detail of organization. . the progress of self-government. chapter v. a world producers' federation . world outlook. . the need of organization. . present-day economic authority. . federation as a way out. . building a producers' federation. . four groups of federations. . the form of organization. . all power to the producers! chapter vi. world administration . the basis for world administration. . the field of world administration. . five world problems. . work of the administrative boards. . the resources and raw materials board. . the transport and communication board. . the exchange, credit and investment board. . the budget board. . the adjudication of disputes board. . the detail of world administration. chapter vii. trial and error in economic organization . trying things out. . the capitalist experiment. . the cost of experience. . education. . pacing the future. . accumulating social knowledge. . conscious social improvement. . the barriers to progress. . next steps. . the success qualities. chapter viii. economic liberation . why organize? . freedom from primitive struggle. . freedom from servility. . wisdom in consumption. . leisure for effective expression. . culture and human aspiration. what to read the next step i. the new economic life . _the historic present_ the knell of a dying order is tolling. its keynote is despair. gaunt hunger pulls at the bell-rope, while dazed humanity listens, bewildered and afraid. uncertainty and a sense of futility have gripped the world. they are manifesting themselves in unrest, disillusionment, the abandonment of ideals, opportunism, and a tragic concentration on the life of the moment, which alone seems sure. the future promises so little that even the most hopeful pause on its threshold, hesitant, and scarce daring to penetrate its mystery. the war showed the impotence of the present order to assure even a reasonable measure of human happiness and well-being. of what profit the material benefits of a civilization that takes a toll of thirty-five millions of lives and that wrecks the economic machinery of a continent in four short years? yet the failure of the revolutionary forces to avail themselves of the opportunity presented by the war proved the unreadiness of the masses to throw off the yoke of the old régime and to lay the foundations of a new order. the world rulers painted a picture of liberated humanity that led tens of millions to fight with the assurance that victory would make that hope a reality. the workers yearned for the social revolution and for the establishment of the co-operative commonwealth with its promise of equality and fraternity. but the events that staggered the world between and shattered both ideals. now that the terrible conflict has ceased, we pause and reflect. millions are weary, millions are old, millions are broken, millions are disappointed, and the weary ones, the old ones, the broken ones and the disappointed ones have lost their vision and have abandoned their faith. yet life sweeps on--its unity unimpaired, its continuity unbroken, its force unchecked, its vigor unabated. multitudes have been born since the end of the great war, and other multitudes, who were babes in arms when the great war began, are growing into young manhood and womanhood. the war, with its hardships and its fearful losses, is history. the present, merging endlessly with the future, makes of each day a to-morrow in which hundreds of millions of those who now inhabit the earth will live. how? that is the question which the world to-day faces. the answer is in our hands. . _economic needs_ humanity has always been face to face with the bread and butter problem because people must have food and clothing and a roof over their heads or pay the penalty in physical suffering. under the present world order, for lack of these simple economic requirements, millions of poverty-stricken workers perish each year, of slow starvation and exposure in paris, london, chicago, tokyo; of famine in china, egypt and india. some issues present themselves for consideration only occasionally. the demand for economic necessaries each day recurs with tireless insistence in the life of every individual. men have learned this fact through frightful experiences, and they look forward with hope or with dread to the comfort of plenty or to the disaster of want. so effectually have these forces entered into everyday life that they color all aspects of human existence, and people continually think and act in terms of economic hardship or of economic well-being. this simple fact of economic determinism--the influence of the livelihood struggle upon the conduct of individuals and of societies--plays a fateful part in shaping both biography and history. the economic issues before primitive society were comparatively simple ones. the producer--the hunter, herder, farmer--snared his game and cooked it, tended his goats and lived on their milk and flesh, planted and reaped his crops, and used them to sustain life. later, the baker, the saddler, the tailor and the carpenter spent their energies in producing the articles of their trade and in disposing of them. the herdsman could live on his hills, the farmer in his valleys and the artisans in their towns, content and at peace with the remainder of the world, neither knowing nor caring what was happening to their fellow dwellers on the planet. confined within its narrow bounds, primitive thought was as local as primitive life. but such isolation is no longer possible. the currents of economic life, like most other phases of human activity, have swept beyond the local forests, the grass lands, the tilled fields, the oven and the carpenter's bench, and gaining momentum in their ever-widening course, they have circled the world. . _worldizing economic activity_ the past hundred years have witnessed a speedy worldizing of human affairs built upon a transformation in the ways of making a living. these changes have been effected by the industrial revolution, which, toward the end of the eighteenth century began to make itself felt in great britain. its influence spread over europe, america and australia during the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century, but it did not reach japan until . almost within the memory of the present generation, therefore, the scope of trade, manufacture and finance, the search for markets, the organization and unification of labor and of popular thinking about economic problems, have passed from a local into a world field. the inventions and discoveries which were the immediate cause of the industrial revolution succeeded one another with a bewildering rapidity that is well illustrated in the case of communication. the steamboat, first made practicable in , and the locomotive, invented about , provided the means of rapid transportation of goods, people and messages. the power press ( ) and the manufacture of paper from wood-pulp (begun in ) made possible cheap and abundant reading matter. the telegraph, invented about , laid the basis for instantaneous communication. the first trans-atlantic cable ( ) annihilated the water barrier to thought. the telephone ( ) and the wireless ( ) brought the more remote parts of each country and of the world within easy reach of the centers of civilization, while the radio-phone ( ) enables millions to sit around a common table for thought, instruction or enjoyment. the camera ( ) supplemented by the moving picture process ( ) has enabled those who do not read to secure information that was formerly reserved for the learned and the cultured. thus steam, electricity, and a number of other discoveries and inventions in the realm of natural science have brought the minds of the world in as close touch as were the inhabitants of a fifteenth century italian city. the effects of industrialism date only from history's yesterday, yet its results have already been momentous and far-reaching. this is particularly true of the close dependence of industries upon supplies of raw materials and fuels, of the volume and the variety of the goods produced and transported, of the speed with which communications are sent, of the widened opportunities for travel, and of the immense amount of information on the printed page and the film that goes, each day, from one part of the world to another. nature has not scattered coal, iron, copper and sugarland over the earth in the same lavish way that she has distributed air and sunshine. on the contrary, the important resources from which industry derives its raw materials and its fuels are found within very limited areas to which the remainder of the world must go for the commodities that supply its basic industries. within each country raw materials are produced at one point and shipped elsewhere. ore, coal, grain and meat-animals make up the bulk of the freight tonnage in europe, in america and in australia. a similar economic relation exists between the various countries, some of which produce far more than their proportionate share of minerals and fuels. thus, in , the united states, with but per cent of the world's population, produced per cent and consumed per cent of the world's iron ore supply. the figures for the other important nations were: ("world atlas of commercial geology," dept. of the interior, washington, , p. ) per cent per cent produced consumed germany britain france russia belgium spain only in france and spain did production exceed consumption. four of the remaining countries used more iron ore than they produced, which meant that they were forced to depend upon some other country for their supply. belgium, with her many industries, imported practically all of the iron ore that she used. coal furnishes an even more striking illustration of the economic dependence of one part of the world upon another. the production and consumption of coal, for , in millions of tons, were as follows: tons tons produced consumed united states britain germany france italy austria-hungary the united states, britain and germany produced, in this one year, millions of tons of coal that were either stored or exported. france, italy and austria, together with many of the smaller industrial countries of europe were forced to depend upon their neighbors for coal. in the case of italy, practically all of the coal used was imported. again, the united states and spain are alone among the principal countries producing a surplus of copper. out of a consumption ( ) of , tons, britain imported , ; france imported , of the , tons consumed, and germany, out of , tons consumed, imported , tons. these figures of the production and consumption of iron, coal and copper tell the story of an economic interdependence that makes isolated industrial life virtually impossible. manufacturing and transport depend for their maintenance upon minerals and fuels, and those countries that propose to manufacture and to transport must either produce minerals themselves or depend upon some other country that does produce them. in practice, a few countries are enabled to produce more of the minerals and fuels than they themselves use, and to sell the surplus to their needy neighbors. with the spread of the industrial system, this dependence will increase rather than diminish because of the way in which the reserve supplies of minerals and fuels are distributed. the principal deposits of iron, coal, copper and petroleum are apparently in the western hemisphere, and particularly in north america. in so far as this is true, the remainder of the world will be compelled to look to the americas for these basic commodities. out of a total world product of iron ore ( ) of millions of tons, the united states produced millions (over a third) because that country is far better supplied with available iron ore deposits than is any other country. since the war, france holds the second largest deposits, but the third largest are in newfoundland, the fourth largest in cuba, and the fifth largest in brazil, whose "enormous deposits are almost untouched" ("atlas," p. ). as for coal, about three-fourths of the world's known reserves are in north america. the largest known reserves of copper are in north and south america--those of canada and mexico are comparatively important; those of chili probably greater than any other country except the united states. petroleum is also highly localized. between and the world's production of petroleum was , millions of tons. of this total, three-fifths came from the united states, while seventeen-twentieths came from the united states and russia. indeed, resources are limited and localized to such a point that the economic survival of many parts of the industrial world depends upon the continued importation of raw materials from other countries or from other continents. this localization of resources has resulted in a corresponding localization of many of the basic industries. germany thus became a manufacturing center and argentina a producer of food. necessarily these two countries exchange their products, the germans eating argentinian wheat reaped by german machinery. so complete has this specialization become, that industrial communities, and even industrial countries, like britain and germany, have ceased to produce sufficient food for their maintenance, and have relied, instead, on the american, african and australian grain fields.[ ] in order to buy wheat, these countries must sell manufactured goods. in order to manufacture, they are compelled to import the raw materials and fuels--cotton, copper, rubber, petroleum, coal, iron. the countries with highly developed industries have therefore ceased to be self-sufficient. their whole economic life has become a part and parcel of the life of the world. this world interdependence is reflected in the growth of world commerce from a total value of , millions of dollars in , , millions in , and , millions in , to , millions in . meanwhile, the nominal tonnage of steam and sailing vessels increased from . millions of tons in to . millions of tons in , to . millions in , and to . millions in . resources are sought after, raw materials are transported and manufactured into usable products, manufactured products are exchanged for food and raw materials, and the cycle is thus completed. in its course, all of the principal countries and all of the continents are drawn upon for the means of maintaining economic life. while the industrial revolution broke the spell of isolation that lay so heavily upon the remote parts of the world, the driving power of the economic forces that followed in its wake, has battered down the geographic barriers that separate men, almost to the vanishing point. peoples work together, exchange the products of their labor, travel, accumulate and spread news, broadcast ideas and organize and co-ordinate business ventures and labor unions, without any great consideration for geography, and despite the political boundary lines that separate nations. a century of rapid economic development has brought the world into a physical unity the like of which it has never before experienced. through the ages, human brotherhood has been the theme of philosophers and poets. recent economic changes have established a world fellowship, not, to be sure, of the kind about which utopists had dreamed, but one growing out of the exigencies of world interdependence. tens of millions are to-day co-operating in production and exchange, not because of any sweet reasonableness but because the pre-emptory demands of existence leave them no choice. of necessity, therefore, since they are in constant touch with one another, they begin to learn one another's little ways; to inquire into the personalities of the "foreigners" that pass them on the street, work with them elbow to elbow in the shops, and eat with them at the same restaurant tables. this new brotherhood is an outgrowth of day-to-day relations in an industrial community. old time questions were of a kind that divided men. "are you a christian?" "where were you born?" "can you speak spanish?" no matter how a man answered these questions he got himself into difficulty. if he was a christian, he found two-thirds of the world confronting him with different religious beliefs. if he was born in france, he was compelled to assume all of the enmities, hatreds and antagonisms felt by frenchmen for their rivals. if he spoke anything except spanish, he was a "foreigner" in spain. the old world was a separatist world, lined with walls, fences, boundary stakes and frontiers. modern questions bring men into touch with one another. "can you repair a locomotive?" "do you understand coal mining?" "can you carry us safely to japan?" "will you take shoes in exchange for petroleum?" "are you able to get along with people?" "have you any surplus wheat?" "how do you suppose we can get rid of the boll-weevil?" "let us show you a new style tractor." if a man can repair an engine, he is wanted in an engine shop. if he can dig coal, he is needed in a coal mine. if he has shoes to exchange for fuel, he finds a ready customer. if he can get along with an odd assortment of his fellows, he is in demand everywhere. the new world is a co-operative world in which people are working together, living together, thinking together; and a test of man's capacity to take part in its activities lies in his ability to be an effective, co-operating member of a world group. [footnote : before the war great britain imported about half of her food. by she was importing about three-quarters of it. on the basis of the - harvests, british wheat sufficed for less than a third of the british population. see "the fruits of victory," norman angell, glasgow. collins, , p. .] . _the basis of a world program_ with economic life established on a world scale, it is inevitable that the range of men's thoughts and the lines of their social groupings should assume the same general scope. the late war made it quite apparent that war means world war, and that a real peace is impossible unless it is a world peace. the post-war experience has shown with equal clearness, that prosperity means world prosperity, and that it is impossible to destroy the economic well-being of an integral part of the world without destroying the well-being of the whole world. these things were suspected before the war, when they formed the themes of moral dissertations and scholarly essays, of syndicalist pamphlets, socialist programs and revolutionary appeals. but it required the hard knocks of the past eight years to lift them so far out of the realm of theory into that of reality, that any thinking human being who faces the facts must admit their truth.[ ] the economics of the modern world make it inevitable that thinkers on public questions, particularly on economic questions, should frame their thoughts in world terms, and that the practical plans for the organization and direction of human affairs should be built around an idea which includes these three elements: . _any workable plan for the organization of the world must have an economic foundation._ . _such a plan must include all of the economically essential portions of the world._ it will be ineffective if it is confined to any one nation, to any one group of nations, or to any one continent. . _such a plan must rely, for its fulfillment, on world thinking and world organization._ these propositions do not imply that economic forces and world organization must become the centers of exclusive attention. there are potent forces, other than economic ones, and there are forms of local organization that must be developed or perpetuated as a matter of course. but for the moment the economic forces and the world phases of organization have assumed a position of primary importance. [footnote : the manchester guardian commercial, supplement for april , , page iv, carries an advertisement signed by sir charles w. macara, chairman and managing director of henry bannerman and sons, ltd., chairman of the manchester cotton employers association, etc., which contains a very forceful presentation of this point. "it is impossible for any country to expect to win economic success at the expense or in total indifference to the success of others.... the good of one country is bound up with the good of another, and it is only by studying what will be mutually advantageous that we shall find the key to our good fortune.... the whole world is interdependent, and you cannot injure one member of the international body without injuring all the rest."] . _the league of nations failure_ the principal scheme recently advanced as a means of co-ordinating the life of the world--the league of nations covenant--violates all three of these essential principles. in the first place, the league covenant, with certain minor exceptions, is a political and not an economic document, devoting its attention to territorial integrity and the preservation of sovereignty, and passing over such economic problems as resource control, and the competition for raw materials, markets and investment opportunities as though they were non-existent. in the second place instead of concerning itself with all of the integral parts of the world, it treats nations other than the "big five" (britain, france, italy, japan and the united states) as though they were of second or of third rate importance. china, india, germany, russia and latin america, with considerably more than half of the world's population, and with at least half of the world's essential resources, were slighted or ignored. in the third place, the league covenant is not based on world thinking. on the contrary, it was designed to set up one part of the world, the victorious allies, against four other parts of the world: the enemy countries, soviet russia, the undeveloped (unexploited) countries, and the small and powerless countries. political, sectional and provincial in its point of view, the league, as a means of world organization, was destined, from its inception, to pathetic failure. world economic life is an established fact of such moment that it must be reckoned with in any scheme for social rebuilding. a capacity for organization and for conscious improvement distinguishes man from most of the animals. in the past, men have organized the army, the church, the city, the nation, the school. the events surrounding the industrial revolution have placed a new task on their shoulders--the task of organizing world economic life. without doubt this is the largest and the most intricate problem in organization that the human race has ever faced. on the other hand, the interdependence of economic life invites co-ordination, while the advances in organization methods, particularly among the masses of the people, render the transition from local to world organization quite logical and relatively easy--far easier, certainly, than the first hesitating steps that the race took in the direction of co-operative activities. even though the task were far more difficult than it is, the race must perform it or pay an immense price in hardship, suffering and decimation. the work is already begun. private capitalists have built world systems of trade, transport and banking. soviet russia has made an heroic attempt to organize one portion of the earth's surface along economic lines. for the most part, however, the task of co-ordinating the world's economic life awaits the courage and the genius of a generation that shall add this triumph to the achievements of the race. . _axioms of economic reorganization_ certain well-defined and widely understood principles, that might almost be called axioms of social procedure, are to be reckoned with in any effort at world economic reorganization. for convenience of discussion, they may be summarized thus: . _the wheels of industry must be kept turning smoothly, regularly and efficiently._ a country like russia, consisting, for the most part of agricultural villages, can survive, even though machine industries practically cease to function, while such countries as germany and britain, built of bremens, hamburgs, essens, glasgows and manchesters are dependent for their food supply as well as for their supply of raw materials upon the continued production and transport of commodities. the state of rhode island, with its . per cent of city and town dwellers, typifies this dependence. given such concentrated populations engaged in specialized industries, and the cessation of production means speedy starvation for those that cannot migrate. . _provision must be made for improvements and betterments._ the increase of population and the normal advances in science and industry both demand a volume of product adequate to cover the necessary increases in equipment. . _the people who do the work must dispose of the products they turn out._ they may consume them all, or they may reserve a portion of them for new roads, for additional rolling stock, for the advancement of art and learning. whatever the character of the decision, the right and power to make it rests with those who produce the goods of which a disposition is being made. . _justice and fair dealing must be embodied in the scheme of production and distribution._ this does not mean absolute justice, but as much justice as the collective intelligence and will of the community are able to put into force. for the attainment of such a result, the forms of social life must be constantly altered to keep pace with economic change. . _the foregoing principles must apply, not to one man, or class, or people, but to all men, all classes and all peoples._ recent events have shown that an injury to one is an injury to all. reasoning, foresight and experience will convince the people of the world that a benefit to one is a benefit to all. while men continue to live together, their livelihood problems must be thought about collectively, and the solutions that are determined upon must be applied to all, without discrimination. how shall such results be obtained? by what means is it possible to lead men to a world vision? who can persuade them to work toward the building of a sounder society than that with which the world is now laboring? of all the issues that confront the teachers of men, this is one of the most pressing and most insistent. those who have taken upon themselves the task of seeking out and of expounding ideas have seldom faced a graver responsibility than that with which they are at the moment confronted. world facts demand world thoughts and world acts, before the human race can adopt saner, wiser and more enlightened economic policies. world thoughts and acts are impossible without world understanding. therefore it is world understanding that is most imperatively needed in this critical hour. the people of the world have many things in common--economic interests, science, art, ideas, ideals. ranged against these common interests there are the traditions, prejudices, hatreds, national barriers, sectarian differences, language obstacles and racial conflicts that have proved so effective in keeping the peoples separated. the common interests are the vital means of social advancement, and it is upon them that the emphasis of constructive thinking must be laid in an effort to promote world understanding. there is no need to apologize, then, for adding to groaning library shelves a book dealing with world economics, the purpose of which is to propose a plan that will pull together the scattered threads of world economic life. the time is so ripe for an examination of these problems that no man may consider himself informed who has not pondered them deeply, and no man may consider that he has done his duty as a member of this generation, who has not helped, at least in some degree, to unify the world's economic activities. most particularly does this apply both to the statesmen and other public men who are striving to rejuvenate a dying order, and to the organizers and leaders of the new order that is even now pressing across the threshold of the western world. ii. the economic muddle . _bankruptcy and chaos_ world economic affairs are in a muddle. famine has gripped central europe since ; unemployment is rife in japan, argentina, britain, and the united states; business depression is felt in all of the principal industrial countries; producer and consumer alike find the world's economic machinery sadly out of gear. there have been innumerable predictions of "better times ahead," but among those who are closely connected with industry, there is serious concern over the future of the present economic system, while a formidable array of students and investigators agree with bass and moulton that: "it is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that all of continental europe might in the course of the next twenty-five years, or even sooner, go the way that russia has already gone. it would not necessarily be through the instrumentality of bolshevism; it might easily go in the austrian way." ("america and the balance sheet of europe." new york. ronald press. . p. - .) the cause for such gloomy utterances may be found in those superficial indications of chaos such as the breakdown of exchange and of international trade; the severe business depression; the waste and inefficiency of industry; the prevalence of unrest and sabotage, and the preparations for future wars. traditionally, the old institutions still exist and are cherished by those who believe that they will be rehabilitated and re-established. but as the months succeed one another and lengthen into years, without any evidence that "things will right themselves as soon as the war is over," it becomes increasingly apparent, even to the conservative that the situation is far from what they had promised themselves it would be. europe's day-to-day experience between and has convinced millions that some disaster impends. for the most part, however, they fail to realize that the "disaster" is already upon them. the disorganization of the world's financial structure, following on the drains of the war and the debauches and exactions of the peace, has been the object of much comment, with the emphasis laid on the aspects rather than on the essential characteristics of the breakdown. one of the basic assumptions of the present economic order is that promises to pay must be redeemed at par. failing in this redemption, the promisor is declared bankrupt, and beyond the pale of reputable business society. during the past eight years, most of the leading countries of europe have become bankrupt. before the world war, the sixteen principal belligerents had total debts of , millions of dollars, with a total note circulation of , millions, making a total of promises to pay amounting to something more than billions of dollars. when the treaty of paris was signed, these sixteen countries reported debts of , millions of dollars and paper money issues of , millions, making a total of promises to pay about eight times the volume of . since the signing of the treaty, most of the european countries, belligerents and neutrals alike, have continued to pile up obligations. according to the estimates of o.p. austin, of the national city bank of new york, world indebtedness was billions of dollars in , billions in and billions in . ("our eleven billions," r. mountsier. seltzer. . p. .) a point has now been reached where the french, russian, italian, german, austrian and hungarian debts are equal to at least half of the total estimated national wealth. when it is remembered that most of this wealth is in private hands, and heavily encumbered with private mortgages; that the cities have issued enormous numbers of bonds against the same wealth, and that even though the wealth were in public hands it could not be liquidated for anything like its estimated value, it must be apparent that the capitalist world--particularly that part lying in central europe--has put itself into a position where its governments cannot meet their promises to pay. nor is this the worst. the war experience taught european government officials that it was possible to make money and pay debts with the aid of printing presses. the rapid increase in prices, and the unwillingness of the owning classes to pay for the war by means of a capital levy, placed the governments in a position where the ordinary expenses, plus the costs of the war, the interest on the war bonds, the costs of reparations and other extraordinary expenses amounted to far more than the total government revenue. as lately as , all of the european belligerents, with the exception of great britain, all of the european neutrals, except sweden, and all of the other principal countries of the world except peru and the united states, reported expenditures in excess of receipts. the deficit for austria amounted to per cent of its expenditures. in other principal countries the ratio of deficit to expenditure was: belgium per cent france " " germany " " italy " " japan " " ("our eleven billions," p. - ). these events led inevitably to a demoralization of the foreign exchange market, which reflects the measure of confidence felt by the business men of one community in the promises to pay made by the government of another community. the exchange values of the non-warring countries remained generally near to par during the entire war and post war period. japanese exchange fluctuated very little; british pounds, which up to the time of the war were recognized the world over as the standard of value, fell to about three fifths of their par value as expressed in dollars; the french franc and the italian lira fell to a quarter of their par values, while the russian ruble, the german mark, the austrian and the polish crowns fell to less than one-tenth of one per cent of par. in addition to the serious depreciation of these various currencies, their values fluctuated from day to day and hour to hour, making business transactions difficult or impossible. coupled with the disorganization of exchange has been the economic depression which, beginning in march, , spread like a tidal wave, bringing disaster and hardship to workers, farmers and business men. with abundant crops, with industries united into great combinations, with the banks more efficiently organized than ever before in modern times, there should have been no crisis according to the accepted economic philosophy, or, if there was a temporary set-back following the strain of the war, it should have been a regulated panic. but despite the predictions the depression came, and proved to be one of the most severe that the modern world has experienced. the thoughtful man noting these facts, and then learning that, beginning with the hard times of , there have been seventeen of these breakdowns in the economic machinery of the united states, with corresponding derangements in france, britain, germany and the other industrial countries; and learning further that there is a tendency for such catastrophes to become more, rather than less severe, begins to wonder whether the difficulty is not very much more deep-seated than many public men would have him believe. even the most stalwart supporters of the present order must agree that the system does not function smoothly. there are many bumps, jars and hitches, and considerable friction. another evidence of economic chaos is furnished by the extent of industrial waste. studies in industrial efficiency have led recently to the publication of a number of reports, the most ambitious of which, "waste in industry," issued by the committee on the elimination of waste in industry of the federated engineering societies of the united states, describes waste under four aspects: . low production caused by faulty management of materials, plant, equipment and men. . interrupted production, caused by idle men, idle materials, idle plant and idle equipment. . restricted production, intentionally caused by owners, management or labor. . lost production, caused by ill health, physical defects and industrial accidents. (page .) with these various kinds of waste in mind the committee made a survey of some of the leading industries in the united states, and drew up a table showing the percentage of waste found in each industry. the figures were as follows: men's clothing manufacturing . per cent building industry . " " printing . " " boot and shoe manufacturing . " " metal trades . " " textile manufacturing . " " the bulk of the responsibility for this waste is placed on "management,"--the lowest percentage ( per cent) in textile manufacturing, and the highest ( per cent) in the metal trades. the remainder of the responsibility is shared by labor, with a minimum of per cent in the metal trades and a maximum of per cent in printing, and by miscellaneous causes, with a minimum of per cent in men's clothing and printing and a maximum of per cent in textile manufacturing. (page .) there are a number of angles from which this result may be viewed. waste may be looked upon merely as the index of industrial inefficiency due to the failure of the industrial mechanism to adjust itself to the demands made upon it. in that case the remedy for the waste is superior adjustment of the present system to itself. on the other hand, if the waste is the result of friction generated within the system, there must be some change in the system before it can be eliminated. the latter explanation seems to tally with the facts more thoroughly than does the former. certainly, the unrest, bitterness and general sabotage which are encountered throughout the industrial order would point to the conclusion that the economic system is generating its own condition of chaos. sabotage, or "go slow," is becoming the dominant note of the entire economic system. "get the most you can out and put the least possible in," is the theory upon which both workers and owners are operating. there has been much comment upon the tendency of the workers to use the go slow tactics. the real withholding of productive effort, however, takes place among the owners and managers of industry. industrial leaders are well versed in the law of monopoly profit: "minimum product at maximum price." the railroad men have rephrased the law thus: "all that the traffic will bear." industry has been organized and capitalized and is now owned by a group whose interests lie, not in the extent of production, but in the volume of profit. when profit is no longer forthcoming, the owners practice the conscious withholding of efficiency. in accordance with this general policy the control of industry is shifting from the hands of engineers into the hands of financial experts "who are unremittingly engaged in a routine of acquisition, in which they habitually reach their ends by a shrewd restriction of output; and yet they continue to be entrusted with the community industrial welfare, which calls for maximum production." ("the engineers and the price system," thorstein veblen. huebsch. . p. - .) the recent cry of the american farmer: "produce only what you need for your own keep," is a crude effort to imitate the successful tactics of the business world in limiting production to the volume that will yield the greatest possible profit to the owner. war-menace constitutes another indication of the chaos existing in modern economic society. the purpose of economic activity is to produce wealth. the purpose of war is to destroy it. the two are therefore in direct antagonism; yet the greatest war machines are maintained by the greatest industrial nations. to reply that they have the big war machines because they can afford to pay for them, is no conclusive answer. the organizing of nations for war came into present-day society with the present industrial system. industrial leaders have engaged in a great competitive struggle from which the final appeal was always the appeal to arms. furthermore, one of the most profitable businesses has been that of making the munitions and supplies required for the prosecution of war. nor is there wanting evidence that modern wars have been made for profits--that they have been "commercial wars," as president wilson put it. there is no longer any question but that the forces behind the world war were in the main economic. the war was fought by capitalist empires, for the furtherance of capitalist enterprises. the publication of the secret treaties entered into by the allies in gives conclusive proof of the land grabbing character of the allies' intentions. there can scarcely be any question of the existence of similar intentions on the side of the central empires. the forces that constituted the war menace in were the economic forces arising out of the competitive economic régime that dominated the european world at that time. since the ending of the war, these forces have been augmented rather than abated. to them there must be added the other element of danger that threatens to throw europe again into turmoil. soviet russia is and for a time must remain a source of international bitterness among the great capitalist nations, while the struggle for the control of the near east is fraught with consequences as momentous as was the pre-war german dream of a railroad from berlin to baghdad. unrest in egypt, india, korea, and the other countries held in subjection by the power of the bayonet; the contest between japan, britain and the united states for the control of the pacific and the exploitation of china; the unrest and revolution that are stirring in china; the keen intensity of the struggle for foreign markets and for such strategic resources as the supply of petroleum, are all suggestive of a situation resembling an open gasoline can surrounded by lighted matches. and to add the last, and the most realistic touch to the picture, there are a million more men under arms in europe than there were in , while the military and naval authorities in all of the leading countries are busy planning how and where the next war is to be fought. (see "the next war," will erwin. dutton, ; "the coming war with america," john maclean. british socialist party, ; "war in the future," f. von bernbardi. berlin, ; "the inevitable war between japan and america," f. wencker. stuttgart, ; "coal, iron and war," e.c. eckel. new york, holt, , etc.) before the grass was green over the graves where lies the flower of europe's manhood, leaders of the present order were busy with the blueprints of another carnage. the facts speak for themselves. the existence of such chaos is a matter of every day comment and experience. though its nature and its causes are little understood, there is no issue of more immediate concern to the western world than the intelligent solution of the vexing questions arising out of the production and distribution of wealth. until the russian revolution of , the entire western world was so organized that one group or class owned the land, the machines and the productive devices with which other groups or classes worked in order to live. the establishment of this "capitalist" system between when it had its start in england, and , when it secured a foothold in japan, has raised certain questions of economic procedure which lie at the background of the economic problems which men are seeking to understand and to solve. there is no necessity for an elaborate discussion of these problems, since they are at the moment quite generally under the dissecting knife of social students, reformers and revolutionaries. they may be divided into two main groups:--those which are localized in character and those which are world-wide in character. perhaps the latter group might be called "worldized." . _localized problems_ there are a number of outstanding economic problems that affect locally, each community that has adopted the capitalist system. among the most important of them are: . the relations between the job owner and the job taker. these relations involve the question as to whether job control shall be vested in those who hold the property or in those who do the work. the issue is an old one, intensified to-day by the absentee ownership which stocks and bonds make possible, and aggravated by the presence of vast industrial establishments in which there are employed thousands of workers without the possibility of any direct contact between job owners and job takers. . the distribution of wealth and income. another old issue has returned to plague a society that makes it possible for some to enjoy "progress" while others must suffer from "poverty." labor saving machinery has increased the quantity of the industrial product, but as yet there has been no general effort to see that the advantages of this wealth production go to those who are in need of food, clothing and shelter. indeed, under the present order, millions of those who work are called upon to accept a standard of living which represents less than physical health and social decency, while those who own the land and the machinery with which the wealth is produced are able to exact a rent or unearned income that keeps them permanently on easy street. this embittering contrast between the house of have and the house of want is leading to-day, as it has in any historical society, to division and conflict, for, as madison wisely observed in the federalist, "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property." . the interrelation of industries. so long as there was a direct connection between a worker and the product which he turned out, economic life was simple. when, however, the coal dug in eastern pennsylvania was used to heat houses in minneapolis, while wheat grown in dakota was milled in duluth, made into crackers in boston and sold all over new england, there arose the problem of the relation between mining, wheat raising, transport, manufacturing, and merchandising. thus far the banker has acted as the go-between in holding this machinery together, but he labors under two important disqualifications: first, he does not represent anyone except himself and his fellow owners and is therefore not socially responsible for what he does; in the second place, like every other business man, he is out to make a profit rather than to render the community a service. hence the structure of industrial society rests in chaotic dependence upon the ambitions and foibles of self-selected financiers. . attempts at government control of industry. the irritated people, incensed by repeated acts of economic tyranny, have turned to the political state, which has been thought of as the guardian of popular rights in a democracy, and through regulatory legislation the appointment of commissions, and even through state competition they have sought to bring obstreperous business interests under the wing of state control. these efforts have generally failed: the business interests, through their control of the economic surplus, have dominated the commissions and have used the machinery of the political state as the instrument for further exploiting ventures; the police, the courts, the executive power, the military--all have been employed by the owners and exploiters against the workers. the issue between the empires of industry and the political state still remains one of the most vexing in the field of public life. these problems of job control, of wealth and income distribution, of industrial inter-relations and of the relation between the state and industry are pressing for solution in every important centre of modern economic life. each constitutes a disturbing element and contributes its mite to the aggregate of social instability and unrest that are racking the economic world. . _world problems_ aside from these problems, localized in character, though world-wide in their distribution, there are a number of other problems of a world character which also are factors in the disorganization of economic life. one of these world problems is the competitive struggle between economic groups for trade, markets, resources and investment opportunities; another is, the excessive concentration of the world's wealth in a few centres. . _competition for economic advantage_ the issue of non-redeemable promises to pay has crippled the world's credit machinery. the competition for economic advantage has played havoc with the world's social stability. theoretically the coffee grower of brazil and the agricultural machine manufacturer of illinois produce and exchange those things that they can turn out most advantageously. practically the resources of the world are monopolized by powerful financial interests each striving to destroy its rivals, each seeking its own enrichment, and each busy reinvesting the surplus wealth which piles up as the result of exploitation at home and abroad. competition for economic advantage has followed the line of greatest profit. the present age inherited from the medieval economic world certain time-honored trade rivalries such as those which had existed between rome, carthage and corinth in classic times, or between holland, france and england in more modern days. these trade rivalries concern themselves with: . the transport of goods and people. . the financing of such transactions through bills of exchange, and the like. . the insuring of trading ventures. the people which succeeded in obtaining the carrying trade quite generally secured the banking and insurance business, both of which until recent years, have been principally concerned with trading. the trade of the middle ages was small in volume, and was carried on, for the most part, in valuable commodities, since the cost of transporting bulky, cheap articles was generally prohibitive. with the emergence of modern industry, and its production of large amounts of surplus commodities, important industrial groups like britain and germany which depended for their prosperity on their ability to find foreign markets for their surplus commodities, have been driven to a fierce struggle for these markets. latterly the effort to dispose of surplus has taken a new form--the investment of capital in foreign enterprises. instead of trying to sell an electrical plant to the city of buenos aires, a german business adventurer (enterpriser) secures a contract to build the plant, buys the equipment from the german general electric company, takes the bonds of the city of buenos aires in payment for the plant, and finances the transaction by selling the bonds to a german banking syndicate. through this process, the german (or belgian, or british) business world invests its funds in "undeveloped" countries. at the outbreak of the world war, foreign investment had become a science, with the british leading all of the investing nations. c.k. hobson, in his book, "the export of capital," and in a later article in the "annals of the american academy" for november, , throws some important side-lights on british foreign investments. he notes that for some years preceding the war, britain had never invested less than millions of dollars per year in foreign countries and that just before the outbreak of the war, the annual export of capital had reached a total of a billion dollars per year. in the british foreign investments were approximately billions of dollars, distributed geographically in a most significant fashion. the largest investment ( , millions of dollars) was in the united states; then came canada with , millions; following were india, , millions, south africa, the same amount, australia, , millions, and argentina a like sum. the british investments in belgium, france, germany and austria were negligible. thus it was in the new and undeveloped countries, not in the old and developed ones that britain sought her investment opportunities. in their efforts to play at this great game of imperialism, and to win their share of profitable business, germany, france, japan, belgium and the united states were dogging the british heels. each of the important producing countries must provide itself with the essential raw materials--coal, iron, copper, cotton, rubber, wheat, etc., upon which the continuance of its industrial life depends. consequently each of these countries busies itself to secure the control of the largest possible reserves of the raw materials most needed by its own industries. the case of petroleum is peculiarly instructive. when it became apparent, in the early years of the present century that oil burning ships, motor vehicles and air craft were bound to play a determining part in the economic life of the immediate future, various interests such as the shell transport, royal dutch and the standard oil, with the open or tacit backing of their respective state departments, entered on a campaign to secure the world's supply of petroleum. in mexico, central america, the near east, russia and the united states this struggle has been waged, and it still continues to be one of the most active contests for economic power that has been fought in recent times. petroleum-hunger is only one of the many economic factors that drive modern nations. the efforts to control the coal and iron of alsace and lorraine, the saar and the ruhr undoubtedly played a leading rôle in making the war of and the peace of . the partition of upper silesia was based on the same contest for iron and coal. wherever the coal veins or iron deposits are, there, likewise, are gathered together the representatives of industrial enterprise, which depends for its life upon iron and coal. as the resources of the earth become better known, and their extent more definitely established, there is every reason to believe that, with the continuance of the present economic system, the necessity for exploiting them will become greater, and the attempts to dominate them will become more aggressive. whether the object of the contest be trade, markets, investment opportunities or resources, the result is the same--rivalry, antagonism, bitterness, hatred, conflict. probably it is fair to say that these economic rivalries constitute the largest single force now operating to keep people apart and to continue the economic desolation and chaos under which the world is suffering. . _distribution of the world's wealth_ there is another problem of world scope--the concentration of wealth in a very few countries. at the present moment the wealth of the world is distributed roughly as follows: great britain billions of dollars france " " " united states " " " ---- total " " " germany billions of dollars russia " " " italy " " " japan " " " belgium " " " argentina " " " canada " " " ---- total " " " probably all of the other nations combined could not show a wealth total of more than billions. great britain, france and the united states have just about per cent of the population of the world, yet they probably hold somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of the world's wealth. the united states alone, at the moment, has nearly half of the world's gold supply and more than a third of the world's wealth. of course these wealth estimates are not to be accepted in detail, particularly in view of the wide fluctuations in the exchange rate. they serve, however, to give an idea of the relative wealth positions of the leading countries. the present economic position of the united states in particular, is a perilous one. the estimated wealth of the united states is greater than that of the four richest nations of the world combined. within a decade, the country has become the world's chief money lender, the world's principal mortgage holder, the world's richest treasure house. the results are inevitable. the united states will be an object of envy, jealousy, suspicion, cajolery and hatred in the eyes of those peoples who concern themselves with the present system of competition for economic supremacy. she holds the wealth and power that they desire and they cannot rest content until they secure it. past periods of civilization have witnessed the concentration of wealth and power in some great city, like carthage, or in some isolated region, like italy. all around were the "barbarians"--those who had less of the good things of life than were at the disposal of the citizens of the metropolis. where two of these centres existed at the same time, they warred for supremacy until one or both were destroyed. before the war the centre of the world's economic power was great britain. to-day the economic centre has shifted to the united states, while britain is still the world's greatest political power. the struggle between these two empires for the political suzerainty of the planet must continue until one is victorious, or until both have been reduced to impotence. . _the livelihood struggle_ behind these struggles between various political and economic groups, there is a broader reality in the shape of a billion and three quarters of people, inhabiting the surface of the earth,--people of various races, religions, nationalities, who, with all of their differences, have this in common: that they are seeking life, striving to improve the opportunities for its enjoyment, yearning for its enrichment, and, despite the innumerable disappointments which they have suffered in the past, willing to pay handsomely, in vast and patient effort for each tiny gain that they secure. one of the chief concerns of these human multitudes is the struggle for livelihood--for the means of continuing physical existence and of gaining the surplus and leisure out of which grow the higher life satisfactions. all men have certain simple economic needs--for food and shelter. denied these, they perish. given them, they are able to devote their remaining energies to one of the many lines of activity that men have developed. what are these other wants of men, aside from the primitive needs for food and shelter? most prominent is the desire for human companionship, friendship, love. again, mankind has accumulated a vast store of knowledge, of philosophy, of imagery, of artistic expression. love, truth and beauty sound an appeal that finds some answering echo in each life. the leisure and the culture of the world, in the immediate past, have been the heritage of a favored few: to-day they are the objectives of the many. heretofore it has been the belief of the aristocrats that the best of life was none too good for them. to-day that idea has spread among the people. dimly, inarticulately, they feel that the world's advantages are for them and for their children. before the cultural advantages of life may be enjoyed by the many, wealth must be produced in sufficient quantities to provide food and shelter. this provision of the economic necessaries is not a far goal. livelihood, when secured, does not make of man either a saint or an artist, but it is a necessary step in the pursuit of either goodness or beauty. the body must be fed before it will function, just as the engine must be fed with fuel before it will run. the provision of a supply of economic essentials is not the ultimate object of life, but until some such provision is made, life in its fullest terms is impossible. . _guaranteeing livelihood_ the millions who inhabit the earth have a direct and immediate interest in organizing economic life in such a way that the supply of economic goods is made regular and certain. this is the premise on which all constructive thinking about economics is necessarily founded. how is this hope to be realized? what means are at hand to insure the ultimate success of these efforts to guarantee livelihood? nature has provided an ample supply of the resources out of which the economic necessaries may be produced. these resources fall mainly into three general classes: . climate, including those conditions of light, air, rainfall and temperature that make possible the maintenance of life in its many forms. . fertility, including those qualities of the earth that are useful to man in the pursuit of his economic activities. . power, including those forces of nature which man may harness and compel to do his bidding. climate, fertility and power are variously distributed over the earth. the heat near the equator and the cold of the arctic regions make any highly organized forms of economic life difficult. consequently it is in the temperate zones that industrial civilizations have developed. the deposits of minerals and fuels are quite uneven. take iron as an example. the available deposits of iron ore are concentrated mainly in brazil, cuba, the appalachians and the great lake basin, so that the americas and particularly north america have far more than a proportionate share of the iron ore supply. copper, coal and petroleum are distributed with even greater irregularity. equally uneven is soil fertility. beside a garden spot, like the mississippi valley, lies a great colorado-utah desert. nature has provided those requisites upon which man must depend for his economic life. they are scattered it is true, and with the present political barriers holding peoples apart, many of them are politically unavailable but, economically, they are an open door to the future. men have met with considerable success in availing themselves of nature's bounty, and of converting it into useful and pleasing forms. all of the tools, weapons, textiles, metals, wheels, machines, have been the result of human effort and ingenuity, spread over long periods of time, and gradually accumulated and concentrated. at last a day seems to have dawned when machinery, applied to nature's bounty, could produce the wealth necessary to support the world's existing population on a minimum standard of living. certainly the energy and wealth which went into the five war years would have fed and clothed the people for that period. . _distribution and the social revolution_ men have succeeded in kindling fires, making wheels, separating the metal from the ore, harnessing electrical power and communicating their thoughts to one another and to their descendants, but they have not made themselves masters of those forces which work through fire and wheels. men have met the immediate economic problem by devising methods for producing food, clothes and roof-trees, but they have been overwhelmed by the social implications of these productive forces. before the problem of sharing the proceeds of their labor, they have stopped, and the whole economic progress of the race now stands like an engine stalled, awaiting some solution of the problems of distribution. through the ages various methods of making a living were inaugurated successively. medieval europe had worked out a combination of herding, agriculture, craft industry and trade that made a stable life for an agricultural village a practical possibility. this period of economic stability--this golden age--was followed by a series of events that threw the fat into the fire. first in england, and then in all of the important countries of europe, the industrial revolution turned the simple grazing, farming, craft-industry life of the village topsy-turvy, by providing a new method of converting nature's bounty into goods and services calculated to meet the increasing needs and wants of mankind. so far-reaching was the change that it has compelled a reorganization of virtually all phases of social life, but for the present purpose, it has been felt chiefly in four fields: manufacturing, commerce, wealth-surplus and population. the efficiency of the new manufacturing processes has provided a large surplus of goods that must be taken somewhere, exchanged for food and raw materials, which must, in turn, be brought to the producers of manufactured goods. in the course of these transactions, a generous share of the values produced goes, in the form of profit, to the owners of the industry, another considerable portion goes into reinvestment, thus swelling the volume of productive capital. the increased wealth, the larger capital and the greater amount of surplus all make possible the maintenance of a larger population. thus it has come about during the past century, that the production of goods, the transport of goods, and the population, have all been increasing at a rate unheard of during the previous thousand years. the suddenness of these economic changes has swept the world away from its accustomed moorings, out upon an uncharted sea. only yesterday the race was struggling to make a meagre living: to-day the centres of industry are glutted with bulging warehouses and equipped with idle machinery that will produce unheard of quantities of shoes and blankets and talking machine records, if the owners will but give the word to the workers who are eager to perform those services that yield them a living. only yesterday the world was maintained by local production: to-day it depends upon transport and exchange. all of these changes in the accustomed ways and acts of men have been brought about in the course of an economic revolution. the tidal wave of the industrial revolution has not stopped with the economic world. no phase of life has been exempt from the power of its magic. the school, the church, the family, the home, the state, have all felt its transforming might. the aggregate of these changes is the profound social revolution that has been for some time, and that is at present tearing the fabric of the old society to tatters, while beneath its surface-chaos is forming the nucleus of a new social order. . _a new order_ the results of profound changes such as those that are now occurring, must be chaos except in so far as the ingenuity and organizing capacity of man re-establishes order. the people in the world are in very much the position of a valley population suffering from a disastrous flood. their houses and fruit-trees--the product of generations of labor--have been swept away. the valley is filled with debris. as the water recedes, the wreckage must first be picked up, then the whole population must fall to with a will and rebuild the community--put up houses, re-plant trees, re-make gardens, repair roads. the social revolution has not swept everything away, but it has modified the form of social institutions, and some of them, such as the old time farm home, the individual workshop and the agricultural village have been obliterated in many localities. how shall the new society be rebuilt? only as the old was built--by the expenditure of human effort and under the guidance of the best wisdom that the community can muster. there are a number of points of view from which the present-day economic chaos may be regarded. the humanitarian feels pity for the suffering and hardship imposed upon multitudes of the world's population. the conservative laments the alterations which are being made in the established order. the liberal regrets that the changes are occurring so rapidly that construction cannot keep pace with destruction. the radical sees, in these fundamental changes, the dawn of his millennium. the scientist and the engineer upon whose shoulders will rest the burden of rebuilding the new society, tighten their belts and turn to the mightiest task that men have ever faced. the economic muddle in which the world now finds itself is one of many transition periods in the history of civilization,--a phase of the great revolution. like any period of chaos, it is the seed-ground of the new order--the demolition which precedes construction. some day men may be wise enough and sufficiently well organized and equipped to demolish and construct at the same time. as yet no such stage has been reached. during the intervals of chaos which separate two periods of forward movement (the dark ages of the world, as they are sometimes called) the masses agonize and suffer, groping blindly and crying out for guidance. such is the period in which the world now finds itself. out of this chaos, men must bring order; and to do this they must discover the foundations upon which the new order can be successfully built. this is the work of the engineers, the constructors of the new society.[ ] . _the basis of world reconstruction_ asiatics, europeans, africans, americans, australians--all people who follow the movement of events realize that the crisis confronting the capitalist world is a serious one. informed men like j.m. keynes and frank vanderlip believe that the situation is perilous. while many persons see that something is wrong, and while some see what is wrong, there is a great diversity of opinion as to the remedies that should be adopted. what most of the writers fail to see, or at least to realize, is that economic organization is the basis--the only possible basis--for the reconstruction of the world. the time has passed when political readjustments will meet the world situation. the events accompanying the industrial revolution have hammered the world into a closely knit economic whole, and until this fact is understood, and made the basis of world thought and world building, there can be no permanent solution of the world's problems. the present chaos in world relations cannot be met and settled by war, legislation, diplomacy or any similar means. all of the steps in these fields imply some adjustment of political relationships, and it is the economic institutions rather than the political institutions of the world that are in need of constructive effort. if a town is suffering from a break in the water-main, there are two things that may be done! the old pipe may be patched or a new pipe may be put in its place. it is sometimes possible for the engineers to patch the old main temporarily, while they are getting in a new one. the same situation confronts the people of the world. their economic life is disorganized and chaotic. shall it be reorganized along old lines, slightly modified in the light of experience, or shall it be built on fundamentally different lines? [footnote : "engineering is the science of controlling the forces and of utilizing the materials of nature for the benefit of man, and the art of organizing and directing human activities in connection therewith." (resolution of the engineering and allied technical societies in creating the federated american engineering societies. "waste in industry" , p. iv).] iii. economic foundations . _the social structure_ when a town or a city decides to repair a water system or to replace an old system by a new one, the plans are made and the work is carried on in accordance with the soundest principles known to the engineering profession. there are communities which neglect their water systems, and which suffer accordingly. but for the most part, the water supply is looked upon as so vital a factor in the common life that no pains are spared to have it reflect the last word in sanitation and efficiency. the same reasoning must apply to the economic machinery upon which a community depends for the supply of its necessaries and comforts. economic life touches every home. no human being who eats food, wears clothes, lives in a house, rides on street cars or reads papers and books can escape its all pervasive influence. therefore when changes are made in an established system of economic life, or when a new economic system is substituted for an old one, it behooves the people concerned to see that the work of reorganization is done in accordance with the soundest known principles of social science. the principles of social science, like the principles of engineering, are matters of profound concern to those who are compelled to depend for health and livelihood on the outcome of a social experiment. the social scientist studies society as the natural scientist studies nature, by examining the social forms, the social forces, the ways of handling or of administering these forces, and the means of making social improvements. the social scientist, like the scientist working in any other field, is concerned with making those additions to knowledge which will prove of the greatest ultimate advantage to the human race. the principles of social activity are not yet so well known as those of astronomy, physics, mechanics or biology, but they operate none the less surely. until these principles are understood, and until men plan their activities in relation to them, there will be no possibility of a rationally organized and wisely managed society. the physicist who planned a pump on the supposition that water is always liquid in form would get no farther than the social scientist who advocated social changes on the theory that the only motive that animated mankind was the economic one. mankind is not wholly ignorant of the principles underlying social structure and social activities. philosophers and statesmen worked over them in the ancient world. within the past two centuries a flood of books and pamphlets has appeared dealing with social organization. to be sure, most of these publications have been of a political nature, but the effort was made none the less to understand society and its workings. the investigations, analyses, comparisons and conclusions are formulating themselves gradually into certain well-defined social laws, which men recognize as essential factors in social thinking. some of the more important among these social laws or principles which have been determined by the painful processes of trial and error are those relating to the manner in which the structure of society is built up. society is not a collection of people, in the sense that a basket of eggs is a collection of eggs. quite the contrary, society is a structure formed through the association of individuals and of groups having some common interests and some co-operative functions or activities. a family, for example, consists of a number of persons, usually connected by blood ties, living together in a common dwelling. a chamber of commerce consists of individuals, firms and corporations, doing business in one locality, and all concerned with the maintenance of certain property rights. the british miners federation is composed of local and of district organizations, which are built up around collieries, towns, and coal deposits. the local union is composed of individual mine workers. the district organization is composed of a number of locals in the same field. the federation is composed of these lesser organizations. no matter which one of the many forms of human association is examined, the same thing will be found true. each social group is composed either of individuals or of lesser social groups which have certain common interests and certain co-operative activities, and which band themselves together in response to their interests and in pursuance of these activities. it is this organic structure of society to which hobson applies the phrase "the federal units which society presents." ("work and wealth." j.a. hobson. macmillan. . p. vi.) among primitive peoples who have simple forms of social organization, each individual is connected with some association like the clan or tribe which is state, church and family, all in one. the stories of the jewish patriarchs are good illustrations of this stage in social evolution. in advanced and complex societies, however, each individual belongs to a number of groups--to a town, a factory, a school, a home, a political party, a fraternal order, a church. in complex societies these groups are united to form the whole social structure. the individual belongs to society, therefore, because he belongs to one or more of the groups composing society, and his membership in society is dependent upon his membership in a social group. without making too much of the comparison between a living organism, like the human body, and a society, the similarities between the two are striking. the human body consists of various systems, such as the circulatory system, the nervous system, the digestive system. each of these systems is composed of many parts, having separate functions to perform. the circulatory system, for example, consists of the heart, veins, arteries, capillaries, the blood, etc. these various parts of each system are in their turn made up of different kinds of tissue. the heart is a complicated organ consisting of muscle tissue, nerve fibers, blood vessels, etc. muscles, nerves and blood vessels are in their turn composed of living cells, each of which contains the mechanism of a life cycle. among the unit cells, the various tissues, organs and systems of the body, there is a working harmony. the whole complex machine functions in unison. if one of the organs fails to do its work,--if the heart fails to pump blood or if the lungs fail to inhale oxygen,--the whole body ceases to function or "dies." throughout the series, from the single cell to the entire organism, the human body is built up compositely. this method of composite structure holds equally true in the composition of modern society. a modern society or community consists of various systems, such as the educational system, the economic system, the political system. each of these systems is, in its turn, composed of institutions. thus, for example, the educational system consists of the common schools, the high schools, the normal and professional schools and universities, the special schools, and so on. each city school system is a going concern with its pupils, teachers, officials, school buildings, textbooks, courses of study. each school building, each class room, each group of pupils, is a social unit, composed either of individuals or of groups. like the single cell of the human body, the individual pupil is a living organism, and it is out of a multitude of such organisms variously grouped that school systems are built. the social machinery, like the machinery of the body, must work smoothly, otherwise misery will be the inevitable result. if the educational or the economic life of a community breaks down, the whole community suffers, as does the body through the failure of an important organ. if the stoppage is significant enough, as for example, a stoppage of the economic machinery like that experienced by central europe since , the social organism "dies,"--that is, it is resolved into its constituent elements, some of which may disappear. those who object to the comparison between society and a living organism like the body, find more satisfaction in likening the social machine to an automobile, with its self-starter, its ignition system, its lighting system, its steering gear, its driving mechanism. each of the systems is in turn composed of parts. each part is made of wood, iron, copper, rubber, and these materials are, in turn, composed of molecules and atoms in certain combination. the automobile is not self-acting, like the body or like society, but the failure of one of its essential parts like the ignition system, means the failure of the whole machine. society, like the human being, or like the engine, is a highly complex mechanism, and like them it cannot function successfully unless its various parts function in harmony. the major problem before a society is therefore the working out of a system of inter-relations between its parts, that will make harmonious functioning possible and easy. just as the mechanical engineer who builds the automobile puts into it the results of his wisdom in an effort to make it effective, so the social engineer devotes himself to the problem of making society function in the way that will yield the largest results to the individuals composing it. . _specialization, association, co-operation_ every social group except the horde, which is an aggregation of unspecialized and non-co-operating individuals, is constructed on the principle of: . specialization . association . co-operation the social group--the family, the school, the factory--takes upon itself the performance of a particular social function--it specializes itself. each group associates itself with other groups--families with families, schools with schools, factories with mines and stores. finally, these associated groups work together or co-operate, exchanging the products which their specializations have created, and uniting their efforts in the furtherance of their common interests. these developments take time, and some communities are more highly specialized than others, but all societies which enter intimately into the life of the modern world are thus constituted. the more advanced the society, the more numerous and the more complex are the relations between its component parts. the agricultural inhabitants of the ganges delta have evolved a far more complex society than that of the aborigines of australia, but the civilization at the mouth of the ganges is simplicity itself compared with that of britain, belgium or japan. in the ganges delta each family group has a homestead. outside of the homestead, the community life is almost wholly unspecialized. even where the homesteads are clustered together there are no stores, no recreation centres, and few churches or schools except in the larger towns or in the market towns, of which there are a very few, since only about one per cent of the people live in towns or cities. practically the entire population is occupied with the work of the homestead, and the work of each homestead is very like the work of every other homestead. ("the economic life of a bengal district." j.c. jack. oxford. clarendon press. . pp. to .) how different is the french, german or italian village, with its various crafts, trades, professions, industries, recreation centres, schools, churches and the like. every such european community of three or four thousand persons is in itself a complex society, while the industrial city of fifty thousand people is a hive of related social activity. the more highly specialized the group, the more complex, intricate and precise are its workings. this principle of social federation through specialization, association and co-operation is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the present economic system. in each centre of population, in each town or city, in each state, in each nation, in the world at large,--the economic system is divided into various elemental economic groups or units, falling under six main headings: . the extractive units, which are concerned with the taking of wealth from nature's storehouse--the farm, the mine, the lumber camp. . the fabricating units, which are busy changing the products of farm, mine and lumber-camp into semi-finished or finished forms--the mill, the smelter, the factory. . the transportation units, which carry goods or people or messages from place to place--railroads, ships, trucks, telephones. . the merchandising units, which assemble the goods turned out by the fabricators and distribute them to the users, wholesalers, jobbers, retailers. . personal service units, which render a service to the consumer in some direct, personal way--housekeepers, educators, entertainers, health experts. . the financial units, which are concerned with the handling of money and of credit (the counters of the economic system) banks, loan associations, credit houses. these are some of the main divisions of the economic system as it exists at the present time. each division is a great net-work of economic inter-relations, specialized and subdivided into individual plants, factories, departments and the like. take, as an example, one group, the manufacturing industries of the united states. when the census of was compiled, the manufacturing industries were classed in fourteen groups,--food and food products, textiles, iron and steel and their products, lumber and its remanufactures, etc. there were , wage-earners working in , food and food products establishments, , , wage-earners in , textile establishments, , , individuals working in , iron and steel establishments, and so forth. each of the fourteen subdivisions of the manufacturing industries of the united states employ hundreds of thousands of men and women who are at work in tens of thousands of establishments in thousands of cities and town. the same kind of specialization is to be found throughout the various modern industries, and in the different industrial countries. each one of the larger establishments--each factory or plant--is in turn composed of departments, divisions, shops and the like. whether the individual establishment or the individual department be regarded as the unit of economic activity, the outstanding feature of the manufacturing industry is the immense number of units that must be in working order and co-operating harmoniously with the others before the whole can function smoothly. and this is but one of the general divisions of industry. at the time of the census of there were in the united states alone, , , farms; in there were , manufacturing establishments; in there were , , retail dealers and , wholesale dealers. literally, there are millions of productive economic units in this one country which are specialized, which are associated in their activities and which must be put on a co-operative basis if effective results are to be obtained from them. . _three lines of economic organization_ so much, then, for the interdependence of the various economic groups under the present forms of society. this interdependence runs throughout the capitalist system. farms depend on railroads, railroads on mines, mines on factories, factories on farms, and so on. this extreme specialization of the economic system is the product of the past two hundred years, the outcome primarily of the industrial revolution. the experience of society with these specialized economic forms does not, therefore, extend over more than five or six generations. this experience is sufficient, however, to indicate, that there are three general lines along which economic organization may develop: . _economic "states rights" or individualism_--the theory upon which the present day industry as well as the modern state was founded. under this theory each economic group must be free to go its way, cutting a path for itself through the ranks of its competitors, and making its triumphant advance over their prostrate remains. . _economic bureaucracy_, involving the concentration of economic authority in the hands of a centralized group which, knowing little or nothing about the requirements of particular localities, is nevertheless in a position to legislate for them and to enforce its mandates. . _economic federation or federalism_, with local groups enjoying local autonomy in all local matters, and only so much centralized control as is necessary for the unified direction of the entire enterprise. american industry has had considerable experience with the two first forms of organization. until the period of the civil war, competition was the generally accepted rule in all phases of economic life. with the formation of the standard oil company in , a new principle was demonstrated, and the idea of centralization was embodied in a form that served as the model for the american trust movement. by the time of the late nineties, this principle of centralization had been carried so far that a reaction set in, and when the united states steel corporation was organized in local autonomy was recognized as one of the essential principles around which its structure was built. experience points to the system of local autonomy in local matters and to the central control of general matters as the most workable in a complex society. in the first instance, under such a system, each local unit is responsible for its own activities and for its own discipline. it is obvious that no matter how efficient the bureaucracy, it would hardly be possible for a centralized authority to control, from one point, the six millions of farms and the quarter million industrial establishments of the united states. it is only where the handling of local matters rests with those immediately concerned that the highest degree of local pride, initiative and energy can be generated and maintained. such a system leaves the central authority free from detail so that it may devote all of its energies to decisions on matters of general policy, and to such procedure as affects the welfare of the whole rather than of any particular part. economic society, to be organized successfully, must be built of units that will prove self-acting and self-directing in all matters of purely local concern. at the same time, a scheme of economic life must be devised that will make it easy and natural for these economic units to function co-operatively in all matters connected with the well-being of the whole industry or of the whole economic society. . _economic forms_ much has been done to organize the economic life of the planet, particularly during the past two centuries. prior to the industrial revolution the economic life of the masses of the people, with the exception of a little trading and shipping, was localized and individualized in the village, the commune, the homestead and the home. the industrial revolution, with its dependence upon mechanical power, served to concentrate economic life in larger units--the factory, the plant, the industrial city. as a matter of necessity, organization followed in the wake of this concentration. the owners of industry organized on the one side: the workers organized on the other. besides these two major forms of organization within the field of industry, there was the organization of the state, which has played a leading rôle in the life of present-day society. the organization of the owners, which is far more complex and more highly developed than that of the workers, has followed four general lines: . the organization of one line of industry. woolen mills in massachusetts and in new york unite to form the american woolen company: sugar refineries are consolidated into the american sugar refining company. . the organization of those industries which are concerned with the turning out of one product--industrial integration. the iron ore beds of michigan, the coal and coke industries of pennsylvania, lime-stone quarries, smelters, converters, rolling-mills, railroad connections and selling organizations all unite into the cambria steel company or the carnegie steel company. timber tracts, ore properties, mills, mines and selling agencies join to form the international harvester company. . the organization of unlike and unrelated industries--manufacturing industries, public utilities, insurance companies, railroads, trust companies and banks brought under the financial control of morgan and company or of some other banking syndicate. . the banding together of these various groups in mutual welfare associations such as chambers of commerce, boards of trade, manufacturers' associations and so on. none of these organizations has any primary interest in geographic areas or in national boundaries. half of the business of the standard oil company of new jersey is carried on outside of the united states; the international harvester company puts up plants in canada and in russia; united states steel buys properties in mexico; the national city bank opens agencies in cuba and in argentina. the great modern business units deal, not with political boundaries, but with economic areas. they seek out, as the field for their operations, abundant resources, cheap labor, attractive markets. the present economic system has made great strides toward the world organization of economic life in a comparatively short time. australia, canada and the united states furnish excellent illustrations of the way in which continents have been surveyed, spanned with steel, populated and exploited in three or four generations. so completely has the economic system been altered that the seventeenth century world would not recognize its infant great-grandson of the twentieth century. . _limitations on capitalism_ important changes have been made in the structure of society since the inauguration of the present economic system, but these changes have not been radical enough to keep pace with the still more radical changes that have occurred in the mechanism of economic production and exchange. the chief failure of the present order is its failure to readjust social machinery in conformity with the economic changes that have occurred in society, and this failure is due, in large measure, to the limitations contained within the capitalist system. like all social systems which attain to positions of consequence, the capitalist system has played an important rôle in the development of society, and like all such systems, it has had its day. the needs of the community have advanced to a point at which they cannot be met under capitalism, whose chief failure to function more effectively in the present crisis may be traced to: . _excessive centralization of the determining control of industry in the hands of financial manipulators, who do not even enjoy the advantage of owning the industries which they dominate._ through shrewd financial dealing they have maneuvered themselves into positions of importance, which they hold because of their ability to manipulate, a political rather than an industrial virtue. the necessary result of this concentration of authority is a denial of local self-determination and a corresponding loss of local initiative. the less local initiative there is, the more centralization is required to keep the machinery running, until a point is reached where all power and authority are exercised from the centre, and the local group is as devoid of spontaneity as it is of authority. at somewhere about this point, the friction involved in administration becomes so great that the whole of the social energy is consumed in the routine of keeping the social machinery running, and there is no surplus, either for leisure or improvement. this was the outcome of a similar centralization of authority under feudalism, and it shows itself in any organization that permits itself to drift into the danger-zone of bureaucracy. . _a second obstacle to the further development of the present economic system is nationalism._ the political state has become an adjunct to the capitalist economic system. it relies for one of its sources of driving power upon a concept of nationalism which places the political boundary lines that happen to surround a people first among the public limitations on conduct. "my country, right or wrong," becomes a catch phrase on the lips of school children. whatever transpires inside these political boundary lines is sanctified by its association with the fatherland, while events having their origin outside of the country must be correspondingly discounted. since the middle of the nineteenth century the business men of every great industrial nation have been compelled to go abroad for raw materials, for markets and for investment opportunities. in order to obtain these economic advantages, the citizens of the civilized nations have not hesitated to plunder the natives, and if they resisted, to murder them--as britain has done in india, as belgium has done in the congo, as japan has done in korea, as the united states has done in the philippines and hayti. this robbing and murdering is sanctified by the fact that "our interests were in danger" or that "our flag was fired upon" or that "our citizens have lost lives and property." but during the past few decades the exploiting nations have found more than natives to deal with. in almost every instance there have been at least two claimants for each choice economic morsel, and a conflict has frequently resulted, like that between russia and japan for the control of eastern asia or between germany and france for the control of the iron and coal deposits of western europe. in such cases the wars are justified to the home populations as necessary defensive measures. the justification may or may not be complete, but the bills must be paid, and they have proved to be inordinately high. the cost of killing african natives or unarmed haytians is comparatively low, but the cost of killing frenchmen and germans is enormous. if, as some experts have estimated, the direct cost of the great war was billions of dollars, and if only millions were killed, it cost something like $ , to kill each of the ten millions. it is at this point that nationalism breaks down because of the sheer inability of the peoples to foot the bills that have been contracted in destroying their "enemies"--namely, the citizens of other nations. when this point is reached--when the costs of expansion beyond boundary lines of a nation are so great that the people who do the country's work cannot or will not meet them, the end of the system that depends upon expansion is already in sight. that point has been reached and passed in capitalist society. while the costs of expansion were merely the cost of subduing naked savages, the business was a remunerative one; but when, to these ordinary costs must be added the stupendous price of capturing trenches protected by barbed wire entanglements, of bombing whole countrysides, of desolating states and wiping out industries, not to mention the cost of building forty million dollar ships that can be sunk in six or seven minutes with one well aimed torpedo, the limit has been reached, and bankruptcy sooner or later ensues. capitalism is now paying that price throughout most of europe. . _a third obstacle to the continuance of the capitalist system lies in the fact that it has fallen into the hands of profiteers (bankers and absentee owners) whose chief purposes are to control economic machinery for the money there is in it, and to guarantee their clients (investors) an opportunity to live without working on the labor of others._ by the very nature of their connections the managers of industry are denied the right to think in economic terms. their function is to "make money" by exploiting nature and men. they are therefore profiteers rather than producers, and no economic system can hope to survive unless it is based on production rather than profiteering. . _the present economic system is in the hands of those who are responsible to wealth (stockholders) and not to the masses of the people._ a small fraction of the people in a modern industrial community--one in or or --holds the controlling vote in the strategic industrial enterprises, and says the final word on all questions of industrial policy. their interest is a property interest. automatically they are precluded and prevented from thinking or acting in the interest of the general welfare, since their clientèle, which is seeking to live on the labor of the masses of their fellow citizens, is only a minute part of the general public. . _there is another limitation arising out of the third and fourth, just enumerated--the limitation imposed upon the whole of society by the incessant struggle between the owners of industry and the workers in industry._ while the owning class continues, without labor, to derive an income from the labor of the workers, the former will grip their privileges, while the latter will oppose, obstruct, attack and ultimately deny the rights of the owners. these five limitations: centralization, nationalism, profiteering, the handling of economic affairs in the name of property rather than in that of human welfare, and the class struggle--make it difficult or impossible for the directors of the present economic system to extend it in response to the pressing demand for expansion. like other social systems that have prevailed in historic times, the capitalist system of economic control has its limitations, and like many another system, it seems to have reached them. . _the growth of capitalism_ the existing economic order has grown to its present proportions competitively and nationalistically, without any centralized supervisory control (without any board of strategy) just as one of the canadian cities out upon the plains has grown, or rather sprawled over the prairie--each man building how and when and where he liked, each industry choosing its own location, stores, schools, churches, theatres, squatting at those points that seemed to be the centres of the crowd life. mines have been opened, factories established, railroads built, electric plants constructed, by some individual or corporation interested in making a profit on the investment, and with little or no relation to the well-being of the community. there has been no recognized intelligent guidance behind the development of the industrial system. in so far as the present economic life was planned, it was planned locally, by the directors of one industry, by the chamber of commerce of some city, by a far-sighted banker or financier who insisted upon thinking in terms of the coming business generation. for the most part the system grew, however, like stalks of corn in a field, each stalk drawing its own nourishment from the soil and making what progress it could along its own path toward the zenith. another serious drawback in the growth of the present economic system is that much of it was developed as an underground organization. even had they decided to do so, individual business men have not been free to plan ahead and work out a business policy in the light of day. on the one side were the jealous competitors, watching every move and eager to profit by any bit of information that they could secure with regard to the plans of their rivals. on the other side was the government, with its conspiracy laws and its anti-trust laws, ready to swoop down on the business director who planned too broadly or thought too far into the future. then, too, there was an ever-growing force in a public opinion that was suspicious of profiteers, no matter what their professions. with competitors on the watch here, and government officials yonder, there was nothing for it but to work in secret, to shadow the new policies in mystery and to get as far as possible without being found out. far-reaching changes have taken place, of late, in the type of men who have held the reins of control over industry. during its early years the economic machinery was constructed by men who had worked at their trades; men who had begun at the bottom and climbed into a place of authority; men who had a first-hand knowledge of the processes underlying their industries. latterly, however, with bankers and other professional manipulators in control of economic life, the engineers, with their intimate knowledge of forces and processes have been pushed into the background, and the actual work of direction has been shifted from producers to money makers. again, the present economic system, built for the profit of the builder rather than for the welfare of the community, represents, not the science of organization for production and use, but the science of organization for exploitation and profiteering. these are some of the reasons why the economic life of the modern world has grown at haphazard. each industrial director put his own ideas into his business, and as it grew in response to them, the various businesses differed as much in shape, size and character as did the early factory buildings. the time seems to have arrived when a new working plan of economic life may be adopted. the faults and failures of the old are glaring and the clamor for the new is reasonable and insistent. the construction of factory buildings has been evolved into a science. why cannot the same thing be done with the whole scheme of economic organization? men no longer erect factory buildings according to personal whim or to the chance ideas of some budding architect. instead they consult scientists in factory construction who have devoted years to the study and to the practical supervision of the detail of factory building. can less be demanded of the community which hopes to build its economic life soundly and solidly? a modern steel plant, like that at gary, indiana, is carefully planned before a sod is turned. the organization of the works is thought out, sketched, drawn in detail, blue-printed, so that each group of workers that participates in the construction is given a blue print that specifies what is to be done, and where and how. when all of the tasks are completed a steel plant has been called into being. but suppose that each of the eighty gangs of workers, busy on the plant, had followed the lines of its fancy or of its own special interest! the result would resemble the helter-skelter of modern economic society. . _effective economic units_ economic life has been haphazard in the past. in the future it will be one of the most scientifically built of all human institutions. it is so vital a part of the social life, and it yields itself so readily to structural co-ordination that the best structural minds will turn to it perforce, as the logical field for their activities. the economic structure of the future, to be sound, must be built of effective working units. it is as impossible to build a live social system with dead component elements as it is to build a live body with dead cells. at least for the time being, an intricate and complicated structure is needed to handle the problem of livelihood. as time goes on, the nature of the economic system may be greatly modified, and its structure simplified correspondingly. while the complicated economic structure remains, however, the problem will be one of co-relating the activities of vast numbers of economic units, and of prevailing on them to function with less friction and greater harmony. like every social structure, the economic system will be built up of lesser social groups, beginning with the simplest local body of farmers, miners or mill workers, and continuing on, by successive stages of organization to the largest and most highly complex groups in the community. the nature of each of the units that enters into the economic structure must vary with the locality, with the industry, and so on, hence it will prove to be impossible to lay down any arbitrary rules concerning their organization. it is possible, however, to suggest certain characteristics that must be present in effective working units: . _the economic unit, which is to be built into the new society as stones are built into a wall, must bear a very close relation to the present working forms of economic life._ ultimately, the economic units of which society is composed will differ completely from those now existing. it is quite out of the question, however, to build a new economic structure and new economic units at the same time. habit and convention are too strong. innovation is too terrifying and too problematical. the life of local economic units will be carried on to-morrow very much as it is carried on to-day by the masses of the people. the most workable economic superstructure, for a new society, will be built upon an answer to the question: "how is work done now?" this method of approach takes the basic economic activities of the masses of the people for granted and seeks to build them into a sounder type of super-organization than that now existing. . _the economic unit, whatever its size and function, must be sufficiently homogeneous and coherent so that it will retain its unity even in the face of severe stresses and strains._ that is, it must be in a state of relatively stable equilibrium. . _the economic unit must be autonomous--self-governing, self-motivating, and in a sense, self-sufficing._ . _the organization and management of the unit must make possible an efficiency in production that will supply human needs and furnish the means of providing some comforts for the population._ . _units must be so organized that they will work effectively with other units in the same industry and in related industries._ whether plans are being made for the rebuilding of existing economic institutions or for the establishment of new ones, these general rules hold good. they have as their objective, a workable social system that will turn the wealth of nature's storehouse into usable forms, and that will procure the distribution of the good things of life, in an equitable manner, among the groups that have assisted in their production. . _classes of economic units_ those who are concerned with the establishment of a working basis for economic society must bear constantly in mind the purpose of economic organization--to provide livelihood on the most effective possible terms. the economic system is not called on to perform any other function. economic function would seem to be most effectively aided by some organization of the economic units that would provide a structurally sound skeleton for the whole economic mechanism. the needs of particular localities, the requirements of larger groups within one industry, the economic relations of continental areas, and finally the world organization of industries must be provided for. in order to meet this situation, it would seem desirable to think in terms of several different grades or classes of economic units. as a working basis, four are suggested: . _the local unit, which would be some particular phase of the economic process that normally functions as a whole._ this unit is now a working part of the present economic order, and whether it is a colliery in wales, a division of the p.l.m. railroad in france, a mill in bombay, or a farming community in saskatchewan, it would continue the process of turning out goods and services under the new economic régime as it does under the present one. . _district units composed of a number of neighboring local units in the same industry or in closely related and co-operative industries._ the district is an aggregation of conveniently situated local units, and is organized as a ready means of increasing the efficiency of the groups concerned. it might cover the tobacco factories of havana, the coal mining industry of the pennsylvania anthracite fields or the dock working activities of belfast. . _the divisional units which would be designed to cover a convenient geographic area, and to include all of the economic activities in a particular major industry within that area._ the boundaries of the districts would vary from one industry to another. the boundaries of the divisions would be uniform for all industries. the whole world would therefore be partitioned into a number of divisions, such, for example, as: north america, south america, south africa, the mediterranean basin, northern europe, northern asia, eastern asia, southern asia and australia. in setting the boundary lines of these divisions, economic homogeneity, geographic unity, the distribution of the world population and the character of existing civilization would all be called into question. under such a grouping would fall the agricultural workers of southern asia, the transport workers of north europe, the manufacturing workers of north america. . _world industrial units, so designed as to include within their scope all of the producers of the world classified in accordance with their occupations._ to-day, the outstanding method of classifying the people of the world is to take them in relation to their political affiliations. the new grouping would arrange all of the peoples in accordance with their economic activities. a simple form of classification would include: agriculture, the extractive industries, manufacturing, transport, trade, housekeeping, and general (miscellaneous) trades. the classification might be made far more elaborate, but for clarity of discussion a simple classification is of great assistance. every person in the world who performed a useful service would belong to one of these great industrial or occupational groups, and the aggregate of the membership of the groups would equal the aggregate of all the producers of the world. under this plan, therefore, each individual would have a series of economic affiliations. he might, for example, be a docker on the french line at le havre (local affiliation); a dock worker in the le havre district (district affiliation); a transport worker of north europe (divisional affiliation); a worker in the transport industries of the world (industrial affiliation). since each of the producers in the world would have this series of relations, all of the producers would be grouped together in local, in district, in divisional and in world industrial groups, so that the economic life of the world would present the picture of a completed economic structure very similar to the political structure that has been evolving for many centuries, and which has reached its highest forms of development in such new countries as australia and the united states, where each person is a citizen in a borough, city or town, in a county, in a state and in the whole nation or federation of states. while political life has been thus organized about the administration of certain public affairs, economic life has remained disorganized, or has been organized largely with an eye to owners' profits. the producers society will be organized in economic terms very much as the present society is organized in political terms. each producer will be a participant in the life of economic units, graduated from the local economic unit to the world industry. . _the ideal and the real_ this is, of course, an idealized picture, subject to an infinitude of modifications, just as an architect's plan for "a bungalow in the woods" or a city planner's scheme for a model town is idealized and subject to modifications. it is not a working drawing, but a general design which is intended to place the whole subject of economic reorganization on a plane where it can be discussed as a matter of practical social science. the plan presented here is simplified as far as possible in order that attention may be concentrated on the essential issues that the world faces. too much time and energy have already gone into contentions over details, when there was no general plan in view. let no man deceive himself with the delusion that the solution of the world's economic problem is a simple matter, but at the same time, each one who is striving toward a better world may rest with the assurance that there are certain simple and fundamental principles that underlie world economic organization. society is structural, and as a structure it must function; the economic world is built up of working units that are compelled, by the nature of modern industry to work co-operatively, but the very nature of the political structure of modern society hampers this co-operative work in many essential directions; federation seems to be the logical answer to the enigma of effective social organization, and it only remains to organize a workable series of economic units and to build them into a world structure--a world structure in terms of production rather than of politics. the world is sadly muddled. millions pay for this muddling with their lives; tens of millions pay with bitter suffering. the owners have had their day. the opportunity for the producers has well-nigh come. the men and women who are responsible for the work that is involved in the economic reorganization of the world must see the whole plan as well as the multiplicity of detail, and must work with the whole plan vividly before their eyes if they are not to be blinded and led astray by the multitude of will-o'-the-wisps that flit across the path. iv. economic self-government . _maximum advantage_ economic society consists of unit groups or organs which are established for the performance of certain functions. mines and other extractive units take nature's stores from their age-old resting place and prepare them for the railroad, the factory or the home; the transport units convey goods and people; the merchandising units bring together many varieties of goods, and act as a distributing agency for those who will consume the products of mine and factory. the existence of a unit of economic organization is therefore a proof of the presence of some economic function. the whole structure of economic society has developed in response to the economic needs and in accordance with the economic activities of the community in which it exists. when a part of the economic structure is built, it is expected to function. mines, when opened, must produce coal; railroads, when completed, must provide transportation. side by side with the problems involved in the kind of groupings that make up economic society, there is the question of the handling and direction of these groups. no economic institution is of value unless it will perform some useful service by turning out an economic good or by affording a benefit that corresponds to some human need. each rational person, and every self-directing social group seeks to get the largest possible return in the form of satisfaction for the time and the energy invested in any given enterprise. this law of maximum advantage--which applies with double force to social enterprises, underlies all intelligently directed effort. unintelligent effort concerns itself with the principle of minimum outlay--seeking to ascertain the least possible expenditure of energy that will yield a subsistence. this is one of the essential distinctions between the present day society and most of those that have proceeded it. likewise it is the difference between the more and the less highly civilized portions of the earth at the present time. the individual or the group--operating on a very narrow margin, or on a deficit that involves constant misery and that may at any time spell disaster, tends to slip by with the least possible misery or suffering, or, to put it more technically, tends to expend the least possible amount of energy that is required for survival. the moment the tables are turned, and the individual or the group operates on a surplus which permits the enjoyment of more than the bare necessaries, the law of minimum outlay is supplanted by the law of maximum returns. the truth of this principle is strikingly illustrated in canada, australia, argentina, and other relatively new societies where resources are abundant and surplus is large. the same men and women who, under european conditions of narrow marginal living, were satisfied to survive with the least possible expenditure of effort, are transformed into creatures operating on another economic plane. in these new and fertile countries, where the individual, and indeed, the entire group is able to live above the line of bare subsistence, and where surplus is so easily accumulated, the individual devotes himself untiringly to the economic struggle. it is not because they are poor, but because they have a chance to get rich that these people are willing to expend unusual effort. just as the individual, working on a basis of economic surplus, directs his energies to the task of insuring and of increasing the surplus, so the group, which has a similar economic advantage, devotes itself to the task of building up a surplus as soon as it realizes the possibility of increasing its returns through an increase in the energy and intelligence devoted to group purposes. the personal comfort and the industrial prosperity of temperate zone civilizations depend, at the present moment, in great measure upon the supply of coal which is available. certain parts of the earth, such as wales, the saar basin and newfoundland contain coal deposits upon which the entire industrial society is dependent for its survival. it is, then, a matter of the gravest importance to secure a maximum coal output, at least to the point of satisfying the minimum demands of the community. whatever men and machinery are required to produce the ration of coal upon which industrial efficiency depends must be directed toward that goal. at the same time, waste, inefficiency and dis-employment, whether of men or of machines must be reduced to a minimum. what volume of production constitutes a maximum of return under a given set of circumstances, experiment alone will decide, but the individual and the social effort to secure this return must be unremitting. such maximum returns will be obtained by society when each productive unit is operating at maximum efficiency. the efficiency of the human body depends upon the efficient operation of the digestive system, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, and so on. the stomach, the lungs, the heart must all function smoothly to maintain bodily health. the body cannot function as a body. it functions through the aggregate activities of its various organs. the same thing is true of a society. it is impossible for the economic system to secure its maximum returns as a system. it will work only through the co-operative functioning of its various constituent elements. if the efficiency (health) of the economic system is to be preserved, it will be accomplished through the effective working of the mines and other extractive units; the mills, and the other fabricating units; the railroads and other transport units. each one of these constituent elements of the whole economic society must be self-efficient, in order that there may be a high standard of efficiency in the entire economic system. the units of which the economic system is composed must therefore be self-motivating and self-acting. they must be "alive." if one part of the economic body is dead, the whole will eventually disintegrate and decay. . _the essentials for maximum returns_ the efficiency of the economic unit--the mine, the factory, the railroad division--depends upon the attitude of the individual human beings of which the unit is composed. just as the entire economic system is made up of an aggregate of functioning units, so each unit is made up of functioning individuals. what would a coal mine be without its pick miners, road men, drivers, door-men, dumpers? the efficiency of the economic unit cannot be maintained unless the individuals who compose it are self-acting, intelligent beings, who know what they want and why they want it; who know the ends they desire to attain and how to reach them. without this beginning there can be no lasting efficiency in a society that is dependent for its success upon the self-generated activity of autonomous groups. in order that society may enjoy a maximum of return for its outlay of labor and machinery, therefore: . _the human values present in each economic unit must be maintained at a high level through an appeal to the finest qualities of the individual human being._ that appeal must be strong enough and constant enough, when coupled with the economic appeal, to provide a reason or incentive for continued activity. . _the integrity and permanence of the unit must be preserved._ the economic unit is one of the tools with which society does its work, and is the means relied upon for the production of livelihood. like the axe of the woodsman or the lathe of the mechanic, the social tools and machinery must be kept in effective working order if society is to receive a return for its outlay of labor and materials. three items enter into the maintenance of this efficiency: (a) current repairs, (b) periodic rebuilding, and (c) ultimate replacement. this is as true of any part of the social structure as it is of mechanical devices. the more complicated the structure the more necessary are rebuilding and replacement. . _the productivity of the unit must be kept up to a high level of efficiency._ this is the purpose for which the unit exists. efficiency is the product of the individual activity of the group members, and of the working effectiveness of the mechanism with which they accomplish their tasks. thus both are essential to efficiency in production. . _self-motivation and co-operation are the two fundamentally important requirements in the working of all economic units._ the former is the best guarantee of the continuous functioning of the unit. the latter links together the different units, making them working parts of the whole economic system. here are four indispensable requirements--the maintenance of human values, the preservation of group integrity and permanence, productive efficiency and self-generated activity--for the building and successful continuance of economically sound unit groups. if society is to secure maximum returns, if the economic mechanism is to yield its largest quota of goods and services to mankind, the units out of which society is built must meet these requirements which constitute four of the essential pre-requisites to the success of any economic experiment. . _centralized authority_ granted the desirability of efficiency in economic organization, the question at once arises as to how this efficiency is to be guaranteed. up to this point the means adopted to secure such an end have consisted in concentrating economic authority in the hands of a small owning and managing class, and in leaving with the members of this class the determination of policy and of methods of procedure. the concentration of administrative authority at one point has proved impracticable, first because of the great amount of red tape involved in the handling of the endless detail, and second because of the resulting destruction of initiative and enterprise. such a centralization of social function would be just as cumbersome as a like centralization of all bodily functions in the higher brain centres. if men were compelled to reason about and to direct each step, each movement of eyes or hands, each breath, each heart-beat, the attention would never pass beyond the boundaries of such pressing and never-ending routine. many bodily organs, like the stomach, function involuntarily. walking becomes habitual. it is only when the stomach and the legs fail to work properly that they become the objects of attention. the same thing should be true of a well-directed economic system. each local unit should function locally and autonomously, and the problems of local function should never come to the attention of a more central authority until there is some failure to work on the part of the local unit. those who despair of the future of society, and who feel that effective co-operation between social groups is impossible, should remember that the organs of the human body have been gaming experience in co-operative and harmonious function for hundreds of thousands or for millions of years, while the organization of society is an art that is still in its extreme infancy. the astonishing thing about the various social groups is not that they work so badly together, but that they work so well. as the centralization of authority increases, the amount of red-tape piles up until more social energy is consumed in overcoming social inertia and the friction that is the result of social function, than is produced by the function in question. when this point is reached, the social machinery operates at a constant loss, and it is only a question of time when it will cease to operate altogether, and the social machinery will begin to disintegrate into its constituent elements. the greater the degree, therefore, of localization, provided the mechanism can be held together and kept in working order, the less the loss in social energy. . _an ideal economic unit_ the social group thus faces two problems: one is the development of sufficient energy to keep the social machinery going. this problem is tied up with the stimulation of human wants, as it is only from the aroused energies of men and women that the social energy is derived. the other is the reduction of social friction and other forms of social waste to a minimum, in order that the largest possible amount of social energy may be devoted to the work of driving society. the present social order relies, in part, for its driving power on man's desire for personal economic advantage. where the rewards have been considerable, large amounts of energy and ingenuity have been developed as the result of this stimulus. the worker, the manager, the whole producing unit strove to excel, both because failure carried with it the penalty of destruction (bankruptcy or unemployment) and because success carried with it the probability of large economic rewards (profits). the result was an outpouring of social energy in the various independent local groups. the real difficulty inherent in the earlier stages of the present order was not its failure to secure abundant human exertion, but its failure to provide any means of co-operation between individuals and between groups. the same set of social principles which decreed local rewards and local punishments for initiative and enterprise, or for the lack of them, was built upon the theory that "competition is the life of trade." thus, while the present economic system, in its earlier stages tended to stimulate initiative, its form made co-operation difficult or impossible. the ideal economic unit would be one capable of generating its own driving power, and given a legitimate exchange of commodities and services with other units, one that could maintain its own energy and efficiency. a society composed of such units would have great vitality because its energy would be generated in a large number of more or less independent localities. a study of the agricultural village of central europe or of the mexican indians shows how workable and how stable such a form of society really is. the only practicable method of maintaining efficiency and of reducing the friction incident to social function is to erect a form of local self-government that will make possible both the stimulation of initiative and effective co-operation between groups. . _rewarding energy_ the issue of economic self-government resolves itself into two questions, which the average human being will sooner or later ask: . what do i get out of it? . who is to be the boss? the intelligent man or woman cannot be expected to exert himself freely for the building of a palace at versailles, on whose grounds he can never set foot, or for the maintenance of a palm beach that he sees only on the screen. the economic necessities are too immediate and the economic urge is too strong. before the individual will expend his maximum energy upon the economic process, he must see tangible results such as bread, shoes, schools, and holidays. one of the strongest arguments that the present economic system advances in favor of its continuance is the showing of large tangible returns in the form of economic goods. to be sure these results have not been secured by everyone, but there is neighbor pitt who started as a stable boy, and who now owns the largest garage in the city; there is neighbor wallace who began life as a grocery clerk and to-day is master of many acres of coal and timber. besides, yonder store is filled with the good things of life, ready for anyone who has the money to buy them. many persons, under the present system, make enough to buy all of them and others beside. so the argument runs, and those who advance it can give a wealth of instances to prove the point. the huge rewards of the present system even though they have gone to the very few, have been turned over to those who could survive in the struggle. everyone knows that the winners in a lottery are few and the losers many, yet each buys a ticket because he hopes and expects to be one of the winners. society, as reconstructed, must be less of a gambling venture and more of an established certainty, with the material rewards going to those who are responsible for producing them. and each person who thus shares in the economic rewards of society must see the connection between the energy expended and the share received. only while such a connection apparently exists will economic effort be expended by the normal individual. . _the ownership of the economic machinery_ the individual cannot be expected to exert himself where there is no apparent connection between the effort expended and the return for his effort. neither can he be expected to exert himself in the interest of economic machinery that belongs to someone else. his interest can be maintained only by the hope of a return for the effort that he expends, and by a sense of control over the job on which he works. among the various experiments that society has tried, in an effort to attain these ends, none has been more successful than self-government. the application of the principle of self-government to the economic world involves the control of economic machinery and economic policy in each unit by those who compose the unit. the members of each economic group must be supreme in their own field, except in so far as their decisions affect the welfare of other units. in such cases the decision must rest with that larger economic group to which the involved economic units belong. thus the aim of economic self-government is to keep the responsibility centered upon those who would normally be the most concerned in getting results. all matters of policy will therefore be decided by those individuals or groups that are directly involved. where possible such decisions should be reached in open meetings corresponding to the tribal council or the town meeting. such meetings may always be held in local economic units, such as collieries, departments of factories and the like. where it proves impossible to get the members of an economic group all into one meeting place, their affairs must necessarily be transacted by representatives, chosen as directly as possible. . _economic leadership_ the decisions having been made with regard to matters of policy, the next and equally important question arises: "who shall be entrusted with the duty of seeing that policies once decided upon are carried out? who shall be entrusted with leadership in economic affairs?" those who are entrusted with the carrying out of economic policy in a producers' society may be divided, roughly, into two classes: the executive and the expert. the executive is the director of general policy. the expert is the specialist, selected to do a particular piece of work. for example, the representatives of district , united mine workers of america decide that, as a matter of general policy, they will advocate the nationalization of the coal mines, and they instruct their president and their executive board accordingly. the executives of district are therefore charged with the duty of organizing a propaganda, which, to be effective, must consist of a well-ordered summary of facts about the coal mining industry, put in a form that can be easily understood by the average man, and distributed in such a manner that it will reach the people responsible for coal mine nationalization. here, then, are three distinct tasks: ( ) an investigation of the facts; ( ) a plan for nationalization; and ( ) an advertising campaign. the first two of these tasks, to be well done, must be placed in the hands of engineers, statisticians and mine experts. the third will fall to the lot of an advertising or publicity man. the president of district is an executive, charged with the duty of seeing that a program of mine nationalization is carried forward. the engineers, statisticians and advertising men that he secures to do the work in their respective fields are experts. these distinctions have been well established in the world of government and of business, and they are rapidly finding their way into the world of labor. there can be no great difference of opinion about the expert. he is a technically trained man, and as a chemist, an electrician, or as an auditor of accounts he has a special field in which he is supposed to be a master craftsman. the selection of such an expert, therefore, is a question of finding men with the knowledge and experience necessary for the doing of a certain piece of work. . _the selection of leaders_ the situation is far more complicated when it comes to the selection, of the executive. he is the keystone of the social arch--the binding force that holds the various parts of the group apart and together. upon his decisions may depend the success or the failure of an entire enterprise, because, tie him with red tape as you will, he still has a margin of free choice in which he registers his success or failure as an executive. the executive is put in office to do the will of a constituency and to carry out a certain policy. but what is the will of the constituency, and which one of a half dozen lines of action will most completely and effectively carry out the policy in question? the executive must find an answer to those questions, and he must find it hour after hour and day after day. society has striven for ages to devise a successful method of picking executives, and of keeping a watchful eye on them after they assume the reins of government. there are three general ways in which the selection may be made: . through heredity--the leadership descending from one generation to the next in the line of blood relationship. this is the method practiced in all countries that have kings, aristocrats, plutocrats or others who automatically inherit power from their ancestors. . through self-selection--the leadership being assumed by those who are the quickest to seize it. primitive, disorganized or unorganized societies or associations pick their leaders in this way. the strongest, the most courageous, the most cunning, press to the front in an emergency, and their leadership is accepted as a matter of course by those who are less strong or courageous or cunning. the leaders of a miscellaneous mob are apt to be thus self-selected. the leaders of new activities, like the organized business of the united states and canada, have been, for the most part, self-selected. seeing opportunities for economic advantage, they have grasped them before their fellows realized what was happening. the great accumulations of economic power that were made in this way during the past generation are now being passed from father to son, and the leadership in american economic life is therefore tending to fall into an hereditary caste or class. there is still, however, a considerable margin of self-selection of american economic leadership. . through social selection--the right and duty of leadership being assigned by the group, after some form of deliberation to a designated individual. this is the method common to all highly organized and self-conscious societies that are not dominated by a system of hereditary caste rule. public officials in most of the countries of the world, officials of trade unions and other voluntary associations are usually selected in this manner. the selection of executive leadership in any organized society must be through heredity or through group choice. self-selection is necessarily confined to new or temporary or loosely organized groups. . _the details of organization_ these general principles of economic self-government may be applied to local, district, divisional and to world economic groupings. to be sure the application, in each instance, will be varied in accordance with the peculiar needs in question, but a general scheme of procedure may be suggested somewhat as follows: . suggestions for the organization of a local economic unit in a given industry--a mine, factory, store-- a. the entire working force would meet at regular intervals, in a shop meeting, or colliery meeting, or store meeting, to transact general business. b. at such a meeting a shop committee selected by those present, would be charged with the responsibility of directing affairs in the shop that had selected it. the shop committee would consist of a small group, varying in size with the size of shop, under the chairmanship of a person selected by the workers at the same time they elected the committee. c. this chairman of the shop committee would be called the shop chairman. his duties would correspond roughly with those of the present-day foreman, or with those of the shop-steward or shop chairman in some of the more advanced of the british industries. in reality this shop chairman would be the shop executive, holding office while he could retain the good will of his shop-mates, and while he could give a satisfactory account of his shop in the way of production and discipline. d. where there were a number of departments in a large factory, store or other establishment, there would be a plant committee made up of the chairmen of all shop committees in the plant. e. where plant committees were organized, it would be their duty to designate one of their members as chairman. this plant committee chairman would therefore be what, under present conditions, is the general manager of the plant, with his fellow committeemen as his executive committee or board of managers. f. each economic unit, whether shop or plant, would have its engineers or experts, picked, like other workers, by the shop committee or the plant committee, and responsible to that committee for the particular tasks assigned to them. all participation in the activities of this basic economic unit--hiring and firing as it is called--would be determined by the shop committees and by the plant committee, each with final local jurisdiction, subject, of course, to a referendum of the workers in the department or the plant concerned. by this means, the members of each basic economic group would be made the sole judges as to those with whom they should work. each group would therefore have an opportunity to set its own group standards and to build up its own group spirit. the individual worker, in order to secure a job, or work place, must therefore subject himself to the scrutiny of his prospective shop-mates, perhaps even to work for a time on probation, and this to prove his fitness to join the group and thus to participate in its activities. such a plan would provide a self-governing and self-directing economic unit, capable of adaptation to the various phases of economic life, and at the same time capable of generating its own social steam, and thus driving itself forward on the path of its own activities. farming, hand-craft industries, and other occupations in which the worker owns his own tools, and is worker, manager and business-man combined, would be forced to organize a local unit more nearly approximating the medieval guild or some of the modern organizations for producers' co-operation. the general principles of organization would be the same in the one case as in the other, power and control being held locally by self-directing, autonomous groups. this plan for the organization of a local self-governing economic unit represents an attempt to apply the best principles of economic and political science to the working out of an intelligently directed society. . suggestions for the organization of an economic district in a given industry. a. the district would consist of a number of economic units in the same or in an immediately related field of industry. for example, it might be formed of steel mills alone, or of machine shops and steel mills, or of machine shops, steel mills, and foundries. the decision on the matter of membership in the district would rest, first with the local economic units that united to form the district, and second, with the industries immediately concerned. the purpose of the organization would be to link together those economic units that were most dependent upon one another, and that therefore had the most interests in common. b. when formed, the organization would apply for recognition to the divisional organization of its particular industry. if the district comprised manufacturing industries, it would apply to the divisional organization of the manufacturing industries; if the district comprised coal mines, it would apply to the divisional organization of the extractive industries. it would be to the interest of the divisional organization to recognize only such district organizations as did not involve the divisional organization in jurisdictional disputes. c. after securing recognition from the divisional organization, the district organization would be the judge of its own membership, and would be in a position to add such local economic units as were to its advantage in pursuit of its general policy. d. the control over the affairs of the district would be in the hands of a district committee, elected directly by the workers of the district, each group of workers voting by ballot in its own shop. a. when the elections for membership of the district committee were held, the members of the plant committees, or of the shop committees where there were no plant committees, would be the candidates. by this means, only those of recognized standing in a local group could become candidates for the higher offices. at the same time, the local group, when it elected to local office would be nominating for higher office. b. when a plant committeeman was elected to the district committee, his position in the plant committee would be filled by special election. e. the district committee would be a large body, consisting of at least one representative from each of the plants or shops in the district. f. the routine work of the district committee would be handled by the district executive committee, picked by the district committee from its own membership, and responsible to it as a board of managers. g. each district would have its staff of engineers, experts or inspectors, whose duty it would be to check up on the technical side of the activities in the district, very much as a county agricultural agent or a district sales manager checks up on the work of those who come within his jurisdiction. these experts would be selected by the district executive committee, subject to the approval of the district committee. h. where possible, important issues confronting the district would be brought to the attention of the workers in the district through one or a series of mass meetings. where this proved to be impossible, newspapers, leaflets, and other forms of printed information must suffice. i. the district would therefore be a self-governing group of economic units, engaged in activities that fell within one of the main divisions of industry. it would be the judge of its own economic affairs and would be autonomous in all matters affecting only the district. . suggestions for the organization of a geographic division within a given industrial or occupational group. a. the division would consist of a convenient geographic area, in so far as possible contiguous and closely bound together by transport facilities, related economic interests, etc. north america, south america, south africa, and mediterranean basin, northern europe, northern asia, eastern asia, southern asia, and australia might be agreed upon as such divisions. b. the organization of the division is, in the main, a replica of the organization of the district, with two exceptions: a. the scope of the organization is limited geographically to the division in question, and covers all of this division, whereas the district organization includes a group of local economic units, which are not necessarily contiguous, and are in no particular geographic relation to one another. while the district organization is strictly industrial, the divisional organization is industrial and geographic. b. the organization is definitely limited to the major occupational groups, each of the groups covering the whole of the division. hence there would be, in each division, a division organization of transport workers, a division organization of agricultural workers, a division organization of those engaged in manufacturing and so on, making a divisional organization for each of the major industrial groups. a district might comprise only one branch of an industry such as textile manufacturing or electric transport. all of these districts would be included, however, in the particular divisional organization with which they would logically affiliate. thus there might be a district organization for the textile workers of lyons and vicinity, and another district organization for the metal workers of st. etienne and vicinity. both districts would be included in the divisional organization of the manufacturing industries of the mediterranean basin. c. the control of each industry within a division would be vested in a divisional congress, elected directly by all of the workers in the division who were engaged in that industry. a. the members of this congress would be elected by districts, with a minimum of at least one member from each district, and an additional member from each district for each additional quota of workers over a specified minimum. the details would necessarily vary with the division, but if there were districts in a division, with a million workers in all of the districts, each district might be allowed a minimum of two members in the divisional congress, with one additional member for each , workers in excess of , . under such an arrangement, a district with , workers would have five representatives in the congress, and so on. b. the members of the district committees are the candidates for election to the divisional congresses. d. the divisional congress meets at least once in each year, and within thirty days of its election. e. the divisional congress picks from its own membership a divisional executive committee, which meets at intervals through the year, and is responsible for the affairs of the division when the divisional congress is not in session. f. the divisional congress selects from its membership a divisional executive board which sits constantly. its members are members of the division executive committee, and it is responsible to the division executive committee when the division congress is not in session. g. each divisional executive board picks a staff of experts or engineers, who are approved by the divisional executive committee, and who constitute the technical general staff of the division. . suggestions for the organization of a general industrial group on a world basis. a. the general industrial group, or general occupational group, would be a major subdivision of the world's industrial life. all of those producers who were engaged in like activities would be classed together, and the number of these world industrial groups would be determined as a matter of administrative convenience. the producers of the world might, for example, be divided into the following major industrial groups: agriculture, the extractive industries, manufacturing, transport, trade, housekeeping, and general (miscellaneous) workers. some such economic grouping of producers would include all who are employed in producing goods and services and would provide the basis for an alignment of the world's population in terms of what the producers did rather than in terms of where they lived. b. thus far, in the detailed statement of local, district and divisional organization, only the barest outline has been given, first because it was the intention to discuss the world economic problem rather than the local problem, and second because the internal structure of each industry would be determined largely by that industry, and would, of necessity, vary considerably with the varying industrial conditions. the organized world industries, however, are the economic framework of the producers' society, and their organization becomes a matter of the most supreme concern to producers everywhere. c. the control of affairs in each of the major industrial groups would be vested in a congress of from to members, meeting at least as often as once in each january. a. the members of the divisional congresses, within these same industrial groups, are the candidates for election to the world congress. they are voted for directly by the workers in each division, and if they are elected to the industrial congress, the places thus made vacant in the divisional congress are filled by special election. b. each division would send a minimum of twenty members to the industrial congress, and an additional member for each specified quota of workers. d. the industrial congress would pick an executive committee from its own membership. this committee would meet at regular intervals, and would be responsible for the conduct of the industry when the industrial congress was not in session. e. the congress would pick a number of additional committees to deal with the various problems arising within each industry. these committees might be called policy committees. in practice, and for the sake of greater effectiveness, it might be desirable for the industrial congress to select a chairman, permit him to pick his committee from the membership of the congress, and then endorse the whole committee, very much as a minister in a responsible government picks his cabinet. since these committees would be concerned with problems of policy on one side and with problems of administration on the other, such a method would develop a far more harmonious working group. f. the chairmen of these various policy committees together with the chairman of the executive committee would constitute the board of managers of the industry, which would be the responsible directing authority for the world industrial group. g. connected with each of these committees, and selected by them, there would be a board of engineers and experts, responsible for the technical side of the industry. a diagram may help to visualize the relations existing between the various parts of the world organization. (p. .) . _the progress of self-government_ this outline of the organization of one of the major world economic units is tentative and suggestive rather than arbitrary or final. the details of the plan would necessarily vary from one industry to another and from one district and one division to another. all such matters of detail would be subject to the decisions made by the district committees, by the divisional congresses and by the world congress of each industrial group. the aim of the plan is to build up an economic structure that will be efficient and at the same time sufficiently elastic to meet the changing needs of the times. production is always necessary, but the methods vary from one age to another. the changes which occur in the economic activities of a population must find their counterpart in the changing economic structure of that community, otherwise disorganization and chaos will inevitably result. the means best calculated to preserve the efficiency and to guarantee the mobility of the economic life of the world is self-government. no other known means of directing and controlling social affairs will secure permanent results, either of efficiency or of mobility. plan for the world organization of one industrial or occupational group -------------------------------- | | | industrial board of managers, | sits | composed of committee chairmen | continually | | -------------------------------- /|\ / | \ each division / | \ represented on / | \ each committee / | \ --------- ---------- --------- |policy | |industrial| |policy | |committee| |executive | |committee| | | |committee | | | --------- ---------- --------- \ | / \ | / \ | / \ | / \|/ ----------------------------------- | industrial congress consisting of | meets in january, | representatives from each of the | no division less | world divisions | than twenty members. ------------------------------------- /|\ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ ---------- ------------- --------- \ | | | | | | the producers of each |australian| |mediterranean| |north | of the world divisions |division | |division | |american | are the qualified | | | | |division | electors for each | | | | | | industry in each ---------- ------------- --------- division. self-government is present to some degree in every form of society of which there is a record. under some circumstances it is confined to one caste or class. again it is the right of the whole society. in one place it is confined to political affairs alone. in others it is present in all public activities. everywhere, however, there is self-government of some kind. recent generations have devoted their attention to the fostering of political self-government, and to the organization of a multitude of voluntary associations based on the self-governing principle. generation by generation the peoples have been prepared to assume an ever-increasing authority over the complicated mechanism of public affairs. self-government in the clan or in the agricultural village was a simple matter compared with the management of public affairs in a modern economic society. it is this task, however, that confronts the present generation. the principle of self-direction, extended into the complex field of economic relationships, must be relied upon to pull together the scattering threads of economic activities. that this task involves an immense amount of propaganda and educational activity, goes without saying. that it is the only sound basis for social procedure seems to be the conclusion inevitably arising out of a careful examination of the premises. the organization of sound economic groups is a problem in the field of social engineering. the preparation of the industrial populations for economic self-government is a problem in the field of education. both of these problems lie at the root of any effective reorganization of the world's economic affairs. v. a world producers' federation . _world outlook_ an organization of producers into groups corresponding with their occupations lays the basis for world thinking and world federation. each active member of society would then be directly associated with a group that was world wide in its scope, so that transport workers, miners, farmers and other producers would be in constant touch with similarly occupied men and women on every continent. one of the principal disadvantages of the present organization of society is the sectionalism arising out of the political divisions established by national boundary lines. in a world where all of the producers were organized along lines corresponding with their occupations, sectionalism would have much less chance to play a rôle in the lives of the people. to be sure issues would arise between the various economic groups, but each individual would be affiliated with a world organization, and the scope of his interests and of his thinking would therefore be much broader than it is under the present system of political divisions. world thoughts and world views on a hitherto unknown scale would be the logical outcome of world economic affiliations in producer groups. the organization of society along the lines of production will therefore necessarily broaden the outlook of those whose visions are now limited by the confines of a political state, and the present ties of loyalty which bind the individual within a geographic area would then attach him to a world organization and would compel him to think in world terms. that there are limitations imposed by the affiliation of the individual with an economic group cannot be denied, but such limitations are far less drastic than those prescribed by restricted geographic areas. . _the need of organization_ the organization of society in terms of economic activity, building up through intimate local units, through district and divisional units to world organization within the major industrial groups does not provide any basis for effective co-operation between the individual groups. the metal workers of the world might produce machinery and the farmers wheat, but by what means are they to exchange their product and regulate their output in a way to secure the maximum of advantage on both sides? there are two outstanding characteristics of present-day economic life. one is its world scope. the other is the intimate and constant inter-working of the various parts of the economic machine so well described by j.a. hobson in his book on "the industrial system." agriculture, mining, transportation, manufacturing and so on are all linked into one functioning mechanism. to be sure there are times when the machine does not work very well--as after a great economic depression, but the purpose is there, the intermittent working harmony of the mechanism is unquestioned, the experience in world economic activity is a permanent part of the heritage of the race, and there remains only the task of making world economic relations more effective and more permanent than they have been in the past. the ice has been broken in the sea of world economic life and the human race has already taken many a plunge in its waters. under any form of society that can be foreseen in the immediate future, the need of close co-operation between the various parts of the world economic mechanism will tend to increase rather than to diminish, and it is therefore of great importance to have at hand a means of maintaining and facilitating the contacts between the different economic groups. the present system has given economic life an exceptional opportunity to grow within the boundaries of single nations, and to co-operate within those areas that are not sacred to competition. meanwhile the need for world co-operative organization has grown steadily with the evolution of economic life on a world plane, fostered by some of the clearest visioned among the men who are responsible for the direction of the economic world. . _present-day economic authority_ under the present system of society the linking together of the various parts of the economic world is a private matter. mines, factories and mills use the railroads as a means of transporting their products. the intermediary in this as in other transactions between the various branches of the economic world is the bank. thus the banker, who provides the credit, and through whose private institution financial transactions take place, becomes the arbiter of economic destiny, rendering decisions upon which the well-being of the masses or producers depends, yet wholly irresponsible for the results that follow on these decisions. using the people's money, possessed of vast authority over the jobs and the property of the producers, the banker is answerable only to other financiers who have a similar power and who enjoy a similar freedom from social restraint. within the scope of the law prohibiting fraud and theft, and subject to the limitations of conscience the bankers and their confreres follow the dictates of their own inclinations. quite naturally, under the circumstances, they have grown rich, and powerful far beyond the extent of their riches, since their control of the credit--upon which the whole business community depends--and their easy access to other people's money in the form of insurance premiums and savings bank deposits, place them in a strategic position which permits them to dominate and to dictate outside the boundaries of their ownership. the power now exercised by the bankers will, in a producers' society, be under the control of public servants whose business it will be to link up the various lines of activity within the economic machine. at one stage in the development of the world's economic life it was necessary to take out of the hands of private individuals the right to issue money, and to make of money issue a public function. to-day no one questions the desirability of having money issued by public authority, and the right to issue money is recognized as one of the important attributes of sovereignty. meanwhile there has been a change in the character of the medium of exchange. credit and not money is employed to adjust most of the relations between economic groups. in , for example, the total amount of money in circulation in the united states, including gold, silver, and all forms of paper money was only , millions of dollars, while the bank-clearings--that is, the exchange of checks between banks--totaled , millions of dollars. if to these figures are added the volume of checks drawn and accepted on the same bank, the amount of commercial paper discounted, etc., some idea may be obtained of the importance of credit transactions as compared with the use of cash under the present system. nevertheless, while the right to issue money has become a public function, the right to issue credit remains in the hands of private bankers. under a producers' society, the relation between the various groups of producers will be maintained through a system of book-keeping that will charge against each economic group what it uses in the form of raw materials, machinery and the like, and will credit each group with the value of its product. such a system is in vogue in any large industrial plant, where each department keeps its own accounts, charges the other departments with what they get from it and credits them with what they receive. the whole is handled through a central book-keeping system. the principle of social book-keeping is not new, therefore, but is an essential link in any large and complex economic organization. it merely remains to apply the principle to producers' groups instead of to the affairs of a private banker or to the book-keeping system of some great industrial trust. how shall a joint control be exercised by all of the producers' groups over those economic activities, such as the handling of credit, or social book-keeping, that affect more than one of them? the obvious answer is that they can be transacted through some organization in which all of the groups participate on a footing of economic equality. common, interests will sooner or later compel common action, or action through a joint board. the point has been reached in the economic history of the world where some such common action of the producing groups is vitally essential to their continued well-being. the logic of economic development is compelling men to turn from the owners' society of the present day to a producers' society, organized by the producing groups and functioning in those cases where the single group of producers finds effective function impossible. . _federation as a way out_ experience has shown that the best way to secure co-operation among a number of groups having more or less divergent interests is through a federated or federal system of organization, under which each of the constituent groups retains control over those matters which relate exclusively to the affairs of that group, while all matters affecting the well-being of two or more groups are handled through the central organization or federation. the united states of america is an association of sovereign states, each of which retains the right to decide those matters which are of importance to that state alone, while all questions of interstate concern are automatically referred to the federal government. at the same time, matters of common concern to all of the states such as the coinage of money, relations with foreign governments, the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the states, and the like, are also under exclusively federal jurisdiction. by this means, those questions which are of local moment may be settled within the state in which they arise, while all questions affecting the interests of more than one state, and those having to do with the common interests of all the states, fall within the jurisdiction of the federal government. the organization of business has followed similar lines of federation. during the early years of capitalism there was a strong tendency to concentrate all of the power of a given business at one point, and in the hands of one man. with the growth of large enterprises, however, such centralization became unworkable. instead of a single generalissimo, business organized the general staff. the corporation with its board of directors (executive committee) helped to make the transition, and when the united states steel corporation was formed, at the peak of the period of american trust organization, its constituent companies were given large scope for individual initiative and activity. the tendency toward departmental autonomy in large businesses is also very marked. bitter experience with "one man" concerns and top-heavy organizations convinced business men that the road to success lay along the path of federated autonomous units rather than of highly centralized bureaucracies. the labor movement has had the same experience in many of the more advanced countries of the world. there has been almost a century of local, independent groups, each one acting on its own initiative. the failure of such a divide-and-perish course was predicted from the beginning. then there have been highly centralized organizations of considerable extent and power, like the american knights of labor, which flourished for a time and then dried up and blew away. but out of the hundred years experience, the labor movement, as at present organized in germany, britain, belgium, the united states, etc., is an exponent of the social principle that local autonomy must be preserved in all local matters, while questions of general concern must be referred to some general body which represents the general interest. one of the most insuperable difficulties before the world at the present time is the lack of any central authority to which may be referred those matters of general and vital concern that affect the peoples of more than one nation. the peoples feel this lack. they are aware of the fact that industry, science, commerce, art, literature have all leaped the national boundary fence. this is particularly true of western europe, whose economic life is closely interwoven, and dependent on certain centers of coal and iron production, and whose political boundaries were determined before the present economic system was dreamed of. the importing of food and of raw materials, the development of markets and of investment opportunities, the organization of means for the transport and the exchange of commodities are matters of common concern to all of the important countries of western europe. before the outbreak of the world war, europe was an economic net-work of transport, finance and trade, and as a matter of course, communication and travel were common between all of the industrial countries. but while there were so many matters of common concern to britain, france, germany, russia, austria, belgium, there was no central authority to which these questions could be referred for decision when the threads of mutual interest became tangled. instead, secret and competitive statecraft made the tangle worse. the mass of conflicting jurisdictions and of petty jealousies that have grown up among the two score of independent and sovereign states of europe made a conflict almost inevitable. under a federated system of the european states, civil war would be possible, but the chances of a conflict would be greatly lessened by the presence of a central authority before whom questions of divergent interests could be publicly threshed out. for when issues arise between organizations of equal and parallel jurisdiction, a conflict can frequently be avoided if there is some commonly recognized and superior authority before whom the points in dispute may be laid, and whose decision will prove binding on both parties. what is so obviously true of europe is also true of the remainder of the western world, though to a lesser degree. the economic, social and cultural life of civilization has passed beyond national boundaries. until this fact is recognized, and until some organization is created with a jurisdiction as wide as the problems at issue, misunderstanding, conflict and catastrophe will continue to occur. . _building a producers' federation_ the first step in economic reorganization is the recognition or establishment of local district, divisional and world groups of producers affiliated along the lines of their economic activities. this is a simple acceptance, in social terms, of the economic forms that have been evolving since the industrial revolution. the second step in economic reorganization is the recognition or establishment of local, district, divisional and world federations of the local, district, divisional and world industrial groups. this second step must be taken in order that there may be some authority competent to deal with those problems which are common to two or more of the groups in question. there are two general types of problems that the federations of industrial groups will be called upon to handle: . those problems involving inter-relations between the various producing groups, such as the factory workers, transport workers, agricultural workers and the like, that must exchange their products and receive from one another the materials upon which existence depends. . those problems which are common to all producing groups simply because they are common to men and women who are trying to live and to function together. the water-supply, roads, education, are questions of this type. problems of the second sort, and the issues raised by them, cannot be entered upon at this point. the same federal authority that is charged with the control over inter-industrial problems will likewise charge itself, in each instance, with these common questions not immediately related to industry. this is not an attempt to under-estimate the importance of non-industrial problems, but to confine attention, for the moment, to matters directly related to production, with the conviction that when a mechanism is developed capable of handling the industrial problems there will be less difficulty in taking care of those not so closely related to industry. . _four groups of federations_ the issues arising between industrial groups, and those problems common to all groups, will best be handled by federations having a jurisdictional scope parallel to that of the separate groups of which the federations are composed. if these component groups are local economic units, the federation will be local in character. if they are district economic units, the federation will have a district as its sphere, and so on. by this means, there will be created a series of federations or joint organizations, beginning with the federation of local economic units, and ending with a federation of world industries. throughout this enlarging series of federations the principle of local autonomy will be maintained in all of its rigor, and no matter will be referred to a federation that can be handled by a local group. at the same time, the principle of federal authority will be asserted, and those matters that concern the welfare of more than one group of parallel jurisdiction, will be referred automatically to the federal authority under whose control the group in question falls. the most elemental of the federations would be the local producers' federation, which would correspond, quite accurately, to the town or the city of the present day, save that its size and character would of necessity be much better regulated than the character and size of the present-day town or city. the modern city has been built as a profiteer's paradise. from the construction of houses to the erection of office buildings, the one foremost question: "what per cent will it yield?" has been the guiding principle behind city construction. the local industrial federation will have, as its chief task, the provision of a living and working place for people, hence the character of the industrial community will be determined with a view to the well-being of the inhabitants rather than to the profit of landlords. the local federation would be under the control of a local council, the members of which would be elected by the producing units or groups composing the local federation, very much as the modern city is managed by a council elected by wards or aldermanic districts. except for the choice of representatives on the council by occupational groups, rather than by geographic divisions, the local federation would closely resemble the municipal government of the present day. in addition to its present functions, however, it would assume the task of dealing with issues arising between two or more of the local producing groups. that is, it would have economic as well as political functions, although it would not necessarily carry on any more productive enterprises (gas, water, house-construction, abbatoirs) than do municipalities at the present time. the local producers' federation would be responsible for two chief lines of activity. on the one hand, it would seek to maintain working relations between the various local economic groups by adjudicating those local questions that affected two or more of the groups. on the other hand, it would take charge of, and administer, those matters of common concern, such as the water supply, the local educational institutions, and so on. this second group of functions would be similar to those now performed by the city council, the board of health, the board of education. there would be a local producers' federation wherever a number of local industrial units agreed to function together. counties, cities, boroughs, and school districts are, at the present time, organized very much in that way. the local producers' federation would therefore differ little from the existing local groups, such as towns and cities, save that its constituent elements would be occupational groups rather than geographic divisions, and that it would be functioning in the economic as well as in the political field. the second series of federations might be called the producers' district federations. they would include all district industrial groups within a given economic field. such a district federation would correspond, roughly, to the present state as it exists in mexico or australia, or to the provinces in canada. the district federation would function in three ways. first, there would be the issues arising between the industrial organizations that composed the district federation; second, there would be the issues arising between local federations within the district, and third, there would be those common matters, like health, education, highways and so on. the third series of federations would be the divisional producers federations, which would correspond, roughly, to such aggregations of states as the commonwealth of australia or the united states of america. the boundaries of such a federation would follow the boundaries of the principal land areas and the chief population centers. north america, south america, south africa, the mediterranean basin, northern europe, northern asia, eastern asia, southern asia and australia would furnish a working basis for separating the world into such geographical divisions. each of these divisional federations would function along the same general lines as the local and district groups. the fourth, in the series of federations, would be the world producers' federation, which would be an organization composed of all of the major industrial groups. these groups, each of which would be organized on a world-wide basis, would unite in the world producers' federation in order to further those interests that were of consequence to two or more of them, as well as those common interests that were of concern to all alike. the world producers' federation would be built on the same principle as the local producers' federation, but unlike this latter federation, the world federation has no prototype existing at the present time. the world producers' federation would be a world authority, linking up those interests of world consequence that are now waving about like cobwebs in the wind. throughout its entire course this outline has been designed in such a way as to separate sharply the producing units and the administrative groups (federations). the local, district, divisional and world industrial units are the back-bone of the public machinery in a producers' society. for the purposes of facilitating the work of administration, these producers' groups are brought together, at various points, in local, district, divisional and in a world producers' federation, all of which federations derive their power directly from the industrial producers' groups. the world producers' federation therefore has no direct relations with the local producers' federation, any more than the government of a county, in a modern state, has with the central federal authority. the authority of the world producers' federation, like that of the local, district and divisional producers' federations, is derived from its constituent industrial member groups, and is confined to the questions that are of immediate concern to a number of them, or that are the common concern of all. this arrangement will make difficult the production of a state of present type which has drifted far away from some of the most pressing necessities of the common life, and into the hands of politicians,--a situation that permits tyranny on the one hand, and that makes any adequate check on the activities of these political rings difficult or impossible. this danger would be considerably reduced by delegating administrative power to the federations, holding each within its prescribed range, and keeping the real power in the hands of the local, district, divisional and world industrial groups. the decision of the world producers' federation would therefore be binding on the industrial groups, and not upon the local, district and divisional producers' federations, except in so far as the industrial groups compelled these federations to follow the policy of the world producers' federation. it is probable that an exception would have to be made in the case of issues arising between two divisional producers' federations. the burden of settling such an issue should rest, however, on the industrial groups rather than on the world producers' federation. this withholding of authority from the federations in general, and from the world producers' federation in particular may be open to criticism, but it has several strong points in its favor. through its control of resources, transport and the like, the world producers' federation will wield an immense power. its constituent members, having aided in its decisions of policy, may follow a similar course of action in the divisional and the district producers' federations. again, the alternative to the organization of a series of disconnected federations is a centralized bureaucracy of such magnitude, and holding such vast power, that it would be both unwieldy and dangerous, beside violating that very essential rule of local authority in local affairs. the separation of the federations would compel each of them to specialize on particular problems of administrative routine. questions that were to be carried to wider authorities would be carried by and through the various constituent industrial groups. the structural organization of the world producers' federation would be similar to that of the united states of america or that of the russian federated soviet republic. the constituent groups would be economic and occupational rather than political or geographic, but the principle of federated autonomous groups would be the same. each of the major industrial groups that belonged to the world producers' federation would have sovereign power over those matters which affected that group alone. the federation, on the other hand, would have jurisdiction over matters affecting two or more of the world industrial groups, as well as over those matters which were of common concern to all of the member groups. . _the form of organization_ the general lines of organization for the world producers' federation would be somewhat as follows: . the workers in each of the major industrial groups would vote in june of each year for the members of a world parliament which would be the central authority in the world producers' federation. . the world parliament would consist of from to delegates, elected in each of the major industrial groups by the producers in that group. a. each industrial group would be entitled to at least members in the world parliament, and to one additional member for each , workers over two and one half millions. but no group would be entitled to more than members in the world parliament. b. the members of the world parliament would be elected by popular vote in each of the major industrial groups, the franchise being extended to all producers, including those who had been producers and were rendered incapable of activity through age or infirmity. c. each industrial division would be entitled to at least five members of the parliamentary delegation from that particular industrial group, but the details of representation from each of the major industrial groups would be left in the hands of the group. . the world parliament would be elected in june and would meet in july of each year. since the world congresses of each of the major industrial groups would meet in the preceding january, they would have six months to thresh out their individual problems, before they were called upon to consider the general problems confronting all of the groups. . the world parliament would select, from its own membership, an executive committee equal in size to ten per cent of the total membership of the parliament. a. on this executive committee each of the world industrial groups would be entitled to at least five members. b. the executive committee would be the steering committee of the world parliament, and when the world parliament was not in session, the executive committee would be the responsible body. c. the executive committee would meet once in four months, or oftener at its discretion. . the executive committee would select, from its membership, a number of administrative boards, at the same time naming the chairman of each board. each of these administrative boards would be charged with the responsibility of handling a unit problem, such as the control of resources, the control of transport, and the like. . the chairmen of the various administrative boards would constitute the executive heads of the world producers' federation. they might be called the world producers' federation board of managers. this board of managers would be responsible to the world parliament executive committee. a. if, at any time, the board of managers failed to secure a vote of confidence from the world parliament executive committee, on any matter involving a question of general policy, the board of managers would be automatically dissolved, and the executive committee would proceed at once to select a new board that would replace the old one. b. if the executive committee failed to select a board of managers that could secure a vote of confidence, the world parliament would be automatically summoned to meet one month from the day on which this failure to elect occurred. c. as soon as it convened, the world parliament would proceed, as a first order of business, to the election of an executive committee which would function. d. if the parliament failed to elect an executive committee capable of functioning, the parliament would be automatically dissolved, a special election would be held within ten days, a new parliament would be selected, and would assemble thirty days from the date of this special election. e. by these means, the whole machinery of the world producers' federation would be rendered immediately responsive at all times to the sentiment of its constituency, and the board of managers would be compelled to function in line with the policy of the executive committee and of the world parliament, or turn the work over to another group. plan for world economic organization ---------------------------------- | | the world | board of managers consists of | executive | chairman of administrative boards| with one | | member from | | each industry. ---------------------------------- /|\ / | \ / | \ / | \ / | \ --------------- -------------- -------------- |administrative | |administrative| |administrative| |board | |board | |board | --------------- -------------- -------------- \ | / boards of \ | / experts and \ | / specialists with \ | / chairmen selected by the \|/ world executive committee. --------------------------------------- | | committee meets | world executive committee consists of | quarterly. no | ten per cent of world parliament | industry less than | | five members. --------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | | meets in july | world parliament consists of representatives | july. no | selected directly by the producers in each of| industry less | the major industrial groups | than fifty | | members. ---------------------------------------------- /|\ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ / | \ \ ------------ ---------- ------------ \ | | | | | | the producers in |machine man-| |transport | |agricultural| each of the major |ufacturing | |industries| |industries | industrial groups |industries | | | | | are the qualified | | | | | | electors of the | | | | | | industry. ------------ ---------- ------------ . the world parliament would exercise, directly, or by delegated authority, all legislative, executive and judicial functions that pertained to its activities. it would therefore create the departments or subdivisions necessary to the carrying out of these various functions. the members of the world parliament would be elected for one year, subject to recall at any time by the constituency that elected them. the parliament would decide on the qualifications of its own members. this proposed plan for the organization of a world producers' federation will be made clearer by a diagram. (p. .) . _all power to the producers!_ the plan for a world producers' federation is designed with the object of placing all power in the hands of the producers. the society of the present day vests power--particularly economic power--in the hands of the owners of economic resources and machinery. their public institution is the capitalist state, and their rule is perpetuated by the manipulation of its machinery. under this order of society, the chief emphasis is placed on owning rather than on working. the largest material rewards and the greatest amount of social prestige go to the owners. the present society sanctifies ownership, and raises the owner to a position of moral superiority. the same system which dignifies ownership can scarcely recognize work as of supreme social consequence. the worker is therefore placed in a position inferior to that of the owner. his economic rewards are less, his place on the social ladder is lower, and his children are taught in the schools the necessity of getting out of his class into the society of those who are able to live without working. it is hardly necessary to remark that in a community dependent for its existence upon labor, the teaching of such a philosophy points the way to class conflict and ultimately to social disintegration. if the community is dependent upon production for its existence, there must be sufficient incentive to continue production, otherwise the community dies. the disastrous consequences that must of necessity follow on the economic order as it is constituted at the present time are already in evidence,--strikingly so in the case of the european breakdown. the owning class society is coming to an end--falling of its own weight. the time has come when the producers must take the control of the world into their own hands or suffer disaster. man's sense of justice tells him that the product should belong to him who is responsible for creating it, and his experience teaches him that human beings take a greater interest in that which is theirs than they take in the property of another. the results of production should go to the producers; the machinery of production and the materials entering into production should belong to those responsible for the carrying on of the productive process. how shall these things be? only when the producers themselves decide to make them come true. all power to the producers! this sentence carries with it the key to the society of the future. vi. world administration . _the basis for world administration_ when the producers of the world are organized along the lines of their economic activities, and are federated in local, district and divisional federations, and in a world producers' federation, the structural side of the producers society will be complete. such a structure is built for use, not for appearance, and its effectiveness depends upon the way in which it works. the handling or administration of the producers society is therefore the determining factor in its success. a world producers' society may fail as miserably as any other form of social organization unless it is deliberately utilized to attain the ends for which it was created. the establishment of a world parliament consisting of representatives from the major industrial groups would create an authority more powerful than that of any existing state because, in the first place, it would be more extensive than any existing state. but even supposing that one of the great nations--britain or the united states--was to conquer the world and attempt to administer it, the world producers' federation would be far more effective than such a victor, because its rule would be founded on the will and on the consent of the governed and not on the imperial foundation of organized might. the world producers' federation could therefore look for a support from its constituency that no empire could hope to demand from its conquered subjects. the centralization involved in maintaining the authority of an imperial ruling class in a large and complex state is so great that it invariably results in friction and disaffection. the self-governing state, less efficiently co-ordinated and centralized, still has a far better chance for survival. its energy-generating centres are so much more numerous and more localized than those of the class governed empire that they necessarily reach a larger share of the population. the roots of the self-governing social group may go no deeper than the roots of the group under a bureaucratic government, but there are more of them, and they go to more places. the foundations are sounder because they are broader. in addition to these functional advantages of self-government, it possesses an immense asset in the sense of proprietorship that leads the citizens of a self-governing community to stand by the community organization because they feel that they have built it and that it is their own. a self-governing community therefore carries within itself the means of its own perpetuation in the enthusiasm and devotion of its population to an institution in which they feel a sense of workmanship and of the pride of possession. a world parliament, organized on the basis of self-governing industrial groups, would be unique in two respects. first, in that it was of world extent, and second in that it was built upon the industrial affiliations of its citizenship. if such an organization were handled in a way to hold the allegiance of its constituent members, its decisions on matters of world importance would carry an immense authority. . _the field of world administration_ there, in fact, would be the test of world government efficacy--in its ability to leave the handling of local problems to local groups, and to concentrate its energies on the administration of those problems which have assumed a distinctively world scope. such capacity to understand the difference between the business of local groups and the business of the world organization would be the touchstone of world statesmanship, the criterion by which the master political minds of the age could be tested. the short-sighted, narrow-visioned leader of world affairs would seek to gain and to hold power for himself and for his immediate local interests. the presence of many such men in positions of power would soon split the world government into a series of factions, each one seeking to destroy the others and to take away their authority. such a competitive stage would represent little advance over the present nationalism. a world government has no virtue in itself, and may as easily degenerate into a scramble for office as may any other phase of group relationship. its success would only be possible where its power was strictly limited to the control of those matters that had reached a plane of world importance. even then success would be impossible unless those responsible for making essential decisions saw the world problems as wholes rather than as localized and separable problems. grave issues hang on the method in which the world problems are approached and handled. success is not assured by any means. still, the dangers and disadvantages of a plan do not condemn it unless they outweigh the apparent advantages. the people of the western world face a number of serious problems that cannot be solved by the existing nations. some step must be taken to cope with the new situation that has followed on the heels of the industrial revolution, and in so far as the actual practices of life have evolved to a world plane, and in so far as they concern the workers in more than one industry, it must be apparent that nothing less than some world authority will suffice to cope with the issues that they present. a number of economic questions, such as the control of resources and of transport, have already passed beyond the boundary of the individual nation, and have reached a stage of world importance where they can be handled only on a world basis. in the normal course of social evolution, other questions will, in like manner, emerge into a place of world consequence. as rapidly as such developments occur, the administration of the world issues must be delegated to the world parliament and to its appointees and subordinate bodies. . _five world problems_ there are a number of problems that have passed beyond the control of any single nation, and that should therefore be made the subject of world administration. among them are: ( ) the control of resources and raw materials, ( ) transport ( ) exchange, credit and investment, ( ) the world economic budget, and ( ) adjudication of world disputes. under a world producers' federation, the administration of these five problems would be in the hands of five administrative boards selected by the executive committee of the world parliament. each administrative board would select and organize a staff of experts and specialists in its own field, and would present the outline of its proposed activities to the world parliament very much as the department of a modern government presents its budget to the parliament of its state. this presentation would take place through the executive committee of the world parliament, and it would be necessary to secure the endorsement of that committee before the plan could go before the parliament. when the plan was approved, the administrative board would begin to function as a part of the machinery of the world producers' federation. thereafter it would serve as a part of the world administrative mechanism, the working organization of which would remain intact, even should there be a change of policy, in exactly the same way that the department of state or of agriculture, in any modern government, remains intact through the various changes of party in power. the specialists and experts who made up the staffs of the administrative boards would secure their appointments as the result of civil service examinations, and would continue in their positions until some question arose as to their efficiency. each administrative board would be organized into a series of departments corresponding with the unit problems coming before the boards, with one specialist or department head charged with the direction of each of these departments. in the raw materials and resources board, for example, there might be one department for each of the more important resources such as coal, iron, copper, cotton, wool, timber, and the like. in the same way, the work of the transport board might be divided into departments covering shipping on the high seas, inland water transport between divisions, inter-divisional land transport, aerial navigation not wholly within one division, and so forth. in each instance, the task of providing an adequate supply of the commodity or an efficient service, would fall to the department or departments involved, while the administrative board itself would sit as a court of last resort, and as a board of strategy for the field in which it was functioning. the administrative board would thus be a group primarily of experts, charged with the specific task of handling some problem of world moment, and responsible to the board of managers of the world producers' federation for the success of its activities. . _work of the administrative boards_ a separate administrative board would be established to handle each of the important administrative problems confronting the world producers' federation. at the outset there would be such problems as resources, transport, credit and exchange, budget, and the adjudication of disputes affecting more than one division or more than one of the major industrial groups. it is neither possible nor desirable to draw up a working program for any one of these boards. such details must be met and solved when the task of administrative work begins. at this point it is only necessary to suggest some of the more important fields in which the boards would operate, and to bring forward typical instances of their functioning. . _the resources and raw materials board_ the survival of a modern industrial centre like the manchester district of england or the lille-roubaix district of france depends upon the supplies of raw material which it is able to secure from and through other industrial groups. these supplies are in turn dependent upon the available deposits of raw materials, the power, and the fertility of the soil. raw materials and resources are thus the foundation upon which all productive enterprise is based, and it would be one of the first duties of a producers' society to handle this issue successfully. some idea of the extent to which a modern industrial community is dependent for its survival upon imported raw materials may be gained from an examination of the trade figures for great britain. in the total value of british imports was , millions of pounds sterling. of this amount, millions (more than a third) were for food, drink and tobacco, while another third ( millions) were for raw materials. under these two general headings were included such items as grain and flour millions, meat millions, cotton and cotton waste millions and wool and wool rags millions of pounds sterling. the two main items of food and raw materials, covered more than three quarters of all british imports. (statesman's year book.) but britain is a relatively small and very much isolated community, lacking some of the essential resources. it is therefore quite natural that her trade figures should show such a result. the same thing is of course true of japan, germany, holland, belgium, italy, france, and in fact most of the important industrial countries. this is taken as a matter of course. oddly enough, however, it is likewise true of the united states, which is as near to industrial self-sufficiency as any of the leading industrial nations. among the , millions of dollars worth of commodities imported by the united states in , there were million pounds of aluminum, million pounds of rice, million pounds of cocoa and cacao, , million pounds of coffee, million pounds of hides, million pounds of fresh meat, million pounds of india rubber, million pounds of wool, million pounds of paper stock, , million pounds of paper, , million pounds of sugar, , million gallons of crude oil, million skins, and so on. here are extensive imports of hides, oil, paper, sugar, coffee, wool and rubber--seven of the most important items of modern commerce. well supplied as it is with varieties of climate and resources, the united states is nevertheless compelled to import large amounts of some of the most essential raw materials. like the nations of europe, it is forced to depend, for these and other industrial essentials, upon portions of the economic world that lie outside the national boundaries. an examination of these and similar figures tells the story of the industrial future--a story of limited, localized resources upon which the expanding industries will be compelled to make ever increasing demands. since all of these demands cannot be met there must ensue a ferocious struggle among the nations to secure and hold the resource key to economic advantage. the beginnings of that struggle have already been witnessed in the contest between france and germany for the coal and iron deposits of western europe. its next stage will include a struggle between great britain and the united states for the possession of the world's reserves of oil. such a struggle, with its appalling toll of suffering and chaos can be obviated in only one way, by an apportionment, among the users, of the chief raw materials, through an agency in whose direction all of those concerned have a share. this result could be accomplished by the resources and raw materials board of the world producers' federation. the activities of the resources and raw materials board will include: . a survey of all available resources and raw materials. . a survey of the present consumption of these raw materials. . a survey of the present production and of the possible production of these materials. . a production budget, assigning to each of the producing areas the amounts of materials that they are responsible for producing. . a consumption budget, assigning to the various using areas their quotas of the materials produced. . provision for the increase in production necessary to meet the demands of the consumers of raw materials. . final decisions as to which resources should be used, and for what purposes. this board would have under its immediate control the destiny of the whole producing world. it would not own the resources any more than the postal department of a government owns the post offices and the mail trucks, but in one case, as in the other, the power to decide on the service to be rendered would rest with the administrative officers. the need for some central control over the world's resources, and of some clearing house for raw materials seems quite obvious. the world producers' federation faces no more important or pressing issue. in this field alone, through its elimination of sources of conflict and its regularizing of raw material supplies, the world producers' federation could undoubtedly justify its existence. . _the transport and communication board_ the transport and communication board would have jurisdiction over all of those activities involving the transfer of goods, of people and of messages, not wholly within one division. such a plan has been worked out in part in the united states of america, where commerce between the states (interstate commerce) is under the control of the federal government, while commerce wholly within one state is under the control of that state. the same principle, applied to a producers' society, would leave local transport in local hands, while all matters concerning world transport would be under the control of the world producers' federation. the present economic system depends on the shipment of goods from one point to another. raw materials are sent from the place of their origin to the fabricating establishment that consumes them. in some cases, these distances are small, but when cuba sends iron ore to the united states, or when brazil ships coffee to europe, or when england sends coal to italy, the distances are considerable and the means of efficient transport are correspondingly important. the same thing holds true of the marketing of finished products. many of the goods turned out by the present-day industry--particularly machinery--are very bulky and heavy. each of the manufacturing nations sells its goods, not only within its own borders, but at the ends of the earth. the transport of goods thus becomes supremely important. the transport of goods and of people is only one aspect of the work coming under the direction of the transport and communication board. in addition, there would be: . the postal system, which is already on a world basis. . the express system, which is really only a branch of the postal system, and which is also on a world basis at the present time. . telephone, telegraph and wireless machinery, which are in their very nature wider than the boundaries of one nation, and which are to-day among the chief means of holding the people of the world close together. the mechanism of transport constitutes a vast net-work of inter-relations that have been carried farther toward a world basis than any other phase of the world's economic life. the nature of ocean transport, of the postal service, of the express service and of the telephone and telegraph made this inevitable. the inventions and discoveries of the past century have worldized transport without the necessity of any intervention from a producer's society. while the work of the transport and communication board would be of vital consequence, it would be relatively simple, in that it would involve little innovation, but rather the unification and co-ordination of existing agencies. . _the exchange, credit and investment board_ many economic writers have characterized the processes of exchange as "non-productive" activities, nevertheless, under the present economic order they lie closer to the seat of power than any other single group of activities. the rise of the banker to his present commanding position is due, primarily, to his control over money, and to his power to issue or to withhold credit. a producers' society may lay far less emphasis on money and its derivatives than does the present system, yet the money function will remain and the money forces will doubtless play some part for a very long period in the new economic order. money will owe its position of importance, under a producers' society, to the need for a medium of exchange, and until men discover a means more effective than money for the facilitating of exchange, money will continue to play an economic rôle. the inhabitant of a modern industrial community buys many things each day. for the newspaper he spends a penny or two; for the street-car ride, five or ten cents; for fruit, groceries, and other food products, a number of small sums. these transactions, in a country of fifty millions of people, aggregate tens of millions for each day. there are three possible ways in which such transactions may be carried on: ( ) each party may give the other some commodity or service--a bunch of carrots for a street-car ride, a sack of flour for a hat, ( ) money may be employed. ( ) a system of book-keeping may be devised, and each purchaser may use a credit card, or some similar device. barter is impossible. money is the usual means of facilitating exchange. bookkeeping, on a scale requisite for all petty transactions would be an immensely intricate mechanism. the chances are that at the outset, a producers' society will be compelled to follow the practices of present-day economic life, and to distinguish between the two chief uses of money: money as a means of making change and money as a basis for credit. this distinction has been pretty well established in all parts of the world. the business man buys his morning paper and his lunch with the change that he carries in his pocket. he buys his automobile or his factory building with a check (credit). money as a means of making change will continue under a producers' society until some more satisfactory means of handling minor transactions is discovered. money as a basis for credit will be superseded by a system of social book-keeping. the money used at the present time is based on an amount of some commodity, such as gold. a producers' society will undoubtedly substitute for this commodity base some unit of productive effort--an hour's labor or a day's labor in a given industry. such an idealized labor production period could be used as a basis for all value computations. there are a number of requirements for such a value measure:--( ) it must be reasonably stable; ( ) it must be generally recognized and accepted; ( ) it must be the medium in which all values in all parts of the economic world are calculated. with a standardized labor unit of value once determined, there would be several methods of procedure. one would be to issue a certificate for each unit of labor performed. the pay-check would then serve as money. another method would be for the world parliament to issue metal and paper money, using the labor unit instead of gold as the basis of value. in the former case, there would be a labor check, or piece of money in the community for each unit of labor performed. in the latter case, only so much money would be issued as was required for the ordinary purposes of making change. the latter method is the one now in use. the former would represent a distinct step in advance, in that there would be a certificate of purchasing power in the community for each unit of goods and services that was produced. there would be still a third method of handling the problem, by having the world producers' federation issue paper currency stamped with the statement "this is a mark" or "this is a franc," and making it receivable for all legal and public obligations. if the amount of this "fiat" money were carefully regulated, it would probably serve all of the purposes for which money is needed. whatever its character, it is essential that all money and credit should be publicly issued and under public control. the first problem confronting the exchange and credit board would be to establish some such generally acceptable standard of value. the chaos now existing in exchange rates is but a foretaste of the difficulties that confront a world which is attempting to carry on economic transactions with scores of different moneys and of differing financial systems. the exchange and credit board would have three other important fields of activity: . the computation of the values produced by the various industrial groups. this result would be accomplished by establishing a clearing house for reports on production in all industries and in all parts of the world. . the financing or exchange of materials between the various producing groups. this activity is now carried on by the commercial banker, who handles trade acceptances, bills of exchange, and the like. it need be no more than a system of book-keeping, with the balances entered as loans from the industries that produce a surplus to those that are using more than they produce. such a situation would of necessity be temporary, since the aim of the central authority would be to balance values in such a way that there would be an equilibrium all around, with no surpluses and no deficits. such an ideal condition would never be reached, but it could be approximated. . transfers of capital, or loans negotiated between various industrial groups, and covering more than one division. these loans would take the form of adverse balances in the general clearing between producing groups, and would cover the advances for improvements and betterments, that one producing group would make to another, or that the world producers' federation would make to one of the producing groups. the exchange and credit board would, in reality, be the book-keeping department for the world producers' federation, whose exchange transactions would be planned and handled through this department. . _the budget board_ two principal functions would be performed by the budget board. on the one hand it would be charged with budgeting or planning the transactions involved in the world organization of economic life. this function would include the estimates of the requirements of the major economic groups during a given year, and the estimate of the sources from which these requirements were to be met. on the other hand, it would be responsible for preparing the budget of the world producers' federation, and of deciding upon the course that must be adopted in order to meet these necessary outlays. thus the board would correspond, in a sense, to the finance committee of a modern parliament or to the department of finance in a modern cabinet. . _the adjudication of disputes board_ the organization of the world producers' federation places before it certain judicial functions. the federation would be called upon to adjudicate: . disputes between any of the industrial groups involving more than one division. . disputes between one of these industrial groups and the world producers' federation. . disputes between various departments of the world producers' federation and its subdivisions. these functions would devolve upon the adjudication of disputes board, which would constitute a court or committee of review, charged with the duty of hearing issues in dispute before they went to the board of managers, the executive committee and the world parliament for final decision. the adjudication of disputes board would not be, in any sense, a court of last resort. rather it would be a court of original jurisdiction, sifting out the issues as they arose, and presenting its findings to a higher body. most of its decisions would, as a matter of routine, be final, but on any issue of importance, the right of final decision would rest in the world parliament, unless that right were assumed by the people through a dissolution of the parliament. the present governmental system, with its checks and balances--legislative, executive and judiciary--has proved far from satisfactory, since it results either in a deadlock between the various authorities, or else some one of them, as for example, the courts in the united states, assume the final authority. in neither case is it possible for the average man to get to the bottom of the difficulty. with all the functions of government centering in the world parliament, there would be less chance of friction between the various parts of the governmental machinery, and a greater likelihood of effective co-operation between the various departments of the government. above all, the citizen would know where to look for action and where to place the responsibility for failure to act. . _the detail of world administration_ there is something of the grotesque in discussing the problems that would come for solution before a world producers' federation. the organization in question does not exist. how impossible, then, to predict what it will do when it comes into being. still, the effectiveness of any proposal must be determined by its results in the realm of those routine affairs with which the organization will be called upon to deal. a world producers' federation will be constituted for the purpose of handling certain world economic problems, and the means by which this control will be exercised is a matter of the first importance. the plan for world administration, as here outlined, is based on two general ideas. the first is that certain problems of world importance would come before the world parliament for solution; the second is that in dealing with any problems of administration, local autonomy should be preserved, the function of each administrative group should be clearly defined, and the control of the central authority should be exerted primarily for the purpose of approving or of disapproving the actions of the administrative divisions, leaving with them the task of initiating and carrying out the plans involved in the work of their respective divisions. with these simple principles of administration in mind, it is easy to plan almost any kind of administrative organization. the real test will come when an issue is raised over the status of a given problem. when has the question of resource distribution ceased to be a local matter and become a world matter? when has the problem of credit become a world problem? to such questions there is but one answer: when these matters are of vital concern to more than one division or to more than one of the major industrial groups--in other words, when they pass beyond the control of one group, they are matters for world jurisdiction. no plan can be drafted that will anticipate the difficulties of world economic organization. the utmost that men can hope to do is to draft a set of working rules that will enable them to act wisely when confronted by difficulties. the world is still in a state of chaos. there are many local authorities, but no central authority. there are plans and policies, looking to the relief of the more pressing economic and social difficulties, but all of them are conditioned upon the establishment of some world power that shall prove competent to handle world affairs. out of this chaos there must emerge, first, clear thinking as to the next steps that are to be taken in the reorganization of the world; second, a willingness to make the concessions necessary to this reorganization, and third a conscious purpose to build a better living place for human society. vii. trial and error in economic organization . _trying things out_ a society, like the individuals of which it is composed, learns first by trial and error. the earliest lessons that the human race received were obtained by this method, and all new information is thus secured. the numerous economic difficulties that lie ahead of the present generation must be met and solved by the method of trial and error, or, as it is sometimes called in political jargon, "muddling through." during historic times men have spent vast stores of energy in trying things out. it has frequently been observed that man is a social animal. it might be said with equal truth that he is an experimenting animal. he is curious, he is venturesome, he enjoys change, he relishes novelty, he is eager to better his condition. animals live on from generation to generation, building nests after the same pattern and migrating over the same territories. but man investigates, ponders, experiments, improves. this principle of experiment--the appeal to trial and error--holds true of social as well as of individual life. the hunter tries out a new snare or weapon, the machinist constructs a new tool, the chemist works out a new formula, the architect creates a new variety of arch or buttress, the educator writes a new kind of text-book, the sanitary engineer devises new methods for securing and safeguarding a water supply, the statesman plans a new system of roads that will open up the rural districts, the social scientist draws the design for a new type of economic organization. from the most personal to the most social, from the most local to the most general or universal, human activities are directed over new fields and into new channels on the principle of experiment, by the method of trial and error. the scientist or inventor works in his laboratory or in his shop, devoting his energies to investigation and research which are nothing more than the application of the principle of trial and error to the particular problems with which his science is confronted. once the experimenter has discovered a way to compel mechanical power to toil for man, or to destroy the typhoid germ, or to talk across a continent without wires, the next task is to find a better way or an easier way. far from decreasing the necessity for experiment, each new discovery in the realm of natural science opens the door to additional possibilities. to-day every important college, most cities, many industries, and public institutions maintain experimental laboratories in the various fields of applied knowledge, and employ highly trained experts whose sole duty it is to try things out. inventors frequently hit upon new ideas or upon novel devices by chance, but for every such chance discovery, there are scores and probably hundreds of ideas and devices that have been carefully thought out, worked over, rejected, revised, modified, until they produced the desired results. there is a margin of chance in all experiment, but surrounding it there is a vast field of careful thinking and planning and of endless purposeful endeavor. these observations are commonplaces in the laboratory and in the department of research. they have filtered through to thinking people who begin to understand the part that experiment plays in all forms of scientific progress. there is a general agreement that if there is to be an increase in the knowledge that men possess regarding the mechanical forces, the only sure way of gaining this knowledge is to weigh, measure, describe and classify. this applies to solids, liquids, gases, rocks, plants, animals, and even to the structure and function of the human body. but when it comes to social institutions, even the wisest hesitate and question. is it possible that social knowledge can be gained only in this way? there is no other way! like the individuals of which it is composed, society must investigate, experiment, and learn through trial and error. indeed, that is the tacitly accepted method by which social knowledge is accumulated. history is a record of social experiments--not so consciously directed nor so carefully planned as the experiments that are taking place in the chemical laboratory, but experiments none the less. what other explanation can account for the many forms of family relationship, the many varieties of religious organizations, the numerous types of political institutions, the multitude of educational institutions. "educational experiments" are the commonplaces of the pedagog. slavery was one of society's economic experiments, feudalism was another, capitalism is a third. through successive generations these institutions have been built up, reformed, discarded and replaced. the history of social institutions is a history of social experiment--of community progress through trial and error. obstacles are thrown in the way of the social experimenter. vested interests seek to convince the credulous and the ignorant that whatever is, is right. the jobs of office holders, the possessions of property owners, the security of ruling classes, depend upon their ability to sit on the lid of social experiment. "do not touch, do not think, do not question!" is the warning of masters to their social vassals. those who eat of the apple of experiment acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and with this knowledge comes the desire to reject and destroy the evil while they hold fast and augment the good. those who have learned, and who have dared to protest, have been ridiculed, persecuted, outlawed. sometimes their bones have bleached on the gibbet or rotted in dungeons. still, the jail, the gallows and the lynching-bee have not kept experimenters quiet in the past, and they will probably not do so in the future. during recent times--particularly in the last fifty years--the changes in economic and social life have been so rapid that the "always was and always will be" protest is having a harder and harder time to make itself heard above the clatter of the social house-wreckers, and the rap and beat of the social construction engineers. . _the capitalist experiment_ the present economic society is an experiment--less than a century old in most parts of the world. it has evolved rapidly through a series of forms, corresponding with the rapid advances in the methods by which men wrested a living from nature. the masses of the people in industrial countries have abandoned their farms, their villages and their rural life, have moved into the cities, and have gone to work in the mines, factories, mills, stores and offices, very much as the mechanics and farmers dropped their accustomed tools and rushed to the gold fields of california and australia. within two or three generations the whole basis of life has been shifted and a new order has been established. this change has been made for the purpose of securing a better living. the people in the industrial countries have accepted capitalism as an essentially desirable means of gaining a livelihood. the new order has given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. it has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had never enjoyed many possessions. the new order has made each family in an industrial district doubly dependent--dependent on a job which it can in no wise control, and dependent on the economic mechanism for the supply of goods and services without which mass city life is quite impossible. the rural family had a supplementary source of living in its chickens, pigs, cows, goats, bees and garden. fuel was cheap and nature provided berries, nuts and game. life was rough, but the means of maintaining it were relatively abundant. city life has cut away almost all of these forms of supplementary income, at the same time that it has imposed upon the family the need to pay for practically all goods and services. the city breadwinner must get and hold a job, if his family is to live. mass life in cities, mass work in factories, job-dependence--all of these experiments are being made in a field that up to the present time has been virtually untouched by the human race. mankind has gone into these experiments hopefully, trustingly, blindly, without any guarantee of their workability. a casual examination of the premises on which the capitalist experiment is built will show the extremely precarious position in which the people who are dependent upon it now find themselves. the capitalist experiment is built on the assumption that competition rather than co-operation is the effective means of promoting social well-being. acting under this theory, each man is to forage for himself. this individual activity was relied upon to promote initiative and to stimulate ambition. in practice, capitalist society has been compelled to abandon competition in many of its aspects. monopoly is the opposite of competition, yet the modern capitalist world is full of monopoly because monopoly pays better than competition--it is a more workable economic scheme. following out the assumption that competition is the life of economic society, one arrives at a necessary corollary to the general theory. the purpose of competition is to injure, wipe out and dispose of the competitor. therefore the misfortune of our competitors is our good fortune. this would lead, as applied to the actual conditions of life, to some such formula as: . bankrupt your competitor and you will profit. . impoverish your neighbor and you will benefit. . injure your fellow-man and you will gain. stated thus baldly and harshly, these three propositions sound incredibly silly, particularly in view of the example the world has just had of large scale competition--the world war--yet they are a fair picture of the line of thought and conduct accepted as rational by modern economic society. the normal processes of competition are directed to the destruction of competitors. war is a frankly avowed means of smashing rivals. nationalism is built on the theory that "our" nation is superior to all other nations, and that, in the long run, it is capable of defeating (injuring) them. the practice of such ideas render an effective organization of society virtually impossible, and it renders social catastrophe almost inevitable. bankruptcy breeds bankruptcy. impoverishment is a contagious economic plague. injury leads to bitterness, hatred and further injury. these logical fruits of competition once admitted into the economic body, threaten its very life. the tenets upon which capitalism is founded have already been abandoned in part by their sponsors as unworkable. but at best they represent a standard of social morality that is essentially destructive of social well-being. the human race has no guarantee of the success of any experiment, and recent experiences with the war, and with the present post-war plight of europe suggest that the capitalist experiment will fail disastrously unless some extraordinarily successful efforts are made to put things to rights. society experiments, trying first one means of advancement and then another. a certain number of these new ventures, which prove to be of social advantage, are adopted and incorporated into the social structure. the vast majority are rejected as inadequate to meet the social need. capitalism is apparently in this latter class. . _the cost of experience_ experiment is the necessary road to new experience, and the cost of experiment is written in the immense wastes that it involves. experience gained through experiment is sometimes very costly. it is never cheap. frequently these costs, measured in terms of misery, are so great as to overbalance the advantages gained through the experiment. if, therefore, there were another way to gain knowledge except through the processes of experiment, it would result in an immense saving for mankind. . _education_ there is a way, other than experiment, in which knowledge may be gained. instead of relying on experiment (direct experience) for the spreading of knowledge, it is possible to utilize the indirect channel called education. if this method is followed, and the results of the race experiment and experience are made available to the young of each generation, the need for experiment will be limited to a narrow field, since most of the necessary knowledge will be communicated through education. the individual need not repeat all of the experiments of his ancestors with animal breeding, harvesting, weaving, smelting, writing, house-building, etc. one by one these arts and crafts were built up--each generation adding its quota to the total of knowledge. these results of past experience, which were first passed from hand to hand, then from mouth to mouth, and finally written down, and which have been handed from generation to generation through the processes of education, are among the most important of all social assets. the farther the race goes in its accumulation of knowledge, the more important does education become, since there is more to transmit from one generation to the next. among primitive people the educational process is completed at a very early age. with the emergence of arts and crafts, the apprenticeship to life becomes longer. at the present time, the individual may continue his education as long as he is capable of acquiring new ideas. under the present society, therefore, the educational processes are the chief reliance for the transmission of new ideas. . _facing the future_ the accumulated knowledge of the ages, handed on from one generation to the next, enables the scientist to suggest the direction in which new experiments should be made as well as to predict their probable outcome. his work ceases to be haphazard. it has a well-understood policy and common problems. particularly in the realm of natural science, has there been a vast accumulation of verified knowledge, from which there have been deduced principles and laws which enable the electrician or the astronomer to predict the action of the electric current or the course of the stars with almost unerring accuracy. to be sure, these predictions do sometimes go wrong, but for the most part they are founded on verified and tested hypotheses. the past thus advises the present, which, from the vantage ground so gained, prepares its contribution to the future. if each generation were compelled to learn how to build fires, to employ language, to shape pottery, to weave, to print and to harness electricity all over again, it would seldom get farther than the rudiments of what is now called civilization. the new knowledge that is gained in each generation is obtained through experiment, but many costly errors are avoided in these experiments through the wisdom that is based on the accumulated knowledge of the past. thus each generation of scientists accepts from its predecessors a trust for the future. not only must it preserve the body of knowledge, but it must verify, amplify and enrich it. this is as true of the social scientist as it is of the natural scientist. the difference between them is that the natural scientist has worked out his technique and established his field, while the social scientist has reached only the threshold. . _accumulating social knowledge_ social knowledge is yet in its infancy. it is only within the century that comte, buckle, marx, spencer and other historians and sociologists have made an attempt to place the accumulations of social knowledge on a par with the accumulations of mathematical or chemical knowledge. until some effort was made to study society in a scientific spirit, there was no reason for supposing that men might be able to cope with social ills or to prevent social disaster. even to-day, while there is no longer any question as to the possibility of classifying social facts, and while sociology is regarded as a science of great promise, the feeling lingers that social events are fore-ordained. many people feel to-day about social disaster as the men of the middle ages felt about the plague--that it is outside the field of man's preventive power. another fatalistic school of thought holds that men learn their social lessons only through failure and disaster. according to the first line of thought it is useless to interfere with social processes because they are in the hands of the gods; according to the second, men will not interfere until they have been whipped into rebellion by the adverse conditions surrounding them. men in the past have modified the course of human events in the most profound way. the first smelter of iron and the first constructor of a wheel began a series of events that is still molding social life. it is quite possible to say that these events were fore-ordained, but it is at least equally possible to reply that the same process of fore-ordination is still busy, and that the changes that it will make through the present generation will be at least as important as those which it has made in the preceding ages. those who believe that the race learns only through hardships and suffering should bear in mind: first, that most of the knowledge communicated to the individuals of each generation is communicated indirectly through some process of education; second, that society is composed of those individuals; third, that modern communities have built a vast machine whose sole purpose it is to influence opinion by teaching (indirectly) in the school, in the church, through the printed page and the film. in japan this machine is employed to teach the people the sanctity of the emperor; in britain it is used to convince the masses of the sanctity of business-as-usual; in france it is used to proclaim the sanctity of property; in russia it is used to inculcate the sanctity of the revolution. if people learned only through first hand experience, these propaganda machines would be failures. in practice, they are highly successful. social disaster is not the only path to social knowledge. it is not necessary for a generation to suffer from typhus or to be ruined by war in order to be convinced that these dread diseases are menaces. the desire to prevent famine is felt by millions who have never come any nearer to it than the stories in the papers. society learns, indirectly, through education--slowly of course, but none the less surely. the average man is convinced of the desirability of trying to avoid disease, hunger and the other ills that effect him personally and immediately. he is not yet convinced of the efficacy of a similar attitude toward war, revolution and other disasters which inevitably destroy some portion of society, and which, in the end will prove as preventable as disease and famine. social disaster seems more inevitable because it strikes more people at one time, while individual disaster has been more carefully studied, is better understood and is more localized. grave dangers menace present-day society. economic breakdown, war and social dissolution with their terrible scourges--pestilence and famine--have already overtaken millions. it is plain that some new course of social action must be planned; that some social experiment must be inaugurated that will ward off the impending disasters. social experiments should be made, as chemical and electrical experiments are made, after all of the available facts have been carefully considered and digested. the results of such wisely planned experiments in the social field may be just as dramatic as the results of similarly planned experiments in the field of natural science. never in the history of social change has there been an intelligent direction of social processes. many men in many ages have had ideals and aspirations, coupled, in some cases, with a limited knowledge of social practice, but social changes have come upon mankind for the most part, as a meteor comes upon the earth's atmosphere--unexpected and unheralded, startling those who have seen it by the suddenness of its appearance. nor has there been any attempt on the part of the ruling powers to instill a different point of view with regard to these matters. on the contrary, there has been a determined effort to convince men that social changes were beyond their ken. the air of mystery has been blown away from natural phenomena, but it is encouraged and permitted to surround social changes. while it endures, an intelligent direction of social life is, of course, quite out of the question. this attitude is being broken down, however. the past hundred years of experiment and experience with a competitive order have convinced multitudes that such an order is unworkable. during the same period, the development of economic organization on ever broader lines has emphasized the need of common purposes and common activities. recent social experience teaches plainly that an injury to one is an injury to all; that a benefit to one is a benefit to all; that men rise in the scale of well-being with their fellows and not from them, and that a co-operative social life is the only one that will prove livable and workable. these four propositions include the best thinking of the modern world on the fundamentals of a social structure that will prove livable and workable. the acceptance of any such standards of social life involves a right-about-face in the basic social philosophy of the world. . _the doctrine of laissez-faire must be accepted for what it is--an exploded theory that has promoted, not social well-being, but the interests of favored classes._ . _catastrophe must be recognized as the most costly avenue to progress._ . _social science must be made at least as effective, in guiding the life of the world as is physical science._ social science alone will not protect men from the dangers that surround them. every social group is dependent for its effectiveness upon the kind of individuals of which it is composed, and their ideas and ideals limit the ideas and ideals of the group. at the same time, a carefully thought out course of social action, like a carefully thought out course of individual action presents a standard toward which society may work. a plan for social organization is like the blue-print with which the mechanic works. science comprises his rules and methods of procedure, but the driving power comes, not from the blue-print and not from the formulas, but from the man himself. this holds equally true of society. . _conscious social improvement_ conscious social improvement is the improvement made by society in pursuance of plans that are prepared and carried out with the knowledge and approval of the mass of the community. it is the product of community intelligence directed to public affairs. the individual can make conscious improvements in his condition only through observation, analysis, conclusion and experiment. the community is under the same limitations. its progress will be intelligent only when it works rationally and purposefully upon the problems with which it is confronted. the individual faced with a perplexing situation in his business or in his private life, sits down and goes over the matter, examining it point by point, until he thinks that he has a solution for his difficulties. society, under similar circumstances, must follow a like course of action. people must ponder and discuss the issues before them until there is some consensus of opinion as to what course should be followed. it is only under such conditions of intelligently directed social action that conscious social improvement is made. conscious social improvement is therefore practicable when the available knowledge about social problems has been socialized or popularized to a degree that renders the community intelligent concerning its own affairs. the task of popularizing any form of knowledge falls primarily to the educator, the journalist and the other moulders of public opinion. . _the barriers to progress_ there are two important barriers to intelligent social progress. one is the lack of organized knowledge concerning social matters. the other is the restriction of this knowledge to a tiny fraction of the population. social science, still in its infancy, has ahead of it decades of advancement before it attains a position corresponding with that of the physical sciences. even at that its progress must be slower, first because of the intricate nature of social phenomena, and second because of the herculean efforts that the vested interests make to destroy any form of social experiment that threatens their privileges. equally serious, as a limitation on the efficacy of social knowledge, is its restriction to a very small fraction of the community. progress in the physical sciences is initiated in the laboratory, without any considerable participation by outsiders, but progress in social science depends on the attitude if not on the consent of the community, and therefore the socialization of social knowledge becomes one of the indispensable elements in social progress. the handling of social problems has been confined, in the past, to a very small minority of each community. an aristocracy or plutocracy has taken charge of domestic and foreign affairs, and has made the decisions on which community well-being has depended. with the advent of "popular government" certain of these decisions have been turned over to the masses of the people or have been seized by them. the essential economic decisions, however, are still made by the owners of private wealth. if there is to be an organization of economic society that will function successfully and autonomously, the knowledge on which the decisions affecting economic policy are made must be public property. until that step is taken the economic life of society will be directed by the chance desires of those who own the machinery of production. social students will accumulate knowledge and reach deductions, but that is not enough. the task is not completed until the results of their researches are common property. recent inventions and discoveries make the distribution of knowledge comparatively easy. cheap paper, rapid printing, the newspaper, the magazine, the book, have all facilitated the scattering of information to those who could read, and in the western world this is more than nine-tenths of the adult population. for those who cannot read, the camera is an educational power. the machinery for public education--the schools, the press, the lecture-platform, has grown within a century to a point that renders possible the speedy distribution of knowledge to the most remote parts of the world. one of the greatest single steps in the reconstruction of the economic life of the world is the use of this machinery to distribute such information as is essential to a clear understanding of the economic problem and the normal course of its development. . _next steps_ accept the foregoing analysis, and what lies immediately ahead of society? . the socialization and persistent distribution of extant knowledge. . a decision with regard to the next great social experiment. . the selection of the group best able to carry through this adventure. . the preparation of this group for its task. . the placing of the task upon their shoulders, and the backing of them with every possible assistance. the working out of the detail of this program is far afield from the purpose of the present study, which must confine itself to the problems of world economics. let it suffice to indicate here that in pursuance of the program outlined above there must be inaugurated a widespread propaganda the object of which will be to get the facts and their implications to the people: the facts regarding the disintegration of the present order; regarding the possibilities of a new society; regarding the next steps that are necessary in its establishment. this propaganda is being carried on by those branches of the labor movement that are concerned with the working out of a new order of society. since it is apparent that the organized producers will be the dominant element in the new society, they are its logical architects and builders. it is to this end that the energies of labor education must be directed. when the producers are ready for their stupendous task, and when the time is ripe, they will assume the responsibility for erecting the superstructure of the new society. they will make costly blunders, some of which may be anticipated. they will be compelled to face difficult questions of tactics. in the course of their activities they will make day-to-day decisions that will play a vital part in the ultimate outcome of their experiments. . _the success qualities_ for the rest, the movement for a producers' society needs an emphasis on those qualities that will bring triumph out of defeat, and that can convert the most menacing situations into assets: . a willingness to learn better ways of doing things, and to abandon outgrown ideas and ideals for new ones. . a faith that will stand up under failure. . a vision that sees beyond a lowering horizon. . the courage to keep looking and trying, even in the face of difficulties that seem insuperable. all human achievement is conditioned on these qualities, and their development is a pre-requisite to successful experiment. viii. economic liberation . _why organize?_ from many sides echo voices urging the human race to co-operate for the general advantage. the world, torn and distracted by the subsistence struggle, yearns toward a method of life that will ease the strain and relieve the heart-ache that are involved in the present-day conflict. it seems that this world-need can be met by a world economic organization built along the lines of productive activity controlled by those who produce, and sufficiently powerful to utter the final word with regard to the disposition of resources and raw materials, of transport, of credit, and of the more general phases of production and consumption. there can be little difference of opinion concerning the necessity for some such organization. a question may well be raised, however, with regard to the probable developments of so vast a world machine. what are its ultimate purposes? why, in the last analysis, do men seek to improve the economic and political structure of human society? why organize at all? there is a clear-cut answer to these questions: men desire changes and improvements in their economic life in order that they may attain greater freedom, and they organize for the purpose of making these changes and improvements more easily. man is subject to many drastic limitations. first, there are the physical limitations of his own body--its height, its reach, its flexibility, its resistance, its fund of energy. then he is limited by nature--by the climate, the altitudes, the fertility of the soil, the deposits of minerals, the movement of water. man is further limited by habit, custom, tradition, and by the opinions of his friends and neighbors. again, he is limited by ignorance, by fear, by cowardice, by prejudice, and by his own lack of understanding as to the true nature of freedom. in addition to all of these restrictions he is limited by the economic bonds that hold him to his job, that tempt him with gain, that drive him, day by day, to seek for food, clothing, shelter: for comfort and luxury. only dimly do men realize these limitations. the more they learn, the more clearly they understand the nature of the bonds that hold them, and the better are they prepared to break down the most hampering barriers, and to follow where aspiration and hope beckon. yet, even among the masses of the people, who have had little time to learn, and less in which to reflect, there is a persistent longing to be free. the plea for liberty always awakens a response in them because, through their own lives they come into such intimate contact with the hateful burdens that oppression lays upon its victims. the longing to be free is probably one of the most widely distributed of human qualities, and one, moreover, which men share with many of the higher animals. the world war focused this longing and raised it to a pitch of frenzied exaltation, under the spell of which hundreds of millions fought and worked, as they thought, for liberty. the fact that they were mistaken in their ideas regarding the purposes of the war does not in any sense detract from the sincerity of their desires, nor from the earnestness of their efforts. the world war fervor was typical of the eager attempts that men have made at intervals all through history, to win freedom against immense odds. during the past three or four centuries this struggle has been particularly severe in the political, the social and in the economic fields alike. although the dark ages almost obliterated the expression of creative energy in the western world, the renaissance, the reformation and the industrial revolution, following in quick succession, proclaimed its reawakening, and to-day there is scarcely a group of people--in egypt, in ireland, in korea, in the philippines, or in dark, enslaved africa that does not hold a molten mass of sentiment surging toward freedom,--a seething, smouldering pressure, continually seeking an outlet. economic emancipation does not include all aspects of freedom. many other chains remain to be broken. but the economic organization of the world would be one step in the direction of freedom, and would burst many a bond that now holds the human race in subjection. . _freedom from primitive struggle_ the first step in economic liberation is to free man from the more savage phases of the life struggle--the struggle against nature: the struggle with other men. since those far-off times when men lived by tearing away clusters of nuts, by picking berries, by digging roots, by snaring fish and by clubbing game, they have been compelled to wrest from nature the means of subsistence. in this struggle, there have been the terrible phantoms of hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and physical suffering of every sort, driving men on. he who won in the contest with nature was able to escape the worst of these miseries, but he who lost was tortured by them as long as life remained in his body. the race is saddled, even to-day, by an oppressive fear of these physical hardships that makes the strongest a willing servant of any agency that will promise to ward them off. the first victory that men must gain in their battle for economic liberation, will be won when hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and other aspects of physical suffering are banished from the lives of all people as effectively as yellow fever and cholera have been banished from the western world during recent generations. this end has already been attained for the favored few in most countries, but famine still stalks periodically among the peoples of asia, and even europe, since the great war, has felt its grip. among the industrial workers of the imperial countries, and among the citizens of the exploited countries, the wolf is a far more frequent visitor than is the fatted calf. liberation from this widespread physical hardship can be achieved by producing enough of the necessaries of life to feed, clothe and house all of the people of the world, and by supplementing an adequate production by a system of distribution that will eliminate hunger and cold. machine industry has made such an achievement possible. it only remains for a world economic organization to co-ordinate the resources, the productive machinery and the labor, and to distribute the commodities produced to those who need them. the conflict with nature is but one aspect of the primitive struggle in which men are engaged. in addition, there is the struggle of man against man; not to aid, to emulate, to excel, but to rob, cripple and destroy. the existing economic system is built upon the assumed desirability of a struggle whose outward manifestations are: ( ) competition between economic groups; ( ) the class war between owners and workers, and ( ) wars between the nations. throughout the business world one establishment seeks to build up its organization by wiping out its competitors; one class seeks to win supremacy at the expense of a rival class, and one nation seeks to found its greatness on the prostrate remains of those opposing nations that it has been able to overthrow. these three phases of competition are accompanied by three forms of war--the economic war, the class war and international wars. all three forms of war have an economic background. the economic war is the contest for resources, trade, markets, monopolies and investment opportunities. the class war between the exploiter and the exploited, grows out of the economic relations existing between the owner and the worker. international wars are fought for economic advantage--for resources, trade, markets. the object of all war is the destruction of a rival by resorting to those measures calculated to bring the desired result. since all is fair in war, the end (destruction) justifies the means, no matter what it may be. what need is there to speak to this generation of the devastation caused by these wars? of the killing, the maiming, the famine, the disease, the disorganization and chaos? the western world has not yet recovered from the latest international war, while the economic war and the class war are being fought on the six continents and the seven seas. the cost of wars in blood, treasure, happiness and usefulness is an intolerable one. the chains with which mars loads the human race weigh men down to the earth. the organization of a world producers' society would go far toward freeing men from the ravages of war. the necessity for economic competition being removed, and exploitation being done away with, the basis of international war and of the class war would be swept away. thus the same economic world organization that enabled man to free himself from the more brutal phases of the struggle with nature would likewise enable him to eliminate the principal causes of war. . _freedom from servility_ the organization of a producers' society would do more than abolish the cruder aspects of the present economic struggle. it would lay the foundation for a new culture founded on the dignity and the worth of labor. there are two groups of human instincts in ceaseless contention for supremacy--the possessive and the creative. both are of immediate economic importance, and the triumph of the one usually means the subordination of the other. the instincts which urge in the direction of acquisition and accumulation tend to make the man a conservator. once let him possess an abundance of the world's goods and his chief object is to hold what he has gained. the instincts which urge toward construction and creation tend to make man an innovator, initiator, an improver. the side of man's nature that urges him to possess, directs him toward wealth and power. the side of his nature that leads him to create points to invention, to craftmanship, to artistry. thus the possessive and the creative instincts are not merely at odds. possession leads to status while creation leads to improvement. there are some natures that are definitely inclined toward acquisition. there are others as firmly set in the direction of creation. for such natures the social standards possess little importance. they have their bent and they follow it. the great mass of men, however, have no positive set in either direction. their lives will be primarily possessive or primarily creative, depending upon the kind of training that they receive. modern society lays its emphasis on possession and accumulation, and upon the wealth and power which they yield. the owner of land or of capital, under the present economic order, is not required to work for his living. his rents and dividends furnish him a source of income far more regular and much more dependable than the wage of the worker, or even than the salary of the man higher up. the rewards of the property owner, moreover, are far larger than those of the worker. compare the income tax returns of germany, britain and the united states with the wage scales from the same countries. the incomes above ten thousand dollars (two thousand pounds or , marks in pre-war values) per year are derived largely or exclusively from the ownership of property. it pays far better to own than it does to work. the ownership of capital, like the ownership of land, carries with it power over those who must use the capital and work the land, thus setting up an owning group or class which is able to control the lives of the workers, at least to the extent of taking a part of their product and living upon it without rendering any commensurate service in return. with the economic rewards go social honors and distinctions, and the wealthy enjoy social as well as economic privileges. they develop a system of dress, of language, of manners and customs that will distinguish them as far as possible from the common herd, namely, those who work for a living. veblen describes the process admirably in his "theory of the leisure class." the leisure class, he says, has its origin in some form of ownership, on which it builds the structure of its prerogatives. the existence of an owning, ruling class divides society into factions, whose contentions threaten the destruction of any social group in which they take place. from the intolerable social situation which they create, there seems to be but one logical means of escape, and that is through the establishment of a society in which labor and not parasitism is the ideal toward which children are taught to strive. such a society would shift the emphasis from possession to creation (production) by rewarding the worker rather than the owner. this result may be accomplished quite simply by giving the chief rewards to those who create, and by denying to the owner any direct reward for his ownership. another step in the same direction could be taken by limiting individual ownership to the things that men use, and concentrating in the producing group the ownership of all productive tools. when economic rewards are withdrawn from possession and given to creation, it will pay better to create than it will to own. furthermore, since ownership of itself would involve no power over others, another important incentive to accumulation would be removed. a producers' society, as a matter of course, would accord the most honor to those who engaged in productive activity, thus registering the social opinion in favor of creating rather than of possessing and exploiting. with the economic and the social rewards going to producers, the young of each generation would learn that it was more worth while to be a producer than to be an owner. again a producers' society would aim to secure the common participation in the necessary social tasks--the drudgery and the "dirty-work." with the essential work performed in part by all able-bodied persons, no stigma would attach to those who were engaged in it, the class of economic pariahs would be eliminated, and each participant in the necessary economic work of the world would feel that he belonged to the group in which he was playing so important a rôle. "but," argues the doubter, "all of this is against human nature. how is it possible to expect that men will stop possessing, or will lose the desire for possession?" they cannot be expected to do either, of course. but it so happens that, in any industrial society, the group living on its ownership is a very small one compared with the group living by its labor. the preference, in an industrial community, can therefore easily incline to labor rather than to ownership. as for the chief rewards of life going to producers rather than to owners, this is historically practicable. greek society worked out an elaborate system of honors and rewards for those who could create. human nature has not been fairly or adequately tested in recent years. only certain of its phases have been developed by social demands, and those phases--the possessive instincts--are among the least socially advantageous of human qualities. an emphasis on production rather than on accumulation would have another important result--more important, in a sense, than any of those named. it would establish a feeling of self-respect among those who work by giving them the only conceivable economic basis for self-respect--the ownership and control of their jobs. while one man owns a job on which another man must work in order to live, the job-owner is the master, and the job-taker is his vassal. necessarily, the vassal occupies a position of servility. when he asks for an opportunity to work, he is asking for an opportunity to live. when he takes a job he is binding his life and his conduct under terms prescribed by the job-owner. if he has a family, or owns a home, or is in any way tied to one spot, he is doubly bound. the establishment of a producers' society would make each man his own master in somewhat the same sense that the farmer or the artisan who owns his land or tools is the arbiter of his own economic destiny. that is, he would own his job and share in its control. thus society would eliminate the inequalities that are now created by the concentration of ownership and power in a few hands, and would establish a relative equality among those who produced. the great fear of the modern worker--the fear of unemployment or job-loss--would also be eliminated, since the producers, in a society of which they had control, would be able to hold their own jobs. these various means would serve to dignify labor and production, and to establish a society in which prestige and honor would attach to creation rather than to ownership. . _wisdom in consumption_ one of the chief weapons of a leisure class is some mark that will easily distinguish its members from the workers. this mark, in modern society, is conspicuous consumption. by the quality and style of its wearing apparel, by the scale of its housing, by the multitude of its possessions, its luxuries and its enjoyments, the leisure class sets itself apart from the remainder of the community, advertising to the world, in the most unmistakable manner, its capacity to spend more than the members of the working class can earn. this need for distinction through consumption has set a living standard which the less well-to-do families seek to emulate. among the leisured, there is an eager race to decide which can spend the most lavishly, while those of less economic means make a determined effort to put on front and to appear richer than they really are. the result of this competition among neighbors is an absurd attention to the quantity and to the cost of possessions, with a comparative indifference to their intrinsic beauty or to their utility. nowhere is this better illustrated than in the rapidly altering styles of woman's dress. one season silk stockings and low-cut waists are worn in the middle of winter: the next, expensive furs appear in mid-summer. with little reference to artistic effect, and with even less attention to the needs of the individual, the procession of the styles moves across the social stage with tens of millions eagerly watching for the tiniest change in cut or color. the devotion of an entire class to this conspicuous leisure has no social justification save the silly argument that "it makes work." it is one of the logical products of a stratified or class society where the lower classes seek to ape the upper classes, while the latter engage in a mad scramble to determine which shall set the most grotesque standards of social conduct. a producers' society will of necessity take a stand of far-reaching consequence on the question of consumption. in the first place it will realize that one of the most signal failures of the present order lies in the inability of the people to find either happiness or growth in the accumulation of possessions. if the multitude of things owned would satisfy men's needs, the upper classes of the present society would be the happiest that the world has ever known, since they are able to command a quantity and a variety of things that far surpasses previous historic records. instead of bringing happiness, however, these things have merely brought care, anxiety and finally disillusionment. now, as always, it is true that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions, or, as carlyle puts it, "not what i have but what i do is my kingdom." the citizens of a producers' society will therefore teach to their children, and will practice an abstemiousness in the midst of plenty--a withdrawal from possessions--in order that the body may have enough, but not too much, and that the spirit may be freed from an undue weight of things. the greeks understood the principle well; so did the american indians. they desired, not many things, but an enrichment of life, which they realized could come only through understanding, tranquillity and inner growth. as a matter of course, a producers' society will enforce the axiom: no luxuries for any until the necessaries are supplied to all. this corresponds with the well-established practice of many primitive peoples. it is likewise the application of the highest ethical principles to economic life, and is the course of procedure that man's most elemental sense of justice demands. a more or less rigid adherence to the principle of necessaries first, and an understanding of the futility of seeking for happiness through possessions, will place a rigid limitation upon the amount of time devoted to satisfying economic needs, and will release a generous share of time and energy that may be devoted to supplying the other needs of man. heretofore, leisure has been absorbed by one class or group. under a producers' society it would be distributed, like any other social advantage, on an equitable basis. already sufficient advances have been made in machine production to enable the human race to produce the economic necessaries of each day in a few hours of labor--two, or three, or four, perhaps. it remains for a producers' society to take advantage of this productive efficiency, and to convert the increased productivity, not, as at present, into more goods, but rather into more free time for people. . _leisure for effective expression_ the primary aim of a producers' society would be leisure rather than goods--an opportunity for expression rather than an increase in the amount of possessions. one of its great tasks would therefore be the education of its citizenship in the effective use of leisure. this new, socialized leisure, which yesterday was a privilege of the ruling classes and of many of the artisans and farmers, which is to-day the heritage of primitive peoples, and which has been so largely lost in the rush of machine production, will be used: ( ) to make and to maintain social contacts; ( ) for creative activities; ( ) for recreation, and ( ) for whatever other means are necessary to promote the growth of the individual. an effective society must be composed of effective individuals. in no other way can a high social standard be maintained. the growth of the individual, in a modern community depends, in large measure, on the way in which he uses his leisure. . _culture and human aspiration_ at various stages in the development of society there have emerged cultures founded on some particular group of human aspirations. thus the forward-looking side of man's nature expressed itself. after he had finished the daily tasks by means of which he earned a subsistence, or, more usually, as a member of a leisure class that was exempt from the necessity of labor, the man dominated by strong creative impulses sought to embody, in some concrete form, the desires which he felt springing up within him, and which could not be satisfied by physical activity. he turned, therefore, to drawing, to painting, to music, to speculation, to discussion. the present age has not as yet developed its culture, and it seems now as though capitalism, with its heritage of revolution, and its curse of instability and hurry, would not persist long enough to establish a well-defined culture. hence, in the present society, multitudes feel that certain finer things are excluded from their lives because the ground is so littered with possessions, and because life is too harried and too sordid to give them place. these forces, the creative impulses of the artist and the builder, yearn unspeakably for expression. each human breast holds a void that is the result of their suppression, and it is this, perhaps, more than anything else, that accounts for the unrest and dissatisfaction that are so characteristic of the present generation. in the past only the favored few had a chance to express their most holy aspirations. the development of modern industry, with its facility in the production of livelihood, promises a time, and that at no very great distance, when this opportunity may be common property, and men everywhere may be able to participate in that unending search after love, beauty, justice, truth--the highest of which humanity is capable. all of these things lie outside the realm of economics, yet none of them is possible for the masses of mankind until there is established a system of economic life that will provide the necessaries upon which physical health depends, together with an amount of leisure sufficient to enable a generation to find itself. this is the goal toward which men are working in their efforts to organize economic life, as they strive to provide a fit dwelling-place for the descendants of the world's seventeen hundred millions. what to read no reader should accept the statements made in this book unless they appeal to his reason and correspond with his experience, nor should he reject them merely because they run counter to his prejudices or his convictions. if the subject-matter of the book is as important as the author believes that it is, the reader should not stop with these brief chapters, but should search farther. the many recent articles, pamphlets and books devoted to economic and social reconstruction give an excellent chance for selection. here are a few suggestions: h. deb. gibbins has written one of the best descriptive books on the economic changes surrounding the industrial revolution. ("industry in england" london, methuen, .) see also his "economic and industrial progress of the century" (london, chambers, ). supplement this by reading another old book, "recent economic changes," by d.a. wells. (new york, appleton, .) more up to date, and in the same field, are "the great society," (graham wallas, new york, macmillan, , chapter i); "economic consequences of the peace," j.m. keynes, (new york, harcourt, , chapter ii); "the fruits of victory," norman angell (glasgow, collins, ) chapters i and ii. the economic chaos resulting from the war has been described with journalistic accuracy by frank a. vanderlip, american banker, in his "what happened to europe?" (new york, macmillan, ) and in "what next in europe?" (new york, harcourt, ). the european situation is dealt with in great detail by the "manchester guardian commercial." beginning with april , , the "commercial" has published a very complete series of articles under the general editorship of j.m. keynes. the series is entitled "reconstruction in europe." "america and the balance sheet of europe" (j.f. bass and h.g. moulton, new york, ronald press, ) is a study by two experts that goes into great detail with regard to budgets, public finances, exchange rates and the like. "our eleven billion dollars" (robert mountsier, new york, seltzer, ) gives the same facts, brought up to date and popularized. the science of economic organization is approached from three quite different positions. first, there are writers who discuss ways of making the economic mechanism efficient. ("theory and practice of scientific management," boston, houghton mifflin, ; "the administration of industrial enterprises," edward david jones, new york, longmans, ; "principles of scientific management," f.w. taylor, new york, harpers, .) in the second place, there are writers like thorstein veblen ("the engineers and the price system," new york, huebsch, , and "the theory of business enterprise," new york, scribners, ) and h.l. gantt ("organization for work," new york, harcourt, ) who desire to see vital changes made in the aims of the whole economic order. third, there are reformers and radicals who write of a re-made or revolutionized economic order. at the present time these radical writers fall into three general groups: ( ) the syndicalists of france, ( ) the guild socialists of britain, and ( ) writers who describe actual economic experiments that are going on in russia, and to a lesser degree elsewhere. (note that the "one big union" movement of canada and australia and the "industrial workers of the world" movement in the united states have produced much controversial material but little constructive writing.) french syndicalism is well presented by e. pataud and e. pouget ("syndicalism," oxford, ); by bertrand russell ("proposed roads to freedom," new york, holt, ) and by georges sorel ("reflections on violence," new york, huebsch, ). the case for guild socialism is stated by a.r. orage ("national guilds," london, bell, ), by g.r.s. taylor ("the guild state," allen and unwin, ), and by g.d. h. cole ("self-government in industry," london, bell, , "chaos and order in industry," london, methuen, , and "guild socialism re-stated," london, parsons, ). actual experiments in the control of economic life by the producers are described by c.l. goodrich ("the frontier of control," new york, harcourt, ), who seeks to answer the question: how much control over industry do the rank and file of those who work in it and their organizations in fact exercise? "the collectivist state in the making," (emil davies, london, bell, ) and "socialism in theory and practice," (h.w. laidler, new york, macmillan, ), cover somewhat the same ground. the whitley committee, in its "report of an enquiry into works committees" (great britain, labor ministry) goes into detail on this point. the experiments in russia are nowhere adequately covered, "the soviets at work" (lenin) was a prediction and a hope rather than a review of achievements. more recent books have been either violently partisan or else so superficially descriptive that they conveyed no idea of the actual state of the economic experiment. it is, of course, in russia, that the experiments in workers' control are being carried forward on the largest and most complete scale. there are many other books in english, books in german, french and russian, pamphlets, magazine articles by the thousands, and reports of special investigations in various technical fields, all of which offer ample opportunity for further study along the lines suggested in this book. index acquisition, menace of, administration, basis of world, administrative and producing groups, administrative authority, concentration of, administration boards, function of, america, resource monopoly of, american imports, american industry, phases of, association, scope of, authority, centralization of, bankers, as arbiters of industry, bankers, power of, barriers to progress, basic industries, and resources, british foreign investments, brotherhood, new possibilities of, budget board, budget deficits, business and geographic lines, business federation, development of, business organization, nature of, business, world character of, capital, transfers of to producer groups, capitalism and nationalism, capitalism and profiteering, capitalism and the class struggle, capitalism, assumptions of, capitalism, centralization of, capitalism, establishment of, capitalism, failure of, capitalism, growth of, capitalism in the western world, capitalism, initiative under, capitalism, limitations on, capitalism, modifications in, capitalism, plutocracy under, capitalism, world rôle of, capitalist experiment, catastrophe, menace of, centralization, in american industry, chance, part of in progress, change and chaos, chaos and change, class struggle, and capitalism, climate and civilization, civilization and climate, coal, as a factor in civilization, coal, production of, coal surplus, where found, commerce, growth of, commodity basis for money, communication, as a world problem, communication, development of, competition, and war, competition, justification of, competition, morality of, competition, place of, competition, profit incentive in, conflict and economic antagonism, conscious social improvement, consumption, education for, consumption, wisdom in, co-operation, in modern industry, co-operation, necessity for, co-operative world organization, copper production, world figures, credit, as a business factor, creation, stimulation of, creative forces, scope for, culture and human aspiration, debts of european nations, deficits, in european budgets, depression, present condition of, disputes, adjustment of, disputes board, distribution and the social revolution, distribution of world wealth, distribution of resources, district and division compared, district committees, divisional congress, organization of, district economic units, district organization, detail of, divisional and district organization compared, district federations, functions of, divisional federations, listed, divisional organization, economic activity, worldizing of, economic affiliations, series of, economic authority, location of, economic aggression, future of, economic bureaucracy, economic causes of war, economic change, working basis for, economic changes, frequency of, economic chaos, source of, economic competition, extent of, economic co-operation, necessity for, economic depression, results of, economic determinism, effects of, economic disaster, menace of, economic disintegration, signs of, economic district organization, economic evolution illustrated, economic federalism, economic forms, economic foundations, economic foundations for world organization, economic groupings, listed, economic institutions, instability of, in europe, economic interdependence, economic isolation no longer possible, economic justice, need for, economic leadership, economic life, chaos in, economic life, new basis for, economic machinery, ownership of, economic muddle, economic organization by divisions, economic organization, details of, economic organization, need for science in, economic needs, economic needs, enumerated, economic organization, by districts, economic organization, lines of, economic organization, nature of, economic organization, world units of, economic power, and the bankers, economic power, for the producers, economic problems, enumerated, economic problems, growing complexity of, economic problems, nature of, economic program, basis for, economic questions of world scope, economic reconstruction, principles of, economic rivalries and war, economic self-government illustrated, economic statesmanship, economic states rights, economic structure, nature of, economic structure, variation in, economic system, divisions of, economic units, character of, economic units, classes of, economic units, efficiency in, economic units, integrity of, economic units, local control of, economic units, nature of local units, economic units, needs of, economic units, productivity in, economic world outlook, education, function of, education, possibilities of, energy, rewarding of, engineers, present position of, european bankruptcy, threat of, european budget deficits, european war debts, exchange and credit board, executive, functions of, executives, selection of, expansion, costs of, experience, costs of, experiment, social value of, experiment, uncertainty of, expert, selection of, exploitation, increase of, federalism, principle of, federation, in social organization, finance, derangement in, financial imperialism, costs of, financial imperialism illustrated, food imports of great britain, financial stability, basis for, forethought, possibilities of, foreign exchange, demoralization of, foreign investment as a science, freedom, human desire for, freedom, struggles for, functional economic units, geographic divisions, organization of, geographic units, scope of, government control of industry, great britain, food imports of, great britain, foreign investments of, great revolution, phases of, hard times, history of, hiring and firing, new plan for, human aspiration and culture, human effort, results of, human nature, limitations on, human values, conservation of, hunger struggle, elimination of, ideal and the real, improvements and betterments, imperialism, costs of, imports of the united states, income distribution, indebtedness, since the war, industrial change, through discovery and invention, industrial efficiency, need of, industrial federation, groups of, industrial federations, problems of, industrial leaders, change in type, industrial organization, evolution of, industrial revolution, and production, industrial revolution, effects of, industrial revolution, spread of, industrial revolution, suddenness of, industrial system, characteristics of, industrial waste, industrial waste, responsibility for, industrialism, effects of, industries, interrelation of, industry, dependence on raw material, industry, divisional organization of, industry, government control of, initiative, loss of under capitalism, initiative, stimulation of, intelligent social direction, iron ore, production of, job-ownership, judiciary, basis for, knowledge, accumulations of, knowledge, additions to, knowledge through suffering, knowledge, through trial and error, labor federation, development of, labor units of value, laissez-faire, abandonment of, leadership, changes in type of, leadership, classes of, leadership in economic affairs, leadership, methods of selection, leadership, selection of executives, leadership, through heredity, leadership, through self-selection, leadership, through social choice, league covenant, principles of, league of nations failure, leisure, function of, liberty, through producers' organization, life, continuity of, limitations on capitalism, livelihood, guarantee of, livelihood struggle, loans, under a producers society, local autonomy, necessity for, local economic problems, local economic units described, local economic units, details of, local federations, character of, local federations, problems of, local initiative under capitalism, machine ownership and self-government, manufacturing, divisions of, mass life, effects of, mass meetings, for public issues, maximum advantage, law of, maximum efficiency, need of, maximum returns, essentials for, meliorism, interest in, militarism, in europe, minimum outlay, law of, modern business methods illustrated, modern warfare, costs of, money as a commodity, money, function of, money, future of, money, labor as a basis for, money, present uses of, monopoly profit, law of, national boundaries and business, nationalism and capitalism, nationalism, and existing problems, nationalism, and world progress, nationalism, costs of, nationalism, failure of, nationalism, narrowness of, natural resources, classified, necessities, provision of, next steps, next war, preparations for, organic function, organic nature of society, organization, difficulties in, organization, need for, organization of world federation, organization, world need of, owners, organization of, ownership of economic machinery, paper money, issues of, parliament, for the world, physical hardship, elimination of, plutocracy, growth of, policy, decision of by self-direction, political federation, experience with, political life, organization of, politics, elimination of, possession, emphasis on, poverty, losses through, power, centralization in industrial groups, present-day economic problems, primitive society, economic issues in, primitive struggle, freedom from, producer groups, organization of, producers, future of, producers, power to, producers' federations, by districts, producers' federations, groups of, producers' world federation, character of, producer groups, control of industry by, production, necessity for, production of raw materials, productivity, necessity for maintaining, producing and administrative groups, production versus profit, profit and competition, profit versus welfare, profiteers, and capitalism, progress, barriers to, progress of self-government, progress through experiment, raw materials, limitations on, raw materials, struggle for, reconstruction, economic basis for, reconstruction, principles of, resource control, as a world problem, resources and raw materials board, resources, relation of to basic industries, results and initiative, sabotage, science and society, sectionalism, failure of, self-government in local economic affairs, self-motivation, need of, self-government, progress of, selection of leaders, separatism, passing of, servility, elimination of, shop committees, organization of, social administration, difficulties of, social book-keeping, function of, social change and intelligence, social disaster, as a means to knowledge, social drive, basis of, social experiment, basis for, social federation and social activity, social groups, federation of, social functions, specialization of, social improvement, social inertia as a problem, social knowledge, accumulations of, social knowledge, limitations on, social machinery and body machinery, social organization, of the owners, social organization through federation, social organization, through producers, social philosophy, restatement of, social problems, handling of, social relations, growing complexity of, social revolution and distribution, social science, future of, social science, needs of, social science, principles of, social structure, nature of, , society, as an organism, society, science of, sources of economic waste, soviet russia, and world peace, specialists, place of in world administration, specialization in society, standard oil company, statesmanship, economic foundations of, success qualities, suffering as a basis for progress, surplus, effect on human effort, transport, place of in industry, trial and error in society, underground organization of business, value, new standards of, war, economic causes of, war debts, war, elimination of, world finance, chaos in, war, forms of, war, increased cost of, war, new preparations for, war, object of, war promises, failure of, war-menace, and chaos in industry, waste in industry, wealth concentration, effects of, wealth distribution, wealth, distribution of, wealth of nations, world administration, world administration, basis of, world administration, detail of, world administration, field of, world authority, lack of, world commerce, growth of, world common interests, world conflict, sources of, world disillusionment, world economic organization, detail of, world economic organization, diagram of, world economic questions, world economic solidarity, world economics and the league, world economics, chaos in, world federation, detail of organization, world industrial congress, organization of, world industrial units, world industry, organization of, world isolation, passing of, world need of organization, world organization, beginnings in, world organization, principles of, world parliament, organization of, world organization, problem of, world parliament, possibilities of, world politics and the league, world problems, enumerated, world problems, method of approach, world producers' federation, character of, world producers' federation, form of, world producers' federation, scope of, world producers' federation, structure of, world reconstruction, basis for, world resources, distribution of, world thinking and organization, world thinking, basis for, world thinking, economic basis of, world wealth, distribution of, worldizing economic activity, hammond press w.b. conkey company chicago generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) [illustration: bremer baumwollbörse, bremen.] bremen cotton exchange / by a. w. cramer president of the bremen cotton exchange translated by ch. f. c. uhte, bremen franz leuwer verlag bremen all rights reserved copyright by franz leuwer bremen printed by h. m. hauschild · bremen a jubilee gift to the members of the bremen cotton exchange fifty years. a period covering years is sure to show to the surviving and the younger generations certain milestones, which indicate a trend of human thought, or memorize important occurrences. we may look back upon mighty wars, or religious upheavals or the cruelties committed in both, or another may recall the peaceful thrifty life with its underlying romantic thought. later generations may possibly call this episode of the last years the period of economic development. every epoch has its dominating spirit; sometimes it is a god of war, sometimes a religious martyr, sometimes it takes the shape of a great poet and even the thoughts and lives of the every-day citizen are the replica of the spirit of its time. the embodiment of the spirit of the last years is a hercules. this famous demi-god executed wondrous deeds, the names of which were painfully instilled into us at school, but his mighty deeds made no impression on the history of his time. our hercules has successfully achieved more than twelve wonderful works, nor need we look far afield to see the lasting imprint of his footsteps; we have always before us the great works of our time. we are the lucky ones, who are privileged to step anywhere on our northern shore into a carriage, far more commodious than the ancient stage coach, compose ourselves for sleep, and allow ourselves to be whirled away, in order to find ourselves the following noon, seated at a comfortable meal on the heights of the rigi. we have crossed the atlantic ocean in six days, we talk and listen to a friend, and it is nothing to us that he is a thousand kilometres distant. by pressing a button, we illuminate our house, by pulling a lever, we light up a whole town. from the birds we have purloined the art of flying, and many other wonders have the past fifty years showered upon us, and yet, all this is not the real monument of our time, but it is "work!" that systematic work, which is sure of its own goal, is the origin of all the wonders of the past half century, and which has set its own seal upon the special character of our own time. if we consider the life of animals and even plants, we find that all adapt themselves to the demands of nature. this is the original primitive condition. but already the bird building its nest for greater comfort and protection of its young, interferes with nature's original conditions. no doubt, mankind once lived under primitive adaptation, and possibly the idealistic thought of paradise may be the echo of those far away days. when, however, mankind began to people the earth, necessity drove them to assist nature and thus "work" was created. for a long period this work was infinitesimal, and many races could still live from nature's storehouse. their wants were few, so that the thought of exploiting nature for the benefit of improved conditions, never entered their heads. for forty years, moses traversed the desert with the people of israel, searching for gifts from heaven, but they did not know, that--he who wishes to live upon milk and honey--must work to obtain them. by degrees, people began to try and win more from dame nature than she was willing to give unaided. they were forced, thereto, by their ever increasing numbers and by the individual demands on life. this healthy thought for improvement was frequently interrupted and, temporally, even entirely suspended, for in the human mind dwell not only great and lofty thoughts, but envy, strife and hatred have also a place. the history of mankind bristles with ugly deeds, wars, enslaving of nations and even extermination. entire periods know nothing of peaceful development, but quietly and persistently "work" gained ground and forced itself, despite resistance, upon mankind. only the more modern times have shown us the might and the blessing which lies dormant in "work". like an avalanche, the knowledge swept fifty years ago across the people, that quite different means were required for mutual benefit and culture, than those provided by nature itself. that was the triumphal entrance of "work" towards a definite goal. words fail to adequately describe what the last fifty years have brought us, in inventions and kindred achievements, and what is the result of this herculean work? an expansion undreamt of in the annals of history. by % the population of several countries had increased, they became too small to feed and clothe their people from their own resources, but the new spirit, which dominated all, has solved this problem, and great blessings have been vouchsafed to humanity. the "hard at work" countries had much better food, clothing, health and enjoyment, and each individual shared in the vast improvement of the general conditions of life. what are the driving forces which put this gigantic machinery into motion? to enumerate them all would be impossible. the workman, who wields the hammer, the woman, who keeps home and hearth bright and cheerful, the patient teacher who moulds the juvenile mind, the professor, who disperses the deeper knowledge of science, the engineer, with his intricate machinery, the inventor, with his fertile brain, and, last not least the merchant, who constantly opens new roads for the interchange of goods, all--and every one of them are cogs in the wheels of the engines of progress. the laws and rules which govern this world of activity cannot be determined. each single one of the co-workers has the purpose and goal of his own endeavour before his eyes, but the human mind is incapable of guiding or even viewing, the concentrated action of all the forces at work. we have given a cursory glance at the general economic development which started in the slowest possible way, and marched with double quick speed during the last fifty years, but now we shall turn to our own particular sphere. we celebrate, to-day, the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the bremen cotton exchange, and with this book of sketches and sidelights on what we have felt and experienced, we wish to contribute a small offering to this festivity. cotton. cotton grows in almost every part of the globe where the climatic conditions are favorable. the plant requires a moderate amount of moisture, but a good deal of sunshine and also warm nights. countries with a moist warm climate are suitable for the raising of particular good qualities. the chief country of production is the southern part of the united states of north america. considerable crops are also grown in east india and egypt, and lesser quantities come from the caucasus, turkestan, china, brazil, argentine, peru and africa. the continental consumption looks for the greater part to american cotton, but, also, east indian is extensively used. in the southern states of america, the first cotton ripens in august. the bolls containing cotton, will grow well into the autumn, and even in winter new bolls will be formed, and it is only a killing frost, which terminates the productive force of the plant. when the bolls are ripe, they open, and then the picking commences. as a rule, the first pickings are the best as to color and cleanness, and the longer the bolls are exposed to the inclemencies of the weather in autumn and winter, the more the quality will deteriorate. the picked cotton consists of two thirds of seed and one third of actual cotton. in order to obtain the fibre, the cotton is passed through a ginning machine. from the seeds, edible oil is gained and the residue is manufactured into food for cattle, while the cotton is formed into bales in specially constructed presses. it is natural, that cotton should show a great diversity of quality, owing to the influence of weather during the long period of picking. the color of cotton covers a fair range, one sees not only snow white and creamy cotton, but also bluish, grey, red and mixed colors. the value of cotton is determined by its quality and character. of chief importance is the percentage of the loss during the cleaning process in the cotton mill. a normal percentage of loss for medium grades is %, this is likely to be higher, if the cotton has been picked during moist weather and contains much unripe cotton. the color is also of great importance, discolored cotton has a decidedly lower value, especially when this cannot be rectified by bleaching which is mainly the case with heavily spotted or bluish cotton. an even greater factor, than the outward appearance, is the inner value, which is represented by the length and strength of the fibre (staple). the staple length of common american cotton is from - mm. in great request are the qualities, which have a longer staple than mm, especially when the staple is even, silky and strong. a difference of only / mm in the length of the staple, may mean a difference of % in the value. it is of the greatest importance to the cotton merchant as well as to the spinner, that the cotton is correctly judged as regards its outward appearance and the length of staple, this adjudication or classing is by no means an easy task. a certain system has been adopted by which the outward appearance of the cotton is fixed by so-called standards into classes. a certain number of cotton samples are arranged in a suitable flat box, in such a way that their surface represents the color and cleanness of the respective class. if a lot of cotton is to be classed, samples are drawn from every bale, these are placed together, sample by sample, and the total thus gained, is compared with the standard. in this way an opinion is formed, whether the cotton is equal to the class represented by the standard, or whether it is below it, in which case, this difference in class has to be valued. the judging of the staple is a very difficult task, / mm is of importance, and yet it is impossible to measure staple correctly. anybody, even with the greatest dexterity in his fingers, will not be able to draw from a piece of cotton the single fibres, place them in such a way next to each other, that they appear like swedish matches in a box. a good expert, however, is able to draw the staple in a manner, that the average length will be accurately judged. to give a correct opinion on cotton, rooms with a good light are required, much experience and good judgment. next in importance for continental consumption is egyptian and east indian cotton. the former is divided into two kinds, the long stapled, which grows on the lower nile, the delta, and the shorter stapled, upper egyptian cotton. the long stapled egyptian is utilised for the very finest yarns, and its only rival is or was sea-island cotton. this latter grows on a group of islands, not far from the shore of georgia which have a moist warm climate, but the boll-weevil has played serious havoc with that crop, and the cultivation has been greatly curtailed. east india produces shorter stapled descriptions of great variety, but each has a character of its own, and yet to differentiate between them, is a knotty problem, especially, as now and then, one comes across a somewhat fraudulent mixture. the names are mostly derived from the locality in which they grow, while the climate and condition of the ground give the character, and in some cases, even distinctive smell, for instance, oomra cotton smells like musk; occasionally the smell is an indisputable proof of origin. it has taken the continental cotton industry a long time to grow from small beginnings to its present importance. the never lacking competition has brought about a great improvement in the quality and variety of the articles produced. it is astounding to compare the raw material in the fields, with the finished articles in the windows of some lady's outfitting shop. it requires many diligent hands and high class technical guidance, to transfer nature's present of raw cotton into the manifold articles, which the people, nowadays, require and desire. the variety of these articles is countless: cloth, as fine as a spider's web, and coarse fustian, here finest batiste, and there, strong drill for overalls. each finished article requires its own particular raw material, low qualities cannot produce fine goods, and it is also impossible to utilise high qualities for low grade goods. the very arbitrary law for economic production, makes it a duty for every spinner to select just that quality of cotton, which is most suitable for his purpose, and it is the task of commerce to adapt the offers and deliveries to the requirements of the consumer. the old time. in the year .., in the old narrow office, father and son met, the latter, a newly made partner. he had been, according to ancient custom, a volunteer for several years in london, where he had been well received amongst english families. but it was with strange feelings that he entered his father's office for the first time after many years of absence. his horizon had widened, while here, little or nothing was changed. the old office furniture, which had done good service for generations, was the same, as no merchant ever thought of altering anything for merely a greater personal comfort, but the old fashioned standup desks and the well worn leather seats of the high office stools, did not look as inviting as of old. his memory had mellowed and idealized their appearance. of course, the influence of the mother was not permitted in the sacred precincts of the office, even most of the cleaning was done by the youngest apprentice. but from the grey walls looked down proudly, the models of the sailing vessels which carried their houseflag to distant shores. during the long hours of a voyage, they had been fashioned by captains or clever sailors, and were a constant reminder of deeds nobly done. here is the "anne marie", a tea clipper of graceful lines, like a swallow, which made the journey from china to london in days, and had earned, besides a good freight, a high premium for bringing the first tea of the new crop to the epicures in london. there is the "katharina", much heavier in build, she took days to fetch wet sugar and hemp from manilla. one may wonder, whether captain and crew ever thought of the enjoyments of life, while they ploughed the sea for months. yonder, in the full light from the window is the "nordstern", a whaler, and underneath a picture of the crew. these wild and rough fellows took their lives in their hands, on the perilous journey from honolulu to the polar seas. they had no regular wages, but shared in the profits from the sale of the oil and whalebone. their hard earned money, however, was mostly dissipated in san francisco, during a few days of riotous jubilation. after some desultory talking, the son carefully broached the following subject: "there is the "augusta" ready in port to sail for baltimore, to bring a cargo of tobacco. pity, that the heavy kentucky barrels fill only half the freight room and leave so much space empty. i think, father, we ought to fill it up with light goods, principally with cotton." "cotton, my dear boy! i fancy, you must be dreaming of the old firm of b. & f. you remember, f. told his agent, in the west indies, to add to the cargo of asphalt and cocoanuts, bales of cotton. his bad handwriting led to the mistake that bales were shipped, the moment they were afloat, the southern ports were blockaded, which caused an unprecedented rise in the price of cotton, so that the last of the bales were sold at "one thaler" per pound (equal then to three marks)." "i do not think, father, that such luck is likely to repeat itself, but the fact remains, that we have room empty, which easily might carry freight, besides, i hear, that there is an increasing demand for cotton, as several new cotton mills are being started in germany." "yes, that is all very well, but think of the enormous risk of the cotton trade. the fluctuations in prices are fabulous, recently, they have been going down and down. my friend w. has been holding cotton for years and has never seen his price back yet. a loss he will not take, he declares 'that he will hold that cotton till he is black in the face.'" "that is a wrong policy, w. ought to have sold the cotton long ago, replaced the same by a lower priced purchase, this would have saved him charges and loss of interest, and would have cheapened his original purchase." "this is a new method of doing business, we--old bremen people--stick firmly to an enterprise, until the success is secured. that is the old hanseatic spirit." "one might almost call it stubbornness, the present time requires quick thinking and turning." "all right, but from whom will you take the money which is required by this modern way of doing business? the local money-broker has no spare cash for it." "no, father, but i can assure you, that in london people are not adverse to assist the legitimate trade, and besides, several of the great london bankers come from this neighbourhood and are very well disposed towards bremen." * * * * * the "augusta" brought, besides her cargo of tobacco, bales of cotton, quite a big quantity for that time. questions of law in the past. according to the universal german commercial law, and later, according to the civil code of law, the buyer has the right to cancel the contract, or to demand a reduction in price, if the goods delivered do not equal the quality guaranteed. experts had to decide, whether the quality tendered was up to the guarantee.--these experts were appointed by the law, in accordance with the proposals of the parties concerned. the cotton trade followed, in olden days, this same procedure, but the weak point, was the verdict of the experts, because there were no experts in germany outside bremen, and no party could forecast the likely result of the verdict. a far worse consequence of the law conditions was for the cotton trade, the fact, that the law made no difference, whether the goods differed much or little from the stipulated quality. in both cases, the buyer had the right to place the goods at the disposal of the seller. the result of this, was most damaging to the trade, sometimes, the sellers had the worst of it, sometimes the buyers. a few examples taken from actual experience will best explain this: extracts from business letters of past years. we have received to-day your bales of cotton, but find the quality not up to our expectations. you have to deliver us middlingfair, but the cotton is hardly goodmiddling. we cannot use the cotton, as it is unsuitable for our hosiery yarns. we place the bales at your disposal. * * * * * we insist upon your taking delivery of the bales. the quality is perfectly correct, you can ask any expert in bremen about it. * * * * * we have nothing to do with your bremen experts, if need be, our local experts will decide. we have no doubt that you know the law on this point. the fact remains, that we place the bales at your disposal. * * * * * your intention to place the bales at our disposal is caused, no doubt, by the fall in prices. we know very well that if it comes to law, experts will decide, who know nothing about it, moreover, the verdict will only be given after many months. this is unbearable; what allowances do you want? * * * * * if you wish us to use the cotton, we demand an allowance of.... * * * * * your demand is preposterous, but we have to agree to it, as we cannot help ourselves. we prefer not to make you any offers in future. * * * * * i am sorry to inform you, that the bales are not equal to the sample, consequently, i place the cotton at your disposal. * * * * * the buying sample has been taken from the actual bales delivered, a difference in the quality is quite impossible. we insist upon your keeping the bales. * * * * * i am sending you a few samples of the delivered cotton, any child can see that they are different from the buying sample. * * * * * the samples sent to us are of no account. bales represent a big quantity of cotton, amongst which, a few inferior flakes are sure to be found, if one searches diligently for them. we cannot agree to your demands. * * * * * my lawyer tells me, that every bale and every part of the bales must be equal to the sample. i have opened several bales and find the contents very irregular. there are good and bad flakes in them, i can only use regular cotton. the bales are at your disposal. * * * * * your bales turn out very badly indeed and are much below the guaranteed quality. what allowance are you willing to make us? * * * * * there can be no question of an allowance, if the bales do not suit you, why do you not place them at our disposal, as you did in a previous case. this time, however, prices have advanced, while last time, they had fallen, now perhaps the case will appear to you in a different light. * * * * * you surely never expect me to take bad cotton instead of good? i cannot return the cotton, as i cannot stop my mill. i propose, that experts fix the lower value, and you pay me the difference according to law. * * * * * if you wish to invoke the law, you must remember, that the cotton is not allowed to be touched, till the experts have made their report and the legal verdict has been given. you say, "you must use the cotton at once," while our agent tells us, "that a few bales have already been spun." this finishes your claim, and we refuse to do anything in the matter. * * * * * a spinner bought direct from america bales of a certain class. the market rose rapidly, and when the bales arrived, they were much inferior, in fact, fully two classes too low. the spinner complained bitterly to the shipper, and demanded an allowance, which the latter refused, on the plea, that, for the price of the contract, he could only deliver low quality. * * * * * from these examples it will be seen that the cotton trade had no suitable foundation in the law. origin of the bremen cotton exchange. during the war of / the cotton trade had suffered a serious relapse, but shortly afterwards, the bremen people began seriously to consider means and ways to put the trade on a proper footing. the industry had expanded, and the occasional chance business had been replaced by a more regular and closer connection with the spinners. the main thing to do now, was to find a proper basis upon which a regular market could be built up. the various questions of law had to be adjusted in a broad minded manner, to suit the particular need of the cotton market. liverpool offered a good example for this, as there, everything had been adapted to the peculiarities of the cotton trade. here, in bremen, first of all, the credit system had to be abolished. it was manifestly impossible to increase the import, as long as the importer was obliged to sell the cotton on - months open credit. a good stock of cotton is the first necessity for a market of any importance, but how to obtain it, if the needful capital is lacking to pay for the cotton? the risk of the great price fluctuations, which are indigenous to cotton, gave the whole trade a bad name, and everybody, who had anything to do with it, lost prestige. was it worth while to follow up the idea of starting a cotton market? we must praise the men, who made it practically their life's work, to overcome the difficulties, and must admire the cleverness with which they left certain items for the future to solve. the men who laboured hard for this object, formed themselves into the "committee for the bremen cotton trade", later on, the name was changed, and on the st of october , everything was ready, and under the new name of "bremer baumwollbörse" an organisation was started, which has since become known all over the cotton world. on the st of october , its birthday re-occurs for the fiftieth time. political occurrences make a deeper impression than those which fall into the sphere of national economics, but the present has taught us, that the latter are by no means to be despised, in fact, deserve more attention than was given to them previously. it may be worth while to recall, that through the influence of the "bremen cotton exchange", a well regulated trade of first magnitude has been built up. we are forced to observe the development of national economy, not only in our own country, but also, that in foreign countries, and by keeping the important factors constantly before us, we can learn a good deal. arbitrations and appeals. the department of the "bremen cotton exchange" which deals with questions relating to actual cotton, has a staff of sworn classers. it is their duty to fix, with the aid of the various standards, the class of cotton, or to pronounce an opinion on it, or to settle the disputes between buyer and seller, as far as they refer to the quality of cotton. american cotton is divided into a number of classes, and each has its standard. originally, these standards were obtained from liverpool, but later on, bremen produced the standards independently. there are original standards and standard copies; the former, remain unchanged, while the latter are renewed every year, because, through constant use, they are liable to deteriorate. the freshly made up standards are subject to the examination and approval of a committee, elected for that purpose, and which consists of members of the trade and the industry. the sworn classers are nominated by the directors, and concern themselves solely with the classing and arbitrating of cotton. they have sworn a solemn oath, to conduct their office with absolute impartiality; this is further safeguarded by the fact, that the names of the parties interested are kept strictly secret. if a party consider, that they have a right to complain about the verdict of the classers, they can appeal against the decision. the verdict of the appeal is given by appeal judges, who are appointed by a committee, elected for that purpose. they are selected from the merchants and spinners, and great care is exercised that they possess the necessary expert knowledge. the names of the interested parties are also withheld from the appeal judges, nor are they informed whether buyer or seller have appealed. it is of great advantage to the whole arbitration system, that the appeal judges are actively engaged in the cotton business, by this means a bureaucratic verdict is avoided. up to a point, the arbitrators and appeal judges work together, and thereby, the former remain in close touch with the general business life, which is of importance for various reasons. it is not sufficient for a correct verdict, to simply compare the cotton with the standards, the judges must know, how the difference in the quality is to be valued; and how far the character of each crop is to be taken into consideration, etc. etc. it is therefore apparent, that the judging of cotton requires a certain connection with the actual business activity, and, it is certain, that only the commerce itself can produce and educate the individuals, who are chosen to pronounce an expert opinion upon questions of such importance and difficulty. * * * * * the "bremen cotton exchange" does not only decide questions concerning quality, but settles also all other disputes, which may arise between members. these decisions are given by, what may be called, a court of arbitration and a court of appeal. to the former each party appoints its own expert, while the exchange appoints the experts to the latter. the conditions of the "bremen cotton exchange" are adapted to the common law, but take into account, the decided peculiarities of the cotton trade. the following is an explanation of an important point, where the conditions differ from the common law. a deviation from the guaranteed quality, does not give the buyer the right to cancel the contract. he is awarded an allowance, when the difference is small; if the inferiority be greater, penalty is added to the allowance, but, when a heavy allowance is not likely to compensate the buyer for the damage sustained, he may return the cotton, but not by cancelling the contract. in such cases, the contract will be what is called, "regulated" or "invoiced back", in which method, the market differences are duly taken into account, with the addition of penalty for the guilty party. when sales are made for specified deliveries, and these should not be made within the proper time, the buyer has also the right of invoicing back, in the manner described. this invoicing back, takes the place of the cancelling of a contract, according to law. it is possible, that when a party practically goes by default on a contract, through a very inferior tender, or by a late delivery, they may yet be entitled to claim from the other party, a difference in price. for instance: somebody sells cotton at cents, the market drops to cents, the contract is invoiced back for bad delivery, then, the seller, who is the guilty party, has a claim against the buyer, for a difference in the market of cents less penalty of % = . cents, equalling . cents net. this claim would not be possible according to common law. the conditions of the "bremen cotton exchange" make it a principal, that no party shall take an advantage of the market fluctuations. in the above case, the buyer would have a profit of cents, if he could have simply cancelled the contract on account of bad delivery, because he could have immediately re-bought the cotton at cents, while all his calculations were based on a purchase at cents. this apparently strange fact, that the innocent should pay to the guilty, is the direct consequence of the elimination of market fluctuations from the law codes. it has been of great benefit to all concerned, that any differences of opinions are promptly settled by the "bremen cotton exchange", and not by having resort to a costly and wearisome law suit. everybody in cotton knows, that quarreling is always bad business, and, it is with some pride, that the cotton exchange looks back upon the big number of decisions given. only very rarely has it happened, that disputes have been referred to the ordinary law courts. the "bremen cotton exchange" has, according to the rules, the power to do so, but that right is only exercised, where purely matters of law are concerned. the union with the industry. the bremen cotton market made slow progress and now and then the progressive movement was interrupted. it required courage to pursue the projected course, but "never despair" was the motto which finally carried the day. it became apparent, that the "weal or woe", of the market depended upon the attitude of the industry. far sighted men strove hard to awaken an interest for bremen amongst the spinners, who still utilised considerably the liverpool market. the following letters bear witness how this idea was received: bremen, ... . the time has arrived, when the south german cotton industry should decide to come a step nearer to the sea. frequently, complaints have been made about mutual misunderstandings, and that this lack of understanding had given rise to friction. if the spinners would unite with the bremen cotton trade, an opportunity would be created for eliminating these misunderstandings. by talking matters over in a friendly spirit, and becoming known to each other, common interests could be defended and furthered. there is no danger that the spinners might be outvoted in bremen, for there is a strong feeling here, that the common welfare must predominate, and that the bremen trade depends, to a large extent, upon the goodwill of the industry. * * * * * augsburg, ... . we note with pleasure the suggestions, which we received from you verbally, and by letter, and are convinced that the reasons which you advance for a union with your market, are perfectly correct. many of our spinners are a little out of the world, and it would be of advantage to them, to come into closer touch with the foreign and oversea trade. we shall gladly come to bremen, after the necessary arrangements have been made in augsburg. we do not wish to be merely affiliated, but desire to become active workers; for this purpose, we should require full membership, with voting power. we shall take care that bremen--as a german sea port--attains the position in the cotton world, which it deserves. * * * * * in july , the entry of the german spinners into the "bremen cotton exchange" became an accomplished fact. the arrangements, which the trade had made, for dealing with the cotton business in a just and fitting manner, were pronounced excellent. it was resolved with great enthusiasm, to unite forces for the fostering and regulating of the cotton import trade, thereby, creating for bremen, a great cotton market, and for the spinners, an easier way of obtaining their raw material. six spinners joined the board of directors of the "bremen cotton exchange". the german spinners unions were now united with the bremen cotton exchange, but, in the course of time, swiss and austria-hungarian spinners followed suit. through this fusion, "the bremen cotton exchange" gained greatly in importance, influence and business activity, so that it stood on equal terms with the great foreign exchanges. at many meetings, spinners and merchants have peacefully sat at the same board table, although the interests of both groups are frequently opposed to each other. now and then, this has been apparent, but on the principle that good reasons must give way to better ones, differences of opinions were settled after proper discussion. mutual understanding and a determination to pay due respect to the interests of the other party, have always been the leading spirit of the meetings. to-day, it stands beyond any doubt that through this fusion, great benefits have accrued to both parties, and to the far sighted men, who brought this about, great honor, praise and veneration are due. in the following we give a few figures concerning the number of members and the activity of the bremen cotton exchange: year members arbitrations appeals bales bales " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " we cannot possibly conclude this chapter, without drawing attention to the fact, that if the commerce has reached its present greatness by its own endeavours, the industry is fully entitled to an equal share of praise. the german cotton industry had to pass through many a hard fight. there was a time, when german goods were deemed inferior, mainly for the reason that they were not known. the german export trade owes something like an apology to the industry, for the poor support it gave at first to the exertions of the manufacturers, to create a market for their goods in foreign countries. it took a long time before german goods were appreciated in foreign markets, but, eventually, they gained for themselves a high class reputation. the "bremen cotton exchange", views with pride, the success of their fellow members of the industry. financial items. in those days, when the world spoke of the five "great powers", money was called the sixth "great power" and that with full right. it is a fact, that money means power, and that in a wider sense of the word than is generally accepted. the power of a state is limited, the power of money is unlimited, it is international. it seems ever to rejuvenate and augment itself, and it constantly draws bigger multitudes under its sway. a man who is a power in financial circles, plays his role in the world. england owes its enormous influence in politics and national economy to money. there have been other countries possessing great riches, but the working, creating and ruling capital, was english. previous to the english, german tribes were known on the sea. daring mariners left our shores, and did a thriving business in all parts of the adjoining seas, where they founded settlements in the northern waters, and on the baltic. how is it, that germany has not gained riches, and why has it not participated in the treasures of the world, which, up to a few hundred years ago, were lying open to everybody? for the most part the unfavorable geographical position is to blame. on all sides, hemmed in by foreign countries, it had to suffer wars upon wars. a hundred years ago, germany might still have had a chance to gain for itself a position in the world, but, at that time, it was lying in the dust, bleeding from a thousand wounds. the wars, which napoleon waged against the german states, had reduced it to a poverty stricken country. all stamina seemed to have disappeared through the napoleonic reign, the wars themselves and the contributions to the same, which the enemy mercilessly exacted, brought about a condition, which stifled all enterprise, and reduced the people to misery. deep thought, poetry and music had to take the place of bodily welfare. in their poverty, the inhabitants could not grasp the advantages offered to other nations. under these conditions, england gained the mastery over half of the globe, politically, and in an economic sense. the colonies provided vast supplies, which were cleverly exploited, riches increased, business relations with the european continent were opened and enlarged, and one fine day, england was the general provider to the continent for nearly everything required. the extension of trade was closely followed by the development of the banking system, which, after all, may be called a branch of the trade. in the colonies, english banks were established, and every ton of rice or grain, every pound of cotton or spice, had to be paid through the intermediary of the banker, who, of course, derived a profit from the transactions. when years ago, germany awakened from its long impotence, her citizens were received, without prejudice, all over the world, and no obstacles were placed in the way of their diligence. this fact, we wish gladly and thankfully to record. many germans were successful in gaining a firm footing in the english colonies, as well as in america, and to attain there important positions. they formed a link between their home country and the centres of trade and finance. valuable services were rendered by them to the german trade, but london remained the banker of the world, and when an industry began to grow in germany, it was, in many cases, the english, who furnished the first capital. when the cotton market started to develop in bremen, most of the financing was done by english bankers, anyhow at first. later on, german banks participated, and it is greatly to their credit, that they showed such great interest and understanding for the requirements of that trade. in the year , the first german bank of importance opened its doors in bremen, and others followed, as the trade expanded. the cotton trade remained, in a certain measure, true to the english banks, while the other branches of commerce worked mostly through german banks, and a great incentive was given to this, by the fact, that american bankers considered german money equal to the american and english values. how do we pay for the cotton, which we import? the planter receives the purchase price from the shipper, through any one of the numerous banks in the south. of course, we cannot give the actual dollars to the shipper, consequently, he or his banker has to advance them for a short period. before the war, we opened a credit with english or german banks, in favor of the shipper, a so-called reimbursement credit, by which he could recover his advanced purchase price. when opening this credit, we took care, however, to have proof that the goods, for which we intended to pay, were certain to reach us eventually. we made the condition, that, against the reimbursement credit, the shipping documents were to be delivered. against delivery of these documents, the shipper drew a draft upon our bankers, discounted the same, and the matter was settled. now the bank was in possession of the documents, and by accepting the draft, had guaranteed to pay the purchase price. the position between the bank and ourselves, was cleared in various ways, which depended upon private arrangements. we, as cotton importers, had to receive the purchase price from the consumer in the interior, before we could satisfy our bank. as the sale of the goods could not always be effected promptly, we remained debtors to the bankers for the purchase price, while they were in possession of the goods or the documents. the settlement of transactions of this kind, requires a certain amount of trust and confidence, which the bankers have to grant to the merchants, on the other hand, they have their security in the value of the goods in their keep. the banks have always given a full measure of trust to the bremen cotton trade, while the commerce has made every arrangement to safeguard the interests of the bankers. in this connection, we mention the establishment of the "bremer lagerhaus-gesellschaft" which was founded in , through their agency the bank obtained, in a simple form, the security of the cotton itself. the hypothecation of goods against an overdraft on the bank, was new in those days, but later, it became common practice, and the old established forwarding houses made similar arrangements to those of the bremer lagerhaus-gesellschaft. it became the custom to issue warrants against the cotton stored. the warehouse owners were, thereby, obliged to keep the cotton, until the holder of the warrant gave it free. with growing trade, the co-operation of the banks increased considerably, and for a long period, business was satisfactorily settled, but the war caused here, like everywhere else, a certain amount of confusion. the settlement with the german banks was easy, but it was impossible, during the long period of the war, to let that cotton remain untouched, which was hypothecated in favor of foreign banks. thus, a peculiar position in law was created, between the warrant holder and the previous owners of the cotton. the settlement of these questions lies with the respective committees of the peace commission. the financial treatment of the import business after the war, is vastly different from previous methods. the american bankers play a far more prominent part, as the german importer pays in dollars on arrival of the goods in port, and he has to buy the dollars at a rate of exchange, which is subject to the vagaries of the stock exchange.--recently a moderate credit has been given to the importer, but the further development of affairs is uncertain. business in futures. cotton is sold to a large extent for distant delivery, but "future" transactions are only those which are concluded on a specified "future" exchange, under the rules and regulations of that particular exchange. here be it mentioned, that the bremen cotton exchange is no exchange within the meaning of the law. it has no regular hours of attendance, nor has it special rules regulating the business in "futures". the important "future" exchanges are liverpool and new-york, and in a lesser degree, havre, alexandria and new orleans. within the specified hours of the "future" markets, large quantities of cotton contracts change hands. there, buyers and sellers are constantly in attendance, and it requires only a nod of the head to conclude a contract for thousands of bales. the rules, referring to "futures", do not differ essentially from those governing the general trade, for it must be borne in mind, that all "future" contracts demand the delivery of actual cotton. nobody can escape this duty, if he has sold futures, he must deliver, unless he buys the contract back before it falls due, or vice versa, which, of course, refers also to any ordinary delivery contract. in fact, all transactions for delivery are settled either by previous transfer or by fulfilment. it is noticeable how the stocks in new-york increase or decline, in accordance with the tenders, against "futures". no doubt, the great majority of the dealers intend to close their contracts before they fall due, and the opportunity to do this, presents itself every minute. in this, the "future" markets offer a great advantage, or, if you like, a great temptation. in former days, the dealing in "futures" had no legal protection in germany, and nowadays only under certain assumptions. dealing in futures came within the gaming act, and claims arising therefrom, were not actionable. the bremen cotton exchange has never accepted this view, but has constantly fought against it, for very good reasons. the following explanation will make it clear, that, as far as cotton is concerned, the trading in futures is of great economic importance, and not practised for snatching easily earned profits. hedges. a great market has the duty to adapt itself to all the requirements of the trade, and these are ever changing. for instance, new districts are opened for commercial enterprise, new methods of doing business develop, bringing increased activity in their train, and all this, has to be regulated or arranged for. many things did not bother us in the past, as the following few questions will show: how can we, without risk of the market, sell cotton in spring, which will only be grown in autumn? how can a planter sell the cotton which he has picked, when there are no buyers at the moment? how can a manufacturer protect himself against a decline in the price of cotton, while his goods are being prepared for the market? how can a manufacturer accept orders for late deliveries, without possessing the cotton? how can an importer take advantage of the great quantity of offers, which flood the market, during the first few months of the gathering of the crop? to anybody in the cotton trade, these questions present no difficulties, but, for the outside world, be it mentioned, that it is the "future" market that furnishes the means to overcome these apparent anomalies. it is the "future" contract, which eliminates the risk of the market from the carefully managed cotton business. anybody who sells new crop cotton, buys a "future" contract as provisional cover, it is then immaterial to him, whether the market advances or declines. his actual sale price is the stipulated price, and the differences which arise from the "future" contract, are added or deducted. a planter, who cannot sell his cotton for the moment, sells the equivalent amount of "futures". a bank takes charge of the cotton and the "future" contract, and pays the price of the day. when the cotton is finally sold, the bank is reimbursed by receiving the then existing price of the day: plus or minus the differences on the "future" contract. a spinner finds himself, now and then, in the position that he cannot effect sales against his production. with a decline in prices, mostly, the cessation of the demand coincides. by selling a "future" contract, he can safeguard himself. when the demand is brisk, a spinner may find himself obliged to book orders, although the time for buying the raw material is not propitious. here also, the "futures" give the necessary assistance. the receipts of cotton are naturally biggest in the first few months of the new season. should an importer miss this opportunity of acquiring most desirable cotton? no, he can buy, with impunity, as much cotton as he considers advisable, for against each purchase, he can put out a provisional sale of "futures". in the cotton trade therefore, two transactions are frequently coupled. the main transaction, is the trading in the actual article, while the accompanying "futures", are a safety measure against the fluctuations of the market. this combination of actual cotton and "futures", is called a "hedge"--the origin of this name is obscure. the "hedge" is a peculiarity of the cotton trade, it may even be called, its life condition. the supreme court of law has, in many decisions, upheld this condition. the endeavours of the cotton trade have always been directed towards the minimising of the market risk, and for this reason, "futures" have always played an important part in cotton business. what are the forces which put life into the "future" market? the world's trade is large, and every minute will find people, who, in the pursuance of legitimate interests, buy or sell. when both groups are fairly equal, the market is steady, while a decline or an advance is caused by a preponderance of one over the other; finally, this adjusts itself again, by the fact, that a rapid advance will produce sellers and vice versa. a further element in the market, is the "jobber", whose main object is to take advantage of the small fluctuation caused by chance, but we must not forget the big speculators. by these, we do not mean those despicable people who aim to snatch a profit, and who, on having to face a loss, plead the gaming act. experience and force of circumstances have, luckily, driven these parasites almost out of the market. but we do mean those big operators, who having weighed carefully "the pros and cons" of the situation, cause the great "bull" or bear movements. technicalities. for those who wish to obtain information concerning the cotton trade from this pamphlet, certain subjects are here elaborated, which were, so far, only indicated in connection with other explanations. of first importance are the shipping documents, which consist of bills of lading and insurance certificates. there are three kinds of bills of lading: port bills of lading, custody bills of lading, and through bills of lading. the first must be signed by the captain of the steamer, who has undertaken to carry the goods, or by a duly authorized shipping agent. they are, therefore, an absolute guarantee on the part of the ship, to deliver the goods to the holder of the bill of lading. unfortunately, this obligation is frequently restricted by the insertion of certain inconspicuous clauses. the "custody bills of lading" are signed by a shipping agent, they acknowledge receipt of the goods, and promise the forwarding in due course. in order to obtain equal value with the "port bill of lading," they should, later on, be supplemented by a so-called "master's receipt", which is an acknowledgment by the captain, that he has actually accepted the goods for forwarding, in accordance with the conditions of the custody bill of lading. they are used when the goods have arrived at the port, previous to the ship. the "through or railway" bills of lading, oblige the railway companies to forward the goods from a place in the interior of america, to their destination. a master's receipt is not necessary, but desirable, as it is an easy means of ascertaining by which steamer the goods are coming forward. at one time, "through or railway bills of lading" were not a properly valid document, as the railway companies were not in duty bound to forward the goods. now, however, a change in the american law binds the companies to this duty. the "insurance certificate" confirms, that the goods have been insured on the terms of an insurance policy, which remains in america, and in case of claims, it has the same documentary value as the policy itself. when "total loss", "general average" or "particular average" occur, claims on the insurer can be made, which must be substantiated in the port of discharge. any claim, referring to difference in quality or loss in weight, has to be made on receiving the goods, and the complaint has to be lodged within a certain specified time. on these points, the bremen cotton exchange has specific rules which are easily understood. if one party to a purchase or sale contract goes by default, the other party is obliged to send in their claim within the time stipulated by the rules of the bremen cotton exchange, this is most important, as the non-observance may mean the loss of any right to claim. the method in which these claims are made up, is easily seen from the rules of the bremen cotton exchange. if one party suspends payment, all unfulfilled contracts are immediately settled, without any action of the other party. the obligation to take or make delivery ceases, and, instead of this, the difference in price is fixed which exists between the date of contract, and the time when payment was suspended. these differences in price are put to account between the parties concerned. it can thus easily happen, that the solvent concern has to pay a considerable amount to the other party, through whose fault the contract was not carried out, and yet, this constitutes no loss to the paying party, as they can at once cover themselves at the existing prices. the advantage of this procedure lies in the fact, that the solvent concern is not left in uncertainty, whether their contracts will be fulfilled or not, while, otherwise, this decision would rest with the liquidators, who, according to common law, are not obliged to declare themselves, until the stipulated time for delivery has been reached. of great importance in the cotton trade is the business for future delivery, and that in a two-fold form. all transactions in "futures" are governed by the stringent rules of the respective exchanges, which refer, particularly, to the price differences caused by the fluctuations in the market, and the safeguarding of the interests thus created. indirectly, every buyer comes frequently into contact with the "future" business, because, for years past, the importing of cotton has not been done at fixed prices, but at so many points "on" or "off" certain "futures" in new-york, for instance, a purchase is made of "goodmiddling" october/november shipment at points "on" december, or lowmiddling at points "off". at any period up to the time of shipment, or even of arrival of the cotton, the buyer can elect to fix the price on the market of the following day. should then december in new-york stand at cents, the price for "goodmiddling" would be cents or cents for "lowmiddling". very peculiar is the "hedge" business, to which reference has been made, and it might be advisable to give a few examples as an explanation. a spinner is obliged to buy cotton to prevent stoppage of his mill, a sale of yarn is impossible for the moment and he decides on a "hedge" transaction. he buys "goodmiddling" at cents, and sells at the same time in new-york december "futures" at cents. later on, the market advances to cents, and at this price the spinner covers his "future" contract, thereby, losing cents. the purchase price of his bales is now not but cents. as the movements of cotton and cotton products run on parallel lines, he has the same chance, for the sale of his production, on the basis of cents, as he had at cents. he gained a longer period to effect a favorable sale, while the chances of the market remained the same. it would have made no difference had the market declined to cents, with a consequent gain of cents, instead of a loss of cents. the cotton would then have cost cents, but this would have been no advantage to him, as the opportunity for selling his yarns would also have been on the basis of cents. a spinner sells his yarns for a distant delivery, at that moment, however, it does not suit him to buy the cotton, he prefers to cover himself in futures, and therefore buys bales december "futures" in new-york at cents. he has calculated that the sale price of his yarns allows him to pay cents for goodmiddling. he watches the market for a favorable opportunity to buy "goodmiddling", he succeeds in buying bales at "on" december. on arrival of the bales, he fixes the price with his seller, now he must be careful to liquidate his "future" contract at the same moment. both are done at cents, and he loses cents on his "futures". the cotton, however, costs him cents, plus the points "on", equal to cents, he therefore makes a profit of cents on the calculated purchase price of cents, from this are to be deducted, the cents loss on the "futures", remaining, one cent net profit. the fluctuations of the market had nothing to do with this profit, which he had, so to say, in his pocket right from the commencement, as he had sold his yarns on the basis of cents for cotton, with "futures" at cents, in fact, he bought his cotton at "on" for goodmiddling, with the value of "futures" at cents, which equals cents. the hedge business, therefore, does away with the market risk, now in what consists its value? the profit on cotton does not lie in the fluctuations of the market, one has to look for it elsewhere. the chances of profit-making are to be found for the merchant in judicious buying, while, for the manufacturer, they consist in the lucrative production of his finished articles. the merchant requires for advantageous buying, far reaching connections and a wide spread organisation, he has to survey the entire field of cotton production, he must watch for every opportunity where cotton is pressed for sale, he must know which district has grown the qualities mostly preferred, in short, he has to keep himself extremely well posted. the consumer has to work with the same tension, to find the devious ways which lead to a profitable result in his business. hardly ever do big profits stare one in the face, and should a particular good opportunity arise, it never lasts long, as everybody wishes to participate in it, which, of course, spoils the best chance. for the common welfare, competition tends to reduce the prices of everything to the lowest possible level, that is the natural course of events. occasional deviations are simply exceptions, that, according to the old proverb: "prove the rule". what is the technical value of a market? the most pressing requirement for a spinner is a big supply, and this, naturally, collects in a big market. the manifold demands which a spinner places upon the quality, can only be satisfied by a great selection. given a good supply, one of the main conditions of the industry has been fulfilled. an active market has a further calling, it regulates the prices, and, thereby, enables the industry to buy the raw material at a figure, warranting a successful competition in the trade of the world. market activity in bremen. future transactions, of course, entail certain expenses, which constitute something of a burden on the running business, while economy is a necessity for every mercantile enterprise. out of this, originated the desire to establish a "future" market in bremen. people felt sure that it would greatly assist the development of the market, to be able to trade in "futures" within their own portals. a certain amount of ambition may also have lent its weight. the establishment took place, though, not under the auspices of the bremen cotton exchange, but in the form of an independent society. early in , the market commenced its activities, and it was soon found, that all expectations were realised, and even surpassed. the clearing house, which was started simultaneously, fulfilled all requirements. the business with the spinners had now a foundation, which answered all demands of modern times. covering transactions, which previously were cabled to new-york and liverpool, could be executed here every minute within business hours. where orders from spinners were concerned, the whole transaction could be done by telephone. the "future" market blossomed out in such a way, that no fears were entertained for its successful future. the coping stone had been set on the edifice of the bremen cotton market. * * * * * with the growth of the industry in germany, the bremen cotton trade expanded, and the business with the surrounding countries grew in proportion. russia, poland, austria-hungary, switzerland, italy, holland and belgium, all became faithful customers, and the bremen cotton exchange hummed with activity. here, was the centre of all the efforts to provide the consumer with the desired material at the lowest prices. every evening, at a late hour, when the last news from america had arrived, a flood of telegrams carried advantageous offers down to the smallest and most distant places on the continent. not only the cotton spinner, but also the weaver, the printer and the wholesale dealer took an interest in the bremen offers, like clockwork operated the business intercourse between the cotton factor and the cotton consumer. the war. the bremen cotton exchange has never occupied itself with politics, but, of course, the members could not help taking serious notice of occurrences which shook the world's foundation. together, with the expansion of business, grew also a political apprehension. france was lending milliards upon milliards to the russian czardom, with the express condition, that the money had to be expended in preparation for a war against germany. one saw, that france gave egypt to england, although it did not own it, on the other hand, england ceded marocco to france, without having any sovereign right over that country. that germany had interests in both places, was overlooked. the english newspapers, so widely read in bremen for their business news, brought articles upon articles, picturing the dangers of a german invasion. in the most lurid of colors, the cruelties of the war were painted, that was supposed to threaten england, and all this, for no other purpose, than to inflame the passions of the english people. what did the commerce do in face of these threatening symptoms?--nothing! without an anxious thought, people looked after their business, and showed an optimism, which to-day, is inexplicable. on the th of july in --after the austria-serbian ultimatum--careful merchants insured their afloat cotton against war risks. the big german insurance companies took this risk for / %, let us repeat it, one eighth per cent! how was it that the insurance companies were so unconcerned? at the same time in bremen, and at other places in germany, many insurances were covered with english companies. did nobody see danger ahead? all political misgivings of those days were silenced by the feeling, that to think of war was monstrous and to believe in war, an impossibility, on account of the highly developed economic relations which connected all countries. yet the war came! at the outbreak, many cargoes of cotton owned by bremen merchants were afloat, and many "future" contracts were open in the liverpool market. later on, the cargoes were taken by the enemy, and the liverpool contracts were liquidated, in accordance with a certain system, but without the consent of the other parties to the contract, and without reservation of their rights. bremen had a considerable stock of cotton at the commencement of the war, consequently was in a position to supply the german cotton mills for a long time. if proof had been needed to show the advantage of having an important cotton market in bremen, the war would have furnished it. the cotton trade was not satisfied to deal only with the existing supply, but did its very utmost to secure fresh imports, and was successful, by means and ways hitherto unknown, to bring considerable quantities of cotton into germany, where it was of great service. the cotton exchange does not trade, but under the war-conditions and in the knowledge of being the centre of commerce and industry, a courageous attempt was made. at the instigation of the exchange, commerce and the spinners of germany and austria-hungaria united, to give a bid for one million bales of cotton to the americans. cotton was no contraband of war, and america was neutral, so no difficulties seemed to be in the way of executing this plan. the buyer was prepared to pay the price which the americans might demand, and the goods were to be paid in hard cash dollars. yet the offer was not accepted, although america had sufficient reason to seek an outlet for the big crop it had grown, and that nobody wanted under the war conditions. politics were too mighty for the reasons of commerce! after a while, all connections ceased with america. the bremen cotton exchange and the cotton trade were at a stand-still. now and then, the exchange tried to place their establishment at the disposal of the trade in substitutes, but only with moderate success. to build up a lasting trade in substitutes was as impossible as it was to find a market for the substitutes, when once cotton began to appear again. the re-opening of the market. after the armistice, the possibility presented itself again, of supplying the german cotton industry with raw material. the government, however, made certain stipulations under which the import might be carried on, but no hymn of praise can be sung about them. notwithstanding all difficulties, cotton found its way into the country, and when, finally, all government measures were cancelled, the legitimate business was restarted. all round the bremen market, competition had grown. rotterdam made great exertions to push bremen aside, even copenhagen made similar endeavours. a few american firms, which were hostile to germany, did their best to circumvent bremen. these efforts, however, were not crowned with success, bremen regained its position. it has been shown that the natural development through many years, cannot be killed and artificially replaced. the manifold relations, started in peace-time, of personal or business character, showed their value. the economic life flows through a great network of channels, should these be artificially closed, they will re-open again of their own accord, as soon as the barriers have been removed. during the war, the german cotton industry either stood still, or worked only with a small percentage of its machinery. the government had husbanded the supply of cotton most carefully, so that, after an unexpectedly long war, a little was still left over. the mills which were running, displayed great assiduity in procuring and utilizing substitutes for cotton. paper, wood, cellulose, reed and nettle fibres, and other materials were tried, some were manufactured quite extensively. during the war they did good service, but in normal times, they cannot usurp the place of cotton. after surmounting many difficulties, the german cotton industry is once more in full swing, and with it, bremen is again the important continental cotton market. the surrounding countries buy in bremen as of old, though some outlets are still closed, owing to political and economic reasons. during the last three years, before the war, the import of north american cotton to bremen averaged bales, during the season / , it reached bales, and in / , bales, the decline, against the former years, is caused, partly, by the disappearance of some outlets, and partly, by the shorter working day. american crops and consumption. the activity of the "bremen cotton exchange" depends, to a large extent, upon the import figures, and these again are under the influence of the various crops. in america, big crops alternate with small ones, the cause for this diversity is to be found in the climate conditions, and also in the ruling range of price. high prices stimulate an extensive planting and a careful cultivation of the ground, while low prices have the contrary effect. the crop figures from - , were ascending, an occasional decline was made good later on. the following figures will make this clear. american crops: bales " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " [ ]" [ ] estimated. the reverse, which the production suffered since , is remarkable, it is largely accounted for, by the want of artificial manure. german potash could not be obtained, and this was largely used by all cotton states, with the exception of texas, louisiana, mississippi, arkansas, which do not require that kind of fertilizer. in addition, the boll weevil has become a dreaded enemy of the cotton plant. the insect world produces quite an army of little fiends, that viciously attack and reduce the crop, many have disappeared, but the boll weevil is, at present, the arch-enemy; it is a small beetle which bores into the bolls to deposit its eggs there. the following figures give the distribution of the american crops. ¦ export from america ¦ ¦ taken by ¦ ¦ to ¦ ¦ american ¦ percentage ¦ great ¦continent, ¦total in ¦ spinners ¦of the crop ¦britain ¦japan etc. ¦thousands¦(in thousands¦used by the ¦in thousands of bales¦of bales ¦ of bales) ¦ u.s.a. + + + + + / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | | from these statistics the important lesson to be learnt, is, that america has surpassed all other countries in the growth of the cotton industry. fifty years ago, and later, america used only about % of the crop for home consumption, while now, it requires more than half. equally remarkable is also the rapid growth of japan. for many decades after , japan used hardly any american cotton, but in , it took bales; in bales; in : bales, and the estimate for , is bales. besides this, a great many other descriptions are spun there. the use of east indian cotton is even greater than that of american, and it reached two thirds of east india's consumption, thus placing japan, after america and england, in the third place of cotton consuming countries. during the first half year of , it has even outdone america and england, because these two countries were in the throes of a crisis. for many decades, england had almost a monopoly for providing asia, and the rest of the world, with cotton goods, and required a corresponding amount of raw material, but now, it has lost that position. grave concern is felt in england, as well as in the whole of europe, regarding the future of the cotton industry, as it seems impossible to prevent a further expansion in america and japan, besides that, there is the growing menace of the boll weevil, which many people consider an unwelcome guest, that has come to stay. amongst the other cotton growing countries, brazil perhaps, offers the best prospect, on account of the great interest taken there in the cultivation of the cotton plant, also, the argentine gives rise to some hope. bremen's position in comparison to the rival markets. the following figures are intended to show how the imports of bremen, and its consequent importance, have grown in comparison to the great rival markets of liverpool and havre: the import was to | bremen | liverpool | havre | in | in | in | bales | bales | bales + + + / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | / | | | there are not exact statistics before , however, bremen's yearly import will have been - bales. from small beginnings, quite a creditable result has been reached, that is worthy of some consideration. history frequently chronicles the decay of some once flourishing commercial centre, and nobody knows to-day, the exact reason. was it an opportunity missed? of such, no records are kept in the book of time. should anybody compile a history of lost opportunities, it might easily require a bigger volume, than that needed for the story of opportunities taken at the crucial moment. the river, on which bremen is situated, was so heavily silted up, that sometimes in summer, one could wade through it; no sea-going vessel could reach the town. under these circumstances, the opportunity of establishing a cotton market in bremen might easily have been missed. the trade which was indigenous to bremen passed, in the second half of the th century, through a period of transition. the shipping business from olden times, a main stay of bremen's commerce, had to adapt itself to more modern requirements. the small vessels hitherto used, had to make way for bigger ones, the steamship had entered into the world's traffic. there was hardly a proper connecting link with the interior, no water ways existed, and the efficiency of the railways was extremely poor. surely, these were not conditions that cried for the opening of a market centre. yet it was established, it grew and blossomed into success. was this chance or method? we owe many thanks to the state of bremen for its co-operation, for, with astounding energy, this small state undertook to build a sea-port in bremen town. this necessitated the deepening of the river "weser", to which work the neighbouring states lent no help, but rather, placed difficulties in the way. this grand work deserves an essay of its own, on account of its influence on the commercial, political and economic position of bremen. here only, be it mentioned, that the furtherance of the cotton trade was a constant stimulus to this great plan. the authorities and the representatives of the trade were in the best harmony, and the most perfect arrangements were made for the dealing with cotton. great practical knowledge and experience was shown, in settling the question of how to raise the interests and amortization needed for the vast expenditure, and of how much the trade could bear without crippling it. the state furnished the capital for the building of great warehouses, and within a number of years their cost was paid off, as planned. in this way, bremen became equipped with all modern requirements for the handling and storing of cotton, which, even to-day, are unsurpassed. the port has the highest reputation for the quick and painstaking unloading and dispatching of cotton cargoes. the co-operation of the banks has already been mentioned, but we do not deem it superfluous to repeat, that without capital, no enterprise can be effectively launched, and all roads to successful completion are barred. fifty years ago bremen was poor in capital. what existed of riches, and was not needed in business, was, by preference, locked up in american securities, very little was left liquid for the cotton trade, although big amounts were needed to handle the import of cotton. credit is not given by merely asking for it, only he is entitled to it, who is sure that he can fulfil his obligation. to incur debts, trusting to luck to pay back, is bad policy. it is unfair dealing to accept goods on credit in the hope that their sale will leave a profit, this is only permissible, when sufficient capital is in existence to pay for the goods, even though a loss takes the place of the expected profit. as these views dominated the trade, close connections could be started with the banks. state and banks have greatly helped the growth of the bremen cotton trade, besides them, however, the assistance of many others must be gratefully acknowledged. most particular reference has to be made to the forwarding trade. with admirable energy, the forwarding houses made all arrangements for the careful and expeditious handling of the technical part of the cotton trade. right from the beginning, they worked on the principle of trustworthiness and reliability, well knowing, that only by these, a mutual confidence between all parties could be established. the great trust shown, alike by shippers and receivers, to the bremen forwarding firms, has made the dealing so easy and satisfactory. the post and telegraphic authorities have likewise been imbued with good will towards the needs of commerce, thereby assisting considerably the furtherance of trade. the harmonious cooperation of so many powerful allies, enhanced the value of the work done by the cotton market itself, though, never for a moment, must the diligent work slacken, lest the budding tree should stop growing. anybody engaged in the cotton business has to be at his post every minute, always ready to take a given opportunity. exact information concerning the conditions in america, as well as personal connections in that country, are of great value. it is characteristic of the german merchant to follow up a business once he has commenced it, and this close attention, from early youth to ripe old age, has contributed materially to the success of the bremen cotton trade. fluctuations in prices. in the spring of , the following conversation might have been overheard between an american and a german. a.: you see the consequences of the war are worse for the victor than for the vanquished. g.: only apparently, and for the moment. the future, i fear, will teach us something different. a.: nobody can look into the future. at the present minute, we witness the biggest economic collapse that the world has ever seen, all countries suffer from it, except germany. all states had made preparations for peace, now the stored up goods are lying there and nobody wants them, not even germany. we thought, that germany, bare of everything, would swallow anything. g.: the reason is, that germany cannot pay. her gold and tangible gold values have been taken from her. why do not the other countries buy? their peace production has been lying idle for years, consequently, the shelves must be fairly empty. a.: quite right, but prices have risen to an unreasonable height. during the war, a most wasteful regime prevailed; everybody made big profits or received huge wages, and accustomed himself to a most sumptuous life. now, vengeance is upon them, for nature does not allow herself to be ravished, nor does she present gifts for extravagant living. g.: if prices have been driven to an unreasonable level by wasteful workings, then, a big decline in prices is the only remedy. a.: we are in the midst of a phenomenal collapse of prices. cotton is a barometer for all other goods. the price in america is, to-day, cents, a short while ago, it was cents. g.: what does the planter say to this? a.: the cost of production is for him this season about - cents per pound. he has worked for nothing, and besides, loses a good deal of money, as his means are small, he will be heavily in debt. g.: and the further consequences? a.: the planter is absolutely unable to produce a similar crop. it is the old story, when prices are too low the crop will be curtailed. g.: we have always experienced that low prices are followed by high ones. what other consequences is this collapse in prices likely to have? a.: all cotton goods fall in the same proportion as the raw material, this means a bad crisis for commerce and industry, and an unprecedented amount of unemployment. besides, this collossal drop in prices has caused other very peculiar situations. g.: of what nature? a.: it is well known that cotton is rarely bought at a fixed price, but generally, at the "future" price of the day on which the buyer "calls" his cotton, plus or minus the agreed upon difference for the quality bought. now, several american houses sold low qualities, at . cents "off". at that time, "futures" were cents, so that the seller calculated to receive about . cents, to-day, "futures" are cents, so that, if the buyer "calls" his cotton to-day, he receives it for nothing, and can claim . cents per pound as well. g.: impossible! no german law would permit a buyer to demand his goods, without paying a price at all, and be justified in claiming money in addition from the seller. a.: what decision would the bremen cotton exchange give? two possibilities are to be taken into account. if the seller has taken a "future" contract as cover, he has no loss, even if he gives the cotton for nothing, and pays . cents in addition, because the difference in the "futures" indemnifies him. but if he has no "futures", what then? to part with valuable cotton for nothing, and pay good money as well, would exceed the demands of shylock. g.: the "bremen cotton exchange" would probably decline to adjudicate, it has the right to refer it to the ordinary law courts. a.: a hard nut to crack for the law! german and american agree on the following: it is a peculiar thing that cotton has always new riddles in store for us. the fluctuations in prices are enough to drive a man mad. woe to him, who is drawn into that maelstrom. the hedges are a safe guard against price fluctuations. the careful merchant thinks he is on solid ground, when, all of a sudden, the premium for the quality begins to rock and he wonders what is worse? the fluctuation of the "future" market, or those of the premiums. hundreds of thousands of bales have been sold, at a premium of to cents for goodmiddling, to-day, the premium is cents, that spells hard times for the cotton market. it is a consolation, that bad times are quickly followed by good ones, and that the darkest hour is before dawn. cotton typifies life and death, joy and sorrow. it is like an untamed animal, it deals serious wounds, it indulges in "buck jumps", that none can foretell, nobody has ever driven it in harness. and yet, he, who deals with it quietly, carefully and pluckily, will always remain fresh and full of life. cotton is king! the exchange building. in the year , the bremen cotton exchange opened the doors to its various tenants, and, as the outward appearance of a man has an influence on the impression he makes upon us, so does the building which houses the cotton trade, play its part. previous to that date, the business of the exchange was carried on in rented rooms, but with expanding trade, these became inadequate, and a new building was contemplated; the idea was, to make the outward appearance worthy of the importance of bremen's cotton trade, with due consideration to the local conditions. bremen can boast of a thousand years history, and has many fine examples of ancient architecture, notably around the market place. there you find in the rich ornate style of the renaissance, the "rathaus" (town hall) and in another style, that however blends harmoniously, is the "schütting" (the seat of the chamber of commerce), the "dom" (cathedral), the "general exchange", as well as a number of private houses of a later date. the combined appearance of these various buildings, form an imposing picture. the site for the new exchange is situated in this very neighbourhood, consequently, a building had to be designed that fitted in with the whole scheme. prominent architects competed, and the plans that gained the first price were accepted, and commissioned for execution. unfortunately, it was proved later on, that the choice had not been a lucky one. the architect adopted the style of the ancient "rathaus", but the rich ornamentations of this architecture, proved its doom. beautiful as the effect was on the smaller, gracefully built, rathaus, yet on the ponderous building of the "exchange", it was utterly unsuitable, and another thing the architect did not consider sufficiently: the old guild masters, with their circumspection and devotion, erected buildings to last an eternity, while now-a-days, all is hurry and scurry, the sooner the job is finished the better, as fresh orders are waiting. this may, possibly, be some excuse for the little care bestowed upon the selection of the material. the soft sandstone selected, was excellently suited to the quick sculpturing of the over-rich ornaments, nevertheless, it was a ghastly mistake to have chosen it. ten years after the building was finished one of the decorations, loosened by the weather, fell, and killed a member of the exchange. an examination showed that a great number of projecting stones were so weatherworn, that they crumbled in the hand. an ugly scaffolding had to be erected to protect the street traffic. measures were at once taken to construct the front of the building more solidly; the most prominent experts were asked for their advice, but the war broke out, and nothing could be done. during the first years after the war, want of money prevented the starting of the repairs. these had become more extensive, owing to the revolution, when the building had been under artillery and rifle fire. at last, however, came the propitious moment, when one could think seriously of beginning the work. it was thought of raising half the estimated cost of millions, by voluntary contributions from the trade and the industry, and both responded nobly to the call. but the moment the money was secured, most of it melted quickly away, through the depreciation of the mark. nevertheless, this day of the th anniversary sees the work in full swing, and it will not be long, before the too richly carved front of the building will have given place, to one of greater simplicity and nobility, which better express the wishes of the cotton exchange. the interior of the exchange is entirely adapted to the needs of the business, special attention is being paid to the light. the judging and valuing of cotton, require a pure and clear day light, this is of such importance, that it cannot receive too much consideration. a portion of the building is reserved for the cotton exchange, while the remainder is utilised as offices for the various cotton firms, unfortunately, there is not room enough for all of them. it would be of great advantage, if all the firms could be housed under one roof, and plans for this are contemplated, but when they will be executed, depends entirely upon the economic development of the future. world-wide business. a new-york commission agent, who has connections all over the world, receives a telephonic message from texas to sell bales of "futures". at the same moment, he receives a cable to buy a bales of "futures", both orders equalize each other, the execution is easy, a few words on the telephone, a cable, a letter, and the business is done. such transactions are daily occurrences, they leave no particular impression, nor call for any deep thought. and yet, it is very interesting to probe deeply to find the origin of this business. a planter in texas has worked hard for six months with his entire family, to raise his cotton crop. in the early days of spring, the ground had to be cleared and ploughed to prepare it for the seed. then comes the time of sowing, and soon afterwards, the weeds require attention. hardly have these been uprooted, when the injurious insects make their appearance, they are destroyed by artificial means. over and over again, the fields require most careful attention, till, at last, the cotton begins to ripen. in the broiling sun it is picked, and only then, the planter is sure about the out-turn of his crop. the prices are favorable at the moment, and he makes his calculations. for extra help, he had spent so much, and for the frugal life of his family and himself, a further amount was required, but the account was all right. if he could obtain the present price for cotton, he could pay for everything, and have a margin to the good. he decided to secure the price by giving the afore-mentioned order. in the family of a landed proprietor in hungary, was joyful excitement, the daughter of the house had become engaged to be married. the wedding was to take place soon, and the question of the trousseau was discussed. this, resulted in a visit to a merchant in a neighbouring town, who discovered that his stocks had run too low for the reputation of his business; at once, he gave a commission to the wholesale merchant, who, in turn, sent a considerable order to the manufacturer. thus it goes on, till finally, the mill that spins the yarn, buys the cotton in bremen, where the merchant cables new-york, to cover the "futures". the business, so unconcernedly done in new-york, had deep lying reasons, which never came within the vision of the commission agent. in a similar manner, the world's transactions are governed. we do not look beyond our own particular horizon, we take what the minutes bring us, without troubling our sluggish mind for the "whys" and "wherefores". nothing, however, is done in the world's eternal circle, without cause and effect. should our mental capacity be able to grasp every transaction in its entirety, we should see, that a never ending thread connects all of us who live and work. when the thread is broken, disorder and confusion replace the organisation, that is as finely balanced as the delicate works of a clock, and endless trouble is required to piece the thread together again. conclusion. the jubilee of the "bremen cotton exchange" takes place at a time, when all economic conditions are in dire confusion. never before, was the economic life, embracing all countries, so finely spun, as in our modern times, and now, the net is torn in untold places. the old europe, predominant for over two thousand years in all spheres, lies bleeding from serious wounds, and the question is, what part will it play in the future, what will be its fate? finally lost is the dominant position in the region of finance. no longer does it reap the interests and means, which originated from the economic assistance it gave to countries in other parts of the globe. on the contrary, europe, itself, has to pay interests, and within europe, between the different countries, obstructions and impediments are heaped upon each other, to surmount them, is a work for "giants"! the only consolation is, that it is not the first time that europe and our own germany were in sore distress. in all previous cases, it recuperated, and rose, like a phoenix, from the rejuvenating fire. the plague and other dread epidemics have devastated towns and countries, wars have destroyed peoples and their culture. final ruin we see, only in cases, where discord and lack of reason have permanently come to reign. the continued depreciation of currency in the affected countries, is one of the causes of the many grievances. no remedy has yet been discovered for it, but it must be apparent to everybody, that the most precious treasure possessed by man, is not gold, but "work"! work alone, however, is not in all circumstances a protection against misery. the possibility must exist to use it correctly in exchange for other goods. the overthrow of all to which we have been accustomed, is likely to cloud our vision, but, ultimately, we have to acknowledge that men and nations depend upon each other, and that, in the exchange of our earthly goods, life and the pleasures of life can be found for each individual. amidst all this oppression and tribulation, it is a blessing to be able to look back upon a successful past. this privilege, however, has stern duties: to keep up the traditions of the past, to adhere to the approved fundamental principles, to regain the lost, to strive and build up afresh. with this determination, the bremen cotton exchange celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. [illustration: guaranty trust co's cotton price chart. _spot prices, new york, middling uplands_] the fabric of civilization a short survey of the cotton industry in the united states guaranty trust company of new york broadway fifth avenue office madison avenue office fifth avenue and rd street madison avenue and th street london offices liverpool office lombard street, e. c. cotton exchange buildings lower grosvenor pl., s. w. paris office havre office brussels office and rue des italiens boulevard strasbourg rue royale copyright, guaranty trust company of new york the cotton industry touches the lives of the vast majority of the peoples of the earth. the ensuing survey does not pretend to cover the field in all its diversity. it aims to give, in brief compass, such general facts concerning the industry in the united states as may enable the reader quickly to familiarize himself with its broader outlines. contents chapter page i the importance and power of cotton ii where cotton is grown and spun and why iii the raw cotton market iv the cloth market v financing cotton and cotton cloth vi american cloth in foreign markets vii some of the grower's problems viii in the cotton mill ix the finishing operations the fabric of civilization chapter i the importance and power of cotton cotton is the fabric of civilization. it has built up peoples, and has riven them apart. it has brought to the world vast and permanent wealth. it has enlisted the vision of statesmen, the genius of inventors, the courage of pioneers, the forcefulness of manufacturers, the initiative of merchants and shipbuilders, and the patient toil of many millions. a whole library could be written on the economic aspects of cotton alone. it could be told in detail, how and why the domination of the field of its manufacture passed from india to spain, to holland, and finally to england, which now shares it chiefly with the united states. the interdependence of nations which it has brought about has been the subject of numerous books and articles. genius that served the world's need nor is the history of the inventions which have made possible to-day's great production of cotton fabrics less impressive. from the unnamed hindu genius of pre-alexandrian days, through arkwright and eli whitney, down to jacquard and northrop, the tale of cotton manufacture is a series of romances and tragedies, any one of which would be a story worth telling in detail. yet, here is a work that is by no means finished. great inventors who will apply their genius to the improvement of cotton growing and manufacture are still to be born. the present purpose, however, is to explain, as briefly as may be, the growth of the cotton industry of the united states, in its more important branches, and to endeavor, on the basis of recognized authority, to indicate its position in relation to the cotton industries of the remainder of the world. america the chief source of raw material for the present, and for the future, as far as that may be seen, the united states will have to continue to supply the greater part of the world's raw cotton. staples of unusual length and strength have been grown in some foreign regions, and short and inferior fibers have come from still others. but the cotton belt of the southern states, producing millions of bales, is the chief source of supply for all the world. the following table, taken from "the world's cotton crops, ," by j. a. todd, gives the comparative production of the great cotton-growing areas, for the - season: america , , bales of pounds india , , " " " egypt , , " " " russia , , " " " china , , " " " others , , " " " ----------- total , , " " " the american crop is thus approximately fifty-six per cent. of the world's total. the other producing countries have shown since the beginning of the century an interesting, if not a remarkable growth, that of china being the largest in quantity, and that of russia, the largest in proportion. the american increase has been larger, absolutely, than that of any other region, and there is little indication that it will not continue to hold first position. english spinners dominate world market in the manufacture of cotton, great britain's supremacy, while not so great proportionately as that of america in growing it, is for the present not likely to be challenged. the following table of the number of spindles in the chief manufacturing countries is based on english figures compiled shortly before the outbreak of the world war. the number of spindles is the usual basis upon which the size of the industry is judged. it is not a perfect method, but it has fewer objections than any other: great britain , , united states , , germany , , russia , , france , , india , , austria , , italy , , latin america , , japan , , spain , , belgium , , switzerland , , scattering , , ----------- total spindles , , such figures can be only approximate. the war has brought growth in the united states and in japan, but has certainly reduced the numbers of spindles in germany, austria, and russia. it is doubtful, moreover, how well the french industry has been able to maintain itself. but the tabulation is accurate enough to show the relative standing of the various countries. there are, as has been indicated, other standards than the number of spindles. the united states, through the fact that it specializes, generally speaking, on the coarser fabrics, uses about , , bales of cotton annually, as compared with great britain's , , . the british product, however, sells for much more. thus the value of the spindle standard is affirmed. england, then, produces well in excess of one-third of the cotton cloth of the world; the united states considerably more than one-fifth of it, with the other countries trailing far behind, but prospering nevertheless. the individuality of the cotton fiber [illustration: _the cotton fiber--a highly magnified view, showing the twist_] it is a curious ruling of fate which makes the spinning of cotton fiber possible. there are many other short vegetable fibers, but cotton is the only one which can profitably be spun into thread. hemp and flax, its chief vegetable competitors, are both long fibered. the individuality of the cotton fiber lies in its shape. viewed through the microscope, the fiber is seen to be, not a hollow cylinder, but rather a flattened cylinder, shaped in cross-section something like the figure eight. but the chief and valuable characteristic is that the flattened cylinder is not straight, but twisted. it is this twist which gives its peculiar and overwhelming importance to cotton, for without this apparently fortuitous characteristic, the spinning of cotton, if possible at all, would result in a much weaker and less durable thread. the twist makes the threads "kink" together when they are spun, and it is this kink which makes for strength and durability. though the cotton plant seems to be native to south america, southern asia, africa, and the west indies, its cultivation, was largely confined at first to india, and later to india and the british west indies. at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the west indies, because of their especial fitness for growing the longer staples were supplying about seventy per cent. of the food of the lancashire spindles. the united states having made unsuccessful attempts to produce cotton in the early days of the colonies, first became an important producing country toward the end of the eighteenth century. american upland cotton, by reason of its comparatively short staple, and the unevenness of the fibers, as well as the difficulty of detaching it from the seed, was decidedly inferior to some other accessible species. the southern planters who grew it, moreover, found it next to impossible to gin it properly, the primitive roller gin of the time being unsuited to the task, and the work of pulling off the fibers by hand being both tedious and expensive. in , the amount exported from the united states was equivalent to only bales. [illustration: _eli whitney, the schoolmaster inventor of the cotton gin_] the next year, , is the most important in the history of cotton growing in the united states. in the autumn of , eli whitney, a young massachusetts man who had just been graduated from yale college, sailed from new york to south carolina where he intended to teach school. on shipboard he met the widow of nathaniel greene, the revolutionary general. mrs. greene invited the youth to begin his residence in the south on her plantation at mulberry grove, georgia. here one evening, some officers, late of general greene's command, were discussing the great wealth which might come to the south were there a suitable machine for removing stubborn upland fiber from its green seed. the story goes that while the discussion was at its height, mrs. greene said: "gentlemen, apply to my young friend, mr. whitney. he can make anything." whitney commenced work on the problem. a room was set aside as his workshop, and it was not long before he had produced the beginnings of the gin. he fixed wire teeth in a board, and found that by pulling the fibers through with his fingers he could leave the tenacious seed behind. he carried this basic idea further by putting the teeth on a cylinder and by providing a rotating brush to clean the fiber from the teeth. the changes which followed immediately upon the introduction of the cotton gin were tremendous in scope and almost innumerable. there was a time, before cotton became a staple, when the south led new england in manufacturing. that time passed almost immediately. iron works and coal mines were abandoned, and men turned their energies from the culture of corn, rice, and indigo largely to the raising of the cotton. expansion in production the following figures, giving production in the equivalent of pound bales for the year at the close of each ten-year period, give some idea of the tremendous expansion which ensued. _ pound _year_ bales_ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , by this table it will be seen that the civil war and the freeing of the slaves held up production only temporarily. in , the banner year, the crop reached the tremendous total of , , bales of five hundred pounds each. some little spinning had been done in the seventeenth century, but in - the first permanent factory, built of brick, and located in beverly, massachusetts, on the bass river, was put into operation by a group headed by john cabot and joshua fisher. this factory failed to justify itself economically, chiefly because of the crudeness of its machinery. but samuel slater, newly come from england with models of the arkwright machinery in his brain, set up a factory in pawtucket in . from that time forth the growth was steady and sure, if not always extremely rapid. the following table,[a] which covers the whole country, relates particularly to new england in the years before , because the cotton manufacturing industry until then was largely concentrated there. it shows how the manufacturing interests of the country profited by the discovery that brought wealth to the agricultural south: =======+=======+============+=========+=============+============== |_number| |_cotton | | | of | _number | used | _number | _value of _year_ | estab-| of | in | of | product in | lish- | spindles_ | million | employes_ | dollars_ | ments_| | pounds_ | | -------+-------+------------+---------+-------------+-------------- | | , | | | | | , | | | | | , , | . | , | $ , , | | , , | . | , | , , | | , , | . | , | , , | | , , | . | , | , , | | , , | . | , | , , | | , , | . | , | , , | | , , | , . | , | , , | | , , | , . | , | , , | | , , | , . | , | , , | | , , | , . | | =======+=======+============+=========+=============+============== [a] this tabulation includes spinning and weaving establishments only. the north, having this growing interest in an industry struggling against the experience and ability of the more firmly established english market, sought naturally for the protection given by a high tariff. the south, having definitely dropped manufacturing, pleaded with congress always for a low tariff, and the right to deal in human chattels. there is little need to go further into the rift which began to develop almost immediately. in the split occurred. the war between the states caused hardly more suffering than the blockade which cut off the spinners of manchester from the vegetable wool which supplied them the means of living. cotton proved its power and its domination. it was a beneficent monarch, but it brooked no denial of its overlordship. early exports to england heavy the invention of the whitney gin, as we have just said, found the united states able to use but a small part of the cotton grown. what became of the remainder? obviously, it was exported to provide the means for operating the english mills. here is a table which shows how american cotton left the southern ports for england and the continent in the alternate decennial years beginning in , three years before the invention of the cotton gin by eli whitney. the figures are exclusive of linters. _exports in equivalent of _year_ pound bales_ , , , , , , , , , , , , in american cotton made up almost exactly three-quarters of the whole amount imported into great britain. the other countries of europe have developed a spinning industry by no means inconsiderable. american cotton is sent to almost all those european countries which spin and weave. such a movement had of course a profound effect upon the currents of world trade. the cotton crop is the second in value of all the crops produced in the united states, and such a large part of it is exported that the credit it gives to its sellers enables them to buy in return some of the most valuable of the products manufactured in europe. the following table gives the amount of cotton, expressed in the equivalent of pound bales, exported to the various countries named in the decennial years: ======+=========+=========+========+=======+========+========+========= |_united | | | | |_nether-| _year_| kingdom_|_germany_|_france_|_italy_|_russia_| lands_ |_belgium_ ------+---------+---------+--------+-------+--------+--------+--------- | , | , | , | , | | , | | , | , | , | | | , | | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | , , | , | , | , | , | , | , , | | , | , | , | , | chapter ii where cotton is grown and spun and why we have seen (page ) that the world's cotton crop is produced chiefly by the united states, with %; india, with %; china, with - / %; egypt and russia with - / %, the remaining - / % being made up by brazil, mexico, peru, turkey, persia, japan, and several other countries. primitive methods of growing in india india is the first country wherein, so far as we have record, the growing of cotton reached the stage of an industry. there conditions are almost ideal, apparently, for the production of a great crop; yet, for many years the crop was a small one, and was utilized locally in the domestic manufacture of the light clothing worn by the people. nothing remotely resembling the present modern factory system developed during all the thousands of years that the indians had the field practically to themselves. the plant grown in india for a long time produced a short, uncertain staple, difficult to gin and still more difficult to spin. the greater part of the cotton growing districts are still given over to the short staple varieties (about / inch) but in recent years certain varieties of egyptian and american cotton have been produced with some success. about , , acres are given over to the culture of the plant, but the methods used are to a great extent primitive in the extreme. most of the crop, being unsuited to the needs of the british spinners, is either manufactured in indian mills, of which the number is constantly growing, or exported to japan. before the war, germany was a large consumer of indian cotton. the figures given as representing the chinese crop probably are not any more accurate than the usual statistical figures concerning china. the chinese are still largely in the domestic system of manufacture, and much of their crop--probably a larger proportion than in india--is spun and woven in the neighborhood where it is grown, without ever appearing in statistical tables. the methods of growing are equally primitive. the fiber is short, and the mills of the country import more raw cotton, yarn, and textiles than they export. the growing importance of egyptian staples the egyptian crop is one of the most interesting, both in the methods of culture, and in the product. from the point of view of statistics--remembering the uncertainty of the size of the chinese crop--egypt is the third cotton growing country of the world. this is the more interesting because it was not until about that egypt was considered as a source of supply. the present area, under extremely intensive cultivation, is about , , acres, and nine-tenths of this is in the nile delta. climatic conditions are radically different from those of the united states. little rain falls during the growing season, but an elaborate system of irrigation provides a sufficient and probably more satisfactory water supply, insomuch as the quantity of water can be regulated, and there is little danger of either too much or too little moisture. the regions where the soil is not composed exclusively of the black delta mud, but is a mixture of sand and mud, produce the best crops. the land, after being plowed, is thrown up into ridges about three feet apart. channels for water are formed at right angles to the ridges. the seeds, before being sown, in march, are thoroughly soaked, and after the seedlings appear there is frequent hoeing and watering. the total water is equivalent to a rainfall of about inches. there is little cultivation in the american fashion, hand labor being employed almost exclusively. the result of all this intensive effort is an abundant crop of long-stapled cotton with an extremely strong fiber, bringing in the open market a price second only to that of the american sea island variety. much of the egyptian cotton is used in the manufacture of hosiery and other knit goods, sateens, sewing thread, etc., but recently it has also been found to be exceedingly well fitted for the manufacture of the fabric used in pneumatic tires, and for the duck or filter cloth used in such industries as the refining of sugar. [illustration: _pickers in delta field_] russian cotton, so-called, is really grown largely in turkestan though a small amount is produced in the southern caucasus. the culture has been under way since very early times, but had little more than local significance until about when the russian government took steps to foster it, distributing american seed of the upland variety, importing the necessary equipment, and providing instructors, frequently americans. railroads to handle the crop were built, and, with all this favorable assistance, progress was rapid. about one-third of the cotton used in the russian mills up to the time of the war was grown on russian soil, the remainder being brought largely from the united states. the american crop as the world's basis but the bulk of the world's supply is the cotton grown in the united states. the price for american upland cotton governs the price of the other varieties. the acreage devoted to the cultivation of the cotton crop in the united states is approximately , , . the increase since , when census figures covering this point were first obtained, has been about seventeen fold. the acreage, of the various states, together with figures giving the value of the crop and the comparative rank, is here given: ================+==========+==============+========+=============== | | _gross | | _crop value | |equivalent |_approx-| including _states_ | _acreage_| pound bales | imate | seed | | exclusive of |percent-| and linters_ | | linters_ | age_ | ----------------+----------+--------------+--------+--------------- alabama | , , | , | . | $ , , arizona | | , | . | , , arkansas | , , | , | . | , , california | | , | . | , , florida | , | , | . | , , georgia | , , | , , | . | , , louisiana | , , | , | . | , , mississippi | , , | , | . | , , missouri | , | , | . | , , north carolina | , , | , | . | , , oklahoma | , , | , | . | , , south carolina | , , | , , | . | , , tennessee | , | , | . | , , texas | , , | , , | . | , , virginia | , | , | . | , , all other states| | , | . | , +----------+--------------+--------+-------------- totals | , , | , , | . | , , , ================+==========+==============+========+============== there are generally speaking, two kinds of cotton produced in the united states--upland cotton, and sea island cotton. the former makes up the great bulk of the crop, the relative percentages in being . and . . the constant search for long staples a few years ago the terms short-staple and upland were practically interchangeable, but the great demand for long staple, chiefly from the manufacturers of thread and of pneumatic tire fabrics has led to a successful attempt to grow the longer fibers in the upland districts, so that now more than a million bales annually are being produced in the upland districts of cotton with a staple length of - / inches and more. the world's total production of long staple is in the neighborhood of , , bales. egypt is the chief producer outside the united states, her product being approximately , , bales of pounds every year. although the product is small, the best sea island produced in the united states grows upon the small islands off the coast of south carolina. the long-staple upland is grown chiefly in the mississippi delta, where the product is called "peeler," "benders," etc., though the percentage of long-staple produced elsewhere is steadily increasing. the success of certain arizona growers in producing long-staple from egyptian seed is being watched with great interest. more than , bales came from this source in , the fiber averaging - / inches in length. there has recently been developed there, the new and important pima variety, which is superior to the native egyptian cotton, being both longer and whiter, and the growers are now planting pima almost exclusively. the following table, taken from the encyclopedia brittanica, gives the comparative length of staple of the more important varieties of cotton. the order in which they are given represents, roughly, their relative commercial value: _length of staple sea island cotton in inches_ carolina sea island . florida sea island . georgia sea island . barbados sea island . egyptian cottons yannovitch . abassi . good brown egyptian (mitafifi) . american cotton good middling memphis . good middling texas . good middling upland . indian cottons fine tinnevelly . fine bhaunagar . fine amraoti . fine broach . fine bengal . fine ginned sind . good ginned kumta . the table of the number of spindles in each country in the world, given on page , gives some idea of the relative position of the united states in the field of cotton manufacturing. we have seen how the english industry, having the prior start, grew to imposing proportions and helped to bring about a change almost as great in its effects as the french revolution, which was occurring at almost the same time. british supremacy in cotton manufacturing has never been truly challenged, but there has been an appreciable growth in several other countries, and in germany and japan, at least, the recent development has been little short of phenomenal. new figures will probably show that in the future japan will be the chief competitor of england and the united states for a share of the cotton trade of the world. [illustration: _fall river, massachusetts_] the home market created an industry the chief factor in the growth of the american industry was probably not the nearness of the source of supply, cheap fuel or labor, nor any of these factors which operated in the case of england, such as climate, geographical position, and shipping control, but more than anything else the presence of a market close at hand which grew so rapidly, more rapidly indeed than the industry could grow to meet it. aided to some extent by an import tariff, the manufacturers have weathered some short periods of depression, but in the main the industry has grown in direct ratio to the growth of the country. [illustration: _a typical southern mill_] new england as home of american spinning the cotton mill, as we have seen, early chose new england as its domicile. mills are scattered more or less throughout the entire region, but there are several localities which stand out beyond all others, and almost deserve the title they have acquired as the centers of the industry. premier place for a long time was held by fall river, and even now the race between that city and new bedford is strong, with the lead slightly in favor of the former city. bristol county, mass., in which these two centers, and taunton, are located, providence, r. i., and middlesex county, mass., together contained , , spindles in , or . % of the country's total of , , . the growth in this one locality is due probably to the advantages which come with centralization, as well as to the natural advantages they possessed. these latter, which include particularly water power and a moist climate, are not as important now, with steam power and mechanical humidifiers as they were a generation ago. in the middle atlantic states, the number of plants and the spindlage have remained about stationary over a long period of years, and are even showing a tendency to decrease. small weaving establishments which buy their yarn are particularly numerous around philadelphia, and there are large cotton duck mills in and near baltimore. mills in the midst of cotton plantations it has been in the south, however, that the growth of the cotton manufacturing industry in the last few decades has been most phenomenal. in there were , spindles in the cotton growing states compared with , , in new england. in , the figures were: northern states (including connecticut, illinois, indiana, maine, massachusetts, new hampshire, new jersey, new york, pennsylvania, rhode island, and vermont), , , spindles devoted to the spinning of cotton exclusively; southern states (including georgia, kentucky, louisiana, maryland, mississippi, north carolina, south carolina, tennessee, texas, and virginia), , , spindles devoted to cotton exclusively. the census figures do not give the number of spindles in each city except when the confines of the city and of the county happen to coincide. but the appended table is presented as showing the spindlage of counties having more than , spindles devoted to the spinning of cotton. about , the southerner saw the opportunity that awaited him when he should manufacture his own cotton. at that time he was consuming only , bales, while new england took , , . in ten years, he was utilizing more than half a million bales, while new england had just passed the million and a half figure. in , the south consumed , , bales, while new england had climbed to only , , . the figures are scherer's, who points out that the race was won in twenty-five years. however, as competition with the south increased, new england, following the earlier lead of old england, has tended always to produce a finer and finer quality of cloth, leaving the coarser grades of sheeting, drills and ducks to the southern mills. thus, while the south is consuming an ever larger proportion of the cotton crop, she is still far from receiving for her product the money that comes to the new englander, who with a higher grade of labor and greater variation of output is constantly catering, with dress fabrics and fine stuffs of various kinds, to a discriminating well-to-do patronage. _spindles _county_ (number)_ bristol, mass. , , providence, r. i. , , middlesex, mass. , , hillsborough, n. h. , spartanburg, s. c. , windham, conn. , worcester, mass. , greenville, s. c. , essex, mass. , hampden, mass. , gaston, n. c. , kent, r.i. , anderson, s. c. , berkshire, mass. , new london, conn. , oneida, n. y. , york, me. , androscoggin, me. , muscogee, ga. , pittsylvania, va. , union, s. c. , strafford, n. h. , cabarrus, n. c. , mecklenburg, n. c. , guilford, n. c. , richland, s. c. , essex, n. j. , albany, n. y. , madison, ala. , greenwood, s. c. , pickens, s. c. , bristol, r. i. , hampshire, mass. , york, s. c. , fulton, ga. , aiken, s. c. , laurens, s. c. , richmond, ga. , rockingham, n. c. , durham, n. c. , newberry, s. c. , chambers, ala. , cherokee, s. c. , kennebec, me. , alamance, n. c. , knox, tenn. , lancaster, s. c. , richmond, n. c. , chester, s. c. , stanley, n. c. , rutherford, n. c. , calhoun, ala. , troup, ga. , floyd, ga. , cleveland, n. c. , cumberland, me. , spalding, ga. , talladega, ala. , philadelphia, pa. , merrimack, n. h. , davidson, n. c. , baltimore city. , halifax, n. c. , hall, ga. , the wealth of the world--at least up to the time of the great war--was constantly increasing and while there is little likelihood that the demand for the coarser grades of goods will fall off, the need for finer stuffs, not only in the united states, but abroad, is constantly growing. the greatest development of the south is probably still to come. the locations of the world's cotton markets have been dictated by the location of the growing fields and the manufacturing centers. thus we find that the great raw cotton markets of the united states are in new york and new orleans. in europe they are at liverpool, bremen and havre. because of conditions imposed by the german government, the bremen market is largely dependent upon new york and liverpool. the other great world market is that of alexandria, which, although it handles but a comparatively small part of the world's crop, is important on account of the quality of the staple which makes up the egyptian bale. the two chief american markets, new york and new orleans, are sharply differentiated. the new orleans market is a true trader's market. the great bulk of the sales made on the new orleans floor are bona-fide sales, in which cotton actually changes hands. the new york market on the other hand is a merchants' and manufacturers' market, in which business transactions are protected against loss by the purchase or sale of "futures", though, of course, there is always a large amount of speculating. delivery is rarely demanded. the function of the exchange, therefore, is largely that of insurance. the intricacies of this market will be discussed later. chapter iii the raw cotton market because of the ramifications of the cotton industry, the cotton itself, on its devious way from planter to consumer, is successively the concern of a series of individuals and corporations. the immense value of the product, the expense of growing, handling, manufacturing, and selling it all mean that great quantities of capital are utilized in bringing it at last to its final consumer. at any stage of the process, cotton represents no inconsiderable part of the nation's wealth, and to expedite its journey, merchandising and financial methods of a highly specialized technique have been developed. there are two very clearly marked stages in this process. the first has to do with the raw cotton, as it goes from planter to mill. the second has to do with the journey from mill to consumer. the first is usually called the raw cotton market, and the second the cloth market. the planter begins his work early in the spring. his crop is dependent upon his ability to secure and pay for the labor to work it, for the tools and machinery which are used, and his own expenses. small planters are rarely sufficiently in funds to enable them to go through the growing season without financial assistance. they must borrow money, and they usually borrow it with the growing crop as a basis. the local grower and the charge account they may borrow from the country merchant in the town near which their plantations are located. credit here is usually furnished through the "charge account" system, whereby the merchant supplies the planter's wants for the growing season, even to the extent of giving credit to his farm hands. tenant farmers live almost entirely on credit furnished by the store-keepers of the vicinity. when the picking season begins, in july, august, or september, according to the region concerned, the merchant, in lieu of money, may take the cotton as it comes from the gins, crediting the grower thereof at the market price. the cotton thus accumulated is sold to local buyers, or, occasionally, to shippers or exporters. in the case of the larger plantations, or groups of plantations operated by syndicates or corporations, the cotton is frequently shipped direct to the mill or, more often, to a warehouse. the larger producers, instead of getting their credit from the local stores, as their tenant farmers do, are financed either by their banks, or by their buyers, who in turn are financed by their bankers. the street buyers of texas towns in some districts, particularly in texas, there is the small or local buyer, usually called a "street buyer," who operates in the smaller towns, buying his cotton at the gins in lots of from one to ten bales, either from the small planters, or from the country merchants. this buying gives a certain concentration to the crop, and enables the larger buyers to deal in lots of comparatively uniform quality from certain regions, the general type of whose product is known. [illustration: _street buyer in a southern town_] cotton bought from the planters or from the country merchants is almost invariably paid for in cash. cotton is frequently sold at the compress point, rather than at the gin, this course being pursued in the case of large producers, or when the original buyer is a mere local operator. one of the most important operations, commercially as well as industrially, is the grading of cotton, which takes place as a rule at the compress point under the supervision of the buyer, who employs experts for this purpose. cotton mills as a rule operate on certain specified grades of cotton, and any deviation from this grade means either a readjustment of machinery or disgruntled and dissatisfied employes, or, perhaps, an inability to fill an order for cloth of certain types. the manufacturer will usually refuse to accept any grades save those he has specifically commissioned the buyer to obtain for him. the actual grades, and the terms describing them have been established by the united states government, and are rigidly adhered to by the trade. prices are established on the grade known as "middling" as a basis, and variation from this basis is taken up in the price. standardization of american cotton grades the grades, for white cotton, as established by usage and confirmed by governmental standardization are: middling fair strict low middling strict good middling low middling good middling strict good ordinary strict middling good ordinary middling for yellow tinged stock the grades are: strict good middling middling good middling strict low middling strict middling low middling for yellow stained and blue stained there are only three grades quoted, good middling, strict middling, and middling, the inference here being that stained cotton below the basic grade, is unsuited for most commercial purposes. with cotton selling around thirty cents a pound, the difference between the cost per pound of middling fair, the highest market grade of white cotton, and good ordinary, the lowest market grade, may amount to twelve or thirteen cents. the value of the shipment, and its use as a basis for credit, is dependent upon its proper classification. the large cotton buyers purchase for the account of mills, for exporters, or for clients abroad. they are usually firms of strong financial standing, and as we have seen, they are bankers or factors themselves, financing growers or small buyers during the growing of the crop, and the first concentration of the cotton. but when the large movement of cotton is on, it is frequently necessary that they, like the local banks, must be financed in order that they may execute their orders, or, as is frequently the case, accept cotton sent to them on consignment. cotton sent on consignment must be stored until a market is found for it, and in order that proper storage facilities may be supplied, the provision of suitable warehouse facilities is an important matter. warehousing as industry's great need until recently, warehousing in its relations to the textile trade, had not been developed to the extent which might have been expected in those methods which would make it of the greatest use and advantage to textile interests. by means of the facilities which could properly be afforded by warehouses, manufacturers, or merchants should be able, at times of favorable markets, to lay in large stocks of materials, and to finance them safely and easily. today, this need is being met in constantly increasing measure by the independent warehouses, inc., affiliated with the textile banking co., and having, like the latter, the support of the guaranty trust company of new york, and the liberty national bank of new york. modern warehouses of approved type, with all requisite facilities, will be established by this company at various ports of entry throughout the country, as well as at the important concentration points in the cotton belt, and also in the great textile manufacturing centers. [illustration: _weighing cotton on the compress platform_] thus it is seen that the cotton merchant has an important economic function to perform. his is the duty of gathering up the great aggregate of cotton, from all parts of the cotton belt, and distributing it in exactly the quantity and grade needed to the cotton manufacturers of the world. in the performance of this function, and in order that the supply of cotton may be fed out exactly as it is needed by the manufacturers, the cotton merchants have found it convenient, and even necessary to establish great common markets where they may meet and enter into the transactions with each other and the whole world which are necessary to bring the cotton into the channels of commerce and keep it moving to its multitudinous destinations. these markets are in addition to the numerous local markets where the preliminary concentration takes place, and to some extent they are subsidiary to the latter, where the cotton of the actual quantity and quality they are seeking is to be had in the first instance. yet it is the great markets which establish the prices, for it is they which are in close and immediate touch with all the other markets of the world, and it is on their floors that the merchants and brokers meet who deal in great quantities. it is their connection with the numerous sources of information which gives these great markets their importance, for it is they which register immediately and most accurately the resultant of the sum total of all the economic forces which determine the price. [illustration: _the new york cotton exchange_] the great cotton markets of the world are those of new york and new orleans, in the united states; liverpool, in england; bremen, in germany; havre, in france; alexandria, in egypt; and bombay, in india. there are differences between these markets which give a greater importance to some of them. bremen, which serves a large territory, operates under governmental restrictions which make it necessary for bremen merchants to deal in other markets as well. havre serves chiefly the needs of france, which is not one of the large cotton consuming countries. alexandria deals only in egyptian cottons, and bombay, whose dealings are confined mostly to the native staples, has neither the responsiveness nor the completeness of the remaining markets. thus, by elimination, the three great markets of the world, wherein cotton of all kinds is dealt in, and all forms of transactions in it are common are those of new york, new orleans, and liverpool. to these, the cotton world looks for guidance from day to day. the prices established on their several floors are the prices of the world. [illustration: _cotton train going from gin to compress_] the liverpool exchange, under different names, has existed since , having taken approximately its present form in , in the attempts to stabilize conditions after the great speculative period which resulted from the american civil war. the new york and new orleans exchanges were both organized the following year. the uniformity of rules and practices in the trade which resulted from the establishment of the exchanges have been of inestimable benefit to the industry and to the world, and this despite occasional abuses, which have usually been corrected as methods for correction have been evolved. spot markets and those which deal in "futures" the new orleans cotton market, and those of lesser cities, are largely spot markets, that is, the dealings which takes place in the exchanges at those points involve the actual transferring of cotton which is on hand, or, at least, contracted for. the new york market deals preponderantly in what are known as contracts for future delivery, or, in the language of the exchange, "futures." the liverpool cotton market is both a great "spot" cotton market, and a great "futures" market. the striking thing about these "futures" contracts is that but few of them are fulfilled by actual delivery. the question then arises, what function is fulfilled by the new york exchange that it should have such an important place in the cotton market? to the uninitiated the speculative features of the market have often served to condemn it, and at times of speculative fever, or of manipulation such as has occurred on one or two occasions, there has been public agitation calling for legislation against dealing in futures. yet the new york exchange performs a very definite and valuable service, and its trading methods have served to stabilize the whole industry, and to remove from it much of that very speculation which is frequently charged against the exchange itself. the justification of the exchange is found in the fact that the futures contracts common on its floor afford the cotton merchant and manufacturer a chance to insure themselves against losses occasioned by fluctuations in the market. the method by which this is done is called hedging. why the merchant must hedge his sales for the cotton merchant, the situation as it develops is approximately this: buying, as he must, all grades and quantities of cotton, he may have an immediate market with the spinners whom he serves for only certain of these grades, and thus may have left on his hands a large supply of cotton of other grades which came to him in his purchases which he has no call for at the time. these "overs" are subject to the risk of a decline in value unless the merchant can find some way to protect himself. nor is this risk the only one run by the cotton merchant. the spinners frequently contract for months ahead for the output of their mills, and it is part of the merchant's task to see that the cotton is available at a contract price when the spinners are in need of it. such contracts for future deliveries are not only common but customary. if it were impossible for the spinner to make such contracts, it would, of course, be impossible for the weaver to make future contracts for the delivery of cloth. such a condition unsettling the distributing markets, would be intolerable. hence, the necessity of future contracts between merchants and spinners. the situation would otherwise be a very difficult one for the merchant whose supply of cotton, and the price he must pay for it, are subject to the vagaries of nature, which may grant a bountiful crop one year, and a short and inferior one the next, with consequent fluctuations in price sufficient not alone to wipe out his profit but his capital as well. the hedge as a credit transaction hedging, as has been said, affords the protection, against serious loss which these varying conditions make probable. "it may almost be said," observes arthur r. marsh, former president of the new york cotton exchange, "that as the main business of banks today is not dealing in money, but in credits, so the main business of the cotton exchanges is now in credit transactions in cotton, toward which the actual cotton 'on the spot' stands in much the same relation as the money in the banks to the sum total of their transactions in credit. it serves as a reserve at once for the satisfaction of unliquidated credit balances and for the maintenance of sound credit values in all the credit operations." elsewhere, mr. marsh describes the hedging process in these words: "a hedge is the purchase or sale of contracts for one hundred or more bales of cotton for future delivery, made not for the purpose of receiving or delivering the actual cotton, but as an insurance against fluctuations in the market that might unfavorably affect other ventures in which the buyer or seller of the hedge is actually engaged." [illustration: _the floor of the new york cotton exchange_] how merchants secure protection by hedging the cotton merchant, in making a hedge, would proceed in this fashion. having made an actual sale of cotton to a spinner for future delivery, the price being fixed according to current quotations in new york for deliveries to be made in the month specified in the contract, he would buy futures for a corresponding amount of cotton on the new york cotton exchange. if the price of cotton should have advanced when the time for the delivery of the actual cotton comes, he will be able to sell his futures contract at a higher price, thus offsetting the loss sustained upon the deal in actual cotton. or, if he prefers, he may hold the "futures" contract until its maturity and sell it at the then prevailing figure. the first course would be the customary one for a bona-fide merchant, whose sole concern is protecting himself against loss by fluctuations in price. if, on the other hand, cotton should fall before the merchant bought to fulfill his actual contract, he would make a profit upon his sales to the spinner. he would, however, suffer a loss upon his futures contract, for the seller would be able to purchase the cotton to fulfill the contract at a lower point than the contract called for, and would consequently be able to deliver to the merchant who made the hedge, cotton which the latter would be forced to accept at a price higher than the then prevailing one, and thus again the profit and loss would balance each other. the usual custom is, not for the merchant to accept delivery, but to pay over to the seller of the futures contract the difference between the contract price and that prevailing. this would be just the difference between his own purchasing and selling price in his actual dealing with the spinner, and so would eliminate the profit, due to change in price, made in that transaction. thus, by the hedging process, the merchant loses a possible profit on a falling market, but at the same time fails to suffer a loss when the market is against him. hedging as practiced by cotton manufacturers the manufacturer's hedging is necessarily somewhat different in practice, though the same in principle. if he accepts orders for cloth requiring more cotton than is being held in his warehouse, he may buy futures contracts to the amount of the additional cotton he will need. then in the event that his actual purchase of cotton may be at a figure which would tend to reduce or eliminate his profits on the sale of the cloth, already fixed by contract, he may sell his futures contract at a corresponding profit, thereby preventing loss. should the price of cotton fall in the interim, his profit on the sale of the cloth will be larger, but the settlement of his futures contract will be expensive to the same extent. thus he sacrifices the chance of a greater possible profit in order to be insured against loss. [illustration: _compress bales bound for new orleans_] it is probably more common for the cotton merchant to hedge than for the manufacturer to adopt that proceeding. the manufacturer, as a rule, has been accustomed to buy his cotton during the buying season, that is, in october, november, december, and january, and he makes his arrangements with his selling agents on the basis of the price paid, trusting to his own judgment, and the comparatively small fluctuations in the price of cloth in normal times, to protect him against loss. it is usually believed that the southern mills, being newer, and frequently of a different financial standing, have found it more desirable to have recourse to this form of insurance than their older competitors in the north. then, too, the rapid development of the cotton warehousing system has made it less necessary for the manufacturers to tie their money up in great quantities of cotton, as they can buy when the market appears favorable. protection for mills running for stock a very important point, however, and one which all manufacturers would do well to consider carefully is the protection which a "futures" market gives to a manufacturer making plain goods for stock, particularly on a falling raw material market, which, of course, would also mean a falling goods market. to stop the mill because values were falling would be impossible without utter disorganization, and its attendant heavy loss, while to keep on manufacturing stock goods with a certainty that they would be worth less each succeeding month is a disheartening prospect for the mill. if, however, the manufacturer sells "futures" for the succeeding months to the extent of the cotton which he would require each month to manufacture the goods, he can run his machinery as usual and have a perfectly free mind, as he has safeguarded himself against any loss due to a falling value of the raw material. suppose, for instance, the cotton market fell off, say one cent a pound each month, with a corresponding fall in the value of the woven goods. in such an event, the manufacturer could, as each month arrived, buy a contract for an amount corresponding to what he had sold, and at a proportionately less price, thus making a profit on the "futures" which he had sold to an extent which would correspond, approximately, to the smaller value which his manufactured goods would then have in the market. thus the profit on the one side would take care of the loss on the other. if the market rose instead of falling, he would make a loss in replacing his futures contract, but his goods would then command a higher value, and again no loss would be experienced. this method of hedging is the regular and standard practice of the english cotton mills, and, of course, of many of our domestic mills, but there are some manufacturers who, through their unfamiliarity with the operations of the futures market, are quite unaware of the protection which they thus have at hand. the responsiveness of the great exchanges the great exchanges, and the new york exchange in particular, are thus used by cotton merchants and manufacturers in every part of the world to protect themselves in their buying and selling operations. the value of middling cotton in new york is kept upon par with the value of the same cotton in any growing or manufacturing point, such factors as freight, insurance, brokerage, etc., being allowed for in the quoted price. quotations on the liverpool exchange are thus higher than quotations in new york by the difference between the amount it costs to deliver cotton in liverpool and to deliver it in new york. thus the merchant and manufacturer is able to buy and sell hedge contracts on the new york exchange, knowing that operations at the new york price in new york are on a parity with operations at the liverpool price in liverpool, or at the havre price in havre. thus the hedge contract which a southern merchant sells in atlanta, through his broker on the new york exchange, may be bought by a spinner in tokyo or manchester, anxious to insure his supply of cotton at a price which would make his contracts profitable. in normal times the selling of merchants and the buying of manufacturing engaged in actual and bona fide hedging transaction has been estimated by competent authorities to make up fully seventy-five per cent. of the trading done on the new york exchange. the remaining twenty-five per cent. may thus be attributed to speculative operations, that is operations entered into by outsiders through brokers, on the chance of a rise or a fall in the market. nor is such speculation without its value. it is the speculators, as a rule, who are the first to take advantage of crop reports or weather conditions, or news likely to affect the market favorably or unfavorably, and buy or sell as their judgment dictates. their operations serve to discount such changes to some extent, or at least to make the breaks and rises more gradual than they would otherwise be. in abnormal times, that is times of great scarcity and great demand, or bumper crops and small demand, the speculative element plays a larger part, for it is in such times that the greatest fluctuations in price take place. merchants or manufacturers holding hedging contracts are under a greater incentive to buy or sell, as they see their opportunities for profit growing greater or less, as the case may be, and in consequence more contracts are made, and they pass from hand to hand with greater rapidity, the gain or loss thus being distributed among a greater number of persons than would otherwise be the case. it is the operations of speculators, and the manipulation that once or twice during its history has been possible by unscrupulous traders which has brought about at such times public agitation for the abolition of the exchange. recent changes in the form of the cotton contract have made it almost impossible for such operations, if repeated, to be successful, and thus there is little likelihood that the very important economic function of the exchange will be interfered with by legislation. chapter iv the cloth market the output of the manufacturer finds its way to the ultimate consumer through a variety of channels. what these are will depend upon the manner in which the various mills are organized, and their respective policies as to the marketing of their products. some mills, usually very large organizations, will have plants completely equipped, in every department, spinning, weaving, dyeing, printing, finishing, etc., and will process all of their goods themselves in every detail, offering them on the market in their finished form. some of these may make a wide variety of fabrics suitable for one class of trade, or for many classes of trade, while others will specialize on a few articles. a good many concerns that are not of the largest size, but which confine their production to a few articles, may also put the goods through every operation themselves. then there are a great number of cotton mills, many of them of very large size, which do no weaving at all, but confine themselves to spinning, finding a market for their yarns with the many weaving mills which have no spinning plants. many large mills do no finishing numerous mills, both large and small, manufacturing, principally, goods of a staple grade, which may either be of fine or coarse character, sell their entire product in the gray, or unfinished state, because they do not wish to burden themselves with the task of putting the goods through the various finishing treatments necessary to fit them for the market. this method of disposing of the product appeals to many for it reduces the manufacturing operations to the spinning of the yarn, and to the weaving of the cloth. the owners or managers of the mills may have had no experience outside of these branches, and if they themselves were to attempt to finish, or "convert," the goods they would be entering strange fields. whatever method of merchandising may be adopted, it is certainly obvious that the product of large mills is so great that it must be disposed of in a large way, and hence various channels of outlet have grown up to satisfy the requirements of the case. dealing direct with dry goods jobbers a substantial portion of the output of the mills (but nothing like what it was years ago, and it grows relatively smaller every year), is disposed of directly to dry goods jobbing houses, and by them to retail dealers, who sell it by the yard to the consumer. this practice was formerly more widespread, but has diminished greatly in recent years. a further enormous yardage passes eventually through the cutting-up houses, which manufacture garments of every kind, from overalls to pajamas, or from raincoats to shirts, and dispose of their products to distributors, who eventually sell them to the public. then there are retailers whose requirements for goods of particular kinds are so considerable that their orders are of sufficient magnitude to warrant the mills in dealing with them direct. again, there are the great mail-order houses, with a gigantic annual turnover, whose catalogues go to every part of the land, and which handle great quantities of piece goods, as well as made-up garments, and whose custom is eagerly sought for. [illustration: _thousands of looms in a single room_] other mills make fabrics suitable for use in the military and naval establishments of the country, and in other public channels, and which, in selling these fabrics, will deal directly with the government, or indirectly through intermediaries. in addition to these, and other domestic outlets, there is a great quantity of goods produced for export, which are handled through houses specially organized for that trade. merchandising by dry goods jobber one of the oldest established agencies for handling mill products is the dry goods jobber, and it is to be remarked that many large retail houses do also a substantial jobbing business, though generally less so in cottons than in other classes of fabrics. the jobber will buy finished products from those mills which sell goods in that state, and will also buy large amounts of gray goods. these he will sell principally to retail distributors, but his transactions, in addition, will extend into a multitude of channels, and, he will deal with small garment manufacturers and makers of all kinds of wares, and will also sell considerable quantities to the larger cutters when they are unable, for one reason or another, to buy direct from the mills or from the converters. there are also numerous small jobbing concerns which buy substantial quantities from the larger jobbers as occasion may require. one of the greatest avenues of outlet is through a class of dealers known as converters, and there are converters operating in every kind of fabric from cotton to silk. in the last forty or fifty years, this business has developed into immense proportions, and the converter performs a real and important service in the trade. he is intimately acquainted with the needs of his customers, and possesses a fair knowledge of the kinds of goods put out by the various mills and the different constructions in which they are sold, and is well acquainted with all of the market dyeing, finishing, bleaching, and printing concerns, having also a fair understanding of the various treatments accorded to the goods. he buys his goods in the gray from the mills, and sends them to the finishers, printers, etc., to be treated, according to his instructions. by a careful studying of the fabric constructions, and of the subsequent treatments, he is able to create fabrics of a suitable and marketable character, which are in some respects different from those offered by any of his competitors, and which are brought out with an exact knowledge of the requirements of the trade to which he is catering. he is able to make a profit, and generally a very substantial one, by handling the goods in this way. considerable capital is required by the converter, as goods bought in the gray have to be paid for on practically a cash basis, and he may have to carry them for a time before they are finally marketed. the converter sells to the cutting-up houses, to jobbers, and to retailers, or, in fact, to whatever trade he seeks. large and profitable businesses have thus been built up. many converters have adopted their own distinctive trade marks, and since the goods that they handle are known by these trade marks, the identity of the mill which made them originally is often entirely unknown to the ultimate consumer. the converter can give his business to whatever mill, at the time, will give him the best value for his money. jobbers must know status of mills these operations are facilitated by the services of another class of intermediaries, the cloth brokers. if a buyer, whether he be retailer, jobber, converter, or what not, wishes to secure goods of a certain kind, he would have a very difficult task if he had to canvass the entire market, and ascertain what was being offered. hence he is likely to go to the cloth brokers. they are in touch with all the principal manufacturing sources of supply, and will have daily quotations of the offerings of the different mills; he will know which mills are "sold up," and which are open for business, and what class of goods they desire to sell. consequently the cloth brokers are in a position to offer to would-be purchasers a wide variety of the different cloths which are available on the market, and it is their business to buy from the mills as cheaply as they can, and so get the best possible price for their customers. the transactions are handled on a small commission, and the average buyer, in many kinds of goods, is able to do much better by working through a broker than by opening negotiations directly with the mill. most mills have offices in chief markets mills selling their products through brokers in this manner may, or may not, have a representative stationed in the goods market, according to circumstances. mills, manufacturing a limited number of plain fabrics, and which do not sell through brokers, may also be without representatives in the primary goods market, and will dispose of their product directly from the mills, partly by correspondence, and partly through the efforts of their travelers. the great mass of the mills, however, are regularly and efficiently represented in the great central goods markets, principally new york, though also in boston, philadelphia, baltimore, and elsewhere, and their selling agencies are very highly organized institutions. these establishments which have sufficient capital to enable them to finance themselves--with or without the assistance of regular bankers' loans--may maintain their own selling offices, and market their product in their own names directly to their customers. the amount of capital required to handle a business in this way is proportionately very large, for the concern must be able to keep itself sufficiently supplied with raw materials, and then to carry the expenses as these materials pass through the slow stages of manufacture until the goods are finally finished, after which they may have to be kept in stock for a time until the delivery dates, and then, after shipment, the accounts have to be carried until the bills are paid, so that, from the time the manufacturer pays for his raw material until he finally receives pay for his goods is a very long period. loans made upon warehouse receipts the financing of a business conducted in this way can be assisted by loans from warehouses upon stocks of raw material stored there, by bank accommodation, and by facilities which certain banks give for the cashing of a substantial percentage of those accounts on the books of the concern which the customers have not discounted themselves. also, in handling his merchandise in this way, the manufacturer must have a thorough understanding of the best means of marketing his product, and this care of the selling end is, of course, an added burden upon his shoulders which, in many cases, he may not feel competent to handle properly. therefore, the comparatively few concerns which do have sufficient capital to sell directly, in addition to the many from great to small who have not, will market their product through what are known as dry goods commission houses, sometimes referred to as factors, and simply as commercial bankers. the commission house system, as we have it here, does not exist anywhere else, and its great growth in the united states has been largely due to certain peculiarities in our banking methods, which have prevented mills--even those with a reasonably sufficient supply of capital--from obtaining the amount of direct banking accommodation necessary for their needs. the commission house, in its usual relations with its mills, undertakes to conduct the sale of their products. some commission agents insist upon having the entire selling control of all of the goods the mill produces, or at any rate, of all the goods of the kind which they are equipped to sell. others, again, will take over a partial selling control of the product of a mill, and various lines of the same manufacturer may be found offering through different channels. there are some obvious disadvantages connected with this latter procedure. if the mill is a very large one, the selling agent may handle no goods except the product of that mill, but in the great majority of cases, the factor will represent a considerable number of mills. immediately on receipt of the invoices of the goods consigned to the selling agent, the mill can draw against them a percentage of their value, previously agreed upon, usually about two-thirds of their net selling price, and upon these loans interest at the rate of % is charged. the difference between the rate at which the commission house can borrow money, (in normal times perhaps to - / %), and the % which is usually charged to the mills, constitutes a considerable part of the profits of the factor's business. factors provide selling facilities the factor often provides a store, together with a complete selling and office force, and every facility for receiving, storing, selling, and shipping the goods, and for financing the business. the salesmen of the house travel throughout the country, reaching all the important markets, and the managers of the different departments, who thus understand the needs of the market, are in a position to advise the mill with intelligence and exactness as to the kind of goods which should be made to meet the requirements of the trade. the cost of warehousing and of insurance on the merchandise is also paid by the commission agent. [illustration: _spinning room in a large mill. these are all ring spindles_] the prices at which the goods are to be sold are fixed by the mill, but, of course, they will finally sell at prices determined by the market conditions. as the goods are sold, the amounts which they bring are credited to the mill, less whatever has been advanced against them. the selling agent also stands ready, no matter on what time and terms the goods may be sold, to credit the mill with the net value of the sale, less % interest for the unexpired time within which the customer may pay, and from this interest charge also he secures part of his return. of course if bank rates are very high, as they sometimes are for short periods, the factor may be out of pocket on the interest account, instead of making profit. as the goods are sold, so are the equities in them released, and the balance is credited to the mill. if, however, the goods sell at a loss there will be no equities coming to the mill, and, in fact, there are not infrequently deficiencies to make up. for these services, and according to the nature of the goods being sold, various commissions are charged, usually ranging between the limits of and % of the net returns of the sales. plain unfinished goods which are marketed in large quantities are charged for at a relatively low figure, while fancy goods, sold in smaller quantities and requiring more effort and expense to sell them, are charged for at a higher figure. the selling agent also guarantees the credits of the firms to which he sells, so that no losses for bad debts can fall upon the manufacturer, but, at the same time, he will decline orders from any concerns except those with whose credit he is entirely satisfied. not infrequently when the manufacturer conducts his own selling operations, he will use the facilities afforded by the commission house for the financial part of the business only, taking advances on his goods, having his sales cashed, and his credits guaranteed, etc. for these lesser services, of course, the commissions charged are smaller. when goods are charged out, the bills are payable to the commission house, and so, as far as the customer is concerned, the commission house is the principal in the transaction. in many cases certain modified arrangements are made, but in most instances the business is conducted as herein described, and it may fairly be said that the bulk of the dry goods of all kinds produced in the united states finds its way into the market through commission house channels. making plain goods for future orders it is the policy of most cotton mills, and certainly of those making plain goods, to run steadily all the year round, and thus the commission agent, whether he has secured advance orders on the goods or not, has constantly flowing into his hands an assured stream of merchandise which must eventually, when sold, pay him a commission. thus the securing of a good account means an assured source of revenue to the commission agent. there are no more important selling organizations for textiles than these dry goods commission houses, many of them having an immense and profitable turnover, and their businesses are conducted on a very high plane of efficiency, and probity, although, in itself, there are many evils attendant upon this method of the distribution of merchandise, and which exercise at times a most adverse influence upon the well being of the mills whose product is thus disposed of. strength of agents makes "paper" acceptable it is evident that no ordinary capital would be sufficient for the supplying of money on call to mills in the immense quantity needed, and it is here that the banker's capital is called into use. the commission house is usually a concern of substantial means, sometimes very rich, and nearly always of a financial standing, which will give it, on its own account, an assured credit. at certain times of the year the calls for money from the mills are greater than at other times, and as shipments come forward, and advances are required, the commission house, in order to put itself in funds, will issue a series of its own notes in convenient sized amounts, $ , to $ , each, for instance, and will offer these for sale, through its note broker. this paper, which commands an advantageously low rate of interest, and which is issued for convenient periods of time, averaging perhaps four months, is much sought after by banks and other institutions in primary markets and throughout the country wishing to invest current funds in a safe and not unprofitable medium. this paper is so acceptable to banks not only because the credit of the issuing firm is behind it, but also because it is known that the money which is obtained for the notes will be lent out to mills on ample collateral. the issuing house is in a position so entirely safe that hardly ever can a question arise as to its ability to take care of its borrowings. chapter v financing cotton and cotton cloth no industry shows better than the cotton industry the economic importance of banking service. no industry, perhaps, utilizes to such a complete extent the modern instruments of credit, nor is so dependent upon these instruments for its proper functioning. at no point in the progress from seed to cloth is the capital represented by the cotton necessarily or even customarily tied up. and not only may the cotton itself at any stage be the basis of credit accommodation, but also, the actual added value which the labor of any factor in the chain may give to the cotton may itself be realized upon in advance. the credit possibilities of the industry have grown with the admission of acceptances to rediscount in the federal reserve banks, and this admissibility has likewise played a part in the present growth of the warehouse system, the lack of which was a handicap to the industry in past years. credit necessary from seed to finished product in considering the raw cotton and the cloth market it was necessary to include some account of the financial and banking processes involved in the various commercial transactions undertaken. it is perhaps advisable, however, even at the risk of some repetition, to give a quick survey of the financial and credit aspects of the industry as a whole from the time the cotton is placed in the ground up to the actual sale to the cutter-up or the jobber. the utilization of credit begins, as we have seen, with the very planting of the crop. many of the growers, even those who own their farms, are men of limited means, and are not able to pay for the necessaries of life and of labor during the long growing season. the country storekeeper, accordingly, in return for a lien on the crop, allows them credit at his store, usually charging interest based on the monthly statement of their ledger accounts. he in turn receives the necessary accommodation for his own purchases from the local bank, or from the local buyer or factor with whom he is affiliated. the high prices prevailing during the past few years have undoubtedly changed to some extent the small grower's financial position. cash for the grower from the local bank the larger growers, or the great corporations which let out cotton lands to renters, usually operate the stores in their villages upon the same basis, credit being advanced against the renter's share of the growing crop. even these large corporations are seldom able to meet the heavy demands of the growing season without recourse to the credit service of those to whom they sell their cotton, or to the local banks. the banks, or buyers, in turn discount at least a proportion of the commercial paper thus created with their correspondent banks in new york, boston, or other financial centers. this credit arrangement, it will be seen, is almost entirely based on a moral risk, the lien being made upon the growing cotton which cannot be liquidated until it is grown, picked, and ginned. when the crop is picked, it is weighed by the merchant before it is ginned, and the farmer is credited on the merchant's books with the amount due him, the balance in his favor being given him in cash. his concern with the cotton is thus ended. in the event that he is able to finance himself through the season he takes the cotton directly to the gin, and has it ginned and baled there, paying the ginnery for the operation, and selling the cotton directly to a local buyer and the seed to an oil mill. if the gin warehouse is available, and he desires to wait for a more favorable opportunity to sell, he may store the cotton, taking a gin receipt for it, against which the cotton will eventually be delivered. the gin receipt may be collateral for a loan from a cotton factor, or from a local bank. thus, it will be seen that the grower receives accommodation throughout his season, and is paid cash for his product when it is delivered. this arrangement puts a heavy strain upon the cotton buyers, particularly upon those who deal in large lots for the mills. the method by which the buyers pay the growers is thus described: the buyers make arrangements with the local bankers where the gins are located for the payment of the cotton, the banks furnishing the actual cash against tickets issued by the buyer's representatives, holding the tickets in question as their collateral in the meantime. when a sufficient amount of cotton has been accumulated the local banker, at the request of the buyer's agent, delivers the tickets in question to the local agent of the railroad, who in turn issues a bill of lading covering the shipment to the compress point, which then is attached to the draft drawn by the buyer's agent upon the buyer's head office, which draft includes the price paid for the cotton plus interest and exchange charged by the local banker, who is reimbursed for the amount of the draft thus drawn. when this cotton is ready for export (or for shipment to the mill in the united states) local bills of lading, covering shipment from point of origin to compress point, are exchanged by the cotton buyer's banker for local bills of lading to port or for through bills of lading. [illustration: "_picked pounds today_"] when cotton is bought at compress points, compress receipts instead of tickets are delivered to the local banker, who pays for the cotton as purchased by the buyer's representative from time to time. when a sufficient amount of cotton is ready for shipment the compress receipts are exchanged by the banker for local bills of lading to port (or to mill), or through bills of lading, as the case may be. these bills of lading are attached to the draft drawn by the representative on the head office of the buyer, the local bank being reimbursed for the amount thus drawn. buyers must necessarily hold great quantities of cotton in storage, for they buy whatever cotton is offered, and must sell, as we have seen, certain grades and qualities to the mills in order that they may weave the cloth for which their orders call. cotton must, therefore, be held in storage, either at the compress points, which is usual, or at warehouses operated by factors, or by independent corporations, or in their own warehouses. while the buyers by cash payments are concentrating the cotton necessary to fill their domestic or foreign orders, their need for funds is a pressing one. their arrangements with local banks we have seen. when the cotton is shipped, the local bank, by means of drafts on the buyer's head office, is relieved of the burden it has been carrying, but the cotton still represents capital, and if that capital is to continue to earn its wages it must be the basis for credit. the factors and large banks in new york or boston, which have been assisting the local bank, must now assist the buyer and the warehouseman. the methods by which this burden is shifted to the larger banks are varied, and we can consider only one or two of their aspects. same mills pay cash, relieving factors of burden some of the larger new england mills pay cash for the cotton which is shipped to them, buying sufficient in the season to carry them through, or nearly through, the year. their buyers, therefore, need support, if they need it at all, only during the period of concentration. they may have their private banking arrangements, and may be able to utilize their warehouse receipts or bills of lading, or their mere notes based upon mixed collateral, for an advance of sixty to seventy-five per cent. of the value of the cotton, the line having been arranged in advance. credit may be obtained by the buyer directly from the warehouseman, who thus becomes a factor in his own right, being supported by arrangements previously made with his own bank. credit may also be obtained from a bank, upon bills of lading which are exchanged for warehouse receipts when the cotton is delivered at the port or at any warehousing point; or the credit obtained from the bank may be settled and a new credit opened with the warehouseman when the cotton is shifted from cars to storage. warehousemen as factors of growing importance the growing importance of the warehouseman has been mentioned. his services have developed with the need of mills for greater credit, and their unwillingness to tie up their working capital in cotton held in their own warehouses. mills which formerly bought all their year's supply during the buying season, so-called, now take their cotton from warehouses as they want it, buying it from their buyers, and making payment according to the individual standing arrangements. the advent of the warehouseman who is either a banker, or closely affiliated with a bank, has undoubtedly done much to make the financing of cotton a more elastic and feasible proposition, distributing the risk over a wider circle and making credit more readily available at any point in the succession. [illustration: _weighing gin bales in a ginnery yard_] [illustration: _cotton warehouses in the south_] the mill, we have seen, frequently pays cash for its raw stock, or else buys upon short term notes. the average mill does not have a working capital large enough to enable it to tie up the thousands of dollars necessary for such a proceeding, as well as the funds which must constantly be paid out for wages, for operation expenses of all kinds, for upkeep, and all other overhead. mills, as a matter of fact, are frequent borrowers, either from general banks, or from textile banks or factors, or from their selling agents, who, as we have seen, combine their primary and original function of selling with that of supplying financial assistance. mills which purchase cotton from their buyers and pay cash, or approximately cash, for it, usually buy such cotton to fill orders which they have already received from their selling agents. they may, in certain instances, obtain an advance from their agents of a proportion of the whole selling price of the order, and out of that advance pay for the purchase of cotton, or they may hold the cotton in warehouses, using it only as needed, and putting up the warehouse receipts as collateral for loans. the raw cotton itself, however, represents only a portion of the mill's operating expenses and it cannot be the entire basis for financial operations of the magnitude often needed. these broader financial wants may be met out of the prospective selling price of the cloth by means of loans from the selling agent; or, they may be met by direct relations with a commercial bank, which may make loans on ordinary collateral, on acceptances, or, as frequently happens in the case of mills of undoubted integrity, on the mere note of the company operating the mill. selling agent may shift burden to banks when the burden is assumed by the selling agent, or factor, he in turn may shift it to the bank, either by indorsing the note of the mill, or by indorsing the note of the purchaser of the cloth or by borrowing directly from the bank on his own paper. the converter, as a rule, is not a factor, but a merchant pure and simple, seeking accommodations from a factor or a bank as his needs may require it. inasmuch as he usually buys for cash or on short-term notes, and sells to jobbers or retailers upon more extended terms, his needs are frequently heavy. his relation with his factor may be, and frequently is, upon the basis of accounts receivable, or he may borrow upon his own collateral, or, if he is counted an "a " risk, upon his unsecured note. these, in brief are the financial steps in the progress of cotton from the grower to the jobber. a cursory view is all that is possible, because in the words of a textile banker of standing "every textile banking transaction is a law unto itself." yet enough has been said to show the all-important part which banking plays in the cotton industry, and to indicate how dependent are the turning of wheels and the distribution of cotton and of cloth upon the credit which banks and bankers are able to provide. factors and their wide financial service frequent use has been made of the word factor, and no adequate definition of its meaning has yet been given. the factor is, briefly, the commercial banker of the industry, and his duty is to provide, at any stage of the cotton process, the financial assistance which may be necessary, either from his own resources or through his affiliations with some large bank. it is true, of course, that some factors work only with those dealing in raw stock, and some confine their services to mills. some factors are cotton buyers, some are selling agents, some deal with buyers and some deal with selling agents. some are employed only by the mills. recently, however, the tendency has been to develop under one roof a unit institution capable of handling every textile banking transaction. it will be interesting to enumerate here, briefly, the various functions and facilities of one such institution: . it makes loans to cotton buyers and to mills on cotton held in warehouses or in transit. . it checks the credit of the mill's prospective customers. . it cashes accounts receivable. . it makes advances against merchandise for the account of mill, converter, or jobber. . it finances merchandise and raw material requirements, and current operations. . it deals in acceptances, specializing, of course, upon paper arising out of transactions in the textile industry. . it maintains an industrial department, which includes: (a) the services of a consulting architect, expert in mill construction. (b) the services of a production engineer, skilled in the laying out of plants in the line of greatest efficiency, and in diagnosing and correcting the production mistakes of an inefficient mill. (c) information as to the newest mill practice, which it is ready to provide for its clients and others. (d) readiness to assist customers in the expansion of their business either by financing new mill construction or by providing sales representatives in other countries. (e) maintenance offices abroad, either for the buying or selling of textiles or equipment, or raw materials, or for the complete and direct financing of such transactions. chapter vi american cloth in foreign markets we have seen that the american cotton grower supplies more than half of the world's demand for raw cotton. the cotton manufacturer in the united states is in no such position. this is not to say that american cotton goods are not exported in very considerable amounts. from the inception of the industry in this country varying percentages of the total product have been sent abroad. the following table, taken from the united states statistical abstract ( ) shows the average annual exports of cotton goods for the five year periods named, expressed in millions of dollars: _uncolored _colored _total_ cloth_ cloth_ _other_ - $ . $ . $ . $ . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . the irregularity of the export trade, as shown by these figures, has been explained on several grounds, the chief factors being, apparently, the fluctuations in the prosperity and consequently in the buying power of the home market, and the pressure upon the home market exerted by the rapid growth of cotton manufacturing in the south. the normal position of the united states as an exporter of cotton goods is shown by the following table, which gives the exports of the chief manufacturing countries in the year before the war (the figures for are also given because they show the changes which had already begun): united kingdom $ , , $ , , germany , , , , france , , , , japan , , , , united states , , , , switzerland , , , , italy , , , , india , , , , holland , , austria hungary , , belgium , , russia , , , , [b] spain , , , , china , , , , ----- [b] eleven months. thus, despite the very remarkable growth which had taken place between and , the united states ranked fifth among the nations exporting cotton goods. the reasons for this might be summed up in almost a word. the attractiveness and rapid growth of the home market provided an outlet for practically the whole output of american mills. with high prices prevailing in the home market, the manufacturer was not called upon to exert himself to stimulate sales in regions where competition would inevitably be keen and profits small. minor handicaps to trade development supporting this main objection there have been others. until recently the banking facilities abroad were insufficient to the needs of a greater commerce; and shipping facilities, in pre-war days, were not such as to make regular shipments possible to many foreign markets. over these conditions manufacturers had not direct control, but there were other matters in which their own short-comings were all too evident. there is little need to list again the familiar complaints, known to every reader of commerce reports and the export magazines. faulty packing and insufficient attention to orders were the most frequent. the former was undoubtedly due to inexperience, and the latter to the tendency of the manufacturer or merchant to consider the foreign market as a place for disposing of a surplus unsalable at home. to this attitude may also be attributed the frequency with which shipments for which orders had been accepted have been delayed or overlooked altogether. [illustration: _compress bales awaiting export on a savannah wharf_] the foreign market remained for the american manufacturer a prize so distant and of such questionable value that he was simply not willing to make the effort and spend the money that would be necessary to compete with british, german, french, and other sellers. he would have had to know local customs and tastes, and all the details that he had so arduously acquired a knowledge of for the home market. the time was not ripe. u. s. export trade as affected by war the war served to disarrange the system of cotton cloth distribution of the whole world. it is now a commonplace to say that the united states, by the cutting off of the usual sources of supply, succeeded for the first time in entering in force markets which hitherto had been closed. it would probably be truer to say that foreign buyers, finding it impossible to secure their customary supply from their regular sources, came to the united states and asked american manufacturers to supply their imperative wants. just what this meant is found in the statement that while in our total exports of cotton goods amounted to about , , yards, in the figure was about , , yards, an increase of fifty-five per cent. the increase, moreover, has been in the colored cottons, the uncolored cloths showing an actual decrease. the united kingdom, during , exported nearly , , , yards of cloth, so there is no immediate prospect that the united states will be a dangerous competitor for that country, except in a few limited lines and in a few markets. the chief gain to the american cotton industry brought by the war was the opportunity it gave merchants to introduce their goods abroad at a time when loss was next to impossible. operating at an assured profit they were able to learn the markets without the long and discouraging fight which would have been necessary had the competitive power of the other nations been at full force. if, as seems likely, the economic forces which projected the united states so suddenly and dramatically into the world's markets shall continue to operate, then the future will see a further development of our sales. future of foreign sales and probable markets our best and most permanent markets are probably to be found in such countries as cuba, mexico, the philippines, central and south america, and, to a certain extent, canada and australia, and parts of asia and africa. to be sure, competition will have to be met both from european countries and from japan, whose development in the cotton industry in recent years has been nothing short of phenomenal. she has practically doubled the number of her spindles in the last ten years, and her competition has already been felt, for instance, in china, where american gray goods have been practically eliminated from the market. other growing markets for japanese cotton goods are south africa, australia, india, and the west coast of south america. in cuba and the philippine islands, the united states has the advantage of a preferential tariff agreement and excellent shipping facilities. in canada and australia our cotton goods are popular but the tariff duties are in favor of great britain. in the dutch east indies there is at present a good opportunity for getting a foothold in the white goods trade. argentina has lately been our best market for cotton goods, and as the imports of cotton products into that country amounted to $ , , in , this trade is worth the intensive efforts which are now being made to clinch it. future development up to merchants on the west coast of south america, as in the manila market, there are established american trading firms that are doing extensive development work and their efforts have produced favorable results. in the other latin-american markets there are practically no local american firms and in none of them have the possibilities of the trade been more than touched. the general opinion seems to be that if the united states is to keep what she has gained by the war in the cotton goods trade the same care and aggressiveness will have to be shown in the foreign as in the domestic trade. england's position today as the foremost exporter of cotton manufactures is the result of careful study of foreign markets and their requirements, of catering to the tastes of the people, of aggressive advertising, of competent foreign salesmen, of reliability in filling orders, of good packing, and of more or less liberal credit terms. manufacturers in the united states will have to follow the same procedure if this country is to keep her present position in international trade. chapter vii some of the grower's problems early in the spring, the farm hands begin the work of getting the seed beds ready. upland fields have to be terraced, ditched, and drained by an elaborate process before the work is well begun. plowing and sub-soiling are the least of the planter's worries. he must often chop last year's stalks with a disc harrow or with a stalk cutter. the spike tooth or the disc harrow must work again after the plowing is finished. it is customary to plant cotton in a slightly raised bed, in order that thinning may be more easily done, and that the soil may be more quickly warmed. much planting is still done by hand, one man dropping the seeds in the long straight furrow and another following close behind him with a hoe, covering them up; but of late years the one-horse planter and the two-horse combined lister and planter have come into vogue, and, now that the tractor is both cheap and serviceable, it is possible to plant two or more rows at a time. the long season of intensive cultivation when the tiny seedlings first appear above the fragrant mellow soil, the planter's work is well begun, but it is only begun, for then comes the season of cultivating and thinning out. as soon as there are two or three inches of growth, the first cultivation takes place. how many times the field is cultivated depends on the planter, the nature of the soil, the availability of labor and other factors. but the general rule is, the more cultivations, the more cotton. the first cultivation scrapes away the soil from the plants, leaving them on a small ridge, where the thinning-out process can easily be done with a hoe. the stalks are left from fifteen to twenty inches apart in the hill, the rows being usually about three and a half feet apart. the next cultivation, usually with a sweep, pushes the soil back against the plants. then begins the farmer's fight against the weeds, each of which seems sturdier and harder to eradicate than its predecessor. usually cultivation must take place about every three weeks. in june, on the average, the bell-shaped blossoms appear. on the first day they are cream colored or white; on the second day, they change to a beautiful wild-rose pink, deepening toward evening to a deeper magenta or carnation. on the third day they fade completely, and the development of the boll begins. the many enemies of the growing boll of the plants upon which humanity depends, the various species of the genus gossypium have probably more enemies, and more relentless enemies, than any other. besides army worms, cut worms, locusts, green flies, leaf bugs, blister mites, and several others, nature has produced and rendered extremely prolific and hardy, these two particular pests, the boll weevil and the boll worm. it is said that the collective attacks of all the insects which feed upon cotton cost the country in the neighborhood of $ , , every year at pre-war prices. the little gray beetle that the world knows as the cotton boll weevil is responsible for most of this. the mother weevil lays her eggs in the bud. as the grubs from the eggs develop, the bud drops. if a weevil arrives on the scene after the bolls have begun to form, she lays her eggs in those with a fine indifference. these bolls will not drop, but the grubs ruin the cotton they contain. there have been numerous investigations and experiments made to develop a variety of cotton impervious to the weevil's attacks, as well as to find another insect willing to meet him in combat and overcome him. guatamalan cotton is said to be immune and efforts are being made to transplant it to the united states. a small ant-like creature called a "kelep" has also been found, which attacks, kills and devours the weevil, but, unfortunately, the kelep prefers a warmer clime, and pines away and dies in even the mild winters of the cotton belt. the boll worm is very similar to the corn worm with which all housewives are familiar, and indeed corn is its favorite diet. but cotton will do in a pinch, and, next to the weevil, he ruins more cotton than any other pest. the boll weevil cost the country about $ , , yearly, pre-war prices, and the boll worm about $ , , yearly, enough to justify an even greater expenditure for investigation and eradication than has yet been made. despite the ravage of insects and diseases, when a well-tended field of cotton is ripening, one would think from the number of bolls per plant, that the owner's fortune was surely made. unfortunately, the plants shed bolls as well as buds and flowers, in great numbers. it has frequently been noted that even well-fertilized plants upon good, carefully cultivated soil, will mature only fifteen to twenty per cent. of the bolls produced. [illustration: _cotton blossoms and bolls at various stages of growth_] the planter will tell you that he would be willing to stand the boll weevil, the dropped bolls, the extra cultivations, and all the remainder of it, if he could only be sure that cotton which did mature would be picked when it should be picked, and picked with rapidity and care. picking is the most laborious, as it is the most picturesque operation on the plantation. many types of machine pickers have been introduced, but there are few planters who will admit that any of them suits his particular needs. now, as a hundred years ago, the picking is done by hand. it is a simple operation, so simple that children ten years old can do it, and women excel in it. but the best pickers rarely average more than a hundred pounds a day, and most of them pull much less. careless work plays its part, too, for cotton is easily dropped from the boll and soiled or lost altogether. leaves and twigs as well as the shell of the boll frequently cling to the fiber, and are picked with it, and all these things tend to dirty and discolor it, and lessen its marketability. it requires about three pounds of cotton with the seed in it, as picked, to produce one pound of ginned or lint cotton. there were in the united states, in , a total of , ginneries, of which , were idle. each active gin produced an average of bales running bales of cotton. the number of gins shows a tendency to decrease every year, not rapidly, but surely, and this despite the opposite tendency of the crop. the whitney gin of the old days has been improved beyond the dreams of its inventor. he boasted that one man could do as much with his machine as ten men without it. today's gin averages about five bales a day--a quantity which the negro of old would find difficult to turn out in a year. to the gin then, which is located either on the plantation or in the immediate neighborhood, the mule drawn wagons, driven by negroes as a rule, bring their loads of cotton. [illustration: _gin bale and compress bale showing reduced bulk of latter_] as the downy lint, pulled from the tenacious seeds, rolls into the receiving bin of the gin, the huge compressors are put to work. the coarse jute bagging is on hand, and the steel straps spread out. the gin balers as a rule turn out a bale measuring approximately by by inches, and weighing approximately pounds including twenty pounds of bagging and straps. the cotton, in being separated from its seeds, has lost about two-thirds of its weight. but the first process in the long series that manufacturing entails has been completed, and the cotton is ready to begin its long journey to the mill. it is usually carted to the nearest railroad station, and from there shipped to the compressing point. the small farmer almost always gets his money for the cotton as it leaves the gin. his interest in it, therefore, is ended when the buyer there pays him the current price. the cotton is a market commodity from that time forth. the compress is a large and powerful hydraulic press, whose function is to force the loosely packed gin bale into a density that will make its handling by the railroads, ships, and warehouses more easy and economical. the compresses are frequently owned by the railroads. gin bales and compress bales before being compressed, the bales are sorted according to grade, and are then compressed into a smaller sized bale, measuring approximately by by inches, with a density of from twenty-eight to thirty pounds a square foot. it is this bale which is handled from that time forth, whether it be for export, for consumption in northern or southern mills, or whether, as sometimes happens, it is shipped from place to place as market conditions change, and the price offered makes reshipment profitable. movement for improving the bale it is encouraging to note that the war brought about, under government auspices, a very definite movement for the improvement of the bale. the proposal demands the installation of high pressure baling machines at the gin, capable of producing a bale with a density of thirty-five pounds a cubic foot. the trading unit in cotton is one hundred bales, and such a compression would mean that one hundred bales could be loaded into a single freight car, and shipped directly to the export point or warehouse. the present practice requires three cars to carry the ginnery bales to the compressor, and two cars to carry the compressed bales to the port, warehouse, or mill. the saving in freight and handling is obvious. it needs only a glance at the photograph of the two bales side by side to see the possible saving in waste and "city crop," or tare. the obstacles in the way of such an improvement are those which face any revolutionary change in commercial methods. established practice, invested capital, and the natural conservatism of human nature militate against quick improvement. chapter viii in the cotton mill the manufacture of cotton cloth may be divided into five departments: . preparatory processes: opening, carding, combing, and drawing. . spinning. . spooling, warping, sizing, slashing, entering or drawing-in. . weaving. . converting and finishing, including bleaching, mercerizing, dying, printing, and finishing. before the cotton fiber can be spun into the yarn from which the cloth is woven, the bales must be broken open, the impurities removed, and the fibers arranged so that they are parallel and contain no bunches or tangles. care in these processes has become more and more necessary and important as the demand for a higher quality of cloth, possessing greater strength and evenness, has been developed. hence, some of the most elaborate, complex, and admirable machinery in the mill is that devoted to these preparatory processes. the principle involved is always that of thoroughly cleaning the material, then opening it so that every fiber shall be thoroughly separated from its fellows, and then straightening out the fibers, no matter what types of machines may be used. conveying fiber by air blast the heavy laps of cotton are first thrown directly from the bale into the breaker, and the cotton is then usually blown through large pipes from the room in which the bales are broken to the room in which the openers are located. the functions of the opener are two. the first is to clean from the cotton the dirt and bits of leaf, pod, and foreign substances, which may have clung to the fiber as it passed through the gin back on the plantation. the second is to roll the cotton into a more or less regular "lap," as it is called. the energetic opener at work as the cotton goes into the opener (see diagram on following page), dusty and dirty, it is seized by strong teeth fastened upon a large cylinder (a), revolving rapidly, and is flung by centrifugal force against an iron grid (b) time after time. sometimes there is a strong current of air blowing through the tangled mass, helping to loosen the particles. the dirt comes out through the grid and is carried away, while the lint itself, after being carried around an indefinite number of times, gradually works its way along a channel, and finally out between two large rollers (c), which compress it once more, so that it is, in effect, a sheet of batting. this sheet, or lap, is rolled up in a large roll (g), which may be two or three feet in diameter, and is then ready for the first doubling or blending process. in mills where strength and evenness of yarn are at a premium, the sheets from three or four laps may be fed through another opener, usually called a "scutcher," which breaks them all apart again, mixes up the fibers, cleans out more of the dirt, and produces a more even lap. the cotton, as it comes from the opener and the scutcher, is much cleaner and more attractive. it begins to look like the riches it contains. [illustration: _cross-section diagram of opener_] to convey the heavy opener-lap from the opener to the carding room, the more modern mills are doing away rapidly with hand-power, and carry the lap on a sort of travelling mono-rail conveyor. the fibers of the lap which comes from the opening room are by no means parallel, but lie in all directions just as they happened to come from the grid of the opener. the function of the card is to straighten them, and at the same time to remove those which are knotted or immature and of a length below that required for the yarn to be spun, and to take out practically all of the impurities which may have escaped in the opening operations. the principle of carding is one of the oldest of textile mechanical principles, and all the improvements that have been made have been in developments rather than in basic ideas. hargreaves, inventor of the jenny, and sir richard arkwright both expended their ingenuity upon it, the latter seeming to have been the first to provide a carding machine operated by other than hand-power. the basic principle involved is the straightening out of the fibers by combing or brushing them with wire brushes or cards. [illustration: _"scutchers" at work_] in the revolving flat card, which dominates the field today, there are, as a rule, three principal cylinders. the lap passes first under the smallest of the three, called the taker-in, which is covered with very fine saw-teeth all in one long strip of steel, wound and fixed spirally in the surface of the cylinder. the taker-in receives the cotton from a feed-roller (c) that turns above a smooth iron plate (d) called the feed plate. the saw-teeth comb the fibers which are imbedded, so to speak, in the lap, and deliver the loose ones to the second cylinder, which is the largest of the group. this main cylinder is covered with wire teeth all bent at exactly the same angle. the cotton clings to them, and is carried around to the top of the cylinder, where it is engaged by teeth on the revolving-flat card which are bent in the opposite direction. this "card-clothing" arranged in strip, crosswise on a travelling lattice, moves in the same direction as the cylinder but moves very slowly, and so the fibers are carded between the two sets of wire points, the short and immature fibers remaining on the card wires of the lattice and the perfect and now almost entirely parallel ones being carried over from the main cylinder to the doffer cylinder, the third of the trio. from this they are removed by an oscillating comb (f), coming off in a light, fleecy lap, which is condensed through a funnel into a soft untwisted roping, or sliver, about the diameter of a man's thumb, and is then coiled into a can, usually about inches high by inches diameter. [illustration: _view of modern motor-driven opener picker_] the conveying of the sliver (pronounced with a long or short i) into the can is in itself an exceedingly ingenious operation, although a very simple one. the device is attached directly to the card, and is called a coiler. the sliver passes into it from the funnel. the hole from which the sliver emerges is off the center of a steel plate which revolves slowly, so that the sliver, as it comes out, has an eccentric motion which causes it to fall into the can in regular coils. tangling is thus prevented, and ease of handling secured. combing necessary in spinning fine "counts" combing is necessary in the preparation of cotton for the spinning of fine "counts" or coarser yarns where great smoothness and regularity are desired. they are now quite extensively used in the united states, and it is significant of the trend of the industry here that the number is rapidly growing. the first cotton comber was invented by a frenchman of alsace named heilmann. the patent was issued in . now there are on the market other machines, both english and american, similar in principle but improved in many ways. [illustration: _revolving flat cards_] the first of these preliminary processes is that which is done by the sliver-lapper. the slivers from to cans are drawn along side-by-side, passing between three pairs of drawing rollers which will be described later. from the drawing rollers the slivers now reduced in size, pass between two pairs of calendar rollers from which they emerge, not as a sliver, of course, but once more as a lap about a foot wide. these laps are usually passed to a ribbon lapper, where six of them are placed end-to-end, and unrolled simultaneously, passed between four pairs of drawing rollers, and then superimposed, one upon the other, and, calendered once more, issued as a lap a little less than a foot wide. this process may be repeated as many times as the quality of the yarn desired may require, for each drawing process served to straighten the fibers and so to render the thread more even and capable of finer spinning. combing is exactly what its name implies. the lap is actually raked by a fine-tooth comb with needle-like teeth of steel ranging from to per inch. this involves breaking the lap again and the intricacy of the comber rests in the mechanism which it employs for joining the separated ends. [illustration: _cross-section diagram of revolving flat card_] six or eight laps go through the machine at once, and the product is combined, condensed, formed into a continuous sliver, and deposited once more into cans. the process is not a fast one at best, and the chief contribution of american inventors is in the direction of speed. each nip combs only / to / of an inch of fiber. the heilman machine made about or nips per minute. the american improvement makes to . the width of the lap in the american machine is likewise increased, and the saving in labor, therefore, is considerable. english improvements have been in the same direction, the resultant saving being almost as great. [illustration: _ribbon lappers_] though many of the processes already described might be called drawing, in a sense, insomuch as they involve a continual lengthening and straightening of the lap or sliver, yet drawing in the strictest sense has not yet begun. it may be done only once, for coarse and cheap yarn, or it may be repeated a half dozen or more times to produce the finer and more expensive products. the frame for each repetition is slightly different, but several types may be isolated. they are, in the order of their use, the drawing frame, the fly frame, or slubber, the intermediate frame, and the roving and jack frames. for fine counts the slivers from the comber, and for other grades that which comes directly from the card, are taken, then to the drawing frame. the slivers from the cans, six or eight in number, are fed through one aperture, and pass, thus combined, between several (usually four) pairs of rollers, so arranged that each succeeding pair revolves at a more rapid rate than that which preceded it. the last pair in the series revolve probably six or eight times as fast as the first pair. this combination of rollers pulls constantly on the more or less irregular slivers, rendering them always more nearly uniform in diameter and density, the thickness of one of the entering slivers serving to counterbalance the thinness of the other. the drawing frame consists usually of four or five "heads," and the sliver, after it passes through one of these "heads," is put through a second one, along with other slivers, so that the doubling and redoubling goes on constantly. there is an electric device to stop the machine when a sliver breaks, either at the back or the front of the frame. [illustration: _combers at work in a mill spinning fine counts_] from the last head of the drawing frame, the sliver passes to the fly frame or slubber, which not only continues the drawing and doubling, usually between three pairs of rollers, but through the aid of a device which gives the sliver a slight twist and winds it, for the first time, upon a spindle. this device is known as the flyer, and is, roughly, a u-shaped piece of metal, which, revolving, inverted, over the spindle, gives the thread a slight lateral twist as it coils upon the spindle. the latter also revolves, but with a diminishing motion so that the amount of twist may be kept uniform as the diameter of the coil upon the spindle increases. the sliver, now being twisted, is called a sliver no longer, but the slubbing. the slubbing is passed between the rollers in pairs, the emerging product being less in diameter than the diameter of a single slubbing. the machine combines the fourfold process of combination, attenuation, twisting and winding. there are more spindles upon this frame than upon the slubber. the last drawing frame, except for very fine yarns spun from egyptian or sea island staples, is the roving frame, similar in principle to the last two but containing still more spindles. it receives the rovings from the intermediate frame, combines two of them into one, twists them a little more, and winds them upon the spindle tubes. the jack frame is similar except that its product is finer and smoother. [illustration: _sliver lappers in a northern mill_] it is interesting to note, however, that the majority of improvements have been the fruit of the brains, not of americans, but of englishmen. copeland points out that this may be due to the english desire to save in the consumption of cotton, but that more probably it is due to the development of fine spinning in england, in which most of the machines here described are chiefly valuable; and he ventures the prediction that now that american mills have definitely gone in for the finer counts, it may be expected that engineers here will apply themselves to the improvement of this machinery. [illustration: _drawing frames, turning slivers into roving_] the "mule" versus the ring spindle spinning is the final process which turns the cotton into firm, coherent yarn, sufficiently twisted, and ready for the loom. the twist given to the thread by the previous machines has been only enough to make the fibers hold together. they are still comparatively loose and fluffy, and their tensile strength is slight. there are, in general, two types of spinning machines. the first, the mule, an english product. the second, radically different, is entirely american. it was invented in by james thorpe, and immediately found some favor, but it was not until the civil war that it was received on equal terms with the mule. today, however, it dominates in the united states, the comparative figures in being: ring spindles , , ; mule spindles , , . the disparity is growing greater every year, and the use of the ring is firmly established in other countries as well. the figures for were: _mule_ _ring_ england ( ) , , , , germany , , , , france , , , , austria , , , , italy , , , , russia , , , , the mule, by reason of the great size to which it has been developed, and the impressiveness of its large, rhythmic motion, is one of the most formidable of all cotton machines, as indeed it is one of the most complex. it received its name from the fact that, performing two principal functions--drawing and spinning--it was regarded as a hybrid, just as the mule is a hybrid cross between the horse and the donkey. in the mule (see diagram on page ), which is a long and wide machine, carrying sometimes, in new models, as many as , spindles, the drawing and twisting are not continuous but consecutive. the rovings (b) are held on a creel (a) at the back of the machine, usually in three or four tiers, or on long beams or spools. they pass from the creel, or spools, between three pairs of drawing rollers (c.) coming out of the rollers, they are fed to the spindles on the carriage which backs away from the creel and recedes somewhat faster than the rovings are unwound. this receding is the essential motion of the mule, for thus the cotton receives its final drawing. the spindles, meanwhile, are revolving rapidly, spinning the yarn. the twist goes first to the thin places where the least resistance is offered. then, as the carriage carrying the whirling spindles continues to back away, the thicker parts of the thread, being comparatively untwisted are pulled down to the average diameter and are twisted in turn. the carriage usually runs back about sixty-three inches. at the termination of its run, or stretch, the spindles increase their speed until the twisting is completed and the carriage starts on its return trip. this reverses the spindles, and the thread which has been wound upon them is unwound, the slack being taken up by one guide wire (d) while the other guides the thread to the winding point, and winds it up in the opposite direction on the cone-shaped cops on the spindles. the rollers do not feed out more roving as the carriage returns. hence, there is no slack when the round trip is completed. [illustration: _slubbers, showing the u-shaped flyers_] except for the use of drawing rollers, there is little similarity between the mule and the ring frame. the latter has no movable carriage, none of the splendid sweep of motion that makes the mule so fascinating to watch. the ring-frame is simple and business-like, and its speed is amazing. the bobbins holding the roving are placed directly over the spindles. around each of the latter is a steel ring. there are at least spindles on each machine, and all the machine rings for the spindles are fixed in a single frame. the upper edge of the ring is flanged, like a miniature railroad track, and snapped over the flange is a small but important c-shaped steel ring, called the traveler. how thread is spun on the ring spindle when the machine is in operation (see diagram on page ) each roving (h) leaving its bobbin, runs through the usual drawing rollers (g) then through a guiding wire to the ring, where it is passed through its traveler (b) which is always at the winding point on the spindle. as the spindle and the rollers revolve, the roving is fed out at a considerably slower rate than the spindle takes it up, so that there is always a tension on the thread. the whirling spindle thus pulls on the traveler, drawing it round and round on its flanged track (a). it revolves just a little more slowly than the spindle and thus the yarn receives its twist. meanwhile, the frame (c) on which the rings are fixed moves slowly up and down, so that the winding is properly regulated. it is possible to operate the spindles at a remarkable speed. so perfect are the bearings which have been evolved that the average speed is ten thousand revolutions a minute, and on fine yarns it is sometimes , to , revolutions. the speed is limited by only two factors: the first is the ability of the operator to make splicings when threads break, and the second is the tendency of the traveler to fly off when the speed is too high. the number of travelers consumed is high at best, and in a mill which has long been in operation the floor in the front of the frame is likely to be paved with the little steel rings which have fallen and been ground into the planks by the heels of the worker. [illustration: _diagram of mule_] the battle between the advocates of the ring frame and those who favor the mule is still on. for the american spinner the ring has undoubtedly many advantages. because it spins continuously, and not intermittently, it turns out about a third more yarn per operator. it is usually admitted, however, that the thread from the mule is more even in diameter. advocates of the mule say, moreover, that the thread from the mule is softer and "loftier", and that cloth woven from it has a more "clothy" feel. but others say they can produce soft yarn with the ring. in the united states, where the labor cost is a vital item, the ring-spindle has an assured place. [illustration: _mules at work_] the yarn is now a finished product. it may be sold by the spinner to the weaver or it may be woven in the mill in which it is spun. before it is ready for the loom, however, there are a number of operations which must be completed. the yarn from the ring frame, or mule, is wound in a large cop, or on a bobbin. it must be put upon spools before it can be warped. the spooler is a simple machine, but one that requires constant attendance. in the spooler, bobbins are placed upon holders or spindles, and the thread is passed over a series of guides to the spool, up above. the spool revolves at a high rate of speed, and the thread is wound evenly upon it. the operator must watch for broken threads, retie them, replace the empty bobbins by full ones and see that the empty ones are gathered up uninjured. she--the operator is usually a girl or woman--must be alert and active, and especially nimble fingered. [illustration: _"close-up" of ring spindle in american mill_] one of the most important inventions, one that was received with acclaim by the american manufacturer, and one which actually reduced his labor cost on spooling no less than ten per cent. at one clip, is a tiny little thing that is held in the palm of the hand. this is the barber knotter. when a thread breaks, the attendant places the two ends together in the machine and by the mere pressure of her thumb ties the knot much better than she could do it without the knotter. the economies which it effects extend beyond the mere spooling, for better knots mean fewer breaks in the warping process, and a better cloth at the end of weaving. the spools from the spooler are placed on a large frame, called a creel. the creels have an average capacity of about spools, and there are usually to in one tier. the threads from the spools are drawn between the dents of an adjustable reed, then under and over a series of rollers. from here they are led down to the beam, upon which they are wound. the revolving of the beam unwinds the yarn from the spools and winds it regularly and evenly upon the beam itself. there is a device for measuring the length of the warp wound, and stop motions for arresting the operation should a thread break or other accident occur. [illustration: _each operator at these spoolers has a barber knotter on her hand_] the yarn of the warp must usually be impregnated with a sizing which will smooth out and stick down its furry surface and add as well to the tensile strength so that the strain of weaving may be withstood. for this the most effective and most generally used machine is the slasher, the chief feature of which is a roller, whose lower side is immersed in the sizing solution. threads from the warp beam are run around this roller through the solution and then dried, after which it is finally wound on another beam for the loom. a considerable number of loom beams can be filled from one set of the warper beams mounted in the slasher. the lengthwise threads of a fabric are called the warp. the crosswise threads are called the weft or filling. to make cloth, the warp and weft must be interlaced with each other in a suitable manner. the operation is called weaving, the machine in which it is performed is, of course, the loom. the principal operations of weaving are as follows: . shedding, or the raising and lowering of the alternate threads of the warp, so that the weft may pass under and over them. this is done by means of the harnesses and their heddles. . picking, or placing a thread of the weft between the warp threads so raised and lowered by means of the shuttle. . beating-up, or pushing, each thread of the weft into its position close against the thread which has preceded it by means of the reed. . letting-off, or permitting the warp to unwind from the beam only just as fast as is needed by the speed of the weaving. this is accomplished by friction bands and weights on the warp beam. . taking-up, or winding upon a roller the cloth as it is manufactured. in addition to these primary operations, the loom has attachments for performing several other functions, such as stop-motions for stopping the loom when warp or filling threads break, or when the shuttle fails to cross the loom completely; temples for holding out the cloth laterally as the weaving proceeds; a mechanism--in the most modern looms--for changing the shuttles, or the cops in the shuttles, as the weft thread on the cops becomes exhausted, etc. [illustration: _diagram of ring spindle_] the modern cotton loom, which automatically removes the filling bobbins without stopping the loom, is rapidly displacing the older types, and one weaver can now attend to a surprisingly large number of looms, being greatly assisted also by the automatic warp and filling "stop motions." chapter ix the finishing operations following the manufacture of the cloth, come the operations necessary to prepare it for the market. these involve such treatments as bleaching, printing, mercerizing, dyeing, and finishing (in the narrow sense). the number of machines involved in these various processes rivals the number which are used in the actual spinning and weaving operations. modern bleaching is a highly technical science, conceived and planned by engineers, and carried out with elaborate machinery by skilled workers. gray cloth, as it comes from the loom, is of an unattractive color, a dirty grayish yellow, and contains not only those impurities which it has picked up on its journey through the mill but those inherent in its natural state as well, all totalling some five per cent. more or less, of the total weight. in addition there may be numerous bits of leaf from the boll which have clung to the fibers through all the processing, and which appear finally in the cloth as little brownish specks, known to the trade as motes. finally, there is the sizing which was put into the warp. [illustration: _warping--the creel in the rear_] bleaching an intricate chemical process in the bleaching of cotton, there is a series of operations which have for their object the elimination of the waxy, fatty matters embodied in the fiber, as well as any dirt which it may have acquired. then, there is the actual whitening and the bleaching of the cloth which destroys any coloring matter which it may contain and finally there are treatments designed to neutralize the effect of the chemicals used in the bleaching. thus, the sequence of treatments might be: first, boiling in plain water, which removes certain soluble substances; next, an extended boiling in a strong alkaline solution, which saponifies the waxy, fatty matters in the fiber, and thus removes them from the cloth or yarn. third, a steeping in a bleaching solution--a solution of chloride of lime being largely employed for this purpose, and which treatment is known as the chemic. next, after another thorough washing there is a treatment in diluted sulphuric acid to neutralize the effects of the chemic, and finally this is followed again by another thorough washing with possibly an additional mild alkaline treatment. the nature and the method of all these treatments varies considerably, and depends upon the character of the goods being treated, but, at the conclusion, if all has gone well, the cloth should be a good white and should not be impaired in strength. singeing necessary in some finishes for a certain class of goods, where a clean, smooth surface is required, it is desirable to singe the goods before the bleaching. this is accomplished by passing the cloth, stretched out at full width, very rapidly over heated plates, or through gas flames, so that the fine hairs or fuzz are singed off, but the fabric itself has not had time to take fire. both sides may be singed and the goods may be passed more than once through the flame. when yarns are singed, the threads are passed through the flame very rapidly, being unwound from one set of bobbins and wound up on another. [illustration: _front view of an automatic loom_] in the dyeing operation the cotton piece goods pass through a series of machines, the goods being in rope form as already explained, so that a number of pieces can be put into each machine, side by side. the wash boxes, dye vats, etc. are equipped with overhead rollers, by means of which the goods, which have been sewn end to end, so as to make a continuous string of them, pass out of the dye, over the roller and down into the bath on the other side, continuing to circulate around thus until the desired results have been obtained. in addition to the preparatory washing and boiling, mordanting and dyeing, there are subsequent washings to free the goods from loose coloring matter, and other special treatments are frequently accorded them. finishing in its special and restricted sense, implies a series of treatments, such as stretching, starching, dampening, drying, pressing, smoothing, lustreing, glazing, stiffening, softening, and whatnot, which are given to them according to the use to which they are to be put. the printing press is constructed with a large main cylinder (d), the size being dictated by the number of colors which it must take care of. as the printing operation is a continuous one, there must be a continuous feeding of the cloth, a continuous inking of the engraved rollers (c), and a continuous cleaning off of the unengraved surface after the inking. under each roller, where it is fixed in its place in the press, is a long copper trough or pan carrying the coloring material, and in the pan under the roller, and extending into the coloring matter, is an intermediate roller known as the "furnisher" roller, and, as the press revolves, this covers the surface of the copper roller with a heavy film of coloring. the surplus coloring is scraped off as the roller revolves, by a long, sharp blade or knife, known as "the doctor," and after the roller passes this it is quite clean, no coloring remaining on it except that in the engraved portion. each roller has its color pan with its own color in it. then, as the cloth (a) passes between the main cylinder, properly covered by suitable intervening materials and the series of rollers, each roller in turn prints its own color, and, collectively, the finished pattern is produced. [illustration: _diagram of cloth printing machine_] the goods then pass into a drying room and are afterwards introduced into a steaming chamber, where they are given a good steaming at a slight pressure. this steaming develops the colors and causes them to impregnate the fibers more thoroughly. subsequently, for good work, the goods should be washed to get rid of the thickening matters that are mixed with the coloring, and then the printing appears in all its beauty. printing on full ground colors the foregoing briefly describes the processes of direct printing. in this case, the penetration of the colors to the opposite side of the goods is not very good. if a solid and full ground color is needed both on the face and back of the goods, it can be had either by the "resist" or "reserve" method, or by the "extract" or "discharge" method. in the "resist" method, when a white figure is wanted on a black or colored ground, the goods are first printed with some substance which will resist the action of the dye stuffs. then, when the goods are dyed, the treated part does not take the color and the substance used as a resist is washed out, and thus a white figure is obtained on a solid colored ground. in the "discharge" method, the goods are first dyed in a solid color, and are then treated with certain chemicals which destroy the dyed color wherever they touch the fabric, these chemicals being subsequently washed out where they have been applied, and thus again a white figure can be had in the colored ground. by the "discharge" method, moreover, colored figures can also be printed on colored grounds, as certain colorings have been developed which are not affected by the discharge materials used, hence, a whole series of beautiful colors can be printed on goods previously dyed with black or colored grounds, each color being mixed with a suitable chemical for discharging the ground color, and thus the colors of the printed pattern come out as desired. another important process which is applied to both cotton yarn and cotton fabrics is that known as mercerization, called after "mercer" an english chemist who introduced the process. cotton when subjected to the action of strong, caustic alkali contracts violently, but when again stretched and straightened it is found to have acquired a distinct silkiness of appearance, and under the microscope the twisted ribbon-like fibers of the material--already referred to--will be found to have become straight, glossy and rodlike, just as a bicycle tire would appear after air was blown into it. cotton may be mercerized either in the yarn, warp, skein, or in the piece, the first being more effective. the best and most satisfactory results are achieved when the material treated is made of fine long staple cotton, either sea island or egyptian, the shorter cottons being relatively much less improved by the treatment. the mercerizing does not diminish the strength of the material, and gives to it a greater affinity for dye stuffs. internal organization of cotton mills the foremen are specialists in their particular departments. the warehouseman, at one end, is a judge of cotton stock, and the foreman of the weaving room at the other knows how many automatic looms may safely be trusted to each weaver on his staff. in between these two there are, according to the individual mill, a dozen or more other foremen, all reporting regularly to the superintendent, all captains of their own companies of workers, and all keen, in the interests of their own reputations, to operate their departments as intelligently, as efficiently, and with as little friction with their individual operators as possible. for it is generally recognized throughout the cotton industry that profitable business depends as much upon the whole-hearted cooperation of the wage-earners, as upon any other single factor. the question of individual efficiency as for the operators themselves, they are so varied, there are so many problems which they have to face, and such difficulties which those who employ and direct them have to solve, that anything like adequate consideration is impossible. from the impersonal viewpoint, leaving out of account the human elements, the problems of wages, and the correlated problem of trade organization, there remains the question of individual efficiency. it is that which we have chiefly to consider. [illustration: _inspecting finished cloth_] the number of men, women, and children employed in the cotton mills of the country has increased at a very high rate, but there has been an interesting diminution in the proportionate percentage of women and children under sixteen years of age employed. the united states census of manufacturers gives the following figures: average number of employes in american cotton mills _men_ _women_ _children_ _total_ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , in percentages these figures express themselves as follows: _men_ _women_ _children_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the question of nationality has had an important bearing upon the development of the industry in the united states. the constant influx into the country of successive waves of immigration from the different countries of europe has often served in a decade to change the whole complexion of the labor question. in the original new england mills, the employees were of almost pure english stock. the sons and daughters of the yankee farmers entered the mills, not as a permanent occupation, but merely as a means of getting a start in life. just before the civil war, the irish began to come rapidly, and the actual advent of that struggle saw a great number of the remaining natives leaving for the army, or thrown out of work. when the fighting was over they did not return, but the irish came in even greater numbers. the next decade saw the arrival of the french canadians in the new england states, and there also came, in quick succession, natives of italy, and of the various states of eastern europe. [illustration: _baled cloth being put aboard waiting freight cars_] this change in the national complexion had two very important results. it brought into the country a constant stream of cheap labor, polyglot, and lacking in homogeneity, and consequently slow at first to unionize and strike. this characteristic brought another in its train--a lack of stability, and a proneness to transiency. the second result was hardly less important. it meant that though labor was relatively plentiful, much of it was unskilled. this lack of skill put a premium upon quantity production, and led to efforts to develop automatic machinery and labor-saving devices of all kinds. it compelled most american manufacturers to specialize upon the coarser kinds of yarns and cloths, made in simple weaves and patterns, in the making of which the minimum amount of skilled labor was required. native stock in southern mills conditions in the south were somewhat different. from the beginning, the employes here have been almost entirely of native stock. they came from a class which previously had little opportunity for any employment of a regular character outside of farming. when the mills were built these folks were given, for the first time, an opportunity for continuous employment. whole families entered the mills, fathers, mothers and children serving in different or in the same departments. the south at first specialized on ducks, twills, denims, and such coarse work. now, however, there is a growing tendency to diversify the product. the reason is found in the increasing capability of the workers, many of whom have by now spent many years of their lives in the mills, and whose fathers before them were operatives. unless present conditions change and the south becomes the mecca of immigrants--a development probably less likely now than in the years before the war--there seems to be a strong possibility that a class of operatives, rivalling eventually in skill those of the english mill towns, will be developed. the stock is the same, and the latent capabilities are all there. the determining factors will probably be the economic changes of the next few years. a remaining factor in the organization of the mill is the size of the individual plant, the number of spindles and looms it contains, the number of workers employed, etc. it is in just this particular that some of the most characteristic developments of the american industry are found. about the time of the civil war, the average new england mill had less than ten thousand spindles. today the average is probably between fifty and one hundred thousand, and perhaps nearer the latter figure than the former. some of the mills have nearly, if not quite, a full million spindles in several buildings. the average in the south is much less than the new england average. the industry in the older section is definitely localized, even to the extent of having whole towns devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture of single grades of cloth. in the south the mills are more widely scattered, advantage having been taken of labor supply, water power, and other conditions. local pride has sometimes caused the establishment of mills in regions economically unfitted for them. such mills do not long survive. the advantage of large scale production has thus been seized chiefly by the new england mills, but the generally lower wages of the south have tended to equalize the situation. [illustration: _original whitney cotton gin, preserved in smithsonian institute in washington_] generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) about sugar buying for jobbers _how you can lessen business risks by trading in refined sugar futures_ _by_ b. w. dyer a booklet for jobbers who sell sugar _lamborn & company_ sugar headquarters front street · new york copyright, lamborn & company about sugar buying jobbers who have had considerable experience in exchange operations will find in this booklet a simplified and non-technical description of activities with which they may be in general familiar. we believe, however, that the inauguration of trading in refined sugar futures on the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc., throws open a new realm of opportunity. we have attempted to outline briefly the chief advantages to be gained by a jobber's use of this new market, assuming that those who have in the past dealt in raw sugar as a protection for their refined sugar needs will welcome suggestions as to the benefits to be derived from trading directly in refined sugar. time, the croupier of business like a croupier at a vast roulette table, time presides over the realm of business. time is the tap-root of most business uncertainties. no one can tell what will happen a year, a month, a day, a minute from now--the future may bring floods and wars, pestilence and drouth; or it may bring great crops and fair weather, happiness and prosperity. as business has become more and more complicated, the time element has become larger and larger. the time element as we know it does not exist in simple barter--a man weaves a piece of cloth and exchanges it for a bushel of corn: time is of no account in the transaction. a small jobber located in the same territory as refiners buys a small amount of sugar today and distributes it to his trade the next--time is negligible. a large jobber, buying perhaps for several branch houses, or located at points which necessitate a delay of two or three weeks in transit, may find it necessary even on a declining market to purchase a considerable amount of sugar, and, as a result, weeks may go by before his sugar arrives and is sold--time is vitally important. time is an element in costs and prices, because over any extended period of time many things may happen to influence costs and prices. all business planning must deal with time. to the unenlightened business man, time is a bugaboo--a gambler whose cards are stacked and against whom there is no defense. such a man conducts his business from hand to mouth, in constant fear. he is a fatalist, taking his profits and losses as if they were gifts or blows of fortune. the enlightened man works with time as an impartial, exacting, inevitable power for his own good or ill. he shapes his actions and enlists the services of time to prevent catastrophe on the one hand, and to enforce prosperity and happiness on the other. storms may come, but so far as his mind may control it, he is "the master of his fate." cost and selling prices that the element of time is important in the jobber's business no one will deny. he does not base his selling price on cost, but rather on the market price. regardless of his cost, he must sell to meet competition. it is equally obvious that the larger his business, or the greater his distance from the source of supplies, the more important part time plays in both his cost and selling prices. all jobbers, large or small, are obliged to assume greater risks (even proportionately) and exercise greater care, than, for instance, retailers buying in small quantities. a jobber's business may enlarge by a perfectly natural process of expansion, but his purchasing risks increase in greater ratio than his business expands. similarly, under abnormal conditions, jobbers located at points requiring several weeks in transit prior to delivery, must assume greater risks than those located at the source of supply. in the event of serious delays in deliveries or in shipments, even buyers located at shipping points are confronted with this problem, and the difficulties of those located at a distance are increased immeasurably. these difficulties tend to accentuate the importance of time in modern business. as business grows, instead of decreasing--risks increase. any machinery which might operate to eliminate or reduce this uncertainty or speculative element in a jobber's business, would, we believe, be welcomed. exchanges provide just such machinery. other commodities, such as raw sugar, wheat, cotton, pork and coffee have had this machinery for years and it was provided for refined sugar on may , , when trading in refined sugar futures was inaugurated on the floor of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc. where buyers and sellers of sugar meet the sugar exchange is a market place, where buyers and sellers of sugar or their representatives meet to trade. the exchange provides a concentration point, where, under any market conditions, sugar may be bought or sold _at a price_. what that price is, is determined by how much sugar is for sale and how many people want it. if the supply is large and buyers are few, the price will be low. if sugar is scarce and buyers are numerous, the price will be high. or, to put it in another way, when there are more sellers than buyers, the market declines; when more buyers than sellers, it advances. if the supply and the number of buyers are normally well balanced, the price will be determined largely by the cost of production and transportation. if events or circumstances operate to increase or curtail either the sugar supply or the number of buyers, and such events or circumstances follow one after the other alternately, the price will fluctuate. these are the results of the operation of well-known economic laws. in the case of all commodities which cannot be bought or sold at a common market place (or exchange), price fluctuations are usually wide and frequent, because no large group ever has common knowledge of supply, demand and other factors that govern prices--purchases and sales are made direct between individuals, and knowledge of the amount asked or paid is restricted to a limited few. through the common market place provided by an exchange, on the other hand, market conditions and prices become common knowledge almost instantly over the entire country. this tends toward stabilization--a fact which, alone, helps to eliminate risks, and enables merchants to buy at lower prices than if forced to deal direct with one another. sellers do not have to take such long chances and can thus afford to sell on a smaller margin of profit. competition is stimulated and freed from many of its complications and uncertainties to the advantage of the seller, the buyer and the public. it is now admitted that, had exchange trading in refined sugar existed in , a general use of the exchange by all branches of the trade might have prevented, to a considerable extent, the abnormal advance in sugar prices of that period, with the hardship and misfortune that attended. the fact that an exchange always provides a buyer and a seller, _at a price_, tends toward keeping business fluid. jobbers are able to protect their future requirements. producers are sure of a market for their crops. crop financing is made easier because bankers are more willing to loan on crops sold in advance--an operation made possible by an exchange. exchanges operate to take the gamble out of business. they help to put and maintain business on a sound basis. that some people who have no real interest in the commodity use the exchange speculatively does not alter this fact. in providing machinery by which speculative risks incident to a jobber's business may be shifted from the jobber to those who make a business of assuming such risks, exchanges help to stabilize his business and to remove a large part of the destructive uncertainty with which he would otherwise have to contend. exchanges are the creations of modern economic development, designed and operated for the benefit of the commerce, industry and people of the civilized world. therefore we welcome trading in refined sugar futures and the opportunity to offer you the advantages that may be derived from a conservative, intelligent use of its services. the exchange provides certain quality standards and other regulations to safeguard your interests. but your real assurance of protection lies in the _character_ and reliability of your broker. if your broker is not strong financially you do not have back of your contract the responsibility that you might otherwise have. if you had a favorable contract with a broker who became insolvent, you would have no means of forcing the fulfillment of the contract, and no way of securing the profit which was due you. the thing to do, of course, is to choose a broker who is so strong financially that you incur no danger in this respect whatsoever. use the exchange when the market is favorably out of line in considering the illustrative examples in this booklet, it should be borne in mind that the measure of protection afforded is relative and not absolute. the theory of exchange operations is that the exchange market will move relatively the same as the market for the actual commodity. this cannot be strictly true, although the exchange market must of necessity follow very closely the actual market, because all the sugar must, in the final analysis, come from the actual market. if thrown out of parity with the actual market, the exchange market is bound to come back eventually. in the exchange market anyone can buy and anyone can sell. the market is subject to many outside influences, and the fluctuations reflect and accentuate the varying shades of market opinions of many individuals. but in the market for the actual commodity, the quotations are made by comparatively few men, which means that there will be less fluctuation. therefore, it is obvious that although the exchange market _should_ be on a parity with the actual market, the unequal fluctuations of the two markets will be constantly throwing them out of parity or "out of line." there are times when the market will be so out of line that the _buying_ of futures should result profitably. at other times, with conditions reversed, _selling_ of futures seems obviously advisable. we do not claim that jobbers can protect sugar purchases with absolute and exact precision. on the basis of long exchange experience, we _do_ believe, however, that by a discreet use of the exchange, and by using the market when quotations are _favorably_ out of line, jobbers can do so to their decided advantage. selling of futures--hedging as the word itself indicates, a "hedge" on the exchange is a protection. you hedge by buying or owning actual sugar, and "selling short" in the same amount. you sell sugar futures although you do not own any. you actually contract to deliver an amount of sugar during a specified future month at a specified price. eventually, you must either buy and deliver actual sugar to carry out this contract, or you must buy another contract for futures to cancel your short sale. this is known as a "covering" operation, and the cancelling of one by the other takes place automatically through the channels of the exchange. from the jobber's point of view, the operation of hedging has three outstanding purposes. he may hedge: . to eliminate the probability of speculative profit or loss, due to market fluctuations. . to protect a profit on a favorable purchase of actual sugar. . to establish and limit a loss on an unfavorable purchase of actual sugar. hedging _to protect a normal jobbing profit by eliminating the probability of a speculative loss or gain_. this operation is particularly useful to jobbers with whom conditions are such that they desire to be assured that their cost will be at about the market price at the time they dispose of their sugar, regardless of whether the market be higher or lower. although there are times when any jobber, no matter where located, will find this a useful transaction, it is obvious that many buyers will not wish to use the market in this way unless they feel it will decline. but it is particularly of advantage to a jobber located in markets necessitating a delay of from one day to several weeks in transit. for instance, on a certain day in april, two jobbers bought their usual quantity of sugar. one was located in syracuse, the other in new york. two days following the purchase, the market broke half a cent per pound. in view of the fact that his sugars were still in transit when the market declined, the syracuse buyer was obliged to sustain this entire loss, in order to meet competition. on the other hand, because he received and distributed the sugar before the market broke, the new york jobber was able not only to avoid a loss, but make his regular profit. chart ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- hedging to protect a normal jobbing profit by eliminating the probability of a speculative loss or gain ------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------+--------- initial | | transactions| subsequent transactions | result ------------+-----------+---------------+-----+-------+-----------+--------- |liquidating| condition |price| result| figure | in each | the hedge | of market | you | of | your | case |(covering) | when you |would| hedge | sugar | the | | "cover" | pay | cost | cost | same | | your hedge | in | this | this | | | |cover| way | way | | | |-ing | | | ------------+-----------+---------------+-----+-------+-----------+--------- you buy | when you | | |profit |actual cost| actual sugar| sell your |it has declined| | |less profit| at . | sugar (or |to . | . | . | - = | | when it is| | | | | | delivered)| | | | | | you buy | | | | |you get | the same | | | | |your | amount of | | | | |sugar | futures at| | | | |at the | the market| | | | |market | price, | | | | |price | whether | | | | |at the | higher or | | | | |time | lower. | | | | |when you | | | | | |sell it | | | | | |(or when at the same | | | | |actual cost|your time you | |it has advanced| |loss |plus loss |delivery hedge by | |to . | . | . | + = |is made.) selling the | | | | | | same amount | | | |no | | of futures | |it stands at | |profit,|actual | at . | | . | . |no loss|cost | ------------+-----------+---------------+-----+-------+-----------+--------- naturally the greater the amount of sugar any one concern may have in transit the greater the need for protection. we call this kind of transaction particularly to the attention of buyers having branch houses who find themselves obliged to make relatively large purchases to supply their trade in the face of a market in which they have no confidence. these disadvantages at which out-of-town buyers are sometimes placed might be overcome by using the exchange. on the other hand, when refiners are badly behind on deliveries, even buyers located at the source of supply will find themselves facing a similar problem the solution of which may be found in a use of the exchange. it is therefore evident that the selling of futures may be a transaction the _sole_ purpose of which is to eliminate speculation from a jobber's business. regardless of how careful a buyer may be, there is an element of _speculation in each purchase of actual sugar_. if the price goes up, there is a speculative gain--the sugar is worth more. but if the price goes down, the buyer sustains a speculative loss. the measure of protection afforded by the exchange will appeal to those jobbers who wish to reduce the speculative element in their business. in the example immediately following, as in all others, we have not taken into consideration the difference between the exchange quotations and the seaboard refiners' quotations, which is explained on page . this would simply inject an unnecessary complication, and would be of no particular advantage for purposes of illustration. suppose you should buy through your broker from a refiner, for prompt shipment, an amount of _actual_ sugar at . , which you plan to sell within a short time after its receipt. instead of worrying about subsequent sugar price fluctuations, you simultaneously hedge this purchase by _selling_ futures in the same amount on the exchange. the price at which you buy actual sugar and the price at which you sell futures should be relatively the same, since exchange prices generally reflect refiners' prices. you should be able to figure the cost of your sugar at about the market price at the time it is received or sold. (see chart .) if the price of sugar should go down to . at about the time when you sell it, your actual sugar, for which you contracted to pay . , would be worth only . ; but you would then buy to cover your futures sale, making . on this transaction, which, subtracted from the price you paid ( . ), brings the cost down to the market price of . . in other words, you have accomplished your purpose of being able to figure your sugar cost at the market price at the time when you received it (or at the time you sell it). that is, although every pound of actual sugar was sold at a loss, this loss was balanced by the profit from your hedge. if, on the other hand, the market should advance to . after your original purchase and hedge at . , the value of your actual sugar would be increased by . . you would then buy futures at . to cover your short sale at . , netting a loss thereby of . . this loss would be added to your original cost of . , making your actual sugar cost . , which is the market price at the time. had you omitted the hedge, your sugar would have cost you only . , but, in this example we are assuming that you would sell only when you were willing to figure your sugar cost at the market price. this you have accomplished by foregoing the speculative profit you _might_ have made in favor of your normal jobbing profit. if the market should remain relatively stable you would buy to cover your hedge at approximately the same price as you sold for, your gain or loss being practically nothing. in other words, you would obtain sugar at the market price, which is the purpose in this kind of a hedge. hedging _to protect a gain on a favorable purchase of actual sugar_. all sugar buyers have had the experience of buying actual sugar, only to see it advance or decline before they have disposed of it. how to protect the gain, or minimize the loss, is described in the two hedging positions which we now discuss. suppose you have bought sugar, have _not_ hedged against it, and have seen it advance. finally you have said, "i think sugar is about as high as it is going. i am going to sell against that to protect that profit." on the other hand, the reverse might be the case. you might find the market going down, and say, "the market is going lower. i want to hedge against that, and limit my loss to a definite amount." chart ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- hedging to protect a gain on a favorable purchase of actual sugar --------------+-----------------------------------------+----------+-------- initial | | transactions | subsequent transactions | result --------------+--------+----------+---------+-----------+----------+-------- | hedge |condition |price you| result of | figure | in | |of market | pay for | hedge and | actual | each | | when you | futures | covering | sugar | case | | "cover" | to cover| operation | cost | the | |your hedge| hedge | | this way | same --------------+--------+----------+---------+-----------+----------+--------- you buy actual| | | | |price paid| sugar at . ,| | | | |for actual| but before you| |it has | | |sugar less|your have received | |declined | | |hedging |sugar it (or before | |to | |a profit |profit |cost you sell it) | | . | . |of . | - = . |is the price | | | | | | . advances to | | | | | |under . | | | | |price paid|the | | | | |for actual|market you now have |you sell|it has | | |sugar plus| your sugar at |futures |advanced | | |hedging | . under the|at |to | |a loss |loss | market | . | . | . |of . | + = . | | | | | | | you feel that | |it stands | |no profit, | | the market may| |at . | . |no loss | . | recede and | | | | | | eliminate | | | | | | this gain, | | | | | | so-- | | | | | | --------------+--------+----------+---------+-----------+----------+-------- in both of these cases, the operation is relative. if a man has a profit, let us say ¢ a pound, and he hedges, he maintains his profit of ¢ a pound as compared with the market at the time of delivery, or at the time when he expects to sell this sugar, regardless of whether the market is higher or lower. in the same way, conversely, if he has a loss on his sugar of ¢ a pound, by hedging he can limit that loss to ¢ a pound, even though the market goes still lower. in other words, his sugar cost at the time of delivery, or at the time when he expects to sell the sugar, will be about ¢ above the market price, whether the market is higher or lower. we shall assume that you have bought from a refiner through your broker a supply of actual sugar at . . while your sugar is in transit or before it has been shipped by refiners, the market advances to . , at which point it apparently is steady. you now have a _theoretical_ gain of . --that is, if you were to sell your sugar at once, you would have an _actual_ profit of . ; but you do not sell because your sugar is in transit or you need it for your trade. however, you do want to preserve and protect this favorable position of having your sugar . below the market at the time you want to sell it. so you sell the same quantity of futures on the exchange at . . three things may occur--the market may decline, or it may continue to advance, or it may remain steady. you have accomplished your purpose in any case (see chart ). by the time you sell your sugar (or at the time of its delivery) it becomes necessary for you to cover your hedge and if the market has declined from . (at which point you hedged) and stands at . again, your hedging operations considered alone would net you an actual profit of . . your original sugar cost was . . your profit on your hedge was . , so that you would figure your actual sugar cost at . . you would have accomplished your purpose of getting your sugar . under the market at the time of selling it (or at the time of its delivery). that is, your delay in selling your sugar has cost you practically nothing, even though the market has declined. if the market has advanced to . , when it becomes necessary for you to cover your hedge (at the time of selling your sugar or when it is delivered) your hedging operations considered alone would net you a _loss_ of . . you would buy in futures at . , which you sold at . . your original sugar cost was . , your loss on your hedge was . , so that you would figure your actual sugar cost at . . but the market at that time was . , so that you have accomplished your purpose of getting your sugar . under the market at the time of selling it (or at the time of delivery). in other words, you would make the same profit as though you had re-sold your sugar to second-hands originally, instead of hedging, but had you followed this course, you might not have had sugar in stock for your regular trade. on the other hand, when it becomes necessary for you to cover your hedge, if the market has remained steady and is again at . , the two futures transactions cancel themselves without profit or loss. your original cost of . , therefore, stands as your actual sugar cost at the time of selling (or at the time of delivery). this is . under the market and you have accomplished your purpose. hedging _to establish and limit a loss on an unfavorable purchase_. this operation is identical in its working with the previous example, except that you have a different end in view. chart -------------------------------------------------------------------------- hedging to establish and limit a loss on an unfavorable purchase ------------+--------+---------------+-------+----------+----------+------- initial | | transactions| subsequent transactions | result ------------+--------+---------------+-------+----------+----------+------- | hedge | condition of | price | result | figure | in | | market when | you | of | actual | each | | you "cover" | pay | hedge | sugar | case | | your hedge | for | and | cost | the | | |futures| covering | this | same | | | to | operation| way | | | | cover | | | | | | hedge | | | ------------+--------+---------------+-------+----------+----------+------- you buy | | | | |price paid| actual sugar| | | | |for actual| at . but | | | | |sugar less| before you | | | | |hedging | have | |it has declined| | a profit |profit | received it | |to . | . | of . | - = . | (or before | | | | | | you sell it)| | | | | | the price | | | | | | declines to | | | | | | . | | | | | | | | | | | | you now have| | | | |price paid|your your sugar | | | | |for actual|sugar at . | | | | |sugar plus|cost is above the |you sell| | | |hedging | . market |futures |it has advanced| |a loss of |loss |above |at . |to . | . | . | + = . |the | | | | | |market you feel | |it stands at | |no profit,| | that the | | . | . |no loss | . | market may | | | | | | decline | | | | | | still | | | | | | further and | | | | | | increase | | | | | | this loss, | | | | | | so-- | | | | | | ------------+--------+---------------+-------+----------+----------+------- let us say that you purchase actual sugar at . . if the market declines to . after your original purchase at . , you have a _loss_ of . , in the value of your sugar. facing the possibility of a further decline and desiring to _limit_ this loss to . , you hedge by selling futures. in this case you should limit your _loss_ to . just as effectively as in the previous example you preserved your _gain_ of . , and by the same course of procedure. (see chart .) by the time it is necessary for you to cover your hedge by buying an equivalent amount of futures, the market may have declined still further, say to . . you sold at . , you bought at . , profit on that operation, . . subtract this profit from your original cost ( . ) and figure your sugar cost at . . in other words, although the market went still lower, you succeeded in limiting your loss to . , as compared with the market price at the time of the delivery of your sugar (or at the time you sell it). had you omitted the hedge, your actual sugar cost would have been . , which was . above the market. after your original purchase at . , and market decline to . (at which point you hedged), the market might advance again to . , or remain steady at . , but the operation is no different from that previously described, and you in each case attain the same result. buying of sugar futures refiners do not make a practice of taking orders more than thirty days in advance of actual delivery--but there are obviously times when it is advisable to cover one's requirements for a longer period. a jobber may do this on the exchange where he will always find a seller at _some_ price for the quantity he desires. this privilege is particularly valuable to: . jobbers who believe that the market price of sugar is going higher and who desire to cover their future requirements beyond the delay period which refiners will extend. . jobbers, who desire to sell to manufacturing customers for future delivery at a fixed price so that these manufacturing customers may determine their selling price, may do so by the use of the exchange. _ . buying of sugar futures--based upon the expectation of higher prices_ no doubt many jobbers will recall occasions when anticipating their requirements seemed obviously advisable, perhaps almost imperative. such a jobber would be one who believed in the market. his action would be based on his opinion of the market. he might note in january, let us say, that the price of may or july futures is favorable. he would like to get his may or july sugar at about that figure. you yourself probably can recollect many times in the past, when the general market was in such a strong position fundamentally that anticipating your requirements seemed advisable. you decided to buy a considerable quantity only to find that refiners would not sell you to the extent that you wished to purchase. when covering your future requirements on the exchange, you can buy any quantity desired. consider also on how many occasions when you wanted and _needed_ a definite future month of shipment, you have been told that "_as soon as possible_" was the only acceptable basis. or have you had the experience of placing an order and waiting twenty-four or thirty-six hours without knowing if the refiner would accept your order? meanwhile the market might have advanced, and, if your order had been declined, you would have had to pay an even higher price for your sugar. the facilities of the exchange offer opportunities for protecting requirements _quickly_ and without the uncertainty and delay sometimes encountered from refiners. a jobber must anticipate the market in order to take full advantage of it, and in this connection it should be borne in mind that the sugar exchange, as in the case of practically all exchanges, usually anticipates either favorable or unfavorable developments in the market for the actual commodity. consequently, prompt action is necessary when either a higher or lower market is expected, as the exchange market will usually be the first to reflect changing conditions. suppose you feel that the price of sugar is low and probably going higher. you try to anticipate your requirements for some time to come, but find that refiners will not sell for more than thirty days. you can go on the exchange and buy futures in the quantity and month desired. assume then, that you pay . for your futures. now, whatever happens in the sugar market, you know you can get the quantity of sugar desired at about . (see chart ). the market will advance, decline or hold steady. say the market advances. when it seems advisable to close out your exchange contract and buy actual sugar, the price may have gone up to . . you will then sell your futures at about . , go into the market and buy actual sugar at the same price, assuming, of course, that the actual market has advanced in relative proportion--which is likely. although actual sugar has cost you . more than you had figured, you have made . on your futures. profit and loss cancel each other. your sugar cost is . . on the other hand, suppose the market declines after you have bought futures at . , and goes down to . , when it seems advisable to close out your exchange contract. you sell your futures at . , a loss of . . but you will also buy your actual sugar at . , which is . lower than you had planned. your actual sugar cost was therefore . , which is the price you had figured was favorable. if the price still is at . when you desire to liquidate, you would sell your futures and buy your actual sugar at about the same price. thus you have neither gained nor lost, but you have been sure of getting sugar at . , which is the price you felt was low. the time to buy actual sugar is generally when the market becomes strong and an advance in the price of the actual commodity seems imminent; but the time to buy sugar futures is before the strength develops. the future market invariably discounts declines and anticipates advances. _ . buying of sugar futures to protect profits on advance sales to customers_ while it may not be an established custom, we know numerous instances where jobbers have sold sugars in small quantities for future delivery. the examples to which we refer are small manufacturers buying sugar locally, who, when the market appears in a strong condition desire to be assured of their regular supply of sugar at a specified price. under such conditions we have known jobbers to sell them sugar for delivery over several months. if at any time you are placed in a similar position, and desire to take care of your customers in this manner, without incurring too great a risk, the exchange offers exceptional opportunities for protection, as, of course, you would be able to buy sugar for delivery in any month you desire, even as far in advance as one year. it is clear that if you sell at a specified price for delivery at a certain time, your only protection is your belief that you'll be able to buy sugar cheaply enough to make a profit. chart ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- buying sugar futures . based on the expectation of higher prices. . to establish costs, pre-determine selling prices and protect profits on advance sales. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- initial | | | transactions | subsequent transactions |sugar cost | result -------------+------+----------+--------+-------+------+------------+------- | |condition | price |result |price | figure it | in | |of market | you | of | you | this way |each | | when you | would |selling| pay | |case | |buy actual| obtain | your | for | |the | | sugar |for your|futures|actual| |same | | |futures | |sugar | | -------------+------+----------+--------+-------+------+------------+------- | | | | | |price paid |your | | | | | |for actual |sugar | | | |a | |sugar less |cost is you buy sugar|when |if it has | |profit | |hedging | . futures at |you |advanced | |of | |profit |as pre- . to cover|buy |to . | . | . | . | - = |deter- future |actual| | | | | |mined requirements;|sugar,| | |a | |price paid | fix your |you |if it has | |loss | |for actual | price and |sell |declined | |of | |sugar plus | take orders |your |to | | | |hedging loss| on the basis |fu- | . | . | . | . | + = | of ¢ sugar |tures | | | | | | | |if it is | |no | | | | |still at | |profit,| | | | | . | . |no loss| . | . | -------------+------+----------+--------+-------+------+------------+------- it is equally clear that if a manufacturer names a price and takes advance orders without pre-determining his sugar cost, his profit is a matter of guesswork. he is not going to know the cost of his manufactured product until he buys his sugar. assume that you have contracted to deliver sugar to a manufacturer or to any customer at a definite date and a specified price, without buying sugar to cover your requirements. if the price of sugar is favorable when you deliver it, you are fortunate and net a profit. but sugar may have advanced to a point where you are forced to pay such a price that your profit is lower than it should be. in fact there may not be any profit at all. by conservative, wise use of the sugar exchange, most of this risk and uncertainty can be eliminated and both you and your customer can go ahead with your plans with your prices determined through a known sugar cost. suppose that in march or april, for example, the market appears strong and you find that some of your manufacturing customers are anxious to be assured of an adequate supply of sugar at a definite price. in such a case, if these advance orders called for a sufficient volume, and provided exchange prices were favorable, you could take care of your trade's future requirements at a fixed price, without yourself taking a speculative position. we also believe that buyers making these arrangements with any of their trade would be justified in requesting the same proportionate marginal protection which it is necessary for jobbers themselves to give the seller on the exchange. there will no doubt be many occasions when it would be worth while to solicit orders on this basis. with your own sugar cost fixed by the use of the exchange, you could take proper care of these buyers without worrying about subsequent fluctuations of the market, as you would know that your sugar cost would be about the price paid for your futures which, let us say, is . . (see chart .) the market may advance so that by september, sugar is selling at . . (you are now making deliveries to your trade as contracted). so you sell your futures at . , go into the market and buy actual sugar for about the same figure, assuming, of course, that actual sugar has also advanced in relative proportion, which is likely. you pay . more for your actual sugar than you had figured but you have profited to the extent of . on the sale of futures. profit and loss cancel each other and you have your sugar at . . in other words, although the market is now . you are delivering . sugar to your customers, with a profit to yourself. if the market declines after your original purchase at . so that in september sugar is selling at . , you will sell your futures at . , taking a loss of . . but you will buy your actual sugar at about . , also, which is . lower than you planned for. this gain of . , while not to be termed an actual profit, may certainly be considered as canceling the loss on the sale of your futures, so that the cost of your sugar is really . , your original price. another way of looking at this is to add the loss of . on the sale of your futures to . , the cost of your actual sugar, making . , the price upon which you had based your plans. if you had waited, you would have been able to get your sugar for . , but by buying it ahead you have had the benefits of protection and the elimination of speculation and risk. if the market remains steady after your june purchase, or after various fluctuations, returns to . by september, you sell your futures at . and buy spot sugar for about the same amount. thus you have neither gained nor lost, but you have been protected in your sugar cost. this is essentially a "playing-safe" operation. it results in profit insurance for the jobber who is willing to sacrifice the possibility of a speculative gain on advance sales to customers. it is thoroughly sound business policy and is neither expensive nor difficult to carry out. point of delivery although chicago is the delivery point in all exchange contracts for refined sugar, it should be plainly understood that the exchange is for anyone, anywhere. whether located in chicago, or in rochester, baltimore, new york or even san francisco, a jobber can advantageously use the exchange. deliveries of refined sugar futures will be made only from the exchange-licensed warehouses in chicago. but, regardless of the prospective buyer's location, the delivery point is not of any material importance as it is an established fact that in operations on all exchanges the percentage of actual deliveries taken is exceptionally small. in fact, the examples used in this booklet are all based on the supposition that the buyer may find it more convenient _not_ to take delivery. the usual procedure followed in sugar exchange operations is for the buyer to close out his exchange transaction prior to the period calling for delivery and purchasing actual sugar from the refiners, executing both transactions practically simultaneously. possibly the most important problem in connection with the organization of any commodity exchange is to reduce the possibility of corners, however remote, to the smallest possible degree. in the case under discussion, the chicago delivery point, by virtue of its accessibility for producers and consumers from all parts of the country, operates to that end. practically every refiner of cane sugars in the east and west, as well as the southern refiners, carries large stocks in chicago, and its favorable location in connection with the beet sugar industry also makes it highly desirable. its situation in regard to the offerings of the louisiana producers is also an additional protection and advantage of considerable importance. the exchange-licensed warehouses in chicago are under the direct and constant supervision of exchange representatives. facilities are provided for testing and grading sugar so as to maintain exchange quality standards. when are refiners' prices and exchange quotations in line? since exchange quotations for refined sugar futures are net cash ex-exchange-licensed warehouse, chicago, while refiners' quotations are f.o.b. refinery, less % for cash, it is obvious that there must be a difference between refiners' prices and exchange quotations. it is equally obvious that the differential should approximate the freight rate between chicago and the seaboard, where the refiners are located, with allowance also for the cash discount. when the markets are in line such is the case. conversely, when the differential is higher or lower, the markets are out of line. therefore, in order to tell whether the markets are out of line, or to what extent, it is necessary to determine on a differential to represent the normal difference between the two markets. there is no one figure, however, that will satisfy all conditions at all times, for the reason that there are various freight rates between the seaboard and chicago. it is inaccurate, for instance, to use ¢ as the basis for the normal differential. the ¢ rate is one rate--the all-rail freight rate from new york to chicago. other important routes and rates are as follows: routing: freight rate: new orleans--chicago (barge and rail) $ . [ ] new york--chicago (rail and lake) . new orleans--chicago (all rail) . philadelphia--chicago (all rail) . new york--chicago (all rail) . savannah--chicago (all rail) . boston--chicago (all rail) . [ ] the cheapest routing ( ¢) takes about two weeks' more time in transit than the new york all-rail routing ( ¢). interest charges on finances involved, etc., for this extra period will bring the expense of this routing to approximately ¢. after a study of the amounts of sugar shipped over these various routes we have arrived at an arbitrary figure to represent the normal differential between refiners' prices and exchange quotations. we believe that ¢ will serve as a safe basis for calculation, but ¢ or ¢ might be equally--or more--accurate. in fact, anyone is entitled to an opinion. ¢ is our opinion. it is not an average of freight rates, but is an arbitrary figure. when the markets are in line, using ¢ as a basis for calculation, % should be deducted from refiners' prices, and ¢ added to determine what exchange quotation should be. conversely, ¢ should be deducted from exchange quotations and % added to determine what refiners' prices should be. if you are willing to accept ¢ as a safe figure, you may find the following chart useful in determining the condition of the market: are refiners' prices and exchange quotations in line? based on a ¢ differential and % cash discount when exchange refiners' quotations prices are should be ¢ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (this chart works both ways. that is, when the exchange quotation is given, if the markets are in line the refiners' prices should be as shown in the first column.) it should be borne in mind that the above calculations are based upon a normal difference in price of ¢ per hundred pounds between beet and cane sugars, which is the ruling difference as quoted in the exchange contract. should beet refiners elect to sell at greater discounts than points under cane refiners' seaboard prices, the amount in excess of points would have to be subtracted from our arbitrary figure of ¢. the function of the sugar broker if you should organize your company so that it could attend to all the details of sugar buying economically, you would probably still profit from the assistance of a sugar broker whose specialty is sugar buying, whose horizon is a sugar horizon, whose thoughts are sugar thoughts and who must necessarily know more about sugar than the average buyer would ever consider it desirable to know. the sugar broker's service to you is unaffected by prices--his prices and all other brokers' prices are the exchange prices; his commissions are based on the same percentages as all other brokers' commissions. his only distinction can come from the actual service he can render. this service may be good or poor, depending upon whether his experience, his organization, his information and his judgment are good or poor. if, added to his knowledge of sugar, he also possesses a broad knowledge of economic fundamentals and a perspective upon and contact with world activities as they affect all phases of the business of sugar, his service will be many times more valuable than if he were limited by a small organization, by a definite locality or by experience in only a few phases of this business. a sugar broker who merely _accepts and transacts orders_ is giving no service worth the name. to give service in accordance with the highest modern standards, he must stand as an adviser, as a constant seeker after opportunities which will benefit his clients, as a partner whose interest in his clients' profits and progress equals his interest in his own. our experience has convinced us that the client secures the greatest amount of protection in filling his sugar needs when one broker handles all sugar transactions. these exchange operations should be carried out when the market is out of line in your favor. you need the best kind of advice, based on an intimate knowledge of your business. a single brokerage house becomes thoroughly acquainted with the client's business and personnel, with the result that the two organizations work in harmony virtually as partners, confusion and misunderstandings are avoided, quicker and more advantageous transactions are made possible. the choice of that broker should be a matter of great care, for in addition to the willingness to serve, he must have the facilities and the financial stability. for, bear in mind that the broker with whom you deal is the responsible party for the fulfillment of the contract. your contract is as good only as the reliability of your broker. lamborn & company has become known throughout this country and abroad as an institution for the service of all those who have a business interest in sugar. lamborn sugar service is rendered through our head office at front street, new york, and through branch offices in philadelphia, chicago, savannah, new orleans, kansas city, mo. and san francisco. lamborn service in all its phases is available to you as a jobber. we shall be very glad to explain either in person or by letter what a brokerage relationship with us involves, how it may be accomplished and how transactions may be carried out. lamborn & company _sugar headquarters_ front street: new york wall street: new york (securities) havana and cienfuegos, cuba paris, france the lamborn company lamborn & cie _branches in the united states_ philadelphia savannah new orleans chicago kansas city san francisco _members of_: new york coffee & sugar exchange, inc. new york stock exchange new york cotton exchange new york produce exchange chicago board of trade london produce clearing house, ltd. cable address: lamborn contract between members of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc. the standard fine granulated sugar contract is as follows: sold for ... to ... bags (of lbs. net each) of standard fine granulated sugar at ... cents per pound, manufactured in the united states or insular possessions, packed in cotton-lined burlap bags, deliverable from licensed warehouse in chicago between the first and last days of ... inclusive. delivery within such time to be at seller's option, upon seven, eight or nine days' notice to the buyer. if domestic beet standard fine granulated sugar be delivered in fulfillment of this contract, seller to make an allowance of ¢ per lbs. the seller shall have the right to deliver foreign cane standard fine granulated sugar in fulfillment of this contract by making an allowance to the buyer of ¢ per lbs., and foreign beet standard fine granulated sugar by making an allowance of ¢ per lbs., provided such sugars comply with the types adopted as standard by the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc., and all duties have been paid thereon. this contract is subject to an adjustment for duty, as provided in the sugar trade rules. either party to have the right to call for margins as the variations of the market for like deliveries may warrant, which margins shall be kept good. this contract is made in view of and in full accordance with the by-laws, rules and conditions established by the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc. (written across the face is the following) for and in consideration of one dollar to ... in hand paid, receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged ... accept this contract with all its stipulations and conditions. brokers' commissions the broker's commission for either buying or selling each contract of bags of sugar depends upon the price at which the transaction is executed. the following table gives a range of prices and the corresponding commissions: for the sale or purchase of each lot of bags: _contract price_ _commission_[ ] up to . ¢, per pound $ . ¢ to . ¢, " " . ¢ to . ¢, " " . ¢ and above, " " . [ ] these commissions apply to transactions in the united states, porto rico and cuba, from non-members of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc. minimum trading basis a "lot" of refined sugar consists of bags of lbs. each, or , lbs. this is the minimum amount which can be sold on the exchange. delivery the date upon which sugar shall be delivered on an exchange contract is at the option of the seller, provided that date come within the month named in the contract. notice of the date of delivery must be given to the buyer seven, eight or nine days preceding the day on which delivery will be made. if you are not going to fill your actual sugar needs by accepting delivery from the exchange warehouses, you should close out your contracts within two weeks, or, at the latest, ten days of the first of the month in which delivery is specified, as after notification of delivery has been given, there is usually not sufficient time to make other plans. orders except in nearby localities, orders should be sent by wire, addressed to: sugar futures department, front street, new york, n.y. inquiries or orders will be given prompt attention at any of our offices, but time will be saved and execution facilitated if they are sent direct to new york. unless otherwise specified, orders are good only for the day on which they are received. if they cannot be executed at the price named before the closing of the exchange on that day, or if they should arrive after the exchange closes, it will be understood that they are automatically cancelled unless specific instructions are given for the execution the following day or unless formally renewed by wire. if you desire to place an order, good until countermanded, you can do so. the general term applied to such orders is "order good till cancelled." the general abbreviation in the trade is g.t.c. exchange trading hours hours for trading on the exchange are from : a.m. to : p.m., except on saturdays. saturday hours are from : a.m. to : a.m. delivery and warehousing charges if you make delivery on the exchange, the following are your charges: storage ¢ per lb. bag handling in and out, charged with first month's storage ¢ per lb. bag negotiable warehouse receipt ¢ if you accept delivery on the exchange, your charges are: carloading - / ¢ per lb. bag acceptance of your order the form of our acceptance of your order reads as follows: in accordance with your instructions we have this day made the following transactions in standard fine granulated sugar for your account and risk, subject in all respects, and in accordance with, the rules, by-laws, regulations and customs of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc., and the rules, regulations and requirements of its board of directors, and all amendments that may be made thereto. all transactions made by us for your account contemplate the actual receipt and delivery of the sugar and payment therefor. the right is reserved to close transactions when margins are exhausted or nearly so, without notice. +=================================================+ |bags of refined sugar | month of delivery| price | |----------------------+------------------+-------| | bought | sold | | | |----------+-----------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |__________|___________|__________________|_______| raw sugar futures prior to the inauguration of trading in refined futures, raw sugar futures were used by many jobbers for hedging and protecting their refined requirements. the theory of operation is that the raw price will be about equivalent to the refined price after duty and the charge for refining are added. while the raw sugar market will at times get out of line with refined, both favorably and unfavorably, this cannot continue for any long period. when the raw futures market is favorably out of line, it may be more to your advantage to use this market, rather than the refined futures market. at the present time there is the added advantage that the volume of trading is greater in raw than in refined. when buying or selling raw sugar futures, you may figure that the variation on a minimum lot of tons would be equivalent to the same variation of bags or barrels. we give you below herewith details of contract and trading conditions: all contracts for future delivery shall be for tons of , pounds each and multiples thereof. contracts: sold for ... to ..., tons of , pounds each of sugar in bags, deliverable from licensed warehouse in the port of new york, between the first and last days of ... inclusive. the delivery within such time to be at seller's option, upon , or days' notice to the buyer. the sugar to be of any grade or grades of raw sugars based on cuban centrifugal of degrees average polarization outturn at the price of ... cents per pound in bond, net cash with additions or deductions for other grades according to the rates of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc., existing upon the afternoon of the day previous to the date of notice of delivery, and shall embrace all centrifugals first running. the foreign sugars deliverable other than cuban centrifugals, are: centrifugals from british west indies, demerara, surinam, san domingo, brazil, peru, java, mauritius, venezuela and haiti, all basis of degrees average polarization outturn at . cents per pound (difference in duty) less; but no lot of tons is to consist of sugar from more than one country of origin. allowances on centrifugal sugars to be . cents per pound per degree above degrees, up to degrees and . cents per pound per degree below degrees, down to degrees and . cents per pound per degree below degrees, down to degrees, with fractional degrees pro rata. exchange trading hours hours for trading in raw sugar futures are from : a.m. to : p.m. on week days and from : a.m. to : a.m. on saturdays. trading differences a fluctuation of ¢ per pounds is equivalent to $ . per lot of tons. margins an original margin in new york funds must accompany all orders, we reserving the right to call for variation margins when contract shows depreciation. we also reserve the right to close transactions when margins are exhausted or nearly so without further notice. the amount of this original margin will of necessity fluctuate with conditions existing at the time orders are placed. at the present time in localities that are in position to make prompt remittance for any variation margins required, the margin is $ . commissions for either buying or selling each contract of tons based upon a price below cents $ . cents to . . cents to . . cents to . . cents and above . note: all orders for raw sugar futures shall be in accordance with the by-laws and rules of the new york coffee and sugar exchange, inc. and the new york coffee and sugar clearing association, inc. file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university.) the negro farmer by carl kelsey a thesis submitted to the university of pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of ph. d. printed and on sale by jennings & pye chicago price fifty cents table of contents chapter page i. introduction ii. geographic location iii. economic heritage iv. present situation virginia sea coast central district alluvial region v. social environment vi. the outlook vii. agricultural training population maps =old-time negroes.= chapter i. introduction. in the last three hundred years there have been many questions of general interest before the american people. it is doubtful, however, if there is another problem, which is as warmly debated to-day as ever and whose solution is yet so uncertain, as that of the negro. in the second decade of the seventeenth century protests were being filed against black slavery, but the system was continued for nearly years. the discussion grew more and more bitter, and to participation in it ignorance, then as now, was no bar. the north had less and less direct contact with the negro. the religious hostility to human bondage was strengthened by the steadily increasing difference in economic development which resulted in the creation of sectional prejudices and jealousies. the north held the negro to be greatly wronged, and accounts of his pitiable condition and of the many individual cases of ill treatment fanned the flames of wrath. the reports of travelers, however, had little influence compared with the religious sentiments which felt outraged by the existence of bond servitude in the land. through all the years there was little attempt to scientifically study the character of the problem or the nature of the subject. a mistaken economic sentiment in the south and a strong moral sentiment at the north rendered such studies unnecessary, if not impossible. the south, perceiving the benefits of slavery, was blind to its fundamental weaknesses, and the north, unacquainted with negro character, held to the natural equality of all men. thus slavery itself became a barrier to the getting of an adequate knowledge of the needs of the slave. the feeling grew that if the shackles of slavery were broken, the negro would at once be as other men. the economic differences finally led to the war. it is not to be forgotten that slavery itself was not the cause of the war, nor was there any thought on the part of the union leaders to make the blacks citizens. that this was done later was a glowing tribute to their ignorance of the real demands of the situation. the republican party of to-day shows no indication of repeating this mistake in the newly acquired islands. i would not be understood as opposing suffrage of the blacks, but any thoughtful observer must agree that as a race they were not prepared for popular government at the time of their liberation. the folly of the measures adopted none can fail to see who will read the history of south carolina or mississippi during what is called "reconstruction." immediately after the war, new sources of information regarding the negro were afforded the north. the leaders of the carpet-bag regime, playing political games, circulated glowing reports of the progress of the ex-slaves. a second class of persons, the teachers, went south, and back came rose-colored accounts. it might seem that the teacher could best judge of the capacity of a people. the trouble is that in the schools they saw the best specimens of the race, at the impressionable period of their lives, and under abnormal conditions. there is in the school an atmosphere about the child which stimulates his desire to advance, but a relapse often comes when ordinary home conditions are renewed. moreover, it is well known that the children of all primitive races are very quick and apt up to a certain period in their lives, excelling often children of civilized peoples, but that this disappears when maturity is reached. hence, the average teacher, not coming in close contact with the mass of the people under normal surroundings, gives, although sincerely, a very misleading picture of actual conditions. a third class of informants were the tourists, and their ability to get at the heart of the situation is obvious. there remain to be mentioned the negro teachers and school entrepreneurs. naturally these have presented such facts as they thought would serve to open the purses of their hearers. some have been honest, many more unintentionally dishonest, and others deliberately deceitful. the relative size of these classes it is unnecessary to attempt to ascertain. they have talked and sung their way into the hearts of the hearers as does the pitiful beggar on the street. the donor sees that evidently something is needed, and gives with little, if any, careful investigation as to the real needs of the case. the result of it all has been that the testimony of those who knew far more than was possible for any outsider, the southern whites, has gone unheeded, not to say that it has been spurned as hostile and valueless. the blame, of course, is not always on one side, and as will be shown later, there are many southern whites who have as little to do with the negro, and consequently know as little about him, as the average new yorker. this situation has been most unfortunate for all concerned. it should not be forgotten that the question of the progress of the negro has far more direct meaning for the southerner, and that he is far more deeply interested in it than is his northern brother, the popular impression to the contrary notwithstanding. it is unnecessary to seek explanations, but it is a pleasure to recognize that there are many indications that a better day is coming, and indications now point to a hearty co-operation in educational efforts. there are many reasons for the change, and perhaps the greatest of these is summed up in "industrial training." the north is slowly learning that the negro is not a dark-skinned yankee, and that thousands of generations in africa have produced a being very different from him whose ancestors lived an equal time in europe. in a word, we now see that slavery does not account for all the differences between the blacks and whites, and that their origins lie farther back. our acquaintance with the ancestors of the negro is meager. we do not even know how many of the numerous african tribes are represented in our midst. a good deal of semitic blood had already been infused into the more northern tribes. what influence did this have and how many descendants of these tribes are there in america? tribal distinctions have been hopelessly lost in this country, and the blending has gone on so continuously that perhaps there would be little practical benefit if the stocks could be determined to-day. it is, however, a curious commentary on the turn discussions of the question have taken, that not until did any one find it advisable to publish a comprehensive study of the african environment and to trace its influence on subsequent development. yet this is one of the fundamental preliminaries to any real knowledge of the subject. in close connection with the preceding is the question of the mulatto. besides the blending of african stocks there has been a good deal of intermixture of white blood. we do not even know how many full blooded africans there are in america, nor does the last census seek to ascertain. mulattoes have almost entirely been the offspring of white fathers and black mothers, and probably most of the fathers have been boys and young men. without attempting a discussion of this subject, whose results ethnologists cannot yet tell, it is certain that a half breed is not a full blood, a mulatto is not a negro, in spite of the social classification to the contrary. the general belief is that the mulatto is superior, either for good or bad, to the pure negro. the visitor to the south cannot fail to be struck with the fact that with rare exceptions the colored men in places of responsibility, in education or in business, are evidently not pure negroes. even in slavery times, the mulattoes were preferred for certain positions, such as overseers, the blacks as field hands. attention is called to this merely to show our ignorance of an important point. some may claim that it is a matter of no consequence. this i cannot admit. to me it seems of some significance to know whether mulattoes (and other crosses) form more than their relative percentage of the graduates of the higher schools; whether they are succeeding in business better than the blacks; whether town life is proving particularly attractive to them; whether they have greater or less moral and physical stamina, than the blacks. the lack of definite knowledge should at least stop the prevalent practice of taking the progress of a band of mulattoes and attempting to estimate that of the negroes thereby. it may be that some day the mulatto will entirely supplant the black, but there is no immediate probability of this. until we know the facts, our prophecies are but wild guesses. it should be remembered that a crossing of white and black may show itself in the yellow negro or the changed head and features, either, or both, as the case may be. a dark skin is, therefore, no sure indication of purity and blood.[ ] it is often taken for granted that the negro has practically equal opportunities in the various parts of the south, and that a fairly uniform rate of progress may be expected. this assumption rests on an ignorance of the geographical location of the mass of blacks. it will be shown that they are living in several distinct agricultural zones in which success must be sought according to local possibilities. development always depends upon the environment, and we should expect, therefore, unequal progress for the negroes. even the highest fruits of civilization fail if the bases of life are suddenly changed. the congregational church has not flourished among the negroes as have some other denominations, in spite of its great activity in educational work. the american mode of government is being greatly modified to make it fit conditions in porto rico. the manufacturers of pennsylvania and the farmers of iowa do not agree as to the articles on which duties should be levied, and it is a question if the two have the same interpretation of the principle of protection. different environments produce different types. so it will be in the case of the negro. if we are to understand the conditions on which his progress depends, we must pay some attention to economic geography. that this will result in a recognition of the need for shaping plans and methods according to local needs is obvious. the present thesis does not pretend to be a completed study, much less an attempt to solve the negro problem. it is written in the hope of calling attention to some of the results of this geographic location as illustrated in the situation of the negro farmer in various parts of the south. the attempt is made to describe the situation of the average man. it is fully recognized that there are numbers of exceptions among the negroes as well as among the white school teachers, referred to above. that there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. that there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that i agree with the late dr. j. l. m. curry in stating that: "i have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism of the man who doubts the capacity of the negro for improvement or usefulness." chapter ii. geographic location. the great appalachian system, running parallel to the atlantic coast, and ending in northern alabama, forms the geological axis of the southern states. bordering the mountains proper is a broad belt of hills known as the piedmont or metamorphic region, marked by granite and other crystalline rocks, and having an elevation decreasing from , to feet. the soil varies according to the underlying rocks, but is thin and washes badly, if carelessly tilled. the oaks, hickories and other hardwoods, form the forests. in virginia this section meets the lower and flatter country known as tide-water virginia. in the southern part of this state we come to the pine hills, which follow the piedmont and stretch, interrupted only by the alluvial lands of the mississippi, to central texas. the pine hills seldom touch the piedmont directly, but are separated by a narrow belt of sand hills, which run from north carolina to alabama, then swing northward around the coal measures and spread out in tennessee and kentucky. this region, in general of poor soils, marks the falls of the rivers and the head of navigation. how important this is may easily be seen by noticing the location of the cities in georgia, for instance, and remembering that the country was settled before the day of railroads. in alabama the black prairie is interposed between the pine hills and the sand hills, and this prairie swings northward into mississippi. the pine hills give way to the more level pine flats, which slope with a gradient of a few feet a mile to the ocean or the gulf, which usually has a narrow alluvial border. going west from alabama we cross the oak and hickory lands of central mississippi, which are separated from the alluvial district by the cane hills and yellow loam table lands. beyond the bottom lands of the mississippi (and red river) we come to the oak lands of missouri, arkansas and texas which stretch to the black prairies of texas, which, bordering the red lands of arkansas, run southwest finally, merging in the coast prairies near austin. in the northern part of arkansas we come to the foothills of the ozarks. these different regions are shown by the dotted lines on the population maps. the soils of these various regions having never been subjected to a glacial epoch, are very diverse, and it would be a thankless task to attempt any detailed classification on the basis of fertility. the soils of the atlantic side being largely from the crystalline rocks and containing therefore much silica, are reputed less fertile than the gulf soils. the alluvial lands of the mississippi and other rivers are beyond question the richest of all. shaler says: "the delta districts of the mississippi and its tributaries and similar alluvial lands which occupy broad fields near the lower portion of other streams flowing into the gulf have proved the most enduringly fertile areas of the country." next to these probably stand the black prairies. in all states there is more or less alluvial land along the streams, and this soil is always the best. it is the first land brought into cultivation when the country is settled, and remains most constantly in use. each district has its own advantages and its own difficulties. in the metamorphic regions, the trouble comes in the attempt to keep the soil on the hills, while in the flat lands the problem is to get proper drainage. in the present situation of the negro farmer the adaptability of the soil to cotton is the chief consideration. the first slaves were landed at jamestown, virginia, in . the importation was continued in spite of many protests, and the practice soon came into favor. almost without interruption, in spite of various prohibitions, the slave traffic lasted right up to the very outbreak of the war, most of the later cargoes being landed along the gulf coast. slavery proved profitable at the south; not so at the north, where it was soon abandoned. it was by no means, however, equally profitable in all parts of the south, and as time went on this fact became more noticeable. thus at the outbreak of the war, kentucky and virginia were largely employed in selling slaves to the large plantations further south. few new slaves had been imported into virginia in the last one hundred years. the center of slavery thus moved southwest because of changing economic conditions, not because of any inherent opposition to the system. this gradual weeding out of the slaves in virginia may very possibly account for the general esteem in which virginia negroes have been held. to indicate the character of those sold south, bracket[ ] gives a quotation from a baltimore paper of which advertised some good negroes to be "exchanged for servants suitable for the south with bad characters." to trace the development of the slave-holding districts is not germain to the present study, interesting as it is in itself. it may be worth while to trace the progress in one state. in georgia, in , the blacks outnumbered the whites in the seacoast counties, excepting camden, and were also in the majority in richmond. in they also outnumbered the whites along the savannah river and were reaching westward as far as jones county. in , besides the coast and the river, they were in a majority in a narrow belt crossing the state from lincoln to harris counties. by they had swung southward in the western part of the state and were in possession of most of the counties south of troup, while the map of shows that they have added to this territory. in other parts of the state they have never been greatly in evidence. the influence of the rivers is again evident when we notice that they moved up to the head of navigation, then swung westward. as slavery developed, it was accompanied by a great extension of cotton growing, or, perhaps, it were truer to say that the gradual rise of cotton planting made possible the increased use of slaves. the center of the cotton industry had reached the middle of alabama by , was near jackson, mississippi, in , and has since moved slowly westward. the most prosperous district of the south in was probably the alluvial lands of the mississippi. this gives us the key to the westward trend of slavery. let it be remembered, too, that the system of slavery demands an abundance of new lands to take the place of those worn out by the short-sighted cultivation adopted. thus in the south little attention was paid to rotation of crops or to fertilizers. as long as the new land was abundant, it was not considered, and probably was not profitable to keep up the old. the result was that "the wild and reckless system of extensive cultivation practiced prior to the war had impoverished the land of every cotton-producing state east of the mississippi river." as cotton became less and less profitable in the east the opening up of the newer and richer lands in the west put the eastern planter in a more and more precarious situation. had cotton fallen to anything like its present price in the years immediately preceding the war, his lot would have been far worse. another influence should be noted. slavery tended to drive out of a community those who opposed the system, and also the poor whites, non-slave holders. the planters sought to buy out or expel this latter class, because of the temptation they were under to incite the slaves to steal corn and cotton and sell it to them at a low price. there was also trouble in many other ways. there was thus a tendency to separate the mass of the blacks from the majority of the whites. that this segregation actually arose a map of the proportionate populations for alabama in shows. it may be claimed that there were other reasons for this separation, such as climatic conditions, etc. this may be partially true, but it evidently cannot be the principal reason, for we find the whites in the majority in many of the lowest and theoretically most unhealthful regions, as in the pine flats. this is the situation to-day also. the influence of the rivers in determining the settlement of the country has been mentioned. nowhere was this more the case than in the alluvial lands of the mississippi, the so-called "delta." this country was low and flat, subject to overflows of the river. the early settlements were directly on the banks of the navigable streams, because this only was accessible, and because the land immediately bordering the streams is higher than the back land. levees were at once started to control the rivers, but not until the railroads penetrated the country in was there any development of the back land. even to-day most of this is still wild. the war brought numerous changes, but it is only in place here to consider those affecting the location of the people. the mobility of labor is one of the great changes. instead of a fixed labor force we now have to deal with a body relatively free to go and come. the immediate result is that a stream of emigration sets in from the border states to the cities of the north, where there was great opportunity for servants and all sorts of casual labor. the following table shows the number of negroes in various northern cities in and also in : . . washington , , baltimore , , philadelphia , , new york , , st. louis , , chicago , coincident with the movement to the more distant towns came a development of southern cities. city life has been very attractive to negroes here also, as the following table indicates: . . new orleans , , atlanta , , richmond , , charleston , , savannah , , montgomery , , birmingham ... , other cities show the same gains. as a rule, the negro has been the common laborer in the cities and in the trades does not seem to hold the same relative position he had in . in recent years there has been quite a development of small tradesmen among them. a comparison of the two tables shows that washington and baltimore have more negroes than new orleans; that st. louis has more than atlanta and richmond, while new york and philadelphia contain double the number of savannah and charleston. this emigration to the north has had great effect upon many districts of the south. it seems also to be certain that the negroes have not maintained themselves in the northern cities, and that the population has been kept up by constant immigration. what this has meant we may see when we find that in the negroes were in the majority in five counties in maryland, in two in ; in in virginia in , in in ; in north carolina in in , in in . the map on page shows the movement of the negro population in virginia between and . the shaded counties, in number, have lost in actual population (negro). the total actual decrease in these counties was over , . even in the towns there has been a loss, for in the twelve towns of over , population contained , negroes. in only , . the only section in which there has been a heavy increase is the seacoast from norfolk and newport news to the north and including richmond. a city like roanoke also makes its presence felt. when we remember that the negroes in virginia number over , , and that the total increase in the decade was only , , a heavy emigration becomes clear. =virginia, - . movement of negro population. shaded counties show decrease. white counties indicate increase. figures show extent of change.= as a common laborer also the negro has borne his part in the development of the economical resources of the south. he has built the railroads and levees; has hewn lumber in the forests; has dug phosphate rock on the coast and coal in the interior. wherever there has been a development of labor industry calling for unskilled labor he has found a place. all these have combined to turn him from the farm, his original american home. the changing agricultural conditions which have had a similar influence will be discussed later. having thus briefly reviewed the influences which have had part in determining his general habitat we are ready to examine more closely his present location. the maps of the negro population will show this for the different states. a word regarding these maps. they are drawn on the same scale, and the shading represents the same things for the different states. the density map should always be compared with the proportionate map to get a correct view of the actual situation. if this is not done, confused ideas will result. on the density maps if a county has a much heavier shading than surrounding ones, a city is probably the explanation. the reverse may be true on the proportionate maps where the lighter shading may indicate the presence of numbers of whites in some city, as in montgomery county, alabama, or charleston county, south carolina. beginning with virginia, we find almost no negroes in the western mountain districts, but their numbers increase as we approach the coast and their center is in the southeast. the heavy district in north carolina adjoins that in virginia, diminishing in the southern part of the state. entering south carolina we discover a much heavier population, both actually and relatively. geographical foundations unfortunately (for our purpose) do not follow county lines. it is very likely, however, that could we get at the actual location of the people, we should find that they had their influence. evidently the sand 'hills have some significance, for the density map shows a lighter negro population. so does the pine flats district, although in this state the negroes are in the majority in the region, having been long settled in the race districts. in no other state do the blacks outnumber the whites in the pine flats. in georgia the northern part is in possession of the whites, as are the pine flats. the negroes hold the center and the coast. in florida the negroes are in the pine hills. in alabama they center in the pine hills and black prairie. in mississippi, arkansas and louisiana they are in the alluvial regions, and in texas they find their heaviest seat near houston. outside of the city counties we do not find a population of over negroes to the square mile until south carolina is reached, and the heaviest settlement is in the black prairie of alabama and the alluvial region of mississippi, and part of louisiana. in tennessee they are found along the river and in the red lands of the center, while in kentucky they are chiefly located in the limestone district. summarizing their location, we may say that they start in the east-central portion of virginia and follow the line of the pine hills to alabama, only slightly encroaching upon the metamorphic district, and except in south carolina, on the pine flats. they occupy the black prairie of alabama and mississippi, and the lands of the river states with a smaller population in the oak hills of texas, the red lands of tennessee and some of the limestone district of kentucky. it is worth while to examine one state more in detail and alabama has been selected as being typical. the negro proportion in the state in was . per cent, and in was . per cent. an examination of a proportionate map for would show that the slave owners found two parts of the state favorable to them. the first is along the tennessee river in the north, and the second, the black prairie of the center. of these the latter was by far the seat of the heavier population. it has already been suggested that this was probably the best land in the slave states, save the alluvial bottoms. both districts were accessible by water. the tombigbee and alabama rivers reached all parts of the prairie, the tennessee forming the natural outlet of the north. by referring now to the map of , it is evident that some changes have taken place. the prairie country, the "black belt," is still in the possession of the negroes, and their percentage is larger, having increased from to . the population per square mile is also heavier. dallas, sumter and lowndes counties had a negro population of . per square mile in , and . in . in the northern district an opposite condition exists. in the region embracing the counties of lauderdale, limestone, franklin, colbert, lawrence and morgan had a colored population forming . per cent of the total. in the negroes were but per cent of the total. the district contains some , square miles, and had in a negro population of to the square mile; in , . . of this increase of . per mile, about one-half is found to be in the four towns of the district whose population is over , each. the smaller villages would probably account for most of the balance, so it seems safe to say that the farming population has scarcely increased in the last forty years. meantime the whites in the district have increased from per square mile to . . the census shows that between and six counties of north alabama lost in the actual negro population, and two others were stationary, while in the black belt the whites decreased in four counties and were stationary in two. it will be seen that the negroes have gained in jefferson (birmingham) and talladega counties. the opportunities for unskilled labor account largely for this, and talladega is also a good cotton county. in winston and cullman counties there are practically no negroes, the census showing but in the two. in they formed per cent of the total in winston and percent in blount, which at that time included cullman. the explanation of their disappearance is found in the fact that since the war these counties have been settled by germans from about cincinnati, and the negroes have found it convenient to move. roughly speaking, the poor land of the sand hills separates the white farmers from the colored. from to the negroes lost relatively in the metamorphic and sand hills, were about stationary in the prairie, from which they have overflowed and gained in the oak hills, and more heavily in the pine hills. this statement is based on an examination of five or six counties, lying almost wholly within each of the districts, and which, so far as known, were not affected by the development of any special industry. the period is too short to do more than indicate that the separation of the two races seems to be still going on. a similar separation exists in mississippi, where the negroes hold the black prairie and the delta, the whites the hill country of the center. it is evident that there is a segregation of the whites and blacks, and that there are forces which tend to perpetuate and increase this. it is interesting to note that whereas in slavery the cabins were grouped in the "quarters," in close proximity to the "big house" of the master, they are now scattered about the plantation so that even here there is less contact. in the cities this separation is evident the blacks occupy definite districts, while the social separation is complete. it seems that in all matters outside of business relations the whites have less and less to do with the blacks. if this division is to continue, we may well ask what is its significance for the future. this geographical segregation evidently had causes which were largely economic. probably the most potent factor to-day in perpetuating it is social, i. e., race antagonism. the whites do not like to settle in a region where they are to compete with the negro on the farms as ordinary field hands. moreover, the negroes retain their old-time scorn of such whites and despise them. the result is friction. mr. a. h. stone cites a case in point. he is speaking of a negro serving a sentence for attempted rape: "i was anxious to know how, if at all, he accounted for his crime, but he was reluctant to discuss it. finally he said to me: 'you don't understand--things over here are so different. i hired to an old man over there by the year. he had only about forty acres of land, and he and his old folks did all their own work--cooking, washing and everything. i was the only outside hand he had. his daughter worked right alongside of me in the field every day for three or four months. finally, one day, when no one else was round, hell got into me, and i tried to rape her. but you folks over there can't understand--things are so different. over here a nigger is a nigger, and a white man is a white man, and it's the same with the women.' ... her only crime was a poverty which compelled her to do work which, in the estimation of the negro, was reserved as the natural portion of his own race, and the doing of which destroyed the relation which otherwise constituted a barrier to his brutality."[ ] mr. stone has touched upon one of the most delicate questions in the relationship of the races. it would be out of place to discuss it here, but attention must be called to the fact that there is the least of such trouble in the districts where the negro forms the largest percentage of the population. i would not be so foolish as to say that assaults upon white women _may_ not take place anywhere, but as a matter of fact they seem to occur chiefly in those regions where white and black meet as competitors for ordinary labor. beaufort county, south carolina, has a black population forming about per cent of the total, yet i was told last summer that but one case of rape had been known in the county, and that took place on the back edge of the county where there are fewest negroes, and was committed by a non-resident black upon a non-resident white. certain it is that in this county, which includes many islands, almost wholly inhabited by blacks, the white women have no fear of such assaults. this is also the case in the mississippi delta. mr. stone says: "yet here we hear nothing about an ignorant mass of negroes dragging the white man down; we hear of no black incubus; we have few midnight assassinations and fewer lynchings. the violation by a negro of the person of a white woman is with us an unknown crime; nowhere is the line marking the social separation of the races more rigidly drawn, nowhere are the relations between the races more kindly. with us race riots are unknown, and we have but one negro problem--though that constantly confronts us--how to secure more negroes." evidently when we hear reports of states of siege and rumors of race war, we are not to understand that this is the normal, typical condition of the entire south. if this is the real situation, it seems clear that the geographical segregation plays no mean part in determining the relation of the two races. it is safe to say that there is a different feeling between the races in the districts where the white is known only as the leader and those in which he comes into competition with the black. what is the significance of this for the future? the same condition exists in the cities, and of this professor dubois has taken note: "savannah is an old city where the class of masters among the whites and of trained and confidential slaves among the negroes formed an exceptionally large part of the population. the result has been unusual good feeling between the races, and the entrance of negroes into all walks of industrial life, with little or no opposition." "atlanta, on the other hand, is quite opposite in character. here the poor whites from north georgia who neither owned slaves nor had any acquaintance with negro character, have come into contact and severe competition with the blacks. the result has been intense race feeling."[ ] in one of the large towns of the delta last summer, a prosperous negro merchant said to me, in discussing the comparative opportunities of different sections: "i would not be allowed to have a store on the main street in such a good location in many places." yet, his store is patronized by whites; and this would be true in many towns in the black belt. other evidences of the difference in feeling towards the negroes is afforded by the epithets of "hill-billies" and "red-necks" applied to the whites of the hill country by the lowland planters, and the retaliatory compliments "yellow-bellies" and "nigger-lovers." does this geographical segregation help to explain the strikingly diverse reports coming from various parts of the south regarding the negro? why does dr. paul barringer, of virginia, find that race antagonism is rapidly growing, while mr. stone of mississippi, says that their problem is to get more negroes? the influence that this segregation has upon school facilities for both races should not be overlooked. the separation of the two races in the schools is to be viewed as the settled policy of the south. here, then, is a farming community in which there are only a few negroes. what sort of a separate school will be maintained for their children? probably they are unable to support a good school, even should they so desire. the opportunities of their children must necessarily be limited. will they make greater progress than children in the districts where the blacks are in large numbers and command good schools? if the situation be reversed and there are a few whites in a black community, the whites will be able to command excellent private schools for their children, if necessary. at present among the males over , the greatest illiteracy is found in the black counties. this may be accounted for by the presence of the older generation, which had little chance in the schools, and by the fact that perhaps those moving away have been the more progressive. it is a matter of regret that the census does not permit us to ascertain the illiteracy among the children from to years of age, to see if any difference was manifest. it would seem, however, that this segregation, coupled with race antagonism, is bound to affect the educational opportunities for the blacks. a problem which becomes more serious as the states waken to the needs of the case and attempt to educate their children. yet again, this fact of habitat should lead us to be very chary of making local facts extend over the entire south and of making deductions for the entire country based on observations in a few places. neglect of this precaution often leads to very erroneous and misleading conceptions of actual conditions. for instance, on page , vol. vi, census of , in discussing the fact that negro receives nearly as much per acre for his cotton as does the white, it is stated: "considering the fact that he emerged from slavery only one-third of a century ago, and considering also his comparative lack of means for procuring the best land or for getting the best results from what he has, this near approach to the standard attained by the white man's experience for more than a century denotes remarkable progress." this may or may not be true, but the reason and proof are open to question. it assumes that the land cultivated by the negroes is of the same quality as that farmed by the whites. this certainly is not true of arkansas, of which it is stated that "arkansas shows a greater production per acre by colored farmers for all three tenures." the three tenures are owners, cash-tenants, share-tenants. mississippi agrees with arkansas in showing higher production for both classes of tenants. are we to infer that the negroes in arkansas and mississippi are better farmers than the whites, and that, therefore, their progress has infinitely surpassed his? by no means. the explanation is that in the two states mentioned the negroes cultivate the rich bottom land while the white farmers are found in the hills. the alluvial land easily raises twice the cotton, and that of a better quality, commanding about a cent a pound more in the market. there may possibly be similar conditions in other states; certainly in alabama the black prairie tilled by the negroes is esteemed better than the other land. since this was first written i have chanced upon the report of the geological survey of alabama for and , in which mr. e. a. smith sums up this same problem as follows: "( ) that where the blacks are in excess of the whites, there are the originally most fertile lands of the state. the natural advantages of the soils are, however, more than counterbalanced by the bad system prevailing in such sections, viz.; large farms rented out in patches to laborers who are too poor and too much in debt to merchants to have any interest in keeping up the fertility of the soil, or rather the ability to keep it up, with the natural consequence of its rapid exhaustion, and a product per acre on these, the best lands of the state, lower than that which is realized from the very poorest. "( ) where the two races are in nearly equal proportions, or where the whites are in only a slight excess over the blacks, as is the case in all sections where the soils are of average fertility, there is found the system of small farms, worked generally by the owners, a consequently better cultivation, a more general use of commercial fertilizers, a correspondingly high product per acre and a partial maintenance of the fertility of the soils. "( ) where the whites are greatly in excess of the blacks (three to one and above) the soils are almost certain to be far below the average in fertility, and the product per acre is low from this cause, notwithstanding the redeeming influences of a comparatively rational system of cultivation. "( ) the exceptions to these general rules are nearly always due to local causes which are not far to seek and which afford generally a satisfactory explanation of the discrepancies." if we are to base our reasoning on the table cited we might argue that land ownership is a bad thing for negroes, for tenants of both classes among them produced more than did the owners. the white cash tenants also produced more than white owners. in explaining this it is said: "the fact that cash tenants pay a fixed money rental per acre causes them to rent only such area as they can cultivate thoroughly, while many owners who are unable to rent their excess acreage to tenants attempt to cultivate it themselves, thus decreasing the efficiency of cultivation for the entire farm." this may be true of the whites, but it is a lame explanation for the blacks. negro farmers who own more land than they can cultivate appear to be better known at washington than they are locally. the trouble with the entire argument is that it assumes that the negro is an independent cultivator of cotton. this is not quite the case. in all parts of the south the negro, tenant or owner, usually receives advances from white factors, and these spend a good part of their time riding about to see that the land is cultivated in order to insure repayment of their loans. if their advice and suggestions are not followed, or if the crop is not cultivated, the supplies are shut off. on many plantations even the portion of the land to be put in cotton is stipulated. the great bulk of the cotton crop is thus raised under the immediate oversight of the white man. there is little call for any great skill on the part of the laborer. no wonder the crop of the negro approximates that of the white man. it is to be further remembered that cotton raising has been the chief occupation of the negro in america. the census gives another illustration of the unhappy effects of attempting to cover very diverse conditions in one statement in the map vol. vi, plate . from this one would be justified in believing that the average farm under one management in the alluvial lands of mississippi and louisiana was small. as a matter of fact they are among the largest in the country. the map gives a very misleading conception and it results wholly from attempting to combine divergent conditions. the quotation from mr. smith touched upon another result of this segregation. where the whites are the farmers the farms are smaller and better cared for, more fertilizers are used, and better results are obtained. the big plantation system has caused the deterioration of naturally fertile soils. of course, there must come a day of reckoning wherever careless husbandry prevails. city conditions are more or less uniform in all sections. the geographical location of the farmer, however, is a matter of considerable importance not only as determining in large measure the crop he must raise, but as limiting the advance he may be able to make under given conditions. it is estimated that about per cent of the men (negroes) and per cent of the women in productive pursuits are farmers. their general location has been shown. for convenience we may divide the territory into five districts: ( ) virginia and kentucky, above the limit of profitable cotton culture. ( ) the atlantic sea coast. ( ) the central belt running from virginia to central mississippi. this includes several different soils, but general conditions are fairly uniform. ( ) the alluvial lands, which may be subdivided into the cotton and cane districts. ( ) texas. these different districts will be treated separately, except texas, which is not included. in summing up this chapter it may be said that the location of the mass of the negro farmers has been indicated, and also the fact that there is a separation between the whites and the blacks which promises to have important bearing on future progress, while the various agricultural districts offer opportunities by no means uniform. chapter iii. economic heritage. =in plowing time.= previous to the appearance of the european, west central africa for untold hundreds of years had been almost completely separated from the outside world. the climate is hot, humid, enervating. the negro tribes living in the great forests found little need for exertion to obtain the necessities of savage life. the woods abounded in game, the rivers in fish. by cutting down a few trees and loosening the ground with sharpened sticks the plantains, a species of coarse banana, could be made to yield many hundred fold. the greater part of the little agricultural work done fell on the women, for it was considered degrading by the men. handicrafts were almost unknown among many tribes and where they existed were of the simplest. clothing was of little service. food preparations were naturally crude. sanitary restrictions, seemingly so necessary in hot climates, were unheard of. the dead were often buried in the floors of the huts. miss kingsley says: "all travelers in west africa find it necessary very soon to accustom themselves to most noisome odors of many kinds and to all sorts of revolting uncleanliness." morality, as we use the term, did not exist. chastity was esteemed in the women only as a marketable commodity. marriage was easily consummated and with even greater ease dissolved. slavery, inter-tribal, was widespread, and the ravages of the slave hunter were known long before the arrival of the whites. religion was a mass of grossest superstitions, with belief in the magical power of witches and sorcerers who had power of life and death over their fellows. might was right and the chiefs enforced obedience. it is not necessary to go more into detail. in the words of a recent writer: "it is clear that any civilization which is based on the fertility of the soil, and not on the energy of man, contains within itself the seed of its own destruction. where food is easily obtained, where there is little need for clothing or houses, where, in brief, unaided nature furnishes all man's necessities, those elements which produce strength of character and vigor of mind are wanting, and man becomes the slave of his surroundings. he acquires no energy of disposition, he yields himself to superstition and fatalism; the very conditions of life which produced his civilization set the limit of its existence." it is evident from the foregoing that there had been almost nothing in the conditions of africa to further habits of thrift and industry. the warm climate made great provision for the future unnecessary, not to say impossible, while social conditions did not favor accumulation of property. it is necessary to emphasize these african conditions, for they have an important influence on future development. under these conditions negro character was formed, and that character was not like that of the long-headed blonds of the north. the transfer to america marked a sharp break with the past. one needs but to stop to enumerate the changes to realize how great this break was. a simple dialect is exchanged for a complex language. a religion whose basic principle is love gradually supplants the fears and superstitions of heathenhood. the black passes from an enervating, humid climate to one in which activity is pleasurable. from the isolation and self-satisfaction of savagery he emerges into close contact with one of the most ambitious and progressive of peoples. life at once becomes far more secure and wrongs are revenged by the self-interest of the whites as well as by the feeble means of self-defense in possession of the blacks. that there were cruelties and mistreatment under slavery goes without saying, but the woes and sufferings under it were as nothing compared to those of the life in the african forests. this fact is sometimes overlooked. with greater security of life came an emphasis, from without, to be sure, on better marital relations. in this respect slavery left much to be desired, but conditions on the whole were probably in advance of those in africa. marriage began to be something more than a purchase. sanitation, not the word, but the underlying idea, was taught by precept and example. there came also a dim notion of a new sphere for women. faint perceptions ofttimes, but ideas never dreamed of in africa. i would not defend slavery, but in this country its evil results are the inheritance of the whites, not of the blacks, and the burden today of american slavery is upon white shoulders. many of the changes have been mentioned, but the greatest is reserved for the last. this is embraced in one word--work. for the first time the negro was made to work, not casual work, but steady, constant labor. from the negro's standpoint this is the redeeming feature of his slavery as perhaps it was for the israelites in egypt of old. booker washington has written:[ ] "american slavery was a great curse to both races, and i would be the last to apologize for it, but, in the providence of god, i believe that slavery laid the foundation for the solution of the problem that is now before us in the south. during slavery the negro was taught every trade, every industry, that constitutes the foundation for making a living." dr. h. b. frissell has borne the same testimony: "the southern plantation was really a great trade school where thousands received instruction in mechanic arts, in agriculture, in cooking, sewing and other domestic occupations. although it may be said that all this instruction was given from selfish motives, yet the fact remains that the slaves on many plantations had good industrial training, and all honor is due to the conscientious men and still more to the noble women of the south who in slavery times helped to prepare the way for the better days that were to come." work is the essential condition of human progress. contrast the training of the negro under enforced slavery with that of the indian, although it should not be thought that the characters were the same, for the life in america had made the indian one who would not submit to the yoke, and all attempts to enslave him came to naught. dr. frissell out of a long experience says: "when the children of these two races are placed side by side, as they are in the school rooms and workshops and on the farms at hampton, it is not difficult to perceive that the training which the blacks had under slavery was far more valuable as a preparation for civilized life than the freedom from training and service enjoyed by the indian on the western reservations. for while slavery taught the colored man to work, the reservation pauperized the indian with free rations; while slavery brought the black into the closest relations with the white race and its ways of life, the reservation shut the indian away from his white brothers and gave him little knowledge of their civilization, language or religion." the coddled indian, with all the vices of the white man open to him, has made little, if any, progress, while the negro, made to work, has held his own in large measure at least. under slavery three general fields of service were open to the blacks. the first comprised the domestic and body servants, with the seamstresses, etc., whose labors were in the house or in close personal contact with masters and mistresses. this class was made up of the brightest and quickest, mulattoes being preferred because of their greater aptitude. these servants had almost as much to do with the whites as did the other blacks and absorbed no small amount of learning. yet the results were not always satisfactory. a southern lady after visiting for a time in new york said on leaving:[ ] "i cannot tell you how much, after being in your house so long, i dread to go home, and have to take care of our servants again. we have a much smaller family of whites than you, but we have twelve servants, and your two accomplish a great deal more and do their work a great deal better than our twelve. you think your girls are very stupid and that they give much trouble, but it is as nothing. there is hardly one of our servants that can be trusted to do the simplest work without being stood over. if i order a room to be cleaned, or a fire to be made in a distant chamber, i can never be sure i am obeyed unless i go there and see for myself.... and when i reprimand them they only say that they don't mean to do anything wrong, or they won't do it again, all the time laughing as though it were a joke. they don't mind it at all. they are just as playful and careless as any wilful child; and they never will do any work if you don't compel them." the second class comprised the mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons and the like. these were also a picked lot. they were well trained ofttimes and had a practical monopoly of their trades in many localities. in technical knowledge they naturally soon outstripped their masters and became conscious of their superiority, as the following instance related by president g. t. winston shows: "i remember one day my father, who was a lawyer, offered some suggestions to one of his slaves, a fairly good carpenter, who was building us a barn. the old negro heard him with ill-concealed disgust, and replied: 'look here, master, you'se a first-rate lawyer, no doubt, but you don't know nothin' 'tall 'bout carpentering. you better go back to your law books.'" the training received by these artisans stood them in good stead after the war, when, left to themselves, they were able to hold their ground by virtue of their ability to work alone. the third class was made up of all that were left, and their work was in the fields. the dullest, as well as those not needed elsewhere, were included. some few became overseers, but the majority worked on the farms. as a rule little work was required of children under , and when they began their tasks were about of the adult's. thence they passed to "half," "three-quarter" and "full" hands. olmsted said:[ ] "until the negro is big enough for his labor to be plainly profitable to his master he has no training to application or method, but only to idleness and carelessness. before children arrive at a working age they hardly come under the notice of their owner.... the only whipping of slaves i have seen in virginia has been of these wild, lazy children, as they are being broke in to work. they cannot be depended upon a minute out of sight. you will see how difficult it would be if it were attempted to eradicate the indolent, careless, incogitant habits so formed in youth. but it is not systematically attempted, and the influences that continue to act upon a slave in the same direction, cultivating every quality at variance with industry, precision, forethought and providence, are innumerable." in many places the field hands were given set tasks to do each day, and they were then allowed to take their own time and stop when the task was completed. in georgia and south carolina the following is cited by olmsted as tasks for a day:[ ] "in making drains in light clean meadow land each man or woman of the full hands is required to dig one thousand cubic feet; in swamp land that is being prepared for rice culture, where there are not many stumps, the task for a ditcher is five hundred feet; while in a very strong cypress swamp, only two hundred feet is required; in hoeing rice, a certain number of rows equal to one-half or two-thirds of an acre, according to the condition of the land; in sowing rice (strewing in drills), two acres; in reaping rice (if it stands well), three-quarters of an acre, or, sometimes a gang will be required to reap, tie in sheaves, and carry to the stack yard the produce of a certain area commonly equal to one-fourth the number of acres that there are hands working together; hoeing cotton, corn or potatoes, one-half to one acre; threshing, five to six hundred sheaves. in plowing rice land (light, clean, mellow soil), with a yoke of oxen, one acre a day, including the ground lost in and near the drains, the oxen being changed at noon. a cooper also, for instance, is required to make barrels at the rate of eighteen a week; drawing staves, a day; hoop-poles, ; squaring timber, feet; laying worm fence, panels per day; post and rail fence, posts set two and a half to three feet deep, nine feet apart, nine or ten panels per hand. in getting fuel from the woods (pine to be cut and split), one cord is the task for a day. in 'mauling rails,' the taskman selecting the trees (pine) that he judges will split easiest, a day, ends not sharpened. "in allotting the tasks the drivers are expected to put the weaker hands where, if there is any choice in the appearance of the ground, as where certain rows in hoeing corn would be less weedy than others, they will be favored. "these tasks would certainly not be considered excessively hard by a northern laborer, and, in point of fact, the more industrious and active hands finish them often by two o'clock. i saw one or two leaving the field soon after one o'clock, several about two, and between three and four i met a dozen women and several men coming to their cabins, having finished their day's work.... if, after a hard day's labor he (the driver) sees that the gang has been overtasked, owing to a miscalculation of the difficulty of the work, he may excuse the completion of the tasks, but he is not allowed to extend them." in other places the work was not laid out in tasks, but it is safe to say that, judging from all reports and all probabilities, the amount of work done did not equal that of the free labor of the north, then or now. if it had the commercial supremacy of the south would have been longer maintained. some things regarding the agricultural work at once become prominent. all work was done under the immediate eye of the task master. thus there was little occasion for the development of any sense of individual responsibility for the work. as a rule the methods adopted were crude. little machinery was used, and that of the simplest. hoes, heavy and clumsy, were the common tools. within a year i have seen grass being mowed with hoes preparatory to putting the ground in cultivation. even today the negro has to be trained to use the light, sharp hoe of the north. corn, cotton and, in a few districts, rice or tobacco were the staple crops, although each plantation raised its own fruit and vegetables, and about the cabins in the quarters were little plots for gardens. the land was cultivated for a time, then abandoned for new, while in most places little attention was paid to rotation of crops or to fertilizers. the result was that large sections of the south had been seriously injured before the war. as some one has said: "the destruction of the soils by the methods of cultivation prior to the war was worse than the ravages of the war. the _post bellum_ farmer received as an inheritance large areas of wornout and generally unproductive soils." yet all things were the master's. a failure of the crop meant little hunger to the black. refusal to work could but bring bodily punishment, for the master was seldom of the kind who would take life--a live negro was worth a good deal more than a dead one. clothing and shelter were provided, and care in sickness. the master must always furnish tools, land and seed, and see to it that the ground was cultivated. there was thus little necessity for the negro to care for the morrow, and his african training had not taught him to borrow trouble. thus neither africa nor america had trained the negro to independent, continuous labor apart from the eye of the overseer. the requirements as to skill were low. the average man learned little of the mysteries of fruit growing, truck farming and all the economies which make diversified agriculture profitable. freedom came, a second sharp break with the past. there is now no one who is responsible for food and clothing. for a time all is in confusion. the war had wiped out the capital of the country. the whites were land poor, the negroes landless. it so happened that at this time the price of cotton was high. the negro knew more about cotton than any other crop. _raise cotton_ became the order of the day. the money lenders would lend money on cotton, even in advance, for it had a certain and sure ready sale. thus developed the crop-lien system which in essence consists in taking a mortgage on crops yet to be raised. the system existed among the white planters for many years before the war. a certain amount of food and clothing was advanced to the negro family until the crop could be harvested, when the money value of the goods received was returned with interest. perhaps nothing which concerns the negro has been the subject of more hostile criticism than this crop-lien system. that it is easily abused when the man on one side is a shrewd and cunning sharpster and the borrower an illiterate and trusting negro is beyond doubt. that in thousands of cases advantage has been taken of this fact to wrest from the negro at the end of the year all that he had is not to be questioned. certainly a system which makes it possible is open to criticism. it should not be forgotten, however, that the system grew out of the needs of the time and served a useful purpose when honestly administered, even as it does today. no money could be gotten with land as security, and even today the land owner often sees his merchant with far less capital get money from the bank which has refused his security. the system has enabled a poor man without tools and work animals without food to get a start and be provided with a modicum of necessities until the crops were harvested. thousands have become more or less independent who started in this way. the evil influences of the system, for none would consider it ideal, have probably been that it has made unnecessary any saving on the part of the negro, who feels sure that he can receive his advances and who cares little for the fact that some day he must pay a big interest on what he receives. secondly, this system has hindered the development of diversified farming, which today is one of the greatest needs of the south. the advances have been conditioned upon the planting and cultivating a given amount of cotton. during recent years no other staple has so fallen in price, and the result has been hard on the farmers. all else has faded into insignificance before the necessity of raising cotton. the result on the fertility of the soil is also evident. luckily cotton makes light demands on the land, but the thin soil of many districts has been unable to stand even the light demands. guano came just in time and the later commercial fertilizers have postponed the evil day. the development of the cotton mills has also served to give a local market, which has stimulated the production of cotton. it seems rather evident, however, that the increasing development of western lands will put a heavier burden upon the atlantic slope. this, of course, will not affect the culture of sea-island cotton, which is grown in only a limited area. to meet this handicap a more diversified agriculture must gradually supplant in some way the present over-attention to cotton. in early days virginia raised much cotton, now it stands towards the bottom of the cotton states. perhaps it is safe to say that virginia land has been as much injured by the more exhaustive crop, tobacco, as the other states by cotton. large areas have been allowed to go back to the woods and local conditions have greatly changed. how this diversification is to be brought about for the negro is one of the most important questions. recent years have witnessed an enormous development of truck farming, but in this the negro has borne little part. this intensive farming requires a knowledge of soil and of plant life, coupled with much ability in marketing wares, which the average negro does not possess. nor has he taken any great part in the fruit industry, which is steadily growing. the question to which all this leads may be stated as follows. to what extent is the negro taking advantage of the opportunities he now has on the farm? what is his present situation? chapter iv. the present situation. the southern states are not densely populated. alabama has an average of per square mile; georgia, ; south carolina, . these may be compared with iowa, ; indiana, , taking two of the typical northern farming states, while connecticut has . in the prairie section of alabama the negro population ranges from to per square mile, and this is about the densest outside of the city counties. there is thus an abundance of land. as a matter of fact there is not the least difficulty for the negro farmer to get plenty of land, and he has but to show himself a good tenant to have the whites offering him inducements. =a cabin interior.= negroes on the farms may be divided into four classes: owners, cash tenants, share tenants, laborers. share tenants differ from the same class in the north in that work animals and tools are usually provided by the landlord. among the laborers must also be included the families living on the rice and cane plantations, who work for cash wages but receive houses and such perquisites as do other tenants and whose permanence is more assured than an ordinary day hand. they are paid in cash, usually through a plantation store, that debts for provisions, etc., may be deducted. both owners and tenants find it generally necessary to arrange for advances of food and clothing until harvest. the advances begin in the early spring and continue until august or sometimes until the cotton is picked. in the regions east of the alluvial lands advances usually stop by the first of august, and in the interim until the cotton is sold odd jobs or some extra labor, picking blackberries and the like, must furnish the support for the family. the landlord may do the advancing or some merchant. money is seldom furnished directly, although in recent years banks are beginning to loan on crop-liens. the food supplied is often based on the number of working hands, irrespective of the number of children in the family. this is occasionally a hardship. the customary ration is a peck of corn meal and three pounds of pork per week. usually a crop-lien together with a bill of sale of any personal property is given as security, but in some states landlords have a first lien upon all crops for rent and advances. in all districts the tenant is allowed to cut wood for his fire, and frequently has free pasture for his stock. there is much complaint that when there are fences about the house they are sometimes burned, being more accessible than the timber, which may be at a distance and which has to be cut. the landlords and the advancers have found it necessary to spend a large part of their time personally, or through agents called "riders," going about the plantations to see that the crops are cultivated. the negro knows how to raise cotton, but he may forget to plow, chop, or some other such trifle, unless reminded of the necessity. thus a considerable part of the excessive interest charged the negro should really be charged as wages of superintendence. if the instructions of the riders are not followed, rations are cut off, and thus the recalcitrant brought to terms. for a long time rations have been dealt out on saturday. so saturday has come to be considered a holiday, or half-holiday at least. early in the morning the roads are covered with blacks on foot, horse back, mule back and in various vehicles, on their way to the store or village, there to spend the day loafing about in friendly discussion with neighbors. the condition of the crops has little preventive influence, and the handicap to successful husbandry formed by the habit is easily perceived. many efforts are being made to break up the custom, but it is up-hill work. another habit of the negro which militates against his progress is his prowling about in all sorts of revels by night, thereby unfitting himself for labor the next day. this trait also shows forth the general thoughtlessness of the negro. his mule works by day, but is expected to carry his owner any number of miles at night. sunday is seldom a day of rest for the work animals. it is a curious fact that wherever the negroes are most numerous there mules usually outnumber horses. there are several reasons for this. it has often been supposed that mules endure the heat better than horses. this is questionable. the mule, however, will do a certain amount and then quit, all inducements to the contrary notwithstanding. the horse will go till he drops; moreover, will not stand the abuse which the mule endures. the negro does not bear a good reputation for care of his animals. he neglects to feed and provide for them. their looks justify the criticism. the mule, valuable as he is for many purposes, is necessarily more expensive in the long run than a self-perpetuating animal. in all parts it is the custom for the negroes to save a little garden patch about the house, which, if properly tended, would supply the family with vegetables throughout the year. this is seldom the case. a recent tuskegee catalog commenting on this says: "if they have any garden at all, it is apt to be choked with weeds and other noxious growths. with every advantage of soil and climate, and with a steady market if they live near any city or large town, few of the colored farmers get any benefit from this, one of the most profitable of all industries." as a matter of fact they care little for vegetables and seldom know how to prepare them for the table. the garden is regularly started in the spring, but seldom amounts to much. i have ridden for a day with but a glimpse of a couple of attempts. as a result there will be a few collards, turnips, gourds, sweet potatoes and beans, but the mass of the people buy the little they need from the stores. a dealer in a little country store told me last summer that he would make about $ an acre on three acres of watermelons, although almost every purchaser could raise them if he would. in many regions wild fruits are abundant, and blackberries during the season are quite a staple, but they are seldom canned. some cattle are kept, but little butter is made, and milk is seldom on the bill of fare, the stock being sold when fat (?). many families keep chickens, usually of the variety known as "dunghill fowls," which forage for themselves. but the market supplied with chickens by the small farmers, as it might easily be. whenever opportunity offers, hunting and fishing become more than diversions, and the fondness for coon and 'possum is proverbial. in a study of dietaries of negroes made under tuskegee institute and reported in bulletin no. , office of experimental stations, u. s. dept. of agriculture, it is stated: "comparing these negro dietaries with other dietaries and dietary standards, it will be seen that-- "( ) the quantities of protein are small. roughly speaking, the food of these negroes furnished one-third to three-fourths as much protein as are called for in the current physiological standards and as are actually found in the dietaries of well fed whites in the united states and well fed people in europe. they were, indeed, no larger than have been found in the dietaries of the very poor factory operatives and laborers in germany and the laborers and beggars in italy. "( ) in fuel value the negro dietaries compare quite favorably with those of well-to-do people of the laboring classes in europe and the united states." this indicates the ignorance of the negro regarding the food he needs, so that in a region of plenty he is underfed as regards the muscle and bone forming elements and overfed so far as fuel value is concerned. one cannot help asking what effect a normal diet would have upon the sexual passions. it is worthy of notice that in the schools maintained by the whites there is relatively little trouble on this account. possibly the changed life and food are in no small measure responsible for the difference. under diversified farming there would be steady employment most of the year, with a corresponding increase of production. as it is there are two busy seasons. in the spring, planting and cultivating cotton, say from march to july, and in the fall, cotton picking, september to december. the balance of the time the average farmer does little work. the present system entails a great loss of time. the absence of good pastures and of meadows is noticeable. this is also too true of white farmers. yet the grasses grow luxuriantly and nothing but custom or something else accounts for their absence; the something else is cotton. the adaptability of cotton to the negro is almost providential. it has a long tap root and is able to stand neglect and yet produce a reasonable crop. the grains, corn and cane, with their surface roots, will not thrive under careless handling. the average farmer knows, or at least utilizes few of the little economies which make agriculture so profitable elsewhere. the negro is thus under a heavy handicap and does not get the most that he might from present opportunities. i am fully conscious that there are many farmers who take advantage of these things and are correspondingly successful, but they are not the average man of whom i am speaking. with this general statement i pass to a consideration of the situation in the various districts before mentioned. tide water virginia. the virginia sea shore consists of a number of peninsulas separated by narrow rivers (salt water). the country along the shore and the rivers is flat, with low hills in the interior. north of old point comfort the district is scarcely touched by railroads and is accessible only by steamers. gloucester county, lying between york river and mob jack bay, is an interesting region. the hilly soil of the central part sells at from $ to $ per acre, while the flat coast land, which is richer although harder to drain, is worth from $ to $ . the immediate water front has risen in price in recent years and brings fancy prices for residence purposes. curiously enough some of the best land of the county is that beneath the waters of the rivers--the oyster beds. land for this use may be worth from nothing to many hundreds of dollars an acre, according to its nature. the county contains square miles, , whites and , blacks, the latter forming per cent of the population. this sea coast region offers peculiar facilities for gaining an easy livelihood. there are few negro families of which some member does not spend part of the year fishing or oystering. there has been a great development of the oyster industry. the season lasts from september to may , and good workmen not infrequently make $ a day or more when they can work on the public beds. this last clause is significant. it is stated that the men expect to work most of september, october and november; one-half of december and january; one-third of february; any time in march is clear gain and all of april. according to a careful study[ ] of the oyster industry it was found that the oystermen, _i. e._, those who dig the oysters from the rocks, make about $ a month, while families occupied in shucking oysters earn up to $ a year, three-fourths of them gaining less than $ . the public beds yield less than formerly and the business is gradually going into the hands of firms maintaining their own beds, with a corresponding reduction in possible earnings for the oystermen. the effect of this industry is twofold; a considerable sum of money is brought into the county and much of this has been invested in homes and small farms. this is the bright side; but there is a dark side. the boys are drawn out of the schools by the age of to work at shucking oysters, and during the winter months near the rivers the boys will attend only on stormy days. the men are also taken away from the farms too early in the fall to gather crops, and return too late in the spring to get the best results from the farm work. the irregular character of the employment reacts on the men and they tend to drift to the cities during the summer, although many find employment in berry picking about norfolk. another result has been to make farm labor very scarce. this naturally causes some complaint. i do not say that the bad results outweigh the good, but believe they must be considered. the population is scattered over the county, there being no towns of any size, and is denser along the rivers than inland. the relations between the two races are most friendly, although less satisfactory between the younger generation. the negroes make no complaints of ill treatment. in the last ten years there have been only four negroes sentenced to the state prison, while in the twelve months prior to may , , i was told that there was but one trial for misdemeanor. it may be that the absence of many of the young men for several months a year accounts in part for the small amount of crime. the jail stands empty most of the time. the chief offenses are against the fish and oyster laws of the state. whites and blacks both claim that illegitimate children are much rarer than formerly. i was told of a case in which a young white man was fined for attempting to seduce a colored girl. the races have kept in touch. white ministers still preach in negro churches, address sunday-schools, etc. in all save a few of the poorer districts the old one-roomed cabin has given place to a comfortable house of several rooms. the houses are often white-washed, although their completion may take a good many years. stoves have supplanted fireplaces. the fences about the yards are often neat and in good repair. so far as housing conditions are concerned, i have seen no rural district of the south to compare with this. the old cabin is decidedly out of fashion. turning to the farm proper, there are other evidences of change. there are no women working in the fields, their time being spent about the house and the garden. the system of crop liens is unknown. each farmer raises his own supplies, smokes his own meat or buys at the store for cash or on credit. wheat and corn are ground in local mills. the heavy interest charges of other districts are thus avoided. it is stated that a great number of the negroes are buying little places, and this bears out the census figures, which show that of the negro farmers . per cent in this county are owners or managers; the average for the negroes as a whole is . per cent. although so many earn money in the oyster business, there are others who have gotten ahead by sticking to the farm. t---- now owns part of the place on which he was a slave, and his slave-time cabin is now used as a shed. he began buying land in , paying from $ to $ . per acre, and by hard work and economy now owns sixty acres which are worth much more than their first cost. with the help of his boys, whom he has managed to keep at home, he derives a comfortable income from his land. his daughter, now his housekeeper, teaches school near by during the winter. what he has done others can do, he says. y---- is another who has succeeded. his first payments were made from the sale of wood cut in clearing the land. in his acres were planted as follows: orchard acres. woodland acres. pasture acres. corn acres. rye / acres. potato patch garden and yard. his children are being trained at hampton, and he laughingly says that one boy is already telling him how to get more produce from his land. b---- is an oysterman during the winter. he has purchased a small place of four acres, for which he paid $ per acre. this ground he cultivates and has a few apple, plum and peach trees in his yard. his case is typical. wages in the county are not high. house servants get from $ to $ per month. day laborers are paid from to cents a day. farm hands get about $ a month and two meals daily (breakfast and dinner). i have already mentioned that farm laborers were getting fewer, and those left are naturally the less reliable. many white farmers are having considerable difficulty in carrying on their places. the result is that many are only partially cultivating the farms, and many of the younger men are abandoning agriculture. what the final result will be is hard to tell. in summarizing it may be said that agriculture is being somewhat neglected and that the opportunity to earn money in the oyster industry acts as a constant deterrent to agricultural progress, if it is not directly injurious. here, as elsewhere, there is room for improvement in methods of tilling the soil and in rotation of crops, use of animal manures, etc. the general social and moral improvement has been noted. it is a pleasure to find that one of the strongest factors in this improvement is due to the presence in the county of a number of graduates of hampton who, in their homes, their schools and daily life, have stood for better things. central virginia. the difficulty of making general statements true in all districts has elsewhere been mentioned. the reader will not be surprised, therefore, to find many things said in the immediately preceding pages inapplicable to conditions in the tobacco districts. the little town of farmville, va., is the market for some , , pounds of tobacco yearly. the county prince edward contained in , negroes and in but , , a decrease of . the county does not give one the impression of agricultural prosperity. the surface is very rolling, the soil sandy and thin in many places. along the bottoms there is good land, of less value than formerly because of freshets. practically all of the land has been under cultivation at some time, and in heavily wooded fields the corn rows may often be traced. on every side are worn-out fields on which sassafras soon gets a hold, followed by pine and other trees. labor conditions have been growing worse, according to common report. it is harder to get farm hands than formerly, and this difficulty is most felt by those who exact the most. the day laborer gets from to cents and his meals, while for special work, such as cutting wheat, the wage may rise to $ . . women no longer work in the fields, and about the house get cents per day. formerly women worked in the fields, and wages for both sexes were lower. hands by the month get $ to $ and board. in this county are many small white farmers who work in the fields with the men, and the white housewife not infrequently cooks the food for the negroes--quite a contrast to typical southern practice. the movement from the farm is not an unmixed evil in that it is compelling the introduction of improved machinery, such as mowing machines, binders. on many a farm only scythes and cradles are known. another element in the problem is the fact that many negroes have been getting little places of their own and therefore do less work for others. there are many whites who think this development a step forward and believe that the land owners are better citizens. there are others who claim that the net result is a loss, in that they are satisfied merely to eke out some sort of an existence and are not spurred on to increased production. it is quite commonly reported that there were some organizations among the negroes whose members agreed not to work for the whites, but i cannot vouch for their existence. although agriculture here is much more diversified than in the cotton belt, the negro finds it necessary to get advances. these are usually supplied by commission merchants, who furnish the fertilizers and necessary food, taking crop liens as security. advances begin in the spring and last until the following december, when the tobacco is marketed. the interest charged is per cent, but the goods sold on this plan are much enhanced in price; interest is usually charged for a year, and the merchant receives a commission of - / per cent for selling the tobacco, so the business appears fairly profitable. it is difficult to estimate the average value of an acre of tobacco, as it varies so much in quality as well as quantity. it is probably safe to say that the negroes do not average over $ per acre, ranging from $ to $ , and have perhaps three or four acres in tobacco. it is generally expected that the tobacco will about pay for the advances. this would indicate, and the commission men confirm it, that the average advance is between $ and $ per year. the rations given out are no longer merely pork and meal, with which it is stated that the negroes are not now content, but include a more varied diet. the customary rent is one-fourth of all that is produced, the landlord paying one-fourth of the fertilizer (universally called guano in this district). tobacco makes heavy demands on the soil and at least pounds, a value of about $ . per acre, should be used. when the landlord furnishes the horse or mule he pays also one-half of the fertilizer and gets one-half of the produce. the rent on tobacco land is thus large, but the average cash rental is between $ and $ . the standard rotation of crops is tobacco, wheat, clover, tobacco. the clover is not infrequently skipped, the field lying fallow or uncultivated until exhausted. the average farmer thus has about as many acres in wheat as in tobacco and raises perhaps twelve bushels of wheat per acre. some corn is also raised, and i have seen fields so exhausted that the stalk at the ground was scarcely larger than my middle finger. the corn crop may possibly average to bushels per acre, or, in virginia terminology, to barrels. the average farmer under present conditions just about meets his advances with the tobacco raised. he has about enough wheat to supply him with flour; perhaps enough corn and hay for his ox or horse; possibly enough meat for the family. the individual family may fall short on any of these. the hay crop is unsatisfactory, largely through neglect. in may, , on a saturday, i saw wagon after wagon leaving farmville carrying bales of western hay. this is scarcely an indication of thrift. the impression one gets from traveling about is that the extensive cultivation of tobacco, in spite of the fact that it is the cash crop and perhaps also the most profitable, is really a drawback in that other possibilities are obscured. it may be that the line of progress will not be to abandon tobacco, but to introduce more intensive cultivation, for the average man, white or black, does not get a proper return from an acre. to-day there is always a likelihood that more tobacco will be planted than can be properly cultivated, for it is a plant which demands constant and careful attention until it is marketed. b---- has a big family of children and lives in a large cabin, one room with a loft. he owns a pair of oxen and manages to raise enough to feed them. he also raises about enough meat for his family. during the season of he raised $ worth of tobacco; corn valued at $ . and bushels of wheat, a total of about $ . deducting one-fourth for rent and estimating his expenses for fertilizer at $ , he had about $ out of which to pay all other expenses. b---- is considered a very good man, who tends carefully and faithfully to his work. it is evident, however, that his margin is small. the farmer has opportunities to supplement his earnings. cordwood finds ready sale in the towns at $ per cord, and i have seen many loads of not over one-fourth of a cord hauled to market by a small steer. butter, eggs and chickens yield some returns and the country produces blackberries in profusion. there are some negroes who are making a comfortable living on the farms and whose houses and yards are well kept. as has been said, this is not the general impression made by the district. considerable sums of money are sent in by children working in the northern cities. this is offset, however, by those who come back in the winter to live off their parents, having squandered all their own earnings elsewhere. the situation in a word is: a generation or more of reliance on one crop, neglect of other crops and of stock, resulting in deteriorated land. the labor force attracted to the towns and the north by higher wages. natural result: decadence of agricultural conditions, affording at the same time a chance for many negroes to become land owners. when the process will stop or the way out i know not. perhaps the german immigrants who are beginning to buy up some of the farms may lead the way to a better husbandry. for an interesting account of conditions in the town of farmville see "the negroes of farmville," by w. e. b. dubois, bulletin department of labor, january, . the sea coast. =a sea-island cabin.= the low-lying coast of south carolina and georgia, with its fringe of islands, has long been the seat of a heavy negro population. of the counties perhaps none is more interesting than beaufort, the southernmost of south carolina. the eastern half of the county is cut up by many salt rivers into numerous islands. broad river separates these from the mainland. the plant system has a line on the western edge of the county, while the georgia railroad runs east to port royal. according to the census, the county contains square miles of land and a population of , blacks and , whites, the negroes thus forming per cent of the total. there are persons to the square mile. with the exception of beaufort and port royal, the whites are found on the western side of the county. the islands are almost solid black. just after the war many of the plantations were sold for taxes and fell into the hands of the negroes, the funds realized being set apart for the education of the blacks, the interest now amounting to some $ , a year. in the seventies there was a great development of the phosphate industry, which at its height employed hundreds of negroes, taken from the farms. enormous fertilizer plants were erected. most of this is now a thing of the past and the dredges lie rotting at the wharves. it is the general opinion that the influence of this industry was not entirely beneficial, although it set much money in circulation. it drew the men from the farms, and now they tend to drift to the cities rather than return. a livelihood is easily gained. the creeks abound with fish, crabs and oysters. there is plenty of work on the farms for those who prefer more steady labor. land valued at about $ per acre may be rented for $ . more than ten acres to the tenant is not usual, and i was told that it is very common for a family to rent all the land it wants for $ per year, the presumption being that not over ten acres would be utilized. the staple crop for the small farmer is the sea island cotton. under the present culture land devoted to this lies fallow every other year. the islands are low and flat, subject to severe storms, that of having destroyed many lives and much property. the county was originally heavily wooded and there is still an abundance for local purposes, though the supply is low in places. on the islands the blacks have been almost alone for a generation and by many it is claimed that there has been a decided retrogression. by common consent st. helena island, which lies near beaufort, is considered the most prosperous of the negro districts. on this island are over , blacks and some whites. the cabins usually have two rooms, many having been partitioned to make the second. they are of rough lumber, sometimes whitewashed, but seldom painted. there are few fences and some damage is done by stock. outbuildings are few; privies are almost unknown--even at the schools there are no closets of any kind. the wells are shallow, six feet or so in depth with a few driven to or feet. a few have pumps, the rest are open. at present there is no dispensary on the island but there are a number of "blind tigers." the nearest physician is at beaufort and the cost of a single visit is from five to ten dollars. the distance from the doctors is said not to be an unmixed evil as it saves much foolish expenditure of money in fancied ills. in slavery times there were plantations on the island and their names, as fripps corner, oaks, still survive to designate localities. there was in olden times little contact with the whites as negro drivers were common. each plantation still has its "prayer house" at which religious services are held. meetings occur on different nights on the various plantations to enable the people to get all the religion they need. these meetings are often what are known as "shouts," when with much shouting and wild rhythmic dancing the participants keep on till exhausted. the suggestion of africa is not vague. the virginia negro views these gatherings with as much astonishment as does any white. many of the blacks speak a strange dialect hard to understand. "shum," for instance, being the equivalent for "see them." the land is sandy and should have skillful handling to get the best results. yet the farming is very unscientific. the first plowing is shallow and subsequent cultivation is done almost entirely with hoes. when a hampton graduate began some new methods last year the people came for miles to see his big plow. it is said that there was more plowing than usual as a result. the daily life of the farmer is about as follows: rising between four and five he goes directly to the field, eating nothing until eight or nine, when he has some "grits," a sort of fine hominy cooked like oat meal. many eat nothing until they leave the field at eleven for dinner, which also consists of grits with some crabs in summer and fish in winter. some have only these two meals a day. corn bread and molasses are almost unknown and when they have molasses it is eaten with a spoon. knives and forks are seldom used. one girl of eighteen did not know how to handle a knife. there are numbers of cows on the island, but milk is seldom served, the cattle being sold for beef. the draft animals are usually small oxen or ponies, called "salt marsh tackies," as they are left to pick their living from the marshes. some chickens and turkeys are raised, but no great dependence is placed on them. there are no geese and few ducks. little commercial fertilizer is used, the marsh grass, which grows in great abundance, being an excellent substitute of which the more progressive take advantage. the following statement will illustrate the situation of three typical families, an unusual, a good, and an average farmer. the figures are for : no. . no. . no. . number in family number rooms number outbuildings number horses number cows number hogs number other animals dog goats dog dog number fowls acres of land owned acres of land rented - / acres in cotton . acres in corn acres in sweet potatoes . / acres in white potatoes / acres in peas (cow) . . / acres in rice . garden very small poor none the rice is grown without flooding and known as "providence rice." with the great ease of getting a livelihood the advances necessarily are small. from january , , to july (which is near the close of the advancing season) several average families had gotten advances averaging $ . . the firm which does most of the advancing on the island writes: "we have some that get more. a few get $ . or about that amount, but we make it a point not to let the colored people or our customers get too much in debt. we have to determine about what they need and we have always given them what was necessary to help them make a crop according to their conditions and circumstances as they present themselves to us." the firm reports that they collect each year about per cent of their outstanding accounts. below are given the customary forms of the bill of sale and the crop lien given to secure advances: the state of south carolina, county of beaufort. know all men by these presents, that ............ of the said county, in consideration of the sum of ............ dollars, to be advanced in merchandise by ............, of beaufort county and state, have bargained and sold unto the said ............ the following personal property, ............, now in my possession, and which i promise to deliver on demand of the said ............ (signed) ..................... $............ on the .... day of .., i promise to pay to the order of ............ ..........., at beaufort, south carolina, ............ dollars for money and supplies to be advanced and furnished me by the said ............, merchants, beaufort, south carolina, for use in the cultivation of crops on the plantation or farm cultivated by me in beaufort county, south carolina, known as the ............ plantation, and containing about ............ acres, during the year ... and in consideration of the said advance made me i hereby give, make and grant to the said ............ a lien to the extent of said advance on all the crops which may be grown on the said plantation or farm during the year .., wherever said crops or parts of them are found. this lien hereby given is executed and to be enforced in accordance with the laws of the state of south carolina. i, the said ............, in consideration of the foregoing, do hereby agree to advance to the said ........... ..... dollars, as above stated. witness the hands and seals of both parties. in the presence of ............, l. s. ............ ............, l. s. this is then recorded in the county court as is an ordinary mortgage. on this island considerable money has been saved and is now deposited with a firm of merchants in whom the people have confidence. in july, , there were about individual depositors having some $ , to their credit. the money can be withdrawn at any time, all debts to the firm being first settled. interest at five per cent. is allowed. some of this money comes from pensions. there are round about beaufort a considerable number of u. s. pensioners, as the city was headquarters for union soldiers for a long time. the effect of the pensions is claimed both by whites and blacks to be bad. a great deal of the credit for the good conditions, relatively speaking, which prevail on st. helena is given to the penn school which for years has come into close touch with the lives of the people. the negroes have also been in touch with a good class of whites, who have encouraged all efforts at improvement. wherever the credit lies, the visitor is struck by the difference between conditions here and on some other islands, for instance, lady's island, which lies between st. helena and beaufort. even here it is claimed that the older generation is more industrious. in the trucking industry, which is very profitable along the coast, the negroes have only been engaged as ordinary laborers. on the main land, wherever fresh water can be obtained, is the seat of a considerable rice industry. in recent years, owing to the cutting of the forests in the hills, the planters are troubled by freshets in the spring and droughts in the summer. the work is done by negroes under direction of white foremen. the men work harder on contract jobs, but work by the day is better done. women are in better repute as laborers than the men and it is stated that more women support their husbands than formerly was the case. wages range from $. to $. per day, varying somewhat according to the work done. they are paid in cash and the planters have given up the plantation store in many cases. all work must be constantly supervised and it is said to be harder and harder to get work done. a planter found it almost impossible in the winter of to get fifty cords of wood cut, the work being considered too heavy. when i left the train at beaufort and found twelve hacks waiting for about three passengers it was evident where some of the labor force had gone. in this county there is a great development of burial and sick benefit societies. the "morning star", "star of hope", "star of bethlehem" are typical names. the dues are from five to ten cents a week. many of the societies have good sized halls, rivaling ofttimes the churches, on the various islands, which are used for lodge and social purposes. beaufort and the other towns offer the country people an opportunity to dispose of fish and any garden produce they may raise, while it is not uncommon to see a little ox dragging a two-wheeled cart and perhaps a quarter of a cord of wood to be hawked about town. during part of the summer a good many gather a species of plant which is used in adulterating cigarettes and cigars. this little account indicates that, so far as the farmers are concerned, there are few evidences of any decided progress save in the district which has been under the influence of one school. the ease of getting a livelihood acts as a deterrent to ambition. yet the old families say that they have the "best niggers of the south" and certain it is that race troubles are unknown. central district. =the old cabin.= in the central district life is a little more strenuous than on the sea coast. the cabins are about the same. the average tenant has a "one mule farm," some thirty or thirty-five acres. occasionally the tenant has more land, but only about this amount is cultivated and no rent is paid for the balance. the area of the land is usually estimated and only rarely is it surveyed. this land ranges in value from $ . to $ . per acre on the average. the customary rental for a "one mule farm" is about two bales of cotton, whose value in recent years would be in the neighborhood of $ . , thus making the rental about $ . per acre. on this farm from four to six bales of cotton are raised. the soil has been injured by improper tillage and requires an expenditure of $ . to $ . per acre for fertilizers if the best results are to be obtained. as yet the negroes do not fully appreciate this. the farmer secures advances based on peck of meal and pounds of "side meat," fat salt pork, per week for each working hand. about six dollars a month is the limit for advances and as these are continued for only seven months or so the average advance received is probably not far from $ . per year. an advance of $ . per month is allowed for a two horse farm. the advancer obligates himself to furnish only necessities and any incidentals must be supplied from sale of poultry, berries and the like. clothing may often be reckoned as an incidental. the luxuries are bought with cash or on the installment plan and are seldom indicated by the books of the merchant. the cost of the average weekly advances for a family in was: pounds meat (salt port sides) @ - / c $ . bushel corn meal . plug tobacco (reckoned a necessity) . ------ $ . =the new house.= conditions throughout this district are believed to be fairly uniform, but the following information was gathered in lowndes county, alabama, so has closest connection with the prairie region of that state: lowndes county lies just southwest of montgomery and there are persons to the square mile. the negroes form per cent. of the population. east and west throughout the county runs the chennenugga ridge, a narrow belt of hills which separate the prairie from the pine hills to the south. the ridge is quite broken and in places can not be tilled profitably. the county is of average fertility, however. there are not an unusual number of one-room cabins. out of families, comprising people, the average was to the room, the greatest number living in one room was . the families were housed as follows: no. no. largest no. average no. families. rooms. persons. persons. ( fam.) the cabins are built of both boards and logs as indicated by cuts on pages and while the interior economy is well shown by the photograph on page . field work is from sun to sun with two hours or so rest at noon. the man usually eats breakfast in the field, the wife staying behind to prepare it. it consists of pork and corn bread. the family come from the field about noon and have dinner consisting of pork and corn bread, with collards, turnip greens, roasting ears, etc. at sundown work stops and supper is eaten, the menu being as at breakfast. the pork eaten by the negroes, it may be said, is almost solid fat, two or three inches thick, lean meat not being liked. the housewife has few dishes, the food being cooked in pots or in small ovens set among the ashes. stoves are a rarity. lamps are occasionally used, but if the chimney be broken it is rarely replaced, the remainder being quite good enough for ordinary purposes. the cabins seldom have glass windows, but instead wooden shutters, which swing outward on hinges. these are shut at night and even during the hottest summer weather there is practically no ventilation. how it is endured i know not, but the custom prevails even in porto rico i am told. in winter the cabins are cold. to meet this the thrifty housewife makes bed quilts and as many as or of these are not infrequently found in a small cabin. the floors are rough and not always of matched lumber, while the cabins are poorly built. the usual means of heating, and cooking, is the big fireplace. sometimes the chimney is built of sticks daubed over with mud, the top of the chimney often failing to reach the ridge of the roof. fires sometimes result. tables and chairs are rough and rude. sheets are few, the mattresses are of cotton, corn shucks or pine straw, and the pillows of home grown feathers. the following regarding the cooking of the alabama negro is taken from a letter published in bulletin no. , u. s. department of agriculture, office of the experiment stations: "the daily fare is prepared in very simple ways. corn meal is mixed with water and baked on the flat surface of a hoe or griddle. the salt pork is sliced thin and fried until very brown and much of the grease tried out. molasses from cane or sorghum is added to the fat, making what is known as 'sap,' which is eaten with the corn bread. hot water sweetened with molasses is used as a beverage. this is the hill of fare of most of the cabins on the plantations of the 'black belt' three times a day during the year. it is, however, varied at times; thus collards and turnips are boiled with the bacon, the latter being used with the vegetables to supply fat 'to make it rich.' the corn meal bread is sometimes made into so-called 'cracklin bread,' and is prepared as follows: a piece of fat bacon is fried until it is brittle; it is then crushed and mixed with corn meal, water, soda and salt, and baked in an oven over the fireplace.... one characteristic of the cooking is that all meats are fried or otherwise cooked until they are crisp. observation among these people reveals the fact that very many of them suffer from indigestion in some form." as elsewhere the advances are supplied by the planter or some merchant. the legal rate of interest is per cent, but no negro ever borrows money at this rate. ten per cent. per year is considered cheap, while on short terms the rate is often per cent. per week. the average tenant pays from . per cent. to per cent. for his advances, which are sold at an average of per cent. higher than cash prices on the average. to avoid any possible trouble it is quite customary to reckon the interest and then figure this into the face of the note so that none can tell either the principal or the rate. below is an actual copy of such a note, the names being changed: $ . . calhoun, alabama, june , . on the first day of october, , i promise to pay to the order of a. b. see twenty two dollars at ............ value received. and so far as this debt is concerned, and as part of the consideration thereof, i do hereby waive all right which i or either of us have under the constitution and laws of this or any other state to claim or hold any personal property exempt to me from levy and sale under execution. and should it become necessary to employ an attorney in the collection of this debt i promise to pay all reasonable attorney's fees charged therefor. attest: c. w. james. his a. t. jones. john x. smith. mark. the possibility of extortion which this method makes possible is evident. it is worth while also to reproduce a copy, actual with the exception of the names, of one of the blanket mortgages often given. the italics are mine. the state of alabama, lowndes county. on or before the first day of october next i promise to pay jones and co., or order, the sum of $ . at their office in fort deposit, alabama. and i hereby waive all right of exemption secured to me under and by the laws and constitution of the state of alabama as to the collection of this debt. and i agree to pay all the costs of making, recording, probating or acknowledging this instrument, together with a reasonable attorney's fee, and all other expenses incident to the collection of this debt, whether by suit or otherwise. and to secure the payment of the above note, as well as all other indebtedness i may now owe the said jones and co., and all future advances i may purchase from the said jones and co. during the year , whether due and payable during the year or not, and for the further consideration of one dollar to me in hand paid by jones and co., the receipt whereof i do hereby acknowledge, i do hereby grant, bargain, sell and convey unto said jones and co. the _entire crops_ of corn, cotton, cotton seed, fodder, potatoes, sugar cane and its products and _all other crops of every kind and description_ which may be made and grown during the year on lands owned, leased, rented or farmed on shares for or by the undersigned in lowndes county, alabama, or elsewhere. also any crops to or in which the undersigned has or may have any interest, right, claim or title in lowndes county or elsewhere _during and for each succeeding year until the indebtedness secured by this instrument is fully paid_. also all the corn, cotton, cotton seed, fodder, peas, and all other farm produce now in the possession of the undersigned. also all the live stock, vehicles and farming implements now owned by or furnished to the undersigned by jones and co. during the year . also one red horse "lee," one red neck cow "priest," and her calf, one red bull yearling. said property is situated in lowndes county, alabama. if, after maturity, any part of the unpaid indebtedness remains unpaid, jones and co., or their agents or assigns, are authorized and empowered to seize and sell all or any of the above described property, at private sale or public auction, as they may elect, for cash. if at public auction, before their store door or elsewhere, in fort deposit, alabama, after posting for five days written notice of said sale on post office door in said town, and to apply the proceeds of said sale to the payment, first of all costs and expenses provided for in the above note and expense of seizing and selling said property; second, to payment in full of debt or debts secured by said mortgage, and the surplus, if any, pay to the undersigned. and the said mortgagee or assigns is hereby authorized to purchase at his own sale under this mortgage. i agree that no member of my family, nor anyone living with me, nor any person under my control, shall have an extra patch on the above described lands, unless covered by this mortgage; and i also agree that this mortgage shall cover all such patches. it is further agreed and understood that any securities held by jones and co. as owner or assignee on any of the above described property executed by me prior to executing this mortgage shall be retained by them, and shall remain in full force and effect until the above note and future advances are paid in full, and shall be additional security for this debt. there is no lien or encumbrance upon any property conveyed by this instrument except that held by jones and co. and the above specified rents. if, before the demands hereby secured are payable, any of the property conveyed herein shall be in _danger of (or from) waste, destruction or removal, said demands shall be then payable and all the terms, rights and powers of this instrument operative and enforceable, as if and under a past due mortgage_. witness my hand and seal this th day of january, . attest: b. c. cook. sam small. l. s. r. j. bennett. it may be granted that experience has shown all this verbiage to be necessary. in the hands of an honest landlord it is as meaningless as that in the ordinary contract we sign in renting a house. in the hands of a dishonest landlord or merchant it practically enables him to make a serf of the negro. the mortgage is supposed to be filed at once, but it is sometimes held to see if there is any other security which might be included. the rascally creditor watches the crop and if the negro may have a surplus he easily tempts him to buy more, or more simply still, he charges to his account imaginary purchases, so that at the end of the year the negro is still in debt. the negro has no redress. he can not prove that he has not purchased the goods and his word will not stand against the merchant's. practically he is tied down to the land, for no one else will advance him under these conditions. sometimes he escapes by getting another merchant to settle his account and by becoming the tenant of the new man. when it is remembered that land is abundant and good labor rare, the temptation to hold a man on the land by fair means or foul is apparent. moreover, the merchant by specious reasoning often justifies his own conduct. he says that the negro will spend his money at the first opportunity and that he might just as well have it as some other merchant. i would not be understood as saying that this action is anything but the great exception but there are dishonest men everywhere who are ready to take advantage of their weaker fellows and the negro suffers as a result, just as the ignorant foreigner does in the cities of the north. the interest may also be reckoned into the face of the mortgage. in any case it begins the day the paper is signed, although the money or its equivalent is only received at intervals and a full year's interest is paid, often on the face of the mortgage, even if only two-thirds of it has actually been advanced to the negro, no matter when the account is settled. the helplessness of the negro who finds himself in the hands of a sharper is obvious when that sharper has practical control of the situation. in many and curious ways the landlord seeks to hold his tenants. he is expected to stand by them in time of trouble, to protect them against the aggressions of other blacks and of whites as well. this paternalism is often carried to surprising lengths. the size of a man's family is known and the riders see to it that he keeps all the working hands in the field. if the riders have any trouble with a negro they are apt to take it out in physical punishment, to "wear him out," as the phrase goes. thus resentment is seldom harbored against a negro and there are many who claim that this physical discipline is far better than any prison regime in its effects upon the negro. in spite of all that is done it is claimed that the negroes are getting less reliable and that the chief dependence is now in the older men, the women and the children. one remark, made by a planter's wife, which impressed me as having a good deal of significance, was, "the negroes do not sing as much now as formerly." to get at anything like an accurate statement of the income and expenses of a negro family is a difficult matter. the following account of three families will give a fair idea of their budget for part of the year at least. family no. consists of five adults (over ) and one child. they live in a two-roomed cabin and own one mule, two horses two cows. their account with the landlord for the years and was: . to balance $ . cash ($ . ) for mule . clothing . feed . provisions . tools . interest and recording fee . ------- $ . . to balance $ . cash . clothing . feed and seed . provisions . tools . interest and recording fee . ------- $ . their credit for was $ , thus leaving a deficit for the beginning of the next year. as the advances stop in august or september, and the balance of the purchases are for cash and may be at other stores, there is no way of getting at them. in the family paid $ toward the acres they are purchasing, part of this sum probably coming from the crop of , and in they made a further payment of $ . this family is doing much better than the average. it may be interesting to see a copy of his account for the year taken from the ledger of the planter. jan. . balance $ . jan. . bu. corn, $ . ; fodder, $ . ; cash, $ . . jan. . cash for tax, $ . ; recording fee, $ . ; cash, $ . . feb. . plowshoes, $ . ; gents' hose, c; yds. check, $ . ; straw hats, $ . . feb. . . bu. corn, $ . ; cash, c; shoes, $ . ; plow lines, c . mar. . yds. drilling, $ . ; yds. check, c; . lbs. bacon, c . apr. . bu. corn, $ . ; bu. cotton seed, $ . ; . lbs. bacon, c . apr. . bu. meal, c; spool cotton, c; tobacco, c; lbs. bacon, c; bu. corn. $ . . may . cash, $ . ; lbs. bacon, $ . ; work shoes, $ . ; gents' shoes, $ . ; half bu. meal, c . may . lbs. bacon, $ . ; ( ) lbs. bacon, $ . ; sack meal, $ . . june . - bu. oats, c; - bu. corn, c; bu. meal, c; sack feed, $ . . june . sack meal, $ . ; lbs. bacon, $ . ; cash, $ . ; ( ) lbs. bacon, $ . . june . sack meal, $ . ; sack feed, $ . ; plow sweep, c . july . lbs. bacon, c; ( ) sack feed, $ . ; half bu. meal, c; ( ) bu. meal, c; lbs. bacon, $ . . july . lbs. bacon, c; ( ) sack feed, $ . ; ( ) bu. meal, c . aug. . half bu. meal, c; lbs. bacon, c; cash, c . aug. . interest . oct. . cash, c . ------- $ . the second family consists of three adults and three children. they have three one-roomed cabins, own one mule and two cows, and are leasing fifty acres of land, the effort to buy it having proven too much. their account for and was as follows: . balance jan. $ . cash . clothing . feed . provisions . tobacco . tools, etc. . interest and recording fee . ------ $ . . balance jan. $ . cash . clothing . feed . provisions . tobacco . tools, etc. . interest and fee . ------ $ . the debit for was all paid by november first and by november first, , $ . of the charge for that year had been paid. in the man paid $ . towards his land but has since been leasing. the third family consists of two adults and three children. they live in a board cabin of two rooms, have one mule, one cow and one horse. they are purchasing acres of land. their accounts for and stand between the two already given. . balance $ . cash . clothing . provisions . tools . interest and fee . ------ $ . . balance $ . cash . clothing . feed . provisions . tools . interest and fee . ------- $ . by november , , they had paid $ . of their account. in they paid $ towards their land and $ . in . all of these families are a little above the average. the income is supplemented by the sale of chickens, eggs and occasionally butter. in hard years when the crops are poor the men and older boys seek service in the mines of north alabama or on the railroads during the summer before cotton picking begins, and again during the winter. the outfit of the average farmer is very inexpensive and is somewhat as follows: harness, $ . ; pony plow, $ . ; extra point, c $ . sweepstock (a), c; sweeps, c; scooter (b), c . hoes, c; blacksmith (yearly average), c . ----- total $ . (a) a sweep is a form of cultivator used in cleaning grass and weeds from the rows of cotton. (b) a scooter or "bull-tongue" is a strip of iron used in opening the furrow for the cotton seed. a cow costs $ , pigs $ to $ . , wagon (seldom owned) $ . a mule now costs from $ to $ , but may be rented by the year for $ or $ . owners claim there is no profit in letting them at this price and the negroes assert that if one dies the owner often claims that it had been sold and proceeds to collect the value thereof. from either point of view the plan seems to meet with but little favor. the following table will give some idea of the condition and personal property of a number of families in lowndes county: ----------+----+----+----+----+----+---+-----+---+---+----+---+----+ | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | ----------+----+----+----+----+----+---+-----+---+---+----+---+----+ family | | | | | | |[ ] | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------+----+----+----+----+----+---+-----+---+---+----+---+----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------+----+----+----+----+----+---+-----+---+---+----+---+----+ key to columns: a adults b children under c log cabins d b'd cabins e no. rooms f sewing machines g mules h horses i oxen j cows k pigs l dogs it will be seen that the number of oxen is small. i should not be surprised if some of the hogs escaped observation. an account of this district would not be complete without reference to the herb doctors who do a thriving business, charging from twenty-five cents per visit up. they make all sorts of noxious compounds which are retailed as good for various ailments. the medicines are perhaps no more harmful than the patent compounds of other places. there are also witch doctors, of whom the negroes stand in great awe and many a poor sufferer has died because it was believed that he or she was bewitched by some evil person, hence physicians could have no power. the budgets given indicate, and this is my own belief, that the farmers in this district are just about holding their own. they are not trained to take advantage of their environment to the full so they do not prosper as they might, while occasional designing persons take great advantage of them, thereby rendering them discouraged. the introduction of a more diversified farming, the greater utilization of local resources in fruits and vegetables, thereby giving variety in the diet, the development of pastures and stock raising would enable them to break away from the mortgage system, which retards them in many ways. this view that the farmers here are about able to make a living is supported by the investigations of professor du bois.[ ] he gives the following report of families in georgia: year, . price of cotton low. bankrupt and sold out $ or over in debt $ to $ in debt $ to $ in debt cleared nothing cleared $ to $ cleared $ to $ cleared $ and over ---- regarding the general situation he says: "a good season with good prices regularly sent a number out of debt and made them peasant proprietors; a bad season, either in weather or prices, still means the ruin of a thousand black homes." under existing conditions the outlook does not seem to me especially hopeful. alluvial district. =a double cabin in the delta.= the mississippi river, deflected westward by the hills of tennessee, at memphis sweeps in a long arc to the hills at natchez. the oval between the river and the hills to the east is known as the "delta." the land is very flat, being higher on the border of the river so that when the river overflows the entire bottom land is flooded. the waters are not restrained by a good system of levees and the danger of floods is reduced. there are similar areas in arkansas and louisiana and along the lower courses of the red and other rivers, but what is said here will have special reference to mississippi conditions. the land is extremely fertile, probably there is none better in the world, and is covered with a dense growth of fine woods, oak, ash, gum and cypress. the early settlements, as already stated, were along the navigable streams, but the great development of railroads is opening up the entire district. the country may still be called new and thousands of acres may be purchased at a cost of less than $ per acre, wild land, of course. cultivated land brings from $ up. considering its possibilities the region is not yet densely populated, but a line of immigration is setting in and the indications are that the delta will soon be the seat of the heaviest negro population in the country. already it rivals the black prairie of alabama. there have been many influences to retard immigration, the fear of fevers, malaria and typhoid, commonly associated with low countries, and the dread of overflows. because of the lack of the labor force to develop the country planters have been led to offer higher wages, better houses, etc. there is about the farming district an air of prosperity which is not noticeable to the east. the country is particularly adapted to cotton, the yield is heavier, about a bale to the acre if well cultivated, though the average is a little less, the staple is longer, and the price is about a cent a pound higher, than in the hills. fertilizers are seldom used and are not carried in the stores. some of the lands which have been longest in use have been harmed by improper tillage, but the injury may easily be repaired by intelligent management. in the delta the average size of the plantations is large, but the amount of land under the care of the tenant is smaller than in other sections. about acres is probably the average to one work animal. the soil is heavier, requiring longer and more constant cultivation. for this land a rental of from $ to $ per acre is paid, while plantations will rent for a term of years at an acre. a good deal of new land is brought in cultivation by offering it rent free to a negro for three years, the tenant agreeing to clear off the timber and bring the soil under cultivation. on some plantations no interest is charged on goods advanced by the negro usually pays per cent. for all money he borrows. the white planter has to pay at least per cent and agree to sell his cotton through the factor of whom the money is obtained and pay him a commission of . per cent. for handling the cotton. the plantation accounts of three families follow for the year . they live in washington county, mississippi, in which the negroes form per cent. of the total population. the first family consists of three adults and one child under . they own two mules, two cows, ten pigs and some chickens. they also have a wagon and the necessary farm implements. their expenses were enlarged, as were those of the other families, by an epidemic of smallpox. debit. credit. doctor $ . cotton $ . blacksmith . cotton seed . implements . ------- clothes . $ . provisions . . rent . ------- extra labor . balance $ . seed . ginning cotton . cash drawn . ------- $ . their account at the close of the year showed thus a balance of $ . . the family raised bales of cotton and had besides bushels of corn from six acres. the second family came to the plantation in with nothing, not even with decent clothing. now they have two mules, keep some pigs, own a wagon and farming tools. there are five adults in the family and two children. they live in a three-roomed cabin and till acres of land, four acres being wood land taken for clearing, for which there is no rent. debit. credit. doctor $ . cotton $ , . feed . cotton seed . mule (balance) . --------- rations and clothes . $ , . rent . , . extra labor . --------- ginning . balance $ . cash drawn . --------- $ , . the third family is of different type. they are always behind, although the wife is a good worker and the man is willing and seems to try. they are considered one of the poorest families on the plantation. there are two adults and one child. they own farming implements, one mule and some pigs. they have a two-roomed cabin and farm acres for which they pay a crop rent of , pounds of cotton. debit. credit. doctor $ . cotton $ . mule . cotton seed . clothing . ------- rations . $ . feed . . rent . ------- extra labor . balance $ . seed . ginning . cash down . ------- $ . an examination of the accounts reveals that there is a charge for extra labor, which for the third family was very heavy. this results from the fact that the average family _could_, but _does not_ pick all the cotton it makes, so when it is seen that enough is on hand to pay all the bills and leave a balance it is very careless about the remainder. planters have great difficulty in getting all the cotton picked and a considerable portion is often lost. extra labor must be imported. this is hard to get and forms, when obtained, a serious burden on the income of the tenant. on the plantation from whose books the above records were taken the system of bookkeeping is more than usually careful and the gin account thus forms a separate item so that although all planters charge for the ginning the charge does not always appear on the books. these three families are believed to be average and indicate what it is possible for the typical family to do under ordinary conditions. it is but fair to state that the owners of this plantation make many efforts to get their tenants to improve their condition and will not long keep those whose accounts do not show a credit balance at the end of the year. a copy of the lease in use will be of interest and its stipulations form quite a contrast to the one quoted from alabama. the cash and share leases are identical save for necessary changes in form. the names are fictitious. "this contract, made this date and terminating december , , between smith and brown, and john doe, hereinafter called tenant, witnesses: that smith and brown have this day rented and set apart to john doe for the year certain twenty acres of land on james plantation, washington county, mississippi, at a rental price per acre of seven dollars and fifty cents. smith and brown hereby agree to furnish, with said land, a comfortable house and good pump, and to grant to the said tenant the free use of such wood as may be necessary for his domestic purposes and to advance such supplies, in such quantity and manner as may be mutually agreed upon as being necessary to maintain him in the cultivation of said land; it being now mutually understood that by the term "supplies" is meant meat, meal, molasses, tobacco, snuff, medicine and medical attention, good working shoes and clothes, farming implements and corn. it is also hereby mutually agreed and understood that anything other than the articles herein enumerated is to be advanced to the said tenant only as the condition of his crops and account and the manner of his work shall, in the judgment of smith and brown, be deemed to entitle him. they also agree to keep said house and pump in good repair and to keep said land well ditched and drained. being desirous of having said tenant raise sufficient corn to supply his needs during the ensuing year, in consideration of his planting such land in corn as they may designate, they hereby agree to purchase from said tenant all corn over and above such as may be necessary for his needs, and to pay therefor the market price; and to purchase all corn raised by him in the event be wishes to remove from james plantation at the termination of this contract. in consideration of the above undertaking on smith and brown's part, the said tenant hereby agrees to sell to them all surplus corn raised by him and in the event of his leaving james' plantation at the termination of this contract to sell to them all corn he may have on hand: in each case at the market price. the said smith and brown hereby reserve to themselves all liens for rent and supplies on all cotton, cotton seed, corn and other agricultural products, grown upon said land during the year , granted under sections and of the code of . they hereby agree to handle and sell for the said tenant all cotton and other crops raised by him for sale, to the best of their ability, and to account to him for the proceeds of the same when sold. they also reserve to themselves the right to at all times exercise such supervision as they may deem necessary over the planting and cultivating of all crops to be raised by him during the year . the said john doe hereby rents from smith and brown the above mentioned land for the year and promises to pay therefor seven dollars and a half per acre on or before november the first, , and hereby agrees to all the terms and stipulations herein mentioned. he furthermore represents to smith and brown that he has sufficient force to properly plant and cultivate same, and agrees that if at any time in their judgment his crops may be in need of cultivation, they may have the necessary work done and charge same to his account. he furthermore agrees to at all times properly control his family and hands, both as to work and conduct, and obligates himself to prevent any one of them from causing any trouble whatsoever, either to his neighbors or to smith and brown. he also agrees to plant and cultivate all land allotted to him, including the edges of the roads, turn rows, and ditch banks, and to keep the latter at all times clean and to plant no garden or truck patches in his field. he also agrees to gather and deliver all agricultural products which he may raise for sale to said smith and brown, as they may designate to be handled and sold by them, for his account. he also agrees not to abandon, neglect, turn back or leave his crops or any part of them, nor to allow his family or hands to do so, until entirely gathered and delivered. in order that smith and brown may be advised of the number of tenants which they may have to secure for the ensuing year, in ample time to enable them to provide for the same, the said tenant hereby agrees to notify them positively by december , , whether or not he desires to remain on james' plantation for the ensuing year. should he not desire to remain, then he agrees to deliver to smith and brown possession of the house now allotted to him by january st, . in order that said tenant may have ample time in which to provide for himself a place for the ensuing year, smith and brown hereby agree to notify him by december , , should they not want him as a tenant during the ensuing year. witness our signatures, this the th day of december, . smith and brown. john doe. witness: j. w. james. the owners have been unable to carry out their efforts in full, but the result has been very creditable. the lease is much preferable to the one given on page . if, as i believe, the families above reported are average and are living under ordinary conditions, it seems evident that a considerable surplus results from their labors each year. i wish i could add that the money were being either wisely spent or saved and invested. this does not seem to be the case and it is generally stated that the amount of money wasted in the fall of the year by the blacks of the delta is enormous. in the cabins the great catalogs of the mail order houses of montgomery ward & co., and sears, roebuck & co., of chicago are often found, and the express agents say that large shipments of goods are made to the negroes. patent medicines form no inconsiderable proportion of these purchases, while "stutson" hats, as the negro says, are required by the young bloods. the general improvidence of the people is well illustrated by the following story related by a friend of the writer. at the close of one season an old negro woman came to his wife for advice as to the use to be made of her savings, some $ . she was advised to buy some household necessities and to put the remainder in a bank, above all she was cautioned to beware of any who sought to get her to squander the money. the woman left but in about two weeks' time returned to borrow some money. it developed that as she went down the street a jewess invited her to come in and have a cup of coffee. the invitation was accepted and during the conversation she was advised to spend the money. this she did, and when the transactions were over the woman had one barrel of flour, one hundred pounds of meat, ten dollars or so worth of cheap jewelry, some candy and other incidentals and no money. foolish expenditures alone, according to the belief of the planters, prevent the negroes from owning the entire land in a generation. i would not give the impression that there are no negro land owners in this region. thousands of acres have been purchased and are held by them, but we are speaking of average families. some curious customs prevail. the planters generally pay the negroes in cash for their cotton seed and this money the blacks consider as something peculiarly theirs, not to be used for any debts they may have. although the prices for goods advanced are higher than cash prices, the negroes will often, when spring comes, insist that they be advanced, so have the goods charged even at the higher prices, even though they have the cash on hand. this great over-appreciation of present goods is a drawback to their progress. in this district i found little dissatisfaction among the negro farmers. they felt that their opportunities were good. those who come from the hills can scarce believe their eyes at the crops produced and constantly ask when the cotton plants are going to turn yellow and droop. that there is little migration back to the hills is good evidence of the relative standing of the two districts in their eyes. wages for day labor range from to cents, but the extra labor imported for cotton picking makes over double this. the sugar region. south of baton rouge, louisiana, the alluvial district is largely given over to the growing of sugar cane with occasional fields of rice. the district under cultivation stretches back from the river a couple of miles or so to the edge of the woods beyond which at present there is no tillable ground, though drainage will gradually push back the line of the forest. these sugar lands are valued highly, $ or so an acre, and the capital invested in the great sugar houses is enormous. probably nowhere in agricultural pursuits is there a more thorough system of bookkeeping than on these plantations. this land is cultivated by hired hands, who work immediately under the eye of overseers. nowhere is the land let out in small lots to tenants. conditions are radically different from those prevailing in the cotton regions. the work season, it is claimed, begins on the first day of january and ends on the st of december, and every day between when the weather permits work in the fields there is work to be done. =cabins on sugar plantation.= these plantations present an attractive appearance. the cabins are not scattered as in the cotton country, but are usually ranged on either side of a broad street, with rows of trees in front. the cabins are often for two families and each has a plot of ground for a garden. the planters say the negroes will not live in the houses unless the garden plots are provided, even if they make no use of them. to each family is allotted a house so long as they are employed on the place. wood is free and teams are provided for hauling it from the forest. free pasture for stock is often provided. from the fact that the men would seldom work more than five and a half days a week arose the custom of paying off every eleven days. each workman has a time book and as soon as he has completed his eleven days his pay is due. this avoids a general pay day and the demoralization that would likely follow. work is credited by quarters of a day: sunrise to breakfast, breakfast to dinner, dinner to about : p. m., : p. m. to sunset. wages vary according to the season, being much larger during autumn when the cane is being ground. for field work men get cents per day, women to cents. during the grinding season the men earn from $ to $ . , the women about cents, children from cents up. wages are usually paid through a store which may or may not be under the direct ownership of the plantation. all accounts against the store are deducted, but the balance must be paid in cash if it is so desired. nominally the men are free to trade where they will, but it is easy to see that pressure might be brought to bear to make it advantageous to trade at the local store. during the year two families were able to earn the following amounts. the first family consists of three adults and two children, but the wife did not work in the field. $ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ------------------------------------------ $ . . . . . . . . . . . . . man . . . . . . son . . . . . . boy . . . boy -------------------------------------------- . . . . . . --$ . during the grinding season the men's wages were increased to $ a day and the boys' to cents and the father had chances to make extra time as nightwatchman, etc. this family own a horse and buggy, keep poultry and have a fair garden. they are rather thrifty and have money stowed away somewhere. the second family consists of the parents and eight children. their income is fair, but they are always "hard up." they spend their money extravagantly. the man is head teamster on the plantation and makes cents per day, which is increased to $ . during the grinding season. the wife in this family also did no work save in the fall. $ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ------------------------------------------ $ . . . . . . . . . . . . . man . . . . . . boy . . . . . . son . . . girl . boy . . . boy . . . woman ---------------------------------------------- . . . . . . -- . these families are typical so far as known. in comparing their incomes with those in other districts it must be borne in mind that they have no rent to pay and their only necessary expenses are for food and clothes and incidentals. certainly both of the families should have money to their credit at the end of the year. the total wages depends not only on the willingness to work, but also on weather conditions. one gets the impression that in some places conditions are pretty bad and even by some white residents of the state it is claimed that a state of servitude almost prevails on many plantations. in any case the negroes do not seem satisfied. the labor is rather heavy. for this or other reasons there has been quite an exodus to the cotton country in recent years, which has caused the cane planters much trouble and they will make many concessions to keep their tenants. to meet this emigration for some time efforts have been made to import italian labor but the results have not been wholly satisfactory. the italians are more reliable and this is a great argument in their favor, but with this exception they are not considered much better workers than the blacks. the storekeepers much prefer the negroes, who spend their money more freely. the planters claim that the labor is unreliable and say they never know on saturday how many workers they will have on monday. they also say it is hard to get extra labor done. in on one plantation the women were offered ten cents a day extra for some hoeing, but only four held out. higher wages were offered if some cane were cut by the ton instead of by the day, but after a week the hands asked to return to the gang at the lower wage. in the rice fields along the river about the same wages prevail as for the field hands in the cane plantations. the rice crop, however, is but a six months crop, so other employment must be found for part of the year if nothing but rice is raised. it is usual in this region to raise rice as a side crop. chapter v. social environment. =country church and school.= hitherto we have had to do chiefly with the economic situation of the negro farmer. there is, however, another set of forces which may not be ignored if we are to understand the situation which confronts us. these are, of course, the social forces. in discussing these it is more than ever essential to remember that a differentiation has been taking place among the negroes and that there are large numbers who are not to be grouped with the average men and women whom we seek to describe. it may even be true that there are communities which have gained a higher level. any statement of the social environment of , , people must necessarily be false if applied strictly to each individual. the existence of the higher class must not, however, be allowed to blind us to the condition of the rest. the average negro boy or girl is allowed to grow. it is difficult to say much more for the training received at home. we must remember that there is an almost total absence of home life as we understand it. the family seldom sits down together at the table or do anything else in common. the domestic duties are easily mastered by the girls and chores do not weigh heavily on the boys. at certain periods of the year the children are compelled to assist in the farm operations, such as picking cotton, but most of the time they are care free. thus they run almost wild while the parents are at work in the fields, and the stranger who suddenly approaches a cabin and beholds the youngsters scattering for shelter will not soon forget the sight. obedience, neatness, punctuality do not thrive in such an atmosphere. the introduction to the country school a little later does not greatly improve conditions. the teachers are often incompetent and their election often depends upon other things than fitness to teach; upon things, indeed, which are at times far from complimentary to the school trustees. the school year seldom exceeds four months and this may be divided into two terms, two months in the fall and two in the spring. school opens at an indefinite time in the morning, if scheduled for nine it is just as likely as not that it begins at ten thirty, while the closing hour is equally uncertain. the individual attention received by the average child is necessarily small. the schools are poorly equipped with books or maps. the interior view given on page is by no means exceptional. it may not be out of place to mention the fact that recognition of these evils is leading in many places in the south to the incorporation of private schools, which then offer their facilities to the public in return for partial support at the public expense. public moneys are being turned over to these schools in considerable amounts. in some counties the public does not own a school building. without questioning the fact that these schools are an improvement over existing conditions, history will belie itself if this subsidizing of private organizations does not some day prove a great drawback to the proper development of the public school system, unless it may be, that the courts will declare the practice illegal and unconstitutional. the home and the school being from our point of view unsatisfactory, the next social institution to which we turn is the church. since the war this has come to be the most influential in the opinion of the negro and it deserves more careful study than has yet been given to it. only some of the more obvious features can here be considered. the first thing to impress the observer is the fact that time is again no object to the negro. the service advertised for eleven may get fairly under way by twelve and there is no predicting when it will stop. the people drift in and out, one or two at a time, throughout the service. families do not enter nor sit together. outside is always a group talking over matters of general interest. the music, lined out, consists of the regulation church hymns, which are usually screeched all out of time in a high key. the contrast between this music and the singing of the plantation songs at hampton or some other schools which impresses one as does little music he hears elsewhere is striking. the people have the idea that plantation songs are out of place in the church. the collection is taken with a view to letting others know what each one does. at the proper time a couple of the men take their places at a table before the pulpit and invite the people to come forward with their offerings. the people straggle up the aisle with their gifts, being constantly urged to hasten so as not to delay the service. after half an hour or so the results obtained are remarkable and the social emulation redounds to the benefit of the preacher. it is difficult for the white visitor to get anything but hints of the real possibilities of the preacher, for he is at once introduced to the audience and induced to address them if it is possible. even when this is not done there is usually an air of restraint which is noticeable. only occasionally does the speaker forget himself and break loose, as it were. the study then presented is interesting in the extreme. while the minister shouts, the audience are swaying backward and forward in sympathetic rhythm, encouraging the speaker with cries of "amen", "that's right", "that's the gospel", "give it to 'em bud", "give 'em a little long sweetening". there is no question that they are profoundly moved, but the identity of the spirit which troubles the waters is to me sometimes a question. the forms of the white man's religion have been adopted, but the content of these forms seems strangely different. seemingly the church, or rather, religion, is not closely identified with morality. i am sorry to say that in the opinion of the best of both races the average country (and city) pastor does not bear a good reputation, the estimates of the immoral running from to per cent. of the total number. it is far from me to discount any class of people, but if the situation is anything as represented by the estimate, the seriousness of it is evident. this idea is supported by the fact that indulgence in immorality is seldom a bar to active church membership, and if a member be dismissed from one communion there are others anxious to receive him or her. there are churches and communities of which these statements are not true. it is interesting to note that the churches are securing their chief support from the women. as an organization the church does not seem to have taken any great interest in the matters which most vitally affect the life of the people, except to be a social center. if these things be considered it is easy to see why the best informed are seeking for the country districts men who can be leaders of the people during the week on the farms as well as good speakers on sunday. it is a pleasure to note that here and there some busy pastor is also spending a good deal of his time cultivating a garden, or running a small farm, with the distinct purpose of setting a good example. the precise way in which the church may be led to exert a wider and more helpful influence on the people is a matter of great importance, but it must be solved from within. turning from religious work we find the church bearing an important place in the social life and amusements. besides its many gatherings and protracted meetings which are social functions, numbers of picnics and excursions are given. these may be on the railroads to rather distant points, and because of the lack of discrimination as to participants, many earnest protests have been filed by the better class of negroes. the amusements of the blacks are simple. nearly all drink, but drunkenness is not a great vice. dances are in high esteem, and are often accompanied by much drinking and not infrequently by cutting scrapes, for the negro's passions lie on the surface and are easily aroused. in south carolina the general belief seems to be that the dispensary law has been beneficial. there is also a universal fondness for tobacco in all its forms. gambling prevails wherever there is ready money and not infrequently leads to serious assaults. music has great charms while a circus needs not the excuse of children to justify it in the negro's eyes. some of the holidays are celebrated, and when on the coast the blacks dubbed the th of may "desecration day," there were those who thought it well named. active sports, with the occasional exception of a ball game, are not preferred to the more quiet pleasure of sitting about in the sunshine conversing with friends. america can not show a happier, more contented lot of people than these same blacks. if we turn our attention to other characteristics of the negro we must notice his different moral standard. to introduce the little i shall say on this point let me quote from a well known anthropologist. "there is nothing more difficult for us to realize, civilized as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation, as regards what we call par excellence 'morality.' it is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we can not help attaching a certain shame, do not in the least shock the still imperfect conscience of the primitive man." from somewhat this standpoint we must judge of the negro. two or three illustrations will suffice. talking last summer to a porter in a small hotel, i asked him if he had ever lived on a farm. he replied that he had and that he often thought of returning. asking him why he did not he said that it would be necessary for him to get a wife and a lot of other things. i suggested the possibility of boarding in another family. he shook his head and said: "niggers is queer folks, boss. 'pears to me they don' know what they gwine do. ef i go out and live in a man's house like as not i run away wid dat man's wife." the second illustration is taken from an unpublished manuscript by rev. j. l. tucker of baton rouge. there is a negro of good character here in baton rouge whose name is ---- ----. he is a whitewasher by trade and does mainly odd jobs for the white people who are his patrons, and earns a good living. he is widely known through the city as a good and reliable man. some time ago he had trouble with his wife's preacher, who came to his house too often. the trouble culminated in his wife leaving him. soon thereafter he sent or went into the country and brought home a negro woman whom he installed in his house to cook and otherwise serve him. explaining the circumstances to mr. ----, he said: "i a'in' got no use for nigga preachers. dey is de debbil wid de wimmen. i tol' dat ar fellah to keep away fr'm my house or i'd hunt him wid a shotgun, an' i meant it. but he got her'n spite a me. she went off to 'im. now i's got me a wife from way back in de country, who don' know the ways of nigga preachers. i kin keep her, i reckon, a while, anyway. i pays her wages reg'lar, an' she does her duty by me. i tell yeh, mr. ----, a hired wife's a heap better's a married wife any time, yeh mark dat. ef yeh don' line er yer can sen' her off an' get anudder, an' she's nutten to complain 'bout a' longs yeh pay her wages. yes siree, yeh put dat down; de hired wife's nuff sight better'n de married one. i don' fus no mo' wid marryin' wives, i hires 'em. an i sent word to dat preacher dat if he comes roun' my house now i lays for 'im shore wid buck shot." commenting, mr. tucker says that the man had no idea of moral wrong, the real wife has lost no caste, the preacher stands just as well with his flock and the "new wife" is well received. the third instance occurred on a plantation. a married woman, not satisfied with the shoes she received from the store, wanted a pair of yellow turned shoes. the planter would not supply them. the woman was angry and finally left her husband, went to a neighboring place and "took up" with another man. these cases sufficiently illustrate prevailing conceptions of the sacredness of the marriage tie. certainly this involves a theory of home life which differs from ours. many matings are consummated without any regular marriage ceremony and with little reference to legal requirements, and divorces are equally informal. moral lapses seldom bring the negro before the courts. all these things but indicate the handicap which has to be overcome. within the family there is often great abuse on the part of the men. the result of it all is that many negroes do not know their own fathers and so little are the ties of kinship' regarded that near relatives are often unknown, and if possible less cared for. this may be substantiated by the records of any charity society in the north which has sought to trace friends of its negro applicants. to attempt a quantitative estimate of the extent of sexual immorality is useless. it is sufficient to realize that a different standard prevails and one result today is a frightful prevalence of venereal diseases to which any practising physician in the south can bear witness. i am glad to say there are sections which have risen above these conditions. the transition from slavery to freedom set in operation the forces of natural selection, which are sure and steadily working among the people and are weeding out those who for any reason can not adapt themselves to the new environment. insanity, almost unknown in slavery times, has appeared and has been increasing among the negroes of the south at a rate of about per cent. a decade since . of course, the number affected is still small, but the end is perhaps not reached. we have witnessed also the development of the pauper and criminal classes. this was to be expected. there is also some evidence of an increase in the use of drugs, cocaine and the like. the point to be noted is that there is taking place a steady division of the negroes into various social strata and in spite of race traits it is no longer to be considered as on a level. i have sought to represent the situation as it appears to me, neither seeking to overemphasize the virtues or the vices of the race. it is clear to me that in spite of the obvious progress the road ahead is long and hard. while i do not anticipate any such acceleration of speed as will immediately bring about an economic or social millenium i believe that proper measures may be found, indeed, are already in use, which if widely adopted will lead to better things. how many of the race will fall by the way is, in one sense, a matter of indifference. in the long run, for the whites as well as the blacks, they will survive who adapt their social theories and, consequently, their modes of life to their environments. chapter vi. the outlook. "one of the things which militates most against the negro here is his unreliability. * * * his mental processes are past finding out and he can not be counted on to do or not to do a given thing under given circumstances. there is scarcely a planter in all this territory who would not make substantial concessions for an assured tenantry." a northern man, now resident in the south and employing negro labor, says: "i am convinced of one thing and that is that there is no dependence to be placed in per cent. of the negro laborers if left to themselves and out of the overseer's sight." these quotations from men who are seeking to promote the success of the negroes with whom they come in contact might be multiplied indefinitely from every part of the south. the statements are scarce open to discussion, so well recognized is the fact. if i have rightly apprehended the nature of the training afforded by africa and slavery there was little in them to develop the habits of forethought, thrift and industry, upon which this reliability must be based. i am not arguing the question as to whether this unreliability marks a decadence of negro standards or whether it is due to the present higher standards of the white. for argument, at least, i am willing to admit that in quality of workmanship, in steadfastness and self-control there has really been great progress. my interest is in the present and future rather than the past. i have tried to show that, judged by present standards, the negro is still decidedly lacking. personally i am not surprised at this. i should be astonished if it were otherwise. the trouble is that we at the north are unable to disabuse ourselves of the idea that the negro is a dark skinned yankee and we think, therefore, that if all is not as it should be that something is wrong, that somebody or some social condition is holding him back. we accuse slavery, attribute it to the hostility of the southern white. something _is holding him back_, but it is his inheritance of thousands of years in africa, not slavery nor the southern whites. it is my observation that the white of the black belt deal with the negro more patiently and endure far more of shiftless methods than the average northerner would tolerate for a day. it is interesting to note that northern white women who go south filled with the idea that the negro is abused can scarce keep a servant the first year or so of their stay. of course there are exceptions, few in number, who say as did a lumberman in alabama last summer: "i never have any trouble with the negro. have worked them for twenty years. why, i haven't had to kill one yet, though i did shoot one once, but i used fine shot and it didn't hurt him much." we have attempted to have the negro do in a few years what it has taken us thousands to accomplish, and are surprised that he has disappointed us. there is no room for discouragement. contrast the negro in africa and america to see what has been done. unless this unreliability is overcome it will form even a greater handicap for the future. southern methods of agriculture have been more wasteful of small economies than have northern. that a change is imperative, in many districts at least, has been shown. is the negro in a position to take advantage of these changes? at present it must be admitted that he does not possess the knowledge to enable him to utilize his environment and make the most out of it. it has been shown that he is bearing little part in the development of the trucking industry, nay more, that he does not even raise enough garden truck for his own support. in a bulletin of the farmer's improvement society of texas i find the following: very many, in the first place, do not try to make their supplies at home. very often much is lost by bad fences. lots of them don't know where their hoes, plows, single-trees, etc., are at this minute. lots of them buy butter, peas, beans, lard, meat and hay. * * * well, really, to sum up, if there's anything like scientific methods among the vast majority of our people i don't know it. * * * i venture to say that not one negro farmer in a hundred ever saw the back of one of these bulletins (agricultural), much less the inside. if some of these primary lessons have not been mastered what chance is there that the negro will overcome, unaided, the crop lien system and his other handicaps and introduce diversified agriculture, stock raising, etc.? slavery taught him something about work and he is willing to work, and work hard, under leadership. herein lies the possibility of his economic salvation. he is not yet ready as a race to stand alone and advance at the pace demanded by america of the twentieth century. he must be taught and the teaching must be by practice as well as by precept. viewed from this standpoint, though it is equally true from another, one of the great needs of the south is that its white farmers should pay more attention to other things than cotton. so long as land is considered too valuable to use for pasture, for hay, for the various crops on which stock live and fatten, or so long as it is considered profitable to sell cotton seed for $ a ton and throw away four or five times this amount in the food and manure which the same seed contains, the negro will not see the advantage of a different system. nor does the sight of thousands of tons of rice straw dumped into the mississippi each year, just as a generation ago the oat straw in iowa was burned, lead him to suspect unused sources of wealth. the possibilities of southern agriculture are great, but the lead must be taken by the whites. the negro has a great advantage over the italian or other european peasant in that the white man prefers him as a helper. he is patient, docile and proud of his work. he is wanted by the native whites, and if the reader doubts this let him go to any southern community and attempt to bring about any great exodus of the negroes and he will be surprised to find how soon he is requested to move on. this interest on the part of the whites is a factor which must be considered. it would be a happy day for the negro if the white woman of the south took her old personal interest in his welfare. this friendly sentiment will not increase with time and each succeeding generation will emphasize, more and more, industrial efficiency, and the negro will not be preferred. corresponding to this is the fact that the negro respects and willingly follows the white man, more willingly and more trustingly than he does another negro. he is personally loyal, as the care received by the soldiers during war time illustrated. but slavery is gone and the feudalism which followed it is slowly yielding to commercialism, which gives the palm to the more efficient. hitherto the negro has tilled much of the best land of the south. meantime the great prairies have been settled and about all the good cheap land of the northwest taken. a tide of immigration is setting in towards the southern states. already the rice industry of louisiana has been revolutionized by white immigrants. what may this mean for the negro if these incoming whites defy race prejudice and seek the rich bottom lands of the mississippi or elsewhere? will the negro be in a position of independence or will he only assist the white? will he till in the future the best lands or will he be forced to the less fertile? with the knowledge of the present regarding yellow fever, malaria and typhoid the dread of the lowlands is disappearing. if the indications point, as many believe, towards the south as the seat of the next great agricultural development these questions become of vital importance to the negro. can he become economically secure before he is made to meet a competition which he has never yet faced? or does the warmer climate give him an advantage, which the whites can not overcome? i must confess that i doubt it. in "the cotton plant" (page ), mr. harry hammond states that in counties of the black prairie region of texas, in which the whites predominate, the average value of the land is $ . per acre, as against $ . for similar soil in twelve counties of the black prairie of alabama, in which the negroes are in the majority. he says further: "the number and variety of implements recently introduced in cotton culture here, especially in the prairies of texas, is very much greater than elsewhere in the cotton belt." this would indicate that heat alone is no insurmountable obstacle. if these things be true, then as the late mr. j. l. m. curry said: "it may be assumed that the industrial problem lies at the heart of the whole situation which confronts us. into our public and other schools should be incorporated industrial training. if to regularity, punctuality, silence, obedience to authority, there be systematically added instruction in mechanical arts, the results would be astounding." the question of classical education does not now concern us. the absolutely essential thing is that the negro shall learn to work regularly and intelligently. the lesson begun in slavery must be mastered. as dr. e. g. murphy puts it: the industrial training supplied by that school (slavery) is now denied to him. the capacity, the equipment, and the necessity for work which slavery provided are the direct cause of the superiority of the old time darkey. is freedom to have no substitute for the ancient school? * * * the demand of the situation is not less education, but more education of the right sort. i would not say that i thought all negroes should be farmers, but i do feel that the farm offers the mass of the race the most favorable opportunity for the development of solid and enduring character. it seems to me that the following words from one of our broadest minded men apply with special force to the negro: if i had some magic gift to bestow it would be to make our country youth see one truth, namely, that science as applied to the farm, the garden and the forest has as splendid a dignity as astronomy; that it may work just as many marvels and claim just as high an order of talent." chapter vii. agricultural training. there remain to be considered some of the agencies at work to better the lot of the farmer. in this i shall not attempt to give a list of institutions and outline of courses but to indicate various lines of work which seem promising. in discussing the training of the negro farmer credit must first be given to the white planters under whom he has learned so much of what he knows. under the changing conditions of agriculture this training, or the training received on the average farm is not sufficient and must be supplemented by special training if the desired results are to be obtained. it probably lay in the situation that the negro should get the idea that education meant freedom from labor. it is none the less unfortunate for him. to counteract this idea has been a difficult matter and the influence of the average school has not been of any special help. the country school taught by a teacher, usually incompetent from any standpoint, whose interest has been chiefly in the larger salary made possible by his "higher education" has not been an unmixed blessing. the children have learned to read and write and have preserved their notion that if only they could get enough education they might be absolved from manual labor. even today hampton and tuskegee and similar schools have to contend with the opposition of parents who think their children should not be compelled to work, for they are sent to school to enable them to avoid labor. quite likely it could not be expected that the country school should hold up a higher ideal, for here we have to do with the beginnings of a system of instruction which had to make use of such material as it could find for teachers. the same excuse does not suffice to explain the attitude taken by the bulk of schools maintained by the northern whites for the negroes. their inability to comprehend the needs of the case can only be ascribed to the conception of a negro as a white man with a black skin and a total failure to recognize the essential conditions of race progress. when the roman monks penetrated the german woods the chief benefits they carried were not embalmed in latin grammars and the orations of cicero, but were embodied in the knowledge of agriculture and the arts which, adopted by the people, made possible later the german civilization. the old rescue mission sought to yank the sinner out of the slough of despond, the social settlement seeks to help him who has fallen in the contest of life or him to whom the opportunity has not been offered, to climb, recognizing that morality and religion attend, not recede progress. the old charity gave alms and the country was overrun with hordes of beggars; the new seeks to help a man to help himself. a similar change must come in the efforts for the negro. it has been sought to give him the fruits of civilization without its bases. it will immediately be argued that this is wrong, that the chief educational work has been but primary and that little so-called "higher education" has been given. this is true, even to the extent that it is possible to find a town of , inhabitants one-half negroes, in which the city provides but one teacher for the black children and the balance are trained in a school supported by the gifts of northern people. but, and this is the important thing, the spirit of the education has been clear and definite and that the plan has not been carried out has not been due to lack of faith in it. general armstrong, thanks to his observations in hawaii, perceived that a different course was necessary. his mantle fell on h. f. frissell and booker t. washington, so hampton and tuskegee have been the chief factors in producing the change which has been noted as coming. now that industrial training is winning support it is amusing to note the anxiety of other schools to show that they have always believed in it. i can but feel that had the plans of general armstrong been widely adopted, had the teachers been trained to take the people where they were and lead them to gradual improvement, that the situation today would be radically different. it is, however, not too late to do this yet and the widespread founding of schools modeled after hampton and tuskegee indicates a general recognition of the needs of the situation. yet, even these schools have not turned out as many farmers as is often supposed. on examination of the catalog of tuskegee for i find only sixteen graduates who are farming and thirteen of these have other occupations (principally teaching). the combination, i think, desirable rather than otherwise. three others are introducing cotton raising in africa under the german government. from the industrial department nine have received certificates in agriculture and six in dairying, but their present occupations are not given. asking a prominent man at tuskegee for the reason, he exclaimed, rather disgustedly, that they disliked work and preferred to teach. this merely indicates the handicap tuskegee has to overcome, and perhaps the average agricultural college of the north cannot show a higher percentage of farmers. an official of the department of agriculture tells me that only per cent of the graduates of the agricultural colleges become farmers. to show how much agricultural training is given at tuskegee the following statement for the year - is of interest: no pupil is counted twice. one hundred and eighty-one students are engaged in the actual operations of the farm, truck garden, orchard, etc. seventy-nine are taking the dairying, etc., and are taking agriculture as part of their academic work. yet, more of the graduates become professional men (lawyers, preachers, etc.) than farmers, the proportion being about three to one. in citing tuskegee i am, of course, not forgetting that other schools, such as tougaloo and talladega, have excellent farms and are seeking (though their chief emphasis is elsewhere) to give agricultural training. reverting to the different lines of work which seem hopeful, the subject may be subdivided into several sections. we have first to do with the efforts to make the young child appreciate nature and become interested in her processes. perhaps hampton has developed this side most extensively, both in the little garden plots cultivated by the children and the nature study leaflets prepared for use in other schools. personally i can but feel that there is a possibility of vastly extending such instruction by means of the country schools. if they may be consolidated, and this is being done in many sections, i think a way can be found to make the school house the social center of the district in such a way as will greatly help conditions. actual instruction in practical farming, dairying, horticulture, etc., is given in an increasing number of schools, but the opportunities are still very inadequate to the needs. if it be possible the way must be found to enable the negro to use more and better machinery. the average planter does not care to introduce expensive machinery lest it be ruined by careless and ignorant tenants. these industrial schools can never hope to reach more than a certain percentage of the people. there must be measures adopted to widen the influence of the school. tuskegee may be mentioned for its attempts to reach out. for many years an annual farmers' conference has been held which bids fair to become the mecca of the negro farmer. the influence exerted cannot be measured, but it is believed to be great. one weak spot in many of the schools is that they have little if any direct influence upon the life of the community in which they are situated. there are, however, some exceptions. the calhoun colored school has a farmer's association meeting monthly. this is made up chiefly of men who are purchasing land through a company formed by the school. topics of local interest, methods of farming, etc., are the subjects for discussion. there is also a mother's meeting with subjects of more domestic interest, with a savings department for co-operative buying. curiously enough the formation of the mother's meeting was at first opposed by the men (and by some whites), as it took the women out of the fields occasionally. now it is more favored. as tuskegee and many other places there are similar farmers' associations, of which no special mention need be made. tuskegee has an outpost some miles from the school which is doing a general neighborhood work. the following papers circulated by the school will give a general idea of their conceptions of the needs as well as of their efforts to influence conditions for the better: my daily work. i may take in washing, but every day i promise myself that i will do certain work for my family. i will set the table for every meal. i will wash the dishes after every meal. monday, i will do my family washing. i will put my bedclothes out to air. i will clean the safe with hot water and soap. tuesday, i will do my ironing and family patching. wednesday, i will scrub my kitchen and clean my yard thoroughly. thursday, i will clean and air the meal and pork boxes. i will scour my pots and pans with soap and ashes. friday, i will wash my dish cloth, dish towels and hand towels. i will sweep and dust my whole house and clean everything thoroughly. sunday, i will go to church and sunday school. i will take my children with me. i will stay at home during the remainder of the day. i will try to read something aloud helpful to all. questions that i will pledge myself to answer at the end of the year. . how many bushels of potatoes, corn, beans, peas and peanuts have we raised this year? . how many hogs and poultry do we keep? . how much poultry have we raised? . how many bales of cotton have we raised? . how much have we saved to buy a home? . how much have we done towards planting flowers and making our yard look pretty? . how many kinds of vegetables did we raise in our home garden? . how many times did we stay away from miscellaneous excursions when we wished to go? what were our reasons for staying at home? . how have we helped our boys and girls to stay out of bad company? . what paper have we taken, and why have we taken our children to church and had them sit with us? how to make home happy. keep clean, body and soul. remember that weak minds, diseased bodies, bad acts are often the result of bad food. remember that you can set a good table by raising fruit, vegetables, grains and your meat. remember that you intend to train your children to stay at home out of bad company. remember that if you would have their minds and yours clean, you will be obliged to help them learn something outside the school room. remember, that you can do this in no better way than by taking a good paper--the new york weekly witness or the sabbath reading, published in new york, cost very little. have your children read to you from the bible and from the papers. your needs. you need chairs in your house. get boxes. cover with bright calico, and use them for seats until you can buy chairs. you need plates, knives and forks, spoons and table cloths. buy them with the tobacco and snuff money. you need more respect for self. get it by staying away from street corners, depots and, above all, excursions. you need to stay away from these excursions to keep out of bad company, out of court, out of jail, and out of the disgust of every self-respecting person. you need more race pride. cultivate this as you would your crops. it will mean a step forward. you need a good home. save all you can. get your home, and that will bring you nearer citizenship. you can supply all these needs. when will you begin? every moment of delay is a loss. how to become prosperous. . keep no more than one dog. . stay away from court. . buy no snuff, tobacco and whisky. . raise your own pork. . raise your vegetables. . put away thirty cents for every dollar you spend. . keep a good supply of poultry. set your hens. keep your chickens until they will bring a good price. . go to town on thursday instead of saturday. buy no more than you need. stay in town no longer than necessary. . starve rather than sell your crops before you raise them. let your mind be fixed on that the first day of january, and stick to that every day in the year. . buy land and build you a home. the various states are beginning to establish institutions in which agriculture and industrial training may be given. among these may be mentioned that of alabama at normal, and of mississippi at westside. alabama has also established an experiment station in connection with the tuskegee institute. in texas there is an interesting movement among the negro farmers known as the "farmers' improvement society." the objects are: . abolition of the credit system. . stimulate improvements in farming. . co-operative buying. . sickness and life insurance. . encouragement of purchase of land and home. the association holds a fair each year which is largely attended. according to the galveston _news_ of october , , the society has about , members, who own some , acres of land, more than , cattle and , horses and mules. this organization, founded and maintained entirely by negroes, promises much in many ways. in october, , a fair was held in connection with the school at calhoun, ala., with exhibitors and entries, including from the school and a very creditable showing of farm products and live stock. besides these general lines which seem to be of promise it is in place to mention a couple of attempts to get the negroes to purchase land. there have been not a few persons who have sold land to them on the installment plan with the expectation that later payments would be forfeited and the land revert. there are some enterprises which are above suspicion. i am not referring now to private persons or railroad companies who have sold large tracts to the negroes, but to organizations whose objects are to aid the blacks in becoming landholders. the land company at calhoun. ala., started in , buying , acres of land, which was accurately surveyed and divided into plots of fifty acres, so arranged that each farm should include different sorts of land. this was sold to the negroes at cost price, $ per acre, the purchasers to pay per cent on deferred payments. the sums paid by the purchasers each year have been as follows: --$ . . found later to be borrowed money in the main. --$ , . . largely borrowed money. --$ . . men paying back borrowed money. advances large. --$ . . --$ , . . money not borrowed. advances small. --$ . . bad year. poor crops. money not borrowed. --$ , . . advances very small. outlook encouraging. there have been some failures on part of tenants, and it has been necessary to gradually select the better men and allow the others to drop out. the company has paid all expenses and interest on its capital. a second plantation has been purchased and is being sold. there is a manager who is a trained farmer, and by means of the farmers' association already mentioned much pressure is brought to bear on the negroes to improve their condition. the results are encouraging. in macon county the southern land company has purchased several thousand acres which it is selling in much the same way, but it is too early to speak of results. even at calhoun but few of the men have yet gotten deeds for their land. a word regarding the methods of the southern land company will be of interest. the land was carefully surveyed in forty-acre plots. these are sold at $ per acre, the payments covering a period of seven years. the interest is figured in advance, and to each plot is charged a yearly fee of $ for management. in this total is also included the cost of house and well (a three-roomed cabin is furnished for about $ , a well for $ ). this sum is then divided into seven equal parts so that the purchaser knows in advance just what he must pay each year. the object of the company is to encourage home ownership. until the place is paid for control of the planting, etc., remains with the manager of the company. advances are in cash (except fertilizers), as no store is conducted by the company and interest is charged at per cent for the money advanced and for the time said money is used. on this place in , h. w., a man aged , with wife and three children, owning a horse, a mule and two cows, did as follows. he and his son-in-law are buying eighty acres. they made a good showing for the first year under considerable difficulties and on land by no means rich: debits. credits. fertilizer $ . cotton $ . whitewashing . liming . lease contract . cash . interest . ------- $ . ------- balance jan. , $ . this leads me to mention the question of land ownership on the part of the negroes. this has not been mentioned hitherto for several reasons. in the first place the data for any detailed knowledge of the subject are not to be had. few states make separate record of land owned by the blacks as distinct from general ownership. the census has to depend upon the statements of the men themselves, and i have heard tenants solemnly argue that they owned the land. again a very considerable proportion of the land owned is also heavily mortgaged, and these mortgages are not always for improvements. nor is it by any means self evident that land ownership necessarily means a more advanced condition than where land is rented. moreover, a considerable proportion of the _farms_ owned are so small that they do not suffice to support the owners. conditions vary in different districts. in virginia it has been possible to buy a few acres at a very low price. in parts of alabama, or wherever the land has been held in large estates in recent years, it has often been impossible for the negro to purchase land in small lots. thus, though i believe heartily in land ownership for the blacks and believe that well conducted land associations will be beneficial, i cannot think that this alone will solve the questions confronting us. retrogression is possible even with land ownership. other things are necessary. on the basis of existing data the best article with which i am acquainted on this subject appeared in the _southern workman_ for january, , written by dr. g. s. dickerman, in which he showed that among the negro farmers the owners and managers formed . per cent of the total in virginia, . per cent in maryland, . per cent in kentucky, falling as we go south to . per cent in alabama, . per cent in mississippi, and . per cent in louisiana, rising to . per cent in texas. evidently the forces at work are various. within a few months, at the suggestion of mr. horace plunkett, of the irish agricultural organization society, a new work has been taken up, whose course will be watched with great interest. i quote from a letter of mr. plunkett to dr. wallace buttrick, of the general education board: from what i have seen of the negro character, my own impression is that the race has those leader-following propensities which characterize the irish people. it has, too, i suspect, in its mental composition the same vein of idealism which my own countrymen possess, and which makes them susceptible to organization, and especially to those forms of organization which require the display of the social qualities to which i have alluded and which you will have to develop. these characteristics which express themselves largely, the old plantation songs, in the form of religions exercises, and in the maintenance of a staff of preachers out of all proportion i should think, to the spiritual requirements, should, in my opinion, lend themselves to associative action for practical ends if the organizing machinery necessary to initiate such action were provided. what, then, is my practical suggestion? it is that your board, if it generally approves of the idea, should take one, two, or, at the most, three communities, such as that we inquired about, and organize them on the irish plan. the farmers should at first he advised to confine their efforts to some simple object, such as the joint purchase of their immediate agricultural requirements. * * * i would at first deal solely with the colored people, beginning in a very small way, leaving larger developments for the future to decide. hampton institute has taken up the suggestion and is planning to organize a community. everything will, of course, depend on the management as well as on the people. if the results are as satisfactory as they have been in ireland the efforts will be well expended. with this brief and incomplete account we must take leave of the negro farmer. throughout the thesis i have attempted to keep two or three fundamental propositions constantly in sight. briefly summarized these are that we have to do with a race whose inherited characteristics are largely of african origin; that these have been somewhat modified under american influences, but are still potent; that the economic environment in america is not a unit and must finally result in the creation of different types among the blacks; that the needs of the different habitats are various; that the segregation from the mass of the whites is fraught with serious consequences; that measures of wider application must be adopted if the negro is to bear his proper part in the progress of the country; that owing to the great race differences the whites must take an active interest in the blacks; that in spite of the many handicaps under which the negro struggles the outlook is not hopeless if his willingness to work can so be directed that a surplus will result. to my mind the negro must work out his salvation, economic and social. it cannot be given without destroying the very thing we seek to strengthen--character. this is the justification for the emphasis now laid upon industrial training. this training and the resulting character are the pre-requisites of all race progress. industrial education is thus not a fad nor a mere expedient to satisfy the selfish demands of southern whites. it is the foundation without which the superstructure is in vain. if i have fairly stated the difficulties in the way and have shown the possibility of ultimate success, i am content. for the future i am hopeful. maps showing the distribution of the negroes in the southern states these maps are particularly referred to in chapter ii. the chief geological districts are indicated. the figures are based upon the census of . the maps are here included in the hope that they may prove of value to students of the problems herein discussed. =virginia negro percentage of population, total negroes , total whites , , negroes form . % of total= =virginia negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile . = =north carolina negro percentage of population, total negroes , total whites , , negroes form % of total= =north carolina negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile = =south carolina negro percentage of total population, total whites in state , total negroes in state , --------- , , negroes form . % of total= =south carolina negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes to square mile . average whites to square mile . = =georgia negro percentage of total population, total whites in state , , total negroes in state , , --------- , , negroes form . % of total= =georgia negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per square mile . average whites per square mile . = =florida negro percentage of population, total whites , total negroes , ------- , negroes form . % of total= =florida negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile . =alabama total whites in state , , total negroes in state , --------- , , negroes form . % of total= =alabama negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile average whites per mile . = =mississippi negro percentage of total population, negro percentage in state . total whites , total negroes , --------- , , = =mississippi negroes per square mile, average negroes per square mile . average whites per square mile . square miles in state , =tennessee negro percentage of population, total negroes , total whites , , negroes form . % of total= =tennessee negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile . = =kentucky negro percentage of population, total negroes , total whites , , negroes form . % of total= =kentucky negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile . = =arkansas negro percentage of total population, negro percentage in state total whites in state , total negroes in state , --------- , , = =arkansas negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per sq. mile . average whites per sq. mile . = =louisiana negro percentage of total population, total whites in state , total negroes in state , --------- , , negroes form . % of total= =louisiana negroes per square mile, square miles in state , average negroes per mile . average whites per mile . = =eastern texas whites in district , , negroes in district , negro percentage in state . in district covered = =eastern texas negroes per square mile, square miles included , average negro . average white . includes all counties with one negro per square mile= footnotes: [ ] see article by a. h. stone. atlantic monthly, may, . [ ] "the negro in maryland." [ ] the negro in the yazoo-mississippi delta. [ ] bulletin, department of labor, no. . [ ] the future of the american negro. [ ] olmsted, f. l.--the cotton kingdom. [ ] olmsted, f. t. the cotton kingdom. [ ] negroes of litwalton, va.--bulletin department of labor, no. . [ ] rents a mule. [ ] bulletin, department of labor, no. . transcriber's notes: passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_. additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been retained from the original. misprints corrected: "entrepeneurs" corrected to "entrepreneurs" (page ) "optomistic" corrected to "optimistic" (page ) "from" corrected to "form" (page ) "atantic" corrected to "atlantic" (page ) "stdy" corrected to "study" (page ) "talledega" corrected to "talladega" (page ) "inhabitated" corrected to "inhabited" (page ) "sevaral" corrected to "several" (page ) "carefuly" corrected to "carefully" (page ) "tusgekee" corrected to "tuskegee" (page ) "talledega" corrected to "talladega" (page ) "charactertistics" corrected to "characteristics" (page ) two footnotes are marked [ ]; both refer to the same footnote. the key to the table on page was extracted from the column headings of the original table that were printed vertically. wide tables have been split in half with one column repeated. in england in *** transcribed from the january george allen & unwin reprint of the march edition by david price, email ccx @coventry.ac.uk the condition of the working-class in england in with a preface written in by frederick engels _translated by florence kelley wischnewetzky_ _london_ george allen & unwin ltd _museum street_ preface the book, an english translation of which is here republished, was first issued in germany in . the author, at that time, was young, twenty- four years of age, and his production bears the stamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed. it was translated into english, in , by an american lady, mrs. f. kelley wischnewetzky, and published in the following year in new york. the american edition being as good as exhausted, and having never been extensively circulated on this side of the atlantic, the present english copyright edition is brought out with the full consent of all parties interested. for the american edition, a new preface and an appendix were written in english by the author. the first had little to do with the book itself; it discussed the american working-class movement of the day, and is, therefore, here omitted as irrelevant, the second--the original preface--is largely made use of in the present introductory remarks. the state of things described in this book belongs to-day, in many respects, to the past, as far as england is concerned. though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern political economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. the pettifogging business tricks of the polish jew, the representative in europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to hamburg or berlin; and, again, the commission agent, who hails from berlin or hamburg, jew or christian, after frequenting the manchester exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. the fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. and it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer and his "hands." the revival of trade, after the crisis of , was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. the repeal of the corn laws and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to english industry and commerce all the elbow- room they had asked for. the discovery of the californian and australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession. the colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing english manufactured goods. in india millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the lancashire power-loom. china was more and more being opened up. above all, the united states--then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial market, but by far the biggest of them all--underwent an economic development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country. and, finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period--railways and ocean steamers--were now worked out on an international scale; they realised actually, what had hitherto existed only potentially, a world-market. this world-market, at first, was composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around one manufacturing centre--england--which consumed the greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. no wonder england's industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled, and such that the status of now appears to us as comparatively primitive and insignificant. and in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. the competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. thus the truck system was suppressed, the ten hours' bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced--much against the spirit of free trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of trades' unions, and finally even to discover in strikes--at opportune times--a powerful means to serve their own ends. the largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. and for a very good reason. the fact is, that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed--at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case--to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman's fate during its earlier stages. and thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact, that the cause of the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but _in the capitalistic system itself_. the wage-worker sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. after a few hours' work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working-day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which cost the capitalist nothing, but yet goes into his pocket. that is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilised society into a few rothschilds and vanderbilts, the owners of all the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour-force, on the other. and that this result is caused, not by this or that secondary grievance, but by the system itself--this fact has been brought out in bold relief by the development of capitalism in england since . again, the repeated visitations of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and other epidemics have shown the british bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities, if he wishes to save himself and family from falling victims to such diseases. accordingly, the most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous. drainage has been introduced or improved, wide avenues have been opened out athwart many of the worst "slums" i had to describe. "little ireland" has disappeared, and the "seven dials" are next on the list for sweeping away. but what of that? whole districts which in i could describe as almost idyllic, have now, with the growth of the towns, fallen into the same state of dilapidation, discomfort, and misery. only the pigs and the heaps of refuse are no longer tolerated. the bourgeoisie have made further progress in the art of hiding the distress of the working-class. but that, in regard to their dwellings, no substantial improvement has taken place, is amply proved by the report of the royal commission "on the housing of the poor," . and this is the case, too, in other respects. police regulations have been plentiful as blackberries; but they can only hedge in the distress of the workers, they cannot remove it. but while england has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it. france, germany, and especially america, are the formidable competitors who, at this moment--as foreseen by me in --are more and more breaking up england's industrial monopoly. their manufactures are young as compared with those of england, but increasing at a far more rapid rate than the latter; and, curious enough, they have at this moment arrived at about the same phase of development as english manufacture in . with regard to america, the parallel is indeed most striking. true, the external surroundings in which the working-class is placed in america are very different, but the same economical laws are at work, and the results, if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. hence we find in america the same struggles for a shorter working- day, for a legal limitation of the working-time, especially of women and children in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system, in rural districts, made use of by the "bosses" as a means of domination over the workers. when i received, in , the american papers with accounts of the great strike of , pennsylvanian coal-miners in the connellsville district, i seemed but to read my own description of the north of england colliers' strike of . the same cheating of the workpeople by false measure; the same truck-system; the same attempt to break the miners' resistance by the capitalists' last, but crushing, resource,--the eviction of the men out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies. i have not attempted, in this translation, to bring the book up to date, or to point out in detail all the changes that have taken place since . and for two reasons: firstly, to do this properly, the size of the book must be about doubled; and, secondly, the first volume of "das kapital," by karl marx, an english translation of which is before the public, contains a very ample description of the state of the british working-class, as it was about , that is to say, at the time when british industrial prosperity reached its culminating point. i should, then, have been obliged again to go over the ground already covered by marx's celebrated work. it will be hardly necessary to point out that the general theoretical standpoint of this book--philosophical, economical, political--does not exactly coincide with my standpoint of to-day. modern international socialism, since fully developed as a science, chiefly and almost exclusively through the efforts of marx, did not as yet exist in . my book represents one of the phases of its embryonic development; and as the human embryo, in its early stages, still reproduces the gill-arches of our fish-ancestors, so this book exhibits everywhere the traces of the descent of modern socialism from one of its ancestors,--german philosophy. thus great stress is laid on the dictum that communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working-class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. this is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. so long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working-class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working-class alone. the french bourgeois of , too, declared the emancipation of the bourgeoisie to be the emancipation of the whole human race; but the nobility and clergy would not see it; the proposition--though for the time being, with respect to feudalism, an abstract historical truth--soon became a mere sentimentalism, and disappeared from view altogether in the fire of the revolutionary struggle. and to-day, the very people who, from the "impartiality" of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes--these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers,--wolves in sheeps' clothing. the recurring period of the great industrial crisis is stated in the text as five years. this was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from to . but the industrial history from to has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear. since the state of things has changed again, of which more anon. i have taken care not to strike out of the text the many prophecies, amongst others that of an imminent social revolution in england, which my youthful ardour induced me to venture upon. the wonder is, not that a good many of them proved wrong, but that so many of them have proved right, and that the critical state of english trade, to be brought on by continental and especially american competition, which i then foresaw--though in too short a period--has now actually come to pass. in this respect i can, and am bound to, bring the book up to date, by placing here an article which i published in the _london commonweal_ of march , , under the heading: "england in and in ." it gives at the same time a short outline of the history of the english working-class during these forty years, and is as follows: "forty years ago england stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only. the immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. every ten years the march of industry was violently interrupted by a general commercial crash, followed, after a long period of chronic depression, by a few short years of prosperity, and always ending in feverish over-production and consequent renewed collapse. the capitalist class clamoured for free trade in corn, and threatened to enforce it by sending the starving population of the towns back to the country districts whence they came, to invade them, as john bright said, not as paupers begging for bread, but as an army quartered upon the enemy. the working masses of the towns demanded their share of political power--the people's charter; they were supported by the majority of the small trading class, and the only difference between the two was whether the charter should be carried by physical or by moral force. then came the commercial crash of and the irish famine, and with both the prospect of revolution "the french revolution of saved the english middle-class. the socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious french workmen frightened the small middle-class of england and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the english working-class. at the very moment when chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally, before even it collapsed externally on the th of april, . the action of the working-class was thrust into the background. the capitalist class triumphed along the whole line. "the reform bill of had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. the repeal of the corn laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest,--bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. free trade meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of england in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists--the class which now represented the nation. and they set about this task with a will. every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. the tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised. everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working-class; the reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down--if not as yet the _bringing down_--of wages. england was to become the 'workshop of the world;' all other countries were to become for england what ireland already was,--markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. england the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of corn and cotton-growing irelands revolving around her, the industrial sun. what a glorious prospect! "the manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their more narrow-minded compeers on the continent. chartism was dying out. the revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of free trade. both these circumstances had turned the english working-class, politically, into the tail of the 'great liberal party,' the party led by the manufacturers. this advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. and the manufacturing capitalists, from the chartist opposition, not to free trade, but to the transformation of free trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. the factory acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. trades' unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers. even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to , were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. and, practically, that horrid 'people's charter' actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. 'the abolition of the property qualification' and 'vote by ballot' are now the law of the land. the reform acts of and make a near approach to 'universal suffrage,' at least such as it now exists in germany; the redistribution bill now before parliament creates 'equal electoral districts'--on the whole not more unequal than those of germany; 'payment of members,' and shorter, if not actually 'annual parliaments,' are visibly looming in the distance--and yet there are people who say that chartism is dead. "the revolution of , not less than many of its predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors. the very people who put it down have become, as karl marx used to say, its testamentary executors. louis napoleon had to create an independent and united italy, bismarck had to revolutionise germany and to restore hungarian independence, and the english manufacturers had to enact the people's charter. "for england, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing capitalists were at first startling. trade revived and extended to a degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from to , with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working power concentrated in the large towns. the progress was indeed interrupted, as before, by a crisis every ten years, in as well as in ; but these revulsions were now considered as natural, inevitable events, which must be fatalistically submitted to, and which always set themselves right in the end. "and the condition of the working-class during this period? there was temporary improvement even for the great mass. but this improvement always was reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant superseding of bands by new machinery, by the immigration of the agricultural population, now, too, more and more superseded by machines. "a permanent improvement can be recognised for two 'protected' sections only of the working-class. firstly, the factory hands. the fixing by act of parliament of their working-day within relatively rational limits has restored their physical constitution and endowed them with a moral superiority, enhanced by their local concentration. they are undoubtedly better off than before . the best proof is that, out of ten strikes they make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. you can never get the masters to agree to work 'short time,' let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the workpeople to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man. "secondly, the great trades' unions. they are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of _grown-up men_ predominates, or is alone applicable. here the competition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. the engineers, the carpenters, and joiners, the bricklayers, are each of them a power, to that extent that, as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers' labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. that their condition has remarkably improved since there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact, that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. they form an aristocracy among the working- class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. they are the model working-men of messrs. leone levi & giffen, and they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general. "but as to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. the east end of london is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. and so in all other large towns--abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts. the law which reduces the _value_ of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its _average price_, as a rule, to the minimum of those means of subsistence, these laws act upon them with the irresistible force of an automatic engine, which crushes them between its wheels. "this, then, was the position created by the free trade policy of , and by twenty years of the rule of the manufacturing capitalists. but, then, a change came. the crash of was, indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about ; but that did not last. we did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in or ; but we have had, ever since , a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. a dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years. how is this? "the free trade theory was based upon one assumption: that england was to be the one great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world. and the actual fact is that this assumption has turned out to be a pure delusion. the conditions of modern industry, steam-power and machinery, can be established wherever there is fuel, especially coals. and other countries beside england,--france, belgium, germany, america, even russia,--have coals. and the people over there did not see the advantage of being turned into irish pauper farmers merely for the greater wealth and glory of english capitalists. they set resolutely about manufacturing, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the world; and the consequence is, that the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by england for nearly a century is irretrievably broken up. "but the manufacturing monopoly of england is the pivot of the present social system of england. even while that monopoly lasted, the markets could not keep pace with the increasing productivity of english manufacturers; the decennial crises were the consequence. and new markets are getting scarcer every day, so much so that even the negroes of the congo are now to be forced into the civilisation attendant upon manchester calicos, staffordshire pottery, and birmingham hardware. how will it be when continental, and especially american, goods flow in in ever-increasing quantities--when the predominating share, still held by british manufacturers, will become reduced from year to year? answer, free trade, thou universal panacea. "i am not the first to point this out. already, in , at the southport meeting of the british association, mr. inglis palgrave, the president of the economic section, stated plainly that 'the days of great trade profits in england were over, and there was a pause in the progress of several great branches of industrial labour. _the country might almost be said to be entering the non-progressive state_.' "but what is to be the consequence? capitalist production _cannot_ stop. it must go on increasing and expanding, or it must die. even now, the mere reduction of england's lion's share in the supply of the world's markets means stagnation, distress, excess of capital here, excess of unemployed workpeople there. what will it be when the increase of yearly production is brought to a complete stop? "here is the vulnerable place, the heel of achilles, for capitalistic production. its very basis is the necessity of constant expansion, and this constant expansion now becomes impossible. it ends in a deadlock. every year england is brought nearer face to face with the question: either the country must go to pieces, or capitalist production must. which is it to be? "and the working-class? if even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from to , they have had to undergo such misery; if even then the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement of their condition, while only a small, privileged, 'protected' minority was permanently benefited, what will it be when this dazzling period is brought finally to a close; when the present dreary stagnation shall not only become intensified, but this, its intensified condition, shall become the permanent and normal state of english trade? "the truth is this: during the period of england's industrial monopoly the english working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. these benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. and that is the reason why, since the dying-out of owenism, there has been no socialism in england. with the breakdown of that monopoly, the english working-class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally--the privileged and leading minority not excepted--on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. and that is the reason why there will be socialism again in england." to this statement of the case, as that case appeared to me in , i have but little to add. needless to say that to-day there is indeed "socialism again in england," and plenty of it--socialism of all shades: socialism conscious and unconscious, socialism prosaic and poetic, socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class, for, verily, that abomination of abominations, socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room _causeuses_. that shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of "society," middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we socialists of a past generation always held that public opinion. at the same time, we have no reason to grumble at the symptom itself. what i consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of socialism, and even more than the actual progress socialism has made in england generally, that is the revival of the east end of london. that immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. it has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the "new unionism;" that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of "unskilled" workers. this organisation may to a great extent adopt the form of the old unions of "skilled" workers, but it is essentially different in character. the old unions preserve the traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once for all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members. the new unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working-class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that _their minds were virgin soil_, entirely free from the inherited "respectable" bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated "old" unionists. and thus we see now these new unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud "old" unions. undoubtedly, the east enders have committed colossal blunders; so have their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire socialists who pooh-pooh them. a large class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than by undergoing the consequences of its own mistakes. and for all the faults committed in past, present, and future, the revival of the east end of london remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this _fin de siecle_, and glad and proud i am to have lived to see it. f. engels. _january_ _th_, . introduction the history of the proletariat in england begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. these inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognised. england is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and england is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. only in england can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and from all sides. we have not, here and now, to deal with the history of this revolution, nor with its vast importance for the present and the future. such a delineation must be reserved for a future, more comprehensive work. for the moment, we must limit ourselves to the little that is necessary for understanding the facts that follow, for comprehending the present state of the english proletariat. before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the working-man's home. wife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work it up himself. these weaver families lived in the country in the neighbourhood of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their wages, because the home market was almost the only one, and the crushing power of competition that came later, with the conquest of foreign markets and the extension of trade, did not yet press upon wages. there was, further, a constant increase in the demand for the home market, keeping pace with the slow increase in population and employing all the workers; and there was also the impossibility of vigorous competition of the workers among themselves, consequent upon the rural dispersion of their homes. so it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased. true, he was a bad farmer and managed his land inefficiently, often obtaining but poor crops; nevertheless, he was no proletarian, he had a stake in the country, he was permanently settled, and stood one step higher in society than the english workman of to-day. so the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors. they did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed. they had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours, and all these games--bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigour. they were, for the most part, strong, well- built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of their peasant neighbours was discoverable. their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there was no question. what the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be guessed. shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn and woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of wages--so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns for work--the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their little holdings. they regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of the region, as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour, as this patriarchal relation involved. they were "respectable" people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity, and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. they had their children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the fear of god; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as the children were unmarried. the young people grew up in idyllic simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married; and even though sexual intercourse before marriage almost unfailingly took place, this happened only when the moral obligation of marriage was recognised on both sides, and a subsequent wedding made everything good. in short, the english industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the fashion still to be found here and there in germany, in retirement and seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in their position in life. they could rarely read and far more rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired, never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited reverence when the bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the "superior" classes. but intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind. they were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. in truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time. the industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men. as in france politics, so in england manufacture, and the movement of civil society in general drew into the whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind. the first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of the english workers was the jenny, invented in the year by a weaver, james hargreaves, of standhill, near blackburn, in north lancashire. this machine was the rough beginning of the later invented mule, and was moved by hand. instead of one spindle like the ordinary spinning-wheel, it carried sixteen or eighteen manipulated by a single workman. this invention made it possible to deliver more yarn than heretofore. whereas, though one weaver had employed three spinners, there had never been enough yarn, and the weaver had often been obliged to wait for it, there was now more yarn to be had than could be woven by the available workers. the demand for woven goods, already increasing, rose yet more in consequence of the cheapness of these goods, which cheapness, in turn, was the outcome of the diminished cost of producing the yarn. more weavers were needed, and weavers' wages rose. now that the weaver could earn more at his loom, he gradually abandoned his farming, and gave his whole time to weaving. at that time a family of four grown persons and two children (who were set to spooling) could earn, with eight hours' daily work, four pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was good and work pressed. it happened often enough that a single weaver earned two pounds a week at his loom. by degrees the class of farming weavers wholly disappeared, and was merged in the newly arising class of weavers who lived wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not even the pretended property of a holding, and so became working-men, proletarians. moreover, the old relation between spinner and weaver was destroyed. hitherto, so far as this had been possible, yarn had been spun and woven under one roof. now that the jenny as well as the loom required a strong hand, men began to spin, and whole families lived by spinning, while others laid the antiquated, superseded spinning-wheel aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a jenny, were forced to live upon the wages of the father alone. thus began with spinning and weaving that division of labour which has since been so infinitely perfected. while the industrial proletariat was thus developing with the first still very imperfect machine, the same machine gave rise to the agricultural proletariat. there had, hitherto, been a vast number of small landowners, yeomen, who had vegetated in the same unthinking quiet as their neighbours, the farming weavers. they cultivated their scraps of land quite after the ancient and inefficient fashion of their ancestors, and opposed every change with the obstinacy peculiar to such creatures of habit, after remaining stationary from generation to generation. among them were many small holders also, not tenants in the present sense of the word, but people who had their land handed down from their fathers, either by hereditary lease, or by force of ancient custom, and had hitherto held it as securely as if it had actually been their own property. when the industrial workers withdrew from agriculture, a great number of small holdings fell idle, and upon these the new class of large tenants established themselves, tenants-at-will, holding fifty, one hundred, two hundred or more acres, liable to be turned out at the end of the year, but able by improved tillage and larger farming to increase the yield of the land. they could sell their produce more cheaply than the yeomen, for whom nothing remained when his farm no longer supported him but to sell it, procure a jenny or a loom, or take service as an agricultural labourer in the employ of a large farmer. his inherited slowness and the inefficient methods of cultivation bequeathed by his ancestors, and above which he could not rise, left him no alternative when forced to compete with men who managed their holdings on sounder principles and with all the advantages bestowed by farming on a large scale and the investment of capital for the improvement of the soil. meanwhile, the industrial movement did not stop here. single capitalists began to set up spinning jennies in great buildings and to use water-power for driving them, so placing themselves in a position to diminish the number of workers, and sell their yarn more cheaply than single spinners could do who moved their own machines by hand. there were constant improvements in the jenny, so that machines continually became antiquated, and must be altered or even laid aside; and though the capitalists could hold out by the application of water-power even with the old machinery, for the single spinner this was impossible. and the factory system, the beginning of which was thus made, received a fresh extension in , through the spinning throstle invented by richard arkwright, a barber, in preston, in north lancashire. after the steam- engine, this is the most important mechanical invention of the th century. it was calculated from the beginning for mechanical motive power, and was based upon wholly new principles. by the combination of the peculiarities of the jenny and throstle, samuel crompton, of firwood, lancashire, contrived the mule in , and as arkwright invented the carding engine, and preparatory ("slubbing and roving") frames about the same time, the factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning of cotton. by means of trifling modifications these machines were gradually adapted to the spinning of flax, and so to the superseding of hand-work here, too. but even then, the end was not yet. in the closing years of the last century, dr. cartwright, a country parson, had invented the power-loom, and about had so far perfected it, that it could successfully compete with the hand-weaver; and all this machinery was made doubly important by james watt's steam-engine, invented in , and used for supplying motive power for spinning since . with these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of machine-work over hand-work in the chief branches of english industry was won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates how the hand-workers have been driven by machinery from one position after another. the consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets, the sudden multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the proletariat, the destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for the working-class, demoralisation, political excitement, and all those facts so highly repugnant to englishmen in comfortable circumstances, which we shall have to consider in the following pages. having already seen what a transformation in the social condition of the lower classes a single such clumsy machine as the jenny had wrought, there is no cause for surprise as to that which a complete and interdependent system of finely adjusted machinery has brought about, machinery which receives raw material and turns out woven goods. meanwhile, let us trace the development of english manufacture { } somewhat more minutely, beginning with the cotton industry. in the years - , there were annually imported into england rather less than , , pounds of raw cotton; in the year there were imported , , pounds, and the import for will reach at least , , pounds. in england exported , , yards of woven cotton goods, , , pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton hosiery of the value of , , pounds. in the same year over , , mule spindles were at work, , power and , hand-looms, throstle spindles not included, in the service of the cotton industry; and, according to macculloch's reckoning, nearly a million and a half human beings were supported by this branch, of whom but , worked in the mills; the power used in these mills was steam, equivalent to , horse-power, and water, equivalent to , horse-power. at present these figures are far from adequate, and it may be safely assumed that, in the year , the power and number of the machines and the number of the workers is greater by one-half than it was in . the chief centre of this industry is lancashire, where it originated; it has thoroughly revolutionised this county, converting it from an obscure, ill-cultivated swamp into a busy, lively region, multiplying its population tenfold in eighty years, and causing giant cities such as liverpool and manchester, containing together , inhabitants, and their neighbouring towns, bolton with , , rochdale with , , oldham with , , preston with , , ashton and stalybridge with , , and a whole list of other manufacturing towns to spring up as if by a magic touch. the history of south lancashire contains some of the greatest marvels of modern times, yet no one ever mentions them, and all these miracles are the product of the cotton industry. glasgow, too, the centre for the cotton district of scotland, for lanarkshire and renfrewshire, has increased in population from , to , since the introduction of the industry. the hosiery manufacture of nottingham and derby also received one fresh impulse from the lower price of yarn, and a second one from an improvement of the stocking loom, by means of which two stockings could be woven at once. the manufacture of lace, too, became an important branch of industry after the invention of the lace machine in ; soon after that date lindley invented the point-net machine, and in heathcote invented the bobbin-net machine, in consequence of which the production of lace was greatly simplified, and the demand increased proportionately in consequence of the diminished cost, so that now, at least , persons are supported by this industry. its chief centres are nottingham, leicester, and the west of england, wiltshire, devonshire, etc. a corresponding extension has taken place in the branches dependent upon the cotton industry, in dyeing, bleaching, and printing. bleaching by the application of chlorine in place of the oxygen of the atmosphere; dyeing and printing by the rapid development of chemistry, and printing by a series of most brilliant mechanical inventions, a yet greater advance which, with the extension of these branches caused by the growth of the cotton industry, raised them to a previously unknown degree of prosperity. the same activity manifested itself in the manufacture of wool. this had hitherto been the leading department of english industry, but the quantities formerly produced are as nothing in comparison with that which is now manufactured. in the whole wool crop of the preceding three years lay unused for want of workers, and would have continued so to lie if the newly invented machinery had not come to its assistance and spun it. the adaptation of this machinery to the spinning of wool was most successfully accomplished. then began the same sudden development in the wool district, which we have already seen in the cotton districts. in there were , pieces of woollen cloth produced in the west riding of yorkshire; in there were , pieces, and so rapid was the extension of the industry that in , , more pieces were produced than in . in , , , pounds of wool ( , , pounds of it imported) were worked up; in , , , pounds were worked up; of which , , pounds were imported. the principal centre of this industry is the west riding of yorkshire, where, especially at bradford, long english wool is converted into worsted yarns, etc.; while in the other cities, leeds, halifax, huddersfield, etc., short wool is converted into hard-spun yarn and cloth. then come the adjacent part of lancashire, the region of rochdale, where in addition to the cotton industry much flannel is produced, and the west of england which supplies the finest cloths. here also the growth of population is worthy of observation: bradford contained in , , and in , inhabitants. halifax ,, ,, , , ,, ,, , ,, huddersfield ,, ,, , , ,, ,, , ,, leeds,, ,, , , ,, ,, , ,, and the whole west riding , , ,, ,, , ,, a population which, since , must have increased at least to per cent. further. in the spinning of wool employed in the united kingdom , mills, with , workers, these last being but a small portion of the multitude who are supported directly or indirectly by the manufacture of wool, and excluding nearly all weavers. progress in the linen trade developed later, because the nature of the raw material made the application of spinning machinery very difficult. attempts had been made in the last years of the last century in scotland, but the frenchman, girard, who introduced flax spinning in , was the first who succeeded practically, and even girard's machines first attained on british soil the importance they deserved by means of improvements which they underwent in england, and of their universal application in leeds, dundee, and belfast. from this time the british linen trade rapidly extended. in , , tons of flax were imported; in , nearly , tons of flax and , tons of hemp. the export of irish linen to great britain rose from , , yards in to , , in , of which a large part was re-exported. the export of english and scotch woven linen goods rose from , , yards in to , , yards in . the number of flax spinning establishments in was , employing , workers, of which one-half were in the south of scotland, more than in the west riding of yorkshire, leeds, and its environs, in belfast, ireland, and the rest in dorset and lancashire. weaving is carried on in the south of scotland, here and there in england, but principally in ireland. with like success did the english turn their attention to the manufacture of silk. raw material was imported from southern europe and asia ready spun, and the chief labour lay in the twisting of fine threads. until the heavy import duty, four shillings per pound on raw material, greatly retarded the development of the english silk industry, while only the markets of england and the colonies were protected for it. in that year the duty was reduced to one penny, and the number of mills at once largely increased. in a single year the number of throwing spindles rose from , to , , ; and, although the commercial crisis of crippled this branch of industry for the moment, yet in more was produced than ever, the mechanical skill and experience of the english having secured their twisting machinery the supremacy over the awkward devices of their competitors. in the british empire possessed twisting mills, employing , workers, located chiefly in cheshire, in macclesfield, congleton, and the surrounding districts, and in manchester and somersetshire. besides these, there are numerous mills for working up waste, from which a peculiar article known as spun silk is manufactured, with which the english supply even the paris and lyons weavers. the weaving of the silk so twisted and spun is carried on in paisley and elsewhere in scotland, and in spitalfields, london, but also in manchester and elsewhere. nor is the gigantic advance achieved in english manufacture since restricted to the production of clothing materials. the impulse, once given, was communicated to all branches of industrial activity, and a multitude of inventions wholly unrelated to those here cited, received double importance from the fact that they were made in the midst of the universal movement. but as soon as the immeasurable importance of mechanical power was practically demonstrated, every energy was concentrated in the effort to exploit this power in all directions, and to exploit it in the interest of individual inventors and manufacturers; and the demand for machinery, fuel, and materials called a mass of workers and a number of trades into redoubled activity. the steam-engine first gave importance to the broad coal-fields of england; the production of machinery began now for the first time, and with it arose a new interest in the iron mines which supplied raw material for it. the increased consumption of wool stimulated english sheep breeding, and the growing importation of wool, flax, and silk called forth an extension of the british ocean carrying trade. greatest of all was the growth of production of iron. the rich iron deposits of the english hills had hitherto been little developed; iron had always been smelted by means of charcoal, which became gradually more expensive as agriculture improved and forests were cut away. the beginning of the use of coke in iron smelting had been made in the last century, and in a new method was invented of converting into available wrought-iron coke-smelted iron, which up to that time had been convertible into cast-iron only. this process, known as "puddling," consists in withdrawing the carbon which had mixed with the iron during the process of smelting, and opened a wholly new field for the production of english iron. smelting furnaces were built fifty times larger than before, the process of smelting was simplified by the introduction of hot blasts, and iron could thus be produced so cheaply that a multitude of objects which had before been made of stone or wood were now made of iron. in , thomas paine, the famous democrat, built in yorkshire the first iron bridge, which was followed by a great number of others, so that now nearly all bridges, especially for railroad traffic, are built of cast- iron, while in london itself a bridge across the thames, the southwark bridge, has been built of this material. iron pillars, supports for machinery, etc., are universally used, and since the introduction of gas- lighting and railroads, new outlets for english iron products are opened. nails and screws gradually came to be made by machinery. huntsman, a sheffielder, discovered in a method for casting steel, by which much labour was saved, and the production of wholly new cheap goods rendered practicable; and through the greater purity of the material placed at its disposal, and the more perfect tools, new machinery and minute division of labour, the metal trade of england now first attained importance. the population of birmingham grew from , in to , in ; that of sheffield from , in to , in , and the consumption of coal in the latter city alone reached in , , tons. in there were exported , tons of iron products and , tons of pig-iron; in , , tons of iron products and , tons of pig-iron, while the whole iron product reaching in but , tons, had risen in to nearly , tons. the smelting of pig-iron alone consumes yearly more than , , tons of coal, and the importance which coal mining has attained in the course of the last years can scarcely be conceived. all the english and scotch deposits are now worked, and the mines of northumberland and durham alone yield annually more than , , tons for shipping, and employ from to , men. according to the durham _chronicle_, there were worked in these two counties: in , mines; in , mines; in , mines; in , mines. moreover, all mines are now much more energetically worked than formerly. a similarly increased activity was applied to the working of tin, copper, and lead, and alongside of the extension of glass manufacture arose a new branch of industry in the production of pottery, rendered important by the efforts of josiah wedgewood, about . this inventor placed the whole manufacture of stoneware on a scientific basis, introduced better taste, and founded the potteries of north staffordshire, a district of eight english miles square, which, formerly a desert waste, is now sown with works and dwellings, and supports more than , people. into this universal whirl of activity everything was drawn. agriculture made a corresponding advance. not only did landed property pass, as we have already seen, into the hands of new owners and cultivators, agriculture was affected in still another way. the great holders applied capital to the improvement of the soil, tore down needless fences, drained, manured, employed better tools, and applied a rotation of crops. the progress of science came to their assistance also; sir humphrey davy applied chemistry to agriculture with success, and the development of mechanical science bestowed a multitude of advantages upon the large farmer. further, in consequence of the increase of population, the demand for agricultural products increased in such measure that from to , , , acres of waste land were reclaimed; and, in spite of this, england was transformed from a grain exporting to a grain importing country. the same activity was developed in the establishment of communication. from to , there were built in england and wales, , english miles of roadway of the width prescribed by law, feet, and nearly all the old roads were reconstructed on the new system of m'adam. in scotland, the department of public works built since nearly miles of roadway and more than , bridges, by which the population of the highlands was suddenly placed within reach of civilisation. the highlanders had hitherto been chiefly poachers and smugglers; they now became farmers and hand-workers. and, though gaelic schools were organised for the purpose of maintaining the gaelic language, yet gaelic- celtic customs and speech are rapidly vanishing before the approach of english civilisation. so, too, in ireland; between the counties of cork, limerick, and kerry, lay hitherto a wilderness wholly without passable roads, and serving, by reason of its inaccessibility, as the refuge of all criminals and the chief protection of the celtic irish nationality in the south of ireland. it has now been cut through by public roads, and civilisation has thus gained admission even to this savage region. the whole british empire, and especially england, which, sixty years ago, had as bad roads as germany or france then had, is now covered by a network of the finest roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in england, are the work of private enterprise, the state having done very little in this direction. before england possessed almost no canals. in that year a canal was built in lancashire from sankey brook to st helen's; and in , james brindley built the first important one, the duke of bridgewater's canal from manchester, and the coal mines of the district to the mouth of the mersey passing, near barton, by aqueduct, over the river irwell. from this achievement dates the canal building of england, to which brindley first gave importance. canals were now built, and rivers made navigable in all directions. in england alone, there are , miles of canals and , miles of navigable river. in scotland, the caledonian canal was cut directly across the country, and in ireland several canals were built. these improvements, too, like the railroads and roadways, are nearly all the work of private individuals and companies. the railroads have been only recently built. the first great one was opened from liverpool to manchester in , since which all the great cities have been connected by rail. london with southampton, brighton, dover, colchester, exeter, and birmingham; birmingham with gloucester, liverpool, lancaster (via newton and wigan, and via manchester and bolton); also with leeds (via manchester and halifax, and via leicester, derby, and sheffield); leeds with hull and newcastle (via york). there are also many minor lines building or projected, which will soon make it possible to travel from edinburgh to london in one day. as it had transformed the means of communication by land, so did the introduction of steam revolutionise travel by sea. the first steamboat was launched in , in the hudson, in north america; the first in the british empire, in , on the clyde. since then, more than have been built in england; and in more than were plying to and from british ports. such, in brief, is the history of english industrial development in the past sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals of humanity. sixty, eighty years ago, england was a country like every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but _proportionally_ large agricultural population. to-day it is a country like _no_ other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the england of those days. the industrial revolution is of the same importance for england as the political revolution for france, and the philosophical revolution for germany; and the difference between england in and in is at least as great as that between france, under the _ancien regime_ and during the revolution of july. but the mightiest result of this industrial transformation is the english proletariat. we have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery. the rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural districts to the towns. population multiplied enormously, and nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat. further, ireland had entered upon an orderly development only since the beginning of the eighteenth century. there, too, the population, more than decimated by english cruelty in earlier disturbances, now rapidly multiplied, especially after the advance in manufacture began to draw masses of irishmen towards england. thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the british empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small shopkeepers, and very very few handicraftsmen. for, though the rising manufacture first attained importance by transforming tools into machines, workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower middle-class into the toiling proletariat, and the former large merchants into manufacturers, though the lower middle-class was thus early crushed out, and the population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and capitalists, this happened outside of the domain of manufacture proper, in the province of handicraft and retail trade as well. in the place of the former masters and apprentices, came great capitalists and working- men who had no prospect of rising above their class. hand-work was carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labour was strictly applied, and small employers who could not compete with great establishments were forced down into the proletariat. at the same time the destruction of the former organisation of hand-work, and the disappearance of the lower middle-class deprived the working-man of all possibility of rising into the middle-class himself. hitherto he had always had the prospect of establishing himself somewhere as master artificer, perhaps employing journeymen and apprentices; but now, when master artificers were crowded out by manufacturers, when large capital had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the working-class became, for the first time, an integral, permanent class of the population, whereas it had formerly often been merely a transition leading to the bourgeoisie. now, he who was born to toil had no other prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his life. now, for the first time, therefore, the proletariat was in a position to undertake an independent movement. in this way were brought together those vast masses of working-men who now fill the whole british empire, whose social condition forces itself every day more and more upon the attention of the civilised world. the condition of the working-class is the condition of the vast majority of the english people. the question: what is to become of those destitute millions, who consume to-day what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness of england by their inventions and their toil; who become with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society?--this, since the reform bill, has become the national question. all parliamentary debates, of any importance, may be reduced to this; and, though the english middle-class will not as yet admit it, though they try to evade this great question, and to represent their own particular interests as the truly national ones, their action is utterly useless. with every session of parliament the working-class gains ground, the interests of the middle-class diminish in importance; and, in spite of the fact that the middle-class is the chief, in fact, the only power in parliament, the last session of was a continuous debate upon subjects affecting the working-class, the poor relief bill, the factory act, the masters' and servants' act; and thomas duncombe, the representative of the working-men in the house of commons, was the great man of the session; while the liberal middle-class with its motion for repealing the corn laws, and the radical middle-class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. even the debates about ireland were at bottom debates about the irish proletariat, and the means of coming to its assistance. it is high time, too, for the english middle-class to make some concessions to the working-men who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late. in spite of all this, the english middle-class, especially the manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by means of the poverty of the workers, persists in ignoring this poverty. this class, feeling itself the mighty representative class of the nation, is ashamed to lay the sore spot of england bare before the eyes of the world; will not confess, even to itself, that the workers are in distress, because it, the property-holding, manufacturing class, must bear the moral responsibility for this distress. hence the scornful smile which intelligent englishmen (and they, the middle-class, alone are known on the continent) assume when any one begins to speak of the condition of the working-class; hence the utter ignorance on the part of the whole middle-class of everything which concerns the workers; hence the ridiculous blunders which men of this class, in and out of parliament, make when the position of the proletariat comes under discussion; hence the absurd freedom from anxiety, with which the middle-class dwells upon a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day collapse, the speedy collapse of which is as certain as a mathematical or mechanical demonstration; hence the miracle that the english have as yet no single book upon the condition of their workers, although they have been examining and mending the old state of things no one knows how many years. hence also the deep wrath of the whole working-class, from glasgow to london, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into a revolution in comparison with which the french revolution, and the year , will prove to have been child's play. the industrial proletariat. the order of our investigation of the different sections of the proletariat follows naturally from the foregoing history of its rise. the first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials, will first claim our attention. the production of raw materials and of fuel for manufacture attained importance only in consequence of the industrial change, and engendered a new proletariat, the coal and metal miners. then, in the third place, manufacture influenced agriculture, and in the fourth, the condition of ireland; and the fractions of the proletariat belonging to each, will find their place accordingly. we shall find, too, that with the possible exception of the irish, the degree of intelligence of the various workers is in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture; and that the factory hands are most enlightened as to their own interests, the miners somewhat less so, the agricultural labourers scarcely at all. we shall find the same order again among the industrial workers, and shall see how the factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the labour movement, and how the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their handicraft has been invaded by the progress of machinery. we shall thus learn from the example which england offers, from the equal pace which the labour movement has kept with the movement of industrial development, the historical significance of manufacture. since, however, at the present moment, pretty much the whole industrial proletariat is involved in the movement, and the condition of the separate sections has much in common, because they all are industrial, we shall have first to examine the condition of the industrial proletariat as a whole, in order later to notice more particularly each separate division with its own peculiarities. it has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the hands of the few. it requires large capital with which to erect the colossal establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to press into its service the forces of nature, so driving the hand labour of the independent workman out of the market. the division of labour, the application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery, are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. manufacture, on a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. meanwhile, it is an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class of the "good old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other. { } the centralising tendency of manufacture does not, however, stop here. population becomes centralised just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. a manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each other and forming a village of themselves in the case of a good-sized factory. they have needs for satisfying which other people are necessary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons, settle at hand. the inhabitants of the village, especially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skilful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall, and the immigration of fresh manufacturers is the consequence. so the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one. the greater the town, the greater its advantages. it offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply because of the competition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country districts, whither timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd, and direct communication with the markets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. hence the marvellously rapid growth of the great manufacturing towns. the country, on the other hand, has the advantage that wages are usually lower than in town, and so town and country are in constant competition; and, if the advantage is on the side of the town to- day, wages sink so low in the country to-morrow, that new investments are most profitably made there. but the centralising tendency of manufacture continues in full force, and every new factory built in the country bears in it the germ of a manufacturing town. if it were possible for this mad rush of manufacture to go on at this rate for another century, every manufacturing district of england would be one great manufacturing town, and manchester and liverpool would meet at warrington or newton; for in commerce, too, this centralisation of the population works in precisely the same way, and hence it is that one or two great harbours, such as hull and liverpool, bristol, and london, monopolise almost the whole maritime commerce of great britain. since commerce and manufacture attain their most complete development in these great towns, their influence upon the proletariat is also most clearly observable here. here the centralisation of property has reached the highest point; here the morals and customs of the good old times are most completely obliterated; here it has gone so far that the name merry old england conveys no meaning, for old england itself is unknown to memory and to the tales of our grandfathers. hence, too, there exist here only a rich and a poor class, for the lower middle-class vanishes more completely with every passing day. thus the class formerly most stable has become the most restless one. it consists to-day of a few remnants of a past time, and a number of people eager to make fortunes, industrial micawbers and speculators of whom one may amass a fortune, while ninety-nine become insolvent, and more than half of the ninety-nine live by perpetually repeated failure. but in these towns the proletarians are the infinite majority, and how they fare, what influence the great town exercises upon them, we have now to investigate. the great towns. a town, such as london, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. this colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised london to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the thames. i know nothing more imposing than the view which the thames offers during the ascent from the sea to london bridge. the masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of england's greatness before he sets foot upon english soil. { } but the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. after roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. the hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? and have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? and still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. and, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. the dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme. hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. just as in stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains. what is true of london, is true of manchester, birmingham, leeds, is true of all great towns. everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together. since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. for him no man has the slightest concern. cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. if he is so happy as to find work, _i.e_., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. during my residence in england, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. the bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. but indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative, brought on severe illness and death. the english working- men call this "social murder," and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. are they wrong? true, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-man that it may not be his turn to-morrow? who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master discharges him to-morrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else "to give him bread?" who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? no one. he knows that he has something to-day, and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something to-morrow. he knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. he knows that, though he may have the means of living to-day, it is very uncertain whether he shall to-morrow. meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the position, in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. let us see what pay for his work society does give the working-man in the form of dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants those who contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first, let us consider the dwellings. every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. true, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. these slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of england, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. these houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen form, throughout england, some parts of london excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. the streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's quarters may readily be imagined. further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing. let us investigate some of the slums in their order. london comes first, and in london the famous rookery of st. giles which is now, at last, about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets. st. giles is in the midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of london idles about, in the immediate neighbourhood of oxford street, regent street, of trafalgar square and the strand. it is a disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. a vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises a horrible smell. the houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. but all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window- frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority irish, or of irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings. nor is st. giles the only london slum. in the immense tangle of streets, there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a dwelling fit for human beings. close to the splendid houses of the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found. so, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner's inquest, a region close to portman square, one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode "of a multitude of irish demoralised by poverty and filth." so, too, may be found in streets, such as long acre and others, which, though not fashionable, are yet "respectable," a great number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light of day. in the immediate neighbourhood of drury lane theatre, the second in london, are some of the worst streets of the whole metropolis, charles, king, and park streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor families. in the parishes of st. john and st. margaret there lived in , according to the _journal of the statistical society_, , working-men's families in , "dwellings" (if they deserve the name!), men, women, and children thrown together without distinction of age or sex, , persons all told; and of these families three-fourths possessed but one room. in the aristocratic parish of st. george, hanover square, there lived, according to the same authority, , working-men's families, nearly , persons, under similar conditions, and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole number crowded together at the rate of one family in one room. and how the poverty of these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is exploited by the property-holding class in lawful ways! the abominable dwellings in drury lane, just mentioned, bring in the following rents: two cellar dwellings, s.; one room, ground-floor, s.; second-storey, s. d.; third-floor, s.; garret-room, s. weekly, so that the starving occupants of charles street alone, pay the house-owners a yearly tribute of , pounds, and the , families above mentioned in westminster, a yearly rent of , pounds. the most extensive working-people's district lies east of the tower in whitechapel and bethnal green, where the greatest masses of london working-people live. let us hear mr. g. alston, preacher of st. philip's, bethnal green, on the condition of his parish. he says: "it contains , houses, inhabited by , families, or about , persons. the space upon which this large population dwells, is less than yards ( , feet) square, and in this overcrowding it is nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children, and, sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room, where they eat, sleep, and work. i believe that before the bishop of london called attention to this most poverty-stricken parish, people at the west end knew as little of it as of the savages of australia or the south sea isles. and if we make ourselves acquainted with these unfortunates, through personal observation, if we watch them at their scanty meal and see them bowed by illness and want of work, we shall find such a mass of helplessness and misery, that a nation like ours must blush that these things can be possible. i was rector near huddersfield during the three years in which the mills were at their worst, but i have never seen such complete helplessness of the poor as since then in bethnal green. not one father of a family in ten in the whole neighbourhood has other clothing than his working suit, and that is as bad and tattered as possible; many, indeed, have no other covering for the night than these rags, and no bed, save a sack of straw and shavings." the foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior of the dwellings. but let us follow the english officials, who occasionally stray thither, into one or two of these working-men's homes. on the occasion of an inquest held nov. th, , by mr. carter, coroner for surrey, upon the body of ann galway, aged years, the newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased: she had lived at no. white lion court, bermondsey street, london, with her husband and a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which neither a bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen. she lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. the feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of vermin. part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by the family as a privy. on monday, jan. th, , two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf's foot from a shop. the magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman: the mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children. she lived at no. pool's place, quaker court, spitalfields, in the utmost poverty. when the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. on the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman's apron, which served the whole family as a bed. for bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. the poor woman told him that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. in short, everything had gone for food. the magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box. in february, , theresa bishop, a widow years old, was recommended, with her sick daughter, aged , to the compassion of the police magistrate in marlborough street. she lived at no. brown street, grosvenor square, in a small back room no larger than a closet, in which there was not one single piece of furniture. in one corner lay some rags upon which both slept; a chest served as table and chair. the mother earned a little by charring. the owner of the house said that they had lived in this way since may, , had gradually sold or pawned everything that they had, and had still never paid any rent. the magistrate assigned them pound from the poor-box. i am far from asserting that _all_ london working-people live in such want as the foregoing three families. i know very well that ten are somewhat better off, where one is so totally trodden under foot by society; but i assert that thousands of industrious and worthy people--far worthier and more to be respected than all the rich of london--do find themselves in a condition unworthy of human beings; and that every proletarian, everyone, without exception, is exposed to a similar fate without any fault of his own and in spite of every possible effort. but in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. in london fifty thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are to lay their heads at night. the luckiest of this multitude, those who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed. but what a bed! these houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can be crowded in. into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to record. and those who cannot pay for such a refuge? they sleep where they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners leave them undisturbed. a few individuals find their way to the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of queen victoria. let us hear the london _times_: "it appears from the report of the proceedings at marlborough street police court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average number of human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. of these, the majority are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless penury, and all the recklessness of early vice. "this is truly horrible! poor there must be everywhere. indigence will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great and luxurious city. amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much suffering--much that offends the eye--much that lurks unseen. "but that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh the regal grandeur of st. james, close on the palatial splendour of bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters, in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has refrained from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems, as it were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that _there_ want, and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all their kindred horrors, consuming body by body, soul, by soul! "it is indeed a monstrous state of things! enjoyment the most absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man's craving, brought in close contact with the most unmitigated misery! wealth, from its bright saloons, laughing--an insolently heedless laugh--at the unknown wounds of want! pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously mocking the pain that moans below! all contrary things mocking one another--all contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is tempted! "but let all men remember this--that within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of god's earth, there may be found, night after night, winter after winter, women--young in years--old in sin and suffering--outcasts from society--rotting from famine, filth, and disease. let them remember this, and learn not to theorise but to act. god knows, there is much room for action nowadays." { } i have referred to the refuges for the homeless. how greatly overcrowded these are, two examples may show. a newly erected refuge for the houseless in upper ogle street, that can shelter three hundred persons every night, has received since its opening, january th to march th, , , persons for one or more nights; and, although the season was growing more favourable, the number of applicants in this, as well as in the asylums of whitecross street and wapping, was strongly on the increase, and a crowd of the homeless had to be sent away every night for want of room. in another refuge, the central asylum in playhouse yard, there were supplied on an average beds nightly, during the first three months of the year , , persons being sheltered, and , portions of bread were distributed. yet the committee of directors declare this institution began to meet the pressure of the needy to a limited extent only when the eastern asylum also was opened. let us leave london and examine the other great cities of the three kingdoms in their order. let us take dublin first, a city the approach to which from the sea is as charming as that of london is imposing. the bay of dublin is the most beautiful of the whole british island kingdom, and is even compared by the irish with the bay of naples. the city, too, possesses great attractions, and its aristocratic districts are better and more tastefully laid out than those of any other british city. by way of compensation, however, the poorer districts of dublin are among the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world. true, the irish character, which, under some circumstances, is comfortable only in the dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of irish in every great city in england and scotland, and as every poor population must gradually sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness of dublin is nothing specific, nothing peculiar to dublin, but something common to all great towns. the poor quarters of dublin are extremely extensive, and the filth, the uninhabitableness of the houses and the neglect of the streets, surpass all description. some idea of the manner in which the poor are here crowded together may be formed from the fact that, in , according to the report of the inspector of workhouses, { } , persons lived in houses with rooms in barral street, and , persons in houses with rooms in and near church street; that: "in this and the adjoining district there exists a multitude of foul courts and alleys; many cellars receive all their light through the door, while in not a few the inhabitants sleep upon the bare floor, though most of them possess bedsteads at least; nicholson's court, for example, contains twenty-eight wretched little rooms with human beings in the greatest want, there being but two bedsteads and two blankets to be found in the whole court." the poverty is so great in dublin, that a single benevolent institution, the mendicity association, gives relief to , persons or one per cent. of the population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day and dismissing them at night. dr. alison describes a similar state of things in edinburgh, whose superb situation, which has won it the title of the modern athens, and whose brilliant aristocratic quarter in the new town, contrast strongly with the foul wretchedness of the poor in the old town. alison asserts that this extensive quarter is as filthy and horrible as the worst district of dublin, while the mendicity association would have as great a proportion of needy persons to assist in edinburgh as in the irish capital. he asserts, indeed, that the poor in scotland, especially in edinburgh and glasgow, are worse off than in any other region of the three kingdoms, and that the poorest are not irish, but scotch. the preacher of the old church of edinburgh, dr. lee, testified in , before the commission of religious instruction, that: "he had never before seen such misery as in his parish, where the people were without furniture, without everything, two married couples often sharing one room. in a single day he had visited seven houses in which there was not a bed, in some of them not even a heap of straw. old people of eighty years sleep on the board floor, nearly all slept in their day-clothes. in one cellar room he found two families from a scotch country district; soon after their removal to the city two of the children had died, and a third was dying at the time of his visit. each family had a filthy pile of straw lying in a corner; the cellar sheltered besides the two families a donkey, and was, moreover, so dark that it was impossible to distinguish one person from another by day. dr. lee declared that it was enough to make a heart of adamant bleed to see such misery in a country like scotland." in the edinburgh _medical and surgical journal_, dr. hennan reports a similar state of things. from a parliamentary report, { a} it is evident that in the dwellings of the poor of edinburgh a want of cleanliness reigns, such as must be expected under these conditions. on the bed-posts chickens roost at night, dogs and horses share the dwellings of human beings, and the natural consequence is a shocking stench, with filth and swarms of vermin. the prevailing construction of edinburgh favours these atrocious conditions as far as possible. the old town is built upon both slopes of a hill, along the crest of which runs the high street. out of the high street there open downwards multitudes of narrow, crooked alleys, called wynds from their many turnings, and these wynds form the proletarian district of the city. the houses of the scotch cities, in general, are five or six-storied buildings, like those of paris, and in contrast with england where, so far as possible, each family has a separate house. the crowding of human beings upon a limited area is thus intensified. { b} "these streets," says an english journal in an article upon the sanitary condition of the working-people in cities, "are often so narrow that a person can step from the window of one house into that of its opposite neighbour, while the houses are piled so high, storey upon storey, that the light can scarcely penetrate into the court or alley that lies between. in this part of the city there are neither sewers nor other drains, nor even privies belonging to the houses. in consequence, all refuse, garbage, and excrements of at least , persons are thrown into the gutters every night, so that, in spite of all street sweeping, a mass of dried filth and foul vapours are created, which not only offend the sight and smell, but endanger the health of the inhabitants in the highest degree. is it to be wondered at, that in such localities all considerations of health, morals, and even the most ordinary decency are utterly neglected? on the contrary, all who are more intimately acquainted with the condition of the inhabitants will testify to the high degree which disease, wretchedness, and demoralisation have here reached. society in such districts has sunk to a level indescribably low and hopeless. the houses of the poor are generally filthy, and are evidently never cleansed. they consist in most cases of a single room which, while subject to the worst ventilation, is yet usually kept cold by the broken and badly fitting windows, and is sometimes damp and partly below ground level, always badly furnished and thoroughly uncomfortable, a straw-heap often serving the whole family for a bed, upon which men and women, young and old, sleep in revolting confusion. water can be had only from the public pumps, and the difficulty of obtaining it naturally fosters all possible filth." in the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. liverpool, with all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with the same barbarity. a full fifth of the population, more than , human beings, live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar dwellings, of which there are , in the city. besides these cellar dwellings there are , courts, small spaces built up on all four sides and having but one entrance, a narrow, covered passage-way, the whole ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians. of such courts we shall have more to say when we come to manchester. in bristol, on one occasion, , families were visited, of whom per cent. occupied but one room each. precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. in nottingham there are in all , houses, of which between , and , are built back to back with a rear parti-wall so that no through ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several houses. during an investigation made a short time since, many rows of houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered only by the boards of the ground floor. in leicester, derby, and sheffield, it is no better. of birmingham, the article above cited from the _artisan_ states: "in the older quarters of the city there are many bad districts, filthy and neglected, full of stagnant pools and heaps of refuse. courts are very numerous in birmingham, reaching two thousand, and containing the greater number of the working-people of the city. these courts are usually narrow, muddy, badly ventilated, ill-drained, and lined with eight to twenty houses, which, by reason of having their rear walls in common, can usually be ventilated from one side only. in the background, within the court, there is usually an ash heap or something of the kind, the filth of which cannot be described. it must, however, be observed that the newer courts are more sensibly built and more decently kept, and that even in the old ones, the cottages are much less crowded than in manchester and liverpool, wherefore birmingham shows even during the reign of an epidemic a far smaller mortality than, for instance, wolverhampton, dudley, and bilston, only a few miles distant. cellar dwellings are unknown, too, in birmingham, though a few cellars are misused as workrooms. the lodging-houses for proletarians are rather numerous (over four hundred), chiefly in courts in the heart of the town. they are nearly all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, who eat, drink, smoke, and sleep here without the slightest regard to comfort or decency in an atmosphere endurable to these degraded beings only." glasgow is in many respects similar to edinburgh, possessing the same wynds, the same tall houses. of this city the _artisan_ observes: "the working-class forms here some % of the whole population (about , ), and lives in parts of the city which exceed in wretchedness and squalor the lowest nooks of st. giles and whitechapel, the liberties of dublin, the wynds of edinburgh. there are numbers of such localities in the heart of the city, south of the trongate, westward from the saltmarket, in calton and off the high street, endless labyrinths of lanes or wynds into which open at almost every step, courts or blind alleys, formed by ill-ventilated, high-piled, waterless, and dilapidated houses. these are literally swarming with inhabitants. they contain three or four families upon each floor, perhaps twenty persons. in some cases each storey is let out in sleeping places, so that fifteen to twenty persons are packed, one on top of the other, i cannot say accommodated, in a single room. these districts shelter the poorest, most depraved, and worthless members of the community, and may be regarded as the sources of those frightful epidemics which, beginning here, spread desolation over glasgow." let us hear how j. c. symonds, government commissioner for the investigation of the condition of the hand-weavers, describes these portions of the city: { } "i have seen wretchedness in some of its worse phases both here and upon the continent, but until i visited the wynds of glasgow i did not believe that so much crime, misery, and disease could exist in any civilised country. in the lower lodging-houses ten, twelve, sometimes twenty persons of both sexes, all ages and various degrees of nakedness, sleep indiscriminately huddled together upon the floor. these dwellings are usually so damp, filthy, and ruinous, that no one could wish to keep his horse in one of them." and in another place: "the wynds of glasgow contain a fluctuating population of fifteen to thirty thousand human beings. this quarter consists wholly of narrow alleys and square courts, in the middle of every one of which there lies a dung heap. revolting as was the outward appearance of these courts, i was yet not prepared for the filth and wretchedness within. in some of the sleeping-places which we visited at night (the superintendent of police, captain miller, and symonds) we found a complete layer of human beings stretched upon the floor, often fifteen to twenty, some clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately. their bed was a litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. there was little or no furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any shimmer of habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. theft and prostitution form the chief means of subsistence of this population. no one seemed to take the trouble to cleanse this augean stable, this pandemonium, this tangle of crime, filth, and pestilence in the centre of the second city of the kingdom. an extended examination of the lowest districts of other cities never revealed anything half so bad, either in intensity of moral and physical infection, nor in comparative density of population. in this quarter most of the houses have been declared by the court of guild ruinous and unfit for habitation, but precisely these are the most densely populated, because, according to the law, no rent can be demanded for them." the great manufacturing district in the centre of the british islands, the thickly peopled stretch of west yorkshire and south lancashire, with its numerous factory towns, yields nothing to the other great manufacturing centres. the woollen district of the west riding of yorkshire is a charming region, a beautiful green hill country, whose elevations grow more rugged towards the west until they reach their highest point in the bold ridge of blackstone edge, the watershed between the irish sea and the german ocean. the valleys of the aire, along which stretches leeds, and of the calder, through which the manchester-leeds railway runs, are among the most attractive in england, and are strewn in all directions with the factories, villages, and towns. the houses of rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with the blackened brick buildings of lancashire, that it is a pleasure to look at them. but on coming into the towns themselves, one finds little to rejoice over. leeds lies as the _artisan_ describes it, and as i found confirmed upon examination: "on a gentle slope that descends into the valley of the aire. this stream flows through the city for about a mile-and-a-half and is exposed to violent floods during thaws or heavy rain. the higher western portions of the city are clean, for such a large town. but the low-lying districts along the river and its tributary becks are narrow, dirty, and enough in themselves to shorten the lives of the inhabitants, especially of little children. added to this, the disgusting state of the working-men's districts about kirkgate, marsh lane, cross street and richmond road, which is chiefly attributable to their unpaved, drainless streets, irregular architecture, numerous courts and alleys, and total lack of the most ordinary means of cleanliness, all this taken together is explanation enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes of filthy misery. in consequence of the overflows of the aire" (which, it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture, flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse), "the houses and cellars are often so full of water that they have to be pumped out. and at such times the water rises, even where there are sewers, out of them into cellars, { a} engenders miasmatic vapours strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen, and leaves a disgusting residuum highly injurious to health. during the spring-floods of the action of such a choking of the sewers was so injurious, that, according to the report of the registrar of births and deaths for this part of the town, there were three deaths to two births, whereas in the same three months, in every other part of the town, there were three births to two deaths. other thickly populated districts are without any sewers whatsoever, or so badly provided as to derive no benefit from them. in some rows of houses the cellars are seldom dry; in certain districts there are several streets covered with soft mud a foot deep. the inhabitants have made vain attempts from time to time to repair these streets with shovelfuls of cinders, but in spite of all such attempts, dung-heaps, and pools of dirty water emptied from the houses, fill all the holes until wind and sun dry them up. { b} an ordinary cottage in leeds occupies not more than five yards square of land, and usually consists of a cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room. these contracted dwellings, filled day and night with human beings, are another point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the inhabitants." and how greatly these cottages are crowded, the report on the health of the working-classes, quoted above, bears testimony: "in leeds we found brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents' sleeping-room, whence arise consequences at the contemplation of which human feeling shudders." so, too, bradford, which, but seven miles from leeds at the junction of several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling stream. on week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of coal smoke, but on a fine sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed from the surrounding heights. yet within reigns the same filth and discomfort as in leeds. the older portions of the town are built upon steep hillsides, and are narrow and irregular. in the lanes, alleys, and courts lie filth and _debris_ in heaps; the houses are ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate vicinity of the river and the valley bottom i found many a one, whose ground-floor, half-buried in the hillside, was totally abandoned. in general, the portions of the valley bottom in which working-men's cottages have crowded between the tall factories, are among the worst built and dirtiest districts of the whole town. in the newer portions of this, as of every other factory town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing working-men's dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak more particularly in discussing manchester. the same is true of the remaining towns of the west riding, especially of barnsley, halifax and huddersfield. the last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory towns of yorkshire and lancashire, by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture, has yet its bad quarter; for a committee appointed by a meeting of citizens to survey the town, reported august th, : "it is notorious that in huddersfield whole streets and many lanes and courts are neither paved nor supplied with sewers nor other drains; that in them refuse, _debris_, and filth of every sort lies accumulating, festers and rots, and that, nearly everywhere, stagnant water accumulates in pools, in consequence of which the adjoining dwellings must inevitably be bad and filthy, so that in such places diseases arise and threaten the health of the whole town." if we cross blackstone edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter upon that classic soil on which english manufacture has achieved its masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, south lancashire with its central city manchester. again we have beautiful hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the irish sea, with the charming green valleys of the ribble, the irwell, the mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and villages, and is the most densely populated strip of country in england. in lancashire, and especially in manchester, english manufacture finds at once its starting point and its centre. the manchester exchange is the thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. the modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in manchester. in the cotton industry of south lancashire, the application of the forces of nature, the superseding of hand labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the highest point; and, if we recognise in these three elements that which is characteristic of modern manufacture, we must confess that the cotton industry has remained in advance of all other branches of industry from the beginning down to the present day. the effects of modern manufacture upon the working-class must necessarily develop here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat present itself in its fullest classic perfection. the degradation to which the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest consciousness. hence because manchester is the classic type of a modern manufacturing town, and because i know it as intimately as my own native town, more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a longer stay here. the towns surrounding manchester vary little from the central city, so far as the working-people's quarters are concerned, except that the working-class forms, if possible, a larger proportion of their population. these towns are purely industrial and conduct all their business through manchester upon which they are in every respect dependent, whence they are inhabited only by working-men and petty tradesmen, while manchester has a very considerable commercial population, especially of commission and "respectable" retail dealers. hence bolton, preston, wigan, bury, rochdale, middleton, heywood, oldham, ashton, stalybridge, stockport, etc., though nearly all towns of thirty, fifty, seventy to ninety thousand inhabitants, are almost wholly working- people's districts, interspersed only with factories, a few thoroughfares lined with shops, and a few lanes along which the gardens and houses of the manufacturers are scattered like villas. the towns themselves are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick, turned black with time, which is here the universal building material. cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible, these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion of the population dwells in them. among the worst of these towns after preston and oldham is bolton, eleven miles north-west of manchester. it has, so far as i have been able to observe in my repeated visits, but one main street, a very dirty one, deansgate, which serves as a market, and is even in the finest weather a dark, unattractive hole in spite of the fact that, except for the factories, its sides are formed by low one and two-storied houses. here, as everywhere, the older part of the town is especially ruinous and miserable. a dark-coloured body of water, which leaves the beholder in doubt whether it is a brook or a long string of stagnant puddles, flows through the town and contributes its share to the total pollution of the air, by no means pure without it. there is stockport, too, which lies on the cheshire side of the mersey, but belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of manchester. it lies in a narrow valley along the mersey, so that the streets slope down a steep hill on one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while the railway from manchester to birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. but far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. i do not remember to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of this district. a few miles north-east of stockport is ashton-under-lyne, one of the newest factory towns of this region. it stands on the slope of a hill at the foot of which are the canal and the river tame, and is, in general, built on the newer, more regular plan. five or six parallel streets stretch along the hill intersected at right angles by others leading down into the valley. by this method, the factories would be excluded from the town proper, even if the proximity of the river and the canal-way did not draw them all into the valley where they stand thickly crowded, belching forth black smoke from their chimneys. to this arrangement ashton owes a much more attractive appearance than that of most factory towns; the streets are broad and cleaner, the cottages look new, bright red, and comfortable. but the modern system of building cottages for working-men has its own disadvantages; every street has its concealed back lane to which a narrow paved path leads, and which is all the dirtier. and, although i saw no buildings, except a few on entering, which could have been more than fifty years old, there are even in ashton streets in which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in the house-corners are no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls have cracks and will not hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is nowise different from that of the other towns of the district, except that in ashton, this is the exception, not the rule. a mile eastward lies stalybridge, also on the tame. in coming over the hill from ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left, fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built usually in the elizabethan style, which is to the gothic precisely what the anglican church is to the apostolic roman catholic. a hundred paces farther and stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast with the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest cottages of ashton! stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine, much narrower even than the valley at stockport, and both sides of this ravine are occupied by an irregular group of cottages, houses, and mills. on entering, the very first cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first houses, so the whole town. a few streets lie in the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell, up hill and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping situation, the ground floor is half-buried in the earth; and what multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks arise out of this confused way of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the town, here and there, in a bird's-eye view almost at one's feet. add to this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of stalybridge, in spite of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined. but enough of these little towns. each has its own peculiarities, but in general, the working-people live in them just as in manchester. hence i have especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and would observe, that all more general observations as to the condition of the labouring population in manchester are fully applicable to these surrounding towns as well. manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills, which stretch hither from oldham, their last peak, kersallmoor, being at once the racecourse and the mons sacer of manchester. manchester proper lies on the left bank of the irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the irk and the medlock, which here empty into the irwell. on the left bank of the irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies salford, and farther westward pendleton; northward from the irwell lie upper and lower broughton; northward of the irk, cheetham hill; south of the medlock lies hulme; farther east chorlton on medlock; still farther, pretty well to the east of manchester, ardwick. the whole assemblage of buildings is commonly called manchester, and contains about four hundred thousand inhabitants, rather more than less. the town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. this arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people's quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle- class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity. manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. this district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant shops. in these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and there, and there is a good deal of life upon them until late at night. with the exception of this commercial district, all manchester proper, all salford and hulme, a great part of pendleton and chorlton, two-thirds of ardwick, and single stretches of cheetham hill and broughton are all unmixed working-people's quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial district. outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in chorlton and the lower lying portions of cheetham hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with gardens in chorlton and ardwick, or on the breezy heights of cheetham hill, broughton, and pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses going into the city. and the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. for the thoroughfares leading from the exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and _can_ care for it. true, these shops bear some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men's dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth. so, for instance, deansgate, which leads from the old church directly southward, is lined first with mills and warehouses, then with second-rate shops and alehouses; farther south, when it leaves the commercial district, with less inviting shops, which grow dirtier and more interrupted by beerhouses and gin palaces the farther one goes, until at the southern end the appearance of the shops leaves no doubt that workers and workers only are their customers. so market street running south-east from the exchange; at first brilliant shops of the best sort, with counting-houses or warehouses above; in the continuation, piccadilly, immense hotels and warehouses; in the farther continuation, london road, in the neighbourhood of the medlock, factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie and the working population; and from this point onward, large gardens and villas of the wealthier merchants and manufacturers. in this way any one who knows manchester can infer the adjoining districts, from the appearance of the thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a glimpse of the real labouring districts. i know very well that this hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; i know, too, that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take possession of the great highways; i know that there are more good buildings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is greater near them than in remoter districts; but at the same time i have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in manchester. and yet, in other respects, manchester is less built according to a plan, after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any other city; and when i consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that the working-class is doing famously, i cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the "big wigs" of manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of construction. i may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or the different canals that ramify throughout the city, before i proceed at once to describe the labouring quarters. first of all, there is the old town of manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the commercial district and the irk. here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow and winding, as todd street, long millgate, withy grove, and shude hill, the houses dirty, old, and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible. going from the old church to long millgate, the stroller has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which not one has kept its original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing manchester, whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants into better-built districts, and have left the houses, which were not good enough for them, to a population strongly mixed with irish blood. here one is in an almost undisguised working- men's quarter, for even the shops and beerhouses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. but all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time. of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. and it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of manchester which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied. the south bank of the irk is here very steep and between fifteen and thirty feet high. on this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows of houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while the front walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill in long millgate. among them are mills on the river, in short, the method of construction is as crowded and disorderly here as in the lower part of long millgate. right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found--especially in the courts which lead down to the irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which i have yet beheld. in one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. this is the first court on the irk above ducie bridge--in case any one should care to look into it. below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. below ducie bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. the first court below ducie bridge, known as allen's court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. dr. kay gives a terrible description of the state of this court at that time. { } since then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at least looking down from ducie bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined walls and heaps of debris with some newer houses. the view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. at the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. in dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. but besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. it may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed close behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames. the background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. on the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the liverpool and leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the workhouse, the "poor-law bastille" of manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below. above ducie bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse rather than better. he who turns to the left here from the main street, long millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth! everywhere heaps of debris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to live in such a district. the newly-built extension of the leeds railway, which crosses the irk here, has swept away some of these courts and lanes, laying others completely open to view. immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of trouble. i should never have discovered it myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though i thought i knew this whole region thoroughly. passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping- room all in one. in such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, i found two beds--and such bedsteads and beds!--which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. in several others i found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it. everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. this whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings. enough! the whole side of the irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. and how could the people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? privies are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or are too remote for most of the inhabitants to use. how can people wash when they have only the dirty irk water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone? in truth, it cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are not more cleanly than the pig-sties which are here and there to be seen among them. the landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below scotland bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the irk that flows not six feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the ground floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when this open ground floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities! if we leave the irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side from long millgate into the midst of the working-men's dwellings, we shall come into a somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from st. michael's church to withy grove and shude hill. here there is somewhat better order. in place of the chaos of buildings, we find at least long straight lanes and alleys or courts, built according to a plan and usually square. but if, in the former case, every house was built according to caprice, here each lane and court is so built, without reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. the lanes run now in this direction, now in that, while every two minutes the wanderer gets into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds himself back where he started from; certainly no one who has not lived a considerable time in this labyrinth can find his way through it. if i may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the ventilation of these streets and courts is, in consequence of this confusion, quite as imperfect as in the irk region; and if this quarter may, nevertheless, be said to have some advantage over that of the irk, the houses being newer and the streets occasionally having gutters, nearly every house has, on the other hand, a cellar dwelling, which is rarely found in the irk district, by reason of the greater age and more careless construction of the houses. as for the rest, the filth, debris, and offal heaps, and the pools in the streets are common to both quarters, and in the district now under discussion, another feature most injurious to the cleanliness of the inhabitants, is the multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens. here, as in most of the working-men's quarters of manchester, the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them. in almost every court one or even several such pens may be found, into which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides, is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable substances. through this quarter, a broad and measurably decent street has been cut, millers street, and the background has been pretty successfully concealed. but if any one should be led by curiosity to pass through one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he will find this piggery repeated at every twenty paces. such is the old town of manchester, and on re-reading my description, i am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. and such a district exists in the heart of the second city of england, the first manufacturing city of the world. if any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air--and _such_ air!--he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. true, this is the _old_ town, and the people of manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this hell upon earth; but what does that prove? everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the _industrial epoch_. the couple of hundred houses, which belong to old manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and from ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they _alone_, the owners, may grow rich. in the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to let go utterly to ruin. this manufacture has achieved, which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived. true, the original construction of this quarter was bad, little good could have been made out of it; but, have the landowners, has the municipality done anything to improve it when rebuilding? on the contrary, wherever a nook or corner was free, a house has been run up; where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up; the value of land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest possible profit on the principle that _no hole is so bad but that some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better_. however, it is the old town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is comforted. let us see, therefore, how much better it is in the new town. the new town, known also as irish town, stretches up a hill of clay, beyond the old town, between the irk and st. george's road. here all the features of a city are lost. single rows of houses or groups of streets stand, here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even grass- grown clay soil; the houses, or rather cottages, are in bad order, never repaired, filthy, with damp, unclean, cellar dwellings; the lanes are neither paved nor supplied with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies of swine penned in small sties or yards, or wandering unrestrained through the neighbourhood. the mud in the streets is so deep that there is never a chance, except in the dryest weather, of walking without sinking into it ankle deep at every step. in the vicinity of st. george's road, the separate groups of buildings approach each other more closely, ending in a continuation of lanes, blind alleys, back lanes and courts, which grow more and more crowded and irregular the nearer they approach the heart of the town. true, they are here oftener paved or supplied with paved sidewalks and gutters; but the filth, the bad order of the houses, and especially of the cellars, remains the same. it may not be out of place to make some general observations just here as to the customary construction of working-men's quarters in manchester. we have seen how in the old town pure accident determined the grouping of the houses in general. every house is built without reference to any other, and the scraps of space between them are called courts for want of another name. in the somewhat newer portions of the same quarter, and in other working-men's quarters, dating from the early days of industrial activity, a somewhat more orderly arrangement may be found. the space between two streets is divided into more regular, usually square courts. these courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate with the streets by means of covered passages. if the totally planless construction is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing ventilation, this method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on all sides by buildings is far more so. the air simply cannot escape; the chimneys of the houses are the sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere of the courts, and they serve the purpose only so long as fire is kept burning. { } moreover, the houses surrounding such courts are usually built back to back, having the rear wall in common; and this alone suffices to prevent any sufficient through ventilation. and, as the police charged with care of the streets, does not trouble itself about the condition of these courts, as everything quietly lies where it is thrown, there is no cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and offal to be found here. i have been in courts, in millers street, at least half a foot below the level of the thoroughfares, and without the slightest drainage for the water that accumulates in them in rainy weather! more recently another different method of building was adopted, and has now become general. working-men's cottages are almost never built singly, but always by the dozen or score; a single contractor building up one or two streets at a time. these are then arranged as follows: one front is formed of cottages of the best class, so fortunate as to possess a back door and small court, and these command the highest rent. in the rear of these cottages runs a narrow alley, the back street, built up at both ends, into which either a narrow roadway or a covered passage leads from one side. the cottages which face this back street command least rent, and are most neglected. these have their rear walls in common with the third row of cottages which face a second street, and command less rent than the first row and more than the second. by this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off than in the former method. the middle row, on the other hand, is at least as badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back street is always in the same filthy, disgusting condition as they. the contractors prefer this method because it saves them space, and furnishes the means of fleecing better paid workers through the higher rents of the cottages in the first and third rows. these three different forms of cottage building are found all over manchester and throughout lancashire and yorkshire, often mixed up together, but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns. the third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the great working-men's district east of st. george's road and ancoats street, and is the one most often found in the other working-men's quarters of manchester and its suburbs. in the last-mentioned broad district included under the name ancoats, stand the largest mills of manchester lining the canals, colossal six and seven-storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low cottages of the workers. the population of the district consists, therefore, chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers. the streets nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they are, however, paved, and supplied with drains. among them i include those nearest to and parallel with oldham road and great ancoats street. farther to the north-east lie many newly- built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between them larger and more numerous. but this can be said of a minority of the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten years. for the construction of the cottages individually is no less to be condemned than the plan of the streets. all such cottages look neat and substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye, and, on passing through a _newly-built_ working- men's street, without remembering the back alleys and the construction of the houses themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the liberal manufacturers that the working population is nowhere so well housed as in england. but on closer examination, it becomes evident that the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them. the outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the weight of the ground floor and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the bricks lying with their long sides touching; but i have seen many a cottage of the same height, some in process of building, whose outer walls were but one-half brick thick, the bricks lying not sidewise but lengthwise, their narrow ends touching. the object of this is to spare material, but there is also another reason for it; namely, the fact that the contractors never own the land but lease it, according to the english custom, for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or ninety-nine years, at the expiration of which time it falls, with everything upon it, back into the possession of the original holder, who pays nothing in return for improvements upon it. the improvements are therefore so calculated by the lessee as to be worth as little as possible at the expiration of the stipulated term. and as such cottages are often built but twenty or thirty years before the expiration of the term, it may easily be imagined that the contractors make no unnecessary expenditures upon them. moreover, these contractors, usually carpenters and builders, or manufacturers, spend little or nothing in repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and partly in view of the approaching surrender of the improvement to the landowner; while in consequence of commercial crises and the loss of work that follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness. it is calculated in general that working-men's cottages last only forty years on the average. this sounds strangely enough when one sees the beautiful, massive walls of newly-built ones, which seem to give promise of lasting a couple of centuries; but the fact remains that the niggardliness of the original expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of emptiness, the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction carried on by the dwellers during the final ten years, usually irish families, who do not hesitate to use the wooden portions for fire-wood--all this, taken together, accomplishes the complete ruin of the cottages by the end of forty years. hence it comes that ancoats, built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture, chiefly indeed within the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. i will not dwell upon the amount of capital thus wasted, the small additional expenditure upon the original improvement and upon repairs which would suffice to keep this whole district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together. i have to deal here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be admitted that no more injurious and demoralising method of housing the workers has yet been discovered than precisely this. the working-man is constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for others, and because there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps, too, because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on condition of his taking such a cottage. the calculation with reference to the forty years' duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly strict; for, if the dwellings are in a thickly-built-up portion of the town, and there is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for them, while the ground rent is high, the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years. they never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all. occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men's districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in the case of several lanes near oldham road; but this does not last long: the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won't come again so soon. these east and north-east sides of manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe. southward from great ancoats street, lies a great, straggling, working- men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. the cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the new town to mind. the stretch cut through by the birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and the worst. here flows the medlock with countless windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley of the irk. along both sides of the stream, which is coal black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men's dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. the bank is chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along the irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the manchester side or in ardwick, chorlton, or hulme. but the most horrible spot (if i should describe all the separate spots in detail i should never come to the end) lies on the manchester side, immediately south- west of oxford road, and is known as little ireland. in a rather deep hole, in a curve of the medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them irish. the cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. a horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. in short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the irk. the race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. this is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. but what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided; and that in spite of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite of the excitement into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police by reason of the condition of little ireland, in spite of everything, in this year of grace , it is in almost the same state as in ! dr. kay asserts that not only the cellars but the first floors of all the houses in this district are damp; that a number of cellars once filled up with earth have now been emptied and are occupied once more by irish people; that in one cellar the water constantly wells up through a hole stopped with clay, the cellar lying below the river level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale out the water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into the street! farther down, on the left side of the medlock, lies hulme, which, properly speaking, is one great working-people's district, the condition of which coincides almost exactly with that of ancoats; the more thickly built-up regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the less populous of more modern structure, but generally sunk in filth. on the other side of the medlock, in manchester proper, lies a second great working-men's district which stretches on both sides of deansgate as far as the business quarter, and in certain parts rivals the old town. especially in the immediate vicinity of the business quarter, between bridge and quay streets, princess and peter streets, the crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest courts of the old town. here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately. according to dr. kay, the most demoralised class of all manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution; and, to all appearance, his assertion is still true at the present moment. when the sanitary police made its expedition hither in , it found the uncleanness as great as in little ireland or along the irk (that it is not much better to-day, i can testify); and among other items, they found in parliament street for three hundred and eighty persons, and in parliament passage for thirty thickly populated houses, but a single privy. if we cross the irwell to salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. salford, once more important than manchester, was then the leading town of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, salford hundred. hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous locality is to be found here, lying opposite the old church of manchester, and in as bad a condition as the old town on the other side of the irwell. farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore ruinous enough. all salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest i have ever seen, the little lanes of genoa. the average construction of salford is in this respect much worse than that of manchester, and so, too, in respect to cleanliness. if, in manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people's districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in these augean stables to be cleansed, in salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. the narrow side lanes and courts of chapel street, greengate, and gravel lane have certainly never been cleansed since they were built. of late, the liverpool railway has been carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? whoever passes over this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes, and glance through the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince himself afresh with every step that the workers of salford live in dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. exactly the same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of salford, in islington, along regent road, and back of the bolton railway. the working-men's dwellings between oldfield road and cross lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with the dwellings of the old town in filth and overcrowding. in this district i found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a cow stable. he had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. this man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-heaps lay next door to his palace! such are the various working-people's quarters of manchester as i had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. if we briefly formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that , working-people of manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the contractor. in a word, we must confess that in the working-men's dwellings of manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home. and i am not alone in making this assertion. we have seen that dr. kay gives precisely the same description; and, though it is superfluous, i quote further the words of a liberal, { } recognised and highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and a fanatical opponent of all independent movements of the workers: "as i passed through the dwellings of the mill hands in irish town, ancoats, and little ireland, i was only amazed that it is possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes. these towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculating builder. a carpenter and builder unite to buy a series of building sites (_i.e_., they lease them for a number of years), and cover them with so-called houses. in one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings for human beings. _not one house of this street escaped the cholera_. in general, the streets of these suburbs are unpaved, with a dung-heap or ditch in the middle; the houses are built back to back, without ventilation or drainage, and whole families are limited to a corner of a cellar or a garret." i have already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested during the cholera visitation. when the epidemic was approaching, a universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. people remembered the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty that each of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it would spread desolation in all directions through the houses of the propertied class. a health commission was appointed at once to investigate these districts, and report upon their condition to the town council. dr. kay, himself a member of this commission, who visited in person every separate police district except one, the eleventh, quotes extracts from their reports: there were inspected, in all, , houses--naturally in manchester proper alone, salford and the other suburbs being excluded. of these, , urgently needed whitewashing within; were out of repair; had insufficient drains; , were damp; were badly ventilated; , were without privies. of the streets inspected, were unpaved, but partially paved, ill-ventilated, containing standing pools, heaps of debris, refuse, etc. to cleanse such an augean stable before the arrival of the cholera was, of course, out of the question. a few of the worst nooks were therefore cleansed, and everything else left as before. in the cleansed spots, as little ireland proves, the old filthy condition was naturally restored in a couple of months. as to the internal condition of these houses, the same commission reports a state of things similar to that which we have already met with in london, edinburgh, and other cities. { } it often happens that a whole irish family is crowded into one bed; often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity, and wretchedness. often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. all slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common. often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together. to these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found. we must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves, receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple; and that the single case of a man and his wife and his adult sister-in-law sleeping in one bed was found, according to the "report concerning the sanitary condition of the working-class," six times repeated in manchester. common lodging-houses, too, are very numerous; dr. kay gives their number in at in manchester proper, and they must have increased greatly since then. each of these receives from twenty to thirty guests, so that they shelter all told, nightly, from five to seven thousand human beings. the character of the houses and their guests is the same as in other cities. five to seven beds in each room lie on the floor--without bedsteads, and on these sleep, mixed indiscriminately, as many persons as apply. what physical and moral atmosphere reigns in these holes i need not state. each of these houses is a focus of crime, the scene of deeds against which human nature revolts, which would perhaps never have been executed but for this forced centralisation of vice. { } gaskell gives the number of persons living in cellars in manchester proper as , . the _weekly dispatch_ gives the number, "according to official reports," as twelve per cent. of the working-class, which agrees with gaskell's number; the workers being estimated at , , , would form twelve per cent. of it. the cellar dwellings in the suburbs are at least as numerous, so that the number of persons living in cellars in manchester--using its name in the broader sense--is not less than forty to fifty thousand. so much for the dwellings of the workers in the largest cities and towns. the manner in which the need of a shelter is satisfied furnishes a standard for the manner in which all other necessities are supplied. that in these filthy holes a ragged, ill-fed population alone can dwell is a safe conclusion, and such is the fact. the clothing of the working-people, in the majority of cases, is in a very bad condition. the material used for it is not of the best adapted. wool and linen have almost vanished from the wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their place. shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the women are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely to be seen on the washline. the men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same. fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called "fustian jackets," and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter words are used as characteristic for the middle-class. when feargus o'connor, the chartist leader, came to manchester during the insurrection of , he appeared, amidst the deafening applause of the working-men, in a fustian suit of clothing. hats are the universal head-covering in england, even for working-men, hats of the most diverse forms, round, high, broad-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, or without brims--only the younger men in factory towns wearing caps. any one who does not own a hat folds himself a low, square paper cap. the whole clothing of the working-class, even assuming it to be in good condition, is little adapted to the climate. the damp air of england, with its sudden changes of temperature, more calculated than any other to give rise to colds, obliges almost the whole middle-class to wear flannel next the skin, about the body, and flannel scarfs and shirts are in almost universal use. not only is the working-class deprived of this precaution, it is scarcely ever in a position to use a thread of woollen clothing; and the heavy cotton goods, though thicker, stiffer, and heavier than woollen clothes, afford much less protection against cold and wet, remain damp much longer because of their thickness and the nature of the stuff, and have nothing of the compact density of fulled woollen cloths. and, if a working-man once buys himself a woollen coat for sunday, he must get it from one of the cheap shops where he finds bad, so-called "devil's-dust" cloth, manufactured for sale and not for use, and liable to tear or grow threadbare in a fortnight, or he must buy of an old clothes'-dealer a half-worn coat which has seen its best days, and lasts but a few weeks. moreover, the working-man's clothing is, in most cases, in bad condition, and there is the oft-recurring necessity for placing the best pieces in the pawnbroker's shop. but among very large numbers, especially among the irish, the prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so patched that the original colour can no longer be detected. yet the english and anglo- irish go on patching, and have carried this art to a remarkable pitch, putting wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse--it's all the same to them. but the true, transplanted irish hardly ever patch except in the extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise fall apart. ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through the rents in the coat or trousers. they wear, as thomas carlyle says,--{ } "a suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar." the irish have introduced, too, the custom previously unknown in england, of going barefoot. in every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot, and their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer english. as with clothing, so with food. the workers get what is too bad for the property-holding class. in the great towns of england everything may be had of the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must keep house on a couple of pence, cannot afford much expense. moreover, he usually receives his wages on saturday evening, for, although a beginning has been made in the payment of wages on friday, this excellent arrangement is by no means universal; and so he comes to market at five or even seven o'clock, while the buyers of the middle-class have had the first choice during the morning, when the market teems with the best of everything. but when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy it. the potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed. the sellers are usually small hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and can sell them cheaply by reason of their badness. the poorest workers are forced to use still another device to get together the things they need with their few pence. as nothing can be sold on sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve o'clock on saturday night, such things as would not keep until monday are sold at any price between ten o'clock and midnight. but nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o'clock is past using by sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which make up the sunday dinner of the poorest class. the meat which the workers buy is very often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it. on the th of january, (if i am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was held in manchester, when eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat. each of them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from fifty to sixty pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted condition. in one case, sixty-four stuffed christmas geese were seized which had proved unsaleable in liverpool, and had been forwarded to manchester, where they were brought to market foul and rotten. all the particulars, with names and fines, were published at the time in the _manchester guardian_. in the six weeks, from july st to august th, the same sheet reported three similar cases. according to the _guardian_ for august rd, a pig, weighing pounds, which had been found dead and decayed, was cut up and exposed for sale by a butcher at heywood, and was then seized. according to the number for july st, two butchers at wigan, of whom one had previously been convicted of the same offence, were fined and pounds respectively, for exposing tainted meat for sale; and, according to the number for august th, twenty-six tainted hams seized at a dealer's in bolton, were publicly burnt, and the dealer fined twenty shillings. but these are by no means all the cases; they do not even form a fair average for a period of six weeks, according to which to form an average for the year. there are often seasons in which every number of the semi-weekly _guardian_ mentions a similar case found in manchester or its vicinity. and when one reflects upon the many cases which must escape detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the front of every main street, under the slender supervision of the market inspectors--and how else can one explain the boldness with which whole animals are exposed for sale?--when one considers how great the temptation must be, in view of the incomprehensibly small fines mentioned in the foregoing cases; when one reflects what condition a piece of meat must have reached to be seized by the inspectors, it is impossible to believe that the workers obtain good and nourishing meat as a usual thing. but they are victimised in yet another way by the money-greed of the middle-class. dealers and manufacturers adulterate all kinds of provisions in an atrocious manner, and without the slightest regard to the health of the consumers. we have heard the _manchester guardian_ upon this subject, let us hear another organ of the middle-class--i delight in the testimony of my opponents--let us hear the _liverpool mercury_: "salted butter is sold for fresh, the lumps being covered with a coating of fresh butter, or a pound of fresh being laid on top to taste, while the salted article is sold after this test, or the whole mass is washed and then sold as fresh. with sugar, pounded rice and other cheap adulterating materials are mixed, and the whole sold at full price. the refuse of soap-boiling establishments also is mixed with other things and sold as sugar. chicory and other cheap stuff is mixed with ground coffee, and artificial coffee beans with the unground article. cocoa is often adulterated with fine brown earth, treated with fat to render it more easily mistakable for real cocoa. tea is mixed with the leaves of the sloe and with other refuse, or dry tea-leaves are roasted on hot copper plates, so returning to the proper colour and being sold as fresh. pepper is mixed with pounded nutshells; port wine is manufactured outright (out of alcohol, dye-stuffs, etc.), while it is notorious that more of it is consumed in england alone than is grown in portugal; and tobacco is mixed with disgusting substances of all sorts and in all possible forms in which the article is produced." i can add that several of the most respected tobacco dealers in manchester announced publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal adulteration of tobacco, no firm could carry on business without adulteration, and that no cigar costing less than threepence is made wholly from tobacco. these frauds are naturally not restricted to articles of food, though i could mention a dozen more, the villainy of mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among them. fraud is practiced in the sale of articles of every sort: flannel, stockings, etc., are stretched, and shrink after the first washing; narrow cloth is sold as being from one and a half to three inches broader than it actually is; stoneware is so thinly glazed that the glazing is good for nothing, and cracks at once, and a hundred other rascalities, _tout comme chez nous_. but the lion's share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the workers. the rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of the large shops which have a reputation to lose, and would injure themselves more than their customers if they kept poor or adulterated wares; the rich are spoiled, too, by habitual good eating, and detect adulteration more easily with their sensitive palates. but the poor, the working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must buy many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in any case because they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste--to their share fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions. they must deal with the small retailers, must buy perhaps on credit, and these small retail dealers who cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the largest retailers, because of their small capital and the large proportional expenses of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly buy adulterated goods in order to sell at the lower prices required, and to meet the competition of the others. further, a large retail dealer who has extensive capital invested in his business is ruined with his ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent practice; but what harm does it do a small grocer, who has customers in a single street only, if frauds are proved against him? if no one trusts him in ancoats, he moves to chorlton or hulme, where no one knows him, and where he continues to defraud as before; while legal penalties attach to very few adulterations unless they involve revenue frauds. not in the quality alone, but in the quantity of his goods as well, is the english working-man defrauded. the small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and an incredible number of convictions for such offences may be read in the police reports. how universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing districts, a couple of extracts from the _manchester guardian_ may serve to show. they cover only a short period, and, even here, i have not all the numbers at hand: _guardian_, june , , rochdale sessions.--four dealers fined five to ten shillings for using light weights. stockport sessions.--two dealers fined one shilling, one of them having seven light weights and a false scale, and both having been warned. _guardian_, june , rochdale sessions.--one dealer fined five, and two farmers ten shillings. _guardian_, june , manchester justices of the peace.--nineteen dealers fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds. _guardian_, june , ashton sessions.--fourteen dealers and farmers fined two shillings and sixpence to one pound. hyde petty sessions.--nine farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and five shillings fines. _guardian_, july , manchester--sixteen dealers condemned to pay costs and fines not exceeding ten shillings. _guardian_, july , manchester.--nine dealers fined from two shillings and sixpence to twenty shillings. _guardian_, july , rochdale.--four dealers fined ten to twenty shillings. _guardian_, july , bolton.--twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned to pay costs. _guardian_, august , bolton.--three dealers fined two shillings and sixpence, and five shillings. _guardian_, august , bolton.--one dealer fined five shillings. and the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers from frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds in the question of quantity too. the habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies according to his wages. the better paid workers, especially those in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for supper. where wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. descending gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the irish, potatoes form the sole food. as an accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar, milk, or spirits, is universally drunk. tea is regarded in england, and even in ireland, as quite as indispensable as coffee in germany, and where no tea is used, the bitterest poverty reigns. but all this pre-supposes that the workman has work. when he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given him, what he can beg or steal. and, if he gets nothing, he simply starves, as we have seen. the quantity of food varies, of course, like its quality, according to the rate of wages, so that among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill- paid is very large. especially in london, where the competition of the workers rises with the increase of population, this class is very numerous, but it is to be found in other towns as well. in these cases all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment. and, if the week's wages are used up before the end of the week, it often enough happens that in the closing days the family gets only as much food, if any, as is barely sufficient to keep off starvation. of course such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases, and when these appear, when the father from whose work the family is chiefly supported, whose physical exertion most demands nourishment, and who therefore first succumbs--when the father is utterly disabled, then misery reaches its height, and then the brutality with which society abandons its members, just when their need is greatest, comes out fully into the light of day. to sum up briefly the facts thus far cited. the great towns are chiefly inhabited by working-people, since in the best case there is one bourgeois for two workers, often for three, here and there for four; these workers have no property whatsoever of their own, and live wholly upon wages, which usually go from hand to mouth. society, composed wholly of atoms, does not trouble itself about them; leaves them to care for themselves and their families, yet supplies them no means of doing this in an efficient and permanent manner. every working-man, even the best, is therefore constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in this way. the dwellings of the workers are everywhere badly planned, badly built, and kept in the worst condition, badly ventilated, damp, and unwholesome. the inhabitants are confined to the smallest possible space, and at least one family usually sleeps in each room. the interior arrangement of the dwellings is poverty-stricken in various degrees, down to the utter absence of even the most necessary furniture. the clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty, and that of great multitudes is in rags. the food is, in general, bad; often almost unfit for use, and in many cases, at least at times, insufficient in quantity, so that, in extreme cases, death by starvation results. thus the working-class of the great cities offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the best cases a temporarily endurable existence for hard work and good wages, good and endurable, that is, from the worker's standpoint; in the worst cases, bitter want, reaching even homelessness and death by starvation. the average is much nearer the worst case than the best. and this series does not fall into fixed classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the working-class is well off, has always been so, and remains so. if that is the case here and there, if single branches of work have in general an advantage over others, yet the condition of the workers in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations that a single working-man may be so placed as to pass through the whole range from comparative comfort to the extremest need, even to death by starvation, while almost every english working-man can tell a tale of marked changes of fortune. let us examine the causes of this somewhat more closely. competition. we have seen in the introduction how competition created the proletariat at the very beginning of the industrial movement, by increasing the wages of weavers in consequence of the increased demand for woven goods, so inducing the weaving peasants to abandon their farms and earn more money by devoting themselves to their looms. we have seen how it crowded out the small farmers by means of the large farm system, reduced them to the rank of proletarians, and attracted them in part into the towns; how it further ruined the small bourgeoisie in great measure and reduced its members also to the ranks of the proletariat; how it centralised capital in the hands of the few, and population in the great towns. such are the various ways and means by which competition, as it reached its full manifestation and free development in modern industry, created and extended the proletariat. we shall now have to observe its influence on the working-class already created. and here we must begin by tracing the results of competition of single workers with one another. competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. this battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place. the workers are in constant competition among themselves as the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. the power- loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. but this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie. hence the effort of the workers to nullify this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them. the proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. the bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. what the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. the proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. it offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent" for his work. it even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! a fine "equivalent" valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! and if one proletarian is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the equitable propositions of the bourgeoisie, his "natural superiors," another is easily found in his place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as to prefer dying to living. here we have the competition of the workers among themselves. if _all_ the proletarians announced their determination to starve rather than work for the bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender its monopoly. but this is not the case--is, indeed, a rather impossible case--so that the bourgeoisie still thrives. to this competition of the worker there is but one limit; no worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. if he must starve, he will prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil. true, this limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another; the englishman who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the irishman who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. but that does not hinder the irishman's competing with the englishman, and gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with it the englishman's level of civilisation, down to the irishman's level. certain kinds of work require a certain grade of civilisation, and to these belong almost all forms of industrial occupation; hence the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this case that wages should be high enough to enable the workman to keep himself upon the required plane. the newly immigrated irishman, encamped in the first stable that offers, or turned out in the street after a week because he spends everything upon drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand. the mill-hand must, therefore, have wages enough to enable him to bring up his children to regular work; but no more, lest he should be able to get on without the wages of his children, and so make something else of them than mere working-men. here, too, the limit, the minimum wage, is relative. when every member of the family works, the individual worker can get on with proportionately less, and the bourgeoisie has made the most of the opportunity of employing and making profitable the labour of women and children afforded by machine-work. of course it is not in every family that every member can be set to work, and those in which the case is otherwise would be in a bad way if obliged to exist upon the minimum wage possible to a wholly employed family. hence the usual wages form an average according to which a fully employed family gets on pretty well, and one which embraces few members able to work, pretty badly. but in the worst case, every working-man prefers surrendering the trifling luxury to which he was accustomed to not living at all; prefers a pig-pen to no roof, wears rags in preference to going naked, confines himself to a potato diet in preference to starvation. he contents himself with half- pay and the hope of better times rather than be driven into the street to perish before the eyes of the world, as so many have done who had no work whatever. this trifle, therefore, this something more than nothing, is the minimum of wages. and if there are more workers at hand than the bourgeoisie thinks well to employ--if at the end of the battle of competition there yet remain workers who find nothing to do, they must simply starve; for the bourgeois will hardly give them work if he cannot sell the produce of their labour at a profit. from this it is evident what the minimum of wages is. the maximum is determined by the competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves; for we have seen how they, too, must compete with each other. the bourgeois can increase his capital only in commerce and manufacture, and in both cases he needs workers. even if he invests his capital at interest, he needs them indirectly; for without commerce and manufacture, no one would pay him interest upon his capital, no one could use it. so the bourgeois certainly needs workers, not indeed for his immediate living, for at need he could consume his capital, but as we need an article of trade or a beast of burden,--as a means of profit. the proletarian produces the goods which the bourgeois sells with advantage. when, therefore, the demand for these goods increases so that all the competing working-men are employed, and a few more might perhaps be useful, the competition among the workers falls away, and the bourgeoisie begin to compete among themselves. the capitalist in search of workmen knows very well that his profits increase as prices rise in consequence of the increased demand for his goods, and pays a trifle higher wages rather than let the whole profit escape him. he sends the butter to fetch the cheese, and getting the latter, leaves the butter ungrudgingly to the workers. so one capitalist after another goes in chase of workers, and wages rise; but only as high as the increasing demand permits. if the capitalist, who willingly sacrificed a part of his extraordinary profit, runs into danger of sacrificing any part of his ordinary average profit, he takes very good care not to pay more than average wages. from this we can determine the average rate of wages. under average circumstances, when neither workers nor capitalists have reason to compete, especially among themselves, when there are just as many workers at hand as can be employed in producing precisely the goods that are demanded, wages stand a little above the minimum. how far they rise above the minimum will depend upon the average needs and the grade of civilisation of the workers. if the workers are accustomed to eat meat several times in the week, the capitalists must reconcile themselves to paying wages enough to make this food attainable, not less, because the workers are not competing among themselves and have no occasion to content themselves with less; not more, because the capitalists, in the absence of competition among themselves, have no occasion to attract working-men by extraordinary favours. this standard of the average needs and the average civilisation of the workers has become very complicated by reason of the complications of english industry, and is different for different sorts of workers, as has been pointed out. most industrial occupations demand a certain skill and regularity, and for these qualities which involve a certain grade of civilisation, the rate of wages must be such as to induce the worker to acquire such skill and subject himself to such regularity. hence it is that the average wages of industrial workers are higher than those of mere porters, day labourers, etc., higher especially than those of agricultural labourers, a fact to which the additional cost of the necessities of life in cities contributes somewhat. in other words, the worker is, in law and in fact, the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. if the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls. if it falls so greatly that a number of them become unsaleable, if they are left in stock, they are simply left idle; and as they cannot live upon that, they die of starvation. for, to speak in the words of the economists, the expense incurred in maintaining them would not be reproduced, would be money thrown away, and to this end no man advances capital; and, so far, malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. the only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of to-day seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. for him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence. the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far better off under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave labour, as adam smith comfortingly pointed out. { } hence it follows, too, that adam smith was perfectly right in making the assertion: "that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast." _just as in the case of any other commodity_! if there are too few labourers at hand, prices, _i.e_. wages, rise, the workers are more prosperous, marriages multiply, more children are born and more live to grow up, until a sufficient number of labourers has been secured. if there are too many on hand, prices fall, want of work, poverty, and starvation, and consequent diseases arise, and the "surplus population" is put out of the way. and malthus, who carried the foregoing proposition of smith farther, was also right, in his way, in asserting that there are always more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence. surplus population is engendered rather by the competition of the workers among themselves, which forces each separate worker to labour as much each day as his strength can possibly admit. if a manufacturer can employ ten hands nine hours daily, he can employ nine if each works ten hours, and the tenth goes hungry. and if a manufacturer can force the nine hands to work an extra hour daily for the same wages by threatening to discharge them at a time when the demand for hands is not very great, he discharges the tenth and saves so much wages. this is the process on a small scale, which goes on in a nation on a large one. the productiveness of each hand raised to the highest pitch by the competition of the workers among themselves, the division of labour, the introduction of machinery, the subjugation of the forces of nature, deprive a multitude of workers of bread. these starving workers are then removed from the market, they can buy nothing, and the quantity of articles of consumption previously required by them is no longer in demand, need no longer be produced; the workers previously employed in producing them are therefore driven out of work, and are also removed from the market, and so it goes on, always the same old round, or rather, so it would go if other circumstances did not intervene. the introduction of the industrial forces already referred to for increasing production leads, in the course of time, to a reduction of prices of the articles produced and to consequent increased consumption, so that a large part of the displaced workers finally, after long suffering, find work again. if, in addition to this, the conquest of foreign markets constantly and rapidly increases the demand for manufactured goods, as has been the case in england during the past sixty years, the demand for hands increases, and, in proportion to it, the population. thus, instead of diminishing, the population of the british empire has increased with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing. yet, in spite of the extension of industry, in spite of the demand for working-men which, in general, has increased, there is, according to the confession of all the official political parties (tory, whig, and radical), permanent surplus, superfluous population; the competition among the workers is constantly greater than the competition to secure workers. whence comes this incongruity? it lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from them. in the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for profit, in the system under which every one works for himself to enrich himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment. for example, england supplies a number of countries with most diverse goods. now, although the manufacturer may know how much of each article is consumed in each country annually, he cannot know how much is on hand at every given moment, much less can he know how much his competitors export thither. he can only draw most uncertain inferences from the perpetual fluctuations in prices, as to the quantities on hand and the needs of the moment. he must trust to luck in exporting his goods. everything is done blindly, as guess-work, more or less at the mercy of accident. upon the slightest favourable report, each one exports what he can, and before long such a market is glutted, sales stop, capital remains inactive, prices fall, and english manufacture has no further employment for its hands. in the beginning of the development of manufacture, these checks were limited to single branches and single markets; but the centralising tendency of competition which drives the hands thrown out of one branch into such other branches as are most easily accessible, and transfers the goods which cannot be disposed of in one market to other markets, has gradually brought the single minor crises nearer together and united them into one periodically recurring crisis. such a crisis usually recurs once in five years after a brief period of activity and general prosperity; the home market, like all foreign ones, is glutted with english goods, which it can only slowly absorb, the industrial movement comes to a standstill in almost every branch, the small manufacturers and merchants who cannot survive a prolonged inactivity of their invested capital fail, the larger ones suspend business during the worst season, close their mills or work short time, perhaps half the day; wages fall by reason of the competition of the unemployed, the diminution of working-time and the lack of profitable sales; want becomes universal among the workers, the small savings, which individuals may have made, are rapidly consumed, the philanthropic institutions are overburdened, the poor-rates are doubled, trebled, and still insufficient, the number of the starving increases, and the whole multitude of "surplus" population presses in terrific numbers into the foreground. this continues for a time; the "surplus" exist as best they may, or perish; philanthropy and the poor law help many of them to a painful prolongation of their existence. others find scant means of subsistence here and there in such kinds of work as have been least open to competition, are most remote from manufacture. and with how little can a human being keep body and soul together for a time! gradually the state of things improve; the accumulations of goods are consumed, the general depression among the men of commerce and manufacture prevents a too hasty replenishing of the markets, and at last rising prices and favourable reports from all directions restore activity. most of the markets are distant ones; demand increases and prices rise constantly while the first exports are arriving; people struggle for the first goods, the first sales enliven trade still more, the prospective ones promise still higher prices; expecting a further rise, merchants begin to buy upon speculation, and so to withdraw from consumption the articles intended for it, just when they are most needed. speculation forces prices still higher, by inspiring others to purchase, and appropriating new importations at once. all this is reported to england, manufacturers begin to produce with a will, new mills are built, every means is employed to make the most of the favourable moment. speculation arises here, too, exerting the same influence as upon foreign markets, raising prices, withdrawing goods from consumption, spurring manufacture in both ways to the highest pitch of effort. then come the daring speculators working with fictitious capital, living upon credit, ruined if they cannot speedily sell; they hurl themselves into this universal, disorderly race for profits, multiply the disorder and haste by their unbridled passion, which drives prices and production to madness. it is a frantic struggle, which carries away even the most experienced and phlegmatic; goods are spun, woven, hammered, as if all mankind were to be newly equipped, as though two thousand million new consumers had been discovered in the moon. all at once the shaky speculators abroad, who must have money, begin to sell, below market price, of course, for their need is urgent; one sale is followed by others, prices fluctuate, speculators throw their goods upon the market in terror, the market is disordered, credit shaken, one house after another stops payments, bankruptcy follows bankruptcy, and the discovery is made that three times more goods are on hand or under way than can be consumed. the news reaches england, where production has been going on at full speed meanwhile, panic seizes all hands, failures abroad cause others in england, the panic crushes a number of firms, all reserves are thrown upon the market here, too, in the moment of anxiety, and the alarm is still further exaggerated. this is the beginning of the crisis, which then takes precisely the same course as its predecessor, and gives place in turn to a season of prosperity. so it goes on perpetually,--prosperity, crisis, prosperity, crisis, and this perennial round in which english industry moves is, as has been before observed, usually completed once in five or six years. from this it is clear that english manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months. this reserve army is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or smaller proportion of its members. and if at the moment of highest activity of the market the agricultural districts and the branches least affected by the general prosperity temporarily supply to manufacture a number of workers, these are a mere minority, and these too belong to the reserve army, with the single difference that the prosperity of the moment was required to reveal their connection with it. when they enter upon the more active branches of work, their former employers draw in somewhat, in order to feel the loss less, work longer hours, employ women and younger workers, and when the wanderers discharged at the beginning of the crisis return, they find their places filled and themselves superfluous--at least in the majority of cases. this reserve army, which embraces an immense multitude during the crisis and a large number during the period which may be regarded as the average between the highest prosperity and the crisis, is the "surplus population" of england, which keeps body and soul together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing handcarts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs. in every great town a multitude of such people may be found. it is astonishing in what devices this "surplus population" takes refuge. the london crossing-sweepers are known all over the world; but hitherto the principal streets in all the great cities, as well as the crossings, have been swept by people out of other work, and employed by the poor law guardians or the municipal authorities for the purpose. now, however, a machine has been invented which rattles through the streets daily, and has spoiled this source of income for the unemployed. along the great highways leading into the cities, on which there is a great deal of waggon traffic, a large number of people may be seen with small carts, gathering fresh horse-dung at the risk of their lives among the passing coaches and omnibuses, often paying a couple of shillings a week to the authorities for the privilege. but this occupation is forbidden in many places, because the ordinary street-sweepings thus impoverished cannot be sold as manure. happy are such of the "surplus" as can obtain a push- cart and go about with it. happier still those to whom it is vouchsafed to possess an ass in addition to the cart. the ass must get his own food or is given a little gathered refuse, and can yet bring in a trifle of money. most of the "surplus" betake themselves to huckstering. on saturday afternoons, especially, when the whole working population is on the streets, the crowd who live from huckstering and peddling may be seen. shoe and corset laces, braces, twine, cakes, oranges, every kind of small articles are offered by men, women, and children; and at other times also, such peddlers are always to be seen standing at the street corners, or going about with cakes and ginger-beer or nettle-beer. matches and such things, sealing-wax, and patent mixtures for lighting fires are further resources of such venders. others, so-called jobbers, go about the streets seeking small jobs. many of these succeed in getting a day's work, many are not so fortunate. "at the gates of all the london docks," says the rev. w. champney, preacher of the east end, "hundreds of the poor appear every morning in winter before daybreak, in the hope of getting a day's work. they await the opening of the gates; and, when the youngest and strongest and best known have been engaged, hundreds cast down by disappointed hope, go back to their wretched homes." when these people find no work and will not rebel against society, what remains for them but to beg? and surely no one can wonder at the great army of beggars, most of them able-bodied men, with whom the police carries on perpetual war. but the beggary of these men has a peculiar character. such a man usually goes about with his family singing a pleading song in the streets or appealing, in a speech, to the benevolence of the passers-by. and it is a striking fact that these beggars are seen almost exclusively in the working-people's districts, that it is almost exclusively the gifts of the poor from which they live. or the family takes up its position in a busy street, and without uttering a word, lets the mere sight of its helplessness plead for it. in this case, too, they reckon upon the sympathy of the workers alone, who know from experience how it feels to be hungry, and are liable to find themselves in the same situation at any moment; for this dumb, yet most moving appeal, is met with almost solely in such streets as are frequented by working-men, and at such hours as working-men pass by; but especially on summer evenings, when the "secrets" of the working-people's quarters are generally revealed, and the middle-class withdraws as far as possible from the district thus polluted. and he among the "surplus" who has courage and passion enough openly to resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to the disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him, goes forth to rob, plunder, murder, and burn! of this surplus population there are, according to the reports of the poor law commissioners, on an average, a million and a half in england and wales; in scotland the number cannot be ascertained for want of poor law regulations, and with ireland we shall deal separately. moreover, this million and a half includes only those who actually apply to the parish for relief; the great multitude who struggle on without recourse to this most hated expedient, it does not embrace. on the other hand, a good part of the number belongs to the agricultural districts, and does not enter into the present discussion. during a crisis this number naturally increases markedly, and want reaches its highest pitch. take, for instance, the crisis of , which, being the latest, was the most violent; for the intensity of the crisis increases with each repetition, and the next, which may be expected not later than , { } will probably be still more violent and lasting. during this crisis the poor- rates rose in every town to a hitherto unknown height. in stockport, among other towns, for every pound paid in house-rent, eight shillings of poor-rate had to be paid, so that the rate alone formed forty per cent. of the house-rent. moreover, whole streets stood vacant, so that there were at least twenty thousand fewer inhabitants than usual, and on the doors of the empty houses might be read: "stockport to let." in bolton, where, in ordinary years, the rents from which rates are paid average , pounds, they sank to , pounds. the number of the poor to be supported rose, on the other hand, to , , or more than twenty per cent. of the whole number of inhabitants. in leeds, the poor law guardians had a reserve fund of , pounds. this, with a contribution of , pounds, was wholly exhausted before the crisis reached its height. so it was everywhere. a report drawn up in january, , by a committee of the anti-corn law league, on the condition of the industrial districts in , which was based upon detailed statements of the manufacturers, asserts that the poor-rate was, taking the average, twice as high as in , and that the number of persons requiring relief has trebled, even quintupled, since that time; that a multitude of applicants belong to a class which had never before solicited relief; that the working-class commands more than two-thirds less of the means of subsistence than from - ; that the consumption of meat had been decidedly less, in some places twenty per cent., in others reaching sixty per cent. less; that even handicraftsmen, smiths, bricklayers, and others, who usually have full employment in the most depressed periods, now suffered greatly from want of work and reduction of wages; and that, even now, in january, , wages are still steadily falling. and these are the reports of manufacturers! the starving workmen, whose mills were idle, whose employers could give them no work, stood in the streets in all directions, begged singly or in crowds, besieged the sidewalks in armies, and appealed to the passers-by for help; they begged, not cringing like ordinary beggars, but threatening by their numbers, their gestures, and their words. such was the state of things in all the industrial districts, from leicester to leeds, and from manchester to birmingham. here and there disturbances arose, as in the staffordshire potteries, in july. the most frightful excitement prevailed among the workers until the general insurrection broke out throughout the manufacturing districts in august. when i came to manchester in november, , there were crowds of unemployed working-men at every street corner, and many mills were still standing idle. in the following months these unwilling corner loafers gradually vanished, and the factories came into activity once more. to what extent want and suffering prevail among these unemployed during such a crisis, i need not describe. the poor-rates are insufficient, vastly insufficient; the philanthropy of the rich is a rain-drop in the ocean, lost in the moment of falling, beggary can support but few among the crowds. if the small dealers did not sell to the working-people on credit at such times as long as possible--paying themselves liberally afterwards, it must be confessed--and if the working-people did not help each other, every crisis would remove a multitude of the surplus through death by starvation. since, however, the most depressed period is brief, lasting, at worst, but one, two, or two and a half years, most of them emerge from it with their lives after dire privations. but indirectly by disease, etc., every crisis finds a multitude of victims, as we shall see. first, however, let us turn to another cause of abasement to which the english worker is exposed, a cause permanently active in forcing the whole class downwards. irish immigration. we have already referred several times in passing to the irish who have immigrated into england; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration. the rapid extension of english industry could not have taken place if england had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of ireland a reserve at command. the irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in england; and from the time when it became known in ireland that the east side of st. george's channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the irish hither. it has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. thus there are in london, , ; in manchester, , ; in liverpool, , ; bristol, , ; glasgow, , ; edinburgh, , , poor irish people. { a} these people having grown up almost without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the english population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. let us hear thomas carlyle upon this subject: { b} "the wild milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. the english coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the milesian is holding out his hat to beg. he is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. in his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back--for wages that will purchase him potatoes. he needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. the saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. the uncivilised irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the saxon native out, takes possession in his room. there abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk. that the condition of the lower multitude of english labourers approximates more and more to that of the irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the english price, but at an approximation to the irish price; at a price superior as yet to the irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that." if we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the irish national character, carlyle is perfectly right. these irishmen who migrate for fourpence to england, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. the worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. what does such a race want with high wages? the worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by irishmen. whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true irishman never loses. i have occasionally heard the irish-celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of manchester. the majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of irish origin. in short, the irish have, as dr. kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the english workers acquainted with it. filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. the lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. the milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working-people's quarters and poison the air. he builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. this new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of irish origin. the irishman loves his pig as the arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of england. the filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. the irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. a piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. when he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. moreover, why should he need much room? at home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in england. so the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the irish immigration. and since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. drink is the only thing which makes the irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. the southern facile character of the irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. the temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. what else should he do? how can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery? with such a competitor the english working-man has to struggle with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. nothing else is therefore possible than that, as carlyle says, the wages of english working-men should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the irish compete with him. and these branches are many. all such as demand little or no skill are open to the irish. for work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken irishman is on too low a plane. to become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the english civilisation, the english customs, become, in the main, an englishman. but for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the irishman is as good as the englishman. such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. and even if the irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their english companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the irish. for when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are irish, or children of irish parents, who have grown up among irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status--in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the irish characteristics. on the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the english workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of irish competition. results. having now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under which the english working-class lives, it is time to draw some further inferences from the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences with the actual state of things. let us see what the workers themselves have become under the given circumstances, what sort of people they are, what their physical, mental, and moral status. when one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. but when society { } places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they _cannot_ live--forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence--knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. but murder it remains. i have now to prove that society in england daily and hourly commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. i have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. that it _knows_ the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder, i shall have proved, when i cite official documents, reports of parliament and of the government, in substantiation of my charge. that a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident. let us review the circumstances once more with especial reference to the health of the workers. the centralisation of population in great cities exercises of itself an unfavourable influence; the atmosphere of london can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen, as the air of the country; two and a half million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four miles square, consume an enormous amount of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty, because the method of building cities in itself impedes ventilation. the carbonic acid gas, engendered by respiration and fire, remains in the streets by reason of its specific gravity, and the chief air current passes over the roofs of the city. the lungs of the inhabitants fail to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality. for this reason, the dwellers in cities are far less exposed to acute, and especially to inflammatory, affections than rural populations, who live in a free, normal atmosphere; but they suffer the more from chronic affections. and if life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health, how great must be the harmful influence of an abnormal atmosphere in the working-people's quarters, where, as we have seen, everything combines to poison the air. in the country, it may, perhaps, be comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap adjoining one's dwelling, because the air has free ingress from all sides; but in the midst of a large town, among closely built lanes and courts that shut out all movement of the atmosphere, the case is different. all putrefying vegetable and animal substances give off gases decidedly injurious to health, and if these gases have no free way of escape, they inevitably poison the atmosphere. the filth and stagnant pools of the working-people's quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they produce precisely those gases which engender disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. but this is by no means all. the manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society to-day is revolting. they are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which, by reason of the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to infect the region of their own dwellings. nor is this enough. all conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. if the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. as though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. they are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets that leak from above. their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. they are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. they are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental condition, the most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like game, and not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet enjoyment of life. they are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command. and if they surmount all this, they fall victims to want of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had hitherto been vouchsafed them. how is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long lived? what else can be expected than an excessive mortality, an unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration in the physique of the working population? let us see how the facts stand. that the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities, together with the other conditions of life of this class, engender numerous diseases, is attested on all sides. the article already quoted from the _artisan_ asserts with perfect truth, that lung diseases must be the inevitable consequence of such conditions, and that, indeed, cases of this kind are disproportionately frequent in this class. that the bad air of london, and especially of the working-people's districts, is in the highest degree favourable to the development of consumption, the hectic appearance of great numbers of persons sufficiently indicates. if one roams the streets a little in the early morning, when the multitudes are on their way to their work, one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or half-consumptive. even in manchester the people have not the same appearance; these pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression, i have seen in such startling numbers only in london, though consumption carries off a horde of victims annually in the factory towns of the north. in competition with consumption stands typhus, to say nothing of scarlet fever, a disease which brings most frightful devastation into the ranks of the working-class. typhus, that universally diffused affliction, is attributed by the official report on the sanitary condition of the working-class, directly to the bad state of the dwellings in the matters of ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. this report, compiled, it must not be forgotten, by the leading physicians of england from the testimony of other physicians, asserts that a single ill-ventilated court, a single blind alley without drainage, is enough to engender fever, and usually does engender it, especially if the inhabitants are greatly crowded. this fever has the same character almost everywhere, and develops in nearly every case into specific typhus. it is to be found in the working-people's quarters of all great towns and cities, and in single ill-built, ill-kept streets of smaller places, though it naturally seeks out single victims in better districts also. in london it has now prevailed for a considerable time; its extraordinary violence in the year gave rise to the report already referred to. according to the annual report of dr. southwood smith on the london fever hospital, the number of patients in was , , or more than in any previous year. in the damp, dirty regions of the north, south, and east districts of london, this disease raged with extraordinary violence. many of the patients were working-people from the country, who had endured the severest privation while migrating, and, after their arrival, had slept hungry and half-naked in the streets, and so fallen victims to the fever. these people were brought into the hospital in such a state of weakness, that unusual quantities of wine, cognac, and preparations of ammonia and other stimulants were required for their treatment; . per cent. of all patients died. this malignant fever is to be found in manchester; in the worst quarters of the old town, ancoats, little ireland, etc., it is rarely extinct; though here, as in the _english_ towns generally, it prevails to a less extent than might be expected. in scotland and ireland, on the other hand, it rages with a violence that surpasses all conception. in edinburgh and glasgow it broke out in , after the famine, and in and with especial violence, after the commercial crisis, subsiding somewhat each time after having raged about three years. in edinburgh about , persons were attacked by the fever during the epidemic of , and about , in that of , and not only the number of persons attacked but the violence of the disease increased with each repetition. { a} but the fury of the epidemic in all former periods seems to have been child's play in comparison with its ravages after the crisis of . one- sixth of the whole indigent population of scotland was seized by the fever, and the infection was carried by wandering beggars with fearful rapidity from one locality to another. it did not reach the middle and upper classes of the population, yet in two months there were more fever cases than in twelve years before. in glasgow, twelve per cent. of the population were seized in the year ; , persons, of whom thirty- two per cent. perished, while this mortality in manchester and liverpool does not ordinarily exceed eight per cent. the illness reached a crisis on the seventh and fifteenth days; on the latter, the patient usually became yellow, which our authority { b} regards as an indication that the cause of the malady was to be sought in mental excitement and anxiety. in ireland, too, these fever epidemics have become domesticated. during twenty-one months of the years - , , fever patients passed through the dublin hospital; and in a more recent year, according to sheriff alison, { c} , . in cork the fever hospital received one-seventh of the population in - , in limerick in the same time one-fourth, and in the bad quarter of waterford, nineteen-twentieths of the whole population were ill of the fever at one time. when one remembers under what conditions the working-people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever does not spread yet farther. and when one reflects how little medical assistance the sick have at command, how many are without any medical advice whatsoever, and ignorant of the most ordinary precautionary measures, the mortality seems actually small. dr. alison, who has made a careful study of this disease, attributes it directly to the want and the wretched condition of the poor, as in the report already quoted. he asserts that privations and the insufficient satisfaction of vital needs are what prepare the frame for contagion and make the epidemic widespread and terrible. he proves that a period of privation, a commercial crisis or a bad harvest, has each time produced the typhus epidemic in ireland as in scotland, and that the fury of the plague has fallen almost exclusively on the working-class. it is a noteworthy fact, that according to his testimony, the majority of persons who perish by typhus are fathers of families, precisely the persons who can least be spared by those dependent upon them; and several irish physicians whom he quotes bear the same testimony. another category of diseases arises directly from the food rather than the dwellings of the workers. the food of the labourer, indigestible enough in itself, is utterly unfit for young children, and he has neither means nor time to get his children more suitable food. moreover, the custom of giving children spirits, and even opium, is very general; and these two influences, with the rest of the conditions of life prejudicial to bodily development, give rise to the most diverse affections of the digestive organs, leaving life-long traces behind them. nearly all workers have stomachs more or less weak, and are yet forced to adhere to the diet which is the root of the evil. how should they know what is to blame for it? and if they knew, how could they obtain a more suitable regimen so long as they cannot adopt a different way of living and are not better educated? but new disease arises during childhood from impaired digestion. scrofula is almost universal among the working-class, and scrofulous parents have scrofulous children, especially when the original influences continue in full force to operate upon the inherited tendency of the children. a second consequence of this insufficient bodily nourishment, during the years of growth and development, is rachitis, which is extremely common among the children of the working-class. the hardening of the bones is delayed, the development of the skeleton in general is restricted, and deformities of the legs and spinal column are frequent, in addition to the usual rachitic affections. how greatly all these evils are increased by the changes to which the workers are subject in consequence of fluctuations in trade, want of work, and the scanty wages in time of crisis, it is not necessary to dwell upon. temporary want of sufficient food, to which almost every working-man is exposed at least once in the course of his life, only contributes to intensify the effects of his usual sufficient but bad diet. children who are half-starved, just when they most need ample and nutritious food--and how many such there are during every crisis and even when trade is at its best--must inevitably become weak, scrofulous and rachitic in a high degree. and that they do become so, their appearance amply shows. the neglect to which the great mass of working-men's children are condemned leaves ineradicable traces and brings the enfeeblement of the whole race of workers with it. add to this, the unsuitable clothing of this class, the impossibility of precautions against colds, the necessity of toiling so long as health permits, want made more dire when sickness appears, and the only too common lack of all medical assistance; and we have a rough idea of the sanitary condition of the english working-class. the injurious effects peculiar to single employments as now conducted, i shall not deal with here. besides these, there are other influences which enfeeble the health of a great number of workers, intemperance most of all. all possible temptations, all allurements combine to bring the workers to drunkenness. liquor is almost their only source of pleasure, and all things conspire to make it accessible to them. the working-man comes from his work tired, exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive; he has urgent need of recreation, he _must_ have something to make work worth his trouble, to make the prospect of the next day endurable. his unnerved, uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body arising from his unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated beyond endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty of his existence, his dependence upon all possible accidents and chances, and his inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. his enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public-house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. how can he be expected to resist the temptation? it is morally and physically inevitable that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working-men should fall into intemperance. and apart from the chiefly physical influences which drive the working-man into drunkenness, there is the example of the great mass, the neglected education, the impossibility of protecting the young from temptation, in many cases the direct influence of intemperate parents, who give their own children liquor, the certainty of forgetting for an hour or two the wretchedness and burden of life, and a hundred other circumstances so mighty that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for yielding to such overwhelming pressure. drunkenness has here ceased to be a vice, for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes a phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions upon an object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. they who have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility to bear. but as inevitably as a great number of working- men fall a prey to drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence upon the body and mind of its victims. all the tendencies to disease arising from the conditions of life of the workers are promoted by it, it stimulates in the highest degree the development of lung and digestive troubles, the rise and spread of typhus epidemics. another source of physical mischief to the working-class lies in the impossibility of employing skilled physicians in cases of illness. it is true that a number of charitable institutions strive to supply this want, that the infirmary in manchester, for instance, receives or gives advice and medicine to , patients annually. but what is that in a city in which, according to gaskell's calculation, { } three-fourths of the population need medical aid every year? english doctors charge high fees, and working-men are not in a position to pay them. they can therefore do nothing, or are compelled to call in cheap charlatans, and use quack remedies, which do more harm than good. an immense number of such quacks thrive in every english town, securing their _clientele_ among the poor by means of advertisements, posters, and other such devices. besides these, vast quantities of patent medicines are sold, for all conceivable ailments: morrison's pills, parr's life pills, dr. mainwaring's pills, and a thousand other pills, essences, and balsams, all of which have the property of curing all the ills that flesh is heir to. these medicines rarely contain actually injurious substances, but, when taken freely and often, they affect the system prejudicially; and as the unwary purchasers are always recommended to take as much as possible, it is not to be wondered at that they swallow them wholesale whether wanted or not. it is by no means unusual for the manufacturer of parr's life pills to sell twenty to twenty-five thousand boxes of these salutary pills in a week, and they are taken for constipation by this one, for diarrhoea by that one, for fever, weakness, and all possible ailments. as our german peasants are cupped or bled at certain seasons, so do the english working- people now consume patent medicines to their own injury and the great profit of the manufacturer. one of the most injurious of these patent medicines is a drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, under the name godfrey's cordial. women who work at home, and have their own and other people's children to take care of, give them this drink to keep them quiet, and, as many believe, to strengthen them. they often begin to give this medicine to newly-born children, and continue, without knowing the effects of this "heartsease," until the children die. the less susceptible the child's system to the action of the opium, the greater the quantities administered. when the cordial ceases to act, laudanum alone is given, often to the extent of fifteen to twenty drops at a dose. the coroner of nottingham testified before a parliamentary commission { a} that one apothecary had, according to his own statement, used thirteen hundredweight of laudanum in one year in the preparation of godfrey's cordial. the effects upon the children so treated may be readily imagined. they are pale, feeble, wilted, and usually die before completing the second year. the use of this cordial is very extensive in all great towns and industrial districts in the kingdom. the result of all these influences is a general enfeeblement of the frame in the working-class. there are few vigorous, well-built, healthy persons among the workers, _i.e_., among the factory operatives, who are employed in confined rooms, and we are here discussing these only. they are almost all weakly, of angular but not powerful build, lean, pale, and of relaxed fibre, with the exception of the muscles especially exercised in their work. nearly all suffer from indigestion, and consequently from a more or less hypochondriac, melancholy, irritable, nervous condition. their enfeebled constitutions are unable to resist disease, and are therefore seized by it on every occasion. hence they age prematurely, and die early. on this point the mortality statistics supply unquestionable testimony. according to the report of registrar-general graham, the annual death- rate of all england and wales is something less than . per cent. that is to say, out of forty-five persons, one dies every year. { b} this was the average for the year - . in - the mortality diminished somewhat, and the death-rate was but one in forty-six. but in the great cities the proportion is wholly different. i have before me official tables of mortality (_manchester guardian_, july st, ), according to which the death-rate of several large towns is as follows:--in manchester, including chorlton and salford, one in . ; and excluding chorlton and salford, one in . . in liverpool, including west derby (suburb), . , and excluding west derby, . ; while the average of all the districts of cheshire, lancashire, and yorkshire cited, including a number of wholly or partially rural districts and many small towns, with a total population of , , for the whole, is one death in . persons. how unfavourably the workers are placed in the great cities, the mortality for prescott in lancashire shows: a district inhabited by miners, and showing a lower sanitary condition than that of the agricultural districts, mining being by no means a healthful occupation. but these miners live in the country, and the death-rate among them is but one in . , or nearly two-and-a-half per cent. better than that for all england. all these statements are based upon the mortality tables for . still higher is the death-rate in the scotch cities; in edinburgh, in - , one in ; in , in the old town alone, one in . in glasgow, according to dr. cowen, { } the average has been, since , one in ; and in single years, one in to . that this enormous shortening of life falls chiefly upon the working-class, that the general average is improved by the smaller mortality of the upper and middle-classes, is attested upon all sides. one of the most recent depositions is that of a physician, dr. p. h. holland, in manchester, who investigated chorlton-on-medlock, a suburb of manchester, under official commission. he divided the houses and streets into three classes each, and ascertained the following variations in the death-rate: first class of streets. houses i. class. mortality one in ,, ,, ,, ii. ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, iii. ,, ,, ,, second ,, ,, i. ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ii. ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, iii. ,, ,, ,, third ,, ,, i. ,, wanting --- ---- ,, ,, ,, ii. ,, mortality ,, ,, ,, ,, iii. ,, ,, ,, it is clear from other tables given by holland that the mortality in the _streets_ of the second class is per cent. greater, and in the streets of the third class per cent. greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality in the _houses_ of the second class is per cent greater, and in the third class per cent. greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality is those bad streets which were improved, decreased per cent. he closes with the remark, very frank for an english bourgeois: { } "when we find the rate of mortality four times as high in some streets as in others, and twice as high in whole classes of streets as in other classes, and further find that it is all but invariably high in those streets which are in bad condition, and almost invariably low in those whose condition is good, we cannot resist the conclusion that multitudes of our fellow-creatures, _hundreds of our immediate neighbours_, are annually destroyed for want of the most evident precautions." the report on the sanitary condition of the working-class contains information which attests the same fact. in liverpool, in , the average longevity of the upper-classes, gentry, professional men, etc., was thirty-five years; that of the business men and better-placed handicraftsmen, twenty-two years; and that of the operatives, day-labourers, and serviceable class in general, but fifteen years. the parliamentary reports contain a mass of similar facts. the death-rate is kept so high chiefly by the heavy mortality among young children in the working-class. the tender frame of a child is least able to withstand the unfavourable influences of an inferior lot in life; the neglect to which they are often subjected, when both parents work or one is dead, avenges itself promptly, and no one need wonder that in manchester, according to the report last quoted, more than fifty-seven per cent. of the children of the working-class perish before the fifth year, while but twenty per cent. of the children of the higher classes, and not quite thirty-two per cent. of the children of all classes in the country die under five years of age. { a} the article of the _artisan_, already several times referred to, furnishes exacter information on this point, by comparing the city death-rate in single diseases of children with the country death-rate, thus demonstrating that, in general, epidemics in manchester and liverpool are three times more fatal than in country districts; that affections of the nervous system are quintupled, and stomach troubles trebled, while deaths from affections of the lungs in cities are to those in the country as . to . fatal cases of smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, and whooping cough, among small children, are four times more frequent; those of water on the brain are trebled, and convulsions ten times more frequent. to quote another acknowledged authority, i append the following table. out of , persons, there die--{ b} under - - - - - - - x years in rutlandshire, a healthy agricultural district , , , , , essex, marshy agricultural district , , , , , town of carlisle, - , before introduction of mills , , , town of carlisle, after introduction of mills , l, , preston, factory town , , , , leeds, factory town , , , apart from the divers diseases which are the necessary consequence of the present neglect and oppression of the poorer classes, there are other influences which contribute to increase the mortality among small children. in many families the wife, like the husband, has to work away from home, and the consequence is the total neglect of the children, who are either locked up or given out to be taken care of. it is, therefore, not to be wondered at if hundreds of them perish through all manner of accidents. nowhere are so many children run over, nowhere are so many killed by falling, drowning, or burning, as in the great cities and towns of england. deaths from burns and scalds are especially frequent, such a case occurring nearly every week during the winter months in manchester, and very frequently in london, though little mention is made of them in the papers. i have at hand a copy of the _weekly despatch_ of december th, , according to which, in the week from december st to december th inclusive, _six_ such cases occurred. these unhappy children, perishing in this terrible way, are victims of our social disorder, and of the property-holding classes interested in maintaining and prolonging this disorder. yet one is left in doubt whether even this terribly torturing death is not a blessing for the children in rescuing them from a long life of toil and wretchedness, rich in suffering and poor in enjoyment. so far has it gone in england; and the bourgeoisie reads these things every day in the newspapers and takes no further trouble in the matter. but it cannot complain if, after the official and non-official testimony here cited which must be known to it, i broadly accuse it of social murder. let the ruling class see to it that these frightful conditions are ameliorated, or let it surrender the administration of the common interests to the labouring-class. to the latter course it is by no means inclined; for the former task, so long as it remains the bourgeoisie crippled by bourgeois prejudice, it has not the needed power. for if, at last, after hundreds of thousands of victims have perished, it manifests some little anxiety for the future, passing a "metropolitan buildings act," under which the most unscrupulous overcrowding of dwellings is to be, at least in some slight degree, restricted; if it points with pride to measures which, far from attacking the root of the evil, do not by any means meet the demands of the commonest sanitary policy, it cannot thus vindicate itself from the accusation. the english bourgeoisie has but one choice, either to continue its rule under the unanswerable charge of murder and in spite of this charge, or to abdicate in favour of the labouring-class. hitherto it has chosen the former course. let us turn from the physical to the mental state of the workers. since the bourgeoisie vouchsafes them only so much of life as is absolutely necessary, we need not wonder that it bestows upon them only so much education as lies in the interest of the bourgeoisie; and that, in truth, is not much. the means of education in england are restricted out of all proportion to the population. the few day schools at the command of the working-class are available only for the smallest minority, and are bad besides. the teachers, worn-out workers, and other unsuitable persons who only turn to teaching in order to live, are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge, without the moral discipline so needful for the teacher, and relieved of all public supervision. here, too, free competition rules, and, as usual, the rich profit by it, and the poor, for whom competition is _not_ free, who have not the knowledge needed to enable them to form a correct judgment, have the evil consequences to bear. compulsory school attendance does not exist. in the mills it is, as we shall see, purely nominal; and when in the session of the ministry was disposed to make this nominal compulsion effective, the manufacturing bourgeoisie opposed the measure with all its might, though the working-class was outspokenly in favour of compulsory school attendance. moreover, a mass of children work the whole week through in the mills or at home, and therefore cannot attend school. the evening schools, supposed to be attended by children who are employed during the day, are almost abandoned or attended without benefit. it is asking too much, that young workers who have been using themselves up twelve hours in the day, should go to school from eight to ten at night. and those who try it usually fall asleep, as is testified by hundreds of witnesses in the children's employment commission's report. sunday schools have been founded, it is true, but they, too, are most scantily supplied with teachers, and can be of use to those only who have already learnt something in the day schools. the interval from one sunday to the next is too long for an ignorant child to remember in the second sitting what it learned in the first, a week before. the children's employment commission's report furnishes a hundred proofs, and the commission itself most emphatically expresses the opinion, that neither the week-day nor the sunday schools, in the least degree, meet the needs of the nation. this report gives evidence of ignorance in the working-class of england, such as could hardly be expected in spain or italy. it cannot be otherwise; the bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to fear, from the education of the working-class. the ministry, in its whole enormous budget of , , pounds, has only the single trifling item of , pounds for public education, and, but for the fanaticism of the religious sects which does at least as much harm as good, the means of education would be yet more scanty. as it is, the state church manages its national schools and the various sects their sectarian schools for the sole purpose of keeping the children of the brethren of the faith within the congregation, and of winning away a poor childish soul here and there from some other sect. the consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected. the working class has repeatedly demanded of parliament a system of strictly secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers of the sects; but, thus far, no ministry has been induced to grant it. the minister is the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is divided into countless sects; but each would gladly grant the workers the otherwise dangerous education on the sole condition of their accepting, as an antidote, the dogmas peculiar to the especial sect in question. and as these sects are still quarrelling among themselves for supremacy, the workers remain for the present without education. it is true that the manufacturers boast of having enabled the majority to read, but the quality of the reading is appropriate to the source of the instruction, as the children's employment commission proves. according to this report, he who knows his letters can read enough to satisfy the conscience of the manufacturers. and when one reflects upon the confused orthography of the english language which makes reading one of the arts, learned only under long instruction, this ignorance is readily understood. very few working-people write readily; and writing orthographically is beyond the powers even of many "educated" persons. the sunday schools of the state church, of the quakers, and, i think, of several other sects, do not teach writing, "because it is too worldly an employment for sunday." the quality of the instruction offered the workers in other directions may be judged from a specimen or two, taken from the children's employment commission's report, which unfortunately does not embrace mill-work proper: "in birmingham," says commissioner grainger, "the children examined by me are, as a whole, utterly wanting in all that could be in the remotest degree called a useful education. although in almost all the schools religious instruction alone is furnished, the profoundest ignorance even upon that subject prevailed."--"in wolverhampton," says commissioner horne, "i found, among others, the following example: a girl of eleven years had attended both day and sunday school, 'had never heard of another world, of heaven, or another life.' a boy, seventeen years old, did not know that twice two are four, nor how many farthings in two pence even when the money was placed in his hand. several boys had never heard of london nor of willenhall, though the latter was but an hour's walk from their homes, and in the closest relations with wolverhampton. several had never heard the name of the queen nor other names, such as nelson, wellington, bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even of st. paul, moses, or solomon, were very well instructed as to the life, deeds, and character of dick turpin, and especially of jack sheppard. a youth of sixteen did not know how many twice two are, nor how much four farthings make. a youth of seventeen asserted that four farthings are four half pence; a third, seventeen years old, answered several very simple questions with the brief statement, that he 'was ne jedge o' nothin'.'" { a} these children who are crammed with religious doctrines four or five years at a stretch, know as little at the end as at the beginning. one child "went to sunday school regularly for five years; does not know who jesus christ is, but had heard the name; had never heard of the twelve apostles, samson, moses, aaron, etc." { b} another "attended sunday school regularly six years; knows who jesus christ was; he died on the cross to save our saviour; had never heard of st. peter or st. paul." { a} a third, "attended different sunday schools seven years; can read only the thin, easy books with simple words of one syllable; has heard of the apostles, but does not know whether st. peter was one or st. john; the latter must have been st. john wesley." { b} to the question who christ was, horne received the following answers among others: "he was adam," "he was an apostle," "he was the saviour's lord's son," and from a youth of sixteen: "he was a king of london long ago." in sheffield, commissioner symonds let the children from the sunday school read aloud; they could not tell what they had read, or what sort of people the apostles were, of whom they had just been reading. after he had asked them all one after the other about the apostles without securing a single correct answer, one sly-looking little fellow, with great glee, called out: "i know, mister; they were the lepers!" { c} from the pottery districts and from lancashire the reports are similar. this is what the bourgeoisie and the state are doing for the education and improvement of the working-class. fortunately the conditions under which this class lives are such as give it a sort of practical training, which not only replaces school cramming, but renders harmless the confused religious notions connected with it, and even places the workers in the vanguard of the national movement of england. necessity is the mother of invention, and what is still more important, of thought and action. the english working-man who can scarcely read and still less write, nevertheless knows very well where his own interest and that of the nation lies. he knows, too, what the especial interest of the bourgeoisie is, and what he has to expect of that bourgeoisie. if he cannot write he can speak, and speak in public; if he has no arithmetic, he can, nevertheless, reckon with the political economists enough to see through a corn-law-repealing bourgeois, and to get the better of him in argument; if celestial matters remain very mixed for him in spite of all the effort of the preachers, he sees all the more clearly into terrestrial, political, and social questions. we shall have occasion to refer again to this point; and pass now to the moral characteristics of our workers. it is sufficiently clear that the instruction in morals can have no better effect than the religious teaching, with which in all english schools it is mixed up. the simple principles which, for plain human beings, regulate the relations of man to man, brought into the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment. the schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the children's employment commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. so short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the english bourgeoisie in its egotism, that it does not even take the trouble to impress upon the workers the morality of the day, which the bourgeoisie has patched together in its own interest for its own protection! even this precautionary measure is too great an effort for the enfeebled and sluggish bourgeoisie. a time must come when it will repent its neglect, too late. but it has no right to complain that the workers know nothing of its system of morals, and do not act in accordance with it. thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as well as physically and mentally. the only provision made for them is the law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the bourgeoisie. like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but intimidating. there is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. they are men so long only as they burn with wrath against the reigning class. they become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke. this, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the proletariat--and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the resentment which it cherishes against the ruling class. the moral training which is not given to the worker in school is not supplied by the other conditions of his life; that moral training, at least, which alone has worth in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; his whole position and environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality. he is poor, life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is denied him, the penalties of the law have no further terrors for him; why should he restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself? what inducement has the proletarian not to steal! it is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the "sacredness of property" asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself. money is the god of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. no wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly god. and when the poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain power. this the bourgeoisie for the most part recognises. symonds { a} observes that poverty exercises the same ruinous influence upon the mind which drunkenness exercises upon the body; and dr. alison explains to property-holding readers, with the greatest exactness, what the consequences of social oppression must be for the working-class. { b} want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it--in plain english, stealing. and there is no cause for surprise that most of them prefer stealing to starvation and suicide. true, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to steal even when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit suicide. for suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper classes, has become fashionable among the english workers, and numbers of the poor kill themselves to avoid the misery from which they see no other means of escape. but far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon the english working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. the smaller peasants in germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. the proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes to-day what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being. the slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each has at worst a guarantee for life itself. but the proletarian must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to be able to rely upon them. everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest control. he is the passive subject of all possible combinations of circumstances, and must count himself fortunate when he has saved his life even for a short time; and his character and way of living are naturally shaped by these conditions. either he seeks to keep his head above water in this whirlpool, to rescue his manhood, and this he can do solely in rebellion { } against the class which plunders him so mercilessly and then abandons him to his fate, which strives to hold him in this position so demoralising to a human being; or he gives up the struggle against his fate as hopeless, and strives to profit, so far as he can, by the most favourable moment. to save is unavailing, for at the utmost he cannot save more than suffices to sustain life for a short time, while if he falls out of work, it is for no brief period. to accumulate lasting property for himself is impossible; and if it were not, he would only cease to be a working-man and another would take his place. what better thing can he do, then, when he gets high wages, than live well upon them? the english bourgeoisie is violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (_i.e_., the bourgeoisie) get possession of. yet such a life is demoralising beyond all others. what carlyle says of the cotton spinners is true of all english industrial workers: { a} "their trade, now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into inanition and 'short time,' is of the nature of gambling; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. black, mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. english commerce, with its world-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable proteus steam demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man are not theirs.--this world is for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all men. is it a green, flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a god; or a murky, simmering tophet, of copperas fumes, cotton fuz, gin riot, wrath and toil, created by a demon, governed by a demon?" and elsewhere: { b} "injustice, infidelity to truth and fact and nature's order, being properly the one evil under the sun, and the feeling of injustice the one intolerable pain under the sun, our grand question as to the condition of these working-men would be: is it just? and, first of all, what belief have they themselves formed about the justice of it? the words they promulgate are notable by way of answer; their actions are still more notable. revolt, sullen, revengeful humour of revolt against the upper classes, decreasing respect for what their temporal superiors command, decreasing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and more the universal spirit of the lower classes. such spirit may be blamed, may be vindicated, but all men must recognise it as extant there, all may know that it is mournful, that unless altered it will be fatal." carlyle is perfectly right as to the facts and wrong only in censuring the wild rage of the workers against the higher classes. this rage, this passion, is rather the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of their position, that they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes, and that they will one day free themselves from servitude to the bourgeoisie. this may be seen in the case of those who do not share this wrath; they either bow humbly before the fate that overtakes them, live a respectful private life as well as they can, do not concern themselves as to the course of public affairs, help the bourgeoisie to forge the chains of the workers yet more securely, and stand upon the plane of intellectual nullity that prevailed before the industrial period began; or they are tossed about by fate, lose their moral hold upon themselves as they have already lost their economic hold, live along from day to day, drink and fall into licentiousness; and in both cases they are brutes. the last-named class contributes chiefly to the "rapid increase of vice," at which the bourgeoisie is so horrified after itself setting in motion the causes which give rise to it. another source of demoralisation among the workers is their being condemned to work. as voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against one's will. and the more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to him, because he feels the constraint, the aimlessness of it for himself. why does he work? for love of work? from a natural impulse? not at all! he works for money, for a thing which has nothing whatsoever to do with the work itself; and he works so long, moreover, and in such unbroken monotony, that this alone must make his work a torture in the first weeks if he has the least human feeling left. the division of labour has multiplied the brutalising influences of forced work. in most branches the worker's activity is reduced to some paltry, purely mechanical manipulation, repeated minute after minute, unchanged year after year. { } how much human feeling, what abilities can a man retain in his thirtieth year, who has made needle points or filed toothed wheels twelve hours every day from his early childhood, living all the time under the conditions forced upon the english proletarian? it is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. the worker's activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. it offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. and a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep, none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of nature, much less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human being to the level of a brute? once more the worker must choose, must either surrender himself to his fate, become a "good" workman, heed "faithfully" the interest of the bourgeoisie, in which case he most certainly becomes a brute, or else he must rebel, fight for his manhood to the last, and this he can only do in the fight against the bourgeoisie. and when all these conditions have engendered vast demoralisation among the workers, a new influence is added to the old, to spread this degradation more widely and carry it to the extremest point. this influence is the centralisation of the population. the writers of the english bourgeoisie are crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the great cities, like perverted jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the destruction, but the growth of the cities. sheriff alison attributes almost everything, and dr. vaughan, author of "the age of great cities," still more to this influence. and this is natural, for the propertied class has too direct an interest in the other conditions which tend to destroy the worker body and soul. if they should admit that "poverty, insecurity, overwork, forced work, are the chief ruinous influences," they would have to draw the conclusion, "then let us give the poor property, guarantee their subsistence, make laws against overwork," and this the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. but the great cities have grown up so spontaneously, the population has moved into them so wholly of its own motion, and the inference that manufacture and the middle-class which profits from it alone have created the cities is so remote, that it is extremely convenient for the ruling class to ascribe all the evil to this apparently unavoidable source; whereas the great cities really only secure a more rapid and certain development for evils already existing in the germ. alison is humane enough to admit this; he is no thoroughbred liberal manufacturer, but only a half developed tory bourgeois, and he has, therefore, an open eye, now and then, where the full-fledged bourgeois is still stone blind. let us hear him: { } "it is in the great cities that vice has spread her temptations, and pleasure her seductions, and folly her allurements; that guilt is encouraged by the hope of impunity, and idleness fostered by the frequency of example. it is to these great marts of human corruption that the base and the profligate resort from the simplicity of country life; it is here that they find victims whereon to practise their iniquity, and gains to reward the dangers that attend them. virtue is here depressed from the obscurity in which it is involved. guilt is matured from the difficulty of its detection; licentiousness is rewarded by the immediate enjoyment which it promises. if any person will walk through st. giles's, the crowded alleys of dublin, or the poorer quarters of glasgow by night, he will meet with ample proof of these observations; he will no longer wonder at the disorderly habits and profligate enjoyments of the lower orders; his astonishment will be, not that there is so much, but that there is so little crime in the world. the great cause of human corruption in these crowded situations is the contagious nature of bad example and the extreme difficulty of avoiding the seductions of vice when they are brought into close and daily proximity with the younger part of the people. whatever we may think of the strength of virtue, experience proves that the higher orders are indebted for their exemption from atrocious crime or disorderly habits chiefly to their fortunate removal from the scene of temptation; and that where they are exposed to the seductions which assail their inferiors, they are noways behind them in yielding to their influence. it is the peculiar misfortune of the poor in great cities that they cannot fly from these irresistible temptations, but that, turn where they will, they are met by the alluring forms of vice, or the seductions of guilty enjoyment. it is the experienced impossibility of concealing the attractions of vice from the younger part of the poor in great cities which exposes them to so many causes of demoralisation. all this proceeds not from any unwonted or extraordinary depravity in the character of these victims of licentiousness, but from the almost irresistible nature of the temptations to which the poor are exposed. the rich, who censure their conduct, would in all probability yield as rapidly as they have done to the influence of similar causes. there is a certain degree of misery, a certain proximity to sin, which virtue is rarely able to withstand, and which the young, in particular, are generally unable to resist. the progress of vice in such circumstances is almost as certain and often nearly as rapid as that of physical contagion." and elsewhere: "when the higher orders for their own profit have drawn the labouring- classes in great numbers into a small space, the contagion of guilt becomes rapid and unavoidable. the lower orders, situated as they are in so far as regards moral or religious instruction, are frequently hardly more to be blamed for yielding to the temptations which surround them than for falling victims to the typhus fever." enough! the half-bourgeois alison betrays to us, however narrow his manner of expressing himself, the evil effect of the great cities upon the moral development of the workers. another, a bourgeois _pur sang_, a man after the heart of the anti-corn law league, dr. andrew ure, { } betrays the other side. he tells us that life in great cities facilitates cabals among the workers and confers power on the plebs. if here the workers are not educated (_i.e_., to obedience to the bourgeoisie), they may view matters one-sidedly, from the standpoint of a sinister selfishness, and may readily permit themselves to be hoodwinked by sly demagogues; nay, they might even be capable of viewing their greatest benefactors, the frugal and enterprising capitalists, with a jealous and hostile eye. here proper training alone can avail, or national bankruptcy and other horrors must follow, since a revolution of the workers could hardly fail to occur. and our bourgeois is perfectly justified in his fears. if the centralisation of population stimulates and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development of the workers yet more rapidly. the workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united; their separation from the bourgeoisie, the development of views peculiar to the workers and corresponding to their position in life, is fostered, the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance. the great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the trades-unions, chartism, and socialism. the great cities have transformed the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of curing it. without the great cities and their forcing influence upon the popular intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than it is. moreover, they have destroyed the last remnant of the patriarchal relation between working- men and employers, a result to which manufacture on a large scale has contributed by multiplying the employes dependent upon a single employer. the bourgeoisie deplores all this, it is true, and has good reason to do so; for, under the old conditions, the bourgeois was comparatively secure against a revolt on the part of his hands. he could tyrannise over them and plunder them to his heart's content, and yet receive obedience, gratitude, and assent from these stupid people by bestowing a trifle of patronising friendliness which cost him nothing, and perhaps some paltry present, all apparently out of pure, self-sacrificing, uncalled-for goodness of heart, but really not one-tenth part of his duty. as an individual bourgeois, placed under conditions which he had not himself created, he might do his duty at least in part; but, as a member of the ruling class, which, by the mere fact of its ruling, is responsible for the condition of the whole nation, he did nothing of what his position involved. on the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own individual advantage. in the patriarchal relation that hypocritically concealed the slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an intellectual zero, totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private individual. only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that the sole bond between employer and employe is the bond of pecuniary profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not the slightest test, had wholly fallen away, then only did the worker begin to recognise his own interests and develop independently; then only did he cease to be the slave of the bourgeoisie in his thoughts, feelings, and the expression of his will. and to this end manufacture on a grand scale and in great cities has most largely contributed. another influence of great moment in forming the character of the english workers is the irish immigration already referred to. on the one hand it has, as we have seen, degraded the english workers, removed them from civilisation, and aggravated the hardship of their lot; but, on the other hand, it has thereby deepened the chasm between workers and bourgeoisie, and hastened the approaching crisis. for the course of the social disease from which england is suffering is the same as the course of a physical disease; it develops, according to certain laws, has its own crisis, the last and most violent of which determines the fate of the patient. and as the english nation cannot succumb under the final crises, but must go forth from it, born again, rejuvenated, we can but rejoice over everything which accelerates the course of the disease. and to this the irish immigration further contributes by reason of the passionate, mercurial irish temperament, which it imports into england and into the english working-class. the irish and english are to each other much as the french and the germans; and the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering english must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both. the rough egotism of the english bourgeoisie would have kept its hold upon the working-class much more firmly if the irish nature, generous to a fault, and ruled primarily by sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational english character in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary contact of life. in view of all this, it is not surprising that the working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the english bourgeoisie. the bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. the workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. thus they are two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them, of whom we on the continent have known but one, the bourgeoisie. yet it is precisely the other, the people, the proletariat, which is by far the more important for the future of england. of the public character of the english working-man, as it finds expression in associations and political principles, we shall have occasion to speak later; let us here consider the results of the influences cited above, as they affect the private character of the worker. the workman is far more humane in ordinary life than the bourgeois. i have already mentioned the fact that the beggars are accustomed to turn almost exclusively to the workers, and that, in general, more is done by the workers than by the bourgeoisie for the maintenance of the poor. this fact, which any one may prove for himself any day, is confirmed, among others, by dr. parkinson, canon of manchester, who says: { } "the poor give one another more than the rich give the poor. i can confirm my statement by the testimony of one of our eldest, most skilful, most observant, and humane physicians, dr. bardsley, who has often declared that the total sum which the poor yearly bestow upon one another, surpasses that which the rich contribute in the same time." in other ways, too, the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting itself pleasantly. they have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more, than the property-holding class. for them money is worth only what it will buy, whereas for the bourgeois it has an especial inherent value, the value of a god, and makes the bourgeois the mean, low money-grabber that he is. the working-man who knows nothing of this feeling of reverence for money is therefore less grasping than the bourgeois, whose whole activity is for the purpose of gain, who sees in the accumulations of his money-bags the end and aim of life. hence the workman is much less prejudiced, has a clearer eye for facts as they are than the bourgeois, and does not look at everything through the spectacles of personal selfishness. his faulty education saves him from religious prepossessions, he does not understand religious questions, does not trouble himself about them, knows nothing of the fanaticism that holds the bourgeoisie bound; and if he chances to have any religion, he has it only in name, not even in theory. practically he lives for this world, and strives to make himself at home in it. all the writers of the bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious, and do not attend church. from the general statement are to be excepted the irish, a few elderly people, and the half-bourgeois, the overlookers, foremen, and the like. but among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost, some trace of deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. the clergy of all sects is in very bad odour with the working-men, though the loss of its influence is recent. at present, however, the mere cry: "he's a parson!" is often enough to drive one of the clergy from the platform of a public meeting. and like the rest of the conditions under which he lives, his want of religious and other culture contributes to keep the working-man more unconstrained, freer from inherited stable tenets and cut-and-dried opinions, than the bourgeois who is saturated with the class prejudices poured into him from his earliest youth. there is nothing to be done with the bourgeois; he is essentially conservative in however liberal a guise, his interest is bound up with that of the property-holding class, he is dead to all active movement; he is losing his position in the forefront of england's historical development. the workers are taking his place, in rightful claim first, then in fact. all this, together with the correspondent public action of the workers, with which we shall deal later, forms the favourable side of the character of this class; the unfavourable one may be quite as briefly summed up, and follows quite as naturally out of the given causes. drunkenness, sexual irregularities, brutality, and disregard for the rights of property are the chief points with which the bourgeois charges them. that they drink heavily is to be expected. sheriff alison asserts that in glasgow some thirty thousand working-men get drunk every saturday night, and the estimate is certainly not exaggerated; and that in that city in , one house in twelve, and in , one house in ten, was a public-house; that in scotland, in , excise was paid upon , , gallons; in , upon , , gallons; in england, in , upon , , gallons, and in , upon , , gallons of spirits. the beer act of , which facilitated the opening of beerhouses (jerry shops), whose keepers are licensed to sell beer to be drunk on the premises, facilitated the spread of intemperance by bringing a beerhouse, so to say, to everybody's door. in nearly every street there are several such beerhouses, and among two or three neighbouring houses in the country one is sure to be a jerry shop. besides these, there are hush- shops in multitudes, _i.e_., secret drinking-places which are not licensed, and quite as many secret distilleries which produce great quantities of spirits in retired spots, rarely visited by the police, in the great cities. gaskell estimates these secret distilleries in manchester alone at more than a hundred, and their product at , gallons at the least. in manchester there are, besides, more than a thousand public-houses selling all sorts of alcoholic drinks, or quite as many in proportion to the number of inhabitants as in glasgow. in all other great towns, the state of things is the same. and when one considers, apart from the usual consequences of intemperance, that men and women, even children, often mothers with babies in their arms, come into contact in these places with the most degraded victims of the bourgeois regime, with thieves, swindlers, and prostitutes; when one reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm gin to drink, the demoralising effects of frequenting such places cannot be denied. on saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. i have rarely come out of manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter. on sunday evening the same scene is usually repeated, only less noisily. and when their money is spent, the drunkards go to the nearest pawnshop, of which there are plenty in every city--over sixty in manchester, and ten or twelve in a single street of salford, chapel street--and pawn whatever they possess. furniture, sunday clothes where such exist, kitchen utensils in masses are fetched from the pawnbrokers on saturday night only to wander back, almost without fail, before the next wednesday, until at last some accident makes the final redemption impossible, and one article after another falls into the clutches of the usurer, or until he refuses to give a single farthing more upon the battered, used-up pledge. when one has seen the extent of intemperance among the workers in england, one readily believes lord ashley's statement that this class annually expends something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating liquor: and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic relations which follow may readily be imagined. true, the temperance societies have done much, but what are a few thousand teetotallers among the millions of workers? when father matthew, the irish apostle of temperance, passes through the english cities, from thirty to sixty thousand workers take the pledge; but most of them break it again within a month. if one counts up the immense numbers who have taken the pledge in the last three or four years in manchester, the total is greater than the whole population of the town--and still it is by no means evident that intemperance is diminishing. next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the principal faults of english working-men is sexual licence. but this, too, follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the position of a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use of its freedom. the bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these two pleasures, while imposing upon it a multitude of labours and hardships, and the consequence is that the working-men, in order to get something from life, concentrate their whole energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled manner. when people are placed under conditions which appeal to the brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality? and when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in maintaining prostitution--and how many of the , prostitutes who fill the streets of london every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie! how many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live?--surely it has least of all a right to reproach the workers with their sexual brutality. the failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remoter advantage. but is that to be wondered at? when a class can purchase few and only the most sensual pleasures by its wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures? a class about whose education no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life--what incentives has such a class to providence, to "respectability," to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? a class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects--who can demand that such a class respect this social order? verily that is asking much! but the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself. thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. in a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. the husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the english working-people, and only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. and children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man! the contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme form--that of offences against the law. if the influences demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at degrees, reaumur. under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in england, and the british nation has become the most criminal in the world. from the annual criminal tables of the home secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime in england has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity. the numbers of arrests for _criminal_ offences reached in the years: , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , in england and wales alone. that is to say, they increased sevenfold in thirty-seven years. of these arrests, in , , were made in lancashire alone, or more than per cent. of the whole; and , in middlesex, including london, or more than per cent. so that two districts which include great cities with large proletarian populations, produced one-fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is far from forming one-fourth of the whole. moreover, the criminal tables prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat; for, in , taking the average, out of criminals, . could neither read nor write; . read and wrote imperfectly; . could read and write well; . had enjoyed a higher education, while the degree of education of . could not be ascertained. in scotland, crime has increased yet more rapidly. there were but arrests for criminal offences in , and as early as the number had risen to , , and in to , . in lanarkshire, where sheriff alison himself made out the official report, population has doubled once in thirty years, and crime once in five and a half, or six times more rapidly than the population. the offences, as in all civilised countries, are, in the great majority of cases, against property, and have, therefore, arisen from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal. the proportion of offences against property to the population, which in the netherlands is as : , , and in france, as : , , was in england, when gaskell wrote, as : . the proportion of offences against persons to the population is, in the netherlands, : , ; in france, : , ; in england, : , ; that of crimes in general to the population in the agricultural districts, as : , ; in the manufacturing districts as : . { a} in the whole of england to-day the proportion is : ; { b} though it is scarcely ten years since gaskell's book appeared! these facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring any one, even a bourgeois, to pause and reflect upon the consequences of such a state of things. if demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this proportion (and if english manufacture in these twenty years should be less prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? society is already in a state of visible dissolution; it is impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing the most striking evidence of the giving way of all social ties. i look at random into a heap of english journals lying before me; there is the _manchester guardian_ for october , , which reports for three days. it no longer takes the trouble to give exact details as to manchester, and merely relates the most interesting cases: that the workers in a mill have struck for higher wages without giving notice, and been condemned by a justice of the peace to resume work; that in salford a couple of boys had been caught stealing, and a bankrupt tradesman tried to cheat his creditors. from the neighbouring towns the reports are more detailed: in ashton, two thefts, one burglary, one suicide; in bury, one theft; in bolton, two thefts, one revenue fraud; in leigh, one theft; in oldham, one strike for wages, one theft, one fight between irish women, one non-union hatter assaulted by union men, one mother beaten by her son, one attack upon the police, one robbery of a church; in stockport, discontent of working-men with wages, one theft, one fraud, one fight, one wife beaten by her husband; in warrington, one theft, one fight; in wigan, one theft, and one robbery of a church. the reports of the london papers are much worse; frauds, thefts, assaults, family quarrels crowd one another. a _times_ of september , , falls into my hand, which gives a report of a single day, including a theft, an attack upon the police, a sentence upon a father requiring him to support his illegitimate son, the abandonment of a child by its parents, and the poisoning of a man by his wife. similar reports are to be found in all the english papers. in this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. it no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law-court. in short, every one sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. and this war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. the enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps--the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other. this war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition. but it may very well surprise us that the bourgeoisie remains so quiet and composed in the face of the rapidly gathering storm- clouds, that it can read all these things daily in the papers without, we will not say indignation at such a social condition, but fear of its consequences, of a universal outburst of that which manifests itself symptomatically from day to day in the form of crime. but then it is the bourgeoisie, and from its standpoint cannot even see the facts, much less perceive their consequences. one thing only is astounding, that class prejudice and preconceived opinions can hold a whole class of human beings in such perfect, i might almost say, such mad blindness. meanwhile, the development of the nation goes its way whether the bourgeoisie has eyes for it or not, and will surprise the property-holding class one day with things not dreamed of in its philosophy. single branches of industry. factory hands. in dealing now with the more important branches of the english manufacturing proletariat, we shall begin, according to the principle already laid down, with the factory-workers, _i.e_., those who are comprised under the factory act. this law regulates the length of the working-day in mills in which wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or woven by means of water or steam-power, and embraces, therefore, the more important branches of english manufacture. the class employed by them is the most intelligent and energetic of all the english workers, and, therefore, the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie. it stands as a whole, and the cotton-workers pre-eminently stand, at the head of the labour movement, as their masters the manufacturers, especially those of lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation. we have already seen in the introduction how the population employed in working up the textile materials were first torn from their former way of life. it is, therefore, not surprising that the progress of mechanical invention in later years also affected precisely these workers most deeply and permanently. the history of cotton manufacture as related by ure, { a} baines, { b} and others is the story of improvements in every direction, most of which have become domesticated in the other branches of industry as well. hand-work is superseded by machine-work almost universally, nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of steam or water, and every year is bringing further improvements. in a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefit for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means of subsistence. every improvement in machinery throws workers out of employment, and the greater the advance, the more numerous the unemployed; each great improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness, and crime. take a few examples. the very first invention, the jenny, worked by one man, produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel had yielded in the same time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners out of employment. the throstle, which, in turn, produced much more than the jenny, and like it, was worked by one man, threw still more people out of employment. the mule, which required yet fewer hands in proportion to the product, had the same effect, and every improvement in the mule, every multiplication of its spindles, diminished still further the number of workers employed. but this increase of the number of spindles in the mule is so great that whole armies of workers have been thrown out of employment by it. for, whereas one spinner, with a couple of children for piecers, formerly set six hundred spindles in motion, he could now manage fourteen hundred to two thousand spindles upon two mules, so that two adult spinners and a part of the piecers whom they employed were thrown out. and since self-acting mules have been introduced into a very large number of spinning-mills, the spinners' work is wholly performed by the machine. there lies before me a book from the pen of james leach, { } one of the recognised leaders of the chartists in manchester. the author has worked for years in various branches of industry, in mills and coal mines, and is known to me personally as an honest, trustworthy, and capable man. in consequence of his political position, he had at command extensive detailed information as to the different factories, collected by the workers themselves, and he publishes tables from which it is clear that in , in factories, , fewer mule spinners were employed than in , though the number of spindles in these factories had increased by , . he cites five factories in which no spinners whatever are employed, self-actors only being used. while the number of spindles increased by per cent., the number of spinners diminished more than per cent. and leach adds that since , so many improvements have been introduced by double-decking and other means, that in some of the factories named, half the operatives have been discharged. in one factory alone, where eighty spinners were employed a short time ago, there are now but twenty left; the others having been discharged or set at children's work for children's wages. of stockport leach tells a similar story, that in , spinners were employed, and in but , though the manufacture of stockport has greatly increased during the last eight or nine years. similar improvements have now been made in carding frames, by which one-half the operatives have been thrown out of employment. in one factory improved frames have been set up, which have thrown four hands out of eight out of work, besides which the employer reduced the wages of the four retained from eight shillings to seven. the same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people. and in all sorts of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is the same. the power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate one branch after another of wool and linen-weaving; in rochdale alone, there are more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches. the bourgeoisie usually replies to this, that improvements in machinery, by decreasing the cost of production, supply finished goods at lower prices, and that these reduced prices cause such an increase in consumption that the unemployed operatives soon find full employment in newly-founded factories. { } the bourgeoisie is so far correct that under certain conditions favourable for the general development of manufacture, every reduction in price of goods _in which the raw material is cheap_, greatly increases consumption, and gives rise to the building of new factories; but every further word of the assertion is a lie. the bourgeoisie ignores the fact that it takes years for these results of the decrease in price to follow and for new factories to be built; it is silent upon the point that every improvement in machinery throws the real work, the expenditure of force, more and more upon the machine, and so transforms the work of full-grown men into mere supervision, which a feeble woman or even a child can do quite as well, and does for half or two-thirds wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly more and more supplanted and _not re-employed_ by the increase in manufacture; it conceals the fact that whole branches of industry fall away, or are so changed that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care not to confess what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of forbidding the work of children is broached, that factory-work must be learned in earliest youth in order to be learned properly. it does not mention the fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch, if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him, and with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for winning his bread. but the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the improvements in machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up money during the first years while many old machines are still in use, and the improvement not yet universally introduced; and it would be too much to ask that it should have an open eye for the disadvantages inseparable from these improvements. the fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the working-men. the bourgeoisie insists that although the price of piece- work has been reduced, yet the total of wages for the week's work has rather risen than fallen, and the condition of the operatives rather improved than deteriorated. it is hard to get to the bottom of the matter, for the operatives usually dwell upon the price of piece-work. but it is certain that the weekly wage, also, has, in many branches of work, been reduced by the improvement of machinery. the so-called fine spinners (who spin fine mule yarn), for instance, do receive high wages, thirty to forty shillings a week, because they have a powerful association for keeping wages up, and their craft requires long training; but the coarse spinners who have to compete against self-actors (which are not as yet adapted for fine spinning), and whose association was broken down by the introduction of these machines, receive very low wages. a mule spinner told me that he does not earn more than fourteen shillings a week, and his statement agrees with that of leach, that in various factories the coarse spinners earn less than sixteen shillings and sixpence a week, and that a spinner, who years ago earned thirty shillings, can now hardly scrape up twelve and a half, and had not earned more on an average in the past year. the wages of women and children may perhaps have fallen less, but only because they were not high from the beginning. i know several women, widows with children, who have trouble enough to earn eight to nine shillings a week; and that they and their families cannot live decently upon that sum, every one must admit who knows the price of the barest necessaries of life in england. that wages in general have been reduced by the improvement of machinery is the unanimous testimony of the operatives. the bourgeois assertion that the condition of the working-class has been improved by machinery is most vigorously proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men in the factory districts. and even if it were true that the relative wage, the price of piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage, the sum to be earned in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow? that the operatives have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers filled their purses from every improvement without giving the hands the smallest share in the gain. the bourgeois forgets, in fighting the working-man, the most ordinary principles of his own political economy. he who at other times swears by malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the workers: "where could the millions by which the population of england has increased find work, without the improvements in machinery?" { } as though the bourgeois did not know well enough that without machinery and the expansion of industry which it produced, these "millions" would never have been brought into the world and grown up! the service which machinery has rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery shall no longer work against but for them. let the wise bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in manchester and elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer: "mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery." the consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive. every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like england where, without that, there is usually a "surplus population," to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. and what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! to escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralisation. and the english operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both. the history of the english proletariat relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair. the worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against a machine that is making its way. the price of the goods which they produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine, and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the lowest wages. the same thing happens to every operative employed upon an old machine in competition with later improvements. and who else is there to bear the hardship? the manufacturer will not throw out his old apparatus, nor will he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead mechanism he can make nothing, so he fastens upon the living worker, the universal scapegoat of society. of all the workers in competition with machinery, the most ill-used are the hand-loom cotton weavers. they receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a position to earn more than ten shillings a week. one class of woven goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so that the trade is always overcrowded. hence it comes that, in average seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day. most woven goods require moreover a damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part, for this reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying for better dwellings, the workrooms of these weavers are usually without wooden or paved floors. i have been in many dwellings of such weavers, in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars. often half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live together in a cottage with one or two workrooms, and one large sleeping- room. their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat. great numbers of them are irish or of irish descent. and these poor hand-loom weavers, first to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must serve the bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory system. "see," cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, "see how these poor creatures must famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and _then_ judge the factory { } system!" as though it were not precisely the factory system and the machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully crushed the hand-loom weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know this quite as well as ourselves! but the bourgeoisie has interests at stake, and so a falsehood or two and a bit of hypocrisy won't matter much. let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and more supersedes the work of men. the human labour, involved in both spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the machine does all the rest. this work requires no muscular strength, but only flexibility of finger. men are, therefore, not only not needed for it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore, naturally almost superseded by them. hence, the more the use of the arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or water- power, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their places. in the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the throstles; among the mules one man, an adult spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes superfluous), and several piecers for tying the threads, usually children or women, sometimes young men of from eighteen to twenty years, here and there an old spinner { } thrown out of other employment. at the power-looms women, from fifteen to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however, rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. among the preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. besides all these, the factories employ numbers of children--doffers--for mounting and taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an engineer for the steam-engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual work of the mills is done by women and children. this the manufacturers deny. they published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does not supersede adult male operatives. according to these tables, rather more than half of all the factory-workers employed, _viz_., per cent., were females and per cent. males, and of those operatives more than half were over eighteen years old. so far, so good. but the manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the adults were men and how many women. and this is just the point. besides this, they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and still they have not the courage to tell the whole truth. these publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions, crooked statements, with calculations of averages, that prove a great deal for the uninitiated reader and nothing for the initiated, and with suppressions of facts bearing on the most important points; and they prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of the manufacturers concerned. let us take some of the statements of a speech with which lord ashley introduced the ten hours' bill, march th, , into the house of commons. here he gives some data as to the relations of sex and age of the operatives, not yet refuted by the manufacturers, whose statements, as quoted above, cover moreover only a part of the manufacturing industry of england. of , factory operatives of the british empire in , , , or nearly half, were under eighteen years of age, and , of the female sex, of whom , were less than eighteen years old. there remain, therefore, , male operatives under eighteen years, and , adult male operatives, _or not one full quarter_ of the whole number. in the cotton factories, . per cent.; in the woollen mills, . per cent.; in the silk mills, . per cent.; in the flax-spinning mills, . per cent. of all operatives are of the female sex. these numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. but you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. the employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the children? they grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse for a shilling or eighteenpence a week, and how they are treated may be imagined. hence the accidents to which little children fall victims multiply in the factory districts to a terrible extent. the lists of the coroner of manchester { a} showed for nine months: deaths from burning, from drowning, from falling, from other causes, or a total of { b} deaths from accidents, while in non-manufacturing liverpool during twelve months there were but fatal accidents. the mining accidents are excluded in both cases; and since the coroner of manchester has no authority in salford, the population of both places mentioned in the comparison is about the same. the _manchester guardian_ reports one or more deaths by burning in almost every number. that the general mortality among young children must be increased by the employment of the mothers is self-evident, and is placed beyond all doubt by notorious facts. women often return to the mill three or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the dinner hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something, and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident. lord ashley repeats the testimony of several workwomen: "m. h., twenty years old, has two children, the youngest a baby, that is tended by the other, a little older. the mother goes to the mill shortly after five o'clock in the morning, and comes home at eight at night; all day the milk pours from her breasts, so that her clothing drips with it." "h. w. has three children, goes away monday morning at five o'clock, and comes back saturday evening; has so much to do for the children then that she cannot get to bed before three o'clock in the morning; often wet through to the skin, and obliged to work in that state." she said: "my breasts have given me the most frightful pain, and i have been dripping wet with milk." the use of narcotics to keep the children still is fostered by this infamous system, and has reached a great extent in the factory districts. dr. johns, registrar in chief for manchester, is of opinion that this custom is the chief source of the many deaths from convulsions. the employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralising consequences for parents as well as children. a mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during its first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably grow indifferent to it, treat it unlovingly like a stranger. the children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working-class. a similar dissolution of the family is brought about by the employment of the children. when they get on far enough to earn more than they cost their parents from week to week, they begin to pay the parents a fixed sum for board and lodging, and keep the rest for themselves. this often happens from the fourteenth or fifteenth year. { } in a word, the children emancipate themselves, and regard the paternal dwelling as a lodging-house, which they often exchange for another, as suits them. in many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down. the wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. this case happens very frequently; in manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. it is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged. there lies before me a letter from an english working-man, robert pounder, baron's buildings, woodhouse, moorside, in leeds (the bourgeoisie may hunt him up there; i give the exact address for the purpose), written by him to oastler: { } he relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to st. helens, in lancashire, and there looked up an old friend. he found him in a miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend went in, there sat poor jack near the fire, and what did he, think you? why he sat and mended his wife's stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide them. but joe, that is my friend's name, had seen it, and said: "jack, what the devil art thou doing? where is the missus? why, is that thy work?" and poor jack was ashamed, and said: "no, i know this is not my work, but my poor missus is i' th' factory; she has to leave at half-past five and works till eight at night, and then she is so knocked up that she cannot do aught when she gets home, so i have to do everything for her what i can, for i have no work, nor had any for more nor three years, and i shall never have any more work while i live;" and then he wept a big tear. jack again said: "there is work enough for women folks and childer hereabouts, but none for men; thou mayest sooner find a hundred pound on the road than work for men--but i should never have believed that either thou or any one else would have seen me mending my wife's stockings, for, it is bad work. but she can hardly stand on her feet; i am afraid she will be laid up, and then i don't know what is to become of us, for it's a good bit that she has been the man in the house and i the woman; it is bad work, joe;" and he cried bitterly, and said, "it has not been always so." "no," said joe; "but when thou hadn't no work, how hast thou not shifted?" "i'll tell thee, joe, as well as i can, but it was bad enough; thou knowest when i got married i had work plenty, and thou knows i was not lazy." "no, that thou wert not." "and we had a good furnished house, and mary need not go to work. i could work for the two of us; but now the world is upside down. mary has to work and i have to stop at home, mind the childer sweep and wash, bake and mend; and, when the poor woman comes home at night, she is knocked up. thou knows, joe, it's hard for one that was used different." "yes, boy, it is hard." and then jack began to cry again, and he wished he had never married, and that he had never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed mary, that it would come to this. "i have often cried over it," said jack. now when joe heard this, he told me that he had cursed and damned the factories, and the masters, and the government, with all the curses that he had learned while he was in the factory from a child. can any one imagine a more insane state of things than that described in this letter? and yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness--this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation, the final achievement of all the efforts and struggles of hundreds of generations to improve their own situation and that of their posterity. we must either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when we see all our labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit that human society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. if the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. if the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession, the necessary inference is that this community of possession is no true and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share. if the family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not family affection, but private interest lurking under the cloak of a pretended community of possessions. the same relation exists on the part of those children who support unemployed parents { a} when they do not directly pay board as already referred to. dr. hawkins testified in the factories' inquiry commission's report that this relation is common enough, and in manchester it is notorious. in this case the children are the masters in the house, as the wife was in the former case, and lord ashley gives an example of this in his speech: { b} a man berated his two daughters for going to the public house, and they answered that they were tired of being ordered about, saying, "damn you, we have to keep you!" determined to keep the proceeds of their work for themselves, they left the family dwelling, and abandoned their parents to their fate. the unmarried women, who have grown up in mills, are no better off than the married ones. it is self-evident that a girl who has worked in a mill from her ninth year is in no position to understand domestic work, whence it follows that female operatives prove wholly inexperienced and unfit as housekeepers. they cannot knit or sew, cook or wash, are unacquainted with the most ordinary duties of a housekeeper, and when they have young children to take care of, have not the vaguest idea how to set about it. the factories' inquiry commission's report gives dozens of examples of this, and dr. hawkins, commissioner for lancashire, expresses his opinion as follows: { c} "the girls marry early and recklessly; they have neither means, time, nor opportunity to learn the ordinary duties of household life; but if they had them all, they would find no time in married life for the performance of these duties. the mother is more than twelve hours away from her child daily; the baby is cared for by a young girl or an old woman, to whom it is given to nurse. besides this, the dwelling of the mill-hands is too often no home but a cellar, which contains no cooking or washing utensils, no sewing or mending materials, nothing which makes life agreeable and civilised, or the domestic hearth attractive. for these and other reasons, and especially for the sake of the better chances of life for the little children, i can but wish and hope that a time may come in which married women will be shut out of the factories." { a} but that is the least of the evil. the moral consequences of the employment of women in factories are even worse. the collecting of persons of both sexes and all ages in a single workroom, the inevitable contact, the crowding into a small space of people, to whom neither mental nor moral education has been given, is not calculated for the favourable development of the female character. the manufacturer, if he pays any attention to the matter, can interfere only when something scandalous actually happens; the permanent, less conspicuous influence of persons of dissolute character, upon the more moral, and especially upon the younger ones, he cannot ascertain, and consequently cannot prevent. but precisely this influence is the most injurious. the language used in the mills is characterised by many witnesses in the report of , as "indecent," "bad," "filthy," etc. { b} it is the same process upon a small scale which we have already witnessed upon a large one in the great cities. the centralisation of population has the same influence upon the same persons, whether it affects them in a great city or a small factory. the smaller the mill the closer the packing, and the more unavoidable the contact; and the consequences are not wanting. a witness in leicester said that he would rather let his daughter beg than go into a factory; that they are perfect gates of hell; that most of the prostitutes of the town had their employment in the mills to thank for their present situation. { c} another, in manchester, "did not hesitate to assert that three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years of age, were unchaste." { a} commissioner cowell expresses it as his opinion, that the morality of the factory operatives is somewhat below the average of that of the working-class in general. { b} and dr. hawkins { c} says: "an estimate of sexual morality cannot readily be reduced to figures; but if i may trust my own observations and the general opinion of those with whom i have spoken, as well as the whole tenor of the testimony furnished me, the aspect of the influence of factory life upon the morality of the youthful female population is most depressing." it is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any other, and to an even higher degree, confers the _jus primae noctis_ upon the master. in this respect also the employer is sovereign over the persons and charms of his employees. the threat of discharge suffices to overcome all resistance in nine cases out of ten, if not in ninety-nine out of a hundred, in girls who, in any case, have no strong inducements to chastity. if the master is mean enough, and the official report mentions several such cases, his mill is also his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers use their power, does not in the least change the position of the girls. in the beginning of manufacturing industry, when most of the employers were upstarts without education or consideration for the hypocrisy of society, they let nothing interfere with the exercise of their vested rights. to form a correct judgment of the influence of factory-work upon the health of the female sex, it is necessary first to consider the work of children, and then the nature of the work itself. from the beginning of manufacturing industry, children have been employed in mills, at first almost exclusively by reason of the smallness of the machines, which were later enlarged. even children from the workhouses were employed in multitudes, being rented out for a number of years to the manufacturers as apprentices. they were lodged, fed, and clothed in common, and were, of course, completely the slaves of their masters, by whom they were treated with the utmost recklessness and barbarity. as early as , the public objection to this revolting system found such vigorous expression through dr. percival and sir robert peel (father of the cabinet minister, and himself a cotton manufacturer), that in parliament passed an apprentices' bill, by which the most crying evils were removed. gradually the increasing competition of free workpeople crowded out the whole apprentice system; factories were built in cities, machinery was constructed on a larger scale, and workrooms were made more airy and wholesome; gradually, too, more work was found for adults and young persons. the number of children in the mills diminished somewhat, and the age at which they began to work rose a little; few children under eight or nine years were now employed. later, as we shall see, the power of the state intervened several times to protect them from the money-greed of the bourgeoisie. the great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome conditions under which they pass their first year. these influences are at work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite so powerfully as upon those who succumb. the result in the most favourable case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development, and consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution. a nine years old child of a factory operative that has grown up in want, privation, and changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient clothing and unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working force of a child brought up under healthier conditions. at nine years of age it is sent into the mill to work . hours (formerly , earlier still, to , even hours) daily, until the thirteenth year; then twelve hours until the eighteenth year. the old enfeebling influences continue, while the work is added to them. it is not to be denied that a child of nine years, even an operative's child, can hold out through . hours' daily work, without any one being able to trace visible bad results in its development directly to this cause; but in no case can its presence in the damp, heavy air of the factory, often at once warm and wet, contribute to good health; and, in any case, it is unpardonable to sacrifice to the greed of an unfeeling bourgeoisie the time of children which should be devoted solely to their physical and mental development, withdraw them from school and the fresh air, in order to wear them out for the benefit of the manufacturers. the bourgeoisie says: "if we do not employ the children in the mills, they only remain under conditions unfavourable to their development;" and this is true, on the whole. but what does this mean if it is not a confession that the bourgeoisie first places the children of the working-class under unfavourable conditions, and then exploits these bad conditions for its own benefit, appeals to that which is as much its own fault as the factory system, excuses the sin of to-day with the sin of yesterday? and if the factory act did not in some measure fetter their hands, how this "humane," this "benevolent" bourgeoisie, which has built its factories solely for the good of the working-class, would take care of the interests of these workers! let us hear how they acted before the factory inspector was at their heels. their own admitted testimony shall convict them in the report of the factories' inquiry commission of . the report of the central commission relates that the manufacturers began to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often of seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals; that the manufacturers permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and often took an active part in so doing themselves. one case is related of a scotch manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years old runaway, forced him to return running after the employer as fast as the master's horse trotted, and beat him the whole way with a long whip. { } in the large towns where the operatives resisted more vigorously, such things naturally happened less often. but even this long working-day failed to satisfy the greed of the capitalists. their aim was to make the capital invested in the building and machinery produce the highest return, by every available means, to make it work as actively as possible. hence the manufacturers introduced the shameful system of night-work. some of them employed two sets of operatives, each numerous enough to fill the whole mill, and let one set work the twelve hours of the day, and the other twelve hours of the night. it is needless to picture the effect upon the frames of young children, and even upon the health of young persons and adults, produced by permanent loss of sleep at night, which cannot be made good by any amount of sleep during the day. irritation of the whole nervous system, with general lassitude and enfeeblement of the entire frame, were the inevitable results, with the fostering of temptation to drunkenness and unbridled sexual indulgence. one manufacturer testifies { a} that during the two years in which night- work was carried on in his factory, the number of illegitimate children born was doubled, and such general demoralisation prevailed that he was obliged to give up night-work. other manufacturers were yet more barbarous, requiring many hands to work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times a week, letting them get a couple of hours sleep only, because the night-shift was not complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives only. the reports of the commission touching this barbarism surpass everything that is known to me in this line. such infamies, as are here related, are nowhere else to be found--yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie constantly appeals to the testimony of the commission as being in its own favour. the consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough. the commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours. this distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs, and is described as follows by francis sharp, m.r.c.s., of leeds: { b} "i never saw the peculiar bending of the lower ends of the thigh bones before i came to leeds. at first i thought it was rachitis, but i was soon led to change my opinion in consequence of the mass of patients who presented themselves at the hospital, and the appearances of the disease at an age (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth year) in which children are usually not subject to rachitis, as well as by the circumstance that the malady had first appeared after children began to work in the mills. thus far i have seen about a hundred such cases, and can, most decidedly, express the opinion that they are the consequences of overwork. so far as i know they were all mill children, and themselves attributed the evil to this cause. the number of cases of curvature of the spine which have fallen under my observation, and which were evidently consequent upon too protracted standing, was not less than three hundred." precisely similar is the testimony of dr. ray, for eighteen years physician in the hospital in leeds: { a} "malformations of the spine are very frequent among mill-hands; some of them consequent upon mere overwork, others the effect of long work upon constitutions originally feeble, or weakened by bad food. deformities seem even more frequent than these diseases; the knees were bent inward, the ligaments very often relaxed and enfeebled, and the long bones of the legs bent. the thick ends of these long bones were especially apt to be bent and disproportionately developed, and these patients came from the factories in which long work-hours were of frequent occurrence." surgeons beaumont and sharp, of bradford, bear the same testimony. the reports of drinkwater, power, and dr. loudon contain a multitude of examples of such distortions, and those of tufnell and sir david barry, which are less directed to this point, give single examples. { b} the commissioners for lancashire, cowell, tufnell, and hawkins, have almost wholly neglected this aspect of the physiological results of the factory system, though this district rivals yorkshire in the number of cripples. i have seldom traversed manchester without meeting three or four of them, suffering from precisely the same distortions of the spinal columns and legs as that described, and i have often been able to observe them closely. i know one personally who corresponds exactly with the foregoing description of dr. ray, and who got into this condition in mr. douglas' factory in pendleton, an establishment which enjoys an unenviable notoriety among the operatives by reason of the former long working periods continued night after night. it is evident, at a glance, whence the distortions of these cripples come; they all look exactly alike. the knees are bent inward and backwards, the ankles deformed and thick, and the spinal column often bent forwards or to one side. but the crown belongs to the philanthropic manufacturers of the macclesfield silk district. they employed the youngest children of all, even from five to six years of age. in the supplementary testimony of commissioner tufnell, i find the statement of a certain factory manager wright, both of whose sisters were most shamefully crippled, and who had once counted the cripples in several streets, some of them the cleanest and neatest streets of macclesfield. he found in townley street ten, george street five, charlotte street four, watercots fifteen, bank top three, lord street seven, mill lane twelve, great george street two, in the workhouse two, park green one, peckford street two, whose families all unanimously declared that the cripples had become such in consequence of overwork in the silk-twisting mills. one boy is mentioned so crippled as not to be able to go upstairs, and girls deformed in back and hips. other deformities also have proceeded from this overwork, especially flattening of the foot, which sir d. barry { a} frequently observed, as did the physicians and surgeons in leeds. { b} in cases, in which a stronger constitution, better food, and other more favourable circumstances enabled the young operative to resist this effect of a barbarous exploitation, we find, at least, pain in the back, hips, and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins, and large, persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves. these affections are almost universal among the operatives. the reports of stuart, mackintosh, and sir d. barry contain hundreds of examples; indeed, they know almost no operative who did not suffer from some of these affections; and in the remaining reports, the occurrence of the same phenomena is attested by many physicians. the reports covering scotland place it beyond all doubt, that a working-day of thirteen hours, even for men and women from eighteen to twenty-two years of age, produces at least these consequences, both in the flax-spinning mills of dundee and dunfermline, and in the cotton mills of glasgow and lanark. all these affections are easily explained by the nature of factory-work, which is, as the manufacturers say, very "light," and precisely by reason of its lightness, more enervating than any other. the operatives have little to do, but must stand the whole time. any one who sits down, say upon a window-ledge or a basket, is fined, and this perpetual upright position, this constant mechanical pressure of the upper portions of the body upon spinal column, hips, and legs, inevitably produces the results mentioned. this standing is not required by the work itself, and at nottingham chairs have been introduced, with the result that these affections disappeared, and the operatives ceased to object to the length of the working-day. but in a factory where the operative works solely for the bourgeois, and has small interest in doing his work well, he would probably use the seats more than would be agreeable and profitable to the manufacturer; and in order that somewhat less raw material may be spoiled for the bourgeois, the operative must sacrifice health and strength. { } this long protracted upright position, with the bad atmosphere prevalent in the mills, entails, besides the deformities mentioned, a marked relaxation of all vital energies, and, in consequence, all sorts of other affections general rather than local. the atmosphere of the factories is, as a rule, at once damp and warm, unusually warmer than is necessary, and, when the ventilation is not _very_ good, impure, heavy, deficient in oxygen, filled with dust and the smell of the machine oil, which almost everywhere smears the floor, sinks into it, and becomes rancid. the operatives are lightly clad by reason of the warmth, and would readily take cold in case of irregularity of the temperature; a draught is distasteful to them, the general enervation which gradually takes possession of all the physical functions diminishes the animal warmth: this must be replaced from without, and nothing is therefore more agreeable to the operative than to have all the doors and windows closed, and to stay in his warm factory-air. then comes the sudden change of temperature on going out into the cold and wet or frosty atmosphere, without the means of protection from the rain, or of changing wet clothing for dry, a circumstance which perpetually produces colds. and when one reflects that, with all this, not one single muscle of the body is really exercised, really called into activity, except perhaps those of the legs; that nothing whatsoever counteracts the enervating, relaxing tendency of all these conditions; that every influence is wanting which might give the muscles strength, the fibres elasticity and consistency; that from youth up, the operative is deprived of all fresh air recreation, it is impossible to wonder at the almost unanimous testimony of the physicians in the factories' report, that they find a great lack of ability to resist disease, a general depression in vital activity, a constant relaxation of the mental and physical powers. let us hear sir d. barry first: { } "the unfavourable influences of mill-work upon the hands are the following: ( ) the inevitable necessity of forcing their mental and bodily effort to keep pace with a machine moved by a uniform and unceasing motive power. ( ) continuance in an upright position during unnaturally long and quickly recurring periods. ( ) loss of sleep in consequence of too long working-hours, pain in the legs, and general physical derangement. to these are often added low, crowded, dusty, or damp workrooms, impure air, a high temperature, and constant perspiration. hence the boys especially very soon and with but few exceptions, lose the rosy freshness of childhood, and become paler and thinner than other boys. even the hand-weaver's bound boy, who sits before his loom with his bare feet resting upon the clay-floor, retains a fresher appearance, because he occasionally goes into the fresh air for a time. but the mill child has not a moment free except for meals, and never goes into the fresh air except on its way to them. all adult male spinners are pale and thin, suffer from capricious appetite and indigestion; and as they are all trained in the mills from their youth up, and there are very few tall, athletic men among them, the conclusion is justified that their occupation is very unfavourable for the development of the male constitution; females bear this work far better." (very naturally. but we shall see that they have their own diseases.) so, too, power: { a} "i can bear witness that the factory system in bradford has engendered a multitude of cripples, and that the effect of long continued labour upon the physique is apparent, not alone in actual deformity, but also, and much more generally, in stunted growth, relaxation of the muscles, and delicacy of the whole frame." so, too, f. sharp, in leeds, the surgeon { b} already quoted: "when i moved from scarborough to leeds, i was at once struck by the fact that the general appearance of the children was much paler, and their fibre less vigorous here than in scarborough and its environs. i saw, too, that many children were exceptionally small for their age. i have met with numberless cases of scrofula, lung trouble, mesenteric affections, and indigestion, concerning which i, as a medical man, have no doubt that they arose from mill work. i believe that the nervous energy of the body is weakened by the long hours, and the foundation of many diseases laid. if people from the country were not constantly coming in, the race of mill-hands would soon be wholly degenerate." so, too, beaumont, surgeon in bradford: "to my thinking, the system, according to which work is done in the mills here, produces a peculiar relaxation of the whole organism, and thereby makes children in the highest degree susceptible to epidemic, as well as to incidental illness. i regard the absence of all appropriate regulations for ventilation and cleanliness in the mills very decidedly as the chief cause of that peculiar tendency or susceptibility to morbid affections which i have so frequently met in my practice." similar testimony is borne by dr. ray: ( ) "i have had opportunity of observing the effects of the factory system upon the health of children under the most favourable circumstances (in wood's mill, in bradford, the best arranged of the district, in which he was factory surgeon). ( ) these effects are decidedly, and to a very great extent, injurious, even under these most favourable circumstances. ( ) in the year , three-fifths of all the children employed in wood's mill were treated by me. ( ) the worst effect is not the predominance of deformities, but of enfeebled and morbid constitutions. ( ) all this is greatly improved since the working-hours of children have been reduced at wood's to ten." the commissioner, dr. loudon himself, who cites these witnesses, says: "in conclusion, i think it has been clearly proved that children have been worked a most unreasonable and cruel length of time daily, and that even adults have been expected to do a certain quantity of labour which scarcely any human being is able to endure. the consequence is that many have died prematurely, and others are afflicted for life with defective constitutions, and the fear of a posterity enfeebled by the shattered constitution of the survivors is but too well founded, from a physiological point of view." and, finally, dr. hawkins, in speaking of manchester: "i believe that most travellers are struck by the lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness which present themselves so commonly to the eye at manchester, and above all, among the factory classes. i have never been in any town in great britain, nor in europe, in which degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard has been so obvious. among the married women all the characteristic peculiarities of the english wife are conspicuously wanting. i must confess that all the boys and girls brought before me from the manchester mills had a depressed appearance, and were very pale. in the expression of their faces lay nothing of the usual mobility, liveliness, and cheeriness of youth. many of them told me that they felt not the slightest inclination to play out of doors on saturday and sunday, but preferred to be quiet at home." i add, at once, another passage of hawkins' report, which only half belongs here, but may be quoted here as well as anywhere else: "intemperance, excess, and want of providence are the chief faults of the factory population, and these evils may be readily traced to the habits which are formed under the present system, and almost inevitably arise from it. it is universally admitted that indigestion, hypochondria, and general debility affect this class to a very great extent. after twelve hours of monotonous toil, it is but natural to look about for a stimulant of one sort or another; but when the above-mentioned diseased conditions are added to the customary weariness, people will quickly and repeatedly take refuge in spirituous liquors." for all this testimony of the physicians and commissioners, the report itself offers hundreds of cases of proof. that the growth of young operatives is stunted, by their work, hundreds of statements testify; among others, cowell gives the weight of youths of years of age, from one sunday school, of whom employed in mills, averaged . pounds, and not employed in mills, . pounds. one of the largest manufacturers of manchester, leader of the opposition against the working- men, i think robert hyde greg himself, said, on one occasion, that if things went on as at present, the operatives of lancashire would soon be a race of pigmies. { a} a recruiting officer { b} testified that operatives are little adapted for military service, looked thin and nervous, and were frequently rejected by the surgeons as unfit. in manchester he could hardly get men of five feet eight inches; they were usually only five feet six to seven, whereas in the agricultural districts, most of the recruits were five feet eight. the men wear out very early in consequence of the conditions under which they live and work. most of them are unfit for work at forty years, a few hold out to forty-five, almost none to fifty years of age. this is caused not only by the general enfeeblement of the frame, but also very often by a failure of the sight, which is a result of mule-spinning, in which the operative is obliged to fix his gaze upon a long row of fine, parallel threads, and so greatly to strain the sight. of , operatives employed in several factories in harpur and lanark, but were over years of age; of , operatives in diverse factories in stockport and manchester, but were over years old. of these , were retained as a special favour, and one was doing the work of a child. a list of spinners contained but seven over years, and yet the whole were rejected by the manufacturers, to whom they applied for work, as "too old," and were without means of support by reason of old age! mr. ashworth, a large manufacturer, admits in a letter to lord ashley, that, towards the fortieth year, the spinners can no longer prepare the required quantity of yarn, and are therefore "sometimes" discharged; he calls operatives forty years of age "old people!" commissioner mackintosh expresses himself in the same way in the report of : "although i was prepared for it from the way the children are employed, i still found it difficult to believe the statements of the older hands as to their ages; they age so very early." surgeon smellie, of glasgow, who treated operatives chiefly, says that forty years is old age for them. { a} and similar evidence may be found elsewhere. { b} in manchester, this premature old age among the operatives is so universal that almost every man of forty would be taken for ten to fifteen years older, while the prosperous classes, men as well as women, preserve their appearance exceedingly well if they do not drink too heavily. the influence of factory-work upon the female physique also is marked and peculiar. the deformities entailed by long hours of work are much more serious among women. protracted work frequently causes deformities of the pelvis, partly in the shape of abnormal position and development of the hip bones, partly of malformation of the lower portion of the spinal column. "although," says dr. loudon, in his report, "no example of malformation of the pelvis and of some other affections came under my notice, these things are nevertheless so common, that every physician must regard them as probable consequences of such working-hours, and as vouched for besides by men of the highest medical credibility." that factory operatives undergo more difficult confinement than other women is testified to by several midwives and accoucheurs, and also that they are more liable to miscarriage. { } moreover, they suffer from the general enfeeblement common to all operatives, and, when pregnant, continue to work in the factory up to the hour of delivery, because otherwise they lose their wages and are made to fear that they may be replaced if they stop away too soon. it frequently happens that women are at work one evening and delivered the next morning, and the case is none too rare of their being delivered in the factory among the machinery. and if the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie find nothing particularly shocking in this, their wives will perhaps admit that it is a piece of cruelty, an infamous act of barbarism, indirectly to force a pregnant woman to work twelve or thirteen hours daily (formerly still longer), up to the day of her delivery, in a standing position, with frequent stoopings. but this is not all. if these women are not obliged to resume work within two weeks, they are thankful, and count themselves fortunate. many come back to the factory after eight, and even after three to four days, to resume full work. i once heard a manufacturer ask an overlooker: "is so and so not back yet?" "no." "how long since she was confined?" "a week." "she might surely have been back long ago. that one over there only stays three days." naturally, fear of being discharged, dread of starvation drives her to the factory in spite of her weakness, in defiance of her pain. the interest of the manufacturer will not brook that his employees stay at home by reason of illness; they must not be ill, they must not venture to lie still through a long confinement, or he must stop his machinery or trouble his supreme head with a temporary change of arrangements, and rather than do this, he discharges his people when they begin to be ill. listen: { a} "a girl feels very ill, can scarcely do her work. why does she not ask permission to go home? ah! the master is very particular, and if we are away half a day, we risk being sent away altogether." or sir d. barry: { b} "thomas mcdurt, workman, has slight fever. cannot stay at home longer than four days, because he would fear of losing his place." and so it goes on in almost all the factories. the employment of young girls produces all sorts of irregularities during the period of development. in some, especially those who are better fed, the heat of the factories hastens this process, so that in single cases, girls of thirteen and fourteen are wholly mature. robertson, whom i have already cited (mentioned in the factories' inquiry commission's report as the "eminent" gynaecologist of manchester), relates in the north of england _medical and surgical journal_, that he had seen a girl of eleven years who was not only a wholly developed woman, but pregnant, and that it was by no means rare in manchester for women to be confined at fifteen years of age. in such cases, the influence of the warmth of the factories is the same as that of a tropical climate, and, as in such climates, the abnormally early development revenges itself by correspondingly premature age and debility. on the other hand, retarded development of the female constitution occurs, the breasts mature late or not at all. { c} menstruation first appears in the seventeenth or eighteenth, sometimes in the twentieth year, and is often wholly wanting. { a} irregular menstruation, coupled with great pain and numerous affections, especially with anaemia, is very frequent, as the medical reports unanimously state. children of such mothers, particularly of those who are obliged to work during pregnancy, cannot be vigorous. they are, on the contrary, described in the report, especially in manchester, as very feeble; and barry alone asserts that they are healthy, but says further, that in scotland, where his inspection lay, almost no married women worked in factories. moreover, most of the factories there are in the country (with the exception of glasgow), a circumstance which contributes greatly to the invigoration of the children. the operatives' children in the neighbourhood of manchester are nearly all thriving and rosy, while those within the city look pale and scrofulous; but with the ninth year the colour vanishes suddenly, because all are then sent into the factories, when it soon becomes impossible to distinguish the country from the city children. but besides all this, there are some branches of factory-work which have an especially injurious effect. in many rooms of the cotton and flax- spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms. some constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but the operative has no choice. he must take the room in which he finds work, whether his chest is sound or not. the most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness--in short, all the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption. { b} especially unwholesome is the wet spinning of linen-yarn which is carried on by young girls and boys. the water spirts over them from the spindle, so that the front of their clothing is constantly wet through to the skin; and there is always water standing on the floor. this is the case to a less degree in the doubling-rooms of the cotton mills, and the result is a constant succession of colds and affections of the chest. a hoarse, rough voice is common to all operatives, but especially to wet spinners and doublers. stuart, mackintosh, and sir d. barry express themselves in the most vigorous terms as to the unwholesomeness of this work, and the small consideration shown by most of the manufacturers for the health of the girls who do it. another effect of flax-spinning is a peculiar deformity of the shoulder, especially a projection of the right shoulder-blade, consequent upon the nature of the work. this sort of spinning and the throstle-spinning of cotton frequently produce diseases of the knee-pan, which is used to check the spindle during the joining of broken threads. the frequent stooping and the bending to the low machines common to both these branches of work have, in general, a stunting effect upon the growth of the operative. in the throstle-room of the cotton mill at manchester, in which i was employed, i do not remember to have seen one single tall, well-built girl; they were all short, dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure. but apart from all these diseases and malformations, the limbs of the operatives suffer in still another way. the work between the machinery gives rise to multitudes of accidents of more or less serious nature, which have for the operative the secondary effect of unfitting him for his work more or less completely. the most common accident is the squeezing off of a single joint of a finger, somewhat less common the loss of the whole finger, half or a whole hand, an arm, etc., in the machinery. lockjaw very often follows, even upon the lesser among these injuries, and brings death with it. besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is like living in the midst of an army just returned from a campaign. but the most dangerous portion of the machinery is the strapping which conveys motive power from the shaft to the separate machines, especially if it contains buckles, which, however, are rarely used now. whoever is seized by the strap is carried up with lightning speed, thrown against the ceiling above and floor below with such force that there is rarely a whole bone left in the body, and death follows instantly. between june th and august rd, , the _manchester guardian_ reported the following serious accidents (the trifling ones it does not notice): june th, a boy died in manchester of lockjaw, caused by his hand being crushed between wheels. june th, a youth in saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with it; died, utterly mangled. june th, a young man at green acres moor, near manchester, at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone, which broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly. july th, a girl in oldham died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone unbroken. july th, a girl in manchester seized by the blower (the first machine that receives the raw cotton), and died of injuries received. august rd, a bobbins turner died in dukenfield, caught in a strap, every rib broken. in the year , the manchester infirmary treated cases of wounds and mutilations caused by machinery, while the number of all other accidents within the district of the hospital was , , so that for five accidents from all other causes, two were caused by machinery. the accidents which happened in salford are not included here, nor those treated by surgeons in private practice. in such cases, whether or not the accident unfits the victim for further work, the employer, at best, pays the doctor, or, in very exceptional cases, he may pay wages during treatment; what becomes of the operative afterwards, in case he cannot work, is no concern of the employer. the factory report says on this subject, that employers must be made responsible for all cases, since children cannot take care, and adults will take care in their own interest. but the gentlemen who write the report are bourgeois, and so they must contradict themselves and bring up later all sorts of bosh on the subject of the culpable temerity of the operatives. the state of the case is this: if children cannot take care, the employment of children must be forbidden. if adults are reckless, they must be mere over-grown children on a plane of intelligence which does not enable them to appreciate the danger in its full scope; and who is to blame for this but the bourgeoisie which keeps them in a condition in which their intelligence cannot develop? or the machinery is ill-arranged, and must be surrounded with fencing, to supply which falls to the share of the bourgeoisie. or the operative is under inducements which outweigh the threatened danger; he must work rapidly to earn his wages, has no time to take care, and for this, too, the bourgeoisie is to blame. many accidents happen, for instance, while the operatives are cleaning machinery in motion. why? because the bourgeois would otherwise oblige the worker to clean the machinery during the free hours while it is not going, and the worker naturally is not disposed to sacrifice any part of his free time. every free hour is so precious to the worker that he often risks his life twice a week rather than sacrifice one of them to the bourgeois. let the employer take from working-hours the time required for cleaning the machinery, and it will never again occur to an operative to clean machinery in motion. in short, from whatever point of view, the blame falls ultimately on the manufacturer, and of him should be required, at the very least, life-long support of the incapacitated operative, and support of the victim's family in case death follows the accident. in the earliest period of manufacture, the accidents were much more numerous in proportion than now, for the machinery was inferior, smaller, more crowded, and almost never fenced. but the number is still large enough, as the foregoing cases prove, to arouse grave question as to a state of things which permits so many deformities and mutilations for the benefit of a single class, and plunges so many industrious working-people into want and starvation by reason of injuries undergone in the service and through the fault of the bourgeoisie. a pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money greed of the manufacturers! women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie. and when one reads of the barbarism of single cases, how children are seized naked in bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory, their clothing over their arms, { a} how their sleepiness is driven off with blows, how they fall asleep over their work nevertheless, how one poor child sprang up, still asleep, at the call of the overlooker, and mechanically went through the operations of its work after its machine was stopped; when one reads how children, too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night, that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite, that their parents found them kneeling by the bedside, where they had fallen asleep during their prayers; when one reads all this and a hundred other villainies and infamies in this one report, all testified to on oath, confirmed by several witnesses, deposed by men whom the commissioners themselves declare trustworthy; when one reflects that this is a liberal report, a bourgeois report, made for the purpose of reversing the previous tory report, and rehabilitating the pureness of heart of the manufacturers, that the commissioners themselves are on the side of the bourgeoisie, and report all these things against their own will, how can one be otherwise than filled with wrath and resentment against a class which boasts of philanthropy and self-sacrifice, while its one object is to fill its purse _a tout prix_? meanwhile, let us listen to the bourgeoisie speaking through the mouth of its chosen apostle, dr. ure, who relates in his "philosophy of manufactures" { b} that the workers have been told that their wages bore no proportion to their sacrifices, the good understanding between masters and men being thus disturbed. instead of this, the working-men should have striven to recommend themselves by attention and industry, and should have rejoiced in the prosperity of their masters. they would then become overseers, superintendents, and finally partners, and would thus--(oh! wisdom, thou speakest as the dove!)--"have increased at the same time the demand for their companions' labour in the market!" "had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions resulting from erroneous views among the operatives, the factory system would have been developed still more rapidly and beneficially." { a} hereupon follows a long jeremiad upon the spirit of resistance of the operatives, and on the occasion of a strike of the best paid workers, the fine spinners, the following naive observation: { b} "in fact, it was their high wages which enabled them to maintain a stipendiary committee in affluence, and to pamper themselves into nervous ailments, by a diet too rich and exciting for their indoor employments." let us hear how the bourgeois describes the work of children: { c} "i have visited many factories, both in manchester and in the surrounding districts, during a period of several months, entering the spinning-rooms unexpectedly, and often alone, at different times of the day, and i never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement inflicted on a child; nor, indeed, did i ever see children in ill-humour. they seemed to be always cheerful and alert; taking pleasure in the light play of their muscles, enjoying the mobility natural to their age. the scene of industry, so far from exciting sad emotions, in my mind, was always exhilerating. it was delightful to observe the nimbleness with which they pieced broken ends, as the mule carriage began to recede from the fixed roller beam, and to see them at leisure, after a few seconds' exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any attitude they chose, till the stretch and winding on were once more completed. the work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity. conscious of their skill, they were delighted to show it off to any stranger. as to exhaustion by the day's work, they evinced no trace of it on emerging from the mill in the evening; for they immediately began to skip about any neighbouring playground, and to commence their little games with the same alacrity as boys issuing from a school." naturally! as though the immediate movement of every muscle were not an urgent necessity for frames grown at once stiff and relaxed! but ure should have waited to see whether this momentary excitement had not subsided after a couple of minutes. and besides, ure could see this whole performance only in the afternoon after five or six hours' work, but not in the evening! as to the health of the operatives, the bourgeois has the boundless impudence to cite the report of just quoted in a thousand places, as testimony for the excellent health of these people; to try to prove by detached and garbled quotations that no trace of scrofula can be found among them, and, what is quite true, that the factory system frees them from all acute diseases, (that they have every variety of chronic affection instead he naturally conceals). to explain the impudence with which our friend ure palms off the grossest falsehoods upon the english public, it must be known that the report consists of three large folio volumes, which it never occurs to a well- fed english bourgeois to study through. let us hear further how he expresses himself as to the factory act of , passed by the liberal bourgeoisie, and imposing only the most meagre limitations upon the manufacturers, as we shall see. this law, especially its compulsory education clause, he calls an absurd and despotic measure directed against the manufacturers, through which all children under twelve years of age have been thrown out of employment; and with what results? the children thus discharged from their light and useful occupation receive no education whatsoever; cast out from the warm spinning-room into a cold world, they subsist only by begging and stealing, a life in sad contrast with their steadily improving condition in the factory and in sunday school. under the mask of philanthropy, this law intensifies the sufferings of the poor, and will greatly restrict the conscientious manufacturer in his useful work, if, indeed, it does not wholly stop him. { } the ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day to attract general attention. we have already alluded to the apprentices' act of . later, towards , robert owen, then a manufacturer in new lanark, in scotland, afterwards founder of english socialism, began to call the attention of the government, by memorials and petitions, to the necessity of legislative guarantees for the health of the operatives, and especially of children. the late sir robert peel and other philanthropists united with him, and gradually secured the factory acts of , , and , of which the first two were never enforced, and the last only here and there. this law of , based upon the motion of sir j. c. hobhouse, provided that in cotton mills no one under twenty-one should be employed between half-past seven at night and half-past five in the morning; and that in all factories young persons under eighteen should work no longer than twelve hours daily, and nine hours on saturday. but since operatives could not testify against their masters without being discharged, this law helped matters very little. in the great cities, where the operatives were more restive, the larger manufacturers came to an agreement among themselves to obey the law; but even there, there were many who, like the employers in the country, did not trouble themselves about it. meanwhile, the demand for a ten hours' law had become lively among the operatives; that is, for a law which should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work longer than ten hours daily; the trades unions, by their agitation, made this demand general throughout the manufacturing population; the philanthropic section of the tory party, then led by michael sadler, seized upon the plan, and brought it before parliament. sadler obtained a parliamentary committee for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee reported in . its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system, for party ends. sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of his questions, answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted form. the manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which represented them as monsters, now demanded an official investigation; they knew that an exact report must, in this case, be advantageous to them; they knew that whigs, genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with whom they were upon good terms, whose principles were opposed to any restriction upon manufacture. they obtained a commission, in due order, composed of liberal bourgeois, whose report i have so often cited. this comes somewhat nearer the truth than sadler's, but its deviations therefrom are in the opposite direction. on every page it betrays sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the sadler report, repugnance to the working-men agitating independently and the supporters of the ten hours' bill. it nowhere recognises the right of the working- man to a life worthy of a human being, to independent activity, and opinions of his own. it reproaches the operatives that in sustaining the ten hours' bill they thought, not of the children only, but of themselves as well; it calls the working-men engaged in the agitation demagogues, ill-intentioned, malicious, etc., is written, in short, on the side of the bourgeoisie; and still it cannot whitewash the manufacturers, and still it leaves such a mass of infamies upon the shoulders of the employers, that even after this report, the agitation for the ten hours' bill, the hatred against the manufacturers, and the committee's severest epithets applied to them are all fully justified. but there was the one difference, that whereas the sadler report accuses the manufacturers of open, undisguised brutality, it now became evident that this brutality was chiefly carried on under the mask of civilisation and humanity. yet dr. hawkins, the medical commissioner for lancashire, expresses himself decidedly in favour of the ten hours' bill in the opening lines of his report, and commissioner mackintosh explains that his own report does not contain the whole truth, because it is very difficult to induce the operatives to testify against their employers, and because the manufacturers, besides being forced into greater concessions towards their operatives by the excitement among the latter, are often prepared for the inspection of the factories, have them swept, the speed of the machinery reduced, etc. in lancashire especially they resorted to the device of bringing the overlookers of workrooms before the commissioners, and letting them testify as working-men to the humanity of the employers, the wholesome effects of the work, and the indifference, if not the hostility of the operatives, towards the ten hours' bill. but these are not genuine working-men; they are deserters from their class, who have entered the service of the bourgeoisie for better pay, and fight in the interests of the capitalists against the workers. their interest is that of the capitalists, and they are, therefore, almost more hated by the workers than the manufacturers themselves. and yet this report suffices wholly to exhibit the most shameful recklessness of the manufacturing bourgeoisie towards its employees, the whole infamy of the industrial exploiting system in its full inhumanity. nothing is more revolting than to compare the long register of diseases and deformities engendered by overwork, in this report, with the cold, calculating political economy of the manufacturers, by which they try to prove that they, and with them all england, must go to ruin, if they should be forbidden to cripple so and so many children every year. the language of dr. ure alone, which i have quoted, would be yet more revolting if it were not so preposterous. the result of this report was the factory act of , which forbade the employment of children under nine years of age (except in silk mills), limited the working-hours of children between - years to per week, or hours in any one day at the utmost; that of young persons from - years of age to per week, or on any one day as the maximum, provided for an hour and a half as the minimum interval for meals, and repeated the total prohibition of night-work for persons under eighteen years of age. compulsory school attendance two hours daily was prescribed for all children under fourteen years, and the manufacturer declared punishable in case of employing children without a certificate of age from the factory surgeon, and a certificate of school attendance from the teacher. as recompense, the employer was permitted to withdraw one penny from the child's weekly earnings to pay the teacher. further, surgeons and inspectors were appointed to visit the factories at all times, take testimony of operatives on oath, and enforce the law by prosecution before a justice of the peace. this is the law against which dr. ure inveighs in such unmeasured terms! the consequence of this law, and especially of the appointment of inspectors, was the reduction of working-hours to an average of twelve to thirteen, and the superseding of children as far as possible. hereupon some of the most crying evils disappeared almost wholly. deformities arose now only in cases of weak constitution, and the effects of overwork became much less conspicuous. nevertheless, enough testimony remains to be found in the factory report, that the lesser evils, swelling of the ankles, weakness and pain in the legs, hips, and back, varicose veins, ulcers on the lower extremities, general weakness, especially of the pelvic region, nausea, want of appetite alternating with unnatural hunger, indigestion, hypochondria, affections of the chest in consequence of the dust and foul atmosphere of the factories, etc. etc., all occur among employees subject to the provisions of sir j. c. hobhouse's law (of ), which prescribes twelve to thirteen hours as the maximum. the reports from glasgow and manchester are especially worthy of attention in this respect. these evils remained too, after the law of , and continue to undermine the health of the working-class to this day. care has been taken to give the brutal profit-greed of the bourgeoisie a hypocritical, civilised form, to restrain the manufacturers through the arm of the law from too conspicuous villainies, and thus to give them a pretext for self-complacently parading their sham philanthropy. that is all. if a new commission were appointed to-day, it would find things pretty much as before. as to the extemporised compulsory attendance at school, it remained wholly a dead letter, since the government failed to provide good schools. the manufacturers employed as teachers worn-out operatives, to whom they sent the children two hours daily, thus complying with the letter of the law; but the children learned nothing. and even the reports of the factory inspectors, which are limited to the scope of the inspector's duties, _i.e_., the enforcement of the factory act, give data enough to justify the conclusion that the old evils inevitably remain. inspectors horner and saunders, in their reports for october and december, , state that, in a number of branches in which the employment of children can be dispensed with or superseded by that of adults, the working-day is still fourteen to sixteen hours, or even longer. among the operatives in these branches they found numbers of young people who had just outgrown the provisions of the law. many employers disregard the law, shorten the meal times, work children longer than is permitted, and risk prosecution, knowing that the possible fines are trifling in comparison with the certain profits derivable from the offence. just at present especially, while business is exceptionally brisk, they are under great temptation in this respect. meanwhile the agitation for the ten hours' bill by no means died out among the operatives; in it was under full headway once more, and sadler's place, he having died, was filled in the house of commons by lord ashley { } and richard oastler, both tories. oastler especially, who carried on a constant agitation in the factory districts, and had been active in the same way during sadler's life, was the particular favourite of the working-men. they called him their "good old king," "the king of the factory children," and there is not a child in the factory districts that does not know and revere him, that does not join the procession which moves to welcome him when he enters a town. oastler vigorously opposed the new poor law also, and was therefore imprisoned for debt by a mr. thornley, on whose estate he was employed as agent, and to whom he owed money. the whigs offered repeatedly to pay his debt and confer other favours upon him if he would only give up his agitation against the poor law. but in vain; he remained in prison, whence he published his fleet papers against the factory system and the poor law. the tory government of turned its attention once more to the factory acts. the home secretary, sir james graham, proposed, in , a bill restricting the working-hours of children to six and one-half, and making the enactments for compulsory school attendance more effective; the principal point in this connection being a provision for better schools. this bill was, however, wrecked by the jealousy of the dissenters; for, although compulsory religious instruction was not extended to the children of dissenters, the schools provided for were to be placed under the general supervision of the established church, and the bible made the general reading-book; religion being thus made the foundation of all instruction, whence the dissenters felt themselves threatened. the manufacturers and the liberals generally united with them, the working- men were divided by the church question, and therefore inactive. the opponents of the bill, though outweighed in the great manufacturing towns, such as salford and stockport, and able in others, such as manchester, to attack certain of its points only, for fear of the working- men, collected nevertheless nearly two million signatures for a petition against it, and graham allowed himself to be so far intimidated as to withdraw the whole bill. the next year he omitted the school clauses, and proposed that, instead of the previous provisions, children between eight and thirteen years should be restricted to six and one-half hours, and so employed as to have either the whole morning or the whole afternoon free; that young people between thirteen and eighteen years, and all females, should be limited to twelve hours; and that the hitherto frequent evasions of the law should be prevented. hardly had he proposed this bill, when the ten hours' agitation was begun again more vigorously than ever. oastler had just then regained his liberty; a number of his friends and a collection among the workers had paid his debt, and he threw himself into the movement with all his might. the defenders of the ten hours' bill in the house of commons had increased in numbers, the masses of petitions supporting it which poured in from all sides brought them allies, and on march th, , lord ashley carried, with a majority of to , a resolution that the word "night" in the factory act should express the time from six at night to six in the morning, whereby the prohibition of night-work came to mean the limitation of working-hours to twelve, including free hours, or ten hours of actual work a day. but the ministry did not agree to this. sir james graham began to threaten resignation from the cabinet, and at the next vote on the bill the house rejected by a small majority both ten and twelve hours! graham and peel now announced that they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed to pass they should resign. the new bill was exactly the old twelve hours' bill with some changes of form, and the same house of commons which had rejected the principal points of this bill in march, now swallowed it whole. the reason of this was that most of the supporters of the ten hours' bill were tories who let fall the bill rather than the ministry; but be the motives what they may, the house of commons by its votes upon this subject, each vote reversing the last, has brought itself into the greatest contempt among all the workers, and proved most brilliantly the chartists' assertion of the necessity of its reform. three members, who had formerly voted against the ministry, afterwards voted for it and rescued it. in all the divisions, the bulk of the opposition voted _for_ and the bulk of its own party _against_ the ministry. { } the foregoing propositions of graham touching the employment of children six and one-half and of all other operatives twelve hours are now legislative provisions, and by them and by the limitation of overwork for making up time lost through breakdown of machinery or insufficient water-power by reason of frost or drought, a working-day of more than twelve hours has been made well-nigh impossible. there remains, however, no doubt that, in a very short time, the ten hours' bill will really be adopted. the manufacturers are naturally all against it, there are perhaps not ten who are for it; they have used every honourable and dishonourable means against this dreaded measure, but with no other result than that of drawing down upon them the ever deepening hatred of the working-men. the bill will pass. what the working-men will do they can do, and that they will have this bill they proved last spring. the economic arguments of the manufacturers that a ten hours' bill would increase the cost of production and incapacitate the english producers for competition in foreign markets, and that wages must fall, are all _half_ true; but they prove nothing except this, that the industrial greatness of england can be maintained only through the barbarous treatment of the operatives, the destruction of their health, the social, physical, and mental decay of whole generations. naturally, if the ten hours' bill were a final measure, it must ruin england; but since it must inevitably bring with it other measures which must draw england into a path wholly different from that hitherto followed, it can only prove an advance. let us turn to another side of the factory system which cannot be remedied by legislative provisions so easily as the diseases now engendered by it. we have already alluded in a general way to the nature of the employment, and enough in detail to be able to draw certain inferences from the facts given. the supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative's thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. we have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. the operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. moreover, he must not take a moment's rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines. this condemnation to be buried alive in the mill, to give constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest degree. there is no better means of inducing stupefaction than a period of factory work, and if the operatives have, nevertheless, not only rescued their intelligence, but cultivated and sharpened it more than other working-men, they have found this possible only in rebellion against their fate and against the bourgeoisie, the sole subject on which under all circumstances they can think and feel while at work. or, if this indignation against the bourgeoisie does not become the supreme passion of the working-man, the inevitable consequence is drunkenness and all that is generally called demoralisation. the physical enervation and the sickness, universal in consequence of the factory system, were enough to induce commissioner hawkins to attribute this demoralisation thereto as inevitable; how much more when mental lassitude is added to them, and when the influences already mentioned which tempt every working-man to demoralisation, make themselves felt here too! there is no cause for surprise, therefore, that in the manufacturing towns especially, drunkenness and sexual excesses have reached the pitch which i have already described. { } further, the slavery in which the bourgeoisie holds the proletariat chained, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the factory system. here ends all freedom in law and in fact. the operative must be in the mill at half-past five in the morning; if he comes a couple of minutes too late, he is fined; if he comes ten minutes too late, he is not let in until breakfast is over, and a quarter of the day's wages is withheld, though he loses only two and one-half hours' work out of twelve. he must eat, drink, and sleep at command. for satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutely required by them. whether his dwelling is a half-hour or a whole one removed from the factory does not concern his employer. the despotic bell calls him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner. what a time he has of it, too, inside the factory! here the employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest stuff, the courts say to the working-man: "you were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it." and so the working-man only gets into the bargain the mockery of the justice of the peace who is a bourgeois himself, and of the law which is made by the bourgeoisie. such decisions have been given often enough. in october, , the operatives of kennedy's mill, in manchester struck. kennedy prosecuted them on the strength of a regulation placarded in the mill, that at no time more than two operatives in one room may quit work at once. and the court decided in his favour, giving the working-men the explanation cited above. { a} and such rules as these usually are! for instance: . the doors are closed ten minutes after work begins, and thereafter no one is admitted until the breakfast hour; whoever is absent during this time forfeits d. per loom. . every power-loom weaver detected absenting himself at another time, while the machinery is in motion, forfeits for each hour and each loom, d. every person who leaves the room during working-hours, without obtaining permission from the overlooker, forfeits d. . weavers who fail to supply themselves with scissors forfeit, per day, d. . all broken shuttles, brushes, oil-cans, wheels, window panes, etc., must be paid for by the weaver. . no weaver to stop work without giving a week's notice. the manufacturer may dismiss any employee without notice for bad work or improper behaviour. . every operative detected speaking to another, singing or whistling, will be fined d.; for leaving his place during working-hours, d. { b} another copy of factory regulations lies before me, according to which every operative who comes three minutes too late, forfeits the wages for a quarter of an hour, and every one who comes twenty minutes too late, for a quarter of a day. every one who remains absent until breakfast forfeits a shilling on monday, and sixpence every other day of the week, etc, etc. this last is the regulation of the phoenix works in jersey street, manchester. it may be said that such rules are necessary in a great, complicated factory, in order to insure the harmonious working of the different parts; it may be asserted that such a severe discipline is as necessary here as in an army. this may be so, but what sort of a social order is it which cannot be maintained without such shameful tyranny? either the end sanctifies the means, or the inference of the badness of the end from the badness of the means is justified. every one who has served as a soldier knows what it is to be subjected even for a short time to military discipline. but these operatives are condemned from their ninth year to their death to live under the sword, physically and mentally. they are worse slaves than the negroes in america, for they are more sharply watched, and yet it is demanded of them that they shall live like human beings, shall think and feel like men! verily, this they can do only under glowing hatred towards their oppressors, and towards that order of things which place them in such a position, which degrades them to machines. but it is far more shameful yet, that according to the universal testimony of the operatives, numbers of manufacturers collect the fines imposed upon the operatives with the most heartless severity, and for the purpose of piling up extra profits out of the farthings thus extorted from the impoverished proletarians. leach asserts, too, that the operatives often find the factory clock moved forward a quarter of an hour and the doors shut, while the clerk moves about with the fines-book inside, noting the many names of the absentees. leach claims to have counted ninety-five operatives thus shut out, standing before a factory, whose clock was a quarter of an hour slower than the town clocks at night, and a quarter of an hour faster in the morning. the factory report relates similar facts. in one factory the clock was set back during working-hours, so that the operatives worked overtime without extra pay; in another, a whole quarter of an hour overtime was worked; in a third, there were two clocks, an ordinary one and a machine clock, which registered the revolutions of the main shaft; if the machinery went slowly, working-hours were measured by the machine clock until the number of revolutions due in twelve hours was reached; if work went well, so that the number was reached before the usual working- hours were ended, the operatives were forced to toil on to the end of the twelfth hour. the witness adds that he had known girls who had good work, and who had worked overtime, who, nevertheless, betook themselves to a life of prostitution rather than submit to this tyranny. { a} to return to the fines, leach relates having repeatedly seen women in the last period of pregnancy fined d. for the offence of sitting down a moment to rest. fines for bad work are wholly arbitrary; the goods are examined in the wareroom, and the supervisor charges the fines upon a list without even summoning the operative, who only learns that he has been fined when the overlooker pays his wages, and the goods have perhaps been sold, or certainly been placed beyond his reach. leach has in his possession such a fines list, ten feet long, and amounting to pounds s. d. he relates that in the factory where this list was made, a new supervisor was dismissed for fining too little, and so bringing in five pounds too little weekly. { b} and i repeat that i know leach to be a thoroughly trustworthy man incapable of a falsehood. but the operative is his employer's slave in still other respects. if his wife or daughter finds favour in the eyes of the master, a command, a hint suffices, and she must place herself at his disposal. when the employer wishes to supply with signatures a petition in favour of bourgeois interests, he need only send it to his mill. if he wishes to decide a parliamentary election, he sends his enfranchised operatives in rank and file to the polls, and they vote for the bourgeois candidate whether they will or no. if he desires a majority in a public meeting, he dismisses them half-an-hour earlier than usual, and secures them places close to the platform, where he can watch them to his satisfaction. two further arrangements contribute especially to force the operative under the dominion of the manufacturer; the truck system and the cottage system. the truck system, the payment of the operatives in goods, was formerly universal in england. the manufacturer opens a shop, "for the convenience of the operatives, and to protect them from the high prices of the petty dealers." here goods of all sorts are sold to them on credit; and to keep the operatives from going to the shops where they could get their goods more cheaply--the "tommy shops" usually charging twenty-five to thirty per cent. more than others--wages are paid in requisitions on the shop instead of money. the general indignation against this infamous system led to the passage of the truck act in , by which, for most employees, payment in truck orders was declared void and illegal, and was made punishable by fine; but, like most other english laws, this has been enforced only here and there. in the towns it is carried out comparatively efficiently; but in the country, the truck system, disguised or undisguised, flourishes. in the town of leicester, too, it is very common. there lie before me nearly a dozen convictions for this offence, dating from the period between november, , and june, , and reported, in part, in the _manchester guardian_ and, in part, in the _northern star_. the system is, of course, less openly carried on at present; wages are usually paid in cash, but the employer still has means enough at command to force him to purchase his wares in the truck shop and nowhere else. hence it is difficult to combat the truck system, because it can now be carried on under cover of the law, provided only that the operative receives his wages in money. the _northern star_ of april th, , publishes a letter from an operative of holmfirth, near huddersfield, in yorkshire, which refers to a manufacturer of the name of bowers, as follows (retranslated from the german): "it is very strange to think that the accursed truck system should exist to such an extent as it does in holmfirth, and nobody be found who has the pluck to make the manufacturer stop it. there are here a great many honest hand-weavers suffering through this damned system; here is one sample from a good many out of the noble-hearted free trade clique. there is a manufacturer who has upon himself the curses of the whole district on account of his infamous conduct towards his poor weavers; if they have got a piece ready which comes to or shillings, he gives them s. in money and the rest in cloth or goods, and to per cent. dearer than at the other shops, and often enough the goods are rotten into the bargain. but, what says the _free trade mercury_, the _leeds mercury_? they are not bound to take them; they can please themselves. oh, yes, but they must take them or else starve. if they ask for another s. in money, they must wait eight or fourteen days for a warp; but if they take the s. and the goods, then there is always a warp ready for them. and that is free trade. lord brougham said we ought to put by something in our young days, so that we need not go to the parish when we are old. well, are we to put by the rotten goods? if this did not come from a lord, one would say his brains were as rotten as the goods that our work is paid in. when the unstamped papers came out "illegally," there was a lot of them to report it to the police in holmfirth, the blythes, the edwards, etc.; but where are they now? but this is different. our truck manufacturer belongs to the pious free trade lot; he goes to church twice every sunday, and repeats devotedly after the parson: 'we have left undone the things we ought to have done, and we have done the things we ought not to have done, and there is no good in us; but, good lord, deliver us.' yes, deliver us till to-morrow, and we will pay our weavers again in rotten goods." the cottage system looks much more innocent and arose in a much more harmless way, though it has the same enslaving influence upon the employee. in the neighbourhood of the mills in the country, there is often a lack of dwelling accommodation for the operatives. the manufacturer is frequently obliged to build such dwellings and does so gladly, as they yield great advantages, besides the interest upon the capital invested. if any owner of working-men's dwellings averages about six per cent. on his invested capital, it is safe to calculate that the manufacturer's cottages yield twice this rate; for so long as his factory does not stand perfectly idle he is sure of occupants, and of occupants who pay punctually. he is therefore spared the two chief disadvantages under which other house-owners labour; his cottages never stand empty, and he runs no risk. but the rent of the cottages is as high as though these disadvantages were in full force, and by obtaining the same rent as the ordinary house-owner, the manufacturer, at cost of the operatives, makes a brilliant investment at twelve to fourteen per cent. for it is clearly unjust that he should make twice as much profit as other competing house-owners, who at the same time are excluded from competing with him. but it implies a double wrong, when he draws his fixed profit from the pockets of the non-possessing class, which must consider the expenditure of every penny. he is used to that, however, he whose whole wealth is gained at the cost of his employees. but this injustice becomes an infamy when the manufacturer, as often happens, forces his operatives, who must occupy his houses on pain of dismissal, to pay a higher rent than the ordinary one, or even to pay rent for houses in which they do not live! the _halifax guardian_, quoted by the liberal _sun_, asserts that hundreds of operatives in ashton-under-lyne, oldham, and rochdale, etc., are forced by their employers to pay house-rent whether they occupy the house or not. { } the cottage system is universal in the country districts; it has created whole villages, and the manufacturer usually has little or no competition against his houses, so that he can fix his price regardless of any market rate, indeed at his pleasure. and what power does the cottage system give the employer over his operatives in disagreements between master and men? if the latter strike, he need only give them notice to quit his premises, and the notice need only be a week; after that time the operative is not only without bread but without a shelter, a vagabond at the mercy of the law which sends him, without fail, to the treadmill. such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits, and with as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie against the defenceless workers permit--deeds to wards which it is impossible to remain indifferent, towards which indifference were a crime. let us compare the condition of the free englishman of with the saxon serf under the lash of the norman barons of . the serf was _glebae adscriptus_, bound to the soil, so is the free working-man through the cottage system. the serf owed his master the _jus primae noctis_, the right of the first night--the free working-man must, on demand, surrender to his master not only that, but the right of every night. the serf could acquire no property; everything that he gained, his master could take from him; the free working-man has no property, can gain none by reason of the pressure of competition, and what even the norman baron did not do, the modern manufacturer does. through the truck system, he assumes every day the administration in detail of the things which the worker requires for his immediate necessities. the relation of the lord of the soil to the serf was regulated by the prevailing customs and by-laws which were obeyed, because they corresponded to them. the free working-man's relation to his master is regulated by laws which are _not_ obeyed, because they correspond neither with the interests of the employer nor with the prevailing customs. the lord of the soil could not separate the serf from the land, nor sell him apart from it, and since almost all the land was fief and there was no capital, practically could not sell him at all. the modern bourgeois forces the working-man to sell himself. the serf was the slave of the piece of land on which he was born, the working-man is the slave of his own necessaries of life and of the money with which he has to buy them--both are _slaves of a thing_. the serf had a guarantee for the means of subsistence in the feudal order of society in which every member had his own place. the free working-man has no guarantee whatsoever, because he has a place in society only when the bourgeoisie can make use of him; in all other cases he is ignored, treated as non-existent. the serf sacrificed himself for his master in war, the factory operative in peace. the lord of the serf was a barbarian who regarded his villain as a head of cattle; the employer of operatives is civilised and regards his "hand" as a machine. in short, the position of the two is not far from equal, and if either is at a disadvantage, it is the free working-man. slaves they both are, with the single difference that the slavery of the one is undissembled, open, honest; that of the other cunning, sly, disguised, deceitfully concealed from himself and every one else, a hypocritical servitude worse than the old. the philanthropic tories were right when they gave the operatives the name white slaves. but the hypocritical disguised slavery recognises the right to freedom, at least in outward form; bows before a freedom- loving public opinion, and herein lies the historic progress as compared with the old servitude, that the _principle_ of freedom is affirmed, and the oppressed will one day see to it that this principle is carried out. { } the remaining branches of industry. we were compelled to deal with the factory system somewhat at length, as it is an entirely novel creation of the industrial period; we shall be able to treat the other workers the more briefly, because what has been said either of the industrial proletariat in general, or of the factory system in particular, will wholly, or in part, apply to them. we shall, therefore, merely have to record how far the factory system has succeeded in forcing its way into each branch of industry, and what other peculiarities these may reveal. the four branches comprised under the factory act are engaged in the production of clothing stuffs. we shall do best if we deal next with those workers who receive their materials from these factories; and, first of all, with the stocking weavers of nottingham, derby, and leicester. touching these workers, the children's employment commission reports that the long working-hours, imposed by low wages, with a sedentary life and the strain upon the eyes involved in the nature of the employment, usually enfeeble the whole frame, and especially the eyes. work at night is impossible without a very powerful light produced by concentrating the rays of the lamp, making them pass through glass globes, which is most injurious to the sight. at forty years of age, nearly all wear spectacles. the children employed at spooling and hemming usually suffer grave injuries to the health and constitution. they work from the sixth, seventh, or eighth year ten to twelve hours daily in small, close rooms. it is not uncommon for them to faint at their work, to become too feeble for the most ordinary household occupation, and so near-sighted as to be obliged to wear glasses during childhood. many were found by the commissioners to exhibit all the symptoms of a scrofulous constitution, and the manufacturers usually refuse to employ girls who have worked in this way as being too weak. the condition of these children is characterised as "a disgrace to a christian country," and the wish expressed for legislative interference. the factory report { } adds that the stocking weavers are the worst paid workers in leicester, earning six, or with great effort, seven shillings a week, for sixteen to eighteen hours' daily work. formerly they earned twenty to twenty-one shillings, but the introduction of enlarged frames has ruined their business; the great majority still work with old, small, single frames, and compete with difficulty with the progress of machinery. here, too, every progress is a disadvantage for the workers. nevertheless, commissioner power speaks of the pride of the stocking weavers that they are free, and had no factory bell to measure out the time for their eating, sleeping, and working. their position to- day is no better than in , when the factory commission made the foregoing statements, the competition of the saxon stocking weavers, who have scarcely anything to eat, takes care of that. this competition is too strong for the english in nearly all foreign markets, and for the lower qualities of goods even in the english market. it must be a source of rejoicing for the patriotic german stocking weaver that his starvation wages force his english brother to starve too! and, verily, will he not starve on, proud and happy, for the greater glory of german industry, since the honour of the fatherland demands that his table should be bare, his dish half empty? ah! it is a noble thing this competition, this "race of the nations." in the _morning chronicle_, another liberal sheet, the organ of the bourgeoisie par excellence, there were published some letters from a stocking weaver in hinckley, describing the condition of his fellow-workers. among other things, he reports families, persons, who were supported by frames; each frame yielded on an average . shillings; each family earned an average of s. d. weekly. out of this there was required for house rent, frame rent, fuel, light, soap, and needles, together s. d., so that there remained for food, per head daily, . d., and for clothing nothing. "no eye," says the stocking weaver, "has seen, no ear heard, and no heart felt the half of the sufferings that these poor people endure." beds were wanting either wholly or in part, the children ran about ragged and barefoot; the men said, with tears in their eyes: "it's a long time since we had any meat; we have almost forgotten how it tastes;" and, finally, some of them worked on sunday, though public opinion pardons anything else more readily than this, and the rattling noise of the frame is audible throughout the neighbourhood. "but," said one of them, "look at my children and ask no questions. my poverty forces me to it; i can't and won't hear my children forever crying for bread, without trying the last means of winning it honestly. last monday i got up at two in the morning and worked to near midnight; the other days from six in the morning to between eleven and twelve at night. i have had enough of it; i sha'n't kill myself; so now i go to bed at ten o'clock, and make up the lost time on sundays." neither in leicester, nottingham, nor derby have wages risen since ; and the worst of it is that in leicester the truck system prevails to a great extent, as i have mentioned. it is therefore not to be wondered at that the weavers of this region take a very active part in all working-men's movements, the more active and effective because the frames are worked chiefly by men. in this stocking weavers' district the lace industry also has its headquarters. in the three counties mentioned there are in all , lace frames in use, while in all the rest of england there are but . the manufacture of lace is greatly complicated by a rigid division of labour, and embraces a multitude of branches. the yarn is first spooled by girls fourteen years of age and upwards, winders; then the spools are set up on the frames by boys, eight years old and upwards, threaders, who pass the thread through fine openings, of which each machine has an average of , , and bring it towards its destination; then the weaver weaves the lace which comes out of the machine like a broad piece of cloth and is taken apart by very little children who draw out the connecting threads. this is called running or drawing lace, and the children themselves lace-runners. the lace is then made ready for sale. the winders, like the threaders, have no specified working-time, being called upon whenever the spools on a frame are empty, and are liable, since the weavers work at night, to be required at any time in the factory or workroom. this irregularity, the frequent night-work, the disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude of physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence, upon which point all witnesses are unanimous. the work is very bad for the eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the threaders is not universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain, tears, and momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading are engendered. for the winders, however, it is certain that their work seriously affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent inflammations of the cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract. the work of the weavers themselves is very difficult, as the frames have constantly been made wider, until those now in use are almost all worked by three men in turn, each working eight hours, and the frame being kept in use the whole twenty-four. hence it is that the winders and threaders are so often called upon during the night, and must work to prevent the frame from standing idle. the filling in of , openings with thread occupies three children at least two hours. many frames are moved by steam-power, and the work of men thus superseded; and, as the children's employment commission's report mentions only lace factories to which the children are summoned, it seems to follow either that the work of the weavers has been removed to great factory rooms of late, or that steam- weaving has become pretty general; a forward movement of the factory system in either case. most unwholesome of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children of seven, and even of five and four, years old. commissioner grainger actually found one child of two years old employed at this work. following a thread which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued fourteen to sixteen hours. in the least unfavourable case, aggravated near-sightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough, incurable blindness from amaurosis. but, apart from that, the children, in consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble, narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion. disordered functions of the uterus are almost universal among the girls, and curvature of the spine also, so that "all the runners may be recognised from their gait." the same consequences for the eyes and the whole constitution are produced by the embroidery of lace. medical witnesses are unanimously of the opinion that the health of all children employed in the production of lace suffers seriously, that they are pale, weak, delicate, undersized, and much less able than other children to resist disease. the affections from which they usually suffer are general debility, frequent fainting, pains in the head, sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart, nausea, vomiting and want of appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula, and consumption. the health of the female lacemakers especially, is constantly and deeply undermined; complaints are universal of anaemia, difficult childbirth, and miscarriage. { a} the same subordinate official of the children's employment commission reports further that the children are very often ill-clothed and ragged, and receive insufficient food, usually only bread and tea, often no meat for months together. as to their moral condition, he reports: { b} "all the inhabitants of nottingham, the police, the clergy, the manufacturers, the working-people, and the parents of the children are all unanimously of opinion that the present system of labour is a most fruitful source of immorality. the threaders, chiefly boys, and the winders, usually girls, are called for in the factory at the same time; and as their parents cannot know how long they are wanted there, they have the finest opportunity to form improper connections and remain together after the close of the work. this has contributed, in no small degree, to the immorality which, according to general opinion, exists to a terrible extent in nottingham. apart from this, the quiet of home life, and the comfort of the family to which these children and young people belong, is wholly sacrificed to this most unnatural state of things." another branch of lace-making, bobbin-lacework, is carried on in the agricultural shires of northampton, oxford, and bedford, chiefly by children and young persons, who complain universally of bad food, and rarely taste meat. the employment itself is most unwholesome. the children work in small, ill-ventilated, damp rooms, sitting always bent over the lace cushion. to support the body in this wearying position, the girls wear stays with a wooden busk, which, at the tender age of most of them, when the bones are still very soft, wholly displace the ribs, and make narrow chests universal. they usually die of consumption after suffering the severest forms of digestive disorders, brought on by sedentary work in a bad atmosphere. they are almost wholly without education, least of all do they receive moral training. they love finery, and in consequence of these two influences their moral condition is most deplorable, and prostitution almost epidemic among them. { } this is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! only a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers' daughters, a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its equally "vile" children and children's children. but what does that come to? nothing, nothing whatsoever! our english bourgeoisie will lay the report of the government commission aside indifferently, and wives and daughters will deck themselves with lace as before. it is a beautiful thing, the composure of an english bourgeois. a great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing establishments of lancashire, derbyshire, and the west of scotland. in no branch of english industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers. the application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much more than was the case in the production of the fabrics. one man, with the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done formerly by block printers; a single machine yields yards of printed cloth per minute. the calico printers are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of lancaster, derby, and chester produced (according to a petition of the printers to the house of commons), in the year , , , pieces of printed cotton goods: of these, , were printed by hand exclusively, , in part with machinery and in part by hand, and , , by machinery alone, with four to six colours. as the machinery is chiefly new and undergoes constant improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too great for the available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore starving; the petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the rest are employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week, and are ill-paid. leach { } asserts of one print-work (deeply dale, near bury, in lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more than five shillings, though he knows that the machine-printers were pretty well paid. the print-works are thus wholly affiliated with the factory system, but without being subject to the legislative restrictions placed upon it. they produce an article subject to fashion, and have therefore no regular work. if they have small orders, they work half time; if they make a hit with a pattern, and business is brisk, they work twelve hours, perhaps all night. in the neighbourhood of my home, near manchester, there was a print-work that was often lighted when i returned late at night; and i have heard that the children were obliged at times to work so long there, that they would try to catch a moment's rest and sleep on the stone steps and in the corners of the lobby. i have no legal proof of the truth of the statement, or i should name the firm. the report of the children's employment commission is very cursory upon this subject, stating merely that in england, at least, the children are mostly pretty well clothed and fed (relatively, according to the wages of the parents), that they receive no education whatsoever, and are morally on a low plane. it is only necessary to remember that these children are subject to the factory system, and then, referring the reader to what has already been said of that, we can pass on. of the remaining workers employed in the manufacture of clothing stuffs little remains to be said; the bleachers' work is very unwholesome, obliging them to breathe chlorine, a gas injurious to the lungs. the work of the dyers is in many cases very healthful, since it requires the exertion of the whole body; how these workers are paid is little known, and this is ground enough for the inference that they do not receive less than the average wages, otherwise they would make complaint. the fustian cutters, who, in consequence of the large consumption of cotton velvet, are comparatively numerous, being estimated at from , to , , have suffered very severely, indirectly, from the influence of the factory system. the goods formerly woven with hand-looms, were not perfectly uniform, and required a practised hand in cutting the single rows of threads. since power-looms have been used, the rows run regularly; each thread of the weft is exactly parallel with the preceding one, and cutting is no longer an art. the workers thrown out of employment by the introduction of machinery turn to fustian cutting, and force down wages by their competition; the manufacturers discovered that they could employ women and children, and the wages sank to the rate paid them, while hundreds of men were thrown out of employment. the manufacturers found that they could get the work done in the factory itself more cheaply than in the cutters' workroom, for which they indirectly paid the rent. since this discovery, the low upper-storey cutters' rooms stand empty in many a cottage, or are let for dwellings, while the cutter has lost his freedom of choice of his working-hours, and is brought under the dominion of the factory bell. a cutter of perhaps forty-five years of age told me that he could remember a time when he had received d. a yard for work, for which he now received d.; true, he can cut the more regular texture more quickly than the old, but he can by no means do twice as much in an hour as formerly, so that his wages have sunk to less than a quarter of what they were. leach { } gives a list of wages paid in and in for various goods, from which it appears that articles paid in at the rates of d., . d., . d., and d. per yard, were paid in at the rate of . d., d., . d., and . d. per yard, cutters' wages. the average weekly wage, according to leach, was as follows: , pounds s. d.; pounds s. d.; pounds; pounds s. d.; and for the same goods in , s. d.; s. d.; s. d.; s.; while there are hundreds of workers who cannot find employment even at these last named rates. of the hand-weavers of the cotton industry we have already spoken; the other woven fabrics are almost exclusively produced on hand-looms. here most of the workers have suffered as the weavers have done from the crowding in of competitors displaced by machinery, and are, moreover, subject like the factory operatives to a severe fine system for bad work. take, for instance, the silk weavers. mr. brocklehurst, one of the largest silk manufacturers in all england, laid before a committee of members of parliament lists taken from his books, from which it appears that for goods for which he paid wages in at the rate of s., s., . s., . s., . s., s., he paid in but s., . s., . s., . s., . s., . s., while in this case no improvement in the machinery has taken place. but what mr. brocklehurst does may very well be taken as a standard for all. from the same lists it appears that the average weekly wage of his weavers, after all deductions, was, in , . s., and, in , but s. since that time wages have fallen still further. goods which brought in d. weavers' wages in , bring in but . d. in (single sarsnets), and a great number of weavers in the country can get work only when they undertake these goods at . d.- d. moreover, they are subject to arbitrary deductions from their wages. every weaver who receives materials is given a card, on which is usually to be read that the work is to be returned at a specified hour of the day; that a weaver who cannot work by reason of illness must make the fact known at the office within three days, or sickness will not be regarded as an excuse; that it will not be regarded as a sufficient excuse if the weaver claims to have been obliged to wait for yarn; that for certain faults in the work (if, for example, more weft-threads are found within a given space than are prescribed), not less than half the wages will be deducted; and that if the goods should not be ready at the time specified, one penny will be deducted for every yard returned. the deductions in accordance with these cards are so considerable that, for instance, a man who comes twice a week to leigh, in lancashire, to gather up woven goods, brings his employer at least pound fines every time. he asserts this himself, and he is regarded as one of the most lenient. such things were formerly settled by arbitration; but as the workers were usually dismissed if they insisted upon that, the custom has been almost wholly abandoned, and the manufacturer acts arbitrarily as prosecutor, witness, judge, law-giver, and executive in one person. and if the workman goes to a justice of the peace, the answer is: "when you accepted your card you entered upon a contract, and you must abide by it." the case is the same as that of the factory operatives. besides, the employer obliges the workman to sign a document in which he declares that he agrees to the deductions made. and if a workman rebels, all the manufacturers in the town know at once that he is a man who, as leach says, { } "resists the lawful order as established by weavers' cards, and, moreover, has the impudence to doubt the wisdom of those who are, as he ought to know, his superiors in society." naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them what leach translates into plain english with the words: "if you don't like to be frizzled in my frying-pan, you can take a walk into the fire." the silk weavers of london, and especially of spitalfields, have lived in periodic distress for a long time, and that they still have no cause to be satisfied with their lot is proved by their taking a most active part in english labour movements in general, and in london ones in particular. the distress prevailing among them gave rise to the fever which broke out in east london, and called forth the commission for investigating the sanitary condition of the labouring class. but the last report of the london fever hospital shows that this disease is still raging. after the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of english industry are the metal-wares. this trade has its headquarters at birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced, at sheffield for cutlery, and in staffordshire, especially at wolverhampton, where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured. in describing the position of the workers employed in these trades, let us begin with birmingham. the disposition of the work has retained in birmingham, as in most places where metals are wrought, something of the old handicraft character; the small employers are still to be found, who work with their apprentices in the shop at home, or when they need steam- power, in great factory buildings which are divided into little shops, each rented to a small employer, and supplied with a shaft moved by the engine, and furnishing motive power for the machinery. leon faucher, author of a series of articles in the _revue des deux mondes_, which at least betray study, and are better than what has hitherto been written upon the subject by englishmen or germans, characterises this relation in contrast with the manufacture of lancashire as "democratie industrielle," and observes that it produces no very favourable results for master or men. this observation is perfectly correct, for the many small employers cannot well subsist on the profit divided amongst them, determined by competition, a profit under other circumstances absorbed by a single manufacturer. the centralising tendency of capital holds them down. for one who grows rich ten are ruined, and a hundred placed at a greater disadvantage than ever, by the pressure of the one upstart who can afford to sell more cheaply than they. and in the cases where they have to compete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty. the apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain independence--that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by the bourgeoisie than under the factory system. thus these small employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon the work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their principal means of support is their own work. this peculiar midway position of the birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely joined wholly and unreservedly in the english labour movements. birmingham is a politically radical, but not a chartist, town. there are, however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in these the factory system reigns supreme. the division of labour, which is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry, for example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children, and we find here { } precisely the same features reappearing which the factories' report presented,--the work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc. etc. the children are described as half-starved and ragged, the half of them are said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them get nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon a pennyworth of bread for a noonday meal--there were actually cases in which children received no food from eight in the morning until seven at night. their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter. hence they are all small and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour. and when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in birmingham fit for military service. "the working men," says a recruiting surgeon, "are small, delicate, and of very slight physical power; many of them deformed, too, in the chest or spinal column." according to the assertion of a recruiting sergeant, the people of birmingham are smaller than those anywhere else, being usually feet to inches tall; out of recruits, but were found fit for service. as to education, a series of depositions and specimens taken from the metal districts have already been given, { a} to which the reader is referred. it appears further, from the children's employment commission's report, that in birmingham more than half the children between five and fifteen years attend no school whatsoever, that those who do are constantly changing, so that it is impossible to give them any training of an enduring kind, and that they are all withdrawn from school very early and set to work. the report makes it clear what sort of teachers are employed. one teacher, in answer to the question whether she gave moral instruction, said, no, for threepence a week school fees that was too much to require, but that she took a great deal of trouble to instil good principles into the children. (and she made a decided slip in her english in saying it.) in the schools the commissioner found constant noise and disorder. the moral state of the children is in the highest degree deplorable. half of all the criminals are children under fifteen, and in a single year ninety ten-years'-old offenders, among them forty-four serious criminal cases, were sentenced. unbridled sexual intercourse seems, according to the opinion of the commissioner, almost universal, and that at a very early age. { b} in the iron district of staffordshire the state of things is still worse. for the coarse wares made here neither much division of labour (with certain exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. in wolverhampton, willenhall, bilston, sedgeley, wednesfield, darlaston, dudley, walsall, wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories, but chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first year. the small employers are in about the same situation as those of birmingham; but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. they get almost exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have died a natural death, or tainted meat, or fish to eat, with veal from calves killed too young, and pork from swine smothered during transportation, and such food is furnished not by small employers only, but by large manufacturers, who employ from thirty to forty apprentices. the custom seems to be universal in wolverhampton, and its natural consequence is frequent bowel complaints and other diseases. moreover, the children usually do not get enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing than their working rags, for which reason, if for no other, they cannot go to sunday school the dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much so that they give rise to disease; and in spite of the not materially unhealthy work, the children are puny, weak, and, in many cases, severely crippled. in willenhall, for instance, there are countless persons who have, from perpetually filing at the lathe, crooked backs and one leg crooked, "hind- leg" as they call it, so that the two legs have the form of a k; while it is said that more than one-third of the working-men there are ruptured. here, as well as in wolverhampton, numberless cases were found of retarded puberty among girls, (for girls, too, work at the forges,) as well as among boys, extending even to the nineteenth year. in sedgeley and its surrounding district, where nails form almost the sole product, the nailers live and work in the most wretched stable-like huts, which for filth can scarcely be equalled. girls and boys work from the tenth or twelfth year, and are accounted fully skilled only when they make a thousand nails a day. for twelve hundred nails the pay is . d. every nail receives twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs . pounds, the nailer must lift , pounds to earn this miserable pay. with this hard work and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop ill-formed, undersized frames, and the commissioners depositions confirm this. as to the state of education in this district, data have already been furnished in the foregoing chapters. it is upon an incredibly low plane; half the children do not even go to sunday school, and the other half go irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts, can read, and in the matter of writing the case is much worse. naturally, for between the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and write their names with difficulty. the prevailing morals correspond with these means of education. in willenhall, commissioner horne asserts, and supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no moral sense among the workers. in general, he found that the children neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for them. they were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat, and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards. they knew nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil from morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired. { } in sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers also. on the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health. certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive disorders; bone-cutting for knife handles brings with it headache, biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia. by far the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks, which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early death. the unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled. the dry grinders' average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders' rarely exceeds forty-five. dr. knight, in sheffield, says: { } "i can convey some idea of the injuriousness of this occupation only by asserting that the hardest drinkers among the grinders are the longest lived among them, because they are longest and oftenest absent from their work. there are, in all, some , grinders in sheffield. about ( men and boys) are fork grinders; these die between the twenty-eighth and thirty-second years of age. the razor grinders, who grind wet as well as dry, die between forty and forty-five years, and the table cutlery grinders, who grind wet, die between the fortieth and fiftieth year." the same physician gives the following description of the course of the disease called grinders' asthma: "they usually begin their work with the fourteenth year, and, if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the twentieth year. then the symptoms of their peculiar disease appear. they suffer from shortness of breath at the slightest effort in going up hill or up stairs, they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the permanent and increasing want of breath; they bend forward, and seem, in general, to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in which they work. their complexion becomes dirty yellow, their features express anxiety, they complain of pressure upon the chest. their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube. from time to time they expectorate considerable quantities of dust, either mixed with phlegm or in balls or cylindrical masses, with a thin coating of mucus. spitting blood, inability to lie down, night sweat, colliquative diarrhoea, unusual loss of flesh, and all the usual symptoms of consumption of the lungs finally carry them off, after they have lingered months, or even years, unfit to support themselves or those dependent upon them. i must add that all attempts which have hitherto been made to prevent grinders' asthma, or to cure it, have wholly failed." all this knight wrote ten years ago; since then the number of grinders and the violence of the disease have increased, though attempts have been made to prevent it by covered grindstones and carrying off the dust by artificial draught. these methods have been at least partially successful, but the grinders do not desire their adoption, and have even destroyed the contrivance here and there, in the belief that more workers may be attracted to the business and wages thus reduced; they are for a short life and a merry one. dr. knight has often told grinders who came to him with the first symptoms of asthma that a return to grinding means certain death, but with no avail. he who is once a grinder falls into despair, as though he had sold himself to the devil. education in sheffield is upon a very low plane; a clergyman, who had occupied himself largely with the statistics of education, was of the opinion that of , children of the working-class who are in a position to attend school, scarcely , can read. this comes of the fact that the children are taken from school in the seventh, and, at the very latest, in the twelfth year, and that the teachers are good for nothing; one was a convicted thief who found no other way of supporting himself after being released from jail than teaching school! immorality among young people seems to be more prevalent in sheffield than anywhere else. it is hard to tell which town ought to have the prize, and in reading the report one believes of each one that this certainly deserves it! the younger generation spend the whole of sunday lying in the street tossing coins or fighting dogs, go regularly to the gin palace, where they sit with their sweethearts until late at night, when they take walks in solitary couples. in an ale-house which the commissioner visited, there sat forty to fifty young people of both sexes, nearly all under seventeen years of age, and each lad beside his lass. here and there cards were played, at other places dancing was going on, and everywhere drinking. among the company were openly avowed professional prostitutes. no wonder, then, that, as all the witnesses testify, early, unbridled sexual intercourse, youthful prostitution, beginning with persons of fourteen to fifteen years, is extraordinarily frequent in sheffield. crimes of a savage and desperate sort are of common occurrence; one year before the commissioner's visit, a band, consisting chiefly of young persons, was arrested when about to set fire to the town, being fully equipped with lances and inflammable substances. we shall see later that the labour movement in sheffield has this same savage character. { } besides these two main centres of the metal industry, there are needle factories in warrington, lancashire, where great want, immorality, and ignorance prevail among the workers, and especially among the children; and a number of nail forges in the neighbourhood of wigan, in lancashire, and in the east of scotland. the reports from these latter districts tell almost precisely the same story as those of staffordshire. there is one more branch of this industry carried on in the factory districts, especially in lancashire, the essential peculiarity of which is the production of machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded out elsewhere, are deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the very enemy which supersedes them. machinery for planing and boring, cutting screws, wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out of employment a multitude of men who formerly found regular work at good wages; and whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of them in manchester. north of the iron district of staffordshire lies an industrial region to which we shall now turn our attention, the potteries, whose headquarters are in the borough of stoke, embracing henley, burslem, lane end, lane delph, etruria, coleridge, langport, tunstall, and golden hill, containing together , inhabitants. the children's employment commission reports upon this subject that in some branches of this industry, in the production of stoneware, the children have light employment in warm, airy rooms; in others, on the contrary, hard, wearing labour is required, while they receive neither sufficient food nor good clothing. many children complain: "don't get enough to eat, get mostly potatoes with salt, never meat, never bread, don't go to school, haven't got no clothes." "haven't got nothin' to eat to-day for dinner, don't never have dinner at home, get mostly potatoes and salt, sometimes bread." "these is all the clothes i have, no sunday suit at home." among the children whose work is especially injurious are the mould-runners, who have to carry the moulded article with the form to the drying-room, and afterwards bring back the empty form, when the article is properly dried. thus they must go to and fro the whole day, carrying burdens heavy in proportion to their age, while the high temperature in which they have to do this increases very considerably the exhaustiveness of the work. these children, with scarcely a single exception, are lean, pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all suffer from stomach troubles, nausea, want of appetite, and many of them die of consumption. almost as delicate are the boys called "jiggers," from the "jigger" wheel which they turn. but by far the most injurious is the work of those who dip the finished article into a fluid containing great quantities of lead, and often of arsenic, or have to take the freshly-dipped article up with the hand. the hands and clothing of these workers, adults and children, are always wet with this fluid, the skin softens and falls off under the constant contact with rough objects, so that the fingers often bleed, and are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this dangerous substance. the consequence is violent pain, and serious disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation, colic, sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among children. among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colica pictorum, and paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomena. one witness relates that two children who worked with him died of convulsions at their work; another who had helped with the dipping two years while a boy, relates that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily, accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use of his limbs. in one factory were found in the dipping-house four men, all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several of whom were already epileptic. in short, this frightful disease follows this occupation universally: and that, too, to the greater pecuniary profit of the bourgeoisie! in the rooms in which the stoneware is scoured, the atmosphere is filled with pulverised flint, the breathing of which is as injurious as that of the steel dust among the sheffield grinders. the workers lose breath, cannot lie down, suffer from sore throat and violent coughing, and come to have so feeble a voice that they can scarcely be heard. they, too, all die of consumption. in the potteries district, the schools are said to be comparatively numerous, and to offer the children opportunities for instruction; but as the latter are so early set to work for twelve hours and often more per day, they are not in a position to avail themselves of the schools, so that three-fourths of the children examined by the commissioner could neither read nor write, while the whole district is plunged in the deepest ignorance. children who have attended sunday school for years could not tell one letter from another, and the moral and religious education, as well as the intellectual, is on a very low plane. { } in the manufacture of glass, too, work occurs which seems little injurious to men, but cannot be endured by children. the hard labour, the irregularity of the hours, the frequent night-work, and especially the great heat of the working place ( to fahrenheit), engender in children general debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially affections of the eye, bowel complaint, and rheumatic and bronchial affections. many of the children are pale, have red eyes, often blind for weeks at a time, suffer from violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds, and rheumatism. when the glass is withdrawn from the fire, the children must often go into such heat that the boards on which they stand catch fire under their feet. the glassblowers usually die young of debility and chest affections. { } as a whole, this report testifies to the gradual but sure introduction of the factory system into all branches of industry, recognisable especially by the employment of women and children. i have not thought it necessary to trace in every case the progress of machinery and the superseding of men as workers. every one who is in any degree acquainted with the nature of manufacture can fill this out for himself, while space fails me to describe in detail an aspect of our present system of production, the result of which i have already sketched in dealing with the factory system. in all directions machinery is being introduced, and the last trace of the working-man's independence thus destroyed. in all directions the family is being dissolved by the labour of wife and children, or inverted by the husband's being thrown out of employment and made dependent upon them for bread; everywhere the inevitable machinery bestows upon the great capitalist command of trade and of the workers with it. the centralisation of capital strides forward without interruption, the division of society into great capitalists and non-possessing workers is sharper every day, the industrial development of the nation advances with giant strides towards the inevitable crisis. i have already stated that in the handicrafts the power of capital, and in some cases the division of labour too, has produced the same results, crushed the small tradesmen, and put great capitalists and non-possessing workers in their place. as to these handicraftsmen there is little to be said, since all that relates to them has already found its place where the proletariat in general was under discussion. there has been but little change here in the nature of the work and its influence upon health since the beginning of the industrial movement. but the constant contact with the factory operatives, the pressure of the great capitalists, which is much more felt than that of the small employer to whom the apprentice still stood in a more or less personal relation, the influences of life in towns, and the fall of wages, have made nearly all the handicraftsmen active participators in labour movements. we shall soon have more to say on this point, and turn meanwhile to one section of workers in london who deserve our attention by reason of the extraordinary barbarity with which they are exploited by the money-greed of the bourgeoisie. i mean the dressmakers and sewing-women. it is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers. we have already seen this in the case of the lacemakers, and come now to the dressmaking establishments of london for further proof. they employ a mass of young girls--there are said to be , of them in all--who sleep and eat on the premises, come usually from the country, and are therefore absolutely the slaves of their employers. during the fashionable season, which lasts some four months, working-hours, even in the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on at these times without any set regulation, so that the girls never have more than six, often not more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more than two hours in the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to twenty hours, if not the whole night through, as frequently happens! the only limit set to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the needle another minute. cases have occurred in which these helpless creatures did not undress during nine consecutive days and nights, and could only rest a moment or two here and there upon a mattress, where food was served them ready cut up in order to require the least possible time for swallowing. in short, these unfortunate girls are kept by means of the moral whip of the modern slave-driver, the threat of discharge, to such long and unbroken toil as no strong man, much less a delicate girl of fourteen to twenty years, can endure. in addition to this, the foul air of the workroom and sleeping places, the bent posture, the often bad and indigestible food, all these causes, combined with almost total exclusion from fresh air, entail the saddest consequences for the health of the girls. enervation, exhaustion, debility, loss of appetite, pains in the shoulders, back, and hips, but especially headache, begin very soon; then follow curvatures of the spine, high, deformed shoulders, leanness, swelled, weeping, and smarting eyes, which soon become short-sighted; coughs, narrow chests, and shortness of breath, and all manner of disorders in the development of the female organism. in many cases the eyes suffer, so severely that incurable blindness follows; but if the sight remains strong enough to make continued work possible, consumption usually soon ends the sad life of these milliners and dressmakers. even those who leave this work at an early age retain permanently injured health, a broken constitution; and, when married, bring feeble and sickly children into the world. all the medical men interrogated by the commissioner agreed that no method of life could be invented better calculated to destroy health and induce early death. with the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the needle-women of london are exploited. the girls employed in stay-making have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. and what wages do they get? i do not know; but this i know, that the middle-man who has to give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work among the needle-women, receives . d. per piece. from this he deducts his own pay, at least . d., so that d. at most reaches the pocket of the girl. the girls who sew neckties must bind themselves to work sixteen hours a day, and receive . s. a week. { } but the shirtmakers' lot is the worst. they receive for an ordinary shirt . d., formerly d.- d.; but since the workhouse of st. pancras, which is administered by a radical board of guardians, began to undertake work at . d., the poor women outside have been compelled to do the same. for fine, fancy shirts, which can be made in one day of eighteen hours, d. is paid. the weekly wage of these sewing-women according to this and according to testimony from many sides, including both needle-women and employers, is s. d. to s. for most strained work continued far into the night. and what crowns this shameful barbarism is the fact that the women must give a money deposit for a part of the materials entrusted to them, which they naturally cannot do unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers very well know), redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the materials, they must appear before a justice of the peace, as happened a sewing-woman in november, . a poor girl who got into this strait and did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in . these women usually live in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where as many crowd together as the space can possibly admit, and where, in winter, the animal warmth of the workers is the only heat obtainable. here they sit bent over their work, sewing from four or five in the morning until midnight, destroying their health in a year or two and ending in an early grave, without being able to obtain the poorest necessities of life meanwhile. { } and below them roll the brilliant equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps away some pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than they can earn in a year. * * * * * such is the condition of the english manufacturing proletariat. in all directions, whithersoever we may turn, we find want and disease permanent or temporary, and demoralisation arising from the condition of the workers; in all directions slow but sure undermining, and final destruction of the human being physically as well as mentally. is this a state of things which can last? it cannot and will not last. the workers, the great majority of the nation, will not endure it. let us see what they say of it. labour movements. it must be admitted, even if i had not proved it so often in detail, that the english workers cannot feel happy in this condition; that theirs is not a state in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and live as human beings. the workers must therefore strive to escape from this brutalizing condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human position; and this they cannot do without attacking the interest of the bourgeoisie which consists in exploiting them. but the bourgeoisie defends its interests with all the power placed at its disposal by wealth and the might of the state. in proportion as the working-man determines to alter the present state of things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed enemy. moreover, the working-man is made to feel at every moment that the bourgeoisie treats him as a chattel, as its property, and for this reason, if for no other, he must come forward as its enemy. i have shown in a hundred ways in the foregoing pages, and could have shown in a hundred others, that, in our present society, he can save his manhood only in hatred and rebellion against the bourgeoisie. and he can protest with most violent passion against the tyranny of the propertied class, thanks to his education, or rather want of education, and to the abundance of hot irish blood that flows in the veins of the english working-class. the english working-man is no englishman nowadays; no calculating money-grabber like his wealthy neighbour. he possesses more fully developed feelings, his native northern coldness is overborne by the unrestrained development of his passions and their control over him. the cultivation of the understanding which so greatly strengthens the selfish tendency of the english bourgeois, which has made selfishness his predominant trait and concentrated all his emotional power upon the single point of money-greed, is wanting in the working-man, whose passions are therefore strong and mighty as those of the foreigner. english nationality is annihilated in the working-man. since, as we have seen, no single field for the exercise of his manhood is left him, save his opposition to the whole conditions of his life, it is natural that exactly in this opposition he should be most manly, noblest, most worthy of sympathy. we shall see that all the energy, all the activity of the working-men is directed to this point, and that even their attempts to attain general education all stand in direct connection with this. true, we shall have single acts of violence and even of brutality to report, but it must always be kept in mind that the social war is avowedly raging in england; and that, whereas it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to conduct this war hypocritically, under the disguise of peace and even of philanthropy, the only help for the working- men consists in laying bare the true state of things and destroying this hypocrisy; that the most violent attacks of the workers upon the bourgeoisie and its servants are only the open, undisguised expression of that which the bourgeoisie perpetrates secretly, treacherously against the workers. the revolt of the workers began soon after the first industrial development, and has passed through several phases. the investigation of their importance in the history of the english people i must reserve for separate treatment, limiting myself meanwhile to such bare facts as serve to characterise the condition of the english proletariat. the earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that of crime. the working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. it was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole. we have seen how crime increased with the extension of manufacture; how the yearly number of arrests bore a constant relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consumed. the workers soon realised that crime did not help matters. the criminal could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. besides, theft was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-men, however much they might approve of it in silence. as a class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial period. the first inventors, arkwright and others, were persecuted in this way and their machines destroyed. later, there took place a number of revolts against machinery, in which the occurrences were almost precisely the same as those of the printers' disturbances in bohemia in ; factories were demolished and machinery destroyed. this form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements. when the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart's content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. a new form of opposition had to be found. at this point help came in the shape of a law enacted by the old, unreformed, oligarchic-tory parliament, a law which never could have passed the house of commons later, when the reform bill had legally sanctioned the distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and made the bourgeoisie the ruling class. this was enacted in , and repealed all laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had hitherto been forbidden. the working-men obtained a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the right of free association. secret coalitions had, it is true, previously existed, but could never achieve great results. in glasgow, as symonds { } relates, a general strike of weavers had taken place in , which was brought about by a secret association. it was repeated in , and on this occasion vitriol was thrown into the faces of the two working-men who would not join the association, and were therefore regarded by the members as traitors to their class. both the assaulted lost the use of their eyes in consequence of the injury. so, too, in , the association of scottish miners was powerful enough to carry on a general strike. these associations required their members to take an oath of fidelity and secrecy, had regular lists, treasurers, bookkeepers, and local branches. but the secrecy with which everything was conducted crippled their growth. when, on the other hand, the working-man received in the right of free association, these combinations were very soon spread over all england and attained great power. in all branches of industry trades unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-man against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. their objects were to deal, _en masse_, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages according to the profit of the latter, to raise it when opportunity offered, and to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country. hence they tried to settle with the capitalists a scale of wages to be universally adhered to, and ordered out on strike the employees of such individuals as refused to accept the scale. they aimed further to keep up the demand for labour by limiting the number of apprentices, and so to keep wages high; to counteract, as far as possible, the indirect wages reductions which the manufacturers brought about by means of new tools and machinery; and finally, to assist unemployed working-men financially. this they do either directly or by means of a card to legitimate the bearer as a "society man," and with which the working-man wanders from place to place, supported by his fellow-workers, and instructed as to the best opportunity for finding employment. this is tramping, and the wanderer a tramp. to attain these ends, a president and secretary are engaged at a salary (since it is to be expected that no manufacturer will employ such persons), and a committee collects the weekly contributions and watches over their expenditure for the purposes of the association. when it proved possible and advantageous, the various trades of single districts united in a federation and held delegate conventions at set times. the attempt has been made in single cases to unite the workers of one branch over all england in one great union; and several times (in for the first time) to form one universal trades association for the whole united kingdom, with a separate organisation for each trade. these associations, however, never held together long, and were seldom realised even for the moment, since an exceptionally universal excitement is necessary to make such a federation possible and effective. the means usually employed by these unions for attaining their ends are the following: if one or more employers refuse to pay the wage specified by the union, a deputation is sent or a petition forwarded (the working- men, you see, know how to recognise the absolute power of the lord of the factory in his little state); if this proves unavailing, the union commands the employees to stop work, and all hands go home. this strike is either partial when one or several, or general when all employers in the trade refuse to regulate wages according to the proposals of the union. so far go the lawful means of the union, assuming the strike to take effect after the expiration of the legal notice, which is not always the case. but these lawful means are very weak when there are workers outside the union, or when members separate from it for the sake of the momentary advantage offered by the bourgeoisie. especially in the case of partial strikes can the manufacturer readily secure recruits from these black sheep (who are known as knobsticks), and render fruitless the efforts of the united workers. knobsticks are usually threatened, insulted, beaten, or otherwise maltreated by the members of the union; intimidated, in short, in every way. prosecution follows, and as the law- abiding bourgeoisie has the power in its own hands, the force of the union is broken almost every time by the first unlawful act, the first judicial procedure against its members. the history of these unions is a long series of defeats of the working- men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. all these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. hence the unions remain powerless against all _great_ forces which influence this relation. in a commercial crisis the union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves. but in dealing with minor, single influences they are powerful. if the employer had no concentrated, collective opposition to expect, he would in his own interest gradually reduce wages to a lower and lower point; indeed, the battle of competition which he has to wage against his fellow-manufacturers would force him to do so, and wages would soon reach the minimum. but this competition of the manufacturers among themselves is, _under average conditions_, somewhat restricted by the opposition of the working-men. every manufacturer knows that the consequence of a reduction not justified by conditions to which his competitors also are subjected, would be a strike, which would most certainly injure him, because his capital would be idle as long as the strike lasted, and his machinery would be rusting, whereas it is very doubtful whether he could, in such a case, enforce his reduction. then he has the certainty that if he should succeed, his competitors would follow him, reducing the price of the goods so produced, and thus depriving him of the benefit of his policy. then, too, the unions often bring about a more rapid increase of wages after a crisis than would otherwise follow. for the manufacturer's interest is to delay raising wages until forced by competition, but now the working-men demand an increased wage as soon as the market improves, and they can carry their point by reason of the smaller supply of workers at his command under such circumstances. but, for resistance to more considerable forces which influence the labour market, the unions are powerless. in such cases hunger gradually drives the strikers to resume work on any terms, and when once a few have begun; the force of the union is broken, because these few knobsticks, with the reserve supplies of goods in the market, enable the bourgeoisie to overcome the worst effects of the interruption of business. the funds of the union are soon exhausted by the great numbers requiring relief, the credit which the shopkeepers give at high interest is withdrawn after a time, and want compels the working-man to place himself once more under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. but strikes end disastrously for the workers mostly, because the manufacturers, in their own interest (which has, be it said, become their interest only through the resistance of the workers), are obliged to avoid all useless reductions, while the workers feel in every reduction imposed by the state of trade a deterioration of their condition, against which they must defend themselves as far as in them lies. it will be asked, "why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the uselessness of such measures is so evident?" simply because they _must_ protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these social conditions, an admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones. against this the working-men must rebel so long as they have not lost all human feeling, and that they protest in this way and no other, comes of their being practical english people, who express themselves in _action_, and do not, like german theorists, go to sleep as soon as their protest is properly registered and placed _ad acta_, there to sleep as quietly as the protesters themselves. the active resistance of the english working-men has its effect in holding the money greed of the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed than trades unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class. but what gives these unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. they imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; _i.e_., upon their want of cohesion. and precisely because the unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. the working-men cannot attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this. if the competition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if all determine not to be further exploited by the bourgeoisie, the rule of property is at an end. wages depend upon the relation of demand to supply, upon the accidental state of the labour market, simply because the workers have hitherto been content to be treated as chattels, to be bought and sold. the moment the workers resolve to be bought and sold no longer, when in the determination of the value of labour, they take the part of men possessed of a will as well as of working-power, at that moment the whole political economy of to-day is at an end. the laws determining the rate of wages would, indeed, come into force again in the long run, if the working-men did not go beyond this step of abolishing competition among themselves. but they must go beyond that unless they are prepared to recede again and to allow competition among themselves to reappear. thus once advanced so far, necessity compels them to go farther; to abolish not only one kind of competition, but competition itself altogether, and that they will do. the workers are coming to perceive more clearly with every day how competition affects them; they see far more clearly than the bourgeois that competition of the capitalists among themselves presses upon the workers too, by bringing on commercial crises, and that this kind of competition; too, must be abolished. they will soon learn _how_ they have to go about it. that these unions contribute greatly to nourish the bitter hatred of the workers against the property-holding class need hardly be said. from them proceed, therefore, with or without the connivance of the leading members, in times of unusual excitement, individual actions which can be explained only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild passion overwhelming all restraints. of this sort are the attacks with vitriol mentioned in the foregoing pages, and a series of others, of which i shall cite several. in , during a violent labour movement, young ashton, a manufacturer in hyde, near manchester, was shot one evening when crossing a field, and no trace of the assassin discovered. there is no doubt that this was a deed of vengeance of the working-men. incendiarisms and attempted explosions are very common. on friday, september th, , an attempt was made to blow up the saw-works of padgin, in howard street, sheffield. a closed iron tube filled with powder was the means employed, and the damage was considerable. on the following day, a similar attempt was made in ibbetson's knife and file works at shales moor, near sheffield. mr. ibbetson had made himself obnoxious by an active participation in bourgeois movements, by low wages, the exclusive employment of knobsticks, and the exploitation of the poor law for his own benefit. he had reported, during the crisis of , such operatives as refused to accept reduced wages, as persons who could find work but would not take it, and were, therefore, not deserving of relief, so compelling the acceptance of a reduction. considerable damage was inflicted by the explosion, and all the working-men who came to view it regretted only "that the whole concern was not blown into the air." on friday, october th, , an attempt to set fire to the factory of ainsworth and crompton, at bolton, did no damage; it was the third or fourth attempt in the same factory within a very short time. in the meeting of the town council of sheffield, on wednesday, january th, , the commissioner of police exhibited a cast-iron machine, made for the express purpose of producing an explosion, and found filled with four pounds of powder, and a fuse which had been lighted but had not taken effect, in the works of mr. kitchen, earl street, sheffield. on sunday, january th, , an explosion caused by a package of powder took place in the sawmill of bently & white, at bury, in lancashire, and produced considerable damage. on thursday, february st, , the soho wheel works, in sheffield, were set on fire and burnt up. here are six such cases in four months, all of which have their sole origin in the embitterment of the working-men against the employers. what sort of a social state it must be in which such things are possible i need hardly say. these facts are proof enough that in england, even in good business years, such as , the social war is avowed and openly carried on, and still the english bourgeoisie does not stop to reflect! but the case which speaks most loudly is that of the glasgow thugs, { a} which came up before the assizes from the rd to the th of january, . it appears from the proceedings that the cotton-spinners' union, which existed here from the year , possessed rare organisation and power. the members were bound by an oath to adhere to the decision of the majority, and had during every turnout a secret committee which was unknown to the mass of the members, and controlled the funds of the union absolutely. this committee fixed a price upon the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers and upon incendiarisms in mills. a mill was thus set on fire in which female knobsticks were employed in spinning in the place of men; a mrs. m'pherson, mother of one of these girls, was murdered, and both murderers sent to america at the expense of the association. as early as , a knobstick named m'quarry was shot at and wounded, for which deed the doer received twenty pounds from the union, but was discovered and transported for life. finally, in , in may, disturbances occurred in consequence of a turnout in the oatbank and mile end factories, in which perhaps a dozen knobsticks were maltreated. in july, of the same year, the disturbances still continued, and a certain smith, a knobstick, was so maltreated that he died. the committee was now arrested, an investigation begun, and the leading members found guilty of participation in conspiracies, maltreatment of knobsticks, and incendiarism in the mill of james and francis wood, and they were transported for seven years. what do our good germans say to this story? { b} the property-holding class, and especially the manufacturing portion of it which comes into direct contact with the working-men, declaims with the greatest violence against these unions, and is constantly trying to prove their uselessness to the working-men upon grounds which are economically perfectly correct, but for that very reason partially mistaken, and for the working-man's understanding totally without effect. the very zeal of the bourgeoisie shows that it is not disinterested in the matter; and apart from the indirect loss involved in a turnout, the state of the case is such that whatever goes into the pockets of the manufacturers comes of necessity out of those of the worker. so that even if the working-men did not know that the unions hold the emulation of their masters in the reduction of wages, at least in a measure, in check, they would still stand by the unions, simply to the injury of their enemies, the manufacturers. in war the injury of one party is the benefit of the other, and since the working-men are on a war-footing towards their employers, they do merely what the great potentates do when they get into a quarrel. beyond all other bourgeois is our friend dr. ure, the most furious enemy of the unions. he foams with indignation at the "secret tribunals" of the cotton-spinners, the most powerful section of the workers, tribunals which boast their ability to paralyse every disobedient manufacturer, { a} "and so bring ruin on the man who had given them profitable employment for many a year." he speaks of a time { b} "when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members." a pity that the english working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the roman plebs, thou modern menenius agrippa! finally, he relates the following: at one time the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power beyond all endurance. high wages, instead of awakening thankfulness towards the manufacturers and leading to intellectual improvement (in harmless study of sciences useful to the bourgeoisie, of course), in many cases produced pride and supplied funds for supporting rebellious spirits in strikes, with which a number of manufacturers were visited one after the other in a purely arbitrary manner. during an unhappy disturbance of this sort in hyde, dukinfield, and the surrounding neighbourhood, the manufacturers of the district, anxious lest they should be driven from the market by the french, belgians, and americans, addressed themselves to the machine-works of sharp, roberts & co., and requested mr. sharp to turn his inventive mind to the construction of an automatic mule in order "to emancipate the trade from galling slavery and impending ruin." { a} "he produced in the course of a few months a machine apparently instinct with the thought, feeling, and tact of the experienced workman--which even in its infancy displayed a new principle of regulation, ready in its mature state to fulfil the functions of a finished spinner. thus the iron man, as the operatives fitly call it, sprung out of the hands of our modern prometheus at the bidding of minerva--a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to confirm to great britain the empire of art. the news of this herculean prodigy spread dismay through the union, and even long before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the hydra of misrule." { b} ure proves further that the invention of the machine, with which four and five colours are printed at once, was a result of the disturbances among the calico printers; that the refractoriness of the yarn-dressers in the power-loom weaving mills gave rise to a new and perfected machine for warp-dressing, and mentions several other such cases. a few pages earlier this same ure gives himself a great deal of trouble to prove in detail that machinery is beneficial to the workers! but ure is not the only one; in the factory report, mr. ashworth, the manufacturer, and many another, lose no opportunity to express their wrath against the unions. these wise bourgeois, like certain governments, trace every movement which they do not understand, to the influence of ill-intentioned agitators, demagogues, traitors, spouting idiots, and ill-balanced youth. they declare that the paid agents of the unions are interested in the agitation because they live upon it, as though the necessity for this payment were not forced upon them by the bourgeois, who will give such men no employment! the incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all to what extent the social war has broken out all over england. no week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages, again by reason of the employment of knobsticks or the continuance of abuses, sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons. these strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. they are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. and when one examines a year's file of the _northern star_, the only sheet which reports all the movements of the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the towns and of country manufacture have united in associations, and have protested from time to time, by means of a general strike, against the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. and as schools of war, the unions are unexcelled. in them is developed the peculiar courage of the english. it is said on the continent that the english, and especially the working-men, are cowardly, that they cannot carry out a revolution because, unlike the french, they do not riot at intervals, because they apparently accept the bourgeois _regime_ so quietly. this is a complete mistake. the english working- men are second to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the french, but they fight differently. the french, who are by nature political, struggle against social evils with political weapons; the english, for whom politics exist only as a matter of interest, solely in the interest of bourgeois society, fight, not against the government, but directly against the bourgeoisie; and for the time, this can be done only in a peaceful manner. stagnation in business, and the want consequent upon it, engendered the revolt at lyons, in , in favour of the republic: in , at manchester, a similar cause gave rise to a universal turnout for the charter and higher wages. that courage is required for a turnout, often indeed much loftier courage, much bolder, firmer determination than for an insurrection, is self-evident. it is, in truth, no trifle for a working-man who knows want from experience, to face it with wife and children, to endure hunger and wretchedness for months together, and stand firm and unshaken through it all. what is death, what the galleys which await the french revolutionist, in comparison with gradual starvation, with the daily sight of a starving family, with the certainty of future revenge on the part of the bourgeoisie, all of which the english working-man chooses in preference to subjection under the yoke of the property-holding class? we shall meet later an example of this obstinate, unconquerable courage of men who surrender to force only when all resistance would be aimless and unmeaning. and precisely in this quiet perseverance, in this lasting determination which undergoes a hundred tests every day, the english working-man develops that side of his character which commands most respect. people who endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie. but apart from that, the english working-man has proved his courage often enough. that the turnout of had no further results came from the fact that the men were in part forced into it by the bourgeoisie, in part neither clear nor united as to its object. but aside from this, they have shown their courage often enough when the matter in question was a specific social one. not to mention the welsh insurrection of , a complete battle was waged in manchester in may, , during my residence there. pauling & henfrey, a brick firm, had increased the size of the bricks without raising wages, and sold the bricks, of course, at a higher price. the workers, to whom higher wages were refused, struck work, and the brickmakers' union declared war upon the firm. the firm, meanwhile, succeeded with great difficulty in securing hands from the neighbourhood, and among the knobsticks, against whom in the beginning intimidation was used, the proprietors set twelve men to guard the yard, all ex-soldiers and policemen, armed with guns. when intimidation proved unavailing, the brick-yard, which lay scarcely a hundred paces from an infantry barracks, was stormed at ten o'clock one night by a crowd of brickmakers, who advanced in military order, the first ranks armed with guns. they forced their way in, fired upon the watchmen as soon as they saw them, stamped out the wet bricks spread out to dry, tore down the piled-up rows of those already dry, demolished everything which came in their way, pressed into a building, where they destroyed the furniture and maltreated the wife of the overlooker who was living there. the watchmen, meanwhile, had placed themselves behind a hedge, whence they could fire safely and without interruption. the assailants stood before a burning brick-kiln, which threw a bright light upon them, so that every ball of their enemies struck home, while every one of their own shots missed its mark. nevertheless, the firing lasted half-an-hour, until the ammunition was exhausted, and the object of the visit--the demolition of all the destructible objects in the yard--was attained. then the military approached, and the brickmakers withdrew to eccles, three miles from manchester. a short time before reaching eccles they held roll-call, and each man was called according to his number in the section when they separated, only to fall the more certainly into the hands of the police, who were approaching from all sides. the number of the wounded must have been very considerable, but those only could be counted who were arrested. one of these had received three bullets (in the thigh, the calf, and the shoulder), and had travelled in spite of them more than four miles on foot. these people have proved that they, too, possess revolutionary courage, and do not shun a rain of bullets. and when an unarmed multitude, without a precise aim common to them all, are held in check in a shut-off market-place, whose outlets are guarded by a couple of policemen and dragoons, as happened in , this by no means proves a want of courage. on the contrary, the multitude would have stirred quite as little if the servants of public (_i.e_., of the bourgeois) order had not been present. where the working-people have a specific end in view, they show courage enough; as, for instance, in the attack upon birley's mill, which had later to be protected by artillery. in this connection, a word or two as to the respect for the law in england. true, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection. he knows that, even if an individual law should injure him, the whole fabric protects his interests; and more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness of order as established by the active will of one part of society, and the passive acceptance of the other, is the strongest support of his social position. because the english bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his god, the policeman's truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. but for the working-man quite otherwise! the working-man knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals to the law. it is ridiculous to assert that the english working-man fears the police, when every week in manchester policemen are beaten, and last year an attempt was made to storm a station-house secured by iron doors and shutters. the power of the police in the turnout of lay, as i have already said, in the want of a clearly defined object on the part of the working-men themselves. since the working-men do not respect the law, but simply submit to its power when they cannot change it, it is most natural that they should at least propose alterations in it, that they should wish to put a proletarian law in the place of the legal fabric of the bourgeoisie. this proposed law is the people's charter, which in form is purely political, and demands a democratic basis for the house of commons. chartism is the compact form of their opposition to the bourgeoisie. in the unions and turnouts opposition always remained isolated: it was single working-men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. if the fight became general, this was scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or, when it did happen intentionally, chartism was at the bottom of it. but in chartism it is the whole working class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself. chartism has proceeded from the democratic party which arose between and with and in the proletariat, gained strength during the french revolution, and came forth after the peace as the radical party. it had its headquarters then in birmingham and manchester, and later in london; extorted the reform bill from the oligarchs of the old parliament by a union with the liberal bourgeoisie, and has steadily consolidated itself, since then, as a more and more pronounced working-men's party in opposition to the bourgeoisie in a committee of the general working-men's association of london, with william lovett at its head, drew up the people's charter, whose six points are as follows: ( ) universal suffrage for every man who is of age, sane and unconvicted of crime; ( ) annual parliaments; ( ) payment of members of parliament, to enable poor men to stand for election; ( ) voting by ballot to prevent bribery and intimidation by the bourgeoisie; ( ) equal electoral districts to secure equal representation; and ( ) abolition of the even now merely nominal property qualification of pounds in land for candidates in order to make every voter eligible. these six points, which are all limited to the reconstitution of the house of commons, harmless as they seem, are sufficient to overthrow the whole english constitution, queen and lords included. the so-called monarchical and aristocratic elements of the constitution can maintain themselves only because the bourgeoisie has an interest in the continuance of their sham existence; and more than a sham existence neither possesses to-day. but as soon as real public opinion in its totality backs the house of commons, as soon as the house of commons incorporates the will, not of the bourgeoisie alone, but of the whole nation, it will absorb the whole power so completely that the last halo must fall from the head of the monarch and the aristocracy. the english working-man respects neither lords nor queen. the bourgeois, while in reality allowing them but little influence, yet offers to them personally a sham worship. the english chartist is politically a republican, though he rarely or never mentions the word, while he sympathises with the republican parties of all countries, and calls himself in preference a democrat. but he is more than a mere republican, his democracy is not simply political. chartism was from the beginning in chiefly a movement among the working-men, though not yet sharply separated from the bourgeoisie. the radicalism of the workers went hand in hand with the radicalism of the bourgeoisie; the charter was the shibboleth of both. they held their national convention every year in common, seeming to be one party. the lower middle-class was just then in a very bellicose and violent state of mind in consequence of the disappointment over the reform bill and of the bad business years of - , and viewed the boisterous chartist agitation with a very favourable eye. of the vehemence of this agitation no one in germany has any idea. the people were called upon to arm themselves, were frequently urged to revolt; pikes were got ready, as in the french revolution, and in , one stephens, a methodist parson, said to the assembled working-people of manchester: "you have no need to fear the power of government, the soldiers, bayonets, and cannon that are at the disposal of your oppressors; you have a weapon that is far mightier than all these, a weapon against which bayonets and cannon are powerless, and a child of ten years can wield it. you have only to take a couple of matches and a bundle of straw dipped in pitch, and i will see what the government and its hundreds of thousands of soldiers will do against this one weapon if it is used boldly." as early as that year the peculiarly social character of the working-men's chartism manifested itself. the same stephens said, in a meeting of , men on kersall moor, the mons sacer of manchester: "chartism, my friends, is no political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. chartism is a knife and fork question: the charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working-hours." the movements against the new poor law and for the ten hours' bill were already in the closest relation to chartism. in all the meetings of that time the tory oastler was active, and hundreds of petitions for improvements of the social condition of the workers were circulated along with the national petition for the people's charter adopted in birmingham. in the agitation continued as vigorously as ever, and when it began to relax somewhat at the end of the year, bussey, taylor, and frost hastened to call forth uprisings simultaneously in the north of england, in yorkshire, and wales. frost's plan being betrayed, he was obliged to open hostilities prematurely. those in the north heard of the failure of his attempt in time to withdraw. two months later, in january, , several so-called spy outbreaks took place in sheffield and bradford, in yorkshire, and the excitement gradually subsided. meanwhile the bourgeoisie turned its attention to more practical projects, more profitable for itself, namely the corn laws. the anti- corn law association was formed in manchester, and the consequence was a relaxation of the tie between the radical bourgeoisie and the proletariat. the working-men soon perceived that for them the abolition of the corn laws could be of little use, while very advantageous to the bourgeoisie; and they could therefore not be won for the project. the crisis of came on. agitation was once more as vigorous as in . but this time the rich manufacturing bourgeoisie, which was suffering severely under this particular crisis, took part in it. the anti-corn law league, as it was now called, assumed a decidedly revolutionary tone. its journals and agitators used undisguisedly revolutionary language, one very good reason for which was the fact that the conservative party had been in power since . as the chartists had previously done, these bourgeois leaders called upon the people to rebel; and the working-men who had most to suffer from the crisis were not inactive, as the year's national petition for the charter with its three and a half million signatures proves. in short, if the two radical parties had been somewhat estranged, they allied themselves once more. at a meeting of liberals and chartists held in manchester, february th, , a petition urging the repeal of the corn laws and the adoption of the charter was drawn up. the next day it was adopted by both parties. the spring and summer passed amidst violent agitation and increasing distress. the bourgeoisie was determined to carry the repeal of the corn laws with the help of the crisis, the want which it entailed, and the general excitement. at this time, the conservatives being in power, the liberal bourgeoisie half abandoned their law-abiding habits; they wished to bring about a revolution with the help of the workers. the working- men were to take the chestnuts from the fire to save the bourgeoisie from burning their own fingers. the old idea of a "holy month," a general strike, broached in by the chartists, was revived. this time, however, it was not the working-men who wished to quit work, but the manufacturers who wished to close their mills and send the operatives into the country parishes upon the property of the aristocracy, thus forcing the tory parliament and the tory ministry to repeal the corn laws. a revolt would naturally have followed, but the bourgeoisie stood safely in the background and could await the result without compromising itself if the worst came to the worst. at the end of july business began to improve; it was high time. in order not to lose the opportunity, three firms in staleybridge reduced wages in spite of the improvement. { } whether they did so of their own motion or in agreement with other manufacturers, especially those of the league, i do not know. two withdrew after a time, but the third, william bailey & brothers, stood firm, and told the objecting operatives that "if this did not please them, they had better go and play a bit." this contemptuous answer the hands received with cheers. they left the mill, paraded through the town, and called upon all their fellows to quit work. in a few hours every mill stood idle, and the operatives marched to mottram moor to hold a meeting. this was on august th. august th they proceeded to ashton and hyde five thousand strong, closed all the mills and coal-pits, and held meetings, in which, however, the question discussed was not, as the bourgeoisie had hoped, the repeal of the corn laws, but, "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work." august th they proceeded to manchester, unresisted by the authorities (all liberals), and closed the mills; on the th they were in stockport, where they met with the first resistance as they were storming the workhouse, the favourite child of the bourgeoisie. on the same day there was a general strike and disturbance in bolton, to which the authorities here, too, made no resistance. soon the uprising spread throughout the whole manufacturing district, and all employments, except harvesting and the production of food, came to a standstill. but the rebellious operatives were quiet. they were driven into this revolt without wishing it. the manufacturers, with the single exception of the tory birley, in manchester, had, _contrary to their custom_, not opposed it. the thing had begun without the working-men's having any distinct end in view, for which reason they were all united in the determination not to be shot at for the benefit of the corn law repealing bourgeoisie. for the rest, some wanted to carry the charter, others who thought this premature wished merely to secure the wages rate of . on this point the whole insurrection was wrecked. if it had been from the beginning an intentional, determined working-men's insurrection, it would surely have carried its point; but these crowds who had been driven into the streets by their masters, against their own will, and with no definite purpose, could do nothing. meanwhile the bourgeoisie, which had not moved a finger to carry the alliance of february th into effect, soon perceived that the working-men did not propose to become its tools, and that the illogical manner in which it had abandoned its law-abiding standpoint threatened danger. it therefore resumed its law-abiding attitude, and placed itself upon the side of government as against the working-men. it swore in trusty retainers as special constables (the german merchants in manchester took part in this ceremony, and marched in an entirely superfluous manner through the city with their cigars in their mouths and thick truncheons in their hands). it gave the command to fire upon the crowd in preston, so that the unintentional revolt of the people stood all at once face to face, not only with the whole military power of the government, but with the whole property-holding class as well. the working-men, who had no especial aim, separated gradually, and the insurrection came to an end without evil results. later, the bourgeoisie was guilty of one shameful act after another, tried to whitewash itself by expressing a horror of popular violence by no means consistent with its own revolutionary language of the spring; laid the blame of insurrection upon chartist instigators, whereas it had itself done more than all of them together to bring about the uprising; and resumed its old attitude of sanctifying the name of the law with a shamelessness perfectly unequalled. the chartists, who were all but innocent of bringing about this uprising, who simply did what the bourgeoisie meant to do when they made the most of their opportunity, were prosecuted and convicted, while the bourgeoisie escaped without loss, and had, besides, sold off its old stock of goods with advantage during the pause in work. the fruit of the uprising was the decisive separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. the chartists had not hitherto concealed their determination to carry the charter at all costs, even that of a revolution; the bourgeoisie, which now perceived, all at once, the danger with which any violent change threatened its position, refused to hear anything further of physical force, and proposed to attain its end by moral force, as though this were anything else than the direct or indirect threat of physical force. this was one point of dissension, though even this was removed later by the assertion of the chartists (who are at least as worthy of being believed as the bourgeoisie) that they, too, refrained from appealing to physical force. the second point of dissension and the main one, which brought chartism to light in its purity, was the repeal of the corn laws. in this the bourgeoisie was directly interested, the proletariat not. the chartists therefore divided into two parties whose political programmes agreed literally, but which were nevertheless thoroughly different and incapable of union. at the birmingham national convention, in january, , sturge, the representative of the radical bourgeoisie, proposed that the name of the charter be omitted from the rules of the chartist association, nominally because this name had become connected with recollections of violence during the insurrection, a connection, by the way, which had existed for years, and against which mr. sturge had hitherto advanced no objection. the working-men refused to drop the name, and when mr. sturge was outvoted, that worthy quaker suddenly became loyal, betook himself out of the hall, and founded a "complete suffrage association" within the radical bourgeoisie. so repugnant had these recollections become to the jacobinical bourgeoisie, that he altered even the name universal suffrage into the ridiculous title, complete suffrage. the working-men laughed at him and quietly went their way. from this moment chartism was purely a working-man's cause freed from all bourgeois elements. the "complete" journals, the _weekly dispatch_, _weekly chronicle_, _examiner_, etc., fell gradually into the sleepy tone of the other liberal sheets, espoused the cause of free trade, attacked the ten hours' bill and all exclusively working-men's demands, and let their radicalism as a whole fall rather into the background. the radical bourgeoisie joined hands with the liberals against the working-men in every collision, and in general made the corn law question, which for the english is the free trade question, their main business. they thereby fell under the dominion of the liberal bourgeoisie, and now play a most pitiful role. the chartist working-men, on the contrary, espoused with redoubled zeal all the struggles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. free competition has caused the workers suffering enough to be hated by them; its apostles, the bourgeoisie, are their declared enemies. the working- man has only disadvantages to await from the complete freedom of competition. the demands hitherto made by him, the ten hours' bill, protection of the workers against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new poor law, all of the things which belong to chartism quite as essentially as the "six points," are directly opposed to free competition and free trade. no wonder, then, that the working-men will not hear of free trade and the repeal of the corn laws (a fact incomprehensible to the whole english bourgeoisie), and while at least wholly indifferent to the corn law question, are most deeply embittered against its advocates. this question is precisely the point at which the proletariat separates from the bourgeoisie, chartism from radicalism; and the bourgeois understanding cannot comprehend this, because it cannot comprehend the proletariat. therein lies the difference between chartist democracy and all previous political bourgeois democracy. chartism is of an essentially social nature, a class movement. the "six points" which for the radical bourgeois are the beginning and end of the matter, which are meant, at the utmost, to call forth certain further reforms of the constitution, are for the proletarian a mere means to further ends. "political power our means, social happiness our end," is now the clearly formulated war- cry of the chartists. the "knife and fork question" of the preacher stephens was a truth for a part of the chartists only, in , it is a truth for all of them in . there is no longer a mere politician among the chartists, and even though their socialism is very little developed, though their chief remedy for poverty has hitherto consisted in the land-allotment system, which was superseded { } by the introduction of manufacture, though their chief practical propositions are apparently of a reactionary nature, yet these very measures involve the alternative that they must either succumb to the power of competition once more and restore the old state of things, or they must themselves entirely overcome competition and abolish it. on the other hand, the present indefinite state of chartism, the separation from the purely political party, involves that precisely the characteristic feature, its social aspect, will have to be further developed. the approach to socialism cannot fail, especially when the next crisis directs the working-men by force of sheer want to social instead of political remedies. and a crisis must follow the present active state of industry and commerce in at the latest, and probably in ; one, too, which will far exceed in extent and violence all former crises. the working- men will carry their charter, naturally; but meanwhile they will learn to see clearly with regard to many points which they can make by means of it and of which they now know very little. meanwhile the socialist agitation also goes forward. english socialism comes under our consideration so far only as it affects the working-class. the english socialists demand the gradual introduction of possession in common in home colonies embracing two to three thousand persons who shall carry on both agriculture and manufacture and enjoy equal rights and equal education. they demand greater facility of obtaining divorce, the establishment of a rational government, with complete freedom of conscience and the abolition of punishment, the same to be replaced by a rational treatment of the offender. these are their practical measures, their theoretical principles do not concern us here. english socialism arose with owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. the socialists are thoroughly tame and peaceable, accept our existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion. yet they are so dogmatic that success by this method is for them, and for their principles as at present formulated, utterly hopeless. while bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order, and refuse to acknowledge that the corruption wrought by private interests and hypocrisy in the property-holding class is much greater. they acknowledge no historic development, and wish to place the nation in a state of communism at once, overnight, not by the unavoidable march of its political development up to the point at which this transition becomes both possible and necessary. they understand, it is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal. they preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of england. they acknowledge only a psychological development, a development of man in the abstract, out of all relation to the past, whereas the whole world rests upon that past, the individual man included. hence they are too abstract, too metaphysical, and accomplish little. they are recruited in part from the working-class, of which they have enlisted but a very small fraction representing, however, its most educated and solid elements. in its present form, socialism can never become the common creed of the working-class; it must condescend to return for a moment to the chartist standpoint. but the true proletarian socialism having passed through chartism, purified of its bourgeois elements, assuming the form which it has already reached in the minds of many socialists and chartist leaders (who are nearly all socialists), must, within a short time, play a weighty part in the history of the development of the english people. english socialism, the basis of which is much more ample than that of the french, is behind it in theoretical development, will have to recede for a moment to the french standpoint in order to proceed beyond it later. meanwhile the french, too, will develop farther. english socialism affords the most pronounced expression of the prevailing absence of religion among the working-men, an expression so pronounced indeed that the mass of the working-men, being unconsciously and merely practically irreligious, often draw back before it. but here, too, necessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class. hence it is evident that the working-men's movement is divided into two sections, the chartists and the socialists. the chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. the socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. the union of socialism with chartism, the reproduction of french communism in an english manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of england. meanwhile, political and social development will proceed, and will foster this new party, this new departure of chartism. these different sections of working-men, often united, often separated, trades unionists, chartists, and socialists, have founded on their own hook numbers of schools and reading-rooms for the advancement of education. every socialist, and almost every chartist institution, has such a place, and so too have many trades. here the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie; and, in the reading-rooms, proletarian journals and books alone, or almost alone, are to be found. these arrangements are very dangerous for the bourgeoisie, which has succeeded in withdrawing several such institutes, "mechanics' institutes," from proletarian influences, and making them organs for the dissemination of the sciences useful to the bourgeoisie. here the natural sciences are now taught, which may draw the working-men away from the opposition to the bourgeoisie, and perhaps place in their hands the means of making inventions which bring in money for the bourgeoisie; while for the working-man the acquaintance with the natural sciences is utterly useless _now_ when it too often happens that he never gets the slightest glimpse of nature in his large town with his long working-hours. here political economy is preached, whose idol is free competition, and whose sum and substance for the working-man is this, that he cannot do anything more rational than resign himself to starvation. here all education is tame, flabby, subservient to the ruling politics and religion, so that for the working-man it is merely a constant sermon upon quiet obedience, passivity, and resignation to his fate. the mass of working-men naturally have nothing to do with these institutes, and betake themselves to the proletarian reading-rooms and to the discussion of matters which directly concern their own interests, whereupon the self-sufficient bourgeoisie says its _dixi et salvavi_, and turns with contempt from a class which "prefers the angry ranting of ill- meaning demagogues to the advantages of solid education." that, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with the interested cant of the bourgeoisie, the frequent lectures upon scientific, aesthetic, and economic subjects prove which are delivered especially in the socialist institutes, and very well attended. i have often heard working-men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, astronomical, and other subjects, with more knowledge than most "cultivated" bourgeois in germany possess. and in how great a measure the english proletariat has succeeded in attaining independent education is shown especially by the fact that the epoch-making products of modern philosophical, political, and poetical literature are read by working-men almost exclusively. the bourgeois, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trembles, blesses, and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletarian has open eyes for it, and studies it with pleasure and success. in this respect the socialists, especially, have done wonders for the education of the proletariat. they have translated the french materialists, helvetius, holbach, diderot, etc., and disseminated them, with the best english works, in cheap editions. strauss' "life of jesus" and proudhon's "property" also circulate among the working-men only. shelley, the genius, the prophet, shelley, and byron, with his glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our existing society, find most of their readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie owns only castrated editions, family editions, cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of to-day. the two great practical philosophers of latest date, bentham and godwin, are, especially the latter, almost exclusively the property of the proletariat; for though bentham has a school within the radical bourgeoisie, it is only the proletariat and the socialists who have succeeded in developing his teachings a step forward. the proletariat has formed upon this basis a literature, which consists chiefly of journals and pamphlets, and is far in advance of the whole bourgeois literature in intrinsic worth. on this point more later. one more point remains to be noticed. the factory operatives, and especially those of the cotton district, form the nucleus of the labour movement. lancashire, and especially manchester, is the seat of the most powerful unions, the central point of chartism, the place which numbers most socialists. the more the factory system has taken possession of a branch of industry, the more the working-men employed in it participate in the labour movement; the sharper the opposition between working-men and capitalists, the clearer the proletarian consciousness in the working- men. the small masters of birmingham, though they suffer from the crises, still stand upon an unhappy middle ground between proletarian chartism and shopkeepers' radicalism. but, in general, all the workers employed in manufacture are won for one form or the other of resistance to capital and bourgeoisie; and all are united upon this point, that they, as working-men, a title of which they are proud, and which is the usual form of address in chartist meetings, form a separate class, with separate interests and principles, with a separate way of looking at things in contrast with that of all property owners; and that in this class reposes the strength and the capacity of development of the nation. the mining proletariat. the production of raw materials and fuel for a manufacture so colossal as that of england requires a considerable number of workers. but of all the materials needed for its industries (except wool, which belongs to the agricultural districts), england produces only the minerals: the metals and the coal. while cornwall possesses rich copper, tin, zinc, and lead mines, staffordshire, wales, and other districts yield great quantities of iron, and almost the whole north and west of england, central scotland, and certain districts of ireland, produce a superabundance of coal. { } in the cornish mines about , men, and , women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. the condition of these workers seems, according to the children's employment commission's reports, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the english often enough boast of their strong, bold miners, who follow the veins of mineral below the bottom of the very sea. but in the matter of the health of these workers, this same children's employment commission's report judges differently. it shows in dr. barham's intelligent report how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust and the smoke of blasting powder, such as prevails in the mines, seriously affects the lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs; that wearing toil, and especially the climbing up and down of ladders, upon which even vigorous young men have to spend in some mines more than an hour a day, and which precedes and follows daily work, contributes greatly to the development of these evils, so that men who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of women who work above ground; that many die young of galloping consumption, and most miners at middle age of slow consumption, that they age prematurely and become unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years, that many are attacked by acute inflammations of the respiratory organs when exposed to the sudden change from the warm air of the shaft (after climbing the ladder in profuse perspiration), to the cold wind above ground, and that these acute inflammations are very frequently fatal. work above ground, breaking and sorting the ore, is done by girls and children, and is described as very wholesome, being done in the open air. in the north of england, on the borders of northumberland and durham, are the extensive lead mines of alston moor. the reports from this district { } agree almost wholly with those from cornwall. here, too, there are complaints of want of oxygen, excessive dust, powder smoke, carbonic acid gas, and sulphur, in the atmosphere of the workings. in consequence, the miners here, as in cornwall, are small of stature, and nearly all suffer from the thirtieth year throughout life from chest affections, which end, especially when this work is persisted in, as is almost always the case, in consumption, so greatly shortening the average of life of these people. if the miners of this district are somewhat longer lived than those of cornwall, this is the case, because they do not enter the mines before reaching the nineteenth year, while in cornwall, as we have seen, this work is begun in the twelfth year. nevertheless, the majority die here, too, between forty and fifty years of age, according to medical testimony. of miners, whose death was entered upon the public register of the district, and who attained an average of years, had died of consumption and of asthma. in the surrounding districts, allendale, stanhope, and middleton, the average length of life was , , and years respectively, and the deaths from chest affections composed , , and per cent. of the whole number. let us compare these figures with the so-called swedish tables, detailed tables of mortality embracing all the inhabitants of sweden, and recognised in england as the most correct standard hitherto attainable for the average length of life of the british working-class. according to them, male persons who survive the nineteenth year attain an average of . years; but, according to this, the north of england miners are robbed by their work of an average of ten years of life. yet the swedish tables are accepted as the standard of longevity of the _workers_, and present, therefore, the average chances of life as affected by the unfavourable conditions in which the proletariat lives, a standard of longevity less than the normal one. in this district we find again the lodging-houses and sleeping-places with which we have already become acquainted in the towns, and in quite as filthy, disgusting, and overcrowded a state as there. commissioner mitchell visited one such sleeping barrack, feet long, feet wide, and arranged for the reception of men and boys, or persons altogether, one-half of whom slept above the other in berths as on shipboard. there was no opening for the escape of the foul air; and, although no one had slept in this pen for three nights preceding the visit, the smell and the atmosphere were such that commissioner mitchell could not endure it a moment. what must it be through a hot summer night, with fifty-six occupants? and this is not the steerage of an american slave ship, it is the dwelling of free-born britons! let us turn now to the most important branch of british mining, the iron and coal mines, which the children's employment commission treats in common, and with all the detail which the importance of the subject demands. nearly the whole of the first part of this report is devoted to the condition of the workers employed in these mines. after the detailed description which i have furnished of the state of the industrial workers, i shall, however, be able to be as brief in dealing with this subject as the scope of the present work requires. in the coal and iron mines which are worked in pretty much the same way, children of four, five, and seven years are employed. they are set to transporting the ore or coal loosened by the miner from its place to the horse-path or the main shaft, and to opening and shutting the doors (which separate the divisions of the mine and regulate its ventilation) for the passage of workers and material. for watching the doors the smallest children are usually employed, who thus pass twelve hours daily, in the dark, alone, sitting usually in damp passages without even having work enough to save them from the stupefying, brutalising tedium of doing nothing. the transport of coal and iron-stone, on the other hand, is very hard labour, the stuff being shoved in large tubs, without wheels, over the uneven floor of the mine; often over moist clay, or through water, and frequently up steep inclines and through paths so low-roofed that the workers are forced to creep on hands and knees. for this more wearing labour, therefore, older children and half-grown girls are employed. one man or two boys per tub are employed, according to circumstances; and, if two boys, one pushes and the other pulls. the loosening of the ore or coal, which is done by men or strong youths of sixteen years or more, is also very weary work. the usual working-day is eleven to twelve hours, often longer; in scotland it reaches fourteen hours, and double time is frequent, when all the employees are at work below ground twenty-four, and even thirty-six hours at a stretch. set times for meals are almost unknown, so that these people eat when hunger and time permit. the standard of living of the miners is in general described as fairly good and their wages high in comparison with those of the agricultural labourers surrounding them (who, however, live at starvation rates), except in certain parts of scotland and in the irish mines, where great misery prevails. we shall have occasion to return later to this statement, which, by the way, is merely relative, implying comparison to the poorest class in all england. meanwhile, we shall consider the evils which arise from the present method of mining, and the reader may judge whether any pay in money can indemnify the miner for such suffering. the children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and iron-stone all complain of being over-tired. even in the most recklessly conducted industrial establishments there is no such universal and exaggerated overwork. the whole report proves this, with a number of examples on every page. it is constantly happening that children throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night asleep on the road. it seems to be a universal practice among these children to spend sunday in bed to recover in some degree from the over- exertion of the week. church and school are visited by but few, and even of these the teachers complain of their great sleepiness and the want of all eagerness to learn. the same thing is true of the elder girls and women. they are overworked in the most brutal manner. this weariness, which is almost always carried to a most painful pitch, cannot fail to affect the constitution. the first result of such over-exertion is the diversion of vitality to the one-sided development of the muscles, so that those especially of the arms, legs, and back, of the shoulders and chest, which are chiefly called into activity in pushing and pulling, attain an uncommonly vigorous development, while all the rest of the body suffers and is atrophied from want of nourishment. more than all else the stature suffers, being stunted and retarded; nearly all miners are short, except those of leicestershire and warwickshire, who work under exceptionally favourable conditions. further, among boys as well as girls, puberty is retarded, among the former often until the eighteenth year; indeed, a nineteen years old boy appeared before commissioner symonds, showing no evidence beyond that of the teeth, that he was more than eleven or twelve years old. this prolongation of the period of childhood is at bottom nothing more than a sign of checked development, which does not fail to bear fruit in later years. distortions of the legs, knees bent inwards and feet bent outwards, deformities of the spinal column and other malformations, appear the more readily in constitutions thus weakened, in consequence of the almost universally constrained position during work; and they are so frequent that in yorkshire and lancashire, as in northumberland and durham, the assertion is made by many witnesses, not only by physicians, that a miner may be recognised by his shape among a hundred other persons. the women seem to suffer especially from this work, and are seldom, if ever, as straight as other women. there is testimony here, too, to the fact that deformities of the pelvis and consequent difficult, even fatal, childbearing arise from the work of women in the mines. but apart from these local deformities, the coal miners suffer from a number of special affections easily explained by the nature of the work. diseases of the digestive organs are first in order; want of appetite, pains in the stomach, nausea, and vomiting, are most frequent, with violent thirst, which can be quenched only with the dirty, lukewarm water of the mine; the digestion is checked and all the other affections are thus invited. diseases of the heart, especially hypertrophy, inflammation of the heart and pericardium, contraction of the _auriculo-ventricular_ communications and the entrance of the _aorta_ are also mentioned repeatedly as diseases of the miners, and are readily explained by overwork; and the same is true of the almost universal rupture which is a direct consequence of protracted over-exertion. in part from the same cause and in part from the bad, dust-filled atmosphere mixed with carbonic acid and hydrocarbon gas, which might so readily be avoided, there arise numerous painful and dangerous affections of the lungs, especially asthma, which in some districts appears in the fortieth, in others in the thirtieth year in most of the miners, and makes them unfit for work in a short time. among those employed in wet workings the oppression in the chest naturally appears much earlier; in some districts of scotland between the twentieth and thirtieth years, during which time the affected lungs are especially susceptible to inflammations and diseases of a feverish nature. the peculiar disease of workers of this sort is "black spittle," which arises from the saturation of the whole lung with coal particles, and manifests itself in general debility, headache, oppression of the chest, and thick, black mucous expectoration. in some districts this disease appears in a mild form; in others, on the contrary, it is wholly incurable, especially in scotland. here, besides the symptoms just mentioned, which appear in an intensified form, short, wheezing, breathing, rapid pulse (exceeding per minute), and abrupt coughing, with increasing leanness and debility, speedily make the patient unfit for work. every case of this disease ends fatally. dr. mackellar, in pencaitland, east lothian, testified that in all the coal mines which are properly ventilated this disease is unknown, while it frequently happens that miners who go from well to ill-ventilated mines are seized by it. the profit-greed of mine owners which prevents the use of ventilators is therefore responsible for the fact that this working-men's disease exists at all. rheumatism, too, is, with the exception of the warwick and leicestershire workers, a universal disease of the coal miners, and arises especially from the frequently damp working-places. the consequence of all these diseases is that, in all districts _without exception_, the coal miners age early and become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year, though this is different in different places. a coal miner who can follow his calling after the th or th year is a very great rarity indeed. it is universally recognised that such workers enter upon old age at forty. this applies to those who loosen the coal from the bed; the loaders, who have constantly to lift heavy blocks of coal into the tubs, age with the twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so that it is proverbial in the coal mining districts that the loaders are old before they are young. that this premature old age is followed by the early death of the colliers is a matter of course, and a man who reaches sixty is a great exception among them. even in south staffordshire, where the mines are comparatively wholesome, few men reach their fifty-first year. along with this early superannuation of the workers we naturally find, just as in the case of the mills, frequent lack of employment of the elder men, who are often supported by very young children. if we sum up briefly the results of the work in coal mines, we find, as dr. southwood smith, one of the commissioners, does, that through prolonged childhood on the one hand and premature age on the other, that period of life in which the human being is in full possession of his powers, the period of manhood, is greatly shortened, while the length of life in general is below the average. this, too, on the debit side of the bourgeoisie's reckoning! all this deals only with the average of the english coal mines. but there are many in which the state of things is much worse, those, namely, in which thin seams of coal are worked. the coal would be too expensive if a part of the adjacent sand and clay were removed; so the mine owners permit only the seams to be worked; whereby the passages which elsewhere are four or five feet high and more are here kept so low that to stand upright in them is not to be thought of. the working-man lies on his side and loosens the coal with his pick; resting upon his elbow as a pivot, whence follow inflammations of the joint, and in cases where he is forced to kneel, of the knee also. the women and children who have to transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while a man behind pushes with hands and head. the pushing with the head engenders local irritations, painful swellings, and ulcers. in many cases, too, the shafts are wet, so that these workers have to crawl through dirty or salt water several inches deep, being thus exposed to a special irritation of the skin. it can be readily imagined how greatly the diseases already peculiar to the miners are fostered by this especially frightful, slavish toil. but these are not all the evils which descend upon the head of the coal miner. in the whole british empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. the coal mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. the hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills every one within its reach. such explosions take place, in one mine or another, nearly every day; on september th, , one killed men in haswell colliery, durham. the carbonic acid gas, which also develops in great quantities, accumulates in the deeper parts of the mine, frequently reaching the height of a man, and suffocates every one who gets into it. the doors which separate the sections of the mines are meant to prevent the propagation of explosions and the movement of the gases; but since they are entrusted to small children, who often fall asleep or neglect them, this means of prevention is illusory. a proper ventilation of the mines by means of fresh air-shafts could almost entirely remove the injurious effects of both these gases. but for this purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare, preferring to command the working-men to use the davy lamp, which is wholly useless because of its dull light, and is, therefore, usually replaced by a candle. if an explosion occurs, the recklessness of the miner is blamed, though the bourgeois might have made the explosion well-nigh impossible by supplying good ventilation. further, every few days the roof of a working falls in, and buries or mangles the workers employed in it. it is the interest of the bourgeois to have the seams worked out as completely as possible, and hence the accidents of this sort. then, too, the ropes by which the men descend into the mines are often rotten, and break, so that the unfortunates fall, and are crushed. all these accidents, and i have no room for special cases, carry off yearly, according to the _mining journal_, some fourteen hundred human beings. the _manchester guardian_ reports at least two or three accidents every week for lancashire alone. in nearly all mining districts the people composing the coroner's juries are, in almost all cases, dependent upon the mine owners, and where this is not the case, immemorial custom insures that the verdict shall be: "accidental death." besides, the jury takes very little interest in the state of the mine, because it does not understand anything about the matter. but the children's employment commission does not hesitate to make the mine owners directly responsible for the greater number of these cases. as to the education and morals of the mining population, they are, according to the children's employment commission, pretty good in cornwall, and excellent in alston moor; in the coal districts, in general, they are, on the contrary, reported as on an excessively low plane. the workers live in the country in neglected regions, and if they do their weary work, no human being outside the police force troubles himself about them. hence, and from the tender age at which children are put to work, it follows that their mental education is wholly neglected. the day schools are not within their reach, the evening and sunday schools mere shams, the teachers worthless. hence, few can read and still fewer write. the only point upon which their eyes are as yet open is the fact that their wages are far too low for their hateful and dangerous work. to church they go seldom or never; all the clergy complain of their irreligion as beyond comparison. as a matter of fact, their ignorance of religious and of secular things, alike, is such that the ignorance of the factory operatives, shown in numerous examples in the foregoing pages, is trifling in comparison with it. the categories of religion are known to them only from the terms of their oaths. their morality is destroyed by their work itself. that the overwork of all miners must engender drunkenness is self-evident. as to their sexual relations, men, women, and children work in the mines, in many cases, wholly naked, and in most cases, nearly so, by reason of the prevailing heat, and the consequences in the dark, lonely mines may be imagined. the number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground; but proves too, that the illegitimate intercourse of the sexes has not here, as in the great cities, sunk to the level of prostitution. the labour of women entails the same consequences as in the factories, dissolves the family, and makes the mother totally incapable of household work. when the children's employment commission's report was laid before parliament, lord ashley hastened to bring in a bill wholly forbidding the work of women in the mines, and greatly limiting that of children. the bill was adopted, but has remained a dead letter in most districts, because no mine inspectors were appointed to watch over its being carried into effect. the evasion of the law is very easy in the country districts in which the mines are situated; and no one need be surprised that the miners' union laid before the home secretary an official notice, last year, that in the duke of hamilton's coal mines in scotland, more than sixty women were at work; or that the _manchester guardian_ reported that a girl perished in an explosion in a mine near wigan, and no one troubled himself further about the fact that an infringement of the law was thus revealed. in single cases the employment of women may have been discontinued, but in general the old state of things remains as before. these are, however, not all the afflictions known to the coal miners. the bourgeoisie, not content with ruining the health of these people, keeping them in danger of sudden loss of life, robbing them of all opportunity for education, plunders them in other directions in the most shameless manner. the truck system is here the rule, not the exception, and is carried on in the most direct and undisguised manner. the cottage system, likewise, is universal, and here almost a necessity; but it is used here, too, for the better plundering of the workers. to these means of oppression must be added all sorts of direct cheating. while coal is sold by weight, the worker's wages are reckoned chiefly by measure; and when his tub is not perfectly full he receives no pay whatever, while he gets not a farthing for over-measure. if there is more than a specified quantity of dust in the tub, a matter which depends much less upon the miner than upon the nature of the seam, he not only loses his whole wage but is fined besides. the fine system in general is so highly perfected in the coal mines, that a poor devil who has worked the whole week and comes for his wages, sometimes learns from the overseer, who fine at discretion and without summoning the workers, that he not only has no wages but must pay so and so much in fines extra! the overseer has, in general, absolute power over wages; he notes the work done, and can please himself as to what he pays the worker, who is forced to take his word. in some mines, where the pay is according to weight, false decimal scales are used, whose weights are not subject to the inspection of the authorities; in one coal mine there was actually a regulation that any workman who intended to complain of the falseness of the scales _must give notice to the overseer three weeks in advance_! in many districts, especially in the north of england, it is customary to engage the workers by the year; they pledge themselves to work for no other employer during that time, but the mine owner by no means pledges himself to give them work, so that they are often without it for months together, and if they seek elsewhere, they are sent to the treadmill for six weeks for breach of contract. in other contracts, work to the amount of s. every days, is promised the miners, but not furnished, in others still, the employers advance the miners small sums to be worked out afterwards, thus binding the debtors to themselves. in the north, the custom is general of keeping the payment of wages one week behindhand, chaining the miners in this way to their work. and to complete the slavery of these enthralled workers, nearly all the justices of the peace in the coal districts are mine owners themselves, or relatives or friends of mine owners, and possess almost unlimited power in these poor, uncivilised regions where there are few newspapers, these few in the service of the ruling class, and but little other agitation. it is almost beyond conception how these poor coal miners have been plundered and tyrannised over by justices of the peace acting as judges in their own cause. so it went on for a long time. the workers did not know any better than that they were there for the purpose of being swindled out of their very lives. but gradually, even among them, and especially in the factory districts, where contact with the more intelligent operatives could not fail of its effect, there arose a spirit of opposition to the shameless oppression of the "coal kings." the men began to form unions and strike from time to time. in civilised districts they joined the chartists body and soul. the great coal district of the north of england, shut off from all industrial intercourse, remained backward until, after many efforts, partly of the chartists and partly of the more intelligent miners themselves, a general spirit of opposition arose in . such a movement seized the workers of northumberland and durham that they placed themselves at the forefront of a general union of coal miners throughout the kingdom, and appointed w. p. roberts, a chartist solicitor, of bristol, their "attorney general," he having distinguished himself in earlier chartist trials. the union soon spread over a great majority of the districts; agents were appointed in all directions, who held meetings everywhere and secured new members; at the first conference of delegates, in manchester, in , there were , members represented, and at glasgow, six months later, at the second conference, , . here all the affairs of the coal miners were discussed and decisions as to the greater strikes arrived at. several journals were founded, especially the _miners' advocate_, at newcastle-upon-tyne, for defending the rights of the miners. on march st, , the contracts of all the miners of northumberland and durham expired. roberts was empowered to draw up a new agreement, in which the men demanded: ( ) payment by weight instead of measure; ( ) determination of weight by means of ordinary scales subject to the public inspectors; ( ) half-yearly renewal of contracts; ( ) abolition of the fines system and payment according to work actually done; ( ) the employers to guarantee to miners in their exclusive service at least four days' work per week, or wages for the same. this agreement was submitted to the "coal kings," and a deputation appointed to negotiate with them; they answered, however, that for them the union did not exist, that they had to deal with single workmen only, and should never recognise the union. they also submitted an agreement of their own which ignored all the foregoing points, and was, naturally, refused by the miners. war was thus declared. on march st, , , miners laid down their picks, and every mine in the county stood empty. the funds of the union were so considerable that for several months a weekly contribution of s. d. could be assured to each family. while the miners were thus putting the patience of their masters to the test, roberts organised with incomparable perseverance both strike and agitation, arranged for the holding of meetings, traversed england from one end to the other, preached peaceful and legal agitation, and carried on a crusade against the despotic justices of the peace and truck masters, such as had never been known in england. this he had begun at the beginning of the year. wherever a miner had been condemned by a justice of the peace, he obtained a _habeas corpus_ from the court of queen's bench, brought his client to london, and always secured an acquittal. thus, january th, judge williams of queen's bench acquitted three miners condemned by the justices of the peace of bilston, south staffordshire; the offence of these people was that they refused to work in a place which threatened to cave in, and had actually caved in before their return! on an earlier occasion, judge patteson had acquitted six working-men, so that the name roberts began to be a terror to the mine owners. in preston four of his clients were in jail. in the first week of january he proceeded thither to investigate the case on the spot, but found, when he arrived, the condemned all released before the expiration of the sentence. in manchester there were seven in jail; roberts obtained a _habeas corpus_ and acquittal for all from judge wightman. in prescott nine coal miners were in jail, accused of creating a disturbance in st. helen's, south lancashire, and awaiting trial; when roberts arrived upon the spot, they were released at once. all this took place in the first half of february. in april, roberts released a miner from jail in derby, four in wakefield, and four in leicester. so it went on for a time until these dogberries came to have some respect for the miners. the truck system shared the same fate. one after another roberts brought the disreputable mine owners before the courts, and compelled the reluctant justices of the peace to condemn them; such dread of this "lightning" "attorney general" who seemed to be everywhere at once spread among them, that at belper, for instance, upon roberts' arrival, a truck firm published the following notice: "notice!" "pentrich coal mine. "the messrs. haslam think it necessary, in order to prevent all mistakes, to announce that all persons employed in their colliery will receive their wages wholly in cash, and may expend them when and as they choose to do. if they purchase goods in the shops of messrs. haslam they will receive them as heretofore at wholesale prices, but they are not expected to make their purchases there, and work and wages will be continued as usual whether purchases are made in these shops or elsewhere." this triumph aroused the greatest jubilation throughout the english working-class, and brought the union a mass of new members. meanwhile the strike in the north was proceeding. not a hand stirred, and newcastle, the chief coal port, was so stripped of its commodity that coal had to be brought from the scotch coast, in spite of the proverb. at first, while the union's funds held out, all went well, but towards summer the struggle became much more painful for the miners. the greatest want prevailed among them; they had no money, for the contributions of the workers of all branches of industry in england availed little among the vast number of strikers, who were forced to borrow from the small shopkeepers at a heavy loss. the whole press, with the single exception of the few proletarian journals, was against them; the bourgeois, even the few among them who might have had enough sense of justice to support the miners, learnt from the corrupt liberal and conservative sheets only lies about them. a deputation of twelve miners who went to london received a sum from the proletariat there, but this, too, availed little among the mass who needed support. yet, in spite of all this, the miners remained steadfast, and what is even more significant, were quiet and peaceable in the face of all the hostilities and provocation of the mine owners and their faithful servants. no act of revenge was carried out, not a renegade was maltreated, not one single theft committed. thus the strike had continued well on towards four months, and the mine owners still had no prospect of getting the upper hand. one way was, however, still open to them. they remembered the cottage system; it occurred to them that the houses of the rebellious spirits were their property. in july, notice to quit was served the workers, and, in a week, the whole forty thousand were put out of doors. this measure was carried out with revolting cruelty. the sick, the feeble, old men and little children, even women in childbirth, were mercilessly turned from their beds and cast into the roadside ditches. one agent dragged by the hair from her bed, and into the street, a woman in the pangs of childbirth. soldiers and police in crowds were present, ready to fire at the first symptom of resistance, on the slightest hint of the justices of the peace, who had brought about the whole brutal procedure. this, too, the working-men endured without resistance. the hope had been that the men would use violence; they were spurred on with all force to infringements of the laws, to furnish an excuse for making an end of the strike by the intervention of the military. the homeless miners, remembering the warnings of their attorney general, remained unmoved, set up their household goods upon the moors or the harvested fields, and held out. some, who had no other place, encamped on the roadsides and in ditches, others upon land belonging to other people, whereupon they were prosecuted, and, having caused "damage of the value of a halfpenny," were fined a pound, and, being unable to pay it, worked it out on the treadmill. thus they lived eight weeks and more of the wet fag-end of last summer under the open sky with their families, with no further shelter for themselves and their little ones than the calico curtains of their beds; with no other help than the scanty allowances of their union and the fast shrinking credit with the small dealers. hereupon lord londonderry, who owns considerable mines in durham, threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of seaham with his most high displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious workers. this "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other result than the merriment of the nation. when none of their efforts produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands from ireland and such remote parts of wales as have as yet no labour movement. and when the competition of workers against workers was thus restored, the strength of the strikers collapsed. the mine owners obliged them to renounce the union, abandon roberts, and accept the conditions laid down by the employers. thus ended at the close of september the great five months' battle of the coal miners against the mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness which demands the highest admiration. what a degree of true human culture, of enthusiasm and strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who, as we have seen in the children's employment commission's report, were described as late as , as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in moral sense! but how hard, too, must have been the pressure which brought these forty thousand colliers to rise as one man and to fight out the battle like an army not only well-disciplined but enthusiastic, an army possessed of one single determination, with the greatest coolness and composure, to a point beyond which further resistance would have been madness. and what a battle! not against visible, mortal enemies, but against hunger, want, misery, and homelessness, against their own passions provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth. if they had revolted with violence, they, the unarmed and defenceless, would have been shot down, and a day or two would have decided the victory of the owners. this law-abiding reserve was no fear of the constable's staff, it was the result of deliberation, the best proof of the intelligence and self-control of the working-men. thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. but the fight had not been in vain. first of all, this nineteen weeks' strike had torn the miners of the north of england forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain; they have left their sleep, are alert to defend their interests, and have entered the movement of civilisation, and especially the movement of the workers. the strike, which first brought to light the whole cruelty of the owners, has established the opposition of the workers here, forever, and made at least two-thirds of them chartists; and the acquisition of thirty thousand such determined, experienced men is certainly of great value to the chartists. then, too, the endurance and law-abiding which characterised the whole strike, coupled with the active agitation which accompanied it, has fixed public attention upon the miners. on the occasion of the debate upon the export duty on coal, thomas duncombe, the only decidedly chartist member of the house of commons, brought up the condition of the coal miners, had their petition read, and by his speech forced the bourgeois journals to publish, at least in their reports of parliamentary proceedings, a correct statement of the case. immediately after the strike, occurred the explosion at haswell; roberts went to london, demanded an audience with peel, insisted as representative of the miners upon a thorough investigation of the case, and succeeded in having the first geological and chemical notabilities of england, professors lyell and faraday, commissioned to visit the spot. as several other explosions followed in quick succession, and roberts again laid the details before the prime minister, the latter promised to propose the necessary measures for the protection of the workers, if possible, in the next session of parliament, _i.e_., the present one of . all this would not have been accomplished if these workers had not, by means of the strike, proved themselves freedom-loving men worthy of all respect, and if they had not engaged roberts as their counsel. scarcely had it become known that the coal miners of the north had been forced to renounce the union and discharge roberts, when the miners of lancashire formed a union of some ten thousand men, and guaranteed their attorney general a salary of pounds a year. in the autumn of last year they collected more than pounds, rather more than pounds of which they expended upon salaries and judicial expenses, and the rest chiefly in support of men out of work, either through want of employment or through dissensions with their employers. thus the working-men are constantly coming to see more clearly that, united, they too are a respectable power, and can, in the last extremity, defy even the might of the bourgeoisie. and this insight, the gain of all labour movements, has been won for all the miners of england by the union and the strike of . in a very short time the difference of intelligence and energy which now exists in favour of the factory operatives will have vanished, and the miners of the kingdom will be able to stand abreast of them in every respect. thus one piece of standing ground after another is undermined beneath the feet of the bourgeoisie; and how long will it be before their whole social and political edifice collapses with the basis upon which it rests? { } but the bourgeoisie will not take warning. the resistance of the miners does but embitter it the more. instead of appreciating this forward step in the general movement of the workers, the property-holding class saw in it only a source of rage against a class of people who are fools enough to declare themselves no longer submissive to the treatment they had hitherto received. it saw in the just demands of the non-possessing workers only impertinent discontent, mad rebellion against "divine and human order;" and, in the best case, a success (to be resisted by the bourgeoisie with all its might) won by "ill-intentioned demagogues who live by agitation and are too lazy to work." it sought, of course, without success, to represent to the workers that roberts and the union's agents whom the union very naturally had to pay, were insolent swindlers, who drew the last farthing from the working-men's pockets. when such insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social question for england must be abandoned. the only possible solution is a violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place. the agricultural proletariat. we have seen in the introduction how, simultaneously with the small bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small peasantry also was ruined when the former union of industrial and agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming competition of the large farmers. instead of being landowners or leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords. for a time this position was endurable, though a deterioration in comparison with their former one. the extension of industry kept pace with the increase of population until the progress of manufacture began to assume a slower pace, and the perpetual improvement of machinery made it impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the agricultural population. from this time forward, the distress which had hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. the twenty-five years' struggle with france came to an end at about the same time; the diminished production at the various seats of the wars, the shutting off of imports, and the necessity of providing for the british army in spain, had given english agriculture an artificial prosperity, and had besides withdrawn to the army vast numbers of workers from their ordinary occupations. this check upon the import trade, the opportunity for exportation, and the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an end; and the necessary consequence was what the english call agricultural distress. the farmers had to sell their corn at low prices, and could, therefore, pay only low wages. in , in order to keep up prices, the corn laws were passed, prohibiting the importation of corn so long as the price of wheat continued less than shillings per quarter. these naturally ineffective laws were several times modified, but did not succeed in ameliorating the distress in the agricultural districts. all that they did was to change the disease, which, under free competition from abroad, would have assumed an acute form, culminating in a series of crises, into a chronic one which bore heavily but uniformly upon the farm labourers. for a time after the rise of the agricultural proletariat, the patriarchal relation between master and man, which was being destroyed for manufacture, developed here the same relation of the farmer to his hands which still exists almost everywhere in germany. so long as this lasted, the poverty of the farm hands was less conspicuous; they shared the fate of the farmer, and were discharged only in cases of the direst necessity. but now all this is changed. the farm hands have become day labourers almost everywhere, are employed only when needed by the farmers, and, therefore, often have no work for weeks together, especially in winter. in the patriarchal time, the hands and their families lived on the farm, and their children grew up there, the farmer trying to find occupation on the spot for the oncoming generation; day labourers, then, were the exception, not the rule. thus there was, on every farm, a larger number of hands than were strictly necessary. it became, therefore, the interest of the farmers to dissolve this relation, drive the farm hand from the farm, and transform him into a day labourer. this took place pretty generally towards the year , and the consequence was that the hitherto latent over-population was set free, the rate of wages forced down, and the poor-rate enormously increased. from this time the agricultural districts became the headquarters of permanent, as the manufacturing districts had long been of periodic, pauperism; and the modification of the poor law was the first measure which the state was obliged to apply to the daily increasing impoverishment of the country parishes. moreover, the constant extension of farming on a large scale, the introduction of threshing and other machines, and the employment of women and children (which is now so general that its effects have recently been investigated by a special official commission), threw a large number of men out of employment. it is manifest, therefore, that here, too, the system of industrial production has made its entrance, by means of farming on a large scale, by the abolition of the patriarchal relation, which is of the greatest importance just here, by the introduction of machinery, steam, and the labour of women and children. in so doing, it has swept the last and most stationary portion of working humanity into the revolutionary movement. but the longer agriculture had remained stationary, the heavier now became the burden upon the worker, the more violently broke forth the results of the disorganisation of the old social fabric. the "over-population" came to light all at once, and could not, as in the manufacturing districts, be absorbed by the needs of an increasing production. new factories could always be built, if there were consumers for their products, but new land could not be created. the cultivation of waste common land was too daring a speculation for the bad times following the conclusion of peace. the necessary consequence was that the competition of the workers among each other reached the highest point of intensity, and wages fell to the minimum. so long as the old poor law existed, the workers received relief from the rates; wages naturally fell still lower, because the farmers forced the largest possible number of labourers to claim relief. the higher poor-rate, necessitated by the surplus population, was only increased by this measure, and the new poor law, of which we shall have more to say later, was now enacted as a remedy. but this did not improve matters. wages did not rise, the surplus population could not be got rid of, and the cruelty of the new law did but serve to embitter the people to the utmost. even the poor- rate, which diminished at first after the passage of the new law, attained its old height after a few years. its only effect was that whereas previously three to four million half paupers had existed, a million of total paupers now appeared, and the rest, still half paupers, merely went without relief. the poverty in the agricultural districts has increased every year. the people live in the greatest want, whole families must struggle along with , , or shillings a week, and at times have nothing. let us hear a description of this population given by a liberal member of parliament as early as . { } "an english agricultural labourer and an english pauper, these words are synonymous. his father was a pauper and his mother's milk contained no nourishment. from his earliest childhood he had bad food, and only half enough to still his hunger, and even yet he undergoes the pangs of unsatisfied hunger almost all the time that he is not asleep. he is half clad, and has not more fire than barely suffices to cook his scanty meal. and so cold and damp are always at home with him, and leave him only in fine weather. he is married, but he knows nothing of the joys of the husband and father. his wife and children, hungry, rarely warm, often ill and helpless, always careworn and hopeless like himself, are naturally grasping, selfish, and troublesome, and so, to use his own expression, he hates the sight of them, and enters his cot only because it offers him a trifle more shelter from rain and wind than a hedge. he must support his family, though he cannot do so, whence come beggary, deceit of all sorts, ending in fully developed craftiness. if he were so inclined, he yet has not the courage which makes of the more energetic of his class wholesale poachers and smugglers. but he pilfers when occasion offers, and teaches his children to lie and steal. his abject and submissive demeanour towards his wealthy neighbours shows that they treat him roughly and with suspicion; hence he fears and hates them, but he never will injure them by force. he is depraved through and through, too far gone to possess even the strength of despair. his wretched existence is brief, rheumatism and asthma bring him to the workhouse, where he will draw his last breath without a single pleasant recollection, and will make room for another luckless wretch to live and die as he has done." our author adds that besides this class of agricultural labourers, there is still another, somewhat more energetic and better endowed physically, mentally, and morally; those, namely, who live as wretchedly, but were not born to this condition. these he represents as better in their family life, but smugglers and poachers who get into frequent bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers and revenue officers of the coast, become more embittered against society during the prison life which they often undergo, and so stand abreast of the first class in their hatred of the property-holders. "and," he says, in closing, "this whole class is called, by courtesy, the bold peasantry of england." down to the present time, this description applies to the greater portion of the agricultural labourers of england. in june, , the _times_ sent a correspondent into the agricultural districts to report upon the condition of this class, and the report which he furnished agreed wholly with the foregoing. in certain districts wages were not more than six shillings a week; not more, that is, that in many districts in germany, while the prices of all the necessaries of life are at least twice as high. what sort of life these people lead may be imagined; their food scanty and bad, their clothing ragged, their dwellings cramped and desolate, small, wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever; and, for young people, lodging-houses, where men and women are scarcely separated, and illegitimate intercourse thus provoked. one or two days without work in the course of a month must inevitably plunge such people into the direst want. moreover, they cannot combine to raise wages, because they are scattered, and if one alone refuses to work for low wages, there are dozens out of work, or supported by the rates, who are thankful for the most trifling offer, while to him who declines work, every other form of relief than the hated workhouse is refused by the poor law guardians as to a lazy vagabond; for the guardians are the very farmers from whom or from whose neighbours and acquaintances alone he can get work. and not from one or two special districts of england do such reports come. on the contrary, the distress is general, equally great in the north and south, the east and west. the condition of the labourers in suffolk and norfolk corresponds with that of devonshire, hampshire, and sussex. wages are as low in dorsetshire and oxfordshire as in kent and surrey, buckinghamshire and cambridgeshire. one especially barbaric cruelty against the working-class is embodied in the game laws, which are more stringent than in any other country, while the game is plentiful beyond all conception. the english peasant who, according to the old english custom and tradition, sees in poaching only a natural and noble expression of courage and daring, is stimulated still further by the contrast between his own poverty and the _car tel est notre plaisir_ of the lord, who preserves thousands of hares and game birds for his private enjoyment. the labourer lays snares, or shoots here and there a piece of game. it does not injure the landlord as a matter of fact, for he has a vast superfluity, and it brings the poacher a meal for himself and his starving family. but if he is caught he goes to jail, and for a second offence receives at the least seven years' transportation. from the severity of these laws arise the frequent bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers, which lead to a number of murders every year hence the post of gamekeeper is not only dangerous, but of ill- repute and despised. last year, in two cases, gamekeepers shot themselves rather than continue their work. such is the moderate price at which the landed aristocracy purchases the noble sport of shooting; but what does it matter to the lords of the soil? whether one or two more or less of the "surplus" live or die matters nothing, and even if in consequence of the game laws half the surplus population could be put out of the way, it would be all the better for the other half--according to the philanthropy of the english landlords. although the conditions of life in the country, the isolated dwellings, the stability of the surroundings and occupations, and consequently of the thoughts, are decidedly unfavourable to all development, yet poverty and want bear their fruits even here. the manufacturing and mining proletariat emerged early from the first stage of resistance to our social order, the direct rebellion of the individual by the perpetration of crime; but the peasants are still in this stage at the present time. their favourite method of social warfare is incendiarism. in the winter which followed the revolution of july, in - , these incendiarisms first became general. disturbances had taken place, and the whole region of sussex and the adjacent counties has been brought into a state of excitement in october, in consequence of an increase of the coastguard (which made smuggling much more difficult and "ruined the coast"--in the words of a farmer), changes in the poor law, low wages, and the introduction of machinery. in the winter the farmers' hay and corn-stacks were burnt in the fields, and the very barns and stables under their windows. nearly every night a couple of such fires blazed up, and spread terror among the farmers and landlords. the offenders were rarely discovered, and the workers attributed the incendiarism to a mythical person whom they named "swing." men puzzled their brains to discover who this swing could be and whence this rage among the poor of the country districts. of the great motive power, want, oppression, only a single person here and there thought, and certainly no one in the agricultural districts. since that year the incendiarisms have been repeated every winter, with each recurring unemployed season of the agricultural labourers. in the winter of - , they were once more extraordinarily frequent. there lies before me a series of numbers of the _northern star_ of that time, each one of which contains a report of several incendiarisms, stating in each case its authority. the numbers wanting in the following list i have not at hand; but they, too, doubtless contain a number of cases. moreover, such a sheet cannot possibly ascertain all the cases which occur. november th, , two cases; several earlier ones are discussed. december th, in bedfordshire, general excitement for a fortnight past in consequence of frequent incendiarisms, of which several take place every night. two great farmhouses burnt down within the last few days; in cambridgeshire four great farmhouses, hertfordshire one, and besides these, fifteen other incendiarisms in different districts. december th, in norfolk one, suffolk two, essex two, cheshire one, lancashire one, derby, lincoln, and the south twelve. january th, , in all ten. january th, seven. january th, four incendiarisms. from this time forward, three or four incendiarisms per week are reported, and not as formerly until the spring only, but far into july and august. and that crimes of this sort are expected to increase in the approaching hard season of - , the english papers already indicate. what do my readers think of such a state of things in the quiet, idyllic country districts of england? is this social war, or is it not? is it a natural state of things which can last? yet here the landlords and farmers are as dull and stupefied, as blind to everything which does not directly put money into their pockets, as the manufacturers and the bourgeoisie in general in the manufacturing districts. if the latter promise their employees salvation through the repeal of the corn laws, the landlords and a great part of the farmers promise theirs heaven upon earth from the maintenance of the same laws. but in neither case do the property-holders succeed in winning the workers to the support of their pet hobby. like the operatives, the agricultural labourers are thoroughly indifferent to the repeal or non-repeal of the corn laws. yet the question is an important one for both. that is to say--by the repeal of the corn laws, free competition, the present social economy is carried to its extreme point; all further development within the present order comes to an end, and the only possible step farther is a radical transformation of the social order. { } for the agricultural labourers the question has, further, the following important bearing: free importation of corn involves (how, i cannot explain _here_) the emancipation of the farmers from the landlords, their transformation into liberals. towards this consummation the anti-corn law league has already largely contributed, and this is its only real service. when the farmers become liberals, _i.e_., conscious bourgeois, the agricultural labourers will inevitably become chartists and socialists; the first change involves the second. and that a new movement is already beginning among the agricultural labourers is proved by a meeting which earl radnor, a liberal landlord, caused to be held in october, , near highworth, where his estates lie, to pass resolutions against the corn laws. at this meeting, the labourers, perfectly indifferent as to these laws, demanded something wholly different, namely small holdings, at low rent, for themselves, telling earl radnor all sorts of bitter truths to his face. thus the movement of the working-class is finding its way into the remote, stationary, mentally dead agricultural districts; and, thanks to the general distress, will soon be as firmly rooted and energetic as in the manufacturing districts. { } as to the religious state of the agricultural labourers, they are, it is true, more pious than the manufacturing operatives; but they, too, are greatly at odds with the church--for in these districts members of the established church almost exclusively are to be found. a correspondent of the _morning chronicle_, who, over the signature, "one who has whistled at the plough," reports his tour through the agricultural districts, relates, among other things, the following conversation with some labourers after service: "i asked one of these people whether the preacher of the day was their own clergyman. "yes, blast him! he is our own parson, and begs the whole time. he's been always a-begging as long as i've known him." (the sermon had been upon a mission to the heathen.) "and as long as i've known him too," added another; "and i never knew a parson but what was begging for this or the other." "yes," said a woman, who had just come out of the church, "and look how wages are going down, and see the rich vagabonds with whom the parsons eat and drink and hunt. so help me god, we are more fit to starve in the workhouse than pay the parsons as go among the heathen." "and why," said another, "don't they send the parsons as drones every day in salisbury cathedral, for nobody but the bare stones? why don't _they_ go among the heathen?" "they don't go," said the old man whom i had first asked, "because they are rich, they have all the land they need, they want the money in order to get rid of the poor parsons. i know what they want. i know them too long for that." "but, good friends," i asked, "you surely do not always come out of the church with such bitter feelings towards the preacher? why do you go at all?" "what for do we go?" said the woman. "we must, if we do not want to lose everything, work and all, we must." i learned later that they had certain little privileges of fire-wood and potato land (which they paid for!) on condition of going to church." after describing their poverty and ignorance, the correspondent closes by saying: "and now i boldly assert that the condition of these people, their poverty, their hatred of the church, their external submission and inward bitterness against the ecclesiastical dignitaries, is the rule among the country parishes of england, and its opposite is the exception." if the peasantry of england shows the consequences which a numerous agricultural proletariat in connection with large farming involves for the country districts, wales illustrates the ruin of the small holders. if the english country parishes reproduce the antagonism between capitalist and proletarian, the state of the welsh peasantry corresponds to the progressive ruin of the small bourgeoisie in the towns. in wales are to be found, almost exclusively, small holders, who cannot with like profit sell their products as cheaply as the larger, more favourably situated english farmers, with whom, however, they are obliged to compete. moreover, in some places the quality of the land admits of the raising of live stock only, which is but slightly profitable. then, too, these welsh farmers, by reason of their separate nationality, which they retain pertinaciously, are much more stationary than the english farmers. but the competition among themselves and with their english neighbours (and the increased mortgages upon their land consequent upon this) has reduced them to such a state that they can scarcely live at all; and because they have not recognised the true cause of their wretched condition, they attribute it to all sorts of small causes, such as high tolls, etc, which do check the development of agriculture and commerce, but are taken into account as standing charges by every one who takes a holding, and are therefore really ultimately paid by the landlord. here, too, the new poor law is cordially hated by the tenants, who hover in perpetual danger of coming under its sway. in , the famous "rebecca" disturbances broke out among the welsh peasantry; the men dressed in women's clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns, demolished the toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters in the name of the imaginary "rebecca," and once went so far as to storm the workhouse of carmarthen. later, when the militia was called out and the police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon false scents, demolished toll-gates at one point while the militia, lured by false signal bugles, was marching in some opposite direction; and betook themselves finally, when the police was too thoroughly reinforced, to single incendiarisms and attempts at murder. as usual, these greater crimes were the end of the movement. many withdrew from disapproval, others from fear, and peace was restored of itself. the government appointed a commission to investigate the affair and its causes, and there was an end of the matter. the poverty of the peasantry continues, however, and will one day, since it cannot under existing circumstances grow less, but must go on intensifying, produce more serious manifestations than these humorous rebecca masquerades. if england illustrates the results of the system of farming on a large scale and wales on a small one, ireland exhibits the consequences of overdividing the soil. the great mass of the population of ireland consists of small tenants who occupy a sorry hut without partitions, and a potato patch just large enough to supply them most scantily with potatoes through the winter. in consequence of the great competition which prevails among these small tenants, the rent has reached an unheard- of height, double, treble, and quadruple that paid in england. for every agricultural labourer seeks to become a tenant-farmer, and though the division of land has gone so far, there still remain numbers of labourers in competition for plots. although in great britain , , acres of land are cultivated, and in ireland but , , ; although great britain produces agricultural products to the value of , , pounds, and ireland of but , , pounds, there are in ireland , agricultural proletarians _more_ than in the neighbouring island. { a} how great the competition for land in ireland must be is evident from this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the labourers in great britain are living in the utmost distress. the consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid. the irish people is thus held in crushing poverty, from which it cannot free itself under our present social conditions. these people live in the most wretched clay huts, scarcely good enough for cattle-pens, have scant food all winter long, or, as the report above quoted expresses it, they have potatoes half enough thirty weeks in the year, and the rest of the year nothing. when the time comes in the spring at which this provision reaches its end, or can no longer be used because of its sprouting, wife and children go forth to beg and tramp the country with their kettle in their hands. meanwhile the husband, after planting potatoes for the next year, goes in search of work either in ireland or england, and returns at the potato harvest to his family. this is the condition in which nine-tenths of the irish country folks live. they are poor as church mice, wear the most wretched rags, and stand upon the lowest plane of intelligence possible in a half-civilised country. according to the report quoted, there are, in a population of . millions, , heads of families in a state of total destitution; and according to other authorities, cited by sheriff alison, { b} there are in ireland , , persons who could not live without public or private assistance--or per cent. of the whole population paupers! the cause of this poverty lies in the existing social conditions, especially in competition here found in the form of the subdivision of the soil. much effort has been spent in finding other causes. it has been asserted that the relation of the tenant to the landlord who lets his estate in large lots to tenants, who again have their sub-tenants, and sub-sub-tenants, in turn, so that often ten middlemen come between the landlord and the actual cultivator--it has been asserted that the shameful law which gives the landlord the right of expropriating the cultivator who may have paid his rent duly, if the first tenant fails to pay the landlord, that this law is to blame for all this poverty. but all this determines only the form in which the poverty manifests itself. make the small tenant a landowner himself and what follows? the majority could not live upon their holdings even if they had no rent to pay, and any slight improvement which might take place would be lost again in a few years in consequence of the rapid increase of population. the children would then live to grow up under the improved conditions who now die in consequence of poverty in early childhood. from another side comes the assertion that the shameless oppression inflicted by the english is the cause of the trouble. it is the cause of the somewhat earlier appearance of this poverty, but not of the poverty itself. or the blame is laid on the protestant church forced upon a catholic nation; but divide among the irish what the church takes from them, and it does not reach six shillings a head. besides, tithes are a tax upon landed property, not upon the tenant, though he may nominally pay them; now, since the commutation bill of , the landlord pays the tithes directly and reckons so much higher rent, so that the tenant is none the better off. and in the same way a hundred other causes of this poverty are brought forward, all proving as little as these. this poverty is the result of our social conditions; apart from these, causes may be found for the manner in which it manifests itself, but not for the fact of its existence. that poverty manifests itself in ireland thus and not otherwise, is owing to the character of the people, and to their historical development. the irish are a people related in their whole character to the latin nations, to the french, and especially to the italians. the bad features of their character we have already had depicted by carlyle. let us now hear an irishman, who at least comes nearer to the truth than carlyle, with his prejudice in favour of the teutonic character: { } "they are restless, yet indolent, clever and indiscreet, stormy, impatient, and improvident; brave by instinct, generous without much reflection, quick to revenge and forgive insults, to make and to renounce friendships, gifted with genius prodigally, sparingly with judgment." with the irish, feeling and passion predominate; reason must bow before them. their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet, persevering activity from reaching development--such a nation is utterly unfit for manufacture as now conducted. hence they held fast to agriculture, and remained upon the lowest plane even of that. with the small subdivisions of land, which were not here artificially created, as in france and on the rhine, by the division of great estates, but have existed from time immemorial, an improvement of the soil by the investment of capital was not to be thought of; and it would, according to alison, require million pounds sterling to bring the soil up to the not very high state of fertility already attained in england. the english immigration, which might have raised the standard of irish civilisation, has contented itself with the most brutal plundering of the irish people; and while the irish, by their immigration into england, have furnished england a leaven which will produce its own results in the future, they have little for which to be thankful to the english immigration. the attempts of the irish to save themselves from their present ruin, on the one hand, take the form of crimes. these are the order of the day in the agricultural districts, and are nearly always directed against the most immediate enemies, the landlord's agents, or their obedient servants, the protestant intruders, whose large farms are made up of the potato patches of hundreds of ejected families. such crimes are especially frequent in the south and west. on the other hand, the irish hope for relief by means of the agitation for the repeal of the legislative union with england. from all the foregoing, it is clear that the uneducated irish must see in the english their worst enemies; and their first hope of improvement in the conquest of national independence. but quite as clear is it, too, that irish distress cannot be removed by any act of repeal. such an act would, however, at once lay bare the fact that the cause of irish misery, which now seems to come from abroad, is really to be found at home. meanwhile, it is an open question whether the accomplishment of repeal will be necessary to make this clear to the irish. hitherto, neither chartism nor socialism has had marked success in ireland. i close my observations upon ireland at this point the more readily, as the repeal agitation of and o'connell's trial have been the means of making the irish distress more and more known in germany. we have now followed the proletariat of the british islands through all branches of its activity, and found it everywhere living in want and misery under totally inhuman conditions. we have seen discontent arise with the rise of the proletariat, grow, develop, and organise; we have seen open bloodless and bloody battles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. we have investigated the principles according to which the fate, the hopes, and fears of the proletariat are determined, and we have found that there is no prospect of improvement in their condition. we have had an opportunity, here and there, of observing the conduct of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat, and we have found that it considers only itself, has only its own advantage in view. however, in order not to be unjust, let us investigate its mode of action somewhat more exactly. the attitude of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat. in speaking of the bourgeoisie i include the so-called aristocracy, for this is a privileged class, an aristocracy, only in contrast with the bourgeoisie, not in contrast with the proletariat. the proletarian sees in both only the property-holder--_i.e_., the bourgeois. before the privilege of property all other privileges vanish. the sole difference is this, that the bourgeois proper stands in active relations with the manufacturing, and, in a measure, with the mining proletarians, and, as farmer, with the agricultural labourers, whereas the so-called aristocrat comes into contact with the agricultural labourer only. i have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the english bourgeoisie; and i mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the liberal, corn law repealing bourgeoisie. for it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. it knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. { } in the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. true, these english bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they are better to deal with than the germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help matters? ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them. i once went into manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-people's quarters, and asserted that i had never seen so ill-built a city. the man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: "and yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir." it is utterly indifferent to the english bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. all the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh. hence, political economy, the science of wealth, is the favourite study of these bartering jews. every one of them is a political economist. the relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it; it is purely economic. the manufacturer is capital, the operative labour. and if the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not labour, but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour force, if he takes it into his head that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity "labour," the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill. he cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the operatives than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human beings, but hands, as he constantly calls them to their faces; he insists, as carlyle says, that "cash payment is the only nexus between man and man." even the relation between himself and his wife is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, mere "cash payment." money determines the worth of the man; he is "worth ten thousand pounds." he who has money is of "the better sort of people," is "influential," and what _he_ does counts for something in his social circle. the huckstering spirit penetrates the whole language, all relations are expressed in business terms, in economic categories. supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the english bourgeois judges all human life. hence free competition in every respect, hence the _regime_ of _laissez-faire, laissez-aller_ in government, in medicine, in education, and soon to be in religion, too, as the state church collapses more and more. free competition will suffer no limitation, no state supervision; the whole state is but a burden to it. it would reach its highest perfection in a _wholly_ ungoverned anarchic society, where each might exploit the other to his heart's content. since, however, the bourgeoisie cannot dispense with government, but must have it to hold the equally indispensable proletariat in check, it turns the power of government against the proletariat and keeps out of its way as far as possible. let no one believe, however, that the "cultivated" englishman openly brags with his egotism. on the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. what? the wealthy english fail to remember the poor? they who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! philanthropic institutions forsooth! as though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. but let us hear the english bourgeoisie's own words. it is not yet a year since i read in the _manchester guardian_ the following letter to the editor, which was published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing: "mr. editor,--for some time past our main streets are haunted by swarms of beggars, who try to awaken the pity of the passers-by in a most shameless and annoying manner, by exposing their tattered clothing, sickly aspect, and disgusting wounds and deformities. i should think that when one not only pays the poor-rate, but also contributes largely to the charitable institutions, one had done enough to earn a right to be spared such disagreeable and impertinent molestations. and why else do we pay such high rates for the maintenance of the municipal police, if they do not even protect us so far as to make it possible to go to or out of town in peace? i hope the publication of these lines in your widely-circulated paper may induce the authorities to remove this nuisance; and i remain,--your obedient servant, "a lady." there you have it! the english bourgeoisie is charitable out of self- interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "if i spend this much upon benevolent institutions, i thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. you shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this i require, this i purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!" it is infamous, this charity of a christian bourgeois! and so writes "a lady;" she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to call herself a woman! but if the "ladies" are such as this, what must the "gentlemen" be? it will be said that this is a single case; but no, the foregoing letter expresses the temper of the great majority of the english bourgeoisie, or the editor would not have accepted it, and some reply would have been made to it, which i watched for in vain in the succeeding numbers. and as to the efficiency of this philanthropy, canon parkinson himself says that the poor are relieved much more by the poor than by the bourgeoisie; and such relief given by an honest proletarian who knows himself what it is to be hungry, for whom sharing his scanty meal is really a sacrifice, but a sacrifice borne with pleasure, such help has a wholly different ring to it from the carelessly-tossed alms of the luxurious bourgeois. in other respects, too, the bourgeoisie assumes a hypocritical, boundless philanthropy, but only when its own interests require it; as in its politics and political economy. it has been at work now well on towards five years to prove to the working-men that it strives to abolish the corn laws solely in their interest. but the long and short of the matter is this: the corn laws keep the price of bread higher than in other countries, and thus raise wages, but these high wages render difficult competition of the manufacturers against other nations in which bread, and consequently wages, are cheaper. the corn laws being repealed, the price of bread falls, and wages gradually approach those of other european countries, as must be clear to every one from our previous exposition of the principles according to which wages are determined. the manufacturer can compete more readily, the demand for english goods increases, and, with it, the demand for labour. in consequence of this increased demand wages would actually rise somewhat, and the unemployed workers be re-employed; but for how long? the "surplus population" of england, and especially of ireland, is sufficient to supply english manufacture with the necessary operatives, even if it were doubled; and, in a few years, the small advantage of the repeal of the corn laws would be balanced, a new crisis would follow, and we should be back at the point from which we started, while the first stimulus to manufacture would have increased population meanwhile. all this the proletarians understand very well, and have told the manufacturers to their faces; but, in spite of that, the manufacturers have in view solely the immediate advantage which the corn laws would bring them. they are too narrow-minded to see that, even for themselves, no permanent advantage can arise from this measure, because their competition with each other would soon force the profit of the individual back to its old level; and thus they continue to shriek to the working-men that it is purely for the sake of the starving millions that the rich members of the liberal party pour hundreds and thousands of pounds into the treasury of the anti-corn law league, while every one knows that they are only sending the butter after the cheese, that they calculate upon earning it all back in the first ten years after the repeal of the corn laws. but the workers are no longer to be misled by the bourgeoisie, especially since the insurrection of . they demand of every one who presents himself as interested in their welfare, that he should declare himself in favour of the people's charter as proof of the sincerity of his professions, and in so doing, they protest against all outside help, for the charter is a demand for the power to help themselves. whoever declines so to declare himself they pronounce their enemy, and are perfectly right in so doing, whether he be a declared foe or a false friend besides, the anti-corn law league has used the most despicable falsehoods and tricks to win the support of the workers. it has tried to prove to them that the money price of labour is in inverse proportion to the price of corn; that wages are high when grain is cheap, and _vice versa_, an assertion which it pretends to prove with the most ridiculous arguments, and one which is, in itself, more ridiculous than any other that has proceeded from the mouth of an economist. when this failed to help matters, the workers were promised bliss supreme in consequence of the increased demand in the labour market; indeed, men went so far as to carry through the streets two models of loaves of bread, on one of which, by far the larger, was written: "american eightpenny loaf, wages four shillings per day," and upon the much smaller one: "english eightpenny loaf, wages two shillings a day." but the workers have not allowed themselves to be misled. they know their lords and masters too well. but rightly to measure the hypocrisy of these promises, the practice of the bourgeoisie must be taken into account. we have seen in the course of our report how the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat in every conceivable way for its own benefit! we have, however, hitherto seen only how the single bourgeois maltreats the proletariat upon his own account. let us turn now to the manner in which the bourgeoisie as a party, as the power of the state, conducts itself towards the proletariat. laws are necessary only because there are persons in existence who own nothing; and although this is directly expressed in but few laws, as, for instance, those against vagabonds and tramps, in which the proletariat as such is outlawed, yet enmity to the proletariat is so emphatically the basis of the law that the judges, and especially the justices of the peace, who are bourgeois themselves, and with whom the proletariat comes most in contact, find this meaning in the laws without further consideration. if a rich man is brought up, or rather summoned, to appear before the court, the judge regrets that he is obliged to impose so much trouble, treats the matter as favourably as possible, and, if he is forced to condemn the accused, does so with extreme regret, etc. etc., and the end of it all is a miserable fine, which the bourgeois throws upon the table with contempt and then departs. but if a poor devil gets into such a position as involves appearing before the justice of the peace--he has almost always spent the night in the station-house with a crowd of his peers--he is regarded from the beginning as guilty; his defence is set aside with a contemptuous "oh! we know the excuse," and a fine imposed which he cannot pay and must work out with several months on the treadmill. and if nothing can be proved against him, he is sent to the treadmill, none the less, "as a rogue and a vagabond." the partisanship of the justices of the peace, especially in the country, surpasses all description, and it is so much the order of the day that all cases which are not too utterly flagrant are quietly reported by the newspapers, without comment. nor is anything else to be expected. for on the one hand, these dogberries do merely construe the law according to the intent of the farmers, and, on the other, they are themselves bourgeois, who see the foundation of all true order in the interests of their class. and the conduct of the police corresponds to that of the justices of the peace. the bourgeois may do what he will and the police remain ever polite, adhering strictly to the law, but the proletarian is roughly, brutally treated; his poverty both casts the suspicion of every sort of crime upon him and cuts him off from legal redress against any caprice of the administrators of the law; for him, therefore, the protecting forms of the law do not exist, the police force their way into his house without further ceremony, arrest and abuse him; and only when a working-men's association, such as the miners, engages a roberts, does it become evident how little the protective side of the law exists for the working-men, how frequently he has to bear all the burdens of the law without enjoying its benefits. down to the present hour, the property-holding class in parliament still struggles against the better feelings of those not yet fallen a prey to egotism, and seeks to subjugate the proletariat still further. one piece of common land after another is appropriated and placed under cultivation, a process by which the general cultivation is furthered, but the proletariat greatly injured. where there were still commons, the poor could pasture an ass, a pig, or geese, the children and young people had a place where they could play and live out of doors; but this is gradually coming to an end. the earnings of the worker are less, and the young people, deprived of their playground, go to the beer-shops. a mass of acts for enclosing and cultivating commons is passed at every session of parliament. when the government determined during the session of to force the all monopolising railways to make travelling possible for the workers by means of charges proportionate to their means, a penny a mile, and proposed therefore to introduce such a third class train upon every railway daily, the "reverend father in god," the bishop of london, proposed that sunday, the only day upon which working-men in work _can_ travel, be exempted from this rule, and travelling thus be left open to the rich and shut off from the poor. this proposition was, however, too direct, too undisguised to pass through parliament, and was dropped. i have no room to enumerate the many concealed attacks of even one single session upon the proletariat. one from the session of must suffice. an obscure member of parliament, a mr. miles, proposed a bill regulating the relation of master and servant which seemed comparatively unobjectionable. the government became interested in the bill, and it was referred to a committee. meanwhile the strike among the miners in the north broke out, and roberts made his triumphal passage through england with his acquitted working-men. when the bill was reported by the committee, it was discovered that certain most despotic provisions had been interpolated in it, especially one conferring upon the employer the power to bring before any justice of the peace every working-man who had contracted verbally or in writing to do any work whatsoever, in case of refusal to work or other misbehaviour, and have him condemned to prison with hard labour for two months, upon the oath of the employer or his agent or overlooker, _i.e_., upon the oath of the accuser. this bill aroused the working-men to the utmost fury, the more so as the ten hours' bill was before parliament at the same time, and had called forth a considerable agitation. hundreds of meetings were held, hundreds of working-men's petitions forwarded to london to thomas duncombe, the representative of the interests of the proletariat. this man was, except ferrand, the representative of "young england," the only vigorous opponent of the bill; but when the other radicals saw that the people were declaring against it, one after the other crept forward and took his place by duncombe's side; and as the liberal bourgeoisie had not the courage to defend the bill in the face of the excitement among the working-men, it was ignominiously lost. meanwhile the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat is malthus' law of population and the new poor law framed in accordance with it. we have already alluded several times to the theory of malthus. we may sum up its final result in these few words, that the earth is perennially over-populated, whence poverty, misery, distress, and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes, of which some are rich, educated, and moral, and others more or less poor, distressed, ignorant, and immoral. hence it follows in practice, and malthus himself drew this conclusion, that charities and poor-rates are, properly speaking, nonsense, since they serve only to maintain, and stimulate the increase of, the surplus population whose competition crushes down wages for the employed; that the employment of the poor by the poor law guardians is equally unreasonable, since only a fixed quantity of the products of labour can be consumed, and for every unemployed labourer thus furnished employment, another hitherto employed must be driven into enforced idleness, whence private undertakings suffer at cost of poor law industry; that, in other words, the whole problem is not how to support the surplus population, but how to restrain it as far as possible. malthus declares in plain english that the right to live, a right previously asserted in favour of every man in the world, is nonsense. he quotes the words of a poet, that the poor man comes to the feast of nature and finds no cover laid for him, and adds that "she bids him begone," for he did not before his birth ask of society whether or not he is welcome. this is now the pet theory of all genuine english bourgeois, and very naturally, since it is the most specious excuse for them, and has, moreover, a good deal of truth in it under existing conditions. if, then, the problem is not to make the "surplus population" useful, to transform it into available population, but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way and to prevent its having too many children, this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. there is, however, in spite of the violent exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. the workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population. since, however, the rich hold all the power, the proletarians must submit, if they will not good-temperedly perceive it for themselves, to have the law actually declare them superfluous. this has been done by the new poor law. the old poor law which rested upon the act of (the rd of elizabeth), naively started from the notion that it is the duty of the parish to provide for the maintenance of the poor. whoever had no work received relief, and the poor man regarded the parish as pledged to protect him from starvation. he demanded his weekly relief as his right, not as a favour, and this became, at last, too much for the bourgeoisie. in , when the bourgeoisie had just come into power through the reform bill, and pauperism in the country districts had just reached its full development, the bourgeoisie began the reform of the poor law according to its own point of view. a commission was appointed, which investigated the administration of the poor laws, and revealed a multitude of abuses. it was discovered that the whole working-class in the country was pauperised and more or less dependent upon the rates, from which they received relief when wages were low; it was found that this system by which the unemployed were maintained, the ill-paid and the parents of large families relieved, fathers of illegitimate children required to pay alimony, and poverty, in general, recognised as needing protection, it was found that this system was ruining the nation, was-- "a check upon industry, a reward for improvident marriage, a stimulus to increased population, and a means of counterbalancing the effect of an increased population upon wages; a national provision for discouraging the honest and industrious, and protecting the lazy, vicious, and improvident; calculated to destroy the bonds of family life, hinder systematically the accumulation of capital, scatter that which is already accumulated, and ruin the taxpayers. moreover, in the provision of aliment, it sets a premium upon illegitimate children." (words of the report of the poor law commissioners.) { } this description of the action of the old poor law is certainly correct; relief fosters laziness and increase of "surplus population." under present social conditions it is perfectly clear that the poor man is compelled to be an egotist, and when he can choose, living equally well in either case, he prefers doing nothing to working. but what follows therefrom? that our present social conditions are good for nothing, and not as the malthusian commissioners conclude, that poverty is a crime, and, as such, to be visited with heinous penalties which may serve as a warning to others. but these wise malthusians were so thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of their theory that they did not for one moment hesitate to cast the poor into the procrustean bed of their economic notions and treat them with the most revolting cruelty. convinced with malthus and the rest of the adherents of free competition that it is best to let each one take care of himself, they would have preferred to abolish the poor laws altogether. since, however, they had neither the courage nor the authority to do this, they proposed a poor law constructed as far as possible in harmony with the doctrine of malthus, which is yet more barbarous than that of _laissez-faire_, because it interferes actively in cases in which the latter is passive. we have seen how malthus characterises poverty, or rather the want of employment, as a crime under the title "superfluity," and recommends for it punishment by starvation. the commissioners were not quite so barbarous; death outright by starvation was something too terrible even for a poor law commissioner. "good," said they, "we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as befits human beings. you are a pest, and if we cannot get rid of you as we do of other pests, you shall feel, at least, that you are a pest, and you shall at least be held in check, kept from bringing into the world other "surplus," either directly or through inducing in others laziness and want of employment. live you shall, but live as an awful warning to all those who might have inducements to become "superfluous." they accordingly brought in the new poor law, which was passed by parliament in , and continues in force down to the present day. all relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built. the regulations for these workhouses, or, as the people call them, poor law bastilles, is such as to frighten away every one who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity. to make sure that relief be applied for only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort had failed, the workhouse has been made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a malthusian can invent. the food is worse than that of the most ill-paid working-man while employed, and the work harder, or they might prefer the workhouse to their wretched existence outside. meat, especially fresh meat, is rarely furnished, chiefly potatoes, the worst possible bread and oatmeal porridge, little or no beer. the food of criminal prisoners is better, as a rule, so that the paupers frequently commit some offence for the purpose of getting into jail. for the workhouse is a jail too; he who does not finish his task gets nothing to eat; he who wishes to go out must ask permission, which is granted or not, according to his behaviour or the inspector's whim, tobacco is forbidden, also the receipt of gifts from relatives or friends outside the house; the paupers wear a workhouse uniform, and are handed over, helpless and without redress, to the caprice of the inspectors. to prevent their labour from competing with that of outside concerns, they are set to rather useless tasks: the men break stones, "as much as a strong man can accomplish with effort in a day;" the women, children, and aged men pick oakum, for i know not what insignificant use. to prevent the "superfluous" from multiplying, and "demoralised" parents from influencing their children, families are broken up, the husband is placed in one wing, the wife in another, the children in a third, and they are permitted to see one another only at stated times after long intervals, and then only when they have, in the opinion of the officials, behaved well. and in order to shut off the external world from contamination by pauperism within these bastilles, the inmates are permitted to receive visits only with the consent of the officials, and in the reception-rooms; to communicate in general with the world outside only by leave and under supervision. yet the food is supposed to be wholesome and the treatment humane with all this. but the intent of the law is too loudly outspoken for this requirement to be in any wise fulfilled. the poor law commissioners and the whole english bourgeoisie deceive themselves if they believe the administration of the law possible without these results. the treatment, which the letter of the law prescribes, is in direct contradiction of its spirit. if the law in its essence proclaims the poor criminals, the workhouses prisons, their inmates beyond the pale of the law, beyond the pale of humanity, objects of disgust and repulsion, then all commands to the contrary are unavailing. in practice, the spirit and not the letter of the law is followed in the treatment of the poor, as in the following few examples: "in the workhouse at greenwich, in the summer of , a boy five years old was punished by being shut into the dead-room, where he had to sleep upon the lids of the coffins. in the workhouse at herne, the same punishment was inflicted upon a little girl for wetting the bed at night, and this method of punishment seems to be a favourite one. this workhouse, which stands in one of the most beautiful regions of kent, is peculiar, in so far as its windows open only upon the court, and but two, newly introduced, afford the inmates a glimpse of the outer world. the author who relates this in the _illuminated magazine_, closes his description with the words: "if god punished men for crimes as man punishes man for poverty, then woe to the sons of adam!" in november, , a man died at leicester, who had been dismissed two days before from the workhouse at coventry. the details of the treatment of the poor in this institution are revolting. the man, george robson, had a wound upon the shoulder, the treatment of which was wholly neglected; he was set to work at the pump, using the sound arm; was given only the usual workhouse fare, which he was utterly unable to digest by reason of the unhealed wound and his general debility; he naturally grew weaker, and the more he complained, the more brutally he was treated. when his wife tried to bring him her drop of beer, she was reprimanded, and forced to drink it herself in the presence of the female warder. he became ill, but received no better treatment. finally, at his own request, and under the most insulting epithets, he was discharged, accompanied by his wife. two days later he died at leicester, in consequence of the neglected wound and of the food given him, which was utterly indigestible for one in his condition, as the surgeon present at the inquest testified. when he was discharged, there were handed to him letters containing money, which had been kept back six weeks, and opened, according to a rule of the establishment, by the inspector! in birmingham such scandalous occurrences took place, that finally, in , an official was sent to investigate the case. he found that four tramps had been shut up naked under a staircase in a black hole, eight to ten days, often deprived of food until noon, and that at the severest season of the year. a little boy had been passed through all grades of punishment known to the institution; first locked up in a damp, vaulted, narrow, lumber-room; then in the dog-hole twice, the second time three days and three nights; then the same length of time in the old dog-hole, which was still worse; then the tramp-room, a stinking, disgustingly filthy hole, with wooden sleeping stalls, where the official, in the course of his inspection, found two other tattered boys, shrivelled with cold, who had been spending three days there. in the dog-hole there were often seven, and in the tramp-room, twenty men huddled together. women, also, were placed in the dog-hole, because they refused to go to church; and one was shut four days into the tramp-room, with god knows what sort of company, and that while she was ill and receiving medicine! another woman was placed in the insane department for punishment, though she was perfectly sane. in the workhouse at bacton, in suffolk, in january, , a similar investigation revealed the fact that a feeble-minded woman was employed as nurse, and took care of the patients accordingly; while sufferers, who were often restless at night, or tried to get up, were tied fast with cords passed over the covering and under the bedstead, to save the nurses the trouble of sitting up at night. one patient was found dead, bound in this way. in the st. pancras workhouse in london (where the cheap shirts already mentioned are made), an epileptic died of suffocation during an attack in bed, no one coming to his relief; in the same house, four to six, sometimes eight children, slept in one bed. in shoreditch workhouse a man was placed, together with a fever patient violently ill, in a bed teeming with vermin. in bethnal green workhouse, london, a woman in the sixth month of pregnancy was shut up in the reception-room with her two-year-old child, from february th to march th, without being admitted into the workhouse itself, and without a trace of a bed or the means of satisfying the most natural wants. her husband, who was brought into the workhouse, begged to have his wife released from this imprisonment, whereupon he received twenty-four hours imprisonment, with bread and water, as the penalty of his insolence. in the workhouse at slough, near windsor, a man lay dying in september, . his wife journeyed to him, arriving at midnight; and hastening to the workhouse, was refused admission. she was not permitted to see her husband until the next morning, and then only in the presence of a female warder, who forced herself upon the wife at every succeeding visit, sending her away at the end of half-an-hour. in the workhouse at middleton, in lancashire, twelve, and at times eighteen, paupers, of both sexes, slept in one room. this institution is not embraced by the new poor law, but is administered under an old special act (gilbert's act). the inspector had instituted a brewery in the house for his own benefit. in stockport, july st, , a man, seventy-two years old, was brought before the justice of the peace for refusing to break stones, and insisting that, by reason of his age and a stiff knee, he was unfit for his work. in vain did he offer to undertake any work adapted to his physical strength; he was sentenced to two weeks upon the treadmill. in the workhouse at basford, an inspecting official found that the sheets had not been changed in thirteen weeks, shirts in four weeks, stockings in two to ten months, so that of forty-five boys but three had stockings, and all their shirts were in tatters. the beds swarmed with vermin, and the tableware was washed in the slop-pails. in the west of london workhouse, a porter who had infected four girls with syphilis was not discharged, and another who had concealed a deaf and dumb girl four days and nights in his bed was also retained. as in life, so in death. the poor are dumped into the earth like infected cattle. the pauper burial-ground of st. brides, london, is a bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of charles ii., and filled with heaps of bones; every wednesday the paupers are thrown into a ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the litany at the top of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be re-opened the next wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in. the putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbourhood. in manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the old town, along the irk: this, too, is a rough, desolate place. about two years ago a railroad was carried through it. if it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! but it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. it was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. the disgusting brutality which accompanied this work i cannot describe in further detail. can any one wonder that the poor decline to accept public relief under these conditions? that they starve rather than enter these bastilles? i have the reports of five cases in which persons actually starving, when the guardians refused them outdoor relief, went back to their miserable homes and died of starvation rather than enter these hells. thus far have the poor law commissioners attained their object. at the same time, however, the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property- holders, who very generally admire the new poor law. from newcastle to dover, there is but one voice among the workers--the voice of hatred against the new law. the bourgeoisie has formulated so clearly in this law its conception of its duties towards the proletariat, that it has been appreciated even by the dullest. so frankly, so boldly had the conception never yet been formulated, that the non-possessing class exists solely for the purpose of being exploited, and of starving when the property-holders can no longer make use of it. hence it is that this new poor law has contributed so greatly to accelerate the labour movement, and especially to spread chartism; and, as it is carried out most extensively in the country, it facilitates the development of the proletarian movement which is arising in the agricultural districts. let me add that a similar law in force in ireland since , affords a similar refuge for eighty thousand paupers. here, too, it has made itself disliked, and would have been intensely hated if it had attained anything like the same importance as in england. but what difference does the ill-treatment of eighty thousand proletarians make in a country in which there are two and a half millions of them? in scotland there are, with local exceptions, no poor laws. i hope that after this picture of the new poor law and its results, no word which i have said of the english bourgeoisie will be thought too stern. in this public measure, in which it acts _in corpore_ as the ruling power, it formulates its real intentions, reveals the animus of those smaller transactions with the proletariat, of which the blame apparently attaches to individuals. and that this measure did not originate with any one section of the bourgeoisie, but enjoys the approval of the whole class, is proved by the parliamentary debates of . the liberal party had enacted the new poor law; the conservative party, with its prime minister peel at the head, defends it, and only alters some petty-fogging trifles in the poor law amendment bill of . a liberal majority carried the bill, a conservative majority approved it, and the "noble lords" gave their consent each time. thus is the expulsion of the proletariat from state and society outspoken, thus is it publicly proclaimed that proletarians are not human beings, and do not deserve to be treated as such. let us leave it to the proletarians of the british empire to re-conquer their human rights. { } such is the state of the british working-class as i have come to know it in the course of twenty-one months, through the medium of my own eyes, and through official and other trustworthy reports. and when i call this condition, as i have frequently enough done in the foregoing pages, an utterly unbearable one, i am not alone in so doing. as early as , gaskell declared that he despaired of a peaceful issue, and that a revolution can hardly fail to follow. in , carlyle explained chartism and the revolutionary activity of the working-men as arising out of the misery in which they live, and only wondered that they have sat so quietly eight long years at the barmecide feast, at which they have been regaled by the liberal bourgeoisie with empty promises. and in he declared that the work of organising labour must be begun at once "if europe or at least england, is long to remain inhabitable." and the _times_, the "first journal of europe," said in june, : "war to palaces, peace unto cabins--that is a battle-cry of terror which may come to resound throughout our country. let the wealthy beware!" * * * * * meanwhile, let us review once more the chances of the english bourgeoisie. in the worst case, foreign manufacture, especially that of america, may succeed in withstanding english competition, even after the repeal of the corn laws, inevitable in the course of a few years. german manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of america has developed with giant strides. america, with its inexhaustible resources, with its unmeasured coal and iron fields, with its unexampled wealth of water-power and its navigable rivers, but especially with its energetic, active population, in comparison with which the english are phlegmatic dawdlers,--america has in less than ten years created a manufacture which already competes with england in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded the english from the markets of north and south america, and holds its own in china, side by side with england. if any country is adapted to holding a monopoly of manufacture, it is america. should english manufacture be thus vanquished--and in the course of the next twenty years, if the present conditions remain unchanged, this is inevitable--the majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous, and has no other choice than to starve or to rebel. does the english bourgeoisie reflect upon this contingency? on the contrary; its favourite economist, m'culloch, teaches from his student's desk, that a country so young as america, which is not even properly populated, cannot carry on manufacture successfully or dream of competing with an old manufacturing country like england. it were madness in the americans to make the attempt, for they could only lose by it; better far for them to stick to their agriculture, and when they have brought their whole territory under the plough, a time may perhaps come for carrying on manufacture with a profit. so says the wise economist, and the whole bourgeoisie worships him, while the americans take possession of one market after another, while a daring american speculator recently even sent a shipment of american cotton goods to england, where they were sold for re-exportation! but assuming that england retained the monopoly of manufactures, that its factories perpetually multiply, what must be the result? the commercial crises would continue, and grow more violent, more terrible, with the extension of industry and the multiplication of the proletariat. the proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of the progressive ruin of the lower middle-class and the giant strides with which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few; and the proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation, with the exception of a few millionaires. but in this development there comes a stage at which the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be overthrown, and then follows a revolution. neither of these supposed conditions may, however, be expected to arise. the commercial crises, the mightiest levers for all independent development of the proletariat, will probably shorten the process, acting in concert with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the lower middle-class. i think the people will not endure more than one more crisis. the next one, in or , will probably bring with it the repeal of the corn laws { } and the enactment of the charter. what revolutionary movements the charter may give rise to remains to be seen. but, by the time of the next following crisis, which, according to the analogy of its predecessors, must break out in or , unless delayed perhaps by the repeal of the corn laws or hastened by other influences, such as foreign competition--by the time this crisis arrives, the english people will have had enough of being plundered by the capitalists and left to starve when the capitalists no longer require their services. if, up to that time, the english bourgeoisie does not pause to reflect--and to all appearance it certainly will not do so--a revolution will follow with which none hitherto known can be compared. the proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of gives no true idea. the war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged. even the union of a part of the bourgeoisie with the proletariat, even a general reform of the bourgeoisie, would not help matters. besides, the change of heart of the bourgeoisie could only go as far as a lukewarm _juste-milieu_; the more determined, uniting with the workers, would only form a new gironde, and succumb in the course of the mighty development. the prejudices of a whole class cannot be laid aside like an old coat: least of all, those of the stable, narrow, selfish english bourgeoisie. these are all inferences which may be drawn with the greatest certainty: conclusions, the premises for which are undeniable facts, partly of historical development, partly facts inherent in human nature. prophecy is nowhere so easy as in england, where all the component elements of society are clearly defined and sharply separated. the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution; but it can be made more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. this depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. in proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery. communism stands, in principle, above the breach between bourgeoisie and proletariat, recognises only its historic significance for the present, but not its justification for the future: wishes, indeed, to bridge over this chasm, to do away with all class antagonisms. hence it recognises as justified, so long as the struggle exists, the exasperation of the proletariat towards its oppressors as a necessity, as the most important lever for a labour movement just beginning; but it goes beyond this exasperation, because communism is a question of humanity and not of the workers alone. besides, it does not occur to any communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act. english socialism, _i.e_. communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. thus the more the english workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. if, indeed, it were possible to make the whole proletariat communistic before the war breaks out, the end would be very peaceful; but that is no longer possible, the time has gone by. meanwhile, i think that before the outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal element of the revolution and prevent a "ninth thermidor." in any case, the experience of the french will not have been undergone in vain, and most of the chartist leaders are, moreover, already communists. and as communism stands above the strife between bourgeoisie and proletariat, it will be easier for the better elements of the bourgeoisie (which are, however, deplorably few, and can look for recruits only among the rising generation) to unite with it than with purely proletarian chartism. if these conclusions have not been sufficiently established in the course of the present work, there may be other opportunities for demonstrating that they are necessary consequences of the historical development of england. but this i maintain, the war of the poor against the rich now carried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. it is too late for a peaceful solution. the classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion. then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the land: "war to the palaces, peace to the cottages!"--but then it will be too late for the rich to beware. translators note. being unable at this late day to obtain the original english, the translator has been compelled to re-translate from the german the passages quoted in the text from the following sources:--g. alston, preacher of st. philip's, bethnal green.--d. w. p. alison, f.r.s.e., "observations on the management of the poor in scotland," .--the _artisan_, , october number.--j. c. symonds, "arts and artisans at home and abroad," edin., .--report of the town council of leeds, published in _statistical journal_, vol. ii., p. .--nassau w. senior, "letters on the factory act to the rt. hon. the president of the board of trade" (chas. poulett thomson, esq.), london, .--report of the children's employment commission.--mr. parkinson, canon of manchester, "on the present condition of the labouring poor in manchester," rd ed., .--factories' inquiries commission's report.--e. g. wakefield, m. p., "swing unmasked; or, the cause of rural incendiarism," london, .--a correspondent of the _morning chronicle_.--anonymous pamphlet on "the state of ireland," london, ; nd ed., .--report of the poor law commissioners: extracts from information received by the poor law commissioners. published by authority, london, . index accidents, , , , , , . adulteration, , _et seq_. apprentices, , , , _et seq_. . charter, , _et seq_. , . chartism, xiv., xix., , , , _et seq_. , . chartists, , , , , _et seq_. , . corn laws, , , , , , . league, , , , . repeal of, vi., , , , . cottage system, v., , , , , . crime--form of rebellion, , _et seq_. . increase of, , _et seq_. juvenile, , . result of overcrowding, , , . diseases, engendered by dwellings, , . filth, , , , , , . occupation, - , - , - , . overwork, , , _et seq_. , - . want, , , , , , - . education--means of, , _et seq_. , , , , , . want of, , , , , , . employment of children, in agriculture, , . in factories, , _et seq_. , , _et seq_. . in house industry, , _et seq_. in mines, , , _et seq_. in the night, , . employment of women, in agriculture, . in factories, , _et seq_. , _et seq_. , . in mines, , , , . in sewing, , _et seq_. epidemics, vi., , , , , , , , . factory acts, x., xi., , , , , , , . food--adulteration of, . insufficiency of, , , , , , . quality of, , , , , . free trade, vii., viii., _et seq_. , , . intemperance, , , . inventions. , , _et seq_. , , _et seq_. , . law--a bourgeois institution, , , , , , , , . new poor, , , , , , _et seq_. , , _et seq_. old poor, , , . of wages, xi., , _et seq_. . mortality, , , , _et seq_. , , . parliament, , , , , , , , . philanthropy, , , , , , . police, , , , , , . reform bill, ix., , , , . reserve army, , . schools--day, , _et seq_. , , , . night, , . sunday, , , . socialism, vi., vii., xii., , , _et seq_. , . starvation, , , , , , , , , . strikes, ix., xiv., xv., , , , , , , , , . suicide, , . surplus population, , _et seq_. , , , , . ten hours' bill, vii., , , , _et seq_. , , . truck system, vii., viii., - , , , . ventilation of dwellings, . mines, . towns, , , , , _et seq_. , , , _et seq_. workrooms, , , . workhouses, , _et seq_. footnotes. { } according to porter's _progress of the nation_, london, , vol. i., , vol. ii., , vol. iii. (official data), and other sources chiefly official. { } compare on this point my "outlines for a critique of political economy" in the _deutsch-franzosische jahrbucher_. { } this applies to the time of sailing vessels. the thames now is a dreary collection of ugly steamers.--f. e. { } _times_, oct. th, . { } quoted by dr. w. p. alison, f.r.s.e, fellow and late president of the royal college of physicians, etc. etc. "observations on the management of the poor in scotland and its effects on the health of great towns." edinburgh, . the author is a religious tory, brother of the historian, archibald alison. { a} "report to the home secretary from the poor-law commissioners on an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the labouring classes in great britain with appendix." presented to both houses of parliament in july , vols. folio. { b} _the artisan_, october, . { } "arts and artisan at home and abroad," by j. c. symonds, edinburgh, . the author, as it seems, himself a scotchman, is a liberal, and consequently fanatically opposed to every independent movement of working- men. the passages here cited are to be found p. _et seq_. { a} it must be borne in mind that these cellars are not mere storing- rooms for rubbish, but dwellings of human beings. { b} compare report of the town council in the statistical journal, vol. , p. . { } "the moral and physical condition of the working-classes employed in the cotton manufacture in manchester." by james ph. kay, m.d. nd ed. . dr. kay confuses the working-class in general with the factory workers, otherwise an excellent pamphlet. { } and yet an english liberal wiseacre asserts, in the report of the children's employment commission, that these courts are the masterpiece of municipal architecture, because, like a multitude of little parks, they improve ventilation, the circulation of air! certainly, if each court had two or four broad open entrances facing each other, through which the air could pour; but they never have two, rarely one, and usually only a narrow covered passage. { } nassau w. senior. "letters on the factory act to the rt. hon. the president of the board of trade" (chas. poulett thompson, esq.), london, , p. . { } kay, loc. cit., p. . { } p. gaskell. "the manufacturing population of england: its moral, social and physical condition, and the changes which have arisen from the use of steam machinery; with an examination of infant labour." "fiat justitia," .--depicting chiefly the state of the working-class in lancashire. the author is a liberal, but wrote at a time when it was not a feature of liberalism to chant the happiness of the workers. he is therefore unprejudiced, and can afford to have eyes for the evils of the present state of things, and especially for the factory system. on the other hand, he wrote before the factories enquiry commission, and adopts from untrustworthy sources many assertions afterwards refuted by the report of the commission. this work, although on the whole a valuable one, can therefore only be used with discretion, especially as the author, like kay, confuses the whole working-class with the mill hands. the history of the development of the proletariat contained in the introduction to the present work, is chiefly taken from this work of gaskell's. { } thomas carlyle. "chartism," london, , p. . { } adam smith. "wealth of nations" i., mcculloch's edition in one volume, sect. , p. : "the wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of his master, but that of a free servant is at his own expense. the wear and tear of the latter, however, is, in reality, as much at the expense of his master as that of the former. the wages paid to journeymen and servants of every kind, must be such as may enable them, one with another, to continue the race of journeymen and servants, according as the increasing, diminishing, or stationary demand of the society may happen to require. but though the wear and tear of a free servant be equally at the expense of his master, it generally costs him much less than that of a slave. the fund for replacing or repairing, if i may say so, the wear and tear of the slave, is commonly managed by a negligent master or careless overseer." { } and it came in . { a} archibald alison. "principles of population and their connection with human happiness," two vols., . this alison is the historian of the french revolution, and, like his brother, dr. w. p. alison, a religious tory. { b} "chartism," pp. , , etc. { } when as here and elsewhere i speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, i mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. this ruling class in england, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie. but that this society, and especially the bourgeoisie, is charged with the duty of protecting every member of society, at least, in his life, to see to it, for example, that no one starves, i need not now prove to my _german_ readers. if i were writing for the english bourgeoisie, the case would be different. (and so it is now in germany. our german capitalists are fully up to the english level, in this respect at least, in the year of grace, .) { a} dr. alison. "management of the poor in scotland." { b} alison. "principles of population," vol. ii. { c} dr. alison in an article read before the british association for the advancement of science. october, , in york. { } "manufacturing population," ch . { a} report of commission of inquiry into the employment of children and young persons in mines and collieries and in the trades and manufactures in which numbers of them work together, not being included under the terms of the factories' regulation act. first and second reports, grainger's report. second report usually cited as "children's employment commission's report." first report, ; second report, . { b} fifth annual report of the reg. gen. of births, deaths, and marriages. { } dr. cowen. "vital statistics of glasgow." { } report of commission of inquiry into the state of large towns and populous districts. first report, . appendix. { a} factories' inquiry commission's reports, rd vol. report of dr. hawkins on lancashire, in which dr. robertson is cited--the "chief authority for statistics in manchester." { b} quoted by dr. wade from the report of the parliamentary factories' commission of , in his "history of the middle and working- classes." london, , rd ed. { a} children's employment commission's report. app. part ii. q. , no. , , , , etc. horne. { b} _ibid_. evidence, p. , ; . { a} _ibid_. p. , ; . { b} _ibid_. p. ; . { c} symonds' rep. app. part i., pp. e, , _et seq_. { a} "arts and artisans." { b} "principles of population," vol. ii. pp. , . { } we shall see later how the rebellion of the working-class against the bourgeoisie in england is legalised by the right of coalition. { a} "chartism," p. , _et seq_. { b} _ibid_., p. . { } shall i call bourgeois witnesses to bear testimony from me here, too? i select one only, whom every one may read, namely, adam smith. "wealth of nations" (mcculloch's four volume edition), vol. iii., book , chap. , p. . { } "principles of population," vol. ii., p. , _et seq_. p. , p. . { } "philosophy of manufactures," london, , p. , _et seq_. we shall have occasion to refer further to this reputable work. { } "on the present condition of the labouring poor in manchester," etc. by the rev. rd. parkinson, canon of manchester, d ed., london and manchester, , pamphlet. { a} "manufacturing population of england," chap. . { b} the total of population, about fifteen millions, divided by the number of convicted criminals ( , ). { a} "the cotton manufacture of great britain," by dr. a. ure, . { b} "history of the cotton manufacture of great britain," by e. baines, esq. { } "stubborn facts from the factories by a manchester operative." published and dedicated to the working-classes, by wm. rashleigh, m.p., london, ollivier, , p. , _et seq_. { } compare factories' inquiry commission's report. { } l. symonds, in "arts and artisans." { } see dr. ure in the "philosophy of manufacture." { } report of factory inspector, l. homer, october, : "the state of things in the matter of wages is greatly perverted in certain branches of cotton manufacture in lancashire; there are hundreds of young men, between twenty and thirty, employed as piecers and otherwise, who do not get more than or shillings a week, while children under thirteen years, working under the same roof, earn shillings, and young girls, from sixteen to twenty years, - shillings per week." { a} report of factories' inquiry commission. testimony of dr. hawkins, p. . { b} in , among the accidents brought to the infirmary in manchester, one hundred and eighty-nine were from burning. { } factories' inquiry commission's report, power's report on leeds: passim tufnell report on manchester, p. . etc. { } this letter is re-translated from the german, no attempt being made to re-produce either the spelling or the original yorkshire dialect. { a} how numerous married women are in the factories is seen from information furnished by a manufacturer: in factories in lancashire, , of them were employed; of the husbands of these women, but , were also employed in the factories, , were otherwise employed, were unemployed, and information was wanting as to ; or two, if not three men for each factory, are supported by the work of their wives. { b} house of commons, march th, . { c} factories' inquiry commission's report, p. . { a} for further examples and information compare factories' inquiry commission's report. cowell evidence, pp. , , , , , ; tufnell evidence, pp. , , , , etc. { b} cowell evidence, pp. , , and elsewhere. { c} power evidence, p. . { a} cowell evidence, p. { b} cowell evidence, p. . { c} factories' inquiry commission's report, p. , hawkins. { } stuart evidence, p. . { a} tufnell evidence, p. . { b} dr. loudon evidence, pp. , . { a} dr. loudon evidence, p. . { b} drinkwater evidence, pp. , , , , (two brothers); (two brothers); , and many others. power evidence, pp. , , (two cases); (three cases); (two cases); in leeds, pp. , , , , , _et seq_. loudon evidence, pp. , (four cases); (several cases), etc. sir d. barry evidence, pp. , , , , , , (three cases), etc. tufnell evidence, pp. , , , etc. { a} factories' inquiry commission's report, , sir d. barry evidence, p. (two cases). { b} factories' inquiry commission's report, , loudon evidence, pp. , , etc. { } in the spinning-room of a mill at leeds, too, chairs had been introduced. drinkwater evidence, p. . { } general report by sir d. barry. { a} power report, p. . { b} the surgeons in england are scientifically educated as well as the physicians, and have, in general, medical as well as surgical practice. they are in general, for various reasons, preferred to the physicians. { a} this statement is not taken from the report. { b} tufnell, p. . { a} stuart evidence, p. . { b} tufnell evidence, pp. , , . { } hawkins report, p. ; evidence, p. , etc. etc. hawkins evidence, pp. , . { a} cowell evidence, p. . { b} sir d. barry evidence, p. . { c} cowell, p. . { a} dr. hawkins evidence, p. ; dr. loudon, p. , etc.; sir d. barry, p. , etc. { b} compare stuart, pp. , , ; mackintosh, p. , etc.; power report on nottingham, on leeds; cowell, p. , etc.; barry, p. ; (five cases in one factory), pp. , , , , etc.; loudon, p. . { a} stuart, p. . { b} "philosophy of manufactures," by dr. andrew ure, p. , _et seq_. { a} _ibid_., . { b} _ibid_., p. . { c} _ibid_., p. . { } dr. andrew ure. "philosophy of manufactures," pp. , , _et seq_. { } afterwards earl of shaftesbury, died . { } it is notorious that the house of commons made itself ridiculous a second time in the same session in the same way on the sugar question, when it first voted against the ministry and then for it, after an application of the ministerial whip. { } let us hear another competent judge: "if we consider the example of the irish in connection with the ceaseless toil of the cotton operative class, we shall wonder less at their terrible demoralisation. continuous exhausting toil, day after day, year after year, is not calculated to develop the intellectual and moral capabilities of the human being. the wearisome routine of endless drudgery, in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge. the mind attains neither knowledge nor the power of thought from the eternal employment of the same muscles. the intellect dozes off in dull indolence, but the coarser part of our nature reaches a luxuriant development. to condemn a human being to such work is to cultivate the animal quality in him. he grows indifferent, he scorns the impulses and customs which distinguish his kind. he neglects the conveniences and finer pleasures of life, lives in filthy poverty with scanty nourishment, and squanders the rest of his earnings in debauchery."--dr. j. kay. { a} _manchester guardian_, october th. { b} "stubborn facts," p. _et seq_. { a} drinkwater evidence; p. . { b} "stubborn facts," pp. - . { } _sun_, a london daily; end of november, . { } i have neither time nor space to deal in detail with the replies of the manufacturers to the charges made against them for twelve years past. these men will not learn because their supposed interest blinds them. as, moreover, many of their objections have been met in the foregoing, the following is all that it is necessary for me to add: you come to manchester, you wish to make yourself acquainted with the state of affairs in england. you naturally have good introductions to respectable people. you drop a remark or two as to the condition of the workers. you are made acquainted with a couple of the first liberal manufacturers, robert hyde greg, perhaps, edmund ashworth, thomas ashton, or others. they are told of your wishes. the manufacturer understands you, knows what he has to do. he accompanies you to his factory in the country; mr. greg to quarrybank in cheshire, mr. ashworth to turton near bolton, mr. ashton to hyde. he leads you through a superb, admirably arranged building, perhaps supplied with ventilators, he calls your attention to the lofty, airy rooms, the fine machinery, here and there a healthy-looking operative. he gives you an excellent lunch, and proposes to you to visit the operatives' homes; he conducts you to the cottages, which look new, clean and neat, and goes with you into this one and that one, naturally only to overlookers, mechanics, etc., so that you may see "families who live wholly from the factory." among other families you might find that only wife and children work, and the husband darns stockings. the presence of the employer keeps you from asking indiscreet questions; you find every one well-paid, comfortable, comparatively healthy by reason of the country air; you begin to be converted from your exaggerated ideas of misery and starvation. but, that the cottage system makes slaves of the operatives, that there may be a truck shop in the neighbourhood, that the people hate the manufacturer, this they do not point out to you, because he is present. he has built a school, church, reading-room, etc. that he uses the school to train children to subordination, that he tolerates in the reading-room such prints only as represent the interests of the bourgeoisie, that he dismisses his employees if they read chartist or socialist papers or books, this is all concealed from you. you see an easy, patriarchal relation, you see the life of the overlookers, you see what the bourgeoisie _promises_ the workers if they become its slaves, mentally and morally. this "country manufacture" has always been what the employers like to show, because in it the disadvantages of the factory system, especially from the point of view of health, are, in part, done away with by the free air and surroundings, and because the patriarchal servitude of the workers can here be longest maintained. dr. ure sings a dithyramb upon the theme. but woe to the operatives to whom it occurs to think for themselves and become chartists! for them the paternal affection of the manufacturer comes to a sudden end. further, if you should wish to be accompanied through the working-people's quarters of manchester, if you should desire to see the development of the factory system in a factory town, you may wait long before these rich bourgeoisie will help you! these gentlemen do not know in what condition their employees are nor what they want, and they dare not know things which would make them uneasy or even oblige them to act in opposition to their own interests. but, fortunately, that is of no consequence: what the working-men have to carry out, they carry out for themselves. { } grainger report. appendix, part i., pp. , , _et seq_., - . { a} grainger's whole report. { b} grainger children's employment commission's report. { } burns, children's employment commission's report. { } leach. "stubborn facts from the factories," p. . { } leach. "stubborn facts from the factories," p. . { } leach. "stubborn facts from the factories," p. - . { } children's employment commission's report. { a} see p. . { b} grainger report and evidence. { } horne report and evidence. { } dr. knight, sheffield. { } symonds report and evidence. { } scriven report and evidence. { } leifchild report append., part ii., p. l , ss. , ; franks report append., part ii., p. k , s. , tancred evid. append., part ii., p. i , etc.--children's employment commission's rep't. { } see _weekly dispatch_, march th, . { } thomas hood, the most talented of all the english humorists now living, and, like all humorists, full of human feeling, but wanting in mental energy, published at the beginning of a beautiful poem, "the song of the shirt," which drew sympathetic but unavailing tears from the eyes of the daughters of the bourgeoisie. originally published in _punch_, it made the round of all the papers. as discussions of the condition of the sewing-women filled all the papers at the time, special extracts are needless. { } "arts and artisans," p. , _et seq_. { a} so called from the east indian tribe, whose only trade is the murder of all the strangers who fall into its hands. { b} "what kind of wild justice must it be in the hearts of these men that prompts them, with cold deliberation, in conclave assembled, to doom their brother workman, as the deserter of his order and his order's cause, to die a traitor's and a deserter's death, have him executed, in default of any public judge and hangman, then by a secret one; like your old chivalry fehmgericht and secret tribunal, suddenly revived in this strange guise; suddenly rising once more on the astonished eye, dressed not now in mail shirts, but in fustian jackets, meeting not in westphalian forests, but in the paved gallowgate of glasgow! such a temper must be widespread virulent among the many when, even in its worst acme, it can take such form in the few."--carlyle. "chartism," p. . { a} dr. ure, "philosophy of manufacture," p. . { b} _ibid_., p. . { a} dr. ure, "philosophy of manufacture," p. . { b} _ibid_., p. , _et seq_. { } compare report of chambers of commerce of manchester and leeds at the end of july and beginning of august. { } see introduction. { } according to the census of , the number of working-men employed in mines in great britain, without ireland, was: men over men under women over women under together years years years years coal mines , , , , , copper mines , , , , lead mines , , , iron mines , , , tin mines , , , various, the mineral not specified , , , total , , , , , as the coal and iron mines are usually worked by the same people, a part of the miners attributed to the coal mines, and a very considerable part of those mentioned under the last heading, are to be attributed to the iron mines. { } also found in the children's employment commission's report: commissioner mitchell's report. { } the coal miners have at this moment, , six of their body sitting in the house of commons. { } e. g. wakefield, m.p. "swing unmasked; or, the cause of rural incendiarism." london, . pamphlet. the foregoing extracts may be found pp. - , the passages dealing in the original with the then still existing old poor law being here omitted. { } this has been literally fulfilled. after a period of unexampled extension of trade, free trade has landed england in a crisis, which began in , and is still increasing in energy in . { } the agricultural labourers have now a trade's union; their most energetic representative, joseph arch, was elected m.p. in . { a} report of the poor law commission upon ireland. { b} "principles of population," vol. ii. { } "the state of ireland." london, ; nd ed., . pamphlet. { } carlyle gives in his "past and present" (london, ) a splendid description of the english bourgeoisie and its disgusting money greed. { } extracts from information received from the poor law commissioners. published by authority. london, . { } to prevent misconstructions and consequent objections, i would observe that i have spoken of the bourgeoisie as a _class_, and that all such facts as refer to individuals serve merely as evidence of the way of thinking and acting of a _class_. hence i have not entered upon the distinctions between the divers sections, subdivisions and parties of the bourgeoisie, which have a mere historical and theoretical significance. and i can, for the same reason, mention but casually the few members of the bourgeoisie who have shown themselves honourable exceptions. these are, on the one hand, the pronounced radicals, who are almost chartists, such as a few members of the house of commons, the manufacturers hindly of ashton, and fielden of todmordon (lancashire), and, on the other hand, the philanthropic tories, who have recently constituted themselves "young england," among whom are the members of parliament, d'israeli, borthwick, ferrand, lord john manners, etc. lord ashley, too, is in sympathy with them. the hope of young england is a restoration of the old "merry england" with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. this object is of course unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognise the vileness of our present condition, is worth something anyhow. wholly isolated is the half-german englishman, thomas carlyle, who, originally a tory, goes beyond all those hitherto mentioned. he has sounded the social disorder more deeply than any other english bourgeois, and demands the organisation of labour. { } and it did. the settlement of wage disputes the macmillan company new york · boston · chicago · dallas atlanta · san francisco macmillan & co., limited london · bombay · calcutta melbourne the macmillan co. of canada, ltd. toronto the settlement of wage disputes by herbert feis, ph.d. associate professor in economics university of kansas new york the macmillan company all rights reserved printed in the united states of america copyright, , by the macmillan company. set up and printed. published october, . press of j. j. little & ives company new york, u. s. a. to mellen st. preface "the settlement of wage disputes" falls naturally into two almost equal parts: the first an account of the present industrial situation in the united states, and of the factors which govern american wage levels at the present time; the second an attempt to formulate principles which might serve as the basis of a policy of wage settlement for the country. the proposals made in the second part are based on the theoretical analysis of the first part. certain chapters in the first part (iii and iv) may prove difficult for the ordinary reader. they are intended to be merely an analysis of a particular set of facts and tendencies--those which affect the present wage situation in the united states, or may affect it in the near future. such an analysis of a particular set of facts is all that economic theory can successfully accomplish. this book was first projected in the summer of . the dress and waist industry of new york city had set up a board of protocol standards to settle wage disputes. the late robert c. valentine was then engaged in finding a basis of wage settlement for the industry that would be of more than passing value--and as his assistant, i first became convinced that there could be no permanent peace under the wages system, once different interests became organized, unless a clear body of fundamentals principles applicable to all industries are supported and enforced. in the course of the work i have incurred many obligations both in the united states and great britain. i can only acknowledge a very few here. to my teachers, prof. f. w. taussig and w. z. ripley, i owe much, both for their instruction, direct help and example. in great britain, mr. john a. hobson, mr. henry clay and mr. and mrs. sidney webb aided me greatly to understand british experience. my debt to the work of judge jethro w. brown of the south australia industrial court is heavy as the book shows. above all i have to thank my friend dr. walter b. kahn for his share in the work. h. f. _university of kansas._ contents page chapter i--introductory § . in any attempt to formulate principles for use in the settlement of wage disputes, past experience furnishes much guidance. what this experience consists of. § . such principles as have been used in the settlement of wage disputes have usually resulted from compromise; reason and economic analysis have usually been secondary factors. however, industrial peace cannot be secured by a recurrent use of expedients. § . the attitude most favorable to industrial peace. chapter ii--some pertinent aspects of the present industrial situation § . the chief aims of any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace defined--the chief tests to be passed. a knowledge of present industrial facts essential to the formulation of sound policy. § . the present economic position of the wage earners. § . their relations to the other groups in industry. the acceptance of the practice of collective bargaining essential to any policy of wage settlement in the united states to-day. trade unionism must prove itself fit for this responsibility, however. § . the economic position of capital in the present industrial order. its service to production. the problems to which the accumulation of capital has given rise. § . the economic position of the directors of industry. industrial control an attribute of ownership. two important suppositions used in this book, concerning: a. the forms of industrial income; b. the possible spread of public ownership, and its consequences for a policy of wage settlement. chapter iii--the principles of wages § . a knowledge of the forces governing existing wage levels essential in any attempt to work out a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. § . wage incomes determined by great number of forces. the three most important and constant among these stated. § . these three to be taken up in order. the volume of the flow of wealth in the county of the worker the first to be considered. its relation to wages indirect, as all product is joint result. § . the scientific management theories of wages based on a misconception of the relation between the productive contribution of labor and wages. these theories merely an elaboration of one method of wage payment. they have perceived one important truth, however. § . the "group-demand" theory of wages as held by some trade unions, based on a similar misconception. valid, sometimes, from group point of view; unsound from point of view of labor in general. § . the second important force determining wages is the relative plenty or scarcity of the different groups or agents of production. how this governs the share of the product going to wage earners. § . many important modifying forces to the influence upon wages of relative plenty or scarcity. the most important considered. § . the forces determining the sharing out of the product of industry summarized. the idea of normal equilibrium in distribution a mistaken one. § . a brief analysis of the factors which determine actual plenty or scarcity of the different agents of production at any one time. § . the third important force introduced--the relative plenty or scarcity of different kinds of labor. the existence of relatively separate groups of wage earners discussed. the nature of an investigation of the principles of wages. chapter iv--principles of wages (_continued_) § . we have next to examine the causes of formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners. § . what is meant by a "relatively separate group"? § . the causes of the existence of these groups in the united states to-day. inequality of natural ability; inequality of opportunity; artificial barriers. all these contradictory to assumptions behind theory of general rate of wages. § . trade unions another factor in the formation of relatively separate groups. indirect effects in opposite direction. § . each of these groups has a relatively independent economic career. there are a series of wage levels, all of which are governed to a considerable extent by the same forces. § . the way in which the relative plenty or scarcity of each kind or group of labor affects its wages. other forces play a part also. § . the nature of wage "differentials." chapter v--wages and price movements § . the transactions of distribution arranged in terms of money. how does this affect the outcome of distribution as regards wages? § . the characteristics of price movements. § . the direct and indirect effects of upward price movements upon the distribution of the product. § . the direct and indirect effects of falling price movements upon the distribution of the product. § . the doctrine of the "vicious circle of wages and prices" examined. its meaning and importance. chapter vi--wages and price movements (_continued_) § . the problems of wage settlement arising out of upward price movements two in number: (a) should wages be increased during such periods? (b) if so, on what basis should increases be arranged? the doctrine of the maintenance of the standard of life analyzed. § . an alternative method of adjustment proposed, based on a new index number. § . periods of falling prices also present two problems of wage settlement, similar in essentials to those presented by upward movement. these problems discussed. chapter vii--the standard wage § . the remainder of the book will consist of an attempt to mark out principles of wage settlement that could be applied with relative peace and satisfaction in the settlement of wage disputes. § . some preliminary notes on the subsequent exposition. the question of the political machinery required to put any policy of wage settlement into effect, avoided on the whole. § . the principle of wage standardization defined and explained. § . the characteristics of the standard wage examined. § . the effect of the standard wage on individual independence and initiative. § . the effect of the standard wage on the distribution of employment within the group. § . its effect upon industrial organization, prices, and managerial ability. § . its effect upon the output of the wage earners. this question cannot be satisfactorily discussed apart from the larger one--that of the effect of unionism upon production. § . wage standardization and the "rate of turnover" of labor. chapter viii--the standard wage (_continued_) § . what variations or limitations should be introduced into the principle of standardization in view of the great area and economic diversity of the united states? § . differences in natural or acquired advantage between different enterprises as a reason for modification and limitation of the principle. § . differences in the character of the work performed by any large group of wage earners as a reason. § . differences in the cost of living at different points within the area of standardization as a reason. § . the grounds for "nominal variations" in standard wage rates. the policy to be pursued in regard to payment for irregular employment. § . the possibility of maintaining standard wage rates over a large and diversified area considered. § . up to the present, the progress of standardization has not proceeded in accordance with reasoned conclusions as to the results produced. § . where should level of standardization be set? the doctrine of "standardization upward." § . the importance of the principle of standardization in wage settlement. chapter ix--the living wage § . the reasons for seeking separate principles for the settlement of the wages of the lowest paid groups. § . wage statistics of these groups a matter of familiar knowledge. § . the definition of the living wage idea. an inescapable element of indefiniteness contained in it. § . the living wage principle put in the form of applied policy. § . should the living wage principle be applied to male labor? the arguments for and against. § . the theoretical case for the living wage principle. the verdict of past experience favorable to its extension. § . the dangers which must be guarded against in applying it. § . it should be administered through machinery which makes possible careful study of facts of each industry. this machinery discussed. § . the question of the relation to be established between living wage for men and women difficult. alternatives considered. § . a plan for the adjustment of the living wage to price changes. the basis of adjustment. § . the policy of adjustment--already discussed. § . the hope of the living wage policy. chapter x--the regulation of wage levels § . why there must be in industry an ordered scheme of wage relationship between each and every group of wage earners. the limits of collective bargaining as a factor in industrial peace. § . in the beginning, the scheme must probably be based on an acceptance of existing wage "differentials." the reasons for this are of a practical kind. § . any policy which planned to develop a scheme of wage relationships merely by maintaining existing differentials would be bound to fall to pieces in the end. the difficulties that would arise. § . two principles proposed as the basis of the desired scheme of wage relationship. their meaning as applied doctrines. § . these principles open to criticism both on practical and theoretical grounds. the chief criticisms examined and taken into account. § . some notes on the best method of administering these principles. the necessity of avoiding political interference, if possible. chapter xi--the regulation of wage levels (_continued_)--wages and prices § . the scheme of wage relationship must recommend itself as just to the wage earners and the community in general. the ultimate distributive question to be met is the division of the product between profit and wages. § . provision for the adjustment of wages to price movements would aid, however, towards reaching distributive goal. a policy of adjustment suggested. § . the difficulty of maintaining scheme of wage relationship of wages adjusted to price movements. the best method of adjustment a compromise. chapter xii--the regulation of wage levels (_continued_)--wages and profits § . the profits return in industry, under any policy of wage settlement, will be closely scrutinized. § . the possibility of measuring a "fair" profits return for all industry discussed. a method suggested. § . would the principles of wage settlement worked out so far, produce a fair profits return? an open question. § . the scope and form of any measure designed to assure the desired distributive outcome can be discerned. § . the various steps in the formulation of such a measure reviewed. a measure tentatively suggested. § . the difficulties of calculating wage changes called for under the suggested measure. § . the chief practical weaknesses of the suggested measure examined. § . it would be open to theoretical criticism also. the alternatives even less satisfactory. chapter xiii--a concept of industrial peace § . the hope for industrial peace in the united states. § . a policy of wage settlement composed out of the principles already set forth. § . what results might be expected from the adoption of these principles as a policy? § . the matter of economic security for the wage earners likely to be important for industrial peace. hardly considered in this book. the question has been presented to the kansas court of industrial relations. § . certain new ideas concerning industrial relationship have come to stay. they indicate the probable current of future change. the settlement of wage disputes chapter i--introductory section . in any attempt to formulate principles for use in the settlement of wage disputes, past experience furnishes much guidance. what this experience consists of.--section . such principles as have been used in the settlement of wage disputes have usually resulted from compromise; reason and economic analysis have usually been secondary factors. however, industrial peace cannot be secured by a recurrent use of expedients.--section . the attitude most favorable to industrial peace. .--the industrial life of the united states is marked by an almost continuous series of open struggles between the employers and wage earners of its highly organized industries. no one defends these struggles for their own sake. there is a general inclination, however, to regard them as a necessary accompaniment of industrial activity and change. it must not be supposed that all labor troubles are merely wage controversies--that is to say, that they are all incidental to the settlement of the wage incomes of the laborers. many of them arise in whole or part from a shifting and conflict of ideas about various other aspects of the industrial order. it is possible, however, to concentrate attention upon those conflicts which center around the settlement of wages. there is a quick and somewhat tumultuous stream of investigation directed to the invention and formulation of principles which could be used as a basis of settlement of wage controversies. in various countries such principles have been formally set forth and used. the awards of the war labor board are an example of their imperfect application. in the industrial court of the commonwealth of australia we have an example of the consistent use of one set of wage principles. the material that has arisen out of this process of discussion and experimentation is of the utmost value to any one endeavoring to work out a wage policy for industrial peace in the united states. it forms a body of doctrines. it gives evidence both as to the chief subjects of wage controversy, and indicates the suitability or the shortcomings of many of the principles or doctrines that might be proposed. thus in any investigation of principles of wage settlement--with a view to industrial peace--we are not without the guidance of experience. this experience consists, firstly, of the principles worked out and applied in the decisions and orders of the courts or boards which have served as agents of wage settlement in the united states, england, canada and the australian dominions. of almost equal value is the material growing out of those great industrial conflicts of recent years, in which claims have been put forward and agreement has been sought on the basis of some definite theory of wages. such, for example, is the material prepared and presented in the course of the railway wage arbitrations in the united states and england. such also is the evidence and material presented in the course of the inquiry recently held in great britain upon the wages of transport workers. .--it should be understood that the principles which have been used in wage settlements in the past were not ideal solutions. that is to say they were not arrived at solely by the use of reason, directed to the discovery of what is just and what is for the general good. the situation has been rather that described by mr. squires, when he writes: "too often in the past arbitration has followed the line of least resistance. with much unction, the lion's share has been awarded to the lion. decisions proposing another settlement were speedily forgotten because not enforced. those submitting to arbitration frequently did so with the mental reservation that the decision to be acceptable must at least approximate the conditions they felt they would be able to establish by a show of strength. from this position to one of complacent acceptance of arbitrary decisions, applied not to an isolated group but seeking to comprehend all labor or a given class, is a long step for both employers and employees." and again: "in arbitrary wage adjustments the absence of well defined and acceptable standards to be used in wage determination as well as the difficulty in enforcing awards that did not conform closely to the law of supply and demand has forced arbitration to resort to the expediency of splitting the difference. cost of living, proportionate expense of labor, and net profits, when taken into account have been more often evoked in defense of claims made than as a means of determining what claims were just under the circumstances."[ ] so, also, with any attempt to devise principles which might serve as the basis of a policy of wage settlement in the united states. they would represent the effort to develop standards by which conflicting claims could be resolved. it is not desired to signify agreement by this admission with those who believe that all principles of wage settlement must be purely passive, with those who argue that wage settlement must perforce be nothing more than a recurrent use of expedients produced on the spur of the occasion out of the magical hat of the arbitrator. all that is meant is that no policy of wage settlement will succeed if its results diverge too greatly from the interests which it, in turn, would guide and restrain. any policy of wage settlement must take into consideration the moral and social circumstances pertinent to the dispute as well as the economic. it must express active social and ethical claims as well as recognize economic facts. it must be supported by the sense that it is at least moderately just. most attempts, furthermore, to settle wage disputes by the use of defined principles have resulted in an incoherence of policy due to the necessity of bowing to the facts of force. this interference of force and the consequent disturbance of policy is likewise to be expected in all future attempts. for, in all human affairs private interest will, on favorable occasions, revolt against laws or rules which restrain it. again, in the united states all past attempts to settle wage disputes by reference to principles have been isolated and sporadic. they have, therefore, been virtually foredoomed to failure. for as will be made clearer as we progress, any successful attempt to base wage settlements upon principles will demand the consistent and courageous application of these principles for a not inconsiderable period, and to all important industries alike. otherwise compromise and a search for any way out of the immediate crisis is the only possible principle of settlement. any well-conceived policy of wage settlement must have regard for a far wider set of forces and facts than are presented by any single controversy. the objects of any policy could only be attained through a long series of decisions ranging throughout the field of industry, and related to each other. this, it is trusted, will become plain as the difficulties of formulating policy are discussed. .--prof. marshall in his great book has an arresting passage on the importance of the tendency to organization which characterizes the whole field of industry. he writes: "this is not a fitting place for a study of the causes and effects of trade combinations and of alliances and counter alliances among the employers and employed, as well as among traders and manufacturers. they present a succession of picturesque incidents and romantic transformations which arrest public attention and seem to indicate a coming change of our social arrangements now in one direction and now in another; and their importance is certainly great and grows rapidly. but it is apt to be exaggerated; for indeed many of them are little more than eddies such as have always flitted over the surface of progress. and though they are on a larger and more imposing scale in this modern age than before; yet now, as ever, the main body of the movement depends on the deep, silent, strong stream of the tendencies of normal distribution and exchange which 'are not seen' but which control the course of those episodes which 'are seen.' for even in conciliation and arbitration the central difficulty is to discover what is the normal level from which the decisions of the court must not depart far under penalty of destroying their own authority."[ ] writing in england in , it seems to me as if the events of change in england were more than the surface movements he speaks of, and that slowly but definitely industrial arrangements are undergoing modification so as to give scope to new energies and ideas which will modify the "normal" distribution and exchange as he conceived it. the future in the united states is even less clearly marked. there too new purposes and claims are arising and will seek adjustment with established arrangements. the attitude of all those who really desire industrial peace must be that of readiness to judge such forces of change as may become active, by the balance of good or harm they seem to promise. for that is the attitude which alone can make possible a fusion of the conservatism of experience and of established interest, and the radicalism of hope and desire--by which fusion society can experience peaceful development. footnotes: [ ] "new york harbor wage adjustment," b. m. squires, _monthly review of the u. s. department of labor_, sept., , page . [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics," th edition, page . chapter ii--some pertinent aspects of the present industrial situation section . the chief aims of any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace defined--the chief tests to be passed. a knowledge of present industrial facts essential to the formulation of sound policy.--section . the present economic position of the wage earners.--section . their relations to the other groups in industry. the acceptance of the practice of collective bargaining essential to any policy of wage settlement in the united states to-day. trade unionism must prove itself fit for this responsibility, however.--section . the economic position of capital in the present industrial order. its service to production. the problems to which the accumulation of capital has given rise.--section . the economic position of the directors of industry. industrial control an attribute of ownership. two important suppositions used in this book, concerning: a. the forms of industrial income; b. the possible spread of public ownership, and its consequences for a policy of wage settlement. .--the problem of wage settlement may be regarded as the task of elucidation or invention of methods and principles in accordance with which the product of industry might be shared among the wage earners and the other participants in the product with relative peace and satisfaction. it is necessary and permissible, as has been remarked, to separate this problem from other closely related problems. however, any policy of wage settlement that might be adopted would be also an important influence in other industrial issues outside of those it settles directly. it would affect in numberless ways the relations between the groups concerned in production. it follows that no policy of wage settlement will work successfully unless it accomplishes two ends. first, it must represent convincingly the effort to divide the product of industry so as to satisfy the most widely held conceptions of justice in the industrial system. second, it must contribute, wherever it is a factor, to such an adjustment of industrial relations as will command the voluntary support of all groups whose coöperation is necessary for the maintenance of industrial peace. for the accomplishment of these two objects, any policy must be based upon a knowledge of the present economic position of the various groups engaged in industry, and of the present state of industrial relations between them. it is obviously impossible to review these matters adequately in this book. the most that can be attempted is a brief survey of those aspects of these questions with which the problem of wage settlement must definitely concern itself. such a survey will occupy this chapter. if it serves no other purpose, it will serve the important one of making clear the source of certain general presuppositions with which the problem of formulating a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace is approached. .--it is convenient to deal with the general field under survey by considering in the order stated, the present economic position, firstly, of the wage earners; secondly, of those who own invested capital; and thirdly, of those who direct industrial activity. questions of industrial relationship between these groups can then be presented at the point at which they arise most pertinently. such a loose order as this is dictated by the desire to avoid all questions except those which inevitably arise when studying the problem of wage settlement. to begin with the wage earners. the task of giving exact scope to the term "wage earners" may be shirked. the term may be taken to include, at least, all those grades of workers whose incomes would be governed directly by any scheme of wage settlement. when using the term in the course of theoretical discussion, as in the ordinary analysis of distribution, it may be taken to include also other grades of workers, whose incomes probably would not be so governed, as for example, assistant or department managers of large businesses. the recent past has witnessed important changes both in the economic position of the wage earners, and in the relations between them and the other groups engaged in industry. a close connection may be traced between the two lines of change. up to the beginning of the present century, at any rate, it may be asserted that the wage earners of the country were not separated from the rest of the industrial community, either socially or economically; although at all times throughout the last century, there was to be found a section of recent immigrant labor which had not yet found its way into the main channels of economic society. the farms, the shops and private businesses of the small and semi-rural towns; these were the common origins and discipline of our industrial leaders and of the more skilled groups of wage earners. there was no great difference either of educational or of industrial opportunity between the mass of men. the few great financial centers of the east may have been the home of an established and separate economic class, but this class was not one of the most important industrial forces. the standard of life as well as the economic prospects of all wage earners who had been thoroughly absorbed into the community encouraged a feeling of equality and independence. the tradition of our period of industrial expansion was that most men should seek to operate their own farm or business (and be their own master). this tradition could flourish as long as a great variety of industrial opportunity existed for the ordinary individual. the first stages in the development of our natural resources, the course of mechanical invention and improvement, the rapid growth of our population--all these changes stimulated independent enterprise, and offered great hopes of success in enterprise to men possessed of common sense, energy, and character. no family felt itself placed in a fixed position in the industrial scale except by reason of its own inferior powers of utilizing opportunity. the wage earners were those workers who worked for some one else, but they did not form a separate class different in experience and outlook from their employers. the possession of wealth, under such circumstances indicated individual capacity, temperament, and ambition. that phase of american industry is certainly not entirely past, although it has not persisted to the extent that some of the industrial leaders whose rise was contemporaneous with the earlier stages of industrial expansion, are wont to argue. at the present time able and determined individuals, who in youth are manual workers frequently succeed in discovering openings to the higher industrial positions. the need for business ability is still too great to be supplied by any one level of society; all are drawn upon. the thought that each man can attain to the possession of a business of his own, or to a position of importance in some big business, is even now a common conviction and inspiration among the more skilled groups of wage earners. yet the economic position of the wage earners in industry has undergone genuine change. the chief characteristics of the present situation are familiar knowledge. first of all, the percentage of employers to wage earners in industry has decreased.[ ] again most new undertakings in the important branches of productive industry require a large amount of capital, a specialized and rather rare capacity for organization and a considerable knowledge of a wide sphere of industry. indeed, the undertaking of new business enterprises has itself become to no small extent the function of organizations rather than of individuals. further the personal coöperation between employer and the best men among his wage earners which was in the past the ordinary method of business education is not often practised now. industry is not a good education for the skilled and able wage earners. industrial management has usually taken the view that there is no need or profit in educating the wage earners beyond the requirements of their specialized task. the gap between ordinary wage work and managerial work and ownership is in most industries great--the path upward hard to discover. the jobs which carry the easiest opportunities for advancement in many important industries are now the subordinate positions in the various executive, administrative or sales branches. these jobs tend to be given to young men from that section of society which has affiliations, direct or indirect, with the management of industry. the growth in importance of these branches has led to the development of a specialized form of education for industrial leadership which the wage earner does not receive. indeed, with the ever increasing complexity of the problems of business enterprise, prolonged education, itself, has become of more importance in determining individual chances of success. all these developments have greatly lessened the chances of the ordinary wage earner for any position of ownership or control. they have tended to separate the wage earners from the groups controlling industry; they have taken away in a large measure the inspiration which work receives from hopes of steady advancement. when that hope is gone only the hope for high wages is left, and that is not a sufficiently potent common aim to insure the coöperation required for so complex an activity as modern industry. simultaneously with the revolution in industrial structure and interacting with it in many ways, there has occurred a great change in the composition and character of the wage-earning body. the change that occurred between and in the sources of the immigration which has furnished the united states with the bulk of its supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labor, is a commonplace of american industrial history. the effects of this change have been largely governed by other industrial events, chief among which may be put the increased concentration of industry in and around a relatively small number of cities or regions. for as mr. chapin in his study of the sources of urban increase has stated: "immigration has been the chief source of urban increase in the united states during the past quarter of a century."[ ] there has assembled in each of our great cities a mass of workers, many of whom are of recent alien origin, quickly habituated to the routine of existence in crowded city streets and busy factories. the interchange of opinion and of sympathy between these lowest grades of industrial workers and the rest of the community is very imperfect. their industrial position and outlook tends to be that of a separate class. as a rule, they are unorganized. it is of these grades of labor that prof. marshall has written "some of these indeed rise; for instance, particular departments of some steel works are so fully manned by slavs, that they are beginning efficiently to take the place of irish and others who have hitherto acted as foremen: while large numbers of them are to be found in relatively light, but monotonous work in large cities. they may lack the resolute will which put many british, german and scandinavian immigrants on terms of equality with native americans. but they are quick withal, versatile; and as a rule, easily molded; they take readily to the use of machinery; and they have no tradition that could prevent them from doing their best in using semi-automatic machines, which are simple of handling, while doing complex work. thus america has obtained a plentiful supply of people who are able and willing to do the routine work of a factory for relatively low wages, and whose aptitudes supplement those of the stronger races that constitute the great bulk of the white population."[ ] they have sought chiefly such improvement in their position as might come from increased wages. they have remained in the regions of the will and of thought subject to those who controlled industry; for they themselves have been in a strange environment, and so have not been able to display, to any considerable extent, the qualities requisite to industrial leadership. the difference of viewpoint and even of economic interest between the groups of skilled craftsmen in industry and the unskilled grades is being gradually reduced. industrial developments have tended to emphasize the measure of common interest between all grades of wage earners. the steady trend to standardization in production and to simplification of the machine processes has lessened somewhat the difference between the character of the work of the upper and lower grades of labor. modern industrial developments have led to an increased emphasis upon "general ability" and a lessened emphasis upon "special ability." to quote marshall again, "manual skill that is so specialized that it is quite incapable of being transferred from one occupation to another is becoming steadily a less and less important factor in production. putting aside for the present the faculties of artistic perception and artistic creation, we may say that what makes one occupation higher than another, what makes the workers of one town or country more efficient than those of another, is chiefly a superiority in general sagacity and energy which are not specialized to any one occupation."[ ] as labor organization tends to become recognized as a regular part of the framework of industry, as the duties put upon trade union leadership are broadened in order that industry may give the wage earners collective representation, it is to be expected that stronger bonds will arise between the skilled and unskilled grades of wage earners than those which unite them at present.[ ] the position of the female industrial workers remains to be noted since the employment of women in industry seems likely to increase. women are employed, on the whole, on the lighter and more routine stages of the process of production. they have shown capacity, endurance and steadiness upon monotonous and nerve straining work both upon machine and hand tasks. it seems likely that they will continue to displace men in many of the simpler mechanical jobs. many individual women wage earners have risen to tasks of responsibility and direction. this number will be greatly added to by improvement in the education of women for industry and by their continued self-assertion. nevertheless, it is likely that the great bulk of women wage earners will continue to be employed as at present upon relatively simple, light and unskilled work. such, in briefest outline, is the economic position of the wage earners in american industry to-day. there is a diversity of outlook and of animating spirit among the various groups or classes. there is no very settled opinion among them as to the place of the wage earner in the industrial system. there is besides a diversity of racial and sex faculty and adaptability. .--change and diversity also mark the relationships between the wage earners and the other industrial groups. up to the very recent past, the connection of the wage earners with the enterprise in which they served was limited practically to the fulfillment of the individual wage contracts which were made. the obligation of the wage earners to the enterprise which employed them has been considered at an end with the performance of the work they were employed to do. similarly, the obligation of the enterprise to the wage earners has been considered fulfilled by the payment of wages earned. the wage earners have been called upon to give their whole-hearted efforts to their work by reason of the belief that such effort was to their own interest, and by reason of their own hopes and desires for advancement. the american wage earners have usually tackled their jobs with energy, good will, and sincerity. it is impossible to attempt to sketch here the development of the practice of collective bargaining, and the various concepts of industrial relationship to which the rise of trade unionism has given impulse. we are now in the midst of a struggle brought about by the efforts of the wage earners to add to their traditional rights of freedom of contract and of enterprise certain other rights. these may be collectively described as the right to organize and to use their organized strength collectively in all ways which may be reconciled with the public interest. some of the greatest industrial conflicts of recent years have been consequences of the efforts of the wage earners to establish these additional rights both in fact and in law (as for example the strike in the steel and iron industry in ). much headway has been made in the establishment of the rule of collective bargaining in industry. the scope of the matters usually settled by that method varies greatly between individual, establishments and industries. organized labor has frequently received official recognition by the fact of its representation on bodies concerned with the investigation or control of the conditions of labor, or with general questions arising out of, or closely connected with, industrial activity--especially during the war. the president's second industrial conference, which was appointed to make recommendations concerning the most urgent problems of industrial relationship that had been accentuated by the war, emphasized the need for the "deliberate organization" of the relationship between employer and employees in large industries, but contributed little to the matters in dispute. their view was expressed as follows: "to-day we have a complex interweaving of vital interests. but we have as yet failed to adjust our human relations to the facts of an economic interdependence. the process toward adjustment, though slow, nevertheless goes on. right relations between employer and employee, in large industries, can be promoted only by deliberate organization of that relationship. not only must the theory that labor is a commodity be abandoned, but the concept of leadership must be substituted for that of mastership." the attitude of the community has been to take no step in advance of what resulted from the trial of argument and force by the directly interested parties. but it is probable that in the future public opinion will be more positive and will grant to labor organizations fuller recognition and greater participation in the control of industrial activity than heretofore. it will be impossible to develop any policy of wage settlement while certain of these questions of industrial relationship remain unsettled--particularly the question of the acceptance of the method of collective bargaining. any proposals of wage policy must put that matter, at least, on firm ground. it is probable that in order to administer any policy of wage settlement some means of representation for the wage earners will be indispensable. and it is likely that satisfactory representation can only be obtained by the organization of the wage earners. furthermore, this organization will have to be on a wider scale than shop organization, although shop organization may also be useful. thus it may be said that it will be found necessary in any attempt to secure industrial peace in the united states by the enforcement of a policy of wage settlement, not only to recognize labor unions where they already exist, but also to give encouragement to some form of organization where none exists.[ ] if in the trying times immediately ahead the trade unions give proof that they are more than servants of craft interests; if they stand up as democratic institutions capable of exercising power in industry and not abusing it; if their leaders show they can be humble, when made powerful, then that opposition to the growth of trade union power which is based on a genuine concern for the public welfare will be disarmed. if the trade unions show none of these qualities, the common sense of the community will resist them in the name of traditional equality and democracy. popular movements such as trade unionism must make mistakes constantly, but because of the spirit behind them, they have great powers of recovery. the trade union movement, as a whole in the united states, has not yet shown a thorough comprehension of the economic system of which it is a part; it has, therefore, often erred in its efforts to end an evil or injustice. particular unions and leaders have often pursued mean, short-sighted and self-seeking policies--which have reflected upon the whole movement. much like other economic groups, when their own interest has not coincided with the general interest, they have frequently put their own interest first. it is the test of all great popular movements, however, that they show they possess the ability to pursue a just and generous policy even while they are hard pressed, provoked by injustice, and maligned. that is the trial which trade unionism faces in the united states to-day; it is the example trade unionism must set before it can expect willing acceptance as a fundamental industrial institution. unless the union movement proves itself intelligent, disciplined, and aware of ethical considerations, a continuance of industrial conflict will be inevitable; for any practicable policy of wage settlement for industrial peace will require union participation. .--let us pass now to the economic position of "capital" (the owners of capital) in the industrial order which uses it (of which they are a part). in a society where labor works upon the gifts of nature almost unaided by instruments invented by man and fashioned by previous human labor, the society must content itself with small numbers or little product or both. modern industry has been shaped, perhaps predominantly, by the effort to support large numbers at a high standard of economic existence. production has become greatly subdivided among specialized groups. in industry to-day, the wage earners of various kinds perform their tasks with the assistance of such equipment, machinery, and general organization as will serve to make their labor result in a large product. the means which make possible this effective employment of labor in industry are what we mean by the term "capital."[ ] the section of the community which owns and directs the investment of the bulk of these means has received the name of capitalists. almost all the capital accumulated within the united states is privately owned. since the beginning of our industrial history the opportunities for accumulation have been left to individuals and the capital which industry has used has been provided by private owners. we have depended upon the personal motives of individuals to persuade them to refrain from the immediate consumption of some part of the product of industry which has come into their possession, and to lead them to put their savings at the further command of industry. the circumstances which have governed the course and direction of this accumulation, and the question of the amount of economic cost that it involved have been the subjects of much capable exposition and of very violent differences. much accumulation has resulted from the fact that industrial or rent incomes have been at certain times distinct surpluses over the possible consumption of the individuals in receipt of them. much has been prompted and maintained by the efforts of men to move ahead to success and power--that is by ambition and rivalry; much by the idea that pecuniary success is itself an achievement, a mark of ability and leadership. the ordinary hopes of the multitude of men, such as the desire for a secure existence for themselves and their family, and the wish to figure among their friends as an equal, have been the steadiest motives of all. saving is not one of the most deeply implanted habits. it is a habit that is closely bound up with the qualities of personal ambition, calculation and the desire for responsibility. that is the reason why rich men are so seldom very likable. it is the reason also why those who are the most needy are at times least disposed to save when they have a chance. and if in the immediate future, the responsibility for accumulation is to be more widely diffused than at present, there will have to be a general cultivation of these qualities--qualities, indeed, most requisite for a complex, mechanical civilization like our own. the accumulation of capital, as has been said, enables industry to utilize such methods of production as result in a high volume of product for a given expenditure of effort. much of the hopefulness and energy which has characterized our industrial life arose out of the belief that the continuous course of capital accumulation, since it made possible the utilization of new inventions and improved methods of production, was preparing the way for a future that would be marked by even a wider distribution of comfort than men saw around them. thus it has been urged that by devotion to industry and by consuming less than was produced, the time would come when the world would be so well equipped that none of its workers would have to be in want of the economic essentials of a satisfactory life. in mr. keynes words, "society was working not for the small pleasures of to-day, but for the future security and improvement of the race,--in fact for 'progress.' if only the cake were not cut, but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would be at last the enjoyment of our labors. in that day, overwork, overcrowding and underfeeding would come to an end and men secure of the comforts and necessities of the body could proceed to the nobler exercise of their faculties."[ ] under the guiding force of this conviction, and in the united states, with the extra stimulus of the belief that individual effort was throwing open vast new resources to the world, the course of accumulation has been viewed with approval and in the spirit of emulation. we, however, have recently been assailed by growing doubts in regard to the idea of economic progress based upon capital accumulation. we have witnessed the growth of severe tensions between those who receive the greatest share of the income from accumulated wealth and the other groups engaged in production. it is pertinent to inquire into the reasons for this change of feeling; for, within the sphere of its operation, any policy of wage settlement must aim to lessen or eliminate this cause of discontent. first of all it must be observed that the bulk of the accumulation has been accomplished by a relatively small number of individuals. if this concentration of wealth were peculiar to the united states it might be attributed to the fact that this country has undergone exceptionally rapid expansion, during which the opportunities for accumulation were both unusual and irregularly distributed. but the explanation seems to lie deeper, for the same condition is to be found in all advanced industrial nations. the opinion may be ventured that it is characteristic of such industrial arrangements as have prevailed in the united states, that the tendency towards diffusion of the results of advances in production (obscured, besides, by the growth of population) should lag seriously behind the tendency towards concentration.[ ] the condition of inequality of wealth, heretofore a condition of the process of capital accumulation, is one of the chief causes of the embitterment of industrial relations. firstly, it is one of the factors which tend to the creation of separate group interests. a high degree of inequality of accumulated wealth leads to a concentration of the control of the larger industrial enterprises within the hands of a small section of the community. the interest in high returns from accumulated wealth appears to be a group interest. and, indeed, if the lag of diffusion behind concentration passes a certain point it is in reality a group interest--in the sense of being opposed to the general interest. secondly, great inequality of wealth leads to the growth of institutions incompatible with the purposes of a democracy. these are a cause of economic antagonism, which has its reflection in industrial relations. thirdly, it has evil psychological effects. in a country bred upon the general ideas of democracy, not even political equality and a wide distribution of economic necessities and comforts will suffice to produce general contentment, if a top stratum of the community is possessed of the social advantages of vast wealth. few are satisfied with their lot as long as they see others, often through no qualities of their own, more satisfactorily endowed with worldly goods. lastly, although great inequality of wealth makes possible a high level of production, it also makes great waste possible. thus, grave dissatisfaction surrounds that very process of capital accumulation which has been regarded as the high road of economic progress. grave doubts have arisen as to the ultimate attainment of the vision at its end. the task is presented of directing and safeguarding the course of capital accumulation. it is evident that no policy of wage settlement can, of itself, do a great deal in this regard. something it can do. that, it is ventured, should be along the following lines: it must aim to effect a distribution of the product of industry in which the return to the owners of accumulated capital does not exceed a point determined by weighing the following considerations: first, the service of capital in production, the sacrifice involved in much accumulation, and the need of assuring capital accumulation, as discussed above. secondly, the evil effects of inequality of wealth as discussed above. thirdly, the fact that the health, energy, and intelligence of those that carry out the work of production are no less important factors in effective production than capital itself. and that the possession and use of these qualities by individuals is to a considerable measure dependent upon their economic position here and now. these various considerations, it need hardly be said, cannot be weighed mechanically, but only by the use of the informed judgment. the policy of wage settlement must, in addition, give indirect encouragement to the growth of such industrial beliefs and institutions as will enable the wage earners to participate in the control over the conditions of production. only then will the effect of industrial methods on the welfare of the wage earner receive constant attention, and the desire of the wage earners for self-improvement be given encouragement. in these directions, then, the policy of wage settlement can and should safeguard and direct the course of capital accumulation. .--the preceding discussion bears directly upon the next question to be considered, namely, the present economic position of those who perform the work of direction in industry. only one or two aspects of this subject require attention in this investigation. it may be remarked, to begin with, that those who own the capital invested in industrial enterprises thereby possess the most general powers of control and direction over them. these powers they may exercise personally or through their agents--but in either case, the fact of ownership is the decisive influence in the settlement of these questions in which the wage earners are most interested. the fact that some of the capital invested in particular enterprises may not carry with it any rights of control or direction--as for example, the capital invested in railway bonds, or the temporary borrowings from the banks contracted by most industrial concerns--does not affect this truth. it is entirely conceivable that enterprises might be carried on wholly with the use of such capital as gave no title to control over the conduct of the enterprise; but at present, the opposite, generally speaking, is the fact. and as is to be expected the work of direction is dominated normally by the necessity of earning profit for the owners of the enterprise--though many other sentiments and motives may and do mingle with the motive of profit-making. these facts form the basis of two suppositions, by the aid of which the argument of this book is carried out. the first one is to this effect: that if rent incomes (in the sense of ricardian rent) are left out of consideration, since they will not be directly affected by the policy of wage settlement, the product of industry is distributed in two major forms. these are to wit: that which is received by workmen in direct return for their labor, which is called wages; and that which goes to those who own, and therefore govern, directly or indirectly, the operation of industrial enterprises, which is called profits. it is hardly necessary to remark that the same individual may be in receipt of both forms of income. the second form of income "profits" is a mixed form of income which may be analyzed in different instances, into very different quantities of the elements which make it up. this mixed form of income, which goes to the owners of industry by virtue of their dual connection with industrial enterprise--the connection of ownership and direction--contains in some forms of enterprise a large element of what has been called "the wages of management"; in other forms this element may be almost entirely absent. so too with the element of "interest" and with the other elements which may enter into it. throughout this inquiry the term "profits" will be used to indicate this mixed form of income. the second supposition supplies an answer to a question that must be faced in any attempt to formulate a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace in the united states. that question is whether it shall be taken for granted that the desire for private profit will continue to govern the performance of the tasks of industrial direction. the wage policy that is developed in the course of this book is based on the assumption that the large majority, if not all, of the industries which would be included in it, were it adopted, will remain privately owned and operated. at the same time, it is by no means outside of current possibilities that certain of our greatest industries may change over into some form of public ownership; and that this ownership would be accompanied either by direct public operation, or very considerable public regulation of their operation. therefore, we are led to ask whether a wage policy conceived on the assumption of private ownership and control would be applicable to industries under public ownership. the answer will be different according to circumstances. if the régime of public ownership should become general, as is contemplated in the orthodox socialist theory, it is likely that, then, an attempt would be made to rest wage policy on principles fundamentally different than any that would be practicable under a régime of private enterprise. on the other hand, if public ownership should be extended only to a very few though important industries such as the railroads and coal mines, it is almost certain that the principles underlying the settlement of wages in the publicly owned industries would have to be the same as those applied in the privately owned. the general policy of operation might differ, however, in other respects. thus, a policy of wage settlement formulated on the assumption of private ownership would not become unsuitable in the event that some industries became publicly owned. the relations between those who carry out the actual work of direction in industry and the wage earners have been touched upon already from the point of view of the wage earners. it has been stated that the policy of wage settlement should give encouragement to such arrangements as will enable the wage earners to participate in the control over the conditions of production. alongside of this general aim may now be put one other, which cannot in any way be embodied in the terms of wage policy, but which should be given a leading place in the calculations of those who execute the wage policy and therefore possess educative influence. that purpose is to try, by the educative power of their position to give vitality to the idea that those who direct industry have a duty to weigh the public interest in their operations, and to emphasize the necessity of seeking a basis of coöperation with the wage earners which will give them all possible chance to find their work healthy and interesting. footnotes: [ ] a. marshall, appendix n, "industry and trade," entitled "the recent increase in the size of the representative business establishment in the united states," has drawn up some tables on this very subject. he writes, "the table given below shows that the , establishments engaged in manufacture in had increased to , ; but meanwhile the total value of their output had increased from $ , m to $ , m: that is, their average output had increased from , to , : if we go back to , when workshops, etc., were reckoned in, we find the average output of an establishment to have been less than , dollars." and again "industrial establishments having a less output than , dollars accounted for . per cent. of the whole in ; but only . in . in the same years the share of establishments with output between , dollars and , , dollars fell from . to . , while that of grant businesses with not less than , , dollars output rose from per cent. to ." [ ] _publications of the american statistical association_, sept., . [ ] a. marshall, "industry and trade," p. . see for analysis of occupations of immigrants, "report of u. s. ind. commission," vol. ix. [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics" ( th edition), page . [ ] in an analysis of the trend toward union amalgamation published by glocker in , he concludes that "instances in which the self interest of the skilled workers demand their amalgamation with the unskilled are still rare, however. if common laborers are admitted in the near future to unions of other workers in the same industry, they will be admitted not from self interest, but from more altruistic motives, from a growing spirit of class consciousness attended, perhaps, by a correspondingly growing realization of class responsibility"--"amalgamation of related trades in unions." _american economic review_, sept., , page . [ ] under the kansas industrial court law passed in , no provision in that direction is made. the court is instructed to deal either with organizations or with individuals. it is likely that the court, in its efforts to get disputes settled before they reach it, will find it necessary to encourage organization. a related question which is bound to arise sooner or later is in regard to the stand that the court will take in disputes arising out of attempts to organize an industry. [ ] it should be observed that the above definition of capital as the "means which make possible the effective employment of labor in industry" is a functional definition. to make the definition good, so to speak, it would be necessary to enter into an analysis of a complex series of interactions including a study of the action of the banking systems, and the methods of industrial finance. to attempt to state the various forms of capital would involve the same process--for capital is to some extent a secretion of the whole industrial organization. for present purposes it is better to disregard the finer shades of interaction involved in the process of creation of capital and the provision of capital to industry important as they are. it will suffice to take note only of the simpler and most fundamental aspect of the process. thus it is not misleading, for present purposes, to say that the capital which is at the command of industry in the u. s. at the present time is the result of accumulation in private hands of some part of the product of past labor. [ ] j. m. keynes, "economic consequences of the peace," pages - . see also a. marshall, "industry and trade," appendix p headed "possibilities of the future." [ ] in the very interesting study made by prof. bowley on "the change in the distribution of the national income, - " (great britain), page , a similar conclusion is stated. see also the article of prof. a. a. young entitled "do the statistics of the concentration of wealth in the united states mean what they are commonly assumed to mean?" in the march, , issue of the _journal of the american statistical association_. chapter iii--the principles of wages section . a knowledge of the forces governing existing wage levels essential in any attempt to work out a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace.--section . wage incomes determined by great number of forces. the three most important and constant among these stated.--section . these three to be taken up in order. the volume of the flow of wealth in the country of the worker the first to be considered. its relation to wages indirect, as all product is joint result.--section . the scientific management theories of wages based on a misconception of the relation between the productive contribution of labor and wages. these theories merely an elaboration of one method of wage payment. they have perceived one important truth, however.--section . the "group-demand" theory of wages as held by some trade unions, based on a similar misconception. valid, sometimes, from group point of view; unsound from point of view of labor in general.--section . the second important force determining wages is the relative plenty or scarcity of the different groups or agents of production. how this governs the share of the product going to wage earners.--section . many important modifying forces to the influence upon wages of relative plenty or scarcity. the most important considered.--section . the forces determining the sharing out of the product of industry summarized. the idea of normal equilibrium in distribution a mistaken one.--section . a brief analysis of the factors which determine actual plenty or scarcity of the different agents of production at any one time.--section . the third important force introduced--the relative plenty or scarcity of different kinds of labor. the existence of relatively separate groups of wage earners discussed. the nature of an investigation of the principles of wages. .--in the preceding chapter, an attempt was made to mark some of the broader tests which will confront any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace and to foresee the ends that must be accomplished. an effort was made to define some of the conditions of industrial peace. to what extent these conditions are attainable, and how they are to be sought, remains to be studied. the starting point of further study is a knowledge of the forces which govern the distribution of the product of industry at the present time in the united states--that is, a knowledge of the principles of distribution. our intention, however, is to undertake that study only in so far as it is necessary to explain how wage incomes are determined. such a partial study of the principles of distribution with the special purpose of making clear the factors that govern wage incomes will occupy the next two chapters. they will constitute a statement of wage principles. .--the distribution of the product of industry between the wage earners and the other groups who share in it is a continuous process in which each group asserts its own interests and purposes. wages are settled through a series of separate bargains between the wage earners and the owners or directors of industrial enterprises. the outcome of these bargains, as regards wages, is determined by the interaction of a great number of circumstances or forces, some of which are relatively more constant and more important than others. we will begin our study of wage principles by considering those forces which are relatively the most important and the most constant. these have been cogently summarized as follows: "... the volume of the flow of wealth in the country of the worker; the relative plenty or scarcity of different agents of production; the relative plenty or scarcity of different kinds of labor."[ ] they may be taken up in the order stated, at the same time noting the way their action is modified and complicated by other factors. one preliminary comment may be admissible. it is to the effect that there has been in the past a tendency to view the problem of distribution (and so, of wages) as if it consisted of making clear by analysis the balance or equilibrium of a few given and unchanging tendencies--which were deduced from human and physical nature. these forces furthermore, were frequently held to be universal; the conclusions based on them have often been likened to physical laws. such a view obscures the fact that any analysis of distribution is but a description of the working of a particular industrial society at a particular time. to mistake what is a description of a particular society for a study of the action of physical laws has the effect of leading men to believe that the present must forever reappear in the future. .--the first factor, "the volume of the flow of wealth in the country of the worker," was never more under discussion than to-day, when from all sides demands are heard for the material means necessary to the realization of desires. as the matter is ordinarily put, the greater the product of industry is, the more there is for distribution among all. the truth of this statement seems obvious. yet in interpreting it into policy more than usual care must be taken lest it be forgotten that other things may make a larger contribution to satisfactory living than an increase in these possessions which make up the flow of wealth. instances are by no means lacking of increases of production obtained at the sacrifice of something more important to human life than the additional product secured. there is a "mean" here also between labor and leisure. all this, however, reads like a lawyer's brief about a simple matter. the greater the volume of goods and services resulting from the labor of society, the more there is to share out; and the greater in amount will the share of the wage earners be, even if their relative share is not increased.[ ] the volume of production depends upon the quantity and quality of each and every agent that assists in production, and upon the organization of the separate powers, and above all upon the progress of invention and of the industrial arts. it depends directly upon: first, the natural resources of the country--which are ordinarily summarized in economic discussion under the term "land"--"by land is meant the material and the forces which nature gives freely for man's aid, in land and water, in air and light and heat;"[ ] second, the "accumulated provision for the production of material goods"--capital--which was discussed in the preceding chapter; thirdly, on the labor of men and women--on the degree of spirit, skill, energy and intelligence which characterizes that labor; fourthly, on the quality of leadership which manifests itself in industrial affairs, and the success with which the elements of production are brought into well directed coöperation; fifthly, on the progress of invention and the industrial arts. the relationship between the volume of production and wages is indirect. though it is true that the larger the product, the higher wages will be, all other forces remaining the same, the connection between them is by no means simple or direct. that is because the wage earners share in a product to the making of which other agents contribute. in our present industrial system work is done under direction, and by the aid of tools and machinery; it is highly subdivided. it is impossible to determine the contribution to total production of any group of workmen, or of all workmen. the product is a joint result in which the part played by any one group, instrument, or factor of production cannot be traced. who, for example, is able to say how much productive activities have been aided by the invention of the telephone and the growth of the telephone system? the problem of the distribution of the product of modern industry is so difficult and so much to the fore because so many different people contribute in some way or other to the product and have a claim upon it. wage incomes may be affected by changes in the volume of the product, no matter what the cause or nature of the change. if suddenly some new chemical fuel were discovered in the laboratory, or some business efficiency expert were to discover some formula which made motors go round, the labor now spent in coal mining could be turned to other tasks. the volume of economic goods produced would be increased. the product to be distributed would be greater, and wage incomes would rise. a similar result would ensue if the magic formula of the expert endowed all workingmen with greater skill and energy. any addition to or subtraction from the capacity of any agent of production tends to affect not only its own income, but that of all claimants. the reward of any one agent of production, for example, labor, depends not only on its own part in production, but upon the contribution of all other factors. a craftsman in the united states may be no abler than his fellow workman in france, but may receive twice his wage. this line of reasoning must be qualified in one respect. there is some competition for employment between the several agents of production. their relative efficiency will affect the demand for them, and so will also affect the share of the product each receives most directly. that is a phase of the subject that will be considered at greater length at another point.[ ] .--given an industrial society at work like the united states, producing each year a varied flow of commodities and services, the question arises as to what determines the share of that flow that goes to the wage earners. we have already seen that the larger the product is, the higher wages are likely to be. but what determines the sharing out? that is the next matter to be considered. first, however, let us examine briefly two theories of wages which are more or less current in certain quarters, and which are built upon partial or complete misunderstanding of the connection between wages and the work actually performed by the wage earners. the first theory, or rather group of theories, is that to which some of the leaders of the scientific management movement have given their sanction. the central idea of this group of theories is that in the output of the wage earners, considered either as individual output or as the output of a small group engaged on a common task, is to be found the final and just measure of wages. it is frequently assumed in the course of the reasoning used in support of these theories, that wages can and should measure a separate contribution which the individual wage earner makes to production. the positive, although hazy, belief which ordinarily underlies the scientific management theories of wages can be perceived in the following quotation from a speech of one of the leading advocates of the movement. "there are two ways in which wages can be advanced. one is the natural method, the proper method, the beneficial method, the one that tends to the uplift of the world. that is to make the advance depend absolutely on the effort of the worker. when the worker delivers more, it is perfectly proper that the returns should go up. in other words as unit costs go down wages can very properly rise, and they should rise. under these circumstances, the worker is tremendously interested in seeing that the unit costs go down. there is a regular mathematical law here. only to a certain extent can the unit cost go down and only to a certain extent can the wages go up.... on the other hand, when you raise wages without any connection whatever with the unit cost you inevitably find that the worker takes his bonus in the form of more leisure...."[ ] at the risk of repetition, it may be remarked that the output of an individual or a group of individuals is of necessity but a contribution to a joint product, and is dependent upon many other things besides the effort of the individual. and, therefore, even if the view that each individual should get what he produces were found to be acceptable as a basis for distribution, any attempt to base wages solely upon considerations of individual or group output must rest on a false assumption. any laws or principles for the determination of wages must reckon with a far wider and more numerous set of considerations than those taken into account by the scientific management theories of wages. these can only be understood by a study of the economic facts and arrangements which govern distribution, and by weighing many questions of social and economic expediency. to talk about basing wages solely on the effort of the worker is to ignore the obvious fact that much of the most laborious work is the worst paid. the exponents of scientific management have not discovered a law of wages; they have simply elaborated a method of wage payment. mr. g. d. h. cole has expressed that well. "clearly, although scientific management methods may reduce the possible margin or error in determining piece-work prices, they cannot altogether remove it, and even if the time that ought to be taken for a job is clearly established a further complication confronts us. all the time-study in the world cannot show how much ought to be paid for a job. it can only show at most the length of time a job ought to take. that is to say, it cannot determine what is to be the standard of living or of remuneration of the workers.... this, indeed, is only another way of saying that scientific management has only devised a further method of payment under the wage system."[ ] the exponents of these theories fell into the error of believing they have unveiled a law of wages because they grasped one important truth. that truth is that where the productivity of labor is high, where labor is efficient, there is a greater chance, all other circumstances being the same, of securing high wages than when the reverse is the case. or as the matter has been put in one of the reports of the u. s. industrial commission ( - ) "a close causal relationship exists between productive efficiency and _possible_ wages. greater efficiency and output makes _possible_ higher wages in general and better conditions of employment and labor."[ ] (italics mine). that the scientific management doctrine of wages consists of nothing more than a method of wage payment is clearly established by its failure to substantiate in practice its claims of furnishing a scientific and equitable method of fixing wage rates. on that point the same industrial commission reports that "in analyzing the wage fixing problem in connection with scientific management two matters are considered; one--the "base-rate" sometimes called the day wage, which constitutes for any group of wage earners the minimum earnings or indicates the general wage level for that group, and two--added "efficiency payments" which are supposed to represent special additional rewards for special adjustments. the investigators sought in vain for any scientific methods devised or employed by scientific management for the determination of the base-rate, either as a matter of justice between the conflicting claims of capital and labor, or between the relative claims of individual and occupational groups."[ ] as a method of wage payment, of course, the method of scientific management must be judged by its good and bad effects like other methods of wage payment. that, however, is not a task which need detain us. .--the other group of wage theories that is based upon a similar misconception of the relation between the productive contribution of labor and wages cannot be so briefly dealt with. this is the group of theories which has been named "the fixed group demand theory" and it has figured prominently in most discussions concerning restriction of output. this group of theories also rests upon the assumption that there is a fixed relation between the productive contribution of a group of workmen and the wages received by these workmen. the fixed group demand theory has been summarized as follows: "the demand for the labor of the group is determined by the demand for the commodity output of the group. the community--wealth and distribution remaining the same--has a fairly fixed money demand for the commodities of a group. it will devote about a given proportion of its purchasing power to these commodities, that is, if the prices of the group commodity are higher, it will buy less units and vice versa, but expend about the same purchasing power. therefore, the demand for the labor of the group; profits remaining the same, is practically fixed, and increasing the group commodity output means simply conferring a benefit on the members of other groups as consumers without gain to the group itself. therefore, to increase the efficiency and output of the group will not increase the group labor demand, and group wages. decreasing the efficiency and output of the group will not decrease the group labor demand and the group wage."[ ] or in simpler terms, that the community will want a relatively fixed amount of the product which the group helps to produce. and thus if the group reduces the time needed to make that product, it will not benefit and may even be harmed, because the services of some of its members will be no longer needed. and, on the other hand, that the members of the group will not be harmed by keeping the products of its labor scarce and high. this line of reasoning, as held by some trade unionists, is valid on occasion, from the point of view of particular groups of workmen--especially during short periods. it is a fact that in many cases workmen employed in particular industries or occupations, may not be benefited and may even be injured by a display of extra effort or by the adoption of a new and more efficient method of production. the benefit of that extra effort or new method may not go _directly_ and _immediately_ to the group which makes the effort or utilizes the new method--it may not go to that group at all except in so far as they may be consumers of their own product. the question of an adequate supply of new houses is at present a vexed one and is likely to remain so for some years. therefore it makes a good illustration of the difficulties involved in the question under discussion. suppose it were possible for all the labor employed in the construction of houses to increase their effort and accomplish, let us say, a third again as much as at present. would that increase of effort repay these workmen--would they receive higher wages? it is not a matter that can be argued with certainty. the expense of construction would fall rapidly, unless combination among the firms supplying building materials or among building contractors prevented such a fall. in the event that the cost of construction fell, there can be little doubt that more construction would be undertaken. would the increased demand for construction lead immediately to an increase in demand for building labor sufficiently great to give employment to workmen who would not be needed on the old construction because of the increase in individual output? would it be so great as to mean a more than proportionate increase in demand for building labor and a consequent rise in wages? would its effect be felt immediately or only after the passage of some months, during which a number of the building laborers would be without employment? what will be the effect on employment two years hence? looked at in this light, the skepticism of trade union groups in regard to appeals for an increase of effort is easy to understand. it arises from the simple desire of the group to protect their position in industry by the only means they possess. it is an attitude strengthened in many cases by the memory of weeks without work and efforts ignored. it is a bitterness, like to others, which men inherit from experience. yet it can be stated with emphasis, that from the point of view of the wage earners as a whole, and of all of society, that any consistent adherence to this group demand theory of wages would be mistaken and unsound. the use of improved methods of production by any group, the more efficient performance of their work, may not result in a quick fall in the price of the product they are engaged upon, though sooner or later it usually does. the fall in price may or may not lead to rapid increase in the demand for the product of the group sufficiently great to give employment to all its members, or increased employment; although that result has usually appeared in the long run also. the fundamental fact is that the demand for the product of labor is ordinarily subject to indefinite increase. if labor is economized in one direction, the power dispensed with will be utilized in another direction. the community income of economic goods is a flow. under our present system of division of labor each individual uses his share of the product (which he measures in terms of money) to buy the particular commodities, or to make the particular investments he desires. if he gets some commodities cheaper than formerly, he will buy more, or buy commodities he had not been able to buy hitherto or increase his investments. the demand of the community for the product of labor in general will ultimately keep pace with the supply of the product. economies in production throughout the whole industrial field mean that there will be more commodities to be shared out. thus, in spite of the fact that there may be, and often are, serious breaches of interest between particular groups of wage earners and society as a whole on the matter of increased production, there can be but one sound policy for labor as a whole. that is to strive to increase production up to a point where further effort would entail a sacrifice of welfare more important than that which the extra product might represent. such general theoretical propositions as the above, however, will never be sufficient to persuade particular groups of wage earners to take a different view of the interests involved. it is easy to understand carlyle's contempt for the smug complacency with which such propositions have often been put forward, when he wrote, "new poor law: laissez faire, laissez passer! the master of horses, when the summer labor is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. if he said to his horses: 'quadrupeds, i have no longer work for you; but work exists abundantly over the world: you are ignorant (or must i read you political economy pictures) that the steam engine always in the long-run creates additional work? railways are forming in one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much cartage is wanted; somewhere in europe, asia, africa and america, doubt it not, ye will find cartage, and good go with you!' they with protrusive upper lip snort dubiously; signifying that europe, asia, africa and america be somewhat out of their beat: that what cartage may be wanted there is not too well known to them. _they_ can find no cartage. they gallop distracted along highways, all fenced in to the right and to the left. finally under pains of hunger, they take to leaping fences; eating foreign property, and--we know the rest." the reasons are plain. first, because the fixed group demand theory is, after all, only one variation of the art of monopoly--though a variation in regard to which special conclusions may be drawn. therefore, as long as monopoly is widely practised particular groups of wage earners will be likely to take advantage of whatever opportunities for monopoly may present themselves; even if it can be proved that the policy pursued injures the wage earners as a whole more than any other industrial group. short-sighted selfishness will always arise in an atmosphere of distrust. if the wage earners, for example, believe that the product of their increased effort will serve but to add to the profits of rings or combinations controlling prices, they will not make that effort. they must be able to see that conscientious work really does contribute to the general good. and second, because at times, the general interest in effective production can only be served at the direct and serious expense of particular groups of wage earners. such a situation arises, for example, when a skilled craft is faced with a revision of its processes that eliminates the need for skill, and results in the lowering of the wages of the group. this is a common event. up to the present, such conflicts between particular interests and the general interest in effective production have been solved by a trial of economic strength, and by time. the viewpoint of the wage earners is clearly put in a statement by the national organizer of the transport workers federation (great britain) before the court of inquiry held upon the subject of the wages of the transport workers. he maintained "that the industry ought to carry to a greater extent than it had done hitherto the responsibility for the unemployment that was peculiar to it. he had always been quite frank with the employers. if they wanted a ship speedily dispatched he would not do it, if that meant that his men would be thrown out of work."[ ] that, however, is a method which results ordinarily either in a sacrifice of welfare or production, or of both. the worst results incident to these conflicts could often be avoided by making them the subject of joint discussion by all those whose interests are directly involved. discussion might lead to working compromise which would protect the wage earners against too great or too sudden loss. even under the best arrangements, however, such conflicts of interest will be far from easy to resolve satisfactorily; they will remain in the words of mr. cole "a question, not of machinery, but of tact and temper."[ ] .--we may now turn to the main question in hand. what forces do govern the sharing out of the product of industry in the united states to-day? what determines wage incomes? so far we have only examined the general proposition that the larger the product, the higher wages are likely to be, other things remaining unchanged. the relative plenty or scarcity of the different groups or agents of production is a constant and important force in the distribution of the product of industry. from the perception of its significance, spring many of the loose statements of the action of "supply and demand," which are ventured as complete explanations of the wage situation. it is not possible to give a simple explanation of the part which relative plenty or scarcity does play in the determination of wages. for other forces which affect distribution act simultaneously with it, and all intermingle their results. the influence of relative plenty or scarcity (to use an elliptic phrase) upon the outcome of distribution is easily understood if it is kept in mind that the distributive process is one of repeated negotiation and bargain. in this process each group or agent strives to get a high return for its services in production. there is a steady, though imperfect competition between the various units of each and every group or agent for employment; there is likewise a steady, though imperfect, competition for the use of the various units of each and every group or agent. these conditions require no elaboration. it is in this process of competition for employment, and competition to employ, that the return to labor--wages--is decided, simultaneously with the return to each and every group or agent. the return to labor will be high if the employment of the ordinary worker, _as part of a productive organization_, adds considerably to the total of market values produced. for if the ordinary wage earner, by his work, makes possible a considerable addition to the market values produced, competition among employers for men will lead to the payment of high wages, and vice versa. now this last result will be largely determined by the relative plenty or scarcity of the various agents of production. if the productive organization has at its command a plentiful supply of capital; if in the community there are many men possessed of a high order of business ability; if then, labor for the commoner tasks of production is relatively scarce, the work of the ordinary wage earner will be a means of adding considerably to the total of market values produced. or, as it is sometimes put, each use of labor will be an important use. labor will be in great demand, and wages will be high. if the opposite conditions exist, the outcome will be reversed. in other words, there is a tendency for work to be highly valued when the number of men available for doing it is small and when the work is performed with the aid of highly perfected machinery, in a community in which able business men are plentiful. each laborer will find his services easily sold for good wages; for his labor will be an important aid to production. a word of warning should be added to this summary conclusion. it does not follow that because the wage incomes of the individual laborers are high, the total relative share of the product which takes the form of wages will be high. the wages received by individual wage earners are no indication of the share of the product received by all wage earners. that depends not only on the return to each wage earner, but also on the total number of wage earners, and upon the number and return to each of the other agents of production. in china, for example, where most work is done by simple hand labor, wage incomes are low. but because the number of wage earners is great, and the amount of capital used is very small, the total share of the product that takes the form of wages is high. the opposite is true in the united states and england. there individual wage incomes are relatively high. but because of the great amount of capital employed, and the great call for business direction, it is doubtful whether much more than half the total product is received by wage earners.[ ] .--moreover, any statement as to the influence of the relative scarcity or plenty of the various groups or agents of production, as unqualified as that just made must be incorrect. it gives no clew to the importance of interacting factors. here, as elsewhere in economics, many separate causes meet to produce a result. the disentanglement of their effects is frequently so difficult as to make more than an approach to the truth possible. the part each cause plays often remains somewhat obscure. yet without reckoning with these interactions not even an approach to the truth is possible. so it is necessary to proceed now to a brief study of the other influences which play a part in distribution; and which lead to results somewhat different from those just described. first, account must be taken of the fact that the various groups or agents of production are not entirely complementary, as has been assumed up to this point. their outstanding relation--that of coöperation in the production of a joint product--has already been studied. but there is also a measure of genuine competition between them for the field of employment. an unusually clear and detailed example of the nature of this competition is to be found in the report of the commission on "the decline of the agricultural population in great britain." to quote "many expedients, other than actually stopping the plow, were adopted to reduce the labor bill. but while manual labor has no doubt been economized to some extent by curtailing some of the operations which require it, the main cause of reduction is undoubtedly the extended use of labor saving machinery. this is referred to by the large majority of correspondents in all parts of the country. with the exception of the self-binding harvester, which was introduced into this country in the eighties, few machines for the performance of a specific manual operation have perhaps been invented since (unless milking machines, shearing machines, and perhaps potato diggers come within that category), but whereas twenty years ago labor saving machinery was fully employed by comparatively few, it has now become almost universal on all holdings of sufficient size to make its use practicable. the substitution of mechanical for horse or hand power, for mixed machinery, e.g., threshing machines, chaff cutters, pumps, etc., has taken place largely, although it has made comparatively little progress for tractive purposes. it may indeed, be questioned if steam is so largely employed in the cultivation of land as it was twenty years ago. but the displacement of manual labor arising from the greatly extended use of drills, horse hoes, mowers, binders, manure distributors and the like must have been in the aggregate very great and probably to this more than to any other single cause the reduced demand for farm laborers may be attributed."[ ] as professor marshall has remarked of such cases of competition for employment between labor and capital as this, the competition is in reality between one kind of labor aided by much waiting, and another kind of labor aided by little waiting. nevertheless, the fact of competition between the various groups or agents is a fact of no mean importance in distribution. as has already been suggested, the efficiency of the wage earners plays a part in determining their field of employment in this competition for employment. secondly, the simpler statements of the action of the factor of relative plenty and scarcity, such as are represented by the marginal diagrammatic expositions familiar in economics, obscure the fact that distribution is a process in which human wills are actively engaged. the constant assertion of will is a real force in the working out of distribution. each group with a claim to a share of the product, by organization, agitation, and other tricks of the market place strives to forward its interest. it explores, by pressure upon the price mechanism and otherwise, the full extent of the dependence of the industrial system upon it or its product, as when monopolists control prices, or a trade union strikes to enforce a wage demand. each group or agent tends to favor or resist changes in laws, industrial methods, and institutions according as it expects to be benefited or otherwise by the change. this may be seen in the discussions surrounding the introduction of the eight hour day, or concerning the limitation of immigration. however, it is a careless exaggeration to state, as is frequently stated, that the attitude of groups to economic legislation must inevitably be determined by their economic interest. every part of the industrial system yields at some time and occasion to the impact of the human will. even changes in the arts of production may result therefrom, as is well exemplified in mr. clay's analysis of the way in which the standard of life of the wage earners may exert an influence over wage rates.... this conception of a standard of life, though fluctuating, is a relatively fixed thing in the flux of forces determining distribution. the workman, by combination tacit or explicit, fixes it and his employer adjusts production to it. the employer will do all in his power, usually with success, to secure an increase in output in return for every increase of wages, and where the local standard compels him to pay higher wages than his competitor in other districts to extract an amount of work correspondingly greater.[ ] or, take the hope entertained by the advocates of the living wage, that its enforcement would produce a better type of management in those industries to which the legislation is applicable. it is characteristic of the present industrial situation that no group should rest quietly under the dictation of what it is told is economic law or necessity. given its way, each group tests anew the habits and arrangements by which it is constrained. every time an industrial method is modified, the agents which share in distribution strike a slightly new balance. the direction of the stream of product changes with every modification of its banks. some of these modifications occur so unexpectedly that they are not to be found upon the maps. the pilot, as mark twain said of the mississippi, must carry the conformation in his head. thirdly (this is usually stated as a limitation of the precision of economic analysis), such a simple analysis of the action of the factor of relative plenty or scarcity as has been given, takes no account of the existence of certain human traits and qualities. as a matter of fact each group or agent of production receives, not what it must receive, but rather what it manages to secure in the higgling of the market. ignorance of the state of the market plays a part in distribution. a sense of fairness plays a part, as when an employer pays wages higher than are current because his business is prosperous. anxiety plays a part, as when the fear of unemployment leads a man to accept a wage below that which he might have asked and secured if he had some money to fall back upon. lastly, changes in distribution resulting from a change in the relative plenty or scarcity of the various groups or agents of production may, in turn, cause further changes in the actual state of plenty or scarcity; or may bring about changes in any of the other forces which affect distribution. for example, it is conceivable that an increase in men's wages in certain industries (due, let us say, to an improvement in productive methods) should be the cause of a withdrawal of a certain amount of juvenile labor from employment in these industries. this withdrawal might in turn lead to an increased demand in those industries for adult labor, and so in turn affect the distributive situation. the process of distribution is a process in which few changes can occur in any direction, without these changes in their turn giving rise to further changes. .--the foregoing exposition of the forces determining the share of the product of industry that goes to the wage earners can be briefly summarized. the process of distribution is carried out mainly by the action of competition; it is marked by active and stubborn self-assertion on the part of all groups which share in the product. one of the most important and constant factors in the determination of the outcome as regards wages is the relative plenty or scarcity of the various groups or agents of production. for the contribution made by the ordinary worker, _as a part of a productive organization_, to the total of market values produced, is largely settled thereby. however, other human qualities besides those which are ordinarily considered as to be active in the competitive process figure in the distributive outcome. furthermore, changes in distribution, brought about by any other cause may in turn modify the relative plenty or scarcity of the various groups or agents of production, and thus result in further changes. and lastly, since the distributive situation at any given time, is dependent upon human arrangements, the idea that underlying all distributive action, there is a tendency to approach a point of "normal equilibrium" must be rejected. for human behavior is frequently directed to produce change, not repetition. the better informed that human beings and communities are of the consequences of their actions, the stronger the tendency mutually to control and adjust them for defined purposes. therefore, the idea that the distributive situation at any given time is directed to a point of rest or equilibrium is incorrect. many diverse tendencies, some of long standing, some of newer birth, act to produce future results different from those of the present or past. the concept of normal equilibrium is inadequate to account for the distributive situation at any given time; it is misleading with regard to prospective policy. .--the preceding sections were devoted to an explanation of the manner in which the relative plenty or scarcity of the various groups or agents of production influenced the sharing out of the product of industry, and of the interactions to which this factor was subject. it may now be asked what governs the actual state of relative plenty or scarcity of the various groups or agents of production. no answer could be returned to that question, however, without undertaking a far-reaching investigation of a great number of separate conditions and tendencies. the task is far beyond our present opportunity. it is worth while, however, for present purposes, to delimit the task sharply, and to attempt a brief enumeration of the most important of the conditions which determine, on the one hand, the need of the productive system for labor, and, on the other hand, the supply of labor--that is, of the relative plenty or scarcity of labor. the conditions which govern the need of the productive system for labor may be summarized as follows: firstly, the consumption habits of the community, by which is decided the direction in which the productive powers are employed; secondly, the state of the productive arts, which governs the manner in which the various agents of production are combined for purposes of production; thirdly, the available supply of the agents of production, other than labor. each of these are in return governed by a complex set of forces. the conditions determining the supply of labor may be summed up under two headings: firstly, "the state of knowledge, and of ethical, social and domestic habits."[ ] secondly, the tide of immigration and emigration. the conditions which are summarized under the first heading govern the supply of labor in many different ways. they govern the length of the working day; they settle the regularity of work. they determine the number of the members of the family that seek work. they regulate the ages of entrance into industry and retirement from industry. they tend to govern the rate of growth of the population--both through the birth and the death rate. it should be clearly understood, however, that many of these habits or conditions are themselves, in a measure, a function of the level of production and of earnings. for example, the state of knowledge within a community is to-day very considerably affected by the financial support of education--by the amount the community can (as well as does) spend upon it. the importance of immigration and emigration is firstly, the addition or subtraction thereby made to or from the supply of labor, and, secondly, the influence of the immigrants upon those habits of the community, which in turn affect the supply of labor. .--the third of the forces quoted earlier in the chapter, as among those which play a constant and important part in the determination of wages, is the relative plenty or scarcity of different kinds of labor. the statement of this force acknowledges the existence of facts which up to this point have been barely recognized. it calls attention to the existence of considerable differences in the levels of earnings of different groups or kinds of labor. it suggests also that the relative plenty or scarcity of the different kinds of labor is the chief explanation of these wage differences. we shall investigate at some length the causes of these differences in the next chapter. before going on to that subject, however, it is well to trace out the connection between the idea of "a general rate of wages" as it has been held, and the existence of different wage levels. the idea of a general rate of wages, as it appears in economic theory, rests upon certain broad assumptions. one of the most important of these is that there are no "differences of inborn gifts," which would lead to a limitation of the flow of labor into the upper grades, and thus lead to a separation of grades. a second important assumption is that of complete mobility of labor--no obstacles of habit, expense or ignorance to retard the flow of labor from place to place, or from industry to industry. a third assumption is the absence of combination among the workers. a fourth is that of equality of opportunity among the wage earners; and the absence of barriers of race, religion or sex. granted these assumptions, the tendency to equality of earnings for labor demanding equal skill and effort and performed with equal efficiency is established. competition among the workers for employment and among the employers for workmen would bring this about. such differences of wages as would exist would arise from differences in the nature of the work performed. thus adam smith wrote that "in a society where things were left to follow their natural course, where there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to choose what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper" five circumstances would explain "a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counter balance a great one in others." these in his words were: "first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them."[ ] all such differences would be such as "equalize the attractiveness of occupations" and would be "equalizing differences."[ ] if these assumptions were realized in fact, it would be correct to view the problem of wages as the study of one set of relationships that governed a basic level of wages--called the general rate of wages--with purely supplementary studies of the circumstances governing equalizing differences. the problem of wages would be a study of forces which were uniformly influential in relation to the wages of all labor. for all wages bargains would be governed by them. in truth, however, practically none of the assumptions underlying the theory of a general rate of wages are perfectly realized in the united states to-day, and some of them stand in almost direct opposition to the fact. it has come about, therefore, that different kinds of labor have relatively independent economic fortunes. the forces which govern distribution do not effect them equally. facts and circumstances which enter into the determination of the level of earnings of one kind of labor may not affect the level of earnings in other groups. the differences between the level of earnings of the various groups cannot be explained entirely as "equalizing differences." the "perfect liberty" of choice of adam smith does not exist. therefore, an investigation of wage principles requires study of two sets of forces and relationships. firstly, of the forces which govern the outcome of distribution as between each and all of the labor groups and the other agents of production.[ ] and secondly, of the causes of the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners, and of the forces which govern the differences of wages between them. the first set of these distributive relationships has been the principal subject of this chapter. the other set will be the principal subject of the following chapter. any policy of wage settlement must be based upon a knowledge of both sets. footnotes: [ ] h. clay, "economics for the general reader" (english edition), page . [ ] see a. c. pigou, "wealth and welfare," page . [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics" ( th edition), page . [ ] see pages - , this chapter. [ ] address of mr. harrington emerson at the national conference of the "society of industrial engineers and western efficiency society" on labor problems. [ ] g. d. h. cole, "the payment of wages," page . [ ] final report of the committee on industrial relations ( - ). report signed by commissioners manly, walsh, lennon, o'connell, and garrettson--the section on scientific management stated to be based on an investigation conducted by frey, valentine, and hoxie, page , vol. i. [ ] _ibid._, vol. i, pages - . [ ] r. f. hoxie, "trade unionism in the united states," page . [ ] london _times_, feb. , . [ ] g. d. h. cole, "payment of wages," page . discussion of the speeding up question. the best analysis of the problem created by the introduction of new and simplifying machine processes in skilled trades is to be found in a volume called "labor, finance, and the war," report of the committee of investigation ( ), the econ. section, british assn. advancement of science. in the same volume there is a careful analysis of the whole question of limitation of output. see also the chapter called "unemployment" in lord askwith's "industrial problems and disputes." [ ] see a. l. bowley, "distribution of income in the united kingdom before the war." [ ] report of the commission on the "decline of agricultural population" (great britain), , page , cd . [ ] h. clay, "economics for the general reader," pages - . see also essay by the same author entitled, "the war and the status of the wage earner" in a volume entitled, "the industrial outlook" for a more extensive analysis of the part played by the standard of life in fixing wages. [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics" ( th edition), page . [ ] adam smith, "wealth of nations" (cannan's ed.), book i, pages - . [ ] f. w. taussig, "principles of economics" (revised edition), vol. ii, page . [ ] the phrase "each and all of the labor groups" is used to indicate that the level of earnings of all the labor groups is determined largely by forces which affect them greatly (those examined in this chapter), and yet that the determination of the level of earnings of each group is something of a separate process--due to the fact that the suppositions underlying the idea of a general rate of wages are not fulfilled. chapter iv--principles of wages (_continued_) section . we have next to examine the causes of formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners.--section . what is meant by a "relatively separate group"?--section . the causes of the existence of these groups in the united states to-day. inequality of natural ability; inequality of opportunity; artificial barriers. all these contradictory to assumptions behind theory of general rate of wages.--section . trade unions another factor in the formation of relatively separate groups. indirect effects in opposite direction.--section . each of these groups has a relatively independent economic career. there are a series of wage levels, all of which are governed to a considerable extent by the same forces.--section . the way in which the relative plenty or scarcity of each kind or group of labor affects its wages. other forces play a part also.--section . the nature of wage "differentials." .--we have next, therefore, to look at the causes which lead to the maintenance of relatively separate groups of wage earners, and then at the forces which govern their relative levels of earnings. .--first of all let us make clear some of the characteristics of the relatively separate groups of wage earners in the united states to-day. they vary greatly both in size and in kind. they are apt, however, to be conceived as similar because of the force of logic. it is not entirely satisfactory to classify them either as horizontal groups (having reference to their position in the scale of skill, or of society) or as vertical groups (having reference to their separation by industries). for the position of certain groups may be due both to the influence of those forces which bring about horizontal divisions, and of those which bring about vertical divisions. such, for example, is the position of a craft which requires a measure of education and training which those who are placed by circumstances at the bottom of the industrial scale cannot easily get, and which besides it is difficult to enter because of trade union regulations. marshall has described the situation in england in terms that roughly fit the facts in the united states also. he suggests that the different occupations may be thought of "as resembling a long flight of steps of unequal breadth, some of them being so broad as to act as landing stages." "or even better still," he writes, "we may picture to ourselves two flights of stairs, one representing the 'hard-handed industries' and the other 'the soft-handed industries'; because the vertical division between the two is in fact as broad and as clearly marked as the horizontal between any two grades."[ ] the position of any relatively separate group is usually to be accounted for only as the result of many forces, each of which has some effect upon the rest. for example, barriers of custom or on vested right may limit the field of employment for women. this would tend to establish one level of earnings for women, and a different one for men. as a result women might find it harder to get the training necessary to enable them to compete with men. and so the interaction of causes would proceed. so much in the way of preliminary remark upon the characteristics of the relatively separate groups of wage earners in the united states to-day. .--among the causes which account for the existence of these groups there are some which if they stood alone would merely modify the applicability of the idea of a general rate of wages. such, for example, is the fact that the wage earner's knowledge of existing opportunities for employment is limited. considerable discrepancies of wages for the same work may arise; although the facilities for the spread of information regarding wages has greatly improved, especially in the more skilled trades. then there are, also, various expenses of removal, both material and psychological, such as are involved in the shifting of a family from the city in which it has long been established.[ ] there are, also, the handicaps and hazards attached to the learning of a new job or trade even though the new job holds out hopes of considerably better wages than the old one. all such facts as these--for but a few examples have been chosen from among many--however, are reconcilable with the theory of a general rate of wages. they are but minor qualifications of a broad general principle. other facts challenge that theory more seriously. they really do point to the existence of relatively separate groups of wage earners, each with an economic career somewhat independently determined. first among them must be put the inequality of natural ability possessed by individuals, and the consequent fact that the numbers who possess the inborn capacity required for certain kinds of work is relatively small. it results from this limitation of the higher forms of natural ability, that the wages received for the more skilled forms of labor may be considerably higher than for the less skilled forms without such an increase of numbers in the more skilled groups as would bring down their wages to the general level. the competition for employment on the tasks demanding skill is limited; separate groups develop. it is impossible to tell the extent to which differences in inborn capacity would lead to the formation of relatively separate groups of labor, if all the other assumptions underlying the theory of a general rate of wages were fulfilled in fact. prof. taussig has expressed this well. "what would be the differences in wages, and to how great an extent would groups and classes persist, if all had the same opportunities, and if choice of occupation were in so far perfectly free? would wages then differ only so far as they might be affected by attractiveness, risk, and other causes of equalizing variations? would coarse manual labor, for instance, then receive a reward nearly as high as any other labor, nay, conceivably (since the work is dirty and disagreeable) higher than any other? would the soft-handed occupations lose entirely the advantages in pay which they now commonly have? the answer must depend on our view as to the limitation of natural abilities. it is clear that some gifted individuals--a few men of science and letters, inventors and engineers, business men and lawyers, physicians and surgeons--would tower above their fellows, and would obtain in a competitive society unusual rewards. but would physicians as a class secure higher rewards than mechanics as a class? they would do so only if the faculties which a capable physician must possess are found among mankind in a limited degree. and mechanics, in turn, would receive wages higher than those of day laborers only if it proved that but a limited number possessed the qualities needed. on this crucial point, to repeat, we are unable to pronounce with certainty. what are the relative effects of nature and of nurture in bringing about the phenomena of social stratification, we cannot say."[ ] next among the facts which account for the existence of relatively separate groups of wage earners are those which are usually summed up under the phrase inequality of opportunity. equality of opportunity in the way of education and training, and in the way of healthy and strengthening environment would have to be assured before the theory of a general rate of wages could possibly apply. this equality of opportunity is not realized in the united states to-day. the united states has been the scene of continuous and heavy immigration. the mass of this immigration entered into the field of unskilled labor. the great majority of these workers because of the partly unavoidable handicap of their strangeness, and their ignorance of american life, and because of their poor education, did not have equal chances with the older inhabitants to rise in the industrial scale. they could not possibly make the same use of the common opportunities--even if their natural ability were on a par with those of the older inhabitants. furthermore, the rapid growth of our great cities and the accompanying social changes, the growth in the size of the average industrial enterprise, and the progress of standardization have all lessened equality of opportunity. the chances of the children born in the lowest industrial groups to discover and fairly test their natural abilities have declined in relation to the chances of the children more fortunately born. these conditions have certainly checked the working out of those forces on which the theory of a general rate of wages rests. thirdly, there is the fact that certain forms of work on which youthful labor is employed, give no preparation and training for the further stages of life and work; and these blind alley employments are filled by children born in the lowest industrial groups. then there are the barriers of different kinds to free movement throughout all parts of the field of employment. there are the barriers of sex which have added to the crowding of certain occupations and industrial grades. there are the barriers of race and religion, which have affected the flow of labor between different industries. lastly, there is the barrier of color, which has prevented the negroes from developing their natural ability. these barriers may be well justified, in part or in whole, by other considerations. that question need not be considered here. but they certainly contribute to the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners, with different levels of earnings. .--the existence and activities of labor unions are still another factor in the formation of relatively separate groups. in many cases labor organization tends to follow closely the lines of separation or unity established by the other causes of group separation or unity. there is often a tendency for a single union to include within its limits the whole of a group within which all the conditions underlying the idea of a general rate of wages are well fulfilled; or for various unions to merge or act together, if these conditions are well fulfilled between them. g. d. h. cole has given a case in point. "clearly the ease with which an industrial union can come into being depends upon the sharpness of the distinction between the skilled and unskilled in the industry concerned. thus in the mining and textile industries, as we have already noted, there is no very sharp distinction between the two classes of workers. in mining, the boy who enters the pit has every chance of passing before many years have gone by into the ranks of the coal getters, who form the skilled section of the mining community. there is no sharp division or cleavage of interest between the main sections of the mining community. promotion runs easily from one grade to another, and therefore, it is easier to realize a form of combination in which all the various sections are grouped together in a single industrial organization."[ ]... this tendency, however, has not been perfectly realized by any means. it often happens that the scope of a labor union will coincide with the underlying facts of unity at one time, but not permanently. the limits of particular trade unions have sometimes been set by an accident of time or place; by some episode in union history. the internal politics of the union movement has been the decisive factor in still other instances. furthermore, industrial conditions are constantly changing and creating new lines of group separation or unity, which may vary from the lines of the existing labor unions. labor organization affects the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners both directly and indirectly. first as to its direct influence. a labor union is a combination of a number of individuals, formed with the intention of advancing the material welfare of the group and for such wider purposes as the group may agree upon. the chief peaceful method of unionism is collective bargaining; its chief combative method is the strike. labor unionism is a factor in the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners, because each autonomous, or practically autonomous, trade union is a point of pressure upon the distributive mechanism. each trade union strives to turn the balance of distribution in its own direction. this it does in a variety of ways. it may by its wage demands test out the nature of the demand for the products of its labor. it strives to force the price of these products up to the point which seems to promise the greatest wage income for the group. it may by its pressure on the employer bring about a revision of productive methods. it seeks by its strength to secure that portion of the product which, in its view, goes to the strongest contender for it. unions, indeed, sometimes strive to restrict the flow of labor into their craft or industry by deliberate regulation or silent obstruction. such instances are less important than formerly in all probability. on occasion unions may even play a part in determining the field of employment for their members. thus g. d. h. cole points out that in england the trade unions do not recognize "differences between skilled and less skilled workers as demarcation disputes, and do not recognize the right of unskilled workers to raise such cases against skilled unions. in fact, the skilled unions virtually claim the right to do such work as they think fit, and so far as they can enforce their claim, to exclude the less skilled where they think fit."[ ] again unionism may indirectly through its wage policy cause a slowing up of recruiting of new men into the craft or industry. in short, by every means at its command, a union strives to assert the importance of its group as against other interests. thus, in respect to the activities just described, unionism must be included among the influences which lead to the formation and maintenance of relatively separate groups of wage earners. on the other hand, trade unionism in many indirect ways tends to have an effect in the opposite direction. by a constant adherence to certain broad policies, the trade union movement may contribute much to a realization of the conditions on which the idea of a general rate of wages is based. such, for example, is the emphasis played by the trade union movement upon free and compulsory education, and the raising of the age of entry into industry. such, also, is its advocacy of social legislation which is aimed to give more nearly equal opportunity to the lowest grades of industrial workers. or, to take a third example, such is the result of the aid given by the skilled trade unions to the unskilled workers in their efforts to organize. unionism works against the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners to the extent that its activities contribute towards the achievement of equality of opportunity for all wage earners, and to the extent that the strong groups come to the assistance of the weaker. .--the main cause of the formation of relatively separate groups of wage earners, with different, though closely related levels of earnings have now been considered. as a result of these influences, it must be concluded that the determination of the wage level of each of the various groups of wage earners is a sufficiently independent process to make it necessary to account for it as such. the various groups of wage earners have relatively separate economic careers so to speak. the economic fortune of each group is not settled merely as part of one general process, though the economic fortunes of all are intimately connected. the wage situation is not to be explained as consisting of one basic level of wages with a series of equalizing differences; but rather as consisting of a series of wage levels, all of which are governed to a considerable extent by the same forces or conditions.[ ] .--we can now pass on the final question which confronts us. how are the differences between the level of earnings of the relatively separate groups of wage earners determined? the factors which determine the relative levels of earnings of each of the different groups may be put into two sets. first, those factors in regard to which each group stands alone and separate. second, those which arise out of the dealings between the several groups. "the relative plenty or scarcity of the different kinds of labor" falls in the first set. it will be remembered that this was among the three forces which, earlier in the book, were stated to be among the most constant and important in the determination of wages. the processes by and through which the facts of relative plenty or scarcity work out their effect in the distributive result have already been examined. if the numbers in any group of wage earners are high relative to the uses in which the employment of the members of that group results in a considerable addition to the product of market values, the wages of that group will be low, and vice versa. the need of the productive system for any kind of labor, relative to the supply available to fill that need is an important factor in determining the reward paid for that labor. furthermore, the statements in regard to the interactions to which the action of the factor of relative plenty or scarcity was subject, apply with equal force to the problem under discussion. every human quality plays its part in the actual processes and negotiations by which the wages of the various groups of wage earners are settled. the outcome depends on many forces, some stable, some shifting and difficult to trace. among those forces labor unionism, as the assertion of group economic power, holds a significant place. in one respect, indeed, the previous analysis does not apply accurately to the question of different, though closely related wage levels. it is probable that the opportunities for the substitution of one type or group of labor for another type or group are more extensive and numerous than the opportunities for the substitution of one agent of production for another. and this fact limits the differences of wage levels that may arise between different kinds or groups of labor. for substitution of one type or group of labor for another is one of the ways in which changes in the relative plenty or scarcity of the different types or groups are brought about. so much for the first set of forces--those in regard to which each group stands alone. the second set--those which arise out of the relationships between the various groups--remains for consideration. among these is the influence of customary wage relationships upon the course of wage movements within an industry, and to a lesser extent throughout industry. because of the existence of vague customary relationships, wage movements affecting some groups or classes of labor are likely to stimulate similar movements among other groups; though it is plain that the efforts of different groups may not meet with equal success. this is well exemplified in the case of railway labor, of which mr. stockett has written, "indeed there is every likelihood that the existence of a powerfully organized and highly paid group of labor in any industry--such as the engineers and conductors in railway transportation--far from being detrimental, may in the long run, be beneficial to the interests of the unorganized and low paid workmen. there is a tendency among the employees to keep a close watch on the wages paid to other groups of their fellow workmen, and the differential between their wage and that of some other grade of employment is jealously guarded. thus on the railways, wage increases usually advance in cycles, an advance to engineers being followed at a close interval by an equivalent advance to firemen, conductors and trainmen. existing differentials are more jealously maintained among the train service employees than among other railway workers, but that the latter do aim to maintain their relative level below the skilled groups is evidenced by the reference in arbitration proceedings to the advances made by the train service employees and by their claims to proportionate advances. thus an increase in the wages of a highly paid group of employees, on account of this tendency to maintain existing differentials tends to put in motion a cycle of wage advances extending to all grades of labor."[ ] public opinion and public agencies of wage settlement have in the past been inclined to give support to the idea of the maintenance of customary relationships, even when the justification was flimsy. far more important is the factor of mutual aid between groups. for example, in pursuance of some general object skilled groups of labor have given support to minimum wage legislation for unskilled female labor; or again, such instances as the occurrence after the panic of , when various organized groups of wage earners made common cause to resist wage reductions even for unskilled and unorganized labor. such mutual aid plays its part in determining the wage levels of the different groups of wage earners. this concludes the explanation of the forces which govern the relative wage levels of the separate groups or classes of labor. the actually existing differences of earnings between different groups of labor can only be explained by the combined influence of all the forces discussed. .--differences in the levels of earnings of various groups of wage earners have been called "differentials." an effort has been made to explain their causes. several practical conclusions, in regard to them, may be deduced from the preceding discussion. firstly, that these differentials (which may be measured by the differences between the average earnings of various occupations) result from, and in that sense represent, a large variety of actual forces; some of which can only be changed slowly and with much effort, as, for example, the relative plenty of the lowest grades of labor. as complete a knowledge as is obtainable of the various forces which produce these differentials is absolutely necessary to any project of wage regulation. secondly, although they represent a large variety of actual forces, it is misleading to apply such adjectives as "normal" or "natural" to them. for such adjectives inevitably suggest that the condition to which they are applied corresponds to a set of facts from which divergence can be only temporary, and is probably accidental. that, however, is not true in regard to the wage differentials which exist at any given time. thus, and thirdly, in any project of wage regulation, existing wage differentials can neither be accepted nor rejected blindly. a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace need not be based upon the acceptance and maintenance of all existing differentials. on the other hand, whatever revisions are undertaken should rest upon a knowledge of the forces which have established existing differentials. the policy of the south australian industrial court, as expressed by its president, would seem to be a practical application of this view. to quote from one of his decisions: "preëxisting or customary marginal differences are followed by this court as a prima facie rule, but the rule is only prima facie, and is subject to revision in the light of argument and evidence."[ ] footnotes: [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics" ( th edition), page . [ ] for an interesting account--from the point of view of the visiting observer--of the mobility of american labor, see the board of trade (great britain) investigation: "working class rents, etc., in american towns" ( ). cd , pt. v. "... as a consequence partly of the comparatively rapid industrial development of the country and partly of the scope of its resources, and acting in response to the opportunities which are offered, either in centers where urban industries may be more rapidly expanding, in agriculture or in mining the mobility of labor is unusually great. in fields of employment that are well known as centers towards which great numbers of foreigners drift; in which much of the labor is unskilled; in which work is especially laborious as in the iron and steel works, or especially intermittent as at the stock yards and packing houses of chicago, the constantly changing stream of labor that passes through is a conspicuous factor of the situation. but in general, there is an unusual degree of movement and restless change." [ ] f. w. taussig, "principles of economics" (revised edition), vol. ii, page . [ ] g. d. h. cole, "introduction to trade unionism," page . [ ] g. d. h. cole, "introduction to trade unionism," page . [ ] for an eloquent and incisive discussion of this whole subject, based, of course, on the facts of his own time, see the chapter in j. s. mill, "principles of political economy," entitled "of the differences of wages in different employments." book ii, chapter xiv, concludes: "consequently the wages of each class have hitherto been regulated by the increase of its own population rather than of the general population of the country." page . (edition ashley.) [ ] j. n. stockett, "arbitral determination of railway wages," pages - . see also account in lord askwith's "industrial problems and disputes" of the influence of customary differentials upon wage movements during the war, pp. - . [ ] page , vol. ii ( - ), s. aust. ind. reports, the furniture trades case. chapter v--wages and price movements section . the transactions of distribution arranged in terms of money. how does this affect the outcome of distribution as regards wages?--section . the characteristics of price movements.--section . the direct and indirect effects of upward price movements upon the distribution of the product.--section . the direct and indirect effects of falling price movements upon the distribution of the product.--section . the doctrine of the "vicious circle of wages and prices" examined. its meaning and importance. .--up to this point the investigation of the forces which govern wage incomes has proceeded with only the most incidental acknowledgment of the fact that the whole series of processes which is described as production and distribution is performed with the aid of a monetary system. production entails a constant comparison and calculation of money values. the transactions of distribution likewise. how does the intervention of a monetary system affect the outcome of distribution? how does it modify the share of the wage earners in the total product of industry? the subject of prices and price levels is one of the most difficult of economic subjects. however, our purposes do not require any inquiry into the general theory of the subject. it will suffice for us merely to recognize the existence of different types of price movements, without investigating except at particular points the conditions which govern them. .--it is common practice to use the term "price level" to denote the position of prices of commodities in general. the price level is never anything more than the concept of a collection of prices of particular commodities. it is convenient to be able to express the position of this collection of prices by a single figure. to do this, use is made of various statistical devices by which this collection of prices can be combined into one price--which will be statistically representative of the collection. that single figure is known as the index number of that collection of prices. changes of the index number represent changes in the position of the collection of prices from which it has been statistically derived. all price changes are changes in the prices of particular commodities. of course, a change in the price of one commodity may produce a change in the prices of other commodities. relatively small and occasional changes in a few, or even in a great many of the prices which make up the price level, have no importance for the problem of wages. indeed, if the price level remained nearly stationary there would be no necessity of undertaking this investigation of the effects of price change upon the distribution of the product. however, large and protracted changes in the price level do occur, and these are genuinely important factors in the distributive outcome. a study of the major price movements of the past makes clear the chief characteristics of these large and protracted changes in the price level. they are irregular changes. that is to say, all of the individual prices which make up the price level do not change at the same time, nor to the same extent. certain prices may even change in opposite directions.[ ] it is well to mark also, in passing, that the prices of some or many of those articles which occupy a very important place in all calculations of the cost of living of the wage earners--the articles of food and clothing, and shelter--may change in a different measure, or even in a different direction from the prices of the other commodities which compose the general price level. this possibility is the most genuine as regards food prices. movements of food prices, and, indeed, of the prices of all agricultural products, are apt over short periods to be determined by weather conditions rather than by the industrial events which govern the general price movement. mr. w. c. mitchell in his book on business cycles studied the relation between the movements of retail food prices (the figures ordinarily used in cost of living investigations) and general business conditions during the - period in the united states. he writes in conclusion that "these figures (i.e., of retail food prices) indicate a certain correspondence between retail prices and business conditions. in , indeed, the thirty foods rose slightly instead of falling, but they declined during the dull years which followed the panic, and rose again when prosperity returned. the rise was slow until - ; it became slow again in - ; but rapid in - . the panic of came too late in the autumn to exercise much influence upon the average retail price level of that year. on the whole, this series reflects the course of business cycles better than might have been expected. for the supply of vegetables and animal foods varies in an arbitrary fashion determined by the weather, and the demand for staple foods is less affected by prosperity and depression than that for the more dispensable commodities."[ ] even over periods of some duration there may be a marked difference between the movement of food prices and other prices. .--changes in the general level of prices must have prior causes, but they, themselves in turn cause economic disturbance. they give a tilt to the whole industrial system which manifests itself in the outcome of distribution. the effects upon the distribution of the product of an upward movement of prices are ordinarily different from those produced by a general decline in prices. it is well to begin with the first case--a period of a rise in the general price level. to give an accurate analysis of the successive interactions by which an upward movement in the general price level, once stimulated, asserts itself, is both a delicate and lengthy task. it cannot be attempted here.[ ] it suffices to note the ordinary distributive results of the process; with the important reservation, however, that they do not occur in the measure that the rise is occasioned by a general reduction in the productivity of industry such as might be caused by war. there are firstly what may be called the direct results. prime costs of production do not increase as rapidly as prices, and supplementary costs rise even less rapidly than prime costs. prices rise faster than wages and interest charges, and rents tend to remain fixed by leases and other arrangements. especially in the first year or two of rising prices, the rise in wages tends to be slow; in the later stages it ordinarily becomes more rapid.[ ] thus mitchell in his study of wage and price movements during the greenback period in the united states ( - ) writes that "... the table shows an almost universal rise of wages during the war--though a rise far from equal to the advance of wholesale or retail price."[ ] and in his study of price and wage movements from - in the united states he writes, "the figures indicate that the prices of labor are influenced by changes in business conditions, but in less measure than the price of commodities, even at retail. the general average declines after the panic of , recovers in , advances in - , makes very little gain in the dull year of , and then rises rapidly again in - . but the degree of rise and fall is considerably less than that of commodities at wholesale and just about the same as that of food at retail."[ ] the lag of wages behind prices varies in degree in different industries and occupations, for neither prices nor wages go up uniformly. the general direction of wage change is marked, but there is nevertheless considerable variation in the amount of wage change.[ ] these variations in wage change are to be explained by the fact that the wage earners tend to fall into groups whose economic fortunes are in some measure independent of each other. they therefore are only slowly affected by changes in each other's position. on the other hand, since the increase in expenses of production in most industries tends to lag behind the rise in the price obtainable for products, profit returns increase during such periods, especially in industries in which the wages bill is an important part of the expenses of production. to quote mitchell again, "the net resultant of these processes is to increase profits. of chief importance is the fact that supplementary costs rise slowly in comparison with the physical volume of business.... in many instances prime costs also lag behind selling prices on the rise...."[ ] the definite exception to this last conclusion is when the rise in prices is caused by general lowering of the productivity of industry. and so also it may be said that to the extent that higher prices are merely a mark of an increased cost of labor, or a drop in the efficiency of industrial enterprises, it does not follow that profits are growing. it is generally held that there is such a falling off in the efficiency of industrial enterprises, and an increase in the cost of labor in a period of very rapid business expansion and rising prices--especially toward the end of the period. mitchell writes: "... prosperity is unfavorable to economy in business management. when mills are running overtime, when salesmen are sought out by importunate buyers, when premiums are being offered for quick deliveries, when the railways are congested with traffic, then neither the over-rushed managers nor their subordinates have the time and the patience to keep waste down to the possible minimum. the pressure which depression applies to secure the fullest utilization of all material and labor is relaxed, and in a hundred little ways the cost of business creeps upward."[ ] then there are the indirect effects of the process of price change upward. since profits generally are large, production tends to be stimulated and the volume of production increases. the turnover of industry is quickened somewhat. plants are more fully utilized, and unemployment is small. more overtime is worked. the total earnings of the wage earners are likely to advance more than wage rates. the extent of the divergence between the increase in hourly or piece rates and weekly or yearly earnings is likely to vary greatly according to the nature of the causes of the price movement. when the price movement is just the reflex of a situation of depreciated paper money, for example, the volume of production may or may not be increasing. an interesting study of the divergence between hourly earnings and weekly earnings for the recent war period (sept., -march, ) is contained in one of the reports of the national industrial conference board. in the metal industries (those most directly affected by the war) the advance in weekly earnings for men was stated to be per cent. as against per cent. in hourly earnings. in the rubber and chemical industries the increases in weekly earnings were greater than in hourly earnings also, but not to the same extent as the above. in the textile industries the percentage increases were practically equal, while in the boot and shoe industry the increase in weekly earnings for men was less than the increase in hourly earnings. and for women in most industries the weekly earnings show the smaller per cent. of increase.[ ] of course, figures of yearly earnings would be more significant as a comparison. it is not easy to reach a general conclusion in the matter. it may be said that if the increase in prices is but the mark of an ordinary business revival--with no unfavorable attendant circumstances--weekly and yearly earnings will be favorably affected. whether they will be affected sufficiently to prevent real wages from falling, particularly at the beginning of the period of rising prices, whether towards the end of the period real wages may not actually have increased--these are questions it is not possible to answer except as regards a concrete situation. and if the increase in prices is the result of currency inflation, or of a general falling off in the level of production, weekly earnings are likely to be even more unfavorably affected during the period of price increase than hourly rates. .--the effects of the process of falling prices may also be considered as direct and indirect. the direct results are somewhat of the opposite character to those just related for a period of rising prices. it is difficult to generalize about them. if the period of falling prices follows closely upon a period of sharply rising prices, during which latter period wage increases lagged greatly behind price increases, the tendency for wages to rise may continue to manifest itself for some time after prices have begun to drop. an example of such a period is furnished by the years immediately following the civil war.[ ] in the case of the price decline of the year-- - , however, wage decreases have come promptly--and this is more likely to be the ordinary case. unless industry in general becomes more efficient during the period, a continued fall in the price level tends to bring about a fall of some degree in the wage level. however, just as in periods of rising prices the wage increase usually tends to lag behind the retail price increase, and even more behind the wholesale price increase, so in times of falling prices, wages often tend to fall more slowly than retail prices, and much more slowly than wholesale prices.[ ] the wages of different groups do not fall equally. the same dispersion that was noted in times of rising prices is found equally in periods of falling prices. this is to be explained in the same way as the dispersion which occurs in periods of rising prices.[ ] organization, however, is likely to play a more decisive part in resistance to reduction of wages than in demands for increased wages. industries in which the wage earners are highly organized generally find it more difficult to economize by way of wage reduction than industries in which the wage earners are not organized. the range of profits of industry during periods of falling prices will depend upon the nature of the causes which produce the decline. if it is simply the result of an increase in industrial efficiency, or progress in the industrial arts, profits will continue to be satisfactory and may even be on the increase. if, on the other hand, the price decline results from the occurrence of those short periods of forced liquidation known as crises, and is accompanied by that state of recuperative and cautious business activity known as depression, profits in most industries are apt to be quite low. such was the - period in the united states. during the period of forced liquidation and immediately thereafter, the number of bankruptcies is likely to be high.[ ] no general statement is possible concerning the duration of such a period of depression and low profits; all accompanying circumstances play a complicating part in retarding or hastening business recovery.--the present depression of - is almost of unprecedented duration, for example. nor should it be supposed that the state of depression must be identical with the period of price decline.[ ] given favorable circumstances, the price decline soon leads to a search for new methods of economy in production. raw materials are likely to fall in price. supplementary costs are rapidly reduced. the price of labor tends to fall. even though prices continue to fall slowly, profits may rise to a level encouraging to business activity. this may also be true of a period of liquidation not preceded by crisis. in conclusion, it can only be repeated, however, that confident generalization as to the direct effects of falling prices is impossible. each business cycle has its own peculiar characteristics--it is unique as mitchell says.[ ] so, too, as to the indirect effects of a general fall in the price level. no one description can be given that will hold true of all instances. if the main cause at work is of the kind that may be called "natural," for example, a gradual increase in the productivity of industry, or a decided falling off in gold production, such periods are not necessarily periods of depression in industry. employment may be constant and weekly and yearly earnings high. thus the period of - in the united states was one of declining prices and it is generally admitted that that period was one of great industrial activity.[ ] moments of excessive activity are rarer in periods of falling prices than in periods of rising prices, but the average amount of unemployment may be either greater or less. again, if the decline of prices is in reality a movement from a state of depreciated paper money to a gold standard, there is a possibility that the period may be one of industrial activity due to a prevailing confidence in a coming recovery. it is more likely, however, that such a period will be characterized by a falling off in business activity and an increase in unemployment, particularly at its commencement. lastly, if the price movement is an indication of such a period of depression as may precede and usually does follow serious industrial crises, it is ordinarily accompanied by liquidation and curtailment of production. in these periods, and especially at their height, unemployment grows and earnings fall more than wage rates. or wage rates may remain comparatively steady, but weekly and yearly earnings will fall. the extent to which this fall in earnings will go depends upon the seriousness of the industrial maladjustments.[ ] still it is safe to conclude that a period of serious depression following upon a crisis is the least favorable phase of the industrial cycle for the wage earners--notwithstanding the fact that wages frequently fall more slowly than wholesale prices, and somewhat more slowly than retail prices. .--our object in discussing the effect of price movements on distribution is to discover how they complicate the problems of wage settlement. before proceeding to this main purpose, however, it is desirable to pay particular attention to one doctrine of the relation of wage change to price change which figures prominently in current discussion. that is the doctrine known as the "vicious circle of wages and prices." it has been well stated by mr. layton: "it is often asserted that a rise in wages is only a move around a vicious circle, the argument being put thus; starting with a rise in wages achieved, let us say, as the result of a strike, the increased wage bill will add to the cost of production, and so raise prices; if the rise becomes general, the cost of living will increase and diminish the purchasing power of wages; this will produce a renewal of discontent among the working classes and result, perhaps, in a further demand, culminating in a strike for still higher wages."[ ] this doctrine is affirmed somewhat indifferently, when the demands for increased wages are made during a period of a relatively steady price level, or during a period in which the price level is rising steadily. what elements of truth does it possess and what is its importance? the first thing to note is that the series of events visualized in the above quotation can be set into motion by any other cause which disturbs the price level just as well as by a demand for increased wages. for example, a great influx of gold into the united states may take place as a result of a steadily favorable balance in international trade. bank reserves may mount, discount rates may fall, and if all other circumstances happen to be already favorable, a period of increased industrial activity may follow. demand for basic products will increase and prices will begin to rise. with the tendency of prices to rise, the general demand for labor will increase. wage demands will follow, and all the conditions required to make the theory applicable are supplied. certain conclusions may be stated at once. firstly, the industrial situation is rarely so balanced, no matter what the price situation, that a measure of wage increase may not be possible without an equivalent increase in prices. the distributive situation is never one of static equilibrium. the gain of one group or agent of production may simply be another's loss. each group or agent strives for a large return. if wages go up, profits may go down, or new methods of production may be devised, or strikes may cease. the same possibilities exist in essentials, irrespective of any prior price movement. the movement of prices upward simply gives ground for the presumption that there is a greater possibility than usual of increasing wages without causing equivalent price increases. it is incorrect to reason that all participants in distribution must come off equally well in this succession of changes. a continuous testing out of the distributive effectiveness of the various agents of production, and of any divisions which may exist within each agent, occurs. the various groups of wage earners may be better or worse off than before. when the price level has shown a prior tendency to rise, there is good reason to believe that the wage earners stand to gain by a vigorous policy of assertion. for then in particular, unless the general rise in prices is to be accounted for by a reduction in the general productivity of industry (a possibility always to be considered), wage increases can come out of the extra income which the other agents are in receipt of because of the price movement. secondly, in normal times the process visualized could not go on indefinitely. sound banking practice imposes a limit upon credit expansion. in an abnormal time such as europe is now passing through credit expansion may, indeed, continue beyond the point dictated by banking reserves. thus depreciation ensues. this, in turn, is ordinarily limited by the desire to return to a gold basis; otherwise it results in financial chaos. barring out this last eventuality, the process of price change has a final limit, which must set a limit upon wage increases. what these general theoretical propositions regarding the idea of the vicious circle do show, is that this idea is in itself an attempt at a complete theory of distribution. that theory, if consistently formulated, would be that the product of industry is already being shared out among the various agents of production in such a way that an attempt on the part of any agent to get more than what it is receiving at any particular time can result only in a price increase. for each agent, it is presumed, is getting its "normal" share as settled by the general economic position and certain unchangeable economic laws. the idea is but the shadow of the theories of normal distribution mentioned in preceding chapters. it does, in common with these theories indeed draw attention to certain fundamental economic relationships. these judge brown has expressed well in one of his decisions which reads, "the element of truth in the 'theory of the pernicious circle' is that, at a given stage in the history of a particular society, there is a limit to the amount which should properly be awarded for wages,--both wages and profits have to be paid out of the price paid by the consumer. if, whether by collective bargaining or by strikes, or by judicial regulation on the part of the public authorities, an attempt is made to narrow unduly the margin of profit on capital, then there is likely to be a period of industrial dislocation, and every class in the community is likely to suffer."[ ] but the idea has all the misleading effects which have been attributed to that general theory of distribution of which it is a corollary. it is derived from an analysis of the distributive process which does not fit all the facts. footnotes: [ ] for data upon this irregularity, see the tables in w. c. mitchell, "report on prices in the united states," - . see also his "gold, prices and wages under the greenback standard." tables - for study of dispersion of retail prices. [ ] "business cycles," w. c. mitchell, page . see also page . "in the case of animal and farm products, however, where dependence is not upon natural deposits of minerals and forests which have grown through decades, but upon the fruits of human labor during one or two seasons, frequent contradictions between the movement of prices on the one hand, and changes in business conditions on the other hand, seem likely to continue for a long time to come." see also "gold, prices, and wages under the greenback standard," pages - . [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles." also b. m. anderson, jr., "the value of money." [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," pages - , . [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "gold, prices, and wages under the greenback standard," page . [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," page , chart . see also f. w. taussig, "results of recent investigations on prices in the u. s.," in _yale review_, nov., . [ ] mitchell writes with reference to the - period that "on examining the figures for separate industries, one finds there is less variety of fluctuation than in commodity markets. but still considerable differences appear between, say, cotton mills and foundries, or building trades and shoe factories. however, no industry escaped a reduction of wages after , and none failed to register a large advance between and ," page , "business cycles." see also for - data, research report number of the national industrial conference board on "war time increases of wages." [ ] w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," pages - . [ ] w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," page . the increased cost of labor arises from many causes besides the increase of wages. the less efficient workers receive fuller employment; extra rates are paid for "the tired labor of overtime"; there is likely to be an increase in the rate of labor turnover due to the rapidity of wage movements and the ease of getting a job; and lastly it is said that work is carried out with less energy when the workmen are secure in their employment. mitchell goes so far as to write that "labor is a highly changeable commodity--its quality deteriorates as its price rises" (pages - ), "business cycles." see also j. c. stamp, "the effect of trade fluctuations on profits," _journal of the royal statistical society_, july, . [ ] see research report no. , national industrial conference board, "wartime changes in prices." see also the controversy between the railways and railwaymen arising from the difference described by j. n. stockett, jr., "arbitral determination of railway wages," pages - : "in determining the increase in railway wages for the purpose of ascertaining whether wages have kept pace with increasing prices the question arises as to whether wages mean earnings or rates. the railways maintain that the cost of living argument is fundamentally directed to the establishment of the proposition that earnings have not kept pace with the increase in the price of commodities, and therefore wages, in connection with the cost of living, means earnings. the employees, on the other hand, contend that the computation of the increase in wages should be based on the assumption that wages mean rates of pay, and that the high earnings which the railways show for the men are the result of excessive hours worked. they claim that it is not valid to assert that wages have kept pace with the increase in prices, if an employee must work continually over the time set for the minimum day in order to make his wages bear the increased price of commodities." [ ] w. c. mitchell, "gold, wages and prices under the greenback standard," page . [ ] for examples, see w. c. mitchell, "gold, wages, and prices under the greenback standard," pages - . [ ] see pages - , this chapter. [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," pages - . [ ] _ibid._, page . [ ] _ibid._, pages - . [ ] see laughlin, "money and prices," chart iii, page . [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," page . [ ] w. t. layton, "introduction to the study of prices," appendix c, page . [ ] "the carpenters' and joiners' case," vol. i, s. australian ind. reports, page . chapter vi--wages and price movements (_continued_) section . the problems of wage settlement arising out of upward price movements two in number: (a) should wages be increased during such periods? (b) if so, on what basis should increases be arranged? the doctrine of the maintenance of the standard of life analyzed.--section . an alternative method of adjustment proposed, based on a new index number.--section . periods of falling prices also present two problems of wage settlement, similar in essentials to those presented by upward movement. these problems discussed. .--we can now proceed to the consideration of the problems of wage settlement which arise out of price movements. first, we will deal with the problems presented by upward price movements. then subsequently we shall take those questions presented by price movements downward. the problems presented by upward price movements are two in number. firstly, is there any reason why wages should be increased during a period of advancing prices? secondly, if there is reason, on what basis should the increases be arranged? the answer to the first of these questions is simple. in periods of rising prices wage increases tend to lag behind the retail price increase, and very much behind the wholesale price increase. the chief aim, therefore, of any plan for the adjustment of wages to upward price movement must be the protection of the interests of the wage earners. changes in the distributive situation that are unfavorable--judged by reference to the distributive outcome to be sought by any policy of wage settlement--must be prevented, if possible. it is the second of the problems which presents the difficulty. there is one method of wage and price adjustment which holds an important place in current discussion. indeed, it has tended to be the prevailing method although it has never been applied systematically in the united states.[ ] that is the method based upon the doctrine of the maintenance of the standard of living. this doctrine aims to maintain real wages at a constant level throughout the course of price change. the labor unions have usually given it their support, finding in it a strong basis for their claims.[ ] is it the best possible method of adjustment considering the end to be attained? its advantages are definite. it is a simple claim. it is a claim the justice of which could be denied only under unusual circumstances. it has in the past brought considerable benefits to the wage earners, because they have usually stood to gain by any vigorous assertion of their interests. what are its disadvantages? the first of its disadvantages is in the difficulty of interpreting the doctrine into practical policy. there has seemed to be one straightforward way of interpreting it. investigations have been made from time to time of the commodities and services on which the working class household tends to spend the bulk of its income. as a result of these investigations budgets have been drawn up which were deemed sufficiently representative of the main currents of expenditure of the mass of wage earners at a given time and place. on the basis of this data an index number of the cost of living for the mass of wage earners, at the given time and place, has been prepared by methods too familiar to require explanation here. in the past the price collections ordinarily used were composed mainly of the prices of foodstuffs. but recent data covers a much wider portion of the total expenditure.[ ] an index number for the cost of living having thus been prepared, it has been conceived that the variations in this index number were indicative of the change in the cost of living. this practice, however, is not altogether satisfactory. firstly, the concept of a representative budget is necessarily more or less artificial; the budgets of wage earners, even in the same class, vary considerably in composition. thus hardly any figure on the change of the cost of living has been given out without being challenged by one or other of the interested parties. secondly, for all except the lowest grades of wage earners, the direction of expenditure changes somewhat as particular prices change in a different measure. this second disadvantage was noted particularly during the war, when the supplies of certain commodities were limited or rationed. thirdly, and this difficulty is of a more serious nature, the prices of some or many of the articles which occupy an important place in all calculations of the cost of living of the wage earners may change in a different measure, or even in a different direction, from the prices of the other commodities produced within the country. food prices in particular are apt to respond to different influences than those governing the general price level.[ ] however, it is only from the course of change of the price level representing _all_ important commodities produced within the country that it is possible to get an indication of the change in the total conglomeration of market values, which has been called the product of industry. even then the indication is far from an exact one. let us consider the two cases in which the change in the prices of some or many articles important in the wage earners' budget diverges considerably from the change in the index number of the prices of all important commodities produced within the country. the first case is that in which the prices of the relatively small collection increase much faster than the index of general prices. such might be the fact in the event of two bad harvests in succession. if wages are increased in accordance with the movement of the prices of the relatively limited collection of commodities, the result of the wage increase may be an increase in prices in general. as a result of this the wage earners may be better or worse off than before, depending upon circumstances. the second case is that in which the prices of the relatively small collection of articles may increase less than the index of prices in general. in this case any wage increase undertaken in accordance with the change of prices of the relatively small collection would fall considerably short of that which could have been ventured without fear of causing another price increase--and without waiting for the test of profit accumulation discussed elsewhere.[ ] fourthly, changes in a relatively small collection of prices, particularly if foodstuff prices bulk largely in the collection, are apt to be more convulsive than general price movements. they are likely to vary more than general price movements from year to year, and, indeed, from season to season. this is so, although it is true that retail prices tend to be far more stable than wholesale prices.[ ] lastly, as mitchell states, as a business factor crops are less an effect than a cause of change in conditions. "good crops tend to bring prosperity and poor crops depression in the seasons which follow...."[ ] if foodstuffs fall because of a good harvest, it is more likely than not that the next industrial year will be a good year. there is, therefore, a preliminary presumption that there will be no occasion for wage reduction (if wage adjustments to falling prices are contemplated--which subject will be discussed immediately hereinafter). if foodstuff prices rise because of a poor harvest, there is a preliminary presumption that the succeeding industrial period will not be one of very great activity. therefore, an increase in wages corresponding to the rise in the prices of food products would not serve to increase very much, if at all, the command of the wage earners over foodstuffs. this possibility of a divergence in the movement in the price of provisions and of wages was pointed out, indeed, by adam smith. to give the explanation in his words, "in a year of sudden and extraordinary plenty, there are funds in the hands of many of the employers of industry, sufficient to maintain and employ a greater number of people than had been employed the year before; and this extraordinary number cannot always be had. those masters, therefore, who want more workmen bid against one another, in order to get them, which sometimes raises both the real and money price of their labor. the contrary of this happens in a year of sudden and extraordinary scarcity."[ ] . such are the disadvantages attaching to a policy of wage adjustment based on the doctrine of the maintenance of the standard of life. it may now be asked whether there is any alternative method to which smaller disadvantages attach? as to the matter of alternative, it is my opinion that a better plan of adjusting wages to price movements can be devised. the basis of it should be the change in the index number of prices of all important commodities produced within the country. any scheme of adjustment arranged on that basis would have one distinct advantage. it would be representative of the fundamental distributive relationship--that is the relationship between the various levels of earnings and the total product of market values. it would assure a closer accord between wages and total product than the widely used method already studied. nevertheless, it must be admitted that this plan also is not free from disadvantages and difficulties. some difficulties of interpretation would remain. the selection of the ratio in which wages should be changed with reference to the course of price changes would be wholly a matter of judgment. for due to the changes in the expenses of production and to the changes in the volume of production, it will always be impossible to reason concerning profits merely from the facts of price change. and secondly, since all prices do not change equally, even if wages are increased in accordance with the changes in the index number of all prices, these wage increases might cause price changes in certain directions. weighing all the difficulties, it may be that the best method that can be devised would be something in the way of a compromise between the two methods that have been discussed. that is, wage adjustment to a rising price (and to a falling price level--if such adjustment is contemplated) level could be made on the basis of the change in the price index number of all the important commodities produced within the country; but in the making of the index number, the prices of food, rent, and clothing could be given a heavy weight ( per cent., for example) of the total. such a compromise would tend to assure, on the one hand, that the wage change did express in a considerable measure the change in the cost of living. and, on the other hand, it would tend to keep wage changes in closer accord with the changes in the total value product of industry than any method based solely on a measurement of the change in the cost of living. in conclusion, however, it may be remarked that when the prices of the essentials of economic existence are increasing very rapidly, there is no way, under our wage system, by which the welfare of the lowest industrial classes can be effectively protected merely by wage adjustment. when supplies are short, if their distribution is left to the free play of the market, the poorest classes must come off badly. . there remain for consideration those questions of wage adjustment which are presented by downward price movements. they are two in number. firstly, is there any reason why wages should be reduced during a period of declining prices? secondly, if they should be reduced, on what basis should the reductions be arranged? in reference to the first question, three different types of situations may be distinguished on the basis of the analysis of the effects of price declines given in the preceding chapter. the first type is that in which the decline in prices is due to some such cause as the progress of invention or the development of the means of transport. in this case the fall of prices is brought about by an increase in the quantity of goods produced, and there is no reason why wages should be decreased. indeed, there may even be occasion for an increase. the second case is that in which the decline in prices marks a period of reaction from a previous period of price increase and a tendency to limit production costs and to proceed cautiously, but is not accompanied by much forced liquidation and is not the result of any urgent necessity to reduce bank credit. in short, when the business conditions accompanying the price decline do not warrant apprehensions of a crisis, serious as they may be temporarily. price declines of this sort may be considerable in extent; they will be gradual rather than violent. they are apt to be characterized by less dispersion than those which are precipitated by crises. in this case also there would seem to be no good reason why wages should be reduced. a decline of prices would be desirable, it is true. the industrial position would be improved thereby and industrial activity would be put upon a sound financial basis. some contraction of credit is to be desired if, as is assumed in this case, the period of decline was preceded by one of considerable price increase and credit expansion. but these results may be obtained without any reduction in wage rates. the cost of labor will fall without any reduction in wage rates, as the amount of overtime work is lessened, as employment is concentrated upon the more efficient workers, and as workmen put more energy into their jobs in order to hold them. such times as these usually lead, furthermore, to the introduction of new or forgotten economies, and to improvements in the method of production. thus it can be concluded in this case that whatever reduction of the price level is required to restore industry to a sound financial basis can be accomplished without reducing wage rates. the third case is that in which the decline in prices is abrupt--at the beginning at all events--and is precipitated by much forced liquidation of a character disastrous to the enterprises forced to undertake it. in short, when it is brought about by an industrial crisis or when an industrial crisis is actively threatened. in this case the decline is usually preceded by a period of rapidly rising prices which brings about an over-extension of credit and puts heavy pressure upon the banking system. maladjustments in industry manifest themselves and fear comes to govern all production. the price decline in different industries is apt to vary greatly in extent. in this case, as in the second, the process of price decline--the state of severe depression--tends to set in motion certain forces which work for recovery. the owners and directors of industry seek for economies. they strive to get greater output from the workers, and generally succeed since a job is more precious. prime as well as supplementary costs are cut down. and yet if there has been great expansion of credit; if the banking system as a whole shows a very low reserve, and some banks suspend specie payment, a reduction in the wage level is necessarily essential to industrial recovery. this may be so especially, if buying is at a halt. the wage reduction should follow the price reduction. there would appear to be no compelling reason for the wage reduction to be in the same ratio as the price decline, since it is probable that the wage increases will have lagged behind prices in the preceding period. the conditions making the case should be clearly present; competition or control must be active, in order to insure that the reduction of wages really does assist price reduction. these important details will be considered at another point.[ ] against such a policy of wage reduction some arguments of weight can be brought forward. it may be said that all other branches of outlay will be subjected to a more severe overhauling when there can be no resort to wage reduction. it may also be argued out that the maintenance of wage levels would confer such indirect assistance to recovery as might come from the lessening of the fear that a future fall in wages will make present production unprofitable. the factor of industrial unrest and discontent is apt to be less menacing. lastly, it may be said that wage reductions might be reflected in the efficiency of the least favorably placed groups of workers.[ ] these objections should be overridden only if it is believed that a decline in the price level greater than that which could be secured without wage reduction must precede industrial recovery. or that such a decline would, at all events, greatly facilitate the recovery. it must be believed that at the level of prices existing at the outset of the crises, or at a position somewhat but not markedly under that level, the margin of safety in the financial system by virtue of which modern industry is carried on, is too small--the ease with which the unfavorable turn of affairs could produce another crisis too great. or that consumers will not resume buying until prices drop greatly. under which circumstances the policy of wage reduction would be as much to the benefit of the wage earners as to the rest of the community. this case is to be distinguished from the previous one really only by the decided seriousness of the situation it reveals. in this case it is presumed that a decided judgment may be made that the price level must be greatly lowered before business operations can revive and be carried on with confidence in steady markets. in the previous one it is presumed that a decided judgment can be formed to the effect that the shock to business will be satisfactorily gotten over with just that reduction of prices that liquidation and a more careful conducting of business operations will bring about. the difference is, in the last analysis, one of degree. a price decline that is in reality a movement from a state of depreciated paper money back to a gold standard may be looked upon as a variant of the third case. for it is obvious that if the depreciation is extensive, the decline in the price level necessary to the attainment of the gold basis must also be extensive. there is a fourth possible case which will be described, but will not be followed up, since it is not applicable to the united states at the present time. it is the case of a country whose chief industries are export industries--the prices of the products of which are determined by world competition. this case is complex and not to be analyzed by a general rule. a few observations may be made. it is conceivable that a situation should arise in which a policy of wage reduction is expedient because the export industries are very gravely threatened by foreign competition. in such a situation it may be argued that any genuine necessity for a reduction of wages would be manifested by the pressure of the banking system, because of the outflow of gold that would occur consequent to a great falling off of exports. but, as we have seen during the war, such a banking situation may be avoided for a number of years by such devices as foreign loans, and the industries in question would decline in the meantime. on the other hand, any policy of general wage reduction could only be undertaken with caution. situations of the sort described tend to call out the reserve energies of a country. they are always present to a greater or less extent. so much then in answer to the first question--as to whether there was any reason for wage reduction during periods of declining prices. the second question then presents itself--on what basis should such reductions as are advocated be arranged? on which subject the conclusions reached in the course of discussion of wage adjustment to upward price movement are applicable. these conclusions will be recalled at various points further on in the book. footnotes: [ ] nor has it for that matter been applied with consistency in great britain. see the minority report of the war cabinet committee on "women's wages," , page . [ ] webb, "industrial democracy," doctrine of the vested interests, pages - , . [ ] the data published in the monthly _u. s. labor bulletin_ covers most of the articles which are at all important in the wage earners' budget. the collection of such data, however, has remained spasmodic up to the present. see the article by h. s. hanna in the october, , issue of the monthly review of the u. s. department of labor. the sumner committee report on the "cost of living in great britain" (cd ), covered food, rent, clothing, fares, fuel and light, insurance, and sundries. data was collected for skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor. [ ] see pages - , chapter v. [ ] see chapter xii. [ ] "while these two series (i.e., of wholesale and retail food prices) agree closely in the general trend of fluctuations, the retail prices are much more stable. they lag behind the wholesale prices both on the rise and on the fall, but more on the fall than on the rise." mitchell, "business cycles," page . the tables given apply to the - period in the united states. they do not show fluctuations for periods less than a year. [ ] w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," page . [ ] adam smith, "wealth of nations" (cannan's ed.), vol. i, page . [ ] see pages - , chapter ix. [ ] these in general were the motives for the passing of the temporary regulation of wages act in england ( ). "during the period of six months from the passing of this act, any person who employs in any trade or industry a workman of a class to which a prescribed rate of wages as defined in the act is applicable, shall pay wages to the workmen not less than the prescribed rate applicable to workmen of that class, or such other rate as may be substituted for the prescribed rate by the interim court of arbitration ... and if he fails to do so, he will be guilty of an offense under this act." chapter vii--the standard wage section . the remainder of the book will consist of an attempt to mark out principles of wage settlement that could be applied with relative peace and satisfaction in the settlement of wage disputes.--section . some preliminary notes on the subsequent exposition. the question of the political machinery required to put any policy of wage settlement into effect, avoided on the whole.--section . the principle of wage standardization defined and explained.--section . the characteristics of the standard wage examined.--section . the effect of the standard wage on individual independence and initiative.--section . the effect of the standard wage on the distribution of employment within the group.--section . its effect upon industrial organization, prices, and managerial ability.--section . its effect upon the output of the wage earners. this question cannot be satisfactorily discussed apart from the larger one--that of the effect of unionism upon production.--section . wage standardization and the "rate of turnover" of labor. .--in the first two chapters the aims towards which any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace should be directed were discussed. in the following four chapters an effort was made to throw into clear light the forces and relationships which determine wages at the present time. the way has thus been prepared for an attempt to work out principles for use in the settlement of industrial disputes. past experience in industrial arbitration or adjudication is a fertile source of suggestion in this endeavor; although much of it has been rather like a search in the dark for objects not too well described beforehand. the definition of aims was an attempt to find out the objects of our search. the analysis of the present economic situation and of wage principles was an attempt to get acquainted with the area in which the search must go on. the remainder of this book will consist of an attempt to work out principles of wage settlement which could be applied in wage disputes with relative peace and satisfaction. if adopted, they would serve as a substitute for a resort to open force in such disputes. their acceptance would mean that when ordinary collective bargaining fails as a means of settling wages, the dispute would be referred to some constituted authority, who would use these principles to reach a decision. .--the plan pursued in the subsequent exposition requires a few brief preliminary notes. first, in regard to the order of exposition. what follows is simply the direct statement of a series of principles (embodied in measures, as all principles must be). these principles, separately taken, cover most of the problems presented by wage disputes. taken together they might be composed into a policy of wage settlement. indeed, at the end of the book, an attempt is made to combine them into such a policy. not that it is believed that any policy of wage settlement can really be wrought in a piece this way. but because it is believed that ultimately it will be recognized that wage disputes cannot be settled as isolated events. there will have to be recourse to thought out principles, systematically applied. it will be found that no single principle will suffice; that many principles will have to be combined and used with reference to each other. there will be, in short, a call for a unified policy of wage settlement. secondly, in regard to the range of the exposition. the question of the political machinery that would have to be created in order to administer the proposed principles is on the whole avoided. to have attempted to discuss that question systematically would have greatly complicated this inquiry. in places, indeed, it will be found impossible to gauge the operation of some proposed principle without an understanding of the machinery by which it is applied. at such points an attempt is made to indicate the arrangements that would best serve the purposes in view. thirdly, in the formulation of the principles suggested, past and present experiments in the application of such principles are liberally drawn upon for suggestion. no attempt will be made, however, to enumerate systematically the principles that have been applied in the pursuance of the aim of industrial peace. no effort will be made to classify the various theories or principles which have been put forward somewhere or sometime in the past, and then to submit each theory or principle to criticism.[ ] or, in other words, no attempt will be made to give a primer of opinions either as to the difficulties to be encountered in any attempt to formulate a policy of wage settlement, or of the suggested means of overcoming such difficulties. .--the first of the principles or measures which is put forward, is known as the principle of wage standardization. this principle has been well interpreted by mr. stockett: "the principle of standardization is designed to abolish within a given area the multiplicity of rates paid for similar service by the application of one standard rate for each occupation, minor differences in the nature of the work due to varying physical and other conditions being disregarded."[ ] it represents the desire to do away with the great variety of wage rates for the same work which frequently exists, and the substitution therefor of a minimum wage rate. good examples of its application are the wage agreements entered into by organized bodies of wage earners and employers. in these the standard rates agreed upon for the various occupations are the minimum to be paid for these occupations, regardless of the particular individuals employed, and of minor differences in the nature of the work performed. trade union activity is undoubtedly responsible for the introduction into industry of the principle of standardization. by the device of the "common rule," so called, the possible influence upon the wage bargain of the economic position of the individual wage earner, or of the inefficiency or policy of the individual employer, is greatly curtailed. the common rule is a suitable instrument of expression for the group unity; by its use the competition for employment between the various members of the group is prevented from taking the form of underbidding.[ ] the enforcement of standard rates throughout a large area hinders industries from locating in places because of the opportunities for the hire of labor at cheaper rates, notwithstanding the fact that other places may possess greater natural advantages. it puts all competing enterprises and localities comprised within the area of standardization upon the same plane. this is well brought out by a resolution brought forward in the convention of the cigar makers which reads "whereas, the cigar makers in local unions are working on prices in some instances ten to twenty dollars cheaper per thousand lower than the cigar makers and unions of different localities, and, whereas cigar manufacturers are taking advantage of the situation, moving their factories or establishing branches of them in cheaper districts ... and, whereas this is detrimental to the welfare of the cigar makers and detrimental to the principles of the cigar makers international union be it resolved by this convention that the cigar makers international union adopt as one of its aims the securing of a uniform bill of prices, taking into consideration all the local conditions and necessities of the trade and local interests of the cigar makers, etc...."[ ] and finally the enforcement of standard rates tends to add to the competitive importance of able management. shrewdness in bargaining with the labor force becomes a less important factor in economical production; ability to use the labor force, at the standard rate, to the best advantage becomes a more important factor. the tone of competition undergoes a change. the principle of wage standardization is already accepted in many branches of american industry. even in those branches, however, there remain many open questions as to the limits of its applicability. it has in the main the approval of public opinion, as shown by its acceptance in all projects of wage regulation undertaken by the government in time of war, and by the report of the president's second industrial conference. .--it is necessary to study the characteristics of standard wage rates in some detail, in order to be able to measure the effect of the introduction of the principle into industry, and in order, also, to mark out the limits of its applicability. the first characteristic of the standard wage to be noted is that it is only a minimum wage for the occupation for which it is enforced. standard wage rates are not of necessity the actual wage rates received, by all or even a majority of the wage earners employed upon the tasks to which they apply. they do sometimes become the actual rates received by most of the wage earners concerned; they become the wage, ordinarily, of those workers who fall around the average in skill and experience. this fact is liable to misinterpretation. it may be taken to mean that the more efficient workmen do not receive recognition for their greater efficiency. what it usually would signify is that the wages of the less efficient members of the group are increased. as a matter of fact variations from the standard wage are commonly found. mr. collier, after an analysis of australasian experience, concludes on this point "... but this is not saying that the minimum wage is necessarily the maximum. although statistics as to wage distribution are largely lacking, the weight of opinion is contrary to this supposition. in some industries, such as the building trades, where contracts are made upon the basis of a legally fixed rate, this rate is frequently the maximum. yet such instances are in the minority. employers do not reduce the pay of their most competent workers because they are compelled to pay those less qualified at a minimum rate."[ ] it will be found usually that the abler, the more skilled or more experienced workers in particular occupations receive higher wages than the standard, because of the special value of their services.[ ] occasionally also agreements are entered into for the employment of a small number of workers, who are acknowledged to be well below the ordinary level of efficiency in their trade or occupation, because of physical disability, old age or analogous causes. as prof. mccabe has said, "nearly all unions permit members who have become unable to command the minimum rate because of old age or physical infirmity to work for what they can get."[ ] a second characteristic of standard wage rates is that they may take the form of time-rates, or payment by results, or any combination of the two. trade union agreements in the united states include all these varieties. it is true that a system of standard time rates is likely to be more in accord with the sentiment underlying the standardization movement. for under a system of payment by results individual differences in capacity are apt to be more readily reflected in the actual wage payments. and the sentiment underlying the principle of standardization is nearer the idea of equal payment for equal effort or equal sacrifice within the group, than the idea of equal payment for equal product. this is illustrated in the report signed by the labor members of the committee on industrial relations ( - ) in reference to the wage payment systems of scientific management which reads, "... all of these systems of (i.e., of scientific management) payment tend to center the attention of the worker on his individual interest and gain and to repress the development of group consciousness and interest. where the work of one man is independent of another, the individual has no motive to consider his fellow, since his work and pay in no wise depend on the other man. what either does will not affect the other's task or rates."[ ] furthermore, in some industries it is difficult under a system of payment by result to arrange that the actual wages received by the average members of the group for average effort, will be approximately equal. those are the industries in which there are a great variety of jobs with different rates, which can only be more or less accurately estimated in the "price list"; or industries in which the working conditions vary greatly, either within the same factory or mine, or between different factories or mines engaged in similar work. where the philosophy of unionism is firmly entrenched these two systems of wage payment tend to be so governed by the actions of the wage earners and employers as to lead to approximately the same results. the standard wage under a time-rate system tends to become the wage for an average or customary output. employers tend to demand at least that output for the standard time wage, and strive to increase the customary output whenever the standard time-wage is increased. and, on the other hand, under a system of payment by results, there is frequently a tendency for the workers to keep their output around a certain general level; which level, indeed, is determined only by all the circumstances governing the group attitude in the particular shop or industry. the "report on collective agreements in the united kingdom" ( ) has stated this as follows: "although the main distinction between time wages and piece wages is of the nature described above, it is of importance to note that, whether the method of remuneration adopted be expressed as payment by results or as payment by time, the amount of work performed and the time taken in performing the work are factors, both of which are, to a greater or less extent, taken into account in every agreement for the payment of wages. thus, on the one hand, the employee who is working on time wages is expected by his employer to turn out in a given time not less than a more or less specifically agreed upon quantity of work--"to do a fair day's work"--while, on the other hand, a list of piece-wage rates usually has an implied, and in some cases has an explicit, reference to the amount of money which can be earned by a man working under the list in a given time."[ ] the principle of standardization can and does find expression under either method of wage payment; its adoption does not exclude the system of payment by results. the terms of all such systems, however, should be made the subject of collective agreement. in that way the group interest in a defined minimum standard wage is protected, and the principle of standardization realized. as prof. pigou has written, "in order that the piece-wage system, and the benefit to production which it carries with it, may win further ground, what is required is to develop in these more difficult industries an adequate machinery for subordinating piece-wages, ... to the full control of collective bargaining."[ ] .--such then, being the leading characteristics of the standard wage, what results can be predicted for an attempt to introduce it throughout industry? during the decades which witnessed the introduction of wage standardization into industry in the united states, the most loudly expressed anxiety was in regard to its conceived effect upon individual independence and initiative. this question cannot be satisfactorily discussed apart from the larger one of which it is a part--that is the question of the influence of labor organization upon individual behavior. a few observations may be ventured with the explicit admission that they leave many sides of the question untouched. the "common rule" has come into operation only where the ground has been prepared for it, where there has been a growth of group consciousness and unity. under such conditions its use and observance mould individual ambitions and actions in some measure. it is a device which attaches the individual to the group, and interests the individual in the group advancement more than he otherwise would be. on the other hand, it indirectly guards for the individual an independence and vigor of spirit often lost in modern industry. when the underlying philosophy of the "common rule" is deeply ingrained the problems of industrial direction are completely changed; they become more difficult. production becomes a task involving the power to win men to their work. where the ethics of the common rule are accepted, effective work on the part of wage earners depends upon interesting them as a group in their work. the usefulness of wage systems which aim to increase individual production through individual reward is not necessarily at an end. but all such systems are compelled to accommodate themselves to the widespread desire for a standard group minimum. .--another question to which the introduction of the standard wage gives rise is that of its effect upon the distribution of the available employment among the members of the group to which the wage applies. this question should be distinguished from that of its possible effect on the total amount of employment. it has often been contended that the multiplicity of wage rates for approximately the same work in industries in which wages are not settled by collective bargaining, is to be accounted for, above all, by the varying efficiency of individual wage earners. and, therefore, it is argued, that any attempt to standardize wages must lead to a concentration of employment upon those members of the group who are the more efficient, and must deprive the relatively less efficient of their employment. it is almost impossible to say, except for concrete situations, to what extent irregularity of wage rates is due to differences in individual efficiency and to what extent to other causes. such factors as differences in bargaining power, differences in the policy or efficiency of the employers, slight differences in the character of the work performed, local differences in the supply and demand situation for the type of labor in question, and the like, certainly account for a great many of the irregularities. prof. marshall has expressed one view of the matter well. he writes, "cliffe leslie and some other writers have naïvely laid stress on local variations of wages as tending to prove that there is little mobility among the working classes, and that competition among them for employment is ineffective. but most of the facts they quote ... are only half facts and when the missing halves are supplied, they generally support the opposite inference to that on behalf of which they are quoted."[ ] in r. h. tawney's study of "minimum rates in the tailoring industry" (great britain) a vigorous statement of the opposite view is given. he writes, "the wages paid to a group of workers in a given industry and a given area depend, in fact, very often not on the conditions obtaining in that industry in other areas, but on the conditions obtaining in that area in other industries."[ ] it can be affirmed that the irregularity of wages is due to a considerable extent to other causes than differences in the efficiency of individuals. as d. a. mccabe writes, "very little seems to be known as to differences of efficiency among men engaged in the same kind of work." but as he adds, "it is safe to assume, however, that they are not reflected in time-working trades with any exactness by the wages paid, even where there is no trade union minimum."[ ] more to the point, it can be affirmed that the percentage of individuals in any occupation whose efficiency is decidedly below the average efficiency of the group is small. for, as a matter of fact, what really comes into question upon the introduction of wage standardization, is the employment of that small percentage of individuals whose efficiency is decidedly below that of group average. the employment of this small percentage in each group will be decisively affected by the general demand and supply situation of that group at the time when standardization is introduced. if the need for the services of a group is relatively great, employment at the standard rate will be given even to those members of the group who are decidedly below the average efficiency of the group. such is the case during periods of industrial expansion. when the demand for the services of the group falls, however, it is probable that these men will be discharged first--more promptly than if wage standardization had not been introduced. there is probably some connection between the progress of the standard wage movement and the tendency to limit overtime in the industries in which the standard wage is enforced. lastly, the effect of the enforcement of wage standardization upon the employment of the least efficient members of the group can be modified by special arrangements, whereby a wage lower than the standard is set for such individuals as are mutually acknowledged to be decidedly below the average of the group. in this regard mr. collier's report on the australasian experience is a useful guide. he writes: "that workers may be displaced following the application of wage regulation to an industry is a fact sustained by the experience of australasia. in new zealand, many bona fide workers were thrown out of employment during the early years of the arbitration law. there was also considerable distress among the boot and clothing workers of victoria. many of the old, inefficient, and slow workers were discharged. but in each case other factors than labor legislation figured in the situation. we have seen that in the board trades of victoria there has frequently been a decrease in the number of employees immediately after a determination became effective, but that in almost every instance this decline was temporary. after the period of adjustment, industry pursued its normal course. this seems to have been the general experience in this and other states."[ ] it may be concluded that some redistribution of available employment will sometimes follow upon the introduction of the standard wage into industries in which wages were hitherto unstandardized, resulting in the partial or complete unemployment of the least efficient members of the group. as was said above, the extent of such redistribution will depend somewhat upon the demand and supply situation at the time when the standard wage is introduced. those whose employment is reduced or taken away will either go into some work on which they compare more favorably with the other workers engaged, (leading to a further redistribution of employment perhaps), or will remain unemployed. the other members of the group will have increased employment. .--still another possible effect of the introduction of the standard wage deserving of attention, is that which it may have upon industrial organization, and upon the level of managerial ability. as will be made clearer elsewhere, the enforcement of standard wage rates in an industry is usually equivalent in practice to the enforcement of those rates that are already being paid by the better organized units of that industry.[ ] this leveling process may have any or all of several consequences. it may cause enterprises which had succeeded in competing partly because they paid lower wages than more efficient enterprises for the same grade of labor either to improve their productive methods, or gradually to cease production. it may result in a reduction of profit for certain enterprises. it may occasion an increase in the price of the commodities produced. it may result in an increase in the productive efforts of the wage earners. in the abstract, it is impossible to balance these various possibilities with complete assurance. the only inductive studies of value which give any indication of the probable result are those which have been made upon the results of living wage legislation. these, almost without exception, make the price increase resulting from standardization, inconsiderable.[ ] they are witness to the fact that improvements in the level of industrial management and a gradual elimination of the less competent employers have frequently taken place. the opinion seems warranted that unless standardization is introduced under very unfavorable circumstances or in the form of an extremely violent upward movement, it will not cause a considerable or permanent rise of prices, but will rather bring improvement in industrial organization and lead to a more intelligent use of labor in industry. along with this, there is reason to hope that it will have a favorable reaction on the efforts of the wage earners. .--the whole subject of the effect of wage standardization upon the output of the wage earners remains to be considered, however. it is an aspect of the subject which has been in the forefront of discussion. it also is a topic which cannot be satisfactorily discussed apart from a larger one--that of the effect of unionism upon production. the most bitter opposition to trade unionism has been connected with allegations made in this regard. these have taken different forms, but they almost always express one contention. that is that if a standard wage is set for work of a given kind, and if all men engaged upon that work receive that wage irrespective of small differences in ability, there will remain no stimulus for the abler workmen to exert themselves. or in other words, that the standard wage makes slackers of all men. sometimes this criticism is leveled only against the standard time wage; at other times against the standard guaranteed minimum wage, such as there used to be in the english coal fields; and, at still other times, against any method of wage payment which takes full power out of the hands of the employers to make an individual wage bargain with each worker. these contentions have some basis on occasion. more often they arise from a misconception of the place of the wage earner in industry, or from a general hostility to labor unionism. wage standardization does not mean that all wage earners receive the same wage irrespective of differences in ability. it simply sets a minimum standard for all workers of the group who are about the average in ability. it is designed to end all differences in remuneration, save those which arise out of differences in ability. it may be worked out in systems of payment by results, as well as in systems of time payment. in reality a deeper conflict lies behind the antagonism to the standard wage--a conflict of social philosophy. most unionists, it will be observed, are inclined to wave away all criticisms of the standard wage which rest upon its alleged effect upon output, no matter what the situation to which it may be addressed. in their opinion, these criticisms of the standard wage are based on a misconception of the place of the wage earner in industry. or, as it is frequently put, they regard the worker in the same way as they do a machine, since they would have each worker paid solely according to his individual value to the industrial system. there exists a conflict between two views of the nature of industrial society, and of the way of industrial progress. in one the social importance of a high level of production predominates, and the wage earner is argued about merely as part of a productive organization. in the other, the wage earner is viewed primarily as a member of an occupational group or class, whose wages should be regulated by the standard of life of his group or class, rather than by strict measurement of his own individual capacity. this conflict is revealed, as r. f. hoxie pointed out, in the antagonism between unionism and scientific management. to quote "much of the misunderstanding and controversy between scientific management and unionism ... results from the fact, that scientific management argues in terms of the individual worker or society as a whole, while the unions argue primarily in terms of group welfare." it is well to recognize these different philosophies. is it possible to find common ground under the principle of standardization? can the desire of the wage earners to be viewed primarily as members of occupational groups or classes be satisfied by the enforcement of standardization, without ignoring the need for a high level of production. it is usual to seek the common ground in the development of some variation of a system of differential time wages, or of a system of payment by results on the basis of a standardized price list. and certainly such ways of enforcing standardization, while at the same time giving special reward to individuals, deserve encouragement, provided they safeguard the group interest in a defined minimum standard wage. still it is not likely that the solution for the problems of output that may arise as a consequence of the enforcement of the principle of standardization, _and of the acceptance of the philosophy to which it corresponds_, is to be found in the evolution of such methods of wage payment as these. for, as was observed above, if the philosophy of unionism is deeply implanted in the minds of the workers, the productive results under all methods of wage payment tend to be controlled in the end by the same influences. the views and motives of the wage earners and of the employers are likely to remain constant under different systems of wage payment--and thus the outcome is not likely to differ greatly. no matter what the method of wage payment, the question of output will be largely one of mutual confidence, of tact, and of fair dealing. it must be so in any arrangement, by which two or more groups mutually regulate their claims and desires. the conclusion that may be drawn as to the effect upon production of the enforcement of wage standardization is as follows. that its results may depend to some extent upon the success with which the principle can be adopted to those methods of wage payment under which wages are varied in accordance with small differences in in-unionism, and act accordingly, the system of wage earners believe heartily in the ideals and aims of unionism, and act accordingly, the system of wage payment adopted will be a factor of secondary importance in determining the effectiveness with which the wage earners perform their work. the motives and sentiments of the various organized groups will govern the action of the wage earners, and produce almost the same result under any system of wage payment. the state of industrial relations, the satisfaction the workers feel in their position, the reasonableness shown by the different groups, the intelligence or ignorance of labor leadership--these and similar other factors will, at bottom, govern the effort put forth by the wage earners. these are the matters to which all who realize the need for steady and willing effort in production will have to attend. the problem of maintaining a high level of production will be primarily one of developing the practice of open-handed and thoroughly understood negotiation between the directors of industry and the workmen. barring the development of the practice of successful negotiation either industrial chaos or a return to individual bargaining must result. .--there is one other possible result of the enforcement of wage standardization which requires brief notice, because it was displayed prominently during the war. the demand during the war for certain essentials of warfare was abnormally great, and the result was a steady bidding up of wages for the supply of labor which could assist in the production of these essentials. this led to a constant shifting about of the wage earners from plant to plant. this movement not only hindered the effective organization of production, but also caused a considerable loss of working time, and fostered a continuous pre-occupation with the question of wages and related questions. in view of these facts, the various governmental agencies of wage settlement undertook to introduce into all wage contracts the principle of standardization throughout large areas. witness, for example, the conclusion of the shipbuilding adjustment board on the matter. "one of the most serious influences retarding the progress of the shipbuilding industry according to the unanimous testimony of the yard owners, and of the district officers of the fleet corporation who have come before us, is the shifting of men from yard to yard.... the only effective way to stop it is to remove its inciting cause, the variable wage rates paid by different yards in the same competitive region. with this purpose in view, we have sought in all our hearings to determine with accuracy the limits of each competitive region, so that we might extend over it a uniform wage scale for shipyard employees...."[ ] the enforcement of wage standardization may serve to prevent wasteful shifting of the labor supply even in normal times. theoretically, it should serve to limit the shifting of the labor supply to movement between different industries and occupations, and to cases which represent movement of unemployed wage earners to points where work exists. there would be, of course, innumerable cases of change based upon personal motives. footnotes: [ ] an attempt to classify systematically and analyze the various theories of wages that have been used in attempts to settle wage controversies in accordance with defined principle has been made by mr. wilson comption in an article entitled "wage theories in industrial arbitration." in its enumeration and discussion of the difficulties to be met in the application of principles, and of the attitude of most agencies of wage settlement it is particularly interesting. _american economic review_, june, . [ ] j. n. stockett, "arbitral determination of railway wages," page . [ ] see webb's "industrial democracy," chapter , part ii. [ ] resolution no. offered to convention, _cigar makers official journal_, may , . [ ] p. s. collier, "minimum wage legislation in australasia," appendix viii, fourth report of the factory investigating commission, new york state ( ). see also r. h. tawney's investigations of retail tailoring and chainmaking trades (great britain). [ ] d. a. mccabe in his book, "the standard rate in american trade unions," calls attention to two aspects of the subject that are frequently overlooked. firstly, that "in any attempt to estimate the extent to which men receive wages above the minimum on account of superior efficiency, it is important to bear in mind that the minimum in different scales may stand in very different relation to the modal or predominant wage. the proportion of men receiving more than the union minimum is frequently large because the competitive wage has increased since the minimum was established" (page ); and secondly, that "the extent to which differential wages are paid above the union minimum, when that rate is the rate actually paid to the men whose efficiency is about the average, varies widely in different trades.... standardization of workmen and of work and the practice of dealing with large bodies of men as classes tend to standardize the wages paid in the railway service more than in trades calling for similar grades of skill in other industries" (page ); so, too, "the tendency towards uniform rates for men engaged in the same kind of work is stronger in large establishments than in small establishments for the same reason" (page ff.). prominent among the factors which tend to make standard time rates actual rates he mentions: firstly, that the variations in efficiency within the membership of a time working union are not as likely to be as wide as among the men outside the union in the same trade, because the mere insistence on a standard rate tends to exclude some men much below the standard of competency. secondly, practically all of the skilled trades unions require candidates for membership to prove their competency or be vouched for as competent by members who have worked with them. and thirdly, because the standard rate is the center of attention in negotiations and thus is made the presumptive rate (page - ). [ ] d. a. mccabe, "the standard rate in american trade unions," page . [ ] report signed by commissioners manly, walsh, lennon, o'connell, and garrettson. vol. i, "final report of the commission on industrial relations" ( - ), page . [ ] report on collective agreements in the united kingdom ( ) (cd ), page xiv. [ ] a. c. pigou, "economics of welfare," page . [ ] a. marshall, "principles of economics" ( th ed.), page . [ ] r. h. tawney, "minimum rates in the tailoring industry" (great britain), pages - . see for similar view, th report of n. y. state factory investigating commission, vol. v ( ), testimony of miss van kleeck. [ ] d. a. mccabe, "the standard rate in american trade unions," page . [ ] p. s. collier, "minimum wage legislation in australasia," fourth report of the factory investigation commission, n. y. state, , page . [ ] see pages - , chapter viii. [ ] see for examples, the reports of the minimum wage commissions of the district of columbia, massachusetts and oregon. also the studies by r. h. tawney and m. e. bulkely on the english experience. those of p. s. collier and m. b. hammond, on the australasian experience. [ ] decision as to wages, etc., in north atlantic & hudson river shipyards, shipbuilding adjustment board, reported in _u. s. monthly labor review_, may, , page . see in same issue of the review, "decision for shipyards of san francisco bay and columbia river, and puget sound districts," pages - . also report of benjamin m. squires in the _monthly labor review_, , sept., on the "new york harbor wage adjustments." chapter viii--the standard wage (_continued_) section . what variations or limitations should be introduced into the principle of standardization in view of the great area and economic diversity of the united states?--section . differences in natural or acquired advantage between different enterprises as a reason for modification and limitation of the principle.--section . differences in the character of the work performed by any large group of wage earners as a reason.--section . differences in the cost of living at different points within the area of standardization as a reason.--section . the grounds for "nominal variations" in standard wage rates. the policy to be pursued in regard to payment for irregular employment.--section . the possibility of maintaining standard wage rates over a large and diversified area considered.--section . up to the present, the progress of standardization has not proceeded in accordance with reasoned conclusions as to the results produced.--section . where should level of standardization be set? the doctrine of "standardization upward."--section . the importance of the principle of standardization in wage settlement. .--we have now completed our analysis of the general effects to be expected from the enforcement of wage standardization throughout industry. that analysis was carried out on the underlying assumption that the general economic position of the industrial enterprises which would be included within any area of standardization was substantially alike. that assumption must now be given up. a further question must be faced. that is whether the principle of standardization, as put forward up to this point, should be limited or varied in any way because it would have to apply, as a matter of fact, to an area so great and so diversified in economic character as the united states, and to an industrial situation which is the product of a great number of separate impulses, and which is made up of a vast number of separate interests. .--we will consider in order the grounds upon which limitation or variation of the principle of standardization has been argued for in the past--limiting ourselves, as we must, to the most important. the first that may be taken up has arisen almost every time that wage standardization has been introduced into a craft or industry. it is the contention that, due to differences in natural or acquired advantage possessed by different enterprises in the same industry, certain going enterprises will be forced to cease production, if all are compelled to pay the same wage rates for the same work.[ ] the weight of this contention must be decided in each case by the facts which support it. in some instances it may be clear that the vigorous and summary application of wage standardization would cause men to be thrown out of work, who could not easily find work elsewhere, and would make a considerable amount of fixed capital valueless or almost so. in those instances there would be reason for considering the extent to which the standardization should be carried out, and also what variations should be introduced into its application. that such cases are not infrequent is borne out by the australasian experience of which mr. collier writes, "in regard to the practicability of the common rule, opinion differs. in some staple industries such as coal mining, it has been said to operate fairly. but its application to small industries and retail stores, where conditions vary more widely, is fraught with considerable risk and is proceeded with slowly.... while the power to enforce industrial conditions throughout a state or given territory is of unquestionable value, experience shows it must be exercised with caution."[ ] the test to be applied in each instance should be the balance of interest involved, including a strong public interest in standardization as one of the elements in a policy of wage settlement. when weighing the facts for or against the limitation or variation for the reason under discussion, several distinctions should be made. firstly, in regard to the nature of the difference in advantage possessed by the various units of the industry in question. secondly, in regard to the way in which the differences in advantage are distributed among the various units of the industry. the case for limitation or variation is apt to be stronger when the difference in advantage is a natural difference than when it is an acquired difference. in either case, the decision must rest upon the balance of good and harm to be anticipated from a straightforward and unmodified application of the principle. but when the difference in advantage is a natural difference, such as exists between different mining areas, there is greater reason for deliberate procedure than otherwise. for the possibility that an abrupt suspension of certain enterprises be caused without compensating extension of other enterprises, is the more genuine. such a situation was recognized, for example, in the case of the living wage legislation for agriculture in england; and thus instead of applying one standard wage throughout all districts, standardization was carried out by districts.[ ] even in this case, however, the various district advisory boards are under a strong and constant pressure (under the terms of the act) to bring the rates in the various districts to the same level. such, also, to take another example was the situation recognized in the course of the attempt during the war to standardize the wages of the stevedores and longshoremen employed in the south atlantic ports. here straightforward and unmodified standardization would have caused, it was judged, the diversion of certain freight carrying steamship lines from ports in which they now operate. if the differences in advantage are in the nature of acquired differences, only convincing evidence of the permanent harm likely to result from general standardization would justify limitation or variation. for in this case, the necessity of paying standard wage rates is itself a powerful force towards overcoming conditions that have been declared a definite competitive disadvantage. probably no extension of wage standardization in industry has ever taken place without injuring some individuals. it is the net balance of gain or loss that is significant. in most past instances when standardization has been enforced in an industry, marked by an unequal distribution of acquired advantages, the consequences have not verified the predictions of those who believed it would cause great disturbance and unemployment. on the contrary, it has frequently resulted in the development of better organization within the industry. again, the case for the limitation or variation is apt to be the stronger, when the difference in advantage is between concentrated but widely separated areas, such as might exist between two ports, for example, than when the differences are between different units in the same industrial area or field. for in the second case, the possibility of causing lasting unemployment would be less. the distinction, however, is entirely one of degree. whatever limitations or variations are admitted should not be settled arbitrarily; they should correspond to the facts which make them advisable. the union attitude in respect to the extension of wage standardization is sometimes as cautious as that of the employers. that is because those workers employed at the points which are supposed to possess the smaller advantages, natural or acquired, are not likely to support an unmodified application of the principle of standardization, unless they believe the consequent industrial changes will be beneficial, or at least not harmful, to themselves. the advice, if not the concurrence, of all interested parties is of the greatest value in arriving at a satisfactory determination. a good example of such an arrangement is to be found in the agricultural living wage legislation in great britain. it is provided therein that "when a district committee has been established for any area, it shall be the duty of the committee to recommend to the agricultural wages board, minimum rates of wages fixed under this act, and no variation or cancellation of such a rate shall have effect within that area unless ... recommended by the district wages committee."[ ] .--another possible ground for limitation or variation of the principle of standardization is set forth often in the contention that the character of the work performed by any large group of wage earners is not the same throughout the field of its employment. such, for example, was the argument of the directors of the american railways, as summarized by mr. stockett: "... the railways oppose district standardization on the ground that rates cannot be disassociated from conditions and since conditions vary widely on different roads in such extensive territories as the railway districts they maintain that rates cannot be made uniformly applicable on all the roads. the amount of compensation, the roads hold, is governed by the labor performed, the skill and efficiency required, the responsibility and hazard involved, the discipline necessary, the rapidity of promotion, and the cost of living."[ ] it is plain that the point of view which inspires the above argument is at variance with the beliefs that are behind the movement for wage standardization. the argument accords no validity to the belief that group unity and group aims deserve recognition in the settlement of wages. the doctrine of standardization on the contrary represents this belief, and sets groups standards above the existence of minor difference in the work performed by the group. the practical consequences of any wage policy which gave full recognition to these minor differences must also be weighed. these have been vigorously stated, for the case of railway labor, by mr. stockett. "... the employees maintain that the varying physical and traffic conditions in the different roads should not constitute a basis for the payment of various rates. it may be true, they hold, that physical conditions and traffic peculiarities differ as between different roads, but it would be impossible to determine a separate rate of pay for each special condition. in the course of development of the railways conditions are always changing. grades may be leveled, additional tracks laid, curves straightened, passenger and freight densities may differ from year to year and from day to day. the attempt to determine the proper rates for each different condition and to change them as conditions change, the employees assert, is obviously absurd. the plan of fixing a standard rate governing an entire district may be illogical and its basis arbitrary, but it is deemed the best devised and does substantial justice in a broader sense than any other system."[ ] cases may arise, indeed, where the difference in the character of the work performed really means that the same name covers two relatively distinct occupations, and two or more quite different classes of wage earners. such cases are probably rare. in circumstances where the constant differences between the character of the work performed by workers is relatively great, it will usually be found that they are distinguished into different groups.[ ] it is a question of degree, of course. and if the existing distinctions do not fit the facts, those distinctions should be changed.[ ] in unorganized industries, it will sometimes be found that the classification of occupations is very defective. if wage standardization were to be introduced into those industries, it would be found necessary to standardize occupations first. such was the task undertaken, for example, by the war labor board in the worthington pump and machinery case.[ ] .--a third possible ground for limitation or variation of the principle of standardization is the existence of differences in the cost of living in the various main centers or regions to which a standard rate might be applied. such variation would be represented, for example, by a collective agreement in accordance with which the wage scale at different points was varied in accordance with the relative cost of living at these points. up to the present there has been a tendency to disregard differences in the cost of living when wage standardization has been extended. no constant tendency, for example, can be found in the agreements made by different local branches of the same national trade union to build up a wage scale in accordance with differences in the cost of living at different points.[ ] the most complete body of material on the subject is contained in the report of the investigating commission of the board of trade (great britain) on working class rents, etc., in the united states ( ). this commission studied the wage schedules of skilled men in the building, engineering and printing trades in twenty-eight of the large cities of the united states and compared these wage schedules with the calculated cost of food and rent in these towns--weighing food three times as heavily as rent. the results are presented by single cities, by geographical groups, and by population groups--i.e., cities grouped in accordance with size of population. _real_ wages tended to be more equal as between population groups than between geographical groups. the range of the index number between geographical groups is from to (new york is taken as ); between population groups from to (new york, ). they reveal a tendency for money wages and living costs to be high in the largest cities, and for both money wages and living costs to decline in the cities making up the smaller population groups. no correlation can be found between living costs and money wages as between individual cities, however. the argument for variation or limitation because of differences in the cost of living is a two-fold one. firstly, it may be argued that such a policy is calculated to maintain industrial activity in the smaller centers, where the cost of living is usually lower, in the face of the competition of the larger centers, in which the cost of living is usually higher. secondly, it may be argued, that variations in the cost of living at different places are indications of the fact that at some places the economic essentials can be procured with a smaller expenditure of human labor and capital than at other places (since labor and capital can move between them) and, therefore, it is to the general interest to encourage industrial development at the points where the cost of living is relatively low. as to the first argument, it seems to me that there is considerable wisdom in the wish to encourage a diffusion of industrial development, rather than concentration at a few points. the strain on the social and political structure of the nation would be less, to-day, if our industrial population were more widely distributed; and our problems of civic and economic life would be simpler. that i believe to be true, although it is probable that the wage earners in new york city are better governed, have more freedom, and enjoy a healthier and more stimulating environment than the wage earners in the smaller industrial towns of massachusetts or pennsylvania, for example. as to the second argument, it is true that differences in the cost of living do indicate that the essentials of economic life can be procured with a smaller expenditure of human labor and capital at some places than at others. there is a further question, however. does not the ability of the enterprises established at the places where the cost of living is relatively high, to compete with the others, denote a compensating advantage in another stage of production? the answer depends on two conditions. are the enterprises in genuine competition with each other? and secondly, do wages at the several places differ in correspondence with the differences in the cost of living? to the extent that these conditions hold true, any shift of industry away from the points where the cost of living is low, as a result of wage standardization, would not be uneconomical--in the sense of this argument. for then, the ability of the enterprises established at the points where the cost of living was relatively high to compete with the others would indicate that they benefited by some compensating advantage in their location. still another matter to be noted is that if differences in the cost of living are recognized in the enforcement of standardization, there will be some tendency for the abler and more energetic workmen to drift to the points where money wages are higher. this movement is likely to occur even though real wages are the same at the different places. in addition to these theoretical considerations, one practical matter should be called to mind. the relative scale of the cost of living at the different points to which a standard wage might be applied does not usually remain fixed over a considerable period. small changes and shifts in the relative scale occur constantly, and even large changes may take place within a short time. experience has shown that wage differences which rest upon a fluctuating basis are apt to give rise to misunderstanding, and to be provocative of unrest. at best, only the relatively permanent and great differences in the cost of living between different points could be taken into consideration. even then a great deal of arbitrary calculation might be involved. in view of the variety of considerations that bear upon the problem, only a tentative conclusion will be ventured. namely, that when in any industry the wage scales prior to standardization do reflect the differences in the cost of living at the different centers in which the industry is carried on, such differences should be maintained. as has been remarked, only the relatively large and permanent differences could be taken into account. when, however, no such differences in wage scales is found prior to standardization, it will probably be inadvisable to introduce them, in order to encourage a wider geographical diffusion of industry.[ ] .--there is yet another ground for limitation or variation of the principle of standardization. it is of a somewhat different character than those already considered. it is that in order to carry out the underlying idea of standardization--equal remuneration for the same type of work despite minor differences in conditions under which it is performed--it is necessary to introduce variations into the hourly or daily time rates (or equivalent piece-work schedules) paid in various sections of the industry. such variations have been designated as "nominal variations" in the australian courts. distinctions may be drawn between different types of these so-called "nominal variations" according to the cause by which they are occasioned. the first type is that which rests on the fact that in certain trades or industries, it is extremely difficult or impossible to make the conditions of work even approximately uniform throughout the trade or industry. agricultural work and coal mining may be cited as examples. in such trades or industries it is usually found that the principle of standardization can only be carried out satisfactorily under a system of time payment. for under a piece-work system a uniform scale of rates yields widely different earnings for labor of approximately the same type and quality. it may be, however, that a time-work system is ill suited to the trades or industries in question. in which case, the only alternative is to draw up different piece-work scales for different conditions of work. different scales of this sort are to be found in the american coal mines for example. such "nominal variations" between piece-work scales would appear to be justified when the differences of conditions upon which they rest are judged to be not subject to standardization. to be really practicable the differences of conditions should also be relatively great, fixed and measureable.[ ] the second type is that which rests upon some difference in the "net advantages" of the same work carried on in different sections of the industry or occupation. for the purpose in hand, three sorts of difference in net advantage may be noted. the first sort would be represented by a claim for a higher rate than that stipulated in the general scale, because the work in question was carried on under conditions involving an _unusual_ degree of disagreeableness or risk. in my opinion, "nominal variations" based on such differences as these can safely be left to voluntary bargaining rather than enforced as a matter of policy. the conduct of almost any occupation involves differences in the conditions under which it is performed. nobody entrusted with the duty of enforcing a policy of wage settlement would find it easy to define the conditions which warranted an addition to the standard rate. it would run the risk of being involved in a process of refined definition which would probably be futile. justice higgins stated this view aptly in a claim for "dirt" money. "my view," he writes, "is that the minimum rate of wages is not to be made to depend upon the degree of dirtiness of the work. a man must accept the conditions of the work to which he has devoted himself; and the court cannot be expected to define degrees of dirt or to express them in terms of money wages. if the employer puts the employee to work which is unnecessarily dirty, the remedy is in prohibition or in regulation--not in increase of wages. my decision in no way prevents the employer and employee from making a voluntary stipulation for dirt money in any particular case."[ ] a second sort of difference in net advantage would be represented by a request on the part of an employer that certain payments in kind should be considered as part of the wage. an example of this would be the provision of meals. such variations would seem to be permissible when the acceptance of the payment in kind is left optional with the workmen. a third sort of difference in net advantage, and possibly the most important, is that represented by differences in the regularity of employment in different sections of a trade or industry. this type of difference is exemplified in the work of longshoremen and lumbermen; some men being engaged on one type of work are employed regularly, while men engaged on other jobs are employed irregularly or casually. it is frequently claimed that irregular or casual work should be paid at higher rates than regular work. the justice of this claim seems apparent. irregularity of work is undoubtedly a great handicap to the workman who seeks to maintain a well ordered life. extra payment for irregularity of employment is a burden which can fairly be put upon an industry, or section of an industry--even if the irregularity is unavoidable. yet the consequences of such a policy of "nominal variation" may be undesirable. it has been revealed by experience that there are some workmen who prefer irregular or casual work to regular work. and if higher wage rates are paid for irregular work this preference--an undesirable one, from the point of view of the community--is apt to be strengthened. on the other hand, it is usually true that only a small percentage of workmen prefer casual work to regular work. most men engage in casual work because they cannot secure regular work. as was well established in the court of enquiry on the work and wages of transport workers (great britain) held early in , the only real solution of the difficulty is the reorganization of the occupation so that the irregular and casual work is reduced to a minimum. until that is accomplished, it is probable that the most advisable policy is to grant "nominal variations" for casual and irregular employment. these variations should not be so great as to influence the run of workmen to prefer casual work. the total earnings from regular work should be higher. another policy that may be practicable, in many cases, is to define a minimum period of employment for all workmen engaged.[ ] such a policy puts strong pressure upon the industry to cut down irregularity of employment. against such a policy stand the practical difficulties involved in determining the basis of any scheme of "nominal variations." the whole question is well surveyed in a decision of the commonwealth court of australia which reads in part as follows: "the casual hand, i propose to define as an employee who is not employed for a fortnight continuously and who is not entitled to a week's notice before his employment is determined. a new light was thrown by the evidence in this case on the growing tendency of some men to depend on the high rates for casual work only, to enable them to work when they thought fit, and idle when they felt inclined.... the yearly return of so many seasonal hands for the wool and grain season, year after year, who look for casual work elsewhere in the meantime in shearing sheds--on the wharfs--in other industries and even in the government temporary service--and prefer casual work is not an encouraging sign. the higher rates paid for casual work do, and will, encourage many men to rely on that class of labor. i do not think that is good for the community or for the employee. i have been asked not to encourage the tendency to prefer casual labor by granting high rates for casual labor. "although the rates for casual labor ought not be so high as to induce men to become casual laborers, a higher rate must in fairness be allowed, where as in this industry, men, however anxious they may be to get permanent work, are not employed for the whole season without a break, and many of them are only employed a short broken part of the season, and some are employed for a day or a few days only."[ ] .--in the examination of the reasons for and against limitation or variation of the principle of standardization, note must be taken of still one other argument of a somewhat different nature than those already dealt with. that argument is that it will prove impossible to maintain uniform standard wage rates throughout an industry in which the various enterprises are distributed over a wide area; in the several parts of which area the cost of living, the general conditions of labor, and the demand and supply situation for labor differ considerably. this contention is supported by two different lines of reasoning. the first is that, because of these differences, there will tend to be a flow of labor away from the less favorable points of employment within the area of standardization towards the more favorable. this flow, it is said, will cause a reappearance of the differentials which existed before standardization. the first comment to be made on this line of reasoning is explanatory, rather than contradictory. it is true that there may be some tendency for labor to flow from the less favorable points to the more favorable. but it must be remembered that the standard wage is intended only as a minimum. if differentials over the standard wage did arise in enterprises where the conditions of labor were worse than the average, or in regions where the cost of living was higher than the average, such differentials would not be incompatible with the ends sought, when standardization is enforced. secondly, it may be commented that the experience of the past does not, in general, support the contention. in many industries the same standard wage scale applies over an area in which there are real differences of the kind set forth above, and no differentials as between the different points within the area have arisen--as, for example, on the railroads. this is to be accounted for, firstly, by the influence of the idea of standardization over trade union activity and policy; secondly, by the fact that relative money wages tend to govern, in a great measure, the calculations and movements of the wage earners; thirdly, by the fact that the application of the principle of standardization is in itself a strong force toward bringing about a leveling in the conditions of employment throughout an industry. the second line of reasoning with which this contention is supported is that the trade unions themselves will not long support any policy of standardization which does not make explicit allowances for such differences as are in question. it is said that the organization of the workers at the points where the cost of living was relatively high would insist upon a differential over other places for that reason. such, for example, was the argument of the employers' counsel before the court of inquiry on the wages of transport workers (great britain), "... he submitted that one of the foundations of his argument was that in fixing wages they must have regard to the class of work. having regard to the very great diversity of conditions and of methods in the different ports, and to the class of work done, he submitted that they could not standardize. they must do in the case of the ports as they did in the case of the coal mines."[ ] there is but one pertinent comment to be made upon this opinion. if the wage earners' organizations, themselves, demand that variation be introduced into the policy of standardization, that demand should be granted. but it must be observed that these organizations must not give lip service to the application of the principle of standardization without variation, and once having secured it, make such a course impossible by demands for differentials over the uniform standard wage. in the face of such tactics, it will be impossible to maintain any definite policy of wage standardization. if the labor organizations desire the application of the principle of wage standardization without qualifications, they must be loyal to that desire, and they must not be swayed by small temporary advantages or by sectional interests. and, on the other hand, if they desire that the principle of standardization be applied with qualifications, they must not attempt to disguise demands for general wage increases as standardization movements. such a policy is calculated to perpetuate industrial conflict. such is the bearing of the pledge given by the representatives of the transport workers (great britain) incidental to their claim for a shilling national minimum daily wage. "i am conscious that whatever your decision may be, if the principle of the minimum be established, some people in some ports are going to get more on the first settlement than others. we have faced that, and we have discussed it with the whole of our men. it was assumed by the chairman of the employers at the previous meeting, to take a striking illustration, that if liverpool received shillings per day and glasgow shillings, if you decided on shilling a day, glasgow would say shilling, 'because i was above liverpool before.' that is not so, my lord. that is clearly understood by every member of the federation in every port in the country."[ ] .--it may be hardly necessary to say, that up to the present, the various questions involved in the application of the principle of standardization in industry have not been settled by a careful study of the results produced. at the present time the manner in which the principle is applied is governed in the first instance, by the economic characteristics of the industry in question, and in the second instance by the area of influence of the various labor organizations, and by the degree of centralized control within each of them.[ ] one of the circumstances which has played a part in determining the area of standardization in any industry is that success in the enforcement of collective agreements has depended largely upon whether all or most of the enterprises in competition with each other have been included in the same agreement. this circumstance has been sometimes decisive of the degree of centralized authority in the various trade unions. it has also tended to govern the attitude of particular trade unions towards the application of the principle of standardization without variation or modification.[ ] the history of trade unionism is full of instances of organizations which have striven in vain to maintain uniform standardized wage rates throughout imperfectly organized areas.[ ] even when wage disputes have been settled by public agency, the usual procedure in the past has been to make the area covered by the agreement entirely dependent upon the area of dispute.[ ] for all of that there has been in recent years a steady drift towards an extension of the area of standardization. in various industries careful thought has been given to the possibility of standardization on a national scale, though at present very few unions enforce such a scale.[ ] on the railroads there are at present nation-wide wage scales. in great britain, to-day this is one of the most vexed of questions. indeed great britain just has gone through a great coal strike in which it was one of the two great issues. the miners asked that "a levy be made upon each colliery company on every ton of coal raised to the surface to be used for ensuring the payment of wages agreed upon in a national wages settlement." the miners argue, and correctly, that district settlements would give unequal reward to men doing precisely the same work, and called upon for the same service.[ ] .--the introduction of standardization into crafts or industries in which a variety of wage rates for substantially the same tasks exist gives rise to one other difficult problem. that is the determination of the level of standardization for each occupation. it will be argued, at a later point, that under any economic system in which labor organization is an accepted part of the economic structure, the wage levels established in different industries or occupations will have to be brought into relation with each other.[ ] if that is so, the level of standardization of any industry or occupation would be determined in accordance with these principles, after they had been in operation for some time. as a matter of fact, however, under any policy of wage settlement, the enforcement of standardization will be something of an independent and prior process--prior, that is, to the application of any other principles intended to keep the wage levels in different industries or occupations in relation to each other. standardization will be, so to speak, an initial stage of policy to be gone through before any other stages are entered upon. in this initial stage, the principal data that should be taken into consideration when fixing the level of standardization for any occupation is the actually existing variety of wage rates for that occupation. where in the scale of actually existing rates the level of standardization is set must be a matter of judgment and compromise. that level of standardization should be chosen, which it is believed will produce more good and less harm than any other level that might be chosen. or in other words, the level of standardization should be determined by a balance of the interests involved--that point being chosen at which, it is judged, the most favorable balance is established. there is current, indeed, one doctrine of standardization which holds that there is but one satisfactory level of standardization for an occupation in which wages have been hitherto unstandardized. that doctrine, crudely stated, is that the standard wage for the work in question should be the highest of the unstandardized wages.[ ] that doctrine is called "standardization upward." if the suggested test is sound, it cannot be admitted that the doctrine of standardization upward is always valid. for there is no reason to believe that the level of the highest of the hitherto unstandardized rates is, of necessity, the one at which the most favorable balance of interests is established. in many cases there may be a presumption to that effect--if the doctrine is reasonably interpreted. that is to say, if it is taken to mean the higher range of wages, rather than the highest single wage. that presumption arises from the fact that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, the higher range of unstandardized wages indicates what wages may be enforced throughout the occupation without causing great disturbance and unemployment. the circumstances which would govern the correctness of this presumption are many and have already been discussed.[ ] the actual range of difference between the various wage rates being paid for the same occupation in different enterprises should be given importance in the judgment as to whether standardization should take place at the level of the higher range of wages. furthermore, in many cases where wages are standardized at a level lower than some of the wage rates already paid for the work in question, it would usually be sound to provide that these higher-wage rates should not be reduced at once. this ruling was adopted in the decisions of the war labor board and it has also been embodied in the so-called "saving clauses" in the american railway wage decisions.[ ] .--the principle of standardization may be considered basic in any wage policy for industrial peace. this is not because the existence of various wage rates for the same work is the greatest source of industrial conflict. but because the establishment of clearly known wage rates for each type of labor, extending over the field of its employment (with whatever limitations or variations are admitted to the principle) is often essential to the operation of any other principles of wage settlement. the establishment of standard wage rates makes possible a clear knowledge of the economic position of the various classes of wage earners. likewise, it makes possible the accurate measurement of wage change; and also makes for simplicity and uniformity in the application of changes. lastly, it tends to produce a careful classification of the different kinds of work, in which the minor and local differences in the nature of the work are gradually eliminated. these are the reasons for the "strong public interest in standardization" which was spoken of above.[ ] footnotes: [ ] thus, take the cautionary warning in the report of commission of enquiry into industrial agreements (great britain) upon the proposal to make collective agreements entered into by joint industrial councils compulsory upon all enterprises engaged in the industry providing a certain majority ( per cent. was the suggestion) of work people and employers in the industry or craft in question were represented in the council. " --attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the establishment of a scheme for dealing with proposals for extension of agreements, it would be necessary to provide for exceptions to be made in regard to individual firms or work people whose conditions of trade or employment were such as to differentiate them from the remainder of the trade to such an extent as to make the application of the agreement to them an inequitable proceeding." cd , , page . a bill embodying a clause providing for such a scheme for extension was proposed by the government in in return for certain concessions from the trade unions, but was withdrawn when the parliamentary labor leaders would not agree to the concessions. [ ] p. s. collier, appendix viii, th report new york state factory investigating commission, , page . [ ] much interesting material bearing on the question of district vs. national standardization is to be found in the report of the commission on "wages and conditions of employment in agriculture" (great britain), . an interesting bit of evidence was given by a farmer from devonshire who was of the opinion "that the sticky nature of the ground in essex induced a slow habit of moving, and he thought the essex workmen did as much as could be expected in view of the labor involved in walking on wet land, during a large part of the year." page . there is also much interesting material on the subject in the report of the court of inquiry into the "wages and conditions of employment of dock labor" (great britain), . the same problem has arisen, of course, many times in the course of trade union negotiations--for example, in the coal mines and railroads of the united states. [ ] section ( ), trades board act, , restated in the corn production act, . [ ] j. n. stockett, jr., "arbitral determination of railway wages," page . [ ] j. n. stockett, jr., "the arbitral determination of railway wages," page . [ ] see d. a. mccabe, "the standard rate in american trade unions," pages - . [ ] for example, see the recommendations of the interstate commission regarding classification of railroad employees. _u. s. monthly bulletin of labor_, nov., . [ ] decision in re employees vs. worthington pump and machinery corp., docket no. , national war labor board; see also decision in the corn products case. [ ] for a recent statistical study of the subject see an article by ogburn and kelley in the _journal of the american statistical ass'n._ for september, . [ ] the commonwealth court of australia, while setting up as an ideal "uniform rates all around australia" (see the case of the federated storemen and packers' union, page , vol. x, commonwealth arbitration reports), has frequently awarded a different basic minimum wage for different cities within the commonwealth. [ ] see d. a. mccabe, page , and - for a review of trade union policy in this matter, "the standard rate in american trade unions." [ ] case of the broken hill proprietary company vs. federated engine drivers' and foremen's association of australia. pages - (vol. x, commonwealth arbitration reports). [ ] thus in one of its opinions the kansas court of industrial relations recommended that the flour mills in the state should pay their skilled men a monthly wage whether the mill is running or not, docket , opinion regarding "continuity of production in the flour-milling industry," . in another case, however, the court refused to order the packing industries to guarantee a minimum amount of employment each week to its employees. docket , wolff packing co., case . [ ] case of "federated storemen and packers' union of australia vs. skin & hide merchants' association of brisbane," page , vol. x, commonwealth arbitration reports. for an example of difficulties to be expected, see the attempt made to set up such a scheme of nominal variations in the salt case, no. , "south australian industrial reports," vol. i, page . [ ] london _times_, feb. , . [ ] court of inquiry into wages of dock labour, etc., as reported in the _monthly labor review_, u. s. dept. of labor, may, , page . [ ] see d. a. mccabe, "the standard rate in american trade unions," page . [ ] see d. a. mccabe, "the standard rate in american trade unions," page . [ ] for example, see "the standard rate in american trade unions," page . [ ] such now seems to be the policy of the most recent experiment in wage settlement in the united states--the court of industrial relations of kansas. [ ] for a study of the influences which have governed the area of standardization in the united states, see chapter iii, especially page , etc., "the standard rate in american trade unions," by d. a. mccabe; also article in the _quarterly journal of economics_ for , pages - . [ ] see the statement of frank hodges, secretary of the miners' federation, in the london _observer_, april , . [ ] see chapters x and xi. [ ] an interesting statement of the doctrine of "standardization upward" is to be found in the evidence of mr. j. h. thomas (then assistant secretary of the amalgamated society of railway servants) before the "commission of inquiry into industrial agreements" (great britain), cd , , q . chairman: i think there are eight railways running into manchester. you were talking about uniformity in such a case. supposing that five out of the eight railways had a particular rate for a particular class of labor, would you apply that rate to the other three railways? a: it may be that the five should be lower than the three, and in that case, i certainly would not apply the lower to the others. i would apply the higher rate as being the uniform rate; but think that would be got over by the suggestion that i have made whereby the rate would be determined for manchester, for example, by one authority. q --i will assume for the moment that the three are less than the five. would you then make the rate that the five are paying a minimum rate? a: yes, if the three were less than the five, then the rate of the five would be the rate, but if one was higher than the seven, then the other seven would come up to the one quite naturally. for another good example, see the claim of the unions in the engineering and foundry trades (special district cases), committee on production reports (great britain), vol. ii, new series ( ). [ ] see pages - , chapter vii, also pages - , chapter ix. [ ] justice higgins of the commonwealth court of australia has dissented from the saving clause idea simply on the ground that if the unions desire standardization and uniformity, they "must take the rough with the smooth," case of the federated shoremen & packers' union, page , vol. x, "commonwealth arbitration reports." [ ] compare j. n. stockett, jr., "arbitral determination of railway wages," pages - . chapter ix--the living wage section . the reasons for seeking separate principles for the settlement of the wages of the lowest paid groups.--section . wage statistics of these groups a matter of familiar knowledge.--section . the definition of the living wage idea. an inescapable element of indefiniteness contained in it.--section . the living wage principle put in the form of applied policy.--section . should the living wage principle be applied to male labor? the arguments for and against.--section . the theoretical case for the living wage principle. the verdict of past experience favorable to its extension.--section . the dangers which must be guarded against in applying it.--section . it should be administered through machinery which makes possible careful study of facts of each industry. this machinery discussed.--section . the question of the relation to be established between living wage for men and women difficult. alternatives considered.--section . a plan for the adjustment of the living wage to price changes. the basis of adjustment.--section . the policy of adjustment--already discussed.--section . the hope of the living wage policy. .--in the brief survey earlier in this book of the present industrial situation in the united states, it was concluded that the improvement of the economic position of the lowest paid groups of wage earners was one of the chief objects to be borne in mind when striving to work out a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. in the following chapters a study was made of the causes of the formation and existence of relatively separate groups of wage earners, and of the forces which determine the level of earnings for the various groups. it was observed that the lowest paid groups of wage earners tended to be separated from the more fortunate groups; they have relatively independent economic fortunes. two reasons exist, therefore, for giving separate treatment to the question of the principles by which the wages of these least favorably placed groups of wage earners should be settled--as part of the policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. firstly, because their economic position is a matter of special concern; secondly, because the wage incomes of these groups are determined, in part, by forces which do not affect equally, or in the same way, the wages of the other groups. the living wage principle as put forth in this chapter is the principle suggested for use in the settlement of wages for these least favorably placed groups of workers. it is the second of the measures, intended to form a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. .--it is not necessary to give here the wage statistics for the groups of wage earners who are lowest in the industrial scale. they form the record of the fact that a considerable percentage of all female industrial wage earners, and some groups of male wage earners who perform unskilled work, are in receipt of wages insufficient to enable them to live according to those conceptions of the minimum level of satisfactory economic existence which have been formulated by public agencies from time to time.[ ] .--the general idea of the living wage is not a new one. it has been the subject of many definitions. a comparison of a few of the best attempts to express the idea shows, on the one hand, the definite purpose which is its inspiration and, on the other hand, an inescapable element of indefiniteness which persists in all instances where the idea has been enacted into policy. the definition given to the living wage idea by the south australian industrial court (an agency which has made searching efforts to explain its underlying assumptions) is that all wage earners should receive "a wage that will meet the reasonable and normal needs of the average citizen in a particular locality."[ ] in the declaration of the war labor policy of the dominion of canada one can read that "all workers, including common laborers shall be entitled to a wage ample to enable them with thrift to maintain themselves and families in decency and comfort, and to make reasonable provision for old age."[ ] and contained among those principles laid down for the guidance of the united states war labor board is the following, "in fixing wages, minimum rates of pay shall be established which will insure the subsistence of the worker and his family in health and comfort."[ ] these definitions reveal clearly the aim which inspires them. they express a determination to secure for the least favorably placed members of the industrial community wages sufficient to enable them to share with the rest of the community prospects of an active and happy life, as the run of men understand that idea at any time and place. still all these definitions--including the one just given--assert a goal sufficiently indefinite to permit, and indeed necessitate interpretation according to the circumstances under which the idea is translated into policy. the clarity of the idea arises from a simple belief. that belief is that any body of individuals of average honesty, though they disagree in many things, can reach a large measure of agreement as to the minimum income which will enable the ordinary wage earner to live a life which satisfies, in a minimum measure, the ideals of life current in the community. the indefiniteness of the idea arises out of the fact that it is not likely that this body of men will be in complete agreement as to this minimum income; and therefore the wage finally settled upon is likely to represent a compromise between conflicting opinions. this is well brought out in a passage contained in one of the reports of the minimum wage board of the district of columbia. "... cost of living is such an unstandardized subject that a mathematically accurate determination is impossible. in each conference there are as many different opinions as there are members. in general, the employers want a wage sufficient to maintain existing standards of living in the industry, while the employees contend that the standard of living should be improved. the wage finally agreed upon is not a scientific determination based solely on facts, but rather a compromise of opinion between the two groups, modified as it may be, by the opinion of the public."[ ] the reference contained in practically all definitions of the living wage principle to the standards of a particular time and place assists greatly in interpreting the principle into policy.[ ] for this reference is tantamount to saying that the standard of economic life which shall be deemed to satisfy the principle, should be fixed primarily by comparison with the standard of life of the wage earning and middle classes in the community at the given time. this comparison tends to govern the content of the living wage idea. it brings the living wage determination into direct relation with--or makes it relative to--the productive capacity of the industrial system at the time and place in question. for a study of the standard of life of the wage earners and the middle classes of the community is of great assistance in indicating the standard of life to which it may be possible to raise even the worst paid industrial groups, by those adjustments in production and distribution which it is the object of a living wage policy to produce. this essential relativity of the living wage idea is well pointed out in a decision of justice brown of the south australian industrial court. "... the statutory definition of the living wage is a wage adequate to meet the normal and reasonable needs of the worker. in other words, the conception is ethical rather than economic. the court has not to determine the value of the services rendered, but to determine what is necessary to meet normal and relative needs. it should be obvious that in the interpretation of reasonable needs the court cannot be wholly indifferent to the national income. the reasonable needs of the worker in a community where national income is high are greater than the reasonable needs of the worker in a community where the national income is low."[ ] the living wage has ordinarily been assessed on different bases for men and women. the basis of assessment for each has been the subject for much controversy. the most generally upheld basis of assessment is, in the case of the male wage earner, to assess his needs on the supposition that he is the supporter of a family consisting of himself, wife, and two or three small children; and in the case of the female wage earner, to assess her needs on the supposition that she is living alone, and is dependent upon her own earnings for her support, and that she has no other obligations. these bases of assessment do not meet all of the demands of logic--applied to the living wage idea--nor, as will be seen, is the choice of different bases of assessment for men and women entirely free of difficulty.[ ] the reasoning, which has been used ordinarily in support of the suggested basis of assessment for men is well set forth in another decision of justice brown, "i look upon the maintenance of home life as of supreme importance to the community. i regard the wage paid to the adult male as essentially and in substance a family wage. true, so far as single men are concerned, it has long been settled that the minimum (living) wage should not be less than that of the married man. in other words, in discussing the needs of the male worker, a man with a family to support has been taken as a basis of assessment. any other conclusion would prejudice the married man in search of employment and would tend to produce sterility of the population, and would place the industrial court in the invidious position of fixing wages at a rate which would make it difficult, if not impossible, for single men to save something for the time when they may have the felicity to become supporters of a family."[ ] the argument in support of the suggested basis of assessment for women rests upon a sentiment to the effect that every worker should earn, at least, enough to enable her to support herself, even though the actual necessity does not exist in many cases, and though in many other cases the female wage earner has obligations beyond self-support. .--after these preliminaries, it is possible to make more definite recommendations concerning living wage policy--with a view towards the adoption of the living wage principle as part of a policy of wage settlement. firstly, as to scope. it should apply to all groups of workers whose average annual earnings fall below the sum settled upon by the constituted agency as the minimum necessary for the fulfillment of the living wage idea. the statistical definition of the term "average" as just used should also be left to the constituted agency. allowance should be made in each occupation for a small percentage of sub-ordinary workers. secondly, as to the basis of assessment of the living wage, and the procedure by which it should be fixed. there should be an extensive and (so far as it is possible) impartial investigation of the cost of that minimum standard of economic life which it is the intention of living wage policy to secure for all industrial wage earners. in the determination of what should be included in the minimum standard, attention should be paid to the income levels of the wage earners in general, and of the middle classes. the wages now received by the lowest paid groups would also be an important consideration. the living wage settled upon by this process of investigation should be in the form of a weekly standard wage. it should be considered as a minimum only for any occupation to which it is applied. like other standard wage rates, it should be subject to limitation or variation in accordance with the conclusions reached on that subject in the preceding chapters.[ ] the questions which arise out of the fact that it would have to be enforced in a number of different industries, and under widely different conditions will be considered at a later point.[ ] the bases of assessment for men and women should be those discussed and approved in the preceding section. the living wage that is fixed should be subject to reconsideration and revision at definite periods; aside from the revisions which may be called for as the result of price movement,[ ] or under the profits test which is suggested later in the book.[ ] .--so much then for the central features of the living wage proposals. we have now to consider the probable result of their enforcement; and any criticisms to which they may be fairly subject in their proposed form. thus we will be enabled to discover what modifications, large or small, are advisable. objection may be taken, first of all, against the scope of these proposals. so far living wage legislation in the united states has been applied to female industrial workers only. the argument against the extension of the principle to male wage earners is put on two grounds--the constitutional and the economic. on the constitutional argument, only the briefest comment will be attempted; and that without any intention to dogmatize upon a most complicated subject. that is that the test of the constitutionality of these proposals should be the balance of good or harm they promise. the constitution is at bottom but a very wise guide as to what public good and harm consists of. but as the conditions and facts which determine good and harm change, these changes should be reflected in the interpretation of the constitution. these living wage proposals do not, it seems to me, offend against any of the fundamental ideas which the constitution contains. the economic argument against the extension of the living wage policy to male wage earners is usually based on the contention that it is unnecessary, or that it has a bad effect upon the spirit and character of the male wage earners concerned, or upon both these contentions. as to its necessity, the statistics of wages for the least favorably placed groups of male wage earners, and observation of their economic handicaps offer sufficient evidence. as to the belief that the extension would be destructive of the spirit or character of the male wage earners concerned, there is little or no factual support for that view, and much to refute it. a minimum level of economic existence is requisite to the growth and development of personal initiative and of a spirit of self-confidence. vigor and independence of temper and action is not bred in a position of extreme economic dependence. one does not have to be blind to the dangers of paternalistic legislation to believe that living wage policy for male wage earners is justified, under modern industrial conditions. all the more so, since experience with living wage legislation proves that it encourages voluntary organization among the wage earners. and this fact, indeed, is also a fair answer to the tough dislike of the american labor unions for all other methods of settling the wages of male workers than that of collective bargaining. .--we may now pass from the possible objections to the scope of these proposals, to those which may be fairly leveled against their substance. although the living wage principle has been used in wage settlement throughout the australian dominions, in many english industries, and in a limited number of industries in some of the american states, the controversy which arose over it, when first it was introduced, is far from quieted. this is explained, in part, by the extreme difficulty of getting evidence as to its results which is beyond the shadow of doubt. that is due, in part, to the great variety of conditions under which it has operated. its results are always complicated by circumstances which differ from place to place. again, there is the fact that such experiments as that of the living wage are apt to be judged from a rapidly changing viewpoint. the very conscientious efforts which have been made, however, to measure the effect of the various experiments with living wage legislation furnish us with much valuable material on most of the debated matters. no attempt can be made here to reproduce the various sides of the controversy, or to summarize the evidence which has been collected upon the disputed aspects of the subject.[ ] much of it covers the same matters which were treated in our analysis of the principle of wage standardization. in my opinion, the existing evidence warrants the advocacy of an extension of the living wage policy in the united states. it furnishes us also with valuable instruction as to the form in which the policy is likely to work out most satisfactorily. the value of the living wage principle as an instrument for bringing about an improvement in the economic condition of the lowest grades of industrial workers, without producing equivalent harm in any other direction, is also supported by general theoretical reasoning; that is, by a study of the forces which govern wages in general, and the wages of these lowest groups in particular. in the study of these forces, earlier in the book, it was pointed out that the outcome of distribution may be affected by just such assertions of purpose as that represented by the living wage policy. if labor organization has been able to increase the wages of certain groups of wage earners without doing equivalent harm in any other direction, there is reason for believing that a living wage policy can accomplish something of the same result for the lowest grades of industrial labor, which have been up to the present practically without organization. and, indeed, in england, the trades boards, which are the machinery of the living wage policy, are ordinarily regarded as fulfilling practically the same functions as organization does for the more favorably placed groups.[ ] furthermore, the nature of certain of the forces which account for the low wage levels of the groups that would be affected by the living wage policy, give the above argument special force. for among those forces are these: that their wages have been, at times, less than the amount necessary to enable them to do as efficient work as they were capable of doing; and so low, frequently, as to make the struggle for self-improvement and advancement, for members of these groups, a very difficult matter. thus the numbers in these groups have been kept greater than they would have been otherwise. furthermore, their wages have been, at times so low that efficient industrial management counted little in success. furthermore, these groups have had practically no organization or leadership to prevent their employment under conditions most unfavorable to their health, energy, and general welfare. and lastly, that the present industrial system has a tendency to take advantage of economic weakness wherever it exists. against these considerations must be put, perhaps, the submission shown by these groups to the course of industrial development, and the constant service they have given, in their position of dependence, in monotonous and wearisome work. the case of the living wage policy rests upon the opinion that the introduction of living wage standards will give rise to a series of adjustments in production and distribution. and that the net sum of the results of these adjustments, perhaps only after a temporary period of dislocation in some instances, will be to increase the wages of the lowest grades of wage earners--without doing equivalent harm in any other direction. it also rests on the opinion that the permanent economic advancement of these lowest groups of wage earners is a practicable ideal--though fate seems to take a special delight in dealing harshly with this particular ideal. .--among the adjustments, however, which general reasoning suggests as a possible consequence of the enforcement of a living wage policy are some which it is the part of policy to guard against. existing evidence shows that they have not often followed upon previous enforcements of living wage policy; yet they must be borne in mind. they are firstly: the possibility that employment of the wage earners who are affected by the living wage policy may be permanently reduced. this may result either because of price increase in the commodities produced by these wage earners, or because of substitution into their occupations of other classes of labor or of machinery. and secondly: the possibility that the enforcement of the living wage policy will bring about a concentration of employment upon the more efficient members of the groups affected, and thus throw out of employment the very individuals who are most in need of help. and thirdly: the possibility that there will be an increase in the numbers of those groups which the living wage principle is designed to aid, with consequences similar to those suggested under the second heading. in my opinion, the chances that any of these things will result from the enforcement of a living wage policy in the united states to-day are small. yet to put the matter summarily,--these are the dangers which those entrusted with the administration of a living wage policy would have to be alive to; and if they become real, seek to overcome, by shaping their policy according to the facts that confront them. the factors which will determine whether any or all of these undesirable results will ensue are many. they cannot be balanced in the abstract. yet general reasoning enables us to discern those which will make that likelihood greater or smaller in any occupation or industry. we may start by enumerating those factors which enter into the likelihood that a reduction of employment will result from the enforcement of a living wage policy. they are: firstly, the amount of wage increase undertaken; secondly, the importance of the wages received by the groups in question in the total expenses of production; thirdly, the shape of the demand curve for the products of the groups; fourthly, the chances for improvements in the methods of production; fifthly, the chances of encouraging better business management by enforcing living wage standards; sixthly, the effect of the wage increases upon the efficiency of the groups affected, and their fitness for advancement to more skilled work; seventhly, upon the opportunities for substitution of machinery; and lastly upon the ultimate effects of the introduction of machinery on the employment of these groups. turning now to the second possibility, that the enforcement of living wage standards will cause a concentration of employment upon the more efficient workmen, thus throwing out of employment those most in need of help, here, too, a great number of factors have to be reckoned with. they, however, have already been dealt with in the previous discussion of the effect of standardization upon the distribution of employment. there is no need of enumerating them again in this place. one point of difference should be observed, however. the differences of individual efficiency among the workers that would be affected by the living wage policy are more substantial than the differences of individual efficiency among the members of the more skilled wage earners. and, therefore, while it would be unnecessary to make any special provision for the least efficient members of the more skilled groups upon the introduction of standardization, it might at the start be decidedly good policy to make special provision for the least efficient members of the unskilled groups. under practically all living wage legislation special provision is made for them. it should also be remarked in this connection, that the probable greater range of individual efficiency among the unskilled as compared with the skilled is in some measure to be attributed to their present low wage levels. inefficiency is likely to grow upon itself. mr. aves has remarked pertinently in this regard, "as with the 'unemployed' or the 'unfair employer' so with the 'incompetent' and the 'slow,' none of these represent well defined classes. all are elastic. some can be created and all merge by imperceptible degrees into the classes above."[ ] the enforcement of a living wage policy, it may be hoped, would in itself reduce the range of individual efficiency among the unskilled. for it would keep from the ranks of the "incompetent" and "slow" some who might have found place elsewhere had their chances been somewhat better. we turn to the third possibility--that as a result of enforcement of a living wage policy there will be an increase in numbers in those groups who fall within its scope. here the pertinent factors are: firstly, the movement out of the lowest paid groups into those more favorably placed, owing to the effect of increased wages upon individual capacity and the use of individual opportunity; secondly, upon the movement from other groups into the groups affected by the living wage policy, due to the wage increases brought about by the policy, and thirdly, upon the effect of these wage increases upon the frequency of family labor, and upon the age of entry into and retirement from industry. .--so much, then, for the possible undesirable consequences of the application of the living wage principle. it is evident that the policy must be put in such a form as will make possible a careful study of the facts of each industry or occupation and adaptation to these facts. the following proposals are made primarily with the view that they will permit this flexibility. they are also designed, however, to fit into the other requirements of the general policy of wage settlement for industrial peace, which is under study. it is proposed that there should be in every industry which is included within the general scheme of wage settlement a joint council or board. there might also be occupational boards or councils. these councils or boards should consist of representatives of the workers and of the employers. representatives of the public might act upon these boards or councils in advisory capacity. there might be both a central board or council, and various district boards or councils in each industry. these joint boards could be given other duties outside of the administration of the living wage policy. that matter will be taken up at a later point. here, note will be taken only of the part they could play in the administration of the living wage policy. the joint boards or councils should be advisory to the central authority which is constituted to administer the policy of wage settlement as a whole. the functions of this central authority in regard to the formulation and declaration of the living wage for men and women have already been discussed. it should be provided, however, that the central authority should make no living wage declaration or hand down any order until it has received the report of the joint boards or councils in the industries or occupations in question upon the subject of such decisions or orders. the report of the joint boards or councils should be given great weight by the central authority in arriving at decisions. the joint boards or councils should be permitted to submit both majority and minority reports to the central authority. among the matters arising in the course of the administration of the living wage policy, upon which the joint boards or councils should be called upon to advise the central authority, are the following: firstly, upon the wage to be prescribed in that industry or occupation. each joint council should be free to recommend a wage less than the wage declared to be a living wage by the central authority, giving its reasons for the same. it should also be free to recommend a wage more than the declared living wage, giving its reasons in this case also. the conclusions reached in regard to "nominal variations" as between different sections of an industry are equally valid as between industries or occupations.[ ] secondly, upon questions connected with the form of wage payment, and the arrangement of piece-work lists designed to yield the prescribed living wage. thirdly, upon the question of sub-ordinary workers in an occupation or industry, and upon the issuance of permits for the same to work for less than the prescribed wage. fourthly, as to whether the wage fixed for any industry or occupation should be varied or limited. fifthly, upon any difficulties that may present themselves because of the fact that the living wages for men and women are assessed on different bases. lastly, upon these boards or councils should rest the duty of observing how well the declarations or orders of the central authority are observed; and of studying the effect of the prescribed wages upon these classes of wage earners that the living wage policy is designed to help, and upon the industry in general; and of reporting periodically to the central authority upon the same. it is true that the procedure of these councils would consist largely of the compromise of conflicting opinions. it will be the duty of the central authority, however, to prevent them from settling down to that régime--nor should the central authority consider itself bound to accept the advice of these joint councils or boards. .--the determination of the relation between the living wage for men and women is one of the difficult questions that will have to be met in the course of the enforcement of any living wage policy. the position of women, both in industry and in society is at present undergoing change. the limit and direction of this change cannot be marked out with certainty. therefore, the presuppositions upon which present policy may be constructed may become invalid in a comparatively short time. the unsatisfactoriness of leaving the question to be settled by the decision of the market has become increasingly plain. that policy produces, on the one hand, a constant effort on the part of the employers to so modify their processes of production as to take advantage of the low range of women's wages, irrespective of the effect on men's wages and of the suitability of the occupation in question for women; and, on the other hand, a constant effort on the part of the men to keep the women out of all new employments. the best advised foundation for present policy, in my opinion, is the two separate bases of assessment, suggested above.[ ] in its favor, it may be pointed out that it corresponds to a certain extent to the existing relation between the wages of men and women in industry, and it would not, therefore, produce any violent change. its unsatisfactoriness lies in the possibility that it may gradually lead to a displacement of men by women in many employments. on the question of whether such displacement is to be desired, there is room for the very deepest differences of opinion. it seems to me, however, that the industrial history of the nineteenth century proves the supreme importance of the wage of the head of the family to the general welfare of the family. for that reason, it is, in my opinion, wise to protect the wage of the male head of the family; and thus to provide that when men and women are employed upon the same work or when women are introduced into employments hitherto filled by men, the wage rates for men should be enforced throughout the employment. this ruling could be interpreted in some cases in terms of the relative efficiency of men and women, if there was a clear difference of efficiency. of course, if the term "relative efficiency" is construed to include the difference in the indirect or overhead expense involved in the employment of male or female labor in any occupation, such a policy would amount to throwing open every field of employment to women. there are a number of alternative policies that might be pursued in order to ensure that the use of different bases of assessment for the living wage for men and women should not lead to haphazard displacement of men by women. justice brown in the printing trades case has called attention to the most important of them. "... i suggest," he writes, "that with respect to any industry or grade, where the prima facie formula above (that is, a different living wage for men and women) is challenged, evidence should be given to show that it is desirable, having in view the interests of all parties and of the community, that men should be retained in that industry or grade even though such retention might involve some departure from the formula in question. where such evidence is satisfactory there are several alternatives open to an industrial court. ( ) to fix the same wage for women as for men. ( ) to fix a ratio wage where it is proved to the satisfaction of the court that the average woman is not of equal value to the employer. ( ) to exclude women. ( ) to accept the prima facie mode of assessment, but to limit the proportion of women who may be employed by any particular employer in any particular industry or grade.... the task of choosing may often be one of extreme difficulty and delicacy."[ ] the task of fixing the relation between men's wages and women's wages will be even more delicate when the introduction of women into a field of employment follows upon a modification of the processes of production involved.[ ] as was said above, to give advice upon the question of the relation between men's wages and women's wages, should be one of the duties of the joint boards or councils in the various industries. the course to be pursued should be decided upon by balancing all of the interests involved. it is to be desired that the same policy be pursued throughout all industries or occupations rather than divergent ones, and the central authority should strive to attain unity of policy. .--the complications introduced into the administration of the living wage principle by changes in the general price level have yet to be dealt with. it has been seen that changes in the general price level affect the outcome of distribution and, for that reason, any policy of wage settlement must include provision for the adjustment of wages to price changes. we have now to consider how this adjustment can best be carried out. the central authority is obviously the most suitable body to supervise the process of adjustment. the adjustment to price change should be expressed as a percentage addition to or subtraction from the existing wage. the central authority should be charged with the collection of all necessary price data. this body should then proceed upon the advice of the joint boards or councils in the industries concerned. unless some strong reason to the contrary exists, however, a uniform policy of adjustment should be pursued--resting upon the following principles. .--the conclusions reached in chapter v in regard to the policy to be pursued in the adjustment of wages to changes in the price level fall into two groups. firstly, those which have to do with the choice of the basis of calculation of wage adjustments. secondly, those which have to do with the choice of the actual policy of adjustment during times of rising and falling prices. the same division and order is maintained in the following attempt to sketch out a good plan of adjustment of living wage rates. first, then, these wage rates should be varied in accordance with the movement of a price index number. this index number should represent the prices of all the important commodities produced within the country, but so weighted as to give a defined importance ( per cent. was suggested) to the prices of those classes of foodstuffs, clothing, housing accommodations, and other commodities upon which the wage earners tend to spend the bulk of their income. it was sufficiently emphasized in the earlier discussion of this subject that this basis of calculation was in the nature of a compromise, and was not beyond criticism. adjustments should not be undertaken unless the index number of prices has moved at least per cent. (the figure is meant to be merely a suggestion) and adjustment should not be more frequent than twice a year (again a suggestion, only). secondly, as to the policy of adjustment to be pursued in times of rising and falling price levels, respectively. the policy for a period of rising prices can be very briefly stated. all wage rates prescribed under the living wage policy should be increased by the same percentage as the index number of prices moves upward. there is one case in which this policy cannot be justified theoretically. that is when the increase of prices can be wholly or mainly accounted for by a falling off in the general level of industrial productivity. however, in my opinion, it will be hardly practicable to attempt to distinguish this case from other cases of price increase,--save in an entirely exceptional circumstance, such as a period of war invasion. the policy to be pursued during a period of falling prices cannot be stated so briefly. the difficulties involved have already been discussed at length.[ ] the following policy based upon that analysis is tentatively suggested. the complexities of the subject are too great to permit of dogmatism. firstly, the occasion for the price decline may be such as was termed "natural," as for example when it is brought about by a general advance in the arts of production, or by the development of the means of transport. in this case, it will be satisfactory to keep wage rates unchanged, though prices decline. it is in these periods that chance is afforded of bringing about genuine improvement in the economic position of the least favorably placed groups of wage earners. secondly, the price decline may be a sign of reaction from a previous period of rapid price increase, and of a general tendency on the part of entrepreneurs to keep down production costs and to proceed with circumspection throughout. nevertheless if little forced liquidation occurs; if there has been no serious overextension of credit during the previous period; if the maintenance of the existing price level, or of a slightly lowered one, would not impose too great a strain upon the banking system--there would be no good cause to reduce wages. this judgment rests on the supposition that the facts of the industrial situation give promise that industrial recovery will take place even if prices do not drop greatly, and drop gradually rather than sharply. thirdly, the price decline may be caused--at the beginning at all events--by much forced liquidation of a character that is disastrous to the enterprises compelled to liquidate. it may have been preceded by a great over-expansion of credit; and the maintenance of the existing price level might mean a steady source of danger to the banking and commercial system. then the soundest policy is to reduce wages as prices fall. to the extent that the trouble may be due to special causes such as over-investment in particular directions, this reduction of wages may be unnecessary. but it will probably be found that the recovery from a genuine industrial crisis will be facilitated if a heavy price decline is stimulated by wage reduction. no wage reductions should be undertaken unless conditions making the case are clearly present. the central authority could avail itself of the advice of the federal reserve board. the lowering of wage rates might be put off until the price decline has reached, say, eight or ten per cent. and the percentage of the reduction of wages might be smaller than the percentage of price decline; say, a three per cent. reduction of wages for every four per cent. reduction in prices. lastly, when it is judged that the pressure on the financial system is definitely at an end, no further reduction in wages should be ordered even though the price decline continues.[ ] in concluding this discussion one general reflection may be permitted. that is to the effect that no policy of wage settlement will, in itself, suffice to protect the standard of life of the lowest industrial classes during critical industrial times; whether such a time be one of rapidly rising prices of foodstuffs due to poor harvests, or to war, or whether it be a period of industrial panic and precipitate price decline. much can be done to protect the standard of life of these classes by measures outside of the scope of any policy of wage settlement. the suggestion made by professor taussig that it may be possible to regularize the supplies of the principal agricultural products from year to year deserves careful consideration.[ ] the best policy, undoubtedly, is one which would enable and encourage the lowest paid industrial classes to accumulate something for hard times. .--the design of the living wage policy is to procure for all members of the industrial community the economic essentials of a hopeful and active life. ultimate success in the maintenance of any conceived standard of life, will, in the long run, depend upon those general relationships which were examined in the earlier chapters. the more productive the industrial organization as a whole is, the better are the chances for the least favored industrial groups to improve their economic condition. the less the economic waste, due to maldistribution and to other causes, the greater the product of industry will be. the greater the economic capacity of the lowest grades of wage earners, the more general their intelligence and the steadier their spirit, the more determined their organization, the better will be their chances of increasing their share of the total product. and lastly, the smaller in numbers these are compared with the need of the economic system for them, the stronger their economic position will be. this is but to restate some of the important influences governing the wages of the lowest groups of industrial workers. but to restate them is to emphasize the fact that the living wage policy must be looked upon merely as one agency among many, directed to the same end. in economic affairs, as in political affairs, to bring about a change in one place it is necessary to bring about a change in many places. footnotes: [ ] the best short summaries of the pre-war wage situation are--"the standard of living among the industrial people of america" ( ), by f. h. streightoff, and an article by c. e. persons in the february, , issue of _the quarterly journal of economics_. for a more extensive study see the report of the commission of enquiry of the board of trade (great britain) into working class rents, etc., which contains material of great value. a recent comprehensive survey of wages in the united states, undertaken by the bureau of labor statistics for the war industries board was published in may, . it is bulletin no. , u. s. bureau of labor statistics, "industrial survey in selected industries in the united states, ." [ ] south australian ind. reports. vol. - -- . page --submission by employees in cardboard box industry. quoted from printing trades case. [ ] _labor gazette of the dominion of canada_, august, , page . [ ] as reported in the _survey_, april , . [ ] second annual report of the minimum wage board, district of columbia ( ), page . [ ] an excellent study of the technique of measurement of the cost of living is that by w. f. ogburn, "measurement of the cost of living and wages." no. , _annals of the american academy of political and social science_ ( ). the article helps to put much firm ground under the feet of those engaged in cost of living investigations for the united states. for a description of the methods pursued in official cost of living investigations in great britain, see the account by f. h. mcleod in the june, , issue of the _u. s. monthly labor bulletin_, page . [ ] the plumber's case, south australian industrial reports (volume i, - ), page . [ ] see pages - , this chapter, for further discussion of this question. [ ] the printing trades case, south australian industrial reports, vol. ii, - , page . [ ] see chapters vii-viii. [ ] see pages - , this chapter. [ ] see pages - , this chapter. [ ] see chapter xii. [ ] a valuable collection of evidence in support of living wage legislation is contained in the briefs presented in the cases of stettler v. o'hara (the oregon minimum wage case) published by the national consumers' league. this collection of evidence is brought up to date in the new brief just published in defense of the minimum wage commission--district of columbia (children's hospital vs. minimum wage board), . for a collection of theoretical opinions on various aspects of the subject, see the symposium on the minimum wage problem, which is printed as appendix iii, vol. i, th report of the new york state factory investigating commission ( ), pages - . an excellent bibliography on the subject by miss irene osgood andrews is to be found in appendix iii, rd report of the same commission ( ). the best studies of the australasian experience are those of m. b. hammond (especially the articles in the _quarterly journal of economics_ for nov., , and may, ), and p. s. collier, appendix vii, th report of the n. y. state factory investigating commission. the bulletins of the massachusetts, oregon, and washington (d. c.), minimum wage commissions are the best studies of the effects of american legislation. upon the results of the british trades boards see the studies of r. h. tawney on the chainmaking and tailoring trades and that of m. e. bulkely on the box making industry. the parliamentary debates th series (vols. - , - , hansard), cover every aspect of the english experience. [ ] the best theoretical statement of the dangers and difficulties presented is the article by f. w. taussig, "minimum wages for women," in the _quarterly journal of economics_, june, . the evidence, however, seems to me to stand against the skepticism expressed therein. [ ] report on wage boards and industrial and condition acts of australia and new zealand ( ). [ ] see pages - , chapter viii. [ ] see pages - , this chapter. [ ] the printing trades case, south australian industrial reports, vol. ii ( - ), page . [ ] the suggestion put forward in the "report of the war cabinet committee on women and industry" (great britain), , is as follows: "in such cases," the report reads, "the time rates for the simplified process or simplified machine should be determined as if this was to be allocated to male labor less skilled than the male labor employed before simplification. only where it was definitely shown by employers that the value of the woman's work on the simplified process or machine was less than the value of the unskilled man, should the woman, if her introduction is agreed to, receive less than the unskilled man's rate in proportion to the value of her work." page . [ ] see pages - , chapter vi. [ ] a number of collective agreements in which the arrangements for wage adjustment to price decline are similar to those suggested here, have recently been negotiated in england. the wage scales established in for many grades of railroad workers are an example. so also, the agreement of the wool textile industrial council, in october, . the following agreement made for the yorkshire dyeing and finishing industry in march, , may be given as an example. "( ) when the index figure as defined in classes and hereof exceeds per cent. the war wages shall be:-- "to male and female timeworkers-- . per cent. of the basis wage. "to male and female pressworkers-- . per cent. of the basis wage. "to hand pressers-- . per cent. of the basis wage, and when the index figure is or less, but not less than , the percentage war wages of timeworkers shall be equal to the index figures; for every per cent. decrease in the index figure below the war wages of timeworkers shall be decreased / of per cent. the ratio of percentage war wages of timeworkers, pieceworkers and pressers respectively, shall for all index figures, be the same as that shown for index figures, exceeding ." [ ] "cost of living and wages," f. w. taussig, _collier's weekly_, sept. , . chapter x--the regulation of wage levels section . why there must be in industry an ordered scheme of wage relationship between each and every group of wage earners. the limits of collective bargaining as a factor in industrial peace.--section . in the beginning, the scheme must probably be based on an acceptance of existing wage "differentials." the reasons for this are of a practical kind.--section . any policy which planned to develop a scheme of wage relationships merely by maintaining existing differentials would be bound to fall to pieces in the end. the difficulties that would arise.--section . two principles proposed as the basis of the desired scheme of wage relationship. their meaning as applied doctrines.--section . these principles open to criticism both on practical and theoretical grounds. the chief criticisms examined and taken into account.--section . some notes on the best method of administering these principles. the necessity of avoiding political interference, if possible. .--we have now completed that part of this inquiry which was concerned with the formulation of principles suitable for the regulation of the wages of the lowest paid industrial groups. the task remains of working out principles which could be used satisfactorily in the settlement of wages for all other groups of wage earners. the subject may be introduced by recalling certain matters, set forth in the preceding analysis of wage principles. it was seen that while the wages of each and every group of wage earners were governed, in a great measure, by forces which acted upon them all in common, yet the wages of each group were settled somewhat independently of all the rest. again, it was seen that one of the leading characteristics of the present distributive situation is the use of the group will and group power to serve group purposes. wage movements in different industries or occupations begin independently of each other; yet because of the firm determination on the part of most groups of wage earners to maintain their position in the industrial scale, a wage movement in one part of the field of industry tends frequently to give rise to similar movements throughout the field. this tendency for the actions of one group to give rise to action on the part of other groups arises from the existence of some "power of interchange or close connection" as mr. aves has said. before the use of group power becomes common and the sense of group interest becomes highly developed, that interchange or interconnection tends to exist only between classes or groups of workmen who can easily move into each other's field of employment. but with the extension and encouragement of unionism, with a constantly growing volume of public discussion of wage questions, there has arisen an interconnection between wage movements in groups very far apart in the industrial scale.[ ] as long as wave movements in different industries and occupations are considered independently of each other, and the claims of each group are judged with only incidental reference to the claims of the other groups, the use of group strength will continue to be a conspicuous characteristic of distribution. the constant assertion of group power will cease only if all groups are brought within some acceptable plan of wage settlement, under which group wages are settled by principles recognized as fair. the problem is to establish an ordered scheme of wage relationship _between_ each and every group of wage earners--which scheme of relationship will do justice _between_ them, and which will also effect such a distribution of the product of industry between _all_ the wage earners and the other claimants to a share in the product, as will justify it to the wage earners and to the community in general. if the objection be raised that the establishment of such a scheme of wage relationship is not practicable, doubt must be admitted. yet it is probably essential to industrial peace,--under our present industrial system, or under an alternative one. it would seem to be the only substitute for the continued reliance of each group upon group power. there has been a strong tendency, both in the united states and england, to believe that industrial peace could be secured by the development of joint industrial or occupational councils throughout industry--which councils would assure fair and complete consideration of all wage questions which arise. it would be a serious error to underestimate the possible value of such joint councils to the cause of industrial peace. indeed, throughout this study of the means of industrial peace great reliance will be placed upon them. yet i do not believe that their creation will suffice to bring industrial peace. such joint councils are among the most satisfactory instruments yet devised for the conduct of collective bargaining. but will collective bargaining keep such an interdependent industrial society as our own at work peacefully? can the philosophy of compromise be developed to that extent? joint industrial councils can produce understanding between employers and wage earners; they can foster a spirit of coöperation between all groups engaged in a productive industry; they can stand in the way of the creation of such intolerable conditions of labor as have, on occasion in the past, led to a spontaneous revolt in an industry; they can foster reasonableness and compromise. but it is difficult to see how they can work out principles of wage settlement for any industry which will have sufficient authority over the actions of those engaged in it in times of stress. before industrial peace can be obtained, particular groups of wage earners must forbear from pressing to the utmost the bargaining advantages they possess. this forbearance will come only from a knowledge of an interest larger than their own. there will have to be a recognition by all sides of principles which represent aims to which all subscribe, and which do justice to the interests of each. .--what then is required, to repeat, is a policy by which wages in various industries and occupations are brought into relation with each other. this policy should be calculated to result in such a distribution of the product of industry as would justify it to the wage earners and community in general. the scheme of wage relationship would have to rest upon expressed principles. in the beginning any policy which has as its aim the establishment of a scheme of wage relationship must accept and protect the existing wage levels of each group of wage earners. that would mean, of course, accepting the wage relationships existing between them. the reasons for this are practical, rather than theoretical. they are: firstly, because it will be impossible to win general consent for any policy of wage settlement which does not guarantee to all wage earners at least their existing rates of wages. secondly, because the existing relationships between the wage levels of the different groups of workers represent, though only vaguely and roughly, customary relationships, and they therefore have, on occasion, meaning to the wage earners. thirdly, the mere fact that they exist makes them the most convenient basis for the very careful process of comparison and calculation involved in any attempt to establish gradually a scheme of wage relationships based upon principles. it should be kept in mind, however, that the reasons for their acceptance are of a practical nature, and that no theoretical considerations compel an unquestioning acceptance of them, as is sometimes urged. .--since, on practical grounds, it is held that any attempt to create an ordered scheme of wage relationship must begin by accepting existing wage levels, it may be judged by some that the scheme that is sought could be developed merely by maintaining these relationships. that would mean that existing differentials would be maintained as customary differentials. that policy, it is true, would have the advantages of simplicity and continuity. but it would be found impossible to maintain. for the scheme of wage relationship to which it would give rise would lack the authority of principle--without which no scheme of wage relationship will receive voluntary and steady support from the various groups of wage earners. the wage earners will not voluntarily accept a place in the industrial scale, unless it is felt that the scale is the result of the application of rules of acknowledged fairness. the existing scale of wage relationship, however, has not been determined either by considerations of justice or of the general interest. nor has it, as is sometimes claimed, the authority of being altogether necessary. it is the product of a multitude of forces, some of which may be given different importance in the future than they had in the past. it is easy to foresee the difficulties with which a policy which planned to create an ordered scheme of wage relationships by maintaining existing differentials would be confronted. claims will constantly be presented by particular groups for some improvement in their economic position. these claims could not be disregarded merely on the score that they contravened the scheme of established differentials. the issue that would arise is clearly exemplified by statements made in the course of two of the most important industrial conflicts that occurred in england of recent years. "we claim," the secretary of one of the shop committees of the molders' union wrote in defense of the demand of his union for differential treatment under an award made for the whole of engineering trades--which demand provoked the molders' strike, "we claim that our work is totally different in many ways from the other departments in the engineering industry. it is arduous, dirty, dangerous, hot, unhealthy, and highly skilled, and we claim separate treatment on these grounds. there is no other department in the engineering industry with so high a percentage of sickness or accidents.... you mention the employers' attitude towards the molders' application--a refusal to grant to molders any separate consideration because other classes of workers would also expect it. to me such an attitude is both unfair and untenable. if the molder can prove that his conditions of working are vile, dangerous and unhealthy, it is surely fair to ask for a proper recompense for such work...."[ ] and consider this extract from one of the reports of the coal industry commission, signed by six members of the commission. "it will, however, be said that desirable as may be an improvement in the miners' conditions, the industry will not bear the cost of a reduction in hours, even if the aggregate output is, by an increase in numbers and, therefore, in the wages bill restored to its pre-war level, without involving a considerable advance in the price of coal, with possible adverse effects on our export trade, on manufacturing industry generally, and on the domestic consumer. we have to observe that if the improvement in the miner's standard of life is really required for the greater efficiency of the industry itself, or in the national interest, the fact that it might involve a temporary increase in the price of coal would not be conclusive against it. moreover, if hours of labor have been reduced in other industries, and if the standard of life has been advanced among other sections of the community, it would be unsuitable to withhold a similar advance from the miners, merely because the others have got in first."[ ] in short, under any scheme of wage relationship based on the preservation of existing differentials, it could not be established in the face of any claim that the relative position of a group was determined either by consideration of justice, or by implacable necessity. therefore, that scheme would not receive the constant and widespread support requisite to its successful operation.[ ] so far then, in this chapter, two conclusions have been reached. firstly, that the course of wage settlement in each industry or occupation cannot be a process entirely independent from the course of wage settlement in every other industry and occupation. secondly, that although the first step in the establishment of any scheme of wage relationship is the acceptance of existing wage levels and differentials, the policy must provide for the reconsideration of these differentials in the light of affirmed principles; with the aim of gradually evolving in industry an ordered scheme of wage relationship, upheld by common consent to the principles on which it rests. .--thus we are put under the necessity of attempting to formulate principles or standards by which all claims made by groups of wage earners for reconsideration of existing wage differentials could be judged. this is not a task to be lightly undertaken. nor is it to be expected that such clear principles of wage relationship can be elaborated as to escape the necessity of deciding many claims by an appeal to compromise and by taking refuge in a general sense of equity. all that it is hoped to do is to suggest certain lines along which a satisfactory formulation of the required principles of wage relationship may be sought. it might be possible gradually to construct such an ordered scheme of wage relationship as has been declared essential to industrial peace by applying to successive wage controversies, as they arose, two central doctrines. these doctrines are: firstly, the doctrine of the unity of the wage income and of the wage earners--by which is meant that the wages of all groups should be regarded as part of one general wage income, to be shared out among all wage earners in as nearly equal proportions, as is practicable, without special favor to any one. and, secondly, what may be called for a lack of a better name, the doctrine of special reward--by which is meant, that the wage differentials between the standard wage levels of different types of labor should be regarded as special rewards, given in order to make it reasonably certain that industry will be provided with at least the existing proportion of the more skilled grades of labor, and to make it reasonably certain also that the more arduous, irregular, dangerous and disagreeable work will command the service of as much labor as at present. it should be observed, first of all, that neither of these two doctrines upholds the rights of particular groups of wage earners. they aim to bring all wage earning groups to perceive that they are part of a larger whole; they emphasize the fact that the wages of each group are what they are, more because the total wage income is what it is, than because of the special type of work performed by the group. they, however, recognize the necessity of giving extra reward for the training and skill or natural ability required for particular kinds of work, for more than common danger or disagreeableness incurred in the performance of particular kinds of work, and the like--in short, for all those factors which elevate a job above what is called common labor. as an applied doctrine, the doctrine of the unity of wage income and of the wage earners means that the same wage should be paid throughout industry for work which requires approximately the same human qualities, and which makes approximately the same demands upon the individual. the common effort involved in production is emphasized, rather than the differences between the work performed by workers in different parts of the field of production. as an applied doctrine, the doctrine of extra reward means that certain groups of wage earners should receive higher wages than other groups, because the work they perform is deemed to require considerably higher individual qualities or talents, or to make considerably greater demands upon the individuals engaged upon it.[ ] the extra reward should not be regarded primarily as an ethical right; but rather as a payment to ensure the development and exercise of those higher qualities and talents required in the performance of the more skilled industrial tasks, and to ensure also the performance of the more arduous, irregular, disagreeable, and less desirable industrial tasks. it is a recognition of the fact that the spirit of serving without direct reward is not a sufficiently strong and constant motive to persuade men to make the special efforts, or to undergo the special disadvantages required for some kinds of work. it is an incentive to the development of those abilities and talents which are relatively scarce in industry; it is also an incentive to the undertaking of those tasks which the run of men, at any given time and place, regard as unusually difficult or undesirable. the extra reward for different kinds of work which are judged to require for their performance qualities equally difficult to secure, and which subject individuals to the same hardships should be the same. the test of the special reward must be in any particular case, the amount necessary to secure the performance of the work in question. the conscientious and consistent application of these two doctrines in settlement of wage controversies which involve the reconsideration of established differentials should result in the gradual building up of an ordered scheme of wage relationship, such as is sought. this scheme would rest upon fairly widely held ideas as to the most suitable basis for wage differences. it would not make greater call upon the human sense of fairness than must be made by any plan which hopes to secure industrial peace by getting all parties to industrial conflict to agree upon rules or principles for the settlement of the claims of each. whether that aim, itself, is a fanciful one, need not be again debated here. .--lest it appear that the above proposals have been put forward without giving due weight to their defects, it is now well to consider certain criticisms to which they may be fairly open. two objections, in particular, are likely to be made. one is of practical nature, the other of a theoretical nature. they may be considered in that order. the objection of a practical nature is that it will not be possible to apply the suggested principles either accurately or consistently, and this for two reasons. firstly, it may be asserted that the application of the proposed doctrines would require a scientific comparison of the characteristics of different kinds of work, which comparison is declared to be unobtainable. secondly, it may be said that in order to fix such wage differentials as are reasonably certain to accomplish the ends for which they are set, it will be necessary to have a precise knowledge of many facts and forces. this knowledge may be declared to be unobtainable. no simple or very final answer can be returned to these doubts. it must be admitted that it will always remain difficult to compare occupations except in general descriptive terms. the relative training and talents required for different kinds of work, and the relative demands made upon the individual by different kinds of work will always remain, to a great extent, a matter of opinion. it is also true that only a general knowledge can be obtained of the factors governing the supply of any particular sort of labor at a given time, and the probable effect of any wage change upon that supply. the differentials which would be established from a consideration of such material could not claim to be more than a practical approximation to the differentials which would carry out the intention of the policy. still, scientific method could be pushed further than it has been in the comparison of occupations. the statements of the various interested parties would be a valuable guide in the estimate of occupations. furthermore, only the major relationships between occupations would have to be taken into consideration. for example, if the question at issue was whether the wages of miners were too low as compared with wages in other industries--that is to say, whether a demand on the part of the miners for an improvement in their relative economic position was justified--only the most important of mining occupations would have to be taken into account in reaching a decision. there would be small risk of error in applying a decision, based upon a study of the work performed and of the income received in the most important mining occupations, to the less important mining occupations also. and indeed such would prove probably the only practicable policy. furthermore, revision of the existing differentials would be undertaken only when the case for revision seemed definite and clear. as for example, it was clear in england before the war, that railroad labor was underpaid; or, as was clear to the whole of the recent president's commission on the wages of coal miners, that the wages of the miners were too low, relative to wages in other industries--though the commission differed on the amount of wage increase to be awarded. but perhaps the most significant answer to those objections which rest on practical grounds is the fact that any wage level that might be set for any occupation under the proposed principles would be but the minimum standard wage for that occupation. and no element in the whole policy of wage settlement should stand in the way of the payment of a higher wage than that fixed by the central authority for any type of work. thus no fear would have to be entertained that any industry would be faced with a shortage of labor due to the difficulty of getting precise knowledge on which to base wage differentials. here, indeed, we approach very close to that other objection which may be put forward on theoretical grounds. which objection is that all attempts at revision of existing wage differentials would involve a risk of producing, on the one hand, a shortage of certain kinds of labor, and, on the other hand, an oversupply of other kinds. it is reasoned that in spite of every effort of careful calculation of wage differentials, some danger of over or undersupply of certain kinds of labor will always be present. these fears would be based upon a misconception of the nature of the policy of wage settlement that is proposed. as has already been emphasized, the wage level that would be fixed for any kind of labor would be but a minimum standard wage. there is no part of the proposed policy of wage settlement which would interfere with the payment of higher wages than the standard minimum. therefore, no industry would find itself unable to secure the labor it required merely because of the differentials established by the central authority. each industry would still retain all its powers of bargaining for the labor it needs. nor, on the other hand, would there be any serious danger that the wage rates set for any industry or occupation would be so high as to add to any already existing possibilities of oversupply of certain types of labor. for, after all, the central authority would consider the question of the revision of existing wage differentials only when the question is pressed upon it by the failure of the workers and employers to agree. the central authority would not be likely to declare wage rates higher than those contended for by the wage earners or lower than those contended for by the employers. and it is not too much to presume that in practically all cases neither of the two sides presses claims from which they do not expect to benefit. the employers are not likely to seek such wage rates as will not procure the needed labor supply; and only in rare cases are the wage earners likely to press for increases of wages that would bring about an increased measure of unemployment.[ ] when those rare cases arise, indeed, it will be the duty of the central authority to protect the interested parties against their own bad judgment. thus it cannot be admitted that the application of the proposed principles would produce an intensification of the already existing possibilities that particular industries or occupations would be short of the kind of labor they need, or that they would be overcrowded. this conclusion is greatly strengthened by the thought that under our present practices, wage settlements are constantly being reached without any reward whatsoever for the disturbance of customary differentials; and serious maladjustments in the supply of labor do not often result because of that. .--a note upon the procedure by which it is expected that the proposed principles would be brought into operation may help to explain away remaining doubts. first of all, it may be emphasized that nothing in these proposals contemplates the discontinuance of collective bargaining throughout industry. rather the creation of joint industrial or occupational boards or councils (those suggested in the course of the living wage discussion) is advised. only when any wage question cannot be settled peacefully by collective bargaining is it proposed that the central authority should enter into the dispute. it is to be expected that as the principles followed by the central authority in its decisions become known and understood--that is, as the probable result of disagreement, and of reference to the central authority become predictable--the agreements reached by collective bargaining would tend to approximate those which would result from reference to the central authority. for example, if a series of decisions expounded the doctrine that the existing relationships between the wages of the miners, railway conductors, and bricklayers are in accordance with the principles recognized by the central authority, the course of negotiation in these occupations will be governed, to some extent, by that knowledge. such an outcome is to be expected, no matter what the principles upheld by the central authority--provided they are consistently upheld. thus judge higgins records of the australasian experience that "it is quite common now for the parties to ask the decision or guidance of the court on a few main subjects in dispute and then to agree as to all the other items--even hundreds of items--in the light of the court's findings; anticipating the application of the court's principles."[ ] since we are on the subject of the method and machinery of application of the policy of wage settlement, one other aspect of the matter may be briefly noted. that is, that if any policy of wage settlement is to succeed, the course of wage decision must be kept as free from all political interference as possible.[ ] spending departments should not be given powers of decision which clash with those of the central authority. appeals to the higher executive officers of the state must be avoided to the utmost possible extent. conjecture as to the measure in which these conditions can be realized in the united states at the present time may be withheld. but unless they are realized in a high degree, wage settlement will continue to be a matter of force and opportunism. freedom from political interference can be obtained, and the elimination of the necessity for frequent appeal to the higher executive officers of the state will be possible, only if the policy of wage settlement which is adopted has the vigorous support of all groups immediately concerned in wage settlement. footnotes: [ ] see for examination of this question, "report of wage boards and industrial and conciliation acts of australia and new zealand." e. aves ( ), page . mr. henry clay in a review of the wage position before the national council of the pottery industry (great britain), made an interesting statement in this regard. he said "... the one great lesson which the war taught everybody (including government departments) was that it was dangerous to make a change in the wages or basis of earnings of one section of workers or of one industry unless they considered what would be the effect on all related classes and grades of workers." printed in the staffordshire _sentinel_, oct. , . see also chapter , lord askwith's "industrial problems and disputes" for a narrative account of the trouble caused by sectional wage advances during the war. [ ] letter printed in london _times_, january , . [ ] report of the coal industry commission ( ), majority report, pages - . for another interesting case, see that of various toronto firms vs. pattern makers under the canadian industrial disputes act, in which case the pattern makers claimed differential treatment over machinists and molders. reported in jan., , _canadian labor gazette_. [ ] the various courts in the australian dominions tended on the whole to confirm existing differentials, occasionally changing the relative position of particular groups, when it has seemed clear to the court that the wages of these groups as compared to other groups is "unreasonable" considering all those factors which are considered to form the ground of "reasonableness" in the matter of differentials. thus justice brown of the industrial court of south australia has expressed himself on this very subject. "in the matter of such perplexity some guidance is afforded to the court by custom. it seems to me i cannot do better than proceed on this basis. i shall state the preëxisting wage, consider whether it is prima facie unreasonable applied to preëxisting conditions, and then if i find it not prima facie unreasonable, i shall consider whether any variations of the wage should be made in view of conditions now existing." (hook boys' case--south australia industrial reports, vol. i, - , page .) [ ] it is in this light that the commonwealth court of australia looks upon its secondary wage. "the secondary wage is remuneration for any exceptional gifts or qualifications not of the individual employee, but gifts or qualifications necessary for the performance of the functions." h. b. higgins, "a new province for law and order," _harvard law review_, march, . [ ] mr. and mrs. webb have described aptly the usual trade union calculations in the formulation of their claims. "the trade unionist has a rough and ready barometer to guide him in this difficult navigation. it is impossible, even for the most learned economist or the most accomplished business men, to predict what will be the result of any particular advance of the common rule. so long, however, as a trade union without in any way restricting the numbers entering its occupation, finds that its members are fully employed, it can scarcely be wrong in maintaining its common rules at the existing level, and even, after a reasonable interval, in attempting gradually to raise them.... to put it concretely, whenever the percentage of the unemployed in any particular industry begins to rise from the or per cent characteristic of 'good trade' to the , or even per cent. experienced in 'bad trade' there must be a pause in the operatives' advance movement." "industrial democracy," pages - . [ ] h. b. higgins, "a new province for law and order," _harvard law review_, dec., , page . [ ] justice higgins, the head of the commonwealth court of australia, has recently resigned because of the action of the legislature in providing that the executive may set up special and independent tribunals of appeal above the court of arbitration. his letter giving the reasons for his resignation (printed in the melbourne _argus_, oct. , ), gives most convincingly the case for freedom from political interference. one passage of explanation in it is as follows: "on the other hand, a permanent court of a judicial character tends to reduce conditions to system, to standardize them, to prevent irritating contrasts. it knows that a reckless concession made in one case will multiply future troubles. a union that knows that a certain claim is likely to be contested by the court will bring pressure to bear for a special tribunal; and the special tribunal appointed by the government will be apt to yield to demands for the sake of continuity in the one industry before it, regardless of the consequences in other industries. the objectives of the permanent court and of the temporary tribunals are, in truth, quite different--one seeks to provide a just and balanced system which will tend to continuity of work in industries generally, whereas the other seeks to prevent or to end a present strike in its own industry." see also lord askwith's "industrial problems and disputes" for another expression of the same view. chapter xi--the regulation of wage levels--(_continued_)-- wages and prices section . the scheme of wage relationship must recommend itself as just to the wage earners and the community in general. the ultimate distributive question to be met is the division of the product between profit and wages.--section . provision for the adjustment of wages to price movements would aid, however, towards reaching distributive goal. a policy of adjustment suggested.--section . the difficulty of maintaining scheme of wage relationship of wages adjusted to price movements. the best method of adjustment a compromise. .--in the last chapter the reasons for seeking an ordered scheme of wage relationship in industry were discussed, and some suggestions were made in regard to such a scheme. one essential to its success was pointed out. that is, that under it the distribution of the product of industry should recommend itself as just to the wage earners and the community in general. the possibility of satisfying this requirement remains to be considered. the ultimate distributive question to be met in any attempt to formulate a policy of wage settlement is the distribution of the product of industry between wages and profits (rent incomes, in the ricardian sense, being left out of the question). it is entirely conceivable that a policy of wage settlement should be put into practice which would take note only of the facts of this relation. however, there are distinct advantages to be obtained by taking note of an intermediate relation. that is the relation between wages and changes in the price level. the relation between wages and general price movements has been discussed. it has been seen that movements in the general level of prices affect the outcome of distribution. they occasion changes in the distributive situation; and these changes may be desirable or undesirable--having reference to the distributive result that is sought. any plan by which such changes as are undesirable are prevented from taking place would contribute, therefore, to the attainment of the aims of the proposed policy; and would be a valuable adjunct to the policy. the conclusions reached in the previous discussion on this subject make up a plan suitable for the purpose. they may now be fitted into the body of these proposals. then in the following chapter that most difficult problem of wage settlement can be considered--the problem of governing the distribution of the product between profit and wages in order that a just distribution may result. .--the results of the discussion in chapter v concerning a plan for the adjustment of wages to price change may be applied at this point without further comment. the central authority in its decisions should take note of all changes in the approved price index number since the time when the wage rates which are up for reconsideration were fixed. it should then in its awards adjust these wage rates to price changes in accordance with the following policy. it need hardly be explained that other considerations besides the fact of price change may enter into the award, as the adjustment of wages to price change is merely one part of a larger policy. the measure of price change by which the central authority should be guided--that is, the approved index number,--should be the movements of the index number of the prices of all important commodities produced within the country; this index number to be so weighted as to give a defined importance ( per cent. suggested) to the prices of those classes of foodstuffs, clothing, housing accommodations and other commodities, upon which the wage earners spend the larger part of their income. it will be noted that this measure of price change is the same as that used in the adjustment of wages prescribed under the living wage policy. and, as was recommended in the discussion of living wage policy, so it is recommended here, that adjustments should not be undertaken unless the index number of prices has moved at least per cent., and that adjustment should not be more frequent than twice a year. in regard to the actual policy of adjustment to be pursued in periods of rising and falling prices, here also, save in one important respect, the same policy that was sketched out for living wage adjustments should be followed. .--the one point in which it may be advisable to depart from the policy laid down for living wage adjustments is in regard to the _amount_ of wage change that should be undertaken for movements in the price level. in the earlier discussion it was suggested that wherever wages were adjusted to price changes, the adjustments should be on the basis of equal percentages. if this basis were to be used in adjusting the wages of all other groups of workers it is evident that during periods of changing prices there would be a different set of wage differentials for every position of the price level. and, furthermore, during periods of rising prices, the lowest paid classes of workers--those who could do least to meet the rise in the cost of living by changing their consumption habits--would receive the smallest wage increases. a great diversity of practice characterized the attempts at adjustment which were made during the period of rapid price increase inaugurated by the war. no two agencies of adjustment used the same basis. possibly the most widespread practice has been to increase all wage levels by the same _absolute_ amount--which amount has been ordinarily calculated as a percentage of some basic wage (frequently the living wage). the advantages of that method are firstly, its simplicity, and secondly, the fact that if it favors any groups, it favors those whose needs are greatest. justice higgins has justified it as follows: "when the court has increased the basic wage because of abnormal increase of prices due to the war it has not usually increased the secondary wage. it has merely added the old secondary wage, the old margin, to the new basic wage. it is true that the extra commodities which the skilled man usually purchases with his extra wages become almost as indispensable in his social habits, as the commodities purchased by the unskilled man, and have no less increased in price; but the court has not seen fit to push its principles to the extreme in the abnormal circumstances of the war, and the moderate course taken has been accepted without demur."[ ] still as a permanent policy, the suitability of this method is not beyond question. the problem to be faced in the choice of method is, after all, this. given a scheme of wage differentials, which are in accord with certain defined principles, at a given position of the price level, what method of adjustment is best calculated to produce such differentials as will be in accord with these principles, at all positions of the price levels? that sounds like a problem in astronomy. but it is not. it can be more understandably, but less accurately, put by asking, what system of adjustment is best calculated to maintain the same _relative_ position of the various groups of wage earners throughout all price movements? under either of the two methods touched upon--that of change by equal percentages, and that of change by the same absolute amount for all groups--the differentials cannot be held in close accord with any such original principles of wage relationship as have been suggested. it cannot be helped. we have come to another point at which the aims of policy can only be imperfectly realized. it seems to me that the best method would be some sort of compromise between the two alternatives that have been presented. a compromise would make allowance, firstly; for the fact that in times of rising prices, those groups whose wages are lowest cannot meet the rise in the cost of living by changing their consumption habits as easily as can the more fortunately placed groups, and secondly; in times of rising prices, the movements of the wage earners from industry, or from occupation to occupation are governed, within limits, by calculations of the absolute change in the wages paid for different kinds of labor, rather than by calculations of relative change. it nevertheless would prevent the relative position of different grades of labor from changing so radically as to lead to great discontent and possibly to derangements in the distribution of the labor supply. it can be claimed, in addition, for this compromise method that its results would be in accord with the general trend of changes in the differentials that have occurred in the past in periods of rapid price movement. an inspection of the available material seems to show that in times of rapidly rising prices the _relative_ differentials between the lower grades of wage earners and the upper grades decrease, while the _absolute_ differentials increase--and the reverse in times of rapidly declining prices. they are in accord, for example, with the results obtained by analyzing the course of differentials during the war ( - ) in the industries for which wage data was gathered by the national industrial conference board--"report wartime changes in wages." the data extends over the metal, cotton, wool, silk, boot and shoe, paper, rubber and chemical manufacturing industries. if the wage earners are classified into five groups according to their pre-war wages, it is found that the relative wages of the least paid groups (pre-war standards) increased most, and so on in order to the best paid groups, the relative wages of which increased least; the absolute increases, however, are in exactly the opposite order.[ ] they are borne out also by mitchell's studies of price movements in the united states.[ ] in conclusion, it may be said, that no matter which of the above methods is adopted, it should be applied with as much consistency as can be attained. the process of wage adjustment to movements of the price level cannot be left in the field of guess work, where it now rests, without giving rise to much quarreling and discontent. footnotes: [ ] h. b. higgins, "a new province for law and order," _harvard law review_, jan., . the commission acting under the canadian industrial disputes act, carried this line of reasoning to its further logical consequences by awarding in some cases higher _absolute_ increases to the lowest paid men, and so on up the scale to the highest paid men who received the smallest increase. the large increases granted to the lowest paid men were justified by the commission as necessary to bring their wages up to a living wage level. see, for example, the report of the commission on disputes in coal mining and other industries in nova scotia. _canadian labor gazette_, july, . for a similar policy based on the same grounds, see the "arbitration award in certain packing industries in the united states." _u. s. monthly labor review_, may, . [ ] the figures are: ----------------------------------------------------------- (wage groups) (group average) , wages relative increase absolute increase, earnings per hour of wages earnings per hour ----------------------------------------------------------- . -. % . . -. % . . -. % . . -. % . . -. % . ----------------------------------------------------------- such figures as these are not, of course, sufficient ground for confident generalization, but they support an imputation that the compromise method does furnish the best solution of the difficulties the problem presents. [ ] see w. c. mitchell, "business cycles," page . also w. c. mitchell, "history of the greenbacks," pages - , - . chapter xii--the regulation of wage levels--(_continued_) wages and profits section . the profits return in industry, under any policy of wage settlement, will be closely scrutinized.--section . the possibility of measuring a "fair" profits return for all industry discussed. a method suggested.--section . would the principles of wage settlement worked out so far, produce a fair profits return? an open question.--section . the scope and form of any measure designed to assure the desired distributive outcome can be discerned.--section . the various steps in the formulation of such a measure reviewed. a measure tentatively suggested.--section . the difficulties of calculating wage changes called for under the suggested measure.--section . the chief practical weaknesses of the suggested measure examined.--section . it would be open to theoretical criticism also. the alternatives even less satisfactory. .--we can now enter upon the further question of whether the principles so far formulated, if used in wage settlement, would produce such distributive results as would justify them to the wage earners and the community in general. it need hardly be said that the criterion of justice which will be applied by public opinion to any policy of wage settlement will not be a simple and clearly defined rule, but will be, rather, one joint in a loosely articulated social philosophy. the distributive justice of any set of wage principles will be judged by the shares of the product of industry which take the form of wages and profits, respectively. it is true that general satisfaction with them will be largely governed by the course of real wages after they have been in force a while. if real wages tended to increase in the period following their adoption, they would receive far greater approval and much sturdier defense than if real wages fall during that period. most witnesses of the australian experiments in wage settlement make that point clear.[ ] but in either case, if the organizations of the wage earners in the united states become as powerful as they are in england to-day, and if the class-consciousness of the wage earners becomes as acute, any policy of wage settlement will be severely scrutinized in regard to the profits return prevailing throughout industry also. if, with the principles in force, the general level of profits throughout the field of industry consistently and considerably exceeded what was deemed to approximate a fair return, it will be held that they give the wage earners too small a share in the product of the industry. if the general level of profits throughout the field of industry tended to approximate a return thought to be fair, the principles will recommend themselves to the wage earners and to the community in general, as just. it may be added that the opinion held in regard to the justice of the principles of wage settlement may also be influenced, in some degree, by the distribution of the profits return in industry. if a comparatively few great industrial corporations earn very great profits, it is likely to arouse greater dissatisfaction than if the same amount of profits are earned by a larger number of enterprises. it is beyond the scope of any policy of wage settlement, however, to control the distribution of profits among the enterprises engaged in an industry. there are some groups who would argue that no division of the product of industry is fair unless it gives to the wage earners the whole of the product. such a view, of course, amounts to a desire to revise the whole of the present economic system fundamentally. no policy of wage settlement akin to that put forward in this book could win favor in their eyes. and if their opinion should become dominant, industrial peace would have to be sought by arrangements far different from those under discussion. for those arrangements rest on the supposition that the country will continue to desire to depend, in the main, upon private accumulation for capital, and individual ambition for business leadership. .--it is possible by bringing into balance a numerous set of factors, to give a reasonably definite meaning to the idea of a fair profits return. that is to say, by weighing all relevant considerations, it is possible to define a general level of profits for industry as a whole, which would represent a just and sound division of the product of industry between wages and profits. the relevant considerations are those which will be likely to hold an important place in the better informed sections of public opinion during the period for which these proposals are intended; and which are admissible as sound and pertinent, on the supposition that the industrial system is to continue to depend mainly upon private initiative and private accumulation. the most important of these considerations are, in my opinion, as follows: first: that the ethical ideas of reward according to need, or reward according to sacrifice, would call for the elimination of the greatest present inequalities of reward; and that these ethical ideas must be given rank among the factors which deserve real consideration when arrangements affecting the distribution of the product are being made. secondly: the service of capital in effective production, the sacrifice involved in much accumulation, and the risk involved in much investment; the great need of assuring continued capital accumulation and investment. likewise, the importance to industry of active and enterprising leadership. thirdly: the social and economic evil effects of great inequality of wealth. fourthly: the fact that the health, energy, spirit, and intelligence of the wage earners are factors of high importance in the creation of a stable and effective industrial régime, and that the development and display of these qualities by individuals are affected by their economic conditions and surroundings, here and now. likewise, the importance of giving the best possible opportunity to all to develop their natural ability. the general level of profits that would be settled upon by comparing and weighing these considerations could be defended as just and sound. the figure (which would be expressed in the form of a percentage, e.g. per cent.) derived from the balance of these factors could be put forward as the mark of just distribution. the distributive goal for the policy of wage settlement would be to achieve a division of the product between wages and profits, such that the general level of profits throughout the field of industry (the basis of calculation of which will be considered at a later point) would approximate the figure defined as just. it is plain that if the suggested method is used to define a just level of profits, differences of opinion will manifest themselves in the process. the facts and circumstances that would have to be studied cannot be subjected to exact measurement. for example, the possible bad social and economic effects which may be produced by various degrees of inequality of distribution can only be guessed at in a general way. or, to take another example, the motives and conditions which govern the bulk of private accumulation and the sacrifices involved therein are questions about which controversy continues to range. the profits return that one man may judge ample to assure an adequate flow of accumulation and investment will not appear to be so, in another man's judgment. indeed, even differences in the general philosophy with which all men parade through life will lead to differences of opinion. for example, one man may believe a community to be better off if every man's income is increased somewhat, though the inequality of wealth within the community be thereby increased; while another man may believe that the poorer community, with the lesser inequality of wealth is likely to be more happy, and perhaps, in the end more prosperous. in spite, however, of the existence of such extensive ground for differences of opinion, it seems to me that an agreement may be expected which will be fair and sound enough to be accepted as a serviceable criterion of the distributive consequences of the policy of wage settlement. .--what grounds, if any, are there for the belief that the principles of wage settlement so far proposed would bring about a division of the product between wages and profits that would meet the test of just and sound distribution suggested above? the principles, so far proposed, leave the determination of the profits return predominantly to the action of industrial competition, reënforced by the action of public opinion in the direction of preventing the return from mounting to an obviously excessive point. they offer no safeguard against the reduction of the profit return below that point set as the mark of just and sound distribution, save the public will to continue the present system and a general knowledge of the motives and conditions upon which it rests. nor could they very well. it is true that the enactment of the principles suggested up to this point would mean the imposition of certain genuine restrictions upon the actions of those who direct industry, as for example, in connection with the living wage program. it would give all wage earners the benefits of organization. it would make for rapid and certain compensation for price movements. it would prevent wage reductions merely because of the poverty of any group. nevertheless, if the analysis of distribution made earlier in the book is substantially correct, the answer to the question at the head of this section must be that there would be no very compelling tendency for distribution to result justly, under the enforcement of the wage principles so far proposed. the distributive result would still depend largely upon the reality and intensity of industrial competition, upon the strength, activity, and foresightedness of the wage earners' organizations, upon the will and spirit of the directors of industry, and upon the quality and liveness of public opinion. that admission can be made, even though it is believed that under the suggested principles the outcome of distribution would be nearer the desired outcome than it is at present; and that there would be a clearer perception of the public interest in the outcome of distribution than at present. .--if a measure could be devised which would help to bring about the desired distributive outcome, without greatly weakening in some other direction the policy as already conceived, such a measure would be a most worth-while addition to the policy. it is possible to discern clearly what the scope and form of such a measure must be. firstly: such a measure should not single out the profits of particular enterprises for division or transfer to the wage earners, if the profits of these particular enterprises are in excess of what is conceived to be a just profit level for industry as a whole. for, in the first place, if the principle of standardization is enforced throughout industry, the excess profits of particular enterprises may frequently be the result of superior business ability, and to take them away would be to discourage the development and use of that ability. and, in the second place, even if it is acknowledged that this is not the true explanation of the great profits of very many enterprises, but that these are accounted for rather by the possession of special privileges or the weakness of competition, nevertheless, to adopt a policy under which these profits are transferred to the wage earners would lead to wastefulness and extravagance in business operation. and lastly, there is the fact that to make wages in any enterprise contingent upon the profit returns of that enterprise is contrary to the ordinary trade union policy. nothing in this conclusion is meant to imply that the wage earners should not be free to enter into wage agreements calling for more than the standard wage. or that profit sharing arrangements should not be permitted--on the contrary, such arrangements should be encouraged, provided the standard wage and the right of the wage earners' organization to be fully represented in such arrangements are not brought into question. the conclusion just reached is meant to apply also in the opposite case--that is, in the case of the profits of particular enterprises falling below the level defined as just and sound industry as a whole. the wages of the workers engaged in these enterprises should not, for that reason, be reduced. this conclusion, it is believed, is amply explained by what has been written in various other connections. secondly: even if almost all or all of the enterprises engaged in a particular industry should be in receipt of profits considerably in excess of what is conceived to be a fair profit return for industry as a whole, no attempt should be made to transfer the extra profits to the wage earners engaged in it by increasing their wages. or to state the matter so as to include both this case and its opposite, the wages in any particular industry should not be adjusted by reference to the profits in that industry. it is clear that here we are upon difficult and very hotly disputed ground. at present, wages in different industries or occupations are not settled in accordance with any principle which includes them all and which is the basis of an ordered scheme of wage relationship. the existence of a very high profits return throughout a particular industry is an almost prima facie justification for a wage demand on the part of the wage earners employed in it. so too in the opposite case. and as long as wages are settled, as at present, it must be so; for the wage earners in each industry or occupation are dependent upon their own activity to make good their claims as against the other participants in distribution. it is this very state of affairs, however, that it is sought to supersede. in an earlier chapter it was argued that in order to maintain industrial peace, wages in different industries and occupations will have to be brought into relation with each other, which relation should rest upon defined principle. it is plain that, if any other principle were also to be adopted, under which wages in particular industries were adjusted by reference to the profits return in these industries, that scheme of relationship would be constantly disturbed. if wages in particular industries were adjusted with reference to the profits return in those industries, the result would be a series of uncoördinated wage movements in different parts of the industrial field, and the re-creation of a state of affairs not much different from the present. then, too, if wages were to be adjusted with reference to the profits return in particular industries, the method that has been advocated of settling upon a criterion of just profits would not be suitable. a separate mark of fair profits would have to be set up for each industry; for different industries involve different degrees of risk and have different initial periods of little or no profits. what might correctly be considered an excessive profit for one industry might be but a fair profit for another. the task of setting up different criteria for the different industries would be extremely delicate, if it were possible at all. the same conclusion holds true in the opposite case wherein the profits in most all or all of the enterprises engaged in a particular industry are considerably below what is conceived as a fair profits return for industry as a whole. cases will arise in which it may be to the interest of the wage earners in particular industries to accept wage reductions, because the industry is doing poorly. in such cases, however, the wage earners may be expected to agree--perhaps, only after a while--to wage reduction, in the course of wage bargaining. if, however, the wage earners will not agree that their interests are served by reduction, it will probably be sound policy to back them up. it must be admitted that this conclusion as to the inadvisability of adjusting wages by reference to the profits return of particular industries is not set down without hesitation. it is plain that if that idea is to be rejected, the policy of wage settlement as a whole must give some other guarantee of distributive justice to the wage earners. and, indeed, if after a certain period of operation and education it was found that very large profits were accruing steadily in certain industries, and if it did not seem likely that these profits would be reduced to what is conceived to be a fair level either by the forces of competition or public opinion, it might be found wiser to pursue the opposite course--that is, grant wage increases in those industries even at the risk of breaking down the scheme of wage relationship. much will depend upon the way in which the employers respond to the purposes embodied in the policy of wage settlement. and upon the success of the wage earners and employers in reaching, by collective bargaining, agreements satisfactory to both. justice w. jethro brown of the industrial court of south australia has stated the problem with great clearness. he writes, "with respect to such an issue, one is on the horns of a dilemma. ( ) if unusually high profits are being made in an industry, ought not the employees to have a right to share therein? ( ) if one does award high rates of wages, is not one inviting discontent amongst other classes of workers in allied industries or industries generally? employees are so apt to judge themselves well or ill treated by a comparison of nominal wages without any reference to conditions of industry. in various judgments i have held that it would be quite permissible, if not appropriate, for the court to take into consideration the fact that an industry is prosperous. on the other hand, as a matter of practice i have tried to work towards an ordered scheme of wages throughout the industry of the community as a whole."[ ] if the above conclusions are accepted, it must be agreed that the scope of any measure designed to help in the attainment of the desired distributive outcome must be the whole field of industrial enterprise to which the policy of wage settlement applies. the question that remains is, whether it is possible to devise a principle of wage settlement by which wages as a whole can be adjusted by reference to the profit situation in industry as a whole. that is to say, whether any measure can be elaborated by which all wages could be adjusted, according as profits in industry as a whole exceeded, approximated, or fell below the profits level that is taken to mark just and sound distribution of the product of industry. .--it is plain that if the measure is of such a character that no great harm can result from the possible error involved in the process of calculation, it can be adopted with less hesitation than if the opposite were the case. that is one of the considerations prompting the following proposals. let us presume, in order that the proposals may be put in definite form, that the profits return for industry as a whole which is agreed upon as just is a per cent. return. the next step would be the invention of some method by which the profits return of industry as a whole at any given time can be measured. this would be a matter of considerable difficulty; yet it is, in my opinion, not beyond the range of practical attainment.[ ] the following method, for example, might not be too unsatisfactory. let a certain number of enterprises be selected in each industry which comes within the field of wage regulation. the selections should be representative of the industry. if there is a variety of types of enterprises within the industry viewed from the standpoint of productive efficiency, the selected enterprises should tend to represent the more efficient sections of the industry. then a valuation of these enterprises should be made. a standardized method should then be devised for keeping account of the profits of these selected enterprises. that might necessitate the inauguration of standard methods of accounting throughout all industry--which is a result to be favored. the profits return from the selected enterprises in all industries should be combined into an index number of profits. possibly, in making up the index number, the figures for each industry should be weighted according to the number of wage earners employed in the industry. the resulting weighted average would be a reliable record of the profits return throughout industry at the particular time. the statistical method just described, however, is meant rather in the nature of a suggestion than as a declaration that it is the best method. suppose the index number of profits so calculated for a given period of time proves to be, for example, per cent.-- per cent. higher than the approved level of profits. on the basis of this profit showing, the wages of all classes of wage earners could be increased for the subsequent period, with some hope of effecting a transfer to the wage earners of at least part of the product of industry represented by the per cent. extra profit. that is to say, that whenever the index of profits showed a profits return in excess of this conceived just return, wages throughout industry should be increased to such an extent as is calculated to bring the profits return down to the approved level. whenever the index of profits showed a profits return approximately equal to or less than the approved level, no wage change should be undertaken. for if the profits return was approximately equal to the approved level, it can be concluded that the distributive result is approximately that which is desired. and if the profits return is under the approved level, it would probably be both impracticable and inadvisable to reduce wages throughout the industry. for since no direct control is exercised over profits, the falling of the profits return to a point below the appointed mark of just and sound distribution, would be but the outcome of industrial competition. while it is conceivable, in particular cases, that the community would be better off if the profits return was greater than the return thereby produced, the contrary presumption is more likely to be correct under present conditions. for it is both desirable and likely that the figure that would be set as the mark of just and sound distribution will err on the side of being higher than the profits return required to assure adequate accumulation and investment. .--so much for the basis of the proposed measure. it is desirable to examine briefly its chief advantages and disadvantages. but first note must be taken of another problem that would arise in the attempt to enforce it. if the wages of all classes or groups of wage earners are to be increased when the profits return in industry as a whole is above the approved level, the question arises as to the best way to calculate the wage increases, and the most satisfactory basis for distributing them among the different groups of wage earners. if both of these calculations can be kept simple, it will be a distinct advantage. possibly the most simple and satisfactory way is to determine the absolute amount of the extra profits, and of the total wages bill for the representative enterprises--putting one in terms of a percentage of the other. for example, if it be calculated that the profits of these enterprises in excess of the approved level be one hundred million dollars, and the total wages bill of the same enterprises two billion dollars, the amount of wage increase to be awarded should be stated as per cent. that is, the wage increase to be awarded should total per cent. of the total wages bill. and here the second problem arises. how should this wage increase be distributed among the various groups or classes of labor? it is probable that the most satisfactory method would be to raise the wages of all groups or classes of labor, including those groups whose wages were determined under the living wage policy, by the same absolute amount. this method does not meet all the demands of our previous reasoning regarding wage differentials. it would, however, be the only way to avoid too much complication in the determination of wages for different groups or classes of labor. .--what would be the chief difficulties and disadvantages attendant upon the application of the measure just sketched out? and what are the chief advantages which it gives promise of? these are the questions which now present themselves. first of all, certain difficulties of a practical nature must be faced. for example, there would be difficulty of settling upon a satisfactory method of calculating the profits return of industry. the most satisfactory method of calculation would probably be in the form of a percentage earned upon capital. if that basis of calculation is chosen, however, some method must be decided upon for the measurement of the capital value of all those enterprises, the profits return of which is combined to form the index number of profits. probably the best way of meeting the difficulties would be to have such a capital valuation of these enterprises as has just been completed for the united states railways. and thereafter standard methods of recording new capital investment should be enforced. such an evaluation would appear to be an unwelcome but inevitable preliminary to any attempt to measure and record business earnings. experience has shown the vast labor and large margin of error involved in formal evaluations. under the proposals made in this chapter, however, errors made in the evaluation of particular enterprises would be of no great consequence to these enterprises. only the combined or general profits figure would be used in the course of wage adjustment. second among the difficulties of a practical nature is that which comes from the necessity of defining clearly what is to be considered profits.[ ] clearly the earnings put back into the depreciation account should not be counted as profits. loss or gain from the change in the value of the stock held should not be taken into account. nor should taxes paid before the distribution of dividends be so counted. bonus stock dividends, representing reinvestment out of current earnings should be counted as profits, as well as being recorded as additions to invested capital. capital borrowed from banks should not be considered as capital--and the interest paid on such borrowings should be considered as a business expense. the question of the treatment to be accorded salaries of direction could be settled by reference to arbitrary rules drawn up upon the subject--some allowance being made in the case of partnerships or of businesses operating under private direction to compensate for the salaries of direction that are paid in large incorporated enterprises. thirdly, provision would have to be made for the reconsideration, at stated intervals, of the profits return that is set as the mark of just and sound distribution. thus heed could be taken of any significant changes in the price level, in the conditions of supply and demand for capital, or in any of the other relevant considerations. likewise, provision would have to be made for the periodical revision of the list of enterprises and industries used in the computation of the profits return for industry as a whole. these matters, though vital, must be left without detailed consideration. nevertheless, it is idle to overlook the amount of labor that would be involved in any attempt to keep a record of the profits return in industry. it would be dreary, and of a type demanding specialized knowledge and disinterestedness. furthermore, any such plan would probably have to be put through in the face of the resentment of most business men. that resentment, however, is likely to flash out against any proposals that look forward to securing industrial peace by giving the wage earners a more assured position in industry, and ready access to the facts of business operation. the standpat temper of those business men who argue that their business is entirely their own private concern would make impossible any policy of wage settlement that did not throw the balance of industrial power in their hands. unless they visualize their position in different terms than these, little hope can be entertained that any proposals calling for a record of profits will be supported by them. but then it is the normal rôle of the peace-maker to seek concessions that contestants are not ready to make; to plead general necessity where contestants see only their own; to represent each side to the other in its best light. .--besides these difficulties of a precise and practical kind, certain weaknesses of a more theoretical nature may be urged against the measure. first, it may be argued that since the policy exerts no direct control over profits, there is little reason to believe that profits will be kept down to an approved level. this criticism would or would not be justified by the event, according as industrial competition were effective; according as employers acted up to the purposes and spirit of the policy of wage settlement, and gave the general interest a place alongside of their particular interests; according as government regulation of industry was competently carried out; and lastly, according to the measure in which public opinion made itself felt on the subject. any such plan as the proposed, by clarifying ideas on the subject, would do much in the way of making public opinion more decisive than at present. it would serve to inform the community that wages can be increased without equivalent price increase, whenever the possibility exists. it would provide employers with a code of honor in industrial relations. and lastly, it must be remembered that the alternative to some such policy of wage increase is a system of direct profits control (leaving out of consideration the possibility of more general and fundamental change). it is conceivable that a policy of direct profits control for all industry can be worked out, which would not penalize and discourage productive capacity. but it would be an extraordinarily hard job and would necessitate a detailed study of the facts of each particular industry. no doubt a policy of direct profits control is to be strongly advised in particular cases. as, for example, on the american railways at present, where the rate-making power is in the hands of a public body; or in the case of the english coal mines, where the question of control is comparatively simple, and the occasion for control plain. but as a policy for all industries it would involve, in my opinion, an entirely impracticable amount of regulation, and it would be likely to lessen the effectiveness of production and to lead to the wasteful conduct of industry. therefore, it must be concluded that some such attempt to control profits indirectly as has been proposed--depending upon the forces of competition, trade union activity, public opinion and government regulation--is to be preferred. there is another possible criticism of a theoretical sort. it may be pointed out that it is proposed to increase wages on the basis of data derived from the whole field of industry. and it may be argued, therefore, that the increases undertaken by the reason of the showing of that data may be considerably greater than particular industries could stand, without an increase in the price of their products. on the other hand, they may be considerably less than the increase required in other industries to reduce the profits return to approximately the approved level. as to the first possibility, it is entirely conceivable. a wage movement based upon the profits return from all industries and applied equally to all groups of wage earners might cause price increases in particular industries and possibly temporary dislocation and even some unemployment. such price changes and dislocations, however, are constantly occurring in industry in the absence of any policy of wage settlement, due to the effect of wage increases in one industry on wage movements in other industries. there is little reason to believe that the measure advocated will add considerably to the frequency of their occurrence. it might in one respect serve to lessen the extent of such disturbances. it might make less frequent the recurrence of wage demands, originating in particular industries because of high profits in these industries, and spreading over a large part of the field of industry. for, as has been emphasized, organized groups of wage earners will not accept passively a change for the worse in their position in the economic scale. finally, there is a safeguard in the fact that no wage increase need occur in any industry except upon the demand of the wage earners in that industry. joint discussion might make it clear that wage increases could not be well afforded in particular industries, and joint agreement reached upon that fact. the self-interest of the wage earners, here as elsewhere, would prove to be some sort of a check upon unwise wage increases. as to the second possibility--that wage increases undertaken on the showing of data derived from all industries may be considerably less than the increases required in particular industries to bring down the profits return in those industries to the approved level--that, too, is entirely conceivable. but against this disadvantage must be weighed those which would be attendant upon any measure by which wages in particular industries are adjusted by reference to the profits return in those industries, which subject has already been considered. the fact must be accepted. in any plan such as the one proposed, faith would have to be put in the power of indirect influences to keep the profits return in particular industries from greatly and consistently exceeding the approved level. by way of conclusion, it may be made clear that any such plan as the proposed would call for the assent of the wage earners to the doctrine that, when the profits return in particular industries is greatly in excess of the approved level for industry as a whole, the community in general have the leading claim to those profits. it is plain that union assent to that doctrine would be forthcoming only if the community made effective its claims. the attainment of a just distributive outcome--one based upon considerations of the general interest--will be essential to the success of any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. footnotes: [ ] m. b. hammond, "wage boards in australia," _quarterly journal of economics_, november, , february, march, . e. aves, "report on wage boards and industrial and conciliation acts of australia and new zealand" ( ). [ ] letter dated march , . [ ] see pages - , this chapter, for a further consideration of this question. [ ] w. j. ashley, in an article in the _economic journal_, december, , entitled "the statistical measurement of profit," reveals the many serious problems involved in the measurement of profit--when no prior preparation (such as the compulsory standardization of methods of accountancy) has been undertaken. the question of profit measurement he aptly states as that of finding out "what the suppliers of capital to business concerns get in the long run over and above the capital they actually put in them" (page ). unless prior preparation is undertaken for the purpose in hand, it is probable that his conclusion does not overstate the difficulties much, if at all. he writes, "modern 'trust finance'--the finance of great new industrial combinations, creates difficulties in the way of gain statistics that will tax the highest skill of the economist and accountant--if, indeed, they are not insuperable" (page ). there would appear to be no good reason, however, why prior preparation, such as is suggested, could not be undertaken; nor would that task be one of extreme difficulty. chapter xiii--a concept of industrial peace section . the hope for industrial peace in the united states.--section . a policy of wage settlement composed out of the principles already set forth.--section . what results might be expected from the adoption of these principles as a policy?--section . the matter of economic security for the wage earners likely to be important for industrial peace. hardly considered in this book. the question has been presented to the kansas court of industrial relations.--section . certain new ideas concerning industrial relationship have come to stay. they indicate the probable current of future change. .--the hope that a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace may be adopted by consent, rests upon the supposition that there exists in the united states to-day a considerable measure of agreement upon a practicable ideal of industrial society. to put the matter more expressly, if half of the community sincerely believed in a policy of the greatest possible freedom of individual enterprise, and the other half were ardent believers in the desirability of a socialist state, the hope of the adoption of a policy of wage settlement would be fatuous. it may seem to many that this necessary measure of agreement upon a practicable ideal of industrial society does not exist in the united states to-day. and, therefore, that the process of debate and conflict in industrial affairs,--as we know it to-day--must continue for a much longer time before the country will be ready to agree upon any policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. in short, that more heads must be broken in order that reasonableness and light may enter into them. still, various reflections should encourage us to go ahead in the search for some policy of wage adjustment for which the necessary general consent can be won. first of all, there is the fact that there is urgent need for industrial peace; that great suffering, and the constant disruption of industry, will be an accompaniment of a continuation of industrial conflict. and it is essential to the settlement of most economic issues, as well as political, that the members of a society do take heed of the needs of the society. it is the origin and justification of the habit of political compromise. secondly, it is not easy after all to be cocksure as to what men will or will not agree to until they are directly faced with the task of decision. it is not easy to tell at what point in the conflict of "opposite convictions" an end may be made of the conflict.[ ] it is usual that doubt be present in many men's minds when a grave decision is made by society. the constitution of the united states was adopted in the midst of a struggle of ideas, so violent that all agreement seemed to be precluded. the chances of agreement can rarely be certainly known until all possible grounds of agreement are explored. thirdly, the belief that the continued battle of ideas will ultimately lead to agreement, and eventuate into policy is an optimistic belief which is not always supported by the facts. sometimes, indeed, it does, as in the case of woman suffrage. sometimes, however, it ends in the resort to force. and frequently not even the resort to force produces a solution of the difficulty. the conflict goes on even after the use of open force is surrendered. lastly, it is possible, and indeed necessary so to frame policy, that even while it maintains peace and produces coöperation between conflicting interests and ideas, it does not stereotype forever the terms of peace and coöperation. agreement is often obtained for an economic or political policy in the knowledge that it can be changed if different ideas come to prevail. a policy of wage adjustment, like any other measure, would have to be always subject to reconsideration and amendment. indeed, it might carry provision in itself for such reconsideration; it might be adopted as an experiment for a definite period of years. .--in the preceding chapters the main problems that must arise in the course of any attempt to settle wages by official authority have been discussed. these problems were considered with reference to the possible formulation of a satisfactory policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. that policy may now be presented as a whole. only in that way, indeed, can the significance of any particular principle of settlement be understood. it is presumed that whatever policy is put into force will be administered by a government agency, with and by the consent and support of both the wage earners and the employers. it is also presumed that the method of collective bargaining is accepted throughout industry. indeed, the existence of organized joint boards or councils of wage earners and employers would be almost essential to the success of any policy. the central constituted agency for the administration of the policy should be a commission or court. the policy should then provide that whenever a dispute arises incidental to the settlement of wages in any industry included within the scope of the policy, which dispute is not settled by the ordinary course of collective bargaining, it should be referred to this commission or court. all sides should be permitted to submit evidence bearing upon the case. the court or commission should have its own expert staff, and its own record and statistical office; and it should be its duty to know the wage situation throughout industry.[ ] every possible effort should be made by the commission or court to render judgment without litigation. the commission or court should give in full the principles and the data upon which it bases its decisions. the wage policy of the commission or court should rest upon the following principles: _first_--the principle of standardization should be applied throughout industry. wages should be standardized by occupations, despite minor differences in the character of the work performed by the same occupational group, or in the conditions under which the work is performed. standard rates should be understood to be merely minimum rates; and the principle of standardization should be construed so as to permit of all methods of wage payment. when the introduction of standardization into a hitherto unstandardized industry or occupation is deemed to involve the possibility of doing more injury to certain sections of the wage earners and employers affected than it promises definite good, the application of the principle should be limited or varied so as to avoid producing such injury. differences in the natural advantages possessed by various enterprises in the same industry, and relatively great and permanent differences in the cost of living in different localities--these are likely to be the chief grounds for limitation or variation in the application of the principle. the exceptions or variations admitted on these grounds would vary greatly in character and extent no doubt. it is to be expected that they would be numerous. under certain conditions it might also prove advisable to grant "nominal variations" of the standard wage. such "nominal variations" would ordinarily be established to compensate for differences of conditions of work governing output in piece-working trades, when such differences of conditions must be accepted as permanent, as in coal mining; or to cover payment in kind or to make up for irregularity of employment. the process of wage standardization should be regarded as an independent process, as a process logically prior to the other principles of wage settlement (though they may all be applied at the same time). that is to say, the determination of the level of standardization should be fixed upon independently of all other principles of wage settlement. the principal data to be taken into consideration when fixing the level of standardization should be the actual variety of wage rates in the industry or occupation in question. wherein the scale of actually existing wage rates, the level of standardization is set will be a matter of judgment and compromise. usually the correct level will be at the higher range of the wage rates already being paid. if any of the existing wage rates in an industry or occupation are higher than the level of standardization which is fixed, the higher rates should ordinarily not be lowered to the level of standardization. _secondly_--the wages of those groups of wage earners who are at the bottom of the industrial scale should be regulated upon the living wage principle. that is to say, the policy of wage settlement for these groups should represent a consistent effort to secure to them a wage at least sufficient to permit them to satisfy their "normal and reasonable needs." these needs must be interpreted in the light of and by direct comparison with the standard of life of the wage earners in general, and of the middle classes in the community. in the determination of the living wage, the existing level of wages for the groups in question will also be an important consideration. the declared living wage--that wage which it is sought to secure for all industrial workers--should be assessed upon a different basis for male and female workers; but if, in particular cases, it is deemed best to safeguard the interests of male workers, or to keep women out of particular industries, this rule could be departed from in any one of a number of suggested ways. the most important of these possible departures from the ordinary basis of assessment is the enforcement of the same wage rates for men and women when they are employed upon the same work. the living wage in any industry should be a standard wage, subject to all the qualifications and limitations of other standard wage rates. the success of the living wage policy will depend in a great degree upon the good judgment with which it is adapted to the conditions obtaining in each individual industry or occupation in which it is enforced. therefore, the court or commission should proceed upon the advice of the joint boards or councils concerned. it should be the function of each joint council to give definite advice to the central authority upon every feature of the policy to be pursued in its field--particularly upon the subject of the wages to be prescribed. the central authority should give no ruling in any industry until after the report of the joint council of that industry. each joint council should have the further duty of observing and reporting upon the effect of the living wage policy in its industry or occupation. the living wage policy should be administered in such a way as to spread among the wage earners, the employers, and the public an understanding of the hope and purpose it embodies and a clear knowledge of the factors which will govern its success. not the least of which factors will be the determination of all grades of wage earners to make good use of whatever new measure of participation in industry they may secure; and the recognition by the employers that the standard of life of their workers is one of their important concerns. _thirdly_--the wages of all groups of wage earners not included in the scope of the living wage policy should be settled by reference to principles which apply equally to them all. the wage decisions, at the inauguration of the policy, must rest upon the acceptance and protection of existing wage levels, and of existing wage relationships. however, as cases arise, which bring up the question of the relative positions on the wage scale of the workers engaged in different industries and occupations (and such cases will arise constantly), they should be settled as part of a general process of building up in industry an ordered scheme of wage relationship. this scheme should rest upon defined principles. these principles should be two in number. they were set forth, both as theoretical and applied doctrines under the titles of the "principle of the unity of the wage income and of the wage earners," and the "principle of extra reward." wage awards for different industries and occupations should be constantly related to each other. the underlying emphasis in the whole series of awards for different industries and occupations should be that the wages of each group are what they are, more because the total wage income is what it is than because of the special type of work performed by any group. the same wage should be paid throughout industry for different kinds of work which require approximately the same human qualities and which make approximately the same demands upon the individual. the wage differentials that are established should be such as will make it reasonably certain that industry will be provided with at least the existing proportion of the more skilled grades of labor, and to make it reasonably certain also that the more arduous, dangerous, irregular, and disagreeable work will command the service of as much labor as at present. the hopes for the establishment of any scheme of wage relationship will be realized or not, according as particular groups of wage earners are willing to accept a wage that may be less than that which they might secure by the continued use of their own group strength. this last remark applies in particular to those groups of wage earners, whose economic position, as organized groups, is very strong by virtue of the fact that the work they perform is essential to the economic existence of the whole community--such, for example, as the railway men, the bank clerks, the printers, and the miners. _fourthly_--with a view to preventing those changes in the distributive situation which may result from price movements, and which are undesirable--judged by reference to the distributive outcome that is sought--all wages including those prescribed under the living wage policy should be promptly adjusted to movements in the general price level. the measure of price change should be the movement of the index number of prices of all the important commodities produced within the country--the index number to be so weighted as to give a defined importance ( per cent. was suggested) to the prices of those classes of foodstuffs, clothing, housing accommodation, and other commodities upon which the wage earners spend a very great part of their income. the policy of adjustment to be pursued in times of rising and falling prices and the amount of wage adjustment to be undertaken in response to price movements of different degrees and character--in short, all the rules by which the adjustment of wages to price movements should be carried out--were considered, at some length, in several of the earlier chapters, and can hardly be produced satisfactorily in summary form. special care should be taken to protect the standard of life of the least favorably placed groups of wage earners during periods of a rising price level. _fifthly_--in order to bring about such a distributive outcome as will recommend the policy of wage settlement to the wage earners and to the community in general, some profits test should be devised. this profits test should be used to mark and measure the distributive situation in industry as a whole, indicating, as it will, the share in the product of industry that is taking the form of profits. whenever the general range of profits in industry exceeds that profits return which is conceived to be just and sound, the wages of all groups of workers should be increased in an attempt to transfer the extra profits to the wage earners. the calculation of the wage increase to be awarded, when the profits test shows that the profits return in industry as a whole is greater than that conceived to be a fair return, and the basis of distribution of this wage increase among the various groups of wage earners, were dealt with at some length and cannot be described more summarily. in order to apply any profits test, such as the suggested one, it would probably be necessary to enforce standardized accounting methods throughout industry. the most satisfactory policy would not attempt any direct control of profits. nor would it make provision for the transfer of the extra profits that may be earned by particular enterprises or industries to the wage earners of those particular enterprises or industries. the forces of industrial competition, trade union activity, public opinion, and government regulation would have to be depended upon to keep the profits return of industry at approximately the level which may be set as the mark of just and sound distribution. a policy of direct control of profits may, however, be advisable in particular industries or on special occasions. the continued assent of the wage earners to any policy of wage settlement will be largely governed by the success of the community in making good its claim to a large part of the extra profits which may accrue to particular enterprises or industries. _sixthly_--any policy of wage settlement of the type considered above should give encouragement to the organization of labor throughout industry. it would have to make use of joint councils or boards in many ways (there may be some craft joint councils also). the english and australian experience seems to prove that. to quote justice higgins of the commonwealth court of australia, "the system of arbitrations adopted by the act is based on unionism. indeed, without unions, it is hard to conceive how arbitration could be worked."[ ] still, once a dispute has come up before the central authority, the final power to render decisions should rest intact in its hands. all organizations of wage earners or employers should be compelled (if necessary) to agree to a policy of open membership. such a policy of open membership should suffice to prevent monopolistic action on the part of the union in any industry or trade.[ ] it would also be well if shop rules could be brought within the field of public supervision, but that may prove impracticable. finally, it may be said that no part of the policy should interfere with the development of profit-sharing plans--provided such plans are the product of joint agreement between the employers and the workers engaging in them; and if the workers immediately concerned so desire, the labor organizations should be given full representation in the arrangements. nor, indeed, should it discourage any movement towards the participation of the workers in the control of industry, whatever the scope of such participation. on the contrary, by creating mutual confidence between the wage earners and the directors of industry, and by giving both the wage earners and the employers training in the art of mutual agreement, it should prepare the way for the growth of such participation. these principles of wage settlement would, it is believed, form a sound and forward looking policy of wage settlement for industrial peace. nevertheless, they are not put forward with the idea that they, or any similar set of principles for the settlement of wages, would be workable in practice without many hitches, and without the need for constant adaptation to the facts encountered. nor without a suspicion of the hard blows and unexpected eventualities which fate usually has in store for fine proposals. .--ultimately, of course, behind any proposals for industrial peace there is a striving to catch sight of a future industrial society more content, more generous and creative than that of the present time. to the ordinary observer no such ultimate question appears to be involved in an ordinary wages dispute. yet it is there. the trade union leader fighting for a wage increase does not always see his demand as a plain group claim for greater reward; it frequently appears as an act of justice to his class, a step towards improving their position and power in industrial society. to the employer more often the struggle is merely to protect his profits. but beyond that in many cases there is a fear lest industrial growth and extension be obstructed. any policy of wage settlement that is more than a weakly supported truce must throw some rays of hope into the future. what type of future industrial society may be envisaged if any principles of wage settlement similar in substance to those discussed in this book should be adopted? what suggestions for the future are contained in them? it is not easy to see. only a few features of the future can be discerned and those sketchily. industry would still be carried on in the main by private enterprise and competitive activity. particular industries, as for example, the railroads, may become government owned or government operated enterprises. but even so, wages in those industries would be, in all probability, determined by the same principle as wages in other industries, and by the same agency. the function of capital accumulation would still be a private function. the tasks of industrial direction would still be carried out by the will of those who owned industry; although, in many industries the power and duty of deciding some of the important questions of direction, especially those which affect the wage earners most directly, might be in the hands of a council or board on which the wage earners are strongly represented. it may be hoped that all wage earners, except those judged sub-ordinary, would be in receipt of a wage at least sufficient to enable them to maintain themselves (and in the case of men, their family) at a standard of life which did not compare too unfavorably with the standard of life of the rest of the community. by virtue of this, the way would be opened for even the lowest grades of the wage earners to take advantage of the opportunities that are provided for physical and mental life and education. the ideal would be to ensure that the whole of the industrial population had that original grant of health, security, and hope which is required to give reality to the idea of equality of opportunity. it is vain, perhaps, to attempt to predict whether the level of production throughout industry would rise or fall; for that will be affected in a decisive measure by influences over which the policy of wage settlement will have little or no control. the proposals made would give adequate encouragement to the accumulation of capital, and to the carrying out of business ventures. it would succeed also, it may be hoped, in securing the active interest of the wage earners in a high level of production, by bringing about such a distributive outcome as appears just to the wage earners, and by giving adequate expression to the aspirations of the wage earners. in an industrial system, largely dominated by the single motive of personal gain, it is not likely that any one group or class will respond to a general need for high production unless its interests are thereby directly served. if the policy adopted brought about a broadening of the motives on which the system rests and operates, there is much ground for the belief that the level of production would be favorably affected. however, as was said above, the possibility of such a result will be largely governed by influences outside of the present field of study. there remain the questions of the distribution of wealth and of opportunity. here, also, any conclusions that are ventured must rest upon an insufficient knowledge of the events which will govern the future. one of the chief requirements that proposals made were designed to satisfy is the attainment of such a distributive outcome as may be judged to be both just and sound--weighing all relevant considerations. yet it would probably be over-optimistic to believe that the result would satisfy the intention. for all that, the general desire for a high level of production will largely depend upon the fulfillment of that intention. the wage earners will only continue to subscribe to a doctrine of high production if they trust to the action of the distributive mechanism to bring them a fair share of the resulting product. here we are at the very storm center of socialist economics. the question is, to what extent, as a matter of fact, do the wage earners share in the result of increased productive efficiency? to that question, the policy of wage settlement must furnish a satisfactory answer--though, of course, no answer will be satisfactory to all men. the question of the prospective distribution of wealth, however, can hardly be considered apart from the question of the future course of growth in population. even if the wage earners do receive that share of the product of industry which represents a just and sound distributive outcome, will that mean a gradual evolution of higher permanent standards of living among the poor, and give them a fair start in the struggle for opportunity? or will it mean but a greater rate of increase in population, such as will more than keep pace with the ability of our natural resources and the advances in production and invention to provide the basis of a rising standard of life for all the population? in the latter case, groups will remain at the bottom of the industrial scale whose economic position will be so unfavorable under any social arrangements as to prevent the individual members of these groups to fairly develop and test their natural ability. in which case the handicap of inequality would be very real. the nineteenth century has left us with a hopeful outlook in regard to the possibility of maintaining a progressive standard of living throughout the community; but the events, purposes, and habits which will determine the outcome are too many, and their relative influence is too indeterminate to warrant any certain predictions. however, even if the menace of population is avoided, even if the general level of production is raised, and if, besides, the distributive outcome laid down as a goal for the policy of wage settlement is attained, nevertheless, there would remain a considerable measure of inequality of wealth. for, it is to be anticipated, that in the course of the development of our industrial organization, the amount of invested capital relative to the number of wage earners will grow. this means that the absolute amount of the product of industry which takes the form of profits will increase, even if the relative share does not. as professor taussig has written, "in general, the very forces which make the total income of society high and the general rate of wages high cause the proportion of income which forms return on capital to be large."[ ] and any continued increase in the absolute amount of the product of industry taking the form of profits will be likely to lead to a considerable measure of inequality of wealth; unless the amount of accumulation and investment on the part of the wage earners is largely increased. so much for the question of the distribution of wealth. is it possible to venture any definite conclusions, at all, regarding the distribution of opportunity? the idea of equality of opportunity is not an easy one to define in terms of facts. it can be said that it would be realized, in the economic sphere, if such economic conditions prevail, as gave all individuals an approximately equal chance to follow their inclinations, and to make whatever use of their natural abilities they desire. if that definition is near the heart of the matter, it is evident that in a society in which there is considerable inequality of wealth it will not be possible to secure equality of opportunity. as mr. tawney has remarked, "talent and energy can create opportunity. but property need only wait for it." under almost all circumstances there is a tendency for the distribution of opportunity to conform to the distribution of wealth. still it is not to be concluded that this tendency is unconditional. if it proves possible to secure to every industrial family (except perhaps the most incapable) such a minimum standard of economic life, and such a degree of economic security as will bring it about that these families are not gravely handicapped in their efforts to utilize the existing opportunities for education and for economic advancement, an important step towards equality of opportunity will have been accomplished. it is true that a small section of the population will be strongly favored from the start. but, in an environment which encourages individual effort, the most important step in the process of securing equality of opportunity is to get rid of the serious obstacles to the development and active use of the natural ability of those born low in the industrial order. .--one important factor in industrial peace, which might well be given consideration in the formulation of a policy of wage settlement for industrial peace, has received but scant mention in this effort to formulate the terms of policy. it is the question of economic security for the wage earners. it is argued by some students of our industrial troubles that the fundamental desire of most workers is not for advancement, or even for high wages, but rather for secure and steady employment at customary rates. that this desire is often uppermost in the struggles of individuals and organizations is undoubtedly true; though the relative ease with which work was to be found in normal times in the united states has prevented the question of insecurity from being as acute a problem as in great britain, for example. the principles of wage settlement that have been put forward contain but one measure which might prove useful in an attempt to modify the insecurity of the wage earner in a modern industrial community. they provide for the establishment of joint boards or councils in each industry which are intended to have those phases of industrial activity which effect the welfare of the wage earners under constant observation. these councils might conceivably work out plans in different industries intended to steady the employment of the wage earners, and methods of insurance against the worst vicissitudes of their employment. in the pottery trade of england, for example, the industrial council has been giving consideration to the question of an unemployment insurance fund for the industry. the possibilities of coöperation between employers and employed in that direction are genuine. the realization of any such plans will depend, of course, upon the growth of mutual trust, and upon the ability of all parties to work for a common end. they require that every important business man and labor leader be a statesman in the sphere of business. in the act establishing the kansas court of industrial relations, and governing its operations, there is a provision which gives the court a power which might enable it to deal with the question of irregularity of industrial activity. it is new in the history of industrial regulation in this country. it provides that the establishments covered by the act "shall be operated with reasonable continuity and efficiency in order that the people of this state may live in peace and security and be supplied with the necessaries of life"; it makes it unlawful for any establishment "wilfully to limit or cease operations for the purpose of limiting production or transportation or to affect prices for the purpose of avoiding any of the provisions of the act."[ ] it further provides that such industries as are affected by changes in seasons, market conditions or other conditions inherent in the business may apply to the court for an order fixing rules and practices to govern its operations. this provision may mean a great deal or very little, according as the court and the higher courts interpret the idea of "reasonable continuity." if it is taken to mean simply that the enterprises covered by the act should not limit production in accordance with some agreement with each other in order to increase profits, or to fight the unions, it will have little or no importance as regards the question of security of employment. and that is probably the interpretation that will be given to it. it will be hardly possible to work out a plan for regularity of operation by mandate of a court, and under penalty. such rules and practices as the court may lay down will probably take cognizance of the laws of the market which ordinarily govern business operations. to rule otherwise would mean embarking upon a comprehensive reform of business operations; it would necessitate the development of some other gauge of business operation than business profits. only one case which has come before the court has brought up this question of continuity of operation. the court investigated a complaint that the flour mills at topeka were reducing production. it found that the mills were running at sixty per cent. capacity; and that the cause of this reduced operation was a falling off in the flour market, due to world-wide economic changes beyond the control of the industry and the court. the court found this limitation of production not unreasonable. it gave no sign of making any radical use of its powers to control the regularity of production, nor of interfering with the ordinary processes of business operation. this policy it tempered with concern for the workers--suggesting to the millers that they put their "skilled and faithful" employees on a monthly pay system. it appointed a committee to draw up rules and regulations to be observed in the operation of the industry, and to keep it informed. .--in the coming years there will take place in the united states much controversy and a great variety of experiments in wage settlement. to the realists of all parties, this course of controversy and experimentation will appear to be only a struggle for power. to the rest, it may appear that there are ideas at work; ideas springing partly from the example of political change, and partly from the fact that the industrial world has undergone such a rapid revolution. it is impossible to predict the ideas which will have the most abiding force. it is impossible even to assert that society will make a satisfactory choice among them. in the present confusion of counsel, two relatively new ideas, in particular, appear to me to be likely to endure and be accepted by society. the first is the idea that the welfare of the wage earners in each particular industry is one of the major questions in the conduct of that industry; and that the wage earners should participate effectively in those activities of direction by which the conditions of labor are determined. the second idea is that the whole body of wage earners in industry should possess the means of checking the action of private enterprise, when they can prove clearly that the methods of production that are being pursued are wasteful either of human or of material resources. an example of such a protest is that of the english coal miners against the organization of their industry--which was one of the grounds for the appointment of the coal commission. it would not appear to be impossible to reconcile the action of private investment and private enterprise with this concept of the right of the wage earners to exert control over the policy of production, in so far as they can establish the fact that human or material resources are not being well applied--the general interest being the test. the main current of industrial change will be, in my opinion, in the direction indicated by these two ideas. and change in that general direction is, it seems to me, essential to the peaceful conduct of industry, for only in some such way will a sense of common interest be established--which sense alone can hold together an undertaking so dependent upon a division of function as is modern industry. through all changes, it will remain true that effective production depends upon the willingness to work hard for the sake of working well, and upon the existence of strong habits of self-dependence. footnotes: [ ] "as law embodies beliefs that have triumphed in the battle of ideas, and have then translated themselves into action, while there is still doubt, while opposite convictions still keep a battle front against each other, the time for law has not yet come; the notion destined to prevail is not yet entitled to the field," "law and the court," address by justice oliver wendell holmes, jr., before the harvard law school association. [ ] in this matter the kansas industrial court law sets a good example by authorizing the court to build up a staff of accountants, engineers and such other experts as it may need for the proper conduct of its operations. [ ] h. b. higgins, "a new province for law and order," _harvard law review_, march, , page . [ ] "where the union admits all qualified workers to membership, under reasonable conditions, such a rule cannot become the basis of monopoly." u. s. ind. comm'n. report ( ), vol. i, page . report signed by commissioners manly, walsh, lennon o'connell and garretson. [ ] f. w. taussig, "principles of economics," vol. ii, page . revised ed. [ ] sections and act creating court of industrial relations, kansas, . the toilers of the field by richard jefferies author of "the gamekeeper at home," etc. etc. [illustration: the silver library] _new impression_ longmans, green, and co. paternoster row, london new york and bombay _all rights reserved_ [illustration: richard jefferies. _from the bust by miss margaret thomas, in salisbury cathedral._ _photographed by mr. owen, salisbury._] _bibliographical note._ _first edition, october ._ _reprinted, november and january ._ _issued in silver library, november ._ _reprinted, june ._ preface. the first and larger part of this volume, from which it takes its name, consists of papers which will be new to the large majority of readers of richard jefferies' works. the five entitled, "the farmer at home," "the labourer's daily life," "field-faring women," "an english homestead," and "john smith's shanty," appeared in _fraser's magazine_ in , long before jefferies had gained any portion of that fame which was so long in coming, and came in full measure too late. of the three letters to the _times_, written in , one was republished, with the permission of mrs. jefferies, in an appendix to mr. walter besant's "eulogy of richard jefferies." it finds its natural place in this volume with the other papers, which give so clear a picture of the life of all classes of the cultivators of the soil in the early seventies. the "true tale of the wiltshire labourer" has never previously been published, and is included in this volume by the kind permission of mr. g. h. harmer of the _wilts and gloucestershire standard_, for which paper it was written when jefferies was on its staff, but for some reason was never used. all the papers in part ii. have appeared in _longman's magazine_, since jefferies' death, and though they are with one exception very slight, yet they are all characteristic specimens of his work. from internal evidence it appears certain that the longest of them, entitled "the coming of summer," was written on june , , and the subsequent days. it contains one or two points of resemblance with the famous "pageant of summer," which appeared in _longman's magazine_ for june . it was perhaps the first study of which that paper is the finished picture. the frontispiece is reproduced by kind permission of mr. j. owen of salisbury, from a photograph taken by him of miss thomas' bust of jefferies in salisbury cathedral. c. j. longman. contents. _part i._ page the farmer at home the labourer's daily life field-faring women an english homestead john smith's shanty wiltshire labourers (letters to the "times") a true tale of the wiltshire labourer _part ii._ the coming of summer the golden-crested wren an extinct race orchis mascula the lions in trafalgar square part i. _the farmer at home._ the new towns, or suburbs which spring up every year in the neighbourhood of london, are all built upon much the same plan. whole streets of houses present exact duplicates of each other, even to the number of steps up to the front door and the position of the scraper. in the country, where a new farmhouse is erected about once in twenty years, the styles of architecture are as varied and as irregular as in town they are prim and uniform. the great mass of farmhouses are old, and some are very picturesque. there was a farmhouse i knew which was almost entitled to be taken as the type of an english rural homestead. it was built at a spot where the open wild down suddenly fell away into rich meadow land. here there was a narrow steep-sided valley, or "combe"--and at the mouth of this, well sheltered on three sides from the north, the east, and north-eastern winds, stood the homestead. a spring arose some way behind, and close to the house widened into a pool which was still further enlarged by means of a dam, forming a small lake of the clearest water. this lake fed a mill-race lower down. the farmyard and rick-barton were a little way up the narrow valley, on one side of which there was a rookery. the house itself was built in the pure elizabethan style; with mullioned windows, and innumerable gables roofed with tiles. nor was it wanting in the traditions of the olden time. this fine old place was the homestead of a large farm comprising some of the best land of the district, both down and meadow. another farmhouse, still used for that purpose, stands upon the wildest part of the down, and is built of flint and concrete. it was erected nearly three hundred years ago, and is of unusual size. the woodwork is all solid black oak, good enough for an earl's mansion. these are specimens of the highest class of farmhouse. immediately beneath them come the houses built in the early part of the present century. they vary in almost every architectural detail, and the materials differ in each county; but the general arrangement is the same. they consist as it were of two distinct houses under one roof. the front is the dwelling-house proper, usually containing a kitchen, sitting-room, and parlour. the back contains the wood-house (coal-house now), the brewhouse--where the beer was brewed, which frequently also had an oven--and, most important of all, the dairy. all this part of the place is paved with stone flags, and the dairy is usually furnished with lattice-work in front of the windows, so that they can be left open to admit the cool air and not thieves. coolness is the great requisite in a dairy, and some gentlemen who make farming a science go to the length of having a fountain of water constantly playing in it. these houses, however, were built before scientific agriculture was thought of. the wood-house contained the wood used for cooking and domestic purposes; for at that date wood was universally used in the country, and coal rarely seen. the wood was of course grown on the farm, for which purpose those wide double mound hedges, now rapidly disappearing, were made. it was considered a good arrangement to devote half-an-acre in some outlying portion of the farm entirely to wood, not only for the fire, but for poles, to make posts and rails, gates, ladders, &c. the coal could not in those days be conveyed so cheaply as it now is by railways. such as was used had to be brought by the slow barges on the canals, or else was fetched by the farmers' waggons direct from the pit-mouth. the teams were not unfrequently absent two days and a night on the journey. in the outlying districts this difficulty in obtaining coal practically restricted the available fuel to wood. now the wood-house is used as much for coal as wood. of course the great stacks of wood--the piles of faggots and logs--were kept outside, generally in the same enclosure as the ricks, only a sufficient number for immediate use being kept under cover. the brewhouse was an important feature when all farmers brewed their own beer and baked their own bread. at present the great majority purchase their beer from the brewers, although some still brew large quantities for the labourers' drinking in harvest time. at a period when comparatively little ready money passed between employer and employed, and the payment for work was made in kind, beer was a matter which required a great deal of the attention of the farmer, and absorbed no little of his time. at this day it is a disputed matter which is cheapest, to buy or to brew beer: at that time there was no question about it. it was indisputably economical to brew. the brewhouse was not necessarily confined to that use; when no brewing was in progress it was often made a kind of second dairy. over these offices was the cheese-room. this was and still is a long, large, and lofty room in which the cheese after being made is taken to dry and harden. it is furnished with a number of shelves upon which the cheeses are arranged, and as no two can be placed one on the other in the early stage of their maturing, much space is required. it is the duty of the dairymaid and her assistant to turn these cheeses every morning--a work requiring some strength. in this part of the house are the servants' rooms. in front of the dairy and brewhouse is a paved court enclosed with a wall, and in this court it was not uncommon to find a well, or hog-tub, for the refuse of the dairy. sometimes, but not often now, the pig-stye is just outside the wall which surrounds the court. in this court, too, the butter is generally churned, under a "skilling" which covers half of it. here also the buckets are washed, and other similar duties performed. the labourers come here to receive their daily allowance of beer. most farmhouses in large arable farms were originally built so as to have a small dairy at the back; though there was a time when the arable farmer never thought of keeping a cow, and butter and cheese were unknown, except as luxuries, in his establishment. this was during the continuance of the corn laws, when everything was sacrificed to the one great object of growing wheat. it was not impossible in those days to find a whole parish (i know of one myself) in which there was not a single cow. now the great object is meat, then it was corn. but at the time when most of the farmhouses were erected, the system of agriculture pursued was a judicious mixture of the dairy and the cornfield, so that very few old farmhouses exist which have not some form of dairy attached. in the corn-growing times, most of the verdant meadows now employed to graze cattle, or for producing hay, were ploughed up. this may be seen by the regular furrows, unmistakable evidences of the plough. when corn declined in price through the influx of foreign produce, the land was again laid down in grass, and most of it continues so till this hour. it might be roughly estimated that england now contains a third more meadow land than in the early part of the present century, notwithstanding the attempt to plough up the downs. we now come to the third class of farmsteads--low thatched buildings, little better than large cottages, and indeed frequently converted into dwellings for labourers. these are generally found on small farms, and in districts where there are a number of small landed proprietors. these freeholders built houses according to their means. in process of time they were bought up by the great landowners, and the farms thrown together, when the houses were used for other purposes. some may still be found, especially in dairy districts. in these the principal part of the house is usually the dairy, which absorbs at least half of the ground floor, and opens on the kitchen, in which the family sit, and in which their food is often cooked. the eaves of the house are low, and there are scarcely any appliances for comfort. the yeomen who originally lived in these places in all respects resembled the labourers with whom they ate and drank and held the most familiar intercourse. their labourers even slept in the same bedrooms as the family. but these men, though they mingled so freely with the labourer, were his worst enemy. the little profit they made was entirely accumulated by careful economy. they were avaricious and penurious to the last degree, and grudged every halfpenny to the labouring man. they were, and the remnant of them still are, the determined opponent of all progress. the interior of some of these cottage-farmsteads, which still exist, is almost dutch-like in simplicity and homeliness. the fireplace is of a vast size, fitted with antique iron dogs for burning wood, and on it swing the irons to sustain the great pot. on each side, right under the chimney, are seats, the ingle-nook of olden times. the chimney itself is very large, being specially built for the purpose of curing sides of bacon by smoking. the chimneypiece is ornamented with a few odd figures in crockery-ware, half-a-dozen old brass candlesticks, and perhaps a snuff-box or tobacco dish. the floor is composed of stone flags--apt to get slimy and damp when the weather is about to change--and the wide chinks between them are filled with hardened dirt. in the centre there is a piece of carpet on which the table stands, but the rest of the room is bare of carpeting, except the hearth-rug. the low window has a seat let into the wall under it. the furniture of the apartment is utilitarian in the strictest sense. there is nothing there for ornament or luxury, or even for ease; only what is absolutely necessary. generally there is a dresser, above which, on shelves, the dishes and plates are arranged. a tall upright eight-day clock, with a brazen face, and an inscription which tells that it was manufactured in a neighbouring village, stands in one corner, and solemnly ticks in its coffin-like panelled case. on each side of the fireplace there is an arm-chair, often cushioned with a fox or badger skin, and a great brazen warming-pan hangs near the door. there is no ceiling properly so called. these old houses were always built with a huge beam, and you can see the boards of the floor above, which are merely whitewashed. a fowling-piece, once a flint-lock, now converted to the percussion cap system, hangs against the beam, and sometimes dried herbs may be seen there too. the use of herbs is, however, going out of date. in the evening when the great logs of wood smoulder upon the enormous hearth and cast flickering shadows on the walls, revealing the cat slumbering in the ingle-nook, and the dog blinking on the rug--when the farmer slowly smokes his long clay pipe with his jug of ale beside him, such an interior might furnish a good subject for a painter. let the artist who wishes to secure such a scene from oblivion set to work speedily, for these things are fast fading away. all these three classes of farmhouse are usually well supplied with vegetables from the garden attached. the garden in fact was, and still is, an object of considerable importance to the farmer, quite as much as the allotment to the labourer. he reckons to receive from it his whole supply of potatoes, cabbages, beans, peas, and other varieties of table vegetables, and salads. these constitute an important item when there is a large family. i do not speak now of the great farmers, although even these set some store by such produce, but the middle class. it is usual in these gardens to grow immense quantities of cabbage of a coarse kind, and also of lettuce, onions, and radishes, all of which are freely given to the men and women working on the place during the harvest. they are, in fact, grown especially for them. at the dinner-hour one or more men of the number, deputed by the rest, come up to the house. one carries the wooden bottles, or small barrels of ale, which are handed out from the dairy. the other repairs to the garden, and pulls up a reasonable quantity of lettuce, onions, or radishes, as the case may be, from the patches indicated to him by the employer. these are then washed in the court by the dairy, where there is almost always a pump, and are then taken out to the men and shared amongst them. these salads make an agreeable addition to the dry bread and cheese, or bacon. the custom is an old one, and much to be commended. it costs the employer next to nothing, and is an element in that goodwill which should exist between him and the labourer. on some farms large quantities of fruit are grown--such as gooseberries, currants, plums, and damsons. most have enough for their own use; some sell a considerable amount. outside the garden is the orchard. some of these orchards are very extensive, even in districts where cider is not the ordinary beverage, and in a good apple year the sale of the apples forms an important item in the peculiar emoluments of the farmer's wife. there are, of course, many districts in which the soil is not adapted to the apple, but as a rule the orchard is an adjunct of the garden. some of the real old english farmsteads possess the crowning delight of a filbert walk, but these are rare now. in fact the introduction of machinery and steam, and the general revolution which has been going on in agriculture, has gone far to sweep away these more pleasant and home-like features of the farm. it becomes daily more and more like a mere official residence, so to speak. the peculiar home-like aspect of a farmhouse is gradually disappearing. the daily life of the middle-class dairy farmer begins at five in the morning. rising about that hour, his first duty is to see that the men have all appeared, and that they are engaged in milking the cows. he breakfasts at six, or half-past, and the whole family have finished breakfast before seven. by this time the day-labourers have come (the milkers are usually hired by the year), and the master has to go out and put them on to their jobs. meantime the dairy is a scene of work and bustle; cheesemaking being in full swing. this is at least superintended, if not partly performed, by the mistress of the house. at larger farms it is the bailiff who rises early and sees that the labourers are properly employed; and the cheesemaking is entrusted to a dairymaid hired at high wages, who often combines with that duty the office of general housekeeper. it was once the practice to rise even earlier than five, but there are not many farmers who do so now. on the arable farm, which is generally much larger, the master has almost always got a bailiff, or head-carter, whom he can trust to see the men set to work. the master is therefore not obliged to come down so soon, except at important seasons. but the ordinary dairy-farm is not large enough to support a bailiff, and the master has to rise himself. the fresh morning air and the exercise give the farmer a tremendous appetite for breakfast. the usual staple food consists of thick rashers of bacon only just "done," so as to retain most of the fat, the surplus of which is carefully caught on slices of bread. the town rasher is crisp, curled, and brown, without a symptom of fat or grease. the farmer's early rasher is to a town eye but half-done, bubbling with grease, and laid on thick slices of bread, also saturated with the gravy. sometimes cold bacon is preferred, but it is almost always very fat. with this he drinks a pint or so of fairly strong beer, and afterwards has a hunch of bread and butter and a cup or two of tea. he is then well fortified for the labour of the morning. this is the common breakfast of the working-farmer, who is as much a labouring man as any cottager on his farm, and requires a quantity of solid food. some, however, who are pretty well off, and have a better idea of the luxuries of the table, regale themselves on collared head, or rolled beef, or ham at breakfast. these hams are usually preserved after a family receipt, and some of them are exquisite. after breakfast the farmer walks round the place, watches the men at work for a few minutes, and gives them instructions, and then settles himself down to some job that requires his immediate superintendence. if it is hay-time he takes a rake and works about the field, knowing full well all the difference that his presence makes. the agricultural labourers, both men and women, are a slow set, never in a hurry; there is none of that bustle characteristic of the town people, even of the lowest class. they take every opportunity of leaning upon the prong-handle, or standing in the shade--they seem to have no idea of time. women are a sore trial to the patience of the agriculturist in a busy time. if you want to understand why, go and ensconce yourself behind a hedge, out of sight but in view of a field in which ten or twelve women are hoeing. by and by a pedlar or a van comes slowly along the turnpike road which runs past the field. at the first sound of footsteps or wheels all the bent backs are straight in an instant, and all the work is at a standstill. they stand staring at the van or tramp for five or six minutes, till the object of attention has passed out of sight. then there is a little hoeing for three or four consecutive minutes. by that time one of them has remembered some little bit of gossip, and stops to tell her nearest fellow-workwoman, and the rest at once pause to listen. after a while they go on again. now another vehicle passes along the road, and the same process of staring has to be gone through once more. if a lady or gentleman pass, the staring is something terrific, and it takes quite ten minutes to discuss all the probabilities as to who they were, and where they were going. this sort of thing goes on all day, so that, in point of fact, they only do half a day's work. the men are not so bad as this; but they never let slip an opportunity for pausing in their work, and even when at work they do it in a slow, dawdling, lack-energy way that is positively irritating to watch. the agriculturist has in consequence plenty to do to keep his eye on them, and in the course of the day he walks over his farm half-a-dozen times at least. very few ordinary working farmers walk much less than ten miles a day on the average, backwards and forwards over the fields. half-past eleven used to be luncheon time, but now it is about twelve, except in harvest, when, as work begins earlier, it is at eleven. this luncheon hour is another source of constant irritation to the agriculturist. he does not wish to bind his men down to an exact minute, and if a man has some distance to walk to his cottage, will readily make all allowance. he does not stint the beer carried out either then or in the field. but do what he likes, be as considerate as he will, and let the season be never so pressing, it is impossible to get the labourers out to their work when the hour is up. most of them go to sleep, and have to be waked up, after which they are as stupid as owls for a quarter of an hour. one or two, it will be found, have strolled down to the adjacent ale-house, and are missing. these will come on the field about an hour later. then one man has a rake too heavy for him, and another a prong too light. there is always some difficulty in starting to work; the agriculturist must therefore be himself present if he wishes to get the labourers out to the field in anything like a moderate time. the nuisance of mowers must be gone through to be appreciated. they come and work very well for the first week. they slash down acre after acre, and stick to it almost day and night. in consequence the farmer puts on every man who applies for work, everything goes on first-rate, and there is a prospect of getting the crop in speedily. at the end of the week the mowers draw their money, quite a lump for them, and away they go to the ale-house. saturday night sees them as drunk as men can be. they lie about the fields under the hedges all day sunday, drinking when the public-house is open. monday morning they go on to work for half-an-hour, but the fever engendered by so much liquor, and the disordered state of the stomach, cause a burning thirst. they fling the scythes down, and go off to the barrel. during all this week perhaps between them they manage to cut half an acre. what is the result? the haymakers have made all the grass that was cut the first week into hay, and are standing about idle, unable to proceed, but still drawing their wages from the unfortunate agriculturist. the hot sun is burning on--better weather for haymaking could not be--but there is not a rood of grass cut for them to work on. after a while the mowers come back, thoroughly tired and exhausted with their debauch, and go on feebly to work. there is hope again. but our climate is notoriously changeable. a fortnight of warm, close heat is pretty sure to breed a thunderstorm. accordingly, just as the scythes begin to lay the tall grass prostrate again, there is a growl in the sky, and down comes the rain. a thunderstorm unsettles the weather, and here is perhaps another week lost. the farmer dares not discharge his haymakers, because he does not know but that he may require them any day. they are put to turn dung-heaps, clean out the yards, pick up the weeds in the garden, and such like little jobs, over which they can dawdle as much as they like. all the while they are on full pay. now, what manufacturer could endure such conduct as this? is it not enough to drive a saint out of his patience? of course the larger farmers who can afford it have the resource of the mowing-machine, but there are hundreds and thousands of farms upon which its sharp rattle has not yet been heard. there is still a great divergence of opinion as to its merits, many maintaining that it does not cut so close to the ground, and therefore wastes a large percentage of the crop, and others that the action of the scissor-like knives bruises the grass, and prevents it growing up into a good after-math. therefore many farmers who could afford it will not admit the mowing-machine into their fields, and the mowers may still be seen at work over miles and miles of meadow, and are still the plague of the agriculturist. the arable farmer has just the same difficulty to keep his labourers at their work, and unless he is constantly on the watch valuable time is lost daily. in the harvest, however, he has an advantage. the corn is reaped by piece-work, and the labourers therefore strain every nerve to do as much as they can. but then he must be on the lookout to see that they do not "scamp" it. the traditional bacon and greens dinner is passing away, though still the usual fare in the small farmhouses. most of the fairly well-to-do farmers have a joint twice or three times a week, well supported with every kind of vegetable. there is no attempt at refinement in cooking, but there is plenty of good substantial food. the hill farmer, whose staple is sheep and wool, has generally a great deal of walking or riding to get over in the day. the down farms are sometimes very large, running perhaps in long narrow strips of land for two or three miles. although he employs a head-shepherd, and even a bailiff, he finds it necessary, if he would succeed in making a profit, to be pretty well ubiquitous. they all want looking after sharply. not that there is much actual dishonesty; but would any manufacturer endure to have his men sitting doing nothing on their benches for fifteen minutes out of every hour of the working day, just because his back was turned? the hill farmer has, perhaps, a preferable life in some respects to the agriculturist in the vale. he has not so much actual manual labour to get through. on the other hand, he is at a great distance from any town, or even large village; he sees no one during the day, and he has to run great risks. wool may fall, so may the price of mutton, either of which would derange his calculations; or the fly may destroy his turnips, or the season may be exceptionally dry and unfavourable. his house is lonely, perched on the side of a hill, and exposed to the bitter blasts of winter which sweep over the downs with resistless fury, and which no doors nor windows can exclude. if there should be snow, it is sure to fall in greater quantities on the hills, and, driving before the wind, fills up the hollows, till the roads are impassable for weeks. taking all the year round, the work of the agriculturist begins and ends with the rising and setting of the sun. there is an exception, because the cows must be milked and foddered nearly as early in the winter, when the sun rises very late, as at other seasons; but then, to make up for that, work ends earlier in the afternoon. in the spring, as the evenings draw out, there is almost always something to be done even after the labourers have left. in harvest time, the superintendence of work continues till late, and in the autumn labour is not unfrequently prolonged into the moonlight, in order to carry the corn. it is a life, on the whole, of hard work. in all this i speak of the ordinary middle-class farmer. the life of the higher class of agriculturists, who possess large capital, and employ bailiffs and all kinds of machinery, is of course not by any means so onerous. it is in general character pretty much that of an independent gentleman, with the addition of the sporting element, and a certain freedom from drawing-room trammels. to get at the physique of the agriculturists, the best plan is to pay a visit to the market-town. here almost every farmer in the neighbourhood, no matter of what class--highest, middle, or lowest--is nearly sure to be seen on market-days. the upper class come in in their smart waggonettes, or dog-carts, drawn by thoroughly good and stylish horses, which are little, if at all, inferior to those of the gentry. some of these keep their groom and coachman, who dress in livery of a quiet and subdued kind, but still unmistakably a livery. the middle-class come in in traps, or old-fashioned four-wheelers, generally bringing their wives and daughters, to do the shopping of the week. the market-day is, in fact, the event of the week, and the streets of the market-town are the rotten row of the neighbourhood. the wives and daughters come in their best dresses, and promenade up and down, and many a flirtation goes on with the young bucks of the district. the lower class of farmers jog in on their mares, rough as cart-horses, and the rider generally so manages to seat himself as to show three or four inches of stocking between his trousers and boots. after the market is over, and the dealing done, the farmers resort to the various inns, and dine at the market ordinary. a very good dinner is usually provided at a low charge on these days. soup is not usual, the dinner generally beginning with fish, followed by joints, and fowl of various kinds. wine "whips" are formed, and the sherry circulates freely. there is a regular chairman, always a man of property and influence, and an old frequenter of the place. after dinner they sit an hour or two discussing, not only the price of sheep and wool or mutton, but the political and other events of the day. the chambers of agriculture are generally so arranged as to meet on market-days, about an hour after the ordinary finishes, and not unfrequently in the same room. the market-towns derive great benefit from this habit of congregating on the market-day. it is the day, too, for paying visits by the ladies. gay costumes pass through the streets, and bright eyes look out of the windows of the hotels upon the crowd of farmers. the yards of the various hostelries are made almost impassable by the innumerable variety of vehicles. the young farmers take the opportunity of playing a game at billiards, which they rarely do on other days. the news of the whole countryside is exchanged, and spreads from mouth to mouth, and is carried home and sent farther on its way. one great characteristic is the general good-humour that prevails. the laugh and the joke are frequently heard--it is a kind of moderate gala-day. the fishmonger's shop is emptied, and the contents carried home, this being the only day in the week when fish is bought by the majority of agriculturists. some towns have only what is called a "gin-and-water" market: that is, the "deal" is begun and concluded from small samples carried in the pocket and examined at an inn over a glass of spirits and water. but in the great market-towns there is now almost always a large room, or hall, set aside for this special purpose. the market begins and concludes at a fixed time, indicated by the ringing of a bell. in this hall the dealers have stands, furnished with desks, at which they may always be found, and here sacks of samples are pitched. there is a clerk of the market, and the current prices are posted up, and afterwards sent to all the local newspapers. the cattle-market used to be carried on entirely in the streets, each farmer selling his own beasts or sheep by private treaty with the dealers. the streets were then often filled with cattle from one end to the other, and were almost impassable for vehicles, and at times not a little dangerous for foot-passengers. now the practice of selling by auction has become very general, and the cattle are either put into the auctioneer's private yard, or in an enclosure provided by the town authorities. the corn-dealers are a most energetic class of men, well educated, and often employing large capital in their business. they are perpetually travelling, and often attend two markets a day. having struck a bargain, the farmer and the purchaser adjourn to the hotel, and have a glass of spirits, without which no transaction seems complete. the use of beer has very much declined among the fairly well-to-do agriculturists. they drink it at dinner and lunch, but whenever a glass is taken with a friend, or in calling at an inn, it is almost invariably spirits. whisky has been most extensively drunk of late years. no other class of men employing so much capital and so many labourers are so simple in their habits as the agriculturists. in dress they adhere to the plainest colours and shapes; there is no attempt to keep pace with the fashion. the materials of the coat and vest are good, and even expensive, but the cut is old and out of date, and the whole effect quite plain. there is no shirt front, no studs, no rings, no kid gloves. the boots are strong and thick, substantial, but not ornamental. a man with his ten or fifteen thousand perhaps will walk down the street buttoned up in an ungainly greatcoat and an old hat, not half so smartly dressed as a well-paid mechanic, and far behind the drapers' assistants in style. there is a species of contempt among them for the meretricious and showy; they believe in the solid. this very fact makes them good friends to shopkeepers, who have no better customers. they carry this leading idea too far, for they admire an article in precisely a corresponding ratio to the money it costs, totally oblivious of all considerations of art or ornament. the first question invariably is, if they are asked to admire anything, "what did it cost?" this results in a heavy and cumbrous style of furniture even in the best farmsteads. everything must be massive, costly, and strong. artistic tendencies they have none. they want something durable, and they get it. but on the whole they make marvellously little show for their money. hundreds of the most substantial agriculturists, whose cheques would be honoured for thousands of pounds, seem absolutely to make no show at all. at the same time it is quite true that some of the rising generation, who have very little to do it on, make a great display with hunters and plated harness, and so forth. but they are not the rule. the generality go just the other way, and live below their income, and take a lower station in society than they might reasonably claim. farmers are decidedly a marrying class of men. the farm is a business in which a wife is of material service, and can really be a helpmate. the lower class of farmers usually marry quite as much or more for that reason than any others. the higher classes of agriculturists feel that they have a right to marry because they too can show a home in which to keep a wife. though they may not have any large amount of capital, still they possess a good house and sufficient provision. they are, therefore, a marrying class of men, but do not commonly contract matrimonial alliances very early in life. the great object of an agriculturist who has sons is to get them settled in farms, and it is astonishing to what an extent this is carried by men who do not seem to have much capital to start their children with. instances are common in which a man has three or four sons all in farms, and doing fairly well. one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend against is the necessity of providing education. where is a farmer, living perhaps two or three miles, often enough four and six miles, from a town, to send his boys to school? the upper class of agriculturists can, of course, afford to have a proper governess at home till they are old enough, and then send them to one of the so-called middle-class schools. the lower class, on the other hand, who do not aspire very high, and whose ideas are little more ambitious than those of their labourers, are contented with the school in the neighbouring village. till recently these village schools were very poor affairs, something a little better than the old dame school, but not much. but since the new education act the lower class of farmers are in a better position with respect to education than those who possess much higher claims to social distinction. where there is not a school board, the clergyman and the landowners have combined, and built first-rate schools, up to all the requirements of the act, and attended by properly certified teachers. the lower class farmer, who is troubled with no scruples about the association of his boys with the labourers' children, can send them to this school at a very low charge indeed, and they will there receive a good foundation. but the middle-class farmer--the man who is neither an independent gentleman, nor obliged to live on bacon and greens--is unprovided for, and yet this class is the most numerous. they have better views for their sons than to confine those early impressions upon which so much depends to the narrow and rude, if not coarse manners of the labourers' children. they look higher than that, and they are fully justified in doing so. they do not, therefore, at all relish the idea of sending their boys to the national school of the parish, let it be never so well supplied with teachers. there is another objection to it. it has a faint suspicion of the pauper. now if there is anything a downright english yeoman abominates more than all the rest it is any approach to the "parish." this is a "parish" school. it is not a paupers' school--that is admitted--but it is a "parish" school, to which the children of men who have often received relief are sent. the yeoman's instinct revolts at it. attempts have been made to get over this niceness of feeling by erecting a special class-room for farmers' sons, and patriotic baronets have even gone so far as to send their own boys so as to set the example. but it is in vain. the middle-class farmer is above all men exclusive in his ideas. he detests the slightest flavour of communism. he likes to be completely and fully independent. he will not patronise the "parish" school. what then is he to do? at this present moment most farmers' sons are sent into the neighbouring towns to the middle-class schools which are to be found there. if the farmer is within two or three miles the boys walk or ride on ponies every morning. if it is farther than that they go as weekly boarders, and return home every saturday. the fault in this system is simply and solely in the character of the school. too often it is a school in name only, where the boys learn next to nothing at all, except mischief. very few schools exist in these small country towns which afford a good education at a moderate price. it is almost impossible that they should exist without an endowment, as the scholars can never be numerous enough to make the profits exceed the expenditure. the result is that the middle-class farmer cannot give his boys a good education unless he sends them to what is called a middle-class school in some town at a great distance, and this he cannot afford. the sum demanded by these so-called middle-class schools is beyond his reach. he may, perhaps, if he has only one son, indulge in the expensive luxury of a sound and thorough education for him. but if there are several the thing is out of the question. with the girls it is even worse--where can he send them? they cannot very well walk or ride to and fro like the boys to the school in the nearest town, and if they are boarded at such schools, the education given is paltry and meagre in the extreme. a good girls' school is one of the rarest things in the country. the result is that a governess is kept while the girls are young. this governess is underpaid, and has consequently herself been only partially educated. then as the girls grow older they are sent for a year or two, to "finish" them, to some young ladies' academy, and the ultimate product is a smattering of french and music, and crude ideas of fashion and refinement, which make them dissatisfied with their home and unfit for an agricultural life as the wife of a farmer. the nonsense talked and published of farmers having pianos, and their daughters strumming all day long instead of attending to the dairy, is perfectly absurd. it is quite true that in hundreds of farmhouses, just at the time when the dairy is in full work in the morning, a piano may be heard going. this is the governess instructing the girls when the farmer is not sufficiently rich to send them to a school. but when once these girls are grown up, and have finished their education, poor as it is, and return home to take a part in the household duties, then the piano is never heard in the morning when work is about. the farmer's wife sees to that sharp enough. in the evening it may be heard--and why not? if the agricultural labourer is to be polished up and refined, why on earth should not his employer take a step in advance? it must be remembered that there is very little society in the country; scarcely any one even passing along the road. there are none of those cheap sights and amusements so readily accessible to the poorest in a great city. the wives and daughters of the mechanics and workmen in london can once a week at least afford to enjoy themselves at some theatre or place of amusement. they are far better off in this respect than the daughters of agriculturists who may be worth thousands. these have nothing whatever to amuse themselves with during the long evenings; they cannot even take a stroll out and look at the shop windows. they are surely entitled to the simple and inexpensive amusement of a piano. it is in fact their only resource. there was a statement in the newspapers of farmers taking their daughters to paris. it is possible that some of the upper class of farmers, who are in fact independent gentlemen, may have done so; but as for the ordinary middle-class farmers, such a thing is utterly unheard of. it is very few of them who even take their wives to london or the seaside for a week. but even if they did, it is nothing more than they are entitled to do. half the tradesmen who do such things do not possess anything like the income of the farmers. the fact is, that the agriculturists are a singularly stay-at-home race of men. the great majority never leave their farms to go farther than the market-town from one year's end to the other. above all classes they are attached to their homes, and slow to go away even temporarily. to such a length is this feeling carried that men have been known to go partially insane for a while at the prospect of having to quit a farm through a landlord's decease, even though no appreciable pecuniary loss was involved. the agriculturists are a remarkably observant race, and as a rule peculiarly well-informed. this is contrary to the popular belief, which represents the farmer as rude and ignorant, a pot-bellied beer-drinker, and nothing more. but the popular belief is a delusion. i do not say that they are literary or scientific in their tastes and private pursuits. there are no great names among them in geology, or astronomy, or anthropology, or any other science. they are not artists in any sense. but they are singularly well-informed. they possess more general knowledge than any other class, and can converse on subjects with which townsmen seem unacquainted. many of them have very fair libraries, not extensive, but containing books of sterling excellence. farming is necessarily an isolated business--there is little society. except on market-days, there is scarcely any interchange of conversation. there is, too, at certain seasons of the year a good deal of leisure. what books they own, therefore, are well read, and the contents reflected upon. it is that habit of thinking over what is read that makes all the difference. it is impossible to avoid being struck with the immense amount of general information possessed by some agriculturists, and the wide field over which their knowledge ranges. yet with all this knowledge and power of reflection they still remain attached to the old-world system of politics, religion, and social relations. the habits of intemperance which were at one time a just and standing reproach against the agriculturist have almost entirely disappeared. a drunken farmer is now unknown. they are as fond as ever of offering hospitality to a friend, and as ready to take a social glass--no total abstainers amongst them; but the steady hard-drinking sot has passed away. the old dodge of filling the bottle with gin instead of water, and so pouring out pure spirit, instead of spirit and water, when the guests were partially intoxicated, in order to complete the process, is no more known. they do not drink more than the inhabitants of towns. it is a singular fact that with so many streams and ponds scattered about the country within easy reach, the farmers do not care for fishing. a farmer engaged in fishing is a rarity indeed. they are eagerly fond of fox-hunting, coursing, and shooting, but fishing is a dead letter. a party will sometimes go out and net a pond, but as for fishing proper, with rod and line, it is almost unknown. every chance of shooting is eagerly snatched at. in may the young rooks are shot, after which the gun is put aside for a while. at the end of july some of the young rabbits are ready, and are occasionally knocked over. very few tenant farmers shoot game even when they could do so, leaving that for some neighbouring gentleman with whom they are friendly, and this too without any remuneration, the fact being that winged game does little damage. but they wage unceasing war on the rabbits, with dog and gun and ferret. all the winter long they are hunted in every possible way. this is, of course, on farms where the tenant has permission to kill the rabbits. whist and post and pair are the staple indoor amusements. of all businesses that of agriculture is peculiarly adapted to descend from father to son. in point of fact, farms so frequently pass from the father to the son as to be looked upon almost as a certain inheritance. in agriculture, then, it must be expected that the effects of inherited instincts and ideas should be very plainly shown. from this cause arises the persistent and unreasoning conservatism of the mass of agriculturists. out of a list of one hundred farmers, i find that one resides upon a farm which has been in the occupation of members of the same family for three hundred years. he possessed a series of documents, receipts, special agreements, and so on, proving that descent beyond all cavil; but with the usual want of proper appreciation for antiquities, most of these papers have been committed to the flames; still there is no question of the fact, which can still be shown from the landlord's family archives. nominally that farm has been in the occupation of one family for ten generations, reckoning by the ordinary calculation of thirty years to each. but this average is not fairly applicable to the agricultural life, which is generally long, and occasionally extends into extreme old age. there were probably about eight successors if the line was unbroken; if not, there may of course have been treble that number. a man may be excused some amount of pride when he thinks of such a continuance as this in one spot, for it means not only an exceptional vitality of race, but an exceptional perseverance in the paths of honesty and straightforwardness. but with this pride it also engenders a stubborn unchangeableness, a dislike and hatred of all things new and unfamiliar, a nervous dread of reform. faithful to the logic of their class, such men as these may in resisting innovations go to lengths which may appear foolish and wrong to others who live in a widely different social atmosphere. to some extent the bitter opposition to change in the position of the labourer, which is thrown in the teeth of the tenant farmer, is the outcome of these very centuries of steady adherence to all that they believed upright and manly. another name on my list has been known at one spot for fully two hundred years. these men attained a position beyond that of yeoman, but they never sank beneath it. the rise of many of the great county families really dates from the success of some ancestor, or the collective success of a series of ancestors, in agriculture. they perhaps claim some knight or nobleman as the founder of the race, although he may have really done nothing for the practical advantage of the family; the true founders being merely proprietors of land, dignified as j.p.'s, and sometimes sheriffs, throwing off branches into the clerical and legal professions. the real ancestor was the sturdy yeoman who accumulated the money to purchase the farm he tilled, and whose successors had the good sense to go on adding acre to acre till they finally expanded into the wide domains of the modern squire. not the knight whose effigy in brass paves the aisle of the parish church laid the corner-stone of the wealth and power of to-day, but the shrewd and close-fisted producer and dealer in wool and corn. their true claim to aristocratic privileges and importance is the sense of centuries of independence. these others of whom we have spoken, the yeoman who never aspired beyond the yeoman's position, are as ancient and as "worshipful"--to use an old and disused term--as they. i do not instance these descents of three and two hundred years as extraordinary, because i believe that they could be paralleled and even extended by inquiry, but because they came under my own observation. there are others on the list ranging from one hundred and sixty down to sixty and eighty years of continued occupation. but not to go into details, i reckon on an average that thirty names out of a hundred have been the occupiers for three generations; forty for two generations; twenty for one hundred and fifty years; and ten are new comers. but a still more curious and instructive fact is the permanence of certain names over a wide section of country; so much so that in places it is a common saying that one has only to be an a, or a b, or a t, to be certain of getting a farm. whole parishes seem related, and not very distantly related either; and yet there is not the remotest class-feeling or _esprit de corps_. the isolation and independence of a farm life are powerful agents in preventing anything like cohesion. any one who will take the trouble to look down the parish register in a strictly agricultural district will be forcibly struck with the permanence of certain names. page after page contains nothing but records of the marriages, intermarriages, burials, baptisms, and so on of two or three generic names. the population appears to have been stationary for scores upon scores of years. say what you will, ridicule it as you like, there is a charm clinging round that which time has hallowed; and even the man of the hour, the successful speculator, yields to this. it is his most eager desire to become a landed proprietor, and if possible he buys a place where he can exercise manorial rights. taking these things into consideration, it is only reasonable to admit that agriculture is a profession in which a man may, above all others, be excused if he manifests a certain amount of irritability at the prospect of change. the slow round of uneventful years, the long continuance of manual labour, the perpetual iteration of a few ideas, in time produce in the mind of the most powerfully intellectual men a species of unconscious creed; and this creed is religiously handed down from generation to generation. setting aside those who have gone into agriculture as a science, and adapt everything to commercial principles--and they are as yet not very numerous--the great mass of farmers believe nearly the same now as they did two centuries ago. looking through a farmer's calendar published in the first few years of this century, and containing a complete _résumé_ of the system of agriculture practised then, i was struck by the remarkable fact that in all main features it was the same as that in use now. we have heard so much of the rapid progress of agriculture, of the important changes introduced, and of the complete revolution which has taken place, that this statement may appear incredible. it is nevertheless the fact that that book might be put with advantage into the hands of any young man about to enter upon a farm. with the exception of those operations which are now performed by steam, and making an allowance for the altered conditions introduced by the abolition of the corn laws, the instructions given there are useful down to this very day. here is the knowledge of the peculiarities and requirements of stock slowly accumulated during ages of agriculture, and at last written down and printed for easy reference. however much the aspect of politics may change, or however much the means of locomotion and communication may be facilitated by the introduction of steam, nature still remains unaltered. the cows and sheep retain their instincts and their internal economy; their modes of feeding, times of rest, and seasons of increase, never vary. the earth too has not changed. the corn is sown at the same time; nature goes on her way as before, heedless of the railway rattle. so it is that the details of management in this book are as useful now as then, more than two generations since. it is the same with the unwritten faith of the men who labour and live among these things. go out among them, and collect from the majority their views and sentiments, and in this age of progress they will be found to correspond almost exactly with those of their forefathers, as recorded by history. they know that such is the fact themselves; they know too that it would subject them to sharp criticism and reproof if they published their real opinions. therefore they remain silent, and it is only among themselves that these ideas are earnestly insisted on. in the earliest days of agriculture, when abraham drove his flocks and herds to and fro under the syrian sun, the father of the family was at once the procreator, the law-giver, the judge, the leader in battle, the priest, and the king. he was absolute master under heaven of all things visible around him. the pope claims to be infallible now, and to be the vicegerent of heaven, but the patriarch of old actually possessed those powers upon his own domain. his sons were under his complete control--he could sacrifice them alive to his god if he chose, or banish them from their native land. his daughters were still more completely in his hand, to be done with as he thought fit. his servants, his slaves, were as much his as the wooden pole of his tent, or the very sandals he walked in. they were as dust before him. there was no coming of age in those days; no escape after the twenty-first year. the tie lasted till his death. at forty his sons and daughters were as much his own as they were at ten years old. they tell us that this system, to some extent, still survives in china. in all fundamental points such is the creed of the agricultural race of our own day. circumstances have, no doubt, had something to do with the production and elaboration of such a faith. in no other profession do the sons and the daughters remain so long, and so naturally, under the parental roof. the growth of half-a-dozen strong sons was a matter of self-congratulation, for each as he came to man's estate took the place of a labourer, and so reduced the money-expenditure. the daughters worked in the dairy, and did not hesitate to milk occasionally, or, at least, to labour in the hayfield. they spun, too, the home-made stuffs in which all the family were clothed. a man's children were his servants. they could not stir a step without his permission. obedience and reverence to the parent was the first and greatest of all virtues. its influence was to extend through life, and through the whole social system. they were to choose the wife or the husband approved of at home. at thirty, perhaps, the more fortunate of the sons were placed on farms of their own nominally, but still really under the father's control. they dared not plough or sow except in the way that he approved. their expenditure was strictly regulated by his orders. this lasted till his death, which might not take place for another twenty years. at the present moment i could point out ten or twelve such cases, where men of thirty or forty are in farms, and to all appearance perfectly free and independent, and yet as completely under the parental thumb as they were at ten years old. why do they not throw off the burden? because they have imbibed the same creed, and intend to carry it out in their own persons. these men, if they think thus of their own offspring, cannot be expected to be more tender towards the lower class around them. they did at one time, and some still wish to, extend the same system to the labouring population. as there was in those days little or no work for a man but upon a farm, and as the cottages were chiefly in the hands of the farmers, there was plenty of opportunity for carrying out these ideas. the old method of poor relief gave another handle. they did not want only to indulge in tyranny; what they did was to rule the labouring poor in the same way as they did their own children--nothing more nor less. these labouring men, like his own children, must do as the farmer thought best. they must live here or there, marry so and so, or forfeit favour--in short, obey the parental head. each farmer was king in his own domain; the united farmers of a parish were kings of the whole place. they did not use the power circumstances gave them harshly; but they paid very little regard to the liberty of the subject. to this very day something of the same sort goes on. it is wonderful with what eager zeal many of the old-style farmers enter into the details of a labourer's life, and carefully ascertain his birth, his parentage, his marriage, his wife's parentage, and the very minutest matters. these facts thus accumulated are talked over in the boardroom when an applicant comes to the union for relief. very often such special knowledge possessed by a guardian of the antecedents of the applicant is most useful and beneficial in enabling the board to extend assistance to a deserving man. what i wish to show is the all-permeating influence of the parental system in the mind of the typical agriculturist. in religion it is, or lately was, the same. it was not a matter with the farmer of the athanasian creed, or the doctrine of salvation by faith, or any other theological dogma. to him the parish church was the centre of the social system of the parish. it was the keystone of that parental plan of government that he believed in. the very first doctrine preached from the pulpit was that of obedience. "honour thy father and mother" was inculcated there every seventh day. his father went to church, he went to church himself, and everybody else ought to go. it was as much a social gathering as the dinner at the market ordinary, or the annual audit dinner of their common landlord. the dissenter, who declined to pay church-rates, was an unsocial person. he had left the circle. it was not the theology that they cared about, it was the social nonconformity. in a spiritual sense, too, the clergyman was the father of the parish, the shepherd of the flock--it was a part of the great system. to go a step farther, in political affairs the one leading idea still threaded itself through all. the proper parliamentary representative--the natural law-giver--was the landlord of the district. he was born amongst them, walked about amongst them, had been in their houses many a time. he knew their wants, their ideas, their views. his own interest was identical with theirs. therefore he was the man. the logic is indisputable. what is more, they acted up to it. in agricultural districts it is not uncommon even now to find men of diametrically opposite political views to the candidate at an election voting for and supporting him, simply and solely because he is the local man. it is natural and right that he should represent them. that one word "right" is the key to the whole ethical system of the agriculturists. they cherish and maintain their belief in right, and in their "rights"--by which they understand much the same thing--even when unaccompanied by any gain or advantage. in brief outline, such is the creed of the agriculturists as a body. it is neither written nor spoken, but it is a living faith which influences every hour of their lives. this faith must ever be borne in mind by those who wish to understand the movements of the agricultural world. without making a proper allowance for it, the farmers will be easily misjudged. the labouring class are imbued to a great extent with the very same ideas. they stick to their rights. they will not give up an old pathway that their fathers used, not if one twice as convenient be offered in lieu of it. they have a right to go that way, and go that way they will. they are brutally tyrannical over their children. i use those words deliberately. he who spares the rod spoils the child, is the practical rule of their conduct. they seem to look upon their offspring as merely slaves. they are fond of them in their way, no doubt, but the law of implicit obedience is maintained by dint of blows and stripes. the children are kicked, punched, and thrashed perpetually. a good ground-ash stick is the gospel of the labouring man. they carry the same plan into their work. how many carters have been severely fined and imprisoned for whipping, and sometimes even maiming, the boys under their commands? and yet the old practice still continues, only a little checked by wholesome terror of the law. despite of all the teaching of the radical papers, all the whispers of the methodist itinerant preachers, despite the hatred which the labourers' union agents endeavour to sow between the labourer and the farmer, still the great mass of labourers at the last election,[ ] wherever they had a vote, supported the local candidate--the man who represented the soil--and declined to do more than listen to the brilliant promises held out by the party of change. so strong above all things is the force of tradition and custom. the agriculturists are firmly and earnestly wedded to that unwritten creed which has grown up among them out of the past. why, then, should they be so hardly dealt with, more than others, for adhering to this faith? argue with them, educate them up to your standard if you like--but is it fair, is it just, is it in accordance with that spirit of liberalism and tolerance which their opponents profess, to taunt, abuse, and bully to the full length that words will permit? they are not facile at expression, these same men of the soil. the flow of language seems denied to them. they are naturally a silent race--preferring deeds to speech. they live much with inarticulate nature. it may be, after all, they have learnt some useful and abiding lessons from that intercourse. the old shepherds on the plains of chaldea, under the starry skies of the east, watched the motions of those shining bodies till they slowly built up a religion, which, mixed with much dross, nevertheless contained some truths which educated men profess to this hour. these english farmers also observe the changes of the seasons, and watch the face of heaven. their deepest convictions are not to be lightly set aside. there are men amongst them of great powers of thought. i remember one at this moment whose grand old head would have been a study for an artist. a large head he had, well-balanced, broad and high at the forehead, deep-set eyes, straight nose, and firm chin--every outward sign of the giant brain within. but the man was dumb. the thoughts that came to him he could communicate roughly to his friends, but the pen failed him. the horny hand which results from manual labour is too stiff to wield the swiftly-gliding quill. but there is another species of handwriting which is called work--a handwriting which will endure when the scribblings of the hour are utterly forgotten. this writing he laboured at earnestly and eagerly, not for his own good either, for it absorbed his own fortune, no small one, in the attempt to realise his conception of machinery which would double the yield of food. it has been done since his time, other men stepping over the bridge of experience which he had built. now this man, who, on the principles of the opponents of the agriculturists, was a benefactor to his species, and a pioneer of true progress, was, nevertheless, one of the firmest, staunchest, most uncompromising supporters of that creed which they are endeavouring to destroy, and which may be stated thus: "i believe in the sovereign, the church, and the land: the sovereign being the father of the people in a temporal sense; the church in a spiritual sense; and the land being the only substantial and enduring means of subsistence. cotton, coal, and iron cannot be eaten, but the land gives us corn and beef; therefore, the land stands first and foremost, and the agriculturist, as the tiller of land, possesses an inalienable right which it is his duty to maintain, and in so doing he is acting for the good of the community. i believe that the son and the daughter should obey their parents, and show regard to their wishes even when legally independent. also that the servant should obey his employer. the connection between employer and employed does not cease with the payment of wages. it is the duty of the servant to show consideration for the advice of the master; and the master is not free from responsibility as to the education and the comfort of the man. the master is bound by all laws, human and divine, to pay a fair amount of wages for a day's work. if he does not do so he robs the workman as much as if he stole the money from his pocket. the workman is equally bound to do his work properly, and in neglecting to do so he robs his employer. to demand more wages than has been earned is an attempt at robbery. both master and man should respect authority, and abide by its decisions." such is a slight outline of the home-life and the faith of the farmer. footnote: [ ] feb. . _the labourer's daily life._ many labourers can trace their descent from farmers or well-to-do people, and it is not uncommon to find here and there a man who believes that he is entitled to a large property in chancery, or elsewhere, as the heir. they are very fond of talking of these things, and naturally take a pride in feeling themselves a little superior in point of ancestry to the mass of labourers. how this descent from a farmer to a labourer is managed there are at this moment living examples going about the country. i knew a man who for years made it the business of his life to go round from farm to farm soliciting charity, and telling a pitiful tale of how he had once been a farmer himself. this tale was quite true, and as no class likes to see their order degraded, he got a great deal of relief from the agriculturists where he was known. he was said to have been wild in his youth, and now in his old age was become a living representative of the farmer reduced to a labourer. this reduction is, however, usually a slow process, and takes two generations to effect--not two generations of thirty years each, but at least two successors in a farm. perhaps the decline of a farming family began in an accession of unwonted prosperity. the wheat or the wool went up to a high price, and the farmer happened to be fortunate and possessed a large quantity of those materials. or he had a legacy left him, or in some way or other made money by good fortune rather than hard work. this elated his heart, and thinking to rise still higher in life, he took another, or perhaps two more large farms. but to stock these required more money than he could produce, and he had to borrow a thousand or so. then the difficulty of attending to so large an acreage, much of it distant from his home, made it impossible to farm in the best and most profitable manner. by degrees the interest on the loan ate up all the profit on the new farms. then he attempted to restore the balance by violent high farming. he bought manures to an unprecedented extent, invested in costly machinery--anything to produce a double crop. all this would have been very well if he had had time to wait till the grass grew; but meantime the steed starved. he had to relinquish the additional farms, and confine himself to the original one with a considerable loss both of money and prestige. he had no energy to rise again; he relapsed into slow, dawdling ways, perpetually regretting and dwelling on the past, yet making no effort to retrieve it. this is a singular and strongly marked characteristic of the agricultural class, taken generally. they work and live and have their being in grooves. so long as they can continue in that groove, and go steadily forward, without much thought or trouble beyond that of patience and perseverance, all goes well; but if any sudden jolt should throw them out of this rut, they seem incapable of regaining it. they say, "i have lost my way; i shall never get it again." they sit down and regret the past, granting all their errors with the greatest candour; but the efforts they make to regain their position are feeble in the extreme. so our typical unfortunate farmer folds his hands, and in point of fact slumbers away the rest of his existence, content with the fireside and a roof over his head, and a jug of beer to drink. he does not know french, he has never heard of metternich, but he puts the famous maxim in practice, and, satisfied with to-day, says in his heart, _après nous le déluge_. no one disturbs him; his landlord has a certain respect and pity for him--respect, perhaps, for an old family that has tilled his land for a century, but which he now sees is slowly but irretrievably passing away. so the decayed farmer dozes out his existence. meantime his sons are coming on, and it too often happens that the brief period of sunshine and prosperity has done its evil work with them too. they have imbibed ideas of gentility and desire for excitement utterly foreign to the quiet, peaceful life of an agriculturist. they have gambled on the turf and become involved. notwithstanding the fall of their father from his good position, they still retain the belief that in the end they shall find enough money to put all to rights; but when the end comes there is a deficiency. among them there is perhaps one more plodding than the rest. he takes the farm, and keeps a house for the younger children. in ten years he becomes a bankrupt, and the family are scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. the plodding one becomes a bailiff, and lives respectably all his life; but his sons are never educated, and he saves no money; there is nothing for them but to go out to work as farm labourers. such is something like the usual way in which the decline and fall of a farming family takes place, though it may of course arise from unforeseen circumstances, quite out of the control of the agriculturist. in any case the children graduate downwards till they become labourers. nowadays many of them emigrate, but in the long time that has gone before, when emigration was not so easy, many hundreds of families have thus become reduced to the level of the labourers they once employed. so it is that many of the labourers of to-day bear names which less than two generations ago were well known and highly respected over a wide tract of country. it is natural for them to look back with a certain degree of pleasure upon that past, and some may even have been incited to attempt a return to the old position. but the great majority, the mass, of the agricultural labourers have been labourers time out of mind. their fathers were labourers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers have all worked upon the farms, and very often almost continuously during that long period of time upon the farms in one parish. all their relations have been, and still are, labourers, varied by one here who has become a tinker, or one there who keeps a small roadside beerhouse. when this is the case, when a man and all his ancestors for generations have been hewers of wood and drawers of water, it naturally follows that the present representative of the family holds strongly to the traditions, the instincts, acquired during the slow process of time. what those instincts are will be better gathered from a faithful picture of his daily life. most of the agricultural labourers are born in a thatched cottage by the roadside, or in some narrow lane. this cottage is usually an encroachment. in the olden time, when land was cheap, and the competition for it dull, there were many strips and scraps which were never taken any notice of, and of which at this hour no record exists either in the parochial papers or the imperial archives. probably this arose from the character of the country in the past, when the greater part was open, or, as it was called, champaign land, without hedge, or ditch, or landmark. near towns a certain portion was enclosed generally by the great landowners, or for the use of the tradesmen. there was also a large enclosure called the common land, on which all burgesses or citizens had a right to feed so many cattle, sheep, or horses. as a rule the common land was not enclosed by hedges in fields, though instances do occur in which it was. there were very few towns in the reign of charles ii. that had not got their commons attached to them; but outside and beyond these patches of cultivation round the towns the country was open, unenclosed, and the boundaries ill-defined. the king's highway ran from one point to another, but its course was very wide. roads were not then macadamised and strictly confined to one line. the want of metalling, and the consequent fearful ruts and sloughs, drove vehicles and travellers further and further from what was the original line, till they formed a track perhaps a score or two of yards wide. when fields became more generally enclosed it was still only in patches, and these strips and spaces of green sward were left utterly uncared for and unnoticed. these were encamped upon by the gipsies and travelling folk, and their unmolested occupation no doubt suggested to the agricultural labourer that he might raise a cottage upon such places, or cultivate it for his garden. i know of one spot at this present moment which was enclosed by an agricultural labourer fully sixty years ago. it is an oval piece of ground of considerable size, situated almost exactly in the centre of a very valuable estate. he and his descendants continued to crop this garden of theirs entirely unmolested for the whole of that time, paying no rent whatever. it soon, however, became necessary to enlarge the size of the fields, which were small, in order to meet the requirements of the modern style of agriculture. this oval piece was surrounded by hedges of enormous growth, and the cultivator was requested to remove to another piece more out of the way. he refused to do so, and when the proprietors of the surrounding estate came to inquire into the circumstances they found that they could do nothing. he had enjoyed undisturbed possession for sixty years; he had paid no rent--no quit rent or manor dues of any kind. but still further, when they came to examine the maps and old documents, no mention whatever appeared of this particular patch of ground. it was utterly unnoticed; it was not recorded as any man's property. the labourer therefore retained possession. this was an extraordinary case, because the encroachment took place in the middle of a cultivated estate, where one would have thought the tenants would have seen to it. commonly the squatters pitched on a piece of land--a long unused strip--running parallel to the highway or lane. this was no one's property; it was the property of the nation, which had no immediate representative to look after its interests. the surrounding farmers did not care to interfere; it was no business of theirs. the highway board, unless the instance was very glaring, and some actual obstruction of the road was caused, winked at the trespass. most of them were farmers, and did not wish to interfere with a poor man, who they knew had no other way of getting a house of his own. by-and-by, when the cottage was built, the labourer was summoned to the court-leet of the manor, and was assessed in quit rent, a mere nominal sum, perhaps fourpence or a shilling a year. he had no objection to this, because it gave him a title. as long as the quit rent was duly paid, and he could produce the receipt, he was safe in the occupation of his cottage, and no one could turn him out. to be assessed by the court-leet in fact established his title. some of these court-leets or manor courts are only held at intervals of three years, or even more, and are generally composed of farmers, presided over by the legal agent of the lord of the manor. the tenants of the manor attend to pay their quit rent for the preceding years, and it often happens that if the cottager has been ill, or is weak and infirm, the farmers composing the court subscribe and pay the quit rent for him. the first step when a labourer intends to become a squatter is to enclose the strip of land which he has chosen. this he does by raising a low bank of earth round it, on which he plants elder bushes, as that shrub grows quickest, and in the course of two seasons will form a respectable fence. then he makes a small sparred gate which he can fasten with a padlock, and the garden is complete. to build the cottage is quite another matter. that is an affair of the greatest importance, requiring some months of thought and preparation. the first thing is to get the materials. if it is a clay country, of course bricks must be chosen; but in stone countries there are often quarries on the farm on which he works. his employer will let him have a considerable quantity of stone for nothing, and the rest at a nominal charge, and will lend him a horse and cart at a leisure season; so that in a very short time he can transport enough stone for his purpose. if he has no such friend, there is almost sure to be in every parish a labouring man who keeps a wretched horse or two, fed on the grass by the roadside, and gains his living by hauling. our architect engages this man at a low price to haul his materials for him. the lime to make mortar he must buy. in the parish there is nearly sure to be at least one native mason, who works for the farmers, putting up pig-styes, mending walls, and doing small jobs of that kind. this is the builder who engages to come on saturday afternoons or in the evenings, while the would-be householder himself is the hod-bearer and mixes the mortar. nine times out of ten the site for the cottage is chosen so as to have a ditch at the back. this ditch acts at once as the cesspool and the sewer, and, unless it happens to have a good fall, speedily becomes a nuisance to the neighbourhood. a certain quantity of wood is of course required in building even this humble edifice. this is either given by the farmers or is purchased at a nominal rate. the ground plan is extremely simple. it consists of two rooms, oblong, and generally of the same size--one to live in, the other to sleep in--for the great majority of the squatters' hovels have no upstair rooms. at one end there is a small shed for odds and ends. this shed used to be built with an oven, but now scarcely any labourers bake their own bread, but buy of the baker. the walls of the cottage having been carried up some six feet, or six feet six--just a little higher than a man's head--the next process is to construct the roof, which is a very simple process. the roof is then thatched, sometimes with flags cut from the brooks, but more usually with straw, and practically the cottage is now built, for there are no indoor fittings to speak of. the chimney is placed at the end of the room set apart for day use. there is no ceiling, nothing between the floor and the thatch and rafters, except perhaps at one end, where there is a kind of loft. the floor consists simply of the earth itself rammed down hard, or sometimes of rough pitching-stones, with large interstices between them. the furniture of this room is of the simplest description. a few chairs, a deal table, three or four shelves, and a cupboard, with a box or two in the corners, constitute the whole. the domestic utensils are equally few, and strictly utilitarian. a great pot, a kettle, a saucepan, a few plates, dishes and knives, half-a-dozen spoons, and that is about all. but on the mantelpiece there is nearly sure to be a few ornaments in crockery, bought from some itinerant trader. the walls are whitewashed. the bedroom is plainly and rudely furnished. some cottages do not even attain to this degree of comfort. they consist of four posts set in the ground which support the cross-beam and the roof, and the walls are made of wattle and daub, _i.e._, of small split willow sticks, put upright and daubed over with coarse plaster. the roofs of these cottages are often half hidden with rank grass, moss, and sillgreen, a vegetation perhaps encouraged by the drippings from a tree overhanging the roof; and the situation of the cottage is itself in many cases low and damp. but there is a class of squatters, who possess habitations more fit for human beings. these were originally built by men who had saved a little money, had showed, perhaps, a certain talent for hedge carpentering or thatching, become tinkers, or even blacksmiths. in such capacities a man may save a little money--not much, perhaps £ or £ at furthest. with the aid of this he manages to build a very tidy cottage, in the face of the statement made by architects and builders that a good cottage cannot be erected under £ . their dwellings do not, indeed, compete with the neat, prim, and business-like work of the professional builder; but still they are roomy and substantial cottages. the secret of cheapness lies in the fact that they work themselves at the erection, and do not entrust some one else with a contract. moreover, they make shifts and put up with drawbacks as no business-man could possibly do. the materials they purchase are cheap and of second-class condition, but good enough to hold together and to last some time. their rude beams and rafters would not satisfy the eye of a landed proprietor, but they hold up the roof-tree equally well. every pound they spend goes its full length, and not a penny is wasted. after a while a substantial-looking cottage rises up, whitewashed and thatched. it has an upper storey with two rooms, and two, at least, downstairs, with the inevitable lean-to or shed, without which no labourer's cottage is complete. this is more like a house, the residence of a man, than that of the poorer squatter. the floor is composed of flag-stones, in this case always carefully washed and holystoned. there are the same chairs and deal table as in the poorer cottage, but there are many more domestic utensils, and the chimney-piece is ornamented with more crockery figures. a few coarse prints hang against the walls. some of these old prints are great curiosities in their way--hardly valuable enough for a collection, but very amusing. a favourite set of prints is the ride of dick turpin to york on black bess, representing every scene in that famous gallop. the upstair rooms are better furnished, and the beds often really good. some of these cottages in summer-time really approach something of that arcadian beauty which is supposed to prevail in the country. everything, of course, depends upon the character of the inmates. the dull tint of the thatch is relieved here and there by great patches of sillgreen, which is religiously preserved as a good herb, though the exact ailments for which it is "good" are often forgotten. one end of the cottage is often completely hidden with ivy, and woodbine grows in thickest profusion over the porch. near the door there are almost always a few cabbage-rose trees, and under the windows grow wall-flowers and hollyhocks, sweet peas, columbine, and sometimes the graceful lilies of the valley. the garden stretches in a long strip from the door, one mass of green. it is enclosed by thick hedges, over which the dog-rose grows, and the wild convolvulus will blossom in the autumn. trees fill up every available space and corner--apple trees, pear trees, damsons, plums, bullaces--all varieties. the cottagers seem to like to have at least one tree of every sort. these trees look very nice in the spring when the apple blossom is out, and again in the autumn when the fruit is ripe. under the trees are gooseberry bushes, raspberries, and numbers of currants. the patches are divided into strips producing potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, onions, radishes, parsnips; in this kitchen produce, as with the fruit, they like to possess a few of all kinds. there is generally a great bunch of rhubarb. in odd corners there are sure to be a few specimens of southernwood, mugwort, and other herbs; not for use, but from adherence to the old customs. the "old people" thought much of these "yherbs," so they must have some too, as well as a little mint and similar potherbs. in the windows you may see two or three geraniums, and over the porch a wicker cage, in which the "ousel cock, with orange-tawny bill," pours out his rich melodious notes. there is hardly a cottage without its captive bird, or tame rabbit, or mongrel cur, which seems as much attached to his master as more high-bred dogs to their owners. these better cottages are extremely pleasing to look upon. there is an old english, homely look about them. i know a man now whose cottage is ornamented much in the way i have described, a man of sixty, who can neither read nor write, and is rude and uncouth in speech, yet everything about him seems pleasant and happy. to my eye the thatch and gables, and picturesque irregularity of this class of cottages, are more pleasing than the modern glaring red brick and prim slate of dwellings built to order, where everything is cut with a precise uniformity. if a man can be encouraged to build his own house, depend upon it it is better for him and his neighbours than that he should live in one which is not his own. the sense of ownership engenders a pride in the place, and all his better feelings are called into play. some of these cottagers, living in such houses as these, are the very best labourers to be had. they stay on one farm a lifetime, and never leave it--an invaluable aid to a farmer. they frequently possess some little special knowledge of carpentering or blacksmith's work, which renders them extremely useful, and at the same time increases their earnings. these men are the real true peasantry, quiet and peaceful, yet strong and courageous. these are the class that should be encouraged by every possible means; a man who keeps his little habitation in the state i have described, who ornaments it within, and fills his garden with fruit and flowers, though he may be totally unable to read or to speak correctly, is nevertheless a good and useful citizen, and an addition to the stability of the state. though these cottages are worth the smallest sums comparatively, it is interesting to note with what pride and satisfaction the possessors contemplate leaving them to their children. of course this very feeling, where there are quarrelsome relations, often leads to bickerings and strife. it is astonishing with what tenacity a man who thinks he has a claim to a part of such a small estate will cling to his cause, and will not hesitate to spend to maintain his claim all his little earnings on the third-class lawyers whom the agricultural poor mostly patronise. even after every shadow of legal chance is gone, he still loudly declares his right; and there is more squabbling about the inheritance of these places than over the succession to great domains. another class of labourers' cottages is found chiefly in the villages. these were not originally erected for the purpose to which they are now applied; they were farmhouses in the days when small farms were the rule, or they were built for tradesmen who have long since departed. these buildings are divided into two, three, or more habitations, each with its family; and many makeshifts have to be resorted to to render them decent and comfortable. this class of cottage is to be avoided if possible, because the close and forced intercourse which must take place between the families generally leads to quarrels. perhaps there is one pump for the entire building, and one wants to use it just at the moment that another requires water; or there is only one gateway to the court, and the passage is obstructed by the wheelbarrow of the other party. it is from these places that the greater part of the malcontents go up to the magistrates in petty sessions. it is rare, indeed, that the cottager living more or less isolated by the side of the road appears in a court of law. of course, in these villages there are cottages which have been built expressly for the use of labouring men, and these, like those in the open country, may be divided into three classes--the hovel, the cottage proper, and the model modern cottage. in the villages there is almost sure to be one or more cottages which carries one's idea of lilliputian dwellings to the extreme. these are generally sheds or outhouses which have been converted into cottages. i entered one not long since which consisted of two rooms, one above and one below, and each of these rooms could not have measured, at a guess, more than six feet six across. i had heard of this place, and expected to find it a perfect den of misery and wretchedness. no such thing. to my surprise the woman who opened the door was neatly clad, clean, and bright. the floor of the cottage was of ordinary flag-stones, but there was a ceiling whitewashed and clean. a good fire was burning in the grate--it was the middle of winter--and the room felt warm and comfortable. the walls were completely covered with engravings from the _illustrated london news_. the furniture was equal to the furniture of the best cottages, and everything was extremely clean. the woman said they were quite comfortable; and although they could have had a larger cottage many times since, they never wished to change, as they had no children. that of course made a great difference. i never should have thought it possible for two human beings to have existed, much less been comfortable, in such a diminutive place. another cottage i know contains but one room altogether, which is about eight feet square; it is inhabited by a solitary old woman, and looks like a toy-house. one or two such places as these may be found in most villages, but it does not by any means follow that because they are small the inhabitants are badly off. the condition they are found in depends entirely upon the disposition of the inmates. if they are slatternly and dirty, the largest cottages would not improve them. in some rural villages a great many cottages may be observed sadly out of repair--the thatch coming off and in holes, the windows broken, and other signs of dilapidation. this is usually set down to the landlord's fault, but if the circumstances are inquired into, it will often be found that the fault lies with the inmates themselves. these cottages are let to labourers at a merely nominal rent, and with them a large piece of allotment ground. but although they thus get a house and garden almost free, they refuse to do the slightest or simplest repairs. if the window gets broken--"oh, let it stop; the landlord can do that." if a piece of thatch comes off--"oh, 'tisn't my house; let the landlord do it up." so it goes on till the cottage is ready to tumble to pieces. what is the landlord to do? in his heart he would like to raze the whole village to the ground and rebuild it afresh. but there are not many who can afford such an expense. then, if it were done, the old women and old men, and infirm persons who find a home in these places, would be driven forth. if the landlord puts up two hundred new cottages, he finds it absolutely necessary to get some kind of return for the capital invested. he does not want more than two and a half per cent.; but to ask that means a rise of perhaps a shilling a week. that is enough; the labourer seeks another tumbledown place where he can live for tenpence a week, and the poor and infirm have to go to the workhouse. so, rather than be annoyed with the endless complaints and troubles, to say nothing of the inevitable loss of money, the landlord allows things to go on as they are. among our english cottages in out-of-the-way places may be found curious materials for the study of character in humble life. in one cottage you may find an upright, stern-featured man, a great student of the bible, and fond of using its language whenever opportunity offers, who is the representative of the old puritan, though the denomination to which he may belong is technically known as the methodist. he is stern, hard, uncompromising--one who sets duty above affection. his children are not spoiled because the rod is spared. he stands aloof from his fellows, and is never seen at the cottage alehouse, or lingering in groups at the cross-roads. he is certain to be at the "anniversary," _i.e._, the commemoration of the foundation of the methodist chapel of the parish. the very next cottage may contain the antithesis of this man. this is a genius in his way. he has some idea of art, as you may gather from the fanciful patches into which his garden is divided. he has a considerable talent for construction, and though he has never been an apprentice he can do something towards mending a cart or a door. he makes stands with wires to put flowers in for the farmers' parlours, and strings the dry oak-apples on wire, which he twists into baskets, to hold knicknackeries. he is witty, and has his jest for everybody. he can do something of everything--turn his hand any way--a perfect treasure on the farm. in the old days there was another character in most villages; this was the rhymer. he was commonly the fiddler too, and sang his own verses to tunes played by himself. since the printing-press has come in, and flooded the country with cheap literature, this character has disappeared, though many of the verses these men made still linger in the countryside. the ordinary adult farm labourer commonly rises at from four to five o'clock; if he is a milker, and has to walk some little distance to his work, even as early as half-past three. four was the general rule, but of late years the hour has grown later. he milks till five or half-past, carries the yokes to the dairy, and draws water for the dairymaid, or perhaps chops up some wood for her fire to scald the milk. at six he goes to breakfast, which consists of a hunch of bread and cheese as the rule, with now and then a piece of bacon, and as a milker he receives his quart of beer. at breakfast there is no hurry for half-an-hour or so; but some time before seven he is on at the ordinary work of the day. if a milker and very early riser, he is not usually put at the heavy jobs, but allowances are made for the work he has already done. the other men on the farm arrive at six. at eleven, or half-past, comes luncheon, which lasts a full hour, often an hour and a quarter. about three o'clock the task of milking again commences; the buckets are got out with a good deal of rattling and noise, the yokes fitted to the shoulders, and away he goes for an hour or hour and a half of milking. that done, he has to clean up the court and help the dairymaid put the heavier articles in place; then another quart of beer, and away home. the time of leaving off work varies from half-past five to half-past six. at ordinary seasons the other men leave at six, but in haymaking or harvest time they are expected to remain till the job in hand that day is finished, often till eight or half-past. this is compensated for by a hearty supper and almost unlimited beer. the women employed in field labour generally leave at four, and hasten home to prepare the evening meal. the evening meal is the great event of the day. like the independent gentleman in this one thing, the labourer dines late in the day. his midday meal, which is the farmer's dinner, is his luncheon. the labourer's dinner is taken at half-past six to seven in the evening, after he has got home, unlaced his heavy and cumbrous boots, combed his hair, and washed himself. his table is always well supplied with vegetables, potatoes, and particularly greens, of which he is peculiarly fond. the staple dish is, of course, a piece of bacon, and large quantities of bread are eaten. it is a common thing now, once or twice in the week, for a labourer to have a small joint of mutton, not a prime joint, of course, but still good and wholesome meat. many of them live in a style, so far as eating and drinking is concerned, quite equal to the small farmers, and far superior to what these small farmers were used to. instead of beer, the agricultural labourer frequently drinks tea with his dinner--weak tea in large quantities. after the more solid parts comes a salad of onions or lettuce. these men eat quantities which would half kill many townspeople. after dinner, if it is the season of the year, they go out to the allotment and do a little work for themselves, and then, unless the alehouse offers irresistible attractions, to bed. the genuine agricultural labourer goes early to bed. it is necessary for him, after the long toil of the day, on account of the hour at which he has to rise in the morning. men employed on arable farms, as carters, for instance, have to rise even earlier than dairymen. they often begin to bait their horses at half-past three, or rather they used to. this operation of baiting is a most serious and important one to the carter. on it depends the appearance of his team--with him a matter of honest and laudable ambition. if he wishes his horses to look fat and well, with smooth shiny coats, he must take the greatest care with their food, not to give them too much or too little, and to vary it properly. he must begin feeding a long time before his horses start to plough. it is, therefore, an object with him to get to rest early. in the winter time especially the labouring poor go to bed very soon, to save the expense of candles. by the bye, the cottagers have a curious habit, which deserves to be recorded even for its singularity. when the good woman of the cottage goes out for half-an-hour to fetch a pail of water, or to gossip with a neighbour, she always leaves the door-key in the keyhole _outside_. the house is, in fact, at the mercy of any one who chooses to turn the key and enter. this practice of locking the door and leaving the key in it is very prevalent. the presence of the key is to intimate that the inmate has gone out, but will shortly return; and it is so understood by the neighbours. if a cottager goes out for the day, he or she locks the door, and takes the key with them; but if the key is left in the door, it is a sign that the cottager will be back in ten minutes or so. the alehouse is the terrible bane of the labourer. if he can keep clear of that, he is clean, tidy, and respectable; but if he once falls into drinking habits, good-bye to all hopes of his rising in his occupation. where he is born there will he remain, and his children after him. some of the cottagers who show a little talent for music combine under the leadership of the parish clerk and the patronage of the clergyman, and form a small brass band which parades the village at the head of the oddfellows or other benefit club once a year. in the early summer, before the earnest work of harvest begins, and while the evenings begin to grow long, it is not unusual to see a number of the younger men at play at cricket in the meadow with the more active of the farmers. most populous villages have their cricket club, which even the richest farmers do not disdain to join, and their sons stand at the wicket. the summer is the labourer's good season. then he can make money and enjoy himself. in the summer three or four men will often join together and leave their native parish for a ramble. they walk off perhaps some forty or fifty miles, take a job of mowing or harvesting, and after a change of scenery and associates, return in the later part of the autumn, full of the things they have seen, and eager to relate them to the groups at the cross-roads or the alehouse. the winter is under the best circumstances a hard time for the labourer. it is not altogether that coals are dear and firewood growing scarcer year by year, but every condition of his daily life has a harshness about it. in the summer the warm sunshine cast a glamour over the rude walls, the decaying thatch, and the ivy-covered window. the blue smoke rose up curling beside the tall elm-tree. the hedge parting his garden from the road was green and thick, the garden itself full of trees, and flowers of more or less beauty. mud floors are not so bad in the summer; holes in the thatch do not matter so much; an ill-fitting window-sash gives no concern. but with the cold blasts and ceaseless rain of winter all this is changed. the hedge next the road is usually only elder, and this, once the leaves are off, is the thinnest, most miserable of shelters. the rain comes through the hole in the thatch (we are speaking of the large class of poor cottages), the mud floor is damp, and perhaps sticky. if the floor is of uneven stones, these grow damp and slimy. the cold wind comes through the ill-fitting sash, and drives with terrible force under the door. very often the floor is one step lower than the ground outside, and consequently there is a constant tendency in rainy weather for the water to run or soak in. the elm-tree overhead, that appeared so picturesque in summer, is now a curse, for the great drops fall perpetually from it upon the thatch and on the pathway in front of the door. in great storms of wind it sways to and fro, causing no little alarm, and boughs are sometimes blown off it, and fall upon the roof-tree. the thatch of the cottage is saturated; the plants and grasses that almost always grow on it, and the moss, are vividly, rankly green; till all dripping, soaked, overgrown with weeds, the wretched place looks not unlike a dunghill. inside, the draught is only one degree better than the smoke. these low chimneys, overshadowed with trees, smoke incessantly, and fill the room with smother. to avoid the draught, many of the cottages are fitted with wooden screens, which divide the room, small enough before, into two parts, the outer of which, towards the door, is a howling wilderness of draught and wet from under the door; and the inner part close, stuffy, and dim with smoke driven down the chimney by the shifting wind. here the family are all huddled up together close over the embers. here the cooking is done, such as it is. here they sit in the dark, or in such light as is supplied by the carefully hoarded stock of fuel, till it is time to go to bed, and that is generally early enough. so rigid is the economy practised in many of these cottages that a candle is rarely if ever used. the light of the fire suffices, and they find their beds in the dark. even when a labourer has risen in the scale, and has some small property, the enforced habits of early life cling to him; and i have frequently found men who were really worth some little money sitting at eight o'clock on a dark winter's night without a candle or lamp, their feet close to a few dying embers. the older people especially go to bed early. going to some cottages once for a parish paper that had been circulated for signature, i rapped at the closed door. this was at half-past seven one evening in november. again and again i hammered at the door; at last an old woman put her head out of window, and the following colloquy ensued:-- "what do 'ee want?" "the paper; have you signed it?" "lor, i doan't know. he's on the table--a bin ther ever since a come. thee's can lift th' latch an' take 'un. _we bin gone to bed this two hours._" they must have gone upstairs at half-past five. to rise at five of a summer's morning, and see the azure of the sky and the glorious sun, may be, perhaps, no great hardship, although there are few persons who could long remain poetical on bread and cheese. but to rise at five on a dark winter's morning is a very different affair. to put on coarse nailed boots, weighing fully seven pounds, gaiters up above the knee, a short greatcoat of some heavy material, and to step out into the driving rain and trudge wearily over field after field of wet grass, with the furrows full of water; then to sit on a three-legged stool, with mud and manure half-way up the ankles, and milk cows with one's head leaning against their damp, smoking hides for two hours, with the rain coming steadily drip, drip, drip--this is a very different affair. the "fogger" on a snowy morning in the winter has to encounter about the most unpleasant circumstances imaginable. icicles hang from the eaves of the rick, and its thatch is covered with snow. up the slippery ladder in the dark morning, one knee out upon the snow-covered thatch, he plunges the broad hay-knife in and cuts away an enormous truss--then a great prong is stuck into this, a prong made on purpose, with extra thick and powerful handle, and the truss, well bound round with a horse-hair rope, is hoisted on the head and shoulders. this heavy weight the fogger has to carry perhaps half-a-mile through the snow; the furrows in the field are frozen over, but his weight crashes through the ice, slush into the chilly water. rain, snow, or bitter frost, or still more bitter east winds--"harsh winds," as he most truly calls them--the fogger must take no heed of either, for the cows must be fed. a quart of threepenny ale for breakfast, with a hunch of bread and cheese, then out to work again in the weather, let it be what it may. the cowyards have to be cleaned out--if not done before breakfast--the manure thrown up into heaps, and the heaps wheeled outside. or, perhaps, the master has given him a job of piece-work to fill up the middle of the day with--a hedge to cut and ditch. this means more slush, wet, cold, and discomfort. about six or half-past he reaches home, thoroughly saturated, worn-out, cross, and "dummel." i don't know how to spell that word, nor what its etymology may be, but it well expresses the dumb, sullen churlishness which such a life as this engenders. for all the conditions and circumstances of such a life tend to one end only--the blunting of all the finer feelings, the total erasure of sensitiveness. the coarse, half-cooked cabbage, the small bit of fat and rafty bacon, the dry bread and pint of weak tea, makes no very hearty supper after such a day as this. the man grows insensible to the weather, so cold and damp; his bodily frame becomes crusted over, case-hardened; and with this indifference there rises up at the same time a corresponding dulness as regards all moral and social matters. generally the best conditions of cottage life are to be found wherever there are, say, three or four great, tall, strong, unmarried sons lodging in the house with their aged parents. each of these pays a small sum weekly for his lodging, and often an additional sum for the bare necessaries of life. in the aggregate this mounts up to a considerable sum, and whatever is bought is equally shared by the parents. they live exceedingly well. such young men as these earn good wages, and now and then make extra time, and come home with a pocketful of money. even after the inevitable alehouse has claimed its share, there still remains enough to purchase fresh meat for supper; and it is not at all unusual in such cottages to find the whole family supping at seven (it is, in fact, dining) on a fairly good joint of mutton, with every species of common vegetables. in one case that was brought under my notice three brothers lived with their aged mother. they were all strong, hard-working men, and tolerably steady. in that cottage there were no less than four separate barrels of beer, and all on tap. four barrels in one cottage seems an extraordinary thing, yet it resolved itself very simply. the cottage was the mother's; they gave her so much for lodging, and she had her own barrel of beer, so that there should be no dispute. the three brothers were mowers--mowers drink enormous quantities of liquor--and with the same view to prevent dispute each had his own especial barrel. families like this live fairly well, and have many little comforts. still, at the best, in winter it is a rough and uncomfortable existence. in the life of the english agricultural labourers there is absolutely no poetry, no colour. even their marriages--times when if ever in life poetry will manifest itself--are sober, dull, tame, clumsy, and colourless. i say sober in the sense of tint, for to get drunk appears to be the one social pleasure of the marriage-day. they, of course, walk to church; but then that walk usually leads across fields full of all the beauties of the spring or the summer. there is nothing in the walk itself to flatten down the occasion. but the procession is so dull--so utterly ungenial--a stranger might pass it without guessing that a wedding was toward. except a few rude jests; except that there is an attempt to walk arm-in-arm (it is only an attempt, for they forget to allow for each other's motions); except the sunday dresses, utterly devoid of taste, what is there to distinguish this day from the rest? there is the drunken carousal, it is true, all the afternoon and evening. there are no fête days in the foreign sense in the english labourer's life. there are the fairs and feasts, and a fair is the most melancholy of sights. showmen's vans, with pictures outside of unknown monsters; merry-go-rounds, nut stalls, gingerbread stalls, cheap jacks, and latterly photographic "studios"; behind all these the alehouse; the beating of drums and the squalling of pigs, the blowing of horns, and the neighing of horses trotted out for show, the roar of a rude crowd--these constitute a country fair. there is no colour--nothing flowery or poetical about this festival of the labourer. the village feasts are still less interesting. here and there the clergyman of the parish has succeeded in turning what was a rude saturnalia into a decorous "fête," with tea in a tent. but generally the feasts are falling into rapid disuse, and would perhaps have died away altogether had not the benefit societies often chosen that day for their annual club-dinner. a village feast consists of two or three gipsies located on the greensward by the side of the road, and displaying ginger-beer, nuts, and toys for sale; an aunt sally; and, if the village is a large one, the day may be honoured by the presence of what is called a rifle-gallery; the "feast" really and truly does not exist. some two or three of the old-fashioned farmers have the traditional roast beef and plum-pudding on that day, and invite a few friends; but this custom is passing away. in what the agricultural labourer's feast nowadays consists no one can tell. it is an excuse for an extra quart or two of beer, that is all. this dulness is not, perhaps, the fault of the labourer. it may be that it is the fault of the national character, shown more broadly in the lower class of the population. speaking nationally, we have no fête days--there is no colour in our mode of life. these english agricultural labourers have no passion plays, no peasant plays, no rustic stage and drama, few songs, very little music. the club dinner is the real fête of the labourer; he gets plenty to eat and drink for that day. it is this lack of poetical feeling that makes the english peasantry so uninteresting a study. they have no appreciation of beauty. many of them, it is true, grow quantities of flowers; but barely one in a thousand could arrange those flowers in a bouquet. the alehouse forms no inconsiderable part of the labourer's life. it is at once his stock exchange, his reading-room, his club, and his assembly rooms. it is here that his benefit society holds its annual dinner. the club meetings take place weekly or monthly in the great room upstairs. here he learns the news of the day; the local papers are always to be found at the public-house, and if he cannot read himself he hears the news from those who can. in the winter he finds heat and light, too often lacking at home; at all times he finds amusement; and who can blame him for seizing what little pleasure lies in his way? as a rule the beerhouse is the only place of amusement to which he can resort: it is his theatre, his music-hall, picture-gallery, and crystal palace. the recent enactments bearing upon the licensed victuallers have been rather hard upon the agricultural labourer. no doubt they are very excellent enactments, especially those relating to early closing; but in the villages and outlying rural districts, where life is reduced to its most rude and simple form, many of the restrictions are unjust, and deprive the labourer of what he feels to be his legitimate right. playing at nine-pins, for instance, is practically forbidden, so also dominoes. now, it was a great thing to put down skittle-sharping and cheating at gambling generally--a good thing to discourage gambling in every form--but in these thinly-populated outlying agricultural parishes, where money is scarce and wages low, there never existed any temptation to allure skittle-sharpers and similar cheaters to the spot. the game at skittles was a legitimate game--a fair and honest struggle of skill and strength. nine times out of ten it was played only for a quart of ale, to be drunk by the loser as well as the winner in good fellowship. why deprive the man who labours all day in wet and storm of so simple a pleasure in the evening? the conditions are very different to those existing in large manufacturing towns, and some modification of the law ought to be made. the agricultural labourer has no cheap theatre at which he can spend an hour, no music-hall, no reading-room; his only resource is the public-house. now that he is practically deprived of his skittles and such games, he has no amusement left except to drink, or play at pitch and toss on the quiet, a far worse pastime than skittles. skittles, of course, are allowed provided the players play for love only; but what public-house keeper cares to put up the necessary arrangements on such terms? the labourer will have his quart in the evening, and, despite of all "cry" to the contrary, i believe it to be his right to have that quart; and it is better, if he must have it, that his whole thoughts should not be concentrated on the liquor--that he should earn it by skill and strength. there is an opprobrium about the public-house, and let us grant that it is at least partially deserved--but where else is the labourer to go? he cannot for ever work all day and sit in his narrow cabin in the evening. he cannot always read, and those of his class who do read do so imperfectly. a reading-room has been tried, but as a rule it fails to attract the _purely agricultural labourer_. the shoemaker, the tailor, the village post-master, grocer, and such people may use it; also a few of the better-educated of the young labourers, the rising generation; but not the full-grown labourer with a wife and family and cottage. it does good undoubtedly; in the future, as education extends, it will become a place of resort. but at present it fails to reach the adult genuine agricultural labourer. for a short period in the dead of the winter the farmers and gentry get up penny readings in many places, but these are confined to at most one evening a week. what, then, is the labourer to do? let any one put himself in his place, try to realise his feelings and circumstances. at present, till education extends, he must go to the public-house. is he to be punished and deprived of his game of skill because in large towns it bears evil fruit? surely the law could be somewhat modified, and playing permitted under some restrictions. the early closing has been an unalloyed good in these rural districts. the labourer is a steady drinker. he does not toss down glasses of stiff brandy and whisky. his beer requires time to produce an effect. the last hour does the mischief. since the earlier closing the village streets have been comparatively free from drunken men. in any case, the agricultural labourer is the most lamb-like of drunkards. he interferes with no one. he unhinges no gates, smashes no windows, does no injury. he either staggers home or quietly lies on the grass till the liquor passes off. he is not a quarrelsome man. he does not fight with knuckle-dusters or kick with his heavy boots. his fights, when he does fight, are very harmless affairs. no doubt his drunkenness is an offence; but it is comparatively innocuous to the general public. religious feeling does not run high among the labourers. a large proportion of them are nonconformists--principally methodists. but this is not out of any very decided notion as to the difference of ceremony or theological dogma; it arises out of a class feeling. they say, or rather they feel, that this is _their_ church. the parish church is the church of the farmers and the gentry. there is no hostility to the clergyman of the parish, no bitter warfare of sect against sect, or of methodist against churchman. but you see very few of the farmers go to chapel. the labourer goes there, and finds his own friends--his cousins and uncles--his wife's relations. he is among his own class. there is no feeling of inferiority. the religion taught, the service, the hymns, the preacher, all are his. he has a sense of proprietorship in them. he helps to pay for them. the french peasant replied to the english tourist, who expressed surprise at the fanatic love of the populace for the first napoleon--"he was as much a tyrant as king louis was." "ah, but napoleon was _our_ king." so the labourers feel that this is their religion. therefore it is that so many of them gather together (where there are no chapels) in the cottage of some man who takes the lead, and sit, with doors and windows shut, crammed together to pray and listen to others pray. any of them who wishes can, as it were, ascend the pulpit here. this is why in so many parishes the pews of the parish church are comparatively empty so far as agricultural labourers are concerned. the best of clergymen must fail to fill them under such disadvantages. it is very difficult not only for the clergyman, but for others who wish to improve the condition of the labourer, to reach him. better cottages are, of course, a most effectual way, but it is not in the power of every one to confer so substantial a benefit. perhaps one of the best means devised has been that of cottage flower-shows. these are, of course, not confined to flowers; in fact, the principal part of such shows consists of table vegetables and fruit. by rigidly excluding all gardeners, and all persons not strictly cottage people, the very best results have often been arrived at in this way. for if there is one thing in which the labourer takes an interest it is his garden and his allotment. to offer him prizes for the finest productions of his garden touches the most sensitive part of his moral organisation. it is wonderful what an amount of emulation these prizes excite--emulation not so much for the value of the prize as for the distinction. these competitions tend besides to provide him with a better class of food, for he depends largely upon vegetables. there is nothing connected with the condition of the agricultural poor that is better worth the attention of improvers than the style of cookery pursued in these cottages. a more wretched cookery probably does not exist on the face of the earth. the soddened cabbage is typical of the whole thing. since higher wages have come in it has become possible for the labourer in many cases to provide himself with better food, such as mutton--the cheap parts--more bacon, pork, and so on; but the women do not know how to make the most of it. it is very difficult to lay down a way in which this defect may be remedied; for there is nothing a man, let him be never so poor, so deeply resents as an inspection of the contents of his pot. he would sooner eat half-raw bacon than have the teaching forced on him--how to make savoury meals of the simple provisions within his reach; nor can he be blamed for this sturdy independent feeling. possibly the establishment of schools of cookery in villages might do much good. they might be attached to the new schools now building throughout the country. the labourer, from so long living upon coarse, ill-cooked food, acquires an artificial taste. some men eat their bacon raw; others will drink large quantities of vinegar, and well they may need it to correct by its acidity the effects of strong unwholesome cabbage. the cottage cook has no idea of those nutritious and pleasant soups which can be made to form so important a feature in the economy of daily life. the labourer is in a lower degree of the same class as the third-rate working farmer of the past. he is the old small dairy farmer in a coarser shape. with a little less education, ruder manners, with the instincts of eating, drinking, and avarice more prominently displayed, he presents in his actual condition at this day a striking analogy to the agriculturist of a bygone time. in fact, those farmers of twenty or thirty acres, living in cottage-like homesteads, were barely distinguishable as far as _personnel_ went from the labourers among whom they lived. this being the case, it is not surprising to find that the labourer of this day presents in general characteristics a marked affinity in ideas and sentiments to those entertained by the old farmer. he has the same paternal creed in a more primeval form. he considers his children as his absolute property. he rules them with a rod of iron, or rather of ground-ash. in fact, the ground-ash stick is his social religion. the agricultural labouring poor are very rough and even brutal towards their children. not that they are without affection towards them, but they are used to thrash them into obedience instead of leading them into it by the gentle means of moral persuasion. bystanders would call the agricultural labourer cruel. carters, for instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a brutal manner. but i do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility to suffering. somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare--whether it has grown up out of the circumstances surrounding them. the same unfeeling brutality often extends to the cattle under their care. in this there has been a decided improvement of late years; but it is not yet extinct. these are some of the lights and shades of the labourer's daily life impartially presented. _field-faring women._ if a thoughtful english peasant-woman rejoiced that in her house a son was born, it would be, not because "she had gotten a man from the lord," but a thanksgiving that it was not a girl. that most natural thanksgiving of the hebrew woman is too rarely heard in the rural cottage, situated though it may be in the midst of meadows and fields abounding with the fat of the earth. the fact that a fresh being has entered upon life, with all its glorious possibilities, is not a subject for joy. "well, john," the farmer says to his man, "your wife has been confined, hasn't she? how's the young one?" "aw, sir, a' be main weak and pickèd, an' like _to go back_--thank god!" replies the labourer with intense satisfaction, especially if he has two or three children already. "pickèd" means thin, sharp-featured, wasted, emaciated. "to go back" is to die. the man does not like to say "die," therefore he puts it "to go back"--_i.e._, whence it came; from the unknown. yet, with all this hard indifference, the labourer is as fond of his children as any one else. the "ego" that utters those apparently heartless words is not the real man, it is the "ego" produced by long experience of the hardships of poverty; of coarse fare, rude labour, exposure. after all, it is in a spirit of tenderness towards the infant that the parent half desires it to die. the real "ego," the true man, delights as all humanity does in watching the growth of the tiny limbs, the expansion of the instincts into mind, and the first employment of that mind. he feels as marguerite in _faust_ felt, tending the babe--"the holiest of all joys." but life is very, very hard, and circumstances push him out of himself. still more do these hardships tell upon his wife; and so it is, knowing what her sex have to go through, that she welcomes a boy more than a girl. an aged agricultural woman said she would sooner have seven boys than one girl; for the former, when they became lads, went out and earned their own living, but the girls you never knew when they were got rid of--they were always coming back. this expressed the practical view of the matter. but supposing that the child should prove a girl; it must not be imagined that it receives any ruder treatment in mere infancy than a boy would have had. in early infancy children have no sex. but the poor mother has her trials. though in the midst of a country teeming with milk, it is often with the utmost difficulty that she can obtain any for her babe, if nature shall have rendered her dependent upon artificial supply. this has become especially the case of late years, now that so much milk is sent to london, instead of being retained in the dairy for the manufacture of butter and cheese. so that it actually happens that the poor mother in the courts of the metropolis can obtain milk easier than her far-away sister in those fabulous fields which the city woman has never seen, and, perhaps, never will. often in arable districts there are scarcely any cows kept. no one cares to retail a pennyworth of milk. it is only by favour, through the interest taken by some farmer's wife, that it can be got. very few agricultural women have a medical man present at their confinement; they usually entrust themselves to the care of some village nurse, who has a reputation for skill in such matters, but no scientifically acquired knowledge--who proceeds by rule of thumb. the doctor--almost always the parish doctor, though sometimes the club officer--is not called in till after the delivery. the poor woman will frequently come downstairs on the fourth day; and it is to this disregard of proper precautions that the distortions of figure and many of the illnesses of poor agricultural women are attributable. nothing but the severe training they have gone through from childhood upwards--the exposure to all kinds of weather--the life in the open air, the physical strength induced by labour, can enable them to support the strain upon the frame caused by so quickly endeavouring to resume their household duties. it is probably this reserve of strength which enables them to recover from so serious a matter so quickly. certain it is that very few die from confinement; and yet, from the point of view of the middle class of society, almost every precaution and every luxury by them deemed necessary is omitted. of course, in some instances, agricultural women whose husbands have, perhaps, worked for one master from boyhood, receive much more attention than here indicated--wines, jellies, meat, and so on--but the majority have to rely upon the tender mercies of the parish. it has been often remarked that the labourer, let him be in receipt of what wages he will, makes no provision for this, the most serious and interesting of all domestic events. though it can be foreseen for months, he does not save a single sovereign. he does not consider it in the least shameful to receive parish relief on these occasions; he leaves his partner entirely to the mercy of strangers, and were it not for the clergyman's wife, she would frequently be without sympathy. there are no matters in which so much practical good is accomplished by the wives of the rural clergy as in these confinements of the poor women in their parishes. it is a matter peculiarly within their sphere, and, to their honour be it spoken, one which they carry out to the utmost of their ability. a cottage is at best a wretched place to be ill in. it is a marvel how many poor women escape at all, from the close atmosphere of the low-pitched holes in which they are confined. it is a wonder that, among the many schemes of philanthropy which have attracted attention of late years, something has not been done for these poor creatures. why should not every large village or cluster of villages--there are often three or four within a mile or two--have their lying-in hospitals, on the cottage hospital system? scarcely any parish but has its so-called charities--money left by misguided but benevolent persons, for the purpose of annual distribution in small doles of groats, or loaves, or blankets. often there is a piece of land called "poor's mead," or some similar name, which has been devised like this, the annual rent from it to be applied for the poor. as it is, the benefit from these charities is problematical. if they were combined, and the aggregate funds applied to maintain a lying-in hospital for the district, a real and efficient good would be arrived at. but of all places, villages are neglected. let it be drainage, water supply, allotments--anything and everything--the villages go on as they may, the fault being the absence of local authority. there are plenty of gentlemen ready and willing to take part in and advance such schemes, but there is no combination. spontaneous combination is uncertain in its operation. if there were some system of village self-government, these wants would be soon supplied. it is true that there is the union workhouse. a poor woman can go to the workhouse; but is it right, is it desirable from any point of view, that decent women should be driven to the workhouse at such times? as a matter of fact, it is only the unfortunates who have illegitimate children that use the workhouse lying-in wards. such an institution as has been suggested would be gladly welcomed by the agricultural poor. most cottages have but two bedrooms, some only one; a better class of cottage is now being gradually erected with three, but even in these the third is very small. now, take the case of a labouring man with seven or eight children, and living in a cottage with two bedrooms, and whose wife is confined; and let it be remembered that large families are common amongst this class. the wife must certainly have one room to herself and her attendant. the father, then, and his children must crowd into the other, or sleep as they can on the ground-floor. in the case of nearly grown-up children the overcrowding is a serious matter. the relief afforded by a lying-in hospital would be immense; and the poor woman herself would be restored to her family with her health firmly re-established, whereas now she often lingers in a sickly state for months. in the soft, warm summer-time, when the midsummer hum of the myriads of insects in the air sheds a drowsy harmony over the tree-tops, the field-faring woman goes out to haymaking, and leaves her baby in the shade by the hedge-side. a wooden sheepcage, turned upside down and filled with new-made hay, forms not at all a despicable cradle; and here the little thing lies on its back and inhales the fresh pure air, and feels the warmth of the genial sun, cheered from time to time by visits from its busy mother. perhaps this is the only true poetry of the hayfield, so much talked of and praised. the mother works with her rake, or with a shorter, smaller prong; and if it is a large farm, the women are kept as much as possible together, for their strength and skill will not allow them to work at the same pace as the men, and if they work in company the one hinders the other. a man can do the work of two women, and do it better in every way, besides being capable of the heavier tasks of pitching, cock-making, &c., which the women cannot manage. before the haymaking machines and horse-rakes came into vogue, it was not uncommon to see as many as twenty women following each other in _échelon_, turning a "wallow," or shaking up the green swathes left by the mowers. farmers were obliged to employ them, but were never satisfied with their work, which was the dearest they paid for. somehow, there was no finish to it. large numbers of women still work in the hayfield, but they are not used in gangs so much as formerly, but distributed about to do light jobs for which a man cannot be spared, and in these they are useful. the pay used to be tenpence a day; now it is one shilling and a pint of beer per day, and in some places fifteenpence. the arcadian innocence of the hayfield, sung by the poets, is the most barefaced fiction; for those times are the rural saturnalia, and the broadest and coarsest of jokes and insinuations are freely circulated; nor does it always stop at language only, provided the master be out of sight. matrons and young girls alike come in for an equal share of this rude treatment, and are quite a match for the men in the force of compliment. the women leave work an hour or so before the men, except when there is a press, and the farmer is anxious to get in the hay before a storm comes. it is not that the hayfield itself originates this coarseness but this is almost the only time of the year when the labouring classes work together in large numbers. a great deal of farm-work is comparatively solitary; in harvest droves of people are collected together, and the inherent vulgarity comes out more strongly. at the wheat-harvest the women go reaping, and exceedingly hard they work at it. there is no harder work done under the sun than reaping, if it is well followed up. from earliest dawn to latest night they swing the sickles, staying with their husbands, and brothers, and friends, till the moon silvers the yellow corn. the reason is because reaping is piece-work, and not paid by the day, so that the longer and the harder they work the more money is earned. in this a man's whole family can assist. his wife, his grown-up sons and daughters cut the corn, the younger ones can carry it and aid in various ways. it is wonderful how the men stand the excessive and continuous labour; it is still more wonderful how the women endure it, trying as it is to the back. it is the hottest season of the year--the early autumn; the sun burns and scorches, and the warm wind gives no relief; even the evenings are close and sultry. the heated earth reflects the rays, and the straw is dry and warm to the touch. the standing corn, nearly as high as the reaper, keeps off the breeze, if there is any, from her brow. grasping the straw continuously cuts and wounds the hand, and even gloves will hardly give perfect protection. the woman's bare neck is turned to the colour of tan; her thin muscular arms bronze right up to the shoulder. short time is allowed for refreshment; right through the hottest part of the day they labour. it is remarkable that none, or very few, cases of sunstroke occur. cases of vertigo and vomiting are frequent, but pass off in a few hours. large quantities of liquor are taken to sustain the frame weakened by perspiration. when night does arrive, even then the task is not over, for they have to carry home on their heads the bundle of wheat gleaned by the smaller children, and perhaps walk two miles to the cottage. this is indeed work for a woman still suckling her child. it is not easy to calculate what a woman earns at such seasons, because they rarely work on their own account: either the father or the husband receives the wages in a lump with his own; but it cannot be much less than that earned by a man; for at these times they work with a will, and they do not at the haymaking. while reaping the baby is nestled down on a heap of coats or shawls under the shelter of the shocks of corn, which form a little hut for it, and, as in the hayfield, is watched by one of the children. often three or four women will place their babies close together, and leave one great girl in charge of the whole, which is an economy, releasing other children for work; for the hayfield and the corn-harvest are the labourer's gold-mine. there is not so much rough joking in the corn-field; they do not work so close together, and the husband or father is near at hand; neither is there time nor inclination in the midst of such severe labour, to which haymaking is play. harvest-homes are going out of fashion. after one of these feasts there was often much that was objectionable; and, wherever possible, farmers have abolished them, giving a small sum of money instead; but in places the labourers grumble greatly at the change, preferring the bacon and the beer, and the unrestrained license. it is noticeable how the women must have their tea. if it is far from home, the children collect sticks, and a fire is made in a corner of the field, and the kettle boiled; and about four o'clock they take a cup in company--always weak tea, with a little brown sugar and no milk, and usually small pieces of bread sopped in it, especially by the elder women. tea is largely used by the agricultural labourers, though it does not by any means prevent them from indulging in beer. snuff is not taken by the women half so much as formerly, though some of the old ones are very fond of it. as soon as ever the child is old enough to crawl about, it is sure to get out into the road and roll in the dust. it is a curious fact that the agricultural children, with every advantage of green fields and wide open downs, always choose the dusty hard road to play in. they are free to wander as they list over mead and leaze, and pluck the flowers out of the hedges, and idle by the brooks, all the year round, the latter part of the spring, when the grass is nearly fit for mowing, only excepted. yet, excepting a few of the elder boys birdnesting, it is the rarest thing to meet a troop of children in the fields; but there they are in the road, the younger ones sprawling in the dust, their naked limbs kicking it up in clouds, and the bigger boys clambering about in the hedge-mound bounding the road, making gaps, splashing in the dirty water of the ditches. hardy young dogs one and all. their food is of the rudest and scantiest, chiefly weak tea, without milk, sweetened with moist sugar, and hunches of dry bread, sometimes with a little lard, or, for a treat, with treacle. butter is scarcely ever used in the agricultural labourer's cottage. it is too dear by far, and if he does buy fats, he believes in the fats expressed from meats, and prefers lard or dripping. children are frequently fed with bread and cheap sugar spread on it. this is much cheaper than butter. sometimes they get a bit of cheese or bacon, but not often, and a good deal of strong cabbage, soddened with pot-liquor. the elder boys get a little beer; the young girls none, save perhaps a sip from their mother's pint, in summer. this is what they have to build up a frame on capable of sustaining heat and cold, exposure, and a life of endless labour. the boys it seems to suit, for they are generally tolerably plump, though always very short for their age. frequently teams of powerful horses drawing immense loads of hay or straw may be seen on the highway, in the charge of a boy who does not look ten years old judged by the town standard, but who is really fifteen. these short, broad, stout lads, look able to stand anything, and in point of fact do stand it, from the kick of a carter's heavy boot to the long and bitter winter. if it is wished to breed up a race of men literally "hard as nails," no better process could be devised; but, looked at from a mental and moral point of view, there may be a difference of opinion. the girls do not appear to thrive so well upon this dietary. they are as tall as the boys, taller if anything considering the ages, but thin and skinny, angular and bony. at seven or eight years old the girl's labour begins. before that she has been set to mind the baby, or watch the pot, and to scour about the hedges for sticks for the fire. now she has not only to mind the baby, but to nurse it; she carries it about with her in her arms; and really the infant looks almost as large as herself, and its weight compels her to lean backwards. she is left at home all day in charge of the baby, the younger children, and the cottage. perhaps a little bread is left for them to eat, but they get nothing more till the mother returns about half-past four, when, woe be to the girl if the fire is not lit, and the kettle on. the girl has to fetch the water--often a hard and tedious task, for many villages have a most imperfect supply, and you may see the ditches by the roadside dammed up to yield a little dirty water. she may have to walk half-a-mile to the brook, and then carry the bucket home as best she may, and repeat the operation till sufficient has been acquired; and when her mother is washing, or, still worse, is a washerwoman by profession, this is her weary trudge all day. of course there are villages where water is at hand, and sometimes too much of it. i know a large village where the brook runs beside the highway, and you have to pass over a "drock," or small bridge, to get to each of the cottages; but such instances are rare. the girl has also to walk into the adjacent town and bring back the bread, particularly if her mother happens to be receiving parish pay. a little older--at ten or eleven, or twelve--still more skinny and bony now as a rule, she follows her mother to the fields, and learns to pick up stones from the young mowing grass, and place them in heaps to be carted away to mend drinking places for cattle. she learns to beat clots and spread them with a small prong; she works in the hayfield, and gleans at the corn-harvest. gleaning--poetical gleaning--is the most unpleasant and uncomfortable of labour, tedious, slow, back-aching work; picking up ear by ear the dropped wheat, searching among the prickly stubble. notwithstanding all her labour, and the hardship she has to endure--coarse fare, and churlish treatment at the hands of those who should love her most--the little agricultural girl still retains some of that natural inclination towards the pretty and romantic inherent in the sex. in the spring she makes daisy chains, and winds them round the baby's neck; or with the stalks of the dandelion makes a chain several feet in length. she plucks great bunches of the beautiful bluebell, and of the purple orchis of the meadow; gathers heaps of the cowslip, and after playing with them a little while, they are left to wither in the dust by the roadside, while she is sent two or three miles with her father's dinner. she chants snatches of rural songs, and sometimes three or four together, joining hands, dance slowly round and round, singing slowly rude rhymes describing marriage--and not over decent some of these rhymes are. she has no toys--not one in twenty such girls ever have a doll; or, if they do, it is but some stick dressed in a rag. poor things! they need no artificial dolls; so soon as ever they can lift it, they are trusted with the real baby. her parents probably do not mean to be unkind, and use makes this treatment bearable, but to an outsider it seems unnecessarily rough, and even brutal. her mother shouts at her in a shrill treble perpetually; her father enforces his orders with a harsh oath and a slap. the pressure of hard circumstances, the endless battle with poverty, render men and women both callous to others' feelings, and particularly strict to those over whom they possess unlimited authority. but the labourer must not be judged too harshly: there is a scale in these matters; a proportion as in everything else; an oath from him, and even a slap on the ear, is really the counterpart of the frown and emphasised words of a father in a more fortunate class of life; and the children do not feel it, or think it exceptionally cruel, as the children of a richer man would. undoubtedly, however, it does lessen the bond between child and parent. there is little filial affection among these cottagers--how should there be? the boy is driven away from home as early as possible; the girl is made day by day to feel her fault in being a girl; to neither can the poor man give any small present, or any occasional treat. what love there is lasts longest between the mother and her daughter. the only way in which a labourer exhibits his affection is when another labourer in authority, as a carter, ill-treats his boy--a too common case--and then he speaks loudly, and very properly. but even in most serious matters there is a strange callousness. i have known instances in which a father, aware that a criminal assault has been attempted by another labourer upon a tender child of twelve, has refused to prosecute, and the brutal offender would have escaped without the slightest punishment had not the clergyman heard of the story. the slow years roll by--they are indeed slow in an agricultural village--and the girl, now fifteen, has to go regularly to work in the fields; that is, if the family be not meantime largely increased. she has in this latter case plenty of work at home to assist her mother. cottagers are not over-clean, but they are not wilfully dirty in their houses; and with a large family there is much washing and other domestic matters to attend to, which the mother, now fast growing feeble, cannot get through herself. in harvest the women get up at four or earlier, and do their household work before starting for the fields. but, perhaps, by this time another girl has grown up sufficiently to nurse baby, mind the young ones, and do slave's work generally. then the elder daughter goes to the fields daily when there is work to be had. in arable districts the women do much work, picking couch grass--a tedious operation--and hoeing. they never or rarely milk now. in the dead of winter there is nothing for women to do. at this age--fifteen or sixteen--the girl perhaps goes out to service at some farmhouse. if she is fortunate enough to enter the house of one of the modern class of farmers, it is a lucky day for her when she begins indoor labour. it is to be feared that the life of a girl of this kind in the old time, and not so long ago, in the houses of the poorer order of farmers, was a rough one indeed. but much of that is past, never to return, and our business is with the present. where they have a dairy she has to clean the buckets and milk-cans and other utensils, to help turn the cheeses, and assist the dairymaid (a most important personage this last) in all kinds of ways. the work is coarse and rude, but it only lasts a portion of the day, and she has regular and ample meals. the bacon and cheese soon begin to tell upon her. the angular bones disappear, the skinny arms grow round, and presently enormously fat--not much the prettier, perhaps, but far more pleasant to look at. her face loses the pinched expression; her cheeks become full, and round, and rosy; in every way her physical frame improves. it is wonderful what a difference a few months in a good farmhouse makes to a girl of this kind. she soon begins to dress better, not from her wages, for these are small enough, and may commence as low as £ ; but her mistress gives her many things, and, if she is a good girl, buys her a dress now and then; and with the shilling or two she asks in advance, she purchases cheap ornaments of the pedlar at the door. her life is low enough socially--it is almost an annual round of working, eating, and sleeping (no one sleeps like a farm-wench); but it is an infinite improvement upon the struggle for existence at the cottage. she has no trouble, no thought, no care now. her mistress may snap occasionally, her master may grumble, and the dairymaid may snarl; but there are no slaps on the ear, no kicks, no going to bed supperless. in summer she goes out in the afternoon haymaking as an extra hand, but only works a few hours, and it is really only a relaxation. she picks up some knowledge of cooking, learns how to make herself useful in the house, and in the course of a year or two, if moderately sharp, is capable of rising a degree, and obtaining a better salary as a maid-servant, having nothing to do with a dairy. the four or five pounds with which she commences may seem a very low sum, but the state of her domestic education at the time must be taken into consideration. she has to learn everything. all the years spent in working in the cottage at home have to be unlearnt--all the old habits replaced by new ones. after the first year or so her value rises considerably; she may continue in the house at a higher salary, or go into the town as maid-servant in a tradesman's family. a large proportion of servant-girls thus find their way from the country into the town. with these we have nothing further to do--they are no longer field-farers. a few after several years learn the art and mystery of butter and cheese, and become dairymaids; and then, if they are clever, earn good wages--indeed, fabulous prices are asked by them. there are not, however, so many dairymaids as formerly, for the small dairies are getting amalgamated and made into larger ones, and then the farmer, if he makes butter and cheese, employs a dairyman in preference. this rise to be maid-servant, or to be dairymaid, is the bright side of the girl's career. there are darker shades which must be mentioned. the overcrowding in cottages leads to what may be called an indifference to decency. it is not that in families decency is wantonly and of a set purpose disregarded, but stern necessity leads to a coarseness and indelicacy which hardens the mind and deadens the natural modesty even of the best girls. then the low scandals of the village talked over from cottage to cottage, the rude jokes of the hayfield, the general looseness and indifference which prevail as to morality, all prepare the girl for the too common fall. if she remains at home and works in the fields after the age of fifteen, unless uncommonly strong-minded, it is an open question whether she will or will not succumb. if she goes into a farmhouse as servant, the chances are in favour of her escaping temptation. but in farmhouses she may also sometimes run into the very jaws of danger. it is not uncommon in some districts for young labourers to sleep in the house, one or two who milk and have to be on the spot early. these take their supper in the kitchen or the brewhouse, and, despite the strictest precautions on the part of the mistress, enjoy plenty of opportunities for flirting with the girl. young, full of animal spirits, giddy and ignorant, she thinks no harm of a romp, and finally falls, and has to leave her service. if a little may be said in favour of the poor girls, not a word can be said in favour of the agricultural men, who are immoral almost without exception, and will remain so until a better-educated generation with more self-respect arises. the number of poor girls, from fifteen to five-and-twenty, in agricultural parishes who have illegitimate offspring is extremely large, and is illustrated by the fact that, out of the marriages that take place--and agricultural poor are a marrying class--scarcely any occur until the condition of the girl is too manifest to be any longer concealed. instances could be mentioned where the clergyman's wife, with a view to check the immorality around her, has offered a reward of a piece of furniture to the first married woman who does not bear a child till nine months after marriage; the custom being within three months. the frequency of the appeals to the petty sessions in rural districts for orders of contribution, by young unmarried girls, also illustrates the prevalent immorality. of late the magistrates have taken the line of ordering contributions on a higher scale, on the grounds that the labourer earns larger wages, and that the cost of living has risen, and also as a check upon the men. this well-intentioned step has had the precisely opposite effect to what was wished. the labourer with higher wages feels the demand upon his pocket but very little more. the cost of living in rural outlying districts has risen only to a very trifling degree--barely perceptibly, in fact. bread is cheap--that is the staple--rents are the same, and there are more allotments than ever, making vegetables more easy to obtain. the result, therefore, is this, that the girl feels she can sin with comparative immunity. she is almost sure to get her order (very few such appeals are refused); let this be supplemented with some aid from the parish, and she is none the worse off than before, for there is no prejudice against employing her in the fields. should her fall take place with some young farmer's son from whom she may get a larger contribution in private, or by order of the magistrates, she is really and truly in a pecuniary sense better off than she was before, for she has a certain fixed income. the evil is aggravated by the new law, which enables the order to be extended over a longer term of years than formerly, so that for fifteen years is a common thing. if it is decided to recognise immorality, and to provide against the woman being unduly injured by it, then these orders are certainly the correct procedure; but if it is desired to suppress it, then they are a total failure. the girl who has had an illegitimate child is thought very little the worse of by her friends and her own class, especially if her seducer is a man who can afford to pay for it--that is the grand point. if she is fool enough to yield to a man who is badly off, she may be jeered at as a fool, but rarely reprimanded as a sinner, not even by her own mother. such things are not looked upon by the rural poor as sins, but as accidents of their condition. it is easy to be hard upon the poor girls, but consider their training. many of them cannot read or write; how many even can sew well? the cottage girl is always a poor hand at her needle, and has to be taught by the elder servants when she first goes into her place. accustomed from childhood to what would be considered abominable indecency in a higher class of life; constantly hearing phrases which it is impossible to allude to; running wild about the lanes and fields with stalwart young men coarser and ruder than those at home; seeing other girls none the worse off, and commiserated with rather than condemned, what wonder is it if the natural result takes place? the fairs have been credited with much of the mischief, and undoubtedly they are productive of evil; but if they were abolished, the average would in all probability remain about the same. the evil is inherent, and does not depend upon circumstances. it is the outcome of a long series of generations; it cannot be overcome in a decade. education will do much, but not all. youth is always led by the tone of the elder people. until the tone of the parent is improved, the conduct of the young will remain much the same. the more distant a parish from a town, the more outlying and strictly agricultural, and therefore stagnant, the greater the immorality. it is the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. they are not thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it evaporates in shouting and slang. they are not riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. no specific cure for this state of things can be devised: it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing social state. it will be slow; for, up to the present, the woman has had but a small share of the benefit that has befallen the labourer through higher wages. if higher wages mainly go for drink, the wife at home is not much the better. the women say themselves they are no better off. if the girl at eighteen or twenty--in most agricultural marriages the girls are very young--is fortunate enough to have placed her faith in a man who redeems his word, then comes the difficulty of the cottage and the furniture to fill it. cottages are often difficult to find, especially anywhere near a man's work, which is the great object. the furniture required is not much, but there must be some. the labourer does not deal much with the town furniture-dealer. a great deal of the furniture in cottages has been picked up at the sales of farmers on quitting their tenancies. such are the old chairs, the formal sideboards and eight-day clocks standing in tall, square oaken cases by the staircase in the cottage. such, too, are the great wooden bedsteads of oak or maple upstairs; and from the same source come the really good feather-beds and blankets. the women--especially the elder women--go to great trouble, and pinch themselves, to find a way of purchasing a good bed, and set no small pride upon it. these old oaken bedsteads, and sideboards, and chairs have perhaps been in the farmhouse for three or four generations, and are at last sold because the final representative of the family is imbued with modern ideas, and quits farming for trade. the cottagers always attend sales like this, and occasionally get hold of good bargains, and so it is that really good substantial furniture may often be found in the possession of the better class of labourers. the old people accumulate these things, and when their sons or daughters marry, can generally spare a few chairs, a bedstead and bed, and with a little crockery from other relations, and a few utensils bought in the adjacent town, the cottage is furnished sufficiently well for a couple whose habits are necessarily simple. after marriage the hard work of the woman's life really begins--work compared with which her early experience at home is nothing; and many, if they have left situations in farmhouses, deeply regret the change. the labourer can hardly be expected to feel the more exalted sentiments; and if in the upper classes even it is said that romance ends with marriage, it is doubly, literally true of the agricultural poor. in addition to her household work, she has to labour in the fields, or to wash--perhaps worse than the former alternative; and after a while her husband, too commonly wearying of his home, in which he finds nothing but a tired woman and troublesome children, leaves her for the public-house, and consumes two-thirds of their slender income in beer. the attachment of the woman for her husband lasts longer than that of the man for the woman. even when he has become a confirmed drunkard, and her life with incessant labour has become a burden to her, she will struggle on, striving to get bread for the children and the rent for the landlord. she knows that as evening comes on, instead of sitting down to rest, her duty will be to go down to the public-house and wait till it pleases her lord and master to try to stagger home, and then to guide his clumsy steps to the threshold. of course there are wives who become as bad as their husbands, who drink, or do worse, and neglect their homes, but they are the exception. as a rule, the woman, once married, does her best to keep her home together. the wife of the labourer does not get her shins smashed with heavy kicks from hobnailed boots, such as the lancashire ruffians administer; but, although serious wife-beating cases are infrequent, there are few women who escape an occasional blow from their husbands. most of them get a moderate amount of thrashing in the course of their lives, and take it much as they take the hardships and poverty of their condition, as a necessity not to be escaped. the labourer is not downright brutal to his wife, but he certainly thinks he has a right to chastise her when she displeases him. once in authority, the labourer is stern, hard, and inconsiderate of the feelings of others, and he is in authority in his own cottage. the wife has been accustomed to such treatment more or less from her childhood; she has been slapped and banged about at home, and therefore thinks comparatively little of a blow from her husband's hand. the man does not mean it so brutally as it appears to outsiders. this semi-wife-beating is only too prevalent. does the incessant labour undergone by an agricultural woman result in ill effects to her physical frame? the day-work in the fields, the haymaking, and such labour as is paid for by the day and not by the piece, cannot do any injury, for it is light, and the hours are short. in some districts the women do not come before half-past eight, and leave a little after four, and they have a long hour out for dinner. it is the piece-work of the corn-harvest that tries the frame, when work begins at sunrise or shortly after, and lasts till the latest twilight, and when it is work, real muscular strain. this cannot but leave its mark. otherwise the field is not injurious to the woman so far as the labour is concerned, and the exposure is not so great as has been supposed, because women are scarcely ever expected to work in wet weather. the worst of the exposure is probably endured upon the arable fields in the bitter winds of spring; but this does not last very long. in what way field-labour is degrading to the women it is difficult to understand. the only work of a disgusting nature now performed by women is the beating of clots on pasture-land, and that is quickly over. after all, there is nothing so very dreadful in it. stone-picking, couch-clearing, hoeing, haymaking, reaping, certainly none of these are in any way disgusting operations. women do not attend to cattle now. as to the immorality, undoubtedly a great deal of what is coarse and rude does pass upon the hayfield, but the hayfield does not originate it; if the same men and women met elsewhere, the same jokes would be uttered and conduct indulged in. the position of agricultural women is a painful one to contemplate, and their lives full of hardships; but field-labour cannot be fairly accused as the cause of the evils they endure. their strength is overstrained in the cornfield; but what can you do? it is their gold-mine--their one grand opportunity of getting a little money. it would be cruel kindness to deny it to them; and, in point of fact, except by interfering with the liberty of the subject, it would be impossible to prevent them. farm-labour is certainly to be preferred to much of the work that women do in manufacturing districts. at least there is no overcrowding; there is plenty of fresh air, and the woman who works in the field looks quite as robust and healthy as her sister sitting all day in a confined factory. it used to be common to see women dressed in a kind of smock-frock; this was in the days when they milked, and it is still occasionally worn. now they generally wear linsey dresses in the winter, and cotton in the summer, at prices from ½d. to d. per yard. they wear boots nailed and tipped much like the men, but not so heavy, and in rough weather corduroy gaiters. their cooking is rude and detestable to any one else's ideas; but it appears exactly suited to the coarse tastes and hearty appetite of their husbands. being uneducated, and a large proportion unable to read, their chief intellectual amusement consists in tittle-tattle and gossip. they are generally inclined to be religious after a fashion, and frequent the chapel or the cottage in which the itinerant preacher holds forth. in summer this preacher will mount upon a waggon placed in a field by the roadside, and draw a large audience, chiefly women, who loudly respond and groan and mutter after the most approved manner. now and then an elderly woman may be found who is considered to have a gift of preaching, and holds forth at great length, quoting scripture right and left. the exhibitions of emotion on the part of the women at such meetings and in the services in their cottages are not pleasant to listen to, but the impression left on the mind is that they are in earnest. they are a charitable race, and eager to help each other. they will watch by the bedsides of their sick neighbours, divide the loaf of bread, look after the children and trudge weary miles to the town for medicine. on the other hand, they are almost childlike in imbibing jealousies and hatreds, and unsparing in abuse and imputation towards a supposed enemy. they are bolder in speech than their husbands to those who occupy higher places in the social scale. it cannot be said that agricultural women are handsome. in childhood they are too often thin and stunted; later they shoot up and grow taller, but remain thin and bony till from eighteen to twenty, when they get plumper, and then is their period of prettiness, if at all. bright eyes, clear complexions, and glossy hair form their attractions, for their features are scarcely ever good. the brief beauty of the prime of youth speedily fades, and at five-and-twenty the agricultural woman, especially if married, is pale or else burnt by the sun to a brown, with flat chest and rounded shoulders. it is rare indeed to see a woman with any pretensions to what is called a figure. it would be wonderful if there were, for much of the labour induces a stooping position, and they are never taught when young to sit upright. growing plainer and plainer as years go by, the elder women are wrinkled and worn-looking, and have contracted a perpetual stoop. many live to a great age. in small parishes it is common to find a large number of women of seventy and eighty, and there are few cottages which do not contain an old woman. this is hardly a result in accordance with the labour they have undergone. the explanation probably is that, continued through a series of generations, it has produced a strength and stamina which can survive almost anything. certain it is that young couples about to marry often experience much difficulty in finding cottages, because they are occupied by extremely aged pairs; and landlords, anxious to tear down and remove old cottages tumbling to pieces, are restrained from doing so out of regard for the aged tenants, who cling with a species of superstitious tenderness to the crumbling walls and decayed thatch. at this age, at seventy-five or even eighty, the agricultural woman retains a strength of body astonishing to a town-bred woman. she will walk eight or ten miles, without apparent fatigue, to and from the nearest town for her provisions. she will almost to the last carry her prong out into the hayfield, and do a little work in some corner, and bear her part in the gleaning after the harvest. she lives almost entirely upon weak tea and bread sops. her mental powers continue nearly unimpaired, and her eyes are still good, though her teeth have long gone. she will laugh over memories of practical jokes played at harvest-homes half-a-century ago; and slowly spells over the service in a prayer-book which asks blessings upon a king instead of a queen. she often keeps the village "confectioner's" shop--_i.e._, a few bottles of sweets and jumbles in the window, side by side with "twists" of whipcord for the ploughboys and carters, and perhaps has a license for tobacco and snuff. but long before this age they have in most cases been kept by the parish. the farmers who form the guardians know well the history of the poor of their parishes, and remembering the long years of hard work, always allow as liberal a relief as they can to these women. out of all their many children and grandchildren, it may happen that one has got on fairly well in life, has a business as a blacksmith, or tinker, or carpenter, and gives her a shilling or so a week; and a shilling goes a long way with a woman who lives upon tea and sops. in their latter days these women resemble the pollard oaks, which linger on year after year, and finally fall from sheer decay. _an english homestead._ it is easy to pass along a country road without observing half of the farmhouses, so many being situated at a distance from the highway, and others hidden by the thick hedges and the foliage of the trees. this is especially the case in districts chiefly occupied in pasture farming, meadow land being usually found along the banks of rivers, on broad level plains, or in slightly undulating prairie-like country. a splendid belt of meadows often runs at the base of the chalk hills, where the springs break out; and it is here that some of the most beautiful pastoral scenery is to be found. by the side of the highway there are gates at intervals in the close-cropped hedge--kept close-cropped by the strict orders of the road surveyors--giving access to the green fields through which runs a waggon-track, apparently losing itself in the grass. this track will take the explorer to a farmhouse. it is not altogether pleasant to drive over in a spring trap, as the wheels jolt in the hard ruts, and the springs are shaken in the deep furrows, the vehicle going up and down like a boat upon the waves. why there should be such furrows in a meadow is a question that naturally arises in the mind. whether it be mown with the scythe or the mowing-machine, it is of advantage to have the surface of the field as nearly as possible level; and it is therefore most probable that these deep furrows had their origin at a period when a different state of things prevailed, when the farmer strove to grow as much wheat as possible, and devoted every acre that he dared break up to the plough. many of these fields were ill adapted for the growth of corn, the soil unsuitable and liable to be partially flooded; consequently as soon as the market was opened, and the price of wheat declined, so that rapid fortunes could no longer be made by it, the fields were allowed to return to their natural condition. no trouble was taken to relevel the land, and the furrows remain silent witnesses to the past. they are useful as drains it is true; but, being so broad, the water only passes off slowly and encourages the rough grass and "bull-polls" to spring up, which are as uneatable by cattle as the australian spinifex. the waggon-track is not altogether creditable to the farmer, who would, one would have thought, have had a good road up to his house at all events. it is very wide, and in damp weather every one who drives along it goes further and further out into the grass to find a firm spot, till as much space is rendered barren as by one of the great hedges, now so abominated. the expense of laying down stone is considerable in some localities where the geological formation does not afford quarries; yet even then there is a plan, simple in itself, but rarely resorted to, by which a great saving in outlay may be effected. any one who will look at a cart-track will see that there are three parallel marks left by the passage of the cart upon the ground. the two outside ruts are caused by the wheels, and between these is a third beaten in by the hoofs of the horse. the plan consists in placing stone, broken up small, not across the whole width of the track, but in these three ruts only; for it is in these ruts alone that the wear takes place, and, if the ground were firm there, no necessity would exist to go farther into the field. to be thoroughly successful, a trench, say six or eight inches wide, and about as deep, should be cut in the place of each rut, and these trenches macadamised. grass grows freely in the narrow green strips between the ruts, and the track has something of the appearance of a railroad. it is astonishing how long these metals, as it were, will last, when once well put down; and the track has a neat, effective look. the foot-passenger is as much benefited as the tenant of the field. in wet weather he walks upon the macadamised strip dryshod, and in summer upon either of the grass strips, easily and comfortably, without going out into the mowing-grass to have the pleasure of turf under his feet. these deep furrows are also awkward to cross with heavy loads of hay or straw, and it requires much skill to build a load able to withstand the severe jolting and lurching. some of the worst are often filled up with a couple of large faggots in the harvest season. these tracks run by the side of the hedge, and the ditches are crossed by bridges or "drocks." the last gate opens into a small field surrounded with a high thick hawthorn hedge, itself a thing of beauty in may and june, first with the may blossom and afterwards with the delicate-tinted dog or wild roses. a spreading ash-tree stands on either side of the gateway, from which on king charles's day the ploughboys carefully select small branches, those with the leaves evenly arranged, instead of odd numbers, to place in their hats. tall elm-trees grow close together in the hedge and upon the "shore" of the ditch, enclosing the place in a high wall of foliage. in the branches are the rooks' nests, built of small twigs apparently thrown together, and yet so firmly intertwined as to stand the swaying of the tree-tops in the rough blasts of winter. in the spring the rook builds a second nest on the floor of the old one, and this continues till five or six successive layers may be traced; and when at last some ruder tempest strews the grass with its ruin, there is enough wood to fill a bushel basket. the dovecot is fixed in the fork of one of the larger elms, where the trunk divides into huge boughs, each the size of a tree; and in the long rank grass near the hedge the backs of a black berkshire pig or two may be seen like porpoises rolling in the green sea. here and there an ancient apple-tree, bent down and bowed to the ground with age, offers a mossy, shady seat upon one of its branches which has returned to the earth from which it sprung. some wooden posts grown green and lichen-covered, standing at regular intervals, show where the housewife dries her linen. right before the very door a great horse-chestnut tree rears itself in all the beauty of its thousands of blossoms, hiding half the house. a small patch of ground in front is railed in with wooden palings to keep out the pigs, and poultry, and dogs--for almost every visitor brings with him one or more dogs--and in this narrow garden grow velvety wall-flowers, cloves, pinks, shrubs of lavender, and a few herbs which are useful for seasoning. the house is built of brick; but the colour is toned down by age, and against the wall a pear-tree is trained upon one side, and upon the other a cherry-tree, so that at certain seasons one may rise in the morning and gather the fresh fruits from the window. the lower windows were once latticed; but the old frames have been replaced with the sash, which if not so picturesque, affords more light, and most old farmhouses are deficient in the supply of light. the upper windows remain latticed still. the red tiles of the roof are dull with lichen and the beating of the weather; and the chimney, if looked at closely, is full of tiny holes--it is where the leaden pellets from guns fired at the mischievous starlings have struck the bricks. a pair of doves perched upon the roof-tree coo amorously to each other, and a thin streak of blue smoke rises into the still air. the door is ajar, or wide open. there is no fear here of thieves, or street-boys throwing stones into the hall. excepting in rain or rough wind, and at night, that front door will be open almost all the summer long. when shut at night it is fastened with a wooden bar passing across the whole width of the door, and fitting into iron staples on each post--a simple contrivance, but very strong and not easily tampered with. many of the interior doors still open with the old thumb-latch; but the piece of shoe-string to pull and lift it is now relegated to the cottages, and fast disappearing even there before brass-handled locks. this house is not old enough to possess the nail-studded door of solid oak and broad stone-built porch of some farmhouses still occasionally to be found, and which date from the sixteenth century. the porch here simply projects about two feet, and is supported by trellis-work, up which the honeysuckle has been trained. a path of stone slabs leads from the palings up to the threshold, and the hall within is paved with similar flags. the staircase is opposite the doorway, narrow, and guiltless of oilcloth or carpeting; and with reason, for the tips and nails of the heavy boots which tramp up and down it would speedily wear carpets into rags. there is a door at the bottom of the staircase closed at night. by the side of the staircase is a doorway which leads into the dairy--two steps lower than the front of the house. the sitting-room is on the left of the hall, and the floor is of the same cold stone flags, which in damp weather become wet and slimy. these flags, in fact, act as a barometer, and foretell rain with great accuracy, as it were perspiring with latent moisture at its approach. the chimney was originally constructed for a wood fire upon the hearth, and of enormous size, so that several sides of bacon could be hung up inside to be smoke-dried. the fireplace was very broad, so that huge logs could be thrown at once upon the fire with very little trouble of sawing them short. since coal has come into general use, and wood grown scarce, the fireplace has been partly built up and an iron grate inserted, which looks out of place in so large a cavity. the curious fire-dogs, upon which the wood was thrown, may still, perhaps, be found upstairs in some corner of the lumber-room. on the mantelpiece are still preserved, well polished and bright, the several pieces of the "jack" or cooking apparatus; and a pair of great brazen candlesticks ornament it at each end. a leaden or latten tobacco-bowl, a brazen pestle and mortar, and half-a-dozen odd figures in china, are also scattered upon it, surmounted by a narrow looking-glass. in one corner stands an old eight-day clock with a single hour hand--minute hands being a modern improvement; but it is silent, and its duties are performed by an american timepiece supported upon a bracket against the wall. upstairs, however, upon the landing, a similar ancient piece of clockmaking still ticks solemn and slow with a ponderous melancholy. the centre of the room is occupied with an oaken table, solid and enduring, but inconvenient to sit at; and upon each side of the fireplace is a stiff-backed arm-chair. a ledge under the window forms a pleasant seat in summer. before the fireplace is a rug, the favourite resort of the spaniels and cats. the rest of the floor used to be bare; but of late years a square of cocoanut matting has been laid down. a cumbrous piece of furniture takes up almost half of one side--not known in modern manufactories. it is of oak, rudely polished, and inlaid with brass. at the bottom are great deep drawers, pulled open with brass rings ornamented with dogs' heads. in these drawers are kept cow-drenches--bottles of oils for the wounds which cattle sometimes get from nails or kicks; dog-whips and pruning-knives; a shot-belt and powder-flask; an old horse-pistol; a dozen odd stones or fossils picked up upon the farm and kept as curiosities; twenty or thirty old almanacs, and a file of the county paper for forty years; and a hundred similar odds and ends. above the drawers comes a desk with a few pigeon-holes; a desk little used, for the farmer is less of a literary turn than almost any other class. the pigeon-holes are stuffed full of old papers, recipes for cattle medicines, and, perhaps, a book of divinity or sermons printed in the days of charles ii., leather-covered and worm-eaten. still higher are a pair of cupboards where china, the tea-set, and the sugar and groceries in immediate use are kept. on the top, which is three or four inches under the ceiling, are two or three small brown-paper parcels of grass seeds, and a variety of nondescript articles. opposite, on the other wall, and close above the chimneypiece, so as to be kept dry, is the gun-rack with two double-barrels, a long single-barrel duck gun, and a cavalry sabre, worn once a year by a son of the house who goes out to training in the yeomanry. there are a few pictures, not of a high class--three or four prints depicting dick turpin's ride to york, and a coloured sketch of some steeplechase winner, or a copy of a well-known engraving representing a feat accomplished many years ago at a farm. a flock of sheep were shorn, the wool carded and spun, and a coat made of it, and worn by the flockowner, and all in one day. from this room a door opens into the cellar and pantry, partly underground, and reached by three or four steps. on the other side of the hall is the parlour, which was originally floored, like the sitting-room, with stone flags, since taken up and replaced by boards. this is carpeted, and contains a comfortable old-fashioned sofa, horse-hair chairs, and upon the side tables may, perhaps, be found a few specimens of valuable old china, made to do duty as flower-vases, and filled with roses. the room has a fresh, sweet smell from the open window and the flowers. it tempts almost irresistibly to repose in the noontide heat of a summer's day. upstairs there are two fair-sized bedrooms, furnished with four-post wooden bedsteads. the second flight of stairs, going up to the attic, has also a door at the foot. this house is built upon a simple but effective design, well calculated for the purposes to be served. it resembles two houses placed not end to end, as in a block, but side by side, and each part has a separate roof. under the front roof, which is somewhat higher than the other, are the living-rooms of the family: sitting-room, parlour, bedroom, and attics, or servants' bedrooms. under the lower roof are the offices, the cheese-loft, dairy, kitchen, cellar, and wood-house. numerous doors give easy communication on each floor, so that the house consists of two distinct portions, and the business is kept quite apart from the living rooms, and yet close to them. this is, perhaps, the most convenient manner in which a dairy farmhouse can be built; and the plan was undoubtedly the result of experience. of course, in dairy-farming upon a very extended scale, or as a gentlemanly amusement, it would be preferable to have the offices entirely apart, and at some distance from the dwelling-house. these remarks apply to an ordinary farm of moderate size. leaving the hall by the door at the side of the staircase, two steps descend into the dairy, which is almost invariably floored with stone flags, even in localities where brick is used for the flooring of the sitting-room. the great object aimed at in the construction of the dairy was coolness, and freedom from dust as much as possible. the stone flags ensure a cool floor; and the windows always open to the north, so that neither the summer sunshine nor the warm southern winds can injuriously affect the produce. it is a long open room, whitewashed, in the centre of which stands the cheese-tub, until lately invariably made of wood, but now frequently of tin, this material taking much less trouble to keep clean. the cheese-tub is large enough for a roman lady's bath of milk. against one wall are the whey-leads--shallow, long, and broad vessels of wood, lined with lead, supported two or three feet above the floor, so that buckets can be placed underneath. in these "leads" the whey is kept, and drawn off by pulling up a wooden plug. under the "leads"--as out of the way--are some of the great milk-pans into which the milk is poured. pussy sometimes dips her nose into these, and whitens her whiskers with cream. at one end of the room is the cheese-press. the ancient press, with its complicated arrangement of long iron levers weighted at the end something like a steelyard, and drawn up by cords and pulleys, has been taken down and lies discarded in the lumber-room. the pressure in the more modern machine is obtained from a screw. the rennet-vat is perhaps hidden behind the press, and there are piles of the cheese-moulds or vats beside it, into which the curd is placed when fit to be compressed into the proper shape and consistency. all the utensils here are polished, and clean to the last degree; without extreme cleanliness success in cheese or butter making cannot be achieved. the windows are devoid of glass; they are really wind doors, closed when necessary, with a shutter on hinges like a cupboard door. cats and birds are prevented from entering by means of wire screens--like a coarse netting of wire--and an upright iron bar keeps out more dangerous thieves. there is a copper for scalding milk. when in good order there is scarcely any odour in a dairy, notwithstanding the decidedly strong smell of some of the materials employed: free egress of air and perfect cleanliness takes off all but the faintest _astringent_ flavour. in summer it is often the custom of dairymaids to leave buckets full of water standing under the "leads" or elsewhere out of the way, or a milk-pan is left with water in it, to purify the atmosphere. water, it is well known, has a remarkable power of preventing the air from going "dead" as it were. a model dairy should have a small fountain in some convenient position, with a jet constantly playing. the state of the atmosphere has the most powerful effect upon the contents of the dairy, especially during times of electrical tension. to the right of the dairy is the brewhouse, now rarely used for the purpose implied in its name, though the tubs, and coolers, and other "plant" necessary for the process are still preserved. here there is a large copper also; and the oven often opens on to the brewhouse. in this place the men have their meals. next to it is the wood-house, used for the storage of the wood which is required for immediate use, and must therefore be dry; and beyond that the kitchen, where the fire is still upon the hearth, though coal is mixed with the logs and faggots. along the whole length of this side of the house there is a paved or pitched courtyard enclosed by a low brick wall, with one or two gates opening upon the paths which lead to the rickyards and the stalls. the buttermilk and refuse from the dairy runs by a channel cut in the stone across the court into a vault or well sunk in the ground, from whence it is dipped for the pigs. the vault is closed at the mouth by a heavy wooden lid. there is a well and pump for water here; sometimes with a windlass, when the well is deep. if the water be low or out of condition, it is fetched in yokes from the nearest running stream. the acid or "eating" power of the buttermilk, &c., may be noted in the stones, which in many places are scooped or hollowed out. a portion of the court is roofed in, and is called the "skilling." it is merely covered in without walls, the roof supported upon oaken posts. under this the buckets are placed to dry after being cleaned, and here the churn may often be seen. a separate staircase, rising from the dairy, gives access to the cheese-loft. it is an immense apartment, reaching from one end of the house to the other, and as lofty as the roof will permit, for it is not ceiled. the windows are like those of the dairy. down the centre are long double shelves sustained upon strong upright beams, tier upon tier from the floor as high as the arms can conveniently reach. upon these shelves the cheese is stored, each lying upon its side; and, as no two cheeses are placed one upon the other until quite ready for eating, a ton or two occupies a considerable space while in process of drying. they are also placed in rows upon the floor, which is made exceptionally strong, and supported upon great beams to bear the weight. the scales used to be hung from a beam overhead, and consisted of an iron bar, at each end of which a square board was slung with ropes--one board to pile up the cheese on, and the other for the counterpoise of weights. these rude and primitive scales are now generally superseded by modern and more accurate instruments, weighing to a much smaller fraction. stone half-hundredweights and stone quarters were in common use not long since. a cheese-loft, when full, is a noble sight of its kind, and represents no little labour and skill. when sold, the cheese is carefully packed in the cart with straw to prevent its being injured. the oil or grease from the cheese gradually works its way into the shelves and floor, and even into the staircase, till the woodwork seems saturated with it. rats and mice are the pests of the loft; and so great is their passion for cheese that neither cats, traps, nor poison can wholly repress these invaders, against whom unceasing war is waged. the starlings--who, if the roof be of thatch, as it is in many farmhouses, make their nests in it--occasionally carry their holes right through, and are unmercifully exterminated when they venture within reach, or they would quickly let the rain and the daylight in. as the dairy and offices face the north, so the front of the house--the portion used for domestic purposes--has a southern aspect, which experience has proved to be healthy. but at the same time, despite its compactness and general convenience, there are many defects in the building--defects chiefly of a sanitary character. it is very doubtful if there are any drains at all. even though the soil be naturally dry, the ground floor is almost always cold and damp. the stone flags are themselves cold enough, and are often placed upon the bare earth. the threshold is on a level with the ground outside, and sometimes a step lower, and in wet weather the water penetrates to the hall. there is another disadvantage. if the door be left open, which it usually is, frogs, toads, and creeping things generally, sometimes make their way in, though ruthlessly swept out again; and an occasional snake from the long grass at the very door is an unpleasant, though perfectly harmless visitor. the floor should be raised a foot or so above the level of the earth, and some provision made against the damp by a layer of concrete or something of the kind. if not, even if boards be substituted for the flags, they will soon decay. it often happens that farmhouses upon meadow land are situated on low ground, which in winter is saturated with water which stands in the furrows, and makes the footpaths leading to the house impassable except to water-tight boots. this must, and undoubtedly does affect the health of the inmates, and hence probably the prevalence of rheumatism. the site upon which the house stands should be so drained as to carry off the water. some soils contract to an appreciable extent in a continuance of drought, and expand in an equal degree with wet--a fact apparent to any one who walks across a field where the soil is clay, in a dry time, when the deep, wide cracks cannot be overlooked. alternate swelling and contraction of the earth under the foundations of a house produce a partial dislocation of the brickwork, and hence it is common enough to see cracks running up the walls. had the site been properly drained, and the earth consequently always dry, this would not have happened; and it is a matter of consideration for the landlord, who in time may find it necessary to shore up a wall with a buttress. the great difference in the temperature of a drained soil and an undrained one has often been observed, amounting sometimes to as much as twenty degrees--a serious matter where health is concerned. a foolish custom was observed in the building of many old farmhouses, _i.e._, of carrying beams of wood across the chimney--a practice that has led to disastrous fires. the soot accumulates. these huge cavernous chimneys are rarely swept, and at last catch alight and smoulder for many days: presently fire breaks out in the middle of a room under which the beam passes. houses erected in blocks or in towns do not encounter the full force of the storms of winter to the same degree as a solitary farmhouse, standing a quarter or half-a-mile from any other dwelling. this is the reason why the old farmers planted elm-trees and encouraged the growth of thick hawthorn hedges close to the homestead. the north-east and the south-west are the quarters from whence most is to be dreaded: the north-east for the bitter wind which sweeps along and grows colder from the damp, wet meadows it passes over; and the south-west for the driving rain, lasting sometimes for days and weeks together. trees and hedges break the force of the gales, and in summer shelter from the glaring sun. the architectural arrangement of the farmhouse just described gives almost perfect privacy. except visitors, no one comes to the front door or passes unpleasantly close to the windows. labourers and others all go to the courtyard at the back. the other plans upon which farmsteads are built are far from affording similar privacy. there are some which, in fact, are nothing but an enlarged and somewhat elongated cottage, with the dwelling-rooms at one end and the dairy and offices at the other, and the bedrooms over both. everybody and everything brought to or taken from the place has to pass before the dwelling-room windows--a most unpleasant arrangement. another style is square, with low stone walls whitewashed, and thatched roof of immense height. against it is a lean-to, the eaves of the roof of which are hardly three feet from the ground. so high-pitched a roof necessitates the employment of a great amount of woodwork, and the upper rooms have sloping ceilings. they may look picturesque from a distance, but are inconvenient and uncouth within, and admirably calculated for burning. a somewhat superior description is built in the shape of a carpenter's "square." the dwelling-rooms form, as it were, one house, and the offices, dairy and cheese-loft are added on at one end at right angles. the courtyard is in the triangular space between. for some things this is a convenient arrangement; but there still remains the disagreeableness of the noise, and, at times, strong odours from the courtyard under the windows of the dwelling-house. nearly all farmsteads have awkwardly low ceilings, which in a town would cause a close atmosphere, but are not so injurious in the open country, with doors constantly ajar. in erecting a modern house this defect would, of course, be avoided. the great thickness of the walls is sometimes a deception; for in pulling down old buildings it is occasionally found that the interior of the wall is nothing but loose broken stones and bricks enclosed or rammed in between two walls. the staircases are generally one of the worst features of the old houses, being between a wall and a partition--narrow, dark, steep, and awkwardly placed, and without windows or handrails. these houses were obviously built for a people living much out of doors. _john smith's shanty._ he was standing in the ditch leaning heavily upon the long handle of his axe. it was a straight stick of ash, roughly shaved down to some sort of semblance of smoothness, such as would have worked up an unpractised hand into a mass of blisters in ten minutes' usage, but which glided easily through those horny palms, leaving no mark of friction. the continuous outdoor labour, the beating of innumerable storms, and the hard, coarse fare, had dried up all the original moisture of the hand, till it was rough, firm, and cracked or chapped like a piece of wood exposed to the sun and weather. the natural oil of the skin, which gives to the hand its beautiful suppleness and delicate sense of touch, was gone like the sap in the tree he was felling, for it was early in the winter. however the brow might perspire, there was no dampness on the hand, and the helve of the axe was scarcely harder and drier. in order, therefore, that the grasp might be firm, it was necessary to artificially wet the palms, and hence that custom which so often disgusts lookers-on, of spitting on the hands before commencing work. this apparently gratuitous piece of dirtiness is in reality absolutely necessary. men with hands in this state have hardly any feeling in them; they find it difficult to pick up anything small, as a pin--the fingers fumble over it; and as for a pen, they hold it like a hammer. his chest was open to the north wind, which whistled through the bare branches of the tall elm overhead as if they were the cordage of a ship, and came in sudden blasts through the gaps in the hedge, blowing his shirt back, and exposing the immense breadth of bone, and rough dark skin tanned to a brown-red by the summer sun while mowing. the neck rose from it short and thick like that of a bull, and the head was round, and covered with a crop of short grizzled hair not yet quite grey, but fast losing its original chestnut colour. the features were fairly regular, but coarse, and the nose flattened. an almost worn-out old hat thrown back on the head showed a low, broad, wrinkled forehead. the eyes were small and bleared, set deep under shaggy eyebrows. the corduroy trousers, yellow with clay and sand, were shortened below the knee by leather straps like garters, so as to exhibit the whole of the clumsy boots, with soles like planks, and shod with iron at heel and tip. these boots weigh seven pounds the pair; and in wet weather, with clay and dirt clinging to them, must reach nearly double that. in spite of all the magnificent muscular development which this man possessed, there was nothing of the hercules about him. the grace of strength was wanting, the curved lines were lacking; all was gaunt, angular, and square. the chest was broad enough, but flat, a framework of bones hidden by a rough hairy skin; the breasts did not swell up like the rounded prominences of the antique statue. the neck, strong enough as it was to bear the weight of a sack of corn with ease, was too short, and too much a part, as it were, of the shoulders. it did not rise up like a tower, distinct in itself; and the muscles on it, as they moved, produced hollow cavities distressing to the eye. it was strength without beauty; a mechanical kind of power, like that of an engine, working through straight lines and sharp angles. there was too much of the machine, and too little of the animal; the lithe, easy motion of the lion or the tiger was not there. the impression conveyed was, that such strength had been gained through a course of incessant exertion of the rudest kind, unassisted by generous food and checked by unnatural exposure. john smith heaved up his axe and struck at the great bulging roots of the elm, from which he had cleared away the earth with his spade. a heavy chip flew out with a dull thud on the sward. the straight handle of the axe increased the labour of the work, for in this curiously conservative country the american improvement of the double curved handle has not yet been adopted. chip after chip fell in the ditch, or went spinning out into the field. the axe rose and fell with a slow, monotonous motion. though there was immense strength in every blow, there was no vigour in it. suddenly, while it was swinging in the air overhead, there came the faint, low echo of a distant railway whistle, and the axe was dropped at once, without even completing the blow. "that's the express," he muttered, and began cleaning the dirt from his shoes. the daily whistle of the express was the signal for luncheon. hastily throwing on a slop hung on the bushes, and over that a coat, he picked up a small bag, and walked slowly off down the side of the hedge to where the highway road went by. here he sat down, somewhat sheltered by a hawthorn bush, in the ditch, facing the road, and drew out his bread and cheese. about a quarter of a loaf of bread, or nearly, and one slice of cheese was this full-grown and powerful man's dinner that cold, raw winter's day. his drink was a pint of cold weak tea, kept in a tin can, for these men are moderate enough with liquor at their meals, whatever they may be at other times. he held the bread in his left hand and the cheese was placed on it, and kept in its place by the thumb, the grimy dirt on which was shielded by a small piece of bread beneath it from the precious cheese. his plate and dish was his broad palm, his only implement a great jack-knife with a buck-horn handle. he ate slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately; weighing each mouthful, chewing the cud as it were. all the man's motions were heavy and slow, deadened as if clogged with a great load. there was no "life" in him. what little animation there was left had taken him to eat his dinner by the roadside--the instinct of sociality--that if possible he might exchange a word with some one passing. in factories men work in gangs, and hundreds are often within call of each other; a rough joke or an occasional question can be put and answered; there is a certain amount of sympathy, a sensation of company and companionship. but alone in the fields, the human instinct of friendship is checked, the man is driven back upon himself and his own narrow range of thought, till the mind and heart grow dull, and there only remains such a vague ill-defined want as carried john smith to the roadside that day. he had finished his cheese and lit a short clay pipe, and thrust his hands deep in his pockets, when there was a rustling noise in the hedge a little farther down, and a short man jumped out into the road--even jumping with his hands in his pockets. he saw smith directly and came towards him, and sat himself on a heap of flints used for mending the road. "what's thee at to-day?" asked john, after a pause. "ditching," said the other laconically, pushing out one foot by way of illustrating the fact. it was covered with black mud far above the ankle, and there were splashes of mud up to his waist--his hands, as he proceeded to light his pipe, were black, too, from the same cause. "thee's bin in main deep," said john, after a slow survey of the other's appearance. the fellow stamped his boot on the ground, and the slime and slush oozed out of it and formed a puddle. "that's pretty stuff to stand in for a man of sixty-four, yent it, john?" with a volubility and energy of speech little to be expected from his wizened appearance, the hedger and ditcher entered into details of his job. he began work at six that morning with stiff legs and swollen feet, and as he stood in the mingled mire and water, the rheumatism came gradually on, rising higher up his limbs from the ankles, and growing sharper with every twinge, while the cold and bitter wind cut through his thin slop on his chest, which was not so strong as it used to be. his arms got stiff with the labour of lifting up shovelful after shovelful of heavy mud to plaster the side of the ditch, his feet turned cold as "flints," and the sickly smell of the slime upset his stomach so that when he tried to eat his bread and cheese he could not. through this speech john smoked steadily on, till the other stopped and looked at him for sympathy. "well, jim, anyhow," said smith, "thee hasn't got far to walk to the job;" and he pointed with the stem of his pipe to the low roof of a cottage just visible a few hundred yards distant. "ay, and a place it be to live in, that," said jim. there were only two rooms, he explained, and both downstairs--no upstairs at all--and the first of these was so small he could reach across it, and the thatch had got so thin in one place that the rain came through. the floor was only hard mud, and the garden not big enough to grow a sack of potatoes, while one wall of the house, which was only "wattle and daub" (_i.e._, lath and plaster), rose up from the very edge of a great stagnant pond. overhead there was an elm, from the branches of which in wet weather there was a perpetual drip, drip on the thatch, till the moss and grass grew on the roof in profusion. all the sewage and drainage from the cottage ran into the pond, over which at night there was almost always a thick damp mist, which crept in through the crevices of the rotten walls, and froze the blood in the sleepers' veins. sometimes a flood came down, and the pond rose and washed away the cabbages from the garden, leaving a deposit of gritty sand which killed all vegetation, and they could only keep the water from coming indoors by making a small dam of clay across the doorway. there was only a low hedge of elder between the cottage and a dirty lane; and in the night, especially if there happened to be a light burning, it was common enough for a stone to come through the window, flung by some half-drunken ploughboy. a pretty place for a human being to live in: and again he looked up into smith's face for comment. "thee built 'un thee-self, didn't 'ee?" said john, in his slow way. "ay, that i did," continued jim, not seeing the drift of the remark. he not only built it, but he brought up nineteen children in it, and fourteen of them lived to grow up, all the offspring of one wife. and a time she had of it, too. none of them ever fell in that pond, though he often wished they would; and they were all pretty healthy, which was a bad thing, because it made them hungry, and if they had been ill the parish would have kept them. all that he had done on s. a week, and he minded the time when it was only s., ay, and even when it was s., and 'twas better then than it was now with s. that was before the unions came about, in the time of the old workhouses in every parish. then the farmers used to find everybody a job. every morning they had to go round from one farmer to the other, and if there was no work then they went to the workhouse, or sometimes to the vestry-room in the church, where every man had a loaf of bread for every head there was in his family, so that the more children he had the more loaves of bread, which was a capital thing when the children were small. he had known a man in those times sent seven miles with a wheelbarrow to fetch a barrow load of coal from the canal wharf, and then have to wheel it back seven miles, and get one shilling for his day's work. still they were better times than these, because the farmers for their own sake were forced to find the fellows something to do; but now they did not care, and it was a hard thing to find work, especially when a man grew old, and stiff about the joints. now the boards of guardians would not give any relief unless the applicants were ill, or not able-bodied, and even then they were often required to break stones, and he was very much inclined to throw his spade in that old pond and go to the union with the "missis" and all the lot for good. he had the rheumatism bad enough. it would serve them right. he had worked "nigh handy" sixty years; and all he had got by it he could put in his eye. they ought to keep him now. it was not half so good as the old times for all the talk; then the children could bring home a bit of wood out of the hedges to boil the pot with, but now they must not touch a stick, or there was the law on them in a minute. and then coal at the price it was. why didn't his sons keep him? where were they? one was a soldier, and another had gone to america, and the third was married and had a hard job to keep himself, and the fourth was gone nobody knew where. as for the wenches, they were no good in that way. so he and his "missis" muddled on at home with three of the youngest. and they could not let them alone even in that. he did go into the union workhouse for a bit, a while ago, when the rheumatism was extraordinary bad, but some of the guardians smelt out that he had a cottage of his own, and it was against the law to relieve anybody that had property; so he must pay back the relief as a loan or sell the cottage. he was offered £ for the place and garden, and he meant to have taken it, but when they came to look into the writings it was not clear that he could sell it. it was quit-rent land, and although the landlord had not taken the rent for twenty years, yet he had entered it in his book as paid (out of good nature), and the lawyers said it could not be done. but as they would not let him sell it, he would not turn out, not he. there he would stop--just to spite them. he knew that nook of his was wanted for cattle stalls on the new principle, and very handy it would be with all that water close at hand, but he had worked for sixty years, and had had nineteen children there, and he would not turn out. not he. the parson's "missis" and the squire's "missis" came the other day about that youngest boy of his. they wanted to get him into some school up in london somewhere, but he remembered how the squire had served him just for picking up a dead rabbit that laid in his path one hard snow time. six weeks in gaol because he could not pay the fine. and the parson turned him out of his allotment because he saw him stagger a little in the road one night with the rheumatism. it was a lie that he was drunk. and suppose he was? the parson had his wine, he reckoned. they should not have his boy. he rather hoped he would grow up a bad one, and bother them well. he minded when that sharp old miss ---- was always coming round with tracts and blankets, like taking some straw to a lot of pigs, and lecturing his "missis" about economy. what a fuss she made, and scolded his wife as if she was a thief for having that fifteenth boy! his "missis" turned on her at last, and said, "lor, miss, that's all the pleasure me an' my old man got." as for this talk about the labourers' unions, it was all very well for the young men; but it made it worse still for the old ones. the farmers, if they had to give such a price, would have young men in full strength: there was no chance at all for an old fellow of sixty-four with rheumatism. some of them, too, were terribly offended--some of the old sort--and turned off the few pensioners they had kept on at odd jobs for years. however, he supposed he must get back to that ditch again. this long oration was delivered not without a certain degree of power and effect, showing that the man, whatever his faults, might with training have become rather a clever fellow. the very way in which he contradicted himself, and announced his intention of never doing that which a moment before he was determined on, was not without an amount of oratorical art, since the turn in his view of the subject was led up to by a variety of reasons which were supposed to convince himself and his hearer at the same time. his remarks were all the more effective because there was an evident substratum of stern truth beneath them. but they failed to make much impression on smith, who saw his companion depart without a word. the fact was, that smith was too well acquainted with the private life of the orator. in his dull, dim way, he half recognised that the unfortunate old fellow's evils had been in great part of his own creating. he knew that he was far from faultless. that poaching business--a very venial offence in a labourer's eyes--he knew had been a serious one, a matter of some two-score pheasants and a desperate fight with a gang. looking at it as property, the squire had been merciful, pleading with the magistrates for a mitigated penalty. the drunkenness was habitual. in short, they were a bad lot--there was a name attached to the whole family for thieving, poaching, drinking, and even worse. yet still there were two points that did sink deep into smith's mind, and made him pause several times that afternoon in his work. the first was that long family of nineteen mouths, with the father and mother making twenty-one. what a number of sins, in the rude logic of the struggle for existence, that terrible fact glossed over! who could blame--what labourer at least could blame--the ragged, ill-clothed children for taking the dead wood from the hedges to warm their naked limbs? what labourer could blame the father for taking the hares and rabbits running across his very path to fill that wretched hovel with savoury steam from the pot? and further, what labourer could blame the miserable old man for drowning his feelings, and his sensation of cold and hunger, in liquor? the great evil of these things is that a fellow-feeling will arise with the wrong-doer, till the original distinction between right and wrong is lost sight of entirely. john smith had a family too. the other point was the sixty years of labour and their fruit. after two generations of hardest toil and rudest exposure, still dependent upon the seasons even to permit him to work, when that work could be obtained. no rest, no cosy fireside nook: still the bitter wind, and the half-frozen slime and slush rising above the ankle. in an undefined way smith had been proud of his broad, enormous strength, and rocklike hardihood. he had felt a certain rude pleasure in opening his broad chest to the winter wind. but now he involuntarily closed his shirt and buttoned it. he did not feel so confident in his own power of meeting all the contingencies of the future. thought without method and without logical sequence is apt to press heavily upon the uneducated mind. it was thus that these reflections left a sensation of weight and discomfort upon smith, and it was in a worse humour than was common to his usually well-balanced organisation that he hid away his tools under the bushes as the evening grew too dark for work, and slowly paced homewards. he had some two miles to walk, and he had long since begun to feel hungry. plodding along in a heavy, uneven gait, there overtook him a tall, raw young lad of eighteen or twenty, slouching forward with vast strides and whistling merrily. the lad slackened his steps and joined company! "where bist thee working now, then?" asked smith. he replied, evidently in high spirits, that he had that day got a job at the new railway that was making. the wages were s. a week-- s. a day--and he had heard that as soon as the men grew to understand their work and to be a little skilful, they could get s. easily, up by london. the only drawback was the long walk to the work. lodgings close at hand were very dear, as also was food, so dear as to lower the actual receipts to an equality, if not below that of the agricultural labourer. four miles every morning and every night was the price he paid for s. a week. smith began in his slow, dull way to reckon up his wages aloud against this. first he had s. a week for his daily work. then he had s. extra for milking on sundays, and two good meals with beer on that day. every week-day he had a pint of beer on finishing work. the young navvy had to find his own liquor. his cottage, it was true, was his own (that is, he only paid a low quit-rent of s. a year for it), so that that could not be reckoned in as part of his earnings, as it could with many other men. but the navvy's wages were the same all the year round, while his in summer were often nearly double. as a stalwart mower he could earn s. a week and more, as a haymaker s., and at harvesting perhaps s. if the season was good, and there was a press for hands, he would get more. but, looking forward, there was no prospect of rising higher in his trade, of getting higher wages for more skilful work. he could not be more skilful than he was in ordinary farm work; and as yet the call for clever men to attend to machinery, &c., was very limited; nor were such a class of workmen usually drawn from the resident population where improvements were introduced. the only hope of higher wages that was held out to him was from the gradual rise of everything, or the forced rise consequent upon agitation. but, said he, the navvy must follow his work from place to place, and lodgings are dear in the towns, and the farmers in country places will not let their cottages except to their own labourers--how was the navvy even with higher wages to keep a wife? the aspiring young fellow beside him replied at once sharply and decisively, that he did not mean to have a wife, leastways not till he had got his regular s. a week, which he might in time. then john smith made a noise in his chest like a grunt. they parted after this. smith went into the farmhouse, and got his pint of beer, drinking it in one long slow draught, and then made his way through the scattered village to his cottage. there was a frown on his forehead as he lifted the latch of the long low thatched building which was his home. the flickering light of the fire on the hearth, throwing great shadows as it blazed up and fell, dazed his eyes as he stepped in, and he did not notice a line stretched right across the room on which small articles of clothing were hanging to dry in a row. a damp worsted stocking flapped against his face, and his foot stumbled on the uneven flag stones which formed the floor. he sat down silently upon a three-legged stool--an old milking-stool--and, putting his hands on his knees, stared into the fire. it was formed of a few sticks with just one knob of coal balanced on the top of them, evident care having been taken that not a jot of its precious heat should be lost. a great black pot with open lid swung over it, from which rose a slight steam and a bubbling noise; and this huge, gaunt, bareboned, hungry man, looking into it, saw a large raw swede, just as from the field, with only the greens cut off, simmering for his supper. that root in its day of life had been fed well with superphosphate, and flourished exceedingly, till now its globe could hardly go into the pot. down the low chimney there came the monotonous growl of the bitter winter wind, and a few spots of rain fell hissing on the embers. "is this all thee has got?" he asked, turning to a woman who was busied with some more damp clothes in a basket. she faced round quickly--a short, narrow, meagre creature, flat-chested and square-shouldered, whose face was the hue of light-coloured clay, an almost corpse-like complexion. her thin lips hissed out, "ay, if thee takes thee money to the pothouse thee won't get bacon for supper." smith said nothing in reply, but stared again into the fire. the children's voices, which had lowered the moment there seemed a coming quarrel between their parents, rose again. there were three of them--the youngest four, the eldest seven--playing on the stone flags of the floor, between whose rough edges there were wide crevices of hardened mud. with a few short sticks and a broken piece of earthenware for toys, they were happy in their way. whatever their food might have been, they showed no traces of hard usage. their red "puddy" fists were fat, and their naked legs round and plump enough. their faces were full and rosy, and their voices clear and anything but querulous. the eager passions of childhood come out fierce and unrestrained, and blows were freely interchanged, without, however, either cries or apparent hatred. their naked knees were on the stone-flags, and the wind, creeping in a draught under the ill-fitting door, blew their ragged clothes about. "thee med well look at 'em, john," said the woman, seeing smith cast a sideway glance at the children; and rapidly manipulating the clothing, her thin nervous lips poured forth a torrent of words upon the silent man. they had had nothing but bread that day, and nothing but bread and lard the day before, and now the lard was gone, and the baker would not trust any more. there were no potatoes because the disease had destroyed them, and the cabbages were sold for that bit of coal; and as for the swede, she took it out of mr. ----'s field, and he was a cross-grained man, and who knew but what they might have the constable on them before morning? jane w. and sarah y. went to prison for seven days for stealing swedes. all along of that cursed drink. if she were the squire she'd shut up all the pothouses in the county. the men went there, and drank the very shirts off their backs, and the clothes off their children, ay, and the shoes off their feet; and what was the use of their having more money when it only went into the publican's pocket? there they sat, and drank the bread out of the babies' mouths. as for the women, the most of them, poor things, never tasted beer from one year's end to another. old carter handed her a pint that day, and when she tasted it she did not know what it was. he might smile, but it was true though: no more did jane w. and sally y.: they did not know what it tasted like. and yet they had to be out in the fields at work at eight o'clock, and their washing to do before that, and perhaps a baby in their arms, and the tea as weak as water, and no sugar. milk, they could not get milk for money--he knew that very well; all the milk went to london. a precious lot of good the higher wages had done them. the farmers would not let them have a drop of milk or a scrap of victuals, and talked about rising the price of the allotment grounds. allotment, did she say? and how did he lose his allotment?--didn't he drink, drink, drink, till he had to hand over his allotment to the landlord of the pothouse, and did not they take it away from both as soon as they heard of it? served him right. they had not got a pound of potatoes, and the children did use to lick up the potato-pot liquor as if they liked it. smith asked where polly was, but that was only a signal for a fresh outburst. polly, if he'd a looked after her she would have been all right. (smith turned a sharp glance at her in some alarm at this.) letting a great girl like that go about at night by herself while he was a drink, drink, drinking, and there she was now, the bad hussy, gone to the workhouse to lie in. (smith winced.) _she_ never disgraced herself like that; and if he had sent the wench to service, or stopped her going down to that pothouse with the fellows, this would not have happened. she always told him how it would end. he was a good-for-nothing, drunken brute of a man, and had brought her to all this misery; and she began sobbing. after twelve long hours of toil, including the walk to and fro, exposed to the bitter cold, with but a slice of cheese to support the strength of that brawny chest, this welcome to his supper was more than the sturdy, silent man could bear. with a dull remembrance of the happy sunlit summer, twenty years ago, when martha was a plump, laughing girl, of sloe-black eyes and nut-brown complexion--with a glimpse of that merry courting time passing across his mind, smith got up and walked out into the dark rainy night. "ay, thee bist agoing to the liquor again," were the last words he heard as he shut the door. it was too true. but what labourer, let us ask, with a full conception of the circumstances, would blame him? here there was nothing but hard and scanty fare, no heat, no light, nothing to cheer the heart, nothing to cause it to forget the toil of the day and the thought of the morrow, no generous liquor sung by poets to warm the physical man. but only a few yards farther down the road there was a great house, with its shutters cosily closed, ablaze with heat and light, echoing with merry laughter and song. there was an array of good fellows ready to welcome him, to tell him the news, to listen eagerly to what he could tell them, to ask him to drink, and to drink from his cup in boon companionship. there was a social circle in which his heart and intellect could expand, at least for a while, till the strong liquor mounted up and overcame his brain; and then, even then, there was the forgetfulness, the deep slumber of intoxication, utterly oblivious of all things--perhaps the greatest pleasure of all. smith went there, and who of his own class would blame him? and if his own class did not, of what use is it for other and higher classes to preach morality to him? it is a man's own comrades, his own class, whose opinions he dreads and conforms to. if they condemned him for going there, he would avoid the public-house. but they would have called him a fool if he avoided it. in their logic who could say they were wrong? a man who is happy is a long while getting drunk, he talks as much as he drinks; but smith was dull and silent, and drank steadily. it was not late, but when the house closed he could but just keep his feet. in the thick darkness and the driving rain he staggered on, unconscious of the road he was taking, but bearing roughly towards home. the cold air rather more stupefied him than brought him to himself. insensibly he wandered with uncertain steps down a lane which led by a gentle slope out into the fields, the fall of the ground guiding his footsteps, and then stumbling over the root of an ash-tree, fell heavily on the wet grass. his eyes, half-shut before, closed as if by clockwork, and in a moment he was firm asleep. his hat had fallen from his brow, and the grizzled hair was blown about by the wind as it came in gusts through the hedge. his body was a little sheltered by the tree, but his chest was open and bare half-way down his waistcoat; and the heavy drops fell from the boughs of the ash on his stalwart neck, gradually saturating his shirt. it may have been that the cold numbed him and rendered him more insensible than he otherwise would have been. no star shone out that night; all was darkness, clouds, and rain till the dawn broke. soon after dawn, the young navvy, going to his work by a short cut, found smith still asleep, and shook him till he got up. he was stupid beyond all power of words to express; but at last came to a dim idea that he must get home. then the young navvy left him, anxious about being late at his employment, and john smith slowly _felt_ his way to his own door. his wife, already up, opened it. "thee varmint! thee never gi'ed i that shilling last night for the baker." smith felt hopelessly in his pocket, and then looked at her vacantly. "thee drunken, nasty old----," said the infuriated woman, almost unconsciously lifting her hand. perhaps it was that action of hers which suggested the same to his mind, which was in a mechanical state. perhaps the stinging words of last night had at last sunk deep enough to scarify his self-esteem. perhaps he did not at that moment fully remember the strength of his own mighty arm. but he struck her, and she fell. her forehead came in contact with the cradle, in which the youngest boy was sleeping, and woke him with a cry. she lay quite still. smith sat stupidly down on the old milking-stool, with his elbows on his knees. the shrill voice of his wife, as she met him at the door, had brought more than one female neighbour to the window; they saw what happened, and they were there in a minute. martha was only insensible, and they soon brought her to, but the mark on the temple remained. five days afterwards john smith, agricultural labourer, aged forty-five, stood in the dock to answer a charge of assaulting his wife. there were five magistrates on the bench--two large landowners, a baronet in the chair, and two clergymen. martha smith hung her head as they placed her in the witness-box, and tried to evade kissing the book, but the police saw that that formality was complied with. the clerk asked her what she had to complain of. no answer. "come, tell us all about it," said the eldest of the magistrates in a fatherly tone of voice. still silence. "well, how did you get that mark on your forehead?" asked the clerk. no answer. "speak up!" cried a shrill voice in the body of the court. it was one of martha's cronies, who was immediately silenced by the police; but the train had been fired. martha would not fail before another woman. but she did not commence about the assault. it was the drink she spoke of, nothing but the drink; and as she talked of that she warmed with her subject and her grievances, and forgot the old love for her husband, and her former hesitation, and placed that vice in all its naked deformity and hideous results in plain but burning words before the bench. had she been the cleverest advocate she could not have prepared the ground for her case better. this tale of drink predisposed their minds against the defendant. only the clerk, wedded to legal forms, fidgeted under this eloquence, and seized the first pause: "but now, how about the assault? come to that," he said sharply. "i'm coming, sir," said martha; and she described smith coming home, stupid and ferocious, after staying out all night, and felling her to the ground because she asked him for a shilling to buy the children's daily bread. then she pointed to the bruise on her forehead, and a suppressed murmur of indignation ran through the court, and angry looks were directed at the defendant. did she do or say anything to provoke the blow? asked the chairman. no more than to ask for the shilling. did she not abuse him? well, yes, she did; she owned she did call him a drunken brute afterwards; she could not help it. these women, with their rapid tongues, have a terrible advantage over the slower-witted men. had the defendant any questions to ask his wife? smith began to say that he was very sorry, sir, but the clerk snapped him up short. "that's your defence. have you any questions? no; well, call your witnesses." martha called her witnesses, the women living next door. they did not do her case much good; they were too evidently eager to obtain the defendant's condemnation. but, on the other hand, they did not do it any harm, for in the main it was easy to see that they really corroborated her statements. smith asked them no questions; the labouring class rarely understand the object of cross-questioning. if asked to do so they almost invariably begin to tell their own tale. "now, then," said the clerk, "what have you got to say for yourself--what's your defence?" smith looked down and stammered something. he was confused; they checked him from telling his story when his mouth was full of language, now it would not come. he did not know but that if he began he might be checked again. the eldest magistrate on the bench saw his embarrassment, and, willing to assist him, spoke as kindly as he could under the circumstances. "speak up, john; tell us all about it. i am sorry to see you there." "he's the finest, most stalwart man in my parish," he continued, turning to the chairman. thus encouraged, john got out a word or two. he was very sorry; he did not mean to hurt her; he knew he was tipsy, and 'twas his own fault; she had been a good wife to him; she asked him for money. then all of a sudden john drew up his form to his full height, and his chest swelled out, and he spoke in his own strong voice clearly now that he had got a topic apart from his disgrace. these were his words, a little softened into more civilised pronunciation to make them intelligible:-- "she asked i for money, she did, and what was i to gi'e her? i hadn't a got a shilling nor a sixpence, and she knew it, and knowed that i couldn't get one either till saturday night. i gets thirteen shillings a week from master h., and a shilling on sundays, and i hev got five children and a wife to keep out of that--that's two shillings a week for each on us, that's just threepence halfpenny a day, look 'ee, sir. and what victuals be i to buy wi' that, let alone beer? and a man can't do no work wi'out a quart a day, and that's fourpence, and there's my share, look 'ee, gone at onst. wur be i to get any victuals, and wur be i to get any clothes an' boots, i should like for to know? and jack he gets big and wants a main lot, and so did polly, but her's gone to the work'us', wuss luck. and parson wants i to send the young 'uns to school, and pay a penny a week for 'em, and missis she wants a bit o' bacon in the house and a loaf, and what good is that of, among all we? i gets a slice of bacon twice a week, and sometimes narn. and beer--i knows i drinks beer, and more as i ought, but what's a chap to do when he's a'most shrammed wi' cold, and nar a bit o' nothin' in the pot but an old yeller swede as hard as wood? and my teeth bean't as good as 'em used to be. i knows i drinks beer, and so would anybody in my place--it makes me kinder stupid, as i don't feel nothing then. wot's the good--i've worked this thirty year or more, since i wur big enough to go with the plough, and i've a knowed they as have worked for nigh handy sixty, and wot do 'em get for it? all he'd a got wur the rheumatiz. yer med as well drink while 'ee can. i never meaned to hurt her, and her knows it; and if it wurn't for a parcel of women a-shoving on her on, her would never a come here agen me. i knows i drinks, and what else be i to do? i can't work allus." "but what are you going to say in your defence--do you say she provoked you or anything?" asked the clerk. "no, i don't know as she provoked i. i wur provoked, though, i wur. i don't bear no malice agen she. i ain't a got nothin' more for to say." the magistrates retired, and the chairman, on returning, said that this was a most brutal and unprovoked assault, made all the worse by the previous drinking habits of the defendant. if it had not been for the good character he bore generally speaking (here he looked towards the elder magistrate, who had evidently said a word in smith's behalf), he would have had a month's imprisonment, or more. as it was, he was committed for a fortnight, and to pay the costs, or seven additional days; and he hoped this would be a warning to him. the elder magistrate looked at john smith, and saw his jaw set firmly, and his brow contract, and his heart was moved towards him. "cannot you get better wages than that, john?" he said. "at the railway they would give you eighteen or twenty." "it's so far to walk, sir, and my legs bean't as lissom as they used to be." "but take the missis and live there." "lodgings is too dear, sir." "ah, exactly. still i don't see how the farmers could pay you more. i'll see what can be done for you." smith was led from the dock to the cell. the expenses were paid by an unknown hand; but he underwent his fortnight's imprisonment. his wife and children, with an empty larder, were obliged to go to the workhouse, where also his daughter was at the same time confined of an illegitimate child. this is no fiction, but an uncompromising picture of things as they are. who is to blame for them? _wiltshire labourers._ letter i. (_to the editor of the "times."_) sir,--the wiltshire agricultural labourer is not so highly paid as those of northumberland, nor so low as those of dorset; but in the amount of his wages, as in intelligence and general position, he may fairly be taken as an average specimen of his class throughout a large portion of the kingdom. as a man, he is usually strongly built, broad-shouldered, and massive in frame, but his appearance is spoilt by the clumsiness of his walk and the want of grace in his movements. though quite as large in muscle, it is very doubtful if he possesses the strength of the seamen who may be seen lounging about the ports. there is a want of firmness, a certain disjointed style, about his limbs, and the muscles themselves have not the hardness and tension of the sailor's. the labourer's muscle is that of a cart-horse, his motions lumbering and slow. his style of walk is caused by following the plough in early childhood, when the weak limbs find it a hard labour to pull the heavy nailed boots from the thick clay soil. ever afterwards he walks as if it were an exertion to lift his legs. his food may, perhaps, have something to do with the deadened slowness which seems to pervade everything he does--there seems a lack of vitality about him. it consists chiefly of bread and cheese, with bacon twice or thrice a week, varied with onions, and if he be a milker (on some farms) with a good "tuck-out" at his employer's expense on sundays. on ordinary days he dines at the fashionable hour of six or seven in the evening--that is, about that time his cottage scents the road with a powerful odour of boiled cabbage, of which he eats an immense quantity. vegetables are his luxuries, and a large garden, therefore, is the greatest blessing he can have. he eats huge onions raw; he has no idea of flavouring his food with them, nor of making those savoury and inviting messes or vegetable soups at which the french peasantry are so clever. in picardy i have often dined in a peasant's cottage, and thoroughly enjoyed the excellent soup he puts upon the table for his ordinary meal. to dine in an english labourer's cottage would be impossible. his bread is generally good, certainly; but his bacon is the cheapest he can buy at small second-class shops--oily, soft, wretched stuff; his vegetables are cooked in detestable style, and eaten saturated with the pot liquor. pot liquor is a favourite soup. i have known cottagers actually apply at farmers' kitchens not only for the pot liquor in which meat has been soddened, but for the water in which potatoes have been boiled--potato liquor--and sup it up with avidity. and this not in times of dearth or scarcity, but rather as a relish. they never buy anything but bacon; never butchers' meat. philanthropic ladies, to my knowledge, have demonstrated over and over again even to their limited capacities that certain parts of butchers' meat can be bought just as cheap, and will make more savoury and nutritive food; and even now, with the present high price of meat, a certain proportion would be advantageous. in vain; the labourers obstinately adhere to the pig, and the pig only. when, however, an opportunity does occur the amount of food they will eat is something astonishing. once a year, at the village club dinner, they gormandise to repletion. in one instance i knew of a man eating a plate of roast beef (and the slices are cut enormously thick at these dinners), a plate of boiled beef, then another of boiled mutton, and then a fourth of roast mutton, and a fifth of ham. he said he could not do much to the bread and cheese; but didn't he go into the pudding! i have even heard of men stuffing to the fullest extent of their powers, and then retiring from the table to take an emetic of mustard and return to a second gorging. there is scarcely any limit to their power of absorbing beer. i have known reapers and mowers make it their boast that they could lie on their backs and never take the wooden bottle (in the shape of a small barrel) from their lips till they had drunk a gallon, and from the feats i have seen i verily believe it a fact. the beer they get is usually poor and thin, though sometimes in harvest the farmers bring out a taste of strong liquor, but not till the work is nearly over; for from this very practice of drinking enormous quantities of small beer the labourer cannot drink more than a very limited amount of good liquor without getting tipsy. this is why he so speedily gets inebriated at the alehouse. while mowing and reaping many of them lay in a small cask. they are much better clothed now than formerly. corduroy trousers and slops are the usual style. smock-frocks are going out of use, except for milkers and faggers. almost every labourer has his sunday suit, very often really good clothes, sometimes glossy black, with the regulation "chimneypot." his unfortunate walk betrays him, dress how he will. since labour has become so expensive it has become a common remark among the farmers that the labourer will go to church in broadcloth and the masters in smock-frocks. the labourer never wears gloves--that has to come with the march of the times; but he is particularly choice over his necktie. the women must dress in the fashion. a very respectable draper in an agricultural district was complaining to me the other day that the poorest class of women would have everything in the fashionable style, let it change as often as it would. in former times, if he laid in a stock of goods suited to tradesmen, and farmers' wives and daughters, if the fashion changed, or they got out of date, he could dispose of them easily to the servants. now no such thing. the quality did not matter so much, but the style must be the style of the day--no sale for remnants. the poorest girl, who had not got two yards of flannel on her back, must have the same style of dress as the squire's daughter--dolly vardens, chignons, and parasols for ladies who can work all day reaping in the broiling sun of august! gloves, kid, for hands that milk the cows! the cottages now are infinitely better than they were. there is scarcely room for further improvement in the cottages now erected upon estates. they have three bedrooms, and every appliance and comfort compatible with their necessarily small size. it is only the cottages erected by the labourers themselves on waste plots of ground which are open to objection. those he builds himself are, indeed, as a rule, miserable huts, disgraceful to a christian country. i have an instance before me at this moment where a man built a cottage with two rooms and no staircase or upper apartments, and in those two rooms eight persons lived and slept--himself and wife, grown-up daughters, and children. there was not a scrap of garden attached, not enough to grow half-a-dozen onions. the refuse and sewage was flung into the road, or filtered down a ditch into the brook which supplied that part of the village with water. in another case at one time there was a cottage in which twelve persons lived. this had upper apartments, but so low was the ceiling that a tall man could stand on the floor, with his head right through the opening for the staircase, and see along the upper floor under the beds! these squatters are the curse of the community. it is among them that fever and kindred infectious diseases break out; it is among them that wretched couples are seen bent double with rheumatism and affections of the joints caused by damp. they have often been known to remain so long, generation after generation, in these wretched hovels, that at last the lord of the manor, having neglected to claim quit-rent, they can defy him, and claim them as their own property, and there they stick, eyesores and blots, the fungi of the land. the cottages erected by farmers or by landlords are now, one and all, fit and proper habitations for human beings; and i verily believe it would be impossible throughout the length and breadth of wiltshire to find a single bad cottage on any large estate, so well and so thoroughly have the landed proprietors done their work. on all farms gardens are attached to the cottages, in many instances very large, and always sufficient to produce enough vegetables for the resident. in villages the allotment system has been greatly extended of late years, and has been found most beneficial, both to owners and tenants. as a rule the allotments are let at a rate which may be taken as £ per annum--a sum which pays the landlord very well, and enables the labourer to remunerate himself. in one village which came under my observation the clergyman of the parish has turned a portion of his glebe land into allotments--a most excellent and noble example, which cannot be too widely followed or too much extolled. he is thus enabled to benefit almost every one of his poor parishioners, and yet without destroying that sense of independence which is the great characteristic of a true englishman. he has issued a book of rules and conditions under which these allotments are held, and he thus places a strong check upon drunkenness and dissolute habits, indulgence in which is a sure way to lose the portions of ground. there is scarcely an end to the benefits of the allotment system. in villages there cannot be extensive gardens, and the allotments supply their place. the extra produce above that which supplies the table and pays the rent is easily disposed of in the next town, and places many additional comforts in the labourer's reach. the refuse goes to help support and fatten the labourer's pig, which brings him in profit enough to pay the rent of his cottage, and the pig, in turn, manures the allotment. some towns have large common lands, held under certain conditions; such are malmesbury, with acres, and tetbury (the common land of which extends two miles), both these being arable, &c. these are not exactly in the use of labourers, but they are in the hands of a class to which the labourer often rises. many labourers have fruit-trees in their gardens, which, in some seasons, prove very profitable. in the present year, to my knowledge, a labourer sold £ worth of apples; and another made £ , s. off the produce of one pear-tree, pears being scarce. to come at last to the difficult question of wages. in wiltshire there has been no extended strike, and very few meetings upon the subject, for the simple reason that the agitators can gain no hold upon a county where, as a mass, the labourers are well paid. the common day-labourer receives s., s., and s. a week, according to the state of supply and demand for labour in various districts; and, if he milks, s. more, making s. a week, now common wages. these figures are rather below the mark; i could give instances of much higher pay. to give a good idea of the wages paid i will take the case of a hill farmer (arable, marlborough downs), who paid this last summer during harvest s. per week per man. his reapers often earned s. a day--enough to pay their year's rent in a week. these men lived in cottages on the farm, with three bedrooms each, and some larger, with every modern appliance, each having a garden of a quarter of an acre attached and close at hand, for which cottage and garden they paid s. per week rent. the whole of these cottages were insured by the farmer himself, their furniture, &c., in one lump, and the insurance policy cost him, as nearly as possible, s. d. per cottage per year. for this he deducted s. per year each from their wages. none of the men would have insured unless he had insisted upon doing it for them. these men had from six to eight quarts of beer per man (over and above their s. a week) during harvest every day. in spring and autumn their wages are much increased by piece-work, hoeing, &c. in winter the farmer draws their coal for them in his waggons, a distance of eight miles from the nearest wharf, enabling them to get it at cost price. this is no slight advantage, for, at the present high price of coal, it is sold, delivered in the villages, at s. per cwt. many who cannot afford it in the week buy a quarter of a cwt. on saturday night, to cook their sunday's dinner with, for d. this is at the rate of £ per ton. another gentleman, a large steam cultivator in the vale, whose name is often before the public, informs me that his books show that he paid £ in one year in cash to one cottage for labour, showing the advantage the labourer possesses over the mechanic, since his wife and child can add to his income. many farmers pay £ and £ a year for beer drunk by their labourers--a serious addition to their wages. the railway companies and others who employ mechanics, do not allow them any beer. the allowance of a good cottage and a quarter of an acre of garden for s. per week is not singular. many who were at the autumn manoeuvres of the present year may remember having a handsome row of houses, rather than cottages, pointed out to them as inhabited by labourers at s. per week. in the immediate neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns s. d. a week is sometimes paid; but then these cottages would in such positions readily let to mechanics for s., s., and even s. per week. there was a great outcry when the duke of marlborough issued an order that the cottages on his estate should in future only be let to such men as worked upon the farms where those cottages were situated. in reality this was the very greatest blessing the duke could have conferred upon the agricultural labourer; for it ensured him a good cottage at a nearly nominal rent and close to his work; whereas in many instances previously the cottages on the farms had been let at a high rate to the mechanics, and the labourer had to walk miles before he got to his labour. cottages are not erected by landowners or by farmers as paying speculations. it is well known that the condition of things prevents the agricultural labourer from being able to pay a sufficient rent to be a fair percentage upon the sum expended. in one instance a landlord has built some cottages for his tenant, the tenant paying a certain amount of interest on the sum invested by the landlord. now, although this is a matter of arrangement, and not of speculation--that is, although the interest paid by the tenant is a low percentage upon the money laid out, yet the rent paid by the labourers inhabiting these cottages to the tenant does not reimburse him what he pays his landlord as interest--not by a considerable margin. but then he has the advantage of his labourers close to his work, always ready at hand. over and above the actual cash wages of the labourer, which are now very good, must be reckoned his cottage and garden, and often a small orchard, at a nominal rent, his beer at his master's expense, piece-work, gleaning after harvest, &c., which alter his real position very materially. in gloucestershire, on the cotswolds, the best-paid labourers are the shepherds, for in that great sheep-country much trust is reposed in them. at the annual auctions of shearlings which are held upon the large farms a purse is made for the shepherd of the flock, into which every one who attends is expected to drop a shilling, often producing £ . the shepherds on the wiltshire downs are also well paid, especially in lambing-time, when the greatest watchfulness and care are required. it has been stated that the labourer has no chance of rising from his position. this is sheer cant. he has very good opportunities of rising, and often does rise, to my knowledge. at this present moment i could mention a person who has risen from a position scarcely equal to that of a labourer, not only to have a farm himself, but to place his sons in farms. another has just entered on a farm; and several more are on the highroad to that desirable consummation. if a labourer possesses any amount of intelligence he becomes head-carter or head-fagger, as the case may be; and from that to be assistant or under-bailiff, and finally bailiff. as a bailiff he has every opportunity to learn the working of a farm, and is often placed in entire charge of a farm at a distance from his employer's residence. in time he establishes a reputation as a practical man, and being in receipt of good wages, with very little expenditure, saves some money. he has now little difficulty in obtaining the promise of a farm, and with this can readily take up money. with average care he is a made man. others rise from petty trading, petty dealing in pigs and calves, till they save sufficient to rent a small farm, and make that the basis of larger dealing operations. i question very much whether a clerk in a firm would not find it much more difficult, as requiring larger capital, to raise himself to a level with his employer than an agricultural labourer does to the level of a farmer. many labourers now wander far and wide as navvies, &c., and perhaps when these return home, as most of them do, to agricultural labour, they are the most useful and intelligent of their class, from a readiness they possess to turn their hand to anything. i know one at this moment who makes a large addition to his ordinary wages by brewing for the small inns, and very good liquor he brews, too. they pick up a large amount of practical knowledge. the agricultural women are certainly not handsome; i know no peasantry so entirely uninviting. occasionally there is a girl whose nut-brown complexion and sloe-black eyes are pretty, but their features are very rarely good, and they get plain quickly, so soon as the first flush of youth is past. many have really good hair in abundance, glossy and rich, perhaps from its exposure to the fresh air. but on sundays they plaster it with strong-smelling pomade and hair-oil, which scents the air for yards most unpleasantly. as a rule, it may safely be laid down that the agricultural women are moral, far more so than those of the town. rough and rude jokes and language are, indeed, too common; but that is all. no evil comes of it. the fairs are the chief cause of immorality. many an honest, hard-working servant-girl owes her ruin to these fatal mops and fairs, when liquor to which she is unaccustomed overcomes her. yet it seems cruel to take from them the one day or two of the year on which they can enjoy themselves fairly in their own fashion. the spread of friendly societies, patronised by the gentry and clergy, with their annual festivities, is a remedy which is gradually supplying them with safer, and yet congenial, amusement. in what may be termed lesser morals i cannot accord either them or the men the same praise. they are too ungrateful for the many great benefits which are bountifully supplied them--the brandy, the soup, and fresh meat readily extended without stint from the farmer's home in sickness to the cottage are too quickly forgotten. they who were most benefited are often the first to most loudly complain and to backbite. never once in all my observation have i heard a labouring man or woman make a grateful remark; and yet i can confidently say that there is no class of persons in england who receive so many attentions and benefits from their superiors as the agricultural labourers. stories are rife of their even refusing to work at disastrous fires because beer was not immediately forthcoming. i trust this is not true; but it is too much in character. no term is too strong in condemnation for those persons who endeavour to arouse an agitation among a class of people so short-sighted and so ready to turn against their own benefactors and their own interest. i am credibly informed that one of these agitators, immediately after the bishop of gloucester's unfortunate but harmlessly intended speech at the gloucester agricultural society's dinner--one of these agitators mounted a platform at a village meeting and in plain language incited and advised the labourers to duck the farmers! the agricultural women either go out to field-work or become indoor servants. in harvest they hay-make--chiefly light work, as raking--and reap, which is much harder labour; but then, while reaping they work their own time, as it is done by the piece. significantly enough, they make longer hours while reaping. they are notoriously late to arrive, and eager to return home, on the hay-field. the children help both in haymaking and reaping. in spring and autumn they hoe and do other piece-work. on pasture farms they beat clots or pick up stones out of the way of the mowers' scythes. occasionally, but rarely now, they milk. in winter they wear gaiters, which give the ankles a most ungainly appearance. those who go out to service get very low wages at first from their extreme awkwardness, but generally quickly rise. as dairymaids they get very good wages indeed. dairymaids are scarce and valuable. a dairymaid who can be trusted to take charge of a dairy will sometimes get £ besides her board (liberal) and sundry perquisites. these often save money, marry bailiffs, and help their husbands to start a farm. in the education provided for children wiltshire compares favourably with other counties. long before the passing of the recent act in reference to education the clergy had established schools in almost every parish, and their exertions have enabled the greater number of places to come up to the standard required by the act, without the assistance of a school board. the great difficulty is the distance children have to walk to school, from the sparseness of population and the number of outlying hamlets. this difficulty is felt equally by the farmers, who, in the majority of cases, find themselves situated far from a good school. in only one place has anything like a cry for education arisen, and that is on the extreme northern edge of the county. the vice-chairman of the swindon chamber of agriculture recently stated that only one-half of the entire population of inglesham could read and write. it subsequently appeared that the parish of inglesham was very sparsely populated, and that a variety of circumstances had prevented vigorous efforts being made. the children, however, could attend schools in adjoining parishes, not farther than two miles, a distance which they frequently walk in other parts of the country. those who are so ready to cast every blame upon the farmer, and to represent him as eating up the earnings of his men and enriching himself with their ill-paid labour, should remember that farming, as a rule, is carried on with a large amount of borrowed capital. in these days, when £ an acre has been expended in growing roots for sheep, when the slightest derangement of calculation in the price of wool, meat, or corn, or the loss of a crop, seriously interferes with a fair return for capital invested, the farmer has to sail extremely close to the wind, and only a little more would find his canvas shaking. it was only recently that the cashier of the principal bank of an agricultural county, after an unprosperous year, declared that such another season would make almost every farmer insolvent. under these circumstances it is really to be wondered at that they have done as much as they have for the labourer in the last few years, finding him with better cottages, better wages, better education, and affording him better opportunities of rising in the social scale.--i am, sir, faithfully yours, richard jefferies. coate farm, swindon, _nov. , ._ lord shaftesbury, in the _times_, dec. th, says:-- "it is our duty and our interest to elevate the present condition of the labourer, and to enable him to assert and enjoy every one of his rights. but i must agree with mr. jefferies that, even under the actual system of things, numerous instances have occurred of a rise in the social scale as the result of temperance, good conduct, and economy. he has furnished some examples. i will give only one from my own estate:--'t. m. was for many years shepherd to farmer p----; he bought with his savings a small leasehold property at ---- for £ , and he had accumulated £ besides. he had brought up a son and three daughters, and his son now occupies the leasehold.' this is the statement as given to me in writing." letter ii. (_to the editor of the "times."_) sir,--i did not intend to make any reply to the numerous attacks made upon my letter published in the _times_ of the th inst., but the statements made by "the son of a wiltshire labourer" are such as i feel bound to resent on the part of the farmers of this county. he says he wishes the landed proprietors would take as much care to provide cottages for their labourers as i represent them as doing. i repeat what i said, that the cottages on large estates are now, one and all, fit habitations for human beings. the duke of marlborough is a large proprietor of cottages in this neighbourhood, and his plan has been, whenever a cottage did not appear sufficiently commodious, to throw two into one. the owner of the largest estate near swindon has been engaged for many years past in removing the old thatched mud hovels, and replacing them with substantial, roomy, and slate-roofed buildings. farmers are invariably anxious to have good cottages. there is a reluctance to destroy the existing ones, both from the inconvenience and the uncertainty sometimes of others being erected. often, too, the poor have the strongest attachment to the cabin in which they were born and bred, and would strongly resent its destruction, though obviously for their good. farmers never build bad cottages now. when a tenement falls in, either from decay or the death of the tenant, the cottage which is erected on its site is invariably a good one. a row of splendid cottages has recently been erected at wanborough. they are very large, with extensive gardens attached. some even begin to complain that the cottages now erected are in a sense "too good" for the purpose. the system of three bedrooms is undoubtedly the best from a sanitary point of view, but it is a question whether the widespread belief in that system, and that system alone, has not actually retarded the erection of reasonably good buildings. it is that third bedroom which just prevents the investment of building a cottage from paying a remunerative percentage on the capital expended. two bedrooms are easily made--the third puzzles the builder where to put it with due regard to economy. nor is a third bedroom always required. out of ten families perhaps only two require a third bedroom; in this way there is a large waste in erecting a row. it has been suggested that a row should consist of so many cottages with two bedrooms only for families who do not want more, and at each end a building with three bedrooms for larger families. in one instance two cottages were ordered to be erected on an estate, the estimate for which was £ ; these when completed might have let for £ per annum, or ¾ per cent, on the capital invested! the plans for these cottages had so many dormer windows, porches, intricacies of design in variegated tiles, &c., that the contractor gave it up as a bad job. i mention this to show that the tendency to build good cottages has gone even beyond what was really required, and ornamentation is added to utility. then it is further stated that the labourer cannot build cottages. i could name a lane at this moment the cottages in which were one and all built by labourers; and there are half-a-dozen in this village which were erected by regular farm labourers. the majority of these are, as i said before, wretched hovels, but there are two or three which demonstrate that the labourer, if he is a thrifty man, earns quite sufficient to enable him to erect a reasonably good building. the worst hovel i ever saw (it was mentioned in my letter of the th) was built by a man who is notorious for his drinking habits. some forty years ago, when wages were much lower than they are now, two labourers, to my knowledge, took possession of a strip of waste land by the roadside, and built themselves cottages. one of these was a very fair building; the other would certainly be condemned now-a-days. the lord of the manor claimed these; and the difficulty was thus adjusted:--the builders were to receive the value of their tenements from the lord of the manor, and were to remain permanent tenants for life on payment of a small percentage, interest upon the purchase-money, as quit-rent. on their deaths the cottages were to become the property of the lord of the manor. one man received £ for his cottage, the other £ , which sums forty years ago represented relatively a far higher value than now, and demonstrate conclusively that the labourer, if he is a steady, hard-working man, can build a cottage. another cottage i know of, built by a farm labourer, is really a very creditable building--good walls, floors, staircase, sashes, doors; it stands high, and appears very comfortable, and even pleasant, in summer, for they are a thrifty family, and can even display flower-pots in the window. other cottages have been built or largely added to in my memory by labourers. on these occasions they readily obtain help from the farmers. one lends his team and waggons to draw the stones; another supplies wood for nothing; but of late i must admit there has been some reluctance to assist in this way (unless for repairs) because it was so often found that the buildings thus erected were not fit habitations. the boards of guardians often find a difficulty from the limited ownership of some of the labourers, who apply for relief, of their cottages. perhaps they have not paid quit-rent for a year or two; but still they cannot sell, and yet it seems unjust to the ratepayers to assist a man who has a tenement which he at least calls his own, and from which he cannot be ejected, i know a labourer at this moment living in a cottage originally built by his father, and added to by himself by the assistance of the neighbouring farmers. this man has been greatly assisted by one farmer in particular, who advanced him money by which he purchased a horse and cart, and was enabled to do a quantity of hauling, flint-carting for the waywardens, and occasionally to earn money by assisting to carry a farmer's harvest. he rents a large piece of arable land, and ought to be comparatively well off. "the son of a wiltshire labourer" complains that the farmers or proprietors do not make sufficient efforts to supply the cottages with water. the lord of the manor and the tenant of the largest farms in this immediate neighbourhood have but just sunk a well for their cottages; previously they had got their supply from a pump in an adjacent farmyard thrown open by the proprietor to all the village. it is the labourer himself who will not rise. in a village with which i am acquainted great efforts have been made by a farmer and a gentleman living near to provide proper school instruction for the children. one labourer was asked why he did not send his children to school. he replied, "because he could not afford it." "but," said the farmer, "it is only threepence altogether." "oh, no; he could not afford it." the farmer explained to him that the object was to avoid a school board, which, in other places, had the power to fine for not sending children to school. "no, he could not afford it." the farmer's books show that this labourer, his wife, and two children received s. d. per week, his cottage rent free, and a very large garden at a low rent. yet he could not afford the d. a week which would enable his children ultimately to take a better position in the world! the same farmer, who is a liberal and large-minded man, has endeavoured, without success, to introduce the practice of paying in cash instead of beer, and also the system of payment for overtime. the men say no, they would rather not. "in wet weather," they say, "we do no work, but you pay us; and if we work a little later in harvest, it only makes it fair." they would not take money instead of beer. in another case which came under my personal observation in the middle of last summer, a farmer announced his intention of paying in cash instead of allowing beer. in the very press of the haymaking, with acres upon acres of grass spoiling, his men, one and all, struck work because he would not give them beer, and went over to a neighbour's field adjacent and worked for him for nothing but their share in the beer. if labourers work longer hours in harvest (corn), it is because it is piece-work, and they thereby make more money. i contend that the payment in kind, the beer, the gleanings, the piece-work, the low and nominal cottage rent, the allotment ground and produce, and the pig (not restricted to one pig in a year), may fairly be taken as an addition to their wages. i am informed that in one parish the cottage rents vary from d. to s. d. per week; nearly all have gardens, and all may have allotments up to a quarter of an acre each at d. per lug, or s. per acre. i am also informed of a labourer renting a cottage and garden at s. per week, the fruit-trees in whose garden produced this year three sacks of damsons, which he sold at s. d. per gallon, or £ , s. i know of a case in which a labourer--an earnest, intelligent, hard-working man--makes £ a week on an average all the year round. but then he works only at piece-work, going from farm to farm, and this is, of course, an exceptional case. the old men, worn out with age and infirmity, are kept on year after year by many farmers out of charity, rather than let them go to the workhouse, though totally useless and a dead loss, especially as occupying valuable cottage-room. there is a society, the annual meetings of which are held at chippenham, and which is supported by the clergy, gentry, and farmers generally of north wilts, for the object of promoting steady habits among the labourers and rewarding cases of long and deserving services. there is also a friendly society on the best and most reliable basis, supported by the gentry, and introduced as far as possible into villages. the labourers on the great western railway works at swindon earn from s. a week upwards, according as they approach to skilled workmen. attracted by these wages, most of the young men of the neighbourhood try the factory, but, usually, after a short period return to farm-work, the result of their experience being that they are better off as agricultural labourers. lodgings in the town close to the factory are very expensive, and food in proportion; consequently they have to walk long distances to their labour--some from wanborough, five miles; wroughton, three and a half miles; purton, four miles; and even wootton bassett, six miles, which twice a day is a day's work in itself. add to this the temptations to spend money in towns, and the severe labour, and the man finds himself better off with his quiet cottage and garden on a farm at s. a week, and s. for milking, with beer, and a meal on sundays. the skilled mechanics, who earn s. to £ per week, rent houses in the town at s. to s.; and in one case i knew of s. per week paid by a lodger for two rooms. these prices cannot be paid out of the mechanic's wage; consequently he sub-lets, or takes lodgers, and sometimes these sub-let, and the result is an overcrowding worse than that of the agricultural cottages, around which there is at least fresh air and plenty of light (nearly as important), which are denied in a town. the factory labourer and the mechanic are liable to instant dismissal. the agricultural labourers (half of them at least) are hired by the year or half-year, and cannot be summarily sent along unless for misconduct. wages have recently been increased by the farmers of wiltshire voluntarily and without pressure from threatened strikes. it is often those who receive the highest wages who are the first to come to the parish for relief. it is not uncommon for mechanics and others to go for relief where it is discovered that they are in receipt of sick pay from the yard club, and sometimes from two friendly societies, making s. a week. a manufacturing gentleman informed me that the very men whom he had been paying £ a week to were the first to apply for relief when distress came and the mills stopped. it is not low wages, then, which causes improvident habits. the only result of deporting agricultural labourers to different counties is to equalise the wages paid all over england. this union-assisted emigration affords the improvident labourer a good opportunity of transporting himself to a distant county, and leaving deeply in debt with the tradesmen with whom he has long dealt. i am informed that this is commonly the case with emigrating labourers. a significant fact is noted in the leader of the _labour news_ of the th of november; the return of certain emigrants from america is announced as "indicative that higher quotations are not always representative of greater positive advantages." the agricultural labourer found that out when he returned from the factory at s. per week to farm labour at s. i am positive that the morality of the country compares favourably with that of the town. i was particularly struck with this fact on a visit to the black country. one of the worst parishes for immorality in wiltshire is one where glovemaking is carried on; singularly enough, manufactures and immorality seem to go together. "the son of a labourer" says that all the advantages the labourer does possess are owing to the exertions of the clergy; pray who support the clergy but the farmers? i think that the facts i have mentioned sufficiently demonstrate that the farmers and the landlords of wiltshire have done their duty, and more than their mere duty, towards the labourers; and only a little investigation will show that at present it is out of their power to do more. take the case of a farmer entering a dairy-farm of, say, acres, and calculate his immediate outgoings--say fifty cows at £ , £ , ; two horses at £ , £ ; waggons, carts, implements, £ ; labour, three men at s. per week, £ ; harvest labour, £ ; dairymaid £ ; tithe, taxes, rates, &c., £ ; rent, £ per acre, £ . total, £ . in other words (exclusive of the capital invested in stock), the outgoings amount to £ per annum; against which put--fifty cows' milk, &c., at £ per head, £ ; fifty calves, £ ; fifty tons of hay at £ , s., £ . total income, £ ; balance in hand, £ . then comes the village school subscription; sometimes a church rate (legally voluntary, but morally binding), &c. so that, in hard figures (all these are below the mark, if anything), there is positively nothing left for the farmer but a house and garden free. how, then, is money made? by good judgment in crops, in stock, by lucky accidents. on a dairy-farm the returns begin immediately; on an arable one there is half a year at least to wait. the care, the judgment, required to be exercised is something astonishing, and a farmer is said to be all his life learning his trade. if sheep are dear and pay well, the farmer plants roots; then, perhaps, after a heavy expenditure for manure, for labour, and seed, there comes the fly, or a drought, and his capital is sunk. on the other hand, if the season be good, roots are cheap and over-plentiful, and where is his profit then? he works like a labourer himself in all weathers and at all times; he has the responsibility and the loss, yet he is expected to find the labourer, not only good cottages, allotments, schooling, good wages, but heaven knows what besides. supposing the £ (on the dairy-farm) be borrowed capital for which he must pay at least per cent.--and few, indeed, are there who get money at that price--it is obvious how hard he must personally work, how hard, too, he must live, to make both ends meet. and it speaks well for his energy and thrift that i heard a bank director not long since remark that he had noticed, after all, with every drawback, the tenant farmers had made as a rule more money in proportion than their landlords. a harder-working class of men does not exist than the wiltshire farmers. only a few days ago i saw in your valuable paper a list, nearly a column long, of the millionaires who had died in the last ten years. it would be interesting to know how much they had spent for the benefit of the agricultural labourer. yet no one attacks them. they pay no poor-rates, no local taxation, or nothing in proportion. the farmer pays the poor-rate which supports the labourer in disease, accident, and old age; the highway rates on which the millionaire's carriage rolls; and very soon the turnpike trusts will fall in, and the farmers--_i.e._, the land--will have to support the imperial roads also. with all these heavy burdens on his back, having to compete against the world, he has yet no right to compensation for his invested capital if he is ordered to quit. without some equalisation of local taxation--as i have shown, the local taxes often make another rent almost--without a recognised tenant-right, not revolutionary, but for unexhausted improvements, better security, so that he can freely invest capital, the farmer cannot--i reiterate it, he cannot--do more than he has done for the labourer. he would then employ more skilled labour, and wages would be better. and, after all that he does for them, he dares not find fault, or he may find his ricks blazing away--thanks to the teaching of the agitators that the farmers are tyrants, and, by inference, that to injure them is meritorious. there is a poster in swindon now offering £ reward for the discovery of the person who maliciously set fire to a rick of hay in lord bolingbroke's park at lydiard. if any farmers are hard upon their men, it is those who have themselves been labourers and have risen to be employers of labour. these very often thoroughly understand the art of getting the value of a man's wage out of him. i deliberately affirm that the true farmers, one and all, are in favour of that maxim of a well-known and respected agriculturist of our county--"a fair day's wage for a fair day's work." i fear the farmers of wiltshire would be only too happy to ride thorough-breds to the hunt, and see their daughters driving phaetons, as they are accused of doing; but i also fear that very, very few enjoy that privilege. most farmers, it is true, do keep some kind of vehicle; it is necessary when their great distance from a town is considered, and the keep of a horse or two comes to nothing on a large farm. it is customary for them to drive their wives or daughters once a week on market-days into the nearest town. if here and there an energetic man succeeds in making money, and is able to send his son to a university, all honour to him. i hope the farmers will send their sons to universities; the spread of education in their class will be of as much advantage to the community as among the labouring population, for it will lead to the more general application of science to the land and a higher amount of production. if the labourer attempted to rise he would be praised; why not the farmer? it is simply an unjustifiable libel on the entire class to accuse them of wilful extravagance. i deliberately affirm that the majority of farmers in wiltshire are exactly the reverse; that, while they practise a generous hospitality to a friend or a stranger, they are decidedly saving and frugal rather than extravagant, and they are compelled to be so by the condition of their finances. to prove that their efforts are for the good of the community i need only allude to the work of the late mr. stratton, so crowned with success in improving the breed of cattle--a work in the sister county of gloucester so ably carried on at this present moment by mr. edward bowly, and by mr. lane and mr. garne in the noted cotswold sheep. the breeds produced by these gentlemen have in a manner impregnated the whole world, imported as they have been to america and australia. it was once ably said that the readings of the english bible sunday after sunday in our churches had preserved our language pure for centuries; and, in the same way, i do verily believe that the english (not the wiltshire only, but the english) farmer as an institution, with his upright, untainted ideas of honour, honesty, and morality, has preserved the tone of society from that corruption which has so miserably degraded france--so much so that dumas recently scientifically predicted that france was _en route à prostitution générale_. just in the same way his splendid constitution as a man recruits the exhausted, pale, nervous race who dwell in cities, and prevents the englishman from physically degenerating.--i am, sir, faithfully yours, richard jefferies. coate farm, swindon, _november , _. _the allotment system._ (_to the editor of the "times."_) sir,--many gentlemen having written to me for further information upon the system of glebe allotments for labourers mentioned in my letter to the _times_ of november , it has occurred to me that the following facts may be interesting:-- the glebe alluded to was that of lyddington, near swindon, and the plan was originated by the late incumbent, mr. may, but carried out into a complete system by the present much-respected rector, the rev. h. munn. the land itself is situated not more than yards from the village of lyddington, by the side of a good turnpike-road, and is traversed by two roads giving easy access to every allotment. each plot of ground is divided from the next by a narrow green path: no hedges or mounds are permitted, and the field itself is enclosed without a hedge to harbour birds. the soil is a rich dark loam, yielding good crops, with very little manure, and the surface is level. there are sixty-three tenants occupying plots varying in size, according to circumstances, from "lug" downwards-- , , , &c. a "lug" is a provincialism for perch. the rent is d. per "lug" or perch, and each occupier on becoming a tenant receives a card on which the following rules are printed in large type:-- "lyddington garden allotments. "rules and regulations. " . the land shall be cultivated by the spade only, and proper attention shall be paid to its cultivation. " . no allotment, or any part thereof, shall be under-let or exchanged. " . the rent shall be due on the st of september in each year, and shall be paid before the crop is taken off the ground. " . all tenants shall maintain a character for morality and sobriety, and shall not frequent a public-house on the sabbath-day. " . if any tenant fail to pay his rent or to perform any of the foregoing conditions he shall immediately forfeit his allotment, with his crop upon the same, and the landlord or his agent shall take possession and enforce payment of the rent due by sale of the crop or otherwise, as in arrears of rent. "all the tenants are earnestly requested to attend regularly at the house of god during the times of divine service, with their families, to the best of their abilities." the object of rule is to enable the landlord to retain a certain amount of influence over the tenant, to bring him in immediate contact with the tenant, and to keep the land itself under his control. many occupiers endeavour to under-let their allotments, which, if permitted, would entirely defeat the main object of the landlord, besides complicating the already great labour of collecting the rents, &c. rule prevents the produce of the allotment going to pay the public-house score; while the date on which the rent falls due is so adjusted as to enable the occupier to receive his money for harvest-work before paying it. rule places a great restraint upon drunkenness and dissolute habits. last year the rev. h. munn addressed a private circular to his tenants, in which he says:-- "sad reports have been brought to me lately of the conduct of some in the parish, and among them, i am sorry to say, are tenants of the allotment gardens. such conduct is contrary to the rules on which the allotments are held, and also contrary to the intentions of my predecessor in letting them out to the parishioners. they are intended to improve the condition of the labourers and their families, giving them employment in the summer evenings, increasing their supply of food, and withdrawing them from the influence of the public-house. but when drinking habits are indulged all these benefits are lost, and the allotments, which were intended to do the labourer good, only increase his means of obtaining intoxicating drinks." the landlord can, of course, exercise his discretion in enforcing rule --can allow time for payment, and in certain cases of misfortune, such as the failure of the potato crop, remit it entirely. but this power must be sparingly used, otherwise every one would endeavour to find excuses for non-fulfilment of the contract. the extent of the allotment is written on the back of the card of rules, with the name of the tenant, thus:--"d. hancock.--lot , lug ; rent s. d.;" and each payment is receipted underneath, with the date and initials of the landlord. the present landlord has in no case disturbed or removed the tenants received by his predecessor, but where land has fallen in he has endeavoured to arrange the extent of the new allotments made to suit the requirements of families, and to allow of a sufficient crop of potatoes being grown for one season on one half of the allotment, while the other half bears different vegetables, and _vice versâ_ for the next season, being the same thing as a rotation of crops. the field has recently been drained at the joint cost of landlord and tenant. the rev. h. munn provided the drain-pipes, and the occupiers paid for the labour, which latter came to £ , the amount being proportioned according to the size of each allotment. the highest amount paid by any one tenant was, i believe, £ (for "lug"), others going down to s. the rent at d. per "lug" or perch comes to £ , s. d. per acre, an amount which bears a proper relation to the rent of arable farming land, when the labour of collecting so many small sums and other circumstances are taken into consideration. the moral effect of the arrangement has been incalculable--as one old woman pertinently remarked, "we needn't steal now, sir." in the olden times the farmers' gardens were constantly subject to depredations. the ordinary rate at which gardens are let in the neighbourhood is d. per "lug." at swindon, the nearest town ( , inhabitants), there are large allotment fields let at s. d. per "lug," or £ per acre, and eagerly caught up at that price. these allotments are rented by every class, from labourers and mechanics to well-to-do tradesmen. the very first desire of every agricultural labourer's heart is a garden, and so strong is the feeling that i have known men apply for permission to cultivate the vacant space between the large double mounds of the hedges on some pasture farms, and work hard at it despite the roots of the bushes and the thefts of the rooks. the facts mentioned above only add one more to the numberless ways in which the noble clergy of the church of england have been silently labouring for the good of the people committed to their care for years before the agitators bestowed one thought on the agricultural poor.--i am, sir, faithfully yours, richard jefferies. coate farm, swindon. (_published in the "times," nov. , ._) _a true tale of the wiltshire labourer._ "now then--hold fast there--mind the furrow, tim." the man who was loading prepared himself for the shock, and the waggon safely jolted over the furrow, and on between the wakes of light-brown hay, crackling to the touch as if it would catch fire in the brilliant sunshine. the pitchers, one on each side, stuck their prongs into the wakes and sent up great "pitches," clearing the ground rapidly, through emulation, for it was a point of honour to keep pace with each other. tim, the old man who had led the horses, resumed his rake in the rear among the women, who instantly began teasing the poor wretch. "tim, she's allus in the way," said one, purposely hitching her rake in his. "thur--get away." "i shan't," said tim, surly as crabbed age and incessant banter under a hot sun could make him. "now--mind, thee's break th' rake." they both pulled as hard as they dared--each expecting the other to give way, for the master was in sight, on horseback, by the rick, and a rake broken wantonly would bring a sharp reprimand. "go it, sal!" cried the loader on the waggon hoarsely, half choked with hay dust. "pull away!" "pull, tim!" cried one of the pitchers. "ha! ha!" laughed two or three more women, closing round as the girl gave a tug which nearly upset tim and broke half-a-dozen teeth out of his rake. "darn thee!" growled the old fellow. the youngest of the girls at the same moment gave him a push under the arm with the end of her rake-handle. it was the last straw which broke the back of tim's temper. swearing, he dropped the rake and seized a prong, and hobbled after the girl, who danced away half in delight and half in terror. "i'll job this into thee--darn thee--if i can come near thee, thee hussy!" the "hussy" let him come near, and danced away again gracefully. she was at once the most handsome and most impudent of his tormentors. there's no saying whether the old man, roused as he was and incensed beyond control, might not really have "jobbed," _i.e._, stabbed, his prong at her, had not one of the pitchers left his wake and rushed on him. "my eye!" shouted the loader, "absalom's at 'un!" absalom took tim by the shoulders and hurled him on the ground pretty heavily. flinging the prong twenty yards away, he threatened to knock his head off if he didn't let madge alone. old tim slowly got up and went off after his tool, growling to himself, while madge clung hold of absalom's arm, who, turning round, kissed her. the other women looked jealously on as she followed him back to his wake, and kept close to him at his work. madge was tall and slenderly made. her limbs were more delicately proportioned than is usual among women accustomed to manual labour from childhood. the rosy glow of health lit up her brown but clear cheek, free from freckles and sun-spots. her eyes, black as sloes, were fringed with long dark eyelashes which gave their glances an _espiègle_ expression. they were very wicked-looking eyes, full of fun and mischief. her dress, open at the throat, displayed a faultless neck, but slightly sun-browned. her curly dark-brown hair escaped in ringlets down her back. a lovely nut-brown maid! soft glances passed rapidly between madge and absalom, as she raked behind him. they did not escape the jealous notice of the other women. it was the last day of the hay-harvest--it was "hay home" that night. harvest is a time of freedom, but the last day resembles the ancient saturnalia, or rather perhaps the vine season in italy, when the grape-gatherers indulged their rude wit on every one who came near. raillery and banter poured incessantly on madge and absalom, who replied with equal freedom. "grin away," shouted absalom at last, half pleased, half irritated, as he stuck his prong in the ground, and seizing madge, kissed her before them all. "thur--i bean't ashamed on her!" "ha! ha! ha! hoorah!" shouted the men. madge slipped away towards the rear, blushing scarlet. so absorbed had they been as not to notice the approach of another waggon coming in the opposite direction, which was now alongside. seeing the kiss and hearing the laugh, one of the men, following it, shouted in a stentorian voice, for which he was renowned-- "darn my buttons if i won't have one of they!" in an instant he was over the wake and caught madge in his arms. but she struggled and cried. absalom was there in a moment. "go it, roaring billy!" shouted the followers of the other waggon. but absalom shook him free, and the girl darted away. the two men stood fronting each other. absalom was angry. billy had had a trifle too much beer. a quarrel was imminent, and fists were doubled, when the pitchers rushed up and separated them. the last pitch was now flung up, and the women began to decorate the horses and the waggons with green boughs. "come on, madge," said absalom, "we'll ride whoam;" and despite of much feminine shyness and many objections, and after much trouble and blushing and rude jokes about legs, madge was hoisted up, and absalom followed her. to the rickyard they rode in triumph among green boughs, and to the rude chorus of a song. at seven that evening the whole gang were collected in the farmer's great kitchen. a huge room it was, paved with stone flags, the walls whitewashed, and the ceiling being the roof itself, whose black beams were festooned with cobwebs. three or four tables had been arranged in a row, and there was a strong smell of "dinner" from smoking joints. absalom came in last. he had spent some time in adorning himself in a white clean slop and new corduroys, with a gay necktie and his grandfather's watch. his face shone from a recent wash. it was an open countenance, which unconsciously prepossessed one in his favour. light-blue or grey eyes, which looked you straight in the face, were overshadowed with rather thick eyebrows. his forehead was well proportioned, and crowned with a mass of curling yellow hair. a profusion of whiskers hid his chin, which perhaps in its shape indicated a character too easy and yielding. his shoulders were broad; his appearance one of great strength. but his mouth had a sensual look. absalom pushed in and out by madge. "what didst thee have to eat?" asked a crony of his afterwards. "aw," said absalom, fetching a sigh at the remembrance of the good things. "fust i had a plate of rus beef, then a plate of boiled beef; then i had one of boiled mutton, and next one of roast mutton; last, bacon. i found i couldn't git on at all wi' th' pudding, but when the cheese and th' salad came, didn't i pitch into that!" absalom's love did not spoil his appetite. soon as the dishes were removed, pipes were brought out and tankards sent on their rounds. by this time poor old tim's weak brains were muddled, and he was discovered leaning back against the wall and mumbling out the tag-end of an old song:-- "on' humphry wi' his flail, but kitty she wur the charming ma-aid to carry th' milking pa-ail!" this set them on singing, and roaring billy insisted on bawling out at the top of his stentorian lungs the doleful ditty of "lord bateman and his daughters," which ran to thirty verses, and lasted half-an-hour. hardly were the last words out of his mouth, when an impatient wight struck up the "leathern bottel," and heartily did they all join in the chorus, down to where the ballad describes the married man wanting to beat his wife, and using a glass bottle for the purpose, which broke and let all the wine about:-- "whereas it had been the leathern bottel, the stopper been in he might banged away well," without danger of creating an unanswerable argument in favour of leathern bottles. by this time they were pretty well "boozed." a thick cloud of tobacco-smoke filled the kitchen. heads were rolling about from side to side and arms stretched over the tables among the _débris_ of broken pipes and in pools of spilt beer and froth. despite these rude, unromantic surroundings, absalom and madge were leaning close against each other, hand-in-hand, almost silent, but looking in each other's eyes. what account takes passion of pipes or beer, smoke or drunken men, of snores and hoarse voices? none: they were oblivious of these things. chapter ii. a month after the "hay home" a gaily dressed party passed through the fields towards the village church. absalom and madge went first, arm-in-arm; followed by roaring billy, who was to give the bride away, with his lady beside him. behind these came two or three more couples, and last of all, toiling along by herself, an old woman, bent nearly double; it was madge's mother. with laugh and light jest they pushed on merrily over the stiles and through the brown autumn grass, covered with a lacework of cobwebs. the ceremony passed off well enough, except that billy, as best-man, made the old arches of the church echo again with his response. absalom had taken a cottage of farmer humphreys. "i'd 'ave sooner had 'un of anybody else," said he, "but thur war nur anuther to be had, and it bean't such a bad 'un nither, only measter humphreys be hardish in the mouth." by the which he meant that humphreys had the reputation of being rather harsh in his dealings with his workpeople. the cottage itself, however, was pleasant enough to look upon, half thatched and half slated, with a narrow strip of flower-garden in front full of hollyhocks, sun-flowers, and wall-flowers, enclosed in a high elder-hedge. besides which, the occupier had a prescriptive right, by custom, to a patch of potato ground in the allotments about a mile up the road. and half-a-dozen damson-trees overshadowed the back of the cottage, their branches coquetting with the roof when the wind blew. here the bridal party made a hearty dinner, and grew jolly and genial afterwards over several gallons of beer ordered from the "good woman" inn: a sign which represented a woman minus a head, and therefore silent. it was the end of the harvest, and absalom had plenty of money in his pocket: a week's holiday was therefore indispensable. the imbibing so much beer left a taste in the mouth next morning: this must be washed away by a visit to the barrel. then there was a stroll to the top of a high hill in the neighbourhood, and as it was very hot, the party was obliged to "wet their whistles" and "wash the dust out of their throats" at every sign on the road, there and back; always backed up with a second glass for the "good of the house." the week wore on, and by saturday absalom had thoroughly emancipated himself from the traces of control. saturday evening brought a company together at the "good woman," whom it behoved him to treat. gallon after gallon was disposed of; absalom, as the hero of the evening, rising higher and higher in his own estimation with every glass. at length a rude jest led to a blow. absalom had his coat off in an instant, and felled roaring billy like an ox. a row began. the landlord, jealous of his license, turned them all out into the road, when one or two, overcome by the fresh air on top of so much liquor, quietly laid down in the dust. absalom, mad with drink and vanity, hit out right and left, and piled up three half-stupefied fellows on top of each other, then, shouting-- "i'm the king of the castle!" stood up in the middle of the road, and brandishing his arms, challenged all comers. at that moment a pair of ponies dashed round the corner and suddenly stopped--obstructed by half-a-dozen men lying in the way. a tall gentleman, with a very broad forehead, a very small nose, and a profusion of grey beard, sprang out, and went up to the landlord, who stood at the door. "johnson," said he sharply, "this is disgraceful. what's that fellow's name?" pointing to absalom. the landlord of course didn't know--was very sorry. "i can tell 'ee, zur," said a voice, almost a childish treble, and old tim crept out from whence he had been sipping up the forsaken goblets. "it be absalom white--it be." "very good," said the reverend j. horton, and resuming his seat, drove on; while absalom, shouting and staggering, marched down the road, imagining he had carried all before him. the reverend j. horton was the owner of the allotment grounds, which he had broken up from the glebe land with the idea of benefiting the poor. every tenant received a circular of rules which were to be observed. foremost amongst these was a rule against fighting and drinking. absalom next week received an intimation that he must give up his allotment. he swore, and said it didn't matter a "cuss," it was autumn, and the crop was up, and he'd warrant he'd get another piece before spring somewhere. but madge cried, for her mother had prophesied evil from this offending of the "gentle-folk." absalom kissed her and went to his work. madge, despite these things, was happy enough. her education had not taught her to expect great things. she went forth to her work in the morning with a light heart. merry as a cricket, she forgot in the sunshine all the ominous forebodings of her feeble old mother. it so chanced, however, that absalom's master could not find her employment at that season, and she therefore worked on a farm at a little distance. madge saw little of absalom, except at night, and then he was tired and went early to bed. her restless spirit could not be satisfied with so little companionship. naturally fond of admiration, she thought no harm of talking and joking with the men, and her gossips encouraged her in it. the very same "gossips" reported her freedom to absalom--very much exaggerated. absalom said nothing. he was slow to understand any new idea. on her road home from her work madge had to come down a lane with but one solitary cottage in it. it belonged to an itinerant tinker, his own property, only paying quit-rent of a shilling a year. he was a bachelor, a gipsy sort of fellow, full of fun and rollicksome mirth, better educated than the labourers, and with a store of original ideas which he had acquired in travelling about. this fellow--"bellows," as he was called--admired madge exceedingly, and had tried to win her for himself, but failed. still, what pretty woman was ever displeased with the attentions of a smart young fellow? after her marriage "bellows" courted her more and more. it became a "talk," as the country people call it. madge, thinking her title as wife exonerated her from all remarks, perhaps allowed him to go further than she ought, but, in strict earnestness, meant no harm. these things came to absalom's ears. he grew fonder and fonder of the public-house. still, at home he said nothing. it grew to be winter. one cold, frosty, but beautiful moonlight night absalom came home late from his work. he had been sent up on the hills with some sheep, and did not return till two hours after his usual time. weary and hungry, and not in the best of tempers, he walked in. the door was ajar, and there were some embers on the hearth, but madge was neither in sight nor call. eager for his supper, absalom went out, and soon learned that she had gone up to the "good woman." madge indeed, finding he did not come home, had gone up there to look for him. "bellows" was there, and the landlord and he had been drinking pretty freely. no sooner did madge come in than the landlord blew out the candle, slipped out, and locked the door with a loud guffaw, leaving the pair alone in the dark. unable to escape, madge sat down, and they chatted away gaily enough. it was thus that absalom found them. he said nothing when he learnt where madge was, but left the house and walked back to the cottage. alarmed at his sullen demeanour, the landlord unlocked the door. madge flew back to the cottage. "ab," said she, rushing in with an armful of sticks to make a blaze, "you'll want your supper." the reply was a blow which doubled her up in a corner senseless. absalom sat for a while sullenly glowering over the embers, and then went to bed, leaving madge sobbing on the bare, hard earthen floor. it was midnight before she crept to his side. early in the morning absalom got up and dressed. madge was sleeping soundly, a dark circle under each eye; she had cried herself to sleep. he went out and left her. chapter iii. six weeks passed, and absalom did not return. madge went over to her mother. "he bean't come," she said, beginning to cry. "i knowed a wassn't," said the old woman, rocking herself to and fro in her low rush-bottomed chair, with her feet on the hearth, almost among the ashes. "thee's soon have to look out for theeself." "how, mother?" "cos i'm going to die." "mother!" "i be goin' to die," repeated the old woman in the same calm, hard tone. a life of incessant labour had crushed all sentiment out of her--except superstition--and she faced the hard facts of existence without emotion. madge began to weep. "thee go and shut up the cottage, wench, and come and bide wi' i." madge did so. in a few days the old woman took to her bed. she had it dragged out of the next room--there was but one floor--and placed near the fire, which was constantly kept up. madge waited on her assiduously when she was not out of doors at field-work. work was growing scarcer and scarcer as the winter advanced. the old woman slowly grew weaker and weaker, till madge could leave her no longer. so she stayed at home, and so lost the little employment she had. one evening, when the firelight was growing low and dark shadows were flickering over the ceiling, the old woman seemed to recover a little strength, and sat up in bed. "madge!" "yes, mother." "thee must promise i one thing." "what be it, mother?" "as thee won't have i buried by the parish." madge began to cry. "dost thee hear?" "i won't." a long silence. "madge!" "yes, mother." "thee go to the fire. dost thee see that brick in the chimbley as sticks out a little way?" "yes." "pull it out." madge caught hold, and after a few tugs pulled the brick out. "put thee hand in!" madge thrust hand and arm into the cavity, and brought out a dirty stocking. "has thee got th' stocking?" "yes, mother." "bury i wi' wots in thur, and take care o' the rest on't. thee's want it bad enough afore th' spring comes." madge replaced the stocking without examining it. she was heavy at heart. before morning her mother was dead. madge went back to her own cottage, carrying with her just a sovereign in sixpences and fourpenny-bits. she sat down and wept. no one came near her. her former gossips, always jealous of her beauty, left her alone with her sorrow. but she knew that she could not remain idle. something must be done. so she went out to rick-work, but there was none to be had. from farm to farm madge wearily toiled along, meeting the same answer everywhere--"had got more on now than they could find work for." madge felt exceedingly ill as she slowly wended her way homewards. then for the first time she remembered that she must shortly become a mother. in her weak state madge caught cold. she shivered incessantly. the poor child could not rise from her bed in the morning, her limbs were so stiff and her head so bad. she lay there all day, crying to herself. hunger at last, towards evening, compelled her to get up and seek food. there was only a piece of crust in the cupboard and a little lard. she was trying to masticate these when there came a tap at the door. "come in," said madge. farmer humphreys now appeared in the doorway. he was a short, thick man, with a shock-head of yellow hair, small grey eyes, and lips almost blue. "there be ten weeks' rent a-owing," said he, sitting down; "and we don't mean to wait no longer. and there's a half-side o' bacon an' a load of faggots." "how much is it altogether?" "seventeen-and-six." "i ain't a-got but a pound, and absalom bean't come whoam." "the vagabond--cuss 'im!" "a bean't no vagabond," cried madge, firing up in defence of her husband. "bist thee a-goin' to pay--or bisn't?" said the fellow, beginning to bully. madge counted him out the money, and he left, casting an ugly leer on her as he went. half-a-crown remained. on that half-crown madge lived for one whole month. the cold clung to her and grew worse. her tongue burned and her limbs shook; it was fever as well as cold--that low aguish fever, the curse of the poor. bread and lard day by day, bread and lard, and a little weak tea. and at the month's end the half-crown was gone: sixpence went for her last half-dozen faggots. madge crawled upstairs and wrapped herself up in a blanket, sitting on the side of the bed. it was her miserable loneliness which troubled the poor child most. her cough, and the cold, and want of food and firing, might have been borne had there been some one to talk to. but alone they did their work. her form was dreadfully shrunken, her hands as thin and bony as those her old mother last stretched over the fire. the ale-house which had absorbed her husband's earnings sent her no aid in this time of distress, and he had offended the clergyman who would otherwise have found her out. it grew dusky, as the poor creature sat on the edge of the bed. suddenly there was a hand on the latch of the door downstairs. madge trembled with eagerness as a heavy step sounded on the floor--could it be absalom? her black eyes, looking larger from the paleness of her sunken cheeks, began to blaze with a new light. the steps came to the foot of the stairs and began ascending. she listened eagerly. a head of yellow hair came up through the trap-door, and the small grey eyes of young humphreys leered on her. disappointed and amazed, madge remained silent. humphreys came up and sat on the bed beside her. "thee's got thin," he said, with a sort of chuckle. "like some grub, wouldn't ye?" no answer. he put his hand on her shoulder and muttered something in her ear. madge seemed scarcely to understand him, but sat staring wildly. "i'll give thee sixpence," said humphreys, showing one. then a full sense of his dishonourable intentions, mingled with shame and disgust at his unutterable meanness, came over madge, and rising with a flush on her cheek, she struck him with all her might. it was a feeble blow, but he was unprepared: it over-balanced him; he staggered backwards, and fell heavily down the stairs. madge, her heart beating painfully fast, leaned back on the bed and listened. there was not a sound. a dreadful thought that he might be killed flashed across her mind. her impulse was to go down and see, but her strength failed, and she sat down again and waited. it seemed hours before she heard him stir and, after a noise like a great dog shaking himself, with mingled curses and threats, leave the house. then a great pain came over her. she felt as if she should die, but the greatest dread was the dread of loneliness. she staggered to the window and looked out. a boy was passing, and she told him to go to mrs. green's and send her down. then she fell on the bed in a faint, with the window open and the cold, bitter, biting east wind blowing in. it was half a mile to mrs. green's--one of madge's old gossips. the boy got there in two hours. mrs. green was putting her baby to bed, but instantly transferred that duty to her eldest girl, and went off eager for news. at nine that night the "good woman" inn resounded with talk of madge. not a bit nor a drop was there in the house, according to mrs. green. the landlord said absalom owed him two shillings unpaid score: he could forgive her the debt, but he couldn't give nothing. mrs. green went home for her supper, and returning, found madge conscious. she would not have the parish doctor. "bellows," the tinker, had during these late months been out on an itinerant journey. he came home that night, and at the "good woman" heard the news. his quick wit put him up to a plan to serve the poor girl. early in the morning he took his pack and went through the village up to the rev. mr. horton's. there, under pretence of asking for kettles to mend, he told the most dismal tale to the housemaid. at breakfast-time this was reported to mrs. horton. distress at such a time was sufficient to engage any lady's attention. mrs. horton was a frail, tender woman, but earnest in works of charity. the ponies were ordered, and down they drove. the tale was not overdrawn. "not a crust in the cupboard--not a stick to light a fire: the poor creature starved, and--and--you know, coming," said the good lady afterwards, describing the scene. "john drove after the doctor instantly, and i stayed. poor girl! it was still-born; and she, poor thing! we saw, could not live long." madge, indeed, died the same night, totally worn out at nineteen. and absalom? he had gone to work on a distant railway as a navvy, and, earning good wages and able to enjoy himself nightly at the taverns, forgot poor madge. months went on. news travels slowly among the poor, but at last intelligence did reach him that his mother was dead and madge starving. to do him justice, he had never thought of that, and he started at once for home, travelling on foot. but passing through a village with his bundle on his shoulders, he was arrested by a policeman who observed some blood on it. it was on the slop he had worn in the fight at the "good woman," and came only from the nose. but there had been a brutal murder in the neighbourhood, the public mind was excited, and absalom was remanded for inquiries. it took a fortnight to prove his identity, and by then madge was dead. absalom went back to the railway and drank harder than ever. it was observed that he drank now by himself and for drinking's sake, whereas before he had only been fond of liquor with company. after a year he found his way back home. madge was forgotten, and he easily got work. likely young men are not so common on farms: strict inquiries are rarely made. the last that was heard of him appeared in the local newspaper:-- "drunk and disorderly.--absalom white was brought up in custody, charged with obstructing the road while in a state of intoxication. fined five shillings and seven-and-six costs." part ii. _the coming of summer._ the june sky is of the deepest blue when seen above the fresh foliage of the oaks in the morning before the sun has filled the heavens with his meridian light. to see the blue at its best it needs something to form a screen so that the azure may strike the eye with its fulness undiminished by its own beauty; for if you look at the open sky such a breadth of the same hue tones itself down. but let the eye rise upwards along a wall of oak spray, then at the rim the rich blue is thick, quite thick, opaque, and steeped in luscious colour. unless, indeed, upon the high downs,--there the june sky is too deep even for the brilliance of the light, and requires no more screen than the hand put up to shade the eyes. these level plains by the thames are different, and here i like to see the sky behind and over an oak. about surbiton the oaks come out into leaf earlier than in many places; this spring[ ] there were oak-leaves appearing on april , yet so backward are some of them that, while all the rest were green, there were two in the hedge of a field by the ewell road still dark within ten days of june. they looked dark because their trunks and boughs were leafless against a background of hawthorn, elm, and other trees in full foliage, the clover flowering under them, and may bloom on the hedge. they were black as winter, and even now, on the st of june, the leaves are not fully formed. the trees flowered in great perfection this spring; many oaks were covered with their green pendants, and they hung from the sycamores. except the chestnuts, whose bloom can hardly be overlooked, the flowering of the trees is but little noticed; the elm is one of the earliest, and becomes ruddy--it is as early as the catkins on the hazel; willow, aspen, oak, sycamore, ash, all have flower or catkin--even the pine, whose fructification is very interesting. the pines or scotch firs by the long ditton road hang their sweeping branches to the verge of the footpath, and the new cones, the sulphur farina, and the fresh shoots are easily seen. the very earliest oak to put forth its flowers is in a garden on oak hill; it is green with them, while yet the bitter winds have left a sense of winter in the air. there is a broad streak of bright-yellow charlock--in the open arable field beyond the common. it lights up the level landscape; the glance falls on it immediately. field beans are in flower, and their scent comes sweet even through the dust of the derby day. red heads of trifolium dot the ground; the vetches have long since been out, and are so still; along the hedges parsley forms a white fringe. the charlock seems late this year; it is generally up well before june--the first flowers by the roadside or rickyard, in a waste dry corner. such dry waste places send up plants to flower, such as charlock and poppy, quicker than happens in better soil, but they do not reach nearly the height or size. the field beans are short from lack of rain; there are some reeds in the ditch by them, and these too are short; they have not half shot up yet, for the same reason. on the sward by the long ditton road the goat's-beard is up; it grows to some size there every season, but is not very common elsewhere. it is said to close its sepals at noon, and was therefore called "jack-go-to-bed-at-noon," but in fact it shuts much earlier, and often does not open at all, and you may pass twenty times and not see it open. its head is like that of the dandelion, and children blow it to see what's o'clock in the same way. it forms a large ball, and browner; dandelion seed-balls are white. the grass is dotted with them now; they give a glossy, silky appearance to the meadows. tiny pink geranium flowers show on bunches of dusty grass; silver weed lays its yellow buttercup-like flower on the ground, placing it in the angle of the road and the sward, where the sward makes a ridge. cockspur grass--three claws and a spur like a cock's foot--is already whitened with pollen; already in comparison, for the grasses are late to lift their heads this summer. as the petals of the may fall the young leaves appear, small and green, to gradually enlarge through the hay-time. a slight movement of the leaves on a branch of birch shows that something living is there, and presently the little head and neck of a whitethroat peers over them, and then under, looking above and beneath each leaf, and then with a noiseless motion passing on to the next. another whitethroat follows immediately, and there is not a leaf forgotten nor a creeping thing that can hide from them. every tree and every bush is visited by these birds, and others of the insect-feeders; the whole summer's day they are searching, and the caterpillar, as it comes down on a thread, slipping from the upper branches, only drops into their beaks. birds, too, that at other periods feed on grain and seed, now live themselves, and bring up their young, upon insects. i went to look over a gate to see how the corn was rising--it is so short, now in june, that it will not hide a hare--and on coming near there was a cock chaffinch perched on the top, a fine bird in full colour. he did not move though i was now within three yards, nor till i could have almost touched him did he fly; he had a large caterpillar in his beak, and no doubt his nest or the young from it were in the hedge. in feeding the young birds the old ones always perch first at a short distance, and after waiting a minute proceed to their fledgelings. should a blackbird come at full speed across the meadow and stay on a hedge-top, and then go down into the mound, it is certain that his nest is there. if a thrush frequents a tree, flying up into the branches for a minute and then descending into the underwood, most likely the young thrushes are there. little indeed do the birds care for appropriate surroundings; anything does for them, they do not aim at effect. i heard a tit-lark singing his loudest, and found him perched on the edge of a tub, formed of a barrel sawn in two, placed in the field for the horses to drink from, as there was no pond. some swallows are very fond of a notice-board fastened to a pole beside the hogsmill bank. upon its upper edge they perch and twitter sweetly. there is a muddy pond by tolworth farm, near the road; it is muddy because a herd of cows drink from and stand in it, stirring up the bottom. an elm overhangs it, and the lower boughs are dead and leafless. on these there are always swallows twittering over the water. grey and yellow wagtails run along the verge. in the morning the flock of goslings who began to swim in the pond, now grown large and grey, arrange themselves in a double row, some twenty or thirty of them, in loose order, tuck their bills under their wings and sleep. two old birds stand in the rear as if in command of the detachment. a sow, plastered with mud like the rhinoceri in the african lakes, lies on the edge of the brown water, so nearly the hue of the water and the mire, and so exactly at their juncture, as to be easily overlooked. but the sweet summer swallows sing on the branches; they do not see the wallowing animal, they see only the sunshine and the summer, golden buttercups and blue sky. in the hollow at long ditton i had the delight, a day or two since, to see a kingfisher. there is a quiet lane, and at the bottom, in a valley, two ponds, one in enclosed grounds, the other in a meadow opposite. standing there a minute to see if there was a martin among the birds with which the pond in the grounds is thickly covered, something came shooting straight towards me, and swerving only a yard or two to pass me, a kingfisher went by. his blue wings, his ruddy front, the white streak beside his neck, and long bill, were all visible for a moment; then he was away straight over the meadow, the directness of his course enabling it to be followed for some time till he cleared the distant hedge, probably going to visit his nest. kingfishers, though living by the stream, often build a good way from water. the months have lengthened into years since i saw one here before, sitting on the trunk of a willow which bends over the pond in the mead. the tree rises out of the water and is partly in it; it is hung with moss, and the kingfisher was on the trunk within a foot or so of the surface. after that there came severe winters, and till now i did not see another here. so that the bird came upon me unexpectedly out from the shadow of the trees that overhang the water, past me, and on into the sunshine over the buttercups and sorrel of the field. this hollow at long ditton is the very place of singing birds; never was such a place for singing--the valley is full of music. in the oaks blackbirds whistle. you do not often see them; they are concealed by the thick foliage up on high, for they seek the top branches, which are more leafy; but once now and then they quietly flutter across to another perch. the blackbird's whistle is very human, like a human being playing the flute; an uncertain player, now drawing forth a bar of a beautiful melody and then losing it again. he does not know what quiver or what turn his note will take before it ends; the note leads him and completes itself. it is a song which strives to express the singer's keen delight, the singer's exquisite appreciation of the loveliness of the days; the golden glory of the meadow, the light, the luxurious shadows, the indolent clouds reclining on their azure couch. such thoughts can only be expressed in fragments, like a sculptor's chips thrown off as the inspiration seizes him, not mechanically sawn to a set line. now and again the blackbird feels the beauty of the time, the large white daisy stars, the grass with yellow-dusted tips, the air which comes so softly unperceived by any precedent rustle of the hedge, the water which runs slower, held awhile by rootlet, flag, and forget-me-not. he feels the beauty of the time and he must say it. his notes come like wild flowers, not sown in order. the sunshine opens and shuts the stops of his instrument. there is not an oak without a blackbird, and there are others afar off in the hedges. the thrushes sing louder here than anywhere; they really seem to have louder notes; they are all round. thrushes appear to vary their songs with the period of the year; they sing loudly now, but more plaintively and delicately in the autumn. warblers and willow wrens sing out of sight among the trees; they are easily hidden by a leaf; ivy-leaves are so smooth, with an enamelled surface, that high up, as the wind moves them, they reflect the sunlight and scintillate. greenfinches in the elms never cease love-making, and love-making needs much soft talking. there is a nightingale in a bush by the lane which sings so loud the hawthorn seems to shake with the vigour of his song; too loud, though a nightingale, if you stand at the verge of the boughs, as he would let you without alarm; farther away it becomes sweet and softer. yellowhammers call from the trees up towards the arable fields. there are but a few of them: it is the place of singing birds. the doves in the copse are nearer the house this year; i see them more often in the field at the end of the garden. as the dove rises the white fringe on the tip of the tail becomes visible, especially when flying up into a tree. one afternoon one flew up into a hornbeam close to the garden, beside it in fact, and perched there full in view, not twenty yards at farthest. at first he sat upright, raising his neck and watching us in the garden; then, in a minute or so, turned and fluttered down to his nest. the wood-pigeons are more quiet now; their whoo-hoo-ing is not so frequently heard. by the sounds up in the elms at the top of the brighton road (at the end of langley lane) the young rooks have not yet all flown, though it is the end of the first week in june. there is a little pond near the rookeries, and by it a row of elms. from one of these a heavy bough has just fallen without the least apparent cause. there is no sign of lightning, nor does it even look decayed; the wood has fractured short off; it came down with such force that the ends of the lesser branches are broken and turned up, though, as it was the lowest limb, it had not far to fall, showing the weight of the timber. there has been no hurricane of wind, nothing at all to cause it, yet this thick bough snapped. no other tree is subject to these dangerous falls of immense limbs, without warning or apparent cause, so that it is not safe to rest under elms. an accident might not occur once in ten years; nevertheless the risk is there. elms topple over before gales which scarcely affect other trees, or only tear off a few twigs. two have thus been thrown recently--within eighteen months--in the fields opposite tolworth farm. the elm drags up its own roots, which are often only a fringe round its butt, and leaves a hollow in the earth, as if it had been simply stood on end and held by these guy-ropes. other trees do, indeed, fall in course of time, but not till they are obviously on the point of tottering, but the elm goes down in full pride of foliage. by this pond there is a rough old oak, which is the peculiar home of some titmice; they were there every day, far back on the frost and snow, and their sharp notes sounded like some one chipping the ice on the horse-pond with an iron instrument. probably, before now, they have had a nest in a crevice. the tallest grass yet to be seen is in a little orchard on the right-hand side of the long ditton road. this little orchard is a favourite spot of mine, meaning, of course, to look at: it is a natural orchard and left to itself. the palings by the road are falling, and held up chiefly by the brambles and the ivy that has climbed up them. there are trees on the left and trees on the right; a fine spruce fir at the back. the apple-trees are not set in straight lines; they were at first, but some have died away and left an irregularity. the trees themselves lean this way and that; they are scarred and marked, as it were, with lichen and moss. it is the home of birds. a blackbird had a nest this spring in the bushes on the left side, a nightingale in the bushes on the right side, and there he sang and sang for hours every morning. a sharp, relentless shrike lives in one of the trees close by, and is perpetually darting across the road upon insects on the sward among the fern there. there are several thrushes who reside in this orchard besides the lesser birds. swallows sometimes twitter from the tops of the apple-trees. as the grass is so safe from intrusion, one of the earliest buttercups flowers here. the apple-bloom appears rosy on the bare boughs only lately scourged by the east wind. after a time the trees are in full bloom, set about into the green of the hedges and bushes and the dark spruce behind. bennets, the flower of the grass, come up. the first bennet is to green things what a swallow is to the breathing creatures of summer. white horse-chestnut blooms stand up in their stately way, lighting the path, which is strewn with fallen oak-flower. may appears on the hawthorn: there is an early bush of it. now the grass is so high the flowers are lost under it; even the buttercups are overtopped; and soon as the young apples take form and shape white bramble-bloom will cover the bushes by the palings. acorns will show on the oaks: the berries will ripen from red to black beneath. along the edge of the path, where the dandelions and plantains are thick with seed, the greenfinches will come down and select those they like best: this they often do by the footpath beside the road. lastly, the apples become red; the beech in the corner has an orange spray, and cones hang long and brown upon the spruce. the thrushes after silence sing again, and autumn approaches. but, pass when you may, this little orchard has always something, because it is left to itself--i had written neglected. i struck the word out, for this is not neglect, this is true attention, to leave it to itself, so that the young trees trail over the bushes and stay till the berries fall of their own over-ripeness, if perchance spared by the birds; so that the dead brown leaves lie and are not swept away unless the wind pleases; so that all things follow their own course and bent. almost opposite, by autumn, when the reapers are busy with the sheaves, the hedge is white with the large trumpet-flowers of the greater convolvulus. the hedgerow seems made of convolvulus then, nothing but convolvulus; nowhere else does the flower flourish so strongly, and the bines remain till the following spring. this little orchard, without a path through it, without a border, or a parterre, or a terrace, is a place to sit down and dream in, notwithstanding that it touches the road, for thus left to itself it has acquired an atmosphere of peace and stillness such as belongs to and grows up in woods and far-away coombs of the hills. a stray passer-by would go on without even noticing it, it is so commonplace and unpretentious, merely a corner of meadow irregularly dotted with apple-trees; a place that needs frequent glances and a dreamy mood to understand as the birds understand it. they are always here, even in the winter, starlings and blackbirds particularly, who resort to a kind of furrow there, which, even in frost, seems to afford them some food. in the spring thrushes move along, rustling the fallen leaves as they search behind the arum-sheaths unrolling beside the palings, or under the shelter of the group of trees where arum-roots are plentiful. there are nooks and corners from which shy creatures can steal out from the shadow and be happy. the dew falls softly, more noiseless than snow, and a star shines to the north over the spruce fir. by day there is a loving streak of sunshine somewhere among the tree-trunks; by night a star above. the trees are nothing to speak of in size or height, but they seem always to bloom well and to be fruitful; tree-climbers run up these and then go off to the elms. beside the long ditton road, up the gentle incline on the left side, the broad sward is broken by thickets and brake like those of a forest. if a forest were cleared, as those in america are swept away before the axe, but a line of underwood left beside the highway, the result would be much the same as may be seen here when the bushes and fern are in perfection. thick hawthorn bushes stand at unequal distances surrounded with brake; one with a young oak in the centre. fern extends from one thicket to the other, and brambles fence the thorns, which are themselves well around. from such coverts the boar was started in old english days, the fawns hide behind and about them even now in many a fair park, and where there are no deer they are frequented by hares. so near the dust which settles on them as the wheels raise it, of course, every dog that passes runs through, and no game could stay an hour, but they are the exact kind of cover game like. one morning this spring, indeed, i noticed a cock-pheasant calmly walking along the ridge of a furrow in the ploughed field, parted from these bushes by the hedge. he was so near the highway that i could see the ring about his neck. i have seen peewits or green plovers in the same field, which is now about to be built on. but though no game could stay an hour in such places, lesser birds love them, white-throats build there, gold-crests come down from the dark pines opposite--they seem fond of pines--yellow-hammers sit and sing on them, and they are visited all day long by one or other. the little yellow flowers of tormentil are common in the grass as autumn approaches, and grasshoppers, which do not seem plentiful here, sing there. some betony flowers are opposite on the other sward. there is a marshy spot by one of the bushes where among the rushes various semi-aquatic grasses grow. blackberries are thick in favourable seasons--like all fruit, they are an uncertain crop; and hawkweeds are there everywhere on the sward towards the edge. the peculiar green of fern, which is more of a relief to the eye than any other shrub with which i am acquainted, so much so that i wonder it is not more imitated, is remarkable here when the burning july sun shines on the white dust thus fringed. by then trees are gone off in colour, the hedges are tired with heat, but the fern is a soft green which holds the glance. this varies much with various seasons; this year the fern is particularly late from a lack of moisture, but sometimes it is really beautiful between these bushes. it is cut down in its full growth by those who have charge of the road, and the scene is entirely destroyed for the remainder of the season; it is not often that such bushes and such fern are found beside the highway, and, if not any annoyance to the residents, are quite as worthy of preservation (not "preservation" by beadle) as open spaces like commons. children, and many of larger growth, revel about them, gathering the flowers in spring and summer, the grasses and the blackberries in autumn. it is but a strip of sward, but it is as wild as if in the midst of a forest. a pleasure to every one--therefore destroy it. in the evening from the rise of the road here i sometimes hear the cry of a barn owl skirting the hedge of southborough park, and disappearing under the shadow of the elms that stand there. the stars appear and the whole dome of the summer night is visible, for in a level plain like this a slight elevation brings the horizon into view. without moon the june nights are white; a faint white light shows through the trees of southborough park northwards; the west has not lost all its tint over the ditton hollow; white flowers stand in the grass; white road, white flint-heaps even, white clouds, and the stars, too, light without colour. by day the breeze comes south and west, free over fields, over corn and grass and hedgerow; so slight a mound as this mere rise in the river-side plain lifts you up into the current of the air. where the wind comes the sunlight is purer. the sorrel is now high and ripening in the little meadows beside the road just beyond the orchard. as it ripens the meadow becomes red, for the stalks rise above the grass. this is the beginning of the feast of seeds. the sorrel ripens just as the fledgelings are leaving the nest; if you watch the meadow a minute you will see the birds go out to it, now flying up a moment and then settling again. after a while comes the feast of grain; then another feast of seeds among the stubble, and the ample fields, and the furze of the hills; then berries, and then winter, and the last seed. a june rose. something caught my eye on the top of the high hawthorn hedge beside the brighton road one evening as it was growing dusk, and on looking again there was a spray of briar in flower, two roses in full bloom and out of reach, and one spray of three growing buds. so it is ever with the june rose. it is found unexpectedly, and when you are not looking for it. it is a gift, not a discovery, or anything earned--a gift like love and happiness. with ripening grasses the rose comes, and the rose is summer: till then it is spring. on the green banks--waste places--beside the "new road" (kingsdown road formerly) the streaked pink convolvulus is in flower; a sign that the spring forces have spent themselves, that the sun is near his fulness. the flower itself is shapely, yet it is not quite welcome; it says too plainly that we are near the meridian. there are months of warmth to follow--brilliant sunshine and new beauties; but the freshness, the joyous looking forward of spring is gone. upon these banks the first coltsfoot flowers in march, the first convolvulus in summer, and almost the last hawkweed in autumn. a yellow vetchling, too, is now opening its yellow petals beside the long ditton road: another summer flower, which comes in as the blue veronica is leaving the sward. as tall as the young corn the mayweed fringes the arable fields with its white rays and yellow centre, somewhat as the broad moon-daisies stand in the grass. by this time generally the corn is high above the mayweed, but this year the flower is level with its shelter. the pale corn buttercup is in flower by the new road, not in the least overshadowed by the crops at the edge of which it grows. by the stream through tolworth common spotted persicaria is rising thickly, but even this strong-growing plant is backward and checked on the verge of the shrunken stream. the showers that have since fallen have not made up for the lack of the april rains, which in the most literal sense cause the flowers of may and june. without those early spring rains the wild flowers cannot push their roots and develop their stalks in time for the summer sun. the sunshine and heat finds them unprepared. in the ditches the square-stemmed figwort is conspicuous by its dark green. it is very plentiful about surbiton. just outside the garden in a waste corner the yellow flowers of celandine are overhung by wild hops and white bryony, two strong plants of which have climbed up the copse hedge, twining in and out each other. both have vine-like leaves; but the hops are wrinkled, those of the bryony hairy or rough to the touch. the hops seem to be the most powerful, and hold the bryony in the background. the young spruce firs which the wood-pigeon visited in the spring with an idea of building there look larger and thicker now the fresh green needles have appeared. in the woodland lane to claygate the great elder-bushes are coming into flower, each petal a creamy-white. the dogwood, too, is opening, and the wild guelder-roses there are in full bloom. there is a stile from which a path leads across the fields thence to hook. the field by the stile was fed off in spring, and now is yellow with birdsfoot lotus, which tints it because the grass is so short. from the grass at every footstep a crowd of little "hoppers" leap in every direction, scattering themselves hastily abroad. the little mead by the copse here is more open to the view this year, as the dry winter has checked the growth of ferns and rushes. there is a flock of missel-thrushes in it: the old birds feed the young, who can fly well in the centre of the field. lesser birds come over from the hedges to the bunches of rushes. slowly wandering along the lane and looking over the mound on the right hand (cow-wheat with yellow lip is in flower on the mound), there are glimpses between the bushes and the spanish chestnut-trees of far-away blue hills--blue under the summer sky. footnote: [ ] . _the golden-crested wren._ this lovely little bird is so small and light that it can cling suspended on the end of a single narrow leaf, or needle of pine, and it does not depress the least branch on which it may alight. the gold-crest frequents the loneliest heath, the deepest pine wood, and the immediate neighbourhood of dwellings indifferently. a scotch fir or pine grew so near a house in which i once lived that the boughs almost brushed the window, and when confined to my room by illness, it gave me much pleasure to watch a pair of these wrens who frequently visited the tree. they are also fond of thick thorn hedges, and, like all birds, have their favourite localities, so that if you see them once or twice in one place you should mark the tree or bush, for there they are almost certain to return. it would be quite possible for a person to pass several years in the country and never see one of these birds. there is a trick in finding birds' nests, and a trick in seeing birds. the first i noticed was in an orchard; soon after, i found a second in a yew-tree (close to a window), and after that constantly came upon them as they crept through brambles or in hedgerows, or a mere speck up in a fir-tree. so soon as i had seen one i saw plenty. _an extinct race._ there is something very mournful in a deserted house, and the feeling is still further intensified if it happens to have once been a school, where a minor world played out its little drama, and left its history written on the walls. for a great boys' school is like a kingdom with its monarchs, its ministers, and executioners, and even its changes of dynasty. such a house stood no long while since on the northern border-land of wilts and berks, a mansion in its origin back in the days of charles ii., and not utterly unconnected with the great events of those times, but which, for hard on a hundred years--from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century--was used as a superior grammar-school, or college, as it would now be called. gradually falling in reputation, and supplanted by modern rivals for fifteen or twenty years, the huge hollow halls and endless dormitories were silent, and the storms that sway with savage force down from the hills wreaked their will upon the windows and the rotting roof. inside the refectory--the windows being blown in--and over the antique-carved mantelpiece, two swallows' nests had been built to the ceiling or cornice. the whitewashed walls were yellow and green with damp, and covered with patches of saltpetre efflorescence. but they still bore, legible and plain, the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them, years and years before, by hands then young, but by now returned to dust. the history of this little kingdom, the hopes and joys, the fears and hatreds of the subjects, still remained, and might be gathered from these writings on the walls, just as are the history of egypt and of assyria now deciphered from the palaces and tombs. here were the names of the kings--the head-masters--generally with some rough doggerel verse, not often very flattering, and illustrated with outline portraits. here were caricatures of the ushers and tutors, hidden in some corner of the dormitories once, no doubt, concealed by the furniture, coupled with the very freest personalities, mostly in pencil, but often done with a burnt stick. dates were scattered everywhere--not often the year, but the day of the month, doubtless memorable from some expedition or lark played off half a century since. now and then there was a quotation from the classics--one describing the groaning and shouting of the dying hercules, till the rocks and the sad hills resounded, which irresistibly suggested the idea of a thorough caning. other inscriptions were a mixture of latin and any english words that happened to rhyme, together producing the most extraordinary jumble. where now are the merry hearts that traced these lines upon the plaster in an idle mood? attached to the mansion was a great garden, or rather wilderness, with yew hedges ten feet high and almost as thick, a splendid filbert walk, an orchard, with a sun-dial. it is all--mansion and garden, noble yew-tree hedges and filbert walk, sun-dial and all--swept away now. the very plaster upon which generation after generation of boys recorded their history has been torn down, and has crumbled into dust. greater kingdoms than this have disappeared since the world began, leaving not a sign even of their former existence. _orchis mascula._ the _orchis mascula_ grew in the brook corner, and in early spring sent up a tall spike of purple flowers. this plant stood alone in an angle of the brook and a hedge, within sound of water ceaselessly falling over a dam. in those days it had an aspect of enchantment to me; not only on account of its singular appearance, so different from other flowers, but because in old folios i had read that it could call up the passion of love. there was something in the root beneath the sward which could make a heart beat faster. the common modern books--i call them common of _malice prepense_--were silent on these things. their dry and formal knowledge was without interest, mere lists of petals and pistils, a dried herbarium of plants that fell to pieces at the touch of the fingers. only by chipping away at hard old latin, contracted and dogged in more senses than one, and by gathering together scattered passages in classic authors, could anything be learned. then there arose another difficulty, how to identify the magic plants? the same description will very nearly fit several flowers, especially when not actually in flower; how determine which really was the true root? the uncertainty and speculation kept up the pleasure, till at last i should not have cared to have had the original question answered. with my gun under my arm i used to look at the orchis from time to time, so long as the spotted leaves were visible, till the grass grew too long. _the lions in trafalgar square._ the lions in trafalgar square are to me the centre of london. by those lions began my london work; from them, as spokes from the middle of a wheel, radiate my london thoughts. standing by them and looking south you have in front the houses of parliament, where resides the mastership of england; at your back is the national gallery--that is art; and farther back the british museum--books. to the right lies the wealth and luxury of the west end; to the left the roar and labour, the craft and gold, of the city. for themselves, they are the only monument in this vast capital worthy of a second visit as a monument. over the entire area covered by the metropolis there does not exist another work of art in the open air. there are many structures and things, no other art. the outlines of the great animals, the bold curves and firm touches of the master hand, the deep indents, as it were, of his thumb on the plastic metal, all the _technique_ and grasp written there, is legible at a glance. then comes the _pose_ and expression of the whole, the calm strength in repose, the indifference to little things, the resolute view of great ones. lastly, the soul of the maker, the spirit which was taken from nature, abides in the massive bronze. these lions are finer than those that crouch in the cages at the zoological gardens; these are truer and more real, and, besides, these are lions to whom has been added the heart of a man. nothing disfigures them; smoke and, what is much worse, black rain--rain which washes the atmosphere of the suspended mud--does not affect them in the least. if the choke-damp of fog obscures them, it leaves no stain on the design; if the surfaces be stained, the idea made tangible in metal is not. they are no more touched than time itself by the alternations of the seasons. the only noble open-air work of native art in the four-million city, they rest there supreme and are the centre. did such a work exist now in venice, what immense folios would be issued about it! all the language of the studios would be huddled together in piled-up and running-over laudation, and curses on our insular swine-eyes that could not see it. i have not been to venice, therefore i do not pretend to a knowledge of that mediæval potsherd; this i do know, that in all the endless pictures on the walls of the galleries in london, year after year exposed and disappearing like snow somewhere unseen, never has there appeared one with such a subject as this. weak, feeble, mosaic, gimcrack, coloured tiles, and far-fetched compound monsters, artificial as the graining on a deal front door, they cannot be compared; it is the gingerbread gilt on a circus car to the column of a greek temple. this is pure open air, grand as nature herself, because it _is_ nature with, as i say, the heart of a man added. but if any one desire the meretricious painting of warm light and cool yet not hard shade, the effect of colour, with the twitching of triangles, the spangles glittering, and all the arrangement contrived to take the eye, then he can have it here as well as noble sculpture. ascend the steps to the national gallery, and stand looking over the balustrade down across the square in summer hours. let the sun have sloped enough to throw a slant of shadow outward; let the fountains splash whose bubbles restless speak of rest and leisure, idle and dreamy; let the blue-tinted pigeons nod their heads walking, and anon crowd through the air to the roof-tops. shadow upon the one side, bright light upon the other, azure above and swallows. ever rolling the human stream flows, mostly on the south side yonder, near enough to be audible, but toned to bearableness. a stream of human hearts, every atom a living mind filled with what thoughts?--a stream that ran through rome once, but has altered its course and wears away the banks here now and triturates its own atoms, the hearts, to dust in the process. yellow omnibuses and red cabs, dark shining carriages, chestnut horses, all rushing, and by their motion mixing their colours so that the commonness of it disappears and the hues remain, a streak drawn in the groove of the street--dashed hastily with thick camel's hair. in the midst the calm lions, dusky, unmoved, full always of the one grand idea that was infused into them. so full of it that the golden sun and the bright wall of the eastern houses, the shade that is slipping towards them, the sweet swallows and the azure sky, all the human stream holds of wealth and power and coroneted panels--nature, man, and city--pass as naught. mind is stronger than matter. the soul alone stands when the sun sinks, when the shade is universal night, when the van's wheels are silent and the dust rises no more. at summer noontide, when the day surrounds us and it is bright light even in the shadow, i like to stand by one of the lions and yield to the old feeling. the sunshine glows on the dusky creature, as it seems, not on the surface, but under the skin, as if it came up from out of the limb. the roar of the rolling wheels sinks and becomes distant as the sound of a waterfall when dreams are coming. all the abundant human life is smoothed and levelled, the abruptness of the individuals lost in the flowing current, like separate flowers drawn along in a border, like music heard so far off that the notes are molten and the theme only remains. the abyss of the sky over and the ancient sun are near. they only are close at hand, they and immortal thought. when the yellow syrian lions stood in old time of egypt, then too, the sunlight gleamed on the eyes of men, as now this hour on mine. the same consciousness of light, the same sun, but the eyes that saw it and mine, how far apart! the immense lion here beside me expresses larger nature--cosmos--the ever-existent thought which sustains the world. massiveness exalts the mind till the vast roads of space which the sun tramples are as an arm's-length. such a moment cannot endure long; gradually the roar deepens, the current resolves into individuals, the houses return--it is only a square. but a square potent. for london is the only _real_ place in the world. the cities turn towards london as young partridges run to their mother. the cities know that they are not real. they are only houses and wharves, and bricks and stucco; only outside. the minds of all men in them, merchants, artists, thinkers, are bent on london. thither they go as soon as they can. san francisco thinks london; so does st. petersburg. men amuse themselves in paris; they work in london. gold is made abroad, but london has a hook and line on every napoleon and dollar, pulling the round discs hither. a house is not a dwelling if a man's heart be elsewhere. now, the heart of the world is in london, and the cities with the simulacrum of man in them are empty. they are moving images only; stand here and you are real. the end. printed by ballantyne, hanson & co. edinburgh & london the government of the philippine islands department of public instruction bureau of education philippine craftsman reprint series no. philippine mats manila bureau of printing foreword. the present bulletin is a reprint from the philippine craftsman, vol. i, nos. , , and , and is issued in this form for the purpose of placing in the hands of teachers a convenient manual for use in giving instruction in this important branch of industrial work. in it are contained directions for the preparation of materials for mat making, with suggestive color schemes for these materials and details for weaving a number of approved philippine designs. the use of mats for sleeping and other household purposes is universal through the extreme orient. suitable mat materials abound in these islands, and when proper attention shall have been given to the artistic and decorative side of their manufacture, the mat industry may well become a source of considerable revenue in thousands of filipino homes. the bureau of education has for some years past been endeavoring to improve the designs used as well as the workmanship of philippine mats, in order that the article produced shall be typical of the country, artistic in design, and of real commercial value. it is expected that this end will be definitely furthered through the study and use of the material contained in this reprint. a considerable part of the subject matter of this publication is the original work of mr. hugo h. miller, mr. john f. minier, mr. u. s. andes, mr. theodore muller, and mrs. alice brezina. credit is also due to numerous american and filipino teachers for the submission of reports and materials used in its preparation. frank l. crone, acting director. manila, february , . philippine mats. the production of mats in the philippines is large because of the extensive domestic demand for them. the sleeping mat [ ] is used throughout the christian provinces, and is also found among the moros. such mats are of the finer class and are usually more or less highly decorated with colored straws in various designs. for this purpose the buri petates are more widely produced than those made from any other material. pandan mats are considered stronger and cooler but their use is not so extensive, probably because they are more expensive than the buri mats. in the visayas, tikug mats are important. another use of mats is in the baling of two of the staple products of the philippines, tobacco and abaca. in the cagayan valley mats of dried banana petioles are employed. a great many of these are made in batac, ilocos norte, from which place they are shipped to cagayan. in most cases the tobacco of the visayas is packed in such mats also. at argao, cebu, banana petiole mats are woven as a by-product of the sabá cloth industry. in obtaining the fiber, the outer skin of the petiole is pulled off for stripping, and the remaining portion, which is called "upag," is dried and woven into very coarse mats by children. these are called "bastos" [ ] or "liplip," and are disposed of to the tobacco balers in the town, or are shipped to cebu and other towns for baling purposes. while sabá sinamay is produced in several of the districts in the visayas, notably in bohol, it is not known that the upag is used for mat weaving there. coarse buri mats are almost exclusively used in wrapping abaca for the export trade. since baling is carried on only in large seaports, particularly in manila and cebu, the weaving of these mats in certain localities where the buri palm is abundant and their transportation to the hemp-producing towns are important industries. while they are not, strictly speaking, mats, plaited sacks [ ] are woven in the same weave and bear the same relation to sugar and rice as do mats to tobacco and abaca. most of the domestic rice crop entering into commerce is packed in buri sacks and practically all the export sugar is sent away in them. a few bayones are made of pandan. the production of bayones is an important industry in certain districts. mats are also employed throughout the provinces for drying paddy and copra in the sun, in the same manner in which trays are used for sun-curing fruit in temperate regions. the use of the finer grades of petates for floor mats and for wall decoration is confined to the foreign population in the philippines. nevertheless, a considerable number is so utilized. for this trade only mats of the better grades are demanded, and the number sold for the purpose is probably considerably restricted by the fact that few mats are of suitable color combination and of proper design to satisfy foreign taste. as yet there is no known commercial export of philippine mats. there is a considerable demand for floor mats and mats for wall decoration in europe and in the united states, but it is improbable that the philippines can hope to supply any part of it unless designs and color combinations are vastly improved. floor mats are used as rugs in the same manner as are the strips of japanese matting which are so popular all over the world. round floor mats, somewhat larger in diameter than the round table tops, are also in demand. small mats can be used as doilies on the table or under the stands of flower pots and the like. sleeping mats and mats intended for floors, walls, stands, and mat doilies are the ones which are suitable for domestic and foreign commerce, and industrial education must interest itself in them. the philippine materials available for weaving these mats are varied and well distributed. with improvement in color combination and design, there should be a large increase in the industry. bleaching agents. sunshine is used to bleach all mat straws, but more often they are also treated with boiling water to which certain bleaching agents have been added. only the most important of these are explained. tamarind.--this tree (tamarindus indica) is known in tagalog, bicol and pampanga as sampalok, in visayan as sambag, in ilocano as salamagui, and in palawan as kalampisao. it is a large tree with dense foliage. the leaves are employed as a bleaching agent in boiling water. it is said that the young green fruit can be used for this purpose. pandakaki.--the leaves of the plant (tabernaemontana pandacaqui) are used as a bleaching agent. this is the name under which it is known, particularly in pampanga and cavite. in palawan it is called alibetbet. it is also known as kampopot in tagalog and as alibubut and toar in parts of the visayas. in ilocano the name is kurribuetbuet. lemons.--the juice of the various species and varieties of citrus is employed to some extent for bleaching. it is usually added to boiling water in which the straw is immersed. vinegar.--of philippine vinegars, those made from palm juices are considered about half as strong as lemon juice. vinegar from sugar cane juice has probably the same strength. that made from cooked rice is considered about one-fourth as strong as lemon juice. alum.--in some towns alum is added to the boiling water in which straw is treated. it is usually employed in combination with other bleaching agents. dyes used on mat straws. mordants. a mordant is a substance employed to fix the dye to the material. in general, different ones are needed for different dyes and various materials. in some cases the mordant is added to the dye liquid; in others the material is previously treated with it before being colored. the most important are the mineral mordants, such as the alumina, the iron, the tin, and the chrome. these are not used in the philippines with local vegetable dyes. tannin is also important and is employed to some extent in the philippines, being generally obtained from the mangrove tan barks. wood ashes are little used but vinegar and lemon juice are important. kolis.--the leaves of this plant (memecylon edule) are commonly used in mordanting buri straw before dyeing it with sappan wood. in tanay, rizal, it is employed on sabutan straw with all of the vegetable dyes. it is known as guisian (laguna), duigim (ilocos, pangasinan), kulis (rizal, nueva ecija, bataan), tagobachi (leyte), kasigay (ilocos norte), agam (negrito, cagayan), guisoc-guisoc (sorsogon), macaasin (tayabas), baian (zambales), diyatdiyatan (tayabas), candong (pangasinan), dioc (pangasinan). natural vegetable dyes. numerous natural vegetable dyes are employed in the philippines. those used on the mat straws are limited in number. the important ones only are here noted. the whole question of dyes is a most difficult one and hardly warrants the time which has been spent upon investigating the various dye materials, nor the effort which would be necessary to determine definitely the methods by which they can be used on mat straws. the artificial dyes have driven the natural vegetable dyes out of use because they are cheaper and are more easily applied, and because in most cases they produce more pleasing and lasting colors. sappan.--this plant (caesalpinia sappan) is known as sapang in tagalog and ilocano and as sibucao in visayan and bicol. a beautiful dye varying from red to red-orange (see plate iii) is obtained from chips of the wood. this is employed on most philippine fibers. lime is sometimes used as a mordant but the straws are usually first treated with kolis leaves. turmeric.--this plant (curcuma longa) is known as dilao throughout the islands. in ilocano it is called kunig. kalaoag is its name in negros and sorsogon, ange in pampanga and duao in parts of the visayas. the yellow dye obtained from the roots is fugitive in the sunlight. annatto.--this plant (bixa orellana) is generally known here as achuete. it is sometimes called achiote. the plant bears burs containing many small reddish seeds, from the pulp of which the dye is obtained. it is often employed in combination with turmeric. the result is a yellow orange. the dye fades easily. deora.--the use of this plant (peristrophe tinctoria) is confined to the visayas and mindanao, where it is known by this name and also as dauda and daura. in samar the name is dala-uda. it is a small bush and is usually grown in the gardens for its leaves and tender stems. a mordant is not used. the color ranges from yellow orange to a deep red orange. the methods of using these dye materials are explained for each straw. materials used with mud to obtain dark grays. red or green straws are turned dark gray by burying them in mud to which certain substances (usually containing tannin) are added. talisay.--this large tree (terminalia catappa) is common in the philippines. the leaves are added to the mud in dyeing straw black. from the bark a brown dye may be obtained. it is, however, seldom used. it is universally known as talisay. spanish speaking people call it almendras. indigo.--two species of indigoferae are grown in the philippines and are known as tagum. except with mud they are not used to dye straws. tiagkot.--the leaves of this plant (pithecolobium subacutum) are employed on romblon island in dyeing buri gray. other names are tagayong, narandauel, saplit (cagayan); carisquis, ayamguitan (zambales); tugurare (pangasinan); inep (bulacan); malasaga, malaganip, tekin (laguna); bahay (sorsogon); tagomtagom (samar); tique (rizal). kabling.--this plant (pogostemon cablin) is generally cultivated, though it grows where its cultivation has been abandoned. a volatile oil, used to keep away insects from textiles, is obtained from the leaves. the leaves are used in tanay, rizal, in obtaining gray sabutan straw. mabolo.--the heart wood of this tree (diospyros discolor) is known as kamagon. the leaves are employed in tanay, rizal. castor.--this plant (ricinus communis) is seldom cultivated in the philippines but is found wild in all localities. the "beans" yield the oil. the leaves are added to mud in obtaining gray sabutan straw. artificial dyes. it is commonly believed that artificial dyes are less permanent than natural ones. this is seldom the case; as a matter of fact, some of the fastest and most valuable dyes are now made artificially and many are not procurable from vegetable coloring matters. most of the cheaper dyes made from coal tar are fugitive; that is, they fade in sunlight or water or in both. they are often still further cheapened by being adulterated with salt, dextrine and the like. such are the colors which are usually sold by the chinese tienda keepers and which have caused artificial dyes in general to come into such ill-repute in the philippines. many of these "chino dyes" contain per cent salt. it is the belief, however, that artificial dyes of a good class, so packed and marketed that they will come cheaply to the hands of the dyers and weavers, will drive out of use practically all of the vegetable dyes now employed in the philippines. the disuse of the natural dyes would not be regretted here, for, with the possible exception of those obtained from sabutan straw in tanay, much finer colors can be produced with artificial dyes, as to both beauty and fastness. if the time of the workers is considered, the vegetable dyes now employed in the philippines are more expensive than the artificial dyes, even though the latter are now sold in wastefully small packages and bear the burden of several large profits before they come to the hands of the persons using them. [ ] dyeing. the process of dyeing is simple. the fluid is prepared in water (usually boiling), and the material is immersed in it. the shade of color obtained depends on the length of time the material is allowed to remain in the fluid or the number of times it is treated, and the strength of the dye. the combination of two different dyes to obtain a third is understood to some extent. in particular, red and yellow are mixed to obtain orange. suggestions on the use of colors in mats. standard colors. the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. the three secondary colors are obtained by combination of the three primary colors, and are orange, green, and violet. orange is made by a combination of yellow and red, green is a combination of blue and yellow, and violet is the combination of red and blue. most of the dye materials explained in the preceding pages do not produce standard colors and so, when combined, do not result in the expected secondary color. often those called red are, in point of fact, red-violet (see plate iii). sometimes, also, dyes called yellow are yellow-orange. a mixture of yellow-orange and red-violet would produce a muddy color. dye called green may be really blue-green or yellow-green, and combined with red, will make a muddy color. the above remarks on standard complementary colors are only valid for pure colors and it is only by much experimentation that pleasing tones can be obtained by a combination of the dyes used on straws in the philippines. how to tone down brilliant colors. many of the colors used in philippine mats are very brilliant. a little brilliantly colored straw, properly combined with subdued colors such as gray or one of the natural colors of philippine straws, is pleasing, but the abundant use of brilliant straws, such as are sometimes seen in mats of solid color, is to be discouraged. all brilliant colors may be subdued by adding to them their complementary color. thus a brilliant red may be subdued by adding to it a small amount of green and in the same way brilliant green may be toned down by mixing with it a small portion of red. if too much of the complementary color is added the result will be gray. as will be seen, all complementary colors will subdue one another. in plate iii the principal colors have been so arranged that the complementary colors are directly opposite each other and are connected by lines. any two colors connected by lines on this chart will tone down each other and, if mixed in proper proportions, will result in gray. it is probable that any straw which has been dyed too brilliant, can be closely matched to one of the colors given on plate iii. consequently its complement can be determined and, by experimentation, the brilliant color toned down. usually only an exceedingly small amount of its complement is needed to tone down a given color. color combination. in general, too many different colors appear in the philippine mats, and most of these are brilliant. it is often true that a large amount of a given brilliant color is offensive to the eye, and yet the addition of a little of it greatly enhances the beauty of the mat. often color combinations are not harmonious. particularly bad effects are obtained with red-violet and yellow or yellow-orange. red-violet with blue-green is another unfortunate combination. certain rules have been set down for combination of colors: ( ) a given color with its tints and shades [ ] may always be safely combined; ( ) complementary colors may always be safely combined; ( ) the tints and shades of complementary colors may always be safely combined; ( ) any three colors occurring in sequence on the color chart may be combined in that sequence. the following notes on the use and combination of the colored straws from tanay, rizal, and from romblon, and those shown on the charts accompanying the dyes of leopold cassela & co., are given. the figures refer to the numbers given the colored straws on these charts. these dyes were evolved for the bureau of education especially for philippine mat straws and will soon be available in the market. the notes have been prepared in accordance with the rules above outlined, and, if they are followed closely, no unfortunate color combination can result. colors obtained from the new dyes. the sample straws on these charts are made with the following dyestuffs: colors. numbers dyestuffs. on chart. yellow yellow-orange no. paraphosphine g. violet no. methylviolett bb no. . brown no. rush brown b. orange red-red no. rush red s a. yellow-green no. rush green t b. blue-violet no. new methylene blue r. red-violet no. magenta prima. black no. rush black m. chocolate no. rush brown x. red no. rush red j s. yellow orange-yellow no. auramine ii. blue-green no. japan green. red violet-violet no. methylviolett r no. . red-orange no. chrysoidine a g. blue blue-green no. new methylene blue n. violet red-red no. safranine s . complementary or opposite colors on the color chart are said to be harmonious. their relation is made more pleasing, however, if one color, usually the more brilliant, is used in very small amount. in many cases in the above combinations colors not exactly opposite have been united. they usually contain a mixture of a primary color common to both. brown, black, chocolate, and dark red are complicated mixtures and may be analyzed with a chart which will appear later. many of these dark colors would harmonize with one another, but would be so dark that they would not be pleasing. in every one of these combinations, the natural straw background figures as another color, and that is why the especially good combinations, as will be noticed, contain browns, yellows and reds, colors which blend particularly well with the background. red-violet no. can be used with only a very few colors, and never with yellow yellow-orange no. . yellow yellow-orange should be used cautiously. in sabutan straw, no. , yellow, must be used sparingly. when used in combinations in place of no. , yellow yellow-orange, the design should be an open one, rather than solid. violet red-red, no. , when being used in place of red, no. , must be used in the same way, and only in places where very, very little is called for. no. is a color that clashes with even a natural straw, so is not advisable in any combination or alone. no. is not a necessary color when no. and no. are available. in placing the color upon the space to be decorated, the heavier colors should usually appear on the outside and near the edge of the space, although a border may sometimes be outlined with darker color on both inside and outside edges. the following combinations of these colored straws will prove harmonious. the numbers correspond to those used on the chart and the different kinds of type indicate the proportions of the color to be used--little, medium amount, much. the relative positions of the colors must also be observed and the given order followed when more than two colors are combined. brown ( ) yellow-yellow orange ( ). especially good. black ( ) yellow-yellow orange ( ). chocolate ( ) yellow-yellow orange ( ). red-orange ( ) chocolate ( ) yellow-yellow orange( ). in this case, the heavy color, , comes in the center of the design, but is necessary to separate nos. and . violet ( ) blue-green ( ) red-orange ( ). violet ( ) red-orange ( ) blue-blue green ( ). brown ( ) alone on natural background. brown ( ) yellow-green ( ). especially good. brown ( ) blue-green ( ). brown ( ) red-orange ( ) red ( ). brown ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. brown ( ) blue-blue green ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. brown ( ) red ( ). in sabutan straw, use no. or in place of no. . black ( ) brown ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. orange-red red ( ) blue-green ( ). use no. instead of with sabutan. blue-blue green ( ) blue-green ( ) orange-red red ( ). especially good. black ( ) orange-red red ( ). especially good. yellow-green ( ) blue-blue green ( ) red-orange ( ). red-violet ( ) blue-blue green ( ) yellow-green ( ). especially good. black ( ) yellow-green ( ). use this combination with an open design (not solid), and do not use much of each. blue-green ( ) yellow-green ( ). blue-blue green ( ) yellow green ( ). blue-violet ( ). on a natural ground. blue-violet ( ) red-orange ( ). chocolate ( ) blue-green ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. chocolate ( ) blue-green ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. blue-blue green ( ) red-orange ( ). especially good. blue-blue green ( ) red ( ). romblon buri vegetable colors. --black. --gray-green. --natural. --orange. --dark red. in romblon buri straw the following combinations will be harmonious: nos. , and in accordance with rule . nos. , and in accordance with rule . exception to rule : no. is inharmonious with no. . it will be noticed that these colors depend for their harmony on their order or sequence and their quantity (in this case equal parts of all three). no. being a neutral color, great quantities of it may be used with any other colors. there is danger, however, in getting too much of one of the other two colors. no. is a very strong color and a little will be pleasing while much will be offensive. it is not well to use it alone on a ground of no. . no. may be used alone with a ground of no. ; no. with a ground of no. ; no. with a ground of no. ; no. with a ground of no. ; nos. and on a ground of no. , with a very small quantity of no. ; equal proportions of nos. and may be combined on a ground of no. ; nos. and on a ground of no. , a very small quantity of no. being used. tanay sabutan colors (mostly vegetable). --black. --blue-green. --natural. --yellow. --red-orange. --red-orange red. it will be necessary to use no. on a ground work. mats made entirely of any of the other colors would hardly be harmonious on a floor or wall, if there were any other furnishings. nos. , , and may be used separately upon a ground of no. ; no. in large quantity; no. in small ground of no. ; no. in equal quantity with no. upon a ground of no. ; no. in equal quantity with no. upon a ground of no. ; no. in large quantity, with no. in small quantity, upon a ground of no. ; no. in large quantity, with no. small, on a ground of no. . stripping mat straws. philippine mat straws can be divided into three classes--palm straws, pandan straws, and straws obtained from sedges. the first two are obtained by stripping the leaves of the plants into narrow lengths. for this purpose there is used in most localities a small gauge held between the thumb and index fingers. a knife blade fitting in the notches serves as the cutting edge. the leaf is held in one hand and the gauge and knife in the other, the edge of the leaf being drawn through the gauge. this is generally made out of the stiff part of the leaf, though, occasionally, of a piece of rattan, bamboo or leather. at best it serves for only a few hours of use, when it is thrown away and another made. when the notch becomes worn, the blade moves about in the gauge, causing the width of the straws to vary, and when a new gauge is made there is always more or less variance in the position of the new notches. this method is very slow, as but one strip can be cut at a time; and, until the operator becomes expert in the use of the gauge, many of the strips are worthless. when used in the school room, each pupil has to prepare his own material. this causes waste of materials and a constant littering of the floor. for stripping sabutan leaves, the mat weavers of tanay, rizal, use a kind of comb which is discussed under the heading "sabutan." the leaves are pulled over this comb before being dried. as sabutan is parallel veined it is very easy to strip it thus, the teeth of the comb following the leaf fibers. the comb produces several uniform straws with one stroke. the object of contriving the stripping machine illustrated and described here was to furnish a quick means of preparing palm and pandan straws with uniform widths and clean cut edges. forms of it have been in use for some time and the model noted here has been tried out for a year. by its use one pupil can prepare materials for the whole class, or else the teacher can have all the materials prepared beforehand if it is so desired. this is half the problem of teaching the weaving of hats or mats. this stripper is made wide enough for inserting teeth three widths apart, so that without adjusting these teeth three widths of straw may be cut. by changing the teeth in the adjustable gums, any width desired may be obtained. it is best to make this apparatus of hard wood, especially the piece represented by fig. a. a is a block of wood cm. by cm. by cm., containing the groove xy. this groove is the size and shape of c, being . cm. wide at the top, . cm. at the bottom, and cm. high. c is one of the blocks which slides in the groove xy. these blocks are made of different thicknesses, about , , and mm., and are of hard wood or metal. the rod b passes through these blocks and tightens on the block d or x by means of a thumb screw. z is a wooden roller cm. long and . cm. in diameter. this should extend mm. below the level of the main surface. it is placed in a groove made in a separate piece of wood from the principal block and is fastened into the principal block by means of screws. the teeth (see c) are made of clock springs or other thin sharp metal. they are cm. long and cm. to / cm. wide. the two upright pieces at both ends contain grooves on the inside in which the block-head slides up and down. to operate this device, the block-head containing the teeth is raised by the handle; the leaf is placed under the teeth, and the block-head is dropped. the teeth pass through the leaf into a groove underneath. the leaf is now pulled through by the hand as illustrated in plate vi. kinds of weaves. with respect to their weaving, philippine mats divide themselves into six groups and are here arranged according to their difficulty. they are ( ) the over and under weave found in most simple mats, such as those made of buri straws, pandan straws, and sedges; ( ) the sawali weaves, which employ the floating straws for making "woven in" designs and panels for figured sabutan and tikug mats; ( ) the open work weaves of the romblon buri mats; ( ) the circular mats which employ the hat weaves, either with or without "woven in" designs; ( ) the hexagonal weave; and ( ) the embroidered mats in which the designs are later added. in difficulty, and in place in a course of instruction, embroidered mats follow the simple over and under weave. over-and-under weave. this weave is the simplest and is the one which beginners should first take up. it is made by weaving over one and under one continuously. until this is thoroughly mastered children should not be allowed to begin the more difficult weaves. the steps have been diagrammed in figures sufficiently large and clear in plates vii, viii, and ix that a detailed explanation is not necessary. step shows the position of the first four straws as they are placed upon the table or desk; steps , , , and , continued additions and weaving; steps , , and , turning the edge a on the end of the mat; step , turning the opposite edge c; step , the double turn of the corner straw; step , the corner turn woven in the mat at corner no. , lapping over the straw already woven; step , the continuation of the second edge b; step , the turning of the second and third corners; and steps and , finishing the mat. in weaving large mats, it is customary to begin at one end of the mat, preferably near the left-hand corner as the mat lies before the weaver. the weaving continues along the end until half of the desired width of the mat is reached, when the first corner is turned. now the weaving continues down the side and in, as far as the middle of the mat. when the desired length is woven, the second corner is turned and the first half of the mat completed. as the straws are not generally long enough without splicing, new straws are now added by lapping them from two to three inches upon the projecting ends of the straws already woven. this makes a narrow strip of double thickness down the center running the length of the mat. the weaving now continues as before until the desired width of the mat is attained, when the third corner is turned. the remainder is woven and finished at the fourth corner as shown by steps and . some weavers begin at the sides, and some few, even at the corners; but this should not be encouraged since it results in making two or more seams, where the straws lap. care must be taken to weave all parts of the mat equally close and keep the edges perfectly straight; otherwise the mat when finished will be lop-sided, and consequently of no value. in weaving tapering grasses like tikug, which have ends of slightly different sizes, the opposite ends of the straws should be alternated. this prevents one edge of a mat from building faster than the other. sawali weaves. simple sawali. by sawali weave is meant all "woven in" designs that are not woven by ones as in the over and under weave. they may be woven regularly by twos, threes, etc.; or they may "switch" the floating straws so as to form a variety of artistic figure designs. in fact, there is no limit to the number of designs that may be thus made. steps and illustrate the beginning of a sawali weave by twos. first , , , , are laid down; then c is put under - , over - , and under ; d over , under - , and over - ; e over - , under - , and over . this process is continued, advancing one straw each time until the desired amount is woven. if the weaving is by threes or fours, the same principle is followed; that is, the straw goes over three and under three, advancing one straw each time. panels. most "woven in" mat designs are arranged in panels, with a ground between, as this gives a more pleasing effect than a continuous figure weaving. panels may be woven either length-wise (step ), crosswise (step ), diagonally across the mat (step ), or in zigzags (step ). they are most easily woven when arranged diagonally, for then the colors may be carried from border to border without mixing with the ground outside of the panel. checks are made by weaving cross panels at regular intervals. in making parallel panels (panels parallel either to the sides or ends), more than two colors can rarely be used to advantage. step illustrates the weaving of a zigzag sawali panel. the straws, a, b, k, and l are woven by ones. it takes twelve straws one way and nine the other to make this panel. if a wider panel is desired, the same weaving is repeated as often as necessary. the straws a, b, k, and l are woven by ones. put l over b and c, under de, over fg, under hi and over j. put under b, over cd, under ef, over gh, under ij and over k. put over b, under c, over de, under fg, over hi and under jk. put under bcd, over ef, under gh and over ijk. put over bc, under de, over fg, under hi and over j. put under b, over cd, under ef, over gh, under ij and over k. put over b, under c, over de, under fg, over hi, under jk. put under b, over cd, under ef, over gh, under ij and over k. put over bc, under de, over fg, under hi and over j. put under bcd, over ef, under gh and over ijk. put over b, under c, over de, under fg, over hi and under jk. put under b, over cd, under ef, over gh, under ij and over k. then the whole operation is again repeated. it will be seen that the manner of weaving and , and , and , and and is the same. step illustrates the diamond figure design, woven by threes, with straws in width. put under cd, over efg, under h, over ijk and under lm. put under c, over def, under ghi, over jkl and under m. put over cde, under fghij and over klm. put over cd, under efg, over h, under ijk and over lm. put over c, under def, over ghi, under jkl and over m. put under cde, over fghij and under klm. now the order reverses, being the same as , as , etc., until the other half of the figure is completed at . now put under cde, over fghij and under klm. put over c, under def, over ghi, under jkl and over m. put under cde, over fghij and under klm. now repeats itself, and the second figure is woven as the first. it is believed that with the aid of the large illustrations here presented the teacher or pupil can now follow for himself the other designs given, without a detailed explanation of each step. "woven-in" borders. woven-in border designs may be made in three different ways; viz., first, by weaving the design around the mat, using the same straws that run through the body. (see plate xiii, fig. .) in this case the color effect is one of confusion, since the dyed straws used in the designs of the body of the mat have no relation to the design of the border when they enter it. second, by weaving the border and the body of the mat of different straws, uniting them at the inner edge of the border by a loop as described in the romblon mat. (see plate xvi.) third, by lapping the colored straws desired in the border, upon the projecting ends of the straws of the body of the mat. (see step , plate xii.) these latter two methods are much more artistic, as a uniform color effect appears throughout the border. (see plate xiii, fig. .) the romblon mat. making open work. simple open work is illustrated in plate xiv. weave corner z, using straws a, b, c, d, e and f, letting f float at both ends. weave g, turning upward and over f, then making a double corner at y, passing under f, to the left and over f, and let float. weave h, i, j, k, l and m in solid weave. turn h under i and over j. turn j upward and over i, to the left under f, upward over g, double corner at w, passing down under g, over g, and floating. turn m upward over l to the left, under i, upward over f, to the left under g, upward over j making a double corner at x, passing under j. the straws j and m alternately cross each other to corner v. the other half of this open design is an exact duplicate of this weaving, and the remaining designs have the same turns as the one explained, except that in opposite designs the straws are turned in opposite directions. by following this plate it is easy to finish the weaves. if one straw is woven over another, it folds down before passing over, and, vice versa, if it passes under, it folds upward in turning. as is seen, the holes are made simply by turning the straws in the weave. the different shaped holes in other designs (see plates) are made by turning a different number of straws according to the shape desired. varied border edges may be made by switching the straws in any direction desired. introducing color panel. step of plate xvi shows the first colored panel, straw ab placed between cd, the space between x and y having been already woven, as shown in step . step . folding a to the right. step . folding a under and down. step . folding c over a and to left. step . folding a over c and upward. step . folding b under d to left. step . folding b upward, with right twist downward. step . folding d downward, with right twist to right. step . folding b under d upward. step . shows addition of second straw ef woven to the right, where the same process of turning is gone through as illustrated in steps to inclusive. if weaving is to the left, steps to inclusive are repeated. step . shows continued additions and weaving both to the right and left. step . shows both edges of panel woven, the inside turnings being the same as those of the outer edge. circular mats. the circular mat is woven like the crown of a hat, with either the radiating center or a square center radiating at the four corners. in either case, the weaver must be careful to add the proper number of straws so that the mat will be flat, and not cupped or fluted. the cupping is caused by not adding a sufficient number and the fluting by adding too many. in tightening the weaving, do not pull the added straws (plate xix, step , straw x-x) or holes will be made at the elbow. instead, pull the longer straws that run through the center, thus making the entire weaving tight. radiating center. step . begin by laying down, in pairs, ab and cd perpendicular to the body. put kl under ab and over cd. put ij over ab and under cd. step . now put ef under cd and ij, and over ab and kl; then put gh over cd and ij, and under kl and ab. see that the two ends of all the straws are equidistant from the center crossing. in step the straws are changed from pairs to singles as follows: bring a over i; e over d; i over h; d over l; h over a; and l over e. step . the most convenient way to perform the next process is to take all the bottom straws in the left hand and allow the top straws to float over the closed fist. then the weaving is done with the right hand. however, for beginners the weaving may also be done on the table. in weaving, place c under b, over a and under k; d over b and under a; g under f, over e and under b; h over f and under e; k under j, over i and under f; l over j and under i; b under c, over d and under a; a over c and under d; f under g, over h and under c; e over g and under h; j under k, over l and under g; i over k and under l; the round is then finished. step . this illustrates the manner of adding straws. straw x is placed under c, over h, under g and then bent back. the bend should be in the middle of the straw. step . in this the right end of the added straw x is brought down over j and under i. step shows how to continue the additions by weaving one straw and then adding one. step shows the mat after the first round of additions has been completed. the weaving is now easy. weave entirely around again without any additions, turning five straws each time. then go around again weaving two and adding one, in the same manner as before, turning seven straws each time. as the diameter of the mat increases, the less often is it necessary to add. but be sure to add enough to keep the weaving close and the mat perfectly flat. step shows how to close the edge of the mat by turning back the straws on each other. it also gives a very pretty "woven in" design for a border, which can easily be followed from the plate. square center. steps for commencing a circular mat with a square beginning are illustrated in plate xxi. the additions at the corner are made in the same manner as explained in the radiating center, except that each is for a fourth of a circle instead of a complete circle. decorations for round mats. decorations are often employed in round mats. (see plates xxii and xxiii.) the most usual are concentric or radiating colored bands of either simple or sawali weaves. hexagonal weave. step . in plate xxiv, place straws and parallel; then put under and over ; put under and over . step . put over and and under and ; put under and and over and . step . put a over and and under and . put b over , and a, and under and . put c under a, over , , b, and under , . step . put d under b, over , , c, and under , , e. put e under c, over , , d, under , , and over a. put f under d, over , , e, under , , a, and over b. step is made open so as to show the triple over and under weave. further weaving is merely a repetition of this process, as shown in step . step shows the turning of the straws on finishing the edge of the mat. step . many designs can be made by inserting colored straws into the natural weave. step illustrates three of these embroidered designs--the star, the bar, and the diamond. embroidered mats. the embroidering of mats is easily done and the method is shown in plate xxvi. mats in over and under weave, of solid color (either natural or dyed), are used, and the embroidery is done with colored straws. plate xxvii illustrates an embroidered color panel. floral, geometrical, and conventionalized designs are discussed under the headings "samar mats" and "special designs." mat materials. many philippine mat materials have been described in a former publication on hats. [ ] only additional and new information is written here and such data from bulletin as are necessary to make a connected article. [ ] buri straw. the buri palm. there are about six species of the genus corypha in tropical asia, but only one of these is found in the philippines; this is corypha elata, the buri palm. [ ] it is widely distributed throughout the philippines but is most abundant in the central part of the pampanga valley and in southern tayabas. mr. c. w. franks, formerly division superintendent of schools for mindoro province, had a careful estimate made by his teaching force of the stands of buri palms on the island of mindoro. it was found that , hectares of land on this island are covered by , , buri palms, of which , , or about per cent, are mature trees. the island of burias, the isla verde, and other small islands are fairly covered with the palm. the province of sorsogon, including the island of masbate, is also well supplied. in the visayas there are districts in panay, negros, cebu, and bohol, where many buri trees are found. the buri is the largest palm that grows in the philippines, attaining a height of meters. its trunk is very erect, spirally ridged and up to . meter in diameter. its wood is of no commercial value. the full-grown leaves may be three meters long. they are spherical in outline and the lower one-third or one-half is entire, like the palm of the hand. the upper part is divided into from to segments each from . to cm. wide and appearing like fingers spread apart. the petioles supporting the leaves are about meters long and cm. thick, and are provided with long, stout, curved spines. both margins and spines are black in color. at flowering time all the leaves are shed. the young leaf grows out from the top of the palm with the segments pressed together in the form of a lance. the buri flowers and fruits but once and then dies. this is said to occur when the plant is from to years old. the individual flowers are greenish-white in color and only from to mm. in diameter. they are nevertheless perfect flowers, with calyx, corolla, and ovary showing plainly a division into threes, and stamens six in number. thousands of these flowers occur on the large, terminal, much branched, pyramidal inflorescence which may grow to be meters in height. the lower branches of this inflorescence may be as much as . meters long, the upper shorter, the highest about one meter in length. from to months after flowering the fruits are mature. they are from to . cm. in diameter and each contains an extremely hard seed . cm. in diameter. preparation. buri straw is prepared from the young, unopened leaf of the buri palm. the coarsest straw is made by separating the leaflets from the midribs and drying them in the sun. a higher grade straw results from boiling them in water. such straws are suitable only for bayon manufacture and for weaving into coarse mats for baling purposes. several methods of bleaching buri straw obtain in various localities. any exact description of the processes is somewhat difficult, since the persons who produce the straw have no very definite idea of the proportions and quantities of various materials which they use, and often do not care to divulge what they consider trade secrets. in several cases, nevertheless, supervising teachers have succeeded in obtaining fairly exact data on the preparation of buri straw. however, the same method carried out in different towns seems to result in different qualities of straw. these differences probably result from slight variations in the method of preparation. it has also been found that the age of the leaf, as determined by the length of the stem (petiole), influences the color of the straw produced. in some districts the unopened leaf is not taken if the stem is over two inches in length. in other places, leaves with stems about one foot high are considered ready to cut. it is probable, too, that the composition of the water in which the straw is boiled influences its color. mauban, in tayabas province, has the reputation of producing the whitest buri straw. mr. john h. finnigan, supervising teacher, attempted to introduce buri straw into the schools of gumaca, tayabas, where the buri palm is very plentiful. the work was in charge of expert weavers from mauban, but only a poor quality of straw was produced. it was claimed that the water in which the segments were boiled, according to the process which is explained later, did not whiten them. it is a fact that in mauban the water of the town fountain is used to produce the fine white straw. in the several years of his experience, mr. finnigan found no place outside of mauban which produces straw equal in color to the mauban straw, but he has noted that the second best straw comes from san fernando, gumaca, where there is an especially clear stream of water. in fact, all reports would seem to indicate that clear, pure water is essential to the production of the finest white buri straw, and only such should be used in all processes of the various methods outlined here. the arayat process.--mr. robert clauson, supervising teacher, has determined the process of whitening buri straw in arayat, pampanga, as follows: the segments are separated from the midrib and rolled rather loosely, so that the water may pass between them, in bundles as large around as a plate. these are placed in a large can or vat containing tamarind leaves and alum (see bleaching agents) in water, and the whole is boiled until about one-half of the water has evaporated. during the boiling the buri must be tightly covered with tamarind leaves and not be allowed to project from the water. after this process the rolls are placed in a jar full of clear water and left to soak for three days. the strips are then washed several times in the river during a period of three days, and they are then laid on the grass or along fences to dry after each washing. the oftener they are alternately washed and dried the whiter and tougher will the material be. after the final drying, which should be thorough, the strips are rolled very tightly into bundles. the san luis method.--the method of whitening buri straw followed in san luis, pampanga, is described by mr. james h. bass, supervising teacher. the unopened leaves are brought down the chico river in rafts. the segments are torn from the midrib and boiled for four hours in five gallons of water to which one liter of nipa vinegar, a lump of alum the size of an egg, a handful of tamarind leaves, and a handful of pandakaki leaves (see bleaching agents) have been added. other steps follow as in the previous process. the mauban process.--the following description is taken from circular no. , series , of the division of tayabas. let the unopened leaves, cut from the stalk, stand in a cool shady place several days, until the sap has well run. open the leaves and separate the segments from the midrib with a sharp knife. put these carefully into a petroleum can or other suitable receptacle filled with a boiling solution of two-thirds water and one-third white nipa or coconut tubá vinegar (see bleaching agents). keep the solution boiling until the segments are cooked so soft that folding them leaves no crease. spread the cooked leaves on clean grass in the sun to dry. the drying process may require one or two days. when the segments are quite dry, prepare a jar with clear soft water, and put them in this to soak over night. in the morning remove them from the jar, wash them thoroughly in clear running soft water and place them in the sun. at noon repeat the washing process until the segments open, then dry thoroughly in the sun. it is customary to roll the buri into coils in order to make it more convenient to store. the dry leaflets may be made flexible for this purpose by laying them on the grass in the night air. after a few minutes they will be flexible enough to roll. care must be taken to have the segments smoothly rolled. when used, they should be smoothed carefully and then split into the widths required. the process can also be followed with rice vinegar (see bleaching agents) substituted for the tuba vinegar. wash two chupas of rice and cook it in water until it becomes very soft and starchy. put this in a clean petroleum can and add cold water until the can is two-thirds full, then cover the can and let it stand five or six days. this mixture will become very sour. strain it through a piece of sinamay or other cloth. cook the segments in this mixture instead of in the solution described in the first process, and then carry out all the other steps. the romblon process.--in romblon, great care is exercised as to the age of the unopened leaf taken for the production of straw. if it is intended to produce bleached straw, stalks having stems about two inches long are selected. in the following description, which was submitted by mr. r. l. barron, head teacher, one unopened leaf is taken as a unit. the midribs are removed and the segments are rolled into round bundles, say by fives. these are boiled in clear water for about three hours. the leaves are then placed in a mixture of half a liter of tuba vinegar (or three liters of vinegar made from cooked rice, or one-fourth liter of lemon juice) to which enough water has been added to cover the rolls of buri, and boiled for about five hours. the material is then spread in the sun for three days to dry, care being taken that it is not exposed to rain or dew. the segments are then placed in cool clear water for twelve hours and again placed out in the sun for two days to dry. the dyeing of buri straw. buri straw intended for mats is usually colored with the cheap imported coal tar dyes previously noted. it is expected that the new dyes for which the bureau of education has arranged will take the place of these. romblon buri mats, which are the finest in point of workmanship and design made in the philippines, are colored entirely by local vegetable dyes. the methods used in the island of romblon in dyeing buri straw have been carefully investigated by mr. barron, and are presented herewith. in each case the unit of material is one stalk of buri for each color. the process of whitening romblon buri straw has already been described. for red, unopened leaves having stems three feet long should be selected. the midribs are removed while green, and the leaves are rolled into bundles of convenient size, say by fives. these are boiled in clear water for about three hours, after which the segments are spread in the sun for three days to dry. care should be taken that they are not exposed to rain or dew. they are then placed in a fluid made by boiling two gantas of kolis leaves (see mordants) in plain water for one hour. the buri leaves remain in the water and soak thus for three days and three nights. the buri leaflets are then placed in a vessel containing two gantas of sappan wood (see dyes), one-half liter of lime water, and one chupa of tobacco leaves. to this a sufficient quantity of plain water is added to thoroughly submerge the buri, and the whole is boiled for eight hours, being stirred at short intervals to obtain a uniform shade of red. the segments are then removed and hung in the wind for about six hours to dry, after which they are smoothed and rolled. for yellow-orange, unopened leaves having stems about two inches long are selected and the segments are removed from the midribs and rolled into bundles. these are boiled in clear water for about three hours and spread in the sun for three days to dry, care being taken that the buri is not exposed to rain or dew. the material is then placed in a vessel containing one ganta of powdered turmeric (see dyes), one chupa of powdered annatto seeds (see dyes), one liter of lime water, and sufficient clear water to cover the buri, and is boiled in this mixture for five hours, with frequent stirring. it is then removed and hung in the wind for one-half day to dry, and is smoothed and rolled. for green, an unopened leaf having a stem about two inches in length is selected. the segments are removed from the midribs, rolled into bundles and boiled in clear water for about three hours. after this, they are boiled in lye (consisting of ashes) for about two hours, the mixture of ashes and water covering the buri during the process. the bundles are then removed from the vessel, wrapped in a bayon, and put in a dark place for hours. the segments are then taken out and hung in the wind for about three hours to dry, and are smoothed and rolled. the preliminary steps in the production of "black straw" (a cold dark gray) are the same in the making of the green material. the segments taken from the bayon, as described above, are buried three days in black mud, in a rice paddy, for instance. the material is then washed in plain water until clean, and is then boiled for two hours in a mixture of one-half ganta each of the leaves of talisay, indigo, and tiagkot (see dyes), with a sufficient quantity of water to cover the mixture. the whole should be stirred at frequent intervals. after two hours the strips are removed and hung in the wind for five hours to dry. then they are smoothed and rolled. types of buri mats. the bontoc peninsula of tayabas produces great quantities of baling mats and bayons. bayons are also produced in large quantities in capiz province. other localities are of less importance. buri sleeping mats are made from the northernmost part of luzon, in the bangui peninsula, to the sulu archipelago. for the most part they are woven in small numbers here and there, in the different towns, sometimes for use in the household in which they are made, often for local trade in the barrios or municipalities. in nearly every province there is at least one town in which the production of buri mats reaches provincial commercial importance. a number of municipalities produce them for a fairly extensive trade with neighboring provinces. in most cases these are ordinary products, usually decorated with a few colors in lines or checks of dyed straws, either woven in or embroidered on the mat. in one region, however, buri mats have reached such a degree of perfection in their weaving and decoration as to have become a distinctive product known throughout the islands. these are the romblon buri mats, and they are produced throughout the islands of romblon. their central market is the town of the same name. they are distinctive because of the fine white and colored materials used, and of the designs which are woven in them. in the designing, not only checks and line borders but also plaids appear, and many of the effects produced by floating straws are employed. the romblon mat, moreover, is most noticeable because of the fancy weave, making a sort of open work along the border, for which these mats are unique. romblon exports great quantities of mats varying in price from p . , to over p , and in size from small mats for stands to large decorative mats which cover the sides of rooms. [ ] pandan straws. description of pandans. pandans or "screw-pines," as they are sometimes called, are readily recognized by their characteristic appearance. [ ] the common forms occasionally planted in pots as house plants and in gardens, or more often found growing wild, have long and rather narrow leaves always supplied with more or less sharp spines which run along both their margins to the very tip. another row of spines is present on the under surface along the midrib. bearing in mind this middle row of spines it is impossible to mistake the leaf of the pandan for that of the pineapple or maguey, which it resembles more or less in form and shape. another very prominent feature of pandans is the presence of air or prop roots which grow from the stem above the ground and are helpful to the plant in various ways. the veins of the leaves always run parallel and in a longitudinal direction. the leaves are never borne on a petiole, but are attached directly, in winding corkscrew fashion, in ranks of three, to the stem. pandans are true tropical shrubs or trees. although also found in the subtropics of australia, they never occur in other temperate regions except when raised as ornamental plants in greenhouses. even their distribution in the tropics is limited, as they are found growing wild only in the tropical regions of the old world, especially on the islands lying between the mainland of australia and southeastern asia. they are hardly ever cultivated, for where they do occur they are found in more than sufficient quantity for the purposes to which they are put. they are essentially seacoast or open swamp forms, generally found at low altitudes and appearing to find a moist, warm climate most congenial to their growth. in the philippines they occur in all provinces, though not always in sufficient quantity to make them of commercial importance. the structure of the pandans presents many exceedingly interesting characteristics well worth noticing. some plants are very low with leaves not wider than a blade of grass, while others form large trees with leaves many meters long and several decimeters wide. spines generally occur along the whole margin of the leaf, though in a few forms, especially in cultivated varieties, they may be present only at the tip or may be wanting entirely. the marginal spines usually curve forward and vary in size from small, hardly perceptible forms, to large sharp conical structures. at times they are set very close together; again they may be several centimeters apart. those on the midrib most often curve backwards and may vary the same as the marginal spines. generally the spines are green in color, though in some species they are pale-green, red, black or white. some forms seem to creep along the ground, while others, low and bushy and standing close together, form, with their numerous supporting prop roots, an almost impenetrable jungle. the high tree forms are very striking because of their peculiarly shaped crowns. the first roots which the pandans develop soon disappear and their place is taken by others. starting high above the ground, these grow at an angle from the stem and generally reach the soil. they serve the twofold purpose of supporting the stem and of supplying it with sufficient air. if, by accident, the underground roots die off, the plant relies entirely on these air and prop roots for support and food. the strong prop roots are generally of the same diameter throughout, though sometimes they thicken at the ends. normally they never branch above the ground, but after reaching the soil very often divide. the tip of the roots is protected by a cap, while a layer of cork tissue prevents the drying out of the root body. the pandan has two kinds of flowers, male and female. the male flowers are arranged in the form of a spike protected by a modified leaf called the bract. they are white in color, crowded together on the spike and consist of stamens which hold the pollen. the flowers do not have the showy colored bracts which forms so prominent a feature in those of many other plants. the female flowers consist only of the necessary parts. as the pollen occurs in enormous quantities and as the plants generally grow in groups, it is very probable that some flowers are pollinated by the wind. the fact that many pandans have very fragrant blossoms makes it almost certain that in the majority of cases insect pollination takes place. in a few forms that have a very disagreeable odor, pollination is effected by night flying insects. the fruit commonly has the general shape of the female inflorescence, but as it matures it increases greatly in size. pandans have a composite fruit made up of smaller fruits called drupes. the most common forms resemble the pineapple with its leafy fruit apex cut off. as is natural, variations from this type occur. cylindrical, eggshaped, jackfruit-like forms are quite common. the largest may be cm. long and weigh kilos, the smallest only cm. in length and grams in weight. the fruit may occur solitary at the end of a branch, or in groups. the color is green, though some species change to a bright red before maturity is reached. the fruit may have drupes ranging from mm. to mm. in length and these may contain one seed or a number of seeds. at maturity the drupes separate and the fruit falls apart. if the plant occurs along the water, the seeds, when liberated, float about until they rest in a suitable place for germination. uses of pandans. pandans are valued chiefly for their strong fibrous leaves, which are woven into mats, bags, and hats. unless specially prepared, the soft plant tissue between the harder leaf fibers becomes dry and dirty and breaks in time; hence the ordinary pandan bag or mat can not be considered a durable article. however, when treated to a boiling process or when rolled, as explained for sabutan and the pandan of majayjay, the leaves yield straw which is stronger and more durable than most palm or sedge straw used for the same purposes. pandan mats are important articles of domestic commerce in malaysia, as it is estimated that four-fifths of the total population use them for sleeping purposes. in all places except where palms, like the buri or sedges occur, they yield the most suitable and most easily prepared mat material. generally the whole leaf is utilized after removing the marginal and midrib spines. the coarsest mats are used in drying out copra, cacao beans, paddy, and such products. pandan mats are made and used widely in the philippines. formerly, before gunny sacks came into general use, coffee was packed in pandan bags and where pandans did not grow they were introduced and cultivated for that purpose. even to-day bags from pandan play an important part in transporting sugar, coffee, and other tropical products in and around southern asia. few pandan bags are made in the philippines in comparison with the enormous quantity of bayons woven of buri straw and used to contain domestic rice and export sugar. pandans are used extensively for making hats in the philippines as well as in other parts of the world. in several islands of the pacific very fine ones are woven from straw consisting of the whole leaf cut into strips. in the loochoo islands imitation panama hats of great strength are woven from the skin of a pandan, bleached and rolled into a straw. in the philippines numerous varieties of pandan hats are produced, varying in grade from the fine and expensive sabutan to the coarse pandan. [ ] in some other places, as burma, pandan leaves are woven or sewed into sails. in southern india they are utilized as umbrella covering. if no stronger material is obtainable, the leaves are placed on roofs as thatching, but they do not seem to lend themselves well to that purpose. in countries where they grow, they are often used instead of twine or made into ropes or hunting nets, or into drag ropes for fishing nets. they are said to be excellent paper-making material. in some islands the fibers are separated from the leaf and used by the inhabitants in the manufacture of belts and aprons. the wood of the tree pandans is too spongy and soft to make a good material for the construction of houses. still, on small islands, such as the coral and marshall islands, the natives construct their huts from pandan wood. generally, it is used only for rough, temporary work. in some localities the soft interior part is removed to make water pipes. again, because of its lightness, the wood is used by the people on the many islands of the pacific to buoy their fishing nets. pandan roots are employed for various purposes. if sufficiently thin they are used, after being cleaned, for making baskets. the roots may also be pounded out, cleaned and made into brushes for painting or whitewashing houses. they are sometimes so employed in the philippines. they are also used for cordage. a medicinal oil is sometimes obtained from them. the flowers of some pandans, especially those of pandanus tectorius, are extremely fragrant. this plant is the most widely distributed of the pandans and is the most frequent pandan found along the seacoast and in low altitudes. some botanists claim that the male flowers of this species have the sweetest odor known among plants. so powerful is their fragrance that by it sailors can often tell the presence of land before they actually see it. the natives in some places use the flowers in making an aromatic water, or, by distillation, a volatile oil, known as keura oil, which is used medicinally for rheumatism. certain pandan fruit is extremely oily and serves at times as a substitute for butter. the sap has the taste of sweet apples and is relished by the inhabitants in many islands. in some places it is even made into fruit jam. the very young leaves, especially those surrounding the flowers, are eaten raw or cooked, and constitute an important article of diet when a famine sweeps india. kinds of pandans. the common seashore pandan. in a walk of half a mile or, at most, a mile along the beach of any of the seacoast provinces in the philippines, one is almost sure to come across pandanus tectorius. a map showing the distribution of this pandan would therefore be practically an outline map of the islands. the species does not grow in nipa swamps, though immediately back of them it will be found well established. neither could one expect to find it in localities where the cliffs come down abruptly to the sea, permitting only the existence of vegetable life of the lowest form. pandan is its usual name in the philippines. in zambales it is called "panglan" or "panglan babai." another name is "pangdan." the stem is not very strong, and reaches a height of from to meters. it is generally supported by aerial roots. the leaves are of medium thickness, on the average . m. long and cm. wide. they are provided with strong sharp spines about mm. in length. these are curved forward and are as much as one centimeter, or a little more, apart. the spines on the under surface of the midrib are shorter and farther apart, but bend in the same direction. the male flowers form a spike and these are surrounded by very fragrant leaves called spathes. the fruit is cm. long, cm. wide, and contains from to drupes, each about . cm. long and . to cm. wide. the upper half of the drupes are free but close together. there are small furrows on the tops of the drupes, rather deep but not very distinct. when ripe the fruit has a fine red color and the drupes fall from the head. pandanus tectorius is of considerable importance in nearly all parts of the world where it grows, and it is devoted to most of the uses already noted for pandans in general. in certain places, large industries are founded on it. in india, the leaves are cut every second year and made into large bags. hats are produced from it in the pacific islands, those from the hawaiian group being especially well known. it is probable that the imitation panama hats of the loochoo islands are also woven from a material (raffia) prepared from the common pandan. in the marshall islands it is recorded that forty varieties of this species have been evolved in the course of planting and cultivation for industrial purposes. from the information submitted with the specimens received in the bureau of education, it is to be judged that the economic importance of the common pandan in the philippines is of but little consequence. though widely used, no large or even local industries are based upon it. a scattering production of hats, mats, and bags is reported in abra, union, zambales, mindoro, bulacan, rizal, batangas, sorsogon, iloilo, antique, oriental negros, cebu, leyte, and sorsogon provinces. near badoc, ilocos norte, and along the abra border the tinguian people make mats from an upland variety for local trade. in balayan, batangas, the leaves are used for thatching. in surigao they are also made into baskets. in most processes the preparation of the straw consists of cutting the leaves into strips and drying them. in zambales, however, it is reported that the leaves are flattened, pressed, split, and rolled. in mindoro, they are soaked in water and dried in the sun before being cut into straw. it is probable that much better material could be prepared from this pandan if such processes as are used in the making of sabutan straw and straw from the majayjay pandan were followed. judging from the results obtained in other countries, it would seem that if suckers of the common pandan were taken, in the districts in which it grows, planted, and cultivated, varieties would result which would be much better adapted for industrial purposes than the parent stock. indeed, it is probable that sabutan, the philippine pandan of greatest economic importance, is a variety which is the result of generations of planting, still closely resembling p. tectorius but differing from it in its leaves, which are thinner, longer, of finer texture and of greater strength. it is possible also that sarakat, the economic pandan of the bangui peninsula, ilocos norte, is a variety of p. tectorius. varieties of the common pandan. sabutan. botanical.--it is a question among botanists whether the pandan known as sabutan is a variety of the common sea-shore pandan (p. tectorius) or whether it has sufficient distinctive characteristics to entitle it to be considered as a separate species (p. sabotan). botanists have not as yet succeeded in securing a fruit of this pandan, which could settle the question, and it is very doubtful whether the fruit will ever be found. [ ] prof. ugolino martelli of florence, italy, an authority on pandans, considers sabutan to be pandanus tectorius var. sinensis. this classification is for the present accepted, as most evidence is in favor of such determination and in this paper sabutan is therefore considered to be a variety of the common pandan, the chief change in which, through generations of planting, has been in the production of a leaf stronger, thinner, and of finer texture than that of the parent stock. the sabutan plant is never found growing wild, though after it has once been started and rooted it will endure neglect and even abandonment. it produces better and finer leaves, however, if it receives some care and attention. in the towns of tanay and pililla, rizal province, and in mabitac, laguna province, and in all the towns along the lake shore as far as paete, the suckers of the plant are set out in small plots of ground surrounding the houses of the people. these form patches which in several years (depending mostly on soil conditions) yield pandan leaves large and fine enough to be used in the manufacture of hats and mats. the ideal location for sabutan is along the banks of streams where it can get the benefit of the light shade of bamboo or plants that happen to grow in the vicinity. ordinarily, good results are obtained by planting the suckers of sabutan in a loose and moist, but well drained, soil. plants are set out one meter apart in each direction, as they spread considerably. they need some shade, especially when young, but not the heavy shade of an abacá or banana grove. the plant grows to be from to meters high. the leaves are fine in texture, about meters long and as wide as centimeters. spines occur on the margins and on the under surface of the midrib. the male inflorescence procured from tanay by the bureau of education is similar in appearance to that of pandanus tectorius and is about centimeters long. at varying distances on the flower stalk are leaves (bracts), thin and fine, from to centimeters long and with fine spines on margins and midrib. the flowers have a pleasant, though not very strong, odor. status of the sabutan mat industry.--as an industry, the weaving of sabutan mats is confined to the towns of tanay and pililla, in the province of rizal. the beginnings of this industry go back beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitants or even of their parents. it is probable that, as the people state, mat weaving has been carried on ever since the towns were founded. tanay is the older of the two and it would seem (though reliable historical data of this kind are difficult to obtain) that the town was the first to engage in sabutan mat weaving and is probably the mother of all the sabutan industries carried on around laguna de bay. the present condition of the mat-weaving industry of these two towns, however, is precarious; it appears to be gradually dying out. the fabrication of sabutan hats has been introduced from mabitac, laguna province, into pililla, with the result that the younger generation is entirely engaged in making hats, and the relatively small number of mats produced is being woven by the older women who have not cared to learn the new art. as yet no hats are made in tanay, but the work is being taught in the schools and from conversation with people of the town it is judged that they are becoming interested also. the disappearance of the sabutan mat industry would be very unfortunate, for the products are the finest samples of the mat weaver's art produced in the philippines. the mats are of fine straw; the natural gray of sabutan is pleasing; the designs used are good; and the colors are usually well combined. the favorite patterns consist of heavy plaids with some of the stripes containing sub-patterns produced by floating straws; the simplest ones have narrow border designs in straight lines. the most expensive mats are decorated with embroidered designs. the combination of colors in these is sometimes not pleasing and the designs themselves are not of special merit. however, if better ones are substituted, these mats should be excellent for a foreign trade demanding expensive articles of this nature. unlike most philippine mat industries, this one has not as yet been affected by coal tar dyes, and only vegetable dyes, found locally in the town or in the forests, are employed. the straw dyes very well and as a consequence the colors produced are even throughout the mat; nor have any of the shades that brilliant effect or "off color" which is so distasteful in certain fibers. the colors obtained are only fairly fast in the light, however, and it is probable that the new coal tar dyes will be faster and cheaper. in point of durability, sabutan mats would be superior to all others produced in the islands if woven of double straws. in price they now vary from forty centavos to thirty pesos, the ordinary ones bringing from p . to p . . if the industry is to be preserved intact, however, something must be done to give it vitality, for the weavers know from experience of neighboring towns that more money can be made from weaving hats than in the fabrication of mats, and they will naturally change to the more remunerative article. unlike most other weaving industries, the craft has not as yet been organized in tanay. the production of mats has been more or less haphazard, with but little supervision by any person resembling the broker usually connected with household industries. the weaver on completing a mat sells it in the market or to some storekeeper. up to the present time, the chief trade in these mats has been at antipolo in may during the "romeria" or annual pilgrimage to the shrine of the virgin of antipolo. certain persons in tanay have made it a practice to gather up a store of mats and take them to antipolo for sale there during the fiesta. a few of them are on sale in manila and in neighboring provinces. of late, however, persons have appeared who are taking up the industry more thoroughly as brokers and it is to be hoped that the workers will be organized into some better system for production than now exists. there is a large opportunity not only for supervision but also for division of labor. at present the men of the house cut the leaves, and each weaver (all the weavers are women) carries out the rest of the process. there would be a considerable saving of time if certain persons devoted themselves to the preparation of the gray straw, and the dyeing were left entirely to certain other workers. in this way the weavers of the mats would be engaged only in the actual fabrication of the article and much time would be saved to them. [ ] planting, maturing, and yield of sabutan.--the plants from which the straw mats at tanay are made are set out in plots near the houses of the workers. the suckers are planted in april at the beginning of the rainy season, and, while it is always stated that straw prepared from the leaves grown in the shade is best for weaving, yet the plants are never intentionally set out in the shade but are planted wherever an unoccupied plot of ground is obtainable. as a matter of fact, the patches to be seen in the sabutan towns grow in a semi-shade such as one would expect to find in yards where the usual ornamental and fruit trees and banana plants grow. much of the sabutan is in the sun from morning to night; some is shaded during all or part of the day. the suckers mature leaves in the third year [ ] but these are cut off and thrown away as useless and it is not until the fourth year that the lower leaves can be stripped into straw. harvest takes place every four months, five or six leaves being obtained from a plant at each cutting. the plants are never irrigated but it is to be noted that the soil around laguna de bay is very moist and that the water table is close to the surface with a good seepage from the hills which are near the shore. it is probable that the plants differ in their production of leaves because some have many more branches than others and the climatic and soil conditions affect the yield. preparation of the straw.--the best straw is prepared during the dry season, because at this time there is sufficient sunshine to produce a good colored material. as a consequence the workers prepare a large quantity at that season and store it in or under their houses, wrapped in mats. the leaves used are about meters in length and cm. in width. the central thorns on the back of the leaves are removed by cutting away the midrib. two lengths about an inch in width are thus produced from which the outer rows of thorns may or may not be removed, according to custom. the lengths thus obtained are left in the sunshine and wind for about half a day to render them more flexible, after which they are cut into straws. for this purpose there is used an instrument consisting of a narrow wooden handle about / cm. wide at the base, into which narrow sharp teeth, usually of steel, are set. brass and even hard woods can be used for teeth. the point of the segment being cut off, the base is grasped in one hand, the inside of the segment being turned toward the operator. the comb-like instrument is forced into it about cm. from the end of the base and the teeth are held against the first finger by pressure of the thumb. the leaf length is then drawn up by the other hand and is cut into straws depending in width upon the fineness of the comb used. if the leaves are too young they will break in this process. the stripped segments are then usually tied up into bundles as large around as the fist, and hung in some shaded place exposed to the wind. the length of time occupied by this process varies. in some places it is omitted, though it seems to be always carried out in tanay. the bundles are then undone and the worker, holding the uncut base of each length in one hand, runs the straw between his fingers and the sharp edged ruler-like piece of bamboo held in the other. this is done several times and results in the removal of considerable moisture, the prevention of wrinkling, and greater pliability of the straw. there are several variations in the processes followed for boiling sabutan. in the province of laguna a fistful of the stripped lengths with bases still attached are rolled up into a bundle and placed in fresh water in order to remove the coloring matter--in some places in clear, running river water, in other places in a can of clean, fresh water--for about twenty-four hours; the water is changed several times. in the last method the process is discontinued when the water remains clear. bundles are then placed in cold vinegar, water or lemon water to which green tamarind fruit has been added to make the color of the straw lighter and to toughen it; the water is brought to a boil. bamboo is used as fuel, as that fire is not so hot as a wood fire. the length of time required for cooking differs. one good authority states that it should be stopped when the odor of sabutan can no longer be detected in the vapor, which occurs after about fifteen minutes boiling. this authority also states that the straw should be removed when it takes on a reddish hue. many women put the straw into clear boiling water to which nothing has been added. after this process the straw is allowed to cool, is washed several times in clean, fresh water and is spread in the sun to dry, whereupon it assumes a gray color. if there is no sun the cool straw must be kept in fresh water which is changed every twelve hours until the sun appears. if a greenish shade is obtained the process has not been correctly carried out. straw from dark green, thick, old leaves, or from those grown in the sun, is often reddish brown in color. the boiling processes noted are those used in the preparation of straw for mats. the process followed in tanay has been described by mr. amado simpoco, principal of the tanay central school. the stripped lengths, after being wilted and drawn over the sharp edged piece of bamboo, are made up into fist bundles, tied at the middle and placed in a large copper pot cm. in diameter and cm. in depth and containing about bundles. the pot is filled with water and the sabutan is boiled for hours, care being taken that the straw is always covered. after boiling, the bundles are removed and untied and the strips are hung in the shade or in the house to cool; afterwards they are placed in the river for a day and are then washed carefully and dried thoroughly in the sun. the gray straw thus obtained is stored in bundles, still attached to the uncut bases, and is left in the air for three or four nights before it is woven into mats. dyeing sabutan.--mr. simpoco has also made a careful study of the methods used in tanay in dyeing sabutan straw, and the results of his efforts are presented here. red orange: for the production of red orange straw the gray material, prepared as outlined above, is first treated by steeping in water containing kolis leaves and twigs. the leaves and chopped twigs are pounded in a mortar and are placed together with the sabutan in a large receptacle capable of containing from to bundles, filled with water. the material is allowed to remain in the receptacle for four days. early in the morning of the fifth day the straw is removed and hung in a shaded place until dry and is made up into bundles tied tightly at the larger end. the dye fluid is carefully prepared. chips of sappan are boiled in a large copper pot for one day. a quantity of turmeric roots and annatto seeds are pounded separately in mortars until they are reduced to a very fine state. these are then separately treated with water and pressed, the result being a turmeric water and an annatto water. these two are mixed and poured into the boiling sappan. after about minutes the bundles of sabutan are placed in the pot and the whole is allowed to boil until every part of the fiber is uniformly colored. after having been boiled sufficiently, the bundles are removed and placed in a large basket, later to be dried in the shade. they are left in the night air for three or four nights and are then rolled up in coarse mats. the shades procured vary with the proportions of the dye materials used. some are a decided orange, others are light yellow. yellow: yellow straw is produced in the same manner, using turmeric and annatto only. red: in the production of red straw the bundles are treated with kolis leaves in the same manner as in the preliminary process for red-orange straw. in a pot capable of holding fist bundles of sabutan, four gantas [ ] of finely chopped sappan are placed. over this are placed bundles of the straw, which in turn is covered with one ganta of chopped sappan. the remaining bundles are then added and covered with still another ganta of sappan. the pot is filled with water and set over a fire for from twelve to fifteen hours. care is taken that the bundles are always kept under the water and that all parts of the material are uniformly colored. the loss by evaporation is counterbalanced by adding water from time to time. when well colored, the straw is removed from the pot and placed in a large basket for a day and is then hung in the sunshine to be dried. it should be allowed to remain in the night air; when thoroughly dried it is rolled in coarse mats. black: black straw, a warm dark gray, is prepared from the red material. buds of bananas, leaves of kabling, talisay, camagon, and the castor plant are pounded in a mortar and are mixed with fine particles of black clay such as can be obtained from rice paddies. sappan water, made by boiling sappan chips, is then added to the mixture and the entire mass is placed in a large receptacle for a day. red straw is put into this mixture and allowed to remain for two days. it is removed on the third day and again returned to the mixture on the fourth day. on the fifth day the straw is finally removed and placed in the sun, being kept in the air at night. coal tar dyes are used in the production of green and purple straws. these are purchased from the chinese stores. the prepared gray fiber is also employed with these dyes. the usual method of boiling in a tin can until the desired shade is obtained, is followed. the straw is dried in the sun and kept in the night air. colors produced are not so uniform or so satisfactory as the others described and are seldom used. weaving the mats.--before weaving the mat the worker runs the straw over the ruler-like piece of bamboo as already explained, and removes the uncut base to which it has been attached during the various processes of preparation, bleaching, and dyeing. one side of the mat is first woven the entire length, and is finished by having the edges turned in. this edge is then placed in a slit made in a narrow stick of wood and is tied in place with strips of sabutan straw running around the stick and through the mat. the mat is allowed to remain attached to this stick until it has been completely woven. as weaving proceeds, the finished part is rolled up on the stick, thus being out of the way of the weaver. this arrangement also serves to keep the mat in position during weaving and prevents it from getting out of shape. single straws are used and consequently the mat has a right and a wrong side. [ ] the most expensive mats, which are seldom made, are double and of very fine material. the extension and cultivation of sabutan.--for a number of years there has been an increasing interest throughout the philippines in the propagation of sabutan. teachers in various places have procured suckers from the towns along the east coast of laguna de bay, and have planted them out with the idea of having their own industrial material close at hand. many of these attempts have been failures, since not enough information had been obtained concerning the soil and moisture conditions necessary for the cultivation of the plant. the bureau of education has therefore gathered as much information as possible on the cultivation of sabutan, based upon the experience of various persons who have attempted planting it. it has been found that, in those regions having a dry season, the suckers should be planted early in the rainy season so that they may become well rooted before the rains stop, or else water should be provided through irrigation ditches. in nearly all cases it has been reported that the loss of plants resulted from lack of water at the planting period. it is reported that difficulty is found in making the suckers live if planted in the sun, but that, when well established, those so planted grow and produce suckers better. as has been previously noted, no special attempt is made to set the plants out in either the sun or shade in the towns around laguna de bay, but all weavers state that leaves grown in the shade are the best for industrial purposes. sabutan plants need a moist but well drained soil. they should be set out about a meter apart each way (that is, the rows one meter apart and plants one meter apart in the row), since they spread out considerably when they become older. where sufficient moisture does not exist, irrigation should be provided. if it is decided to shade the suckers, plants such as the papaya, having long roots rather than surface roots, are best. no sabutan plants should be planted within feet of the papaya. it is probable that with cultivation the plants will yield leaves suitable for straw in from one and one-half to two years, the time to mature depending upon the conditions noted in the preceding paragraphs. [ ] sabutan types.--in several places in the philippines there are pandans which yield leaves similar to those of sabutan. it is probable that none of these are the true sabutan. the most important one is that growing along the northeastern shore of tayabas province. mats are made at both casiguran and baler, and enter to a small extent, the interprovincial trade with neighboring provinces. it is stated, however, that these regions abound in the species of pandan from which the mats are made. sabutan type mats are also reported made at palanan in isabela province, and a trade is carried on in them with neighboring towns. other pandans reported under the name of sabutan and resembling it more or less have no commercial importance. sarakat. sarakat is a distinctive pandan of the bangui peninsula of ilocos norte. the climate of this region differs from the rest of ilocos norte in that it has rainfall practically throughout the year, receiving as it does the benefit of the northeast monsoon which is cut off from the country to the south. it has not as yet been determined whether sarakat is to be described as a new variety of p. tectorius or is to be designated as an entirely new species. from mats submitted to this office, it is to be judged that sarakat straw is as fine as sabutan. in fact, the material is so thin that even though the mats are woven of double straws they are no thicker, and are a good deal more pliable than all other commercial pandan mats, sabutan excepted, produced in the philippines. the upper surface of pandan straw is glossy, and the under surface is rough. in making the double straw, the two rough surfaces are placed together so as to expose both glossy ones. hence, unlike the sabutan, both sides of sarakat mats are similar in appearance. the material, however, is not so strong as sabutan. [ ] the mats are not decorated either by weaving in colored straws or by embroidered or border designs. in price they vary from about p to p . mr. petronilo castro, formerly supervising teacher of bangui, has stated that that town supplies most of the mats used by the people of ilocos norte. some buri mats and a few "pandan" mats (probably from the common seashore variety) are made. the sarakat mats exceed those of pandan in numbers and in commercial importance and are more beautiful and stronger. the demand for the mats is great and many people are engaged exclusively in their fabrication. the pandan of majayjay. [ ] this pandan (p. utilissimus) is known in most places where it grows as "pandan" or "pandan totoo," the true or tame pandan. it is extensively used in laguna and tayabas and is remarkable for its very large leaves and its heavy fruit. the tree occurs in groups in dry ground but thrives best in half shade near streams. it attains a height of from to meters. the trunk branches toward the top and is supported by a few short and thick prop roots. the leaves are often meters long and decimeters wide. the lower part of the older leaves stands up straight, while the upper half droops. the younger leaves are erect with only their tips bent down. the leaf spines are short, blunt, and conical. the fruits look like the jackfruit and are very large and heavy, being often decimeters long and decimeters in diameter and weighing at times or more kilograms. the drupes ripen slowly and gradually; they are red in color when fully mature and possess a peculiar faint odor. it takes some time before all the drupes are shed, and in a grove of fruiting trees they can be found in all stages of maturity during the month of may. p. utilissimus is found growing wild throughout the plateau region of majayjay, luisiana, and cavinti in laguna province, and extending into tayabas province. it is only the leaves from those plants which have been set out in plots, however, that are utilized in the making of mats, hats and telescope baskets. like sabutan, this pandan grows best in the half-shade near streams, and leaves grown in the sun are considered inferior. nevertheless, no attempt seems to be made to select a locality for their propagation, and plots are planted wherever land is available. this pandan will not live in stagnant water and is particularly adapted to hill-sides where there is a constant flow. the most satisfactory statistics on the propagation of p. utilissimus are obtained from cavinti, where the plant has been introduced within recent years and suckers are still being brought in from other towns. it is stated that suckers one-half meter in height mature in about three years, while suckers one meter in height or over will produce suitable leaves in one year or less. the most satisfactory results are obtained by transplanting the mature plants, since leaves are obtainable in a few months and in half a year suckers large enough for transplanting are produced. it is stated that in setting the plants out, the undergrowth is cleared away and the suckers are placed in the ground about / meters apart. some attention is given to the young plants such as loosening the earth around them; but as soon as they obtain a good foothold no cultivation is attempted. usually weavers own their patch of pandan from which the leaves are obtained for making the straw. several workers sometimes have a patch in common and the few weavers who do not own pandans themselves must purchase. the leaves are sold on the tree, the purchaser cutting them off with a bolo. the price is from to centavos per hundred, depending upon their size, softness, thickness, and imperfections. the longest, thinnest, darkest green leaves, with the fewest imperfections, are considered the best and cost the most. in cavinti, where the leaves are imported from luisiana and majayjay, the price of the best leaves is centavos per hundred. the estimates of the number of leaves yielded by a plant in a year differ considerably. by some it is stated that on the average one leaf is produced per month; others report that from three to five leaves are gathered in from three to six weeks. the thorns are removed from the edges, and the midrib is cut away, thus reducing the leaf into two halves, each of which is again divided. these strips are placed in the sun for half a day. the unique process in the preparation of this pandan straw is the rolling which occurs at this point. while it is probable that any roller with sufficient weight could be used, that employed in the pandan districts of laguna is the primitive "iluhan" by which sugar-cane and copra are also crushed. it consists essentially of three heavy wooden horses, in the grooves of which a log, heavily weighted with stones, rotates. the pandan lengths are placed in one of the grooves underneath the log and so rolled. the object of the process is to make the material thinner and more pliable. straw is stripped from the lengths thus prepared by the use of the gauge. [ ] the straw is then further dried in the sunshine and is ready to be woven. sometimes the lengths are stripped before being rolled, hence the straw is left in the sunshine for another half day and then placed under the log in the iluhan. mats are woven in majayjay and luisiana only, the weavers of cavinti devoting their entire time to the fabrication of hats. the mats are woven of single straw, but they are fairly thick and not at all limber. the number produced per week runs probably into the thousands, of which about per cent are made of coarse straw and are intended for use in drying palay, copra, etc. these mats are known as "bangkoan," a word having about the same significance as "bastos;" that is, coarsely or poorly made. the finer and better made mats are intended for use as sleeping mats and for the floor. they are decorated with colored buri straw, usually in some shade of red produced by mordanting with kolis leaves and boiling with sappan wood as explained for buri straw. occasionally, other colors are used, produced from the imported coal-tar ("chino") dyes, but in all cases the shades produced are not very pleasing. the decorations are embroidered in, and consist of simple borders in straight lines with an open center design of somewhat the same pattern. when first woven, the mats are usually of a dark green color. before being sold, they are placed in the sun, which changes them to a grayish color somewhat resembling sabutan. after long use, however, the final shade is yellowish green. there seems to be but little division of labor in the production of these mats. usually the whole family goes out into the patch and cuts the leaves, removing the thorns before bringing them home. only women weave the mats. in majayjay a few workers color their own buri straw used in decorating the mats, but for the most part this material is obtained from dyers, one a chinese, the other a filipino, who prepare it for sale. the weavers are independent of advances by brokers and sell their product to filipinos or to the representatives of chinese merchants in pagsanjan and manila. a few weavers take their mats to lukban, whence they are distributed over tayabas province, but many more are gathered up by these brokers and sold in the market at pagsanjan. the mat market there usually occupies one whole sidewalk running the length of the market building. the pandan mats of majayjay and luisiana are notable for their strength and durability, and are excellent for the floor or bath. in price they range from p . to p . . the usual price of the decorated mats is p . . the demand continues brisk and prices have recently risen. the weakest point in the mat at the present time is in the colored buri straw used to decorate it, for this tears long before the pandan shows signs of wear. if colored sabutan straw is substituted for the buri, a much stronger and probably more pleasing article will result. [ ] karagumoy. [ ] the pandan p. simplex, known as "karagumoy" or "carogumoy," is the economic pandan of the bicol peninsula in southern luzon. it is usually found growing in well drained soil under the shade of banana and abaca plants and areca palms. it needs this protection because the leaves are easily broken or ruined by hard winds. the leaves are generally longer than those of sabutan (they are meters to / meters in length) and are but from cm. to cm. wide. they are very thick, being practically as coarse as the leaves of p. utilissimus. they bear stout spines on the midrib and along the margins, from two centimeters to three centimeters apart. a fungus disease often attacks them, causing dry hard patches, and not only spoiling the color but also making the material so brittle that it breaks in the preparation of the straw. the plant is propagated by means of suckers in patches seldom over a half hectare in extent and often consisting of a few plants back of the house. the suckers are set out in rows and are probably one year old when the first leaves are taken, though the workers disagree on this point. at a specified time, from eight to fifteen leaves are cut from the plant each year; at other periods, two or three may be taken from the same plants. most of the leaves are harvested during the rainy season. karagumoy leaves have a commercial value in many of the places in which the plant occurs. in tabaco, albay, women cut the leaves and carry them in large bundles to the market, where they are sold at prices usually varying from to centavos per hundred. throughout the province of albay mats are made from karagumoy, and in some towns the industry is of considerable importance. for instance, in the barrio of san lorenzo in tabaco, mats may be found in the making in nearly every house. in sorsogon, too, the industry is widespread though not so important commercially. in balusa the production is large enough to supply the local demand and leave a surplus for export to neighboring towns. in the bicol provinces karagumoy is considered the best of all straws for the production of mats. in price the mats vary from thirty to ninety centavos, according to fineness. in preparing the material, the spines and midrib are first removed and the leaves are divided into four strips of about equal width. the straw is prepared from these with the knife and gauge; it is dried in the shade for a few hours and drawn several times over a piece of bamboo as explained for sabutan in order to make it more supple and smooth. the mats are woven in the early morning and at night, the straw being more pliable then. attempts have been made in the schools to dye karagumoy but no success has yet been attained. the mats are plain. bariu. the stem of this plant, p. copelandii, grows from to meters high. the leaves have an average length of . meter and a width of cm. [ ] spines occur along the entire margin. near the base they are comparatively coarse and from to mm. long. towards the apex of the margins and midveins, the spines are short and close together like the teeth of a fine saw. from to heads generally form on the fruit stalk, each of them from to cm. long and to cm. across, at first pale yellowish in appearance but soon turning red. their drupes are mm. long and to mm. in diameter. this pandan is found in cagayan, benguet, nueva ecija, samar, bohol, occidental negros, capiz, surigao, davao, and other provinces. [ ] this pandan is not of economic importance in central and southern luzon. in the bicol provinces it is used to some extent but it is considered inferior to other materials. in parts of the visayas, such as bohol, capiz and samar, it is utilized to a considerable extent, but cannot be considered of commercial importance. it is the economic pandan of surigao, but even there its commercial importance is local only. table showing comparative measurements of certain philippine pandans. p. sabutan. p. p. p. tectorius. utilissimus. simplex. copelandii. height of trunk to m to m to m m m. leaves: length . m m m to . m . m. width cm cm cm to cm cm. thickness medium fine thick thick medium. fruit: length cm cm cm to cm. thickness cm cm cm to cm. drupes-- length . cm to cm cm mm. thickness . to cm cm cm to mm. number in head to many many many. pandans of minor utility. the species p. radicans is reported as olango from leyte, wañgo in bohol, owañgo in surigao and uyagño in sorsogon. it is usually found growing along rivers and in marshes. the trunk reaches a height of m. and its largest leaves may be m. long and cm. wide. there are from to dark brick red fruits in a cluster. the fruit is cm. long and cm. wide and contains or more drupes. each drupe is . cm. in length and mm. in diameter. the leaves are made into straw from which coarse mats are woven. taboan is the name given to pandanus dubius in surigao while in bohol it is known as bacong. it is a rare species. it is said to be a heavy, clumsy appearing tree with stem about m. high, wide spreading branches near the top, and soft, pulpy and stringy wood. the flowers are grouped into an inflorescence. the male inflorescence, about cm. long and partly covered by creamy yellow bracts, is erect and occurs at the end of the branches. the leaves are deep green in color on both sides, with an average length of . cm. and a width of cm. the drupes of this pandan are from cm. to cm. long and from cm. to cm. wide. the plant is utilized to a small extent in making mats. in the tagalog speaking provinces of bulacan, bataan, and in and around manila, pandanus luzonensis is called "alasas." it is also called "pandan" but this name should be reserved for pandanus tectorius. the former is restricted in its habitat to the provinces around manila bay, while the latter is found in most of the seacoast provinces of the philippines as well as in other tropical parts of the world. pandanus luzonensis attains a greater height than pandanus tectorius, but has narrower leaves than the latter. the male flowers are borne in a fleshy, much-branched inflorescence from to cm. long. each branch is partly surrounded by a broad thin bract, cm. wide. each individual flower has from to stamens. the whole fruit is about centimeters long and contains from to drupes, yellowish red in color when ripe. each drupe is from to cm. long, to . cm. thick, and contains from to seeds. the straw from this pandan is of inferior quality, though it is said to be used in bulacan for mats. unidentified pandans. besides the pandans, the identity of which has been explained above, there are several unidentified specimens or varieties from which mats are made. it may be that some of these will be found identical with those already discussed when sufficient botanical material has been gathered to determine them. in isabela province, a pandan known as "langu" having long, strong, thin leaves, is made into mats in santa maria, delena and bolasi. mats are made along the coast of cagayan province, in the ilocano barrios of the towns of claveria and sanchez mira, from a pandan known as "pataga." these are very coarse and thick and have an unusually shiny surface. according to mr. otto harwood, the leaves vary in length from cm. to . cm. and in width from . cm. to cm. the straw is made by cutting the leaf into strips and drying them in the sun. although the industry is yet small, it is developing. a species of pandan is employed in the towns of camalaniugan, aparri, gataran, and lal-loc in cagayan province for making mats. locally they are valued at from to centavos, but in isabela province to which they are exported they sell for as high as a peso and a half. the only municipality in pangasinan province in which the making of mats has reached provincial and interprovincial importance is bolinao. the species of pandan employed is not known. the mats are shipped to towns along the seacoast of ilocos and zambales province by sailing vessels, and are sold in the local markets or to local merchants. in mindoro the town of subang makes pandan mats which are shipped to batangas, cavite, and manila. two pandans, called lingo and baring were sent to the general office of the bureau of education from guindalman, bohol. it was impossible to identify them as no fruit was included. they probably represent two new species. lingo has a leaf . m. in length and of an almost uniform width of . cm. at cm. from the tip, it is . cm. wide, then gradually becomes acuminate. the marginal spines are mm. long, curved forward, from to mm. apart near the stem, but closer together at the distal one-third of the leaf. spines of mm. or less in length and mm. or less apart, curved forward and extending throughout the length of the leaf, occur on the lower surface of the midrib only. the surface of the leaf is smooth and shiny. the leaf of baring is cm. long, . cm. wide, apparently spineless, smooth and fine in texture. both of these pandans would probably yield good industrial materials. in iloilo, the town of banate has a pandan mat industry of interprovincial importance, whose product is an article of commerce as far as negros. the mats sell at about centavos each. there is a large export of pandan mats from dao, antique, to the province of iloilo. pandan mats are exported from cuyo island in palawan. some are sent to the mainland of palawan and others to antique. the moro pandan mats are the most richly colored of all those produced in the philippines. at this writing, information is not at hand to determine the method of preparing the straw or the species of pandan from which they are made. mats which have been exhibited at successive philippine expositions have undoubtedly been dyed with imported coloring matter. the designs are of the general effect of the mat reproduced on page . the colors are often well combined and the effect is very striking. the cottabato mats are double; the under portion is woven of thick, heavy, uncolored straw, and the upper portion is of finer material; the two parts are spliced together. sedge straws. kinds of sedges. botanical. the sedges which form the family of cyperaceae are grass-like or rush-like herbs, with solid, jointless, usually triangular stems, while the grasses (gramineae) are mostly herbs, usually with hollow stems closed and enlarged at the nodes. the former play an important part in the manufacture of mats because of their length and freedom from nodes. the family includes several genera of importance; viz., scirpus, cyperus, and fimbristylis. of these the fimbristylis is the most important, for two species of fimbristylis have a fairly large commercial use; they are therefore taken up separately. of the genus scirpus, the species s. grossus, known as "balangot" in ambos camarines and capiz, "bagaas" in occidental negros, "tiquio" in rizal, and "bagui-bagui" in capiz, and s. erectus, are used for mats. s. grossus is not a very suitable material for industrial purposes, its distinctly three-cornered stalk being too coarse in texture and too large to permit of weaving even a fair grade article. s. erectus is much better. the stalk is about as fine as tikug and grows to a height of cm. the flowers sometimes occur in a solitary cluster, but more often from to clusters of spikelets are found on the side of the stalk near its top. the plant is widely distributed in the philippines and inhabits open grass lands. it bears some flowers throughout the year. as yet only coarse mats are made from it, but its general appearance would warrant experiments along the lines of the processes by which tikug is treated. the only native names noted are "tayoc-tayoc" and "tikug" by which names the plant is known in occidental negros. these names, however, are more properly applied to other plants. scirpus mucronatus is somewhat like s. erectus in general appearance. the stem of s. mucronatus is more robust and coarser in texture and attains a height of cm. its dried stem has an average width of to mm., while that of s. erectus measures from to mm. the flowers of s. mucronatus appear in a very dense head on the side of the plant from to cm. from the top. each head is made up of from to spikelets. these spikelets are from to mm. long, while those of s. erectus are never more than cm. in length. the coarser stalk of s. mucronatus makes it a less desirable mat material than s. erectus. in the ilocos provinces a very coarse round sedge called tiker (scirpus lacustris) occurs. it may be of value if split and dried in the sun so that it curls up into a round straw. the genus cyperus includes a number of economic plants, among them the chinese matting sedge. the species most used in the philippines is c. malaccensis. this plant has an underground stem which, as it continues its growth, sends out new stalks. the plant lives for a number of years and when fully grown is from . to . meters high. the stem is stout and three-sided in shape. it has few or no leaves, and when present the leaves are not more than cm. long. from to leaf-like stems (bracts) not more than cm. long occur under the inflorescence. the spikelets which make up the inflorescence are somewhat crowded together; they are very narrow, from to cm. long. the plant occurs in the philippines in brackish swamps and along tidal streams. it is also found in tropical africa, asia, the islands of polynesia, and australia. it is usually in flower from july to december. it was formerly made into mats and hats and is even now utilized in rare instances in weaving them, but it is most important as a material for slippers, and possibly for matting. of the species of fimbristylis found only in warm regions, two are of economic importance in the philippines, while one more might perhaps be tried out as a mat material. all the species of fimbristylis have tufted, fibrous or woody stems. the leaves occur near the base. the inflorescence consists of a great number of flowers grouped closely together to form one or more spikelets. the spikelets themselves may be either solitary or clustered. the individual flowers are covered by glumes and are arranged spirally on the axis. as the fruit matures, the glumes of the flowers become the "chaff" of the grain. tikug. this sedge (fimbristylis utilis) grows usually more than a meter long and has tufted stems which are shiny and smooth in appearance and average about mm. in diameter. the stems may have long leaves at the base or may be entirely leafless, and are usually four- or five-sided immediately under the inflorescence. the general appearance of the stalk is round. the plant has few or no underground root-like stems. the flowers are densely clustered together to form spikelets, dusky brown in color, measuring mm. by mm. in the visayas it is generally known as tikug. in agusan and surigao it is called "anahiwan" and in bukidnon "sudsud". sometimes it is called tayoc-tayoc in confusion with the smaller sedge more properly known by that name, which much resembles tikug. a specimen from pampanga was labeled "muta". tikug grows in greatest profusion and reaches its highest economic importance in parts of mindanao, bohol, leyte, and samar. to a less degree, it is found and utilized on negros and panay. while it is found in cebu, it is not used there. as a recognized industrial plant, therefore, its distribution is confined to the visayas and mindanao. its appearance in pampanga would indicate that it may be found in other regions in which its value in hand-weaving and in the making of matting is not understood. [ ] tikug is utilized in making hats, mats, matting, slippers and various minor articles. samar mats. gathering the straw. the best known tikug mats are produced on the island of samar, where the sedge grows wild. [ ] it has never been cultivated there. different grades are recognized in the height and width of the straw. the finest is / mm. in diameter while the largest straws are fully four times that width. full grown stalks sometimes reach meters in height, but the average is / meters. in most places in samar only very coarse tikug is found and this is especially true in the northern half of the island. the best material grows near the towns of basey and sulat, a circumstance probably due to the fact that most of these sedges are pulled up for weaving before they become old and coarse, for it is in these two towns that the mat industry of samar is centered. all grades of tikug can be used in making mats; but as the straw cannot be split into finer pieces, it is only from the narrower material that the fine mats are made. the map on the distribution of tikug shows the regions in samar in which this sedge occurs. [ ] bleaching. in some parts of samar rough mats are made from tikug dried in the shade. in basey and sulat bleached straw is used. in the bleaching process only the sun is used, the bundles being spread out where there is neither grass nor shade. the straw must be kept perfectly dry at all times, for if it becomes wet or damp it will mildew and turn an unsightly black or brown. in the morning it must not be put out until the ground is dry and in the evening it should be taken in before dew is formed upon it. the best results are obtained by drying the material in a place where there is no grass, as the turf generally holds considerable moisture and retards the process. with proper care clean white straw can be obtained in about one week under the most favorable conditions. sometimes, but not often, the above process is preceded by boiling the straw for ten or twenty minutes in plain water. several bleaching experiments have already been made with tikug, but as yet none has been entirely successful. in one experiment straw was boiled in alum, but the resultant material was not so white as that obtained by simply drying it in the sun. boiling green tikug in water containing acetic acid from the juice of limes and lemons was unsatisfactory. the best straw obtained was that produced by simply boiling the green stalk for a few minutes in water and rinsing it well and then drying in the sunshine for several days. the straws are of different lengths and diameters; after bleaching they must be sorted. the seed clusters are removed and the bunches are tied in a big bundle which is laid on the floor with root toward the worker. the longer straws of small diameter are then pulled out and placed in small bundles, the process continuing until the several different grades are thus separated and nothing remains but a few short thick straws which are kept for embroidering designs. each bundle is then trimmed by cutting off the roots and ragged tops and the straw is ready for storing, dyeing, or flattening. if tikug remains in a damp place it will mold and become worthless. it is easily kept during the dry season, if frequently exposed to the sun. during the rainy season it should be wrapped in a blanket or cloth. dyeing. very few uncolored straws are used in samar mats. the dyed material is more durable and does not mildew as readily as the uncolored straws. tikug dyes easily and this is probably one of the reasons why the mats of samar have so much color. the cost of the dye in a basey mat is no small part of the total expense of production. consequently it is necessary to employ a cheap dye. for instance, one of the best commercial dyes known in manila was used with great success on samar mats, but the value of the coloring material consumed in making them was greater than their selling price. the dye used in making the cheapest of samar mats costs the weavers about centavos while the more elaborate products need as much as centavos worth of dye to color them. a common mat containing centavos worth of dyestuff sells for about a peso. [ ] the colors obtained by the basey mat weavers have a greater variety of shades and tints than those produced by any other workers in the philippines on tikug or any other mat material. the shades and tints depend upon two considerations: ( ) the amount of dyestuffs used and ( ) the length of time the boiling process is continued. four dyestuffs are used. yellows are obtained from turmeric; greens and reds are obtained from coal-tar dyes; and a red-orange from deora. the leaves of the latter plant are crushed and the pulpy mass thus obtained is boiled to yield the dye fluid. by combining these four dye materials in different proportions, by using varying amounts of the material, and by boiling varying lengths of time, different colors, shades and tints are obtained. the method of dyeing is as follows: the bunches of tikug are coiled and placed in a can of hot dye, where they are boiled from two to ten minutes, or until the desired intensity has been secured. the more the straw is boiled, the more nearly permanent will be the color and the greater will be its intensity. care must be taken to see that the dye fluid is not too strong; otherwise the color will be too intense. in order that the material may be evenly colored, the tikug is submerged in the dye so that it is well covered and is turned over several times during the process. after the coils are removed they should be laid upon the ground or floor, allowed to cool, and then hung in the shade to dry. flattening. the straws composing the bleached or dyed bundles of material are stiff and uneven; some are bent and others are round. the process of flattening them and making them more pliable is carried on during damp days, in the morning or evening, for if done in the open air on cloudless days, or at any time when the atmosphere is dry, the straw becomes brittle and breaks. however, climatic conditions may be overcome by wrapping the straw in banana leaves or damp cloth for an hour or more and then working it where no breeze can dry it out. no water should be applied. the workers employ the usual blunt-edged, ruler-like piece of wood; between this and the thumb the straw is drawn by the free hand. this process flattens the straw and makes it pliable so that it does not split during weaving. the weaving of samar mats. up to three years ago tikug was but little used in samar except for weaving mats. commercially, mat weaving was confined to sulat and basey. since the american occupation it has been widely done and the work has been introduced into most of the schools. not only have methods been greatly improved but new uses have been found for the material. to-day the sedge is woven into floor and wall mats, hats, table mats, slippers, book-bags, hand-bags, necktie cases, pencil holders, pencil cases, and pillow and cushion covers. recently the weaving of matting on looms has been undertaken in the schools and a fine product, similar to the matting of japan, has been produced on the ordinary loom adjusted to the straw. the chief use of tikug in samar is in the weaving of mats in the towns of basey and sulat. since time immemorial tikug mats have been woven in samar. at palapag, oras, dolores, taft, balangiga, santa rita, gandara, oquendo, and catarman, a few rough ones, the product of unskilled workmen, were made, but they were of no commercial importance, since the people did not weave enough to supply their own demand. as far back as can now be traced, the people of basey and sulat have been making mats for the provincial and interprovincial trade. since the people of dolores, oras, santa rita, and balangiga have improved in weaving and are now producing a few mats for the market. their work is much inferior to that of basey and sulat. in the year basey produced about , mats and sulat about . the latter town could have increased its production greatly, but its remoteness from the market and from the routes of commerce reduces the large demand which might otherwise exist for the mats. basey is better situated in these respects; moreover, the people have been forced to fall back on mat weaving as their chief means of support, for typhoons have destroyed their coconuts and abaca, and their rice crop is scant. almost every night mat weavers are found at work in many of the houses. several years ago, when american soldiers were stationed in the vicinity of the town, there grew up a great demand for mats, and the weavers, taking advantage of their need and their little knowledge of values in the philippines, demanded exorbitant prices and received them. most of the basey people spent their time producing mats, and to a great extent sacrificed quality for quantity. the grade of mat that sold for p several years ago can now be bought for about p ; that which sold for p two years ago can be bought to-day for p . lately there has been a rise in price owing to increased commercial demand. mats made to order, particularly special mats, cost more than those bought already woven, the price depending upon the size of the article, the character of the design, and the fineness of the straw and the weave. a mat two meters by one meter, made of the finest grade of tikug, would require several months for completion and would probably cost between p and p . there is hardly a limit to the size of the mat which can be woven. three years ago one having dimensions of meters by meters was made for a church, as many as women working on it at the same time. basey mats are of two general kinds: those with plaid designs woven in and those on which the designs are embroidered. the former are the more difficult to weave; but as there is no decoration to be added, they are the cheapest mats obtainable, the prices for the ordinary grades ranging from p . to p each. some weavers turn out only blank mats of one color and do neither designing nor decorating. straw used on these is usually dyed, very few mats of natural colors being made. they are worth from p . to p each and are generally sold to girls who are skillful in embroidering designs. these girls decorate the mats and sell them for from p . to p each, the price depending upon the original cost of the mat and the amount of decoration put upon it. the ideas for the designs on basey mats are usually obtained from pictures or textiles. the straws, both bleached and dyed, are split in two for embroidering purposes. this makes them thinner and more pliable. the time necessary for making a plaid mat sold for two pesos was found to be as follows, an eight-hour day being used as the basis of a day's work: days. gathering tikug . dyeing tikug . flattening tikug . weaving mat . ---- total time . the selling price of the mat was one peso, the cost of the dye centavos, which left the weaver a balance of centavos for five days' labor. the plaids used in basey mats are simple, but the embroidered designs are extremely intricate. they consist for the most part of foliage, flowers, and animals. weavers are often given a contract to make a stated number of mats in accordance with a design furnished them. a few are capable of reproducing almost any pattern presented, [ ] but if they are not told exactly what colors to use they employ every shade, color and tint they can secure. the basey mats are distinguished by the multitude of colors used. in general it may be stated that the chief criticism of this product is the gaudy effect produced by the colors used. in some cases the colors are well toned and harmoniously combined, but the majority of the mats produced contain vivid colors which are not all harmonious. through the schools, efforts have been made to reduce the number of colors and to modify the gaudy and complicated floral designs. an improvement is seen each year. the ordinary mat is usually about meters by / meters, though smaller and larger ones are made. during the past three years the weavers have been encouraged to make mats about the size of an ordinary cot and to use no more than two colors in weaving them. a few mats suitable for placing under dining tables are also made. sulat weavers produce fewer mats than those of basey but make them of fine, closely woven straw. most of the mats with a woven-on border come from sulat. these people, while able to produce a fine, soft, pliable mat, can not embroider decorations on them nearly so well as do the people of basey. samar mats wear well. wall mats last indefinitely and sleeping mats are used from two to ten years or more. [ ] the marketing of basey mats. the port of tacloban, leyte, due to its proximity to basey, is the chief center for the distribution of samar mats. as soon as the mats are completed the weavers take them across the straits to tacloban, where they are sold to chinese brokers, transients and residents, both american and native. few ships leave tacloban that do not carry away from to mats; often they take away as many as , the amount generally depending upon the number of passengers aboard the boat. some of the ship's employees are regular customers of the weavers and buy mats at stated prices to sell them again at a reasonable profit at manila and other ports of call. besides, there is quite a sale of mats in the towns of samar, leyte, and cebu through vendors, residents of basey, who secure the mats in their home town at low prices and sell them at a profit. these persons usually deal only in the mats, and sell them for cash, not trading for other articles. plaid basey mats are on sale in nearly all the chinese general merchandise stores of manila. as yet there is little supervision by brokers in basey. the mat industry there needs but the introduction of some system of supervision by brokers to regulate the size, quality, design and color scheme of the mats, and a foreign market to become a much more extended industry. the schools have already done much toward improving workmanship and design; it must remain for individual enterprise, however, to get in touch with foreign demand and supervise the weaving of mats to suit it. [ ] bohol mats. [ ] tikug mats are made in large numbers in bohol. the straw for the most part is finer than that used in samar and the patterns are chiefly stripes and checks. very little embroidering is attempted. bohol mats are used principally for sleeping purposes. in northern bohol there is scarcely a family that has not three or more large mats, which are rolled up and laid away during the day time and are unrolled upon the floor at night for a bed. they are durable and last for years. large sleeping mats may be purchased in quantities as high as to during the sunday market day in talibon or on the saturday market day in ypil, a barrio of the same town. in price they range from one to three pesos each. the second use of bohol mats is for decorating walls, tables, and floors. those so employed are smaller than the sleeping mats, usually square, but sometimes round. more care is exercised in their weaving and only fine young straws are used. the preparation of the straw and the dyeing are done with great care. mats of the best quality are quite difficult to secure and the schools have recently been encouraging their production. as in other regions, the tikug from which bohol mats are made, grows wild in the rice fields after the harvest. it is found in abundance in northern bohol in the municipalities of getafe, talibon and ubay, and sparingly in other towns of the island (see map). the straws are gathered from the field by pulling them, thus breaking them off at the roots, and they are tied into bundles about decimeters in circumference and sold in the market. the largest market for such bundles is found in the barrio of ypil in the municipality of talibon. the price is usually about centavos per bundle. from two to four of these bundles are required to make a mat. the tikug is not kept in the original bundles longer than one or two days, for it will turn black. the material is usually separated into two parts, one to be dyed, the other to be bleached. that to be dyed is spread in the sun and thoroughly dried for one or two days, care being taken that rain does not fall upon it and blacken it. the other part is boiled in a solution of acetic acid for twenty minutes, after which it is thoroughly dried in the sun and thus bleached. the natural dyes used in bohol for coloring tikug are dauda and turmeric. the former produces permanent colors, the latter fugitive ones. the artificial dyes bought at chinese stores are also used in producing shades and tints of green, violet and ruby which are satisfactory. in general, those in crystal form have proven more satisfactory than the powder dyes. before dyeing, the sheath-like leaf is pulled from the bottom of each straw and the material is looped into small bundles. often the straws are dampened with water. dyeing is usually done in a -gallon petroleum can two-thirds full of water, heated to boiling. if the artificial dyes are used the powder is stirred in and dissolved and the bundles of tikug are then pressed down into the liquid so that all the material is well covered. a stone is often laid upon the straws so as to keep them down in the boiling dye. it usually requires about twenty minutes to obtain the desired shade, which is nearly always a deep one. where fresh dauda leaves are employed, about pounds are placed in the water and boiled a few minutes before the tikug is put in. if dried leaves are used about one pound is soaked in cold water for a few minutes and the whole mass is then added to the boiling water. turmeric roots are pounded in a mortar and then added to the boiling water, after which the tikug is added. all the dyes noted are combined to produce other colors and varying shades. during the process of dyeing, the straw should be turned and moved about in the boiling water to insure an even color. the straw should never be boiled too long, or it will be cooked and become tender and weak. after the straw has taken on the shade desired, it is removed from the can and thrown on the ground. when the bundles are cool enough to be handled, they are untied and the straws spread out to dry, preferably in the shade. after it is thoroughly dried the material is rebundled and thus kept for weaving. before weaving, the straws are flattened by drawing each one separately between the edge of the knife and the heel of the weaver's foot or the sole of the chinela. damp days are best for this process. weaving is done under the house or under trees. evenings and nights are most suitable for this work on account of the dampness of the atmosphere. the embroidered mats of bohol are decorated with split straws. the mats of bohol are bought by traders who exchange cloth and other goods for them. these men carry them to the towns of bohol which do not produce mats, and to other islands, where they sell or exchange them at a good profit. when once the supply of mats on hand has been bought up in a mat producing town, several months elapse before the market there is replenished by a new supply. after completing a mat, the weaver has no immediate desire to begin another. it is quite probable that the output of mats could be increased considerably if the market and the price were better. it is estimated that the weavers earn not more than centavos per day at the industry. other tikug mats. tikug also grows in large quantities in leyte. its chief use there is in the weaving of matting on a crude loom, an adaptation of the common textile loom. tikug is apparently generally used throughout surigao in making mats. the best mats of this region come from the upper agusan and the island of dinagat. they are usually made for local consumption, though the people of dinagat exchange their mats with bohol traders. the sedge grows in great abundance in the lake of talacogon near the town of the same name in agusan. tikug is also found in many parts of the moro province. it abounds in the swamp lands of the lanao region, from which mats are exported via iligan. if it is to be colored, the straws are soaked in water for about two days, after which they are cooked in the boiling dye. bleached straw is prepared by exposing it to the sun, after which the material is polished and flattened at the same time by rubbing the stalks with ashes, between the fingers. the cultivation of tikug. the question of the cultivation of tikug is one of considerable importance. it is a well known fact that the finest leghorn hat straw is produced in italy by sewing wheat closely and reaping the straw before the grain ripens. the best mat straws of china and japan are produced from cultivated sedges. the bureau of education is therefore encouraging experiments in the cultivation of tikug, but as yet these have not been extensive enough to determine whether the sedge can be propagated for industrial purposes. there are no data as to cost. a quantity of seed was procured and forwarded to various parts of the islands in which tikug had not been reported as growing. these were sent out to various persons with the idea of determining ( ) soils suitable to the plant, ( ) whether it could be cultivated in the rice paddies between harvest and planting, ( ) how closely the seeds should be planted, ( ) how old the plants should be at harvest. [ ] no results have as yet been obtained from the seeds so sent out. fair results, however, have been realized in samar, where approximately , stalks were grown to the square foot in very rich soil fertilized with manure secured from the military stables. the straws obtained were meters long. it was found that the thicker the seeds are planted the finer and longer are the straws obtained. reports differ as to whether tikug should be considered a pest or not. in leyte it is stated that it grows in the rice fields along with the rice crop and appreciably diminishes the crop. there it is a weed pest; in samar it is not so considered. in bohol one teacher states that the plant is not a pest as it will not grow in dry localities, and hence does not interfere with crops. where it is found in the rice paddies, a covering of earth will easily destroy it. it does not scatter quickly, for, while the roots will grow if transplanted, the sedge is mostly propagated by seeds and these are distributed principally by water and not by wind. no great chances are taken in planting tikug. on the other hand, some teachers state that the seeds are scattered by the wind and that the roots impede the plowing of the fields. it is probable that where the tikug obtains a good foothold on irrigated rice land it proves a considerable annoyance to farmers; but its growth as a pest can be regulated by plowing. tayoc-tayoc. this plant, f. diphylla, one of the most widely distributed of all sedges, is found at all altitudes up to , meters throughout the warm regions of the world. the stems may be smooth or hairy and the leaves one-third to two-thirds as long as the stem. f. diphylla is generally smaller than f. utilis. its stem is only mm. in diameter. the flowers, densely clustered into spikelets, are generally of two colors--straw and brown. they reach cm. in length and mm. in diameter. below the spikelet the stem has from to sides. the roots are fibrous; underground stems may occur, but they are never more than . cm. long. this plant is known as tayoc-tayoc in iloilo, capiz, and occidental negros. it is reported from pampanga and is called "tab-tabin" in zambales. the straw produced by tayoc-tayoc is much finer but considerably stiffer than that from tikug, and cannot be considered so good an industrial material. nevertheless, it is used to some extent in the production of hats and mats, especially in the provinces of iloilo and capiz. in dumalag, capiz province, hats are of considerable importance. mats of tayoc-tayoc are reported as made in banate and janiuay, iloilo province, but this has not yet been verified. as with tikug, seeds of tayoc-tayoc were obtained and distributed among various provinces to determine whether the propagation of the straw was practicable and if the cultivation of the plant would result in a better material. as yet no definite results have been obtained. a rush straw. but one rush straw has been brought to the attention of the bureau of education; it is the japanese matting rush, juncus effusus. this species is distributed over a large part of the globe, being the candle rush of europe and the common plant of wet ground in the united states. in japan it is made into beautiful mattings, the handsomest and most costly produced. the pith is also employed for lamp wicks, and probably the "timsim" imported from china and used in oil lamps in the philippines is obtained from this plant. juncus effusus has no native name in the philippines. it is found throughout the mountain province and in the apo region of mindanao. it attains a height of almost meters where soil and moisture conditions are favorable. the stalk is cylindrical and at the end tapers to a point. it is from to mm. in diameter. the flowers grow in a bunch on the side of the stalk near the top and are light brown in color. at the present time this rush is not utilized in the philippines, though it is probable that it can be used in the weaving of many articles. if split, a flat straw is obtained by removing the pith. embroidered mat designs. [ ] it is better not to decorate a mat at all than to have the design ill fitting. design is the pleasing arrangement of all spaces unfilled as well as filled. decoration is for beauty wholly. if all the spaces are not well arranged, the design is not beautiful. if the design is startling or gaudy in color, it is not beautiful. if the arrangement of colors is inharmonious, the design is not beautiful. all mats cannot be in the same proportion and suitable for all designs. plate lxv, for instance, shows a long design; it requires a long mat, and would not look well on a square one. all mats here considered are about / inch to / inch in width of straw. some of the designs are used exactly as they are, counting a straw for a square which represents a straw in the design; the others are double in size and contain four times as many squares in the weave as in the design. in such cases twice the count of the design will always give the right number for the weave. in circular mats the directions are given in inches. the sizes of the mats should be taken into consideration, but a variance of a few inches will not matter if that variance always makes the mat larger rather than smaller. in these mats more is left to the judgment of the weaver than in rectangular mats. designs should never be crowded on circular mats. repeated groups should always be made exactly alike. in the color notes, a series of colors set off by commas indicates that each series may be used alone for the whole design. often the deep colors, especially no. , have been left out, as the effect of a very dark color on a very light mat is often startling. designs on mats or hangings should not be more conspicuous than the mat itself, but should rather present a complete and harmonious appearance when both mat and design are considered as a whole. circular mats. design a. the straws of a circular mat cannot be counted and then divided equally by numbers, as straws are continually added at irregular intervals as the circumference is being reached. hence, the only way to place designs on a mat of this kind is by dividing the whole mat with a diameter through its center. fold the mat and make a crease at the edges or mark a diameter through it with a pencil; at right angles to this diameter draw another through the same center, and the mat will now be divided into equal quadrants. the quadrants may again be divided and subdivided, and marked by pencil or with strings. in design a the mat is about inches in diameter. in a mat of this size there would be units in the circle with a margin of - / inches from the outer edge of the outer border line to the circumference of the mat. divide the mat into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths, and measure with strings. each sixteenth contains three units. divide this space into three equal parts. now embroider in each third one exact unit. in weaving in the unit, always commence on its outer edge; then if any slight variation of space has occurred, the irregularity will not be noticeable, as it will be in the line work of the unit, and not in its solid part. each unit made in working as suggested from the outer edge inward will begin the other half of a solid figure already commenced. notice the part of the design which has been marked off as one unit, and adhere to that arrangement. this design may be placed on a mat inches in diameter, or inches in diameter making each figure with twice as many straws as in the first. in ticug mats of natural straw, this design may be done in the following colors: no. , , , , , , , or . ( and should not be used on sabutan.) no. , with a solid diamond and outer border line in no. . no. , , , or , with outer border line extending to edge of mat. design b. in design b, the mat should be inches in diameter. in each sixteenth of the mat, as in design a, three units can be spaced. note the unit marked off in the design and use only this unit; weave its two outer solid parts first, with the irregularities of space occurring in the open part of the unit. [ ] mats woven for this design should be or inches in diameter. in mats of the latter size the numbers of straws are all doubled. in mats of natural straw, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , or . ( should not be used on sabutan.) circular fish design. this design calls for the division of a circular mat into sixths or twelfths, according to the size of the mat. the diameters of mats for this design may be, (about feet); ( feet); ( feet); and straws ( feet). to divide a circle into sixths, mark off the circumference into distances equal to / of the diameter. in a mat of straws diameter, make the outside border line one inch from the edges of the mat. about inches inside of the outer border line, weave another border line one-half inch wide. midway between these two border lines, measure and mark the space for the center fish, making it counts long, on the left and on the right of the dividing line. measure spaces on the other five dividing lines to locate the central fish of each group. after weaving these central fish, go back to the first group, estimate and mark the place for the upper fish and the lower fish, and weave them, making each of the same size and proportion as the central fish, as shown in the design. in mat , as noted above, the border lines and all the fish are the same size as in mat . in mat all measurements are the same as in the above mats, except that the circle is divided into twelfths instead of sixths, making twice as many groups of fish. in mat the outer border line is inches from the edge of the mat instead of inch and is / inches thick. the other measurements are the same as in mat . in mats of natural straw, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , or . ( should not be used on sabutan.) gecko design. mats woven for this design should be of the following diameters: ( feet); ( feet); straws ( feet). divide the circle into sixths, then into twelfths. weave a border band on the edge of the mat / inch wide. this band is not in the design but will come outside, and reach to the circumference line in the design. down one of the twelve dividing lines, inside the border band, measure off / inches and weave a gecko, half on one side and half on the other side of the line, extending the tail about / inches toward the center of the mat. weave the two on each side of this gecko, and the four above it. now space and weave the other five groups. each group contains seven figures. the only difference in the larger mats will be in the spacing between the tails. the groups should be spaced the same as before. in ticug mats of natural straw, the following colors may be used: no. with band of no. . no. with band of no. . no. with band of no. . (no. should not be used on sabutan.) no. (singly) , , , , , or . geometric design f. the distance from a (the corner of the mat) to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from d to h is ; from h to i is ; from e to f is ; and from f to g is . count from a to b. weave from b to c and on around the entire mat. count from c to d and weave corner d h j e l. weave all of the four corner designs exactly like d h j e l. count from e to f and weave the two inner border lines around the entire mat. now count from h to i and mark similar points across one side. weave from h to i. weave from i to the next point ( counts distant) the exact design between h and i. weave at each point marked. complete all four sides in a similar manner. mats woven for this design should be made in the following sizes: by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is ; by --from a to b is ; by --from a to b is (double count); by --from a to b is (double count). in the last two sizes make the design twice as large as the count; that is, a b should be , b c should be , c d should be , etc. in mats of natural color straw, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , , , or , each alone. ( and should not be used on sabutan.) geometric design v. the distance from the corner of the mat a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to f is ; from d to e is ; from f to g is ; from l to m is ; from c to n is ; from n to o is ; from f to p is ; and from p to q is . count from a to b. at b weave the corner double square and continue on at fd to ge. now weave the double square g h j e. next weave the double squares in all four corners of the mat. now count from p to q and mark. in the same way mark all the centers of the squares along the outer border line from corner to corner. weave these squares, then the lines joining them. weave down from l to m and continue the design on the inner border line, making double lines like l m as the weaving progresses. mats woven for this design should be of the following sizes: by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws. in straw mats of natural color, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , or . geometric design x. the distance from a (corner of mat) to b is straws (counting the fold at a); from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from g to h is ; from h to i is ; and from j to l is . count from a to b and weave border line around the entire mat. count from b to c and weave c d and over to j, back to h, over to k and back to c. weave inner part of corner design. weave inner border line at i entirely around the mat. weave all four corner designs. mark off j l, and l m, and m n, etc., until the corner is reached, making l m, m n, etc., each equal to j l. weave all designs on side now spaced off. space off and mark each side of the mat, before weaving. weave all sides, completing the mat. mats woven for this design should be in the following sizes: by ; by ; by ; by . in mats of uncolored straw, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , , or . ( and should not be used on sabutan.) geometric design z. the distance from the corner a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from g to h is ; from d to k is ; from k to l is ; from l to m is ; and from i to j is . count down from a to b and weave the border lines b c around the entire mat. count from c to d and weave the outer square of the corner figure. complete the corner figure to i and n. count from f to g and weave g h around the entire mat. complete all four corner designs. count from i to j and mark. from j count a distance equal to i j and mark. make similar marks until the corner is reached. weave the design i l m j between all these marks. space off each side of the mat in the same way and finish the design on all sides. mats woven for this design should be of the following sizes: by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws; by --from a to b is straws. on mats of uncolored straw, the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , , or . ( should not be used on sabutan.) no. for border lines and the four large spots in the side of each square; no. for the remainder of the design. no. with spots and border lines of no. . large banca design. [ ] distance from corner a to b is straws; from b to c, ; from b to g, ; from g to s, ; from c to d, ; from d to e, ; and from d to f, . begin weaving at letter b and weave the outer border line around the entire mat. next weave the inside border line beginning at d. after finishing the border lines, weave all four corner designs. count from c to h, straws; from h to i, ; from i to j, ; from j to k, ; from l to m, ; and from n to o, . now weave from o to p. from p to q is straws, and from p to r is straws. mats woven for this design should be: by ; by ; by ; by . in the last mat, by , g to s is instead of . on ticug mats of natural straw this design may be embroidered in the following colors: no. , , , or , solid. no. with border lines of no. (except on sabutan). no. with border lines of no. . chick design. the distance from a to b is straws (count first fold); from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from h to i is ; and from g to j is . count down from corner a to b and weave the corner design. now weave all four corner designs. begin at f and weave the inner border line entirely around the mat. count from f to g and weave the design above g. count from h to i and weave the second design. now count from g to j and weave the figure above j exactly like the figure above g. mats woven for this design should be by , by , by , or by straws. the last mat has a change in margin, and the distance from a to b is straws. this mat may be embroidered in the following colors: no. , , , or . orchid design. the distance from the corner a to b is straws; from b to c, ; from c to d, ; from d to e, ; from e to f, ; from c to f, ; from f to g, ; from g to h, ; from m to n, ; from f to m, ; from m to k, ; and from k to j, . begin weaving at b and weave the outside border line around the entire mat. next count from c to f and weave the inside border line. now weave all four corner designs. count from f to m, then up to k, and weave from k to j. [ ] to find the position of the next design count straws beyond l along the inner border line, and then up the same distance as l k. mats woven for this design should be by ; by ; by ; and by straws. in mat by , a b is straws. in mats of natural color straw, the following colors may be used in the designs: no. , , , or solid. no. with flowers of no. and border lines of no. except on sabutan. no. with flowers of no. and border lines of no. . woman carrying clothes design. the distance from a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from i to j is ; from b to e is ; from e to k is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; and from g to h is . count from a, the corner of the mat, to b. at b begin to weave the border line. weave first to e, then entirely around the mat. now count from c to d and weave the inner border line entirely around the mat. next, weave in the four corner designs. count from e to f, then down to g. from g to h is straws. now weave the first two designs on the side and then the next two, and so on. mats woven for this design should be by ; by ; by ; or by . on all of these mats the design will look better if twice the size of the pattern. therefore all the above distances will be double, or as follows: a to b, straws; b to c, ; b to e, ; e to f, ; c to d, straws; i to j, ; e to k, ; f to g, . in mat by , e to k is and a to b is (already double). in mat by , from a (corner of mat) to b is , making e to k straws (already doubled). this design in ticug straw will work up well in no. solid; in no. solid; in no. solid; in no. with no. as inner and outer border line, or with no. as inner and outer border line. this design on sabutan straw may be made in no. solid; in no. solid; in no. solid; in no. solid; in no. with no. for border lines; in no. with no. for border lines; or in no. with no. for border lines. this design will work up well in the following colors: no. , , , or . lavandera design. the distance from a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from g to h is ; from d to i is ; from i to j is ; from i to k is ; from k to o is ; from o to l is ; from l to m is ; and from m to n is . count down from a to b and mark b and c. place similar marks at the three other corners of the mat. weave the border line around the entire mat, touching the marked points. count from c to g, mark, and do the same in the other three corners. weave g h around the mat, touching the marked points at the corners. count from c to d and over to i, and weave i j. weave the whole figure just started, and the figure facing it, including the ground line beneath. weave the other corners in a similar manner. at k count to o, back to l, over to m, and weave the figure beneath m. mark off l m and m n. now continue marking alternately across the side spaces equal to l m and m n, making the last space equal to l m. weave the figure between these marks and continue marking and weaving in the same way on the other sides. mats woven for this design should be made: by ; by ; by (units double size); by . in ticug mats of natural straw the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , , or , solid. ( should not be used on sabutan.) man with bow and arrow design. the distance from a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from g to h is / ; from h to i is ; from j to k is ; from i to l is ; and from l to m is / . count from a to b. at b weave the border band around the entire mat. count from c to f ( ) and weave the inner border line around the entire mat. now weave all four corner designs. count from g to h and up to i, and weave the two figures. to place the next two figures, which are exactly like the two just woven, count out from j, straws, and repeat from k which is the tip of the arrow of the first figure, just made. mats woven for this design should be: by , straws; by , ; by , . in mats by , and by , from a to b is straws. this design in tikug may be worked up in the following colors on natural color straw: solid, no. , , , , or . casa design. the distance from the corner a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; and from f to g is . count down from a to b and weave border line around the entire mat. now count from b to d and from d to e, / straws, and commence weaving the inner border line. when completed, weave in all four corner designs. count from f to g and weave in the next design, and so on. let h i, the steps, be on the left of every casa except the corner ones. mats woven for this design should be by straws; by ; by (double); by (double); or by . in the last three of these, by , by , and by , the counts should all be doubled, the designs being twice the size of those in the first two mats; that is, from a to b will be , b to c, , and so on. tikug mats in natural straw may be embroidered in the following colors: no. for casa, no. for tree, no. for border lines except on sabutan; no. for casa, no. for tree, no. for border lines; and nos. , , , , , , , or , solid; no. should not be used on sabutan. chicken vender design. the distance from the corner a to b is straws, counting the corner fold as . all counts in this design are woven double. therefore from a to b is ; from b to c is by or ; from c to d is ; from e to g is ; from f to h is ; from b to d is ; from g to i is ; and from j to k is . notice that the space on the right of the corner is one less than the space on the left; this will occur on the right and left of each corner. count down from corner a to b and weave a line entirely around the mat. count from b to d and weave the inner border line. now weave the basket in each corner. then weave from g to i and j to k, and so on. mats woven for this design should be: ( ) by ( )--from a to b is straws; ( ) by ( )--from a to b is ; ( ) by ( )--from a to b is ; or by ( )--from a to b is . on tikug mats of natural color this design may be embroidered in the following colors: no. , , , , , , , or . ( should not be used on sabutan). no. with a single straw outline and solid border lines of no. , , or . no. with outlines of no. and baskets and hats of no. , except on sabutan. carabao, cart, and driver design. the distance from a to b is straws, but it must be woven twice that size, making a b equal . all the sizes given below are double the count on the drawings: from a to b is ; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from d to f is ; from a to d is ; from b to i is ; and from g to h is . count from the corner a to b and weave b c. count from a to d and mark off d. count from c to d and test the count. from each corner of the mat make a count similar to a d and mark. weave the border line, commencing at d, around the entire mat, touching the marks at the corners. weave design b c, and a similar design in each remaining corner. count from b to i and weave design i j. at j count and weave another design like i j facing i j. the space between the backs of the carts, not shown on this diagram, is . mats woven for this design should be in the following sizes: by ; by ; by ; by ; or by . in tikug mats of natural color straw the following colors may be used: singly, no. , , , , or ; and no. with border line of no. . rooster design. the distance from the corner a to b is by or (counts in this design are all double); from b to c is by or ; from c to d is by or ; from d to e is by or ; from e to f is by or ; from e to o is ; from o to g is ; from h to j is ; from g to h is by or . count from a to b in all four corners and mark b in each corner. join all the b's by a double border line. at the first b, count down to c and over to d and weave d e. count from e to o and up to g and mark. mark h, counting from g. mark j, counting from h. mark all points similar to h and j on this side of the mat, counting back from the corner a space equal to g b. now weave all designs on this side of the mat. mark off spaces on each side of the mat before weaving that side. mats woven for this design should be by ; by ; or by . in tikug mats of natural color straw the following colors may be used: no. , , , , , or . ( should not be used on sabutan.) no. , cock; no. , comb, (three squares from i to c and two above m); no. , legs and feet; no. , grass and other border line. (on sabutan use no. instead of no. for legs and feet). carabao head design. the distance from a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from d to e is ; from e to f is ; from f to g is ; from g to h is ; from f to i is ; from h to j is ; from i to k is ; from l to m is ; from i to n is ; from n to o is / ; and from i to p is . count from the corner a to b and mark. count the same number in from every corner and mark. at b weave the border line the thickness of b c around the entire mat, intersecting the marks at the other three corners. count c d and weave the corner design d g. count from g to h and mark. count from b to h and see if the mark is correct. mark off b h in the other three corners and weave the border line h j around the entire mat. now weave the other three corner designs. count from f to i and mark. count from i to k and mark. from k on, mark off distances like i k along this side of the mat until the last point is reached. the remaining space to the point similar to f will equal i f. now weave the intervening designs, and complete the mat. mats woven for this design should be of the following sizes: by ; by ; by ; or by . in tikug mats of natural color straw the following colors may be used: no. , carabao and all border lines; no. , grasses. no. , , , , or . fishtail palm design. this is an "all over" design. the unit counts are as follows: from a to b is straws; from b to c is ; from c to d is ; from e to f is ; from e to g is . from the corner of the mat, a, on the long edge, count down to b. at b count in to c. mark c o d e f and weave the design. from d count , and a point similar to c will be reached. weave the same pattern again. from f count , and a point similar to e will be reached. weave the same pattern again. measuring as at the first corner a, mark off spaces and weave all three other corner designs. weave all intervening designs, first between corners on the sides of the mat, then on the interior. mats woven for this design should be: by ; by ; by ; by . in tikug mats of natural straw, the following colors may be used separately, not in combination: no. , , , , , , or . notes [ ] banig, petate, ikamen, dase. [ ] meaning coarse stuff. [ ] bayones, bayong, canastro, banyot. [ ] the bureau of education has taken steps to procure a series of dyes suited to each one of the mat straws and other important fibers used in household industries and industrial instruction in the philippines. [ ] a tint is a paler or less intense tone than the standard color. a shade is a darker, more intense tone of the standard color. [ ] bulletin no. of the bureau of education, entitled "philippine hats." [ ] this office is indebted to mr. e. d. merrill, botanist, bureau of science, manila, p. i., for placing at its disposal an unpublished manuscript on the flora of manila. information from the following sources is also acknowledged: engler and prantl: das pflanzenreich. hooker's flora of british india, . blanco's flora de filipinas, . the sugar and alcohol produced by the palms are discussed by dr. h. d. gibbs in the journal of science, manila, vol. vi, sec. a, no. . hats are also discussed by mr. c. b. robinson in the same journal, vol. vi, sec. c, no. . [ ] buri (in most localities), buli or búle, silag, ebus. [ ] it is probable that some of the double moro mats which will be described under the heading "pandan straws" are woven from buri straw. [ ] due to the efforts of elmer d. merrill and a. d. e. elmer, botanists of manila, aided by prof. martelli, of florence, italy, our knowledge of philippine pandans has been greatly broadened. it is hoped that interested persons into whose hands this paper may come will help to extend it by sending specimens of pandans for identification to the bureau of education, manila. such specimens should consist of the ripe fruit and of at least two full-grown leaves from which no spines or tips have been removed, and which have been cut as close as possible to the stem. [ ] bulletin no. , bureau of education. journal of science, manila, vol. vi, sec. c, no. . [ ] to settle, if possible, the question of whether sabutan flowers and fruits, inquiries and investigations on the ground were made in tanay and pililla by a representative of the general office of the bureau of education. the people interviewed in these towns were positive in their statements that they had never seen the fruit of this pandan though they did remember seeing the flower. every possible effort was made to get accurate, reliable information. an old man was engaged as guide and a male inflorescence of sabutan was found in a patch located on a hillside, under the shade of trees and surrounded by considerable underbrush. the patch, according to the statement of the old man was older than he could remember; the age of the guide was, perhaps, between sixty and seventy years. the flowers were odorous and covered with small brown insects almost hiding the inflorescence. [ ] plain double pandan mats, the material of which resembles sabutan, are imported from singapore and sold by chinese storekeepers in manila in large quantities. they are roughly made and the fact that they are double permits the unfinished edges to be turned under and sewed down with coarse red cotton twine. they sell for a little less than the plain, single, tanay sabutan mats with finished edges. [ ] it is very difficult to obtain definite information with exact figures. these statements were made by a woman expert in weaving mats, and owing to the frank answers to the questions put, her information seems more reliable than that of the usual weaver interviewed. other persons state that from two to six leaves are taken from a plant every month. [ ] three liters equal ganta. [ ] sabutan lends itself easily to the fabrication of pocketbooks useful as purses, card-cases or cigarette-cases. from it can also be made very pretty, strong, durable and useful handbags. the weaving of both of these articles has been taken up in the schools of tanay, but it is not as yet commercial in the town. sets consisting of a handbag and a pocketbook in the same color and design are attractive. [ ] sabutan suckers may be purchased from several firms in manila at p per hundred, freight prepaid. in shipping, the plants are packed in baskets so that they can be easily handled. it is believed by persons who have received shipments from this source that the plants will remain in good condition out of the ground for a week or more during shipment. hence it is not advisable for places more remote than one week from manila to order any of these plants. for further information see circular no. , s. , bureau of education. it is probable that suckers can be obtained from the cultivated plants in about a year after they are set out. [ ] at this writing no data are at hand as to the preparation of sarakat straw, but it is probably made simply by drying. it is possible that much stronger and more pliable straw could be obtained if a process such as is used in the preparation of sabutan were followed. [ ] vol. i, no. of the philippine agriculturist and forester. a description of the plant occurs in mr. a. d. e. elmer's leaflets. [ ] it is probable that the improved andes stripper can be utilized in the cutting of pandan straws. [ ] arrangements are now being made through the schools for the introduction of sabutan plants into the towns of majayjay and luisiana. [ ] most of the information on "karagumoy" is taken from the report submitted to the director of education by mr. ralph e. spencer. [ ] the average was obtained by measuring accurately a number of specimens of the species sent in to the bureau of education from various provinces [ ] its most common name is bariu, spelled also bario, balio, balewe, baleau. in occidental negros it is also called, balean, barog in surigao, batin in capiz. [ ] robinson, in vol. vi, no. , section c of the journal of science, states that this sedge also grows on the eastern side of luzon. [ ] f. meliacea is also known as tikug in samar but it cannot be used in weaving. [ ] in pulling up tikug the whole stalk can generally be obtained by grasping it a short distance below the top. it is made into small bundles and tied a short distance below the seed heads. each bundle contains from forty to sixty straws. in all towns except basey the weavers gather the stalks they use. at basey, however, where weaving of mats is a recognized industry, the straw is obtained from country people who make it a business to gather and sell it. these tikug vendors carry the bundles of green straw to the town, where they sell for from forty centavos to one peso per hundred bundles, depending upon the length of the straws. [ ] the high cost of these dyes results from the adulteration practiced and the exorbitant profits, usually about per cent. it is expected that the new dyes obtained from germany through the bureau of education will make a saving of about per cent to the workers. [ ] the following story is reported as showing the cleverness of the weavers of basey in embroidering designs on mats. an engineer in charge of road construction refused to buy certain mats from a vendor but stated, jokingly, and in order to be rid of the insistent merchant, that if he were brought mats having designs which were of interest to him, as showing scenes connected with his work, he would buy them. in a few weeks the broker returned, bringing with him a large mat on which were displayed a road roller, wheel barrows, shovels, spades and other implements connected with road building, and part of a road itself. [ ] in general it may be stated that the sabutan and tikug mats are the strongest made in the philippines. neither the wearing qualities of the straw nor the permanency of the dyes in buri mats are equal to those of tikug. if tikug floor mats become dirty they may be cleaned without injury if the dyeing was well done. they should be shaken to remove dust and dirt, laid flat on the floor and lightly scrubbed with a cloth, sponge or brush, using lukewarm soapsuds, after which cold water should be thrown on them. they are dried by hanging in the sunshine or the breeze. [ ] a firm has recently entered the field and is doing a mail order business in these mats with the united states. their plans include the furnishing of straw and dyes to the weavers and the weaving of standard designs. [ ] most of the information given under this heading was taken from reports by percy m. jones and frank thomason, formerly supervising teachers of bohol. [ ] circular no. , s. , bureau of education. [ ] based on original designs by mrs. alice brezina. [ ] three units will take up about times , or straws. in starting, a curved pattern straws across will have to be made and slipped up or down in a sixteenth division of the mat in order that the margin space may be determined. [ ] this design, in all cases except where g s is instead of , would look well with the outer border line broadened to the edge of the mat. this is a suggestion only; it means a great deal of work. [ ] weave large solid parts of designs first, when possible, and slight mistakes of one or two straws, which may happen, will then occur in open parts where they will show very little. mistakes of this kind are only allowable in cases of flaws in the mat which is used. bureau of education publications. annual reports: first annual report of the superintendent of public instruction, . (edition exhausted.) second annual report of the general superintendent of public instruction, . (edition exhausted.) third annual report of the general superintendent of education, . (edition exhausted.) fourth annual report of the general superintendent of education, . (edition exhausted.) fifth annual report of the general superintendent of education, . (not issued in printed form.) sixth annual report of the director of education, . seventh annual report of the director of education, . eighth annual report of the director of education, . (supply limited.) ninth annual report of the director of education, . tenth annual report of the director of education, . (supply limited.) eleventh annual report of the director of education, . twelfth annual report of the director of education, . bulletins: . the philippine normal school. catalogue for - . english and spanish. april, . (obsolete.) . a course of study in vocal music for vacation normal institutes. may, . (edition exhausted.) . the philippine school of arts and trades, prospectus for - . english and spanish. june, . (obsolete.) . the philippine nautical school, prospectus for - . english and spanish. june, . (obsolete.) . notes on the treatment of smallpox. june, . . reports of industrial exhibits of the philippine schools at the louisiana purchase exposition. june, . . courses of instruction for the public schools of the philippine islands. june, . (obsolete.) . cursos de enseñanza para las escuelas públicas de las islas filipinas. (spanish edition of bulletin no. .) june, . (edition exhausted.) . a list of philippine baptismal names. june, . (edition exhausted.) . government in the united states. (prepared for use in the philippine public schools.) june, . . courses in mechanical drawing, woodworking, and ironworking for provincial secondary schools. june, . (obsolete.) . advanced and post-graduate studies offered by the philippine normal school for preparation for entrance to american colleges and universities or to the university of the philippines. english and spanish. august, . (obsolete.) . not issued in printed form. . the school law of the philippine islands, as amended by acts of the philippine commission to and including act , with executive orders and attorney-general's opinions affecting the bureau of education. january, . (obsolete.) - . not issued in printed form. . philippine normal school. catalogue for - . english and spanish. may, . (obsolete.) . lessons on familiar philippine animals. august, . (edition exhausted.) . standard course of study in vocal music for the public schools of the philippine islands. . revised and re-issued in . (editions exhausted.) . outline of year's course in botany and key to the families of vascular plants in the philippine islands. august, . revised and re-issued in . third edition issued in . fourth edition issued in . . official roster of the bureau of education, corrected to march , . may, . (obsolete.) . high school and secondary courses of instruction. june, . (obsolete.) . philippine normal school. catalogue for - and prospectus for - . may, . (obsolete.) (a). philippine normal school, courses of study, secondary course. january, . (obsolete.) . the milkfish or bangos. may, . (supply limited.) . constructive lessons in english, designed for use in intermediate grades. august, . revised and re-issued, . third edition, . . philippine normal school, catalogue for - and announcement for - . june, . (obsolete.) . school and home gardening july . (now being revised) . courses in mechanical and free-hand drawing, for use in trade and intermediate schools. december, . . philippine hats. december, . (supply limited.) . lace making and embroidery. december, . . housekeeping and household arts--a manual for work with the girls in the elementary schools of the philippine islands. february, . . catalogue and announcement of the philippine normal school. may, . (edition exhausted.) . school buildings, part i. . . school buildings, part ii. . . a manual of free-hand drawing for philippine primary schools. (in course of preparation.) . athletic handbook for the philippine public schools. (now being revised.) . service manual of the bureau of education, . . intermediate english. ii--notes, directions, and aids to the preparation of the correspondence study course, . . catalogue of the philippine school of arts and trades, . . libraries for philippine public schools. . the school of household industries, . . industrial museum, library, and exhibits of the bureau of education. . good manners and right conduct, for use in primary grades. . a course in civics. (in course of preparation.) . philippine industrial fibers. (in course of preparation.) . arbor day and school holidays. (in course of preparation.) . the philippine school of commerce. . . the philippine school of arts and trades, nautical department. . civico-educational lectures: . the rights and duties of citizens of the philippines. . (supply limited.) . the prevention of diseases. . (supply limited.) . rice. . (supply limited.) . diseases of animals. . (supply limited.) . coconut beetles. . (supply limited.) . the housing of the public schools. . (supply limited.) . coconuts. . . corn. . the teachers' assembly herald: volume i, . (edition exhausted.) volume ii, . (edition exhausted.) volume iii, . (edition exhausted.) volume iv, . (supply limited.) volume v, . (supply limited.) volume vi, . (now current.) the philippine craftsman: a monthly school industrial magazine. now current. text-books: woodworking, a manual of elementary carpentry for philippine public schools, . selected short poems by representative american authors. . commercial geography: the materials of commerce for the philippines. . macaulay's samuel johnson; emerson's self reliance; lincoln's gettysburg address. . an introduction to the study of colonial history. economic conditions in the philippines. (in course of preparation.) miscellaneous problems for trade schools and trades classes in the philippine public schools. (in course of preparation.) housekeeping--a textbook for girls in the public schools of the philippine islands. (in course of preparation.) a primary sewing course. (in course of preparation.) miscellaneous: suggestions for the third annual observance of arbor day in philippine schools, . domestic science, a guide to practical instruction in housekeeping, sewing, cooking and laundering in grades three and four of the philippine public schools, . abraham lincoln--a collection of passages from his speeches and letters, with brief comments, . (supply exhausted.) some recipes for preparing jellies, preserves, pickles, and candies from philippine fruits, . (supply exhausted.) syllabus of economic conditions in the philippines, . (supply exhausted.) second annual report on private schools and colleges of the philippine islands, . third annual report on private schools and colleges of the philippine islands. . a statement of organization, aims and conditions of service in the bureau of education, published for general information. several editions printed at manila and washington. los fines y la organización de las escuelas públicas de filipinas. (in course of preparation.) (tagalog translation in course of preparation.) a talk on health conditions in the philippines. dr. victor g. heiser, director of health craftsman reprints: i. philippine mats. [illustration: coniston from a photograph] library edition the complete works of john ruskin crown of wild olive time and tide queen of the air lectures on art and landscape aratra pentelici national library association new york chicago time and tide by weare and tyne twenty-five letters to a working man of sunderland on the laws of work. contents. page preface ix letter i. co-operation the two kinds of co-operation.--in its highest sense it is not yet thought of. ii. contentment co-operation, as hitherto understood, is perhaps not expedient. iii. legislation of true legislation.--that every man may be a law to himself. iv. expenditure the expenses for art and for war. v. entertainment the corruption of modern pleasure.--(covent garden pantomime.) vi. dexterity the corruption of modern pleasure.--(the japanese jugglers.) vii. festivity of the various expressions of national festivity. viii. things written the four possible theories respecting the authority of the bible. ix. thanksgiving the use of music and dancing under the jewish theocracy, compared with their use by the modern french. x. wheat-sifting the meaning, and actual operation, of satanic or demoniacal influence. xi. the golden bough the satanic power is mainly twofold: the power of causing falsehood and the power of causing pain. the resistance is by law of honor and law of delight. xii. dictatorship the necessity of imperative law to the prosperity of states. xiii. episcopacy and dukedom the proper offices of the bishop and duke; or, "overseer" and "leader." xiv. trade-warrant the first group of essential laws.--against theft by false work, and by bankruptcy.--necessary publicity of accounts. xv. per-centage the nature of theft by unjust profits.--crime can finally be arrested only by education. xvi. education of public education irrespective of class distinction. it consists essentially in giving habits of mercy, and habits of truth. (_gentleness and justice._) xvii. difficulties the relations of education to position in life. xviii. humility the harmful effects of servile employments. the possible practice and exhibition of sincere humility by religious persons. xix. broken reeds the general pressure of excessive and improper work, in english life. xx. rose-gardens of improvidence in marriage in the middle classes; and of the advisable restrictions of it. xxi. gentillesse of the dignity of the four fine arts; and of the proper system of retail trade. xxii. the master of the normal position and duties of the upper classes. general statement of the land question. xxiii. landmarks of the just tenure of lands; and the proper functions of high public officers. xxiv. the rod and honeycomb the office of the soldier. xxv. hyssop of inevitable distinction of rank, and necessary submission to authority. the meaning of pure-heartedness. conclusion. appendices. appendix page i. expenditure on science and art ii. legislation of frederick the great iii. effect of modern entertainments on the mind of youth iv. drunkenness as the cause of crime v. abuse of food vi. regulations of trade vii. letter to the editor of the _pall mall gazette_ preface. the following letters were written to mr. thomas dixon, a working cork-cutter of sunderland, during the agitation for reform in the spring of the present year. they contain, in the plainest terms i could use, the substance of what i then desired to say to our english workmen, which was briefly this:--"the reform you desire may give you more influence in parliament; but your influence there will of course be useless to you,--perhaps worse than useless, until you have wisely made up your minds what you wish parliament to do for you; and when you _have_ made up your minds about that, you will find, not only that you can do it for yourselves, without the intervention of parliament; but that eventually nobody _but_ yourselves can do it. and to help you, as far as one of your old friends may, in so making up your minds, such and such things are what it seems to me you should ask for, and, moreover, strive for with your heart and might." the letters now published relate only to one division of the laws which i desired to recommend to the consideration of our operatives,--those, namely, bearing upon honesty of work, and honesty of exchange. i hope in the course of next year that i may be able to complete the second part of the series, [i could not; but 'fors clavigera' is now ( ) answering the same end:] which will relate to the possible comforts and wholesome laws, of familiar household life, and the share which a laboring nation may attain in the skill, and the treasures, of the higher arts. the letters are republished as they were written, with, here and there, correction of a phrase, and omission of one or two passages of merely personal or temporary interest; the headings only are added, in order to give the reader some clue to the general aim of necessarily desultory discussion; and the portions of mr. dixon's letters in reply, referred to in the text, are added in the appendix, and will be found well deserving of attention. denmark hill, _december , ._ time and tide, by weare and tyne. letter i. the two kinds of co-operation.--in its highest sense it is not yet thought of. denmark hill, _february , ._ my dear friend, . you have now everything i have yet published on political economy; but there are several points in these books of mine which i intended to add notes to, and it seems little likely i shall get that soon done. so i think the best way of making up for the want of these is to write you a few simple letters, which you can read to other people, or send to be printed, if you like, in any of your journals where you think they may be useful. i especially want you, for one thing, to understand the sense in which the word "co-operation" is used in my books. you will find i am always pleading for it; and yet i don't at all mean the co-operation of partnership (as opposed to the system of wages) which is now so gradually extending itself among our great firms. i am glad to see it doing so, yet not altogether glad: for none of you who are engaged in the immediate struggle between the system of co-operation and the system of mastership know how much the dispute involves; and none of us know the results to which it may finally lead. for the alternative is not, in reality, only between two modes of conducting business--it is between two different states of society. it is not the question whether an amount of wages, no greater in the end than that at present received by the men, may be paid to them in a way which shall give them share in the risks and interest in the prosperity of the business. the question is, really, whether the profits which are at present taken, as his own right, by the person whose capital, or energy, or ingenuity, has made him head of the firm, are not in some proportion to be divided among the subordinates of it. . i do not wish, for the moment, to enter into any inquiry as to the just claims of capital, or as to the proportions in which profits ought to be, or are in actually existing firms, divided. i merely take the one assured and essential condition, that a somewhat larger income will be in co-operative firms secured to the subordinates, by the diminution of the income of the chief. and the general tendency of such a system is to increase the facilities of advancement among the subordinates; to stimulate their ambition; to enable them to lay by, if they are provident, more ample and more early provision for declining years; and to form in the end a vast class of persons wholly different from the existing operative:--members of society, possessing each a moderate competence; able to procure, therefore, not indeed many of the luxuries, but all the comforts of life; and to devote some leisure to the attainments of liberal education, and to the other objects of free life. on the other hand, by the exact sum which is divided among them, more than their present wages, the fortune of the man who, under the present system, takes all the profits of the business, will be diminished; and the acquirement of large private fortune by regular means, and all the conditions of life belonging to such fortune, will be rendered impossible in the mercantile community. . now, the magnitude of the social change hereby involved, and the consequent differences in the moral relations between individuals, have not as yet been thought of,--much less estimated,--by any of your writers on commercial subjects; and it is because i do not yet feel able to grapple with them that i have left untouched, in the books i send you, the question of co-operative labor. when i use the word "co-operation," it is not meant to refer to these new constitutions of firms at all. i use the word in a far wider sense, as opposed, not to masterhood, but to _competition_. i do not mean, for instance, by co-operation, that all the master bakers in a town are to give a share of their profits to the men who go out with the bread; but that the masters are not to try to undersell each other, nor seek each to get the other's business, but are all to form one society, selling to the public under a common law of severe penalty for unjust dealing, and at an established price. i do not mean that all bankers' clerks should be partners in the bank; but i do mean that all bankers should be members of a great national body, answerable as a society for all deposits; and that the private business of speculating with other people's money should take another name than that of "banking." and, for final instance, i mean by "co-operation" not only fellowships between trading _firms_, but between trading _nations_; so that it shall no more be thought (as it is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an advantage for one nation to undersell another; and take its occupation away from it; but that the primal and eternal law of vital commerce shall be of all men understood--namely, that every nation is fitted by its character, and the nature of its territories, for some particular employments or manufactures; and that it is the true interest of every other nation to encourage it in such speciality, and by no means to interfere with, but in all ways forward and protect, its efforts, ceasing all rivalship with it, so soon as it is strong enough to occupy its proper place. you see, therefore, that the idea of co-operation, in the sense in which i employ it, has hardly yet entered into the minds of political inquirers; and i will not pursue it at present; but return to that system which is beginning to obtain credence and practice among us. this, however, must be in a following letter. letter ii. co-operation, as hitherto understood, is perhaps not expedient. _february , ._ . limiting the inquiry, then, for the present, as proposed in the close of my last letter, to the form of co-operation which is now upon its trial in practice, i would beg of you to observe that the points at issue, in the comparison of this system with that of mastership, are by no means hitherto frankly stated; still less can they as yet be fairly brought to test. for all mastership is not alike in principle; there are just and unjust masterships; and while, on the one hand, there can be no question but that co-operation is better than unjust and tyrannous mastership, there is very great room for doubt whether it be better than a just and benignant mastership. . at present you--every one of you--speak, and act, as if there were only one alternative; namely, between a system in which profits shall be divided in due proportion among all; and the present one, in which the workman is paid the least wages he will take, under the pressure of competition in the labor-market. but an intermediate method is conceivable; a method which appears to me more prudent, and in its ultimate results more just, than the co-operative one. an arrangement may be supposed, and i have good hope also may one day be effected, by which every subordinate shall be paid sufficient and regular wages, according to his rank; by which due provision shall be made out of the profits of the business for sick and superannuated workers; and by which the master, _being held responsible, as a minor king or governor, for the conduct as well as the comfort of all those under his rule_, shall, on that condition, be permitted to retain to his own use the surplus profits of the business which the fact of his being its master may be assumed to prove that he has organized by superior intellect and energy. and i think this principle of regular wage-paying, whether it be in the abstract more just, or not, is at all events the more prudent; for this reason mainly, that in spite of all the cant which is continually talked by cruel, foolish, or designing persons about "the duty of remaining content in the position in which providence has placed you," there is a root of the very deepest and holiest truth in the saying, which gives to it such power as it still retains, even uttered by unkind and unwise lips, and received into doubtful and embittered hearts. . if, indeed, no effort be made to discover, in the course of their early training, for what services the youths of a nation are individually qualified; nor any care taken to place those who have unquestionably proved their fitness for certain functions, in the offices they could best fulfil,--then, to call the confused wreck of social order and life brought about by malicious collision and competition, an arrangement of providence, is quite one of the most insolent and wicked ways in which it is possible to take the name of god in vain. but if, at the proper time, some earnest effort be made to place youths, according to their capacities, in the occupations for which they are fitted, i think the system of organization will be finally found the best, which gives the least encouragement to thoughts of any great future advance in social life. . the healthy sense of progress, which is necessary to the strength and happiness of men, does not consist in the anxiety of a struggle to attain higher place, or rank, but in gradually perfecting the manner, and accomplishing the ends, of the life which we have chosen, or which circumstances have determined for us. thus, i think the object of a workman's ambition should not be to become a master; but to attain daily more subtle and exemplary skill in his own craft, to save from his wages enough to enrich and complete his home gradually with more delicate and substantial comforts; and to lay by such store as shall be sufficient for the happy maintenance of his old age (rendering him independent of the help provided for the sick and indigent by the arrangement pre-supposed), and sufficient also for the starting of his children in a rank of life equal to his own. if his wages are not enough to enable him to do this, they are unjustly low; if they are once raised to this adequate standard, i do not think that by the possible increase of his gains under contingencies of trade, or by divisions of profits with his master, he should be enticed into feverish hope of an entire change of condition; and as an almost necessary consequence, pass his days in an anxious discontent with immediate circumstances, and a comfortless scorn of his daily life, for which no subsequent success could indemnify him. and i am the more confident in this belief, because, even supposing a gradual rise in social rank possible for all well-conducted persons, my experience does not lead me to think the elevation itself, when attained, would be conducive to their happiness. . the grounds of this opinion i will give you in a future letter; in the present one, i must pass to a more important point--namely, that if this stability of condition be indeed desirable for those in whom existing circumstances might seem to justify discontent, much more must it be good and desirable for those who already possess everything which can be conceived necessary to happiness. it is the merest insolence of selfishness to preach contentment to a laborer who gets thirty shillings a week, while we suppose an active and plotting covetousness to be meritorious in a man who has three thousand a year. in this, as in all other points of mental discipline, it is the duty of the upper classes to set an example to the lower; and to recommend and justify the restraint of the ambition of their inferiors, chiefly by severe and timely limitation of their own. and, without at present inquiring into the greater or less convenience of the possible methods of accomplishing such an object, (every detail in suggestions of this kind necessarily furnishing separate matter of dispute,) i will merely state my long-fixed conviction, that one of the most important conditions of a healthful system of social economy, would be the restraint of the properties and incomes of the upper classes within certain fixed limits. the temptation to use every energy in the accumulation of wealth being thus removed, another, and a higher ideal of the duties of advanced life would be necessarily created in the national mind; by withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed limits of wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success, and earlier marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would become possible to the young; while the older men of active intellect, whose sagacity is now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own meanest interests, would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves in the superintendence of public institutions, or furtherance of public advantage. and out of this class it would be found natural and prudent always to choose the members of the legislative body of the commons; and to attach to the order also some peculiar honors, in the possession of which such complacency would be felt as would more than replace the unworthy satisfaction of being supposed richer than others, which to many men is the principal charm of their wealth. and although no law of this purport would ever be imposed on themselves by the actual upper classes, there is no hindrance to its being gradually brought into force from beneath, without any violent or impatient proceedings; and this i will endeavor to show you in my next letter. letter iii. of true legislation. that every man may be a law to himself. _february , ._ . no, i have not been much worse in health; but i was asked by a friend to look over some work in which you will all be deeply interested one day, so that i could not write again till now. i was the more sorry, because there were several things i wished to note in your last letter; one especially leads me directly to what i in any case was desirous of urging upon you. you say, "in vol. th of 'frederick the great' i find a great deal that i feel quite certain, if our queen or government could make law, thousands of our english workmen would hail with a shout of joy and gladness." i do not remember to what you especially allude, but whatever the rules you speak of may be, unless there be anything in them contrary to the rights of present english property, why should you care whether the government makes them law or not? can you not, you thousands of english workmen, simply make them a law to yourselves, by practising them? it is now some five or six years since i first had occasion to speak to the members of the london working men's college on the subject of reform, and the substance of what i said to them was this: "you are all agape, my friends, for this mighty privilege of having your opinions represented in parliament. the concession might be desirable,--at all events courteous,--if only it were quite certain you had got any opinions to represent. but have you? are you agreed on any single thing you systematically want? less work and more wages, of course; but how much lessening of work do you suppose is possible? do you think the time will ever come for everybody to have _no_ work and _all_ wages? or have you yet taken the trouble so much as to think out the nature of the true connection between wages and work, and to determine, even approximately, the real quantity of the one, that can, according to the laws of god and nature, be given for the other; for, rely on it, make what laws you like, that quantity only can you at last get. . "do you know how many mouths can be fed on an acre of land, or how fast those mouths multiply? and have you considered what is to be done finally with unfeedable mouths? 'send them to be fed elsewhere,' do you say? have you, then, formed any opinion as to the time at which emigration should begin, or the countries to which it should preferably take place, or the kind of population which should be left at home? have you planned the permanent state which you would wish england to hold, emigrating over her edges, like a full well, constantly? how full would you have her be of people, first? and of what sort of people? do you want her to be nothing but a large workshop and forge, so that the name of 'englishman' shall be synonymous with 'ironmonger,' all over the world? or would you like to keep some of your lords and landed gentry still, and a few green fields and trees? . "you know well enough that there is not one of these questions, i do not say which you can answer, but which you have ever _thought_ of answering; and yet you want to have voices in parliament! your voices are not worth a rat's squeak, either in parliament or out of it, till you have some ideas to utter with them; and when you have the thoughts, you will not want to utter them, for you will see that your way to the fulfilling of them does not lie through speech. you think such matters need debating about? by all means debate about them; but debate among yourselves, and with such honest helpers of your thoughts as you can find; if by that way you cannot get at the truth, do you suppose you could get at it sooner in the house of commons, where the only aim of many of the members would be to refute every word uttered in your favor; and where the settlement of any question whatever depends merely on the perturbations of the balance of conflicting interests?" . that was, in main particulars, what i then said to the men of the working men's college; and in this recurrent agitation about reform, that is what i would steadfastly say again. do you think it is only under the lacquered splendors of westminster,--you working men of england,--that your affairs can be rationally talked over? you have perfect liberty and power to talk over, and establish for yourselves, whatever laws you please; so long as you do not interfere with other people's liberties or properties. elect a parliament of your own. choose the best men among you, the best at least you can find, by whatever system of election you think likeliest to secure such desirable result. invite trustworthy persons of other classes to join your council; appoint time and place for its stated sittings, and let this parliament, chosen after your own hearts, deliberate upon the possible modes of the regulation of industry, and advisablest schemes for helpful discipline of life; and so lay before you the best laws they can devise, which such of you as were wise might submit to, and teach their children to obey. and if any of the laws thus determined appear to be inconsistent with the present circumstances or customs of trade, do not make a noise about them, nor try to enforce them suddenly on others, nor embroider them on flags, nor call meetings in parks about them, in spite of railings and police; but keep them in your thoughts and sight, as objects of patient purpose and future achievement by peaceful strength. . for you need not think that even if you obtained a majority of representatives in the existing parliament, you could immediately compel any system of business, broadly contrary to that now established by custom. if you could pass laws to-morrow, wholly favorable to yourselves, as you might think, because unfavorable to your masters, and to the upper classes of society,--the only result would be that the riches of the country would at once leave it, and you would perish in riot and famine. be assured that no great change for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor by impulsive, ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men, without much suffering. the suffering must, indeed, come, one way or another, in all greatly critical periods; the only question, for us, is whether we will reach our ends (if we ever reach them) through a chain of involuntary miseries, many of them useless, and all ignoble; or whether we will know the worst at once, and deal with it by the wisely sharp methods of godsped courage. . this, i repeat to you, it is wholly in your own power to do, but it is in your power on one condition only, that of steadfast truth to yourselves, and to all men. if there is not, in the sum of it, honesty enough among you to teach you to frame, and strengthen you to obey, _just_ laws of trade, there is no hope left for you. no political constitution can ennoble knaves; no privileges can assist them; no possessions enrich them. their gains are occult curses; comfortless loss their truest blessing; failure and pain nature's only mercy to them. look to it, therefore, first that you get some wholesome honesty for the foundation of all things. without the resolution in your hearts to do good work, so long as your right hands have motion in them; and to do it whether the issue be that you die or live, no life worthy the name will ever be possible to you, while, in once forming the resolution that your work is to be well done, life is really won, here and for ever. and to make your children capable of such resolution, is the beginning of all true education, of which i have more to say in a future letter. letter iv. the expenses for art and for war. _february , ._ . in the 'pall mall gazette' of yesterday, second column of second page, you will find, close to each other, two sentences which bear closely on matters in hand. the first of these is the statement, that in the debate on the grant for the blacas collection, "mr. bernal osborne got an assenting cheer, when he said that 'whenever science and art were mentioned it was a sign to look after the national pockets.'" i want you to notice this fact, _i. e._, (the debate in question being on a _total_ grant of , _l._, of which , _l._ only were truly for art's sake, and the rest for shop's sake,) in illustration of a passage in my 'sesame and lilies' (pp. , of the small edition, and pp. , of vol. i. of the revised series of the entire works),[a] to which i shall have again to refer you, with some further comments, in the sequel of these letters. the second passage is to the effect that "the trades' union bill was read a second time, after a claim from mr. hadfield, mr. osborne, and mr. samuelson, to admit working men into the commission; to which mr. watkin answered 'that the working men's friend was too conspicuous in the body;' and mr. roebuck, 'that when a butcher was tried for murder it was not necessary to have butchers on the jury.'" [a] appendix i. . note this second passage with respect to what i said in my last letter, as to the impossibility of the laws of work being investigated in the house of commons. what admixture of elements, think you, would avail to obtain so much as decent hearing (how should we then speak of impartial judgment?) of the cause of working men, in an assembly which permits to one of its principal members this insolent discourtesy of language, in dealing with a preliminary question of the highest importance; and permits it as so far expressive of the whole color and tone of its own thoughts, that the sentence is quoted by one of the most temperate and accurate of our daily journals, as representing the total answer of the opposite side in the debate? no! be assured you can do nothing yet at westminster. you must have your own parliament, and if you cannot detect enough honesty among you to constitute a justly minded one, for the present matters must take their course, and that will be, yet awhile, to the worse. . i meant to have continued this subject, but i see two other statements in the 'pall mall gazette' of to-day, with which, and a single remark upon them, i think it will be well to close my present letter. ( ) "the total sum asked for in the army estimates, published this morning, is , , _l._, being an increase of , _l._ over the previous year." ( ) "yesterday the annual account of the navy receipts and expenditure for the year ending st march, , was issued from the admiralty. the expenditure was , , _l._ _s._" omitting the seven shillings, and even the odd hundred-thousands of pounds, the net annual expenditure for army and navy appears to be twenty-four millions. the "grant in science and art," two-thirds of which was not in reality for either, but for amusement and shop interests in the paris exhibition--the grant which the house of commons feels to be indicative of general danger to the national pockets--is, as above stated, , _l._ now, i believe the three additional ciphers which turn thousands into millions produce on the intelligent english mind usually the effect of--three ciphers. but calculate the proportion of these two sums, and then imagine to yourself the beautiful state of rationality of any private gentleman, who, having regretfully spent _l._ on pictures for his walls, paid willingly , _l._ annually to the policeman who looked after his shutters! you practical english!--will you ever unbar the shutters of your brains, and hang a picture or two in those state-chambers? letter v. the corruption of modern pleasure.--(covent garden pantomime.) _february , ._ . there is this great advantage in the writing real letters, that the direct correspondence is a sufficient reason for saying, in or out of order, everything that the chances of the day bring into one's head, in connection with the matter in hand; and as such things very usually go out of one's head again, after they get tired of their lodging, they would otherwise never get said at all. and thus to-day, quite out of order, but in very close connection with another part of our subject, i am going to tell you what i was thinking on friday evening last, in covent garden theater, as i was looking, and not laughing, at the pantomime of 'ali baba and the forty thieves.' when you begin seriously to consider the question referred to in my second letter, of the essential, and in the outcome inviolable, connection between quantity of wages, and quantity of work, you will see that "wages" in the full sense don't mean "pay" merely, but the reward, whatever it may be, of pleasure as well as profit, and of various other advantages, which a man is meant by providence to get during life, for work well done. even limiting the idea to "pay," the question is not so much what quantity of coin you get, as--what you can get for it when you have it. whether a shilling a day be good pay or not, depends wholly on what a "shilling's worth" is; that is to say, what quantity of the things you want may be had for a shilling. and that again depends, and a great deal more than that depends, on what you _do_ want. if only drink, and foul clothes, such and such pay may be enough for you; if you want good meat and good clothes, you must have larger wage; if clean rooms and fresh air, larger still, and so on. you say, perhaps, "every one wants these better things." so far from that, a wholesome taste for cleanliness and fresh air is one of the final attainments of humanity. there are now not many european gentlemen, even in the highest classes, who have a pure and right love of fresh air. they would put the filth of tobacco even into the first breeze of a may morning. . but there are better things even than these, which one may want. grant that one has good food, clothes, lodging, and breathing, is that all the pay one ought to have for one's work? wholesome means of existence and nothing more? enough, perhaps, you think, if everybody could get these. it may be so; i will not, at this moment, dispute it; nevertheless, i will boldly say that you should sometimes want more than these; and for one of many things more, you should want occasionally to be amused! you know, the upper classes, most of them, want to be amused all day long. they think "one moment _un_amused a misery not made for feeble men." perhaps you have been in the habit of despising them for this; and thinking how much worthier and nobler it was to work all day, and care at night only for food and rest, than to do no useful thing all day, eat unearned food, and spend the evening, as the morning, in "change of follies and relays of joy." no, my good friend, that is one of the fatalest deceptions. it is not a noble thing, in sum and issue of it, not to care to be amused. it is indeed a far higher _moral_ state, but is a much lower _creature_ state, than that of the upper classes. . yonder poor horse, calm slave in daily chains at the railroad siding, who drags the detached rear of the train to the front again, and slips aside so deftly as the buffers meet; and, within eighteen inches of death every ten minutes, fulfils his changeless duty all day long, content, for eternal reward, with his night's rest, and his champed mouthful of hay;--anything more earnestly moral and beautiful one cannot image--i never see the creature without a kind of worship. and yonder musician, who used the greatest power which (in the art he knew) the father of spirits ever yet breathed into the clay of this world;--who used it, i say, to follow and fit with perfect sound the words of the 'zauberflöte' and of 'don giovanni'--foolishest and most monstrous of conceivable human words and subjects of thought--for the future "amusement" of his race!--no such spectacle of unconscious (and in that unconsciousness all the more fearful) moral degradation of the highest faculty to the lowest purpose can be found in history. but mozart is nevertheless a nobler creature than the horse at the siding; nor would it be the least nearer the purpose of his maker that he, and all his frivolous audiences, should evade the degradation of the profitless piping, only by living, like horses, in daily physical labor for daily bread. . there are three things to which man is born[a]--labor, and sorrow, and joy. each of these three things has its baseness and its nobleness. there is base labor, and noble labor. there is base sorrow, and noble sorrow. there is base joy, and noble joy. but you must not think to avoid the corruption of these things by doing without the things themselves. nor can any life be right that has not all three. labor without joy is base. labor without sorrow is base. sorrow without labor is base. joy without labor is base. [a] i ask the reader's thoughtful attention to this paragraph, on which much of what else i have to say depends. . i dare say you think i am a long time in coming to the pantomime; i am not ready to come to it yet in due course, for we ought to go and see the japanese jugglers first, in order to let me fully explain to you what i mean. but i can't write much more to-day; so i shall merely tell you what part of the play set me thinking of all this, and leave you to consider of it yourself, till i can send you another letter. the pantomime was, as i said, 'ali baba and the forty thieves.' the forty thieves were girls. the forty thieves had forty companions, who were girls. the forty thieves and their forty companions were in some way mixed up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were girls. there was an oxford and cambridge boat-race, in which the oxford and cambridge men were girls. there was a transformation scene, with a forest, in which the flowers were girls, and a chandelier, in which the lamps were girls, and a great rainbow which was all of girls. . mingled incongruously with these seraphic, and, as far as my boyish experience extends, novel, elements of pantomime, there were yet some of its old and fast-expiring elements. there were, in speciality, two thoroughly good pantomime actors--mr. w. h. payne and mr. frederick payne. all that these two did, was done admirably. there were two subordinate actors, who played, subordinately well, the fore and hind legs of a donkey. and there was a little actress of whom i have chiefly to speak, who played exquisitely the little part she had to play. the scene in which she appeared was the only one in the whole pantomime in which there was any dramatic effort, or, with a few rare exceptions, any dramatic possibility. it was the home scene, in which ali baba's wife, on washing day, is called upon by butcher, baker, and milkman, with unpaid bills; and in the extremity of her distress hears her husband's knock at the door, and opens it for him to drive in his donkey, laden with gold. the children who have been beaten instead of getting breakfast, presently share in the raptures of their father and mother; and the little lady i spoke of, eight or nine years old,--dances a _pas-de-deux_ with the donkey. . she did it beautifully and simply, as a child ought to dance. she was not an infant prodigy; there was no evidence, in the finish or strength of her motion, that she had been put to continual torture through half her eight or nine years. she did nothing more than any child well taught, but painlessly, might easily do. she caricatured no older person,--attempted no curious or fantastic skill. she was dressed decently,--she moved decently,--she looked and behaved innocently,--and she danced her joyful dance with perfect grace, spirit, sweetness, and self-forgetfulness. and through all the vast theater, full of english fathers and mothers and children, there was not one hand lifted to give her sign of praise but mine. presently after this, came on the forty thieves, who, as i told you, were girls; and, there being no thieving to be presently done, and time hanging heavy on their hands, arms, and legs, the forty thief-girls proceeded to light forty cigars. whereupon the british public gave them a round of applause. whereupon i fell a thinking; and saw little more of the piece, except as an ugly and disturbing dream. letter vi. the corruption of modern pleasure.--(the japanese jugglers.) _february , ._ . i have your pleasant letter with references to frederick. i will look at them carefully.[a] mr. carlyle himself will be pleased to hear this letter when he comes home. i heard from him last week at mentone. he is well, and glad of the light and calm of italy. i must get back to the evil light and uncalm, of the places i was taking you through. [a] appendix . (parenthetically, did you see the article in the 'times' of yesterday on bribery, and the conclusion of the commission--"no one sold any opinions, for no one had any opinions to sell"?) both on thursday and friday last i had been tormented by many things, and wanted to disturb my course of thought any way i could. i have told you what entertainment i got on friday, first, for it was then that i began meditating over these letters; let me tell you now what entertainment i found on thursday. . you may have heard that a company of japanese jugglers has come over to exhibit in london. there has long been an increasing interest in japanese art, which has been very harmful to many of our own painters, and i greatly desired to see what these people were, and what they did. well, i have seen blondin, and various english and french circus work, but never yet anything that surprised me so much as one of these men's exercises on a suspended pole. its special character was a close approximation to the action and power of the monkey; even to the prehensile power in the foot; so that i asked a sculptor-friend who sat in front of me, whether he thought such a grasp could be acquired by practice, or indicated difference in race. he said he thought it might be got by practice. there was also much inconceivably dexterous work in spinning of tops,--making them pass in balanced motion along the edge of a sword, and along a level string, and the like;--the father performing in the presence of his two children, who encouraged him continually with short, sharp cries, like those of animals. then there was some fairly good sleight-of-hand juggling of little interest; ending with a dance by the juggler, first as an animal, and then as a goblin, now, there was this great difference between the japanese masks used in this dance and our common pantomime masks for beasts and demons,--that our english masks are only stupidly and loathsomely ugly, by exaggeration of feature, or of defect of feature. but the japanese masks (like the frequent monsters of japanese art) were inventively frightful, like fearful dreams; and whatever power it is that acts on human minds, enabling them to invent such, appears to me not only to deserve the term "demoniacal," as the only word expressive of its character; but to be logically capable of no other definition. . the impression, therefore, produced upon me by the whole scene, was that of being in the presence of human creatures of a partially inferior race, but not without great human gentleness, domestic affection, and ingenious intellect; who were, nevertheless, as a nation, afflicted by an evil spirit, and driven by it to recreate themselves in achieving, or beholding the achievement, through years of patience, of a certain correspondence with the nature of the lower animals. . these, then, were the two forms of diversion or recreation of my mind possible to me, in two days, when i needed such help, in this metropolis of england. i might, as a rich man, have had better music, if i had so chosen, though, even so, not rational or helpful; but a poor man could only have these, or worse than these, if he cared for any manner of spectacle. (i am not at present, observe, speaking of pure acting, which is a study, and recreative only as a noble book is; but of means of _mere_ amusement.) now, lastly, in illustration of the effect of these and other such "amusements," and of the desire to obtain them, on the minds of our youth, read the 'times' correspondent's letter from paris, in the tenth page of the paper, to-day;[a] and that will be quite enough for you to read, for the present, i believe. [a] appendix . letter vii. of the various expressions of national festivity. _march , ._ . the subject which i want to bring before you is now branched, and worse than branched, reticulated, in so many directions, that i hardly know which shoot of it to trace, or which knot to lay hold of first. i had intended to return to those japanese jugglers, after a visit to a theater in paris; but i had better, perhaps, at once tell you the piece of the performance which, in connection with the scene in the english pantomime, bears most on matters in hand. it was also a dance by a little girl--though one older than ali baba's daughter, (i suppose a girl of twelve or fourteen). a dance, so called, which consisted only in a series of short, sharp contractions and jerks of the body and limbs, resulting in attitudes of distorted and quaint ugliness, such as might be produced in a puppet by sharp twitching of strings at its joints: these movements being made to the sound of two instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick vibratory beating and strumming, in nearly the time of a hearth-cricket's song, but much harsher, and of course louder, and without any sweetness; only in the monotony and unintended aimless construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile cries or warnings: partly of the cicala's hiss; partly of the little melancholy german frog which says "mu, mu, mu," all summer-day long, with its nose out of the pools by dresden and leipsic; and partly of the deadened quivering and intense continuousness of the alarm of the rattlesnake. while this was going on, there was a bible text repeating itself over and over again in my head, whether i would or no:--"and miriam the prophetess, the sister of aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances." to which text and some others, i shall ask your attention presently; but i must go to paris first. . not at once, however, to the theater, but to a bookseller's shop, no. , rue voltaire, where, in the year , was published the fifth edition of balzac's 'contes drôlatiques,' illustrated by designs by gustave doré. both text and illustrations are as powerful as it is ever in the nature of evil things to be (there is no _final_ strength but in rightness). nothing more witty, nor more inventively horrible, has yet been produced in the evil literature, or by the evil art, of man: nor can i conceive it possible to go beyond either in their specialities of corruption. the text is full of blasphemies, subtle, tremendous, hideous in shamelessness, some put into the mouths of priests; the illustrations are, in a word, one continuous revelry in the most loathsome and monstrous aspects of death and sin, enlarged into fantastic ghastliness of caricature, as if seen through the distortion and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell. take this following for a general type of what they seek in death: one of the most labored designs is of a man cut in two, downwards, by the sweep of a sword--one half of him falls toward the spectator; the other half is elaborately drawn in its section--giving the profile of the divided nose and lips; cleft jaw--breast--and entrails; and this is done with farther pollution and horror of intent in the circumstances, which i do not choose to describe--still less some other of the designs which seek for fantastic extreme of sin, as this for the utmost horror of death. but of all the , there is not one, which does not violate every instinct of decency and law of virtue or life, written in the human soul. . now, my friend, among the many "signs of the times" the production of a book like this is a significant one: but it becomes more significant still when connected with the farther fact, that m. gustave doré, the designer of this series of plates, has just been received with loud acclaim by the british evangelical public, as the fittest and most able person whom they could at present find to illustrate, to their minds, and recommend with grace of sacred art, their hitherto unadorned bible for them. of which bible, and of the use we at present make of it in england, having a grave word or two to say in my next letter (preparatory to the examination of that verse which haunted me through the japanese juggling, and of some others also), i leave you first this sign of the public esteem of it to consider at your leisure. letter viii. the four possible theories respecting the authority of the bible. _march , ._ . i have your yesterday's letter, but must not allow myself to be diverted from the business in hand for this once, for it is the most important of which i have to write to you. you must have seen long ago that the essential difference between the political economy i am trying to teach, and the popular science, is, that mine is based on _presumably attainable honesty_ in men, and conceivable respect in them for the interests of others, while the popular science founds itself wholly on their supposed constant regard for their own, and on their honesty only so far as thereby likely to be secured. it becomes, therefore, for me, and for all who believe anything i say, a great primal question on what this presumably attainable honesty is to be based. . "is it to be based on religion?" you may ask. "are we to be honest for fear of losing heaven if we are dishonest, or (to put it as generously as we may) for fear of displeasing god? or, are we to be honest on speculation, because honesty is the best policy; and to invest in virtue as in an undepreciable stock?" and my answer is--not in any hesitating or diffident way (and you know, my friend, that whatever people may say of me, i often do speak diffidently; though, when i am diffident of things, i like to avoid speaking of them, if it may be; but here i say with no shadow of doubt)--your honesty is _not_ to be based either on religion or policy. both your religion and policy must be based on _it_. your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night. if you ask why you are to be honest--you are, in the question itself, dishonored. "because you are a man," is the only answer; and therefore i said in a former letter that to make your children _capable of honesty_ is the beginning of education. make them men first, and religious men afterwards, and all will be sound; but a knave's religion is always the rottenest thing about him. . it is not, therefore, because i am endeavoring to lay down a foundation of religious concrete, on which to build piers of policy, that you so often find me quoting bible texts in defense of this or that principle or assertion. but the fact that such references are an offense, as i know them to be, to many of the readers of these political essays, is one among many others, which i would desire you to reflect upon (whether you are yourself one of the offended or not), as expressive of the singular position which the mind of the british public has at present taken with respect to its worshiped book. the positions, honestly tenable, before i use any more of its texts, i must try to define for you. . all the theories possible to theological disputants respecting the bible are resolvable into four, and four only. ( .) the first is that of the illiterate modern religious world, that every word of the book known to them as "the bible" was dictated by the supreme being, and is in every syllable of it his "word." this theory is of course tenable by no ordinarily well-educated person. ( .) the second theory is, that, although admitting verbal error, the substance of the whole collection of books called the bible is absolutely true, and furnished to man by divine inspiration of the speakers and writers of it; and that every one who honestly and prayerfully seeks for such truth in it as is necessary for his salvation, will infallibly find it there. this theory is that held by most of our good and upright clergymen, and the better class of the professedly religious laity. ( .) the third theory is that the group of books which we call the bible were neither written nor collected under any divine guidance, securing them from substantial error; and that they contain, like all other human writings, false statements mixed with true, and erring thoughts mixed with just thoughts; but that they nevertheless relate, on the whole, faithfully, the dealings of the one god with the first races of man, and his dealings with them in aftertime through christ: that they record true miracles, and bear true witness to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. this is a theory held by many of the active leaders of modern thought. ( .) the fourth, and last possible, theory is that the mass of religious scripture contains merely the best efforts which we hitherto know to have been made by any of the races of men towards the discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that they are only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or beliefs of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no more authoritative claim on our faith than the religious speculations and histories of the egyptians, greeks, persians, and indians; but are, in common with all these, to be reverently studied, as containing a portion, divinely appointed, of the best wisdom which human intellect, earnestly seeking for help from god, has hitherto been able to gather between birth and death. this has been, for the last half-century, the theory of the soundest scholars and thinkers of europe. . there is yet indeed one farther condition of incredulity attainable, and sorrowfully attained, by many men of powerful intellect--the incredulity, namely, of inspiration in any sense, or of help given by any divine power to the thoughts of men. but this form of infidelity merely indicates a natural incapacity for receiving certain emotions; though many honest and good men belong to this insentient class. . the educated men, therefore, who may be seriously appealed to, in these days, on questions of moral responsibility, as modified by scripture, are broadly divisible into three classes, severally holding the last three theories above stated. now, whatever power a passage from the statedly authoritative portions of the bible may have over the mind of a person holding the fourth theory, it will have a proportionately greater over that of persons holding the third or the second. i, therefore, always imagine myself speaking to the fourth class of theorists. if i can persuade or influence _them_, i am logically sure of the others. i say "logically," for the actual fact, strange as it may seem, is that no persons are so little likely to submit to a passage of scripture not to their fancy, as those who are most positive on the subject of its general inspiration. . addressing, then, this fourth class of thinkers, i would say to them, when asking them to enter on any subject of importance to national morals, or conduct, "this book, which has been the accepted guide of the moral intelligence of europe for some fifteen hundred years, enforces certain simple laws of human conduct which you know have also been agreed upon, in every main point, by all the religious, and by all the greatest profane writers, of every age and country. this book primarily forbids pride, lasciviousness, and covetousness; and you know that all great thinkers, in every nation of mankind, have similarly forbidden these mortal vices. this book enjoins truth, temperance, charity, and equity; and you know that every great egyptian, greek, and indian, enjoins these also. you know besides, that through all the mysteries of human fate and history, this one great law of fate is written on the walls of cities, or in their dust; written in letters of light, and letters of blood,--that where truth, temperance, and equity have been preserved, all strength, and peace, and joy have been preserved also;--that where lying, lasciviousness, and covetousness have been practised, there has followed an infallible, and, for centuries, irrecoverable ruin. and you know, lastly, that the observance of this common law of righteousness, commending itself to all the pure instincts of men, and fruitful in their temporal good, is by the religious writers of every nation, and chiefly in this venerated scripture of ours, connected with some distinct hope of better life, and righteousness, to come. . "let it not then offend you if, deducing principles of action first from the laws and facts of nature, i nevertheless fortify them also by appliance of the precepts, or suggestive and probable teachings of this book, of which the authority is over many around you, more distinctly than over you, and which, confessing to be divine, _they_, at least, can only disobey at their moral peril." on these grounds, and in this temper, i am in the habit of appealing to passages of scripture in my writings on political economy; and in this temper i will ask you to consider with me some conclusions which appear to me derivable from that text about miriam, which haunted me through the jugglery; and from certain others. letter ix. the use of music and dancing under the jewish theocracy, compared with their use by the modern french. _march , ._ . having, i hope, made you now clearly understand with what feeling i would use the authority of the book which the british public, professing to consider sacred, have lately adorned for themselves with the work of the boldest violator of the instincts of human honor and decency known yet in art-history, i will pursue by the help of that verse about miriam, and some others, the subject which occupied my mind at both theaters, and to which, though in so apparently desultory manner, i have been nevertheless very earnestly endeavoring to lead you. . the going forth of the women of israel after miriam with timbrels and with dances, was, as you doubtless remember, their expression of passionate triumph and thankfulness, after the full accomplishment of their deliverance from the egyptians. that deliverance had been by the utter death of their enemies, and accompanied by stupendous miracle; no human creatures could in an hour of triumph be surrounded by circumstances more solemn. i am not going to try to excite your feelings about them. consider only for yourself what that seeing of the egyptians "dead upon the sea-shore" meant to every soul that saw it. and then reflect that these intense emotions of mingled horror, triumph, and gratitude were expressed, in the visible presence of the deity, by music and dancing. if you answer that you do not believe the egyptians so perished, or that god ever appeared in a pillar of cloud, i reply, "be it so--believe or disbelieve, as you choose;--this is yet assuredly the fact, that the author of the poem or fable of the exodus supposed that, under such circumstances of divine interposition as he had invented, the triumph of the israelitish women would have been, and ought to have been, under the direction of a prophetess, expressed by music and dancing." . nor was it possible that he should think otherwise, at whatever period he wrote; both music and dancing being, among all great ancient nations, an appointed and very principal part of the worship of the gods. and that very theatrical entertainment at which i sate thinking over these things for you--that pantomime, which depended throughout for its success on an appeal to the vices of the lower london populace, was, in itself, nothing but a corrupt remnant of the religious ceremonies which guided the most serious faiths of the greek mind, and laid the foundation of their gravest moral and didactic--more forcibly so because at the same time dramatic--literature. . returning to the jewish history, you find soon afterwards this enthusiastic religious dance and song employed, in their more common and habitual manner, in the idolatries under sinai; but beautifully again and tenderly, after the triumph of jephthah, "and behold his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances." again, still more notably, at the triumph of david with saul, "the women came out of all the cities of israel singing and dancing to meet king saul with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music." and you have this joyful song and dance of the virgins of israel not only incidentally alluded to in the most solemn passages of hebrew religious poetry (as in psalm lxviii. , , and psalm cxlix. , ), but approved, and the restoration of it promised as a sign of god's perfect blessing, most earnestly by the saddest of the hebrew prophets, and in one of the most beautiful of all his sayings. "the lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, 'yea, i have loved thee with an everlasting love. therefore, with loving-kindness have i drawn thee.--i will build thee, and thou shalt be built, o virgin of israel; thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets, and thou shalt go forth in dances with them that make merry,'" (jer. xxxi. , ; and compare v. ). and finally, you have in two of quite the most important passages in the whole series of scripture (one in the old testament, one in the new), the rejoicing in the repentance from, and remission of, sins, expressed by means of music and dancing, namely, in the rapturous dancing of david before the returning ark; and in the joy of the father's household at the repentance of the prodigal son. . i could put all this much better, and more convincingly, before you, if i were able to take any pains in writing at present; but i am not, as i told you; being weary and ill; neither do i much care now to use what, in the very truth, are but tricks of literary art, in dealing with this so grave subject. you see i write you my letter straightforward, and let you see all my scratchings out and puttings in; and if the way i say things shocks you, or any other reader of these letters, i cannot help it; this only i know, that what i tell you is true, and written more earnestly than anything i ever wrote with my best literary care; and that you will find it useful to think upon, however it be said. now, therefore, to draw towards our conclusion. supposing the bible inspired, in any of the senses above defined, you have in these passages a positively divine authority for the use of song and dance, as a means of religious service, and expression of national thanksgiving. supposing it not inspired, you have (taking the passages for as slightly authoritative as you choose) record in them, nevertheless, of a state of mind in a great nation, producing the most beautiful religious poetry and perfect moral law hitherto known to us, yet only expressible by them, to the fulfilment of their joyful passion, by means of professional dance and choral song. . now i want you to contrast this state of religious rapture with some of our modern phases of mind in parallel circumstances. you see that the promise of jeremiah's, "thou shalt go forth in the dances of them that make merry," is immediately followed by this, "thou shalt yet _plant vines_ upon the mountains of samaria." and again, at the yearly feast to the lord in shiloh, the dancing of the virgins was in the midst of the vineyards (judges xxi. ), the feast of the vintage being in the south, as our harvest home in the north, a peculiar occasion of joy and thanksgiving. i happened to pass the autumn of in one of the great vine districts of switzerland, under the slopes of the outlying branch of the jura which limits the arable plain of the canton zurich, some fifteen miles north of zurich itself. that city has always been a renowned, stronghold of swiss protestantism, next in importance only to geneva; and its evangelical zeal for the conversion of the catholics of uri, and endeavors to bring about that spiritual result by stopping the supplies of salt they needed to make their cheeses with, brought on (the uri men reading their matt. v. , in a different sense) the battle of keppel, and the death of the reformer zwinglius. the town itself shows the most gratifying signs of progress in all the modern arts and sciences of life. it is nearly as black as newcastle--has a railroad station larger than the london terminus of the chatham and dover--fouls the stream of the limmat as soon as it issues from the lake, so that you might even venture to compare the formerly simple and innocent swiss river (i remember it thirty years ago--a current of pale green crystal) with the highly educated english streams of weare or tyne; and, finally, has as many french prints of dissolute tendency in its principal shop windows as if they had the privilege of opening on the parisian boulevards. . i was somewhat anxious to see what species of thanksgiving or exultation would be expressed at _their_ vintage, by the peasantry in the neighborhood of this much enlightened, evangelical, and commercial society. it consisted in two ceremonies only. during the day, the servants of the farms where the grapes had been gathered, collected in knots about the vineyards, and slowly fired horse-pistols, from morning to evening. at night they got drunk, and staggered up and down the hill paths, uttering, at short intervals, yells and shrieks, differing only from the howling of wild animals by a certain intended and insolent discordance, only attainable by the malignity of debased human creatures. . i must not do the injustice to the zurich peasantry of implying that this manner of festivity is peculiar to them. a year before, in , i had formed the intention of living some years in the neighborhood of geneva, and had established myself experimentally on the eastern slope of the mont salève; but i was forced to abandon my purpose at last, because i could not endure the rabid howling, on sunday evenings, of the holiday-makers who came out from geneva to get drunk in the mountain village. by the way, your last letter, with its extracts about our traffic in gin, is very valuable. i will come to that part of the business in a little while. meantime, my friend, note this, respecting what i have told you, that in the very center of europe, in a country which is visited for their chief pleasure by the most refined and thoughtful persons among all christian nations--a country made by god's hand the most beautiful in the temperate regions of the earth, and inhabited by a race once capable of the sternest patriotism and simplest purity of life, your modern religion, in the very stronghold of it, has reduced the song and dance of ancient virginal thanksgiving to the howlings and staggerings of men betraying, in intoxication, a nature sunk more than half-way towards the beasts; and you will begin to understand why the bible should have been "illustrated" by gustave doré. . one word more is needful, though this letter is long already. the peculiar ghastliness of this swiss mode of festivity is in its utter failure of joy; the paralysis and helplessness of a vice in which there is neither pleasure, nor art. but we are not, throughout europe, wholly thus. there is such a thing, yet, as rapturous song and dance among us, though not indicative, by any means, of joy over repentant sinners. you must come back to paris with me again. i had an evening to spare there, last summer, for investigation of theaters; and as there was nothing at any of them that i cared much about seeing, i asked a valet-de-place at meurice's what people were generally going to. he said, "all the english went to see the _lanterne magique_." i do not care to tell you what general entertainment i received in following, for once, the lead of my countrymen; but it closed with the representation of the characteristic dancing of all ages of the world; and the dance given as characteristic of modern time was the cancan, which you will see alluded to in the extract given in the note at page of 'sesame and lilies' (the small edition; and page of vol. i. of the revised series of the entire works). "the ball terminated with a devilish chain and a cancan of hell, at seven in the morning." it was led by four principal dancers (who have since appeared in london in the _huguenot captain_), and it is many years since i have seen such perfect dancing, as far as finish and accuracy of art and fulness of animal power and fire are concerned. nothing could be better done, in its own evil way, the object of the dance throughout being to express, in every gesture, the wildest fury of insolence and vicious passions possible to human creatures. so that you see, though, for the present, we find ourselves utterly incapable of a rapture of gladness or thanksgiving, the dance which is presented as characteristic of modern civilization is still rapturous enough--but it is with rapture of blasphemy. letter x. the meaning and actual operation of satanic or demoniacal influence. _march , ._ . you may gather from the facts given you in my last letter that, as the expression of true and holy gladness was in old time statedly offered up by men for a part of worship to god their father, so the expression of false and unholy gladness is in modern times, with as much distinctness and plainness, asserted by them openly to be offered to another spirit: "chain of the devil," and "cancan of hell" being the names assigned to these modern forms of joyous procession. now, you know that, among the best and wisest of our present religious teachers, there is a gradual tendency to disbelieve, and to preach their disbelief, in the commonly received ideas of the devil, and of his place, and his work. while, among some of our equally well-meaning, but far less wise, religious teachers, there is, in consequence, a panic spreading in anticipation of the moral dangers which must follow on the loss of the help of the devil. one of the last appearances in public of the author of the 'christian year' was at a conclave of clergymen assembled in defense of faith in damnation.[a] the sense of the meeting generally was, that there _must_ be such a place as hell, because no one would ever behave decently upon earth unless they were kept in wholesome fear of the fires beneath it: and mr. keble, especially insisting on this view, related a story of an old woman who had a wicked son, and who, having lately heard with horror of the teaching of mr. maurice and others, exclaimed pathetically, "my son is bad enough as it is, and if he were not afraid of hell, what would become of him!" (i write from memory, and cannot answer for the words, but i can for their purport.) [a] _physical_ damnation, i should have said. it is strange how seldom pain of heart is spoken of as a possible element of future, or as the worst of present pain. . now, my friend, i am afraid that i must incur the charge of such presumption as may be involved in variance from _both_ these systems of teaching. i do not merely _believe_ there is such a place as hell. i _know_ there is such a place; and i know also that when men have got to the point of believing virtue impossible but through dread of it, they have got _into_ it. i mean, that according to the distinctness with which they hold such a creed, the stain of nether fire has passed upon them. in the depth of his heart mr. keble could not have entertained the thought for an instant; and i believe it was only as a conspicuous sign to the religious world of the state into which they were sinking, that this creed, possible in its sincerity only to the basest of them, was nevertheless appointed to be uttered by the lips of the most tender, gracious, and beloved of their teachers. . "virtue impossible but for fear of hell"--a lofty creed for your english youth--and a holy one! and yet, my friend, there was something of right in the terrors of this clerical conclave. for, though you should assuredly be able to hold your own in the straight ways of god, without always believing that the devil is at your side, it is a state of mind much to be dreaded, that you should not _know_ the devil when you _see_ him there. for the probability is that when you do see him, the way you are walking in is not one of god's ways at all, but is leading you quite into other neighborhoods than his. on his way, indeed, you may often, like albert dürer's knight, see the fiend behind you, but you will find that he drops always farther and farther behind; whereas, if he jogs with you at your side, it is probably one of his own bypaths you are got on. and, in any case, it is a highly desirable matter that you should know him when you set eyes on him, which we are very far from doing in these days, having convinced ourselves that the graminivorous form of him, with horn and tail, is extant no longer. but in fearful truth, the presence and power of him _is_ here; in the world, with us, and within us, mock as you may; and the fight with him, for the time, sore, and widely unprosperous. do not think i am speaking metaphorically or rhetorically, or with any other than literal and earnest meaning of words. hear me, i pray you, therefore, for a little while, as earnestly as i speak. . every faculty of man's soul, and every instinct of it by which he is meant to live, is exposed to its own special form of corruption: and whether within man, or in the external world, there is a power or condition of temptation which is perpetually endeavoring to reduce every glory of his soul, and every power of his life, to such corruption as is possible to them. and the more beautiful they are, the more fearful is the death which is attached as a penalty to their degradation. . take, for instance, that which, in its purity, is the source of the highest and purest mortal happiness--love. think of it first at its highest--as it may exist in the disciplined spirit of a perfect human creature; as it has so existed again and again, and does always, wherever it truly exists at all, as the _purifying_ passion of the soul. i will not speak of the transcendental and imaginative intensity in which it may reign in noble hearts, as when it inspired the greatest religious poem yet given to men; but take it in its true and quiet purity in any simple lover's heart,--as you have it expressed, for instance, thus, exquisitely, in the 'angel in the house':-- "and there, with many a blissful tear, i vowed to love and prayed to wed the maiden who had grown so dear;-- thanked god, who had set her in my path; and promised, as i hoped to win, i never would sully my faith by the least selfishness or sin; whatever in her sight i'd seem i'd really be; i ne'er would blend, with my delight in her, a dream 'twould change her cheek to comprehend; and, if she wished it, would prefer another's to my own success; and always seek the best for her with unofficious tenderness." take this for the pure type of it in its simplicity; and then think of what corruption this passion is capable. i will give you a type of that also, and at your very doors. i cannot refer you to the time when the crime happened; but it was some four or five years ago, near newcastle, and it has remained always as a ghastly landmark in my mind, owing to the horror of the external circumstances. the body of the murdered woman was found naked, rolled into a heap of ashes, at the mouth of one of your pits. . you have thus two limiting examples, of the pure passion, and of its corruption. now, whatever influence it is, without or within us, which has a tendency to degrade the one towards the other, is literally and accurately "satanic." and this treacherous or deceiving spirit is perpetually at work, so that all the worst evil among us is a betrayed or corrupted good. take religion itself: the desire of finding out god, and placing one's self in some true son's or servant's relation to him. the devil, that is to say, the deceiving spirit within us, or outside of us, mixes up our own vanity with this desire; makes us think that in our love to god we have established some connection with him which separates us from our fellow-men, and renders us superior to them. then it takes but one wave of the devil's hand; and we are burning them alive for taking the liberty of contradicting us. . take the desire of teaching--the entirely unselfish and noble instinct for telling to those who are ignorant, the truth we know, and guarding them from the errors we see them in danger of;--there is no nobler, no more constant instinct in honorable breasts; but let the devil formalize it, and mix the pride of a profession with it--get foolish people entrusted with the business of instruction, and make their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in pulpits above a submissive crowd--and you have it instantly corrupted into its own reverse; you have an alliance _against_ the light, shrieking at the sun, and the moon, and stars, as profane spectra:--a company of the blind, beseeching those they lead to remain blind also. "the heavens and the lights that rule them are untrue; the laws of creation are treacherous; the poles of the earth are out of poise. but _we_ are true. light is in us only. shut your eyes close and fast, and we will lead you." . take the desire and faith of mutual help; the virtue of vowed brotherhood for the accomplishment of common purpose, (without which nothing great can be wrought by multitudinous bands of men); let the devil put pride of caste into it, and you have a military organization applied for a thousand years to maintain that higher caste in idleness by robbing the laboring poor; let the devil put a few small personal interests into it, and you have all faithful deliberation on national law rendered impossible in the parliaments of europe, by the antagonism of parties. . take the instinct for justice, and the natural sense of indignation against crime; let the devil color it with personal passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a gravestone. take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which are the source of every true achievement in art; let the devil touch them with sensuality, and they are stronger than the sword or the flame to blast the cities where they were born, into ruin without hope. take the instinct of industry and ardor of commerce, which are meant to be the support and mutual maintenance of man; let the devil touch them with avarice, and you shall see the avenues of the exchange choked with corpses that have died of famine. . now observe--i leave you to call this deceiving spirit what you like--or to theorize about it as you like. all that i desire you to recognize is the fact of its being here, and the need of its being fought with. if you take the bible's account of it, or dante's, or milton's, you will receive the image of it as a mighty spiritual creature, commanding others, and resisted by others: if you take Ã�schylus's or hesiod's account of it, you will hold it for a partly elementary and unconscious adversity of fate, and partly for a group of monstrous spiritual agencies connected with death, and begotten out of the dust; if you take a modern rationalist's, you will accept it for a mere treachery and want of vitality in our own moral nature exposing it to loathsomeness or moral disease, as the body is capable of mortification or leprosy. i do not care what you call it,--whose history you believe of it,--nor what you yourself can imagine about it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us, and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. deadly reality, i say. the puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. unbelievable,--_those_,--unless you had seen them; no fable could have been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent--working its way sidelong in the sand. as real, but with sting of eternal death--this worm that dies not, and fire that is not quenched, within our souls or around them. eternal death, i say--sure, that, whatever creed you hold;--if the old scriptural one, death of perpetual banishment from before god's face; if the modern rationalist one, death eternal for _us_, instant and unredeemable ending of lives wasted in misery. this is what this unquestionably present--this, according to his power, _omni_-present--fiend, brings us towards, daily. he is the person to be "voted" against, my working friend; it is worth something, having a vote against _him_, if you can get it! which you can, indeed; but not by gift from cabinet ministers; you must work warily with your own hands, and drop sweat of heart's blood, before you can record that vote effectually. of which more in next letter. letter xi. the satanic power is mainly twofold: the power of causing falsehood and the power of causing pain. the resistance is by law of honor and law of delight. _march , ._ . you may perhaps have thought my last three or four letters mere rhapsodies. they are nothing of the kind; they are accurate accounts of literal facts, which we have to deal with daily. this thing, or power, opposed to god's power, and specifically called "mammon" in the sermon on the mount, is, in deed and in truth, a continually present and active enemy, properly called "_arch_-enemy," that is to say, "beginning and prince of enemies," and daily we have to record our vote for, or against him. of the manner of which record we were next to consider. . this enemy is always recognizable, briefly in two functions. he is pre-eminently the lord of _lies_ and the lord of _pain_. wherever lies are, he is; wherever pain is, he has been--so that of the spirit of wisdom (who is called god's helper, as satan his adversary) it is written, not only that by her kings reign, and princes decree justice, but also that her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths peace. therefore, you will succeed, you working men, in recording your votes against this arch-enemy, precisely in the degree in which you can do away with falsehood and pain in your work and lives; and bring truth into the one, and pleasure into the other; all education being directed to make yourselves and your children _capable of honesty_ and _capable of delight_; and to rescue yourselves from iniquity and agony. and this is what i meant by saying in the preface to 'unto this last' that the central requirement of education consisted in giving habits of gentleness and justice; "gentleness" (as i will show you presently) being the best single word i could have used to express the capacity for giving and receiving true pleasure; and "justice" being similarly the most comprehensive word for all kind of honest dealing. . now, i began these letters with the purpose of explaining the nature of the requirements of justice first, and then those of gentleness, but i allowed myself to be led into that talk about the theaters, not only because the thoughts could be more easily written as they came, but also because i was able thus to illustrate for you more directly the nature of the enemy we have to deal with. you do not perhaps know, though i say this diffidently (for i often find working men know many things which one would have thought were out of their way), that music was, among the greeks, quite the first means of education; and that it was so connected with their system of ethics and of intellectual training, that the god of music is with them also the god of righteousness;--the god who purges and avenges iniquity, and contends with their satan as represented under the form of python, "the corrupter." and the greeks were incontrovertibly right in this. music is the nearest at hand, the most orderly, the most delicate, and the most perfect, of all bodily pleasures; it is also the only one which is equally helpful to all the ages of man,--helpful from the nurse's song to her infant, to the music, unheard of others, which so often haunts the deathbed of pure and innocent spirits. and the action of the deceiving or devilish power is in _nothing_ shown quite so distinctly among us at this day,--not even in our commercial dishonesties, nor in our social cruelties,--as in its having been able to take away music, as an instrument of education, altogether; and to enlist it almost wholly in the service of superstition on the one hand, and of sensuality on the other. . this power of the muses, then, and its proper influence over you workmen, i shall eventually have much to insist upon with you; and in doing so i shall take that beautiful parable of the prodigal son (which i have already referred to), and explain, as far as i know, the significance of it, and then i will take the three means of festivity, or wholesome human joy, therein stated,--fine dress, rich food, and music;--("bring forth the fairest robe for him,"--"bring forth the fatted calf, and kill it;" "as he drew nigh, he heard music and dancing"); and i will show you how all these three things, fine dress, rich food, and music (including ultimately all the other arts) are meant to be sources of life, and means of moral discipline, to all men; and how they have all three been made, by the devil, the means of guilt, dissoluteness, and death.[a] but first i must return to my original plan of these letters, and endeavor to set down for you some of the laws which, in a true working men's parliament, must be ordained in defense of honesty. [a] see 'fors clavigera,' letter xxiv. of which laws (preliminary to all others, and necessary above all others), having now somewhat got my raveled threads together again, i will begin talk in my next letter. letter xii. the necessity of imperative law to the prosperity of states. _march , ._ . i have your most interesting letter,[a] which i keep for reference, when i come to the consideration of its subject in its proper place, under the head of the abuse of food. i do not wonder that your life should be rendered unhappy by the scenes of drunkenness which you are so often compelled to witness; nor that this so gigantic and infectious evil should seem to you the root of the greater part of the misery of our lower orders. i do not wonder that george cruikshank has warped the entire current of his thoughts and life, at once to my admiration and my sorrow, from their natural field of work, that he might spend them, in struggle with this fiend, for the poor lowest people whom he knows so well. i wholly sympathize with you in indignation at the methods of temptation employed, and at the use of the fortunes made by the vendors of death; and whatever immediately applicable legal means there might be of restricting the causes of drunkenness, i should without hesitation desire to bring into operation. but all such appliance i consider temporary and provisionary; nor, while there is record of the miracle at cana (not to speak of the sacrament) can i conceive it possible, without (logically) the denial of the entire truth of the new testament, to reprobate the use of wine as a stimulus to the powers of life. supposing we did deny the words and deeds of the founder of christianity, the authority of the wisest heathens, especially that of plato in the 'laws,' is wholly against abstinence from wine; and much as i can believe, and as i have been endeavoring to make you believe also, of the subtlety of the devil, i do not suppose the vine to have been one of his inventions. of this, however, more in another place. by the way, was it not curious that in the 'manchester examiner,' in which that letter of mine on the abuse of dancing appeared, there chanced to be, in the next column, a paragraph giving an account of a girl stabbing her betrayer in a ball-room; and another paragraph describing a parisian character, which gives exactly the extreme type i wanted, for example of the abuse of food?[b] [a] appendix . [b] appendix . . i return, however, now to the examination of possible means for the enforcement of justice, in temper and in act, as the first of political requirements. and as, in stating my conviction of the necessity of certain stringent laws on this matter, i shall be in direct opposition to mr. stuart mill; and, more or less, in opposition to other professors of modern political economy, as well as to many honest and active promoters of the privileges of working men (as if privilege only were wanted and never restraint!), i will give you, as briefly as i can, the grounds on which i am prepared to justify such opposition. . when the crew of a wrecked ship escape in an open boat, and the boat is crowded, the provisions scanty, and the prospect of making land distant, laws are instantly established and enforced which no one thinks of disobeying. an entire equality of claim to the provisions is acknowledged without dispute; and an equal liability to necessary labor. no man who can row is allowed to refuse his oar; no man, however much money he may have saved in his pocket, is allowed so much as half a biscuit beyond his proper ration. any riotous person who endangered the safety of the rest would be bound, and laid in the bottom of the boat, without the smallest compunction, for such violation of the principles of individual liberty; and, on the other hand, any child, or woman, or aged person, who was helpless, and exposed to great danger and suffering by their weakness, would receive more than ordinary care and indulgence, not unaccompanied with unanimous self-sacrifice on the part of the laboring crew. there is never any question under circumstances like these, of what is right and wrong, worthy and unworthy, wise or foolish. if there _be_ any question, there is little hope for boat or crew. the right man is put at the helm; every available hand is set to the oars; the sick are tended, and the vicious restrained, at once, and decisively; or if not, the end is near. . now, the circumstances of every associated group of human society, contending bravely for national honors and felicity of life, differ only from those thus supposed, in the greater, instead of less, necessity for the establishment of restraining law. there is no point of difference in the difficulties to be met, nor in the rights reciprocally to be exercised. vice and indolence are not less, but more, injurious in a nation than in a boat's company; the modes in which they affect the interests of worthy persons being far more complex, and more easily concealed. the right of restraint, vested in those who labor, over those who would impede their labor, is as absolute in the large as in the small society; the equal claim to share in whatever is necessary to the common life (or commonwealth) is as indefeasible; the claim of the sick and helpless to be cared for by the strong with earnest self-sacrifice, is as pitiful and as imperative; the necessity that the governing authority should be in the hands of a true and trained pilot is as clear and as constant. in none of these conditions is there any difference between a nation and a boat's company. the only difference is in this, that the impossibility of discerning the effects of individual error and crime, or of counteracting them by individual effort, in the affairs of a great nation renders it tenfold more necessary than in a small society that direction by law should be sternly established. assume that your boat's crew is disorderly and licentious, and will, by agreement, submit to no order;--the most troublesome of them will yet be easily discerned; and the chance is that the best man among them knocks him down. common instinct of self-preservation will make the rioters put a good sailor at the helm, and impulsive pity and occasional help will be, by heart and hand, here and there given to visible distress. not so in the ship of the realm. the most troublesome persons in _it_ are usually the least recognized for such, and the most active in its management; the best men mind their own business patiently, and are never thought of; the good helmsman never touches the tiller but in the last extremity; and the worst forms of misery are hidden, not only from every eye, but from every thought. on the deck, the aspect is of cleopatra's galley--under hatches there is a slave hospital; while, finally (and this is the most fatal difference of all), even the few persons who care to interfere energetically, with purpose of doing good, can, in a large society, discern so little of the real state of evil to be dealt with, and judge so little of the best means of dealing with it, that half of their best efforts will be misdirected, and some may even do more harm than good. whereas it is the sorrowful law of this universe, that evil, even unconscious and unintended, never fails of _its_ effect; and in a state where the evil and the good, under conditions of individual "liberty," are allowed to contend together, not only every _stroke_ on the devil's side tells--but every _slip_, (the mistakes of wicked men being as mischievous as their successes); while on the side of right, there will be much direct and fatal defeat, and, even of its measure of victory, half will be fruitless. . it is true, of course, that, in the end of ends, nothing but the right conquers; the prevalent thorns of wrong, at last, crackle away in indiscriminate flame: and of the good seed sown, one grain in a thousand some day comes up--and somebody lives by it; but most of our great teachers, not excepting carlyle and emerson themselves, are a little too encouraging in their proclamation of this comfort, not, to my mind, very sufficient, when for the present our fields are full of nothing but darnel instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley; and none of them seem to me yet to have enough insisted on the inevitable power and infectiousness of all evil, and the easy and utter extinguishableness of good. medicine often fails of its effect--but poison never: and while, in summing the observation of past life, not unwatchfully spent, i can truly say that i have a thousand times seen patience disappointed of her hope, and wisdom of her aim, i have never yet seen folly fruitless of mischief, nor vice conclude but in calamity. . there is, however, one important condition in national economy, in which the analogy of that of a ship's company is incomplete: namely, that while labor at oar or sail is necessarily united, and can attain no independent good, or personal profit, the labor properly undertaken by the several members of a political community is necessarily, and justly, within certain limits, independent; and obtains for them independent advantage, of which, if you will glance at the last paragraph of the first chapter of 'munera pulveris,' you will see i should be the last person to propose depriving them. this great difference in final condition involves necessarily much complexity in the system and application of general laws; but it in no wise abrogates,--on the contrary, it renders yet more imperative,--the necessity for the firm ordinance of such laws, which, marking the due limits of independent agency, may enable it to exist in full energy, not only without becoming injurious, but so as more variously and perfectly to promote the entire interests of the commonwealth. i will address myself therefore in my next letter to the statement of some of these necessary laws. letter xiii. the proper offices of the bishop and duke; or, "overseer" and "leader." _march , ._ . i see, by your last letter, for which i heartily thank you, that you would not sympathize with me in my sorrow for the desertion of his own work by george cruikshank, that he may fight in the front of the temperance ranks. but you do not know what work he has left undone, nor how much richer inheritance you might have received from his hand. it was no more _his_ business to etch diagrams of drunkenness than it is mine at this moment to be writing these letters against anarchy. it is "the first mild day of march" (high time, i think, that it should be!), and by rights i ought to be out among the budding banks and hedges, outlining sprays of hawthorn and clusters of primrose. that is _my_ right work; and it is not, in the inner gist and truth of it, right nor good, for you, or for anybody else, that cruikshank with his great gift, and i with my weak, but yet thoroughly clear and definite one, should both of us be tormented by agony of indignation and compassion, till we are forced to give up our peace, and pleasure, and power; and rush down into the streets and lanes of the city, to do the little that is in the strength of our single hands against their uncleanliness and iniquity. but, as in a sorely besieged town, every man must to the ramparts, whatsoever business he leaves, so neither he nor i have had any choice but to leave our household stuff, and go on crusade, such as we are called to; not that i mean, if fate may be anywise resisted, to give up the strength of my life, as he has given his; for i think he was wrong in doing so; and that he should only have carried the fiery cross his appointed leagues, and then given it to another hand; and, for my own part, i mean these very letters to close my political work for many a day; and i write them, not in any hope of their being at present listened to, but to disburthen my heart of the witness i have to bear, that i may be free to go back to my garden lawns, and paint birds and flowers there. . for these same statutes which we are to consider to-day, have indeed been in my mind now these fourteen years, ever since i wrote the last volume of the 'stones of venice,' in which you will find, in the long note on modern education, most of what i have been now in detail writing to you, hinted in abstract; and, at the close of it, this sentence, of which i solemnly now avouch (in thankfulness that i was permitted to write it), every word: "finally, i hold it for indisputable, that the first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion. but in order to the effecting this the government must have an authority over the people of which we now do not so much as dream." that authority i did not then endeavor to define, for i knew all such assertions would be useless, and that the necessarily resultant outcry would merely diminish my influence in other directions. but now i do not care about influence any more, it being only my concern to say truly that which i know, and, if it may be, get some quiet life, yet, among the fields in the evening shadow. . there is, i suppose, no word which men are prouder of the right to attach to their names, or more envious of others who bear it, when they themselves may not, than the word "noble." do you know what it originally meant, and always, in the right use of it, means? it means a "known" person; one who has risen far enough above others to draw men's eyes to him, and to be known (honorably) for such and such an one. "ignoble," on the other hand, is derived from the same root as the word "ignorance." it means an unknown, inglorious person. and no more singular follies have been committed by weak human creatures than those which have been caused by the instinct, pure and simple, of escaping from this obscurity. instinct, which, corrupted, will hesitate at no means, good or evil, of satisfying itself with notoriety--instinct, nevertheless, which, like all other natural ones, has a true and pure purpose, and ought always in a worthy way to be satisfied. all men ought to be in this sense "noble"; known of each other, and desiring to be known. and the first law which a nation, desiring to conquer all the devices of the father of lies, should establish among its people, is that they _shall_ be so known. . will you please now read § of 'sesame and lilies'? the reviewers in the ecclesiastical journals laughed at it, as a rhapsody, when the book came out; none having the slightest notion of what i meant: (nor, indeed, do i well see how it could be otherwise!). nevertheless, i meant precisely and literally what is there said, namely, that a bishop's duty being to watch over the souls of his people, and _give_ account of every one of them, it becomes practically necessary for him first to _get_ some account of their bodies. which he was wont to do in the early days of christianity by help of a person called "deacon" or "ministering servant," whose name is still retained among preliminary ecclesiastical dignities, vainly enough! putting, however, all questions of forms and names aside, the thing actually needing to be done is this--that over every hundred (more or less) of the families composing a christian state, there should be appointed an overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the state, of the life of every individual in those families; and to have care both of their interest and conduct to such an extent as they may be willing to admit, or as their faults may justify: so that it may be impossible for any person, however humble, to suffer from unknown want, or live in unrecognized crime;--such help and observance being rendered without officiousness either of interference or inquisition (the limits of both being determined by national law), but with the patient and gentle watchfulness which true christian pastors now exercise over their flocks; only with a higher legal authority presently to be defined, of interference on due occasion. and with this farther function, that such overseers shall be not only the pastors, but the biographers, of their people; a written statement of the principal events in the life of each family being annually required to be rendered by them to a superior state officer. these records, laid up in public offices, would soon furnish indications of the families whom it would be advantageous to the nation to advance in position, or distinguish with honor, and aid by such reward as it should be the object of every government to distribute no less punctually, and far more frankly, than it distributes punishment: (compare 'munera pulveris,' essay iv., in paragraph on critic law), while the mere fact of permanent record being kept of every event of importance, whether disgraceful or worthy of praise, in each family, would of itself be a deterrent from crime, and a stimulant to well-deserving conduct, far beyond mere punishment or reward. . nor need you think that there would be anything in such a system un-english, or tending to espionage. no uninvited visits should ever be made in any house, unless law had been violated; nothing recorded, against its will, of any family, but what was inevitably known of its publicly visible conduct, and the results of that conduct. what else was written should be only by the desire, and from the communications, of its head. and in a little while it would come to be felt that the true history of a nation was indeed not of its wars, but of its households; and the desire of men would rather be to obtain some conspicuous place in these honorable annals, than to shrink behind closed shutters from public sight. until at last, george herbert's grand word of command would hold not only on the conscience, but the actual system and outer economy of life, "think the king sees thee still, for _his_ king does." . secondly, above these bishops or pastors, who are only to be occupied in offices of familiar supervision and help, should be appointed higher officers of state, having executive authority over as large districts as might be conveniently (according to the number and circumstances of their inhabitants) committed to their care; officers who, according to the reports of the pastors, should enforce or mitigate the operation of too rigid general law, and determine measures exceptionally necessary for public advantage. for instance, the general law being that all children of the operative classes, at a certain age, should be sent to public schools, these superior officers should have power, on the report of the pastors, to dispense with the attendance of children who had sick parents to take charge of, or whose home-life seemed to be one of better advantage for them than that of the common schools; or who, for any other like cause, might justifiably claim remission. and it being the general law that the entire body of the public should contribute to the cost, and divide the profits, of all necessary public works and undertakings, as roads, mines, harbor protections, and the like, and that nothing of this kind should be permitted to be in the hands of private speculators, it should be the duty of the district officer to collect whatever information was accessible respecting such sources of public profit; and to represent the circumstances in parliament: and then, with parliamentary authority, but on his own sole personal responsibility, to see that such enterprises were conducted honestly and with due energy and order. the appointment to both these offices should be by election, and for life; by what forms of election shall be matter of inquiry, after we have determined some others of the necessary constitutional laws. . i do not doubt but that you are already beginning to think it was with good reason i held my peace these fourteen years,--and that, for any good likely to be done by speaking, i might as well have held it altogether! it may be so: but merely to complete and explain my own work, it is necessary that i should say these things finally; and i believe that the imminent danger to which we are now in england exposed by the gradually accelerated fall of our aristocracy (wholly their own fault), and the substitution of money-power for their martial one; and by the correspondingly imminent prevalence of mob violence here, as in america; together with the continually increasing chances of insane war, founded on popular passion, whether of pride, fear, or acquisitiveness,--all these dangers being further darkened and degraded by the monstrous forms of vice and selfishness which the appliances of recent wealth, and of vulgar mechanical art, make possible to the million,--will soon bring us into a condition in which men will be glad to listen to almost any words but those of a demagogue, and to seek any means of safety rather than those in which they have lately trusted. so, with your good leave, i will say my say to the end, mock at it who may. p.s.--i take due note of the regulations of trade proposed in your letter just received[a]--all excellent. i shall come to them presently, "cash payment" above all. you may write that on your trade-banners in letters of gold, wherever you would have them raised victoriously. [a] appendix . letter xiv. the first group of essential laws--against theft by false work, and by bankruptcy.--necessary publicity of accounts. _march , ._ . i feel much inclined to pause at this point, to answer the kind of questions and objections which i know must be rising in your mind, respecting the authority supposed to be lodged in the persons of the officers just specified. but i can neither define, nor justify to you, the powers i would desire to see given to them, till i state to you the kind of laws they would have to enforce: of which the first group should be directed to the prevention of all kinds of thieving; but chiefly of the occult and polite methods of it; and, of all occult methods, chiefly, the making and selling of bad goods. no form of theft is so criminal as this--none so deadly to the state. if you break into a man's house and steal a hundred pounds' worth of plate, he knows his loss, and there is an end (besides that you take your risk of punishment for your gain, like a man). and if you do it bravely and openly, and habitually live by such inroad, you may retain nearly every moral and manly virtue, and become a heroic rider and reiver, and hero of song. but if you swindle me out of twenty shillings' worth of quality on each of a hundred bargains, i lose my hundred pounds all the same, and i get a hundred untrustworthy articles besides, which will fail me and injure me in all manner of ways, when i least expect it; and you, having done your thieving basely, are corrupted by the guilt of it to the very heart's core. . this is the first thing, therefore, which your general laws must be set to punish, fiercely, immitigably, to the utter prevention and extinction of it, or there is no hope for you. no religion that ever was preached on this earth of god's rounding ever proclaimed any salvation to sellers of bad goods. if the ghost that is in you, whatever the essence of it, leaves your hand a juggler's, and your heart a cheat's, it is not a holy ghost, be assured of that. and for the rest, all political economy, as well as all higher virtue, depends _first on sound work_. let your laws, then, i say, in the beginning, be set to secure this. you cannot make punishment too stern for subtle knavery. keep no truce with this enemy, whatever pardon you extend to more generous ones. for light weights and false measures, or for proved adulteration or dishonest manufacture of article, the penalty should be simply confiscation of goods and sending out of the country. the kind of person who desires prosperity by such practices could not be made to "emigrate" too speedily. what to do with him in the place you appoint to be blessed by his presence, we will in time consider. . under such penalty, however, and yet more under the pressure of such a right public opinion as could pronounce and enforce such penalty, i imagine that sham articles would become speedily as rare as sound ones are now. the chief difficulty in the matter would be to fix your standard. this would have to be done by the guild of every trade in its own manner, and within certain easily recognizable limits, and this fixing of standard would necessitate much simplicity in the forms and kinds of articles sold. you could only warrant a certain kind of glazing or painting in china, a certain quality of leather or cloth, bricks of a certain clay, loaves of a defined mixture of meal. advisable improvements or varieties in manufacture would have to be examined and accepted by the trade guild: when so accepted, they would be announced in public reports; and all puffery and self-proclamation, on the part of tradesmen, absolutely forbidden, as much as the making of any other kind of noise or disturbance. . but observe, this law is only to have force over tradesmen whom i suppose to have joined voluntarily in carrying out a better system of commerce. outside of their guild, they would have to leave the rogue to puff and cheat as he chose, and the public to be gulled as they chose. all that is necessary is that the said public should clearly know the shops in which they could get warranted articles; and, as clearly, those in which they bought at their own risk. and the above-named penalty of confiscation of goods should of course be enforced only against dishonest members of the trade guild. if people chose to buy of those who had openly refused to join an honest society, they should be permitted to do so, at their pleasure, and peril: and this for two reasons,--the first, that it is always necessary, in enacting strict law, to leave some safety valve for outlet of irrepressible vice (nearly all the stern lawgivers of old time erred by oversight in this; so that the morbid elements of the state, which it should be allowed to get rid of in a cutaneous and openly curable manner, were thrown inwards, and corrupted its constitution, and broke all down);--the second, that operations of trade and manufacture conducted under, and guarded by, severe law, ought always to be subject to the stimulus of such erratic external ingenuity as cannot be tested by law, or would be hindered from its full exercise by the dread of it; not to speak of the farther need of extending all possible indulgence to foreign traders who might wish to exercise their industries here without liability to the surveillance of our trade guilds. . farther, while for all articles warranted by the guild (as above supposed) the prices should be annually fixed for the trade throughout the kingdom; and the producing workman's wages fixed, so as to define the master's profits within limits admitting only such variation as the nature of the given article of sale rendered inevitable;--yet, in the production of other classes of articles, whether by skill of applied handicraft, or fineness of material above the standard of the guild, attaining, necessarily, values above its assigned prices, every firm should be left free to make its own independent efforts and arrangements with its workmen, subject always to the same penalty, if it could be proved to have consistently described, or offered, anything to the public for what it was not: and finally, the state of the affairs of every firm should be annually reported to the guild, and its books laid open to inspection, for guidance in the regulation of prices in the subsequent year; and any firm whose liabilities exceeded its assets by a hundred pounds should be forthwith declared bankrupt. and i will anticipate what i have to say in succeeding letters so far as to tell you that i would have this condition extend to every firm in the country, large or small, and of whatever rank in business. and thus you perceive, my friend, i shall not have to trouble you or myself much with deliberations respecting commercial "panics," nor to propose legislative cures for _them_, by any laxatives or purgatives of paper currency, or any other change of pecuniary diet. letter xv. the nature of theft by unjust profits.--crime can finally be arrested only by education. _ th march._ . the first methods of polite robbery, by dishonest manufacture and by debt, of which we have been hitherto speaking, are easily enough to be dealt with and ended, when once men have a mind to end them. but the third method of polite robbery, by dishonest _acquisition_, has many branches, and is involved among honest arts of acquisition, so that it is difficult to repress the one without restraining the other. observe, first, large fortunes cannot honestly be made by the work of any _one_ man's hands, or head. if his work benefits multitudes, and involves position of high trust, it may be (i do not say that it _is_) expedient to reward him with great wealth or estate; but fortune of this kind is freely given in gratitude for benefit, not as repayment for labor. also, men of peculiar genius in any art, if the public can enjoy the product of their genius, may set it at almost any price they choose; but this, i will show you when i come to speak of art, is unlawful on their part and ruinous to their own powers. genius must not be sold; the sale of it involves, in a transcendental, but perfectly true, sense, the guilt both of simony and prostitution. your labor only may be sold; your soul must not. . now, by fair pay for fair labor, according to the rank of it, a man can obtain means of comfortable, or if he needs it, refined life. but he cannot obtain large fortune. such fortunes as are now the prizes of commerce can be made only in one of three ways:-- ( .) by obtaining command over the labor of multitudes of other men and taxing it for our own profit. ( .) by treasure-trove,--as of mines, useful vegetable products, and the like,--in circumstances putting them under our own exclusive control. ( .) by speculation, (commercial gambling). the first two of these means of obtaining riches are, in some forms and within certain limits, lawful, and advantageous to the state. the third is entirely detrimental to it; for in all cases of profit derived from speculation, at best, what one man gains another loses; and the net results to the state is zero, (pecuniarily,) with the loss of the time and ingenuity spent in the transaction; besides the disadvantage involved in the discouragement of the losing party, and the corrupted moral natures of both. this is the result of speculation at its best. at its worst, not only b loses what a gains (having taken his fair risk of such loss for his fair chance of gain), but c and d, who never had any chance at all, are drawn in by b's fall, and the final result is that a sets up his carriage on the collected sum which was once the means of living to a dozen families. . nor is this all. for while real commerce is founded on real necessities or uses, and limited by these, speculation, of which the object is merely gain, seeks to excite imaginary necessities and popular desires, in order to gather its temporary profit from the supply of them. so that not only the persons who lend their money to it will be finally robbed, but the work done with their money will be, for the most part, useless, and thus the entire body of the public injured as well as the persons concerned in the transaction. take, for instance, the architectural decorations of railways throughout the kingdom,--representing many millions of money for which no farthing of dividend can ever be forthcoming. the public will not be induced to pay the smallest fraction of higher fare to rochester or dover because the ironwork of the bridge which carries them over the thames is covered with floral cockades, and the piers of it edged with ornamental cornices. all that work is simply put there by the builders that they may put the percentage upon it into their own pockets; and, the rest of the money being thrown into that floral form, there is an end of it, as far as the shareholders are concerned. millions upon millions have thus been spent, within the last twenty years, on ornamental arrangements of zigzag bricks, black and blue tiles, cast-iron foliage, and the like; of which millions, as i said, not a penny can ever return into the shareholders' pockets, nor contribute to public speed or safety on the line. it is all sunk forever in ornamental architecture, and (trust me for this!) _all that architecture is bad_. as such, it had incomparably better not have been built. its only result will be to corrupt what capacity of taste or right pleasure in such work we have yet left to us! and consider a little, what other kind of result than that might have been attained if all those millions had been spent usefully: say, in buying land for the people, or building good houses for them, or (if it had been imperatively required to be spent decoratively) in laying out gardens and parks for them,--or buying noble works of art for their permanent possession,--or, best of all, establishing frequent public schools and libraries. count what those lost millions would have so accomplished for you! but you left the affair to "supply and demand," and the british public had not brains enough to "demand" land, or lodging, or books. it "demanded" cast-iron cockades and zigzag cornices, and is "supplied" with them, to its beatitude for evermore. . now, the theft we first spoke of, by falsity of workmanship or material, is, indeed, so far worse than these thefts by dishonest acquisition, that there is no possible excuse for it on the ground of self-deception; while many speculative thefts are committed by persons who really mean to do no harm, but think the system on the whole a fair one, and do the best they can in it for themselves. but in the real fact of the crime, when consciously committed, in the numbers reached by its injury, in the degree of suffering it causes to those whom it ruins, in the baseness of its calculated betrayal of implicit trust, in the yet more perfect vileness of the obtaining such trust by misrepresentation, only that it may be betrayed, and in the impossibility that the crime should be at all committed, except by persons of good position and large knowledge of the world--what manner of theft is so wholly unpardonable, so inhuman, so contrary to every law and instinct which binds or animates society? and then consider farther, how many of the carriages that glitter in our streets are driven, and how many of the stately houses that gleam among our english fields are inhabited, by this kind of thief! . i happened to be reading this morning ( th march) some portions of the lent services, and i came to a pause over the familiar words, "and with him they crucified two thieves." have you ever considered (i speak to you now as a professing christian), why, in the accomplishment of the "numbering among transgressors," the transgressors chosen should have been especially thieves--not murderers, nor, as far as we know, sinners by any gross violence? do you observe how the sin of theft is again and again indicated as the chiefly antagonistic one to the law of christ? "this he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag" (of judas). and again, though barabbas was a leader of sedition, and a murderer besides,--(that the popular election might be in all respects perfect)--yet st. john, in curt and conclusive account of him, fastens again on the theft. "then cried they all again saying, not this man, but barabbas. now barabbas was a robber." i believe myself the reason to be that theft is indeed, in its subtle forms, the most complete and excuseless of human crimes. sins of violence usually are committed under sudden or oppressive temptation: they may be the madness of moments; or they may be apparently the only means of extrication from calamity. in other cases, they are the diseased acts or habits of lower and brutified natures.[a] but theft involving deliberative intellect, and absence of passion, is the purest type of wilful iniquity, in persons capable of doing right. which being so, it seems to be fast becoming the practice of modern society to crucify its christ indeed, as willingly as ever, in the persons of his poor; but by no means now to crucify its thieves beside him! it elevates its thieves after another fashion; sets them upon a hill, that their light may shine before men and that all may see their good works, and glorify their father, in--the opposite of heaven. [a] see the analysis of the moral system of dante, respecting punishment, given in 'fors clavigera,' letter xxiii. . i think your trade parliament will have to put an end to this kind of business somehow! but it cannot be done by laws merely, where the interests and circumstances are so extended and complex. nay, even as regards lower and more defined crimes, the assigned punishment is not to be thought of as a preventive means; but only as the seal of opinion set by society on the fact. crime cannot be hindered by punishment; it will always find some shape and outlet, unpunishable or unclosed. crime can only be truly hindered by letting no man grow up a criminal--by taking away the _will_ to commit sin; not by mere punishment of its commission. crime, small and great, can only be truly stayed by education--not the education of the intellect only, which is, on some men, wasted, and for others mischievous; but education of the heart, which is alike good and necessary for all. so, on this matter, i will try in my next letter to say one or two things of which the silence has kept my own heart heavy this many a day. letter xvi. of public education irrespective of class-distinction. it consists essentially in giving habits of mercy, and habits of truth. (gentleness[a] and justice.) _march th, ._ . thank you for sending me the pamphlet containing the account of the meeting of clergy and workmen, and of the reasonings which there took place. i cannot promise you that i shall read much of them, for the question to my mind most requiring discussion and explanation is not, why workmen don't go to church, but--why other people do. however, this i know, that if among our many spiritual teachers, there are indeed any who heartily and literally believe that the wisdom they have to teach "is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her," and if, so believing, they will further dare to affront their congregations by the assertion; and plainly tell them they are not to hunt for rubies or gold any more, at their peril, till they have gained that which cannot be gotten for gold, nor silver weighed for the price thereof,--such believers, so preaching, and refusing to preach otherwise till they are in that attended to, will never want congregations, both of working men, and every other kind of men. [a] "mercy," in its full sense, means delight in perceiving nobleness, or in doing kindness. compare § . . did you ever hear of anything else so ill-named as the phantom called the "philosopher's stone"? a talisman that shall turn base metal into precious metal, nature acknowledges not; nor would any but fools seek after it. but a talisman to turn base souls into noble souls, nature has given us! and that is a "philosopher's stone" indeed, but it is a stone which the builders refuse. . if there were two valleys in california or australia, with two different kinds of gravel in the bottom of them; and in the one stream bed you could dig up, occasionally and by good fortune, nuggets of gold; and in the other stream bed, certainly and without hazard, you could dig up little caskets, containing talismans which gave length of days and peace; and alabaster vases of precious balms, which were better than the arabian dervish's ointment, and made not only the eyes to see, but the mind to know, whatever it would--i wonder in which of the stream beds there would be most diggers? . "time is money"--so say your practised merchants and economists. none of them, however, i fancy, as they draw towards death, find that the reverse is true, and that "money is time"? perhaps it might be better for them, in the end, if they did not turn so much of their time into money, lest, perchance, they also turn eternity into it! there are other things, however, which in the same sense are money, or can be changed into it, as well as time. health is money, wit is money, knowledge is money; and all your health, and wit, and knowledge may be changed for gold; and the happy goal so reached, of a sick, insane, and blind, auriferous old age; but the gold cannot be changed in its turn back into health and wit. . "time is money;" the words tingle in my ears so that i can't go on writing. is it nothing better, then? if we could thoroughly understand that time was--_itself_,--would it not be more to the purpose? a thing of which loss or gain was absolute loss, and perfect gain. and that it was expedient also to buy health and knowledge with money, if so purchasable; but not to buy money with _them_? and purchasable they are at the beginning of life, though not at its close. purchasable, always, for others, if not for ourselves. you can buy, and cheaply, life, endless life, according to your christian's creed--(there's a bargain for you!) but--long years of knowledge, and peace, and power, and happiness of love--these assuredly and irrespectively of any creed or question,--for all those desolate and haggard children about your streets. . "that is not political economy, however." pardon me; the all-comfortable saying, "what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again," is quite literally true in matters of education; no money seed can be sown with so sure and large return at harvest-time as that; only of this money-seed, more than of flesh-seed, it is utterly true, "that which thou sowest is not quickened except it _die_." you must forget your money, and every other material interest, and educate for education's sake only! or the very good you try to bestow will become venomous, and that and your money will be lost together. . and this has been the real cause of failure in our efforts for education hitherto--whether from above or below. there is no honest desire for the thing itself. the cry for it among the lower orders is because they think that, when once they have got it, they must become upper orders. there is a strange notion in the mob's mind now-a-days (including all our popular economists and educators, as we most justly may, under that brief term "mob"), that _everybody_ can be uppermost; or at least, that a state of general scramble, in which everybody in his turn should come to the top, is a proper utopian constitution; and that, once give every lad a good education, and he cannot but come to ride in his carriage (the methods of supply of coachmen and footmen not being contemplated). and very sternly i say to you--and say from sure knowledge--that a man had better not know how to read and write, than receive education on such terms. . the first condition under which it can be given usefully is, that it should be clearly understood to be no means of getting on in the world, but a means of staying pleasantly in your place there. and the first elements of state education should be calculated equally for the advantage of every order of person composing the state. from the lowest to the highest class, every child born in this island should be required by law to receive these general elements of human discipline, and to be baptized--not with a drop of water on its forehead--but in the cloud and sea of heavenly wisdom and of earthly power. and the elements of this general state education should be briefly these: . first--the body must be made as beautiful and perfect in its youth as it can be, wholly irrespective of ulterior purpose. if you mean afterwards to set the creature to business which will degrade its body and shorten its life, first, i should say, simply,--you had better let such business alone;--but if you must have it done, somehow, yet let the living creature, whom you mean to kill, get the full strength of its body first, and taste the joy, and bear the beauty of youth. after that, poison it, if you will. economically, the arrangement is a wiser one, for it will take longer in the killing than if you began with it younger; and you will get an excess of work out of it which will more than pay for its training. therefore, first teach--as i have said in the preface to 'unto this last'--"the laws of health, and exercises enjoined by them;" and, to this end, your schools must be in fresh country, and amidst fresh air, and have great extents of land attached to them in permanent estate. riding, running, all the honest, personal exercises of offense and defense, and music, should be the primal heads of this bodily education. . next to these bodily accomplishments, the two great mental graces should be taught, reverence and compassion: not that these are in a literal sense to be "taught," for they are innate in every well-born human creature, but they have to be developed exactly as the strength of the body must be, by deliberate and constant exercise. i never understood why goethe (in the plan of education in 'wilhelm meister') says that reverence is not innate, but must be taught from without; it seems to me so fixedly a function of the human spirit, that if men can get nothing else to reverence they will worship a fool, or a stone, or a vegetable.[a] but to teach reverence rightly is to attach it to the right persons and things; first, by setting over your youth masters whom they cannot but love and respect; next, by gathering for them, out of past history, whatever has been most worthy in human deeds and human passion; and leading them continually to dwell upon such instances, making this the principal element of emotional excitement to them; and, lastly, by letting them justly feel, as far as may be, the smallness of their own powers and knowledge, as compared with the attainments of others. [a] by steady preaching against it, one may quench reverence, and bring insolence to its height; but the instinct cannot be wholly uprooted. . compassion, on the other hand, is to be taught chiefly by making it a point of honor, collaterally with courage, and in the same rank (as indeed the complement and evidence of courage), so that, in the code of unwritten school law, it shall be held as shameful to have done a cruel thing as a cowardly one. all infliction of pain on weaker creatures is to be stigmatized as unmanly crime; and every possible opportunity taken to exercise the youths in offices of some practical help, and to acquaint them with the realities of the distress which, in the joyfulness of entering into life, it is so difficult, for those who have not seen home suffering, to conceive. . reverence, then, and compassion, we are to teach primarily, and with these, as the bond and guardian of them, truth of spirit and word, of thought and sight. truth, earnest and passionate, sought for like a treasure, and kept like a crown. this teaching of truth as a habit will be the chief work the master has to do; and it will enter into all parts of education. first, you must accustom the children to close accuracy of statement; this both as a principle of honor, and as an accomplishment of language, making them try always who shall speak truest, both as regards the fact he has to relate or express (not concealing or exaggerating), and as regards the precision of the words he expresses it in, thus making truth (which, indeed, it is) the test of perfect language, and giving the intensity of a moral purpose to the study and art of words: then carrying this accuracy into all habits of thought and observation also, so as always to _think_ of things as they truly are, and to see them as they truly are, as far as in us rests. and it does rest much in our power, for all false thoughts and seeings come mainly of our thinking of what we have no business with, and looking for things we want to see, instead of things that ought to be seen. . "do not talk but of what you know; do not think but of what you have materials to think justly upon; and do not look for things only that you like, when there are others to be seen"--this is the lesson to be taught to our youth, and inbred in them; and that mainly by our own example and continence. never teach a child anything of which you are not yourself sure; and, above all, if you feel anxious to force anything into its mind in tender years, that the virtue of youth and early association may fasten it there, be sure it is no lie which you thus sanctify. there is always more to be taught of absolute, incontrovertible knowledge, open to its capacity, than any child can learn; there is no need to teach it anything doubtful. better that it should be ignorant of a thousand truths, than have consecrated in its heart a single lie. . and for this, as well as for many other reasons, the principal subjects of education, after history, ought to be natural science and mathematics; but with respect to these studies, your schools will require to be divided into three groups: one for children who will probably have to live in cities, one for those who will live in the country, and one for those who will live at sea; the schools for these last, of course, being always placed on the coast. and for children whose life is to be in cities, the subjects of study should be, as far as their disposition will allow of it, mathematics and the arts; for children who are to live in the country, natural history of birds, insects, and plants, together with agriculture taught practically; and for children who are to be seamen, physical geography, astronomy, and the natural history of sea-fish and sea-birds. . this, then, being the general course and material of education for all children, observe farther, that in the preface to 'unto this last' i said that every child, besides passing through this course, was at school to learn "the calling by which it was to live." and it may perhaps appear to you that after, or even in the early stages of education such as this above described, there are many callings which, however much called to them, the children might not willingly determine to learn or live by. "probably," you may say, "after they have learned to ride, and fence, and sing, and know birds and flowers, it will be little to their liking to make themselves into tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and the like." and i cannot but agree with you as to the exceeding probability of some such reluctance on their part, which will be a very awkward state of things indeed, (since we can by no means get on without tailoring and shoemaking,) and one to be meditated upon very seriously in next letter. . p.s.--thank you for sending me your friend's letter about gustave doré; he is wrong, however, in thinking there is any good in those illustrations of 'elaine.' i had intended to speak of them afterwards, for it is to my mind quite as significant--almost as awful--a sign of what is going on in the midst of us, that our great english poet should have suffered his work to be thus contaminated, as that the lower evangelicals, never notable for sense in the arts, should have got their bibles dishonored. those 'elaine' illustrations are just as impure as anything else that doré has done; but they are also vapid, and without any one merit whatever in point of art. the illustrations to the 'contes drôlatiques' are full of power and invention; but those to 'elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical bêtises, with the taint of the charnel-house on them besides. letter xvii. the relations of education to position in life. _april , ._ . i am not quite sure that you will feel the awkwardness of the dilemma i got into at the end of last letter, as much as i do myself. you working men have been crowing and peacocking at such a rate lately; and setting yourselves forth so confidently for the cream of society, and the top of the world, that perhaps you will not anticipate any of the difficulties which suggest themselves to a thoroughbred tory and conservative, like me. perhaps you will expect a youth properly educated--a good rider--musician--and well-grounded scholar in natural philosophy, to think it a step of promotion when he has to go and be made a tailor of, or a coalheaver? if you do, i should very willingly admit that you might be right, and go on to the farther development of my notions without pausing at this stumbling-block, were it not that, unluckily, all the wisest men whose sayings i ever heard or read, agree in expressing (one way or another) just such contempt for those useful occupations, as i dread on the part of my foolishly refined scholars. shakespeare and chaucer,--dante and virgil,--horace and pindar,--homer, Ã�schylus, and plato,--all the men of any age or country who seem to have had heaven's music on their lips, agree in their scorn of mechanic life. and i imagine that the feeling of prudent englishmen, and sensible as well as sensitive englishwomen, on reading my last letter, would mostly be--"is the man mad, or laughing at us, to propose educating the working classes this way? he could not, if his wild scheme were possible, find a better method of making them acutely wretched." . it may be so, my sensible and polite friends; and i am heartily willing, as well as curious, to hear you develop your own scheme of operative education, so only that it be universal, orderly, and careful. i do not say that i shall be prepared to advocate my athletics and philosophies instead. only, observe what you admit, or imply, in bringing forward your possibly wiser system. you imply that a certain portion of mankind must be employed in degrading work; and that, to fit them for this work, it is necessary to limit their knowledge, their active powers, and their enjoyments, from childhood upwards, so that they may not be able to conceive of any state better than the one they were born in, nor possess any knowledge or acquirements inconsistent with the coarseness, or disturbing the monotony, of their vulgar occupation. and by their labor in this contracted state of mind, we superior beings are to be maintained; and always to be curtseyed to by the properly ignorant little girls, and capped by the properly ignorant little boys, whenever we pass by. . mind, i do not say that this is _not_ the right state of things. only, if it be, you need not be so over-particular about the slave-trade, it seems to me. what is the use of arguing so pertinaciously that a black's skull will hold as much as a white's, when you are declaring in the same breath that a white's skull must not hold as much as it can, or it will be the worse for him? it does not appear to me at all a profound state of slavery to be whipped into doing a piece of low work that i don't like; but it is a very profound state of slavery to be kept, myself, low in the forehead, that i may not dislike low work. . you see, my friend, the dilemma is really an awkward one, whichever way you look at it. but, what is still worse, i am not puzzled only, at this part of my scheme, about the boys i shall have to make _workmen_ of; i am just as much puzzled about the boys i shall have to make _nothing_ of! grant, that by hook or crook, by reason or rattan, i persuade a certain number of the roughest ones into some serviceable business, and get coats and shoes made for the rest,--what is the business of "the rest" to be? naturally, according to the existing state of things, one supposes they are to belong to some of the gentlemanly professions; to be soldiers, lawyers, doctors, or clergymen. but alas, i shall not want any soldiers of special skill or pugnacity. _all_ my boys will be soldiers. so far from wanting any lawyers, of the kind that live by talking, i shall have the strongest possible objection to their appearance in the country. for doctors, i shall always entertain a profound respect; but when i get my athletic education fairly established, of what help to them will my respect be? they will all starve! and for clergymen, it is true, i shall have a large number of episcopates--one over every hundred families--(and many positions of civil authority also, for civil officers, above them and below), but all these places will involve much hard work, and be anything but covetable; while, of clergymen's usual work, admonition, theological demonstration, and the like, i shall want very little done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for i will allow no man to admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own dinner by more productive work than admonition. well, i wish, my friend, you would write me a word or two in answer to this, telling me your own ideas as to the proper issue out of these difficulties. i should like to know what you think, and what you suppose others will think, before i tell you my own notions about the matter. letter xviii. the harmful effects of servile employments. the possible practice and exhibition of sincere humility by religious persons. _april , ._ . i have been waiting these three days to know what you would say to my last questions; and now you send me two pamphlets of combe's to read! i never read anything in spring-time (except the ai, ai, on the "sanguine flower inscribed with woe"); and, besides, if, as i gather from your letter, combe thinks that among well-educated boys there would be a percentage constitutionally inclined to be cobblers, or looking forward with unction to establishment in the oil and tallow line, or fretting themselves for a flunkey's uniform, nothing that he could say would make me agree with him. i know, as well as he does, the unconquerable differences in the clay of the human creature: and i know that, in the outset, whatever system of education you adopted, a large number of children could be made nothing of, and would necessarily fall out of the ranks, and supply candidates enough for degradation to common mechanical business: but this enormous difference in bodily and mental capacity has been mainly brought about by difference in occupation, and by direct maltreatment; and in a few generations, if the poor were cared for, their marriages looked after, and sanitary law enforced, a beautiful type of face and form, and a high intelligence, would become all but universal, in a climate like this of england. even as it is, the marvel is always to me, how the race resists, at least in its childhood, influences of ill-regulated birth, poisoned food, poisoned air, and soul neglect. i often see faces of children, as i walk through the black district of st. giles's (lying, as it does, just between my own house and the british museum), which, through all their pale and corrupt misery, recall the old "non angli," and recall it, not by their beauty, but by their sweetness of expression, even though signed already with trace and cloud of the coming life,--a life so bitter that it would make the curse of the th psalm true upon our modern babylon, though we were to read it thus, "happy shall _thy children_ be, if one taketh and dasheth them against the stones." . yes, very solemnly i repeat to you that in those worst treated children of the english race, i yet see the making of gentlemen and gentlewomen--not the making of dog-stealers and gin-drinkers, such as their parents were; and the child of the average english tradesman or peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate disposition such as must fetter him forever to the clod or the counter. you say that many a boy runs away, or would run away if he could, from good positions to go to sea. of course he does. i never said i should have any difficulty in finding sailors, but i shall in finding fishmongers. i am at no loss for gardeners either, but what am i to do for greengrocers? . the fact is, a great number of quite necessary employments are, in the accuratest sense, "servile;" that is, they sink a man to the condition of a serf, or unthinking worker, the proper state of an animal, but more or less unworthy of men; nay, unholy in some sense, so that a day is made "holy" by the fact of its being commanded, "thou shalt do no _servile_ work therein." and yet, if undertaken in a certain spirit, such work might be the holiest of all. if there were but a thread or two of sound fiber here and there left in our modern religion, so that the stuff of it would bear a real strain, one might address our two opposite groups of evangelicals and ritualists somewhat after this fashion:--"good friends, these differences of opinion between you cannot but be painful to your christian charity, and they are unseemly to us, the profane; and prevent us from learning from you what, perhaps, we ought. but, as we read your book, we, for our part, gather from it that you might, without danger to your own souls, set an undivided example to us, for the benefit of ours. you, both of you, as far as we understand, agree in the necessity of humility to the perfection of your character. we often hear you, of calvinistic persuasion, speaking of yourselves as 'sinful dust and ashes,'--would it then be inconsistent with your feelings to make yourselves into 'serviceable' dust and ashes? we observe that of late many of our roads have been hardened and mended with cinders; now, if, in a higher sense, you could allow us to mend the roads of the world with _you_ a little, it would be a great proof to us of your sincerity. suppose, only for a little while, in the present difficulty and distress, you were to make it a test of conversion that a man should regularly give zaccheus's portion, half his goods, to the poor, and at once adopt some disagreeable and despised, but thoroughly useful, trade? you cannot think that this would finally be to your disadvantage; you doubtless believe the texts, 'he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the lord,' and 'he that would be chief among you, let him be your servant.' the more you parted with, and the lower you stooped, the greater would be your final reward, and final exaltation. you profess to despise human learning and worldly riches; leave both of these to _us_; undertake for us the illiterate and ill-paid employments which must deprive you of the privileges of society and the pleasures of luxury. you cannot possibly preach your faith so forcibly to the world by any quantity of the finest words, as by a few such simple and painful acts; and over your counters, in honest retail business, you might preach a gospel that would sound in more ears than any that was ever proclaimed over pulpit cushions or tabernacle rails. and, whatever may be your gifts of utterance, you cannot but feel (studying st. paul's epistles as carefully as you do) that you might more easily and modestly emulate the practical teaching of the silent apostle of the gentiles than the speech or writing of his companion. amidst the present discomforts of your brethren you may surely, with greater prospect of good to them, seek the title of sons of consolation, than of sons of thunder, and be satisfied with barnabas's confession of faith, (if you can reach no farther,) who, 'having land, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet.' . "to you, on the other hand, gentlemen of the embroidered robe, who neither despise learning nor the arts, we know that sacrifices such as these would be truly painful, and might at first appear inexpedient. but the doctrine of self-mortification is not a new one to you; and we should be sorry to think--we would not, indeed, for a moment dishonor you by thinking--that these melodious chants, and prismatic brightnesses of vitreous pictures, and floral graces of deep-wrought stone, were in any wise intended for your own poor pleasures, whatever profane attraction they may exercise on more fleshly-minded persons. and as you have certainly received no definite order for the painting, carving, or lighting up of churches, while the temple of the body of so many poor living christians is so pale, so mis-shapen, and so ill-lighted; but have, on the contrary, received very definite orders for the feeding and clothing of such sad humanity, we may surely ask you, not unreasonably, to humiliate yourselves in the most complete way--not with a voluntary, but a sternly _in_voluntary humility--not with a show of wisdom in will-worship, but with practical wisdom, in all honor, to the satisfying of the flesh; and to associate yourselves in monasteries and convents for the better practice of useful and humble trades. do not burn any more candles, but mould some; do not paint any more windows, but mend a few where the wind comes in, in winter time, with substantial clear glass and putty. do not vault any more high roofs, but thatch some low ones; and embroider rather on backs which are turned to the cold, than only on those which are turned to congregations. and you will have your reward afterwards, and attain, with all your flocks thus tended, to a place where you may have as much gold, and painted glass, and singing, as you like." thus much, it seems to me, one might say with some hope of acceptance, to any very earnest member of either of our two great religious parties, if, as i say, their faith could stand a strain. i have not, however, based any of my imaginary political arrangements on the probability of its doing so; and i trust only to such general good nature and willingness to help each other, as i presume may be found among men of the world; to whom i should have to make quite another sort of speech, which i will endeavor to set down the heads of, for you, in next letter. letter xix. the general pressure of excessive and improper work, in english life. _april , ._ . i cannot go on to-day with the part of my subject i had proposed, for i was disturbed by receiving a letter last night, which i herewith enclose to you, and of which i wish you to print, here following, the parts i have not underlined-- , phene street, chelsea, april , . my dear r----,-- it is long since you have heard of me, and now i ask your patience with me for a little. i have but just returned from the funeral of my dear, dear friend ----, the first artist friend i made in london--a loved and prized one. for years past he had lived in the very humblest way, fighting his battle of life against mean appreciation of his talents, the wants of a rising family, and frequent attacks of illness, crippling him for months at a time, the wolf at the door meanwhile. but about two years since his prospects brightened * * * and he had but a few weeks since ventured on removal to a larger house. his eldest boy of seventeen years, a very intelligent youth, so strongly desired to be a civil engineer that mr. ----, not being able to pay the large premium required for his apprenticeship, had been made very glad by the consent of mr. penn, of millwall, to receive him without a premium after the boy should have spent some time at king's college in the study of mechanics. the rest is a sad story. about a fortnight ago mr. ---- was taken ill, and died last week, the doctors say, of sheer physical exhaustion, not thirty-nine years old, leaving eight young children, and his poor widow expecting her confinement, and so weak and ill as to be incapable of effort. this youth is the eldest, and the other children range downwards to a babe of eighteen months. there is not one who knew him, i believe, that will not give cheerfully, to their ability, for his widow and children; but such aid will go but a little way in this painful case; and it would be a real boon to this poor widow if some of her children could be got into an orphan asylum. * * * if you are able to do anything i would send particulars of the age and sex of the children. i remain, dear sir, ever obediently yours, fred. j. shields. p.s.--i ought to say that poor ---- has been quite unable to save, with his large family; and that they would be utterly destitute now, but for the kindness of some with whom he was professionally connected. . now this case, of which you see the entire authenticity, is, out of the many of which i hear continually, a _notably_ sad one only in so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was catering for the public amusement. hardly a week now passes without some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in england are now suffering, is so great that i feel constantly as if i were living in one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into them, out of sight. . now i want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand." here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining art,--say for fifty good years,--if you had paid him enough for his day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. but you like having your prints as cheap as possible--you triumph in the little that your laugh costs--you take all you can get from the man, give the least you can give to him,--and you accordingly kill him at thirty-nine; and thereafter have his children to take care of, or to kill also, whichever you choose; but, now, observe, you must take care of _them_ for nothing, or not at all; and what you might have had good value for, if you had given it when it would have cheered the father's heart, you now can have no return for at all, to yourselves; and what you give to the orphans, if it does not degrade them, at least afflicts, coming, not through their father's hand, its honest earnings, but from strangers. observe, farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be from the public at all. it will not be from those who profited by their father's labors; it will be chiefly from his fellow-laborers; or from persons whose money would have been beneficially spent in other directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought never to have occurred,--while those who waste their money without doing any service to the public will never contribute one farthing to this distress. . now it is this double fault in the help--that it comes too late, and that the burden of it falls wholly on those who ought least to be charged with it--which would be corrected by that institution of overseers of which i spoke to you in the twelfth of these letters, saying, you remember, that they were to have farther legal powers, which i did not then specify, but which would belong to them chiefly in the capacity of public almoners, or help-givers, aided by their deacons, the reception of such help, in time of true need, being not held disgraceful, but honorable; since the fact of its reception would be so entirely public that no impostor or idle person could ever obtain it surreptitiously. . ( th april.) i was interrupted yesterday, and i am glad of it, for here happens just an instance of the way in which the unjust distribution of the burden of charity is reflected on general interests; i cannot help what taint of ungracefulness you or other readers of these letters may feel that i incur, in speaking, in this instance, of myself. if i could speak with the same accurate knowledge of any one else, most gladly i would; but i also think it right that, whether people accuse me of boasting or not, they should know that i practise what i preach. i had not intended to say what i now shall, but the coming of this letter last night just turns the balance of the decision with me. i enclose it with the other; you see it is one from my bookseller, mr. quaritch, offering me fischer's work on the _flora of java_, and latour's on _indian orchidaceæ_, bound together, for twenty guineas. now, i am writing a book on botany just now, for young people, chiefly on wild flowers, and i want these two books very much; but i simply cannot afford to buy them, because i sent my last spare twenty guineas to mr. shields yesterday for this widow. and though you may think it not the affair of the public that i have not this book on indian flowers, it is their affair finally, that what i write for them should be founded on as broad knowledge as possible; whatever value my own book may or may not have, it will just be in a given degree worth _less_ to them, because of my want of this knowledge. . so again--for having begun to speak of myself i will do so yet more frankly--i suppose that when people see my name down for a hundred pounds to the cruikshank memorial, and for another hundred to the eyre defense fund, they think only that i have more money than i know what to do with. well, the giving of those subscriptions simply decides the question whether or no i shall be able to afford a journey to switzerland this year, in the negative; and i wanted to go, not only for health's sake, but to examine the junctions of the molasse sandstones and nagelfluh with the alpine limestone, in order to complete some notes i meant to publish next spring on the geology of the great northern swiss valley; notes which must now lie by me at least for another year; and i believe this delay (though i say it) will be really something of a loss to the traveling public, for the little essay was intended to explain to them, in a familiar way, the real wonderfulness of their favorite mountain, the righi; and to give them some amusement in trying to find out where the many-colored pebbles of it had come from. but it is more important that i should, with some stoutness, assert my respect for the genius and earnest patriotism of cruikshank, and my much more than disrespect for the jamaica committee, than that i should see the alps this year, or get my essay finished next spring; but i tell you the fact, because i want you to feel how, in thus leaving their men of worth to be assisted or defended only by those who deeply care for them, the public more or less cripple, to their own ultimate disadvantage, just the people who could serve them in other ways; while the speculators and money-seekers, who are only making their profit out of the said public, of course take no part in the help of anybody. and even if the willing bearers could sustain the burden anywise adequately, none of us would complain; but i am certain there is no man, whatever his fortune, who is now engaged in any earnest offices of kindness to these sufferers, especially of the middle class, among his acquaintance, who will not bear me witness that for one we can relieve, we must leave three to perish. i have left three, myself, in the first three months of this year. one was the artist paul gray, for whom an appeal was made to me for funds to assist him in going abroad out of the bitter english winter. i had not the means by me, and he died a week afterwards. another case was that of a widow whose husband had committed suicide, for whom application was made to me at the same time; and the third was a personal friend, to whom i refused a sum which he said would have saved him from bankruptcy. i believe six times as much would not have saved him; however, i refused, and he is ruined. . and observe, also, it is not the mere crippling of my means that i regret. it is the crippling of my temper, and waste of my time. the knowledge of all this distress, even when i can assist it,--much more when i cannot,--and the various thoughts of what i can and cannot, or ought and ought not, to do, are a far greater burden to me than the mere loss of the money. it is peremptorily not my business--it is not my gift, bodily or mentally, to look after other people's sorrow. i have enough of my own; and even if i had not, the sight of pain is not good for me. i don't want to be a bishop. in a most literal and sincere sense, "_nolo episcopari_." i don't want to be an almoner, nor a counselor, nor a member of parliament, nor a voter for members of parliament. (what would mr. holyoake say to me if he knew that i have never voted for anybody in my life, and never mean to do so!) i am essentially a painter and a leaf dissector; and my powers of thought are all purely mathematical, seizing ultimate principles only--never accidents; a line is always, to me, length without breadth; it is not a cable or a crowbar; and though i can almost infallibly reason out the final law of anything, if within reach of my industry, i neither care for, nor can trace, the minor exigencies of its daily appliance. so, in every way, i like a quiet life; and i don't like seeing people cry, or die; and should rejoice, more than i can tell you, in giving up the full half of my fortune for the poor, provided i knew that the public would make lord overstone also give the half of his, and other people who were independent give the half of theirs; and then set men who were really fit for such office to administer the fund, and answer to us for nobody's perishing innocently; and so leave us all to do what we chose with the rest, and with our days, in peace. thus far of the public's fault in the matter. next, i have a word or two to say of the sufferers' own fault--for much as i pity them, i conceive that none of them _do_ perish altogether innocently. but this must be for next letter. letter xx. of improvidence in marriage in the middle classes; and of the advisable restrictions of it. _april , ._ . it is quite as well, whatever irregularity it may introduce in the arrangement of the general subject, that yonder sad letter warped me away from the broad inquiry, to this speciality, respecting the present distress of the middle classes. for the immediate cause of that distress, in their own imprudence, of which i have to speak to you to-day, is only to be finally vanquished by strict laws, which, though they have been many a year in my mind, i was glad to have a quiet hour of sunshine for the thinking over again, this morning. sunshine which happily rose cloudless; and allowed me to meditate my tyrannies before breakfast, under the just opened blossoms of my orchard, and assisted by much melodious advice from the birds; who (my gardener having positive orders never to trouble any of them in anything, or object to their eating even my best peas if they like their flavor) rather now get _into_ my way, than out of it, when they see me about the walks; and take me into most of their counsels in nest-building. . the letter from mr. shields, which interrupted us, reached me, as you see, on the evening of the th instant. on the morning of the th, i received another, which i herewith forward to you, for verification. it is--characteristically enough--dateless, so you must take the time of its arrival on my word. and substituting m. n. for the name of the boy referred to, and withholding only the address and name of the writer, you see that it may be printed word for word--as follows:-- sir,-- may i beg for the favor of your presentation to christ's hospital for my youngest son, m. n.? i have nine children, and no means to educate them. i ventured to address you, believing that my husband's name is not unknown to you as an artist. believe me to remain faithfully yours, * * * . now this letter is only a typical example of the entire class of those which, being a governor of christ's hospital, i receive, in common with all the other governors, at the rate of about three a day, for a month or six weeks from the date of our names appearing in the printed list of the governors who have presentations for the current year. having been a governor now some twenty-five years, i have documentary evidence enough to found some general statistics upon; from which there have resulted two impressions on my mind, which i wish here specially to note to you, and i do not doubt but that all the other governors, if you could ask them, would at once confirm what i say. my first impression is, a heavy and sorrowful sense of the general feebleness of intellect of that portion of the british public which stands in need of presentations to christ's hospital. this feebleness of intellect is mainly shown in the nearly total unconsciousness of the writers that anybody else may want a presentation, besides themselves. with the exception here and there of a soldier's or a sailor's widow, hardly one of them seems to have perceived the existence of any distress in the world but their own: none know what they are asking for, or imagine, unless as a remote contingency, the possibility of its having been promised at a prior date. the second most distinct impression on my mind, is that the portion of the british public which is in need of presentations to christ's hospital considers it a merit to have large families, with or without the means of supporting them! . now it happened also (and remember, all this is strictly true, nor in the slightest particular represented otherwise than as it chanced; though the said chance brought thus together exactly the evidence i wanted for my letter to you)--it happened, i say, that on this same morning of the th april, i became accidentally acquainted with a case of quite a different kind: that of a noble girl, who, engaged at sixteen, and having received several advantageous offers since, has remained for ten years faithful to her equally faithful lover; while, their circumstances rendering it, as they rightly considered, unjustifiable in them to think of marriage, each of them simply and happily, aided and cheered by the other's love, discharged the duties of their own separate positions in life. . in the nature of things, instances of this kind of noble life remain more or less concealed, (while imprudence and error proclaim themselves by misfortune,) but they are assuredly not unfrequent in our english homes. let us next observe the political and national result of these arrangements. you leave your marriages to be settled by "supply and demand," instead of wholesome law. and thus, among your youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which they declare themselves "incapable of providing for their children's education"). on the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish, and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and tenderness from any offices of parental duty. is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a celestial empire, such as that of these british isles? . i will not here enter into any statement of the physical laws which it is the province of our physicians to explain; and which are indeed at last so far beginning to be understood, that there is hope of the nation's giving some of the attention to the conditions affecting the race of man, which it has hitherto bestowed only on those which may better its races of cattle. it is enough, i think, to say here that the beginning of all sanitary and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so mortal as licentiousness in marriage. . briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such modifications in detail as local circumstances and characters would render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nation would institute respecting its marriages. permission to marry should be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been rightly fulfilled. it should not be attainable without earnest and consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their being able honorably to maintain and teach their children. . no girl should receive her permission to marry before her seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both sexes to gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. i do not mean that they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. in every year there should be two festivals, one on the first of may, and one at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned, the maids by the old french title of rosières, and the youths, perhaps by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the day ended with feasting of the poor. . and every bachelor and rosière should be entitled to claim, if they needed it, according to their position in life, a fixed income from the state, for seven years from the day of their marriage, for the setting up of their homes; and, however rich they might be by inheritance, their income should not be permitted to exceed a given sum, proportioned to their rank, for the seven years following that in which they had obtained their permission to marry, but should accumulate in the trust of the state until that seventh year, in which they should be put (on certain conditions) finally in possession of their property; and the men, thus necessarily not before their twenty-eighth, nor usually later than their thirty-first year, become eligible to offices of state. so that the rich and poor should not be sharply separated in the beginning of the war of life; but the one supported against the first stress of it long enough to enable them, by proper forethought and economy, to secure their footing; and the other trained somewhat in the use of moderate means, before they were permitted to have the command of abundant ones. and of the sources from which these state incomes for the married poor should be supplied, or of the treatment of those of our youth whose conduct rendered it advisable to refuse them permission to marry, i defer what i have to say till we come to the general subjects of taxation and criminal discipline; leaving the proposals made in this letter to bear, for the present, whatever aspect of mere romance and unrealizable vision they probably may, and to most readers, such as they assuredly will. nor shall i make the slightest effort to redeem them from these imputations; for though there is nothing in all their purport which would not be approved, as in the deepest sense "practical"--by the spirit of paradise-- "which gives to all the self-same bent, whose lives are wise and innocent," and though i know that national justice in conduct, and peace in heart, could by no other laws be so swiftly secured, i confess with much _dis_peace of heart, that both justice and happiness have at this day become, in england, "romantic impossibilities." letter xxi. of the dignity of the four fine arts; and of the proper system of retail trade. _april , ._ . i return now to the part of the subject at which i was interrupted--the inquiry as to the proper means of finding persons willing to maintain themselves and others by degrading occupations. that, on the whole, simply manual occupations _are_ degrading, i suppose i may assume you to admit; at all events, the fact is so, and i suppose few general readers will have any doubt of it.[a] [a] many of my working readers have disputed this statement eagerly, feeling the good effect of work in themselves; but observe, i only say, _simply_ or _totally_ manual work; and that, alone, _is_ degrading, though often in measure, refreshing, wholesome, and necessary. so it is highly necessary and wholesome to eat sometimes; but degrading to eat all day, as to labor with the hands all day. but it is not degrading to think all day--if you can. a highly-bred court lady, rightly interested in politics and literature, is a much finer type of the human creature than a servant of all work, however clever and honest. granting this, it follows as a direct consequence that it is the duty of all persons in higher stations of life, by every means in their power to diminish their demand for work of such kind, _and to live with as little aid from the lower trades_, as they can possibly contrive. . i suppose you see that this conclusion is not a little at variance with received notions on political economy? it is popularly supposed that it benefits a nation to invent a want. but the fact is, that the true benefit is in extinguishing a want--in living with as few wants as possible. i cannot tell you the contempt i feel for the common writers on political economy, in their stupefied missing of this first principle of all human economy--individual or political--to live, namely, with as few wants as possible, and to waste nothing of what is given you to supply them. . this ought to be the first lesson of every rich man's political code. "sir," his tutor should early say to him, "you are so placed in society,--it may be for your misfortune, it _must_ be for your trial--that you are likely to be maintained all your life by the labor of other men. you will have to make shoes for nobody, but some one will have to make a great many for you. you will have to dig ground for nobody, but some one will have to dig through every summer's hot day for you. you will build houses and make clothes for no one, but many a rough hand must knead clay, and many an elbow be crooked to the stitch, to keep that body of yours warm and fine. now remember, whatever you and your work may be worth, the less your keep costs, the better. it does not cost money only. it costs degradation. you do not merely employ these people. you also tread upon them. it cannot be helped;--you have your place, and they have theirs; but see that you tread as lightly as possible, and on as few as possible. what food, and clothes, and lodging, you honestly need, for your health and peace, you may righteously take. see that you take the plainest you can serve yourself with--that you waste or wear nothing vainly--and that you employ no man in furnishing you with any useless luxury." . that is the first lesson of christian--or human--economy; and depend upon it, my friend, it is a sound one, and has every voice and vote of the spirits of heaven and earth to back it, whatever views the manchester men, or any other manner of men, may take respecting "demand and supply." demand what you deserve, and you shall be supplied with it, for your good. demand what you do _not_ deserve, and you shall be supplied with something which you have not demanded, and which nature perceives that you deserve, quite to the contrary of your good. that is the law of your existence, and if you do not make it the law of your resolved acts, so much, precisely, the worse for you and all connected with you. . yet observe, though it is out of its proper place said here, this law forbids no luxury which men are not degraded in providing. you may have paul veronese to paint your ceiling, if you like, or benvenuto cellini to make cups for you. but you must not employ a hundred divers to find beads to stitch over your sleeve. (did you see the account of the sales of the esterhazy jewels the other day?) and the degree in which you recognize the difference between these two kinds of services, is precisely what makes the difference between your being a civilized person or a barbarian. if you keep slaves to furnish forth your dress--to glut your stomach--sustain your indolence--or deck your pride, you are a barbarian. if you keep servants, properly cared for, to furnish you with what you verily want, and no more than that--you are a "civil" person--a person capable of the qualities of citizenship.[a] [a] compare 'the crown of wild olive,' §§ , , and . . now, farther, observe that in a truly civilized and disciplined state, no man would be allowed to meddle with any material who did not know how to make the best of it. in other words, the arts of working in wood, clay, stone, and metal, would all be _fine_ arts (working in iron for machinery becoming an entirely distinct business). there would be no joiner's work, no smith's, no pottery nor stone-cutting, so debased in character as to be entirely unconnected with the finer branches of the same art; and to at least one of these finer branches (generally in metal-work) every painter and sculptor would be necessarily apprenticed during some years of his education. there would be room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every grade of practical intelligence and productive imagination. . but it should not be artists alone who are exercised early in these crafts. it would be part of my scheme of physical education that every youth in the state--from the king's son downwards,--should learn to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him know what _touch_ meant; and what stout craftsmanship meant; and to inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some severely accurate discipline in doing. let him once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. he might choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after life, that among the middle classes a good deal of their house furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough work, more or less clumsily, but not ineffectively, got through, by the master himself and his sons, with much furtherance of their general health and peace of mind, and increase of innocent domestic pride and pleasure, and to the extinction of a great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean handicraft. . farther. a great deal of the vulgarity, and nearly all the vice, of retail commerce, involving the degradation of persons occupied in it, depends simply on the fact that their minds are always occupied by the vital (or rather mortal) question of profits. i should at once put an end to this source of baseness by making all retail dealers merely salaried officers in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards, that is to say, of the salable properties of those guilds, and purveyors of such and such articles to a given number of families. a perfectly well-educated person might, without the least degradation, hold such an office as this, however poorly paid; and it would be precisely the fact of his being well educated which would enable him to fulfil his duties to the public without the stimulus of direct profit. of course the current objection to such a system would be that no man, for a regularly paid salary, would take pains to please his customers; and the answer to that objection is, that if you can train a man to so much unselfishness as to offer himself fearlessly to the chance of being shot, in the course of his daily duty, you can most assuredly, if you make it also a point of honor with him, train him to the amount of self-denial involved in looking you out with care such a piece of cheese or bacon as you have asked for. . you see that i have already much diminished the number of employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of those that are left. there remain to be considered the necessarily painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of transport--(by merchant shipping, etc.) and the conditions of menial service. it will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to live, for whom all this hard work is to be done. letter xxii. of the normal position and duties of the upper classes. general statement of the land question. _april , ._ . in passing now to the statement of conditions affecting the interests of the upper classes, i would rather have addressed these closing letters to one of themselves than to you, for it is with their own faults and needs that each class is primarily concerned. as, however, unless i kept the letters private, this change of their address would be but a matter of courtesy and form, not of any true prudential use; and as besides i am now no more inclined to reticence--prudent or otherwise; but desire only to state the facts of our national economy as clearly and completely as may be, i pursue the subject without respect of persons. . before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also always be. the upper classes, broadly speaking, are originally composed of the best-bred (in the mere animal sense of the term), the most energetic, and most thoughtful, of the population, who either by strength of arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them, or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore, within certain limits, true personal right; or, by industry, accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or in teaching, or in gifts of art. this is all in the simple course of the law of nature; and the proper offices of the upper classes, thus distinguished from the rest, become, therefore, in the main threefold:-- . (a) those who are strongest of arm have for their proper function the restraint and punishment of vice, and the general maintenance of law and order; releasing only from its original subjection to their power that which truly deserves to be emancipated. (b) those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle; and to establish such systems of trade and distribution of goods as shall preserve the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all, according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious industry. (c) the third class, of scholars and artists, of course, have for function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude. the office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with themselves of which those inferiors are capable. so far as they are thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human power and beauty. . this, then, being the natural ordinance and function of aristocracy, its corruption, like that of all other beautiful things under the devil's touch, is a very fearful one. its corruption is, that those who ought to be the rulers and guides of the people, forsake their task of painful honorableness; seek their own pleasure and pre-eminence only; and use their power, subtlety, conceded influence, prestige of ancestry, and mechanical instrumentality of martial power, to make the lower orders toil for them, and feed and clothe them for nothing, and become in various ways their living property, goods, and chattels, even to the point of utter regardlessness of whatever misery these serfs may suffer through such insolent domination, or they themselves, their masters, commit of crime to enforce it. . and this is especially likely to be the case when means of various and tempting pleasures are put within the reach of the upper classes by advanced conditions of national commerce and knowledge: and it is _certain_ to be the case as soon as position among those upper classes becomes any way purchasable with money, instead of being the assured measure of some kind of worth, (either strength of hand, or true wisdom of conduct, or imaginative gift). it has been becoming more and more the condition of the aristocracy of europe, ever since the fifteenth century; and is gradually bringing about its ruin, and in that ruin, checked only by the power which here and there a good soldier or true statesman achieves over the putrid chaos of its vain policy, the ruin of all beneath it; which can be arrested only, either by the repentance of that old aristocracy, (hardly to be hoped,) or by the stern substitution of other aristocracy worthier than it. . corrupt as it may be, it and its laws together, i would at this moment, if i could, fasten every one of its institutions down with bands of iron, and trust for all progress and help against its tyranny simply to the patience and strength of private conduct. and if i had to choose, i would tenfold rather see the tyranny of old austria triumphant in the old and new worlds, and trust to the chance (or rather the distant certainty) of some day seeing a true emperor born to its throne, than, with every privilege of thought and act, run the most distant risk of seeing the thoughts of the people of germany and england become like the thoughts of the people of america. my american friends, of whom one, charles eliot norton, of cambridge, is the dearest i have in the world, tell me i know nothing about america. it may be so, and they must do me the justice to observe that i, therefore, usually _say_ nothing about america. but this much i have said, because the americans, as a nation, set their trust in liberty and in equality, of which i detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other; and because, also, as a nation, they are wholly undesirous of rest, and incapable of it; irreverent of themselves, both in the present and in the future; discontented with what they are, yet having no ideal of anything which they desire to become.[a] [a] some following passages in this letter, containing personal references which might, in permanence, have given pain or offense, are now omitted--the substance of them being also irrelevant to my main purpose. these few words about the american war, with which they concluded, are, i think, worth retaining:--"all methods of right government are to be communicated to foreign nations by perfectness of example and gentleness of patiently expanded power, not suddenly, nor at the bayonet's point. and though it is the duty of every nation to interfere, at bayonet point, if they have the strength to do so, to save any oppressed multitude, or even individual, from manifest violence, it is wholly unlawful to interfere in such matter, except with sacredly pledged limitation of the objects to be accomplished in the oppressed person's favor, and with absolute refusal of all selfish advantage and _increase of territory or of political power_ which might otherwise accrue from the victory." . but, however corrupted, the aristocracy of any nation may thus be always divided into three great classes. first, the landed proprietors and soldiers, essentially one political body (for the possession of land can only be maintained by military power); secondly, the moneyed men and leaders of commerce; thirdly, the professional men and masters in science, art, and literature. and we were to consider the proper duties of all these, and the laws probably expedient respecting them. whereupon, in the outset, we are at once brought face to face with the great land question. . great as it may be, it is wholly subordinate to those we have hitherto been considering. the laws you make regarding methods of labor, or to secure the genuineness of the things produced by it, affect the entire moral state of the nation, and all possibility of human happiness for them. the mode of distribution of the land only affects their numbers. by this or that law respecting land you decide whether the nation shall consist of fifty or of a hundred millions. but by this or that law respecting work, you decide whether the given number of millions shall be rogues, or honest men;--shall be wretches, or happy men. and the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared with that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the prior determination of character. make your nation consist of knaves, and, as emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any other vermin--"the more, the worse." or, to put the matter in narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be hanged. the great difficulty in dealing with the land question at all arises from the false, though very natural, notion on the part of many reformers, and of large bodies of the poor, that the division of the land among the said poor would be an immediate and everlasting relief to them. an _immediate_ relief it would be to the extent of a small annual sum (you may easily calculate how little, if you choose) to each of them; on the strength of which accession to their finances, they would multiply into as much extra personality as the extra pence would sustain, and at that point be checked by starvation, exactly as they are now. . any other form of pillage would benefit them only in like manner; and, in reality, the difficult part of the question respecting numbers, is, not where they shall be arrested, but what shall be the method of their arrest. an island of a certain size has standing room only for so many people; feeding ground for a great many fewer than could stand on it. reach the limits of your feeding ground, and you must cease to multiply, must emigrate or starve. the modes in which the pressure is gradually brought to bear on the population depend on the justice of your laws; but the pressure itself must come at last, whatever the distribution of the land. and arithmeticians seem to me a little slow to remark the importance of the old child's puzzle about the nails in the horseshoe--when it is populations that are doubling themselves, instead of farthings. . the essential land question, then, is to be treated quite separately from that of the methods of restriction of population. the land question is--at what point will you resolve to stop? it is separate matter of discussion how you are to stop at it. and this essential land question--"at what point will you stop?"--is itself two-fold. you have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly, whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their numbers, such sacrifice should be made, and to what extent? i think it will be better, for clearness' sake, to end this letter with the putting of these two queries in their decisive form, and to reserve suggestions of answer for my next. letter xxiii. of the just tenure of lands: and the proper functions of high public officers. _ th april, ._ . i must repeat to you, once more, before i proceed, that i only enter on this part of our inquiry to complete the sequence of its system, and explain fully the bearing of former conclusions, and not for any immediately practicable good to be got out of the investigation. whatever i have hitherto urged upon you, it is in the power of all men quietly to promote, and finally to secure, by the patient resolution of personal conduct; but no action could be taken in re-distribution of land or in limitation of the incomes of the upper classes, without grave and prolonged civil disturbance. such disturbance, however, is only too likely to take place, if the existing theories of political economy are allowed credence much longer. in the writings of the vulgar economists, nothing more excites my indignation than the subterfuges by which they endeavor to accommodate their pseudoscience to the existing abuses of wealth, by disguising the true nature of rent. i will not waste time in exposing their fallacies, but will put the truth for you into as clear a shape as i can. . rent, of whatever kind, is, briefly, the price continuously paid for the loan of the property of another person. it may be too little, or it may be just or exorbitant or altogether unjustifiable, according to circumstances. exorbitant rents can only be exacted from ignorant or necessitous rent-payers: and it is one of the most necessary conditions of state economy that there should be clear laws to prevent such exaction. . i may interrupt myself for a moment to give you an instance of what i mean. the most wretched houses of the poor in london often pay ten or fifteen per cent. to the landlord; and i have known an instance of sanitary legislation being hindered, to the loss of many hundreds of lives, in order that the rents of a nobleman, derived from the necessities of the poor, might not be diminished. and it is a curious thing to me to see mr. j. s. mill foaming at the mouth, and really afflicted conscientiously, because he supposes one man to have been unjustly hanged, while by his own failure, (i believe, _wilful_ failure)[a] in stating clearly to the public one of the first elementary truths of the science he professes, he is aiding and abetting the commission of the cruelest possible form of murder on many thousands of persons yearly, for the sake simply of putting money into the pockets of the landlords. i felt this evil so strongly that i bought, in the worst part of london, one freehold and one leasehold property, consisting of houses inhabited by the lowest poor; in order to try what change in their comfort and habits i could effect by taking only a just rent, but that firmly. the houses of the leasehold pay me five per cent.; the families that used to have one room in them have now two; and are more orderly and hopeful besides; and there is a surplus still on the rents they pay after i have taken my five per cent., with which, if all goes well, they will eventually be able to buy twelve years of the lease from me. the freehold pays three per cent., with similar results in the comfort of the tenant. this is merely an example of what might be done by firm state action in such matters. [a] see § . . next, of wholly unjustifiable rents. these are for things which are not, and which it is criminal to consider as, personal or exchangeable property. bodies of men, land, water, and air, are the principal of these things. parenthetically, may i ask you to observe, that though a fearless defender of some forms of slavery, i am no defender of the slave _trade_. it is by a blundering confusion of ideas between _governing_ men, and _trading in_ men, and by consequent interference with the restraint, instead of only with the sale, that most of the great errors in action have been caused among the emancipation men. i am prepared, if the need be clear to my own mind, and if the power is in my hands, to throw men into prison, or any other captivity--to bind them or to beat them--and force them, for such periods as i may judge necessary, to any kind of irksome labor: and on occasion of desperate resistance, to hang or shoot them. but i will not _sell_ them. . bodies of men, or women, then (and much more, as i said before, their souls), must not be bought or sold. neither must land, nor water, nor air, these being the necessary sustenance of men's bodies and souls. yet all these may, on certain terms, be bound, or secured in possession, to particular persons under certain conditions. for instance, it may be proper, at a certain time, to give a man permission to possess land, as you give him permission to marry; and farther, if he wishes it and works for it, to secure to him the land needful for his life; as you secure his wife to him; and make both utterly his own, without in the least admitting his right to buy other people's wives, or fields, or to sell his own. . and the right action of a state respecting its land is, indeed, to secure it in various portions to those of its citizens who deserve to be trusted with it, according to their respective desires and proved capacities; and after having so secured it to each, to exercise only such vigilance over his treatment of it as the state must give also to his treatment of his wife and servants; for the most part leaving him free, but interfering in cases of gross mismanagement or abuse of power. and in the case of great old families, which always ought to be, and in some measure, however decadent, still truly are, the noblest monumental architecture of the kingdom, living temples of sacred tradition and hero's religion, so much land ought to be granted to them in perpetuity as may enable them to live thereon with all circumstances of state and outward nobleness; _but their income must in no wise be derived from the rents of it_, nor must they be occupied (even in the most distant or subordinately administered methods), in the exaction of rents. that is not noblemen's work. their income must be fixed, and paid them by the state, as the king's is. . so far from their land being to them a source of income, it should be, on the whole, costly to them, great part of it being kept in conditions of natural grace, which return no rent but their loveliness; and the rest made, at whatever cost, exemplary in perfection of such agriculture as develops the happiest peasant life;[a] agriculture which, as i will show you hereafter, must reject the aid of all mechanism except that of instruments guided solely by the human hand, or by animal, or directly natural forces; and which, therefore, cannot compete for profitableness with agriculture carried on by aid of machinery. [a] compare 'fors clavigera,' letter xxi., page . and now for the occupation of this body of men, maintained at fixed perennial cost of the state. . you know i said i should want no soldiers of special skill or pugnacity, for all my boys would be soldiers. but i assuredly want _captains_ of soldiers, of special skill and pugnacity. and also, i said i should strongly object to the appearance of any lawyers in my territory; meaning, however, by lawyers, people who live by arguing about law,--not people appointed to administer law; and people who live by eloquently misrepresenting facts--not people appointed to discover and plainly represent them. therefore, the youth of this landed aristocracy would be trained, in my schools, to these two great callings, not _by_ which, but _in_ which, they are to live. they would be trained, all of them, in perfect science of war, and in perfect science of essential law. and from their body should be chosen the captains and the judges of england, its advocates, and generally its state officers, all such functions being held for fixed pay (as already our officers of the church and army are paid), and no function connected with the administration of law ever paid by casual fee. and the head of such family should, in his own right, having passed due (and high) examination in the science of law, and not otherwise, be a judge, law-ward or lord, having jurisdiction both in civil and criminal cases, such as our present judges have, after such case shall have been fully represented before, and received verdict from, a jury, composed exclusively of the middle or lower orders, and in which no member of the aristocracy should sit. but from the decision of these juries, or from the lord's sentence, there should be a final appeal to a tribunal, the highest in the land, held solely in the king's name, and over which, in the capital, the king himself should preside, and therein give judgment on a fixed number of days in each year;--and, in other places and at other times, judges appointed by election (under certain conditions) out of any order of men in the state (the election being national, not provincial): and all causes brought before these judges should be decided, without appeal, by their own authority; not by juries. this, then, recasting it for you into brief view, would be the entire scheme of state authorities:-- . ( ) the king: exercising, as part both of his prerogative and his duty, the office of a supreme judge at stated times in the central court of appeal of his kingdom. ( ) supreme judges appointed by national election; exercising sole authority in courts of final appeal. ( ) ordinary judges, holding the office hereditarily under conditions; and with power to add to their number (and liable to have it increased if necessary by the king's appointment); the office of such judges being to administer the national laws under the decision of juries. ( ) state officers charged with the direction of public agency in matters of public utility. ( ) bishops, charged with offices of supervision and aid, to family by family, and person by person. ( ) the officers of war, of various ranks. ( ) the officers of public instruction, of various ranks. i have sketched out this scheme for you somewhat prematurely, for i would rather have conducted you to it step by step, and as i brought forward the reasons for the several parts of it; but it is, on other grounds, desirable that you should have it to refer to, as i go on. . without depending anywise upon nomenclature, yet holding it important as a sign and record of the meanings of things, i may tell you further that i should call the elected supreme judges, "princes"; the hereditary judges, "lords"; and the officers of public guidance, "dukes"; and that the social rank of these persons would be very closely correspondent to that implied by such titles under our present constitution; only much more real and useful. and in conclusion of this letter, i will but add, that if you, or other readers, think it idle of me to write or dream of such things; as if any of them were in our power, or within possibility of any near realization, and above all, vain to write of them to a workman at sunderland: you are to remember what i told you at the beginning, that i go on with this part of my subject in some fulfilment of my long-conceived plan, too large to receive at present any deliberate execution from my failing strength; (being the body of the work to which 'munera pulveris' was intended merely as an introduction;) and that i address it to you because i know that the working men of england must, for some time, be the only body to which we can look for resistance to the deadly influence of moneyed power. i intend, however, to write to you at this moment one more letter, partly explanatory of minor details necessarily omitted in this, and chiefly of the proper office of the soldier; and then i must delay the completion of even this poor task until after the days have turned, for i have quite other work to do in the brightness of the full-opened spring. . p.s.--as i have used somewhat strong language, both here and elsewhere, of the equivocations of the economists on the subject of rent, i had better refer you to one characteristic example. you will find in paragraph th and th of book ii., chap. , of mr. mill's 'principles,' that the right to tenure of land is based, by his admission, only on the proprietor's being its improver. without pausing to dwell on the objection that land cannot be improved beyond a certain point, and that, at the reaching of that point, farther claim to tenure would cease, on mr. mill's principle--take even this admission, with its proper subsequent conclusion, that "in no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it." now, had that conclusion been farther followed, it would have compelled the admission that all rent was unjustifiable which normally maintained any person in idleness; which is indeed the whole truth of the matter. but mr. mill instantly retreats from this perilous admission; and after three or four pages of discussion (quite accurate for _its_ part) of the limits of power in management of the land itself (which apply just as strictly to the peasant proprietor as to the cottier's landlord), he begs the whole question at issue in one brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal assertion (of the right to rent) nestles itself, as if it had been already proved,--thus--i italicize the unproved assertion in which the venom of the entire falsehood is concentrated. "even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with it as if it concerned nobody but himself. _the rents or profits which he can obtain from it are his, and his only_; but with regard to the land, in everything which he abstains from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits, be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with the public good." . i say, this sentence in italics is slipped _cunningly_ into the long sentence, as if it were of no great consequence; and above i have expressed my belief that mr. mill's equivocations on this subject are wilful. it is a grave accusation; but i cannot, by any stretch of charity, attribute these misrepresentations to absolute dulness and bluntness of brain, either in mr. mill or his follower, mr. fawcett. mr. mill is capable of immense involuntary error; but his involuntary errors are usually owing to his seeing only one or two of the many sides of a thing; not to obscure sight of the side he _does_ see. thus his 'essay on liberty' only takes cognizance of facts that make for liberty, and of none that make for restraint. but in its statement of all that can be said for liberty, it is so clear and keen, that i have myself quoted it before now as the best authority on that side. and, if arguing in favor of rent, absolutely, and with clear explanation of what it was, he had then defended it with all his might, i should have attributed to him only the honest shortsightedness of partisanship; but when i find his defining sentences full of subtle entanglement and reserve--and that reserve held throughout his treatment of this particular subject,--i cannot, whether i utter the suspicion or not, keep the sense of wilfulness in the misrepresentation from remaining in my mind. and if there be indeed ground for this blame, and mr. mill, for fear of fostering political agitation,[a] _has_ disguised what he knows to be the facts about rent, i would ask him as one of the leading members of the jamaica committee, which is the greater crime, boldly to sign warrant for the sudden death of one man, known to be an agitator, in the immediate outbreak of such agitation, or, by equivocation in a scientific work, to sign warrants for the deaths of thousands of men in slow misery, for _fear_ of an agitation which has not begun; and if begun, would be carried on by debate, not by the sword? [a] with at last the natural consequences of cowardice,--nitro-glycerine and fire-balls! let the upper classes speak the truth about themselves boldly, and they will know how to defend themselves fearlessly. it is equivocation in principle, and dereliction from duty, which melt at last into tears in a mob's presence.--(dec. th, .) letter xxiv. the office of the soldier. _april , ._ . i must once more deprecate your probable supposition that i bring forward this ideal plan of state government, either with any idea of its appearing, to our present public mind, practicable even at a remote period, or with any positive and obstinate adherence to the particular form suggested. there are no wiser words among the many wise ones of the most rational and keen-sighted of old english men of the world, than these:-- "for forms of government let fools contest; that which is best administered is best." for, indeed, no form of government is of any use among bad men; and any form will work in the hands of the good; but the essence of all government among good men is this, that it is mainly occupied in the _production and recognition of human worth_, and in the detection and extinction of human unworthiness; and every government which produces and recognizes worth, will also inevitably use the worth it has found to govern with; and therefore fall into some approximation to such a system as i have described. and, as i told you, i do not contend for names, nor particular powers--though i state those which seem to me most advisable; on the contrary, i know that the precise extent of authorities must be different in every nation at different times, and ought to be so, according to their circumstances and character; and all that i assert with confidence is the necessity, within afterwards definable limits, of _some such_ authorities as these; that is to say, . i. an _observant_ one:--by which all men shall be looked after and taken note of. ii. a _helpful_ one, from which those who need help may get it. iii. a _prudential_ one, which shall not let people dig in wrong places for coal, nor make railroads where they are not wanted; and which shall also, with true providence, insist on their digging in right places for coal, in a safe manner, and making railroads where they _are_ wanted. iv. a _martial_ one, which will punish knaves and make idle persons work. v. an _instructive_ one, which shall tell everybody what it is their duty to know, and be ready pleasantly to answer questions if anybody asks them. vi. a _deliberate_ and _decisive_ one, which shall judge by law, and amend or make law; vii. an _exemplary_ one, which shall show what is loveliest in the art of life. you may divide or name those several offices as you will, or they may be divided in practice as expediency may recommend; the plan i have stated merely puts them all into the simplest forms and relations. . you see i have just defined the martial power as that "which punishes knaves and makes idle persons work." for that is indeed the ultimate and perennial soldiership; that is the essential warrior's office to the end of time. "there is no discharge in that war." to the compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. the soldier's office at present is indeed supposed to be the defense of his country against other countries; but that is an office which--utopian as you may think the saying--will soon now be extinct. i say so fearlessly, though i say it with wide war threatened, at this moment, in the east and west. for observe what the standing of nations on their defense really means. it means that, but for such armed attitude, each of them would go and rob the other; that is to say, that the majority of active persons in every nation are at present--thieves. i am very sorry that this should still be so; but it will not be so long. national exhibitions, indeed, will not bring peace; but national education will, and that is soon coming. i can judge of this by my own mind, for i am myself naturally as covetous a person as lives in this world, and am as eagerly-minded to go and steal some things the french have got, as any housebreaker could be, having clue to attractive spoons. if i could by military incursion carry off paul veronese's "marriage in cana," and the "venus victrix," and the "hours of st. louis," it would give me the profoundest satisfaction to accomplish the foray successfully; nevertheless, being a comparatively educated person, i should most assuredly not give myself that satisfaction, though there were not an ounce of gunpowder, nor a bayonet, in all france. i have not the least mind to rob anybody, however much i may covet what they have got; and i know that the french and british public may and will, with many other publics, be at last brought to be of this mind also; and to see farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not depend on properties and territories, nor on machinery for their defense; but on their getting such territory as they _have_, well filled with none but respectable persons. which is a way of _infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every potentate; and dependent no wise on getting trent turned, or rhine-edge reached. . not but that, in the present state of things, it may often be soldiers' duty to seize territory, and hold it strongly; but only from banditti, or savage and idle persons. thus, both calabria and greece ought to have been irresistibly occupied long ago. instead of quarreling with austria about venice, the italians ought to have made a truce with her for ten years, on condition only of her destroying no monuments, and not taxing italians more than germans; and then thrown the whole force of their army on calabria, shot down every bandit in it in a week, and forced the peasantry of it into honest work on every hill-side, with stout and immediate help from the soldiers in embanking streams, building walls, and the like; and italian finance would have been a much pleasanter matter for the king to take account of by this time; and a fleet might have been floating under garganus strong enough to sweep every hostile sail out of the adriatic, instead of a disgraced and useless remnant of one, about to be put up to auction. and similarly, _we_ ought to have occupied greece instantly, when they asked us, whether russia liked it or not; given them an english king, made good roads for them, and stout laws; and kept them, and their hills and seas, with righteous shepherding of arcadian fields, and righteous ruling of salaminian wave, until they could have given themselves a greek king of men again; and obeyed him, like men. _april ._ . it is strange that just before i finish work for this time, there comes the first real and notable sign of the victory of the principles i have been fighting for, these seven years. it is only a newspaper paragraph, but it means much. look at the second column of the th page of yesterday's 'pall mall gazette,' the paper has taken a wonderful fit of misprinting lately (unless my friend john simon has been knighted on his way to weimar, which would be much too right and good a thing to be a likely one); but its straws of talk mark which way the wind blows perhaps more early than those of any other journal--and look at the question it puts in that page, "whether political economy be the sordid and materialistic science some account it, or almost the noblest on which thought can be employed?" might not you as well have determined that question a little while ago, friend public? and known what political economy _was_, before you talked so much about it? but, hark, again--"ostentation, parental pride and a host of moral" (immoral?) "qualities must be recognized as among the springs of industry; political economy should not ignore these, but, to discuss them, _it must abandon its pretensions to the precision of a pure science_." . well done the 'pall mall'! had it written "prudence and parental affection," instead of "ostentation and parental pride," "must be recognized among the springs of industry," it would have been still better; and it would then have achieved the expression of a part of the truth, which i put into clear terms in the first sentence of 'unto this last,' in the year --which it has thus taken five years to get half way into the public's head. "among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious--certainly the least creditable--is the modern _soi-disant_ science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined, irrespectively of the influence of social affection." look also at the definition of skill, p. . "under the term 'skill' i mean to include the united force of experience, intellect, and passion, in their operation on manual labor, and under the term 'passion' to include the entire range of the moral feelings." . i say half way into the public's head, because you see, a few lines further on, the 'pall mall' hopes for a pause "half way between the rigidity of ricardo and the sentimentality of ruskin." with one hand on their pocket, and the other on their heart! be it so for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque attitude can be maintained; meantime, it chances strangely--as several other things have chanced while i was writing these notes to you--that they should have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on the meaning of the homeric and platonic sirens, at the very moment when i was doubting whether i would or would not tell you the significance of the last song of ariel in 'the tempest.' i had half determined not, but now i shall. and this was what brought me to think of it:-- . yesterday afternoon i called on mr. h. c. sorby, to see some of the results of an inquiry he has been following all last year, into the nature of the coloring matter of leaves and flowers. you most probably have heard (at all events, may with little trouble hear) of the marvelous power which chemical analysis has received in recent discoveries respecting the laws of light. my friend showed me the rainbow of the rose, and the rainbow of the violet, and the rainbow of the hyacinth, and the rainbow of forest leaves being born, and the rainbow of forest leaves dying. and, last, he showed me the rainbow of blood. it was but the three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it cast its measured bars, for ever recognizable now to human sight, on the chord of the seven colors. and no drop of that red rain can now be shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice of it heard out of the ground. . but the seeing these flower colors, and the iris of blood together with them, just while i was trying to gather into brief space the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of long ago, that even the trees of the earth were "capable of a kind of sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and along the dells of england her beeches cast their dappled shades only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; amidst the fair defiles of the apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at sunset." and so also now this chance word of the daily journal, about the sirens, brought to my mind the divine passage in the cratylus of plato, about the place of the dead. "and none of those who dwell there desire to depart thence,--no, not even the sirens; but even they, the seducers, are there themselves beguiled, and they who lulled all men, themselves laid to rest--they, and all others--such sweet songs doth death know how to sing to them." so also the hebrew. "and desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home." for you know i told you the sirens were not pleasures, but desires; being always represented in old greek art as having human faces, with birds' wings and feet; and sometimes with eyes upon their wings; and there are not two more important passages in all literature, respecting the laws of labor and of life, than those two great descriptions of the sirens in homer and plato,--the sirens of death, and sirens of eternal life, representing severally the earthly and heavenly desires of men; the heavenly desires singing to the motion of circles of the spheres, and the earthly on the rocks of fatalest shipwreck. a fact which may indeed be regarded "sentimentally," but it is also a profoundly important politico-economical one. and now for shakespeare's song. . you will find, if you look back to the analysis of it, given in 'munera pulveris,' § , that the whole play of 'the tempest' is an allegorical representation of the powers of true, and therefore spiritual, liberty, as opposed to true, and therefore carnal and brutal slavery. there is not a sentence nor a rhyme, sung or uttered by ariel or caliban, throughout the play, which has not this under-meaning. . now the fulfilment of all human liberty is in the peaceful inheritance of the earth, with its "herb yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit" after his kind; the pasture, or arable, land, and the blossoming, or wooded and fruited, land uniting the final elements of life and peace, for body and soul. therefore, we have the two great hebrew forms of benediction, "his eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk," and again, "butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good." and as the work of war and sin has always been the devastation of this blossoming earth, whether by spoil or idleness, so the work of peace and virtue is also that of the first day of paradise, to "dress it and to keep it." and that will always be the song of perfectly accomplished liberty, in her industry, and rest, and shelter from troubled thoughts in the calm of the fields, and gaining, by migration, the long summer's day from the shortening twilight:-- "where the bee sucks, there lurk i; in a cowslip's bell i lie; there i couch when owls do cry. on the bat's back i do fly after summer merrily: merrily, merrily, shall i live now under the blossom that hangs on the bough." and the security of this treasure to all the poor, and not the ravage of it down the valleys of the shenandoah, is indeed the true warrior's work. but, that they may be able to restrain vice rightly, soldiers must themselves be first in virtue; and that they may be able to compel labor sternly, they must themselves be first in toil, and their spears, like jonathan's at bethaven, enlighteners of the eyes. letter xxv. of inevitable distinction of rank, and necessary submission to authority. the meaning of pure-heartedness. conclusion. . i was interrupted yesterday, just as i was going to set my soldiers to work; and to-day, here comes the pamphlet you promised me, containing the debates about church-going, in which i find so interesting a text for my concluding letter that i must still let my soldiers stand at ease for a little while. look at its twenty-fifth page, and you will find, in the speech of mr. thomas, (carpenter,) this beautiful explanation of the admitted change in the general public mind, of which mr. thomas, for his part, highly approves, (the getting out of the unreasonable habit of paying respect to anybody.) there were many reasons to mr. thomas's mind why the working classes did not attend places of worship: one was, that "the parson was regarded as an object of reverence. in the little town he came from, if a poor man did not make a bow to the parson he was a marked man. this was no doubt wearing away to a great extent" (the base habit of making bows), "because, the poor man was beginning to get education, and to think for himself. it was only while the priest kept the press from him that he was kept ignorant, and was compelled to bow, as it were, to the parson.... it was the case all over england. the clergyman seemed to think himself something superior. now he (mr. thomas) did not admit there was any inferiority" (laughter, audience throughout course of meeting mainly in the right), "except, perhaps, on the score of his having received a classical education, which the poor man could not get." now, my dear friend, here is the element which is the veriest devil of all that have got into modern flesh; this infidelity of the nineteenth century st. thomas in there being anything better than himself alive;[a] coupled, as it always is, with the farther resolution--if unwillingly convinced of the fact,--to seal the better living thing down again out of his way, under the first stone handy. i had not intended, till we entered on the second section of our inquiry, namely, into the influence of gentleness (having hitherto, you see, been wholly concerned with that of justice), to give you the clue out of our dilemma about equalities produced by education; but by the speech of our superior carpenter, i am driven into it at once, and it is perhaps as well. [a] compare 'crown of wild olive,' § . . the speech is not, observe, without its own root of truth at the bottom of it, nor at all, as i think, ill intended by the speaker; but you have in it a clear instance of what i was saying in the sixteenth of these letters,--that education _was desired by the lower orders because they thought it would make them upper orders_, and be a leveler and effacer of distinctions. they will be mightily astonished, when they really get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the fatalest of all discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing, even to the division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein your body and soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls, and to sign deed of separation with unequivocal seal. . education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed, an instant effacer and reconciler. whatever is undivinely poor, it will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it will make whole, and equal, and seeing. the blind and the lame are to it as to david at the siege of the tower of the kings, "hated of david's soul." but there are other divinely-appointed differences, eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of their ceaseless waters. and these, education does _not_ do away with; but measures, manifests, and employs. in the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only educated to be, every one, round, you will see little difference between the noble and mean stones. but the jeweler's trenchant education of them will tell you another story. even the meanest will be better for it, but the noblest so much better that you can class the two together no more. the fair veins and colors are all clear now, and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that not only will the polish show which is best, but the best will take most polish. you shall not merely see they have more virtue than the others, but see that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the more dimly you shall see what there is of it. . and the law about education, which is sorrowfulest to vulgar pride, is this--that all its gains are at compound interest; so that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms. two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. through all their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. one is presently a page ahead,--two pages, ten pages,--and evermore, though each toils equally, the interval enlarges--at birth nothing, at death, infinite. . and by this you may recognize true education from false. false education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you every day think more of yourself. and true education is a deadly cold thing with a gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every day think worse of yourself. worse in two ways, also, more's the pity. it is perpetually increasing the personal sense of ignorance and the personal sense of fault. and this last is the truth which is at the bottom of the common evangelical notion about conversion, and which the devil has got hold of, and hidden, until, instead of seeing and confessing personal ignorance and fault, as compared with the sense and virtue of others, people see nothing but corruption in human nature, and shelter their own sins under accusation of their race (the worst of all assertions of equality and fraternity). and so they avoid the blessed and strengthening pain of finding out wherein they are fools, as compared with other men, by calling everybody else a fool too; and avoid the pain of discerning their own faults, by vociferously claiming their share in the great capital of original sin. i must also, therefore, tell you here what properly ought to have begun the next following section of our subject--the point usually unnoticed in the parable of the prodigal son. . first, have you ever observed that all christ's main teachings, by direct order, by earnest parable, and by his own permanent emotion, regard the use and misuse of _money_? we might have thought, if we had been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that he would have left inferior persons to give directions about money; and himself spoken only concerning faith and love, and the discipline of the passions, and the guilt of the crimes of soul against soul. but not so. he speaks in general terms of these. but he does not speak parables about them for all men's memory, nor permit himself fierce indignation against them, in all men's sight. the pharisees bring him an adulteress. he writes her forgiveness on the dust of which he had formed her. another, despised of all for known sin, he recognized as a giver of unknown love. but he acknowledges no love in buyers and sellers in his house. one should have thought there were people in that house twenty times worse than they;--caiaphas and his like--false priests, false prayer-makers, false leaders of the people--who needed putting to silence, or to flight, with darkest wrath. but the scourge is only against the _traffickers and thieves_. the two most intense of all the parables: the two which lead the rest in love and terror (this of the prodigal, and of dives), relate, both of them, to management of riches. the practical order given to the only seeker of advice, of whom it is recorded that christ "loved him," is briefly about his property. "sell that thou hast." and the arbitrament of the day of the last judgment is made to rest wholly, neither on belief in god, nor in any spiritual virtue in man, nor on freedom from stress of stormy crime, but on this only, "i was an hungered and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me; sick, and ye came unto me." . well, then, the first thing i want you to notice in the parable of the prodigal son (and the last thing which people usually _do_ notice in it), is--that it is about a prodigal! he begins by asking for his share of his father's goods; he gets it, carries it off, and wastes it. it is true that he wastes it in riotous living, but you are not asked to notice in what kind of riot; he spends it with harlots--but it is not the harlotry which his elder brother accuses him of mainly, but of having devoured his father's living. nay, it is not the sensual life which he accuses himself of--or which the manner of his punishment accuses him of. but the _wasteful_ life. it is not said that he had become debauched in soul, or diseased in body, by his vice; but that at last he would fain have filled his belly with husks, and could not. it is not said that he was struck with remorse for the consequences of his evil passions, but only that he remembered there was bread enough and to spare, even for the servants, at home. now, my friend, do not think i want to extenuate sins of passion (though, in very truth, the sin of magdalene is a light one compared to that of judas); but observe, sins of passion, if of _real_ passion, are often the errors and backfalls of noble souls; but prodigality is mere and pure selfishness, and essentially the sin of an ignoble or undeveloped creature; and i would rather, ten times rather, hear of a youth that (certain degrees of temptation and conditions of resistance being understood) he had fallen into any sin you chose to name, of all the mortal ones, than that he was in the habit of running bills which he could not pay. farther, though i hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children, both these head and chief crimes, and all others, are rooted first in abuse of the laws, and neglect of the duties concerning wealth. and thus the love of money, with the parallel (and, observe, _mathematically commensurate_ looseness in management of it), the "mal tener," followed necessarily by the "mal dare," is, indeed, the root of all evil. . then, secondly, i want you to note that when the prodigal comes to his senses, he complains of nobody but himself, and speaks of no unworthiness but his own. he says nothing against any of the women who tempted him--nothing against the citizen who left him to feed on husks--nothing of the false friends of whom "no man gave unto him"--above all, nothing of the "corruption of human nature," or the corruption of things in general. he says that _he himself_ is unworthy, as distinguished from honorable persons, and that _he himself_ has sinned, as distinguished from righteous persons. and _that_ is the hard lesson to learn, and the beginning of faithful lessons. all right and fruitful humility, and purging of heart, and seeing of god, is in that. it is easy to call yourself the chief of sinners, expecting every sinner round you to decline--or return--the compliment; but learn to measure the real degrees of your own relative baseness, and to be ashamed, not in heaven's sight, but in man's sight; and redemption is indeed begun. observe the phrase, i have sinned "_against_ heaven," against the great law of that, and _before_ thee, visibly degraded before my human sire and guide, unworthy any more of being esteemed of his blood, and desirous only of taking the place i deserve among his servants. . now, i do not doubt but that i shall set many a reader's teeth on edge by what he will think my carnal and material rendering of this "beautiful" parable. but i am just as ready to spiritualize it as he is, provided i am sure first that we understand it. if we want to understand the parable of the sower, we must first think of it as of literal husbandry; if we want to understand the parable of the prodigal, we must first understand it as of literal prodigality. and the story has also for us a precious lesson in this literal sense of it, namely this, which i have been urging upon you throughout these letters, that all redemption must begin in subjection and in the recovery of the sense of fatherhood and authority, as all ruin and desolation begin in the loss of that sense. the lost son began by claiming his rights. he is found when he resigns them. he is lost by flying from his father, when his father's authority was only paternal. he is found by returning to his father, and desiring that his authority may be absolute, as over a hired stranger. and this is the practical lesson i want to leave with you, and all other working men. . you are on the eve of a great political crisis; and every rascal with a tongue in his head will try to make his own stock out of you. now this is the test you must try them with. those that say to you, "stand up for your rights--get your division of living--be sure that you are as well off as others, and have what they have!--don't let any man dictate to you--have not you all a right to your opinion?--are you not all as good as everybody else?--let us have no governors, or fathers--let us all be free and alike." those, i say, who speak thus to you, take nelson's rough order for--and hate them as you do the devil, for they _are_ his ambassadors. but those, the few, who have the courage to say to you, "my friends, you and i, and all of us, have somehow got very wrong; we've been hardly treated, certainly; but here we are in a piggery, mainly by our own fault, hungry enough, and for ourselves, anything but respectable: we _must_ get out of this; there are certainly laws we may learn to live by, and there are wiser people than we are in the world, and kindly ones, if we can find our way to them; and an infinitely wise and kind father, above all of them and us, if we can but find our way to _him_, and ask him to take us for servants, and put us to any work he will, so that we may never leave him more." the people who will say that to you, and (for by _no_ saying, but by their fruits, only, you shall finally know them) who are themselves orderly and kindly, and do their own business well,--take _those_ for your guides, and trust them; on ice and rock alike, tie yourselves well together with them, and with much scrutiny, and cautious walking (perhaps nearly as much back as forward, at first), you will verily get off the glacier, and into meadow land, in god's time. . i meant to have written much to you respecting the meaning of that word "hired servants," and to have gone on to the duties of soldiers, for you know "soldier" means a person who is paid to fight with regular pay--literally with "soldi" or "sous"--the "penny a day" of the vineyard laborers; but i can't now: only just this much, that our whole system of work must be based on the nobleness of soldiership--so that we shall all be soldiers of either plowshare or sword; and literally all our actual and professed soldiers, whether professed for a time only, or for life, must be kept to hard work of hand, when not in actual war; their honor consisting in being set to service of more pain and danger than others; to life-boat service; to redeeming of ground from furious rivers or sea--or mountain ruin; to subduing wild and unhealthy land, and extending the confines of colonies in the front of miasm and famine, and savage races. and much of our harder home work must be done in a kind of soldiership, by bands of trained workers sent from place to place and town to town; doing, with strong and sudden hand, what is needed for help, and setting all things in more prosperous courses for the future. of all which i hope to speak in its proper place after we know what offices the higher arts of gentleness have among the lower ones of force, and how their prevalence may gradually change spear to pruning-hook, over the face of all the earth. . and now--but one word more--either for you, or any other readers who may be startled at what i have been saying, as to the peculiar stress laid by the founder of our religion on right dealing with wealth. let them be assured that it is with no fortuitous choice among the attributes or powers of evil, that "mammon" is assigned for the direct adversary of the master whom they are bound to serve. you cannot, by any artifice of reconciliation, be god's soldier, and his. nor while the desire of gain is within your heart, can any true knowledge of the kingdom of god come there. no one shall enter its stronghold,--no one receive its blessing, except, "he that hath clean hands and a pure heart;" clean hands that have done no cruel deed,--pure heart, that knows no base desire. and, therefore, in the highest spiritual sense that can be given to words, be assured, not respecting the literal temple of stone and gold, but of the living temple of your body and soul, that no redemption, nor teaching, nor hallowing, will be anywise possible for it, until these two verses have been, for it also, fulfilled:-- "and he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought. and he taught daily in the temple." appendices. appendix i. page .--_expenditure on science and art._ the following is the passage referred to. the fact it relates is so curious, and so illustrative of our national interest in science, that i do not apologize for the repetition:-- "two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of solenhofen to be sold in bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). this collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the english nation for seven hundred: but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have been in the munich museum at this moment, if professor owen[a] had not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the british public in the person of its representatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other three!--which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. consider, i beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. your annual expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at least fifty millions. now seven hundred pounds is to fifty million pounds, roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park walls and footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the sum of sevenpence sterling; and that the gentleman who is fond of science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping his servant waiting several months, 'well, i'll give you fourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra threepence yourself till next year.'" [a] i originally stated this fact without professor owen's permission; which, of course, he could not with propriety have granted, had i asked it; but i considered it so important that the public should be aware of the fact, that i did what seemed to me right, though rude. appendix ii. page .--_legislation of frederick the great._ the following are the portions of mr. dixon's letters referred to:-- "well, i am now busy with frederick the great; i am not now astonished that carlyle calls him great, neither that this work of his should have had such a sad effect upon him in producing it, when i see the number of volumes he must have had to wade through to produce such a clear terse set of utterances; and yet i do not feel the work as a book likely to do a reader of it the good that some of his other books will do. it is truly awful to read these battles after battles, lies after lies, called diplomacy; it's fearful to read all this, and one wonders how he that set himself to this--he, of all men--could have the rare patience to produce such a labored, heart-rending piece of work. again, when one reads of the stupidity, the shameful waste of our moneys by our forefathers, to see our national debt (the curse to our labor now, the millstone to our commerce, to our fair chance of competition in our day) thus created, and for what? even carlyle cannot tell; then how are we to tell? now, who will deliver us? that is the question; who will help us in these days of _idle or no work_, while our foreign neighbors have plenty and are actually selling their produce to our men of capital cheaper than we can make it? house-rent getting dearer, taxes getting dearer, rates, clothing, food, etc. sad times, my master, do seem to have fallen upon us. and the cause of nearly all this lies embedded in that frederick; and yet, so far as i know of it, no critic has yet given an exposition of such laying there. for our behoof, is there no one that will take this, that there lies so woven in with much other stuff so sad to read, to any man that does not believe man was made to fight alone, to be a butcher of his fellow-man? who will do this work, or piece of work, so that all who care may know how it is that our debt grew so large, and a great deal more that we ought to know?--that clearly is one great reason why the book was written and was printed. well, i hope some day all this will be clear to our people, and some man or men will arise and sweep us clear of these hindrances, these sad drawbacks to the vitality of our work in this world." " , nile street, sunderland, feb. , . "dear sir,-- "i beg to acknowledge the receipt of two letters as additions to your books, which i have read with deep interest, and shall take care of them, and read them over again, so that i may thoroughly comprehend them, and be able to think of them for future use. i myself am not fully satisfied with our co-operation, and never have been; it is too much tinged with the very elements that they complain of in our present systems of trade--selfishness. i have for years been trying to direct the attention of the editor of the _co-operator_ to such evils that i see in it. now further, i may state that i find you and carlyle seem to agree quite on the idea of the _masterhood_ qualification. there again i find you both feel and write as all working men consider just. i can assure you there is not an honest, noble working man that would not by far serve under such _master_-hood, than be the employé or workman of a co-operative store. working men do not as a rule make good masters; neither do they treat each other with that courtesy as a noble master treats his working man. george fox shadows forth some such treatment that friends ought to make law and guidance for their working men and slaves, such as you speak of in your letters. i will look the passage up, as it is quite to the point, so far as i now remember it. in vol. vi. of _frederick the great_, i find a great deal there that i feel quite certain, if our queen or government could make law, thousands of english working men would hail it with such a shout of joy and gladness as would astonish the continental world. these changes suggested by carlyle and placed before the thinkers of england, are the noblest, the truest utterances on real kinghood, that i have ever read; the more i think over them, the more i feel the truth, the justness, and also the fitness of them, to our nation's present dire necessities; yet this is the man, and these are the thoughts of his, that our critics seem never to see, or if seen, don't think worth printing or in any way wisely directing the attention of the public thereto, alas! all this and much more fills me with such sadness that i am driven almost to despair. i see from the newspapers, yorkshire, lancashire, and other places are sternly endeavoring to carry out the short time movement until such times as trade revives, and i find the masters and men seem to adopt it with a good grace and friendly spirit. i also beg to inform you i see a mr. morley, a large manufacturer at nottingham, has been giving pensions to all his old workmen. i hope such a noble example will be followed by other wealthy masters. it would do more to make a master loved, honored, and cared for, than thousands of pounds expended in other ways. the government savings banks is one of the wisest acts of late years done by our government. i, myself, often wish the government held all our banks instead of private men; that would put an end to false speculations, such as we too often in the provinces suffer so severely by, so i hail with pleasure and delight the shadowing forth by you of these noble plans for the future: i feel glad and uplifted to think of the good that such teaching will do for us all. "yours truly, "thomas dixon." " , nile street, sunderland, feb. , . "dear sir,-- "i now give you the references to _frederick the great_. vol. vi.: land question, page, where he increases the number of small farmers to , ( , ). english soldiers and t. c.'s remarks on our system of purchase, etc. his law, ( , , ). state of poland and how he repaired it, ( , , , ). i especially value the way he introduced all kinds of industries therein, and so soon changed the chaos into order. again, the school-masters also are given (not yet in england, says t. c.). again the use he made of , _l._ surplus in brandenburg; how it was applied to better his staff of masters. to me, the vol. vi. is one of the wisest pieces of modern thought in our language. i only wish i had either your power, c. kingsley, maurice, or some such able pen-generalship, to illustrate and show forth all the wise teaching on law, government, and social life i see in it, and shining like a star through all its pages.[a] i feel also the truth of all you have written, and will do all i can to make such men or women that care for such thoughts, see it, or read it. i am copying the letters as fast and as well as i can, and will use my utmost endeavor to have them done that justice to they merit. "yours truly, "thomas dixon." [a] i have endeavored to arrange some of the passages to which mr. dixon here refers, in a form enabling the reader to see their bearing on each other more distinctly, as a sequel to the essay on war in the 'crown of wild olive.' appendix iii. page .--_effect of modern entertainments on the mind of youth._ the letter of the _times'_ correspondent referred to contained an account of one of the most singular cases of depravity ever brought before a criminal court; but it is unnecessary to bring any of its details under the reader's attention, for nearly every other number of our journals has of late contained some instances of atrocities before unthought of, and, it might have seemed, impossible to humanity. the connection of these with the modern love of excitement in the sensational novel and drama may not be generally understood, but it is direct and constant; all furious pursuit of pleasure ending in actual desire of horror and delight in death. i entered into some fuller particulars on this subject in a lecture given in the spring at the royal institution. [any part of the lecture referred to likely to be of permanent interest will be printed, somewhere, in this series.] appendix iv. page .--_drunkenness as the cause of crime._ the following portions of mr. dixon's letter referred to, will be found interesting:-- "dear sir,-- "your last letter, i think, will arouse the attention of thinkers more than any of the series, it being on topics they in general feel more interested in than the others, especially as in these you do not assail their pockets so much as in the former ones. since you seem interested with the notes or rough sketches on gin, g * * * of dublin was the man i alluded to as making his money by drink, and then giving the results of such traffic to repair the cathedral of dublin. it was thousands of pounds. i call such charity robbing peter to pay paul! immense fortunes are made in the _liquor traffic_, and i will tell you why; it is all paid for in cash, at least such as the poor people buy; they get credit for clothes, butchers' meat, groceries, etc., while they give the gin-palace keeper _cash_; they never begrudge the price of a glass of gin or beer, they never haggle over _its_ price, never once think of doing that; but in the purchase of almost every other article they haggle and begrudge its price. to give you an idea of its profits--there are houses here whose average weekly takings in cash at their bars is _l._, _l._, _l._, _l._, l_._, to _l._, per week. nearly all the men of intelligence in it, say it is the curse of the working classes. men whose earnings are, say _s._ to _s._ per week, spend on the average _s._ to _s._ per week (some even _s._). it's my mode of living to supply these houses with corks that makes me see so much of the drunkenness; and that is the cause why i never really cared for _my trade_, seeing the misery that was entailed on my fellow men and women by the use of this stuff. again, a house with a license to sell spirits, wine, and ale, to be consumed on the premises, is worth two to three times more money than any other class of property. one house here worth nominally _l._ sold the other day for _l._; another one worth _l._ sold for _l._ i know premises with a license that were sold for , _l._, and then sold again two years after for , _l._; another place was rented for _l._, now rents at _l._--this last is a house used by working men and laborers chiefly! no, i honor men like _sir w. trevelyan_, that are teetotalers, or total abstainers, as an example to poor men, and, to prevent his work-people being tempted, will not allow any public-house on his estate. if our land had a few such men it would help the cause. we possess one such a man here, a banker. i feel sorry to say the progress of temperance is not so great as i would like to see it. the only religious body that approaches to your ideas of political economy is quakerism as taught by george fox. carlyle seems deeply tinged with their teachings. _silence_ to them is as valuable to him. again, why should people howl and shriek over the law that the alliance is now trying to carry out in our land called the permissive bill? if we had just laws we then would not be so miserable or so much annoyed now and then with cries of reform and cries of distress. i send you two pamphlets;--one gives the working man's reasons why he don't go to church; in it you will see a few opinions expressed very much akin to those you have written to me. the other gives an account how it is the poor indians have died of _famine_, simply because they have destroyed the very system of political economy, or one having some approach to it, that you are now endeavoring to direct the attention of thinkers to in our country. the _sesame and lilies_ i have read as you requested. i feel now fully the aim and object you have in view in the letters, but i cannot help directing your attention to that portion where you mention or rather exclaim against the florentines pulling down their _ancient walls_ to build a _boulevard_. that passage is one that would gladden the hearts of all true _italians_, especially men that love _italy and dante_!" appendix v. page .--_abuse of food._ paragraphs cut from 'manchester examiner' of march , :-- "a parisian character.--a celebrated character has disappeared from the palais royal. rené lartique was a swiss, and a man of about sixty. he actually spent the last fifteen years in the palais royal--that is to say, he spent the third of his life at dinner. every morning at ten o'clock he was to be seen going into a restaurant (usually tissat's), and in a few moments was installed in a corner, which he only quitted about three o'clock in the afternoon, after having drunk at least six or seven bottles of different kinds of wine. he then walked up and down the garden till the clock struck five, when he made his appearance again at the same restaurant, and always at the same place. his second meal, at which he drank quite as much as at the first, invariably lasted till half-past nine. therefore, he devoted nine hours a day to eating and drinking. his dress was most wretched--his shoes broken, his trousers torn, his paletôt without any lining and patched, his waistcoat without buttons, his hat a rusty red from old age, and the whole surmounted by a dirty white beard. one day he went up to the _comptoir_, and asked the presiding divinity there to allow him to run in debt for one day's dinner. he perceived some hesitation in complying with the request, and immediately called one of the waiters, and desired him to follow him. he went into the office, unbuttoned a certain indispensable garment, and, taking off a broad leather belt, somewhat startled the waiter by displaying two hundred gold pieces, each worth one hundred francs. taking up one of them, he tossed it to the waiter, and desired him to pay whatever he owed. he never again appeared at that restaurant, and died a few days ago of indigestion." "revenge in a ball-room.--a distressing event lately took place at castellaz, a little commune of the alpes-maritimes, near mentone. all the young people of the place being assembled in a dancing-room, one of the young men was seen to fall suddenly to the ground, whilst a young woman, his partner, brandished a poniard, and was preparing to inflict a second blow on him, having already desperately wounded him in the stomach. the author of the crime was at once arrested. she declared her name to be marie p----, twenty-one years of age, and added that she had acted from a motive of revenge, the young man having led her astray formerly with a promise of marriage, which he had never fulfilled. in the morning of that day she had summoned him to keep his word, and, upon his refusal, had determined on making the dancing-room the scene of her revenge. she was at first locked up in the prison of mentone, and afterwards sent on to nice. the young man continues in an alarming state." appendix vi. page .--_regulations of trade._ i print portions of two letters of mr. dixon's in this place; one referring to our former discussion respecting the sale of votes:-- " , nile street, sunderland, march , . "i only wish i could write in some tolerable good style, so that i could idealize, or rather realize to folks, the life and love, and marriage of a working man and his wife. it is in my opinion a working man that really does know what a true wife is, for his every want, his every comfort in life depends on her; and his children's home, their daily lives and future lives, are shaped by her. napoleon wisely said, 'france needs good mothers more than brave men. good mothers are the makers or shapers of good and brave men.' i cannot say that these are the words, but it is the import of his speech on the topic. we have a saying amongst us: 'the man may spend and money lend, if his wife be _ought_,'--_i. e._ good wife;--'but he may work and try to save, but will have _nought_, if his wife be nought,'--_i. e._ bad or thriftless wife. "now, since you are intending to treat of the working man's parliament and its duties, i will just throw out a few suggestions of what i consider should be the questions or measures that demand an early inquiry into and debate on. that guilds be established in every town, where masters and men may meet, so as to avoid the temptations of the public-house and _drink_. and then, let it be made law that every lad should serve an apprenticeship of not less than seven years to a trade or art, before he is allowed to be a member of such guild; also, that all wages be based on a rate of so much _per hour_, and not day, as at present; and let every man prove his workmanship before such a guild, and then allow to him such payment per hour as his craft merits. let there be three grades, and then let there be trials of skill in workmanship every year; and then, if the workman of the third grade prove that he has made progress in his craft, reward him accordingly. then, before a lad is put to any trade, why not see what he is naturally fitted for? combe's book, entitled _the constitution of man_, throws a good deal of truth on to these matters. now, here are two branches of the science of life that, so far, have never once been given trial of in this way. we certainly use them after a _crime_ has been committed, but not till then. "next to that, cash, payment for all and everything needed in life. _credit is a curse_ to him that gives it, and that takes it. he that lives by credit lives in general carelessly. if there was no credit, people then would have to live on what they earned! then, after that, the statute of limitations of fortune you propose. by the hour system, not a single man _need be idle_; it would give employment to all, and even two hours per day would realize more to a man than _breaking stones_. thus you would make every one self-dependent--also no fear of being out of work altogether. then let there be a government fund for all the savings of the working man. i am afraid you will think this a wild, discursive sort of a letter. "yours truly, "thomas dixon." "i have read your references to the _times_ on 'bribery.' well, that has long been my own opinion; they simply have a vote to sell, and sell it the same way as they sell potatoes, or a coat, or any other salable article. voters generally say, 'what does this gentleman want in parliament? why, to help himself and his family or friends; he does not spend all the money he spends over his election for pure good of his country! no: it's to benefit his pocket, to be sure. why should i not make a penny with my vote, as well as he does with his in parliament?' i think that if the system of canvassing or election agents were done away with, and all personal canvassing for votes entirely abolished, it would help to put down bribery. let each gentleman send to the electors his political opinions in a circular, and then let papers be sent, or cards, to each elector, and then let them go and record their votes in the same way they do for a councillor in the corporation. it would save a great deal of expense, and prevent those scenes of drunkenness so common in our towns during elections. _bewick's opinions_ of these matters are quite to the purpose, i think (_see page of memoir_). again, respecting the paris matter referred to in your last letter, i have read it. does it not manifest plainly enough that europeans are also in a measure possessed with that same _demoniacal spirit like the japanese_?" appendix vii. the following letter did not form part of the series written to mr. dixon; but is perhaps worth reprinting. i have not the date of the number of the _gazette_ in which it appeared, but it was during the tailors' strike in london. "to the editor of the _pall mall gazette_. "sir,-- "in your yesterday's article on strikes you have very neatly and tersely expressed the primal fallacy of modern political economy--to wit, that 'the value of any piece of labor cannot be defined'--and that 'all that can be ascertained is simply whether any man can be got to do it for a certain sum.' now, sir, the 'value' of any piece of labor, that is to say, the quantity of food and air which will enable a man to perform it without losing actually any of his flesh or his nervous energy, is as absolutely fixed a quantity as the weight of powder necessary to carry a given ball a given distance. and within limits varying by exceedingly minor and unimportant circumstances, it is an ascertainable quantity. i told the public this five years ago--and under pardon of your politico-economical contributors--it is not a 'sentimental,' but a chemical fact. "let any half-dozen of recognized london physicians state in precise terms the quantity and kind of food, and space of lodging, they consider approximately necessary for the healthy life of a laborer in any given manufacture, and the number of hours he may, without shortening his life, work at such business daily, if so sustained. "and let all masters be bound to give their men a choice between an order for that quantity of food and lodging, or such wages as the market may offer for that number of hours' work. "proper laws for the maintenance of families would require further concession--but, in the outset, let but _this_ law of wages be established, and if then we have any more strikes you may denounce them without one word of remonstrance either from sense or sensibility. "i am, sir, "your obedient servant, "john ruskin." the earth is moving, the universe is working, all the laws of creation are working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over. industrial conspiracies by clarence s. darrow noted lawyer, philosopher, author and humanitarian =price c= the earth is moving, the universe is working, all the laws of creation are working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over. industrial conspiracies by clarence s. darrow noted lawyer, philosopher, author and humanitarian lecture delivered in heilig theatre, portland, oregon, september , . stenographically reported and published by permission of the author. published by turner, newman and knispel, address box portland, ore. single copies of this lecture may be had by sending cents to publishers, copies $ . , $ . per thousand. orders must be accompanied by cash or money order. postage will be prepaid. make checks payable to otto newman, publisher. box , portland, oregon. =all rights reserved= publisher's note.--this address was delivered shortly after mr. darrow's triumphant acquittal on a charge growing out of his defense of the mcnamaras at los angeles, california. the man, the subject and the occasion makes it one of the greatest speeches of our time. it is the hope of the publishers that this message of mr. darrow's may reach the millions of men, women and youth of our country, that they may see the labor problem plainer and that they may receive hope and inspiration in their efforts to make a better and juster world. paul turner, otto newman, julius knispel. copyright, october , , by turner, newman & knispel. industrial conspiracies by clarence s. darrow mr. darrow said: i feel very grateful to you for the warmth and earnestness of your reception. it makes me feel sure that i am amongst friends. if i had to be tried again, i would not mind taking a change of venue to portland (applause); although i think i can get along where i am without much difficulty. the subject for tonight's talk was not chosen by me but was chosen for me. i don't know who chose it, nor just what they expected me to say, but there is not much in a name, and i suppose what i say tonight would be just about the same under any title that anybody saw fit to give. i am told that i am going to talk about "industrial conspiracies." i ought to know something about them. and i won't tell you all i know tonight, but i will tell you some things that i know tonight. the conspiracy laws, you know, are very old. as one prominent laboring man said on the witness stand down in los angeles a few weeks ago when they asked him if he was not under indictment and what for, he said he was under indictment for the charge they always made against working men when they hadn't done anything--conspiracy. and that is the charge they always make. it is the one they have always made against everybody when they wanted them, and particularly against working men, because they want them oftener than they do anybody else. (applause). when they want a working man for anything excepting work they want him for conspiracy. (laughter). and the greatest conspiracy that is possible for a working man to be guilty of is not to work--a conspiracy the other fellows are always guilty of. (applause). the conspiracy laws are very old. they were very much in favor in the star chamber days in england. if any king or ruler wanted to get rid of someone, and that someone had not done anything, they indicted him for what he was thinking about; that is, for conspiracy; and under it they could prove anything that he ever said or did, and anything that anybody else ever said or did to prove what he was thinking about; and therefore that he was guilty. and, of course, if anybody was thinking, it was a conspiracy against the king; for you can't think without thinking against a king. (applause). the trouble is most people don't think. (laughter and applause). and therefore they are not guilty of conspiracy. (laughter and applause). the conspiracy laws in england were especially used against working men, and in the early days, not much more than a hundred years ago, for one working man to go to another and suggest that he ask for higher wages was a conspiracy, punishable by imprisonment. for a few men to come together and form a labor organization in england was a conspiracy. it is not here. even the employer is willing to let you form labor organizations, if you don't do anything but pass resolutions. (laughter and applause). but the formation of unions in the early days in england was a conspiracy, and so they used to meet in the forests and in the rocks and in the caves and waste places and hide their records in the earth where the informers and detectives and burnes' men of those days could not get hold of them. (applause). it used to be a crime for a working man to leave the county without the consent of the employer; and they never gave their consent. they were bought and sold with the land. some of them are now. it reached that pass in england after labor unions were formed, that anything they did was a conspiracy, and to belong to one was practically a criminal offense. these laws were not made by parliament; of course they were not made by the people. no law was ever made by the people; they are made for the people (applause); and it does not matter whether the people have a right to vote or not, they never make the laws. (applause). these laws, however, were made by judges, the same officials who make the laws in the united states today. (applause). we send men to the legislature to make law, but they don't make them. i don't care who makes a law, if you will let me interpret it. (laughter). i would be willing to let the steel trust make a law if they would let me tell what it meant after they got it made. (laughter). that has been the job of the judges, and that is the reason the powerful interests of the world always want the courts. they let you have the members of the legislature, and the aldermen and the constable, if they can have the judges. and so in england the judges by their decisions tied the working man hand and foot until he was a criminal if he did anything but work, as many people think he is today. he actually was at that time, until finally parliament, through the revolution of the people, repealed all these laws that judges had made, wiped them all out of existence, and did, for a time at least, leave the working man free; and then they began to organize, and it has gone on to that extent in england today, that labor organizations are as firmly established as parliament itself. much better established there than here. we in this country got our early laws from england. we took pretty much everything that was bad from england and left most that was good. (applause). at first, when labor organizations were started they had a fair chance; they were left comparatively free; but when they began to grow the american judges got busy. they got busy with injunctions, with conspiracy laws, and there was scarcely anything that a labor organization could do that was not an industrial conspiracy. congress took a hand, not against labor; but to illustrate what i said about the difference between making a law and telling what the law means, we might refer to the act which was considered a great law at the time of its passage, a law defining conspiracy and combinations in reference to trade, the sherman anti-trust law. in the meantime, the combinations of capital had grown so large that even respectable people began to be afraid of them, farmers and others who never learn anything until everybody else has forgotten it (laughter); they began to be afraid of them. they found the great industrial organizations of the country controlling everything they used. one powerful organization owned all the oil there was in the united states; another handful of men owned all the anthracite coal there was in the united states; a few men owned all the iron mines in the united states; and the people began to be alarmed about it. and so they passed a law punishing conspiracies against trade. the father of the law was senator sherman of ohio. the law was debated long in congress and the senate. every man spoke of it as a law against the trusts and monopolies, conspiracies in restraint of trade and commerce. every newspaper in the country discussed it as that; every labor organization so considered it. congress passed it and the president signed it, and then an indictment was found against a corporation, and it went to the supreme court of the united states for the supreme court to say what the law meant. of course congress can't pass a law that you and i can understand. (laughter). they may use words that are only found in the primer, but we don't know what they mean. nobody but the supreme court can tell what they mean. everybody supposed this law was plain and simple and easily understood, but when they indicted a combination of capital for a conspiracy in restraint of trade, the supreme court said this law did not apply to them at all; that it was never meant to fit that particular case. so they tried another one, and they indicted another combination engaged in the business of cornering markets, engaged in the business of trade, rich people, good people. it means the same thing. (laughter). and the supreme court decided that this law did not fit their case, and every one began to wonder what the law did mean anyhow. and after awhile there came along the strike of a body of laboring men, the american railway union. they didn't have a dollar in the world altogether, because they were laboring men and they were not engaged in trade; they were working; but they hadn't found anything else that the sherman anti-trust act applied to, so they indicted debs and his followers for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; and they carried this case to the supreme court. i was one of the attorneys who carried it to the supreme court. most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. i can tell you about some i lose. (applause). a lawyer who wins all his cases does not have many. (laughter). debs was indicted for a conspiracy in restraint of trade. it is not quite fair to say that i lost that case, because he was indicted and fearing he might get out on the indictment the judge issued an injunction against him. (laughter). the facts were the same as if a man were suspected of killing somebody and a judge would issue an injunction against him for shooting his neighbor and he would kill his neighbor with a pistol shot and then they would send him to jail for injuring his clothes for violating an injunction. (laughter). well, they indicted him and they issued an injunction against him for the same thing. of course, we tried the indictment before a jury, and that we won. you can generally trust a part of a jury anyhow, and very often all of them. but the court passed on the injunction case, and while the facts were just the same and the law was just the same, the jury found him innocent, but the court found him guilty. (laughter). and judge wood said that he had violated the injunction. then we carried it to the supreme court on the ground that the sherman anti-trust law, which was a law to punish conspiracies in restraint of trade, was not meant for labor unions but it was meant for people who are trading, just as an ordinary common man would understand the meaning of language, but the supreme court said we didn't know anything about the meaning of language and that they had at last found what the sherman anti-trust law meant and that it was to break up labor unions; and they sent mr. debs to jail under that law (laughter and applause), and nobody, excepting someone connected with the union had ever been sent to jail under that law, and probably never will be. so of course, even the employer, the merchants' and manufacturers' association and the steel trust, even they would be willing to let the socialists go to the legislature and make the laws, as long as they can get the judges to tell what the law means. (loud applause). for the courts are the bulwarks of property, property rights and property interests, and they always have been. i don't know whether they always will be. i suppose they will always be, because before a man can be elected a judge he must be a lawyer. they did patch up the laws against combinations in restraint of trade. even the fellows who interpreted it, were ashamed of it and they fixed it up so they might catch somebody else, and they brought a case against the tobacco trust, and after long argument and years of delay the supreme court decided on the tobacco trust and they decided that this was a combination in restraint of trade, but they didn't send anybody to jail. they didn't even fine them. they gave them six months--not in jail, but six months in which to remodel their business so it would conform to the law, which they did. (applause and laughter). but plug tobacco is selling just as high as it ever was, and higher. they brought an action against the standard oil trust--mr. roosevelt's enemy. (laughter and applause). that is what he says. (laughter and applause). they brought an action against the standard oil trust to dissolve the trust and they listened patiently for a few years--the supreme court is made up of old men, and they have got lots of time (laughter)--and after a few years they found out what the people had known for twenty-five years, that it was a trust, and they so decided that this great corporation had been a conspiracy in restraint of trade for years, had been fleecing the american people. i don't suppose anybody would have brought an action against them, excepting that they had a corner on gasoline and the rich people didn't like to pay so much for gasoline to run their automobiles. (laughter and applause). they found out that the standard oil company was guilty of a conspiracy under the sherman anti-trust law, and they gave them six months in which to change the form of their business, and standard oil stock today is worth more than it ever was before in the history of the world, and gasoline has not been reduced in price, nor anything else that they have to sell. there never has been an instance since that law was passed where it has ever had the slightest effect upon any combination of capital, but under it working men are promptly sent to jail; and it was passed to protect the working man and the consumer against the trusts of the united states. so, you see, it does not make much difference what kind of a law we make as long as the judges tell us what it means. the steel trust has not been hurt. they are allowed to go their way, and they have taken property, which at the most, is worth three hundred million dollars and have capitalized it and bonded it for a billion and a half, or five dollars for every one that it represents, and the interests and dividends which have been promptly paid year by year have come from the toil and the sweat and the life of the american workingman. (applause). and nobody interferes with the steel trust; at least, nobody but the direct action men. (laughter and applause). the courts are silent, the states' attorneys are silent; the governors are silent; all the officers of the law are silent, while a great monster combination of crooks and criminals are riding rough-shod over the american people. (applause). but it is the working man who is guilty of the industrial conspiracy. they and their friends are the ones who are sent to jail. it is the powerful and the strong who have the keys to the jails and the penitentiaries, and there is not much danger of their locking themselves in jails and penitentiaries. the working man never did have the keys. their business has been to build them and to fill them. there have been other industrial conspiracies, however, which are the ones that interest me most, and it is about these and what you can do about them and what you can't do about them that i wish to talk tonight. the real industrial conspiracies are by the other fellow. it is strange that the people who have no property have been guilty of all of the industrial conspiracies, and the people who own all the earth have not been guilty of any industrial conspiracy. it is like our criminal law. nearly all the laws are made to protect property; nearly all the crimes are crimes against property, and yet only the poor go to jail. that is, all the people in our jail have committed crimes against property, and yet they have not got a cent. the people outside have so much property they don't know what to do with it, and they have committed no crime against property. so with the industrial conspiracies, those who are not in trade or commerce are the ones who have been guilty of a conspiracy to restrict trade and commerce, and those who are in trade and commerce that have all the money have not been guilty of anything. their business is prosecuting other people so they can keep what they have got and get what little there is left. but there are real industrial conspiracies. they began long ages ago, and they began by direct action, when the first capitalist took his club and knocked the brains out of somebody who wanted a part of it for himself. that is direct action. they got the land by direct action. they went out and took it. if anybody was there, they drove them off or killed them, as the case might be. it is only the other fellow that can't have direct action. they got all their title to the earth by direct action. of course, they have swapped it more or less, since, but the origin is there. they just went out and took possession of it, and it is theirs. and the strong have always done it; they have reached out and taken possession of the earth. a few men today can control all the industry and do control all of the industry of this country. a dozen men sitting around the table in a big city can bring famine if they wish; they can paralyze the wheels of industry from one end of the united states to the other, and the prosperity of villages, cities and towns, and the wages of its people depends almost entirely upon the wills of a dozen men. they have taken the mines; and all the coal there is in the united states, or practically all, is controlled today by a few railroad companies who can tell us just what we must pay, and if we are not willing to pay it, we can freeze; and we respect private property so much that we will stand around and freeze rather than take the coal that nature placed in the earth for all mankind. (applause). all the iron ore in the united states that is worth taking is owned and controlled by the steel trust, one combination with a very few men managing the business; not more than a half a dozen absolutely controlling it have their will; and nobody can have any iron ore, or mold it or use it, excepting at the will of a few men who have taken possession of what nature placed there for all of us, if we were wise enough to use it and understand it. and the great forests of the united states, what is left of them--and there is not so very much left. we are a wise people. we pass laws now for the protection of timber in the united states, so it won't be destroyed too fast, and at the same time, we put a tariff duty of two dollars a thousand on lumber that comes from somewhere else so that it will be destroyed at a high price. (laughter and applause). we are the wisest set of people of any land that the sun ever shone upon. and if you don't believe it, ask roosevelt when he comes here. (laughter and applause). a few men control what is left of the forests, a few men and a few great corporations have taken the earth, what is good of it. they have left the arid lands, the desert and the mountains which nobody can use,--the desert for sand heaps and the mountains for scenery. they are now taxing the people to build reservoirs so that the desert will blossom; and after it begins to blossom, they will take that. (applause). and even if they didn't own the land, they own all the ways there are of getting to it, and they are able to take from the farmer just so much of his grain as they see fit to take, and so far as the farmer is concerned, i wish they would take it all (laughter and applause), because he always has been against the interests of every man that toils, including himself. (applause). and they are able to say to the working man engaged in industry just how much of his product they will take, and from him they take just enough to leave him alive. they have got to leave him alive, or he can't work, and they have got to leave him enough strength and ambition to propagate his species or the rich people can't get their work done in the next generation. and that is all that they are bound to leave him. they own the railroads, the mills, the factories, and all the tools and implements of trade and commerce, and the workingman has only one thing to sell. that is his labor, his life; and he has to sell that to the highest bidder. there are only a few of these men who own the earth and all of its fullness. there are millions and millions of the people who do the work, and if you can keep these millions and millions disorganized and competing with each other, they will keep wages down themselves without any help from the bosses. (loud applause). on the other hand, there are so few men who own the earth and the tools that they find it perfectly easy to combine with each other and regulate the price of their products, and they have learned better than to compete, and there is no way for the wit of man to make and interpret any law which will ever set them to competing again. they have managed to control the price of their products, and charge what they see fit and all they need is to buy their raw material in the open markets of the world as cheaply as they can, and labor is the principal raw material that they use. so of course they want free trade in labor, and protection in commodities; and they have always had it, and our wise americans that are the marvel of the day, including the working people, have cheerfully given them protection in the commodities that they sell and free trade in the labor which they buy. (applause). and they thought by protecting the steel trust, so there can't be any foreign competition that it will make the steel trust so rich that they can afford to pay high prices to their working men. it is one thing to make a man rich enough so he can afford to pay high wages; it is another thing to make him pay. (laughter). so the employer and the capitalist have combined in all industry, and they fix the price to suit themselves and insist that the workingman shall come to them individually and unorganized and compete with each other for a day's labor, so they can buy labor at the smallest cost and if, perchance, there are not working men enough here, they want the ports of the world opened so they can draw on china or japan or any other country on the face of the earth, and get working men there to work for them at the smallest price. the game is simple and easy. it seems as if it were simple enough for an american farmer to understand; but he doesn't. (laughter). now, the original conspiracy, industrial conspiracy, has been on the part of the strong to take the earth, and they have got it. they own it, and all they need now is to get enough working men and women at a low enough price to make them as much wealth as they want. it is pretty hard to fill that market, they want so much; but that is all they need. and the conspiracy on the other side of the workingman of the united states is the same conspiracy as the conspiracy of the workingman of the world, and it has only one object. we may temporize; we may be content with a little; we may stop at half measures, but in the end it only has one object, and that is for the workers of the world to take back the earth that has been taken from us. (cries of hurrah and loud cheering). take it back, and have all the products of their toil, not part of it, but all of it. now, it is a long road. it is a universal, world-wide conspiracy by the intelligent working people and by their friends the world over to get back the earth that has been stolen by direct action. (applause). now, no one who understands this question wants anything less and the employer is right when he says if workingmen are permitted to organize they won't stop with that; and they won't. (applause). you may place every lawyer on the bench and you may place a jail in every block and a penitentiary in every ward, and the workingmen won't stop. (applause). if they will, they deserve to be workingmen forever. (applause). the employer understands that if workingmen organize something will be doing; and so he does not believe in organization. sometimes he says he does, but he does not. if workingmen must organize, then the thing is to keep them as quiet as they can, to turn their labor meetings into prayer meetings. (laughter and applause). they are entirely harmless. they don't help the people who pray, and the lord has always been so far away from the workingman that it doesn't bother him either. (laughter). they are willing even, as i have said, to let them pass resolutions, but that is about the limit. (laughter). they understand that one thing leads to another, and if they concede higher wages today, next year they will want another raise and so they will. there is no danger of raising it too high for a long while to come. and if they concede shorter hours today, next year they may want them shorter still. everybody is working for shorter hours, especially the people who don't work. and they are all working for bigger pay; even those who get all there is, they want more. and of course, there will be no stopping, there will be no end to the demand, until we get it all, and that is a long way off. and the question is how? and that is not so easy. it is easier to tell how you can't get it than to tell how you can get it. it is easier to tell how you haven't got it than how you are going to get it. there is another thing that they are fairly well satisfied with: they don't worry much about voting. they have been satisfied to let all the men vote, and they have still kept their property. (laughter). they will be satisfied to let all the women vote, and they will still keep their property. voting has not done very much. we have been practicing at it for more than a hundred years, and it is a nice little toy to keep people satisfied, but that is all it has done so far. (applause). of course, here and there we have been able to pass a few laws. for instance, we have statutes which forbid women from working in a factory more than ten hours a day. (laughter). now, we have done something. (laughter and applause). we have statutes forbidding men to labor more than a certain number of hours a day. that is, people like to work; they love it so dearly that you have to pass a law to keep a working man from working. (laughter). when we pass laws to keep men and women from working it ought to show the stupidest mind that there is something terribly wrong with the industrial conditions under which we live. if men had a chance to work and get all the proceeds of their work, you would not have to pass laws to keep them from working. they would stop soon enough. and if every man could employ his own labor and receive the full product of his toil it would make no difference how hard your neighbor worked, it would not hurt you in the least, and you could let him work himself to death if he wanted to. the only difficulty is under the patch work industrial system of today where a few men own all the earth, and all the factories and mills and are compelled to sell their product to the workingman, they give him such a small share of that product that the workingmen haven't anything to buy it with. they can't buy it back, and so there is not work enough to go around. and for that reason we are tinkering up this old system of laws to keep people from working, and we pass a law to limit the number of hours that a man can work and to limit the number of hours that a woman can work, and to limit the age at which a little child can be fed into a factory or a mill. do you suppose that the fatherhood and the motherhood of the people of the united states is not of a high enough grade so they would not send their children to a factory or a mill if there was any way to avoid it? and do you think under any fair system of industry and life we would ever need a law to keep a child out of a factory or a mill? (applause). we have managed to pass some laws to require safety appliances in factories and in mills and upon railroads. for instance, to put a guard on a buzz saw so that a workingman won't saw his hand instead of sawing the wood. (laughter). but if a workingman had any chance to employ his labor and get what he produced he would not be fooling with a buzz saw and there would be no need of it and he would look out for the safety of the machines himself and do it a great deal better than the government ever did it or can ever possibly do it. (applause). so we have done everything and tried everything, excepting to strike at the root of any evil and accomplish something of real value. we have even passed laws excluding the chinaman and the jap from the united states. that is, we love our own people so dearly that we won't let the chinaman or the jap do the work for them. (laughter). we want our people to have all the work, and if they come here and volunteer to do it we won't let them; for work is a blessing under the present industrial system. we have to work. if we stop we starve. now, i could imagine a system, and it seems to me that most all of you could imagine a system that was so fair and so just and so equal that if any body of philanthropic heathens would agree to come over here and do our work for us, we would go and play golf or run automobiles whilst they were doing it; but with a condition of life where a few men have it all and the rest can only live if they have the work to do, why no one can do it for us; we have got to do it ourselves. we can't even allow a machine to do it, for every time we get the machine to do the work it takes the place of a man or two, or more, and they go out to beg or tramp or starve, as the case may be. we have got a wonderful system of industry, and industrial life. if anybody ever invented it, which they didn't, he must have been standing on his head and drunken at the time he did it. (laughter and applause). and now what are we going to do about it? we have the great mass of men living upon the will of a few and taking what they can get, and we have got to get back the earth. a small job. some people would say, "well, if you have got to get it back why don't you go and take it?" well, we don't. some people say we have got to vote it back, and some say we have got to get it back through labor organizations, and some say we have got to have a good deal more than that. i don't know. but i want to say some things about political action. if we are going to get at it in that way we first had better understand the size of the contract, and there are a great many people who don't. (applause). we have been voting a long time, and we have a democracy. everybody can vote--every man past twenty-one. if we are not doing well enough we are going to let the women vote; then if we don't do any better we will let the children vote, and then we will get somewhere. (applause). if we are going to get out of this muss by voting, why, let's have a little of it. we had better have an election every day, because if we can do it that way it is about the simplest there is. but we have been working at it a long while and we are getting in worse all the time. in the first place, how many of us understand our system of government? we hear people talk about it on the fourth day of july, and they run for an office in the fall. the most glorious system ever invented by the wit of man! i want to say that it is about the craziest system that was ever conceived in the brain of man. (applause). our system of government never was conceived in the brain of man, because no man or combination of men were ever foolish enough and weak enough to conceive them. it is a system of blunders. if you would elect for the next hundred years a president as wise as roosevelt (laughter and applause) you could not move a peg. let me just tell you why. suppose we want to pass a law. as i have said, we pass little fool laws and nobody pays much attention to them. they don't hurt anybody and they let them go. but suppose we want to pass a law of substance, if there is any such thing as a law of substance; suppose we want to do it, something affecting fundamental rights, now how are we going to get at it? one hundred and twenty-five years ago and more a body of men, very wise for their day and generation, met to form the constitution. they had just been indulging in a little direct action against england. (laughter). they could have sent members to parliament up to now and we would have still been british subjects. i don't know as we would have been any worse off if we had been. but they got at it simply and directly, and so they won our american independence. i don't know just when it was lost, but they won it. (applause). and the first thing they did was to have a constitution. you can't do anything without a constitution. you have got to have a good constitution to get anywhere. and so they got together a body of men, john hancock and some more penmen, and they wrote a constitution. now, what is a constitution? why, it is just the same as if a boy, twenty-one years of age, would say, "well, now, i have become of age, and i am wise, and i am going to write out a constitution to cover the rest of my life, and when i am forty i can't do anything that is unconstitutional." there wasn't a railroad one hundred and twenty-five years ago; there wasn't a steam engine; there wasn't a flying machine, of course, nor an automobile. nobody knew anything about electricity, except what came down from the clouds and they were busy dodging it. there were few machines; there was just a body of farmers--that's all. (laughter and applause). and they wrote the constitution, and there it is. it didn't apply to the industrial conditions of today, for they didn't know anything about the industrial conditions of today, but they imagined that they were so wise that lest people one hundred and twenty-five years later should think they knew more they would tie things up so that we could not make a fool of ourselves, to the third or fourth generation after they were dead. (laughter). and so they wrote down a constitution which meant that whatever the american people wanted to do a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred years afterward, they could not do it unless it agreed with the constitution that had already been written down or unless they changed it. well now, that was a wise piece of business so far, wasn't it? but that is only the beginning of it. then they organized this government into separate states. i don't know how many there are now, they are hatching some new ones all the while. but every state was independent in a way, and in a way it was united with all the rest. nobody knows just how much independence there is and how much union there is. nobody knows but the judges, and they only know in the particular case. they can say this goes or this does not go; nobody can tell until they get there. (laughter). what comes within the state province and what comes within the national province nobody knows, nor ever did know. the states are individual and separate to make laws for themselves. each one of them has a law factory of their own, and they are all busy; and the united states government has another big law factory, and they have all been grinding out laws for a hundred years and not only that but the courts have been telling us what they mean and what they don't mean; so it has been pretty busy for the lawyer. then they decided that they should have a congress, which consisted of the senate, where men were selected for six years, not by the people but by state legislatures, and a congress where men were elected for two years by the people. but these congressmen elected for two years didn't take their seat for a year after they were elected, and time to forget all about the issue on which they were elected. (laughter). and not satisfied with that, they had to have a supreme court to tell us what congress or the senate meant, and the supreme court was appointed for life and not beholden to anybody; and they are generally about a hundred years old apiece. (laughter). and then they had a president, who was elected for four years, and who had a right to veto anything that congress and the senate saw fit to pass, and if he vetoed it you could not pass it except by a two-thirds majority of both houses. and there you have got it, so far as the united states government is concerned. but that is not nearly all. so if you want to pass some important law, let's see what you have to do. of course, little laws don't count, for you can't keep up a factory unless you do something, pass laws one year and repeal them the next, or some little thing like that, to save the job. but take an important thing, an issue coming up from the people, one ultimately meaning the taking of the earth. nothing else is important. it may be in one form or another, but it must have that purpose, or it won't be important, because you can't regulate things that belong to other people very successfully; you have got to get it yourselves. (applause). now, let's see what you have got to do. in the first place, you must elect a congress, and the congress does not take its seat for a year after they are elected; and then they run up against the united states senate, holding six year terms, and one-third of them passing away each two years, none of them elected upon the issue upon which congress were elected, mostly old men and generally rich men--rich enough to get the job. (laughter). now you have got to get the law through congress and through the senate both, which is well nigh impossible, if it is a law of any consequence. and then here comes a president, who is elected by the people for four years, and he must sign it, and if congress and the senate or the president refuses, then you can't do it. excepting if the president refuses then you have got to get two-thirds of both the houses, which is impossible if the law amounts to anything, and then you have only begun. if you should happen to get all these three at once, which we never did and never will on anything very important because the claws are all cut out of any bill before it ever gets very far,--then you have only begun. then here is this document, this sacred document which came down from mount sinai one hundred and twenty-five years ago, the constitution, and you lay down the law beside the constitution and see whether it is unconstitutional or not and of course you could not tell. you would not know anything about it. congress could not tell; the senate could not tell; the president could not tell. there is only one tribunal that could tell, and that is the supreme court. and while the constitution fills about ten pages, the interpretation of the constitution will fill a hundred volumes or more. (laughter). and the constitution is not what is written in ten pages but it is what is written in the decisions of the judges covering over a hundred years; and they don't always agree, at that, which makes some of them right. if they all agreed probably none of them would be right. (laughter). so if you should ever succeed in getting a law past congress with its two year term, and the senate with its six, and the president with his four, any one of whom may block it, and will, if it is important, then you have got to pass it to these wise judges who are not elected at all and who have no interests with the people because they are holding their office for life and they have been there so long and got so old that they don't understand any of the new questions anyhow, and could not, and who have the conservatism of age anyway, and they have got to decide whether that law is constitutional or not, and before they have decided it and before it has run the gauntlet of all of them, even if they decided it right you would not need the law. the law would be dead. (laughter). but you must combine on all these four things before you can accomplish anything. and that is not all. then you must decide whether the law is within the province of the state or the nation; whether it is state business or whether it is national business; and most of our laws are state laws and when we get back to the state we find the same old story. wonderful wisdom! here is first a constitution, which is nothing except as i illustrated, a boy twenty-one years old swears he won't know any more when he is fifty, and that kind of a boy generally does not. (laughter). and we have a legislative body to make laws, composed of a house and a senate, two bodies, one not being wise enough to make them themselves; and we have a governor with a veto, and a supreme court to say whether the law is constitutional or not. the same thing in the state and the same thing in the nation. then we have got to see whether it is in the province of the nation or the state, and you see it is next to impossible to ever get a constitutional law that amounts to anything, and we have never done it. but, they say, this is a country where people vote, and if you don't like the law, why change it. if you didn't vote there would be some excuse for direct action, but as long as you vote you can change the law. (applause). the trouble is you can't change it. you haven't got a chance. how can you change one of these laws that are important? how can you appeal to the people, first of all, and change it with the people? and next, how could you possibly elect a congress and a senate and a president and a supreme court all at once, that ever would make any substantial change, or ever did? "well," they say, "if the constitution fetters you too much, why, change the constitution. the constitution provides that it can be changed." and so it does; but how? you can change the constitution of the united states. you could change mt. hood, but it would take a pile of shovels. (laughter). you could change mt. hood a good deal easier. it could be done. the law provides that if you pass a law through congress and the senate and it is signed by the president, to change the constitution, you may submit it to the people and if three-fourths of all the states in the union consent to it, why you can change it. what do you think of that? do you suppose there is any power on earth that ever could get a law through congress and the senate, approved by the senate, and then get three-fourths of the individual states in the union to approve it? you and your children and your children's children would die while you are doing it. the best proof of that is the fact that we have had a constitution for one hundred and twenty-five years, and the lord knows it needs patching. it needs something worse: it needs abolishing worse than anything else. (applause). if anybody does want to tinker with voting the first thing necessary is to get rid of the constitution. we have had one for a hundred and twenty-five years with a provision for changing it. it has needed change. it needs it all the while, and yet it has never been changed but once. they passed several amendments all in a heap. what were those? those were amendments growing out of the civil war, and they didn't permit any of the southern states to vote. they just ran them over their heads, and they were all amendments protecting the negroes after enfranchisement. and those are the only amendments we have had in one hundred and twenty-five years, and it took a war to get those--considerable direct action. why, if a body of ingenious men had gotten together to make the frame work of a government to absolutely take from the people all the power they possibly could, they could not have contrived anything more mischievous and complete than our american form of government. (applause). russia is easy and simple compared with this. if you did happen to get a progressive, kindly, sympathetic, humane czar, which you probably won't, but if you did you could change all the laws of russia and you could change them right away and get something. but if you got the wisest and kindest and most sympathetic man on earth at the head of our government he could not do anything; or if you filled congress with them they could not do anything, or the senate they could not, and the supreme court could not. you would have to fill them all at once, and then they would have to override all the precedents of a hundred and twenty-five years to accomplish it. the english government is simplicity itself compared to it. as compared with ours it is as direct as a convention of the i. w. w. (applause). the english people elect a parliament and when some demand comes up from the country for different legislation which reaches parliament and is strong enough to demand a division in parliament and the old majority fails, parliament is dissolved at once, and you go right straight back to the people and elect a new parliament upon that issue and they go at once to parliament and pass a law, and there is no power on earth that can stop them. the king hasn't any more to say about the laws of england, nor any more power than a floor manager of a charity ball would have to say about it. he is just an ornament, and not much of an ornament at that. (applause). the house of lords is comparatively helpless, and they never had any constitution; there never was any power in england to set aside any law that the people made. it was the law, plain and direct and simple, and you might get somewhere with it. but we have built up a machine that destroys every person who undertakes to touch it. i don't know how you are ever going to remedy it. nothing short of a political revolution, which would be about as complete as the deluge, could ever change our laws under our present system (applause) in any important particular. but while anybody is voting they had better vote the right way if they can find it out. if they can't it is just as well not to vote. they had better vote for some workingman's candidate and be counted as long as you are doing it. (applause). still any benefit that must come anywhere in the near future must come some other way. workingmen have not raised their wages by it; they haven't shortened their hours of toil by it; they haven't improved the conditions of life by it; it has all been done in some other way. all of this has been accomplished by trades-unionism, by organization. if you can organize workingmen sufficiently so that they may make their demands strong enough you can accomplish something in all of these directions. (applause). but our political institutions are such that before you could get anything like a political revolution you need an industrial revolution. (applause). and then we come to face some of the problems of today, and i want to speak a little bit about that. i have talked to you about as long as i ought to tonight, but i want to say something about some matters that perhaps are closer home than those. we find the american workingman bound by the law, as i have said,--everything taken from him. he can't do anything by voting. the courts are almost always against him, for the simple reason that courts are made from lawyers, generally prominent lawyers and well known lawyers. in almost every instance these lawyers have been corporation lawyers. their instincts are that way. their beliefs are that way, and their training and heredity are that way; and they are not with the poor. in order to be a lawyer you must spend considerable time, if not studying, at least you must spend it not working. you can't work while you are becoming a lawyer, and you won't work afterwards. (laughter). it takes eight or ten years' schooling at least. that is one reason why a lawyer says he should have big fees, it takes him so long to learn the trade. that is, the poor people support a lawyer so long while he is preparing that they ought to support him better while he is practicing (laughter); because a fellow studying to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a minister--i don't know what they study to be a minister, but i suppose they do (laughter)--has got to be living while he is studying and somebody must take care of him; to take care of him while he is learning--after he gets it learned he takes care of himself. so the judges are not on your side. they don't look at things the way you do. they are trained differently. if they were picked out of your trade councils they would look at them differently and they could decide cases differently. everything is in habit, and the environment and the training, and they are all the time fashioning the law against you. then what? workingmen find themselves hedged about wherever they turn. they can't employ themselves. somebody has got the earth. they can't mine ore; somebody owns it. they can't get the steel to do the work with themselves; they have got to buy it off somebody. they can't do the work except for wages; the employer does it and the employer insists upon open competition in labor and workingmen are constantly fighting each other. everybody admits that the systems must change, that the laws must change. they can't change them by political action, and the injustice goes on, and on, and on. they find children taken from school and put in factories and mills; their children, not the children of the rich but the children of the poor. the rich love their children so much that they don't put them in factories and mills. only the children of the poor are put in factories and mills, which shows that mother love is not the same with poor people as it is with rich people. still the poor people have all the children anyway, so there are enough. (laughter). they are good to the rich and they have the children for them. they find that the life of a poor man is only about two-thirds as long as that of a rich man. a man dies because he is poor. a lawyer, or preacher or a doctor can take care of himself; but the workingman dies because he is poor. lots of gray-headed lawyers and preachers and bankers and doctors, but there are not so very many gray-haired workingmen. that is lucky for them, too, because they would have to go to the poor house. (laughter). maybe they will get old age pensions sometimes. (applause). it is always safe and economical to give workingmen old age pensions, because they never reach old age. they find themselves ground up by all kinds of machinery, ground to death under car wheels, sawed to pieces in factories and mills, falling from ten and twelve story buildings, picked up on the ground just one big spatter of blood and bones. they know these conditions are wrong and they can't change them, and the people who have control of it are squeezing them tighter and tighter all the time and they don't know which way to turn. and which way do they turn? they try voting. they don't accomplish it. they try organization, and that is hard. they try direct action, and that is hard, too. you wonder that they try it. now, a great many people condemned the mcnamaras. a great many working people condemned them. i don't say that the working people ever need to resort to force, or ever should resort to force, but it is not for me to condemn anybody who believes they should. (applause). i know that the progress of the human race is one long bloody story of force and violence (applause); and from the time man got up on his hind legs and looked the world in the face he has been fighting, and fighting, and fighting for all the liberty and the opportunity that he has had. i think the time will come when he can stop. perhaps it has come. and no one hates cruelty and force and violence more than i hate it. but don't let them ever tell you that all the force has been on our side. (loud applause). it never has been; most all of it has been with them. (applause). they are the ones who have the force, who have the power. why are these standing armies and navies; and, more than that, the militia building their armories in every great city in the united states? are they there for a foreign foe or are they there to shoot strikers and workingmen when the time shall come? (loud applause). are they there to protect the people from china and japan and england, or are they there to protect property against the poor? (loud and prolonged applause). what is a lockout in a factory or mill when they call it famine and want and hunger and cold, to do their work? is that force, or is it peace and quietness and gentleness, and the golden rule? what are the policemen, what are the officers of the law, what is the machinery of government directed against the workingmen, holding all the resources of the earth in the power of a few and compelling the money to go to those few for the means of life? isn't this force? what is the blacklist? is it anything but force that drives children into the factories, that drives women into factories, and compels men to work with defective machinery for long hours and poor wages? is it anything but the force of starvation and want that has always been used by the owners of the earth to make the poor do their bidding and their will? the force is there. it is not with the weak. the weak have never had the strength or the opportunity to use the force. and when here and there some man like the mcnamaras and others--i don't need to mention them alone, excepting that i want to live to see the day that justice will be done to them (loud applause)--here and there when they reach out blindly to meet force with force, call it blind if you will, call it wrong if you will; i have never counseled it or advised it, perhaps because i am not brave enough; it is not for me to say; but call it blind, call it mistaken, call it what you will; but the fact will ever remain that men who do it never do it for their own mean personal ends but because they love their fellowmen. (loud applause). and long ago it was written down that "greater love hath no man than this, that he who would give his life for his friend." some day, i say, it will be understood, and some day the world will understand that they and wood who was indicted from the other side for an attempt to charge something to labor that labor was not guilty of, and all of these other indictments growing out of the same acts, that all of these acts were not individual acts at all, but they were a part of a great industrial tragedy of a great evolution of society; that they are what are called social crimes or social acts for which these men were responsible in no degree. they were a part of a machine; they were risking their lives; a part of a system; and, do what you will, others will be ground out of it forever and forever, until the system shall change and until there will be some equity and justice in the world. (loud applause). the world is changing, and every person is doing his part in his own way. it is not for you to criticize me or for me to criticize you, but to judge men by their motives and to judge them by the side they are on. labor must stand for its own men. (loud applause). it must stand even for its own mistakes, and its own crimes if it is guilty of them. (applause). there is one question, and only one, to ask concerning a man or concerning an act: "was he on my side?" (applause). you may counsel him to do differently; yes. you may teach him moderation, and believe in it; and all of us want to see peace and justice and harmony come out of all of these contending forces, as it one day will come; you may teach it and you may believe it, but the man who lets a thought loose in the universe can never tell what the results of that thought may be. it may bear fruit in a thousand ways of which we never dream; but even though it does and it must the thought must go forth to do its work and to change the face of the earth. the highest and the holiest and the best thought may bring on strife and war. and john brown, a devoted man who believed in the liberty of the slaves, took his gun in his hand and went to virginia and raised his hand in rebellion against the country. he was tried and convicted and hanged for murder, and he was guilty of murder under the laws of man, but under the laws of god he was a hero. the laws of justice and righteousness look not to the act but they look at the motive that moved the brain. were they fighting on our side? were they fighting for justice and humanity and the weak and the poor and the oppressed, as they saw it? if so, whoever they are and whatever, they demand our sympathy and our support. (applause). john brown by his act of heroism plunged the united states into a civil war costing hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions of property. but he was not responsible for the thought. it came in the evolution of time. and so don't think that any one man is responsible for any one great event in this world. the earth is moving, the universe is working, all the laws of creation are working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over. (applause). the evolution will not all be peaceful. it can't be. there will be conflict and blood shed; there will be prisons, there will be jails, but through it all this same humanity that has come onward and upward from the brute below us, onward and upward to where we are today, this same humanity will be growing in wisdom and strength and righteousness, and the good and the evil, the peace and the charity, the violence and all, will be combined to make man better and make the world juster and fairer than it has ever been before. (loud applause). (at the conclusion of the address of mr. darrow at the suggestion of a member of the audience three lusty cheers were given for the speaker). transcriber's notes . passages in bold are indicated by =bold=. . other than the misprint corrections listed below, printer's inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation have been retained: "wont" corrected to "won't" (page ) added missing period at the end of "conspiracy" (page ) "alays" corrected to "always" (page ) "laugher" corrected to "laughter" (page ) "appause" corrected to "applause" (page ) "guity" corrected to "guilty" (page ) "especialy" corrected to "especially" (page ) "hey" corrected to "they" (page ) "dolars" corrected to "dollars" (page ) "penitentaries" corrected to "penitentiaries" (page ) "rairoad" corrected to "railroad" (page ) "ony" corrected to "only" (page ) "laud" corrected to "loud" (page ) added missing bracket at the start of "applause)" (page ) "you" corrected to "your" (page ) "yon" corrected to "you" (page ) "can'" corrected to "can't" (page ) "yaers" corrected to "years" (page ) "voted" corrected to "vetoed" (page ) "coud" corrected to "could" (page ) "whlie" corrected to "while" (page ) extra comma removed at the end of "four," (page ) "qoestions" corrected to "questions" (page ) "strong strong" corrected to "strong" (page ) "chidren" corrected to "children" (page ) "oe" corrected to "on" (page ) "and and" corrected to "and" (page ) "strvation" corrected to "starvation" (page ) "applaune" corrected to "applause" (page ) note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustration. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) the long day the story of a new york working girl * * as told by herself [illustration: logo] new york the century co. [illustration] copyright, , by the century co. published october, the devinne press to my three "lady-friends" happy, fortunate minnie; bessie, of gentle memory; and that other, silent figure in the tragedy of failure, the long-lost, erring eunice, with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed. contents chapter page i in which i arrive in new york ii in which i start out in quest of work iii i try "light" housekeeping in a fourteenth-street lodging-house iv wherein fate brings me good fortune in one hand and disaster in the other v in which i am "learned" by phoebe in the art of box-making vi in which phoebe and mrs. smith hold forth upon music and literature vii in which i acquire a story-book name and make the acquaintance of miss henrietta manners viii wherein i walk through dark and devious ways with henrietta manners ix introducing henrietta's "special gentleman-friend" x in which i find myself a homeless wanderer in the night xi i become an "inmate" of a home for working girls xii in which i spend a happy four weeks making artificial flowers xiii three "lady-friends," and the adventures that befall them xiv in which a tragic fate overtakes my "lady-friends" xv i become a "shaker" in a steam-laundry xvi in which it is proved to me that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn epilogue the long day i in which i arrive in new york the rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little room in which i opened my eyes on that february morning whence dates the chronological beginning of this autobiography. the jangle of a bell had awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon the chill gloom of the daybreak. lying there, i wondered whether i had really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. everything about me was so strange, so painfully new. never before had i waked to find myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had i lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed. staring hard at the streaming skylight, i tried to think, to recall some one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. when? and how? and why? how inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments after that rude awakening! and then, as the fantasies of a dream gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding twenty-four hours--the long journey and the weariness of it; the interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset. suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill in western pennsylvania. with equal suddenness, too, the fugue of thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying monody--"work or starve, work or starve!" and then i remembered! an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, i was a stranger in a strange city which i had not yet so much as seen by daylight. i was a waif and a stray in the mighty city of new york. here i had come to live and to toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. very wide awake now, i jumped out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes. i dressed as quickly as the cold and my sodden garments permitted. on the washstand i found a small tin ewer and a small tin basin to match, and i dabbed myself gingerly in the cold, stale water. another jangle of the harsh bell, and i went down dark stairs to the basement and to breakfast, wondering if i should be able to recognize miss jamison; for i had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my arrival the previous midnight. wrapped in a faded french flannel kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling "kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. making due allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono, curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance, respectively, i knew about what to look for in the daylight miss jamison. a short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, i predicted to myself. the secretary of the young women's christian association, to which i had written some weeks before for information as to respectable and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and addresses, among them that of miss elmira jamison, "a lady of very high christian ideals." miss jamison was no disappointment. she fulfilled perfectly all my preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired. spying me the moment i got inside the dining-room door, she immediately pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under my nose, while another servant tossed a wet, warm napkin upon my plate. my breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the collection of dishes, and which i ate with not the greatest relish in the world. there were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. they ate at little tables set uncomfortably close together. gradually my general observations narrowed down to the people at my own table. i noticed a young man opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish black eyes, who sat beside me. the bearded young man talked at a great rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject was one of absorbing interest. gradually i discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, i found myself listening to the history of miss elmira jamison's career as a purveyor of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals. five years ago miss jamison had come into this shabby though eminently respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a neighboring street. she had come from some up-state country town, and her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small, old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. miss jamison was a genius--a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. she wasn't the "slob" that she looked. the epithet is not mine, but that of the young gentleman to whom i am indebted for this information. no, indeed; miss jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out who had occasion to deal with her very long. a shrewd, exacting, penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. miss jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. the result was that "the calvin" immediately became filled with homeless presbyterians, or the homeless friends and acquaintances of presbyterians. they not only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow miss jamison rented the adjoining house. miss jamison was now a successful boarding-house keeper on a scale large enough to have satisfied the aspirations of a less clever woman. but she longed for other denominations to feed and house. of the assortment that offered themselves, she chose the methodists next, and soon had several flourishing houses running under the pious appellation "wesley," which name, memorialized in large black letters on a brass sign, soon became a veritable magnet to board-seeking methodism. the third and last venture of the energetic lady, and the one from which she was to derive her largest percentage of revenue, was the establishment of the place of which i had so recently become an inmate. of all three of miss jamison's boarding-houses, this was the largest and withal the cheapest and most democratic: in which characteristics it but partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which flocked in vast numbers to all people's church. the all people's edifice was a big, unsightly brick building. it had been originally designed for a roller-skating rink. all people's, as the church was colloquially named, was one of the most popular places of worship in the city. every sunday, both at morning and evening services, the big rink was packed to the doors with people who were attracted quite as much by the good music as they were by the popular preaching of the very popular divine. a large percentage of this great congregation was recruited from the transient element of population which lives in lodgings and boarding-houses. from its democracy and lack of all ceremony, it was a church which appealed particularly to those who were without ties or affiliations. into this sanctuary the lonely young man (or girl) of a church-going temperament was almost sure to drift sooner or later if his probationary period of strangerhood happened to fall in this section of the city. the clever miss jamison put a sign bearing the legend, "all people's," on each of the doors of six houses, opposite the church, which she acquired one by one as her business increased. the homeless and lonely who came to all people's for spiritual refreshment, or to gratify their curiosity, remained to patronize miss jamison's "special sunday" thirty-five-cent table d'hôte, served in the basement of one house; or bought a meal-ticket for four dollars, which entitled them to twenty-one meals served in the basement of another of the houses; or for the sum of five dollars and upward insured themselves the privilege of a week's lodging and three meals a day served in still another of the basements. such is the history of miss jamison as detailed at the breakfast-table that sunday morning. i went out for a walk late in the afternoon, and wandered about, homesick and lonely. when i returned dinner was over and the dining-room almost deserted, only a few remaining to gossip over their dessert and coffee. at my table all had gone save the young girl with the dark eyes, who, i felt instinctively, was a very nice and agreeable girl. as i approached the table, she raised her eyes from the book she was reading and gave me a diffident little bow, when, seeing i was so glad to respond to it, she immediately smiled in a friendly way. from the glimpse i had caught of her during the morning meal, i had thought her very pretty in a smart, stiffly starched, mannish-looking shirt-waist. that night she looked even prettier, clad in a close-fitting cloth gown of dark wine-color. i noticed, too, as i sat down beside her, that she was an unusually big woman. "how do you like the boarding-house by this time?" she asked, with an encouraging smile, to which i responded as approvingly as i could in the remembrance of the cheerless hall bedroom far above, and in the presence of the unappetizing dinner spread before me. "well, i think it's rotten, if you'll excuse my french," laughed miss plympton, as she cut a square of butter off the common dish and passed it to me. "and i guess you think so, too, only you're too polite to roast the grub like the rest of us do. but you'll get over that in time. i was just the same way when i first begun living in boarding-houses, but i've got bravely over that now. "i've been here just a little over a week myself," she went on in her frank and engaging manner. "i saw you this morning, and i just knew how you felt. i thought i'd die of homesickness when i came. not a soul spoke to me for four days. not that anybody would want to particularly get acquainted with these cattle, only i'm one of the sort that has got to have somebody to speak to. so this morning i said to myself, when i saw you, that i'd put on nerve and up and speak to you even if you did turn me down. and that's why i waited for you to-night." i responded that i was glad she had been so informal; absence of formality being the meaning i interpreted from her slang, which was much more up-to-date and much more vigorous than that to which i had been accustomed in the speech of a small country village. as i ate, we talked. we talked a little about a great many things in which we were not at all interested, and a very great deal about ourselves and the hazards of fortune which had brought our lives together and crossed them thus at miss jamison's supper-table,--subjects into which we entered with all the zest and happy egotism of youth. of this egotism i had the greater preponderance, probably because of my three or four years' less experience of life. before we rose from the table i had told miss plympton the story of my life as it had been lived thus far. of her own story, all i knew was that she was a westerner, that she had worked a while in chicago, and had come to new york on a mission similar to my own--to look for a job. we went together to her room, which was as small and shabby as my own, and a few minutes later we were sitting round the little jenny lind stove, listening to the pleasant crackle of the freshly kindled fire. both were silent for a few minutes. then my new friend spoke. "what does that put you in mind of?" she asked slowly. "you mean the crackle of the kindling-wood and the snap of the coal as the flames begin to lick it?" i asked. "u-m-m, yes; the crackle of the wood and the snap of the coal," said the girl in a dreamy tone. "home!" i cried, quick as a flash. "it makes me think of home--of the home i used to have," and my eyes blurred. "here, too! home!" she replied softly. "funny, isn't it, that we have so many ideas exactly alike? but i suppose that's because we were both brought up in the country." "in the country!" i exclaimed in surprise. "i thought you were from chicago." "oh, no; i'm from the country. i didn't go to chicago till i was twenty. i lived all my life on a farm in iowa, till i went up to get a job in chicago after my father died and i was all alone in the world. we lived in the very wildest part of the state--in the part they call the 'big woods.' oh, i know all about frontier life. and there's hardly any kind of 'roughing it' that i haven't done. i was born to it." she laughed, opening the stove door, for the elbow of the pipe was now red-hot and threatening conflagration to the thin board partition behind, which divided the little room from that of the next lodger. a loud thump upon the board partition startled us. we listened for a few moments,--at first with alarm,--and then realized that the noise was only the protest of a sleepy boarder. presently, as we continued to talk, the banging of a shoe-heel on the wall grew more insistent. we heard doors opening along the hall, and a high, raucous voice invoked quiet in none too polite phrase. so i said, "good night," in a whisper and tiptoed to my own door. thus began my acquaintance with minnie plympton--an acquaintance which, ripening later into a warm friendship, was to have an incalculable influence upon my life. ii in which i start out in quest of work when i woke up the next morning it was to find a weight of homesickness lying heavy upon my heart--homesickness for something which, alas! no longer existed save in memory. then i remembered the girl on the floor below, and soon i was dressing with a light heart, eager to hurry down to breakfast. i was somewhat disappointed to find that she had eaten her breakfast and gone. i went out upon the stoop, hailed a newsboy, and sought my skylight bedroom. it was with a hope born of youth and inexperience that i now gave systematic attention to "help wanted--female." i will confess that at first i was ambitious to do only what i chose to esteem "lady-like" employment. i had taught one winter in the village school back home, and my pride and intelligence naturally prompted me to a desire to do something in which i could use my head, my tongue, my wits--anything, in fact, rather than my hands. the advertisements i answered all held out inducements of genteel or semi-genteel nature--ladies' companions; young women to read aloud to blind gentlemen and to invalids; assistants in doctors' and dentists' offices, and for the reception-room of photograph galleries. all of them requested answers in "own handwriting, by mail only." i replied to scores of such with no success. there was also another kind of illusive advertisement which i answered in prodigal numbers in the greenness of these early days. these were those deceitfully worded requests for "bright, intelligent ladies--no canvassing." and not less prodigal were the returns i got. they came in avalanches by every mail, from patent-medicine concerns, subscription-book publishers, novelty manufacturers--all in search of canvassers to peddle their trash. i might have saved much superfluous effort, and saved myself many postage-stamps, had i been fortunate enough to have had the advice of miss plympton throughout this first week. but miss plympton had gone away for several days. i had not seen her since we had parted on sunday night; but monday evening, when i went to the table, i found a hasty note saying she had gone out of town to see about a job, and would see me later. that was all. i found myself longing for her more and more as the week wore away. meanwhile, however, i did not allow the sentiment of an interrupted acquaintance to interfere with my quest for a job, nor did i sit idle in miss jamison's boarding-house waiting for replies. i had only a few dollars in the world, and on the other side of those few dollars i saw starvation staring me in the face unless i found work very soon. i planned my search for work as systematically as i might have conducted a house-cleaning. as soon as each day's grist of "wants" was sifted and a certain quota disposed of by letter, i set out to make personal applications to such as required it. this i found to be an even more discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. the distances were interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of coffee at wayside lunch-counters. i traveled over miles and miles of territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to brooklyn, to harlem, to jersey city and newark, only to reach my destination cold and hungry, and to be interviewed by a seedy man with a patent stove-lifter, a shirt-waist belt, a contrivance for holding up a lady's train, or a new-fangled mop--anything, everything that a persistent agent might sell to the spendthrift wife of an american workingman. by the end of the week i was obliged to hunt for another boarding-house as well as continue the search for work. my little bedroom under the skylight, and three meals per day of none too plentiful and wretchedly cooked food, required the deposit of five dollars a week in advance. with but a few dollars left in my purse, and the prospect of work still far off, nothing in the world seemed so desirable as that i might be able to pass the remainder of my days in miss jamison's house, and that i might be able to breakfast indefinitely in her dark basement dining-room. sunday morning came around again. i had been a week in the city, and was apparently no nearer to earning a livelihood than the day i started out. i had gained a little experience, but it had been at the cost of nearly five precious dollars, all spent in street-car fare and postage-stamps; of miles and miles of walking through muddy, slushy streets; and at the sacrifice of my noon lunch, which i could have had done up for me at the boarding-house without extra charge, but which my silly vanity did not allow me to carry around under my arm. sunday morning again, and still no miss plympton. she was under discussion when i reached the breakfast-table. the lady with the cataract and her friend were speaking of how well she always dressed, and one of them wondered how she managed to do it, since she had no visible means of support. dr. perkins didn't seem to relish the turn the conversation had taken, and suddenly he fell completely out of it. but the gossips clacked on regardless, until they were brought to a standstill by a peremptory exclamation from the end of the table. "excuse me," spoke up the doctor, dryly, "but i'll have to ask you to change the subject. you are talking about a young lady of whom you know absolutely nothing!" the scandal-mongers finished breakfast in silence and soon shuffled away in their bedroom slippers. "old cats!" said the doctor, energetically. "boarding-house life breeds them. a boarding-house is no place for anybody. it perverts all the natural instincts, mental, moral, and physical. you'd hardly believe it, but i've lived in boarding-houses so long that i can't digest really wholesome food any more." when at last we rose to go, he handed me a card upon which i later read this astonishing inscription in heavy black type: "painless perkins"; and, in smaller type underneath, the information that the extracting or filling of molars; crown and bridge work; or the fitting of artificial teeth, would be done by painless perkins in a "particularly pleasing way," and that he was "predisposed to popular prices." with no books to read, and no advertisements to answer, and no friend with whom to gossip, the day stretched before me a weary, dreary waste, when i happened to think of the church across the way, something of the history of which i had heard from painless perkins. and so i joined the crowd of strangers who were pouring into the doors of "all people's" to the music of a sweet-toned bell. i was there early, but the auditorium was packed, and i was ushered to a camp-chair in the aisle. the crowd was not suggestive of fashionable new york, though there were present many fine-looking, well-groomed men and women. but nearly everybody was neatly and decently if not well dressed. many of the faces looked as sad and lonely as i felt. they appeared to be strangers--homeless wanderers who had come here to church not so much for worship as to come in touch with human beings. i was too tired, too discouraged even to hear what the earnest-voiced preacher said. the two girls sitting directly in front of me listened intently, as they passed a little bag of peppermints back and forth, and i envied them the friendship which that furtive bag of peppermints betokened. if i had had any prospect of getting a job the following week, i too could have listened to the preacher. as it was, my ears were attuned only to the terrifying refrain which had haunted me all week: "work or starve, work or starve!" after a while i tried to rouse myself and to take in the sermon which was holding the great congregation breathless. it was about the good samaritan. i heard a few sentences. then the preacher's voice was lost once more in that insistent refrain. dinner at noon and supper in the evening in the dark house across the street, and still my friend was absent. the scandal-mongers were as busy as ever, for painless perkins was away. monday morning i made my way eastward on foot, across union square. the snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big, flowery flakes. the trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like those that grow only in a child's picture-book. the slat-benches were covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in the morning. i was up extraordinarily early, as i started out on a double search. the first item on my list--"board and room, good neighborhood, $ . "--took me south across fourteenth street, choked and congested with the morning traffic. the pavements were filled with hurrying crowds--factory-hands, mill-girls, mechanics--the vanguard of the great labor army. i hunted for mrs. mcginniss's residence in a street which pays little attention to the formality of numbers. an interview with a milk-cart driver brought the discouraging news that i might find it somewhere between first and second avenues, and i hurried on down the street, which stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the elevated railroad. the stoop-line on either side presented an interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons. wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop i found mrs. mcginniss's number. it was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. a soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the button informed possible visitors that mrs. mcginniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was out of order, and that one should "push guggenheim's." the guggenheims responded with a click from above. i ascended a flight of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of numerous small guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and petticoats. their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for my guidance upward. "is this where mrs. mcginniss lives?" i inquired of the dropsical slattern who responded to my rap. "i'm her." mrs. mcginniss's manner was aggressive. conscious of her bare, sodden arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed i had mistaken her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed her resentment by chilly reticence. "i don't run no boarding-house, and i don't take just any trash that come along, either." i agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then, somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a stuffy bedroom. it had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. a slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a much-spotted brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and soap-suds. "there's one thing, though, i won't stand for, and that's cigarettes. i've had the last girl in my house that smokes cigarettes i'm going to have. look at that nice carpet! look at it! all burned full of holes where that trollop throwed her matches." i hurried away, with a polite promise to consider the mcginniss accommodations. the abode of mrs. cunningham was but a few blocks away. mrs. cunningham did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. she proved to be an irish lady with a gin-laden breath. her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. she was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. her little parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings, and the close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies and stale tuberoses. remarking the unusual prodigality of flowers, the good lady explained that the undertaker beneath was in the habit of showing his esteem by the daily tender of such funeral decorations as had served their purpose. mrs. cunningham's accommodations at four dollars per week were beyond my purse, however; but, as she was willing to talk all day, my exit was made with difficulty. the remainder of that day and a good part of the days that followed were spent in interviewing all manner of landladies, most of whom, like mrs. mcginniss's bell, were disordered physically or mentally. heartsick, i decided by saturday to take blind chances with the janitress of a fourteenth-street lodging-house. she had a cleft palate, and all i could understand of her mutilated talk was that the room would be one dollar a week with "light-housekeeping" privileges thrown in. i had either to pay miss jamison another five dollars that next morning or take chances here. i took the hazard, paid the necessary one dollar to the more or less inarticulate woman, and went back to miss jamison's to get my baggage and to eat the one dinner that was still due me--not forgetting to leave a little note for the still absent minnie plympton, giving her my new address. iii i try "light" housekeeping in a fourteenth-street lodging-house bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in quite an optimistic frame of mind as i drew close to the most fearfully and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a lonely fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." in the red-hot glow of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude which it presented, how could i have felt otherwise than optimistic? it was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world of misfortune and bad luck! there was something whimsically, almost pathetically, human about it. this, it so pleased my fancy to believe, was because of the sufferings it had borne. its little body cracked and warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the broken hinge by a twisted nail--a brave, bright, merry little cripple of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. i made the interesting discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "little lottie" was the name which i spelled out in the broken letters that it wore across its glowing heart. and straightway little lottie became more human than ever--poor little lottie, the one solitary bright and cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which i had elected to make my home. home! the tears started at the mere recollection of the word. the firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and to which i looked back with such loving thoughts that night. a narrow wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as little lottie, but without the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded calico, a single chair with a mended leg--these rude conveniences comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on the shelf behind the calico curtain. there was no bureau, only a waved bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. my wardrobe was strung along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat. beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag before the door. it had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the philadelphia centennial. in the quiet, uneventful years that followed it had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "the mistletoe bough" and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our grandfather's student days. what a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last twelve months had brought about! after the door had been further barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle on top of the chair, i blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. it received my slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time i stirred. through the thin mattress i could feel the slats, that seemed hard bands of pain across my tired body. from where i was lying i could look straight into little lottie's heart, now a steady, glowing mass of coals. little lottie invited me to retrospection. how different it all was in reality from what i had imagined it would be! in the story-books it is always so alluring--this coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. a year ago i had been teaching in a little school-house among my pennsylvania hills, and i recalled now, very vividly, how i used to love, on just such cold winter nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the farm-house where i boarded during the school year to pull my rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come at all. i was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. i stepped across the bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. bleak and unbeautiful was the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children. something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. i followed suit. in the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. the window next to mine was quickly raised, and i drew back to escape being included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful scene--but too late. "what's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. it was the girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in her hand. i answered that i did not know. she was very young, hardly more than sixteen. she had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might be supposed to possess. she was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the young fellow in his shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. he had a weak face, covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but, despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. again i gave a civil evasion to the girl's trivial question, and as i did so her companion, looking over her frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. i jerked my head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to little lottie. it was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily. i was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. i opened it to find the ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a cigarette between his teeth. "what do you wish?" i asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner. he puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer. "the girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates," he replied at last. "i am sorry," i said, with freezing politeness--"i am very sorry, but i have only one plate, and i'll need that myself," and i closed the door. after breakfast i walked up to first avenue to lay in my provisions for the day--a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of butter, and two cents' worth of milk. never in my life before had i bought anything on the sabbath day, and never before had i seen a place of business open for trade on that day. my people had not been sternly religious people, and, theoretically, i didn't think i was doing anything wicked; yet i felt, as i gave my order to the groceryman, as though i were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding. after that i tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if i needed anything on sunday i made myself go without it. returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, i made my first daylight inventory of that block of fourteenth street where i lived. on each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a raines law hotel. it seemed to have been at one time the abode of fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone, broken at intervals by long flights of steps leading to handsome, though long-neglected black-walnut doors. the basements were given over to trade. on the stairs i was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking young man. i looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. but i found the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall. "what's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "say, i'll take you to the theater, if you want to go. what do you say to 'the jolly grass widows' to-morrow night?" thoroughly frightened, i responded to the unwarranted invitation by retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped down and grasped the arm in which i held my packages. i don't know what nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my landlady's milk-pitcher. then i ran up the remaining two flights as fast as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. in passing, i could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was being ordered out of the house. when quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. i demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as i could command. "mrs. pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. i saw, when i opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. i also saw, what i had not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was superior to most of the women of her class. she had been grimy and unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth gray hair, there was a pathetic sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her spare, bent figure. somehow, i felt that she would not be so very angry when i explained about the pitcher, and i invited her in with genuine cordiality. she listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her starched gingham apron. "that's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face. "i'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head." "you know him, then?" i suggested. she shook her head. "no, i don't know him, but i know the bad lot he belongs to. i've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she can pack her things. i gave her back her rent-money. she only come day afore yesterday, and i supposed she was an honest working-girl or i'd never have took her. she pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. and i hated to turn her out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. she can't be more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. you come from the country, don't you?" there was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her voice, and i did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent, motherly soul my little story. she listened attentively. "i knowed you were a well-brought-up young woman the moment i laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which they were spoken. "and i knowed you was from the country, too; so i did. you don't mind, honey, do you, if i speak sort of plain with you, being as i'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? do you, now?" i replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and i would take no offense, and then she smiled approvingly upon me and drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom. "i like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't listen to a word of advice--least of all when it comes from an old woman that they thinks don't know as much as they does. they don't relish being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get acquainted with. now i'm talking to you just as if you was one of my own. you may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright sort of girl, i'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked city. a young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be willing to lead her off. this is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you got to be mighty careful about yourself. forewarned is forearmed, as you've heard tell before; and i have saw so many young girls go wrong that i felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked straight at them in the beginning, like i'm talking here to you. i had a girl here in this house two years agone. a pretty girl she was, and she was from the country too. somewheres up in connecticut she come from. she was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to rent a room. this very room you've got was the one she had. just as quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she was. she worked down in st. mark's place. she was a cap-maker and got four dollars a week. she started out to live honest, for she'd been brought up decent. her father, she told me when she come here, was a blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. she thought she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she could have a fine time; and i guess she was terrible disappointed when she found just how things really was. she hankered for fine clothes and to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four dollars a week. by and by, though, she did get to going out some with a young fellow that worked where she did. he was a nice, decent young fellow, and i'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. i don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and i say that when a young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of her to begin with. that's what, i think, started this girl going wrong. at first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. now it's none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in this house, being as i'm only the janitress. i have my orders from the boss--who's a real nice sort of man--to only rent rooms to respectable people, and to put anybody out where i knows there's bad conduct going on. he's strong on morals, the boss is. he used to be a saloon-keeper, and the salvation army converted him; and then he sold out and went into this business. he has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on second avenue. these germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and mr. schneider has did a lot of good. if any of his tenants get sick and can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent, either!" here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn the channel of her talk back to the girl from connecticut. "well, i didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her gentleman friend to her room, because there ain't no law again it in any light-housekeeping rooms. the people who live here are all working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as they please so they're quiet and respectable. but i took it on myself to kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if she just dropped him at the front door. a man 'll always pick a spunky, independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time, anyway. she looked sort of miffed when i said this, and then i said that she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking--and which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any time you've a mind. "well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. she tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs, as though i had turribly insulted her; so what could i do?" again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps. "and what became of her at last?" i asked. "what became of her!" she echoed. "what becomes of all of 'em?" and she jerked her head significantly in the vague direction of the street. "she left soon after that, though i never said another word to her, but just kept on bidding her the time of day, as if nothing had ever passed between us. i felt turrible about her leaving, too; and i tried to persuade her she was making a mistake by leaving a house that she knowed was decent and where she could manage to live within her means. oh, you don't know how i felt for days and weeks after she went. i knew how good she was when she come to this house, and i kept thinking how my annie might have been just as foolish and heedless if she'd been throwed amongst strangers and had the same temptations. i don't know where she went exactly. she didn't give me much satisfaction about it, and i never seen her again, till one morning this winter, when i went out to bring in my ash-cans, i run right into her. it was real early in the morning, just getting daylight. i always get up at five o'clock winter and summer, because i'm used to it; and then i've got to, so's to get the work done, for i can't work fast with my rheumatics. it was hardly light enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the snow. it had snowed in the night, and it was the first we'd had this season. she didn't see me at first. she was walking slow,--real slow and lingering-like,--like them poor things do. i was standing at the top of the stairs in the areaway, and her face was turned across the street, as if she was expecting somebody. i tried to speak to her, but sometimes something catches me when i'm strong moved and i can't sound a word for several moments. and that's the way i was struck that morning. i started to run after her; then i thought better of it, and sort of guessed she'd turn around at the corner and come back. so i went to the cans and made believe to be turrible interested in them, and when i looked up, sure enough she had started back again, and i had caught her eye. "thinking of annie, i bade her the time of day real friendly-like, just as though everything was all right, and i asked her to come in and have a bite of breakfast. i'd left the coffee on the stove, and had fried myself a nice mess of onions. she looked sort of half shamed and half grateful, and had started to come with me, when all of a sudden she stopped and said she guessed she couldn't that morning. then she strolled off again. i picked up my ash-cans and started down-stairs, but i wasn't half-way down when i saw her hurrying along the other side of the street with a man i'd seen come round the corner by skelly's saloon while we was talking together. and i never saw her again." an expression of pathos, infinitely sweet and tender, had crept into the woman's thin, worn face--an expression in strange, almost ludicrous, contrast to the high, cracked voice in which the talc had been delivered. i gazed at the bent old creature with something like reverence for the nobility which i now could read so plainly in every line of her face--the nobility which can attach itself only to decency of life and thought and action. in my brief interview with her in the twilight of the evening before i had heard only the ridiculous jargon of a woman without a palate, and i had seen only an old crone with a soot-smeared face. but now the maimed voice echoed in my ears like the sound of the little old melodeon with the broken strings--which had been my mother's. "i must be going now," she said, rising with an effort. "you'll come down and see me sometimes, won't you, honey? i like young people. they sort of cheer me up when i feel down. come down this afternoon, if you haven't got any place to go. come down and i'll lend you some books." i thanked her, and promised i would. iv wherein fate brings me good fortune in one hand and disaster in the other monday morning--a cheerless, bleak monday morning, with the rain falling upon the slush-filled streets. i ate a hurried breakfast of bread and butter and black coffee, locked my door, and started out with renewed vigor to look for a job. i had learned by this time to use a little discrimination in answering advertisements; and from now on i paid attention to such prospective employers only as stated the nature of their business and gave a street number. i had also learned another important thing, and that was that i could not afford to be too particular about the nature of my job, as i watched my small capital diminish day by day, despite my frugality. i would have been glad, now, to get work at anything that promised the chance of a meager livelihood. anything to get a foothold. the chief obstacle seemed to be my inexperience. i could obtain plenty of work which in time promised to pay me five dollars a week, but in the two or three months' time necessary to acquire dexterity i should have starved to death, for i had not money to carry me over this critical period. work was plenty enough. it nearly always is so. the question was not how to get a job, but how to live by such jobs as i could get. the low wages offered to green hands--two and a half to three dollars a week--might do for the girl who lived at home; but i had to pay room-rent and car-fare and to buy food. so, as long as my small capital could be made to hold out i continued my search for something that would pay at least five dollars a week to begin with. on monday night i was no nearer to being a bread-winner than when i had started out for the first time from miss jamison's boarding-house. i climbed the bare stairs at nightfall, and as i fumbled at the keyhole i could hear the click of a typewriter in the room next to mine. my room was quite dark, but there was a patch of dim white on the floor that sent a thrill of gladness all over me. i lighted the lamp and tore open the precious envelop before taking off my gloves or hat. it was a note from minnie plympton, saying she had got employment as demonstrator for a cereal-food company, and was making a tour of the small new england cities. the letter was dated at bangor, maine, and she asked me to write her at portland, where she expected to be all week; and which i did, at considerable length, after i had cooked and eaten my supper. bread and butter and black coffee for breakfast, and potato-soup and bread and butter for supper, with plain bread and butter done up in a piece of paper and carried with me for luncheon--this was my daily menu for the weeks that followed, varied on two occasions by the purchase of a half-pint of new orleans molasses. the advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were very numerous; and as that sounded like humble work, i thought i might stand a better chance in that line than any other. accordingly i applied to the foreman of a factory in avenue a, who wanted "bunch-makers." he heard my petition in a drafty hallway through which a small army of boys and girls were pouring, each one stopping to insert a key in a time-register. they were just coming to work, for i was very early. the foreman, a young german, cut me off unceremoniously by asking to see my working-card; and when i looked at him blankly, for i hadn't a ghost of an idea what he meant, he strode away in disgust, leaving me to conjecture as to his meaning. nothing daunted, however, for i meant to be very energetic and brave that morning, i went to the next factory. here they wanted "labelers," and as this sounded easy, i approached the foreman with something like confidence. he asked what experience i'd had, and i gave him a truthful reply. "sorry, but we're not running any kindergarten here," he replied curtly and turned away. i was still determined that i'd join the rank of cigar-makers. somehow, they impressed me as a very prosperous lot of people, and there was something pungent and wholesome in the smell of the big, bright workrooms. the third foreman i besought was an elderly german with a paternal manner. he listened to me kindly, said i looked quick, and offered to put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which i must serve a three years' apprenticeship before i could become a member of the union and entitled to draw union wages. i left him feeling very humble, and likewise disillusioned of my cigar-making ambitions. "girls wanted to learn binding and folding--paid while learning." the address took me to brooklyn bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare running toward the east river. above was the great bridge, unreal, fairy-like in the morning mist. i was looking for rose street, which proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. rose street was choked with moving carts loaded with yellow-back literature done up in bales. the superintendent proved to be a civil young man. he did not need me before monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me. he paid only three dollars a week, and i accepted, but with the hope that as this was only thursday, and not yet nine o'clock, i might find something better in the meantime. a brooklyn merchant was in need of two "salesladies--experience not necessary." a trolley-car swirled me across the river, now glistering in the spring sunshine. we were hurtled down interminable vistas of small shops, always under the grim iron trestle of the elevated railroad. at the end of an hour i entered the "majestic," a small store stocked with trash. after much dickering, mr. lindbloom and his wife decided i'd do at three and a half dollars per week, working from seven in the morning till nine in the evening, saturdays till midnight. i departed with the vow that if i must work and starve, i should not do both in lindbloom's. five cents got me back to cortlandt street in manhattan, where i called upon a candy-manufacturer who wanted bonbon-makers. the french foreman, in snowy cap and apron, received me in a great room dazzling with white-tile walls and floor, and filled with bright-eyed girls, also in caps and aprons, and working before marble tables. the frenchman was polite and apologetic, but they never hired any but experienced workers. it was half-past three, and i had two more names on my list. rose-making sounded attractive, and i walked all the way up to bond street. shabby and prosaic, this street, strangely enough, has been selected as the forcing-ground or nursery of artificial flowers. its signs on both sides, even unto the top floor, proclaim some specialization of fashionable millinery--flowers, feathers, aigrets, wire hat-frames. on the third floor, rear, of a once fashionable mansion, now fallen into decay, i stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. the jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the white-faced girls bending over these gay garlands. it was a signal, though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the next room and curtly demand my business. "we only pay a dollar and a half to learners," he said, smiling unpleasantly over large yellow teeth. i fled in dismay. down broadway, along bleecker, and up squalid thompson street i hurried to a paper-box factory. the office of e. springer & company was in pleasant contrast to the flower sweat-shop, for all its bright colors. so, too, was there a grateful comparison between the jew of the ugly smile and the portly young man who sat behind a glass partition and acknowledged my entrance by glancing up from his ledger. the remark he made was evidently witty and not intended for my ears, for it made the assistant bookkeeper--a woman--and the two women typewriters laugh and crane their necks in my direction. the bookkeeper climbed down from his high stool and opened the glass door. he was as kind now as he was formerly merry. possibly he had seen my chin quiver the least bit, and knew i was almost ready to cry. he did not ask many questions; but presently he sent one typewriter flying up-stairs for the superintendent, and the other was sent to ask of the forewoman if all the jobs were filled. the superintendent proved to be a woman, shrewd, keen-faced, and bespectacled. the forewoman sent down word that no. had not rung up that morning, and that i could have her key. the pay was three dollars a week to learners, but miss price, the superintendent, thought i could learn in a week's time, which opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so i allowed him to enroll my name. he gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth i should be known as " ." i thanked him in as steady a voice as i could command, and reached the street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to get away from that which i had been trying to obtain for so many weeks. the street i stepped into had been transformed. behind my blurred vision, as i hurried along, i saw no squalor, no wretchedness now. through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying people were all glorified, all transfigured. everything was right--the whole world and everybody in it. thus i sped homeward on that eventful evening, eager to tell my good news to mrs. pringle, who, i knew, would be glad to hear it. as i drew near the block where i lived, i became half conscious of something strange and unusual in the atmosphere; i felt the strange sensation of being lost, of being in the wrong place. men and women stood about in silent knots, and through the deep twilight i felt rather than heard the deep throbbing of fire-engines. pressing through the little knots of men and women, i stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house. dazed, stupefied, i asked questions of the bystanders. but nobody knew anything definite. one man said he guessed a good many lives had been lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five. the houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in, and the tenants fled. there seemed to be not even a neighbor who might know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend mrs. pringle. i spoke to a policeman. he listened gently, and then conducted me to a house in fifteenth street, where they had offered shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it. the basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater number and came straggling in one by one. a man-servant in livery passed hot coffee and sandwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. i had never met any of these people before, though they had all been my fellow-lodgers. the girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. she was stupid and ugly. her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and by she asked: "youse didn't live there too, did youse?" our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a discussion of the catastrophe. her english was so sadly perverted and her voice so guttural that i could make out her meaning only with the greatest exercise of the imagination. but it was to the effect that the fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old mrs. pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of coal for the fire. just what happened nobody knew. every one on the top floor at the time had perished, including mrs. pringle. "didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. and then it dawned upon me for the first time that i had nothing in all the world now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow. "yes, i have lost everything," i answered. "youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued. the question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice. "i have. i've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on. "five hundred dollars!" the girl nodded. "huh, that's what! i could live tony if i wanted, but i like to save my money. i makes good money, too,--twelve dollars a week,--and i don't spend it, neither." "what do you do?" i asked, regarding the large, rough hands with something like admiration for their earning abilities. "i'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride. "a lady-buffer! what's that?" i cried, looking at the slovenly, dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her shoulders to the cot. she regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and then delivered herself of an axiom. "a lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." and, to render the definition still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions in midair. "what do you buff?" i next ventured. "brass!" this laconic reply squelched me completely, and i subsided without further conversation. despite my weariness, there was little sleep for me that night. affairs had come to a crisis; my condition was about as bad as it could possibly be. whatever was going to become of me? why, in the name of all common sense, had i ever come to new york? why was i not content to remain a country school-ma'am, in a place where a country school-ma'am was looked up to as something of a personage? that night, if i had had enough money to buy a ticket back to the town i had come from, my fate would have been settled definitely then and there. not the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that there was really no help for me save what i should be able to give myself. to be sure, i had certain distant relatives and friends who had warned me against my flight to the city, and to whom i might have written begging for money sufficient to carry me back to my native place, and the money, with many "i-told-you-so's," would have been forthcoming. to return discredited was more than my pride could bear. i had to earn my livelihood anyway, and so, on this night of grim adversity, owing my very bed and supper to charity, i set my teeth, and closed my tired lids over the tears i could not hide, and swore i'd fight it out alone, so long as i had strength to stand and heart to hope; and then there was the prospect of a job at springer's on the morrow, though the wage would hardly keep body and soul together. the next morning, while her servants were giving us our breakfast, a stately middle-aged woman came down to the basement and passed among us, making inquiries regarding our various conditions, and offering words of well-meant, if patronizing, advice and suggestion wherever she thought them needed, but which somehow did not seem to be relished as her more material kindness had been. when it came my turn to be interviewed i answered her many questions frankly and promptly, and, encouraged by the evident interest which she displayed in my case, i was prompted to ask her if she might know of any place where i could get work. she looked at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes. "you would not go into service, i suppose?" she asked slowly. i had never thought of such an alternative before, but i met it without a moment's hesitation. "no, i would not care to go into service," i replied, and as i did so the lady's face showed mingled disappointment and disgust. "that is too bad," she answered, "for in that case i'm afraid i can do nothing for you." and with that she went out of the room, leaving me, i must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing the definite badge of servitude. v in which i am "learned" by phoebe in the art of box-making the "lady-buffer" and i were the last to leave the house. we went out together and parted company at third avenue, she going south to her work, and i continuing along the street westward. the catastrophe of the preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave me a parting greeting. i was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as i hurried along, when suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was i, not she, who was open to that charge. here i was, speeding along to my work with hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in the potter's field, unless saved from that ignoble end by some friend. and yet i was powerless. i could not even spare time to go to the morgue or to make inquiries. i knew not a soul who could have helped me, and i had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that morning at springer's. i stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. but only for a moment: the law of life--self-preservation--again asserted itself, and for the time being i put the past behind me and hurried on toward thompson street. it lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, i turned into the squalid street at the end of which stands springer's. in the sunshine of the mild march morning the façade of the tall buff building looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax--nay, rather to coerce me into entering her awful house. the instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run away. but there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. it was the fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me to turn back. instinct told me that i was about to enter into no commonplace experience. and so, unresisting, i was borne along in the swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. before springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. at the last moment i hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all. again there was the strong impulse to run away--far, far away from springer's and from thompson street, when suddenly the old monody began to ring in my ears, "work or starve, work or starve!" another moment, and i too had passed within the wide black doors. the entrance passage was lighted by a sickly gas-jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys in the time-register. i was jostled and tumbled over unceremoniously. i was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until i found myself squeezed tight against the wall. from the scrambling and confusion it was evident everybody was late, and tones and language attested to racked nerves and querulous tempers. suddenly there was a scuffle and the sharp scraping of feet on the floor. "get out, yez dirty irish!" rang out in the stifling air. "i wuz here fust!" snarled another voice. "call me dirty irish ag'in and i'll dirty irish you." the black-haired girl had accepted the challenge, and the maligned daughter of erin, cheeks aflame and eyes blazing, rushed at her detractor with clenched fist. "go for her, rosie! she's nothin' but a dirty black ginney, nohow!" "pitch into her, celie! punch her!" yelled a chorus from the stairs who came swooping down from above, attracted by the scrimmage, and just in time to see the combatants rush at each other in a hand-to-hand struggle, punctuated with loud oaths. the noise suddenly subsided at the screeching of a raucous nasal voice. "well, young ladies! what does this mean?" demanded the superintendent, and rosie and celie both began to talk at once. "never mind about the rest of it," snapped miss price, cutting the tale short. "i'll dock you both half a day's pay: and the next time it happens you'll both be fired on the spot." then miss price turned to me, while the now silent wranglers meekly turned their keys in the register and marched up-stairs, whither their respective factions had since disappeared. "i do hope to goodness you ain't high-tempered like some is," she remarked, with an effort toward affability, as we stepped before the time-register, where i inserted my key for the first time. "all i got to say is, don't get into no fights with the girls. when they say things to you, don't talk back. it's them that just takes things as they come, and lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the week. some of them fight more 'n they work, but i guess you won't be that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows of false teeth. then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and the hum of innumerable voices, i was to meet my prospective forewoman. "miss kinzer! here's a lady wants to learn," shrilled the high nasal voice. "miss kinzer! where's miss kinzer? oh, here you are!" as a young woman emerged from behind a pile of pasteboard boxes. "i've a learner for you, miss kinzer. she's a green girl, but she looks likely, and i want you to give her a good chance. better put her on table-work to begin with." and with that injunction the little old maid hopped away, leaving me to the scrutiny and cross-questioning of a rather pretty woman of twenty-eight or thirty. "ever worked in a factory before?" she began, with lofty indifference, as if it didn't matter whether i had or had not. "no." "where did you work?" "i never worked any place before." "oh-h!" there was a world of meaning, as i afterward discovered, in miss kinzer's long-drawn-out "oh-h!" in this instance she looked up quickly, with an obvious display of interest, as if she had just unearthed a remarkable specimen in one who had never worked at anything before. "you're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly, straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a police-court. she was now all attention. "well, not exactly that," i replied, nettled by her manner and, above all, by her way of putting things. "i have worked before, but never at factory-work." "then why didn't you say so?" she now opened her book and inscribed my name therein. "where do you live?" "over in east fourteenth street," i replied mechanically, forgetting for the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever. "home?" "no, i room." then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, i added hastily, "i have no home. my folks are all dead." what impression this bit of information made i was unable to determine as i followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy, roaring workroom. "be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by the light that filtered through the grimy windows, i got vague, confused glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came girlish laughter and song. "good morning, carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had taken up the burden of the song. "don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "they don't mean nothing by it--watch out there for your head!" safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain of the table-workers, and i was turned over to phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in the trade of "finishing." somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. from the loud-mouthed tirades as to "annie kinzer's nerve," it became evident that the assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning jealousies, and that phoebe, either because of some special adaptability or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices. "that's right, phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of mrs. smith. mrs. smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured invective upon the head of her chum--or, as she termed it, her "lady-friend," phoebe. the amiability with which mrs. smith dealt out her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim, who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "hot air!" "hot a--i--r!" the clear tones of phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. in and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated. "hot a--i--r!" every few minutes, all through the long, weary day, phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call. "the rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," phoebe explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the work-table. "they say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because i'm easy to get on with, i guess, and don't play no tricks on them.... you have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. them girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to hang them in the coat-room. them ginneys 'll do 'most anything. wuz you down-stairs when celie polatta got into the fight with rosie?" "i just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "i was born unlucky." "hello, phoebe! so you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the table, and i put a question. "why do they all want to teach the new girl? i should think they'd be glad to be rid of the trouble." "you mean _learn_ her? why, because the girl that learns the green hand gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how. never worked in a box-factory before?" i shook my head. "i guessed as much. well, box-making's a good trade. have you an apron?" as i had not, i was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that i might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather than on its outer surface. i gently demurred against this very slovenly expedient. "all right; call it hot air if you want to. i s'pose you know it all," tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "you know better 'n me, of course. most learners do think they knows it all. now looky here, i've been here six years, and i've learned lots of green girls, and i never had one as didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. the ladies i'm used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they're like other times." with the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest i infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was nothing to do but yield. i unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor, and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the good will of phoebe. instantly she brightened, and good humor once more flashed over her grimy features. "h-m! that's the stuff! there's one thing you hadn't ought to forget, and mind, i'm speaking as one lady-friend to another when i tell you these things--and that is, that you have a right to do as the other girls in the factory or you'll never get 'long with them. if you don't they'll get down on you, sure's pussy's a cat; and then they'll make it hot for you with complaining to the forelady. and then she'll get down on you after while too, and won't give you no good orders to work on; and--well, it's just this way: a girl mustn't be odd." continuing her philosophy of success, phoebe proceeded to initiate me into the first process of my job, which consisted in pasting slippery, sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and steam-pipes. two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be finished on the particular order upon which phoebe was working. each must be given eight muslin strips, four on the box and four on its cover; two tapes, inserted with a hair-pin through awl-holes; two tissue "flies," to tuck over the bonnet soon to nestle underneath; four pieces of gay paper lace to please madame's eye when the lid is lifted; and three labels, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one bearing the name of a fifth avenue modiste on an escutcheon of gold and purple. the job, as it progressed, entailed ceaseless shoving and shifting and lifting. in order that we might not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the "strippers." these latter, who were small girls, covered the sides with glazed paper on machines; and as fast as each box was thus covered it was tossed to the "turner-in," a still smaller girl, who turned in the overlapping edge of the strip, after which the box was ready to come back to the table for the next process at our hands. by ten o'clock, with mrs. smith's gay violet-boxes and our own bonnet-boxes, we had built a snug bower all round our particular table. through its pasteboard walls the din and the songs came but faintly. my mates' tongues flew as fast as their fingers. the talk was chiefly devoted to clothes, phoebe's social activities, and the evident prosperity of mrs. smith's husband's folks, among whom it appeared she had only recently appeared as "jeff's" bride. having exhausted the smiths, she again gave phoebe the floor by asking: "are you going to-night?" "well, i should say! don't i look it?" to determine by phoebe's appearance where she might be going were an impossibility to the uninitiated, for her dress was an odd combination of the extremes of wretchedness and luxury. a woefully torn and much-soiled shirt-waist; a gorgeous gold watch worn on her breast like a medal; a black taffeta skirt, which, under the glue-smeared apron, emitted an unmistakable frou-frou; three nethersole bracelets on her wrist; and her feet incased in colossal shoes, broken and stringless. the latter she explained to mrs. smith. "i just swiped a pair of paw's and brought them along this morning, or i'd be dished for getting into them high heels to-night. my corns and bunions 'most killed me yesterday--they always do break out bad about easter. my pleasure club," she explained, turning to me--"my pleasure club, 'the moonlight maids,' give a ball to-night." which fact likewise explained the curl-papers as well as the slattern shirt-waist, donned to save the evening bodice worn to the factory that morning and now tucked away in a big box under the table. a whole side of our pretty violet-sprinkled bower caved in as a little "turner-in" lurched against it in passing with a top-heavy column of boxes. through the opening daylight is visible once more, and from the region of the machines is heard a chorus of voices singing "the fatal wedding." "hot a--i--r!" phoebe intones derisively. "it's a wonder angelina wouldn't get a new song. them strippers sing that 'fatal wedding' week in and week out." we worked steadily, and as the hours dragged on i began to grow dead tired. the awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable. at last the hour-hand stood at twelve, and suddenly, out of the turmoil, a strange quiet fell over the great mill. the vibrations that had shaken the whole structure to its very foundations now gradually subsided; the wheels stayed their endless revolutions; the flying belts now hung from the ceiling like long black ribbons. out of the stillness girl-voices and girl-laughter echoed weirdly, like a horn blown in a dream, while sweeter and clearer than ever rang phoebe's soprano "hot air!" the girls lunched in groups of ten and twelve. each clique had its leader. by an unwritten law i was included among those who rallied around phoebe, most of whom she had "learned" at some time or other, as she was now "learning" me. the luncheons were divested of their newspaper wrappings and spread over the ends of tables, on discarded box-lids held across the knees--in fact, any place convenience or sociability dictated. then followed a friendly exchange of pickles and cake. a dark, swarthy girl, whom they called "goldy" courtleigh, was generous in the distribution of the lukewarm contents of a broken-nosed tea-pot, which was constantly replenished by application to the hot-water faucet. although we had a half-hour, luncheon was swallowed quickly by most of the girls, eager to steal away to a sequestered bower among the boxes, there to lose themselves in paper-backed romance. a few of less literary taste were content to nibble ice-cream sandwiches and gossip. dress, the inevitable masquerade ball, murders and fires, were favorite topics of discussion,--the last always with lowered voices and deep-drawn breathing. for fire is the box-maker's terror, the grim specter that always haunts her, and with good reason does she always start at the word. "i'm always afraid," declared phoebe, "and i always run to the window and get ready to jump the minute i hear the alarm." "i don't," mused angelina; "i haven't sense enough to jump: i faint dead away. there'd be no chance for me if a fire ever broke out here." once or twice there was mention of beaux and "steady fellows," but the flesh-and-blood man of every-day life did not receive as much attention in this lunch chat as did the heroes of the story-books. while it was evident, of course, from scattered comments that box-makers are constantly marrying, it was likewise apparent that they have not sufficient imagination to invest their hard-working, sweat-grimed sweethearts with any halo of romance. promptly at half-past twelve the awakening machinery called us back to the workaday world. story-books were tucked away, and their entranced readers dragged themselves back to the machines and steaming paste-pots, to dream and to talk as they worked, hot of their own fellows of last night's masquerade, but of bankers and mill-owners who in fiction have wooed and won and honorably wedded just such poor toilers as they themselves. vi in which phoebe and mrs. smith hold forth upon music and literature "don't you never read no story-books?" mrs. smith asked, stirring the paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. she looked at me curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my answer. i was conscious that mrs. smith didn't like me for some reason or other, and i was anxious to propitiate her. i was pretty certain she thought me a boresome prig, and i determined i'd prove i wasn't. my confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had the desired effect; and when i confessed further, that i liked best of all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably: "how do you like 'little rosebud's lovers'?" "i've never read that," i replied. "is it good?" "it's fine," interposed phoebe; "but i like 'woven on fate's loom' better--don't you?" the last addressed to mrs. smith. "no, i can't say as that's my impinion," returned our vis-à-vis, with a judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping paste-brush over the strips. "not but what 'woven on fate's loom' is a good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story. but i think 'little rosebud's lovers' is more int'resting, besides being better wrote." "and that's just what i don't like about it," retorted phoebe, her fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes. "you like this hot-air talk, and i don't; and the way them fellows and girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'little rosebud's lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!" "what is it about?" i asked with respectful interest, addressing the question to mrs. smith, who gave promise of being a more serious reviewer than the flippant phoebe. mrs. smith took a bite of gingerbread and began: "it's about a fair, beautiful young girl by the name of rosebud arden. her pa was a judge, and they lived in a grand mansion in south car'lina. little rosebud--that's what everybody called her--had a stepsister maud. they was both beauties, only maud didn't have a lovely disposition like little rosebud. a harvard gradjate by the name of percy fielding got stuck on little rosebud for the wealth she was to get from her pa, and she was terrible stuck on him. she was stuck on him for fair, though not knowing he was a villain of the deepest dye. that's what the book called him. he talked her into marrying him clandestinely. maud and her mother put up a job to get rid of little rosebud, so maud could get all the money. so they told lies to her pa, who loved her something awful; and one night, when she came in after walking in the grand garden with her husband, who nobody knew she was married to, she found herself locked out. then she went to the hotel where he was staying, and told him what had happened; but he turned her down flat when he heard it, for he didn't want nothing to do with her when she wasn't to get her pa's money; and then--" she stopped her cornering to inspect my work, which had not flagged an instant. mrs. smith took another bite of gingerbread, and continued with increasing animation: "and then little rosebud turned away into the night with a low cry, just as if a dagger had been punched into her heart and turned around slow. she was only sixteen years old, and she had been brought up in luxury and idolized by her father; and all of a sudden she found herself homeless, with nowheres to sleep find no money to get a room at the hotel, and scorned by the man that had sworn to protect her. her pa had cursed her, too, something awful, so that he burst a blood-vessel a little while afterwards and died before morning. only little rosebud never found this out, for she took the midnight express and came up here to new york, where her aunt lived, only she didn't know the street-number." "where did she get the money to come to new york with?" interrupted the practical phoebe. "that's something i don't understand. if she didn't have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in south carolina for overnight, i'd like to know where she got money for a railroad ticket." "well, that's just all you know about them swells," retorted mrs. smith. "i suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over the country on a pass. and saying she didn't have a pass, it's only a story and not true anyway. "she met a fellow on the train that night who was a villain for fair!" she went on. "his name was mr. paul howard, and he was a corker. little rosebud, who was just as innocent as they make 'em, fell right into his clutches. he was a terrible man; he wouldn't stop at nothing, but he was a very elegant-looking gentleman that you'd take anywheres for a banker or 'piscopalian preacher. he tipped his hat to little rosebud, and then she up and asked if he knew where her aunt, mrs. waldron, lived. this was nuts for him, and he said yes, that mrs. waldron was a particular lady-friend of his. when they got to new york he offered to take little rosebud to her aunt's house. and as little rosebud hadn't no money, she said yes, and the villain called a cab and they started for brooklyn, him laughing to himself all the time, thinking how easily she was going to tumble into the trap he was getting fixed for her." "hot air!" murmured phoebe. "but while they were rattling over the brooklyn bridge, another man was following them in another cab--a wall-street broker with barrels of cash. he was raymond leslie, and a real good man. he'd seen rosebud get into the cab with paul howard, who he knew for a villain for fair. they had a terrible rumpus, but raymond leslie rescued her and took her to her aunt's house. it turned out that he was the gentleman-friend of little rosebud's cousin ida, the very place they were going to. but, riding along in the cab, he fell in love with little rosebud, and then he was in a terrible pickle because he was promised to ida. little rosebud's relations lived real grand, and her aunt was real nice to her until she saw she had hooked on to ida's gentleman-friend; then they put her to work in the kitchen and treated her terrible. oh, i tell you she had a time of it, for fair. her aunt was awful proud and wicked, and after while, when she found that raymond leslie was going to marry little rosebud even if they did make a servant of her, she hired paul howard to drug her and carry her off to an insane-asylum that he ran up in westchester county. it was in a lonesome place, and was full of girls that he had loved only to grow tired of and cast off, and this was the easiest way to get rid of them and keep them from spoiling his sport. once a girl was in love with paul howard, she loved him till death. he just fascinated women like a snake does a bird, and he was hot stuff as long as he lasted, but the minute he got tired of you he was a demon of cruelty. "he did everything he could, when he got little rosebud here, to get her under his power. he tried his dirty best to poison her food, but little rosebud was foxy and wouldn't touch a bite of anything, but just sat in her cell and watched the broiled chicken and fried oysters, and all the other good things they sent to tempt her, turn to a dark-purplish hue. one night she escaped disguised in the turnkey's daughter's dress. her name was dora gray, and paul howard had blasted her life too, but she worshiped him something awful, all the same-ee. dora gray gave little rosebud a lovely dark-red rose that was soaked with deadly poison, so that if you touched it to the lips of a person, the person would drop dead. she told little rosebud to protect herself with it if they chased her. but she didn't get a chance to see whether it would work or not, for when she heard them coming back of her after while with the bloodhounds barking, she dropped with terror down flat on her stummick. she had suffered so much she couldn't stand anything more. the doctors said she was dead when they picked her up, and they buried her and stuck a little white slab on her grave, with 'rosebud, aged sixteen' on it." "hot air!" from the irrepressible phoebe. i felt that courtesy required i should agree upon that point, and i did so, conservatively, venturing to ask the name of the author. mrs. smith mentioned the name of a well-known writer of trashy fiction and added, "didn't you never read none of her books?" my negative surprised her. then phoebe asked: "did you ever read 'daphne vernon; or, a coronet of shame'?" "no, i haven't read them, either," i replied. "oh, mama! carry me out and let me die!" groaned mrs. smith, throwing down her paste-brush and falling forward in mock agony upon the smeared table. "water! water!" gasped phoebe, clutching wildly at her throat; "i'm going to faint!" "what's the matter? what did i say that wasn't right?" i cried, the nature of their antics showing only too plainly that i had "put my foot in it" in some unaccountable manner. but they paid no attention. mortified and utterly at sea, i watched their convulsed shoulders and heard their smothered giggles. then in a few minutes they straightened up and resumed work with the utmost gravity of countenance and without a word of explanation. "what was it you was asking?" phoebe inquired presently, with the most innocent air possible. "i said i hadn't read the books you mentioned," i replied, trying to hide the chagrin and mortification i felt at being so ignominiously laughed at. "eyether of them?" chirped mrs. smith, with a vicious wink. "eyether of them?" warbled phoebe in her mocking-bird soprano. it was my turn to drop the paste-brush now. eye-ther! it must have slipped from my tongue unconsciously. i could not remember having ever pronounced the word like that before. i didn't feel equal, then and there, to offering them any explanation or apologies for the offense. so i simply answered: "no; are they very good? are they as good as 'little rosebud's lovers'?" "no, it ain't," said mrs. smith, decisively and a little contemptuously; "and it ain't two books, eye-ther; it's all in one--'daphne vernon; or, a coronet of shame.'" "well, now i think it is," put in phoebe. "them stories with two-handled names is nearly always good. i'll buy a book with a two-handled name every time before i'll buy one that ain't. i was reading a good one last night that i borrowed from gladys carringford. it had three handles to its name, and they was all corkers." "why don't you spit 'em out?" suggested mrs. smith. "tell us what it was." "well, it was 'doris; or, the pride of pemberton mills; or, lost in a fearful fate's abyss.' what d' ye think of that?" "it sounds very int'resting. who wrote it?" "charles garvice," replied phoebe. "didn't you ever read none of his, e--y--e--ther?" "no, i must say i never did," i answered, ignoring their mischievous raillery with as much grace as i could summon, but taking care to choose my words so as to avoid further pitfalls. "and did you never read none of charlotte m. braeme's?" drawled mrs. smith, with remorseless cruelty--"none of charlotte m. braeme's, eye-ther?" "no." "nor none by effie adelaide rowlands, e--y--e-ther?" still persisted mrs. smith. "no; none by her." "e--y--e--ther!" both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences returned to earth and speaking-voices again. "what kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. to which i replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. they had never heard of "david copperfield" or of dickens. nor had they ever heard of "gulliver's travels," nor of "the vicar of wakefield." they had heard the name "robinson crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance. "little women," "john halifax, gentleman," "the cloister and the hearth," "les misérables," were also unknown, unheard-of literary treasures. they were equally ignorant of the existence of the conventional sunday-school romance. they stared at me in amazement when i rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the fecund pens of mrs. a. d. t. whitney, "pansy," amanda m. douglas, and similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks being that their titles didn't sound interesting. i spoke enthusiastically of "little women," telling them how i had read it four times, and that i meant to read it again some day. their curiosity was aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the story for them, which i did with great accuracy of statement, and with genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce anybody to meg and jo and all the rest of that delightful march family. when i had finished, phoebe stopped her cornering and mrs. smith looked up from her label-pasting. "why, that's no story at all," the latter declared. "why, no," echoed phoebe; "that's no story--that's just everyday happenings. i don't see what's the use putting things like that in books. i'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and girls. they just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling about them i could just see them as plain as plain could be--couldn't you, gwendolyn?" "yep," yawned our vis-à-vis, undisguisedly bored. "but i suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," phoebe generously suggested. "they ain't used to the same styles of anything that us city folks are." while we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. the quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild laughter. at another table the forthcoming ball of the "moonlight maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens, making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "the lucky dream book." far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. they hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, angela's voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "the fatal wedding." phoebe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words: "the scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth have gathered in splendid array; but silent and sad is a fair woman there, whose young heart is pining away. "a card is brought to her--she reads there a name of one that she loved long ago; then sadly she whispers, 'just say i'm not here, for my story he never must know.' "that night in the banquet at misery hall she reigned like a queen on a throne; but often the tears filled her beautiful eyes as she dreamed of the love she had known. "her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song to the days she could never recall, and she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast at the banquet in misery hall. "the time passes quickly, and few in the throng have noticed the one vacant chair-- till out of the beautiful garden beyond a pistol-shot rings on the air. "now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays-- too quickly his life doth depart; while kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved finds her picture is close to his heart." "what is the name of that song?" i asked when the last cadence of phoebe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room was hushed, had died away. "that! why, it's 'the banquet in misery hall,'" answered mrs. smith, somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. but i speedily forgot the rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another without interlude. phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and i, consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. the theme in every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books. reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject--the frailty of woman. on the one side was presented virtue tempted, betrayed, repentant; on the other side, virtue fighting at bay, persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious, with all good things added unto it. it was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though i couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so trying to the feelings. for the sweet voices of the singers could not but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden of the song seemed so unworthy. "you all sing so beautifully!" i cried, in honest admiration, at the close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "where did you learn?" phoebe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes, and even mrs. smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion. "i guess we sort of learn from the ginney girls," explained phoebe. "them ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. you ought to hear them sing dago songs, oughtn't she, gwendolyn?" "yep," answered gwendolyn; "i could just die hearing angela and celie polatta singing that--what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st out crying?" "you mean 'punchinello.' yep, that's a corker; but, lord! the one what makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that 'ave maria.' therese nicora taught them--what she says she learned in the old country. i wouldn't want anything to eat if i could hear songs like that all the time." the clock-hands over annie kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour of six, and angela had only begun the first stanza of-- "papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day; "i'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away. you don't know how much i'm longing for her loving good-night kiss!" papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this: "down in the city of sighs and tears, under the white light's glare, down in the city of wasted years, you'll find your mama there, wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers; and perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the city of sighs and tears." the machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering stillness with the soft crescendo refrain: "wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers; and perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the city of sighs and tears-- in the city of sighs and tears." vii in which i acquire a story-book name and make the acquaintance of miss henrietta manners before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, i feel it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my whereabouts during the intervening night. it will be remembered that when i left the factory at the end of the first day, i had neither a lodging nor a trunk. i will not dwell upon the state of my feelings when i walked out of thompson street in the consciousness that if i had been friendless and homeless before, i was infinitely more so now. i will say nothing of the ache in my heart when my thoughts traveled toward the pile of ruins in fourteenth street, with the realization of my helplessness, my sheer inability even to attempt to do a one last humble little act of love and gratitude for the dead woman who had been truly my friend. briefly stated, the facts are these: i had, all told, one dollar, and i walked from thompson street straight to the jefferson market police-station, which was not a great distance away. i stated my case to the matron, a kindly irishwoman. i was afraid to start out so late in the evening to look for a lodging for the night. i would have thought nothing of such a thing a few weeks previous, but the knowledge of life which i had gained in my brief residence in fourteenth street and from the advice of mrs. pringle had showed me the danger that lurked in such a course. the police matron said my fears were well founded, and she gave me the address of a working-girls' home over on the east side, which she said was not the pleasantest place in the world for a well-brought-up girl of refinement and intelligence, such as she took me to be, but was cheap, and in which i would be sure of the protection which any young, inexperienced woman without money needs so badly in this wicked city. she wrote down the address for me, and i had started to the door of her little office when her motherly eye noticed how fagged out and lame i was--and indeed i could scarcely stand--and with a wave of her plump arm she brought me back to her desk. "why don't you stay here with me to-night?" she asked. "you needn't mind; and if i was you i would do it and save my pennies and my tired legs. you can have a bite of supper with me, and then bundle right off to bed. you look clean tuckered out." so to my fast-growing list of startling experiences i added a night in the station-house; but a very quiet, uneventful night it was, because the matron tucked me away in her own little room. that is, it was quiet and uneventful so far as my surroundings were concerned, though i slept little on account of my aching bones. all night i tossed, pain-racked and discouraged; for, after all the long, hard day's work of the day before, phoebe's card had only checked one dollar and five cents, which represented two persons' work. such being the case, how could i expect to grow sufficiently skilful and expeditious to earn enough to keep body and soul together in the brief apprenticeship i had looked forward to? unable to sleep, i was up an hour earlier than usual, and after i had breakfasted--again by the courtesy of the matron--i was off to work long before the working-day began. i had thought to be the first arrival, but i was not. a girl was already bending over her paste-pot, and the revelers of the "ladies' moonlight pleasure club" came straggling in by twos and threes. some of the weary dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty windows. others were busy doffing cinderella garments, which rites were performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of the big loft. "oh, henrietta, you had ought to been there," georgiana gushed, dropping her lace-trimmed petticoats about her feet and struggling to unhook her corsets. "it was grand, but i'm tired to death; and oh, dear! i've another blow-out to-night, and the 'clover leaf' to-morrow night!" with a weary yawn, the society queen departed with her finery. "you didn't go to the ball?" i suggested to the girl addressed as henrietta, and whom i now recalled as one who had worked frantically all the day before. "me? no. i don't believe in dancing," she replied, without looking up. "our church's down on it. i came early to get ahead with my order. you can do more work when there's not so many round." such strict conformity to her religious scruples, combined with such pathetic industry, seemed to augur well for the superior worth of this tall, blonde, blue-eyed girl. i was anxious to make a friend of her, and accordingly proffered my services until phoebe should come to claim me. she accepted gladly, and for the first time looked up and rewarded me with a smile. i caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing countenance--despite rather good features and fine hair--the most striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips that hung loose and colorless. as we worked, the conversation became cordial. she inquired my name, and i repeated the plain, homely scotch-irish cognomen that had been handed down to me by my forefathers. "why don't you get a pretty name?" she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. "all the girls do it when they come to the factory to work. it don't cost no more to have a high-sounding name." much interested, i protested, half in fun, that i didn't know any name to take, and begged her to suggest one. she was silent for a moment. "well, last night," she went on--"last night i was reading a story about two girls that was both mashed on the same feller. he was rich and they was poor and worked, and one of them was called 'rose fortune.'" "that's a very pretty name," i remarked. "isn't it, though? rose fortune--ever so much prettier than your own. say, why don't you take it, and i'll begin calling you by it right away." "and what's your name?" i ventured. "mine? oh, mine's henrietta manners; only," she added hastily--"only that's my real name. i was born with it. now most of the girls got theirs out of story-books. georgiana trevelyan and goldy courtleigh and gladys carringford and angelina lancaster and phoebe arlington--them girls all got theirs out of stories. but mine's my own. you see," and she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud birth--"you see, manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and married my papa against her rich father's wishes. he was a banker. i mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young gentleman. so grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but left everything to me if i would take the name of manners." the heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if i had cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at least i was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already gathering, was proof of that. "no, indeed," continued miss manners: "i haven't always been a working-girl. i used to go to boarding-school. i thought i'd be a governess or something, and once i tried to learn bookkeeping, but my eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then i got sick and had to come to this box-factory. but i'm the first manners that ever worked." i was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and i inquired with sincere interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family. "all dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "but don't let us talk anything more about it. i get so worked up and mad when i talk about the mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor parents!" the threatened spell with henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden turning on of the power, and the day's work began. phoebe did not appear to claim me, and i worked away as fast as i could to help swell henrietta's dividends. "i guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," annie kinzer said, stopping at the table. "the 'moonlight maids' must have been too much for phoebe. guess she won't show up to-day." henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add a few pennies to her earnings. "i only made sixty cents yesterday, and i worked like a dog," she remarked. "it was a bad day for everybody. we ought to make more than a dollar to-day. phoebe says you're a hustler." our job was that of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. henrietta urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. i soon discovered that for all her manners blood and alleged gentle breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian phoebe. her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every possible effort of my strength and energy, i gladly excused, however, when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the support of a certain mission sunday-school in which she was a teacher. the conversation drifted from church matters to my own personal affairs. "isn't it awful lonesome living alone in a room?" "how did you know i lived in a room?" i inquired in surprise, with the uncomfortable feeling that i had been the subject of ill-natured gossip. "oh, annie kinzer told me. say, i wouldn't tell her anything about my affairs. she's an awful clack." we were silent for a moment, while i wondered if henrietta, if annie kinzer, if any girl in all the world could ever guess how lonely i had been every moment since i had come to this great city to work and to live. then came the unexpected. "wouldn't you like to come and room with me?" "with you?" i was half pleased, half doubtful. "yes. i've got plenty of room." "perhaps i couldn't afford it." "yes, you can. i don't put on style. it won't cost us more than a dollar and a half a week for each--rent, eating, and everything else. i was thinking, as you're a learner, it will be a long time before you can make much, and you'd be glad to go halvers with somebody. two can always live cheaper than one." a dollar and a half a week! that was indeed cheaper than i had been living. i had something less than two dollars in my purse, and pay-day, for me, was still a week off. and so i accepted the proposition, and by lunch-time the news was all over the factory that the new girl was to be henrietta's room-mate. annie kinzer--everybody, in fact--approved, except, possibly, emma. emma was a homely, plainly dressed girl who had worked ten years here at springer's. she bore the reputation of being a prudey and a kill-joy. thus far she had never deigned to look at me, but now she took occasion to pass the time of day when we met at the water-faucet, and asked, in a doubtful tone, how long i had known henrietta manners. meanwhile we "cornered" and "tissued" and "laced" and "labeled." higher and higher grew our pasteboard castle, which we built as children pile up brightly colored blocks. at eleven henrietta sent me below for trimmings. "how do you like your job?" asked the young fellow who filled my order. this was strictly conventional, and i responded in kind. while charlie cut tapes and counted labels, he made the most of his opportunity to chat. dismissing, with brief comment, the weather and the peculiar advantages and disadvantages of box-making as a trade, he diplomatically steered the talk along personal and social lines by suggesting, with a suppressed sigh, the probability that i should not always be a box-maker. i replied heartily that i hoped not, which precipitated another question: "is the day set yet?" my amused negative to the query, and intimation that i had no "steady," were gratefully received, and warranted the suggestion that, as a matter of course, i liked to go to balls. "my pleasure club has a blow-out next sunday night," he remarked significantly, as i gathered up my trimmings and departed. during my five minutes' absence the most exciting event of the day had occurred. adrienne, one of the strippers, had just been carried away, unconscious, with two bleeding finger-stumps. in an unguarded moment the fingers had been cut off in her machine. although their work does not allow them to stop a moment, her companions were all loud in sympathy for this misfortune, which is not rare. little jennie, the unfortunate girl's turner-in and fellow-worker for two years, wept bitterly as she wiped away the blood from the long, shining knife and prepared to take the place of her old superior, with its increased wage of five dollars and a half a week. the little girl had been making only three dollars and a quarter, and so, as henrietta remarked, "it's a pretty bad accident that don't bring good to somebody." "did they take her away in a carriage?" henrietta asked of goldy courtleigh, who had stopped a moment to rest at our table. "well, i should say! what's the use of getting your fingers whacked off if you can't get a carriage-ride out of it?" "yes, and that's about the only way you'd ever squeeze a carriage-ride out of this company," commented henrietta. "now i've two lady-friends who work in mills where a sick headache and a fainting-spell touch the boss for a carriage-ride every time!" the order on which we worked was, like most of the others on the floor that day, for late-afternoon delivery. our ruching-boxes had to be finished that day, even though it took every moment till six or even seven o'clock. saturday being what is termed a "short-day," one had to work with might and main in order to leave at half-past four. this henrietta was very anxious to do, partly because she had her easter shopping to do, and partly because this was the night i was to be installed in my new quarters. lunch-time found us still far behind. therefore we did not stop to eat, but snatched bites of cake and sandwich as hunger dictated, and convenience permitted, all the while pasting and labeling and taping our boxes. nor were we the only toilers obliged to forgo the hard-earned half-hour of rest. the awakening thunder of the machinery burst gratefully on our ears. it meant that the last half of the weary day had begun. how my blistered hands ached now! how my swollen feet and ankles throbbed with pain! every girl limped now as she crossed the floor with her towering burden, and the procession back and forth between machines and tables began all over again. lifting and carrying and shoving; cornering and taping and lacing--it seemed as though the afternoon would never wear to an end. the whole great mill was now charged with an unaccustomed excitement--an excitement which had in it something of solemnity. there was no sign of the usual mirth and hilarity which constitute the mill's sole attraction. there was no singing--not even angelina's "fatal wedding." no exchange of stories, no sallies. each girl bent to her task with a fierce energy that was almost maddening in its intensity. blind and dizzy with fatigue, i peered down the long, dusty aisles of boxes toward the clock above annie kinzer's desk. it was only two. every effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now strained almost to the breaking-point. how long can this agony last? how long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained fiddle-string and brings relief? the remorseless clock informed us that there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean up"--a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has finished her allotted task. at half-past two it appeared hopeless even to dream of getting out before the regular six o'clock. the head foreman rushed through the aisles and bawled to us to "hustle for all we were worth," as customers were all demanding their goods. "my god! ain't we hustling?" angrily shouted rosie sweeny, a pretty girl at the next table, who supplied most of the profanity for our end of the room. "god almighty! how i hate easter and christmas-time! oh, my legs is 'most breaking," and with that the overwrought girl burst into a passionate tirade against everybody, the foreman included, and all the while she never ceased to work. there were not many girls in the factory like rosie. hers were the quickest fingers, the sharpest tongue, the prettiest face. she was scornful, impatient, and passionate--qualities not highly developed in her companions, and which in her case foreboded ill if one believed annie kinzer's prophecy: "that rosie sweeny 'll go to the bad yet, you mark my words." three o'clock, a quarter after, half-past! the terrific tension had all but reached the breaking-point. then there rose a trembling, palpitating sigh that seemed to come from a hundred throats, and blended in a universal expression of relief. in her clear, high treble angelina began the everlasting "fatal wedding." that piece of false sentiment had now a new significance. it became a song of deliverance, and as the workers swelled the chorus, one by one, it meant that the end of the day's toil was in sight. by four o'clock the last box was done. machines became mute, wheels were stilled, and the long black belts sagged into limp folds. every girl seized a broom or a scrub-pail, and hilarity reigned supreme while we swept and scrubbed for the next half-hour, angelina and her chorus singing all the while endless stanzas of the "fatal wedding." henrietta sent me for a fresh pail of water, which i got from the faucet in the toilet-room; and as i filled my bucket i made a mental inventory of my fellow-toilers' wardrobes. hanging from rows of nails on all sides were their street garments--a collection of covert-cloth jackets, light tan automobile coats, black silk box-coats trimmed in white lace, raglans, and every other style of fashionable wrap that might be cheaply imitated. sandwiched among the street garments were the trained skirts and evening bodices of the "moonlight maids" of the night before, and which were to be again disported at some other pleasure-club festivity that easter evening, now drawing near. along the walls were ranged the high-heeled shoes and slippers, a bewildering display of gilt buckles and velvet bows; each pair waiting patiently for the swollen, tired feet of their owner to carry them away to the ball. the hats on the shelf above were in strict accord with the gowns and the cloaks and the foot-gear--a gorgeous assortment of easter millinery, wherein the beflowered and beplumed picture-hat predominated. i hurried back with my bucket of water, hoping in my heart that the pleasure their wearers got out of this finery might be as great as the day's work which earned it was long and hard. and so indeed it must have been, if henrietta was any authority on such questions. "i love nice clothes, even if i do have to work hard to get them," she remarked, as we turned into bleecker street a few minutes later, four one-dollar bills safely tucked away in her stocking. "but say, you ought to see my new hat. it's elegant," and drawing my arm through hers, my new room-mate hurried me through the saturday-evening crowd of homeward-bound humanity. viii wherein i walk through dark and devious ways with henrietta manners it had been an ideal day for march--a day touched with pale-yellow sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime, despite the chill east wind. into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of thompson street this shy primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but, being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving thompson dim and cold by comparison when henrietta manners and i emerged from springer's. henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some yards down the street. while we stopped long enough for her to perform this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled cañon the appearance of a gay checkered ribbon. but if the march sunshine had deserted thompson street, the march winds still claimed it as their own. up and down they had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street. grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, henrietta and i also eddied down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind which struck us at the crowded corner of bleecker street. this whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human forces. for it was saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide all over the great city. always tempestuous, always disturbed with the passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest ebb--now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. at the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint. it was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this windy corner--italian, spanish, german, slav, jew, greek, with a preponderance of irish and "free-born" americans. the general air was one of unwonted happiness and freedom. the atmosphere of holiday liberty was vibrant with the expectation of saturday-night abandon to fun and frolic or wild carousal. for "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. it is a pleasant sensation to feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket, or in the depths of your stocking, where henrietta had hidden hers safe out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was lurking at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that saturday evening, which was also easter eve. easter eve! i had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the unmistakable holiday air which bleecker street displayed. as far as we could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their easter wares. henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on, determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned pennies. she succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a pushcart piled high with sacred images. henrietta showed a lively interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for st. peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for st. john in purple; and only twenty-five for the blessed virgin in flowing blue clasping the holy babe. they were "dirt-cheap," henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged our shopmate, little angela, clasping a madonna under her arm and counting her change. the three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment until angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change. "what a slop you are!" remarked henrietta, as her critical eye swept over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a drabbled blue skirt. "why don't you never turn your skirt, angela?" "oh, what's the dif?" replied angela. "there ain't no fellows going to look at me any more now." this reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice. "why, what's the matter?" i asked. "don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at henrietta's silly, vacant "tee-hee." "know? know what?" i asked. "that i'm a grass-widow." "a grass-widow!" i echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish creature in sheer unbelief--for child i had always considered her. "why, how old are you, anyway, angela?" "fifteen--i mean i'm 'most fifteen." "and you're really married!" i exclaimed again, quite aghast and altogether innocent of the construction which angela immediately put upon the qualifying adverb. "well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten times angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony; "i was married for fair, and i was married lawful. a priest did it." "oh, i didn't mean to question that," i hastened to apologize with some confusion. "only you seemed so very young, i thought you were just joking me." "well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting. "and you've a baby, too--you!" the bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired, dark little face. "it's up to the crèche--that's where i'm going now. the ladies keeps it awful good for me." "and it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared henrietta, softly. "i seen it once." "she's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented the little mother. "look what i bought her--here, you hold this peter a minute--henrietta, just hang on to the holy virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of henrietta. henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag. "i don't never like to break a bill unless i've got to," she remarked, returning the holy virgin to angela's arms; "but i'm going to have one of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. a moment later she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we three continued our walk westward along bleecker, dropping little angela at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery where she would pick up her baby and carry it home. "that was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" i remarked, as my eyes followed the little figure. but my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if indeed she heard the remark at all. she seemed to be deep in a brown study, and several times i caught her watching me narrowly from the corner of her eye. i was already beginning to have some misgivings as to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat and sleep. and this feeling increased with every block we covered, for by and by i found myself studying henrietta in the same furtive manner as she was evidently studying me. at last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of bleecker street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out explosively: "hope to god you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!" "why? what did she do?" "went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark, silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow. something in her manner seemed to say, "ask no more questions," but nevertheless i pursued the subject. "went crazy! how?" "i d'know; she just went sudden crazy. she come to springer's one day just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me; and all of a sudden in the night i woke up with her screamin' and going on something fearful, and i run down and got the dago lady in the basement to come up, and her man run for the police. they took her away to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the island now." "what island?" i asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail, but because i was too disturbed for the moment to make any other comment. it seemed to henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for she remarked rather testily: "why, just the island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox." "mercy! what an awful place it must be!" i cried. "and that's where the poor girl went?" "that's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?" "run away! where from?" "run away from home--now didn't you?" "mercy, no! what put such an idea as that in your head?" i asked, laughing. "fanny harley did." "who's fanny harley?" "she's the girl they took to the crazy-house." "but," i argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that i ran away from home too?" "yep, it is. you're ever so much like fanny harley. you talk just alike, and you've got just the same notions she had, from what i can make; and she did run away from home. she told me so. she lived up-state somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--" "but i'm not a farmer, and never was," i put in. "why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and i saw there was no use trying to point out to henrietta the difference between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms of contempt in her vocabulary. we were still threading the maze of strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former brief abiding-place of fanny harley; and, filled with curiosity regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, i revived the subject by asking carelessly: "how is it i talk and act that makes me like fanny harley?" "well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained. "i don't mind the way you talk, though,--using big words and all that. that ain't none of our business, i tell the girls; but you do walk so funny and stand so funny, that it is all i can do to keep from bu'stin' out laughing to see you. and the other girls says it's the same with them, but i told them it was because you was just from the country, and that farmers all walk the same way. but really, rose,--you're getting used to that name, ain't you?--you ought to get yourself over it as quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory if you're going to be queer like that." "but i walk as i always did. how else should i walk? how do i walk that makes me so funny?" i asked, mortified at the thought of my having been the butt of secret ridicule. henrietta was cordial in her reply. "you walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back ache to watch you." then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction. "and what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? why, it just about kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'" "but," i remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of my english, "why shouldn't i say 'lid' if i want to? it means just the same as cover." "well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner" retorted, with ill-disguised anger that i should question her authority; and i dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued in silence. it was growing more and more apparent that i had not made a wise selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now--at least until i had given her a trial of several days. i felt as though i had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short walk from the factory. i had thought her at the work-table a kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for which i could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. but now i recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much more besides. henrietta manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with despotic severity. and yet, in the face of all these unpleasant reflections upon poor henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, i felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which i knew still beat under that shabby golf-cape. meanwhile, henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had urged me to emulate, and which i thought so hideous. i did not know then, but i do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic of the constitution in which there is not the proper coördination of muscular effort. in the light of knowledge gained in later years, i can now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--i can see in that girl-face framed by a trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape, one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed. i was, however, on this memorable easter eve most happily innocent of my lombroso and my mantagazza, else i had not been walking home with henrietta manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated country-girl. so much confidence did i have in my shop-mate that i did not yet know the name of the street on the west side where my future home was, nor did i know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front, with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be found in new york. in later and more prosperous years i have several times walked into thompson street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our walk of that night, bordering along old greenwich village, but as well have tried to unravel the mazes of the cretan labyrinth. the last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and majestic upon the horizon. a little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture, and i hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge; but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. the street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy getting supper. it was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid streets i had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke overhead. there were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. it was all so hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk i was not surprised to see henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as the one we should enter. as we climbed the high stoop, i could see, through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome balusters, the form of an italian woman sitting in the basement window beneath, nursing a baby at her breast. "that's the lady what come up to help hold fanny harley," my room-mate remarked as we passed inside. ix introducing henrietta's "special gentleman-friend" "say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?" henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that i nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes i had sat watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat. an answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of the question. it hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which i would receive it. so i tried to look unconscious, and at this critical juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what i should reply. and as i considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of the room. the heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a fashionable quarter of new york, and its spaciousness and former elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. the latter consisted of two wooden boxes, one of which i sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have been the twin sister of my own "little lottie" at the ill-fated fourteenth-street house. this stove, connected with the flue by a small pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel of italian marble sculptured with the story of prometheus's boon to mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. overhead the ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which the fire was replenished. the door to the closet was gone, and in its recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while henrietta's scant wardrobe was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. the long, cobweb-hung windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface against the batten shutters. all these details i could descry but dimly by the light of the smoking oil-lamp that sat on the mantelshelf above the stove, and which cast a ghastly light upon a row of empty bottles--the sole burden of the once spotless, but now sadly soiled, vestal virgins. henrietta was bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light falling across her pale face. as she boiled the coffee and fried the eggs i studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background, and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent beauty. for beautiful henrietta was--beautiful with a beauty quite her own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. i watched her as one horribly fascinated,--that high, wide white forehead, that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile would so often play, and those great, wide eyes of blue that now looked purple in the lamp-light. and then, gradually, i saw, as i watched, an expression i had never seen there before; the wavering suggestion of the smile left the lips and they fell apart, loose and bloodless, with a glimpse of the missing front tooth. it was an expression that lasted but the fraction of a second, but it stamped her whole countenance with something sinister. then henrietta lifted the eggs, carried the coffee-pot across to the table, which was none other than the board-capped barrel, and went back for the lamp. all these things she insisted upon doing herself, just as she had stubbornly refused to allow me to help with the cooking of the supper. setting the lamp down upon the improvised table, she threw open one of the shutters to let in a breath of fresh air, and as she did so the room was filled with the roar and dust of the elevated train which passed so close to our windows, and after it came a cold draft of air caused by the suction of the cars. henrietta closed the window and returned to the table. then i answered her question: "well, that depends upon what you mean by gentleman-friend," i said. "i mean just what i said," replied henrietta, sliding an egg upon her plate and passing the remaining one to me. "i mean a _special_ gentleman-friend." "well, no; i guess i haven't. i used to know lots of boys in the country where i lived, but there isn't one of them i could call my special gentleman-friend, and i don't know any men here." i uttered this speech carefully, so as not to imply any criticism of henrietta's use of the expression "gentleman-friend," nor to call down upon my own head her criticism for using any other than the box-factory vernacular in discussing these delicate amatory affairs. "oh, go and tell that to your grandmother!" she retorted, with a sly little laugh. "don't none of the girls there have gentlemen-friends, or is farmers so different that they never stand gentlemen-friends to them?" "oh, dear me, yes!" i answered hastily, trying to avoid the unpleasant _double entendre_, and choosing to accept it in its strictly explicit phase. "why, certainly, the girls get married there every day. there are hardly any old maids in my part of the country. they get engaged almost as soon as they are out of short dresses, and the first thing you know, they are married and raising families." then i added, "but have you got a gentleman-friend yourself?" "yep," she answered, nodding and pouring out the coffee; "i have a very particular gentleman-friend what's been keeping company with me for nearly a year, off and on." "oh!" i cried, eager to turn the conversation toward henrietta's personal affairs instead of my own, which i felt she completely misconstrued. "do tell me about him; what is his name--and are you engaged to him yet?" "my! ain't you fresh, though?" she said; but there was cordiality in the rebuff. "i met him at the mission where i teach sundays," she went on. "he's brother mason, and he's the sunday-school superintendent. he give me all that perfume on the mantel," and she pointed a dripping knife toward the row of empty bottles. "why, is he in the perfumery business?" i asked innocently, my eyes ranging over the heterogeneous collection on the mantel. henrietta took the remark as exceedingly funny, for she immediately fell into a paroxysm of tittering, choking over a mouthful of food before she could attain gravity enough to answer. "lord! no; you do ask the funniest questions!" thus checked, i did not press for further information as to brother mason's vocation, but proceeded to satisfy my hunger, which was not diminished by the unappetizing appearance of the food on the barrel. it was a matter of great surprise to me to see how little henrietta ate, and i was likewise ashamed of my own voracious appetite. henrietta noticed this and frowned ominously. "god! but you do eat!" she commented frankly, poising her knife in air. "i'm hungry. i've worked hard to-day," i replied with dignity. "maybe you won't eat so much, though, after a while," she said hopefully. "maybe not," i agreed. "but you, henrietta--you are not eating anything!" "me? oh, i'm all right. i'm eating as much as i ever do. the works takes away my hunger. if it didn't, i don't know how i'd get along. if i eat as much as you, i'd be likely to starve to death. i couldn't make enough to feed me. when i first begun to work in the factory i'd eat three or four pieces of bread across the loaf, and potatoes and meat, and be hungry for things besides; but after a while you get used to being hungry for so long, you couldn't eat if you had it to eat." "how long have you been working?" i ventured. henrietta put her cup on the table and shot a suspicious glance at me before she answered: "oh, off and on, and for five or six years, ever since my uncle died. he was my guardian--that's his house up there." i looked in the direction of henrietta's pointed finger to a cheap chromolithograph that was tacked on the wall between the windows and immediately over the barrel where we were eating. i recognized it at once as a reproduction of a familiar scene showing a castle on the rhine. i had seen the same picture many times, once as a supplement with a sunday newspaper. that this stately pile of green and yellow variegated stones should be the residence of henrietta's uncle and guardian seemed obviously but a bit of girlish fun, of a piece with her earlier talk regarding her aristocratic ancestry; for by this time i had construed that strange story into a hoax that was never meant to be taken seriously. but one glance now at henrietta's face showed me my mistake. it was plainly to be seen that she had come to believe every word of what she had told me. my eye had traveled to the row of garments on the pegs behind the door and had rested with curiosity upon a "lassie" bonnet and cloak. henrietta did not wait for the question on my lips. "them's my adjutant's uniform," she said, with a touch of pride. "you didn't know i used to be an adjutant in the salvation army, did you?" i shook my head. "well, i was, all right. adjutant faith manners, that's what i was," and rising, she limped across the floor, and burrowing in the depths of the trunk, returned in a moment with an envelop which she handed me with the command to read its contents. the envelop, postmarked "pittsburg, pa.," was addressed to adjutant faith manners. "but how does it come you have two names?" i inquired. "well," the girl replied slowly, "i thought as how it sounded better for a professing christian to have some name like that, than henrietta. henrietta is kind of fancy-sounding, specially when you was an adjutant officer and was supposed to have give yourself to jesus." i read the letter; it was a curious epistle, written in a beautiful, flowing hand, well worded, and complimenting adjutant manners upon her "persistence in the good work for jesus," and winding up with the offer of a small post, at a salary to be determined later on, in the pittsburg barracks of the salvation army. the name of the writer, which for obvious reasons it is best not to divulge, was that of an officer who, i have since discovered, is well and favorably known in pittsburg. the whole thing was a bewildering paradox. there was no doubt of its being a bona-fide letter, nor of adjutant faith manners and my room-mate being one and the same person. and yet, how explain the ludicrous inconsistency of such an experience in the life of such a girl? i had opened my mouth to ask some question to this end, when we started as a heavy step resounded in the hallway outside. then the latch rattled, the door swung open, and a thick-set, burly, bearded man stood upon the threshold. i screamed before i noticed that henrietta regarded the new-comer quite as a matter of course. the man stood in the doorway, evidently surprised for the moment at seeing me there; then, closing the door behind him, he advanced awkwardly, tiptoeing across the floor, and sat down upon the edge of the bed without so much as a word. "will you have a cup of coffee, brother mason?" asked henrietta, shaking the pot to determine whether its contents would warrant the invitation. "i don't care if i do, sister manners," returned brother mason, removing his hat as if it were an afterthought, and drawing forth a large red handkerchief with which he mopped his forehead and thick red neck. "this is my lady-friend, rose fortune," said henrietta as she drained the coffee-pot, and nodding first to the visitor, then to myself; "my gentleman-friend, brother mason." brother mason had risen and tiptoed forward, his hands thrust into the bulging pockets of his overcoat, whence he proceeded gravely to draw forth and deposit upon the barrel-top a heterogeneous love-offering, as follows: two oranges; a box of mustard; a small sack of nutmegs; a box of ground pepper; a package of allspice; a box containing three dozen bouillon capsules; a bottle of the exact size and label as the innumerable empty vessels on the mantel; a package of tea done up in fancy red-and-gold paper; and, last, a large paper sack of pulverized coffee. henrietta now handed a cup to the donor of these gifts, which he accepted meekly and carried on tiptoe back to his place on the edge of the bed. brother mason drank his coffee with a great deal of unnecessary noise, while henrietta gathered up the dishes, after again rebuffing me almost rudely for presuming to offer my services. thus there was nothing left for me to do, apparently, but to sit on the soap-box and look at brother mason, who regarded me in rather sheepish fashion over the top of his cup. i judged him to be a good-natured man on the near side of fifty. his close-cropped hair was an iron-gray, and his stubby beard and mustache a fierce red, the ferocity of which was tempered by the mildness of deep-set, small blue eyes. his general appearance would, i thought, have been more in accord with the driver of a beer-truck than anything so comparatively genteel as driving a grocer's wagon--his occupation, i discovered, which explained the source of his offerings to henrietta. despite the burliness of brother mason, there was that about him which rather encouraged confidence than aroused suspicion, although it was difficult to reconcile him with the superintendence of a mission sunday-school. the latter incongruity had just popped into my mind when he broke the silence by asking in a deep guttural, and with a vigorous nod in my direction as he put down his empty cup: "ha! cat'lic?" "oh, no," i answered, eager to break the embarrassing silence--"oh, no; i'm a protestant." "ha! but you be irish, ben't you?" i laughed. "no; american!" "ha! father and mother irish, mebbe?" "no, they were american, too; but my great-great-grandfather and-grandmother were irish." "aye, that's it! i knowed you was irish the minute i seen them red cheeks, eh! sister manners?" chuckled brother mason in a rich brogue, rubbing his hands and looking across at my room-mate, who had been apparently oblivious to our conversation, as she washed and wiped the dishes out of a tin basin which i recognized as that from which we had washed our hands and faces after we got home from work. she now fixed the visitor with her periwinkle eyes, and replied severely: "i ain't got nothing to say against my lady-friend's looks, as you certainly know, brother mason." something in this answer--no doubt, a hint of smothered jealousy--made brother mason throw his hand to his mouth and duck his head as he darted a sly look toward me. but i met the look with a serious face, and indeed i felt serious enough without getting myself into any imbroglio with this strange pair of lovers. "you're irish, i suppose, mr. mason?" i asked when he had recovered his gravity after this mirth-provoking incident. "me? i'm from county wicklow, but i ain't no cat'lic irish. i'm a methody. cat'lic in the old country, methody here. got converted twenty years ago at one of them moody and sankey meetings--you've heard tell of moody and sankey, mebbe? eh? ha!" these latter ejaculations the catholic apostate repeated alternately and with rhythmic precision as he proceeded to press tobacco into a clay pipe with numerous deft movements of his large red thumb, regarding me fixedly all the while. "yes, yes," i repeated many times, but not until he had lighted the pipe and drawn a deep whiff of it did brother mason choose to regard his question as answered. "well, it was them that brought me to the mourners' bench, for fair. it was moody and sankey that did the damage; and i've got to say this much for them gentlemen, i've never seen the day i was sorry they did it. i'm the supe of a mission sunday-school now, meself; and i've done me dirty best to push the gospel news along." here he turned to henrietta. "be your lady-friend coming over to-morrow afternoon, sister manners?" "i don't hinder her, nor nobody's, doing what they like!" answered henrietta, again with that air of severity, not to say iciness, in her manner; and i shifted myself uncomfortably on the box as i met her glance of patient scorn. she had now finished her dish-washing, and seated herself upon the edge of the box, which brother mason had already appropriated with his large, clumsy bulk. "come now, you do care, ye know you care!" he said gruffly, as he threw an arm carelessly across the girl's shoulder and patted her kindly; the scowl immediately left her face and her head dropped upon his brawny, red-shirted breast and snugly settled itself there, much to my embarrassment. then, between long-drawn whiffs of the rank-smelling pipe, brother mason descanted upon himself and his achievements, religious, social, financial, and political, with no interruption save frequent fits of choking on the part of poor henrietta, whom even the clouds of rank smoke could not drive from her position of vantage. brother mason, so he informed me, was not only an irishman and a methodist, but a member of tammany hall and a not unimportant personage in the warehouses of the wholesale grocers for whom he drove the delivery wagon, and from whom, i now haven't a doubt in the world, he had stolen for the benefit of his lady-love many such an offering of sweet perfume and savory spice as he had carried her that easter eve. i found his talk eminently entertaining, with the charm that often goes with the talk of an unlettered person who knows much of life and of men. he was densely ignorant from the schoolmaster's point of view, and openly confessed to an inability to write his name; but his ignorance was refreshing, as the ignorance of man is always refreshing when compared with the ignorance of woman; which fact, it has often appeared to me, is the strongest argument in favor of the general superiority of the male sex. for hidden somewhere within brother mason's thick, bullet head there seemed to be that primary germ of intelligence which was apparently lacking in the fair head snuggled on his breast. it was therefore with a mingled feeling of relief and regret that, after a couple of hours of conversation, i saw him gently push henrietta away and announce his departure,--relief from the embarrassment which this open love-making had caused me, and regret that i was once more to be left alone with henrietta in that dark, cavernous house. it was then after midnight, and henrietta suggested, as brother mason drew on his overcoat, that she accompany him as far as the corner saloon, where she wanted to buy a quarter-pint of gin; and they went off together, leaving me alone. when their resounding footsteps had died away down the stairs, i picked up the lamp and walked about, examining the shadowy corners of the room, peering into the black abyss of the alcove where the unwholesome bed stood, and not neglecting, like the true woman i was, to look underneath and even to poke under it with the handle of a broom. i raised the windows and threw open the batten-shutters, and through the darkness tried to measure the distance to the street below. not only that, but i also speculated upon being able to climb out upon the railroad tracks, should the worst come to the worst. what worst? what did i fear? i don't know. i did not exactly know then, and i scarcely know now. it may have been the promptings of what is popularly termed "woman's intuition." no more do i know why i then and there resolved that i should sleep with my shoes and stockings on; and further, if possible, i determined to keep awake through the long night before me. i closed the windows and returned to a further inspection of the room, stopping before the open trunk to examine some of the many books it contained. one by one i opened and examined the volumes; a few of them were romances of the laura jean libbey school of fiction, but the majority were hymnals inscribed severally on the fly-leaf with the names "faith manners," "hope manners," "patience manners." across the room the bottles on the mantel shone vaguely in the shadow. i carried the lamp over, and placing it in the little cleared-out space among them, began to examine the bottles with idle curiosity. "wild crab apple," "jockey club," "parma violet," "heliotrope," i read on the dainty labels, lifting out the ground-glass corks and smelling the lingering fragrance which yet attached to each empty vial. of these there must have been two dozen or more. and there were other bottles, also empty, but not perfume-bottles. of these others there were more than a dozen. at first i did not quite comprehend the purport of the printing on their labels, and it was not until i had studied some half a dozen of them that the sickening horror of their meaning dawned upon me fully. there was no mistaking them; the language was too unblushingly plain. they were the infamous nostrums of the malpractitioner; and in the light of this loathsome revelation there was but one thing for me to do: i had to get out of that room, and before henrietta should return; and so, grabbing up my hat and jacket, i rushed in a panic out of the awful place into the midnight blackness of the empty street. x in which i find myself a homeless wanderer in the night in making my escape i had not counted upon my chances of meeting henrietta returning from the saloon. i had thought of nothing but to get as far away as possible from the horror of it all. dashing headlong down the street, i was going i knew not where, when suddenly henrietta's vacuous "tee-hee" rang out in the darkness and echoed among the iron girders of the elevated trestle; and, looking ahead of me, i saw her in the light of the corner gas-jet coming toward me, a man on either side of her, and all three evidently in the best of spirits. i sank back into the darkness of a doorway that stood open, motionless until they had passed and their voices had died away. in the few minutes of waiting, i had collected my wits sufficiently to determine upon a plan of action. i would find my way back to the jefferson market, and stay there until daylight, and then go to the working girls' home recommended by the police matron. but no sooner had i determined on this plan, which was really the only thing i could have done, than i heard women's voices close at hand; and before i could creep out of the doorway, two figures, groping up to it through the darkness, dropped down upon the threshold. they muttered and mumbled to each other for a little while, then their deep breathing told me they had fallen into a doze. again and again i had crept out of my hiding-place, looked at the two bowed, crouching figures, which i could see only in vague outline, and then withdrew again into the comparative safety of the black hallway. i hesitated to waken them, and i could not creep over them asleep--not until i heard the low, guttural voice of a drunken man in the darkness above, and the uncertain shuffle of feet feeling their way to the head of the staircase. then, my heart in my mouth, quite as much for the fear of what was before me as for what was fumbling about in the darkness behind, i came boldly out and stood over the huddled figures. now i saw that they were old women, very old, and both fast asleep, with their arms locked about each other for protection against the cold. both were bare-headed and scantily dressed, and each wore a little wisp of gray hair drawn into a button at the back of her head, just as mrs. pringle had worn hers. i touched the nearest bundle on the shoulder. she awoke with a start, and peered around at me with a pitiful whimper. i explained that i only wanted to pass, and that she would oblige me very much to allow me to do so. "you want to git out, do ye, dearie? well, you jist shall git out," came the rejoinder in a high, quavering voice, and slowly the old woman lifted herself, with many groans and "ouches" for her stiffened joints. "dearie! dearie! i thought ye wuz the cop," the old crone went on, as she grasped my arm in a hand whose thinness i could feel through my thin jacket. "a nice arm it is ye have got, and yit ye don't speak as if ye be one of we uns, be you?" the withered hand held me as though in a vise, while i could feel the gin-laden breath of the unfortunate creature as she peered close into my face. "please--please let me go!" i whispered, for i could hear the stumbling footsteps within near the bottom of the stairs. "please let me go! i must go to the drug-store to find a doctor; some one is sick." "sure, dearie, sure!" and the thin fingers relaxed their hold. "do ye know where the drug-store is? and mightn't i make bold enough to ask to go with ye? it's late for a lady to be out, with the streets full of drunks and lazy longshoremen; and i know you _be_ a lady." i was in a quandary. naturally i did not want to accept this drunken woman's offer to pilot me, and yet i really had not the heart to offend the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice at the mention of sickness. she seemed to take my silence for acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the dark street. at the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each other distinctly for the first time. she was dark and swarthy, with deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, i noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. she was about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy, stooped shoulders. evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city, with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw one, and that if i wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name wasn't mrs. bridget reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married woman and the mother of a family all dead now, god rest their souls!" who should know a lady better than she? and why was mrs. bridget reynolds, a proper married and equally proper widowed woman of her reverend years, sitting upon a doorstep at three o'clock of a cold march morning? och! god bless ye, just a little trouble with the landlord, no work for several weeks, and a recent eviction; a small matter that had often happened before, and was like as not to happen ag'in, god willing! and who was mrs. bridget reynolds's sleeping mate left behind on the doorstep? divil a bit did mrs. bridget reynolds know about her, only that she had found her that night in the empty warehouse, where she had gone like herself to sleep, among the packing-cases, under the straw and excelsior, which made a bed fit for a queen, and where they might still have been taking their ease had not a heartless cop chased them out, bad luck to him! such was the gist of mrs. reynolds's discourse. i have not the courage to attempt to transcribe her rich brogue and picturesque phraseology; and even were i able to do so, it could give the reader no adequate idea of the wealth of optimism and cheerfulness that throbbed in her quavering voice. hers could be a violent tongue, too, as the several men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to my side, mrs. bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. somehow, i no longer felt afraid under her protection and guidance. at last, after a very long walk, we came in sight of the brightly lighted windows of a drug-store, and mrs. reynolds said we were on bleecker street. i had now to explain that my asking the way to a drug-store had been merely a bit of subterfuge, which i did in fear and trembling as to how mrs. reynolds would accept such deception on my part. but she was all good humor. "sure, dearie, it's all right! i'm glad to do a good turn for yez, being as you're a poor body like mesilf, even if ye air a lady!" we were now standing in the glare of the big colored-glass carboys in the drug-store window at the corner of bleecker street and some one of its intersecting alleys. it was now four in the morning, and the streets were almost deserted. my companion smiled at me with the maudlin tenderness which gin inspires in the breast of an old irishwoman, and as we stood irresolute on the corner i noticed how thinly clad she was. the sharp wind wrapped her calico skirt about her stiffened limbs, and her only wrap was a little black knitted fascinator which did not meet over the torn calico blouse. "a wee nip of gin would go right to the spot now, wouldn't it, dearie?" the old soul asked wistfully, which reminded me of something i had forgotten: that i still had my precious dollar and a half snugly stowed away in my petticoat pocket. so i suggested that we go to a lunch-room and have a good meal and a cup of hot coffee, and sit there till daylight, which now was not far off. the prospect of something to eat and something hot to drink infused great cheerfulness into my strange chaperon; she grasped my arm with the gaiety of a school-girl, and we walked eastward until we came to a dairy lunch-room upon the great plate-glass windows of which was enameled in white letters a generous bill of fare at startlingly low prices. the place was of the sort where everybody acts as his own waiter, buying checks for whatever he wants from the cashier and presenting them at a long counter piled up with eatables. mrs. reynolds was modesty itself in accepting of my bounty. when we had finished it was daylight, and i parted from my duenna at the door, she with innumerable terms of maudlin endearment, and an invocation to all the saints in the calendar that they should keep a kindly eye upon me. as to my own feelings, i felt heartless to be obliged to leave the poor creature with nothing more than a twenty-five-cent piece, and with no proffer of future help--if, indeed, she was not beyond help. but i was powerless; for i was as poor as she was. i had suggested her applying to the authorities for aid, but she had received it scornfully, even indignantly, declaring that mrs. bridget reynolds would die and rot before she'd be beholden to anybody for charity. anything in the shape of organized authority was her constitutional enemy, and the policeman was her hereditary foe. hospitals were nefarious places where the doctors poisoned you and the nurses neglected you in order that you should die and furnish one more cadaver to the dissecting-rooms; almshouses were the last resort of the broken in heart and spirit, institutions where unspeakable crimes were perpetrated upon the old and helpless. therefore, was it any wonder this independent old dame of erin preferred deserted warehouses and dark doorways as shelter? and so, early in this easter morning, i left mrs. bridget reynolds at the door of the bleecker street lunch-room, she to go her way and i to go mine. i looked back when i had got half a block away, and she was still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. i watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. then i turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. i was going to find the home for working girls which the good matron at jefferson market had recommended, and the address of which i still had in the bottom of my purse. xi i become an "inmate" of a home for working girls the spirit of the early easter day had breathed everywhere its own ineffable sabbath peace, and when at last i emerged into broadway, it was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. on the six days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises, it was now silent and deserted as a country lane--silent but for the echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me. my way lay northward, with the spire of grace church as a finger-post. grace church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so often had i walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now i approached it as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. the fact that i was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one, now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so persistently reflected by the shop windows. before one of them i stopped and surveyed myself. truly i was a sorry-looking object. i had not been well washed or combed since the last morning at mrs. pringle's house; for two days i had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the small side-combs i wore, and on neither morning had i enjoyed the luxury of soap. and two successive mornings without soap and the services of a stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory. fortunately the street was deserted. i stepped into the entrance of a big, red-sandstone building, and standing between the show-windows, took off my hat, laid it on the pavement, and proceeded to unroll my hair and slick it up once more with the aid of the side-comb, of which i had now only one left, having lost the other somewhere in my flight from henrietta's. that i should have thought to put on my hat in preparing for that flight i do not understand, for i forgot my gloves, a brand-new pair too; my handkerchief; and, most needful of all else, my ribbon stock-collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket-collar. looking at it ruefully, i began to feel for the first time what was for me at least the very quintessence of poverty--the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment. i had known hunger and loneliness since i had come to new york, but never before had i experienced this new, this infinitely greater terror--lack of self-respect. that i had done nothing to lower my self-respect had nothing whatever to do with it, since self-respect is often more a matter of material things than of moral values. it is possible for a hungry woman to walk with pride, and it is possible for the immoral and utterly degraded woman to hold her own with the best of her sisters, when it comes to visible manifestation of self-respect, if only she is able to maintain her usual degree of cleanliness and good grooming. but unacquainted with soap for two days! and without a collar! how could i ever summon courage to present myself to anybody in such a condition? had i been an old woman, i mightn't have cared. but i was a girl; and, being a girl, i suffered all of a girl's heartache and melancholy wretchedness when i remembered that it was sunday and that there was no hope of buying either collar or comb for twenty-four hours--if, indeed, i dared to spend any of my few remaining dimes and nickels for these necessities, which had suddenly soared to the heights of unattainable luxuries. in the full consciousness of my disreputable appearance, i hung in the doorway, reluctant to fare forth in the cruel light of the thoroughfare. hitherto i had had the street all to myself, so it had not mattered so much how i looked. but now an empty car hurtled by, its gong breaking for the first time the silence of the long vista stretching away and dipping southward to the battery. then another car came speeding along from the opposite direction, whirled past grace church, and northward around the curve at fourteenth street; and following in the wake of the car, a hansom-cab with a jaded man and woman locked in each other's arms and fast asleep. as the latter passed close to the curb, i drew into the embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by the cabman--as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not; but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood. it was then that i noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts to "primp." "wanted--girls to learn flower-making. paid while learning. apply monday morning at nine o'clock." i repeated the street-number over and over, so as to make sure of remembering it; and then, screwing up my courage, walked hurriedly up the street, trying to ignore the glances which were cast at me by occasional pedestrians. i happened to think of a large dairy lunch-room on fourteenth street where i had several times gone for coffee and rolls, and where the cashier and waitresses knew me by sight, and where i thought, by investing in a cup of coffee, i might tidy up a bit in the toilet-room. if only the place should be open on sunday morning! and it was. the cashier had just stepped into her cage-like desk, and the waitresses were lined up in their immaculate white aprons and lace head-dresses. i was their first customer, apparently. the cashier, a pretty, amiable girl, suppressed any surprise she may have felt at my appearance, and greeted me with the same dazzling smile with which she greeted every familiar face. i explained to her what i wanted to do, apologizing for my slovenliness. she was all sympathetic attention, her eyes snapped with good-humored interest, and she told me to go back and take all the time i wanted to wash up. in a few minutes she sent me, by one of the waitresses, a fresh piece of soap, a comb, a bit of pumice-stone, a whisk-broom, a nail-file, a pair of curved nail-scissors, a tiny paper parcel containing some face-powder, and, wonder of wonders, a beautifully clean, fresh, shining collar! before the big, shimmering mirrors i washed and splashed to my heart's content and to the infinite advantage of my visage. how delicious it was to see and hear and feel the clear, hot water as it rushed from the silver faucet into the white porcelain bowl! i washed and i washed, i combed and i combed, until there was absolutely no more excuse for doing either; then i powdered my face, just enough to take the shine off, filed my finger-nails, brushed my clothing, put on my borrowed collar, and stepped out into the eating-room, feeling, if not looking, like the "perfect lady" which the generous-hearted cashier declared i resembled "as large as life." "never mind about the collar; you can just keep it," she said when i returned her toilet articles. "it's not worth but a few cents, anyway, and i've got plenty more of them.... don't mention it at all; you're perfectly welcome. i didn't do anything more for you than i'd expect you to do for me if i was in such a pickle. if we working girls don't stand up and help one another, i'd like to know who's going to do it for us.... so long!" "so long!" it was not the first time that i had heard a working girl deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore i had always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it was and is. but from the lips of that kind-hearted woman it fell upon my ears with a sort of lingering sweetness. it was redolent of hope and good cheer. the home for working girls i found, not very far away from this lunch-room, in one of the streets south of fourteenth street and well over on the east side. it was a shabby, respectable, unfriendly-looking building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. on the cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on end. a polite pull at the rusty handle of the bell-cord brought no response, and i rang again, a little louder. a chain was rattled and a bolt drawn back. the lid of the black coffin flew open, disclosing, with the suddenness of a jack-in-the-box, a withered old beldam with a large brass key clutched in a hand that trembled violently with palsy. she grumbled inarticulately, and with a jerk of her head motioned me into a small room opening off the hall, while she closed and locked the door with the great brass key. the little reception-room, or office, was no more cheerful than the front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect. arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous terms of the wrath of god toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. and then, at intervals, the vindictive utterances were broken by pictures--these, too, of a religious or pseudo-religious nature. one of these pictures particularly attracted my attention. it was entitled "hope leaning upon faith," and showed an exceedingly sentimental young girl leaning heavily upon an anchor, her eyes lifted heavenward, where the sun was just breaking through black clouds, and all against a perspective of angry sea. i was trying to apply its symbolism to my own case, when a sharp, metallic voice inquired abruptly: "what did you wish?" i turned about quickly. a tall, hard-faced woman of forty or thereabouts stood in the door, and looked at me coldly through spectacles that hooked behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very top of the head. she was the personification of neatness, if such be the word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly spinster. she wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as i was shortly to discover, had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "old gum heels." what her real name was i never found out. nobody knew. she was the most hated of all our tormentors; and in all of the weeks i was to remain in the house over which she was one of the supervisors, i never heard her referred to by any other than the very disrespectful cognomen already quoted. but i am anticipating. "i would like to get board here," i replied timidly, for the very manner of the woman had in it an acid-like quality which bit and burned the sensibilities like vitriol does the flesh. "have you any money?" "not very much." "how much?" she demanded. "about one dollar." "what baggage have you?" "none," i replied, and related as well as my embarrassment would allow me the story of the fire and of my flight from henrietta, not forgetting the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. she listened in silence, and when i had finished i thought i saw the repression of a smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. then she motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. the sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "old gum heels" stopped here, and was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of the contents upon the floor. "julia, take this girl along with you to mrs. pitbladder's room, and tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging." and then to me: "mrs. pitbladder is the matron. you will pay your money to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for inmates.--and then, julia, hurry back to the kitchen; i'll need you right away." "yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she proceeded laboriously up the stairs. at the landing she stopped to draw breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little arms. she was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. this was swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. judged, however, by the close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. the child leaned her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, i reciprocated. she was evidently sizing me up. i smiled, and she screwed her full, sensitive mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a deep, contralto voice, she spoke. what she said i didn't hear, or rather didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep, beautiful sound. i apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said. "your skirt--it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious garment. "i'm very glad you like it," i laughed, "for it's the only skirt i have"; and i picked up the heavy pitcher and carried it up the rest of the way, the child following me, holding up her apron skirts with both hands to keep from stumbling, and making a ringing, metallic noise as the copper toes struck the wood at every rise. she took the pitcher at the head of the stairs without comment, but with a look full of diffident gratitude. stopping before one of the doors, the child rapped timidly--so timidly, in fact, that it could scarcely be heard. no answer coming, she rapped again, this time a little louder, and a woman's shrill voice screamed, "come in!" "mis' pitbladder, the lady down-stairs says as this is a young girl what wants to have a talk with youse about coming here," my little guide announced all in one breath, and almost before the door had entirely swung open upon the group within, consisting of an old lady and two little girls. the old lady was in a comfortable state of dishabille; the little girls each wore big checked gingham aprons like julia's, and buttoned down the back with the same big, white bone buttons. one of them was waving mrs. pitbladder's hair with a crimping-iron which she heated in a gas-jet before the bureau; the other child was laboriously working at one of the pudgy hands with a pair of nail-scissors. "come in, come in, and don't stand there with the door open," mumbled the bowed figure in the armchair, who held a twisted bit of uncrimped forelock between her teeth to keep it from getting mixed with what was already waved, and which fell over her face so that i could not see her features. "so you want to come here to board with us, my dear?" began the masked one, which was the signal for an exchange of grave winks between the hairdresser, the manicure, and the little slavey, julia, who was pouring the hot water into the pitcher on the washstand. "if i could arrange it," i replied quickly, taking courage from the woman's kindly manner of putting the question, which was in such startling contrast to that of the dragon down-stairs. "you are a working girl, are you, my dear?" "i want to be. i'm looking for work now, and i hope to get a job in a few days. i understand your rates are very low, and that i can live here cheaper than almost anywhere else." "and who sent you here, my dear?" in answer to this i told her my story almost in totality, leaving out only such details as could not possibly have concerned her. perfect candor, i was fast learning, was the only way in which one in my desperate situation could hope for any degree of sympathetic treatment, as the time for all silly pride was passed. then mrs. pitbladder explained the system upon which the house was run. i could have a room all to myself for a dollar and a half a week, or i could sleep in the dormitory for ten cents a night, or fifty cents a week; all terms payable in advance. the latter fact she was particular to impress upon me. as to food, she named a price which fairly took away my breath. six cents each for meals--six cents each for breakfast, dinner, and supper! i said at once i would become a boarder, and that i would take a cot in the dormitory, for which i would pay from night to night. at this juncture the girl who answered to the name of may finished undulating the last strand of gray hair, and as she lifted it off her mistress's face that lady raised her head and we looked at each other for the first time. she was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy, and very fat. mrs. pitbladder's face was a surprise to me, for all it was a round, red face--the very sort of face in which one would have expected good nature to repose. its predominating features were a huge, beaked nose and high cheek-bones which encroached to an alarming degree upon the eye-sockets, wherein little dark, furtive eyes regarded me fixedly. it was a face which even the most unsophisticated observer could scarcely fail to characterize as that of a woman hardened in every sort of petty tyranny, a woman who, having the power to make others uncomfortable, found infinite pleasure in doing so, quite apart from any motive of selfish interest. to be sure, i did not read all this in mrs. pitbladder's face by the end of our first meeting. the supreme question to be settled, the only one which had for me a vital interest then, was how long i might still put off utter destitution in the event of my not finding work within the ensuing week. the terms were always in advance, mrs. pitbladder again repeated, as she entered my name and age in a long book which may brought from the dark mahogany desk that matched the rest of the well-made furniture in the spacious room. i would now pay her, she said, ten cents for the bed i was to sleep in that night, and my board money would be paid meal by meal to the woman in charge of the dining-room. i gave her a twenty-five-cent piece. i had remaining three other silver quarters. i watched my twenty-five-cent piece drop into mrs. pitbladder's purse, and heard the greedy mouth of that receptacle snap shut. "mintie," mrs. pitbladder spoke briskly, "show this girl to the sitting-room, and then go and find mrs. lumley and tell her to come to me at once." mintie, who had now finished lacing the matron's shoes, rose eagerly and, with a shy glance toward me, made for the door. i hesitated, and looked at mrs. pitbladder. "you may go now," she said, with a wave of the pudgy hand. "excuse me," i replied, considerably abashed, quite as much by the curious looks of the little girls as by the annoyance of having to remind the matron about the fifteen cents change still due me--"excuse me, but i gave you twenty-five cents." "and i gave you your change, my dear," the matron returned suavely but decisively. "i beg your pardon for contradicting you," i replied firmly, and without taking my eyes from hers, which blinked unpleasantly. "you did _not_ give me any change." "look in your purse and see," said mrs. pitbladder. "it is quite unnecessary," i replied; "but i will do so to satisfy you"; and i opened the purse again and showed my three remaining silver pieces, which to further satisfy her i took out upon my palm and then turned the purse's lining inside out. but mrs. pitbladder did not seem impressed. i for my part resolved to be equally insistent, inspired as i was with the determination that comes to desperate people. there were fifteen cents due me, and nobody should cheat me out of a single one of those precious pennies if i could possibly prevent it. there was a short silence in which we took each other's measure, the children looking on in evident enjoyment of the situation. finally the old lady opened the purse again and gave me the change due, though she grumblingly maintained that it was i, not she, who was in error. when the door closed at last upon us, my small companion clutched my hand and gave it a jubilant squeeze. "golly! that did me good," she whispered as we were going down-stairs. "she always lets on to make mistakes about the girls' change, only most of 'em is so scairt of her they just let her beat them out of it." while the child went to find mrs. lumley i waited in the sitting-room. it was an empty, ugly place, with bare floors and whitewashed walls, the latter decorated, like those of the office, with framed scriptural texts. its furniture consisted of several long, slat-bottomed settees and a single large rocking-chair which, crowded with children, was swinging noisily over the bare boards. at our entrance the chair stopped rocking, and one of the children climbed out. it was julia. she came promptly over to my side, while a half-dozen of the other children jumped off the benches and ran to the rocking-chair to squabble over the question of who should take the vacant place. "did yez have a row?" she asked eagerly. "say, did yez?" i evaded the question, thinking it neither advisable nor proper to satisfy the curiosity of the little mite. to divert her attention, i began questioning her about herself and her little companions--who were they, what were they, and how did they come to be here? "why, don't you know?" the little one asked, looking at me in amazement. "we're waifs!" "waifs! what sort of waifs?" "why, just waifs." "but i didn't know this was an orphan-asylum," i said, looking about at the children sitting in rows of two and three upon the scattered settees. "oh, no, ma'am. we're not orfants," the child hastened to correct me; "we're just waifs." "and where are your fathers and mothers, then?" i cried. "we ain't got none," julia replied promptly, the little hand again stealing through the long sleeve and stroking my much-admired skirt. she had now snuggled down beside me upon the settee, and instinctively, rather than from any desire to show friendliness, i drew my arm about the small shoulders, which overture was interpreted as an invitation for the cropped head to nestle closer. "but if you haven't father or mothers, then you must be orphans," i reasoned,--an argument which made julia straighten up suddenly and look at me in puzzled wonderment. "no, we ain't orfants, neither, exceptin' just a few that did onct have fathers and mothers, mebbe; but me and may wistaria and mintie delancy--they was the girls you seen up-stairs in her room--we never did have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs too that's playing in the rocking-chair. they was all foundling-asylum kids." at this moment a thick-set woman in a black dress appeared in the doorway, which was a signal for all the little girls to make an onslaught upon her. they twined their arms about her large waist, they hung three and four upon each of her generous, kindly arms, and the smaller girls held on to her skirts. thus encumbered, the good mrs. lumley introduced herself in an asthmatic voice which was scarcely more than a whisper, and in a manner as kindly as it was humble. then she shoved the children back to their benches, and led me up-stairs to the dormitory; showing me the cot where i was to sleep, the lavatory where i would make my toilet in the mornings, and the bath-room where i had the privilege of taking a bath once a week. she also told me the rules of the house: first bell at six o'clock, when everybody in the dormitory must rise and dress; second bell at half-past six, when everybody must leave the dormitory, not to return until bedtime. as to that hour, it came at various times: for the waifs it was seven o'clock; for the regular lodgers, ten o'clock; and for the transients, from seven till twelve o'clock, at which hour the house was closed for the night. all this mrs. lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was revealed in her homely countenance. she was a working matron, a sort of upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, i gradually gleaned from her, had been started as a home for destitute children and had eventually assumed the character and discharged the functions of a girls' lodging-house. under what auspices the house was conducted she didn't know any more than did i, any more than i know to this day. there was a board of managers,--ladies who sometimes came to look at the dormitories and the bath-rooms and then went away again in their carriages; there was the matron, mrs. pitbladder, who had been there four or five years, she thought, but wasn't certain; there were several under-matrons, who acted as teachers to the children. what did the children study? reading and writing and arithmetic and the bible; and then, as soon as they were old enough, they were turned into the sewing-room, where they were taught dressmaking, or into the laundry, where they learned to do fine laundry-work. all this sounded just and good, and i began to alter my opinion of the place. i even began to think that perhaps mrs. pitbladder was merely absent-minded and a little crotchety; that she had not meant to forget my fifteen cents change. i did not know until several days later that the house did a large dressmaking and laundry business, and that their advertisement appeared, and does to this day appear, in all the daily newspapers. it was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered talks we had at night after we were in bed, that i learned this and innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that followed served to confirm. to this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all sorts of tender years, came from god only knows where--i could never find out exactly--some of them, perhaps, from city asylums, some from the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. they came as little children, and they went away as grown women. for them the home was practically a prison. locked in here from morning till night, week in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the matrons. in return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches, and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been snatched. "you won't eat here?" mrs. lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs again. to which i replied with a "yes, why not? i have arranged with mrs. pitbladder to do so." we were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor. she glanced apprehensively at mrs. pitbladder's door, into which a small blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with mrs. pitbladder's breakfast. when it had closed again, she looked at me hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence. then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she replied with a brief-- "i wouldn't, if i was you. you can't stand it." "but i'll have to stand it," i returned; "i'm as poor as anybody here." she shook her head. "but you couldn't work on it--you're not used to it. i can see that. besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. you'd better go out. i wouldn't even eat here to-day. i wouldn't begin it. there's a little lunch-room over on third avenue where you can get enough to eat, and just as cheap as here." the woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to say urgent, that i felt instinctively that there was something more in all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals she warned me against. so i was not surprised when she said slowly and insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way: "you know the misunderstanding you had this morning--about the change?" "yes," i answered, more mystified than ever. then, as she looked me full in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and i saw the old woman up-stairs in a character as startling as it was infamous. "well," mrs. lumley said, when she saw that i understood; and with that she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. we parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the house, and i to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room. the afternoon i spent sitting in union square, whence i went at half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where i had made my toilet in the morning. i had had no luncheon, feeling that i could not afford more than two meals a day now. i sat a long time over my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. i did not want to return to that dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to bed. the very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling. i returned a few minutes before seven, just in time to hear the children singing the last stanza of "beulah land" as i passed up-stairs to the dormitory on the third floor. an old woman sat outside the door, crocheting a shawl in such light as she could get from a blue-shaded night-lamp that hung in the middle of the great whitewashed room within. she looked up from her work long enough to challenge me with a shrewd, impertinent look of inquiry, demanded to know if i had any lead-pencils about my person, and, receiving a polite negative, allowed me to pass. i was not the first arrival. in the dim light i could make out, here and there, a bulging surface in the row of gray-blanketed cots, while in the quiet i could hear the deep breathing of the sleepers. for they all seemed to be asleep, save one who tossed from one side to the other and sighed wearily. the latter was not far away from my own cot, and before i had finished undressing she was sitting up looking at me. "i'd give anything for a drink of water," she said softly. "why, is there no water?" i whispered. the words were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply: "no talking, girls!" the thirsty girl dropped back to her pillow, and i crept under the blanket. later on i learned that each must have her drink of water before entering the dormitory, because, once there, it was an iron-clad rule that we should not leave until after the rising-bell had rung at six the next morning. i also learned, later on, that had there not been also an iron-clad rule against carrying lead-pencils into the dormitory, the snowy-white walls were like as not to be scrawled with obscenities during the night hours. all sorts of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this working-girls' home. most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad." when, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed. and these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the frightful testimony of their innate depravity. fortunately for me, i was quite ignorant on this first night of what the character of the girls under the gray blankets might in all possibility have been, and i settled myself to go to sleep with the thought that a working-girls' home was not half bad, after all. a little while later there was a fresh burst of childish voices and the clatter of shoes on the stairs. it was the orphans marching up to bed singing "happy day!" the music stopped when they reached the dormitory door, which they entered silently, two by two. their undressing was but the matter of a few moments, so methodical and precise was every movement. the small aprons and petticoats were folded across the foot of each cot, and, on top, the long black stockings laid neatly. each pair of copper-toed shoes was placed in exactly the same spot under the foot of each cot, and each little body, after wriggling itself into a gray flannellet nightgown, dropped to its knees and bowed its head upon the blanket in silent prayer. after they had tucked themselves in bed a voice very near me, and which i recognized as julia's, whispered: "may, are yez asleep?" "no," muttered may. "say, is to-morrow bean day or molasses day?" "bean," replied may; and then all was silent in the dormitory, and so remained save for the interruption caused by the tiptoe entrance of some newly arrived "transient," some homeless wanderer driven here to seek a night refuge. in the morning we washed and combed in a large common toilet-room. there were only a dozen face-bowls, and these we had to watch our chance to pounce upon. i waited until the rush was over, and after the orphans had scurried down to their breakfast i performed a more leisurely toilet. two other girls were there, doing the same thing. i recognized them as transient lodgers, like myself, wanderers that had drifted in. both were very young, and one, whom i had heard sigh, and who groaned continuously in her sleep, very, very pretty. the latter entered into conversation as we combed before the long, narrow glass. "do you stay here all the time?" i asked. no, she had been living with her "lady-friend"; and that lady-friend having departed to the country for lack of employment until times would pick up, she was looking about for a boarding-house. the subject of work gave me my opportunity, and i asked her if she knew of a job. she shook her head. she was a skirt-hand; she had worked in a broadway sweat-shop, and didn't know anything about any other sort of work. as we talked she finished her toilet, putting on as the finishing touch a great picture-hat and a scanty black eton. ready for the street, you would have little dreamed that she had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. after going through a sort of inspection by the old woman at the entrance, during which it was ascertained we had not pilfered anything, we were allowed to depart. xii in which i spend a happy four weeks making artificial flowers bright and early, after a four-cent breakfast, i was on my way to find the place where i had read the sign, "flower-makers wanted.--paid while learning." it was not difficult to find, even had i not had the number so securely tucked away in my memory. "flowers & feathers," in giant gilded letters, i read a block away, as i dodged electric cars and motor vehicles, and threaded the maze of delivery wagons and vans. i had a hasty interview with the superintendent, a large and effusively polite man, whose plump white hands sparkled with gems. he put me on the freight-elevator and told the boy to show me to miss higgins. at the third floor the iron doors were thrown open, and i stepped into what seemed to be a great, luxuriant garden. the room was long and wide, and golden with april sunshine, and in the april breeze that blew through the half-open windows a million flowers fluttered and danced in the ecstacy of spring. flowers, flowers, flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room. "the lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them american beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear. i passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like blossoming hedges. through the green of branches and leaves flashed the white of shirt-waists, and among the scarlet and purple and yellow and blue of myriad flowers bobbed the smiling faces of girls as they looked up from their task long enough to inspect the passing stranger. here were no harsh sounds, no rasping voices, no shrill laughter, no pounding of engines. everything just as one would expect to find it in a flower-garden--soft voices humming like bees, and gentle merriment that flowed musically as a brook over stones. "the lady with the black hair" sat before a cleared space on a table banked on either side with big red roses. in front of her were three or four glasses, each containing one salmon-colored rose, fresh and fragrant from the hothouse. leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm, she was staring intently at these four splendid blooms. then she picked up a half-finished muslin rose and compared them. all this i saw while i waited timidly for her to look up. but she did not see me. she was absorbed in the study of the living rose. at last i summoned courage to inquire if she was miss higgins. she started, looked up quickly, and nodded her head, with a smile that displayed a row of pretty teeth. her manner was cordial. "have you ever worked at flowers before?" she asked. "no." "ever worked at feathers?" "no." "well, the best i can do is to put you at blossom-making to-day, and see how you take to it. it's too bad, though, you don't know anything about feathers; for the flower season ends in a month, anyway, and then i have to lay off all my girls till september, unless they can make feathers too. then they get jobs on the next floor. there'll be lots of work here, though, for a month, and we might take you back in september." the tone was so kindly, the interest so genuine, that i was prompted to explain my situation, assuring her i should be glad to get work even for four weeks. as a result, i was put on rosenfeld's pay-roll for three and a half dollars per week, with half a day's extra pay for night work: the latter had been a necessity three or four nights every week for six months, and was likely to continue for two, maybe three, weeks longer. besides the assurance of extra pay from this source, miss higgins also intimated, as she conducted me to one of the tables, that if i was "able to make good" she would raise me to four dollars at the end of the week. soon i was "slipping up" poppies under the instruction of bessie, a dreamy-eyed young jewess. the process was simple enough, to watch the skilled fingers of the other girls, but it was very tedious to my untried hand. in awkward, self-conscious fashion i began to open out the crimped wads of scarlet muslin which came to us hot from the crimping-machine. "you mustn't smooth the creases out too much," bessie protested; and with a deft touch, the right pull here, the proper flattening there, the muslin scrap blossomed into a fluttering corolla. "don't get discouraged. we've all got to learn," one of the girls at the far end of the table called out cheerily. "yes, and don't be afraid of making a mistake," put in my vis-à-vis, a pretty italian. "we all make mistakes while we're learning; but you'll find this a nice place to work, and miss higgins is so lovely--she's awful nice, too, to the new girls." "yes, indeed," added bessie. "it isn't many years since she worked at the table herself. i've often heard her tell about the first day she went to work down at golderberg's." "that's the worst in town," piped another; "i stayed there just two days. that was enough for me. whenever the girls disagree down there, they step out into the hall and lick each other. first day i was there, one girl got two ribs broken. her rival just walked all over her." "what did they do with the girls?" "oh, nothing. they made it all up, and were as sweet as two turtle-doves, walking around the workroom with their arms around each other." "well, that's what it is to work in those cheap shops," commented annie welshons, of the big blue eyes and yellow hair. "if they ever do get respectable girls, they won't stay long." as we worked the conversation ran easily. the talk was in good, up-to-date english. there was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live questions of the day. the topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an intelligent point of view. "are you american born?" bessie inquired by and by. the question sounded unusual, almost unnecessary, until i discovered that out of the eight girls in our immediate circle, only half were native americans. my vis-à-vis, therese, was a neapolitan; mamie, a genoese; amelia was born in bohemia; the girl with the yellow hair was north german; and nellie declared she was from county killarney and mighty glad of it. "well, i'm an american," said bessie, tossing her head in mock scorn, as she cleared away a quantity of the flowers that had been meanwhile accumulating on the wire lines. therese laughed. "but only by the skin of your teeth--an eleventh-hour arrival." then she turned to me and whispered that bessie was born only two weeks after her mother came to this country. "better late than never," laughed bessie, casting a backward and withering glance at the aliens as she moved away with her trayful of scarlet blossoms to the branchers' table, where another relay of workers twisted green leaves among the scarlet and tied them in wreaths and bunches. by eleven o'clock i had made two dozen poppies, which amelia told me was "just grand for a beginner." i began to feel confident that i should hold the job, and my fingers flew. into the glue-pot at my right hand i dipped my little finger, picking up at the same moment with my other hand a bit of paper-covered wire. on the end of the wire was a bunch of short yellow threads, which were touched lightly with my glue-smeared finger, the wire being held between the thumb and forefinger. with the free left hand, i caught up a fluttering corolla, touching its perforated center with glue; then i "slipped up" the wire about an inch, took up another corolla in the same way, and then drew the two to the "pipped" or heart end of the wire, where they now became a big red flower with a golden eye. a bit of dark-green rubber tubing drawn over the wire completed the process, the end was bent into a hook, and the full-blown poppy hung on the line. at a quarter past eleven a little girl wearing an immense flower-hat and carrying a large market-basket came and asked us for our lunch orders. she carried a long piece of pasteboard and wrote as the girls dictated. one could buy anything one wanted, bessie explained; bread and butter, eggs, chops, steak, potatoes, canned goods, for which there was ample provision for cooking on the gas-stoves used by the rose-makers to heat their pincers. when the little girl was gone i learned that she was one of the errand-runners, and that this was her daily task. "how far does she go to market?" "over to first avenue." "isn't that pretty far for a small girl to carry such a heavy load?" "oh, she doesn't mind it. all the errand-girls are tickled to death to get the job. the grocers pay them ten per cent. commission on all they buy." it lacked but a few minutes of twelve when the child returned, panting under her burden. "how much did you clear to-day?" somebody asked. "twenty-one cents," the child answered, blushing as red as the poppies. when miss higgins slipped her tall, light figure into her stylish jacket and began to pin on her hat it was always a sign that the lunch-hour had come. one hundred and twenty girls popped up from their hiding-places behind the hedges, which had grown to great height since morning. in a trice spaces were cleared on the tables. cups and saucers and knives and forks appeared as if by magic. in that portion of the room where the crimping-machines stood preparations for cooking commenced. the pincers and tongs of the rose-makers, and the pressing-molds of the leaf-workers, were taken off the fires, and in their place appeared stew-pans and spiders, and pots and kettles. bacon and chops sputtered, steak sizzled; potatoes, beans, and corn stewed merrily. what had been but lately a flower-garden, by magic had become a mammoth kitchen filled with appetizing sounds and delicious odors. white-aproned cooks scurried madly. it was like a school-girls' picnic. as they moved about i noticed how well dressed and neat were my shop-mates in their white shirt-waists and dark skirts. indeed, in the country village i had come from any one of them would have appeared as the very embodiment of fashion. cooked and served at last, we ate our luncheon at leisure, and with the luxury of snowy-white table-cloths and napkins of tissue-paper, which needs of the workroom were supplied in prodigal quantities. during this hour i heard a great deal about the girls and their work. they told me, as they told all new-comers, of the wonderful rise of miss higgins, who began as a table-worker at three and a half dollars a week, and was now making fifty dollars. they told me of her rise from the best rose-maker in new york to designer and forewoman. they dwelt on her kindness to everybody, discussed her pretty clothes, and wondered which of her beaux she was going to marry. all afternoon i "slipped up" poppies. at five miss higgins came to tell me i was "doing fine," and that i should have four dollars instead of three and a half. this made the work easier than ever, and my fingers flew happily till six o'clock. then we cooked dinner as we did our luncheon, but we took only half an hour for our evening meal, so as to get off at half-past nine instead of ten. at night the work was harder, as the room became terribly hot from the gas-jets and from the stoves where the rose-makers heated their tools. the faces grew tired and pale, and the girls sang to keep themselves awake. "the rabbi's daughter," "the city of sighs and tears," and "the banquet in misery hall" were the favorite songs. a rising breeze swept up broadway, now almost deserted, and rushed through the windows, setting all our blossoms fluttering. outside a soft, warm spring rain began to fall on the tired, sleepy city. one week, two weeks, passed in these pleasant surroundings. i was still "slipping up" poppies all day long, and every evening till half-past nine. then i went home to the little cot in the dormitory of the "home." it would seem that all the world's wife and daughters were to wear nothing but poppies that season. but ours was only a small portion of rosenfeld's output. violets, geraniums, forget-me-nots, lilies-of-the-valley, apple-blossoms, daisies, and roses of a score of varieties were coming to life in this big garden in greater multitudes even than our common poppies. forty girls worked on roses alone. the rose-makers are the swells of the trade. they are the best paid, the most independent, and always in competitive demand during the flower season. any one can learn with patience how to make other kinds of flowers; but the rose-maker is born, and the thoroughly experienced rose-maker is an artist. her work has a distinction, a touch, a "feel," as she calls it, which none but the artist can give. the star rose-maker of the shop, next to the forewoman (who was reputed the finest in america), was about twenty-five. her hair was fluffy and brown, and her eyes big and dark blue. she was of irish birth, and had been in america about fourteen years. one day i stopped at her chair and asked how long it took her to learn. "i'm still learning," she replied, without looking up from the tea-rose in her fingers. "it was seven years before i considered myself first-class; and though i'm at it now thirteen, i don't consider i know it all yet." she worked rapidly, flecking the delicate salmon-colored petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the fast-growing rose. i watched her pinch and press and crease each frail petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and smiled. "want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for my inspection. she laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. calloused and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly all semblance to the other. "it is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing her pincers from the fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed with the work. "we use them every minute. we crease the petals with them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. and we always have to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin." "how many can you make a day?" "that depends on the rose. this sort--" picking up a small, cheap june rose--"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. but i have made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job. each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however; and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place. if one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been spoiled. but they don't make many of such complicated roses in this country. they have to import them. they haven't enough skilled workers to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with small orders." the girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of two. she had no rival to whom this surplus work could be turned over. the dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her comrades had they been equally skilled. she made from twenty-two to twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to take a vacation. the other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. they were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer grade of roses. the third week came and went all too quickly, and we were now entering on the fourth. plainly the season was drawing to its close. the orders that had come pouring in from milliners and modistes all over the land for six months were now dwindling daily. the superintendent and the "boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk about overproduction. friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. the girls' faces were grave. almost without exception, there were people at home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. i have not talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have always some one at home to care for. a few were widows with small children at home or in the day nursery. one can tell little, by their appearance, about these secret burdens. each girl wears a mask. the neat costume, made with her own hands in midnight hours snatched from hard-earned rest, is no evidence of extravagance, or even of comfortable circumstances. it is only that manifestation of proper pride and self-respect which the best type of wage-earning woman is never without. if they sometimes talk happily about theaters and parties and beaux, if occasionally there is a brief spell of innocent hilarity in the workroom, it is only the inevitable and legitimate outcropping of healthy and wholesome animal spirits, of a vigorous hope which not even the hard conditions of life can crush. on saturday morning many of the girls sat idle. "don't work too fast, or you'll work yourself out of a job," one cried in jest; but the meaning was one of dead earnest. and as the day passed the prophecy came true to one after another. in the afternoon we made a feint of work by papering wires and opening petals for those who were still busy. the hours passed drearily. miss higgins was going over her pay-roll, checking off the names of the girls who could make feathers as well as flowers. all others were to be laid off indefinitely that night. we watched anxiously for the moment, which was not far off. "i hope miss higgins won't cry--she did last year. it breaks her up terribly to let us off," somebody remarked. "it's a long time to be idle--till september," i suggested to the girl across the work-table. she looked up in surprise. "idle!" she exclaimed. "but we are never idle. we daren't. we get other jobs." "what?" "oh, everything: waitress in a summer boarding-house, novelty goods, binderies, shirt-waists, stores, anything we can get." "she's coming," some one whispered. everybody tried to look unconcerned. those who had no work to claim attention looked carefully at their finger-nails, or found sudden necessity to adjust collars and belts. miss higgins passed along the tables, bending over the heads and speaking to each in a low voice. the tears were running down her cheeks. those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions. the warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than tears. from the far end of the room i heard an unaccustomed sound, and turning, i saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the forget-me-not table, her face buried in her arms, and sobbing like a child. it was the signal that her cruel duty was done, that the last "lay-off" sentence had been pronounced, that the work for the day and for the "season" was over, that it had come time to say good-by. "good-by!" the voices echoed as we trooped down-stairs to the street door. "good-by! good-by!" the lingering farewells rose faintly above the noises of broadway, as we scattered at the corner. good-by to rosenfeld's--now no longer a reality, but rather a memory of idyllic beauty--the workroom bright with sunshine and flashing with color, with the faces of the workers bent over the fashioning of rose and poppy, and best of all, the kind hearts and the quick sympathy that blossomed there as luxuriantly as the flowers themselves. good-by to my four happiest weeks in the workaday world. xiii three "lady-friends," and the adventures that befall them into every human experience there must come sooner or later the bitter consciousness that nature is remorselessly cruel; that she laughs loudest when we are most miserable; that she is never so bright, never so beautiful as in the darkest hour of our need; that she ever makes mock of our agony and ever smiles serenely at our despair. such, at least, were my feelings in those long, beautiful june days that followed close on the "lay-off" at rosenfeld's. dear little bessie! poor unhappy eunice! this chapter of my experiences is so dominated by their personalities that i shall devote a few words to recounting the circumstances which brought us together and sent us faring forth on a summer's day to seek new fortunes, three "lady-friends," arm in arm. i make no apology for saying "lady-friends." i know all the prejudices of polite society, which smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic of the working-girl world. and yet i use the term here in all seriousness, in all good faith; not critically, not playfully, but tenderly. because in the humble world in which our comradeship was formed there is none other to designate the highest type of friendship, no other phrase to define that affection between girl and girl which is as the love of sisters. in the great workaday world where we toiled and hoped and prayed and suffered together for a brief period we were called "the three lady-friends" by our shop-mates, and such we were to each other always, and such we shall be throughout the chapter; and i know, if bessie and eunice were here to-night, looking over my shoulder as i write the account of that sordid little tragedy and the part they played in it,--i know they would clasp their rough little hands in mine and nod approval. bessie had been my "learner" at rosenfeld's. i still remember her exactly as i saw her that first time, a slender little figure bending over the work-table. her shirt-waist was snowy-white, and fastened down--oh, so securely!--under the narrow leather belt; she had a wealth of straight blonde hair of that clear, transparent quality which, when heaped high on her head, looked like a mass of spun glass; her cheeks, which were naturally very pale, burned a deep crimson as they reflected the light on the poppies beneath; and after a while, when she raised her head, i saw that her eyes were blue, and that her profile, sharp and clear cut, was that of a young jewess. i had thought her to be about twenty-two,--for, pretty and fresh as she was, she looked every day of it,--but i found out later that she was not then eighteen. we had not been long getting acquainted--that is, as well acquainted as was possible in a busy shop like rosenfeld's. indeed, it would be a strange, sad world--stranger and sadder than it really is--if bessie and i had not sooner or later established a certain bond of intimacy. sitting opposite at the same work-table, we made poppies together and exchanged our little stories. she had been working, since she was fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store; running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy lunch-room; making picture-frames. this was her second season at flower-making, and she liked it better than anything she had ever tried, if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to sit idle through the long summer months--well, i should say not!--with eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! the experiences of a score of shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy years, bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest with lifelike reality. scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where i was now living. for to bessie, with her inborn racial love of family, nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter there. she seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. i told her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her duties,--which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. for such offenses, and they happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of the sour, autocratic matron. as each night brought a fresh relay of girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes, which i related faithfully to bessie. that is how she became interested in eunice. the latter had come tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next to mine. in the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her face, i saw, as i peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was no common type of waif and stray. there was an elusive charm in the glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that enveloped them like a death-mask. as i was gazing furtively at her she turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind is gone forever. such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. several times, waking in the night, i had listened pityingly to the same half-smothered lament. on this night i had fallen asleep as usual, when suddenly a shriek rang out, and i wakened to hear the angry accents of the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately disturbed. in a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor. it was then, all sleep gone for that night, i reached out my hand and touched the sleeve of her black dress. from that moment we became friends. the information which she vouchsafed about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon her former condition and environment. it was obvious that there had been a tragedy in her life, and i instinctively guessed what that tragedy was, although i respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no indiscreet questions. she was fairly well educated, had been brought up in a small new jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. between that job and her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she vaguely referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on everything." she had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. her cot and three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the "home" kitchen. after a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there grew a film of silent misery. stirred by my fragmentary accounts of eunice's wretchedness, the generous-hearted bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into effect at rosenfeld's. and so, on the monday morning following that dreaded event, bessie met eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner of broadway and grand street, and together we applied for work at the r---- underwear company, which had advertised that morning for twenty operators. "ever run a power singer?" queried the foreman. "no, but we can learn. we're all quick," answered bessie, who had volunteered to act as spokesman. "yes, i guess you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at first. all come together?... so! well, then, i guess you'll want to work in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. the girls, who sat in long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms. every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying and endless strip of white that raced through a pair of hands to feed itself into the insatiable maw of the electric sewing-machine. every face, tense and stony, bespoke a superb effort to concentrate mind and body, and soul itself, literally upon the point of a needle. every form was crouched in the effort to guide the seam through the presser-foot. and piled between the opposing phalanxes of set faces were billows upon billows of foamy white muslin and lace--the finished garments wrought by the so-many dozen per hour, for the so-many cents per day,--and wrought, too, in this terrific, nerve-racking noise. the foreman led us into the middle of the room, which was lighted by gas-jets that hung directly over the girls' heads, although the ends of the shop had bright sunshine from the windows. he seemed a good-natured, respectable sort of man, of about forty, and was a jew. bessie and me he placed at machines side by side, and eunice a little farther down the line. then my first lesson began. he showed me how to thread bobbin and needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and on the electric current which operated the machinery. my first attempt to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever under the machine with my knee, i had accidently exploded a bomb. the foreman laughed good-naturedly at my fright. "you'll get used to it by and by," he shouted above the noise; "but like as not for a while you won't sleep very good nights--kind of nervous; but you'll get over that in a week or so," and he ducked his head under the machine to adjust the belt. suddenly, above all the frenzied crashing of the machines came a sound, half scream, half cackle: "yi! yi! my pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used to anything in this world." it was an old woman's voice, and looking across the table, i saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was grinning and nodding at me. "hello! hello there, miriam! what's eating you now?" shouted the foreman, emerging and scrambling to his feet as he turned to get bessie started. but the strange old creature only grinned wider and screeched, "yi! yi!" louder than ever. but i had not time, either, to look at or listen to her now, as i leaned over the machine and practised at running a straight seam. ah, the skill of these women and girls, and of the strange creature opposite, who can make a living at this torturing labor! how very different, how infinitely harder it is, as compared with running an ordinary sewing-machine. the goods that my nervous fingers tried to guide ran every wrong way. i had no control whatever over the fearful velocity with which the needle danced along the seam. in utter discouragement, i stopped trying for a moment, and watched the girl at my right. she was a swarthy, thick-lipped jewess, of the type most common in such places, but i looked at her with awe and admiration. in rachel goldberg's case the making of muslin, lace-trimmed corset-covers was an art rather than a craft. she was a remarkable operator even among scores of experts at the r----. under her stubby, ill-kept hands ruffles and tucks and insertion bands and lace frills were wrought with a beauty and softness of finish, and a speed and precision of workmanship, that made her the wonder and envy of the shop. and with what ease she seemed to do it all, despite the riveted eyes and tense-drawn muscles of her expressionless face! suddenly her machine stopped, she looked up with a loud yawn, and stretched her arms above her head. she acknowledged the flattery of my look with a patronizing smile and a "how-do-you-think-you're-going-to-like-your-job?" i answered the conventional question in the usual way, and remarked that she sewed as if she had done it for ever and ever, and as if it were no work at all. she shook her head. "yes, i've worked a long time at it, but my shoulder aches as bad this morning as it did when i was a learner like you," and she pressed the power-lever and again bent over the tucking. at my left bessie was also practising on running seams, and a little farther down we saw poor eunice struggling at the same hopeless lesson. the foreman, whose name proved to be isaacs,--"abe" isaacs,--brought us our first "lot" of work. mine consisted of six dozen coarse muslin corset-covers, which were already seamed together, and which i was shown how to "finish" with an embroidery yoke and ruffled edging about the arm's-eye. there is no basting, no pinning together of pieces; all the work is free-hand, and must be done with infinite exactness. i must hold the embroidery and the finishing strips of beading on the edge of the muslin with an exact nicety that will insure the edges of all three being caught in one seam; a process difficult enough on any sewing-machine, under any circumstances, but doubly so when the lightest touch sends the three-ply fabric under the needle with an incalculable velocity. result of my first hour's work: i had spoiled a dozen garments. try as i would, i invariably lost all control of my materials, and the needle plunged right and left--everywhere, in fact, except along the straight and narrow way laid out for it. and, to make matters still worse, i was painfully conscious that my old woman vis-à-vis was laughing at my distress with her irritating "yi, yi!" as i spoiled each garment i thrust it into the bottom of a green pasteboard box under the table, which held my allotment of work, and from the top of the box grabbed up a fresh piece. i glanced over my shoulder and saw that bessie was doing the same thing, although what we were going to do with them, or how account for such wholesale devastation of goods, we were too perturbed to consider. at last, however, after repeated trials, and by guiding the seam with laborious care, i succeeded in completing one garment without disaster; and i had just started another, when--crash!--flying shuttles and spinning bobbins and swirling wheels came to a standstill. my sewing-machine was silent, as were all the others in the great workroom. something had happened to the dynamo. there was a howl of disappointment. "yi, yi!" screamed the old woman, throwing up her hands in a gesture of unutterable disgust; and then, catching my eye, her wrinkled old lips parted in a smile of friendly interest. "how many did ye bungle?" she chuckled, leaning over and looking furtively up and down the room, as if afraid of being caught talking to me. i blushed in confusion that was half fright, and she raised a forefinger menacingly: "yi! yi! ye thought i didn't see ye sneaking the spoiled truck into the green box; but old miriam's got sharp eyes, she has, and she likes to watch you young uns when you comes in first. you're not the only one. they all spoil lots before they learn to make a living out of it. there's lots like ye!" and stooping over, she drew a handful of my botched work out of the box and began to rip the stitching. "that's all right; i'm glad to help ye!" she protested. "and sure, if we don't help each other, who's a-going to help us poor devils, i'd like to know?" i, too, busied myself with the task of ripping, which i saw bessie and eunice were also doing; in fact, all the new-comers of the morning could be thus singled out. the practised hands availed themselves of the enforced rest by yawning and stretching their arms, and by comparing the earnings of the morning; for we all worked on piece-work. rachel goldberg had finished four dozen of extra-fine garments, which meant seventy-five cents, and it was not yet eleven o'clock. she would make at least one dollar and sixty cents before the day was over, provided we did not have any serious breakdowns. she watched the clock impatiently,--every minute she was idle meant a certain fraction of a penny lost,--and crouched sullenly over her machine for the signal. "what are you thinking about, miriam?" a frowsy-headed girl asked, giving the wink to the crowd. the generous-hearted old lady looked up from the task she was helping me to do, and raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the gaslight, peered down the long line of girls until she placed the speaker. "yi, yi! ye want to know what i'm thinking about? well, mebbe, beckie frankenstein, i'm thinking what a beautiful world this is, and what a fine time you and me has," and the strange creature broke into a laugh that was more terrible than a sob. "ah, there you go again, miriam! what's eatin' you to-day?" cried the foreman, as he came along to inspect the work; and seeing miriam undoing my blunders, asked, "who did that?" before i could put in a half-frightened acknowledgment, my intercessor had spoken up: "and whose 'u'd them be but mine, abe isaacs?"--scowling at me to keep silence when i opened my mouth to contradict her. the foreman looked incredulous. "you, miriam! do you mean to tell me it was you spoiled all that work? what's the matter with you to-day, anyway? if you don't do better, i'll have to fire you." there was a good-natured tone, a kindly compassion, in abe isaacs's voice which was not in accord with the words; and when he turned and asked me what i had done, there was no fear in my heart. i answered by looking significantly at old miriam. "i thought as much," he muttered under his breath, and passed on to bessie. "poor old miriam, she's teched up here," one of the girls explained, tapping her forehead. "they say it was the old sweat-shops put her out of her mind, and i guess it's so, all right. my mother knows two ladies that was made crazy sewing pants up to sternberg's. but that was long ago, when they used to treat the girls so bad. things is ever so much better now, only miriam can't get used to the improvements. she's a hundred years behind the times." i was still lost in admiring wonder of rachel goldberg's skill. i asked her how long it would take me to learn to do it as well. she did not have a chance to answer before a harsh laugh was heard and a new voice asserted itself. "oh-ho! you'll never learn to work like her, and you'd better find it out now. i seen you running your machine, and i says to myself, 'that girl 'll never make her salt making underclothes.' pants 'd be more in your line. to make money on muslin you've got to be born to 't." "that's no lie, either," muttered another. "you bet it ain't!" declared the expert rachel. "my mother was working on shirts for a straight ten months before i was born." in half an hour we had resumed work, and at half-past twelve we stopped for another half-hour and ate luncheon--bessie, eunice, and i in a corner by ourselves. we held a conference, and compared notes of the morning's progress, which had been even more discouraging to poor eunice than to us; for to her it had brought the added misfortune of a row of stitches in her right forefinger. we counted up our profits for the morning, and the aggregate earnings of the three of us did not amount to ten cents. of course we would learn to do better, but it would take a long, long time, bessie was firmly convinced, before we could even make enough to buy our lunches. it was decided that one of us should resign the job that night, and the other two keep at it until the delegate found something better for us all and had tested the new job to her satisfaction. bessie was of course appointed, and the next morning eunice and i went alone, with plausible excuses for the absent bessie, for we had a certain delicacy about telling the real facts to so kind a foreman as "abe." the second day we had no better luck, and the pain between the shoulder-blades was unceasing. all night long i had tossed on my narrow cot, with aching back and nerves wrought up to such a tension that the moment i began to doze off i was wakened by a spasmodic jerk of the right arm as it reached forward to grasp a visionary strip of lace. that evening, as we filed out at six o'clock, bessie was waiting for us, her gentle face full of radiance and good news. even the miserable eunice was affected by her hopefulness. "oh, girls, i've got something that's really good--three dollars a week while you're learning, and an awful nice shop; and just think, girls!--the hours--i never had anything like it before, and i've knocked around at eighteen different jobs--half-past eight to five, and--" she paused for breath to announce the glorious fact--"girls, just think of it!--_saturday afternoons off_, all the year round." xiv in which a tragic fate overtakes my "lady-friends" the next morning we met on the corner, as usual, and bessie led us to our new job--led us through a world that was strange and new to both eunice and me, though poor eunice had little heart for the newness and the strangeness of it all. in and out, and criss-cross, we threaded our way through little narrow streets bordered with stately "sky-scrapers," and at last turned into maiden lane. we walked arm in arm till we came to an alley which bessie said was gold street. it is more of a zigzag even than maiden lane, and is flanked by dark iron-shuttered warehouses and factories. wolff's, our destination, was at the head of the street, and in a few minutes we were sitting side by side at the work-table, while our new forewoman, a cross-eyed irish girl, was showing us what to do and how to do it. making jewel-and silverware-cases was now our work. in the long, whitewashed workroom there were thirty other girls performing the same task, and on each of the five floors beneath there were as many more girls, pasting and pressing and trimming cases that were to hold rings, watches and bracelets, and spoons, knives, and forks--enough to supply all christendom, it seemed to me. as beginners we were given each a dozen spoon-boxes to cover with white leather and line with satin. it is light, pleasant work, and was such an improvement on the sweat-shop drudgery that even eunice smiled a little after a while. "is youse lady-friends?" the forewoman asked when, in the course of ten minutes, she came to inspect our progress; on receiving an affirmative reply, she scowled. "fiddlesticks! if i'd knowed youse was lady-friends, i'd jist told izzy he could get some other girls," and she walked off, still scowling. the girls about us giggled. "why doesn't miss gibbs like us to be lady-friends?" asked bessie. a young italian answered, "because they always git to scrappin'." we all laughed--even eunice--at such an ending to our friendship. "we had a fearful row here yisterday," spoke up another; "and they wuz lady-friends--thicker than sardines, they wuz--till they got on the outs about a feller down on pearl street; a diamond-cutter he wuz, and they wuz both mashed on him--a dutchman, too, he wuz, that wore ear-rings. i couldn't get mashed on a dutchman, ear-rings or no ear-rings, could you?" "what did they do?" asked bessie. "do! they snapped at each other all morning over the work-table, and then one of them called the other a name that wuz something awful, and she up and spit in her face for it." "well, i don't blame that girl for spitting in her face," interrupted a voice. "i don't blame her; lady-like or not lady-like, i'd have done the same thing. i'd spit in the president's face if i was in the white house and he was to call me such a name!" "and then what happened?" asked bessie. "oh, they just up and at each other like two cats, tumbling over a stack of them there white velvet necklace-cases, and bloodying up each other's faces something fierce; and then miss gibbs she called izzy; and izzy he fired them on the spot." despite these tales of strenuous conflicts, we were happy in our work at wolff's. our shop-mates were quiet, decent-looking girls, and their conversation was conspicuously clean--not always a characteristic of their class. miss gibbs, despite her justifiable prejudice against lady-friends, proved not unkind, and we congratulated ourselves as we bent over our work and listened to the cheerful hum of voices. after each case was finished,--after the satin linings and interlinings and the tuftings had been fitted and glued into their proper places, and the bit of leather drawn across the padded cover,--we could raise our eyes for a moment and look out upon a strange, fascinating world. the open windows on one side of the shop looked into the polishing-room of a neighboring goldsmith, and on the other side into a sunshiny workroom filled with swirling black wheels and flying belts among which the workmen kept up a dialogue in a foreign tongue. the latter place was near enough for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. all the long forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel and beginning all over again. late in the afternoon he came to the window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon so that the sunshine fell directly upon it, held it aloft for us to admire the great glittering gem that now sparkled deep-bedded in the ugly wax. "i gif you dat if you marry me!" cried the diamond-cutter, striking a dramatic attitude for bessie's benefit. thus one, two days passed swiftly, and we had learned to make jewel-cases with tolerable rapidity. we had a half-hour for luncheon, during which bessie, eunice, and i went off by ourselves to the rear of the shop, where we ate our sandwiches in silence and gazed out upon the forest of masts that filled the east river lying below. on the fourth day eunice and i ate luncheon alone. bessie did not come that morning, nor send any excuse. her absence gave me an opportunity, in this half-hour's respite from work, to get better acquainted with my silent and mysterious fellow-boarder; anything more than a most meager acquaintance was impossible at the place where we lived. like the majority of semi-charitable institutions, the "home" was conducted on the theory that the only safety to morals, as well as to pocket-books, was espionage and isolation. "it's awful up there, isn't it?" she remarked suddenly after we had discussed every possible cause for bessie's absence. "yes, isn't it?" i replied, somewhat surprised, for this was the first time the girl had ever expressed any opinion about anything, so fearful did she seem of betraying herself. "i suppose you often wonder what brought me there that night?" she went on. "you've told me your story, and you don't know anything at all about mine. you must often wonder, though you are too considerate to ask. but i'm going to tell you now without asking. it was to keep me from going there," pointing through the window down to the river. "i'd had a lot of trouble,--oh, a terrible lot of trouble,--and it seemed as if there wasn't any place for me; and i walked down to the edge of the river up there at the end of east fourteenth street, and something stopped me just when i was ready to jump in. why i didn't, i don't know," and the girl turned a stony face to the window. "why, it was hope and renewed courage, of course!" i replied quickly. "everybody gets blue spells--when one is down on one's luck." eunice shook her head. "no, it wasn't hope. it was because i was afraid--it was because i'm a coward. i'm too much of a coward to live, and i'm too much of a coward to die. you never felt as i do. you couldn't. i've lost my grip on everything. everything's gone against me, and it's too late now for things to change. you don't know--_you don't know_, you and bessie. if you did, you'd see how useless all your kindness is, in trying to get me to brace up. i've tried--my god! i have tried to feel that there's a life before me, but i can't--i can't. sometimes, maybe for a minute, i'll forget what's gone by, and then the next minute the memory of it all comes back with a fearful stab. there is something that won't let me forget." "hush! eunice; don't talk so loud," i whispered as her passionate voice rose above the hum of the other girls in a far portion of the room. "i tell you it's no use--it's no use. i've lost my grip on things, and i can never catch hold again. i thought, maybe, when i started out with you and bessie, and got to working again, there'd be a change. but there isn't any difference now from--from the night i went into that dormitory first. now with you it would be different. what's happened to me might, maybe, happen to you; but you could fight it down. there's something inside of you that's stronger than anything that can hurt you from the outside. most girls are that way. they get hurt--and hurt bad, and they cry a lot at the time and are miserable and unhappy; but after a while they succeed in picking themselves up, and are in the end as good, sometimes better, than ever. they forget in a little while all about it, and wind up by marrying some man who is really in love with them, and they are as happy as if nothing had ever happened." i looked at the occupant of cot no. with mingled feelings of pity and amazement--pity for the hopelessness of her case, now more apparent than ever; amazement at her keen and morbid generalizations. "how old are you, eunice?" "twenty-four," she replied--"oh, i know what you're going to say: that i have my whole life before me, and all that. but i haven't. my life is all behind me." "'i am the captain of my soul, i am the master of my fate,'" i quoted. "yes, you are; but i am not," she replied simply, and turned and looked at me with her hopeless eyes. poor, unfortunate eunice! that night, as we walked home together, she revealed a little more about herself by telling me that she had recently been discharged from the hospital on "the island." i did not need to inquire the nature of the illness that had left her face so white and drawn. brief as my experience had been among the humble inmates of the "home," i had learned the expediency of not being too solicitous regarding the precise facts of such cases. the next day was saturday, and still no bessie. as we worked we speculated as to her absence, and decided to spend the afternoon looking her up. meanwhile, although i had been managing to do my work a little better each day, eunice had not been succeeding so well. her apathy had been increasing daily, until she had lost any interest she might ever have had in trying to do her work well. on this morning the forewoman was obliged to give her repeated and sharp reproofs for soiling her materials and for dawdling over her work. "you seem to like to work," eunice said once, breaking a long silence. "not any better than you do, only i've got to, and i try to make the best of it." "yes, you do. you like to work, and i don't, and that's the difference between us. and it's all the difference in the world, too. if i liked work for its own sake, like you do, there'd be some hope for me living things down." "i wonder," she whispered, again breaking a long silence--"i wonder if bessie had any man after her." i looked up suddenly, perhaps indignantly, and my reply was not encouraging to any conjectures along this line, as eunice saw quickly. "i'm sorry i offended you," she added hastily; "but i didn't think anything wrong of bessie--you know i didn't. only i've watched the boss following her around with his eyes ever since we came here to work. you didn't see, for you don't know as much about their devilment as i do; but i tell you, if anything was ever to happen that poor little girl through any man, i'd choke him to death with my own hands!" the satin-tufted box she was working on dropped from her fingers and clattered on the floor, bringing the forewoman down upon her with many caustic remarks. when the flurry was over i assured her that i thought bessie fully capable of taking care of herself, although i had seen more of the manager's advances than eunice gave me credit for observing. at last noon came, and with it our first half-holiday. with the first shriek of the whistle we jumped up and began folding our aprons, preparatory to rushing out to find bessie. "where does she live?" asked eunice. i looked at her in blank amazement, for i didn't know. i had never even heard the name of the street. i knew it was somewhere on the east side; that was all. in all our weeks of acquaintanceship no occasion had arisen whereby bessie should mention where she lived. i thought of rosenfeld's. perhaps some one there might know, and we took a broadway car up-town. but miss higgins was away on her vacation, and none of the girls who still remained in the flower-shop knew any more about bessie's whereabouts than i did. thus it is in the busy, workaday world. nobody knows where you come from, and nobody knows where you go. eunice suggested looking in the directory; but as we found forty of the same name, it seemed hopeless. i did happen to know, however, that her father had once been a cutter or tailor; and so out of the forty we selected all the likeliest names and began a general canvass. after five hours of weary search, and after climbing the stairs of more than a score of tenement-houses, without success, we turned at last into east broadway, footsore and dusty. in this street, on the fifth floor of a baking tenement, we tapped at the door of bessie's home. a little blonde woman answered the knock, and when we asked for bessie she burst into sobs and pointed to a red placard on the door--the quarantine notice of the board of health, which we had not seen. and then bessie's mother told us that four of her brood had been laid low with malignant diphtheria. the three younger ones were home, sick unto death, but they had yielded to the entreaties of the doctor and allowed him to take bessie to bellevue. thither we hurried as fast as the trolley would take us, only to find the gates closed for the day. we were not relatives, we had no permits; and whether bessie were dead or alive, we must wait until visiting-hours the next day to discover. what we found out the next day, when we filed into the superintendent's office with the ill-dressed horde of anxious sunday-afternoon visitors, was hardly a surprise. we expected nothing but what eunice had predicted from the first. bessie had died the night before--died murmuring about poppies, the young doctor told us. "she's better off where she is than she'd be down at wolff's," said eunice, as we passed through the gates on to the street again. i made no comment, and we walked silently away from the big, ugly brick pile that holds such horrors for the poor. when we reached third avenue, eunice stopped before a florist's window, and we looked in at a cluster of great white lilies. neither spoke, however, and in a moment we passed on down third avenue, now brightly lighted and teeming with its usual gay sunday night crowd. at last we turned into our own street, and were in front of the dark building we both called "home." here eunice caught my hand in hers, with a convulsive little motion, as might a child who was afraid of the dark. we climbed the stone steps together, and i pulled the bell, eunice's grasp on my hand growing tighter and tighter. "good-by; it's no use," she whispered suddenly, dropping my hand and moving away as we heard the matron fumbling at the lock; and before i could utter a word of protest, before i could reach forward and snatch her from some dread thing, i knew not what, she had disappeared among the shadows of the lamplit street. "where's the other girl?" asked the matron. "i don't know," i replied,--nor have i since been able to find the faintest clue to her whereabouts, if living, or her fate, if dead. from that moment at the door-step when she said good-by, eunice stepped out of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up. is she dead or alive? did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction that june night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with bated breath? i do not know. i never expect to know the fate of eunice. it is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this was only an incident in real life. xv i become a "shaker" in a steam-laundry the next day, monday, they buried bessie in a big, shabby jewish cemetery out on long island. i did not follow my comrade to the grave. nor did i go to work. all that long, beautiful june day was spent in fruitless search for poor eunice. this hopeless quest, begun on monday, was continued for three days in the few hours that i could snatch between five o'clock, the closing-time at the shop, and ten o'clock, the curfew hour at the "home." on wednesday the strain grew unbearable. all the associations of wolff's were tinctured with memories of the dead bessie and the lost eunice. under the counter, in the big pasteboard box, their checked-gingham aprons were still rolled up just as they had left them, with the scissors inside; and on the pine table under my eyes were their names and mine, scrawled in a lead-pencil by bessie's hand, and framed with heavy lines. their high stools, which were on either side of mine, had been given over to two new-comers, also "lady-friends," who chewed gum vigorously and discussed beaux and excursions to coney island with a happy vivacity that made my secret misery all the harder to bear. that night i went to the desk and drew my money, tucked the two aprons away in a bundle with my own, and said good-by to wolff's. the sum total of my capital now amounted to five dollars; and with this i felt that i could afford to spend the remainder of the week trying to find eunice, and trust to luck to get taken back at wolff's the following monday morning. after three days' systematic inquiry, i climbed the stairs to the dormitory late on sunday night, no wiser than i had been a week before. my discouragement gave way to a thrill of joyous surprise when i descried a long, thin form stretched under the gray blanket of eunice's cot. i sprang forward and laid an eager hand on the thin shoulder. "gr-r-r! don't you try gettin' fresh, susie jane, er i'll smash yer face!" snarled the angry voice of a new-comer, as she pulled the coverlet up to her eyes and rolled over on the other side. monday morning i presented myself at the jewel-case factory, and asked miss gibbs to take me back. but i was already adjudged a "shiftless lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." then once more i scanned the advertising columns. "shakers wanted.--apply to foreman" was the first that caught my eye. i didn't know what a "shaker" was, but that did not deter me from forming a sudden determination to be one. the address took me into a street up-town--above twenty-third street--the exact locality i hesitate to give for reasons that shortly will become obvious. here i found the "pearl laundry," a broad brick building, grim as a fortress, and fortified by a breastwork of laundry-wagons backed up to the curb and disgorging their contents of dirty clothes. making my way as best i could through the jam of horses and drivers and baskets, i reached the narrow, unpainted pine door marked, "employees' entrance," and filed up the stairs with a crowd of other girls--all, like myself, seeking work. at the head of the stairs we filed into a mammoth steam-filled room that occupied an entire floor. the foreman made quick work of us. thirty-two girls i counted as they stepped up to the pale-faced, stoop-shouldered young fellow, who addressed each one as "sally," in a tone which, despite its good-natured familiarity, was none the less businesslike and respectful. at last it came my turn. "hello, sally! ever shook?" "no." "ever work in a laundry?" "no; but i'm very handy." "what did you work at last?" "jewel-cases." "all right, sally; we'll start you in at three and a half a week, and maybe we'll give you four dollars after you get broke in to the work.--go over there, where you seen them other ladies go," he called after me as i moved away, and waved his hand toward a pine-board partition. here, sitting on bundles of soiled linen and on hampers, my thirty-two predecessors were corralled, each awaiting assignment to duty. they were dressed, literally, "some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns." calico wrappers brushed against greasy satin skirts, and faded kimono dressing-jackets vied in filth and slovenliness with unbelted shirt-waists. a faded rose bobbed in one girl's head, and on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in new york as the "du barry." the scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of the kitchen on wash-day. "did yez come in the barber's wagon?" asked a stupid irish girl, looking at me curiously. i looked blank, and she repeated the question. "what does she mean?" i asked a more intelligent girl who was seated on a bundle in the corner. "didn't yez come in tony's wagon?" "no; who's tony?" "oh, tony he's a barber--a ginny barber--that goes out with a wagon when they run short of help, and he picks up any girls he can find and hauls them in. he brought three loads this morning. we thought tony picked you up. me and her," pointing to a black-browed girl who was nodding to sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon." the girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room for me on the bundle beside her. "ever worked at this job before?" she asked. "no. have you?" she replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. at my exclamation of horror, she grinned. "why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "it happens every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired. that's the way it was with me: i was clean done out, one saturday night, and i jist couldn't see no more; and first thing i know--wo-o-ow! and that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. and i was jist tired, that's all. i didn't have nothing to drink all that day, excepting pop; but the boss he swore i was drunk, and he made the foreman swear the same thing, and so i didn't try to get no damages. they sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back again; but i jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some damages, and goes and swears i was drunk when i didn't have nothing but rotten pop, i says, i can up and go some place else and get my four dollars a week." before i could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his heels. down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped high with wet clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the steam-wringer. an old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple process of "shaking." "jist take the corners like this,"--suiting the action to the word,--"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one another--like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates, and throwing out palpable insults to the "ginnies" who stood vis-à-vis, and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care. for the first half-hour i shook napkins bearing the familiar legend--woven in red--of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous hostelry. during that time i had become fairly accustomed to my new surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and action. all the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform that ran parallel with and a little behind the shakers' tables. the negroes were stripped to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. there was something demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. the latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy load. the contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers' tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we--the shakers--redumped the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who ironed it all out in the hot rolls. so, after several other dumpings and redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled. meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms--that excruciating, nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular action that knows no variation or relaxation. to forget it, i began to watch the eight others at our particular table. there were four italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl, with delicate wrists and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament, who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames--she who had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony, mrs. mooney. both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each sustained her flagging energies with frequent pinches of snuff and chunks of coffee-cake which they drew from inexhaustible pockets. my attempts at conversation with these two having been met with chilling silence, and as mrs. mooney had given me several painful thrusts with her sharp elbow when i happened to get too close to her, i took care to keep a safe distance, puzzled as to wherein i might have offended, and lapsing into a morbid interest in the gossip flying thick and fast around me. the target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous beauty." here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use the adjective of her detractors. the queen owed her nickname to the boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after him." she was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant her in doing. now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump it on the table--laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. she had been in the "pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. i rather liked the queen, despite the fact that i detected in her immediately a relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her, notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her. "tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "yes, it's hard work, but it's steady. you're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied on." there was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped talking. "did yez come in the barber's wagon?" mrs. mooney asked. on being assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't ginnies, anyway." "whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my companion. unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially with her little story--glad, apparently, to have a listener. "it was something i caught in the hospital when i had appendicitis three years ago. when i was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye had took sore. the doctor he says when he seen it, 'that eye's too far gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' my mother she didn't know nothing about it till it was all over. she'd have carried on awful if she'd knowed it. but it didn't hurt a bit. i went under chloroform, and when i come out of it i jist thought i'd been having a long sleep in a big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking. "that's the way with them hospitals," said mrs. mooney, sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of spice-cake. "you'd been better to ha' stayed at home. poor folks don't have no chanst in them high-toned places." "why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread out?--it'll rest them," suggested mrs. mooney, now passing me a peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim determination to be civil. indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these two sullen old women. all that was human in them had been touched by the tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground--the common ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress. the work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters. nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide--not a moment to stop and rest the aching arms. just as fast as the sweating negroes could unload the trucks into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in greater new york. above the orchestra of noise i distinguished a faintly familiar voice, which i could not place until i heard: "and it was nothing but pop i had that day--i hadn't had nothing but rotten old pop all day!" from the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal occasion, or at the implied aspersions upon her character for sobriety. looking up, i saw that she was in one of the truck-teams. she had her one hand and arm strained against the rear of the sodden load, which she was urging forward with her hip. the load happened to be for our table, and as we dumped it out i asked her if there wasn't anything easier she could do. she responded cheerily: "no. you've got to have two hands to run the mangles, and you've got to have two hands to shake, and you've got to have two hands to tie up, but you can push a truck with one hand." which statement of the case, combined with the cripple's optimism, made us laugh--all except the one-eyed girl, espying whom, the maimed girl suddenly changed the tone of levity with which she treated her own misfortune, and asked in a lowered voice: "what's the matter with yer eye?" and the hospital infection tale was repeated. could a duchess have claimed greater grace than that poor, unlettered, uncouth creature's delicate perception of that subtle principle of courtesy, which allowed her to jest over her own misfortunes, but which prompted a gentle hesitation in speaking to another about hers! in the excruciating agony of the hours that followed, the trucks became a veritable anodyne for the pains that shot through my whole body. leaning over their deep sides was a welcome relief from the strained, monotonous position at the tables. the one-eyed girl had likewise discovered the anodyne, and remarked upon it once as we dived into the wet freight. "it's so funny how one kind of pain sort of eases up another," she said; "i always feel good every time i see the truck coming, though trucking's far harder work than shaking if you had to do it steady. i wonder why it is. it was the same way with my eye. when it was getting better and just ached a little bit, steady, all the time, i used to wish i could have real hard jumping toothache, just for a change." "god love ye, and it's so," fervently exclaimed mrs. mooney. the day was terrifically hot outdoors, and with the fearful heat that came up through the floor from the engine-room directly under us, combined with the humidity of the steam-tilled room, we were all driven to a state of half-dress before the noon hour arrived. the women opened their dresses at the neck and cast off their shoes, and the foreman threw his suspenders off his shoulders, while the colored washers paddled about on the sloppy floor in their bare black feet. "don't any men work in this place except the foreman?" i asked mrs. mooney, who had toiled a long time in the "pearl" and knew everything. "love of mary!" she exclaimed indignantly; "and d' ye think any white man that called hisself a white man would work in sich a place as this, and with naygurs?" "but we work here," i argued. "well, we be wimmin," she declared, drawing a pinch of snuff into her nostrils in a manner that indicated finality. "but if it isn't good enough for a man, it isn't good enough for us, even if we are women!" i persisted. she looked at me half in astonishment, half in suspicion at my daring to question the time-honored order of things. economics could make no appeal to her intelligence, and shooting a glance out of her hard old black eyes, she replied with a logic that permitted no gainsaying. "love of mary! if yez don't like yer job, ye can git out. sure and we don't take on no airs around here!" at twelve the noise ceased, and a shrill whistle ushered in the half-hour's respite. the effect of that raucous shriek was as solemn, as awe-inspiring, for the first moment, as the ringing of the angelus bell in a catholic country-side. for one moment everybody stood motionless and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers with drooping, relaxed shoulders. each tortured frame seemed to heave with an inaudible "thank god!" and then we slowly scattered in all directions--some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along with the wraps, some down the stairs into the street. on this day the one-eyed girl and i found a bundle of clothes large enough for two to sit on, and shared our lunch. for half a ham sandwich she gave me a piece of cold sausage, and i gave her a dill pickle for a greasy doughnut. the inevitable bottle of "pop" neither of us was able to open until the foreman came along and lent his assistance. he lingered a moment to talk the usual inanities that pass between a democratic foreman and a couple of new girls. under his jovial exterior there seemed to be a vein of seriousness, amounting almost to sadness when one looked at his well-modeled face and his steady gray eyes. tall and pale and prematurely bent, he had a certain distinction, as if he had been cut out for better things. his manner had lost all the easy familiarity of a few hours before, and he asked us in the kindest tone possible how we liked the work, and heartened us with the assurance that it wouldn't be nearly so hard in a few days, telling us to "stand slack-like" and see if it didn't make the pain in our backs better. by slack-like he meant stoop-shouldered, as everybody grows sooner or later in a laundry. the foreman's hygienic lecture was interrupted by the warning rumble of the awakening machinery, and we scurried back to our table to make practical test of his theory. we followed it to the letter, but, like every other palliative of pain, it soon lost its virtue, and the long afternoon was one of unspeakable agony. there were now not only aching backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning floors. the air was rent with lamentations, and before long my side-partner and i had also shed our shoes. by four o'clock everybody had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant queen lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the business of goading us on to our tasks. "we're two days behind with them hospital sheets," she screamed to one relay; "s---- hotel barber shop got to go out to-night," which information brought groans from mrs. mooney. "mother of god!" she cried. "sure and that means nine o'clock to-night." "aren't we going to get out at six?" asked the one-eyed girl, while i glanced dismally at the never-ending train of trucks that kept rolling out upon the washers' platform, faster now than at any other time of the day. "god love ye! dearie, no," returned mrs. mooney. "ye'll never get outside _this_ shop at six any night, unless ye're carried out dead. we're in luck to get out as early as eight." "every night?" "sure, every night exceptin' saturday, and then it's twelve to half-past one." "oh, that's not so bad if you have a half-holiday." "half-holiday!" echoed mrs. mooney. "will ye listen to that! a half-holiday, indeed!" then the mocking voice grew kinder. "sure and it's every minute of twelve o'clock or a half-hour into sunday mornin' afore you ever see the outside of this place of a saturday in summer-time, with all the washin' and ironin' for the summer hotels and the big bugs as is at the sea-shore." "youse ain't got no kick coming," said one of the ginney girls. "youse gets six cents an hour overtime, and youse 'll be mighty glad to make that exter money!" mrs. mooney glared viciously at the interlopers. "yes, and if it wasn't for the likes of yez ginnies that 'll work for nothing and live in pig-pens, the likes of us white people wouldn't have to work nights." "well i made ninety-six cents' overtime last week," spoke up the silent fat woman in the under-petticoat, "and i was thankful to the lord to get it." of the two hours or more that followed i have only a hazy recollection of colored men bending over the pungent foam, of straining, sweating women dragging their trucks round and round the great steaming-room. i remembered nothing whatever of the moment when the agony was ended and we were released for the day. up to a certain dim borderland i remember that my back ached and that my feet dragged heavily over the burning floor, two pieces of boiling flesh. i do remember distinctly, however, suddenly waking up on third avenue as i was walking past a delicatessen store, and looking straight into the countenance of a pleasant-faced woman. i must have walked right into her, for she seemed amused, and went on her way laughing at something--probably my look of surprise as the impact brought me suddenly to full consciousness. a clock was hanging in the delicatessen-store window, and the hour-hand stood at nine. a cooling sea-breeze was blowing up from the south, and as i continued my walk home i realized that i had just passed out of a sort of trance,--a trance superinduced by physical misery,--a merciful subconscious condition of apathy, in which my soul as well as my body had taken refuge when torture grew unbearable. xvi in which it is proved to me that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn the next morning i asked mrs. mooney what time it was when we left the laundry the evening before, and she said half-past eight. then i recounted the strange experience of the trance, which did not arouse the interest i had expected. "that's nothing. that's the way we all get sometimes," she declared. "if we didn't get into them trance-spells there'd be none of us workin' here at all, at all." "yes, indeed," said a prayerful voice. "praise god, it's one of his blessid pervisions to help us bear our crosses." "i don't think the lord's got much to do with our breaking backs or feet, do you?" asked the one-eyed girl, as we turned to unload a truck. "now i'm not an unbeliever, and i believe in god and jesus christ, all right; but i sometimes think they don't do all these things that the methodists and salvation army says they do. somehow, i don't believe god knows anything about my eye or that one-armed girl's getting hurt in the roller. i used to believe everything i heard the evangelist say, but i don't think no more that religion is what it's cracked up to be." a few moments later she asked if i was a protestant, too, and receiving an affirmative, proceeded to express herself on the superior merits of that form of faith as compared with the catholic, against which she had all the narrow-minded ignorance and superstition which, strange to say, only too often characterize the better element of the class to which she belonged. this girl's unreasonable prejudice against something of which she knew not the first thing presented a paradox universal in her world. the catholic church as an institution was her enemy, and the enemy of all protestants. "if they could kill you, and not be found out by the law, they'd do it just as quick as wink, because the priest would bail them out of hell for a dollar and a quarter." and yet, when it came to the concrete and personal, she had to admit that all the catholics she had ever known were "just about as good as protestants." this religious discussion was carried on in a low voice, with many side-glances toward the catholic side of the table, as if danger threatened were they to hear a word of it. i knew, however, that there was nothing to fear from that quarter. there was only one religious conscience there, and that belonged to the one-eyed girl herself. from innumerable other instances i had met with before i had come to this generalization: that bigotry and bitter prejudices in matters of faith, deplorable as they at first seem to be, mark a distinct step in the social evolution and moral development of the ignorant and degraded. nobody else at that table was far enough along to worry herself with principles of faith. "i think the salvation army's a kind of good religion," she continued; "only they--" but i heard no more; we were interrupted by a flurry of interest in the front, which spread quickly to our region, as a portly man in an automobile coat and panama hat made his way by the mangle-machines and the tables. the foreman, diffident and uncertain, was walking by his side; and from the peremptory and numerous instructions he was receiving, it became patent that his companion was the "boss." everybody looked hastily, stealthily, at the queen, who hid her pleasure under a very transparent veil of dissembling, as she helped us unload a truck. never before had i heard the queen laugh so merrily, and never before had i realized what a superb, handsome animal she was. there was a certain rhythmic movement as she raised and lowered her body over the truck. the excitement of the moment added a deeper color to her always splendid rose-and-white complexion, upon which the steam-laden atmosphere distilled perpetually that soft dewiness characteristic of the perfect complexion of young children or of goddesses. and like a goddess the queen appeared that moment,--an untidy, earth-chained goddess, mirthful, voluptuous. "she thinks she's mighty fine, don't she?" whispered my one-eyed friend. the boss halted at the truck, and the queen looked up with ill-feigned surprise, as if she hadn't known for five minutes that he was in the room. he seemed the personification of prosperous, ignorant vulgarity, and his manner, as he swept his eye carelessly over his queen's subjects, was one of good-natured insolence. he didn't tarry long, and if guilty of the gentle dalliance of which he was accused, it was plain to be seen that he did not allow it to interfere with the discipline of the "pearl." at lunch-time the one-eyed girl and i went off to the same corner as before, and no sooner had we begun to divide our pickles and sandwiches than in sauntered the foreman, munching alternately from a cylinder of bologna sausage in one hand and a chunk of dry bread in the other. "well, how goes it?" he asked pleasantly, dropping his long, lank frame upon a bundle of hotel table-linen. "did you try my advice about standin' slack-like?" we replied to his question while the one-eyed girl carved a dill pickle and a sweet pickle each into three portions. he related how he had come to the "pearl" six years ago, and had worked himself up to his present job, which was not to be sneezed at, he said, considering that eighteen dollars a week wasn't to be picked up every day--and steady work, too, no layoffs and no shut-downs. he emphasized the fact, evidently very important in his mind, that he wasn't married, that he had not met any girl yet that would have him, which my companion insisted couldn't possibly be true, or if it was, then none of the girls he had ever asked had any taste at all. he lived at home with his mother, whom he didn't allow to "work out" since he'd been big enough to earn a living for her. there was a sister, too, at home, who had a job in a near-by manufactory; but she was engaged, and going to be married in her "intended's" vacation. then, the foreman thought, he'd have to get a wife himself, if he could find anybody to have him. and she wouldn't have to work, either--not on your tintype! she would live at home with his mother, and darn his socks and sew on his buttons, and she'd have no washing or ironing to do, as he got his all done for nothing in the "pearl." that perquisite went along with the eighteen dollars a week. oh, she'd have things as nice as any hard-working young fellow could give her. "would she have to be purty?" asked the one-eyed girl, who seemed unusually interested in this hypothetical wife, and who took such a lively interest in the foreman and his plans that i felt my heart sink in pity for the poor maimed creature. was she hanging breathless on the foreman's reply to this question? if so, there was a certain comfort in the gallant answer. "no, i should say not," he replied, as i thought with gentle consideration of her to whom he was speaking; "i don't think i could ever trust a wife who was a ten-thousand-dollar beaut'. she'd want to gad too much. i don't think looks count for much; and i'd think she was pretty, anyway, if i was terrible stuck on her. them things don't make much difference only in story-papers. but there's one thing she would have to be, and that is handy at doing things. i wouldn't marry a lazy girl, and i wouldn't marry a girl that wasn't a working girl." the engines began to give out a warning rumble, and the foreman scrambled somewhat reluctantly to his feet, and stretching out his long arms, started off. "say, that feller's clean, dead gone on you," remarked my companion, closing her hand over mine in a pressure that was full of congratulation and honest delight. i scouted the idea, but nevertheless i became suddenly conscious of a complete change in his manner from the easy familiarity of the morning before. instead of the generic name of "sally," or the christian name which on better acquaintance he applied to the other girls, he had politely prefixed a "miss" to my surname. there had come, too, a peculiar feeling of trust and confidence in him--a welcome sensation in this horrible, degraded place; and it was with gratefulness that i watched him disappear in the steamy vista, throwing off his suspenders preparatory to plunging into the turmoil of the afternoon's work now under way. "sure thing he is, i'd bet my life on it," she insisted, as we, too, hurried back to the table and took up our towels and napkins once more. "there's no mistakin' them signs, and you'd be a little fool if you wasn't to help him along. men's all sort of bashful, some more 'n others, and it's a good thing to help along. i like the looks of that fellow--he'd be awful silly and soft with his wife." there was gentle solicitude in the voice, and looking up, i was almost startled with the radiance of the girl's face--the face of a good woman who loves, and who takes a generous interest in the love affairs of another. as we leaned over the truck and began to haul out its wet freight, she whispered to me: "i know all about it because i've been there myself. i've got a gentleman-friend, too, and he's awful nice to me. he's been going with me five years, and he didn't shake me when i lost my eye. lots of fellows i know would have backed out. that's what i like about that foreman. i think he'd do just the same by a girl he loved as jim did to me. we'd have been married this long time, only jim's got his hands full with a crazy mother, and he says she'll never go to any asylum s' long's he's able to keep her; and so jim's aunt she lives with them and tends his mother, and it takes 'most all jim makes, because his mother's sick all the time, too, and has to have the doctor and be humored. but i like a man that's good to his mother. jim isn't overly strong, either, and is likely to break down." late in the afternoon my partner was overcome by an attack of sick-headache, and dropped with nausea and exhaustion. mrs. mooney and the queen helped her to her feet. "it's them pickles and them rotten cold lunches you girls eat," declared mrs. mooney, who was fond of talking on the nutritious properties of food. "now i says, the lord only give me one stummick, and when that's wore out he'll never give me another, and i can't never buy one with no money, and i never put anything in that stummick at noon but a good cold beer and a good hot plate of soup, and that's what you ought to do. only cost you five cents for the both of them together, down to devlin's place. we go there every day," jerking her head in the direction of her crony, "and you can go along if ye have a mind to." in accordance with this invitation, we became patrons of devlin's the very next day. promptly at twelve we hurried out, sleeves still rolled up and our damp aprons unremoved. there was no time for making a toilet, mrs. mooney insisted, as devlin's was three blocks away, and we had only a half-hour. across lexington, across third avenue, and down one block, we came to a corner saloon, and filed in the "ladies' entrance." the room was filled with workmen drinking beer and smoking at the little round tables, and when they saw us each man jumped up, and grabbing his glass, went out into the barroom. commenting upon this to mrs. mooney, she explained as we seated ourselves: "sure, and what'd ye expect! sure, and it's a proper hotel ye're in, and it's dacent wurrkin'-men that comes here, and they knows a lady when they see her, and they ups and goes!" in response to mrs. mooney's vigorous order, "six beers with the trimmin's!" a waiter appeared presently with a steaming tray. "now eat that, and drink that, and see if they don't go to the spot," cried the old woman, gaily, and we all fell to, with table manners more eager than elegant. whatever the soup was made of, it seemed to me the best soup i had ever eaten in new york, and i instantly determined never again to blame a working man or woman for dining in a saloon in preference to the more godly and respectable dairy-lunch room. we all ate ravenously, and i, who never before could endure the sight or smell of beer, found myself draining my "schooner" as eagerly as mrs. mooney herself. "my! but that braces me up," she declared, sighing deeply and licking the froth from her lips; "it's almost as good as whisky." it was a propitious moment to ask questions, and i inquired how long she had worked at the "pearl." "eighteen months, off and on. i gets the rheumatism and stay home sometimes. i believe in taking care of yer back. i says, i've only got one back, and when that's wore out the lord ain't going to give me another. so i stay home; but it's so lonesome i'm always mighty glad to get to work ag'in." the long, long days sped by, their torture relieved by such comfort as we could find in the gossip of the table, and in daily excursions to devlin's, where i had become a regular patron. the foreman, too, added a little variety to the monotony by coming to our table sometimes, and shaking clothes for a few moments with us, while he gossiped with the one-eyed girl and me, which unusual proceeding filled her romantic soul with all sorts of happy anticipation. on saturday morning, after he had come and gone, she whispered ecstatically: "that fellow is stuck on you, and i'll bet he'll be askin' you to go to the theayter with him--just see if he don't!" but alas for woman's dreams! the next day we saw the boss coming across the floor, this time alone. he sauntered up to our table, began to fling jokes at us all in a manner of insolent familiarity, and asked the names of the new faces. when he came to me he lingered a moment and uttered some joking remarks of insulting flattery, and in a moment he had grasped my bare arm and given it a rude pinch, walking hurriedly away. in a few moments the foreman came back and motioned me to go with him, and i followed to the front of the room, where the boss stood smoking and joking with the wrappers. the foreman retired a respectful distance, and the boss, after looking me over thoughtfully, informed me that i was to be promoted monday morning to the wrappers' counter. "and now run away, and be a good girl the rest of the day," he concluded, with a wave of the hand, and i rushed back to the table, more disgusted with the man and his manner than i was thankful to him for my promotion to a job that would pay me five dollars a week. "didn't i tell you so!" exclaimed my friend, amid the excited comments and questions of the others at the table. "that's some of the foreman's doing, and i'm real glad for you--it's nothing more than what i've been expectin', though." this opinion was not shared, however, by the rest of my companions, who repeated divers terrible tales of moral ruin and betrayal, more or less apocryphal, wherein the boss was inevitably the villain. i now found myself suddenly the cynosure of all eyes, the target of a thousand whispered comments, as i moved about the workroom. the physical agony of aching back and blistered feet was too great, though, for me to feel any mental distress over the fact--for the moment at least. in the awful frenzy of the saturday-afternoon rush, greater than that of any other day of the week, i did not care much what they thought or said about the boss and me. i was shaking my towels and napkins, and trying to look as indifferent as i believed i felt, when the foreman beckoned me again, and stepping aside, thrust a piece of yellow wrapping-paper into my hand. "read it when nobody's looking," he said in a low voice; "and don't think wrong of me for meddling in what's not my business"; and he was off again. a few minutes later i read: "you'd better give up this job. it's no place for a girl that wants to do right. come back monday and get your money; and i wouldn't stay to-night after six o'clock, if i was you, but go home and rest. if you can't get a job as good as this inside of a day or two, i think my sister can get one for you in her place; but you won't stay here if you take my advice. "yours truly, "j. p. "p.s. please don't show this, or i'd lose my job; and be sure to come monday evening for your money." i made at once for the cloak-room. when i emerged, a moment later, it was to find the narrow passage obstructed by one of the big soiled-linen trucks, over which "j. p." bent industriously, as if he hadn't another thought in the world beyond the sorting of table-cloths and napkins. suddenly he lifted up his lank frame, and seeing one of his workpeople making her escape, he called out: "it's not six o'clock yet!" "i don't care if it isn't; i am going home," i replied promptly. "what's the matter?" he asked in a loud voice, and then, as he drew near, added in an undertone: "you read my note?" "yes," i replied. "s'pose you kind of wonder at me doing it?" he went on, moving with me toward the staircase. "no; i guessed right away," i answered. we had now reached the top of the stairs leading to the street door, and were out of ear-shot of the busy workroom. the curious faces and craning necks were lost to us through an interposing veil of steam. the foreman grasped my extended hand in a limp, hasty clasp as i began to move down the steps. "you guessed part, but not all," he whispered, turning away. i dragged myself to the end of the block and turned into lexington avenue just as the six-o'clock whistles began to blow. so much i remember very distinctly, but after that all is an indistinct blur of clanging street-cars, of jostling crowds. i do not know whether i had lost my senses from the physical agony i was enduring, though still able to perform the mechanical process of walking, or whether it was a case of somnambulism; but i know that i walked on, all unconscious of where i was going, or of my own identity, until i came in collision with some one, and heard a feminine voice beg my pardon. then a little cry, and two arms were thrown about me, and i looked up into the smiling face of minnie plympton--minnie plympton as large as life and unspeakably stunning in a fresh shirt-waist and sailor-hat. she was smiling at me like a princess issuing from her enchantment in a rose-bush; and lest she should vanish as suddenly as she had appeared, i clutched wildly at her arm, trembling and sobbing at this delicious awakening from the horrible nightmare that had been my existence for so many days. we were standing on the corner of lexington avenue and a cross-town thoroughfare, and ever after must that spot remain in my mind as the actual turning-point of my fortunes--indeed, the very turning-point of my whole life. as i look back upon that beautiful june evening, i again hear the rumble of the elevated trains in the street beyond, and again i hear the clang of the electric cars as they swirl out of the avenue into the street. probably every man and woman who ever came a stranger to a great city has his or her own particular secret and holy place where angels came and ministered in the hour of need. i do not doubt it, but i do often wonder whether every such person visits his sacred place as often as i visit mine. i go to mine very often, especially in summer-time, about six o'clock, when, amid the roar and the turmoil and the banalities of the real and the actual, i recall the wondrous tale of the burning bush. for there god appeared to me that evening--the god who had hidden his face for so long. "why, you look as weak as a kitten--you look sick!" minnie declared. "you need a good cup of tea and to be put to bed, and i'm going to be the one to do it for you!" i was half dazed as minnie plympton bundled me into a passing electric car; and then, with my head leaning comfortably on minnie plympton's plump shoulder, and with minnie plympton's strong arm about my aching body, i was jolted away somewhere into a drowsy happiness. epilogue three years have elapsed since that last day in the "pearl laundry" and my providential meeting with minnie plympton. the events of those three years may be recounted in almost as few sentences, for prosperous working girls, like happy nations, have no history. and we have been very prosperous, minnie plympton and i. we, i say, because from the moment of our unforeseen meeting in the hurly-burly of that street corner, the interests of minnie plympton's life and of mine were to become, for the succeeding year, almost inseparable. i said we have both been very prosperous. but minnie plympton has been more than that: she has been successful--successful in the only real way a woman can, after all, be successful. minnie is married. she is the wife of an enterprising young business man, and the mother of a charming baby. she has been married nearly two years, and lives in a pretty cottage in a peaceful suburb. it was what the world would call a good match, and minnie declares she is perfectly happy. and no doubt she is, else that honest creature would not be so bent upon making matches for everybody else. as for myself, i have been merely prosperous--prosaically and uninterestingly, though none the less agreeably, prosperous. i do not know whether i am happy or not. i am still a working girl, and by all the portents of the dream-book i am foredoomed eternally to remain a wage-earner in spite of all mrs. minnie's good offices. for i was born on a saturday; and "saturday's child must work for its living." now, i do not care to be accused of a superstitious faith in dream-books, but i do want to say that i have found all sorts of inspiration in a philosophical acceptance of that oracle attaching to my unfortunate birthday. if saturday's child must work for her living, why not make the best of it? why not make the most advantageous terms possible with fate? why not work with, and not against, that inexorable forelady, in coöperation with her plans and along the lines of her least resistance? this i have tried to do. how i have done it, and what the results have been, i shall now try to sketch with not more attention to tedious details than i feel justified in assuming may be of some help and encouragement to other strugglers. i became a stenographer and typewriter, earning twenty dollars a week. i worked hard for my money, and the day was still a long day. i went to work at nine o'clock in the morning, and while i was supposed to get off at five, and sometimes did, i was often obliged to work till six or seven. and this i called prosperity? yes; for me this was prosperity, when i remembered the circumstances of my beginnings. when i met minnie plympton on the street corner, that hot summer night, i was "dead broke," not only in purse, but in body and spirit as well. she took me home with her to the two small rooms where she was doing light housekeeping, and where we continued to live together until her marriage a year later broke up our happy domestic partnership. a few weeks after minnie took me home with her i got a position in the notion department of one of the large stores. i received only four dollars a week; but, as our rent was small and our living expenses the very minimum, i was able to meet my half of the joint expenditure. i worked four months at selling pins and needles and thread and whalebone and a thousand and one other things to be found in a well-stocked notion department; and then, by a stroke of good luck and minnie plympton's assistance, i got a place as demonstrator of a new brand of tea and coffee in the grocery department of the same "emporium." my new work was not only much lighter and pleasanter, but it paid me the munificent salary of eight dollars a week. but i did not want to be a demonstrator of tea and coffee all my life. i had often thought i would like to learn shorthand and typewriting. the demonstrator of breakfast foods at the next counter to mine was taking a night course in bookkeeping; which gave me the idea of taking a similar course in stenography. and then the long day began in earnest. i went to night-school five nights out of every week for exactly sixty weeks, running consecutively save for a fortnight's interim at the christmas holidays, when we worked nights at the store. on saturday night, which was the off night, i did my washing and ironing, and on sunday night i made, mended, and darned my clothes--that is, when there was any making, mending, or darning to be done. as my wardrobe was necessarily slender, i had much time to spare. this spare time on sunday nights i spent in study and reading. i studied english composition and punctuation, both of which i would need later on when i should become a stenographer. i also brushed up on my spelling and grammar, in which, i had been informed--and correctly--the average stenographer is sadly remiss. as for reading, which was the only recreation my life knew, it was of a most desultory, though always mercenary sort. i read every book i could get out of the circulating library which, from its title or general character as summarized in the newspaper reviews, i thought might help me to solve the problem of earning a good livelihood. the title of one book particularly attracted me--a book which was so much in demand that i had to wait a whole six months before i succeeded in getting it through the slow and devious process peculiar to circulating libraries. that book was "up from slavery," and it brought home to me as nothing else could have done what was the real trouble with myself and all the rest of the struggling, ill-paid, wretched working women with whom i had come in contact during my apprenticeship. what that trouble was i shall revert to later. when i had thoroughly learned the principles of my trade and had attained a speed of some hundred and odd words a minute, the hardest task was yet before me. this task was not in finding a position, but in filling that position satisfactorily. my first position at ten dollars a week i held only one day. i failed to read my notes. this was more because of fright and of self-consciousness, however, than of inefficiency. my next paid me only six dollars a week, but it was an excellent training-school, and in it i learned self-confidence, perfect accuracy, and rapidity. although this position paid me two dollars less than what i had been earning brewing tea and coffee and handing it over the counter, and notwithstanding the fact that i knew of places where i could go and earn ten dollars a week, i chose to remain where i was. there was method in my madness, however, let me say. i had a considerate and conscientious employer, and although i had a great deal of work, and although it had to be done most punctiliously, he never allowed me to work a moment overtime. he opened his office at nine in the morning, and i was not expected before quarter after; he closed at four sharp. this gave me an opportunity for further improving myself with a view to eventually taking not a ten-dollar, but a twenty-dollar position. i went back to night-school and took a three months' "speed course," and at the same time continued to add to my general education and stock of knowledge by a systematic reading of popular books of science and economics. i became tremendously interested in myself as an economic factor, and i became tremendously interested in other working girls from a similar point of view. of science and economics i knew nothing when i started out to earn my living. one day i answered an advertisement calling for the sort of stenographer i now believed myself to be. it brought a response signed with the name of a large religious publishing house. i got the position, beginning with a salary of fifteen dollars a week, which was to be increased to twenty dollars provided i could fill the position. that i should succeed in doing so, there was evident doubt in my employers' minds, and no wonder! for i was the fifth to attempt it. my work consisted for the most part in taking dictation from the editor of the periodical published weekly by the house--letters to contributors, editorials, and special articles. also, when it was found that i had some intelligent, practical knowledge of grammar and english--and here was where my studies of the preceding year bore fruit--i was intrusted with the revision and correction of the least important of the manuscripts, thus relieving the busy editors of one of their most irksome tasks. one day i had occasion to mention to the editor some of the strenuous experiences i had undergone in my struggle to attain a decent living. he was startled--not to say a little shocked--that a young woman of apparently decent birth and upbringing should have formed such an intimate acquaintance with the dark side of life. inspired by his sympathetic interest, i boldly interviewed the editor of a well-known monthly magazine, with the result that i immediately prepared two papers on certain of my experiences; and, to my surprise and delight, they were accepted. and, somehow, with the appearance of those two articles--the first fruits of authorship--part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to pride, the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul i felt had not been in vain. i can now look back upon the recent, still vivid past without a shiver; for there is comfort in the thought that what i have undergone is to be held up to others as a possible lesson and warning. and now a word as to the verity of this narrative. have i actually been through all that i have described? yes, and more; and in other cities beside new york. yet for the sake of unity the order of things has been somewhat changed; and no record is given of many weeks, and even months, when life flowed uneventfully, if not smoothly, on. "but," says the thoughtful reader, "do your sordid experiences of some two or three years ago match conditions of to-day?" and i answer: generally speaking, they do; because lately i reinforced memory by thorough investigation. i went further than that: when it came to me to write this little book--that is so absolutely a transcript from real life--i voluntarily labored, a week here, a week there, at various trades allied to those that previously had been my sole means of livelihood, and all the time living consistently the life of the people with whom i was thus temporarily associated. there were, of course, many little points that when i was a worker in earnest i had not eyes to see, but which my recent conscious study brought out in proper perspective. yet it was as a working girl that i learned to know most of the characters that people this book, and which give to it any value it may possess. for obvious reasons, i have been obliged to give fictitious names to factories and shops in which i worked; and i have, in most cases, substituted for the names of the streets where the factories were located the names of streets of like character. the physical conditions, the sordid wretchedness of factory and workshop, of boarding-and lodging-house, i have not in any wise overstated. as to moral conditions, i have not been in every instance so scrupulously truthful--that is, i have not told all the truth. for it is a truth which only too often will not bear even the suggestion of telling. only in two or three instances--for example, in my account of henrietta manners--have i ventured to hint definitely at anything pertaining to the shame and iniquity underlying a discouragingly large part of the work-girls' world. in my magazine articles i was obliged to leave out all reference to this tabooed topic. the attitude of the public, especially the american public, toward this subject is a curious mixture of prudery and gallantry. it bridles at anything which impeaches the traditional honor and chastity of the working girl. the chivalry of american men--and my experience in workshop, store, and factory has proved to me how genuine and deep-rooted that chivalry is--combined with our inherent spirit of democracy, is responsible for the placing of the work-girl, as a class, in a light as false and ridiculous as that in which don quixote was wont to view the charms of his swineherd lady, dulcinea. in the main, our notions of the woman who toils do more credit to our sentiments and to the impulses of our hearts than they do credit to our heads or to any serious desires we may cherish for her welfare. she has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals--and a goodly share of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow--that the real work-girl has been quite lost sight of. her name suggests, according to their imaginations, a proud, independent, self-reliant, efficient young woman--a young woman who works for her living and is glad of it. one hardly dares criticize her, unless, indeed, it be to lecture her for an ever-increasing independence of her natural male protectors and an alleged aversion to babies. that we should cling so tenaciously to this ideal is to our honor and glory. but fine words butter no parsnips; nor do our fine idealizations serve to reduce the quota which the working-girl ranks contribute to disreputable houses and vicious resorts. the factories, the workshops, and to some extent the stores, of the kind that i have worked in at least, are recruiting-grounds for the tenderloin and the "red light" districts. the springers and the "pearl laundries" send annually a large consignment of delinquents to their various and logical destinations. it is rare indeed that one finds a female delinquent who has not been in the beginning a working girl. for, sad and terrible though it be, the truth is that the majority of "unfortunates," whether of the specifically criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not because they are inherently vicious, but _because they were failures as workers and as wage-earners_. they were failures as such, primarily, for no other reason than that they did not like to work. and they did not like to work, not because they are lazy--they are anything but lazy, as a rule--but _because they did not know how to work_. few girls know how to work when they undertake the first job, whether that job be making paper boxes, seaming corset-covers, or taking shorthand dictation. nor by the term, "knowing how to work," do i mean, necessarily, lack of experience. one may have had no experience whatever in any line of work, yet one may know _how_ to work--may understand the general principles of intelligent labor. these general principles a girl may learn equally well by means of a normal-school training or through familiarity with, and participation in, the domestic labor of a well-organized household. the working girl in a great city like new york does not have the advantage of either form of training. her education, even at the best, is meager, and of housework she knows less than nothing. if she is city-born, it is safe to assume that she has never been taught how to sweep a room properly, nor how to cook the simplest meal wholesomely, nor how to make a garment that she would be willing to wear. she usually buys all her cheap finery at a cheap store, and such style and taste as she displays is "ready made." not having learned to work, either at school or at home, she goes to the factory, to the workshop, or to the store, crude, incompetent, and, worst of all, with an instinctive antagonism toward her task. _she cannot work, and she does not work. she is simply "worked."_ and there is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked." to work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. to be worked is degrading. to work is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental quite as much as the physical self. but the average working girl puts neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery. the harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as she is worth. for her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter of heredity and environment. being a girl, it is not natural to her to work systematically. the working woman is a new product; in this country she is hardly three generations old. as yet she is as new to the idea of what it really means to work as is the afro-american citizen. the comparison may not be flattering to our vanity, but, after a reading of booker washington's various expositions of the industrial abilities of the negro, i cannot but be convinced that the white working woman is in a corresponding process of evolution, so far as her specific functions for labor have been developed. conditions in the "pearl," from the view-point of mere physical labor, were the most brutal in all my experience; but, from what i can learn, the "pearl" is no worse than many other similar establishments. young women will work in such places only as a last resort, for young women cannot work long under conditions so detrimental to bodily health. the regular workers are old women--women like mrs. mooney and her cronies. the steady workers at the "pearl" were, with the exception of the "queen," all old women. every day saw the arrival of a new force of young hands who were bound to "play out" at the end of three or four days' apprenticeship, if not sooner. i played out completely: i didn't walk a step for a week after i went home with minnie plympton that saturday night. which was all in accord with mrs. mooney's prediction the first day: "you won't last long, mind ye; you young uns never do. if you ain't strong as an ox it gits in your back and off ye go to the 'orspital; and if you're not able to stand the drivin', and thinks you're good-lookin', off you goes to the bad, sooner 'n stay here." i would like to dwell for a moment upon the character and personality of her whom i have more than once referred to as the "queen." the queen had worked, i was told, for seven years in the laundry, and she was, as i saw and knew her in those days, as fresh as the proverbial daisy. she seemed the very embodiment of blithesome happiness. in the chapter dealing with the laundry i had occasion to speak of her voluptuous beauty. her long years of hard labor--and she labored harder than any one else there--seemed to have wrought no effect upon her handsome, nerveless body. her lovely eyes, her hair, her dazzling complexion and perfect features, were all worthy the reputation of a stage beauty. she was kind; in her rough, uncouth way, she was kind to everybody--so kind, in fact, that she was generally popular, though envied as enjoying the boss's favor. and, as may be imagined, her influence, during those seven years, upon the underfed, underpaid, ignorant, unskilled green hands who streamed into the "pearl" every morning must have been endless for evil. on the subject of morality i am constrained to express myself with apparent diffidence, lest i be misinterpreted and charged with vilifying the class to which i once belonged. and yet behind my diffidence of expression i must confess to a very honest and uncompromising belief, founded upon my own knowledge and observation, that the average working girl is even more poorly equipped for right living and right thinking than she is for intelligent industrial effort. one of the worst features of my experience was being obliged to hear the obscene stories which were exchanged at the work-table quite as a matter of course; and, if not a reflection of vicious minds, this is at least indicative of loose living and inherent vulgarity. the lewd joke, the abominable tale, is the rule, i assert positively, and not the exception, among the lower class of working girls with whom i toiled in those early months of my apprenticeship. the flower-manufactory in broadway was the one glorious exception. i do not attempt to account for this exception to the general rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly superior class of girls. the flower-girls i met at rosenberg's were, without exception, wholesome-minded and pure-hearted. they knew how to cook, as they had ample opportunity of proving at our luncheons and dinners during those four busy, happy weeks. i never met factory-girls in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or coffee that was fit to drink. the flower-girls gave every evidence of having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been, were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. the girls i met in other places seemed never to have lived in homes at all. in the telling of the obscene story, jew and gentile, catholic and protestant, were equally guilty. that the responsibility for these conditions of moral as well as physical wretchedness is fundamentally attributable to our present socio-economic system is a fact that has been stated so often before, and by writers who by right of specialized knowledge and scientific training are so much better equipped to discuss social economics than i may ever hope to be, that i need not repeat the axiom here. nor would it be any more becoming for me to enter into any discussion of the various theories upon which the economists and the social reformers base their various projects for the reconstruction of the present system. personally i have a strong prejudice in favor of the trades-union. i believe that working women should awaken as quickly as possible to the advantages to be derived from organization of the industries in which they are employed. but i seem to be alone in my cherished desire. the women and girls i have worked with in new york do not view the trades-union as their more progressive and enlightened sisters of chicago and the west generally choose to regard it. chicago alone shows a roster of nearly forty thousand women and girls who are organized into unions of their own, officered by themselves and with their own feminine "walking delegates." i recently spent four weeks among these trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and i found, everywhere i went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the organization idea. as for the working women of new york, they have so far refused to countenance the trades-union. new york has no woman's trades-union. a small percentage of women workers belong to labor organizations, it is true; but it is merely as auxiliaries to the men's unions, and where they work at trades that have been thoroughly organized for the benefit of the men workers. they belong to these unions always under protest, not of their own volition; because they are obliged to do so in order to be permitted to work at their trades in competition with men who are organized. for this reason, owing to the blindness of the workwoman to the benefits to be derived from organization,--and because, moreover, it has not yet been proved that the trades-union, carried to its logical conclusion, is likely to be a panacea for the industrial woes of the sex which does favor and support it--it seems to me rather idle to urge its wider adoption under the protest of those most vitally concerned--the women workers themselves. the idea of organized labor will have to grow among the ranks of women workers just as the idea has grown into the consciousness of her father and brother. we have a great and crying need for two things--things which it is entirely within the power of a broad-minded philanthropy to supply. the most urgent of these needs is a very material and unpoetic one. we need a well-regulated system of boarding-and lodging-houses where we can live with decency upon the small wages we receive. we do not want any so-called "working girls' homes"--god forgive the euphemism!--which, while overcharging us for the miserable accommodations, at the same time would put us in the attitude of charity dependants. what the working girl needs is a cheap hotel or a system of hotels--for she needs a great many of them--designed something after the mills hotels for working-men. she also needs a system of well-regulated lodging-houses, such as are scattered all over the city for the benefit of men. my experience of the working girls' home in which i lived for many weeks, and from my observation and inquiries regarding a number of similar "homes" which i have since visited, justifies me in making a few suggestions regarding the general plan and conduct of the ideal philanthropic scheme which i have in mind. first and most important, there must be no semblance of charity. let the working girls' hotel and the working girls' lodging-house be not only self-supporting, but so built and conducted that they will pay a fair rate of interest upon the money invested. otherwise they would fail of any truly philanthropic object. as to their conduct as institutions there should be no rules, no regulations which are not in full operation in the waldorf-astoria or the hotel st. regis. the curse of all such attempts in the past has been the insistence upon _coercive morality_. make them not only non-sectarian, but non-religious. there is no more need of conducting a working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of god or under the auspices of religious sentiment than there is necessity for advertising the martha washington hotel or any fashionable bachelor-apartment house as being under divine guidance. a clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day _can_ be furnished to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store. we do not ask for luxuries or dainties. we do not get them in the miserable, dark warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find sustenance. i do not know--i suppose nobody does know--how many working girls in new york city live in lodging-and boarding-houses. but they are legion, and very few of them are contented with that life. the most important necessity of the model working woman's hotel or lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty sleeping-room, but a parlor! the number of young girls who go wrong in a great city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor must make the angels in heaven weep. the houses where the poorly paid girl lives have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male friends. if the house is conducted with any respect for the conventions, the girl lodger must meet her young man on the "stoop" or on the street corner. as the courtship progresses, they must have recourse either to the benches of the public parks, provided the weather be favorable, or else to the light and warmth of the back room of a saloon. the average cheap lodging-house is usually conducted, however, with but scant regard for the conventions, and the girl usually is forced to adopt the more convenient and, as it would seem to her, really more self-respecting habit of receiving her company in her room. and either one of these methods of courtship, it is evident, cannot but be in the end demoralizing and degrading to thoughtless young people, however innocent they may be of any deliberate wrong-doing. in the model lodging-house there should be perfect liberty of conduct and action on the part of guests--who will not be "inmates" in any sense of the word. such guests should have perfect liberty to go and come when they please at any hour of the day or night; be permitted to see any person they choose to have come, without question or challenge, so long as the conventions of ordinary social life are complied with. such an institution, conducted upon such a plan and managed so that it would make fair returns to its promoters, cannot fail to be welcomed; and would be of inestimable benefit as an uplifting and regenerative force with those for whom it is designed. the other need is for a greater interest in the workwoman's welfare on the part of the church, and an effort by that all-powerful institution to bring about some adjustment of her social and economic difficulties. i am old-fashioned enough to believe in the supreme efficacy of organized religion in relation to womanhood, and all that pertains to womanhood. i believe that, in our present state of social development, the church can do more for the working girl than any of the proposed measures based upon economic science or the purely ethical theory. working women as a class are certainly not ripe for the trades-union, as i have already intimated; and the earnest people of the "settlements" are able to reach but a small part of the great army of women marching hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring. few are they who, like tolstoi, can gracefully stoop to conquer; and those who shall be ordained to revolutionize conditions will rise from the ranks, even as did booker t. washington. this, of course, is the ultimate object of settlement work: to prepare the leaven for the loaf. but a live and progressive church--a church imbued with the christian spirit in the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the term--can do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college settlements and all the trades-unions that can be organized within the next ten years could hope to do. and for this reason: the church has all the machinery ready, set up and waiting only for the proper hand to put it in motion to this great end. the christian church has a vast responsibility in the solution of all problems of the social order, and none of those problems is more grave or urgent than the one affecting the economic condition of the wage-earning woman. it is curious that the church, in this age, should choose to regard its primary function with such evident apathy. the first business of the church in the past was the adjustment of social difficulties. the gospel of jesus christ was preëminently a social gospel, and when the church ceases to be a social force it will have outlived its usefulness. there are those who believe that the church _has_ outlived that primal usefulness. i do not believe so. for men, perhaps, it has; but not for women--certainly not for working women. we do not as a sex, we do not as a class, flatter ourselves that we have got along so far in race development that we have no further need of organized religion. in all my experience of meeting and talking, often becoming intimately acquainted, with girls and women of all sorts, i have never known one, however questionable, to whom the church was not, after all, held in respect as the one all-powerful human institution. and yet, unless they were catholics, mighty few went to church at all, and most of them were resentful, often bitter, toward the church and hostile toward all kinds of organized religion. they accused the church of not doing its duty toward them, and they declared that organized religion was a sham and a hypocrisy. the only activity exerted by the church in the direction indicated partakes too strongly of the eleemosynary nature to make it acceptable to any save the most degraded--the weak-chinned, flabby-natured horde of men and women who rally instinctively to the drum-taps of the street-corner salvationist, or seek warmth and cheer on cold winter nights, and if possible more substantial benefits, from the missions and "church houses." i have no quarrel to pick with the salvation army, nor with the city missions, as institutions. both have done too much good for that "ninety and nine" which the church forgets. but it is a pity that the work of the salvation army and of the city missions is sometimes relegated to the control of such incompetent and unworthy persons as henrietta manners and "brother" mason. since my brief acquaintance with those aspiring reformers, i have investigated and found that both were prominent workers and "guides" in the respective religious movements to which they claimed allegiance; i also found that there were other henrietta mannerses and not a few "brother" masons interested in the same good work. it is the part of charity and justice to assume that their superior officers were totally ignorant of their real characters. but why should these sacred duties be relegated to the henrietta mannerses and the "brother" masons? are there not enough intelligent, conscientious christian men and women among the churches who would consider it not only a duty, but a precious privilege, to carry the gospel of jesus christ into the dark places? it is not wise to set a thief to catch a thief, and it is worse than useless to encourage the weak, not to say the depraved, to carry the gospel to their kind. in the days when i could see no silver lining to the clouds i tried going to a protestant church, but i recognized very shortly the alienation between it and me. personally, i do not like to attend salvation meetings or listen to the mission evangelists. so i ceased any pretension of going to church, thus allying myself with that great aggregation of non-church-going protestant working women who have been forced into a resentful attitude against that which we should love and support. it is encouraging, however, to find that the church itself has, at last, begun to heed our growing disaffection and alienation: "the fact must be admitted that the wage-workers of this country are largely outside the churches. this breach has been steadily widening; conditions are worse now than they were ten years ago. one of the strongest reasons for this is the fact that the churches have not recognized so clearly as they ought the equities of this conflict. it is a grave failure. they ought never to have suffered such an alienation to occur between themselves and the people who constitute the very bone and sinew of our civilization," says a prominent preacher and reformer. "how can the christian church clear herself of the charge that the very people who heard her lord gladly turn in multitudes from her threshold? there is need of sober thought and deep humiliation, that this most grave social problem may find a solution which shall bring honor to the church and peace to society."[ ] obviously the fundamental need of the worker of either sex is education. she needs to be educated, this work-girl. she does not need a fancy education; but she does need a good education, so that upon her entrance into the workshop she will be able to read and write and add up a column of figures correctly and with ease. this she seems not to be able to do under present conditions. and there are other things, even more important than the "three r's," which she should be taught. she should be taught how to work--how to work _intelligently_. she should be trained young in the fundamental race activities, in the natural human instinct for making something with the hands, or of doing something with the hands, and of taking an infinite pleasure in making it perfect, in doing it well. i have no technical knowledge of pedagogics; i must admit that. my criticism of the public-school system i base entirely upon the results as i have seen them in the workshops, the factories, and the store in which i worked. during this period i had opportunity for meeting many hundreds of girls and for becoming more or less acquainted with them all. now, of all these i have not yet discovered one who had not at some time in her earlier childhood or girlhood attended a public school. usually the girl had had at least five years' continuous schooling, but often it was much more. but, great or small as the period of her tuition had been, i never met one whose knowledge of the simplest rudiments of learning was confident and precise. spelling, geography, grammar, arithmetic, were never, with them, positive knowledge, but rather matters of chance and guess. even the brightest girls showed a woeful ignorance of the "three r's." in only one thing did i find them universally well taught, and that was in handwriting. however badly spelled and ungrammatical their written language might be, it was invariably neatly and legibly--often beautifully--executed. but if these girls, these workmates of mine, learned to write clear and beautiful hands, why were they not able also to learn how to spell, why were they not able to learn the principles of grammar and the elementary knowledge of arithmetic as far at least as long division? that they did not have sufficient "apperceiving basis" i cannot believe, for they were generally bright and clever. it is true that the public schools are already teaching manual training, and that kindergartens have enormously increased lately. these facts i know very well. i also know how much ignorance and senseless prejudice the pioneers of these educational reforms have had to overcome in the introduction of the newer and better methods. the point i wish to make carries no slur upon the ideal which the best modern pedagogy is striving for; it is, on the contrary, an appeal for the support and furtherance of that ideal on the part of intelligent citizenship generally, and of conscientious parenthood particularly. i believe firmly in the kindergarten; i believe that the child, whether rich or poor, who goes to kindergarten in his tender years has a better chance in life, all else being equal, than the child who does not. i do not know how long the free kindergarten system has obtained to any degree in new york city, but i do know that i have as yet found only one working girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. she was "lame lena" at springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity, which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in the shop. tersely put, and quoting her own speech, the secret of her success was in "knowing how to kill two birds with one stone," and, again, "makin' of your cocoanut save your muscle." these formulæ were more or less vague until further inquiry elicited the interesting fact that "lame lena," had had in childhood the privilege of a kindergarten training in a class maintained by some church society when the free kindergarten was not so general as it is now. it is not unreasonable to suppose that had this lame girl's workmates enjoyed the privilege of the same elementary training, they might have shown an equal facility in the humble task of pasting and labeling and tissuing paper boxes. "lame lena" knew how to work; she knew how to husband every modicum of nervous energy in her frail, deformed body; and thus she was able to make up--more than make up--for her physical inferiority. "lame lena" brought to her sordid task a certain degree of organizing faculty; she did the various processes rhythmically and systematically, always with the idea in view of making one stroke of the arm or the hand do, if possible, a double or a triple duty. the other girls worked helter-skelter; running hither and thither; taking many needless journeys back and forth across the floor; hurrying when they were fresh to the task, dawdling when they were weary, but at all times working without method and without organization of the task in hand, and without that coördination of muscular and mental effort which the kindergarten might have taught them, just as it had certainly taught "lame lena." the free kindergarten movement is not yet old enough to begin to show its effects to any perceptible degree in the factory and workshop. henrietta manners and phoebe arlington and little angelina were born too soon: they did not know the joy of the kindergarten; they did not know the delight of sitting in a little red chair in a great circle of other little red chairs filled with other little girls, each and all learning the rudimentary principles of work under the blissful delusion that they were at play. these joys have been reserved for their little sisters, who, sooner or later, will step into their vacant places in the box-factory. what was denied angelina it is the blessed privilege of angelina's baby to revel in. angelina's baby--the little baby that she kept in the day-nursery when we worked together at springer's--now goes to a free kindergarten. i happen to know this because not long ago i met angelina. she did not recognize me--indeed, she had difficulty in recalling vaguely that i had worked with her once upon a time; for angelina's memory, like that of a great majority of her hard-worked class, is very poor,--a fact i mention because it is very much to the point right here. my solicitous inquiry for the baby brought forth a burst of latin enthusiasm as to the cunningness and sweetness of that incipient box-maker, who, angelina informed me, goes to kindergarten in a free hack along with a crowd of other babies. but angelina, bless her soul! is down on the kindergarten. she says, with a pout and a contemptuous shrug, "they don't teach you're kid nothing but nonsense, just cutting up little pieces of paper and singing fool songs and marching to music." angelina admitted, however, that her _bambino_ was supremely happy there,--so happy, in fact, that she hadn't the heart to take her away, even though she does know that it is all "tomfoolishness" the "kid" is being taught by a mistaken philanthropy. it is fair to suppose that in the factory and workshop of every description the kindergarten is bound to work incalculable results. indeed, i sometimes wonder if the kindergarteners themselves can quite realize how well they are building--can fully comprehend the very great need in the working woman of the identical principles which they are so patiently and faithfully inculcating into the tender minds of these forlorn babies gathered up in the courts and alleys. another important thing looking to the well-being of the working girl of the future would be the wide dissemination of a better literature than that with which she now regales herself. i have already outlined at some length the literary tastes of my workmates at the box-factory. the example cited is typical of other factories and other workshops, and also of the department-store. a certain downtown section of new york city is monopolized by the publishers and binders of "yellow-backs," which are turned out in bales and cart-loads daily. girls fed upon such mental trash are bound to have distorted and false views of everything. there is a broad field awaiting some original-minded philanthropist who will try to counteract the maudlin yellow-back by putting in its place something wholesome and sweet and sane. only, please, mr. or mrs. philanthropist, don't let it be shakspere, or ruskin, or walter pater. philanthropists have tried before to reform degraded literary tastes with heroic treatment, and they have failed every time. that is sometimes the trouble with the college-settlement folk. they forget that shakspere, and ruskin, and all the rest of the really true and great literary crew, are infinite bores to every-day people. i know personally, and love deeply and sincerely, a certain young woman--a settlement-worker--who for several years conducted an evening class in literature for some girl "pants-makers." she gave them all the classics in allopathic doses, she gave them copies of "a crown of wild olive" and "the ethics of the dust," which they read dutifully, not because they liked the books, which were meaningless to their tired heads, but because they loved miss ---- and enjoyed the evenings spent with her at the settlement. but miss ---- did not succeed in supplanting their old favorites, which undoubtedly she could have done had she given them all the light, clean present-day romance they could possibly read. it is a curious fact that these girls will not read stories laid in the past, however full of excitement they may be. they like romance of the present day, stories which have to do with scenes and circumstances not too far removed from the real and the actual. all their trashy favorites have to do with the present, with heroes and heroines who live in new york city or boston or philadelphia; who go on excursions to coney island, to long branch, or to delaware water gap; and who, when they die, are buried in greenwood over in brooklyn, or in woodlawn up in westchester county. in other words, any story, to absorb their interest, must cater to the very primitive feminine liking for identity. this liking, this passion, their own special authors have thoroughly comprehended, and keep it constantly in mind in the development of their plots. this taste for better literature could be helped along immeasurably if still another original-minded philanthropist were to make it his business that no tenement baby should be without its "mother goose" and, a little later, its "little women," "uncle tom's cabin," "robinson crusoe," and all the other precious childhood favorites. as it is, the majority know nothing about them. but, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the working girl as a wage-earning unit--the most potent force for the adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral--will be the attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs to be righted. at the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself and her condition as the working woman herself. taking everything into consideration, and in spite of conditions which, to the observer viewing them at a distance great enough to get a perspective, seem irreconcilably harsh and bitter--in the face of all this, one must characterize the working woman as a contented, if not a happy woman. that is the great trouble that will have to be faced in any effort to alleviate her condition. she is too contented, too happy, too patient. but not wholesomely so. hers is a contentment, a happiness, a patience founded, not in normal good health and the joy of living and working, but in apathy. her lot is hard, but she has grown used to it; for, being a woman, she is patient and long-suffering. she does not entirely realize the tragedy of it all, and what it means to herself, or to her children perhaps yet to be born. in the happy future, the working girl will no longer be content to be merely "worked." then she will have learned to work. she will have learned to work intelligently, and, working thus, she will begin to think--to think about herself and all those things which most vitally concern her as a woman and as a wage-earner. and then, you may depend upon it, she will settle the question to please herself, and she will settle it in the right way. footnote: [ ] "the church and social problems," by rev. washington gladden, d.d. ("international quarterly.") the everett massacre by walker c. smith a history of the class struggle in the lumber industry [illustration: decoration] i. w. w. publishing bureau chicago, ill. this book is dedicated to those loyal soldiers of the great class war who were murdered on the steamer verona at everett, washington, in the struggle for free speech and free assembly and the right to organize: felix baran, hugo gerlot, gustav johnson, john looney, abraham rabinowitz, and those unknown martyrs whose bodies were swept out to unmarked ocean graves on sunday, november fifth, . printed by the members of the general recruiting union i. w. w. preface in ten minutes of seething, roaring hell at the everett dock on the afternoon of sunday, november , , there was more of the age-old superstition regarding the identity of interests between capital and labor torn from the minds of the working people of the pacific northwest than could have been cleared away by a thousand lecturers in a year. it is with regret that we view the untimely passing of the seven or more fellow workers who were foully murdered on that fateful day, but if the working class of the world can view beyond their mangled forms the hideous brutality that was the cause of their deaths, they will not have died in vain. this book is published with the hope that the tragedy at everett may serve to set before the working class so clear a view of capitalism in all its ruthless greed that another such affair will be impossible. c. e. payne. with grateful acknowledgments to c. e. payne for valuable assistance in preparing the subject matter, to harry feinberg in consultation, to marie b. smith in revising manuscript, and to j. j. kneisle for photographs. everett, november fifth by charles ashleigh ["* * * and then the fellow worker died, singing 'hold the fort' * * *"--from the report of a witness.] song on his lips, he came; song on his lips, he went;-- this be the token we bear of him,-- soldier of discontent! out of the dark they came; out of the night of poverty and injury and woe,-- with flaming hope, their vision thrilled to light,-- song on their lips, and every heart aglow; they came, that none should trample labor's right to speak, and voice her centuries of pain. bare hands against the master's armored might!-- a dream to match the tools of sordid gain! and then the decks went red; and the grey sea was written crimsonly with ebbing life. the barricade spewed shots and mockery and curses, and the drunken lust of strife. yet, the mad chorus from that devil's host,-- yea, all the tumult of that butcher throng,-- compound of bullets, booze and coward boast,-- could not out-shriek one dying worker's song! song on his lips, he came; song on his lips, he went;-- this be the token we bear of him,-- soldier of discontent! [illustration: released free speech prisoners who visited the graves of their murdered fellow workers at mount pleasant cemetery, may , .] the everett massacre chapter i. the lumber kingdom perhaps the real history of the rise of the lumber industry in the pacific northwest will never be written. it will not be set down in these pages. a fragment--vividly illustrative of the whole, yet only a fragment--is all that is reproduced herein. but if that true history be written, it will tell no tales of "self-made men" who toiled in the woods and mills amid poverty and privation and finally rose to fame and affluence by their own unaided effort. no abraham lincoln will be there to brighten its tarnished pages. the story is a more sordid one and it has to do with the theft of public lands; with the bribery and corruption of public officials; with the destruction and "sabotage," if the term may be so misused, of the property of competitors; with base treachery and double-dealing among associated employers; and with extortion and coercion of the actual workers in the lumber industry by any and every means from the "robbersary" company stores to the commission of deliberate murder. no sooner had the larger battles among the lumber barons ended in the birth of the lumber trust than there arose a still greater contest for control of the industry. lumberjack engaged lumber baron in a struggle for industrial supremacy; on the part of the former a semi-blind groping toward the light of freedom and for the latter a conscious striving to retain a seat of privilege. nor can the full history of that struggle be written here, for the end is not yet, but no one who has read the past rightly can doubt the ultimate outcome. that history, when finally written, will recite tales of heroism and deeds of daring and unassuming acts of bravery on the part of obscure toilers beside which the vaunted prowess of famous men will seem tawdry by comparison. today the perspective is lacking. time alone will vindicate the rebellious workers in their fight for freedom. from all this travail and pain is to be born an industrial democracy. the lumber industry dominated the whole life of the northwest. the lumber trust had absolute sway in entire sections of the country and held the balance of power in many other places. it controlled governors, legislatures and courts; directed mayors and city councils; completely owned sheriffs and deputies; and thru threats of foreclosure, blackmail, the blacklist and the use of armed force it dominated the press and pulpit and terrorized many other elements in each community. the sworn testimony in the greatest case in labor history bears out these statements. out of their own mouths were the lumber barons and their tools condemned. for, let it be known, the great trial in seattle, wash., in the year , was not a trial of thomas h. tracy and his co-defendants. it was a trial of the lumber trust, a trial of so-called "law and order," a trial of the existing method of production and exchange and the social relations that spring from it,--and the verdict was that capitalism is guilty of murder in the first degree. to get even a glimpse into the deeper meaning of the case that developed from the conflict at everett, wash., it is necessary to know something of the lives of the migratory workers, something of the vital necessity of free speech to the working class and to all society for that matter, and also something about the basis of the lumber industry and the foundation of the city of everett. the first two items very completely reveal themselves thru the medium of the testimony given by the witnesses for the defense, while the other matters are covered briefly here. the plundering of public lands was a part of the policy of the lumber trust. large holdings were gathered together thru colonization schemes, whereby tracts of acres were homesteaded by individuals with money furnished by the lumber operators. often this meant the mere loaning of the individual's name, and in many instances the building of a home was nothing more than the nailing together of three planks. other rich timber lands were taken up as mineral claims altho no trace of valuable ore existed within their confines. all this timber fell into the hands of the lumber trust. in addition to this there were large companies who logged for years on forty acre strips. this theft of timber on either side of a small holding is the basis of many a fortune and the possessors of this stolen wealth can be distinguished today by their extra loud cries for "law and order" when their employes in the woods and mills go on strike to add a few more pennies a day to their beggarly pittance. altho cheaper than outright purchase from actual settlers, these methods of timber theft proved themselves quite costly and the public outcry they occasioned was not to the liking of the lumber barons. to facilitate the work of the lumber trust and at the same time placate the public, nothing better than the forest reserve could possibly have been devised. the establishment of the national forest reserves was one of the long steps taken in the united states in monopolizing both the land and the timber of the country. the first forest reserves were established february , , when , , acres were set aside as national forests. within the next eight years practically all the public forest lands in the united states that were of any considerable extent had been set off into these reserves, and by there had been over , square miles included within their confines.[ ] this immense tract of country was withdrawn from the possibility of homestead entry at approximately the time that the mississippi valley and the eastern slope of the rocky mountains had been settled and brought under private ownership. whether the purpose was to put the small sawmills out of business can not be definitely stated, but the lumber trust has profited largely from the establishment of the forest reserves. so long as there was in the united states a large and open frontier to be had for the taking there could be no very prolonged struggle against an owning class. it has been easier for those having nothing to go but a little further and acquire property for themselves. but on coming to what had been the frontier and finding a forest reserve with range riders and guards on its boundaries to prevent trespassing; on looking back and seeing all land and opportunities taken; on turning again to the forest reserve and finding a foreman of the lumber trust within its borders offering wages in lieu of a home, it was inevitable that a conflict should occur. with the capitalistic system of industry in operation, the conflict between the landless homeseekers and the owners of the vast accumulations of capital would inevitably have taken place, but this clash has come at least a generation earlier because of the establishment of the national forests than it otherwise would. the land now in reserves would furnish homes and comfortable livings for ten million people, and have absorbed the surplus population for another generation. it is also true that the establishment of the national forests has been one of the vital factors that made the continued existence of the lumber trust possible. prior to the shipments of lumber to the prairie states from west of the rocky mountains were very small, and of no effect on the domination of the lumber industry by the trust. also, prior to that date but a small part of the valuable timber west of the rocky mountains had been brought under private ownership. but about this time the pioneer settlers began swarming over the pacific slope and taking the free government land as homesteads. as the timber land was taken up, floods of lumber from the pacific coast met the lumber of the trust on the great prairies. the lumber trust had looted the government land and the indian reservations in the middle states of their timber, and had almost full control of the prairie markets until the lumber of the pacific slope began to arrive. in lumber from the puget sound was sold in dakota for $ . per thousand feet, and it kept coming in a constantly increasing volume and of a better quality than the trust was shipping from the east. it was but natural that the trust should seek a means to stifle the constantly increasing competition from the homesteads of the west, and the means was found in the establishment of the national forest reserves. while the greater portion of north america was yet a wilderness, the giving of vast tracts of valuable land on the remote frontier to private individuals and companies could be accomplished. but at this time such a procedure would have been impossible, tho it was imperative for the life of the trust that the timber of the pacific slope should be withdrawn from the possibility of homestead entry. in order to carry out this scheme it was necessary to raise a cry of "benefit to the public" and make it appear that this new public policy was in the interest of future generations. the cry was raised that the public domain was being used for private gain, that the timber was being wastefully handled, that unnecessary amounts were being cut, that the future generations would find themselves without timber, that the watersheds were being denuded and that drought and floods would be the certain result, that the nation should receive a return for the timber that was taken, together with many other specious pleas. that the public domain was being used for private gain was in some instances true, but the vast majority of the timber land was being taken as homesteads, and thus taking the timber outside the control of the trust. that the timber was being wastefully handled was to some extent true, but this was inevitable in the development of a new industry in a new country, and so far as the pacific slope is concerned there is but little change from the methods of twenty years ago. that unnecessary amounts were being cut was sometimes true, but this served only to keep prices down, and from the standpoint of the trust was unpardonable on that account alone. the market is being supplied now as formerly, and with as much as it will take. the only means that has been used to restrict the amount cut has been to raise the price to about double what it was in . the denuding of the watersheds of the continent goes on today the same as it did twenty-five years ago, the only consideration being whether there is a market for the timber. some reforesting has been done, and some protection has been established for the prevention of fires, but these things have been much in the nature of an advertisement since the government has taken charge of the forests, and was done automatically by the homesteaders before the reserves were established. there has never been any restriction in the amount of timber that any company could buy, and the more it wanted, the better chance it had of getting it. the nation is receiving some return from the sale of timber from the government land, but it is in the nature of a division of the spoils from a raid on the homes of the landless. when the reserve were established, the secretary of the interior was empowered to "make rules and regulations for the occupancy and the use of the forests and preserve them from destruction." no attempt was made in the general land office to develop a technical forestry service. the purpose of the administration was mainly protection against trespass and fire. the methods of the administration were to see to it first that there were no trespassers. fire protection came later. when the reserves were established, people who were at the time living within their boundaries were compelled to submit the titles of their homesteads to the most rigid scrutiny, and many people who had complied with the spirit of the law were dispossessed on mere technicalities, while before the establishment of the reserve system the spirit of the compliance with the homestead law was mainly considered, and very seldom the technicality. and while the forestry service was examining all titles to homesteads within the boundaries of the reserve with the utmost care, the large lumbering companies were given the best of consideration, and were allowed all the timber they requested and a practically unlimited time to remove it. the system of dealing with the lumber trust has been most liberal on the part of the government. a company wanting several million feet of timber makes a request to the district office to have the timber of a certain amount and on a certain tract offered for sale. the forestry service makes an estimate of the minimum value of the timber as it stands in the tree and the amount of timber requested within that tract is then offered for sale at a given time, the bids to be sent in by mail and accompanied by certified checks. the bids must be at least as large as the minimum price set by the forestry service, and highest bidder is awarded the timber, on condition that he satisfies the forestry service that he is responsible and will conduct the logging according to rules and regulations. the system seems fair, and open to all, until the conditions are known. but among the large lumber companies there has never been any real competition for the possession of any certain tract of timber that was listed for sale by request. when one company has decided on asking for the allotment of any certain tract of timber, other companies operating within that forest seldom make bids on that tract. any small company that is doing business in opposition to the trust companies, and may desire to bid on an advertised tract, even tho its bid may be greater than the bid of the trust company, will find its offer thrown out as being "not according to the government specifications," or the company is "not financially responsible," or some other suave explanation for refusing to award the tract to the competing company. on the other hand, when a small company requests that some certain tract shall be listed for sale, it very frequently happens that one of the large companies that is commonly understood to be affiliated with the lumber trust will have a bid in for that tract that is slightly above that of the non-trust company, and the timber is solemnly awarded to "the highest bidder." when a company is awarded a tract of timber, the payment that is required is ten per cent of the purchase price at the time of making the award, and the balance is to be paid when the logs are on the landing, or practically when they can be turned into ready cash, thus requiring but a comparatively small outlay of money to obtain the timber. when the award is made, it is the policy of the forestry service to be on friendly terms with the customers, and the men who scale the logs and supervise the cutting are the ones who come into direct contact with the companies, and it is inevitable that to be on good terms with the foreman the supervision and scaling must be "satisfactory." forestry service men who have not been congenial with the foremen of the logging companies have been transferred to other places, and it is almost axiomatic that three transfers is the same as a discharge. the little work that is required of the companies in preventing fires is much more than offset by the fact that no homesteaders have small holdings within the area of their operations, either to interfere with logging or to compete with their small mills for the control of the lumber market. that the forest lands of the nation were being denuded, and that this would cause droughts and floods was a fact before the establishment of the reserves, and the fact is still true. where a logging company operates, the rule is that it shall take all the timber on the tract where it works, and then the forest guards are to burn the brush and refuse. a cleaner sweep of the timber could not have been made under the old methods. the only difference in methods is that where the forest guards now do the fire protecting for the lumber trust, the homesteaders formerly did it for their own protection. in january, , the forestry service issued a statement that the policy of the service for the kaniksu forest in northern idaho and northeastern washington would be to have all that particular reserve logged off and then have the land thrown open to settlement as homesteads. as the timber in that part of the country will but little more than pay for the work of clearing the land ready for the plow, but is very profitable where no clearing is required, it can be readily seen that the forestry service was being used as a means of dividing the fruit--the apples to the lumber trust, the cores to the landless homeseekers. one particular manner in which the government protects the large lumber companies is in the insurance against fire loss. when a tract has been awarded to a bidder it is understood that he shall have all the timber allotted to him, and that he shall stand no loss by fire. should a tract of timber be burned before it can be logged, the government allots to the bidder another tract of timber "of equal value and of equal accessibility," or an adjustment is made according to the ease of logging and value of the timber. in this way the company has no expense for insurance to bear, which even now with the fire protection that is given by the forestry service is rated by insurance companies at about ten per cent. of the value of the timber for each year. no taxes or interest are required on the timber that is purchased from the government. another feature that makes this timber cheaper than that of private holdings, is that to buy outright would entail the expense of the first cost of the land and timber, the protection from fire, the taxes and the interest on the investment. in addition to this there is always the possibility that some homesteader would refuse to sell some valuable tract that was in a vital situation, as holding the key to a large tract of timber that had no other outlet than across that tract. there has been as yet no dispute with the government about an outlet for any timber purchased on the reserves; the contract for the timber always including the proviso that the logging company shall have the right to make and use such roads as are "necessary," and the company is the judge of what is necessary in that line. the counties in which reserves are situated receive no taxes from the government timber, or from the timber that is cut from the reserves until it is cut into lumber, but in lieu of this they receive a sop in the form of "aid" in the construction of roads. in the aggregate this aid looks large, but when compared with the amount of road work that the people who could make their homes within what is now the forest reserves could do, it is pitifully small and very much in the nature of the "charity" that is handed out to the poor of the cities. it is the inevitable result of a system of government that finds itself compelled to keep watch and ward over its imbecile children. so in devious ways of fraud, graft, coercion, and outright theft, the bulk of the timber of the northwest has been acquired by the lumber trust at an average cost of less than twelve cents a thousand feet. in the states of washington and oregon alone, the northern pacific and the southern pacific railways, as allies of the weyerhouser interests of st. paul, own nearly nine million acres of timber; the weyerhouser group by itself dominating altogether more than thirty million acres, or an area almost equal to that of the state of wisconsin. the timber owned by a relatively small group of individuals is sufficient to yield enough lumber to build a six-room house for every one of the twenty million families in the united states. why then should conservation, or the threat of it, disturb the serenity of the lumber trust? if the government permits the cutting of public timber it increases the value of the trust holdings in multiplied ratio, and if the government withdraws from public entry any portion of the public lands, creating forest reserves, it adds marvelously to the value of the trust logs in the water booms. even forest fires in one portion of these vast holdings serve but to send skyward the values in the remaining parts, and by some strange freak of nature the timber of trust competitors, like the "independent" and co-operative mills, seems to be more inflammable than that of the "law-abiding" lumber trust. and so it happens that the government's forest policy has added fabulous wealth and prestige and power to the rulers of the lumber kingdom. but whether the timber lands were stolen illegally or acquired by methods entirely within the law of the land, the exploitation of labor was, and is, none the less severe. the withholding from labor of any portion of its product in the form of profits--unpaid wages--and the private ownership by individuals or small groups of persons, of timber lands and other forms of property necessary to society as a whole, are principles utterly indefensible by any argument save that of force. such legally ordained robbery can be upheld only by armies, navies, militia, sheriffs and deputies, police and detectives, private gunmen, and illegal mobs formed of, or created by, the propertied classes. alike in the stolen timber, the legally acquired timber, and in the government forest reserves, the propertyless lumberjacks are unmercifully exploited, and any difference in the degree of exploitation does not arise because of the "humanity" of any certain set of employers but simply because the cutting of timber in large quantities brings about a greater productivity from each worker, generally accompanied with a decrease in wages due to the displacement of men. with the development of large scale logging operations there naturally came a development of machinery in the industry. the use of water power, the horse, and sometimes the ox, gave way to the use of the donkey engine. this grew from a crude affair, resembling an over-sized coffee mill, to a machine with a hauling power equal to that of a small sized locomotive. later on came "high lead" logging and the flying machine, besides which the wonderful exploits of "paul bunyan's old blue ox" are as nothing. the overhead system was created as a result of the additional cost of hauling when the increased demand for a larger output of logs forced the erection of more and more camps, each new camp being further removed from the cities and towns. today its use is almost universal as there remains no timber close to the large cities, even the stumps having been removed to make room for farming operations. roughly the method of operation is to leave a straight tall tree standing near the logging track in felling timber. the machine proper is set right at the base of this tree, and about ninety feet up its trunk a large chain is wrapped to allow the hanging of a block. from this spar tree a cable, two inches in diameter, is stretched to another tree some distance in the woods. on this cable is placed what is known as a bicycle or trolley. various other lines run back and forth thru this trolley to the engine. at the end of one of these lines an enormous pair of hooks is suspended. these grasp the timber and convey it to the cars. [illustration: the flying machine as now used in western logging.] ten to twenty thousand feet of logs a day was the output of the old bull or horse teams. the donkey engine brought it to a point where from seventy-five to one hundred thousand could be turned out, and the steam skidder doubled the output of the donkey. ordinarily the crew for one donkey engine consists of from thirteen to fifteen men, sometimes even as high as twenty-five, but this number is reduced to nine or even lower with the introduction of the steam skidder. loggers claim that the high lead system kills and maims more men than the methods formerly in vogue, but be that as it may, the fact stands out quite plainly that as compared with a line horse donkey, operated with a crew of twenty-five men, the flying machine will produce enough lumber to mean the displacement of one hundred men. at the same time the sawmills of the old type have disappeared with their rotary or circular saws, dead rollers, and obsolete methods of handling lumber, and in their place is the modern mill with its band saw, shot-gun feed, steam nigger, live rollers, and resaw. nor do the mills longer turn out rough lumber to be re-handled by trained specialists and highly skilled carpenters with large and costly kits of intricate hand tools. relatively unskilled workers send forth the finished products, window sashes, doors, siding, etc., carpenters armed only with square, hammer and saw, and classed with unskilled labor, put these in place, and a complete house can be ordered by parcel post. as is usual with the introduction of new machinery and methods where the workers are not in control, the actual producers find that all these innovations force them to work at a higher rate of speed under more hazardous conditions for a lower rate of pay. it is true of all industry in the main, particularly true of the lumber industry, and the mills of everett and camps of snohomish county have no exceptions to test this rule. the story of everett has no hint of romance. some time in the late seventies the representatives of john d. rockefeller gained possession of a tract of land in western washington, on puget sound, about thirty miles north of seattle. the land was heavily timbered and water facilities made it a perfect site for mill and shipping purposes. the everett land company was organized, the tract was plotted, and the city of everett laid out. the leading streets, rockefeller, colby, hoyt, etc., were named for these early promoters. hewitt avenue was given the name of a man who is today recognized as the leading capitalist of the state of washington. even the building of those streets reflected no credit upon the city. the work was done by what amounted to convict labor. unemployed workers, even tho they were plentifully supplied with money, were arrested and without being allowed the alternative of a fine were set to work clearing, grading, planking and, later on, paving the streets. perhaps it is too much to expect freedom of speech to be allowed on slave-built streets. in their articles of incorporation the promoters reserved to themselves all right to the ownership and control of public utilities, such as water, light and power and street railway systems. a mortgage of $ , , was placed upon the property. after a time the company failed, the mortgage was foreclosed and the property purchased by rucker brothers. the everett improvement company was then organized with j. t. mcchesney as president. it held all rights to dispose of public utility franchises. the firm of stone & webster, the construction, light, heat, power and traction trust, secured franchises granting them the right to furnish light and power for the city of everett and also to operate the street railway system for years. the everett improvement company owns a dock lying to the south of the municipally owned city dock where the everett tragedy was staged. thru its alliances the shipping of everett is in the hands of the same group of capitalists that control all other public utilities. the waterworks was sold to the city but has remained in the hands of the same officials who were in charge when its title was a private one. everett operates under the commission form of government. the american national bank was organized with mcchesney as president. the only other bank of importance in everett was the first national. these two institutions consolidated with wm. c. butler as president and mcchesney as one of the directors. the everett savings and trust company was later organized, with the same stockholders and under the same management as the first national bank. the control of every public service corporation in everett is directly in the hands of these two banks, and, indirectly, thru loans to industrial corporations, they control both the lumber and the shingle mills of snohomish county in which everett is situated. everett, the "city of smokestacks," as its promoters have named it, is an industrial community of approximately , people. its main activities are the production of lumber and shingles, and shipping. the practically undiversified nature of its economic life binds all those engaged in the employment of labor into a common body. the owners of the lumber and shingle mills, the owners and officials of the banks where the lumber men do business, the lawyers representing the mills and the banks, the employers engaged in shipping lumber and supplies for the lumber industry, their lawyers and their bank connections, the owners of hardware stores that supply equipment for the mills and allied industries, all are united by common ties and common interests and they all support one policy. not only are they banded together against the wage workers but they also oppose the entrance of any kind of business that will in any way menace their rule. they arose almost as one in opposition to the entrance of the ship building industry into everett, despite the fact that it would add measurably to the general prosperity of the city, and with a full knowledge that their harbor offered wonderful natural facilities for that line of endeavor. in the face of an action that threatened their autocratic power their alleged "patriotism" vanished. in the everett commercial club was organized. in the month of december, , following a visit from a san francisco representative of the merchants and manufacturers' association, it was re-organized on the bureau plan as a stock concern. stock memberships were issued to employers and business houses and were subsequently distributed among the employers and their employes. memberships were doled out to persons who would be subservient to the wishes of the small group of capitalists representing the great corporate interests. w. w. blain, secretary of the commercial club, testified, under oath, that the everett improvement company took memberships, the first national bank took , the weyerhouser lumber company , the clough-hartley mill company , the jamison mill company , and other mills and allied industries also purchased memberships in bulk. organized labor, however, had no representation at the commercial club. there is nothing in the history of everett to suggest the usual spontaneous outgrowth of the honest endeavors of hardy pioneer settlers. from the first day the rockefeller interests set foot in the virgin forests of snohomish county up to the present time, the spirit of democracy has been crushed by the greed and cupidity of this small and powerful group. the struggle at everett was but one of the inevitable phases of the larger struggle that takes place when a class or group that has no property comes in contact with those who have monopolized the earth and its resources. it was no new, marvelous, isolated case of violence. it was the normal accompaniment of industry based upon the exploitation of wage workers, and was of one piece with the outbreak on the mesaba range, in bayonne, ludlow, paint creek, paterson, lawrence, san diego, fresno, spokane, homestead and in countless other places. all these apparently disconnected and sporadic uprisings of labor and the accompanying capitalist violence are joined together in a whole that spells wage slavery. as one of the manifestations of the class conflict, the everett tragedy cannot be considered apart from that age-long and world-wide struggle between the takers of profits and the makers of values. footnote: [ ] data on forest reserve taken from encyclopedia britannica articles by gifford pinchot. chapter ii. class war skirmishes "shingle-weaving is not a trade; it is a battle. for ten hours a day the sawyer faces two teethed steel discs whirling around two hundred times a minute. to the one on the left he feeds heavy blocks of cedar, reaching over with his left hand to remove the rough shingles it rips off. he does not, he cannot stop to see what his left hand is doing. his eyes are too busy examining the shingles for knot holes to be cut out by the second saw whirling in front of him. "the saw on his left sets the pace. if the singing blade rips fifty rough shingles off the block every minute, the sawyer must reach over to its teeth fifty times in sixty seconds; if the automatic carriage feeds the odorous wood sixty times into the hungry teeth, sixty times he must reach over, turn the shingle, trim its edge on the gleaming saw in front of him, cut out the narrow strip containing the knot hole with two quick movements of his right hand and toss the completed board down the chute to the packers, meanwhile keeping eyes and ears open for the sound that asks him to feed a new block into the untiring teeth. hour after hour the shingle weaver's hands and arms, plain, unarmored flesh and blood, are staked against the screeching steel that cares not what it severs. hour after hour the steel sings its crescendo note as it bites into the wood, the sawdust cloud thickens, the wet sponge under the sawyer's nose, fills with fine particles. if 'cedar asthma,' the shingle weaver's occupational disease, does not get him, the steel will. sooner or later he reaches over a little too far, the whirling blade tosses drops of deep red into the air, and a finger, a hand or part of an arm comes sliding down the slick chute."[ ] this description of shingle weaving was given by walter v. woehlke, managing editor of the sunset magazine, in an article which had as its purpose the justification of the murders committed by the everett mob, and it contains no over-statement. shingle weavers are set apart from the rest of the workers by their mutilated hands and the dead grey pallor of their cheeks. "the nature of a man's occupation, his daily working environment, marks in a large degree the nature of the man himself, and cannot help but mold the early years, at least, or his economic organization. men who flirt with death in their daily calling become inured to physical danger, they become contemptuous of the man whose calling fails to bring forth physical prowess. so do they in their organizations become irritated and contemptuous at the long-drawn-out process of bargaining, the duel of wits and brain power engaged in by the more conservative organizations to win working concessions. their motto becomes 'strike quick and strike hard,'* * *" so says e. p. marsh, president of the washington state federation of labor, in speaking of the shingle weavers.[ ] logging, no less than shingle weaving, is a dangerous occupation. the countless articles of wood in every-day use have claimed their toll of human blood. a falling tree or limb, a mis-step on the river, a faulty cable, a weakened trestle; each may mean a still and mangled form. time and again the loggers have organized to improve their working conditions only to find themselves beaten or betrayed. playing upon the natural desire of the woodsmen for organization, shrewd swindlers have formed unions which were nothing more than dues collection agencies. politicians have fathered organizations for their own purposes. unions built by the men themselves have fallen into the hands of officials who used them for selfish personal gain. over and over the employers have crushed the embryonic unions only to see them rise again with added strength. forced by the very necessities of their daily lives, the workers always returned to the fight with a new and better form of unionism. like the loggers, the shingle weavers were routed time and again, but their spirit never died. the everett shingle weavers formed their union as a result of a successful strike in . in they were strong enough to resist a proposed reduction of wages. in they struck in sympathy with the ballard weavers, and lost. within a year the defeated union was back as strong as before. by the international shingle weavers union had attained a membership of nearly , , the majority of whom were in accord with the industrial workers of the world. the question of affiliation with the i. w. w. was widely discussed and was only prevented from going to a referendum vote by the efforts of a few officials. further discussion of the question was excluded from the columns of their official organ, "the shingle weaver," by the ninth annual convention.[ ] following this slap in the face, the progressive members quit the union in large numbers, leaving affairs in the hands of conservative and reactionary elements. endeavors were made to negotiate contracts with the employers; and in the officials secured $ , from the american federation of labor and made a pretense at the organization of all workers in the woods and mills into one body. this was a move aimed at the forest and lumber workers of the i. w. w., which was feared alike by the employers and the craft union officials because of its new strength gained thru the affiliation of the brotherhood of timber workers in the southern states. instead of gaining ground by the move, the shingle weavers union lost in membership and subsequently claimed that industrial unionism was a failure in the lumber industry. the industrial depression of - found all unions in bad shape. employers used the army of unemployed as an axe to cut wages. in the spring of notice of a wage reduction was posted in the everett shingle mills. the weavers promptly struck. scabs, gunmen, injunctions, and violence followed. the strike failed, the wage reduction was made, but the men returned to work relying upon a "gentlemen's agreement" that the employers would voluntarily raise the wages of the shingle weavers when shingles again sold for what they were bringing before the depression. faith in agreements had gotten in its deadly work; the shingle weavers believed that the employers meant to keep their word. in the spring of shingles soared to a price higher than had prevailed for years, but the promised raise failed to materialize. with but a skeleton of an organization to back them, a handful of determined delegates met in seattle in april and decided to demand the restoration of the scale thruout the entire jurisdiction of the shingle weavers' union, setting may st as the date when the raise should take effect. at the time set, or shortly thereafter, most of the mills in the northwest paid the scale. everett, where the employers had given their "word of honor," refused the strikers' demand. the fight was on! the seaside shingle company, which held no membership in the commercial club, soon granted the raise. many of the other companies, notably the jamison mill, began the importation of scabs within the month. the cry of "outside agitators" was forgotten long enough to go outside in search of notorious gunmen and scab-herders. the slums, the hells of capitalism, were raked with a fine-toothed comb for degenerates with a record for lawless deviltry. the strikers threw out their picket line and the ever-present class war began to show itself in other than peaceful ways. during may, june and july the picket line had to be maintained in the face of strong opposition by the local authorities who were the pliant tools of the lumber trust. the ranks of the pickets were constantly being thinned by false arrest and imprisonment on every charge and no charge, until on august th there were but eighteen men on the picket line. on that particular morning the everett police searched the little handful of pickets in front of the jamison mill to make sure that they were unarmed, and when that fact was determined, they started the men across the narrow trestle bridge that extended over an arm of the bay. when the pickets were well out on the bridge, the imported thugs, some seventy in number, personally directed and urged on by their employer, neil jamison, poured in from either side, leaving no means of escape save that of making a thirty foot leap into the deep waters of the bay, and with brass knuckles and blackjacks made an attack upon the defenseless weavers. the pickets were unmercifully beaten. robert h. mills, business agent of the shingle weavers' union, was knocked down by one of the open-shop thugs and kicked in the ribs and face as he lay senseless in the roadway. from a vantage point, thoughtfully removed from the danger zone, the police calmly surveyed the scene. when darkness fell that night, the pickets, aided by irate citizens, returned to the attack with clubs and fists. the tables were turned. the "moral heroes" had their heads cracked. seeing that the scabs were thoroly whipped, the "guardians of the peace" rushed to the rescue with drawn revolvers. in the melee one union picket was shot thru the leg. about ten nights later, mr. jamison herded his scabs into military formation and after a short parade thru the main streets led them to the everett theater; the party being in appreciation of their "efficiency." this arrogant display incensed the strikers and citizens, and when the scabs emerged from the show a near-riot occurred. mills was present and altho too weak from his recent injuries to have taken any active part in the fray, he was arrested and thrown in jail in default of bail. the man who had murderously assaulted him at the mill swore out the complaint. mills was subsequently tried and acquitted on a charge of inciting to riot. nothing was done to his assailant. and in none of these acts of violence was the i. w. w. in any way a participant. during this period there existed a strike of longshoremen on the entire pacific coast, including the port of everett. the wrath of the employers fell heavily upon the riggers and stevedores because that body was not in sympathy with the idea of craft contracts or agreements, and because of the adoption by a large majority of a proposal to "amalgamate all the unions of the maritime transportation industry, between the warehouse at the shipping point and warehouse at the receiving point into one big powerful organization, meeting, thinking, and acting together at all times."[ ] the industrially united employers of the pacific coast did not relish the idea of the workers grouping themselves together along lines similar to those on which the owners were associated. the longshoremen's strike started on june st and was marked by more or less serious disorders at various points, most of the violence being precipitated by detectives placed in the unions by the employers. the tug boat men were also on strike in everett, particularly against the american tug boat company owned by captain harry ramwell. all of the unions on strike in everett were affiliated with the a. f. of l. striking longshoremen from seattle aided the shingle weavers on their picket line from time to time, and individual members of the i. w. w., holding duplicate cards in the a. f. of l. stood shoulder to shoulder with the strikers, but officially the i. w. w. had no part in any of the strikes. [illustration: one of the thousands who donate their fingers to the lumber trust. the trust compensated all with poverty and some with bullets on november , .] meanwhile in seattle the i. w. w. had planned to organize the forest and lumber workers on a scale never before attempted. calls for organizers had been coming in from the surrounding district and there were demands for a mass convention to discuss conditions in the industry. yet, strange as it may seem to those who do not know of the ebb and flow of labor unions, there were at that time less than half a hundred paid-up members in the seattle loggers branch, so great had been the depression from to . the conference was set for july th and five hundred logger delegates responded, representing nearly as many camps in the district. enthusiasm ran high! the assembled workers suggested the adoption of a plan of district organization along lines more in keeping with the modern trend of the lumber industry. the loggers' union, then known as local , ratified the actions of the conference. as a preliminary move it was decided that an organizer be secured to make a survey of the lumber situation in the surrounding territory. general headquarters in chicago was communicated with, james rowan was found to be available, and on july st he was sent to everett to find out the sentiment for industrial unionism at that point. that night rowan spoke on wetmore avenue fifty feet back from hewitt avenue, in compliance with the street regulations. no mention was made of local conditions as rowan had just come from another part of the country and was unaware that a shingle weavers strike was in progress. his speech consisted mainly of references to the industrial relations commission report, a pamphlet summarizing that report being the only literature offered for sale at the meeting. toward the end of his speech rowan declared: "the a. f. of l. believes in signing agreements with the employers. the craft unions regard these contracts as sacred. when one craft goes on strike the others are forced to remain at work. this makes the craft unions scab on each other." "you are a liar!" cried jake michel, an a. f. of l. representative, staunchly defending his organization. from an automobile near the edge of the crowd, donald mcrae, sheriff of snohomish county, called to michel: "jake, i will run that guy in if you say so." "i don't see any need to run him in;" remonstrated michel. "he hasn't said anything yet to run him in for." nevertheless mcrae, usurping the powers of the local police department, made rowan leave the platform and go with him to the county jail. mcrae was drunk. rowan was held for an hour. immediately upon his release he returned to the corner to resume his speech. police officer fox thereupon arrested him and took him to the city jail. he was thrown into a dark cell for refusing to do jail work, was taken into court next morning and absurdly charged with peddling without a license, was denied a jury trial, refused a postponement, not allowed a chance to secure counsel, and was sentenced to thirty days imprisonment with an alternative of leaving town. no ordinance against street speaking at wetmore and hewitt then existed. rowan chose to leave town. no time was set as to how long he was to remain away. he then left for bellingham and from there went to sedro-woolley. using an assumed name to avoid the blacklist he worked at the latter place for a short time to familiarize himself with job conditions, subsequently returning to everett. levi remick, a one-armed veteran of the industrial war, was next sent to everett on august th to act as temporary delegate. he interviewed a number of people and sold some literature. receiving orders to stop selling the pamphlets and papers, he inquired the price of a peddler's license and finding it prohibitive he returned to seattle to secure funds to open an office. a small hall was found at ½ hewitt avenue, a month's rent was paid, and on august th remick placed a sign in the window and started to sell literature and transact business for the i. w. w. the little hall remained open until late in august. migratory workers, strikers, and citizens generally, dropped in from time to time to ask about the organization or to purchase papers. solidarity and the industrial worker were particularly in demand, the latter paper having commenced publication in seattle on april st, . a number of everett citizens, desiring to hear a lecture by james p. thompson, who had spoken in everett without molestation in and in march and april of , made donations to remick sufficient to cover all expenses, and it was arranged that thompson speak on august nd. attempts to secure a hall met with failure; the halls of everett were closed to the i. w. w. the conspiracy against free speech and free assembly was on in earnest! no other course was left but to hold the proposed meeting on the street, so hewitt and wetmore, the spot where the salvation army and various religious and political bodies spoke almost nightly, was selected and the meeting advertised. early in the morning on the day before the scheduled meeting, sheriff mcrae, commanding a body of police officers over whom he had no official control, stormed into the i. w. w. hall and tore from the wall all bills advertising thompson's meeting, saying with an oath: "that man won't be allowed to speak in everett!" turning to remick and throwing back his coat to display the badge, he yelled: "i order you out of this town! get out by afternoon or you go to jail!" mcrae was drunk. stalking out as rapidly as his condition would permit he staggered down the street to a near-by pool hall where the order was repeated to the men assembled therein. these, with other workingmen, in all were rounded up, seized, roughly questioned, searched, and all those who had no families or property in everett were forcibly deported. that night ten more were taken from the shingle weaver's picket line and sent out of town without due process of law. treatment of this kind became general. "not a man in overalls is safe!" declared the secretary of the everett building trades council. "men just off the job with their pay checks in their pocket have been unceremoniously thrown out of town just because they were workingmen."[ ] remick closed the little hall and left for seattle the next morning to place the question of the thompson meeting before the seattle membership. shortly before noon rowan, who had just returned to everett, went to the hall and finding it closed and locked he proceeded to open it up. within a few minutes sheriff mcrae, in company with police officer fox, entered the place and ordered rowan to leave town by two o'clock. he then tore up the balance of the advertising matter for the thompson meeting. mcrae was drunk. rowan went to seattle, where the report of this occurrence made the members more determined than ever to hold the meeting that night. with about twenty other members of the i. w. w., thompson went to everett. the salvation army was holding services on the corner. placing his platform even further back from the street intersection thompson waited until the army had concluded and then commenced his lecture. using the industrial relations commission report as the basis of his talk, he spoke for about twenty minutes without interruption. then a body of fifteen policemen marched down the street and swung into the crowd. the officer in charge stepped up to thompson and requested him to go to see the chief of police at the police station. after addressing a few remarks to the crowd thompson withdrew from the platform. his place was taken at once by rowan, who was immediately dragged from the stand and turned over to the same officer who had charge of thompson and his wife. mrs. edith frennette then spoke briefly and called for a song. the audience responded with "the red flag," but meanwhile mrs. frennette and mrs. lorna mahler had been placed under arrest. in succession several others attempted to speak but were pulled or pushed off the stand. the police then formed a circle by holding hands around those who were close to the platform. one by one the citizens were allowed to slip outside the "ring-around-a-rosy" until only "desperadoes" were left. these made no effort to resist arrest, and were started toward the city jail. the officer entrusted with thompson was so interested in his captive that rowan was able to quietly remove himself from the scene, returning to the street corner where he spoke for more than half an hour before being rearrested. aroused by this invasion of liberty, mrs. letelsia fye, an everett citizen, arose to recite the declaration of independence, but even that proved too revolutionary for the tools of the lumber trust. a threatening move on the part of the police brought back the thought of her two unprotected children and caused her to cease her efforts to declare independence in everett. "is there a red-blooded man in the audience who will take the stand?" called out the gallant little woman as she stepped from the platform. jake michel promptly accepted the challenge and was as promptly suppressed by the police at the first mention of free speech. in the jail the arrested persons were searched one by one and thrown into the "receiving tank." when thompson's turn came, commissioner of public safety, as chief of police kelly was known under everett's form or government, said to him: "mr. thompson, i don't want to lock you up." "that's interesting," replied thompson. "why have you got me down here?" "we don't want you to speak on the street at this time." "have you any ordinance against it, that is, have i broken any law?" enquired thompson. "oh no, no. that isn't the idea," rejoined kelly. "we have strikes on, labor troubles here, and we don't want you to speak here at all. you are welcome at any other time, but not now." "well," said thompson, "as a representative of labor, when labor is in trouble is the time i would like to speak, but i am not going to advocate anything that i think you could object to." "now, thompson," said kelly, "if you will agree to get right out of town i will let you go. i don't want to lock you up." "do you believe in free speech?" asked thompson. "yes." "and i am not arrested?" "no, you are not arrested." "come up to the meeting then," thompson said with a smile, "for i am going back and speak." "oh no, you are not!"--and kelly kind of laughed. "no, you are not!" "if you let me go i will go right up to the corner and speak, and if you send me out of town i will come back," said thompson emphatically. "i don't know what you are going to do, but that's how i stand." "lock him up with the rest!" was the abrupt reply of the "commissioner of public safety." at this juncture james rowan was brought in from the patrol wagon, and searched. as the officers were about to put him in the cell with the others, sheriff mcrae called out: "don't put him in there, he is instigator of the whole damn business. turn him over to me." he then took rowan in his automobile to the county jail and threw him in a cell, along with b. e. peck, who had previously been given a "floater" out of town for having spoken on the street on or about august th. mcrae was drunk. more than half a thousand indignant citizens followed the twenty-one arrested persons to the jail, loudly condemning the outrage against their constitutional rights. editor h. w. watts, of the northwest worker, a union and socialist paper published in everett, forcibly expressed his opinion of the suppression of free speech and was thereupon thrown into jail. fearing a serious outbreak, michel secured permission to address the people surrounding the jail. the crowd, upon receiving assurances from michel that the men would be well treated and could be seen in the morning, quietly dispersed and returned to their homes. the free speech prisoners were charged with vagrancy on the police blotter, but no formal charge was ever made, nor were they brought to trial. next morning, thompson and his wife, who had return tickets on the interurban, were deported by rail, together with herbert mahler, secretary of the seattle i. w. w. mrs. mahler, mrs. frennette and the balance of the prisoners were taken to the city dock and deported by boat. at the instigation of mcrae, and without a court order, the sum of $ . was seized from the personal funds of james orr and turned over to the purser of the boat to pay the fares of the deportees to seattle. protests against this legalized robbery were of no avail; the amount of the fares was never repaid. mayor merrill of everett, replying to a letter from mahler, promised that this money would be refunded to orr. his word proved to be as good as that of the everett shingle mill owners. prominent members of the commercial club lent civic dignity to the deportation by their profane threats to use physical force in the event that any of the deported prisoners dared to return. upon their arrival in seattle the deported men conferred with other members of the union, telling of the beating some of them had received while in jail, and as a result there was organized a free speech committee composed of sam dixon, dan emmett and a. e. soper. telegrams were then sent to general headquarters, to solidarity and to various branches of the organization, notifying them of what had happened. at a street meeting that night, mrs. frennette, mrs. mahler and james p. thompson, gave the workers the facts and collected over $ . for the committee to use in its work. in everett the labor council passed a resolution stating that the unions there were back of the battle for free speech and condemning mcrae and the authorities for their illegal actions. the free speech fight was on! remick, in the meantime, had returned to everett and found that all the literature had been confiscated from the hall. the day following his return, august th, sheriff mcrae blustered into the hall with a police officer in his train. leering at remick he exclaimed: "you god damn son of a b----, are you back here again? get on your coat and get into that auto!" seizing an i. w. w. stencil that was lying on the table he tore it to shreds. "if anybody asks who tore that up,"--bombastically--"tell them sheriff mcrae tore it!" shoving remick into the automobile with the remark that jail was too easy for him and they would therefore take him to the interurban and deport him, the sheriff drove off to make good his threat. mcrae was drunk. on the corner that night, harry feinberg spoke to a large audience and was not molested. that this was due to no change of policy on the part of the lumber trust tools was shown when secretary herbert mahler went to everett the following day in reference to the situation. he was met at the depot by sheriff mcrae who asked him what he had come to everett for. "to see the mayor," answered mahler. "anything you have to say to the mayor, you can say to me," was mcrae's rejoinder. after a brief conversation mahler was deported to seattle by the same car on which he had made the trip over. mcrae was drunk. f. w. stead reopened the hall on the th and managed to hold it down for a couple of days. three speakers appeared and spoke that night. j. a. macdonald, editor of the industrial worker, opened the meeting. george reese spoke next, but upon commencing to advocate the use of violence he was pulled from the platform by harry feinberg, who concluded the meeting. no arrests were made. it was during this period that secretary herbert mahler addressed a letter to governor ernest lister, informing him of the state of lawlessness existing in everett. a second letter was sent to mayor merrill and in it was enclosed a copy of the letter to lister. no reply was received to the communication. for a time following this there was no interference with street meetings. feinberg spoke without molestation on monday night and dan emmett opened up the hall once more. on tuesday evening, the same night as the theater riot, thompson addressed an audience of thousands of everett citizens, giving them the facts of the arrests made the previous week, and advising the workers against the use of violence in any disputes with employers. after having been held by mcrae for eight days without any commitment papers, rowan was turned over to the city police and released on september st. he returned to the street corner and spoke for several succeeding nights including "labor day" which fell on the th. incidentally he paid a visit to the home of jake michel and, after industrial unionism was more fully explained, michel agreed that the craft union contract system forced scabbery upon the workers. rowan left shortly thereafter for anacortes to find out the sentiment for organization in that section. this period of comparative peace was due to the fact that the lumber barons realized that their actions reflected no credit upon themselves or their city and they wished to create a favorable impression upon federal mediator blackman who was in everett at the request of u. s. commissioner of labor wilson. it was during this time, too, that the protagonists of the open shop were secretly marshalling their forces for a still more lawless and brutal campaign. affairs gradually slipped from the hands of the everett authorities into the grasp of those snohomish county officials who were more completely dominated by the lumber interests. "tom," remarked jake michel one day to chief of police kelley, "it seems funny that you can't handle the situation." "i can handle it all right," replied kelley, bitterly, "but mcrae has been drunk around here for the last two or three weeks and he has butted into my business." it was on august th that the lumber trust definitely stripped the city officials of all power and turned affairs over to the sheriff. on this point a quotation from the industrial relations commission report is particularly illuminating in showing a common industrial condition: "free speech in informal and personal intercourse was denied the inhabitants of the coal camps. it was also denied public speakers. union organizers would not be permitted to address meetings. periodicals permitted in the camps were censored in the same fashion. the operators were able to use their power of summary discharge to deny free press, free speech, and free assembly, to prevent political activities for the suppression of popular government and the winning of political control. +i find that the head of the political machinery is the sheriff.+" in everett the sheriff's office was controlled by the commercial club and the commercial club in turn was dominated, thru an inner circle, by the lumber trust. acting for the trust a small committee meeting was held on the morning of the th with the editor of a trust-controlled newspaper, the secretary of the commercial club, two city officials, a banker and a lumber trust magnate in attendance. a larger meeting of those in control met in the afternoon and, pursuant to a call already published in the everett herald, several hundred scabs, gunmen, and other open shop advocates were brought together that night at the commercial club. commissioner of finance, w. h. clay, suggested that as federal mediator blackman, an authority on labor questions, was in the city it might be well to confer with him regarding a settlement. banker moody said he did not think a conference would be advisable as mr. blackman might be inclined to lean toward the side of the laboring men, and at a remark by "governor" clough, formerly governor of minnesota and spokesman for the mill owners, to the effect that there was nothing to be settled the suggestion was not considered further. h. d. cooley, special counsel for a number of the mills, governor clough, a prominent mill owner, and others then addressed the meeting in furtherance of the plans already laid. clough asked mcrae if he could handle the situation. mcrae said he did not have enough deputies. "swear in the members of the commercial club, then!" demanded clough. this was done. nearly two hundred of the men whose membership had been paid for by the mill owners "volunteered" their services. mcrae swore in a few and then, for the first time in his life, found swearing a difficulty, so w. w. blain, secretary of the commercial club, who was neither a city nor a county official, administered the remainder of such oaths as were taken by the deputies. the whole meeting was illegal. from time to time the deputy force was added to until it ran way up in the hundreds. it was divided into sections a, b, c, etc. each division was assigned to a special duty, one to watch incoming trains for free speech advocates, another to watch the boats for i. w. w. members, and others for various duties such as deporting and beating up workers. this marked the beginning of a reign of terror during which no propertyless worker or union sympathizer was safe from attack. about this same time the commercial club made a pretense of investigating the shingle weavers' strike. not one of the strikers was called to give their side of the controversy, and j. g. brown, international president of the shingle weavers' union, was refused permission to testify. the committee claimed that the employers could not pay the wages asked. an adverse report was returned and was adopted by the club. attorneys e. c. dailey, robert fassett, and george loutitt, along with a number of other fair minded members who did not favor the open shop program, withdrew from membership on account of these various actions. their names were placed on the bulletin board and a boycott advised. feeling against the organization responsible for the chaotic conditions in everett finally became so strong that practically all of the merchants whose places were not mortgaged or who were not otherwise dependent upon the whims of the lumber barons, posted notices in their windows, "we are not members of the commercial club." their names, too, were placed on the bulletin board, and the boycott and other devices used in an endeavor to force them into bankruptcy. prior to these occurrences and for some time thereafter, the club was addressed by emissaries of the open shop interests. a. l. veitch, special counsel for the merchants' and manufacturers' association, on one occasion addressed the deputies on labor troubles in san francisco and the methods used to handle them. veitch was later one of the attorneys in the case against thomas h. tracy, and he was employed by the state, it being stipulated that he receive no state compensation. h. d. cooley, lumber mill lawyer and former prosecuting attorney, also spoke at different times on the open shop questions. cooley was likewise an attorney for the prosecution in the tracy case and he, like veitch, was retained by "interested parties." cooley was one of the anti-union speakers at a meeting of the deputies which was also addressed by f. c. beach, of san francisco, president of the m. & m., robert moody, president of the first national bank of everett, governor clough, mill magnate, f. k. baker, president of the commercial club, and col. roland h. hartley, open shop candidate for the nomination as governor of washington at the pending election. leigh irvine, of seattle, secretary of the employers' association, and murray, president of the national association of manufacturers, were also active in directing the destinies of the commercial club. a special open shop committee was formed, the nature of its operations being apparent when the following two quotations from its minutes, taken from among others of similar purport, are considered: "decided to go after advertisements in labor journals and the northwestern worker."[ ] "matter of how far to go on open shop propaganda at the deputies meeting this morning was discussed. also the advisability of submitting pledges. mr. moody to take up matter of the legality of pledges with mr. coleman. note: at deputies meeting all speakers touched quite strongly on the open shop, and as far as it was possible to see all in attendance seemed favorable."[ ] just how far they finally did go is a matter of history. at the time, however, there were appropriations made for the purchase of blackjacks, leaded clubs, guns and ammunition, and for the employment of detectives, labor spies, and "agents provocateur."[ ] [illustration: joe (red) doran capt. jack mitten the launch wanderer.] footnotes: [ ] sunset magazine, february . "the i. w. w. and the golden rule." [ ] supplemental report on "everett's industrial warfare," by president ernest p. marsh to state federation of labor convention held at everett, wash., from january to , . [ ] vol. , no. , the shingle weaver, special convention number, february, . [ ] proposition no. , submitted to referendum of membership of pacific coast district i. l. a., riggers and stevedores local , at their annual election on jan. , . [ ] dreamland rink meeting, seattle, nov. th, over , in attendance. [ ] minutes of open shop committee, sept. th. [ ] minutes of open shop committee, october . [ ] the incidents of the foregoing chapter are corroborated by the sworn testimony of prosecution witnesses donald mcrae, sheriff of snohomish county; and d. d. merrill, mayor of everett; and by witnesses called by the defense, w. w. blain, secretary of the commercial club: j. g. brown, international president of the shingle weavers' union; w. h. clay, commissioner of finance in everett; robert faussett, everett attorney; harry feinberg, one of the defendants; mrs. letelsia fye, everett citizen; jake michel, secretary everett building trades council; herbert mahler, secretary seattle i. w. w. and subsequently secretary of the everett prisoners' defense committee; robert mills, business agent everett shingle weavers' union; james orr, and levi remick, i. w. w. members; james rowan, i. w. w. organizer; and james p. thompson, national organizer for the i. w. w. and a speaker of international reputation. chapter iii. a reign of terror no sooner had mediator blackman left everett than the "law and order" forces resumed their hostilities with a bitterness and brutality that seems almost incredible. on september th mrs. frennette, h. shebeck, bob adams, j. johnson, j. fred, and dan emmett were dragged from the platform at hewitt and wetmore avenues and were literally thrown into their cells. next morning mrs. frenette was released but the men were "kangarood" for days each. petty abuses were heaped upon them and johnson was cast into the "black hole" by the sheriff. some of the men were severely beaten just before their release a few days afterward. when fred reed and james dwyer were arrested the next night for street speaking, the crowd of everett citizens, in company with the few i. w. w. members present, followed the deputies to the county jail, demanding the release of reed, dwyer and peck, and those who had been arrested the night before. in its surging to and from the crowd pushed over a post-rotted picket fence that had been erected in the early days of everett. this violence, together with cries of "you've got the wrong bunch in jail! let those men out and put the 'bulls' in!" was the basis from which the trust-owned press built up a story of a riot and attempted jail delivery. on the same flimsy basis a warrant was issued charging mrs. frennette with inciting a riot. the free speech committee sent john berg to everett that same day to retain an attorney for the men held without warrants. he secured the services of e. c. dailey, and, while waiting to learn the result of the lawyer's efforts, he went to the i. w. w. hall only to find it closed. a man was there waiting to get his blankets to go to work and berg volunteered to get them for him. he then went to the county jail and asked for mcrae. when mcrae came in and learned that berg wanted to see the secretary in order to get the keys to the hall, he yelled out: "you are another i. w. w. throw him in jail, the old son-of-a-b----!" without having any charges placed against him, berg was held until the next morning, when mcrae and a deputy took him out in a roadster to a lonely spot on the county road. forcing him to dismount, mcrae ordered berg to walk to seattle under threats of death if he returned, and then knocked berg down and kicked him in the groin as he lay prostrate. mcrae was drunk. berg subsequently developed a severe rupture as a result of this treatment. he managed to make his way to seattle and in spite of his condition returned to everett that same night. undaunted by their previous deportations, and determined to circumvent the deputies who were seizing men from the railroad trains and regular boats, a body of free speech fighters, on september th, took the train to mukilteo, a village about four miles from everett, and there, by pre-arrangement, were taken aboard the launch "wanderer." the little boat would not hold the entire party and six men were towed behind in a large dory. there were first class life preservers on board, the captain borrowing some to supplement his equipment. when the "wanderer" reached a point about a mile and a half from the weyerhouser dock a boat was seen approaching. it was the scab tug "edison," belonging to the american tugboat company. on board was captain harry ramwell, sheriff mcrae and a body of about sixty deputies. when the "edison" was about feet away the sheriff commenced shooting--but let captain jack mitten tell his own story. "the first shot went over the bow. i don't know whether there was one or two shots fired, then there was a shot struck right over my head onto the big cast iron muffler. the next shot came on thru the boat,--i had my bunk strapped up against the wall,--and thru the blanket,--and the cotton in the blanket turned the bullet,--and it struck flat on the bottom of the bunk. "i shut the engine down and went out to the stern door and just as i stepped out there was a shot went right by my head and at the same time mcrae hollered out and says 'you son-of-a-b--, you come over here!' says i, "if you want me, you come over here." with that they brought their boat and my boat up together. six shots in all were fired. "mcrae commenced to take the people off the boat and when he had them all off he kicked the pilot house open and says, 'oho, there is a woman here!' mrs. frennette was sitting in the pilot house. anyhow, they took her and he says, 'you'll get a one piece suit on mcneil's island for this,' and then he says to cap ramwell--cap ramwell was sitting on the side--'this is oscar lindstrom, drag him along too.' "then they were going to make fast the line--they had made fast my stern line--and as i bent over with the line mcrae struck me with his revolver on the back of the head, and when i straightened up he struck me in here, a revolver about that long. (indicating.) i said something to him and then he ran the revolver right in here in my groin and he ruptured me at the same time. i told him 'it's a fine way of using a citizen.' he says, 'you're a hell of a citizen, bringing in a bunch like that,' he says, 'to cause a riot in this town.' i says, 'well, they are all union men anyway.' he says, 'you shut your damn head or i will knock it clean off!' and i guess he would, because he had whiskey enough in him at the time to do it. "there was a small man, i believe they call him miller, he saw him standing there and he says, 'you here, too?' and he hauled off and struck him in the temple and the blood flowed way down over his face and shirt. he struck him again and staggered him. if he hadn't struck him so he would have gone inboard, he would have gone over the edge, close to the edge. "then there was a man by the name of berg, it seemed he knowed john berg. he said, 'you ----, i will fix you so you will never come back!' and then he went at berg, but berg was foxy and kept ducking his head. he rapped him on the shoulders two or three different times, i wouldn't say how often, but he didn't draw blood on berg. (an i. w. w. member named kurgvel was also beaten on the head and shoulders.) "they drove us all in alongside of the boiler between the decks, down on the main deck of the "edison" and kept us there till they docked and got automobiles and the patrol wagon and filed us off into them and took us to jail." the arrest of captain mitten and acting engineer oscar lindstrom made twenty-one prisoners in all, and these were jailed without any charge being placed against them. as berg was taken into the jail, mcrae cursed him roundly, ordering two deputies to hold him while a beating was administered over the shoulders and back with a leather strap loaded with lead on the tip. the men were treated with great brutality within the jail. one young fellow was asked by the deputies, "are you an i. w. w.?" and each time the lad answered "yes!" he was thrown violently against the steel walls of the cell, until his body was a mass of bruises. mitten was denied a chance to communicate with his everett friends in order to get bail. the nights were cold and the prisoners had to sleep on the bare floor without blankets. at the end of nine days all the men were offered their liberty except mitten. they promptly refused the offer. "all or none!" was their indignant demand, and peck and mitten were set at liberty with the rest as a result of this show of solidarity. upon his release captain mitten found that the life preservers had been stolen from his boat, and the flattened bullet removed from his bunk. scotty fife, the port captain of the american tugboat company, told captain mitten that he had straightened up the things on the "wanderer!" thus to the crimes of unlawful arrest, false imprisonment, theft, deportation, assault and physical injury, the lumber trust added that of piracy on the high seas. and all this was but a taste of what was yet to come! organizer james rowan returned to everett from anacortes on the afternoon of september th and was met at the depot by three deputies who promptly took him to the county jail. there were at that time between thirty and forty other members of the i. w. w. being unlawfully held. rowan learned that these men had been taken from their cells one at a time and beaten by the deputies, thorne and dunn having especially severe cuts on the face and head. rowan's story of the outrage that followed gives a glimpse of the methods employed by the lumber trust. "as soon as i dropped off the train at everett i was met by three deputies. one of them told me the sheriff wanted to see me and i asked if he was a deputy. he said, 'yes,' and showed me a badge. then i went up with two of the deputies to the county jail. in a minute or two sheriff mcrae came in and he was pretty drunk. he caught hold of me and gave me a yank forward, and he says, 'so you are back, eh?' and i says 'yes.' and he says 'we are going to fix you so you won't come back any more.' there was some more abusive talk and then i was searched and put in a cell. "just after dark that night i was taken out of the cell, my stuff was given back, and mcrae says, 'we are going to start you on the road to seattle.' with a deputy he took me out to the automobile and mcrae drove the automobile, and we had some conversation. mcrae seemed to feel very sore because i told the people on the street that the jail was lousy, and he says 'we wanted you to get out of here and you would not do it, and now,' he says, 'now instead of dealing with officers you have to deal with a bunch of boob citizens, and there is no telling what these boobs will do.' there was more talk that is not worth repeating and most of it not fit to repeat anyhow. "we went out in the country until we came to where the road crosses the interurban tracks about two miles from silver lake and mcrae told me to get out. he then pointed down the track and says, 'there is the road to seattle and you beat it!' so i started down the track. "i hadn't gone far, maybe or yards, when i met a bunch of gunmen. they came at me with guns. they had clubs and they started to beat me up on the head with the butts of their guns and with the clubs. they all had handkerchiefs over their face except one. they threw a cloth over my head and beat me some more on the head with their gun butts and then they dragged me thru the fence at the right-of-way and went a little ways back into the woods. then they held me down over a log about eighteen inches or two feet in diameter. there were about a dozen of them i would say. two or three held each arm and two or three each leg and there were four or five of them holding guns around my ribs--they had the guns close around my ribs all the time, several of them--and they tore my clothes off, tore my shirt and coat off. then one of them beat me on the back, on the bare back with some kind of a sap, i don't know just what kind it was, but i could hear him grunt every time he was going to strike a blow. i was struck fifty times or more. "after he got thru beating me they went back to the fence toward the road and i picked up my scattered belongings and went down to silver lake, taking the first car to seattle." [illustration: organizer james rowan; showing his back lacerated by lumber trust thugs.] rowan exhibited his badly lacerated and bruised back to several prominent seattle citizens, and then had a photograph made, which was widely circulated. contrary to the expectation of the lumber barons this treatment did not deter free speech fighters from carrying on the struggle. instead, it brought fresh bodies of free speech enthusiasts to the scene within a short period. the personnel of the free speech committee changed continually because of the arrest of its members. on sunday, september th, at a mass meeting in seattle harry feinberg and william roberts were elected to serve. roberts had just come down from port angeles and desired to investigate conditions at first hand, so in company with feinberg he went to everett on the th. they met jake michel, who telephoned to chief of police kelley for permission to hold a street meeting. "i have no objection to this meeting," replied kelley, "but wait a minute, you had better call up mcrae and find out." attempts to reach mcrae at the commercial club and the sheriff's office met with failure. meanwhile feinberg had gone ahead with the meeting, the following being his sworn statement of what transpired: "i went to everett at : monday night. i got a box and opened a meeting for the i. w. w. there must have been three thousand people on the corner, against buildings and looking out of the windows. "i spoke about minutes, with the crowd boisterous in their applause. three companies of deputies and vigilantes, about one hundred and fifty thugs in all, marched down the street and divided up in three companies. one of the deputies came up and told me he wanted me and grabbed me off the box. "they took me up to the jail, took my description, and my money and valuables, which were not returned. by that time fellow worker roberts was brought in. a drunken deputy came in and grabbed me by the coat and dragged me out of the jail, with the evident permission of the officers. the vigilantes proceeded to beat me up on the jail steps. there were anyway fifty deputies waiting outside and all of them crowded to get a chance to hit me. they gave me a chance to get away finally and shot after me, or in the air, i could not tell which, but i was not hit by the bullets." the sworn statement of william roberts corroborated the foregoing: "i took the box after fellow worker feinberg had been arrested. the crowd were extreme in their hostility to the lawlessness of the officers. i told them to keep cool, that the i. w. w. would handle the situation, in their own time and way. they arrested me, and, right there, they clubbed me on the head. they brought me to the jail, where feinberg was at the desk. they took me out of the jail and threw me into the bunch of vigilantes with clubs. they started beating me around the body. one of them said: 'do anything, but don't kill him!' "finally one of them hit me on the head and i came out of it and as i was getting away they shot in the air. a bunch of them then jumped into an automobile, came after me and again clubbed me. one of them knocked me out for ten minutes, according to one of the women who were watching. "while we were in the jail, two men we did not know were brought into the jail with their heads cut open. the vigilantes were clubbing women right and left, and a young girl, about eight years of age, had her head cut open by one of sheriff mcrae's commercial club tools." roberts ran down the street to the interurban depot, where he hid behind a freight car until just before the car left for seattle. feinberg, with his face and clothing covered with blood, got on the same car about a mile and a half from everett and the two returned to seattle. john ovist, a resident of mukilteo who had joined the i. w. w. in everett on labor day, got on the box and said, "fellow comrades----" but got no further. he was knocked from the box. ovist states: "mr. henig was standing alongside of me when sheriff mcrae came up and cracked him over the forehead with a club. i don't know what else happened to him for just then sheriff mcrae came in front of me and pushed the fellow off the box. when the two fellows were arrested i started to speak and mcrae took me and turned me over to one of them--i don't know what you call them--deputies, or whatever they are. he had a white handkerchief around his neck and he took me toward the county jail. there was a policeman standing in front of the jail. if i am not mistaken his name is ryan, a short heavy-set fellow. i walked by him. of course, i never thought he was going to hit me, but i felt something over behind. he hit me with a club behind the ear and cut my head until it was bleeding awful." "when we came to the county jail, henig, he was in there already. his face was red and he was full of blood. and they took us into the toilet to have us wash the blood off, and when i came back i heard screams and pounding. "then the sheriff recognized me, he had been down in mukilteo before, and he says, 'what are you doing up here?' i said, 'well, i didn't come up here, they brought me up here.' he says, 'you are a member of the i. w. w., too.' so i told him, 'i don't see why i should come and ask you what organization i should belong to!' so he opened the gate and says, 'here is a fellow from mukilteo,' he says. 'beat it!' and i seen, i guess--a hundred and fifty or maybe two hundred, i didn't have time to count them, right out back of the jail lined up in lines on either side. and i had to run between them and come out the other end. they banged me on the head with clubs, and all over. i looked bad and i felt worse. i had blue marks on my shoulders and on my hips and under my knees. "i got thru them and there was a couple ran after me, but i beat it ahead of them. i guess they intended to club me. i ran down to that depot where the electric car goes thru to seattle and then i turned to look around because the car was at hewitt and colby, and as i went down the walk two men stopped me and asked me if i hadn't had enough. they told me to beat it, and as i turned around the same policeman, ryan, i think his name is, hit me on the forehead and then pulled his gun and said, 'beat it!' he was drunk and they were all swearing at me. "after i got a block or so, there were two or three shots. i walked two more blocks and then was so dizzy i had to rest. finally i walked further and an automobile came past me and i tried to holler but they didn't hear me. and then i walked a little further and the stage came along and they picked me up." eye witnesses declared that officer daniels was one of those who fired shots at the fleeing men after they had been forced to run the gauntlet. frank henig, an everett citizen, tells what happened in these words: "i will start from the time i left the house. my wife and i, and the little baby were going to the show. when we got on wetmore there was a big crowd standing there. i had worked the night before in the mill and i had cedar asthma, so i said to my wife, 'i would like to stay out in the fresh air,' and she said, 'all right, i will meet you at nine o'clock at wetmore and hewitt.' "there was quite a crowd and i got up pretty close in front so i could hear the speaker. i stood there a little while and finally the sheriff came along with a bunch of deputies, and the speaker said, 'here they come, but now people, i will tell you, don't start anything, let them start it.' "they took him off the box and arrested a couple of others with him, and then immediately after that the commercial club deputies came along in a row. they had white handkerchiefs around their necks. so i looked out there and the crowd commenced to yell and cheer like, and mcrae got excited and started toward me, saying, 'we have been looking for you before.' when he said that i stopped--before that i had tried to get farther back--i stopped and he got hold of me. meanwhile commissioner kelley came up and took care of me and mcrae walked away a little way. kelley had hold of my right arm and he pinched me a little bit, and i said 'let go kelley and i will go with you.' "we stood there a few minutes longer and mcrae came back. kelley said 'come along with me,' and just as i said 'all right,' mcrae grabbed me by the coat and hit me on the head with a black club fastened to his strap with a leather thong. i was looking right at him and he knocked me unconscious. then kelley picked me up and shook me and i came to again, and i fell over the curb of the sidewalk. "kelley then turned me over to daniels, a policeman in everett, and he turned me over to a couple of commercial club deputies. then fred luke came along and said, 'i will take care of him.' so we walked a little ways and he said, 'you better go to the doctor and have that dressed.' i said to him, 'oh, i guess it ain't so bad,' and so he said, 'come along with me and we will wash up at the jail.' i said, 'all right,' and while i was going up the steps to the jail, why a policeman by the name of bryan or something like that,--a little short fellow, well anyhow he got canned off the force for being drunk, that is how i heard of him,--when i was kind of slow walking along because i was bleeding pretty bad, he said, 'hurry up and get in there, you low-down, dirty son-of-a-b----' and i answered, 'i guess i ain't arrested, i don't have to hurry in there.' so he cursed some more. "i went into the jail and washed up and came back into the office of the county jail. the fellows that they had arrested were sitting in the chairs and mcrae came in and grabbed one of the i. w. w.'s--i guess they were i. w. w.'s, anyway one of them that was arrested--and he says, 'what in hell are you doing up here, don't you know i told you to keep away from here?' and while he was going in the door into the back office i saw him haul off with his sap, but i don't see him hit him, but the little fellow cried like a baby. "mcrae came back and he looked at me and said, 'what in hell are you doing up here?' i didn't know what to say for a little while and then i said, 'i didn't do nothing, mac, i don't see what you wanted to sap me for.' and he said, 'i didn't sap you,' he said, 'kelley hit you.' then i said to him, 'my wife says for me to meet her down at the corner of wetmore and hewitt at nine o'clock and i would like to go down there and meet her.' so he said, 'all right, you go; you hurry and go.' i was going out the front door and he said, 'no, don't go out there. if you go out there, they will kill you!' he led me to the back door of the jail, i don't know where it was, i never was in jail in my life before, and he said, 'hurry and beat it, and pull your hat down over your head so they wont know you.' but when i got to town everybody knew, because there was blood still running all over my face after i washed up." henig endeavored to prosecute mcrae for his illegal and unwarranted assault but all attempts to secure a warrant met with failure. lumber trust law operates only in one direction. in this raid upon the meeting mcrae smashed citizens right and left, women as well as men. he was even seen to kick a small boy who happened to get in his path. deputy sam walker beat up harry woods, an everett music teacher; another deputy was seen smashing an elderly gentleman on the head; still another knocked mrs. louise mcguire, who was just recovering from a sprained knee, into the gutter; and ed morton, g. w. carr and many other old-time residents of everett were struck by the drunken commercial club thugs. mrs. leota carr called up chief of police kelley next morning, the following being an account of the conversation that ensued: "i said, 'what are you trying to kill my husband for?' and he kind of laughed and said he didn't believe it, and i said, 'did you know they struck him over the head last night and he could hardly go to work today?' he said, 'my god, they didn't strike him, did they?' and i said, 'they surely did!' and he said 'why there isn't a better man in town than he is,' and i said, 'i know it.' it surprised me to think that he thought i didn't know it myself. and then i said, 'these here deputies are making more i. w. w.'s in town than the i. w. w.'s would in fifty years.' and he said, 'i know it.' then i said, 'why do you allow them to do it? you are the head of the police department.' he replied, 'mcrae has taken it out of my hands; the sheriff is ahead of me and it is his men who are doing it, and i am not to blame.'" at the city park four nights after this outrage, only one arrest for street speaking having occurred in the meantime, the aroused citizens of everett met to hear attorney e. c. dailey, t. webber, and various local speakers deal with the situation, and to view at first hand the wounds of ovist, henig and other towns people who had been injured. thousands attended the meeting, and disapproval of the actions of the commercial club and its tools was vehemently expressed. this remonstrance from the people had some effect. the commercial club, knowing that all arrests so far had been unlawful, took steps to "legalize" any further seizing of street speakers at hewitt and wetmore avenues. the lumber interests issued an ordinance preventing street speaking on that corner. the mayor signed it without ever putting it to a reading, thus invalidating the proposed measure. this made no difference; henceforth it was a law of the city of everett and as such was due to be enforced by the lumber trust. during the whole controversy there had not been an arrest made on the charge of violation of any street speaking ordinance. with the new ordinance assumed to be a law, mrs. frennette went to everett and interviewed chief kelley. after telling him that the i. w. w. members were being disturbed and mistreated by men who were not in uniform, she said: "it seems that there is an ordinance here against street speaking and we feel that it is unjust. we feel that we have a right to speak here. we are not blocking traffic and we propose to make a test of the ordinance. will you have one of your men arrest me or any other speaker who chooses to take the box, personally, and bring me to jail and put a charge against me, and protect me from the vigilantes who are beating the men on the street?" kelley replied that so far as he was concerned he would do the best he could but mcrae had practically taken the authority out of his hands and that he really could not guarantee protection. so a legal test was practically denied. quiet again reigned in everett following the brutalities cited. a few citizens were manhandled for too openly expressing their opinion of mob methods and several wearers of overalls were searched and deported, but the effects of bootleg whiskey seemed to have left the vigilantes. on wednesday, sept. th, a committee of citizens met at the labor temple and arranged for a mass meeting to be held in the public park on the following friday. the meeting brought forth between ten and fifteen thousand citizens, one-third of the total population at least, who listened to speakers representing the i. w. w., socialists, trades unions and citizens generally. testimony was given by some of the citizens who had been clubbed by the vigilantes. recognizing the hostile public opinion, sheriff mcrae promised that the office of the i. w. w. would not again be molested. as he had lied before he was not believed, but, as a test, earl osborne went from seattle to open up the hall once more. for a period thereafter the energies of the deputies were given to a course of action confined to the outskirts of the city. migratory workers traveling to and from various jobs were taken from the trains, beaten, robbed and deported. as an example of mcrae's methods and as depicting a phase of the life of the migratory worker the story of "sergeant" john j. keenan, sixty-five years old, and still actively at work, is of particular interest: "i left great falls, mont., about the th of september after i had been working on a machine in the harvest about nine miles from town. the boys gathered together--they were coming from north dakota--and we all came thru together. we had an organization among ourselves. we carried our cards. there was a delegate with us, a field delegate, and i was spokesman, elected by the rank and file of the twenty-two. there was another division from north dakota on the same train with us, going to wenatchee to pick apples. we were going to seattle. i winter in seattle every year and work on the snow sheds. "we carried our cooking utensils with us, and when we got off at a station we sent our committee of three and bought our provisions in the store, and two of the cooks cooked the food, and we ate it and took the next train and came on. this happened wherever we stopped. "we arrived in snohomish, wash., on sept. rd at about : in the morning. when the committee came down i sent out and they brought me back the bills--i was the treasurer as well--one man carried the funds, and they brought back $ . worth of food down, including two frying pans, and when i was about cooking, a freight train from everett pulled in and a little boy, who was maybe about ten years old, he says, 'dad, are you an i. w. w.?' i says, 'i am, son.' 'well,' he says, 'there are a whole bunch of deputies coming out after you.' i laughed at the boy, i thought he was joshing me. "about half an hour after the boy told me this the deputies appeared. in the first bunch were forty-two, and then sheriff mcrae came with more, making altogether, what i counted, sixty-four. the first bunch came around the bush alongside the railroad track where i was and the sheriff came in about twenty minutes later with his bunch from the opposite way. "in the first bunch was a fat, stout fellow with two guns. he had a chief's badge--a chief of police's badge--on him. he was facing toward the fire and he says, 'if you move a step, i will fill you full of lead!' i laughed at him, says i, 'what does this outrage mean?' there was another old gentleman with a chin beard, fat, middling fat, probably my own age, and he picked up my coat which was lying alongside me and looked at my button. he says, 'oh, undesirable citizen!' i says, 'what do you mean?' he says, 'are you an i. w. w.?' i says, 'i am, and i am more than proud of it!' 'well,' he says, 'we don't want you in this county.' i says, 'sure?' he says, 'yes.' i says, 'well, i am not going to stay in this county, i am going to cook breakfast and go to seattle.' he says, 'do you understand what this means?' i says, 'no.' he says, 'the sheriff will be here in a few minutes and he will tell you what it means.' i heard afterward that this man was the mayor of snohomish. "i was sitting right opposite the fire with my coffee and bread and meat in my hand when sheriff mcrae came up and says, 'who is this bunch?' so a tall, black deputy, a tall, dark complected fellow, says, 'they are a bunch of harvest hands coming from north dakota.' mcrae says, 'did you search these men?' and he says, 'yes.' 'did you find any shooting arms on them?' he says, 'no.' they had searched us and we had no guns or clubs. "mcrae then asked, 'who is their leader?' and this old gentleman that spoke to me first, he says, 'they have no leader, but that old man over there is the spokesman.' so he came over to me and says, 'where are you going?' i says, 'i am going to seattle.' then he used an expression that i don't think is fit for ladies to hear. i says, 'my mother was a lady and she never raised any of us by the name you have mentioned, and,' i says, 'i don't think i have done anything that i will have to walk out of the county.' he says, 'do you see that track?' i says, 'yes.' he says, 'well, you will walk down that track!' i says, 'but for these twenty-one men that are here in my hands i wouldn't walk a foot for you.' he says, 'you get out. i am going to shoot all these things to pieces.' i says, 'you will shoot nothing to pieces, i bought them with my hard-earned money.' he says, 'all right, take them with you.' then he shot up the cans and things, and he says, 'that is the track to seattle and you go up it, and if i ever catch you in this county again you will get what you are looking for.' "so we walked up the hill toward seattle and there is a town, i think they call it maltby, and we got there between four and five o'clock in the evening. fellow worker thornton, adams and love were the committee men and they asked me how i felt. i told them my feet were pretty sore. "i went over to the station agent and found out that there was a freight due at : but that sometimes it didn't get in until three in the morning. i then asked permission to light a fire and cook some coffee, and after we were thru eating we lay down. "about : the train came along and i called the men. as the train was backing up i saw some light come, and one auto throwing her searchlight, and i counted four automobiles. that is all i could count but there were a whole lot of them coming. i says, 'men, we have run up against a stone wall.' "fellow worker love and i--he came off the machine with me in great falls--we were first in line and sheriff mcrae and two other men with white handkerchiefs around their necks came forward first and he says, 'you son-of-a-b----, i thought you were going to seattle?' i says, 'ain't i going to seattle? i can't go till the train goes,' i says, 'you've had me walking now till i have no foot under me. what do you mean by this outrage? my father fought for this country and i have a right here. i am on railroad property and have done nothing to anybody.' mcrae then hit fellow worker love on the head and i yelled 'break and run, men, or they will kill you!' he turned around then and he said to me, 'you dirty old irish bastard, now i will make you so you can't run. i'll show you!' with that he let drive and hit me, leaving this three cornered mark here (indicating place on head). and when the others went up the track he says, 'get now, god damn your old soul, or i will kill you!' i says, 'sheriff, look here, you are a perfect gentleman, you are, to hit a fellow old enough to be your father.' he made as if to hit me again and then fellow worker love came back and says, 'have a heart!' i says 'you run,' and he says 'no, they are not going to kill you while i am here.' and fellow worker paterson came back down the track and i says, 'what is the matter, paterson, are you crazy? get the men and tell them to go over the line. don't stay in this county or they are liable to murder you!' then love and i went off the track into the thick bushes and lay down till next morning. "at daylight we got up, went down to the junction and gathered up fifteen of the men. when the train pulled in the trainman asked me where i was going and i said i was going to seattle. he says, 'do you carry a card?' 'yes,' says i. 'produce!' says he. that is the word the trainmen use. so i put my hand in my pocket and pulled it out. 'you better get back in the caboose, you are hurt,' he said. he saw the blood where fellow worker love had bandaged my head with his handkerchief. 'no,' says i, 'where the men are riding is good enough for me.' so we went to where the interurban comes in and i was seven men short. i paid two-fifty into seattle, and we came in, and i made a report to the seattle locals." incidents similar to this were of almost daily occurrence, scores of deportations taking place during the month of september. then on the th, despite his promises to refrain from molesting the hall, mcrae entered the premises, forcibly seized earl osborne, the secretary, took him a long distance out in the country, and at the point of a gun made him start the thirty-mile trip on foot to seattle. on the th of september the everett authorities arrested j. johnson and george bradley in seattle. johnson was held on an arson charge but no legal warrant for his arrest was issued until october th, or until he had been in jail for nineteen days. then the charge against him was that he had set fire to a box factory--but this was soon changed when it was learned by the authorities that the box factory had not caught fire until after johnson was in jail, and for the first charge they substituted the claim that johnson had burned the garage of one walter smith, a scab shingle weaver deputy. george bradley, who had been deported from everett after having served one day as secretary, was accused of second degree arson as an alleged accomplice. each man was told that the other had confessed and the best thing to do was to make a clean breast of matters, but this scheme of mcrae's fell thru for two reasons: the men were not guilty, and they had never seen or heard of each other before. johnson was in jail fifty-eight days without a preliminary hearing. both men were released on property bonds, and the trials were "indefinitely postponed," that still being their status at this writing. no further attempts were made to open the hall after osborne's deportation until october th when the organization in seattle again selected a man to act as secretary in everett. thomas h. tracy took charge on that date, remaining in everett until a few days prior to november th, at which time he resigned, his place being taken by chester micklin. during the month of october there were between three and four hundred deportations, the vigilantes operating mainly from the commercial club. many of these "slugging parties" were attended by mayor d. d. merrill, governor clough, captain harry ramwell, t. w. anguish, w. r. booth, edward hawse, and other "pillars of society" in everett. most of the men were deported without any formalities whatever, and the methods used in handling the others may well be judged by frequent entries on the police blotter to the effect that men arrested by great northern detective fox were ordered turned over to sheriff mcrae by mayor merrill. the railroad company, acting in conjunction with the lumber trust, put on a private army, and had its men roughly dressed to resemble honest workingmen. cases of "hi-jacking" became quite numerous about this time, but no redress from this highway robbery could be had. on the question of the hiring of armed forces by the railroads the industrial relations commission report has this to say: "under the authority granted by the several states the railroads maintain a force of police, and some, at least, have established large arsenals of arms and ammunition. this armed force, when augmented by recruits from detective agencies and employment agencies, as seems to be the general practice during industrial disputes, constitutes a private army clothed with a degree of authority which should be exercised only by public officials; these armed bodies, usurping the supreme functions of the state and oftentimes encroaching on the rights of citizens, are a distinct menace to public welfare." a number of the men deported during september and october were not members of the i. w. w., some even being opposed at the time to the tenet of the organization, "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common," but almost without exception the non-members who suffered deportation made it a point to join the union when the nearest branch or field delegate was reached. in everett, delegates working quietly among the millmen, longshoremen, and other workers, were also getting numerous recruits as the class struggle stood forth in its naked form. all the efforts of the lumber trust to suppress the i. w. w. were as tho they had tried to quench a forest fire with gasoline. [illustration: beverly park] [illustration: a close up view of beverly park showing cattle guards.] it was on october th that forty-one men left seattle by boat in a determined effort to reach the corner of hewitt and wetmore avenues in order to test the validity of the alleged ordinance prohibiting free speech at that point. they were the first contingent of an army of harvesters who were just returning from a hard season's labor in the fields and orchards. the party was double the size of any free speech group that had tried to enter everett at any previous time. they were met at the dock by a drunken band of deputies, most of whom wore white handkerchiefs around their necks as a means of identification. the deputies were armed with guns and clubs, and they outnumbered the i. w. w. body five to one. several of the lawless crew were so intoxicated they could scarcely stand, and one in particular had to be forcibly restrained by his less drunken associates from attempts to commit murder in the open. the i. w. w. men were clubbed with gun butts and loaded clubs whenever their movements were not swift enough to suit the fancies of the drunken mob. john downs' face was an indistinguishable mass of blood where sheriff mcrae had "sapped up" on him and split open his upper lip. boat passengers who remonstrated were promised the same treatment unless they kept still. in its mad frenzy the posse struck in all directions. so blindly drunk and hysterical was deputy joseph irving that he swung his heavy revolver handle with full force onto the head of deputy joe schofield. he continued the insane attack, while mcrae, awry-eyed and lusting for blood, assisted in the brutal task until warning cried from the other vigilantes showed them their mistake. schofield was carried to an automobile and hastened to the nearest drug store, where it was found necessary to call a physician to take three stitches to bind together the edges of the most severe wound. the prisoners were loaded into large auto trucks and passenger cars, more than twenty of which were lined up in waiting, and were taken out to a lonely wooded spot near beverly park on the road to seattle. mcrae, with deputies fred luke, william pabst and fred plymale, took one i. w. w. out in their five-passenger reo, mcrae afterward endeavored unsuccessfully to prove an alibi because his own car was in a garage. deputy sheriff jefferson beard also took out a prisoner. upon their arrival at beverly the prisoners were made to dismount at the point of guns and stand in the cold drizzling rain until their captors had formed two lines reaching from the roadway to the interurban tracks. there in the darkness the men were forced to run stumbling over the uneven ground down a gauntlet that ended only with the cruel sharp blades of a cattle guard, while on their unprotected heads and shoulders the drunken outlaws rained blow after blow with gun-butts, black-jacks, loaded saps and pick-handles. in the confusion one boy escaped from ed hawse, but before he could get away into the brush this bully, weighing about pounds, bore down upon him, and with a couple of other deputies proceeded to beat him well-nigh into insensibility. deputies who lost their clubs in the scramble aimed kicks at the privates of the men as they passed down the line. deputy fred luke swung at one man with such force that the leather wrist thong parted and the club disappeared into the woods. with drunken deliberation joseph irving cracked the head of man after man, informing each one that they were getting an extra dose because of his mistake in beating up a brother deputy. in the thick of it all, smashing, kicking, and screaming obscene curses at the helpless men and boys who dared demand free speech within the territory sacred to the lumber trust, was the deputy-sheriff of snohomish county, jefferson e. beard! a few of the men broke the lines and ran into the woods, a bullet past their heads warning others from a like attempt. across the cattle guard, often sprawling on hands and knees from the force of the last blows received, went the men who had cleared the gauntlet. legs sank between the blades of the guard and strained ligaments and sprained ankles were the result. one man suffered a dislocated shoulder at the hands of a doctor allison, another had the bridge of his nose broken by a blow from mcrae, and dangerously severe wounds and bruises were sustained by nearly all of the forty-one. so horrible were the moans and outcries of the stricken men, so bestial were the actions of the infuriated deputies, that one of their own number, w. r. booth, sickened at the sight and sound, went reeling up the roadway retching as he left the brutal scene. attracted by the curses of the deputies, the sound of the blows, and the moans and cries of the wounded men, mrs. ruby ketchum came to the door of her house nearly a quarter of a mile away, and remained there listening to the hideous din, while her husband, roy ketchum, and his brother, lew, went down to the scene of the outrage to investigate. the ketchum brothers reported that the deputies were formed in two lines ending in six men, three on each side of the cattle guard. a man would be taken out of the car and two deputies would join his arms up behind him meanwhile hammering his unprotected face from both sides as hard as they could strike with their fists. then the man was started down the line, one deputy following to club him on the back to make him hurry, and the other deputies striking with clubs and other weapons and kicking the prisoner as he progressed. just before reaching the cattle guard he was made to run, and, in crossing the blades, the three men on the east side of the track would swing their clubs upon his back while the men on the west clubbed him across the face and stomach. this was repeated with the men as fast as they were dragged from the autos. they also heard the sound of blows and then cries of "oh my god! doc, don't hit me again, doc, you're killing me!" lew ketchum took deputy fred luke by the coat tails and pulled him back from the cattle guard, asking, "what are you doing, what is going on here?" and luke replied, "we are beating up forty-one i. w. w.'s." harry hubbard tells the story in these words from the time the autos arrived at beverly: "i got out of the car with another fellow, rice, and i says, 'we had better stay together, it looks to me like we were going to get tamped up,' and somebody grabbed hold of him, and i stood a minute, and then i ran by one fellow up into the woods. just as i got out of the radius of the automobile lights i fell over a stump on the edge of the embankment. i was in kind of a peculiar predicament and i had to get hold of the stump to pull myself up, and just as i did that some fellow behind me swung with a blackjack and grazed my temple, knocking me to my knees. i got up and he grabbed hold of me and we both fell down the bank together. then two or three others grabbed me, and this hawse had me by the collar, and sheriff mcrae walked up and said 'you are the son-of-a---- that was over here last week,' and i answered, 'i was working here last week.' then he said, 'are you an i. w. w.?' i said, 'yes,' and he hit me an upward swing on the nose. he repeated, 'you are an i. w. w., are you?' and again i said, 'yes.' he then swore at me and said, 'say that you ain't!' and i replied, 'no, i won't say that i ain't,' and he hit me three more times on the nose. "then the man who was holding my left wrist with one hand and my shoulder with the other, said, 'wait a minute until i get a poke at him,' and mcrae said, 'all right, doc,' and then someone else said 'all right allison, hit him for me!' this fellow they called doc allison hit me and blackened my eye. mcrae swore at me, he seemed to be intoxicated and he looked and acted like a maniac, he said 'if you fellows ever come back some of you will die, that's all there is to it.' i said, 'i don't think there is any necessity for killing anybody,' and he answered 'i will kill you if you come back,' and he raised his blackjack and said 'run!' i said 'i wont run,' and he hit me again and i dropped to the ground. he raised his foot over my face, and used some pretty raw language, and as he stood there with his heel over my face i grabbed hold of a fellow's leg and pulled myself along so instead of hitting my face his heel scraped my side. then i got some kicks, three of them in the small of the back around my kidneys. "when i got up i walked thru the line, there were twenty or thirty different ones hollered for me to run, but i was stubborn and wouldn't do it. and when i got to the cattle guard and stood at the other side kind of wiping the blood off my face i heard some one coming and i said, 'four hundred," and he said 'yes,' and he was crying. it was a young boy and i walked down the track with him afterward. "at the city hospital in seattle next day the doctor told me my nose was badly fractured and that i had internal injuries. a few days later my back pained me severely and i passed blood for a time after that." c. h. rice, whose shoulder was dislocated, gives about the same version. "two big fellows would hold a man until they were thru beating him and then turn him loose. i was turned loose and ran probably six or eight feet, something like that, and i was hit and knocked down. as i scrambled to my feet and ran a few feet again i was hit on the shoulder with a slingshot. this time i went down and i was dazed, i think i must have been unconscious for a moment because when i came to they were kicking me, and some of them said, 'he is faking,' and others said, 'no, he is knocked out.' i remember seeing some of the boys during that time running by me, and when they got me up i started to run a bit farther and was knocked down again. "then they called for somebody there, addressing him as dr. allison, and he grabbed my arm and pulled me up, and he raised my arm up and said, 'aw, there is nothing the matter with you,' and jerked it down again. my arm was out of place, it seemed way over to one side, and i couldn't straighten it up. "as i was going over the cattle guard several of them hit me and some one hollered 'bring him back here, don't let him go over there.' they brought me back and this doctor said 'you touch your shoulder with your hand,' and i couldn't. he says 'there is nothing the matter with you.' "then the fellow who was on the dock, and who had been drinking pretty heavily, because they would have to shove him back every once in a while, he shouted out 'let's burn him!' about that time sheriff mcrae came over and got hold of my throat and said, 'now, damn you, i will tell you i can kill you right here and there never would be nothing known about it, and you know it.' and some one said, 'let's hang him!' and this other fellow kept hollering 'burn him! burn him!' mcrae kept hitting me, first on one side and then the other, smacking me that way, and then he turned me loose again and hit me with one of those slingshots, and finally he said 'oh, let him go,' and he started me along, following behind and hitting me until i got over the cattleguard. "i went down to the interurban track until i caught up with some of the boys. they tried to pull my shoulder back into place and then they took handkerchiefs and neckties, and one thing and another, and made a kind of a sling to hold it up. we then went down to the first station and the boys took up a collection and the eight of us who were hurt the worst got on the train and went to seattle. the others had to walk the twenty-five miles into seattle. most of us had to go to the hospital next day." sam rovinson was beaten with a piece of gaspipe, but taking advantage of the fact that the shooting when archie collins made his escape had attracted the attention of the deputies he got thru the gauntlet with only minor injuries. rovinson testifies that mcrae said to him: "this time we will let you off with this, but next time you come up here we will pop you full of holes." "i just came up here to exercise my constitutional right of free speech," expostulated rovinson. "to hell with free speech and the constitution!" shouted mcrae, "you are now in snohomish county, and we are running the county!" after the deputies had returned to town the two ketchum brothers took their lanterns and went out to the scene thinking they might find some of the men out there hurt, with a broken leg, or arm or something, and that they could be taken to their house to be cared for. no men were seen, but three covered with blood were found and after examination were returned to where they had been picked up. early next morning some of the deputies, frightened at their cowardly actions of the previous night, were seen at beverly park making an examination of the ground. two of them approached the ketchum residence and asked if any i. w. w.'s had been found lying around there. after being assured that they had stopped short of murder, the deputies departed. a little later an investigation committee composed of rev. oscar mcgill of seattle, and rev. elbert e. flint, rev. jos. p. marlatt, jake michel, robert mills, ernest marsh, e. c. dailey, commissioner w. h. clay, messrs. fawcett, hedge, ballou, houghton and others from everett, made a close examination of the grounds. in spite of the heavy rain and notwithstanding the fact that deputies had preceded them, the committee found blood-soaked hats and hat bands and big brown spots of blood soaked into the cement roadway. in the cattle guard was the sole of a shoe, evidently torn off as one of the fleeing men escaped his assailants. "hearing of the occurrence i accompanied several gentlemen, including a prominent minister of the gospel of everett, next morning to the scene. the tale of that struggle was plainly written. the roadway was stained with blood. the blades of the cattle guard were so stained, and between the blades was a fresh imprint of a shoe where plainly one man in his hurry to escape the shower of blows, missed his footing in the dark and went down between the blades. early that morning workmen going into the city to work, picked up three hats from the ground, still damp with blood. there can be no excuse for nor extenuation of such an inhuman method of punishment," reported president e. p. marsh to the state federation of labor. j. m. norland stated that "there were big brown blotches on the pavement which we took to be blood. they were perhaps two feet in diameter, and there were a number of smaller blotches for a distance of twenty-five feet. in the vicinity of the cattle guard the soil was disarranged and there were shoe marks near the cattle guard. you could also notice where, in their hurry to get across, they would go in between, and there would be little parts or shreds of clothing there, and on one there was a little hair." all that day the talk in everett centered around the crime of the preceding night. little groups of citizens gathered here and there to discuss the matter. the deputies went about strenuously denying that they had a hand in the infamous affair, and friends of long standing refused to speak to those who were known positively to have been concerned in the outrage. a number of the ministers of the city conferred regarding a course of action, but finding the problem too deep for them to solve they left it to up to the individual. various everett citizens, representing a large degree of public sentiment, felt that the thing to do was to hold an immense mass meeting in order to present the facts of the hideous crime to the whole public. this plan met with immediate approval from many quarters, and the i. w. w. in seattle was notified of this desire by mail, by telephone, and by means of citizens' delegations. rev. oscar mcgill conferred with secretary herbert mahler and was quite insistent upon the necessity for such a meeting, as the everett papers had carried no real information about the affair in beverly. he brought out the fact that there had been thousands in attendance at the mass meeting in the everett city park a month or so previous to this occurrence, and the speakers were then escorted by a large body of citizens from the interurban depot to the meeting place, and the feelings of the people were such that similar or even more adequate protection would be given were another meeting held. he suggested that the meeting be held in broad daylight and on a sunday. that the plan met with the approval of the i. w. w. membership was shown by its adoption at a meeting the night following the trouble at beverly park. and the date selected was sunday, november th. immediately steps were taken to inform the various i. w. w. branches in the northwest of the proposed action. telegrams were sent to solidarity, and a ringing call for two thousand men to help in the fight for free speech was published in the industrial worker. in addition to telegraphing the story and its attendant call for action to the unions of the pacific coast there were various members selected from among the forty-one who had been beaten, and these were dispatched to different points to spread the tale of everett's atrocities, and to gain new recruits for the "invading army" of free speech fighters. seeking the widest possible publicity the free speech committee had printed and circulated thousands of handbills in everett to call attention to the proposed meeting. citizens of everett attention! a meeting will be held at the corner of hewitt and wetmore aves., on sunday, nov. th, p. m. come and help maintain your and our constitutional right. +committee.+ the authorities in everett were notified, the editors of all the seattle daily papers were requested to have representatives present at the meeting, and reporters were called in and told of the intentions of the organization. during the week frequent meetings were held in the hall in seattle to arrange for the incoming free speech fighters, and without an exception all these meetings were held with no examination of membership books and were open to the public. with their cards laid upon the table the members of the industrial workers of the world were preparing to call the hand of the semi-legalized outlaws of snohomish county who had cast aside the law, abrogated the constitution of the united states, and denied the right of free speech and free assembly. following the beverly affair the commercial club redoubled its activities. blackjacks and "robinson-clubs," so called because they were manufactured especially for the deputies by the robinson mill, were set aside for revolvers and high power rifles, and the ranks of the deputies were enlarged by the off-scouring and scum of the open shop persuasion. mcrae entered the i. w. w. hall on friday, nov. rd, the day thomas h. tracy turned the office over to chester micklin, and abruptly said "by god, i will introduce myself. i am sheriff mcrae! i won't have a lot of sons-of-bitches hanging around this place like in seattle." micklin looked at the drunken sheriff a moment and replied, "the constitution guarantees us free speech, free assembly, and free----" "to hell with the constitution," broke in mcrae. "we have a constitution here that we will enforce." "you believe in unions, you believe in organized labor, don't you?" asked micklin. "yes, i belonged to the shingle weavers at one time," returned mcrae, "but when the shingle weavers went out on strike i donated $ . to their strike fund and they gave me a rotten deal and sent the check back to me, and to hell with the shingle weavers and the rest of the unions!" then, as he was leaving the hall, mcrae pulled from his pocket a letter; took from it a black cat cut from pasteboard and stuck it in the secretary's face, saying "that's the kind of ----s that is in your organization!" next morning the sheriff raided the hall and seized the men who were found there, with the exception of the secretary. turning to micklin he said boastfully "i'll bet you a hundred dollars you ----s won't hold that meeting tomorrow!" mcrae was drunk. the arrested men were searched and deported and, as was the case in every previous arrest and deportation, there was no resistance offered, no physical violence threatened, and no weapons of any character found upon any of the i. w. w. men. that night the deputies were secretly assembled at the commercial club where they were given their final instructions by the lumber trust and ordered to report fully armed and ready for action at the blowing of the mill whistles. with these preparations the open shop forces were ready to go to still greater lengths to uphold "law and order!" the answer of the i. w. w. to this damnable act of violence at beverly park and to the four months of terrorism that had preceded it was a call for two thousand men to enter everett, there to gain by sheer force of numbers that right of free speech and peaceable assembly supposed to have been guaranteed them by the constitution of the united states.[ ] [illustration: the ketchum home near beverly park] footnote: [ ] (the incidents in the foregoing chapter are corroborated by the sworn testimony of i. w. w. men who were shot at, beaten, robbed, and abused; by citizens of everett and seattle who were also beaten and mistreated or who witnessed the scenes; by physicians, attorneys, public officials, members of craft unions, and by deputies who hoped to make amends by testifying to the truth for the defense.) chapter iv. bloody sunday how shall we enter the kingdom of everett? was the question that confronted the committee in charge of affairs in seattle on the morning of november th. inquiries at the interurban office developed the fact that sufficient cars could not be had to accommodate the crowd. the cost of making the trip by auto truck was found to be prohibitive. at the eleventh hour the committee, taking the money pooled by the members, secured the regular passenger steamship verona, and an orderly and determined body of men filed down the steps leading from the i. w. w. headquarters and marched by fours to the colman dock. their mission was an open and peaceable one. cheerful, optimistic, enthusiastic, the band of social crusaders felt that the conquest of free speech was assured. not for a moment did they think that the everett klu-klux-klan would dare resort to violent and criminal tactics in the broad daylight of that beautiful sunny day and in plain view of a host of conscientious everett citizens. assisted by harry feinberg and john t. (red) doran, captain chauncey wiman checked the number of men who went on board, stopping further entry when the legal limit of two hundred and fifty persons was reached, feinberg joining the men on board in order to serve as the main speaker at the proposed meeting. among those who secured passage were several who were not members of the free speech party, but in the work of checking, the tickets of these persons were not collected, their fares being paid in the lump sum that was handed to the captain. regular passengers of the verona were informed that their tickets would be good for the steamer calista, lying at pier . thirty-eight additional members of the free speech band joined the regular patrons who took passage on the calista. laughter and jest were on the lips of the men who crowded the verona, and songs of the one big union rang out over the sparkling waters of puget sound. loyal soldiers were these in the great class war, enlightened workers who were willing to give their all in the battle for bread, happiness and liberty. men of all callings these--logger, carpenter, laborer, railroad clerk, painter, miner, printer, seaman and farmhand, all united with one common aim--the desire to gain for labor the right of free expression. among their number, however, were two individuals of a breed reckoned among the lowest order of the human species; two "stool pigeons," low informers upon whom even a regular detective looks down with contempt. one of these, carrying an i. w. w. card and in the employ of snohomish county and the everett commercial club under the direction of the pinkerton detective agency, had sneaked out of the i. w. w. headquarters long enough to telephone lieutenant hedges of the seattle police force that there was a boatload of i. w. w. men leaving for everett. there was no secret in connection with the trip, but that there exist such class traitors, relatively few as they are, to whom the enemies of the workers can look for information is one of the sad features of the class struggle. the "stool's" message was relayed to the everett authorities and, after being revised by the advocates of the open shop, it finally reached the deputies in the form of a report that a boatload of i. w. w.'s, armed to the teeth, were about to invade, pillage, and burn the city. at one o'clock the mill whistles blew, the mill deputies armed with their mill clubs, mill revolvers, rifles and shotguns, assembled at the mill headquarters--the commercial club--and from there were transported in mill automobiles down the alleys and back streets to the city dock. citizens were driven from the dock and a rope, guarded by armed deputies, was stretched across the land end to prevent access by any save men with guns. part of the equipment of the naval militia was stored in readiness at the commercial club--a stubborn fact for those who deny that government is a class institution. at the pacific hardware company, deputy dave oswald had an auto load of rifles and ammunition prepared for immediate transportation and use. in captain ramwell's office, at the point where the rope was stretched, there were stacked a number of high-power rifles, brought there from the same source. it is even rumored that there was a machine gun on the dock. on the scab tugboat edison, moored at the north side of the dock, men armed with rifles lay in waiting. the everett improvement dock to the south was also prepared for action. hundreds of deputies were admitted to the city dock and were lined up under the direction of sheriff mcrae, deputy-sheriff jefferson beard, and lieutenant charles o. curtis, of the officers' reserve corps of the national guard of washington. boards were removed from the sides of the warehouses so as to command a view of the landing place, and sacks of potatoes and lumber were used as partial barricades. a few of the deputies were in the west warehouse at the extreme end of the dock, but the majority of them were in the larger warehouse to the east of the open docking space. plentifully supplied with ammunition and "booze," the cowardly deputies lay hidden in this ambush. the scene was set and the tragedy of november fifth about to be staged. as the verona cleaved the placid, sunlit waters of the bay and swung up to the city dock at everett, shortly before two o'clock, the men were merrily singing the english transport workers' strike song, "hold the fort!" we meet today in freedom's cause, and raise our voices high; we'll join our hands in union strong, to battle or to die. chorus hold the fort for we are coming, union men be strong. side by side we battle onward, victory will come! look, my comrades, see the union, banners waving high. reinforcements now appearing, victory is nigh. see our numbers still increasing; hear the bugle blow: by our union we shall triumph over every foe. fierce and long the battle rages, but we will not fear. help will come whene'er it's needed, cheer, my comrades, cheer! from a hillside overlooking the scene thousands upon thousands of everett citizens sent forth cheer after cheer as a hearty welcome to the "invading army." high up on the flag-pole of the verona clambered hugo gerlot, a youthful free speech enthusiast, to wave a greeting to the throng that lined the shore. passenger oscar carlson and his friend ernest nordstrom, from their position on the very bow of the boat, caught the spirit of the party and endeavored to join in the song that resounded louder and clearer as many of the men left the cabins to go out upon the deck. completely filling the bow of the boat and blocking the passageway on either side, the singers crowded to the rail in the usual joyously impatient manner of holiday excursionists, and then for the first time observed a body of deputies march from the large warehouse and settle into lines across the back and sides of the open landing space on the dock, where curtis, mcrae, and beard were stationed. waiting until captain ramwell's wharfinger, william kenneth, had made fast the bowline to prevent the boat from backing out, sheriff donald mcrae gave his belt holster a hitch to bring his gun directly across his middle and then lurched forward to the face of the dock. holding up his left hand to check the singing, he yelled to the men on board: "who is your leader?" immediate and unmistakable was the answer from practically every member of the industrial workers of the world: "we are all leaders!" angrily jerking his gun from its holster and flourishing it in a threatening manner, mcrae cried: "you can't land here!" "the hell we can't!" came the reply as the men stepped toward the partly thrown-off gang plank. a shot rang out from the immediate vicinity of deputy w. a. bridges, then another, closely followed by a volley that sent them staggering backward. many fell to the deck. evidently the waving of mcrae's revolver was the prearranged signal for the carnage to commence. the long months of lumber trust lawlessness had culminated in cowardly, deliberate, premeditated and foul murder! young gerlot crumpled up and slid part way down the flag pole, then suddenly threw out both arms and crashed lifeless to the deck, his bullet-torn and bleeding body acting as a shield for several who had thrown themselves prostrate. passenger oscar carlson threw himself flat upon the forward deck and while in that position seven bullets found their way into his quivering flesh, life clinging to the shattered form by a strange vagary of fate. with a severe bullet wound in his abdomen, ed roth swayed back and forth for a moment and then toppled forward on his face. when a bullet whistled past the head of captain chauncey wiman, and another tore a spoke as thick as a man's wrist from the pilot wheel beneath his hand, he deserted his post to barricade himself behind the safe with a mattress, remaining in that position until the close of the hostilities. at the first shot and during the first volley the unarmed men wildly sought cover from the deadly leaden hail. those who had not dropped to the deck, wounded or seeking shelter, surged to the starboard side of the boat, causing it to list to an alarming degree, the fastened bowline alone preventing it from capsizing. several men lost their footing on the blood-slimed decks and were pitched headlong overboard. there, struggling frantically in the water,--by no possible chance combatants--a storm of rifle bullets churning little whirlpools around their heads, one by one they were made the victims of lumber trust greed by the hessianized deputies stationed at the shore end of the city dock and upon the dock to the south. the bay was reddened with their blood. of all who went overboard, james hadley alone regained the deck, the rest disappearing beneath the silent waters to be dragged by the undertow out to an unknown and nameless ocean grave. young joe ghilezano seized the rail preparatory to jumping overboard, but seeing two men shot dead while they were in the water he lay down on the deck instead. while there a bullet pierced his hip, another went thru his back close to the spine, and a third completely tore off his left knee cap. harry parker slipped over the starboard side in order to gain the lower deck, and a rifle bullet from the vicinity of the tug goldfinch, along the everett improvement company dock, ranged thru his back from left to right, just as his friend, walter mulholland, also wounded, pulled him in thru a hole torn in the canvas wind shield. an abdominal wound laid felix baran low. the thud of bullets as they struck the prostrate men added to the ghastly sound caused by the firing of rifles and revolvers, the curses of the deputies and the moans of the wounded men. following the first volley the deputies who had been out in the open scuttled into the warehouses on either side. thru their scattering ranks the scabs on the tug edison poured their rifle fire toward the men on the verona. lieutenant c. o. curtis pitched forward and fell dead upon the dock--the victim of a rifle bullet. one of the fleeing deputies paused behind the corner of the waiting room just long enough to flinchingly reach out his hand and, keeping his head under cover, emptied his revolver without taking aim. deputy sheriff jefferson beard fell mortally wounded as he turned to run, and was dragged into the warehouse by some of the less panic stricken murderers. sheriff mcrae, with a couple of slight wounds in his left leg and heel, was forced to his knees by the impact of bullets against the steel jacket which he wore, remaining in a supplicating attitude for a few seconds while he sobbed out in a quavering tone, "o-o-oh! i'm hit! i-i'm hit!! i-i-i'm hit!!!" placed on board the verona to serve the interests of the lumber trust, what were the two pinkerton operatives doing while the boat was landing and just before the first heavy firing commenced? their actions were shrouded in mystery. but, as if anticipating something, one was seen directly after the first shot scurrying into hiding where he lay shivering until long after the firing had ceased. the other, while under cover, was struck on the head by a glancing bullet. he became so enraged at this lack of thoughtfulness on the part of his degenerate brothers that he emptied his revolver at their backs as they broke for cover. from a safe position on the dock, deputy h. d. cooley, with a pair of field glasses, was tremblingly trying to spy for the approach of the calista. inside the waiting room and the warehouses the drink-crazed deputies ran amuck, shooting wildly in all directions, often with some of their own number directly in the line of fire--bullet holes in the floor and a pierced clock case high up on the waiting room wall giving mute evidence of their insane recklessness. one deputy fled from the dock in terror, explaining to all who would listen that a bullet hole in his ear was from the shot of one of his associates on the dock. "they've gone crazy in there!" he cried excitedly. "they're shootin' every which way! they shot me in the ear!" thru the loopholes already provided, and even thru the sides of the warehouses they blazed away in the general direction of the boat, using revolvers and high powered rifles with steel and copper-jacketed missiles. dum-dums sang their deadly way to the verona and tore gaping wounds in the breasts of mere boys--an added reward by the industrial lords for their first season of hard labor in the scorching harvest fields. john looney was felled by a rifle bullet and even as he fell shuddering to the deck another leaden missile shattered the woodwork and impaled one of his eyeballs upon a spear of wood, gouging it from the socket. at the foot of the dock, protected by the klatawa slip, (indian name for runaway) c. r. schweitzer, owner of a scab plumbing establishment, fired time after time with a magazine shotgun, the buckshot scattering at the long range and raking the forward deck with deadly effect. the pilot house was riddled and the woodwork filled with hundreds of the little leaden messengers that carried a story of "mutual interests of capital and labor." deputy russell and about ten others assisted in the dastardly work at that point, pouring shot after shot into the convulsive struggling heaps of wounded men piled four and five deep on the deck. one boy in a brown mackinaw suddenly rose upright from a tangled mass of humanity, the blood gushing from his wounds, and with an agonized cry of "my god! i can't stand this any longer!" leaped high in the air over the side of the boat, sinking from sight forever, his watery resting place marked only by a few scarlet ripples. two bodies, one with the entire throat shot away, were found next morning washed up on the beach, and that fact was reported to the everett police by ed. and rob. thompson. that night some men fishing in a little sailboat far out in the bay saw five weighted objects about six feet long, and apparently wrapped in canvas, thrown overboard from a launch, but in none of the daily papers was there any mention of bodies having been found. six uncalled-for membership cards, deposited by men who took passage on the verona, may represent as many murders by the cowards on the dock. those cards are made out to fred berger, william colman, tom ellis, edward raymond, peter viberts, and chas. e. taylor. some of the deputies gloatingly declared that the death toll of the workers was twelve men at the lowest count. so wanton was the slaughter of the helpless men and boys that strong men who witnessed the scene turned away vomiting. from the hillside the women--those whom the deputies were pretending to protect from the "incoming horde,"--casting aside all womanly fears, raced to the dock in a vain endeavor to stop the commission of further crime, crying out in their frenzy, "the curs! the curs! the dirty curs! they're nothing but murderers!" they, as well as the men who tried to launch boats to rescue the men in the water, were halted by the same citizen deputies whose names head the list of red cross donors. for a short period of time, seemingly endless hours to the unarmed and helpless men on the boat, the rain of lead continued. tho the boat had righted itself, the men were still unable to extricate themselves from the positions into which they had been thrown. near the top of one heap lay abraham rabinowitz, a young jewish college graduate, and as he struggled to regain his footing a bullet tore off the whole back part of his head, his blood and brains splashing down over raymond lee and michael reilly who lay just beneath him. rabinowitz died in the arms of leonard broman, his "pal" in the harvest fields, without ever having regained consciousness. "hold me up, fellow workers!" suddenly called out gus johnson as he was fatally stricken by a bullet. "i want to finish the song." then, above the din of the gunfire and curses of the deputies, the final verse of "hold the fort" rang out in defiance of industrial tyranny, and with the termination of the words "cheer, my comrades, cheer!" the bright red death-foam flecked the ever-to-be silent lips of the brave swedish revolutionist. splintering the stairways, seats and woodwork, and wounding many of the men crouched in hiding, thousands of rounds of ammunition found their way into the boat during the ten long minutes of the onslaught. finally, with a colts revolver to enforce his demand, j. f. billings ordered engineer ernest shellgren to back the boat away from the dock. with no pilot at the wheel the propeller churned madly backward for a moment, the bowline drew taut and snapped, and the verona pulled away from the murderous crew of vigilantes. not content with the havoc they had wrought at close quarters some of the deputies continued to fire as long as the boat was within range, a bullet from a high powered rifle shattering the left leg of harry golden, a youth of twenty-two years, when the boat was far out in the bay. amputation of the limb was necessary, a cork leg daily reminding young golden of the majesty of the law. the verona with its grim cargo of dead and wounded steamed toward seattle, meeting the steamer calista about four miles out, stopping just long enough for captain wiman to shout thru his megaphone, "for god's sake don't land! they'll kill you! we have dead and wounded on board now." with unaccustomed fingers the uninjured men bathed the wounded, tearing up shirts and underclothing in order to bind up their injuries, and making the men as comfortable as possible during the two and one half hour return trip. a few of the men on board had been armed. these voluntarily threw overboard their revolvers, together with the few empty shells that lay scattered upon the deck, george reese alone having to be forced to discard the "souvenirs" he had picked up. it was a quiet crowd that pulled into seattle, not only because they realized that the class struggle is not all jokes and songs, but also in deference to the sufferings of their wounded comrades. this same spirit animated the men when they were met by drawn cordons of police at the seattle dock, their first thought and first words being, "get the wounded fellows out and we will be all right." in the city jail, located on the floor above the hospital, the same generous consideration of their wounded fellow workers' condition led them to forego the demonstration usually attending the arrest and jailing of any body of i. w. w. members. the four dead members, their still forms covered with blankets, were first removed from the boat and taken to the morgue. police and hospital ambulances were soon filled with the thirty-one wounded men, who were taken to the city hospital. the uninjured men were then lined up and slowly marched to the city jail. from the calista the thirty-eight i. w. w. members were taken and placed in the county jail. at the hospital, felix baran, shot in the abdomen, slowly and painfully passed away from internal hemorrhage. dr. mary equi, of portland, ore., who examined the body, stated that with surgical attention there would have been more than an even chance of recovery. no one will ever know how many brave workers were swept out to sea and lost, but sunday, november fifth, of the year nineteen-sixteen, wrote in imperishable letters of red on the list of labor's martyrs who gave up their lives in freedom's cause the names of felix baran; hugo gerlot; gustav johnson; john looney; abraham rabinowitz. french, german, swedish, irish, and russian jew,--these are the true internationalists of the world-wide brotherhood of toil who died for free speech and the right to organize in this "land of liberty." to them courtenay lemon's tribute to the i. w. w. applies with full force. "again and again its foot-free members, burning with an indignation and a militant social idealism which is ever an inscrutable puzzle to local authorities, have hastened to towns where free speech fights were on, defied the police, braved clubbings, and voluntarily filled the jails to overflowing, to the rage and consternation of the police and taxpayers. it has acted as the flying squadron of liberty, the unconquered knight-errantry of all captive freedoms; and the migratory workers who constitute a large part of its membership, ever on the march and pitching their camp wherever the industrial battle is thickest, form a guerilla army which is always eager for a fight with the powers of tyranny. whether they disagree with its methods and aims, all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for its defense of free speech. absolutely irreconcilable, absolutely fearless, and unsuppressibly persistent, it has kept alight the fires of freedom, like some outcast vestal of human liberty. that the defense of traditional rights to which this government is supposed to be dedicated should devolve upon an organization so often denounced as 'unpatriotic' and 'un-american,' is but the usual, the unfailing irony of history."[ ] baran, gerlot, johnson, looney, rabinowitz,--these names will be a source of inspiration to the workers when their cowardly murderers have long been forgotten. those who survived their wounds, saving as pocket pieces the buckshot, copper and steel jacketed and dum-dum bullets extracted from their persons, were; mentioning their more serious wounds: harry golden, age , shot in left leg, making amputation necessary. joseph ghilazano, age , shot in shoulder and both legs, entire knee-cap shot off and replaced with a silver substitute. albert scribner, age , severely wounded in hip, probably lamed for life. mario marino, age , shot thru the lungs. edward roth, age , severely wounded in abdomen. walter mulholland, age , shot in buttock. carl bjork, age , wounded in back. harry parker, age , shot above abdomen, in back, and in legs. john ryan, age , wounded in right shoulder and left leg. leland e. butcher, age , shot in the left leg. j. a. kelly, age , shot in right leg. hans peterson, age , wounded in head. fred savery, age , wounded in hip. steve sabo, age , shot in left shoulder. robert adams, age , shot in left arm. owen genty, age , wounded in right kidney. c. c. england, age , shot in left knee. nick canaeff, age , shot in left arm. albert doninger, age , wounded in left arm. brockman b. armstrong, age , wounds on head. e. j. shapeero, age , wounded in right leg. carl burke, age , shot in back and shoulder. ira luft, age , shot in right side of back. george turnquist, age , wounded in left leg. george brown, age , shot in back. d. j. mccarthy, age , shot in side of head and in right leg. john adams, age , wounded in right elbow. edward truitt, age , shot in right elbow. others on the boat who were wounded were oscar carlson, passenger, nine severe bullet wounds in all parts of his body; l. s. davis, ship steward, wounded in the arm, and charles smith, pinkerton "stool pigeon" with a slight scalp injury. the wounded men were none too well treated at the city hospital, only a part of the neglect being due to the overcrowded condition of the wards. wounds were hastily dressed and in some cases the injured men were placed in jail at once where they had to care for themselves as best they might. in everett the deputies left the dock when the verona had steamed out of the range of their rifle fire, taking with them the corpse of gunman c. o. curtis, office manager of the canyon lumber company, and deputy-sheriff jefferson beard, whose wounds caused his death the following morning. the injured deputies were h. b. blackburn, james a. broadbent, r. e. brown, e. p. buehrer, owen clay, louis connor, jr., fred durr, a. j. ettenborough, athol gorrell, thomas hedley, joe irving, james meagher; donald mcrae, j. c. rymer, edwin stuchell, and charles tucker. hooted, hissed, and jeered at by the thousands of citizens on the viaduct and hill above the dock, these self-immolated prostitutes to the god of greater profits were taken to the hospitals for treatment. among the crowd of citizens was mrs. edith frennette, who had been in everett a couple of days in connection with a lumber trust charge against her, and with her were mrs. lorna mahler and mrs. joyce peters, who had come from seattle to attend the proposed street meeting. making the claim that mrs. frenette had threatened the life of sheriff mcrae with a gun and had tried to throw red pepper into his eyes as he was being transported from the dock, the everett authorities caused the arrest of the three women in seattle as they were returning in an auto to meet the verona at the seattle dock. they were held several days before being released, no charges having been placed against mrs. mahler or mrs. peters, and the case against mrs. frenette was eventually dismissed, just as had been all previous charges made by mcrae. these three arrests brought the total number of free speech prisoners up to two hundred and ninety-four. what were the feelings of the everett public directly following the massacre can best be judged from the report of an everett correspondent to the seattle union record, the official a. f. of l. organ. "your correspondent was on the street at the time of the battle and at the dock ten minutes afterward. he mingled with the street crowds for hours afterwards. the temper of the people is dangerous. nothing but curses and execrations for the commercial club was heard. men and women who are ordinarily law abiding, who in normal times mind their own business pretty well, pay their taxes, send their children to church and school, pay their bills, in every way comport themselves as normal citizens, were heard using the most vitriolic language concerning the commercial club, loudly sympathizing with the i. w. w.'s. and therein lies the great harm that was done, more menacing to the city than the presence of any number of i. w. w.'s, viz., the transformation of decent, honest citizens into beings mad for vengeance and praying for something dire to happen. i heard gray-haired women, mothers and wives, gentle, kindly, i know, in their home circles, openly hoping that the i. w. w.'s would come back and 'clean up.'" corroborating this is the report of president e. p. marsh to the state federation of labor. "a dangerous situation existed in everett after the battle of november . public feeling ran high and anything might have happened. half a thousand citizens were under arms enraged at the industrial workers of the world and deadly determined to stamp out their organization in everett. it is no exaggeration to say that literally thousands of the working people of everett were just as enraged toward the members of the commercial club who participated in the gun battle. * * * as an instance of how high the feeling ran let me tell you that on the following morning the mayor of the city appeared on the (shingle weavers') picket line with a high power rifle and told the union pickets that he had every reason to believe that an attempt might be made by snipers to pick them off. he asked them to scatter as much as possible, make no demonstration whatever, and declared he would defend them with his life if necessary." mayor merrill, equally guilty with the deputies who were on the dock, taking advantage of a means of spreading information that was denied to the workers, directly after the massacre spoke from a soap box on the corner of wetmore and california avenues, telling all who would listen that he was not responsible for the trouble as the commercial club had taken the power away from him and put it in the hands of mcrae. the insincerity of this vacillating lackey of the lumber trust was demonstrated by his brutal treatment of young louis skaroff, who with chester micklin and osmond jacobs, had been arrested and thrown into jail when the three, bravely taking their lives in their hands, attempted to speak on the corner of hewitt and wetmore two hours after the tragedy. it was on monday night about ten o'clock that the night jailer took skaroff into a room where mayor merrill and a man posing as an immigration officer were seated. the fake immigration officer tried to frighten the prisoner with threats of deportation, after which the jailer beat skaroff across the head. merrill arose and took a hand in the proceedings, buffeting the boy back and forth until he fell to the floor. then, with the aid of the jailer, skaroff's fingers were placed, one by one, beneath the legs of an iron bed in the room while the ponderous mayor jumped up and down on the bed, mashing and tearing flesh and knuckles. upon regaining consciousness the mutilated boy found himself in the jail corridor, crushed beneath merrill's massive form, the mayor having grasped skaroff by the hair in order to repeatedly hammer the lad's head against the hard cement floor. finding that skaroff's spirit could not be broken the cowards finally desisted. skaroff was released at the end of eleven days. chaos reigned in everett following the tragedy. that night over five hundred deputies patrolled the streets, fearing just retribution for their criminal misdeeds. those who had been on the dock as parties to the massacre were overheard saying to each other, "we must stick together on this story about the first shot coming from the boat." certain officials called for the state militia which was mobilized in seattle but not used. one militiaman, a young lad named ted kennedy, refused to serve, claiming that it was the same as strike duty. the fact that the militia was mobilized at once, and that governor ernest lister went to everett to confer with officials and mill owners there, when he had refused to furnish protection or even to make an investigation at the request of the i. w. w. a short time before showed the governor's bias in favor of the employers. in this lumber district the militia was apparently the property of the mill owners. a hastily gathered coroner's jury in everett on november th brought in a verdict that c. o. curtis and jefferson f. beard met death from "gunshot wounds inflicted by a riotous mob on the steamer verona at the city dock." if any of the jury dissented from its false statement they were too spineless to express their opinion. the deliberations were under the direction of coroner a. r. maulsby and the members of the jury were adam hill, c. e. anthony, o. h. king, chris culmback, c. sandstein, and charles f. manning. the inquest was a farce. those who were outside the "deadline" and who were willing to swear that the first shots came from the dock were not permitted to testify, only sympathizers with the commercial club being called as witnesses. no real attempt to take testimony was made. the seattle central labor council on november th appropriated $ for a more complete investigation after branding the everett inquest as fraudulent in the following resolution: "whereas, it appears to this council that, following a lockout and open-shop campaign by roland h. hartley and others of everett, wash., the police and business men of that city have attempted to ruthlessly and lawlessly suppress all street speaking and demonstrations by labor organizations, and that unarmed men have been brutally beaten and terrorized, and whereas, this policy culminated in a bloody battle on sunday, november , resulting in the death of seven or more men and the wounding of many more, and whereas, a fair inquest should be held to fix responsibility for this crime, and it appears that this has not been done, but that only witnesses favorable to the bosses have been heard; therefore, we demand another inquest, free from control by the forces opposed to labor, and a change of venue, if that be necessary." capitalism stood forth in all its hideous nakedness on that day of red madness, and public opinion was such that the striking shingle weavers had but to persistently press their point in order to win. a conference of prominent men, held in everett on monday, decided that the situation could be relieved only by a settlement of the strike. the mill men, when called in, abruptly refused to grant a single demand so long as the men were still out, an attitude they could not have maintained for long. listening to the false advice of "friends of labor" and "labor leaders" the shingle weavers, albeit grudgingly, returned to their slavery, unconditional surrender being the price they were forced to pay for the doubtful privilege of "relieving the social tension." but with the pay envelopes that could not be stretched to cover the increased cost of living, the weavers, discouraged to an extent and lacking their former solidarity, were forced to down tools again within a few weeks by the greatest of all strike agitators--hunger. [illustration: mayor gill says i. w. w. did not start riot seattle executive places blame for sunday tragedy on citizens of everett--gives prisoners tobacco. providing the i. w. w.'s. whose attempted armed invasion of everett last sunday resulted in seven deaths and injuries to forty-nine persons, with every comfort possible. mayor h. c. gill yesterday afternoon personally directed the carrying of warm blankets and an assortment of tobacco to the prisoners now held in the city jail. in this manner gilt replied to criticism in seattle and everett for not having stopped the i. w. w's from going to the snohomish county city. he supplemented this today by assailing sheriff donald mcrae, of snohomish county and the posse of special deputies who met the invading i. w. w.'s at the boat. "in the final analysis," the mayor declared, "it will be found these cowards in everett who, without right or justification, shot into the crowd on the boat were the murderers and not the i. w. w.'s. calls them cowards. "the men who met the i. w. w.'s at the boat were a bunch of cowards. they outnumbered the i. w. w.'s five to one, and in spite of this they stood there on the dock and fired into the boat, i. w. w.'s, innocent passengers and all.] [illustration: "mcrae and his deputies had no legal right to tell the i. w. w.'s or anyone else that they could not land there. when the sheriff put his hand on the butt of his gun and told them they could not land, he fired the first shot, in the eyes of the law, and the i. w. w.'s can claim that they shot in self-defense." mayor gill asserted the everett authorities have no intention of removing the i. w. w.'s now in jail here to snohomish county. "they are afraid to come down here and get them," he declared, "because everett is in a state of anarchy and the authorities don't know where they're at." asked what he would have done at everett sunday when the i. w. w.'s appeared at that city, the mayor said he would have permitted them to land. "after they had been allowed to come ashore," he said, "i would have had them watched. then if they violated the law i would have had them thrown in jail. there would have been no trouble that way." no fight in seattle. "because everett has been reduced to a state of anarchy by their high-handed methods of dealing with this situation it is no reason they are going to attempt to bring their fight down in seattle, at least while i am mayor. "if i were one of the party of forty i. w. w.'s who was almost beaten to death by citizens of everett without being able to defend myself, i probably would have armed myself if i intended to visit everett again. "if the everett authorities had an ounce of sense, this tragedy would have never happened. they have handled the situation like a bunch of imbeciles, and they have been trying to unload these men onto seattle. you don't see any disturbances here, because we don't use nickel methods." the mayor charged that everett officials were inconsistent in their handling of this situation. he said that they permit candidates for office to violate the city ordinances by speaking on the streets and yet run the i. w. w.'s out of town if they endeavor to mount a soap box.] the prisoners in seattle were held incommunicado for several days. they were fed upon the poorest grade of prison fare, and were made to sleep on the winter-chilled cement floors without blankets. but mayor hiram gill, realizing that public sentiment was with the imprisoned men, ordered that they be placed upon a proper diet, be given blankets and be allowed to see relatives and friends. on november th in the seattle times there appeared a statement by gill that played a very important part in riveting the attention of the people upon the real criminals in the case. as the times is a notoriously conservative and labor-hating sheet, being largely responsible for the raid on the i. w. w. and socialist halls on july , , and for the attack by drunken sailors and soldiers on the i. w. w. hall on june , , it can hardly be accused of exaggeration in favor of the workers in this interview. following the publication of this interview the seattle chamber of commerce, seattle's "commercial club," endeavored to father a movement looking to the recall of gill from office. back of this attempt were judge thomas burke, louis lang, jay thomas, and four stall-fed ministers, the reverends w. a. major, e. v. shailer, wood stewart and carter helm jones. of these, thomas represented the liquor interests, lang was the former police chief who had been discharged in disgrace and was herding scabs on the waterfront, burke was chief spokesman for the low-wage open-shop interests, and as to the preachers--the less said the better. the lumber and shipping trusts had adequate representation at the "law and order" meeting as the attempted recall gathering was styled. but the whole thing fell flat when gill himself offered to sign the recall for the opportunity it would give him to tell the real facts about the everett case and the interests lined up behind the prosecution and the recall. on the night of the tragedy a report was circulated in seattle to the effect that every known i. w. w. would be arrested on sight. the answer to this was a street meeting at which nearly ninety dollars were collected as the first money toward the everett prisoners' defense, and the packing of the hall for weeks thereafter by members and sympathizers who had not attended meetings for a long time. a temporary committee was chosen to handle the work of the defense of the imprisoned men, and this committee acted until november th, at which time at a mass meeting of i. w. w. members herbert mahler was elected secretary of the everett prisoners' defense committee, charles ashleigh, publicity agent, and w. j. houser, morris levine and thomas murphy as the committee. richard smith was afterward chosen to take the place vacated by levine. this committee functioned thruout the case and up until the final audit of their account on june , . within the jail a process of selection had gone on. one by one the free speech prisoners were taken from their cells and slowly led past a silent and darkened cell into whose gloomy depths the keenest eye was unable to penetrate. again and again they were marched past the peephole, first with hats on and then with them off, while two sinister looking fingers were slid out of a narrow opening from time to time to indicate those who should be held. "i'd give two of my fingers," muttered one of the prisoners bitterly, "to know the skunk that belongs to those two fingers." little did he and his fellow workers realize that they were to learn later, thru the development of the trial, that the principal person engaged in the despicable work was george reese, a member of the i. w. w. and of the i. l. a. it was on learning this that many of the actions of reese were made clear; his connection with dock riots during the longshoremen's strike, his establishment of a "flying squadron" to beat up scabs on the waterfront, his open boast on the floor of i. l. a. meetings that his pockets were lined with money gained by robbing the strike-breakers after they had been beaten up and his advice to other strikers to do likewise, his activities just prior to the various dock fires, his seemingly miraculous escape in every instance when strikers were arrested, his election as delegate from the longshoremen to the seattle central labor council, his requests of prominent i. w. w. members that they purchase various chemicals for him, his giving of phosphorus to members of the i. l. a. and the i. w. w. with instructions as to how and where to use it, his attempts to advocate violence at an everett street meeting, his gathering of "souvenirs" on the verona--all actions designed either to aid the employers in their fights against the workers or to furnish an excuse for his further employment as an "informer." well may the question be asked--what was reese doing just as the verona docked in everett on november th? was reese merely a "stool pigeon" or was he an "agent provocateur?" aiding reese in the selective process was charles smith, the other pinkerton operative who had been on the boat. one of the men first picked out was i. p. mcdowell, alias charles adams, and this individual was weak enough to fall for the promise of immunity offered by agents of the lumber trust if he would point out the "leaders" and then take the stand to swear that the men on the boat were armed and the first shot came from one of them. mcdowell pointed out some of the men, but lacking the nerve to carry out the last part of the program he was held with the rest for trial. the seventy-four men thus picked were formally charged with murder in the first degree. the first charge carried the names of c. o. curtis as well as that of jefferson beard, but later the name of curtis was dropped from the information. the men so charged were: charles auspos, alias austin, age , teamster, born in wisconsin. james d. bates, age , steam fitter, born in illinois. e. m. beck, age , laborer, born in new york. charles berg, age , laborer, born in germany. j. h. beyer, age , painter, born in michigan. j. f. billings, age , cook, born in nebraska. charles black, age , laborer, born in pennsylvania. j. j. black, age , longshoreman, born in massachusetts. john w. bowdoin, age , laborer, born in sweden. frank boyd, age , laborer, born in illinois. pete breed, age , laborer, born in holland. w. h. brown, age , laborer, born in maryland. h. t. cheetman, age , carpenter, born in florida. fred crysler, age , laborer, born in canada. charles h. cody, age , painter, born in montana. william coffin, age , motorman, born in california. clarence cyphert, age , logger, born in washington. roy davis, age , laborer, born in california. william davis, age , cook, born in maryland. axel downey, age , laborer, born in iowa. john downs, age , sailor, born in colorado. adolph ersson, age , laborer and sailor, born in sweden. harry feinberg, age , cleaner and dyer, born in illinois. charles hawkins, age , laborer, born in indiana. charles haywood, age , miner, born in minnesota. e. f. hollingsworth, age , fireman, born in north carolina. j. e. houlihan, age , miner, born in ireland. alfred howard, age , coal packer, born in new york. harvey hubler, age , teamster, born in illinois. oscar johnson, age , laborer, born in sweden. victor johnson, age , laborer, born in finland. j. a. kelly, age , logger, born in ohio. theodore lauer, age , laborer, born in new york. william lawson, age , laborer, born in washington. jack leonard, age , laborer, born in kentucky. pat lyons, age , laborer, born in england. jim mack, age , laborer, born in ireland. joseph manning, age , automobile repairer, born in pennsylvania. laurence manning, age , laborer, born in new york. ed miller, age , painter, born in new york. harold miller, age , gas fitter, born in kansas. john mitchell, age , miner, born in illinois. george murphy, age , laborer, born in kentucky. louis mccall, age , laborer, born in texas. i. p. mcdowell, alias charles adams, age , printer, born in illinois. c. d. mclennan, age , longshoreman, born in georgia. carl newman, age , laborer, born in sweden. john nugent, age , laborer, born in new york. malachi o'neill, age , blacksmith, born in ireland. earl osborne, age , logger, born in north carolina. jack paterson, age , laborer, born in illinois. harston peters, age , laborer, born in virginia. james powers, age , sheet metal worker, born in massachusetts. john rawlings, age , laborer, born in wisconsin. michael j. reilly, age , laborer, born in new york. john ross, age , laborer, born in massachusetts. ed. roth, age , longshoreman, born in new york. thomas savage, age , machinist, born in new york. e. j. shapeero, age , timekeeper, born in pennsylvania. william shay, age , laborer, born in massachusetts. h. shebeck, age , laborer, born in wisconsin. albert shreve, age , laborer, born in illinois. h. sokol, age , laborer, born in russia. d. stevens, age, , longshoreman, born in canada robert struick, age , farmer, born in michigan. frank stewart, age , logger, born in canada. tom tracy, age , crane driver, born in pennsylvania. thomas h. tracy, age , teamster, born in nebraska. edwart truitt, age , longshoreman, born in pennsylvania. f. o. watson, age , blacksmith, born in louisiana. james whiteford (kelly), age , cook, born in new york. abraham b. wimborne, age , buss-boy, born in england. william winn, age , miner, born in maryland. all of these men, with the exception of j. h. beyer, were heavily handcuffed and secretly transferred to everett, forty-one being taken in the first contingent and the balance later. meanwhile the i. w. w. branches in seattle had communicated with the general headquarters of the organization and steps had been taken to secure legal aid. attempts to enlist the services of frank p. walsh, former chairman of the industrial relations commission, were unsuccessful. for various reasons other well known attorneys refused to ally themselves with the defense. attorney fred h. moore of los angeles, responding to the call from seattle, reached seattle just one week after the tragedy, on sunday, november, th. moore acted as chief counsel for the defense. he had first come into prominence thru his connection with the great free speech fight waged in spokane, wash., during the fall of and the spring of . during that fight he handled the legal end of the cases of many hundreds of free speech fighters whose arrests ran into the thousands. he was also connected with various other cases in connection with the industrial workers of the world, notably that of jack whyte and others arrested in the contest for free speech in san diego, cal. and the famous ettor-giovannitti case that developed from the great strike of textile workers in lawrence, mass., in . his sympathy with the workers and his understanding of the class struggle made him invaluable to the defense. of equal importance was attorney george f. vanderveer, who was called into the case a little later than moore. vanderveer was formerly the prosecuting attorney for king county, in which position he won a reputation for clever and merciless cross-examination. one of seattle's most prominent and brilliant lawyers, his wide acquaintance with all classes of people and his comprehensive knowledge of conditions in king and snohomish counties, coupled with his keen satire and compelling logic, gave a force to the case that cannot be underestimated. attorney e. c. dailey of everett, caroline a. lowe of kansas city, mo., and harry sigmond and j. l. finch, both of seattle, completed the list of counsel for the defense. after being held in the seattle city jail for nine days without any charge having been placed against them, one hundred twenty-eight men who were on the verona were released, small bodies of them being sent out at different periods in order to avoid demonstrations from the public. those who were released were: james agen, frank andrews, brockman armstrong, w. d. beachy, j. h. beyer, john bolan, j. bonfield, elmer brisbon, leonard broman, george brown, james burns, martin cable, val calze, a. l. cameron, james carlough, j. h. carr, ray clark, joseph cline, archie collins, robert conning, nick conaieff, joseph costello, r. f. dalton, frank dante, c. w. davis, lawrence davis, albert doninger, john donohue, william dott, joseph dougherty, ned dustard, j. h. elliott, c. c. england, john fitzpatrick, a. fletcher, russell free, alfred freeman, ben freeman, james freeman, john gibson, frank gillarkey, p. a. gragler, charles gray, james gray, paul grossman, ed gruberg, raymond gurber, robert hansen, joe harris, l. w. harris, arnold hensel, roy howell, g. h. isenberg, carl jacobson, george johnson, ray johnson, john karne, henry krieg, fred laveny, henry lea, raymond lee, william ledingham, charles leider, ira luft, ed lynn, george maguire, william micklenburg, august miller, dennis miller, frank c. miller, john miller, frank millet, roy mitchell, william montgomery, william moore, james murray, leo mccabe, j. mccoy, bernard narvis, al. nickerson, ben noll, tom norton, tom o'connor, jack osborne, e. peckman, hans peterson, a. pilon, ira porter, max ramsey, edward rays, herman rechlenberg, frank reiner, ernest rich, john j. riley, c. h. ross, m. rountell, steve sabo, j. l. samuel, joe sarracco, ed schwartz, carl schultz, h. stredwick, arthur shumek, charles smith, harry smith, e. j. smith, cecil snedegar, frank sofer, stanley stafl, raymond st. clair, john stroka, mike stysco, c. thomas, richard tibbs, john utne, joseph vito, john walker, benny warshawsky, f. westwood, ben whitehead, arley whiteside, william wilke, h. wilson, frank wise, and charles wolskie. most of these were mere boys. mere boys--but undaunted by their recent terrible experience on the verona where the open shop fiends had fired upon them without warning. mere boys--and yet they loyally marched straight to the i. w. w. hall as soon as they were released, there to inquire about the condition of their wounded fellow workers and to gain news of those who had been taken to everett to answer charges of first degree murder. mere boys--youthful enthusiasm shining on their beardless faces. scattered among them were a few men of middle years, and here and there a grey head stood out in bold relief--but the majority of them were mere boys, youthful soldiers in the social revolution, fine and clean and loyal material called together by the compelling ideal of a new society. the predominance of young blood in the organization was noted in the report of the convention, where it was shown that ninety per cent of the membership were under thirty years of age, due of course to the fact that the modern tendency is to displace the older men in industry. as one wit has put it "if a man works as hard as the employers want him to he is worn out at forty-five; if he isn't worn out at forty-five he is not the kind of worker the employers want." others have noted the percentage of the very young. john graham brooks, for instance, in "american syndicalism--the i. w. w." has this to say: "of the same nature as a characteristic is the +youth+ of the membership. the groups i saw in the west bore this stamp so unmistakably as to suggest bodies of students at the end of a rather jolly picnic. the word 'bum' usually applied to them in that region does not fit them. there are plenty of older men, as there are men with every appearance of being 'down and out'--with trousers chewed off at the heels, after the manner of tramps, but in face and bearing they are far from 'bums.' in one of the speeches the young were addressed as 'best material;' because they could stand the wear and tear of racking journeys. they were free from family responsibilities, and could at any moment respond to the call of duty." bearing out this idea, tho along a somewhat different line, is an excerpt from an article by anna louise strong which appeared in the survey magazine just prior to the trial. this and other articles, together with the personal efforts of miss strong, whose official standing as a member of the seattle school board and as executive secretary of the seattle council of social agencies gave weight to her opinion, did much toward creating a favorable public sentiment during the trial. says miss strong: "the boys in jail are a cheerful lot. the 'tanks' which contain them are the tanks of the usual county jail, much overcrowded now by the unusual number. bunks crowded above each other, in full sight thru the bars; a few feet away, all the processes of life open to the casual beholder. but they sit in groups playing cards or dominoes; they listen to tunes played on the mouth-organ; most of all they sing. they sing whenever visitors come, and smile thru the bars in cheerful welcome. theirs is the spirit of the crusader of all ages, and all causes, won or lost, sane or insane. theirs is the irresponsibility and audacious valor of youth. when they disliked their food, says a conservative newspaper, they went on strike and 'sang all night.' sang all night! what sane adults in our drab, business-as-usual world would think of doing that? who, in fact, could think of doing it but college boys or industrial workers of the world, cheerfully defying authority?" thru an absurd and laughable error j. h. beyer, one of the seventy-four men charged with first degree murder, was among those who were released. beyer immediately sought out and told attorney moore his story. then this "hardened criminal" walked the street of seattle after public announcement had been made that he was willing to be taken to everett to be incarcerated with the rest of his fellow workers, and that he awaited rearrest. the prosecution made no move to apprehend him, so on december th beyer went to everett and asked the authorities to lock him up. the snohomish officials shamefacedly granted this unique request but they absolutely refused to refund the money beyer had paid to deliver himself up to "justice." before leaving seattle beyer made this statement: "i have waited here nearly a month since my release from the seattle jail, yet no officer from everett has come for me. in justice to the other boys accused i feel that i should share their lot as well as the accusation. i do not fear returning to everett and giving myself up for i am confident that we shall be all exculpated. i am fifty-three years of age and have had many and varied experiences in my career, but i never expected to be accused of crime because i endeavored to assert my constitutional right of free speech." the same day that beyer surrendered himself, bonds of $ each were secured for thirty-eight men who had been selected from the verona and calista and held on charges of unlawful assembly. bail was given by james duncan, secretary of the central labor council, and e. b. ault, editor of the union record, both of seattle. the released men were dewey ashmore, e. belmat, c. burke, l. e. butcher, james callahan, harry chase, charles day, a. j. deach, charles ellis, j. ford, owen genty, hy gluckstad, frank goff, james c. hadley, steve heletour, a. o. hooper, c. c. hulbert, h. p. hunsberger, c. l. johnson, r. w. jones, joe kelley, f. lansing, w. o. lily, e. mcbride, william mcgregor, r. nicholson, david o'hern, harry parker, j. ryan, sam scott, mark skomo, thomas smye, and f. thorpe. altho an inquest had been held over the dead gunmen at such an early date after the tragedy and with such haste as to seem suspicious, repeated demands for an inquest over labor's dead were of no avail. no such inquest was ever held. only by strong protest were the bodies kept from the potter's field. thirty-eight charged with unlawful assembly, seventy-four in jail accused of first degree murder, thirty-two severely wounded and at least two of these crippled for life, six unaccounted for and probably shot and drowned, and five known dead in the city morgue,--this was the answer of the tyrannical timber barons to labor's demand for free speech and the right to organize within the confines of the lumber kingdom. footnote: [ ] courtenay lemon, "free speech in the united states." pearson's magazine, december . chapter v. behind prison bars "one of the greatest sources of social unrest and bitterness has been the attitude of the police toward public speaking. on numerous occasions in every part of the country the police of cities and towns have, either arbitrarily or under the cloak of a traffic ordinance, interfered with or prohibited public speaking, both in the open and in halls, by persons connected with organizations of which the police or those from whom they receive their orders did not approve. in many instances such interference has been carried out with a degree of brutality which would be incredible if it were not vouched for by reliable witnesses. bloody riots frequently have accompanied such interference, and large numbers of persons have been arrested for acts of which they were innocent or which were committed under the extreme provocation of brutal treatment by police or private citizens. "in some cases this suppression of free speech seems to have been the result of sheer brutality and wanton mischief, but in the majority of cases it undoubtedly is the result of a belief by the police or their superiors that they were 'supporting and defending the government' by such invasion of personal rights. there could be no greater error. such action strikes at the very foundation of government. it is axiomatic that a government which can be maintained only by the suppression of criticism should not be maintained. furthermore, it is the lesson of history that attempts to suppress ideas result only in their more rapid propagation." the foregoing is the view of the industrial relations commission as it appears on page and of volume one of their official report to the united states government. [illustration: jail at everett] the growth of a public sentiment favorable to the industrial workers of the world was clearly shown on november th, at which time the bodies of felix baran, hugo gerlot and john looney were turned over to the organization for burial. gustav johnson had already been claimed by relatives and a private funeral held, and the body of abraham rabinowitz sent to new york at the request of his sister. thousands of workers, each wearing a red rose or carnation, formed in line at the undertaking parlors and then silently marched four abreast behind the three hearses and the automobiles containing the eighteen women pall bearers and the floral tributes to the martyred dead. to the strains of the "red flag" and the "marseillaise" the grim and imposing cortege wended its way thru the crowded city streets, meeting with expressions of sorrow and sympathy from those who lined the sidewalk. delegations of workers from everett, tacoma, and other washington cities and towns were in line, and a committee from portland, ore., brought appropriate floral offerings. the solidarity of labor was shown in this great funeral procession, by all odds the largest ever held in the northwest. arriving at the graveside in mount pleasant cemetery the rebel women reverently bore the coffins from the hearses to the supporting frame, surrounded by boughs of fragrant pine, above the yawning pit. a special chorus of one hundred voices led the singing of "workers of the world, awaken," and as the song died away charles ashleigh began the funeral oration. standing on the great hill that overlooks the whole city of seattle, the speaker pointed out the various industries with their toiling thousands and referred to the smoke that shadowed large portions of the view as the black fog of oppression and ignorance which it was the duty of the workers to dispel in order to create the workers' commonwealth. the entire address was marked by a simple note of resolution to continue the work of education until the workers have come into their own, not a trace of bitterness evincing itself in the remarks. ashleigh called upon those present never to falter until the enemy had been vanquished. "today," he said, "we pay tribute to the dead. tomorrow we turn, with spirit unquellable, to give battle to the foe!" as the notes of "hold the fort!" broke a moment of dead silence, a shower of crimson flowers, torn from the coats of the assembled mourners, covered the coffins and there was a tear in every eye as the bodies slowly descended into their final resting place. as tho loath to leave, the crowd lingered to sing the "red flag" and "solidarity forever." those present during the simple but stirring service were struck with the thought that the class struggle could never again be looked upon as a mere bookish theory, the example of those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom was too compelling a call to action. but the imperious exactions of the class war left no time for mourning, and ere the last man had left the graveside the first to go was busily spreading the news of an immense mass meeting to be held in dreamland rink on the next afternoon. at this meeting five thousand persons from all walks of life gathered to voice their protest against the everett outrage and to demand a federal investigation. the labor unions, the clergy, public officials and the general citizenry, were represented by the speakers. this was the first of many mass meetings held by the aroused and indignant people of seattle until the termination of the case. [illustration: funeral of gerlot, looney and baran] the "kept" press carried on a very bitter campaign against the i. w. w. for some few days after the dock tragedy, but dropped that line of action when the public let them understand that they were striking a wrong note. thereafter their policy was to ignore, as far as possible, the entire affair. practically the only time this rule was broken was in the printing of the song "christians at war" by john f. kendrick, taken from the i. w. w. song book. the seattle post-intelligencer gave a photographic reproduction of the cover page of the book and of the page containing the song. the obvious intent was to have people think that this cutting satire was an urge for the members of the i. w. w. to do in times of peace those inglorious things that are eminently respectable in times of war. later the times, and several other papers, reproduced the same cover and song, the only change being that certain words were inked out to make it appear that the song was obscene. and tho the p.--i. had published the song in full the times placed beneath their garbled version these words, "the portions blotted out are words and phrases such as never appear in the times or in any other decent newspaper." the simultaneous appearance of this song in a number of papers was merely a coincidence, no doubt; there is no reason to believe that the lumber trust inspired the attack! allied as usual with the capitalist press and "stool pigeons" and employers' associations in a campaign to discredit the workers involved in the case, was the moribund socialist labor party thru its organ, the weekly people. the entire i. w. w. press came to the support of the imprisoned men as a matter of course. the seattle union record and many other craft union papers, realizing that an open shop fight lay back of the suppression of free speech, also did great publicity work. but no particular credit is due to those "labor leaders" who, like j. g. brown, president of the shingle weavers' union, grudgingly gave a modicum of assistance under pressure from radicals in their respective organizations. the northwest worker of everett deserves especial praise for its fearless and uncompromising stand in the face of the bitterest of opposition. this paper had practically to suspend publication because of pressure the lumber trust brought to bear on the firm doing their printing. this, with the action recorded in the minutes of the commercial club, "decided to go after advertisements in labor journals and the northwest worker," shows that a free press is as obnoxious to the lumber lords as are free speech and free assembly. it scarcely needs noting that the international socialist review rendered yeoman service, as that has been its record in all labor cases since the inception of the magazine. several other socialist publications, to whom the class struggle does not appear merely as a momentary quadrennial event, also did their bit. diverse foreign language publications, representing varying shades of radical thought, gave to the trial all the publicity their columns could carry. just why seventy-four men were picked as prisoners is a matter of conjecture. probably it was because the stuffy little snohomish county jail could conveniently, to the authorities, hold just about that number. the men were placed four in a cell with ten cells to each tank, there being two tanks of steel resting one above the other. even with all the windows thrown open the ventilation was so poor that the men were made ill by the foul air. for almost two full months after being transported to everett the men were held incommunicado; were not allowed to see papers or magazines or to have reading matter of any description; were subjected to the brutalities of sheriff mcrae and other jail officials who had been prominent in previous outrage and participants in the massacre at the dock; and were fed on the vilest prison fare. mush was the principal article of diet; mush semi-cooked and cold; mush full of mold and maggots; mush that was mainly husks and lumps that could not be washed down with the pale blue prison milk; mush--until the prisoners fitfully dreamed of mush and gagged at the mere mention of the word. finding themselves slowly starving the men decided that it were better to complete the job at once rather than to linger in misery. a hunger strike was declared! meal after meal--or mush after mush--passed and the men refused to eat. those who were thought to be leaders in the miniature revolt were thrown in the blackhole where there was neither light nor fresh air. still the men refused to eat, so the authorities were forced to surrender and the men had something to eat besides mush. great discomfort was experienced by the prisoners from having to sleep on the cold steel floors of the unheated cells during the chill november nights. deciding to remedy the condition they made a demand for mattresses and blankets from the authorities, not a man of them being willing to have the defense committee purchase such supplies. the needed articles were refused and the men resorted to a means of enforcing their demands known as "building a battleship." with buckets and tins, and such strips of metal as could be wrenched loose, the men beat upon the walls, ceilings, and floors of the steel tanks. those who found no other method either stamped on the steel floors in unison with their fellows, or else removed their shoes to use the heels to beat out a tattoo. to add to the unearthly noise they yelled concertedly with the full power of their lungs. three score and ten men have a noise-making power that words cannot describe. the townspeople turned out in numbers, thinking that the deputies were murdering the men within the jail. the battleship construction workers redoubled their efforts. acknowledging defeat, the jail officials furnished the blankets and mattresses that had been demanded. a few days later the men started their morning meal only to find that the mush was strongly "doped" with saltpeter and contained bits of human manure and other refuse--the spite work, no doubt, of the enraged deputies. another battleship was started. this time the jailers closed all the windows in an effort to suffocate the men, but they broke the glass with mop-handles and continued the din. as before, the deputies were defeated and the men received better food for a time. on november th an official of the state board of prisoners took the finger prints and photographs of the seventy-four men who were innocent until proven guilty under the "theory" of law in this country, and, marking these bertillion records with prison serial numbers, sent copies to every prison in the united states. in taking the prints of the first few men brute force was used. lured from their cells the men were seized, their hands screwed in a vise, and an imprint taken by forcibly covering their hands with lampblack and holding them down on the paper. when the others learned that some had thus been selected they voted that all should submit to having their prints taken so the whole body of prisoners would stand on the same footing. attorney moore was denied all access to the prisoners during the consummation of this outrage. after obtaining permission of the jail officials a committee of everett citizens, with the voluntary assistance of the cooks' and waiters' union, prepared a feast for the free speech prisoners on thanksgiving day. when the women arrived at the jail they were met by sheriff mcrae who refused to allow the dinner to be served to the men. mcrae was drunk. in place of this dinner the sheriff set forth a meal of moldy mush so strongly doped with chemicals as to be unfit for human consumption. this petty spite work by the moon-struck tool of the lumber trust was in thoro keeping with the cowardly characteristics he displayed on the dock on november th. and the extent to which the daily press in everett was also under the control of the lumber interests was shown by the publication of a faked interview with attorney fred moore published in the everett herald under date of november th, moore having been credited with the statement that the prison food deserved praise and the prisoners were "given as good food and as much of it as they could wish." during the whole of mcrae's term as sheriff there was no time that decent food was given voluntarily to the prisoners as a whole. at times, with low cunning, mcrae gave the men in the upper tank better food than those confined below, and also tried to show favoritism to certain prisoners, in order to create distrust and suspicion among the men. all these attempts to break the solidarity of the prisoners failed of their purpose. on one occasion mcrae called "paddy" cyphert, one of the prisoners whom he had known as a boy, from his cell and offered to place him in another part of the jail in order that he might escape injury in a "clubbing party" the deputies had planned. cyphert told mcrae to put him back with the rest for he wanted the same treatment as the others and would like to be with them in order to resist the assault. in the face of this determination, which was typical of all the prisoners, the contemplated beating was never administered. mcrae would oftentimes stand outside the tanks at a safe distance and drunkenly curse the prisoners and refer to them as cowards, to which the men would reply by repeating the words of the sheriff on the dock, "o-oh, i'm hit! i-i'm h-hit!! i-i-i'm h-h-hit!!!" then they would burst forth with a song written by william whalen in commemoration of the exploits of the doughty sheriff, a song which since has become a favorite of the migratory workers as they travel from job to job, and which will serve to keep the deeds of mcrae fresh in the minds of the workers for many years to come. to sheriff mcrae call out your fire department, go deputize your bums; gather in your gunmen and stool pigeons from the slums; you may resolute till doomsday, you ill-begotten knave; we'll still be winning free speech fights when you are in your grave! you reprobate, you imp of hate, you're a traitor to the mind that brought you forth in human shape to prey upon mankind. you are lower than the snakes that crawl or the scavengers that fly; you're the living, walking image of a damn black-hearted lie! we'll still be here in everett when your career is ended, and back among the dregs of life your dirty hide has blended; when you shun the path of honest wrath and fear the days to come, and bow your head to the flag of red, you poor white-livered bum! for the part you played in everett's raid that fateful sunday morn, may your kith and kindred live to curse the day that you were born; may the memory of your victims haunt your conscience night and day, until your feeble, insect mind beneath the strain gives way! oh, don mcrae, you've had your day; make way for freedom's host: for labor's sun is rising, soon 'twill shine from coast to coast! the shot you fired at everett re-echoes thru the night as a message to the working class to organize and fight! those graves upon the hillside as monuments will stand to point the way to freedom's goal to slaves thruout the land; and when at last the working class have made the masters yield, may your portion of the victory be a grave in the potter's field! the end of the first week in january brought about the change in the administrative force of snohomish county that had been voted at the november election. a new set of lumber trust lackeys were placed in office. james mccullogh succeeded donald mcrae as sheriff, and lloyd black occupied the office vacated by prosecuting attorney o. t. webb. the advent of a new sheriff made some slight difference in the jail conditions, but this was more than offset by the underhanded methods used from that time on with the idea of breaking the solidarity of the free speech fighters. liquor was placed in the bathrooms where the men could easily get hold of it, but even among those who had been hard drinkers on the outside there were none who would touch it. firearms were cunningly left exposed in hopes that the men might take them and attempt a jail break, thus giving the jailers a chance to shoot them down or else causing the whole case to be discredited. the men saw thru the ruse and passed by the firearms without touching them. working in conjunction with the prosecuting attorney was h. d. cooley. this gentleman was one of the deputies on the dock, having displayed there his manly qualities by hiding behind a pile of wood at first, and later by telling others to go with rifles to head off the calista which he had spied approaching from the direction of mukilteo. cooley had a practice among the big lumbermen, and in the case against the i. w. w. he was hired by the state with no stipulation as to pay. the general excuse given for his activities in the case, which dated from november th, was that he was retained by "friends of jefferson beard" and other "interested parties." attorney a. l. veitch was also lined up with the prosecution. he was the same gentleman who had lectured to the deputies during the preceding fall as a representative of the merchants' and manufacturers' association, and had told the deputies how to handle "outside agitators." veitch was also employed by the state as a matter of record, but there was a direct stipulation that he receive no pay from state funds. he also was employed by "friends of jefferson beard" and other "interested parties." with veitch there was imported from los angeles one malcolm mclaren, an m. and m. detective and office partner with veitch, to act as "fix-it" man for the lumber trust. mclaren was at one time an operative for the infamous wm. j. burns, and burns has well said "private detectives, ninety per cent of them, as a class, are the worst of crooks, blackmailers and scoundrels." under mccullogh's regime this open-shop gumshoe artist had free access to the jail with instructions to go as far as he liked. just what the prisoners thought about jail conditions during the time they were incarcerated is given in the following report which was smuggled out to the industrial worker and published on march rd: "'everything is fine and dandy on the outside, don't worry, boys.'" "this is the first thing we heard from visitors ever since we seventy-four have been incarcerated in the snohomish county jail at everett. "while 'everything is fine and dandy on the outside' there are, no doubt, hundreds who would like to hear how things are on the inside. let us assure everyone on the outside that 'everything is fine and dandy' on the inside. we are not worrying as it is but a short time till the beginning of the trials, the outcome of which we are certain will be one of the greatest victories labor has ever known, if there exists a shadow of justice in the courts of america. "one hundred days in jail so far--and for nothing! stop and think what one hundred days in jail means to seventy-four men! it means that in the aggregate the master class have deprived us of more than twenty years of liberty. twenty years! think of it, and a prospect of twenty more before all are at liberty. "and why? "there can be but one reason, one answer: we are spending this time in jail and will go thru the mockery of a trial because the masters of everett are trying to shield themselves from the atrocious murders of bloody november fifth. "after being held in seattle, convicted without a trial, except such as was given us by the press carrying the advertising of the boss and dependent on him for support, on november th forty-one of us were brought to everett. a few days later thirty more were brought here. "we found the jail conditions barbarous. there were no mattresses and only one blanket to keep off the chill of a puget sound night in the cold, unheated steel cells. there were no towels. we were supplied with laundry soap for toilet purposes, when we could get even that. workers confined in lower cells were forced to sleep on the floors. there were five of them in each cell and in order to keep any semblance of heat in their bodies they had to sleep all huddled together in all their clothing. "the first few days we were in the jail we spent in cleaning it, as it was reeking with filth and probably had never been cleaned out since it was built. it was alive with vermin. there were armies of bedbugs and body lice. we boiled up everything in the jail and it is safe to say that it is now cleaner than it had ever been before, or ever will be after the wobblies are gone. "when we first came here the lower floor was covered with barrels, boxes and cases of whiskey and beer. this was moved in a few days, but evidently not so far but mcrae and his deputies had access to it, as their breath was always charged with the odor of whiskey. it was an everyday occurrence to have several of the deputies, emboldened by liquid courage and our defenseless condition--walk around the cell blocks and indulge in the pastime of calling us vulgar and profane names. threats were also very common, but we held our peace and were content with the thought that 'a barking dog seldom bites.' "the worst of these deputies are gone since the advent of sheriff mccullogh, but there are some on the job yet who like their 'tea.' about two weeks ago every deputy that came into the jail was drunk; some of them to the extent of staggering. "when we first entered the jail, true to the principles of the i. w. w., we proceeded to organize ourselves for the betterment of our condition. a 'grub' committee, a sanitary committee and a floor committee were appointed. certain rules and regulations were adopted. by the end of the week, instead of a growling, fighting crowd of men, such as one would expect to find where seventy-four men were thrown together, there was an orderly bunch of real i. w. w.'s, who got up at a certain hour every morning, and all of whose actions were part of a prearranged routine. even tho every man of the seventy-four was talking as loudly as he could a few seconds before ten p. m., the instant the town clock struck ten all was hushed. if a sentence was unfinished, it remained unfinished until the following day. "when the jailer came to the door, instead of seventy-four men crowding up and all trying to talk at once, three men stepped forward and conversed with him. our conduct was astonishing to the jail officials. one of the jailers remarked that he had certainly been given a wrong impression of the i. w. w. by mcrae. he said, 'this bunch is sure different from what i heard they were. you fellows are all right.' the answer was simply: 'organization.' instead of a cursing, swearing, fighting mob of seventy-four men, such as sheriff mcrae would like to have had us, we were entirely the opposite. "time has not hung heavy on our hands. one scarcely notices the length of the days. educational meetings are frequent and discussions are constantly in order. our imprisonment has been a matter of experience. we will all be better able to talk industrial unionism than when we entered the jail. "the meals! did we say 'meals?' a thousand pardons! next time we meet a meal we will apologize to it. up to the time we asserted our displeasure at the stinking, indigestible messes thrown up to us by a drunken brute who could not qualify as head waiter in a 'nickel plate' restaurant, we had garbage, pure and simple. think of it! mush, bread and coffee at : a. m., and not another bite until p. m. then they handed us a mess which some of us called 'slumgullion,' composed of diseased beef. is it any wonder that four of the boys were taken to the hospital? but we will not dwell on the grub. suffice it to say we were all more or less sick from the junk dished out to us. we were all hungry from november th until january nd. one day in november we had beans. little did we surmise the pains, the agony contained in that dish of innocent looking nutriment, beans. at two in the morning every man in the jail was taken violently ill. we aroused the guards and they sent for a doctor. he came about eight hours later and looked disappointed upon learning that we were not dead. this doctor always had the same remedy in all cases. his prescription was, 'stop smoking and you will be all right.' this is the same quack who helped beat up the forty-one members of the i. w. w. at beverly park on october th, . his nerve must have failed him or his pills would have finished what his pickhandle had started. "during the entire time of our confinement under mcrae, drunken deputies came into the jail and did everything in their power to make conditions as miserable as possible for us. mcrae was usually the leader in villification of the i. w. w. "when on january th a change of administration took place, we called a meeting which resulted in an interview with sheriff mccullogh. among other things we demanded a cook. for days the sheriff stalled us off. he professed that he wanted to do things for our comfort. we gave him ample time--but there was no change in the conditions. on january th the matter came to a climax. for five days prior to this we had been served with what some called 'mulligan.' in reality it was nothing more or less than water slightly colored with the juice of carrots. if there had ever been any meat in it that meat was taken out before the mulligan was served. we called for the sheriff and were informed that he had gone away. we called for one of our attorneys who was in one of the outer offices at the time, but jailer bridges refused to let us see him. having tried peaceful methods without success, we decided to forcibly bring the matter to the attention of the authorities. we poured the contents of the container out thru the bars and onto the floor. the boys in the upper tank did the same thing. for doing this we were given a terrible cursing by jailer bridges and the drunken cook, the latter throwing a piece of iron thru the bars, striking one of the boys on the head, and inflicting a long, ugly wound. the cook also threatened to poison us. "that night when we were to be locked in, one of our jailers, decidedly under the influence of liquor, was in such a condition that he was unable to handle the levers properly and in some manner put the locking system out of commission. after probably three quarters of an hour, during which all of us and every i. w. w. in the world were consigned to hell many times, the doors were finally locked. "'by god, you s--s-of-b----s will wish you ate that stew,' was the way in which the jailer said 'good night' to us. the significance of his words was brought back to us next morning when the time came for us to be unlocked. we were left in our cells without food and with the water turned off so we could not even have a drink. we might have remained there for hours without toilet facilities had we not taken matters into our hands. with one accord we decided to get out of the cells. there was only one way to do this--'battleship!' [illustration: an all-i. w. w. crew raising a spar tree ft. long, ½ inches at top and ½ inches at butt, at index, wash.] [illustration: another view of the same operation.] "battleship we did! such a din had never before been heard in everett. strong hands and shoulders were placed to the doors which gave up their hold on the locks as if they had been made of pasteboard, and we emerged into the recreation corridors. the lumber trust papers of everett, which thought the events of november th and the murder of five workers but a picnic, next day reported that we had wrecked the jail and attempted to escape. we did do a little wrecking, but as far as trying to escape is concerned that is a huge joke. the jail has not been built that can hold seventy-four i. w. w. members if they want to escape. we had but decided to forcibly bring the jail conditions to the attention of the authorities and the citizens. we were not willing to die of hunger and thirst. we told sheriff mccullogh we were not attempting to escape; he knew we were not. yet the papers came out with an alleged interview in which the sheriff was made to say that we were. it was also said that tomato skins had been thrown against the walls of the jail. there were none to throw! "summing up this matter: we are here, and here we are determined to remain until we are freed. not a man in this jail would accept his liberty if the doors were opened. this is proven by the fact that one man voluntarily came to the jail here and gave himself up, while still another was allowed his liberty but sent for the everett authorities to come and get him while he was in seattle. this last man was taken out of jail illegally while still under the charge of first degree murder, but he preferred to stand trial rather than to be made a party to schemes of framing up to perjure away the liberties of his fellow workers. "signed by the workers in the snohomish county jail." if the authorities hoped to save money by their niggardly feeding policy the battleship of january th, mentioned in the foregoing account, convinced them of their error. with blankets tied to the cell doors they first tore them open and then twisted them out of shape. taking a small piece of gaspipe they disarranged the little doors that controlled the locking system above each cell, and then demolished the entire system of locks. every bolt, screw and split pin was taken out and made useless. while some were thus engaged others were busy getting the food supplies which were stacked up in a corner just outside the tanks. when sheriff mccullogh finally arrived at the jail, some three hours later, he found the prisoners calmly seated amid the wreckage eating some three hundred pounds of corned beef they had obtained and cooked with live steam in one of the bath tubs. shaking his head sadly the sheriff remarked, "you fellows don't go to the same church that i do." the deputy force worked for hours in cleaning up the jail, and it took a gang of ironworkers nine working days, at a cost of over $ . , to repair the damage done in twenty minutes. twenty of the "hard-boiled wobblies" were removed to seattle shortly after this, but it was no trouble for the men to gain their demands from that time on. they had but to whisper the magic word "battleship" to remind the jailers that the i. w. w. policy, as expressed in a line in virgil, was about to be invoked: "if i cannot bend the powers above, i will rouse hell." lloyd black, prosecuting attorney only by a political accident, soon dropped his ideals and filled the position of prosecutor as well as his limited abilities allowed, and it was apparent that he felt the hands of the lumber trust tugging on the strings attached to his job and that he had succumbed to the insidious influence of his associates. he called various prisoners from their cells and by pleading, cajoling and threatening in turn, tried to induce them to make statements injurious to their case. fraudulently using the name of john m. foss, a former member of the general executive board of the i. w. w. and then actively engaged in working for the defense, black called out axel downey, a boy of seventeen and the youngest of the free speech prisoners, and used all the resources of his department to get the lad to make a statement. downey refused to talk to any of the prosecution lawyers or detectives and demanded that he be returned to his cell. from that time on he refused to answer any calls from the office unless the jail committee was present. nevertheless the name of axel downey was endorsed, with several others, as a witness for the prosecution in order to create distrust and suspicion among the prisoners. about this time the efforts of detective mclaren and his associates were successful in "influencing" one of the prisoners, and charles auspos, alias charles austin, agreed to become a state's witness. contrary to the expectation of the prosecution, the announcement of this "confession" created no sensation and was not taken seriously on the outside, while the prisoners, knowing there was nothing to confess, were concerned only in the fact that there had been a break in their solidarity. "we wanted to come out of this case one hundred per cent clean," was the sorrowful way in which they took the news. auspos had joined the i. w. w. in rugby, north dakota, on august th, , and whether he was at that time an agent for the employers is not known, but it is evident that he was not sufficiently interested in industrial unionism to study its rudimentary principles. it may be that the previous record of auspos had given an opportunity for mclaren to work upon that weak character, for auspos started his boyhood life in hudson, wisconsin, with a term in the reformatory, and his checkered career included two years in a military guard house for carrying side-arms and fighting in a gambling den, a dishonorable discharge from the united states army, under the assumed name of ed. gibson, and various arrests up until he joined the i. w. w. this auspos was about years of age, five foot eleven inches tall, weight about pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, medium complexion but face inclined to be reddish, slight scar on side of face, and was a teamster and general laborer by occupation, his parents living in elk river, minn. and while auspos had by his actions descended to the lowest depths of shame, there were those among the prisoners who had scaled the heights of self-sacrifice. there were some few among them whose record would look none too well in the light of day, but the spirit of class solidarity within them led them to say, "do with me as you will, i shall never betray the working class." james whiteford, arrested under the name of james kelly, deserves the highest praise that can be given for he was taken back to pennsylvania, which state he had left in violation of a parole; to serve out a long penitentiary sentence which he could have avoided by a few easily told lies implicating his fellow workers in a conspiracy to do murder on november th. shortly after the attempted "frame-up" with axel downey there was a strong effort made to bring pressure upon harvey hubler. a "lawyer" who called himself minor blythe, bearing letters obtained by misrepresentation from hubler's father and sister, attempted to get hubler from his cell on an order signed by malcolm mclaren, the detective. with the experience of downey fresh in mind, hubler refused to go out of the tank, even tho the "lawyer" stated that he had been sent by hubler's father and could surely get him out of jail. the next day twelve armed deputies came into the jail to force hubler to accompany them to the office. the prisoners as a whole refused to enter their cells, and armed themselves with such rude weapons as they could find in order to repulse the deputies. the concerted resistance had its effect and a committee of three, feinberg, peters and watson, accompanied hubler to the office. hubler there refused to read the letter, asking that it be read aloud in the presence of the other men. the detectives refused to do this and the men were put back in the tank. that afternoon, with two other prisoners, hubler went out of the tank to wash his clothes. the jailers had been awaiting this opportunity and immediately locked the men out. the gunmen then overpowered hubler and dragged him struggling to the office. the letter was then read to hubler, who made no comment further than to say that the i. w. w. had engaged attorneys to defend him and he wished to be taken back where the rest of the men were. meanwhile the men in the tanks had started another battleship. a hose had been installed in the jail since the previous battleship and the deputies turned this upon the men as soon as the protest started. the prisoners retaliated by taking all mattresses, blankets, clothing and supplies belonging to the county and throwing them where they would be ruined by the water, and not knowing what was happening to hubler they shouted "murder" at the top of their voices. while the trouble was going on several members of the i. w. w., many everett citizens, and one attorney tried to gain admittance to the jail office to learn the cause of the disturbance, but this was denied for more than an hour. hubler was finally brought back and the battleship ceased. the county had to furnish new bedding and clothing for the prisoners. after this occurrence the prisoners were allowed the run of the corridors and were often let out to play ball upon the jail lawn, with only two guards to watch them. there were no disorders in the jail from that time on. a committee of everett women asked permission to serve a dinner to the imprisoned men and when this was granted they fairly outdid themselves in fixing up what the boys termed a "swell feed." this was served to the men thru the bars but tasted none the less good on that account. [illustration: judge j. t. ronald] the seattle women, not to be outdone, gave a banquet to the prisoners who had been transported to the seattle county jail. the banquet was spread on tables set the full length of the jail corridor, and the menu ran from soup to nuts. an after dinner cigar, and a little boutonniere of fragrant flowers furnished by a gray-haired old lady, completed the program. these banquets and the jail visitors, together with numerous books, magazines and papers--and a phonograph that was in almost constant operation--made the latter part of the long jail days endurable. the defense was making strong efforts, during this time, to secure some judge other than bell or alston, the two superior court judges of snohomish county, finally winning a victory in forcing the appointment of an outside judge by the governor of the state. judge j. t. ronald, of king county, was selected by governor lister, and after the men had pleaded "not guilty" on january th, a change of venue on account of the prejudice existing in everett's official circles was asked and granted, seattle being selected as the place where the trial would take place. eleven of the prisoners were named on the first information, the men thus arraigned being f. o. watson, john black, frank stuart, charles adams, harston peters, thomas h. tracy, harry feinberg, john downs, harold miller, ed roth and thomas tracy. the title of the case was "state vs. f. o. watson et al.," but the first man to come to trial was thomas h. tracy. the date of the trial was set for march th. on november th, when he was taken from the verona to jail, thomas h. tracy gave his name at the booking window as george martin, in order to spare the feelings of relatives to whom the news of his arrest would have proven a severe shock. when the officers were checking the names later he was surprised to hear them call out "tracy, thomas tracy." thinking that his identity was known because of his having been secretary in everett for a time, he stepped forward. an instant later a little fellow half his size also marched to the front. there were two tom tracys among the arrested men! neither of them knew the other! tracy then gave his correct name and both he and "little tom tracy" were later held among the seventy-four charged with murder in the first degree. during all the time the free speech fighters were awaiting trial the lumber trust exerted its potent influence at the national capital to the end of preventing any congressional investigation of the tragedy of november th and the circumstances surrounding it. the petitions of thousands of citizens of the state of washington were ignored. all too well the employers knew what a putrid state of affairs would be uncovered were the lumber trust methods exposed to the pitiless light of publicity. that the trial itself would force them into the open evidently did not enter into their calculations. in changing the information charging the murder of c. o. curtis to the charge of murdering jefferson beard the prosecution thought to cover one point beyond the possibility of discovery, which change seems to have been made as a result of the exhuming of the body of c. o. curtis in february. curtis had been buried in a block of solid concrete and this had to be broken apart in order to remove the body. just who performed the autopsy cannot be ascertained as the work was covered in the very comprehensive bill of $ . for "exhuming the body of c. o. curtis, and autopsy thereon," this bill being made out in the name of the superintendent of the graveyard and was allowed and paid by snohomish county. this, together with the fact that at no time during the trial did the prosecution speak of c. o. curtis as having met his death at the hands of the men on the verona, seems to bear out the contention of the defense that curtis was the victim of the rifle fire of one of his associates. so on march th, after holding the free speech prisoners for four months to the day, the lumber trust, in the name of the state of washington, brought the first of them, thomas h. tracy, to trial, on a charge of first degree murder, in the king county court house at seattle, washington. chapter vi. the prosecution the king county court house is an imposing, five story, white structure, covering an entire block in the business section of the city of seattle. its offices for the conduct of the county and city business are spacious and well appointed. its corridors are ample, and marble. the elevator service is of the best. but the courtrooms are stuffy little dens, illy ventilated, awkwardly placed, and with the poorest of acoustics. they seem especially designed to add to the depressing effect that invariably attends the administration of "law and order." the court of judge ronald, like many other courts in the land, is admirably designed for the bungling inefficiencies of "justice." yet it was in this theater, thru the medium of the everett trial, that the class struggle was reproduced, sometimes in tragedy and sometimes in comedy. to reach the greatest trial in the history of labor unionism, perhaps the greatest also in the number of defendants involved and the number of witnesses called, one had to ascend to the fourth floor of the court house and line up in the corridor under the watchful eyes of the i. w. w. "police," c. r. griffin and j. j. keenan, appointed by the organization at the request of the court. there, unless one were a lawyer or a newspaper representative, it was necessary to wait in line for hours until the tiny courtroom was opened and the lucky hundred odd persons were admitted to the church-like benches of j. t. ronald's sanctum, where the case of state versus tracy was on trial. directly in front of the benches, at the specially constructed press table, were seats provided for the representatives of daily, weekly and monthly publications whose policies ranged from the ultra conservative to the extreme radical. here the various reporters were seen writing madly as some important point came up, then subsiding into temporary indifference, passing notes, joking in whispers, drawing personal cartoons of the judge, jury, counsel, court functionaries and out-of-the-ordinary spectators,--the only officially recognized persons in the courtroom showing no signs of reverence for the legal priesthood and their mystic sacerdotalism. just ahead of the press table were the attorneys for the prosecution: lloyd black, a commonplace, uninspired, beardless youth as chief prosecutor; h. d. cooley, a sleek, pusillanimous recipient of favors from the lumber barons, a fixture at the commercial club, and an also-ran deputy at the dock on november th, as next counsel in line; and a. l. veitch, handsome in a gross sort of a way, full faced, sensual lipped, with heavy pouches beneath the eyes, a self-satisfied favorite of the m. & m., and withal the most able of the three who by virtue of polite fiction represented the state of washington. from time to time in whispered conference with these worthy gentlemen was a tall, lean, grey, furtive-eyed individual who was none other than the redoubtable californian detective, malcolm mclaren. at right angles to this array of prosecutors the counsel for the defense were seated, where they remained until the positions were reversed at the close of the prosecution's case. chief counsel fred h. moore, serious, yet with a winning smile occasionally chasing itself across his face and adding many humorous wrinkles to the tired-looking crow-feet at the corners of his eyes; next to him george f. vanderveer, a strong personality whose lightning flashes of wit and sarcasm, marshalled to the aid of a merciless drive of questions, were augmented by a smile second only to moore's in its captivating quality; then e. c. dailey, invaluable because of his knowledge of local conditions in everett and personages connected with the case; and by his side, at times during the trial, was h. sigmund, special counsel for harry feinberg. seated a little back, but in the same group, was a man of medium height, stocky built, slightly ruddy complexion, black hair, and twinkling blue eyes. he was to all appearances the most composed man in the courtroom. a slight smile crept over his face, at times almost broadened into a laugh, and then died away. this was thomas h. tracy, on trial for murder in the first degree. to the rear of the defendant and forming a deep contrast to the determined, square-jawed prisoner was the guard, a lean, hungry-looking deputy with high cheek bones, unusually sharp and long nose and a pair of moustachios that drooped down upon his chest, a wholly useless and most uncomfortable functionary who could scarce seat himself because of the heavy artillery scattered over his anatomy. the court clerk, an absurdly dignified court bailiff, a special stenographer, and sheriff mccullogh of snohomish county, occupied the intervening space to the pulpit from which judge j. t. ronald delivered his legal invocations. the judge, a striking figure, over six feet in height and well proportioned, of rather friendly countenance and bearing in street dress, resembled nothing so much as a huge black owl when arrayed in his sacred "mother hubbard" gown, with tortoise-shell rimmed smoked glasses resting on his slightly aquiline nose and surmounting the heavy, closely trimmed, dark vandyke beard. to the right of the judge as he faced the audience was the witness chair, and across the whole of the corner of the room was a plat of the everett city dock and the adjacent waterfront, together with a smaller map showing part of the streets of the city. the plat was state's exhibit "a." below these maps on a tilted platform was a model of the same dock, with the two warehouses, waiting room, klatawa slip, and the steamer verona, all built to scale. this was defendant's exhibit " ." extending from these exhibits down the side of the railed enclosure, were seats for two extra jurors. the filling of this jury box from a long list of talesmen was the preliminary move to a trial in which the defendant was barely mentioned, and which involved the question of labor's right to organize, to assemble peaceably, to speak freely, and to advocate a change in existing social arrangements. capital was lined up in a fight against labor. there was a direct reflection in the courts of the masters of the age-long, world-wide class struggle. the examination of talesmen occupied considerable time. each individual was asked whether he had read any of the following papers: the industrial worker, the socialist world, or the pacific coast longshoreman. the prosecution also inquired as to the prospective juror's familiarity with the i. w. w. song book and the various works on sabotage. union affiliations were closely inquired into, and favorable mention of the right to organize brought a challenge from the state. the testing of the talesmen was no less severe on the part of the defense. fifty-one talesmen were disqualified, after long and severe legal battles, before a jury was finally secured from among the voters and property owners who alone were qualified to serve. the jury, as selected, was rather more intelligent than was to be expected when consideration is taken of the fact that any person who acknowledged having an impression, an opinion, or a conclusion regarding the merits of the case was automatically excused from service. those who were chosen to sit on the case were: mrs. mattie fordran, wife of a steamfitter; robert harris, a rancher; fred corbs, bricklayer, once a member of the union, then working for himself; mrs. louise raynor, wife of a master mariner; a. peplan, farmer; mrs. clara uhlman, wife of a harnessmaker in business for himself; mrs. alice freeborn, widow of a druggist; f. m. christian, tent and awning maker; mrs. sarah f. brown, widow, working class family; james r. williams, machinist's helper, member of union; mrs. sarah j. timmer, wife of a union lineman, and t. j. byrne, contractor. the two alternate jurors, provided for under the "extra juror" law of washington, passed just prior to this trial, were: j. w. efaw, furniture manufacturer, president of seattle library board and henry b. williams, carpenter and member of a union. judge ronald realized the importance of the case as was shown in his admonition to the jury, a portion of which follows: "it is plain, from both sides here, that we are making history. let us see that the record that we make in this case,--you and i, as a court,--be a landmark based upon nothing in the world but the truth. we may deceive some people and we may, a little, deceive ourselves; but we cannot deceive eternal truth." on the morning of march th judge ronald, the tail of his black gown firmly in hand, swept into the courtroom from his private chambers, the assembled congregation arose and stood in deep obeisance before his majesty the law, the pompous bailiff rapped for order and delivered an incantation, the judge seated himself on the throne of "justice," the assemblage subsided into their seats--and the trial was opened in earnest. prosecuting attorney lloyd black then gave his opening statement, the gist of which is contained in the following quotations: "you are at the outset of a murder trial, murder in the first degree. the defendant, thomas h. tracy, alias george martin, is charged with murder in the first degree, in having assisted, counselled, aided, abetted and encouraged some unknown person to kill jefferson beard on the th of november, . "* * * as far as the state is concerned, no one knows or can know or could follow the course of the particular bullet that struck and mortally wounded and killed jefferson beard. "* * * the evidence further will show that the first, or one of the first, shots fired was from the steamer verona and was from a revolver held in the hand of thomas h. tracy. "* * * as to the killing of jefferson beard itself the probabilities are, as the evidence of the state will indicate, that he was killed by someone on the hurricane deck of the verona because the evidence will show that the revolver shots went thru his overcoat, missing his coat, and thru his vest, and had a downward course, so that it must have come from the upper deck. the evidence will show that thomas h. tracy was on the main deck firing thru an open cabin window. "* * * of the approximately special and regular deputies of snohomish county about one-half were armed, some with revolvers, some with rifles and some with clubs. "* * * when the fusilade had come from the i. w. w.'s on the verona, a portion of the deputies ran thru a door into this warehouse, (indicating): a portion of them went into that warehouse, and used some of the knotholes there, and some shot holes thru which they could see, * * *" black then gave a recital of the lumber trust version of the events leading up to november th, bringing in the threats of an alleged committee who were said to have declared "that they would call thousands of their members to the city of everett, flood the jails, demand separate trials, and tie up and overwhelm the court machinery, and that the mayor should consider that they had beaten spokane and killed its chief, killed chief sullivan of that city, that they had defeated wenatchee and north yakima, and now it was everett's turn." "* * * that in furtherance of their threats that they would burn the city of everett, that a number of mysterious fires took place, fires connected with some person who was opposed to the i. w. w. * * * and in addition, the i. w. w. members were arrested at different times preceding this trouble on the th of november and phosphorus was found upon their person either in cans or wrapped up. "* * * at different times, the evidence will show, sheriff donald mcrae and other peace officers of the city of everett, including mayor merrill, received anonymous letters, and also received direct statements from the i. w. w. that they would get them; and, as one speaker put it, he says 'sheriff mcrae will wake up some day and say '"good morning, jesus!"' black continued his recital of events, admitting the "wanderer" incident, but he tried to sidestep the criminal actions at beverly park. "now, there happened at beverly park an incident that the state in this action doesn't feel that it has anything to do with this particular cause." ironical laughter at this juncture caused the removal of several spectators from the courtroom. so disconcerted was black that he proceeded to give away the real cause of action against the i. w. w. "the i. w. w. organization itself is an unlawful conspiracy, an unlawful conspiracy in that it was designed for the purpose of effecting an absolute revolution in society and in government, effecting it not by the procedure of law thru the ballot, but for effecting it by direct action. the i. w. w. meant to accomplish the change in society, not by organization as the labor unions hope to get higher wages, not to get into effect their theory of society by the ballot, as the socialists hope, but that they expressly state that the election of a socialist president will accomplish no good, and that sabotage should be employed against government ownership as well as against private production, so that directly they might put into effect their theories of government and society." the defense reserved the right to make their opening statement at the close of the prosecution's case, thus leaving the state in the dark as to the line of defense, and forcing them to open their case at once. lester l. beard and chester l. beard, twin sons of the deceased deputy sheriff, testified as to the condition of their father's clothing, attorney vanderveer drawing from lester beard the admission that his father was an employment agent in seattle in . following them, drs. william o'keef cox, h. p. howard, and william p. west testified to having performed an autopsy on beard and described the course of the bullet upon entering the body. dr. west was an armed guard at the land end of the city dock on november th, dr. cox was also on the dock as a deputy, and dr. howard carried a membership in the commercial club. they were the physicians present when the autopsy was performed. the next witness, harry w. shaw, a wood and coal dealer of everett, admitted having joined the citizen deputies because of a call issued by the sheriff thru the commercial club. shaw went to the dock on november th, carrying, as he claimed, a revolver with a broken firing pin which he had hoped to have repaired on that sunday on the way to the dock. he was close to beard when the latter fell and helped to carry him from the open space on the dock into the warehouse. he afterward accompanied beard to the hospital in an automobile and returned to the dock with beard's unfired revolver in his possession. he swore that he had seen mcrae sober three times in succession! when asked by attorney moore he gave an affirmative answer to this pertinent question: "you knew that the matter of the enforcement of the city ordinances of everett was peculiarly within the powers of the police department of the city, didn't you?" owen clay was then called to the stand. clay had been made bookkeeper of the weyerhouser mill about a year and a half before this, and had been given a membership in the commercial club at the time. he was injured in the right arm in the trouble at the dock and then ran around the corner of the ticket office, after which he emptied his revolver with his left hand. attorney vanderveer questioned this witness as follows: "who shot jeff beard in the right breast?" "i don't know." "did you do it?" "i don't know." "thank you! that's all," said vanderveer with a smile. the next witness was c. a. mitchell, employee of the clark-nickerson mill. he testified that he belonged to company "b" under the command of carl clapp. his testimony placed sheriff mcrae in the same position as that given by the preceding witness, about eight to ten feet from the face of the dock in the center of the open space between the two warehouses, but unlike clay, who testified that mcrae had his left hand in the air, he was positive that the sheriff had his right hand in the air at the time the shooting started. w. r. booth, engaged in real estate and insurance business, a member of the commercial club, and a deputy at the dock, was next called. attorney cooley asked this witness about the speech made at an unspecified street meeting. vanderveer immediately objected as follows: "we object to that as immaterial and calling for a conclusion of the witness. he does not know who was speaking, nor whether he was authorized to do it, or brought there by the industrial workers of the world, or a hireling of the merchants' and manufacturers' society. it has happened time and time again that people are employed by these capitalists themselves to go out and make incendiary speeches and cause trouble, and employed to go out and fire buildings and do anything to put the opposition in wrong." when questioned about mcrae's position on the dock, booth stated that the sheriff had both hands in the air. this witness admitted having been a member of the "flying squadron" and being a participant in the outrage at beverly park. he named others who went out with him in the same automobile, will seivers and harry ramwell, and stated that a. p. bardson, clerk of the commercial club, was probably there as he had been out on all the other occasions. he said that he would not participate in the beating up of anyone, and that when the affair started he went up the road for purposes of his own. he was asked by vanderveer as to the reason for continuing to associate with people who had abused the men at beverly park, to which he replied: "because i believe in at least trying to maintain law and order in our city." during the examination of this witness, and at various times thruout the long case, it was only with evident effort that attorney vanderveer kept on the unfamiliar ground of the class struggle, his natural tendencies being to try the case as a defense of a pure and simple murder charge. w. p. bell, an everett attorney representing a number of scab mills, a member of the commercial club and a deputy on the dock, testified next, contradicting the previous witnesses but throwing no additional light upon the case. he was followed by charles tucker, a scab and gunman employed by the hartley shingle company and a deputy on the dock. tucker lied so outrageously that even the prosecution counsel felt ashamed of him. he was impeached by his own testimony. editor j. a. macdonald of the industrial worker was called to the stand to show the official relation of the paper to the i. w. w. and to lay a foundation for the introduction of a file of the issues prior to november th. a portion of the file was introduced as evidence and at the same time the state put in as exhibits a copy of the i. w. w. constitution and by-laws, sabotage by elizabeth gurley flynn, sabotage by walker c. smith, the revolutionary i. w. w. by grover h. perry, the i. w. w., its history, structure and methods by vincent st. john, and the joe hill memorial edition of the song book. herbert mahler, former secretary of the seattle i. w. w. and at the time secretary-treasurer of the everett prisoners' defense committee, was next upon the stand. he was asked to name various committees and to identify certain telegrams. the unhesitatingly clear answers of both macdonald and mahler were in vivid contrast to the mumbled and contradictory responses of the deputies. william j. smith, manager of the western union telegraph company was then called to further corroborate certain telegrams sent and received by the i. w. w. as the next step in the case prosecutor black read portions of the pamphlet "sabotage" by smith, sometimes using half a paragraph and skipping half, sometimes using one paragraph and omitting the next, provoking a remonstrance from attorney vanderveer which was upheld by the court in these words: "you have a right to do what you are doing, mr. black, but it don't appeal to my sense of fairness if other omissions are as bad as the one you left out. you are following the practice, but i don't know of an instance where there has been such an awful juggling about, and it is discretionary with the court, and i want to be fair in this case. i want to let them have a chance to take the sting out of it so as to let the jury have both sides, because it is there. now, mr. vanderveer, i am going to leave it to you not to impose upon the court's discretion. any new phases i don't think you have the right to raise, but anything that will modify what he has read i think you have the right to." thereupon vanderveer read all the omitted portions bearing upon the case, bringing special emphasis on these two parts: "note this important point, however. sabotage does not seek nor desire to take human life." "sabotage places human life--and especially the life of the only useful class--higher than all else in the universe." with evidences of amusement, if not always approval, the jury then listened to the reading of numerous i. w. w. songs by attorney cooley for the prosecution, tho some of the jurymen shared in the bewilderment of the audience as to the connection between the song "overalls and snuff" and defendant tracy charged with a conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree. d. d. merrill, mayor of everett, next took the stand. he endeavored to give the impression that the i. w. w. was responsible for a fire loss in everett of $ , . during the latter part of the year . vanderveer shot the question: "from whom would you naturally look for information on the subject of fires?" "from the fire chief, w. c. carroll," replied the mayor; "we offer this report in evidence," said vanderveer crisply. the report of the fire chief was admitted and read. it showed that there were less fires in that in any previous year in the history of everett, and only four of incendiary origin in the entire list! the prosecution tried to squirm out of this ticklish position by stating that they meant also the fires in the vicinity of everett, but here also they met with failure for the principal fire in the surrounding district was in the co-operative mill, owned by a number of semi-radical workingmen at mukilteo. the mayor told of having been present at the arrest of several men taken from a freight train at lowell, just at the everett city limits. some of these men were i. w. w.'s, and on the ground afterward there was said to have been found some broken glass about which there was a smell of phosphorus. the judge ruled out this evidence because there were other than i. w. w. men present, no phosphorus was found on the men, and if only one package were found it would not indicate a conspiracy but might have been brought by an agent of the employers. this was the nearest the prosecution came at any time in the trial in their attempt to connect the i. w. w. with incendiary fires. a tense moment in this sensational trial came during the testimony of mayor merrill, when young louis skaroff was suddenly produced in court and the question flashed at the cringing witness: "do you recognize this boy standing here? do you recognize him, louis skaroff?" "i think i have seen him," mumbled the mayor. "let me ask you if on the th day of november at about ten o'clock at night in a room in the city hall at everett where there was a bed room having an iron bedstead in it, in the presence of the jailer, didn't you have an interview with this man?" merrill denied having mutilated skaroff's fingers beneath the casters of the bed, but even the capitalist press reported that his livid face and thick voice belied his words of denial. and prosecutor lloyd black remarked heatedly, "i don't see the materiality of all this." merrill left the stand, having presented the sorriest figure among the number of poor witnesses produced by the prosecution. carl clapp, superintendent of the municipal waterworks at everett, and commander of one of the squads of deputies, followed with testimony to the effect that sixty rifles from the naval militia were stored in the commercial club on november th. at this juncture the hearing of further evidence was postponed for a half day to allow attorney vanderveer to testify on behalf of mayor h. c. gill in a case then pending in the federal court. on several other occasions vanderveer was called to testify in this case and there were times when it was thought that he also would be indicted and brought to trial, yet with this extra work and the threat of imprisonment hanging over him, vanderveer never flagged in his keen attention to the work of the defense. it was commonly thought that the case against gill and the attempt to involve vanderveer were moves of the lumber trust and chamber of commerce directed toward the i. w. w., for in the background were the same interested parties who had been forced to abandon the recall against seattle's mayor. gill's final acquittal in this case was hailed as an i. w. w. victory. upon the resumption of the trial the prosecution temporarily withdrew clapp and placed clyde gibbons on the stand. this witness was the son of james gibbons, a deceased member of the i. w. w., well and favorable known in the northwest. james gibbons was killed by a speeding automobile about a year prior to the trial, and his widow and son, clyde, were supported by the i. w. w. and the boiler makers' union for several months thereafter. clyde gibbons, altho but seventeen years old, joined the navy by falsifying his age. charity demands that the veil be drawn over the early days of clyde's training, yet his strong imagination and general untruthfulness are matters of record. he was shown in court to have stolen funds left in trust with him by mrs. peters, one of the persons against whom his testimony was directed. it is quite probable that the deceit about his age, or some other of his queer actions, were discovered and used to force him to testify as the prosecution desired. the following testimony bears out this idea: "who was it that you met at the naval recruiting station and took you to mclaren?" "i don't know his name." "well, how did you get to talking to this total stranger about the everett matter?" "he told me he wanted to see me in the judge's office." "and they took you down to the judge's office, did they?" "yes, sir." "and when you got to the judge's office you found you were in mr. mclaren's and mr. veitch's and mr. black's office in the smith building?" "yes, sir." gibbons testified as to certain alleged conversations in an apartment house frequented by members of the i. w. w., stating that a party of members laid plans to go to everett and to take with them red pepper, olive oil and bandages. harston peters, one of the defendants, had a gun that wouldn't shoot and so went unarmed, according to this witness. gibbons also stated that mrs. frenette took part in the conversation in this apartment house on the morning of the tragedy, whereupon attorney moore asked him: "on directing your attention to it, don't you remember that you didn't see mrs. frenette at all in seattle, anywhere, at any time subsequent to saturday night; that she went to everett on saturday night?" "well, i am quite sure i saw her sunday, but maybe i am mistaken." the judge upheld the defense attorneys in their numerous objections to the leading questions propounded by prosecutor black during the examination of this witness. clapp was recalled to the stand and testified further that scott rainey, head of the u. s. naval militia at everett, had ordered ensign mclean to take rifles to the dock, and that the witness and mclean had loaded the guns, placed them in an auto and taken them to the dock, where they were distributed to the deputies just as the verona started to steam away. ignorance as to the meaning of simple labor terms that are in the every-day vocabulary of the "blanketstiff" was shown by clapp in his answers to these queries: "what is direct action?" "using force instead of lawful means." "what do you mean?" "well, either physical force, or conspiracy." "you understand conspiracy to be some kind of force, do you?" "it may be force." when asked where he had obtained information about sabotage, this witness said that he had looked up the word in webster's unabridged dictionary, a work in which the term is strangely absent. clapp was the first witness to admit the armed character of the deputy body and also to state that deputies with guns were stationed on all of everett's docks. after excusing this witness, cooley brought in copies of two city ordinances covering street speaking in everett. one of them which allowed the holding of meetings at the corner of hewitt and wetmore avenues was admitted without question, but the other which purported to have been passed on september , , was objected to on the ground that it had not been passed, was never put upon passage and never moved for passage in the everett city council. richard brennan, chauffeur of the patrol wagon, a. h. briggs, city dog catcher, and floyd wildey, police officer, all of everett, then testified regarding the arrest of i. w. w. members during august and september. wildey stated that on the night of august four or five members of the i. w. w. came away from their street meeting carrying sections of gaspipe in their hands. this was thought to be quite a blow against the peaceful character of the meeting until it was discovered on cross-examination that the weapons were the removable legs of the street speaking platform. david daniels, arthur s. johnson, garland queen, j. r. steik, m. j. fox and, later on, earl shaver, all of whom were police officers in everett, gave testimony along somewhat the same lines as the other witnesses from everett who owed their jobs to the lumber trust. they stated that the i. w. w. men deported on august rd, had made threats against mcrae and several police officers. ed. m. hawes, proprietor of a scab printing and stationery company, member of the commercial club and citizen deputy, gave testimony similar to that of other vigilantes as to the trouble on november th. when asked if he had ever known any i. w. w. men offering resistance, hawes replied that one had tried to start a fight with him at beverly park. having thus established his connection with this infamous outrage, further questioning of this witness developed much of the story of the brutal gauntlet and deportation. hawes told of one of his prisoners making an endeavor to escape, and when asked whether he blamed the man for trying to get away, answered that he thought the prisoner was a pretty big baby. "you thought he was a pretty big baby?" queried vanderveer. "yes, sir." "or do you think the men were pretty big babies and cowards who were doing the beating?" the witness had no answer to this question. "how much do you weigh?" demanded vanderveer sharply. "i weigh pounds," replied hawes. frank goff and henry krieg, two young lads who were severely beaten at beverly park, were suddenly produced in court and the big bully was made to stand alongside of them. he outweighed the two of them. it was plainly evident who the pretty big baby was! howard hathaway, law student and assistant to the state secretary of the democratic central committee, was forced to admit his connection with the raid upon the launch "wanderer" and also upon the men peacefully camping at maltby. his testimony was mainly for the purpose of making it appear that james p. thompson had advocated that the shingle weavers set fire to the mills and win their strikes by methods of terrorism. two newspaper reporters, william e. jones of the seattle post-intelligencer, and j. j. underwood of the seattle times, were placed upon the stand in order to lay the foundation for an introduction of an article appearing in the p-i on sunday morning, november th. jones testified that he was present at the seattle police station when philip k. ahern, manager of the pinkerton detective agency, requested the release of smith and reese, two of his operatives who had been on the verona. underwood stated that upon hearing of the treatment given the i. w. w. men at beverly park he had exclaimed, "i would like to see anybody do that to me and get away with it." "you meant that, did you?" asked vanderveer. "you bet i meant it!" asserted the witness positively. the two reporters proved to be better witnesses for the defense than for the prosecution. sanford asbury, t. n. henry, ronald johnson, john s. donlan, and j. e. gleason, then testified regarding the movements of the men who left seattle on the verona and calista on the morning of november th. they uniformly agreed that the crowd was in no way disorderly, nor were their actions at all suspicious. the defense admitted that the verona had been chartered but stated that there were passengers other than i. w. w. members on board. the first witness from the verona was ernest shellgren, the boat's engineer, who testified that he was in the engine pit when the boat landed and heard crackling sounds telegraphed down the smoke stack that he knew an instant later were bullets. he was struck by a spent bullet and ran to various places on the boat seeking shelter from the hail of lead that appeared to come from all directions, finally returning to the boiler as the safest place on the boat. he stated that he saw one man firing a blue steel revolver from the boat, only the hand and revolver being in his line of vision. the only other gun he saw was one in the hands of the man who asked him to back the boat away from the dock during the firing. he also stated that the i. w. w. men on the way over to everett comported themselves as was usual with any body of passengers. shellgren was asked if he could identify john downs or thomas h. tracy as being connected with the firing in any way and he stated that he could not do so. the defense objected to the use of downs' picture, as it did on every occasion where a picture of one of the prisoners was used, on the grounds that the photographs were obtained by force and in defiance of the constitutional rights of the imprisoned free speech fighters. seattle police detectives, theodore montgomery and james o'brien, who made a search of the verona upon its return to seattle, testified to having found a little loose red pepper, two stones the size of a goose egg tied up in a cloth, and a few empty cartridges. these two witnesses also developed the fact that in no case were regular bandages used on the wounded men, thus establishing the fact that no serious trouble was anticipated. james meagher, occupation "home owner," member of the commercial club and citizen deputy, testified that a hundred shots were fired from the verona before a gun was pulled on the dock, one of the first shots striking him in the leg. this witness was asked: "did you see a single gun on the boat?" "no sir," was his mumbled response. the prosecution witnesses disagreed as to the number of lines of deputies stretched across the back and sides of the open space on the dock, the statements varying from one to four files. chad ballard, harry gray, and j. d. landis, of the seattle police detective bureau, and j. g. mcconnell, everett interurban conductor, testified to the return and arrest of mrs. frenette, mrs. mahler and mrs. peters, after the trouble on november th. the police officers also told of a further searching of the verona on its return. the defense admitted that some of the members had red pepper in their possession and stated that they would ask the judge to instruct the jury that red pepper is a weapon of defense and not of offense and that murder cannot be committed with red pepper. elmer buehrer, engineer at the everett high school, and citizen deputy, gave testimony that was halting, confused and relatively unimportant. he was prompted by the prosecution to such an extent that attorney vanderveer at the close of one question said, "look at me and not at counsel." "look where you please," cried cooley angrily. "well, look where you please," rejoined vanderveer. "he can't help you." it was apparent that the only reason for putting on this witness and former witness meagher was because of a desire to create sympathy thru the fact that they had been wounded on the dock. edward armstrong, master mariner on the verona, testified that he had thrown out the spring line and lifted out the gate when the firing started. he fell to the deck behind a little jog, against the bulkhead, and while in that position two bullets went thru his cap. altho this witness stated that he judged from the sound that the first shot came from some place to the rear of him, his testimony as to the attitude of mcrae was as follows: "i seen him with his right hand hanging on the butt of the gun." "and that was before there was any shooting?" "yes sir." as to the condition of the boat after the trouble he gave an affirmative answer to the question: "you know that the whole front of the pilot house and the whole front of this bulkhead front of the forward deck leading to the hurricane deck is full of b. b. shot, don't you?" james broadbent, manager of the clark-nickerson mill, and a citizen deputy, followed armstrong with some unimportant testimony. l. s. davis, steward on the verona, also stated that mcrae committed the first overt act in taking hold of his gun. he was asked: "he had his hand on his gun while he was still facing you?" "yes sir. i could see it plainly," answered davis. [illustration: pilot house of the "verona" riddled with rifle bullets at everett] "that was before he started to turn, before he was hit?" "yes sir." davis was wounded in the arm as he was on the pilot house steps. he was asked about the general disposition, manner and appearance of the men on the verona on the way over to everett, and answered: "i thought they were pretty nicely behaved for men--for such a crowd as that." "any rough talk; any rough, ugly looks?" "no sir." "any guns?" "no." "any threats?" "i didn't hear any threats." "jolly, good-natured bunch of boys?" "yes." "lots of young boys among them, weren't there?" "yes, quite a few." davis stated that three passengers got off at edmunds on the way up to everett, thus establishing the fact that there were other than i. w. w. men on board. r. s. "scott" rainey, commercial manager of the puget sound telephone company and a citizen deputy, was called and examined at some length before it was discovered that he was not an endorsed witness. this was the second time that the prosecution had turned this trick. vanderveer objected, stating that there would be two hundred endorsed witnesses who would not be used. "oh no!" returned mr. veitch. "well," said vanderveer, "a hundred then. a hundred we dare you to produce!" "we will take that dare," responded veitch. but the prosecution failed to keep their word, and deputy dave oswald of the pacific hardware company, who during the various deportations tried to have the i. w. w. men stripped, covered with hot tar, rolled in feathers and ridden out of town on a rail, and a number of his equally degenerate brother outlaws were never produced in court. rainey testified that he had seen a quantity of murderous looking black-jacks in the commercial club for distribution to the deputies. he also saw men fall overboard from the verona and saw none of them rescued. he thought there were twenty-five men with guns on the boat, and he did his firing at the main deck. "and you didn't care whether you hit one of the twenty-five or one of the other two hundred and twenty-five?" scornfully inquired vanderveer. "no sir," said the miserable witness. the next witness called was william kenneth, city dock wharfinger in the employ of captain ramwell. this witness testified that there were numerous holes in the warehouses that were smooth on the inside and splintered on the outside, thus indicating that they were from shots blindly fired thru the walls from within. on being recalled on the monday morning session of march th the witness said he wished to state that he was unable to testify from which direction the holes in the warehouses had been made. it appeared that he had discovered the bullet marks to have been whittled with a penknife since he had last viewed them. arthur blair gorrell, of spokane, student at the state university, was on the dock during the trouble and was wounded in the left shoulder blade. he stated that he knew that mcrae had his gun drawn before he was shot. captain k. l. forbes, of the scab tugboat edison, next took the witness chair. he didn't like the idea of calling his crew scabs for the engineer carried a union card. when questioned about the actions of the scab cook on the edison, this witness would not state positively that the man was not firing directly across the open space on the dock at the verona, and in line with curtis and other deputies. thomas e. headlee, ex-mayor of everett, bookkeeper at the clark-nickerson mill, and a citizen deputy, said he went whenever and wherever he was called to go by the sheriff. "then it's just like this," said vanderveer, "when you pull the string, up jumps headlee?" this witness tried to blame all the fires in everett onto the i. w. w. and the absurdity of his testimony brought this question from the defense: "just on general principles you blame it on the i. w. w.?" "sure!" replied the witness, "i got their reputation over in wenatchee from my brother-in-law who runs a big orchard there." lewis connor, member of the commercial club, and his friend, edwin stuchell, university student, both of whom were deputies on the dock on november th, then testified, but developed nothing of importance. stuchell's father was part owner of the eclipse mill and was said to have been on the board of directors of the commercial club. these witnesses were followed by raymond e. brown, owner of an everett shoe store, a weak-kneed witness who had been sworn in as a deputy by w. w. blain, secretary of the commercial club. one of the greatest sensations in this sensational trial was when former sheriff donald mcrae took the stand on tuesday, march th. mcrae was sober! the sheriff was fifty years of age, of medium height, inclined to stoutness, smooth-shaven, with swinish eyes set closely on either side of a pink-tinted, hawk-like nose that curved just above a hard, cruel and excessively large mouth. the sneering speech and contemptible manner of this witness lent weight to the admissions of his brutality that had been dragged from reluctant state's witnesses thru the clever and cutting cross-examination conducted by moore and vanderveer. mcrae told of his former union affiliations, having once been international secretary of the shingle weavers' union, and on another occasion the editor of their paper--but he admitted that he had never in his life read a book on political economy. he detailed the story of the arrests, deportations and other similar actions against the striking shingle weavers and the i. w. w. members, the recital including an account of the "riot" at the jail, the deportation of feinberg and roberts, the shooting at the launch "wanderer" and the jailing of its passengers, and the seizing of forty-one men and their deportation at beverly park. mcrae's callous admissions of brutality discounted any favorable impression his testimony might otherwise have conveyed to the jury. he admitted having ordered the taking of the funds of james orr to pay the fares of workers deported on august rd, but denied the truth of an account in the everett herald of that date in which it was said that i. w. w. men had made some remarks to him "whereupon sheriff mcrae and police officer * * promptly retaliated by cracking the i. w. w.'s on the jaw with husky fists." regarding the launch "wanderer" the sheriff was asked: "did you strike captain mitten over the head with the butt of your gun?" "certainly did!" replied mcrae with brutal conciseness. "did any blood flow?" "a little, not much." "not enough to arouse any sympathy in you?" "no," said the sheriff unfeelingly. "did you strike a little finnish fellow over the head with a gun?" "i certainly did!" "and split his head open and the blood ran out, but not enough to move you to any sympathy?" "no, not a bit!" viciously answered mcrae. "did you hit any others?" inquired vanderveer. "no, not then." "why not?" "they probably seen what happened to the captain and the other fellow for getting gay." as to the holding of mitten in jail for a number of days on a charge of resisting an officer, and his final release, mcrae was asked: "why didn't you try him on that charge?" "because when we let the i. w. w.'s go they insisted on him going, too, and i said, 'all right, take him along.'" "you did whatever the i. w. w.'s wanted in that?" "well, i was glad to get rid of them," remarked the sheriff. mcrae said that none of the men taken to beverly park were beaten on the dock before being placed in automobiles for deportation, but on cross-examination he admitted that one of the deputies got in a mix-up and was beaten by a brother deputy. the sheriff stated that he took one man out to beverly park in a roadster, and had then returned to everett to attend a dance given by the elks' lodge. in relating the events on november th, mcrae's story did not differ materially from that of the witnesses who had already testified. he stated that a bullet passed thru his foot, striking the heel of his shoe, and coming out of the side. the shoe was then offered in evidence. he testified that another shot struck the calf of his leg and passed completely thru the limb. both these wounds were from the rear. his entire suit was offered in evidence. the coat had nine bullet holes in it, yet mcrae was not injured at all in the upper portion of his body! the sheriff stated that he fired twenty shots in all, and was then removed to the sister's hospital while the shooting was still in progress. mcrae then identified ed roth, james kelly and thomas h. tracy as three of the i. w. w. men who were most active in firing from the verona. in his identification of tracy, mcrae stated that the defendant was in the second or third cabin window aft the door, and was hanging out of the window with his breast against the sill and his elbow on the ledge. vanderveer then placed himself in the position described by the sheriff and requested mcrae to assume the same attitude he was in at the time he saw tracy. upon doing this it was apparent that the edge of the window sill would have cut off all view of tracy's face from the sheriff, so mcrae endeavored to alter his testimony to make it appear that tracy's face was a foot or more inside the cabin window. this was the first identification of tracy or other men on the boat that was attempted by the prosecution. the sheriff stated that there were only twenty or twenty-five armed men on the verona, and he admitted, before he left the stand, that he had told attorney vanderveer it was a pity that the spring line on the verona did not break when the boat tilted so as to drown all the i. w. w.'s in the bay. charles auspos, alias charles austin, followed mcrae as the state's witness second in importance only to the ex-sheriff. the testimony of these two was relied upon for a conviction. just why auspos joined the i. w. w. will never be known, but his claim was that he could not work in the dakota harvest fields or ride on the freight trains without an i. w. w. card. he was asked: "when you did line up, you were then willingly a member, were you?" "yes sir." "and you did not go to yakima and come back to seattle to fight for free speech because you were compelled to do so?" asked moore. "no," replied auspos, "there was no compulsion." [illustration: arrival of the verona at seattle] auspos stated that he was willing to take a chance in the fight for free speech and that the worst he expected was something similar to the happenings at beverly park. that he was not so willing in his testimony was shown by the uneasy actions of the prosecution lawyers, who moved from place to place around the court room during the examination of this witness, with the view of having him look one of them in the eyes at all times during his recital. at one time black nearly climbed into the jury box, while cooley fidgeted in his chair placed directly in the middle of the aisle, and veitch stood back of the court clerk on the opposite side of the court room, trying to engage the attention of the hesitating witness. the testimony was to the effect that auspos had reached seattle on saturday, november th, and had slept in the i. w. w. hall that night. next morning at about eleven o'clock he returned from breakfast and was again admitted with examination for a membership card. a meeting was in progress in the gymnasium but was too crowded for him to be able to get in. there was no secrecy, however, just as there was no oath of fealty demanded of a worker upon joining the organization. the witness claimed that he and one of the defendants, j. e. houlihan, were standing together in the hall when "red" doran called houlihan aside into the gymnasium. two minutes later houlihan returned and said, "i made it." "what did you get?" auspos declared he then asked his partner, receiving the reply, "a thirty-eight." auspos claimed he saw earl osborne cleaning a gun in the gymnasium that same morning, and there was a rifle or shotgun in a canvas case in one corner. he said that men were breaking up chairs to obtain legs as clubs and that he, with others, was furnished with a little package of red pepper. regarding his actions upon the verona the witness stated that he and james hadley came up the steps from the freight deck to the passenger deck just as the boat was nosing against the dock and that he walked across the deck to a point within three feet of the rail. his description of the motion of mcrae's hands differed from that given by the deputy witnesses and was such as would indicate the drawing of a gun from a belt holster. he testified that mcrae swung around to the right just before being shot, thus contradicting mcrae, who had declared that the turn he had made was to the left. the witness in a rather indefinite manner stated that the first shot came from the boat. all the damaging claims in the testimony of auspos were severely shaken by the cross-examination conducted by moore, and auspos finally admitted that the only point on which he wished to have his evidence differ from the statement he had made to vanderveer prior to the trial was in the matter of the firing of the first shot. auspos made no attempt to identify anyone on the boat as having a firearm. during the examination some reference was made to "red" downs, at which judge ronald remarked: "i am a little confused. did he say 'red' downs or 'red' doran?" "there are two of them," responded moore. "lots of red in this organization," cut in prosecutor cooley, amid laughter from the spectators. attorney moore brought from auspos the admission that the plea of "not guilty" was a true one and he still believed that he and the other prisoners were not guilty of any crime. yet such are the peculiarities of the legal game that an innocent man can turn state's evidence upon his innocent associates. after uncovering the previous record of auspos, he was asked about his "confession" as follows: "mr. mclaren and you had reached an understanding in your talk before mr. cooley came?" "yes sir." "the question of what you are to get in connection with your testimony here has not as yet been definitely decided?" "i am going to get out of the country." "you are not going to get a trip to honolulu?" asked moore with a smile as he concluded the cross-examination of auspos. "no sir," stammered the tool of the prosecution unconvincingly. it was at this point that the prosecution introduced several additional leaflets and pamphlets issued by the i. w. w. publishing bureau, the principal reason being to allow them to appeal to the patriotism of the jury by referring to herve's pamphlet, "patriotism and the worker," and smith's leaflet, "war and the workers." the next witness after auspos was leo wagner, another poor purchase on the part of the prosecution. he merely testified that a man on the calista had said that the men were armed and were not going to stand for being beaten up. objection was made to the manner in which cooley led the witness with his questions, and when cooley stated that it was necessary to refresh the memory of the witness, vanderveer replied that the witness had been endorsed but a few days before and his recollection should not be so very stale. when this witness was asked what he was paid for his testimony he squirmed and hesitated until the court demanded an answer, whereupon he said: "i got enough to live on for a while." william h. bridge, deputy sheriff and snohomish county jailer, was the next witness. he stated on his direct examination that the first shot came from the second or third window back from the door on the upper cabin. black asked bridge: "how do you know there was a shot from that place?" "because i saw a man reach out thru the window and shoot with a revolver." "in what position was he when shooting?" "well, i could see his hand and a part of his arm and a part of his body and face." "who was the man, if you know?" "well, to the best of my judgement, it was the defendant, thomas h. tracy." under vanderveer's cross-examination this witness was made to place the model of the verona with its stern at the same angle as it had been at the time of the shooting. the witness was then asked to assume the same position he had been in at the time he said he had seen tracy. the impossibility of having seen the face of a man firing from any of the cabin windows was thus demonstrated to the jury. then to clinch the idea that the identification was simply so much perjury, vanderveer introduced into evidence the stenographic report of the coroner's inquest held over jefferson beard in which the witness, bridge, had sworn that the first shot came from an open space just beneath the pilot house and had further testified that he could not recognize the person who was doing the firing. walter h. smith, a scab shingle weaver, and deputy on the dock, followed with a claim to have recognized tracy as one of the men who was shooting from the verona. he also stated that he could identify another man who was shooting from the forward deck. he was handed a number of photographs and failed to find the man he was looking for. instead he indicated one of the photographs and said that it was tracy. vanderveer immediately seized the picture and offered it in evidence. "i made a mistake there," remarked smith. "i know you did," responded vanderveer, "and i want the jury to know it." the witness had picked out a photograph of john downs and identified it as the defendant. the prosecution then called s. a. mann, who had been police judge in spokane, wash., from into , and questioned him in regard to the spokane free speech fight and the death of chief of police john sullivan. here attorney fred moore was on familiar ground, having acted for the i. w. w. during the time of that trouble. moore developed the fact that there had been several thousand arrests with not a single instance of resistance or violence on the part of the i. w. w., not a weapon found on any of their persons, and no incendiary fires during the entire fight. he further confounded the prosecution by having judge mann admit that in the spokane fight a prisoner arrested on a city charge was always lodged in the city jail and one arrested on a county charge was always placed in the county jail--a condition not at all observed in everett. moore also brought out the facts of the death of chief sullivan so far as they are known. the witness admitted that sullivan was charged with abuse of an adopted daughter of mr. elliott, a g. a. r. veteran; that desk officer n. v. pitts charged sullivan with having forced him to turn over certain chinese bond money and the chief resigned his position while under these charges; that the spokane press bitterly attacked sullivan and was sued as a consequence, the scripps-mcrae paper being represented by the law firm of robertson, miller and rosenhaupt, of which judge frank c. robertson was the head; that the chronicle and spokesman-review joined in the attack upon the chief; and that when sullivan was dying from a shot in the back the following conversation occurred between himself and the dying man: "i said to him 'john, who do you suppose did this?' he says, 'judge f. c. robertson and the press are responsible for this.' i said, 'john, you don't mean that, you can't mean it?' he says, 'that is the way i feel.'" judge ronald prevented the attorneys from going very deeply into the spokane affair, saying: "i am not going to wash spokane linen here; we have some of our own to wash!" c. r. schweitzer, owner of a scab plumbing shop, aged , yet grey-haired, brazenly admitted having emptied a shotgun into the unarmed boys on the verona. it was the missiles from the brand-new shotgun--probably furnished by dave oswald--that riddled the pilot house and wounded many of the men who fell to the deck when the verona tilted. schweitzer fired from a safe position behind the klatawa slip. why the prosecution used him as a witness is a mystery. w. a. taro, everett fire chief, testified regarding the few incendiary fires that had occurred in everett during the year , but failed to connect them with the i. w. w. in any way. d. daniels, everett police officer, testified to a phosphorous fire which did no damage and was in no way connected with the i. w. w. mrs. jennie b. ames, the only woman witness called by the prosecution, testified that mrs. frennette was on the inclined walk at the great northern depot, at a point overlooking the dock, and was armed with a revolver at the time the verona trouble was on. police officer j. e. moline also swore to the same thing, but was badly tangled when confronted with his own evidence given at the preliminary hearing of mrs. frennette on december th, . never was there a cad but who wished himself proclaimed as a gentleman; never a bedraggled and maudlin harlot but who wanted the world to know that she was a perfect lady. the last witness to be called by the prosecution was john hogan--"honest" john hogan if prosecutor lloyd black was to be credited. "honest" john hogan was a young red-headed regular deputy sheriff, who was a participant in the outrage on the city dock on november th. "honest" john hogan claimed to have seen the defendant, thomas tracy, firing a revolver from one of the forward cabin windows. "honest" john hogan had the same difficulty as the other "identifying" witnesses when he also was asked to state whether it was possible to see a man firing from a cabin window when the stern of the boat was out and the witness in his specified position on the dock. "honest" john hogan was sure it was tracy that he saw because the man had a week's growth of whiskers on his face. and this ended the case for the prosecution. as had been predicted there were hundreds of witnesses who were endorsed and not called, and almost without an exception those who testified were parties who had a very direct interest in seeing that a conviction was secured. but thru the clever work of the lawyers for the defense what was meant to have been a prosecution of the i. w. w. was turned into an extremely poor defense of the deputies and their program of "law and order." from the state's witnesses the defense had developed nearly the whole outline and many of the details of its side of the case. when the state rested its case, tracy leaned over to the defense lawyers and, with a smile on his face, said: "i'd be willing to let the case go to the jury right now." chapter vii. the defense the case for the defense opened on monday morning of april nd when vanderveer, directly facing the judge and witness chair from the position vacated by the prosecution counsel, moved for a directed verdict of not guilty on the ground that there had been an absolute failure of evidence upon the question of conspiracy, any conspiracy of which murder was either directly or indirectly an incident, and there was no evidence whatever to charge the defendant directly as a principal in causing the death of jefferson beard. the motion was denied and an exception taken to the ruling of the court. fred moore made the opening statement for the defense. in his speech he briefly outlined the situation that had existed in everett up to and including november th and explained to the jury the forces lined up against each other in everett's industrial warfare. not for an instant did the attention of the jury flag during the recital. herbert mahler, secretary of the i. w. w. in seattle during the series of outrages in everett, was the first witness placed upon the stand. mahler told of the lumber workers' convention and the sending of organizer james rowan to make a survey of the industrial situation in the lumber centers, everett being the first point because of its proximity to seattle and not by reason of any strikes that may have existed there. the methods of conducting the free speech fight, the avoidance of secrecy, the ardent desire for publicity of the methods of the lumber trust as well as the tactics of the i. w. w., were clearly explained. cooley cross-examined mahler regarding the song book with reference to the advocacy and use of sabotage, asking the witness: "how about throwing a pitchfork into a threshing machine? would that be all right?" "there are circumstances when it would be, i suppose," replied mahler. "if there was a farmer deputy who had been at beverly park, i think they certainly would have a right to destroy his threshing machine." "you think that would justify it?" inquired cooley. "yes," said the witness, "i think that if the man had abused his power as an officer and the person he abused had no other way of getting even with him and that justice was denied him in the courts, i fully believe that he would be. that would not hurt anybody; it would only hurt his pocketbook." "now what is this joe hill memorial edition?" "joe hillstrom, known as joe hill, had written a number of songs in the i. w. w. song book and he was murdered in utah and the song book was gotten out in memory of him," responded mahler. "he was executed after having been convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. and you say he was murdered?" said cooley. "yes," said mahler with emphasis. "our contention has been that hillstrom did not have a fair trial and we are quite capable of proving it. i may say that president wilson interceded in his behalf and was promptly turned down by governor spry of utah. hillstrom was offered a commutation of sentence and he refused to take it. he wanted a retrial or an acquittal. when the president of the united states had interceded with the governor of utah, when various labor organizations asked that he be given a retrial, and a man's life is to be taken from him, and people all over the country ask for a retrial, that certainly should be granted to him." james p. thompson was placed upon the stand to explain the principles of the i. w. w. the courtroom was turned into a propaganda meeting during the examination of the witness. one of the first features was the reading and explanation of state's exhibit "k," the famous i. w. w. preamble which has been referred to on various occasions as the most brutally scientific exposition of the class struggle ever penned: i. w. w. preamble the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. there can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. we find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. the trade unions foster a state of affairs which allow one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. these conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. instead of the conservative motto, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "abolition of the wage system." it is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. the army of production must be organized, not only for the every day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. by organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. "men in society represent economic categories," said thompson. "by that i mean that in the world of shoes there are shoemakers, and in the world of boats there are seamen, and in this society there are economic categories called the employing class and the working class. now, between them as employing class and working class there is nothing in common. their interests are diametrically opposed as such. it is not the same thing as saying that human beings have nothing in common. the working class and the employing class have antagonistic interests, and the more one gets the less remains for the other. "labor produces all wealth," continued thompson, "and the more the workers have to give up to anyone else the less remains for themselves. the more they get in wages the less remains for the others in the form of profits. as long as labor produces for the other class all the good things of life there will be no peace; we want the products of labor ourselves and let the other class go to work also. "the trades unions are unable to cope with the power of the employers because when one craft strikes the others remain at work and by so doing help the company to fill orders, and that is helping to break the strike. if a group of workers strike and win, other workers are encouraged to do likewise: if they strike and lose, other workers are discouraged and employers are encouraged to do some whipping on their own account. "we believe in an industrial democracy; that the industry shall be owned by the people and operated on a co-operative plan instead of the wage plan; that there is no such thing as a fair day's pay; that we should have the full product of our labor in the co-operative system as distinguished from the wage system. "furthermore," went on the witness, as the jury leaned forward to catch his every word, "our ideas were suggested to us by conditions in modern industry, and it is the historical mission of the workers to organize, not only for the preliminary struggles, but to carry on production afterward." "we object to this!" shouted mr. cooley, and the court sustained the objection. despite continual protests from the prosecution thompson gave the ideas of the i. w. w. on many questions. speaking of free speech the witness said: "free speech is vital. it is a point that has been threshed out and settled before we were born. if we do not have free speech, the children of the race will die in the dark." the message of industrial unionism delivered thru the sworn testimony of a labor organizer was indeed an amazing spectacle. judge ronald never relaxed his attention during the entire examination, the jury was spell-bound, and it was only by an obvious effort that the spectators kept from applauding the various telling points. "there is overwork on one hand," said thompson, "and out-of-work on the other. the length of the working day should be determined by the amount of work and the number of workers. you have no more right to do eight or ten or twelve hours of labor when others are out of work, despondent, committing suicide, than you have to drink all the water, if that were possible, while others are dying of thirst. "solidarity is the i. w. w. way to get their demands. we do not advocate that the workers should organize in a military way and use guns and dynamite. the most effective weapon of labor is economic power: the modern wage workers are the living parts of industry and if they fold their arms, they immediately precipitate a crisis, they paralyze the world. no other class has that power. the other class can fold their arms, and they do most of the time, but our class has the economic power. the i. w. w. preaches and teaches all the time that a far more effective weapon than brickbats or dynamite is solidarity. "we have developed from individual production, to social production, yet we still have private ownership of the means of production. one class owns the industries and doesn't operate them, another class operates the industries and does not own them. we are going to have a revolution. no one is more mistaken than those who believe that this system is the final state of society. as the industrial revolution takes place, as the labor process takes on the co-operative form, as the tool of production becomes social, the idea of social ownership is suggested, and so the idea that things that are used collectively should be owned collectively, presents itself with irresistible force to the people of the twentieth century. so there is a struggle for industrial democracy. we are the modern abolitionists fighting against wage slavery as the other abolitionists fought against chattel slavery. the solution for our modern problems is this, that the industries should be owned by the people, operated by the people for the people, and the little busy bees who make the honey of the world should eat that honey, and there should be no drones at all in the hives of industry. "when we have industrial democracy you will know that the mills, the mines, the factories, the earth itself, will be the collective property of the people, and if a little baby should be born that baby would be as much an owner of the earth as any other of the children of men. then the war, the commercial struggles, the clashes between groups of conflicting interests, will be a night-mare of the past. in the place of capitalism with its one class working and its other class enjoying, in the place of the wages system with its strife and strikes, lockouts and grinding poverty, we will have a co-operative system where the interests of one will be to promote the interests of all--that will be industrial democracy." thompson explained the meaning of the sarcastic song, "christians at war," to the evident amusement of the jury and spectators. the witness was then asked about herve's work on anti-patriotism in this question by attorney moore: "what is the attitude of your organization relative to internationalism and national patriotism?" "we object to that as incompetent and immaterial," cried veitch of the prosecution. "what did you put this book in for then?" said judge ronald in a testy manner as he motioned the witness to proceed with his answer. "in the broader sense," answered thompson, "there is no such thing as a foreigner. we are all native born members of this planet, and for the members of it to be divided into groups or units and to be taught that each nation is better than the other leads to clashes and the world war. we ought to have in the place of national patriotism--the idea that one people is better than another,--a broader conception, that of international solidarity. the idea that we are better than others is contrary to the declaration of independence which declares that all men are born free and equal. the i. w. w. believes that in order to do away with wars we should remove the cause of wars; we should establish industrial democracy and the co-operative system instead of commercialism and capitalism and the struggles that come from them. we are trying to make america a better land, a land without child slaves, a land without poverty, and so also with the world, a world without a master and without a slave." when the lengthy direct examination of thompson had been finished, the prosecution questioned him but five minutes and united in a sigh of relief as he left the stand. the next witness called was ernest nordstrom, companion of oscar carlson who was severely wounded on the verona. nordstrom testified rather out of his logical order in the trial by reason of the fact that he was about to leave on a lengthy fishing trip to alaska. his testimony was that he purchased a regular ticket at the same time as his friend carlson, but these tickets were not taken up by the purser. the original ticket of this passenger was then offered in evidence. the witness stated that the first shot came from almost the same place on the dock as did the words "you can't land here." he fell to the deck and saw carlson fall also. carlson tried to rise once, but a bullet hit him and he dropped; there were nine bullet holes in him. nordstrom was asked: "did you have a gun?" "no sir." "did carlson have a gun?" "no sir." "did you see anybody with a gun on the boat?" "no. i didn't." organizer james rowan then gave his experiences in everett, ending with a vivid recital of the terrible beating he had received at the hands of deputies near silver lake. upon telling of the photograph that was taken of his lacerated back he was asked by veitch: "what was the reason you had that picture taken?" "well," said rowan, in his inimitable manner, "i thought it would be a good thing to get that taken to show up the kind of civilization that they had in everett." dr. e. j. brown, a seattle dentist, and thomas horner, seattle attorney, corroborated rowan's testimony as to the condition of his back. they had seen the wounds and bruises shortly after the beating had been administered and were of the opinion that a false light was reflected on the photograph in such a way that the severest marks did not appear as bad as they really were. otto nelson, everett shingle weaver, gave testimony regarding the shingle weavers' strikes of and but was stopped from going into detail by the rulings of the court. he told also of the peaceful character of all the i. w. w. meetings in everett, and stated that on one occasion police officer daniels had fired two shots down one of the city streets at an i. w. w. man who had been made to run the gauntlet. h. p. whartenby, owner of a five-ten-fifteen cent store in everett, said that the i. w. w. meetings were orderly, and further testified that he had been ordered out of the commercial club on the evening of november th but not until he had seen that the club was a regular arsenal, with guns stacked all over the place. to establish the fact that the sidewalks were kept clear, that there was no advocacy of violence, that no resistance was offered to arrest, and that the i. w. w. meetings were well conducted in every particular, the defense put on in fairly rapid succession a number of everett citizens: mrs. ina m. salter, mrs. elizabeth maloney, mrs. letelsia fye, bruce j. hatch, mrs. dollie gustaffson, miss avis mathison, mrs. peter aiken, mrs. annie pomeroy, mrs. rebecca wade, f. g. crosby, and mrs. hannah crosby. the fact that these citizens, and a number of other women who were mentioned in the testimony, attended the i. w. w. meetings quite regularly, impressed the jury favorably. some of these women witnesses had been roughly handled by the deputies. mrs. pomeroy stated that the deputies, armed with clubs and distinguished by white handkerchiefs around their necks, invaded one meeting and struck right and left. "and they punched me at that!" said the indignant witness. "punched you where?" inquired vanderveer in order to locate the injury. "they punched me on the sidewalk!" answered the witness, and the solemn bailiff had to rap for order in the court room. cooley caught a tartar in his cross-examination of mrs. crosby. he inquired: "did you hear the i. w. w.'s say that when they got a majority of the workers into this big union they would take possession of the industries and run them themselves?" "why certainly!" "you did hear them say they would take possession?" "why certainly!" flashed back the witness. "that's the way the north did with the slaves, isn't it? they took possession without ever asking them. my people came from the south and they had slaves taken away from them and never got anything for it, and quite right, too!" "then you do believe it would be all right, yourself?" said cooley. "i believe that confiscation would be perfectly right in the case of taking things that are publicly used for the public good of the people----." "that's all," hastily cut in cooley. "that they should be used then by the people and for the people!" finished the witness. "that's all!" cried cooley loudly and more anxiously. frank henig, the next witness, told of having been blackjacked by sheriff mcrae and exhibited the large scar on his forehead that plainly showed where the brutal blow had landed. he stated that he had tried to secure the arrest of mcrae for the entirely unwarranted attack but was denied a warrant. jake michel, secretary of the everett building trades council, gave evidence regarding a number of the i. w. w. street meetings. he was questioned at length about what he had inferred from the speeches of rowan, thompson and others. replying to one question he said: "i think the american federation of labor uses the most direct action that any organization could use." "in a strike?" "yes." "and by that you mean a peaceful strike?" said cooley suggestively. "well, i haven't seen them carry on very many peaceful ones yet," replied michel. cooley asked michel whether rowan had said that "the workers should form one great industrial union and declare the final and universal strike; that is, that they should remain within the industrial institutions and lock the employers out for good as owners?" "i never heard him mention anything about locking anyone out; i think he wanted to lock them in and make them do some of the work!" answered michel. "you haven't any particular interest in this case, have you?" asked cooley with a sneer. "yes, i have!" replied michel with emphasis. when asked what this particular interest was, michel caused consternation among the ranks of the prosecution by replying: "the reason i have that interest is this; i have two sons and two daughters. i want to see the best form of organization so that the boys can go out and make a decent living; i don't want my girls to become prostitutes upon the streets and my boys vagabonds upon the highways!" harry feinberg, one of the free speech prisoners named on the first information with watson and tracy, was then placed on the stand and questioned as to the beating he had received at the hands of deputies, as to the condition of frank henig after mcrae's attack, and upon matters connected with various street meetings at which he had been the speaker. mention of the name of george reese brought forth an argument from the prosecution that it had not been shown that reese was a detective. after an acrimonious discussion vanderveer suddenly declared: "just to settle this thing and settle it for now and all the time, i will ask a subpoena forthwith for philip k. ahern and show who reese is working for." the subpoena was issued and a recess taken to allow it to be served. as vanderveer stepped into the hall, detective malcolm mclaren said to him, "you can't subpoenae the head of the pinkerton detective agency!" "i have subpoenaed him," responded vanderveer shortly as he hurried to the witness room. while awaiting the arrival of this witness, feinberg was questioned further, and was then taken from the stand to allow the examination of two everett witnesses, mrs. l. h. johnson and p. s. johnson, the latter witness being withdrawn when ahern put in an appearance. vanderveer was very brief, but to the point, in the examination of the local head of the pinkerton agency. "mr. ahern, on the fifth day of november you had in your employ a man named george reese?" "yes sir." "for whom was he working, thru you, at that time?" "for snohomish county." "that's all!" said vanderveer triumphantly. cooley did not seem inclined to cross-examine the witness at any length and vanderveer in another straightforward question brought out the fact that reese was a pinkerton employe during the longshoremen's strike--this being the time that reese also was seated as a delegate to the seattle trades council of the a. f. of l. a portion of the testimony of mrs. l. h. johnson was nearly as important as that concerning reese. she recited a conversation with sheriff mcrae as follows: "mcrae said he would stop the i. w. w. from coming to everett if he had to call out the soldiers. and i told him the soldiers wouldn't come out on an occasion like this, they were nothing but industrial workers of the world and they had a right to speak and get people to join their union if they wanted to. and he said he had the backing of the millmen to keep them out of the city, and he was going to do it if he had to call the soldiers out and shoot them down when they landed there, when they came off the dock." [illustration: cutting off top of tree to fit block for flying machine.] this clearly indicated the bloodthirsty designs of the millmen and the sheriff at a time long before november th. g. w. carr, wilfred des pres, and j. m. norland testified to the breaking up of peaceably conducted i. w. w. meetings, des pres also telling of rifles having been transported from the pacific hardware company to the dock on november th. all three were everett citizens. black asked norland if he knew what sabotage was, to which norland replied: "everybody that follows the labor movement knows what sabotage is." there was a sensation in court at this question for it was the first and only time that any of the prosecution counsel correctly pronounced the word sabotage! w. w. blain, secretary of the commercial club, altho an unwilling witness, gave much information of value to the defense. he was forced to produce the minutes of the "open shop committee" and give up the story of how control of the club was purchased by the big interests, how the boycott was invoked against certain publications, and finally to tell of the employment of pinkerton detectives prior to november th, and to give a list of the deputies furnished by the commercial club. during the examination of this witness some telegrams, in connection with the testimony, were handed up to the judge. while reading these judge ronald was interrupted by a foolish remark from black to vanderveer. looking over his glasses the judge said: "every time i start to read anything, you gentlemen get into a quarrel among yourselves. i am inclined to think that the 'cats,' some of them, are here in the courtroom." "i will plead guilty for mr. black, your honor!" said vanderveer quickly, laughing at the reference to sabotage. testimony to further establish the peaceable character of the i. w. w. meetings and the rowdyism of the police and deputies was given by witnesses from everett: gustaf pilz, mrs. leota carr, j. e. mcnair, ed morton, michael maloney, verne c. henry and morial thornburg. the statements of these disinterested parties regarding the clubbings given to the speakers and to citizens of their acquaintance proved very effective. attorney h. d. cooley for the prosecution was placed upon the witness stand and vanderveer shot the question at him: "by whom were you employed in this case, mr. cooley?" "objected to as immaterial!" cried veitch, instantly springing to his feet. but the damage had been done! the refusal to allow an answer showed that there were interested parties the prosecution wished to hide from the public. levi remick related the story of the deportation from everett, and was followed on the witness stand by edward lavelly, james dwyer, and thomas smye, who testified to different atrocities committed in everett by mcrae and the citizen deputies. their evidence had mainly to do with the acts of piracy committed against the launch "wanderer" and the subsequent abuse of the arrested men. a little later in the trial this testimony was fully corroborated by the statements of captain jack mitten. during mitten's examination by black the old captain continually referred to the fact that the life preservers and other equipment of his boat had been stolen while he was in jail. the discomfiture of the youthful prosecutor was quite evident. j. h. buel impeached the testimony of state's witness judge bell who had made the claim that a filer at the clark-nickerson mill had been assaulted by a member of the i. w. w. vanderveer asked this witness: "what was the name of the man assaulted?" "jimmy cain." "who did it?" "i did." "are you an i. w. w.?" "no sir." "were you ever?" "no sir." louis skaroff followed with a detailed story of the murderous attack made upon him by mayor merrill in the everett jail, his story being unshaken when he was recalled and put thru a grilling cross-examination. william roberts, who had been beaten and deported with harry feinberg, related his experience. the childish questions of black in regard to the idea of abolishing the wages system nettled this witness and caused him to exclaim, "the trouble is that you don't understand the labor movement." james orr then told of having his money stolen by the officials so they might pay the fares of twenty-two deported men, and john ovist followed with the tale of the slugging he had received upon the same occasion that feinberg, roberts and henig were assaulted. attorneys george w. loutitt and robert faussett, of everett, stated that the reputation of mcrae for sobriety was very bad. both of these lawyers had resigned from the commercial club upon its adoption of an open shop policy. thomas o'niel testified regarding street meetings and other matters in connection with the case. cooley asked the witness how many people usually attended the meetings. "it started in with rather small meetings," said the witness, "and then every time, as fast as they were molested by the police, the crowd kept growing until at last the meetings were between two and three thousand people." the witness said he had read considerable about industrial unionism, and tho he was shocked at first he had come to believe in it. "until now you are satisfied that their doctrines taken as a whole are proper and should be promulgated and adopted by the working class?" inquired cooley. "in this way," answered o'niel, "it was not the i. w. w. literature that convinced me so much as the actions of the side that was fighting them." "that is, you believe they were right because of the actions of the people on the other side?" said cooley. "yes," responded the witness, "because i think there are only two people interested in this movement, the people carrying on the propaganda and the people fighting the propaganda, and i saw the people who were fighting the propaganda use direct action, sabotage, and every power, political and industrial, they used it all to whip this organization, and then i asked myself why are they fighting this organization. and the more deeply i became interested, the more clearly i saw why they were doing it, and that made me a believer in the i. w. w." mrs. louise mcguire followed this witness with testimony about injuries she had received thru the rough treatment accorded her by citizen deputies engaged in breaking up a street meeting. w. h. clay, everett's commissioner of finance, was brought on the stand to testify that he was present and active at the conference that resulted in the formation of the citizen deputies. john berg then related his experiences at the time he was taken to the outskirts of everett and deported after mcrae had kicked him in the groin until a serious injury resulted. owing to the fact that the jury was a mixed one berg was not permitted to exhibit the rupture. this witness also told his experience on the "wanderer" and his treatment in the jail upon his arrest. oscar lindstrom then took the stand and corroborated the stories of the witnesses who had testified about the shooting up of the "wanderer" and the beating and jailing of its passengers. h. sokol, better known as "happy," also told of his experience on the "wanderer" and gave the facts of the deportation that had taken place on august rd. irving w. ziegaus, secretary to governor lister, testified that the letter concerning everett sent from the seattle i. w. w. had been received; steven m. fowler identified certain telegrams sent from everett to seattle officials by david clough on november th; after which chester micklin, who had been jailed in everett following the tragedy, corroborated parts of the story of louis skaroff. the evidence of state's witness, clyde gibbons, was shattered at this stage of the trial by the placing of mrs. lawrence macarthur on the stand. this witness, the proprietor of the merchants hotel in everett, produced the hotel register for november th and showed that mrs. frennette had registered at that time and was in the city when gibbons claimed she was holding a conversation in an apartment house on yesler way in seattle. the defense found it necessary to call witnesses who logically should have been brought forward by the prosecution on their side of the case. among these was the famous "governor" clough, citizen deputy and open shop mill owner. david clough unwillingly testified to having been present at the deportation of twenty-two i. w. w. members on august rd, having gone down to the dock at : that morning, and also to his interest in joseph schofield, the deputy who had been injured by his brother outlaws on the dock just before the beverly park deportations. mahler and micklin were recalled for some few additional questions, and were followed on the stand by herman storm, who gave testimony about the brutal treatment received by himself and his fellow passengers on the launch "wanderer." john hainey and joseph reaume also gave details of this outrage. "sergeant" j. j. keenan, who had become a familiar figure because of his "police" duty in the outer court corridor from the inception of the trial, then took the witness stand and recounted his experiences at snohomish and maltby, his every word carrying conviction that the sheriff and his deputies had acted with the utmost brutality in spite of the advanced age of their victim. john patterson and tom thornton corroborated keenan's testimony. a surprise was sprung upon the prosecution at this juncture by the introduction on the witness stand of george kannow, a man who had been a deputy sheriff in everett and who had been present when many of the brutalities were going on. he told of the treatment of berg after the "wanderer" arrests. "he was struck and beaten and thrown down and knocked heavily against the steel sides of the tank, his head striking on a large projecting lock. he was kicked by mcrae and he hollered 'my god, you are killing me,' and mcrae said he didn't give a damn whether he died or not, and kicked him again and then shoved him into the tank." the gauntlet at the county jail was described in detail and the spirit of the free speech fighters was shown by this testimony: "yes, i heard some of them groan. they all took their medicine well, tho. they didn't holler out but some of them would groan; some of them would go down pretty near to their knees and then get up, then they would get sapped again as they got up. but they never made any real outcries." the witness stated that "governor" clough was a regular attendant at the deportation parties and so also were w. r. booth, ed hawes, t. w. anguish, bill pabst, ed seivers, and will taft. he described mcrae's drunken condition and told of drunken midnight revels held in the county jail. his testimony was unshaken on cross-examination. mrs. fern grant, owner of the western hotel and grant's cafe, testified that mrs. frennette was in her place of business in everett on the morning of the tragedy, thus adding to the evidence that clyde gibbons had perjured himself in testifying for the prosecution. a party of christian scientists, who had attended a lecture in everett by bliss knapp, told of the frightful condition of the eight men who had taken the interurban train to seattle following their experience at beverly park. mrs. lou vee siegfried, christian science practitioner, thorwald siegfried, prominent seattle lawyer, mrs. anna tenelli and miss dorothy jordan were corroborated in their testimony by ira bellows, conductor on the interurban car that took the wounded men to seattle. another break in the regular order of the trial was made at this point by the placing on the stand of nicholas conaieff, member of the i. w. w., who was to leave on the following day with a party of russians returning to their birthplace to take part in the revolution then in progress. conaieff stated that the first shot came from the dock. his realistic story of the conditions on the verona moved many in the courtroom to tears. in his description conaieff said: "i was wounded myself. but before i was wounded and as we were lying there three or four deep i saw a wounded man at my feet in a pool of blood. then i saw a man with his face up, and he was badly wounded, probably he was dead. there were three or four wounded men alongside of me. the conditions were so terrible that it was hard to control one's self, and a young boy who was in one pile could not control himself any longer; he was about twenty years old and had on a brown, short, heavy coat, and he looked terrified and jumped up and went overboard into the water and i didn't see him any more." mrs. edith frennette testified to her movements on the day of the tragedy and denied the alleged threats to sheriff mcrae. lengthy cross-examination failed to shake her story. members of the i. w. w. who had been injured at beverly park then testified. they were edward schwartz, harry hubbard, archie collins, c. h. rice, john downs, one of the defendants, sam rovinson and henry krieg. any doubt as to the truth of their story was dispelled by the testimony of mrs. ruby ketchum, her husband roy ketchum, and her brother-in-law lew ketchum, all three of whom heard the screams of the victims and witnessed part of the slugging near their home at beverly park. some members of the investigation committee who viewed the scene on the morning after the outrage gave their evidence as to the finding of bits of clothing, soles of shoes, bloodstained hats and loose hat-bands, and blotches of blood on the paved roadway and cattle guard. these witnesses were three ministers of the gospel of different denominations, elbert e. flint, joseph p. marlatt, and oscar h. mcgill. the last named witness also told of having interviewed herbert mahler, secretary of the i. w. w. in seattle, following a conference with everett citizens, with the object of having a large public demonstration in everett to expose the beverly park affair and to prevent its repetition. it was after this interview that the call went out for the i. w. w. to hold a public meeting in everett on sunday, november th. mahler was recalled to the stand to verify mcgill's statement in the matter of the interview. this testimony brought the case up to the events of november th and the defense, having proven each illegal action of the sheriff, deputies and mill owners, and disproven the accusations against the i. w. w., proceeded to open to the gaze of the public and force to the attention of the jury the actual facts concerning the massacre on the verona. an important witness was charles miller, who viewed the tragedy from a point about four hundred feet from the verona while on the deck of his fishing boat, the "scout." he stated that the verona tilted as soon as the first shots came. miller placed the model of the boat at the same relative position it had occupied as the firing started on bloody sunday and the prosecution could not tangle up this witness on this important point. the "identification" witnesses of the prosecution were of necessity liars if the stern of the verona was at the angle set by miller. c. m. steele, owner of apartment houses and stores in everett, stated that he had been in a group who saw an automobile load of guns transported to the dock prior to the docking of the verona, this auto being closely followed by a string of other machines. the witness tried to get upon the dock but was prevented by deputies who had a rope stretched clear across the entrance near the office of the american tug boat company. he saw the boat tilt as the firing started and noticed that the stern swung out at the time. this testimony was demonstrated with the model. harry young, chauffeur, corroborated this testimony and told of rifle fire from the dock. mrs. mabel thomas, from a position on johnson's float quite near the verona, told of the boat listing until the lower deck was under water, almost immediately after the firing started. mrs. thomas testified that "one man who was facing toward the improvement dock, raised his hands and fell overboard from the hurricane deck as tho he were dead. his overcoat held him to the top of the water for a moment and then he went down. one jumped from the stern and then there were six or seven in the water. one got up thru the canvas and crawled back in. one man that fell in held up his hands for a moment and sank. there were bullets hitting all around him." mr. carroll thomas, husband of the preceding witness, gave the same testimony about the men in the water and stated that he saw armed men on the improvement dock. the testimony of ayrold d. skinner, a barber in everett at the time of the tragedy and who had been brought from california to testify, was bitterly attacked by veitch but to no avail. when the verona landed skinner was so situated as to command a view of the whole proceedings. he told of the boat listing, the men falling in the water and being shot, and his testimony about a man on board the tug "edison" firing a rifle directly across the open space on the dock in the direction of the verona was unshakeable. this witness also testified that about ten deputies with rifles were running back and forth in a frightened manner and were firing from behind the klatawa slip. the witness saw dick hembridge, superintendent of the canyon lumber company, carl tyre, timekeeper, percy ames, the boom man, and a dr. hedges. the last two came up to where the witness was, each bearing a rifle. skinner stated that he said to ames, "percy, what is the world coming to?" and ames broke down as tho he felt something were wrong. then dr. hedges came running up from where the boat was, he was white in the face, and he cried "don't go down there, boys; they are shooting wild, you don't know where in hell the shots are coming from." carl ryan, night watchman of the everett shingle company, n. c. roberts, an everett potter, robert thompson and edward thompson testified about the angle of the boat, as to rifles on the dock, the shooting from the tug "edison" and from the improvement dock, in support of witnesses who had previously testified. alfred freeman, i. w. w. member who was on the verona, testified about the movements of those who made the trip to everett and told of the conditions on the boat. his testimony, and that of numerous other i. w. w. witnesses, disproved the charges of conspiracy. i. w. mcdonald, barber, john josephson, lumber piler, and t. m. johnson, hod carrier, all of everett, stated that the shots from the boat did not come until after there had been considerable firing from the dock. these witnesses were among the thousands of citizens who overlooked the scene from the hillside by the great northern depot. [illustration: verona at everett dock. under same tide condition as at time of massacre.] on wednesday, april th, the jury, accompanied by judge ronald, the attorneys for both sides, the defendant, thomas tracy, and the court stenographer, went in automobiles to everett to inspect the various places mentioned in the court proceedings. the party stopped on the way to everett to look over the scene of the beverly park outrages of october th. no one spoke to the jury but judge ronald, who pointed out the various features at the request of the attorneys in the background. after visiting the corner of hewitt and wetmore avenues, the party went to the city dock. both warehouses were carefully examined, the bulletholes, tho badly whittled, being still in evidence. bulletholes in the floor, clock-case, and in the walls still showed quite plainly that the firing from within the warehouse and waiting room had been wild. bullets imbedded in the klatawa slip on the side toward the bay also gave evidence of blind firing on the part of the deputies. in the floor of the dock, between the ship and the open space near the waiting room, were several grooves made by bullets fired from the shore end of the dock. these marks indicated that the bullets had taken a course directly in line with the deputies who were in the front ranks as the verona landed. the party boarded the verona and subjected the boat to a searching examination, discovering that the stairways, sides, and furnishings were riddled with shot holes. the pilot house, in particular, was found to have marks of revolver and high power rifle bullets, in addition to being closely marked with small shot holes, some of the buck-shot still being visible. the captain swung the boat out to the same angle as it had been on november th, this being done at a time when it was computed that the tide would be relatively the same as on the date of the tragedy. someone assumed the precise position at the cabin window that tracy was alleged to have been in while firing. the jury members then took up the positions which the "identification witnesses" had marked on a diagram during their testimony. the man in the window was absolutely invisible! a photograph was then taken from the point where "honest" john hogan claimed to have been when he saw tracy firing and another view made by a second camera to show that the first photograph had been taken from the correct position. these were later introduced as evidence. no testimony was taken in everett but on the re-opening of court in seattle next morning frank a. brown, life insurance solicitor, testified that mcrae dropped his hand just before the first shot was fired from somewhere to the right of the sheriff. he also identified a mr. thompson, engineer of the clark-nickerson mill, and a mr. scott, as being armed with guns having stocks. mike luney, shingle weaver, told of a fear-crazed deputy running from the dock with a bullethole in his ear and crying out that one of the deputies had shot him. fred bissinger, a boy of , told of the deputies breaking for cover as soon as they had fired a volley at the men on the boat. it was only after the heavy firing that he saw a man on the boat pull a revolver from his pocket and commence to shoot. he saw but two revolvers in action on the verona. one of the most dramatic and clinching blows for the defense was struck when there was introduced as a witness fred luke, who was a regular deputy sheriff and mcrae's right-hand man. luke's evidence of the various brutalities, given in a cold, matter-of-fact manner, was most convincing. he stated that the deputies wore white handkerchiefs around their necks so they would not be hammering each other. he contradicted mcrae's testimony about beverly park by stating positively that the sheriff had gone out in a five passenger car, and not in a roadster as was claimed, and that they had both remained there during the entire affair. he told how he had swung at the i. w. w. men with such force that his club had broken from its leather wrist thong and disappeared into the woods. when questioned about the use of clubs in dispersing street crowds at the i. w. w. meetings he said: "i used my sap as a club and struck them and drove them away with it." "why didn't you use your hands and push them out?" asked cooley. "i didn't think we had a right to use our hands," said the big ex-deputy. "what do you mean by that?" said the surprised lawyer. "well," replied the witness, "what did they give us the saps for?" cooley also asked this witness why he had struck the men at beverly park. "well," replied the ex-deputy, "if you want to know, that was the idea of the commercial club. that was what they recommended." luke, who was a guard at the approach to the dock on november th, told of having explained the workings of a rifle to a deputy while the shooting was in progress. the state at first had contended that there were no rifles on the dock and later had made the half-hearted plea that none of the rifles which were proven to have been there were fired. following this important witness the defense introduced fird winkley, a. e. amiott, dr. guy n. ford, charles leo, ed armstrong, mate of the verona and a witness for the state, and b. r. watson, to corroborate the already convincing evidence that the stern of the verona was swung quite a distance from the dock. robert mills, business agent of the everett shingle weavers, who had been called to the stand on several occasions to testify to minor matters, was then recalled. he testified that it was his hand which protruded from the verona cabin window in the photographs, and that his head was resting against the window jamb on the left hand side as far out as it would be possible to get without crawling out of the window. as mills was a familiar figure to the entire jury and was also possessed of a peculiarly unforgettable type of countenance, the state's identification of tracy was shown to have been false. the chief of police of seattle, charles beckingham, corroborated previous testimony by stating that the identification and selection of i. w. w. men had been made from a dark cell by two pinkerton men, smith and reese, aided by one of the defendants, i. p. mcdowell, alias charles adams. malcolm mclaren was then placed upon the stand and the admission secured that he was a detective and had formerly been connected with the burns agency. objection was made to a question about the employment of mclaren in the case, to which vanderveer replied that it was the purpose of the defense to prove that the case was not being prosecuted by the state of washington at all. in the absence of the jury vanderveer then offered to prove that mclaren had been brought from los angeles and retained in the employ of certain mill owners, among them being "governor" clough and mr. moody of the first national bank, and that mclaren had charge of the work of procuring the evidence introduced by the state. he offered to prove that veitch and cooley were employed by the same people. the court sustained the objection of the state to the three offers. testimony on various phases of the case was then given by mrs. fannie jordan, proprietor of an apartment house in seattle, nick shugar, henry luce, paul blakenship, charles w. dean, and later on by oliver burnett. captain chauncey wiman was called to the stand, but it happened that he had gone into hiding so soon after the boat landed that he could testify to nothing of particular importance. from his appearance on the witness stand it seemed that he was still nearly scared to death. another surprise for the prosecution was then sprung by placing joseph schofield on the witness stand. schofield told of having been beaten up at the city dock by joseph irving, during the time they were lining up the forty-one i. w. w. men for deportation. the witness displayed the scar on his head that had resulted from the wound made by the gun butt, and described the drunken condition of mcrae and other deputies on the occasion of his injury. and then he told that "governor" clough had gone to his wife just a couple of days before he took the witness stand and had given her $ . . this deputy witness was on the dock november th, and he described the affair. he swore that mcrae had his gun drawn before any shooting started, that there were rifles in use on the dock, that a man was firing a winchester rifle from the tug edison. he was handed a bolt action army rifle to use but made no use of it. schofield voluntarily came from oregon to testify for the defense. chief beckingham resumed the stand and was asked further about mcdowell, alias adams. he said: "we sent a man in with this man adams, who was in constant fear that somebody might see him, and he would stand way back that he might tip this man with him and this man's fingers came out to identify the i. w. w. men who were supposed to have guns." "what inducements were made to this man adams?" asked vanderveer. "in the presence of mr. cooley and mr. webb and captain tennant and myself he was told that he could help the state and there would be no punishment given him. he was taken to everett with the impression that he would be let out and taken care of." another ex-deputy, fred plymale, confirmed the statements of fred luke in regard to mcrae's use of a five passenger car at beverly park and showed that it was impossible for the sheriff to have attended a dance at the hour he had claimed. the efforts of the prosecution to shake the testimony that had been given by fred luke was shown by this witness who testified that he had been approached by mr. clifford newton, as agent for mr. cooley, and that at an arranged conversation mcrae had tried to have him state that the runabout had been used to go to the slugging party. walter mulholland, an year old boy, and henry krieg, both of whom were members of the i. w. w. and passengers on the verona, then testified in detail about the shattering gun fire and the wounding of men on board the boat. mulholland told of wounds received, one bullet still being in his person at that time. krieg, not being familiar with military terms, stated that there were many shells on the deck of the verona after the trouble, and the prosecution thought they had scored quite a point until re-direct examination brought out the fact that henry meant the lead bullets that had been fired from the dock. e. carl pearson, snohomish county treasurer, rather unwillingly corroborated the testimony of ex-deputies luke and plymale in regard to the actions of mcrae at beverly park. the witness chair seemed almost to swallow the next nine witnesses who were boys averaging about twelve years in age. these lads had picked up shells on and beneath the dock to keep as mementos of the "battle." handfuls of shells of various sizes and description, from revolver, rifle and shotgun, intermingled with rifle clips and unfired copper-jacketed rifle cartridges, were piled upon the clerk's desk as exhibits by these youthful witnesses. after the various shells had been classified by l. b. knowlton, an expert in charge of ammunition sales for the whiton hardware company of seattle for six years, the boys were recalled to the stand to testify to the splintered condition of the warehouses, their evidence proving that a large number of shots had been fired from the interior of the warehouses directly thru the walls. the boys who testified were jack warren, palmer strand, rollie jackson, william layton, eugene meives, guy warner, tom wolf, harvey peterson, and roy jensen. veitch, by this time thoroly disgusted with the turn taken by the case, excused these witnesses without even a pretense of cross-examination. completely clinching this link in the evidence against the citizen deputies was the testimony of miss lillian goldthorpe and her mother, hannah goldthorpe. miss goldthorpe, waitress in the commercial club dining room, picked up some rifle shells that had fallen from the rifles stacked in the office, and also from the pocket of one of the hunting coats lying on the floor. she took these home to her mother who afterward turned them over to attorney moore. she also identified certain murderous looking blackjacks as being the same as those stored in the club. it is hardly necessary to state that the open-shop advocates who continually prate about the "right of a person to work when and where they please" were not slow about taking away lillian's right to work at the commercial club after she had given this truthful testimony! james hadley, i. w. w. member on the verona, told how he had dived overboard to escape the murderous fire and had been the only man in the water to regain a place on the boat. "i saw two go overboard and i didn't see them any more," said hadley. "then i saw another man four feet from me and he seemed to be swimming all right, and all of a sudden he went down and i never saw him any more. i was looking right at him and he just closed his eyes and sank." mario marino, an year old member of the i. w. w., then told of the serious wounds he had received on the boat. he was followed by brockman b. armstrong, another member of the union, who was close to the rail on the port side of the boat. he saw a puff of smoke slightly to the rear of mcrae directly after the sound of the first shot. a rifle bullet cut a piece out of his forehead and a second went thru his cap and creased his scalp, felling him to his knees. owen genty was shot thru the kidney on the one side of him, and gust turnquist was hit in the knee on the other. as he lay in the heap of wounded men a buckshot buried itself in the side of his head near the temple. as the verona was pulling out he tried to crawl to shelter and was just missed by a rifle bullet from the dock situated to the south. archie collins, who had previously testified about beverly park, was then called to the stand to tell of the trip to everett and the trouble that resulted. prosecutor black displayed his usual asininity by asking in regard to preparations made by verona passengers: "what were they taking or not taking?" "there might be two or three million things they were not taking," cut in judge ronald chidingly. black's examination of the various witnesses was aptly described by publicity agent charles ashleigh in the industrial worker, as follows: "his examinations usually act as a soporific; heads are observed nodding dully thruout the courtroom and one is led to wonder whether, if he were allowed to continue, there would not be a sort of fairy-tale scene in which the surprised visitor to the court would see audience, jury, lawyers, judge, prisoner and functionaries buried in deep slumber accompanied only by a species of hypnotic twittering which could be traced eventually to a dignified youth who was lulled to sleep by his own narcotic burblings but continued, mechanically, to utter the same question over and over again." during this dreamy questioning black asked about the men who were cleaning up the boat on its return trip, with a view to having the witness state that there were empty shells all over the deck. his question was: "did you pick anything up from the floor?" instantly the courtroom was galvanized into life by collin's startling answer: "i picked up an eye, a man's eye." the witness had lifted from the blood-stained deck a long splinter of wood on which was impaled a human eye! the story of fred savery was typical of the unrecognized empire builders who make up the migratory class. fred was born in russia, his folks moving to austria and then migrating to canada when the lad was but two years old. at the age of nine he started at farm work and at twelve he was big enough to handle logs and work in the woods. savery took the stand in his uniform of slavery, red mackinaw shirt, stagged-off pants, caulked shoes, and a battered slouch hat in his hand. the honest simplicity of his halting french-canadian speech carried more weight than the too smooth flowing tales told by the well drilled citizen deputies on whom the prosecution depended for conviction. cooley dwelt at great length on the constant travel of this witness, a feature incidental to the life of every migratory worker. even the judge tired of these tactics and told the prosecution that there was no way to stop them from asking the interminable questions but it was merely a waste of time. but all of cooley's dilatory tactics could not erase from the minds of the listeners the simple, earnest, sincere story fred savery told of the death of his fellow worker, hugo gerlot. charles ashleigh was then placed upon the witness stand to testify to having been selected as one of the speakers to go to everett on november th. he stated that he had gone over on the interurban and had returned that afternoon at four o'clock. after the prosecution had interrogated him about certain articles published subsequent to the tragedy ashleigh was excused. to impeach the testimony of william kenneth, wharfinger at the city dock, the defense then introduced peter aikken of everett. following this witness owen genty, one of the i. w. w. men wounded on the verona, gave an account of the affair and stated that the first shot came from a point just to the rear of the sheriff. raymond lee, a youth of years, told of having gone to everett on the day of the beverly park affair in order to mail free speech pamphlets directly to a number of everett citizens. he went to the dock at the time of the deportation, getting past the deputies on a plea of wanting to see his uncle, his youth and neat appearance not being at all in accord with the current idea of what an i. w. w. member looked like. lee was cross-questioned at great length by veitch. this witness told the story of the death of abraham rabinowitz on the verona in these few, simple words: [illustration: view of beverly park, showing county road.] "rabinowitz was lying on top of me with his head on my leg. i felt my leg getting wet and i reached back to see what it was, and when i pulled my hand away it was covered with blood. he was shot in the back of the brain." james mcroden, i. w. w. member who was on the verona, gave corroborative testimony about the first shot having been from the dock. james francis billings, one of the free speech prisoners, testified that he was armed with a colts revolver on the verona, and shortly after the shooting started he went to the engineer of the boat and ordered him to get the verona away from the dock. he threw the gun overboard on the return trip to seattle. black tried to make light of the serious injuries this witness had received at beverly park by asking him if all that he received was not a little brush on the shin. the witness answered: "no sir. i had a black eye. i was beaten over both eyes as far as that is concerned. my arms were held out by one big man on either side and i was beaten on both sides. as sheriff mcrae went past me he said 'give it to him good,' and when i saw what was coming i dropped in order to save my face, and the man on the left hand side kicked me from the middle of my back clear down to my heels, and he kept kicking me until the fellow on the right told him to kick me no more as i was all in. my back and my hip have bothered me ever since." black tried to interrupt the witness and also endeavored to have his answer stricken from the testimony but the judge answered his objection by saying: "i told you to withdraw the question and you didn't do it." vanderveer asked billings the question: "why did you carry a gun on the fifth of november?" "i took it for my own personal benefit," replied billings. "i didn't intend to let anybody beat me up like i was beaten on october th in the condition i was in. i was in bad condition at the time." harvey e. wood, an employe of the jamison mill company, took the stand and told of a visit made by jefferson beard to the bunkhouse of the mill company on the night of november th and stated that at the time there were six automatic shot guns and three pump guns in the place. these were for the use of james b. reed, neal jamison, joe hosh, roy hosh, walter s. downs, and a man named mccortell. this witness had acted as a strikebreaker up until the time he was subpoenaed. two of the defendants, benjamin f. legg and jack leonard, fully verified the story told by billings. leland butcher, an i. w. w. member who was on the verona, told of how he had been shot in the leg. when asked why he had joined the i. w. w. he answered: "i joined the i. w. w. to better my own condition and to make the conditions my father was laboring under for the last years, with barely enough to keep himself and family, a thing of the past." another of the defendants, ed roth, who had been seriously wounded on the verona, gave an unshaken story of the outrage. roth testified that he had been shot in the abdomen at the very beginning of the trouble and because of his wounded condition and the fact that there were wounded men piled on top of him he had been unable to move until some time after the verona had left the dock. this testimony showed the absurdity of mcrae's pretended identification of the witness. roth was a member of the international longshoremen's association and had joined the i. w. w. on the day before the tragedy. john stroka, a lad of , victim of the deputies at beverly park and a passenger on the verona, gave testimony regarding the men wounded on the boat. the next witness was ernest p. marsh, president of the state federation of labor, who was called for the purpose of impeaching the testimony of mayor merrill and also to prove that mrs. frennette was a visitor at the everett labor temple on the morning of november th, this last being added confirmation of the fact that clyde gibbons had committed perjury on the stand. to the ordinary mind--and certainly the minds of the prosecution lawyers were not above the ordinary--the social idealist is an inexplicable mystery. small wonder then that they could not understand the causes that impelled the next witness, abraham bonnet wimborne, one of the defendants, to answer the call for fighters to defend free speech. wimborne, the son of a jewish rabbi, told from the witness stand how he had first joined the socialist party, afterward coming in contact with the i. w. w., and upon hearing of the cruel beating given to james rowan, had decided to leave portland for everett to fight for free speech. arriving in seattle on november th, he took passage on the steamer verona the next day. prosecutor black asked the witness what were the preparations made by the men on the boat. "don't misunderstand my words, mr. black," responded wimborne, "when i say prepared, i mean they were armed with the spirit of determination. determined to uphold the right of free speech with their feeble strength; that is, i never really believed it would be possible for the outrages and brutalities to come under the stars and stripes, and i didn't think it was necessary for anything else." "then when these men left they were determined?" inquired black. "yes, determined that they would uphold the spirit of the constitution; if not, go to jail. there were men in everett who would refuse the right of workingmen to come and tell the workers that they had a way whereby the little children could get sufficient clothing, sufficient food, and the right of education, and other things which they can only gain--how? by organizing into industrial unions, sir, that is what i meant. we do not believe in bloodshed. thuggery is not our method. what can a handful of workers do against the mighty forces of maxim guns and the artillery of the capitalist class?" "did you consider yourself a fighting member?" questioned black. "if you mean am i a moral fighter? yes; but physically--why, look at me! do i look like a fighter?" said the slightly built witness. "did you or did you not expect to go to jail when you left portland?" asked the prosecutor. "my dear mr. black, i didn't know and i didn't care!" responded wimborne with a shrug of his shoulders. wimborne joined the i. w. w. while in the everett county jail. michael j. reilley, another of the defendants, testified as to the firing of the first shot from the dock and also gave the story of the death of abraham rabinowitz. vanderveer asked him the question: "do you know why you are a defendant?" "yes, sir," replied reilley, "because i didn't talk to them in the city jail in seattle. i was never picked out." attorney h. d. cooley was recalled to the stand and was made to admit that he was a member of the commercial club and a citizen deputy on the dock november th. he was asked by vanderveer: "did you see any guns on the dock?" "yes sir." "did you see any guns fired on the dock?" "yes sir." "did you see any guns fired on the boat?" "no sir." "did you see a gun on the boat?" "i did not." "you were in full view of the boat?" "i was." yet the ethics of the legal profession are such that this attorney could justify his actions in laboring for months in an endeavor to secure, by any and all means, the conviction of the men on the boat! defendant charles black testified that mcrae dropped his hand to his gun and pulled it just as one of the deputies fired from a point just behind the sheriff. black ran down the deck and into the cabin, passing in front of the windows from which the deputies had sworn that heavy firing was going on. leonard broman, working partner with abraham rabinowitz, then took the stand and told his story. when asked what were the benefits he received from having joined the i. w. w., the witness replied: "they raised the wages and shortened the hours. before i joined the i. w. w. the wages i received in ellis, kansas, was $ . for twelve hours and last fall the i. w. w. got $ . for nine hours on the same work." ex-deputy charles lawry told of various brutalities at the jail and also impeached mcrae's testimony in many other particulars. dr. grant calhoun, who had attended the more seriously injured men who were taken from the verona on its return to seattle, told of the number and nature of the wounds that had been inflicted. on eight of the men examined he had found twenty-one serious wounds, counting the entrance and exit of the same bullet as only one wound. veitch conducted no cross-examination of the witness. joe manning, j. h. beyers, and harvey hubler, all three of them defendants, gave their testimony. manning told of having been seated in the cabin with tracy when the firing commenced, after which he sought cover behind the smokestack and was joined by tracy a moment later. beyers identified deputy bridge as having stood just behind mcrae with his revolver drawn as tho firing when the first shot was heard. this witness also corroborated the story of billings in regard to demanding that the engineer take the boat away from the dock. hubler verified the statements about conditions on the verona and also told of being taken from his jail cell by force on an order signed by detective mclaren in an attempt to have him discharge the defense attorneys and accept an alleged lawyer from los angeles. [illustration: thomas h. tracy] harry parker and c. c. england told of injuries sustained on the verona, and john riely stated there was absolutely no shooting from the cabin windows, that being impossible because the men on the boat had crowded the entire rail at that side. jerry l. finch, former deputy prosecuting attorney of king county, gave impeaching testimony against wm. kenneth and charles tucker. cooley asked this witness about his interviews with the different state's witnesses: "if you talked with all of them, you would probably have something on all of them?" the judge would not let finch answer the question, but there is no doubt that cooley had the correct idea about the character of the witnesses on his side of the case. in detailing certain arrests sheriff mcrae had claimed that men taken from the shingleweavers' picket line were members of the i. w. w. b. said was one of the men so mentioned. said took the witness stand and testified that he was a member of the longshoremen's union and was not and had not been a member of the i. w. w. j. g. brown, president of the international shingleweavers' union, testified that the various men arrested on the picket line in everett were either members of the shingle weavers' union or else were longshoremen from seattle, none of the men named by mcrae being members of the i. w. w. the testimony of brown was also of such a nature as to be impeaching of the statements of mayor merrill on the witness stand. charles gray, robert adams, and joe ghilezano, i. w. w. men on the verona, then testified, adams telling of having been shot thru the elbow, and ghilezano giving the details of the way in which his kneecap had been shot off and other injuries received. the murderous intentions of the deputies were further shown by the testimony of nels bruseth, who ran down to the shore to launch a boat and rescue the men in the water. he was stopped in this errand of mercy by the deputies. civil engineer f. whitwith, jr., of the firm of rutherford and whitwith, surveyed the dock and the steamer verona and made a report in court of his findings. his evidence clearly showed that there was rifle, shotgun and revolver fire of a wild character from the interior of the warehouses and from many points on the dock. he stated that there were one hundred and seventy-three rifle or revolver bullet marks, exclusive of the b-b and buckshot markings which were too numerous to count, on the verona, these having come from the dock, the shore, and the improvement dock to the south. there were sixteen marks on the boat that appeared as tho they might have been from revolver fire proceeding from the boat itself. there were also small triangular shaped gouges in the planking of the dock, the apex of the triangles indicating that bullets had struck there and proceeded onward from the klatawa slip to the open space on the dock where deputies had been stationed. the physical facts thus introduced were incontrovertible. defendant j. d. houlihan gave positive testimony to the effect that he had not spoken privately with "red" doran in the i. w. w. hall on the morning of november th, that he had received no gun from doran or anyone else, that he did not have the conversation which auspos imputed to him, that he had no talk with auspos on the return trip. all efforts to confuse this witness failed of their purpose. in verification of the testimony about deputies firing on the verona from the improvement company dock the defense brought percy walker upon the stand. walker had been cruising around the bay in a little gasoline launch and saw men armed with long guns, probably rifles or shotguns, leaning over a breastwork of steel pipes and firing in the direction of the verona. lawrence manning, harston peters, and ed. j. shapeero, defendants, told their simple straightforward stories of the "battle." peters stated that as he lay under cover and heard the shots coming from the dock he "wished to christ that he did have a gun." shapeero told of the wounds he had received and of the way the uninjured men cared for the wounded persons on the boat. mrs. joyce peters testified that she had gone to everett on the morning of november th in company with mrs. lorna mahler. the reason she did not go on the verona was because the trip by water had made mrs. mahler ill on previous occasions. she saw mrs. frennette in everett only when they were on the same interurban car leaving for seattle after the tragedy. albert doninger, w. b. montgomery and japheth banfield, i. w. w. men who were on the verona, all placed the first shot as having come from the dock immediately after the sheriff had cried out "you can't land here." n. inscho, chief of police of wenatchee, testified that during the time the i. w. w. carried on their successful fight for free speech in his city there were no incendiary fires, no property destroyed, no assaults or acts of violence committed, and no resistance to arrest. h. w. mullinger, lodging house proprietor, john m. hogan, road construction contractor, edward case, railroad grading contractor, william kincaid, alfalfa farmer, and john egan, teamster, all of north yakima and vicinity, were called as character witnesses for tracy, the defendant having worked with or for them for a number of years. the defense followed these witnesses with oscar carlson, the passenger on the verona who had been fairly riddled with bullets. carlson testified that he was not and never had been a member of the i. w. w., that he had gone to everett with his working partner, nordstrom, as a sort of an excursion trip, that he had purchased a one way ticket which was taken up by the captain after the boat had left seattle, that he intended returning by way of the interurban, and that the men on the boat were orderly and well behaved. he told of having gone to the very front of the boat as it pulled into everett from which point he heard the first shot, which was fired from the dock. he fell immediately and while prostrate was struck with bullet after bullet. he then told of having entered suit against the vashon navigation company for $ , . on account of injuries received. robert c. saunders, of the law firm of saunders and nelson, then testified that he was handling the case for carlson and had made out the affidavit of complaint himself and was responsible for the portion that alleged that a lawless mob were on the boat, carlson having made no such statement to him at any time. charles ashleigh was recalled to the stand to testify to having telephoned to the seattle newspapers on november th, requesting them to send reporters to everett the next day. he was followed on the stand by john t. doran, familiarly known as "red" on account of the color of his hair. doran stated that he was the author of the handbill distributed in everett prior to the attempted meeting of november th. he positively denied having given a gun to houlihan or anyone else on november th. upon cross-examination he said that he was in charge of the work of checking the number of men who went on the verona to everett, and had paid the transportation of the men in a lump sum. as the next to the last witness on its side of the long-drawn out case the defense placed on the stand the defendant, thomas h. tracy. the witness told of having been one of a working class family, too large to be properly cared for and having to leave home and make his own way in the world before he was eleven years old. from that time on he had followed farming, teaming and construction work in all parts of the west, his bronzed appearance above the prison pallor giving evidence of his outdoor life. tracy told of having been secretary of the i. w. w. in everett for a short time, that being the only official position he had ever held in the organization. he explained his position on the boat at the time it docked, stating that the first shot apparently came from the dock and struck close to where he was sitting. immediately the boat listed and threw him away from the window, after which he sought a place of safety behind the smokestack. he denied having been in any way a party to a conspiracy to commit an act of violence, or to kill anyone. "you are charged here, mr. tracy," said vanderveer, "with having aided and abetted an unknown man in killing jefferson beard. are you guilty or not guilty?" "i am not guilty," replied tracy without a trace of emotion. the cross-questioning of the defendant in this momentous case was conducted by citizen-deputy cooley. his questions to the man whom he and his fellow conspirators on the dock had not succeeded in murdering were of the most trivial nature, clearly proving that arch-sleuth mclaren had been unable to discover or to manufacture anything that would make tracy's record other than that of a plain, unassuming, migratory worker. "where did you vote last?" asked cooley. "i never voted," responded tracy. "never voted in your life?" queried cooley. "no!" replied the defendant who for the time represented the entire migratory class. "i was never in one place long enough!" then, acting on the class theory that it is an honor to be a "globe-trotter" but a disgrace to be a "blanket-stiff," the prosecutor brought out tracy's travels in minute detail. this examination of the railroad construction worker brought home to the listeners the truth of the little verse: "he built the road; with others of his class he built the road; now o'er its weary length he packs his load, chasing a job, spurred on by hunger's goad, he walks and walks and walks and walks, and wonders why in hell he built the road!" then there hobbled into the court room on crutches a stripling with an empty trouser leg, his face drawn with suffering, and who was able to get into the witness chair only by obviously painful efforts with the assistance of vanderveer and judge ronald. this was harry golden, whose entire left leg had been amputated after having been shattered by a high-power rifle bullet fired by a "law and order" deputy. golden stated that he had been born in poland twenty-two years before, and had come to the united states at the age of sixteen. he was asked: "why did you come to this country?" "i came to the united states," said the witness, "because it is supposed to be a free country." "we object to that as immaterial!" cried prosecutor veitch. the witness described the firing of the first shot and told of his attempts to find a place of safety. he said he was wounded in the hand as he attempted to climb into a life boat. he remained on the starboard side of the starboard life boat until the verona had backed out into the bay. then just as he was starting to raise up a rifle bullet struck his leg, taking a course thru the limb and emerging at the knee. "that is on your left--?" "on my left, yes, which i ain't got; i lost it!" said the witness. "did i understand you to say you stood up to see something before you were shot?" asked veitch. "why, sure!" replied golden contemptuously. "i had my two legs then." veitch wished to learn the exact location of the witness at the time he was shot and to that end referred to the model with the remark: "look here. here is the boat as it was at the dock." "i don't like to look at it!" said golden heatedly. "i lost my leg on that boat!" [illustration: everett from the water. to the left g. n. depot from where bystanders viewed battle.] the witness was in evident pain during the examination, having just had a hospital treatment applied to his raw stump, and was rather irritable as a consequence. he answered several questions rather sharply and proceeded to explain his answers. at one of these interruptions judge ronald exclaimed to the witness angrily: "when he asks you a question answer yes or no! if you want to live in this country try and live like an american!" "i take an exception to your honor's remarks!" said moore emphatically. the judge grudgingly allowed an exception to his uncalled for statement. in concluding his examination veitch asked the witness: "what is your name in polish?" "i am not polish; i am a jew," replied golden. "well, what is your family name in poland?" asked the prosecutor. "goldenhaul, or something like that. now i call myself golden. when we come to this country--." "never mind," interposed veitch hurriedly. "when we come to this country for good luck we always change the name, you know," finished golden, and added bitterly, "i sure did have good luck!" this ended the case in chief for the defense, the marshalling of such a mass of testimony from a host of disinterested witnesses, men, women and children, putting it on an entirely different footing from the prejudiced testimony brought forward by the prosecution. in rebuttal of testimony produced by the defense the prosecution introduced a series of witnesses. as in their case in chief every one of the parties who testified were in some way concerned in the case as deputies, jailers, police officers, dance hall habitues, detectives, and the like. the witnesses were w. p. bell, dr. f. r. hedges, e. e. murphy, charles hall, rudolph weidaur, w. j. britt, percy ames, harry blackburn, reuben westover, harry groger, w. m. maloney, albert burke, w. r. conner, a. e. andrews, david d. young, howard hathaway, george leonard mickel, paul hill, e. c. mony, b. h. bryan, all of whom were deputies, d. c. pearson, w. h. bridge, and "honest" john hogan, all three jailers and deputies, robert c. hickey, city jailer, david daniels and adolph miller, police officers, charles manning and j. t. rogers, personal friends of mcrae, oscar moline, dance hall musician, albert mckay, of the ocean food products company located on the everett improvement dock, t. j. mckinnon, employe of mckay, r. b. williams, contractor, john flynn, agent everett improvement dock, w. w. blain and f. s. ruble, secretary and bookkeeper respectively of the commercial club and also deputies, a. e. ballew, great northern depot agent, h. g. keith, great northern detective, charles auspos, who was shown to be in receipt of favors as state's witness, and george reese, pinkerton informer and "stool pigeon." one deputy, h. s. groger, stated on cross-examination that he continuously fired at a man on the boat who appeared to be trying to untie the spring line. outside of this evidence of a desire for wholesale slaughter nothing developed of sufficient importance to warrant the production of sur-rebuttal witnesses, except in the testimony of auspos and reese. auspos testified that defendant billings in the presence of john rawlings had stated in the everett county jail that he had a gun that made a noise like a cannon. this was intended to controvert the testimony of billings. reese related a conversation that tracy was alleged to have carried on in his presence on the verona as it was bound for everett. he stated that a launch was seen approaching and someone remarked that it was probably coming to head them off, to which tracy replied "let them come; they will find we are ready for them, and we will give them something they are not looking for." this was intended as impeachment of tracy. cross-examination of this informer brought out the fact that he was a pinkerton agent at the time he was holding the office of delegate to the central labor council of the american federation of labor. reese stated that he was employed on the waterfront during the longshoremen's strike with instructions to "look for everybody who was pulling the rough stuff, such as threatening to burn or attempting to burn warehouses, and shooting up non-union workers, and beating them up and so forth." he had been in the employ of the pinkerton agency for six weeks this last time before he was ordered to go down and join the i. w. w. he stated in answer to a question by vanderveer: "i was instructed to go down there and find out who these fellows were that was handling this phosphorus and pulling off this sabotage and the only way i could find out was to get a card and get in and get acquainted with them." attorney moore in the absence of the jury offered to prove that reese had practically manufactured this job for himself by promoting the very things he was supposed to discover. moore stated some of the things he would prove if permitted by the court: "that on or about august st reese went to one j. m. wilson, an official of the longshoremen's union, and endeavored to get $ . with which to buy dynamite to blow up a certain city dock; that on september th the witness gave percy may, a member of the longshoremen's union, a bottle of phosphorus with instructions to start a fire at pier ; that in the month of july the witness opposed a settlement of the longshoremen's strike and when members of the union argued that they could remain out no longer as they had no money, reese clapped his pockets and said, 'you fellows wouldn't be starving if you had the nerve that i have got. why don't you go out and get it, take it off the scabs the way i do;' that in september feinberg had to make reese leave the speaker's stand in everett because he was talking on matters harmful to industrial union propaganda; that on november th the witness went to the place where feinberg was employed and left a suit of clothes to be pressed, saying to feinberg, after he had ascertained that feinberg was thinking of going to everett on the following day, "mark the bill 'paid' so i will have a receipt if you don't come back;" that on august th, the day before the big dock fire in seattle, reese went to the down-town office of the same dye works in which walker c. smith was manager and in charge of the purchase of chemicals and tried to get smith to purchase for him some carbon disulphide to be used in connection with phosphorus; that in the month of november in the labor temple, in the presence of sam sadler, reese had said to albert brilliant that if the longshoremen had any guts they would go out with guns and clean up the scabs on the waterfront; and that reese tried to get other men to co-operate with him in a scheme to capture a government boat lying in the sound during the progress of the longshoremen's strike." the court refused to allow the defense to go into these matters so the only showing of the true character of reese was confined to examination as to the perjury he had committed in his initial sworn statement to the defense. the sur-rebuttal of the defense occupied but a few minutes. it was admitted that mr. garver, the court reporter, would swear that reese had made an initial statement to the defense counsel and that the same had been taken down stenographically and sworn to. charles tennant, captain of the detective force of the seattle police department, testified to having telephoned to the sheriff's office in everett on november th to give the information that a boatload of i. w. w. men had left for everett. he did not describe the body of men in any way and had not said that they were armed. this was for the purpose of showing that somewhere between the time that jefferson beard received the message and the time it was transmitted to the deputies some one had inserted the statement that the men on the boat were heavily armed. john rawlings, defendant, testified that no such conversation as that related by auspos had occurred in the presence of defendant billings. thomas h. tracy denied making the threats ascribed to him by reese, and this closed the hearing of evidence in the case. outside the courtroom on the day the last of the evidence was introduced there was in progress one of the largest demonstrations of labor ever held in the pacific northwest. the date was may first, and international labor day was celebrated by the united radicals of the entire city and surrounding district. meeting at the i. w. w. hall at : in the morning, thousands of men and women fell into a marching line of fours, a committee pinning a red rose or carnation on each marcher. fifteen solid blocks of these marchers, headed by wagner's band, then wended their way thru the streets to mount pleasant cemetery and grouped themselves around the graves of baran, gerlot and looney--labor's martyred dead. there, upon the hillside, in accordance with his final wishes, the ashes of joe hill were scattered to the breeze, and with them were cast upon the air and on the graves beneath, the ashes of jessie lloyd and patrick brennan, two loyal fighters in the class struggle who had died during the year just passed. a fitting song service, with a few simple words by speakers in english, russian, swedish, hungarian and italian, in commemoration of those who had passed away, completed the tribute to the dead. nor were the living forgotten! the great crowd drifted from the graveside, but hundreds of them reassembled almost automatically and marched to the king county jail. standing there, just outside of the very heart of the great city, the crowd, led by the i. w. w. choir, sang song after song from the revolutionary hymnal--the little red song book, each song being answered by one from the free speech prisoners confined in the jail. the service lasted until late in the day and, to complete the one labor day that is as broad as the world itself, a meeting was held in one of the largest halls of the city. at this meeting the final collection for the everett prisoners' defense was taken and at the request of the imprisoned men one half of the proceeds was sent to aid in the liberation of tom mooney and his fellow victims of the merchants' and manufacturers' association in san francisco. there remained but the reading of the instructions of the court and the addresses by the counsel for either side to complete this epoch making case and place it in the hands of the jury for their final verdict. chapter viii. pleadings and the verdict the instructions of the court, carefully prepared by judge j. t. ronald, required sixty-five minutes in the reading. these instructions were divided into twenty-three sections, each section representing a different phase of the case. herewith is presented the first section in its entirety and a summary of the remaining portion: "ladies and gentlemen of the jury: "my responsibility is to decide all questions of law in this case; yours to decide one question of fact. with these instructions my responsibility practically ends, your commences. you have taken a solemn oath that 'you will well and truly try and true delivery make between the state of washington and the prisoner at the bar, whom you have in charge, according to the evidence.' "there is no escape from the responsibility which has come to you, save in the faithful effort to render a true verdict. any verdict other than one based upon pure conscience will be an injustice. an honest juror yields to no friendship, nor bears any enmity. he is moved by no sympathy, nor influenced by any prejudice. he seeks the approval of no one, nor fears the condemnation of anyone--save that one unerring, silent monitor, his own conscience. disregard this whispering voice in yourself and you may fool the public, you may fool the defendant, you may, hereafter, with some effort, even close your own soul to her whispering reproaches and enjoy the ill-earned plaudits of the selfish or biased friend or interest whom you sought to please, but be assured you will not change the truth, you will not deceive justice which, at some time, and in some way, will collect from you the penalty which is always sooner or later exacted from those who betray the truth. "so let me urge that in deciding the issue of facts which is now your responsibility you be guided by these instructions which you have sworn to follow, and by their conscientious application to the evidence in this case. "do not permit yourselves to be swayed by sympathy, influenced by prejudice, or moved in the least by a consideration of what might or might not meet the approval or the condemnation of any person or class of persons, or of interest whatever. to do so will be an act alike dishonest, violative of your oath, substituting for a fair and impartial trial an unfair and a partial one. this is an epoch in your lives to which you will ever look back. be sure that when you do you may face the smiling approval of your conscience rather than its stinging reproach. "the guilt or innocence of this defendant is a single question of fact to be determined by the evidence alone. if this evidence shows defendant to be guilty, then no sympathy, no desire for approval, no fear of condemnation, can make him innocent; if the evidence fails to show him guilty, then no prejudice, no desire for approval, no fear of condemnation, can make him guilty. the issue is a momentous one, not only to the defendant, who, if innocent, deserves the deepest sympathy, for the accusation made against him is a serious one; but likewise to the public and to society at large, and the tranquility and security of our different communities. "a false verdict against the defendant conflicts with the purpose and the laws of the state as effectively as a false verdict in his favor. the state has no higher duty or interest than to preserve all its citizens from suffering under unfounded accusations. if, on the other hand, the guilt of the defendant has been shown, a false verdict of acquittal would not only be a breach of your oaths, but it would inflict a grievous wrong upon the state. if a true verdict calls for conviction, the misfortune to the defendant is not in the verdict, nor in the penalty, but in the fact it was his conduct which makes the verdict true. you alone of all the world, and who now possess all the facts, are therefore responsible for the verdict in this case. the law is not concerned about conviction merely--but it is concerned, deeply concerned, that juries shall conscientiously and fearlessly declare the truth. whether it be conviction, or whether it be acquittal, a true verdict is justice--a false is injustice." judge ronald followed this lecture on civic righteousness and personal duty with more specific instructions to the jury, of which the following are excerpts. "in this case you must answer the question--is this defendant guilty or innocent? * * * keep constantly in mind this issue and do not go astray to discuss any other of the many issues that may be suggested by or may lay hidden among the great mass of evidence in this case. whether the industrial workers of the world shall or shall not speak at a certain place in the city of everett is not an issue here. * * * whether the open or the closed shop shall prevail is not a subject for your consideration. "every defendant in a criminal case is presumed to be innocent. * * * you must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt of the facts necessary to show guilt before you can convict. * * * you should give the phrase 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' its full meaning and weight as explained and defined to you in these instructions. on the other hand, you should not magnify nor exaggerate its force and fail to return a verdict of guilty simply because the evidence does not satisfy you of guilt to an absolute certainty. no crime can be proved to an absolute certainty. "it does not follow because every one of the facts which are disputed between the parties may not be established beyond a reasonable doubt, that there cannot be a conviction. at the same time you will bear carefully in mind that all facts which are necessary to establish the conclusion of guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. "there are two facts necessary to convict this defendant: ( ) that some person on the boat unlawfully killed jefferson beard. ( ) that this defendant aided, incited or encouraged such shooting. "if you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt of these two facts, then you must convict, no matter what may be your belief concerning any other question in dispute in this case; if you have a reasonable doubt as to either of these two facts, then you must acquit." the instructions then went into detail as to the rights of the workers to organize, to bargain in regard to compensation, hours of labor and conditions of work generally, to go on strike, to persuade or entice their fellow workers by peaceful means from taking the positions which they have left, to assemble at public places where such meetings are not prohibited by law and ordinance, and "no person, either private citizen or public official, has any right to deny, abridge or in any manner interfere with the full and free enjoyment of those privileges and any person who attempts to do so is himself guilty of an unlawful act." after reciting such acts attributed to the workers in this case as were in violation of law, the instructions went on to state that "a sheriff has no authority to arrest any person without a warrant except upon probable cause for believing such person has violated a law of the state; nor has he authority after making such arrest to hold his prisoner in custody for a longer time than is reasonably necessary to cause proper complaint to be filed, and an opportunity given for bail. * * * a sheriff has no right or authority to interfere with or prevent any person from violating a city ordinance, nor has he the right or authority to arrest for violations of city ordinances" unless "the act threatened, or the act done, in violation of such ordinance be at the same time violation of a state law." the instructions then outlined the scope of criminal conspiracy, stating that it was unnecessary for one conspirator to know all of the other conspirators but that common design is the essence of the charge of conspiracy. the acts of one conspirator become the acts of any and all conspirators. in the eyes of the law the sheriff and the deputies also constituted in this case but one personality, the sheriff being bound by the acts of his deputies and the deputies being authorized by the powers of the sheriff. also the ordinance dated september st, , was held to be a valid one. "now whether any of the industrial workers of the world have been, prior to november , , guilty of encouraging disrespect for law, or of unlawful assemblage, or of riot, is not the question on trial here. they could all be guilty of all the acts or offenses heretofore mentioned, and still this defendant be innocent of this particular crime charged on november th, or they could all be innocent of all the acts mentioned, and defendant still be guilty of the main charge here. "again, whether the sheriff or any of his assistants have been guilty of any of the acts charged against them is not on trial here. they could all be guilty of all the acts charged and still be the victims of unjustifiable shooting from that boat, or they could all be innocent of any offense, and still be the aggressors and cause of that shooting on the dock wherein jefferson beard lost his life. "one of the questions in this case is the question--which side was the aggressor on that occasion? "in determining who was the aggressor it is your duty to consider all the facts and circumstances surrounding the situation, the relations of the parties to each other, their intentions toward each other, and all the things they did. you will also consider the past conduct of all the parties, any acts of violence or other assaults that may have been committed, and any threats that may have been made, and the character as known and understood by each other. [illustration: victims at morgue. john looney hugo gerlot, felix baran abe rabinowitz] "therefore, simplify your deliberations and determine first the question: did somebody on the boat unlawfully kill jefferson beard? if somebody on the boat did not kill beard, then of course tracy could not be guilty of aiding john doe to do something which john doe did not do. but if the state has satisfied you beyond a reasonable doubt that beard was killed by a shot fired by somebody on the boat, then such killing is either unlawful, in which case john doe would be guilty of one of three degrees of unlawful or felonious homicide, viz., murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, or manslaughter; or it is justifiable in which case john doe would not be guilty. hence you will render one of four verdicts in this case-- . guilty of murder in the first degree, or . guilty of murder in the second degree, or . guilty of manslaughter, or . not guilty. "it is very desirable that you reach a verdict in this case. the law requires that your conclusion shall be unanimous. it is not required that any one of you should surrender his individual freedom of judgement, but it is well that each of you should have in mind that your true verdict cannot ordinarily be reached except by mutual consideration and discussion of all the different views that may suggest themselves to any of your number. the jury room is no place for pride of opinion. a verdict which is the result of real harmony, or that growing out of open-minded discussion between jurors, and a willingness to be convinced, with a proper regard for the opinions of others, and with a reasonable distrust of individual views not shared by their fellows, is a fair yielding of one reason to a stronger one; such, having in mind the great desirability of unanimity, is not open to criticism. the law contemplates that jurors shall, by their discussions, harmonize their views if possible, but not that they shall compromise and yield for the mere purpose of agreement. one should not surrender his conscientious convictions. "and now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, i commit the case to your hands. listen to the arguments. regardless of what may be counsel's recollection of testimony, you must take and follow your own recollection. you are not required to adopt any view which counsel may suggest in argument, but you should give close attention to all they say. take up your task fearlessly, with but one single aim--to discharge the obligations of your oaths. you have no class to satisfy--simply the dictates of your own conscience." taken as a whole the instructions were distinctly unfavorable to the defendant, not because of any particular bias of the judge whose political ambitions might have made him desirous of establishing a record for fairness, but by reason of the fact that the law itself on the question of criminal conspiracy is archaic and absurd, being based upon precedents established when the use of electricity and steam power were unknown, when the stage coach was the fastest means of locomotion and the tallow dip the principal form of illumination. this law, like all other statute law, was created thru the desire of the ruling class to protect property, therefore it contained no element of justice when applied to the modern proletariat, the twentieth century worker stripped of everything but his power to labor. following the reading of the court's instructions prosecutor black made his argument, vanderveer and moore for the defense addressing the jury in turn, and cooley making the concluding plea for the state. this arrangement gave veitch no chance to turn loose his oratorical fireworks, much to the chagrin of the gentleman who had been so kindly loaned to the prosecution by the merchants' and manufacturers' association. black's lengthy address was a whine for pity because of his youth and a prayer for relief from the dire straits and legal bankruptcy into which snohomish county had fallen. it is summarized in the following: "we are at the close of a great trial. a great deal of evidence has been introduced; practically two million five hundred words. from the standpoint of the attorneys who have tried this case the evidence has been very complicated because it had in it a great mass of evidence that was only remotely connected with the real issue at bar. you as jurors have a very simple question to decide in this case. "thomas h. tracy is charged with the crime of murder in the first degree, not that he himself killed jefferson beard, but that he, thomas h. tracy, aided, incited and encouraged some unknown one to kill jefferson beard of everett, on last november th. "i repeat first that some person on the boat unlawfully killed jefferson beard; secondly that this defendant, aided, incited and encouraged such shooting. "i come before you as the prosecuting attorney of snohomish county. owing to the exigencies of politics i was elected to office a few days after november th, the time of this catastrophe. two months and a few days after, i took office and found a man charged with a crime that i did not have the power of prosecution over up to that time. mr. webb, then prosecuting attorney, who had started the action and initiated and seen fit to collect some of the evidence, was not able to complete the prosecution on account of the size of the trial. "i am a young man without the experience that any man ought to have in the prosecuting of a case like this, a case the size of which has never been experienced in the state of washington, and in many ways an absolutely pioneer case in criminal trials the world over. "so the state has been hampered in that at the outset a young man, a new prosecuting attorney, has come into office and to him there has come a case that no man could read up concerning, and a large piece of battle--it is the state's contention, a battle between hundreds of men on the boat and a large number of deputies on the dock, a battle absolutely and surely initiated by firing from the boat, but still a battle;--a case without parallel in the criminal history of this state or of the united states. "it happens that fortunately the state has had assistance in this case. the state of washington, thru its county commissioners, requested the assistance in this case of mr. cooley, whom you have all grown to know, a man who formerly for four years was prosecuting attorney of snohomish county, and who since that time has been associated as assistant counsel in practically all the criminal prosecutions of snohomish county that have required assistance. "and in addition to this the state has been fortunate in having, at the request of the county commissioners, the assistance of mr. veitch, a young man it is true, but one who thru years of service in the district attorney's office in los angeles county had experience in criminal trials, and especially because of his connection with what are known as the conspiracy murder trials in los angeles county, and also in assisting the federal prosecution at indianapolis. it has been necessary in this kind of a case for the state to have assistance. "now i told you my friends that i came here as prosecuting attorney of snohomish county. i am also a deputy prosecuting attorney of king county under mr. lundin. after i was appointed i was very unpleasantly surprised by one statement. a little phrase, 'without pay,' so that i don't know whether really i am a deputy prosecuting attorney or not, because i found that in public office a man always likes to see the warrant come at the end of the month! "you are a jury in this case from king county because the defendant and the other defendants filed an affidavit to the effect that they didn't expect that a jury selected in snohomish county would give the defendant a fair trial. the state is happy in your selection and knows that you will follow the dictates of your conscience and is likewise confident that you cannot help but believe that jefferson beard was killed by someone shooting from the verona, and that thomas h. tracy, alias george martin, incited, aided and encouraged in that shooting. "now, the witnesses on the dock are men of everett, men of family, men who are laborers, but with families; men who are clerks, with interests in snohomish county; men who hold some important positions, as lawyers; people with families, people who by residence have established reputation for truth and veracity; men who have established themselves, have made themselves successful, sometimes in merely that they have established a small home, or who have lived in everett and have made friends and acquaintances. that is the class of men that were on the dock. "there are only two classes of people who know anything about the shooting. the people on the dock are one set, and the people on the boat are the other. "the people on the boat, with but one or two exceptions, are men who have established no reputation for truth and veracity, have been successful in the world in no way, even from the standpoint of stable friends, living here and there, unfortunately; perchance, with some of them it is due to unfortunate circumstances and environments, and they have been unlucky, but still they haven't established stable friends in any community. "then there are the three boatmen on the boat--and those three men, unprejudiced, unbiased, not deputies and not commercial club members, but merely laborers, they know where the first shot came from, and they tell, and their testimony absolutely and entirely contradicts the testimony of the defense in this case from start to finish. "and when you look at that red face and red hair and that honest expression of big jack hogan john hogan here, and his honest blue eyes, it doesn't seem to me that you can have any more doubt than i have that jack hogan saw tracy. "now, these men that come on the stand all confess they had a common design. their common design they say, was that about two o'clock in everett they were going to speak at the corner of wetmore and hewitt avenues, that is their common design. "the court tells you that the purpose that they admit was unlawful, so tracy, by the testimony adduced in his favor, was one of the men having a common design for an unlawful purpose. tracy, regardless of his location, regardless of whether he fired or not, is guilty. "the sheriff and his deputies could have been guilty of everything claimed against them previous to this and the defendant still be guilty of helping and encouraging someone else to unjustifiably kill jefferson beard. "under the court's instructions there were acts done at beverly park that were unlawful. there is no question about that. instead of this being a weakness on the state's part, it seems to me that it is an added strength. because the i. w. w. used beverly park for what purpose? they jumped on it with desire, deeming it a fortunate circumstance because they wanted to inflame men to invade everett. they jumped on this, the men at the head of the conspiracy, they jumped on beverly park because they could use it to inflame their members. how do we know? their own statements! their telegrams! 'advertise conditions and send volunteers.' volunteers for what? volunteers for what? when a man represents things and so helps to make men mad he wants these men up there as volunteers for retaliation. and the court has instructed you that if these men went up there with the purpose of retaliating, they are guilty. tracy having been one of a common design makes it central, vital, in good conscience as citizens, that you return your verdict asked by the state. "any time a murder is committed it is important that prosecution be had and conviction secured. that is always vital from the standpoint of protection to society. the police, the sheriff's office, and the officials of all cities and states of the united states sometimes forget themselves, i take it, sometimes do things they shouldn't do, sometimes do things they should be censured for, but the fact that they had is no reason that murder is to be excused or justified, because if you did, we would have no society. that is true in an ordinary murder case. that is overwhelmingly true in this case. "the i. w. w. is an organization that realizes the great truth in combating government. they have stumbled upon an overwhelmingly successful instrument in fighting society. what is that? to commit a violation of the law in numbers, to violate the law by so many people that only a few can be prosecuted and even if they are convicted, the great majority go scott free. they built better than they knew when they stumbled upon the great secret that the violation of a law in great numbers would protect practically all of the violators. and this trial itself is proof of that. "snohomish county can ill afford the expense of this one trial; can ill afford the expense of two or three trials after this; would be overwhelmed with debt to convict all the men who are in this conspiracy, if there were a conspiracy it can't do it; most of them are safe from prosecution and they know it; and the only protection that snohomish county has, and king county has, and the state of washington has, and the united states has, is that when something happens like this a conviction be secured against a man who is guilty, not because you are convicting all, because you can't, you are helpless--but because that at least is the voice of warning to the men that if you lead an attempt you may be the one of the great number that will be caught. it is important from the standpoint of citizens of the state of washington to establish the principle that crimes cannot be committed by numbers with impunity, that while it is fairly safe, it won't be absolutely safe. we have no protection. that is the vital part of this case. we have no protection. [illustration: john looney] "if this case were just that of murder committed by one man acting alone, the importance of your verdict would be of small significance, compared with the importance of your verdict in a criminal case where the members are part of an organization. true, the society has no doubt a great many aims that are desirable to improve the welfare of the workingman. but it has one aim, one vital aim, in its platform to bring upon it the condemnation of thinking, sober men and women residing permanently in the state of washington, and that is sabotage. "we are not claiming that the killing of jefferson beard was in the exercise of sabotage. we are saying that sabotage along with the conscious withdrawal of efficiency, sabotage along with the destruction of property, may also mean crime. "the i. w. w. members did not come to everett for the purpose of employment; they were men who were wanderers upon the face of the earth, who desired to establish themselves nowhere, and none of them, as far as this witness stand is concerned, expected to work in everett or to put sabotage in effect in everett by working slow. the only way they could use sabotage in everett was by the destruction of property. the mayor became alarmed, and the sheriff, after their repeated threats in their papers. but whether you believe sabotage to be good, bad, or indifferent, really is not vital in this case except as a circumstance. "now, the wanderer. the wanderer did not happen the way they said it happened. the sheriff did shoot after they refused to stop. the sheriff did hit some of them with the butt of his gun. the sheriff brought them into everett because they constituted an unlawful assemblage. the sheriff did the only thing he could do. he filed charges against them and they were arraigned in court. twenty-three men cannot be tried quickly when each one demands a separate trial by jury. twenty-three trials would stop the judicial machinery for three months. they could not be tried and so the sheriff turned them loose. maybe he did hit them harder than he should have. policemen do that! sheriff do that! lots of time they hit men when it is not necessary. hit them too hard, sometimes. they don't always understand exactly what they are supposed to do. but the i. w. w. exaggerated the matter and used it to incite retaliation on the fifth. so the beverly park incident, and all other incidents, if true to the last syllable of the defense testimony, merely in this case extenuated the motive on november th. "now then, why did the state select tracy? the state's evidence was to the effect that tracy was not only a member of the conspiracy, but was firing. several state's witnesses recognized tracy. there was another reason. what was that? some of these men, some of these boys, flitting here and there from job to job, with never more than a dollar or two in their pockets, were inflamed intentionally by people who misrepresented conditions. they did not have any right to be inflamed; they did not have any right to go to everett and they are guilty of murder if they went up there to retaliate for any wrong, actual or conceived. but the state has preferred to put on first a man who was in the forefront of the conspiracy; the man that appeared to be an important cog of that conspiracy, and that man is tracy. "tracy knew that a great many people of everett were alarmed and disturbed. tracy knew that the i. w. w. did not want anything in everett, had no interests there, no friends there except as they were disturbing conditions. tracy knew the purposes and tracy went back to seattle so he could lead this excursion to everett. tracy is a man of determination. he knew the situation and he was prominent enough to be selected by the organization as a stationary delegate. and if any man knew what they intended to do in everett, it undoubtedly was tracy. so, regardless of whether he fired or not, tracy was one of the men who were on the inside. tracy is a part of the conspiracy that happened. but no man, my friends, on that boat, that went up there with a common design to break the ordinance has been sinned against because he is in jail. "now, my friends, you want in good faith to follow the instructions of the court. it seems to me that the only question you have to decide is the one the court told you to decide--was beard killed unlawfully by a shot from the boat, and did tracy aid, encourage or incite that killing? "the murder of jefferson beard was a premeditated murder. following the instructions of the court, separating the wheat from the chaff, and deciding that one question, we of the state are confident that you as jurors and good citizens, as honest, sincere and conscientious citizens, will protect snohomish county--we believe that your verdict will say 'we are convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that tracy is guilty, and, being so convinced, we are going to protect snohomish county as we would our own.' i thank you!" vanderveer handled the case from two different viewpoints--that of a first degree murder trial and also as a section of the class struggle. his address was a masterly array of invincible logic and satire. omitting his readings from the transcript of evidence, his speech was substantially as follows: "this cause is, as the counsel for the state has told you, one of momentous importance not only to the defendant but to a class--a large class of people of whom today he stands merely as an unfortunate single member, fighting their battle. "we do not ask in this case for mercy, we do not ask for sympathy, but it is essential, absolutely essential that we should have cold, stern justice; justice for the defendant, justice for those who have oppressed him, those who have denied him his rights. we hope this case is the beginning of a line of prosecution which will see that justice is done in the everett situation. "it is not the defense who outlined the issues in this case, it was the state who determined that. they have chosen their fighting ground, and we had to meet them on that battle. in the beginning of this case the state, thru mr. black, told you that it would prove a conspiracy of very formidable proportions, a conspiracy in the first place to commit acts of violence and to incite acts of violence, a conspiracy to commit arson, a conspiracy to overrun all law and order in everett and bring on a condition of chaos. the claim was a very formidable one. the evidence has been very silly. the state ought to apologize, in common decency, for ever having suggested these things. "what is the evidence about the fires? the fire marshall's report, made by a man who would naturally try to enlarge the performance of his duties and impress upon the public the manner in which he discharged them, reports only four fires of incendiary origin for the entire year. every one of these were discovered before they did five cents worth of damage. who had notice of them? was it the i. w. w. who set them or was it reese or some paid employe of the pinkerton agency? can you conceive that an organization embracing as many members as this does, bent upon the destruction of everett, could not set one fire at least that would do some damage. it is nothing but a hoax! "as to force and violence, who did they put on to prove it? young howard hathaway, a mere boy, whose father represents some mill companies in everett. then sheriff mcrae, and mcrae couldn't tell you one thing that he heard at the street meetings. then they put on ed hawes, the big brute that out at beverly called the little boy a coward, a baby, because he wouldn't stand there and be slugged with guns and clubs. and what did hawes say? that he looked up sabotage in the international dictionary! and you can search that book until you are black in the face and you won't find a word in there about sabotage. why, if sabotage is such a terrible thing, did hawes, having heard all about it at the street meeting, have to go home to look it up at all? "at these meetings there was not one thing said that could invite criticism, there was not one thing said that could justify or invite censure or abuse; there was not one disorderly thing done but was done by the officers of the law themselves, and they went in recklessly, without excuse, without right, they clubbed henig, they clubbed carr, a former member of the council, and they roughed women around and knocked them down. why? because these people were mill owners, their hirelings and their representatives, who had been instructed in the propaganda of the open shop by employes, aides and emissaries of the merchants' and manufacturers' association. "a lot of people went to the jail one night, a thousand, maybe. they hooted, they cat-called, and they hissed. is it any wonder they did? ladies and gentlemen, i want to tell you there is no surer verdict on earth than the verdict of a crowd; and the verdict of that crowd condemned what the deputies had done. "finally they say there was a conspiracy on the th of november to go to everett and to hold their meeting at all hazard, to brook no opposition, to ride rough-shod over it, to oppose everyone and anything that stood in the way of accomplishing their purpose. i ask you to think just for a moment how foreign that is to everything you know about the i. w. w. and their operations and behavior in everett. not one witness for the state could tell you an incident where one of them resisted arrest, could tell you an occasion where one of them had advocated violence, could tell you one occasion where any one of them had committed any acts of violence. "these people wrote to governor lister calling his attention to the violations of the law on the part of the officers of everett; they wrote to mayor merrill, enclosing a copy of that letter and calling on him to restore the order that had been violated by the officers of the law; they scattered handbills all over everett, among its best homes and in its business streets, calling upon the good citizens to come to their meeting on november th at wetmore and hewitt, to come and help maintain your own and our constitutional privileges; they mailed to the citizens of everett on october th, seven or eight hundred copies of a little pamphlet calling upon them to intervene and stop the brutality of officers of the law; they questioned governor lister at a public meeting and again called his attention to the conditions in everett; they called in the reporters, called the newspapers and notified the editors that they were going to everett and asked them to have representatives present: are these the acts of conspirators? "you know how that meeting was called and why it was called. you know it from ministers of the gospel, you know it from the lips of those whom you cannot help but believe. and it was called for sunday, the day when people ordinarily resent disorders of the kind that had occurred there. it was called for the daytime, when ordinarily abuse and violence are not attempted. and this big crowd went up there on this fine sunday afternoon because in number there is strength and in numbers there is protection against brutality. "at first the deputies had taken out one or two and abused and beaten them; then they had taken five or six; they had taken eighteen; finally they had taken forty-one. but i ask you, would you believe it possible that they could take two hundred or three hundred people in broad daylight and do to them what had been done to the others? yet the evidence in this case shows convincingly and conclusively they intended to do substantially that thing. they intended to run those men into a warehouse; they didn't intend to let one of them get away. and had they gotten them into that warehouse you don't know, i don't know, nobody knows what would have happened! "that is the evidence of conspiracy in this case. they have claimed no other conspiracy; they have offered no other evidence of conspiracy, either to set fires or to incite violence, or to override all opposition on november th. their evidence doesn't stand even if unanswered--and no evidence could be more successfully answered. "what evidence is there that tom tracy had anything to do with such a conspiracy, if there were one? their most willing tools, auspos and reese, don't say a word about tracy. "what does the identification by mcrae amount to? he identifies tracy as the man who leaned out of the window and shot at him. now at the time this shot was fired mcrae had his back turned to the man who shot it. he says himself he did, and he was shot thru the heel, which seems to prove it. that, by the way, suggests to me that it was not an i. w. w. who shot mcrae. the man who shot him must have thought mcrae a hero, like the gentleman of mythological fame who was killed by an arrow thru the heel which no i. w. w. does, i assure you. or else he thought that mcrae wore his brains there. "but i am not going to discuss mcrae at great length either now or at any other stage of this case, because the greatest kindness i can do him is to forget him. the man is a perjurer! he lied! he was not mistaken. he deliberately, cold-bloodedly lied about almost everything in this case wherein his conduct as an officer was questioned. he lied about 'sergeant' keenan! he lied about shooting at the "wanderer," and you saw the bullet holes. he lied about berg and about mitten, and finally, and last of all lied, and we have proven it conclusively, about being out to beverly park. "bridge's identification of tracy does not agree with that of smith, and bridge does not even agree with his own testimony given at the coroner's inquest. smith picked out a photograph and said it was tracy and that picture resembles tracy about as much as i do some of you jurors. bridge and smith say that tracy fired three shots, and hogan says he fired only one. and you know, ladies and gentlemen, that hogan did not see this man at all. you know that he did not even see the window at which he pretends this man was sitting when the shot was fired. you know it because you went there to the dock and you saw the boat lined up to a mathematical certainty by the shot marks, and you saw a photograph taken with the camera placed by john hogan exactly where he said he was standing himself. and there wasn't a one of you who could identify bob mills, with his long nose and angular features, with everything that makes identification easy, when he was in the position attributed to tracy. and when you came around from there to where you could look directly at the place, the reflected glare of the sunshine left nothing but a blank background. "there were one hundred and forty deputies looking toward the place where the first shot was supposed to have been fired. they have produced on the witness stand only about one in ten. we challenged them to bring them all on, we dared them to do it, and mr. cooley said 'i accept that dare!'--look it up mr. cooley on page of the transcript--but he did not dare accept that dare. mr. cooley knows what those nine-tenths would testify to. twelve out of their sixteen witnesses who testified about the first shots said that their brother deputies were mistaken as to even the place on the boat where the first three shots came from. "i venture, ladies and gentlemen, that with a bit of the kind of work the state has employed in this case, a little bit of the same zeal that was employed on auspos, a little bit of the same zeal that was employed with reese, a little bit of the help of mclaren of los angeles, i can take these one hundred and forty-five men and pick out four men who will honestly and truthfully testify that they saw anything, and i say that with no reflection on their honesty either, because the power of suggestion is enormous. it is not surprising that four people have come here to say they saw tracy. it is not surprising that three out of the four should have been proven, conclusively, convincingly and absolutely, not to know what they were talking about. [illustration: felix baran dark lines on body caused by internal hemorrhage; portland doctor said life might have been saved by operation.] "the court has told you that in this case it is not a question of who shot first, not a question of which side shot first, it is a question of who was the aggressor, who made the first aggressive movement, who did the first hostile thing. the man who did a thing to excite fear was the aggressor, and that man was mcrae when he pulled his gun. mcrae clearly did that before there was any shooting. "in determining who the aggressor was, you are entitled--not only entitled but must take into account the past behavior of all parties. and what does that show you? was it the i. w. w.'s who had never offered violence, who had never done an act of violence, who had decried and deplored violence, as members of their audiences told you, and advised caution against it? or was it mcrae and his deputies? "it is only formally correct to refer to these as deputies. they had commissions, but in nothing else in the world did they bear the remotest resemblance to officers of the law, not in their conduct, not in their training, not in their purposes, not in anything. they were the hirelings of either the mill owners of everett or the commercial club. did you ever in your life before hear of officials taking their instructions from representatives of an industrial movement? did you ever before hear of deputy sheriffs being instructed in the propaganda of the open shop, being instructed in the methods employed at minot unlawfully to prevent street speaking? that is where the first mistake in this case was made. first in the selection of that kind of men; second in the deliberate attempts which were made to color their actions, to pervert them, to make them the tools of the employers. "that is the reason henig and carr were beaten, that is the reason feinberg and roberts were beaten, that is the reason men and women were knocked down in the crowds, that is the reason that this boy, schwartz, was taken out by mcrae and chased zigzag down the road in mortal terror of being run down by the sheriff's automobile, that is the reason 'sergeant' keenan was hit over the head with a gun, that is the reason james rowan was taken out and beaten black and blue. how do you suppose rowan got those marks on his back? did he put them there for fun, or were they put there by somebody else's rotten, dirty brutality? if you didn't know a thing about him except what you know about beverly and these other incidents, and it was deep darkness where this happened, i venture you would all say off-hand, 'it must have happened at everett, anyway. there is no place else that i know of where they do such things.' "black says the "wanderer" has been greatly misrepresented to you, that the things we claim happened did not happen there at all. well, there is a lot of evidence that they did happen. there are a lot of people who could have denied it. there are a whole crew of deputies who could have come up here and denied it. why didn't they? because they were ashamed of it and they knew they could not stand the grilling that was awaiting them in the court room. it is true, certainly! and i say here that nothing but providential intervention prevented mcrae on that day from being a cold-blooded murderer! that is the manner of man you are considering. you are considering whether he was the aggressor, he or the people he shot at. "counsel says that louis skaroff lied. now i am very frank to confess that when we produced that story on the witness stand i feared you would not believe it, not because i doubted the truthfulness of his statement but because the story itself is so brutal and inhuman that i questioned whether there could be found anywhere in the county twelve persons who would think such things could possibly happen just thirty miles away. but when one of their own witnesses went on the stand here, in rebuttal, and told you that louis skaroff came out of that room with his arms above his head, crying, with the blood running from his finger tips, i knew that you knew that louis skaroff had told the truth. "the state has been very reluctant in this case to admit that there were rifles on the dock, because if the deputies went there with rifles there was a reason for it. you could not find a rifle on that dock until we proved--what? that rifle shells were around the dock in great numbers; we proved it by innocent, clean little boys who picked up the shells; until we proved by witnesses that the rifles were there and were being shot; until we proved by a rifle bullet with human blood and a man's hair on it that the use made of the rifles was a deadly one. "who was the aggressor? even now the state doesn't like to admit, because the state knows it is fatal to their case to admit, and notwithstanding hopeless to deny, that there were helpless men in the water being shot at. they do not like to admit that a man was so impressed with the inhumanity of the thing that he ran from the depot to the boat house hoping to effect a rescue of the men and was stopped by the armed deputies. the state does not like to admit the evidence of their own deputy witness, groger,--whose actions i want the counsel for the state to explain and justify if he can--who repeatedly fired at a man who was trying to untie the boat so the unarmed men could escape. "counsel said that if there was any intention to start trouble men would not have lined up as they were on the dock in an exposed position. and i ask you, if there was not an intention to start trouble why were they kept in the warehouse until the boat had almost tied up? if that was not an ambuscade, what on earth was it? if they did not intend to start trouble why was it mcrae waited until the line was out and made fast. why was it, then, he did not say to the captain, 'take your boat out?' he said he was afraid they would go somewhere else. well, when he told those boys they could not land he expected them to go away. or did he expect them to go away? which was it? "the manner in which mcrae handled this thing indicates nothing so much as that he intended to get them there and administer to them another of the things that he calls a lesson, another of the things that other people call infamous, damnable brutality. "counsel says there have been mistakes made. he doesn't want to apologize for them, but clearly he doesn't want to be held responsible for them. there were mistakes made. beverly was one! the "wanderer" was one! from the beginning to the end of all their operations in everett everything has been a mistake--a mistake because the ordinary processes of law and the rights of other people were ignored. there was no ordinance prohibiting speaking. the boys were yielding implicit, careful obedience to such law as there was. mcrae unblushingly tells you that the reason he made arrests was because there were labor troubles in everett and the shingle mill owners didn't want things embarrassed by the truth, by the disclosures contained in this little report of the industrial relations commission. "they were not afraid of the i. w. w.'s going up there to incite violence, to advise disorder, to invoke a reign of terror. reigns of terror are the employers' specialty! they were afraid of cold fact. never a man went up there to speak on the street and used that little industrial relations report but was thrown in jail for it--thompson, rowan, feinberg, roberts, all. "it's nice to enjoy the powers, the position and authority of a dictator who can repeal, amend and modify, ignore, disregard laws when it suits his fancy, but it's kind of tough on other people. that's what mcrae did! "on the th of march, nearly nine weeks ago, his honor called this case from his bench 'state versus thomas h. tracy,' and my friend mr. cooley rose from his chair and said 'your honor, the state is ready.' i say to you, mr. cooley, you slandered the fair name of your state! what has the state of washington to do with this thing? the name of the state of washington in such a case as this should stand for law and order and decency. the state is supposed to protect the innocent against abuse and injustice and you who are now running this case do not now maintain these things, or if you do, you protect them only when convenience requires it. "it is not the state of washington versus thomas h. tracy at all, and if the decent people of everett who know the facts could decide what course this action should take it would never be here. even the title of the case is a mistake. it is the case of the commercial club of everett, the mill owners of everett, against labor. this is an attempt, just as all the actions for months have been an attempt, to keep labor out of its rights in everett. the same people who took possession of the machinery of law in everett, who took possession of the sheriff and furnished him with guns and clubs and murderous things like that and instructed him how to act, the same people who employed detectives to set fires in order that they might manufacture evidence and public sentiment against these boys, those same people are today prosecuting this case. "i don't know where governor clough was on november th. i suspect he was not anywhere where there was any danger, but i know the smoke had not left the decks of the verona before he was hot-footing it to the telegraph office,--governor clough, not the prosecuting attorney, not the sheriff, nobody but clough and joe irving, the man who was so drunk that he beat up schofield,--to send a telegram to judge burke of the chamber of commerce of seattle, to the mayor of this city and to the chief of police of this city to arrest the whole bunch of them. "then right away they got their other emissaries at work, reese and smith, down here with two fingers out of the door of a darkened cell, deciding for the state of washington who should be prosecuted in this case, and h. d. cooley, who surely then was not a prosecuting attorney, giving them legal counsel and directing their energy, taking out the men, preparing statements, and getting ready for the work he was going to do in this case, because his employers wanted it. "there is a conspiracy in this case, a conspiracy supported by evidence, a conspiracy of men in the commercial club to take over the machinery of government, and by it club these fellows out of their rights, club them out of everett, club them out of all contact with the workers in order that they might not bring to them the gospel of their organization. "but i say to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this struggle, the struggle of capital against labor, the struggle of the commercial club against the i. w. w., which is just one phase of the bigger one, this struggle is going on in spite of cooley, this struggle is going on in spite of mclaren, this struggle is going on in spite of arthur l. veitch of the merchants' and manufacturers' association, this struggle is going on in spite of mcrae, this struggle is going on in spite of the commercial club, because it is founded on a principle so big, so wholesome, and so decent, so righteous, that it must live. and it will go on until in this country we have industrially that which we have struggled so long and hard for and finally won politically; until we have democracy. "there is nothing in revolution, gentlemen, that is wrong. we came to the condition in which we now find ourselves by revolution; first the grand american revolution and then the revolution against chattel slavery. it was nothing more nor less than revolution, because slavery was then entrenched under the highest law of the land, the decision of the supreme court in the dred scott case. we took it out of the courts and slavery was wiped out. slavery again will be wiped out! "the thing about this case which makes it of most serious importance, the thing about this case which makes it of public interest, the thing about this case which has so enlisted the sympathy of every one connected with it, which makes us feel the importance of a just verdict, is that it is not merely the liberty of a man that is at stake, but in a larger measure than you know there is at stake in your verdict in this case the rights of the working people, their right to organize, their right to protect themselves, their right to receive and enjoy the fruits of their labor. "there is involved the question of whether or not the working people shall receive justice or forever must be victimized by organized capitalists. there is involved the question of whether or not such things as have gone on in everett for the last six months may continue forever with the endorsement of the jury or whether the working people on the other hand may go and discuss their wrongs and grievances and strive for their rights. "as i have confidence in the righteousness of this cause and the integrity of this purpose, so i have confidence that your verdict will be not guilty." attorney fred moore closed the case for the defense with one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in a court room, a speech that seered its way to the minds and hearts of the jurors. far more than a defense of thomas h. tracy it was an explanation of the industrial problems underlying society, the class warfare rooted in industry and manifesting itself on november th. it was a sustained and definite statement of the aims and objects of the i. w. w. and moore showed, not only a great knowledge of the problems of the working class, but a wonderful command of satire and irony. following is an abridgement of moore's speech to the jury: "may it please the court, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury; for a period of something like five hundred years the anglo-saxon has seen fit to place the final adjustment of the question of justice in the hands of twelve men. in the evolution of the law, that number has been increased until now in this state we have fourteen. likewise, in the evolution of the law and in the face of the vast amount of public protest, and in the face of the most reluctant world, we have enlarged the term jurors to include women jurors. this is the first time that i personally have ever tried a lawsuit in which ladies sat in the jury. [illustration: hugo gerlot] "the state has told you why this case is one of grave responsibility for them. allow me to tell you why this is one of grave responsibility for you. one hundred and ninety-six witnesses have appeared for the defendant in this case. yesterday, counsel brought home the fact that many of these witnesses were not residents of this community, were without homes, without any permanent places of abode. all true. the responsibility that you have in this case is commensurate with the fact that the case reveals to you, as it were, a cross-section of our lives. you who are property-qualified have a responsibility to pass upon the liberties and the lives of a body of men who are propertyless. if there is any change in men's thoughts and views as they acquire a home, as they settle down, as they marry, as they bring into the world children, then i ask you in all fairness to attempt to put yourselves in the places of this defendant and of this defendant's witnesses who have taken the stand, and to realize that your responsibility here is commensurate with the fact that the testimony reveals, as it were, a most deplorable condition of modern life. in other words, your responsibility here is that of measuring out absolute and complete justice between warring elements in our modern life, not for one moment allowing your judgment to be swerved by the fact that one class of witnesses here are witnesses of social position, are witnesses of property qualifications, are witnesses with homes, while, on the other hand, the witnesses called by the defense were witnesses from the four parts of the earth, witnesses whose only claim to your consideration is that they have built the railroads, that they have laid the ties, that they have dug the tunnels, that they have harvested the crops, that they have worked from one end of the country to the other, in season and out, floating from job to job. "in most jurisdictions, the defendant has the opportunity of either a grand jury investigation or of a preliminary; in other words, he is in some degree advised of what evidence he is going to be called upon to meet. in this case, we came in here on the th day of march with no information whatsoever relative to the state's case other than that given us from the four corners of the instrument on file here, known as the information, together with the fact that on that information there were the names of some three hundred or more witnesses. that was all we had. we were further handicapped in view of the fact that we did not have behind us all the resources of the state of washington and the county of snohomish, neither did we have behind us all of the resources of various business interests, neither did we have behind us all the resources of allied business on this west coast, as represented by mr. veitch." mr. veitch: to which i take an exception, if the court please. the court: exception allowed. mr. veitch: on a matter of personal privilege, i have a right to characterize that statement as a deliberate misstatement of the fact. mr. moore: mr. veitch has not seen fit to explain why he was here. mr. veitch: i am employed by friends of mr. jefferson beard. if that is not enough-- mr. moore: that is outside of the record. the court: both of you are outside of the record. proceed mr. moore. "suffice it to say that we are here as the frank and honest representatives of the defendant and of the defendant's organization. we do not have behind us the power of the state, or the power of any interest other than the defendant himself and of his organization. "mr. black complained that the state had been hampered in this cause. is it fair to say that the state has been hampered when on the fatal november the th. judge bell and mr. cooley were both on the dock? judge bell would have us believe that he was unarmed, and so far as we know mr. cooley was unarmed. then why were they on the dock? judge bell was there as the representative, as he himself has testified, of a number of lumber mills, and mr. cooley was there likewise; both citizen deputies; both there; both unarmed if their testimony is to be believed. again mr. cooley was, in the matter of a few hours, down here at the seattle jail. certainly he was not there to represent the defendant tracy. who was he there to represent? he was either there in a private capacity, representing private clients, or he was there in a public capacity representing a public client, namely, snohomish county. wherein do you find the evidence of the state being hampered, sir? from the beginning to the end the state has moved majestically, exercising all the power that it had. mr. black has had able assistance in this cause, the able assistance of mr. cooley, the able assistance of mr. veitch, the able assistance of the man behind mr. cooley and mr. veitch, mr. mclaren. yet, all the resources of the state have failed to produce one scintilla of evidence against the defendant tracy here so far as tending to indicate that he did counsel, aid, incite, abet, or encourage anyone to fire any shot, except the testimony of george reese produced at the eleventh hour on rebuttal. i intend to treat of our friend mr. reese later. "it is significant that out of all that mass of testimony that has been introduced in this case up to this time not one single bit of testimony has been introduced or any argument had upon that testimony dealing with the object and principles and purpose of the industrial workers of the world. mr. black did not refer to it. mr. cooley has the final say. i anticipate his argument for the state. they have that old reliance, that old faith, if you will, in the trial of a case of this character, namely conspiracy; hallowed by age. "way back in the sixteenth century the tub women on the banks of the river thames were indicted for conspiracy in attempting to raise wages. the chandlers in london were likewise later indicted. the stonebreakers in new york, the carpenters in boston. from time immemorial the charge of conspiracy has been leveled against the ranks of labor. indeed, it was only in the reign of queen victoria that labor unions became other than simple conspiracies. up to that time labor unions were within a classification themselves of criminal conspiracy. "knowing that under the charge contained in the information we might be called upon to meet evidence of conspiracy, we then commenced a careful survey of all the facts in connection with the everett tragedy. and what did we find? we found not a hint of conspiracy! [illustration: dead body of abraham rabinowitz.] "james rowan had come into everett without knowledge at the time that there was any trouble there. he had not been advised that there was any possibility of trouble. from all the prior history of everett he had no reason to anticipate trouble. thompson had spoken there and many others had spoken there. rowan was charged with a violation of the peddling ordinance. he had been given an arbitrary floater out of town and had exercised his right to come back, was seized again and taken to the city jail; the sheriff goes there and arbitrarily demands rowan from the chief of police. these things happened prior to any acts that by any remote possibility could be charged to us. there was no literature in the town at that time other than the industrial relations report. what at that time did we have to conspire about? we had no object. "and as with rowan so it was with thompson, remick and others. if there was a conspiracy to violate a city ordinance why did not the city officials make arrests and charge the men with such violations? the record is silent. why wait until tom tracy is on trial for murder, and then at the eleventh hour spring this delightfully specious argument? "i can almost hear ringing in my ears the impassioned plea of mr. cooley in closing this case. he is going to read this, 'the question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us.' he is going to say that is the i. w. w. philosophy. my god, did it ever concern the sheriff of snohomish county? does it seem very much to concern others who are attempting this prosecution? "we were told in connection with the argument of counsel that hickey was not on trial. they might have said that sheriff mcrae was not on trial; they might have said that bill pabst was not on trial; they might have said that joe irving was not on trial; they might have said that the commercial club was not on trial; they might have said that all the men that have been guilty of all the brutality in that county during the months of august, september and october were not on trial. we know it! why are they not on trail? "deprivation of due process of law and confiscation of property! and yet mr. cooley is going to urge that the i. w. w. does not believe in government; he is going to urge that the i. w. w. does not respect the law. that kind of law never gets the respect of anyone. i hang my head in shame before such a history of usurpation and seizure of public authority as has been shown in this case. "are you going to give the stamp of your approval to this sort of thing? when you bring in a verdict in this case for the state you give your approval to donald mcrae. i beg of you to not put the seal of your approval upon lawlessness, official lawlessness, the kind of lawlessness that is worse, tenfold worse, than any private lawlessness. "you are asked to stamp with your endorsement, to give your approval, to a man; a public official, the chief executive officer of a municipality, mayor merrill, who admits on the witness stand that he allowed a little group of members of the commercial club to take the power of the police department out of his office and turn it over to the sheriff of the county. "had the state put on governor clough and others on their side of the case we might have wrung from their reluctant lips the evidence of what occurred at the meeting on august th at the commercial club. but the state was careful not to put him on. indeed, the most significant and outstanding thing in all this case is not who they put on, but who they did not put on. neil jamison did not testify in this case for the state; governor clough did not testify in this case for the state; joe irving did not testify in this case; colonel hartley did not testify in this case; captain ramwell did not testify. why didn't kelly, chief of police, take the stand? you might go down the line and you will find that the assets of all the witnesses for the state combined would total but a few thousand dollars, while you could take the remaining witnesses for the state who did not testify and you could build up an enormous fortune, running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. we didn't call them because we cannot cross-examine our own witnesses. "is the administration of the law to be made a farce? shall the state be allowed to blow hot and cold; one minute hot on the enforcement of the law, the next minute cold when the shoe pinches, and then hot again when they can use the law for the advancement of the interests of their prosecution? they say mcrae and hickey are not on trial; there is no promise that they shall ever be on trial! "let me say to you that no one violates the law, i care not who it is, just for the fun of violating the law. jails are not pleasant places to abide in. people who violate the law and go to jail do so either because they are deliberately criminal or because they want to focus attention on some public issue. however, mr. black is too kind and considerate when he gives all this credit to the i. w. w. "the facts are, if you go back into the history of the revolutionary days, that our forefathers urged and banded together and combined and federated, and if you will, conspired to violate the stamp act of the british government, and were willing to go to jail if necessary. they went even further! they threw the british tea into boston harbor. violation of the law? yes, if you want to call it such, but the indignant protest of a people as against the enforcement of an unjust law. "i might urge upon you that the state at that time wanted to absolutely suppress any speech whatsoever, because they had constituted the chief of police, the sheriff, the arresting officer, as the executive, the legislative and the judicial department of our government. the sheriff executed the law in person, the sheriff declared the question of guilt himself, the sheriff ordered deportations, and the sheriff took physical charge of the deportations. isn't it impossible to avoid a fight when someone usurps unlawfully and illegally the legislative and judicial functions of government? isn't it time to fight? if it isn't then we may as well cease any attempt to administrate the law! "in the phraseology of these boys 'fight' means a moral adherence to principle, a firm determination to face the authorities in the administration of the law, and if necessary to be arrested. but the state would have you put into it now a more sinister meaning, entirely new and foreign to its former use. "the state brought in the death of sullivan of spokane in their opening and abandoned it in their close. one of the exploded hopes of the state! they counted on north yakima and wenatchee to show violence and arson, and they failed most miserably. they have failed in their identification of the defendant. now, their forlorn and bankrupt plea here is the charge of conspiracy. "the court has told you that this is a murder case. why then has the state cumbered the record with the i. w. w. preamble and constitution? why with two pamphlets on sabotage? why with an i. w. w. song book and such matters? why? "because out of some of the phraseology here, phraseology far removed from you and me, they may build up a condition of prejudice which may result in your returning a conviction on a smaller degree of evidence than you would otherwise require. mr. cooley is going to stand here and read little, short, listed extracts from the context of the whole. the pamphlets he has introduced on the question of patriotism and the worker is the foundation from which mr. cooley will appeal to your prejudices and passions. "we are not afraid of the evidence. we are afraid of this deep-grained interest that goes down into men's conscience and that reached back a thousand years. "remember that behind this case are many women and children whose cause these boys represent; whose cause these boys are attempting to fight for. they fight because they must! they fight because to do anything else is suicide. you could not have stopped the american revolution with all the powers of the british government. since this jury was empaneled you have had the collapse of one of the greatest powers of modern times. i refer to russia. it has passed from an absolute monarchy to a stage of a republic. "the trial of this cause is the presentation of a great social issue, the greatest issue of modern times, namely, what are we going to do today with the migratory and occasional workers? these migratories, they are the boys who have told their story on the stand. "if there is one principle that is ground into anglo-saxon thought it is that of liberty of the press and freedom of speech. those two things stand as the bulwark of our liberty. they are the things for which the anglo-saxon has fought from time immemorial. away back in the eighteenth century charles erskine, a member of the british bar, defended thomas paine for having written the 'rights of man'. case after case was fought out during that period when english thought was budding into fruition; when english thought was being tremendously influenced by the french revolution and when those thoughts were bearing fruit in england. time and time again the british crown attempted to throttle freedom of speech and liberty of the press. time and time again charles erskine's voice was raised in the house of lords in protest. time and time again the british courts and finally the british jurors, gave voice to the doctrine that freedom of speech and liberty of the press may not be invaded except insofar as that subject, that document, is accompanied with acts; that you may not convict men for what they think; you may convict men only for what they do. freedom of discussion thru the press and thru the public forum are the mainstay and the backbone of social development and social evolution. only in that way, thru freedom of thought and freedom of discussion, may you fan the wheat from the chaff. "why, if this i. w. w. literature is all the state claims it is, why doesn't the state act in the way the law says they should act, prefer charges, arrest someone, bring the literature before a duly qualified body, a court with jurisdiction, and try the matter out? the state has not done that; the state will not do that; and we are in the position of a man fighting in the dark, without knowledge of what character of argument the state proposes to make. "i do know that the name of joe hill is going to be paraded in front of this jury. the i. w. w. song book dedicated to joe hill, with the inscription 'murdered by the authorities of the state of utah, november th, .' i cannot go into the conditions that surround that tragedy, but i can call your attention to one or two things that bear upon the question of the type of the man. before he died, written in his cell on the eve of the execution, was joe hill's last will: my will is easy to decide, for there is nothing to divide. my kin don't need to fuss and moan-- moss does not cling to a rolling stone. my body? ah, if i could choose, i would to ashes it reduce, and let the merry breezes blow my dust to where some flowers grow. perhaps some fading flower then would come to life and bloom again. this is my last and final will. good luck to all of you, joe hill. "this is the type of man you are asked, because he was honored, because some odd hundred thousand workers who suffer and who wander and who live in the jungles of labor as he did, and because he wrote songs that they understood, songs that because their songs, to judge as the author of the songs and bring in a verdict against tom tracy. mr. cooley will parade the songs one by one. remember that behind any words he voices, any thought he expresses, behind it all was a human soul, a human soul passed, a human soul that lived as you and i, a human soul that had rights that had been trampled upon, and who attempted to voice those things. "with all the oratory he can display mr. cooley will read the song, 'christians at war.' a song that mr. thompson designated as a satire. you recollect that when the european war broke out both parties in that conflict called to their aid and said they were acting under divine guidance; that the kaiser was fighting under the name of god, and that the british and french governments were allied with the almighty. it is not for me to attempt a settlement of that dispute. history will say that of all the tragedies of the twentieth century, the most tragic thing of our modern life is that we of different nationalities, but bound together by all other ties, should be engaged in a death grapple. but that is not the issue here. but i cannot at this time anticipate wherein and how this literature presented by the state helps you to decide the question of who was the aggressor on november th. "who was the aggressor on july st when james rowan was arrested and brought into the city court? mcrae comes in and tells him to get out of town. an intervening series of events and levi remick is run out of town. who was the aggressor? sheriff mcrae! on august nd rowan and remick were both in the union hall. mcrae comes in and orders them out of town. who was the aggressor? that night thompson and others came up to everett--who was the aggressor then? next morning, with kelly treating them half way white, along comes mcrae and takes away one of the boy's money. who was the aggressor? we come now to the deputies meeting at the commercial club on august th. who was the aggressor? had any of their members been beaten up? had anything happened to their members whatsoever? not at all! yet murderous blackjacks were put into the hands of the membership of the club. was james rowan the aggressor when he was railroaded out of town and beaten? who was the aggressor at the time of the 'wanderer' outrage? old capt. mitten, old john berg, edith frenette? who was the aggressor with henig? with feinberg? with roberts? you have the testimony of cannow, you have the testimony of schofield, you have testimony showing the instructions given to the deputies. no one denies it. here is a series of acts leading up to october th, in which on each and every occasion mcrae and his deputies, either regular or citizen deputies, were the aggressors. i said, who were the aggressors? is there any question in your mind who was the aggressor up to beverly park? any question in god's world who had done the dirty work up to that time? the state would have you believe that the i. w. w., with its membership coming from the four corners of the country, changed complexion practically over night, changed their whole ideas and their methods. i do not believe it and you do not believe it. [illustration: part of prisoners of county everett wn. released may , .] "the excuse the state gives for the actions of the deputies is that in the case of large numbers they could not give due process of law. gentlemen, i refuse to believe that the government is bankrupt in its capacity to protect itself thru legal and lawful measures of law enforcement. i have yet to sit in a court room and hear a plea on social and governmental bankruptcy such as is the plea of counsel for the state. "the machinery of the government was there but it was not the kind of machinery that mcrae wanted to use. it was not the kind clough wanted to use. it was not the kind of machinery the executive committee, whoever they were, sitting behind the closed doors of the commercial club, wanted to use. "and these members and leaders of the commercial club passed resolutions stigmatizing their own citizens, member of their own community, property owners in their own town, as well as the i. w. w., when they declared for an open shop. how do they stigmatize them? 'professional agitators!' yes. lloyd garrison was a professional agitator. wendell phillips was a professional agitator. the men who fought the battle that lay the ground work that made abraham lincoln possible, the men who are at work to better american politics, those men have all been professional agitators. "now on the boat they were ninety-nine percent i. w. w.'s, just a few passengers had bought their passage before. on the dock they were all citizen deputies, persons interested therein, and persons satisfactory to the men who had been stationed there to see that nobody but the right ones got on the dock. that means that as far as the first shot was concerned the two classes of witnesses are in some degree interested parties. the state put on a total of twenty-two witnesses, one of them not a deputy, all of whom testified that the shot came, or they thought it came from the dock, and of that number thirty-seven were i. w. w.'s, and twenty-four were not members at all but were everett people from all walks of life. "now counsel is going to discount the value of the testimony of these citizens. well, mr. cooley, we used the only kind of witnesses that you, in all of your care exercised in advance on november th, left for us. in the exercise of the highest degree of judicial advance knowledge they saw to it that nobody got any closer to the end of the dock than the landing. we could not help that. you barred us from the dock; you barred us from access to the facts. we did all we could to get the facts, and if we couldn't get any closer it was not our fault. and the man who barred us from access to the facts is the man who is least qualified to come into court now and urge that our witnesses are disqualified in the face of the evidence that they disqualified them. but those witnesses could testify, and they did testify, to the very definite and specific facts--the first tipping of the boat, the rushing of the men, the volley firing, all of those matters. "at the eleventh hour there came into this case a man by the name of reese, a member, if you will, of the i. w. w. back in the chicago stockyards they have a large pen where they keep the cattle which are to be driven to slaughter. in that place they have had for years a steer that has performed the function of going into the big pen where all the cattle are, and, after mingling with them, then walking out thru a gate. he is trained to do it, he is skilled at it, this steer--and after walking around with the poor peaceful cattle that don't know they are about to be killed, this steer then goes up an incline, the gate is opened and the other cattle follow, and when he gets to the top of the incline there is a door and he turns to the right thru this door to safety and his followers turn to the left to death. that's george reese! proud of him? george reese, the man who reported day by day with his confederates! to whom? during one period to the pinkerton agency in regard to the longshoremen's union; during another period on behalf of the pinkerton agency to the commercial club in everett. george reese! a man who doesn't even come under the approximately dignified title of a detective; a man whom ahern, of his own agency says, 'well, he wasn't a detective, we used him as an informer.' informer! a human being that has lost its human color. "in connection with the testimony of reese let me call your attention to the industrial relations commission report, a report that our friends of the commercial club had read and knew all about: "'spies in the union: if the secret agents of employers, working as members of labor unions, do not always instigate acts of violence, they frequently encourage them. if they did not they would not be performing the duties for which they are paid. if they find that labor unions never discuss acts of violence they have nothing to report to those employing them. if they do not report matters which the detective agencies employing them can use to frighten the corporation to cause their employment, they cannot continue long as spies. either they must make reports that are false, in which case discovery would be inevitable, or they must create a basis on which to make a truthful report. the union spy is not in business to protect the community. he has little respect for the law, civil or moral. men of character do not engage in such work, and it follows that the men who do are, as a rule, devoid of principle and ready to go to almost any extreme to please those who employ them.' "that is the descriptive adjective, definition and analysis of the character of union informants made by the national industrial commission, appointed by president wilson, and composed of nine men, all men of national standing, three representatives of labor, three representatives of capital and three representatives of the general public. that is their definition, description and classification of that character of testimony. "mr. vanderveer closed yesterday by saying that this struggle, whatever your verdict is, will win. if yours is a verdict of 'not guilty,' tom tracy must take up again the job of finding a job, the endless tragedy of marching from job to job, without home, wife or kindred. his offense consists of being a migratory worker. i beg of you to render a verdict that has due regard and consideration for the tragedy of our twentieth century civilization that does not as yet measure out economic justice. "your verdict means much. the wires tonight will carry the word all over this land, into australia, new zealand and thruout the world. your verdict means much to the workers, their mothers, their children, who are interested in this great struggle. we are not in this courtroom as the representatives of one person, two persons or three persons; our clients run into five or six hundred thousand. we are here as the mouthpiece of the workers of america, organized and unorganized, and they are all behind our voices. "tom tracy stands here in your control. you are the ones to determine whether or not he shall walk out free, whether or not he shall be branded for all times with the most serious felony known to the law, namely, that of a murderer. can you find it in the evidence to bring in a verdict of guilty in this case? [illustration: singing to the prisoners.] "in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, we want no compromise here. when you retire to your jury room i beg of you not to compromise with any verdict other than not guilty. we don't want manslaughter in this case, we don't want second degree murder in this case; it is either first degree murder or an acquittal, one or the other. allow none of those arguments that we, as lawyers, know are made in the juryroom to influence your honest verdict in this case. we ask at your hands, and we believe with all the sincerity of our souls, that the evidence warrants it, we ask a verdict of not guilty for the defendant, thomas h. tracy!" if the speech of prosecutor black was a whine, that of prosecutor cooley was a yelp and a snarl. apologies, stale jokes, and sneers at the propertyless workers followed one another in close succession. the gist of his harangue was as follows: "in this case i am going to try simply in the closing argument to select a few of the monuments that it seems to me stand out in this case and that point a way to a proper verdict. "now, in the first place, a whole lot has been said here as to the nature of the controversy that existed for a number of months before november the th, , between two classes of individuals there at everett. upon the one side were the people who were living in the city of everett, who had made their homes there, who had come there for the purpose of carrying out their future destiny in that city. it was their home. their interests were there. their families were there. and upon the other side were a class of people who did not claim everett as their home, who did not come there for the purpose of amalgamating with the citizenship of the city of everett. they were not coming there because they had work there, nor because they were seeking work there; they were not citizens of everett, nor were they seeking to become citizens of everett, and there arose a controversy between the citizens of everett on the one hand and these people from the four corners of the earth upon the other. the first thing we want to inquire into to find out if we can from the testimony in this case exactly what was the nature of that trouble that existed between them. why was it that upon the one hand there was a band of people congregated down here in the city of seattle from all over the land and making one excursion after another, attempting to break into the city of everett? why was it that there were citizens of everett up there seeking to do only one thing, asking only one thing, that these people keep away from everett? "was it a fight to win the right of free speech on the one hand? was it a fight on the other hand of a group of individuals who were simply seeking to force the open shop? or was it a fight of a more serious nature on either hand? "i grant you that the origin of the trouble arose because a man was seeking to speak upon the streets of everett and he was stopped. but long before november th that original incident was lost sight of and forgotten. the controversy had grown to a magnitude that overshadowed the original incident. it was necessary in order that you might understand the situation with which the people of everett were confronted that you should be apprised of the nature of the organization to which those people belong, that you should be apprised of the nature of the place in the world that they had attained, and that you should be apprised of the nature of their propaganda that they were seeking to inject into the city of everett and that locality. "i want to say right here and now that i have the highest regard for organized labor. labor has the right to organize. there is not any question about it; there is not any dispute about it. labor has organized and it has made a manful fight, and all down the pages of history you will find that labor, thru its organization and thru its lawful methods pursued under its organization, has gradually bettered its condition. "it is not a question, and never has been in this case, as to the right of the labor men to organize; the right of the laboring man to use all of the lawful methods for the purpose of bettering his condition. the question in this case is as to whether any organization, whether it be a labor organization or any other, has the right to use unlawful methods; whether it has the right, because it may have the power, to use unlawful methods. "now there were coming into the city of everett people representing this organization known as the industrial workers of the world. what was the propaganda that they were seeking to introduce there? they put upon the stand their chief exponent in this part of the country, to tell you what their purpose was in coming to the city of everett, and what the doctrines were that they were teaching to the people that congregated there in the city of everett. mr. thompson was upon the stand for about two days, and he delivered to this jury a lecture, which he says was a resume of three lectures that he gave up there in the city of everett. he was asked whether or not he talked on sabotage and he told you what he had to say about it. he said sabotage was 'a conscious withdrawal of efficiency, a folding of the arms.' but thompson says it is never the destruction of property, and yet the organization that sends him out to talk on sabotage puts out right along with him the literature that has been adopted by the i. w. w. as a part of their propaganda, defining what sabotage really is and it gives the lie to mr. thompson. it may mean working slow; it may mean poor work; it may mean folding of arms; it may mean conscious withdrawal of efficiency. so far sabotage is legal and anyone has a right to use it. but it may mean the spoiling of a finished product, it may mean the destruction of parts of machinery, it is the destruction of property. 'sabotage is a direct application of the idea that property has no rights that its creators are bound to respect.' it does not say that certain kinds of property has no rights, but that there is no property that has any rights that are bound to be respected. but thompson says that is not sabotage. "sabotage is what? where is that old song book? let us see whether it means simply the folding of the arms. (cooley dived into a mass of pamphlets, but being unable to locate the song book he came up with elizabeth gurley flynn's pamphlet on sabotage, reading from it as follows:) 'sabotage itself is not clearly defined. sabotage is as broad and changing as industry, as flexible as the imagination and passions of humanity.' why, if it consisted simply of a folding of the arms, if it consisted simply of the withdrawal of efficiency, there would not be much flexibility to it, would there, and the passions of humanity would have nothing to do with it? that language means that sabotage means anything that the imagination can devise and the passions of men adopt, if they had the power to use it and get away with it. oh, it is not wrong! no matter what form it takes it is not wrong, because they say so in their official publication. 'the tactics used are determined solely by the power of the organization to make good in their use. the question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us.' put the two together. legality and illegality, those terms have no meaning to a man of the industrial workers of the world. why? because there is no law that they are bound to respect except the law that is made by them in their own union hall. it is in the song book, 'make your laws in the union hall, the rest can go to hell.' that is the class of people that we had to deal with, who were coming there to everett. "in spokane there were twelve hundred convictions upon a valid ordinance, and yet, after they had convicted a hundred of them they didn't stop coming, and two hundred, and two hundred and fifty, and five hundred, and they continued coming there until the city jail of the city of spokane was filled, until the county jail of spokane county was filled, until an old deserted school house was filled, and then until an army post jail was filled. a species of sabotage! they weren't willing to accept the verdict of one jury, or ten juries, or of a hundred juries, that they were violating the law. they had made their laws in their union halls and they were going to speak at a certain place, upon a certain street of spokane; and they were going to compel the citizens of spokane to let them speak when they pleased, where they pleased, and say what they pleased; and they kept it up until after spokane had the expense of a thousand trials and had upon its hands a thousand defendants it began to think it had better yield and let them speak when they pleased, where they pleased and say what they pleased. and spokane was licked! [illustration: charles ashleigh speaking at the funeral, of looney, baran and gerlot.] "is it any wonder that the citizens of everett said 'if you have no regard for law we will meet you on your own ground; we are not going to be bankrupted; we are not going to be hammered into defeat as they were in spokane; we are not going to have you sabotage us in that manner by your numbers; we are not going to have your people coming from the dakotas, from montana, from oregon, and from all over the various parts of the state of washington, and camping down on us until we surrender to you. we are going to keep you out of here.' now, that may not have been strictly legal, but it was human nature. "there is not hint anywhere in the argument of either counsel for the defense in this case as to what was ever done in the city of everett by the i. w. w. that would constitute new methods and new tactics. do you remember the testimony over a period of time there before labor day that they allowed them to speak without interference and a meeting was held there and every time they went up with a chip on their shoulder and were not satisfied when no one interfered with them. when they were there speaking on the corner of hewitt and wetmore somebody was going around the city of everett distributing a nasty stinking chemical in the theater building, into the store buildings, into the business houses, into the automobiles. and the paper in the next issue gloats over it and intimates that the reason the officers did not arrest feinberg was because they were evidently too busy chasing a cat of malodorous tendencies. when thompson was upon the stand and was being questioned about sabotage and about cats; he could tell you what a cat was, he got a bit halting in his speech when he was asked what it meant when they said that the claws of the cat had been sharpened, when he was asked what a 'sabcat' meant, but when he was asked as to what a cat of 'malodorous tendencies' was he said he didn't know unless it was a skunk. but by that was meant that the skunk accomplishes sabotage. you never heard of a skunk that did sabotage by simply a withdrawal of efficiency, never! "now as to incendiary and phosphorous fires. fire chief terrell tells you that up to the date of september th, the date of the first known phosphorous fire in everett, that up to that time, in all of his experience upon the fire force of the city of everett, it never had come to his knowledge or observation in any way that a phosphorous fire had ever occurred in the city. it occurred there, known to be a phosphorous fire, and within a period of two months at least two other fires occurred, mysterious, the origin unknown because the fire had progressed to such an extent that no one could tell how it did start." mr. vanderveer: didn't your detective go to work september st? mr. cooley: yes sir, he did. "and they would have you believe that the detective was up there setting those fires. that, i know, is an insinuation not supported by any evidence in this case, and the detective wasn't working up there, he was operating down here in the city of seattle. he was sending his reports to blain before the wanderer started out, before the men started out on october th, and that goes a good way to explain how it happened how these people were met on these different excursions and were not permitted to come within the city of everett. they were trying to get into the city of everett, to use their own judgment, to act on their own initiative, according to instructions that had gone out. and the officers stopped the thing before it started. "what were they coming to everett for, these forty-one men who were met? were they coming to hold a street meeting? forty-one men, enthused with the enthusiasm of the belief in their grand and glorious doctrine that they are teaching, forty-one men starting out as crusaders to carry the gospel of their organization to the benighted of everett, forty-one going up there to be martyrs, to be beaten for the cause, and nothing else! "i have told of the tactics and methods advocated, used and encouraged, by this peculiar, particular organization, so you can judge the character, purpose and intentions of the individuals that were seeking from time to time to force themselves into the city of everett, in order that you may judge the two hundred and sixty that left on the verona on november the th. "but there is another matter you should likewise take into consideration in determining the character of the individuals of that crowd. regardless of all environment, regardless of the effect of all legislation, regardless of all social conditions, men are born--not all with the same propensities, not all with the same natural ambitions, not all with the same qualifications, and out of the entire mass of humanity there is a certain percentage that were born without any ambition, born without any incentive; they go thru life without any incentive, constantly tired. now i am not here to say that all the i. w. w.'s are that kind of people. i am not here to say that because a man is a member of the i. w. w. he is a tramp or a hobo. but there is a class that has been recognized in this country ever since the country existed, a class that don't want to work, that would not work if you gave them an opportunity. these are a percentage, i don't know how large, and i say that every one of these people are members of the i. w. w. organization or should be. why? well, in the first place, you don't have to show any qualification for any line of work. you don't have to make proof of anything whatever to become a member of that organization. and is there any inducement for a man who has been drifting here and there, walking the ties, counting the mile posts as he walks from one place to another, to join that organization? it gives him a pass upon every freight train that travels the length and breadth of the land. one of the best inducements in the world. "there is another class of people in this country that are born with criminal instincts implanted in their very natures; they are scattered all over this land and we have them with us and we will always have them with us. there are men who are driven to crime thru misfortune; there are men who commit crime under the influence of environment; but there is a percentage of men who are habitual, natural and instinctive criminals. now i don't say that because a man is a member of the i. w. w. he is necessarily and instinctively a criminal, but i do say that every habitual, instinctive criminal, who knows that he intends to violate the law upon every opportunity to satisfy his own criminal desire, has every inducement to become a member of that organization. "there are a few uncontested and undisputed facts in connection with the occurrence at the dock. jefferson beard was killed on that dock. no doubt about that! the defendant was on the boat. no question about that! there is no question that the conversation between mcrae and the people on the boat occurred substantially in the language that you have heard repeated here by witnesses for the state and for the defense, all agreeing that the conversation preceded the shooting. there is no dispute that mcrae turned partially away from the boat and that one of the first three shots fired hit mcrae while he was turning. the burden of the whole argument of the defense was that when somebody on the boat saw mcrae put his hand on his gun he was justified in shooting. it is not material whether tracy shot jefferson beard or somebody else. it is not material whether tracy fired a gun or not, provided the evidence in this case satisfies you beyond a reasonable doubt that tracy was a party to the conspiracy to go up to the city of everett to violate an ordinance of the city of everett. "but have you any doubt that tracy was seen on the boat? hogan saw the window and he saw a man with his face at the window shooting in his direction. hogan wasn't thinking of the exact angle at which the boat was standing to the dock, but he knows he was standing at such an angle to the boat that he could see a man in a certain place on the boat. and he testified he did see him. "it wasn't thomas tracy that was looking out of that window, it was martin. it wasn't thomas tracy dressed for the occasion, it wasn't thomas tracy shaven for a picnic, it wasn't thomas tracy wearing a sunday countenance, it wasn't thomas tracy gazing placidly out of a mild blue eye! it was thomas tracy, alias martin, with his face drawn down into a scowl of hatred, with his eyebrows lowering over his eyes, gazing at john hogan, not only gazing at him thru a window, but gazing at him over a gun! and if there is anything that would impress itself into the memory and recollection of a man it is the remembrance of a face filled with venomous hatred, the eyes shooting daggers at you while he is gazing at you over the muzzle of a gun--and you are not going to forget that! "counsel for the defense says this is an important trial, that important questions are involved, that the verdict in this case will have a great deal to do with the ultimate future of the working man and organized labor. i don't think that matters of that kind should enter the minds of the jurors in arriving at a verdict, but if it does, i want to supplement what counsel for the defense has said. i want to say that in my mind a verdict in this case will have much to do with the future success and the future advancement of honest labor in every line and in all organizations. it will have much to do with clarifying the situation insofar as this one organization is concerned. every organization don't preach the doctrines that are preached by this organization, and if this jury by its verdict does not support that kind of method and that kind of procedure it will aid in purifying an organization that otherwise might do a world of good, but as it stands today, uttering the propaganda that it does, pursuing the tactics that it does it, is a menace not only to society, but is a menace to the welfare of the other labor organizations that believe in pursuing lawful methods, in a lawful manner. this is an important case in that regard. "i believe that it is a fortunate thing that a jury of king county and a jury from the city of seattle should have been called to try this case. the seed was not planted in snohomish county! the plot was not hatched in snohomish county! it was hatched down here in seattle. the expedition started out from seattle, not this one alone but many of them. seattle was the base, the enemy's base, and it was from here that they started. just down here almost in sight of this court house is the place where we claim the plot was formed, and it has come back here, and we come into court and lay it at your feet. they returned here, they have brought the case here for trial, and we are satisfied. now we lay it before you and say,--'as citizens of seattle do justice to the city of everett and snohomish county.'" with these words ringing in their ears the twelve jurors retired for their deliberations, the court having entered an order discharging from further service the two alternate jurors, efaw and williams. retiring shortly before noon, the jury consulted for nearly twenty-two hours, taking ballot after ballot only to find that there were some who steadfastly refused to agree to any compromise verdict. then, shortly after nine o'clock on may th, two full calendar months after the start of the trial and just six months to the day from the time of the tragedy of the verona, foreman james r. williams announced the result of their deliberations, and the word sped out to the many hundred thousands who had spent an anxious and sleepless night; "we, the jury, find the defendant, thomas h. tracy, not guilty!" chapter ix. solidarity scores a success "i. w. w. not guilty!" in this headline the daily papers of seattle, washington, gave the findings of the jury. with an unbroken series of successful prosecutions of labor to the credit of the merchants and manufacturers association this, the first great victory for the working class on the pacific coast, was a bitter pill for the allied employers and open shop interests to swallow. with tracy freed and the i. w. w. exonerated, there was nothing for the snohomish county officials to do but to release the rest of the free speech prisoners. yet the same contemptible spirit that had marked their actions from the very start of the trouble led them to hold the prisoners for several days and to try to make a few of the men think that there would be a trial of a second prisoner. part of the men were released in seattle and part in everett. all went at once to the i. w. w. hall upon gaining their freedom, and from there nearly the whole body of released men went to mount pleasant cemetery to visit the graves of their dead fellow workers. returning to the hall, those who had previously been delegates, or who had fitted themselves for the work while in jail, immediately took out credentials and started on an organizing campaign of the northwest, with the uniting of the workers in the lumber industry as their main object. [illustration: gus johnson felix baran john looney] [illustration: hugo gerlot abraham rabinowitz] the dearth of workers due to the war, the tremendous advertisement the i. w. w. had received because of the tragedy and the trial, and the spirit of mingled determination and resentment that had grown up in the jail, made the work easy for these volunteer organizers. members joined by the dozen, then by the score, and finally by the hundreds. seattle had but two officials under pay on november th--herbert mahler, secretary of the i. w. w., and j. a. macdonald, editor of the industrial worker. by july th, , one year from the time of the loggers' convention at which there were only half a hundred paid up members, the i. w. w. in seattle had thirty people under pay, working at top speed to take care of the constantly increasing membership, and preparations were under way to launch the greatest lumber strike ever pulled in the history of the industry with the eight hour day as the main demand. that strike in which thousands of men stood out for week after week in the face of persecution of every character, in the face of raids upon their halls and the illegal detention of hundreds of members by city, county, state and federal agents, and in the face of deportations by mobs of lumber trust hirelings, deserves a volume to itself. this activity in the lumber industry reflected itself in all other lines, particularly so in construction projects all over the northwest. demands for literature, for speakers, for organizers, flooded the offices of the organization and many opportunities to organize had to be passed by simply because there were not enough men capable of taking up the work. part of this growth was of those who had interested themselves in the trial. many of those who had gone on the witness stand for the defense afterwards took out membership cards in the i. w. w. the women of everett,--considerably more inclined toward revolutionary ideas than the men there, by the way,--were among the first to ask for a "red card." too great praise cannot be given to those who voluntarily gave their services to the defense and thus helped to bring about a verdict of acquittal. thru the work of mr. a. l. carpenter a great deal of valuable information was secured and it was thru his efforts that deputy joseph schofield was brought from oregon to testify for the defense. for his activity on behalf of organized labor mr. carpenter received the rebel's reward--he was discharged from his position as district manager of a large corporation. scores of everett citizens gave splendid assistance to the defense, asking only that their names be withheld on account of the commercial club blacklist. all persons directly in the employ of the defense proved their worth. deserving special mention in their work of investigation were rev. t. t. edmunds, w. a. loomis and john m. foss. the reverend edmunds, being no follower of a "cold statistical christ" and having more of humanitarianism than theology or current religion in his makeup, was able to gain information where many another investigator might have failed. the expert services of loomis were of no less value, while the particular merit of the work of john foss was that he went to everett immediately after the catastrophe, at a time when chaos still reigned and when the blood-lust of the deputies had not yet completely given way to craven fear, and worked there night and day until a verdict of acquittal for his fellow workers was practically assured. both as an investigator and as correspondent to the i. w. w. press, c. e. payne, familiarly known as "stumpy," proved himself invaluable. charles ashleigh handled the publicity for the everett prisoners' defense committee in an able and efficient manner, while to herbert mahler credit is due for the careful and painstaking handling of the large fund raised to fight the case thru the courts. "justice" is an expensive luxury in the lumber kingdom. independent of the large amount of money spent directly by individuals and by branches of the i. w. w. the cost of the verdict of acquittal was $ , . . nearly thirty-eight thousand dollars! thirty-eight thousand dollars to free innocent workers from the clutches of the law! the victims in jail and the murderers at liberty! but then, the last thing expected of "justice" is that it be just. whence came the fund that, as a token of solidarity, set the free speech prisoners at liberty? in the financial statement of the everett prisoners defense committee it is set forth in full. summarized, this report shows that labor united in the defense of the prisoners, that, while this case was more largely financed directly thru the i. w. w. than any other trial of the organization, there were many and generous contributions from local unions of the american federation of labor, from the workers' sick and death benefit fund, from various other working class societies and from sources so numerous as to make special mention impossible. but these receipts varied from a dollar bill sent by "a poor working stiff" from north bend, oregon, to a donation of $ . from the benevolent society for the propagating of cremation at yonkers, new york. hundreds of dollars were raised in seattle by the i. w. w. thru smokers, dances, theatrical benefits, entertainments and collections by speakers who told the story of bloody sunday before societies of every kind and character. the dreamland rink meetings, attended in every instance by thousands of people, were the means of bringing hundreds of dollars to the defense. a considerable fund was raised directly within the organization by the sale of embossed leatherette membership card cases issued in memoriam to the martyred dead. in seattle notable service was rendered by the international workers' defense league. [illustration: may first at graveside of gerlot, baran and looney.] the nature of the case demanded heavy expenditures unlike those required in any of the previous trials in which i. w. w. members were involved. many of the witnesses were men who had beaten their way from long distances thru storms and snow to be in readiness to testify in behalf of their imprisoned fellow workers, and most of these had to be maintained at a relief station until called upon the stand. the care of the wounded was an added item, and there were many necessary expenditures for the big body of prisoners held as defendants. to each of the men who was released at the end of the six months imprisonment there was given a sum of $ . owing to the sweeping nature of the conspiracy charges and because of the large number of witnesses endorsed by the state, all of whom required investigation, there was a large sum required for use in taking these necessary legal precautions. heavy charges were also made for the work of the stenographers who recorded the evidence, this being an item borne by the state in most parts of the country. the totals of these expenditures were as follows: counsel fees in full $ , . legal investigation , . court stenographers , . miscellaneous legal expense , . office expense , . publicity work , . miscellaneous accounts , . ---------- total expenditures $ , . a balance of $ . was sent to the general headquarters of the i. w. w. and this, with $ . which remained in the general office from the sale of voluntary assessment stamps, was set aside as a fund to be used for the maintenance of harry golden, joseph ghilezano and albert scribner, three of the boys who were seriously injured on the verona. the financial report was audited by e. g. shorrock and co., certified accountants, and by a committee composed of harry feinberg and j. h. beyer, representing the prisoners, c. h. rice, representing the seattle unions of the i. w. w., and general executive board member, richard brazier, representing the general headquarters of the i. w. w. the statement made to contributors to the fund concluded with these expressive words: "on behalf of the defendants, and the industrial workers of the world, we take this opportunity to express our grateful appreciation to all contributors, and to all the brave men and women who assisted us so nobly in this great struggle to save seventy-three workingmen from a living death at the hands of the lumber trust and the allied commercial bodies of the pacific coast. "it was the solidarity of the working class, and that alone, which brought about this great victory for labor, so let us turn fresh from victory, with determined hearts and unquellable spirit to unflinchingly continue the struggle for the liberation of all prisoners of the class war, remembering always that greatest expression of solidarity, 'an injury to one, is an injury to all.' "the everett prisoners defense committee. thomas murphy, charles ashleigh, wm. j. houser, richard smith, herbert mahler, sec'y-treas." seattle, wash., june th, . chapter x. the bankruptcy of "law and order" the facts in this case speak pretty well for themselves. to draw conclusions at length would be an impertinence. he who runs may read the signs of decay of capitalism, the crumbling of a social system based upon the slavery and degradation of the vast majority of mankind. and from the lips of the prosecution counsel--the voice of the state--we have the open and frank acknowledgement of the bankruptcy of law and order, the failure of government as it is now administered. it is no part of this work to attack the law. the law is august, majestic in its impartial findings and the equality of its judgements, always however with due allowance for those subtle distinctions so incomprehensible to the masses which exist between high finance, kleptomania and theft. the law strips no one of his possessions; under its beneficent reign the rich retain their wealth and the poor keep their poverty. founded on dogma and moulded by tradition, the law stands as a mighty monument to justice. it is ever in this way that we show our respect and reverence for the dead. being an outgrowth of precedent it gains added sanctity with each fresh proof of antiquity, differing in this regard from automobiles, eggs, women, hats, the six best sellers, and the commoner things of life. surrounded by mysticism, surcharged with the language of the dead, and sustained by force, who is there would have the temerity to question the sanctity of the law? it remained for attorneys black and cooley--and not for the outcast industrial unionists, socialists or anarchists--to charge that the law is a bankrupt institution, and it was for the citizen-deputies--and not for the despised workers--to prove the truth of the indictment. truly society moves in a mysterious way its blunders to reform! with the true logic of the counting-house cooley admitted that the mill owners had formed a mob to protect themselves from the rabble, they had pursued illegal methods to prevent the breaking of the law, they had jailed men in order to preserve liberty, they had even blacklisted union men in order to give to every man the right to work where, when and for whom he pleased. there is no escaping such logic if one owns property. of course those who possess no property are the natural enemies of property, and law being based upon property, they are defiers of the law, and society being upheld only by observance of the law, they are the foes of society. it is not best to kill them in too large numbers for they are useful in doing the work of the world, but they must be kept in fear and trembling of the law and made to respect it as sacred and inviolable, even if we do not. so argued black and cooley. but the whine of black, the snarl of cooley, the moody silence of veitch, alike served as a confession that "law and order" was a failure. the plea of the state was that all law is the creature of property and when the power of the law proves inadequate in its function of protecting the accumulations of wealth the possessors of property are justified in supplementing the law with such additional physical or brute force as they can muster, or in casting aside the law altogether, as it suits their convenience. to the workers the law must remain sacred while to the leisure class property is the thing to worship, for however much robbery is to be condemned, the proceeds of robbery are always to be respected. their further contention was that the streets are for traffic, for maintaining commerce, in other words to aid in the gathering of property and to enhance the property values already cleared. out of the graciousness of their hearts the business men and employers allow the pedestrians to use the streets incidental to the purchase of goods or to journey to and from their tasks in the factories, mines, mills and workshops. that the streets might be used for social, religious, political or educational purposes does not enter their calculations, their ledgers carry no place for such entries on the profit side. free speech is tolerated at times provided nothing of importance is said. two trials were going on in the court room at the same time; that of thomas h. tracy and the i. w. w. before a property-qualified jury, and that of the existing system of law enforcement before the great jury of the working class. and just as surely as was the verdict that of acquittal for tracy and his union, was there a most decided judgment of guilty upon "law and order." for tracy was not freed by the law but by the common sense of the jury who refused to consider him guilty and viewed him as a class rather than as an individual. under the existing conspiracy laws he might well have been considered technically guilty. but "law and order" technically and otherwise was proven guilty, and the charge that capitalism is guilty of first degree murder, and a host of other crimes, was clearly proven. why? why all the brutality depicted herein? why? the answer is that we are living in an insane social system in which money ranks higher than manhood. to be more specific the outrages at everett had their roots in the belief that the men who labor, and especially the migratory and the unskilled element, form an inferior caste or class to those who exploit them. the dominant class viewed any attempt to claim even the same civil rights as an assault upon their supremacy and integrity,--this to them being synonymous with social order and civilization. this is always more evident where a single industry dominates, as evidenced by the occurrences at ludlow, in the coal district, mesaba in the iron ore section, and bisbee where copper is the main product. everett controlled by the lumber interests clinches the argument. a community dominated by an industry, impelled by a desire for high profits; or under the spell of fear or passion, whether justified or not, cannot be restrained by law from a summary satisfaction of its desires or a quieting of its apprehensions. before such a condition the fabric of local government crumbles and lynch law is substituted for the more orderly processes designed to attain the same end. the everett outrages were no example of the rough and ready justice of primitive communities. the outlaws were in full possession of local government, legislative, judicial, and executive, yet they fell back upon brute force and personal violence and attempted to protect the lumber trust profits by tactics of terrorism. insofar as the law can be wielded for their immediate purpose a capitalistic mob, such as these at everett, will clothe their violence in the form of ostensible legal process, yet often the letter and the spirit of their own class-influenced laws will be ruthlessly thrust aside. they want law and order, efficacious, impartial, august, in the eyes of the general citizenry, but they want exemption of their class from the rule of the law on certain occasions. strongly would they deny that all law is class law, made, interpreted and administered in behalf of a privileged property-owning class, yet the facts bear out this contention. the conception of impersonal and impartial legalism has been generally accepted along with traditional moral opinion and the naive belief in the excellence of competitive, individualistic, and unrestrained business. but this historical case has proven, as nothing else could prove, that these bonds are relaxing and the faith and formulas underlying the whole legal establishment are the subject of attack by an increasingly large and uncompromising army of dissenters. from the developments of the everett situation one can sense the rising tide of industrial solidarity. it was the unity of the workers that won the great case. it will be the unity of labor that will win the world for the workers, just as the embryonic democracy of the toilers in its blind groupings has already cracked the shell of the industrial autocracy of the present day. at present we are at the parting of the ways. there is not sufficient faith in the law to hold the dying wage system together and there is not a sufficiently clear conception of the solidaric ideal of a new society to bind the rebellious elements to a definite program. so chaos reigns in society and events like those at everett may be expected to arise until the struggle of the exploited takes on a more constructive form and develops the necessary power to overthrow capitalism and all its attendant institutions. industrial unionism is the only hope of the disinherited and dispossessed proletariat. it is the voice of the future. it spells at once evolution and revolution. its assured success means an end to classes and class rule and the rearing of a race of free individuals. the strength of the workers is in industry. every worker, man, woman or child, has economic power. the control of industry means the control of the world. he who strives to bring the workers closer together so that their allied forces in an industrial organization may overthrow the wage system and rear in its place an industrial republic in which slavery will be unknown and where joy will form the mainspring of human activity, pays the highest homage to those who, in order that the spirit of liberty might not perish from the land, gave their lives at everett, washington, on sunday, november th, : felix baran, hugo gerlot, gustav johnson, john looney, abraham rabinowitz. finish * * * * * songs of the workers the latest i. w. w. song book general defense edition contains sixty-four pages of satirical, humorous and inspiring songs of labor. parodies on the well known popular airs. wherever the english language is spoken, there will be found countless numbers of workers singing these real rebel songs. [illustration] prices single copies ten cents $ . a hundred address i. w. w. publishing bureau w. madison st., chicago, ill. * * * * * i. w. w. literature i. w. w. publishing bureau w. madison st., chicago pamphlets at c each, or . per hundred i. w. w. history, structure & methods (st. john), revised industrial unionism, the road to freedom (ettor) the evolution of industrial democracy (woodruff) one big union, the greatest thing on earth advancing proletariat (woodruff) patriotism and the worker (hervé) onward sweep of the machine process (hanson) red down (harrison george) is freedom dead? pamphlets at c each, or $ . per hundred the i. w. w. song book. the general strike (haywood); also containing "the last war." proletarian and petit bourgeois (lewis) the general secretary's report of the tenth convention hotel, restaurant and domestic workers (l. s. chumley) revolutionary writings (kelly cole) books at various prices the new unionism (tridon), c per copy $ . opening statement of g. f. vanderveer, c . cloath bound, c per copy . testimony of william d. haywood before the industrial relations commission, c . trial of new society (ebert), c per copy . proceedings th convention, c per copy . the everett massacre, cloath bound, $ . . indictment, c per copy . i. w. w. leaflets i. w. w. industrial unionism (st. john), c per copy $ . high cost of living (dougherty), c per copy . metal and machinery workers (leaflet) . to colored working men and women . songs and music by joe hill c copy; for $ . ; or more, c each. workers of the world, awaken! the rebel girl. don't take my papa away from me. the enclosures in england studies in history, economics and public law edited by the faculty of political science of columbia university volume lxxx] [number whole number the enclosures in england an economic reconstruction by harriett bradley, ph.d. _assistant professor of economics, vassar college sometime university fellow in economics_ new york columbia university longmans, green & co., agents london: p.s. king & son, ltd. "it fareth with the earth as with other creatures that through continual labour grow faint and feeble-hearted." _from speech made in the house of commons, _ to emilie louise wells contents page introduction the subject of inquiry--no attempt hitherto made to verify the different hypothetical explanations of the enclosures--nature of the evidence. chapter i the price of wool accepted theory of enclosure movement based on price of wool--enclosures began independently of black death and before expansion of woollen industry--price of wool low as compared with that of wheat in enclosure period--seventeenth-century conversions of pasture to arable--of arable to pasture--conversion not explained by change in prices or wages--double conversion movement due to condition of soil--summary. chapter ii the fertility of the common fields dr. russell on soil fertility--insufficient manure--statistical indications of yield--compulsory land-holding--desertion of villains--commutation of services on terms advantageous to serf--low rent obtained when bond land was leased--remission of services--changes due to economic need, not desired for improved social status--poverty of villains--cultivation of demesne unprofitable. chapter iii the disintegration of the open fields growing irregularity of holdings--consolidation of holdings--turf boundaries plowed under--lea land--restoration of fertility--enclosure by tenants--land used alternately as pasture and arable--summary of changes. chapter iv enclosure for sheep pasture enclosure by small tenants difficult--open-field tenants unprofitable--low rents--neglect of land--high cost of living--enclosure even of demesne a hardship to small holders--intermixture of holdings a reason for dispossessing tenants--higher rents from enclosed land another reason--poverty of tenants where no enclosures were made--exhaustion of open fields recognised by parliament--restoration of fertility and reconversion to tillage--new forage crops in eighteenth century--recapitulation and conclusion. index introduction the enclosure movement--the process by which the common-field system was broken down and replaced by a system of unrestricted private use--involved economic and social changes which make it one of the important subjects in english economic history. when it began, the arable fields of a community lay divided in a multitude of strips separated from each other only by borders of unplowed turf. each landholder was in possession of a number of these strips, widely separated from each other, and scattered all over the open fields, so that he had a share in each of the various grades of land.[ ] but his private use of the land was restricted to the period when it was being prepared for crop or was under crop. after harvest the land was grazed in common by the village flocks; and each year a half or a third of the land was not plowed at all, but lay fallow and formed part of the common pasture. under this system there was no opportunity for individual initiative in varying the rotation of crops or the dates of plowing and seed time; the use of the land in common for a part of the time restricted its use even during the time when it was not in common. the process by which this system was replaced by modern private ownership with unrestricted individual use is called the enclosure movement, because it involved the rearrangement of holdings into separate, compact plots, divided from each other by enclosing hedges and ditches. the most notable feature of this process is the conversion of the open fields into sheep pasture. this involved the eviction of the tenants who had been engaged in cultivating these fields and the amalgamation of many holdings of arable to form a few large enclosures for sheep. the enclosure movement was not merely the displacement of one system of tillage by another system of tillage; it involved the temporary displacement of tillage itself in favor of grazing. in this monograph two things are undertaken: first, an analysis of the usually accepted version of the enclosure movement in the light of contemporary evidence; and, secondly, the presentation of another account of the nature and causes of the movement, consistent with itself and with the available evidence. the popular account of the enclosure movement turns upon a supposed advance in the price of wool, due to the expansion of the woollen industry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. landlords at this period (we are told) were increasingly eager for pecuniary gain and, because of the greater profit to be made from grazing, were willing to evict the tenants on their land and convert the arable fields to sheep pasture. about the end of the sixteenth century, it is said, this first enclosure movement came to an end, for there are evidences of the reconversion of pastures formerly laid to grass. an inquiry into the evidence shows that the price of wool fell during the fifteenth century and failed to rise as rapidly as that of wheat during the sixteenth century. moreover, the conversion of arable land to pasture did not cease when the contrary process set in, but continued throughout the seventeenth century with apparently unabated vigor. these facts make it impossible to accept the current theory of the enclosure movement. there is, on the other hand, abundant evidence that the fertility of much of the common-field land had been exhausted by centuries of cultivation. some of it was allowed to run to waste; some was laid to grass, enclosed, and used as pasture. productivity was gradually restored after some years of rest, and it became possible to resume cultivation. the enclosure movement is explained not by a change in the price of wool, but by the gradual loss of productivity of common-field land. this explanation is not made here for the first time. it is advanced in denton's _england in the fifteenth century_[ ] and gardiner, in his _student's history of england_,[ ] accepts it. prothero[ ] and gonner[ ] give it some place in their works. dr. simkhovitch, at whose suggestion this inquiry was undertaken, has for some time been of the opinion that deterioration of the soil was the fundamental cause of the displacement of arable farming by grazing.[ ] this explanation, however, stands at the present time as an unverified hypothesis, which has been specifically rejected by gibbins, in his widely used text-book,[ ] and by hasbach,[ ] who objects that denton does not prove his case. in this respect the theory is no more to be criticised than the theory which these authorities accept, for that does not rest upon proof, but upon the prestige gained through frequent repetition. but the matter need not rest here. it is unnecessary to accept any hypothetical account of events which are, after all, comparatively recent, and for which the evidence is available. of the various sources accessible for the study of the english enclosure movement, one type only has been extensively used by historians. the whole story of this movement as it is usually told is based upon tracts, sermons, verses, proclamations, etc. of the sixteenth century--upon the literature of protest called forth by the social distress caused by enclosure. until very recently the similar literature of the seventeenth century has been neglected, although it destroys the basis of assumptions which are fundamental to the orthodox account of the movement. much of significance even in the literature of the sixteenth century has been passed over--notably certain striking passages in statutes of the latter half of the century, and in books on husbandry of the first half. details of manorial history derived from the account rolls of the manors themselves, and contemporary manorial maps and surveys, as well as the records of the actual market prices of grain and wool, have been ignored in the construction of an hypothetical account of the movement which breaks down whenever verification by contemporary evidence is attempted. the evidence is in many respects imperfect. it would be of great value, for instance, to have access to records of grain production over an area extensive enough, and for a long enough period, to furnish reliable statistical indications of the trend of productivity. it would be helpful to have exact information about the amount of land converted from arable to pasture in each decade of the period under consideration, and to know to what extent and at what dates land was reconverted to tillage after having been laid to grass. there are no records to supply most of this information. it is possible that the materials for a statistical study of soil productivity are in existence, but up to the present time they have not been published, and it is doubtful if this deficiency will be supplied. it is even more doubtful whether more can be learned about the rate of conversion of arable land to pasture than is now known, and this is little. professor gay has made a careful study of the evidence on this question, and has analysed the reports of the government commissions for enforcing the husbandry statutes before ,[ ] and miss leonard has made the returns of the commission of for leicestershire available.[ ] the conditions under which these commissions worked make the returns somewhat unreliable even for the years covered by their reports, and much interpolation is necessary, as there are serious gaps in the series of years for which returns are made. for dates outside of the period - we must rely entirely on literary references. unsatisfactory as our statistical information is on this important question, it is far more complete than the evidence on the subject of the reconversion to tillage of arable land which had been turned into pasture. it is to the unfortunate social consequences of enclosure that we owe the abundance of historical material on this subject. undoubtedly much land was converted to pasture in a piece-meal fashion, as small holders saw the possibility of making the change quietly, and without disturbing the rest of the community. if enclosure had taken no other form than this, no storm of public protest would have risen, to express itself in pamphlets, sermons, statutes and government reports. enclosure on a large scale involved dispossession of the inhabitants, and a complete break with traditional usage. for this reason the literature of the subject is abundant. when, however, the process was reversed, and the land again brought under cultivation, there was involved no interference with the rights of common holders. it was to the interest of no one to oppose this change, and no protest was made to call the attention of the historian to what was being done. references to the process are numerous enough only to prove that reconversion of land formerly laid to grass took place during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries--to an extent of which not even an approximate estimate can be made. imperfect as the evidence is from some points of view, it is nevertheless complete for the purposes of this monograph. it would be impossible, with the material at hand, to reconstruct the progress of the enclosure movement, decade by decade, and county by county, throughout england. my intention, however, is not so much to describe the movement in detail as it is to give a consistent account of its nature and causes. even a few sixteenth-century instances of the plowing up of pasture land should be enough to arrest the attention of historians who believe that the conversion of arable land to pasture during this period is sufficiently explained by an assertion that the price of wool was high. what especial circumstances made it advantageous to cultivate land which had been under grass, while other land was being withdrawn from cultivation? contemporary writers speak of the need of worn land for rest for a long period of years, and remark that it will bear well again at the end of the period. evidence such as this is significant without the further information which would enable us to estimate the amount of land affected. for our purposes, also, the notice of enclosure of arable land for pasture on one group of manors in the early thirteenth century is important as an indication that the fundamental cause of the enclosure movement was at work long before the black death, which is usually taken as the event in which the movement had its beginning. low rents, pauperism, and abandonment of land are facts which indicate declining productivity of the soil, and statistical records of the harvests reaped are not needed when statutes, proclamations, and books of husbandry describe the exhausted condition of the common fields. the fact that the enclosure movement continued vigorously in the seventeenth century is conclusively established, and when this fact is known the impossibility of estimating the comparative rate of progress of the movement in the preceding century is of no importance. upon one point at least, the evidence is almost all that could be desired. the material for a comparison of the prices of wheat and wool throughout the most critical portion of the period has been made accessible by thorold rogers.[ ] it is to this material that the defenders of the theory that enclosures are explained by the price of wool should turn, for they will find a fall of price where they assume that a rise took place. instead of an increase in the supply of wool due to a rise in its price, there is indicated a fall in the price of wool due to an increase in the supply. the cause of the increase of the supply of wool must be sought outside of the price conditions. acknowledgment should here be made of my indebtedness to dr. v. g. simkhovitch of columbia university, without whose generous help this study would not have been planned, and whose criticism and advice have been invaluable in bringing it to completion. professor seager also has given helpful criticism. professor seligman has allowed me the use of books from his library which i should otherwise have been unable to obtain. for material which could not be found in american libraries i am indebted to my mother and father, who obtained it for me in england. footnotes: [ ] v. g. simkovitch, _political science quarterly_, vol. xxvii, p. . [ ] (london, ), pp. - . denton refers here to gisborne's _ag. essays_, as does curtler, in his _short hist. of eng. ag._ (oxford, ), p. . [ ] vol. i, p. . [ ] _english farming past and present_ (london, ), p. . [ ] _common land and enclosure_, p. . [ ] see _political science quarterly_, vol. xxxi, p. . [ ] _industry in england_ (new york, ), p. . [ ] _hist. of the eng. ag. laborer_ (london, ), p. . [ ] _pub. am. ec. assoc._, third series ( ), vol vi, no. , pp. - : "inclosure movement in england." [ ] _royal hist. soc. trans._, new series ( ), vol. xix, pp. - : "inclosure of common fields." [ ] _cf. infra_, p. . chapter i the price of wool the generally accepted version of the enclosure movement turns upon supposed changes in the relative prices of wool and grain. the conversion of arable land to pasture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is accounted for by the hypothesis that the price of wool was rising more rapidly than that of grain. the beginning of the enclosure movement, according to this theory, dates from the time when a rise in the price of wool became marked, and the movement ended when there was a relative rise in the price of agricultural products. before the price of wool began to rise, it is supposed that tillage was profitable enough, and that nothing but the higher profits to be made from grazing induced landholders to abandon agriculture. the agrarian readjustments of the fourteenth century are regarded as due simply to the temporary shortage of labor caused by the black death. high wages at this time caused the conversion of some land to pasture, according to the orthodox theory, and from time to time during the next two centuries high wages were a contributing factor influencing the withdrawal of land from tillage; but the great and effective cause of the enclosure movement, the one fundamental fact which is insisted upon, is that constant advances in the price of wool made grazing relatively profitable. it is usually accepted without debate that the withdrawal of arable land from tillage did not begin until after the black death, that the enclosures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were caused by a rise in the price of wool, and that the conversion of arable land to pasture ceased when this cause ceased to operate. against this general explanation of the enclosure movement, it is urged, first, that the withdrawal of land from cultivation began long before the date at which the enclosure movement, caused by an alleged rise in the price of wool, is ordinarily said to have begun. the fourteenth century was marked by agrarian readjustments which have a direct relation to the enclosure movement, and which cannot be explained by the black death or the price of wool. even in the thirteenth century the causes leading to the enclosure movement were well marked. secondly, the cause of the substitution of sheep-farming for agriculture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot have been a rise in the price of wool relatively to that of grain, because statistics show that the price of wool fell during the fifteenth century, and failed to rise as rapidly as that of wheat in the sixteenth century. thirdly, a mere comparison of the relative prices of grazing and agricultural products cannot explain the fact that conversion of open-field land to pasture continued throughout the seventeenth century in spite of prices which made it profitable for landowners at the same time to convert a large amount of grass-land to tillage, including enclosures which had formerly been taken from the common fields. if these facts are accepted the explanation of the enclosure movement which is based upon a comparison of the prices of wheat and wool must be rejected, and the story must be told from a different point of view. taking up these points in order, we shall inquire first into the causes of the agrarian readjustments of the fourteenth century. a generation after the black death, the commutation of villain services and the introduction of the leasehold system had made notable progress. the leasing of the demesne has been attributed to the direct influence of the pestilence, which by reducing the serf population made it impossible to secure enough villain labor to cultivate the lord's land. the substitution of money rents in place of the labor services owed by the villains has been explained on the supposition that the serfs who had survived the pestilence took advantage of the opportunity afforded by their reduction in numbers to free themselves from servile labor and thus improve their social status. the connection between the black death and the changes in manorial management which are usually attributed to it could be more convincingly established had not several decades elapsed after the black death before these changes became marked. a recent intensive study of the manors of the bishopric of winchester during this period confirms the view of those who have protested against assigning to the black death the revolutionary importance which is given it by many historians. on these estates the black death "produced severe evanescent effects and temporary changes, with a rapid return to the _status quo_ of ."[ ] the great changes which are usually attributed to the plague of - were under way before , and were not greatly accelerated until , possibly not before , and cannot, therefore, have been due to the black death. levett and ballard devote especial attention to the effect of the black death upon the substitution of money payments for labor services and rents in kind, but their study also brings out the fact that the difficulty in persuading tenants to take up land on the old terms (usually ascribed to the black death) began before the pestilence, and continued long after its effects had ceased to exert any influence. before the black death landowners were unable to secure holders for bond land without the use of force. a generation after the black death they were still contending with this problem, and it had become more serious than at any previous time. whatever the significance of the black death, it must not be advanced as the explanation of a condition which arose before its occurrence, nor of events which took place long after its effects were forgotten. one result of the pestilence was, indeed, to place villains in a stronger position than before, but the changes which took place on this account must not be allowed to obscure the fact that landowners were already facing serious difficulties before . holders of land were already deserting, and the tenements of those who died or deserted could frequently be filled only by compulsion. villains were refusing to perform their services _on account of poverty_, and they were already securing reductions in their rents and services. the temporary reduction of the population by the black death has been advanced as the reason for the ability of the villains of the decade - to enforce their demands; but without the help of any such cause, villains of an earlier period were obtaining concessions from their lords, and after the natural growth of the population had had ample time to replace those who had died of the pestilence, the villains were in a stronger position than ever before, if we are to estimate their strength by their success in lightening their economic burdens. the black death at the most did no more than accelerate changes in the tenure of land which were already under way. villain services were being reduced, and the size of villain holdings increased. the strength of the position of the serfs lay not so much in the absence of competition due to a temporary reduction in their numbers as in their poverty. tenants could not be held at the accustomed rents and services because it was impossible to make a living from their holdings. the absence of competition for holdings was no temporary thing, due to the high mortality of the years - , but was chronic, and was based upon the worthlessness of the land. the vacant tenements of the fourteenth century, the reduction in the area of demesne land planted, the complaints that no profit could be made from tillage, the reduction of rents on account of the poverty of whole villages, all point in the same direction. these matters will be taken up more fully in a later chapter. here it need only be pointed out that the withdrawal of land from cultivation was under way because tillage was unprofitable. if tillage was unprofitable in the fourteenth century, so unprofitable that heirs were anxious to buy themselves free of the obligation to enter upon their inheritance, while established landholders deserted their tenements, the enclosure of arable land for pasture in the fifteenth century is seen in a new light. when there was no question of desiring the land for sheep pasture, it was voluntarily abandoned by cultivators. displacement of tillage due to an internal cause precedes displacement of tillage for sheep pasture. the process of withdrawing land from cultivation began independently of the scarcity of labor caused by the black death and independently of any change in the price of wool; the continuation of this process in the fifteenth century is not likely to depend entirely upon a rise in the price of wool. that the enclosures of the fifteenth century were in reality merely a further step in the readjustments under way in the fourteenth century cannot be doubted. and that the whole process was independent of the especial external influence upon agriculture exerted in the fourteenth century by the black death and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the growth of the woollen industry is shown in the case of a group of manors where the essential features of the enclosure movement appeared in the thirteenth century. more than a hundred years before the black death the lord of berkeley found it impossible to obtain tenants for bond land at the accustomed rents. villains were giving up their holdings because they could not pay the rent and perform the services. the land which had in earlier times been sufficient for the maintenance of a villain and his family and had produced a surplus for rent had lost its fertility, and the holdings fell vacant. the land which reverted to the lord on this account was split up and leased at nominal rents, when leaseholders could be found, just as so much land was leased at reduced rents by landowners generally in the fourteenth century. moreover, some of the land was unfit for cultivation at all and was converted to pasture under the direction of the lord.[ ] if the disintegration of manorial organization observed in the fourteenth century and earlier was not due to the black death; if this disintegration was under way before the pestilence reduced the population, and was not checked when the ravages of the plague had been made good; if tillage was already unprofitable before the fifteenth century with its growth of the woollen industry; and if land was being converted to pasture at a time when neither the price of wool nor the black death can be offered as the explanation of this conversion; then there is suggested the possibility that the whole enclosure movement can be sufficiently accounted for without especial reference to the prices of wool and grain. if the enclosure movement began before the fifteenth century and originated in causes other than the black death, the discovery of these original causes may also furnish the explanation of the continuance of the movement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. the amount of land under cultivation was being reduced before the date at which the price of wool is supposed to have risen sufficiently to displace agriculture for the sake of wool growing, and this early reduction in the arable cannot, clearly, be accounted for by reference to the prices of wool and grain. but it also happens that, in the very period when an increase in the demand for wool is usually alleged as the cause of the enclosures, the price of wool fell relatively to that of grain. the increase in sheep-farming in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, together with the fact that the domestic cloth manufacture was being improved at this time, has been the basis of the assumption that the price of wool was rising. the causal sequence has been supposed to be: ( ) an increase in the manufacture of woollens; ( ) an increase in the demand for wool; ( ) an increase in the price of wool; ( ) an increase in wool-growing at the expense of tillage, and the enclosure of common lands. if, as a matter of fact, the price of wool fell during this period, the causal sequence is reversed. if the price of wool fell, the increase in the manufacture of woollens has no relation to the enclosure movement, unless it is its result, and we are forced to look elsewhere for the cause of the increase of sheep-farming. the accompanying tables and chart, showing the changes in the price of wool and of wheat from the middle of the thirteenth century through the first quarter of the sixteenth century, have been prepared from the materials given by thorold rogers in his _history of agriculture and prices in england_.[ ] the averages given in his tables are based upon records of actual sales. they furnish, therefore, the exact information needed in connection with the theory that a rise in the price of wool relatively to that of wheat was the cause of the enclosure movement in england. in the century and a half before , there were wide fluctuations in the prices of both commodities, but the price of wool rose and fell with that of wheat. the first quarter of the fourteenth century was a period of falling prices. the fall continued in the case of wool until about the middle of the century, when a recovery began, culminating about . a rise in the price of wheat occurred sooner than that of wool and reached its climax about . in the last quarter of the century the prices of both wool and wheat fell, with a slight recovery in the last decade of the century. table i prices of wheat and wool, - . decennial averages wheat, per wool, per quarter tod ( lbs.) s. d. s. d. - - / - - - / - - / - - / - - / - - - / - - / - - / - - / - - / - - / - - / - - - - - / - / - - / - / - - / - / - - - / - / - - / - / - - / - / - - / - - / - / - - / - / - - / - / - - / - / - - / - - / - / - - - / - - / - - - table ii prices of wheat and wool. long period averages wheat, per wool, per date quarter tod s. d. s. d. - - - / - - / - - / - - / - / [illustration: graph] after the price of wheat held at about the average price of the previous period, but for sixty years the price of wool fell, without a check in its downward movement. it is in this period that the woollen industry entered upon the period of expansion which is supposed to have been the cause of the enclosure movement, but there was no rise in the price of wool. instead, there was a decided fall.[ ] the average price for the decade - was just about one-half of the average price for the period - . (the average price of wool in the last fifty years of the fourteenth century happens to be the same as the average for the period - . either the longer or the shorter period may be used indifferently as the basis for comparison). the average price for the period - was per cent lower than the average for the preceding half-century. a comparatively slight depression in the price of wheat in the same period is shown in the tables. the average for - is only three per cent lower than that for - (seven per cent lower than the average for - ). before , then, there was nothing in market conditions to favor the extension of sheep farming, but there is reason to believe that the withdrawal of land from tillage had already begun. leaving aside the enclosure and conversion of common-field land by the berkeleys in the thirteenth century, we may yet note that "an early complaint of illegal enclosure occurs in where the inhabitants of parleton and ragenell in notts petition against richard stanhope, who had inclosed the lands there by force of arms." miss leonard, who is authority for this statement, also refers to the statute of in which "depopulatores agrorum" are mentioned.[ ] in a grant of edward v the complaint is made that "this body falleth daily to decay by closures and emparking, by driving away of tenants and letting down of tenantries."[ ] it is strange, if these enclosures are to be explained by increasing demand for wool, that this heightened demand was not already reflected in rising prices. but, it may be urged, the true enclosure movement did not begin until after . if a marked rise in the price of wool occurred after , it might be argued that enclosures spread and the price of wool rose together, and that the latter was the cause of the former. turning again to the record of prices, we see that although the low level of the decade - marks the end of the period of falling prices, no rise took place for several decades after . rous gives a list of places "which, within a circuit of thirteen miles about warwick had been wholly or partially depopulated before about ."[ ] two or three years later acts were passed against depopulation in whose preambles the agrarian situation is described: the isle of wight "is late decayed of people, by reason that many townes and vilages been lete downe and the feldes dyked and made pastures for bestis and cattalles." in other parts of england there is "desolacion and pulling downe and wylfull wast of houses and towns ... and leying to pasture londes whiche custumably haue ben used in tylthe, wherby ydlenesse is growde and begynnyng of all myschevous dayly doth encrease. for where in some townes ii hundred persones were occupied and lived by their lawfull labours, now ben there occupied ii or iii herdemen, and the residue falle in ydlenes."[ ] it may be remarked that while the price records show conclusively that no rise in the profits of wool-growing caused these enclosures, the language of the statutes shows also that scarcity of labor was not their cause, since one of the chief objections to the increase of pasture is the unemployment caused. it would seem hardly necessary to push the comparison of the prices of wool and wheat beyond . in order to establish the contention that the enclosure movement was caused by an advance in the price of wool, it would be necessary to show that this advance took place before the date at which the enclosure problem had become so serious as to be the subject of legislation. by statesmen were already alarmed at the progress made by enclosure. the movement was well under way. yet it has been shown that the price of wool had been falling for over a century, instead of rising, and that the price of wheat held its own. even if it could be established that the price of wheat fell as compared with that of wool after this date, the usually accepted version of the enclosure movement would still be inadequate. but as a matter of fact the price of wheat rose steadily after , reaching a higher average in each succeeding decade, while the price of wool wavered about an average which rose very slowly until . the entries on which these wool averages are based are few, and greater uncertainty therefore attaches to their representativeness than in the case of the prices of earlier decades, but the evidence, such as it is, points to a more rapid rise in the price of wheat than in the price of wool. between and the average price of wheat was nearly per cent above that of the previous forty years, but the average price of wool rose only ten per cent. there are only nine entries of wool prices for the forty-six years after , but these are enough to show that the price of wool, like that of wheat and all other commodities, was rising rapidly at this time. the lack of material upon which to base a comparison of the actual rate of increase of price for the two commodities makes further statistical analysis impossible, but a knowledge of prices after the date at which the material ceases would add nothing to the evidence on the subject under consideration. sir thomas more's _utopia_ was written in , with its well-known passage describing contemporary enclosures in terms similar to those used in the statutes of thirty years before, and complaining that the sheep that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as i heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up, and swallow downe the very men them selfes. they consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses, and cities. for looke in what partes of the realme doth growe the fynest, and therfore dearest woll, there noblemen, and gentlemen: yea and certeyn abbottes ... leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pastures: thei throw doune houses: they plucke downe townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepe-howse.[ ] these enclosures were not caused by an advance in the price of wool relatively to that of wheat, as the rise in the price of wool in the decade - was no greater than that of corn. nor does sheep farming seem to have been especially profitable at this time, as more himself attributes the high price of wool in part to a "pestiferous morrein." again, the complaint is also made that unemployment was caused, showing that scarcity of labor was not the reason for the conversion of arable to pasture: the husbandmen be thrust owte of their owne, ... whom no man wyl set a worke, though thei never so willyngly profre themselves therto. for one shephearde or heardman is ynoughe to eate up that grounde with cattel, to the occupiyng wherof aboute husbandrye manye handes were requisite.[ ] in a new husbandry statute was passed, penalising the conversion of tillage to pasture, and requiring the restoration of the land to tillage. it was repeated and made perpetual in the following year. in a commission was ordered to enquire into the destruction of houses since and the conversion of arable to pasture. in a fresh commission was issued and the prosecution of offenders was begun. these facts are cited as a further reminder of the fact that the period for which the prices of wool and wheat are both known is the critical period in the enclosure movement. it is the enclosures covered by these acts and those referred to by sir thomas more which historians have explained by alleging that the price of wool was high. as a matter of record, the course of prices was such as to encourage the extension of tillage rather than of pasture. after an examination of these price statistics it hardly seems necessary to advance further objections to the accepted account of the enclosure movement, based as it is upon the assumption that price movements in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were exactly opposite to those which have been shown to take place. there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of rogers' figures within the limits required for our purpose, and the evidence based on these figures is in itself conclusive. even without this evidence, however, there is sufficient reason for rejecting the theory that changes in the prices of grain and wool account for the facts of the enclosure movement. for one thing, if the price of wool actually did rise (in spite of the statistical evidence to the contrary) and if this is actually the cause of the enclosure movement, the movement should have come to an end when sufficient time had elapsed for an adjustment of the wool supply to the increasing demand. if the movement did not come to an end within a reasonable period, there would be reason for suspecting the adequacy of the explanation advanced. as a matter of fact, it is usually thought that the enclosure movement did end about . much land which had not been affected by the changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (it is usually asserted) escaped enclosure altogether until the need for better agriculture in the eighteenth century ushered in the so-called second enclosure movement, which did not involve the conversion of tilled land to pasture. this alleged check in the progress of the enclosure movement is inferred from the fact that new land, and even some of the land formerly withdrawn from the common-fields to be converted to pasture, was being tilled. this is interpreted by economic historians as evidence that arable land was no longer being converted to pasture. we are told by meredith, for instance, that "moneyed men at the end of elizabeth's reign were beginning to find it profitable to sink money in arable farming, a fact which points to the conclusion that there was no longer any differential advantage in sheep-raising."[ ] cunningham is also of the opinion that "so far as such a movement can be definitely dated, it may be said that enclosure for the sake of increasing sheep-farming almost entirely ceased with the reign of elizabeth."[ ] innes gives as the cause of this supposed check in the reduction of arable land to pasture that "the expansion of pasturage appears to have reached the limit beyond which it would have ceased to be profitable."[ ] it is indeed reasonable that the high prices which are supposed to have been the cause of the sudden increase in wool production should be gradually lowered as the supply increased, and that thus the inducement to the conversion of arable to pasture would in time disappear. the theory that the enclosure movement was due to an increase in the price of wool would be seriously weakened if the movement continued for a time longer than that required to bring about an adjustment of the supply to the increased demand. for the sake of consistency, then, this point in the account of the enclosure movement is necessary. it would follow naturally from the original explanation of the movement as the response to an increased demand for wool, as reflected in high prices. with the decrease in prices to be expected as the supply increased, the incentive for converting arable to pasture would be removed. historians sometimes speak of other considerations which might have contributed to the cessation of the enclosure movement. ashley, for instance, suggests that landowners found that to "devote their lands continuously to sheep-breeding did not turn out quite so profitable as was at first expected."[ ] others refer to the contemporary complaints of the bad effect of enclosure upon the quality of wool. the breed of sheep which could be kept in enclosed pastures was said to produce coarser wool than those grazing on the hilly pastures, and this deterioration in the quality of wool so cut down the profits from enclosures that men now preferred to plow them up again, and resume tillage. the extent to which the plowing up of pasture can be attributed to this cause must be very slight, however, as even contemporaries disagreed as to the existence of any deterioration in the quality of the wool. some authorities even state that the quality was improved by the use of enclosed pasture: when cornwall, through want of good manurance lay waste and open, the sheep had generally little bodies and coarse fleeces, so as their wool bare no better name than cornish hair ... but since the grounds began to receive enclosure and dressing for tillage, the nature of the soil hath altered to a better grain and yieldeth nourishment in greater abundance to the beasts that pasture thereupon; so as, by this means ... cornish sheep come but little behind the eastern flocks for bigness of mould, _fineness of wool, etc._[ ] the plowing up of pasture land for tillage cannot, then, be explained by the effect of enclosure upon the quality of wool. it has been ordinarily taken as an indication that the price of grain was now rising more rapidly than that of wool, partly because a relaxation of the corn-laws permitted greater freedom of export, and partly because the home demand was increasing on account of the growth of the population. graziers were as willing to convert pastures to corn-fields for the sake of greater profits as their predecessors had been to carry out the contrary process. the deciding factor in the situation, according to the orthodox account, was the relative price of wool and grain. when the price of wool rose more rapidly than that of grain, arable land was enclosed and used for grazing. when the price of grain rose more rapidly than that of wool, pastures were plowed up and cultivated. up to this point, the account is consistent. if the price of wool was rising more rapidly than that of grain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (in spite of the statistical evidence to the contrary) it is reasonable that the differential advantage in grazing should finally come to an end when a new balance between tillage and grazing was established. it is not even surprising that the conversion of arable to pasture should have continued beyond the proper point, and that a contrary movement should set in. bacon, in , remarked that men had of late been enticed by the good yield of corn and the increased freedom of export to "break up more ground and convert it to tillage than all the penal laws for that purpose made and enacted could ever by compulsion effect."[ ] in lord monson plowed up acres of grafton park, which had formerly been pasture, and there are many other records showing a tendency to convert pasture to arable in the seventeenth century.[ ] it is true that men were able to make a profit from agriculture by the end of the sixteenth century. but there is one difficulty which has been overlooked: the withdrawal from agriculture of common-field land did _not_ cease. the protests against depopulating enclosure continue, and government reports and surveys show that enclosure for pasture was proceeding at as rapid a rate as in the sixteenth century. miss leonard's article on "inclosure of common fields in the seventeenth century"[ ] contains a mass of evidence which is conclusive. a few quotations will indicate its character: "in leicestershire the enclosures of cottesbach in , of enderby about , of thornby about , were all accomplished by a lessening of the land under the plough. moore, writing in , says: 'surely they may make men as soon believe there is no sun in the firmament as that usually depopulation and decay of tillage will not follow inclosure in our inland countyes.'" (p. ). letters from the council were written in complaining of "'enclosures and convercons tending as they generallie doe unto depopulation.... there appeares many great inclosures ... all wch are or are lyke to turne to the conversion of much ground from errable to pasture and be very hurtfull to the commonwealth.... we well know wth all what ye consequence will be, and in conclusion all turne to depopulation!'" (p. ). forster, writing in , says, "there hath been of late years divers whole lordships and towns enclosed and their earable land converted into pasture!" (p. ). frequently the same proprietor in the same year plowed up pasture land for corn and laid arable to pasture. tawney cites a case in which ninety-five acres of ancient pasture were brought under cultivation while thirty-five acres of arable were laid to grass.[ ] in the countess of westmoreland enclosed and converted arable, but tilled other land instead.[ ] the enclosure movement, then, did not end at the time when it is usually thought to have ended. since it is difficult to suppose that the price of wool could have been advancing constantly throughout two centuries, without causing such a readjustment in the use of land that no further withdrawal of land from tillage for pasture would be necessary, the continuance of the conversion of arable to pasture in the seventeenth century throws suspicion upon the whole explanation of the enclosure movement as due to the increased demand for wool. miss leonard, indeed, advances the hypothesis that the price of wool ceased to be the cause of enclosure during the seventeenth century, but that other price changes had the same effect: the increase in pasture in the sixteenth century was rendered profitable by the rapid increase in the price of wool, but, in the seventeenth century, this cause ceases to operate. the change to pasture, however, continued, partly owing to a great rise in the price of cattle, and partly because the increase in wages made it less profitable to employ the greater number of men necessary for tilling the fields.[ ] the assumption that wages and the price of cattle advanced sufficiently in the seventeenth century to account for the change to pasture are no better justified than the assumption of the rapid rise in the price of wool in the sixteenth century. if the price of meat and dairy products rose in the seventeenth century, so did the price of grain and other foods. the relative rate of increase is the only point significant for the present discussion. no statistics are available to show whether the price of cattle rose more rapidly than that of grain, and the evidence afforded by the reduction of arable land to pasture is counterbalanced by the equally well-established fact that much pasture land was plowed and planted in this period. it is equally probable on the basis of this evidence that the prices of wheat and barley advanced more rapidly than those of meat and butter and cheese. the same difficulty is met in the suggestion that the increase in pasturage was due partly to higher wages for farm labor. the extension of tillage over much land formerly laid to pasture as well as that which had never been plowed at all is sufficient cause for doubting a prohibitive increase in wages. moreover, in modern times, wages lag in general rise of prices. unless conclusive evidence is presented to show that this was not the case in the seventeenth century, it must be assumed to be inherently probable that the increased wages of the time were more than offset by the rapidly advancing prices. during the seventeenth century, then, when it is admitted that the high price of wool was not the cause which induced landowners to convert arable to pasture, it cannot be shown that the high price of cattle or exorbitant wages will account for the withdrawal of land from cultivation. this is an important point, for historians frequently support their main contention with regard to the enclosure movement (_i. e._, that it was caused by an increase in the price of wool), by the statement that increasing wages made landlords abandon tillage for sheep-farming, with its smaller labor charges. it has been shown that the conversion of arable to pasture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be explained by the price of wool, but it may still be urged that agriculture was rendered unprofitable by high wages. indeed, it is usually stated that the withdrawal of land from cultivation which took place in the fourteenth century was due to the scarcity of labor caused by the black death. in the fifteenth century population was reduced by the wars of the roses; and throughout the period under consideration, agriculture had to meet the competition of the growing town industries for labor. is it not possible that these influences caused an exorbitant rise in wages which would alone account for the substitution of sheep-farming for tillage? the obvious character of the enclosure movement makes it impossible to accept this hypothesis. the conversion of arable land to pasture was caused by no demand for higher wages, which made tillage unprofitable. the unemployment and pauperism caused by the enclosure of the open fields are notorious, and it is to these features of the enclosure movement that we owe the mass of literature on the subject. enclosures called forth a storm of protest, because they took away the living of poor husbandry families. the acute distress undergone by those who were evicted from their holdings is sufficient indication of the difficulty of finding employment, and it is impossible that wages could remain at an exorbitant level when the enclosure of the lands of one open-field township made enough men homeless to supply any existing dearth of labor in all of the surrounding villages. if agriculture was unprofitable, it was not because laborers demanded excessive wages, but because of the low productivity of the land. the significance of contemporary complaints of high wages is missed if they are interpreted as an indication of an exorbitant increase in wages. the facts are, rather, that land was so unproductive that farmers could not afford to pay even a low wage. if it were necessary to argue the point further, it could be pointed out that wages even in industry were not subject to that steady rise which would have to be assumed, if high wages are to furnish the explanation of the substitution of pasture for tillage from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth. the statistical data on this subject are fragmentary, but thorold rogers' calculations for the period - are significant. in this period wages rose per cent above the average of the previous century and a half; but the market prices of farm produce rose per cent.[ ] the rise in wages was far from keeping pace with the rise in selling prices, and the displacement of agriculture for grazing at this time must be due to some cause other than the greater number of laborers needed in agriculture. if, during certain periods within the four centuries under consideration wages advanced more rapidly than the prices of produce (statistical information on this subject is lacking) the continuous withdrawal of land from tillage during periods when wages fell remains to be explained by some cause other than high wages. nor can high wages account for the conversion of tilled land to pasture simultaneously with the conversion of pasture land to tillage in the seventeenth century. if wages were exorbitantly high in the seventeenth century, and if this is the reason for the laying to pasture of so much arable, how could farmers afford to cultivate the large amount of fresh land which they were bringing under the plow? is this accounted for not by any expectation of profit from this land but by the statutory requirement that no arable should be laid to pasture unless an equal amount of grass land were plowed in its stead? pasture in excess of the legal requirements was plowed up, and persons who did not wish to convert any arable to pasture are found increasing their tilled land by bringing grass land under cultivation. the movement cannot be explained, therefore, merely on the basis of the husbandry statutes. nor is the law itself to be dismissed without further examination, for in it we find the explicit statement that fresh land could be substituted for that then under cultivation, because common-field land was in many cases exhausted; it was therefore better to allow this to be laid to grass while better land was cultivated in its place.[ ] here then, is the simple explanation of the whole problem. the land which was converted from arable to pasture was worn out; but there was fresh land available for tillage, and some of this was brought under cultivation. no alternative explanation can be worked out on the basis of hypothetical wage or price movements. the historian is indeed at liberty to form his own theories as to the trend of prices in the seventeenth century, for he is unhampered by the existence of known records such as those for the sixteenth century; but it is impossible to construct any theory of prices which will explain why the conversion of arable land to pasture continued at a time when much pasture land was being plowed up. it is necessary to choose a theory of prices which will explain either the extension of tillage or the extension of pasture; both cannot be explained by the same prices. if, as some historians assume, the increase of population or some such factor was causing a comparatively rapid increase in the price of grain in this period, the continued conversion of arable to pasture requires explanation. if, as miss leonard supposes, the contrary assumption is true, and the products of arable land could be sold to less advantage than those of pasture, then the cause of the conversion of pasture to arable must be sought. it is not only in the seventeenth century that this double conversion movement took place. in the second half of the fourteenth century pastures were being plowed up. at holway, - , three plots of land which had been pasture were converted to arable.[ ] in this period much land was withdrawn from cultivation. the explanation usually advanced by historians for the conversion of arable to pasture at this time is that the scarcity of labor since the black death (a quarter of a century before) made it impossible to cultivate the land as extensively as when wages were low, or when serf labor was available. if this is the whole case, it is difficult to account for the conversion to arable of land already pasture. other factors than the supposed scarcity of labor were involved; land in good condition, such as the plots of pasture at holway, repaid cultivation, but the yield was too low on land exhausted by centuries of cultivation to make tillage profitable. in the sixteenth century, also, the restoration of cultivation on land which had formerly been converted from arable to pasture was going on. fitzherbert devotes several chapters of his treatise on surveying to a discussion of the methods of amending "ley grounde, the whiche hath ben errable lande of late," (ch. ) and "bushy ground and mossy that hath ben errable lande of olde time" (ch. ). this land should be plowed and sown, and it will produce much grain, "with littell dongynge, and sow it no lengar tha it will beare plentye of corne, withoute donge", and then lay it down to grass again. tusser also describes this use of land alternately as pasture and arable.[ ] a farmer on one of the manors of william, first earl of pembroke, had an enclosed field in , which afforded pasture for sheep as well as an unspecified number of cattle, "_qui aliquando seminatur, aliquando iacet ad pasturam_."[ ] the motives of this alternating use of the land would be clear enough, even though they were not explicitly stated by contemporaries; arable land which would produce only scant crops unless heavily manured made good pasture, and after a longer or shorter period under grass, was so improved by the manure of the sheep pasturing on it and by the heavy sod which formed that it could be tilled profitably, and was therefore restored to tillage. the fact of two opposite but simultaneous conversion movements is unaccountable under the accepted hypothesis of the causes of the enclosure movement, which turns upon assumptions as to the relative prices of grain and wool or cattle or wages. the authorities for this theory have necessarily neglected the evidence that pasture land was converted to arable in the sixteenth century and that arable land was converted to pasture in the seventeenth, and have separated in time two tendencies which were simultaneous. they have described the increase in pasturage at the expense of arable in the early period, and the increase of arable at the expense of pasture in the later period, and have explained a difference between the two periods which did not exist by a change in the ratio between the prices of wool and grain for which no proof is given. it has been shown in this chapter that the conversion of arable to pasture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot have been caused by increased demand for wool, since the price of wool relatively to that of grain fell, and the extension of tillage rather than of pasture would have taken place had price movements been the chief factor influencing the conversion of land from one use to the other. it has also been shown that the conversion of arable to pasture did not cease at the beginning of the seventeenth century. if the principal cause of the enclosure movement had been the increasing demand for wool, this cause would have ceased to operate when time had elapsed for the shifting of enough land from tillage to pasture to increase the supply of wool. that the conversion of arable to pasture did not cease after a reasonable time had passed is an indication that its cause was not the demand for wool. when it is found that pasture was being converted to arable at the same time that other land was withdrawn from cultivation and laid to grass, the insufficiency of the accepted explanation of the enclosure movement is made even more apparent. a change in the price of wool could at best explain the conversion in one direction only. the theory that the cause of the enclosure movement was the high price of wool must be rejected, and a more critical study must be made of the readjustments in the use of land which became conspicuous in the fourteenth century, but which are overlooked in the orthodox account of the enclosure movement. footnotes: [ ] levett and ballard, _the black death on the estates of the see of winchester_ (oxford, ), p. . [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_ (gloucester, ), vol. i, pp. - . [ ] (oxford, - ), vols. i, iv. [ ] increase in manufacture of woollen cloth constituted no increase in the demand for wool in so far as exports of raw wool were reduced. [ ] _royal historical soc. trans._, n. s. ( ), vol. ix, p. , note . [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] gay, _quarterly journal of economics_ ( - ), vol. xvii, p. . [ ] pollard, _reign of henry vii_ (london, ), vol. ii, pp. - . [ ] more, _utopia_ (everyman edition), p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _outlines of the economic history of england_ (london, ), p. . [ ] _growth of eng. ind. and commerce_ (cambridge, ), p. . [ ] _england's industrial development_ (london, ), p. . [ ] _english economic history_ (new york, ), part ii, p. . [ ] carew, _survey of cornwall_ (london, ), p. . [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce, modern times_, , part i, p. . [ ] lennard, _rural northamptonshire_ (oxford, ), p. . for other examples, _cf. infra_, pp. , - . [ ] leonard, _royal hist. soc. trans._, . gonner in _common land and inclosure_ covers much the same ground, but does not bring out as clearly the extent to which the seventeenth century enclosures were accompanied by conversion of tilled land to pasture. [ ] tawney, _agrarian problem in the sixteenth cen._ (london, ), p. . [ ] _royal hist. soc. trans._ ( ), vol xix, note , p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, vol. iv, p. . [ ] _cf. infra_, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _the black death_, p. . [ ] _cf. infra_, p. . [ ] tawney, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] _infra_, p. , , - . chapter ii the fertility of the common fields up to this point attention has been given chiefly to the theory that the enclosure movement waxed and waned in response to supposed fluctuations in the relative prices of wool and grain, and it has been found that this theory is untenable. it is now necessary to consider more closely the true cause of the conversion of arable land to pasture--the declining productivity of the soil--and the cause of the restoration of this land to cultivation--the restoration of its fertility. the connection between soil fertility and the system of husbandry has been explained by dr. russell, of the rothamsted experiment station: virgin land covered with its native vegetation appears to alter very little and very slowly in composition. plants spring up, assimilate the soil nitrates, phosphates, potassium salts, etc., and make considerable quantities of nitrogenous and other organic compounds: then they die and all this material is added to the soil. nitrogen-fixing bacteria also add to the stores of nitrogen compounds. but, on the other hand, there are losses: some of the added substances are dissipated as gas by the decomposition bacteria, others are washed away in the drainage water. these losses are small in poor soils, but they become greater in rich soils, and they set a limit beyond which accumulation of material cannot go. thus a virgin soil does not become indefinitely rich in nitrogenous and other organic compounds, but reaches an equilibrium level where the annual gains are offset by the annual losses so that no net change results. this equilibrium level depends on the composition of the soil, its position, the climate, etc, and it undergoes a change if any of these factors alter. but for practical purposes it may be regarded as fairly stationary. when, however, the virgin soil is broken up by the plough and brought into cultivation the native vegetation and the crop are alike removed, and therefore the sources of gain are considerably reduced. the losses, on the other hand, are much intensified. rain water more readily penetrates, carrying dissolved substances with it: biochemical decompositions also proceed. in consequence the soil becomes poorer, and finally it is reduced to the same level as the rate of gain of nitrogenous matter. a new and lower equilibrium level is now reached about which the composition of the soil remains fairly constant; this is determined by the same factors as the first, _i. e._ the composition of the soil, climate, etc. thus each soil may vary in composition and therefore in fertility between two limits: a higher limit if it is kept permanently covered with vegetation such as grass, and a lower limit if it is kept permanently under the plough. these limits are set by the nature of the soil and the climate, but the cultivator can attain any level he likes between them simply by changing his mode of husbandry. the lower equilibrium level is spoken of as the inherent fertility of the soil because it represents the part of the fertility due to the soil and its surroundings, whilst the level actually reached in any particular case is called its condition or "heart", the land being in "good heart "or "bad heart", according as the cultivator has pushed the actual level up or not; this part of the fertility is due to the cultivator's efforts. the difference between the higher and lower fertility level is not wholly a question of percentage of nitrogen, carbon, etc. at its highest level the soil possesses a good physical texture owing to the flocculation of the clay and the arrangement of the particles: it can readily be got into the fine tilth needed for a seed bed. but when it has run down the texture becomes very unsatisfactory. much calcium carbonate is also lost during the process: and when this constituent falls too low, the soil becomes "sour" and unsuited for crops. the simplest system of husbandry is that of continuous wheat cultivation, practiced under modern conditions in new countries. when the virgin land is first broken up its fertility is high; so long as it remains under cultivation this level can no longer be maintained, but rapidly runs down. during this degradation process considerable quantities of plant food become available and a succession of crops can be raised without any substitution of manure ... after a time the unstable period is over and the new equilibrium level is reached at which the soil will stop if the old husbandry continues. in this final state the soil is often not fertile enough to allow of the profitable raising of crops; it is now starving for want of those very nutrients that were so prodigally dissipated in the first days of its cultivation, and the cultivator starves with it or moves on. fortunately recovery is by no means impossible, though it may be prolonged. it is only necessary to leave the land covered with vegetation for a period of years when it will once again regain much of the nitrogenous organic matter it has lost.[ ] dr. russell adds that soil-exhaustion is essentially a modern phenomenon, however, and gives the following reasons for supposing that the medieval system conserved the fertility of the soil. first, the cattle grazed over a wide area and the arable land all received some dung. thus elements of fertility were transferred from the pasture land to the smaller area of tilled land. this process, he admits, involved the impoverishment of the pasture land, but only very slowly, and the fertility of the arable was in the meanwhile maintained. secondly, the processes of liming and marling the soil were known, and by these means the necessary calcium carbonate was supplied. thirdly, although there was insufficient replacement of the phosphates taken from the soil, the yield of wheat was so low that the amount of phosphoric acid removed was small, and the system was permanent for all practical purposes. one of the facts given in substantiation of this view is that the yield after enclosure increased considerably.[ ] in discussing these points, it will be well to begin with the evidence as to exhaustion afforded by the increased yield under enclosure. the improvement in yield took place because of the long period of fallow obtained when the land was used as pasture; or, in the eighteenth century, with the increase in nitrogenous organic matter made possible when hay and turnips were introduced as field forage crops. that is, the increase in yield depended either upon that prolonged period of recuperation which will _restore fertility_, or upon an actual increase in the amount of manure used. apparently, then, open-field land had become exhausted, since an increase in yield could be obtained by giving it a rest, without improving the methods of cultivation, etc., or by adding more manure. there was not, as dr. russell supposes, enough manure under the medieval system of husbandry to maintain the fertility of the soil. it is true that the husbandman understood the value of manure, and took care that the land should receive as much as possible, and that he knew also of the value of lime and marl. but, as dr. simkhovitch says: it is not within our province to go into agrotechnical details and describe what the medieval farmer knew, but seldom practiced for lack of time and poor means of communication, in the way of liming sour clay ground, etc. plant production is determined by the one of the necessary elements that is available in the least quantity. it is a matter of record that the medieval farmer had not enough and could not have quite enough manure, to maintain the productivity of the soil.[ ] the knowledge of the means of maintaining and increasing the productivity of the soil is one thing, but the ability to use this knowledge is another. the very origin and persistence of the cumbersome common-field system in so many parts of the world is sufficient testimony as to the impossibility of improving the quality of the soil in the middle ages. the only way in which these men could divide the land into portions of equal value was to divide it first into plots of different qualities and then to give a share in each of these plots to each member of the community. they never dreamed of being able to bring the poor plots up to a high level of productivity by the use of plentiful manuring, etc., but had to accept the differences in quality as they found them. the inconvenience and confusion of the common-field system were endured because, under the circumstances, it was the only possible system. very few cattle were kept. no more were kept because there was no way of keeping them. in the fields wheat, rye, oats, barley and beans were raised, but no hay and no turnips. field grasses and clover which could be introduced in the course of field crops were unknown. what hay they had came entirely from the permanent meadows, the low-lying land bordering the banks of streams. "meadow grass," writes dr. simkhovitch, "could grow only in very definite places on low and moist land that followed as a rule the course of a stream. this gave the meadow a monopolistic value, which it lost after the introduction of grass and clover in the rotation of crops."[ ] the number of cattle and sheep kept by the community was limited by the amount of forage available for winter feeding. often no limitation upon the number pastured in summer in the common pastures was necessary other than that no man should exceed the number which he was able to keep during the winter. the meadow hay was supplemented by such poor fodder as straw and the loppings of trees, and the cattle were got through the winter with the smallest amount of forage which would keep them alive, but even with this economy it was impossible to keep a sufficient number. the amount of stall manure produced in the winter was of course small, on account of the scant feed, and even the more plentiful manure of the summer months was the property of the lord, so that the villain holdings received practically no dung. the villains were required to send their cattle and sheep at night to a fold which was moved at frequent intervals over the demesne land, and their own land received ordinarily no dressing of manure excepting the scant amount produced when the village flocks pastured on the fallow fields. the supply of manure, insufficient in any case to maintain the fertility of the arable land, was diminishing rather than increasing. as dr. russell suggested in the passage referred to above, the continuous use of pastures and meadows causes a deterioration in their quality. the quantity of fodder was decreasing for this reason, almost imperceptibly, but none the less seriously. fewer cattle could be kept as the grass land deteriorated, and the small quantity of manure which was available for restoring the productivity of the open fields was gradually decreasing for this reason. soil exhaustion went on during the middle ages not because the cultivators were careless or ignorant of the fact that manure is needed to maintain fertility, but because this means of improving the soil was not within their reach. they used what manure they had and marled the soil when they had the time and could afford it, but, as the centuries passed, the virgin richness of the soil was exhausted and crops diminished. the only crops which are a matter of statistical record are those raised on the demesne land of those manors managed for their owners by bailiffs who made reports of the number of acres sown and the size of the harvest. these crops were probably greater than those reaped from average land, as it is reasonable to suppose that the demesne land was superior to that held by villains in the first place, and as it received better care, having the benefit of the sheep fold and of such stall manure as could be collected. even if it were possible to form an accurate estimate of the average yield of demesne land, then, we should have an over-estimate for the average yield of ordinary common-field land. no accurate estimate of the average yield even of demesne land can be made, however, on the basis of the few entries regarding the yield of land which have been printed. variations in yield from season to season and from manor to manor in the same season are so great that nothing can be inferred as to the general average in any one season, nor as to the comparative productivity in different periods, from the materials at hand. for instance, at downton, one of the winchester manors, the average yield of wheat between and was . bushels per acre, but this average includes a yield of . bushels in and one of bushels in ,[ ] showing that no single year gives a fair indication of the average yield of the period. for the most part the data available apply to areas too small and to periods too brief to give more than the general impression that the yield of land was very low. in the thirteenth century walter of henley and the writer of the anonymous _husbandry_ are authorities for the opinion that the average yield of wheat land should be about ten bushels per acre.[ ] at combe, oxfordshire, about the middle of the century, the average yield during several seasons was only bushels.[ ] about , the fifty acres of demesne planted with wheat at forncett yielded about five-fold or bushels an acre (five seasons).[ ] between and , the average yield ( acres for three seasons), at ten manors of the merton college estates was also bushels.[ ] at hawsted, where about acres annually were sown with wheat, the average yield for three seasons at the end of the fourteenth century was a little more than - / bushels an acre.[ ] statistical data so scattered as this cannot be used as the basis of an inquiry into the rate of soil exhaustion. where the normal variation from place to place and from season to season is as great as it is in agriculture, the material from which averages are constructed must be unusually extensive. so far as i know, no material in this field entirely satisfactory for statistical purposes is accessible at the present time. there is, however, one manor, witney, for which important data for as many as eighteen seasons between and have been printed. a second suggestive source of information is gras's table of harvest statistics for the whole winchester group of manors, covering three different seasons, separated from each other by intervals of about a century. the acreage reported for the winchester manors is so extensive that the average yield of the group can be fairly taken to be the average for all of that part of england. moreover, witney seems to be representative of the winchester group, if the fact that the yield at witney is close to the group average in the years when this is known can be relied upon as an indication of its representativeness in the years when the group average is not known. the average yield for all the manors in - was - / bushels per acre; for witney alone, - / . in - the yield of the group and the yield at witney are, respectively, and - / bushels per acre.[ ] table iii shows the yield of wheat on the manors of the bishopric of winchester in the years , and . if it could be shown that these were representative years, we should have a means of measuring the increase or decrease in productivity in these two centuries. some indication of the representativeness of the years and is given by a comparison of prices for these years with the average prices of the period in which they lie. the price in was about per cent below the average for the period - ,[ ] an indication that the crop of nine bushels per acre reaped in - was above the normal. the price of wheat in was very slightly above the average for the period;[ ] six bushels an acre or more, then, was probably a normal crop at the end of the fourteenth century. this conclusion is supported also by the fact that the yield in that year at witney was approximately the same as the average of the eleven seasons between and noted in table v. the price of wheat in the year - is not ascertainable. walter of henley's statement that the price of corn must be higher than the average to prevent loss when the return for seed sown was only three-fold[ ] is an indication that the normal yield must have been at this time at least three-fold, or six bushels, so that the extremely low yield of the year - can hardly be considered typical. this examination of the yield in the three seasons shown in the table gives these results: at the beginning of the thirteenth century the average yield was probably about six bushels and certainly not more than ten; at the beginning of the fourteenth century the average was less than nine bushels--how much less, whether more or less than six bushels, is not known--at the end of the fourteenth century the yield was about six bushels. table iii yield of wheat on the manors of the bishipric of winchester[ ] _area sown_ _produce_ _ratio produce_ _date_ _acres_ _bushels per acre_ _to seed_ - - / - / - [ ] - - / table iv acerage planted with grains on the manor of the bishopric of winchester[ ] _wheat_ _mancorn and rye_ _barley_ - - table v yield of wheat at witney[ ] _date_ _bushels per acre_ _acres sown_ - / - / ... - / ... - / ... - / ... ( - ) ... - / - / ... - / - / - / - / - / ... - / ... - / ... ... - / - / the yield of the soil in single seasons at widely separated intervals is a piece of information of little value for our purpose. these tables reveal other facts of greater significance. the yield for the year gives almost no information about the normal yield over a series of years, but the area planted depends very largely upon that yield. the farmer knows that it will pay, on the average, to sow a certain number of acres, and the area under cultivation is not subject to violent fluctuations, as is the crop reaped. the area sown in any season is representative of the period; the crop reaped may or may not be representative. land which, over a series of years, fails to produce enough to pay for cultivation is no longer planted. if the fertility of the soil is declining, this is shown by the gradual withdrawal from cultivation of the less productive land, as it is realized that it produces so little that it no longer pays to till it. table iv shows that in fact this withdrawal of worn out land from cultivation was actually taking place. the area sown with wheat on the twenty-five manors for which the statistics for both periods are available was reduced by more than fifty per cent between the beginning and the end of the thirteenth century. a similar reduction in the area planted with all of the other crops, mancorn, rye, barley and oats, took place. a process of selection was going on which eliminated the less fertile land from cultivation. if six bushels an acre was necessary to pay the costs of tillage, land which returned less than six bushels could not be kept under the plow. the six bushel crop which seems to be normal in the fourteenth century is not the average yield of all of that land which had been under cultivation at an earlier time, but only of the better grades of land. plots which had formerly yielded their five or six bushels an acre had become too barren to produce the bare minimum which made tillage profitable, and their produce no longer appeared in the average. even with the elimination of the worst grades of land the average yield fell, because the better land, too, was becoming less fertile. at witney (table v) the area planted with wheat fell from about acres in to less than acres in ; but, in spite of this reduction in the amount of land cultivated, the average annual yield after was less than - / bushels, while it had been about - / bushels per acre in the period - . this withdrawal of land from cultivation took place without the occurrence of any such calamity as the black death, which is ordinarily mentioned as the cause of the reduction of arable land to pasture in so far as this took place before . it affords an indirect proof of the fact that much land was becoming barren. these statistical indications of declining productivity of the soil are supported by the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the fourteenth century peasantry--poverty which can be explained only by the barrenness of their land. many of the features of the agrarian changes of this period are familiar--the substitution of money payments for villain services, the frequency of desertion, the amalgamation and leasing of bond-holdings, the subdividing and leasing of the demesne. a point which has not been dwelt upon is the favorable pecuniary terms upon which the villains commuted their services. where customary relations were replaced by a new bargain, the bargain was always in favor of the tenant. what was the source of this strategic advantage of the villain? the great number of holdings made vacant by the black death and the scarcity of eligible holders placed the landowner at a disadvantage, but this situation was temporary. how can the difficulty of filling vacant tenements before the black death be accounted for, and why were villains still able to secure reductions in their rents a generation after its effects had ceased to be felt? even before the black death, it was frequently the case that villain holdings could be filled only by compulsion. the difficulty in finding tenants did not originate in the decrease in the population caused by the pestilence. there is little evidence that there was a lack of men qualified to hold land even after the black death, but it is certain that they sought in every way possible to avoid land-holding. the villains who were eligible in many cases fled, so that it became exceedingly difficult to fill a tenement when once it became vacant. land whose holders died of the pestilence was still without tenants twenty-five and thirty years later, although persistent attempts had been made to force men to take it up. when compulsion succeeded only in driving men away from the manor, numerous concessions were made in the attempt to make land-holding more attractive. it is important to notice that these concessions were economic, not social. the force which was driving men away was not the desire to escape the incidents of serfdom, but the impossibility of making a living from holdings burdened with heavy rents. these burdens were eased, grudgingly, little by little, by landlords who had exhausted other methods of keeping their land from being deserted. it was necessary to reduce the rent in some way in order to permit the villains to live. the produce of a customary holding was no longer sufficient to maintain life and to allow the holder to render the services and pay the rent which had been fixed in an earlier century when the soil was more fertile. notices of vacated holdings date from before on the estates of the berkeleys. thomas the first was lord of berkeley between and , and such were the tymes for the most part whilest this lord thomas sate lord, that many of his tenants in divers of his manors ... surrendred up and least their lands into his hands because they were not able to pay the rent and doe the services, which also often happened in the tyme of his elder brother the lord robert.[ ] this entry in the chronicle is significant, for it is typical of conditions on many other manors at a later date. the tenants were not able to pay the rent and do the services, and therefore gave up the land. it was leased, when men could be found to take it at all, at a rent lower than that which its former holders had found so oppressive. it is interesting to note that much of this land was soon after enclosed and converted to pasture, more than a century before the event which is supposed to mark the beginning of the enclosure movement. the productivity of the land had declined; its holders were no longer able to pay the customary rent, and the lord had to content himself with lower rents; the productivity was so low in some cases that the land was fit only for sheep pasture. land holding was regarded as a misfortune in the fourteenth century. the decline in fertility had made it impossible for a villain to support himself and his family and perform the accustomed services and pay the rent for his land. sometimes heirs were excused on account of their poverty. page has made note of the prevailing custom of fining these heirs for the privilege of refusing the land: in j. f., who held a messuage and half a virgate, had to pay two shillings for permission to give up the land, because he was unable to render the services due from it. three other men at the same time paid six pence each not to be compelled to take up customary land ... at woolston, , r. g. gave up his messuage and half virgate because he could not render the necessary services; whereupon t. s. had to pay three shillings three pence that he might not be forced to take the holding, and another villain paid six shillings eight pence for the same thing.[ ] miss levett mentions the fact that cases were fairly frequent at the winchester manors in the fourteenth century where a widow or next of kin refused to take up land on account of poverty or impotence;[ ] and three villains of forncett gave up their holdings before on account of their poverty.[ ] in case no one could be found who would willingly take up the land, the method of compulsion was tried. the responsibility for providing a tenant in these cases seems to have been shifted to the whole community. a villain chosen by the whole homage had to take up the land. at crawley in there were two such cases. a fine was paid by one villain for a cottage and ten acres "_que devenerunt in manus domini tanquam escheata pro defectu tenentium & ad que eligebatur per totam decenuam_." at twyford in - , j. paid a fine for a messuage and a half virgate of land, "_ad que idem johannes electus est per totum homagium_."[ ] in other entries cited by page, the element of compulsion is unmistakable: the new holder of land is described as "_electus per totum homagium ad hoc compulsus_," a phrase which is frequently found also in the entries of fines paid on some of the winchester manors after the black death.[ ] this method of compulsion was useful to some extent, but there were limits beyond which it could not be pushed. five men of therfield in were ordered to take up customary land, and several of them left the manor rather than obey. "_vendiderunt quod habuerunt et recesserunt nocitante._"[ ] at nailesbourne, in the same year, "_robertus le semenour compulsus finivit et clam recessit et ea tenere recusavit_."[ ] the problem which confronted landowners during the black death was not so much an absolute lack of men on the manors, as a stubborn unwillingness on the part of these men to hold land. there were enough men left by the pestilence, but they were determined to avoid taking up the tenements whose holders had died. the pressure which was brought upon the villains to induce them to take up land and to prevent them from leaving the manor could not prevent the desertions, which had begun before the pestilence, and which took away the men who would naturally have supplied the places of those who died. the whole village must have been anxious to prevent the desertion of these men, for the community was held responsible for the services from vacant tenements, when they failed to provide a tenant. at meon, for instance, each of twenty-six tenants paid _d._ in place of works due from a vacant holding, according to an arrangement which had been made before the black death,[ ] and at burwell, in , when three villains left the manor, their land was "_tradita toto homagio ad faciendum servicia et consuetudines_."[ ] in spite of the deterring force which must have been exerted by public opinion under these conditions, and in spite of the aggressive measures taken by bailiffs to prevent desertion and to recapture those who had fled, the records are full of the names of those who had been successful in making their escape. throughout the latter half of the fourteenth century and the first part of the fifteenth there was a gradual leakage from the winchester manors. "villeins were apt 'to go away secretly' and to be no more found."[ ] page describes a similar tendency on the part of villains of the manors whose records he has examined. at weston, three villains deserted in . at woolston in a serf "_recessit a dominio et dereliquit terram suam_." at chilton, between and , eleven men and two women fled, some of whom were recaptured. at therfield in a man who held twenty-three acres of land fled with his whole family. in the same year at abbot's ripton a man escaped with his horses, and three years later another villain left weston by night.[ ] at forncett, "before from to tenements had fallen into the lord's hands. it was the serfs especially who were relinquishing their land; for a larger proportion of the tenements charged with week-work were abandoned than of the more lightly burdened tenements."[ ] this, of course, is what we should expect, as the lighter burdens of these holdings caused their tenants to feel less severely than the ordinary serfs the declining productivity of the land. the method of compulsion failed to keep the tenants on the land. they ran off, and the holdings remained vacant. it was necessary to make concessions of a material nature in order to persuade men to take up land or to keep what they had. they were excused of a part of their services in some cases, and in others all of the services were definitely commuted for small sums of money. when no tenants for vacant land could be secured who would perform the customary services due from it, the bailiff was forced to commute them. "'so and so holds such land for rent, because no one would hold it for works,' is a fairly frequent entry both before and after ," on the records of the bishopric of winchester. the important point to be noticed here is that the money rent paid in these cases was always less than the value of the services which had formerly been exacted from the land; not only that, it was less than the money equivalent for which those services had sometimes been commuted, an amount far less than the market value of the services in the fourteenth century at the prevailing rates of wages. for instance, when roger haywood took up three virgates and a cotland at a money rent instead of for the traditional services, "_quia nullus tenere voluit_," he contracted to pay rents whose total sum amounted to less than twenty-five shillings and included the church scot for one virgate and the cotland. on this manor, sutton, the total services of _one_ virgate valued at the rate at which they were ordinarily "sold" must have amounted to at least eighteen or twenty shillings. at wargrave the services of thirty-two virgates were all commuted at three shillings each, and the same sum was paid by each of twenty-three virgates at waltham.[ ] at forncett and on the manors of the berkeley estates commutation had little part in the disappearance of labor dues. the vacated land was leased in larger or smaller parcels at the best rents which could be obtained. this rent bore no relation to the value of the services formerly due from the land. the customary tenements which had been the units upon which labor dues were assessed were broken up, and the acres leased separately, or in new combinations, to other men.[ ] at forncett, as in the case of the winchester manors where the services were commuted, the terms of the new arrangement can be compared with those of the old, and it is seen that the money rent obtained was less than the value of the services formerly due. the customary services were here valued at over two shillings per acre; the average rent obtained was less than one shilling an acre. the net pecuniary result of the change, then, was the same as though the services had been commuted for money at less than their value. another method of reducing rents in this period was the remission of a part of the services due. miss levett notes the extent to which this took place on the winchester manors, and suggests that the bishop wished to avoid the wastefulness and inefficiency of serf labor.[ ] she overlooks the fact that he failed to exact the money payment in place of the services for which manorial custom provided. it was a well established custom that in case work owed by the tenants was not used they should pay money instead. the amount of work needed each year on the demesne varied according to the size of the harvest, etc., but the number of days' works for which the tenants was liable was fixed. the surplus of works owed above those needed were "sold" each year to the villains. frequently the number of works sold exceeded the number performed, although formal commutation of dues had not taken place. at nailesbourne ( - ), works were due from the villains, but nearly of these were sold.[ ] if the bishop had merely wished to avoid waste, then, in ceasing to require the performance of villain services on his manors, he would have required the payment of the money equivalent of these services. when the services were excused, and the customary alternative of a money payment also, the change was clearly an intentional reduction in the burden of villain tenure. this fact makes emphasis upon the payment of money as the distinguishing feature of the changed relations between landlord and tenant in this period misleading. there was every precedent for requiring a money payment in the place of services not wanted. when, therefore, a great many services were simply allowed to lapse, it is an indication that it was impossible to exact the payment. it makes little difference whether the services were commuted at a lower rate than that at which they had formerly been "sold" or whether the villain was simply held accountable for a smaller number of services at the old rate; in either case the rent was reduced, and the burden of the tenant was less. the reduction of rent is thus the characteristic and fundamental feature of all of the changes of land tenure during this period. this fact is ignored by historians who suppose the chief factor in the commutation movement to have been the desire of prosperous villains to rid themselves of the degrading marks of serfdom. vinogradoff, for instance, in his preface to the monograph from which most of the foregoing illustrations have been drawn, has nothing at all to say of the reduction of rent and the poverty of the tenants when he is speaking of the various circumstances attending the introduction of money payments. in the particular case under discussion the cultural policy of william of wykeham may have suggested arrangements in commutation of labour services and rents in kind. in other cases similar results were connected with war expenditures and town life. in so far the initiative in selling services came from the class of landowners. but there were powerful tendencies at work in the life of the peasants which made for the same result. the most comprehensive of these tendencies was connected, it seems to me, with the accumulation of capital in the hands of the villains under a system of customary dues. when rents and services became settled and lost their elasticity, roughly speaking, in the course of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the surplus of profits from agriculture was bound to collect in the hands of those who received them directly from the soil, and it was natural for these first receivers to turn the proceeds primarily towards an improvement of their social condition; the redemption of irksome services was a conspicuous manifestation of this policy.[ ] this paragraph contains several suggestions which are shown to be misleading by a study of the extracts from the original sources embodied in the essay of whose preface it forms a part. it is true that the cultural policy of william of wykeham was an extravagant one, and that he was in need of money when the system of tenure was being revolutionized on his estates; but it is misleading to interpret the changes which took place as measures for the prompt conversion into cash of the episcopal revenues. no radical changes in the system of payment were necessary in order to secure cash, for the system of selling surplus services to the villains had become established decades before the time of this bishop, and no formal commutation of services was necessary in order to convert the labor dues of the villains into payments in money. the bulk of the services were not performed, even before commutation, and the lord received money for the services not used on the demesne. the essential feature of the changes which took place was a reduction in the amount paid--a reduction which the bishop must have resisted so far as he dared, just as other landowners must have resisted the reductions which their tenants forced them to make at a time when they were in need of money. the commutation of services was incidental, and was only a slight modification of the system formerly in use, but, whether services were commuted or were in part excused, the result was a lessening of the burden borne by the tenant, and the reduction of the rent received by the lord. it is true, as professor vinogradoff states, that there were powerful tendencies in the life of the peasants which made for this result. in fact no initiative in selling services--at these rates--could have come from the side of the landowners. the change was forced upon them. unless they compromised with their tenants and reduced their rents they soon found vacant tenements on their hands which no one could be compelled to take. the amount of land which was finally leased at low rents because the former holders had died or run away and no one could be forced to take it at the old rents is evidence of the reluctance with which landowners accepted the situation and of their inability to resist the change in the end. but it is not true that the most comprehensive of these tendencies was the accumulation of capital in the hands of the villains, and their desire to improve their social condition. the immediate affect of the commutation of services and similar changes at this time was to leave their social condition untouched, whatever the final result may have been. these villains did not buy themselves free of the marks of servitude. their gradual emancipation came for other reasons. at witney, for example, where the works of all the native tenants had been commuted by , they were still required to perform duties of a servile character: they were all to join in haymaking and in washing and shearing the lord's sheep, to pay pannage for their pigs, to take their turn of service as reeve and tithingman, and to carry the lord's victuals and baggage on his departure from witney as the natives were formerly wont to do.[ ] this example, taken at random, is typical of the continuance of conditions which should make the historian hesitate before adopting the view that the social condition of the peasants was improved by the new arrangements made as to the bulk of their services and rents. but more than that, the terms of the new arrangements are not those which would be offered by well-to-do cultivators in whose hands the profits from the soil had accumulated. in all of these cases the new terms were advantageous to the tenants, not to the lord, and advantageous in a strictly pecuniary way. the lord had to grant these terms because the tenants were in the most miserable poverty, and could no longer pay their accustomed rent. neither the black death, whose effects were evanescent, nor the desire of prosperous villains to free themselves of the degrading marks of serfdom was an important cause in the sequence of agrarian changes which took place in the fourteenth century. serfdom as a status was hardly affected, but a thousand entries record the poverty and destitution which made it necessary to lighten the economic burdens of the serfs. at brightwell, for example, the works of three half-virgaters were relaxed, the record reads, because of their poverty ( - ).[ ] some villains had no oxen, and were excused their plowing on this account, or were allowed to substitute manual labor for carting services.[ ] at weston, in , a tenant "_non arat terram domini causa paupertate_."[ ] at downton, in - , no money could be collected from the villains in place of the services they owed in haymaking.[ ] frequently when services were commuted for money, the record of the fact is accompanied by the statement that the change was made on account of the poverty of the tenants. at witney, for instance, the works and services of all the native tenants were commuted at fixed payments (_ad certos denarios_) by favour of the lord as long as the lord pleases, on account of the poverty of the homage.[ ] the reduction in rent in this case was at least a third of the total. the value of the customary services commuted was at least ten shillings six pence per acre, and they were commuted at six shillings eight pence. other explicit references to the poverty of the tenants as the cause of commutation are quoted by page: at hinton, berks, the bailiff reports in , that the former lord before his death had commuted the services of the villains for money, "eo quod customarii impotentes ad facienda dicta opera et pro eorum paupertate" ... at stevenage, , s. g. "tenuit unam vergatam reddendo inde per annum in serviciis et consuetudinibus xxii solidos. et dictus s. g. pauper et impotens dictam virgatam tenere. ideo concessum est per dominum quod s. g. habeat et teneat predictam terram reddendo inde xiii solidos iv denarios pro omnibus serviciis et consuetudinibus."[ ] in connection with the matter of heriots, also, evidences of extreme poverty are frequent. frequently when a tenant died there was no beast for the lord to seize. the heriot of a virgate was generally an ox, or money payment of its value. but the amount as often reduced "propter paupertatem," and sometimes when a succeeding tenant could not pay, a half acre was deducted from the virgate and held by the lord instead of the heriot.[ ] the rate at which the value of these holdings declined when their tenants possessed too few cattle was rapid. land without stock is worthless. the temptation to sell an ox in order to meet the rent was great, but when the deficiency was due to declining productivity of the soil, there was no probability that it would be made up the following year even with all the stock, and with fewer cattle the situation was hopeless. after this process had gone on for a few years nothing was left, not even a yoke of oxen for plowing. whatever means had been taken to keep up the fertility of the land, attend to the drainage, _etc._, were of necessity neglected, and finally the hope of keeping up the struggle was abandoned. the spirit which prompted the reply of the chatteris tenant when he was ordered by the manorial court to put his holding in repair can be understood: "_non reparavit tenementum, et dicit quod non vult reparare sed potius dimittere et abire._"[ ] if he left the manor and joined the other men who under the same circumstances were giving up their land and becoming fugitives, it was not with the hope of greatly improving his condition. some of the fugitives found employment in the towns, but this was by no means certain, and the records frequently state that the absent villains had become beggars.[ ] the declining productivity of the soil not only affected the villains, but reduced the profits of demesne cultivation. it has already been seen that the acreage under crop was steadily decreasing, as more and more land reached a stage of barrenness in which it no longer repaid cultivation. this process is seen from another angle in the frequent complaints that the customary meals supplied by the lord to serfs working on the demesne cost more than the labor was worth. according to miss levett: this complaint was made on many manors belonging to the bishop of winchester in spite of the fact that if one may judge from the cost of the "autumn works" the meals were not very lavish, the average cost being _d._ or - / _d._ per head for each _precaria_.... the complaint that the system was working at a loss comes also from brightwaltham (berkshire), hutton (essex), and from banstead (surrey), as early as , and is reflected in contemporary literature. "the work is not worth the breakfast" (or the _reprisa_) occurs several times in the winchester pipe rolls.... by the entry is considerably more frequent, and applies to ploughing as well as to harvest-work.[ ] at meon acres of ploughing were excused _quia non fecerunt huiusmodi arrura causa reprisae_. a similar note occurs at hambledon (_ecclesia_) and at fareham with the further information that the ploughing was there performed _ad cibum domini_. at overton four virgates were excused their ploughing _quia reprisa excedit valorem_.[ ] miss levett quotes these entries as an explanation for the tendency to excuse services, forgetting that the lord could usually demand a money equivalent for services not required for any reason. we have here the reason why so few services are demanded, but no explanation of the failure to require money instead. the fundamental cause of the worthlessness of the labor on the demesne is the fact which accounts for the absence of a money payment for the work not performed. the demesne land was worn out, and did not repay costs of cultivation; the bond land was worn out, and the villains were too poor to "buy" their labor. the profits of cultivating this unproductive land were so small that a deficit arose when it was necessary to meet the cost of maintaining for a few days the men employed on it. it is not surprising that men who had families to support and were trying to make a living from the soil abandoned their worthless holdings and left the manor. the lord had only to meet the expense of food for the laborers during the few days when they were actually at work plowing the demesne or harvesting the crop. how could the villain support his whole family during the entire year on the produce of worse land more scantily manured? in this low productivity of the land is to be found the reason for the conversion of much of the demesne into pasture land, as soon as the supply of servile labor failed. it was, of course, impossible to pay the wages of free men from the produce of soil too exhausted to repay even the slight cost incidental to cultivating it with serf labor. the bailiffs complained of the exorbitant wages demanded by servants in husbandry; these wages were exorbitant only because the produce of the land was so small that it was not worth the pains of tillage. the most important of the many causes which were at work to undermine the manorial system in the fourteenth century is, therefore, plain. the productivity of the soil had declined to a point where villain holdings would no longer support the families which cultivated them and where demesne land was sometimes not worth cultivation even by serf labor. under these conditions, the very basis of the manor was destroyed. the poverty of the peasants, the difficulty with which tenants could be found for vacant holdings, even though the greatest pressure was brought to bear upon eligible villains, and even though the servile burdens were considerably reduced, and the frequency with which these serfs preferred the uncertainty and risk of deserting to the certain destitution and misery of land-holding, are facts which are intimately connected, and which are all due to the same cause. it had been impossible to maintain the productive capacity of the land at a level high enough to provide a living for the tillers of the soil. footnotes: [ ] e. j. russell, _the fertility of the soil_, cambridge, , pp. - . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] _political science quarterly_, vol. xxviii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _the black death_, p. . [ ] _walter of henley's husbandry, together with an anonymous husbandry, etc._, ed. by elizabeth lamond (london, ), pp. , . [ ] curtler, _short history of english agriculture_, p. . [ ] davenport, _econ. dev. of a norfolk manor_ (cambridge, ), p. . [ ] rogers, _history of agriculture, etc._, vol. i, pp. - . [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, pp. - . [ ] unfortunately, the figures for the year - reveal an error which makes it impossible to use the test of the representativeness of witney in a third season with accuracy. the acreage planted is obviously understated, and it is possible to make only a rough estimate of the correct acreage. the acceptance of the area given by gras ( acres) results in the conclusion that bushels per acre was reaped. the suspicion that this result must be incorrect is confirmed when it is found, also, that - / quarters of seed were sown--an amount sufficient for acres at the average rate of bushels per acre, or for acres at the rate of - / bushels per acre, which ballard gives as the rate usual at witney. (levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. .) in the acreage sown with wheat at witney was acres, and in , . (_ibid._, p. .) if bushels per acre were sown in , the area in this year also was acres. if these estimates are used instead of the figure , as indicating the correct acreage, the yield for the year is found to be between and bushels per acre, in a season in which the average yield for the whole group of manors was bushels per acre. the figures at witney in the three seasons where a comparison with the general average for the group is possible deviate from it within limits narrow enough to indicate that conditions at witney were roughly typical. [ ] rogers, _history of agriculture and prices_, vol. i, p. . [ ] _ibid._, vol. i, p. ; vol. iv, p. . [ ] _op. cit._, p. . [ ] gras, _evol. of the eng. corn market_ (cambridge, ), appendix a. [ ] gras gives . quarters as the acre produce, or nearly bushels. this figure is incorrect, as it is derived by dividing the total produce of manors by the total acreage planted on only manors. the produce of the four manors on which the acreage planted is unknown amounts to nearly quarters, a large item in a total of only quarters for the whole group of manors. the ratio of produce to seed, however, is independent of the number of acres planted, and these four manors are included in the computation of this figure. [ ] gras, _op. cit._, appendix a. these figures are given only for the manors for which the acreage planted in both periods is known-- in the case of wheat, in the case of the other grains. [ ] gras, _op. cit._, appendix a; levett and ballard, _op. cit._, pp. , . [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, vol. i, p. . [ ] page, _end of villainage_ (publications of the american economic association, third series, , vol. i, pp. - ), at p. , note . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] davenport, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] page, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. , note , and levett, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. , note . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] page, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] page, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] davenport, _decay of villainage_, p. . for further evidence of the voluntary relinquishment of land in this period, see seebohm, _eng. village community_ (london, ), p. , note , and davenport, _economic development of a norfolk manor_, pp. , , . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] davenport, _economic development of a norfolk manor_, p. , and smyth, _op. cit._, vol. i, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . "on many manors the majority of the services owed were simply dropped, neither sold nor commuted. they were evidently in many cases inefficient, expensive, and inelastic." [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. v. [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. , . [ ] page, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] page, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] seebohm, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] page, _end of villainage_, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. . chapter iii the disintegration of the open-fields for the reasons given in the last chapter, bailiff-farming rapidly gave way to the various forms of the leasehold system in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. the economic basis of serfdom was destroyed; a servile tenement could no longer be depended upon to supply an able-bodied man to do work on the demesne for several days a week throughout the year, with extra helpers from his family at harvest time. the money received in commutation of customary labor, or as rent from land which had formerly been held for services was far less than the value of the services, and would not pay the wages of free men hired in place of the serfs who had formerly performed the labor. moreover, the demesne land itself was for the most part so unproductive that it had hardly paid to cultivate it even at the slight expense incurred in furnishing food for the serfs employed; it was all the more a waste of money to hire men to plow it and sow it. the text books on economic history usually give a careful account of the various forms of leases which were used as bailiff-farming was abandoned. we are told how the demesne was leased either as a whole or in larger or smaller pieces to different tenants and sets of tenants, for lives, for longer or shorter periods of years, with or without the stock which was on it, and, in some cases, with the servile labor of some of the villains, when this had not all been excused or commuted into money payments. arrangements necessarily differed on the different manors, and the exact terms of these first experimental leases do not concern us here. the fact which does interest us is that with the cessation of bailiff farming the last attempt at keeping the land distributed in fairly equal shares among a large number of tenants was abandoned. bond land had been divided into portions which were each supposed to be sufficient for the maintenance of a laborer and his family. as long as the demesne was cultivated for the lord, it was to his interest to prevent the concentration of holdings in a few hands, unless some certain provision could be made to insure the performance of the labor due from all of them. but even when the demesne was still being managed for the lord, it had already become necessary in some cases to allow one man to hold two or more of these portions, for the productivity had so declined that one was no longer enough. now, with the leasing of the demesne, the lord no longer had an interest in maintaining the working population of the manor at a certain level, but was concerned with the problem of getting as much rent as possible. when the demesne and the vacant bond tenements began to be leased, the land was given to the highest bidder, and the competitive system was introduced at the start. this led to the gradual accumulation of large holdings by some tenants, while other men were still working very small portions, and others occupied holdings of every intermediate size. the uniformity of size characteristic of the early virgates disappeared. in this chapter these points will be considered briefly, and a study will also be made of the way in which these new holders managed their lands. in the first place, as the more destitute villains were giving up their holdings and leaving the manor, and as no one could be found to take their places on the old terms, the landlords gave up the policy of holding the land until someone should be willing to pay the accustomed services and let the vacant lands at the best rents obtainable. freeholders, and villains whose land was but lightly burdened, and those who by superior management had been able to make both ends meet, were now able to increase their holdings by adding a few acres of land which had been a part of the demesne or of a vacated holding. the case of the man at sutton, who took up three virgates and a cotland, has already been mentioned. another case of "engrossing," as it was called, dated from - at meon, where john blackman paid fines for one messuage with ten acres of land, two other messuages with a virgate of land each, one parcel of four acres, and another holding whose nature is not specified.[ ] legislators who observed this tendency issued edicts against it. no attempt was made to discover the underlying cause of which it was merely a symptom. the first agrarian statutes were of a characteristically restrictive nature, and no constructive policy was attempted by the government until after a century of futile attempts to deal with the separate evils of engrossing, enclosure, conversion to pasture, destruction of houses and rural depopulation. the first remedy these evils suggested was limitation of the amount of land which one man should be allowed to hold.[ ] in the statutes begin to prohibit the occupation of more than one farm by the same man, or to regulate the use of the land so occupied. the statute of refers to the isle of wight, where "many dwelling places, fermes, and fermeholdes have of late tyme ben used to be taken in to oon manys hold and handes, that of old tyme were wont to be in severall persons holdes and handes."[ ] the proclamation of regulated the use of land held by all persons who were tenants of more than _one_ farm.[ ] a law of provides that no person should occupy more than _two_ farms.[ ] the old villain holdings did not necessarily pass intact into the hands of one holder, but were sometimes divided up and taken by different men, a few acres at a time. one richard grene in held lands of which ten and a half acres had been gradually acquired through as many as ten grants. this land had formed part of six other holdings, and much of the rest of the land belonging to these holdings had also been alienated.[ ] the inquisition of reported numerous cases of engrossing, and professor gay notes some of the entries in the returns of the inquisition of which are also interesting in this connection: w. s. separated six yardlands from a manor house and put a widow in the house, a laborer in the kitchen and a weaver in the barn. the land was divided between two tenants who already had houses, and presumably, other land, and were taking this opportunity to enlarge their holdings of land. g. k. took from a farmhouse the land which formed part of the same tenement and leased the house to a laborer who had "but one acre of land in every field."[ ] the growing irregularity of holdings, combined with the decrease in the number of holders whose interests had to be consulted, made it easier than it had formerly been to modify the traditional routine of husbandry. even though the new land acquired by tenants from the demesne or from old bond-holdings did not happen to be adjacent to strips already in their possession, exchange could accomplish the desired result. at gorleston, suffolk, a tenant sublet about half of his holding to eight persons, and at the same time acquired plots of land for himself from another eight holdings.[ ] before exchanges, sales and subletting of land by tenants had become general on the manors of the bishopric of winchester. it is unusual to find more than two cases of exchanges in any one year, even on a large manor; but miss levett adds: "on the other hand, one can hardly look through the fines on any one of the episcopal manors for a period of ten years without finding one or two. from the close correspondence of the areas exchanged, together with exact details as to position, it is fairly clear that the object of the exchange was to obtain more compact holdings."[ ] fitzherbert writes that "by the assente of the lordes and tenauntes, euery neyghbour may exchange lands with other."[ ] this practice was especially sanctioned by law in "for the more comodious occupyinge or husbandrie of anye land, meadows, or pastures,"[ ] but it was common in the open-field villages before the legal permission was given. tawney reproduces several maps belonging to all souls' muniment room, which show the ownership of certain open-field holdings of about . here consolidation of plots had proceeded noticeably. there are several plots of considerable size held by a single tenant. the advantage of consolidated holdings are considerable. in the first place, the turf boundaries between the strips could be plowed up, or the direction of the plowing itself could be changed, if enough strips were thrown together. fitzherbert advises the farmer who has a number of strips lying side by side and who hath no dung nor shepe to compost nor dung his land withall. then let the husband take his ploughe, and cast al such landes three or four tymes togider, and make theyr rigge theyr as ye raine was before.... and so shel he finde new moulde, that was not sene in an hundred yeres before, the which must nedes gyue more corne than the other dydde before.[ ] in two elizabethan surveys examined by corbett, we have evidence that the theoretical advantages urged by fitzherbert were not unknown in practice. it is now and then stated that the _metae_ between strips have been plowed up. but sometimes, even though all of the strips in a furlong had been acquired by the same owner, and enclosed, the land was left in strips. some of the pieces were freehold, others copyhold, and the lord may have objected to having the boundaries obliterated.[ ] cross plowing is also occasionally referred to in these surveys, but it was apparently rare.[ ] the possibility of improvement in this direction, although not to be ignored, was, however, comparatively slight. the important changes which resulted from the increased size of the holdings were not so much in the direction of superior management of the land, as in that of making a selection between the different qualities of land, and cultivating only the land in comparatively good condition. tenants taking up additional land cultivated only a part of their enlarged holdings. the least productive strips were allowed to become overgrown with grass. the better strips were kept under crop. if we are to accept the testimony of fitzherbert and tusser, strips of grass in the common fields, or lea land, as it was called, were a feature of every open-field township, by the sixteenth century. according to fitzherbert, "in euery towneshyppe that standeth in tillage in the playne countrye, there be ... leyse to tye or tedder theyr horses and mares vpon."[ ] according to tusser, the process of laying to grass unproductive land was still going on. land arable driuen or worne to the proofe, and craveth some rest for thy profits behoof, with otes ye may sowe it the sooner to grasse more sooner to pasture to bring it to passe.[ ] the later surveys give additional evidence of the extent to which the new tenantry had restricted the area of cultivation in the old fields which had once been entirely arable land. the most noteworthy feature of the survey of east brandon, durham ( ), was, according to gray, the appearance in certain fields of meadow along-side the arable. lowe field was almost transformed by such procedure, for seldom did the tenants retain any arable there. instead they had large parcels of meadow, sometimes as many as twenty acres; nor does anything indicate that these parcels were enclosed. they seem, rather to have remained open and to point to a gradual abandonment of arable tillage. such an abandonment is more clearly indicated by another survey of this series, that of eggleston.... presumably the fields had once been largely arable. when, however, the survey was made, change had begun, though not in the direction of enclosure, of which there was still little. conversion to meadow had proceeded without it: nearly all the parcels of the various tenants in east field and west field are said to have been meadow; arable still predominated only in middle field, and even there it had begun to yield.[ ] at westwick, whorlton, bolam and willington in durham, and at welford, northamptonshire, a similar transformation had taken place.[ ] this land was obviously withdrawn from cultivation not because the tenants preferred grass land, or because grass land was more valuable than arable, but because it could be plowed only at a loss. where, as at greens norton, arable and leas are valued separately in the survey, the grass land is shown to be of less value than the land still under cultivation.[ ] the land craved rest, (to use tusser's phrase), and the grass which grew on it was of but little value. here we have no capitalist systematically buying up land for grazing, but a withdrawal of land from cultivation by the tenants themselves, even though they were in no position to prepare it properly for grazing purposes. the importance of this fact cannot be over-emphasized. it is true that pasture, properly enclosed and stocked, was profitable, and that men who were able to carry out this process became notorious among their contemporaries on account of their gains. but it is also true that the land which was converted to pasture by these enclosers was fit for nothing else. husbandmen had had to withdraw much of their open-field ground from tillage simply because it was so unproductive that they could not count on a bare return of seed if they planted it. the pasturage for an additional horse or cow which these plots furnished was pure gain, and was not the object of the conversion to grass. the unproductive strips would have been left untilled even though no alternative use had been possible. they were unfit for cultivation. the advantage of holding this lea land did not end, however, with the fact that a few additional horses or cows could be kept on the grass which sprang up. this was undoubtedly of some value, but the greatest advantage lay in the fact that this land gradually recovered its strength. when the strips which were kept under cultivation finally produced in their turn so little that they had to be abandoned, the tenant who had access to land which had been laid to grass years before could plow this instead, for it had regained its fertility and had improved in physical quality. fitzherbert recommends a regular interchange between "reyst" ground and arable land which had become exhausted. when the grass strips become mossy and make poor pasture, plow them up and plant them; when arable strips fail to produce good crops, lay them to grass. lea ground, "the whiche hath ben errable land of late" should be plowed up. and if a man haue plentie of suche pasture, that wil be mossie euery thyrd yere, lette hym breake vp a newe piece of gronde, and plowe it and sowe it (as i haue seyde before), and he shal haue plentye of corne, with littell dongynge, and sow it no lengar thu it will beare plentye of corne, without donge, and it will beare much better grasse, x or xii yere after.... reyst grounde if it be dry, will bringe much corne, for the mosse will rotte, and the moll hillockes will amende the ground wel.[ ] tusser's references to the practice of plowing up lea ground and laying other land to grass are so incidental as to be good evidence of the fact that this was not merely the recommendation of a theorist, but a common practice, the details of which were familiar to those for whom he intended his book. a passage in which he refers to the laying to grass of land in need of rest has already been quoted.[ ] in discussing the date at which plowing should take place he mentions the plowing up of lea land as well as of fallow.[ ] the superior value of enclosed pasture to open-field leas, and of enclosed arable to open-field arable, is not only asserted by fitzherbert and others who are urging husbandmen to enclose their land, but appears also when manorial surveys are examined. it would seem, therefore, that the tenants would have been anxious to carry the process to an end and enclose their land. undoubtedly the larger holders were desirous of making the change, but as long as the rights of the lesser men were respected, it was almost impossible to carry it out. the adjustment of conflicting and obscure claims was generally held to be an insuperable obstacle, even by those who urged the change most strongly, while those who on principle opposed anything in the way of enclosure took comfort in the fact that holdings were so intermixed that there was little prospect of accomplishing the change: wheare (men) are intercominers in comon feildes and also haue theare portions so intermingled with an other that, thoughe they would, they could not inclose anie parte of the saide feldes so long as it is so.[ ] just as the services of a promoter are needed in the formation of a modern industrial combination, pressure from above was usually necessary in order to overcome the difficulties of the situation. the lord of berkeley ( - ) drewe much profitt to his tenants and increase of fines to himselfe ... by makeing and procuringe to bee made exchanges of land mutually one with an other, thereby casting convenient parcells togeather, fitting it for an inclosure and conversion. and by freeinge such inclosures from all comonage of others.[ ] a landlord of this sort would do much to override the opposition of those who, through conservatism, fear of personal loss, or insistence upon more than their share of the benefits of the readjustment, made it impossible for tenants to carry out these changes unassisted. where tenants with or without the assistance of the lord had managed to enclose some of their land and free it from right of common, they were in a position to devote it to sheep-farming if they chose to do so. ordinarily they did not do this. if, as has been claimed, the large-scale enclosures which shall be considered later were made because of an increasing demand for wool, it is surprising that these husbandmen were willing to keep enclosed land under cultivation, and even to plow up enclosed pasture. the land had to be kept under grass for a part of the time, whether it was open or enclosed, because if kept continuously under the plow it became unproductive; and it was better to have this land enclosed so that it could be used advantageously as pasture during the period when it was recovering its strength. but the profits of pasturage were not high enough to prevent men from plowing up the land when it was again in fit condition. at forncett, the tenants had begun sheep-farming by the end of the fourteenth century, and had also begun to enclose land in the open-fields; the situation was one, therefore, in which agriculture was likely to be permanently displaced by grazing, according to the commonly accepted theory of the enclosure movement. this change failed to take place; not because enclosures ceased to be made--nearly half of the acreage of the fields was in enclosures by --but because the tenants preferred to cultivate this enclosed land.[ ] if the enclosures had been pasture when they were first made, they did not remain permanently under grass. like the land still in the open fields, and like the small enclosures in cheshire reported by the commission of , they were sometimes plowed and sometimes laid to grass, according to the condition of the soil. in a cheshire village, two tenants had small enclosures in the same field, which were treated in this way. at the time the commission visited the place, one of these closes was being used as pasture, and the other was in cultivation. john monkesfield's close, which had been made six years before, _continet in se duas acras & diversis temporibus fuit in cultura & aliis temporibus in pastura & nunc occupata est in pastura._[ ] john molynes' close of one acre had been made the year before and _fuit antea in pastura & nunc occupata est in cultura._ it had evidently been a strip of lea land which had been so improved by being kept under grass that it was in fit condition for cultivation, while john monkesfield's close had been plowed long enough and was just at this time in need of rest. these men were apparently unaffected by any increasing demand for wool, but were managing their land according to its needs. by the sixteenth century, then, some enclosures had appeared in the open fields, and the old common-field system was disintegrating. the old customary holdings had been so altered that they were hardly recognizable. some tenants held a great number of acres, and had managed by purchase or exchange to get possession of a number of adjacent strips, which they might, under certain conditions, be able to enclose. much of the land, however, was withdrawn from cultivation, and for years was allowed to remain almost in the condition of waste. for the most part, however, there had been no revolutionary change in the system of husbandry. the framework remained. the whole community still possessed claims extending over most of the land. the village flocks pastured on the stubble and the fallows of the open fields. the advantages which could in theory be derived from the control of several adjacent strips of land were reduced to a minimum by the necessity of maintaining old boundaries to mark off from each other lands of differing status. even where the consolidation of holdings had proceeded to some extent, the tenants who had acquired the most compact holdings in comparison with the majority still possessed scattered plots of land separated from each other by the holdings of other men, and some of the smaller holders had no two strips which touched each other. when the tenants had been left to themselves, all of the changes which took place before the eighteenth century, numerous as they were, usually left the fields in a state resembling more their condition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than that of the nineteenth century. footnotes: [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, p. , note. [ ] a speech on enclosures commending bills proposed in contrasts the constructive character of that legislation with the earlier laws: "where the gentleman that framed this bill hath dealt like a most skilful chirugien, not clapping on a plaster to cover the sore that it spread no further, but searching into the very depths of the wound that the life and strength which hath so long been in decay by the wasting of towns and countries may at length again be quickened and repaired." bland, brown & tawney, _eng. econ. history--select documents_, pp. - . [ ] h. , c. , as quoted by pollard, _reign of henry vii_, p. . [ ] leadam, _domesday of inclosures_ (london, ), p. [ ] h. , c. . [ ] gray, _english field systems_ (cambridge, ), pp. - . [ ] "midland revolt," _r. h. s. trans._, new series, vol. xviii, p. . [ ] tawney, _agrarian problem_, pp. - . [ ] levett and ballard, _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] _husbandry_ (ed. english dialect society, ), p. . [ ] el., c. i, vi. [ ] _surveying_ ( nd ed., ), ch. . [ ] corbett, "elizabethan village surveys," _royal hist. soc. trans._, new series, vol. ii, pp. - . [ ] _surveyinge_, ch. . [ ] _five hundred points_ (london, ). [ ] gray, _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] gray, _op. cit._, pp. , - . [ ] lennard, _rural northamptonshire_, pp. - . [ ] fitzherbert, _surveyinge_, chs. and . [ ] see p. . another reference to this process is made in october's _husbandry_, vol. , ch. . [ ] tusser, january's _husbandry_, vol. , ch. . [ ] _a discourse of the common weal of this realm of england_, ed. by elizabeth lamond, cambridge, . [ ] smyth, _lives of the berkeleys_, vol. ii, pp. - . [ ] davenport, _norfolk manor_, pp. - . [ ] leadam, _op. cit._, pp. - . chapter iv enclosure for sheep pasture enclosure made by the tenants themselves by common agreement aroused no opposition or apprehension. no diminution of the area under tillage beyond that which had already of necessity taken place occurred, and the grass land already present in the fields was made available for more profitable use. the doctor in hales' dialogue carefully excepts this sort of enclosure from condemnation: i meane not all inclosures, nor yet all commons, but only of such inclosures as turneth commonly arable feildes into pastures; and violent inclosures, without recompense of them that haue the right to comen therein: for if the land weare seuerallie inclosed to the intent to continue husbandrie theron, and euerie man, that had right to commen, had for his portion a pece of the same to him selfe inclosed, i thincke no harm but rather good should come therof, yf euerie man did agre theirto.[ ] in this passage hales recognizes the theoretical possibility of a beneficial sort of enclosure, but the conditional form in which his remarks are thrown indicates that, so far as he knew, there was little systematic division of the land among the tenants by common consent. orderly rearrangement of holdings into compact plots suitable for enclosure was difficult unless the small holders had all disappeared, leaving in the community only men of some means, who were able to undertake the expenses of the readjustment. in most villages, however, holdings of all sizes were the rule. some tenants had almost no land under cultivation, but picked up a living by working for others, and by keeping a few sheep on the commons and on the fallow lands of the town. there was thus always a fringe of peasant families on the verge of destitution. they were being gradually eliminated, but the process was extremely slow. a few of them in each generation, feeling as a realized fact the increasing misery which has been predicted for the modern industrial laborer, were forced to give up the struggle. their land passed into the hands of the more prosperous men, who were thus gradually accumulating most of the land. in some cases, no doubt, all of the poorer tenantry were drained off in this fashion, making it possible for those who remained to consolidate their holdings and enclose them in the fashion advocated by fitzherbert, keeping a part under tillage until it needed a rest, and pasturing sheep and cattle in the closes which were under grass. it is impossible to estimate the number of these cases. what we do know is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries no such stage had been reached in hundreds of english townships. the enclosures which had been made by the tenants were of a few acres here and there. the fields for the most part were still open and subject to common, and consisted in part of poor pasture land. we do know also that many landlords took matters into their own hands, dispossessed the tenants, and enclosed a part or all of the land for sheep pastures. the date at which this step was made, and the thoroughness with which it was carried out, depended very much upon the character and needs of the landlord, as well as upon local circumstances affecting the condition of the soil and the degree of poverty suffered by the tenants. the tendency for landlords to lose patience with the process which was gradually eliminating the poorer men and concentrating their land in the hands of the more prosperous is not characteristic of any one century. it began as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, and it extended well into the seventeenth. by clergy were being indicted as _depopulatores agrorum_.[ ] in the fifteenth century statutes against enclosure and depopulation were beginning to be passed, and rous gives a list of fifty-four places near warwick which had been wholly or partially depopulated before about .[ ] for the sixteenth century, we have the evidence of numerous statutes, the returns of the commissions, doggerel verse, popular insurrections, sermons, _etc._ miss leonard's study of the seventeenth-century enclosures is confirmed by additional evidence presented by gonner that the movement was unchecked in this period. in , for instance, houghton was attacking the "common notion that enclosure always leads to grass," by pointing out a few exceptions.[ ] in gibson spoke of the change from tillage to pasture, which had been largely within living memory.[ ] there is no reason to believe that the landowners who carried out this process were unusually mercenary and heartless. the need for putting their land to some remunerative use was imperative, and it is surprising that the enclosure movement was of such a piece-meal character and extended over so many years, rather than that it took place at all. there was little rent to be had from land which lay for the most part in open fields, tilled by men who had no capital at their command for improving the condition of the soil, or for utilizing profitably the portion of the land which was so impoverished that it could not be cultivated. poor tenants are unprofitable tenants; it is difficult to collect rent from them and impossible to raise their rent, and they attempt to save by exploiting the land, leaving it in worse condition than when they received it. contemporary references to the poverty of these open-field tenants all confirm the impression given by hales: they that be husbandmen now haue but a scant lyvinge therby.[ ] i that haue enclosed litle or nothinge of my grond could (never be able) to make vp my lordes rent weare it not for a little brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens that i doe rere vpon my ground: whereof, because the price is sumwhat round, i make more cleare proffitt than i doe of all my corne and yet i haue but a bare liuinge.[ ] harrison, at the end of the century, writes of the open-field tenants: they were scarce able to liue and paie their rents at their daies without selling of a cow or an horsse, or more, although they paid but foure poundes at the vttermost by the yeare.[ ] the tenant who could not pay this rent without selling stock was, of course, one of those who would soon have to give up his land altogether, if the landlord continued to demand rent. if he sold his horses and oxen to raise the rent one year, he was less able to work his land properly the next year, and the crop, too small in the first place to enable him to cover expenses, diminished still more. when the current income was ordinarily too small to cover current expenses, no relief was to be found by reducing the capital. a time came when these men must be either turned away, and their land leased to others, or else allowed to stay and make what poor living they could from the soil, without paying even the nominal rent which was to be expected of them. lord north's comment on the enclosure movement as he saw it in the seventeenth century is suggestive of the state of affairs which led to the eviction of these husbandmen: gentlemen of late years have taken up an humor of destroying their tenements and cottages, whereby they make it impossible that mankind should inhabit their estates. this is done sometimes barefaced because they harbour poor that are a charge to the parish, and sometimes because the charge of repairing is great, and if an house be ruinous they will not be at the cost of rebuilding and repairing it, and cast their lands into very great farms which are managed with less housing: and oftimes for improvement as it is called which is done by buying in all freeholds, copyholds, and tenements that have common and which harboured very many husbandry and labouring families and then enclosing the commons and fields, turning the managry from tillage to grasing.[ ] not only were these men able to pay little rent for the land they held, but, as has been suggested, they were unable to maintain the land in proper condition by the use of manure and marl. these expenses were beyond the means of the farmer who was falling behind; they neglected the soil because they were poor, and they were poor because the yield of the land was so low; but their neglect caused it to decline even more. fitzherbert, who deplores the fact that marl is no longer used in his time, points out that not only the leaseholder, who is averse to making improvements on account of the insecurity of his tenure, but the freeholder, also, is neglecting his land; although he knoweth well, he shall take the profits while he liueth, & his heyres after him, a corrage to improw his owne, the which is as good as and he purchased as much as the improwment cometh to.[ ] but if he spent money on marling the soil, he would have nothing to live on while waiting for the crop. the very poverty of the small holders made it necessary for them to sink in still greater poverty, until the lord deprived them of the land, or until they became so discouraged that they gave it up of their own volition. they might easily understand the force of fitzherbert's arguments without being able to follow his advice. "marle mendeth all manor of grounde, but it is costly."[ ] the same thing is true of manure. according to denton, the expense of composting land was almost equivalent to the value of the fee simple of the ground. he refers to a record of the early fourteenth century of the payment of more than twice the ordinary rent for composted land.[ ] with manure at high prices, the man in difficulty might be tempted to sell what he had; it was certainly out of the question for him to buy more. or, what amounted to the same thing, he might sell hay or straw, and so reduce the forage for his cattle, and return less to the soil by means of their dung. dr. simkhovitch points out the difference between the farmer who is unable to meet expenses in a particular year because of an exceptionally bad season, and one who is suffering because of progressive deterioration of his farm. the first may borrow and make good the difference the following year; the latter will be unable to extricate himself. he neither has means to increase his holding by renting or buying more land, nor to improve the land which he has already. his distress is cumulative: only one with sufficient resources can improve his land. by improving land we add to our capital, while by robbing land we immediately add to our income; in doing so, however, we diminish out of all proportion our capital as farmers, the productive value of our farm land. the individual farmer can therefore improve his land only when in an economically strong position. a farmer who is failing to make a living on his farm is more likely to exploit his farm to the utmost; and when there is no room for further exploitation he is likely to meet the deficit by borrowing, and thus pledging the future productivity of his farm.[ ] while small holders in the open fields were in no position to pay higher rents, the land owners were suffering. prices were rising, and while the higher price of farm produce in the market was of little help to the tenant whose own family used nearly everything he could raise, the landlords felt the pressure of an increasing cost of living. many of us [says the gentleman, in hales' dialogue] haue bene driuen to giue over oure houshold, and to kepe either a chambere in london, or to waight on the courte vncalled, with a man and a lacky after him, wheare he was wonte to kepe halfe a score cleane men in his house, and xxtie or xxxtie other persons besides, everie day in the weke.... we are forced either to minyshe the thirde parte of our houshold, or to raise the thirde parte of our revenues.[ ] it was difficult for the landowners to make economic use of even those portions of the land which were not in the hands of customary tenants. if they were willing to invest capital in enclosing demesne land and stocking it with sheep, without disturbing their small tenants, they found it impossible to do so. not only did the poorer tenants have to cultivate land which was barely productive of more than the seed used, because they could not afford to allow it to lie idle as long as it would produce anything; not only did they allow the land which was under grass to remain practically waste, because they could not afford to enclose it and stock it with sheep; not only did they neglect manuring and marling the land because these improvements were beyond their means, so that the land was constantly growing poorer in their hands, and so that they could pay very little rent; but they were also tenacious of their rights of common over the rest of the land, and resisted all attempts at enclosure of the holdings of the more prosperous tenants, because they had to depend for their living largely upon the "little brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens" which were maintained partly by the gleanings from other men's land when it lay common. they undoubtedly suffered when the lord himself or one of the large leaseholders insisted on enclosing some of the land. if the commonable area was reduced, or if the land enclosed was converted from arable to pasture (as it usually was), the means by which they made their living was diminished. the occasional day's wages for labor spent on the land converted was now withdrawn, and the pasturage for the little flock was cut down. the practical effect of even the most innocent-looking enclosures, then, must have been to deprive the poorer families of the means of livelihood, even though they were not evicted from their worthless holdings. enclosures and depopulation were inseparably linked in the minds of contemporaries, even when the greatest care was taken by the enclosing authorities to safeguard the rights of the tenants. these rights, however, seriously interfered with the most advantageous use of land, and often were disregarded. not only did the small holders have rights of common over the rest of the land, but their own strips were intermingled with those of the lord and the large holders. the typical problem confronting the enclosing landlord is shown below: holdings in open field, west lexham, norfolk, [ ] _strips in furlong a_ _strips in furlong b_ . will yelverton, freeholder. . robert clemente, freeholder. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . will yelverton. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . will lee, freeholder. . glebe. . will gell, copyholder. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . demesne. . glebe. . demesne. if, as was probably the case, the product from these demesne strips was so small that the land was fit only for conversion to pasture, the pecuniary interest of the lord was to be served best by enclosing it and converting it. but should he make three enclosures in furlong a, and two in furlong b, besides taking pains to leave a way clear for will yelverton and lee and gell to reach their land? or should he be content merely with enclosing the larger plots of land, because of the expense of hedging and ditching the smaller plots separately from the rest? if he did this, the unenclosed portions would be of little value, as the grass which grew on them could not be properly utilized for pasture. the final alternative was to get possession of the strips which did not form part of the demesne, so that the whole could be made into one compact enclosure. in order to do this it might be necessary to dispossess will lee, will gell, _etc._ the intermingling of holdings, in such a way that small holders (whose own land was in such bad condition that they could not pay their rents) blocked the way for improvements on the rest of the land, was probably responsible for many evictions which would not otherwise have taken place. but not all evictions were due to this cause alone. the income to the owner from land which was left in the hands of customary tenants was much lower than if it was managed by large holders with sufficient capital to carry out necessary changes. where it is possible to compare the rents paid by large and small holders on the same manor, this fact is apparent: average rent per acre of land on five manors in wiltshire, [ ] i ii iii s. d. s. d. s. d. lands held by farmers / / lands held by customary tenants / / iv v s. d. s. d. lands held by farmers / / lands held by customary tenants / / the differences in these rents are sufficient to be tempting to the lord who was seeking his own interest. the large holders were able to expend the capital necessary for enclosing and converting the part of the land which could not be profitably cultivated because of its bad condition. the capital necessary for this process itself was considerable, and besides, it was necessary to wait several years before there was a return on the investment, while the sod was forming, to say nothing of the large expenditure necessary for the purchase of the sheep. the land when so treated, however, enabled the investor to pay higher rents than the open-field husbandmen who "rubbed forth their estate in the poorest plight."[ ] a lord who was willing to consider only pecuniary advantage had everything to gain by clearing the land entirely of small holders, and putting it in the hands of men with capital. it is, therefore, to the credit of these landowners that there are so few authentic cases of the depopulation of entire villages and the conversion of all of the arable land into sheep runs. these cases made the lords who were responsible notorious and were, no doubt, exceptional. nearly fifteen hundred places were covered by the reports of the commissions of and , and professor gay has found among these "but a round dozen villages or hamlets which were all enclosed and emptied of their inhabitants, the full half of them in northamptonshire."[ ] for the most part, the enclosures reported under the inquisitions as well as those indicated on the maps and surveys of the period involved only small areas, and point to a process of piece-meal enclosure. the landowners seem to have been reluctant to cause hardship and to have left the open-field tenants undisturbed as far as possible, contenting themselves with the enclosure and conversion of small plots of land. the social consequences of so-called depopulating enclosure were serious, but they are not seen in their proper perspective when one imagines the condition of the evicted tenants to have been fairly good before they were dispossessed. the cause lying back of the enclosure movement was bringing about the gradual sinking of family after family, even when no evictions were made. to attribute the poverty and misery of the rural population to the enclosure movement is to overlook the unhappy condition of the peasants, even where no enclosures had been made. enclosures had been forbidden in the fields of royal manors in northamptonshire, but this did not protect the peasantry from destitution. the manor of grafton, for instance, was surveyed in and a note was made at the end of the survey that the revenue drawn from the lordship had lately been increased, but "there can no ferther enprovemente there be made and to kepe the tenantries standyng. item the tenauntriez there be in sore decaye." the surveyor of hartwell also notes that the "tenements there be in decay."[ ] the economic basis of the unfortunate social changes which were associated with the process of enclosure came gradually to be recognized. it was evidently futile to enact laws requiring the cultivation of land "wasted and worn with continual plowing and thereby made bare, barren and very unfruitfull."[ ] merely restrictive and prohibitory legislation was followed by the suggestion of constructive measures. until the middle of the sixteenth century, laws were made in the attempt to put a stop to the conversion of arable land to pasture under any conditions, and required that land which had been under cultivation should be plowed in the future. in the act of , however, an attitude somewhat more reasonable is to be seen. it was provided that land which had been under cultivation within a certain number of years preceding the act should be tilled, "_or so much in quantity_."[ ] public men were also urging that less time be devoted to the futile attempt to force men to cultivate land unfit for tillage, and that encouragement be given instead to measures for improving the waste, and bringing fresh land under the plow.[ ] after a time, moreover, another fact became apparent: there was a marked tendency to break up and again cultivate the land which in former generations had been converted to pasture. the statute of not only contained a proviso permitting the conversion of arable fields to pasture on condition that other land be tilled instead,[ ] thus tacitly admitting that the reason for withdrawing land from cultivation was not the low price of grain, but the barrenness of the land, but also explicitly referred to this fact in another proviso permitting the conversion of arable land to pasture temporarily, _for the purpose of recovering its strength_: provided, nevertheless, that if anie _p_son or body pollitique or corporate hath ... laide or hereafter shall lay anie grownde to graze, or hathe used or shall use the same grownde with shepe or anie other cattell, which grownde hath bene or shall be dryven or worne owte with tillage, onely upon good husbandrie, and with intente bona fide withowt fraude or covyne the same grownde shall recover harte and strengthe, an not with intent to continue the same otherwise in shepe pasture or for fattinge or grazinge of cattell, that no such _p_son or body politike or corporate shall be intended for that grownde a converter within the meaning of this lawe.[ ] a speaker in the house of commons commends these provisions: for it fareth with the earth as with other creatures that through continual labour grow faint and feeble-hearted, and therefore, if it be so far driven as to be out of breath, we may now by this law resort to a more lusty and proud piece of ground while the first gathers strength, which will be a means that the earth yearly shall be surcharged with burden of her own excess. and this did the former lawmakers overslip, tyeing the land once tilled to a perpetual bondage and servitude of being ever tilled.[ ] several years before the passage of this statute, bacon had remarked that men were breaking up pasture land and planting it voluntarily.[ ] in , a commission was appointed to consider the granting of licenses "for arable lands converted from tillage to pasture." the proclamation creating this commission, after referring to the laws formerly made against such conversions, continues: as there is much arable land of that nature become pasture, so is there by reason thereof, much more other lands of old pasture and waste, and wood lands where the plough neuer entred, as well as of the same pasture lands so heretofore conuerted, become errable, and by husbandrie made fruitfull with corne ... the quantitie and qualitie of errable and corne lands at this day doth much exceed the quantitie that was at the making of the saide lawe.... as the want thereof [of corn] shall appeare, or the price thereof increase, all or a great part of those lands which were heretofore converted from errable to pasture and have sithence gotten heart, strength and fruitfulness, will be reduced to corne lands againe, to the great increase of graine to the commonwealth and profite to each man in his private.[ ] john hales had protested against depopulating enclosures, in , by appealing to the public spirit of landowners. they increased their profits by converting arable land to pasture, but, he argued, it may not be liefull for euery man to vse his owne as hym lysteth, but eueyre man must vse that he hath to the most benefyte of his countrie. ther must be somethynge deuysed to quenche this insatiable thirst of greedynes of men.[ ] but now it was no longer necessary to persuade the owners of this same land to forgo their own interests for the sake of the public good. those whose land had been used as pasture for a great number of years were finding it valuable arable, because of its long period of rest and regeneration. land which had been converted to pasture was being put under the plow because of the greater profit of tillage. so great was the profit of cultivating these pastures that landlords who were opposed to having pastures broken up by leaseholders had difficulty in preventing it. towards the end of the sixteenth century at hawsted, and in the beginning of the seventeenth, a number of leases contained the express provision that no pastures were to be broken up. in and the years following, some of the leases permitted cultivation of pasture, on the condition that the land was to be laid to grass again five years before the expiration of the lease.[ ] there is no doubt of the fact that much land was being converted from pasture to arable in this period. evidence of this tendency multiplies as the century advances. in joseph lee gave a list of fifteen towns where arable land hitherto converted to pasture had been plowed up again within thirty years.[ ] barren and insufficiently manured land did not produce good crops merely because other land had been given an opportunity to recover its strength. the conversion of open-field arable to pasture went on unchecked in the seventeenth century because it had not yet had the benefit of the prolonged rest which made agriculture profitable, and without which it had become impossible to make a living from the soil. the lands which have been "heretofore converted from errable to pasture.... have sithence gotten heart, strength and fruitfulnesse," and are therefore being plowed again; but the land which has escaped conversion, and has been tied to the "perpetual bondage and servitude of being ever tilled," is "faint and feeble-hearted," and is being laid to grass, for pasture is the only use for which it is suited. the cause of the conversion of arable fields to pasture is the same as that which caused the same change on other lands at an earlier date--so low a level of productivity that the land was not worth cultivating. lands whose fertility had been restored were put under cultivation and plowed until they were again in need of rest. thus the final result was about the same whether an enclosing landlord cut across the gradual process of readjustment of land-holding among the tenants, and converted the whole into pasture, or whether the process was allowed to go on until none but large holders remained in the village. in both cases the tendency was towards a system of husbandry in which the fertility of the soil was maintained by periodically withdrawing portions of it from cultivation and laying it to grass. in the one case, cultivation was completely suspended for a number of years, but was gradually reintroduced as it became evident that the land had recovered its strength while used as pasture. in the other, the grazing of sheep and cattle was introduced as a by-industry, for the sake of utilizing the land which had been set aside to recover its strength, while the better land was kept under the plow. whether enclosures were made for better agriculture, then, as mr. leadam contends, or for pasture, as is argued by professor gay,[ ] the arable enclosures were used as pasture for a part of the time and the enclosed pastures came later to be used for tillage part of the time, and the two things amount to the same thing in the end. this end, however, had still not been reached in a great number of open-field villages by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and we should expect to find that the history of the land in this century was but a repetition of what had gone before, in so far as the fields which had not hitherto been enclosed are concerned. but, during the seventeenth century, an agricultural revolution was taking place. experiments were being made with new forage crops. for one thing, it was found that turnips could be grown in the fields and that they made excellent winter forage; and grass seeding was introduced. the grasses and clovers which were brought from holland not only made excellent hay, but improved the soil rapidly. the possibility of increasing the amount of hay at will put an end to the absolute scarcity of manure--the limiting factor in english agriculture from the beginning. and the comparative ease with which the artificial grasses could be made to grow did away with the need of waiting ten or fifteen years, or perhaps half a century, for natural grass to cover the fields and restore their productiveness. only with the introduction of grass seeding did it become possible to keep a sufficient amount of stock, not only to maintain the fertility of the soil, but to improve it steadily. the soil instead of being taxed year after year under the heavy strain of grain crops was being renovated by the legumes that gathered nitrogen from the air and stored it on tubercles attached to their roots. the deep roots of the clover penetrated the soil, that no plow ever touched. legumes like alfalfa, producing pound by pound more nutritious fodder than meadow grass, produced acre by acre two and three times the amount, and when such a field was turned under to make place for a grain crop, the deep and heavy sod, the mass of decaying roots, offered the farmer "virgin" soil, where previously even five bushels of wheat could not be gathered.[ ] as the value of these new crops became generally recognized, some effort was made to introduce them into the regular rotation of crops in the fields which were still held in common, but, for the most part, these efforts were unsuccessful, and new vigor was given to the enclosure movement. frequently persons having no arable land of their own had right of common over the stubble and fallow which could not be exercised when turnips and clover were planted; for reasons of this sort, it was difficult to change the ancient course of crops in the open fields. for example, late in the eighteenth century ( ) at stiffkey and morston, the improvements due to enclosure are said to have been great, for: being half-year land before, they could raise no turnips except by agreement, nor cultivate their land to the best advantage.[ ] at heacham the common fields were enclosed by act in , and young notes: before the enclosure they were in no regular shifts and the field badly managed; now in regular five-shift norfolk management.[ ] at northwald, about , acres of open-field land were enclosed in and clover was introduced. the comment made is that "the crops bear quite a new face." the common field of brancaster before enclosure in "was in an open, rude bad state; now in five or six regular shifts."[ ] hitherto there had been only one way of restoring fertility to land; converting it to pasture and leaving it under grass for a prolonged period. now it could be speedily improved and used intensively. arthur young describes the modern method of improvement in his account of the changes made in norfolk husbandry before : from forty to fifty years ago, all the northern and western and a great part of the eastern tracts of the county were sheep walks, let so low as from _d._ to _s._ _d._ and _s._ an acre. much of it was in this condition only thirty years ago. the improvements have been made by the following circumstances. first. by enclosing without the assistance of parliament. second. by a spirited use of marl and clay. third. by the introduction of an excellent course of crops. fourth. by the introduction of turnips well hand-hoed. fifth. by the culture of clover and ray-grass. sixth. by the lords granting long leases. seventh. by the country being divided chiefly into large farms.[ ] the evidence which has been examined in this monograph reveals the far-reaching influence of soil exhaustion in english agrarian history in the centuries before the introduction of these new crops. as the yield of the soil declined, the ancient arable holdings proved incapable of supporting their cultivators, and a readjustment had to be made. the pressure upon subsistence was felt while villainage was still in force, and the terms upon which serfdom dissolved were influenced by this fact to an extent which has hitherto not been recognized. the economic crisis involved in the spread of the money economy threw into relief the destitution of the villains; and the easy terms of the cash payments which were substituted for services formerly due, the difficulty with which holders for land could be obtained on any terms, the explicit references to the poverty of whole communities at the time of the commutation of their customary services, necessitate the abandonment of the commonly accepted view that growing prosperity and the desire for better social status explain the substitution of money payments for labor services in the fourteenth century. the spread of the money economy was due to the gradual integration of the economic system, the establishment of local markets where small land holders could sell their produce for money. until this condition was present, it was impossible to offer money instead of labor in payment of the customary dues; as soon as this condition was present, the greater convenience of the use of money made the commutation of services inevitable. in practise money payments came gradually to replace the performance of services through the system of "selling" works long before any formal commutation of the services took place. but, whatever the explanation of the spread of the money economy in england during this period, it is not the prosperity of the villains, for, at the moment when the formal change from payments in labor to money payments was made, the poverty and destitution of the landholders were conspicuous. that this poverty was due to declining fertility of the soil cannot be doubted. land in demesne as well as virgate land was showing the effects of centuries of cultivation with insufficient manure, and returned so scant a crop that much of it was withdrawn from cultivation, even when serf labor with which to cultivate it was available. exhaustion of the soil was the cause of the pauperism of the fourteenth century, as it was also of the enclosure and conversion to pasture of arable land in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. systematic enclosure for the purpose of sheep-farming on a large scale was but the final step in a process of progressively less intense cultivation which had been going on for centuries. the attention of some historians has been devoted too exclusively to the covetous sheep-master, against whom contemporary invective was directed, and the process which was going on in fields where no encloser was at work has escaped their notice. the three-field system was breaking down as it became necessary to withdraw this or that exhausted plot from cultivation entirely for a number of years. the periodic fallow had proved incapable of keeping the land in proper condition for bearing crops even two years out of three, and everywhere strips of uncultivated land began to appear in the common fields. this lea land--waste land in the midst of the arable--was a common feature of sixteenth and seventeenth century husbandry. the strips kept under cultivation gave a bare return for seed, and the profit of sheep-raising need not have been extraordinarily high to induce landowners to abandon cultivation entirely under these conditions. a great part of the arable fields lay waste, and could be put to no profitable use unless the whole was enclosed and stocked with sheep. the high profit made from sheep-raising cannot be explained by fluctuations in the price of wool. the price of wool fell in the fifteenth century. sheep-farming was comparatively profitable because the soil of the ancient fields was too barren to repay the costs of tillage. land which was in part already abandoned, was turned into pasture. the barrenness and low productivity of the common fields is explicitly recognised by contemporaries, and is given as the reason for the conversion of arable to pasture. its use as pasture for a long period of years gave it the needed rest and restored its fertility, and pasture land which could bear crops was being brought again under cultivation during the centuries in which the enclosure movement was most marked. footnotes: [ ] lamond, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] h. , c. . miss leonard calls attention to this statute. "inclosure of common land in the seventeenth century." _royal hist. soc. trans._, new series, vol. xix, p. , note . [ ] _cf. supra_, p. . [ ] gonner, _common land and inclosure_, p. . [ ] leonard, _op. cit._, p. , note . [ ] lamond, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, pp. - . [ ] _description of britain_ (_holinshed chronicles_, london, ), p. . [ ] leonard, _op. cit._, vol. xix, p. . [ ] _surveyinge_, ch. . [ ] _ibid._, ch. . [ ] denton, _england in the fifteenth century_, p. . [ ] "rome's fall reconsidered," _political science quarterly_, vol. xxxi, pp. , . [ ] lamond, _common weal of this realm of england_, pp. - . [ ] tawney, _agrarian problem in the sixteenth century_, pp. - . [ ] tawney, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] carew, as quoted by leonard, _op. cit._, vol. xix, p. . [ ] "enclosures in england," _quarterly journal of ec._, vol. xvii, p. . [ ] lennard, _rural northamptonshire_, pp. - . [ ] the reason stated in the preamble of many of the durham decrees granting enclosure permits (leonard, _op. cit._, p. ). [ ] & ed. , c. . re-enacted by el., c. . [ ] memorandum addressed by alderman box to lord burleigh in , gonner, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] el., ch. , proviso iii. [ ] _ibid._, proviso iv. [ ] bland, brown & tawney: _select documents_, p. . [ ] cunningham, _growth of english industry and commerce, modern times_, part ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] lamond, _op. cit._, p. lxiii. [ ] cullum, _hawsted_, pp. - . [ ] leonard, "inclosure of common fields in the seventeenth century," _royal hist. soc. trans._, n. s., vol. xix, p. , note. [ ] for this controversy see, "the inquisitions of depopulation in and the 'domesday of inclosures,'" by edwin f. gay and i. s. leadam, _royal hist. soc. trans._, , vol. xiv, pp. - . [ ] simkhovitch, _political science quarterly_, vol. xxviii, pp. , . [ ] _board of agriculture report, norfolk_, ch. vi. [ ] _ibid._, ch. vi. [ ] _ibid._ [ ] bland, brown and tawney, _op. cit._, pp. - . index abbot's ripton, arable, ; area reduced, , , , - , , ; barren, , - , , , , - , , , , , , , - , , ; fertility restored, , - , - , - , - , , ; converted to pasture, - , , - , , - , , , - , , , , , , ; cultivation resumed, , - , , , , - ; lea strips, , - , , ; enclosed, - , ashley, bacon, bailiff-farming, , , - ballard, , , - , , , barley, , beggars, berkeley estates, , , , , black death, , - , , , - , , bolam, bond land deserted, , , - , - , , , ; refused, ; no competition for, ; vacant, - , - , , , ; compulsory holding of, , , - , , ; leased, , , , - ; rents of, , - , - , , - brightwell, burwell, cattle, - , , , carew, _survey of cornwell_, chatteris, clover, , combe, commissions on enclosure, engrossing, etc., , , common-field system, , , ; stability of, , , , ; disintegration of, chapter iii commutation of villain services, , - , - , , concessions to villains, , , - , , ; see villain services, rents conversion, arable to pasture, - , , - , , - , , , - , - , , , , , , ; pasture to arable, , , - , - , ; both, , - , - , ; reconversion of open-field land formerly laid to grass, , - , , , , - convertible husbandry, - , - , , corbett, corn-laws, - cornwall, cost of living, crawley, crops, , - cross-plowing, cunningham, curtler, demesne, leased, - , , ; intermixed with tenant land, - denton, , , depopulation, - , , desertion, , , - , - , , , downton, , east brandon, emparking, enclosed land, pasture, , ; tilled, - , ; convertible husbandry, - , , , - enclosure, defined, - ; progress of, - , - ; early, , - , - , , ; seventeenth century, , , , - , , ; eighteenth century, , - ; causes, see productivity, soil-exhaustion, prices; social consequences, , - , , see depopulation, unemployment, eviction; literature of, - ; opposition to, , ; effect on quality of wool, ; for sheep-farming, , , , , , , - , - , - , , , ; enclosed land cultivated, - , engrossing, ; see holdings, amalgamation of eviction of tenants, , , , , , , , fallow, , , , , ; see pasture, lea land fertility, see productivity, soil-exhaustion; fertility restored, , - , - , - , - , , fines, fitzherbert, , - , - , forage, , , forncett, , , , gay, professor e. f., , , gonner, e. c. k., , gorleston, grafton park, gras, norman, gray, h. l., grazing, , , ; profits from, ; see sheep-farming, pasture hales, john, , , , harrison, description of britain, hasbach, hawsted, hay, - , , heriots, holdings, deserted, , , - , - , , , ; refused by heir, ; vacant, - , - , , , ; intermixed, , - , , - ; amalgamated, , , - ; divided, holway, houses, destruction of, _husbandry_, anonymous, innes, isle of wight, , labor, supply of, , - , , ; see wages, unemployment landlords, enclosure by, , , , leadam, lea-land, , , - , , lee, joseph, leicestershire, leonard, e. m., , , - , , levett, a. e., , , - , , , manorial system, readjustments in fourteenth century, _et seq._ manure, - , - , , , ; see sheep-fold, marl markets, local, marl, , , - , meadow, - meredith, merton college, money-economy, ; see commutation of services monson, lord, more, sir thomas, - nailesbourne, , north, lord, northwald, open-field land, see common-field system, enclosures, lea-land page, - , pasture, waste, , , ; fallow pasture, , , , , ; lea strips, , - , , ; enclosed, , , ; converted to arable, , , , , - , ; profits of, , , , - , ; leased, pauperism, see poverty pembroke, population, poverty, villains, , , , , - , , ; small tenants, , - , prices, sixteenth century, ; wool and wheat, , - , - , - , , ; seventeenth century, - productivity, , , , - , - , ; see soil-exhaustion profits, tillage, , , , , , , , - ; pasture, , , , - , , protests against enclosures, - , prothero, reconversion, pasture to arable, , - , , , , , rents, , - , - , , - , , - , rogers, j. t., , , , rotation of crops, , - rothamsted experiment station, rous, , russell, , - , seager, seligman, sheep, , sheep-farming, , , , , , , - , - , - , , , sheep-fold, - simkhovitch, , , - , smyth, john, , soil-exhaustion, , - , , , , - , , , , , - , - , , statutes of husbandry, , , - , - , , - stiffkey, stock and land lease, strips, , , - ; exchanged, tawney, tenants, elimination of, ; evicted, , , , , , , , ; poverty, , - , ; enclosure by, , - ; opposition to enclosure, , ; rents of, - , therfield, , turf-borders, ; plowed under, turnips, - tusser, , , twyford, unemployment, , , utopia, - villains, poverty, , , , , - , , ; compelled to take land, , , - , , ; desertion of, , , - , - , , , ; social status with relation to commutation, , , , - villain-services, - ; reduced, , - , ; commuted, - , - , , - , , ; sold, , , ; excused, - ; leased, ; retained, vinogradoff, - virgate, ; value of services, - wages, , - , - walter of henley, , waste, , , , , westmoreland, countess of, weston, , westwick, wheat, yield, , - , ; prices, , - , - , - , - , , whorlton, winchester, bishopric of, , , - , - , , , witney, - , - , - wool, demand for, , , - , , , , ; price of, , - , , - ; quality, woollen industry, expansion of, , , - woolston, young, arthur, columbia university in the city of new york the university includes the following: columbia college, founded in , and barnard college, founded in , offering to men and women, respectively, programs of study which may be begun either in september or february and which lead normally in from three to four years to the degrees of bachelor of arts. the program of study in columbia college makes it possible for a well qualified student to satisfy the requirements for both the bachelor's degree and a professional degree in law, medicine, technology or education in five to eight years according to the course. the faculties of political science, philosophy and pure science, offering advanced programs of study and investigation leading to the degrees of master of arts and doctor of philosophy. the professional schools of law, established in , offering courses of three years leading to the degree of bachelor of laws and of one year leading to the degree of master of laws. medicine. the college of physicians and surgeons, established in , offering two-year courses leading to the degree of bachelor of science and five-year courses leading to the degree of doctor of medicine. mines, founded in , offering courses of three years leading to the degrees of engineer of mines and of metallurgical engineer, and of one year leading to the degree of master of science. chemistry and engineering, set apart from school of mines in , offering three-year courses leading to degrees in civil, electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering, and of one year leading to the degree of master of science. teachers college, founded in , offering in its school of education courses in the history and philosophy of education and the theory and practice of teaching, leading to appropriate diplomas and the degree of bachelor of science in education; and in its school of practical arts founded in , courses in household and industrial arts, fine arts, music, and physical training leading to the degree of bachelor of science in practical arts. all the courses in teachers college are open to men and women. these faculties offer courses leading to the degree of master of arts and master of science. architecture, offering a program of indeterminate length leading to the degree of bachelor of architecture and master of science. journalism, founded in , offering a two-year course leading to the degree of bachelor of literature in journalism. the regular requirement for admission to this course is two years of college work. business, founded in , offering two and three-year courses in business training leading to appropriate degrees. dentistry, founded in , offering five-year courses leading to appropriate degrees. pharmacy. the new york college of pharmacy, founded in , offering courses of two, three and four years leading to appropriate certificates and degrees. in the summer session the university offers courses giving both general and professional training which may be taken either with or without regard to an academic degree or diploma. through its system of extension teaching the university offers many courses of study to persons unable otherwise to receive academic training. the institute of arts and sciences provides lectures, concerts, readings and recitals--approximately two hundred and fifty in number--in a single season. the price of the university catalogue is twenty-five cents postpaid. detailed information regarding the work in any department will be furnished without charge upon application to the _secretary of columbia university_, new york, n. y. the west florida controversy of - 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(page / , times) missing "to added (page / ) (although not [to] be ignored) "and and" corrected to "and" (page / ) footnote [ ] has no corresponding marker in the text. page contains three footnote markers (two of which are marked with the same number - [ ]) but only two footnotes. additional spacing after some of the block quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as is in the original text. monopolies and the people by charles whiting baker, c. e. associate editor of "the engineering news" new york & london g. p. putnam's sons the knickerbocker press copyright by g. p. putnam's sons the knickerbocker press electrotyped and printed by g. p. putnam's sons to all those who love truth and justice and equity, who value our heritage of liberty and peaceful fraternity, and who are willing to unite in upholding and defending the commonwealth--that preserver and protector of the rights of the whole people--the author dedicates this work. preface. in the following pages it has been my endeavor to present, first, the results of a careful and impartial investigation into the present and prospective status of the monopolies in every industry; and, second, to discuss in all fairness the questions in regard to these monopolies--their cause, growth, future prospects, evils, and remedies--which every thinking man is to-day asking. the first part of this task, the presentation of facts with regard to existing monopolies, may seem to the well informed reader to be imperfectly done, because of the host of powerful and important monopolies of every sort that are not so much as mentioned. but i have deemed it most important that the broad facts concerning monopolies should be widely known; and i have, therefore, aimed to present these facts in a readable and concise way, although, in so doing, only a few of the important monopolies in each industry could be even mentioned. it is to be hoped that no one will underrate the importance of the problem of monopoly, or question the conclusions which i have reached, because of these omissions. to any such readers who may not be satisfied from the facts hereafter given that monopolies are the salient feature of our present industrial situation, and, moreover, that they have come to stay, i would recommend a careful perusal of the financial and trade journals for a few months. wherever possible i have presented actual statistics bearing on the question at issue; but as regards trusts, monopolies in trade, mining, labor, and in fact nearly all monopolies, there are no statistics to be had. nor can any be obtained, for it would be absurd for the government to collect statistics of the operation of that which it pronounces illegal but makes no effort to punish. it may increase the respect of some readers for the conclusions i have reached, to know that it was a practical acquaintance with monopolies rather than any study of economic theories which led me to undertake the present work; that, at the time i undertook it, i was wholly undecided as to the proper remedies for monopolies, and was quite willing to believe, if the facts had proved it to me, that they were destined to work their own cure; and that the rapid growth and increase of monopolies in very many industries, in the few months since these chapters were written, have furnished fresh evidence that my conclusions have not been amiss. finally, i wish to place all emphasis on the fact that all the great movements toward genuine reform must go hand in hand. the cause of the people is one cause, and those who work for honest officers in our government, pure elections, the suppression of crime and pauperism, the mental and moral elevation of men and women, are striking harder blows at monopolies than they may realize. but if they desire to hasten the day of their success, they must bring the great masses of the people to comprehend that these movements aim at nothing less than their complete deliverance; and that the reformers who labor so earnestly to make our government purer and its people nobler, heartily desire also to cure the evils of monopoly, and to serve the cause of the people in its every form. charles whiting baker. tribune building, new york city. june, . table of contents. i. the problem presented a new use for the word "trust," the people's knowledge of trusts, remedies for trusts, , trusts a species of monopoly, the problems which monopoly presents, an impartial investigation necessary, the question to be discussed from different standpoints, a scientific method for solving the problem, . ii. trusts and monopolies in manufacturing industries definition of a trust, the first trusts and their successors, description of the organization of the linseed-oil trust by one of its founders, the action of trust-makers perfectly natural, actual effect of trusts upon the public, profits of the linseed-oil trust, decreased market for goods controlled by trusts, control of the labor market by trusts, the causes which have produced trusts, production on a large scale the most economical, the standard oil trust's defence of its work, its profits, and the cause of its low prices, industries in which trusts have been formed, andrew carnegie's views of trusts, the trust at once a benefit and a curse, . iii. monopolies of mineral wealth mining, the first monopolized industry, monopolies in iron-ore production, monopolies in other metals, the french copper syndicate, the effect of its action on consumers of copper, profits of the richest copper mines, anthracite-coal production, the anthracite-coal pool, coal monopolies in the west and south, monopolies in petroleum and natural gas, other monopolies of this class, . iv. monopolies of transportation and communication transportation only a necessity in modern times, the importance of railway traffic, railway transportation a vital necessity, shipping points where competition exists very few, consolidation and its benefits, intensity of competition in railway traffic on trunk lines, its inevitable effect, the necessity of pools or traffic agreements, their history, the interstate commerce law, the effect of stimulating competition, the evils charged to railway monopolies, evils due to wasteful competition, monopolies in other forms of transportation, monopolies on natural highways, monopolies of bridges, the telegraph monopoly, . v. municipal monopolies city dwellers dependent upon monopolies, suburban passenger traffic, street-railway monopolies, water-supply monopolies, competition and monopoly in gas supply, t. m. cooley on municipal monopolies, prices, cost, and profits of gas supply, monopolies in electric lighting and in telegraph, telephone, and messenger service, other monopolies beneath city pavements, monopolies in railway terminals, monopoly in real estate, . vi. monopolies in trade absolute control not essential to a monopoly, history of trade monopolies, monopolies in country retail trade, in city retail trade, in wholesale trade, co-operation of trusts and trade monopolies, monopolies in the grocery trade, monopolies in meat, a general view, monopolies among purchasers, "corners" and monopolies, commercial exchanges and speculation, warehouse monopolies, insurance monopolies, trade monopolies artificial, their unjust acts, vii. monopolies depending on the government government monopolies in ancient times, government monopolies established for the benefit of the people, copyrights, patents, evils arising from the patent system, monopolies based on patents, the bell telephone monopoly, government subsidies, relation of the tariff to monopolies, origin of the protective tariff, the tariff a secondary cause of trusts, reductions in the tariff as a remedy for trusts, monopolies carried on directly by government, . viii. monopolies in the labor market classes of labor considered, monopolies of capital and monopolies of labor compared, locomotive engineers' strike on the chicago, burlington, and quincy railway, effect of labor monopolies upon the people, the history of labor, the first trade-unions, laws against them, labor organizations from the laborer's standpoint, "an injury to one the concern of all," preserving the self-respect of the laborer, repeal of unjust laws, a defence for the action of labor monopolies, the underlying cause of labor monopolies, limits to the power of labor monopolies, . ix. monopolies and competition in other industries occupations of the people, proportion of the people in any way benefited by monopolies proportion deriving the principal profits from monopolies, monopolies in the professions, monopolies among the servant classes, agricultural industry, can monopolies be established there? a proposed farmers' trust, the grange and the farmers' alliance, killing the competition of oleomargarine, monopolies among agricultural laborers, proportion of the people benefited and proportion injured by monopolies, monopolies in the use of capital impossible, . x. the theory of universal competition the general effect of monopolies, two sorts of remedies suggested, study of the laws of competition necessary, the growth of civilized society outlined, the interdependence of modern society, the theory of civilized industry, supply and demand and the unequal rewards of men's industry, the theoretical perfection of our social system, "competition the life of trade," the orthodox school of political economy, . xi. the laws of modern competition competition defined, competition in corn-raising, in paper-making, in railway traffic, the laws governing competition deduced, monopoly defined, natural agents in production, different classes of competition, the three salient causes of monopoly, the proper remedy for monopoly, . xii. the evils due to monopoly and intense competition the theoretical perfection of human industry, over-production not a fault of production, the ideal distribution of wealth, the law of supply and demand, evils due to monopoly: the congestion of wealth, how great fortunes are made, monopolized industries and speculation, how monopolies reduce the income of small capitalists, monopolies the cause of over-production, monopolies and poverty, the church and the laboring classes, intemperance, reforms must go hand in hand, how monopolies keep men in idleness, the waste of competition, waste due to parallel railway lines, the waste of competition and financial crises, wasteful competition in other industries, waste by strikes of labor monopolies, false remedies for the disease, . xiii. ameliorating influences two classes of palliatives to the evils of monopoly, reduction in price to increase demand, the influence of christianity, its promise as a remedy, a social system based on nobler attributes than selfishness, the tendency of modern society, the possibilities of altruism, direct and indirect charities, the benevolent spirit in business enterprises, the proper attitude of the church toward monopolies, the fraternal spirit opposed to competition, monopolists to be judged charitably, unjust judgment of labor monopolies, enmity toward monopolists no cure for monopoly, . xiv. remedies for the evils of monopoly schemes for bettering society, the doctrine of individualism, the doctrine of societism, the defects of each when unmodified by the other, societism a necessary accompaniment of civilization, the interdependence of mankind, does societism threaten liberty? government for the benefit of the whole people, the dangers of government action to aid special classes, remedies for monopoly: the creation of new competitors, its practical result, remedies by prohibiting consolidations, their inevitable effect, government the only agent to prevent monopoly, why direct action by the government is impossible, indirect action and its probable results, the interstate commerce law as an example, the proper remedy for monopoly not abolition, but control, the relative advantages of government and private management of industry, . xv. the sovereign rights of the people and of their representative, the government questions brought up by the preceding conclusion, the rights of property holders, property in the products of labor an inherent right, property in natural agents and public franchises a matter of expediency, eminent domain over natural agents still held by the public, the laws of competition applicable to determine when this right should be exercised, absolutely perfect equity impossible, does private ownership of land work injustice? fundamental difficulties in dealing with monopolies not dependent on natural agents, why a remedy for their evils is essential, the basis of the people's authority over these monopolies, government regulation with private management the only feasible plan, . xvi. practical plans for the control of monopolies economists should unite on the principles already propounded, practical details a matter of opinion, a plan for the equitable and permanent adjustment of the railway problem, the ownership and operation of the railways, their securities as investments and for use in connection with the currency, readjustment of outstanding securities, lending the government's credit to private corporations, how rates of fare and freight should be fixed, how the incentive to economy is retained, how to avoid strikes, principles to be observed in establishing government control of monopolies, plans for the control of mineral monopolies, state ownership with private operation, plans for controlling municipal monopolies, the control of other monopolies, the dangers of special legislation, government control of manufacturing enterprises not feasible, taking trusts within the pale of the law, enforcing publicity, enforcing non-discrimination, direct action to prevent extortion by the monopoly, potential competition to prevent extortion, reform of corporation laws, the contrast between this plan for controlling trusts and existing law, reductions in the tariff as a remedy for trusts, plans for the control of labor monopolies, strikes an injury to labor, removal of other monopolies as a cure, what shall fix the rate of wages? cooperative ownership, fraternal benevolence most needed here, a definite relation between monopolies and the people, conclusion, . monopolies and the people i. the problem presented. the word "trust," standing for one of the noblest faculties of the heart, has always held an honorable place in our language. it is one of the strange occurrences by which languages become indelible records of great facts in the history of the world, that this word has recently acquired a new meaning, which, to the popular ear at least, is as hateful as the old meaning is pleasant and gratifying. some future generation may yet be interested in searching out the fact that back in the nineteenth century the word "trust" was used to signify an obnoxious combination to restrict competition among those engaged in the same business; and that it was so called because the various members of the combination entrusted the control of their projects and business to some of their number selected as trustees. we of the present day, however, are vitally interested in a question far more important to us than the examination of a curiosity of philology. we are all of us directly affected to-day by the operation of trusts; in some cases so that we feel the effect and rebel under it; in other cases, so that we are unconscious of their influence and pay little heed to their working. it is but a few months since public attention was directed to the subject of trusts; but, thanks to the widespread educational influence of the political campaign, at the present day the great proportion of the voters of the country have at least heard of the existence of trusts, and have probably some idea of their working and their effect upon the public at large. they have been pointed out as a great and growing evil; and few speakers or writers have ventured to defend them farther than to claim that their evil effects were exaggerated, and predict their early disappearance through natural causes; but while remedy after remedy has been suggested for the evil so generally acknowledged, none seems to have met with widespread and hearty approval, and practically the only effect thus far of the popular agitation has been to warn the trust makers and trust owners that the public is awakening to the results of their work and is likely to call them to account. the truth is, as we shall see later, that it is a difficult matter to apply an effective remedy of any sort to the trusts by legislation, without running counter to many established precedents of law and custom, and without serious interference with what are generally regarded as inalienable rights. yet we are making the attempt. already legislative and congressional committees have made their tours of investigation, and bills have been introduced in the legislatures of many of the states, and in congress, looking to the restriction or abolition of trust monopolies. it is the wise surgeon, however, who, before he takes the knife to cut out a troublesome growth, carefully diagnoses its origin and cause, determines whether it is purely local, or whether it springs from the general state of the whole body, and whether it is the herald of an organic disease or merely the result of repressed energies or wrongly-trained organs. so we, in our treatment of the body politic, will do well to examine most carefully the actual nature of the diseases which we seek to cure, and discern, if we can, the causes which have brought them on and tend to perpetuate them. if we can discover these, we shall, perhaps, be able to cure permanently by removing the ultimate cause. at any rate, our remedies will be apt to reach the disease far more effectually than if they were sought out in a haphazard way. the crudest thinker, at the first attempt to increase his knowledge of the general nature of trusts, discovers that the problem has a close connection with others which have long puzzled workers for the public good. trusts ally themselves at once in his mind with monopolies, in whichever form he is most familiar with them, and are apt to be classed at once, without further consideration, as simply a new device for the oppression of the laborer by the capitalist. but the man of judicious and candid mind is not content with any such conclusion; he finds at once, indeed, that a trust is a combination to suppress competition among producers of manufactured goods, and he calls to mind the fact that other combinations to suppress competition exist in various other lines of industry. surely when the governing motives are so similar, the proper remedies, if remedies are needed, cannot be greatly unlike. and though, taking the country as a whole, trusts have occupied more attention lately than any other form of monopoly, the problem of railroad monopoly is still all-absorbing in the west; in every city there is clamor against the burdens of taxation levied by gas, electric-light, street-railway, and kindred monopolies; while strikes in every industry testify to the strength of those who would shut out competition from the labor market. these and similar social and industrial problems are quite as important as the problem of trusts, and their solution is becoming every day more urgent and necessary. if we neglect them too long, or carelessly adopt some unsuitable or unjust remedy, who knows the price we may pay for our folly in blood and treasure? the problem before us, then, as we see it from our present standpoint, is the problem of monopoly. what is it? whence comes it? what are its effects? and, most important of all, what ought we to do about it? surely questions whose correct answer is of such importance to the welfare of each person and to the very existence of society demand the careful consideration of every thinking man. let us then take up this problem and give it the fairest and most candid investigation possible. in order to do this, let us remember that _the truth_ is the object of our search, and that it will be necessary, if the conclusions from our investigation are to be of value, that we divest ourselves, so far as possible, of all preconceived opinions founded, perhaps unconsciously, on the statements or evidence of incompetent authorities, and also of all prejudices. let us, in searching for facts and principles, examine with impartiality the evidence and arguments which each side presents, and judge with candor between them. the author wishes to make an earnest personal request to the reader who is minded to follow the discussion through the following pages, that he will in good faith attempt to do this thing: that he will lay aside for the present his opinions already formed, as the author himself has conscientiously aimed to do while pursuing this investigation, and give a fair hearing to both sides of the question. a complicated machine can only be understood when it is viewed from different standpoints. so, here, in order to find the truth, we must examine trusts from the standpoint of the trust maker as well as from that of the consumer; and trade unions, from the standpoint of their members as well as from the ground of employers and of the public at large. we shall indeed meet much error by this method of study, but is it not proverbial that there are two sides to every question? it will be our task to study these opposing views and sift from them the truths for which we seek. in taking up now the problem before us, let us adopt the true scientific method for its solution. we must first find out as fully as possible the actual facts with regard to monopolies of every sort and the competition which monopoly replaces. next, by discussing and comparing the evidence obtained, we may be able to discover the natural laws by which competition and monopoly are controlled; and finally, with our knowledge of these, we will try to discover both the source of the evils which vex us and the proper methods for ameliorating, curing, or preventing them, whichever may be found possible. such is the outline of the investigation before us, which it may as well be said here could easily be extended and amplified to fill many volumes. the author has preferred to prepare the present volume without such amplification, believing that the busy men of affairs, to whom a practical knowledge of the subjects herein treated is most essential, have, as a rule, no leisure for the extended study which the volumes into which the present one might easily be expanded would require. he trusts, however, that brevity will not be found wholly incompatible with thoroughness; and that the fact that much which might have properly been included in the book is omitted, will not be taken as a necessary indication that the conclusions arrived at are without value. ii. trusts and monopolies in manufacturing industries. in common use the word "trust" is at present rather loosely used to denote any combination formed for the purpose of restricting or killing competition. properly speaking, however, a trust is a combination to restrain competition among producers, formed by placing the various producing properties (mills, factories, etc.) in the hands of a board of trustees, who are empowered to direct the operations of production and sale, as if the properties were all under a single ownership and management. the novel characteristic of the trust is not the fact that it is a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly formed by combining several competitors according to a new plan. the process of placing property in the hands of trustees is familiar to every business man. in the formation of a trust the different firms or companies who have been competing with each other in the production and sale of goods agree to place the management of all their several properties in the hands of a board of trustees. the powers of this board and its relation to the owners of the various properties are ingeniously devised to evade the common law, which declares that contracts in restraint of competition are against public policy, and illegal. the first of the modern trusts was the standard oil trust, which was a combination formed among several of the refiners of crude petroleum in the states of pennsylvania and ohio in the year . the original combination grew out of the control of certain important patents connected with the process of refining. it pursued its course for a number of years without attracting much attention outside of the centre of its operations; but of late years so much has been published in regard to it that the very word "standard" has come to be almost a synonym for monopoly. it is probable that certain branches of the iron and steel trade were the next to be combined by means of a trust, but as these were arrangements between private firms, not much information as to the time of their origin has reached the public. the second great trust to attract general public attention was the american cotton oil trust, in which some of the same men who have so successfully engineered the standard oil combination are heavily interested. these two great trusts, the cotton oil and the standard, have attracted widespread attention, and, to a certain extent, the public has become familiar with their organization and plan of operation; but popular feeling on the subject was not fully aroused until , when the newspapers of the country made generally known the fact that the trust principle of combination was being rapidly adopted by the manufacturers of a large number of important lines of goods. the effect which these monopolies were believed to have upon the public welfare was pointed out by writers and speakers, and congress and the state legislatures were besought to investigate these combinations and seek to suppress them. meanwhile it seems to be true that the popular agitation has had no effect in lessening the number of trusts, or checking their formation and growth; and they continue to increase and to gather their profits, while the public impotently wonders what it is going to do about it. let us be careful, however, to make no assumption that the trust is injurious to the public at large. that is a matter which is before us for investigation. it is safe to assume that the reader is somewhat familiar with the general charges which have been brought against the trusts; but even if this side of the story has not been heard, it is not unfair to look at them first from the standpoint of the men who make and manage them. in order to do this, suppose we select some particular trust which will serve as a type, and imagine that some frank, candid manufacturer, who is a member of this trust, comes before us to give an account of its formation and operations. this man comes, we suppose, not as an unwilling informant, or as one on trial. he is frank, honest, and plain-spoken. he talks as man to man, and gives us, not the specious argument of an eloquent pleader in defence of trusts, but just that view of his trust and its work that his own conscience impels him to take. certainly, then, he deserves an impartial hearing. a number of years ago the principal manufacturers of linseed oil in the united states formed an association. it was started largely for social ends, and was very successful. business men are generally most interested in their own plans and operations; and those who are familiar with the same topics and have similar interests and purposes are apt to make agreeable companions for each other. we discussed many points connected with the management of our business at the meetings, and by interchanging with each other our views and experiences with different devices, methods of management, etc., we were able to get much valuable information, as well as social pleasure, from meeting one another. now within the past few years things have been going from bad to worse with the manufacturers of linseed oil. the long and short of it all was that the margin between the cost of the raw seed and running our mills, and what we could get for the oil cake and the linseed oil in the market, has grown exceedingly narrow. it's hard to tell just what has caused it. they say over-production; but what has caused the over-production? one thing that may have had something to do with it is the new mills they have been putting up in the northwest. many of the eastern mills used to get large quantities of seed from iowa; but they are building cities out there now, as well as raising flax-seed, and when they were booming some of those cities they would raise heavy bonuses in aid of new enterprises. among these were some great linseed oil mills, which have loaded up the market pretty heavily of late years; so that not only has the price sagged down, but we have all had to work to get rid of our stocks. the firms which had the best mills and machinery, and were in a position to get their seed reasonably and put their goods on the market with least expense for transportation, etc., have been making a small profit over and above their expenses. but some of the works which had to bring their seed a long way, and which haven't quite as good machinery as can be had now, were in a bad way. there were some of the oldest houses in the trade among them, too, and with fine men at their head. it was too bad to have them go under. they tried to cut down expenses, but strikes and trouble with their men prevented their saving much in that way. then there was one item of expense which they had to increase instead of cutting down: that was the cost of marketing. competition was so fierce, that, in order to keep up their trade, they had to spend more on salaries of expensive salesmen, and in advertising and pushing their goods, than they would dream of ordinarily. it seemed too bad to cut each other's throats in that way, for that was what it amounted to, and when the association met,--or what was left of it, for the business rivalries had grown so bitter that many of the former personal friendships between the members had become strained and one after the other had dropped out,--the situation was discussed by the few members who met together. it was discussed earnestly, too, by men who felt an interest in what they said, because unless some remedy could be devised, they had got to sit still and watch the savings of a lifetime slip through their fingers. one thing was very clear to all. though competition was as sharp as any one could possibly wish, the public was not getting such a wonderful benefit after all. prices were not so very much lower for oil, nor higher for seed. it was the selling expense which had run up to a ruinous figure; and on one point all the members were unanimous,--that if all the firms in the trade could only work together in harmony in marketing their goods, they could save enough in salesmen's salaries, etc., to make a great difference in the profit-and-loss account without affecting the selling prices in the market one penny. another very important matter, which we had to handle pretty tenderly in our discussions, was that of adulteration. i must confess that a good many firms in the trade, who used to be above any thing of the sort, have been marketing some goods in the past few years which were not exactly the "pure linseed oil" which they were labelled. it's a mean business--adulteration,--but not many of our customers ever test their purchases. the one thing they are apt to look at is price, for they are buying to sell again; and when rivals are selling a cheaper oil that seems just as good until it is laid on as the pure linseed that you are obliged to ask a higher price for, the temptation to meet them at their own game, rather than lose your old customers, is a very strong one. certainly, when competition took this form, it hurt the public even more than it hurt us. when people wish to buy pure linseed oil they ought to have some prospect of getting it, instead of getting an adulterated mixture of various substances; but at the rate competition was running, there seemed to be small prospect that there would be any really pure linseed oil put on the market in a short time. we have often discussed the possibility of stopping these adulterations, but it was a hard matter to cure by mere mutual agreement. how do i know what my competitor in a city a hundred miles away, does with the vats in his cellar after working hours, even if he has solemnly agreed not to adulterate his goods? for i must confess that there are a few men in our trade who are as tricky as horse jockeys. quite a number of improvements have been patented in linseed oil machinery in the past twenty years. nothing wonderful, but things that effect little economies in the manufacture. we could have done without them; but when a few firms took them up, of course the rest had to follow suit, or fall behind in the race of competition. we have had to pay a heavy royalty on some of these machines, and it has been rather galling to count out our hard-earned dollars to the company which has bought up most of the patents, and is making per cent. a year on what it paid for them, with no risk, and without doing a stroke of work. now if we manufacturers could work in harmony, we could make this company come down from their high horse, and they would have to ask a reasonable price for their machines. but we could do more than this. it stands to reason that a good many improvements will be made in our machinery in the future. we don't object to paying a fair price to any inventor who will work out these new ideas for us; but it does seem unjust for him to go and sell them to some outside company for a song, and have that company bleed the users of the improvement for every ounce they will stand. now, by working together, we can refuse to pay royalties on any thing new which comes up; but require, instead, that any new patent in our line be submitted to a committee, who will examine and test it; and if they find it to be of value, will purchase it for the use of all members of the association. some of the members thought this was as far as we ought to go. they were opposed to "trusts" on principle. but the great majority saw so clearly where we could continue to better ourselves that they became enthusiastic over it. some speculators, in years of short crops, have occasionally tried to "corner" flax-seed in a small way. we could refuse to buy except directly from the growers, and that branch of speculation would be a thing of the past. we have sent out some pretty sharp men as buyers, and sometimes they have bought flax-seed in some of the backwoods districts at very low rates. at other times, two buyers from rival firms have run counter to each other, and paid prices larger than their employers could really afford. but with our combination, we cannot only fix uniform prices for seed, but we can send out only enough buyers to cover the territory; and the work of buying is reduced to simply inspecting and weighing the seed. now another thing: of course, not every manufacturer in the business owns his mills. it is a fact that since the close times of the past few years the majority of the firms are carrying mortgages on their mills; and some of them in the west are paying as high as eight or ten per cent. interest. but with the combined capital of all the firms in the trade at our back, we can change all that. either by a guaranty, or by assuming the obligations, we can bring the interest charges on every mill in the association down to four or five per cent. at most. we have been paying enormous rates to fire insurance companies. they are not as familiar with our business as we are ourselves, and they don't know just how much risk there really is; so they charge us a rate which they make sure is high enough. we can combine together and insure ourselves on the mutual plan; and by stipulating that each firm shall establish and keep up such precautions against fire as an expert may direct, we can not only reduce the cost of our insurance to that of our actual losses, but we can make these a very small amount. it may be said that we might have done all these things without forming any trust to control prices. but the practical fact was that we could not. there was so much "bad blood" between some of the different firms in the business, from the rivalry and the sharp competition for trade, that as long as that was kept up it was impossible to get them to have any thing to do with each other in a business way. it was no small task to get these old feuds patched up; but some of the best and squarest men in the business went right into the work, and at meetings of the association, and privately, exerted all their influence to forward this coming together for mutual aid and protection. they did it conscientiously, too, i think, believing that it was necessary to save many of us from financial ruin; and that we were not bound, under any circumstances, to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the public. the trust has been formed, as every one knows, and many of the things we planned to do have been already accomplished. we have stopped adulterations on all goods made by members of the trust; and the improvement in the quality of linseed oil which has been effected is an important benefit to the public. we are managing all the works in the trust as if it were all a single property, controlled by different managers; and the saving in expense, over the old plan of cut-throat competition, when everybody was striving to save himself and sink his rivals, is an enormous one. one thing which has caused much hue and cry, is the fact that we have closed half a dozen mills or so. but the matter stood in this way: these mills were not favorably situated for doing business, all things considered; and all the mills in the country cannot run all the time, because there are more mills in existence than are needed to supply the market. these mills must have been closed soon, if the trust had not commenced operations, because they could not be run under the old regime and pay expenses. we knew we could make the oil at a less cost in our other mills, so we concluded to buy out the owners of these at a fair price, and shut up the works. prices of linseed oil have been raised somewhat, we confess; but we claim that they had been forced down much too low, by the excessive competition which has prevailed for a few years past. of course some of the most hot-headed and grasping among us, were anxious to force prices away up, when they once realized that we had an absolute monopoly of the linseed oil trade of the country; but the great majority were practically unanimous in a demand for just prices only, and the adoption of the policy of live and let live; for trust-makers are not entirely selfish. we claim, moreover, that we are breaking no legal or moral law by this action. we are, for the most part, private parties or firms--but few corporations,--hence the attempt to abolish trusts on the ground that the corporations composing trusts have exceeded the power given by their charters will fail to reach our case. we have certainly done this: we have killed competition in the linseed oil trade; but we submit that with so many other interests and trades organized to protect themselves from outside competition, and control the prices at which their products are sold to the public, we were, in self-defence and for our own preservation, obliged to take this step.[ ] [ ] it should be explained that the above is not given as a _bona-fide_ statement of facts concerning this especial trust, but as a vivid description of the organization and plans of a typical trust, from the standpoint of its owners and managers. probably, too, few or no existing trusts have tried to benefit themselves in so many different ways as we have supposed this imaginary trust to have done. but to shorten our investigation, the author has purposely extended the scope of this trust's action, to bring out clearly the variety and importance of the methods by which a trust reaps profits, aside from any advance in the price of its product. if we omit the references to the especial trade, the above view of a trust from the trust-makers' standpoint will do for almost any of the many combinations which have been formed by different manufacturers for the purpose of controlling production and prices. one thing is clearly indicated in the above, and will certainly be conceded: that the men who have formed these trusts are animated by the same motives as those that govern humanity in general. they have, in some cases at least, known what it was to be crowded close to the wall by severe competition. they all at once saw a way opening by which they could be freed from the worries and losses which had been making their business one of small and uncertain profits, and would be set squarely on their feet with a sure prospect for large and steady gains. it is using a common expression to say that they would have been more than human if they had refused to improve this opportunity. certainly, then, in examining further the trusts, we shall do so with no feeling of personal prejudice toward the men who originated them and carry them on. as we have given a hearing to the case from the trust-makers' standpoint, it is only fair that we should hear at equal length from the public who oppose the trusts; but to abbreviate the investigation, let us suppose that we are already familiar with the various charges which are brought against the trust monopolies, and let us proceed at once to consider the actual effect of the trusts upon the public. since we have heard so much in defence of the linseed oil trust, it will be well for us to inquire concerning the results, in which the public is interested, which have followed its organization. during the year (the trust was formed in january of that year) the price per gallon of linseed oil rose from thirty-eight cents to fifty-two cents; and this price was kept up or exceeded during . that is to say, every purchaser of linseed oil, or every one who had occasion to have painting done, pays to the members of this trust, for every gallon of oil that he uses, about fourteen cents _over and above_ the sum which he would pay if competition were allowed to do its usual work in keeping down prices. what profits are the members of this trust making? let us suppose that they were just able, at the old price of thirty-eight cents per gallon, to pay all their running expenses and four per cent. on the capital invested, making nothing for profits beyond a fair salary to the managers of the business. then the gain of fifteen cents a gallon in the selling price is _clear profit_ to them. now add to this the fact, which was plainly brought out in the foregoing supposed statement by a member of the trust, that it is possible by means of the trust to greatly reduce expenses in many directions as well as to increase receipts, and we begin to form some conception of the profits which this trust is harvesting. if we wish to put the statement in figures, suppose we take the annual consumption of linseed oil in the country at thirty million gallons. then the profits of the trust from the increased prices alone will amount to four and one half million dollars per annum. there is another way in which trusts directly affect the public, which has received very much less attention than it deserves. besides the people who use the linseed oil and pay the trust an extra fourteen cents a gallon for the privilege, there are a great number of people who would have used oil if the price had not advanced, but who cannot afford to do so at the advanced price. it is a well-known fact that every increase in the price of any article decreases the demand, and the advance in the price of linseed oil has undoubtedly had a great effect in decreasing the consumption of oil. so while it is undoubtedly true that _at the trust's prices_ there are more linseed-oil mills in the country than are needed to supply its wants, yet if the prices were lowered to the point which free competition would fix, there would probably be demand enough to keep all the mills running. to the trust, then, must be ascribed the final responsibility for the stoppage of the mills and the loss of employment by the workmen. nor does the effect upon the labor market stop there. from the fact that less people can afford to paint their houses, because of the higher price of the oil, it is certain that there will be less employment for painters; and as less paint is used, all those interested in and employed in the paint trade are sufferers. it is to be remembered that we are speaking of the linseed oil trust only to make the case more vivid. the principle is general and applies equally well to other trusts, as for instance to the loss of employment by thousands of men working in refineries controlled by the sugar trust, in the fall of . still another effect of this trust's action is to be especially noted: the fact that the diminished production of oil lessens the demand for seed; and also that in the purchase of seed, as well as in the sale of oil, the trust has killed competition. the trust may, if it chooses, fix uniform prices for the seed which it purchases; and the farmer can take the prices they offer or keep his seed. fortunately the farmer can raise other products instead of flax-seed, and will do so if the price is lowered by any large amount. one other possible mode of profit for the trusts, which, however, they are hardly likely to engage in--from their fear of public opinion, if for no other reason--lies in the power which they possess over the labor market. it will probably be conceded at once that the rate of wages in any occupation depends, among other things, upon the competition of the various workmen who seek employment in that occupation, and also upon the competition among those who wish to hire men to work at that occupation. it is plain that when the competition among employers to secure men is active, wages will rise; and when this competition falls off, wages will fall. now the trust is more than a combination for selling purposes only. it is a combination of all the properties concerned under practically a single ownership. clearly, then, as the various mills belonging to a single owner will not compete with each other in the employment of labor, the mills belonging to a trust will be no more likely to do so. thus if it were not for the fact that the workmen are able to take up some other employment if their wages are too low, they would be absolutely obliged to take what wages, great or small, the trust chose to give, and would be as dependent for their food and clothing upon the trust as was the slave upon his master. the question is often asked why trusts have not been formed before, and what the causes are which have started them up so rapidly in such varied lines of industry. there is certainly room for much honest difference of opinion in reference to these causes; but one cause concerning whose influence there can be no dispute is the culmination of the change from the ancient system of manufacturing to the modern. let us briefly trace the manner in which this branch of civilization has grown: in the most primitive state of existence, each man procures and prepares for himself the few things which he requires. with the first increase in intelligence those of most skill in making weapons and preparing skins make more than they require for themselves, which they exchange with others for the products of the chase. the next step is to teach to others the special skill required, and to employ them to aid the chief workman. conditions analogous to these existed down to the end of the last century. the great bulk of all manufacturing was done in small shops, each employing only a few workmen; and the manufacturer or master workman labored at the side of his journeymen and apprentices. the products of these little workshops were sold in the country immediately adjacent. of course the number of these scattered shops was so great that the possibility of uniting all the manufacturers in any one trade into a single organization to prevent competition among them, was beyond the thoughts of the most visionary. the present century has seen three great economic wonders accomplished: the invention of labor-saving machinery, greatly multiplying the efficiency of labor in every art and trade; the application of steam power to the propulsion of that machinery; and the extension over all civilized lands of a network of railway lines, furnishing a rapid, safe, and miraculously cheap means of transportation to every part of the civilized world. in order to realize the greatest benefit from these devices, it has become necessary to concentrate our manufacturing operations in enormous factories; to collect under one roof a thousand workmen, increase their efficiency tenfold by the use of modern machinery, and distribute the products of their labor to the markets of the civilized world. the agency which has acted to bring about this result is competition. the large workshops were able to make goods so much cheaper than the small workshops that the latter disappeared. then one by one the large workshops were built up into factories, or were shut up because the factories could make goods at less cost. so the growth has gone on, and each advance in carrying on production on a larger scale has resulted in lessening the cost of the finished goods. competition, too, which at first was merely an unseen force among the scattered workshops, is now a fierce rivalry; each great firm strives for the lion's share of the market. under these conditions it is quite natural that attempts should be made to check the reduction of profits by some form of agreement to limit competition. many plans have been tried which attempted to effect this by mere agreements and contracts, methods which left each property to the control of its special owners; but none have been permanently successful. by the trust plan of combination, the properties are practically consolidated; and the failure of the combination through withdrawal of its members is avoided. it offers to manufacturers, close crowded by competition, a means of swelling their profits and ensuring against loss; and encouraged by the phenomenal success of the standard oil combination, they have not been slow to accept it. the point to which we need to pay especial attention, in the foregoing consideration of the causes which have produced trusts, is the fact that the cost of production is continually being cheapened as it is carried on on a larger and larger scale. and because the cheaper mode of production must always displace the mode which is more expensive: as prof. richard ely expresses it, "production on the largest possible scale will be the only practical mode of production in the near future." we need not stop to prove the statement that the cost of production by the modern factory system is a small fraction of that by the old workshop system. the fact that the former has beaten the latter in the race of competition would prove it, if it were not evident to the most careless observer. but it is also a fact that the trust, apart from its character as a monopoly, is actually a means of cheapening production over the system by independent factories, for it carries it on on a larger scale than it has ever before been conducted. our review of the trust from the trust makers' standpoint showed this most forcibly; and we shall see more of it as we study further the methods by which the monopoly gains an advantage over the independent producer in dispensing with what we may call the waste of competition. in the argument presented by the standard oil trust before the house committee on manufactures in the summer of , occurs the following statement of the work which that monopoly has done in cheapening production: "the standard oil trust offers to prove by various witnesses, including messrs. flagler and rockefeller, that the disastrous condition of the refining business and the numerous failures of refiners prior to arose from imperfect methods of refining, want of co-operation among refiners, the prevalence of speculative methods in the purchase and sale of both crude and refined petroleum, sudden and great reductions in prices of crude, and excessive rates of freight; that these disasters led to co-operation and association among the refiners, and that such association and co-operation, resulting eventually in the standard oil trust, has enabled the refiners so co-operating to reduce the price of petroleum products and thus benefit the public to a very marked degree and that this has been accomplished: " . by cheapening transportation, both local and to the seaboard, through perfecting and extending the pipe-line system, by constructing and supplying cars with which oil can be shipped in bulk at less cost than in packages, and the cost of packages also be saved; by building tanks for the storage of oil in bulk; by purchasing and perfecting terminal facilities for receiving, handling, and reshipping oils; by purchasing or building steam tugs and lighters for seaboard or river service, and by building wharves, docks, and warehouses for home and foreign shipments. " . that by uniting the knowledge, experience, and skill, and by building manufactories on a more perfect and extensive scale, with approved machinery and appliances, they have been enabled to and do manufacture a better quality of illuminating oil at less cost, the actual cost of manufacturing having been thereby reduced about per cent. " . that by the same methods, the cost of manufacture in barrels, tin cans, and wooden cases has been reduced from to per cent. " . that as a result of these savings in cost, the price of refined oils has been reduced since co-operation began, about cents per gallon, after making allowance for reduction in the price of crude oil, amounting to a saving to the public of about $ , , per annum." certainly it would seem that this is a strong defence of the trust's character as a public benefactor; but it is well to note that while it has been making these expenditures and reducing the price of oil to the consumer, it has also been making some money for itself. the profits of this trust in , according to the report of the committee appointed to investigate the subject of trusts by the new york legislature, were $ , , . the nominal capital of the trust is but $ , , , a large portion of which is confessedly water. in answer to the statement that the price of oil has been reduced steadily by the operations of the trust, it is charged that no thanks is due to the trust for this benefit. the trust has always wished to put up the price, but the continual increase in the production of the oil fields has obliged the trust to make low prices in order to dispose of its stock. there are also about one hundred independent refineries competing with the trust, and their competition may have had some influence in keeping prices down. it is undoubtedly true that the economy in the storage, transportation, and distribution of oil by the systematic methods of the standard oil trust has made it possible to deliver oil to the consumer at a small fraction of its cost a decade ago. but it is also true that a good part of the reduction in the price of oil is due to the abundant production of the petroleum wells, which have furnished us so lavish a supply. the principal charges against this trust, made by those who were conversant with its operations, have never been that it was particularly oppressive to consumers of oil; but that, in the attempt to crush out its competitors, it has not hesitated to use, in ways fair and foul, its enormous strength and influence to ruin those who dared to compete with it. in a later chapter we shall be able to study these more intricate questions regarding trusts with a better understanding of our problem. let us pay some attention now to the growth of the trusts and of combinations in general for the purpose of limiting competition among manufacturers, which has taken place within the past few years. according to the little book entitled "trusts," by mr. wm. w. cook, the production of the following articles was, in february, , more or less completely in the hands of trusts: petroleum, cotton-seed oil and cake, sugar, oatmeal, pearl barley, coal, straw-board, castor oil, linseed oil, lard, school slates, oil cloth, gas, whiskey, rubber, steel, steel rails, steel and iron beams, nails, wrought-iron pipe, iron nuts, stoves, lead, copper, envelopes, paper bags, paving pitch, cordage, coke, reaping and binding and mowing machines, threshing machines, ploughs, and glass--a long and somewhat jumbled list, to which, however, at the present time, there should probably be added: white lead, jute bagging, lumber, shingles, friction matches, beef, felt, lead pencils, cartridges and cartridge-shells, watches and watch cases, clothes-wringers, carpets, coffins and undertakers' supplies, dental tools, lager beer, wall paper, sandstone, marble, milk, salt, patent leather, flour, and bread. it should be said that, as regards most of these combinations, the public is ignorant beyond its knowledge that some form of combination for the purpose of restricting competition has been formed. for the purpose of our present investigation it makes little difference just what this combination may be. the salient facts for us to note are, that among the manufacturers of this country there has arisen a widespread movement to partially or wholly avoid competition in the production and sale of their goods; that in a very great number of manufacturing industries these combinations have progressed so far that their managers have been able to advance prices and check production; that some of these combinations have taken the form of trusts, and by this means have every prospect of maintaining their stability and reaping their enormous profits with the same permanency and safety as has their predecessor, the standard oil trust; and, finally, that with this prospect before them, our manufacturers, as a class, would lose their reputation as shrewd business men if they did not follow out the path marked out for them, and combine every manufacturing industry in which combination is possible upon the plan of the trust. in conclusion, it may be well to examine the statement attributed to mr. andrew carnegie, that, "there is no possibility of maintaining a trust. if successful for a time, and undue profits accrue, competition is courted which must be bought out; and this leads to fresh competition, and so on until the bubble bursts. i have never known an attempt to defeat the law of competition to be permanently successful. the public may regard trusts or combinations with serene confidence." surely if this statement is true, we have little need for further examination of this subject. we have now knowledge enough of our subject to enable us to determine its truth or falsity. we have found in the actual trusts that we have examined none which have shown signs of succumbing to outside competition. more than this, however, we have seen that it is possible for a trust to carry on business and deliver goods to the consumer at much less cost than an independent manufacturer can. and as surely as this law holds that production on the largest scale is the cheapest production, so surely will the trust triumph over the independent manufacturer wherever they come into competition. if the trust were always content when its competitors were disposed of, to make only the profits which it could secure by selling at such prices as the independent manufacturers could afford, there would be less outcry against it. but with the consumers wholly dependent upon it for supplies, the prices are in the trust's hands; and the tendency is to reap not only the profits due to its lessened cost of production, but also all it can secure by raising the selling price without arousing too much the enmity of the public. clearly the trust is at once a benefit and a curse. can we by any means secure the benefit which it gives of reduction in cost without placing ourselves at the mercy of a monopoly? this is the question which must occur to every thoughtful man. before we can answer it, however, we must examine the effects of competition and monopoly in other industries. iii. monopolies of mineral wealth. it is a well known historical fact that the extraction of metals and minerals from the earth has been more subject to monopoly than almost any other business. it was, and in a large part of the civilized world still is, esteemed a prerogative of the sovereign. agricultural products have always been gathered from a wide area; manufactures were formerly the product of mean and scattered workshops; but in the working of a rich mine, there was a constant income more princely than was to be obtained from any other single source. again, with all due respect to the traditions of former generations, it seems to have been thought that any thing to which no one else had a valid title belonged to the crown; and as no one was able to assert any stronger claim to the ownership of mineral wealth than that they had stumbled upon it, it was natural for the sovereign to claim it as his. we see thus the recognition at an early date of the inherent difference between natural wealth and that created by labor. but coming down to the present time, it is evident that the business of extracting some of the rarer metals from the earth is peculiarly liable to become a monopoly. it is one of the new laws of trade, whose force and importance we are just finding out, that the ease of restricting competition varies with the number of competing units which must be combined. our most valuable metal, iron, is so widely distributed that any attempt to control the whole available supply could not long be successful. but it is one of the peculiarities of modern industry that by its specialization it furnishes constant opportunities for the establishment of new forms of monopoly, whose power is not generally understood. in the manufacture of bessemer steel, which has now largely displaced wrought iron in the arts, it is necessary to use an iron ore of peculiar chemical composition. this ore is found most abundantly and of best quality in the mines of the vermilion range, lying about one hundred miles north of duluth, minn., and in the mines of the marquette gogebic, and menominee regions in the north michigan peninsula. according to good authorities, a combination more or less effective has been formed among the owners of all these mines; and the highest price is charged for the ore which can be obtained without driving the customer to more distant markets for his supply. among the mines of this district, competition, if not entirely stopped, is greatly checked, and is likely soon to be entirely a thing of the past. it is an interesting fact that among the members of the syndicate which owns the principal mines in the vermilion regions are some of the trustees of the standard oil trust. it is stated that some of these mines have paid per cent. per annum on their capital stock, which, it is to be noted, represents a much greater sum than the amount invested in the plant of the mine. it is thus apparent that the mining of the raw ore from which iron is made, abundant and scattered though it is, is not free from monopoly. the combinations to restrict competition among the makers of cast iron and of steel belong properly under the head of monopolies in manufactures. we need only refer here to the fact that they are supposed to exist and have more or less control of the market. fortunately for the stability of our system of currency and of finance, the precious metals, through the small ratio which their current production bears to the world's stock, and the fact that this stock is scattered among an enormous number of holders, are safe from any attempts to establish a monopoly to control their price through the control of their production. other metals, however, which are like silver and gold in being found in workable deposits at but a few points on the globe but are there found in abundance, are peculiarly adapted to facilitate the schemes of monopolists. of lead, copper, zinc, and tin, we require a steady supply for use in the various arts; and the statement has been made that the supply of each one of these is in the hands of a trust. to see the effect which these combinations have had on prices, let us examine the prices which have prevailed for two years past on these four articles, as shown in the following table: table of wholesale prices (cents per lb.) in new york city of copper, lead, tin, and zinc during , , and : +--------------+-------+------+-------+------+ | |copper | lead | tin | zinc | | +-------+------+-------+------+ | dec. | . | . | - | . | | apr. | . | . | - | . | | july | . | . | - | . | | oct. | . | . | - | . | | jan. | . | . | . | . | | apr. | . | . | . | . | | july | . | . | . | . | | oct. | . | . | . | . | | dec. | . | . | . | . | | mar. | . | . | . | . | | july | . | . | . | . | | oct. | . | . | . | . | | jan. | . | . | . | . | | apr. | . | . | . | . | +--------------+-------+------+-------+------+ taking the evidence of this table, we conclude that the combination which is said to control the zinc and lead markets is probably not a trust, but a "producer's syndicate" or corner. the prices of lead show no such firm tendency to advance as would be expected if the production was in the hands of a single combination. the prices of zinc, however, show a decided advance in the past two years over the prices for the three years preceding, the average price for being but . , while for - it is . . this is a rise of no small importance, and the way it is maintained seems to give evidence of restriction of competition among producers. but the striking fact in the above table is the evidence it presents of the work which has been done by that most gigantic and daring combination for the suppression of competition ever organized, the french copper syndicate or _la société industrielle commerciale des metaux_. this syndicate of french capitalists began operations in , with the intention of "cornering" the tin supply of the world. the rise in price which was due to their operations is shown in the above table. but before completing their scheme they relinquished it for a grander enterprise, which would embrace the copper production of the world. they made contracts with the copper-mining companies in every country of the globe, by which they agreed to purchase all the copper which should be produced by the mines for three years to come at the fixed price of cents per pound, and a bonus of half the profit which the syndicate was able to make from its sales to consumers. in effect this move killed the competition in the copper trade of the world, and placed every consumer at the mercy of this paris syndicate. the advance in tin was of short duration, and those who suffered by it were speculators rather than consumers; but the advance in copper, as shown by our table, is still firmly maintained, and its effect on the industries using copper has been seriously felt all through . in october, , the _société_ extended its contracts with several mining companies to cover a period of twelve years, and advanced its price to the producers to ½ cents per pounds. at the same time, to avoid the accumulation of stock, which the diminished consumption consequent upon the increased price had caused, and which it had been generally predicted would finally be the cause of the _société's_ downfall, they arranged for the restriction of the production of the mines. if the _société_, which is backed by the heaviest capital, and managed by the shrewdest business skill of france, does what it intends to do, and its tributary producers are faithful to their contracts, for ten years to come, yes, for all years to come--for it is not likely that an enterprise of such golden returns will ever be abandoned if it can once profitably be carried out,--the world must pay for its copper whatever these monopolists demand. probably the argument against the private ownership and control of the wealth which nature has stored up for the whole world's use was never brought home to men's minds so forcibly as it has been by the acts of these french speculators. copper is a necessity to the industries of civilized society; and the mind of every unprejudiced person protests against the injustice of placing in the hands of any single firm or combination the power to exact such prices as they choose for the great staples of human consumption. this increase of price of about cents per pound is a tax which affects, directly or indirectly, every person in the civilized world. let us inquire what becomes of this tax. perhaps cents per pound will go into the pockets of the frenchmen who have engineered the combination, a sum which will give them, if we set the annual consumption of copper at , , pounds, a comfortable net income of about $ , , per annum. the lion's share of the profits is taken by the producers, however; who, if cents is the price at which copper would sell if free competition were in force, are receiving under the present contract with the _société_ about cents per pound as a reward for their co-operation in its monopolistic scheme.[ ] [ ] since the above was written the collapse of the copper syndicate has taken place. the causes which brought this about were the failure to complete the contracts for restriction of production, and lack of funds to meet the current liabilities. the reason for both these must be largely ascribed to the fact that it had come to be generally realized how great and how obnoxious the monopoly was; and capitalists rightly feared that government interference would be interposed to check the monopoly's operations. if the syndicate had made its long-time contracts at the start, or if it had been bold and shrewd enough to have inveigled speculators on the bear side of the market into operating against it, m. secretan and his associates might have won as many millions as they could have wished. it is a significant fact that the downfall of the syndicate was not followed by the reëstablishment of free competition. instead there was at once talk of another syndicate being formed to hold the copper stored up by the _société_, and keep the price up as long as possible. on this side of the water the question was at once canvassed whether a combination could be formed among the different american companies to prevent competition and support the price. evidently the failure of this scheme has not discouraged the makers of monopolies. it is appropriate here, too, to make reference to the enormous profits which the owners of the copper mines of the country are receiving, apart from the special influence of this great syndicate. the richest and most valuable copper mines in the world lie on the southern shore of lake superior. the calumet and hecla company, which works one of the richest deposits of native copper ever found, has a capital stock of $ , , , on which it has paid, since , $ , , in dividends. the reports of these companies to their stockholders show that the present cost of refined copper at the mines is as low as cents per pound, and its cost, delivered in the new york market, is only ¾ cents. probably the officers of these companies are right in their belief that in no other mines of the world can copper be produced so cheaply. but the question that comes with force to every thinking man is: if the wealth of the ore in these mines is so much greater than that in any other that it can be produced at so much less cost, does there not exist here a natural monopoly, of which the owners of these mines are getting the sole benefit? and, again, by what right does the chief benefit from this rich deposit accrue to the few men who own the mines, rather than to the many men in all parts of the world who wish to use their product? great and important as is the copper monopoly, of far greater importance to us than any and all the combinations in the metal industries are the monopolies which control the price of coal. we do not often realize how intimately connected is our nineteenth-century civilization with the store of fuel laid up for us in distant geologic ages. and in this country, with our severe climate, coal is all-important as a factor of domestic economy, as well as a necessity to manufacturing and metallurgical industries. the total cost to the consumers of the coal used in the united states every year (about , , tons), calling the average retail price $ . per ton, is nearly $ , , , or over $ . per annum for every man, woman, and child in the country. surely, then, the statement which we make at the outset, that the coal trade of the united states is in the hands of monopolists; and that competition, where not killed, is almost impotent to keep down prices, is one which merits earnest attention. the united states possesses coal fields of enormous extent and richness. the mineral is widely distributed, too, productive mines being now in operation in of the states and territories. anthracite coal, however, which is by far the best adapted to domestic use, only occurs in a limited area in the state of pennsylvania; but here the deposit is of phenomenal richness. the total area of the pennsylvania anthracite field is about , acres. of this area nearly , acres is owned by seven railway corporations. these companies, either directly or through subsidiary companies controlled in the same interest, carry on mining operations, carry the coal to market, and sell it. the following figures[ ] exhibit the receipts of each of these companies from sales of coal from their mines during the year : +-----------------------------------------+-----------+------------+ | company. | tons. | receipts. | +-----------------------------------------+-----------+------------+ | philadelphia and reading r. r. co. | , , |$ , , | | central r. r. co. of n. j. | , , | , , | | lehigh valley r. r. co. | , , | , , | | del., lackawanna, and western r. r. co. | , , | , , | | delaware and hudson canal co. | , , | , , | | pennsylvania r. r. co. | , , | , , | | new york, lake erie, and western r'y co.| , , | , , | | +-----------+------------+ | total | , , |$ , , | +-----------------------------------------+-----------+------------+ [ ] compiled from "the coal trade," , (h. e. saward), and "poor's manual of railroads," and partially estimated. thus these seven corporations alone produced from their own mines, carried to market, and sold, over , , tons of coal during the year, for which they received about $ , , . of the magnitude of the operations carried on by these great corporations we now have some idea. let us next inquire to what extent competition is allowed to act between them to keep down prices. many years ago these seven companies formed the famous anthracite-coal pool. this was an agreement by which all the companies concerned agreed to maintain a uniform selling price for coal at all important distributing points where two or more of the companies came into competition. some of the prices which were fixed by the pool were extremely arbitrary. cities in pennsylvania within an hour's ride of the coal fields had to pay nearly as high a price for coal as those miles or more distant. rates of transportation on coal mined by individual operators were made such that the latter could not afford to sell below the prices fixed by the pool, even if they had been so disposed. at the present time the situation has been modified by the long and short-haul clause of the interstate commerce law, by which the railroad is obliged to make its transportation rates somewhat proportionate to distance, and also by the passage of a law in the state of pennsylvania, by which the acts of the anthracite-coal pool were declared illegal and punishable. nominally, therefore, the pool is a thing of the past; but the practical fact is, that by secret or tacit agreement the various companies are not competing with each other any more now than in the days of the pool, and at points like new york or buffalo, where two or more roads meet, the same prices are quoted by each different company. nor are the charges against the pool comprehended in its autocratic determination of the price of coal. to make production correspond with price, it was necessary at times to close collieries entirely, throwing the miners out of employment. the individual operators, too, have no love for the combination. their profit depends more than any thing else on the rate of transportation, and thus whether they shall make or lose depends on the railroad companies. they claim that the railways base their rates for carrying coal upon the principle of "charging what the traffic will bear." this is a matter, however, which we can better discuss in the next chapter. it is thus evident beyond dispute that the production of anthracite coal in this country is an industry uncontrolled by competition. to sum up: these seven great corporations own more than two thirds of the area in which workable anthracite coal is found: they mine and market directly the great bulk of the total production; the individual operators are dependent on the railways for getting their coal to a market; and the price at which they can afford to sell it depends on the railroad rates. finally, consider that these seven companies work in harmony, both as to traffic rates and prices for the sale of coal, and the conclusion is irresistible that competition in anthracite-coal production in the united states is practically dead. let it be noted, for the benefit of those who may conceive that the above statement is unfair to the railway companies, that no charge is here made that the prices fixed by the companies for the coal are at the present time extortionate or unjust. that is a separate matter; in which, doubtless, there would be plenty to affirm on the one hand that the prices charged were no more than a just compensation, while their opponents would declare that the prices adopted by the pool favor some points to the prejudice of others, and that the statement that they were on the whole exorbitant was proven by the fact that the railway lines in the coal regions, where honestly managed, have paid great dividends on the actual capital invested. compared with the production of pennsylvania anthracite, the coal production of any other single section seems small. but it is only so by comparison, for the western coals, while inferior in quality, are abundant and easily mined, and must remain the staple for general consumption throughout the region west of the mississippi, as well as for large sections further east. as is well known, the people of the western and northwestern plains are wholly dependent upon the railroads for their supplies of every description, except the raw products of the soil. the railways themselves are great consumers of coal, and have bought up large tracts of coal lands and opened mines. in the desire to develop traffic and ensure a supply of coal to the settlers on their lines--we will even say of cheap coal,--the railway companies have entered the coal trade themselves, either directly or through subsidiary companies. thus it comes about that hundreds of thousands of people of the west and northwest must pay for coal, which is an absolute necessity of life during several months of the year, whatever price the managers of a single railway corporation may demand. let it be understood that no charges are here made of injustice or extortion on the part of the railway companies. it is only wished to bring out the fact that competition is here wholly absent. it is believed that, in some cases at least, an honest attempt has been made to mine and sell the coal at merely a fair profit. but in days to come it will not be so directly for the interest of the railways to deal liberally with their patrons as at present. other men of less breadth and principle and more ready to grasp at a chance for enormous profits may control the company's affairs; and if that happens, the opportunity to take advantage of the absence of competition and raise the price of coal will be utilized. a brief review of the actual status of the coal production of the west and south will help us to a clear appreciation of the case. the missouri pacific railway company, through subsidiary companies, extracted from its mines in missouri and the indian territory, during , , , tons of coal. through its control of transportation rates, private operators have been compelled to sell coal at the company's prices in the market. the company has recently purchased large tracts of coal lands in colorado, on which it is opening mines. the atchison, topeka, and santa fé, the chicago, burlington, and quincy, the denver and new orleans, the union pacific, and the denver and rio grande railway companies are also heavily interested in the colorado coal mines. the last company has long held a bonanza in the monopoly of the coal mining and transportation for the colorado silver-mining and smelting districts. though the other companies, to which the rock island should probably be added, come in as competitors, there can be no doubt that their active competition will be of short duration. the wyoming coal fields are being worked by the union pacific and the chicago and northwestern companies, while the chicago, burlington, and quincy and a company supposed to be closely connected with the northern pacific are preparing to take the field at an early date. on the pacific coast the coal trade has long been a monopoly in the hands of the oregon railway and navigation company, who have kept the prices in san francisco just below the point at which it becomes profitable to import australian coal. other railways are now preparing to reach the coal fields, but can we doubt that the competition to which the coal consumers are looking with eager anticipation will prove evanescent? returning to the east, we find the coal mines of northern illinois all held by a single company, which has full control of the traffic; while the mines of southern illinois, on which the st. louis consumers depend, are united as the consolidated coal company. this latter corporation has "wrecked" many of its mines for the purpose of limiting the supply and raising the price; and has bought many mines of competing companies and closed them for the same purpose. the attorney-general of illinois has been requested to bring suit against this "trust" for the forfeiture of its charter. in the hocking valley coal fields in ohio, the columbus, hocking valley and toledo railway company owns , acres of coal lands, and mined, in , , , tons of coal. the coal in western virginia is coming into the hands of the norfolk and western railroad company, while the coal of alabama, of which so much has been noised abroad, has been quietly gathered in by the louisville and nashville corporation. the tennessee coal and iron company, which owns , acres of coal lands, and mined , , tons in , is owned by parties largely interested in the east tennessee, virginia and georgia railroad system. west virginia has probably the most valuable untouched coal deposits of any state in the union, but these also are rapidly being gathered up by railway corporations. to sum up, in the words of one of the best informed authorities, the coal business of the country is at the mercy of the railroads. it is to be noted, however, that this is simply the result of natural causes. railway managers, in seeking to develop and place on a sound basis the mineral properties which could furnish a heavy and profitable traffic to their lines, have only done what they regarded as their duty to the owners of their roads. and that this policy has effected a rapid development of our resources is beyond question. the combinations to restrict competition among bituminous coal producers have been of a very different sort from those in force among the anthracite producers. the soft-coal fields are so widely scattered that it has never been possible to combine all the producers so as to control prices by a single authority. local combinations, however, controlling all the fields of a single locality, have long been an important feature of the trade, and have been able to control prices pretty absolutely within their respective localities. the fact that the principal item in the cost of coal is transportation, enables a combination covering all the producers of a certain field to raise prices very notably before competitors can afford to ship from other coal-producing districts. it would seem that our fuel is especially liable to be subjected to monopoly, for, as we have already seen in the preceding chapter, the control over the petroleum trade is held by the standard oil trust. how much of the production of crude petroleum is in the hands of the trust it is hard to say. this much is certain, that there is a "petroleum producers' association," which has a compact enough organization to be able to make contracts with the standard oil company regarding the limitation of production. it is even stated that the standard oil trust itself controls to a considerable extent the oil-producing territory; but this is hardly probable. our newest and most wonderful fuel, natural gas, has already come under the control of a few great corporations, who own the wells and the pipes for conveying and distributing it to the consumers. a striking instance of the arbitrary nature of prices when under a monopoly's control was shown at pittsburgh a few months ago. as is well known, upon the introduction of natural gas to that city a great number of the manufactories, as well as the private houses, discarded coal, and at considerable expense fitted up boilers, furnaces, etc., to use the new fuel. after the use of the gas had become general and its value had come to be thoroughly understood, the company furnishing the supply advanced the rates per cent., without previous notice; and despite the remonstrance of indignant consumers, the advanced rate had to be paid or the use of the gas discontinued, the latter alternative involving the loss of the money invested in piping, burners, etc. of the minor products of mines and quarries, marble, sandstone, borax, salt, and asphalt are all known to be more or less thoroughly under the control of monopolies, which, though less important and powerful, show the same tendency toward the destruction of competition. great as is the extent to which the monopoly of the mineral wealth of the world has gone, we can scarcely doubt that if the movement is unchecked it will go much farther. in one sense the only absolute necessaries of life are food and clothing. but to the civilization of to-day the metals and minerals are no less indispensable; and these cannot be made anywhere, like manufactured goods; or grown on wide areas, like the products of the soil. we are absolutely at the mercy of the men who own our deposits of coal and copper and lead, and it is only to be expected that they will take greater advantage of their legal industrial advantage. the combinations that exist will be made stronger and more binding, and new ones will be formed. the french copper "corner" has taught men that under the broad protection of international law their schemes of industrial conquest may embrace the world; and it is not to be doubted that the temporary "corner" will yet result in a strong permanent combination; and that the precedent set by this successful monopoly will be eagerly followed by those who wish to secure like profits by the control of some other form of mineral wealth. iv. monopolies of transportation and communication. we have already alluded to the fact that the concentration of manufacturing in large mills at great commercial centres has been made possible by the development of railway transportation, and that the rapid settlement of our western prairies is due to the same agency; but it is worth while to note more fully the difference between ancient and modern conditions in the business of transportation. in the first place, it is plain that no more than a century ago the world had comparatively very little need for railways. each community produced from its farms and shops most of the things which it needed; and the interchange of goods between different sections, while considerable in the aggregate, was as nothing in comparison with modern domestic commerce. the king's highways were open to every one, and though monopolies for coach lines were sometimes granted and toll roads were quite common, there was no possibility for any really harmful monopoly in transportation to arise, because the necessity of transportation was so small. some writer has ascribed all the evils of modern railway monopolies to the fact that in their establishment the old principle of english common law that the king's highway is open to every man, was disregarded. but if we sift down this ancient maxim of law to its essential principle, we find it to be, _there must be no monopoly in transportation_; and the problem of obtaining the advantages of modern railway transportation and keeping up, at the same time, the free competition that exists in transportation on a highway is seen to be as far from solution as before. the importance of our railway traffic is proven by statistics. of the total wealth annually produced in this country, it is probably a fair estimate to say that ten per cent. is paid for transportation of the raw material and finished goods in their various journeys between producers, dealers, and consumers, and for transportation of passengers whose journeys directly or indirectly contribute to the nation's industry. that is to say, the gross yearly earnings of all the railroads and transportation lines of the country is about one tenth of the total value of all the year's products. the average is brought down by the amount of sustenance still consumed in the locality where it is produced, and by the amount of valuable merchandise. but of the bulky products like coal and grain, the greater part of the cost to the remote consumer is due to the cost of carriage. it is also necessary to a proper appreciation of the problem, that we understand that railway transportation is now as absolutely necessary as is the production of food and clothing. annihilate the railway communications of any of our great cities, and thousands would perish by starvation before they could scatter to agricultural regions. there was great suffering in many small communities in minnesota and dakota in the severe winter of - , because the heavy storms blockaded the railroads and prevented them from bringing in a supply of coal and provisions. but it is not taking the question in its broadest sense to consider whether we could eke out an existence without railway communication. the fact is that under modern conditions every man obtains all the things which he desires, not by producing them himself, but by producing some one thing which others desire. the interchange between each producer and each consumer must, broadly speaking, be all made by means of the railway; and without that, stores, factories, mills, mines, and farms, would have to cease operation. remembering now the importance and necessity of transportation, let us inquire how the price at which it is sold to the public, the rate of fare and freight, is fixed. is it or can it be generally fixed by competition? there are now in the united states about , railway stations where freight and passengers are received for transportation. now, from the nature of the case, not more than ten per cent. of these are or can be at the junction of two or more lines of railway. (by actual count, on january , , eight per cent. of existing stations were junction points.) therefore the shippers and buyers of goods at nine-tenths of the shipping points of the country must always be dependent on the facilities and rates offered by a single railway. such rates of transportation as are fixed, be they high or low, must be paid, if business is carried on at all. and when we consider the ten per cent. of railway stations which are, or may be, junction points, we find that at least three-fourths of them are merely the junction of two lines owned by the same company. consolidation of railway lines has gone on very rapidly within the past few years and is undoubtedly destined to go much further. of the , miles of railway in the country, about eighty per cent. is included in systems miles or more in extent; and a dozen corporations control nearly half of the total mileage. the benefits which the public receive from this consolidation are so vast and so necessary that no one who is familiar with railway affairs would dream of making the suggestion that further consolidations be stopped or that past ones be undone. there is a great tendency on the part of the public, however, to look with fear and disfavor on further railway consolidation. and because this is so, it is greatly to be desired that the beneficial effects of consolidation should be better understood. the most important benefits are included under one head, the saving in expense and the avoidance of waste, and this is effected in very many different ways. suppose a great system like the pennsylvania or the chicago & northwestern were cut up into fifty or sixty independent roads, each with its own complete staff of officers. each road would have to pay its president, directors, and heads of operating departments, would have to maintain its own repair-shops, general offices, etc., and conduct in general all the business necessary to the profitable operation of a railway corporation. a car of wheat or a passenger in going from chicago to new york would have to be transferred from one road to another at perhaps twenty different points, and the freight or fare paid would be divided among twenty different companies, with corresponding clerical labor. the modern conveniences of through tickets, through baggage-checks, and through freight shipments, would be difficult, if not impossible. further, consolidation tends to produce vastly better service and greater safety. the large systems can and do employ the highest grade of talent to direct their work. every thing is systematized and managed with a view to producing the best results in efficiency and safety with the least waste of material and labor. and while the improvement in safety and convenience is all for the benefit of the public, a large part of the saving in expense effected by consolidation has likewise come back to the patrons of the roads in the form of reduced rates of fare and freight. it is difficult, however, for any one not familiar with the technical details of the railway business to fully appreciate the importance and necessity of the consolidations which have been effected, and the grave results that would follow the realization of the mad proposition to set us back a half century by cutting up our railroad systems into short local lines. it must be plain to every one, however, that while the loss of all the benefits of consolidation would be certain, the gain in competition could affect only the few junction points; and as we shall now see, the effect even on them would be small. assuming that the total number of railway junction points in the united states is , , we find, on examination, that at about two-thirds only two lines meet, and at more than half the remainder only three lines meet. it is plain that in the vast majority of cases where two roads intersect, and in many cases where three or four come together, the lines meet perhaps at right angles and diverge to entirely different localities. the shipper bringing goods to the station, then, may choose whether he will send his goods north or east perhaps; but only in the few cases where two lines run to the same point does he really have the choice of two rates for getting his produce to market. practically, then, there are not, and never can be, more than a few hundred places in the country where shippers will be able to choose different routes for sending their goods to market. we say there never can be, because the building of a line of railway to parallel an existing line able to carry all the traffic is an absolute loss to the world of the capital spent in its construction, and a constant drain after it is built in the cost of its operation. this fact is now, fortunately, generally appreciated. but what of the competitive traffic which exists between commercial centres, like the trunk-line traffic between chicago and the cities on the seaboard, or between the former city and the collecting centres farther west like st. paul, omaha, and kansas city? here, indeed, there is competition; and it is of great importance because of the enormous bulk of the traffic which traverses these few routes. it is a peculiar feature of the railway business which we have now to consider, and one which is not generally understood. we have already perceived the principle that competition cannot permanently exceed a certain intensity; and the proof of this principle in the case of the railway is remarkably plain. suppose two roads are competing for the traffic between omaha and chicago. a shipper at the former city who wishes to send a few tons of freight to chicago may go to one company and ask their rates, then to the other and induce them to give him a lower rate, and then back to the first again, until he secures rates low enough to suit him. now it is a fact that either company can afford to carry this especial freight for less than the actual cost of carrying it better than it can afford to lose the shipment. this is because it costs the company practically _no more_ to carry the goods than if they were not shipped by its line; and hence whatever is received for the freight is so much profit. stated in the form of a principle, this fact is expressed thus: _receipts from additional traffic are almost clear profit_. nor is this all. the practical impossibility of distinguishing _additional_ traffic from other traffic, and the enactment of state and national laws requiring uniform rates to be charged, places all traffic on a common basis; and the same cause which makes it more profitable to carry additional traffic for a song than to lose it, makes it better for a railroad to carry traffic, temporarily at least, for less than the actual running expenses of the road, rather than to lose it. the train and station service, the general office and shop expenses, must all be kept up, though the freight and passengers carried dwindle to almost nothing; and the capital invested in the road is a total loss, unless the line is kept in operation and earns some income, even though it be small. this last influence, as we shall see later, is a most important and far-reaching one in its effect on industrial competition. the cause of the intensity of competition in railway traffic is now evident. and from what we have seen, it follows that two railway lines competing freely with each other cannot possibly do business at a profit. let us see what are the actual results of this law of practical railway management. evidently the managers of two competing railway lines have but two possible courses open. they may, by tacit or formal agreement, unite in fixing common rates on both the roads, or they _may_ attempt to do business with free competition. but we have already proven that the latter course must result in reducing the income of the road certainly below the amount necessary to pay the operating expenses and the interest on the bonds, and probably it will be insufficient to pay the running expenses alone. the inevitable result, then, is the bankruptcy of the weaker road, the appointment of a receiver, and its sale, in all probability to its stronger competitor. this is the chain of cause and effect which has wrought the consolidation of competing parallel roads in scores of cases, and which, if free competition is allowed to act, is sure to do so. we can now appreciate the _necessity_ which managers of competing lines are under to agree upon uniform rates for traffic over their roads, and at the same time the difficulty of doing this. the strange paradox is true that while it is _necessary_ to the continued solvent existence of the competing corporations that such an agreement be made, it is also greatly to their advantage to break it secretly and secure additional traffic. it is necessary, therefore, that the parties to the agreement be strongly bound to maintain it inviolate; and to effect this, "pools" were established. in pooling traffic, each company paid either the whole or a percentage of their traffic receipts into a common fund, which was divided among the companies forming the pool, according to an agreed ratio. under this method it is evident that all incentive to secret cutting of rates and dishonest methods for stealing additional traffic from another road was taken away. how widespread and universal is the restraint of competition by railway corporations may be seen by the following pithy words, penned by charles francis adams, president of the union pacific railway: "irresponsive and secret combinations among railways always have existed, and, so long as the railroad system continues as it now is, they unquestionably always will exist. no law can make two corporations, any more than two individuals, actively undersell each other in any market, if they do not wish to do so. but they can only cease doing so by agreeing, in public or private, on a price below which neither will sell. if they cannot do this publicly, they will assuredly do it secretly. this is what, with alternations of conflict, the railroad companies have done in one way or another; and this is what they are now doing and must always continue to do, until complete change of conditions is brought about. against this practice, the moment it begins to assume any character of responsibility or permanence, statutes innumerable have been aimed, and clauses strictly interdicting it have of late been incorporated into several state constitutions. the experience of the last few years, if it has proved nothing else, has conclusively demonstrated how utterly impotent and futile such enactments and provisions necessarily are." disregarding for the present the latter part of the above quotation, consider the statement that during the whole history of railway corporations, agreements to restrain competition have been the rule. this the slightest research proves to be an historical fact, and it is in perfect accord with our preceding statement, that such agreements were necessary to the solvent existence of railway corporations. the records also show that invariably when these agreements have been broken and competition has been allowed to have full play, the revenues of the roads have been rapidly reduced to a point where, unless a peace was effected, bankruptcy ensued. mr. adams said, with truth, that no law had proven of any effect in preventing these competition-killing agreements between railways; but since the above extract was written, the interstate commerce law has been enacted. let us pay some attention to its working and results. it is a curious fact that the framers of railway legislation in this country, almost down to the present time, have concentrated all their energies on the endeavor to keep up free competition; and the interstate law is no exception to this rule. the plan of the interstate law was about as follows: "here are a few dozen great commercial centres where the railway lines of different systems meet. we will first prohibit the pooling by which they have restricted competition at these points. then, in order that the thousands of other shipping points shall receive an equal benefit, we will enact a 'long and short haul clause,' obliging the rates charged to be in some degree proportionate to the distance. thus competition at the great centres will bring rates down everywhere, and the public will be benefited." for a year after the enactment of the law its effects were not prominent. pooling was abolished, but the agreements to maintain rates were still kept up and were fairly observed. but in , the second year of the law's working, it came to be realized that the pool was the vital strength of the agreement to maintain rates, and that this agreement might now be easily broken. then ensued a remarkable season of rate cutting, which, at the present writing, has reduced many strong companies to the verge of bankruptcy. it is plain enough that if this is allowed to go on, the various stages of receivership, sale, and consolidation will follow in regular order. to avoid this too sudden revolution and the general financial disaster which all sudden revolutions entail, the principal companies in the west are now striving to combine in an association for the maintenance of rates by a plan which will bind them more closely together than any other ever before adopted. thus to quote mr. adams again: "the interstate commerce law has given a new impetus to the process of gravitation and consolidation, and it is now going on much more rapidly than ever before. it is at this moment rapidly driving us forward toward some grand railroad-trust scheme." it is a fact which we shall do well to ponder over, that this legislation intended to stimulate competition has finally had just the opposite effect from that which its makers desired. they did increase the intensity of the competition, and have thereby nearly brought about a permanent end to all competition in railway traffic. it must now be clear that the railway is essentially a monopoly, not, be it noted, because of any especial wickedness of its managers or owners, but because competition is _impossible_ as regards the greater part of its business, and because wherever competition is possible, its effect, as the managers well know, would be to annihilate all profits from the operation of the road. let us consider now some of the evils with which this monopoly is charged. the first of these is _discrimination_ between persons and between places. a favored shipper has been enabled to ruin his competitors because he could obtain special rates, while they, perhaps, were charged an extra amount. the strong monopolies have in this way been able to strengthen their hands for the purpose of throttling their weak competitors. passenger rates, too, have been low to one class and high to another; and the system of free passes has led to great abuses. discrimination between towns and cities and states has been hardly less serious; and while the railways were permitted to make high local rates and low through rates, a great stimulus was given to the city at the expense of the country. the second class of evils is that rates in themselves have been too high. the railways have been wastefully built and then capitalized at double their actual cost, and it has been attempted to pay dividends of to per cent. on these securities. in some cases the principle of charging "what the traffic will bear" has been so applied that industries have been ruined through the absorption of their profits by unjust transportation charges. but our space will not permit a comprehensive review of the many abuses of railway management. they are already familiar to the public. we needed only to refer to them sufficiently to carry on our argument by showing that the railroad monopoly is not by any means a harmless monopoly if left to work its own pleasure. there are two evils of our present railway system, however, which are not chargeable to monopoly, but to the _attempt to defeat monopoly_, and which are important to our discussion. the first is the waste of competition in railway traffic; the second, the waste of competition by the construction and _threatened_ construction of competing lines where present facilities are ample for the traffic. of the first it need only be said that in advertising, "drumming," and soliciting patronage the railways spend many millions of dollars every year, which comes out of the pockets of the public. the second is most serious, for it involves a far greater waste. it is a conservative estimate to say that per cent. of the railways of the country were only built to divide the profits of older roads, and that their owners would be delighted to-day to have their money back in their possession and the railroad wiped out. the millions these roads have cost, the millions required every year to maintain and operate them, the millions spent on proposed roads that never reached completion, and the millions squandered in fighting proposed roads by every means short of actual bloodshed,--these are some of the wastes which we have made in our endeavor to create competition in railway transportation. and with all our efforts, and notwithstanding the fact that until within a short time the public sentiment and the railway managers have been united in the belief that free competition was the only mode of regulating railroad rates, we are farther removed from free competition now than ever before. and now consider in addition to all this the fact that every railway company must first of all secure from the state a right to exercise the sovereign power of eminent domain, and that it may and does choose and take every advantage of the favorable locations where its road can be built most cheaply; which natural highways, mountain passes, and the like, are gifts of nature, the right to whose use equitably belongs to the general public, and not to private parties exclusively. taking these facts also into consideration, it seems needless to offer further proof of the fact that the business of railway transportation is essentially a monopoly, and that the attempt to regulate it by competition must always prove a failure in the future, as it always has in the past. necessarily we have limited our discussion to the most salient points, and have not touched at all many of the complicated details of the railway problem. in a later chapter we can study farther the evils due to railway monopolies, and the proper remedies therefor. at present we have accomplished our purpose in finding out the fact that railways are monopolies, and that they are so by their inherent nature. of monopolies in other forms of internal transportation, but little need be said. our once busy canals and great rivers seem destined, with the constant rapid improvement and cheapening in the carriage of goods by rail, to lose all their former importance. the monopolies small and great that once held sway there have all vanished before their strong rival, the railway. the use of steam in the vessels that navigate the ocean has had an effect very similar to the replacing of stage-coaches and freight wagons by the locomotive. where hundreds of sailing vessels plied their slow and uncertain trade, steamer lines now make trips only less regular than the railway itself. the only cause for the existence of a monopoly in ocean traffic by steam is the greatly increased capital required for a rival steamship line as compared with that needed for the old sailing vessels. we find this, the requirement of a large capital, to be a feature of more or less importance in nearly every monopoly of the present day. in this case, however, unless there is an artificial monopoly in the shape of government aid or authorization, the strength of its capital is the only power the monopoly has. we may reach a clear idea of the essential nature of all the monopolies considered in this chapter by considering an especial class of monopolies of communication, namely, mountain passes, bridges, and ship canals. if a person or a railway corporation could secure sole control of the only pass through a high mountain range separating two wealthy and populous districts producing goods of different sorts, they might exact a princely yearly revenue for its use, equal to the interest on the capital required to secure an equally favorable passage by tunnelling, or the annual cost of sending goods over some longer and more expensive route. but under the law no private person would be allowed to do this; and if the pass were a very important and necessary one, probably no one railway company would be allowed to do so. the law recognizes to some extent, and should recognize much more than it does, the fact that the benefit of this natural pathway is not the property of any one man or set of men, but equitably belongs equally to every person who needs to use it directly or remotely. a very large and expensive bridge is like an important mountain pass, differing only in that one is the gift of nature, while the other is wholly the work of man. but because the latter is the work of man, it does not follow that it is not a monopoly. the great bridge across the mississippi river at st. louis is owned by a private company which levies tolls for the teams and trains passing over it. these are deemed excessive, as they are sufficient to pay an exorbitant interest on the cost of the bridge. yet for many years no one has cared to invest money in the erection of a new bridge, for they saw that there was no more traffic than one bridge could readily carry, and they knew that if a new bridge were erected, in the rivalry in tolls which would ensue, the old-established company would probably bankrupt its rival. it is thus plainly seen how an important bridge may become a monopoly, and a most powerful and onerous one. we have still one important monopoly of communication to describe, the telegraph. viewed from a narrow standpoint it may be thought that there should be no monopoly in the telegraph. a telegraph line is not expensive to erect and maintain, and it gets no monopoly from taking advantage of the most favorable route through difficult country as a railway does. but the economy effected by combination and the effect of sharp competition in bringing about bankruptcy and then consolidation are exactly similar to the case of the railway, which we have just described. in the early history of telegraph companies, many short competing lines struggled and fought for supremacy. in the western union telegraph company was formed with the avowed intention of combining these warring companies and making the telegraph business profitable. it has exceeded the most sanguine dreams of its promoters by swallowing up its rivals until the entire system of telegraph communication of the country is practically in its hands. the effects of this consolidation have been of two sorts. on the one hand we have the telegraph service of the country performed with the least possible work; there is nothing wasted in the maintenance of two or more rival offices in small towns where one is sufficient, nor in operating two lines of wire where a single one would serve as well. all expense of "drumming up" business in various ways is avoided, and also the cost of keeping the complicated books necessary when the receipts of a single message must be divided among several companies. on the other hand it is plain that the public is wholly at the mercy of the monopoly in the matter of rates, and must pay for the use of the telegraph exactly what the corporation asks. there is a weak and foolish argument which is often used in an attempt to show that this particular monopoly is not hurtful. it is that the telegraph is a luxury which only wealthy people use, and hence whether its rates are high or low is of little account. the fallacy of this statement is easily seen. a principal use of the telegraph is to aid the prosecution of business; hence to unduly raise rates is to cause an additional tax on business,--on the carrying on of the processes of production. this tax will certainly have its effect, either in decreased profits, decreased wages, or an increased price for the product. another large class of telegrams are those which are sent with little thought of the cost, in time of sickness, death, or sudden emergency, yet by people whose purse feels severely the tax. what to do with this vast monopoly is one of the questions of the day, but we will content ourselves at present with this investigation of its character, reserving its proper treatment for later consideration. v. municipal monopolies. the people who live in cities are far more dependent on monopolies than the resident of the country. the farmer can still, on necessity, return to the custom of primitive times, and supply himself with food, clothing, fuel, and shelter without aid from the outside world; but the city dweller must supply all his wants by purchasing, and is absolutely dependent on his fellow-men for the actual necessaries, as well as the luxuries of life. from the peculiar circumstances of city life, many monopolies arise in production and transportation which occur nowhere else. one of these is the carriage of passengers on street and suburban railways. there is no better instance, perhaps, of the great power which is placed in the hands of railway managers than this matter of suburban passenger traffic. one example must suffice to show this. let us suppose that the managers of a railway, which has hitherto not been run with a view to the development of suburban traffic, secure control of several choice tracts of land on the line of their road near a growing city, and establish low rates of commutation and frequent and convenient train service. the land which they purchased is sold out in building-lots for many times its cost, and a number of thriving villages become established there, inhabited chiefly by people whose business is in the city and who are obliged to go back and forth on the trains. after a number of years the growth of the towns becomes more sluggish, and the managers find that the commutation traffic is not after all extremely profitable; therefore they lessen their train service and increase the rates of fare. perhaps they may abolish commutation rates altogether. it is a well known fact that the value of suburban real estate depends almost entirely on the convenience and cheapness of access to the city. by the removal and forced sale, which many of these people will be obliged to make, it may easily happen that they may lose their entire property. it is not stated that such flagrant cases of autocracy on the part of railway managers are common. indeed, it is a high compliment to the uprightness and probity of these men that such occurrences are so infrequent, and that the temptation, so constantly presented, of enriching one's self at the expense of the owners of the road and the public is yielded to so seldom. but there have been cases where railway managers have secured excellent train service and low rates of fare to benefit places where they held an interest in real estate, while other and competing places were given poor service and high rates. and the entire abolition of long-established commutation rates has happened more than once. but turning now to the city railways proper, those carrying passengers through the streets, it is evident at first sight that we have another case where competition is a factor of little account. the power of this monopoly for harm is greatly intensified by the fact that its use is largely a necessity. in all our great cities the business sections are far removed from the residence sections, and the great mass of the industrial population is _obliged_ to ride at least twice each day in going to and returning from work. in nine cases out of ten there is one route so much more convenient than any other as to overbalance any slight difference of fare. thus, even on the supposition that every different line was run in competition with every other line, the amount of really competitive business would be but a trifle. but besides this, as is well known, in a great many cities consolidation has gone on as rapidly among street-railway companies as among the great trunk-line railways. the three lines of new york elevated roads were originally projected by rival companies; but they were not long in coming together under one management. a philadelphia syndicate has secured control of most of the street railways of that city, and in addition has purchased a number of the lines in boston, chicago, pittsburg, and st. louis. although the benefit in economy by consolidation is much less in the case of street railways than in the case of steam roads, yet considerable is gained, and the competition which is killed by the consolidation is, as we have just seen, of no great importance to the public. the so-called street-railway trust, then, is really of no great moment. the monopoly in street-railway traffic arises from the nature of the business rather than from any especial effort of capitalists to kill competition. but the railway companies are not the only monopolies which have the use of our city streets. water, gas, and steam pipes beneath the pavements, and wires, either in subways or strung overhead, carrying electricity for street and domestic lighting, telegraph, telephone, and messenger service, are all necessities to our modern civilization. the absolute necessity of a public water supply, and the practical impossibility in most cases that any competition in the furnishing thereof can be established and maintained, have led, in the case of most of our large cities, to the work of water supply being undertaken by the municipal authorities. but many of our smaller cities have entrusted to private companies the work of furnishing a water supply. while this is a case of real monopoly, yet under the conditions which may be enforced, most of the power for harm is taken away. according to the best plan in vogue, the city sells the franchise for constructing the works to the company who bids to furnish water at the lowest rates under definitely specified conditions, the franchise being sometimes perpetual, but oftener granting to the city at some future date an option for the purchase of the works. it is to be particularly noticed that this is a case in which the administration of an absolute monopoly has been entrusted to private enterprise with excellent results; a fact which may be of use to us in our later investigation. while the fact was early appreciated that a water supply when once introduced became an absolute necessity, it was not recognized when illuminating gas was first brought into use how important it was to become. franchises, or more properly permits, for erecting works and laying mains for supplying consumers were given away to hastily formed companies; and even at the present time there are but a few cities (only five in the united states) which own their works and mains for supplying gas. as a matter of course the gas companies saw their advantage. knowing that gas once introduced was a necessity at almost any price, they made no move toward lowering rates as new and cheaper methods came into vogue and their output and profits increased. the stocks of our gas companies have been swollen by enormous amounts of water, and upon this fictitious capital they have continually paid enormous dividends. at one time there was a great call for competition in the gas business. the public demanded it, and as usual the demand was supplied. rival companies were organized, and the city authorities made haste to grant them permits for laying their mains in the city streets. a war of rates of course ensued, and lasted till one company gave up the fight and sold out to its rival. the consolidated company promptly increased its stock by at least the amount which had been spent in purchasing and laying this extra and entirely needless set of gas mains. the public has to pay interest on this sum, and suffer besides the damage done to the pavements by tearing up and re-laying. in at least twenty cities of the united states has this farce been repeated, and in every case with the same result. it is now generally acknowledged that the attempt to regulate the price of gas by competition is unwise and harmful. prof. e. j. james, of the university of pennsylvania, in a monograph entitled "the relation of the modern municipality to the gas supply," has treated this subject most fully. he describes the experience of cities in england, france, and germany, where competition has been tried and abandoned, it being found by dear experience that the gas business is necessarily a monopoly. a congressional committee, who reported on the application of a rival gas company which proposed to lay mains in the city of washington, declared that "it is bad policy to permit more than one gas company in the same part of the city." one of the best informed men in the gas business says: "the business is almost outside of the domain of rules governing other enterprises. competition is so deadly to it that it is impossible for rival companies to occupy the same street without ruin to both, or without consolidation with its attendant double investment, and cheap light is thus rendered an impossibility." hon. t. m. cooley says: "the supply of public conveniences to a city is usually a monopoly, and the protection of the public against excessive charges is to be found first in the municipal power of control. except in the very large cities, public policy requires that for supplying light and water there should be but one corporation, because one can perform the service at lower rates than two or more, and in the long run will be sure to do so. in some kinds of business competition will keep corporations within bounds in their charges; in others it will not. when it will not, it may become necessary to legislate upon profits." considering it determined, therefore, that the gas industry is a monopoly, let us inquire something of the manner in which this monopoly regulates the prices for its service. according to recent statistics, collected from gas companies in the united states, companies charge $ per thousand cubic feet, and companies charge $ . per thousand. it is thus seen that rates have been fixed to make "even figures," something which does not occur when margins of profit are reduced by competition. the complete table shows this fact more fully as follows: companies charge $ . per thousand cubic feet. " " . " " " " " " . " " " " " " . " " " " " " . " " " " " " . " " " " companies charge . per thousand cubic feet. " " . " " " " " " . " " " " " " . " " " " companies charge various other prices per thousand cubic feet. according to the same authority these companies in produced , , , cubic feet of gas, for which they received $ , , , an average price per m. of $ . - / . according to the statement of good authorities, gas can be manufactured at a cost of to cents per m. in this country. prof. james, in his work before quoted, says: "in england at the present time gas is manufactured at a net cost of cents per thousand feet; some works in new england now manufacture it for cents per thousand feet to the holder." the president of the american gas-light association is quoted as stating in an address before the association that the cost of the gas delivered to consumers by the south metropolitan company of london in was . cents per thousand, and figuring by the relative cost of coal and labor there and here, he stated that gas could be delivered in new york at a cost of cents per thousand. in germany the price of gas to consumers varies from cents in cologne to $ . in berlin. very recent improvements in processes have greatly cheapened the cost of manufacture. mr. henry woodall, the engineer of the leeds, england, gas-works, states that coal-gas costs in the holder cents per thousand. of nineteen companies doing business in principal english cities, the average rate charged consumers is ½ cents, and the average cost of manufacture is - / cents. the history of the gas monopoly is repeating itself in the matter of electric lighting. the smaller cities of the country, in their haste to "boom," are ready to grant a liberal franchise to the first firm or company which offers to supply an electric-lighting system, trusting to future competition to regulate prices, a resource that must prove of no avail. nor are the men in power in our larger cities any wiser. the city of new york is taking every means to encourage the operation of rival electric-light companies, and is letting yearly contracts for street-lighting to the lowest bidder. it is true that competition is active just now, but it requires no far-seeing eye to discern the inevitable combination and consolidation among the companies. again, not only is competition of this sort sure to fail, but the attempt to establish it is very harmful. to say nothing of the expense and waste of wealth which is involved when rival companies are allowed to stretch their wires and establish their extensive central stations in the same district, it is everywhere acknowledged that the multiplication of wires overhead is a crying evil and danger. are we to double and treble it, then, by permitting rival companies to place their wires wherever they please? it is evident that the temporary rivalry which we obtain in this way is bought at much too great a cost. what is true of electric street light wires is equally true of the vastly greater multitude of wires which belong to our rapidly growing system of domestic lighting, and the telegraph, telephone, and messenger service. surely no man knoweth the beginning or the end of the network which is woven over our heads, and which, besides all the useful wires already enumerated, is full of "dead" wires, many of them strung by defunct or irresponsible companies, who would never have been allowed to obstruct the streets if they had not been "competing" for the business. can there be any doubt that it is the height of folly to continue this work, and that the only rational way of entrusting electric service to incorporated companies is to permit but a single company to operate in a district and control prices by some other means than competition? we have the beginnings of other monopolies in our city economies which are destined to become much more important, but to which we need only refer. steam for supplying heat and power is beginning to be distributed from great central stations, through mains laid underground, to all parts of the surrounding district. the necessity for frequent repairs and stoppage of leaks renders it necessary to break the pavement and dig down to the mains much oftener than is required for any other of our underground furniture. nothing would seem more evident than that the number of these pipes to be laid should be the fewest consistent with the proper supply of the district, yet it is a fact that for a time two competing steam companies were permitted to run riot in the streets of lower new york, until the weaker one succumbed "to over-pressure." yet it is scarcely to be doubted, that if another rival company were to ask for a permit to operate in the district now monopolized by the new york steam company, public opinion would tend to favor the granting of the permit "because it would give more competition." it is to be hoped that before these great systems for the distribution from central stations of various necessities reach much greater proportions, the public will become educated enough to perceive the folly of attempting to regulate them by competition. the necessity for this will be more, rather than less, apparent with the use of underground instead of overhead wires. the cost of placing wires in subways is far beyond the cost of stringing them on poles, and if we are obliged to build our subways large enough to accommodate all the rival wires which may be offered, we have a herculean task upon our hands. the great question of the monopoly of land can be merely touched in this connection. while the fact that land is natural wealth must be freely acknowledged, it is only where population is most dense that any great monopoly appears in its ownership. the principle is well established, indeed, that private ownership of land cannot stand in the way of the public good. when a railway is to be built, any man who refuses to sell right of way to the railway company at a reasonable price may have it judicially condemned and taken from him. we have already noted in the chapter on railway monopolies the injustice of permitting a single person or corporation to control and own any especially necessary means of communication, as a mountain pass or a long and expensive bridge, and the same principle is apparent in connection with the railway terminals in our large cities. the enormous expense attendant upon securing right of way for an entrance to the heart of the city, makes it a very difficult matter for any new company to obtain a terminus there, except by securing running rights over the tracks of an older company. to give to any single corporation the sole control of the entrance to a city _and permit it to charge what toll it pleases_ for trains that pass through it, evidently places the city at the mercy of a monopoly. practically the case is not so bad as this, as most large cities have means of water communication, and the railroads are run to the heart of the city through the public streets. but the time is fast approaching when these city grade crossings will be done away with, and in every city of importance the railways will enter the city on elevated viaducts terminating in a single union depot. evidently it is contrary to the public welfare to sink more capital in these expensive structures than is necessary; and in general, several companies will use a single structure for entrance and exit. it is evident that the control of these terminals, if vested in a single company, may give rise to just the abuse we have set forth; and that the city itself should retain enough control over its railway terminals and freight-transfer lines to ensure that no single carrier or combination shall monopolize them. in the last analysis it is evident that the monopoly of entrance to a city is really a monopoly in land, or, we might more properly say, in space. we are fortunate in this country in having millions of acres of land still awaiting cultivation; and while it is not intended here to defend the policy of _giving away_ the estate of the public which our government has pursued, there is no danger for a long time to come that an actual monopoly will exist in agricultural lands. the price of land used for business purposes in a city, however, depends almost wholly upon its location. the price at which a single block of land near wall street, in new york city, was recently sold was so great that, at the same price, the value of a square mile would be equal to half the whole estimated wealth of every sort in the united states. now the question must occur to every thinking man, by what right does the owner of this property receive this enormous wealth? to make the case of those who advocate the public control of the gifts of nature more clear, let us consider a special case. suppose a man in an eastern city chanced to come into possession two-score years ago of a tract of land in what is now kansas city. we may suppose that he got it by inheritance, or through some chance, and that, except to pay the taxes upon it, he has never given farther attention to it. during all the years of the city's rapid growth he pays no attention to his land and takes no part in furthering the growth of the city. at last, at the height of the real-estate boom, he sells the land, and, whereas it cost him in the first instance a merely nominal sum, perhaps $ , he sells it now for $ , . this value it has, not because of itself, as is the case with farming lands, but because of its situation in reference to the community around it. in other words, practically the whole value of this land has been given it by the people who have come and built this city around it. it is their labor that has given this property its value, and, in equity, the value should be theirs. a more detailed statement of the arguments for the public control of land incomes cannot be given here. what we are concerned with here is the extent to which land is subject to a monopoly. it appears too evident to require further discussion that, as a general rule, agricultural lands in every section of the country are competing to a greater or less extent with lands in every other section, and that the lands used for business purposes in the cities compete likewise, each city with others neighboring and of similar size, while lands in the same city similarly situated compete with each other. vi. monopolies in trade. we have now examined the various forces which are destroying competition in the production of goods in our factories, and of raw material from our mines; in the transportation of these goods in their various journeys between the producer and the consumer, and in the supply of the especial needs of the dwellers in our cities. it is an old and well-worn adage that "competition is the life of trade"; and if this be true, we shall certainly not expect to find the men who are earning their living by the purchase and sale of goods endeavoring to take away the life of their business by restraining or destroying competition. at first sight it seems as if it would be a difficult matter in any case to destroy competition in trade. the buyer and seller of merchandise has no exclusive control over natural wealth; no mine or necessary channel of transportation is under his direction; nor does he in his trade produce any thing, as does the manufacturer. he only serves the public by acting the part of a reservoir to equalize and facilitate the flow between the consumers and producers; and if necessity requires, the two can deal directly with each other and leave him out altogether. but in dealing with the question of monopolies we must not conclude that the absolute control of supply is at all necessary to the existence of a monopoly. while there are monopolies, as we have seen, which have the keys to some of the necessities of civilized life, there are others which control merely some _easier means_ for their production, carriage, or distribution; and to this latter class belong the principal monopolies in trade. to be sure that this constitutes a monopoly, we have but to turn to the case of the mountain pass mentioned in a former chapter. the use of that particular pass for transporting goods is only an _easier means_ of transportation than the detour to some other pass or by some other route; and the degree of power of the monopoly depends directly on the amount which is saved by the use of its facilities. so with the monopolies in trade. brokers and jobbers and retail merchants form a channel through which trade is accustomed to pass, and through which it can pass more readily than by any new one. it is to be noted that under modern conditions the power of middle-men has been greatly reduced from what it was formerly. as we have already seen, manufacturing was then carried on only in families and small workshops, and the mines which were worked were principally in the hands of the king. the merchants were the wealthy men of olden time. they controlled largely the transportation facilities of that day; and while, as we have already noted, the commerce which then existed was but a trifle compared with the present, the principal exchange being in local communities, yet the trade in all articles which were imported, and all domestic commerce between points any great distance apart was in the hands of the merchants. it is natural, therefore, that we find monopolies in trade to have been among the first which existed and to have been of importance and power when manufacturers' trusts were not dreamed of. the guilds which flourished near the close of the middle ages, while not devoted to the establishment of a monopoly, did nevertheless aim, in some cases at least, to hinder competition from those outside their guild. but turning to the present, let us examine the conditions under which competition in trade is checked to-day. let us take, first, the case of retail trade in any of the thousands of country villages and petty trade centres in the land. the history of the life of the country store-keeper is a constant succession of combinations and agreements with his rivals, interleaved with periods of "running," when, in a fit of spite, he sells kerosene and sugar below cost, and, to make future prices seem consistent, marks down new calico as "shop-worn--for half price." it is true the sum involved in each case is a petty one, but when we consider the enormous volume of goods which is distributed through these channels, the total effect of the monopoly in raising the cost of goods to the consumer must approach that effected by monopolies of much wider fame. but perhaps it may not seem evident that this is a monopoly of the same nature (not of the same degree) as a manufacturers' trust or a railroad pool. it certainly _seems_ to be true that the merchant has a right to do as he chooses with his own property; and that if he and his neighbor over the way agree to charge uniform prices for their goods, it is no one's business but their own. and, indeed, we are not yet ready to take up the question of right and wrong in this matter. that the act is essentially a "combination in restriction of competition," however, is self-evident. the degree of this monopoly may vary widely. if the merchants who effect this combination raise their prices far above what will secure them a fair profit on the capital invested in their business, and if it is difficult for their customers to reach any other source of supply outside of the combination, the monopoly will have considerable power. on the other hand, if the stores of another village are easy of access, or if the merchants who form the combination fix their prices at no exorbitant point, the effect of the monopoly may be very slight indeed. we find this class of trade monopolies most powerful and effective on the frontier. wherever railroad communication is easy and cheap the tradesmen of different towns--between whom combinations are seldom formed--compete with each other. the extension of postal, express, and railway-freight facilities to all parts of the country, too, have made it possible for country buyers to purchase in the cities, if necessary. thus the railways have been a chief instrument in _lessening_ the power of this species of monopoly in country retail trade, which was of great power and importance a half century ago. of retail trade in the cities, it is not necessary to speak at length. combination here has seldom been found practicable because of the great number of competing units. there is, however, a noticeable tendency of late to the concentration of the trade in large establishments, which by their prestige and capital are able to take away business from their smaller competitors. it does not seem likely, however, that this movement will result in any very injurious monopoly among city retailers. the wholesale trade is on quite a different basis from the retail. the number of competitors being so much less, combination is vastly easier. the tendency toward it has been greatly fostered and strengthened by the formation of trusts among the producers. these combinations made the manufacturer more independent in his treatment of jobbers, and disposed him to cut their profits to the lowest point. naturally these men combined to resist this encroachment on their income. they refused to handle any goods for less than a certain minimum commission. it might be possible in many cases for manufacturers to sell directly to the retail traders, but in general the difficulty of changing old commercial channels is such that the friction and expense is less if the goods are permitted to pass through the wholesaler's hands. it is to be noted that one cause for ill-feeling between manufacturer and wholesaler is the fact that before the days of trusts the latter often reaped much greater proportionate profits than the producer himself. but in time this cause of dissension will be forgotten, and the trust and the wholesalers' association will work in harmony. the point of greatest interest in this is the fact that combinations among this first class of middlemen are fostered and made possible by the combination of producers. nor does the series end here necessarily. the increased price which the retail dealers are obliged to pay for the goods, with the fact that others are making larger profits, makes them eager to do the same; and by the aid and co-operation of the wholesale merchants they may be able to do much toward checking competition among themselves and increasing their profits. thus by the operation of the combination at the fountain-head among the producers, there is a tendency to check competition all along the line, and grant to each handler of the goods between producer and consumer an abnormal profit. an excellent example of this is found in the sugar trade. the wholesale grocers' guild of canada, which includes per cent. of the dominion's wholesale traders, entered into a compact with the canadian sugar refiners, who agreed that dealers outside of the guild should be charged cents per pounds more for sugar than those who were in the guild. in november, , fourteen members of the guild were expelled and were compelled to pay the higher price. the executive committee of the guild fixed the selling price for the retail dealers. the guild was so successful with sugar that it extended its operations to starch, baking powder, and tobacco, fixing prices for those goods as well. the committee of the dominion parliament, appointed to investigate the guild, reported that it was a combination obnoxious to public interest, because it limited competition, advanced prices, and treated with gross injustice those in the trade who were not its members. in new york state there are two associations of wholesale grocers which are working to prevent competition in the sugar trade. they have fixed a uniform price for sugar, and have tried to make arrangements with the managers of the sugar trust by which that organization shall discriminate against all grocers who are not members of the association by refusing to sell them sugar or charging them a higher price. in some other sections an attempt has been, or is being, made by which the retail grocer sells only at certain fixed prices determined by a committee of the wholesalers who issue each week a card of rates. it is urged in defense of the movement that sugar has been sold at an actual loss by both the wholesale and retail trade for a very long time. the grocers' association, at its first meeting, passed a resolution declaring that it was opposed to combinations for the purpose of extorting unreasonable profits from the public, and that all that was sought was to prevent the evil of handling certain staples below the cost of doing the business. but if we inquire why these staples have been handled at a loss, the answer is, because of the strong competition which has prevailed. the organization, then, is a combination to limit competition, to suppress it, in fact, and the difference between its purpose and work and that of the sugar trust is a difference of degree and not of kind. the reason for its moderate demands may be because grocers are more liberal-hearted than refiners, or because they understand that their power over the trade is more limited than those who control the original product, so that an attempt to exact too large profits would offer a tempting premium to competitors of the association. another staple article of consumption in which combinations are known to exist is meat. it is affirmed that a combine of buyers and slaughterers controls the markets of chicago and kansas city, and both depresses the price paid for cattle in the market, and raises the price of beef to the retail dealer. this monopoly proved so oppressive, and attracted so much attention, that in february, , gov. humphrey of kansas, called a convention of delegates from the legislatures of ten different states and territories to devise a system of legislation, to be recommended for adoption by the several states, which should destroy the power of the combination. one of the combinations investigated by the new york state committee appointed to investigate trusts and similar organizations, was an association of the retail butchers, and the brokers buying sheep, lambs, calves, etc., from the farmers. the purpose of the association is to prevent competition among its members and keep control of prices in its own hands by charging a higher price to outsiders than to members of the association. the ultimate effect is to increase profits by paying less for the animals and getting higher prices for the meat sold. we might go on at indefinite length to examine the various monopolies of this sort, but it does not seem necessary. the salient fact which is evident to any one at all conversant with business affairs is, that in almost every line of trade the restriction of competition is in force to a greater or less extent. those monopolies are strongest, indeed, which have control of production; but in so far as they can control the market, the men engaged in buying and selling are equally ready to create minor monopolies, and an acquaintance with the general markets convinces one that these monopolies are numerous enough to have a very important effect in increasing the cost of goods to the consumer. we are accustomed to think of competition as a force which always tends to keep prices down, and of a monopoly as always raising prices; but it should be understood that this is true only of the competition and monopolies among _sellers_ of goods. it must be remembered that the competition among _buyers_, is a force which acts in the opposite direction and tends to raise prices; and that it is quite possible to have combinations among buyers to restrict competition and keep prices down. of course, where the buyer is the final consumer, this is almost impossible, for the great number of competitors forbids any permanent combination. also where the product concerned is a manufactured article or a mineral product, the mining or manufacturing company or firm will generally have capital enough and business ability enough to defeat any attempt of the wholesale merchants to combine to reduce the prices paid for their output. this he can easily do by selling to retail dealers direct. but in the case of products gathered from the farmers the case is different, and the producer can less easily protect himself against combinations among buyers to fix the price he shall receive. the power and extent of these monopolies varies with the distance of the farmer from markets, and also, it must be said, with the intelligence and shrewdness of the farmer. in districts remote from railways and markets the farmers are often dependent on the travelling buyers for a chance to sell their cattle or produce. in a thinly settled region there may be no more than two or three times in a season when a farmer will have an opportunity to dispose of his surplus products; and, realizing his necessity, he is apt to be beaten down to a much lower price than the buyer would have given if other buyers had been competing with him to secure the goods. in the chief markets, too, there is often a combination of buyers formed to keep down prices. the combine of cattle-buyers in kansas city and chicago has just been noted. the new york legislative committee discovered that a milk trust had control of the supply of milk for new york city, fixing the price paid to the farmer at three cents per quart, and the selling price at or cents per quart. according to the suit brought by the attorney-general of louisiana against the cotton-seed oil trust, that monopoly has reduced the price paid to the planters for seed from $ to $ per ton. as the total amount of cotton seed which it purchases is about , tons a year, it is evident that this feature of the combination alone puts into the pockets of the owners of the trust over two million dollars per annum, over and above the profits made through its control of the cotton-seed oil market. evidently the combinations which lower prices by restricting competition among purchasers are not to be overlooked because of unimportance. in the chapter on monopolies of mineral wealth it was stated that the french copper syndicate is not a "trust," but a "corner." it has not been common to consider "corners" as a species of monopoly, except as they have, like the latter, acquired a bad reputation with the general public from their effect in raising the price of the necessaries of life. but if we look at the matter carefully, it becomes plain that the aim of the maker of corners is the same exactly as that of the organizer of trusts,--to kill competition. the difference lies in the fact that the "corner" is a temporary monopoly, while the trust is a permanent one. the man who forms a corner in, let us say, wheat, first purchases or secures the control of the whole available supply of wheat, or as near the whole supply as he can. in addition to this he purchases more than is really within reach of the market, by buying "futures," or making contracts with others who agree to deliver him wheat at some future time. of course he aims to secure the greater part of his wheat quietly, at low figures; but after he deems that the supply is nearly within his control, he spreads the news that there is a "corner" in the market, and buys openly all the wheat he can, offering larger and larger prices, until he raises the price sufficiently high to suit him. now the men who have contracted to deliver wheat to him at this date are at his mercy. they must buy their wheat of him at whatever price he chooses to ask, and deliver it as soon as purchased, in order to fulfil their contracts. meanwhile mills must be kept in operation, and the millers have to pay an increased price for wheat; they charge the bakers a higher price for flour, and the bakers raise the price of bread. thus is told by the hungry mouths in the poor man's home, the last act in the tragedy of the "corner." fourier tells of an event in his early life which made a lasting impression on him. while in the employ of a mercantile firm at marseilles, his employers engaged in a speculation in rice. they purchased almost all the available supply and held it at high prices during the prevalence of a famine. some cargoes which were stored on shipboard rotted, and fourier had to superintend the work of throwing the wasted grain, for the want of which people had been dying like dogs, into the sea. the "corners" of the present day are no less productive of discontent with the existing state of society than were those of fourier's time. but, returning to our subject, it should be said that the "corner," generally speaking, does much less injury to the public than is commonly supposed. as we have shown, the manipulators of the corner make their chief profits from other speculators who operate on the opposing side of the market; and it is but a small part of their gains which is taken from the consumers. the effect on the consumer of the abnormal rise in price caused by the corner is sometimes quite made up for by the abnormal fall which occurs when the corner breaks. generally, however, the drop in prices will be slower to reach down to the final consumer, past the middlemen, than will the higher prices. the corner makers also are apt, if they are shrewd and successful, to make the total of their sales for the current supply yield them a profit. thus suppose that the normal price of wheat is cents per bushel, and that the syndicate secures control of five million bushels at the normal price. if while it keeps the price up it sells two million bushels at $ . per bushel, it can afford to get rid of the rest of its stock at an average price as low even as cents per bushel, and still make four hundred thousand dollars' profit. the operations of corner makers are confined principally to goods which are dealt in upon commercial exchanges. one evident reason for this is that the vast purchases and sales, which are necessary in the formation of a corner are impossible without the facilities afforded by an exchange. it must be said, too, that the plain truth is that our principal commercial exchanges, while they do serve certain useful purposes, are yet practically devoted chiefly to speculation. this, simmered down to its essence, means that the business of the speculators is to bet on the future prices of the articles dealt in,--a game in which the largest players are able to influence prices to accord with their bets, and hence have their "lamb" opponents at an obvious disadvantage. the evil of this sort of commercial gambling is recognized by practical men of every class; but its cure is yet to be effected. a sort of business allied both to trade and transportation is the business of storage or warehousing, and this has recently shown some interesting cases of monopoly. the owners of warehouses along the brooklyn waterfront combined their business in january, , and doubled their rates for storage. in the testimony of one of the members of this trust, before the new york legislative committee, he said: "we want to destroy competition all we can. it is a bad thing." the owners of grain elevators at buffalo, n. y., have long combined to exact higher prices for the transfer of grain than would have prevailed were free competition the rule. at the session of the new york legislature took the bull by the horns and enacted a law fixing a maximum rate for elevator charges; a statute which was based on the popular demand for its enactment, but is hard to accord with the principles of a free government. there are a number of lines of business auxiliary to trade in which competition is more or less restricted by the fact that the amount of capital controlled and the prestige of the established firms renders it a difficult and risky matter to start a new and competing firm. the insurer of property or life, if he be wise, will demand financial stability as a first requisite for the company in which he takes a policy. the companies engaged in the business of fire insurance have long been trying to agree on some uniform standard of rates and the avoidance of all competition with each other. these combinations, however, are apt to be broken, as soon as formed, by the weaker companies, whose financial condition operates to prevent them from getting their share of the business under uniform rates. even when this rate-cutting is stopped, there is still competition to be met from the various small mutual companies, who are necessarily outside the combination. banks are a necessity to the carrying on of modern commerce, and they have great power over the financial affairs of the business men of the community which they serve. as a general rule, however, they are largely owned by the merchants and others who patronize them, and the instances of this power being abused are, therefore, not common. it is to be remembered, in discussing this, as in other monopolies, that the power of a monopoly depends entirely upon its degree. a bank, trust company, or real-estate guaranty company which has a great capital, an established reputation for safety and conservatism, sole control of many special facilities, and conveniences for obtaining and dispatching business, has a real monopoly, whose degree varies with the tendency people have to patronize it instead of some weaker competitor, if one exists. there is no evil effect from the monopoly upon the community, unless it takes advantage of its power to charge a sum greater than their real worth for the services it renders, or uses it to discriminate to the injury of special persons or places. in closing our discussion of the monopolies in trade, there is an important point to be noted. in the lines of industry considered in the preceding chapter, the monopoly was easy of maintenance because it held full control of the source of production, or of some necessary channel through which commerce must pass. no gift of nature assists to maintain a monopoly in trade. it must be wholly artificial, and it relies for its strength simply on the adherence of its members to their agreement to maintain prices. its degree of power can never be great, compared with monopolies which control the original sources of production; for if it is attempted to put up prices inordinately, competition will start up outside of the combination, or the consumer will be led to deal directly with the producer. because of this weakness, the temptation is great for these monopolies to strengthen themselves in ways quite indefensible on any score. the alliance of trade monopolies with trusts, in order to strengthen themselves, we have already considered. but the trust which makes such an alliance must plead guilty to the charge of _discrimination_ as well as _monopoly_. it is bad enough to raise the prices of the necessaries of life, and force the whole community to pay the tax; but it is worse to add to this the crime of discrimination against certain persons in the community, at the instance of a minor monopoly. but the trade monopoly does not confine its sins to tempting the stronger monopoly to practise discriminations. it practises discrimination itself in some very ugly forms. a combination among manufacturers of railway car-springs, which wished to ruin an independent competitor, not only agreed with the american steel association that the independent company should be charged $ per ton more for steel than the members of the combine, but raised a fund to be used as follows: when the independent company made a bid on a contract for springs, one of the members of the trust was authorized to underbid at a price which would incur a loss, which was to be paid for out of the fund. in this way the competing company was to be driven out of business. it is often argued that combinations to advance prices can never exist long, because of the premium which the advanced price puts upon the entrance to the field of new competitors; but the weapons which this trust used to ruin an old and strong competitor are even more effectual against a new-comer; and the knowledge that they are to meet such a warfare is apt to deter new competitors from entering the field. the boycott was once deemed rather a degrading weapon of warfare; but now the term has grown to be a familiar one in trade circles. even the great railway companies do not scruple to use the boycott in fighting their battles. one might imagine that both the thing and the name filled a long felt want. vii. monopolies depending on the government. the fact has been already referred to that the principal monopolies which existed previous to the present century were those created by government. in the days when governments were less strong than now, and less able to raise money by such taxes as they chose to assess, it was a very convenient way to replenish the king's exchequer to sell the monopoly of a certain trade to some rich merchant. nor was the establishment of these monopolies entirely without just reason. in those days of scarce and timid capital, inducements had to be held out to encourage the establishment of new enterprises. an instance of this, familiar to every one, was the grant to the owners of the first steamboat of the sole right to navigate the hudson river by steam for a term of years. in the early history of the nation and in colonial days, government grants to establish local monopolies were very common. in this, however, we only followed the example of the mother country, which had long granted limited monopolies in trade and transportation as a means of encouraging new enterprises and the investment of capital. the monopolies of the present day which are properly considered as government monopolies are of two classes. the essential principle on which all are based is that their establishment is for the common benefit, real or supposed; but the first class--to which belong the patents and copyrights--are also justified on the ground that the brain worker should be protected in his right to reap the just profits from his labor. the effect of a copyright is simply to make it possible for an author to receive some recompense from his work. he can only do this by selling it in printed form to those who may wish to buy; but if there were no copyright, any printer might sell duplicates of the book as soon as it was issued, and could sell them at a much less price than the original edition, as the book would have cost him nothing to prepare. the practical result would thus be that few could afford to spend study and research in writing books, and the volumes which would be printed would be apt to be only those of so cheap and worthless a sort that no one would take the trouble to copy them. the monopoly produced by a copyright takes nothing from the public which it previously enjoyed. the writer of a book creates something which did not before exist; and if people do not wish to buy that which he has created, they are at perfect liberty not to do so. the monopoly relates only to the production and sale of that particular book. others are at liberty to write similar books upon the same subject, which will compete with the first; and the same information may be given in different words without infringing the copyright. it seems clear enough, then, that the monopoly which occurs in the use of a copyright, is of an entirely different sort from the monopolies which we have previously considered. competition is not destroyed by it, and its only effect upon the public relates to an entirely new production, which is not a necessity, and which the public could not have had an opportunity to enjoy if the copyright law had not made it possible for the author to write the book with the prospect of being repaid for his labor by the sale of the printed volume. as already stated, the granting of patents is based on the same principle as the granting of copyrights. a clause of the constitution empowers the general government to grant to authors and inventors for limited periods the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. if we judge the granting of patents by the aims and intentions which are held in the theory of the law, we must conclude that it is a highly wise, just, and beneficial act. the man who invents a new machine or device which benefits the public by making easier or cheaper some industrial operation, performs a valuable service to the world. but he can receive no reward for this service, if any one is at liberty to make and sell the new machine he has invented; and unless the patent laws gave him the power to repay himself for the labor and expense of planning and designing his new device, it is altogether probable that he would not spend his time in inventing. the wealth which a valuable patent promises has been a great incentive to the work of inventors, and has undoubtedly been a chief cause of the great mechanical advancement of the last half century. but the state of mechanical science has greatly changed from what it was when the clause of the constitution was penned which speaks of inventions as "discoveries." the trained mechanical designer now perfects a machine to do a given work, with almost the same certainty that it will be successful in its operation that he would feel if the machine were an old and familiar one. the successful inventor is no longer an alchemist groping in the dark. his task is simply to accomplish certain results with certain known means at his disposal and certain well-understood scientific principles to guide him in his work. but this statement, too, must be qualified. there are still inventions made which are the result of a happy inspiration as well as of direct design. not all the principles of mechanical science and the modes of reaching desired ends are yet known or appreciated by even the best mechanical engineers. there is still room for inventors whose rights should be protected. the interpreters of our patent laws have always held the theory that the use of a natural agent or principle could not be the subject of a patent. this is undoubtedly wise and just. the distinction should always be sharply drawn between those existing forces of nature which are as truly common property as air and sunlight, and the tool or device invented to aid in their use. again, it is a notorious fact that the great multiplicity of inventions has made the search to determine the novelty of any article submitted for a patent for the most part a farce. no one is competent nowadays to say surely of any ordinary mechanical device that it is absolutely new. the bulky volumes of patent-office reports are for the most part a hodge-podge of crude ideas, repeated over and over again under different names, with just enough valuable matter, in the shape of the inventions of practical mechanical designers and educated inventors, to save the volumes from being an entire waste of paper and ink. space, however, will not permit us to discuss at length the faults of our patent system. the important point for us to notice is that the patent system establishes certain monopolies, and that these monopolies are not always harmless. patents are given to "promote the useful arts," but the inventor whom they are supposed to encourage reaps but a small share of the profits of his inventions. valuable improvements soon fall into the hands of large companies, who are able to defend them in the courts, and reap all possible profits by their use. again, patents sometimes aid in the formation of trusts and combinations. two or three firms may control all the valuable patents in connection with some important industry. if they agree to combine their interests and work in harmony, they are far stronger than an ordinary trust, because the patents they hold prevent outside competition. it was pointed out in the opening chapter how the control of patents was sometimes a feature helping to induce the formation of trusts. the standard oil trust had its origin in the superiority which one firm gained over its competitors through the control of an important patent. the envelope trust, which, at this date, has raised the price of envelopes about twenty per cent., owes its chief strength to its control of patents on the machines for making the envelopes. instances innumerable could be given where a few manufacturers, who by their ownership of patents controlled the whole field, have ended a fierce competition by consolidating or agreeing to work together harmoniously in the matter of selling-prices. very many of these are monopolies in trade or monopolies in manufacturing, and as such have already been considered in the preceding chapters; but it is proper here to point out the part which our patent system has taken in their formation, and the fact that it is due to their control of patents that many of the existing combinations owe their security against outside competition. probably the public was never so forcibly reminded of the defects of our patent system by any other means as it has been by the operation of the bell telephone monopoly. the purpose in granting patents is to aid in the establishment of new lines of industrial activity, secure to the inventor the right to reap a reward for his work, and encourage other inventors to persevere in their search for new improvements. all these things are effected by the monopoly which is held by the bell telephone company; but they are effected at a cost to the users of the telephone under which they have grown very restive. passing by the statement that the patents which the bell company holds were illegally procured in the first place, through the inventor having had access to the secret records in the patent office of other inventions for which a patent had been asked at about the same time as his own, it is an undisputed fact that the bell company holds the monopoly of communication by electric telephone in this country. they have managed this monopoly with great skill. while the instrument was yet in its introductory stage, and when every smart town felt obliged to start a telephone exchange or fall behind the times, prices were kept low; but when once the telephone became a business necessity and its benefits were well known, rates of rental were advanced to the point where the greatest possible profits would accrue to the bell company's stockholders. this was excellent generalship. the same principle is applied in many other lines of business; and it was only because the company held a monopoly of a most valuable industry, that it proved so immensely profitable here. but other acts of the company, it is alleged, while within the letter of the law, are yet clearly infringements on the just rights of the public. it is charged that the company has purposely refrained from putting into practical use any of the many improvements which have been made in the telephone during the past few years, but at the same time has quietly secured their control. by skilfully managing "interferences" of one patent against another, and by amending and altering the various specifications, it contrives to delay as long as possible the issue of the patents upon these inventions. by means of these improvements, which it purposes to introduce as its present patents expire, it proposes to continue its monopoly for many years to come. it is very likely that this attempt will succeed. we have already seen the folly of establishing competing electric light companies, and the attempt to establish rival telephone exchanges is just as sure to result ultimately in a heavy additional tax on the public. then, too, the monopoly has grown so wealthy and powerful through its enormous profits that it will be very loth to release its hold, even when it is no longer protected by patents. rival companies which may be established then, it will seek to crush by a fierce competition; and it will be quite likely to succeed. but in so far as it is not protected by patents, it is properly to be considered with other municipal monopolies, in which class we have already referred to it. the course pursued by the bell telephone company has at least proved that our whole patent system demands a thorough and radical revision. the inventor should certainly be protected, but not to the public hurt. the second class of monopolies which the government establishes or aids in establishing because it is deemed to be for the public welfare that they exist, are, first, those private industries which receive aid from the government, either directly by subsidies or indirectly by the taxation of the goods of foreign competitors; and second, those branches of industry which are carried on by the government itself. the question concerning the granting of subsidies is principally a past issue. a century ago many new enterprises in all lines of industry looked to the government for aid. in those days, when capital was scarce and when investors hesitated at risk, it was perhaps wise to grant the help of the public treasury to aid the establishment of young industries; but nowadays, when millions of capital are ready to seize every opportunity for profitable investment, it is recognized that subsidies by the general government are no longer needed. the days of subsidy granting ended none too soon. the people of the united states gave away millions of acres of their fertile lands and other millions of hard-earned dollars to aid in the building of the railroad lines of the west; and a great part of the wealth thus lavished has been gathered into the coffers of a few dozen men. the monopolies created by these subsidies have been largely shorn of their power; but while they reigned supreme, their profits were gathered with no halting hand. there is only one direction in which we still hear the granting of subsidies by the general government strongly advocated; that is in the direction of establishing steamship lines to foreign ports. it would be apart from the scope of our subject to discuss the wisdom or folly of such a proceeding farther than to note the fact that it establishes a monopoly. take, let us say, the case of a steamer line between new york and buenos ayres. it is plain in the first place that the government aid will only be granted if there is not business enough to induce private parties to take up the enterprise. but as we suppose that there was not business enough in the first place to support one steamer line unaided, it is certain that none will undertake to establish a rival line to compete with that already sure of profits by reason of the government aid. hence this line will have a monopoly of the trade; and unless some proper restrictions as to rates accompany the subsidy, the monopoly may lay an extortionate tax on the public who patronize it. the relation of the tariff to monopolies is one which deserves the careful attention of every thinking man. let us, in discussing this question, lay aside all prejudice and preconceived ideas for or against the protective tariff system and consider candidly what are the actual facts of the case. it is evident, in the first place, that the purpose of the tariff tax which the government levies on goods imported from abroad is to _keep out foreign competition from our markets_. the imported goods cost more by the amount of the tariff than they otherwise would; and the american producer, if he makes equally desirable goods and does not raise his selling price above that at which imported goods can be bought, is secure against foreign competition. but we have already learned that monopoly is simply the absence of competition; and inasmuch as the tariff checks or shuts out foreign competition, it has a _tendency_ toward the establishment of monopoly. but this tendency may not result in the establishment of any monopoly. there is a tariff on potatoes, but there is no monopoly in their production. evidently the tariff cannot create a monopoly; it only makes its establishment more easy by narrowing the field of competition to the producers of this single country. if we turn back over the list of monopolies we have studied, to find those which the tariff has any effect in aiding to establish, we shall find none till we reach the first two chapters. the monopolies in mineral products and manufactured goods, known generally by the name of trusts, it is self-evident are largely dependent upon the tariff. if they raise their price above a certain point, people will buy goods of foreign production instead. this point--the price at which foreign goods can be profitably sold--depends on the rate of the tariff, on the cost of production in foreign countries, and the cost of their carriage here. of the various trusts, it is evident that only those would be effected by the removal or reduction of the tariff whose products are now covered by it. thus the standard oil trust and the cotton-seed oil trust would not be injured by any reduction in the tariff. as a matter of fact, however, nearly all of the trusts have to do with manufactured goods which are covered by the tariff, and the two exceptions already named are about the only ones. the trusts in manufactured products, broadly speaking, then, are all dependent on the tariff. here is a strange condition of affairs. in the early history of this nation, the people of this country, represented by their popular government, were appealed to by the men engaged in manufacturing after this fashion: "we cannot make the things you need as cheaply as the manufacturers in foreign countries. they are wealthy and we are poor. they have their mills already in operation, we have ours to build. the capital we borrow bears a rate of interest double that which the foreign mill-owner has to pay. the labor we must employ is not yet trained as is theirs, and it must receive far higher wages. therefore we ask that you aid us in establishing our industries by paying us higher prices for our goods than those for which you could purchase the same goods of foreign manufacture. in order that every one shall be obliged to do this, and that all may contribute equally to our support, we ask you to pass laws laying a tax on all imported goods which compete with ours, whereby none shall be able to buy them at a cheaper price than we can afford to sell our own goods." and the people replied: "while we recognize the fact that we must pay an increased price for your goods compared with that which is asked for goods from foreign mills, and are thus taxing ourselves for your benefit, yet we see how desirable it is that our industries should be diversified and that we should not be dependent on foreign nations for the necessaries and comforts of life. thus _for a season_ we will grant your petition and tax ourselves to establish you in your business." such was the spirit of the movement that inaugurated the protective tariff. one other great argument for its establishment, which was believed by the people and was assented to by the manufacturers, was as follows: "our natural advantages for engaging in manufacturing are beyond those of any other nation. our workmen are more skillful, intelligent, and ingenious; our capitalists are more enterprising. at the same time there are many difficulties to be overcome in establishing a manufacturing business in a new country. some assistance is needed at the outset to tide it past the critical period. now, if we can give our manufacturers a start and enable them to establish themselves, they will improve all these natural advantages which we possess; and with the abundance of raw material in our mines and farms and forests, with our ingenuity and yankee enterprise and skill, who can doubt that our manufacturers, once established, can produce goods more cheaply than they could ever be brought across from foreign countries? this protection from foreign competition will be a great incentive to the establishment of manufacturing enterprises. everywhere mills and factories will spring up; a brisk home competition will be created; and that will finally reduce prices lower than they could ever go if we remained dependent on foreign countries for our manufactured goods." it was a wise and well-founded plan, and only as to its final result did it fail. the protective tariff did make manufacturing more profitable than any other business, and mills and factories of every sort have sprung up in all parts of the country. but the expected extreme competition which was to reduce manufacturers' profits and the price of manufactured goods to a basis in accordance with the profits in agricultural and other branches of industry has been long delayed. the wonderful development of the country has kept up prices and profits, and has furnished a market for our manufacturers which has long kept in advance of their capacity to supply it. at last, however, the result which was expected by the founders of the protective tariff has come to pass. our domestic mills and factories have a capacity beyond the present demand for their products. the home competition which was predicted has come; and if it had operated to reduce prices as was expected, there would now be employment for all our mills, for it is an axiom that every reduction in price increases the demand. but the manufacturers who had been making enormous profits of ten, twenty, and thirty per cent. on their capital for these many years, were far from willing to accept calmly the situation and reduce their profits to a reasonable figure. they have tried combinations of many sorts to keep up prices, and at last have found in the trust a strong and effective means of killing home competition and keeping up their profits, if they choose, to the highest point which the tariff permits. it is not to be argued that the manufacturers were especially worse than the general run of men in taking this action. it is the most natural thing in the world that a man who has all his life been used to making enormous profits in his business should come to think that he had an inalienable right to make them; and that when competition became so sharp that he had to lower his prices, it was due to an unnatural condition of affairs glibly designated as "over-production," for which the trust was an appropriate and wise remedy. it is thus plain how, in a secondary way, the tariff is a cause of the trusts. the fat profits which the former gave have made men covetous enough to engage in the latter. we are, perhaps, not yet prepared to discuss the question of the proper remedies for trusts; but it is too obvious to call for comment that an easy and most effective remedy is to cut away the protection from foreign competition, under which they flourish, and let them sink or swim as they best can. at the least it will be wise to reduce their protection to a point where any attempt to tax the nation of consumers and reap exorbitant profits by putting up prices so that profits of twenty-five per cent. or more can be reaped, will be counteracted by foreign competition. it is only fair to point out at the same time that this remedy is far from being a panacea against all trusts and monopolies. the monopolies in the peculiar products of this country will be unaffected by it, and the combinations which embrace the whole globe in their plan of operations are quite beyond its power. the copper syndicate and the salt trust, and according to mr. carnegie a steel rail trust, are the only actual examples of international combinations which have ever been attempted, and it will probably be many years yet before the constant movement towards tennyson's "federation of the world" permits the general formation of effective industrial combinations which shall embrace all commercial nations. we have finally to consider the monopolies carried on directly by the government. the carriage of the mails is the most important monopoly carried on by the government, and we may find some facts of interest by enquiring the reasons why it is for the public welfare that it should be so conducted rather than by private enterprise. in the first place, if it were left to private enterprise to furnish us with postal facilities, the postal service would be much more limited than now; many places of small importance being left without postal facilities or charged a much higher rate for service than now. on the other hand--and this is an important point--there would, perhaps, be in and between the large cities competition between different companies; in which case there would be duplicate sets of postal facilities, including buildings, mail-boxes, furniture, and employees of every grade. it is plain that all this would be a waste. one set of facilities is better for the public than two or three or more, and is ample to carry all the mails. to put another set of men at the work that others are already able to do, is to waste just so much of the working force of the world, as well as the capital necessary to furnish tools and buildings for its use. the matter of rates, too, would vary with the competition. one could never be sure what his postage bill for the coming year was to be. the receipts of the companies would be uncertain, and they would be obliged to pay a high rate of interest on the capital invested in their plant, thus making it necessary for them to charge high rates for their service. the intense competition between rival companies would lead to the bankruptcy of the weaker, and the final result would be the establishment of a single corporation in the control of the whole system. rates would then be put up to the point where the greatest profit would accrue to the corporation. under the existing system, then, we save in cost of service over competing systems under private direction, in that the existing facilities are all made use of. there is no waste by setting two men to do the work of one, or by renting two offices to do the business which one could accommodate, neither is any energy wasted in soliciting business. the capital invested by the government in its plant for carrying on the postal service would bear interest, if the money were borrowed, of not more than two or three per cent. but if a private company borrowed money to carry a similar business, they would have to pay five to seven per cent., which they would have to make up for by charging a higher rate of postage. other monopolies which have been carried on by the government are the business of transportation, and the provision of roads, bridges, and canals therefor; monopolies in mining; and in the case of municipal governments, as already noted, the supply of water, gas, and electric service, and street railway transportation. viii. monopolies in the labor market. it should be said at the outset of this chapter that, in a very true sense, practically all men are laborers. that into which a man puts his energy and by which he earns his living, is his labor, whether it be work of the hand or the head. but the labor we are to consider in this chapter is that of the men who work for wages; and we will also make the arbitrary distinction that it is that of the men who work for wages in some branch of manufacturing, mining, trade, or transportation, the great divisions of modern industry which we have thus far considered. almost all these monopolies employ large amounts of capital in carrying on their business; and in the popular speech, "monopolist" and "capitalist" are often used interchangeably. it is a very common belief that monopolies are confined to the capitalized industries of production, transportation, and trade, which we have already considered; but we are now confronted by the fact that the wage-workers in the various trades of the country are engaged in exactly the same monopolistic schemes, in which they have exactly the same ends in view as have the monopolists who combine millions of dollars' worth of capital to effect their purposes. on the one hand we have the standard oil trust and the railroad pools and the hundreds of other capitalistic combinations striving to benefit the producer at the expense of the consumer; while among those whose only capital is their strength and skill, we find the workers in all the various trades, and even some of the lower grades of laborers firmly banded together with the avowed purpose of raising their wages above those which they would receive if competition alone determined the rate. and they are successful, too. notwithstanding the fact that they deal with tens of thousands of producing units where the combiner of capitalized interests deals with tens, the success achieved by the combinations of labor is quite comparable with that reached by combinations of capital. it speaks volumes for the intelligence and ability of the wage-workers of the present day--yes, and for the growth of the spirit of fraternity; that in the advancement of what they deem a just and righteous cause, they should voluntarily put themselves under discipline and endure patiently the untold hardships of uncounted strikes, often brought on in the unselfish work of aiding their brother laborers against what they deem a common enemy. the modes in which the combinations of skilled laborers attain their desired ends are akin to those which obtain in a well organized manufacturers' trust. the former allow only a certain number of apprentices to learn their trade. the latter permit the establishment of only such additional mills as shall not unduly increase the market supply. the former fix a standard scale of wages below which no member of the union shall work; the latter fix a minimum price for the goods sold in the market. if there are more laborers in the union than can be employed at the advanced rate of wages, some must be idle. if there are more mills in the trust than the lessened demand for the goods will keep busy, some must be shut down. the trade-union boycotts competing workmen outside its ranks, and stigmatizes them as "scabs." the trusts endeavor to punish every outside manufacturer, sometimes by forcing upon him such a competition as shall cause his ruin; sometimes by means as illegal and criminal as are the riotous acts of a mob of hungry workmen, and far less defensible. but let us not yet bring up the question of relative blame. the main point which must impress every candid observer is that the means employed for the monopolies of capital and the monopolies of labor are identical in principle and motive. nor are we confined to manufacturers' trusts to show that the spirit of rule or ruin characterizes capital as well as labor. railroad monopolies, in the words of the president of one of the greatest corporations of the country, "strive eagerly to protect themselves while entirely indifferent as to what shall befall their rivals." how many weak corporations have been deliberately ruined by the cut rates of stronger competitors? if the laborer has "scab" in his vocabulary, has not the railroad manager his "scalper" and "guerilla"? the close relationship, viewed in many different aspects, of the monopolies of labor and the monopolies in production generally has hardly received the notice its importance deserves. still, it is an evidence that people are thinking of and discussing the matter when such a writer as w. d. howells, who is popularly supposed to cater to the tastes of those who have very little in common with the laboring classes, puts into the mouth of one of his characters a defence of workingmen for executing a boycott on a non-union workingman, on the ground that they "did only once just what the big manufacturing trusts do every day." perhaps it was never so forcibly realized how thoroughly effective these labor combinations have become, and how completely they hold the country at their mercy, as in the strike of the locomotive engineers on the chicago, burlington and quincy railroad system in march, . here were, perhaps two thirds of the men in the country qualified for the responsible and onerous work of running a locomotive engine, firmly banded together to advance their own interests and secure assent to their demands. granted the will, the courage, the discipline, and it was possible, yes, easy, for them to have obliged the railroads to raise the wages of every engineer in the brotherhood to $ . per day, for on a refusal they could have enforced the extreme penalty of bringing down a total paralysis upon the business of the country. it speaks volumes for the good sense, the honesty and moderation of the men and their leaders, that, notwithstanding the fact that their demands were not immoderate, and that the failure which came permanently deprived of a remunerative position a thousand members of their brotherhood, they refrained from the extreme to which they might easily have gone, and permitted themselves to be defeated, when they had the power to have forced a different result. organized workers in many trades have the power to force wages much higher than they have done. would that the sugar refineries company, and some other monopolies of production, were as moderate in their demands upon the public as are the workingmen. but though their demands are in one sense moderate, it is yet true that in so far as they exceed the amount which the laborer would receive when the market for labor is open to free competition, they are the direct result of the artificial monopoly which the laborers have created by their combination, and, in effect, levy a tax upon the community. to illustrate: let us suppose that if every man were permitted to follow the trade of bricklaying who wished to do so, the equilibrium between supply and demand would be found at a rate of wages of $ . per day. at that rate, if the price rose, more men would wish to follow the trade and at the same time less people could afford to build houses, thus raising the supply above the demand. if the price fell, some of the men would prefer to work at some other trade and more people would conclude they could afford to build houses. but when the rate, which, without prejudice, we call the natural rate, is at $ . per day, suppose the men belonging to the trade form a union and resolve to charge $ . a day for their work. then it is very evident that the cost of building is increased, and every one has to pay more for construction and ask a higher rent to repay himself afterward. evidently, then, by this action of the bricklayers every man in the trade receives $ . more per day for each day's work, which must be paid, directly by their employers, but indirectly by the whole community. it would be easy to prove that the tax on the community when the wages are raised in any trade, affects the whole public as well as those directly employing the workers in that trade; but it seems too plain to require proof. the main point we now wish to show, is that any increase in the wages of labor over that received under ordinary competition must be paid by the community, just as much as any increase in the price of coal, iron, copper, wood, wheat, or any other commodity must be paid by consumers at large. nor does the injury to the community stop here, by any means. we saw that the advance of prices by the linseed oil trust was an injury to all those who, on that account, were obliged to forego painting; and that it thus caused a further injury to painters, paint-makers, and even those employed in the building trade. but the increase in the price of the bricklayers' work has results no less important. not only is injury done to those who build and have to pay more for their buildings, but many are prevented from building on account of the increased cost. if we argue according to a prevalent method, we may say that this reduced activity in the building trade will cause stagnation among allied trades with corresponding loss of employment. again, as a less number of houses are built, and those which are built are more expensive, rents are certain to rise, which means that the poor man must pay out a still greater part of his earnings for his shelter, or else must put up with poorer and meaner quarters. it is a strange thing to trace, in connection with this, the history of labor, and see how recent it is that the natural right of a man to sell his services for such a price as he could obtain has been acknowledged. history shows that until modern times, compulsory personal servitude has been in every age and country the lot of a large part of the human race. and when wages began to be paid for service, conditions were not much improved. in england, in the fourteenth century, in the reign of edward iii., a pestilence seriously depopulated the country, and reduced the supply of laborers so much that it was not equal to the demand for labor, and wages began to rise. laws were therefore enacted that each able-bodied man and woman in the realm, not over three score, "not living in merchandise, nor exercising any craft, nor having of his own whereof to live, nor land about whose tillage he might employ himself, nor serving any other," should be bound to serve at the wages accustomed to be given five years previously. no persons were allowed to pay an advance on these wages, on pain of forfeiting to the crown double what they had paid. previous to the fifteenth century, workmen in various occupations were impressed into the service of the king at wages regardless of their will as to the terms and place of employment. indeed, all through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were continual attempts to fix the rate of wages arbitrarily by law, and also the hours of labor. these, by one old statute, were decreed to last from a.m. to or p.m. these acts, and others of similar nature, were intended for the subjugation of laborers and the benefit of the employers of labor. it is only since the era of popular government that legislation for an opposite purpose has come in vogue. gradually the right of the workingman to have the price of his labor fixed as is the price of other commodities, by the law of supply and demand, came to be recognized, although the progress was pitifully slow. the old ideas of the relation between "master" and "servant" were very tenacious of life, and the substitution of the terms "workman" and "employer" is a change which has taken place in england during the present generation. it was the petty tyranny and the grinding extortion which the laborers had begun to feel, even though they were far better paid and better treated than their fathers, that caused the formation of the original trade unions. laborers saw that each was helpless alone, but that combined they were a power which their employers need not despise. the old craft guilds furnished them an example of effective combination among those engaged in the same trade; and as men everywhere in every age, when a common danger or misfortune has confronted them, have come together for mutual help and defence, these ignorant laborers, in violation of stringent statutes, but following blindly their human instincts of self-defence, came together and organized the first trade unions. the common law has always held trade unions to be "illegal combinations in restraint of trade." between the reigns of edward i. and george iv., the common law was affirmed and made more effective by the passage of over thirty acts of parliament, all intended to abolish the trade unions. in a stringent law was passed, by which all persons combining to advance their wages or decrease the quantity of their work, or in any way affect or control those who carried on the business in which they were employed, might be committed to jail by a justice for not more than three months, or to work in the house of correction for not more than two months. not till was an act passed slightly ameliorating this stringent law, and even then the trade unions remained for the most part secret organizations. at last, in and , laws were passed under which no person can be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit an act which would not be criminal if committed by him singly; and the trade unions, thus legalized, were taken in common with other benefit societies under the protection of the law. we have already pointed out the main fact that the chief end and aim of the trade unions is the advancement of wages by securing a monopoly of the supply of labor in some particular trade. it is now fair to explain, as we have for other monopolies, the labor monopoly from the standpoint of the laborer himself. it is a sound axiom of business that a forced sale is apt to be an unprofitable one to the seller; and that when a man's needs are so great that he is absolutely obliged to sell at any price, he is quite certain not to get the full worth of his goods. now it is an undeniable fact that the condition of many of the wage-workers of the country approximates to this: they must have food, shelter, and clothing for themselves and their families, and the only thing they can offer in exchange for it is their labor. suppose an honest and industrious man has some misfortune, as an accident, or illness, and loses employment. when once more able to work, he finds his old place filled and new places hard to find; but at last he finds a mercenary employer who agrees to give him half wages. disheartened at his prospects, he thinks half a loaf is better than no bread, especially when those dearest to him are hungry, and so takes the place. but his employer takes care that his constant work shall leave him no time to hunt for a better position. indeed, by a few judicious threats from his employer, the man may be put in terror of losing the pittance he already has, and seeing those dependent on him in absolute starvation. such cases are amply provided for by the trade union. ill treatment of any one of its members may be avenged by the organization as a whole, on the principle, whose spirit of fraternity and self-sacrifice all must admire, that "an injury to one is the concern of all." more than this, by means of the benefit feature of the fraternity, the member unfortunate, or in distress, is properly cared for. no member is obliged to feel, when seeking for employment, that his food or shelter is at stake if his attempts fail, and he need never be at the mercy of employers who drive sharp bargains. it is often charged as an evil of trade-unions interfering with wages, that they tend to bring all their members to the same level, and are opposed to the payment of wages in proportion to the varying abilities of the men working at the same employment. but with unorganized labor, and employers who were none too just in their ideas, it was not uncommon to see the necessity of the laborer, or his inability to drive a good bargain, taken advantage of. thus the workmen whose necessities were greatest, and who were the most docile and obedient, received lower wages than the men who were not particular whether they were busy or idle, and were inclined to pay more attention to their own rights and prerogatives than to the work for which they were hired. while the tendency toward non-recognition of the varying abilities and ambitions of workmen by the trade unions must be deprecated, it has largely grown from the reform of this worse abuse. there is another benefit which the organization of labor has effected which may, perhaps, be thought an evil by some, but which every broad and generous man must gratefully recognize as a gain to the whole community; and in a self-governed nation like our own, it is a benefit whose importance it is difficult to over-estimate. this is the maintenance of the laborer's dignity and self-respect. we have but to look back to the times we have already mentioned, to see the laborer hardly better than a dog, a cringing dependent, kicked and beaten on slight pretext, and with almost every vestige of manhood worked and bullied out of him. we have come upon far happier times to-day, and there are few corners of the civilized world where conditions so evil prevail now. but without the organization of labor, the status of workingmen would be much farther removed from what is just and right than it now is. every employer who is wise and honest, and who has the true spirit of a gentleman, will see that his workmen are treated with the respect that is their just due. discipline there must be, but it is a wrong view of discipline that makes it consist of oaths and brutal insults delivered according to the prevalent good temper or ugliness of the overseer. unfortunately, not every man who is placed in authority is wise, honest, and a gentleman. bodily violence is no longer permitted by law, but too often the curses and insults which are heaped on men with no due cause are a violence which is more severe to many a man than actual cuffs and kicks. no man can take such treatment without resentment, and maintain his dignity and self-respect. yet in how many places is petty tyranny of this sort still active, and its victims are cowed into submission for fear of taking the bread from their children's mouths. but the member of a strong labor organization need not be cowed or tamely accept insult. he has the right to resent it, and has the power of his fraternity to support him. he knows this, and his employer knows it. overseers, big with their importance, and inclined to show it by attacking the self-respect of the men under them are no longer in demand. it is very unfortunate that many people misconstrue this result of the organization of labor as a move toward the abolition of all social ranks and grades. it is nothing of the kind. social gradations cannot be created or brushed away by any legislative enactment, or the acts of any single class. the combination of the workmen to secure their right to protect themselves from insult is indeed a movement toward making them better and nobler men, just as the abolition of slavery in all its forms was a move in this direction. but no man is truly free if he is not secure in his right to immunity from personal insult as well as from bodily violence. it is not strange, however, that the workman, conscious of the strength of the fraternity behind him, sometimes grows arrogant and insolent toward those who must necessarily be in authority over him. unaccustomed for generations past to other government than fear of one sort or other, he is all unused to self-control. but it is hardly possible that this should be a great evil. the body of workmen will, eventually, if not now, refuse to sanction and defend their members in any thing which their innate sense of justice must teach them is wrong. few workingmen will causelessly ask their brotherhood to undertake the hardships and loss of prestige which accompany a strike. and even when insolence is shown toward employers or overseers, they have at least equal power to resent it, and are not, as was the laborer of a half-century ago, forced to submit to insults with outward humility. we have already noticed the condition of the laws in reference to the laborer in former times: but the repeal of the laws oppressing the workman, and making him a servant to a master instead of a workman for an employer, has been largely due to the organized efforts of the trade unions. to them, also, we owe the passage of many acts like those for the guarding of machinery in factories, the restrictions upon the employment of child labor, and the proper care for the health, comfort, and convenience of employés in general. it cannot be said that the labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. on the whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade unions--something which can be said of very few special interests for whose benefit our legislatures have enacted laws. all the above facts we must admit in defence of the organizations which have, to a large degree, killed competition in the labor market. but in defence of the especial action of the labor monopolists in forcing wages up to a point above that which competition alone would determine, there is also much to be said. those who are unwilling to concede that there is any justice in the claim of the wage-workers that full justice is not yet awarded them, are accustomed to expand on the theme of the improved condition of the laborer over that in which he was a century ago. how this can be taken for argument is a mystery. no one thinks of disputing or diminifying the well-known fact that many workmen of to-day have more comforts than the princes of the middle ages. the single point in dispute is this: of the total wealth which is being produced in the world to-day, is the laborer receiving his fair share? there are not wanting men of judgment and ability who answer this question with a decided no. and the greater share of the blame for this injustice they lay upon the monopolies which we have been discussing. they charge, and they verify their charge with ample and sound testimony, that of the wealth which the united brains, and strength, and skill of the world daily produces, the lion's share is taken by men who render the world no proportionate service. this is partly due to existing laws, which the public is not yet wise enough to better; partly to the inertia of public opinion, which is still prone to cling in many points to the idea of past generations that the workman was necessarily a slave; and partly to the narrow selfishness and grasping ambition of many men in the business world. this is not arguing for the reduction of all to a dead level, as is so often absurdly claimed. it is arguing that the inequalities which exist at the present day are not held securely in place by agreement with the inflexible laws of justice and right. instead they are abrupt and uneven, and contrary to these laws; and there is great danger that the readjustment, which must inevitably take place to bring them in accord with these laws, will come, not as a gradual change, but as a series of terrible social catastrophes, involving us in a wreck which will require a century of civilization to repair. only fanatics preach absolute equality. as men differ in their ability and their power to serve the world, so is it just that the reward which the world metes out to them should differ in like proportion. but if we stretch to the utmost the benefit which we conceive the world to derive from the life of many of its men who reap the richest harvest from its production, we cannot in any way make out that their services are so valuable as to deserve such munificent reward. indeed, it is not very far from the truth to say of some of our most wealthy men that their wealth was won instead of earned; and many place a much worse term in the place of "won." the workman sums up his case with the argument that as he is confessedly not getting his just share of the results of his work, he is only getting his due, or part of it, if by combination with his fellows to crush out competition, he is able to put up the price of his labor above the natural rate. finally, as a last defence for the labor monopolies, he calls attention to the trusts and pools and monopolies which are taxing him at every hand for the necessaries of life, and declares that if he, working on the same principle as the wealthy capitalists, is able to combine his tens of thousands of fellows into an effective monopoly, surely he should not be condemned for following the example of the men who are, or are supposed to be, his social, moral, and intellectual superiors. such is the strong case which the labor organizations present in defence of the unions which they have formed to kill competition in the labor market. the investigation we have pursued in the preceding chapters enables us to add to this a statement of the case more comprehensive and striking even, than the narrower views which have preceded. in the chapter on the monopolies in trade, reference was made to the fact that the competition among purchasers tends to keep prices up, just as competition among sellers tends to keep them down. now labor is a commodity whose price in the market is governed by the same laws of supply and demand that regulate the prices of all other things that are bought and sold. but it has this peculiar difference, that the _sellers_ of labor are many, while the _purchasers_ are few, as compared with the relative proportion of sellers and buyers of goods in general. then, wherever there is little competition among purchasers of labor, we shall expect to find low wages; and where competition to secure workmen is active, high wages will be the rule. this is so obviously true, in the light of every one's experience, that we need not stop to prove it. now, in the days when manufacturing was carried on in small workshops, there was a great number of purchasers of labor. the concentration of manufacturing in great establishments where thousands of workmen are employed has lessened the number of employers greatly; has it not also lessened competition among them? it is a well-known fact that in many great industries, as, for instance, the mining of coal or the manufacture of iron, there is one rate of wages paid all through one district, and the employers fix that rate through their associations. the makers of trusts have sometimes defended them, on the ground that they enabled the employer to pay his laborers higher wages; but it is plain that when all the firms in a trade are united in one combination, there can be no competition between them for the employment of labor. they will pay them only such wages as they choose; and the bulk of evidence seems to show that, notwithstanding the vast profits which the monopolies are reaping, they have been far from showing any general disposition to share their profits with their employés. it seems almost unquestionable that we have here the real reason for the extraordinary increase of labor monopolies within the past quarter century. this period has witnessed a rapid growth of consolidation and combination in all our industries, lessening thus the number of employers of labor. the wage-worker found himself confronted with the fact that he was soon to lose entirely the benefit of competition for the purchase of his work, and felt that his only salvation from practical slavery was to prevent the competition between himself and his comrades from forcing his wages down to the starvation point. he met the monopoly that threatened to lower his wages by forming another monopoly that could meet the first on equal terms. we have given little space in this chapter to the consideration of the limit of the power of labor monopolies; but it is obvious that this is very clearly defined. in the first place, while there are certain attempts at combination among unskilled laborers, and those not working at trades, these attempts cannot, as a general rule, be at all successful. any man out of employment may be a competitor for the work which they do, and it seems practically impossible that any organization can combine, under effective discipline, even a majority of the workingmen of the country not skilled in a trade. the only ways in which attempts to kill competition in unskilled labor can be successful, then, are by the use of force or the boycott, or similar means, and these can never come into vogue as permanent agents in the world's industry. the labor monopolies which exist, and which promise, if let alone, to enjoy continued success, are principally combinations of the workers in skilled trades, and certain of those employed in manufacturing, mining, trade, and transportation. ix. monopolies and competition in other industries. as we take a look back over the long list of monopolies which we have investigated in the preceding chapters, the natural thought is that we have considered now the greater part of the industries of the country. certainly these occupations of manufacturing and trade and transportation, are generally considered as our important industries, and a pretty good share of our legislation and public agitation concerns itself with the welfare of these industries and with the men who are employed in them. but certain questions will naturally arise in the curious mind. just what proportion of our total working population are employed in these industries; and of that number how many are reaping the profits of the monopoly? what are the remaining occupations of our people, and are the workers in them doing any thing to destroy competition? to the investigation of these matters we will devote the present chapter. the united states census bureau classes the gainful occupations of the people in four great divisions: ( ) agriculture. ( ) professional and personal service. ( ) trade and transportation. ( ) manufacturing, mining, and mechanical industries. the monopolies which we have studied in the preceding chapters are all included in the last two classes. the total number of persons engaged in trade and transportation in the country in is given as , , , and the total engaged in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining operations is , , , or a total of , , in all these occupations among which we have found monopolies to exist. of course the great proportion of the persons included in the above number have no direct interest in the profits of the industries in whose operation they aid. it is, indeed, argued that the manufacturer, miner, or merchant who is making enormous profits, pays, therefore, larger and more generous wages; but it is urged on the other side that while this is true in isolated cases, the general rule holds good that the price of labor is governed by the law of supply and demand; and that, as already pointed out, monopoly among producers means a monopoly among purchasers of labor. let us now, however, leave out this indirect benefit which may, or may not, accrue to the workmen in these various occupations, and find as nearly as we can the number which are, or can possibly be, directly benefited by the operation of monopolies. let us deduct from the total of , , , such classes of persons as it is evident cannot have a direct share in the results of a monopoly and are not engaged as skilled workmen in a trade which has been organized to control competition. we may certainly deduct the following items from the total: +---------------------------------------------------------+----------+ | agents | , | | clerks, salesmen, and accountants in stores | , | | commercial travellers, hucksters, and peddlers | , | | draymen, hackmen, teamsters, etc. | , | | sailors, steamboat-men, canal-men, pilots, and watermen | , | | apprentices | , | | blacksmiths | , | | fishermen and oystermen | , | | lumbermen, raftsmen, and wood-choppers | , | | photographers | , | | saw-mill operatives | , | | tailors, tailoresses, milliners, and dressmakers | , | | +----------+ | total | , , | +---------------------------------------------------------+----------+ there are a great many other occupations in the list[ ] from which these items are taken which might properly be included in the above, as the combination which does or can exist in them it is almost certain is of no practical importance. on the other hand, however, our total of , , takes no account of the persons interested in trade, transportation, or manufacturing through holding the shares or bonds of incorporated companies; also the errors and omissions of the census are so great in any event that only broad and general statements can be based upon them. deducting, then, from the total of , , the , , , which we found to be surely not interested in monopolies, we have about four million persons as the utmost number who are benefited by the profits of the monopolies which we have thus far considered. but let us look into this a little farther. as we have already stated, the monopolies of trade are generally unable to raise prices far above their normal rate. in retail trade, especially, competition shows great tenacity of life. also with regard to labor monopolies, it is true, as we have already stated, that the limits of their operation are pretty closely defined; even the men in the highest grades of skilled labor cannot secure for each workman by any combination more than two or three dollars per day over what he would receive under the freest competition. let us, therefore, deduct from the preceding four millions the persons engaged in retail trade, and all skilled laborers in the various trades which we formerly included because we conceived that they might be connected with some form of labor organization, and might also obtain some benefit through the profits of their employers. but when we make these deductions we find that we have only a hundred thousand or so of our four millions left. briefly summed up, therefore, the fact is, that the strong monopolies in manufacturing, mining, trade, and transportation are owned by a very small portion of the population. just what this number is, it is impossible to say, for the stock and bonds of railroad companies, mining companies, and manufacturing companies are changing hands continually, and no public record is taken of their distribution and ownership. it may possibly be true, however, that one million different persons own an interest in some of the various monopolies which we have studied, excluding the monopolies in trade and labor. but even if this estimate is correct, it is a well-known fact that a few hundred immensely wealthy men hold a large share of the stock of these very profitable monopolies. [ ] from the "compendium of the tenth census of the united states," part ii., pp. and . leaving the questions which this statement opens up, for later consideration, let us consider the other classes of occupations in which men engage for the purpose of gain, and see if this far-reaching movement towards the destruction of competition has infected them, and whether it has proved, or can prove, so successful there as it has in the industries considered in preceding chapters. the third great class of occupations, rendering professional or personal service, gives employment to over four million persons ( , , ), and includes in its members those in widely separated ranks of society. it is, of course, true that the competition in the professions is far more a competition of ability, real or supposed, than it is a competition of price; and the former is a competition which is never likely to be done away with. yet in all occupations, to a greater or less degree, there tends to arise more or less competition in relation to price, and the professions are not entirely exempt. lawyers, indeed, seem never to have felt the necessity of fixing any minimum tariff of fees; and so far as is known, clergymen have never combined to advance their salaries. but the medical profession has its well known code of ethics which debars its members from "pushing their business," and has, in certain places and times at least, prescribed a minimum tariff of fees. it should be clearly understood, however, that this is not cited with the intention of putting any aspersion upon the medical profession in any way. the services which are freely rendered to the poor, and the disgusting indecencies and insults which are thrust upon the public by some who choose to ignore this code of medical ethics, would make us ready to forgive very much worse things than a possible tendency among members of the profession to refrain from "cutting under each other" in the matter of fees. but while the three older professions have evidently little need or disposition to combine for the purpose of increasing their income from the community, some of the newer professions occupy different ground. architecture is coming to be a profession of no small importance. the principal architects' society, the association of american architects, has a regular schedule of minimum commissions below which its members are forbidden to go. another singular case of professional combination is the musical protective union, a combination of professional musicians in new york city, which fixes minimum prices that its members may charge for their services. on the whole, however, it must be said that the limitation of competition in the professional and intellectual occupations is in this country still in its infancy. in england the fixing of prices of professional service by usage is very much more common, and in many professions the check to competition thus effected is of no small importance. to the careful observer there are indications of a tendency in a similar direction in this country. is it not more and more common in professional circles to see a slur cast on the man who will work cheaply? there is hardly an occupation or specialty which has not its associations and its periodicals; and what is more natural than that an association for mutual benefit should come to adopt that certain method of securing mutual benefit at the expense of the public, the restraint of competition? examining the remaining occupations in this division, we find that those engaged in them form a large percentage of the whole population. there are of laborers whose occupation is not more definitely specified, , , . then there are , , domestic servants, , launderers, , hotel and restaurant employés, , soldiers, , messengers, and enough in other occupations similar to the above, in that very many persons can engage in them without special training, to make it certain that at least three fourths of the members of this division, or a little over three million persons, belong to the class of unskilled workers, among whom, as we have already seen, the attempt to limit competition and force up wages has not, and cannot possibly have, more than a limited and doubtful success. nevertheless, to a very great extent, the unskilled laborers of the country as well as those working at minor trades are organized for mutual help and protection; and while they cannot increase much the rate of their wages without drawing a host of competitors, they can do much in the way of protecting themselves from injustice and extortion, as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter. it may be possible, indeed, that certain changes in the future, as the requirement of greater skill and efficiency in all kinds of labor, may make combinations in this class of occupations easier and more effective. our domestic affairs, for instance, are constantly growing more complex, and require greater skill in their operation. housekeepers are prone to think the "servant girl" problem serious and perplexing enough already. it remains to be seen what they would say if a "cooks' protective union," a "chambermaids' sisterhood," or a "laundresses' amalgamated association," should assume control of the wages and hours of labor of their domestics. to sum up, we find that as a whole the , , persons engaged in rendering professional and personal services are in general not increasing the cost to the public of their services by combining together to limit competition; and that so far as we can determine, it is not probable that many of them can do so in the future, even if they are so disposed. there remains yet one important class of the community to be considered: those engaged in agriculture. can the farmers of the country fall into line behind the manufacturers and miners and railroad owners, and force up the price of their products by killing competition, to correspond with the increased prices which are demanded in many other lines of industry? they have one thing in their favor in that the principal products of the soil are necessaries of life, which the community cannot do without whether the price be great or small, although an increase in price is sure to result in a decreased consumption. we may best determine this question by inquiring exactly how the prices are forced up by monopolies. there can be but one way. the laws of supply and demand hold good, and it is out of the power of the producer to greatly affect the demand. it is only the supply of which he has control. from the manufacturers' trust to the laborers' union, the only way in which prices can be controlled is through a reduction in the supply of goods made or men allowed to work; and if the price were to be arbitrarily raised, the result would be the same; there would be a surplus of goods, or some unemployed workmen. in order to raise the price of his products, then, the farmer must do one of two things, which will bring in the end the same result. he must send less of his products to market--lessen the supply--or refuse to sell any thing at less than the increased price which he desires. in either case, if he plants the same acreage and gets the same yield as before, he will have a part of his crop left on his hands. the query then comes, can it be possible for the farmers all over the country to form so perfect and well-disciplined an organization that every member shall diminish his remittances to market of grain, wool, meat, hay, or what not, enough to raise prices; or that he shall refrain from selling all these articles below a certain defined price? it must be plain to every intelligent person that it would be a practical impossibility to effect such a thing. it would be possible to bring only a small percentage of the farmers in an area , miles in length and , in width into a single organization; and it would be essential to the success of this, as of every other scheme, that no outside competition should be permitted to exist. it may be argued that the knights of labor succeeded to a degree in gathering into one organization a large proportion of the workingmen in all the various trades in the country; but their members were mostly in cities, many worked together in great factories, and as regards ease of combination, they were far more easily handled than the widely scattered farmers of the country could hope to be. besides, the knights of labor organization appears to be too unwieldy and cumbrous to be long successful, and internal dissension seems to have already brought it near its end. it is plain that the farmers are powerless to effect a reduction of the competition among themselves. nor is this condition at all likely to change. farming is unlike other modern productive industries in that the cost of production does not decrease as it is conducted on a larger scale. the most profitable farms are, and perhaps will always be, the small ones, where the details of the tillage come directly under the eye of the owner. such are the facts with respect to the prospect of making a monopoly of agriculture, and it would seem that they are so simple and so easily understood that no attempt would ever be made to restrict competition among farmers. it is to be recorded, however, that such attempts are being seriously made. prominent farmers of the west in the spring of took the preliminary steps towards the formation of a farmers' trust. conventions were held and resolutions adopted reciting that the operation of trusts in manufacturing industries and of monopolies in trade and transportation laid serious burdens on the farmers of the country; and that in order not to be left behind in the struggle for existence the farmers must combine for their own protection. committees were appointed to work out the details of a plan of organization; but the movement seems to have lost vitality when its projectors came to study it in detail. the preceding argument fully explains the reason. it should be said, however, that coöperative associations among the farmers are growing at a rapid pace. the grange and the farmers' alliance are primarily coöperative associations for the purpose of benefiting their members in the purchase of goods and in various other directions, and they are fast increasing in numbers and influence. the attempts made to benefit their members in the sale of their produce have been generally confined to protection against the "middle men." the only movement of which the author is aware for restricting production to increase price, has been in certain sections of the south, where recently a general attempt has been made to restrict the acreage planted in tobacco in the hope of raising the price. it is a matter worthy of note here that the combined influence of the farmers of the country has recently been successful in securing legislation to defeat an important outside competitor. a few years ago some chemists found out that from a cheap substance known as beef suet, an imitation butter could be made, which was in composition and appearance the same as butter made by the ordinary process, and was exactly as nourishing a food. there has been much talk of the halcyon days to come when the progress of science will be so great that food will be made in the laboratory. well, here was an important practical step in that direction. a cheap product worth three or four cents a pound could be easily converted by a chemical treatment into a valuable food worth three times as much, and the great profit in the business brought this substitute for butter rapidly into use. but at once an indignant protest went up from the farmers of the land. they were being ruined by the competition of the "grease butter" as they disrespectfully called it. there was something suggested about the idea that if just as good butter could be made out of the fat of the cow as out of her milk, and at half the expense, that it would be a benefit to everybody in the country who had butter to buy. but the weak protest for the protection of the general interests of the whole people was not heeded, and congress passed a bill laying a tax on the new butter sufficient to stop the sale. here was an evident case of killing competition for the sake of the farming interests, and the force of their unorganized sentiment alone was sufficient to secure the desired legislation. but when the farmers attempt to form a trust, they will have to kill competition among themselves instead of outside competition; and that is a different and far harder matter. to agricultural laborers the same rule applies which we have found to govern other unskilled labor, viz.: that combination cannot effect much in raising wages. added to this is the fact that they are widely scattered, and that a great proportion do not follow this as a steady occupation. in england, indeed, there is an agricultural laborers' union, and we may possibly come to that here. but our circumstances are widely different. the fact that in many sections the agricultural laborer is not a "hand," or an "employé," or "servant," but a "hired man," is an important one, for the difference in terms denote a vast difference in conditions. it is hardly likely that an organization of any sort is to be expected among those in this occupation. this last division of occupations contains the most members of any of the four divisions. the farmers of the country number , , and the farm laborers number , , . other minor occupations of the division, as gardener, florist, etc., bring up the total engaged in agriculture to , , . we can now make some interesting comparisons. the evident effect of monopoly is, in general, to tax the community at large for the benefit of those who own the monopoly. let us see what proportion exists between the two classes: +-----------------------------------------------------+------------+ | total number of persons engaged in manufacturing, | | | mining, trade, and transportation (occupations more | | | or less monopolized) | , , | | | | | total number of persons engaged in agriculture and | | | in furnishing professional and personal services | | | (occupations not monopolized) | , , | +-----------------------------------------------------+------------+ thus at the greatest estimate we can make of the number benefited by monopolies, for each man who is gaining by them, two are having their income reduced. if we take the estimate previously made, that the utmost number of persons who can possibly be reaping benefit by ownership of the especially profitable monopolies, trusts, transportation lines, mines, etc., is one million, we have opposed over sixteen millions of the community who are being taxed by their operation. let a sharp distinction be drawn at this point, however. the above comparison is to be confined to the things between which it is made, and not confused with others to which it has no reference. it is not a comparison of the sort which social agitators are fond of making between the great numbers of the working classes and the relative scarcity of the wealthy. except so far as the operation of profitable monopolies by the few tends to bring about this unequal distribution of wealth, that is a matter with which we have nothing now to do. there is one point in this connection, however, which it is well to make plain, as it concerns a class of people which is not included in either of the four divisions that we have already described--those who live on the income of their property. we have before alluded to the fact that in the popular speech "capitalist" and "monopolist" are often used interchangeably. if we carefully consider the real status of the capitalist, however, we find that of the three requisites of production--labor, capital, and natural agents--capital is the requisite which is most perfectly secured from the control of monopoly. the rate of interest for the use of capital is regulated so perfectly by the law of supply and demand, that all the anti-usury laws which have ever been enacted have been able to accomplish but little in enabling the borrower to secure loans at a less rate than that prescribed by competition. the reason for this is plain on consideration. the total supply of accumulated wealth of the whole civilized world is engaged in this competition, and the millions of wealth which are added every day are new contestants in the market. competition in other products is held in local bounds by the cost of shipment over long distances; but wealth in the form of value can be transferred quickly and easily to any part of the civilized world where a market awaits it. every person who earns money or owns property is a potential competitor, in that he can be made to lend his capital for great enough inducements. under the pressure of this competition, the price for the use of capital--the rate of interest--has steadily fallen; and the enormous production of wealth of which our industrial resources are now capable is such that the fall is certain to continue, and a very few years will see loans at per cent. as common as those at per cent. are to-day. combination to restrict competition among those who loan capital for investment is an utter impossibility. the number of people with money to loan, or with property on which they can raise money for that purpose, if they wish, is too large a proportion of the population to be ever brought into a combination to restrict competition. the stringency which sometimes occurs in the money market need not be cited as a contradiction of this statement. that is a matter which has only to do with the currency. the broad fact, and it is a most important one, is that capital, a necessary agent of production, can never be monopolized. x. the theory of universal competition. we have now examined all the important occupations in which men engage for the purpose of gain; and we have found that while certain large classes of men still have the returns for their industry fixed by the laws of competition, other large and important classes have been able to check and limit competition, so that their returns from their work are constantly increased; while others still, are in possession of certain agents, so necessary to the community and so rare, that a price can be exacted for their use greatly in excess of the original cost to their owners. some of the effects of this state of affairs it is easy to perceive. we have, indeed, pointed out for each monopoly described some of the especial abuses to which it gives rise; and it is plain enough that the general tendency is, first, to greatly enrich the possessors of the strongest monopolies at the expense of all other men; second, to give a certain degree of advantage to the possessors of minor monopolies,--as, for instance, monopolies in articles which are luxuries, and can easily be dispensed with; and third, to seriously injure all those engaged in occupations in which the price of the product is still fixed by competition. every one will agree that this is an evil state of affairs. it is not just that my neighbor, who owns a mine or a railroad, should ask me what he pleases for coal, or for carriage of my produce to market; while i, being a farmer, must sell the products of my labor at a price determined by competition with the products of ten thousand other farms. no one can deny at this day that it is contrary to the principles of justice to give to the men in any one occupation or calling an advantage over those in any other, except in just the degree that one occupation is more beneficial to the world than another. the question then arises, how may we best remedy this state of affairs? shall our panacea be to do away with all monopolies, and put every industry back upon the competitive system? if so, by what means are we to apply this remedy? or shall we go to the other extreme and adopt the antipodal doctrine to the foregoing, that competition is an evil which ought to be done away with; and then proceed to abolish competition in every trade and occupation where it still exists, if we can find any possible means of accomplishing such a task. the investigation we have already pursued gives us no answer to these questions. we have thus far studied facts, and made little attempt to deduce from them general truths. we are now informed as to the widespread growth of monopoly; and we have paid some attention to the injustice and wrong to which it gives rise, in order that we may understand the urgent necessity for finding the right remedies, and finding them at once. our study is henceforth to be devoted to this end. how shall we go about it? in the first place, it is evident that we might make a far wider and more detailed investigation of existing monopolies, and still be no nearer our desired end. we might study the facts concerning each especial railroad monopoly in the country, for instance, without reaching any valuable conclusion with regard to the proper method of restricting railroad monopolies in general. but if we were to take the monopoly exercised by a single railroad company, and study the principles on which it is founded and the laws by which it is governed, we might then be able to state something of value in reference to proper methods for its control. evidently, then, principles rather than facts are to be the chief subjects of our future discussion, although, of course, we can only discover these principles by investigating the facts already found, together with others which may come to our notice. our very first and most obvious generalization from the facts which we have studied is, that in all the monopolies we have considered, the inherent principle is the same, and the effect on the community is of the same sort. therefore, instead of hunting for separate remedies for railroad monopolies and trusts and labor monopolies, we will see what the general problem of monopoly is, and what is the general nature of the remedy that should be applied; the details applicable to each case will, of course, be different; but the underlying principle must be the same. but if we examine our problem a little more closely we see that the word _monopoly_ seems to be only a negative, expressing the fact that _competition_ is absent. we will therefore direct our studies to competition itself, and will consider first its action as the basis of our social system. in the most primitive condition of man which we can imagine, each person provided for his or her own need. the competition which then existed was not competition, in the sense which we use the word in this volume, but was a struggle for existence and a gratification of the baser desires, of the same sort as that which now prevails in the brute creation, resulting in a "survival of the fittest." with the introduction of the family relation, the principle of the "division of labor" was utilized, the female doing the hard and menial work, while the male devoted himself to hunting and fishing, or subsisting on the results of his helpmate's industry. as men's wants increased and they became more industrious in supplying them, this division of labor was extended. the man most skilful in fishing neglected the use of the bow and spear, and his surplus of fish he exchanged with his neighbor for the fruit of the chase. the very same principle applied to different tribes brought about the first commerce. a pastoral tribe, with large flocks and herds, exchanged their surplus products with less civilized tribes who continued to live by the chase, or with a more civilized people who had begun to till the soil. it is plain that these were first steps in civilization. man, so long as he supplies only such of his wants as he can supply with the labor of his unaided hands, must remain in a half-fed, half-clothed, and untaught condition, because his strength and skill, when diverted in the many directions which his wants require, are not enough to enable him, even when he spends all his time at work, to supply himself with more than the barest necessaries of life. it would be interesting to trace the development of this principle of action through its various stages down to the present time, when we see men everywhere working at various trades and occupations, and always to supply some want of their fellow-men. every person in the community is absolutely dependent upon a multitude of others, most of whom he knows nothing of, for the supply of almost all his wants. human society is thus growing more and more interwoven and interdependent. the motto of the knights of labor is a true one, apart from the altruism involved in it. "an injury to one _is_ the concern of all," because the mass of humanity is connected and woven together by such strong ties of self-interest, as well as fraternity, that a calamity to any class or country is felt in some degree throughout the civilized world. this is vastly more true now than it was a half-century ago. under such conditions as existed then, the doctrine of _laissez-faire_, that the government should confine itself to the prevention of violence and crime and the maintenance of national honor and integrity, letting alone the industries of the country to develop and operate according to natural laws, was not liable to do harm. but the conditions now are wholly changed. the interdependence of the community involves a moral inter-responsibility, and the time has come when we must recognize this by making it a legal responsibility as well. we are now ready to consider in detail this inter-relationship of society, and to examine the natural laws which govern it. we have already stated the fact that, broadly speaking, each man is engaged in supplying the wants of his fellow men, because in that way better than in any other he can supply his own wants. we shall find this an easy matter to understand if we conceive that every man puts the products of his labor, of whatever sort it be, into a common public stock (offers it for sale), and takes out of this common stock (buys) the various articles which he wants. he does the first simply that he may do the second, not because he desires to benefit his fellow-men. the money which he receives (as we do not propose to consider here any questions regarding the currency) we may regard as simply a certificate that he has done a certain amount of work for the world, the measure of which is the number of dollars he receives; and on presentation of that certificate, he can obtain other articles which he desires. we have next to consider the fact that there is a great variation in the amount which a man can take out from this common stock. one man is able to provide himself from the common stock with a host of luxuries, while another may only take out a scant supply of the barest necessaries of life. if this distribution operated with perfect equity, a man would be permitted to take out of this common stock exactly in proportion to the benefit which the world at large received from that which he put in. no human judgment, however, is competent to fix, with even an approach to precision, the relative actual benefit which each member of society renders to his fellow-men as a whole. but our social system effects that for us better than it could be fixed by any arbitrary human judgment. this it does by a law known as the law of supply and demand. instead of the actual benefit, this law takes what people choose to consider as benefit, which is the granting of their desires, whether they desire things hurtful or beneficial. it is these desires for things which others can produce which constitute demand. it is to be borne in mind that this is a broad term, and includes not only desires for food, clothing, and actual things, but for service of every sort, in short, demand is the desire for any thing whatever for which people are willing to pay money. but when there is this demand--this willingness to pay money for any article--people begin at once to supply it, because the money they receive allows them to take goods which they wish from the common stock. evidently, if there is an unlimited supply of any thing, people will not pay money for it. people will not pay money for fresh air to breathe when they are out-of-doors, and the supply is unlimited; but when indoors, the supply may be limited, and they will spend money to have ventilators and air-pipes built to supply them with fresh air. or take the contrary case: the supply of some commodity, say flour, falls very short. evidently less flour must be used by the world than was used in the years of a more plentiful wheat harvest. but no one will wish to be the one to go without, and most people will pay a little more rather than do so. therefore the price rises. the competition which we have chiefly considered is the rivalry which exists between the men who supply the same sort of goods; but there is a rivalry among buyers as well. speaking generally, every buyer is trying to purchase for as little as possible, and every seller is trying to dispose of his goods or services to the world for as much as possible, which each has a perfect right to do. we have already seen that prices vary with the relative proportion between supply and demand, rising as demand rises or supply fails, and falling as supply increases or demand falls off. but to complete the wonderful perfection of the mechanism, the reciprocal relation is introduced, so that supply and demand vary with price. if the price rises, fewer people can afford to buy and more will be anxious to sell; while if the price falls, more people will wish to buy and fewer people will be willing to sell. we can now easily see why some men are able to take out from the world's common stock of product so large an amount, while most men can take but a meagre allowance. by the law of supply and demand the price is far higher for the service which one man renders to the world than another. let us take the operation of a large machine shop, for instance. only one superintendent is needed, and he should be a man who has devoted much time to mastering all the details of the business, and is experienced and competent to so govern the work that a large product will be turned out at a small expense. there is a demand in the country, let us say, for , such men; but out of the , who are filling such places, there are perhaps who seem almost faultless in their skill and industry, there are who are with one or two exceptional faults, almost equally efficient, there are , who are fairly good men, and the rest may be classed as those who hold their positions because better men for the place cannot be had. so with the skilled machinists, the relation of supply and demand is such that the price of their labor is kept up to perhaps $ . per day. but of common laborers the supply is so related to demand that the price of their work is very low. thus the three classes take very unequal amounts from the common stock. the superintendent, perhaps, is able to take five thousand dollars' worth of goods each year. the skilled workman can spend perhaps one thousand five hundred dollars, while the laborer can spend but five or six hundred dollars. thus the men who secure the greatest amount of wealth in return for their services to the world, secure it because people are willing to pay it rather than pay less for men of less ability. this is not the same as rewarding a man according to the actual benefit which he does to the community, but it is an approach to it; and it seems to be as close an approach as is possible by human methods. this social system is not the creation of any man or set of men, but has grown of itself out of the tendency among men to secure the things they wish for with the least exertion. and its theoretical working is marvellously perfect. any thing which men desire sufficiently to exert themselves to secure it, can be bought with a small part of the time and labor, measured in money, which would be required if each made it for himself. not only this, but the aim of every man is to do the greatest service to the world and best meet its desires, thus securing in return the greatest rewards for himself. rivalry among purchasers constantly tends to increase the rewards of the producers, while competition among the latter tends toward the furnishing of a better article at a smaller price. these two forces hold each other in stable equilibrium, for a variation tends always to bring things back to their normal condition. let us look more closely at the theory of the competition among producers. we see that, speaking broadly, all occupations are competing with each other. if changes in the supply or demand raise the rewards in any calling, men will leave other work to engage in it. men by the pressure of competition are forced to seek out the easiest and most direct methods, and to learn how to secure the greatest results with the least expenditure of labor and material. it is this principle which lies at the very root of our industrial development. men have so striven to meet each other's competition and outstrip each other in the production of superior goods at low prices, that the cost of the staple articles of consumption, measuring by the labor required to produce them now and the labor required by the clumsy tools and hand work of a century ago, is from a tenth to a hundredth of the cost in those days. it must be remembered, too, that this system of competition is in accordance with the sense of inalienable personal rights which is implanted in the breast of every man. the work of my hands and brain are my own. in disposing of it for a price, i have a right which none may deny to obtain such a sum as i can induce any one to pay me. if i choose to sell it for less than my neighbor, it is my right. in short, the open market is open to all; and every man has a right to sell there his labor, his skill, or his goods, of whatever sort he can produce, at such a price as he can obtain. the same is true of the buyer. i have a _right_ to go into the open market and secure such goods as any one wishes to sell me at the lowest price for which he will part with them. a curious illustration of this sense of personal right is the custom duties on imported goods. it is an evidence of this inherent feeling of a natural right that both public opinion and the law hold that it is a much less serious crime to smuggle than to steal. there are a dozen people who would smuggle, if tempted to do so, to one who would steal. another illustration is the opposition shown to sumptuary laws on the same grounds. it is to be said that the fact that competition lies at the foundation of our industrial civilization, tersely expressed in the saying, "competition is the life of trade," has long been known, and, to a certain extent, appreciated. the common law, based on the decisions of men most eminent for wise insight and sound judgment, has always held that combinations to restrict competition and establish a monopoly were contrary to public policy, and the protection of the law has invariably been refused, whether they were combinations of labor or of capitalized industries. the establishment of labor combinations, indeed, was long a criminal offence, as we have pointed out more fully in the chapter devoted to that subject. it must be said, too, that the principle has come to be generally, though rather blindly, understood by the masses of men. it is recognized, though perhaps not very clearly, that competition lowers the prices of goods, and that this benefits every consumer. let a proposition to build a competing railroad line, or a competing electric-light plant be submitted to popular approval, and, under the impression that they are benefiting themselves, hard-working men will cheerfully assume heavy burdens of taxation to aid the new enterprise. so blind and unreasoning indeed, is this popular abiding faith in the merits of competition, that it has been responsible for some of the greatest wastes of wealth in unproductive enterprises that have ever been known. we have now examined the theory of universal competition as commonly accepted at the present day, and it is rightly considered a fundamental principle of society. it is the practice of most economic writers of the orthodox school to lay great stress on the importance of this fundamental principle, and enlarge upon its various manifestations. the many attempts to limit and destroy competition, which we have studied, they consider merely as abnormal manifestations which are opposed to law, and so not worth while considering very fully. but we have seen clearly to what extent the destruction of competition has gone on; and, with this knowledge, the question almost inevitably occurs to us: is not this decay and death of competition, this attempt to suppress it under certain conditions, too wide and general a movement to be treated as merely a troublesome excrescence? is it not likely that there are certain fixed laws regarding competition which determine its action and operation, and sometimes its death? if this be so, it is of the highest importance that we find and study these laws; and to that purpose we will devote the following chapter. xi. the laws of modern competition. thus far in our study, we have assumed that we knew what competition was. now, however, as we are to study it scientifically, we are in need of an exact definition, that we may know just what the term includes. prof. sturtevant, in his "economics," says: "_competition is that law of human nature by which every man who makes an exchange will seek to obtain as much as he can of the wealth of another for a given amount of his own wealth._" simmer this down to its essence, and we have simply: _competition is selfishness._ to the other evident faults of the definition we need not allude. it is a much more satisfactory definition which webster's dictionary gives us, for it includes the idea that competition necessitates two or more parties to exercise it: "_competition is the act of seeking the same object that another is seeking._" but this is too broad a definition for our purpose. it takes in competitions for fame, social standing, etc., with which we have nothing to do. failing to find a satisfactory definition, let us make one, as follows: _competition is that force of rivalry between buyers or between sellers which tends to make the former give a greater price for the commodity they wish to secure, and tends to make the latter offer better commodities for a less price._ that competition _is_ a force, even in the popular estimation, is evidenced by such common expressions as "the pressure of competition," "a strong competition," and indeed, "the force of competition." but these very expressions show us as well, what we have already found to be true in the preceding chapters, that it is not a constant force but a variable one. what, then, are the laws of its variation? let us see what we can learn by a study of three typical examples of the force of competition. let us take first the business of growing corn. there are perhaps three million farmers in the united states engaged in producing corn, and each one of these competes with all the others. is this doubted? we have defined competition as a rivalry that tends to make the sellers offer better goods for a less price. now at first sight it may seem that there is no rivalry at all. neighboring farmers work together in all harmony; and no man thinks that because his neighbors have raised a large crop of corn, he is in any way injured. and yet this _tendency_ to give better goods and lower prices exists and is plainly felt. suppose a new and superior variety of corn were introduced, which buyers preferred. some farmers would at once begin to raise it, so that they might be more sure of a market and perhaps of a better price, and other farmers would be obliged to follow suit to meet the competition. again, consider that the supply and demand adjust themselves to each other through competition. for suppose, at the ruling price, the demand to be less than the supply; then to increase the demand, the price must fall; and the cause of the fall in price is simply that the farmers compete with each other for the market, and lower their prices in order to secure a sale for their crops. note, however, that the rivalry in this case never becomes a personal one. each farmer recognizes that an increased supply lessens the price for his goods; but his neighbor's extra acreage is such a drop in the bucket, that he never thinks of it as being really a rival of his own crop. take as a second example, the wholesale paper trade. here are perhaps three hundred men, each knowing personally many of his competitors and probably hating some of them cordially. each striving to secure for himself all the trade possible, and to gain, if he can, his rivals' customers. he sends out his salesmen with instructions to, "sell goods! for the best prices you can get, but sell them, anyhow." these "drummers" are sharp, active business men, they might well be employed in directing some productive process; but they go out and spend their time in inducing customers by all the means in their power to buy their goods. they spend money in various "treats" to secure the good-fellowship of the man with whom it is desired to trade, and use his time as well as their own. another item of expense is for advertising and for keeping the firm name prominently before the purchasing public. all these things cost money, as any wholesale merchant engaged in a business where there is sharp competition can testify. it may be thought that a firm which would have the courage to do away with all these expenses and give the money thus saved to their patrons in reduced prices and better goods, would be able to keep its trade and even gain over its competitors. but it is hardly so; most men are more likely to be wheedled into taking slightly inferior goods at a slightly greater price. another matter to be considered in this connection is the variation in price. in the case of the producers of corn, we saw that prices were practically uniform at any given place, being fixed by the ratio of supply and demand in the chief markets of the world. but in making sales of paper, the sharp, close-dealing buyer is generally able to secure a better price than a buyer not posted in regard to the condition of the paper trade. as competition becomes more intense, its burdens become more heavy to carry. perhaps two of the largest houses in the trade, who are able to force prices lowest, come to a sort of tacit understanding that their salesmen "will respect each others rights a little and not force prices down beyond all reason." it is plain that _here_ the foundation is laid for the establishment of a monopoly. yet the agreement certainly seems to be nothing more than these two firms have a right to make. its result is seen, however, in a slight increase in the price their customers have to pay. soon the tacit agreement becomes a formal one. then other firms are taken in. the first seed has borne fruit. the combination grows larger and stronger. the number of producing units is growing less. finally it includes practically all the paper manufacturers in the country. whoever wants paper must buy of the combination, there is no other source of supply. competition is dead. if the combination is strong enough and is managed well enough, it may be permanent; and prices of paper will be regulated by other laws than the law of competition. but suppose that the number of paper makers is so great and that they are so widely scattered that the combination proves difficult to maintain; local jealousies creep in, and charges are made of partiality on the part of the managers. the combination finally breaks up. can we expect a perfect return to the old system of free competition? when men have once reaped the enormous returns that are yielded by the control of a monopoly, the ordinary profits of business seem tame and dull. there will surely be attempts to form the monopoly anew on a stronger and more permanent basis; and even if these attempts do succeed in producing only short-lived monopolies, the effect will be to keep the whole trade and all dependent upon it in a state of disquiet and uncertainty. prices will swing up and down very suddenly between wide limits; and it is everywhere recognized that _stability in price_ is a most important element in inducing general prosperity. a perusal of the trade journals for the years and will convince one of the truth that when a combination is once formed, its members are loth to try competition again. a considerable number of combinations which were formed in were soon broken up, often from the strength of old feuds and jealousies. but in almost every case they have been formed anew on a stronger basis after a short experience of competition. this matter of the variation in price is a very important one, and it has an important influence in checking business prosperity. men are far less apt to engage in an enterprise, if they cannot calculate closely on prices and profits. but the main point, after all, is the waste which is due to competition. it is for the interest of the public at large that the papermakers should devote all the energies which they give to their business to making the best quality of each grade of paper with the least possible waste of labor and material. take for a third example two railway lines doing business between the same points. we have fully pointed out the practical working of this sort of competition in the chapter devoted to railways. it is plain that the general effect is a fluctuation of rates between wide limits, an enormous waste of capital and labor, and ultimately, the permanent death of competition by the consolidation of the two lines. in comparing now the above three cases, the most noticeable difference in the conditions is in the _number of competing units_. there were in the first example three million competitors; in the second, three hundred; and in the last, but two. the first difference in the competition which existed is in intensity. in the case of the producers of corn, competition was so mild that its very existence was doubted. in the case of the papermakers it was vastly more intense, so that it caused those engaged in it to take steps to restrict and finally abolish it. in the case of the railroads it was still more intense, so that it was not able to survive any length of time, but had to suffer either a temporary or permanent death very soon. let us state, therefore, as the first law of competition, this: _in any given industry the intensity of competition tends to vary inversely as the number of competing units._ we also saw that among the producers of corn there was virtually no waste of energy from competition. among the paper makers there was a large waste. and in the case of the railroads, the whole capital invested in the rival railroad, as well as the expense of operating it, was probably a total waste. let us state, then, for a second law of competition: _in any given industry the waste due to competition tends to vary directly as the intensity._ as an additional example to prove the truth of these laws, take the competition which exists between buyers. in the case of ordinary retail trade the number of buyers is very great, and the competition between them is so moderate that we hardly remember that it exists. it is difficult to see how there could be any waste from this competition among buyers, at least of any amount. expressed in the language of the laws we have found: the number of competing units is so great that competition is neither intense nor wasteful. from these two laws and a study of the examples we have given, it is easy to deduce a third. we have seen that when competition became very wasteful, monopoly arose; indeed, we have noted the working of this law all through our investigation. the principal cause assigned for the formation of the linseed-oil trust was the waste which intense competition had caused. the third law is, then: _in any given industry the tendency toward the death of competition (monopoly) varies directly with the waste due to competition._ we might now combine these three laws to deduce the fourth law, which is: _in any given industry the tendency toward the death of competition (monopoly) varies inversely with the number of competing units._ but this law is also proved independently. look back over all the monopolies we have studied, and it will be seen that one of the most important conditions of their success was the small number of competitors. fifty men could be brought together and organized, and made to bury their feuds and rivalries, when with a thousand the combination would have been impossible. we have seen, in the case of the farmers, how their great number alone has prevented them from forming combinations to restrict the competition among themselves. it should be said that these laws, like all other laws of economics, are not to be taken in a narrow mathematical sense. we cannot study causes and effects dependent on the caprice of men's desires and wills with the minute exactness with which we solve numerical problems. taken in the broad sense, however, the study we have made in the preceding chapters is sufficient proof of their truth. the common expressions of trade afford still further evidence. we often hear the expression: "a healthy competition." but the very existence of the phrase implies that there may be an unhealthy competition, and if so, what is it? is it not that competition whose intensity is so great that it causes a large waste of capital and labor in work other than production; whose intensity is so great that, like an animal or a machine working under too great a load, it labors intermittently,--now acting with great intensity and forcing prices far below their normal plane, now pausing in a reaction, when a temporary combination is formed, and allowing prices to spring back as far above the point indicated by the relation of supply and demand; and finally reaching the natural end for unhealthiness--death. in fact, a recent economic writer declares that especially intense competition should be called war, as, indeed, it frequently is called, rather than competition. looking about us for other causes of variation in the intensity of competition we discover a fifth law: _the intensity of competition tends to vary directly in proportion to the amount of capital required for the operation of each competing unit, especially when the interest on the capital invested forms a large proportion of the cost of production._ take, for example, the case of a railway line. all the capital invested in it is wasted unless the road is in operation. hence it will be better to operate the road, so long as receipts are any thing more than the expense of operation, than to abandon it. an enterprise in which no capital is invested will cease operations when receipts do not exceed its expenditure and there is no prospect of betterment. but in the total expense of operating a railroad, a large item is the interest on the capital invested, which is as truly a part of the total cost of carrying the traffic as is the daily labor expended in keeping the road in good repair. (in railway bookkeeping only an arbitrary line can ever be drawn between capital account and operating expenses.) now, in order to pay operating expenses and fixed charges, railways must secure traffic. we suppose that they are doing this by competition, and that they have not yet combined to form a monopoly. let us suppose that this competition cuts down receipts to a point where they are just sufficient to pay the whole cost of carriage. in an enterprise in which no capital was invested some of the competitors would be sure to fall out when profits disappeared; but here there is no such chance of relief; and though the competition keeps on until the receipts are only enough to pay the operating expenses, still the road is not abandoned because then the capital invested, in it would be a complete loss. changes in productive processes often lessen the demand for a line of goods; but the owners of the capital invested in factories and machines for making these goods may often cause them to be continued in operation at a loss rather than lose all that they have invested, and because they hope for better days and a renewal of the demand. for the sixth law of competition we have: _in any given industry the tendency toward the death of competition (monopoly) varies directly with the amount of capital required for each competing unit._ this law is proven in part by the preceding laws; for when a large capital is required for each competing unit, the number of competitors will be small and the tendency toward monopoly will be strong; but it may also be proven independently. business men, before they form a combination, are certain to ask whether new competitors are likely to enter the field against the combination. now, as we have seen in very many cases in the preceding chapters, when there is a great amount of capital required, new competitors will be very unlikely to enter the field. if there is but little capital required, they will be very apt to do so, being tempted by the prospect of large profits at the monopoly's prices. but they know that the combination will concentrate its strength to fight them in every way; and if they must invest a great deal of money in buildings, plant, etc., to start operations, they will be apt to think twice before they take the field against the combination. the seventh law of competition is: _in any given industry in which natural agents are necessary, the tendency toward the inequality of competition (monopoly) tends to vary directly with the scarcity of available like natural agents._ the influence of limited natural agents in promoting the growth of monopolies is a matter of the greatest importance. that the law is true, is evident upon slight investigation. for if some especial gift of nature is a necessity to any industry, and those who are engaged in that industry can secure all the available gifts of nature of that sort, there is no opportunity for new competitors to enter the field. it is to be noted that in this seventh law we have used in apposition with the term monopoly, the term "inequality of competition" instead of "death of competition," as in the preceding laws. we are now in need of a definition of the term monopoly. webster defines it as "the sole control over the sale of any line of goods"; prof. newcomb says "a monopoly is the ownership or command by one or a limited number of persons of some requisite of production which is not solely a product of human labor"; sturtevant says "a monopoly is such a control of the supply of any desirable object as will enable the holder to determine its price without appeal to competition." to the first definition we object that it is both narrow and indefinite. the second seems to omit such important classes of monopolies as the combinations to limit competition; and sturtevant's definition is unscientific in this: hardly any monopoly exists whose holders can without limit determine the price of its product. if the price continues to rise, competition in some form will appear. take, for example, the business of transporting goods from new york to san francisco; if all the railway lines combine to form a monopoly, the competition of ocean steamers via panama would eventually stop the rise in rates, if no other outside competition stopped it before. the owners of a rich mine have a real monopoly, though they cannot raise the price above a certain point without being undersold by the owners of poorer mines or those more remote from market. consideration of these facts lead us to construct the following definition: _a monopoly in any industry consists in the control of some advantage over existing or possible competitors by which greater profits can be secured than these competitors can make._ for the law of monopolies we have: _the degree of a monopoly depends upon the amount of advantage which is held over existing or possible competitors._ when the advantage of the monopoly is so great that no other competitor will try to do business in competition with it, we may rightly say that competition is dead. the great share of the monopolies which are based on this seventh law of competition, those due to the control of natural agents, only restrict competition by the attainment of an advantage over their competitors, and do not destroy it. the principal natural agents which are necessary to production, and whose supply may be so limited to cause an appreciable monopoly, are: ( ) land for agricultural purposes; ( ) land for purposes of manufacture or commerce; ( ) transportation routes, such as mountain passes, room for railway tracks in a city street, or for gas-and water-pipes beneath its surface; ( ) natural deposits of minerals and metals; ( ) sources of water supply or water power. (the latter is unimportant now compared with a score of years ago, because of the lessened cost of its competitor, steam.) let us be especially careful not to confound this seventh law of competition with a certain doctrine which is now receiving more and more credence, which is, in brief, that the private ownership of the gifts of nature used in production should be abolished. the grounds in opposition to this doctrine we will discuss in a later chapter. the law we have stated says nothing of the right or wrong of the private ownership of the gifts of nature. what it does say is, that when any of these are limited in amount, those who control them are given an advantage over other would-be competitors, which constitutes a monopoly. in considering the natural agents enumerated above, we can easily see the truth of the law. agricultural lands, the most important of natural agents, are in this country so abundant that their rental is entirely fixed by competition. in england, where they are so much more limited in area, rent is fixed by custom. as regards land for purposes of manufacture or commerce, we have already pointed out the cases in which monopolies are prominent, as also for transportation routes. as regards mineral wealth, deposits of iron are so numerous and widespread that no monopoly has ever yet succeeded in controlling competition in the manufacture of pig-iron to any great extent. but the rarer metals, like copper, tin, nickel, and others, are largely controlled by monopolies. now, while this seventh law says nothing as to the right or wrong, the expediency or inexpediency of the private ownership of natural wealth, it does follow from it that this private ownership generally constitutes a monopoly, as we have defined it. for of no class of natural agents is it true that their richness and availability are absolutely equal. those competitors who have the richest and best natural resources to work with have an advantage over their competitors which is essentially a monopoly. thus the owners of fertile lands near a large city have an advantage over the owners of less fertile lands far removed from markets, which is of a monopolistic nature. if any one doubts this, let him say how this case is logically different from that of the ownership of a mine of native copper so near to new york city that the cost of laying it down in the market there will be half what it is from any existing mine; or, for a second case, take the new york central railway, which has the control of such a valuable pathway between the mississippi valley and the atlantic seaboard that it has an advantage over all competitors in the business of transportation between those points. we have now to turn our attention to other variations in competition besides the variation in intensity. we need to distinguish the different species of competition. that competition which is in daily operation in most branches of industry we may call _actual_ competition. that competition which would spring up in any industry in case an increase in profits called it out, we may call _potential_ competition. the third class is instanced in the letting to the highest bidder a franchise for city water or gas-works, or street-car lines. here competition acts at a single time to fix the price for perhaps twenty years. we may call this, for want of a better name, _franchise_ competition. it possesses the evident advantage that it avoids both the waste of competition and the fluctuation of prices. it has the disadvantage that, unless the owners of the franchise are held strictly to their contract, quality is apt to be sacrificed; also that if the purchase is for a term of years, cheapening in processes may result in undue profits to the franchise holders. the discussion of this matter, however, does not properly belong to this chapter. arranging in their logical order the laws of competition which we have found, we have the following diagram: in any given industry the tendency toward monopoly increases: ( .) as the waste due to competition increases. the waste of competition increases in proportion to its intensity. ( .) the intensity of competition increases as the number of competing units decreases. ( .) the intensity of competition increases with the amount of capital required for each competing unit. ( .) as the number of competing units decreases. ( .) as the amount of capital required for each competing unit increases. ( .) as the number of available natural agents decreases. the preceding diagram sets plainly before us the three great salient causes from which have grown the long list of monopolies under which our civilization labors. first, the supply of natural agents of which new competitors in any industry may avail themselves has been largely exhausted, or has been gathered up by existing monopolies to render their position more secure; the world has not the natural resources to develop that she had a century ago. second, the concentration of all the productive industries, except agriculture, into great establishments, while it has enormously lessened the cost of production, has so reduced the number of competing units that a monopoly is the inevitable final result. last, the enormous capital required for the establishment and maintenance of new competing units tends to fortify the monopoly in its position and render the escape of the public from its grasp practically impossible. these terse statements contain exactly the kernel of potent truth for which we are seeking; monopolies of every sort are an inevitable result from certain conditions of modern civilization. the vital importance of this truth cannot be over-estimated. for so long as we refuse to recognize it, so long as we attempt to stop the present evils of monopoly by trying to add a feeble _one_ to the number of competing units, or by trying to legislate against special monopolies, we are only building a temporary dam to shut out a flood which can only be controlled at the fountain head. the facts of history testify to the truth of this law. monopolies were never so abundant as to-day, never so powerful, never so threatening; and with unimportant exceptions they have all sprung up with our modern industrial development. the last fifteen years have seen a greater industrial advancement than did the thirty preceding, but they have also witnessed a more than proportionate growth of monopolies. how worse than foolish, then, is the short-sightedness that ascribes monopolies to the personal wickedness of the men who form them. it is as foolish to decry the wickedness of trust makers as it is to curse the schemes of labor monopolists. each is working unconsciously in obedience to a natural law; and the only reason that almost every man is not engaged in forming or maintaining a similar monopoly is that he is not placed in similar circumstances. away, then, with the pessimism which declares that the prevalence of monopolies evidences the decay of the nobler aspirations of humanity. the monopolies of to-day are a natural outgrowth of the laws of modern competition, and they are as actually a result of the application of steam, electricity, and machinery to the service of man, as are our factories and railways. great evils though they may have become, there is naught of evil omen in them to make us fear for the ultimate welfare of our liberties. to the practical mind, however, the question at once occurs, what light have we gained toward the proper method of counteracting this evil? can it be true that the conditions of modern civilization necessitates our subjection to monopolies, and that all our vaunted progress in the arts of peace only brings us nearer to an inevitable and deplorable end, in which a few holders of the strongest monopolies shall ride rough shod over the industrial liberties of the vast mass of humanity? were this true, perhaps we had better take a step backward; relinquish the factory for the workshop, the railway for the stage-coach. "better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide spoil with the proud." but the law we have found commits us to no such fate. we cannot, indeed, abolish the causes of monopolies. we cannot create new gifts of nature, and it would be nonsense to attempt to bring about an increase in the number of competing units and a decrease in the capitalization of each by exchanging our factories and works of to-day for the workshops of our grandfathers. but while monopolies are inevitable, our _subjection_ to them is not inevitable; and when the public once comes to fully understand that _the remedy for the evils of monopoly is not abolition, but control_, we shall have taken a great step toward the settlement of our existing social evils. to discuss the details of the remedy, so far as it can be done in a volume of this sort, belongs properly to a later chapter. before undertaking it, however, it seems well to devote some further attention to the evils which the attempt to abolish monopolies and adhere to the ideal system of universal competition has brought upon us, and to make, also, some further study of the general evils due to monopoly. xii. the evils due to monopoly and intense competition. it is a strange thing when we come to analyze the various social evils which demand our attention, and which every true man longs to cure, to find how great a proportion can be traced back to the one great evil of faulty competition. as a preliminary to a survey of these evils, in order that we may understand the necessity that all good men and true should exert themselves in applying the remedy, let us see just what conditions of our industrial society we should seek to work toward. what is the theoretical perfection of human industry? probably all thinking men, whatever their belief and practice, will acquiesce in the proposition that the end we should aim to secure is "the largest good to the greatest number." as we are discussing here only economic questions, this means that the end to be sought is that the largest number of people should have secured to them the greatest possible amount of the necessaries and comforts of life; or, more simply, that the total of human happiness to be derived from the world's production of wealth should be the greatest possible. now for our present purpose we may assume that since all men desire wealth, the greater its production, the greater will be the number of human desires gratified. from this it follows that our social organization should be such as to increase to the greatest possible degree the world's stock of wealth. there is no easier or safer way of studying questions of economics than to consider the community as a unit, and see what is for the interest of the people as a whole; what conduces most to the "common wealth"; and if we do this, whenever the question concerns production alone, the task is simple, because the interests of the people as a whole are judged in the same way as the interests of a single person. whatever tends to increase the total amount of wealth in the world, therefore, benefits the community as a whole; and whatever diminishes the supply is an injury. all work of every sort which tends to aid in the economical production of wealth and its transfer to the consumer is a benefit to the community; and any thing which destroys wealth, lessens its production, or hinders men from exerting themselves to produce it, is an economic injury. what, then, are we to say of the condition known as over-production? is it not a fact that some lines of industry are so overdone that the production is far in excess of the demand, and is not this an evil rather than a benefit? do not periods of business depression occur when all industries stagnate for want of a market for their goods? the true answer to this question is: over-production is not a fault of _production_, but of _distribution_. it is true that, in special industries, a surplus of production sometimes occurs, due to over-stimulation, or too rapid growth; but over-production as commonly spoken of, refers to a general state of trade, in which demand for all sorts of goods seems to fall far below the market supply. but this lack of demand is not due to lack of desire. the desires of men are always in excess of their abilities to supply them; it follows, therefore, that the condition known as over-production consists in a lack of _ability_ to purchase goods rather than in a lack of _desire_ to purchase them. this lack of ability has evidently to do with the distribution of wealth rather than its production. while it is easy to formulate laws to govern the theoretically perfect production of wealth, to whose justice all men will consent, we cannot go far in the details of the ideal distribution of wealth without reaching points upon which the views of different parties are diametrically opposed. some foundation principles, however, let us state, believing that in their truth the great majority of men will concur. in the chapter on the theory of competition we saw that, if we conceived the results of the labor of the whole community to be placed in a common storehouse and gave to each man the right to draw from it an amount just equal to the benefit derived from the goods which he had placed within it, the ideal of a perfect system of distribution of wealth would be realized. no human judgment, however, is, or ever can be, competent to measure the exact industrial benefits which each person confers upon the community at large. we must inevitably permit men to measure the result of their own work by securing for it such an amount of the results of others' work as they can induce them to give in exchange. but while we cannot measure exactly the benefit which each person confers, we can see cases in which the reward received is manifestly out of all proportion to the benefit conferred. consider the fortunes which have been accumulated by some of our midases of the present decade. it is quite certain that the benefits which cornelius vanderbilt, for instance, conferred on the community by his enterprise and business sagacity, by his work in opening new fields of industry, forming new channels for commerce, etc., were so valuable that he honestly earned the right to enjoy a large fortune. it is equally certain that a great part of his gains had nothing whatever to do with any benefit conferred upon the community, and that the fortune of $ , , or so which he accumulated was an example of inequitable distribution of the products of the world's industry. stating this in the form of a general principle, we should say: _the amount of wealth which any man receives should bear some approximate relation to the benefit which he confers upon the world._ we have already stated that, by the law of supply and demand, the rewards of each worker are regulated in theory even more perfectly in accordance with our ideas of liberty than they could be on the basis of actual benefit conferred. for it is inconceivable that people would submit to pay for what was beneficial to them instead of what they desired. a man who prefers to purchase wines instead of books with his surplus money would think it a great injustice if he were prevented from doing as he preferred with his own. but so long as every one is at liberty to use his income in buying whatever he desires most, _demand_--the willingness to pay money for the gratification of the desire--will exist, and so long as demand exists it will be met by a supply, furnished by those who are desirous of money and what it will bring. it is inconceivable, then, that any juster arrangement than this law of supply and demand can ever be practicable for regulating the compensation of each individual. the man who can drive a locomotive will receive larger wages than the man who shovels the earth to form its pathway, because the supply of men competent to drive an engine is small in proportion to the number of men who are wanted for that work, while almost any man can shovel dirt. let us state, then, for our second principle: _the amount of wealth which any man receives should depend on the ratio between the demand which exists for his services and the supply of those able to render like service._ farther than these statements of the ideal principles governing the economical production and equitable distribution of wealth we need not go at present. let us turn now to examine the result of a violation of these principles in some of the crying evils of the present day which are wholly or in part due to the growth of monopoly and the waste of competition. every candid man will acknowledge that the enormous congestion of wealth in a few hands which exists to-day is a danger to be feared. we have had it constantly dinned in our ears that in this free land the ups and downs of fortune were such that the rich man of to-day was apt to be the beggar to-morrow; also that almost invariably a rich man's sons were reckless spendthrifts. these things, aided by the abolition of primogeniture and entails, it was said, were to prevent the growth of a moneyed aristocracy in this country. the propounders of this amiable theory never explained how the community received reparation for the destruction of wealth which the spendthrift sons were to carry on; but so long as the theory has failed to work in practice, that does not matter so much. a few years ago it was a favorite occupation of newspaper paragraphers to estimate the gould and vanderbilt fortunes; but lately they seem to have given them up as beyond the limits of even their robust guessing abilities. some idea of the latter's fortune may be gained, however, by realizing the fact that the vanderbilt railway system now has a total extent of nearly , miles, the total value of which can hardly be less than one thousand millions of dollars. probably not less than half of the securities of these companies are owned by the vanderbilt family, and it is well known that their investments are by no means confined to railways. the important fact is, that this fortune grows so fast now that it is sure to increase; and will double itself every fifteen or twenty years, because all that its owners can spend is but a drop in the bucket toward using up their income. but this fortune, while the largest which is still under one name, is but one of many enormous ones. the names of gould, flagler, astor, rockefeller, stanford, huntington, and a host of others follow close after the vanderbilts. in the days of our grandfathers, millionaires were no more plentiful than hundred-millionaires are to-day. we have next to show the present and prospective evils which result from this congestion of wealth. the first and most obvious one is its injury to the remainder of the people of the country, by the diversion from them of wealth which they have rightfully earned and which they would receive were it not for the tax of monopoly. it is obvious that a certain amount of wealth is annually produced by the industry of the country from which the whole wants of the country must be supplied. this amount may be greater, indeed, when a gould or a flagler or a crocker directs the enterprise; but for the most part it is indisputable that the owners of these colossal fortunes have made them, not by any stimulus of the production of wealth by their owners, but by a diversion of the produced wealth in the general distribution from others' pockets to their own. in short, all other men are poorer that these many times millionaires may be richer. to show how these fortunes have in many cases been obtained, i cannot do better than to quote a writer not at all likely to err by undue severity to our millionaires, as he is himself the president of a railway system a thousand miles in extent: the great majority of the phenomenal fortunes of the day are the result of what may be called lucky gambling.... man is a gambling animal by nature, and modern methods have enormously developed both its facilities and its temptations and have opened large fields in which gambling is not held to be disreputable. under such stimulus is it wonderful that its growth has been phenomenal? wall street is its head-quarters, and millions upon millions of dollars are accumulated there to meet the wants of the players. railroad stocks are its favorite cards to bet upon, for their valuation is liable to constant fluctuation on account of weather, crops, new combinations, wars, strikes, deaths, and legislation. they can also be easily affected by personal manipulations.... money makes money, and money in great masses has its attractive power increased. the aspect of phenomenal fortunes, therefore, is a social problem of some importance. their manner of growth and their manner of use are to be observed, and what restrictions, if any, should be placed on their accumulation should be considered.[ ] [ ] "railway practice." by e. p. alexander, president central railroad and banking co. of georgia. the fact pointed out by general alexander in the above quotation is one which is far too lightly appreciated. the evils of railway management by which the owners of the stocks and bonds of the company are victimized to enrich stock speculators are much too complex and numerous to be described here. the state of affairs can be briefly summed up, however, with the statement that our present system of conducting corporate enterprises results inevitably in the gravitation of their ownership into the hands of the holders of large fortunes. the railways of the country are an instance in point. time was when the stocks and bonds of railways were owned by people of small means all over the country. but after many severe lessons in the shape of stocks wiped out, and bond interest scaled down, these small holders were taught the folly of investing their savings in business over which they had practically no control, and thus placing them at the mercy of irresponsible corporate officers. broadly speaking, the railway property of the country is owned by men worth their millions; and the small holdings are being rapidly absorbed every day. but the case is not true of railways alone. telegraph lines, telephone, and electric light plants, our mines, and to a large extent our factories, which were once held by private owners, are now controlled by corporations whose shares are quoted on the exchanges and are consequently subject to a forced variation, dictated according as "bull" or "bear" has the ascendancy. and when the ownership of a property is once brought into this channel, it is no longer a suitable investment for the man of small means. it is the prey of men who practically make bets as to what its future price will be, and manipulate the price, if possible, to win their bets. if it is ever again held for investment simply, it is when it is locked in the safe of some modern croesus. we have shown now the extent to which the congestion of wealth has gone. we have shown that other men are poorer that these men may be richer. we have explained that these great fortunes have been made, not by legitimate enterprise, but largely by "lucky gambling." and finally we have seen how the transfer of each enterprise to the control of stock speculators adds it eventually to some already overgrown fortune. the connection with the subject of the present volume is obvious. the cotton-seed oil mills of the south, once held by private owners, are now in the hands of a trust whose certificates are quoted on the stock-exchanges, and are held only by men of large capital, or by stock gamblers. this is a typical example of the change which is everywhere occurring. private enterprise gives way to the stock company, and that in turn gives way to the trust. the salient fact, then, we may express in similar terms to those of our first law of competition, as follows: _the congestion of wealth tends to increase inversely with the number of competing units._ the facts we have stated make it impossible for the greater monopolies to defend themselves, on the ground that their profits inure to the benefit of any great number of people. but this is not an innocuous state of affairs. it is one of serious injustice and evil. the workman who struggles hard to save a hundred dollars a year can receive only a paltry three dollars and a half of interest or less, if he deposits it in a saving-bank. but the capitalist who is clearing a hundred thousand a year may make twice or thrice that interest from his investments. in short, the charge is: that monopoly and intense competition, with the variation in price which they cause, have shut out the small capitalists of the country from the ownership of the most profitable sorts of property; and by confining them to other lines, have decreased their possible income from their investments. a further evil resulting from the congestion of wealth is what is commonly spoken of as over-production. we are confronted of late years with the strange spectacle of factories and mills shut down for months at a time, of markets which, at various times, are glutted with every sort of commodity. all sorts of causes are given; all sorts of remedies are suggested and tried. where is the true one? with the exception of a few special cases, the fault is not that there are no people who want the goods. probably ninety-nine families out of every hundred would buy more if they had the money to buy with. in many cases the lack of money to buy with is due to the fact that the bread-winners are out of employment because of the glutted markets and idle mills. in this way the evil tends to perpetuate itself and grow worse. now combine this fact with the fact that the holders of monopolies are in the receipt of incomes so great that, in many cases, they are quite unable to spend them. also, that this income is largely locked up to wait the chance of profitable investment, or is used in speculation. is it not obvious, now, that the reason why people cannot afford to purchase the goods, with which the storehouses are glutted, is that too large a proportion of profits has been diverted to swell fortunes already enormous? have we not in this way accounted for a large amount, at least, of the over-production which is throwing out of employment thousands of workmen, rendering useless a vast amount of valuable capital, and affecting from time to time the business of the whole country with a veritable paralysis? the facts bear out this theory. for, at many times when producers in every industry are complaining of dull times because people who buy have no money to spend, there is an abundance of money to be had for investment. fortunately, the evil seen from this aspect must, to a certain extent, be but a temporary one, and will tend to work its own cure. for as the world's stock of invested wealth continues to grow, there is less opportunity for its profitable investment in improving undeveloped natural resources. the greater portion of our wealth we save and invest, the faster will the rate of interest tend downward. but, as this occurs, the operators of mills and mines have to pay less out of their receipts as interest on their borrowed capital, and can, therefore, pay more to their workmen. there is another way in which monopoly works to cause over-production, with its attendant evils. suppose a trust is formed in some manufacturing industry, where the working capacity is just equal to supplying the demand. the first work of the trust is to raise the prices perhaps , , or per cent. of course this causes a falling off in the demand, and the trust has to shut down some of its mills to ward off over-production. the true cause of over-production in this case is, that the prices are not in equilibrium with the relation between supply and demand. let prices come down, and the demand will increase. the working of this special case gives us an idea of the way in which general over-production is caused. for it is well known that monopolies have raised the prices and reduced the consumption not of one, but of hundreds of articles. if the men who are made idle by the over-production in these industries flock into other occupations to secure work, they reduce wages there; so that, in any case, their purchasing power is reduced, and this tends to perpetuate and increase the evil. of course it is not pretended to claim that all industrial depressions have been due to over-production, or the local congestion of the world's income. but that a large part of it may be justly laid to this cause, seems to be beyond question. we have shown that the congestion of wealth is very largely due to the growth of monopoly, and we have discussed the more immediate evils that result from this congestion of wealth. but when we attempt to describe the evils and abuses which follow close after, as a result of the power which monopoly has placed in the hands of a few, we may well pause at the task. the whole array of perplexing social problems comes before us, and we realize more and more what a curse monopoly has become. the philanthropist tells us that poverty, and all the distresses that follow in its wake, are largely due to the fact that our workingmen under present conditions _must_ live from hand to mouth, _must_ rely on charity for aid in every emergency, and _must_, therefore, decrease in manliness and self-reliance and the ambition to better themselves, as the practical impossibility of success is comprehended. good men are lamenting because the church has, to a great degree, lost its hold on the laboring classes, and are casting about on all sides for a remedy. will they ever find one as long as the wage-worker carries in his bosom a rankling sense of injury done him? injury which he feels that the church is merely seeking to drug with charity instead of wishing to cure it with justice? there is great need that the church, not alone by the sermons of its most enlightened thinkers, like dr. heber newton, but by the daily practice of the rank and file of its membership, should recognize, as it never yet has done, the great principles of human fraternity, and move intelligently and earnestly to remedy the great evils that menace us. even the evil of intemperance can be traced back to a connection with monopoly. who shall blame the tired laborer, if after a week with sixty hours of unremitting toil, he takes refuge from the dreariness and lassitude of physical exhaustion, the hopelessness of ambition-quenched life, and perhaps the discomforts and disquiet of the place he calls home, in a long draught of that which does, for the time, create in him an image of exhilaration, strength, self-respect, and manhood? it is but an image, indeed, and to all but the victim it is a caricature; but when a man cannot hope for the reality, to only imagine for a brief hour that he is indeed a king of men, and that care and woe and degradation are no longer his lot, is a refuge not to be despised. there is indeed a class of philanthropists who say, with some truth, that the laboring classes as a whole have now more than they will spend for their own good, and declare that higher wages means merely more spent on sprees and debasing sports, of different sorts but universally harmful. on the other side, the wise philanthropists who are trying to help their fellow-men in that best of all ways, by teaching them to rely on themselves, testify that their efforts to make men independent are largely hampered because it is so extremely difficult for a workingman to live in any other way than from hand to mouth, especially in our large cities. the true solution seems to be that all these reforms must go hand in hand. we must teach men how to make nobler uses of their incomes and themselves, while we endeavor to bring about reforms that shall give them greater comforts and more leisure to use for either self-improvement or self-debasement. much more might be said of the indirect effects which result from the taxation which monopolies inflict upon the community for their own profit; but they are now so generally realized and understood that we can devote our time more profitably to the investigation of other evils. under the ideal system of competition which we studied in chapter x., we found that all occupations were competing with each other; so that if, from any cause, one calling became especially profitable, men would flock to it and bring down the profits to a normal point. monopolies have seriously interfered with this important and beneficent law. how often do we hear the complaint of the great difficulties that beset young men on their first entrance to business or industrial life in securing a situation. the monopolized industries shut out new competitors by every means in their power. the trade-unions limit the number of apprentices which shall be allowed to learn their trade each year. the result is, first, a most deplorable tendency to idleness on the part of young men just at the time when they should be most active; and, second, a still larger increase of men in the professions and non-monopolized callings, tending to still further increase the competition in those callings, where returns are already inferior to what they should be. surely, we must begin to appreciate how vitally important to every person in the land is this matter of competition and monopoly. the evils which we have thus far considered pertain to the distribution of wealth. let us now turn our attention to the production of wealth. our second law of competition stated that the waste due to competition varied directly as its intensity. we have frequently referred to this waste of competition; let us now inquire more fully concerning its amount and effect. in the first place, however, let us settle the question, once for all, that waste or destruction of wealth of any sort is an economic injury to the community. we have, indeed, already explained this in the first paragraphs of the chapter; but while all authorities on economics agree on this point, the general public is still seriously infected with the fallacy that waste, destruction, and unprofitable enterprises are beneficial because they furnish employment to labor. if this were merely a theory, we could afford to ignore it; but the trouble is that it is acted upon, and works untold evil and damage to the world. to take a typical case, people reason that damage done by flood or fire or storm is not a total loss because employment will be furnished to many in repairing and rebuilding after the devastation. they do not stop to reflect that so much wealth has been wiped out of the world, and that _instead of the destruction furnishing so much additional employment, it has only changed the direction of the employment_. for money nowadays is always spent, either directly, by its owners, or by some one to whom he lends it. and wherever money is spent it furnishes employment. therefore, if the money which was used in repairing and rebuilding had not been required for that work, it would have been spent in some other direction and furnished employment to labor there. understanding, then, that the economic interests of the community are best served when each one of its members exerts his energies with the greatest result and with the least waste in producing wealth, let us see to what extent intense competition and monopolies have violated this law. in his interesting book entitled "questions of the day," prof. richard p. ely, of johns hopkins university, refers to the building of two great railways with closely paralleled roads already in operation, the nickel plate, and the new york, west shore and buffalo, and says: "it is estimated that the money wasted by these two single attempts at competition amounts to $ , , . let the reader reflect for a moment what this means. it will be admitted that, taking city and country together, comfortable homes can be constructed for an average of $ , each. two hundred thousand homes could be constructed for the sum wasted, and two hundred thousand homes means homes for one million people. i suppose it is a very moderate estimate to place the amount wasted in the construction of useless railroads at $ , , , , which, on the basis of our previous calculations, would construct homes for five millions of people. but this is probably altogether too small an estimate of even the direct waste resulting from the application of a faulty political economy to practical life. when the indirect losses are added, the result is something astounding, for the expense of a needless number of trains and of what would otherwise be an excessively large permanent force of employés must be added. of course, nothing much better than guesswork is possible, but i believe that the total loss would be sufficient to provide a greater portion of the people of the united states with homes." but it seems quite possible to make a closer estimate of the wealth wasted by the construction of unneeded railways than the general one above. there are now, in round numbers, , miles of railway in the united states. the two lines named above have a total extent of nearly , miles; and while they are the most flagrant examples of paralleling in the country, there is no small number of other roads in various parts of the country which, except for their competition with roads already constructed, would never have been built. considering the fact that the paralleling has been done in regions where the traffic was heaviest and where the cost of construction was greatest, it seems a conservative estimate to say that per cent. of the capital invested in railways in the united states has been spent in paralleling existing roads. but the total capital invested in the railways of the united states is about $ , , , , per cent. of which is $ , , . it is also to be remembered that this , miles of needless road has to be maintained and operated at an average expense per mile per annum of $ , , or a total annual cost of nearly $ , , . taking prof. ely's estimate of $ , as the cost at which an average size family can be provided with a comfortable home, and we find that the cost of these unneeded railways would have provided , homes, sufficient to accommodate , , people. say that per cent. of the cost of these homes is required annually to keep them in repair, then this could be furnished by the $ , , now paid for the operating expenses of needless railways, and an annual margin of about $ , , would be left, or enough to provide each year homes for nearly , more people in addition. of course, this is merely a concrete example of what possible benefits we have been deprived by wasting our money in building needless railways. as a matter of fact, the money we have spent on unprofitable railways, as well as those totally useless, has wrought us an amount of damage far in excess of their actual cost. it is generally agreed by financiers that the periods of industrial depression during the past score of years have been largely due to excessive railway building. for in a period of active railway construction, roads are built whose only excuse for existence is that they will encroach upon the territory of some rival. the capital invested fails to make a return. the loss of income which ensues decreases the purchasing power of the community; and this combines with the sudden loss of business confidence caused by the failure of the enterprise to bring about a general panic and crash which affects the whole community; and by checking enterprise and industry, damages the country ten times the amount of the original loss. the waste of competition is by no means confined to railways. the sugar refiners' trust has raised the price of sugar and thus reduced its consumption so much that they have permanently closed several of their factories. yet claus spreckels is now building a great refinery in philadelphia, the output of which is to compete with the trust. all this capital invested in that which is not needed by the community is an injury to the public. the french copper syndicate so raised the price of copper that it became profitable to work old mines of poor ore, which under ordinary circumstances could not be worked at all at a profit. capital was expended in opening and refitting these mines, and in preparing them for working; while other mines, able to produce the metal at much less cost, were reducing their output because of their contract with the trust. in various cities of the country, millions have been wasted in tearing up the streets to bury the unneeded mains of competing gas companies. the electric light competitors are stringing their wires over our heads and beneath our feet, and by covering the same district twice or three times, double and treble the attendant evils as well as the cost. the waste due to intense competition in trade may be avoidable or unavoidable; but it is certainly of enormous magnitude, although the fact of its being a waste is still little appreciated. the waste due to labor monopolies is much better understood. the strikes which paralyze industry and send want and distress in ever widening circles are universally recognized to be a waste of wealth whose annual amount is enormous. the cost to employers and workmen of the strikes in the state of new york in and , was $ , , . reckoning from this as a basis, it is probable that the total annual cash cost of strikes in the united states is twenty or twenty-five million dollars. the results of these strikes in decreasing the purchasing power of employés and thus causing overproduction, and in discouraging enterprise and increasing the cost of capital, serve to spread their effect throughout the whole industrial community and thus cause an actual loss and injury many times that borne by the parties directly engaged. it is thus evident that the waste due to the intense competition which the concentration of productive enterprise has brought about in modern times is a matter of startling proportions. we are wasting and destroying wealth all the time sufficient to go a long way towards abolishing all the poverty in our midst; and the blame for this state of affairs we are now able to place where it belongs. surely with a full appreciation of these evils, every honest and patriotic man must be willing to use every endeavor to strike at the root of the evil. the public indeed is, and has long been, a unit in its opposition to monopoly; but in endeavoring to defeat monopoly it has taken just the course which could give no permanent gain. cities have beggared themselves to aid competing railway lines only to see them consolidated eventually with the monopoly which it was expected to defeat. the multitude regard claus spreckels as a benefactor--and will till he forces the sugar trust to divide their per cent. profits with him in return for the control of his refinery. it is no benefit to us if in steering away from the scylla of monopoly, we be wrecked on the charybdis of wasteful competition. we have been trying for a score of years now to defeat monopolies by creating competition; but in spite of a universal public sentiment in favor of the reform, and notwithstanding the millions of wealth which we have poured out like water to accomplish this object, monopolies to-day are far more numerous and powerful than ever before. the people who are groaning under their burden of oppression are anxious for relief. the remedy they have so long and faithfully tried to apply has but made a bad matter worse; and it is small wonder that, despairing of other relief, they are adopting false and injurious plans for bettering themselves which serve merely to extend the monopoly policy into all industrial affairs. we are threatened with a state of society in which most of the principal industries will be wholly given over to monopoly. those in each occupation will band together to secure the greatest returns for themselves at the expense of all other men; while the few occupations which cannot thus combine in a monopoly--farming, and the different sorts of unskilled labor--will be filled to overflowing with those crowded out of other callings. those who follow them will do so only because the monopolized occupations are closed to them. thus will our farming population degenerate into a peasantry more miserable than that of europe, and our laborers be ground down to a level lower than they have yet known. is there a probability that such a state of affairs will come to pass? there might be if the public were not keenly alive to the curse of monopoly. but as it is, the greater danger is that through ignorance a wrong course may be adopted for the cure of our present evils, which will aggravate instead of curing them. xiii. ameliorating influences. if pure selfishness were the only motive influencing the masses of mankind, the evils which we have considered in the preceding chapter would be wholly unbearable. all men would be waging an industrial warfare with each other in their greed for gain, just as the barons of feudal times fought to satisfy their thirst for power and possessions; and as motive is the great force which determines character, we would be, as far as moral excellence is concerned, in the same category as the uncivilized savages. fortunately for the happiness of the race, there are important influences at work counteracting, modifying and ameliorating the social evils that threaten us. these influences are not cures for these evils, though they are so considered by very many people. but they are very important palliatives. they are certainly of inestimable value in the lack of real remedies; but it is better to consider them as palliatives merely; for necessary, as they are and always will be, to soften and relieve the ruggedness of human laws and human administration of law, in the present condition of humanity they cannot effect a cure of the evils which burden us. the first of these palliatives has a purely selfish origin. it arises from the desire of the managers of every monopoly to make the greatest possible profit from its operations. let us take, for example, a street railway monopoly which is at liberty to charge such rates of fare as it chooses and which has no competitors. if it fixes its fare at cents, very many people will prefer to walk or take some other mode of conveyance, who, if the fare was at cents, would patronize the road. thus it may very likely happen that -cent fares will yield it the greatest net income. it is often said that it is competition which has brought our rates of railroad transportation down to their present low point. while this is largely true, it is also true that the tendency to foster the growth of traffic by making a low tariff has been a large factor in bringing rates down to a reasonable point. another example of this principle's operation is in the case of monopolies protected by the patent laws. in this case the collection of only a moderate royalty will generally result in greater profits to the inventor than he would secure by exacting a large fee, because of the greatly increased sales in the former case. it should not be understood, however, that this principle has its only application in cases similar to the two mentioned. there is hardly an industry, monopolized or competitive, into which it does not enter to effect important results. it is to be noted, however, that it is least effective where the demand for the monopolized article is least sensitive to a variation in price. this fact should be considered by those who are fond of arguing that this principle alone is always sufficient to prevent monopolies from doing much harm. while it is powerful in the case of such monopolies as we have mentioned, where the demand for the commodity furnished varies greatly with the price, in the case of the great copper trust or of the quinine trust or of any monopoly controlling the great staples of human consumption, it seems plain that it can have little effect. nor do we need to base our proof that this principle is not a sufficient remedy upon this ground alone. grant it to be true that a certain monopoly makes the greatest net profit when its rates or prices are at a certain point; then will it not be apt to set them slightly above that point, where they will give nearly the same profit with a considerable decrease in the volume of business transacted and in the corresponding labor and responsibility? and, again, the point where it makes the greatest net profit is considerably above the point where it is of the greatest possible benefit to the community at large. this latter end is attained when it uses its facilities to their full capacity for the benefit of the public. the rates should be fixed at such a point that this full capacity will be utilized, or as much higher as may be necessary to pay the monopoly a fair profit on its operations. this influence just considered has its origin in the selfishness of men. the second, and by far the most important influence tending to ameliorate the evils due to monopolies and intense competition arises from that essentially noble trait of human character whose province it is to seek the welfare of others before that of self. it is not to be wondered at that the large benevolence of our noblest christian thinkers rebels against the inflexible laws of competition, or rather at their stern application to modern conditions of life. under our social system, indeed, each man is striving to do his utmost to benefit his fellow-men, but only so far as it benefits himself. christianity goes far beyond this. it teaches the fraternity of man, the fatherhood of god, and thus the duty of all men to care for and love their brothers' happiness and welfare. it is in accord with the noblest and most exalted desires of the human soul. it teaches a man to seek to benefit others for their own sake, not for the sake of the reflex benefit on himself. the burden of christ's sermon on the mount was that golden rule of action, "whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them"; and the whole of his teachings glow with the spirit of fraternity; the strong bearing the burdens of the weak; the rich cast down and the poor exalted; brother sharing with brother, according to their needs. we are accustomed to make ourselves complaisant with the reflection that these were figurative expressions, and not meant as literal commands. but if we consider candidly, we must confess that if it is the spirit of its master's commands which the church means to follow, it is very far, as a body, from reaching up to their full import. the love for one's fellow-men which christ taught was certainly meant to be expressed in great, noble acts of brotherly kindness. consider the want, the suffering, the distress, the misfortune, the inequality by which a thousand families have hard work and scanty fare while one revels in luxury. are these thing repugnant to the spirit of christianity, or not? every one knows that they are. it is because christian men in these days are prone to follow their own ease in common with the rest of the world, and are accustomed to make their christian code of morals to fit that which public opinion declares to be sufficiently advanced, that christianity as a remedy for social evils has fallen into disrepute with the laboring classes. but men, both in and out of the church, who are better informed as to the grand and noble spirit that lies at its foundation, are coming to look more and more toward christianity as the only deliverance from the evils that threaten us. our social system, say the devout among these men, is based on the selfish desires of men, their wish to get the most for themselves with the least service to their fellow-men. it is inconceivable that a system founded on any thing less than the noblest attributes of humanity can be intended as a permanent basis for society. the system founded on competition was adapted to the conditions of men during the formative period of civilization: but modern inventions, processes, and methods are revealing a strange want of elasticity in its action. it is leading us to such grave evils that men everywhere are looking for an escape from it. we are brought face to face with the fact that the law of competition, the cruelly terse "survival of the fittest," was never meant to control the wondrously intricate relations of the men of the coming centuries. and if selfishness is not to control, it is because unselfishness is to reign in its stead. it is because there will grow up in the hearts of men a fraternal love, such as the world has not yet seen, which will make them gladly share a common inheritance with each other, as they do a common fatherhood. men will then labor for others' welfare as now; but each with the thought of others' benefit, not of his own. nor are these men alone in their belief. earnest thinkers outside of the church, who are familiar with the evils which intense competition and extortionate monopoly are constantly pushing into our notice, discern a tendency in our social organism to pulsate with stronger and more rapid beats in its convulsions of strike and boycott and commercial crisis. and in these mighty vibrations, like the swing of a gigantic pendulum, there is danger that it may swing so hard and so far as to break its controlling bonds and leave humanity in chaos. anarchy means more than the reign of individualism. it means such a ruin of the world's wealth, the storehouses and fields and factories which supply its wants, that nine tenths of the population of the globe would be swept off its face by actual starvation. some social organism there must be if our civilization is to continue. what can adjust the delicate relations of man to man when the bond of selfishness which holds us together breaks? there are many men, even now, whose greatest desire and strongest purpose is to benefit their fellow-men; and if we can extend and strengthen this noble principle so that it will govern the great mass of humanity, why may we not cease to measure and bargain and weigh with our brother men? such is the argument for what we may appropriately call christian communism. who shall say what shall be possible with a new and nobler generation of men? when the great mass of the race has altruism for its governing motive, then it may be possible to use that trait of character as the basis of industrial society. but to-day the governing motives of mankind are largely selfish. society must govern men in their dealings with each other, not by arbitrary force but by their inner motives of action. when men at large begin to heartily desire to benefit others more than themselves, then the system of selfish competition will begin to disappear, and the system of fraternal devotion will arise to take its place. this will come about naturally. it will be an effect which can only be brought about by producing the cause. when christianity shall have so regenerated mankind that its governing motives are noble and generous, then the social problems we are discussing, as well as many others, will be forever happily solved. every one will say, god speed the attempt to implant such noble motives in the breasts of men; but we recognize at the same time the vast change which must be wrought before mankind at large will reach this high standard; and in the centuries which will be required to effect this, we must have other forces to govern society. thus, while not denying the possibility that the christian principle of altruism may be the final solution of the problem of society, it seems best for us to regard it at the present day as what it is,--an influence tending to smooth over the inequalities and soften the asperities of our social system, and to transform the warfare of competition into a peaceable and friendly emulation. it is not easy to overestimate the valuable work which this christian principle of human fraternity is thus doing at the present day. it is recognized in many ways so common that we cease to think of them as what they are--expressions of the common brotherhood of man. our vast public charities supported by law are an instance. it is recognized now by all civilized countries that it is a duty for the state to care for those who are so poor or unfortunate as to be unable to care for themselves. private charities, too, are as much more enormous now than they were a century ago as private fortunes are, compared with those of that day. in fact, beneficence has come to be recognized as an important duty of the very wealthy; and churches, schools, hospitals, and the like bear witness everywhere to the benevolence of wealthy men. all this public and private benevolence has certainly accomplished wonderful results in relieving the want and misfortune of men, and making their lot a bearable one. the above beneficences require outright giving; but there are many ways in which the fraternal spirit of men works to cause men to treat each other in business affairs more liberally than they would if competition were the only governing motive. in very many cases of the employment of labor, the wages paid are higher than the rate which competition alone would fix. it is true that this is largely due to a selfish motive. the men are more contented and industrious than when their wages are lower. there are always plenty of applicants for any vacant position. the men are not prone to find fault with their pay, knowing that plenty would be glad to fill their places. at the same time, it is certainly true that in many cases a principal motive for giving higher wages is the desire to be liberal and generous with the workers whose labor brings income and profits. again it is very frequently the case that mills and mines are kept in operation in dull times, when goods must be sold at a loss, if sold at all, simply to keep the employees from the destitution and suffering consequent upon idleness. cases of especial personal benevolence are still more common. there are tens of thousands of working people to-day rendering service whom their employers well know to be unprofitable servants, but who are retained because their youth or age or incapacity renders them proper objects of assistance in this way, a sort of charity far better than outright gift. in business enterprises, again, the spirit of fraternity is widely diffused. as we have seen, it has been one principal cause of the formation of trusts and combinations to limit and restrain competition. there are also a growing number of enterprises which are purely philanthropic, such as the provision of cheap and healthy homes for working men and women. in the conduct of business, too, public opinion does not approve of the man who exacts the utmost farthing, and weighs and measures to the closest fraction. the most grasping creditor, who precipitates the ruin upon the bankrupt, and the landlord or money-lender, who exacts pitilessly and turns a deaf ear to the call of a brother for mercy, are also condemned at the bar of public opinion. these and many other considerations lead us to some knowledge of the inestimable value of the principle of fraternity to correct the harsh and inequitable working of the industrial organism. it remains only to be said that in this sphere of action its influence is but a small fraction of what it ought to be and what it promises to become. it is through their conscience, as well as through their innate sense of justice and right, that men are coming to see how the extortion by monopolies and the waste of competition in which they have engaged are an injury to the common weal and an expression of might rather than of right. it is in this way that we are beginning to discern the faults and imperfections of our present industrial system and to recognize that progress toward better things is to be found by recognizing, not covering, these faults, and doing all in our power to remedy them. in this work the christian church should be in the lead; and a large proportion of its pastors, accustomed to an earnest and sympathetic appreciation of social evils, are among the foremost to second the efforts of modern reformers. of the rank and file of the church, however, it is to be regretfully said that they are eminently conservative; and that, with very many notable exceptions, they are certainly not in the lead in the efforts to equalize the injustices which have grown up under the laws of competition. it is largely because the course of christians is in this respect so inconsistent with their professed belief in that grand doctrine of man's divine origin and universal brotherhood, that the church, is losing the respect of the laboring classes. nor will it regain that respect until it shows by unmistakable evidence to the men who toil with their hands that it is alive to the questions of the day,--alive to the injustice of society to-day; and that the love of the church's great master for their souls is echoed by a longing in the hearts of his followers for their temporal welfare. but it should be also said that, save as they assume it, the responsibility of those within the church is not greater than of those without. all men alike are brothers; and it is more, far more, than a selfish tie that binds us together in civilized society. legal rights are based largely on the system of competition under which our industries have grown up; but the moral duties of all men go far beyond this. it is the duty of all men alike to supplement the working of the law of selfish competition with the acts of a fraternal love for the welfare of all men. too much stress cannot be laid on this. there can be little doubt that if it were not for the charity and beneficence and for the strong spirit of humanity, which lives in a strange strength, even in the hearts of the debased and evil-minded, the industrial warfare which our modern competition has come to be would have wrought tenfold more evil than it has, and would have already arrayed class against class with other weapons than those of peaceable industry. may heaven grant that the time shall never come when the growth of the principle of human fraternity shall not far outstrip and overtop the growth of human selfishness, whatever forms the latter may take. in concluding this chapter it seems eminently proper to call attention to one practical application of this great principle of fraternity which ought to go a great way towards saving us from the results of mistakes in our attempts to remedy the evils which have grown up. the fraternal principle should lead men to judge charitably the men who are engaged in monopolies and in wasting the world's wealth in intense competition. the more especially as _these evils are due, not to the malignity of any person, but to our system of industry, which causes them to spring up_. the investigation which we pursued in the first chapters showed very clearly that monopolists are simply striving, like all other men, to protect and advance their own interests by what they consider legal and honorable means. and our study of the laws of competition has shown us that the evils of monopoly and unhealthy competition are the natural outgrowth of the great revolution in modern industries by which the number of competing units has been reduced from many to few. unfortunately there is a great tendency to make these evils worse by recrimination. it is very common to hear those engaged in monopolistic enterprises, whether as owners or managers, denounced as unscrupulous villains, double-dyed rascals, scoundrelly enemies of the people, or perhaps in terms less blunt but more scathing. now, what are the facts of the case? speaking broadly, it is a fact that the men who own and manage our modern monopolies are as a class far more large-hearted in their sympathies than the average of men. it is only because they do not realize the consequences of their acts that they seem to those who do realize them and those who suffer by them to be incomprehensibly brutal. the same man who at a corporation meeting may do his part toward throwing a thousand men out of employment or wasting a million dollars of the world's wealth to effect some monster "deal," may stop as he leaves his office to help a crippled beggar regain his feet; and when he hears of the destitution that his own official act has helped create, he will give with a lavish hand to relieve it. when we come to questions between labor and its employers, more than this is true. the employers of labor as a class are closely in sympathy with the honest desire of their men to better themselves, and the constant increase in the employment of arbitration to settle difficulties, the experiments in co-operation and profit-sharing, and the furnishing of cheap and good houses to the workers are all evidences of this fact. the truth is, that it is circumstances, not men, which have created monopolies. for to tell the truth, there are but very few men who, if put in the place of the stigmatized monopolists, would not have done as much or more, as their abilities permitted, to achieve a fortune as have these men. all men strive in general to make as much as possible out of their fellow-men, and to gain the most possible with the least labor. the monopolist only goes further on this road than most other men can go. on the other hand, a still more common error exists with reference to the monopolies of labor. the newspaper press seems strangely fond of repeating the statement that all labor organizations are kept up by idle and turbulent labor agitators, who wish to live off the proceeds of their fellows' labor. a little candid thought and investigation will convince any one that this is an out-and-out lie, and as such deserves the condemnation of all honest men. granted, indeed, that labor monopolies are an evil, as we have fully shown, and that the men who have charge of them are far from perfect, and make many mistakes, they have far more to excuse them than have the men who form monopolies for the purpose of adding to fortunes already plethoric. the truth is, that if the men who are so incomprehensibly unjust in their estimate of the work of labor organizations were put in the place of the laborers at the bench or in the mill, they would be foremost in securing their own rights by organizing their fellow workmen. it would be a great thing for the world's peace if men would try to look at their brother's failings through their brother's eyes. before you criticise a man too harshly, candidly consider whether you would do any better if you were in his place. we hear much said of the folly and wickedness of stirring up and reviving the sectional animosity between the north and the south; and all patriotic men rejoice in burying past issues and inaugurating the era of a united nationalism. but those who, by personal attacks upon monopolists, whether they are millionaire monopolists or hard-handed workingmen, cultivate animosity and hatred between social classes already too widely separated and too prone to hostility, are sowing seed whose fruit may be reaped in a social strife far more destructive and fatal than any sectional strife could be. in discussing remedies for the evils we have been investigating, we should always keep the fact in mind that our remedy should seek, not to punish, but to cure. personal or class enmities never yet helped the world to advance. it will be fortunate if men can be taught to see how useless such enmities are in this case; and how little revenge and reprisal can ever do to heal a wrong. xiv. remedies for the evils of monopoly. we have now investigated the nature of all the different classes of monopolies and combinations for the suppression of competition. we have studied their working and their effect upon the different classes of society. we have discussed the foundation principles of civilized society as seen in abstract theory and as seen in the actual practice of to-day, with the evils which intense competition on the one hand and extortionate monopoly on the other have brought upon us. finally, we have considered the influences which tend to lessen and ameliorate these evils, and the extent to which we may rely on them to benefit the condition of society. we are now fully prepared to consider the remedies which are proposed for these evils, and to see in what direction our hope lies for the improvement of the condition of mankind. it would be a far larger task than we propose to attempt, however, to discuss all the schemes which have been proposed for bettering the condition of society. they have been numerous ever since the dawn of the idea of popular liberty, have accompanied it all through its centuries of growth, and to-day, despite the fact that the amount of the comforts of life accessible to the masses of the people is far greater than ever before, plans for further betterment of the condition of society, the more economical production and equitable distribution of wealth, are being pressed forward and advocated more strongly than ever. nor does this fact furnish any ground for pessimism. we shall have far more occasion to deplore when men become so conceited over the advancement which the race has already made,--so numb to the evils which still oppress them,--that they will no longer take part in the agitation of plans for further advancement. in considering now the plans proposed at the present day by those who wish to remedy the evils of monopoly, we shall find it profitable to consider first two great opposing principles, which we will designate as _individualism_ and _societism_. upon one or the other of these principles almost every scheme for bettering the condition of society is based. the doctrine of individualism has for its foundation the absolute industrial liberty of each individual. by this is meant that every person shall have "the free right of contract,"--that is, the right to sell his labor or property or purchase that of others as he chooses. it holds that in all matters where the production and distribution of wealth is concerned, the desire of each man to advance his own interests will, alone, in the long run, result in the highest good to the greatest number. it asks the government to "let alone" the industrial affairs of the country, and leave private enterprise to take its own course. its adherents are fond of asserting that each man knows his own wants and can direct his own business affairs much better than any government can direct them for him. it declares that free competition is the best possible agent to regulate all industrial affairs, and it ascribes all economic evils to the fact that free competition has been thwarted or destroyed. the opposing doctrine of societism holds that the waste in the production of wealth and the inequities in its distribution, which afflict mankind to-day, are due to the extreme application of the doctrine of individualism. its adherents analyze competition and declare it to be but another expression of a law of savage nature, tersely expressed as "the survival of the fittest." a system which brutally forces the weaker to the wall, say they, is unfit to govern the inter-relations of civilized human beings. condemning thus the principles and practice of their opponents, they would go to the opposite extreme and place the control of the production and distribution of wealth in the hands of organized society or of local and central governments, to be by them administered for the common benefit. the first and most obvious commentary upon these two opposing doctrines is that either of them is impracticable; and that if either of them were given the entire control of our industries, the whole people would unite in condemning it. lest there should be any mistake as to what is meant by this, it is well to say that we now refer to neither the individualism nor the societism which is practically advocated at the present day, but rather to the essence of the two opposing principles. to see most clearly the practical failure of either of these principles when applied without modification by the other, consider our present social system, which is based on both individualism and societism. if the principle of individualism were to be fully applied and societism were to be entirely abolished, a first step would be the relinquishment by the government of all the enterprises it now carries on; and they would be left for private enterprise to take up or leave alone as it chose. this means, for one thing, to bring the matter plainly home, that the whole national postal system would be wiped out, and we should depend on some private company or companies to collect, carry, and distribute our mails. the government would also abandon all its work in keeping clear and safe the natural waterways of the country, as well as all the harbors, light-houses, etc. municipal governments would give up all their systems of water supply to private companies, as well as their sewerage systems, and even paving, street cleaning, etc. indeed, the maintenance of our whole system of highways would be given over to private enterprise. is this too much? it is only a legitimate application of the principle that government should leave to private enterprise all matters connected with commerce and industry. little need be said to prove that a similar application of the principle of societism to our industrial system would result even more disastrously. as a general thing, the necessary formality and expense of administration when business is carried on by the government, causes the final cost of production to be much greater than under private management, even when conducted with all honesty. but the chief reason why the principle of societism is impracticable and unwise for universal application, lies in the fact that the men who administer our governments are neither the wisest nor the most honest of men. the competition among those engaged in private business tends by a process of natural selection to bring the men of greatest business ability into control of affairs. but by any form of government yet tried, popularity rather than merit, and excellence in the arts of the politician, rather than experience and capacity as a statesman and business man, are the qualities which place men in positions where they can control public affairs. not that very many wise and good men do not now hold office, and that many unprincipled and vicious men do achieve success in private business. but, as a general rule, the statements just made hold good. it seems plainly apparent, then, that neither the principle of individualism nor the principle of societism can be taken as an infallible guide for determining the control of our industry. it would be as manifestly unwise to take a step toward abolishing existing societism by placing our postal department under the control of a private company, as it would be to make a move toward abolishing individualism by having the government assume the management of all the farms in the country. both of these principles are necessary. there is, indeed, a marked tendency toward an increased reliance on the principle of societism as civilization progresses and our life becomes necessarily more intense and complex. a community of plain farmers, isolated from each other, can live their individual lives about as they please, without any interference of the government becoming necessary to protect the rights of each man from infringement by his neighbors. but the resident in a large village must submit to certain restrictions for the common good. he must not carry on any kind of business likely to become a public nuisance. his cattle may not graze in the streets. he must give part of his earnings toward maintaining a water supply for a protection against fire. the citizen of a great city is subject to far more restrictions. the government assumes the control of education, charities, the care of the public health, the drainage of the streets, the collection of offal, and a multitude of other duties which in a less intense civilization each family performs for itself. the advance in science and the arts, too, has brought about a revolution whose effect we must recognize. a hundred years ago almost every community, and to a large degree every family, was industrially almost independent of every other, as we have already shown. to-day each man relies on a million others to supply him with the commonest necessaries of life. the armored knight was proof against all foes, save the few antagonists similarly clad. to-day my life is dependent on the fidelity and vigilance of ten thousand men, and every man i meet has me in his power. given the malignant will and fiendish cunning necessary, and one single man can kill a thousand human beings and destroy a million dollars at a blow. to sum up, each advance in civilization makes men more dependent upon each other, and increases the advantage and necessity of having industries most important to the common welfare controlled by society as a whole instead of by individuals. it is contended by some that from the increased interference of government with private affairs, there is danger that the liberties of the people will be curtailed, and that their rights will be so hedged about by restrictions that the result will be evil instead of beneficial. to this it must be answered that the people themselves are the source of the government's authority and power of restriction, and that in no case will a restriction of the government be long maintained which does not benefit far more in conserving the rights of men than it injures by infringing them. apply this rule to any case of government action in industrial matters. a city government, for instance, constructs a system of sewerage. all taxpayers must contribute something towards its expense, and their right to spend that money in such other ways as they choose is abridged; but, at the same time, the more important right of having healthy and safe drainage for their houses is conserved. in a similar way, the government may pass laws of various sorts to restrict and control what seems to be at first sight purely private business, such as the sale of explosives, spirituous liquors, poisons, drugs, and many other articles. in every instance, this is done on the ground that the interference of government is necessary to protect the rights of the community as a whole, even though the liberties of certain classes are abridged. the study of these facts brings to our attention an important principle of governmental action, which should always be remembered when in any industrial matter we find that the principle of individual action is producing unsatisfactory results, and conclude, therefore, to ask the government to take some part in its control. this principle is as follows: _government, as the representative of the will of the whole people, should in general, attempt the regulation, or control, of industrial matters only to benefit the people as a whole_. of course it cannot be said that all government action for the benefit of special classes of the community is wrong. the granting of pensions to those defenders and upholders of the government who deserve it, is a case in point where special legislation is justifiable and proper; and many other cases exist. nevertheless, the shaping of legislation to effect the interests of special classes of the community is one which is now working the nation serious injury; and it has obtained so firm a bold that it will take a long time for us to throw it off. it causes men of all classes to consider the government as a paternal benefactor, whose duty it is to aid them, either in their schemes for getting rich or their struggles to earn a living; when its real office is to protect all citizens in their individual rights, undertake only such industrial enterprises as can manifestly be better and more economically conducted by it than by private enterprise, and enforce restrictions upon industry only as they are needed to protect personal rights or the interests of the community as a whole. worst of all, the use of government to advance special interests places a premium on the efforts of those who seek to corrupt the expression of the popular will in its every stage, from the voters at the polls to the chief rulers in the seats of government. for by combining to accomplish their mutual purposes, they are able to turn aside all departments of government from their legitimate work and occupy them with measures to advance special interests, some commendable enough, others a mere excuse for stealing from the public treasury, but all alike claiming attention and action, while the business of the people goes all awry. it has seemed necessary to thus briefly discuss these two opposing theories of society, individualism and societism, in order to show the impracticability of either when applied to the society of to-day without limitation and modification by the other; and that in adopting or rejecting any remedies that may be proposed for the industrial evils which we have discussed, we should be guided by the facts as we find them, and not by blind adherence to abstract principles. let us now gather up the salient decisions which we have reached in all our past investigation. we have discovered that a great industrial revolution is in progress, by which manufacturing, mining, and transportation to a very great extent, and other industries to a considerable extent, have been and are being concentrated in the hands of a very few competitors. we have found that by the laws of competition this reduction in the number of competitors greatly increases the intensity of competition and the resulting waste and instability of price, and finally brings monopoly into existence. this monopoly we have determined to be a serious infringement on the rights of the people, and we have found that the losses due to intense competition and the fruitless attempts to defeat monopoly by adding new competing units have wasted the wealth of the nation in uncounted millions. we are now to consider the remedies proposed for these evils. the most obvious remedy for monopoly, and the one which has been tried and persevered in with the most remarkable faith, is _the creation of new competitors_. does a railroad monopoly oppress us? build a competing line. is the gas company of our city charging us $ per thousand for gas which cost but cents to produce and deliver? let us start another gas company and tear up all our pavements again to lay its mains. has the sugar trust put up the price of sugar two cents per pound? well, "sugar can be produced anywhere by the expenditure of labor and capital," the trust's lawyers say, and so _we_ will "trust" that some enterprising manufacturer will take the field against the combination. but if we do any of these things, we have added only _one_ competitor to the number in the field. and with only _two_ competitors in the field, competition is sure to be so _intense_ and _wasteful_ that the formation of a new monopoly is a matter of but a short time. this is the conclusion to which the theory brings us; and the more one studies the history of actual attempts to create competition in this way, the more thoroughly convinced he must be that the inevitable result will be the same,--the tacit or formal combination between the old monopoly and the new competitor, resulting in the re-establishment of the absolute reign of monopoly. the author has thoroughly studied the actual working of hundreds of schemes, in every part of the united states, whose object was to create competition in railroad transportation. it is a most astonishing fact to see the eagerness with which thousands of municipalities, all over the country, which have taken great loads of debt upon their shoulders to secure "competing lines," and have seen these lines swallowed up by their rivals, are still anxious to repeat the folly and assume new burdens to aid in building new lines, which will inevitably be absorbed like those which they preceded. if the people as a whole learn wisdom by experience, they seem to learn with painful slowness. the first great lesson for the people who are groaning under the burden of monopoly to learn, then, is that when we try to defeat monopoly by creating new competing units, the remedy is worse for the community at large than the disease, and effects at best but a temporary relief. another class of remedies against monopoly seek to accomplish their purpose by opposing the tendency to a reduction in the number of competing units. there are not wanting people who, having gained a dim perception that monopolies are an inevitable result of the modern concentration of industry, conclude that, after all, "the former days _were_ better than these," and that our wisest course is a retrograde one. fortunately, however, these people are comparatively few. it is a fact so plain that even the dullest can hardly fail to perceive it, that the consolidation and concentration of industry which have gone on everywhere have wonderfully cheapened the cost of production,--made it possible for us to make better goods with a less expenditure of labor and material. the revolution in our industries could not be undone without a more radical action toward vested property rights than could be countenanced now; and as already seen, it would work to the detriment of every person in the community. we cannot go back to the stage-coach, the workshop, and the hand-loom of our ancestors; we cannot, if we would, undo the growth of a century in civilization; and it is well that it is so. but while most men see the benefit which has resulted from the consolidations already effected, there are but few who are not opposed to further consolidations. it is argued that the reduction in the number of competing units results in increasing the intensity of competition, which is assumed to be a desirable end; and that it has also worked great benefit in the reduction in cost. having attained this, it is proposed to stop further consolidations and prevent the establishment of monopoly. this is what most of the present plans for giving relief from monopoly propose to accomplish. certainly the task is no easy one; let us inquire if it be even possible. we may safely assume, in the first place, that the competitors in any industry will always be reduced to a very small number before the public will be sufficiently aroused to make any movement for the prevention of consolidation. so long as a monopoly is not imminent, usually, indeed, so long as it is not in actual operation, no one cares or notices how far consolidation and combination goes. now by the laws of competition, when the number of competing units is small, competition is intense and wasteful, and acts to so reduce the returns from industry that combination and the establishment of a monopoly are a natural sequence. evidently this result can only be prevented by some interference outside the industry itself. if we allow it to take its own course, a monopoly is certain, sooner or later, to be formed. but the only agency which has the right and power to interfere is government. the question then is, can government successfully interfere to prevent intense competition from bringing about monopoly? in order to do this it must of course keep competition in action; but it cannot do this directly. competition is essentially a strife. no law was ever enacted which could force two men to fight if they were really determined to be at peace. no law was ever enacted which could force two manufacturers or merchants to compete with each other in price, if they really were agreed to sell at the same price. the common-law principle that contracts in restraint of competition are void, so often appealed to nowadays, has really but slight power. it merely prevents the parties who make an agreement to restrain competition, from enforcing such agreements in court. attempts have also been made to apply this principle to secure an annulment of the charter of corporations which engage in monopolistic combinations. even if this be successful, the only result probable is that private parties instead of corporations will carry on the monopolies in a few cases, while in most cases the competition-destroying agreements will be made so secretly that it will be impossible to prove their existence. it is thus plain that the action of the government in declaring the restriction of competition to be illegal is wholly ineffectual to check the growth of monopoly. and, further, the fact is that it is hardly possible for the government to take any more extreme stand in the matter. let us suppose that it does declare, not only that these combinations are against public policy, but that they shall be punished. then would it be a punishable offence for two country grocers who had been selling sugar below cost to agree that henceforth they would charge a uniform price and make an eighth of a cent per pound! it is to be remembered that _competition_ necessitates _action_. can the government, therefore, _compel_ a man to compete, to cut prices below his neighbors, or to carry on his business at all, if he does not choose to do so? such a law would establish the government's right to regulate the conduct of purely private business to a degree never before known. such a law to protect the theory of individualism would be a most flagrant infringement of the rights of individuals. it is plain, then, that government cannot possibly keep up competition by direct action. whether it is possible to do so by indirect means is a much harder question. monopoly results, as we have found, from the intensity of competition. if it is possible to modify the intensity, to keep the candle from burning itself out too quickly, so to speak, it is possible that competition may be kept alive by legislative enactment. so far, practically nothing has been done in this direction, and it remains yet to be seen what remedies of this sort may accomplish. a pertinent example of an attempt by the government to keep competition alive is the interstate commerce law. before its passage the railway companies had a patched-up and nominally illegal species of combination to restrict competition, known as pooling. as described by president charles francis adams of the union pacific railway, "it was merely a method through which the weaker corporations were kept alive." the interstate law prohibited this restriction of competition, and also, by enactment of the long-and short-haul clause, made the competition more widespread and injurious to the railways. as a result an astonishing impetus has been given to the growth of the great systems and the consolidation of the minor competing roads. more than that, however, the great increase in the intensity of competition has done so much to drain the resources of the companies and injure their revenues, that some measure for uniting all the railroads of the country under one management is now being seriously planned by many men in railroad circles. thus this result, which was probably inevitable, has doubtless been hastened many years by the action of the law. the means taken to intensify competition has operated, as might have been expected, to hasten the complete establishment of monopoly. we have now found that monopoly is the inevitable result of the concentration of competition in any industry in a few hands, if events are allowed to take their natural course; that the only agent which has either the right or the power to interfere in the case is the government,--national, state, or municipal; that government cannot punish directly those who form combinations to restrict competition, without exercising to an unprecedented degree its right to interference with private affairs; while its attempt to deter men from establishing monopolies by refusing its protection to them in their contracts to restrict competition has proved to be but a slight hindrance to the growth of monopoly. there are, then, but two ways of preventing monopoly from establishing itself and laying such a tax upon the people at large for the supply of the commodity which it controls as it chooses. the first is, action to reduce the intensity of competition so that the weaker competitors may maintain their independence and not be forced to consolidate with their stronger rivals. the second is, action to permit or encourage the establishment of monopoly, and regulate by some means other than competition the prices which it shall charge for the products and the quality of product which it shall supply. these two general classes of remedies which we find to be feasible we will discuss here only in a general way. the first, reduction in the intensity of competition, has hardly been tried in any form, and we cannot yet say what practical means should be taken to put it into effect. we will return to this at a later period in our discussion. the second remedy is the one towards whose adoption we are rapidly working. state and interstate commissions have already been established to regulate railway monopolies; and in general it is true that the people who feel the burden of monopolies are looking to the government for relief, and expect it to take positive action for the control of other monopolies as it has for the control of railways. it will be seen that we have now arrived by a study of the various possible remedies for monopoly at the same irresistible conclusion to which we were brought by our study of the laws of competition. _the proper remedy for monopoly is not abolition but control._ it seemed necessary to conduct this independent investigation in order that no blind adherence to individualism and no thought of the possible efficacy of other remedies might lead us to doubt this important truth. we have next to consider the fact that the government can control monopolies in two ways. it can either permit the monopoly to remain under private ownership, and regulate its operations by law and by duly appointed officers; or it can itself assume the entire ownership and control of the monopoly. which of these plans is the better, is a question of public policy over which future political parties are likely to dispute. one party will hold that when it is necessary for the government to interfere to protect those whom it represents from the oppression of monopoly, it should assume at once the whole ownership and management of the monopoly. their opponents will argue that government should interfere only to the extent needful to maintain the rights of the public; and that it is far better that industry should be directed by the private individuals whose interests are at stake than by government officials. to discuss fully the arguments for each of these two principles of our future practice in dealing with monopolies, would be beyond the intended scope of this volume. it can only be briefly said that the arguments presented will certainly indicate that the conditions surrounding each given monopoly will have great weight in determining which policy is the most advantageous. it would be manifestly unwise, for instance, to place our postal facilities under the direction of a corporation, even though its operations were regulated by government. it would be even more unwise to place the operations of the flouring mills of the country in the hands of a department of the government. the important factors to be considered in deciding any given case are, first, the importance and necessity to the public of the service, and, second, the question whether production in the given case is likely to be carried on more economically by the government or by private enterprise. the former has an advantage in that it can secure its capital at a lower rate of interest. the latter, an advantage in that it secures greater efficiency from the labor it employs. other circumstances being equal, it would appear wisest, then, for government to take direct charge of those monopolies in which the greatest amount of capital is invested and the least labor is employed, leaving to private enterprise under government regulation the operation of monopolies in which the opposite set of conditions prevails. as already stated, however, the question is complicated by the social and industrial effects which might follow a large transfer of enterprise from private to governmental direction; and these effects we will not now discuss. xv. the sovereign rights of the people and of their representative, the government. we have now at last deduced the important facts, that the only remedy for the evils of monopoly must come from the popular will, expressed in direct action by the government; that the government may possibly keep competition alive by checking its intensity, or can certainly allow events to take their natural course and permit monopolies to be established. it can then protect the public, either by assuming itself the ownership and operation of the monopoly, or by taking the less radical step of placing the monopoly under official supervision and control while permitting its private ownership to continue. this conclusion is of the utmost importance, for it marks out one single direction as the one in which relief from the evils which vex us may be found. if we can once make the thinking people of the country understand the effect which monopolies have upon their welfare, and that the evil will not cure itself and cannot be cured by attempts to create competition or by any remedy short of direct action by the government, we shall have made a great advance. but with this goal reached, new questions at once present themselves. can the interference of the government with private industries be defended? how shall government exercise its control, so as to protect the people without infringing vested property rights and discouraging private enterprise? it may be objected, too, that, while our preceding discussion has fully proved the weakness of other methods of dealing with monopoly, compared with that by the direct action of government, it has not been shown that the latter is practicable, or that it would not be likely to result in more harm than good to the people at large. these questions are coming before the people in a thousand practical forms. they are being fought over in courts and legislatures and councils, and are destined to be fought over at the polls. how important their right decision is, we have already seen. let us make some attempt to find what this right decision is. in taking up first the question of the rights of private property holders, we touch a point over which there is likely in the future to be serious dispute. a certain faction vigorously contend that past precedents are no ground on which to base future action, and that little attention need be paid to the rights of private owners if the public interest is at stake. a far stronger and more influential faction are jealous of every thing which seems to question their right to hold and use their property in whatever way they see fit. but certainly, if their claims are just, they need not fear the result of that investigation which every idea we have inherited from former generations has in these days to receive. it would be beyond the scope of our investigation to make any exhaustive study of this subject, but it is necessary to note some of the important facts in connection with property rights as light upon the question at issue. in the first place, it must be conceded that the question is to be decided upon its merits, and not by precedent. it is of little use for one faction to show, as they can, that the idea of private property is largely of modern growth; or for their opponents to prove, as they may, that the progress of law and government has been continually toward better protection of the rights of property. the question must be, on what grounds of inherent right or public expediency is property held to-day in private ownership? distasteful as it may be, to realize that what has been considered a fundamental principle of civilized society is here challenged and put upon the defensive, the fact remains that the defence must be made, and must be based only on what is just and wise to-day, for the opposing side may properly reject arguments based on the wholly different conditions under which past generations lived. the question of the rights of property in the products of labor we may pass briefly, as it is almost undisputed; and while certain thinkers have asserted that there is no such thing as a natural right to the ownership of property of any sort, it seems certain that this is true only in a technical sense; and that a man's right to hold, control, dispose of, and enjoy the fruits of his own strength or skill is as certain as his right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and follows from that right as a natural sequence. the most radical revolutionist hardly ventures nowadays to argue against this fact. thus, though it is recognized that private property even in one's own strength and skill must, at times, be subjected to the higher law of public necessity--as when in time of war a man may be obliged to give up his time, strength, and even life for the public welfare--in general the right to hold the results of labor as private property is well established, on the grounds both of natural right and public expediency. but when we consider the private ownership of the gifts of nature and of public franchises, it is apparent that we are on very different ground. these forms of property, which constitute a great proportion of the world's total wealth, are not created by labor. nature's gifts were not stored up to enrich and benefit any one man, but the whole race. it follows, therefore, that they are always, in the first instance, public property. the argument presented to prove any inherent right of the private owners to any form of natural wealth seem to be insufficient to prove the case. the fact seems to be that the inherent right to the benefit of every one of nature's gifts is vested, if perfect equity were established, in the whole human race; or, as a reasonable approach to this, in that portion of the public to whom this gift is a direct benefit. the title which the public holds may be transferred to private individuals, as a matter of expediency; but the public must still retain a prior claim upon the property. its right to have the property used for the general welfare, transcends the right of any private owner to direct it solely to his own profit and the public injury. it is thus plain that the private ownership of our natural wealth and of all public franchises rests on the grounds of expediency alone. all the lands and mineral wealth, all franchises for railway lines and for the various public works discussed in the chapters on municipal monopolies were the heritage of the whole people in the first instance, and they have only transferred the title to private owners because it seemed expedient so to do. on the grounds of expediency alone, then, is the private ownership of natural wealth to be considered. it can hardly be doubted that in the case of our own country, the transfer to private owners of the title to our natural resources has been in the past the wisest and only proper course. it is a fact not often realized that the title to nearly all the natural wealth of the country, almost all the lands and mines and forests, has been held directly by the public within a century, and that the transfer to private owners of a great part of it has taken place within a generation. the question now comes: did the public, in transferring the title to a private owner, relinquish all its right to the future control of these valuable properties, as a private owner would have done? the answer must be in the negative. regarded simply as a matter of expediency, it is plain that to cause the act of any public official to bind all succeeding generations, living under dissimilar conditions and circumstances, which were then unknown and unprophesied, might result in unbearable evils. necessary as it might be at the start to give away valuable properties to meet present needs, one generation or its representatives has no conceivable right to sell for a mess of pottage the heritage of all succeeding ones. the fact is, then, that the natural title to all gifts of nature is vested in the public at large; and while it is in duty bound to observe the contracts which it makes with private parties, it is also not to be thought that the dishonesty or incompetence of a public official, or the failure to foresee the future, can work for too long a time an injury to the community. it seems certain that, in every case where the public has transferred to private owners the title to any gift of nature, or has conferred any franchise upon a corporation, under whatever conditions, the right of supreme control still remains with the natural owner, the public; and when the need arises, this control may be exercised. the rights of the owners and the contract obligations into which the public has entered should be regarded so far as possible; but when the public necessity demands, control on its behalf can always be exercised. this may seem like a formidable and revolutionary doctrine, but, in reality, it is based on every-day acts of the public representatives, with which every one is familiar. suppose it is conceived to be for the public interest that a certain railway shall be built. to do this it is necessary to cross many hundred tracts of land, the title to which was many years ago transferred by the public to private owners who have bought and sold since then as they pleased, as if their control were absolute. many of the owners of these lands may be opposed to parting with the right of way necessary for a railroad, but their private wishes must not stop the progress of improvements necessary to the general welfare. the state, which has the natural title, asserts its right to supreme control; and, if necessary, will use all its power to force these private owners to relinquish their land for the public good. this is the commonest example of the exercise of the right of eminent domain, but other cases frequently occur. the laying out of city streets, building public bridges, and, in fact, highways of every class, furnish a similar example. provision of public water supply often requires an exercise of this power even more positive than in the cases just cited. by the construction of one great reservoir to store the flow of the croton water-shed for the supply of new york city, it is proposed to condemn the dwellings and lands now owned and occupied by several thousand people. it is to be noted that, in every case, the rights of the private owners are observed, and compensation is made them for the damage done. under the common law the owner of lands bordering a running stream has certain rights to its use; and these riparian rights, as they are called, have been established by precedent for centuries. but, in the state of colorado, it was found that the water in the streams was of such value for irrigation that the old system of permitting private ownership of these riparian rights led to grave abuses. the state constitution, therefore, declares that all water in running streams is the inalienable property of the whole people, and the system providing for its use by private parties is based on this principle. so much for the power of the public to exercise its supreme control, when public exigency requires, over nature's gifts in land and water. as an example of the supreme control of the public over the franchises which it grants, take the case of the railway again. it is well established that the public has the right through its legal representatives to regulate the management and operation of the railway in every detail; and not only that, but the rates which the railway may charge for its services as well. many other examples might be given, for the necessities of the present decade have awakened men as never before to the facts which we have just discussed. the final conclusion must inevitably be that _the public as the sole possible holder of the natural title to the gifts of nature, while it may find it expedient to transfer this ownership to private owners, retains always supreme control, which may be exercised as the public exigency demands_. we have next to determine in what cases the exercise by the public of this right of supreme control over its heritage is demanded. we are greatly aided here, however, by the thorough study we have made of the laws of competition. it is evident at once that competition in the case of natural agents acts according to the laws already found. agricultural land in this country is so abundant and its ownership is so widely diffused that any monopoly of it is now impossible. each farmer competes with every other farmer, and the extension of transportation facilities has so broadened the field of competition that in no industry is the day when the few competing units shall replace the many, and monopoly shall ensue, farther off than in this. in great britain and ireland opposite conditions prevail. a limited amount of land is held by a few owners, and its rental is fixed without competition; consequently the land question has been almost, if not quite, the chief issue in british politics during this decade. if we examine nature's gifts to the world in the shape of metals, we find iron to be so widely distributed that competition has always acted to reduce profits, and that combinations to restrict competition in the production of the metal have only recently become even possible. on the other hand, the workable deposits of copper are so scarce and the number of competitors in its production is so much smaller, that it has become the subject of the greatest monopoly the world has ever seen. with these examples--and any number of others might be cited--is it not plain enough that the laws of competition are exactly applicable to aid in solving the problem? the smaller the number of competing units, the stronger the tendency to monopoly. certain gifts of nature are given to us in profusion. the people transfer the title to private owners, and of these there must of necessity be so many that they will compete steadily with each other. the consequence is that the people receive the benefit from the country's natural resources, while the private owner gets only enough to compensate him reasonably well for the labor he employs and the capital which he invests. certain other gifts of nature are, as we have found, very scarce; the number of men who can own and use them and compete with each other in offering their advantages to the public is necessarily small. the inevitable result of this condition is, first, intense competition and then monopoly. it is thus evident that there is no necessity for the state to interfere with the private ownership of those gifts of nature which are so widely distributed that competition can act for the protection of the public. as regards those other gifts which are so limited in their extent that their control has become a matter of monopoly, the right of the public to exercise its control is already proven. whether in any given case the exigency is so great as to call for the assertion of this power, is a question which must be decided in each case separately. it may be objected, with truth, that nothing short of the actual ownership of all nature's gifts by the public is in accord with absolutely perfect justice; but as a matter of fact every human work carried out by human hands and brains is only an approach to perfection. it will never be possible by any human agency to distribute the wealth production of the world with absolute equity. a careful writer says: "the view that the right of every human being to his share in the gifts of nature should be recognized is not an unreasonable one." but by no system possible of putting into practical execution can these gifts be equitably divided among all men. what can be done is to cause the benefit of these gifts to be widely distributed, and to prevent them from being monopolized for the benefit of a few. the fact maybe alluded to, that even under widespread competition the holders of the most favorably situated and richest lands, mines, etc., receive a benefit which in absolute equity should be divided among all men. but the vastly more important matter of the monopolies which prevent the public from obtaining the benefit of the natural resources to which it holds an inalienable title, so overshadows such trivial injustices that they may be neglected. so much attention has been called of late, however, to the fact that land as a gift of nature should, if absolute justice were done, have the benefit from its use equally divided among all men, that something further on this subject may be said. let us first note the fact, which no one will dispute, that the title held by the public refers only to the "site value." the value of all improvements which are the product of labor belongs to the owner by natural right. now it is conceivable that of the total value of $ , , , at which the farms of the united states were valued at the last census, $ , , , may perhaps have been the value of the land apart from the value of the buildings and improvements made since the country was settled. in there were at least , , farmers who owned agricultural lands. it is a well-known fact that the holding of agricultural land in large parcels is the rare exception. we may reasonably conclude, therefore, that the "site value" held by each farmer was about $ , . this is the sum which in absolute equity is said to belong to the public at large. but let us reflect that each farmer has only received a small proportion of this $ , through the increase in the value of his land. the fact is that the land which at first was actually valueless has increased in value with each generation, and it is this increase alone, apart from the increase due to the betterments, after which the public has any right to inquire. remembering the number of sales and changes in the ownership which take place in this country, how often the benefits which have accrued to a single property are divided up among a number of heirs, and that each owner represents on the average a family of three individuals, it seems reasonable to suppose that this increase in the "site value" of each farm may have been divided among twenty different persons. thus, while the statement may be made that the public has a claim upon the farms of the country of $ , , , , it must be remembered that this sum has been divided among about , , different people, and that this division has been in progress for over two centuries. when the benefits of our natural resources are so widely distributed as this, there can be little occasion to alarm ourselves regarding injustice through the private control of farming lands. this, however, is somewhat apart from our argument. the main point, of which we must not lose sight, is that the private ownership of those gifts of nature which are widely distributed operates to the general benefit of the community far more than any system of public ownership that could be devised. but, on the other hand, in the case of natural agents limited in amount, it is practically certain that sooner or later a monopoly will be established by their private owners, to the serious detriment of the public at large. the sovereign right of the public in this latter case to take such steps as are necessary for its proper protection, is something which both _a priori_ reasoning and judicial decisions amply prove. the great problem of monopoly would be a far easier one to solve, both theoretically and practically, were it as easy to regulate justly those forms of monopoly whose strength lies in combination only, as it is those whose power depends on the possession of gifts of nature, which we have just considered. in dealing with trusts, monopolies in trade, and labor monopolies, we are in danger, on the one hand, of sanctioning oppressive interference with private business, and on the other of permitting a license in the conduct of private business which encourages its managers to continue to extort unjust gains from the public. in the face of this difficulty, which careful consideration shows to be very serious, and in the dread of other evils, such as the government proving incompetent to safely undertake these new and strange responsibilities, we may well feel like trying to get along with the aid of those old defenses against monopolies that have always, until the modern concentration of industry was accomplished, been ample to hold them in check. but the one argument which prevents this is the fact that this tendency to concentration and consolidation is still actively at work. in the words of prof. ely: "production on the largest possible scale will be the only practical mode of production in the near future." it is for this reason that we must not cease to look about for some better protection against this new class of monopolies than are afforded by merely placing stumbling-blocks in their way. we shall have need, for many years yet, of such weapons in fighting monopoly as the public is already familiar with; the creation of new competitors and their support by public opinion, judicial decisions against combinations, and the like. but before these grow absolutely useless, we ought to be prepared to meet the new conditions of industry with something better than mere opposition; and even now be experimenting and studying upon a permanent and consistent policy. in attempting to control monopolies which are not dependent on natural agents for their strength, we are met at once by the declaration that the government has no power or right to interfere with property which is the product of labor; and that the owner cannot be prevented from making such disposition of it as he chooses. the president and counsel of the sugar trust said after judge barrett's decision was announced: "we do not believe that the law prevents two persons engaged in rivalry with each other from uniting their interests." this seems indeed true; and yet, on reflection, it appears to be absolutely certain that power must reside in the sovereign people to protect themselves from the unjust taxation which a monopoly may seek to enforce. let us brush away cobwebs and set the facts clearly before us. that competition among producers is the sole present protection of the public against extortionate prices is undoubted. when by combination this defense is abolished, has not the public a right to adopt some other means of protection? there can be no doubt that it has; the only question is, what form should that protection take? it must be plain that, as a general rule, it is unfitting that government should own and operate industrial establishments. practical experience has indicated that this experiment is wellnigh certain to result in failure, for reasons so evident as to require no mention here. the only alternative remaining is government regulation with private ownership and management. the essential features in the adoption of any plan should be that the returns of the private owner should be in proportion to the skill and economy which he exercises in managing his business; that competition and its resulting waste be done away with; and that the industry be placed on such a safe and stable basis that the capital invested in it shall receive the lowest possible rate of interest, thus leaving the greatest possible amount for the payment of wages of labor and permitting sales of the product at a low price. xvi. practical plans for the control of monopolies. the investigation of the preceding chapters, leading up to the final conclusion that the proper and only wise remedy for the evils of monopoly lies in direct action of the government to protect the rights of the people, finishes the chain of our argument and really accomplishes the work laid out in the opening chapter. the laws which we have found to govern competition in modern industry are so far-reaching in their effects, and their correct apprehension by the people at large is so important to the general welfare, that economists ought to unite in recognizing and teaching their truth, while all who desire to work for the alleviation of present crying evils of society should understand these laws and be guided by them. in the practical application of these truths, however, so many complicated details are involved that there is ample reason for the widest differences of opinion. to decide intelligently upon these practical methods demands special knowledge, in order that all necessary details may be provided for, and rare practical judgment to adapt the method to the means at hand. the investigations which the author has pursued in the preparation of the preceding chapters and for certain other purposes have suggested to him certain principles in the practical execution of plans for the control of various monopolies, which seem to him necessary to success in the work. well understanding the fallibility of any one man's judgment, especially in these matters of detail, he has determined to outline in a brief way what seem to him the most feasible plans for the control of each class of monopolies. these suggestions, however, are to be regarded in an entirely different light from the general laws propounded in the preceding chapters; and they are presented with a full knowledge of the fact that slight variations in circumstances may necessitate wide changes in plans and processes. taking up the monopolies which by their use of natural agents or their exercise of a franchise granted by the public, are already acknowledged to be subject to the public control, let us consider first the railway system. the two years in which the interstate commerce law has been in force have seen a great progress toward the final solution of this problem, even though railway affairs are at present in so unsatisfactory a condition. the important features of our future policy which now seem to be quite generally understood are: full state and national control over both tariff rates and facilities; the abolition of competition, either by consolidation or by legalized agreements to that end; and strict prohibition of the construction of parallel lines not warranted by the traffic. that we are working very rapidly in this direction, no one will deny who is familiar with the progress of legislation affecting railway interests and with the opinions of railway men. evidently, however, government cannot justly take so prominent a part in railway management without becoming in some degree responsible to railway stock- and bond-holders for the protection of their interests; and it is a difficult question to say in what manner this responsibility should be met. it has been the intention of the author in devising the following plan for the control of our railway system to make this responsibility a definite one, and not leave it as now, a vague constitutional right. for according to the law at present, state and national legislators may make laws to vary the receipts and expenditures of the railway companies as much as they please, and the only redress of the railway owner is an appeal to the courts, the judges of which must decide whether the company's revenue is so injured that its legal rights are infringed. space will not permit here a full statement of the many serious evils and abuses with which our present system of railway management is burdened. the study which the author has made of them has convinced him of their importance and magnitude. the following plan is designed to permit their remedy as well as to remedy the special evils of monopoly with which our present investigation is concerned: let the government acquire the title to the franchise, permanent way, and real estate of all the railway lines in the country. let a few corporations be organized under government auspices; and let each, by the terms of its charter, receive a perpetual lease of all the railway lines built or to be built within a given territory. let the territory of each of these corporations be so large and so planned with regard to its neighbors that there shall be, so far as possible, no competition between them. for instance, one corporation would operate all lines south of the ohio and east of the mississippi rivers; another all lines east of the hudson and of lake champlain, etc. let the terms of rental of these lines be about ¼ per cent. on the road's actual "present cost" (the sum of money it would cost to rebuild it entirely at present prices of material and labor) less a due allowance for depreciation. the corporations would be obliged to keep the property in as good condition as when received, and would own absolutely all their rolling stock, machinery, etc. it is not proposed, however, that the government shall own any interest in the railways save the legal title. bonds would be issued to the full amount of the appraised valuation, running twenty-five years and bearing interest at per cent., principal and interest guaranteed by the government, and these would be sold to the highest bidder. thus the real ownership of the roads would be vested in the bondholders. as is well known, there is a great and fast increasing need for investments of absolute safety, even though they bear very low rates of interest. this is especially desirable for the continuance of our national banking system, in order to insure us a safe, stable, and ample currency. such bonds would find a market at a premium as fast as offered. it would not even be necessary that the money to pay the interest coupons should pass through the government's hands. the operating company would pay it directly to the bond-holder and at the same time the ¼ of per cent. would be paid into the government treasury. the object in making the bonds run for no longer time than twenty-five years, when it is intended that the whole value of the road shall be perpetually held in the form of bonds, is that at proper intervals a revaluation may be made of the improvements to the road and the interest charges may be readjusted to correspond with the general change in the income from capital. when the bonds fall due, a new block would be issued and sold to the highest bidder. the interest rate should be set at such a point that the bonds could be sold at a premium. these premiums, with the ¼ of per cent. on the bonds, paid by the operating company to the government, (which we may regard as a legitimate fee to the government for its guaranty) should form a government railway fund. this should be used, first, to defray the expenses of the government department of railways, and second, to pay the deficit when on any line the net receipts after operating expenses are paid are insufficient to pay the rental. the remainder should be expended in making improvements and additions to the railway system, such as building new bridges and stations, and improving the line, the cost of which, however, should be represented by additional bonds at the end of the twenty-five-year term. the amount of income should be so regulated, by varying the rate of interest on new bonds, that the sum remaining for the last purpose may be about sufficient for usual needs. the whole administration of the receipt and expenditure of this fund should be vested in the government department of railways. in this way the danger that the whole work of this government department might be blocked through the neglect of congress to make necessary appropriations, would be avoided. the readjustment of existing stocks and bonds presents difficulties which will be considered in very different ways by different classes of persons. the "granger" element, for instance, would cut off the holder of "watered stock" with a shilling. fortunately, if we take time enough, we can arrange this matter with no shadow of injustice. to illustrate: the government can purchase the a. b. & c. road outright at its market value, which, owing to inflated prices and watered securities, is perhaps $ , , . it is desired to wipe out $ , , of this to place the road upon its proper basis. the government issues per cent. guaranteed ten-year bonds upon the road and leases it at an annual rental of per cent. on what it has paid. at the time the bonds are due, the accumulation of rentals over interest is more than sufficient to pay off $ , , of the bonds, while the remainder are renewed on the permanent basis. the author is well aware that a very strong prejudice exists against the lending by the government of its credit to private corporations. this prejudice--which has perhaps already been sufficient to condemn the plan, as thus far presented, in the mind of the reader--he believes to be a very wise and well founded one. the assumption by the government of any risk in connection with corporate enterprise is highly undesirable. it is now to be noted that this objection is wholly overcome; for, notwithstanding the fact that the government guarantees the bonds of the railways, it is not proposed that it shall really assume any risk, as will be seen from the further description of the powers and obligations of the operating corporations. these should be essentially private companies, but there should be two or three representatives of the government on the board of directors. they should be required to operate the roads in a safe, efficient, and economical manner, and to keep accurate and simple records, open to the inspection of the government commissioners, of the receipts and expenditures on every separate line of road. the rates of fare and freight should be, first of all, stable. when once fixed they should neither be raised nor lowered except by the direction of the government railway commissioners. next--and this is the cardinal feature of the whole plan--it should be the endeavor to fix the rates of fare and freight at such a point that the total receipts would be sufficient, first, to pay the whole expense of operating and maintaining the road; second, to pay the annual rental of ¼ per cent. interest on the cost of the road; and, third, an annual dividend to the stockholders of the operating company of from to per cent. the capital stock of the operating company should be fixed by law at about ¼ times the actual cost of rolling stock and machinery. the operating company should be allowed to issue only one class of securities, and these should represent at par the actual cash capital invested by the operating company. under this plan it is evident that every community would pay its equitable share of the cost of transportation, since the rates would be based on the cost of service.[ ] instead of roads running along, bankrupt for years, as now, we would have every community paying for its transportation facilities just what it cost to furnish them. but if, on any road, such a rule would raise the rates above a certain prescribed maximum point, then the rate could be lowered, if necessary, to a point where it was only great enough to pay the operating expenses; and part or all the bond interest would be paid out of the government railway fund. [ ] it should be explained that it is only proposed to base the _rates as a whole_ upon the cost of service. as regards the relative rates on different commodities, the author, in common with all who have given careful study to the question, recognizes that the only equitable principle for proportioning rates is the much maligned one of "charging [in proportion to] what the traffic will bear." the argument against this principle is so very plausible that, until he had given the subject thorough study he held a diametrically opposite opinion. to make plain to the reader that this is really the only equitable principle, the following illustration may serve: a coal-mine operator and a sewing-machine manufacturer build together a railroad to carry their respective products to a market. they will fix the total rates of freight at such a point as to just pay the cost of service; but it is required to find what relative rates each should be equitably charged on the shipments from his works. evidently, to have the rates perfectly equitable, they must be in exact proportion to the _benefit_ which each party derives from the use of the road. but this benefit which each derives is _measured_ by the profits which each makes from his business; and this profit, in turn, is the measure of the amount each can afford to pay for the use of the road,--that is to say, "what the traffic will bear." _q. e. d._ "but," the objector says, "is it not true that when you limit the profits of the companies and base rates on cost of service you take away all incentive to economy and careful operation? the public, and not the company, gain if the cost of service is reduced; so why should the manager exert himself to economize? this very same principle has been tried. many states have chartered railway corporations, and provided that fares and freight rates should be reduced when dividends exceeded a certain per cent., or else that a percentage of the surplus earnings, above the amount necessary to earn, say per cent. dividends, should be paid into the state treasury. of course the railway corporations who have been able to earn surplus dividends which they were not permitted to pay, have been sharp enough to spend their surplus on their own property instead of turning it over to the state treasury. how is it possible, then, to base rates on cost of service and still leave the incentive to economy, frugality, and efficiency which exists, when the corporation is permitted to make all the profits it can?" to discover a means of overcoming this difficulty, let us see how it is overcome under competition. a man invents a new machine, for instance, which effects a saving in the cost of some manufacturing process of per cent. one manufacturer adopts it because it greatly increases his profits, and one by one his competitors follow suit. the competition between them cuts the prices lower and lower, till finally the consumers of the goods get all the benefit from the saving effected by the new machine, and the manufacturers' profits are no greater than they were originally. but the important point to be noted is this, that the benefit to the manufacturer continued long enough to repay him for introducing the machine. so in our attempts to base railway rates upon cost of service, we must permit the profit from the introduction of economies, the use of improved appliances, etc., to be gathered by the railway company long enough to induce it to work toward that end. all we need to do to effect this end is to _somewhat delay_ the change in rates to correspond to change in cost of service. as already stated, it is most necessary that rates should be _stable_, and it is proposed to make any change, either advance or reduction, only through the action of a government commission. now, suppose that some such clause as this forms a part of our railway law: "upon the petition of any railway corporation, or of not less than twenty-five patrons of any single 'railway district,' it shall be the duty of the railway commission to investigate regarding a readjustment of rates to correspond more closely to the cost of service. if it shall be found that in the given 'railway district' the net receipts over the operating expenses and fixed charges have been for one year not less than per cent. on the capital of the operating company invested in the given railway district; and that for two successive years they have been not less than per cent.; or, if they have been for one year per cent., and for two years per cent., and it shall be proven to the satisfaction of the commission, that any due and proper measure of economy, to which the attention of the officers was called in writing has been wilfully neglected, or that any uncalled for and manifestly extravagant expenditures have been entered into during that time, then it shall be the duty of the commission to lower the rates. if it shall be found that for one year the net earnings have been less than ½ per cent., and for two years less than ½ per cent., unless it shall be proven that this deficit has been fostered by neglect of due economy, or by extravagant expenditure as aforesaid, the rates shall be raised. in all cases where rates are readjusted, it shall be the endeavor of the commission to set them at such a point that the net earnings will equal per cent. on the capital stock." the provision requiring two years of excess or deficiency before a change, would be necessary to avoid the fluctuations which occur in single seasons. every piece of economy is so much gain to the stockholders, and its benefit is received for at least two years. it must be remembered that in any railway corporation, as at present conducted, none but the highest of the managing officials have any personal interest in the profit from operations. it may well be believed, therefore, that the measure of economy and efficiency effected would be at least as great as now. as this plan also contemplates government representation on the board of directors, any action by the higher officials to evade the law would be unlikely to occur. the receipts of a company operating say , miles of railway and carrying its traffic at fixed rates would vary but little from year to year; and its stock would be so largely held by investors and would vary so little in price that there would be very little speculation in it. to bankrupt the company would be an impossibility, since its receipts would always be regulated to preserve its revenue, although not so strictly but that the company would still have every incentive to cultivate traffic by offering good facilities, and to economize at the same time by the introduction of improved methods. no doubt it can be shown where every detail of the foregoing plan leaves loop-holes for abuses to creep in. it will be much the same with any plan whatever. the questions to be asked are, would abuses, waste and stealing be any more likely to occur than under any other plan? could they be any more prevalent than they are now,--bearable only because we are calloused to them? of course, the foregoing is a mere outline of the general principles of the plan. details which readily suggest themselves would, of course, be necessary to carry out the principle successfully. that some attempt should be made in this connection to solve the perplexing problem of strikes on railway lines is proven by the memorable engineers' strike on the chicago, burlington, & quincy system. perhaps a provision requiring every employé and officer to hold at least a certain number of shares in the operating company in proportion to his salary would help to solve the labor problem; and it might give the higher officers a greater interest in their work than they always show. the author has deemed it worth while to outline the foregoing plan for the equitable control of railway monopolies with considerable fulness, because, to a very great extent, the principles followed in the design of this plan are applicable to a great number of other monopolies. these important principles are: ( ) government protection to the owners of fixed capital so that the public may obtain the use of it at the lowest possible rate of interest. ( ) the operation of monopolies by corporations rather than by the government, thus securing the increased efficiency of private over official management. ( ) securing to the people at large the benefit of the monopoly by basing the prices for its product on cost of service. ( ) but leaving a suitable incentive for the company's managers to maintain economy and efficiency in its operations. ( ) government representation in the directorate controlling the ordinary affairs of the company. it is evident that the plan just outlined for railways would be especially well adapted, with but slight changes, for the control of the telegraph lines of the country. * * * * * we will next consider the monopolies discussed in chapter iii. it seems too plain to need proof that our mines and quarries are certain to have a steady increase in value as we use up the easily worked surface deposits and have to dig deeper shafts and develop the poorer deposits to supply the demand. in the case of any metals or minerals of which the deposits are so abundant, easily worked, and widely scattered, that the number of evenly matched competitors is great enough to ensure steady competition, the public will get the benefit of the especial gift of nature, and its owner can receive little more than an ordinary return for his labor and capital. but, as we have already amply shown, in the production of a great number of minerals and metals competition has been killed, or is heavily handicapped by the vast advantages of a few bonanza mines, and the public is being taxed millions of dollars for that which belongs to it by right. how long is this condition to continue? must all succeeding generations pay for coal, copper, zinc, lead, nickel, marble, oil, gas, and various other products of our mother-earth just what those who control the chief deposits choose to ask? because a pioneer stumbles upon a valuable mine, shall the sole right to use the product of that mine be secured "to him, his heirs and assigns" forever? suppose, now, that each of the several states were to acquire the title to all the productive mines, quarries, and mineral wealth within its borders, and enact laws providing that future discoverers of minerals on land where they are not now known to exist should be liberally rewarded, if the discovery proved valuable, but the minerals should belong to the state and not to the owner of the land. the same principle which we found to apply in the case of the railways would serve here in readjusting values, viz.: the difference in the rates of interest on safe investments and on risky ones. when acquired, the mines should be leased to private parties for operation. in the case of coal-mines and perhaps of iron, it would be well to copy largely from the scheme proposed for railway operation, viz.: place all the business in the hands of a single company, which should thus be enabled to carry on its business on the largest possible scale; do away with wasteful competition, and aim to regulate prices to provide a certain reasonable steady income on its capital to the mining company. for mines of copper, zinc, lead, and similar metals, it would be best to pursue a different plan, and simply provide by statute that such mines should be leased for short terms of years to the bidder who would offer to sell his product at the lowest price per ton at the mines, all lettings and relettings to be publicly advertised, and the successful bidder to give bonds for the faithful performance of his contract. it is difficult to see how, under these conditions, a combination to defeat competition could be formed. relettings of expired leases would be frequent; and bidding by the _selling price_, a single competitor would be sufficient to break any combination. of course the lease should specify a minimum product which the mine should furnish. it would be advisable, too, that a manifest duty of the government, which should be undertaken even under present conditions, should be observed. it should be required to work the mine with due attention to saving the greatest possible amount of ore or mineral contained in the seam or vein. the third class of monopolies, whose legal subjection to public control is acknowledged, are those connected with our municipal public works. there is already a widespread movement toward taking the control and operation of these out of the hands of private corporations, and placing it directly with the city government, and progress in this direction is very rapid. the author believes, however, that the general law already stated is applicable here. if the public works of states and of the nation are more economically and efficiently managed when in the hands of private parties, it is surely unwise, as a general rule, to entrust the operation of municipal works to the average city official. while it is in the highest degree desirable that water-works, gas, and electric-lighting plants, street railways, and the other municipal enterprises, discussed in chapter v., should be _owned_ by the municipality, their operation, in cases where the employment of considerable labor and the carrying on of intricate business and mechanical operations is involved, should in general be entrusted to private companies. in every case where the financial condition of the municipality obliges it to rely at first upon private corporations for the construction and ownership of its public works, the franchise should expire at the end of a short term of years, and the city should then have the privilege of purchasing the works at their actual cost. as regards works for water supply, there can be little doubt that almost invariably the municipality should operate as well as own the works, for the administration of the works requires but a small amount of labor, and that of such a class that the city can safely carry it on. but gas or electric-light plants, both for street and resident lighting, should be operated by private companies. these industries are making such rapid progress in the way of new processes, effecting both economy and improvement, that it is somewhat difficult to say what steps should be taken. many are of the opinion that gas is destined to be entirely replaced by the electric light; but while this may eventually prove true, it will probably be a very long time before the existing gas-works cease to supply consumers. thus the true solution of the problem seems to be that when a growing town nowadays wishes to establish a new lighting plant of its own, it should adopt electricity. but in the case of a town having gas-works already established, the municipality is safe in assuming their ownership. as regards the operation of lighting plants in small towns, it would doubtless be best to lease the plant for short terms of years to the highest bidder, making sure that the call for proposals is widely circulated. great cities, however, would find this policy unsatisfactory. if a ten-year lease of the philadelphia gas-works, for instance, were advertised for sale to the highest bidder, there would be but few really close bidders upon it, and the danger of "a combination to defeat competition" would be great. it is at least worth considering whether such a plan as we proposed for railways could not be made feasible here. let a corporation be chartered to operate the lighting plant of the city, and let the charter of the corporation provide that its rates shall be such as to pay an annual dividend upon its capital stock (fixed by law and not changeable) equal to the legal rate of interest in the state. provided, that in no case should the rates be lowered unless the net profits in one year were more than per cent. in excess of this rate, and that the excess for two consecutive years was more than ½ per cent. in excess of this rate. provided also, that in no case should the rates be raised unless the deficit exceeded ½ per cent. in any year, and per cent. for two consecutive years, and that it should be proven by the company that it had exercised all reasonable diligence, care, and economy in the management and operation of its business. a certain proportion of the stock--less than a majority--should be held by the city; and the mayor should appoint directors to represent the city, at least one of whom should be personally conversant with the industry carried on by the company. although not often so considered, the matter of passenger transportation is a much more important matter in our greatest cities than either lighting or water supply. the laboring man, who has to pay perhaps twelve cents for the necessary ride back and forth to his work every day, feels this tax most severely. suppose that under such an arrangement for street railways as we have outlined for gas and electric lighting companies the fare would be reduced to three cents. his savings from this source would amount to at least $ per year. counting the extra rides and those which his wife and children have to take, the annual saving would probably reach $ , a sum which to the average laboring man with a family dependent upon him means a great deal. our municipal monopolies are now taxing us that they may pay swollen dividends on millions of dollars of fictitious capital. it is quite time that the public recovered possession of the valuable franchises which are its rightful property, and managed them for its own benefit. the legal difficulties in regaining the title to these franchises are certainly not insuperable, and the readjustment of capitalization can be made on the principle outlined in the case of steam railways. to illustrate: the city of "polis" purchases the works which supply it with water from the private company owning them, paying the average market value of the stock and bonds during five years past, which amounts, perhaps, to one and one half times the cost of the works. the revenue from the works has been sufficient, probably, to pay per cent. on these securities. the city issues per cent. ten-year bonds to raise funds for the purchase, and it then operates the works so as to gain a yearly revenue of per cent., or per cent. less than that gained by the private company. at the end of ten years the surplus income from the works is enough to pay more than one third the bonded indebtedness; and, if desired, the rest may be reissued as new bonds to run for a long period. the three classes of monopolies just discussed--railways, mineral wealth, and municipal works--include practically all the monopolies which are generally acknowledged to be subject to the public control by virtue of their use of natural agents or the exercise of franchises granted by the public. we will next consider the monopolies in trade, in manufacturing, and in the purchase and sale of labor, to see what steps should be taken to protect them from encroaching on the rights of the people. in exercising the right of the people at large to take control of these purely private industries from the hands of their owners, we are assuming a power which, like a strong medicine, may be as potent for evil as for good. only extreme necessity should sanction its use, and its abuse must be carefully guarded against. it is not saying too much to assert that the abuse of this power has already become an evil. we have become so used to legislation for the benefit of special industries, that legislation for their injury does not seem to be regarded as the exercise of a dangerous prerogative. thus we are threatened with a flood of laws to fix the prices in various industries now subject to monopoly, or to crush them out altogether by enacting some restrictive measure,--legislation which, by its directness, is apt to strike the average lawmaker very favorably, but which, it needs little wisdom to see, is the sure forerunner of abuses. the author trusts that nothing in this book may be construed as advocating or defending some of the crude and ill-considered attempts at anti-monopoly legislation already made, or that may be made in the future. we have proven in the preceding chapters that, from the character of modern concentrated industry, a very large number of our manufactures must either exist as monopolies or else must engage in intense and wasteful competition. if the monopoly can be so managed that it shall carry on the industry economically, adopt improvements, keep up the character of its product, and keep the prices therefor so low as to make no more than ordinary profits, it would be for the public advantage that monopolies rather than competition should exist. can we regulate monopolies to secure such results? if so, our problem will be solved. the author has proposed for the first class of monopolies--those obtaining the benefit of natural agents and public franchises--government ownership of fixed capital and regulation of prices, with private operation and general management. but he is far from believing that such a plan would now be wise for regulating trusts. it may indeed be that, at some time in the future, many of the great staple manufactures will be formally established by the government as monopolies, and controlled in a similar way to that which we have outlined for the railway system; but it is so far in the future that we need not consider it in detail now. under our present political organization it would be practically impossible for the government to undertake to regulate justly and equitably such an industry, for instance, as the steel-rail manufacture. we have set our state, national, and municipal governments a hard enough task in the preceding pages of this chapter, in bringing under public control our monopolies of transportation and communication and our productive mines; and although it is a work possible of accomplishment, it will need good statesmanship to carry it out. by the time that task is accomplished, a similar plan, improved as experience will then suggest, may perhaps be found available for the regulation of the important manufacturing industries. we decide, then, that it is for the public advantage at present that both the ownership and operation of manufacturing industries and of trade must remain in private hands. the next question is, will the greatest advantage to the public be secured by starting a crusade to re-establish competition and break up all existing monopolies in manufacturing and trade; or by taking the opposite course, legalizing monopolies and so regulating them by law that they shall be prevented from making undue profits by laying an exorbitant tax upon the public? practically all the efforts made or proposed thus far for remedying the evils of monopolies in manufacturing and trade have had for their purpose the re-establishment of competition. the investigation to which the first part of this book was devoted shows the wide extent of the movement to restrict competition. is it possible to wholly counteract this? all our study of the laws of competition seems to show that the tendency of modern competition is to destroy itself by its own intensity. certainly all the strenuous efforts to keep it alive by the force of legal enactment and public opinion have thus far proved unavailing. there are now, probably, at least a million persons in the united states who are directly or indirectly interested in unlawful contracts in restraint of competition; and among them are included many of the best financiers and most enterprising business men of the country. certainly those who propose to drive these men into a renewal of competitive strife contrary to their will have set themselves a very difficult task. let us consider the opposite alternative. it cannot be a good thing to have such a great proportion of the active business men of the country, who bear the highest personal character, engaged in illegal contracts. let us therefore take them within the pale of the law. they seem to be determined to make contracts with each other in restraint of competition; and believe, indeed, that they are forced to do it by modern conditions of trade. suppose we were to legalize these contracts and permit the establishment of monopolies. what can we then do to protect the public from extortion in prices and adulteration in its products on the part of the monopoly? in the first place, now that we have legalized monopolies there is no more excuse for secrecy. to work in darkness and privacy befits law-breakers, but is needless for legitimate enterprises. let the law provide that every contract for the restriction of competition shall be in writing, and that a copy shall be filed, as a deed for real estate is filed now, with the proper city or town officer where the property affected is situate, and also with the secretary of state where the contract is made. certainly no honest man will object to this provision. the contention has been made that contracts to restrict competition were necessarily kept secret because they were "without the pale of the law." very well; we have legalized them. there can be no further defense of secrecy. if any now refuse to make public their contracts to restrict competition, the refusal is evidence that the contract is for the injury of the public or some competitor and therefore properly punishable. we shall now know just what monopolies exist; just what is their strength, and for just how long a time their members are bound. let us next see what measures we can adopt to prevent these legalized monopolies from practising extortion upon the public and abusing the power they have gained by the combination. the first important means to secure this which the author would suggest is simply an extension of the common-law principle of non-discrimination. a man in conducting certain sorts of business is permitted to do as he chooses. he may sell to one person and refuse to sell to another; he may give to one and withhold from another. but if he enters business as the keeper of an inn or as a common carrier of passengers or freight, he can no longer exercise partiality. he has _elected to become a necessary servant of the public_, and as such he is bound to serve impartially all who apply. in the same way a manufacturer while he engages in business under the usual laws of competition, may sell to whom he pleases and exercise such preference as he chooses. but when he combines with all other manufacturers of the same sort in a combination to restrict competition, he and his allies voluntarily change their relation to the public. is it not true that they do actually _elect to become necessary servants of the public_--far more necessary, indeed, than the inn-keeper or the stage-coach driver,--and ought they not therefore to be placed under similar legal restrictions? in every case where combination or consolidation restricts competition in an industry, one effect produced is an increase in the power over the public which the industry possesses. but this increased power over the public, thus voluntarily assumed, must inevitably carry with it increased responsibility to the public. it is the duty of the government to see that this responsibility is legally enforced. this first principle, then, should be embodied in a law providing, in substance, that every person or firm entering into a contract to restrict competition should, so long as that contract was in force, be debarred from showing any preference in his or its purchases and sales, by giving more or less favorable prices to any person or firm than those quoted to any other person or firm. to enforce this requirement and prevent its evasion it is necessary to provide also that prices shall be public and that they shall not be altered without due notice. the requirement of publicity might be best effected by providing that the contract restricting competition should contain a schedule of prices, which would usually be the case in any event. while this may seem like quite an assumption of authority on the part of the state, it is exactly what trusts and trade associations are striving to effect, though with the important qualification that when occasion, in the shape of an obnoxious competitor, requires, they wish to be at liberty to put prices up or down at short notice and exercise their preferences as they choose. let us now see what we would effect by the enforcement of this principle of non-discrimination. we have explained in the chapter on combinations in trade how one monopoly gains strength by alliance with another; as when the firms belonging to the car-spring combination made a contract with the steel combination by which that monopoly agreed to sell to them at a reduced price and to make an extra rate to their competitors. under this law it would be impossible to found one monopoly upon the favors of another in this manner. the obnoxious trade boycott, too, which is now becoming so common, would be effectually checked. and the scheme for crushing out a rival by giving all his customers specially favorable rates would no longer be practicable. the fact is that if we can stop the discriminations which the monopolies have practised, we shall cure a large share of the evils they have caused. it may be said that the courts will already punish many conspiracies of this sort; but a monopoly which is already breaking the law by its contracts of combination, finds in its methods of doing business plenty of chances to evade the laws against conspiracy. certainly with a properly drawn law with reference to the publicity and stability of prices, it should be possible to practically wipe out the evil of discrimination by monopolies. it is also to be noted that the requirement of non-discrimination and of public and stable prices would bring profit in doing away with the waste of competition. we have now to inquire what means it is possible to take to ensure that the prices charged by the monopoly shall not only be the same to all, but that they shall not in themselves be so exorbitant that the monopoly will reap large profits at the public expense. how can we keep the prices charged by the monopoly from rising far above the point where they would stand if free competition were in force? two methods are open to us. we may keep down the monopoly's rates by what we will call _potential_ competition, or we may reduce them directly by legislative enactment. the right of the public to take this latter course may be defended on the ground that the monopoly has voluntarily made itself a necessary public servant, and in that capacity offers to the public its goods. while it is true that the people permit the monopoly to become a necessary public servant and protect it in the contracts by which it restricts competition, it is also true that the monopoly cannot justly make merchandise of the necessities of the people. the public may allow a combination to obtain control of all the sugar refineries, for instance, and protect the combination in its formation. but suppose the owners of the combination then say: "the people are obliged to have sugar and we control the supply. we will set a high price on sugar, therefore, because we know that they will pay it rather than go without." they are then making the necessity of the public a source of gain, and it cannot be believed that this will be permanently suffered. the serious difficulty in fixing by direct government action the prices which a monopoly of this sort shall charge, is that we cannot stop at that point. when once the government steps in to do so radical a thing as to fix the price which a monopoly shall charge, it becomes in equity responsible to the owners of that monopoly for the maintenance of their incomes from their capital invested. if their profits have been so reduced by this action as to seriously injure the value of their property, they have a legal right to claim compensation from the state for the injury it has done them. and in almost every case they would set up the claim that their property had been thus injured. to determine the point at which reasonable prices and reasonable profits become extortionate prices and unjust profits is a task requiring expert knowledge and the most comprehensive judgment, aided by the most accurate statistics. to impose this task on our already overburdened courts would permanently block the wheels of justice, and would give to the judicial department of government a work which its machinery is wholly unsuited to carry on. it seems evident, therefore, that when it becomes necessary for the state to directly fix prices to be charged by monopolies, a more radical step should be taken. the monopoly should be established on a permanent basis, and the state should have some part in its direct control. discarding, therefore, direct action by the state to fix prices as inexpedient, for the present, at least, let us see what we can effect by means of "potential" competition, which term we will use to signify that competition which may be established in any monopolized industry if the inducements offered are sufficiently great. it must be remembered that nowadays men of capital and enterprise are always on the look-out for every opportunity to invest money and expend their industry where it will bring the greatest returns. if any monopoly seems to be making large returns, people are generally ready to believe that it is making twice as great profits as it really is; and some one is quite likely to start in as a competitor, if there is a prospect of large profits. now we wish to do two things. we wish to make it so easy for new competitors to enter the field against a monopoly that its managers will keep their profits down in order not to call in any new competitors. we also wish to so modify the intensity of competition between the monopoly and the new competitor that the latter may have a chance at least of being repaid for its expenditure in entering the field. the simplest and best of the legal provisions which we may enforce to this end is the one already stated of non-discrimination. the monopoly can no longer reduce its price to apply to only the limited field in which the new competitor works, but must reduce its prices everywhere to meet those made by the rival. in the case of monopolies in trade and all monopolies in manufacturing in which the fixed capital required is but small, this is all that would be needed to encourage the establishment of new competitors and discourage the monopoly from grasping after undue profits from the public. in the case of those manufacturing monopolies in which a large fixed capital must be invested at the start by any new competitor, we have a much more difficult problem. it is true that in this case the monopoly itself has more at stake; and this may induce the starting up of new competitors simply to be bought out by the trust,--a sort of blackmailing operation which is certainly repugnant in its character. it might be possible to provide that rates charged by the monopoly must be so stable that a competitor would have a chance to establish itself before the monopoly could bring its own rates down. it might be possible to force the monopoly to keep all its factories in operation, and thus oblige it to keep down its price in order to dispose of its products; but there are evident practical difficulties in the way of enforcing such laws. it seems a great pity that just now, when to find some employment of prison convicts in some manner that will not "compete with free labor," and thus displease the labor interests, seems an impossibility, we cannot set the convicts at work to compete with the trusts and bring down their profits to a reasonable point. surely the labor party would find no fault with this use of convict competition. there is one step, however, which we can take, and whose effect would certainly be very great; in its desirability, apart from questions of monopoly, all honest men are practically united. we can reform our laws regarding corporate management. it is a mild arraignment compared to what is deserved, to say that our present laws regarding the formation and management of corporations, taking the country as a whole, are a shame to the people and a disgrace to the men who made them. they seem designed to place a premium on fraud and knavery, and to assist the professional projector and stock manipulator in reaping gains from innocent--generally very innocent--stockholders. now a real reform in our corporation laws would greatly simplify our work in controlling monopolies. let us have no more stock-watering of any sort at any time in a corporation's life. let us have no more "income bonds" which yield no income, and "preferred stock" in which another is preferred after all. two classes of securities are enough for an honest corporation, and the public interest requires the charter of no other class of companies. let us have done, too, with the iniquitous custom of one corporation holding another's stock or bonds. with a few such simple reforms as these effected, the holders of stock in our corporations would have some idea where they stand and what their securities represent, and would take some interest in the control of their property. with these reforms, in the case of every corporation making a contract to restrict competition, it would be required that the company make public annually a full statement of its receipts, expenditures, and profits. every monopoly would stand before the public then in its true position, and every one would know if it were making per cent. per annum on the actual capital invested, or only per cent. with these facts made public, if any monopoly ventured to raise its price till it reaped unusual profits, some of the heaviest consumers of the monopolized product would be very apt to start a factory of their own in opposition. it is to be remembered that under the law of _non-discrimination_ the monopolies would be prevented from currying favor with the large consumers by giving them specially favorable prices. it is now common to do this, as it removes the danger of combination among these important customers to compete with the monopoly. to sum up, the chief features of the plan proposed for the control of monopolies in manufacture and trade are as follows: make contracts to restrict competition, legal and binding, instead of illegal and void as now. _but_; provide that every such contract shall be filed for public inspection; that prices charged by the combination shall be public, stable, and absolutely unvarying to all; that the affairs of the combination shall be managed according to a consistent and stringent corporation law; and that an annual report of the operations of the combination be made to a public commission. contrast this with the existing law upon this important subject. in judge barrett's decision in the sugar trust case he said: "the development of judicial thought, in regard to contracts in restraint of trade, has been especially marked. the ancient doctrine upon that head has been weakened and modified to such a degree that but little if any of it is left. indeed, excessive competition may sometimes result in actual injury to the public; and anti-competitive contracts, to avert personal ruin, may be perfectly reasonable. it is only when such contracts are publicly oppressive that they become unreasonable, and are condemned as against public policy." this is probably the best statement of the present status of the common law upon this subject now extant. but what a path to endless litigation does it open! who shall draw the line where a contract to restrain competition ceases to be beneficial and lawful, and becomes an injury to the public welfare? must this be left to judge and jury? if so, the responsibilities of our already overburdened courts are vastly increased. in contrast with such a policy as this, the plan before presented certainly promises definiteness in the place of uncertainty; and treats all contracts in restraint of competition with impartiality. it is believed that the effect of its enforcement would be a great reduction in the tax now levied on us by monopolies. there is yet one way, however, in which all these monopolies that we have found it so difficult to devise a plan to deal with--the manufacturers' trusts--may be quickly and certainly reduced. our heavy tariff on imported goods, by protecting manufacturers from foreign competition, and thus reducing the number of possible competitors, has undeniably been a chief reason why trusts have appeared and grown wealthy in this country before any other. the author has purposely refrained, as far as possible, from reference to the relation of the tariff to monopolies; for the question has been so hotly fought over, and the real facts concerning it have been so garbled and distorted, that people are not yet ready to consider it in an unprejudiced way. this much, however, no one can gainsay. we hold in our hands the means to at any time reduce the prices and profits of practically all our monopolies in manufacturing to a reasonable basis, by simply cutting down the duty on the products of foreign manufactories. now, if after our plan just described is in force, the managers of any monopoly choose to be so reckless as to raise its prices to a point where its published reports will show it to be making enormous profits, thus tempting new competitors to enter the field and breeding public hostility, all honest protectionists and free-traders will be quite apt to unite in a demand that the "protection" under which this monopoly is permitted to tax the public be taken away. if only we could find in any possible plan so excellent a solution of the problem of labor monopolies as a reduction of the tariff offers us in the case of trusts! the question is so complex a one that it is hardly possible to consider it here, except very briefly. certainly, if we legalize combinations to restrict competition among capitalists, we should among laborers as well. indeed, the decay of the old common-law principle, that such contracts were against public policy, and that such combinations were punishable, has been more marked in the case of trade unions than anywhere else. besides this, as long as employers have the right to kill competition in the purchase of labor, workmen should certainly have the right to avoid competition in its sale. but to prevent by force other competitors from taking the field, if they choose, against any labor combination, is an infringement of the personal liberty guaranteed to every man by the constitution, and can by no means be lawfully permitted. if workingmen only understood how much the apparent gain when they win in a strike is overbalanced by their loss in the higher prices which they have to pay for the necessaries of life, and in the reduced demand for labor, they would be as anxious to protect capital as they now are--some of them--to injure it. the strikes make timid the men who have capital to invest. they will not loan their money to business men, builders, manufacturers, or any one who wishes to use it to employ workmen, except at a higher rate of interest, to pay for the increased risk. _hence_, the cost of the capital used in production is greater, and the price the public has to pay for the product must be greater. again, when men have to pay higher rates of interest for the money they borrow they are slower to engage in new enterprises. mr. a. a builder, intended to put up a block of a dozen houses this season, which would have tended to reduce rents; but the fear of strikes, with their attendant damage and loss, has prevented him from borrowing money at less than per cent. interest. he concludes that, on the whole, this will eat up so much of his profits that he will not build. is it not too plain to need proof that the _moral influence_ alone of the strikes has robbed the workmen at every point? and this is one of a thousand cases in a hundred different industries. the plans we have discussed for the treatment of monopolies have for their object a benefit to the people at large, by enabling them to purchase the products of industry and of natural wealth free from the tax now levied upon them by monopolies. if we can effect this, we shall not have a millennium; there will still be injustice and suffering enough in the world; but we shall have reduced the pressure upon the men who work with their hands for their daily bread, enough so that we shall no longer see the strange spectacle of over-production and hunger and nakedness existing side by side. men's desires were made by an all-wise creator to be always in advance of their ability to gratify them. and the commercial supply of that ability--the supply of men willing to work--ought always to be behind the demand for men. it seems beyond dispute, then, that whatever will remove these obstructions to the wheels of production will increase the demand for labor, as well as increase the wages of labor by lowering the prices of the necessaries of life. this the plan we have discussed promises to do, and it also promises to benefit the whole people by lowering the cost of monopolized articles. the men and women who work with their hands, and those dependent on them, form per cent. of the population of the country. instead of combining to stop production in this shop or that factory, why not join hands to work for reforms in the interest of the whole people? be sure that in so doing, organized labor will have the hearty co-operation, and leadership if need be, of the best men in every class of society. but while the reforms proposed promise great and important benefits to the workers on whom the tax laid by monopoly falls most cruelly, the question, "what shall fix the rate of wages, if competition cannot?" is still left undecided. the best answer the author can make to this is as follows: the monopoly formed by the trade unions in the sale of labor is unnatural, because the number of competing units is great instead of small. as new competitors must continually arise, the monopoly can never be successful without the use of unlawful means. if it raises the price of labor above what free competition would determine, it as truly lays a tax on the whole people as did the copper monopoly. on the other hand, we must recognize the fact that competition is now often absent in the _purchase_ of labor, and this is a chief and sufficient cause for the existing attempts to kill competition in its sale. but this is largely due to the fact that the supply of labor is now in excess of the demand. when instead of signs everywhere, "no one need apply for employment here," we see placards, "men wanted; high prices to good workmen," then competition will assert itself in the purchase of labor. in regard to the first class of industries, those utilizing natural agents, which we proposed to place under the care of the state, it is evident that we can permit no strikes there. our transportation lines, our mines, our gas-works, our water supplies, are to be operated for the benefit of the whole people, and no labor monopoly can be permitted to stop them. the plan that might be adopted to prevent interruptions in these industries has been already referred to. the author would suggest a similar plan for the benefit of labor in general. suppose that in the charter of a manufacturing corporation, a certain portion of the stock in small-sized shares was set aside for the employés required to operate the mill. let each employé be _required_ to hold a certain number of shares in proportion to his wages; to purchase them when he begins to work, and to return them when he leaves the service of the corporation; the price in all cases to be par. in case he leaves without giving a certain notice, he should forfeit a certain proportion of his stock. if, on the other hand, he is discharged without an equal notice, he should receive the full amount of his stock, and a sum in addition equal to the penalty which he would have incurred had he broken the contract. who will deny that such a move would be vastly to the interest of both parties, the employer and employed. is not a protection needed by the workman against the power of the employer to turn him adrift at any time without a penny? finally it must be said that the labor question, more than any other connected with monopoly, needs solution through the influence of the principles of christian fraternity. in the last analysis, every man sells to his brother men his service and receives his food, clothing, and shelter in return. we may execute justice never so well, and regulate never so nicely the wages of men by the law of supply and demand, there will still be special cases demanding and deserving to be treated by the rules of brotherly charity. the strong were given their power that they might aid the feeble; and they who fall behind in the struggle for position are not to be blotted out by the brute law of the survival of the fittest, but cared for as the noblest instincts of humanity prompt. * * * * * i am well aware that the indictment which conservative critics will be apt to bring against the plans for the equitable control of monopolies presented in this chapter is that they are too novel, and that they require too much of an upheaval of existing institutions for their accomplishment. the conservative man is invariably in favor of getting along with things as they are. the answer to be made to this is, that no candid man who will make a thorough study of the present status of monopoly and of the attempts to control it can be conservative. the present status of monopolies is just neither to their owners nor to the public. they are plundering the public as much or as little as they choose; and the sovereign people are submitting to it and taking their revenge by passing retaliatory laws intended to ruin the monopolies if possible. these legislative "strikes" are thus especially well calculated to foster extortion on the part of the owners of monopolies, who naturally wish to make what profits they can before some piece of legislation is put through to destroy the industry they have built up. in contrast to this are the plans proposed in this chapter. they offer to establish a definite relation between the public and the monopolies, and a permanent and stable foundation for each industry they affect in place of the present fickle and ever changing one. there is another class of critics who may complain that the plan proposed leaves too much power still in the hands of the monopolists, and gives the government too small a part in their management. the answer to this is very evident. we have found the cardinal value of the system of individual competition to be that it tends by a process of natural selection to bring the men of greatest ability into the control and management of our industries; while the vital weakness in the management of industry by government is the fact that the sovereign people does not choose the wisest and most honest men to control its affairs. men may well say that if they are to be robbed it had better be by a corporation, where innocent stockholders will receive part of the benefit, than by dishonest officials of government. the ultimate remedy for the evils of monopoly, therefore, lies with the people. when they will choose to control their affairs the men of greatest wisdom and honor; when each man will exercise the same care in choosing men to care for the public business that he does in caring for his own private interests, then we can safely trust far greater responsibilities to our government than is now prudent. there is no more important lesson to impress on the minds of the toiling millions who are growing restless under the burdens of monopoly than this: the only remedy for monopoly is control; the only power that can control is government; and to have a government fit to assume these momentous duties, all good men and true must join hands to put only men of wisdom and honor in places of public trust. there is a virtue which shone in all brightness when this nation was born, not alone in the hearts of the commander-in-chief and his brother heroes, but in the hearts of the men and women who gave themselves to their country's service. it glowed with all fervor when, a quarter of a century ago, the north fought to sustain what the fathers had created, and the rank and file of the south gave their lives and all they had for what they deemed a righteous and noble cause. though the robust spirit of partisanship may seem for a time to have crowded out from men's hearts the love of their country, surely that love still remains; and in the days of new import which dawn upon us, in the virtue of patriotism will be found a sufficient antidote for the vice of _monopoly_. +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note and errata | | | | some tables have been reformatted for clarity. | | | | one instance of an oe ligature has been expanded to 'oe'. | | | | the following typographical errors have been corrected: | | | | |particularly |particular | | | | , | . | | | |succcessful |successful | | | |ascendency |ascendancy | | | |quenced |quenched | | | |accomodate |accommodate | | | |owership |ownership | | | | | the following words were hyphenated in varying fashion in | | the text: | | | | |bond-holders ( ) |bondholders ( ) | | | |midle-men ( ) |middlemen ( ) | | | |over-estimate ( ) |overestimate ( ) | | | |over-production ( ) |overproduction ( ) | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ deep furrows which tells of pioneer trails along which the farmers of western canada fought their way to great achievements in co-operation by hopkins moorhouse toronto and winnipeg george j. mcleod, limited publishers copyright, canada, by george j. mcleod, limited to the men and women of the soil contents chapter foreword i the man on the qu'appelle trail ii a call to arms iii the first shot is fired iv "that man partridge!" v "the house with the closed shutters" vi on a card in the window of wilson's old store vii a fight for life viii a knock on the door ix the grain exchange again x printers' ink xi from the red river valley to the foothills xii the showdown xiii the mysterious "mr. observer" xiv the internal elevator campaign xv concerning the terminals xvi the grip of the pit xvii new furrows xviii a final test xix meanwhile, in saskatchewan xx what happened in alberta xxi in the drag of the harrows xxii the width of the field xxiii the depth of the furrows xxiv and the end is not yet appendix foreword once in awhile, maybe, twenty-five or thirty years ago, they used to pack you off during the holidays for a visit on somebody's farm. have you forgotten? you went with your little round head close clipped till all the scar places showed white and you came back with a mat of sunbleached hair, your face and hands and legs brown as a nut. probably you treasure recollections of those boyhood days when a raw field turnip, peeled with a "toad-stabber," was mighty good eatin'. you remember the cows and chickens, the horses, pigs and sheep, the old corn-crib where generally you could scare up a chipmunk, the gnarled old orchard--the eastern rail-fenced farm of a hundred-acres-or-so. you remember wilson's emporium at the corners where you went for the mail--the place where the overalled legs of the whole community drummed idly against the cracker boxes and where dried prunes, acquired with due caution, furnished the juvenile substitute for a chew of tobacco! or perhaps you did not know even this much about country life--you of the big cities. to you, it may be, the farmer has been little more than the caricatures of the theatres. you have seen him wearing blue jeans or a long linen duster in "the old homestead," wiping his eyes with a big red bandana from his hip pocket. you have seen him dance eccentric steps in wrinkled cowhide boots, his hands beneath flapping coat-tails, his chewing jaws constantly moving "the little bunch of spinach on his chin!" you have heard him fiddle away like two-sixty at "pop goes the weasel!" you have grinned while he sang through his nose about the great big hat with the great big brim, "all ba-ound ra-ound with a woolen string!" yes, and you used to read about the farmer, too--will carleton's farm ballads and legends; riley's fine verses about the frost on the pumpkin and "little orphant annie" and "over the hill to the poorhouse!" and when cousin letty took you to the harvest home supper and grand entertainment in the town hall you may have heard the village choir wail: "oh, _shall_ we mortgage the farm?" perhaps even yet, now that you are man grown--business or professional man of the great cities--perhaps even yet, although you long have studied the market reports and faithfully have read the papers every day--perhaps that first impression of what a farmer was like still lingers in a more or less modified way. so that to you pretty much of an "old hayseed" he remains. thus, while you have been busy with other things, the new farmer has come striding along until he has "arrived in our midst" and to you he is a stranger. remember the old shiny black mohair sofa and the wheezy, yellow-keyed melodeon or the little roller hand-organ that used to play "old hundred"? they have given place to new styles of furniture, upright pianos and cabinet gramophones. coffin-handles and wax flowers are not framed in walnut and hung in the farmer's front parlor any more; you will find the grotesque crayon portrait superseded by photo enlargements and the up-to-date kodak. the automobile has widened the circle of the farmer's neighbors and friends, while the telephone has wiped distance from the map. in the modern farm kitchen hot and cold water gushes from bright nickel taps into a clean white enamel sink, thanks to the pneumatic water supply system. the house and other farm buildings are lighted by electricity and perhaps the little farm power plant manages to operate some machinery--to drive the washing machine, the cream separator, the churn and the fodder-cutter or tanning-mill. there is also a little blacksmith shop and a carpenter shop where repairs can be attended to without delay. true, all these desirable conveniences may not be possessed generally as yet; but the farmer has seen them working on the model farmstead exhibited by the government at the big fair or in the farm mechanics car of the better farming special trains that have toured the country, and he dreams about them. more scientific methods of agriculture have been adopted. the farmer has learned what may be accomplished by crop rotations and new methods of cultivation. he has learned to analyze the soil and grow upon his land those crops for which it is best suited. if he keeps a dairy herd he tests each cow and knows exactly how her yield is progressing so that it is impossible for her to "beat her board bill." no longer is it even considered good form to chop the head off the old rooster; the farmer sticks him scientifically, painlessly, instantaneously dressing him for market in the manner that commands the highest price. so with the butter, the eggs and all the rest of the farm products. do you wonder that the great evolution of farming methods should lead to advanced thought upon the issues of the day? in the living room the family bible remains in its old place of honor, perhaps with the crocheted mat still doing duty; but it is not now almost the only book in the house. there is likely to be a sectional bookcase, filled with solid volumes on all manner of practical and economic subjects--these as well as the best literature, the latest magazines and two or three current newspapers. yes, a whole flock of tin roosters have rusted away on top of the barn since the farmer first began to consider himself the rag doll of commerce and to seek adjustments. it is the privilege of rag dolls to survive a lot of abuse; long after wax has melted and sawdust run the faithful things are still on hand. and along about crop time the farmer finds himself attracting a little attention. that is because this business of backbone farming is the backbone of business in general. as long as money is circulating freely business in general, being merely an exchange in values, wears a clean shirt and the latest cravat. but let some foreign substance clog the trade channels and at once everything tightens up and squeezes everybody. day by day the great mass of the toilers in the cities go to work without attempting to understand the fluctuations of supply and demand. they are but cogs on the rim, dependent for their little revolutions upon the power which drives the machinery. that power being money value, any wastage must be replaced by the creation of new wealth. so men turn to the soil for salvation--to the greatest manufacturing concern in the world, nature unlimited. this is the plant of which the farmer is general manager. on state occasions, therefore, it has been the custom in the past to call him "the backbone of his country"--its "bone and sinew." without him, as it were, the commercial fabric could not sit up in its high chair and eat its bread and milk. such fine speeches have been applauded loudly in the cities, too frequently without due thought--without it occurring to anyone, apparently, that perhaps the farmer might prefer to be looked upon rather as an ordinary hard-working human being, entitled as such to "a square deal." but all these years times have been changing. gradually agriculture has been assuming its proper place in the scheme of things. it is recognized now that successful farming is a business--a profession, if you like--requiring lifelong study, foresight, common sense, close application; that it carries with it all the satisfaction of honest work well done, all the dignity of practical learning, all the comforts of modern invention, all the wider benefits of clean living and right thinking in god's sunny places. and with his increasing self-respect the new farmer is learning to command his rights, not merely to ask and accept what crumbs may fall. he is learning that these are the days of organization, of co-operation among units for the benefit of the whole; that by pooling his resources he is able to reach the common objective with the least waste of effort. he has become a power in the land. these pages record a story of the western canadian farmer's upward struggle with market conditions--a story of the organized grain growers. no attempt is made to set forth the full details of the whole farmer's movement in western canada in all its ramifications; for the space limits of a single volume do not permit a task so ambitious. the writer has endeavored merely to gather an authentic record of the earlier activities of the grain growers' associations in the three prairie provinces--why and how they came to be organized, with what the farmers had to contend and something of their remarkable achievements in co-operative marketing during the past decade. it is a tale of strife, limned by high lights and some shadows. it is a record worthy of preservation and one which otherwise would pass in some of its details with the fading memories of the pathfinders. if from these pages the reader is able to glean something of interest, something to broaden--be it ever so slightly--his understanding of the western canadian farmers' past viewpoint and present outlook, the undertaking will have found its justification and the long journeys and many interviews their reward. for, under the alchemy of the great war, many things are changing and in the wonderful days of reconstruction that lie ahead the farmer is destined to play an upstanding part in the new greatness of our country. because of this it behooves the humblest citizen of us to seek better understanding, to meet half way the hand of fellowship which he extends for a new conception of national life. the writer is grateful to those farmers, grain men, government officials and others who have assisted him so kindly in gathering and verifying his material. indebtedness is acknowledged also to sundry dominion government records, to the researches of herbert n. casson and to the press and various provincial departments of agriculture for the use of their files. h.m. winnipeg, march st, . deep furrows chapter i the man on the qu'appelle trail among the lonely lakes i go no more, for she who made their beauty is not there; the paleface rears his tepee on the shore and says the vale is fairest of the fair. full many years have vanished since, but still the voyageurs beside the camp-fire tell how, when the moon-rise tips the distant hill, they hear strange voices through the silence swell. --_e. pauline johnson._ _the legend of qu'appelle._ to the rimming skyline, and beyond, the wheatlands of assiniboia[ ] spread endlessly in the sunshine. it was early october in the year --one of those clear bright days which contribute enchantment to that season of spun gold when harvest bounties are garnered on the canadian prairies. everywhere was the gleam of new yellow stubble. in serried ranks the wheat stocks stretched, dwindling to mere specks, merging as they lost identity in distance. here and there stripes of plowed land elongated, the rich black freshly turned earth in sharp contrast to the prevailing gold, while in a tremendous deep blue arch overhead an unclouded sky swept to cup the circumference of vision. many miles away, yet amazingly distinct in the rarefied air, the smoke of threshers hung in funnelled smudges above the horizon--like the black smoke of steamers, hull down, at sea. on this particular autumn afternoon a certain black dot might have been observed, so lost in the immensity of landscape that it appeared to be stationary. it was well out upon the trail that wound northward from indian head into the country of the fishing lakes--the trail that forked also eastward to dip through the valley of the qu'appelle at blackwood before striking north and east across the kenlis plain towards the pheasant hills. in reality the well kept team which drew the big grain wagon was swinging steadily ahead at a smart pace; for their load of supplies, the heaviest item of which was a new plow, was comparatively light, they were homeward bound and the going in the earlier stages of the long journey was smooth. the driver sat hunched in his seat, reins sagging. he was a man of powerful physique, his skin deep coppered by long exposure to prairie winds and sun. in repose the face that was shadowed by the wide felt hat would have appeared somewhat deceptive in its placidity owing to the fact that the strong jaw and firm mouth were partly hidden by a heavy moustache and a thick, black beard, trimmed short. just now it was evident that the big farmer's mood was far from pleasant. forearm on knee, he had surrendered completely to his thoughts. his fists clenched spasmodically and there was an angry glint in his eyes. occasionally he shook his head as if the matter in mind were almost too hopeless for consideration. a sudden surge of resentment made him lash his booted leg with the ends of the lines. "confound them!" he muttered aloud. he had just delivered his first load of the season's new wheat. three nights before, by lantern light, he had backed his horses to the wagon and hauled it twenty-five miles to the railway at indian head. his stay there had not been conducive to peace of mind. to reach the rails with a heavy load in favorable weather was simple enough; it merely required time. but many such trips would be necessary before his crop was marketed. some of the farmers from beyond the qu'appelle would be hauling all winter; it was in winter that the haul was long and cruel. starting at one, two or three o'clock in the morning, it would be impossible to forecast the weather with any degree of accuracy, so that often they would be overtaken by blizzards. at such times the lack of stopping-places and shelter in the sparsely settled reaches of the trail encompassed the journey with risks every whit as real as pioneer perils of marauding indians or trailing wolf-packs. snow and wind, however, had no place in the thoughts of the lonely farmer at the moment. such things he had been used to ever since he first homesteaded; this long haul with the products of his toil he had been making for many years. what immediately concerned him was the discouraging prospect of another wheat blockade instead of any improvement in conditions which had become unbearable. with the country as full of wheat as it was this year it required no great gift of prophecy to foretell what would happen. it was happening already. the railway people were ignoring completely the car-distribution clauses of the grain act and thereby playing in with the elevator interests, so that the farmers were going to be just where they were before--at the mercy of the buyers, their legitimate profits filched by excessive dockage, low grades, depressed prices, exorbitant storage charges, even short weights in some cases. all this in spite of the strong agitation which had led to government action, in spite of the royal commission which had investigated the farmers' claims and had recommended the grain act, in spite of the legislation on the statutes! law or no law, the farmer was still to be preyed upon, apparently, without a single weapon left with which---- the eyes of the man in the broad-brimmed hat grew grave. scoff as he might among the men of the district when the serious ones voiced their fears to him, his own thoughts always came back to those fears. from the red river valley to the foothills long-smouldering indignation was glowing like a streak of fire in the prairie grass; a spark or two more and nothing could stop the conflagration that would sweep the plains country. if the law were to fail these red-blooded and long-suffering homesteaders there would be final weapons alright--real weapons! it was no use shutting one's eyes to the danger. some fool would do something rash, and with the farmers already inflamed and embittered, there was no telling what desperate things might be attempted. that was the fear which stirred and perplexed the solitary traveller; for he had heard things that afternoon--seen things that he did not like but could not ignore. he recognized an undercurrent of feeling, a silence more ominous than all the heated talk, and that was where the danger lay. something would have to be done, and that soon. but what? what? so engrossed was he that beyond an occasional flip of the reins or a word to the horses he paid no heed to his surroundings. a huge jack-rabbit sprang up, almost from beneath the noses of the team, and went flying off in great leaps over the stubble. a covey of prairie chicken, fat and fit, whirred into the air and rocketed away. but he scarcely saw them. had he looked up he might have noticed a horseman loping down a cross trail with the evident intention of heading off the wagon. but the rider had pounded almost within hailing distance before the other was aware of his approach. it was bob mcnair of the "two-bar ranch," as he insisted upon calling his wheat farm. he waved an oil-spattered stetson and came into the trail with a rush, pulling up the wiry broncho with a suddenness that would have unseated one less accustomed than mcnair, former corporal, royal north-west mounted police. "howdy, w. r. thought 'twas your outfit. good job i aint a blackfoot on the warpath," he laughed. "i'd sure 'a' had your scalp sneaked before you could draw a bead!" he swung alongside, stepped into the wagon, looped the bridle-rein over the handle of the new plow and, climbing forward, shook hands heartily and sat down. "you're looking fit, bob," welcomed the other with evident pleasure. "what brings you over this way? everything going alright?" "so-so," nodded mcnair. "been over sintaluta to see about gettin' a car, among other things." "of course you got it?" "sure! oh, sure i got it--got it still to get!" and mcnair burst into a flow of language that did even him justice. more or less vehement at all times, the one-time corporal exhibited so much vigor in his remarks that his good-natured auditor had to laugh. "i ain't tryin' to be funny!" finished mcnair. "i mean every dashed word of it, motherwell. if i don't get some of it out o' my system i'll bust to bits, that's what. say, i met sibbold. he told me some of you fellows was meetin' over at the head to-day. what about it?" "why, yes, johnny millar got a few of us together to talk things over. lot of talk alright. some of the boys were feeling pretty hot, i can tell you! but i can't see that anything came of it except some resolutions--the usual sort, you know." "pshaw! i was hopin' it meant action of some kind." the ex-rancher was silent for a moment. then his right fist went into his left palm with a smack. "the only kind o' resolution that'll get anythin' is made o' lead and fits in a rifle breech! and i want to tell you, old man, if there ain't some pretty quick right-about-facin' in certain quarters, i'll be dashed if i ain't for it! an' i won't be standin' alone, either!" he added grimly. w. r. motherwell[ ] glanced sharply at the tense face. "don't talk nonsense!" he reproved quietly. "i ain't talkin' nonsense. not on your life! if i am, then i reckon i know a hundred or so hard-headed farmers who're doin' the identical same. an' if i know that many in my territory, w. r., how many d'you suppose there are if we take in manitoba and clean through to the mountains?" "then all i've got to say is: there are more and bigger fools in the country than i had any idea of." "what d'you mean, talkin' like that?" "that's just what i've got to say to you, mcnair," retorted the big farmer with heat. "what do _you_ mean, talking like that? if you're serious in what you say----" "i said i was, didn't i?" snapped the other. "then you ought to be tied up on the two-bar and muzzled, for you're plumb mad, mcnair! it's just that kind of firebrand talk that's hurting our cause. the farmers have got enough enemies now, god knows, without making a lot of new ones. doggone your hide, mac, what're you trying to do?--stir up another rebellion like that of ' ?" "if it's necessary--you bet i am!" he brazened. "you, of all men!" "an' why not me? just because i've worn the queen's uniform, eh? well, let me tell you, sir, i belonged to a body of men who stood for british justice an' a square deal to even the meanest injun in the territories." the ex-mounted policeman spoke with pride. "we'd never have handled the beggars if it hadn't been for that. even the injuns were men enough to recognize justice, an' that's more'n these commercial blood-suckers to-day can do! if our case was in the hands of the force it'd rest on its merits an' us grain growers'd get justice. instead, where is it?--in the hands of a pussy-footed, hifalutin' bunch o' political windbags in the east who don't care a damn about us hayseeds out west! an' what's more----" "the royal mounted stood for law and order, bob; but you'd class yourself with the half-breeds, would you? have another little rebellion like that of ' with all the----" "not like ' ," interrupted the rancher. "no, sir, this one'll be bloodless; but it'll knock the spots off the 'breeds' little shindig all the samee!" "you spoke of rifles, mcnair. guns go off," interpolated the other sententiously. "what'n the mischief do you expect to gain by that sort of thing?" "a hearing, by jingo! that's more'n all your letters to the papers an' your meetin's an' resolutions have got us. we'll show 'em we mean business----" "rot! how did we get the royal commission except by those letters and meetings? that put the manitoba grain act on the statutes, didn't it? mean to say we're no farther ahead? we've got the whole grain trade under control and supervision----" "like ducks you have!" the former rancher threw back his head and laughed. "we've got the privilege of loading our wheat direct on cars through the flat warehouses or any other way we like----" "what's the good o' that if a man can't get a car when he wants it?" demanded mcnair impatiently. "the elevator gang 've organized to grab everything in sight. i know it. you know it. everybody knows it, by heaven! so what's the use o' talkin'?" "we've got to be fair, though. the elevator people have put a lot of money--say, why can't we organize, too?" suggested motherwell with a flash of inspiration. "we haven't tried that yet. that's constitutional. that's what the livestock breeders have done," he said eagerly. mcnair shook his head. "i tell you, bill, it's too late for that sort o' thing," he objected. "unless you mean organizin' to fight--" "exactly." "with guns, if necessary?" "it won't be necessary." "possibly not to shoot anybody. the showin' mebbe'll turn the trick. now, look here. my idea is that if a bunch of us fellows got together on the quiet some night an' seized a few elevators--say, wouldn't it bring things to a head so quick we'd get action? the law's there, but these fellows are deliberately breakin' it an' we got to show 'em----" "the action you'd get would be the wrong kind, mac," protested w. r. motherwell emphatically. "you'd land in jail!" "don't see it that way," persisted mcnair. "wouldn't give a continental if i did so long's it woke a few people up." "i tell you you're on the wrong trail unless you want to get it where the chicken got the axe!" "doggone it, man! ain't that where we're gettin' it _now_?" "whereas with the right kind of organization----" "don't believe it," grunted mcnair, starting to climb back to his horse. "the time for any more o' these here granny tea-parties is past to my way o' thinkin' an' if we can't agree on it, we'd better shut up before we get mad." he vaulted easily into the saddle. "but i'll tell you one thing, w. r.--there's the sweetest little flare-up you ever saw on its way. i was talkin' the other day to ed. partridge, the railton boys, al. quigley, billy bonner and some more----" "and i'll bet they gave you a lot of sound advice, mac!" laughed motherwell confidently. "that's alright," resented mcnair, the tan of his cheek deepening a trifle. "they're a pretty sore bunch an' a fellow from down turtle mountain way in manitoba told me----" "that the mud-turtle and the jack-rabbit finally agreed that slow and steady----" "bah! you're sure hopeless," grinned the owner of the two-bar, giving his horse the rein. "hope_ful_," corrected w. r. motherwell with a laugh. "tell wilson, if you see him, that peter dayman and i are expecting him over next week, will you? and i say, mac, don't kill too many before you get home!" he called in final jocularity. the flying horseman waved his hat and his "s'long" came back faintly. the other watched till horse and rider lost themselves among the distant wheat stocks. the twinkle died out of his eyes as he watched. so mcnair was another of them, eh? after all, that was only to be expected of an old indian fighter and cow-puncher like him. poor bob! he had his reputation to sustain among the newcomers--hard rider, hard fighter, hard drinker; to do it under the changed conditions naturally required some hard talking on occasion. while mac had become civilized enough to keep one foot in a cowhide boot planted in the practical present, the other foot was still moccasined and loath to forget the days of war-paint and whiskey-traders, feathers and fears. over the crudities and hardships, the dirt and poverty, the years between had hung a kindly curtain of glamor; so that mcnair with his big soft kerchiefs, his ranger's hat, his cow-puncher's saddle and trappings and his "two-bar" brand was a figure to crane an eastern neck. likeable enough chap--too much of a man to be treated as a joke to his face, but by no means to be taken seriously--not on most occasions. in the present instance, with feeling running as high as it was in some quarters, that crazy idea of seizing a few elevators at the point of a gun--! what in heaven's name would they do with them after they got them? nevertheless, mcnair might find rattle-brained listeners enough to cause a heap of trouble. there were always a few fellows ready for excitement; they might go in for the fun of it, then before they knew it the thing would curdle over night like a pan of milk in a thunder-storm. "he's just darn fool enough to try some funny work," muttered the anxious driver of the grain wagon. "jailing him only makes a hero of him and that's the kind of thing the beggar glories in. the son-of-a-gun!" one by one throughout the afternoon the miles crept tediously beneath the wagon. the sun which had steeped the stubble in gold all day had turned the sky and was poising for its nightly dip below the horizon by the time the long misty blue line of the qu'appelle hills began to creep from the prairie. when the lone traveller at last could count the deep shadowy coulees the sun had disappeared, but the riot of after-fires still burned brightly in the west. he had passed his own place hours before, but had stopped there only for a change of horses and a brief rest; a parcel and an important message which he wished to deliver in person at fort qu'appelle without delay was extending his day's journey. six hundred feet below the level of the plain the grassy slopes of the qu'appelle valley bowled to the blue lakes. hugging the water's edge, the buildings of the romantic old fort scattered in the twilight. the winding trail stood out like a white thread that reached down the valley towards the catholic mission of lebret. before heading into the steep descent the farmer from over abernethy way slipped on his heavy cardigan jacket; for behind the rim of the hills the sunset fires were dying and already the coolness of the october night was making itself felt. at the mouth of a coulee he spoke to a solitary indian, standing motionless before a camp fire. the appetizing odor of roasting wild fowl reminded him that he was more than ready for the "bite to eat" which he would enjoy with the good father hugonard at the indian mission--he of the dark, gentle eyes, the quick understanding, the quiet tones. there would be much to talk about. so it proved. the hour was growing late when finally he bade good-bye to his pleasant host and resumed his journey in the starlight, refreshed and encouraged. for here in the seclusion of this peaceful valley, since the days of the great buffalo herds, father hugonard had ministered to the indians, starved with them, worked patiently with them through many seasons of flowers and snows. nevertheless, out of many discouragements and privations had this sterling man retained an abiding faith in the triumph of righteousness in all things. in the quiet beauty of the wonderful october night was little place for the anxious thoughts of the day. bitterness of spirit, the bickerings of men, commercial oppression and injustice--these were things far removed from the planets of the ages that sparkled like jewels in the vault of night. a vagrant breeze whispered in the valley sedges to the placid lake. high in the air, invisible, migrating _wavies_ winged into the south, the distant gabble of their passing falling weirdly earthward. the trail began to ascend sharply. off to the right the sky was growing rapidly lighter behind a distant hill and presently a lop of yellow moon crept slowly over the edge and rose into the air like a broken chalice, chasing the shadows to their retreats. as he watched it the driver of the grain wagon recalled again the old indian legend that haunted this valley and had given it its name--how, long ago, a young indian chieftain was paddling his canoe through these waters on his way to win a bride when suddenly above "the night wind's melancholy song" he heard a voice calling him through the twilight. "qu'appelle? qu'appelle?" he answered in french. "who calls?" but only his own voice came back in echoes while the gloom of night deepened and a wan moon rose silently behind the distant hill. then when he reached the indian encampment it was only to see the death fires lighted on the shore, to hear the wail of women and to learn that just before her lips had closed forever, his beloved had called for him--just at the moon-rise. thus, ever since, the indians claimed, strange spirit voices spoke through the lone valley at every rising of the moon. thrilled by the beauty of the valley scene, misty in the moonlight, the big farmer half unconsciously drew rein and listened. all he could hear at first was the impatient stamp of his horses' feet, the mouthing of the bits as the animals tossed their heads restlessly, the clink of the trace-chains; but presently he sensed a subdued undertone of night noises that wafted mysteriously over the silver water. it was nothing that could be recognized definitely; rather was it an impression of strangely merged minor sounds that grew upon him as imagination was given play under the influence of time and place. it was easy to supply interpretations of that faint medley, even while one knew that it was merely the murmur of night airs in the dry grasses, the whisper of the water-edges, the stirring of restless water-fowl in the dying reeds. the man who had ridden all day with his thoughts began unconsciously to apply other meanings to the sound, to people the night with dim faces and shapes that came trooping over the edge of the tablelands above--toil-bent figures of old pioneer farmers, care-worn faces of women and bright eager faces of little children who were holding out their hands trustfully to the future. there seemed to be a never-ending procession--faces that were apathetic from repeated disappointments, faces that scowled threateningly, brave faces tense with determination and sad faces on which was written the story of struggle hidden within many a lonely wind-buffeted shack on the great bosom of the prairie. was it, then, that all the years of toil and hardship were to come to naught for this great company of honest workers, these brave pioneer men and women of the soil? was all their striving forward to find them merely marking time, shouldered into the backwater while the currents of organized commercialism swept away their opportunities? were not these producers of the world's bread themselves to partake of the fruits of their labor? yes! surely the answer was _yes_! it was their right. wrong could not endure forever in the face of right; else were the world a poor place, life itself a failure, the mystic beauty of god's calm night a mockery. the man from abernethy roused himself. it would be nearly dawn before his team would reach their home stalls. he whistled to the horses and they plunged into the black shadows of the coulee up which the trail rose in steep ascent from the valley. when they emerged into the moonlight he drew rein for a moment. somewhere back in a forgotten arroyo a coyote yapped lonesomely. around through the night were flung the distant glow-dots of the burning straw piles, and as he filled his lungs with the fresh sweet air the hope of better days warmed the heart of the belated traveller. the hand which set the orbits of the universe created the laws of truth and justice and these never could be gainsaid. everything would come out aright if only men were steadfast in faith and duty. he gave the horses their heads and they were off once more through the cool night upon the wheatland sea that was bounded only by far purple shadows. [ ] the provinces of saskatchewan and alberta, western canada, were not created until . prior to that the entire country west of the province of manitoba was known as the north-west territories, of which the district of assiniboia was a part, the part which subsequently formed the southern portion of the province of saskatchewan. [ ] hon. w. r. motherwell, minister of agriculture, province of saskatchewan. chapter ii a call to arms and my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the people: and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have i gathered all the earth.--_isaiah_ : . for five thousand years man has grown wheat for food. archaeologists have found it buried with the mummies of egypt; the pictured stones of the pyramids record it. but it was the food of princes, not of peasants--of the aristocracy, not of the people; for no man could harvest enough of it with his sickle to create a supply which would place it within the reach of the poor. while century after century[ ] has passed since wheat was first recognized as the premier nourishment for the human body, it is only of recent times that it has become the food of the nations. the swift development of grain growing into the world's greatest industry goes back for a small beginning to . it was in that year that a young american-born farm boy of irish-scotch extraction was jeered and laughed at as he attempted to cut wheat with the first crude reaper; but out of cyrus hall mccormick's invention soon grew the wonderful harvesting machinery which made possible the production of wheat for export. close on heel the railways and water-carriers began competing for the transportation of the grain, the railways pushing eagerly in every direction where new wheat lands could be tapped. in wheat was leaving chicago for europe and four years later grain vessels from california were rounding cape horn. the nine years that followed saw the conquest of the vast prairies of the american west which were crossed by the hissing, iron monsters that stampeded the frightened bison, out-ran the wild horses and out-stayed the lurking indian. no sooner had the railways pushed back the frontier than wheat began to trickle steadily upon the market, to flow with increased volume, then to pour in by train-loads. sacks were discarded for quicker shipment in bulk; barns and warehouses filled and spilled till adequate storage facilities became the vital problem and, the need mothering invention, f. h. peavey came forward with an idea--an endless chain of metal cups for elevating grain. from this the huge modern elevator evolved to take its place as the grain's own particular storehouse. with the establishment of exchanges for conducting international buying and selling the universalizing of wheat was complete. these things had come to pass while that great region which is now western canada was still known as a great lone land. pioneer settlers, however, were beginning to venture westward to the newly organized province of manitoba and beyond. the nearest railroad was at st. paul, minnesota, from which point a "prairie schooner" trail led north for miles to winnipeg at the junction of the red and assiniboine rivers; the alternative to this overland tented-wagon route was a tedious trip by red river steamer. it was not until that a railway was built north into manitoba from st. paul; but it was followed shortly after by the projection of the canadian pacific railway, which reached vancouver in . then began what has been called the greatest wheat-rush ever known. land, land without end, to be had for the asking--rich land that would grow wheat, forty bushels to the acre, millions of acres of it! fabulous tales, winging east and south, brought settlers pouring into the new country. they came to grow wheat and they grew it, the finest wheat in the world. they grew it in ever increasing volume. successful operation of new railroads--even ordinary railroads--is not all glistening varnish and bright new signal flags. the canadian pacific was no ordinary railway. it was a young giant, reaching for the western skyline with temerity, and it knew trouble as it knew sun and wind and snow. the very grain which was its life-blood gorged the embryo system till it choked. the few elevators and other facilities provided could not begin to handle the crop, even of , the heavy yield upsetting all calculations. the season for harvesting and marketing being necessarily short, the railroad became the focus of a sudden belch of wheat; it required to be rushed to the head of the lakes in a race with the advancing cold which threatened to congeal the harbor waters about the anxiously waiting grain boats before they could clear. with every wheel turning night and day no ordinary rolling stock could cope with the demands; for the grain was coming in over the trails to the shipping points faster than it could be hauled out and the railroad was in a fix for storage accommodation. it was easy to see that such seasonal rushes would be a permanent condition in western canada, vital but unavoidable; so the canadian pacific railway company cast about for alleviations. they hit upon the plan of increasing storage facilities rapidly by announcing that the company would make special concessions to anyone who would build elevators along the line with a capacity of not less than , bushels and equipped with cleaning machinery, steam or gasoline power--in short, "standard" elevators. the special inducement offered was nothing more nor less than an agreement that at points where such elevators were erected the railway company would not allow cars to be loaded with grain through flat warehouses, direct from farmers' vehicles or in any other way than through such elevators; the only "condition" was that the elevator owners would furnish storage and shipping facilities, of course, for those wishing to store or ship grain. at once the noise of hammer and saw resounded along the right-of-way. persons and corporations whose business it was to mill grain, to buy and export it, were quick to take advantage of the opportunity; for the protection offered by the railway meant that here was shipping control of the grain handed out on a silver platter, garnished with all the delectable prospects of satisfying the keenest money hunger. on all sides protests arose from the few owners of ordinary warehouses who found their buildings useless, once the overtopping elevator went up alongside--from small buyers who found themselves being driven out of the market with the flat warehouses. but these voices were drowned in the swish of grain in the chutes and the staccato of the elevator engines--lost in the larger exigencies of the wheat. the railway company held to their promises and the tall grain boxes reared their castor tops against the sky in increasing clusters. to operate a standard elevator at a country point with profit it was considered necessary in the early days to fill it three times in a season unless the owner proposed to deal in grain himself and make a buyer's profit in addition to handling grain for others. the cost of building and operating the class of elevator demanded by the railway company was partly responsible for this. before long the number of elevators in manitoba and the north-west territories increased till it was impossible for all of them to obtain the three fillings per season even had their owners been inclined to perform merely a handling service. but those who had taken up the railway's offer with such avidity and had invested large sums of shareholders' capital in building the elevator accommodation were mostly shrewd grain dealers whose primary object was to buy and sell. these interested corporations were not constructing elevators in order to admire their silhouettes against the beautiful prairie sunsets! in every corner of the earth the dollar almighty, or its equivalent, was being stalked by all sorts and conditions of men, some of whom chased it noisily and openly while others hunted with their boots in one hand. properly enough, the grain men were out for all that their investment could earn and for all the wheat which they could buy at one price and sell at another. that was their business, just as it was the business of the railway company to transport the grain at a freight rate which would net a profit, just as it was the farmer's business-- but to the farmer it seemed that he had no business! he merely grew the grain. apparently a farmer was a pair of pants, a shirt and a slouch hat that sat on a wagon-load of wheat, drove it up the incline into the elevator and rattled away again for another load! to farm was an occupation easily parsed--subjunctive mood, past tense, passive voice! the farmer was third person, singular! he came and went in single file like an indian or a chinaman--john doe, yon yonson and johann x (his mark)--every kind of johnny on no spot but his own! as soon as his grain was dumped each of him went back to the land among the dumb animals where the pomp and vanity of this wicked world would not interfere with preparations for next year's crop! wheat was bought upon the grading system--so much per bushel for this grade, so much for that, according to the fluctuations of supply and demand upon the world's markets. but the average farmer at that time knew little or nothing about what went on in the great exchanges of the cities; there was no means of learning the intricacies of the grain business and many farmers even did not know what a grain exchange was. all such a man knew was that his wheat was graded and he received a certain price for it. the railway company's refusal to furnish cars for loading direct from the farmer's wagon compelled the shipper to sell to the elevator operator for whatever price he could get, accepting whatever weights the operator allowed and whatever "dockage" he chose to decree. the latter represented that portion of the farmer's delivery which was supposed to come through the cleaning sieves as waste material such as dirt, weed seeds, broken wheat kernels, etc. to determine the percentage of dockage in any given load of wheat the ordinary human being would require to weigh and clean a pound of it at least; but so expert were many of the elevator operators of those days that they had no trouble at all in arriving at the dockage by a single glance. nor were they disconcerted by the fact that the country was new and grain frequently came from the thresher in a remarkably clean condition. with everything thus fallow for seeds of discord the big trouble was not long in making itself manifest. all over the country the bumping of the bumpkins apparently became the favorite pastime of elevator men. certain persons with most of their calluses on the inside cracked the whip and the three-ring circus began. excessive dockage, short weights, depressed prices! the farmers grew more and more bitter as time passed. to begin with, they resented being compelled by the railway to deal with the elevators; it was a violation of that liberty which they had a right to enjoy as british citizens. the grain was theirs to sell where they liked, and when on top of the refusal to let them do it came this bleeding of their crops, their indignation was fanned to white heat. it was useless for the farmers to build elevators of their own; for these had to conform to the requirements of the railway and, as already stated, it was impossible to run them profitably without making a buyer's profit in addition to the commission for handling and storage. the farmers were not buyers but sellers of grain and with very few exceptions, where conditions were specially favorable, the farmers' elevators that were attempted were soon in difficulties. leading farmers began to write strong letters to the newspapers and it was not long before the agitation became so widespread that it reached the floor of parliament. mr. james m. douglas, member for east assiniboia, during two successive sessions introduced bills to regulate the shipping and transportation of grain in manitoba and the north-west territories and these were discussed in the house of commons. a special committee of the house was appointed finally to investigate the merits of the case and as considerable difference of opinion was expressed as to the actual facts, the appointment of a royal commission to make a full and impartial investigation of the whole subject in the public interest was recommended. this royal commission accordingly was appointed on october th, , and consisted of three manitoba farmers--w. f. sirett, of glendale; william lothian, of pipestone, and charles c. castle, of foxton--with his honor e. j. senkler, of st. catharines, ontario, as chairman; charles n. bell, of winnipeg, acted as secretary. owing to the illness and death of judge senkler, albert elswood richards (afterwards the late hon. mr. justice richards, of winnipeg), succeeded as chairman in february, . sittings were held at many places throughout manitoba and the north-west territories and much evidence was taken as to the grievances complained of, these being mainly: ( ) that vendors of grain were being subjected to unfair and excessive dockage at the time of sale; ( ) that doubt existed as to the fairness of the weights allowed or used by owners of elevators; ( ) that the owners of elevators enjoyed a monopoly in the purchase of grain by refusing to permit the erection of flat warehouses where standard elevators were situated and were thus able to keep prices of grain below true value to their own benefit and the disadvantage of the public generally as well as others who were specially interested in the grain trade. meanwhile the railway companies had hastened to announce that they would furnish cars to farmers who wished to ship direct and do their own loading. this concession, made in - , resulted in somewhat better prices and better treatment from the elevator operators. but farmers who lived more than four or five miles from the shipping points could not draw in their grain fast enough to load a car within the time allowed by the railway; so that the situation, so far as these farmers were concerned, remained practically unchanged. in march, , the royal commission made a complete report. they had done their work thoroughly. they found that so long as any farmer was hampered in shipping to terminal markets himself he would be more or less at the mercy of elevator operators and that the only proper relief from the possibility of undue dockage and price depression was to be found in the utmost freedom of shipping and selling. to this end they considered that the railroads should be compelled by law to furnish farmers with cars for shipping their own grain and that flat warehouses should be allowed so that the farmer could have a bin in which to accumulate a carload of grain, if he so wished. this, the commissioners thought, should be the farmer's legal right rather than his privilege. loading platforms for the free use of shippers were also recommended. it was the further opinion of the commission that the law should compel elevator and warehouse owners to guarantee the grades and weights of a farmer's grain and to do this the adoption of a uniform grain ticket system was suggested. at the same time, the commissioners pointed out, these guarantees might lead to such careful grading and docking by the elevator operator as might appear to the farmer to be undergrading or overdocking; so that the farmer's right to load direct on cars was a necessary supplementary protection. the annual shortage of cars during the rush season following harvest was found to be a direct cause of depression in prices. when cars were not available for immediate shipments the grain soon piled up on the elevator companies who were thereby forced to miss the cheaper transportation by boat from the head of the lakes or assume the risk of carrying over the grain until the following spring; in buying, therefore, they naturally allowed a wide margin to cover all possible contingencies. increase of transportation facilities during october and november accordingly was imperative. with no rules to regulate the grain trade except those laid down by the railways and the elevator owners, the need was great for definite legislation similar to that which obtained in the state of minnesota and, as a result of the royal commission's recommendations, the manitoba grain act was placed upon the statutes and became operative in . to supervise the carrying out of the law in connection with the grain trade a warehouse commissioner was appointed, mr. c. c. castle who acted on the royal commission being selected for this responsible office. a sigh of relief went up from many intelligent farmers who had begun to worry over the conditions developing; for they looked upon the manitoba grain act as a sort of magna charta. with the grain trade under official control and supervision along the lines laid down by the royal commission, they felt that everything would be alright now. it was like calling in a policeman to investigate suspicious noises in the house; like welcoming the doctor's arrival upon an occasion of sudden and severe illness. unfortunately, the patient's alarming symptoms sometimes continue; sometimes the thief makes a clean get-away; king john had no sooner left runnymede than he proceeded to ignore the great charter and plan new and heavier scutages upon the people! up till now the elevator owners had been operating with nothing more definite than a fellowship of interests to hold them together; but upon appearance of the grain act they proceeded to organize the north west elevator association, afterwards called the north west grain dealers' association. by agreeing on the prices which they would pay for wheat out in the country and by pooling receipts the members of such an organization, the farmers suspected, would be in a position to strangle competition in buying. the new act was aiming point blank at these very things by affording the farmer an opportunity of loading his grain direct into cars through flat warehouses, if he chose, and shipping where he liked. but because many farmers did not know with just what the new weapon was loaded or how to pull the trigger, the railways and elevators merely stepped up and smilingly brushed the whole thing aside as something which were better hanging on a high peg out of harm's way. the crop of being comparatively light, the ignoring of the car-distribution clauses of the act did not obtrude as brazenly as it did the year following. but when grain began to pour in to the shipping points in and the farmers found the railway unheeding their requests for cars their disgust and disappointment were as complete as their anger was swift. it was the rankling disappointment of men whose rights have been officially decreed only to be unofficially annulled; it was the hot anger of a slap in the face--the anger that makes men fight with every ounce of their strength. the quick welling of it planted anxiety in the minds of such level-headed farmers as w. r. motherwell and peter dayman, of abernethy; williams, of balcarres; snow, of wolseley; sibbold and millar, of indian head. while the two latter were riding into town with wheat one day john sibbold suggested to john millar that, as secretary of the local agricultural society, it might be a good thing if he called a meeting to talk things over. it was the high state of feeling manifested at this meeting which furnished w. r. motherwell with food for thought on the lonely qu'appelle trail. and it was the idea that it might be advisable to hold similar mass meetings throughout the country that brought peter dayman driving over to the motherwell place, not long after, to discuss it. these two men had been friends and neighbors since . each of them felt that the time had come for definite action of some kind and they spent the greater part of the day in talking over the situation in search of the most practical plan of campaign. there was little use in the farmers attempting to organize in defence of their own interests unless the effort were absolutely united and along broader lines than those of any previous farmers' organization. politics, they both agreed, would have to be kept out of the movement at all costs or it would land on the rocks of defeat in the same way that the farmers' union and patrons of industry had been wrecked. it was in the middle eighties when the west was settled but sparsely that the farmers had attempted to improve their lot by the formation of "farmers' unions." the movement had had a brief and not very brilliant career and as the offspring of this attempt at organization some progressives with headquarters at brandon, manitoba, had tried to enter the grain trade as an open company. when one of the chief officers of this concern defected in an attempt to get rich the failure dragged down the earnest promoters to deep financial losses. again in the early nineties the farmers had rebelled at their pioneer hardships by organizing the "patrons of industry," a movement which had gained strength and for a while looked healthy. it had got strong enough to elect friends to the legislature and was sowing good seed when again temptation appeared, centred in the lure of commercial success and politics. some of the chief officers began to misuse the organization for selfish ends and away went the whole thing. there was no use in repeating these defeats. couldn't some way be devised of sidestepping such pitfalls? the great weakness of the farmers was their individual independence; if they could be taught to stand together for their common interests there was hope that something might be accomplished. the sitting-room clock ticked away the hours unheeded as these two far-sighted and conscientious farmers lost themselves in earnest discussion. the lamps were lighted, but still they planned. finally w. r. motherwell reached across the table for a pad of note-paper and drafted the call to arms--a letter which summoned the men of wolseley, sintaluta and indian head, of qu'appelle, wideawake and other places to gather for _action_. there and then copies were written out for every leading farmer within reach, and in order that no political significance might be attached to the call, both men signed the letters. when peter dayman drove away from the motherwell place that night perhaps he scarcely realized that he carried in his pocket the fate of the farmers of western canada. neither he, w. r. motherwell, nor any other man could have foretold the bitter struggles which those letters were destined to unleash--the stirring events that were impending. [ ] wheat was first grown in canada in at port royal (now annapolis) in nova scotia, where champlain and pourtincourt built a fort and established a small colony. a plot of ground was made ready and wheat planted. "it grew under the snow," said pourtincourt, "and in the following midsummer it was harvested." chapter iii the first shot is fired let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.--_abraham lincoln_. the eighteenth of december, , was a memorable day in the little prairie town of indian head. strangers from east and west had begun to arrive the night before and early in the day the accommodations were taxed to the limit while the livery stables were overflowing with the teams of farmers from every direction. all forenoon the trails were dotted with incoming sleighs and the groups which began to congregate on main street grew rapidly in size and number. the shop-keepers had stayed up half the night to put the final touches to their holiday decorations and make their final preparations for the promised rush of christmas buying. many prominent men would grace the town with their presence before nightfall. the premier of the north-west territories, hon. f. w. g. haultain, would be on hand, as well as hon. g. h. v. bulyea and senator william d. perley; coming to meet them here would be premier r. p. roblin and other gentlemen of manitoba. certain boundary matters, involving the addition of a part of assiniboia to the province of manitoba, were to be discussed at a public meeting in the town hall at night. messrs. motherwell and dayman had chosen their date well, many farmers having planned already to be at indian head on the th. the grain growers' meeting was announced for the afternoon and so keen was the interest that when order was called the chairman faced between sixty and seventy-five farmers, as well as a number of public men, instead of the dozen-or-so whom w. r. motherwell had ventured to expect. although it was december out of doors, the temperature of that meeting was about one hundred in the shade! as the discussion expanded feeling ran high. farmer after farmer got to his feet and told the facts as he knew them, his own personal experiences and those of his neighbors. there was no denying the evidence that it was full time the farmers bestirred themselves. w. r. motherwell and peter dayman spoke earnestly in favor of immediate organization along strong, sane lines. the farmer was always referred to as the most independent man on earth, and so he was; but it was individual independence only. he had come lumbering into the country behind his own oxen with his family and all his worldly goods in his own wagon; had built a roof over their heads with his own hands. alone on the prairie, he had sweated and wrestled with the problem of getting enough to eat. one of the very first things the pioneer learned was to stand on his own two feet--to do things by himself. his isolation, the obstacles he had overcome by his own planning, the hardships he had endured and survived--these were the excuses for his assertiveness, his individualism, his hostility to the restrictions of organization. he was a horse for work; but it was an effort for him to do team work because he was not used to it. this was the big barrier which would have to be surmounted in the beginning if battle were to be waged successfully against present oppressive conditions. the right kind of organization was the key that would unlock a happier future. the farmer was as much a producer as any manufacturer who made finished articles out of raw material; but his was the only business in which full energies were expended upon production of goods to sell while the marketing end was left for the "other fellow" to organize. that was why he was obliged to do as he was told, take what was given him or haul his wheat home and eat it himself. like all such meetings, it was not without its few pails of cold water. these were emptied by some who hinted dark things about "political reasons," and it was easy to make the trite statement that history repeats itself and to predict that the formation of such a farmers' association as was proposed would be riding only for the same fall which had overtaken former attempts. the enthusiasm refused to be dampened and it broke out in unmistakable accents when without waste of words angus mckay nominated w. r. motherwell as provisional president of the "territorial grain growers' association." john millar as provisional secretary and a board of directors[ ] were quickly chosen. when it was all over and senator william d. perley rose slowly to his feet, it was to deliver a parting message of confidence that the farmers were taking the right step in the right manner. there were few men who could be listened to with greater respect than the elderly senator and as the silence of his audience deepened it was almost as if the white-haired gentleman's dignified words were prophetic. he had been familiar with a somewhat similar movement in new brunswick, he said, and back there by the atlantic this movement was still very much alive and doing good work. long after those who were present at this meeting had passed away, it was his prediction that this newborn organization of prairie farmers would be living still, still expanding and still performing a useful service to the farmers generally. the meeting adjourned with the general feeling that at last matters were advancing beyond mere talk. the sixth of january was set as the date for a second meeting to draft a constitution and prepare a definite plan of campaign. emphasis was laid upon the importance of a good attendance; but when the date arrived the leaders of the new movement were disappointed to find that, including themselves, there were just eleven farmers present. while this did not look very promising, they proceeded with their plans and it is a tribute to the careful thought expended at that time that the constitution then framed has stood the test of many years, even much of the exact phraseology remaining to-day. the idea of having local associations scattered throughout the country, each with its own officers, governed by a central organization with its special officers, was adopted from the first. among those present was c. w. peterson, deputy commissioner of agriculture for the north-west territories. he freely offered his services in the capacity of secretary; but the offer was turned down so flat and so quickly that it was breath-taking. the incident reflected very vividly the jealousy with which the farmers were guarding the new movement rather than any depreciation of the deputy commissioner's ability; every man of them was on the alert to deflect the thinnest political wedge, imagined or otherwise, that might come along. they would trust nobody with an official connection and the appointment of john millar, who was one of themselves, was confirmed without loss of time. there was no salary attached to any office, of course; nobody thought of salaries. the farmers who knew the feel of spare cash in those days were seventh sons of seventh sons. winter and all as it was, the leaders of the young organization did not let the snow pack under their feet. no sooner were the preliminaries over than they set about preparing for the first convention of the association by hitching up and travelling the country, organizing local associations. w. r. motherwell, john millar and matt. snow, of wolseley, tucked the robes around them and jingled away in different directions. wherever they went they were listened to eagerly and the resulting action was instantaneous. the movement took hold of the farmers like wildfire; so that by february thirty-eight local grain growers' associations had been formed, each sending enthusiastic delegates to the first annual convention, which was held at indian head in february, . all that summer, pacing the rapidly growing wheat, the territorial grain growers' association spread and took root till by harvest time it was standing everywhere in the field, a thrifty and full-headed champion of farmers' rights, lacking only the ripening of experience. there had been as yet no particular opportunity to demonstrate its usefulness in dollars and cents; but with the approach of the fall and market season the whole organization grew tense with expectancy. there seemed little reason to believe that the railway people would do other than attempt to continue their old methods of distributing cars where and when they chose and to disregard, as before, those provisions of the grain act which aimed to protect the farmer in getting his fair share of cars in which to load direct. thus it soon turned out. the officers of the association at once warned the canadian pacific railway company that if they persisted in such practice the farmers would be compelled to take legal action against them. it looked so much like the attack of a toddling child against a man full grown that the big fellow laughed good-naturedly. who, pray, were the "territorial grain growers' association"? "we represent the farmers of western canada," retorted the unabashed officers of the little organization "and we want what the law allows us as our right. what's more, we propose to get it!" that was about the message which w. r. motherwell and peter dayman went down to winnipeg to deliver in person to the canadian pacific railway company. the official whom they interviewed manipulated the necessary levers to start the matter on its way through the "proper channels" towards that "serious consideration" into which all good politicians and corporation officials take everything that comes unexpectedly before them. w. r. motherwell could not wait for the unfolding of this hardy perennial and left peter dayman at winnipeg to follow up developments. when the latter got back home he brought with him a bagful of promises. the practical improvement in the situation which was to support these promises, however, evidently got wrapped up in somebody else's order and delivered to another address. as soon as the association were satisfied that relief was not to be forthcoming they promptly filled out a standard form of information and complaint and notified the railway that they were going to take legal action at sintaluta against the company's station agent; if no results were forthcoming there, they assured the company, they would take action against every railway agent in the territories who was guilty of distributing cars contrary to the provisions of the grain act. the complaint went before mr. c. c. castle, the official warehouse commissioner; the information was laid before magistrate h. o. partridge at sintaluta. all over the country the newspapers began to devote valuable space to the impending trial. it was talked about in bar-rooms and barber-shops. some anti-railroaders declared at once that the farmers hadn't a minute's chance to win against the c. p. r. the news percolated eastward, its significance getting lighter till it became merely: "a bunch of fool hayseeds out west in some kind of trouble with the c. p. r.--cows run over, or something." at ottawa, however, were those who saw handwriting on the wall and they awaited the outcome with considerable interest. several public men, especially from regina, made ready to be in actual attendance at the preliminary trial. the farmers were out in force, for they realized the importance of this test case. it was not the agent at sintaluta they were fighting, but the railway itself; it was not this specific instance of unjust car distribution that would be settled, but all other like infringements along the line. the very efficacy of the grain act itself was challenged. two hours before the magistrate's court sat to consider the case, j. a. m. aikins (now sir james aikins, lieutenant-governor of manitoba), who was there as the legal representative of the c. p. r., tapped the president of the farmers' association on the elbow. "let's make a real case of it while we're at it," he smiled, and proceeded to suggest that instead of laying information against the railway company on two charges, the association should charge them also with violating some five or six other sections of the act. "then we'll have a decision on them, too, you see. for the purpose of this case the company will plead guilty to the offences. what do you say?" "don't you do it, w. r.! not on your life, mister!" the farmers within earshot crowded about the two. they suspected trickery in such a last-minute suggestion; either the railway people were very sure they had the case in their pocket or they were up to some smooth dodge, you bet! president motherwell shook his head dubiously. "how can we change the information on such short notice?" he objected. "it would mean risking an adjournment of the court." "that's what they're after! stick to him, motherwell!" but it did seem very advisable to have the meaning of those other doubtful sections of the act cleared up, and as c. p. r. counsel went more fully into the matter the desirability of it for both sides became even more apparent. "tell you what we'll do, mr. aikins," said w. r. motherwell, finally turning to him after consulting the others, "if you'll give your pledged word before this assembled crowd of farmers that you won't take any technical advantage of the change you've suggested us making in the information--by raising objections when court opens, i mean--why, we'll make the change." "certainly," agreed mr. aikins without hesitation, and in solemn silence he and the president of the association shook hands. this alteration in the information made the issue even more far-reaching and it was a tense moment for the farmers who packed the little court room when the magistrate opened proceedings and on behalf of the warehouse commissioner, mr. t. q. mathers (now chief justice mathers, of winnipeg), rose to his feet for argument. after the evidence was complete and the magistrate at last handed down his decision--fifty dollars fine and costs, to be paid by the defendant--the victorious grain growers were jubilant and especially were the officers of the young association proud of the outcome. the case was carried to the supreme court by the railway company, which made every effort to have the decision of the lower court reversed. when the appeal case came to trial, much to the disgust and chagrin of the railway authorities and the corresponding elation of the farmers, the magistrate's decision was sustained. at once the newspapers all over the country were full of it. oracles of bar-room and barber-shop nodded their heads wisely; hadn't they said that even the c. p. r. couldn't win against organized farmers, backed up by the law of the land? away east the news was magnified till it became: "the farmers out west have licked the c. p. r. in court and are threatening to tear up the tracks!" at ottawa members of parliament dug into hansard to see if they had said anything when the manitoba grain act was passed. empty cars began to roll into western sidings and they were not all spotted to suit the elevators but were for farmers who had signified a desire to load direct. it was unnecessary to carry out the threat of proceeding against every delinquent railway agent in the territories; for the delinquencies were no longer deliberate. the book in which by turn the orders for cars were listed began to be a more honest record of precedence in distribution, as all good car-order books should be. for the railway authorities were men of wide experience and ability, who knew when they were defeated and how to accept such defeat gracefully. it meant merely that the time had come to recognize the fact that there was a man inside the soil-grimed shirt. the farmer had won his spurs. while the railway people did not like the action of the association in hauling them into court, in all fairness they were ready to admit that they had received full warning before such drastic action was taken. if the railway officials began to regard the farmer in a new light, the latter on his part began to appreciate somewhat more fully the task which faced these energetic men in successfully handling the giant organization for which they assumed responsibility. after the tilt, therefore, instead of the leaders of the grain growers and the railway looking at each other with less friendly eyes, their relations became more kindly as each began to entertain for the other a greater respect. best of all, applications were beginning to pour in upon the secretary of the territorial grain growers' association--applications from farmers everywhere for admission to the organization. skeptics who had been holding out now enrolled with their local association and, as fast as they could be handled, new locals were being formed. and at this very time, over in the hotel at sintaluta, a grain grower of great ability and discernment was warning an interested group of farmers against the dangers of over-confidence. "at present we are but pygmies attacking giants," declared e. a. partridge. "giants may compete with giants, pygmies with pygmies, but pygmies with giants, never. we are not denizens of a hamlet but citizens of a world and we are facing the interlocking financial, commercial and industrial interests of a thousand million people. if we are to create a fighting force by co-operation of the workers to meet the giants created by the commercial co-operation of the owners, we have scarcely started. if we seek permanent improvement in our financial position and thereby an increase of comfort, opportunity and sense of security in our lives and the lives of our families, the fight will be long and hard. "and we are going to need every man we can muster." [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter iv "that man partridge!" any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of faith . . . that requires a heroism which is transcendent. and no man, i think, ever puts the plow into the furrow and does not look back, and sows good seed therein, that a harvest does not follow.--_henry ward beecher_. it was a handy place to live, that little tar-paper shanty around which the prairie wind whooed and whiffed with such disdain. so small was it that it was possible to wash oneself, dress oneself and get breakfast without getting out of bed. on the wall was a shelf which did duty as a table. there were also a little box stove and some odds and ends. when the roof leaked, which was every time it rained, it was necessary to put pans on the bed to catch the drip. but it was better than the tent in which e. a. partridge and his brother slept through their first star-strewn winter nights on the open prairie--more pretentious than the tent and assuredly not so cold. the two boys were proud of it, even though they were fresh from civilization--from simcoe county, ontario, where holly-hocks topped the fences of old-fashioned flower gardens in summer and the houses had shingles on top to keep out the weather, and where there were no coyotes to howl lonesomely at night, where--well, never mind. those houses belonged to other people; the shanty was theirs. all around stretched acres and acres of snow; but there was land under that snow--rich, new land--and that was theirs, too, by right of homesteading. it was about christmas time in when e. a. partridge was twenty-one. the place was near sintaluta, district of assiniboia, north-west territories, and homesteading there in the days before the rebellion was no feather bed for those who tackled it. a piece of actual money was a thing to take out and look at every little while, to show to one's friends and talk about. season after season the half starved agricultural pathfinders lost their hard-earned crops by drouth and what was not burned out by the sun was eaten by ubiquitous gophers. the drouth was due, no doubt, to the frequent prairie fires which swept the country; these found birth in the camp-fire coals left by ignorant or careless settlers on their way in. under the rays of the summer sun the blackened ground became so hot that from it ascended a column of scorching air which interfered with the condensation of vapor preceding the falling of rain. clouds would bank up above the prairie horizon, eagerly watched by anxious homesteaders; but over the burned area the clouds seemed to thin out without a drop falling upon the parching crops. forty-three acres, sown to wheat, was the first crop which the partridge brothers put in. the total yield was seven bushels, obtained from around the edges of a slough! one by one discouraged settlers gathered together their few belongings and sought fresh trails. lone men trudged by, pack on back, silent and grim. swearing at his horses, wheels squealing for axle-grease, tin pans rattling and flashing in the hot morning sun, a settler with a family stopped one day to ask questions of the two young men. he was on his way--somewhere--no place in particular. "i tell ye, boys, this country ain't no place fer a white man," he volunteered. "when y'ain't freezin' ye're burnin' up, an' that's what happens in hell!" he spat a stream of tobacco juice over the wagon wheel and clawed his beard, his brown face twisted quizzically. "god a'mighty ain't nowheres near here! he didn't come this fur west--stopped down to rat portage![ ] well, anyways, good luck to ye both; but ef ye don't git it, young fellers, don't ye go blamin' me, by jupiter!" he cracked his whip. "come up out o' that, ye god-forsaken old skates!" and, mud-caked wheels screeching, tin pans banging and glaring, he jolted back to the trail that led away in distance to no place in particular. but along with some others who confessed to being poor walkers, the partridge boys stuck right where they were. they set about the building of a more permanent and comfortable shack--a sod house this time. it took more than seven thousand sods, one foot by three, three inches thick; but when it was finished it was a precocious raindrop or a mendacious wind that could find its way in. about thirteen miles distant was a little mud schoolhouse, and one day e. a. partridge was asked to go over and teach in it. it was known that back east, besides working on his father's farm, he had taught school for awhile. learning was a truant for the younger generation on the prairies at that time, there being only a few private schools scattered here and there. though it was not much of an opportunity for anything but something to do, the offer was accepted, and every morning, after sucking a couple of eggs for a breakfast, e. a. partridge took to loping across the prairie on a "shag" pony. but the little school put an idea into his head. he wondered if it might be worth while starting a private school of his own, and in he thought the broadview locality offered profitable prospects. he decided to go down there and look over the situation. by this time the occupants of the sod house numbered four--three partridge brothers and a friend. the problem of fitting out the school-teacher for his broadview trip so that he would create the necessary impression among strangers was one which called for corrugated brows. the solution of it was not to be found in any of the teacher's few text-books; it quite upset euclid's idea that things which were equal to the same thing were equal to one another--when it came to finding enough parts to make a respectable whole! for among the four bachelors was not one whole suit of clothes sufficiently presentable for social events. everything was rough and ready in those days and in spite of the hardships the friendly pioneer settlers had some good times together; but the sod house quartette had never been seen at any of these gatherings--not all four at one time! three of them were always so busy with this or that work that they had to stay home, you know; it would have been embarrassing to admit that it was only by pooling their clothes they could take turns in exhibiting a neighborly spirit. as it was, there was often a secret fear of exhibiting even more--an anxiety which led the visitor to keep the wall at his back like a man expecting general excitement to break loose at any moment! on reaching broadview the prospects for the new school looked bright, so the hopeful pedagogue sent back word to the sod house to this effect. "and don't you fellows forget to send my linen," he wrote jokingly. "make the trunk heavy, too. i don't know how long it will have to represent my credit!" when the trunk arrived it was so heavy that it took two men to carry it into the hotel. when in the secrecy of his own room e. a. partridge ventured to look inside he found his few books, a pair of "jumper" socks--and a lot of stones! also there was an old duster with a piece of paper pinned to it, advising: "here's your linen!" the broadview school did not last long for the reason that the second north-west rebellion broke out that year and the teacher joined the yorkton rangers. fifty cents a day and grub was an alluring prospect; many a poor homesteader would have joined the ranks on active service for the grub alone, especially when the time of his absence was being allowed by the government to apply on the term set for homestead duties before he could come into full possession of his land. many farmers earned money, also, teaming supplies from the railway north to battleford and prince albert. in common with his fellow grain growers, the five years that followed were years of continuous struggle for e. a. partridge. the railway came and the country commenced to settle quickly. the days of prairie fires that ran amuck gave way to thriving crops; but at thirty and forty cents per bushel the thriving of those who sowed them was another matter. this man with the snappy blue eyes and caustic tongue was among the first to foresee "the rising colossus," the shadow of which was creeping slowly across the farmer's path, and he watched the "brewing menace" with growing concern. with every ounce of his tremendous energy he resented the encroachment of capital upon the liberties of labor. being of the people and temperamentally a democrat, he had a great yearning for the reorganization of society in the general interest. his championship in this direction earned him the reputation in some quarters of being full of "fads," a visionary. but his neighbors, who had toiled and suffered beside him through the years, knew "ed." partridge, man to man, and held him in high regard; they admired him for his human qualities, respected him for his abilities, and wondered at his theories. on occasion they, too, shook their heads doubtfully. they could not know the big part in their emancipation which this friend and neighbor of theirs was destined to play through many days of crisis. not yet had the talley begun. but events even now slowly were shaping. with the winning of their first clash the farmers' movement was achieving momentum. in the latter part of december, , down in the town of virden, manitoba, a committee was appointed at a meeting of the virden agricultural society, to arrange a district meeting for the purpose of organizing the first grain growers' association in manitoba. as soon as the date was set j. w. scallion wrote to w. r. motherwell, urgently asking him to assist in the organization. although roads and weather were rough, the president of the territorial grain growers' association at considerable inconvenience went down to virden, taking with him matt. snow and copies of the constitution and by-laws upon which the territorial association was founded, with this assistance a strong local association was formed at virden on january th, , with capable officers[ ] and a first-year membership of one hundred and twenty-five. the same difficulties that faced the farmers farther west were being experienced in manitoba and the newspapers were full of protesting letters from country points. as president of the virden grain growers' association, j. w. scallion wrote letters to every place where complaints were being voiced and urged organization. at every opportunity it was advocated through the press that from the eastern boundary of manitoba to the rocky mountains the farmers should organize themselves for self-defence against oppression, present or possible, by "the interests." in about six weeks over fifteen local associations had been formed in manitoba and virden began calling for a provincial association. accordingly, on march rd and th, , the manitoba grain growers held their first convention at brandon with one hundred delegates present, representing twenty-six local associations. great enthusiasm marked the event and the officers[ ] chosen were all men of initiative. the members of the parent organization watched the rapid expansion on all sides with sparkling eyes. their own second annual convention at indian head revealed considerable progress and the promise of greater things to come. on the invitation of the delegates from the regina district it was decided to hold the third annual convention at the capital and the rousing gathering which met there in due course was productive of such stimulus and publicity that its effect was felt long afterward. at every convention the farmers found some additional weak spot in the grain act and suggested remedial legislation. records are lacking to show in what order the various changes came; but step by step the farmers were gaining their rights. it all seemed so wonderful--to get together thus and frame requests of the government at ottawa, to find their very wording incorporated in the act. the farmers scarcely had dared to think of such a thing before. to them the ear of a government was a delicate organism beyond reach, attuned to the acoustics of high places only; that it was an ear to hear, an ear to the ground to catch the voice of the people was a discovery. at any rate when w. r. motherwell and j. b. gillespie, of the territories, d. w. mccuaig and r. c. henders, of manitoba, went to ottawa for the first time they were received with every consideration and many of their requests on behalf of the farmers granted. with such recognition and the recurring evidence of advantageous results the jeering grins of a certain section of the onlooking public began to sober down to a less disrespectful mien. those who talked glibly at first of the other farmers' organizations which they had seen go to pieces became less free with their forebodings. in the farmers began to press for something more than the proper distribution of cars and the freedom of shipment. they were dissatisfied with the grading system and the re-inspection machinery. some of them claimed that the grading system did not classify wheat according to its milling value. some wanted a change in the government's staff at the office of the chief grain inspector where the official grading was done. some wanted a sample market; some didn't. the farmers were about evenly divided. the department of agriculture for the territories commissioned professor robert harcourt, chemist of the ontario agricultural college, to conduct tests as to the comparative values of the different grades of wheat. e. a. partridge, of sintaluta, and a. a. perley, of wolseley, undertook to secure eight-bushel samples of the various grades from their districts. these were carefully sacked and shipped to the chief grain inspector at winnipeg, where he graded them and forwarded them to professor harcourt, sealed in such a way that any tampering with the shipment would be detected readily. these samples were all of crop. there had been a bad snowstorm in september of that year and much wheat had been standing in stook. the farmers believed that the grain was not frozen or injured in any way and that they were defrauded to some extent in the grading of their wheat. the samples represented all grades from "no. hard" to "feed." they were milled with exceptional care to prevent mixing of the various lots and the flours obtained were put through three different baking tests. the conclusion reached was that there did not appear to be much difference in the value of the different grades of wheat. even the "feed" sample proved by no means useless for bread-making purposes, either in yield or quality; the only thing that rendered it less available for bakers' use was its darker color. all who saw the loaves were surprised at the quality of this bread. the tests on these samples confirmed the farmers in their opinion that on wheat the spread in price between no. hard and no. was not in harmony with the milling quality. from no. hard the amount of flour obtained was . per cent. as against per cent. from the no. grade. the large percentage of stook-frozen grain that went into the lower grades because it was technically debarred from the higher ones no doubt raised the milling value, it was thought, of all the grades that year. the department of agriculture for the territories therefore decided to repeat the tests with wheat. the samples with which professor harcourt was furnished represented the grain just as it was sold by the farmer and graded either at the elevator or by the chief grain inspector; it was not a composite sample of the commercial grades. the second tests practically confirmed the work done the previous year. the milling, chemical and baking tests failed to show very wide differences in the composition and milling value of the grades submitted. the conclusion reached was that the difference in composition and milling value was nearly as great between samples of any one grade as between the various grades. the farmers began to feel that it would be a good thing to have a representative at winnipeg to watch the grading of their cars and to look after their interests generally. the department of agriculture for the territories was asked by the sintaluta grain growers to appoint a man and w. h. gaddes was commissioned to act for two weeks. then the farmers began to wonder if they could not send down a man of their own; at one of their meetings the question was put and those present subscribed five dollars apiece for the purpose. thus it came about that on the th of january, , there stepped from the train at the c. p. r. depot in winnipeg a man who looked no different from any one of a dozen other farmers who daily reached the city, tanned of cheek and bright of eye. but his business in town was of a very special nature. in his pocket was a hundred dollars and the grip in his hand was packed for a month's stay. it was a month of "cold shoulders" and patronizing manners for e. a. partridge. no band music was played in his honor, no festive board was spread, nor was he taken around and shown the sights of the city. on the contrary, he was made to feel like a spy in the camp of an enemy; for he found himself entirely without status, the grain dealers recognizing him merely as a farmers' representative, whatever that was. even at the office of the chief grain inspector he was looked upon as a man who was meddling with something which he wasn't supposed to know anything about. nevertheless, the chief inspector himself gave him information at times and there were one or two others who took the trouble to explain some things about which he asked questions. among the latter was a grain man by the name of tom coulter. for the most part, however, the presence of the "farmers' representative" at winnipeg was looked upon as a joke; so that information as to the grain business became for him largely a still hunt. he visited offices, listened to how interviews were conducted over the telephone and picked up whatever loose ends he could find to follow up. "who is that fellow, anyway?" asked a grain man who had just got back to the city. he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "oh, him!" laughed his partner as he saw who was indicated. "only that gazabo from sintaluta who's been nosing around lately. some hayseeds out the line sent him down here to learn the grain business. they believe that all wheat's no. hard, all grain buyers are thieves, and that hell's to be divided equally between the railways and the milling companies!" "so that's the guy, eh?--that's that man partridge!" [ ] the new name of rat portage is kenora (ontario). [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter v "the house with the closed shutters" knock, knock, knock! who's there, i' the name of beelzebub? here's a farmer . . .--_macbeth_. when wheat ceased to be grown for local needs and overflowed upon the markets of the world, becoming a factor in finance, arenas where its destiny was decided were established in the large centres of trade. in these basins of commerce the never-ending flow concentrated and wheeled for a short space before in re-directed currents it rolled on its way to ocean ports. here, according to the novelists, frantic men were sucked into the golden eddies, their cries strangled and their fate forgotten even as they were engulfed by the leviathan with which they adventured; or they emerged with eyes bloodshot, voices gone and clothes torn, successful speculators of a day. perhaps the general reader is more familiar with these mad scenes of "the pit," as the trading floor is called, than with the steadily turning marketing machinery of which they are but a penumbra. the modern grain exchange is much more than a mere roulette wheel for the speculator. its real purpose is to provide a centre for the legitimate trader. it is a great information bureau of world happenings where every item of news concerning the wheat in any way is gathered and classified--drouth, rain, frost, rust, locusts, hail, hessian fly, monsoon or chinch bug. in every corner of the earth where the wheat streams take their rise, from green blade to brown head the progress of the crop is recorded and the prospects forecasted--on the steppes of russia, the pampas of the argentine, the valley of the san joaquin, the prairies of western canada and the dakotas, the fields of india, iowa, illinois and kansas. good news, bad news, the movements of ships, the prices on the corn exchanges of london and liverpool, at chicago, on the bourses of paris, antwerp and amsterdam--all are listed. with such a timepiece of international exchange ticking out the doings of nations, both buyer and seller can know what prices will govern their dealings. in office or farmhouse an ear to a telephone is all that is necessary. a grain exchange, then, is the market-place where grain dealers meet to secure information and maintain regulations for the prompt performance of contracts. the exchange organization does not deal in grain, but has for its sole purpose the protection of those who do and the facilitating of transactions; in other words, it is on the ground to see that the grain trade is carried on in an honest and capable manner and to punish offenders against proper business ethics and established rules. its membership is composed of grain dealers doing business in the exchange's territory--milling companies, exporting companies, line elevator companies as well as independent dealers and "commission men." besides seeking a supply of wheat to keep their mills busy for the season, the milling companies sell wheat. it is the business of the exporters to make shipment to other countries. wheat is sold to exporters and millers by the elevator companies, who are interested in running as much grain as possible through their elevators at country points. the chief business of independent dealers is to handle wheat that stands "on track," ready for shipment, either buying outright from the farmer or handling it for him on a commission basis. the "commission man" is in an especially good position to do a clean-cut business. he assumes no burden of large capital investment and operating expense, as do the elevator companies. his chief need is a line of credit at a bank and from this he pays advances to his clients, his security being the bills of lading of wheat consigned to him. he does not need to buy or sell on his own account and, unlike the exporter, he does not have to risk changes in freight rates or in prices or make deliveries by given dates. as for the satisfactory milling quality of the crop--that is something for the miller to worry over. in order to do business it is necessary only for the commission man to be a member of the exchange and to obey its rules. for a long time winnipeg has been known as the greatest primary wheat market in the world. that means that a greater volume of new wheat, direct from the producer, passes through the winnipeg market than anywhere else, not even excepting chicago where the first grain exchange to reach international development was established in . the winnipeg market is fed by the vast wheat area of western canada and frequently between two and three million bushels of wheat go through winnipeg in a single day. during the rush season sixty or seventy cars of wheat leave winnipeg for the east every twenty minutes of every twenty-four hours. the freight boats on the lakes load , bushels in three-and-a-half hours.[ ] it is interesting to note that nowhere else in the world is a great public grain market like the winnipeg market found located four hundred miles away from the storage point where grain dealt in is kept for sale delivery. geographically fort william and port arthur at the head of the great lakes water route would provide the natural delivery point for western grain which has been routed eastward[ ] and there the location of the exchange might be looked for logically. it so happens, however, that the eastern edge of the vast grain fields lies four hundred miles west of the twin harbors, the country between not being adapted for farming, and to avoid the delay of mail transit and to operate the trading effectively it was necessary to locate the exchange at winnipeg, the great metropolitan railway centre where the incoming grain concentrated. in western canada the grain is stored in bulk by grades, thereby cheapening handling cost. unlike most countries--which sell grain on sample--western canadian grain has been sold by grade. the inspection and grading of wheat, therefore, is a very important factor in the grain trade of canada and is in full charge of dominion government officials. upon their verdict depends the price per bushel which will be paid for any shipment of grain, market quotations varying for different grades; whether stored, sold at home or sold abroad their certificate of grade brands that particular wheat throughout. the huge river of grain flows in upon them unceasingly; at times the inspectors have to work at top speed to avoid being engulfed. the variety of nature's response to the growing conditions in changing seasons must not confuse them from year to year; but with sharpened senses and sound judgment they must steer a sure course through the multiplicity of grades and grade subdivisions. the thoroughness of the system adopted by the grain inspection department is shown by description of the work done at winnipeg. offices and staffs in charge of deputy inspectors are maintained in the different railway yards. they work in shifts night and day; for during the mad seventy-or-so days in which the western crop stampedes for the lakefront there is no let-up to the in-rolling wheat-bins which come swaying and grinding in over the rails like beads on a string--the endless rosary of harvest thanksgiving. wheat samples must be obtained from each car and no train can be moved until a placard has been placed at the end of it, reading: "grain inspectors have finished this train." a fifty-car train can be sampled in about an hour and a half, which is comfortable time for a change of engines and crews. the sampling gangs work with all the precision of gun crews--each man with a particular thing to do. one goes down the train, opening car doors and leaving an empty sample bag in each car. running up a short ladder, the sampler climbs over the top of the inner door, which extends above the "load line"; the standard sampler which he uses is a cylindrical brass rod, so constructed that when it is "stabbed" to the bottom of the car the grain which fills it is a correct sample of wheat at every depth. seven such samples are procured from different sections of the car, and the track foreman, standing on a ladder, watches these poured onto a cloth with an eye to detecting evidence of "plugging" with an inferior quality of grain; these seven samples having been mixed thoroughly, a canvas bag is filled from the result and the two-and-one-half pounds which it will hold become the official sample. the rest of the mixture is dumped back and the car resealed. the foreman has filled out a sample ticket with car number, date, load line, initials of sampler and any other notations necessary--such as leakages, etc. his own name is stamped on the back of the ticket, which goes into the sample sack. copies of the way bills with full information as to all cars, shipping points, consignees or advisees and destinations are obtained from the railway yard office and these, together with the samples, are sent twice a day to the chief grain inspector's office at the grain exchange. here the samples are inspected and graded in a room with special lighting facilities. the grading is done only in broad daylight. the quality of the grain, its condition and the admixtures are determined respectively by judgment of hand and eye, by elaborate mechanical moisture tests and by a sieving and weighing process. the whole sample is examined closely for color, plumpness, weight, etc., in order to fix its grade as no. hard, no. northern, northern, northern; hard and northern must weigh at least sixty pounds, northern fifty-eight pounds, and so on. grades below these are set by the grain standards board. damp or wet grain is marked "no grade," which means that it is considered unfit for storing and therefore has a lower market value. grain which is heated or bin-burnt is "condemned." if it is unsound, musty, dirty, smutty, sprouted or badly mixed with other grain, etc., it is "rejected." grain which, because of weather or other conditions, cannot be included in the grades provided by statute is given a "commercial grade." it will be seen at once that here is work requiring great nicety of judgment and that long experience is necessary to enable the grader to reach his decisions quickly and accurately. when the grading is completed the sample is placed in a small tin box and filed systematically; it is supposed to remain thus stored until there is no longer the possibility of a demand for re-inspection and finally the samples are sacked and sold to the miller with the highest bid, the money being paid to the dominion government. grade certificates, bearing the chief grain inspector's signature, are issued for each shipment and sent at once to the elevator company, miller or commission agent to whom the car is consigned. these grade certificates, together with the weight certificate and the bill of lading, make the grain negotiable on the market; the dealer does not see the actual grain, merely handling these papers. if dissatisfaction with grade or dockage arises, the owner of the grain or his agent can obtain re-inspection at the office of the chief grain inspector free of charge, and, if still dissatisfied, appeal can be made to the survey board. this is a board of twelve men; the governing rules and regulations are established by the grain commission. six members are recommended by the winnipeg board of trade and two each by the minister of agriculture in each of the three prairie provinces.[ ] the verdict of the survey board is final. now, back in the machinery for moving the crop upon its way was little understood by the average western canadian farmer. the wheels went around, gave a click and away went his wheat; but in approaching it all with the idea of understanding everything he was in the position of the small boy examining the works of a watch to see how it told the time. he felt that he ought to understand what went on down at winnipeg; for of course where there were so many rules and regulations to be broken there must be "funny work." it was the natural suspicion of the man who lived much to himself in the quiet spaces, who could not believe that grain dealers could be honest and build palatial residences in winnipeg while his own toil in producing the grain was rewarded with a living only. it looked as if the roost was being robbed and with his newborn initiative he wanted to find out how it was done and who was doing it. the satisfactory manner in which things are conducted in the grain trade to-day is the result of long experience and gradual improvement of conditions. it must be remembered that in the earlier days the trade was not so well organized for efficiency and in when e. a. partridge began to probe for "plugging" he had a big job on his hands, especially in view of the fact that he was treated for the most part as a meddler who was not entitled to reliable information. there are two ways of reaching a conclusion--one by approaching it logically on facts laid down; the other by jumping to it across a yawning lack of detail. at the end of his month of investigation the farmer's scout had a regular rag-bag of material out of which to fashion a patchwork report. a grain man might have condemned it as a "crazy quilt" because bits of high color obtruded inharmoniously. but if here and there an end was short or a bit of information on the bias, it was because the "farmers' representative" had not been treated with sufficient frankness. he had to make the best of the materials allowed him and his natural tendency to bright-colored metaphor may have been quickened. he hit out straight from the shoulder in all sincerity at conditions as they appeared to him. he thought he saw five companies controlling the exporting business, and also their margin of profit, so that they were able to keep out smaller dealers who might have the temerity and the necessary capital to try exporting on their own account. he saw the smaller dealers in turn stem-winding their prices by those of the exporters, controlling the prices paid for street and track wheat throughout the country; thereby, he reasoned, it became possible to set special prices at any given point by the simple expedient of wiring the necessary instructions to the operator at that point to pinch independent competition. he saw elevator companies cutting their charges at certain points to kill off competition from "farmers' elevators" which sold to independent dealers. all this he was sure he saw. the sampling appeared to be carried on in a systematic and satisfactory manner. the grading, too, appeared to be uniform enough as regarded the standard grades; but in the item of color there seemed just cause for complaint. lack of color, a trifling number of imperfectly formed kernels or the suspicion of a wrinkle on the bran apparently doomed a sample to low grade no matter how heavy and flinty the wheat might be. this seemed scarcely fair to partridge, who bore in mind that the sunny seasons of past years had been succeeded by cloudier ones, the dry autumns by wet ones and that with stacking discontinued and much of the farmers' wheat left long in stock, bleaching was bound to follow. so that if the chief grain inspector were a "crank on color," he should remember that beauty was only skin deep. the fracture and microscopic and weighing tests seemed to be the only reasonable tests which could be applied quickly; the milling test was the only one which was absolutely correct. any rapid eye test which pretended to determine whether there was sixty-one per cent. or fifty-nine per cent. of red fife wheat in a given sample struck the farmers' representative as farcical; yet this was sufficient to make the difference of a grade and sometimes a difference of seven cents per bushel in the price obtained. the whim of the inspector likewise decided how many lean berries in a plump sample would disqualify it for "plump" classification and how many mature or defective berries among sound wheat, would disqualify it from being classed as "sound." with a single concocted sample as a basis of judgment partridge considered that the grading of the lower grades often was very unjust to the producer, especially to the owners of plump frosted wheat; the process of concocting the basic sample was very interesting; but the result was "a nightmare." w. h. gaddes, who had preceded him to winnipeg, agreed with him in this. also, mr. gaddes denounced the survey board at that time as unsatisfactory in its composition, open to suspicion in its findings and in practice--so far as outsiders' wheat was concerned--simply a machine to register confirmation of the inspector's previous grading. it was partridge's belief that "many a fraud perpetrated in a line elevator" was added to the "iniquities" of the inspector, in whose personal integrity he had every confidence. for this reason he was inclined to be lenient with the hard-working and conscientious officials of the government. nevertheless, it appeared wise that a farmers' special agent be maintained permanently at winnipeg to safeguard the interests of the farmers, especially if certain powers were allotted to him under the inspection act. in making his report to the territorial grain growers' association partridge went into the whole situation as he saw it and particularly was he outspoken in regard to "that house with the closed shutters," as he called the winnipeg grain and produce exchange. in fact, his gas attack upon the exchange was ablaze with the fires of hostility. and for the use of his reckless language partridge was to be called to account in due course. [ ] although only about ten per cent. of the arable area in western canada is under cultivation there are already , country elevators. terminal elevators at the head of the lakes with a storage capacity of forty-four million bushels and interior government terminals with ten and one-half million bushels capacity are overflowing already. wheat exports of canada have increased from , , bushels in to , , bushels in . per capita canada has more railway mileage than any country in the world. [ ] in early days nearly all grain was routed eastward via winnipeg; but with the development of the grain trade and the opening of the panama canal some western canadian grain travels west and south. facilities for inspection and grading have been established at calgary, superior, duluth, saskatoon, moose jaw, medicine hat and vancouver. [ ] in three members of the survey board were recommended by the winnipeg board of trade and three each by the respective departments of agriculture in the three prairie provinces. chapter vi on a card in the window of wilson's old store . . . is it vain to hope the sons of such a land will climb and grope along the undiscovered ways of life, and neither seek nor be found shunning strife, but ever, beckoned by a high ideal, press onward, upward, till they make it real; with feet sure planted on their native sod, and will and aspirations linked with god? --robert j. c. stead. ideas grow. the particular idea which now began to occupy the thoughts of e. a. partridge to the exclusion of everything else was a big idea to begin with; but it kept on growing so rapidly that it soon became an obsession. why couldn't the farmers themselves form a company to undertake the marketing of their own wheat? that was the idea. if a thousand farmers got together in control of ten million bushels of wheat and sold through a single accredited agency, they would be in the same position exactly as a single person who owned ten million bushels. if the owner of ten thousand bushels was able to make a better bargain than the owner of one thousand, what about the owner of ten million bushels? "would the owner of ten million bushels peddle his wheat by the wagonload at the local shipping point or by the carload in winnipeg?" mused partridge. "would he pay one hundred thousand dollars to a commission man to sell his wheat, with perhaps a nice rake-off to an exporter, who turns it over at a profit by selling it to a british dealer, who blends it and makes a good living by selling the blend to a british miller?" his pencil travelled swiftly on the back of an envelope. "would he pay one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to the line elevator and stand a dockage of one hundred thousand bushels in addition? would he pay the terminal elevator seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of screenings? would he pay two and one-half million dollars for transportation when 'by a little method known to large exporters' he could save one and a quarter million dollars out of this item? "you just bet he wouldn't!" concluded this man partridge. "and supposing we had ten thousand farmers in one company and each farmer produced, on an average, five thousand bushels of wheat--that would put the company in control of the sale of _fifty_ million bushels, not ten! why, there's the answer to the whole blame thing--so simple we've been stepping right over it!" pools, mergers, combines, trusts and monopolies were but various forms of the same co-operative principle acting within narrow limits to the benefit of the co-operatives and the prejudices of the outsiders. the remedy lay not in legislative penalties against co-operation but in the practice of co-operation on a large scale by the people. that would provide the most powerful weapon of defence against financial buccaneering. universally employed, it would bring about an industrial millennium! but this was dreaming, of course. none knew better than e. a. partridge that if even a small part of it was to come true, there lay immediately ahead a great educational campaign. ignorance and suspicion would require to be routed. it would be difficult to convince some farmers that his motives were unselfish. others would be opposed to the idea of a farmers' trading company in the belief that it would wreck the association. "we must keep our organization non-partizan, non-political and non-trading" had been the slogan from the first. nothing daunted by the difficulties which loomed in the foreground, partridge obtained permission from his territorial associates to tell the central manitoba grain growers' association the result of his investigations at winnipeg. the manitoba convention was about to be held at brandon and on his way back home he remained over to address the delegates. they listened carefully to what he had to say; but when he began to urge the necessity of the farmers themselves going into trading in grain his fire and enthusiasm caused more excitement where he was standing on the platform than in the audience. the best he could do by his earnestness was to create sufficient interest for a committee[ ] to be appointed with instructions to investigate the possibilities of the scheme and report at the next annual convention of the manitoba grain growers' association. on arrival at sintaluta, however, he succeeded in stirring up his neighbors to the proper pitch of enthusiasm. they knew him at sintaluta, listened to him seriously, and the leaders of the little community shook hands on the idea of organizing, in the form of a joint stock company, "a scheme for the co-operative marketing of grain by farmers." when he made his report of the winnipeg investigations at the annual convention of the territorial grain growers' association at moose jaw he found that while the principle which he advocated was favorably received--just as it had been in manitoba--many farmers drew back distrustfully from the idea of "going into business." their experience with business in the past had not been of a nature to instill confidence in such a venture and if the enterprise failed, they feared it would discredit the association. there was a strong prejudice against any association director or officer being closely identified with such a propaganda. back to sintaluta went e. a. partridge. a public meeting was called to discuss the situation. it was to be held in the town hall on january th ( ) and in preparation for it a preliminary meeting was held in the sitting-room of the hotel and a committee[ ] appointed to prepare a synopsis of what was to be done. this synopsis was presented to the thirty farmers who gathered in the town hall and a lengthy resolution was passed unanimously, setting forth the aims and objects of the prospective trading company. everybody present undertook to subscribe for shares. justification for what they were attempting was found in "the widespread discontent existing among the grain growers of the west with conditions governing the marketing of their grain." it was pointed out also that the isolation of farmers from each other, their distance from the secondary and ultimate markets and their ignorance of the details of the grain business--that these things rendered them individually liable to suffer grave injustices, even without their knowledge and certainly without hope of remedy by individual efforts. the scientific selling of wheat was just as important to the farmer as the scientific growing of it and this scientific knowledge could be obtained only by actually engaging in the business at some important commercial centre where the methods of successful operators could be studied. there was every reason to believe that a scheme which limited its activities at first to acquiring a seat on the grain exchange and doing a straight commission business, or at most a commission and track-buying business--that such a co-operative scheme stood an excellent chance of success. without much financial risk, it should prove immediately profitable, afford protection from crooked practices and at the same time the shareholders could gain an insight into the whole grain business and thereby equip themselves for greater enterprises; it would not be long before they would be in a position to deal intelligently with their problems and pertaining legislation. besides all this there was the possible piling up of a surplus revenue, over and above dividends, which could be turned to good account in uncovering conditions in eastern canadian and european markets and learning the best ways to meet those conditions. for these reasons the grain growers of sintaluta, saskatchewan, went on record at this meeting in the little town hall as heartily recommending the formation of a joint stock company which was to be composed wholly of farmers and to be known as "the grain growers' grain company, limited," with shares at twenty-five dollars each. it was stipulated that no one person could hold more than four shares, that even these were not to be transferable except by vote at annual meeting, and that no man could have more than one vote at annual meetings. with this single far-sighted stroke the possibility of control passing into the hands of any clique was removed. in furtherance of the plans set forth a committee[ ] was named to take charge of the preliminary organization work until relieved by the election of a provisional directorate at an organization meeting which it was hoped to hold at brandon the following march. this committee was authorized to conduct a campaign for subscriptions in the meantime, printed receipts to be issued for the same. such was the scheme to which the farmers of sintaluta subscribed to a man. two hundred shares at sintaluta to begin with and sintaluta only one point in the west! the committee went to work with enthusiasm. ten dollars was spent in printing a prospectus. e. a. partridge got a card and blocked out on it: grain growers' grain company. this he hung in the window of wilson's old store at sintaluta, where a dollar was paid for the use of a desk. here in the evenings would assemble william hall, al quigley, william bonner and e. a. partridge to send out circulars and keep the pot boiling till enough funds were on hand to let quigley out canvassing on board wages. on february th the manitoba grain growers' association held their convention and as chairman of the committee appointed the year before to report upon the matter, e. a. partridge again urged the advisability of establishing a company to handle the farmers' grain. by this time the plan had taken more definite shape and he pressed the claims of the proposed commission company with such logic and eloquence that besides having the committee's report adopted by the association unanimously, he secured the interest of quite a few delegates. there was, nevertheless, much adverse criticism, not a little apathy and some levity. "let's hold a meeting of our own," suggested someone. the word was passed for all who were interested to meet in the council chamber of the brandon town hall. between twenty and thirty farmers attended this meeting and the plans of the sintaluta men for a co-operative trading company were approved. it was decided to meet at the leland hotel in winnipeg some time in march or april to formulate plans for an active campaign. for two days those in attendance at this second meeting discussed the details of the undertaking. a great many different views were expressed, not all of them favorable. there were those who objected to the chosen name of the prospective company as being a handicap upon the association movement in case the venture failed. the sintaluta provisional directorate was allowed to stand and the canvassing committee was enlarged to include a number of manitoba men who were to take the field for a stock canvass. that stock-selling campaign will dodder through to the final memory of those who took part in it. the man who stood on the street-corner and offered ten-dollar gold-pieces for a dollar had no harder task. blood from stones! milk from dry cows! although ten per cent. on each share was all the cash that was asked apparently some farmers were so hard up that if yarn were selling at five cents per mile, they couldn't buy enough of it to make a pair of mitts for a doodlebug! "if you take four shares," admitted al quigley at his meetings, "i can't guarantee that you're not losing four times $ . , which is ten dollars. but you lose that much when you draw a load of wheat up to the elevator anyway," he argued. "you might just as well let another ten go to see what's become of the first ten!" "huh!" grunted a skeptical farmer after one of e. a. partridge's meetings. "this here thing's just a scheme for partridge to feather his nest! you bet he didn't get any o' my money," he bragged. "did he get you, pete?" "he did, ben, an' i'll tell you why. this thing'll probably go bust; but i put a hundred into it. supposin' i put a hundred in a horse an' he dies on me. same thing, ain't it? i got to have horses to do farmin' an' i just go an' buy another one. i figure it's worth takin' a hundred-dollar chance on this thing to try her out." up in the northern part of manitoba was one man who was meeting with pretty fair success. his name was kennedy and his friends who knew him best called him "honest john." his plan was simple--to start talking, talk for awhile, then keep right on talking. "for god's sake, kennedy, if $ . will stop you talking, here it is! we're sleepy!" then he would stop talking. one by one the original canvassers dropped out of the field till almost the only one left besides e. a. partridge was this hard-talking enthusiast up in the swan river country who wound himself up for the night and tired them out--but got the money! [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter vii a fight for life! my dear little demus! you'll find it is true, he behaves like a wretch and a villain to you . . . --aristophanes. it was characteristic of john kennedy to keep everlastingly at it. he was used to hard things to do. in this life some men seem to get rather more than their share of tacks in the boots and crumbs in bed! but every time fate knocked him down he just picked himself up again. always he got up and went at it once more--patiently, conscientiously, smiling. even fate cannot beat a man like that and john kennedy was a hard fighter in a quiet way who did not know how to quit. with four younger brothers and an equal number of younger sisters to crowd up to the home table down there on the farm near beaverton, ontario county, ontario, it was advisable for the eldest son to work out as a farm boy. he was thirteen years old when he first hired out to a farmer for the summer and he was to receive twenty-four dollars for the season. but the farmer had a hard time that year and at the end of the summer-- "john," said the poor fellow with ill-concealed embarrassment, "i--i'm afraid i can't pay you that money. but you know that big flock of sheep down in the back pasture? well, tell you what we'll do. over at beaverton i've got an uncle who's a tailor. i can give you a suit of full cloth of homespun and call it square," and though the boy wanted the money for fifty things he had to take the homespun suit. three or four hobble-de-hoy years of it on the farms of the neighborhood and young kennedy literally took to the woods and drove the rivers in muskoka and michigan as a lumberjack till he was a chunk of whalebone in a red flannel shirt and corked boots and could pull the whiskers out of a wild-cat! with varying success he fought the battle of life and learned that many things glitter besides gold and that the four-leafed clover in this life after all is a square deal between men. the appeal of e. a. partridge at the convention of the manitoba grain growers in therefore found john kennedy feeling responsive. he knew the unjust position in which the farmers were placed; for he was a farmer himself--up in the swan river valley--and he was a delegate from the swan river grain growers' association. the idea of forming a farmers' commission company for handling the farmers' grain sounded like a very satisfactory solution of a very unsatisfactory state of affairs and he threw himself whole-heartedly into the campaign to sell enough stock to obtain a charter. up in the newer part of the country, which was his own particular territory, he found the farmers ready enough to listen; for they had suffered up there from the evils at which the new movement was aiming. he found also that the most interested members of his audiences were men who could least afford to lose any money. an effort was made to discredit the whole proposition as a political move of the conservative party. throughout the swan river district, the dauphin district and all the way down to neepawa the rumor spread ahead of the meetings; so that the speakers were asked many pertinent and impertinent questions, j. w. robson, a swan river farmer who was at that time a conservative member of the manitoba legislature, was giving his services free as a speaker on behalf of the proposed company; john kennedy was known to be a political supporter of j. w. robson. one and one make two; two and two sometimes make a fairly large-sized political rumor. but mr. robson was a ready and convincing speaker who was known to be a farmer first and last and mr. kennedy attributes the practical results obtained as due largely to mr. robson's logic and sincerity. along in june kennedy received a telegram from winnipeg that startled him. it contained the first intimation that difficulties were arising at ottawa to prevent the proposed farmers' company from getting their charter. taking the first train, he found on his arrival at winnipeg that francis graham and w. a. robinson, the two committeemen who met him, had not yet notified e. a. partridge. a wire was despatched at once to sintaluta and the chairman joined them by first train. for two days the board wrestled with this unexpected difficulty which threatened to annihilate the company before it got started. the application of the organization committee for a charter was refused on the ground that the shares of a company with a capital of $ , could not be less than $ each. their solicitor tried in vain to induce the department to change its views, all canvassing to sell stock being discontinued by the committee in the meantime. "well, let 'em keep their charter if they want to," said kennedy finally. "this discussion's not getting us anywhere and if we can't get a dominion charter, why we can't get it." "guess you're right, john. we might as well quit and go on home." "who said anything about quitting?" kennedy brought down his big fist on the table with a thump. "we'll get a manitoba charter. that's what i mean." the others shook their heads. a provincial charter would be useless for what they were proposing to do, they contended. kennedy disagreed so emphatically that he refused to stop arguing about it till at last he and john spencer were delegated to see the manitoba authorities. in the course of a few days the arrangements for a provincial charter were complete, and the committee turned its attention to selling enough stock to be ready for business by the middle of the following month. by this time the harvest season was so near at hand that prompt action was necessary if they were to do any business that fall. under the manitoba charter the company could open for business with a provisional directorate and as five members of the original committee were in winnipeg and available for quick action, it was decided to go ahead as it would be impossible to hold a representative general meeting of the shareholders before harvest and it was advisable in the interests of the subscribers to take advantage of the opportunity to do business in the meantime. provisional organization therefore was undertaken during the week of the winnipeg industrial exhibition, in a tent on the fair grounds, and july th was set as the date. when space was sought for the erection of their sixteen-foot tent, however, they found themselves classed with the "sunflower belles" and "katzenjammer castle" and it was only after the payment of fifty dollars that permission was granted for the erection of the tent. here to the accompaniment of a raucous medley of sounds--the beating of tom-toms, the ballyhooing of the sideshows, the racket of the machinery exhibits and the cries of the peanut and lemonade vendors--the farmers' trading company was organized with provisional officers[ ] and directorate in legal shape to start the wheels in motion as a joint stock company. but before actual business could begin a manager must be located who knew all the ins and outs and ups and downs of the grain business; also a seat upon the winnipeg grain exchange must be purchased before the farmers could enter the arena as dealers in grain. none of the officers of the young company which was about to try its wings overlooked the fact that nothing could be more foolhardy than for farmers like themselves, direct from the green pastures, to attempt the plunge they were about to take without proper guidance as to the depth of the water and the set of the currents. they knew they were embarking in a most intricate and difficult business and with so much at stake on behalf of the whole farming population of western canada it was necessary to place the helm in the hands of somebody who could pilot them through the shoals. at best it promised to be a stormy passage. about the only man in sight for the position was thomas coulter, of the independent grain company. he had treated e. a. partridge with more consideration as the "farmers' representative" than most of the other grain men and there was a possibility that he might be persuaded to take the offer seriously. but on approaching him, mr. coulter did not become excited over the prospect of managing a farmers' company in the grain business; even he was not inclined to take too seriously the effort of the farmers to do their own trading. how long would the farmers stand behind the company in the face of the competition that would be brought to bear? that was the question that bulged right out in front; for, as everybody knew, farmers never had been able to hang together very long when it came down to a matter of dollars and cents in their individual pockets. finally, however, he agreed that there might be a fighting chance and accepted the management. so far so good. but what about the seat on the grain exchange? the price of it was $ , . one thousand shares of the company's stock had been disposed of with ten per cent. paid up and from the $ , thus realized the expenses of organization had to be met, the charter paid for, the legal fee and expenses at ottawa in connection with the effort to secure a dominion charter, office rent, printing bills and what not. "which leaves us about $ , to buy a $ , seat and finance our first business operations," said john spencer with the look of a worried secretary-treasurer. "we'll have to issue a twenty per cent. call on subscribed stock," admitted the president reluctantly. "in the meantime i'll have to see if some of the boys out at sintaluta will go security for the fifteen hundred. thank heaven, these fellows down here think we're a hilarious joke! the only chance we've got to get through the fence with this thing is for them to keep right on laughing at us till we get our toes in the sand!" he wrote to sintaluta, explaining the situation, and five of e. a. partridge's friends[ ] at once responded by going to the bank with their personal notes for the amount needed. "with support like that we're going to win, boys," cried the president proudly when the bank notified them that the money was available. financial arrangements were established with the bank of british north america and when a room had been rented on the top floor of the old tribune building and circulars sent broadcast among the farmers, soliciting grain, the wheels began to turn. the little office was opened for business on september th ( ). it was so small that even two or three people got in each other's way, though all they were doing was to watch the mails anxiously for the first indications as to whether the farmers would stand behind the big idea that was now put to the test. then came the bill of lading for the first carload of grain consigned to the new company, followed quickly by the second, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth--two at a time, three, ten, fifteen per day! every foot of space in the little office was a busy spot and the lone typewriter clickety-clacked on the second-hand table with cheerful disregard of lunch hours. by the end of the month the weekly receipts had risen to one hundred cars of grain. it became necessary to move to a larger office and accommodation was obtained in the henderson block. at the present rate, a whole floor would be needed soon. over at the grain exchange some men were talking seriously. they were talking about e. a. partridge and they were not laughing. the secretary of the exchange was instructed to write a letter. partridge hit the desk so hard that the paper-knife with which he had sliced open that letter hopped to the floor. "they're after us already!" he exploded. it looked that way. the company's seat on the grain exchange was held in the name of the president and the letter summoned him to appear before the council of the exchange to answer to a charge of having sinned against the honor and "diginity" of that institution and of violating its rules. a short time before the young company had issued a circular setting forth their intention of dividing co-operatively whatever profits were earned; in other words, the man sending the larger amount of grain would receive the larger profits. this, the exchange claimed, was a violation of the strict rules of the grain exchange and would have to be abandoned. "you are virtually splitting the commission with the shipper," claimed the exchange, "and we can't allow that for a minute." "it's up to you to prove i'm guilty, not up to me to come here and commit myself," argued partridge. "if you can find any profits that have been distributed co-operatively by the grain growers' grain company, go ahead. nor have i sinned against your 'diginity'!" he added, sarcastically taking advantage of the stenographer's error in spelling. "for that matter, you've been digging into me ever since i came on here!" "you can't do any more business with our members till you change your ways," declared the exchange and forthwith, on october th, notice was posted to all exchange members that any of them found dealing with the farmers' company would be penalized themselves. expelled from trading privileges! practically boycotted! it was a straight punch on the nose that threatened to put the young organization out of business for the final count. membership in the exchange was absolutely imperative if the farmers were to be in a position to sell grain to exporters; they were not strong enough yet to export direct to old country markets and all the exporters through whom they were compelled to deal were members of the exchange. "the whole thing's just a pretext!" cried partridge vehemently. "we haven't got any by-law regarding distribution of profits co-operatively; the only thing they've got to go on is that circular. they're beginning to get scared of us and they see a chance to put us out of business." if this were the object, it looked as if it might be achieved in short order. the grain was pouring in steadily by the carload and with no buyer daring to deal with them in face of the mandate from the exchange, of which they were all members, the new company was in a quandary to dispose of the incoming grain on a falling market. the only thing they could do was to wait until they had sufficient of any grade to make a shipment of from , to , bushels of that grade and try to place it somewhere in the east. the manager was sent east hurriedly to see what connections he could establish while his office assistant mailed letter after letter to eastern points in an endeavor to work several contracts. the farmers who shipped their grain to the new company were expecting to receive seventy-five per cent. of an advance from the bank on their bills of lading and a prompt remittance of the balance when the inspection certificate and outturn were in the hands of the company. with the grain piling up on their company day by day, it was not long before the overdraft at the bank began to assume alarming proportions. luckily the assistant manager succeeded in making several sales in the east, which eased away from the crisis which was shaping. it was quite patent that it would have been suicide for the young trading organization to notify the farmers to stop sending in business. they dare not do that. in desperation the president and vice-president went to the manitoba government and laid their case in full before the cabinet. premier r. p. roblin (now sir rodmond roblin) was very much surprised to learn the facts. "the government certainly cannot countenance any such action on the part of the grain dealers," he declared emphatically. "we cannot allow them to boycott a company composed of farmers who have as much right to sell grain as any other body of men." accordingly the government set a time limit within which the exchange had the option of removing the ban against the farmers' company or of losing their provincial charter. in the meantime, however, this did not obtain restoration of trading privileges, without which the farmers' company could not do business with exchange members except by paying them the full commission of one cent per bushel. the situation, therefore, was approaching a crisis rapidly. the company was fortunate in having the friendship of their local bank manager; but even he could not go on forever making advances on consigned grain and there was some suspicion that letters were reaching the head office of the bank in montreal, advising that the quicker this particular account was closed out the better off the bank would be. then one morning the local manager called on the executive and his face was grave. "this is not the first time i've heard from the head office about this account, as you know," he began at once, "but i'm afraid it's the last call, gentlemen." he handed a letter to the president. "as you see, i am instructed to close out your account at once unless further security is forthcoming. i'm sorry; for i believe you've merely run into hard luck in getting squared away. but--i'm not the bank, you understand." "what do you want us to do? what can we do?" asked partridge anxiously. "this thing will straighten out, mr. machaffie. we're getting the business. you know that. we're going to get back our trading privileges and everything will be alright." the banker shook his head slowly. "i'm sorry, gentlemen. but do you know what your overdraft amounts to now?" "three hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars," murmured the secretary-treasurer. "exactly." "what are we to do?" "before coming here i've been to see the scottish co-operative wholesale society about taking some of your wheat. fisher is ready to help you out if he finds he's not overstepping the rules of the exchange. i may be able to carry you along for a short time if you three gentlemen, the executive of your company, will give the bank your personal bond without limit as to the amount. i have even gone so far as to draw up the document for signature, if it meets with your approval." "what about that, kennedy? spencer?" "guess we've got to do it," nodded kennedy. "looks like it," agreed spencer. "then--down she goes!" decided partridge, dipping his pen in the ink. the others signed after him. "that means we three go down with the ship," he remarked quietly after the door had closed upon the bank manager. "i appreciate you two fellows signing that thing." he got up and shook hands with each of them in turn. "if bad gets worse and we go to smash----" "it can't get worse and we're not going to smash," reassured the others. but that remained to be seen. although placing grain in the east was robbing them of profits, it was the best that could be done to tide things over. the three active officials were on the anxious seat from morning till night. it had got down now to a question of meeting each day's events as they came and frequently the lights blazed in the little office till two and three in the morning while the provisional officers raked the situation from every angle in an endeavor to forecast the next day's difficulties and to prepare for them. for three months the overdraft at the bank had averaged $ , , due almost entirely to the conditions resulting from the action of the exchange. it was useless to worry over the amount of interest which this accommodation was costing and the profits which might have been rolled up had things been different; the real worry was to keep going at any cost. for, as the bank manager had intimated, the whole thing was just hard luck rather than any unsoundness in the business. it was a fine paradox that the more pronounced the success of the idea itself became, the greater grew the danger of complete failure because of the predicament! death by wheat! an ironical fate indeed for a grain company! upon investigation, the farmers' company discovered that their original idea of distributing their profits co-operatively--as embodied in the circular to which the exchange had objected--was contrary to the provisions of the manitoba joint stock companies' act under which they held their charter. therefore the co-operative idea in connection with profits was formally dropped by the grain growers' grain company. this had been done at a directors' meeting on december nd ( ), when a resolution had been passed, cancelling the proposal contained in the objectionable circular.[ ] but although the exchange had been notified immediately and repeated applications for reinstatement had been made, the farmers' company was still struggling along in the throes of their dilemma--proof positive, concluded the farmers, that the grain exchange had used the co-operative suggestion as a mere pretext to oust the company from the field altogether. in piled the wheat, car after car of it! a considerable portion of it had been bought on track and farmers who had consigned their grain were anxious, naturally, to have it disposed of without delay. with prices going down and navigation on the point of closing, the best hopes of the management became centred in getting a big shipment away to buffalo by boat. that would enable them to escape a big item in storage charges and to place the grain in line for export at rates considerably below the all-rail figures. "with those bills of lading in the bank, we've no control of them and the bank can do just about as it likes," reviewed the president one night. "if they should come down on us to sell our wheat inside of forty-eight hours--we're goners, boys! all that those fellows over at the exchange have got to do is to shove down the market thirty points and our name is _mud_! the loss to the farmers who've shipped us their grain will kill this movement and every one like it in the west for all time to come. this company will be as dead as a doornail and so will we financially as its bonded backers." kennedy was running a finger tentatively down the window-pane. it left a streak in the forming frost. "what i want to know is, how long ought it to take to load up this whole boatload we're trying to move?" "oh, about seventeen hours or so." "and how long have they been at it already? five days, ain't it? and she's not away yet! what d'you suppose that means?" he snapped. he began to throw things into a grip. he made for the door. "where'n the mischief are you going, john?" "fort william--can just make the train if i hustle. the _j. p. walsh_ gets out of that harbor with that wheat of ours, by hickory!--if she has to be chopped out with an axe!" two days later a telegram reached the little office: _s.s. j. p. walsh_ cleared to-day for buffalo. three hundred and ten thousand bushels. last boat out. kennedy. [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] this resolution was confirmed at a meeting of the shareholders, february th, . chapter viii a knock on the door every man is worth just as much as the things are worth about which he is concerned.--_marcus aurelius_. that big shipment to buffalo, along with several others which were placed in the east with the market recovering, relieved the situation greatly. also, the scottish co-operative wholesale society's winnipeg office decided to stand by the farmers' co-operative marketing venture and risked disapproval to buy some of the young company's wheat; not only that, but the farmers' company was allowed the regular commission of one cent per bushel on the purchase and the cheque paid in to the bank amounted to $ , . this friendly co-operation the farmers were not quick to forget and they still speak of it with gratitude. it began to look as if the struggling farmers' agency might worry through the winter after all. the strain of the past few months had told upon the men at the head of the young organization and especially upon the provisional president, who felt keenly the responsibilities of his office. of a sensitive, high-strung temperament, e. a. partridge suffered reaction to such a degree that at times he became almost despondent. he began to talk of resigning. he felt that he had done quite a lot in getting things under way and that the hard fight which the farmers would have to wage before the trading company was established permanently would be carried on more successfully by a younger man. so frequently had his motives been questioned by suspicious farmers at organization meetings that he thought it would be better for the company if he occupied a less prominent place in the conduct of its affairs. the idea seemed to be prevalent that the organizers were enthusiastic for direct financial reasons. "those fellows are talking for what they are going to get out of it," was an open accusation at times--a misconception so unjust that on several occasions partridge had refuted it by pledging to resign from the presidency as soon as the company was on its feet. "you men keep saying how much i've got out of this," he reproved in disheartened tones. "gentlemen, i'll admit that i've got a little silver out of this. but it isn't in my pocket; it's in my hair!" partridge had no respect for a "quitter," however. he did not propose to take it easy until the farmers' agency did get into proper running order. although his associates tried to dissuade him altogether from the course he had planned, the best he would promise was to remain at his post until the first annual meeting. immediately preceding the annual convention of the manitoba grain growers' association at brandon in february a general meeting of grain growers' grain company shareholders was held with about two hundred represented. until now the company had been operating under a provisional directorate only and it was the purpose of the meeting to complete organization. since opening for business the shareholders had practically doubled in number and over , , bushels of farmers' grain had been handled by their own agency, its ability to dispose of wheat at good figures being demonstrated in spite of deprivation of trading privileges on the exchange. putting a conservative estimate upon the holdings of the farmers' venture into co-operative marketing, its paid-up capital remained intact, its organization expenses paid--including the membership on the grain exchange--and there still was left a respectable margin of profit. to this showing the shareholders responded by electing the provisional directorate as directors for the balance of the year, adding two[ ] to their number, while the same officers were left in charge. in connection with the directorate it was pointed out that it might be better to have the trading company's directorate independent of the association's directorate. the suggestion came from a tall young man who had a habit of thinking before he spoke and it was but one of many practical ideas which he had thrown out at the meeting. "that young chap, crerar, of russell--makings of an able man there, ed," commented the re-elected vice-president later. "know anything about him?" "i know his father better than i do him," nodded the president thoughtfully. "i met his father in the old patron movement years ago. i've got a great respect for his attitude of mind towards moral and economic questions. i like that young man's views, kennedy; he seems to have a grasp of what this movement could accomplish--of the aims that might be served beyond the commercial side of it. in short, he seems to be somewhat of a student of economics and he has the education--used to be a school-teacher, i believe." "remember when i went up to russell, during their fair in october, to tell them what the exchange was trying to do to us? well, he was at the meeting and came over to my room at the hotel afterward," remarked kennedy. "that's how interested he was. we had quite a talk over the whole situation. told me he had an arrangement to buy grain for graves & reilly, besides running the farmers' elevator at russell, and he offered to ship us all the grain that wasn't consigned to his firm. we've got quite a few carloads from him during the season." "if there were only a few more elevator operators like him!" sighed partridge. "when i was up there last july, selling stock, only eight men turned out," he recalled. "crerar was one of them. i sold four shares. crerar bought one. say, he'd be a good man to have on the next directorate. how would it be if i wrote him a letter about it?" but "alex." crerar laid that letter aside and promptly forgot it; he did not take it seriously enough to answer it. if there was anything he could do to help along a thing in which he believed as thoroughly as he believed in the grain growers' movement and the farmers' agency he was more than willing to do it; but executive offices, he felt, were for older and more experienced men than he. as manager of an elevator in his home town, as buyer for a grain firm and as a farmer himself he had had opportunities for studying the situation from many angles. from the first he had followed the organization of the farmers with much interest and sympathy. he could not forget his own early experiences in marketing grain when the elevators offered him fifty-nine cents per bushel, nineteen cents under the price at the terminal at the time. the freight rate on his no. northern wheat he knew to be only nine cents per bushel and when he was docked a bushel and a half to a load of fifty bushels on top of it all he had been aroused to protest. a protest from young crerar was no mild and bashful affair, either. it was big-fisted with vigor. but when, with characteristic spirit, he had pointed out the injustice of the price offered and the dockage taken--the elevator man, quite calmly, had told him to go to the devil! "there's no use going to the other elevators, for you're all alike," said young crerar hotly. "then take your damned grain home again!" grinned the elevator operator insolently. so the young farmer was compelled to sell his first wheat for what he could get. he was prepared to pay three cents per bushel on the spread, that being a reasonable charge; but although plenty of cars were available at the time, the spread cost him ten cents, a direct loss of seven cents per bushel. besides this he was forced to see between twenty-five and thirty bushels out of every thousand appropriated for dockage, no matter how clean the wheat might be. that was in . it was hard to forget that kind of treatment. and when, later on, young crerar accepted an offer of $ per month to manage a farmers' elevator at russell he bore his own experience in mind and extended every possible consideration to the farmers who came to him. the elevator company, as a company, did not buy grain; but as representative of graves & reilly, a winnipeg firm, he bought odd lots and for this service received an extra fifty dollars per month. financially, it was better than teaching school. he had made ten dollars the first summer he taught school and to earn it he had walked three miles and a half each morning after milking the cows at home, arriving at the school soaking wet with dew from wading in the long prairie grass. and even at that, the trustees had wanted a "cheaper" teacher! a woman, they thought, might do it cheaper. the young schoolmaster objected so earnestly, however, that the argument was dropped. he needed this money to assist in a plan for attending the collegiate at portage la prairie. he taught the school so well that after studying latin at manitoba college in , the trustees were glad to get him back the following year at a salary of $ per month. but milking cows at home night and morning and teaching school in between was not an exciting life at best for a young fellow ambitious to go farming. so at last he acquired a quarter-section of hudson bay company land near russell and took to "baching it" in a little frame shack. in the fall some lumber was required for buildings and it so happened that along came an old chap with a proposition to put in a portable sawmill on a timber limit up in the riding mountains nearby. the old man meant business alright; he had the engine within ten miles of its destination before he was overtaken and the whole machine seized for debt. it looked as if the thousands of logs which the residents of the district had taken out for the expected mill had been piled up to no purpose. crerar, however, succeeded in making a deal for the engine and, with a couple of partners, began sawing up logs. the little sawmill proved so useful that he ran it for four winters. when finally it was burned down no attempt was made to rebuild. its owner was entering wider fields of activity. after meeting partridge and kennedy his interest in the affairs of the farmers' little trading concern was quickened. he was much impressed with the fact that here were men so devoted to an idea--so profound in their belief that it was the right idea--that its advancement was their first and only thought at all times. alex. crerar liked that. if a thing were worth attempting at all, it was worth every concentration of effort. what these men were trying to accomplish appealed to him as a big thing, a bigger thing than most of the farmers yet realized, and it deserved all the help he could give it. the little agency was in the thick of a fight against tremendous odds and that, too, had its appeal; for to a natural born fighter the odds meant merely a bigger fight, a bigger triumph. accordingly, the young man lost no opportunity to boost things along. he was able to consign many carloads of grain in a season. if an idea occurred to him that he thought might be of service he sat down and wrote a letter, offering the suggestion on the chance that it might prove useful to the executive. he did everything he could to build up the company's business in the russell district and when he returned home from the shareholders' organization meeting he kept right on sending in business, offering helpful suggestions and saying a good word when possible. as the weeks went by and it became more apparent that they would wind up their first year's business satisfactorily, e. a. partridge decided definitely that he would not accept another term as president. there were several good men available to succeed him; but he could not get it out of his head that the one man for the tasks ahead was the young fellow up at russell. when he went there in june to speak at a grain growers' picnic he drew crerar aside for an hour's chat, found out why he had not answered the letter suggesting that he play a more active part, and liked him all the better for his modesty. without saying anything of what he had in mind he returned to winnipeg and sent the vice-president to russell to size up the situation quietly. when kennedy got back he agreed with the president's choice of a successor. the company was holding its first annual meeting on july th and care was taken that the unsuspecting crerar was on hand. the vice-president button-holed him, explaining that he was wanted on the board of directors and in spite of his protest the president himself nominated him and he was elected promptly. but when at the directors' meeting that night the president told the board that he had been looking around for a young man to take charge and that t. a. crerar was the man--when everybody present nodded approval, the man from russell was speechless. if they had asked him to pack his grip and leave at once for japan to interview the mikado, he could not have been more completely surprised. "why, gentlemen" he objected, "i don't know anything about managing this company! i could not undertake it." "what is the next order of business?" asked e. a. partridge. the shareholders were almost as much surprised as the newcomer himself when the name of the new president was announced. many of them had never heard of t. a. crerar. had the young president-elect been able to see what lay ahead of him-- but, fortunately or unfortunately, that is one thing which is denied to every human being. [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter ix the grain exchange again "how many tables, janet, are there in the law?" "indeed, sir, i canna just be certain; but i think there's ane in the foreroom, ane in the back room an' anither upstairs." --_scotch wit and humor (howe)_. the efforts of the elevator faction of the winnipeg grain and produce exchange, apparently to choke to death the grain growers' grain company, had awakened the farmers of the west to a fuller realization of the trading company's importance to the whole farmers' movement. the grain growers of the three prairie provinces had been watching things closely and they did not propose to let matters take their course unchallenged. a second royal commission had been appointed by the dominion government in , under the chairmanship of john millar, indian head, saskatchewan, to probe conditions in the grain trade and the farmers felt that certain evidence which had been taken by this commission at winnipeg justified their claims that they were the victims of a combine. in the latter part of november ( ) the president of the manitoba grain growers' association, d. w. mccuaig, laid formal charges against three members of the winnipeg grain and produce exchange--charges of conspiring in restraint of trade--and when these gentlemen appeared in the police court it was evident that the exchange intended to fight the case every inch of the way. the farmers discovered that the legal talent of winnipeg had been cornered; for of the twenty lawyers to whom their solicitor, r. a. bonnar, k.c., could turn for assistance in the prosecution every one appeared to have been retained by the defendants. the case involved such wide investigation that such assistance was imperative and finally the grain growers secured the services of ex-premier f. w. g. haultain,[ ] of saskatchewan. the preliminary hearing in the police court proved to be most interesting and at times developed considerable heat among the battling legal lights. the defendants and their friends were so confident that commitment for trial would not be forthcoming at all that when the magistrate decided that he was justified in so ordering, the grain men were shocked somewhat rudely out of their complacency. following up this preliminary victory, the manitoba grain growers turned to the manitoba government and demanded that the charter under which the grain exchange operated be amended in certain particulars. the deputation from the grain growers met the committee on agriculture, the house being in session, and asked that the powers of the charter be limited so that business would be conducted on an equitable basis between buyer and producer. they asked that the exchange be allowed to set no limit as to the number of persons who might enjoy its privileges, the question of the reputability of such persons to be decided by a majority of the members and that a seat purchased for the use of any firm or corporation should entitle that firm to the privileges of the exchange even though registration of membership was under the name of an individual; also that the right to membership should include the right to delegate the trading powers to anyone in the employ of the firm or corporation. the grain growers also asked that arbitrary interference with the business methods employed by individual firms or corporations and inquisitional inquiry into such be prohibited; also that the penalties and disabilities against those breaking the common rules and the maximum-price rule be abolished; that the right to define the eligibility of a person as an employee or fix a limit to salary in any way be denied; also that the expulsion of no member should be considered final until assented to by the minister of agriculture and that all by-laws should receive the assent of the lieutenant-governor in council before becoming legal and binding. the farmers asked that the government have full access to the minute books, papers and accounts of the grain exchange and that provision be made for the public to have free access to a gallery overlooking the trading room during the sessions of the exchange so that the transactions occurring might be observed and the prices disseminated through the public press. they further wished to see gambling in futures made a criminal offence. roderick mckenzie, secretary of the manitoba association, told how the existing grain exchange had about three hundred members, of whom one hundred were active and fifty-seven of these active members represented the elevator interests. he said that the interests of the fifty-seven were looked after by twelve elevator men in the exchange and that these twelve men agreed so well that they allowed one of their number to send out the price which should be paid for wheat for the day. the committee on agriculture promised to consider the requests and later, when they met to do so, members of the grain exchange attended in force to present their side of the case. they claimed that a great deal of the trouble existing between the producer and the grain exchange was due to misconception of the exchange's methods of action. the exchange was only a factor in the grain business and under their charter they were allowed to make by-laws and regulations, these being necessary in such an intricate business as handling grain. the wiring of prices to country points was done by the north-west grain dealers' association, which had nothing to do with the exchange but was a distinct and separate organization for the purpose of running elevators at country points as cheaply as possible. the highest possible prices were quoted and the plan was merely to avoid duplicate wiring. the grain men claimed that it was impossible to handle the wheat of the country unless futures were allowed while to carry on its business properly the exchange must have the power to say who should be members and otherwise to regulate its business. if the producer was getting full value for his wheat why should the grain exchange be interfered with? the exchange was willing that its membership should be extended. their books always would be open to government inspection in future and they would also repeal the rule regarding track-buyers' salaries. the press was already admitted and it would be found that when the new building which the exchange was erecting was completed there would be a gallery for the use of the public during trading hours. if the legislature were to amend the charter, declared the exchange's spokesman, the exchange would demand that the charter be cancelled _in toto_ and a receiver appointed to distribute the assets. the exchange was tired of being branded thieves and robbers and they should be let alone to do their business. if this were not satisfactory, then they wished to be put out of business altogether. the grain growers protested that it was not their desire to have the charter cancelled. they were not blind to the usefulness of the exchange if it were properly managed and all they asked was that this organization be compelled to do what was right. the reason the exchange had admitted the grain growers' grain company, the farmers claimed, was so that they could have it under discipline, being afraid of a combination of farmers in the interests of the producer. the farmers had lost confidence in the manipulations of the exchange and wanted official protection. the question of declaring deals in futures to be a criminal offence was outside provincial jurisdiction and the farmers withdrew that part of the request. they wished everything else to stand, however. at this juncture a recommendation was made that a conference be held between the government, the grain growers, the exchange, reeves of municipalities, bankers, railroads, etc., for discussion of everything pertaining to the handling of wheat, including amendments to the grain exchange charter. the idea appealed to the premier and before the committee he pledged that the resolutions passed at the proposed conference would be converted into legislation. after adopting the agricultural committee's report the government did not act independently regarding the suggested charter amendments, as the farmers had hoped they would; instead, the whole thing was shelved, pending the suggested conference. when this conference was held in the latter part of february, however, the government was duly impressed by the earnestness of the grain growers. many strong speeches were made, including one powerful arraignment by j. w. scallion, of virden, whose energetic leadership had earned him the title: "father of all the grain growers." the government promised to amend the exchange charter at the next session of the legislature. the activity of the manitoba grain growers' association was putting a new face upon the struggle of the grain growers' grain company for the restoration of their trading privileges on the floor of the exchange. it demonstrated that the farmers could act in concert if occasion arose and that the grain growers' associations were in accord with the principles for which the farmers' trading company was fighting. when, therefore, the manitoba association took a hand in the matter by officially urging the manitoba government to assist in restoring the company to its former position on the exchange in order that it could enjoy the rights of the seat for which it had paid, the government was forced to take action. it is doubtful if a minister of the crown in manitoba ever had been called upon to make a more remarkable official statement than that which now appeared in print in connection with this matter. in the absence of hon. r. p. roblin it became the duty of the acting-premier to make it. hon. robert rogers, then minister of public works in the manitoba government, was the official head of the government in the premier's absence and in the _winnipeg telegram_ of april th, , the statement appeared as follows: "the action of the council of the winnipeg grain exchange in refusing trading privileges to the grain growers' grain company is regarded by the government as an arbitrary exercise of the powers conferred upon them (the exchange) through their charter from the legislative assembly of manitoba, and unless remedied by the exchange, the government will call the legislature together during the present month for the purpose of remedying the conditions by legislative amendments." on april th the farmers' trading company was admitted once more to the full privileges of their seat on the exchange. the case against the three members of the grain exchange, who had been indicted under section of the criminal code, came to trial in the assize court a week later, on april nd, before judge phippen. it was now a matter for crown prosecution and under direction of the attorney-general, r. a. bonnar, k.c., proceeded vigorously. the grain growers claimed that the exchange had rules and regulations which had been carried out in restraint of trade and that in combination with the north-west grain dealers' association there had been a practice of restricting the price to be paid for grain to certain daily figures, sent out by the parties conspiring. also, they expected to show that there had been a combine in existence between the elevator companies so that there was no competition in the buying of grain at certain points while there was an agreement that only a certain amount of street wheat would be received at the various elevators, the whole thing amounting to the restriction of wheat buying within certain limits fixed by the combination of the buyers who belonged to the combine--this to the consequent barring out of the small buyer from the trade. the latter, the grain growers argued, was prevented from buying by the rule which called for the payment of a salary to track buyers and prohibited the hiring of men on commission; there were points where the quantity of grain offered for sale was too limited to justify the payment of a fifty-dollar salary to the buyer. another point of complaint was that the grain exchange membership was restricted to three hundred, the members having agreed among themselves that no more seats be added although all present seats were sold and many more might be sold to eligible citizens. also, claimed the prosecution, there was a practical boycott of expelled members in that the members of the exchange were forbidden to deal with expelled members; it was practically impossible to do business in grain in western canada unless connected with the grain exchange, one firm having experienced this difficulty. the rule which barred the purchasing of grain on track during the hours of trading on the exchange was, they would endeavor to show, an act in restraint of trade and the three men under indictment, the prosecution hoped to prove, had been active in the enactment of the alleged illegal by-laws of the grain exchange. prior to the enactment of these obnoxious laws of the exchange the farmers had been sought by the buyers, whereas since the rules had been established the farmer must seek the purchaser. while the prices given out were fixed by the grain exchange in what was claimed to be open competition, the prosecution intended to show that it was a gambling transaction pure and simple, the price-fixing being nothing more than the guess of the men who acted for their own gain. the trial lasted for a month, during which time a great many witnesses were examined--grain men and farmers--and the whole grain trade reviewed. the array of legal talent for the defence was very imposing and the case attracted much attention because, aside from its interest to the grain trade and the farming population, it promised to test the particular and somewhat obscure section of the criminal code under which the indictment was laid. at one stage of the proceedings the tension in court became so high and witnesses so unwilling that upon reproval by the court regarding his examination, leading counsel for the grain growers picked up his bag and walked out in protest, willing to risk punishment for the breach of etiquette rather than remain. after the grain growers' executive and counsel had conferred with the government, however, the grain growers' counsel was prevailed upon to resume the case. the finding of the court did not come as much of a surprise; for it was apparent before the trial ended that the section of the code was considered ambiguous by the presiding judge. the latter held that all restraints suggested by the evidence were agreed to, whether justifiably or not, as business regulations and before finding the defendants guilty these restraints must appear to be "undue," according to his reading of the section. it was necessary to respect the right of a particular trade or business or of a particular class of traders to protect their property by regulations and agreements so long as the public interests were not thereby "unduly" impaired; to the judge's mind there was no question that the public had not been _unduly_ affected. after reviewing the case the judge held that the gravamen of the whole charge hung upon the commission rule of the exchange--that one cent commission per bushel should be made in handling grain; so that the price paid would be the price at the terminal (fort william) less the freight and one cent per bushel commission, neither more nor less. witnesses agreed that this was the lowest profit on which the business could live. fort william prices were the highest the world's markets could justify. owing to the presence in the statute of the word, "unduly," therefore, the judge could not find the defendants guilty. the grain growers were much dissatisfied with the decision; for they believed that they had adduced evidence to support their case and did not relish losing it on a technicality. appeal was made, therefore; but the appeal court upheld the judgment of the assize court. apparently, deduced the farmers, this meant that men could conspire to create monopolies by driving all competitors out of business so long as they did not do it out of pure malice--so long as they justified it on the grounds of "personal interest"--so long as the things they did were not "malicious restraints, unconnected with any business relations of the accused!" in other words, if men merely conspired to advance their own business interests they committed no offence under the then existing law; to be liable to punishment they must be actuated by malice. so that all the turmoil and talk, court proceedings and conferences, deputations and denunciations, evidence and evasions--all the excitement of the past few months practically left conditions just where they were. for the amendments to the grain exchange charter would not materialize till the legislature met again next year. but there was one spot where the clouds had rifted and the light shone through. the grain growers' grain company had won back its place on the exchange. more and more the farmers began to pin their faith to their little fighting trading company "at the front." it appeared to be the concentration point for the fire of enemy guns. in all probability hostilities would break out anew, but the men in charge were good men--loyal and determined; they could be relied upon to take a full-sized whack at every difficulty which raised its head. the first of these to threaten was on the way. [ ] now chief justice haultain. chapter x printers' ink the fewer the voices on the side of truth, the more distinct and strong must be your own.--_channing_. as the farmers saw it, there was no reason in the world why the bank should do what it did. the company had closed its first year with net profits sufficient to declare a seven per cent. cash dividend and the profits would have been augmented greatly had it not been for the heavy interest payments which accrued on the unusual overdrafts imposed by special conditions. in spite of their extremely limited resources and the handicaps forced upon them, the volume of business transacted had exceeded $ , , during the first ten months that the farmers had been in business; their paid-up capital had been approximately eleven thousand dollars of which over seven thousand had been required for organization outlay. the number of shareholders had nearly doubled during the ten months and everything was pointing to rapid advancement. the company had been a good customer of the bank, which had received about $ , in interest. the security offered for their line of credit was unquestioned. yet the new directors had scarcely settled into place for the approaching busy season before, without warning, the bank notified them that they wished to close out the account. when men set themselves up in business they expect to have to compete for their share of trade. the farmers did not expect to find their path lined with other grain dealers cheering them forward and waving their hats. they expected competition of the keenest. what they could not anticipate, however, was the lengths to which the fight might go or the methods that might be adopted to put their agency out of business altogether. hitherto the grain grower had been in the background when it came to marketing and handling grain. he was away out in the country somewhere--busy plowing, busy seeding, busy harvesting, busy something-or-other. he was a farm hand who so "tuckered himself out" during daylight that he was glad to pry off his wrinkled boots and lie down when it got dark in order to yank them on again, when the rooster crowed at dawn, for the purpose of "tuckering himself out" all over again. it was true that without him there would have been no grain to handle; equally true that without the grain dealers the farmer would have been in difficulty if he tried to hunt up individual consumers to buy his wheat. the farmer interfering in the established grain trade was something new and it was not to be supposed that when the surprise of it wore off things were not liable to happen. the farmer was quick to infer that the action of the bank in cutting off the trading company's credit without apparent cause was another move of the opposing forces. it was so palpably a vital spot at which to strike. this time, however, the threatening cloud evaporated almost as soon as it appeared. the manager, w. h. machaffie, resigned and assumed the management of another bank. he was a far-sighted financier, mr. machaffie, and almost the first account he sought for the home bank was that of the grain growers' grain company. the home bank was new in the west and in the east it had been an old loan company without big capitalistic interests, its funds being derived mostly from small depositors; but while at that time it was not among the wealthiest banking institutions of the country, it was quite able to supply full credit facilities. the opportunity for the farmers' company and the young bank to get together to mutual advantage was too good to be overlooked. under the banking laws of canada valuable special privileges are granted in view of the important part which the banks play in the country's development. government returns indicate that the greater part of the business done by banks is carried on upon their deposits. if the working people and the farmers, as is generally accepted, form the majority of these depositors of money in banks, then were not many loans which went to monopolistic interests being used against the very people who furnished the money? if the farmers could acquire stock in a bank of their own, would they not be in a position to finance their own requirements rather than those of corporations which might be obtaining unreasonable profits from the people at large? such an investment would be safe and productive at the same time that it strengthened the farmers' hands in their effort to do their own trading. with all this in view the directors of the grain growers' grain company made a heavy investment in home bank stock and were appointed sole brokers to sell a large block of the bank's stock to western farmers, working men and merchants. on the sale of this they were to receive a commission which would, they expected, be enough to cover the expense of placing the stock. as the business expanded the company would be assured of an extended line of credit as it was needed. and the business certainly was expanding. although the prospects for the new crop were not as bright as they had been the year before, a substantial increase in the amount of grain they would handle--owing to the increase in the number of shareholders--was anticipated by the management. they were not prepared, however, for the heavy volume that poured in upon them when the crop began to move; it was double that of their first season and the office staff was hard pressed to keep pace with the rising work. there now seemed no reason to believe that the success of the farmers' venture was any longer in doubt so far as the commercial side of it was concerned. but the president and directors had in mind a much broader objective. it was not enough that the farmer should receive a few more cents per bushel for his grain. "we must bear clearly in mind," warned t. a. crerar, "that there are still those interests who would delight in nothing more than in our failure and destruction. a great many improvements require yet to be made in our system of handling grain. the struggle for the bringing about of those reforms is not by any means accomplished. as a great class of farmers, composing the most important factor in the progress and development of our country, we must learn the lesson that we must organize and work together to secure those legislative and economic reforms necessary to well-being. in the day of our prosperity we must not forget that there are yet many wrongs to be righted and that true happiness and success in life cannot be measured by the wealth we acquire. in the mad, debasing struggle for material riches and pleasure, which is so characteristic of our age, we often neglect and let go to decay the finer and higher side of our nature and lose thereby that power of sympathy with our fellows which finds expression in lending them a helping hand and in helping in every good work which tends to increase human happiness and lessen human misery. in keeping this in view we keep in mind that high ideal which will make our organization not alone a material success but also a factor in changing those conditions which now tend to stifle the best that is in humanity." an important step towards the upholding of these ideals was now taken by the directors. the president and the vice-president happened to be in a little printshop one day, looking over the proof of a pamphlet which the company was about to issue, when the former picked up a little school journal which was just off the press for the teachers' association. "why can't we get out a little journal like that?" he wondered. "it would be a great help to our whole movement." about this time the company was approached by a winnipeg farm paper which devoted a page to the doings of the grain growers. "if you'll help us to get subscriptions amongst the farmers," said the publisher, "we'll devote more space still to the doings of the grain growers." "but why should we build up another man's paper for him?" argued the president. "why can't we get out a journal for ourselves?" the idea grew more insistent the longer it was entertained, and although at first e. a. partridge, who was on the directorate, was opposed to such a venture, he finally agreed that it would be of untold assistance to the farmers if they had a paper of their own to voice their ideals. the logical editor for the new undertaking was e. a. partridge, of course, and accordingly he began to gather material for the first issue of a paper, to be called the _grain growers' guide_. partridge had a few ideas of his own that had lived with him for a long time. on occasion he had introduced some of them to his friends with characteristic eloquence and the eloquence of e. a. partridge on a favorite theme was something worth listening to; also, he gave his auditors much to think about and sometimes got completely beyond their depth. it was then that some of them were forced to shake their heads at theories which appeared to them to be so idealistic that their practical consummation belonged to a future generation. in connection with this new paper it was partridge's idea to issue it as a weekly and as the official organ of the grain growers' trading company instead of the grain growers' movement as a whole. he thought, too, that it would be advisable to join hands with _the voice_, which was the organ of the labor unions. the president and the other officers could not agree that any of these was wise at the start; it would be better, they thought, to creep before trying to walk, to issue the paper as a monthly at first and to have it the official organ of the grain growers' associations rather than the trading company alone. this failure of his associates to see the wisdom of his plan to amalgamate with the organ of the labor unions was a great disappointment to partridge; for he had been working towards this consummation for some time, devoutly wished it and considered the time opportune for such a move. he believed it to be of vital importance to "the cause" and its future. in october he had met with an unfortunate accident, having fallen from his binder and so injured his foot in the machinery that amputation was necessary; he was in no condition to undertake new and arduous duties in organizing a publishing proposition as he was still suffering greatly from his injury. on the verge of a nervous breakdown, it required only the upsetting of the plans he had cherished to make him give up altogether and he resigned the editorship of the new magazine after getting out the first number. "i'm too irritable to get along with anybody in an office," he declared. "i know i'm impatient and all that, boys. you'd better send for mckenzie to come in from brandon and edit the paper." this suggestion of his editorial successor seemed to the others to be a good one; for roderick mckenzie had been secretary of the manitoba grain growers' association from the first and had been a prime mover in its activities as well as wielding considerable influence in the other two prairie provinces where he was well known and appreciated. he was well posted, mckenzie. so the vice-president wired him to come down to winnipeg at once. yes, he was well posted in the farming business, rod. mckenzie. he had learned it in the timber country before he took to it in the land of long grass. at eleven years of age he was plowing with a yoke of oxen on the stump lands of huron, helping his father to scratch a living out of the bush farm for a family of nine and between whiles attending a little log schoolhouse, going on cedar-gum expeditions, getting lost in the bush and indulging in other pioneer pastimes. along in , when people were talking a lot about dakota as a farming country, mckenzie took a notion to go west; but he preferred to stay under the british flag and winnipeg was his objective. a friend of his was running a flour-mill at gladstone (then called palestine), manitoba, and young mckenzie decided to take a little walk out that way to visit him. it was a wade, rather than a walk! it was the year the country was flooded and during the first thirty days after his arrival he could count only three consecutive days without rain. in places the water was up to his hips and when he reached the flour-mill there was four feet of water inside of it. such conditions were abnormal, of course, and due to lack of settlement and drainage. after helping to build the first railway through the country roderick mckenzie eventually located his farm near brandon and so far as the rich land and the climate were concerned he was entirely satisfied. not so with the early marketing of his grain, though. he disposed of two loads of wheat at one of the elevators in brandon one day and was given a grade and price which he considered fair enough. when he came in with two more loads of the same kind of wheat next day, however, the elevator man told him that he had sent a sample to winnipeg and found out that it was not grading the grade he had given him the day before. "the train service wouldn't allow of such fast work, sir," said roderick mckenzie. "i suppose you sent it by wire!" he picked up the reins. "that five cents a bushel you want me to give you looks just as good in my pocket as in yours." so he drove up town where the other buyers were and three of them looked at the wheat but refused to give a price for it. one of them was a son of the first elevator man to whom he had gone and, said he: "the old man gave you a knockdown for it, didn't he?" "yes, but----" "well, we're not going to bid against him and if you want to sell it at all, haul it back to him." as there was nothing else he could do under the conditions that prevailed, mckenzie was forced to pocket his loss without recourse. with such experiences it is scarcely necessary to say that when the grain growers' movement started in manitoba roderick mckenzie occupied a front seat. he was singled out at once for a place on the platform and was elected secretary of the brandon branch of the association. at the annual convention of the manitoba locals he was made secretary of the provincial association, a position which he filled until , when he became secretary of the canadian council of agriculture. his activities in the interests of the association have made him a well-known figure in many circles. from the first he had been very much in favor of the farmers' trading company and only the restrictions of his official position with the association had prevented him from taking a more prominent part in its affairs. as it was, the benefit of his experience was frequently sought. mckenzie was plowing in the field when the boy from the telegraph office reached him with john kennedy's message. "they don't say what they want me for; but i guess i'm wanted or they wouldn't send a telegram--haw! back you!" and like cincinnatus at the call of the state in the "brave days of old," mckenzie unhitched the horses and leaving the plow where it stood, made for the house, packed his grip and caught the next train for winnipeg. john kennedy met him at the station. "what's wrong?" demanded the secretary of the manitoba grain growers' association at once. "i came right along as soon as i got your wire, kennedy. what's up now?" "the editor of the _grain growers' guide_. partridge wants you to take his place." "me? why, i never edited anything in my life!" cried mckenzie, standing stock still on the platform. "pshaw! come along," laughed kennedy reassuringly. "you'll be alright. it ain't hard to do." chapter xi from the red river valley to the foothills it ain't the guns or armament nor the funds that they can pay, but the close co-operation that makes them win the day; it ain't the individual, nor the army as a whole, but the everlastin' team-work of every bloomin' soul! --_kipling_. at one of the early grain growers' conventions it had been voiced as an ideal that there were three things which the farmers' movement needed--first, a trading company to sell their products (with ultimately, it might be, the cheaper distribution of farm supplies); second, a bank in which they could own stock; third, a paper that would publish the farmers' views. so that if the new executive of the company had done little else than break ground for better financial arrangements and a farmers' own paper, their record for the year would have shown progress. but when the second annual meeting of the company was held they were able to show that the volume of farmers' grain handled was almost five million bushels, double that of the first year, while the net profits amounted to over thirty thousand dollars. the number of farmer shareholders had increased to nearly three thousand with applications on file for another twelve hundred and a steady awakening of interest among the farmers was to be noticed all over the west. all this in spite of the general shortage of money, a reduced total crop yield and the keenest competition from rival grain interests. it had been apparent to the directors that if the business grew as conditions seemed to warrant it doing, it would require to be highly organized. bit by bit the service to the farmer was being widened. for instance, the nucleus of a claims department had been established during the year; for under the laws governing the canadian railway companies the latter were required to deliver to terminal elevators the amount of grain a farmer loaded into a car and to leave the car in a suitable condition to receive grain. the official weights at the terminal were unquestioned and if a farmer could furnish reasonable evidence of the quantity of grain he had loaded, any leakage in transit would furnish a claim case against the railway. during six months the farmers' company had collected for its shippers nearly two thousand dollars in such claims, a beginning sufficient to illustrate that the company was destined to serve the farmers in many practical ways if they would only stand behind it. if the farmers would stand behind it! but would they? it was a question which was forever popping up to obscure the future. many tongues were busy with inuendo to belittle what the farmers had accomplished already and to befog their efforts to advance still farther. at every shipping point in the west industrious little mallets were knocking away on the xylophone of doubt, all playing the same tune: "just kiss yourself good-bye!" no farmers' business organization ever had been a success in the past and none ever could be. this new trading venture was going to go off with a loud bang one of these fine days and every farmer who had shipped grain to it would stand a first-class chance of losing it. you betcha! the grain growers' associations mightn't be so bad; yes, they'd done some good. but this concern in the grain business--run by a few men, wasn't it? well, say, does a cat go by a saucer of cream without taking a lick? "farmers' company" they called it, eh? go and tell it to your grandmother! the worst of it was that in many localities were farmers who believed this very suggestion already--that the company belonged to the men at the head of its affairs. discouraged by past failures and without much respect for the dignity of their occupation, their attitude towards the company was almost automatic. that it was a great co-operative movement of their class, designed to improve economic and social conditions, was something quite out of their grasp. and upon these strings, already out of tune, elevator men strummed diligently in an effort to create discord. from the first it had been like that. friends who would speak a good word for the struggling venture at the time it was most needed were about as scarce as horns on a horse. on the other hand the organizers ran across "the knockers" at every turn. a traveller for one of the milling companies, for instance, happened to get into conversation on the train with e. a. partridge one day. the latter was a stranger to him and he naturally supposed he was talking to "just a farmer." the subject of conversation was the grain trade and this traveller began to make a few remarks about the "little grain company" that had started up. "what about that company?" asked partridge with visible interest. "i've heard a lot about it." "oh, it's just a little dinky affair," laughed the traveller. "they've got a little office about ten feet square and they actually have a typewriter! they get a car or two a month. don't amount to anything." for a full hour he kept the chutes open and filled his interested auditor with all the latest brands of misrepresentation and ridicule. he explained why it was that the farmers' effort was nothing but a joke and how foolish it would be for any farmer to send business to it. he was a good salesman, this traveller, and he was sure he had "sold" this rather intelligent hayseed when he got to the end of his talk and his station was called. "i've really enjoyed this," assured partridge gratefully. "as a farmer i'm naturally interested in that sort of thing, you know, and i've got a particular interest in that little grain company. my name is partridge and i only want to say----" but the traveller had grabbed his club bag and was off down the aisle as fast as he could go. salesmanship is punctuated by "psychological moments" and good salesmen always know when to leave. he did not look around. his ears were very red. it was funny. no, it wasn't, either! lies about the company, thought the then president, would travel a thousand miles before the truth could get its boots on! it was not a matter for amusement at all. as the "little dinky affair" became a competitor of increasing strength in the grain trade the efforts of a section of the grain men, particularly the elevator interests, to discredit it among the farmers became more and more marked. while the farmers' company was not openly attacked, influences nevertheless were constantly at work to undermine in roundabout ways. the elevator men were in a strong position to fight hard and they pressed every advantage. at practically every shipping point they had agents whose business it was to secure shipments of grain in car lots as well as buying on street. many of these men were very popular locally and as individuals were good fellows, well liked by their farmer friends. a rebate on the charges for loading grain through an elevator or the mere fact that letting the elevator have it saved the bother of writing a letter--these were excellent inducements to the unthinking farmer, and when added to this was the element of personal acquaintance with the buyer, it was hard to refuse. for your farmer is a man of simple code. he is not versed in subterfuge and diplomacy. he takes words at their face value, unless he distrusts you, just as he hands them out himself. he lives a clean, honest life and earns his money. if in some cases his viewpoint is narrowed by treading much in the same furrows, it is at least an honest viewpoint in which he really believes. and one of the things in which the average farmer prides himself is that he will "never go back on a friend." even a red indian would not do that! in selling to the elevator these same farmers probably had no intention of unfriendliness to the farmers' trading company. they hoped to see it succeed but did not appreciate their individual responsibility in the matter or realize that while their own personal defection represented a loss to the company of just one shipment, the loss became vital when multiplied many times all along the line. and the company had no agent on the ground to argue this out, face to face. although many requests for the appointment of such local agents reached the office, the directors decided that it would be poor policy as it would mean appointing agents everywhere and abuses might develop. it would be easy under such a system for an impression to get abroad that favoritism was being shown in appointments; jealousies and disappointments might be the result. on the other hand, one of the greatest sources of strength which the company could foster would be a sense of individual responsibility among its farmer shareholders--each shareholder an agent for his own grain and that of his non-member neighbors, each doing his part to keep down the handling cost of his grain and build up his own company. in the meantime it were better to lose some grain than run the risk of disrupting the whole movement--to let the elevators enjoy their advantage until it became a nullity by education of the farmer himself. such educational work was already a regular part of the routine. pamphlets and circulars were issued from time to time, dealing with prevailing conditions, advocating amendments to the grain act, etc., and explaining the need for government ownership of elevators. the feeling that the provincial governments should acquire and operate all storage facilities in the way of elevators and warehouses was spreading rapidly among farmers and business men. in the second year the grain growers' grain company began to export several small shipments, more for the sake of the experience than anything else. a very extensive line of credit was necessary to go into the export business and, until the arrangement with the home bank developed this, their hands were tied in the matter of exporting for themselves. their third year in business, though, found their financial relations so improved that they were able to do a considerable and profitable business in the exporting of grain, thereby advancing definitely towards one objective which the farmers had had from the first. most of the grain which the company handled in this way was sold to exporters in the eastern states and in eastern canada, this method being found more satisfactory than selling direct to buyers in the old country at this time. in spite of everything, therefore, things were swinging the farmers' way. the whole farmers' movement was expanding, solidifying, particularly in alberta, which for so long had been primarily a cattle country. grain production was now increasing rapidly in this province of the foothills and chinooks and the future shipment of alberta grain to the pacific coast and thence via the new panama canal route was a live topic. owing to special conditions prevailing in the farthest west of the three prairie provinces the grain growers' movement there did not solidify until into its final cohesion under the name, "united farmers of alberta." prior to this the farmers of alberta had been organized into two groups--the canadian society of equity and the alberta farmers' association. the first had its beginnings among some farmers from the united states--mostly from nebraska and dakota--who settled near edmonton and who in their former home had been members of the american society of equity. these farmers in - organized some branches of the american society after arrival in the new land and, becoming ambitious, formed the canadian society of equity with the idea of owning and controlling their own flour and lumber mills and what not. for this purpose they got together a concern called "the canadian society of equity, limited," and bought a timber limit, so called. they secured shareholders in all parts of alberta and the concern went to smash in , this unfortunate failure making doubly shy those farmers who had been bitten. meanwhile, in , the members of the local branch of the american society of equity which had been established at clover bar had reached the conclusion that the work of the society did not meet the requirements of conditions in alberta and that it was not desirable to have the farmers of the province organized into two camps--the society of equity on one hand and the alberta branches of the territorial grain growers' association on the other. especially now that the territories were to be established into the provinces of saskatchewan and alberta, it was desirable that reorganization and a change of name take place. accordingly the clover bar branch of the american society of equity and the strathcona branch of the territorial grain growers' association got their heads together on a proposal to amalgamate into one farmers' organization under the name, alberta farmers' association. under the impression that this was a veiled scheme of the grain growers to swallow their organization whole, the society of equity turned down the idea of amalgamation. the clover bar farmers withdrew from the society and joined the strathcona grain growers in forming the nucleus of a provincial farmers' association as planned. owing to the mixed nature of alberta's agricultural population and to the general distrust of farmers' organizations the new alberta farmers' association faced a difficult situation. but the principles laid down by their leaders were so fair, so sane and broad-minded, that in two years the association became an influence in almost every line of trade in the province. they organized a very successful seed fair, a feature of which was a meeting to discuss improvement of the market for live stock, especially hogs; this resulted in the appointment of a pork commission. at their convention in the association took stand on such important matters as the special grading of alberta hard winter wheat, the establishment of a terminal elevator at the pacific coast, of a pork-packing and beef-chilling plant by the provincial government, etc. in the discussion of everything affecting the welfare of the farmers the association played an important part and it was at their request that the provincial government sent an agent to investigate the markets of british columbia with the idea of closer relations. a second attempt to amalgamate with the canadian society of equity, which had succeeded the american society, had fallen through and there were still two farmers' organizations in the province of alberta. however, with the progress being made with the provincial government in connection with the pork-packing and beef-chilling plant and with the dominion government in regard to government ownership of terminal elevators, the farmers as a whole began to see the need of closer union. such wide measures as a system of government-owned internal elevators were bringing the farmers of all three western provinces into closer conference and in the feeling in favor of amalgamation of all alberta farmers into one organization began to crystallize. finally in september a conference was held between representatives of the alberta farmers' association and the canadian society of equity. the constitution drafted at this conference was submitted to the annual conventions of both bodies at edmonton on january th, . the following morning the delegates of the canadian society of equity marched from their hall to the convention of the alberta farmers' association and amid great cheers the two became one under the name, united farmers of alberta, with "equity" as their motto, and with a strong coalition directorate.[ ] until now each of the organizations had had its separate official organ; but on amalgamation these were dropped and the _grain growers' guide_ adopted as the official organ for alberta. first published under the auspices of the manitoba grain growers' association, the _guide_ now represented the farmers' movement in all three provinces. the wisdom of its establishment was being proved steadily. its circulation was gathering momentum with every issue. it was now coming out as a weekly and its pages were filled with valuable information for the farmer on every subject dealing with the marketing of his produce. also it was proving a wonderful educator on such large questions as government ownership of elevators, the tariff, control of public service corporations and so forth. the farmer was getting information which he had never been able to obtain before and he was getting it without distortion, uncolored by convenient imagination, plain as fact itself. an up-to-date printing plant had been installed to print the _guide_ and do a general job-printing business, and this was organized as a separate company under the name of the "public press, limited." in addition to all the difficulties which usually attend the building of a publishing enterprise to success, the farmers' own journal had to face many more which were due to the special nature of its policies. manufacturers who disapproved of its attitude on the tariff, for instance, refused for a long while to use its advertising columns. each year as the _guide's_ struggle went on there was an annual deficit and had it not been for the grants with which the grain growers' grain company came to its rescue, the paper must have gone under. for this financial assistance the farmers' trading company got no return except the satisfaction of knowing that the money could not be spent to better advantage in the interests of western farmers. with the rapid developments in alberta and the probable future shipment of alberta grain via the panama canal route, branch offices were being opened at calgary by winnipeg grain dealers. not to be behind in the matter of service, the farmers' company followed suit. a seed branch department to supply good seed grain was another improvement in service and the farmers by this time were taking a keen interest in their trading organization. when the third annual meeting came around, there was no longer any doubt that a farmers' business organization _could_ succeed--that this venture of the grain growers was _not_ going to go off with a loud bang--at least, not yet. but, as the president remarked, it seemed that they had no more than touched the fringe of what remained to be accomplished. one of the immediate questions pressing for solution, he considered, was government ownership of elevators. "our company's experience has demonstrated completely," he said, "that our grain marketing conditions can never reach a proper basis as long as the elevators necessary for that marketing are allowed to remain in private hands for private gain. the grain growers' associations are the one thing above everything else that stands between the farmer and the power of merciless corporations. they have undoubtedly been the greatest shield this company has had since its organization; they have helped the company to prove, far beyond any question of doubt, the advantages of co-operation." and what had the elevator men to say about all this? surely these farmers were becoming a menace! at the present rate of speed another three years would see them in control of the grain business and was that good for the grain business? was it good for the farmer? the elevator men did not think so. strangely enough, they were not worrying greatly about government ownership. they were more interested in the fact that the volume of grain which had flowed so faithfully all these years was being split up by all these commission men--these hangers-on who invested little or no capital but necked right up to the profits of the trade as if they owned the whole business! trouble was brewing on the winnipeg grain exchange--had been for some time. then one day word reached the office of the grain growers' grain company that by a majority vote the grain exchange had suspended, for a period of one year, the commission rule under which grain was handled. thus did things come to a showdown. [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter xii the showdown it's scarcely in a body's power tae keep at times frae being sour tae see how things are shared. --_robert burns_. a fight was on between the elevator interests and the commission merchants of the winnipeg grain exchange--a fight for existence. for, with the commission rule of the exchange eliminated, those firms which handled grain on a straight commission basis would be forced to meet the competition of the elevator buyers and the chances were they would be forced to handle grain at a loss; the best they could hope for would be to cover their costs. it will be remembered that this commission rule, established in , was that a charge of one cent commission per bushel should be made for handling grain and that all members of the exchange dealing in grain must show that the price paid was the price at the terminal (fort william) less the freight and one cent per bushel commission. this commission could be neither more nor less than one cent; for at that time it was felt that business could not be done, offices maintained and an efficient and reliable service given for less. it was a charge which both farmers and grain men considered fair and reasonable. the trouble in the exchange started when the commission men claimed the right to have country agents and to pay them on a commission basis of one-quarter cent per bushel. the elevator companies were able to buy at elevator points through their salaried representatives but the commission men were prohibited from having country agents except on a salary basis, and this they could not afford, handling grain on commission. for some years past there had been considerable dissatisfaction among exchange members in regard to the operation of the commission rule, doubt being entertained that all the members were keeping good faith in the collection of the full commission charge of one cent to non-members of the exchange and one-half cent per bushel to members on country consigned and purchased grain. although the council of the exchange had held many special meetings in an endeavor to find a remedy and to investigate the charges, the results had not been very marked owing to the difficulty of securing the evidence to support such charges. this was given as a reason for the doing away with the one cent commission restriction altogether for a trial period of one year. thereby the trade was put on a "free for all" basis, as the president of the exchange then in office pointed out. it meant that exchange members were "enabled to pay owners of grain in the country any price they desired without regard to actual market values as regularly established on the floor of the exchange." it was the personal opinion of the president that to preserve stable markets with uniformity and discipline amongst exchange members a commission rule was absolutely necessary and he predicted that perhaps in a short while, after the suspension of the commission rule had been given a fair trial, the exchange might see its way clear to rescind the suspension. "just so," nodded the commission men among themselves. "the logical and certain result will be the weeding out of the commission men and track buyers, who give practically the only element of competition that exists in the trade! one of the curses of our canadian commercialism is the strong tendency to monopoly and this looks like an effort to create an absolute elevator monopoly of the grain trade, which is the staple industry of the country." but if the small dealers on the exchange were aroused, what about the farmers' trading company? they did business on a commission basis only and with the elevators offering to handle the farmers' grain for nothing, or next door to it, what would happen? would the farmer be "unable to see past his nose," as was predicted? would he forget the conditions of the early days and grab for a present saving of five or ten dollars per car? if the farmers did not stand together now, they were licked! it was a showdown. there was only one thing to do--take a referendum of the shareholders as to the basis on which they wished the year's business handled. the board of control of the grain growers' grain company therefore issued the following circular letter, which was mailed to every farmer shareholder: "this matter we now bring to your notice is the most important yet. "at a meeting of the grain exchange, held a few days ago, the commission rule was suspended for a year. this means that there is no fixed charge for handling grain, and any company or firm can, if they wish, handle car lots for nothing. how did this come about? the elevator companies did it with the aid of bank managers and other winnipeg men outside of the grain trade, who hold seats on the exchange, and voted with them. the intention of these elevator companies is to handle all grain for / c. per bushel or for nothing in order to take it away from the commission men, who have no elevators, and especially to keep it away from the grain growers' grain company. "the elevator companies can handle farmers' cars for nothing and still not lose anything. how? in four ways-- " st. they all buy street grain and the immense profits they make on this will make up for any loss they have in handling cars for nothing. " nd. the dockage they get on street grain and on car lots passed through their elevators helps them. " rd. the charges on the cars loaded through their elevators helps them. " th. when they get your car it is sent to their own terminal elevator, and they earn the storage on it there which is very profitable. "the commission man, such as ourselves, has none of these things to fall back on. his profit is what is left out of the cent a bushel commission after all expenses such as rent, taxes, insurance, wages for office help, telegrams, telephone, etc., are paid. "the elevator combine know this. they know the weakness of the commission dealers' position and the strength of their own, and knowing it, deliberately cut out the commission and will offer to handle the farmers' grain for nothing in order to put the only opposition they have out of business. and mark you! this is aimed at our company more than any other, though we believe they are after all commission dealers. some of them have said so. they want to kill us and they think they have at last found a way. their dodge is simple. by handling cars for half a cent or nothing, they are going to bribe the farmers and our own shareholders to send cars away from us, and by keeping grain from us help to kill us and plant us that deep we shall never come up again. "in this way they hope to 'rule the roost' and get back the good old days they had ten or twelve years ago. "can they succeed? it depends on the men who ship the grain. if they support the combine by giving the elevators (or the commission houses that work for the elevators under a different name) their cars, they may soon expect to find themselves in a worse position than they have ever been before. "as a prominent commission man said the other day, 'the elevator companies are asking the farmers to help at their own funeral.' it is an anxious time for our own company. we have shown that with anything like fair play it may succeed. we have been growing stronger and, we believe, doing some good. are our shareholders and friends going to take the bribe that is meant to put us out of business? we hope and believe not. for this reason we are taking a referendum vote of our shareholders." it was at this crisis that the _grain growers' guide_ had an opportunity of demonstrating its value to the farmers as a fighting weapon. it seized the cudgels and waded right into the thick of the controversy without fear or favor. it came out flat-footed in its charges against the elevator interests and emphasized the warning of the company in language that carried no double meaning. "we have no quarrel with the winnipeg grain exchange as an exchange," said the _guide_. "it is a convenience for gathering reports from other parts of the world, market conditions, and for drafting rules that facilitate and simplify business dealings. "as we have often pointed out, however, the exchange is being used by the elevator interests that seem to dominate it, to further their own particular ends with the result that the nefarious methods of the elevator trust bring suspicion and condemnation upon the exchange and its members. "the demand for the royal grain commission arose from the methods pursued by the elevator companies in dealing with the farmers at country points. the pooling of receipts at country points is not forgotten by the farmers; heavy dockage and unfair grading and low prices paid when the farmers were compelled to sell and could not help themselves, are also not forgotten. "every injustice and disturbance in the trade that has taken place since grain commenced to be marketed in manitoba, can be traced to the elevator monopoly. "the farmers of this country owe nothing to the elevator trust and we have confidence enough in them to believe that they will not be bought over by them now. the commission men and track buyers certainly owe nothing to this trust either. they have helped in the past to carry the suspicion and sin arising from its methods and it commences to look as if they were getting tired of carrying the load." column after column of such plain talk was given place in the _guide_ week after week, together with reports of grain exchange proceedings, interviews with commission men and elevator men, pronouncements of grain exchange officials and comment upon pamphlets circulated amongst the farmers by the north-west grain dealers' association, etc. everything having a bearing upon the situation was brought to light and analyzed. letters from farmers throughout the country were published as fast as they reached the editor's desk, and they were coming pretty fast, about as fast as the mail could bring them. they were reaching the office of the farmers' trading company by the bagful. the company had asked three definite questions of the farmers in connection with the commission to be charged on grain shipped to the company--whether or not the old rate should be maintained in spite of the action of the exchange; whether the commission should be reduced; whether the whole matter should be left to the discretion of the directors. the letters poured in by the thousand and only two per cent. of the farmers recommended any reduction in the rates; of the remainder, seventy per cent. were in favor of the company maintaining the one cent commission and the other twenty-eight per cent. were willing to abide by the decision of the directors. the comments contained in some of these letters revealed strong feeling. many farmers were ready to pay two cents commission per bushel if necessary, rather than sell to "the monopolies." "i will pledge myself to ship every bushel of grain i grow to the farmers' company," wrote one, "even though the directors found it necessary to charge me five cents per bushel, coin." "no, they cauna draw the blinds ower the daylights o' a scotchman," assured one old son of the heather. "i am verra pleased to leave the hale concern in your hands as i do believe you are thoroughly plumb and always square." with this encouragement the directors announced that they would continue to charge a commission of one cent per bushel on wheat shipped to them, just as if the commission rule had not been suspended by the exchange. other commission merchants, they knew, intended to reduce their charges to half a cent per bushel; the elevator men, they expected, would handle the grain for the same and in many cases for nothing in order to persuade the farmers to ship their way. it would be a great temptation to many farmers who had been sitting on the fence, shouting "sic 'em!" but never lifting a little finger to help, and it was to be expected that those with limited vision would ship their grain where they could make the biggest saving at the time. notwithstanding, the directors believed that the majority of the farmers would not prove one cent wise and many dollars foolish by failing to realize what the future might hold in store if the elevators succeeded in killing off competition. finding that it was possible to handle oats on a smaller margin, they made the farmers a gift reduction of half a cent per bushel on oat shipments; otherwise the former rate was sustained. the wheat ripened. harvesting began. the long grain trains commenced to drag into winnipeg across the miles of prairie. by the middle of september the weekly receipts of the farmers' company were running to cars. in they had handled about five per cent. of the crop and seven and one-half per cent. of the crop; of the total number of cars so far inspected in this year of "free for all" methods, the grain growers' grain company handled about fifteen per cent. when the end of the season brought the figures to a final total it was found that the farmers' organization had handled well over sixteen million bushels of farmers' grain. this was an increase over the preceding year of nearly nine million bushels, or per cent. it was nearly one and one-half million bushels greater than all the previous years of operation and represented one-eighth of all the grain inspected during the year in western canada. chapter xiii the mysterious mr. "observer" observation tells me that you have a little reddish mold adhering to your instep. . . . so much is observation. the rest is deduction. --_sherlock holmes_. _sign of four (doyle)_. in prehistoric days, when one man hied himself from his cave to impress his ideas upon another the persuasion used took the form of a wallop on the head with a stone axe. it was the age of individual opinion. but as man hewed his way upward along time's tangled trails personal opinions began to jog along together in groups, creating force. with the growth of populations and the invention of printing this power was called public opinion and experience soon taught the folly of ignoring it. in the course of human aspiration somebody who had a bright mind got the notion that in order to get his own way without fighting the crowd all he had to do was to educate the "great common pee-pul" to his way of thinking and by sowing enough seed in public places up would come whatever kind of crop he wanted. thus, by making public opinion himself he would avoid the hazard of opposing it. the name of this sagacious pioneer of special privilege who manufactured the first carload of public opinion is lost to posterity; all that is known about him is that he was a close student of the art of concealing artifice by artlessness and therefore wore gum rubbers on his feet and carried around a lot of presents to give away. it is quite possible to direct the thought of tom-dick-and-harry. a skillful orator can swing a crowd from laughter to anger and back again. the politician who prepares a speech for a set occasion builds his periods for applause with every confidence. but it was to the public prints that they who sought the manufacture of public opinion were in the habit of turning. there has always been something very convincing about "cold print." the little boy believes that the cow really did jump over the moon; for isn't it right there in the nursery book with a picture of her doing it? and despite the disillusionments of an accelerated age many readers still cherish an old-time faith in their favorite newspaper--a faith which is a relic of the days when the freedom of the press was a new and sacred heritage and the public bought the paper to learn what joseph howe, george brown, franklin, greeley or dana thought about things. this period gave place gradually to the great modern newspaper, the product in some cases of a publishing company so "limited" that it thought mostly in terms of dollars and cents and political preferments. when the cub reporter rushed in to his city editor with eyes sparkling he cried out enthusiastically: "gee, i've got a peach of a story! old john smith's daughter's eloped with the chauffeur. she's a movie fan and----" but it did not get into the paper for the very good reason that "old john" was the proprietor of the big departmental store which took a full-page advertisement in every issue the year around. the editor would have used it soon enough, but--the business office--! then there was the theatrical press-agent, a regular caller with his advance notices and free electros of coming attractions, his press passes. "give us a chance, old man," he pleaded, perhaps laying down a good cigar. "say, that was a rotten roast you handed us last week." "yes, and it was a rotten show!" the editor would retort. "i saw it myself." the telephone rings, maybe--the business office again. "the blank theatre have doubled their space with us, charlie. go easy on 'em for awhile, will you?" the floor around the editor's desk was scuffed by the timid boots of the man who wanted his name kept out of the paper and the sure tread of the corporation representative who wanted his company's name mentioned on every possible occasion. business interests, railway corporations, financial institutions--many of these had a regular department for the purpose of supplying "news" to the press. some american railroads finally took to owning a string of papers outright, directly or indirectly, and one big trust went so far as to control a telegraphic news service. in fact, to such a pass did things come in the united states that the exploitation of the press became a menace to public interest and a law was passed, requiring every publication to register the name of its proprietor; in the case of corporate ownerships the names of the shareholders had to be filed and the actual owners of stock held in trust had to be named also. this information had to be printed in every issue and the penalties for suppression or falsification were drastic. no such law was passed in canada, although the reflection of the situation in the united states cast high lights and shadows across the northern boundary. partizan politics were rife in canada and too often have party "organs" and "subsidies" dampered down the fires of independence in the past. a few journals, however, even in the days before the great changes of the war, placed a jealous guard upon their absolute freedom from trammelling influences and to-day they reap the reward of public confidence. while not a newspaper, the _grain growers' guide_ was a highly specialized journal for the western farmer, aiming frankly at educating him to be the owner of his land, his produce, his self-respect and his franchise; to make him self-thinking and self-reliant and to defend him from unjust slurs. the editorial responsibility of carrying out such a programme in the face of existing conditions required a well chosen staff. in roderick mckenzie, then secretary of the manitoba grain growers' association, the farmers had an editor upon whose viewpoint they could depend; for he was one of themselves. but lacking practical experience in newspaper work, it was necessary to secure an associate editor who would figure largely in the practical management of the publication. mckenzie was finding that his duties as secretary of the association were becoming too heavy for him to attempt editorial services as well; so that not long after the appointment of an associate editor he decided to devote his whole time to his official duties. in its selection of a young man to take hold the _guide_ was fortunate. george fisher chipman was not only a very practical newspaper man to meet the immediate needs of the young journal, but he was capable of expanding rapidly with his opportunities. well versed in the economic problems of the day, he was known already in many magazine offices as a reliable contributor upon current topics. he was well poised and, as legislative reporter for the _manitoba free press_, chipman had made something of a reputation for himself on both sides of the political fence as a man who endeavored to be fair and who upheld at all times the traditional honor of the press. by training and inclination chipman was in complete sympathy with the farmers' movement in western canada. away east, in the valley of evangeline, near grand pré, nova scotia, he was brought up on a farm, learning the farmers' viewpoint as afterwards he came to know that of the big men in the cities. he believed in co-operation, his father having been a leader in every farmers' organization in nova scotia for more than twenty years. it was not long before the young editor's influence made itself manifest in the official paper of the western farmers. he saw many ways of improving it and organizing it for the widest possible service in its field. editorially he believed in calling a spade a spade and, being free from political restrictions, chipman did not hesitate to "get after" politicians of all stripes whenever their actions seemed to provide fit subject for criticism. by the time the commission rule difficulty arose the _guide_ had increased its weekly circulation by many thousands. the new editor seized the opportunity for "active service" and waged an effective campaign. the grain exchange finally restored the one-cent commission rule and never since has it been dropped. meanwhile, however, hostilities broke out anew in an unexpected direction. they took the form of "letters" to the press and they began to appear in five papers which were published in winnipeg--two newspapers and three farm journals. concealing his identity under the _nom-de-plume_, "observer," the writer attacked the grain growers' grain company and the men at the head of it. declaring himself to be a farmer, mr. "observer" endeavored to discredit the farmers' trading organization by casting suspicion upon its motives and methods of business. as letter followed letter it became evident that the object in view was to stir up discontent among the farmers with the way their own agency was being conducted. after issuing a single, dignified and convincing refutation of these attacks, the company ignored the anonymous enemy. but the gauntlet was picked up by the _grain growers' guide_. it lay right at the editor's feet. chipman recognized a direct challenge and did not propose to drop the matter with a denial in the columns of his paper--even with a dozen denials. his old reportorial instinct was aroused. who was this mysterious "observer"? why was he going to so much trouble as to launch a systematic campaign? one thing was certain--he was not a farmer! all good newspaper reporters have two qualifications well developed; they are able to recognize news values--having "a nose for news," it is called--and they are able to run down a "story" with the instinct of a detective. g. p. chipman had been a good reporter--a good police reporter particularly. he had the detective's instinct and it did not take him long to recognize that he was facing a situation which could be uncovered only by detective work. in the first place, he reasoned, the letters were too cleverly written--so cleverly, in fact, that they could be the product of a professional writer only, most likely a winnipeg man. this narrowed the search at once. by process of elimination the list of possible "observers" was soon reduced to a few names. it was an easy matter to verify the suspicion that the "letters" were paid for at advertising rates and the question uppermost became: "who are the greatest beneficiaries of these attacks?" "the elevator interests, of course!" was chipman's answer to his own question. he began to make progress in his investigations and before long he became very much interested in an office which happened to be located in the merchant's bank building, winnipeg. here a certain bright newspaper man with some farming experience had taken to business as a "financial agent"--telephone, stenographer and all the rest of the equipment. so sure was chipman that he was on the right track in following this clue that finally he shut the door of his private office and wrote up the whole story of the "deal" which he expected to have been made between certain elevator men and this clever editorial writer who knew so much about money that he had opened up a financial agency. with the whole "exposure" ready for publication and the photograph of the "suspect" handy in a drawer of the desk, chipman asked the "financial agent" to call at the _guide_ office. "thought you might like to look over that copy before we use it," explained the editor casually when his visitor's pipe was going well. he handed the write-up across his desk. "i want to be fair and there might be something----" there decidedly was!--a number of things, in fact! not the least of them was the utter surprise of the pseudo financial agent. he did not attempt to deny the truth of the statements made for publication. according to the story which he told the editor of the _guide_, it had been the original intention to have these "letters to the press" signed by leading elevator men themselves; but when it was decided to hire an expert press agent to mould public opinion in such a way as to offset the "onesidedness" of the farmers' movement, none of the elevator men cared to assume the publicity. the name, "observer," would do just as well. a committee was organized to direct and supervise the work of the press agent and the chairman of this committee conducted the negotiations with the newspaper man who was to undertake the preparation of the "letters" and other material. by the terms of his contract the press agent was to be paid in equal monthly instalments at the rate of $ , per year, with a contract for two years. for this he was to write letters which would turn public opinion against this grain growers' grain company, which was getting so much of the farmers' grain, and minimize the growth of sentiment in favor of government ownership of internal and terminal elevators. these communications he was to have published in the various papers of winnipeg and the west. such was the story. the better to conceal the wires beneath this publicity campaign and the identity of the writer, mr. "observer" opened his office as a financial agency and became a subscriber to the _grain growers' guide_--one paper, of course, which could not be approached for the purpose in view. it was necessary, nevertheless, to clip and file the _guide_ very carefully for reference; hence the subscription. the space used by the "correspondence" was paid for at regular advertising rates. the advertising bill each week amounted to about $ . but one factor in the success of the plan had been overlooked--the influence of the _guide_. no sooner had the official paper of the grain growers pointed out the situation to its readers and suggested that papers which accepted material antagonistic to the farmers' cause were no friends of the farmers--no sooner was this pointed out than letters began to arrive in batches at the offices of all the papers which were publishing the "observer" attacks. most of these letters cancelled subscriptions and so fast did they begin to come that one after another the papers refused to publish any more "observations," paid for or not. for unknown reasons it was decided to call off the attempt to create public opinion against government ownership of elevators and with the letters aimed at the farmers' trading activities being refused publication, the employers of "observer" had no further work for him to do. as they were still paying his interesting salary each month, they offered him $ , to tear up his contract, he said. but with more than a year and a half still to run--over $ , coming to him--mr. "observer" had a certain affection for that contract. fifteen hundred dollars? pooh, pooh! he would settle for--well, say so-much. "you're talking through your hat!" scoffed his employers in effect. "it's a six-thousand-dollar hat!" smiled "observer" pleasantly. "well, we won't pay any such lump sum as you say," virtually declared his employers, not so pleasantly. "just as you wish, gentlemen. i'll wait, then, and draw my salary--$ . / every month, according to contract. i know you don't want me to sue for it; because we'd have to air the whole thing in the courts and there would be a lot of publicity. so we'll just let her toddle along and no hard feelings." he got his money. the alleged attempt of these elevator men, whether with or without the sanction of their associates, to make public opinion by means of the "observer" letters began in the fall of . it lasted but a few weeks. chapter xiv the internal elevator campaign what constitutes a state? . . . men who their duties know, but know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain. --_sir william jones._ _ode after alcaeus._ now, about this government ownership of elevators. the grain growers had had it in mind right along. the elevators were the contact points between the farmer and the marketing machinery; therefore if his fingers got pinched it was here that he bled. complaints of injustice in the matter of weights, dockage, grades and prices colored the conversation of farmers in many parts of the country and, rightly or wrongly, many farmers were profoundly dissatisfied with existing conditions at initial elevators. these elevators provided the only avenue by which grain could be disposed of quickly if transportation facilities were not fully adequate. it seemed to the farmers, therefore, that the only way to avoid monopolistic abuses was for the provincial governments to own and operate a system of internal storage elevators and for the dominion authorities to own and operate the terminals. the elevators, declared the farmers, should be a public utility and not in private hands. this feeling first found definite expression in a request by the manitoba grain growers prior to the manitoba elections in . the manitoba government declined to act on the request of the grain growers alone, but called a conference of municipal reeves and others interested. this conference was held in june and urgently requested the manitoba government to acquire and operate a complete system of storage elevators throughout the province, as asked for by the grain growers. nothing was done at the first session of the renewed government, however. meanwhile the grain growers were circularizing the three prairie provinces on the need for a government system of elevators and at the annual conventions of the organized farmers in manitoba, saskatchewan and alberta in strong endorsement of the idea was made. an "inter-provincial council of grain growers' and farmers' associations" [ ] had been created, and this body urged the several executives to wait upon their respective governments and try to obtain definite action. at the suggestion of premier roblin, of manitoba, a conference of the three premiers was arranged through the secretary of the inter-provincial council. it was the hope of the farmers that this might lead to uniform legislation, introducing government ownership of the elevators, and that the three provincial governments would join in an appeal to the dominion government for co-operation. in each province the whole subject had been dealt with exhaustively in the text prepared by the grain growers--the conditions making a government system of elevators necessary, how it could be created and the practicability of its operation, the question of financing and the beneficial results that would follow. it was the idea of the farmers that the provinces would purchase existing storage houses at a fair valuation, issuing government bonds to finance the undertaking and build new elevators where needed. the provincial premiers met at regina on may th, , talked over the matter, then sent for george langley, m.p.p., one of the directors of the saskatchewan grain growers' association who occupied a seat in the saskatchewan legislature. they appointed mr. langley as a sort of ambassador in their negotiations with the grain growers' representatives, sending him to the inter-provincial council to present verbally a couple of alternative propositions--that the railways should be asked to build loading elevators with storage bins or that the management of the elevators should be taken away from the present owners and profits limited while the farmers' organizations became responsible for grades, weights, etc. back came the grain growers with a document which repeated their former demands and amplified their argument. they claimed that they were entitled to what they were asking if only because the farmers formed the major part of the population and their demands could be granted without placing any tax upon the remainder of the people. they requested a conference with the three premiers to go into the matter in detail. not until november th, , did this conference take place in regina. when they did get together the premiers were not posted well enough on details to promise anything more definite than that they would consult their colleagues and make reply in due course. it was the end of january, , before the inter-provincial council had an official reply. the premiers pointed to grave and complicated questions which stood in the way of granting what the farmers were asking. constitutional difficulties, financial difficulties, legislative difficulties--all were set forth in a lengthy and well written memorandum. the british north america act would have to be amended to grant the provinces authority to create an absolute monopoly without which success would not be assured. in short, there was such a tangle of overlapping jurisdictions, public interest in trade and commerce, federal rights, railway rights and so on that the premiers could not see their way clear at all in spite of their great desire to help the farmers at all times. the grain growers passed the document to their legal adviser and r. a. bonnar, k.c., gave them his opinion in writing. that opinion was very complete, very authoritative, and poked so many holes in the "constitutional difficulties" that the farmers could see their way much more clearly than the premiers, to whom they made dignified rejoinder. they handed on the holes while they were at it in the hope that the heads of the three provincial governments could take a peek through the "difficulties" for themselves and see just how clear the way really was after all. the provincial premiers, however, took the step which logically followed their reply to the farmers. resolutions were introduced in the alberta and manitoba legislatures that his excellency the governor-in-council be memorialized in regard to the elevator question and asked to provide government ownership and operation or to have the necessary powers to deal with the matter conferred upon the provinces. thus things rode until december th, , when the committee on agriculture in the saskatchewan legislative assembly recommended the appointment of a commission to make searching enquiry into the subject of government control and operation of the internal elevators as asked for by the saskatchewan grain growers' association. two days later, at the annual convention of the manitoba grain growers, hon. george coldwell announced for the manitoba government that they had accepted the principle of establishing a line of internal elevators as a public utility, owned by the public and operated for the public. so unexpectedly did this good news come that the farmers were amazed at their own success. they had fought for it long and earnestly and victory meant a very great deal; but it had seemed still beyond reach. in the case of manitoba it only remained now to get together and thresh out the details. a strong committee was appointed to conduct negotiations with the government and there was prepared a memorandum of the plan which the farmers recommended the government to follow. this was presented on january th, . the government and the grain growers then each got ready a bill for consideration by the legislature. many conferences took place. the government refused the farmers' bill and the farmers did not approve of the government's proposals. while leaving full financial control in the hands of the government, the grain growers demanded that the operation of the elevators be undertaken by an absolutely independent commission without any political affiliations whatsoever; it was provided also that no officer of the grain growers could act on this commission. the government did not deem it wise to let control of the managing commission out of its hands. so negotiations were broken off. the manitoba government now prepared a new bill, but did not remove the features to which the farmers were objecting. this bill was passed and the government voted $ , for initial expenses and $ , , for acquiring elevators. beyond a weak protest from the north-west grain dealers' association the elevator owners had not shown much excitement over the situation. while the manitoba grain growers were not satisfied that the government plan would work out successfully and therefore refused to assume responsibility in connection with it, they were ready nevertheless to lend their best co-operation to the manitoba elevator commission when it got into action. in the province of saskatchewan an altogether different plan was evolved in due course. the investigating commission, appointed february th, , consisted of three well qualified men--george langley, m.p.p.; f. w. green, secretary of the saskatchewan grain growers' association; professor robert magill, of dalhousie university, nova scotia, the latter acting as chairman. the commission held sittings at many points in saskatchewan, taking evidence from a large number of farmers, went to winnipeg to meet representatives of elevator companies, the exchange and government officials, and also visited several american cities. their final report, consisting of typewritten pages, was handed to the saskatchewan government on october st, . in addition to the comprehensive scheme outlined by the saskatchewan grain growers many different suggestions were considered by the commission, such as government ownership and operation, state aided farmers' elevators, municipal elevators and various modifications of these plans. all, however, were discarded by the commission in favor of an experiment in co-operative ownership and management by the farmers themselves, assisted financially by the provincial government. the scheme presented by the executive of the saskatchewan grain growers' association appeared to be unworkable because it overstepped mere public ownership and operation of initial elevators to include methods of sampling, grading before shipment, bank and government loans, features outside the power of a provincial legislature. the schemes of municipal and district elevators, while appealing to local loyalty for patronage, did not secure the farmers' direct pecuniary interest to make the elevators successful in the face of competition. as to the manitoba plan, the commission were unanimous in advising against it in view of the financial risk and the disadvantages of political influences which would tend to make themselves felt. instead, therefore, of a plan aiming at ownership of initial elevators by the state and management by the government of the day, the commission recommended ownership and management by the growers of grain. such a co-operative scheme would aim equally well at removing initial storage from the ownership of companies interested in grain trading--would recognize as promptly the feeling of injustice in the minds of many farmers--would seek just as fully to create marketing conditions which would give the farmer satisfaction and confidence. while both the manitoba scheme and the proposed co-operative scheme involved financial aid by the state, the commission saw reason to believe that with control and management in the hands of the farmers themselves many of the risks and limitations of other plans would be avoided. it is to be noted that in reporting upon general conditions in the grain trade of canada in the saskatchewan elevator commission pointed out the great change which had taken place since . one factor in this had been the construction of new transcontinental lines and thousands of miles of branch railway lines together with a great increase in car supply and a more efficient and cheaper system of transportation. again, the use of loading-platforms had introduced real competition with the elevators, almost fifteen million bushels of the - crop in western canada having been shipped direct by the farmers. the development of co-operation among the farmers through the grain growers' associations had led to much advantageous legislation, while farmers' elevators and public weigh scales had had a salutary effect at many shipping points. the organization of the grain growers' grain company as a farmers' own selling agency likewise had exerted a wide influence for good all over the west, enabling the farmers to obtain first-hand information about existing methods of dealing in grain. finally, the protection afforded by the manitoba grain act was not to be questioned; for while it was impossible to draft any act which would prevent all the abuses alleged, it had been the means of providing many weapons of defence for the farmer and unfamiliarity with these provisions by individual farmers was scarcely to be blamed upon the act itself. the improvement in conditions, compared with earlier years, was recognized by most of the farmers appearing before the commission and many of them had no personal complaint to make in regard to weights, grades or prices. they were advocates of provincial ownership not so much on their own behalf as upon behalf of settlers in newer districts. the commission, therefore, while not saying that there were no cases of sharp practice or no grounds for dissatisfaction, were impressed by the fact that however powerless farmers had been in earlier days they were now in a very different position. the strong feeling which many farmers had against the line elevator companies was based upon experiences of rank injustice and bitter recollections of the past; for this the elevator people could blame nobody but themselves. but the factors enumerated undoubtedly had improved the situation from the farmers' standpoint and it only remained to strengthen these factors to give the farmer complete control in the matter of initial storage. the commission were unanimous in recommending co-operative organization of the farmers as the probable solution of the situation in saskatchewan. they suggested the enactment of special legislation to provide for the financing of the undertaking by the farmers themselves, assisted by a government loan. that is, the farmers surrounding a point where an elevator was needed would subscribe the total amount of capital necessary to build it, paying fifteen per cent. in cash, the crop acreage of the shareholders at that point to total not less than , acres for each , bushels capacity of the proposed elevator; these conditions fulfilled, the government would advance the remaining eighty-five per cent. of the subscribed capital in the form of a loan, repayable in twenty equal annual instalments of principal and interest, first mortgage security. the commission also suggested that the responsibility of preliminary organization be thrown upon the farmers themselves by appointing the executive of the saskatchewan grain growers' association as provisional directors of the new grain handling organization. when the matter came before the saskatchewan legislature the annual convention of the saskatchewan association was being held at regina and the farmers declared themselves ready to assume responsibility and go ahead. a bill was introduced by the government, embodying the recommendations of the commission, and the act incorporating the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company, limited, was assented to on march th, . because of the unusual financial arrangements with the provincial government the capital stock was not set at a fixed amount but left subject to change from time to time by the government. in order to protect the credit of the province the government thus was able to control the amount of stock the company could issue and thereby the amount of money the government might be called upon to advance for the construction or purchase of elevators. shares were placed at $ each, available for farmers only, and a limit was set upon individual holdings. it was provided that each local unit would have a local board of management and appoint delegates to an annual meeting where a central board of management would be elected. the company was empowered not only to own and operate elevators and buy and sell grain, but to own and operate lumber yards, deal in coal and other commodities and "do all things incidental to the production, storing and marketing of grain." by june th, , the provisional directors[ ] were able to call the first annual meeting of the new organization, having fulfilled the requirement of the act that twenty-five "locals" be first organized, and by july th--the date of the general meeting at moose jaw--an additional twenty-one "locals" were ready. thus they were able to start with forty-six units, representing $ , capitalization with , shares held by , shareholders. the newly-elected directors[ ] proceeded forthwith to let contracts for forty new elevators, standard type of thirty and forty thousand bushels capacity with cleaning machinery and special bins. six existing elevators were purchased. the grain growers' grain company agreed to act as selling agents for this new baby sister and wide-spread interest became manifest as the grain growers took another step into commercial circles. [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter xv concerning the terminals i have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. i know no way of judging the future but by the past.--_patrick henry_. with the establishment of co-operative elevators for the storing of grain at interior points the farmers of western canada launched out upon the greatest experiment in co-operation this continent has seen. the success of these elevators, owned and controlled by the farmers themselves, in all probability would evolve the final phase of internal storage in connection with the canadian grain fields. co-incident with their agitation for government ownership of elevators at country points, the farmers were urging upon the federal authorities the desirability of government control and operation of terminal storage facilities. it was not enough that the provincial governments of the prairie provinces should protect the farmers within their boundaries; for the terminal storage of grain was a part of the system and the farmers contended that corporation control of the terminals by grain dealers was leading to abuses and manipulations of the grain that were not in the best interests of the country. grateful as they were, therefore, for the efforts to improve early conditions by legislation, it was the opinion of the grain growers that these contraventions of the grain act would be prevented only by acquisition of the terminals by the dominion government. mere legislation and supervision by the government would not provide an effective remedy. at the head of the lakes the grain passed out of the control of the transportation companies into the hands of the grain dealers; it was the only point in transit where it became subject to manipulation. with the exception of those owned by the c. p. r., the terminal elevators were operated by dealers, largely controlled by united states concerns and managed by experts from across the line. it was frequently charged that terminal operators forgot that they ought to be warehousemen solely and sought profits outside those of legitimate elevation and storage charges, although these authorized charges paid ample return on capital investment. the farmers wanted this temptation of handling and mixing grain at the terminals removed so that terminal operators could not tamper with the grain while it was in their custody. the claims of the grain growers that mixing was going on at fort william and port arthur were based upon the report of the royal grain commission which had investigated the grain trade in - . the first definite step taken to lay these matters before the dominion government was in the winter of after the formation of the inter-provincial council of grain growers' and farmers' associations. at a meeting of these representatives of all the organized farmers it was decided to send delegates to ottawa. when these gentlemen reached their destination in may, , they found themselves face to face with a large and active group of grain men, railway officials and bankers who had gathered to take a hand in the interview with sir richard cartwright, then minister of trade and commerce. beyond some concessions regarding special binning of grain, nothing came of this trip apparently, although the western farmers were supported strongly by the dominion millers' association. a second memorandum was presented early in and the grain growers were granted a very respectful hearing by the government; for, while the organized farmers represented but part of the farming constituency in the west, they had the sympathy of the entire farming community behind them in these requests. they went home, however, feeling the need of concentrating their energies on organization if they were to get actual action from politicians. they had not much more than got home safely before something happened which proved their assertions that all was not as it should be down on the lake-front. mr. c. c. castle, warehouse commissioner, one day held in his hand some official reports from the inspection department concerning certain elevator concerns and compared the figures with the returns made to the authorities by these concerns themselves. he shook his head at the discrepancies and started an investigation. there were three companies involved and after full evidence was taken legally these three companies were prosecuted for returning untrue statements and in the police court at winnipeg they were fined a total of $ , by the magistrate. the next thing was the drafting of a grain bill which aimed to improve certain matters. it was considered by the senate and passed. it reached the house of commons and hon. frank oliver took it by the halter and led it about. before anything could happen to it, however, and the judges get a chance to study its good and bad points, july ( ) came along and parliament dissolved like a lump of sugar dropped into a cup of tea and in the hub-bubbles of a general election everything was _in statu quo_, as they say. and when the race was over and the party nags back in their stalls, lo! new tenants were taking their turn at sliding around on the polished treasury benches and having a sun bath! the new minister of trade and commerce was hon. george e. foster. he looked over the grain bill, passed his hand along its withers and patted it on the rump. then he sat down and made a copy of it, idealizing it by injecting a few "betterments," then trotted it out for inspection with tail and mane plaited and bells on its patent-leather surcingle. he did not claim to be its real father--only its foster-father. he introduced it to the house with a very lucid review of the whole agitation for improvement in the grain and inspection acts since "johnny" millar, of indian head, saskatchewan, handed in the royal grain commission report in . the new government proposed to grant government control of terminal elevators only on a limited and experimental scale. they wanted to test out the principle by lease or construction of two or three terminals at the head of the lakes before undertaking the financial responsibility of handling the entire terminal system. heretofore there had been government supervision merely; but now for an experiment there would be government operation as well while the management of the remaining terminals would have to be satisfactory to the government. "the demand of the west is that the grain should not be manipulated at the terminals," declared mr. foster. "it does not matter a pin as to how that is brought about so that the thing itself is accomplished." the new bill provided for sample markets and the farmers did not like this unless the government acquired the terminals as had been requested. owing to the grain blockade, due to car shortage, feeling was running high in the west and the farmers eyed the new legislation closely. they came upon a clause which startled them and in the row that followed it looked at one time as if the new bill would be led to the boneyard and killed. one of the proposals of the government was the formation of a board of grain commissioners with wide discretionary powers. they would be made responsible for the proper conduct of the entire grain trade and deal with all matters pertaining thereto. they were to have the absolute say-so in regard to car distribution and there was one clause that threatened this protection for which the western farmers had fought so hard in earlier days. at once consternation spread among the grain growers, their apprehensions based upon bitter experience. they protested vehemently. letters, petitions and resolutions slid all over the official government desks and delegations followed to ottawa. not the organized grain growers alone, but the whole western farming element was up in arms. nevertheless, the new grain bill passed the house of commons and browsed over to the senate. it was the farmers' last chance to stop it. r. mckenzie and j. s. wood, of the manitoba grain growers; j. a. maharg and f. w. green, of the saskatchewan grain growers, and e. j. fream, of the united farmers of alberta--these practical men figuratively took off their coats and waded in when they got in conference with senate members. they preferred to see the whole bill killed unless the objectionable clause regarding car distribution were struck out; they saw the old-time elevator abuses again becoming possible and quite nullifying the many good features which the new legislation possessed. the final upshot was that somewhat unexpectedly hon. senator lougheed, leader in the upper house, withdrew the offending clause on behalf of the government, although the government felt that the farmers were unduly excited. the new board of grain commissioners was appointed without delay and consisted of three men who understood western conditions--w. d. staples, of treherne, manitoba; frank e. gibbs, of fort william, and dr. robert magill, now secretary of the winnipeg grain exchange. dr. magill was made chief grain commissioner, for he had rendered excellent services in the past and commanded the respect of the entire west. the board was not long in reaching the conclusion that if grain dealing companies were to be eliminated from the business of owning and operating terminal elevators, outright purchase and breaking of leases would be necessary. the companies refused to lease to the government voluntarily on any terms which the board could recommend. some would not lease on any terms whatever, claiming that to lease their terminals would dislocate their whole system of interior elevators, involving a loss of capital which had been invested legitimately. apart from this, the board had its hands so full with other important things that expropriation and all that it involved would claim their whole time and energy to the neglect of other urgent matters. accordingly, the grain commissioners recommended that the government meet the immediate need of increased terminal facilities at the head of the lakes by building a three-million-bushel elevator, thoroughly equipped for storing, cleaning, drying and handling grain and with provision for future extensions to a capacity of thirty million bushels. they also approved of the grain growers' grain company leasing one of the c. p. r. elevators. in this way both the board and the grain growers would gain first-hand knowledge of terminal elevator conditions. while formulating a policy for terminal elevators the grain commissioners considered the need for terminal storage in the interior as well as at the lakefront. the increase in the area of the grain fields, particularly in alberta, was straining the transportation facilities to the limit and the construction of the grand trunk pacific promised to open up still more acreage. railway rolling stock, railway yard accommodations at winnipeg and fort william and elevator storage were not keeping pace with the annual volume of new grain. the government inspection department was up to its eyes in grain, working night and day during the rush season, while lake and ocean tonnage likewise were inadequate. even the eleven million bushels of extra storage capacity being built at the lake at the time the board was considering the situation would soon fill and overflow. congestion at eastern transfer houses or terminal points was threatening, water freight rates were up and the export market disturbed and there was no reserve of storage capacity in western canada to meet emergencies. in a wet season the drying plants at fort william and port arthur were far from adequate. delayed inspection returns and terminal outturns, due to the recurring car shortage, prevented the farmers from financing and widened the spread between street and track prices as the close of navigation approached. reviewing all this, the grain commissioners came to the conclusion that it was time to consider seriously the erection of government terminal facilities nearer the grain fields. especially in alberta was the need great for inspection and terminal storage to be nearer the producer. it would relieve congestion, benefit the whole grain trade and provide for the future possibility of alternate shipping routes via hudson bay or the panama canal. it was true that the royal grain commission of - had raised objections to interior terminals and inspection, such as the extra expense of handling, the extra loss to the grain in handling and re-handling, the possibility of the railways solving the car shortage problem, the difficulty of getting shippers to send their grain to such elevators and so forth. but the board considered that, in view of other possible routes than the eastern, these objections were not strong enough to balance the benefits. accordingly they recommended the government to take action, the elevators to be regarded as public terminals in which mixing of grades would be forbidden. while the farmers in all three prairie provinces were busy with these vital matters, the grain growers' grain company meanwhile was wading along through all the difficult seasons of car shortage, expanding its usefulness and trying its best to give the maximum of service the while it was reaching out into the export field in an experimental way. then, in , a situation arose unexpectedly that caused turmoil among the officers of the pioneer company and led to considerable anxiety among the grain growers all over the west. for, through an excess of zeal upon the part of an employee, the grain growers' grain company suddenly found itself dragged into the maelstrom of "the pit." it was accused of trying to corner the oat market and was forced to fight for very life. so that at last it looked indeed as if chance had delivered the farmers into the hands of those who preferred to see them eliminated altogether from the market. chapter xvi the grip of the pit now, infidel, i have thee on the hip! --_merchant of venice._ the visitors' gallery is an excellent vantage point from which to view the trading floor of the exchange. it runs the full width of the south wall. the chairs entrenched behind the rail have acquired a slippery polish from the shiftings of countless occupants just as the wall behind has known the restless backs of onlookers who have stood for hours at a stretch. it is here that the curious foregather--good people from every walk of life except the grain business. the tourist who is "just passing through your beautiful city" and has heard that winnipeg has the largest primary wheat market in the world--the tourist drops in to see the sights. friend husband is there, pretending to be very bored by these things while fulfilling his promise to take friend wife "some day when there's something doing." young girls who only know that bulls hate anything red and that bears hug people to death--they are there, thrilled by the prospect of what they are about to witness with but a very vague idea of what it will be. a dear old lady from the quiet eddies of some sheltered spot has been brought in by the rest of her party to see "goin's on" of which she does not approve because gambling is a well-known sin. she is somewhat reassured by noting a few seats away a man who wears the garb of a clergyman; presently he will take notes for his forthcoming sermon on "the propinquity of temptation and its relation to the christian life." the two young women who whisper together in the corner have been reading stockmarket stories in the magazines and they are wondering which of the traders, assembling on the floor below, will have his coat and collar torn off and which will break down and give vent to those "big, dry man-sobs" when his fortune is wrecked! not the least of the sights at the grain exchange is the visitors' gallery! two tanned farmers are discussing quotations and general conditions in a matter-of-fact way. war demands, the unfavorable united states government report and rumors of black rust are making for a bullish condition. cables are up and the market promises to be wild this morning. the gong will go in five minutes. "the pit" is out in the middle of the floor. there is an octagonal platform, raised a couple of feet from the floor level. in the centre of this platform three wide steps descend to floor level again; so that the traders standing on the different steps are able to see over one another's heads and note each other's bids. on the west side of the pit is an elevated, built-in desk like those seen in court-rooms, somewhat resembling an old-fashioned pulpit; here three men sit throughout the session. one keeps his fingers on the switch-box which operates the big clock on the north wall where the fluctuations of the trading are flashed on a frosted dial in red-light figures. at his left sits a second man whose duty it is to record the bidding on an official form for the purpose. at the right is a telegraph operator who sends the record of the trading as it occurs to other big exchanges--minneapolis, chicago, new york, etc. the telegraphic report registers in several instruments attached to the big blackboard that occupies the entire north wall. operators with chalk and chalk-brush in hand move about the platform at the base of this blackboard, catching the quotations from the clicking instruments and altering the figures on the board to keep pace with the changing information. a glance at this great blackboard will furnish the latest quotations on wheat, oats, barley, flax, corn, etc., the world over. ranged along the entire east wall are the clacking instruments of the various telegraph companies for the use of the brokers and firms trading on the winnipeg exchange. telephone booths at the north, seats for friends of members on the west side, weather maps, etc., beneath the gallery--these complete the equipment of the big chamber. the group about the pit, waiting for the market to open, grows rapidly as . approaches. members of the exchange saunter in from the smoking-room, swap good-natured banter or confer earnestly with their representatives on the floor. in response to the megaphoned bellow of a call boy, individuals hurry to the telephone booths. messengers shove about, looking for certain brokers. the market is very unsteady; it may go up or down. the men are clustering about the pit now; most of them are in their shirt-sleeves and they are on tip-toe like sprinters who wait for the starter's pistol. some of them have instructions to dump wheat on the market; some have been told to buy. hundreds of thousands of bushels will change hands in the first few minutes. the market may go up or it may go-- bang goes the gong! they're off! above the red abbreviation, oct., at the bottom of the big clock the blood-red figure indicates the opening of the market at $ . even. with a mad swirl the trading begins in a roar of voices. a small forest of arms waves wildly above jostling bodies. traders dive for each other, clutch each other and watch the clock. the red figure has gone out and / has in turn vanished in favor of / -- / -- / -- --(?) instead of going up, she's falling fast. before the market closes the price may rebound to $ . . somebody will make a "clean-up" to-day and many speculators will disappear; for margins are being wiped out every minute. to the gallery it is a pandemonium of noise, unintelligible in the volume of it that beats against the void of the high chamber. only one shrill voice flings up out of the roar: "sell fifty oc, sev'-eights!" he offers , bushels of wheat for october delivery at $ . / per bushel. it's that fellow down there with the blazing red tie half way up his collar. he hits out with both hands at the air as he yells. a surge of buyers overwhelms him. they scribble notes upon their sales cards and go at it again. down there in the mêlée those men are thinking fast. with every flash of the clock the situation changes for many of them. some pause, watching, listening; others who have been quiet till now suddenly break in with a bellow, seemingly on the point of punching the noses of the men with whom they are doing business. lightning calculation; instantaneous decisions! "use your discretion" many of them have been cautioned by their firms and they are using it. a moment's hesitation may cost a thousand dollars. trading in the pit is no child's play; rather is it a severe strain even upon those who know every trick, every firm and the character of its dealings, every trader and his individuality, his particular methods--who know every sign and its meaning, who can read the coming shout by the first movement of the lips. and always, in and out, are darting the telegraph messenger boys with yellow slips that cause upheavals. "why don't they take their time and do their trading more quietly and systematically?" ventures friend wife up in the gallery. "and lose a cent a bushel while they're turning around, eh?" laughs friend husband. "on a hundred thousand bushels that'd only be a thousand dollars. of course that's mere car-fare!" the dear old lady from the quiet eddies of shelterville is shaking her head in disapprobation and communing with herself upon the iniquities of gambling. "my, oh my! what won't men do for money! jt-jt! just look at 'em! fightin' like that for money they ain't earnt! an' that nice lookin' young feller with the intelligent gold specs!--dear me, it's enough to make a body sad!" she could not know that but comparatively few of the traders below were representatives of brokerage firms which were trading on margins for speculating clients--that most of the traders were negotiating legitimate deals in futures for firms who actually had the grain for sale, for exporters who would take delivery of the actual wheat for shipment, for milling companies who would grind it into actual flour. because trading for delivery in future months affords opportunity for speculation, it is not to be condemned necessarily. it is the balance wheel which steadies the entire grain business. even the speculating element is not without its uses at times and the layman who ventures to condemn this or that out of hand will do well to make sure he understands what he is talking about; for the business of the grain dealer is so subject to varying conditions and so involved in its methods that it is one of the most difficult to be found in the commercial world. trading in futures finds birth in the very natural disinclination of mr. baker to buy his flour by the warehouseful. he does not want to provide storage for a year's supply, even if he could stand such a large bite out of his capital without losing his balance. so while the bakery man is anxious to order his flour in large quantities for future use, he is equally anxious to have it delivered only as he needs it, paying for it only as it reaches him--say, every three months. before contracting for the delivery of the flour on this basis mr. miller must look to his wheat supply on a similar basis of so-much every so-often and he, too, has an eye on storage and, like his friend the baker, he "needs the dough," as they say on the street, and he does not want to part with any more hard-working money than he can help. accordingly he looks around for somebody who has wheat for sale and will sell it right now at a fixed price but defer delivery and payment to a future date. with the price of his wheat thus nailed down, mr. miller can set the future price on his flour to his customers, taking delivery and paying for the wheat as he requires it for filling his flour orders. in the meantime where is the wheat? out near the fields where it was grown, in country elevators perhaps, ready for transportation to market as the law of supply and demand dictates instead of the whole crop being dumped at once and smothering prices below the cost of production. or perhaps it is in store at the terminal where mr. exporter can handle it. it will be seen that the mutual arrangement to buy and sell for future delivery simplifies matters for everybody in the grain trade. the manner in which the legitimate trader in futures protects himself from price fluctuation is easily understood. while a deal in cash wheat would refer to a definite shipment as shown by warehouse receipts, a deal for future delivery is merely an obligation involving a given quantity of grain at a given time at a given price. being merely a contract and not an actual shipment, the seller does not require to produce the grain immediately nor is the buyer required to hand over the purchase price when the trade is made. thus it is possible to buy a thousand bushels to-day for october payment and sell a thousand bushels to-morrow for october delivery, cancelling the obligation. the trade can be balanced at any time before october st. again, a thousand bushels of october wheat may be bought (or sold) to-day and the future switched to may st by the sale (or purchase) of a thousand bushels for may delivery. take the man with the blazing red tie half way up his collar, the man who this morning offered to sell fifty thousand bushels for october delivery at $ . / . suppose that he represents a company with a line of elevators at country points. to his office at winnipeg has come word from country representatives that fifty thousand bushels have been purchased for the company. at once he enters the pit and sells fifty thousand bushels for delivery at a future date, thereby "hedging" the cash purchase out in the country. once this future of fifty thousand is sold the company no longer is interested in market prices so far as this grain is concerned. if the market goes up, their cash grain is that much more valuable, offsetting the loss of an equal amount on the future delivery; if the price goes down, what is lost on the cash wheat will be gained on the future. so that the difference between the price paid for the grain at the country elevators and the price at which they sold "the hedge" is the only thing which need concern the grain company and it is here they must look for expenses and profits. this method of hedging enables a grain company to make purchases in the country on much smaller margins than was possible in the early days when the marketing machinery was less completely organized. it eliminates to the greatest extent the necessity of speculating to cover risks. the speculator's opportunity comes in connection with the fluctuations of the market in deliveries. he merely bets that prices will go up or down, as the case may be. he is not dealing in actual wheat but in margins. he buys to-day through his broker, who has a seat on the exchange, and deposits enough money to cover a fluctuation of say ten cents per bushel. if october wheat to-day is quoted at $ . his deposit will keep his purchase in good standing until the price has dropped to $ . . he must put up a further deposit then or lose the amount he has risked already, the broker selling out his holding. if the speculator is on the right side of the market--if he has guessed that it will go up and it does go up--he can sell and pocket a profit of so-many-cents per bushel, according to the number of points the price has risen. if he has bet that the market will go down the situation merely is reversed. the machinery for handling the huge volume of business transactions in a grain exchange must be complete and smooth running to the last detail, so designed that every contingency which may arise will be under control. for simplicity and efficiency in this connection the winnipeg grain exchange occupies a unique position among the great exchanges of the american continent; in fact, it is a matter for wonder that its methods have not been copied elsewhere. the winnipeg grain and produce exchange clearing association is a separate organization within the exchange and to it belong all the exchange members who deal largely in futures. each day the market closes at . p.m. by two o'clock every firm trading on the floor must hand in a report sheet, showing every deal made that day by the firm--the quantity of wheat bought or sold, the firm with whom the trade was made, the price, etc. if on totalling the day's transactions it is found that they entail a loss, the firm must hand over a cheque to the clearing house to cover the loss; if a gain in price is totalled the clearing house will issue a cheque for it to the firm so gaining. thus, if jones & brown have bought wheat at $ . and the market closes at $ . they lose four cents per bushel on their purchase and must settle the difference with the clearing house. all differences between buyers and sellers must be settled each day and if the volume of trades has been heavy, the clearing house staff work on their books--all night, if necessary--until everything has been cleared for next day's business. the firm which loses to-day may gain by to-morrow's trades, maintaining good average business health. any private trading which may take place after official trading hours is known as "curb" trading. the rules of the clearing house are very strict. any firm which fails to report by two o'clock is fined. the clearing house assumes responsibility for all purchases and sales and, being actually liable, keeps close tab on every firm. each firm has a certain credit on the books of the clearing house, allotted impartially, according to its standing, and this credit forms the fixed basis of that firm's dealings. if its activities exhaust the line of credit, the clearing house calls for "original margins" at once--a deposit of so-many cents per bushel for every bushel involved and for every point which the market drops. the amount per bushel called for is entirely at the discretion of the clearing house authorities and if the quantity of grain reaches dangerous proportions the deposit required may be set so high that it becomes practically equivalent to cash purchase. to "corner the market" under these conditions would require unlimited credit with the clearing house. when jones & brown are "called" for deposit margins they drop everything and obey. they have just fifteen minutes to reach the bank with that cheque, have it "marked" and rushed to the clearing house. if they fail to arrive with it the manager of the clearing house will step into their office and if there were any "hemming and hawing" jones & brown would be reported at once to the secretary of the exchange who would call a hurry-up meeting of the exchange council and messrs. jones & brown would find themselves posted and all trades with them forbidden. all clerical errors in regard to trades are checked up by the clearing house and fines paid in for mistakes. only a nominal charge is made for its services--enough to pay overhead expenses--but the fines have enabled the clearing house to accumulate a large reserve fund which gives it financial stability to provide for all responsibilities should occasion arise through failure of any firm. all futures which have not been cancelled before delivery date are negotiated through the clearing house and with its assistance the grain can be placed just where it should go and tremendous quantities of it are handled without a hitch and with the utmost despatch. excitement in the pit is not always over wheat. it may be oats. it was canadian western oats which became the storm centre in when the grain growers got into difficulty with the "bears." traders who attempt to boost prices are known as "bulls"; those who are interested in depressing the market are "bears." a trader may be a bear to-day and a bull to-morrow; thus the opposing groups are constantly changing in make-up and the firm which was a chief opponent in yesterday's trading may be lined up alongside the day following, fighting with instead of against. it is all in the day's business and the strenuous competition on the floor, into which the uninitiated visitor reads all manner of animosity and open anger, is a very misleading barometer to the actual good feeling which prevails. in recording what now took place in the pit in connection with the farmers' commission agency it will be well to remember that the rest of the traders would have acted in the same way toward any firm which was fool enough to leave the opening for attack. it may be that as the thing developed some of those who were specially interested in the downfall of the farmers' organization seized the opportunity to ride the situation beyond the pale of business ethics and in their eagerness to be "in at the death" revealed special vindictiveness. but in view of the long struggle with this element it was only what the grain growers should have expected when they ran their heads deliberately into the noose. the situation was this: shortly after new year's the export demand for canadian western oats became heavy and it looked as if in great britain and all over europe, where the oat crop had been small, there would continue to be a shortage of oats. in spite of this situation, however, no sooner was the proposed reciprocity agreement reached between the canadian and united states governments of the day, on january th, than market prices began to go down. the then manager of the grain growers' grain company came to the conclusion that this price lowering was a local condition and that the export market for oats was too strong to justify it or sustain it. "i'll just step into the market and buy some oats," said he. "later on i'll sell for export at a satisfactory figure." accordingly, one fine morning he went into the pit and began to buy. the manager's motive in attempting to sustain the market may have been of the best; but it was the first time that such methods had been attempted by the grain growers--methods which were not at all in keeping with the avowed principles of the company. the board of control had every confidence in their manager and, although he was merely a salaried employee and not an executive officer, he had been given a pretty free hand in the conduct of the company's operations. apparently it did not occur to him that he should consult the board before entering the market on a speculative basis. had the board known what he was about to do they would have vetoed it; but when they did discover what was afoot it was too late to prevent the situation. it developed very swiftly. "the grain growers are up to the neck in may oats," was the whisper which passed about among the other traders. that was all that was necessary. "sell may oats! sell may oats!" on every side of the pit they were being offered by thousands of bushels--five--twenty-five--fifty thousand! the idea was to load up the grain growers' grain company to the point where their line of credit with the clearing house would become exhausted, after which every bushel would require a marginal deposit. then when the company could carry no further burden the clearing house would be forced to dump back the oats onto the market, breaking it several cents per bushel. at this lower price the traders who had obligated themselves to make these big deliveries would buy back the necessary supply of oats at a profit and everything would resume the even tenor of its way--except the grain growers, of course. their serviette would be folded. their chair would be pushed back from the table! they would be _through_! up until now all the troubles of the farmers in marketing their own grain may be said to have come from sources outside themselves; but in the present instance they had nobody to blame but themselves for the predicament. it arose at a time, too, when the other grain dealers were beginning to recognize the farmers as a force in the grain market--a force which had come to stay. it was unfortunate, therefore, that just as they were beginning to acquire a standing as a solid and sensible business concern, the grain growers' grain company should find themselves driven into a corner, their backs to the wall, the focus of pointing fingers and gleeful grins. the fact that a salaried employee, not an officer of the company, had acted on his own initiative without the consent of the directors was no excuse for a reliable business concern to tender as such. the first question flung back at them naturally would be: "then your 'board of control' doesn't control, eh?" for although the board of control did not know what their manager was doing until it was too late to prevent it, they should have known. that is what they were there for--to protect the shareholders from managerial mistakes. however, there they were. the only thing they could do was to fight it out to a finish in the pit and, if they survived, to see that no similar mistakes occurred in the future. all sorts of rumors were flying about the corridors of the exchange, gathering momentum as they passed from lip to lip, swelling with the heat of the excitement until it was a general guess that the grain growers must be loaded with anywhere between five and eight million bushels of oats more than they had been able to sell. it was only a guess, though, and a wild one. many traders would have given a good round sum to know exactly how the farmers' company stood on the books of the clearing house. only the clearing house and the company itself knew the true figures and the clearing house officials were men of the highest integrity who dare not be approached for secret tips. thanks to the splendid export connection which had been built up in the old country and to the equally solid financial relations with the home bank, the farmers' agency was selling oats for export very rapidly. it began to look as if they would get out from under the threatening avalanche without much loss, if any. the company's old-time enemies apparently saw an opportunity to undermine its credit at this crisis; for attacks began to appear in print--accusations of speculation, of official negligence and so forth. if the grain growers could be prevented from paying for the large quantity of oats, delivery of which they would have to take on may st to complete the export sales made during the winter--if they could be made to fail in filling these export orders when navigation opened, they would be smashed. but in attacking the credit of the grain growers, these opponents overlooked the rapid increase in paid-up capital and the ability of the farmers to secure money outside of winnipeg. it was not being forgotten by the grain growers that upon the first day of may there would be delivered to them over , , bushels of oats. when the day arrived, therefore, the money was on hand to meet every contingency. every bushel was paid for immediately. within a few weeks half of the quantity was riding the waves of the atlantic, bound for the old country to fill part of the sales already made there. before long some of the grain companies which had sold the oats were trying to buy them back. had the farmers' company been a speculating firm they might have turned upon the market and cornered the oats with a vengeance. it was one of those rare occasions when a corner could have been operated successfully to a golden, no-quarter finish; for the export demand was sustained and the local market could have been made to pay "through the nose" for its fun. chapter xvii new furrows fishes, beasts and fowls are to eat each other, for they have no justice; but to men is given justice, which is for the best.--_hesiod_. the situation was changing indeed for the grain growers in western canada. in spite of all opposition the farmers had made themselves a factor in the grain trade and had demonstrated their ability to conduct their affairs on sound business principles. co-operative marketing of grain no longer was an untried idea, advocated by a small group of enthusiasts. the manner in which the farmers' pioneer trading agency had weathered the stormy conditions of its passage from the beginning and the dignified stand of its directors--these gradually were earning status in the solid circles of the business world. out in the country also things were different. those farmers who at first had been most certain that the trading venture would crumble away like so many other organized business efforts of farmers in the past, now were ready to admit their error--to admit that a farmers' business organization, managed by farmers, could succeed in such ample measure that its future as a going concern was assured. instead of hovering on the outskirts of its activities, like small boys surrounding a giant fire-cracker on victoria day--waiting for the loud bang so freely predicted--these gentlemen were beginning to look upon it as a safe investment. the success of the grain growers' grain company was an argument for co-operation which could not be overlooked and the co-operative spirit spread rapidly among the farmers in many districts. it will be remembered that the promoters of the grain company had intended originally to operate under a dominion charter but were compelled by circumstances to content themselves with provincial powers. the farmers now were finding themselves too restricted and application was made for a new charter which would facilitate the transaction of business in other provinces than manitoba. special powers were asked for and by special act of parliament the charter was granted in in the face of considerable opposition at ottawa from those whom the farmers regarded as representing the canadian manufacturers' association and the retail merchants' association. for the trend of the organized farmers was quite apparent. no secret had been made of the views entertained by the grain growers regarding co-operation. to familiarize every member of the various organizations with the history of co-operative achievements in other countries had been the object of many articles in the _grain growers' guide_ and much speech-making from time to time. the possibility of purchasing farm supplies co-operatively in addition to co-operative marketing of grain was being urged convincingly. and during the long winter evenings when the farmer shoved another stick into the stove it was natural for him to ask himself questions while he stood in front of it and let the paring from another ontario apple dangle into the ash-pan. "the fellow who made that stove paid a profit to the iron an' steel trust who supplied the raw iron ore," considered he. "then he turned around an' added a profit of his own before he let the wholesaler have it. then the wholesaler chalked up more profit before he shipped it along to joe green over in town an' joe just naturally had to soak me something before i got her aboard for home. that's profits on the profits! it's a hot proposition an' it's my money that goes up the flue!" when he added further profits which he figured might be due to agreements between supposed competitors in prices, the grain grower was quite ready to believe that he had paid about twice as much for that stove as the thing would cost him legitimately if he dealt with the maker direct. here was the high cost of living that everybody was talking about. the remedy? the same chance as the other fellow for the farmer to use the resources of nature and, by co-operation, the reduction to a minimum of production and distribution cost. "i've done it with my grain. why can't i do it with what i need to buy?" that was what the grain grower was asking himself. "why must i feed and clothe and buy the smokes for so many of these middlemen?" so when the directors of the grain-trading company came before him with the suggestion of buying a timber limit in british columbia in order to put in their own saw-mills eventually to supply building materials on the prairie, the grain grower slapped his leg and said: "good boy! an' say, what about a coal mine, too?" that was the beginning of great developments for the organized farmers of western canada. it was the beginning of new furrows--the opening up of new vistas of emancipation, as the farmer saw it. and as the furrows lengthened and multiplied they were destined to cause much heart-burning and antagonism in new directions. the timber limit which the grain growers' grain company purchased was estimated to contain two hundred and twenty-two million feet of lumber. a co-operative department was opened with the manufacture and sale of more than carloads of flour at a saving to the farmer of fifty cents per cwt, even this small beginning registering a drop in milling company prices. next they got in touch with the ontario fruit growers' association and sold over , bbls. of apples to western farmers at the eastern growers' carload-lot price, plus freight, plus a commission of ten cents per barrel. more than one hundred carloads of coal were handled in one month and the farmers then got after the lumber manufacturers for lumber by the carload at a saving of several dollars per thousand feet. still experimenting, the grain growers' grain company added to the list of commodities in - --fence posts, woven fence wire, barbed wire and binder twine. followed other staples--cement, plaster, sash and doors, hardware and other builders' supplies; sheet metal roofing and siding, shingles, curbing, culverts, portable granaries, etc.; oil, salt and other miscellaneous supplies; finally, in - , farm machinery of all kinds, scales, cream separators, sewing machines and even typewriters. of binder twine alone nearly seven million pounds was handled during this season. thus did co-operative purchasing by the farmers pass from experiment to a permanent place in their activities. expansion was taking place in other directions also. in the company leased from the canadian pacific railway a terminal elevator at fort william, capacity , , bushels. a small cleaning elevator was acquired at the same place and, with an eye to possible developments at the pacific coast, a controlling interest in a small terminal elevator in british columbia was purchased. at port arthur, on a six-hundred-foot lake frontage, a new elevator has just been built with a storage capacity of , bushels. so much for terminal facilities of this farmers' pioneer trading organization. now, what about the country elevators for government control of which the farmers had campaigned so vigorously in the three prairie provinces? as we have seen, the problem had been handled in saskatchewan along very different lines to the method adopted in manitoba. in manitoba the elevators, owned by the provincial government and operated by the provincial elevator commission, showed a loss. it was even hinted in some quarters that the manitoba government had no intention in the first place of operating at anything but a loss. whether or not there was any ground for these irreverent suspicions, the fact remained that the government elevator system in manitoba was beginning to assume the bulk of a snow-white elephant. the government, not entering the field as buyers, had tried to run the elevators as a storage proposition solely. in - the loss had exceeded $ , and the year following was not much better. at last the government said in effect to the grain growers: "we've lost money on this proposition. we tried it out to please you farmers, but you're still dissatisfied. try to run 'em yourselves!" "we'll just do that," replied the farmers, although the grain growers' grain company was not enthusiastic over the prospect of converting the elevator failure into immediate financial success. it was too much to expect. at many points the government owned all the elevators in sight. in some places there was too much elevator accommodation for the district's volume of business. in certain cases the elevators which had been sold to the government were practically discards to begin with. however, the need for improvement in the service which the farmers were getting at country points was so very great that finally, in , the farmers assumed control of the government system in manitoba. it was late in august when this came about. with only three or four weeks in which to prepare for the season's crop, make repairs, secure competent managers, travelling superintendents and office staff the results of the first season scarcely could offer a fair test. even so, prices for street grain went up at competing points. line elevator companies began asking the farmer for his grain instead of merely permitting him to place it in their elevators. the farmers were quick to note this and asked that the elevator service be continued by their company. with better organization the following season brought still greater improvement in service. prices rose. the special binning service from their own elevators the farmers found genuine, not just a last-minute privilege granted to secure their grain. in spite of bad crop conditions in - , the elevators continued to succeed under the farmers' own management and, the year following, letters of highest praise from farmers everywhere marked the complete success of the undertaking. so excellent was the service now being rendered by the company that independent farmers' elevators in several instances approached the grain growers and sought their management. the handling of co-operative supplies at elevator points began in - . flour houses were erected where prices were out of proportion and at other places the elevator agents began to arrange for carload shipments and proper distribution of coal among the farmers at a saving of from two to three dollars per ton. these co-operative lines at elevator points soon were enlarged with much success. in addition to the elevators leased from the manitoba government the grain growers' grain company bought outright, erected or leased sixty elevators of its own. those who were watching all this steadily grew more restive. the farmers' movement in the west was fast becoming a subject of bitter debate. "when farmers advance to the last furrow of plowed land on the farm they breast the fence which skirts the public highway," argued many men of business. "they are climbing over the fence!" but the organized farmers were not inclined to recognize fences in restriction of honest competition. they believed they were on the open range and held unswervingly on their way. chapter xviii a final test we sometimes had those little rubs which providence sends to enhance the value of its favors.--_vicar of wakefield_. while developing co-operative purchasing of farm supplies the pioneer business organization of the farmers had continued its policy of expansion in the grain business. the ideal of the farmers had been to reduce to the lowest possible point the cost between the producer in western canada and the old country consumer who bought most of the western grain. by engaging in the export business they hoped to become an influence in keeping export values--the price at port william, in other words--at a truer level. prior to the export activities of the grain growers had been restricted necessarily to an experimental basis; but on january st, , the "grain growers' export company," as it was called, was organized for business on a larger scale. it now becomes necessary to record a final test of the grain growers' grain company inasmuch as it demonstrated the mettle of the farmers in a significant manner--the test of serious internal disagreement. of all the threatening situations through which this organization had passed none was more critical than this later development. the trouble was a brew which simmered for some time before the steam of it permeated beyond directors' meetings. it began early in as an aftermath of the unfortunate deal in oats, bubbled along to a boil with the fat finally in the fire at the annual meeting of the shareholders. the consequences were ladled out during and the bill was settled in full at the annual meeting that year with a cheque for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. like most internal troubles in business organizations the personal equation entered into it. certain of the directors were inclined to criticise other directors and to be somewhat dictatory as to how the farmers' business should be conducted. with the idea of improving the system of management, the directors at this stage abolished the board of control and the president was made managing-director with supervisory and disciplinary powers. not long after this, at a special meeting of the directors to consider future management, four of the nine directors introduced a resolution to declare the position of managing-director vacant. they failed to carry it--and promptly resigned. this occurred in march. in the june columns of the _guide_ these four directors addressed an open letter to the shareholders, urging full representation at the forthcoming annual meeting in order that their criticisms might be threshed out. president crerar joined in the request for a full meeting of shareholders. if the loyalty or ability of any director was to be questioned because he refused to surrender his judgment to other directors who might disagree with him on certain matters, it was time to have an understanding. so far as he was concerned, he could not agree to become a mere speaking-tube for others who might want their own way against his own convictions of what was in the best interests of the farmers. when the annual meeting opened, on july th, there was a record attendance of shareholders and during the routine preliminaries it was evident that expectancy was on tip-toe among the farmers. the split in the directorate was a vital matter. in delivering his annual address the president detailed the business of the organization for the past year, referring but briefly to the facts which had led up to the resignation of the four directors. the shareholders' auditor followed with the balance sheet, giving detailed accounts of receipts, expenditures, assets and liabilities; he answered all questions asked. then came a resolution, expressing the thanks of the shareholders to the president--and this moment was chosen by the leader of the revolt to spin his pin-wheels. the debate began at three o'clock in the afternoon. it did not end until ten at night. the president retired from the chair and the auditor was called on for detailed information, covering a period of several years past. in the long speech which was then made by the leader of the critics the president was declared responsible for all the alleged mismanagement and his retention in office undesirable. to the surprise of everyone a fifth director now took the floor and joined the attack. not having been one of the four directors who resigned, this new criticism was unexpected and the tension of the meeting grew. after amusing himself and the audience for awhile with a humorous speech, no. ended by suggesting that the president was not sufficiently wicked to be driven from office. arose the remaining three members of the resigning quartette and, one after another, had their say. finally, when words failed them and they rested their case, the president spoke briefly. in the annual address, which he had delivered that morning, no attempt had been made to deny the inadequacy of the company's office organization to cope with the exceptional crop conditions of and . the latter season particularly had been very trying owing to the lateness of the crop and the wet harvesting conditions. twenty-five per cent. of the grain, which started for market a month late, was tough, damp or wet. the arrival of snow had prevented hundreds of thousands of acres from being threshed and, on top of it all, railway traffic had become congested so that cars of grain got lost for weeks and even months and there were long delays in getting the outturns of cars after they were unloaded. money was scarce and farmers who were being pressed for liabilities to merchants, banks and machinery companies found it hard to get cars; naturally, once they had shipped, they were in no mood for further delays. owing to the condition of the grain, too, the grading was so uncertain that exceptional care had been necessary in accepting bank drafts on carloads of grain for amounts nearly double their possible value under the unusual current crop conditions. even with the greatest care the company found that in many instances they had given greater advances than were realized when the cars were sold. the refusal of drafts, passed by some local banks for amounts the managers should have known could not be met, led to many hard things being said against the farmers' agency. under these conditions it was only to be expected that the work in the office would become congested badly for weeks at a stretch. double the amount of work was entailed in handling a given quantity of grain, compared to the season before. the company was handicapped for office space also and errors were bound to occur in a business involving so much detail that a simple mistake might lead to infinite trouble. correspondence had not been answered as promptly as it should have been, the necessary information regarding shipments being unavailable. all of these things had been met frankly in the president's annual address and now when he brought the day's animated debate to a close he added merely a word or two regarding the strong financial position to which the farmers' pioneer trading organization had won its way in the commercial world. he pointed out the future that lay before it. upon personal attacks he did not comment at all. immediately a unanimous vote of thanks for his untiring work and loyalty was tendered mr. crerar. the debate was over. the following morning the officers for the ensuing year were chosen and only one of the four directors who had resigned from the old board was re-elected. he withdrew and the whole incident was closed. but the real test was yet to come. the withdrawal of the four directors had left but five to cope with the difficult situation of the export company. it had found itself with a large amount of ocean freight on its hands--freight which had been secured on favorable terms from shipping agents for use later in transporting grain which the farmers' agency expected to sell in the old country. it was decided to cut off the export business entirely for the time being and to re-let the ocean shipping space to other exporters. the price of ocean freight fluctuated to such an extent, however, that rather than accept an immediate loss it was thought better to use the freight, after all, making shipment to fill. at the time of the sixth annual meeting the export company had stood about level on the books; but during the two succeeding months the grain shipped from fort william went out of condition while crossing the ocean and when it arrived in port the old country buyers refused to look at it. heavy charges had to be met in treating to bring it to sale condition and very heavy losses were incurred. before the matter was cleaned up finally these losses totalled more than $ , . when a quarter of a million dollars has been expended in a direction where tangible results have not been in evidence--when it has been sacrificed apparently for the sake of a principle--then does the manner in which such a loss is accepted become significant. the exporting of grain had begun to receive particular attention from the shareholders of the grain growers' grain company following the season of - when they discovered the apparent margin of profit in the export business during much of the season to be from eight to twelve cents per bushel. this had been due, no doubt, to the fact that it was a time of financial stringency and only a few exporting firms could get the money necessary to carry on the business. the export value of grain, the farmers had figured, should be its value in the world's markets, less the cost of delivering it. by engaging in the export business, obtaining their cable offers regularly from the old country, they felt that their competition would be a factor in governing the prices paid the farmer, thereby benefiting every farmer in the west. that this had been accomplished the shareholders of the trading company were convinced. therefore, instead of losing their heads as well as this large sum of money, they examined the situation coolly and sanely, making up their minds that the loss was due to the grain going out of condition because of the unusual weather which had characterized the season. no doubt the executive and directors had been handicapped by their lack of knowledge as to the methods and manner in which the export business was done; but that was to be expected and only by experience could they learn. "can the export part of our business be developed successfully with a little more time?" asked the farmers. "yes, we believe so," replied their officers. "that's all we want to know. write a cheque to cover this loss, reorganize the export company and stick to it." this faith in their officers, in themselves and in the cause they had at heart was justified within the next two seasons when success was achieved with the subsidiary concern and the farmers were able to congratulate themselves that they had been sufficiently level-headed not to allow themselves to be stampeded from the exporting field altogether to the great weakening of their influence. the accomplishments of the grain growers in marketing their own grain cannot be dismissed with careless gesture. their severest critic must admit that the manner in which the farmers conducted themselves in the face of the situation that threatened entitles them to respect. chapter xix meanwhile, in saskatchewan-- an old man on the point of death summoned his sons around him to give them some parting advice. he ordered his servants to bring in a faggot of sticks, and said to his eldest son: break it. the son strained and strained, but with all his efforts was unable to break the bundle. the other sons also tried, but none of them was successful. untie the faggots, said the father, and each of you take a stick. when they had done so, he called out to them: now break; and each stick was easily broken. you see my meaning, said their father. let affection bind you to one another. together you are strong; separated you are weak.--_aesop_. eventful years, these through which the grain growers of western canada were passing. while the grain growers' grain company was undertaking the initial experiments in co-operative purchasing of farm supplies, showing the manitoba government that farmers could run elevators satisfactorily and fighting its way forward to success in the exporting field, how were things getting along in saskatchewan? with $ , and another four or five hundred in loose change tucked away in its hip pocket as the net profit of its first season's operations the new system of co-operative elevators had struck out "on a bee line" for success and was swinging along at a steady gait, full of confidence. the volume of business handled through these elevators the first year had been affected by the failure of the contractors to finish construction of all the elevators by the dates specified. even so, the new company had handled , , bushels of grain, more than half of it being special binned. in planning to build eighty-eight new elevators in and to purchase six, thereby bringing the total to co-operative elevators, the directors thought it wise to form a construction department of their own instead of relying upon outside contractors. also it was decided to open a commission department of their own at winnipeg, the volume of business in sight being very encouraging. this move was not made, however, because of any dissatisfaction with the grain growers' grain company's services as selling agent; on the other hand, although crop conditions had been perhaps the most unfavorable in the history of saskatchewan and the grain with its diversity of grades therefore very difficult to market satisfactorily, the board of directors acknowledged in their annual report that the wisdom of the arrangement with the grain growers' grain company had been proved by the satisfactory working of it. the volume of business handled by the elevators in operation the second year jumped to , , bushels with a net profit of approximately $ , , and it was apparent that the general acceptance of the co-operative scheme throughout the province would mean organization upon a large scale. this was emphasized during the grain season when elevators were in operation and about , , bushels of grain were hauled in to the co-operative elevators by farmers. this rapid expansion of the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company was entailing such an increase in staff organization that it became necessary to provide special office accommodation. accordingly a site for a permanent building of their own was purchased in at regina and the following year a modern, fireproof building was erected. it stands two storeys on a high basement, with provision for additional storeys, occupies a space of , square feet, has interior finish of oak and architecturally it is a matter of pride to the farmers who own it. this building has become the headquarters of the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company and likewise the saskatchewan grain growers' association, the offices of the latter occupying the entire top floor. while the erection of this building afforded visible proof of financial progress the saskatchewan farmers were warned by the directors and the general manager of the "co-op" that co-operation which was allowed to degenerate into mere production of dividends would but reproduce in another form the evil it was intended to destroy. the ideal of service was the vital force which must be kept in mind and the work of the grain growers' association in fostering this ideal must be encouraged. "the association has its great work of organization, education and agitation," stated charles a. dunning, the elevator company's manager, "and the company the equally great work of giving practical effect to the commercial and co-operative ideals of the association, both institutions being branches of one united farmers' movement having for its object the social and economic uplift of the farming industry." not a little of the early success of the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company was due to the energy and business ability which dunning brought to bear upon its organization and development. the story of this young homesteader's rise from the ranks of the grain growers is worth noting. it was back in that he first reached the west--a seventeen-year-old englishman, "green" as the grass that grew over there in leicester. he did not know anything then about the historic meeting of pioneer grain growers which motherwell and dayman had assembled not long before at indian head. he was concerned chiefly with finding work on a farm somewhere and hired out near yorkton, saskatchewan, for ten dollars a month. after awhile he secured one of the government's -acre slices of homestead land and proceeded to demonstrate that oxen could haul wheat twenty-five miles to a railway if their driver sat long enough on the load. there came a day when dunning, filled with a new feeling of independence, started for yorkton with a load of wheat and oats. it was along towards spring when the snow was just starting to go and at a narrow place in the trail, as luck would have it, he met a farmer returning from town with an empty sleigh. in trying to pass the other fellow dunning's sleigh upset. while helping to reload the farmer imparted the information that oats were selling for eight cents and all he had been able to get for his wheat was something like thirteen cents in yorkton the day before! the young englishman's new feeling of "independence" slid into his shoe-packs as he stared speechless at his neighbor. right-about went his oxen and back home he hauled his load, angry and dismayed and realizing that something was wrong with western conditions that could bring about such treatment. when a branch of the grain growers' association was formed at beaverdale, not far from his homestead, it is scarcely necessary to say that young dunning joined and took an active part in the debates. finally he was chosen as delegate for the district at the annual grain growers' convention at prince albert on condition that he could finance the trip on $ . . the story is told that dunning figured by making friends with the furnace man of one of the hotels he might be allowed to sleep in the cellar for the week he would be in prince albert and manage to get through on this meagre expense fund! at any rate he did find a place to lay his head and, if reports be true, actually came back with money in his pocket. it was at this convention that the young man first attracted attention. the delegates had deadlocked over a discussion in regard to a scheme for insuring crops against hailstorms in saskatchewan, half of them favoring it and half opposing it. the young homesteader from beaverdale got up, ran his fingers through his pompadour and outlined the possibilities of co-operative insurance which would apply only to municipalities where a majority of the farmers favored the idea. he talked so convincingly and sanely that the convention elected him as a director of the association and later when the co-operative elevator scheme was broached he was elected vice-president of the association and the suggestion was made that he undertake the work of organizing the new elevator concern. incidentally, the man who suggested this was e. a. partridge, of sintaluta--the same partridge who had fathered the grain growers' grain company and who already had located t. a. crerar, of russell, manitoba. out of dunning's suggestion at prince albert grew the saskatchewan hail insurance commission which was recommended to the provincial government by the association in and brought into operation the following year. the legislation provided for municipal co-operative hail insurance on the principle of a provincial tax made operative by local option. twenty-five or more rural municipalities having agreed to join to insure against hail the crops within the municipalities, authority would be granted to collect a special tax--not to exceed four cents per acre--on all land in the municipalities concerned. administration would be in the hands of the hail insurance commission, which would set the rate of the special tax. all claims and expenses would be paid from the pooled fund and all crops in the respective municipalities would be insured automatically. if damage by hail occurred insurance would be paid at the rate of five dollars per acre when crop was destroyed completely and _pro rata_ if only partially destroyed. this co-operative insurance scheme was instituted successfully in the fall of , soon spread throughout saskatchewan and was destined eventually to carry more than twenty-five million dollars of hail insurance. shortly after the launching of co-operative hail insurance the discussions among the saskatchewan farmers in regard to the co-operative purchasing of farm commodities for their own use came to a head in a request to the provincial government for the widening of charter powers in order that the association might organize a co-operative trading department. in authorization to act as a marketing and purchasing agent for registered co-operative associations was granted and next year the privilege was extended to include local grain growers' associations. thus the trading department of the saskatchewan grain growers' association takes the form of a central office, or wholesale body, through which all the locals can act collectively in dealing with miners, millers, manufacturers, etc. the central sells to organized locals only, they in turn selling to their members. the surplus earnings of the central are distributed to the locals which have invested capital in their central, such distribution being made in proportion to the amount of business done with the central by the respective locals. during its first season of co-operative purchasing the association handled , tons of coal and in a year or two there was turned over in a season enough binder twine to bind fifty million bushels of grain--about , , pounds of twine. when the western potato crop failed in the association imported four and one-half million bushels of potatoes for its members, cutting the market price in some cases a dollar per bushel. flour, apples, cord-wood, building supplies, vegetables and groceries likewise were purchased and distributed co-operatively. the savings effected by the farmers cannot be tallied alone from actual quantities of goods thus purchased through their own organization but must include a large aggregate saving due to reduction of prices by outside dealers. such commodities as coal and flour being best distributed through local warehouses, it is likely that eventually the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company will take a hand in helping the association and the locals with the handling of co-operative supplies by furnishing the large capital investment needed to establish these warehouses. the necessary financial strength to accomplish this is readily conceived to be available after a glance at later developments in saskatchewan. the co-operative elevators now exceed . the figures for the season of - show a total of more than , , bushels of grain handled with an additional , , bushels shipped over the loading platforms. without deducting war-tax the total profit earned by the saskatchewan company within the year was in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million dollars. the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company in began building its own terminal elevator at port arthur with a capacity of , , bushels. by this time there were , shareholders with a subscribed capital of $ , , , of which $ , was paid up. in these later years a remarkable development is recorded also by the saskatchewan grain growers' association until it is by far the largest and best organized secular body in the province with over , locals and a membership exceeding , . the secretary of the association--j. b. musselman, himself a farmer--has done much hard work in office and looks forward to the time when the locals will own their own breeding stock, assemble and fatten their own poultry, handle and ship their eggs, operate their own co-operative laundries and bakeries, kill and cure meat in co-operative butcher-shops for their own use--have meeting places, rest rooms, town offices, libraries, moving-pictures and phonographs with which to entertain and inform themselves. to stand with a hand on the hilt of such a dream is to visualize a revolution in farm and community life--such a revolution as would switch much attraction from city to country. whatever the future may hold in store, the fact remains that already much valuable legislation has been secured from the government of saskatchewan by the farmers. perhaps in no other province are the grain growers in as close touch with the government, due to the nature of the co-operative enterprises which have been launched with government support financially. three members of the cabinet are men who have been identified closely with the grain growers' movement. hon. w. r. motherwell has held portfolio as minister of agriculture for many years. hon. george langley, minister of municipal affairs, helped to organize the farmers of northern saskatchewan in the early days. finally in c. a. dunning[ ] resigned as general manager of the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company to become the youngest provincial treasurer in canada; for already the saskatchewan government had called upon him for service on two official commissions to investigate agriculture and finance in most of the european countries and his services were valuable. langley has been a prominent figure in saskatchewan affairs ever since his arrival in the country in . he was forty-one years old when he came and he brought with him long training as a public speaker, a knowledge of human nature and a ready twinkle in his eye for everything humorous. according to himself, his first job was chasing sparrows from the crops. after leaving the english rural life in which he was reared, he had worked on the london docks and as a london business man. in politics he became a disciple of the cobden-bright school and was one of the first members of the fabian society under the leadership of the redoubtable bernard shaw. it was langley's habit, it is said, to talk to london crowds on side thoroughfares, standing on a soap-box and ringing a hand-bell to attract attention. in becoming a western canadian farmer it did not take him long to slip around behind the problems of the farming class; for there was no greater adept at poking a cantankerous problem about with a sharp stick than the honorable george. it was natural for this short, stout, bearded englishman to gravitate into the first legislature of the newly-formed province of saskatchewan and just as naturally he moved up to a place in the cabinet. as one of the sponsors of the co-operative elevator scheme, by virtue of his place on the commission which recommended it, langley has taken much interest in the co-operative activities of the farmers and on many occasions has acted as their spokesman. with the relationships outlined it was to be expected that now and then opponents would hint that the saskatchewan authorities had played politics with the farmers. such charges, of course, are refuted indignantly. knowing the widespread desire among the farmers themselves to keep free from political alliances, it would be a foolish government indeed which would fail to recognize that not to play politics was the best kind of politics that could be played. other leaders of sterling worth have contributed to the acknowledged success of co-operation in saskatchewan, not forgetting john a. maharg who came from western ontario in to settle near moose jaw. from the very beginning j. a. maharg has worked for the cause of the farmers. a pioneer himself, he has a deep understanding of the western canadian farmers' problems and his devotion to their solution has earned him universal appreciation among the grain growers of saskatchewan. year after year he has been elected to the highest office in the gift of the association. he has been president many times of both the saskatchewan grain growers' association and the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company. the grain growers' movement, then, in this province of saskatchewan where it had its beginning, has grown to wonderful proportions with the passing of the years. co-operation has been a pronounced success. the old conditions have passed far back down the trail. the new order of things has been fought for by men who have known the taste of smoky tea, the sour sweat of toil upon the land, the smell of the smudge fires on a still evening and the drive of the wind on the open plain. out of the pioneer past they have stepped forward to the larger opportunities of the times--times which call for clear heads and wise vision. for as they build for the future so will the sons of the movement watch and learn. [ ] the union government at ottawa decided in february, , to replace the office of food controller by the canada food board, organized as a branch of the dominion department of agriculture under hon. t. a. crerar. hon. charles a. dunning was selected as director of production. the other members of the canada food board were: h. b. thomson, chairman and director of conservation; j. d. mcgregor, director of agricultural labor. (mr. mcgregor resigned after a year in office.) chapter xx what happened in alberta beyond the fields we plough are others waiting, the fallows of the ages all unknown. beyond the little harvests we are reaping are wider, grander harvests to be grown. --_gerald j. lively._ out in the great range country all this time the united farmers were lickety-loping along the trail of difficulties that carried their own special brand. the round-up revealed increasing opportunities for service and one by one their problems were cut out from the general herd, roped, tied and duly attended to for the improvement of conditions in alberta. here and there a difficulty persisted in breaking away and running about bawling; but even these finally were coralled. along with the grain growers of manitoba and saskatchewan the united farmers of alberta had campaigned consistently for government ownership of elevators, both provincial and terminal. they had received assurance from premier rutherford that if a satisfactory scheme could be evolved, the provincial government was prepared to carry out the establishment of a line of internal elevators in alberta. it looked as if all that remained to be done was to follow the lead of manitoba or saskatchewan. but on careful consideration neither of the plans followed in the other two provinces appeared to fit the special needs of the alberta farmers. the province at the western end of the grain fields accordingly experienced quite a delay in obtaining elevator action. in the meantime the discussion of terminal storage facilities was going on at ottawa. the need for such facilities at calgary and vancouver was pressed by the alberta representatives on various farmer delegations and finally the dominion government declared its intention of establishing internal elevators with full modern equipment at moose jaw and saskatoon in saskatchewan and at calgary in alberta; a dominion government terminal elevator at the pacific coast likewise was on the programme. by this time the government operation of the manitoba elevators had proved a complete failure and they had been leased by the grain growers' grain company. in saskatchewan, however, the co-operative elevators were proving successful. a close study of the co-operative scheme adopted in the province just east of them enabled the united farmers of alberta to work out a plan along similar lines. this was presented to the premier, whose name meanwhile had changed from rutherford to sifton. the act incorporating the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company, limited, was drafted in the spring of and passed unanimously by the legislature. the new company held its first meeting in august, elected its officers[ ] and went to work enthusiastically. it had been decided by the united farmers that full control and responsibility must rest in their own hands. they proposed to provide the means for raising at each point where an elevator was built sufficient funds to finance the purchase of grain at that point from their own resources, at the same time providing for the handling of other business than grain. under the act the provincial government made cash advance of eighty-five per cent. of the cost of each elevator built or bought by the company, but had no say whatever as to whether any particular elevator should be bought or built at any particular place, what it should cost or what its capacity or equipment should be. in security for the loan the government took a first mortgage on the elevator and other property of the company at the given point. the loans on elevators were repayable in twenty equal annual instalments. the company started off with the organization of forty-six locals instead of the twenty which the act called for and the construction of forty-two elevators was rushed. ten additional elevators were bought. although construction was not completed in time to catch the full season's business the number of bushels handled was , , , the grain growers' grain company acting as selling agent. by the end of the second year twenty-six more elevators had been built and the volume of grain handled had expanded to , , bushels. now, this progress had been achieved in the face of continuous difficulties of one kind and another. chief of these was the attempt to finance such a large amount of grain upon a small paid-up capital. the company found that after finishing construction of the elevators they had no money with which to buy grain nor any assets available for bank borrowings. it was impossible to obtain credit upon the unpaid capital stock. the provincial government was approached for a guarantee of the account along the lines followed in saskatchewan; but the government refused to assume the responsibility. it was at this juncture that the enemies of co-operation were afforded a practical demonstration of the fact that they had to deal not with any one farmers' organization but with them all. for the grain growers' grain company stepped into the breach with its powerful financial assistance. the alberta farmers were clamoring for the handling of farm supplies as well as grain; so that the young trading company in alberta had its hands more than full to organize a full stride in usefulness from the start. the organization of the united farmers of alberta was growing very rapidly and the co-operative spirit was tremendously strong throughout the province. there was a demand for the handling of livestock shipments and soon it was necessary to establish a special livestock department. it will be recalled that one of the subjects in which the alberta farmers were interested from the first was the possibility of persuading the provincial government to undertake a co-operative pork-packing plant. following the report of the pork commission upon the matter, however, official action on the part of the authorities had languished. the various committees appointed from year to year by the united farmers gradually had acquired much valuable data and at last were forced to the conclusion that the development of a packing industry along co-operative lines was not so simple as it had appeared at first. even in much older settled countries than alberta the question, they found, had its complications. the first thing to discover was whether the farmers of a community were able and willing to adjust themselves to the requirements of an association for shipping stock together in carload lots to be sold at the large markets. until such demonstration had been made it seemed advisable to defer the organization of a co-operative packing business. after the formation of the co-operative elevator company, therefore, the alberta farmers proceeded to encourage the co-operative shipment of livestock on consignment by their local unions. the livestock department entered the field first as buyers of hogs, handling , hogs in the first four months. the experiment bettered prices by half-a-cent per pound and the expansion of the department began in earnest the following season when nearly cars of hogs, cattle and sheep were handled. on top of all the other troubles of the first year the farmers lost a valuable leader in the death of the president of the co-operative elevator company, w. j. tregillus. complete re-organization of the executive was made and the question of his successor was considered from every angle. it was vital that no mistake be made in this connection and two of the directors were sent to study the business methods and policies of the grain growers' grain company and the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company and to secure a general manager. they failed to get in touch with anyone to fill the requirements and the management of both the other farmers' concerns expressed grave doubts as to the wisdom of a farmers' company looking for a manager whose training had been received with line elevator companies and who had not seen things from the farmer's side. one of the remarkable features of the advance of the farmers' movement has been the manner in which strong leaders have stepped from their own ranks to meet every need. it has been a policy of the organized farmers to encourage the younger men to apply themselves actively in the work in order that they might be qualified to take up the responsibilities of office when called upon. there are many outstanding examples of the wisdom of this in the various farmers' executives to-day; so that with the on-coming of the years there is little danger that sane, level-headed management will pass. several of the men occupying prominent places to-day in the farmers' movement have grown up entirely under its tutelage. so it turned out that in alberta the man the farmers were seeking was one of themselves--one of the two directors sent out to locate a manager, in fact. his name was c. rice-jones. his father was an english church clergyman whose work lay in the slum districts of london. this may have had something to do with the interest which the young man had in social problems. when at the age of sixteen he became a canadian and went to work on various farms, finally homesteading in alberta, that interest he carried with him. out of his own experiences he began to apply it in practical ways and the farmers' movement drew him as a magnet draws steel. he became identified with the veteran district eventually and there organized a local union. it was not long before he was in evidence in the wider field of the united farmers' activities. fortunately the new president and general manager of the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company was not a man to lose his sense of direction in a muddle of affairs. into the situation which awaited him he waded with consummate tact, discernment and push; so that it was not long before his associates were pulling with him for the fullest weight of intelligent effort. the difficulties were sorted and sifted and classified, the machinery oiled and running true, and with a valuable directorate at his back rice-jones "made good." the third season of the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company brought the final proof that the farmers knew how to support their own institutions. for through the elevators that the farmers operated in alberta flowed a total of nearly twenty million bushels of grain, with well over ten and one-quarter million bushels handled on commission. the livestock department in the face of severe competition achieved a permanent place in the livestock business of the province with offices of its own in the stock yards at calgary and edmonton. by this time livestock shipments had amounted to a value in excess of two million dollars. the co-operative department had handled farm supplies to a total turnover of approximately $ , . as in the case of the grain growers' grain company and the saskatchewan grain growers' association's trading department the list of articles purchased co-operatively by the alberta farmers grew very rapidly to include flour, feed, binder twine, coal, lumber and fence posts, wire fencing, fruit and vegetables, hay, salt, etc. in - a thousand cars of these goods were purchased and distributed co-operatively, besides which a considerable volume of business was done in less-than-carload lots. coal sheds were built in connection with many elevators, the staff increased and the entire co-operative department thoroughly organized for prompt and satisfactory service. [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter xxi in the drag of the harrows "i see the villain in your face!" "may it plaze yer worship, that must be a personal reflection, sure." --_irish wit and humor (howe)._ the "good old days" when the farmer was a poor sheep without a shepherd, shorn to the pink hide with one tuft of wool left over his eyes--those "good old days" are gone forever. it is some time now since he became convinced that if a lion and a lamb ever did lie down together the lamb would not get a wink of sleep. as a matter of survival he has been making use of the interval to become a lion himself and the process has been productive of a great roaring in the jungle. all this co-operative purchasing of commodities in the three prairie provinces has not been developed to its present great volume without arousing antagonism in the business world. the co-operative idea in merchandizing is not confined to the west by any means. from the atlantic to the pacific various organizations have been formed to carry on business along co-operative lines. a co-operative union has been formed to propagate the movement and the subject is vast. but the establishment of an extending network of elevators under the control of the western farmers has brought about possibilities which threaten to revolutionize the whole established commercial system. farmers' elevators in dakota, minnesota and alberta have proved that it is practical to utilize the same staff at each point to manage the distribution of farm supplies as well as looking after elevator operation during the grain season. this being so, it is not difficult to visualize a great distributing system under centralized management with tremendous purchasing power. there are those whose imaginations stretch readily to the extreme view that the grain growers are a menace. such are filled with foreboding. they see the country merchant out of business and the whole business fabric destroyed. "the farmers are talking everlastingly about 'a square deal,'" it is argued. "why don't they practice what they preach and give the country merchant a square deal? what about the times of poor crops and money scarcity? where would the farmer have been if the country merchant had not carried him on the books for the necessities of life?" "it didn't cost the merchant anything to carry me," denies the farmer. "he just raised his prices to me and got credit from the wholesaler." "then what about the wholesaler?" "raised his prices and got credit from the manufacturer and the bank." "then the banks----" "refused to give me the credit in the first place!" interrupts the farmer resentfully. "do you dare to blame me, mister, for cutting out all these unnecessary middle charges when by proper organization i am able to finance myself and take advantage of cash discounts on the cost of living?" that is the farmer's motive for taking action. he wants to improve his scale of living for the sake of his family. by making the farm home a place of comfort his sons and daughters will be more content to remain on the land. he does not seek to hoard money; he intends to spend it. if middlemen are crowded out of his community it will be because there are too many of them. instead of having to support parasites the community will be just that much more prosperous, the farms just that much better equipped, the land just that much more productive and thereby the country's wealth just that much greater. that is how it appears to the farmer. "if the farmer is to be a merchant, a wholesaler, a banker and all the rest of it he is no longer a farmer. is nobody else to have a right to live?" enquires the cynic. "did these grain growers fight the elevator combine of the early days in order that they could establish a farmers' combine? is one any better than the other?" the inference is that the grain growers are bluffing deliberately and aiming at all the abuses conjured by the word, "combine." the slander is self-evident to anyone who examines the constitution of the farmers' movement, so framed from the first that any possibility of clique control was removed for all time. it is impossible to have a "combine" of fifty thousand units and maintain the necessary appeal to the cupidity of the individual. it is not possible for designing leaders, if such there were, to take even the first step in manipulation without discovery. it simply cannot be done. woe betide the man who even exhibited such tendencies among his fellow grain growers! these organized farmers have learned how to do their own thinking and every rugged ounce of them is assertive. they are not to be fooled easily nor stampeded from their objective. and what is that objective? "to play politics!" explodes the hidebound party politician knowingly. "to get a share in the divvy and eventually hog it!" suggests the financial adventurer. "equal opportunities to all; special privileges to none," the grain grower patiently reiterates. he believes in doing away with "the divvy" altogether. he believes that "the spoils system" is bad government and that no stone should be left unturned to elevate the living conditions of the average citizen to the highest possible plane. he believes that the status of a nation depends upon the status of its average citizen and in that he does not consider himself to be preaching socialism but common sense. come back to the country store--to the country retailer who is pulling on the other end of the whiffle-tree with the farmer for community progress. each is necessary to the other and it is a vital matter if the co-operation of the farmer is going to kill off a teammate, especially when tandeming right behind them are the clydesdales of commerce, the wholesaler and the manufacturer. with the farmer kicking over the traces, the retailer biting and squealing at the wholesaler every little while and the manufacturer with his ears laid back flat this distribution of merchandize in western canada is no easy problem. it is bringing the bankers to their aristocratic portals all along the route and about the only onlooker who is calm and serene is the mail-order man as he passes overhead post-haste in the government flying machine. "i'd get along alright if the farmer would pay up his debts to me," cries the retailer. "i've been giving him too long a line of credit and now he's running rings around me and tying me up in a knot. when he gets some money he goes and buys from my competitors for cash or he buys more land and machinery. if i shorten the rope he busts it and runs away!" "i'd be alright if everybody else would mind their own business," grumbles the wholesaler. "just trot along there now! pay your bills, farmer. improve your service, retailer. don't ask me about high or low tariff. i've got my hands full with established lines and it's my business to supply them as cheaply as is consistent with quality. i want to see everybody succeed and it isn't fair to include me in any mix-up. only the humming of that confounded flying-machine up there--can't somebody bring down that mail-order bird? he isn't paying his share of the taxes while i've helped to finance this country." "we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves," sings the manufacturer. "giddap, dobbin!" "'money makes the mare go,'" quotes the finance minister, taking another look out of the window at the war cloud. "'money comes from the soil,'" and he push-buttons a buzz-bell over in the department of agriculture. "send out the choir and let's have that 'patriotism and production' song again," is the order issued by some deputy sub-chief's assistant in response to the p. m.'s signal. "we must encourage our farmers to even nobler efforts." and all the while the unearned increment loafs around, studying the interest charges which are ticking away like a taxicab meter, and the "common pee-pul" gaze in frozen fascination at the high cost of living flying its kite and climbing the string! seriously, though, the situation demands the earnest thought of all classes. the argument has so many facets that it is impossible within the limits of a few pages to present an adequate conception of all the vital problems that surround the farmers' movement. each interest has its own data--packages of it--and it is difficult to know what to select and what to leave out and at the same time remain entirely fair to all concerned. there is some truth in many of the accusations which are bandied about. no new country can do without credit facilities. what about the homesteader or the poorer farmer who is starting on meagre resources? they will win through if given a chance. who is to give it to them if business is put on a cash basis? on the other hand, is the man who has the cash to receive no consideration? the trouble with our banks is that their system falls down when the retailer or the farmer need them most--in times of stringency. it is true that the wholesaler has done much for the country, that the retailer is often at the mercy of careless or selfish customers who abuse credit privileges. it is true that the mail-order houses also have performed good services in the general task of making a new country. the solution can be arrived at only by co-operation in its true sense--getting together--everybody. also, while one may joke about "patriotism and production," the fact remains that much has been accomplished by these campaigns. asked if the organization of the farmers meant that the retailer would be forced out of business, the well posted credit manager of a large winnipeg wholesale establishment admitted that it would not mean that necessarily. the same question put to c. rice-jones, president and manager of the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company, brought the same denial. "the only men who would be weeded out," said he, "are those who have gone into the local store business without knowing anything about it and who can remain in it only because the present system allows them to charge any price they like. the men who know their business will remain. those who are objecting to us are objecting to the very thing they have been doing themselves for fifty years--organizing." "we want to farm, not to go into business," remarked h. w. wood, president of the united farmers of alberta. "the local merchant gives us a local distribution service, a service which has to be given. we cannot destroy one single legitimate interest. but if there are four or five men living by giving a service that one man should give in a community and get just a living--that is what we are going to correct and we are absolutely entitled to do so. the selfishness we are accused of the accusers have practiced right along and these very things make it necessary for us to organize for self-protection. if they will co-operate with us to put their business on a legitimate basis we are willing to quit trying to do this business ourselves." that is straight talk, surely. it is a challenge to the business men to meet the farmers half way for a better understanding. no problem ever was solved by extremists on either side. enmity and suspicion must be submerged by sane discussion and mutual concessions bring about the beginnings of closer unity. chapter xxii the width of the field our times are in his hand who saith, "a whole i planned, youth shows but half; trust god; see all, nor be afraid." --_robert browning._ the grain growers' movement in western canada now had attained potential proportions. in saskatchewan, manitoba and alberta the provincial associations with their many locals were in a flourishing condition. each province was headquarters for a powerful farmers' trading organization to market grain and provide co-operative supplies. unlike the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company and the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company, however, the pioneer business organization of the grain growers--the grain growers' grain company--was not provincial in scope but had a large number of shareholders in each of the three prairie provinces, in british columbia and ontario. altogether, in the farmers owned and operated over country elevators as well as terminal elevators to a capacity of three million bushels. the farmer shareholders in the three business concerns numbered more than , . during the farmers handled over ninety million bushels of their own grain. with this remarkable growth the danger of rivalries and jealousies developing between their business organizations was a possibility upon which the farmers were keeping an eye. a certain amount of friendly competition was unavoidable. for some time, therefore, the necessity of closer union of their various organizations had been a serious topic among the leaders of the grain growers in all three provinces. it was the logical preparation for future achievements. at its regular meetings in the canadian council of agriculture--comprising officials representing the whole grain growers' movement--had agreed that definite action would be desirable. a meeting of representatives from the respective associations and companies interested accordingly was held in the offices of the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company at regina. the plan discussed was the formation of one large business concern, similar in a general way to the wholesale co-operative societies in the old country. the idea was that this wholesale company should market and export grain, control terminal elevators and any manufacturing that might be done later on as well as importing supplies when necessary. this would leave each provincial company with its own organization to look after collection and distribution of supplies and to operate along the lines already existing in saskatchewan and alberta. the provincial companies would be in absolute control of the central or wholesale company. a difference of opinion arose in regard to the method of selling grain. the representatives from the united farmers of alberta, the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company, the manitoba grain growers' association and the grain growers' grain company were unanimous in agreeing that it would be unwise to divide the marketing strength of the farmers into three parts instead of concentrating for fullest buying and selling power in the interest of the farmers in all three provinces. with the individual organizations each having a voice in the control of the central company there did not seem to them to be justification for carrying provincial divisions into the marketing machinery, thereby weakening it. with this view the saskatchewan representatives could not agree, holding out for a separate selling channel for saskatchewan grain. a committee was appointed to try to work out some other solution to the problem of federating all three farmers' companies and a new proposal was submitted at a meeting of the canadian council of agriculture, held in winnipeg in july, . this second attempt to get together was along the line of joint ownership of subsidiary concerns which would look after certain phases of the work--an export company, a terminal elevator company, the public press, limited, and so on. however, the plan did not work out satisfactorily. the feeling of the alberta officials after the regina meeting was that even if saskatchewan were not ready at the present time to consider federation on a basis acceptable to the other provinces, this should not overthrow all idea of federation. in short, the alberta directors were strongly of the opinion that, failing complete affiliation of the farmers' business organizations at this time, the organization in alberta and the grain growers' grain company should get together nevertheless, and this suggestion they presented at the meeting of the canadian council of agriculture in winnipeg. as this was approved by the grain growers' grain company and the manitoba association officials steps were taken to go into the matter in detail, the saskatchewan organization having signified its intention of withdrawing from present action. president c. rice-jones, of the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company, and president t. a. crerar, of the grain growers' grain company, were asked to give the matter careful thought and make their recommendations to their respective boards of directors. there followed a joint meeting of all those interested. it was held at winnipeg and the result was a recommendation that the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company and the grain growers' grain company be amalgamated under the name "united grain growers, limited." [ ] when the matter finally came before the farmers concerned--at their annual meetings in --it was decided unanimously to go ahead with the amalgamation of these two farmers' business organizations. accordingly application was made for necessary changes in the charter of the grain growers' grain company and these changes were granted by act of the dominion parliament in june, . the authorized capital stock of united grain growers is five million dollars. its annual meetings are to be held in the different provinces alternately. the shareholders are formed into local groups, each represented by delegates at annual meetings, these delegates alone doing the voting. proxy voting is not allowed. the charter is designed, in brief, to introduce the system of internal government that has been in practice by the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company and the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company and has proved so satisfactory in every way. this "merger" is unique in that the objections to a monopoly cannot be urged against it. there is no watered stock. with proxy voting eliminated no group of men can gain control of the company's affairs. stock holdings by individuals is limited to $ , on a capitalization of five million and no man can grow rich by speculation with assets. instead of exploiting the public the aim is service--reduction of prices instead of inflation. united grain growers, limited, have begun their first year's business as an amalgamated farmers' concern, all the final details having been settled to the entire satisfaction of the farmers interested. the fact that the saskatchewan grain growers' executives did not decide to amalgamate their co-operative marketing machinery with that of the others just now must not be misconstrued as a lack of harmony among the leaders of these powerful institutions. for they are meeting constantly in their inter-provincial relations, for mutual business advantages and in the broader educational aspects of the entire movement. it will be seen that with such complete and solid business resources established in the three prairie provinces the organized farmers have been in a position to widen their field of influence and to carry on much propaganda work. the movement has spread steadily until it embraces organization in other than prairie provinces. there seems to be a tendency among the entire agricultural population of canada to organize and co-operate; so that it is not impossible for canadian farmers in time to have a unity of organization in every province of the dominion. in ontario for many years there have been various farmers clubs, associations or granges. until these were merely disorganized units. at the annual meeting of the dominion grange, however--december th and th, --the advisability of consolidating for greater co-operation was discussed at some length. representatives from the western grain growers were present and told the story of what the western farmer had accomplished. a committee[ ] was appointed and, after investigating rural conditions in ontario, this committee called a convention for march th and th, , at toronto. farmers and fruit growers turned out in strength, old-time organization was cast aside and there came into being the "united farmers of ontario," [ ] and the "united farmers' co-operative company, limited," [ ] with aims and organization similar to those of the grain growers. although practically born during the war--although conditions have been far from normal, the united farmers of ontario have progressed steadily and naturally, with the co-operative activities setting the pace and with efficient service as the watchword. by there were local associations with a total membership of , . in the face of bad climatic conditions and war disturbances found the young organization being looked upon by the ontario agriculturists with interest instead of suspicion. it continued to grow of its own accord. by that is meant that no advertising or other energetic campaign was undertaken; yet the membership increased during the year to , with locals organized throughout the province. to-day there is a total membership in excess of twenty thousand throughout the province. local conventions, addressed by western leaders and other qualified speakers, have become a feature of the development. the first month in business for the united farmers' co-operative company was september, , when $ was taken in. the next month the sales increased to $ , , and in november to $ , . the december sales jumped to $ , . the sales for approximated $ , . in this amount was nearly doubled and during the first five months of the business done reached a total of $ , . all this on paid-up capital of only $ , . the ontario company has secured a new charter, increasing its authorized capital from $ , to $ , . this expansion has been very satisfactory in view of the special conditions which necessarily make the progress of the movement in the east slower than in the west. ontario crops varying widely in different districts, the same unity of interest which has made possible the large grain companies of the west does not obtain. the ontario farmers have had to confine their efforts to commercial lines. co-operative sale of livestock, cheese, etc., may develop in time. also the farm population in ontario is in the minority and there are few electoral divisions where the urban vote does not control, resulting in mixed issues unknown on the prairies. powerful influences have been brought to bear to handicap the farmers' movement in ontario; but nevertheless it is spreading so rapidly that with the proper educational campaign great possibilities lie ahead of the ontario farmers. the united farmers of ontario now have become affiliated with the canadian council of agriculture,[ ] the inter-provincial body of the organized farmers of canada. the farmers of nova scotia, prince edward island and quebec are showing much interest and have sought to have the movement extended. meetings have been held and no doubt in due course the eastern farmers will be prepared for unity of action in every province. what about british columbia? on february th, , the "united farmers of british columbia" was a development in the pacific coast province. prior to this there had been quite a number of individual farmers' organizations scattered throughout the agricultural sections of british columbia. the initiative for closer unity was taken by the cowichan creamery association, which called a meeting of the farmers in the cowichan district to discuss the cost of production and serious labor conditions which were threatening complete failure of agriculture in british columbia. at this meeting what was called temporarily the "vancouver island farmers' union" was formed with over one hundred members. representatives from other districts were on hand to assure the expansion of the movement and a provisional organization committee[ ] was appointed to carry on the missionary work. this provisional committee--called into existence by a mass meeting of farmers held at duncan, b.c., on november th, --at once prepared a strong circular, setting forth the case of the farmers and the need for organization. this was sent out to the secretaries of all farmers' institutes and suggested that a special meeting of delegates should be held at victoria when the usual farmers' conventions were in session a few months later. thus came about the final large organization meeting of february th, , which resulted in the "united farmers of british columbia," with strong membership under the guidance of enthusiastic officers.[ ] representatives of the grain growers, from alberta and manitoba, were present to lend the encouragement of their experience. among them was roderick mckenzie, then secretary[ ] of the canadian council of agriculture. when the farmers commenced organization in manitoba, he said, it was possible to find many old-fashioned farmers who could see no reason for organization. had not their fathers been successful farmers? had they not raised a family of eight or ten or a dozen or more without belonging to any organization?--educated them, too? these old-time farmers forgot that the world was making progress as the years went by and they were not living in the same age as their fathers before them. "fifty years ago, when i was a boy," mr. mckenzie continued, "there was no such thing as a joint stock company. we would not hear a word about combines or trusts or transportation organizations or financial institutions. at that time the business was carried on by individuals. then it grew into partnerships. from partnerships it developed into joint stock corporations and now we have these forming into trusts and combines and holding companies. it is simply co-operation of the few in the interests of the few. it created a force in public affairs and this must be met by another force--the organization of the common people, led by the farmers. "where would the british army be as a disorganized army confronting the germans? nowhere! place a body of disorganized farmers in front of organized industrial interests and you see where you are at! there is no form of industry, no form of labor, no form of finance, banking associations, loan associations, insurance compensation associations, transportation associations, that are not organized. in winnipeg we have a bootblack's association and each of the little fellows contributes five dollars a year to the support of their organization and five dollars represents fifty pairs of boots to blacken at a dime the pair. "in our grain growers' associations the organization is simple and coherent. there is no pass-word. there is no grip. there is no riding of the goat. we don't ask a farmer whether he is a grit or a tory; we don't ask him anything about his nationality or his relations or where he comes from or anything else. one of the main aims of the organization is to make good canadians of the different nationalities we have in this western country. we are getting the galicians and other nationalities gradually brought in--getting them together for the development of canadianism and the community spirit. "the one thing we have steered clear of is letting party politics enter into our organization. the thing we are trying to do is to co-operate with our legislators by helping them to find out the things that need enacting into law and that have not been enacted into law or to find what laws already on the statute books are weak and ask that these weaknesses be corrected--not in a dominating spirit but in a spirit of equity." public opinion is rallying to the leadership of the farmers. their policy is progressive. probably the first body in canada to give woman her proper place in its activities and councils was the saskatchewan grain growers' association. to-day the farm women of the west are organized with the grain growers in all three prairie provinces, working side by side. their aims are to solve the many problems directly bearing upon home life, educational facilities, health and all things which affect the farm woman's life and they have been of great assistance in many ways, particularly in red cross and other patriotic endeavors. to do justice to the noble efforts of western canada's farm women would require a separate volume. still another development with far-reaching possibilities is the tendency of the grain growers and the church to get together. it first revealed itself in alberta under the conscientious encouragement of president h. w. wood, of the united farmers of alberta, when in he inaugurated "u.f.a. sunday"--one sunday in each year to be set aside as the farmers' own particular day, with special sermons and services. it was born of a realization that something is fundamentally wrong with our social institutions and that "the church will have to take broader responsibilities than it is now doing." "is christ to develop the individuals and carl marx mobilize and lead them?" asked mr. wood. "is christ to hew the stones and henry george build them into the finished edifice? if christ cannot mobilize his forces and build true civilization his name will be forgotten in the earth. the solution of the economic problems must be spiritual rather than intellectual. this is the work of the church and the church must take the responsibility for it." not only did the idea of a special sunday meet with hearty response from the churches and farmers in alberta, but it was taken up in manitoba and saskatchewan. in "grain growers' sunday" was observed all over the west and led to many inspiring addresses. one of the most significant of these was delivered by president j. a. maharg, of the saskatchewan grain growers' association, at a mass meeting in moose jaw on sunday, may th. "there has been a strong agitation against church union," said mr. maharg. "we hope to bring the churches together. the establishment of community churches is not altogether an impossibility. that groups of churches will be brought together for the holding of community services is not altogether impossible, and a farmers' organization is not an organization that is farthest away from doing this." in these days of revolutionary thought who shall set the length and width of the farmers' field of influence, therefore? a string of co-related provincial organizations of farmers, stretching right across the dominion, working harmoniously through the canadian council of agriculture, will create a national force which in itself will represent public opinion--which cannot be denied the upward trend to wider and better citizenship for all classes in canada. for public opinion governs legislation as legislation governs the country. [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . [ ] see appendix--par. . chapter xxiii the depth of the furrows men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. --_julius caesar._ because it was the logical and primary source of redress for the abuses which led the western farmers to organize, the grain growers from the first have concerned themselves seriously with legislation. it took them a little while to discover that instead of being an all-sufficient panacea, mere legislation may become at times as flat and useless as a cold pancake. but by the time the farmers had come to close quarters with their difficulties their vision had widened so that they were able to look ahead, clearing the path for the next step forward. so frequently have they besought the governments, both federal and provincial, that occasionally they have been accused by harassed politicians of "playing politics and nothing else." as their organizations grew and acquired knowledge it is true that these "petitioners" who "did humbly pray" began to straighten their backs a little, the while they wrestled with the kinks that were bothering them from too much stooping. it was a sort of chiropractic process for the alleviation of growing pains--the discovery of the proper nerve to ask and receive, to seek and find. as the people grew more accustomed to the sound of their own voice it was only natural that the quaver of timidity began to disappear from the tones of it and that their speech grew stronger in the legislative halls dedicated to government "of, by and for" them. the "backbone of his country" set out to prove that he was not spineless, merely disjointed. and as he gained confidence in his vertebrae the farmer began to sit up and take notice--began even to entertain the bold idea of getting eventually upon his feet. the intention was laudable. to make it audible he assembled a platform, stood up on it, and argued. his protests could be heard clean to the back of the hall. like the young elephant whose trunk was being stretched by the crocodile, he said: "you are hurting me!" in the nose-pulling game of party politics as it too often has been played, it sometimes takes a lusty holler to make itself heard above all the other hollering that is going on; if getting a hearing is "playing politics," then the grain growers have run up a pretty good score. they began with various amendments to the grain act. these included the famous "car distribution" clause, the farmer's right to a car and his procedure to obtain it and additional cars as he needed them, the provision of penalties for the purchase or sale of car rights, etc. opposition to some of these amendments was keen and the farmers had to fight constantly; when they were not fighting for necessary amendments they were fighting to retain those already secured. constant vigilance was required. many delegations of grain growers visited ottawa from time to time to plead for improvement of conditions in handling grain, more equitable inspection methods, government ownership and operation of terminal facilities and so on. each year the annual conventions of the various associations in saskatchewan, manitoba and alberta grew in size and importance; each year the grain growers' knowledge expanded, much of it gained by marketing experience. from these "farmers' parliaments" and the pages of the _grain growers' guide_ they drew inspiration for many radical ideas and threshed them out into well defined policies. by the time sir wilfrid laurier, then premier of canada, ventured west in the farmers were pretty well posted on national topics. everywhere he went he faced thousands of ruddy, big-fisted men who read addresses to him and did a lot of extemporaneous talking which was no less forceful and complete than the prepared briefs. six or eight hundred of them followed him back to ottawa in december of that same year and laid siege to the government on its own stamping-ground. it was the most remarkable red-seal record of the voice from the soil that hitherto had been known thereabouts. in order that there might be no doubt as to the planks on which they stood, the grain growers assembled a platform in full view of the audience. "we want reciprocal free trade between canada and the united states in all horticultural, agricultural and animal products," declared the farmers; "also in spraying materials and fertilizers; illuminating, fuel and lubricating oils; cement, fish and lumber. "we want reciprocal free trade between the two countries in all agricultural implements, machinery, vehicles and parts of each of these. we want it carried into effect through the independent action of the respective governments rather than by the hard and fast requirements of a treaty. "we want the duties on all british goods lowered to one-half the rates charged under the general tariff schedule, whatever that may be. also, we want any trade advantages given to the united states in reciprocal trade relations to be extended to great britain. "we want such further gradual reduction of the remaining preferential tariff as will ensure the establishment of complete free trade between canada and the mother land within ten years. we're willing to face direct taxation, in such form as may be advisable, to make up the revenue required under new tariff conditions." "this bunch wants the whole earth!" cried the canadian manufacturers indignantly. "sub-soil and all!" nodded the railways. "certainly they're plowing deep," commented the banks. "to eradicate weeds," admitted the farmers. "damn it all, anyway!" worried the politicians. to show that they were talking neither tory nor grit, the western farmers proceeded to waylay the leader of the opposition, hon. r. l. borden, the following year when he in turn decided to "go west." he, too, came face to face with thousands of ruddy, big-fisted men and listened to their equally plain-spoken addresses, prepared and extemporaneous. and what came of it all? did these farmers get what they wanted? not yet! but while all this agitation of the grain growers one time and another seldom has resulted in assent to their full requests, certain compliances have been made on different occasions with beneficial results. for instance--to mention three--the royal grain commission of , the permanent grain commission, and the government terminal elevators are an outcome of various requests and delegations of the grain growers. certainly the organized farmers of western canada have attained a measure of self-confidence which enables them to declare themselves in definite language. while seeking wider markets and the real value of their products, they have been opposed always to any scheme which accomplishes higher prices at the expense of the consumer or of the british workman. they do not believe in import duties on food stuffs, clothing, fuel or building material. rather do they favor bringing closer together the producer and consumer to the advantage of both. they believe in cheaper money for the development of agriculture and other industries and in such utilization of natural resources that the homes of the people may be improved. they have stood consistently behind woman suffrage and the abolition of the liquor traffic. they would adopt direct legislation through the initiative and referendum. they believe in the principles of co-operation in buying and selling. they have urged extension of the parcel post system, the reduction of traffic charges to a reasonable basis, government control of waterways and all natural resources that they may be developed only in the public interest. does a creed like this spell class legislation? does it indicate that in his eagerness to improve the conditions surrounding his own life the grain grower is forgetting the general welfare of the dominion of canada? listen to the doctrine which the leaders have inculcated on every occasion--to president t. a. crerar before the war: "you have a very clear-cut and distinct responsibility in supporting the whole movement of the organized farmers in western canada; for this means that you are improving not alone your own environment and condition, but also creating the conditions and influences that will develop a higher and purer ideal of public service upon the part of our people than we have in canada to-day. it should be a source of great satisfaction that upon all important matters the policies adopted and supported by the organized farmers in the past have been formed upon what in their judgment would benefit the country as a whole and not from the narrow view of selfish interest. "during the past ten years the people of canada have mortgaged the prosperity of the future to far too great an extent. our total borrowings as a nation, for public and private purposes, have run into such a colossal sum that it requires about $ , , annually to pay interest on the amounts borrowed. this constitutes a very heavy task on a country with about eight millions of a population. manufacturing industries have been built up with a view of developing home industry and furnishing home markets, but often at a very heavy cost to our agricultural development, with the result that we have been travelling in a circle, reaching nowhere, rather than along the road that leads to progress. "we hear considerable nowadays of the necessity of a 'back to the land' movement. it is necessary, however, to do a little more than get people located on the land with a view of increasing agricultural production. it is necessary to free agriculture from the burdens now resting upon it and make it the first business of the country. "much of our natural resources has been recklessly handled, and as a people we are faced with the necessity of overcoming the evil effects of our unbusinesslike methods as a nation in administering resources. if we are to surmount our shortcomings in this respect and pay our obligations as a nation to the outside world, we must place agriculture throughout canada upon a thoroughly sound and profitable basis. the creation of wealth from our wonderfully rich natural resources, in which agriculture stands in the forefront, is the essential thing and should receive most consideration from our governments--both dominion and provincial. "we must learn to respect each other's differences and, if we do, with the development of that democratic spirit which is now day by day becoming more manifest in western canada, we need have no fear of our usefulness as an agency in bringing about the ultimate triumph of the principles of justice between man and man." listen to president j. a. maharg, addressing the saskatchewan grain growers' association in : "what is wanted is the general recognition by all classes of the importance of agriculture and an honest desire by them to assist in placing it on a basis equal to that of any other industry--making it an occupation that will draw people to it instead of driving them away. in soliciting the aid of other classes i am not asking them to assist us in gaining any special favors whatever; all we ask is that they assist us to have agriculture placed in the position its importance entitles it to." hear the president of the united farmers of alberta, h. w. wood: "this is the day of class co-operation. that means inter-class competition. in this competition of class against class ours is the losing class at every turn because we have been the least organized, the least co-operative; consequently the weakest. before we can hope to hold our own in this struggle we will have to bring our full strength, thoroughly organized, to bear in protection of our rights. "i have an abiding faith that the organized farmers will receive that strength, not selfishly but unselfishly in the defence of the rights of all and for the spoliation of none. the highest ambition i have for our organization is that it may develop along the lines of safety and sanity, that we may hold to a steady determination to go forward unwaveringly in our efforts till the door of hope and opportunity is as wide open to the farmers as to any class in the world, that we may zealously cultivate unselfish co-operation and learn to treat fairly and justly every man and every class that is giving a useful service to society." and this from the presidential address of r. c. henders at the last manitoba grain growers' convention: "in order to have legislation that will be equitable to the different interests concerned, all of these interests should be somewhat equally represented in the passing of such legislation. we do not desire to minimize in any way the great commercial interests of our people, yet we feel that the work of our associations is educational and legislative in its character. democratic rule requires that the average citizen be an active, instructed and intelligent ruler of his country and therefore the success of democracy depends upon the education of the people along two principal lines--first, political knowledge; second, and what is of far more importance, political morality. ideal government is found when we have righteous rulers governing a people of character and intelligence. right education is right thinking and right thinking can only come through accurate information." now, is all this preaching of the men who are leading the farmers just so much talk?--chaff?--prairie wind? if not, what lies back of it? the farmers have an organization which meets every so-often to harmonize and crystallize the thought among their various associations and business units. it is that same canadian council of agriculture which has been mentioned already. it consists of the executive committees of eight farmers' co-operative, business and educational institutions, to wit: the united farmers of ontario, the united farmers' co-operative company of ontario, the grain growers' association of manitoba, united grain growers (of the entire west), the grain growers' association of saskatchewan, the saskatchewan co-operative elevator company, the united farmers of alberta, and the _grain growers' guide_, the official organ of the whole movement. at a meeting of this influential body in winnipeg in december, --representing an affiliation of , farmers--a "national political platform" was adopted to embrace economic, political and social reforms not alone in the interests of the farmers but of canada's citizens generally. the farmers are looking for the support of all who live in cities and towns as well as the rural districts; of organized labor as well as organized farmers. this platform was referred to the provincial organizations which stand behind the canadian council of agriculture. it was considered by each of the provincial boards and by them referred in turn to the three thousand local community associations into which the members are organized. each local was asked to call a meeting to consider the platform and vote upon its adoption. the next step was for the members to give their votes and financial support only to such candidates for the house of commons as would pledge support of this national platform in its entirety and who could be relied upon as members of parliament to live up to their pledges. and here is the national political platform on which the farmers stand without equivocation: the customs tariff whereas the war has revealed the amazing financial strength of great britain, which has enabled her to finance not only her own part in the struggle, but also to assist in financing her allies to the extent of hundreds of millions of pounds, this enviable position being due to the free trade policy which has enabled her to draw her supplies freely from every quarter of the globe and consequently to undersell her competitors on the world's markets, and because this policy has not only been profitable to great britain but has greatly strengthened the bonds of empire by facilitating trade between the motherland and her overseas dominions--we believe that the best interests of the empire and of canada would be served by reciprocal action on the part of canada through gradual reductions of the tariff on british imports, having for its object a closer union and a better understanding between canada and the motherland, and by so doing not only strengthen the hands of great britain in the life and death struggle in which she is now engaged, but at the same time bring about a great reduction in the cost of living to our canadian people; and whereas the protective tariff has fostered combines, trusts and "gentlemen's agreements" in almost every line of canadian industrial enterprise, by means of which the people of canada--both urban and rural--have been shamefully exploited through the elimination of competition, the ruination of many of our smaller industries and the advancement of prices on practically all manufactured goods to the full extent permitted by the tariff; and whereas agriculture--the basic industry upon which the success of all other industries primarily depends--is almost stagnant throughout canada as shown by the declining rural population in both eastern and western canada, due largely to the greatly increased cost of agricultural implements and machinery, clothing, boots and shoes, building material and practically everything the farmer has to buy, caused by the protective tariff, so that it is becoming impossible for farmers generally to carry on farming operations profitably; and whereas the protective tariff is the most wasteful and costly method ever designed for raising national revenue, because for every dollar obtained thereby for the public treasury at least three dollars pass into the pockets of the protected interests, thereby building up a privileged class at the expense of the masses, thus making the rich richer and the poor poorer; and whereas the protective tariff has been and is a chief corrupting influence in our national life because the protected interests, in order to maintain their unjust privileges, have contributed lavishly to political and campaign funds, thus encouraging both political parties to look to them for support, thereby lowering the standard of public morality; therefore be it resolved that the canadian council of agriculture, representing the organized farmers of canada, urges that as a means of bringing about these much needed reforms and at the same time reducing the high cost of living, now proving such a burden on the people of canada, our tariff laws should be amended as follows: ( ) by reducing the customs duty on goods imported from great britain to one half the rates charged under the general tariff and that further gradual, uniform reductions be made in the remaining tariff on british imports that will ensure complete free trade between great britain and canada in five years. ( ) that the reciprocity agreement of , which still remains on the united states statute books, be accepted by the parliament of canada. ( ) that all food stuffs not included in the reciprocity agreement be placed on the free list. ( ) that agricultural implements, farm machinery, vehicles, fertilizer, coal, lumber, cement, illuminating fuel and lubricating oils be placed on the free list. ( ) that the customs tariff on all the necessaries of life be materially reduced. ( ) that all tariff concessions granted to other countries be immediately extended to great britain. taxation for revenue as these tariff reductions will very considerably reduce the national revenue derived from that source, the canadian council of agriculture would recommend that in order to provide the necessary additional revenue for carrying on the government of the country and for the prosecution of the war to a successful conclusion, direct taxation be imposed in the following manner: ( ) by a direct tax on unimproved land values, including all natural resources. ( ) by a sharply graduated personal income tax. ( ) by a heavy graduated inheritance tax on large estates. ( ) by a graduated income tax on the profits of corporations. other necessary reforms the canadian council of agriculture desires to endorse also the following policies as in the best interests of the people of canada: ( ) the nationalization of all railway, telegraph and express companies. ( ) that no more natural resources be alienated from the crown but brought into use only under short term leases, in which the interests of the public shall be properly safeguarded, such leases to be granted only by public auction. ( ) direct legislation, including the initiative and referendum and the right of recall. ( ) publicity of political campaign fund contributions and expenditures both before and after elections. ( ) the abolition of the patronage system. ( ) full provincial autonomy in liquor legislation, including manufacture, export and import. ( ) that the extension of the franchise to women in any province shall automatically admit them to the federal franchise. that is the official stand of the farmers and they point out that their political platform[ ] is constructive, not destructive. the farmers are not trying to sidestep their fair share of the expenses in connection with government and public institutions; where they have torn down they have rebuilt. admitting that the prosperity of western canada is essential to our national prosperity, it is not necessary to look far in order to understand why the farmers have taken this definite action. western farmers and citizens generally are carrying extra burdens which offset the advantages of cheap and fertile land. interest on mortgages and bank loans have been higher than in eastern canada. it is more expensive to distribute commodities west than east. on account of the lavish donations of western lands to railway promoters the cost of railway construction has borne heavily on the west. freight rates are about sixty per cent. higher and express rates about sixty-six per cent. higher than in eastern canada. thanks to the protective tariff, western people are paying high for everything they get without any return compensation. "something has to be done to lift some of these unjust burdens," say the farmers, "if a prosperous country is to be developed west of the great lakes." hence this platform. the western farmers believe in it earnestly. it is their politics. they believe that the results which would follow its support in the house of commons would be of untold benefit to the canadian people as a whole. they will continue to believe it. when the crisis arose which brought about the last election, in which union government swept the west, the farmers saw the gravity of the situation and were prepared to forego immediate discussion of tariff amendments to concentrate on winning the war. some of the farmers' candidates even withdrew in favor of union candidates. all those who remained in the field were elected. after the war is won--what? reforms of breathtaking sweep are taking place as the natural outcome of current conditions. the liquor traffic has been tossed aside like a useless boot. woman has stepped forth to a sphere of active worth without upheaval. just where lie the boundaries of the impossible and who shall define them? it is a far-seeing, clear-thinking new farmer who has come forward in the last decade. through his associations, his marketing experiences, his contact with railways and banks and manufacturers and governments he has become a student of economics. at the same time he has strengthened his thews and sinews for whatever may face him on the path ahead. and his eyes are wide open to the fact that there are "lions in the path!" wait a minute, mr. business man! before condemning this western farmer out of hand, put yourself in his place and try for a moment in all fairness to forget your own viewpoint. it may be that you have not even seen the prairies. have you ever been at sea with not a thing in sight but water, sky, horizon? imagine the water to be land, and yourself living in a one-room shack or a little low sod hut bewhiskered with growing grass. the nearest railway was fifty miles away and you got so lonesome that the howl of a coyote or the cry of owls in the night nearly drove you crazy. neighbors so scarce your social pleasures were cut off by distance and you reared your family on that homestead twenty-five miles from a doctor, a church or a school. when you made the long trip in for supplies in those early days you found you had to pay anywhere up to twice as much as their market value while for what you had to sell you had to take from twenty-five to fifty per cent. less than the market value. the implements you simply had to have for your work you bought on the instalment plan with interest at ten and twelve per cent. for the privilege. when you had survived three years of this and with high hopes took your patent to the mortgage company to raise a loan at ten per cent. you found you couldn't get accommodation. thereupon in marched your implement and other creditors with a chattel mortgage on everything you had--except the missus and the kids and the baby's bottley-by! then in the beautiful hot month of august it blew up black one day and the chickens scurried for shelter and you and the wife stood with your noses flattened against the window-pane--unless it was only oiled paper--and watched the big ice-marbles bouncing and heard the hail drumming flat in a few minutes the acres of wheat you had worked so hard to produce. or perhaps you escaped that time only to have your wheat frozen later on and when you took three days on purpose to haul in a wagonload to the elevator you couldn't get a decent offer for it. so that you pulled off your mitts and clenched your frost-cracked hands as you prepared to turn homeward with but a pitiful portion of the food and clothing you had promised the family you would bring. as you spread across your chest, inside your sheepskin coat, the old newspaper somebody had given you would your soul expand with the joy of living while you headed out into the snowy waste at forty degrees below zero? and if after you got home and the crying young ones had been put to bed in the corner behind the canvas curtain and your wife came and sat beside you, her own tears bravely dried--if then you read in the paper that the government had decided you farmers were so prosperous you should contribute from your easily gained wealth a free gift to manufacturers, financiers, railway magnates or others--then would you say with a great booming, hearty enthusiasm and shining eyes: "i tell you, wife, this is the life!"--would you? or would you just proceed to swear--naturally, successfully, in what is known as "flowing" language? by just such pioneer hardships were the farmers of western canada driven to organize in self-defence. it has ever been the history of revolt that its wellspring was the suffering of the people. pioneer hardships it was that caused the various movements which agitated the farmers of the western states in earlier days. when fingers become hardened and crooked from unceasing toil that achieves nothing but premature old age; when hope withers in a treadmill that grinds to the very soul--then comes rebellion. [ ] since the formation of the organized farmers' national political platform several of its planks have been adopted as legislation at ottawa, notably the abolition of the patronage system, extension of the franchise to women, total prohibition, and personal income taxation. chapter xxiv and the end is not yet. the principle of co-operation draws the whole community together. it breaks down barriers. it unites the state. it gives hope to the humblest toiler. and it strengthens the great moral ideal of duty, without which no state can endure.--_earl grey_. what is to be the final outcome of the western farmers' revolt and its spread to rural communities in eastern provinces? is there to be greater harmony among opposing interests or is canada on the threshold of internal strife which will plow deep furrows of dissension between class and class to an extent hitherto unknown in this country? if there is to be a pitched fight between capitalistic groups and the people at large, led by the farmers, what are the chances of victory for the latter? if they win, what will be the national effect? these were a few of the questions which first turned the writer's serious attention to the grain growers. it seems scarcely credible that this great economic movement has attained present momentum practically unheralded; yet such is the case. the writer had watched its early struggles to success from government windows and as preparation for a brief historical sketch it seemed desirable to get out among the farmers themselves and study the situation from their angle. frankly, the task was not approached without some skepticism as to the motives which might be uncovered. almost the only occasions on which the grain growers revealed themselves to the public were when they waited upon politicians for this, that or the other. so often did this happen and so insistent were they that there seemed some grounds for the belief that to satisfy a grain grower was humanly impossible. from legislative casements it even looked at times as if they were a new species of indian, collecting political scalps! all manner of people accused them of all manner of things. in the east they were called "blacksmith-shop politicians, nail-keg economists, grousers and soreheads"; in the west they were dubbed "corner-grocer statesmen and political football players." when the caravans of the eastern political chieftains, liberal and conservative, came west they knew they were going to be held up by the outlaws. long before these respective expeditions started across the plains infested with wild and dangerous grain growers, their scouts--the western m.p.'s--were ranging far and wide in preparation. and when those grain growers in turn rode east to take possession of ottawa there was a popular expectation that they were about to whoop in and shoot up the town in the real old wild and woolly way. they were referred to cleverly as "sod-busters." it was rather startling to find them merely a new type of business farmer, trained to think on his feet, a student of economics. to gather and verify the facts here recorded has required two years. during that time the writer has listened to earnest farmers in prairie shacks, pioneers and newcomers, leaders and followers, and has watched these farmers at work in their "farmers' parliaments" where they assemble annually by the thousands. it is impossible thus to meet and know these men while examining the facts of their accomplishments without being impressed by the tremendous potentialities that underlie their efforts. almost the first discovery is that the organized farmers have ideals beyond material advantage and that these ideals are national in scope, therefore involving responsibilities. undeterred by these, the farmers are eager to push on to further achievements. their hope for these ideals lies in the success of their business undertakings and it is because that success is the spinal column of the whole movement that it occupies such a prominent place in this historical outline. not all the grain growers are men of vision, it must be admitted. many have joined the movement for what they can get out of it. in all great aggregations of human beings it is quite possible to discover the full gamut of human failings. but loose threads sticking to a piece of cloth are no part of its warp and woof. it is the thinking grain grower who must be reckoned with and he is in the majority; the others are being educated. if there is doubt as to the sincerity of the organized farmers, why did their pioneer business agency spend its substance in educational directions instead of solely along the straight commercial lines of the concerns with which it was in competition? the very mould into which it poured its energies shaped special difficulties, generated special antagonisms and every possible obstruction to its progress. its cash grants to the associations in the west, to the official organ of the movement, even to the ontario farmers, run over the hundred-thousand-dollar mark. or, take the case of the grain growers at virden, manitoba, who proposed to bring into the district a large shipment of binder twine to supply their members. when the local merchant who had been handling this necessity learned of the plan he raised his voice, thus: "if you fellows are going to do that then i go out of binder twine this season. i won't handle a pound of it." "not even to supply the farmers who don't belong to our association?" "that's what i said. you're going to make a convenience of me when you rob me of all my cash business. the only business i could do would be with farmers who wanted credit." did the grain growers say: "that's their lookout, then. let them join us or go twineless"? no. they decided to bring in their co-operative shipment as planned, but to allow the merchant to handle it on commission in order to prevent any injustice to the other farmers. incidents like that can be recorded from all over the country. it does not take very many of them to compel the honest conviction that equity of citizenship for all the people in every walk of life means more to these farmers than a high-sounding shibboleth. that being so, it becomes difficult to accept the slur of utter selfishness--the idea that the farmers are auto-intoxicated, a pig-headed lot who cause trouble for nothing. it is very hard to believe that everybody else is good and kind and sincere and true, affectionate one to another with brotherly love, not slothful in business; for one knows that the best of us need the prayers of our mothers! when these grain growers started out they did not know very much about what was going on. they had their suspicions; but that was all. to-day they know. their business activities have taught them many things while providing the resources for the fight that is shaping unless the whole monopolistic system lets go its stranglehold. yes, the farmers do talk about freedom in buying and selling; also about tariff reform. they point out that there are criminal laws to jail bankers who dared to charge from twenty-five per cent. to forty-two per cent. for the use of money; that food and clothing and the necessaries of life are the same as money and that high tariff protection which fosters combines and monopolies is official discrimination against the many in favor of the few; that there are other and more just forms of taxation and that all old systems of patronage and campaign funds have got to go if the grave problems of these grave times are to be met successfully. it is no old-time "hayseed" who is discussing these things. it is a new farmer altogether. the farmers' movement is no fancy of the moment either, but the product of time itself. it is a condition which has developed in our rural life as the corolla of increased opportunities for education. the farmer to-day is a different man to what he was ten years ago--indeed, five years ago. it has taken fifteen years of bitter struggle for the western farmers to win to their present position and now that they are far enough along their trail to better things to command respect they are going to say what they think without fear or favor. they believe the principles for which they stand to be fundamental to national progress. if there is to be any attempt to cram the old order of things down the people's throats; if, under cloak of all this present talk of winning the war, of new eras and of patriotism, profiteers should scheme and plan fresh campaigns--then will there be such a wrathful rising of the people as will sweep everything before it. in the forefront of that battle will stand the rugged legions of the organized farmers. make no miscalculation of their ability to fight. this year, , will see them sawing their own lumber in their own saw-mills in british columbia. if necessary, they can grind their own flour in their own flour mills, dig their own coal from their own mines, run their own packing-plants, provide their own fidelity and fire-insurance, finance their own undertakings. they grow the grain. they produce the new wealth from the soil. they are the men who create our greatest asset, everything else revolving upon the axis of agriculture in canada. if, then, the farming population has learned to co-operate and stand solid; if in addition they have acquired the necessary capital to educate the masses and are prepared to spend it in advancing their ideals; if the working classes of the cities and the soldier citizens of coming days join their ranks--what chance will special privilege have against the public desire for equal rights? is it to be co-operation in all sincerity or class warfare? if the other great interests in our national life will meet the farmer in a fair spirit, approaching our national problems in an honest attempt to co-operate in their solution for the common good, they will find the farmer meeting them eagerly. they will find that these farmer leaders are reasonable men, broad-minded, square-principled and just--no less so because the class they represent is organized to stand up for its rights. the situation is not hopeless. most of these pages we have been turning are back pages. old conditions and much of the bitterness which they generated have passed. the story of those old conditions has been told from the viewpoint of the farmer in order that his attitude may be understood. but it must be remembered that the grain trade to-day is a very different proposition to what it was and that many of the men who have devoted their lives to it in the cities have played a big and honest part in its development. the winnipeg grain exchange as an exchange has done a great deal for western canada, a point that undoubtedly has been overlooked by many farmers. gradually, however, the farmer has learned that all is not evil in "babylon"; for out of revolution has come evolution.[ ] the key to that better future which is desired so earnestly and wisely is education. the problems of the day are commanding the mental focus of the nation. the banks, the railways, the manufacturers are considering them. the joint committee of commerce and agriculture has great opportunities for removing much old-time hostility on both sides. and now that true co-operation of all classes has become a national duty, surely out of the testing must come better understanding and a greater future. just now, of course, there is only the war. it has brought the canadian people to their feet. for the angry glare of the gun flashes has thrown in silhouette many fallacies, many foibles and rubbish heaps, and these must be swept out in preparation for the new nationhood which canada is called upon to assume. with a third of the entire british empire entrusted to her management and the hopeful gaze of homemakers the world over turning upon her canada's responsibilities are great. but she will rise to her opportunities. just now there is only the war. the history of mankind has no previous record of such chaos, such a solemn time. thrones toppling, maps changing, whole peoples dying of starvation and misery while the fate of democracy is balanced on the issue. men are slaying each other on land, in the air, on the water and below it while the forces of destruction are gnawing holes in the world's resources with the rapacity of swarming rats. it is costing great britain alone over thirty-five million dollars every day--a million and a half every hour! as for canada--much figuring is being done by experts and others in attempts to estimate the total debt which the canadian people will have to carry after the war. but the people themselves are too far immersed in war efforts to pause for futile reckonings. there will be time enough for that when the war is won, and won it shall be, no matter what the cost. it requires no great perspicacity to realize that our total national debt will be a sum which rolls so easily on its ciphers that it eludes the grasp of the average mind. it is going to cost a lot even to keep the wheels greased at five and one-half per cent. from year to year. everybody knows it. _win the war!_ when the lamp went out and the old world we had known blew up--away back in --we spagged about anxiously, calling to each other: "business as usual!" since then factory production has gone up fifty per cent.; export trade a hundred; profits on capital all the way up to the billion-and-a-quarter mark. we have got so used to things in four years that there is danger of forgetting that war has driven a sap beneath these ironical gifts of mars and it is full time business looked around for a place to light and got ready to dig itself in. mobilization, co-operation of every interest, the full grapple of every individual--national effort, in short--these the state demands. the coverlet has been thrown back upon the realization that the state has claims upon each citizen which transcend his individual fortunes--that individual prosperity, in fact, is entirely dependent upon the prosperity of the national whole. not all by himself can the man behind the gun win a war like this. at his heels must stand the munition workers, the man back of the desk, the people themselves, each guarding against waste and each contributing his or her part, great or small, for that national economy which alone can hope to sustain the terrific pace that victory demands. finally, out in the great open spaces, faithful and unassuming and backing his country to the limit, must plod the man behind the plow, working silently and steadily from dawn till dark to enlist and re-enlist the horizoned acres. canada has reason for pride in her farmers. no class is more loyal to british traditions. no class is more determined to win this war. thousands of their sons are at the front. many a lonely mother has stood on a prairie knoll, straining her eyes for the last glimpse of the buggy and bravely waving "god-speed." in many a windswept prairie farm home reigns the sad pride of sacrifice. out of the sanctifying fires is arising a national tendency to new viewpoints. the hope of canada lies in a more active participation in affairs by the average citizen. in opposition to an awakened national interest what chance is there going to be for the silent partnerships of "invisible government"? 'twill be a sorry partizan who allows his thoughts at this crisis to patter away at that old practice line, so full of past mistakes: "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." win-the-war unity is the leaven at work in canada to-day and regeneration is coming. what does it matter except that our country's leaders shall rise to their opportunities for true statesmanship with a deep sense of their responsibilities to the millions who turn to them for guidance in this time of national stress? what does it matter except that the people shall grant to their leaders their sympathy and co-operation in the cares of crisis? as this book goes to the publisher union government in canada has become a fact. not since confederation has such a thing happened in this country. the vampire methods with which our political system has been cursed have been thrown under foot and thinking canadians everywhere have drawn a breath of relief. the energies which have been wasted in jockeying for party position are now concentrating upon effective unity of action. let us hope so indeed. there must be no want of confidence in the cheers which echo from canadian trenches. for over there where canada's first line of defence runs from the north sea through belgium into france your boy, mr. business man, and your boy, mr. farmer, stand shoulder to shoulder. think you that in the crucible which bares the very souls of men those boys have any thought of class criticism or of selfish grabbings? in those trenches you will find more practical christianity, more unselfishness, more true brotherhood than can be realized at this distance. the spirit of sacrifice, the help-one-another idea, the equal share and charity of thought--these revitalizing principles will be brought back by our khaki citizens when they march home from victory. it is past belief that there should be anything but complete unity of purpose as they look back for their country's supports. a coat of arms on the red field of a british flag, a maple leaf on khaki cap or collar-band, a single name on every shoulder-strap--canada. all the nations of the earth salute that name. for it is emblazoned on the shell-churned fields of ypres where, sweltering and bleeding, canada "saved the day" for all humanity. it is inscribed for all time to come on the somme--on vimy ridge--on the difficult slopes of passchendaele. just now, only the war. but when in the years to be we find ourselves in some far land or in some international circle which chance, mayhap, has thrown together; when the talk turns upon the great war and the wonderful victory of civilization; when we are questioned as to who and what we are and we reply simply: "gentlemen, i am a canadian"---- then may the light of pride in our eyes be undimmed by any sense of shame for duty shunned. may it be that out of it all has arisen a higher conception of individual and national life. so that in place of deep furrows of dissension there will be the level seed-bed of greater unity and justice among men. the end. [ ] abnormal conditions in the grain trade at present, due to the war, have led to government control of the crop by means of a board of grain supervisors, aside altogether from the permanent board of grain commissioners. this government commission has very wide powers, superseding the grain act for the time being, and can fix the price at which grain stored in any elevator may be purchased, ascertain available supplies, fix conditions of removal from storage and determine the destination of grain, receive purchase offers and fix sale prices, take possession of grain in elevators and sell it, provide transportation, etc. the board of grain supervisors consists of two representatives of the organized farmers--hon. t. a. crerar, minister of agriculture, and h. w. wood, president of united farmers of alberta; one representative of unorganised farmers--s. k. rathwell; three representatives of the winnipeg grain exchange--j. c. gage, w. e. bawlf and dr. magill (chairman); a representative of the british food commission--jas. stewart; two representatives of labor--controller ainey (montreal) and w. b. best, of locomotive firemen; w. a. matheson, of lake of the woods milling company, and lionel h. clarke, head of the canada malting company and a member of the toronto harbor commission. dr. robert magill, the chairman, is secretary of the winnipeg grain exchange and was formerly chief commissioner of the permanent board of grain commissioners. appendix first officers, directors, committees, etc., of the farmers' movement in western canada, etc. . _territorial_ (saskatchewan) _grain growers' association-- _. president, w. r. motherwell (abernethy); secretary, john millar (indian head). among those who acted on the first board of directors were: messrs. walter govan and m. m. warden (indian head); john gillespie, elmer shaw and peter dayman (abernethy); matthew snow (wolseley). . _virden_ (manitoba) _grain growers' association-- _. president, j. w. scallion; vice-president, george carefoot; secretary-treasurer, h. w. dayton; directors: j. a. blakeman, isaac bennett, peter mcdonald and c. e. ivens. . _manitoba grain growers' association-- _. president, j. w. scallion (virden); vice-president, r. c. henders (culross); secretary-treasurer, r. mckenzie (brandon); directors: donald mcewan, brandon; william ryan (boissevain), w. a. robinson (elva), d. w. mccuaig (portage la prairie), john wilson (lenore), and h. a. fraser, hamiota. . _committee to investigate possibilities of farmers trading in grain-- _. the first step towards co-operative trading in grain by the farmers of western canada was a scheme, fathered by e. a. partridge, of sintaluta, sask., the first official action being taken by the manitoba grain growers' association at their annual convention in , when the following committee was ordered to investigate and report: chairman, e. a. partridge (sintaluta, sask.); j. a. taylor (cartwright, man.); a. s. barton (boissevain, man.). . _local committee to organise meeting of sintaluta farmers-- _. the following committee of sintaluta farmers made arrangements for a meeting of the farmers in the sintaluta district to discuss co-operative trading in grain and to pledge support of the trading company proposed by e. a. partridge: e. a. partridge, al quigley, dave railton, w. j. bonner, t. mcleod, james ewart. . _preliminary organisation committee of sintaluta farmers-- _. e. a. partridge (chairman), a. j. quigley (secretary), william hall (treasurer), james halford, james ewart, d. railton, sr., j. o. partridge, william j. bonner, thomas s. mcleod, w. malhiot, h. o. partridge, g. k. grass, harold bird, h. t. smith, george hill--all of sintaluta, sask. subsequently this committee was enlarged to include a number of manitoba canvassers. . _provisional officers of grain growers' grain company-- _. provisional organization of the western farmers' pioneer trading company finally took place at winnipeg, july th, , when the following officers were chosen: president, e. a. partridge; vice-president, john kennedy; secretary-treasurer, john spencer; directors: w. a. robinson (elva, man.), and francis graham (melita, man.). at a general meeting of the shareholders these same officers were elected subsequently and the directorate increased by two--robert cruise (dauphin) and t. w. knowles (emerson). . _sintaluta_ (sask.) _farmers who pledged personal securities-- _. finding themselves $ , short of the necessary $ , for the purchase of a seat on the winnipeg grain exchange, the young trading company of farmers had recourse to personal securities in order to finance their start in business. the friends to whom e. a. partridge appealed and who immediately gave the bank their personal notes were the following sintaluta men: dave railton, al quigley, tom mcleod, jim ewart, william e. hall. . _inter-provincial council of grain growers' and farmers' associations-- _. it was under this name that the executive officers of the various farmers' organizations in the three prairie provinces first came together to discuss problems affecting the movement as a whole. the first officers of the inter-provincial council were: president, e. n. hopkins (moose jaw, sask.); secretary, m. d. geddes (calgary, alberta). . _united farmers of alberta-- _. until january th, , the farmers of alberta had two provincial organizations--the "canadian society of equity" and the "alberta farmers' association." on this date amalgamation took place at edmonton under the name, "united farmers of alberta" with officers and directors as follows: president, james bower (red deer); vice-president, rice sheppard (strathcona); secretary, edward j. fream (calgary); directors: g. a. dixon (fishburn), a. von mielecki (calgary), george mcdonald (olds), george long (edmonton), thomas balaam (vegreville), l. h. jelliffe (spring coulee), e. carswell (penhold), h. jamieson (red deer). . _canadian council of agriculture-- _. the name of the inter-provincial council (par. ) was changed to the "canadian council of agriculture" in when relations were established with the grange, the early organization of ontario farmers. the first officers of the new inter-provincial body were: president, d. w. mccuaig (portage la prairie, man.); vice-president, james bower (red deer, alberta); secretary, e. c. drury (barrie, ont.). . _saskatchewan co-operative elevator company-- _. _provisional officers_: president, j. a. maharg (moose jaw); vice-president, f. w. green (moose jaw); secretary-treasurer, charles a. dunning (beaverdale); directors: a. g. hawkes (percival), james robinson (walpole), dr. t. hill (kinley). upon early withdrawal of f. w. green for personal reasons, george langley (maymont) was called by the board in an advisory capacity. _first election_: president, j. a. maharg (moose jaw); vice-president, george langley (maymont); secretary-treasurer, charles a. dunning (beaverdale); directors: james robinson (walpole), w. c. sutherland (saskatoon), n. e. baumunk (dundurn), a. g. hawkes (percival), j. e. paynter (tantallon), dr. e. j. barrick. . _alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company-- _. _provisional officers_: president, w. j. tregillus (calgary); vice-president, e. carswell (red deer); secretary-treasurer, e. j. fream (calgary); directors: joseph quinsey (noble), william s. henry (bow island), rice sheppard (edmonton), p. p. woodbridge (calgary). _first election_: president, w. j. tregillus; vice-president, j. quinsey (noble); secretary-treasurer, e. j. fream (calgary); directors: e. carswell (red deer), rice sheppard (edmonton), p. s. austin (ranfurly), j. g. mckay (provost), r. a. parker (winnifred), c. rice-jones (veteran). . _united farmers of ontario-- _. _organisation committee-- _: e. c. drury (barrie), j. j. morrison (arthur), henry glendinning (manilla), elmer lick (oshawa), h. b. cowan (peterboro), w. c. good (paris), col. j. z. frazer (burford). _first election of officers-- _: president, e. c. drury (barrie); secretary-treasurer, j. j. morrison (arthur). . _united farmers' co-operative company, limited-- _. president, w. c. good (paris); secretary-treasurer, j. j. morrison (arthur); executive: anson groh (preston), c. w. gurney (paris), col. j. z. fraser (burford), e. c. drury (barrie). . _united farmers of british columbia-- _. _provisional committee_ (vancouver island farmers' union)--_ _: chairman, r. m. palmer (cowichan bay); secretary-treasurer, w. paterson (duncan); h. g. helgesen (metchosin), g. a. cheeke (shawnigan lake), a. e. brooke wilkinson (cobble hill), e. h. forrest (hillbank), f. j. bishop (cowichan station), g. h. hadwen (comiaken), c. g. palmer, c.i.e. (quamichan), f. maris hale (deerholme), a. a. mutter (somenos), l. f. solly (westholme), r. u. hurford (courtenay), a. c. aiken (duncan). _first election_ (united farmers of british columbia)--_ _: president, c. g. palmer (quamichan); vice-presidents: j. w. berry (langley), r. a. copeland (kelowna), p. h. moore (saanich); secretary, h. j. ruscombe poole (duncan); directors: j. johnson (nelson), r. u. hurford (comox), l. dilworth (kelowna), r. h. helmer (summerland), w. e. smith (revelstoke), w. paterson (koksiloh). . _united grain growers, limited-- _. by act of dominion parliament, june, , the necessary changes in the charter of the grain growers' grain company, limited, were granted to enable amalgamation with the alberta farmers' co-operative elevator company under the name, "united grain growers, limited"; authorized capital, $ , , . the first election of officers was as follows: president, t. a. crerar; st vice-president, c. rice-jones (veteran, alta.); nd vice-president, john kennedy; secretary, e. j. fream (calgary, alta.); directors: c. f. brown (calgary), r. a. parker (winnifred, alta.), j. j. mclellan (purple springs, alta.), p. s. austin (banfurly, alta.), h. c. wingate (cayley, alta.), roderick mckenzie (brandon, man.), f. j. collyer (welwyn, sask.), john morrison (yellow grass, sask.), j. f. reid (orcadia, sask.). . at the meeting of the canadian council of agriculture in winnipeg on july th, , norman p. lambert was appointed secretary-treasurer to succeed roderick mckenzie, who now occupies the position of vice-president. . r. a. bonnar, k.c. (bonnar, trueman, hollands & robinson), has been solicitor and counsel for the grain growers since and has been identified closely with them on many dramatic occasions. none none none none social science text-books edited by richard t. ely a history of trade unionism in the united states by selig perlman, ph.d. assistant professor of economics in the university of wisconsin; co-author of the history of labour in the united states new york the macmillan company printed in the united states of america the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped. october, . author's preface the present _history of trade unionism in the united states_ is in part a summary of work in labor history by professor john r. commons and collaborators at the university of wisconsin from to , and in part an attempt by the author to carry the work further. part i of the present book is based on the _history of labour in the united states_ by commons and associates (introduction: john r. commons; colonial and federal beginnings, to : david j. saposs; citizenship, - : helen l. summer; trade unionism, - : edward b. mittelman; humanitarianism, - : henry e. hoagland; nationalization, - : john b. andrews; and upheaval and reorganization, - : by the present author), published by the macmillan company in in two volumes. part ii, "the larger career of unionism," brings the story from down to date; and part iii, "conclusions and inferences," is an attempt to bring together several of the general ideas suggested by the history. chapter , entitled "an economic interpretation," follows the line of analysis laid down by professor commons in his study of the american shoemakers, - .[ ] the author wishes to express his strong gratitude to professors richard t. ely and john r. commons for their kind aid at every stage of this work. he also wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to mr. edwin e. witte, director of the wisconsin state legislative reference library, upon whose extensive and still unpublished researches he based his summary of the history of the injunction; and to professor frederick l. paxson, who subjected the manuscript to criticism from the point of view of general american history. s.p. footnote: [ ] see his _labor and administration_, chapter xiv (macmillan, ). contents page preface v part i. the struggle for survival chapter labor movements before the civil war ( ) early beginnings, to ( ) equal citizenship, - ( ) the period of the "wild-cat" prosperity, - ( ) the long depression, - the "greenback" period, - the beginning of the knights of labor and of the american federation of labor revival and upheaval, - the victory of craft unionism and the final failure of producers' cooperation stabilization, - trade unionism and the courts part ii. the larger career of unionism partial recognition and new difficulties, - ( ) the miners ( ) the railway men ( ) the machinery and metal trades ( ) the employers' reaction ( ) legislation, courts, and politics radical unionism and a "counter-reformation" the war-time balance sheet recent developments part iii. conclusions and inferences an economic interpretation the idealistic factor why there is not an american labor party the dictatorship of the proletariat and trade unionism bibliography part i the struggle for survival history of trade unionism in the u.s. chapter labor movements before the civil war ( ) _early beginnings, to _ the customary chronology records the first american labor strike in . in that year the new york bakers went out on strike. a closer analysis discloses, however, that this outbreak was a protest of master bakers against a municipal regulation of the price of bread, not a wage earners' strike against employers. the earliest genuine labor strike in america occurred, as far as known, in , when the philadelphia printers "turned out" for a minimum wage of six dollars a week. the second strike on record was in by philadelphia house carpenters for the ten-hour day. the baltimore sailors were successful in advancing their wages through strikes in the years , , and , but their endeavors were recurrent, not permanent. even more ephemeral were several riotous sailors' strikes as well as a ship builders' strike in at medford, massachusetts. doubtless many other such outbreaks occurred during the period to , but left no record of their existence. a strike undoubtedly is a symptom of discontent. however, one can hardly speak of a beginning of trade unionism until such discontent has become expressed in an organization that keeps alive after a strike, or between strikes. such permanent organizations existed prior to the twenties only in two trades, namely, shoemaking and printing. the first continuous organization of wage earners was that of the philadelphia shoemakers, organized in . this society, however, existed for less than a year and did not even leave us its name. the shoemakers of philadelphia again organized in under the name of the federal society of journeymen cordwainers and maintained their existence as such at least until . in the society conducted the first organized strike, which lasted nine or ten weeks. prior to , the only recorded strikes of any workmen were "unorganized" and, indeed, such were the majority of the strikes that occurred prior to the decade of the thirties in the nineteenth century. the printers organized their first society in in new york under the name of the typographical society and it continued in existence for ten years and six months. the printers of philadelphia, who had struck in , neglected to keep up an organization after winning their demands. between the years and , the shoemakers and the printers had continuous organizations in philadelphia, new york, and baltimore. in the shoemakers of pittsburgh and the boston printers were added to the list, and somewhat later the albany and washington printers. in the printers organized in new orleans. the separation of the journeymen from the masters, first shown in the formation of these organizations, was emphasized in the attitude toward employer members. the question arose over the continuation in membership of those who became employers. the shoemakers excluded such members from the organization. the printers, on the other hand, were more liberal. but in the new york society put them out on the ground that "the interests of the journeymen are _separate_ and in some respects _opposite_ to those of the employers." the strike was the chief weapon of these early societies. generally a committee was chosen by the society to present a price list or scale of wages to the masters individually. the first complete wage scale presented in this country was drawn up by the organized printers of new york in . the strikes were mainly over wages and were generally conducted in an orderly and comparatively peaceful manner. in only one instance, that of the philadelphia shoemakers of , is there evidence of violence and intimidation. in that case "scabs" were beaten and employers intimidated by demonstrations in front of the shop or by breaking shop windows. during a strike the duties of "picketing" were discharged by tramping committees. the philadelphia shoemakers, however, as early as , employed for this purpose a paid officer. this strike was for higher wages for workers on boots. although those who worked on shoes made no demands of their own, they were obliged to strike, much against their will. we thus meet with the first sympathetic strike on record. in the new york shoemakers, starting with a strike against one firm, ordered a general strike when they discovered that that firm was getting its work done in other shops. the payment of strike benefits dates from the first authenticated strike, namely in . the method of payment varied from society to society, but the constitution of the new york shoemakers, as early as , provided for a permanent strike fund. the aggressive trade unionism of these early trade societies forced the masters to combine against them. associations of masters in their capacity as merchants had usually preceded the journeymen's societies. their function was to counteract destructive competition from "advertisers" and sellers in the "public market" at low prices. as soon, however, as the wage question became serious, the masters' associations proceeded to take on the function of dealing with labor--mostly aiming to break up the trade societies. generally they sought to create an available force of non-union labor by means of advertising, but often they turned to the courts and brought action against the journeymen's societies on the ground of conspiracy. the bitterness of the masters' associations against the the journeymen's societies perhaps was caused not so much by their resistance to reductions in wages as by their imposition of working rules, such as the limitation of the number of apprentices, the minimum wage, and what we would now call the "closed shop." the conspiracy trials largely turned upon the "closed shop" and in these the shoemakers figured exclusively.[ ] altogether six criminal conspiracy cases are recorded against the shoemakers from to . one occurred in philadelphia in ; one in new york in ; two in baltimore in ; and two in pittsburgh, the first in and the other in . each case was tried before a jury which was judge both of law and fact. four of the cases were decided against the journeymen. in one of the baltimore cases judgment was rendered in favor of the journeymen. the pittsburgh case of was compromised, the shoemakers paying the costs and returning to work at the old wages. the outcome in the other cases is not definitely known. it was brought out in the testimony that the masters financed, in part at least, the new york and pittsburgh prosecutions. effective as the convictions in court for conspiracy may have been in checking the early trade societies, of much greater consequence was the industrial depression which set in after the conclusion of the napoleonic wars. the lifting of the embargo enabled the foreign traders and manufacturers to dump their products upon the american market. the incipient american industries were in no position to withstand this destructive competition. conditions were made worse by past over investment and by the collapse of currency inflation. trade unionism for the time being had to come to an end. the effect on the journeymen's societies was paralyzing. only those survived which turned to mutual insurance. several of the printers' societies had already instituted benefit features, and these now helped them considerably to maintain their organization. the shoe-makers' societies on the other hand had remained to the end purely trade-regulating organizations and went to the wall. depression reached its ebb in . thereafter conditions improved, giving rise to aggressive organizations of wage earners in several industries. we find strikes and permanent organizations among hatters, tailors, weavers, nailers, and cabinet makers. and for the first time we meet with organizations of factory workers--female workers. beginning with and running through , the year which saw the culmination of a period of high prices, a number of strikes occurred in the important industrial centers. the majority were called to enforce higher wages. in philadelphia, weavers out of about in the city were on strike. but the strike that attracted the most public attention was that of the boston house carpenters for the ten-hour day in . the boston journeymen carpenters chose the most strategic time for their strike. they called it in the spring of the year when there was a great demand for carpenters owing to a recent fire. close to six hundred journeymen were involved in this struggle. the journeymen's demand for the ten-hour day drew a characteristic reply from the "gentlemen engaged in building," the customers of the master builders. they condemned the journeymen on the moral ground that an agitation for a shorter day would open "a wide door for idleness and vice"; hinted broadly at the foreign origin of the agitation; declared that all combinations intending to regulate the value of labor by abridging the working day were in a high degree unjust and injurious to the other classes in the community; announced their resolution to support the masters at the sacrifice of suspending building altogether; and bound themselves not to employ any journeyman or master who might enforce the ten-hour day. the strike failed. the renewed trade-union activities brought forth a fresh crop of trials for conspiracy.[ ] one case involved philadelphia master shoemakers who combined to reduce wages, two were against journeymen tailors in philadelphia and buffalo and the fourth was a hatters' case in new york. the masters were acquitted and the hatters were found guilty of combining to deprive a non-union man of his livelihood. in the philadelphia tailors' case, the journeymen were convicted on the charge of intimidation. of the buffalo tailors' case it is only known that it ended in the conviction of the journeymen. ( ) _equal citizenship, - _ so far we have dealt only with trade societies but not yet with a labor movement. a labor movement presupposes a feeling of solidarity which goes beyond the boundaries of a single trade and extends to other wage earners. the american labor movement began in , when the several trades in philadelphia organized the mechanics' union of trade associations, which was, so far as now known, the first city central organization of trades in the world. this union, originally intended as an economic organization, changed to a political one the following year and initiated what was probably the most interesting and most typically american labor movement--a struggle for "equality of citizenship." it was brought to a head by the severe industrial depression of the time. but the decisive impulse came from the nation-wide democratic upheaval led by andrew jackson, for which the poorer classes in the cities displayed no less enthusiasm than the agricultural west. to the wage earner this outburst of democratic fervor offered an opportunity to try out his recently acquired franchise. of the then industrial states, massachusetts granted suffrage to the workingmen in and new york in . in pennsylvania the constitution of had extended the right of suffrage to those who paid any kind of a state or county tax, however small. the wage earners' jacksonianism struck a note all its own. if the farmer and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage of political aspiration with the jeffersonian democratic movement, were now, with jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which political power might yield, the wage earners, being as yet novices in politics, naturally were more strongly impressed with that aspect of the democratic upheaval which emphasized the rights of man in general and social equality in particular. if the middle class jacksonian was probably thinking first of reducing the debt on his farm or perchance of getting a political office, and only as an after-thought proceeding to look for a justification in the declaration of independence, as yet the wage earner was starting with the abstract notion of equal citizenship as contained in the declaration, and only then proceeding to search for the remedies which would square reality with the idea. hence it was that the aspiration toward equal citizenship became the keynote of labor's earliest political movement. the issue was drawn primarily between the rich and the poor, not between the functional classes, employers and employes. while the workmen took good care to exclude from their ranks "persons not living by some useful occupation, such as bankers, brokers, rich men, etc.," they did not draw the line on employers as such, master workmen and independent "producers." the workingmen's bill of complaints, as set forth in the philadelphia _mechanic's free press_ and other labor papers, clearly marks off the movement as a rebellion by the class of newly enfranchised wage earners against conditions which made them feel degraded in their own eyes as full fledged citizens of the commonwealth. the complaints were of different sorts but revolved around the charge of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." incontrovertible proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks and other corporations. the banks were indicted upon two counts. first, the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. second, banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the make." the latter accusation may be understood only if we keep in mind that this was a period when bank credits began to play an essential part in the conduct of industry; that with the extension of the market into the states and territories south and west, with the resulting delay in collections, business could be carried on only by those who enjoyed credit facilities at the banks. now, as credit generally follows access to the market, it was inevitable that the beneficiary of the banking system should not be the master or journeyman but the merchant for whom both worked.[ ] to the uninitiated, however, this arrangement could only appear in the light of a huge conspiracy entered into by the chartered monopolies, the banks, and the unchartered monopolist, the merchant, to shut out the possible competition by the master and journeyman. the grievance appeared all the more serious since all banks were chartered by special enactments of the legislature, which thus appeared as an accomplice in the conspiracy. in addition to giving active help to the rich, the workingmen argued, the government was too callous to the suffering of the poor and pointed to the practice of imprisonment for debt. the boston prison discipline society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in that about , persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the united states. many of these were imprisoned for very small debts. in one massachusetts prison, for example, out of cases, were for less than $ . the philadelphia printer and philanthropist, mathew carey, father of the economist henry c. carey, cited a contemporary boston case of a blind man with a family dependent on him imprisoned for a debt of six dollars. a labor paper reported an astounding case of a widow in providence, rhode island, whose husband had lost his life in a fire while attempting to save the property of the man who later caused her imprisonment for a debt of cents. the physical conditions in debtors' jails were appalling, according to unimpeachable contemporary reports. little did such treatment of the poor accord with their newly acquired dignity as citizens. another grievance, particularly exasperating because the government was responsible, grew in pennsylvania out of the administration of the compulsory militia system. service was obligatory upon all male citizens and non-attendance was punished by fine or imprisonment. the rich delinquent did not mind, but the poor delinquent when unable to pay was given a jail sentence. other complaints by workingmen went back to the failure of government to protect the poorer citizen's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." the lack of a mechanic's lien law, which would protect his wages in the case of his employer's bankruptcy, was keenly felt by the workingmen. a labor paper estimated in that, owing to the lack of a lien law on buildings, not less than three or four hundred thousand dollars in wages were annually lost. but the most distinctive demands of the workingmen went much further. this was an age of egalitarianism. the western frontiersmen demanded equality with the wealthy eastern merchant and banker, and found in andrew jackson an ideal spokesman. for a brief moment it seemed that by equality the workingmen meant an equal division of all property. that was the program which received temporary endorsement at the first workingmen's meeting in new york in april . "equal division" was advocated by a self-taught mechanic by the name of thomas skidmore, who elaborated his ideas in a book bearing the self-revealing title of "_the rights of man to property: being a proposition to make it equal among the adults of the present generation: and to provide for its equal transmission to every individual of each succeeding generation, on arriving at the age of maturity_," published in . this skidmorian program was better known as "agrarianism," probably from the title of a book by thomas paine, _agrarian justice, as opposed to agrarian law and to agrarian monopoly_, published in in london, which advocated equal division by means of an inheritance tax. its adoption by the new york workingmen was little more than a stratagem, for their intention was to forestall any attempts by employers to lengthen the working day to eleven hours by raising the question of "the nature of the tenure by which all men hold title to their property." apparently the stratagem worked, for the employers immediately dropped the eleven-hour issue. but, although the workingmen quickly thereafter repudiated agrarianism, they succeeded only too well in affixing to their movement the mark of the beast in the eyes of their opponents and the general public. except during the brief but damaging "agrarian" episode, the demand for free public education or "republican" education occupied the foreground. we, who live in an age when free education at the expense of the community is considered practically an inalienable right of every child, find it extremely difficult to understand the vehemence of the opposition which the demand aroused on the part of the press and the "conservative" classes, when first brought up by the workingmen. the explanation lies partly in the political situation, partly in the moral character of the "intellectual" spokesmen for the workingmen, and partly in the inborn conservatism of the tax-paying classes upon whom the financial burden would fall. that the educational situation was deplorable much proof is unnecessary. pennsylvania had some public schools, but parents had to declare themselves too poor to send their children to a private school before they were allowed the privilege of sending them there. in fact so much odium attached to these schools that they were practically useless and the state became distinguished for the number of children not attending school. as late as a labor paper estimated that , out of , children in pennsylvania of school age were not in any school. the public school society of new york estimated in a report for that in new york city alone there were , children between the ages of five and fifteen years not attending any school whatever. to meet these conditions the workingmen outlined a comprehensive educational program. it was not merely a literary education that the workingmen desired. the idea of industrial education, or training for a vocation, which is even now young in this country, was undoubtedly first introduced by the leaders of this early labor movement. they demanded a system of public education which would "combine a knowledge of the practical arts with that of the useful sciences." the idea of industrial education appears to have originated in a group of which two "intellectuals," robert dale owen and frances wright, were the leading spirits. robert dale owen was the eldest son of robert owen, the famous english manufacturer-philanthropist, who originated the system of socialism known as "owenism." born in scotland, he was educated at hofwyl, switzerland, in a school conducted by emmanuel von fellenberg, the associate of the famous pestalozzi, as a self-governing children's republic on the manner of the present "julior republics." owen himself said that he owed his abiding faith in human virtue and social progress to his years at hofwyl. in robert dale left england to join his father in a communistic experiment at new harmony, indiana, and together they lived through the vicissitudes which attended that experiment. there he met frances wright, america's first suffragist, with whom he formed an intimate friendship lasting through many years. the failure at new harmony convinced him that his father had overlooked the importance of the anti-social habits which the members had formed before they joined; and he concluded that those could be prevented only by applying a rational system of education to the young. these conclusions, together with the recollections of his experience at hofwyl, led him to advocate a new system of education, which came to be called "state guardianship." state guardianship was a demand for the establishment by the state of boarding schools where children should receive, not only equal instruction, general as well as industrial, but equal food and equal clothing at the public expense. under this system, it was asserted, public schools would become "not schools of charity, but schools of the nation, to the support of which all would contribute; and instead of being almost a disgrace, it would become an honor to have been educated there." it was urged as an especial advantage that, as children would be clothed and cared for at all times, the fact that poor parents could not afford to dress their children "as decently as their neighbors" would not prevent their attendance. state guardianship became the battle cry of an important faction in the workingmen's party in new york. elsewhere a less radical program was advocated. in philadelphia the workingmen demanded only that high schools be on the hofwyl model, whereas in the smaller cities and towns in both pennsylvania and new york the demand was for "literary" day schools. yet the underlying principle was the same everywhere. a labor candidate for congress in the first congressional district of philadelphia in expressed it succinctly during his campaign. he made his plea on the ground that "he is the friend and indefatigable defender of a system of general education, which will place the citizens of this extensive republic on an equality; a system that will fit the children of the poor, as well as the rich, to become our future legislators; a system that will bring the children of the poor and the rich to mix together as a band of republican brethren." in new england the workingmen's movement for equal citizenship was simultaneously a reaction against the factory system. to the cry for a republican system of education was added an anti-child labor crusade. one who did more than any other to call attention to the evils of the factory system of that day was a lawyer by the name of seth luther, who, according to his own account, had "for years lived among cotton mills, worked in them, travelled among them." his "_address to the working men of new england on the state of education, and on the condition of the producing classes in europe and america, with particular reference to the effect of manufacturing (as now conducted) on the health and happiness of the poor, and on the safety of our republic_" was delivered widely and undoubtedly had considerable influence over the labor movement of the period. the average working day in the best factories at that time was nearly thirteen hours. for the children who were sent into the factories at an early age these hours precluded, of course, any possibility of obtaining even the most rudimentary education. the new england movement was an effort to unite producers of all kinds, including not only farmers but factory workers with mechanics and city workingmen. in many parts of the state of new york the workingmen's parties included the three classes--"farmers, mechanics, and working men,"--but new england added a fourth class, the factory operatives. it was early found, however, that the movement could expect little or no help from the factory operatives, who were for the most part women and children. the years , , and were years of political labor movements and labor parties. philadelphia originated the first workingmen's party, then came new york and boston, and finally state-wide movements and political organizations in each of the three states. in new york the workingmen scored their most striking single success, when in they cast votes out of a total of , . in philadelphia the labor ticket polled in and the labor party gained the balance of power in the city. but the inexperience of the labor politicians coupled with machinations on the part of "designing men" of both older parties soon lost the labor parties their advantage. in new york tammany made the demand for a mechanics' lien law its own and later saw that it became enacted into law. in new york, also, the situation became complicated by factional strife between the skidmorian "agrarians," the owenite state guardianship faction, and a third faction which eschewed either "panacea." then, too, the opposition parties and press seized upon agrarianism and owen's alleged atheism to brand the whole labor movement. the labor party was decidedly unfortunate in its choice of intellectuals and "ideologists." it would be, however, a mistake to conclude that the philadelphia, new york, or new england political movements were totally without results. though unsuccessful in electing their candidates to office, they did succeed in placing their demands to advantage before the public. humanitarians, like horace mann, took up independently the fight for free public education and carried it to success. in pennsylvania, public schools, free from the taint of charity, date since . in new york city the public school system was established in . the same is true of the demand for a mechanics' lien law, of the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and of others. ( ) _the period of the "wild-cat" prosperity, - _ with the break-up of the workingmen's parties, labor's newly acquired sense of solidarity was temporarily lost, leaving only the restricted solidarity of the isolated trade society. within that limit, however, important progress began to be made. in , there were in new york twenty-nine organized trades; in philadelphia, twenty-one; and in baltimore, seventeen. among those organized in philadelphia were hand-loom weavers, plasterers, bricklayers, black and white smiths, cigar makers, plumbers, and women workers including tailoresses, seamstresses, binders, folders, milliners, corset makers, and mantua workers. several trades, such as the printers and tailors in new york and the philadelphia carpenters, which formerly were organized upon the benevolent basis, were now reorganized as trade societies. the benevolent new york typographical society was reduced to secondary importance by the appearance in of the new york typographical association. but the factor that compelled labor to organize on a much larger scale was the remarkable rise in prices from to . this rise in prices was coincident with the "wild-cat" prosperity, which followed a rapid multiplication of state banks with the right of issue of paper currency--largely irredeemable "wild-cat" currency. cost of living having doubled, the subject of wages became a burning issue. at the same time the general business prosperity rendered demands for higher wages easily attainable. the outcome was a luxuriant growth of trade unionism. in there were in philadelphia fifty-eight trade unions; in newark, new jersey, sixteen; in new york, fifty-two; in pittsburgh, thirteen; in cincinnati, fourteen; and in louisville, seven. in buffalo the journeymen builders' association included all the building trades. the tailors of louisville, cincinnati, and st. louis made a concentrated effort against their employers in these three cities. the wave of organization reached at last the women workers. in the well-known philadelphia philanthropist, mathew carey, asserted that there were in the cities of new york, boston, philadelphia, and baltimore about , women who could not by constant employment for sixteen hours out of twenty-four earn more than $ . a week. these were mostly seamstresses and tailoresses, umbrella makers, shoe binders, cigar makers, and book binders. in new york there was in a female union association, in baltimore a united seamstresses' society, and in philadelphia probably the first federation of women workers in this country. in lynn, massachusetts, a "female society of lynn and vicinity for the protection and promotion of female industry" operated during and among the shoe binders and had at one time members, who, like the seamstresses, were home workers and earned scanty wages. where nearly every trade was in motion, it did not take long to discover a common direction and a common purpose. this was expressed in city "trades' unions," or federations of all organized trades in a city, and in its ascendency over the individual trade societies. the first trades' union was organized august , , in new york. baltimore followed in september, philadelphia in november, and boston in march . new york after was the metropolis of the country and also the largest industrial and commercial center. there the house carpenters had struck for higher wages in the latter part of may , and fifteen other trades met and pledged their support. out of this grew the new york trades' union. it had an official organ in a weekly, the _national trades' union_, published from to , and a daily, _the union_, issued in . ely moore, a printer, was made president. moore was elected a few months later as the first representative of labor in congress. in addition, trades' unions were organized in washington; in new brunswick and newark, new jersey; in albany, troy, and schenectady, new york; and in the "far west"--pittsburgh, cincinnati, and louisville. except in boston, the trades' unions felt anxious to draw the line between themselves and the political labor organizations of the preceding years. in philadelphia, where as we have seen, the formation of an analogous organization, the mechanics' union of trade associations of , had served as a preliminary for a political movement, the general trades' union took especial precaution and provided in the constitution that "no party, political or religious questions shall at any time be agitated in or acted upon in the union." its official organ, the _national laborer_, declared that "_the trades' union never will be political_ because its members have learned from experience that the introduction of politics into their societies has thwarted every effort to ameliorate their conditions." the repudiation of active politics did not carry with it a condemnation of legislative action or "lobbying." on the contrary, these years witnessed the first sustained legislative campaign that was ever conducted by a labor organization, namely the campaign by the new york trades' union for the suppression of the competition from prison-made goods. under the pressure of the new york union the state legislature created in a special commission on prison labor with its president, ely moore, as one of the three commissioners. on this question of prison labor the trade unionists clashed with the humanitarian prison reformers, who regarded productive labor by prisoners as a necessary means of their reform to an honest mode of living; and the humanitarian won. after several months' work the commission submitted what was to the union an entirely unsatisfactory report. it approved the prison-labor system as a whole and recommended only minor changes. ely moore signed the report, but a public meeting of workingmen condemned it. the rediscovered solidarity between the several trades now embodied in the city trades' unions found its first expression on a large scale in a ten-hour movement. the first concerted demand for the ten-hour day was made by the workingmen of baltimore in august , and extended over seventeen trades. but the mechanics' aspiration for a ten-hour day--perhaps the strongest spiritual inheritance from the preceding movement for equal citizenship,[ ] had to await a change in the general condition of industry to render trade union effort effective before it could turn into a well sustained movement. that change finally came with the prosperous year of . the movement was precipitated in boston. there, as we saw, the carpenters had been defeated in an effort to establish a ten-hour day in ,[ ] but made another attempt in the spring of . this time, however, they did not stand alone but were joined by the masons and stone-cutters. as before, the principal attack was directed against the "capitalists," that is, the owners of the buildings and the real estate speculators. the employer or small contractor was viewed sympathetically. "we would not be too severe on our employers," said the strikers' circular, which was sent out broadcast over the country, "they are slaves to the capitalists, as we are to them." the strike was protracted. the details of it are not known, but we know that it won sympathy throughout the country. a committee visited in july the different cities on the atlantic coast to solicit aid for the strikers. in philadelphia, when the committee arrived in company with delegates from new york, newark, and paterson, the trades' union held a special meeting and resolved to stand by the "boston house wrights" who, "in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their revolutionary fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs." many societies voted varying sums of money in aid of the strikers. the boston strike was lost, but the sympathy which it evoked among mechanics in various cities was quickly turned to account. wherever the boston circular reached, it acted like a spark upon powder. in philadelphia the ten-hour movement took on the aspect of a crusade. not only the building trades, as in boston, but most of the mechanical branches were involved. street parades and mass meetings were held. the public press, both friendly and hostile, discussed it at length. work was suspended and after but a brief "standout" the whole ended in a complete victory for the workingmen. unskilled laborers, too, struck for the ten-hour day and, in the attempt to prevent others from taking their jobs, riotous scenes occurred which attracted considerable attention. the movement proved so irresistible that the common council announced a ten-hour day for public servants. lawyers, physicians, merchants, and politicians took up the cause of the workingmen. on june the master carpenters granted the ten-hour day and by june the victory was complete. the victory in philadelphia was so overwhelming and was given so much publicity that its influence extended to many smaller towns. in fact, the ten-hour system, which remained in vogue in this country in the skilled trades until the nineties, dates largely from this movement in the middle of the thirties. the great advance in the cost of living during and compelled an extensive movement for higher wages. prices had in some instances more than doubled. most of these strikes were hastily undertaken. prices, of course, were rising rapidly but the societies were new and lacked balance. a strike in one trade was an example to others to strike. in a few instances, however, there was considerable planning and reserve. the strike epidemic affected even the girls who worked in the textile factories. the first strike of factory girls on record had occurred in dover, new hampshire, in . a factory strike in paterson, new jersey, which occurred in the same year, occasioned the first recorded calling out of militia to quell labor disturbances. there the strikers were, however, for the most part men. but the factory strike which attracted the greatest public attention was the lowell strike in february, , against a percent reduction in wages. the strike was short and unsuccessful, notwithstanding that striking girls at first exhibited a determination to carry their struggle to the end. it appears that public opinion in new england was disagreeably impressed by this early manifestation of feminism. another notable factory strike was one in paterson in july . unlike similar strikes, it had been preceded by an organization. the chief demand was the eleven-hour day. the strike involved twenty mills and persons. two weeks later the employers reduced hours from thirteen and a half to twelve hours for five days and to nine hours on saturday. this broke the strike. the character of the agitation among the factory workers stamps it as ephemeral. even more ephemeral was the agitation among immigrant laborers, mostly irish, on canals and roads, which usually took the form of riots. as in the preceding period, the aggressiveness of the trade societies eventually gave rise to combative masters' associations. these, goaded by restrictive union practices, notably the closed shop, appealed to the courts for relief. by employers' associations appeared in nearly every trade in which labor was aggressive; in new york there were at least eight and in philadelphia seven. in philadelphia, at the initiative of the master carpenters and cordwainers, there came to exist an informal federation of the masters' associations in the several trades. from to there were eight recorded prosecutions of labor organizations for conspiracy. the workingmen were convicted in two cases; in two other cases the courts sustained demurrers to the indictments; in three cases the defendants were acquitted after jury trials; and the outcome of one case is unknown. finally, in , long after the offending societies had gone out of existence under the stress of unemployment and depressions, the supreme judicial court of massachusetts handed down a decision, which for forty years laid to rest the doctrine of conspiracy as applied to labor unions.[ ] the unity of action of the several trades displayed in the city trades' unions engendered before long a still wider solidarity in the form of a national trades' union. it came together in august , in new york city upon the invitation of the general trades' union of new york. the delegates were from the trades' unions of new york, philadelphia, boston, brooklyn, poughkeepsie, and newark. ely moore, then labor candidate for congress, was elected president. an attempt by the only "intellectual" present, a doctor charles douglass, representing the boston trades' union, to strike a political note was immediately squelched. a second convention was held in and a third one in . the national trades' union played a conspicuous part in securing the ten-hour day for government employes. the victory of the ten-hour principle in private employment in generally led to its adoption by states and municipalities. however, the federal government was slow to follow the example, since federal officials were immune from the direct political pressure which the workingmen were able to use with advantage upon locally elected office holders. in october , the mechanics employed in the new york and brooklyn navy yards petitioned the secretary of the navy for a reduction of the hours of labor to ten. the latter referred the petition to the board of navy commissioners, who returned the petition with the opinion that it would be detrimental to the government to accede to their request. this forced the matter into the attention of the national trades' union. at its second convention in it decided to petition congress for a ten-hour day for employes on government works. the petition was introduced by the labor congressman from new york, ely moore. congress curtly replied, however, that it was not a matter for legislation but "that the persons employed should redress their own grievances." with congress in such a mood, the hopes of the workingmen turned to the president. a first step was made in the summer of , when the workers in the navy yard at philadelphia struck for a ten-hour day and appealed to president jackson for relief. they would have nothing further to do with congress. they had supported president jackson in his fight against the united states bank and now sought a return favor. at a town meeting of "citizens, mechanics, and working men," a committee was appointed to lay the issue before him. he proved indeed more responsive than congress and ordered the ten-hour system established. but the order applied only to the localities where the strike occurred. the agitation had been chiefly local. besides philadelphia and new york the mechanics secured the ten-hour day in baltimore and annapolis, but in the district of columbia and elsewhere they were still working twelve or fourteen hours. in other words, the ten-hour day was secured only where trade societies existed. but the organized labor movement did not rest with a partial success. the campaign of pressure on the president went on. finally, although somewhat belatedly, president van buren issued on march , , the famous executive order establishing the ten-hour day on government work without a reduction in wages. the victory came after the national trades' union had gone out of existence and should be, more correctly, correlated with a labor political movement. early in came a financial panic. the industrial depression wiped out in a short time every form of labor organization from the trade societies to the national trades' union. labor stood defenseless against the economic storm. in this emergency it turned to politics as a measure of despair. the political dissatisfaction assumed the form of hostility towards banks and corporations in general. the workingmen held the banks responsible for the existing anarchy in currency, from which they suffered both as consumers and producers. moreover, they felt that there was something uncanny and threatening about corporations with their continuous existence and limited liability. even while their attention had been engrossed by trade unionism, the workingmen were awake to the issue of monopoly. together with their employers they had therefore supported jackson in his assault upon the largest "monster" of them all--the bank of the united states. the local organizations of the democratic party, however, did not always remain true to faith. in such circumstances the workingmen, again acting in conjunction with their masters, frequently extended their support to the "insurgent" anti-monopoly candidates in the democratic party conventions. such a revolt took place in philadelphia in ; and in new york, although tammany had elected ely moore, the president of the general trades' union of new york, to congress in , a similar revolt occurred. the upshot was a triumphant return of the rebels into the fold of tammany in . during the next twenty years, tammany came nearer to being a workingmen's organization than at any other time in its career. ( ) _the long depression, - _ the twenty-five years which elapsed from to form a period of business depression and industrial disorganization only briefly interrupted during - by the gold discoveries in california. the aggressive unions of the thirties practically disappeared. with industry disorganized, trade unionism, or the effort to protect the standard of living by means of strikes, was out of question. as the prospect for immediate amelioration became dimmed by circumstances, an opportunity arrived for theories and philosophies of radical social reform. once the sun with its life-giving heat has set, one begins to see the cold and distant stars. the uniqueness of the period of the forties in the labor movement proceeds not only from the large volume of star-gazing, but also from the accompanying fact that, for the first and only time in american history, the labor movement was dominated by men and women from the educated class, the "intellectuals," who thus served in the capacity of expert astrologers. and there was no lack of stars in the heaven of social reform to occupy both intellectual and wage earner. first, there was the efficiency scheme of the followers of charles fourier, the french socialist, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the associationists. theirs was a proposal aiming directly to meet the issue of the prevailing industrial disorganization and wasteful competition. albert brisbane, horace greeley, and the brook farm enthusiasts and "associationists" of the forties, made famous by their intimate association with ralph waldo emerson, had much in common with the present-day efficiency engineers. this "old" efficiency of theirs, like the new one, was chiefly concerned with increasing the production of wealth through the application of the "natural" laws of human nature. with the enormous increase in production to be brought about by "fourierism" and "association," the question of justice in distribution was relegated to a secondary place. where they differed from the new efficiency was in method, for they believed efficiency would be attained if only the human instincts or "passions" were given free play, while the efficiency engineers of today trust less to unguided instinct and more to "scientific management" of human "passions." midway between trade unionism and the simon-pure, idealistic reform philosophies stood producers' and consumers' cooperation. it had the merit of being a practical program most suitable to a time of depression, while on its spiritual side it did not fail to satisfy the loftiest intellectual. it was the resultant of the two most potent forces which acted upon the movement of the forties, the pressure of an inadequate income of the wage earner and the influence of the intellectuals. during no other period has there been, relatively speaking, so much effort along that line. although, as we shall see, the eighties were properly the era of producers' cooperation on a large scale, the self-governing workshop had always been familiar to the american labor movement. the earliest attempt, as far as we have knowledge, occurred in philadelphia in , when the house carpenters out on strike offered by way of retaliation against their employers to undertake contracts at percent less than the price charged by the masters. fourteen years later, in , the journeymen cordwainers of the same city, following their conviction in court on the charge of conspiracy brought in by their masters, opened up a cooperative shoe warehouse and store. as a rule the workingmen took up productive cooperation when they had failed in strikes. in many of the trade societies began to lose their strikes and turned to cooperation. the cordwainers working on ladies' shoes entered upon a strike for higher wages in march , and opened three months later a "manufactory" or a warehouse of their own. the handloom weavers in two of the suburbs of philadelphia started cooperative associations at the same time. at the end of the hand-loom weavers of philadelphia proper had two cooperative shops and were planning to open a third. in new brunswick, new jersey, the journeymen cordwainers opened a shop after an unsuccessful strike early in ; likewise the tailors of cincinnati, st. louis, and louisville. in new york the carpenters had done so already in , and the painters of new york and brooklyn opened their shops in . before long the spirit became so contagious that the trades' union of philadelphia, the city federation of trade societies, was obliged to take notice. early in a conference of about delegates requested each trade society to submit estimates for a shop to employ ten members. however, further steps were prevented by the financial panic and business depression. the forties witnessed several similar attempts. when the iron molders of cincinnati failed to win a strike in the autumn of , a few of their number collected what funds they could and organized a sort of joint-stock company which they called "the journeymen molders' union foundry." two local philanthropists erected their buildings. in pittsburgh a group of puddlers tried to raise money by selling stock to anyone who wished to take an interest in their cooperative venture. the cooperative ventures multiplied in and , following a widespread failure of strikes and were entered upon with particular readiness by the german immigrants. among the germans was an attitude towards producers' cooperation, based more nearly on general principles than the practical exigencies of a strike. fresh from the scenes of revolutions in europe, they were more given to dreams about reconstructing society and more trustful in the honesty and integrity of their leaders. the cooperative movement among the germans was identified with the name of wilhelm weitling, the well-known german communist, who settled in america about . this movement centered in and around new york. the cooperative principle met with success among the english-speaking people only outside the larger cities. in buffalo, after an unsuccessful strike, the tailors formed an association with a membership of and in october , were able to give employment to of that number. again, following an unsuccessful pittsburgh strike of iron founders in , about a dozen of the strikers went to wheeling, virginia, each investing $ , and opened a cooperative foundry shop. two other foundries were opened on a similar basis in stetsonville, ohio, and sharon, pennsylvania. these associations of iron founders, however, might better be called association of small capitalists or master-workmen. during the forties, consumers' or distributive cooperation was also given a trial. the early history of consumers' cooperation is but fragmentary and, so far as we know, the first cooperative attempt which had for its exclusive aim "competence to purchaser" was made in philadelphia early in . a store was established on north fifth street, which sold goods at wholesale prices to members, who paid twenty cents a month for its privileges. in distributive cooperation was much discussed in boston by a "new england association of farmers, mechanics, and other working men." a half dozen cooperative attempts are mentioned in the cooperator, published in utica in , but only in the case of the journeymen cordwainers of lynn do we discover an undertaking which can with certainty be considered as an effort to achieve distributive cooperation. several germs of cooperative effort are found between and , but all that is known about them is that their promoters sought to effect a saving by the purchase of goods in large quantities which were then broken up and distributed at a slight advance above original cost in order to meet expenses. the managers were unpaid, the members' interest in the business was not maintained, and the stores soon failed, or passed into the possession of private owners. it was the depression of - which supplied the movement for distributive cooperation with the needed stimulus, especially in new england. although the matter was discussed in new york, new jersey, pennsylvania, maryland, and even as far west as ohio and illinois, yet in none of the industrial centers of these states, except perhaps in new york, was it put into successful operation. in new england, however, the conditions were exceptionally favorable. a strike movement for higher wages during a partial industrial revival of - had failed completely. this failure, added to the fact that women and girls were employed under very unsatisfactory conditions, strengthened the interest of humanitarians in the laboring people and especially in cooperation as a possible means of alleviating their distress. under the stimulus of these agitations, the new england protective union was formed in . until , however, it bore the name of the working men's protective union. as often happens, prosperity brought disunion and, in , a schism occurred in the organization due to personal differences. the seceders formed a separate organization known as the american protective union. the working men's protective union embodied a larger conception of the cooperative idea than had been expressed before. the important thought was that an economy of a few dollars a year in the purchase of commodities was a poor way out of labor difficulties, but was valuable only as a preparation for something better. though the resources of these laborers were small, they began the work with great hopes. this business, starting so unpretentiously, assumed larger and increasing proportions until in october, , the union embraced divisions of which reported a capital of $ , and of these announced annual sales amounting to $ , , . though the schism of , mentioned above, weakened the body, the agent of the american protective union claimed for the divisions comprising it sales aggregating in value over nine and one-fourth millions dollars in the seven years ending in . it is not possible to tell what might have been the outcome of this cooperative movement had the peaceful development of the country remained uninterrupted. as it happened, the disturbed era of the civil war witnessed the near annihilation of all workingmen's cooperation. it is not difficult to see the causes which led to the destruction of the still tender plant. men left their homes for the battle field, foreigners poured into new england towns and replaced the americans in the shops, while share-holders frequently became frightened at the state of trade and gladly saw the entire cooperative enterprise pass into the hands of the storekeeper. this first american cooperative movement on a large scale resembled the british movement in many respects, namely open membership, equal voting by members irrespective of number of shares, cash sales and federation of societies for wholesale purchases, but differed in that goods were sold to members nearly at cost rather than at the market price. dr. james ford in his _cooperation in new england, urban and rural_,[ ] describes two survivals from this period, the central union association of new bedford, massachusetts, founded in , and the acushnet cooperative association, also of new bedford, which began business in . but the most characteristic labor movement of the forties was a resurgence of the old agrarianism of the twenties. skidmore's "equal division" of all property appealed to the workingmen of new york because it seemed to be based on equality of opportunity. one of skidmore's temporary associates, a welshman by the name of george henry evans, drew from him an inspiration for a new kind of agrarianism to which few could object. this new doctrine was a true agrarianism, since it followed in the steps of the original "agrarians," the brothers gracchi in ancient rome. like the gracchi, evans centered his plan around the "ager publicum"--the vast american public domain. evans began his agitation about . man's right to life, according to evans, logically implied his right to use the materials of nature necessary for being. for practical reasons he would not interfere with natural resources which have already passed under private ownership. evans proposed instead that congress give each would-be settler land for a homestead free of charge. as late as debaters in congress pointed out that in the preceding sixty years only , , acres of the public lands had been sold and that , , , acres still remained at the disposal of the government. estimates of the required time to dispose of this residuum at the same rate of sale varied from or to years. with the exaggerated views prevalent, it is no wonder that evans believed that the right of the individual to as much land as his right to live calls for would remain a living right for as long a period in the future as a practical statesman may be required to take into account. the consequences of free homesteads were not hard to picture. the landless wage earners could be furnished transportation and an outfit, for the money spent for poor relief would be more profitably expended in sending the poor to the land. private societies and trade unions, when laborers were too numerous, could aid in transporting the surplus to the waiting homesteads and towns that would grow up. with the immobility of labor thus offering no serious obstacle to the execution of the plan, the wage earners of the east would have the option of continuing to work for wages or of taking up their share of the vacant lands. moreover, mechanics could set up as independent producers in the new settlements. enough at least would go west to force employers to offer better wages and shorter hours. those unable to meet the expenses of moving would profit by higher wages at home. an equal opportunity to go on land would benefit both pioneer and stay-at-home. but evans would go still further in assuring equality of opportunity. he would make the individual's right to the resources of nature safe against the creditors through a law exempting homesteads from attachment for debts and even against himself by making the homestead inalienable. moreover to assure that right to the american people _in perpetuo_ he would prohibit future disposal of the public land in large blocks to moneyed purchasers as practiced by the government heretofore. thus the program of the new agrarianism: free homesteads, homestead exemption, and land limitation. evans had a plan of political action, which was as unique as his economic program. his previous political experiences with the new york workingmen's party had taught him that a minority party could not hope to win by its own votes and that the politicians cared more for offices than for measures. they would endorse any measure which was supported by voters who held the balance of power. his plan of action was, therefore, to ask all candidates to pledge their support to his measures. in exchange for such a pledge, the candidates would receive the votes of the workingmen. in case neither candidate would sign the pledge, it might be necessary to nominate an independent as a warning to future candidates; but not as an indication of a new party organization. evans' ideas quickly won the adherence of the few labor papers then existing. horace greeley's new york tribune endorsed the homestead movement as early as . the next five years witnessed a remarkable spread of the ideas of the free homestead movement in the press of the country. it was estimated in that papers were published in the united states and that in , of these supported land reform. petitions and memorials having proved of little avail, the land reformers tried evans' pet plan of bargaining votes for the support of their principles. tammany was quick to start the bidding. in may, , a mass-meeting was held at tammany hall "of all those in favor of land and other industrial reform, to be made elements in the presidential contest of ." a platform was adopted which proclaimed man's right to the soil and urged that freedom of the public lands be endorsed by the democratic party. senator isaac a. walker of wisconsin was nominated as the candidate of the party for president. for a while the professional politician triumphed over the too trusting workingman reformer. but the cause found strong allies in the other classes of the american community. from the poor whites of the upland region of the south came a similar demand formulated by the tennessee tailor, andrew johnson, later president of the united states, who introduced his first homestead bill in . from the western pioneers and settlers came the demand for increased population and development of resources, leading both to homesteads for settlers and land grants for railways. the opposition came from manufacturers and landowners of the east and from the southern slave owners. the west and east finally combined and the policy of the west prevailed, but not before the south had seceded from the union. not the entire reform was accepted. the western spirit dominated. the homestead law, as finally adopted in , granted one hundred and sixty acres as a free gift to every settler. but the same congress launched upon a policy of extensive land grants to railways. the homestead legislation doubtless prevented great estates similar to those which sprang of a different policy of the australian colonies, but did not carry out the broad principles of inalienability and land limitation of the original agrarians. their principle of homestead exemption, however, is now almost universally adopted. thus the homestead agitation begun by evans and a group of wage earners and farmers in was carried to victory, though to an incomplete victory. it contained a fruitful lesson to labor in politics. the vested interests in the east were seen ultimately to capitulate before a popular movement which at no time aspired toward political power and office, but, concentrating on one issue, endeavored instead to permeate with its ideas the public opinion of the country at large. of all the "isms" so prevalent during the forties, "agrarianism" alone came close to modern socialism, as it alone advocated class struggle and carried it into the political field, although, owing to the peculiarity of the american party structure, it urged a policy of "reward your friends, and punish your enemies" rather than an out and out labor party. it is noteworthy that of all social reform movements of the forties agrarianism alone was not initiated by the intellectuals. on the other hand, another movement for legislative reform, namely the shorter-hour movement for women and children working in the mills and factories, was entirely managed by humanitarians. its philosophy was the furthest removed from the class struggle idea. for only a short year or two did prosperity show itself from behind the clouds to cause a mushroom growth of trade unions, once in - and again in - , following the gold discoveries in california. during these few years unionism disentangled itself from humanitarianism and cooperationism and came out in its wholly modern form of restrictive craft unionism, only to be again suppressed by the business depressions that preceded and followed the panic of . considered as a whole, however, the period of the forties and fifties was the zenith in american history of theories of social reform, of "panaceas," of humanitarianism. the trade union wave of the fifties was so short lived and the trade unionists were so preoccupied with the pressing need of advancing their wages to keep pace with the soaring prices caused by the influx of california gold, that we miss the tendency which was so strong in the thirties to reach out for a wider basis of labor organization in city trades' unions, and ultimately in a national trades' union. on the other hand, the fifties foreshadowed a new form of expansion of labor organization--the joining together in a nation-wide organization of all local unions of one trade. the printers[ ] organized nationally in , the locomotive engineers and the hat-finishers in ; and the iron molders, and the machinists and blacksmiths in ; in addition there were at least a half dozen less successful attempts in other trades. footnotes: [ ] see below, - . [ ] see below, - . [ ] see below, - . [ ] the workingmen felt that they required leisure to be able to exercise their rights of citizens. [ ] the ship carpenters had been similarly defeated in . [ ] for a detailed discussion of these trials see below, - . [ ] published in by the russell sage foundation, pp. - . [ ] the printers had organized nationally for the first time in , but the organization lasted less than two years; likewise the cordwainers or shoemakers. but we must keep in mind that what constituted national organization in the thirties would pass only for regional or sectional organization in later years. chapter the "greenback" period, - the few national trade unions which were formed at the close of the fifties did not constitute by themselves a labor movement. it needed the industrial prosperity caused by the price inflation of the civil war time to bring forth again a mass movement of labor. we shall say little of labor's attitude towards the question of war and peace before the war had started. like many other citizens of the north and the border states the handful of organized workers favored a compromise. they held a labor convention in philadelphia, in which a great labor leader of the sixties, william h. sylvis, president of the international molders' union, took a prominent part and pronounced in favor of the compromise solution advanced by congressman crittenden of kentucky. but no sooner had fort sumter been fired upon by the secessionists than labor rallied to the support of the federal union. entire local unions enlisted at the call of president lincoln, and sylvis himself assisted in recruiting a company composed of molders. the first effect of the war was a paralysis of business and an increase of unemployment. the existing labor organizations nearly all went to the wall. the period of industrial stagnation, however, lasted only until the middle of . the legal tender acts of and authorized the issue of paper currency of "greenbacks" to the amount of $ , , , , and immediately prices began to soar. for the next sixteen years, namely until , when the government resumed the redemption of greenbacks in gold, prices of commodities and labor expressed in terms of paper money showed varying degrees of inflation; hence the term "greenback" period. during the war the advance in prices was due in part to the extraordinary demand by the government for the supply of the army and, of course, to speculation. in july , retail prices were percent above those of and wages only percent above; in july , retail prices rose to percent and wages to percent above ; and in july , prices rose to percent and wages only to percent above the level of . the unequal pace of the price movement drove labor to organize along trade-union lines. the order observed in the thirties was again followed out. first came a flock of local trade unions; these soon combined in city centrals--or as they came to be called, trades' assemblies--paralleling the trades' union of the thirties; and lastly, came an attempt to federate the several trades' assemblies into an international industrial assembly of north america. local trade unions were organized literally in every trade beginning in the second half of . the first trades' assembly was formed in rochester, new york, in march ; and before long there was one in every town of importance. the international industrial assembly was attempted in , but failed to live up to the expectations: the time had passed for a national federation of city centrals. as in the thirties the spread of unionism over the breadth of the land called out as a counterpart a widespread movement of employers' associations. the latter differed, however, from their predecessors in the thirties in that they made little use of the courts in their fight against the unions. the growth of the national trade unions was a true index of the condition of business. four were organized in as compared to two organized in , none in , and one in . during , which marked the height of the intense business activity, six more national unions were organized. in industry entered upon a period of depression, which reached its lowest depth in and continued until . accordingly, not a single national union was organized in and only one in . in two new national labor unions were organized. in two more unions were formed--a total of seven for the four depressed years, compared with ten in the preceding two prosperous years. in the summer of business became good and remained good for approximately three years. nine new national unions appeared in these three years. these same years are marked also by a growth of the unions previously organized. for instance, the machinists and blacksmiths, with only members in , had , in . other unions showed similar gains. an estimate of the total trade union membership at any one time (in view of the total lack of reliable statistics) would be extremely hazardous. the new york _herald_ estimated it in august , to be about , . a labor leader claimed at the same time that the total was as high as , . probably , would be a conservative estimate for the time immediately preceding the panic of . although the strength of labor was really the strength of the national trade unions, especially during the depression of the later sixties, far greater attention was attracted outside as well as inside the labor movement by the national labor union, a loosely built federation of national trade unions, city trades' assemblies, local trade unions, and reform organizations of various descriptions, from philosophical anarchists to socialists and woman suffragists. the national labor union did not excel in practical activity, but it formed an accurate mirror of the aspirations and ideals of the american mechanics of the time of the civil war and after. during its six years' existence it ran the gamut of all important issues which agitated the labor movement of the time. the national labor union came together in its first convention in . the most pressing problem of the day was unemployment due to the return of the demobilized soldiers and the shutting down of war industries. the convention centered on the demand to reduce the working day to eight hours. but eight hours had by that time come to signify more than a means to increase employment. the eight-hour movement drew its inspiration from an economic theory advanced by a self-taught boston machinist, ira steward. and so naturally did this theory flow from the usual premises in the thinking of the american workman that once formulated by steward it may be said to have become an official theory of the labor movement. steward's doctrine is well expressed by a couplet which was very popular with the eight-hour speakers of that period: "whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay." steward believed that the amount of wages is determined by no other factor than the worker's standard of living. he held that wages cannot fall below the standard of living not because, as the classical economists said, it would cause late marriages and a reduction in the supply of labor, but solely because the wage earner will refuse to work for less than enough to maintain his standard of living. steward possessed such abundant faith in this purely psychological check on the employer that he made it the cornerstone of his theory of social progress. raise the worker's standard of living, he said, and the employer will be immediately forced to raise wages; no more can wages fall below the level of the worker's standard of living than new england can be ruled against her will. the lever for raising the standard of living was the eight-hour day. increase the worker's leisure and you will increase his wants; increase his wants and you will immediately raise his wages. although he occasionally tried to soften his doctrine by the argument that a shorter work-day not only does not decrease but may actually increase output, his was a distinctly revolutionary doctrine; he aimed at the total abolition of profits through their absorption into wages. but the instrument was nothing more radical than a progressive universal shortening the hours. so much for the general policy. to bring it to pass two alternatives were possible: trade unionism or legislation. steward chose the latter as the more hopeful and speedy one. steward knew that appeals to the humanity of the employers had largely failed; efforts to secure the reform by cooperation had failed; the early trade unions had failed; and there seemed to be no recourse left now but to accomplish the reduction of hours by legislative enactment. in steward organized the grand eight-hour league of massachusetts as a special propagandist organization of the eight-hour philosophy. the league was a secret organization with pass words and obligations, intended as the central organization of a chain of subordinate leagues in the state, afterwards to be created. of a total of about eighty local leagues in existence from to , about twenty were in massachusetts, eight elsewhere in new england, at least twenty-five in michigan, four or five in pennsylvania, about seven in illinois, as many in wisconsin, and smaller numbers in missouri, iowa, indiana, and california. michigan, illinois, iowa, and pennsylvania had each a grand eight-hour league. practically all of these organizations disappeared soon after the panic of . the national labor union centered on the passage of an eight-hour law for employes of the federal government. it was believed, perhaps not without some justice, that the effect of such law would eventually lead to the introduction of the same standard in private employment--not indeed through the operation of the law of supply and demand, for it was realized that this would be practically negligible, but rather through its contagious effect on the minds of employes and even employers. it will be recalled that, at the time of the ten-hour agitation of the thirties, the federal government had lagged about five years behind private employers in granting the demanded concession. that in the sixties the workingmen chose government employment as the entering wedge shows a measure of political self-confidence which the preceding generation of workingmen lacked. the first bill in congress was introduced by senator gratz brown of missouri in march . in the summer a delegation from the national labor union was received by president andrew johnson. the president pointed to his past record favorable to the workingmen but refrained from any definite promises. finally, an eight-hour bill for government employes was passed by the house in march , and by the senate in june . on june , , president johnson signed it and it went into effect immediately. the result of the eight-hour law was not all that the friends of the bill hoped. the various officials in charge of government work put their own interpretations upon it and there resulted much diversity in its observance, and consequently great dissatisfaction. there seemed to be no clear understanding as to the intent of congress in enacting the law. some held that the reduction in working hours must of necessity bring with it a corresponding reduction in wages. the officials' view of the situation was given by secretary gideon wells. he pointed out that congress, by reducing the hours of labor in government work, had forced upon the department of the navy the employment of a larger number of men in order to accomplish the necessary work; and that at the same time congress had reduced the appropriation for that department. this had rendered unavoidable a twenty percent reduction in wages paid employes in the navy yard. such a state of uncertainty continued four years longer. at last on may , , president grant prohibited by proclamation any wage reductions in the execution of the law. on may , , congress passed a law for the restitution of back pay. the expectations of the workingmen that the federal law would blaze the way for the eight-hour system in private employment failed to materialize. the depression during the seventies took up all the impetus in that direction which the law may have generated. even as far as government work is concerned forty years had to elapse before its application could be rounded out by extending it to contract work done for the government by private employers. we have dealt at length with this subject because it marked an important landmark. it demonstrated to the wage earners that, provided they concentrated on a modest object and kept up a steady pressure, their prospects for success were not entirely hopeless, hard as the road may seem to travel. the other and far more ambitious object of the workingman of the sixties, that of enacting general eight-hour laws in the several states, at first appeared to be within easy reach--so yielding political parties and state legislatures seemed to be to the demands of the organized workmen. yet before long these successes proved to be entirely illusory. the year was the banner year for such state legislation. eight-hour laws were passed in illinois, wisconsin, connecticut, missouri, and new york. california passed such a law in . in pennsylvania, michigan, maryland, and minnesota bills were introduced but were defeated. two common features characterized these laws, whether enacted or merely proposed to the legislatures. there were none which did not permit of longer hours than those named in the law, provided they were so specified in the contract. a contract requiring ten or more hours a day was perfectly legal. the eight-hour day was the legal day only "when the contract was silent on the subject or where there is no express contract to the contrary," as stated in the wisconsin law. but the greatest weakness was a lack of a provision for enforcement. new york's experience is typical and characteristic. when the workingmen appealed to governor fenton to enforce the law, he replied that the act had received his official signature and he felt that it "would be an unwarrantable assumption" on his part to take any step requiring its enforcement. "every law," he said, "was obligatory by its own nature, and could derive no additional force from any further act of his." in massachusetts, however, the workingmen succeeded after hard and protracted labor in obtaining an enforceable ten-hour law for women--the first effective law of its kind passed in any american state. this law, which was passed in , provides that "no minor under the age of eighteen years, and no woman over that age" shall be employed more than ten hours in one day or sixty hours in any one week in any manufacturing establishment in the state. the penalty for each violation was fixed at fifty dollars. the repeated disappointments with politics and legislation led in the early seventies to a revival of faith in trade unionism. even in the early sixties we find not a few unions, national and local, limiting their hours by agreement with employers. the national unions, however, for the most part left the matter to the local unions for settlement as their strength or local conditions might dictate. in some cases the local unions were advised to accept a reduction of wages in order to secure the system, showing faith in steward's theory that such reduction could not be permanent. the movement to establish the eight-hour day through trade unionism reached its climax in the summer of , when business prosperity was at its height. this year witnessed in new york city a general eight-hour strike. however, it succeeded in only a few trades, and even there the gain was only temporary, since it was lost during the years of depression which followed the financial panic of . to come back to the national labor union. at the second convention in the enthusiasm was transferred from eight-hour laws to the bizarre social reform philosophy known as "greenbackism." "greenbackism" was, in substance, a plan to give the man without capital an equal opportunity in business with his rich competitor. it meant taking away from bankers and middlemen their control over credit and thereby furnishing credit and capital through the aid of the government to the producers of physical products. on its face greenbackism was a program of currency reform and derived its name from the so-called "greenback," the paper money issued during the civil war. but it was more than currency reform--it was industrial democracy. "greenbackism" was the american counterpart of the contemporary radicalism of europe. its program had much in common with that of lassalle in germany who would have the state lend its credit to cooperative associations of workingmen in the confident expectation that with such backing they would drive private capitalism out of existence by the competitive route. but greenbackism differed from the scheme of lassalle in that it would utilize the government's enormous civil war debt, instead of its taxing power, as a means of furnishing capital to labor. this was to be done by reducing the rate of interest on the government bonds to three percent and by making them convertible into legal tender currency and convertible back into bonds, at the will of the holder of either. in other words, the greenback currency, instead of being, as it was at the time, an irredeemable promise to pay in specie, would be redeemable in government bonds. on the other hand, if a government bondholder could secure slightly more than three percent by lending to a private borrower, he would return his bonds to the government, take out the corresponding amount in greenbacks and lend it to the producer on his private note or mortgage. this would involve, of course, the possible inflation of legal tender currency to the amount of outstanding bonds. but inflation was immaterial, since all prices would be affected alike and meanwhile the farmers, the workingmen, and their cooperative establishments would be able to secure capital at slightly more than three percent instead of the nine or twelve percent which they were compelled to pay at the bank. thereby they would be placed on a competitive level with the middleman, and the wage earner would be assisted to escape the wage system into self-employment. such was the curious doctrine which captured the leaders of the organized wage earners in . the way had indeed been prepared for it in , when the wage earners espoused producers' cooperation as the only solution. but, in the following year, , they concluded that no system of combination or cooperation could secure to labor its natural rights as long as the credit system enabled non-producers to accumulate wealth faster than labor was able to add to the national wealth. cooperation would follow "as a natural consequence," if producers could secure through legislation credit at a low rate of interest. the government was to extend to the producer "free capital" in addition to free land which he received with the homestead act. the producers' cooperation, which offered the occasion for the espousal of greenbackism, was itself preceded by a movement for consumers' cooperation. following the upward sweep of prices, workmen had begun toward the end of to make definite preparations for distributive cooperation. they endeavored to cut off the profits of the middleman by establishing cooperative grocery stores, meat markets, and coal yards. the first substantial effort of this kind to attract wide attention was the formation in december , of the union cooperative association of philadelphia, which opened a store. the prime mover and the financial secretary of this organization was thomas phillips, a shoemaker who came from england in , fired with the principles of the rochdale pioneers, that is, cash sales, dividends on purchases rather than on stock, and "one man, one vote." by the movement had extended until practically every important industrial town between boston and san francisco had some form of distributive cooperation. this was the high tide of the movement. unfortunately, the condition of the country was unfavorable to these enterprises and they were destined to early collapse. the year witnessed disastrous business failures. the country was in an uncertain condition and at the end of the sixties the entire movement had died out. from to experiments in productive cooperation were made by practically all leading trades including the bakers, coach makers, collar makers, coal miners, shipwrights, machinists and blacksmiths, foundry workers, nailers, ship carpenters, and calkers, glass blowers, hatters, boiler makers, plumbers, iron rollers, tailors, printers, needle women, and molders. a large proportion of these attempts grew out of unsuccessful strikes. the most important undertakings were among the workers in iron, undoubtedly due in large measure to the indefatigable efforts of william h. sylvis, the founder of the iron molders' international union. at the close of members of the iron molders' international union owned and operated many cooperative foundries chiefly in new york and pennsylvania. the first of the foundries established at troy in the early summer of was followed quickly by one in albany and then during the next eighteen months by ten more--one each in rochester, chicago, quincy, louisville, somerset, pittsburgh, and two each in troy and cleveland. the original foundry at troy was an immediate financial success and was hailed with joy by those who believed that under the name of cooperationists the baffled trade unionists might yet conquer. the new york _sun_ congratulated the iron molders of troy and declared that sylvis had checkmated the association of stove manufacturers and, by the establishment of this cooperative foundry, had made the greatest contribution of the year to the labor cause. but the results of the troy experiment, typical of the others, show how far from a successful solution of the labor problem is productive cooperation. although this "troy cooperative iron founders' association" was planned with great deliberation and launched at a time when the regular stove manufacturers were embarrassed by strikes, and although it was regularly incorporated with a provision that each member was entitled to but one vote whether he held one share at $ , or the maximum privilege of fifty in the total of two thousand shares, it failed as did the others in furnishing permanent relief to the workers as a class. at the end of the third year of this enterprise, the _american workman_ published a sympathetic account of its progress unconsciously disclosing its fatal weakness, namely, the inevitable tendency of cooperators to adopt the capitalistic view. the writer of this account quotes from these cooperators to show that "the fewer the stockholders in the company the greater its success." a similar instance is furnished by the cooperative foundry company of rochester. this venture has also been a financial success, though a partial failure as a cooperative enterprise. when it was established in all employes were stockholders and profits were divided as follows: twelve percent on capital and the balance in proportion to the earnings of the men. but the capitalist was stronger than the cooperative brother. dividends on capital were advanced in a few years to seventeen and one-half percent, then to twenty-five, and finally the distribution of any part of the profits in proportion to wages was discontinued. money was made every year and dividends paid, which in amounted to forty percent on the capital. at that time about one-fifth of the employes were stockholders. also in this case cooperation did not prevent the usual conflict between employer and employe, as is shown in a strike of three and a half months' duration. it is interesting to notice that one of the strikers, a member of the molders' union, owned stock to the amount of $ . the machinists, too, throughout this period took an active interest in cooperation. their convention which met in october, , appointed a committee to report on a plan of action to establish a cooperative shop under the auspices of the international union. the plan failed of adoption, but of machinists' shops on the joint-stock plan there were a good many. two other trades noted for their enthusiasm for cooperation at this time were the shoemakers and the coopers. the former, organized in the order of st. crispin, then the largest trade union in the country, advocated cooperation even when their success in strikes was at its height. "the present demand of the crispin is steady employment and fair wages, but his future is self-employment" was one of their mottoes. during the seventies they repeatedly attempted to carry this motto into effect. the seventies also saw the beginning of the most successful single venture in productive cooperation ever undertaken in this country, namely, the eight cooperative cooperage shops in minneapolis, which were established at varying intervals from to . the coopers took care to enforce true cooperation by providing for equal holding of stock and for a division of ordinary profits and losses in proportion to wages. the cooper shops prospered, but already ten years later four out of the eight existing in had passed into private hands. in when the eight-hour demand was as yet uppermost, the national labor union resolved for an independent labor party. the espousal of greenbackism in only reenforced that resolution. the leaders realized only too well that neither the republican nor democratic party would voluntarily make an issue of a scheme purporting to assist the wage earner to become an independent producer. accordingly, the history of the national labor union became largely the history of labor's first attempt to play a lone political hand on a national scale. each annual session of the national labor union faithfully reaffirmed the decision to "cut loose" from the old parties. but such a vast undertaking demanded time. it was not until that the national labor union met as a political convention to nominate a national ticket. from the first the stars were inauspicious. charges were made that political aspirants sought to control the convention in order to influence nominations by the republican and democratic parties. a "greenback" platform was adopted as a matter of course and the new party was christened the national labor and reform party. on the first formal ballot for nomination for president, judge david davis of illinois, a personal friend of abraham lincoln, received votes, wendell phillips, the abolitionist, , and the remainder scattered. on the third ballot davis was nominated. governor j. parker of new jersey was nominated for vice-president. at first judge davis accepted the nomination, but resigned after the democrats had nominated horace greeley. the loss of the candidate spelled the death of the party. the national labor union itself had been only an empty shell since , when the national trade unions, disaffected with the turn towards politics, withdrew. now, its pet project a failure, it, too, broke up. in , on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely trade-union basis in the form of a national industrial congress. but the economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor organizations. another attempt to get together on a national basis was made in the national labor congress at pittsburgh in . but those who responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist. as neither greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt naturally came to naught. greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity--not the phantastic scheme of the national labor union. yet in the presidential election of the greenback party candidate, peter cooper, the well known manufacturer and philanthropist, drew only a poor , , which came practically from the rural districts only. it was not until the great strikes of had brought in their train a political labor upheaval that the greenback movement assumed a formidable form. the strikes of , which on account of the wide area affected, the degree of violence displayed, and the amount of life and property lost, impressed contemporaries as being nothing short of social revolution, were precipitated by a general ten percent reduction in wages on the three trunk lines running west, the pennsylvania, the baltimore & ohio, and the new york central, in june and july . this reduction came on top of an earlier ten percent reduction after the panic. the railway men were practically unorganized so that the steadying influence of previous organization was totally lacking in the critical situation of unrest which the newly announced wage reduction created. one must take also into account that in the four terrible years which elapsed since the panic, america had developed a new type of a man--the tramp--who naturally gravitated towards places where trouble was expected. the first outbreak occurred at martinsburg, west virginia, on july , the day after the ten percent reduction had gone into effect. the strike spread like wildfire over the adjacent sections of the baltimore & ohio road, the strikers assuming absolute control at many points. the militia was either unwilling or powerless to cope with the violence. in baltimore, where in the interest of public safety all the freight trains had stopped running, two companies of militia were beleaguered by a mob to prevent their being dispatched to cumberland, where the strikers were in control. order was restored only when federal troops arrived. but these occurrences fade into insignificance when compared with the destructive effects of the strike on the pennsylvania in and around pittsburgh. the situation there was aggravated by a hatred of the pennsylvania railway corporation shared by nearly all residents on the ground of an alleged rate discrimination against the city. the pittsburgh militia fraternized with the strikers, and when troops which arrived from philadelphia attempted to restore order and killed about twenty rioters, they were besieged in a roundhouse by a furious mob. in the battle the railway yards were set on fire. damages amounting to about $ , , were caused. the besieged militia men finally gained egress and retreated fighting rear-guard actions. at last order was restored by patrols of citizens. the strike spread also to the erie railway and caused disturbances in several places, but not nearly of the same serious nature as on the baltimore & ohio and the pennsylvania. the other places to which the strike spread were toledo, louisville, chicago, st. louis, and san francisco. the strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous. the general public still retained a fresh memory of the commune of paris of and feared for the foundations of the established order. the wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been fairly dealt with. it was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew. whereas in the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement. local greenback-labor parties were being organized everywhere and a national greenback-labor party was not far behind in forming. the continued industrial depression was a decisive factor, the winter of - marking perhaps the point of its greatest intensity. naturally the greenback movement was growing apace. one of the notable successes in the spring of was the election of terence v. powderly, later grand master workman of the knights of labor, as mayor of scranton, pennsylvania. the congressional election in the autumn of marked the zenith of the movement. the aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded a million, and fourteen representatives were sent to congress. in new england the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the total vote in maine, over percent of the total vote in both connecticut and new hampshire, and from to percent, in the other states. in maine the greenbackers elected members of the upper house and members of the lower house and one congressman, thompson murch of rochland, who was secretary of the national granite cutters' union. however, the bulk of the vote in that state was obviously agricultural. in massachusetts, the situation was dominated by general benjamin f. butler, lifelong republican politician, who had succeeded in getting the democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the greenback convention. he received a large vote but was defeated for office. but just as the greenback-labor movement was assuming promising proportions a change for the better in the industrial situation cut under the very roots of its existence. in addition, one month after the election of , its principal issue disappeared. january , , was the date fixed by the act for resumption of redemption of greenbacks in gold and on december , , the premium on gold disappeared. from that day on, the greenback became a dead issue. another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume of the currency. in the currency, which had averaged about $ , , for the years - , reached over $ , , , . under these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called "monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to the refunding of the bonded debt of the government. the disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had held together the farmer and the wage-worker. so long as depression continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a common enemy--the banker. the financial issue once settled, or at least suspended, the object of the attack by labor became the employer, and that of the attack by the farmer--the railway corporation and the warehouse man. prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes, but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners' struggle now turned entirely economic and not political. in california, as in the eastern industrial states, the railway strikes of precipitated a political movement. california had retained gold as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. the political issue after was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"--violence. the anti-chinese agitation in california, culminating as it did in the exclusion law passed by congress in , was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of american labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.[ ] the seventies witnessed another of those recurring attempts of consumers' cooperation already noticed in the forties and sixties. this time the movement was organized by the "sovereigns of industry," a secret order, founded at worcester, massachusetts, in by one william h. earle. the spirit of the order was entirely peaceful and unobtrusive as expressed in the first paragraph of the declaration of purposes which reads as follows: "the order of the sovereigns of industry is an association of the industrial or laboring classes, without regard to race, sex, color, nationality, or occupation; not founded for the purpose of waging any war of aggression upon any other class, or for fostering any antagonism of labor against capital, or of arraying the poor against the rich; but for mutual assistance in self-improvement and self-protection." the scheme of organization called for a local council including members from the town or district, a state council, comprising representatives from the local councils and a national council in which the states were represented. the president of the national council was the founder of the order, william h. earle. success accompanied the efforts of the promoters of the sovereigns of industry for a few years. the total membership in - was , , of whom seventy-five percent were in new england and forty-three percent in massachusetts. though the order extended into other states and even reached the territories, its chief strength always remained in new england and the middle states. during the last period of its existence a national organ was published at washington, but the order does not appear to have gained a foothold in any of the more southern sections of the country. in , local councils reported as having some method of supplying members with goods, of whom operated stores. the largest store belonged to the council at springfield, massachusetts, which in built the "sovereign block" at a cost of $ , . in his address at the fourth annual session in washington, president earle stated that the store in springfield led all the others with sales amounting to $ , for the preceding year. about one-half of the councils failed to report, but at the congress of president earle estimated the annual trade at $ , , . much enthusiasm accompanied the progress of the movement. the hall in "sovereign block" at springfield was dedicated amid such jubilation as marks an event thought to be the forerunner of a new era. there is indeed a certain pathos in the high hopes expressed in the address of dedication by president earle, for, though the order continued to thrive until , shortly after a decline began, and dissolution was its fate in . the failure of the sovereigns marked the latest attempt on a large scale[ ] to inoculate the american workingmen with the sort of cooperative spirit which proved so successful in england.[ ] this failure of distributive cooperation to gain the strong and lasting foothold in this country that it has abroad has been accounted for in various ways by different writers. great emphasis has been laid upon the lack of capital, the lack of suitable legislation on the subject of cooperation, the mutual isolation of the educated and wage-earning classes, the lack of business ability among wage earners, and the altogether too frequent venality and corruption among cooperators. probably the lack of adequate leadership has played as important a part as any. it is peculiar to america that the wage earner of exceptional ability can easily find a way for escaping into the class of independent producers or even employers of labor. the american trade union movement has suffered much less from this difficulty. the trade unions are fighting organizations; they demand the sort of leader who is of a combative spirit, who possesses the organizing ability and the "personal magnetism" to keep his men in line; and for this kind of ability the business world offers no particular demand. on the other hand, the qualifications which go to make a successful manager of a cooperative store, namely, steadiness, conservatism of judgment, attention to detail and business punctuality always will be in great demand in the business world. hence, when no barrier is interposed in the form of preempted opportunities or class bias, the exceptional workingman who possesses these qualifications will likely desert his class and set up in business for himself. in england, fortunately for the cooperative movement, such an escape is very difficult. the failure of consumers' cooperation in america was helped also by two other peculiarly american conditions. european economists, when speaking of the working class, assume generally that it is fixed in residence and contrast it with capital, which they say is fluid as between city and city and even between country and country. american labor, however, native as well as immigrant, is probably more mobile than capital; for, tradition and habit which keep the great majority of european wage earners in the place where their fathers and forefathers had lived before them are generally absent in this country, except perhaps in parts of new england and the south. it is therefore natural that the cooperative spirit, which after all is but an enlarged and more generalized form of the old spirit of neighborliness and mutual trust, should have failed to develop to its full strength in america. another condition fatal to the development of the cooperative spirit is the racial heterogeneity of the american wage-earning class, which separates it into mutually isolated groups even as the social classes of england and scotland are separated by class spirit. as a result, we find a want of mutual trust which depends so much on "consciousness of kind." this is further aggravated by competition and a continuous displacement in industry of nationalities of a high standard of living by those of a lower one. this conflict of nationalities, which lies also at the root of the closed shop policy of many of the american trade unions, is probably the most effective carrier that there is to a widespread growth of the cooperative spirit among american wage earners. this is further hindered by other national characteristics which more or less pervade all classes of society, namely, the traditional individualism--the heritage of puritanism and the pioneer days, and the emphasis upon earning capacity with a corresponding aversion to thrift. footnotes: [ ] the national labor union came out against chinese immigration in , when the issue was brought home to the eastern wage earners following the importation by a shoe manufacturer in north adams, massachusetts, of chinese strike breakers. [ ] there were many cooperative stores in the eighties and a concerted effort to duplicate the venture of the sovereigns was attempted as late as under the pressure of the soaring cost of living. [ ] where consumers' cooperation has worked under most favorable conditions as in england, its achievements have been all that its most ardent champions could have desired. such is the picture presented by mr. and mrs. sidney webb in the following glowing terms: "the organization of industry by associations of consumers offers, as far as it goes, a genuine alternative to capitalist ownership, because it supersedes the capitalist power, whether individual or joint-stock, alike in the control of the instruments of production by which the community lives, and in the absorption of the profits, which otherwise support a capitalist class. the ownership and control are vested in, and the profits are distributed among, the whole community of consumers, irrespective of their industrial wealth. through the device of dividend on purchases the cooperative movement maintains an open democracy, through the control of this democracy of consumers it has directly or indirectly kept down prices, and protected the wage-earning class from exploitation by the credit system and from the extortions of monopolist traders and speculators. by this same device on purchases, and the automatic accumulation of part of the profit in the capital of each society and in that of the wholesales, it has demonstratedly added to the personal wealth of the manual working class, and has, alike in great britain, and in other countries, afforded both a valuable financial reserve to the wage earners against all emergencies and an instrument for their elevation from the penury to which competition is always depressing them. by making possible the upgrowth of great business enterprises in working class hands, the cooperative movement has, without divorcing them from their fellows, given to thousands of the manual workers both administrative experience and a well-grounded confidence; and has thus enabled them to take a fuller part in political and social life than would otherwise have been probable."--_new statesman_, may , . "special supplement on the cooperative movement." indeed the success of the consumer's cooperative movement in european countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures. in all europe in , there were about , , cooperators of whom one-third lived in great britain and not less than two and a half millions in germany. in england and scotland alone, the stores and two wholesale cooperative societies controlled in about million dollars of retail distributive trade and employed nearly , operatives in processes of production in their own workshops and factories. chapter the beginning of the knights of labor and of the american federation of labor with the practical disintegration of the organized labor movement in the seventies, two nuclei held together and showed promise of future growth. one was the "noble order of the knights of labor" and the other a small trade union movement grouped around the international cigar makers' union. the "noble order of the knights of labor," while it first became important in the labor movement after , was founded in by uriah smith stephens, a tailor who had been educated for the ministry, as a secret organization. secrecy was adopted as a protection against persecutions by employers. the principles of the order were set forth by stephens in the secret ritual. "open and public association having failed after a struggle of centuries to protect or advance the interest of labor, we have lawfully constituted this assembly," and "in using this power of organized effort and cooperation, we but imitate the example of capital heretofore set in numberless instances;" for, "in all the multifarious branches of trade, capital has its combinations, and, whether intended or not, it crushes the manly hopes of labor and tramples poor humanity into the dust." however, "we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital." the remedy consists first in work of education: "we mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created." the next remedy was legislation: "we shall, with all our strength, support laws made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to lighten the exhaustiveness of toil." next in order were mutual benefits. "we shall use every lawful and honorable means to procure and retain employ for one another, coupled with a just and fair remuneration, and, should accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his creed." for nine years the order remained a secret organization and showed but a slow growth. in it was forced to abolish secrecy. the public mind was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of paris who set up the famous "commune of paris" of , by the destructive great railway strikes in this country in and, lastly, by a wave of criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in eastern pennsylvania,[ ] and became only too prone to attribute revolutionary and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in secrecy. simultaneously with coming out into the open, the knights adopted a new program, called the preamble of the knights of labor, in place of the vague secret ritual which hitherto served as the authoritative expression of aims. this preamble recites how "wealth," with its development, has become so aggressive that "unless checked" it "will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses." hence, if the toilers are "to enjoy the blessings of life," they must organize "every department of productive industry" in order to "check" the power of wealth and to put a stop to "unjust accumulation." the battle cry in this fight must be "moral worth not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness." as the "action" of the toilers ought to be guided by "knowledge," it is necessary to know "the true condition of the producing masses"; therefore, the order demands "from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics." next in order comes the "establishment of cooperative institutions productive and distributive." union of all trades, "education," and producers' cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the knights of labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as "first principles," namely principles bequeathed to the order by uriah stephens and the other "founders."[ ] these idealistic "first principles" found an ardent champion in terence v. powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of scranton, pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded stephens in to the headship of the order. powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor leader in the country. unlike samuel gompers, who came to supplant him about , he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest concessions from the employers. even when circumstances which were largely beyond his control made powderly a strike leader on a huge scale, his heart lay elsewhere--in circumventing the wage system by opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through cooperation. producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the order of the knights of labor expected to lead the american wage-earning class out of the bondage of the wage system into the canaan of self-employment. thus the order was the true successor of the cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. its motto was "cooperation of the order, by the order, and for the order." not scattered local initiative, but the order as a whole was to carry on the work. the plan resembled the rochdale system of england in that it proposed to start with an organization of consumers--the large and ever-growing membership of the order. but it departed radically from the english prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow. consumers' cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. eventually when the order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society--so the plan contemplated--it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception. so far, therefore, as "first principles" went, the order was not an instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic cooperators. it was this pure idealism which drew to the order of the knights of labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like dr. richard t. ely[ ] and president john bascom of wisconsin. the other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union movement grouped around the cigar makers' union, was neither so purely american in its origin as the knights of labor nor so persistently idealistic. on the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic." the training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the american branch of the international workingmen's association, the "first _internationale_," which was founded by karl marx in london in . the conception of _economic_ labor organization which was advanced by the _internationale_ in a socialistic formulation underwent in the course of years a process of change: on the one hand, through constant conflict with the rival conception of _political_ labor organization urged by american followers of the german socialist, ferdinand lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with american reality. out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the american federation of labor. the _internationale_ is generally reputed to have been organized by karl marx for the propaganda of international socialism. as a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of british trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the continent and to prevent the importation of continental strike-breakers. that karl marx wrote its _inaugural address_ was merely incidental. it chanced that what he wrote was acceptable to the british unionists rather than the draft of an address representing the views of giuseppe mazzini, the leader of the "new italy" and the "new europe," which was submitted to them at the same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation. marx emphasized the class solidarity of labor against mazzini's harmony of capital and labor. he did this by reciting what british labor had done through the rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what the british parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of against the protest of capitalists. now that british trade unionists in were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their unions, it followed that marx merely stated their demands when he affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in all lands. his _inaugural address_ was a trade union document, not a _communist manifesto_. indeed not until bakunin and his following of anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years to did the program of socialism become the leading issue. the philosophy of the _internationale_ at the period of its ascendency was based on the economic organization of the working class in trade unions. these must precede the political seizure of the government by labor. then, when the workingmen's party should achieve control, it would be able to build up successively the socialist state on the foundation of a sufficient number of existing trade unions. this conception differed widely from the teaching of ferdinand lassalle. lassallean socialism was born in with lassalle's _open letter_ to a workingmen's committee in leipzig. it sprang from his antagonism to schultze-delizsch's[ ] system of voluntary cooperation. in lassalle's eagerness to condemn the idea of the harmony of capital and labor, which lay at the basis of schultze's scheme for cooperation, he struck at the same time a blow against all forms of non-political organization of wage earners. perhaps the fact that he was ignorant of the british trade unions accounts for his insufficient appreciation of trade unionism. but no matter what the cause may have been, to lassalle there was but one means of solving the labor problem-political action. when political control was finally achieved, the labor party, with the aid of state credit, would build up a network of cooperative societies into which eventually all industry would pass. in short, the distinction between the ideas of the _internationale_ and of lassalle consisted in the fact that the former advocated trade unionism prior to and underlying political organization, while the latter considered a political victory as the basis of socialism. these antagonistic starting points are apparent at the very beginning of american socialism as well as in the trade unionism and socialism of succeeding years. two distinct phases can be seen in the history of the _internationale_ in america. during the first phase, which began in and lasted until , the _internationale_ had no important organization of its own on american soil, but tried to establish itself through affiliation with the national labor union. the inducement held out to the latter was of a practical nature, the international regulation of immigration. during the second phase the _internationale_ had its "sections" in nearly every large city of the country, centering in new york and chicago, and the practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on behalf of the propaganda of socialism. these "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders of the american federation of labor: for example, adolph strasser, the german cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade unionism, and p.j. mcguire, the american-born carpenter, who founded the brotherhood of carpenters and joiners and who was for many years the secretary-treasurer of the american federation of labor. fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. when, at the world congress of the international workingmen's association at the hague in , the anarchist faction led by bakunin had shown such strength that marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the general council out of mischief's way, they removed it to new york and entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful german marxians on this side of the atlantic. this spelled the end of the _internationale_ as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the factional fights within the handful of american internationalists. the organization of the workers into trade unions, the _internationale's_ first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for empty honors and powerless offices. on top of that, with the panic of and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift asserted itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions, entered, urged on by the lassalleans, into a series of political campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. upon men of strasser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. strasser had been elected president of the cigar makers' international union in , in the midst of a great strike in new york against the tenement-house system. the president of the local new york union of cigar makers was at the time samuel gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in england and came to america in . in his endeavor to build up a model for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that movement for forty years is indicated gompers' truly representative character. born of dutch-jewish parents in england in , he typifies the cosmopolitan origins of american unionism. his early contact in the union of his trade with men like strasser, upon whom the ideas of marx and the international workingmen's association had left an indelible stamp, and his thorough study of marx gave him that grounding both in idealism and class consciousness which has produced many strong leaders of american unions and saved them from defection to other interests. aggressive and uncompromising in a perpetual fight for the strongest possible position and power of trade unions, but always strong for collective agreements with the opposing employers, he displays the business tactics of organized labor. at the head of an organization which denies itself power over its constituent unions, he has brought and held together the most widely divergent and often antagonistic unions, while permitting each to develop and even to change its character to fit the changing industrial conditions. the dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in cigar making brought home to both strasser and gompers the weakness of the plan of organization of their union as well as that of american trade unions in general. they consequently resolved to rebuild their union upon the pattern of the british unions, although they firmly intended that it should remain a militant organization. the change involved, first, complete authority over the local unions in the hands of the international officers; second, an increase in the membership dues for the purpose of building up a large fund; and, third, the adoption of a far-reaching benefit system in order to assure stability to the organization. this was accomplished at the convention held in august, . this convention simultaneously adopted the british idea of the "equalization of funds," which gave the international officers the power to order a well-to-do local union to transfer a portion of its funds to another local union in financial straits. with the various modifications of the feature of "equalization of funds," the system of government in the cigar makers' international union was later used as a model by the other national and international trade unions. as strasser and men of his ilk grew more and more absorbed in the practical problems of the everyday struggle of the wage-earners for better conditions of employment, the socialistic portion of their original philosophy kept receding further and further into the background until they arrived at pure trade unionism. but their trade unionism differed vastly from the "native" american trade unionism of their time, which still hankered for the haven of producers' cooperation. the philosophy which these new leaders developed might be termed a philosophy of pure wage-consciousness. it signified a labor movement reduced to an opportunistic basis, accepting the existence of capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. its opportunism was instrumental--its idealism was home and family and individual betterment. it also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, socialism, or anarchism. perhaps the most concise definition of this philosophy is to be found in strasser's testimony before the senate committee on education and labor in : "_q._ you are seeking to improve home matters first? "_a._ yes, sir, i look first to the trade i represent; i look first to cigars, to the interests of men who employ me to represent their interest. "_chairman_: i was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends. "_witness_: we have no ultimate ends. we are going on from day to day. we are fighting only for immediate objects--objects that can be realized in a few years. "by mr. call: _q._ you want something better to eat and to wear, and better houses to live in? "_a._ yes, we want to dress better and to live better, and become better citizens generally. "_the chairman_: i see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theoriser, i do not look upon you in that light at all. "_the witness_: well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and i have to represent the organization here. we are all practical men." another offshoot of the same marxian _internationale_ were the "chicago anarchists."[ ] the _internationale_, as we saw, emphasized trade unionism as the first step in the direction of socialism, in opposition to the political socialism of lassalle, which ignored the trade union and would start with a political party outright. shorn of its socialistic futurity this philosophy became non-political "business" unionism; but, when combined with a strong revolutionary spirit, it became a non-political revolutionary unionism, or syndicalism. the organization of those industrial revolutionaries was called the international working people's association, also known as the "black" or anarchist international, which was formed at pittsburgh in . like the old _internationale_ it busied itself with forming trade unions, but insisted that they conform to a revolutionary model. such a "model" trade union was the federation of metal workers of america, which was organized in . it said in its declaration of principles that the entire abolition of the present system of society can alone emancipate the workers, but under no consideration should they resort to politics; "our organization should be a school to educate its members for the new condition of society, when the workers will regulate their own affairs without any interference by the few. since the emancipation of the productive classes must come by their own efforts, it is unwise to meddle in present politics.... all _direct_ struggles of the laboring masses have our fullest sympathy." alongside the revolutionary trade unions were workers' armed organizations ready to usher in the new order by force. "by force," recited the pittsburgh manifesto of the black international, "our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic bondage. it is, therefore, your right, it is your duty, says jefferson,--to arms!" the following ten years were to decide whether the leadership of the american labor movement was to be with the "practical men of the trade unions" or with the cooperative idealists of the knights of labor. footnotes: [ ] after the defeat of a strong anthracite miners' union in , which was an open organization, the fight against the employers was carried on by a secret organization known as the molly maguires, which used the method of terrorism and assassination. it was later exposed and many were sentenced and executed. [ ] the preamble further provides that the order will stand for the reservation of all lands for actual settlers; the "abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor, the removal of unjust technicalities, delays, and discriminations in the administration of justice, and the adopting of measures providing for the health and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits"; the enactment of a weekly pay law, a mechanics' lien law, and a law prohibiting child labor under fourteen years of age; the abolition of the contract system on national, state, and municipal work, and of the system of leasing out convicts; equal pay for equal work for both sexes; reduction of hours of labor to eight per day; "the substitution of arbitration for strikes, whenever and wherever employers and employees are willing to meet on equitable grounds"; the establishment of "a purely national circulating medium based upon the faith and resources of the nation, issued directly to the people, without the intervention of any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender in payment of all debts, public or private". [ ] dr. ely in his pioneer work, _the labor movement in america_, published in , showed a most genuine sympathy for the idealistic strivings and gropings of labor for a better social order. he even advised some of his pupils at the johns hopkins university to join the knights of labor in order to gain a better understanding of the labor movement. [ ] schultze-delizsch was a german thinker and practical reformer of the liberal school. [ ] the anarchists who were tried and executed after the haymarket square bomb in chicago in may, . see below, - . chapter revival and upheaval, - with the return of business prosperity in , the labor movement revived. the first symptom of the upward trend was a rapid multiplication of city federations of organized trades, variously known as trade councils, amalgamated trade and labor unions, trades assemblies, and the like. practically all of these came into existence after , since hardly any of the "trades' assemblies" of the sixties had survived the depression. as was said above, the national trade unions existed during the sixties and seventies in only about thirty trades. eighteen of these had either retained a nucleus during the seventies or were first formed during that decade. the following is a list of the national unions in existence in with the year of formation: typographical ( ), hat finishers ( ), iron molders ( ), locomotive engineers ( ), cigar makers ( ), bricklayers and masons ( ), silk and fur hat finishers ( ), railway conductors ( ), coopers ( ), german-american typographia ( ), locomotive firemen ( ), horseshoers ( ), furniture workers ( ), iron and steel workers ( ), granite cutters ( ), lake seamen ( ), cotton mill spinners ( ), new england boot and shoe lasters ( ). in the western greenbottle blowers' national union was established; in the national unions of boiler makers and carpenters; in , plasterers and metal workers; in , tailors, lithographers, wood carvers, railroad brakemen, and silk workers. an illustration of the rapid growth in trade union membership during this period is given in the following figures: the bricklayers' union had in ; in ; in ; in . the typographical union had members in ; in ; in ; , in ; , in . the total trade union membership in the country, counting the three railway organizations and those organized only locally, amounted to between , and , in and probably was not below , in the beginning of . a distinguishing characteristic of the trade unions of this time was the predominance in them of the foreign element. the illinois bureau of labor describes the ethnical composition of the trade unions of that state during , and states that percent were american, percent german, percent irish, percent british other than irish, percent scandinavian, and the poles, bohemians, and italians formed about percent. the strong predominance of the foreign element in american trade unions should not appear unusual, since, owing to the breakdown of the apprenticeship system, the united states had been drawing its supply of skilled labor from abroad. the order of the knights of labor, despite its "first principles" based on the cooperative ideal, was soon forced to make concessions to a large element of its membership which was pressing for strikes. with the advent of prosperity, the order expanded, although the knights of labor played but a subordinate part in the labor movement of the early eighties. the membership was , in ; , in ; , in ; , in ; , in ; showing a steady and rapid growth, with the exception of the year . but these figures are decidedly deceptive as a means of measuring the strength of the order, for the membership fluctuated widely; so that in the year , when it reached , no less than one-half of this number passed in and out of the organization during the year. the enormous fluctuation, while reducing the economic strength of the order, brought large masses of people under its influence and prepared the ground for the upheaval in the middle of the eighties. it also brought the order to the attention of the public press. the labor press gave the order great publicity, but the knights did not rely on gratuitous newspaper publicity. they set to work a host of lecturers, who held public meetings throughout the country adding recruits and advertising the order. the most important knights of labor strike of this period was the telegraphers' strike in . the telegraphers had a national organization in , which soon collapsed. in they again organized on a national basis and affiliated with the order as district assembly .[ ] the strike was declared on june , , against all commercial telegraph companies in the country, among which the western union, with about operators, was by far the largest. the demands were one day's rest in seven, an eight-hour day shift and a seven-hour night shift, and a general increase of percent in wages. the public and a large portion of the press gave their sympathy to the strikers, not so much on account of the oppressed condition of the telegraphers as of the general hatred that prevailed against jay gould, who then controlled the western union company. this strike was the first in the eighties to call the attention of the general american public to the existence of a labor question, and received considerable attention at the hands of the senate committee on education and labor. by the end of july, over a month after the beginning of the strike, the men who escaped the blacklist went back to work on the old terms. from till the labor movement was typical of a period of rising prices. it was practically restricted to skilled workmen, who organized to wrest from employers still better conditions than those which prosperity would have given under individual bargaining. the movement was essentially opportunistic and displayed no particular class feeling and no revolutionary tendencies. the solidarity of labor was not denied by the trade unions, but they did not try to reduce the idea to practice: each trade coped more or less successfully with its own employers. even the knights of labor, the organization _par excellence_ of the solidarity of labor, was at this time, in so far as practical efforts went, merely a faint echo of the trade unions. but the situation radically changed during the depression of - . the unskilled and the semi-skilled, affected as they were by wage reductions and unemployment even in a larger measure than the skilled, were drawn into the movement. labor organizations assumed the nature of a real class movement. the idea of the solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal and took on life! general strikes, sympathetic strikes, nationwide boycotts and nation-wide political movements became the order of the day. the effects of an unusually large immigration joined hands with the depression. the eighties were the banner decade of the entire century for immigration. the aggregate number of immigrants arriving was , , --two and a half millions larger than during the seventies and one million and a half larger than during the nineties. the eighties witnessed the highest tide of immigration from great britain and the north of europe and the beginning of the tide of south and east european immigration. however, the depression of - had one redeeming feature by which it was distinguished from other depressions. with falling prices, diminishing margins of profit, and decreasing wages, the amount of employment was not materially diminished. times continued hard during , a slight improvement showing itself only during the last months of the year. the years and were a period of gradual recovery, and normal conditions may be said to have returned about the middle of . except in new england, the old wages, which had been reduced during the bad years, were won again by the spring of . the year was one of decisive failure in strikes. they were practically all directed against reductions in wages and for the right of organization. the most conspicuous strikes were those of the fall river spinners, the troy stove mounters, the cincinnati cigar makers and the hocking valley coal miners. the failure of strikes brought into use the other weapon of labor--the boycott. but not until the latter part of , when the failure of the strike as a weapon became apparent, did the boycott assume the nature of an epidemic. the boycott movement was a truly national one, affecting the south and the far west as well as the east and middle west. the number of boycotts during was nearly seven times as large as during . nearly all of the boycotts either originated with, or were taken up by, the knights of labor. the strike again came into prominence in the latter half of . this coincided with the beginning of an upward trend in general business conditions. the strikes of , even more than those of the preceding year, were spontaneous outbreaks of unorganized masses. the frequent railway strikes were a characteristic feature of the labor movement in . most notable was the gould railway strike in march, . on february , a cut of percent was ordered in the wages of the shopmen of the wabash road. a similar reduction had been made in october, , on the missouri, kansas & texas. strikes occurred on the two roads, one on february and the other march , and the strikers were joined by the men on the third gould road, the missouri pacific, at all points where the two lines touched, making altogether over men on strike. the train service personnel, that is, the locomotive engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors, supported the strikers and to this fact more than to any other was due their speedy victory. the wages were restored and the strikers reemployed. but six months later this was followed by a second strike. the road, now in the hands of a receiver, reduced the force of shopmen at moberly, missouri, to the lowest possible limit, which virtually meant a lockout of the members of the knights of labor in direct violation of the conditions of settlement of the preceding strike. the general executive board of the knights, after a futile attempt to have a conference with the receiver, declared a boycott on wabash rolling stock. this order, had it been carried out, would have affected over , miles of railway and would have equalled the dimensions of the great railway strike of . but jay gould would not risk a general strike on his lines at this time. according to an appointment made between him and the executive board of the knights of labor, a conference was held between that board and the managers of the missouri pacific and the wabash railroads, at which he threw his influence in favor of making concessions to the men. he assured the knights that in all troubles he wanted the men to come directly to him, that he believed in labor organizations and in the arbitration of all difficulties and that he "would always endeavor to do what was right." the knights demanded the discharge of all new men hired in the wabash shops since the beginning of the lockout, the reinstatement of all discharged men, the leaders being given priority, and an assurance that no discrimination against the members of the order would be made in the future. a settlement was finally made at another conference, and the receiver of the wabash road agreed, under pressure by jay gould, to issue an order conceding the demands of the knights of labor. the significance of the second wabash strike in the history of railway strikes was that the railway brotherhoods (engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors), in contrast with their conduct during the first wabash strike, now refused to lend any aid to the striking shopmen, although many of the members were also knights of labor. but far more important was the effect of the strike upon the general labor movement. here a labor organization for the first time dealt on an equal footing with probably the most powerful capitalist in the country. it forced jay gould to recognize it as a power equal to himself, a fact which he conceded when he declared his readiness to arbitrate all labor difficulties that might arise. the oppressed laboring masses finally discovered a powerful champion. all the pent-up feeling of bitterness and resentment which had accumulated during the two years of depression, in consequence of the repeated cuts in wages and the intensified domination by employers, now found vent in a rush to organize under the banner of the powerful knights of labor. to the natural tendency on the part of the oppressed to exaggerate the power of a mysterious emancipator whom they suddenly found coming to their aid, there was added the influence of sensational reports in the public press. the newspapers especially took delight in exaggerating the powers and strength of the order. in the new york _sun_ detailed one of its reporters to "get up a story of the strength and purposes of the knights of labor." this story was copied by newspapers and magazines throughout the country and aided considerably in bringing the knights of labor into prominence. the following extract illustrates the exaggerated notion of the power of the knights of labor. "five men in this country control the chief interests of five hundred thousand workingmen, and can at any moment take the means of livelihood from two and a half millions of souls. these men compose the executive board of the noble order of the knights of labor of america. the ability of the president and cabinet to turn out all the men in the civil service, and to shift from one post to another the duties of the men in the army and navy, is a petty authority compared with that of these five knights. the authority of the late cardinal was, and that of the bishops of the methodist church is, narrow and prescribed, so far as material affairs are concerned, in comparison with that of these five rulers. "they can stay the nimble touch of almost every telegraph operator; can shut up most of the mills and factories, and can disable the railroads. they can issue an edict against any manufactured goods so as to make their subjects cease buying them, and the tradesmen stop selling them. "they can array labor against capital, putting labor on the offensive or the defensive, for quiet and stubborn self-protection, or for angry, organized assault, as they will." before long the order was able to benefit by this publicity in quarters where the tale of its great power could only attract unqualified attention, namely, in congress. the knights of labor led in the agitation for prohibiting the immigration of alien contract laborers. the problem of contract immigrant labor rapidly came to the front in , when such labor began frequently to be used to defeat strikes. twenty persons appeared to testify before the committee in favor of the bill, of whom all but two or three belonged to the knights of labor. the anti-contract labor law which was passed by congress on february , , therefore, was due almost entirely to the efforts of the knights of labor. the trade unions gave little active support, for to the skilled workingmen the importation of contract italian and hungarian laborers was a matter of small importance. on the other hand, to the knights of labor with their vast contingent of unskilled it was a strong menace. although the law could not be enforced and had to be amended in in order to render it effective, its passage nevertheless attests the political influence already exercised by the order in . the outcome of the gould strike of and the dramatic exaggeration of the prowess of the order by press and even by pulpit were largely responsible for the psychological setting that called forth and surrounded the great upheaval of . this upheaval meant more than the mere quickening of the pace of the movement begun in preceding years and decades. it signalled the appearance on the scene of a new class which had not hitherto found a place in the labor movement, namely the unskilled. all the peculiar characteristics of the dramatic events in and , the highly feverish pace at which organizations grew, the nation-wide wave of strikes, particularly sympathetic strikes, the wide use of the boycott, the obliteration, apparently complete, of all lines that divided the laboring class, whether geographic or trade, the violence and turbulence which accompanied the movement--all of these were the signs of a great movement by the class of the unskilled, which had finally risen in rebellion. this movement, rising as an elemental protest against oppression and degradation, could be but feebly restrained by any considerations of expediency and prudence; nor, of course, could it be restrained by any lessons from experience. but, if the origin and powerful sweep of this movement were largely spontaneous and elemental, the issues which it took up were supplied by the existing organizations, namely the trade unions and the knights of labor. these served also as the dykes between which the rapid streams were gathered and, if at times it seemed that they must burst under the pressure, still they gave form and direction to the movement and partly succeeded in introducing order where chaos had reigned. the issue which first brought unity in this great mass movement was a nation-wide strike for the eight-hour day declared for may , . the initiative in this strike was taken not by the order but by the trade unionists and on the eve of the strike the general officers of the knights adopted an attitude of hostility. but if the slogan failed to arouse the enthusiasm of the national leaders of the knights, it nevertheless found ready response in the ranks of labor. the great class of the unskilled and unorganized, which had come to look upon the knights of labor as the all-powerful liberator of the laboring masses from oppression, now eagerly seized upon this demand as the issue upon which the first battle with capital should be fought. the agitation assumed large proportions in march. the main argument for the shorter day was work for the unemployed. with the exception of the cigar makers, it was left wholly in the hands of local organizations. the knights of labor as an organization figured far less prominently than the trade unions, and among the latter the building trades and the german-speaking furniture workers and cigar makers stood in the front of the movement. early in the strike the workingmen's cause was gravely injured by a bomb explosion on haymarket square in chicago, attributed to anarchists, which killed and wounded a score of policemen. the bomb explosion on haymarket square connected two movements which had heretofore marched separately, despite a certain mutual affinity. for what many of the knights of labor were practising during the upheaval in a less drastic manner and without stopping to look for a theoretical justification, the contemporary chicago "anarchists,"[ ] the largest branch of the "black international," had elevated into a well rounded-out system of thought. both syndicalism and the knights of labor upheaval were related chapters in the revolutionary movement of the eighties. whether in its conscious or unconscious form, this syndicalism was characterized by an extreme combativeness, by the ease with which minor disputes grew into widespread strikes involving many trades and large territories, by a reluctance, if not an out and out refusal, to enter into agreements with employers however temporary, and lastly by a ready resort to violence. in the membership of the black international probably was about or and of this number about were english speaking. the circumstances of the bomb explosion were the following. a strikers' meeting was held near the mccormick reaper works in chicago, late on the third of may. about this time strike-breakers employed in these works began to leave for home and were attacked by strikers. the police arrived in large numbers and upon being received with stones, fired and killed four and wounded many. the same evening the international issued a call in which appeared the word _"revenge"_ with the appeal: "workingmen, arm yourselves and appear in full force." a protest mass meeting met the next day on haymarket square and was addressed by internationalists. the police were present in numbers and, as they formed in line and advanced on the crowd, some unknown hand hurled a bomb into their midst killing and wounding many. it is unnecessary to describe here the period of police terror in chicago, the hysterical attitude of the press, or the state of panic that came over the inhabitants of the city. nor is it necessary to deal in detail with the trial and sentence of the accused. suffice it to say that the haymarket bomb showed to the labor movement what it might expect from the public and the government if it combined violence with a revolutionary purpose. although the bomb outrage was attributed to the anarchists and not generally to the strikers for the eight-hour day, it did materially reduce the sympathy of the public as well as intimidate many strikers. nevertheless, _bradstreet's_ estimated that no fewer than , men took part in the movement; , actually struck, only , of this number with success, and , secured shorter hours without a strike. thus the total number of those who secured with or without strikes the eight-hour day was something less than , . but even those who for the present succeeded, whether with or without striking, soon lost the concession, and _bradstreet's_ estimated in january, , that, so far as the payment of former wages for a shorter day's work is concerned, the grand total of those retaining the concession did not exceed, if it equalled, , . american labor movements have never experienced such a rush to organize as the one in the latter part of and during . during the combined membership of labor organizations was exceptionally large and for the first time came near the million mark. the knights of labor had a membership of , and the trade unions at least , , the former composed largely of unskilled and the latter of skilled. the knights of labor gained in a remarkably short time--in a few months--over , new members and grew from local assemblies with , members in good standing in july , to assemblies with , members in july . the greatest portion of this growth occurred after january , . in the state of new york there were in july , about , members ( , in district assembly of new york city alone); in pennsylvania, , ( , in district assembly , philadelphia, alone); in massachusetts, , ( , in district assembly of boston); and in illinois, , . in the state of illinois, for which detailed information for that year is available, there were local assemblies with , members, of which percent were found in cook county (chicago) alone. one hundred and forty-nine assemblies were mixed, that is comprised members of different trades including unskilled and only were trade assemblies. reckoned according to country of birth the membership was percent american, percent german, percent irish, percent british, percent scandinavian, and the remaining percent scattered. the trade unions also gained many members but in a considerably lesser proportion. the high water mark was reached in the autumn of . but in the early months of a reaction became visible. by july , the membership of the order had diminished to , . while a share of this retrogression may have been due to the natural reaction of large masses of people who had been suddenly set in motion without experience, a more immediate cause came from the employers. profiting by past lessons, they organized strong associations. the main object of these employers' associations was the defeat of the knights. they were organized sectionally and nationally. in small localities, where the power of the knights was especially great, all employers regardless of industry joined in a single association. but in large manufacturing centers, where the rich corporation prevailed, they included the employers of only one industry. to attain their end these associations made liberal use of the lockout, the blacklist, and armed guards and detectives. often they treated agreements entered into with the order as contracts signed under duress. the situation in the latter part of and in had been clearly foreshadowed in the treatment accorded the knights of labor on the gould railways in the southwest in the early part of . as already mentioned, at the settlement of the strike on the gould system in march , the employes were assured that the road would institute no discriminations against the knights of labor. however, it is apparent that a series of petty discriminations was indulged in by minor officials, which kept the men in a state of unrest. it culminated in the discharge of a foreman, a member of the knights, from the car shop at marshall, texas, on the texas & pacific road, which had shortly before passed into the hands of a receiver. a strike broke out over the entire road on march , . it is necessary, however, to note that the knights of labor themselves were meditating aggressive action two months before the strike. district assembly , the organization embracing the employes on the southwest system, held a convention on january , and authorized the officers to call a strike at any time they might find opportune to enforce the two following demands: first, the formal "recognition" of the order; and second, a daily wage of $ . for the unskilled. the latter demand is peculiarly characteristic of the knights of labor and of the feeling of labor solidarity that prevailed in the movement. but evidently the organization preferred to make the issue turn on discrimination against members. another peculiarity which marked off this strike as the beginning of a new era was the facility with which it led to a sympathetic strike on the missouri pacific and all leased and operated lines. this strike broke out simultaneously over the entire system on march . it affected more than miles of railway situated in missouri, kansas, arkansas, indian territory, and nebraska. the strikers did not content themselves with mere picketing, but actually took possession of the railroad property and by a systematic "killing" of engines, that is removing some indispensable part, effectively stopped all the freight traffic. the number of men actively on strike was in the neighborhood of , including practically all of the shopmen, yardmen, and section gangs. the engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors took no active part and had to be forced to leave their posts under threats from the strikers. the leader, one martin irons, accurately represented the feelings of the strikers. personally honest and probably well-meaning, his attitude was overbearing and tyrannical. with him as with those who followed him, a strike was not a more or less drastic means of forcing a better labor contract, but necessarily assumed the aspect of a crusade against capital. hence all compromise and any policy of give and take were excluded. negotiations were conducted by jay gould and powderly to submit the dispute to arbitration, but they failed and, after two months of sporadic violence, the strike spent itself and came to an end. it left, however, a profound impression upon the public mind, second only to the impression made by the great railway strike of ; and a congressional committee was appointed to investigate the whole matter. the disputes during the second half of ended, for the most part, disastrously to labor. the number of men involved in six months, was estimated at , . of these, about , were in nine great lockouts, of whom , suffered defeat at the hands of associated employers. the most important lockouts were against , laundry workers at troy, new york, in june; against , chicago packing house workers; and against , knitters at cohoes, new york, both in october. the lockout of the chicago butcher workmen attracted the most attention. these men had obtained the eight-hour day without a strike during may. a short time thereafter, upon the initiative of armour & company, the employers formed a packers' association and, in the beginning of october, notified the men of a return to the ten-hour day on october . they justified this action on the ground that they could not compete with cincinnati and kansas city, which operated on the ten-hour system. on october , the men, who were organized in district assemblies and , suspended work, and the memorable lockout began. the packers' association rejected all offers of compromise and on october the men were ordered to work on the ten-hour basis. but the dispute in october, which was marked by a complete lack of ill-feeling on the part of the men and was one of the most peaceable labor disputes of the year, was in reality a mere prelude to a second disturbance which broke out in the plant of swift & company on november and became general throughout the stockyards on november . the men demanded a return to the eight-hour day, but the packers' association, which was now joined by swift & company, who formerly had kept aloof, not only refused to give up the ten-hour day, but declared that they would employ no knights of labor in the future. the knights retaliated by declaring a boycott on the meat of armour & company. the behavior of the men was now no longer peaceable as before, and the employers took extra precautions by prevailing upon the governor to send two regiments of militia in addition to the several hundred pinkerton detectives employed by the association. to all appearances, the men were slowly gaining over the employers, for on november the packers' association rescinded its decision not to employ knights, when suddenly on november , like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, a telegram arrived from grand master workman powderly ordering the men back to work. powderly had refused to consider the reports from the members of the general executive board who were on the ground, but, as was charged by them, was guided instead by the advice of a priest who had appealed to him to call off the strike and thus put an end to the suffering of the men and their families. new york witnessed an even more characteristic knights of labor strike and on a larger scale. this strike began as two insignificant separate strikes, one by coal-handlers at the jersey ports supplying new york with coal and the other by longshoremen on the new york water front; both starting on january , . eighty-five coal-handlers employed by the philadelphia & reading railroad company, members of the knights of labor, struck against a reduction of - / cents an hour in the wages of the "top-men" and were joined by the trimmers who had grievances of their own. soon the strike spread to the other roads and the number of striking coal-handlers reached . the longshoremen's strike was begun by men, employed by the old dominion steamship company, against a reduction in wages and the hiring of cheap men by the week. the strikers were not organized, but the ocean association, a part of the knights of labor, took up their cause and was assisted by the longshoremen's union. both strikes soon widened out through a series of sympathetic strikes of related trades and finally became united into one. the ocean association declared a boycott on the freight of the old dominion company and this was strictly obeyed by all of the longshoremen's unions. the international boatmen's union refused to allow their boats to be used for "scab coal" or to permit their members to steer the companies' boats. the longshoremen joined the boatmen in refusing to handle coal, and the shovelers followed. then the grain handlers on both floating and stationary elevators refused to load ships with grain on which there was scab coal, and the bag-sewers stood with them. the longshoremen now resolved to go out and refused to work on ships which received scab coal, and finally they decided to stop work altogether on all kinds of craft in the harbor until the trouble should be settled. the strike spirit spread to a large number of freight handlers working for railroads along the river front, so that in the last week of january the number of strikers in new york, brooklyn, and new jersey, reached approximately , ; , longshoremen, boatmen, grain handlers, coal-handlers, and bag-sewers. on february , august corbin, president and receiver of the philadelphia & reading railroad company, fearing a strike by the miners working in the coal mines operated by that road, settled the strike by restoring to the eighty-five coal-handlers, the original strikers, their former rate of wages. the knights of labor felt impelled to accept such a trivial settlement for two reasons. the coal-handlers' strike, which drove up the price of coal to the consumer, was very unpopular, and the strike itself had begun to weaken when the brewers and stationary engineers, who for some obscure reason had been ordered to strike in sympathy, refused to come out. the situation was left unchanged, as far as the coal-handlers employed by the other companies, the longshoremen, and the many thousands of men who went out on sympathetic strike were concerned. the men began to return to work by the thousands and the entire strike collapsed. the determined attack and stubborn resistance of the employers' associations after the strikes of may , coupled with the obvious incompetence displayed by the leaders, caused the turn of the tide in the labor movement in the first half of . this, however, manifested itself during exclusively in the large cities, where the movement had borne in the purest form the character of an uprising by the class of the unskilled and where the hardest battles were fought with the employers. district assembly , new york, fell from its membership of , in june , to , in july . during the same interval, district assembly , philadelphia, decreased from , to , , and district assembly , boston, from , to , . in chicago there were about , knights immediately before the packers' strike in october , and only about , on july , . the falling off of the largest district assemblies in large cities practically equalled the total loss of the order, which amounted approximately to , . at the same time the membership of the smallest district assemblies, which were for the most part located in small cities, remained stationary and, outside of the national and district trade assemblies which were formed by separation from mixed district assemblies, thirty-seven new district assemblies were formed, also mostly in rural localities. in addition, state assemblies were added in alabama, florida, georgia, indiana, kansas, mississippi, nebraska, north carolina, ohio, west virginia, and wisconsin, with an average membership of about each. it thus becomes clear that by the middle of , the great upheaval of the unskilled and semi-skilled portions of the working class had already subsided beneath the strength of the combined employers and the unwieldiness of their own organization. after the knights of labor lost its hold upon the large cities with their wage-conscious and largely foreign population, and became an organization predominantly of country people, of mechanics, small merchants, and farmers,--a class of people which was more or less purely american and decidedly middle class in its philosophy. the industrial upheaval in the middle of the eighties had, like the great strike of , a political reverberation. although the latter was heard throughout the entire country, it centered in the city of new york, where the situation was complicated by court interference in the labor struggle. a local assembly of the knights of labor had declared a boycott against one george theiss, a proprietor of a music and beer garden. the latter at first submitted and paid a fine of $ to the labor organization, but later brought action in court against the officers charging them with intimidation and extortion. the judge, george c. barrett, in his charge to the jury, conceded that striking, picketing, and boycotting as such were not prohibited by law, if not accompanied by force, threats, or intimidation. but in the case under consideration the action of the pickets in advising passers-by not to patronize the establishment and in distributing boycott circulars constituted intimidation. also, since the $ fine was obtained by fear induced by a threat to continue the unlawful injury to theiss inflicted by the "boycott," the case was one of extortion covered by the penal code. it made no difference whether the money was appropriated by the defendants for personal use or whether it was turned over to their organization. the jury, which reflected the current public opinion against boycotts, found all of the five defendants guilty of extortion, and judge barrett sentenced them to prison for terms ranging from one year and six months to three years and eight months. the theiss case, coming as it did at a time of general restlessness of labor and closely after the defeat of the eight-hour movement, greatly hastened the growth of the sentiment for an independent labor party. the new york central labor union, the most famous and most influential organization of its kind in the country at the time, with a membership estimated at between , and , , placed itself at the head of the movement in which both socialists and non-socialists joined. henry george, the originator of the single tax movement, was nominated by the labor party for mayor of new york and was allowed to draw up his own platform, which he made of course a simon-pure single tax platform. the labor demands were compressed into one plank. they were as follows: the reform of court procedure so that "the practice of drawing grand jurors from one class should cease, and the requirements of a property qualification for trial jurors should be abolished"; the stopping of the "officious intermeddling of the police with peaceful assemblages"; the enforcement of the laws for safety and the sanitary inspection of buildings; the abolition of contract labor on public work; and equal pay for equal work without distinction of sex on such work. the george campaign was more in the nature of a religious revival than of a political election campaign. it was also a culminating point in the great labor upheaval. the enthusiasm of the laboring people reached its highest pitch. they felt that, baffled and defeated as they were in their economic struggle, they were now nearing victory in the struggle for the control of government. mass meetings were numerous and large. most of them were held in the open air, usually on the street corners. from the system by which one speaker followed another, speaking at several meeting places in a night, the labor campaign got its nickname of the "tailboard campaign." the common people, women and men, gathered in hundreds and often thousands around trucks from which the shifting speakers addressed the crowd. the speakers were volunteers, including representatives of the liberal professions, lawyers, physicians, teachers, ministers, and labor leaders. at such mass meetings george did most of his campaigning, making several speeches a night, once as many as eleven. the single tax and the prevailing political corruption were favorite topics. against george and his adherents were pitted the powerful press of the city of new york, all the political power of the old parties, and all the influence of the business class. george's opponents were abram s. hewitt, an anti-tammany democrat whom tammany had picked for its candidate in this emergency, and theodore roosevelt, then as yet known only as a courageous young politician. the vote cast was , for hewitt, , for george, and , for roosevelt. there is possible ground for the belief that george was counted out of thousands of votes. the nature of the george vote can be sufficiently gathered from an analysis of the pledges to vote for him. an apparently trustworthy investigation was made by a representative of the new york sun. he drew the conclusion that the vast majority were not simply wage earners, but also naturalized immigrants, mainly irish, germans, and bohemians, the native element being in the minority. while the irish were divided between george and hewitt, the majority of the german element had gone over to henry george. the outcome was hailed as a victory by george and his supporters and this view was also taken by the general press. in spite of this propitious beginning the political labor movement soon suffered the fate of all reform political movements. the strength of the new party was frittered away in doctrinaire factional strife between the single taxers and the socialists. the trade union element became discouraged and lost interest. so that at the next state election, in which george ran for secretary of state, presumably because that office came nearest to meeting the requirement for a single taxer seeking a practical scope of action, the vote in the city fell to , and in the whole state amounted only to , . this ended the political labor movement in new york. outside of new york the political labor movement was not associated either with the single tax or any other "ism." as in new york it was a spontaneous expression of dissatisfaction brought on by failure in strikes. the movement scored a victory in milwaukee, where it elected a mayor, and in chicago where it polled , out of a total of , . but, as in new york, it fell to pieces without leaving a permanent trace. footnotes: [ ] see the next chapter for the scheme of organization followed by the order. [ ] see above, - . chapter the victory of craft unionism and the final failure of producers' cooperation we now come to the most significant aspect of the great upheaval: the life and death struggle between two opposed principles of labor organization and between two opposed labor programs. the upheaval offered the practical test which the labor movement required for an intelligent decision between the rival claims of knights and trade unionists. the test as well as the conflict turned principally on "structure," that is on the difference between "craft autonomists" and those who would have labor organized "under one head," or what we would now call the "one big union" advocates. as the issue of "structure" proved in the crucial eighties, and has remained ever since, the outstanding factional issue in the labor movement, it might be well at this point to pass in brief review the structural developments in labor organization from the beginning and try to correlate them with other important developments. the early[ ] societies of shoemakers and printers were purely local in scope and the relations between "locals" extended only to feeble attempts to deal with the competition of traveling journeymen. occasionally, they corresponded on trade matters, notifying each other of their purposes and the nature of their demands, or expressing fraternal greetings; chiefly for the purpose of counteracting advertisements by employers for journeymen or keeping out dishonest members and so-called "scabs." this mostly relates to printers. the shoemakers, despite their bitter contests with their employers, did even less. the philadelphia mechanics' trades association in , which we noted as the first attempted federation of trades in the united states if not in the world, was organized as a move of sympathy for the carpenters striking for the ten-hour day. during the period of the "wild-cat" prosperity the local federation of trades, under the name of "trades' union,"[ ] comes to occupy the center of the stage in new york, philadelphia, boston, and appeared even as far "west" as pittsburgh, cincinnati, and louisville. the constitution of the new york "trades' union" provided, among other things, that each society should pay a monthly per capita tax of - / cents to be used as a strike fund. later, when strikes multiplied, the union limited the right to claim strike aid and appointed a standing committee on mediation. in it discussed a plan for an employment exchange or a "call room." the constitution of the philadelphia union required that a strike be endorsed by a two-thirds majority before granting aid. the national trades' union, the federation of city trades' unions, - , was a further development of the same idea. its first and second conventions went little beyond the theoretical. the latter, however, passed a significant resolution urging the trade societies to observe a uniform wage policy throughout the country and, should the employers combine to resist it, the unions should make "one general strike." the last convention in went far beyond preceding conventions in its plans for solidifying the workingmen of the country. first and foremost, a "national fund" was provided for, to be made up of a levy of two cents per month on each of the members of the trades' unions and local societies represented. the policies of the national trades' union instead of merely advisory were henceforth to be binding. but before the new policies could be tried, as we know, the entire trade union movement was wiped out by the panic. the city "trades' union" of the thirties accorded with a situation where the effects of the extension of the market were noticeable in the labor market, and little as yet in the commodity market; when the competitive menace to labor was the low paid out-of-town mechanic coming to the city, not the out-of-town product made under lower labor costs selling in the same market as the products of unionized labor. under these conditions the local trade society, reenforced by the city federation of trades, sufficed. the "trades' union," moreover, served also as a source of reserve strength. twenty years later the whole situation was changed. the fifties were a decade of extensive construction of railways. before there was more traffic by water than by rail. after the relative importance of land and water transportation was reversed. furthermore, the most important railway building during the ten years preceding was the construction of east and west trunk lines; and the sixties were marked by the establishment of through lines for freight and the consolidation of connecting lines. the through freight lines greatly hastened freight traffic and by the consolidations through transportation became doubly efficient. arteries of traffic had thus extended from the eastern coast to the mississippi valley. local markets had widened to embrace half a continent. competitive menaces had become more serious and threatened from a distance. local unionism no longer sufficed. consequently, as we saw, in the labor movement of the sixties the national trade union was supreme. there were four distinct sets of causes which operated during the sixties to bring about nationalization; two grew out of the changes in transportation, already alluded to, and two were largely independent of such changes. the first and most far-reaching cause, as illustrated by the stove molders, was the competition of the products of different localities side by side in the same market. stoves manufactured in albany, new york, were now displayed in st. louis by the side of stoves made in detroit. no longer could the molder in albany be indifferent to the fate of his fellow craftsman in louisville. with the molders the nationalization of the organization was destined to proceed to its utmost length. in order that union conditions should be maintained even in the best organized centers, it became necessary to equalize competitive conditions in the various localities. that led to a well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade rules, and strikes. in other trades, where the competitive area of the product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount nationalizing influence was a more intensive competition for employment between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized mechanics. this describes the situation in the printing trade, where the bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing. accordingly, the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the result was that the local unions remained practically independent. the third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the organization of employers. where the power of a local union began to be threatened by an employers' association, the next logical step was to combine in a national union. the fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid industry open to invasion by "green hands." the shoemaking industry, which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, illustrates this in a most striking manner. few other industries experienced anything like a similar change during this period. of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated operated in entire isolation. in some trades one cause, in other trades other causes, had the predominating influence. consequently, in some trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality. in other trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace. the national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. however slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades. in the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the national labor union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. in the same national unions asserted their rejection of "panaceas" and politics by attempting to create in the national labor congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character. the panic and depression nipped that in the bud. when trade unionism revived in the national trade unions returned to the idea of a national federation of labor, but this time they followed the model of the british trades union congress, the organization which cares for the legislative interests of british labor. this was the "federation of organized trades and labor unions of the united states and canada," which was set up in . it is easy to understand why the unions of the early eighties did not feel the need of a federation on economic lines. the trade unions of today look to the american federation of labor for the discharge of important economic functions, therefore it is primarily an economic organization. these functions are the assistance of national trade unions in organizing their trades, the adjustment of disputes between unions claiming the same "jurisdiction," and concerted action in matters of especial importance such as shorter hours, the "open-shop," or boycotts. none of these functions would have been of material importance to the trade unions of the early eighties. existing in well-defined trades, which were not affected by technical changes, they had no "jurisdictional" disputes; operating at a period of prosperity with full employment and rising wages, they did not realize a necessity for concerted action; the era of the boycotts had not yet begun. as for having a common agency to do the work of organizing, the trade unions of the early eighties had no keen desire to organize any but the skilled workmen; and, since the competition of workmen in small towns had not yet made itself felt, each national trade union strove to organize primarily the workmen of its trade in the larger cities, a function for which its own means were adequate. the new organization of was a loose federation of trade and labor unions with a legislative committee at the head, with samuel gompers of the cigar makers as a member. the platform was purely legislative and demanded legal incorporation for trade unions,[ ] compulsory education for children, the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, uniform apprentice laws, the enforcement of the national eight-hour law, prison labor reform, abolition of the "truck" and "order" system, mechanics' lien, abolition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor organizations, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protective tariff for american labor, an anti-contract immigrant law, and recommended "all trade and labor organizations to secure proper representation in all law-making bodies by means of the ballot, and to use all honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished." although closely related to the present american federation of labor in point of time and personnel of leadership, the federation of organized trades and labor unions of the united states and canada was in reality the precursor of the present state federations of labor, which as specialized parts of the national federation now look after labor legislation. two or three years later it became evident that the federation as a legislative organization proved a failure.[ ] manifestly the trade unions felt no great interest in national legislation. the indifference can be measured by the fact that the annual income of the federation never exceeded $ and that, excepting in , none of its conventions represented more than one-fourth of the trade union membership of the country. under such conditions the legislative influence of the federation naturally was infinitesimal. the legislative committee carried out the instructions of the convention and communicated to the national committees of the republican and democratic parties the request that they should define their position upon the enforcement of the eight-hour law and other measures. the letters were not even answered. a subcommittee of the legislative committee appeared before the two political conventions, but received no greater attention. it was not until the majority of the national trade unions came under the menace of becoming forcibly absorbed by the order of the knights of labor that a basis appeared for a vigorous federation. the knights of labor were built on an opposite principle from the national trade unions. whereas the latter started with independent crafts and then with hesitating hands tried, as we saw, to erect some sort of a common superstructure that should express a higher solidarity of labor, the former was built from the beginning upon a denial of craft lines and upon an absolute unity of all classes of labor under one guiding head. the subdivision was territorial instead of occupational and the government centralized. the constitution of the knights of labor was drawn in when the order laid aside the veil of secrecy to which it had clung since its foundation in . the lowest unit of organization was the local assembly of ten or more, at least three-fourths of whom had to be wage earners at any trade. above the local assembly was the "district assembly" and above it the "general assembly." the district assembly had absolute power over its local assemblies and the general assembly was given "full and final jurisdiction" as "the highest tribunal" of the order.[ ] between sessions of the general assembly the power was vested in a general executive board, presided over by a grand master workman. the order of the knights of labor in practice carried out the idea which is now advocated so fervently by revolutionary unionists, namely the "one big union," since it avowedly aimed to bring into one organization "all productive labor." this idea in organization was aided by the weakness of the trade unions during the long depression of the seventies, which led many to hope for better things from a general pooling of labor strength. but its main appeal rested on a view that machine technique tends to do away with all distinctions of trades by reducing all workers to the level of unskilled machine tenders. to its protagonists therefore the "one big union" stood for an adjustment to the new technique. first to face the problem of adjustment to the machine technique of the factory system were the shoemakers. they organized in the order of the knights of st. crispin, mainly for the purpose of suppressing the competitive menace of "green hands," that is unskilled workers put to work on shoe machines. at its height in , the crispins numbered about , , perhaps the largest union in the whole world at that time. the coopers began to be menaced by machinery about the middle of the sixties, and about the same time the machinists and blacksmiths, too, saw their trade broken up by the introduction of the principle of standardized parts and quantity production in the making of machinery. from these trades came the national leaders of the knights of labor and the strongest advocates of the new principle in labor organization and of the interests of the unskilled workers in general. the conflict between the trade unions and the knights of labor turned on the question of the unskilled workers. the conflict was held in abeyance during the early eighties. the trade unions were by far the strongest organizations in the field and scented no particular danger when here or there the knights formed an assembly either contiguous to the sphere of a trade union or even at times encroaching upon it. with the great upheaval, which began in , and the inrushing of hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled and unskilled workers into the order, a new situation was created. the leaders of the knights realized that mere numbers were not sufficient to defeat the employers and that control over the skilled, and consequently the more strategic occupations, was required before the unskilled and semi-skilled could expect to march to victory. hence, parallel to the tremendous growth of the knights in , there was a constantly growing effort to absorb the existing trade unions for the purpose of making them subservient to the interests of the less skilled elements. it was mainly that which produced the bitter conflict between the knights and the trade unions during and . neither the jealousy aroused by the success of the unions nor the opposite aims of labor solidarity and trade separatism gives an adequate explanation of this conflict. the one, of course, aggravated the situation by introducing a feeling of personal bitterness, and the other furnished an appealing argument to each side. but the struggle was one between groups within the working class, in which the small but more skilled group fought for independence of the larger but weaker group of the unskilled and semi-skilled. the skilled men stood for the right to use their advantage of skill and efficient organization in order to wrest the maximum amount of concessions for themselves. the knights of labor endeavored to annex the skilled men in order that the advantage from their exceptional fighting strength might lift up the unskilled and semi-skilled. from the point of view of a struggle between principles, this was indeed a clash between the principle of solidarity of labor and that of trade separatism, but, in reality, each of the principles reflected only the special interest of a certain portion of the working class. just as the trade unions, when they fought for trade autonomy, really refused to consider the unskilled men, so the knights of labor overlooked the fact that their scheme would retard the progress of the skilled trades. the knights were in nearly every case the aggressors, and it is significant that among the local organizations of the knights inimical to trade unions, district assembly , of new york, should prove the most relentless. it was this assembly which conducted the longshoremen's and coal miners' strike in new york in and which, as we saw,[ ] did not hesitate to tie up the industries of the entire city for the sake of securing the demands of several hundred unskilled workingmen. though district assembly , new york, came into conflict with not a few of the trade unions in that city, its battle royal was fought with the cigar makers' unions. there were at the time two factions among the cigar makers, one upholding the international cigar makers' union with adolph strasser and samuel gompers as leaders, the other calling itself the progressive union, which was more socialistic in nature and composed of more recent immigrants and less skilled workers. district assembly of the knights of labor took a hand in the struggle to support the progressive union and by skillful management brought the situation to the point where the latter had to allow itself to be absorbed into the knights of labor. the events in the cigar making trade in new york brought to a climax the sporadic struggles that had been going on between the order and the trade unions. the trade unions demanded that the knights of labor respect their "jurisdiction" and proposed a "treaty of peace" with such drastic terms that had they been accepted the trade unions would have been left in the sole possession of the field. the order was at first more conciliatory. it would not of course cease to take part in industrial disputes and industrial matters, but it proposed a _modus vivendi_ on a basis of an interchange of "working cards" and common action against employers. at the same time it addressed separately to each national trade union a gentle admonition to think of the unskilled workers as well as of themselves. the address said: "in the use of the wonderful inventions, your organization plays a most important part. naturally it embraces within its ranks a very large proportion of laborers of a high grade of skill and intelligence. with this skill of hand, guided by intelligent thought, comes the right to demand that excess of compensation paid to skilled above the unskilled labor. but the unskilled labor must receive attention, or in the hour of difficulty the employer will not hesitate to use it to depress the compensation you now receive. that skilled or unskilled labor may no longer be found unorganized, we ask of you to annex your grand and powerful corps to the main army that we may fight the battle under one flag." but the trade unions, who had formerly declared that their purpose was "to protect the skilled trades of america from being reduced to beggary," evinced no desire to be pressed into the service of lifting up the unskilled and voted down with practical unanimity the proposal. thereupon the order declared open war by commanding all its members who were also members of the cigar makers' union to withdraw from the latter on the penalty of expulsion. later events proved that the assumption of the aggressive was the beginning of the undoing of the order. it was, moreover, an event of first significance in the labor movement since it forced the trade unions to draw closer together and led to the founding in the same year, , of the american federation of labor. another highly important effect of this conflict was the ascendency in the trade union movement of samuel gompers as the foremost leader. gompers had first achieved prominence in at the time of the organization of the federation of organized trades and labor unions. but not until the situation created by the conflict with the knights of labor did he get his first real opportunity, both to demonstrate his inborn capacity for leadership and to train and develop that capacity by overcoming what was perhaps the most serious problem that ever confronted american organized labor. the new federation avoided its predecessor's mistake of emphasizing labor legislation above all. its prime purpose was economic. the legislative interests of labor were for the most part given into the care of subordinate state federations of labor. consequently, the several state federations, not the american federation of labor, correspond in america to the british trades union congress. but in the conventions of the american federation of labor the state federations are represented only nominally. the federation is primarily a federation of national and international (including canada and mexico) trade unions. each national and international union in the new federation was acknowledged a sovereignty unto itself, with full powers of discipline over its members and with the power of free action toward the employers without any interference from the federation; in other words, its full autonomy was confirmed. like the british empire, the federation of labor was cemented together by ties which were to a much greater extent spiritual than they were material. nevertheless, the federation's authority was far from being a shadowy one. if it could not order about the officers of the constituent unions, it could so mobilize the general labor sentiment in the country on behalf of any of its constituent bodies that its good will would be sought even by the most powerful ones. the federation guaranteed to each union a certain jurisdiction, generally coextensive with a craft, and protected it against encroachments by adjoining unions and more especially by rival unions. the guarantee worked absolutely in the case of the latter, for the federation knew no mercy when a rival union attempted to undermine the strength of an organized union of a craft. the trade unions have learned from experience with the knights of labor that their deadliest enemy was, after all, not the employers' association but the enemy from within who introduced confusion in the ranks. they have accordingly developed such a passion for "regularity," such an intense conviction that there must be but one union in a given trade that, on occasions, scheming labor officials have known how to checkmate a justifiable insurgent movement by a skillful play upon this curious hypertrophy of the feeling of solidarity. not only will a rival union never be admitted into the federation, but no subordinate body, state or city, may dare to extend any aid or comfort to a rival union. the federation exacted but little from the national and international unions in exchange for the guarantee of their jurisdiction: a small annual per capita tax; a willing though a not obligatory support in the special legislative and industrial campaigns it may undertake; an adherence to its decisions on general labor policy; an undertaking to submit to its decision in the case of disputes with other unions, which however need not in every case be fulfilled; and lastly, an unqualified acceptance of the principle of "regularity" relative to labor organization. obviously, judging from constitutional powers alone, the federation was but a weak sort of a government. yet the weakness was not the forced weakness of a government which was willing to start with limited powers hoping to increase its authority as it learned to stand more firmly on its own feet; it was a self-imposed weakness suggested by the lessons of labor history. by contrast the order of the knights of labor, as seen already, was governed by an all-powerful general assembly and general executive board. at a first glance a highly centralized form of government would appear a promise of assured strength and a guarantee of coherence amongst the several parts of the organization. perhaps, if america's wage earners were cemented together by as strong a class consciousness as the laboring classes of europe, such might have been the case. but america's labor movement lacked the unintended aid which the sister movements in europe derived from a caste system of society and political oppression. where the class lines were not tightly drawn, the centrifugal forces in the labor movement were bound to assert themselves. the leaders of the american federation of labor, in their struggle against the knights of labor, played precisely upon this centrifugal tendency and gained a victory by making an appeal to the natural desire for autonomy and self-determination of any distinctive group. but originally perhaps intended as a mere "strategic" move, this policy succeeded in creating a labor movement which was, on fundamentals, far more coherent than the knights of labor even in the heyday of their glory. the officers and leaders of the federation, knowing that they could not command, set themselves to developing a unified labor will and purpose by means of moral suasion and propaganda. where a bare order would breed resentment and backbiting, an appeal, which is reinforced by a carefully nurtured universal labor sentiment, will eventually bring about common consent and a willing acquiescence in the policy supported by the majority. so each craft was made a self-determining unit and "craft autonomy" became a sacred shibboleth in the labor movement without interfering with unity on essentials. the principle of craft autonomy triumphed chiefly because it recognized the existence of a considerable amount of group selfishness. the knights of labor held, as was seen, that the strategic or bargaining strength of the skilled craftsman should be used as a lever to raise the status of the semi-skilled and unskilled worker. it consequently grouped them promiscuously in "mixed assemblies" and opposed as long as it could the demand for "national trade assemblies." the craftsman, on the other hand, wished to use his superior bargaining strength for his own purposes and evinced little desire to dissipate it in the service of his humbler fellow worker. to give effect to that, he felt obliged to struggle against becoming entangled with undesirable allies in the semi-skilled and unskilled workers for whom the order spoke. needless to say, the individual self-interest of the craft leaders worked hand in hand with the self-interest of the craft as a whole, for had they been annexed by the order they would have become subject to orders from the general master workman or the general assembly of the order. in addition to platonic stirrings for "self-determination" and to narrow group interest, there was a motive for craft autonomy which could pass muster both as strictly social and realistic. the fact was that the autonomous craft union could win strikes where the centralized promiscuous order merely floundered and suffered defeat after defeat. the craft union had the advantage, on the one hand, of a leadership which was thoroughly familiar with the bit of ground upon which it operated, and, on the other hand, of handling a group of people of equal financial endurance and of identical interest. it has already been seen how dreadfully mismanaged were the great knights of labor strikes of and . the ease with which the leaders were able to call out trade after trade on a strike of sympathy proved more a liability than an asset. often the choice of trades to strike bore no particular relation to their strategic value in the given situation; altogether one gathers the impression that these great strikes were conducted by blundering amateurs who possessed more authority than was good for them or for the cause. it is therefore not to be wondered at if the compact craft unions led by specialists scored successes where the heterogeneous mobs of the knights of labor had been doomed from the first. clearly then the survival of the craft union was a survival of the fittest; and the federation's attachment to the principle of craft autonomy was, to say the least, a product of an evolutionary past, whatever one may hold with reference to its fitness in our own time. whatever reasons moved the trade unions of the skilled to battle with the order for their separate and autonomous existence were bound sooner or later to induce those craftsmen who were in the order to seek a similar autonomy. from the very beginning the more skilled and better organized trades in the knights sought to separate from the mixed "district assemblies" and to create within the framework of the order "national trade assemblies."[ ] however, the national officers, who looked upon such a move as a betrayal of the great principle of the solidarity of all labor, were able to stem the tide excepting in the case of the window glass blowers, who were granted their autonomy in . the obvious superiority of the trade union form of organization over the mixed organization, as revealed by events in and , strengthened the separatist tendency. just as the struggle between the knights of labor and the trade unions on the outside had been fundamentally a struggle between the unskilled and the skilled portions of the wage-earning class, so the aspiration toward the national trade assembly within the order represented the effort of the more or less skilled men for emancipation from the dominance of the unskilled. but the order successfully fought off such attempts until after the defeat of the mixed district assemblies, or in other words of the unskilled class, in the struggle with the employers. with the withdrawal of a very large portion of this class, as shown in ,[ ] the demand for the national trade assembly revived and there soon began a veritable rush to organize by trades. the stampede was strongest in the city of new york where the incompetence of the mixed district assembly had become patent. at the general assembly in at minneapolis all obstacles were removed from forming national trade assemblies, but this came too late to stem the exodus of the skilled element from the order into the american federation of labor. the victory of craft autonomy over the "one big union" was decisive and complete. the strike activities of the knights were confessedly a deviation from "first principles." yet the first principles with their emphasis on producers' cooperation were far from forgotten even when the enthusiasm for strikes was at its highest. whatever the actual feelings of the membership as a whole, the leaders neglected no opportunity to promote cooperation. t.v. powderly, the head of the order since , in his reports to the annual general assembly or convention, consistently urged that practical steps be taken toward cooperation. in , while the general opinion in the order was still undecided, the leaders did not scruple to smuggle into the constitution a clause which made cooperation compulsory. notwithstanding powderly's exhortations, the order was at first slow in taking it up. in a general cooperative board was elected to work out a plan of action, but it never reported, and a new board was chosen in its place at the assembly of . in that year, the first practical step was taken in the purchase by the order of a coal mine at cannelburg, indiana, with the idea of selling the coal at reduced prices to the members. soon thereafter a thorough change of sentiment with regard to the whole matter of cooperation took place, contemporaneously with the industrial depression and unsuccessful strikes. the rank and file, who had hitherto been indifferent, now seized upon the idea with avidity. the enthusiasm ran so high in lynn, massachusetts, that it was found necessary to raise the shares of the knights of labor cooperative shoe company to $ in order to prevent a large influx of "unsuitable members." in powderly complained that "many of our members grow impatient and unreasonable because every avenue of the order does not lead to cooperation." the impatience for immediate cooperation, which seized the rank and file in practically every section of the country, caused an important modification in the official doctrine of the order. originally it had contemplated centralized control under which it would have taken years before a considerable portion of the membership could realize any benefit. this was now dropped and a decentralized plan was adopted. local organizations and, more frequently, groups of members with the financial aid of their local organizations now began to establish shops. most of the enterprises were managed by the stockholders, although, in some cases, the local organization of the knights of labor managed the plant. most of the cooperative enterprises were conducted on a small scale. incomplete statistics warrant the conclusion that the average amount invested per establishment was about $ , . from the data gathered it seems that cooperation reached its highest point in , although it had not completely spent itself by the end of . the total number of ventures probably reached two hundred. the largest numbers were in mining, cooperage, and shoes. these industries paid the poorest wages and treated their employes most harshly. a small amount of capital was required to organize such establishments. with the abandonment of centralized cooperation in , the role of the central cooperative board changed correspondingly. the leading member of the board was now john samuel, one of those to whom cooperation meant nothing short of a religion. the duty of the board was to educate the members of the order in the principles of cooperation; to aid by information and otherwise prospective and actual cooperators; in brief, to coordinate the cooperative movement within the order. it issued forms of a constitution and by-laws which, with a few modifications, could be adopted by any locality. it also published articles on the dangers and pitfalls in cooperative ventures, such as granting credit, poor management, etc., as well as numerous articles on specific kinds of cooperation. the knights of labor label was granted for the use of cooperative goods and a persistent agitation was steadily conducted to induce purchasers to give a preference to cooperative products. as a scheme of industrial regeneration, cooperation never materialized. the few successful shops sooner or later fell into the hands of an "inner group," who "froze out" the others and set up capitalistic partnerships. the great majority went on the rocks even before getting started. the causes of failure were many: hasty action, inexperience, lax shop discipline, internal dissensions, high rates of interest upon the mortgage of the plant, and finally discriminations instigated by competitors. railways were heavy offenders, by delaying side tracks and, on some pretext or other, refusing to furnish cars or refusing to haul them. the union mining company of cannelburg, indiana, owned and operated by the order as its sole experiment of the centralized kind of cooperation, met this fate. after expending $ , in equipping the mine, purchasing land, laying tracks, cutting and sawing timber on the land and mining $ worth of coal, they were compelled to lie idle for nine months before the railway company saw fit to connect their switch with the main track. when they were ready to ship their product, it was learned that their coal could be utilized for the manufacture of gas only, and that contracts for supply of such coal were let in july, that is nine months from the time of connecting the switch with the main track. in addition, the company was informed that it must supply itself with a switch engine to do the switching of the cars from its mine to the main track, at an additional cost of $ . when this was accomplished they had to enter the market in competition with a bitter opponent who had been fighting them since the opening of the mine. having exhausted their funds and not seeing their way clear to securing additional funds for the purchase of a locomotive and to tide over the nine months ere any contracts for coal could be entered into, they sold out to their competitor. but a cause more fundamental perhaps than all other causes of the failure of cooperation in the united states is to be found in the difficulties of successful entrepreneurship. in the labor movement in the united states there has been a failure, generally speaking, to appreciate the significance of management and the importance which must be imputed to it. glib talk often commands an undeserved confidence and misleads the wage earner. thus by , three or four years after it had begun, the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. the failure, as said, was hastened by external causes and discrimination. but the experiments had been foredoomed anyway,--through the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. the cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future profits. in consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear reductions in their wages. a labor movement which endeavors to practice producers' cooperation and trade unionism at the same time is actually driving in opposite directions. footnotes: [ ] see chapter . [ ] in the thirties the term "union" was reserved for the city federations of trades. what is now designated as a trade union was called trade society. in the sixties the "union" became the "trades' assembly." [ ] see below, - . [ ] see below, - , for a discussion why american labor looks away from legislation. [ ] the constitution read as follows: "it alone possesses the power and authority to make, amend, or repeal the fundamental and general laws and regulations of the order; to finally decide all controversies arising in the order; to issue all charters.... it can also tax the members of the order for its maintenance." [ ] see above, - . [ ] the "local assemblies" generally followed in practice trade lines, but the district assemblies were "mixed." [ ] see above, - . chapter stabilization, - the great upheaval of had, as we saw, suddenly swelled the membership of trade unions; consequently, during several years following, notwithstanding the prosperity in industry, further growth was bound to proceed at a slower rate. the statistics of strikes during the later eighties, like the figures of membership, show that after the strenuous years from to the labor movement had entered a more or less quiet stage. most prominent among the strikes was the one of , iron and steel workers in pennsylvania, ohio, and the west, which was carried to a successful conclusion against a strong combination of employers. the amalgamated association of iron and steel workers stood at the zenith of its power about this time and was able in , by the mere threat of a strike, to dictate terms to the carnegie steel company. the most noted and last great strike of a railway brotherhood was the one of the locomotive engineers on the chicago, burlington & quincy railroad company. the strike was begun jointly on february , , by the brotherhoods of locomotive engineers and locomotive firemen. the main demands were made by the engineers, who asked for the abandonment of the system of classification and for a new wage scale. two months previously, the knights of labor had declared a miners' strike against the philadelphia & reading railroad company, employing , anthracite miners, and the strike had been accompanied by a sympathetic strike of engineers and firemen belonging to the order. the members of the brotherhoods had filled their places and, in retaliation, the former reading engineers and firemen now took the places of the burlington strikers, so that on march the company claimed to have a full contingent of employes. the brotherhoods ordered a boycott upon the burlington cars, which was partly enforced, but they were finally compelled to submit. the strike was not officially called off until january , . notwithstanding the defeat of the strikers, the damage to the railway was enormous, and neither the railways of the country nor the brotherhoods since that date have permitted a serious strike of their members to occur. the lull in the trade union movement was broken by a new concerted eight-hour movement managed by the federation, which culminated in . although on the whole the eight-hour movement in was a failure, it was by no means a disheartening failure. it was evident that the eight-hour day was a popular demand, and that an organization desirous of expansion might well hitch its wagon to this star. accordingly, the convention of the american federation of labor in declared that a general demand should be made for the eight-hour day on may , . the chief advocates of the resolution were the delegates of the carpenters, who announced a readiness to lead the way for a general eight-hour day in . the federation at once inaugurated an aggressive campaign. for the first time in its history it employed special salaried organizers. pamphlets were issued and widely distributed. on every important holiday mass meetings were held in the larger cities. on labor day , no less than such mass meetings were held throughout the country. again the knights of labor came out against the plan. the next year the plan of campaign was modified. the idea of a general strike for the eight-hour day in may , was abandoned in favor of a strike trade by trade. in march , the carpenters were chosen to make the demand on may of the same year, to be followed by the miners at a later date. the choice of the carpenters was indeed fortunate. beginning with , that union had a rapid growth and was now the largest union affiliated with the federation. for several years it had been accumulating funds for the eight-hour day, and, when the movement was inaugurated in may , it achieved a large measure of success. the union officers claimed to have won the eight-hour day in cities and a nine-hour day in most other places. however, the selection of the miners to follow on may , , was a grave mistake. less than one-tenth of the coal miners of the country were then organized. for years the miners' union had been losing ground, with the constant decline of coal prices. some months before may , , the united mine workers had become involved in a disastrous strike in the connelsville coke region, and the plan for an eight-hour strike was abandoned. in this manner the eight-hour movement inaugurated by the convention of the federation in came to an end. apart from the strike of the carpenters in , it had not led to any general movement to gain the eight-hour work day. nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of workingmen had won reduced hours of labor, especially in the building trades. by the eight-hour day had been secured for all building trades in chicago, st. louis, denver, indianapolis, and san francisco. in new york and brooklyn the carpenters, stone-cutters, painters, and plasterers worked eight hours, while the bricklayers, masons, and plumbers worked nine. in st. paul the bricklayers alone worked nine hours, the remaining trades eight. in the labor movement faced for the first time a really modern manufacturing corporation with its practically boundless resources of war, namely the carnegie steel company, in the strike which has become famous under the name of the homestead strike. the amalgamated association of iron and steel workers, with a membership of , in , was probably the strongest trade union in the entire history of the american labor movement. prior to the relations between the union and the carnegie firm had been invariably friendly. in january , h.c. frick, who, as owner of the largest coke manufacturing plant, had acquired a reputation of a bitter opponent of organized labor, became chairman of carnegie brothers and company. in the same year, owing to his assumption of management, as the union men believed, the first dispute occurred between them and the company. although the agreement was finally renewed for three years on terms dictated by the association, the controversy left a disturbing impression upon the minds of the men, since during the course of the negotiations frick had demanded the dissolution of the union. negotiations for the new scale presented to the company began in february . a few weeks later the company presented a scale to the men providing for a reduction and besides demanded that the date of the termination of the scale be changed from july to january . a number of conferences were held without result; and on may the company submitted an ultimatum to the effect that, if the scale were not signed by june , they would treat with the men as individuals. at a final conference which was held on june , the company raised its offer from $ per ton to $ as the minimum base of the scale, and the union lowered its demand from $ , the rate formerly paid, to $ . but no agreement could be reached on this point nor on others and the strike began june upon the definite issue of the preservation of the union. even before the negotiations were broken up, frick had arranged with the pinkerton detective agency for men to serve as guards. these men arrived at a station on the ohio river below pittsburgh near midnight of july . here they embarked on barges and were towed up the river to pittsburgh and taken up the monangahela river to homestead, which they approached about four o'clock on the morning of july . the workmen had been warned of their coming and, when the boat reached the landing back of the steel works, nearly the whole town was there to meet them and to prevent their landing. passion ran high. the men armed themselves with guns and gave the pinkertons a pitched battle. when the day was over, at least half a dozen men on both sides had been killed and a number were seriously wounded. the pinkertons were defeated and driven away and, although there was no more disorder of any sort, the state militia appeared in homestead on july and remained for several months. the strike which began in homestead soon spread to other mills. the carnegie mills at th and d streets, pittsburgh, went on strike. the strike at homestead was finally declared off on november , and most of the men went back to their old positions as non-union men. the treasury of the union was depleted, winter was coming, and it was finally decided to consider the battle lost. the defeat meant not only the loss by the union of the homestead plant but the elimination of unionism in most of the mills in the pittsburgh region. where the great carnegie company led, the others had to follow. the power of the union was henceforth broken and the labor movement learned the lesson that even its strongest organization was unable to withstand an onslaught by the modern corporation. the homestead strike stirred the labor movement as few other single events. it had its political reverberation, since it drove home to the workers that an industry protected by high tariff will not necessarily be a haven to organized labor, notwithstanding that the union had actively assisted the iron and steel manufacturers in securing the high protection granted by the mckinley tariff bill of . many of the votes which would otherwise have gone to the republican candidate for president went in to grover cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. it is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the disillusionment brought on by the homestead defeat. in the summer of occurred the financial panic. the panic and the ensuing crisis furnished a conclusive test of the strength and stability of the american labor movement. gompers in his presidential report at the convention of , following the long depression, said: "it is noteworthy, that while in every previous industrial crisis the trade unions were literally mowed down and swept out of existence, the unions now in existence have manifested, not only the power of resistance, but of stability and permanency," and he assigned as the most prominent cause the system of high dues and benefits which had come into vogue in a large number of trade unions. he said: "beyond doubt the superficial motive of continued membership in unions organized upon this basis was the monetary benefits the members were entitled to; but be that as it may, the results are the same, that is, _membership is maintained, the organization remains intact during dull periods of industry, and is prepared to take advantage of the first sign of an industrial revival_." gompers may have overstated the power of resistance of the unions, but their holding power upon the membership cannot be disputed. the aggregate membership of all unions affiliated with the federation remained near the mark of , throughout the period of depression from to . at last the labor movement had become stabilized. the year was exceptional for labor disturbances. the number of employes involved reached nearly , , surpassing even the mark set in . however, in contradistinction to , the movement was defensive. it also resulted in greater failure. the strike of the coal miners and the pullman strike were the most important ones. the united mine workers began their strike in ohio on april . the membership did not exceed , , but about , struck. at first the demand was made that wages should be restored to the level at which they were in may . but within a month the union in most regions was struggling to prevent a further reduction in wages. by the end of july the strike was lost. the pullman strike marks an era in the american labor movement because it was the only attempt ever made in america of a revolutionary strike on the continental european model. the strikers tried to throw against the associated railways and indeed against the entire existing social order the full force of a revolutionary labor solidarity embracing the entire american wage-earning class brought to the point of exasperation by unemployment, wage reductions, and misery. that in spite of the remarkable favorable conjuncture the dramatic appeal failed to shake the general labor movement out of its chosen groove is proof positive of the completion of the stabilization process which had been going on since the early eighties. the pullman strike began may , , and grew out of a demand of certain employes in the shops of the pullman palace car company, situated at pullman, illinois, for a restoration of the wages paid during the previous year. in march , the pullman employes had voted to join the american railway union. the american railway union was an organization based on industrial lines, organized in june , by eugene v. debs. debs, as secretary-treasurer of the brotherhood of locomotive firemen, had watched the failure of many a strike by only one trade and resigned this office to organize all railway workers in one organization. the american railway union was the result. between june and june the latter held a convention in chicago. the pullman matter was publicly discussed before and after its committee reported their interviews with the pullman company. on june , the delegates under instructions from their local unions, feeling confident after a victory over the great northern in april, unanimously voted that the members should stop handling pullman cars on june unless the pullman company would consent to arbitration. on june the railway strike began. it was a purely sympathetic strike as no demands were made. the union found itself pitted against the general managers' association, representing twenty-four roads centering or terminating in chicago, which were bound by contracts with the pullman company. the association had been organized in , its main business being to determine a common policy as to traffic and freight rates, but incidentally it dealt also with wages. the strike soon spread over an enormous territory. many of the members of the brotherhoods joined in, although their organizations were opposed to the strike. the lawless element in chicago took advantage of the opportunity to rob, burn, and plunder, so that the scenes of the great railway strike of were now repeated. the damages in losses of property and business to the country have been estimated at $ , , . on july , e.v. debs, president, and other principal officers of the american railway union were indicted, arrested, and held under $ , bail. on july they were charged with contempt of the united states court in disobeying an injunction which enjoined them, among other things, from compelling or inducing by threats railway employes to strike. the strike had already been weakening for some days. on july , at the request of the american railway union, about twenty-five of the executive officers of national and international labor unions affiliated with the american federation of labor met in conference in chicago to discuss the situation. debs appeared and urged a general strike by all labor organizations. but the conference decided that "it would be unwise and disastrous to the interests of labor to extend the strike any further than it had already gone," and advised the strikers to return to work. on july , the american railway union, through the mayor of chicago, offered the general managers' association to declare the strike off, provided the men should be restored to their former positions without prejudice, except in cases where they had been convicted of crime. but the association refused to deal with the union. the strike was already virtually beaten by the combined moral effect of the indictment of the leaders and of the arrival in chicago of united states troops, which president cleveland sent in spite of the protest of governor altgeld of illinois. the labor organizations were taught two important lessons. first, that nothing can be gained through revolutionary striking, for the government was sufficiently strong to cope with it; and second, that the employers had obtained a formidable ally in the courts.[ ] defeats in strikes, depression in trade, a rapidly falling labor market and court prosecutions were powerful allies of those socialistic and radical leaders inside the federation who aspired to convert it from a mere economic organization into an economic-political one and make it embark upon the sea of independent politics. the convention of is memorable in that it submitted to the consideration of affiliated unions a "political programme." the preamble to the "programme" recited that the english trade unions had recently launched upon independent politics "as auxiliary to their economic action." the eleven planks of the program demanded: compulsory education; the right of popular initiative in legislation; a legal eight-hour work-day; governmental inspection of mines and workshops; abolition of the sweating system; employers' liability laws; abolition of the contract system upon public work; municipal ownership of electric light, gas, street railway, and water systems; the nationalization of telegraphs, telephones, railroads, and mines; "the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution"; and the referendum upon all legislation. immediately after the convention of affiliated unions began to give their endorsement to the political program. not until comparatively late did any opposition make itself manifest. then it took the form of a demand by such conservative leaders as gompers, mcguire, and strasser, that plank , with its pledge in favor of "the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution," be stricken out. notwithstanding this, the majority of national trade unions endorsed the program. during the trade unions were active participants in politics. in november, , the _federationist_ gave a list of more than union members candidates for some elective office. only a half dozen of these, however, were elected. it was mainly to these local failures that gompers pointed in his presidential address at the convention of as an argument against the adoption of the political program by the federation. his attitude clearly foreshadowed the destiny of the program at the convention. the first attack was made upon the preamble, on the ground that the statement therein that the english trade unions had declared for independent political action was false. by a vote of to the convention struck out the preamble. upon motion of the typographical union, a substitute was adopted calling for the "abolition of the monopoly system of land holding and the substitution therefor of a title of occupancy and use only." some of the delegates seem to have interpreted this substitute as a declaration for the single tax; but the majority of those who voted in its favor probably acted upon the principle "anything to beat socialism." later the entire program was voted down. that sealed the fate of the move for an independent labor party. the american federation of labor was almost drawn into the whirlpool of partisan politics during the presidential campaign of . three successive conventions had declared in favor of the free coinage of silver; and now the democratic party had come out for free coinage. in this situation very many prominent trade union leaders declared publicly for bryan. president gompers, however, issued a warning to all affiliated unions to keep out of partisan politics. notwithstanding this secretary mcgraith, at the next convention of the federation, charged president gompers with acting in collusion with the democratic headquarters throughout the campaign in aid of bryan's candidacy. after a lengthy secret session the convention approved the conduct of gompers. free silver continued to be endorsed annually down to the convention of , when the return of industrial prosperity and rising prices put an end to it as a demand advocated by labor. the depressed nineties demonstrated conclusively that a new era had arrived. no longer was the labor movement a mere plaything of the alternating waves of prosperity and depression. formerly, as we saw, it had centered on economic or trade-union action during prosperity only to change abruptly to "panaceas" and politics with the descent of depression. now the movement, notwithstanding possible changes in membership, and persistent political leanings in some portions of it, as a whole for the first time became stable in purpose and action. trade unionism has won over politics. this victory was synchronous with the first successful working out of a national trade agreement and the institutionalization of trade unionism in a leading industry, namely stove molding. while one of the earliest stable trade agreements in a conspicuous trade covering a local field was a bricklayers' agreement in chicago in , the era of trade agreements really dates from the national system established in the stove foundry industry in . it is true also that the iron and steel workers had worked under a national trade agreement since . however, that trade was too exceptionally strong to be typical. the stove industry had early reached a high degree of development and organization. there had existed since the national association of stove manufacturers, an organization dealing with prices and embracing in its membership the largest stove manufacturers of the country. the stove foundrymen, therefore, unlike the manufacturers in practically all other industries at that time, controlled in a large measure their own market. furthermore, the product had been completely standardized and reduced to a piecework basis, and machinery had not taken the place of the molders' skill. it consequently was no mere accident that the stove industry was the first to develop a system of permanent industrial peace. but, on the other hand, this was not automatically established as soon as the favorable external conditions were provided. in reality, only after years of struggle, of strikes and lockouts, and after the two sides had fought each other "to a standstill," was the system finally installed. the eighties abounded in stove molders' strikes, and in the national union began to render effective aid. the stove founders' national defense association was formed in as an employers' association of stove manufacturers. the defense association aimed at a national labor policy; it was organized for "resistance against any unjust demands of their workmen, and such other purposes as may from time to time prove or appear to be necessary for the benefit of the members thereof as employers of labor." thus, after , the alignment was made national on both sides. the great battle was fought the next year. march , , the employes of the bridge and beach manufacturing company in st. louis struck for an advance in wages and the struggle at once became one between the international union and the national defense association. the st. louis company sent its patterns to foundries in other districts, but the union successfully prevented their use. this occasioned a series of strikes in the west and of lockouts in the east, affecting altogether about molders. it continued thus until june, when the st. louis patterns were recalled, the defense association having provided the company with a sufficient number of strike-breakers. each side was in a position to claim the victory for itself; so evenly matched were the opposing forces. during the next four years disputes in association plants were rare. in august , a strike took place in pittsburgh and, for the first time in the history of the industry, it was settled by a written trade agreement with the local union. this supported the idea of a national trade agreement between the two organizations. since the dispute of , negotiations with this object were from time to time conducted, the defense association invariably taking the initiative. finally, the national convention of the union in appointed a committee to meet a like committee of the defense association. the conference took place march , , and worked out a complete plan of organization for the stove molding industry. every year two committees of three members each, chosen respectively by the union and the association, were to meet in conference and to draw up general laws for the year. in case of a dispute arising in a locality, if the parties immediately concerned were unable to arrive at common terms, the chief executives of both organizations, the president of the union and the president of the association, were to step in and try to effect an adjustment. if, however, they, too, failed, a conference committee composed of an equal number of members from each side was to be called in and its findings were to be final. meanwhile the parties were enjoined from engaging in hostilities while the matter at dispute was being dealt with by the duly appointed authorities. each organization obligated itself to exercise "police authority" over its constituents, enforcing obedience to the agreement. the endorsement of the plan by both organizations was practically unanimous, and has continued in operation without interruption for thirty years until the present day. since the end of the nineties the trade agreement has become one of the most generally accepted principles and aspirations of the american labor movement. however, it is not to be understood that by accepting the principle of the trade agreement the labor movement has committed itself to unlimited arbitration of industrial disputes. the basic idea of the trade agreement is that of collective bargaining rather than arbitration. the two terms are not always distinguished, but the essential difference is that in the trade agreement proper no outside party intervenes to settle the dispute and make an award. the agreement is made by direct negotiation between the two organized groups and the sanction which each holds over the head of the other is the strike or lockout. if no agreement can be reached, the labor organization as well as the employers' association, insists on its right to refuse arbitration, whether it be "voluntary" or so-called "compulsory." the clarification of the conception of the trade agreement was perhaps the main achievement of the nineties. without the trade agreement the labor movement could hardly come to eschew "panaceas" and to reconstitute itself upon the basis of opportunism. the coming in of the trade agreement, whether national, sectional, or local, was also the chief factor in stabilizing the movement against industrial depressions. footnote: [ ] see below, - . chapter trade unionism and the courts while it was in the nineties that trade unionists first tasted the sweets of institutionalization in industry through "recognition" by employers, it was also during the later eighties and during the nineties that they experienced a revival of suspicion and hostility on the part of the courts and a renewal of legal restraints upon their activities, which were all the more discouraging since for a generation or more they had practically enjoyed non-interference from that quarter. it was at this period that the main legal weapons against trade unionism were forged and brought to a fine point in practical application. the history of the courts' attitude to trade unionism may therefore best be treated from the standpoint of the nineties. the subject of court interference was not altogether new in the eighties. we took occasion to point out the effect of court interference in labor disputes in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century and again in the thirties. mention was made also of the court's decision in the theiss boycott case in new york in , which proved a prime moving factor in launching the famous henry george campaign for mayor. and we gave due note to the role of court injunctions in the debs strike of and in other strikes. our present interest is, however, more in the court doctrines than in their effects: more concerned with the development of the legal thought underlying the policies of the courts than with the reactions of the labor movement to the policies themselves. the earliest case on record, namely the philadelphia shoemakers' strike case in ,[ ] charged two offences; one was a combination to raise wages, the other a combination to injure others; both offences were declared by the judge to be forbidden by the common law. to the public at large the prosecution seemed to rest solely upon the charge that the journeymen combined to raise wages. the defense took advantage of this and tried to make use of it for its own purposes. the condemnation of the journeymen on this ground gave rise to a vehement protest on the part of the journeymen themselves and their friends. it was pointed out that the journeymen were convicted for acts which are considered lawful when done by masters or merchants. therefore when the next conspiracy case in new york in was decided, the court's charge to the jury was very different. nothing was said about the illegality of the combinations to raise wages; on the contrary, the jury was instructed that this was not the question at issue. the issue was stated to be whether the defendants had combined to secure an increase in their wages by unlawful means. to the question what means were unlawful, in this case the answer was given in general terms, namely that "coercive and arbitrary" means are unlawful. the fines imposed upon the defendants were only nominal. a third notable case of the group, namely the pittsburgh case in , grew out of a strike for higher wages, as did the preceding cases. the charges were the same as in those and the judge took the identical view that was taken by the court in the new york case. however, he explained more fully the meaning of "coercive and arbitrary" action. "where diverse persons," he said, "confederate together by direct means to impoverish or prejudice a third person, or to do acts prejudicial to the community," they are engaged in an unlawful conspiracy. concretely, it is unlawful to "conspire to compel an employer to hire a certain description of persons," or to "conspire to prevent a man from freely exercising his trade in a particular place," or to "conspire to compel men to become members of a particular society, or to contribute toward it," or when persons "conspire to compel men to work at certain prices." thus it was the effort of the shoemakers' society to secure a closed shop which fell chiefly under the condemnation of the court. the counsel for the defense argued in this case that whatever is lawful for one individual is lawful also for a combination of individuals. the court, however, rejected the arguments on the ground that there was a basic difference between an individual doing a thing and a combination of individuals doing the same thing. the doctrine of conspiracy was thus given a clear and unequivocal definition. another noteworthy feature of the pittsburgh case was the emphasis given to the idea that the defendants' conduct was harmful to the public. the judge condemned the defendants because they tended "to create a monopoly or to restrain the entire freedom of the trade." what a municipality is not allowed to do, he argued, a private association of individuals must not be allowed to do. of the group of cases which grew out of the revival of trade union activity in the twenties, the first, a case against philadelphia master shoemakers, was decided in , and the judge held that it was lawful for the masters, who had recently been forced by employes to a wage increase, to combine in order to restore wages to their "natural level." but he also held that had the employers combined to depress wages of journeymen below the level fixed by free competition, it would have been criminal. another pennsylvania case resulted from a strike by philadelphia tailors in to secure the reinstatement of six discharged members. as in previous cases the court rejected the plea that a combination to raise wages was illegal, and directed the attention of the jury to the question of intimidation and coercion, especially as it affected third parties. the defendants were found guilty. in a third, a new york hatters' case of , the charge of combining to raise wages was entirely absent from the indictment. the issue turned squarely on the question of conspiring to injure others by coercion and intimidation. the hatters were adjudged guilty of combining to deprive a non-union workman of his livelihood. the revival of trade unionism in the middle of the thirties brought in, as we saw, another crop of court cases. in new york state had made "conspiracy to commit any act injurious to public morals or to trade or commerce" a statutory offence, thus reenforcing the existing common law. in the shoemakers of geneva struck to enforce the closed shop against a workman who persisted in working below the union rate. the indictment went no further than charging this offence. the journeymen were convicted in a lower court and appealed to the supreme court of the state. chief justice savage, in his decision condemning the journeymen, broadened the charge to include a conspiracy to raise wages and condemned both as "injurious to trade or commerce" and thus expressly covered by statute. the far-reaching effects of this decision came clearly to light in a tailor's case the next year. the journeymen were charged with practising intimidation and violence, while picketing their employers' shops during a prolonged strike against a reduction in wages. judge edwards, the trial judge, in his charge to the jury, stigmatized the tailors' society as an illegal combination, largely basing himself upon judge savage's decision. the jury handed in a verdict of guilty, but recommended mercy. the judge fined the president of the society $ , one journeyman $ , and the others $ each. the fines were immediately paid with the aid of a collection taken up in court. the decisions produced a violent reaction among the workingmen. they held a mass-meeting in city hall park, with an estimated attendance of , , burned judge savage and judge edwards in effigy, and resolved to call a state convention to form a workingmen's party. so loud, indeed, was the cry that justice had been thwarted that juries were doubtless influenced by it. two cases came up soon after the tailors' case, the hudson, new york, shoemakers' in june and the philadelphia plasterers' in july . in both the juries found a verdict of not guilty. of all journeymen indicted during this period the hudson shoemakers had been the most audacious ones in enforcing the closed shop. they not only refused to work for employers who hired non-society men, but fined them as well; yet they were acquitted. finally six years later, in , long after the offending trade societies had gone out of existence under the stress of unemployment and depression, came the famous decision in the massachusetts case of commonwealth _v._ hunt. this was a shoemakers' case and arose out of a strike. the decision in the lower court was adverse to the defendants. however, it was reversed by the supreme judicial court of massachusetts. the decision, written by chief justice shaw, is notable in that it holds trade unions to be legal organizations. in the earlier cases it was never in so many words held that trade unions were unlawful, but in all of them there were suggestions to this effect. now it was recognized that trade unions are _per se_ lawful organizations and, though men may band themselves together to effect a criminal object under the disguise of a trade union, such a purpose is not to be assumed without positive evidence. on the contrary, the court said that "when an association is formed for purposes actually innocent, and afterwards its powers are abused by those who have the control and management of it to purposes of oppression and injustice, it will be criminal in those who misuse it, or give consent thereto, but not in other members of the association." this doctrine that workingmen may lawfully organize trade unions has since commonwealth _v._ hunt been adopted in nearly every case. the other doctrine which justice shaw advanced in this case has been less generally accepted. it was that the members of a union may procure the discharge of non-members through strikes for this purpose against their employers. this is the essence of the question of the closed shop; and commonwealth _v._ hunt goes the full length of regarding strikes for the closed shop as legal. justice shaw said that there is nothing unlawful about such strikes, if they are conducted in a peaceable manner. this was much in advance of the position which is taken by many courts upon this question even at the present day. after commonwealth _v._ hunt came a forty years' lull in the courts' application of the doctrine of conspiracy to trade unions. in fact so secure did trade unionists feel from court attacks that in the seventies and early eighties their leaders advocated the legal incorporation of trade unions. the desire expressed for incorporation is of extreme interest compared with the opposite attitude of the present day. the motive behind it then was more than the usual one of securing protection for trade union funds against embezzlement by officers. a full enumeration of other motives can be obtained from the testimony of the labor leaders before the senate committee on education and labor in . mcguire, the national secretary of the brotherhood of carpenters and joiners, argued before the committee for a national incorporation law mainly for the reason that such a law passed by congress would remove trade unions from the operation of the conspiracy laws that still existed though in a dormant state on the statute books of a number of slates, notably new york and pennsylvania. he pleaded that "if it (congress) had not the power, it shall assume the power; and, if necessary, amend the constitution to do it." adolph strasser of the cigar makers raised the point of protection for union funds and gave as a second reason that it "will give our organization more stability, and in that manner we shall be able to avoid strikes by perhaps settling with our employers, when otherwise we should be unable to do so, because when our employers know that we are to be legally recognized that will exercise such moral force upon them that they cannot avoid recognizing us themselves." w.h. foster, the secretary of the legislative committee of the federation of organized trades and labor unions, stated that in ohio the law provided for incorporation at a slight cost, but he wanted a national law to "legalize arbitration," by which he meant that "when a question of dispute arose between the employers and the employed, instead of having it as now, when the one often refuses to even acknowledge or discuss the question with the other, if they were required to submit the question to arbitration, or to meet on the same level before an impartial tribunal, there is no doubt but what the result would be more in our favor than it is now, when very often public opinion cannot hear our cause." he, however, did not desire to have compulsory arbitration, but merely compulsory dealing with the union, or compulsory investigation by an impartial body, both parties to remain free to accept the award, provided, however, "that once they do agree the agreement shall remain in force for a fixed period." like foster, john jarrett, the president of the amalgamated association of iron and steel workers, argued for an incorporation law before the committee solely for its effect upon conciliation and arbitration. he, too, was opposed to compulsory arbitration, but he showed that he had thought out the point less clearly than foster. the young and struggling trade unions of the early eighties saw only the good side of incorporation without its pitfalls; their subsequent experience with courts converted them from exponents into ardent opponents of incorporation and of what foster termed "legalized arbitration." during the eighties there was much legislation applicable to labor disputes. the first laws against boycotting and blacklisting and the first laws which prohibited discrimination against members who belonged to a union were passed during this decade. at this time also were passed the first laws to promote voluntary arbitration and most of the laws which allowed unions to incorporate. only in new york and maryland were the conspiracy laws repealed. four states enacted such laws and many states passed laws against intimidation. statutes, however, played at that time, as they do now, but a secondary role. the only statute which proved of much importance was the sherman anti-trust act. when congress passed this act in , few people thought it had application to labor unions. in - , as we shall see, however, this act was successfully invoked in several labor controversies, notably in the debs case. the bitterness of the industrial struggle during the eighties made it inevitable that the labor movement should acquire an extensive police and court record. it was during that decade that charges like "inciting to riot," "obstructing the streets," "intimidation," and "trespass" were first extensively used in connection with labor disputes. convictions were frequent and penalties often severe. what attitude the courts at that time took toward labor violence was shown most strikingly, even if in too extreme a form to be entirely typical, in the case of the chicago anarchists.[ ] but the significance of the eighties in the development of relations of the courts to organized labor came not from these cases which were, after all, nothing but ordinary police cases magnified to an unusual degree by the intensity of the industrial struggle and by the excited state of public opinion, but in the new lease of life to the doctrine of conspiracy as affecting labor disputes. during the eighties and nineties there seemed to have been more conspiracy cases than during all the rest of the century. it was especially in and that organized labor found court interference a factor. at this time, as we saw, there was also passed voluminous state legislation strengthening the application of the common law doctrine of conspiracy to labor disputes. the conviction of the new york boycotters in and many similar convictions, though less widely known, of participants in strikes and boycotts were obtained upon this ground. where the eighties witnessed a revolution was in a totally new use made of the doctrine of conspiracy by the courts when they began to issue injunctions in labor cases. injunctions were an old remedy, but not until the eighties did they figure in the struggles between labor and capital. in england an injunction was issued in a labor dispute as early as ;[ ] but this case was not noticed in the united states and had nothing whatever to do with the use of injunctions in this country. when and where the first labor injunction was issued in the united states is not known. an injunction was applied for in a new york case as early as but was denied.[ ] an injunction was granted in iowa in , but not until the southwest railway strike in were injunctions used extensively. by the public had yet heard little of injunctions in connection with labor disputes, but such use was already fortified by numerous precedents. the first injunctions that attained wide publicity were those issued by federal courts during the strike of engineers against the chicago, burlington, & quincy railroad[ ] in and during the railway strikes of the early nineties. justification for these injunctions was found in the provisions of the interstate commerce act and the sherman anti-trust act. often the state courts used these federal cases as precedents, in disregard of the fact that there the issuance of injunctions was based upon special statutes. in other cases the more logical course was followed of justifying the issuance of injunctions upon grounds of equity. but most of the acts which the courts enjoined strikers from doing were already prohibited by the criminal laws. hence organized labor objected that these injunctions violated the old principle that equity will not interfere to prevent crime. no such difficulties arose when the issuance of injunctions was justified as a measure for the protection of property. in the debs case,[ ] when the supreme court of the united states passed upon the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes, it had recourse to this theory. but the theory of protection to property also presented some difficulties. the problem was to establish the principle of irreparable injury to the complainant's property. this was a simple matter when the strikers were guilty of trespass, arson, or sabotage. then they damaged the complainant's physical property and, since they were usually men against whom judgments are worthless, any injury they might do was irreparable. but these were exceptional cases. usually injunctions were sought to prevent not violence, but strikes, picketing, or boycotting. what is threatened by strikes and picketing is not the employer's physical property, but the relations he has established as an employer of labor, summed up in his expectancy of retaining the services of old employes and of obtaining new ones. boycotting, obviously, has no connection with acts of violence against physical property, but is designed merely to undermine the profitable relations which the employer had developed with his customers. these expectancies are advantages enjoyed by established businesses over new competitors and are usually transferable and have market value. for these reasons they are now recognized as property in the law of good-will and unfair competition for customers, having been first formulated about the middle of the nineteenth century. the first case which recognized these expectancies of a labor market was walker _v._ cronin,[ ] decided by the massachusetts supreme judicial court in . it held that the plaintiff was entitled to recover damages from the defendants, certain union officials, because they had induced his employes, who were free to quit at will, to leave his employ and had also been instrumental in preventing him from getting new employes. but as yet these expectancies were not considered property in the full sense of the word. a transitional case is that of brace bros. _v._ evans in .[ ] in that case an injunction against a boycott was justified on the ground that the value of the complainant's physical property was being destroyed when the market was cut off. here the expectancies based upon relations which customers and employes were thought of as giving value to the physical property, but they were not yet recognized as a distinct asset which in itself justifies the issuance of injunctions. this next step was taken in the barr[ ] case in new jersey in . since then there have been frequent statements in labor injunction cases to the effect that both the expectancies based upon the merchant-function and the expectancies based upon the employer-function are property. but the recognition of "probable expectancies" as property was not in itself sufficient to complete the chain of reasoning that justifies injunctions in labor disputes. it is well established that no recovery can be had for losses due to the exercise by others of that which they have a lawful right to do. hence the employers were obliged to charge that the strikes and boycotts were undertaken in pursuance of an unlawful conspiracy. thus the old conspiracy doctrine was combined with the new theory, and "malicious" interference with "probable expectancies" was held unlawful. earlier conspiracy had been thought of as a criminal offence, now it was primarily a civil wrong. the emphasis had been upon the danger to the public, now it was the destruction of the employer's business. occasionally the court went so far as to say that all interference with the business of employers is unlawful. the better view developed was that interference is _prima facie_ unlawful but may be justified. but even this view placed the burden of proof upon the workingmen. it actually meant that the court opened for itself the way for holding the conduct of the workingmen to be lawful only when it sympathized with their demands. during the eighties, despite the far-reaching development of legal theories on labor disputes, the issuance of injunctions was merely sporadic, but a veritable crop came up during - . only the best-known injunctions can be here noted. the injunctions issued in the course of the southwest railway strike in and the burlington strike in have already received mention. an injunction was also issued by a federal court during a miners' strike at coeur d'alène, idaho, in .[ ] a famous injunction was the one of judges taft and rickes in , which directed the engineers, who were employed by connecting railways, to handle the cars of the ann arbor and michigan railway, whose engineers were on strike.[ ] this order elicited much criticism because it came close to requiring men to work against their will. this was followed by the injunction of judge jenkins in the northern pacific case, which directly prohibited the quitting of work.[ ] from this injunction the defendants took an appeal, with the result that in arthur _v._ oakes[ ] it was once for all established that the quitting of work may not be enjoined. during the pullman strike numerous injunctions, most sweeping in character, were issued by the federal courts upon the initiative of the department of justice. under the injunction which was issued in chicago arose the famous contempt case against eugene v. debs,[ ] which was carried to the supreme court of the united states. the decision of the court in this case is notable, because it covered the main points of doubt above mentioned and placed the use of injunctions in labor disputes upon a firm legal basis. another famous decision of the supreme court growing out of the railway strikes of the early nineties was in the lennon case[ ] in . therein the court held that all persons who have actual notice of the issuance of an injunction are bound to obey its terms, whether they were mentioned by name or not; in other words, the courts had evolved the "blanket injunction." at the end of the nineties, the labor movement, enriched on the one side by the lessons of the past and by the possession of a concrete goal in the trade agreement, but pressed on the other side by a new form of legal attack and by the growing consolidation of industry, started upon a career of new power but faced at the same time new difficulties. footnotes: [ ] see above, . [ ] see above, - . [ ] springhead spinning co. _v._ riley, l.r. e. ( ). [ ] johnson harvester co. _v._ meinhardt, how. pr. . [ ] chicago, burlington, etc., r.r. co. _v._ union pacific r.r. co., u.s. dist. ct., d. neb. ( ). [ ] in re debs, u.s. ( ). [ ] mass. ( ). [ ] pa. co. ct. ( ). [ ] barr _v._ trades' council, n.j.e. ( ). [ ] coeur d'alène mining co. _v._ miners' union, fed. ( ). [ ] toledo, etc. co. _v._ penn. co., fed. ( ). [ ] farmers' loan and trust co. _v._ n.p.r. co., fed. ( ). [ ] fed. ( ). [ ] in re debs, u.s. ( ). [ ] in re lennon, u.s. ( ). part ii the larger career of unionism chapter partial recognition and new difficulties, - when, in , industrial prosperity returned, there came with it a rapid expansion of labor organization. at no time in its history, prior to the world war, not excepting the great upheaval in the eighties, did labor organizations make such important gains as during the following five years. true, in none of these years did the labor movement add over half a million members as in the memorable year of ; nevertheless, from the standpoint of permanence, the upheaval during the eighties can scarcely be classed with the one which began in the late nineties. during the membership of the american federation of labor remained practically stationary, but during it increased by about , (to about , ); in , it increased by , ; in , by , ; in , by , ; in , by , ; in , by , , bringing the total to , , . in a backward tide set in; and the membership decreased by nearly , during that year. it remained practically stationary until , when the upward movement was resumed, finally bringing the membership to near the two million mark, to , , , in . if we include organizations unaffiliated with the federation, among them the bricklayers[ ] and the four railway brotherhoods, with about , members, the union membership for will be brought near a total of , , . a better index of progress is the proportion of organized workers to organizable workers. two such estimates have been made. professor george e. barnett figures the organizable workers in at , , ; in at , , . on this basis wage earners were . percent organized in and percent in .[ ] leo wolman submits more detailed figures for . excluding employers, the salaried group, agricultural and clerical workers, persons engaged in personal or domestic service, and those below twenty years of age (unorganizable workers), the organizable total was , , . with an estimated trade union strength of , , for the percentage of the organized was . .[ ] excluding only employers and salaried persons, his percentage was . , which compares closely with professor barnett's. of greater significance are wolman's figures for organization by industries. these computations show that in the breweries had . percent, organized, printing and book binding . percent, mining . percent, transportation . percent, clothing . percent, building trades . percent, iron and steel . percent, metal . percent, and textile . percent.[ ] by separate occupations, railway conductors, brakemen, and locomotive engineers were from - percent organized; printers, locomotive firemen, molders and plasterers, from - percent; bakers, carpenters, plumbers, from - percent organized.[ ] accompanying the numerical growth of labor organizations was an extension of organization into heretofore untouched trades as well as a branching out into new geographical regions, the south and the west. on the whole, however, though the federation was not unmindful of the unskilled, still, during the fifteen years after it brought into its fold principally the upper strata of semi-skilled labor. down to the "boom" period brought on by the world war, the federation did not comprise to any great extent either the totally unskilled, or the partially skilled foreign-speaking workmen, with the exception of the miners and the clothing workers. in other words, those below the level of the skilled trades, which did gain admittance, were principally the same elements which had asserted their claim to organization during the stormy period of the knights of labor.[ ] the new accretions to the american wage-earning class since the eighties, the east and south europeans, on the one hand, and the ever-growing contingent of "floaters" of native and north and west european stock, on the other hand, were still largely outside the organization. the years of prosperity brought an intensified activity of the trade unions on a scale hitherto unknown. wages were raised and hours reduced all along the line. the new strength of the trade unions received a brilliant test during the hard times following the financial panic of october , when they successfully fought wage reductions. as good a test is found in the conquest of the shorter day. by the eight-hour day was the rule in the building trades, in granite cutting and in bituminous coal mining. the most spectacular and costly eight-hour fight was waged by the printers. in the later eighties and early nineties, the typographical union had endeavored to establish a nine-hour day in the printing offices. this was given a setback by the introduction of the linotype machine during the period of depression, - . in spite of this obstacle, however, the typographical union held its ground. adopting the policy that only journeymen printers must operate the linotype machines, the union was able to meet the situation. and, furthermore, in , through agreement with the united typothetæ of america, the national association of employers in book and job printing, the union was able to gain the nine-hour day in substantially all book and job offices. in the union demanded the eight-hour day in all printing offices to become effective january , . to gain an advantage over the union, the united typothetæ, late in the summer of , locked out all its union men. this at once precipitated a strike for the eight-hour day. the american federation of labor levied a special assessment on all its members in aid of the strikers. by the typographical union won its demand all along the line, although at a tremendous cost of money running into several million dollars, and in the united typothetæ formally conceded the eight-hour day. another proof of trade union progress is found in the spread of trade agreements. the idea of a joint partnership of organized labor and organized capital in the management of industry, which, ever since the fifties, had been struggling for acceptance, finally showed definite signs of coming to be materialized. ( ) _the miners_ in no other industry has a union's struggle for "recognition" offered a richer and more instructive picture of the birth of the new order with its difficulties as well as its promises than in coal mining. faced in the anthracite field[ ] by a small and well knitted group of employers, generally considered a "trust," and by a no less difficult situation in bituminous mining due to cut-throat competition among the mine operators, the united mine workers have succeeded in a space of fifteen years in unionizing the one as well as the other; while at the same time successfully and progressively solving the gigantic internal problem of welding a polyglot mass of workers into a well disciplined and obedient army. the miners' union attained its first successes in the so-called central bituminous competitive field, including western pennsylvania, west virginia, ohio, indiana, michigan, and illinois. in this field a beginning had been made in when the coal operators and the union entered into a collective agreement. however, its scope was practically confined to ohio and even that limited agreement went under in .[ ] with the breakdown of this agreement, the membership dwindled so that by the time of a general strike in , the total paid-up membership was barely , . this strike was undertaken to restore the wage-scale of , but during the ensuing years of depression wages were cut still further.[ ] the turn came as suddenly as it was spectacular. in , with a membership which had dropped to , and of which were in ohio and with an empty treasury, the united mine workers called a general strike trusting to a rising market and to an awakened spirit of solidarity in the majority of the unorganized after four years of unemployment and distress. in fact the leaders had not miscalculated. one hundred thousand or more coal miners obeyed the order to go on a strike. in illinois the union had but a handful of members when the strike started, but the miners struck to a man. the tie-up was practically complete except in west virginia. that state had early become recognized as the weakest spot in the miners' union's armor. notwithstanding the american federation of labor threw almost its entire force of organizers into that limited area, which was then only beginning to assume its present day importance in the coal mining industry, barely one-third of the miners were induced to strike. a contributing factor was a more energetic interference from the courts than in other states. all marching upon the highways and all assemblages of the strikers in large gatherings were forbidden by injunctions. on one occasion more than a score of men were sentenced to jail for contempt of court by federal judge goff. the handicap in west virginia was offset by sympathy and aid from other quarters. many unions throughout the country and even the general public sent the striking miners financial aid. in illinois governor john r. tanner refused the requests for militia made by several sheriffs. the general strike of ended in the central competitive field after a twelve-weeks' struggle. the settlement was an unqualified victory for the union. it conceded the miners a percent increase in wages, the establishment of the eight-hour day, the abolition of company stores, semi-monthly payments, and a restoration of the system of fixing interstate wage rates in annual joint conferences with the operators, which meant official recognition of the united mine workers. the operators in west virginia, however, refused to come in. the first of these interstate conferences was held in january, , at which the miners were conceded a further increase in wages. in addition, the agreement, which was to run for two years, established for illinois the run-of-mine[ ] system of payment, while the size of the screens of other states was regulated; and it also conceded the miners the check-off system[ ] in every district, save that of western pennsylvania.[ ] such a comprehensive victory would not have been possible had it not been for the upward trend which coal prices had taken. but great as was the union's newly discovered power, it was spread most unevenly over the central competitive field. its firmest grip was in illinois. the well-filled treasury of the illinois district has many times been called upon for large contributions or loans, to enable the union to establish itself in some other field. the weakest hold of the united mine workers has been in west virginia. at the end of the general strike of , the west virginia membership was only about . moreover, a further spread of the organization met with unusual obstacles. a large percentage of the miners of west virginia are negroes or white mountaineers. these have proven more difficult to organize than recent southern and eastern european immigrants, who formed the majority in the other districts. and yet west virginia as a growing mining state soon assumed a high strategic importance. a lower wage scale, the better quality of its coal, and a comparative freedom from strikes have made west virginia a formidable competitor of the other districts in the central competitive field. consequently west virginia operators have been able to operate their mines more days during the year than elsewhere; and despite the lower rates per ton, the west virginia miners have earned but little less annually than union miners in other states. but above all the united mine workers have been handicapped in west virginia as nowhere else by court interference in strikes and in campaigns of organization. in a temporary injunction was granted at the behest of the hitchman coal and coke company, a west virginia concern, restraining union organizers from attempting to organize employes who signed agreements not to join the united mine workers while in the employ of the company. the injunction was made permanent in . the decree of the district court was reversed by the circuit court of appeals in , but was sustained by the united states supreme court in march .[ ] recently the united states steel corporation became a dominant factor in west virginia through its ownership of mines and lent additional strength to the already strong anti-union determination of the employers. very early the united mine workers established a reputation for strict adherence to agreements made. this faithfulness to a pledged word, which justified itself even from the standpoint of selfish motive, in as much as it gained for the union public sympathy, was urged upon all occasions by john mitchell, the national president of the union. the first test came in , when coal prices soared up rapidly after the joint conference had adjourned. although they might have won higher wages had they struck, the miners observed their contracts. a more severe test came in during the great anthracite strike.[ ] a special union convention was then held to consider whether the bituminous miners should be called out in sympathy with the hard pressed striking miners in the anthracite field. by a large majority, however, the convention voted not to strike in violation of the agreements made with the operators. the union again gave proof of statesmanly self-control when, in , taking into account the depressed condition of industry, it accepted without a strike a reduction in wages in the central competitive field. however, as against the miners' conduct in these situations must be reckoned the many local strikes or "stoppages" in violation of agreements. the difficulty was that the machinery for the adjustment of local grievances was too cumbersome. in the trade agreement system encountered a new difficulty in the friction which developed between the operators of the several competitive districts. on the surface, the source of the friction was the attempt made by the ohio and illinois operators to organize a national coal operators' association to take the place of the several autonomous district organizations. the pittsburgh operators, however, objected. they preferred the existing system of agreements under which each district organization possessed a veto power, since then they could keep the advantage over their competitors in ohio and indiana with which they had started under the original agreement of . the miners in this emergency threw their power against the national operators' association. a suspension throughout most districts of the central competitive field followed. in the end, the miners won an increase in wages, but the interstate agreement system was suspended, giving place to separate agreements for each district. in the situation of was repeated. this time the illinois operators refused to attend the interstate conference on the ground that the interstate agreement severely handicapped illinois. as said before, ever since payment in illinois has been upon the run-of-mine basis; whereas in all other states of the central competitive field the miners were paid for screened coal only. with the operators of each state having one vote in the joint conference, it can be understood why the handicap against illinois continued. theoretically, of course, the illinois operators might have voted against the acceptance of any agreement which gave an advantage to other states; however, against this weighed the fact that the union was strongest in illinois. the illinois operators, hence, preferred to deal separately with the united mine workers. accordingly, an interstate agreement was drawn up, applying only to indiana, ohio, and pennsylvania. in , the illinois operators again refused to enter the interstate conference, but this time the united mine workers insisted upon a return to the interstate agreement system of . on april , , operations were suspended throughout the central competitive field. by july agreements had been secured in every state save illinois, the latter state holding out until september. this long struggle in illinois was the first real test of strength between the operators and the miners since . the miners' victory made it inevitable that the illinois operators should eventually reenter the interstate conference. in , after repeated conferences, the net result was the restoration of the interstate agreement as it existed before . the special burden of which the illinois operators had been complaining was not removed; yet they were compelled by the union to remain a party to the interstate agreement. the union justified its special treatment of the operators in illinois on the ground that the run-of-mine rates were percent below the screened coal rates, thus compensating them amply for the "slack" for which they had to pay under this system. the federal report on "restriction of output" of substantiated the union's contention. ultimately, the united mine workers unquestionably hoped to establish the run-of-mine system throughout the central competitive field. the union, incidentally to its policy of protecting the miners, has considerably affected the market or business structure of the industry. an outstanding policy of the union has been to equalize competitive costs over the entire area of a market by means of a system of grading tonnage rates paid to the miner, whereby competitive advantages of location, thickness of vein, and the like were absorbed in higher labor costs. this doubtless tended to eliminate cut-throat competition and thus stabilize the industry. on the other hand, it may have hindered the process of elimination of unprofitable mines, and therefore may be in some measure responsible for the present-day overdevelopment in the bituminous mining industry, which results in periodic unemployment and in idle mines. in the anthracite coal field in eastern pennsylvania the difficulties met by the united mine workers were at first far greater than in the bituminous branch of the industry. first, the working population was nearly all foreign-speaking, and the union thus lacked the fulcrum which it found in illinois with its large proportion of english-speaking miners accustomed to organization and to carrying on a common purpose. secondly, the employers, instead of being numerous and united only for joint dealing with labor, as in bituminous mining, were few in number besides being cemented together by a common selling policy on top of a common labor policy. in consequence, the union encountered a stone wall of opposition, which its loose ranks found for many years well-nigh impossible to overcome. during the general strike of the united mine workers made a beginning in organizing the anthracite miners. in september , they called a general strike. although at that time the union had only members in this region, the strike order was obeyed by over , miners; and within a few weeks the strike became truly general. probably the union could not have won if it had to rely solely on economic strength. however, the impending presidential election led to an interference by senator mark hanna, president mckinley's campaign manager. through him president john mitchell of the united mine workers was informed that the operators would abolish the objectionable sliding scale system of wage payments, increase rates percent and agree to meet committees of their employes for the adjustment of grievances. this, however, did not carry a formal recognition of the union; it was not a trade agreement but merely an unwritten understanding. a part of the same understanding was that the terms which had been agreed upon should remain in force until april, . at its expiration the identical terms were renewed for another year, while the negotiations bore the same informal character. during the essential instability of the arrangement led to sharp friction. the miners claimed that many operators violated the unwritten agreement. the operators, on their part, charged that the union was using every means for practically enforcing the closed shop, which was not granted in the understanding. in the early months of the miners presented demands for a reduction of the hours of labor from to , for a twenty percent increase in wages, for payment according to the weight of coal mined, and for the recognition of the union. the operators refused to negotiate, and on may the famous anthracite strike of began. it is unnecessary to detail the events of the anthracite strike. no other strike is better known and remembered. more than , miners stood out for approximately five months. the strike was financed by a levy of one dollar per week upon all employed miners in the country, which yielded over $ , , . in addition several hundred thousand dollars came in from other trade unions and from the public generally. in october, when the country was facing a most serious coal famine, president roosevelt took a hand. he called in the presidents of the anthracite railroads and the leading union officials for a conference in the white house and urged arbitration. at first he met with rebuff from the operators, but shortly afterward, with the aid of friendly pressure from new york financiers, the operators consented to accept the award of a commission to be appointed by himself. this was the well-known anthracite coal strike commission. its appointment terminated the strike. not until more than a half year later, however, was the award of the commission made. it conceded the miners a percent increase in wages, the eight and nine-hour day, and the privilege of having a union check-weighman at the scale where the coal sent up in cars by the miners is weighed. recognition was not accorded the union, except that it was required to bear one-half of the expense connected with the maintenance of a joint arbitration board created by the commission. when this award was announced there was much dissatisfaction with it among the miners. president mitchell, however, put forth every effort to have the union accept the award. upon a referendum vote the miners accepted his view. the anthracite coal strike of was doubtless the most important single event in the history of american trade unionism until that time and has since scarcely been surpassed. to be sure, events like the great railway strike of and the chicago anarchist bomb and trial in - had equally forced the labor question into public attention. what distinguished the anthracite coal strike, however, was that for the first time a labor organization tied up for months a strategic industry and caused wide suffering and discomfort to the public without being condemned as a revolutionary menace to the existing social order calling for suppression by the government; it was, on the contrary, adjudged a force within the preserves of orderly society and entitled to public sympathy. the public identified the anthracite employers with the trust movement, which was then new and seemingly bent upon uprooting the traditional free american social order; by contrast, the striking miners appeared almost as champions of old america. a strong contributory factor was the clumsy tactics of the employers who played into the hands of the leaders of the miners. the latter, especially john mitchell, conducted their case with great skill. yet the award of the commission fell considerably short of what the union and its sympathizers outside the ranks of labor hoped for. for by refusing to grant formal recognition, the commission failed to constitute unionism into a publicly recognized agency in the management of industry and declared by implication that the role of unionism ended with a presentation of grievances and complaints. for ten years after the strike of the union failed to develop the strength in the anthracite field which many believed would follow. certain proof of the weakness of the union is furnished by the fact that the wage-scale in that field remained stationary until despite a rising cost of living. the wages of the anthracite miners in were slightly higher than in , because coal prices had increased and the anthracite coal strike commission had reestablished a sliding scale system of tonnage rates. a great weakness, while the union still struggled for existence, was the lack of the "check-off." membership would swell immediately before the expiration of the agreement but diminish with restoration of quiet. with no immediate outlook for a strike the slav and italian miners refused to pay union dues. the original award was to be in force until april , . in june, , the union membership was less than , . but by april , , one-half of the miners were in the union. a month's suspension of operations followed. early in may the union and the operators reached an agreement to leave the award of the anthracite coal strike commission in force for another three years. the following three years brought a duplication of the developments of - . again membership fell off only to return in the spring of . again the union demanded formal recognition, and again it was refused. again the original award was extended for three more years. in the winter of , when the time for renewing the agreement again drew near, the entire membership in the three anthracite districts was slightly above , . nevertheless, the union demanded a twenty percent raise, a complete recognition of the union, the check-off, and yearly agreements, in addition to a more expeditious system of settling local grievances to replace the slow and cumbersome joint arbitration boards provided by the award of the commission. a strike of , anthracite miners followed on april , , during which the operators made no attempt to run their mines. the strike ended within a month on the basis of the abolition of the sliding scale, a wage increase of approximately percent, and a revision of the arbitration machinery in local disputes. this was coupled with a somewhat larger degree of recognition, but by no means a complete recognition. nor was the check-off system granted. strangest of all, the agreement called for a four-year contract, as against a one-year contract originally demanded by the union. in spite of the opposition of local leaders, the miners accepted the agreement. president white's chief plea for acceptance was the need to rebuild the union before anything ambitious could be attempted. after the union entered upon the work of organization in earnest. in the following two years the membership was more than quadrupled. with the stopping of immigration due to the european war, the power of the union was greatly increased. consequently, in , when the agreement was renewed, the miners were accorded not only a substantial wage increase and the eight-hour day but also full recognition. the united mine workers have thus at last succeeded in wresting a share of industrial control from one of the strongest capitalistic powers of the country; while demonstrating beyond doubt that, with intelligent preparation and with sympathetic treatment, the polyglot immigrant masses from southern and eastern europe, long thought to be impervious to the idea of labor organization, can be changed into reliable material for unionism. the growth of the union in general is shown by the following figures. in it was , ; in , , ; in , , ; in , , ; and in , , .[ ] ( ) _the railway men_ the railway men are divided into three groups. one group comprises the brotherhood of locomotive engineers, the order of railroad conductors, the brotherhood of firemen and enginemen, and the brotherhood of railroad trainmen. these are the oldest and strongest railway men's organizations and do not belong to the american federation of labor. a second group are the shopmen, comprising the international association of machinists; the international brotherhood of blacksmiths, drop forgers, and helpers; the brotherhood of railway carmen of america; the amalgamated sheet metal workers' international alliance; the brotherhood of boilermakers and iron ship builders and helpers of america; the international brotherhood of electrical workers; and the international brotherhood of stationary firemen and oilers. a third and more miscellaneous group are the brotherhood of railway clerks, the order of railway telegraphers, the switchmen's union of north america, the international brotherhood of maintenance of way employes and railroad shop laborers, and the brotherhood of railway signalmen. the organizations comprised in the latter two groups belong to the american federation of labor. for the period from to the outbreak of the war, the organizations, popularly known as the "brotherhoods," namely, those of the engineers, conductors, firemen, and trainmen, are of outstanding importance. the brotherhoods were unique among american labor organizations in that for many years they practically reproduced in most of their features the sort of unionism typified by the great "amalgamated" unions of the fifties and sixties in england.[ ] like these unions the brotherhoods stressed mutual insurance and benefits and discouraged when they did not actually prohibit striking. it should, however, be added that the emphasis on insurance was due not to "philosophy," but to the practical consideration that, owing to the extra hazardous nature of their occupations, the men could get no insurance protection from ordinary commercial insurance companies. by the end of the eighties the brotherhoods began to press energetically for improvements in employment conditions and found the railways not disinclined to grant their demands in a measure. this was due in great measure to the strategic position of these trades, which have it in their power completely to tie up the industry when on strike, causing enormous losses to the carriers.[ ] accordingly, they were granted wages which fairly placed them among the lower professional groups in society as well as other privileges, notably "seniority" in promotion, that is promotion based on length of service and not on a free selection by the officials. seniority was all the more important since the train personnel service is so organized that each employe will pass several times in the regular course of his career from a lower to a higher rung on the industrial ladder.[ ] for instance, a typical passenger train engineer starts as fireman on a freight train, advances to a fireman on a passenger train, then to engineer on a freight train, and finally to engineer on a passenger train. a similar sequence is arranged in advancing from brakeman to conductor. along with seniority the brotherhoods received the right of appeal in cases of discharge, which has done much to eliminate discrimination. since they were enjoying such exceptional advantages relative to income, to the security of the job, and to the stability of their organization, it is not surprising, in view of the limited class solidarity among american laboring men in general, that these groups of workers should have chosen to stand alone in their wage bargaining and that their refusal to enter "entangling alliances" with other less favored groups should have gone even to the length of staying out of the american federation of labor. this condition of relative harmony between employer and employe, notwithstanding the energetic bargaining, continued for about fifteen years until it was disturbed by factors beyond the control of either railway companies or brotherhoods. the steady rise in the cost of living forced the brotherhoods to intensify their demands for increased wages. at the same time an ever tightening regulation of railway rates by the federal government since practically prevented a shift of increased costs to the shipper. "class struggles" on the railways began in earnest. the new situation was brought home to the brotherhoods in the course of several wage arbitration cases in which they figured.[ ] the outcome taught them that the public will give them only limited support in their efforts to maintain their real income at the old high level compared with other classes of workers. a most important case arose from a "concerted movement" in [ ] of the engineers and firemen on the eastern roads for higher wages. two separate arbitration boards were appointed. the engineers' board consisted of seven members, one each for the interests involved and five representing the public. the award was unsatisfactory to the engineers, first, because of the meager raise in wages and, second, because it contained a strong plea to congress and the country to have all wages of all railway employes fixed by a government commission, which implied a restriction of the right to strike. the award in the firemen's case, which was decided practically simultaneously with the engineers', failed to satisfy either side. the conductors and trainmen on the eastern roads were next to move "in concert" for increased wages. the roads refused and the brotherhoods decided by a good majority to quit work. this threatened strike occasioned the passage of the so-called newlands bill as an amendment to the erdman act, with increased powers to the government in mediation and with more specified conditions relative to the work of the arbitration boards chosen for each occasion. whereupon both sides agreed to submit to arbitration. the award allowed an increase in wages of seven percent, or less than one-half of that demanded, but disallowed a plea made by the men for uniformity of the wage scales east and west, and denied the demanded time and a half for overtime. the men accepted but the decision added to their growing opposition to the principle of arbitration. another arbitration case, in , involving the engineers and firemen on the western roads led the brotherhoods to come out openly against arbitration. the award was signed only by the representatives on the board of the employers and the public. a characteristic aftermath of this case was an attack made by the unions upon one of the "neutrals" on the board. his impartiality was questioned because of his relations with several concerns which owned large amounts of railroad securities. therefore, when in the four brotherhoods together demanded the eight-hour day, they categorically refused to consider arbitration.[ ] the evolution to a fighting unionism had become complete. while the brotherhoods of the train service personnel were thus shifting their tactics, they kept drawing nearer to the position held by the other unions in the railway service. these had rarely had the good fortune to bask in the sunshine of their employers' approval and "recognition." some railways, of the more liberal sort, made agreements with the machinists and with the other shop unions. on the whole, however, the hold of these organizations upon their industry was of a precarious sort. to meet their strong opponents on a basis nearer to equality, they started about a movement for "system federations,"[ ] that is, federations of all organized trades through the length of a given railway system as, for instance, the pennsylvania railroad or the illinois central railroad. in turn the creation of system federations sharpened the employers' antagonism. some railway systems, like the illinois central, might be willing to enter into agreements with the separate crafts, but refused to deal with a federation of crafts. in , stimulated by a dispute on the illinois central railroad and on the harriman lines in general, involving the issue of system federations, a federation of system federations was formed by forty systems upon an aggressive program. in a weak and rather tentative railway employes' department had been launched by the american federation of labor. the federation of federations was thus a rival organization and "illegal" or, at best, "extra-legal" from the standpoint of the american federation of labor. the situation, however, was too acute to permit the consideration of "legality" to enter. an adjustment was made and the federation of system federations was "legitimatized" through fusion with the "department," to which it gave its constitution, officers, and fighting purpose, and from which it took only its name. this is the now well-known railway employes' department of the american federation of labor (embracing all important national unions of the railway workers excepting the four brotherhoods), and which, as we shall see, came into its own when the government took over the railways from their private owners eight months after america's entry into the world war. ( ) _the machinery and metal trades_ unlike the miners and the railway brotherhoods, the unions in the machinery and metal trades met with small success in their efforts for "recognition" and trade agreements. the outstanding unions in the industry are the international association of machinists and the international molders' union, with a half dozen smaller and very small unions.[ ] the molders' international united in the same union the stove molders, who as was seen had been "recognized" in , and the molders of parts of machinery and other foundry products. the latter found the national founders' association as their antagonist or potential "co-partner" in the industry. the upward swing in business since , combined with the growth of trade unionism and with the successful negotiation of the interstate agreement in the soft coal mining industry, created an atmosphere favorable to trade agreements. for a time "recognition" and its implications seemed to all concerned, the employer, the unions, and the public, a sort of cure-all for industrial disputes. accordingly, in march , the national founders' association (organized in the previous year and comprising foundrymen engaged principally in machinery manufacturing and jobbing) and the international molders' union of north america met and drew up the following tersely worded agreement which became known as the new york agreement: "that in event of a dispute arising between members of the respective organizations, a reasonable effort shall be made by the parties directly at interest to effect a satisfactory adjustment of the difficulty; failing to do which, either party shall have the right to ask its reference to a committee of arbitration which shall consist of the president of the national founders' association and the president of the iron molders' union or their representatives, and two other representatives from each organization appointed by the respective presidents. "the finding of this committee of arbitration by majority vote shall be considered final in so far as the future action of the respective organizations is concerned. "pending settlement by the committee, there shall be no cessation of work at the instance of either party to the dispute. the committee of arbitration shall meet within two weeks after reference of dispute to them." the agreement was a triumph for the principle of pure conciliation as distinct from arbitration by a third party. both sides preferred to run the risk of a possible deadlock in the conciliation machinery to throwing decisions into the hands of an umpire, who would be an uncertain quantity both as regards special bias and understanding of the industry. the initial meeting of the arbitration committee was held in cleveland, in may , to consider the demand by the unions at worcester, massachusetts, and providence, rhode island, for a minimum wage which the employers had refused. in each city one member of the national founders' association was involved and the men in these firms went to work pending the arbitration decision, while the others stayed out on strike. the meeting ended inauspiciously. the founders and molders seemed not to be able to settle their difficulties. each side stood fast on its own principles and the arbitration committees regularly became deadlocked. the question of a minimum wage was the most important issue. from to several joint conventions were held to discuss the wage question. in a settlement was made, which, however, proved of short duration. in november , the two organizations met, differed, and arranged for a sub-committee to meet in march . the sub-committee met but could reach no agreement. the two organizations clashed also on the question of apprentices. the founders contended that, because there were not enough molders to fill the present demand, the union restrictions as to the employment of apprentices should be removed. the union argued that a removal of the restriction would cause unlimited competition among molders and eventually the founders could employ them at their own price. they likewise failed to agree on the matter of classifying molders. owing to the stalling of the conciliation machinery many strikes occurred in violation at least of the spirit of the agreement. july , , the molders struck in cleveland for an increase in wages; arbitration committees were appointed but failed to make a settlement. in chicago and san francisco strikes occurred for the same reason. it was at last becoming evident that the new york agreement was not working well. in the autumn of business prosperity reached its high watermark and then came a sharp depression which lessened the demand for molders. early in the national founders' association took advantage of this situation to reduce wages and finally practically abrogated the new york agreement. in april, , the founders and molders tried to reach a decision as to how the agreement could be made effective, but gave it up after four days and nights of constant consideration. the founders claimed that the molders violated the agreement in out of the cases that came up during the five years of its life; and further justified their action on the ground that the union persistently refused to submit to arbitration by an impartial outsider the issues upon which the agreement was finally wrecked. an agreement similar to the new york one was concluded in between the national metal trades' association and the international association of machinists. the national metal trades' association had been organized in by members of the national founders' association, whose foundries formed only a part of their manufacturing plants. the spur to action was given by a strike called by the machinists in chicago and other cities for the nine-hour day. after eight weeks of intense struggle the association made a settlement granting a promise of the shorter day. although hailed as one of the big agreements in labor history, it lasted only one year, and broke up on the issue of making the nine-hour day general in the association shops. the machinists continued to make numerous agreements with individual firms, especially the smaller ones, but the general agreement was never renewed. thereafter the national metal trades' association became an uncompromising enemy of organized labor. in the following ten years both molders and machinists went on fighting for control and engaged in strikes with more or less success. but the industry as a whole never again came so near to embracing the idea of a joint co-partnership between organized capital and labor as in . ( ) _the employers' reaction_ with the disruption of the agreement systems in the machinery producing and foundry industries, the idea of collective bargaining and union recognition suffered a setback; and the employers' uneasiness, which had already steadily been feeding on the unions' mounting pressure for control, now increased materially. as long, however, as business remained prosperous and a rising demand for labor favored the unions, most of the agreements were permitted to continue. therefore, it was not until the industrial depression of - had freed the employers' hands that agreements were disrupted wholesale. in the structural erectors' association discontinued its agreements with the structural iron workers' union, causing a dispute which continued over many years. in the course of this dispute the union replied to the victorious assaults of the employers by tactics of violence and murder, which culminated in the fatal explosion in the _los angeles times_ building in . in the employing lithographers discontinued their national agreement with the lithographers' union. in the united typothetæ broke with the pressmen, and the stove founders with the stove mounters and stove polishers. in the agreements between the lake carriers and lumber carriers (both operating on the great lakes) and the seafaring and water front unions were terminated. in the operation of these unsuccessful agreements the most serious stumbling blocks were the union "working rules," that is to say, the restrictive rules which unions strove to impose on employers in the exercise of their managerial powers in the shop, and for which the latter adopted the sinister collective designation of "restriction of output." successful trade unionism has always pressed "working rules" on the employer. as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, the trade societies then existing tried to impose on the masters the closed shop and restrictions on apprenticeship along with higher wages and shorter hours. as a union advances from an ephemeral association to a stable organization more and more the emphasis is shifted from wages to working rules. unionists have discovered that on the whole wages are the unstable factor, going up or down, depending on fluctuating business conditions and cost of living; but that once they have established their power by making the employer accept their working rules, high wages will ultimately follow. these working rules are seldom improvisations of the moment, but, crude and one-sided as they often are, they are the product of a long labor experience and have taken many years to be shaped and hammered out. since their purpose is protective, they can best be classified with reference to the particular thing in the workingman's life which they are designed to protect: the standard of living of the trade group, health, the security of the worker's job, equal treatment in the shop and an equal chance with other workmen in promotion, the bargaining power of the trade group, as a whole, and the safety of the union from the employer's attempts to undermine it. we shall mention only a few of these rules by way of illustration. thus all rules relating to methods of wage payment, like the prohibition of piece work and of bonus systems (including those associated with scientific management systems), are primarily devices to protect the wage earner's rate of pay against being "nibbled away" by the employer; and in part also to protect his health against undue exertion. other rules like the normal (usually the eight-hour) day with a higher rate for overtime; the rule demanding a guarantee of continuous employment for a stated time or a guarantee of minimum earnings, regardless of the quantity of work available in the shop; again the demand for the sharing of work in slack times among all employes; and further, when layoffs become necessary, the demand of recognition by the employer of a right to continuous employment based on "seniority" in the shop;--all these have for their common aim chiefly the protection of the job. another sort of rules, like the obstruction to the splitting up of trades and the restrictions on apprenticeship, have in view the protection of the bargaining power of the craft group--through artificially maintaining an undiminished demand for skilled labor, as well as through a reduction of the number of competitors, present and future, for jobs. the protection of the union against the employer's designs, actual or potential, is sought by an insistence on the closed union shop, by the recognition of the right of appeal to grievance boards in cases of discharge to prevent anti-union discrimination, and through establishing a seniority right in promotion which binds the worker's allegiance to his union rather than to the employer. with these rigid rules, partly already enforced on the employer by strikes or threats to strike and partly as yet unrealized but energetically pushed, trade unionism enters the stage of the trade agreement. the problem of industrial government then becomes one of steady adjustment of the conflicting claims of employer and union for the province of shop control staked out by these working rules. when the two sides are approximately equal in bargaining strength (and lasting agreements are possible only when this condition obtains), a promising line of compromise, as recent experience has shown, has been to extend to the unions and their members in some form that will least obstruct shop efficiency the very same kind of guarantees which they strive to obtain through rules of their own making. for instance, an employer might induce a union to give up or agree to mitigate its working rules designed to protect the job by offering a _quid pro quo_ in a guarantee of employment for a stated number of weeks during the year; and likewise, a union might hope to counteract the employer's natural hankering for being "boss in his own business," free of any union working rules, only provided it guaranteed him a sufficient output per unit of labor time and wage investment. however, compromises of this sort are pure experiments even at present--fifteen to twenty years after the dissolution of those agreements; and they certainly require more faith in government by agreement and more patience than one could expect in the participants in these earlier agreements. it is not surprising, therefore, that the short period of agreements after should in many industries have formed but a prelude to an "open-shop" movement.[ ] after their breach with the union, the national founders' association and the national metal trades' association have gone about the business of union wrecking in a systematic way. they have maintained a so-called "labor bureau," furnishing men to their members whenever additional help was needed, and keeping a complete card system record of every man in the employ of members. by this system occasion was removed for employers communicating with the business agents of the various unions when new men were wanted. the associations have had in their regular pay a large number of non-union men, or "strike-breakers," who were sent to the shop of any member whose employes were on strike. in addition to these and other national organizations, the trade unions were attacked by a large and important class of local employers' associations. the most influential association of this class was the employers' association of dayton, ohio. this association had a standing strike committee which, in trying to break a strike, was authorized to offer rewards to the men who continued at work, and even to compensate the employer for loss of production to the limit of one dollar per day for each man on strike. also a system was adopted of issuing cards to all employes, which the latter, in case of changing employment, were obliged to present to the new employer and upon which the old employer inscribed his recommendation. the extreme anti-unionism of the dayton association is best attested by its policy of taking into membership employers who were threatened with strikes, notwithstanding the heavy financial obligations involved. another class of local associations were the "citizens' alliances," which did not restrict membership to employers but admitted all citizens, the only qualification being that the applicant be not a member of any labor organization. these organizations were frequently started by employers and secured cooperation of citizens generally. in some places there were two associations, an employers' and a citizens' alliance. a good example of this was the citizens' alliances of denver, colorado, organized in . these "citizens' alliances," being by virtue of mixed membership more than a mere employers' organization, claimed in time of strikes to voice the sentiment of the community in general. so much for the employers' counter attacks on trade unions on the strictly industrial front. but there were also a legal front and a political front. in was organized the american anti-boycott association, a secret body composed mainly of manufacturers. the purpose of the organization was to oppose by legal proceedings the boycotts of trade unions, and to secure statutory enactments against the boycott. the energies of the association have been devoted mainly to taking certain typical cases to the courts in order thereby to create legal precedents. the famous danbury hatters' case, in which the sherman anti-trust law was invoked against the hatters' union, was fought in the courts by this association. the employers' fight on the political front was in charge of the national association of manufacturers. this association was originally organized in for the pursuit of purely trade interests, but about , under the influence of the dayton, ohio, group of employers, turned to combating trade unions. it closely cooperated with other employers' associations in the industrial and legal field, but its chief efforts lay in the political or legislative field, where it has succeeded through clever lobbying and manipulations in nullifying labor's political influence, especially in congress. the national association of manufacturers saw to it that congress and state legislatures might not weaken the effect of court orders, injunctions and decisions on boycotts, closed shop, and related matters. the "open-shop movement" in its several aspects, industrial, legal, and political, continued strong from to . nevertheless, despite most persistent effort and despite the opportunity offered by the business depression which followed the financial panic of , the results were not remarkable. true, it was a factor in checking the rapid rate of expansion of unionism, but it scarcely compelled a retrogression from ground already conquered. it is enough to point out that the unions managed to prevent wage reductions in the organized trades notwithstanding the unemployment and distress of - . on the whole trade unionism held its own against employers in strictly competitive industry. different, however, was the outcome in industries in which the number of employers had been reduced by monopolistic or semi-monopolistic mergers. the steel industry is the outstanding instance.[ ] the disastrous homestead strike of [ ] had eliminated unionism from the steel plants of pittsburgh. however, the carnegie steel company was only a highly efficient and powerful corporation, not yet a "trust." the panic of dealt another blow to the amalgamated association of iron & steel workers. the steel mills of alleghany county, outside pittsburgh, were all put upon a non-union basis before . in pittsburgh, the iron mills, too, became non-union between and . there remained to the organization only the iron mills west of pittsburgh, the large steel mills of illinois, and a large proportion of the sheet, tin, and iron hoop mills of the country. in there began to be whisperings of a gigantic consolidation in the steel industry. the amalgamated officials were alarmed. in any such combination the carnegie steel company, an old enemy of unionism, would easily be first and would, they feared, insist on driving the union out of every mill in the combination. then it occurred to president shaffer and his associates that it might be a propitious time to press for recognition while the new corporation was forming. anxious for public confidence and to float their securities, the companies could not afford a labor controversy. accordingly, when the new scales were to be signed in july , the amalgamated association demanded of the american tin plate company that it sign a scale not only for those mills that had been regarded as union but for all of its mills. this was agreed, provided the american sheet steel company would agree to the same. the latter company refused, and a strike was started against the american tin plate company, the american sheet steel company, and the american steel hoop company. in conferences held on july , , and these companies offered to sign for all tin mills but one, for all the sheet mills that had been signed for in the preceding year and for four other mills that had been non-union, and for all the hoop mills that had been signed for in the preceding year. this highly advantageous offer was foolishly rejected by the representatives of the union; they demanded all the mills or none. the strike then went on in earnest. in august, president shaffer called on all the men working in mills of the united states steel corporation to come out on strike. by the middle of august it was evident that the association had made a mistake. instead of finding their task easier because the united states steel corporation had just been formed, they found that corporation ready to bring all its tremendous power to bear against the organization. president shaffer offered to arbitrate the whole matter, but the proposal was rejected; and at the end of august the strike was declared at an end. the steel industry was apparently closed to unionism.[ ] ( ) _legislation, courts, and politics_ while trade unionism was thus on the whole holding its ground against the employers and even winning victories and recognition, its influence on national and state legislation failed for many years to reflect its growing economic strength. the scant success with legislation resulted, on the one hand, from the very expansion of the federation into new fields, which absorbed nearly all its means and energy; but was due in a still greater measure to a solidification of capitalist control in the republican party and in congress, against which president roosevelt directed his spectacular campaign. a good illustration is furnished by the attempt to get a workable eight-hour law on government work. in the main the leaders of the federation placed slight reliance upon efforts to shorten the working day through legislation. the movement for shorter hours by law for women, which first attained importance in the nineties, was not the work of organized labor but of humanitarians and social workers. to be sure, the federation has supported such laws for women and children workers, but so far as adult male labor was concerned, it has always preferred to leave the field clear for the trade unions. the exception to the rule was the working day on public work. the federal eight-hour day law began to receive attention from the federation towards the end of the eighties. by that time the status of the law of which decreed the eight-hour day on federal government work[ ] had been greatly altered. in a decision rendered in the supreme court held that the eight-hour day law of was merely directory to the officials of the federal government, but did not invalidate contracts made by them not containing an eight-hour clause. to counteract this decision a special law was passed in , with the support of the federation, establishing the eight-hour day in the united states printing office and for letter carriers. in a new general eight-hour law was passed, which provided that eight-hours should be the length of the working day on all public works of the united states, whether directed by the government or under contract or sub-contract. within the next few years interpretations rendered by attorney generals of the united states practically rendered the law useless. in the federation began to press in earnest for a satisfactory eight-hour law. in its eight-hour bill passed the house of representatives unanimously. in the senate it was introduced by senator kyle, the chairman of the committee on education and labor. after its introduction, however, hearings upon the bill were delayed so long that action was prevented during the long session. in the short session of - the bill met the cruel fate of having its introducer, senator kyle, submit a minority report against it. under the circumstances no vote upon the bill could be had in the senate. in the next congress, - , the eight-hour bill once more passed the house of representatives only to be lost in the senate by failure to come to a vote. in , the bill again unanimously passed the house, but was not even reported upon by the senate committee. in the hearings upon the eight-hour bill in that year the opposition of the national manufacturers' association was first manifested. in the house labor committee sidetracked a similar bill by recommending that the department of commerce and labor should investigate its merits. secretary metcalf, however, declared that the questions submitted to his department with reference to the eight-hour bill were "well-nigh unintelligible." in the house labor committee, at a very late stage in the session, reported "favorably" upon the eight-hour bill. at the same time it eliminated all chances of passage of the bill through the failure of a majority of the members of the committee to sign the "favorable" report made. this session of congress, also, allowed a "rider" to be added to the panama canal bill, exempting the canal construction from the provisions of the eight-hour law. in the next two congresses no report could be obtained from the labor committees of either house upon the general eight-hour day bill, despite the fact that president roosevelt and later president taft recommended such legislation. in the sessions of the congress of - the american federation of labor hit upon a new plan. this was the attachment of "riders" to departmental appropriation bills requiring that all work contracted for by these departments must be done under the eight-hour system. the most important "rider" of this character was that attached to the naval appropriation bill. under its provisions the attorney-general held that in all work done in shipyards upon vessels built for the federal government the eight-hour rule must be applied. finally, in june , a democratic house and a republican senate passed the eight-hour bill supported by the american federation of labor with some amendments, which the federation did not find seriously objectionable; and president taft signed it. still better proof of the slight influence of the federation upon government is furnished by the vicissitudes of its anti-injunction bills in congress. the federation had been awakened to the seriousness of the matter of the injunction by the debs case. a bill of its sponsoring providing for jury trials in "indirect" contempt cases passed the senate in only to be killed in the house. in only eight votes were recorded in the house against a bill exempting labor unions from the sherman anti-trust act; it failed, however, of passage in the senate. in an anti-injunction bill championed by the american federation of labor passed the house of representatives. that was the last time, however, for many years to come when such a bill was even reported out of committee. thereafter, for a decade, the controlling powers in congress had their faces set against removal by law of the judicial interference in labor's use of its economic strength against employers. in the meantime, however, new court decisions made the situation more and more critical. a climax was reached in - . in february , came the supreme court decision in the danbury hatters' case, which held that members of a labor union could be held financially responsible to the full amount of their individual property under the sherman anti-trust act for losses to business occasioned by an interstate boycott.[ ] by way of contrast, the supreme court within the same week held unconstitutional the portion of the erdman act which prohibited discrimination by railways against workmen on account of their membership in a union.[ ] one year later, in the buck's stove and range company boycott case, gompers, mitchell, and morrison, the three most prominent officials of the american federation of labor, were sentenced by a lower court in the district of columbia to long terms in prison for violating an injunction which prohibited all mention of the fact that the plaintiff firm had ever been boycotted.[ ] even though neither these nor subsequent court decisions had the paralyzing effect upon american trade unionism which its enemies hoped for and its friends feared, the situation called for a change in tactics. it thus came about that the federation, which, as was seen, by the very principles of its program wished to let government alone,--as it indeed expected little good of government,--was obliged to enter into competition with the employers for controlling government; this was because one branch of the government, namely the judicial one, would not let it alone. a growing impatience with congress was manifested in resolutions adopted by successive conventions. in the convention authorized the executive council to take "such further steps as will secure the nomination--and the election--of only such men as are fully and satisfactorily pledged to the support of the bills" championed by the federation. accordingly, the executive council prepared a series of questions to be submitted to all candidates for congress in by the local unions of each district. the federation was more active in the congressional election of . early in the year the executive council urged affiliated unions to use their influence to prevent the nomination in party primaries or conventions of candidates for congress who refused to endorse labor's demands, and where both parties nominated refractory candidates to run independent labor candidates. the labor campaign was placed in the hands of a labor representation committee, which made use of press publicity and other standard means. trade union speakers were sent into the districts of the most conspicuous enemies of labor's demands to urge their defeat. the battle royal was waged against congressman littlefield of maine. a dozen union officials, headed by president gompers, invaded his district to tell the electorate of his insults to organized labor. however, he was reelected, although with a reduced plurality over the preceding election. the only positive success was the election of mcdermott of the commercial telegraphers' union in chicago. president gompers, however, insisted that the cutting down of the majorities of the conspicuous enemies of labor's demands gave "more than a hint" of what organized labor "can and may do when thoroughly prepared to exercise its political strength." nevertheless the next congress was even more hostile than the preceding one. the convention of the federation following the election approved the new tactics, but was careful at the same time to declare that the federation was neither allied with any political party nor had any intention of forming an independent labor party. in the presidential election of , however, the federation virtually entered into an alliance with the democrats. at a "protest conference" in march, , attended by the executive officers of most of the affiliated national unions as well as by the representatives of several farmers' organizations, the threat was uttered that organized labor would make a determined effort in the coming campaign to defeat its enemies, whether "candidates for president, for congress, or other offices." the next step was the presentation of the demands of the federation to the platform committees of the conventions of both parties. the wording of the proposed anti-injunction plank suggests that it had been framed after consultation with the democratic leaders, since it omitted to demand the sweeping away of the doctrine of malicious conspiracy or the prohibition of the issuance of injunctions to protect business rights, which had regularly been asked by the american federation of labor since . in its place was substituted an indefinite statement against the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes where none would be allowed if no labor dispute existed and a declaration in favor of jury trial on the charge of contempt of court. the republicans paid scant attention to the planks of the federation. their platform merely reiterated the recognized law upon the allowance of equity relief; and as if to leave no further doubt in the minds of the labor leaders, proceeded to nominate for president, william h. taft, who as a federal judge in the early nineties was responsible for some of the most sweeping injunctions ever issued in labor disputes. a year earlier gompers had characterized taft as "the injunction standard-bearer" and as an impossible candidate. the democratic platform, on the other hand, _verbatim_ repeated the federation plank on the injunction question and nominated bryan. after the party conventions had adjourned the _american federationist_ entered on a vigorous attack upon the republican platform and candidate. president gompers recognized that this was equivalent to an endorsement of bryan, but pleaded that "in performing a solemn duty at this time in support of a political party, labor does not become partisan to a political party, but partisan to a principle." substantially, all prominent non-socialist trade-union officials followed gompers' lead. that the trade unionists did not vote solidly for bryan, however, is apparent from the distribution of the vote. on the other hand, it is true that the socialist vote in in almost all trade-union centers was not materially above that of , which would seem to warrant the conclusion that gompers may have "delivered to bryan" not a few labor votes which would otherwise have gone to debs. in the congressional election of the federation repeated the policy of "reward your friends, and punish your enemies." however, it avoided more successfully the appearance of partisanship. many progressive republicans received as strong support as did democratic candidates. nevertheless the democratic majority in the new house meant that the federation was at last "on the inside" of one branch of the government. in addition, fifteen men holding cards of membership in unions, were elected to congress, which was the largest number on record. furthermore william b. wilson, ex-secretary of the united mine workers, was appointed chairman of the important house committee on labor. the congress of - with its democratic house of representatives passed a large portion of the legislation which the federation had been urging for fifteen years. it passed an eight-hour law on government contract work, as already noted, and a seaman's bill, which went far to grant to the sailors the freedom of contract enjoyed by other wage earners. it created a department of labor with a seat in the cabinet. it also attached a "rider" to the appropriation bill for the department of justice enjoining the use of any of the funds for purposes of prosecuting labor organizations under the sherman anti-trust law and other federal laws. in the presidential campaign of gompers pointed to the legislation favorable to labor initiated by the democratic house of representatives and let the workers draw their own conclusions. the corner stone of the federation's legislative program, the legal exemption of trade unions from the operation of anti-trust legislation and from court interference in disputes by means of injunctions, was yet to be laid. by inference, therefore, the election of a democratic administration was the logical means to that end. at last, with the election of woodrow wilson as president and of a democratic congress in , the political friends of the federation controlled all branches of government. william b. wilson was given the place of secretary of labor. hereafter, for at least seven years, the federation was an "insider" in the national government. the road now seemed clear to the attainment by trade unions of freedom from court interference in struggles against employers--a judicial _laissez-faire_. the political program initiated in seemed to be bearing fruit. the drift into politics, since , has differed essentially from that of earlier periods. it has been a movement coming from "on top," not from the masses of the laborers themselves. hard times and defeats in strikes have not very prominently figured. instead of a movement led by local unions and by city centrals as had been the case practically in all preceding political attempts, the executive council of the american federation of labor now became the directing force. the rank and file seem to have been much less stirred than the leaders; for the member who held no union office felt less intensely the menace from injunctions than the officials who might face a prison sentence for contempt of court. probably for this reason the "delivery" of the labor vote by the federation has ever been so largely problematical. that the federation leaders were able to force the desired concessions from one of the political parties by holding out a _quid pro quo_ of such an uncertain value is at once a tribute to their political sagacity as well as a mark of the instability of the general political alignment in the country. footnotes: [ ] the bricklayers became affiliated in . [ ] "the growth of labor organizations in the united states, - ," in _quarterly journal of economics_, aug., , p. . [ ] "the extent of trade unionism," in _annals of american academy of political science_, vol. , p. . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] "the extent of trade unionism," in _annals of american academy of political science_, vol. , p. . [ ] the "federal labor unions" (mixed unions) and the directly affiliated local trade unions (in trades in which a national union does not yet exist) are forms of organization which the federation designed for bringing in the more miscellaneous classes of labor. the membership in these has seldom reached over , . [ ] a small but immensely rich area in eastern pennsylvania where the only anthracite coal deposits in the united states are found. [ ] at a conference at columbus, ohio, in january, , coal operators from western pennsylvania, ohio, indiana, and illinois met the organized miners and drew up an agreement covering the wages which were to prevail throughout the central competitive field from may , , to april , . the scale established would seem to have been dictated by the wish to give the markets of the central competitive field to the ohio operators. ohio was favored in the scale established by this first interstate conference probably because more than half of the operators present came from that state, and because the chief strength of the miners' union also lay in that state. to prevent friction over the interpretation of the interstate agreement, a board of arbitration and conciliation was established. this board consisted of five miners and five operators chosen at large, and one miner and operator more from each of the states of this field. such a board of arbitration and conciliation was provided for in all of the interstate agreements of the period of the eighties. this system of interstate agreement, in spite of the cut-throat competition raging between operators, was maintained for pennsylvania and ohio practically until , illinois having been lost in , and indiana in . it formed the real predecessor of the system established in and in vogue thereafter. [ ] see above, . [ ] the run-of-mine system means payment by weight of the coal as brought out of the mine including minute pieces and impurities. [ ] the check-off system refers to collection of union dues. it means that the employer agrees to deduct from the wage of each miner the amount of his union dues, thus constituting himself the union's financial agent. [ ] in that district the check-off was granted in . [ ] hitchman coal and coke company _v._ mitchell, u.s. . [ ] see below, - . [ ] the actual membership of the union is considerably above these figures, since they are based upon the dues-paying membership, and miners out on strike are exempted from the payment of all dues. the number of miners who always act with the union is much larger still. even in non-union fields the united mine workers have always been successful in getting thousands of miners to obey their order to strike. [ ] see webb, _history of trade unionism_, p. ff. [ ] this was demonstrated in the bitterly fought strike on the chicago, burlington and quincy railroad in . (see above, - .) [ ] seniority also decides the assignment to "runs," which differ greatly in desirability, and it gives preference over junior employes in keeping the job when it is necessary to lay men off. [ ] the first arbitration act was passed by congress in . in it was superseded by the well known erdman act, which prescribed rules for mediation and voluntary arbitration. [ ] concerted movements began in as joint demands upon all railways in a single section of the country, like the east or the west, by a single group of employes; after two or more brotherhoods initiated common concerted movements, first in one section only, and at last covering all the railways of the country. [ ] see below, - . [ ] long before this, about the middle of the nineties, the first system federations were initiated by the brotherhoods and were confined to them only; they took up adjustment of grievances and related matters. [ ] the international brotherhood of blacksmiths, the brotherhood of boilermakers and iron shipbuilders, the pattern makers' league, the international union of stove mounters, the international union of metal polishers, platers, brass and silver workers, the international federation of draftsmen's unions, and the international brotherhood of foundry employes. [ ] professor barnett attributes the failure of these agreements chiefly to faulty agreement machinery. the working rules, he points out, are rules made by the national union and therefore can be changed by the national union only. at the same time the agreements were national only in so far as they provided for national conciliation machinery; the fixing of wages was left to local bodies. consequently, the national employers' associations lacked the power to offer the unions an indispensable _quid pro quo_ in higher wages for a compromise on working rules. ("national and district systems of collective bargaining in the united states," in _quarterly journal of economics_, may, , pp. ff.) [ ] the following account is taken from chapter x of the _steel workers_ by john a. fitch, published by the russell sage foundation. [ ] see above, - . [ ] the opposition of the steel corporation to unionism was an important factor in the disruption of the agreement systems in the structural iron-erecting industry in and in the carrying industry on the great lakes in ; in each of these industries the corporation holds a place of considerable control. [ ] see above, - . [ ] loewe _v._ lawlor, u.s. ( ). [ ] adair _v._ u.s., u.s. ( ). [ ] wash. law rep. ( ). gompers was finally sentenced to imprisonment for thirty days and the other two defendants were fined $ each. these penalties were later lifted by the supreme court on a technicality, u.s. ( ). chapter radical unionism and a "counter-reformation" for ten years after , when it reached its high point, the american federation of labor was obliged to stay on the defensive--on the defensive against the "open-shop" employers and against the courts. even the periodic excursions into politics were in substance defensive moves. this turn of events naturally tended to detract from the prestige of the type of unionism for which gompers was spokesman; and by contrast raised the stock of the radical opposition. the opposition developed both in and outside the federation. inside it was the socialist "industrialist" who advocated a political labor party on a socialist platform, such as the federation had rejected when it defeated the "program" of ,[ ] together with a plan of organization by industry instead of by craft. outside the federation the opposition marched under the flag of the industrial workers of the world, which was launched by socialists but soon after birth fell into the hands of syndicalists. however, fully to understand the issue between conservatives and radicals in the federation after , one needs to go back much earlier for the "background." the socialist movement, after it had unwittingly assisted in the birth of the opportunistic trade unionism of strasser and gompers,[ ] did not disappear, but remained throughout the eighties a handful of "intellectuals" and "intellectualized" wage earners, mainly germans. these never abandoned the hope of better things for socialism in the labor movement. with this end in view, they adopted an attitude of enthusiastic cooperation with the knights of labor and the federation in their wage struggle, which they accompanied, to be sure, by a persistent though friendly "nudging" in the direction of socialism. during the greater part of the eighties the socialists were closer to the trade unionists than to the knights, because of the larger proportion of foreign born, principally germans, among them. the unions in the cigar making, cabinet making, brewing, and other german trades counted many socialists, and socialists were also in the lead in the city federations of unions in new york, chicago, cleveland, st. louis, milwaukee, and other cities. in the campaign of henry george for mayor of new york in , the socialists cooperated with him and the labor organizations. when, however, the campaign being over, they fell out with george on the issue of the single tax, they received more sympathy from the trade unionists than george; though one should add that the internal strife caused the majority of the trade unionists to lose interest in either faction and in the whole political movement. the socialist organization went by the name of the socialist labor party, which it had kept since . its enrolled membership was under , , and its activities were non-political (since it refrained from nominating its own tickets) but entirely agitational and propagandist. the socialist press was chiefly in german and was led by a daily in new york. so it continued until there appeared on the scene an imperious figure, one of those men who, had he lived in a country with conditions more favorable to socialism than the united states, would doubtless have become one of the world's outstanding revolutionary leaders. this man was daniel deleon. deleon was of south american ancestry, who early immigrated to new york. for a time he was teacher of languages at columbia college; later he devoted himself thoroughly to socialist propaganda. he established his first connection with the labor movement in the george campaign in and by we find him in control of the socialist organization. deleon was impatient with the policy of slow permeation carried on by the socialists. a convinced if not fanatical marxian, his philosophy taught him that the american labor movement, like all national labor movements, had, in the nature of things, to be socialist. he formed the plan of a supreme and last effort to carry socialism into the hosts of the knights and the federation, failing which, other and more drastic means would be used. by he learned that he was beaten in both organizations; not, however, without temporarily upsetting the groups in control. for, the only time when samuel gompers was defeated for president of the federation was in , when the socialists, angered by his part in the rejection of the socialist program at the convention,[ ] joined with his enemies and voted another man into office. gompers was reelected the next year and the federation seemed definitely shut to socialism. deleon was now ready to go to the limit with the federation. if the established unions refused to assume the part of the gravediggers of capitalism, designed for them, as he believed, by the very logic of history, so much the worse for the established trade unions. out of this grew the socialist trade and labor alliance as a life and death rival to the federation. from the standpoint of socialism no more unfortunate step could have been taken. it immediately stamped the socialists as wilful destroyers of the unity of labor. to the trade unionists, yet fresh from the ordeal of the struggle against the knights of labor, the action of the socialists was an unforgivable crime. all the bitterness which has characterized the fight between socialist and anti-socialist in the federation verily goes back to this gross miscalculation by deleon of the psychology of the trade union movement. deleon, on his part, attributed the action of the federation to a hopelessly corrupt leadership and, since he failed to unseat it by working from within, he now felt justified in striking at the entire structure. the socialist trade and labor alliance was a failure from the outset. only a small portion of even the socialist-minded trade unionists were willing to join in the venture. many trade union leaders who had been allied with the socialists now openly sided with gompers. in brief, the socialist "revolution" in the american labor world suffered the fate of all unsuccessful revolutions: it alienated the moderate sympathizers and forced the victorious majority into taking up a more uncompromising position than heretofore. finally, the hopelessness of deleon's tactics became obvious. one faction in the socialist labor party, which had been in opposition ever since he assumed command, came out in revolt in . a fusion took place between it and another socialist group, the so-called debs-berger social democracy,[ ] which took the name of the social democratic party. later, at a "unity congress" in , it became the socialist party of america. what distinguished this party from the socialist labor party (which, although it had lost its primacy in the socialist movement, has continued side by side with the socialist party of america), was well expressed in a resolution adopted at the same "unity" convention: "we recognize that trade unions are by historical necessity organized on neutral grounds as far as political affiliation is concerned." with this program, the socialists have been fairly successful in extending their influence in the american federation of labor so that at times they have controlled about one-third of the votes in the conventions. nevertheless the conservatives have never forgiven the socialists their "original sin." in the country at large socialism made steady progress until , when nearly one million votes were cast for eugene v. debs, or about / of the total. after , particularly since , the socialist party became involved in the war and the difficulties created by the war and retrogressed. for a number of years deleon's failure kept possible imitators in check. however, in , came another attempt in the shape of the industrial workers of the world. as with its predecessor, impatient socialists helped to set it afoot, but unlike the alliance, it was at the same time an outgrowth of a particular situation in the actual labor movement, namely, of the bitter fight which was being waged by the western federation of miners since the middle nineties. beginning with a violent clash between miners and mine owners in the silver region of coeur d'alène, idaho, in the early nineties, the mining states of the west became the scene of many labor struggles which were more like civil wars than like ordinary labor strikes. a most important contributing cause was a struggle, bolder than has been encountered elsewhere in the united states, for control of government in the interest of economic class. this was partly due to the absence of a neutral middle class, farmers or others, who might have been able to keep matters within bounds. the western federation of miners was an organization of workers in and around the metaliferous mines. it also included workers in smelters. it held its first convention in in butte, montana. in the men employed in the cripple creek, colorado, gold fields demanded a minimum wage of three dollars for an eight-hour day. after four months the strike resulted in a victory for the union. other strikes occurred in and at leadville, in in the coeur d'alène mining district, and in at rossland and fernie, british columbia, and also in the san juan district in california. the most important strike of the western federation of miners, however, began in at colorado city, where the mill and smeltermen's union quit work in order to compel better working conditions. as the sympathetic strike was a recognized part of the policy of the western federation of miners, all the miners in the cripple creek region were called out. the eight-hour day in the smelters was the chief issue. in the colorado legislature had passed an eight-hour law which was declared unconstitutional by the supreme court of the state. to overcome this difficulty, an amendment to the state constitution was passed in by a large majority, but the legislature, after having thus received a direct command to establish the eight-hour law, adjourned without taking action. much of the subsequent disorder and bloodshed in the cripple creek region during - is traceable to this failure on the part of the legislature to enact the eight-hour law. the struggle in colorado helped to convince the western miners that agreements with their employers were futile, that constitutional amendments and politics were futile, and from this they drew the conclusion that the revolutionary way was the only way. william d. haywood, who became the central figure in the revolutionary movement of the industrial workers of the world since its launching in , was a former national officer of the western federation of miners and a graduate of the colorado school of industrial experience.[ ] even before the western federation of miners, which was out of touch with the american federation of labor for reasons of geography and of difference in policy and program, attempted to set up a national labor federation which would reflect its spirit. an american labor union was created in , which by had a membership of about , besides the , of the miners' federation. it was thus the precursor of the industrial workers of the world in . in the latter the revolutionary miners from the west joined hands with radical socialists from the east and middle west of both socialist parties, the socialist party of america and deleon's socialist labor party. we shall forbear tracing here the complicated internal history of the i.w.w., that is the friction which immediately arose between the deleonites and the other socialists and later on the struggle between the socialists and the syndicalist-minded labor rebels from the west. suffice it to say that the western federation of miners, which was its very heart and body, convinced of the futility of it all, seceded in . in it joined the american federation of labor and after several hard-fought strikes, notably in michigan in , it practically became assimilated to the other unions in the american federation of labor. the remnant of the i.w.w. split in into two rival industrial workers of the world, with headquarters in detroit and chicago, respectively, on the issue of revolutionary political versus non-political or "direct" action. as a rival to the federation of labor the i.w.w. never materialized, but on the one hand, as an instrument of resistance by the migratory laborers of the west and, on the other hand, as a prod to the federation to do its duty to the unorganized and unskilled foreign-speaking workers of the east, the i.w.w. will for long have a part to play. in fact, about , it seemed as though the i.w.w. were about to repeat the performance of the knights of labor in the great upheaval of - . its clamorous appearance in the industrial east, showing in the strikes by the non-english-speaking workers in the textile mills of lawrence, massachusetts, paterson, new jersey, and little falls, new york, on the one hand, and on the other, the less tangible but no less desperate strikes of casual laborers which occurred from time to time in the west, bore for the observer a marked resemblance to the great upheaval. furthermore, the trained eyes of the leaders of the federation espied in the industrial workers of the world a new rival which would best be met on its own ground by organizing within the federation the very same elements to which the i.w.w. especially addressed itself. accordingly, at the convention of , held in rochester, the problem of organizing the unskilled occupied a place near the head of the list. but after the unsuccessful paterson textile strikes in and , the star of the industrial workers of the world set as rapidly as it had risen and the organization rapidly retrogressed. at no time did it roll up a membership of more than , as compared with the maximum membership of , of the knights of labor. the charge made by the i.w.w. against the federation of labor (and it is in relation to the latter that the i.w.w. has any importance at all) is mainly two-fold: on aim and on method. "instead of the conservative motto, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work,'" reads the preamble, "we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'abolition of the wage system.' it is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown." then on method: "we find that the centering of management in industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade union unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. the trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of the workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars.... these conditions must be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization founded in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or a lockout is in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all." lastly, "by organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." this meant "industrialism" versus the craft autonomy of the federation. "industrialism" was a product of the intense labor struggles of the nineties, of the pullman railway strike in , of the general strike of the bituminous miners of , and of a decade long struggle and boycott in the beer-brewing industry. industrialism meant a united front against the employers in an industry regardless of craft; it meant doing away with the paralyzing disputes over jurisdiction amongst the several craft unions; it meant also stretching out the hand of fellowship to the unskilled worker who knowing no craft fitted into no craft union. but over and above these changes in structure there hovered a new spirit, a spirit of class struggle and of revolutionary solidarity in contrast with the spirit of "business unionism" of the typical craft union. industrialism signified a challenge to the old leadership, to the leadership of gompers and his associates, by a younger generation of leaders who were more in tune with the social ideas of the radical intellectuals and the labor movements of europe than with the traditional policies of the federation. but there is industrialism and industrialism, each answering the demands of a _particular stratum_ of the wage-earning class. the class lowest in the scale, the unskilled and "floaters," for which the i.w.w. speaks, conceives industrialism as "one big union," where not only trade but even industrial distinctions are virtually ignored with reference to action against employers, if not also with reference to the principle of organization. the native floater in the west and the unskilled foreigner in the east are equally responsive to the appeal to storm capitalism in a successive series of revolts under the banner of the "one big union." uniting in its ranks the workers with the least experience in organization and with none in political action, the "one big union" pins its faith upon assault rather than "armed peace," upon the strike without the trade agreement, and has no faith whatsoever in political or legislative action. another form of industrialism is that of the middle stratum of the wage-earning group, embracing trades which are moderately skilled and have had considerable experience in organization, such as brewing, clothing, and mining. they realize that, in order to attain an equal footing with the employers, they must present a front coextensive with the employers' association, which means that all trades in an industry must act under one direction. hence they strive to assimilate the engineers and machinists, whose labor is essential to the continuance of the operation of the plant. they thus reproduce on a minor scale the attempt of the knights of labor during the eighties to engulf the more skilled trade unions. at the same time the relatively unprivileged position of these trades makes them keenly alive to the danger from below, from the unskilled whom the employer may break into their jobs in case of strikes. they therefore favor taking the unskilled into the organization. their industrialism is consequently caused perhaps more by their own trade consideration than by an altruistic desire to uplift the unskilled, although they realize that the organization of the unskilled is required by the broader interests of the wage-earning class. however, their long experience in matters of organization teaches them that the "one big union" would be a poor medium. their accumulated experience likewise has a moderating influence on their economic activity, and they are consequently among the strongest supporters inside the american federation of labor of the trade agreement. nevertheless, opportunistic though they are in the industrial field, their position is not sufficiently raised above the unskilled to make them satisfied with the wage system. hence, they are mostly controlled by socialists and are strongly in favor of political action through the socialist party. this form of industrialism may consequently be called "socialist industrialism." in the annual conventions of the federation, industrialists are practically synonymous with socialists. the best examples of the "middle stratum" industrialism are the unions in the garment industries. enthusiastic admirers have proclaimed them the harbingers of a "new unionism" in america. one would indeed be narrow to withhold praise from organizations and leaders who in spite of a most chaotic situation in their industry have succeeded so brilliantly where many looked only for failure. looking at the matter, however, from the wider standpoint of labor history, the contribution of this so-called "new unionism" resides chiefly, first, in that it has rationalized and developed industrial government by collective bargaining and trade agreements as no other unionism, and second, in that it has applied a spirit of broadminded all-inclusiveness to all workers in the industry. to put it in another way, its merit is in that it has made supreme use of the highest practical acquisition of the american federation of labor--namely, the trade agreement--while reinterpreting and applying the latter in a spirit of a broader labor solidarity than the "old unionism" of the federation. as such the clothing workers point the way to the rest of the labor movement. the first successful application of the "new unionism" in the clothing trades was in by the workers on cloaks and suits in the international ladies' garment workers union of america, a constituent union of the american federation of labor. they established machinery of conciliation from the shop to the industry, which in spite of many tempests and serious crises, will probably live on indefinitely. perhaps the greatest achievement to their credit is that they have jointly with the employers, through a joint board of sanitary control, wrought a revolution in the hygienic conditions in the shops. the amalgamated clothing workers of america have won great power in the men's clothing industry, through aggressive but constructive leadership. the nucleus of the union seceded from the united garment workers, an a.f. of l. organization, in . the socialistic element within the organization was and still is numerically dominating. but in the practical process of collective bargaining, this union's revolutionary principles have served more as a bond to hold the membership together than as a severe guide in its relations with the employers.[ ] as a result, the amalgamated clothing workers attained trade agreements in all the large men's clothing centers. the american federation of labor, however, in spite of this union's success, has persistently refused to admit it to affiliation, on account of its original secessionist origin from a chartered international union. the unions of the clothing workers have demonstrated how immigrants (the majority in the industry are russian and polish jews and italians) may be successfully organized on the basis of a broad minded industrialism. on the issue of industrialism in the american federation of labor the last word has not yet been said. it appears, though, that the matter is being solved slowly but surely by a silent "counter-reformation" by the old leaders. for industrialism, or the adjustment of union structure to meet the employer with ranks closed on the front of an entire industry, is not altogether new even in the most conservative portion of the federation, although it has never been called by that name. long before industrialism entered the national arena as the economic creed of socialists, the unions of the skilled had begun to evolve an industrialism of their own. this species may properly be termed craft industrialism, as it sought merely to unite on an efficient basis the fighting strength of the unions of the skilled trades by devising a method for speedy solution of jurisdictional disputes between overlapping unions and by reducing the sympathetic strike to a science. the movement first manifested itself in the early eighties in the form of local building trades' councils, which especially devoted themselves to sympathetic strikes. this local industrialism grew, after a fashion, to national dimensions in the form of the international building trades' council organized in st. louis in . the latter proved, however, ineffective, since, having for its basic unit the local building trades' council, it inevitably came into conflict with the national unions in the building trades. for the same reason it was barred from recognition of the american federation of labor. the date of the real birth of craft industrialism on a national scale, was therefore deferred to , when a structural building trades' alliance was founded. the formation of the alliance marks an event of supreme importance, not only because it united for the first time for common action all the important national unions in the building industry, but especially because it promulgated a new principle which, if generally adopted, was apparently destined to revolutionize the structure of american labor organizations. the alliance purported to be a federation of the "basic" trades in the industry, and in reality it did represent an _entente_ of the big and aggressive unions. the latter were moved to federate not only for the purpose of forcing the struggle against the employers, but also of expanding at the expense of the "non-basic" or weak unions, besides seeking to annihilate the last vestiges of the international building trades' council. the brotherhood of carpenters and joiners, probably the most aggressive union in the american federation of labor, was the leader in this movement. from the standpoint of the federation, the structural alliance was at best an extra-legal organization, as it did not receive the latter's formal sanction, but the federation could scarcely afford to ignore it as it had ignored the international building trades' council. thus in the alliance was "legitimatized" and made a "department" of the american federation of labor, under the name of the building trades' department, with the settlement of jurisdictional disputes as its main function. it was accompanied by departments of metal trades, of railway employes, of miners, and by a "label" department. it is not, however, open to much doubt that the department was not a very successful custodian of the trade autonomy principle. jurisdictional disputes are caused either by technical changes, which play havoc with official "jurisdiction," or else by a plain desire on the part of the stronger union to encroach upon the province of the weaker one. when the former was the case and the struggle happened to be between unions of equal strength and influence, it generally terminated in a compromise. when, however, the combatants were two unions of unequal strength, the doctrine of the supremacy of the "basic" unions was generally made to prevail in the end. such was the outcome of the struggle between the carpenters and joiners on the one side and the wood workers on the other and also between the plumbers and steam fitters. in each case it ended in the forced amalgamation of the weaker union with the stronger one, upon the principle that there must be only one union in each "basic" trade. in the case of the steam fitters, which was settled at the convention at rochester in , the federation gave what might be interpreted as an official sanction of the new doctrine of one union in a "basic" trade. notwithstanding these official lapses from the principle of craft autonomy, the socialist industrialists[ ] are still compelled to abide by the letter and the spirit of craft autonomy. the effect of such a policy on the coming american industrialism may be as follows: the future development of the "department" may enable the strong "basic" unions to undertake concerted action against employers, while each retains its own autonomy. such indeed is the notable "concerted movement" of the railway brotherhoods, which since has begun to set a type for craft industrialism. it is also probable that the majority of the craft unions will sufficiently depart from a rigid craft standard for membership to include helpers and unskilled workers working alongside the craftsmen. the clearest outcome of this silent "counter-reformation" in reply to the socialist industrialists is the railway employes' department as it developed during and after the war-time period.[ ] it is composed of all the railway men's organizations except the brotherhoods of engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen, telegraphers, and several minor organizations, which on the whole cooperate with the department. it also has a place for the unskilled laborers organized in the united brotherhood of maintenance of way employes and railroad shop laborers. the railway employes' department therefore demonstrates that under craft unionism the unskilled need not be left out in the cold. it also meets the charge that craft unionism renders it easy for the employers to defeat the unions one by one, since this department has consolidated the constituent crafts into one bargaining and striking union[ ] practically as well as could be done by an industrial union. finally, the railway employes' department has an advantage over an industrial union in that many of its constituent unions, like the machinists', blacksmiths', boiler-makers', sheet metal workers', and electrical workers', have large memberships outside the railway industry, which might by their dues and assessments come to the aid of the railway workers on strike. to be sure, the solidarity of the unions in the department might be weakened through jurisdictional disputes, which is something to be considered. however, when unions have gone so far as to confederate for joint collective bargaining, that danger will probably never be allowed to become too serious. footnotes: [ ] see above, - . [ ] see above, - . [ ] see above, - . [ ] eugene v. debs, after serving his sentence in prison for disobeying a court injunction during the pullman strike of , became a convert to socialism. it is said that his conversion was due to victor berger of milwaukee. berger had succeeded in building up a strong socialist party in that city and in the state of wisconsin upon the basis of a thorough understanding with the trade unions and was materially helped by the predominance of the german-speaking element in the population. in the milwaukee socialists elected a municipal ticket, the first large city to vote the socialists into office. [ ] in haywood was tried and acquitted with two other officers of the western federation of miners at boisé, idaho, on a murder charge which grew out of the same labor struggle. this was one of the several sensational trials in american labor history, on a par with the molly maguires' case in the seventies, the chicago anarchists' in , and the mcnamaras' case in . [ ] the same applies to the international ladies' garment workers' union. [ ] except the miners, brewers, and garment workers. [ ] see above, - . [ ] this refers particularly to the six shopmen's unions. chapter the war-time balance sheet the outbreak of the war in europe in august found american labor passing through a period of depression. the preceding winter had seen much unemployment and considerable distress and in the summer industrial conditions became scarcely improved. in the large cities demonstrations by the unemployed were daily occurrences. a long and bloody labor struggle in the coal fields of colorado, which was slowly drawing to an unsuccessful end in spite of sacrifices of the heaviest kind, seemed only to set into bold relief the generally inauspicious outlook. yet the labor movement could doubtless find solace in the political situation. owing to the support it had given the democratic party in the presidential campaign of , the federation could claim return favors. the demand which it was now urging upon its friends in office was the long standing one for the exemption of labor unions from the operation of the anti-trust legislation and for the reduction to a minimum of interference by federal courts in labor disputes through injunction proceedings. during the anti-trust bill introduced in the house by clayton of alabama was going through the regular stages preliminary to enactment and, although it finally failed to embody all the sweeping changes demanded by the federation's lobbyists, it was pronounced at the time satisfactory to labor. the clayton act starts with the declaration that "the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce" and specifies that labor organizations shall not be construed as illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade under federal anti-trust laws. it further proceeds to prescribe the procedure in connection with the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes as, for instance, limiting the time of effectiveness of temporary injunctions, making notice obligatory to persons about to be permanently enjoined, and somewhat limiting the power of the courts in contempt proceedings. the most vital section of the act relating to labor disputes is section , which says "that no such restraining order or injunction shall prohibit any person or persons, whether singly or in concert, from terminating any relation of employment, or from ceasing to perform any work or labor or from recommending, advising, or persuading others by peaceful means so to do; or from attending at any place where any such person or persons may lawfully be, for the purpose of peacefully persuading any person to work or to abstain from working, or from recommending, advising, or persuading others by peaceful and lawful means so to do; or from paying or giving to, or withholding from, any person employed in such dispute, any strike benefits or other moneys or things of value; or from peacefully assembling in a lawful manner, or for lawful purposes, or from doing any act or things which might lawfully be done in the absence of such dispute by any party thereto; nor shall any of the acts specified in this paragraph be considered or held to be violations of any law of the united states." the government was also rendering aid to organized labor in another, though probably little intended, form, namely through the public hearings conducted by the united states commission on industrial relations. this commission had been authorized by congress in to investigate labor unrest after a bomb explosion in the _los angeles times_ building, which was set off at the order of some of the national officers of the structural iron workers' union, incidental to a strike. the hearings which were conducted by the able and versatile chairman, frank p. walsh, with a particular eye for publicity, centering as they did around the colorado outrages, served to popularize the trade union cause from one end of the country to the other. the report of the commission or rather the minority report, which was signed by the chairman and the three labor members, and was known as the "staff" report, named _trade unionism_ as the paramount remedy--not compulsory arbitration which was advocated by the employer members, nor labor legislation and a permanent governmental industrial commission proposed by the economist on the commission. the immediate practical effects of the commission were _nil_, but its agitational value proved of great importance to labor. for the first time in the history of the united states the employing class seemed to be arrayed as a defendant before the bar of public opinion. also, it was for the first time that a commission representing the government not only unhesitatingly pronounced the trade union movement harmless to the country's best interests but went to the length of raising it to the dignity of a fundamental and indispensable institution. the commission on industrial relations on the whole reflected the favorable attitude of the administration which came to power in . the american federation of labor was given full sway over the department of labor and a decisive influence in all other government departments on matters relating to labor. without a political party of its own, by virtue only of its "bargaining power" over the old parties, the american federation of labor seemed to have attained a position not far behind that of british labor after more than a decade of independent political action. furthermore, fortunately for itself, labor in america had come into a political patrimony at a time when the country was standing on the threshold of a new era, during which government was destined to become the arbiter of industry. the war in europe did not immediately improve industrial conditions in america. the first to feel its effects were the industries directly engaged in the making of munitions. the international association of machinists, the organization of the now all-important munition workers, actually had its membership somewhat decreased during , but in the following year made a percent increase. the greater part of the new membership came from the "munitions towns," such as bridgeport, connecticut, where, in response to the insatiable demand from the allied nations, new enormous plants were erected during and shipment of munitions in mass began early the next year. bridgeport and surrounding towns became a center of a successful eight-hour movement, in which the women workers newly brought into the industry took the initiative. the federation as a whole lost three percent of its membership in and gained seven percent during . on its war policy the federation took its cue completely from the national government. during the greater part of the period of american neutrality its attitude was that of a shocked lover of peace who is desirous to maintain the strictest neutrality if the belligerents will persist in refusing to lend an ear to reason. to prevent a repetition of a similar catastrophe, the federation did the obvious thing, pronouncing for open and democratized diplomacy; and proposed to the several national trade union federations that an international labor congress meet at the close of the war to determine the conditions of peace. however, both the british and germans declined. the convention in condemned the german-inspired propaganda for an embargo on shipments to all belligerents and the fomenting of strikes in munitions-making plants by german agents. the federation refused to interpret neutrality to mean that the american wage earner was to be thrown back into the dumps of depression and unemployment, from which he was just delivered by the extensive war orders from the allied governments. by the second half of the war prosperity was in full swing. cost of living was rising rapidly and movements for higher wages became general. the practical stoppage of immigration enabled common labor to get a larger share than usual of the prosperity. many employers granted increases voluntarily. simultaneously, a movement for the eight-hour day was spreading from strictly munitions-making trades into others and was meeting with remarkable success. but witnessed what was doubtless the most spectacular move for the eight-hour day in american history--the joint eight-hour demand by the four railway brotherhoods, the engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen. the effectiveness acquired by trade unionism needs no better proof than the remarkable success with which these four organizations, with the full support of the whole labor movement at their back and aided by a not unfriendly attitude on the part of the national administration, brought to bay the greatest single industry of the country and overcame the opposition of the entire business class. the four brotherhoods made a joint demand for an eight-hour day early in .[ ] the railway officials claimed that the demand for the reduction of the work-day from ten to eight hours with ten hours' pay and a time and a half rate for overtime was not made in good faith. since, they said, the employes ought to have known that the railways could not be run on an eight-hour day, the demand was but a covert attempt to gain a substantial increase in their wages, which were already in advance of any of the other skilled workers. on the other hand, the brotherhoods stoutly maintained during their direct negotiations with the railway companies and in the public press that their demand was a _bona fide_ demand and that they believed that the railway business did admit of a reorganization substantially on an eight-hour basis. the railway officials offered to submit to arbitration the demand of the men together with counter demands of their own. the brotherhoods, however, fearing prejudice and recalling to mind past disappointments, declined the proposal and threatened to tie up the whole transportation system of the country by a strike on labor day. when the efforts at mediation by the united states board of mediation and conciliation came to naught, president wilson invited to washington the executives of the several railway systems and a convention of the several hundred division chairmen of the brotherhoods and attempted personal mediation. he urged the railway executives to accept the eight-hour day and proposed that a commission appointed by himself should investigate the demand for time and a half overtime. this the employes accepted, but the executives objected to giving the eight-hour day before an investigation was made. meantime the brotherhoods had issued their strike order effective on labor day and the crisis became imminent. to obviate the calamity of a general strike, at a time when the country was threatened with troubles on the mexican frontier and with the unsettled submarine controversy with germany ready to flare up any moment, the president went before congress and asked for a speedy enactment of an eight-hour law for train operatives without a reduction in wages but with no punitive overtime. he coupled it with a request for an authorisation of a special commission to report on the operation of such a law for a period of six months, after which the subject might be reopened. lastly, he urged an amendment to the newlands act making it illegal to call a strike or a lockout pending an investigation of a controversy by a government commission. spurred on by the danger of the impending strike, congress quickly acceded to the first two requests by the president and passed the so-called adamson law.[ ] the strike was averted, but in the immediately following presidential campaign labor's "hold-up" of the national government became one of the trump issues of the republican candidate. this episode of the summer of had two sequels, one in the courts and the other one in a negotiated agreement between the railways and the brotherhoods. the former brought many suits in courts against the government and obtained from a lower court a decision that the adamson law was unconstitutional. the case was then taken to the united states supreme court, but the decision was not ready until the spring of . meantime the danger of a strike had been renewed. however, on the same day when the supreme court gave out its decision, the railways and brotherhoods had signed, at the urging of the national council of defense, an agreement accepting the conditions of the adamson law regardless of the outcome in court. when the decision became known it was found to be in favor of the adamson law. the declaration of war against germany came a few days later and opened a new era in the american labor situation. previous to that, on march , , when war seemed inevitable, the national officers of all important unions in the federation met in washington and issued a statement on "american labor's position in peace or in war." they pledged the labor movement and the influence of the labor organizations unreservedly in support of the government in case of war. whereas, they said, in all previous wars "under the guise of national necessity, labor was stripped of its means of defense against enemies at home and was robbed of the advantages, the protections, and guarantees of justice that had been achieved after ages of struggle"; and "labor had no representatives in the councils authorized to deal with the conduct of the war"; and therefore "the rights, interests and welfare of workers were autocratically sacrificed for the slogan of national safety"; in this war "the government must recognize the organized labor movement as the agency through which it must cooperate with wage earners." such recognition will imply first "representation on all agencies determining and administering policies of national defense" and "on all boards authorized to control publicity during war time." second, that "service in government factories and private establishments, in transportation agencies, all should conform to trade union standards"; and that "whatever changes in the organization of industry are necessary upon a war basis, they should be made in accord with plans agreed upon by representatives of the government and those engaged and employed in the industry." third, that the government's demand of sacrifice of their "labor power, their bodies or their lives" be accompanied by "increased guarantees and safe-guards," the imposing of a similar burden on property and the limitation of profits. fourth, that "organization for industrial and commercial service" be "upon a different basis from military service" and "that military service should be carefully distinguished from service in industrial disputes," since "the same voluntary institutions that organized industrial, commercial and transportation workers in times of peace will best take care of the same problems in time of war." for, "wrapped up with the safety of this republic are ideals of democracy, a heritage which the masses of the people received from our forefathers, who fought that liberty might live in this country--a heritage that is to be maintained and handed down to each generation with undiminished power and usefulness." we quote at such length because this document gives the quintessence of the wise labor statesmanship which this crisis brought so clearly to light. turning away from the pacifism of the socialist party, samuel gompers and his associates believed that victory over world militarism as well as over the forces of reaction at home depended on labor's unequivocal support of the government. and in reality, by placing the labor movement in the service of the war-making power of the nation they assured for it, for the time being at least, a degree of national prestige and a freedom to expand which could not have been conquered by many years of the most persistent agitation and strikes. the war, thus, far from being a trial for organized labor, proved instead a great opportunity. for the war released organized labor from a blind alley, as it were. the american federation of labor, as we saw, had made but slow progress in organization after . at that time it had succeeded in organizing the skilled and some of the semi-skilled workers. further progress was impeded by the anti-union employers especially in industries commonly understood to be dominated by "trusts." in none of the "trustified" industries, save anthracite coal, was labor organization able to make any headway. and yet the american federation of labor, situated as it is, is obliged to stake everything upon the power to organize.[ ] the war gave it that all-important power. soon after the federal government became the arbiter of industry--by virtue of being the greatest consumer, and by virtue of a public opinion clearly outspoken on the subject--we see the taft-walsh war labor board[ ] embody "the right to organize" into a code of rules for the guidance of the relations of labor and capital during war-time, along with the basic eight-hour day and the right to a living wage. in return for these gifts american labor gave up nothing so vital as british labor had done in the identical situation. the right to strike was left unmolested and remained a permanent threat hanging over slow moving officialdom and recalcitrant employers. and the only restraint accepted by labor was a promise of self-restraint. the federation was not to strike until all other means for settlement had been tried, nor was it to press for the closed shop where such had not existed prior to the war declaration. but at the same time no employer was to interpose a check to its expansion into industries and districts heretofore unorganized. nor could an employer discipline an employe for joining a union or inducing others to join. in , when the president established the national council of defense, he appointed samuel gompers one of the seven members composing the advisory commission in charge of all policies dealing with labor and chairman of a committee on labor of his own appointment. among the first acts of the council of defense was an emphatic declaration for the preservation of the standards of legal protection of labor against the ill-advised efforts for their suspension during war-time. the federation was given representation on the emergency construction board, the fuel administration board, on the woman's board, on the food administration board, and finally on the war industries board. the last named board was during the war the recognized arbiter of the country's industries, all labor matters being handled by its labor representative. the department of labor, which in the war emergency could rightly be considered the federation's arm in the administration, was placed in supreme charge of general labor administration. also, in connection with the administration of the military conscription law, organized labor was given representation on each district exemption board. but perhaps the strongest expression of the official recognition of the labor movement was offered by president wilson when he took time from the pressing business in washington to journey to buffalo in november , to deliver an address before the convention of the american federation of labor. in addition to representation on boards and commissions dealing with general policies, the government entered with the federation into a number of agreements relative to the conditions of direct and indirect employment by the government. in each agreement the prevalent trade union standards were fully accepted and provision was made for a three-cornered board of adjustment to consist of a representative of the particular government department, the public and labor. such agreements were concluded by the war and navy departments and by the united states emergency fleet corporation. the shipping board sponsored a similar agreement between the shipping companies and the seafaring unions; and the war department between the leather goods manufacturers and leather workers' union. when the government took over the railways on january , , it created three boards of adjustment on the identical principle of a full recognition of labor organizations. the spirit with which the government faced the labor problem was shown also in connection with the enforcement of the eight-hour law. the law of provided for an eight-hour day on contract government work but allowed exceptions in emergencies. in congress gave the president the right to waive the application of the law, but provided that in such event compensation be computed on a "basic" eight-hour day. the war and navy departments enforced these provisions not only to the letter but generally gave to them a most liberal interpretation. the taking over of the railways by the government revolutionized the railway labor situation. under private management, as was seen, the four brotherhoods alone, the engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen enjoyed universal recognition, the basic eight-hour day (since ), and high wages. the other organizations of the railway workers, the shopmen, the yardmen, the maintenance of way men, the clerks, and the telegraphers were, at best, tolerated rather than recognized. under the government administration the eight-hour day was extended to all grades of workers, and wages were brought up to a minimum of cents per hour, with a considerable though not corresponding increase in the wages of the higher grades of labor. all discrimination against union men was done away with, so that within a year labor organization on the railways was nearing the hundred percent mark. the policies of the national railway administration of the open door to trade unionism and of recognition of union standards were successfully pressed upon other employments by the national war labor board. on march , , a national war labor conference board, composed of five representatives of the federation of labor, five representatives of employers' associations and two joint chairmen, william h. taft for the employers and frank p. walsh for the employes, reported to the secretary of labor on "principles and policies to govern relations between workers and employers in war industries for the duration of the war." these "principles and policies," which were to be enforced by a permanent war labor board organized upon the identical principle as the reporting board, included a voluntary relinquishment of the right to strike and lockout by employes and employers, respectively, upon the following conditions: first, there was a recognition of the equal right of employes and employers to organize into associations and trade unions and to bargain collectively. this carried an undertaking by the employers not to discharge workers for membership in trade unions or for legitimate trade union activities, and was balanced by an undertaking of the workers, "in the exercise of their right to organize," not to "use coercive measures of any kind to induce persons to join their organizations, nor to induce employers to bargain or deal therewith." second, both sides agreed upon the observance of the _status quo ante bellum_ as to union or open shop in a given establishment and as to union standards of wages, hours, and other conditions of employment. this carried the express stipulation that the right to organize was not to be curtailed under any condition and that the war labor board could grant improvement in labor conditions as the situation warranted. third, the understanding was that if women should be brought into industry, they must be allowed equal pay for equal work. fourth, it was agreed that "the basic eight-hour day was to be recognized as applying in all cases in which the existing law required it, while in all other cases the question of hours of labor was to be settled with due regard to government necessities and the welfare, health, and proper comfort of the workers." fifth, restriction of output by trade unions was to be done away with. sixth, in fixing wages and other conditions regard was to be shown to trade union standards. and lastly came the recognition of "the right of all workers, including common laborers, to a living wage" and the stipulation that in fixing wages, there will be established "minimum rates of pay which will insure the subsistence of the worker and his family in health and reasonable comfort." the establishment of the war labor board did not mean that the country had gone over to the principle of compulsory arbitration, for the board could not force any party to a dispute to submit to its arbitration or by an umpire of its appointment. however, so outspoken was public opinion on the necessity of avoiding interruptions in the war industries and so far-reaching were the powers of the government over the employer as the administrator of material and labor priorities and over the employes as the administrator of the conscription law that the indirect powers of the board sufficed to make its decision prevail in nearly every instance. the packing industry was a conspicuous case of the "new course" in industrial relations. this industry had successfully kept unionism out since an ill-considered strike in , which ended disastrously for the strikers. late in , , employes in the packing houses went on strike for union recognition, the basic eight-hour day, and other demands. intervention by the government led to a settlement, which, although denying the union formal recognition, granted the basic eight-hour day, a living wage, and the right to organize, together with all that it implied, and the appointment of a permanent arbitrator to adjudicate disputes. thus an industry which had prohibited labor organization for fourteen years was made to open its door to trade unionism.[ ] another telling gain for the basic eight-hour day was made by the timber workers in the northwest, again at the insistence of the government. what the aid of the government in securing the right to organize meant to the strength of trade unionism may be derived from the following figures. in the two years from to the organization of the meat cutters and butcher workmen increased its membership from less than , to over , ; the boilermakers and iron shipbuilders from , to , ; the blacksmiths from , to , ; the railway clerks from less than to over , ; the machinists from , to , ; the maintenance of way employes from less than , to , ; the railway carmen from , to , ; the railway telegraphers from , to , ; and the electrical workers from , to , . the trades here enumerated--mostly related to shipbuilding and railways--accounted for the greater part of the total gain in the membership of the federation from two and a half million members in to over three and a third in . an important aspect of the cooperation of the government with the federation was the latter's eager self-identification with the government's foreign policy, which went to the length of choosing to play a lone hand in the allied labor world. labor in america had an implicit faith in the national government, which was shared by neither english nor french labor. whereas the workers in the other allied nations believed that their governments needed to be prodded or forced into accepting the right road to a democratic peace by an international labor congress, which would take the entire matter of war and peace out of the diplomatic chancellories into an open conference of the representatives of the workers, the american workers were only too eager to follow the leadership of the head of the american nation. to this doubtless was added the usual fervor of a new convert to any cause (in this instance the cause of the war against germany) and a strong distrust of german socialism, which american labor leaders have developed during their drawn-out struggle against the german-trained socialists inside the federation who have persistently tried to "capture" the organization. when on january , , president wilson enunciated his famous fourteen points, the federation of course gave them an enthusiastic endorsement. in the autumn of gompers went to europe and participated in an inter-allied labor conference. he refused, however, to participate in the first international labor and socialist congress called since the war, which met at berne, switzerland, in march , since he would not sit with the germans while their country was not formally at peace with the united states. the convention of the federation in june gave complete endorsement to the league of nations pact worked out at versailles,--on general grounds and on the ground of its specific provisions for an international regulation of labor conditions designed to equalize labor standards and costs. contrasting with this was the position of british labor, which regarded the pact with a critical eye, frankly confessing disillusionment, but was willing to accept it for the sake of its future possibilities, when the pact might be remodelled by more liberal and more democratic hands. the contrast in outlook between the mild evolutionism of the american federation of labor and the social radicalism of british labor stood out nowhere so strongly as in their respective programs for reconstruction after the war. the chief claim of the british labor party for recognition at the hands of the voter at the general election in december , was its well-thought-out reconstruction program put forth under the telling title of "labour and the new social order." this program was above all a legislative program. it called for a thoroughgoing governmental control of industry by means of a control of private finance, natural resources, transportation, and international trade. to the workingmen such control would mean the right to steady employment, the right to a living wage, and the appropriation of economic surpluses by the state for the common good--be they in the form of rent, excessive profits, or overlarge personal incomes. beyond this minimum program loomed the cooperative commonwealth with the private capitalist totally eliminated. such was the program of british labor. what of the reconstruction program of american labor? first of all, american labor thought of reconstruction as a program to be carried out by the trade union, not by the government. moreover, it did not see in reconstruction the great break with the past which that meant to british labor. the american federation of labor applied to reconstruction the same philosophy which lies at the basis of its ordinary, everyday activity. it concerned itself not with any far-reaching plan for social reorganization, but with a rising standard of living and an enlarged freedom for the union. the american equivalent of a government-guaranteed right to employment and a living wage was the "right to organize." assure to labor that right, free the trade unions of court interference in strikes and boycotts, prevent excessive meddling by the government in industrial relations--and the stimulated activities of the "legitimate" organizations of labor, which will result therefrom, will achieve a far better reconstruction than a thousand paper programs however beautiful. so reasoned the leaders of the american federation of labor. during the period of war, they of course gladly accepted directly from the government the basic eight-hour day and the high wages, which under other circumstances they could have got only by prolonged and bitter striking. but even more acceptable than these directly bestowed boons was the indirect one of the right to organize free from anti-union discriminations by employers. having been arrested in its expansion, as we saw, by anti-union employers and especially "trusts," the american federation of labor took advantage of the war situation to overflow new territory. once entrenched and the organization well in hand, it thought it could look to the future with confidence. footnotes: [ ] for the developments which led up to this joint move see above, - . [ ] congress ignored the last-named recommendation which would have introduced in the united states the canadian system of "compulsory investigation." [ ] see below, - . [ ] see below, - . [ ] the unions again lost their hold upon the packing industry in the autumn of . chapter recent developments the armistice with germany came suddenly and unexpectedly. to the organized workers the news was as welcome as to other citizens. but, had they looked at the matter from a special trade union standpoint, they would probably have found a longer duration of the war not entirely amiss. for coal had been unionized already before the war, the railways first during the war, but the third basic industry, steel, was not touched either before or during the war. however, it was precisely in the steel industry that opposition to unionism has found its chief seat, not only to unionism in that industry alone but to unionism in related or subsidiary industries as well. the first three months after the armistice the general expectation was for a set-back in business conditions due to the withdrawal of the enormous government war-time demand. employers and trade unions stood equally undecided. when, however, instead of the expected slump, there came a prosperity unknown even during the war, the trade unions resumed their offensive, now unrestrained by any other but the strictly economic consideration. as a matter of fact, the trade unions were not at all free agents, since their demands, frequent and considerable though they were, barely sufficed to keep wages abreast of the soaring cost of living. through and the first half of profits and wages were going up by leaps and bounds; and the forty-four hour week,--no longer the mere eight-hour day,--became a general slogan and a partial reality. success was especially notable in clothing, building, printing, and the metal trades. one cannot say the same, however, of the three basic industries, steel, coal, and railways. in steel the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week continued as before for approximately one-half of the workers and the unions were preparing for a battle with the "steel trust." while on the railways and in coal mining the unions now began to encounter opposition from an unexpected quarter, namely, the government. when in the summer of the railway shopmen demanded an increase in their wages, which had not been raised since the summer of , president wilson practically refused the demand, urging the need of a general deflation but binding himself to use all the powers of the government immediately to reduce the cost of living. a significant incident in this situation was a spontaneous strike of shopmen on many roads unauthorized by international union officials, which disarranged the movement of trains for a short time but ended with the men returning to work under the combined pressure of their leaders' threats and the president's plea. in september , the united states railroad administration and the shopmen's unions entered into national agreements, which embodied the practices under the administration as well as those in vogue on the more liberal roads before , including recognition and a large number of "working rules." these "national agreements" became an important issue one year later, when their abolition began to be pressed by the railway executives before the railroad labor board, which was established under the transportation act of . in the summer of employers in certain industries, like clothing, grew aware of a need of a more "psychological" handling of their labor force than heretofore in order to reduce a costly high labor turnover and no less costly stoppages of work. this created a veritable eldorado for "employment managers" and "labor managers," real and spurious. universities and colleges, heretofore wholly uninterested in the problem of labor or viewing training in that problem as but a part of a general cultural education, now vied with one another in establishing "labor management" and "labor personnel" courses. one phase of the "labor personnel" work was a rather wide experimentation with "industrial democracy" plans. these plans varied in form and content, from simple provision for shop committees for collective dealing, many of which had already been installed during the war under the orders of the war labor board, to most elaborate schemes, some modelled upon the constitution of the united states. the feature which they all had in common was that they attempted to achieve some sort of collective bargaining outside the channels of the established trade unions. the trade unionists termed the new fashioned expressions of industrial democracy "company unions." this term one may accept as technically correct without necessarily accepting the sinister connotation imputed to it by labor. the trade unions, too, were benefiting as organizations. the amalgamated clothing workers' union firmly established itself by formal agreement on the men's clothing "markets" of chicago, rochester, baltimore, and new york. the membership of the amalgamated clothing workers' union rose to , . employers in general were complaining of increased labor unrest, a falling off of efficiency in the shop, and looked askance at the rapid march of unionization. the trade unions, on their part, were aware of their opportunity and eager for a final recognition as an institution in industry. as yet uncertainty prevailed as to whether enough had survived of the war-time spirit of give and take to make a struggle avoidable, or whether the issue must be solved by a bitter conflict of classes. a partial showdown came in the autumn of . three great events, which came closely together, helped to clear the situation: the steel strike, the president's industrial conference, and the strike of the soft coal miners. the great steel strike, prepared and directed by a committee representing twenty-four national and international unions with william z. foster as secretary and moving spirit, tried in september to wrest from the owners of the steel mills what the railway shopmen had achieved in by invitation of the government, namely, "recognition" and the eight-hour day. three hundred thousand men went out on strike at the call of the committee. the industry came to a practical standstill. but in this case the twenty-four allied unions were not dealing with a government amenable to political pressure, nor with a loosely joined association of employers competing among themselves. furthermore, the time had passed when the government had either the will or the power to interfere and order both sides to arbitrate their dispute. on the contrary, the unions were now dealing unaided with the strongest capitalist aggregation in the world. at the request of president wilson, gompers had urged the strike committee to postpone the strike until after the meeting of the national industrial conference called by the president in october, but the committee claimed that it could not have kept the men back after a summer of agitation and feverish organization had they even tried. the president's conference, modelled upon a similar conference which met earlier in great britain, was composed of three groups of representatives equal in number, one for capital, one for labor, and one for the general public. decisions, to be held effective, had to be adopted by a majority in each group. the labor representation, dominated of course by gompers, was eager to make the discussion turn on the steel strike. it proposed a resolution to this effect which had the support of the public group, but fearing a certain rejection by the employer group the matter was postponed. the issue upon which the alignment was effected was industrial control and collective bargaining. all three groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group, advocated collective bargaining,--but with a difference. the labor group insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the national trade union. in the absence of a powerful protector in the national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel themselves on a bargaining equality with their employer, nor can they be represented by a spokesman of the necessary ability if their choice be restricted to those working in the same plant. the employers, now no longer dominated by the war-time spirit which caused them in to tolerate an expansion of unionism, insisted that no employer must be obliged to meet for the purpose of collective bargaining with other than his own employes.[ ] after two weeks of uncertainty, when it had become clear that a resolution supported by both labor and public groups, which restated the labor position in a milder form, would be certain to be voted down by the employer group, the labor group withdrew from the conference, and the conference broke up. the period of the cooperation of classes had definitely closed. meantime the steel strike continued. federal troops patrolled the steel districts and there was no violence. nevertheless, a large part of the country's press pictured the strike by the steel workers for union recognition and a normal workday as an american counterpart of the bolshevist revolution in russia. public opinion, unbalanced and excited as it was over the whirlpool of world events, was in no position to resist. the strike failed. nothing made so clear to the trade unionists the changed situation since the war ended as the strike of the bituminous coal miners which began november . the miners had entered, in october , into a wage agreement with the operators for the duration of the war. the purchasing power of their wages having become greatly reduced by the ever rising cost of living, discontent was general in the union. a further complication arose from the uncertain position of the united states with reference to war and peace, which had a bearing on the situation. the miners claimed that the armistice had ended the war. the war having ended, the disadvantageous agreement expired with it. so argued the miners and demanded a sixty percent increase in tonnage rates, a corresponding one for yardmen and others paid by the day or hour, and a thirty-hour week to spread employment through the year. the operators maintained that the agreement was still in force, but intimated a readiness to make concessions if they were permitted to shift the cost to the consumer. at this point, the fuel administration, a war-time government body, already partly in the process of dissolution, intervened and attempted to dictate a settlement at a fourteen percent increase, which was entirely unacceptable to the union. the strike continued and the prospect of a dire coal famine grew nearer. to break the deadlock, on motion of attorney-general palmer, judge anderson of indianapolis, under the war-time lever act, issued an injunction forbidding the union officials to continue conducting the strike. the strike continued, the strikers refusing to return to work, and a bituminous coal commission appointed by the president finally settled it by an award of an increase of twenty-seven percent. but that the same administration which had given the unions so many advantages during the war should now have invoked against them a war-time law, which had already been considered practically abrogated, was a clear indication of the change in the times. in a strike by anthracite coal miners in the following year an award was made by a presidential board of three, representing the employers, the union, and the public. the strikers, however, refused to abide by it and inaugurated a "vacation-strike," the individual strikers staying away on a so-called vacation, nominally against the will of the union officers. they finally returned to work. both the steel and coal strikes furnished occasions for considerable anti-union propaganda in the press. public sentiment long favorable to labor became definitely hostile.[ ] in kansas the legislature passed a compulsory arbitration law and created an industrial relations court to adjudicate trade disputes. simultaneously an "anti-red" campaign inaugurated by attorney-general palmer contributed its share to the public excitement and helped to prejudice the cause of labor more by implication than by making direct charges. it was in an atmosphere thus surcharged with suspicion and fear that a group of employers, led by the national association of manufacturers and several local employers' organizations, launched an open-shop movement with the slogan of an "american plan" for shops and industries. many employers, normally opposed to unionism, who in war-time had permitted unionism to acquire scope, were now trying to reconquer their lost positions. the example of the steel industry and the fiasco of the president's industrial conference crystallized this reviving anti-union sentiment into action. meanwhile the railway labor situation remained unsettled and fraught with danger. the problem was bound up with the general problem as to what to do with the railways. many plans were presented to congress, from an immediate return to private owners to permanent government ownership and management. the railway labor organizations, that is, the four brotherhoods of the train service personnel and the twelve unions united in the railway employes' department of the american federation of labor, came before congress with the so-called plumb plan, worked out by glenn e. plumb, the legal representative of the brotherhoods. this plan proposed that the government take over the railways for good, paying a compensation to the owners, and then entrust their operation to a board composed of government officials, union representatives, and representatives of the technical staffs.[ ] so much for ultimate plans. on the more immediate wage problem proper, the government had clearly fallen down on its promise made to the shopmen in august , when their demands for higher wages were refused and a promise was made that the cost of living would be reduced. early in president wilson notified congress that he would return the roads to the owners on march , . a few days before that date the esch-cummins bill was passed under the name of the transportation act of . strong efforts were made to incorporate in the bill a prohibition against strikes and lockouts. in that form it had indeed passed the senate. in the house bill, however, the compulsory arbitration feature was absent and the final law contained a provision for a railroad labor board, of railway, union, and public representatives, to be appointed by the president, with the power of conducting investigations and issuing awards, but with the right to strike or lockout unimpaired either before, during, or after the investigation. it was the first appointed board of this description which was to pass on the clamorous demands by the railway employes for higher wages.[ ] no sooner had the roads been returned under the new law, and before the board was even appointed, than a strike broke out among the switchmen and yardmen, whose patience had apparently been exhausted. the strike was an "outlaw" strike, undertaken against the wishes of national leaders and organized and led by "rebel" leaders risen up for the occasion. for a time it threatened not only to paralyze the country's railway system but to wreck the railway men's organizations as well. it was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the national leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an announcement by the newly constituted railroad labor board that no "outlaw" organization would have standing before it. the board issued an award on july , retroactive to may , increasing the total annual wage bill of the railways by $ , , . the award failed to satisfy the union, but they acquiesced. when the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period of slump. with the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater vigor. with unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance to regain freedom from union control. a few months later the tide also turned in the movement of wages. inside of a year the steel industry reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the chief causes of the strike of and for which the united states steel corporation was severely condemned by a report of a committee of the interchurch world movement,[ ] has largely continued as before. in the new york "market" of the men's clothing industry, where the union faces the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the opportunity to break with the amalgamated clothing workers' union. by the end of the spring of the clothing workers won their struggle, showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a fighting machine as any of the older unions. it was this union also and several local branches of the related union in the ladies' garment industry, which realized the need of assuring to the employer at least a minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was not to be materially lowered. hence the acceptance of the principle of "standards of production" fixed with the aid of scientific managers employed jointly by the employers and the union. the spring and summer of were a time of widespread "readjustment" strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building trades. the building industry went through in and one of its periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the "walking delegates" and against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among the employers. in san francisco, where the grip of the unions upon the industry was strongest, the employers turned on them and installed the "open-shop" after the building trades' council had refused to accept an award by an arbitration committee set up by mutual agreement. the union claimed, however, in self-justification that the committee, by awarding a _reduction_ in the wages of fifteen crafts while the issue as originally submitted turned on a demand by these crafts for a _raise_ in wages, had gone outside its legitimate scope. in new york city an investigation by a special legislative committee uncovered a state of reeking corruption among the leadership in the building trades' council and among an element in the employing group in connection with a successful attempt to establish a virtual local monopoly in building. some of the leading corruptionists on both sides were given court sentences and the building trades' council accepted modifications in the "working rules" formulated by the counsel for the investigating committee. in chicago a situation developed in many respects similar to the one in san francisco. in a wage dispute, which was submitted by both sides to federal judge k.m. landis for arbitration, the award authorized not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well. most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation developed into literal warfare. in chicago the employers' side was aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the landis award. the committee claimed to have imported over , out-of-town building mechanics to take the places of the strikers. in the autumn of the employers in the packing industry discontinued the arrangement whereby industrial relations were administered by an "administrator,"[ ] judge alschuler of chicago, whose rulings had materially restricted the employers' control in the shop. some of the employers put into effect company union plans. this led to a strike, but in the end the unions lost their foothold in the industry, which the war had enabled them to acquire. by that time, however, the open-shop movement seemed already passing its peak, without having caused an irreparable breach in the position of organized labor. evidently, the long years of preparation before the war and the great opportunity during the war itself, if they have failed to give trade unionism the position of a recognized national institution, have at least made it immune from destruction by employers, however general or skillfully managed the attack. in the total organized union membership, including the , in unions unaffiliated with the american federation of labor, was slightly short of , , , or over four million in the federation itself. in the membership of the federation declined slightly to , , , and the total organized membership probably in proportion. in the membership of the federation declined to about , , , showing a loss of about , since the high mark of . the legal position of trade unions has continued as uncertain and unsatisfactory to the unions, as if no clayton act had been passed. the closed shop has been condemned as coercion of non-unionists. yet in the coppage case[ ] the united states supreme court found that it is not coercion when an employer threatens discharge unless union membership is renounced. similarly, it is unlawful for union agents to attempt organization, even by peaceful persuasion, when employes have signed contracts not to join the union as a condition of employment.[ ] a decision which arouses strong doubt whether the clayton act made any change in the status of trade unions was given by the supreme court in the recent duplex printing case.[ ] in this decision the union rested its defense squarely on the immunities granted by the clayton act. despite this, the injunction was confirmed and the boycott again declared illegal, the court holding that the words "employer and employes" in the act restrict its benefits only to "parties standing in proximate relation to a controversy," that is to the employes who are immediately involved in the dispute and not to the national union which undertakes to bring their employer to terms by causing their other members to boycott his goods. the prevailing judicial interpretation of unlawful union methods is briefly as follows: strikes are illegal when they involve defamation, fraud, actual physical violence, threats of physical violence, or inducement of breach of contract. boycotts are illegal when they bring third parties into the dispute by threats of strikes, or loss of business, publication of "unfair lists,"[ ] or by interference with interstate commerce. picketing is illegal when accompanied by violence, threats, intimidation, and coercion. in december the supreme court declared mere numbers in groups constituted intimidation and, while admitting that circumstances may alter cases, limited peaceful picketing to one picket at each point of ingress or egress of the plant.[ ] in another case the court held unconstitutional an arizona statute, which reproduced _verbatim_ the labor clauses of the clayton act;[ ] this on the ground that concerted action by the union would be illegal if the means used were illegal and therefore the law which operated to make them legal deprived the plaintiff of his property without due process of law. in june , in the coronado case, the court held that unions, although unincorporated, are in every respect like corporations and are liable for damages in their corporate capacity, including triple damages under the sherman anti-trust law, and which may be collected from their funds. we have already pointed out that since the war ended the american labor movement has in the popular mind become linked with radicalism. the steel strike and the coal miners' strike in , the revolt against the national leaders and "outlaw" strikes in the printing industry and on the railways in , the advocacy by the organizations of the railway men of the plumb plan for nationalization of railways and its repeated endorsement by the conventions of the american federation of labor, the resolutions in favor of the nationalization of coal mines passed at the conventions of the united mine workers, the "vacation" strike by the anthracite coal miners in defiance of a government wage award, the sympathy expressed for soviet russia in a number of unions, notably of the clothing industry, have led many to see, despite the assertions of the leaders of the american federation of labor to the contrary, an apparent drift in the labor movement towards radicalism, or even the probability of a radical majority in the federation in the not distant future. the most startling shift has been, of course, in the railway men's organizations, which have changed from a pronounced conservatism to an advocacy of a socialistic plan of railway nationalization under the plumb plan. the plumb plan raises the issue of socialism in its american form. in bare outline the plan proposes government acquisition of the railroads at a value which excludes rights and privileges not specifically granted to the roads in their charters from the states. the government would then lease the roads to a private operating corporation governed by a tri-partite board of directors equally representing the consuming public, the managerial employes, and the classified employes. an automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to assure efficient service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn of capitalized privileges. the purpose of the plumb plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services rendered to the public. in this respect it resembles many of the land reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history. wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the direct management of industry. an ideal of copartnership and self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties. but it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism. the plumb plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the american labor program. although the american federation of labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of and , president gompers, who spoke against the plan, was reelected and again reelected. and in obeying instructions to cooperate with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune to press plumb plan legislation actively. so far as the railway men themselves are concerned, after the railroad labor board set up under the esch-cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting wages and working rules, the pressure for the plumb plan subsided. instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of employment. the drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate, also remains quite inconclusive. a farmer-labor party, launched in by influential labor leaders of chicago (to be sure, against the wishes of the national leaders), polled not more than , votes. and in the same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the change in the government's attitude after the passage of the war emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for president fell below a million, that is behind the vote of , notwithstanding a doubling of the electorate with women's suffrage. finally, the same convention of the american federation of labor, which showed so much sympathy for the ideas of the plumb plan league, approved a rupture with the international trade union federation, with headquarters in amsterdam, holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the addresses issued by the latter. footnotes: [ ] the most plausible argument in favor of the position taken by the employing group is that no employer should be forced to decide matters as intimately connected with the welfare of his business as the ones relating to his labor costs and shop discipline with national union leaders, since the latter, at best, are interested in the welfare of the trade as a whole but rarely in the particular success of _his own_ particular establishment. [ ] the turn in public sentiment really dated from the threat of a strike for the eight-hour day by the four railway brotherhoods in , which forced the passage of the adamson law by congress. the law was a victory for the brotherhoods, but also extremely useful to the enemies of organized labor in arousing public hostility to unionism. [ ] see below, - , for a more detailed description of the plan. [ ] the transportation act included a provision that prior to september , , the railways could not reduce wages. [ ] a protestant interdenominational organization of influence, which investigated the strike and issued a report. [ ] the union had not been formally "recognized" at any time. [ ] coppage _v._ kansas, u.s. ( ). [ ] hitchman coal and coke co. _v._ mitchell et al, u.s. ( ). [ ] duplex printing press co. _v._ deering, sup. ct. ( ). [ ] montana allows the "unfair list" and california allows all boycotts. [ ] american steel foundries of granite city, illinois, _v._ tri-city central trades' council, sup. ct. ( ). [ ] truax et al. _v._ corrigan, sup. ct. ( ). part iii conclusions and inferences chapter an economic interpretation to interpret the labor movement means to offer a theory of the struggle between labor and capital in our present society. according to karl marx, the founder of modern socialism, the efficient cause in all the class struggles of history has been technical progress. progress in the mode of making a living or the growth of "productive forces," says marx, causes the coming up of new classes and stimulates in each and all classes a desire to use their power for a maximum class advantage. referring to the struggle between the class of wage earners and the class of employers, marx brings out that modern machine technique has concentrated the social means of production under the ownership of the capitalist, who thus became absolute master. the laborer indeed remains a free man to dispose of his labor as he wishes, but, having lost possession of the means of production, which he had as a master-workman during the preceding handicraft stage of industry, his freedom is only an illusion and his bargaining power is no greater than if he were a slave. but capitalism, marx goes on to say, while it debases the worker, at the same time produces the conditions of his ultimate elevation. capitalism with its starvation wages and misery makes the workers conscious of their common interests as an exploited class, concentrates them in a limited number of industrial districts, and forces them to organize for a struggle against the exploiters. the struggle is for the complete displacement of the capitalists both in government and industry by the revolutionary labor class. moreover, capitalism itself renders effective although unintended aid to its enemies by developing the following three tendencies: first, we have the tendency towards the concentration of capital and wealth in the hands of a few of the largest capitalists, which reduces the number of the natural supporters of capitalism. second, we observe a tendency towards a steady depression of wages and a growing misery of the wage-earning class, which keeps revolutionary ardor alive. and lastly, the inevitable and frequent economic crises under capitalism disorganize it and hasten it on towards destruction. the last and gravest capitalistic industrial crisis will coincide with the social revolution which will bring capitalism to an end. the wage-earning class must under no condition permit itself to be diverted from its revolutionary program into futile attempts to "patch-up" capitalism. the labor struggle must be for the abolition of capitalism. american wage earners have steadily disappointed several generations of marxians by their refusal to accept the marxian theory of social development and the marxian revolutionary goal. in fact, in their thinking, most american wage earners do not start with any general theory of industrial society, but approach the subject as bargainers, desiring to strike the best wage bargain possible. they also have a conception of what the bargain ought to yield them by way of real income, measured in terms of their customary standard of living, in terms of security for the future, and in terms of freedom in the shop or "self-determination." what impresses them is not so much the fact that the employer owns the employment opportunities but that he possesses a high degree of bargaining advantage over them. viewing the situation as bargainers, they are forced to give their best attention to the menaces they encounter as bargainers, namely, to the competitive menaces; for on these the employer's own advantage as a bargainer rests. their impulse is therefore not to suppress the employer, but to suppress those competitive menaces, be they convict labor, foreign labor, "green" or untrained workers working on machines, and so forth. to do so they feel they must organize into a union and engage in a "class struggle" against the employer. it is the employer's purpose to bring in ever lower and lower levels in competition among laborers and depress wages; it is the purpose of the union to eliminate those lower levels and to make them stay eliminated. that brings the union men face to face with the whole matter of industrial control. they have no assurance that the employer will not get the best of them in bargaining unless they themselves possess enough control over the shop and the trade to check him. hence they will strive for the "recognition" of the union by the employer or the associated employers as an acknowledged part of the government of the shop and the trade. it is essential to note that in struggling for recognition, labor is struggling not for something absolute, as would be a struggle for a complete dispossession of the employer, but for the sort of an end that admits of relative differences and gradations. industrial control may be divided in varying proportions,[ ] reflecting at any one time the relative ratio of bargaining power of the contesting sides. it is labor's aim to continue increasing its bargaining power and with it its share of industrial control, just as it is the employer's aim to maintain a _status quo_ or better. although this presupposes a continuous struggle, it is not a revolutionary but an "opportunist" struggle. once we accept the view that a broadly conceived aim to control competitive menaces is the key to the conduct of organized labor in america, light is thrown on the causes of the american industrial class struggles. in place of looking for these causes, with the marxians, in the domain of technique and production, we shall look for them on the market, where all developments which affect labor as a bargainer and competitor, of which technical change is one, are sooner or later bound to register themselves. it will then become possible to account for the long stretch of industrial class struggle in america prior to the factory system, while industry continued on the basis of the handicraft method of production. also we shall be able to render to ourselves a clearer account of the changes, with time, in the intensity of the struggle, which, were we to follow the marxian theory, would appear hopelessly irregular. we shall take for an illustration the shoe industry.[ ] the ease with which shoes can be transported long distances, due to the relatively high money value contained in small bulk, rendered the shoe industry more sensitive to changes in marketing than other industries. indeed we may say that the shoe industry epitomized the general economic evolution of the country.[ ] we observe no industrial class struggle during colonial times when the market remained purely local and the work was custom-order work. the journeyman found his standard of life protected along with the master's own through the latter's ability to strike a favorable bargain with the consumer. this was done by laying stress upon the quality of the work. it was mainly for this reason that during the custom-order stage of industry the journeymen seldom if ever raised a protest because the regulation of the craft, be it through a guild or through an informal organization, lay wholly in the hands of the masters. moreover, the typical journeyman expected in a few years to set up with an apprentice or two in business for himself--so there was a reasonable harmony of interests. a change came when improvements in transportation, the highway and later the canal, had widened the area of competition among masters. as a first step, the master began to produce commodities in advance of the demand, laying up a stock of goods for the retail trade. the result was that his bargaining capacity over the consumer was lessened and so prices eventually had to be reduced, and with them also wages. the next step was even more serious. having succeeded in his retail business, the master began to covet a still larger market,--the wholesale market. however, the competition in this wider market was much keener than it had been in the custom-order or even in the retail market. it was inevitable that both prices and wages should suffer in the process. the master, of course, could recoup himself by lowering the quality of the product, but when he did that he lost a telling argument in bargaining with the consumer or the retail merchant. another result of this new way of conducting the business was that an increased amount of capital was now required for continuous operation, both in raw material and in credits extended to distant buyers. the next phase in the evolution of the market rendered the separation of the journeymen into a class by themselves even sharper as well as more permanent. the market had grown to such dimensions that only a specialist in marketing and credit could succeed in business, namely, the "merchant-capitalist." the latter now interposed himself permanently between "producer" and consumer and by his control of the market assumed a commanding position. the merchant-capitalist ran his business upon the principle of a large turn-over and a small profit per unit of product, which, of course, made his income highly speculative. he was accordingly interested primarily in low production and labor costs. to depress the wage levels he tapped new and cheaper sources of labor supply, in prison labor, low wage country-town labor, woman and child labor; and set them up as competitive menaces to the workers in the trade. the merchant-capitalist system forced still another disadvantage upon the wage earner by splitting up crafts into separate operations and tapping lower levels of skill. in the merchant-capitalist period we find the "team work" and "task" system. the "team" was composed of several workers: a highly skilled journeyman was in charge, but the other members possessed varying degrees of skill down to the practically unskilled "finisher." the team was generally paid a lump wage, which was divided by an understanding among the members. with all that the merchant-capitalist took no appreciable part in the productive process. his equipment consisted of a warehouse where the raw material was cut up and given out to be worked up by small contractors, to be worked up in small shops with a few journeymen and apprentices, or else by the journeyman at his home,--all being paid by the piece. this was the notorious "sweatshop system." the contractor or sweatshop boss was a mere labor broker deriving his income from the margin between the piece rate he received from the merchant-capitalist and the rate he paid in wages. as any workman could easily become a contractor with the aid of small savings out of wages, or with the aid of money advanced by the merchant-capitalist, the competition between contractors was of necessity of the cut-throat kind. the industrial class struggle was now a three-cornered one, the contractor aligning himself here with the journeymen, whom he was forced to exploit, there with the merchant-capitalist, but more often with the latter. also, owing to the precariousness of the position of both contractor and journeyman, the class struggle now reached a new pitch of intensity hitherto unheard of. it is important to note, however, that as yet the tools of production had not undergone any appreciable change, remaining hand tools as before, and also that the journeyman still owned them. so that the beginning of class struggles had nothing to do with machine technique and a capitalist ownership of the tools of production. the capitalist, however, had placed himself across the outlets to the market and dominated by using all the available competitive menaces to both contractor and wage earner. hence the bitter class struggle. the thirties witnessed the beginning of the merchant-capitalist system in the cities of the east. but the situation grew most serious during the forties and fifties. that was a period of the greatest disorganization of industry. the big underlying cause was the rapid extension of markets outrunning the technical development of industry. the large market, opened first by canals and then by railroads, stimulated the keenest sort of competition among the merchant-capitalists. but the industrial equipment at their disposal had made no considerable progress. except in the textile industry, machinery had not yet been invented or sufficiently perfected to make its application profitable. consequently industrial society was in the position of an antiquated public utility in a community which persistently forces ever lower and lower rates. it could continue to render service only by cutting down the returns to the factors of production,--by lowering profits, and especially by pressing down wages. in the sixties the market became a national one as the effect of the consolidation into trunk lines of the numerous and disconnected railway lines built during the forties and fifties. coincident with the nationalized market for goods, production began to change from a handicraft to a machine basis. the former sweatshop boss having accumulated some capital, or with the aid of credit, now became a small "manufacturer," owning a small plant and employing from ten to fifty workmen. machinery increased the productivity of labor and gave a considerable margin of profits, which enabled him to begin laying a foundation for his future independence of the middleman. as yet he was, however, far from independent. the wider areas over which manufactured products were now to be distributed, called more than ever before for the services of the specialist in marketing, namely, the wholesale-jobber. as the market extended, he sent out his traveling men, established business connections, and advertised the articles which bore his trade mark. his control of the market opened up credit with the banks, while the manufacturer, who with the exception of his patents possessed only physical capital and no market opportunities, found it difficult to obtain credit. moreover, the rapid introduction of machinery tied up all of the manufacturers' available capital and forced him to turn his products into money as rapidly as possible, with the inevitable result that the merchant was given an enormous bargaining advantage over him. had the extension of the market and the introduction of machinery proceeded at a less rapid pace, the manufacturer probably would have been able to obtain greater control over the market opportunities, and the larger credit which this would have given him, combined with the accumulation of his own capital, might have been sufficient to meet his needs. however, as the situation really developed, the merchant obtained a superior bargaining power and, by playing off the competing manufacturers one against another, produced a cut-throat competition, low prices, low profits, and consequently a steady and insistent pressure upon wages. this represents the situation in the seventies and eighties. for labor the combination of cut-throat competition among employers with the new machine technique brought serious consequences. in this era of machinery the forces of technical evolution decisively joined hands with the older forces of marketing evolution to depress the conditions of the wage bargain. it is needless to dilate upon the effects of machine technique on labor conditions--they have become a commonplace of political economy. the shoemakers were first among the organized trades to feel the effects. in the later sixties they organized what was then the largest trade union in the world, the order of the knights of st. crispin,[ ] to ward off the menace of "green hands" set to work on machines. with the machinists and the metal trades in general, the invasion of unskilled and little skilled competitors began a decade later. but the main and general invasion came in the eighties, the proper era from which to date machine production in america. it was during the eighties that we witness an attempted fusion into one organization, the order of the knights of labor, of the machine-menaced mechanics and the hordes of the unskilled.[ ] with the nineties a change comes at last. the manufacturer finally wins his independence. either he reaches out directly to the ultimate consumer by means of chains of stores or other devices, or else, he makes use of his control over patents and trade marks and thus succeeds in reducing the wholesale-jobber to a position which more nearly resembles that of an agent working on a commission basis than that of the _quondam_ industrial ruler. the immediate outcome is, of course, a considerable increase in the manufacturer's margin of profit. the industrial class struggle begins to abate in intensity. the employer, now comparatively free of anxiety that he may be forced to operate at a loss, is able to diminish pressure on wages. but more than this: the greater certainty about the future, now that he is a free agent, enables him to enter into time agreements with a trade union. at first he is generally disinclined to forego any share of his newly acquired freedom by tying himself up with a union. but if the union is strong and can offer battle, then he accepts the situation and "recognizes" it. thus the class struggle instead of becoming sharper and sharper with the advance of capitalism and leading, as marx predicted, to a social revolution, in reality, grows less and less revolutionary and leads to a compromise or succession of compromises,--namely, collective trade agreements. but the manufacturer's emancipation from the middleman need not always lead to trade agreements. in the shoe industry this process did not do away with competition. in other industries such an emancipation was identical with the coming in of the "trust," or a combination of competing manufacturers into a monopoly. as soon as the "trust" becomes practically the sole employer of labor in an industry, the relations between labor and capital are thrown almost invariably back into the state of affairs which characterized the merchant-capitalist system at its worst, but with one important difference. whereas under the merchant-capitalist system the employer was _obliged_ to press down on wages and fight unionism to death owing to cut-throat competition, the "trust," its strength supreme in both commodity and labor market, can do so and usually does so _of free choice_. the character of the labor struggle has been influenced by cyclical changes in industry as much as by the permanent changes in the organization of industry and market. in fact, whereas reaction to the latter has generally been slow and noticeable only over long periods of time, with a turn in the business cycle, the labor movement reacted surely and instantaneously. we observed over the greater part of the history of american labor an alternation of two planes of thought and action, an upper and a lower. on the upper plane, labor thought was concerned with ultimate goals, self-employment or cooperation, and problems arising therefrom, while action took the form of politics. on the lower plane, labor abandoned the ultimate for the proximate, centering on betterments within the limits of the wage system and on trade-union activity. labor history in the past century was largely a story of labor's shifting from one plane to another, and then again to the first. it was also seen that what determined the plane of thought and action at any one time was the state of business measured by movements of wholesale and retail prices and employment and unemployment. when prices rose and margins of employers' profits were on the increase, the demand for labor increased and accordingly also labor's strength as a bargainer; at the same time, labor was compelled to organize to meet a rising cost of living. at such times trade unionism monopolized the arena, won strikes, increased membership, and forced "cure-alls" and politics into the background. when, however, prices fell and margins of profit contracted, labor's bargaining strength waned, strikes were lost, trade unions faced the danger of extinction, and "cure-alls" and politics received their day in court. labor would turn to government and politics only as a last resort, when it had lost confidence in its ability to hold its own in industry. this phenomenon, noticeable also in other countries, came out with particular clearness in america. for, as a rule, down to the world war, prices both wholesale and retail, fluctuated in america more violently than in england or the continent. and twice, once in the thirties and again in the sixties, an irredeemable paper currency moved up the water mark of prices to tremendous heights followed by reactions of corresponding depth. from the war of , the actual beginning of an industrial america, to the end of the century, the country went through several such complete industrial and business cycles. we therefore conveniently divide labor and trade union history into periods on the basis of the industrial cycle. it was only in the nineties, as we saw, that the response of the labor movement to price fluctuations ceased to mean a complete or nearly complete abandonment of trade unionism during depressions. a continuous and stable trade union movement consequently dates only from the nineties. the cooperative movement which was, as we saw, far less continuous than trade unionism, has also shown the effects of the business cycle. the career of distributive cooperation in america has always been intimately related to the movements of retail prices and wages. if, in the advance of wages and prices during the ascending portion of the industrial cycle, the cost of living happened to outdistance wages by a wide margin, the wage earners sought a remedy in distributive cooperation. they acted likewise during the descending portion of the industrial cycle, when retail prices happened to fall much less slowly than wages. producers' cooperation in the united states has generally been a "hard times" remedy. when industrial prosperity has passed its high crest and strikes have begun to fail, producers' cooperation has often been used as a retaliatory measure to bring the employer to terms by menacing to underbid him in the market. also, when in the further downward course of industry the point has been reached where cuts in wages and unemployment have become quite common, producers' cooperation has sometimes come in as an attempt to enable the wage earner to obtain both employment and high earnings bolstered through cooperative profits. footnotes: [ ] the struggle for control, as carried on by trade unions, centers on such matters as methods of wage determination, the employer's right of discharge, hiring and lay-off, division of work, methods of enforcing shop discipline, introduction of machinery and division of labor, transfers of employes, promotions, the union or non-union shop, and similar subjects. [ ] the first trade societies were organized by shoemakers. (see above, - .) [ ] see chapter on "american shoemakers," in _labor and administration_, by john r. commons (macmillan, ). [ ] see don d. lescohier, _the order of the knights of st. crispin_. [ ] see above, - . chapter the idealistic factor the puzzling fact about the american labor movement is, after all, its limited objective. as we saw before, the social order which the typical american trade unionist considers ideal is one in which organized labor and organized capital possess equal bargaining power. the american trade unionist wants, first, an equal voice with the employer in fixing wages and, second, a big enough control over the productive processes to protect job, health, and organization. yet he does not appear to wish to saddle himself and fellow wage earners with the trouble of running industry without the employer. but materialistic though this philosophy appears, it is nevertheless the product of a long development to which the spiritual contributed no less than the material. in fact the american labor movement arrived at an opportunist trade unionism only after an endeavor spread over more than seventy years to realize a more idealistic program. american labor started with the "ideology" of the declaration of independence in . intended as a justification of a political revolution, the declaration was worded by the authors as an expression of faith in a social revolution. to controvert the claims of george iii, thomas jefferson quoted rousseau. to him rousseau was in all probability little more than an abstract "beau idéal," but rousseau's abstractions were no mere abstractions to the pioneer american farmer. to the latter the doctrine that all men are born free and equal seemed to have grown directly out of experience. so it appeared, two or three generations later, to the young workmen when they for the first time achieved political consciousness. and, if reality ceased to square with the principles of the declaration, it became, they felt, the bounden duty of every true american to amend reality. out of a combination of the principles of individual rights, individual self-determination, equality of opportunity, and political equality enumerated and suggested in the declaration, arose the first and most persistent american labor philosophy. this philosophy differed in no wise from the philosophy of the old american democracy except in emphasis and particular application, yet these differences are highly significant. labor read into the declaration of independence a condemnation of the wage system as a permanent economic régime; sooner or later in place of the wage system had to come _self-employment_. americanism to them was a social and economic as well as a political creed. economic self-determination was as essential to the individual as political equality. just as no true american will take orders from a king, so he will not consent forever to remain under the orders of a "boss." it was the _uplifting_ force of this social ideal as much as the propelling force of the changing economic environment that molded the american labor program. we find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very beginning of the labor movement. it then took the form of a demand for a free public school system. these workingmen in philadelphia and new york discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the declaration, america had developed into an "aristocracy." they thought that the root of it all lay in "inequitable" legislation which fostered "monopoly," hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. but they further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on an educated and intelligent working class. no measure, therefore, could be more than a palliative until they got a "republican" system of education. the workingmen's parties of - failed as parties, but humanitarians like horace mann took up the struggle for free public education and carried it to success. if in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic opportunity. this took the form of a demand of a grant of public land free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life. the government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage system into self-employment by way of free land. after years of agitation, the same cry was taken up by the western states eager for more settlers to build up their communities and this combined agitation proved irresistible and culminated in the homestead law of . the homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free land and agriculture. but in the sixties the united states was already becoming an industrial country. in abandoning the city for the farm, the wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession--his skill. moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere access to free land. whether he went on the land or stayed in industry, he needed access to reasonably free credit. the device invented by workingmen to this end was the bizarre "greenback" idea which held their minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. "greenbackism" left no such permanent trace on american social and economic structure as "republican education" or "free land." the lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. but already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers' cooperation. in the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. the protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of american labor was the "noble order of the knights of labor," which reached its height in the middle of the eighties. the period of the greatest enthusiasm for cooperation was between and ; and by the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. the failure of cooperation proved a turning point in the evolution of the american labor program. whatever the special causes of failure, the idealistic unionism, for which the ideas of the declaration of independence served as a fountain head, suffered in the eyes of labor, a degree of discredit so overwhelming that to regain its old position was no longer possible. the times were ripe for the opportunistic unionism of gompers and the trade unionists. these latter, having started in the seventies as marxian socialists, had been made over into opportunistic unionists by their practical contact with american conditions. their philosophy was narrower than that of the knights and their concept of labor solidarity narrower still. however, these trade unionists demonstrated that they could win strikes. it was to this practical trade unionism, then, that the american labor movement turned, about , when the idealism of the knights of labor had failed. from groping for a cooperative economic order or self-employment, labor turned with the american federation of labor to developing bargaining power for use against employers. this trade unionism stood for a strengthened group consciousness. while it continued to avow sympathy with the "anti-monopoly" aspirations of the "producers," who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage earners organized by themselves. this opportunist unionism, now at last triumphant over the idealistic unionism induced by america's spiritual tradition, soon was obliged to fight against a revolutionary unionism which, like itself, was an offshoot of the socialism of the seventies. at first, the american federation of labor was far from hostile to socialism as a philosophy. its attitude was rather one of mild contempt for what it considered to be wholly impracticable under american conditions, however necessary or efficacious under other conditions. when, about , the socialists declared their policy of "boring from within," that is, of capturing the federation for socialism by means of propaganda in federation ranks, this attitude remained practically unchanged. only when, dissatisfied with the results of boring from within, the socialists, now led by a more determined leadership, attempted in to set up a rival to the federation in the socialist trade and labor alliance, was there a sharp line drawn between socialist and anti-socialist in the federation. the issue once having become a fighting issue, the leaders of the federation experienced the need of a positive and well rounded-out social philosophy capable of meeting socialism all along the front instead of the former self-imposed super-pragmatism. by this time, the federation had become sufficiently removed in point of time from its foreign origin to turn to the social ideal derived from pioneer america as the philosophy which it hoped would successfully combat an aggressive and arrogant socialism. thus it came about that the front against socialism was built out from the immediate and practical into the ultimate and spiritual; and that inferences drawn from a reading of jefferson's declaration, with its emphasis on individual liberty, were pressed into service against the seductive collectivist forecasts of marx. chapter why there is not an american labor party the question of a political labor party hinges, in the last analysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. if, under the constitution, government possesses considerable power to regulate industrial relations and improve labor conditions, political power is worth striving for. if, on the contrary, the power of the government is restricted by a rigid organic law, the matter is reversed. the latter is the situation in the united states. the american constitutions, both federal and state, contain bills of rights which embody in fullness the eighteenth-century philosophy of economic individualism and governmental _laissez-faire_. the courts, federal and state, are given the right to override any law enacted by congress or the state legislatures which may be shown to conflict with constitutional rights. in the exercise of this right, american judges have always inclined to be very conservative in allowing the legislature to invade the province of economic freedom. at present after many years of agitation by humanitarians and trade unionists, the cause of legislative protection of child and woman laborers seems to be won in principle. but this progress has been made because it has been shown conclusively that the protection of these most helpless groups of the wage-earning class clearly falls within the scope of public purpose and is therefore a lawful exercise of the state's police power within the meaning of the constitution. however, adult male labor offers a far different case. moreover, should the unexpected happen and the courts become converted to a broader view, the legislative standards would be small compared with the standards already enforced by most of the trade unions. consequently, so far as adult male workers are concerned (and they are of course the great bulk of organized labor), labor in america would scarcely be justified in diverting even a part of its energy from trade unionism to a relatively unprofitable seeking of redress through legislatures and courts.[ ] but this is no more than half the story. granting even that political power may be worth having, its attainment is beset with difficulties and dangers more than sufficient to make responsible leaders pause. the causes reside once more in the form of government, also in the general nature of american politics, and in political history and tradition. to begin with, labor would have to fight not on one front, but on forty-nine different fronts.[ ] congress and the states have power to legislate on labor matters; also, in each, power is divided between an executive and the two houses of the legislature. decidedly, government in america was built not for strength but for weakness. the splitting up of sovereignty does not especially interfere with the purposes of a conservative party, but to a party of social and industrial reform it offers a disheartening obstacle. a labor party, to be effective, would be obliged to capture all the diffused bits of sovereignty at the same time. a partial gain is of little avail, since it is likely to be lost at the next election even simultaneously with a new gain. but we have assumed here that the labor party had reached the point where its trials are the trials of a party in power or nearing power. in reality, american labor parties are spared this sort of trouble by trials of an anterior order residing in the nature of american politics. the american political party system antedates the formation of modern economic classes, especially the class alignment of labor and capital. each of the old parties represents, at least in theory, the entire american community regardless of class. party differences are considered differences of opinion or of judgment on matters of public policy, not differences of class interest. the wage earner in america, who never had to fight for his suffrage but received it as a free gift from the jeffersonian and jacksonian democratic movements and who did not therefore develop the political class consciousness which was stamped into the workers in europe by the feeling of revolt against an upper ruling class, is prone to adopt the same view of politics. class parties in america have always been effectively countered by the old established parties with the charge that they tend to incite class against class. but the old parties had on numerous occasions, as we saw, an even more effective weapon. no sooner did a labor party gain a foothold, than the old party politician, the "friend of labor," did appear and start a rival attraction by a more or less verbal adherence to one or more planks of the rising party. had he been, as in europe, a branded spokesman of a particular economic class or interest, it would not have been difficult to ward him off. but here in america, he said that he too was a workingman and was heart and soul for the workingman. moreover, the workingman was just as much attached to an old party label as any average american. in a way he considered it an assertion of his social equality with any other group of americans that he could afford to take the same "disinterested" and tradition-bound view of political struggles as the rest. this is why labor parties generally encountered such disheartening receptions at the hands of workingmen; also why it was difficult to "deliver the labor vote" to any party. this, on the whole, describes the condition of affairs today as it does the situations in the past. in the end, should the workingman be pried loose from his traditional party affiliation by a labor event of transcendent importance for the time being, should he be stirred to political revolt by an oppressive court decision, or the use of troops to break a strike; then, at the next election, when the excitement has had time to subside, he will usually return to his political normality. moreover, should labor discontent attain depth, it may be safely assumed that either one or the other of the old parties or a faction therein will seek to divert its driving force into its own particular party channel. should the labor party still persist, the old party politicians, whose bailiwick it will have particularly invaded, will take care to encourage, by means not always ethical but nearly always effective, strife in its ranks. should that fail, the old parties will in the end "fuse" against the upstart rival. if they are able to stay "fused" during enough elections and also win them, the fidelity of the adherent of the third party is certain to be put to a hard and unsuccessful test. to the outsider these conclusions may appear novel, but labor in america learned these lessons through a long experience, which began when the first workingmen's parties were attempted in - . the limited potentialities of labor legislation together with the apparent hopelessness of labor party politics compelled the american labor movement to develop a sort of non-partisan political action with limited objectives thoroughly characteristic of american conditions. labor needs protection from interference by the courts in the exercise of its economic weapons, the strike and the boycott, upon which it is obviously obliged to place especial reliance. in other words, though labor may refuse to be drawn into the vortex of politics for the sake of positive attainments, or, that is to say, labor legislation, it is compelled to do so for the sake of a _negative_ gain--a judicial _laissez-faire_. that labor does by pursuing a policy of "reward your friends" and "punish your enemies" in the sphere of politics. the method itself is an old one in the labor movement; we saw it practiced by george henry evans and the land reformers of the forties as well as by steward and the advocates of the eight-hour day by law in the sixties. the american federation of labor merely puts it to use in connection with a new objective, namely, freedom from court interference. although the labor vote is largely "undeliverable," still where the parties are more or less evenly matched in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever side it turns. under certain conditions[ ] labor has been known even to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won had it come to share in power as a labor party. the controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement. in america his role has been remarkably restricted. for a half century or more the educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the forties and fifties, when the brook farm enthusiasts and their associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really alone in the field, since the protracted trade depression had laid all labor organization low. it was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the knights of labor and the anarchist bomb in chicago, that the "intellectuals" first awakened to the existence of a labor problem. to this awakening no single person contributed more than the economist professor richard t. ely, then of johns hopkins university. his pioneer work on the _labor movement in america_ published in , and the works of his many capable students gave the labor movement a permanent place in the public mind, besides presenting the cause of labor with scientific precision and with a judicious balance. among the other pioneers were preachers like washington gladden and lyman abbott, who conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes according to the golden rule and the latter to moderation in their demands. together with the economists they helped to break down the prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was non-revolutionary. and though their influence was large, they understood that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor movement. in recent years a new type of intellectual has come to the front. a product of a more generalized mental environment than his predecessor, he is more daring in his retrospects and his prospects. he is just as ready to advance an "economic interpretation of the constitution" as to advocate a collectivistic panacea for the existing industrial and social ills. nor did this new intellectual come at an inopportune time for getting a hearing. confidence in social conservatism has been undermined by an exposure in the press and through legislative investigations of the disreputable doings of some of the staunchest conservatives. at such a juncture "progressivism" and a "new liberalism" were bound to come into their own in the general opinion of the country. but the labor movement resisted. american labor, both during the periods of neglect and of moderate championing by the older generation of intellectuals, has developed a leadership wholly its own. this leadership, of which samuel gompers is the most notable example, has given years and years to building up a united fighting _morale_ in the army of labor. and because the _morale_ of an army, as these leaders thought, is strong only when it is united upon one common attainable purpose, the intellectual with his new and unfamiliar issues has been given the cold shoulder by precisely the trade unionists in whom he had anticipated to find most eager disciples. the intellectual might go from success to success in conquering the minds of the middle classes; the labor movement largely remains closed to him. to make matters worse the intellectual has brought with him a psychology which is particularly out of fit with the american labor situation. we noted that the american labor movement became shunted from the political arena into the economic one by virtue of fundamental conditions of american political institutions and political life. however, it is precisely in political activity where the intellectual is most at home. the clear-cut logic and symmetry of political platforms based on general theories, the broad vistas which it may be made to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. the mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. he is out of patience with mere amelioration, even though it may mean much in terms of human happiness to the worker and his family. when in , in consequence of the heaping up of legal disabilities upon the trade unions, american labor leaders turned to politics to seek a restraining hand upon the courts,[ ] the intellectuals foresaw a political labor party in the not distant future. they predicted that one step would inevitably lead to another, that from a policy of bartering with the old parties for anti-injunction planks in their platforms, labor would turn to a political party of its own. the intellectual critic continues to view the political action of the american federation of labor as the first steps of an invalid learning to walk; and hopes that before long he will learn to walk with a firmer step, without feeling tempted to lean upon the only too willing shoulders of old-party politicians. on the contrary, the federation leaders, as we know, regard their political work as a necessary evil, due to an unfortunate turn of affairs, which forces them from time to time to step out of their own trade union province in order that their natural enemy, the employing class, might get no aid and comfort from an outside ally. of late a _rapprochement_ between the intellectual and trade unionist has begun to take place. however, it is not founded on the relationship of leader and led, but only on a business relationship, or that of giver and receiver of paid technical advice. the role of the trained economist in handling statistics and preparing "cases" for trade unionists before boards of arbitration is coming to be more and more appreciated. the railway men's organizations were first to put the intellectual to this use, the miners and others followed. from this it is still a far cry to the role of such intellectuals as sidney and beatrice webb, g.d.h. cole and the fabian research group in england, who have really permeated the british labor movement with their views on labor policy. however, there is also a place for the american intellectual as an ally of trade unionism, not only as its paid servant. the american labor movement has committed a grave and costly error because it has not made use of the services of writers, journalists, lecturers, and speakers to popularize its cause with the general public. some of its recent defeats, notably the steel strike of , were partly due to the neglect to provide a sufficient organization of labor publicity to counteract the anti-union publicity by the employers. footnotes: [ ] this assumes that the legislative program of labor would deal primarily with the regulation of labor conditions in private employment analogous to the legislative program of the british trade unions until recent years. should labor in america follow the newer program of labor in britain and demand the taking over of industries by government with compensation, it is not certain that the courts would prove as serious a barrier as in the other case. however, the situation would remain unchanged so far as the difficulties discussed in the remainder of this chapter are concerned. [ ] for the control of the national government and of the forty-eight state governments. [ ] such as a state of war; see above, - . [ ] see above, - . chapter the dictatorship of the proletariat and trade unionism the rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning class in revolutionary russia in has focussed public opinion on the labor question as no other event ever did. but one will scarcely say that it has tended to clarity of thought. on the one hand, the conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. the extreme radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a bolshevist upheaval in america as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically fearful. both forget that an effective social revolution is not the product of mere chance and "mob psychology," nor even of propaganda however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between contending economic classes. to students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of russian life, past and present. in fact, the continued bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of the several classes in russian society--the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial propertied class, and the peasantry. it is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact into life the marxian social program should belie the truth of marx's materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is shaped by both economic and non-economic forces. marx, as is well known, taught that history is a struggle between classes, in which the landed aristocracy, the capitalist class, and the wage earning class are raised successively to rulership as, with the progress of society's technical equipment, first one and then another class can operate it with the maximum efficiency. marx assumed that when the time has arrived for a given economic class to take the helm, that class will be found in full possession of all the psychological attributes of a ruling class, namely, an indomitable will to power, no less than the more vulgar desire for the emoluments that come with power. apparently, marx took for granted that economic evolution is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding development of an effective will to power in the class destined to rule. yet, whatever may be the case in the countries of the west, in russia the ruling classes, the gentry and the capitalists, clearly failed in the psychological test at the critical time. this failure is amply attested by the manner in which they submitted practically without a fight after the bolshevist coup _d'état_. to get at the secret of this apparent feebleness and want of spunk in russia's ruling class one must study a peculiarity of her history, namely, the complete dominance of russia's development by organized government. where the historian of the western countries must take account of several independent forces, each standing for a social class, the russian historian may well afford to station himself on the high peak of government and, from this point of vantage, survey the hills and vales of the society which it so thoroughly dominated. apolitism runs like a red thread through the pages of russian history. even the upper layer of the old noble class, the "boyars," were but a shadow of the western contemporary medieval landed aristocracy. when the several principalities became united with the czardom of muscovy many centuries ago, the boyar was in fact no more than a steward of the czar's estate and a leader of a posse defending his property; the most he dared to do was surreptitiously to obstruct the carrying out of the czar's intentions; he dared not try to impose the will of his class upon the crown. the other classes were even more apolitical. so little did the several classes aspire to domination that they missed many golden opportunities to seize and hold a share of the political power. in the seventeenth century, when the government was exceptionally weak after what is known as the "period of troubles," it convoked periodical "assemblies of the land" to help administer the country. but, as a matter of fact, these assemblies considered themselves ill used because they were asked to take part in government and not once did they aspire to an independent position in the russian body politic. another and perhaps even more striking instance we find a century and a half later. catherine the great voluntarily turned over the local administration to the nobles and to that end decreed that the nobility organize themselves into provincial associations. but so little did the nobility care for political power and active class prerogative that, in spite of the broadest possible charters, the associations of nobles were never more than social organizations in the conventional sense of the word. even less did the commercial class aspire to independence. in the west of europe mercantilism answered in an equal measure the needs of an expanding state and of a vigorous middle class, the latter being no less ardent in the pursuit of gain than the former in the pursuit of conquest. in russia, on the other hand, when peter the great wanted manufacturing, he had to introduce it by government action. hence, russian mercantilism was predominantly a state mercantilism. even where peter succeeded in enlisting private initiative by subsidies, instead of building up a class of independent manufacturers, he merely created industrial parasites and bureaucrats without initiative of their own, who forever kept looking to the government. coming to more recent times, we find that the modern russian factory system likewise owes its origin to governmental initiative, namely, to the government's railway-building policy. the government built the railways for strategic and fiscal reasons but incidentally created a unified internal market which made mass-production of articles of common consumption profitable for the first time. but, even after russian capitalism was thus enabled to stand on its own feet, it did not unlearn the habit of leaning on the government for advancement rather than relying on its own efforts. on its part the autocratic government was loath to let industry alone. the government generously dispensed to the capitalists tariff protection and bounties in the form of profitable orders, but insisted on keeping industry under its thumb. and though they might chafe, still the capitalists never neglected to make the best of the situation. for instance, when the sugar producers found themselves running into a hole from cut-throat competition, they appealed to the minister of finances, who immediately created a government-enforced "trust" and assured them huge dividends. since business success was assured by keeping on the proper footing with a generous government rather than by relying on one's own vigor, it stands to reason that, generally speaking, the capitalists and especially the larger capitalists, could develop only into a class of industrial courtiers. and when at last the autocracy fell, the courtiers were not to be turned overnight into stubborn champions of the rights of their class amid the turmoil of a revolution. to be sure, russia had entered the capitalistic stage as her marxians had predicted, but nevertheless her capitalists were found to be lacking the indomitable will to power which makes a ruling class. the weakness of the capitalists in the fight on behalf of private property may be explained in part by their want of allies in the other classes in the community. the russian peasant, reared in the atmosphere of communal land ownership, was far from being a fanatical defender of private property. no thiers could have rallied a russian peasant army for the suppression of a communistic industrial wage-earning class by an appeal to their property instinct. to make matters worse for the capitalists, the peasant's strongest craving was for more land, all the land, without compensation! this the capitalists, being capitalists, were unable to grant. yet it was the only sort of currency which the peasant would accept in payment for his political support. in november, , when the bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts was to satisfy the peasant's land hunger by turning over to his use all the land. the "proletariat" had then a free hand so far as the most numerous class in russia was concerned. just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the will to rule outran all expectations and beat the marxian time-schedule. among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class. the economic and social oppression under the old régime had seen to it that no group of laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to separate from the rest. moreover, for several decades, and especially since the memorable days of the revolution of , the laboring class has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of the great historical role of the proletariat. the writer remembers how in even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of the "heroic proletariat marching in the van of russia's progress." no wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely to be a bourgeois revolution--with the social revolution still remote. instead they listened to the slogan "all power to the soviets." the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in the course of the abortive revolution of - . after a victory for the people in october, , the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an understanding with the autocracy. an order by the soviet of petrograd workmen in november, , decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy. if the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all? have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in europe and america? why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them from coming to the top? therefore, they declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than a government by the representative organ of the workers--the soviets. if we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they practice, then the american end of the problem, too, appears in a new light. no longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or against the desirability of a bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and probable behavior of the classes in a given society. it is as futile to "see red" in america because of bolshevism in russia as to yearn for bolshevism's advent in the united states. either view misses the all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned america is the antipodes of russia, where the capitalists have shown little fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight. bolshevism is unthinkable in america, because, even if by some imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." no one who knows the american business class will even dream that it would under any circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities. a bolshevist _coup d'état_ in america would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private property.[ ] but it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the united states is so decisively with private property that america is proof against a social upheaval like the russian one. another and perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her four million organized trade unionists. for, however unjustly they may feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution. the truth is that the revolutionary labor movement in america looms up much bigger than it actually is. though in many strikes since the famous textile strike in lawrence, massachusetts, in , the leadership was revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by the same purpose. given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the politician, the policeman, and the native american labor organizer; given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and children and to shedding their blood on picket duty. if they follow a haywood or an ettor, it is precisely because they have been ignored by a golden or a gompers. withal, then, trade unionism, despite an occasional revolutionary facet and despite a revolutionary clamor especially on its fringes, is a conservative social force. trade unionism seems to have the same moderating effect upon society as a wide diffusion of private property. in fact the gains of trade unionism are to the worker on a par with private property to its owner. the owner regards his property as a protective dyke between himself and a ruthless biological struggle for existence; his property means liberty and opportunity to escape dictation by another man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for his choice. the french peasants in who flocked to the army of the government of versailles to suppress the commune of paris (the first attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property, they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itself. and having acquired relative protection in their private property, small though it might be, they were unwilling to permit something which were it to succeed would lose them their all. now with some exceptions every human being is a "protectionist," provided he does possess anything at all which protects him and which is therefore worth being protected by him in turn. the trade unionist, too, is just such a protectionist. when his trade union has had the time and opportunity to win for him decent wages and living conditions, a reasonable security of the job, and at least a partial voice in shop management, he will, on the relatively high and progressive level of material welfare which capitalism has called into being, be chary to raze the existing economic system to the ground on the chance of building up a better one in its place. a reshuffling of the cards, which a revolution means, might conceivably yield him a better card, but then again it might make the entire stack worthless by destroying the stakes for which the game is played. but the revolution might not even succeed in the first round; then the ensuing reaction would probably destroy the trade union and with it would go the chance of a recovery of the original ground, modest though that may have been. in practice, therefore, the trade union movements in nearly all nations[ ] have served as brakes upon the respective national socialist movements; and, from the standpoint of society interested in its own preservation against catastrophic change, have played and are playing a role of society's policemen and watch-dogs over the more revolutionary groups in the wage-earning class. these are largely the unorganized and ill-favored groups rendered reckless because, having little to lose from a revolution, whatever the outcome might be, they fear none. in america, too, there is a revolutionary class which, unlike the striking textile workers in - , owes its origin neither to chance nor to neglect by trade union leaders. this is the movement of native american or americanized workers in the outlying districts of the west or south--the typical i.w.w., the migratory workers, the industrial rebels, and the actors in many labor riots and lumber-field strikes. this type of worker has truly broken with america's spiritual past. he has become a revolutionist either because his personal character and habits unfit him for success under the exacting capitalistic system; or because, starting out with the ambitions and rosy expectations of the early pioneer, he found his hopes thwarted by a capitalistic preemptor of the bounty of nature, who dooms to a wage-earner's position all who came too late. in either case he is animated by a genuine passion for revolution, a passion which admits no compromise. yet his numbers are too few to threaten the existing order. in conclusion, american trade unionism, no matter whether the american federation of labor keeps its old leaders or replaces them by "progressives" or socialists, seems in a fair way to continue its conservative function--so long as no overpowering open-shop movement or "trustification" will break up the trade unions or render them sterile. the hope of american bolshevism will, therefore, continue to rest with the will of employers to rule as autocrats. footnotes: [ ] though writers and public speakers of either extreme have often overlooked the fundamental consideration of where the preponderance of social power lies in their prognostications of revolutions, this has not escaped the leaders of the american labor movement. the vehemence with which the leaders of the american federation of labor have denounced sovietism and bolshevism, and which has of late been brought to a high pitch by a fear lest a shift to radicalism should break up the organization, is doubtless sincere. but one cannot help feeling that in part at least it aimed to reassure the great american middle class on the score of labor's intentions. the great majority of organized labor realize that, though at times they may risk engaging in unpopular strikes, it will never do to permit their enemies to tar them with the pitch of subversionism in the eyes of the great american majority--a majority which remains wedded to the régime of private property and individual enterprise despite the many recognized shortcomings of the institution. [ ] notably in germany since the end of the world war. bibliography the first seven chapters of the present work are based on the _history of labour in the united states_ by john r. commons and associates,[ ] published in in two volumes by the macmillan company, new york. the major portion of the latter was in turn based on _a documentary history of the american industrial society_, edited by professor commons and published in in ten volumes by clark and company, cleveland. in preparing chapters to , dealing with the period since , which is not covered in the _history of labour_, the author used largely the same sort of material as that in the preparation of the above named works; namely, original sources such as proceedings of trade union conventions, labor and employer papers, government reports, etc. there are, however, many excellent special histories relating to the recent period in the labor movement, especially histories of unionism in individual trades or industries, to which the author wishes to refer the reader for more ample accounts of the several phases of the subject, which he himself was of necessity obliged to treat but briefly. the following is a selected list of such works together with some others relating to earlier periods: barnett, george e., _the printers--a study in american trade unionism_, american economic association, . bing, alexander m., _war-time strikes and their adjustment_, dutton and co., . bonnett, clarence e., _employers' associations in the united states_, macmillan, . brissenden, paul f., _the i.w.w.--a study in american syndicalism_, columbia university, . brooks, john g., _american syndicalism: the i.w.w._, macmillan, . budish and soule, _the new unionism in the clothing industry_, harcourt, . carlton, frank t., _economic influences upon educational progress in the united states, - _, university of wisconsin, . deibler, frederick s., _the amalgamated wood workers' international union of america_, university of wisconsin, . fitch, john l., _the steel workers_, russell sage foundation, . hoagland, henry e., _wage bargaining on the vessels of the great lakes_, university of illinois, . ------, _collective bargaining in the lithographic industry_, columbia university, . interchurch world movement, commission of inquiry, report on the steel strike of , harcourt, . laidler, harry, _socialism in thought and action_, macmillan, . robbins, edwin c., _railway conductors--a study in organized labor_, columbia university, . schlÃ�ter, herman, _the brewing industry and the brewery workmen's movement in america_, international union of brewery workmen, . suffern, arthur e., _conciliation and arbitration in the coal mining industry in america_, mifflin, . sydenstricker, edgar, _collective bargaining in the anthracite coal industry_, bulletin no. of the united states bureau of labor statistics, . wolman, leo, _the boycott in american trade unions_, johns hopkins university, . _labor encyclopedias_: american federation of labor, _history, encyclopedia, reference book_, american federation of labor, . browne, waldo r., _what's what in the labor movement_, huebsch, . footnote: [ ] see author's preface. none made available by the albert r. mann library, cornell university note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) images of the original pages are available through the albert r. mann library, cornell university. see http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/ text-idx?c=hearth;idno= making both ends meet the income and outlay of new york working girls by sue ainslie clark and edith wyatt new york the macmillan company [illustration: photograph by lewis hine] to florence kelley this book is dedicated preface this book is composed of the economic records of self-supporting women living away from home in new york. their chronicles were given to the national consumers' league simply as a testimony to truth; and it is simply as a testimony to truth that these narratives are reprinted here. the league's inquiry was initiated because, three years ago in the study of the establishment of a minimum wage, only very little information was obtainable as to the relation between the income and the outlay of self-supporting women workers. the inquiry was conducted for a year and a half by mrs. sue ainslie clark, who obtained the workers' budgets as they were available from young women interviewed in their rooms, boarding places, and hotels, and at night schools and clubs. after mrs. clark had collected and written these accounts, i supplemented them further in the same manner; and rearranged them in a series of articles for mr. s.s. mcclure. the budgets fell naturally into certain industrial divisions; but, as will be seen from the nature of the inquiry, the records were not exhaustive trade-studies of the several trades in which the workers were engaged. they constituted rather an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly lives of chance passing workers in those trades. wherever the facts ascertained seemed to warrant it, however, they were so focussed as to express definitely and clearly the wisdom of some industrial change. in two instances in the course of the serial publication of the budgets such industrial changes were undertaken and are now in progress. the firm of macy & co. in new york has inaugurated a monthly day of rest, with pay, for all permanent women-employees who wish this privilege. the change was made first in one department and then extended through a plan supplied by the national civic federation to all the departments of the store. the manhattan laundrymen's association, the brooklyn laundrymen's association, and the laundrymen's association of new york state held a conference with the consumers' league after the publication of the laundry report, and asked to cooperate with the league in obtaining the establishment of a ten-hour day in the trade, additional factory inspection, and the placing of hotels and hospital laundries under the jurisdiction of the department of labor. largely through the efforts of the laundrymen's association of new york state, a bill defining as a factory any place where laundry work is done by mechanical power passed both houses of the last legislature at albany. a standard for a fair house was discussed and agreed upon at the conference. it is the intention of the league to publish within the year a white list of the new york steam laundries conforming to this standard in wages, hours, and sanitation. the new york of the workers is not the new york best known to the country at large. the new york of broadway, the new york of fifth avenue, of central park, of wall street, of tammany hall,--these are by-words of common reference; and when two years ago the daily press printed the news of the strike of thirty thousand shirt-waist makers in the metropolis, many persons realized, perhaps for the first time, the presence of a new and different new york--the new york of the city's great working population. the scene of these budgets is a corner of this new york. the authors of the book are many more than its writers whose names appear upon the title-page. the second chapter is chiefly the word-of-mouth tale of natalya perovskaya, one of the shirt-waist workers, a household tale of adventure repeated just as it was told to the present writer and to her hostess' family and other visitors during a call on the east side on a warm summer evening. the sixth chapter is almost entirely the contribution of miss carola woerishofer, miss elizabeth howard westwood, and miss mary alden hopkins, three young college-bred women from bryn mawr, smith, and wellesley, respectively, who made an inquiry for the national consumers' league in the hospital, hotel, and commercial steam laundries of new york. the fifth chapter is composed largely from a chronicle of the new york cloak makers' strike written by dr. henry moskowitz, one of the most efficient leaders in attaining the final settlement last fall between the employers and the seventy thousand members of the cloak makers' union. mr. frederick winston taylor gave the definition of "scientific management" which prefaces the last chapter. it is a pleasure to acknowledge help of several kinds received from mrs. florence kelley, miss perkins, and miss johnson of the consumers' league; from miss neumann, of the woman's trade-union league; from miss pauline and josephine goldmark, and mr. louis p. brandeis; from miss willa siebert cather of _mcclure's magazine_; and from mr. s.s. mcclure. to record rightly any little corner of contemporary history is a communal rather than an individual piece of work. while no title so pompous as that of a cathedral could possibly be applied except with great absurdity to any magazine article, least of all to these quiet, journalistic records, yet the writing of any sincere journalistic article is more comparable, perhaps, to cathedral work than to any sort of craft in expression. if the account is to have any genuine social value as a narrative of contemporary truth, it will be evolved as the product of numerous human intelligences and responsibilities. especially is this true of any synthesis of facts which must be derived, so to speak, from many authors, from many authentic sources. unstandardized conditions in women's work are so frequently mentioned in the first six chapters that their connection with the last chapter will be sufficiently clear. what is the way out of the unstandardized and unsatisfactory conditions obtaining for multitudes of women workers? legislation is undoubtedly one way out. trade organization is undoubtedly one way out. but legislation is ineffectual unless it is strongly backed by conscientious inspection and powerful enforcement. in the great garment-trade strikes in new york, in spite of their victories, the trade orders have gone in such numbers to other cities that neither the spirit of the shirt-waist makers' strike nor the wisdom of the cloak makers' preferential union agreement have since availed to provide sufficient employment for the workers. further, neither legislation nor trade organization are permanently valuable unless they are informed by justice and understanding. in the same manner, unless it is informed by these qualities, the new plan of management outlined in the last chapter is incapable of any lasting and far-reaching industrial deliverance. but it provides a way out, hitherto untried. with an account of this way as it appears to-day our book ends, as a testimony to living facts can only end, not with the hard-and-fast wall of dogma, but with an open door. edith wyatt. chicago, march , . contents chapter i the income and outlay of some new york saleswomen chapter ii the shirt-waist makers' strike chapter iii the income and outlay of some new york factory workers. (unskilled and seasonal work) chapter iv the income and outlay of some new york factory workers. (monotony and fatigue in speeding) chapter v the cloak makers' strike and the preferential union shop chapter vi women laundry workers in new york chapter vii scientific management as applied to women's work chapter i the income and outlay of some new york saleswomen i one of the most significant features of the common history of this generation is the fact that nearly six million women are now gainfully employed in this country. from time immemorial, women have, indeed, worked, so that it is not quite as if an entire sex, living at ease at home heretofore, had suddenly been thrown into an unwonted activity, as many quoters of the census seem to believe. for the domestic labor in which women have always engaged may be as severe and prolonged as commercial labor. but not until recently have women been employed in multitudes for wages, under many of the same conditions as men, irrespective of the fact that their powers are different by nature from those of men, and should, in reason, for themselves, for their children, and for every one, indeed, be conserved by different industrial regulations. what, then, are the fortunes of some of these multitudes of women gainfully employed? what do they give in their work? what do they get from it? clearly ascertained information on those points has been meagre. about two years ago the national consumers' league, through the initiative of its secretary, mrs. florence kelley, started an inquiry on the subject of the standard of living among self-supporting women workers in many fields, away from home in new york. among these workers were saleswomen, waist-makers, hat makers, cloak finishers, textile workers in silk, hosiery, and carpets, tobacco workers, machine tenders, packers of candy, drugs, biscuits, and olives, laundry workers, hand embroiderers, milliners, and dressmakers. the consumers' league had printed for this purpose a series of questions arranged in two parts. the first part covered the character of each girl's work--the nature of her occupation, wages, hours, overtime work, overtime compensation, fines, and idleness. the second part of the questions dealt with the worker's expenses--her outlay for shelter, food, clothing, rest and recreation, and her effort to maintain her strength and energy. in this way the league's inquiry on income and outlay was so arranged as to ascertain, not only the worker's gain and expense in money, but, as far as possible, her gain and expense in health and vitality. the inquiry was conducted for a year and a half by mrs. sue ainslie clark.[ ] the account of the income and outlay of self-supporting women away from home in new york may be divided, for purposes of record, into the chronicles of saleswomen, shirt-waist makers, women workers whose industry involves tension, such as machine operatives, and women workers whose industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength, such as laundry workers. among these the narrative of the trade fortunes of some new york saleswomen is placed first. mrs. clark's inquiry concerning the income and outlay of saleswomen has been supplemented by portions of the records of another investigator for the league, miss marjorie johnson, who worked in one of the department stores during the christmas rush of - . further informal reports made by the shop-girls in the early summer of proved that the income and expenditures of women workers in the stores had remained practically unchanged since the winter of mrs. clark's report. so that it would seem that the budgets, records of the investigator, and statements given by the young women interviewed last june may be reasonably regarded as the most truthful composite photograph obtainable of the trade fortunes of the army of the new york department-store girls to-day.[ ] the limitations of such an inquiry are clear. the thousands of women employed in the new york department stores are of many kinds. from the point of view of describing personality and character, one might as intelligently make an inquiry among wives, with the intent of ascertaining typical wives. the trade and living conditions accurately stated in the industrial records obtained have undoubtedly, however, certain common features. among the fifty saleswomen's histories collected at random in stores of various grades, those that follow, with the statements modifying them, seem to express most clearly and fairly, in the order followed, these common features--low wages, casual employment, heavy required expense in laundry and dress, semidependence, uneven promotion, lack of training, absence of normal pleasure, long hours of standing, and an excess of seasonal work. one of the first saleswomen who told the league her experience in her work was lucy cleaver, a young american woman of twenty-five, who had entered one of the new york department stores at the age of twenty, at a salary of $ . a week. ii in the course of the five years of her employment her salary had been raised one dollar. she stood for nine hours every day. if, in dull moments of trade, when no customers were near, she made use of the seats lawfully provided for employees, she was at once ordered by a floor-walker to do something that required standing. during the week before christmas, she worked standing over fourteen hours every day, from eight to twelve-fifteen in the morning, one to six in the afternoon, and half past six in the evening till half past eleven at night. so painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forego eating at noon in order to give themselves the temporary relief of a foot-bath. for this overtime the store gave her $ , presented to her, not as payment, but as a christmas gift. the management also allowed a week's vacation with pay in the summer-time and presented a gift of $ . after five years in this position she had a disagreement with the floor-walker and was summarily dismissed. she then spent over a month in futile searching for employment, and finally obtained a position as a stock girl in a sixth avenue suit store at $ a week, a sum less than the wage for which she had begun work five years before. within a few weeks, dullness of trade had caused her dismissal. she was again facing indefinite unemployment. her income for the year had been $ . she lived in a large, pleasant home for girls, where she paid only $ . a week for board and a room shared with her sister. without the philanthropy of the home, she could not have made both ends meet. it was fifteen minutes' walk from the store, and by taking this walk twice a day she saved carfare and the price of luncheon. she did her own washing, and as she could not spend any further energy in sewing, she bought cheap ready-made clothes. this she found a great expense. cheap waists wear out very rapidly. in the year she had bought at cents each. here is her account, as nearly as she had kept it and recalled it for a year: a coat, $ ; hats, $ ; pairs of shoes, $ ; waists at cents, $ . ; skirts, $ . ; underwear, $ ; board, $ ; doctor, $ ; total, $ . . this leaves a balance of $ . . this money had paid for necessaries not itemized,--stockings, heavy winter underwear, petticoats, carfare, vacation expenses, every little gift she had made, and all recreation. she belonged to no benefit societies, and she had not been able to save money in any way, even with the assistance given by the home. so much for her financial income and outlay. after giving practically all her time and force to her work, she had not received a return sufficient to conserve her health in the future, or even to support her in the present without the help of philanthropy. she was ill, anæmic, nervous, and broken in health. before adding the next budget, two points in lucy cleaver's outlay should, perhaps, be emphasized in the interest of common sense. the first is the remarkable folly of purchasing waists at cents each. in an estimate of the cost of clothing, made by one of the working girls' clubs of st. george's last year,[ ] the girls agreed that comfort and a presentable appearance could be maintained, so far as expenditure for waists was concerned, on $ . a year. this amount allowed for five shirt-waists at $ . apiece, and one net waist at $ . . in extenuation of lucy cleaver's weak judgment as a waist purchaser, and the poor child's one absurd excess, it must, however, be said that the habit of buying many articles of poor quality, instead of fewer articles of better quality, is frequently a matter, not of choice, but of necessity. the cheap, hand-to-mouth buying which proves paradoxically so expensive in the end is no doubt often caused by the simple fact that the purchaser has not, at the time the purchase is made, any more money to offer. whatever your wisdom, you cannot buy a waist for $ . if you possess at the moment only cents. the st. george's girls made their accounts on a basis of an income of $ a week. lucy cleaver never had an income of more than $ . a week, and sometimes had less. the fact that she spent nearly three times as much as they did on this one item of expenditure, and yet never could have "one net waist at $ . " for festal occasions, is worthy of notice. the other point that should be emphasized is the fact that she did her own washing. the more accurate statement would be that she did her own laundry, including the processes, not only of rubbing the clothes clean, but of boiling, starching, bluing, and ironing. this, after a day of standing in other employment, is a vital strain more severe than may perhaps be readily realized. saleswomen and shop-girls have not the powerful wrists and muscular waists of accustomed washerwomen, and are in most instances no better fitted to perform laundry work than washerwomen would be to make sales and invoice stock. but custom requires exactly the same freshness in a saleswoman's shirt-waist, ties, and collars as in those of women of the largest income. the amount the girls of the st. george's working club found it absolutely necessary to spend in a year for laundering clothes was almost half as much as the amount spent for lodging and nearly two-thirds as much as the amount originally spent for clothing. where this large expense of laundry cannot be met financially by saleswomen, it has to be met by sheer personal strength. one department-store girl, who needed to be especially neat because her position was in the shirt-waist department, told us that sometimes, after a day's standing in the store, she worked over tubs and ironing-boards at home till twelve at night. it is worth noting, as one cause of the numerous helpless shifts of the younger salesgirls, that, living, as most of them do, in a semidependence, on either relatives or charitable homes, it is almost impossible for them to learn any domestic economy, or the value of money for living purposes. it seems significant that quite the most practical spender encountered among the saleswomen was a widow, mrs. green, whose accounts will be given below, who was for years the manager of her own household and resources, and not a wage-earner until fairly late in life. this helplessness of a semidependent and uneducated girl may be further illustrated by the chronicle of alice anderson, a girl of seventeen, who had been working in the department stores for three years and a half. she was at first employed as a check girl in a fourteenth street store, at a wage of $ . - / a week; that is to say, she was paid $ . twice a month. her working day was nine and a half hours long through most of the year. but during two weeks before christmas it was lengthened to from twelve to thirteen and a half hours, without any extra payment in any form. she was promoted to the position of saleswoman, but her wages still remained $ . - / a week. she lived with her grandmother of eighty, working occasionally as a seamstress, and to her alice gave all her earnings for three years. it was then considered better that she should go to live with an aunt, to whom she paid the nominal board of $ . a week. as her home was in west hoboken, she spent two and a half hours every day on the journey in the cars and on the ferry. during the weeks of overtime alice could not reach home until nearly half past eleven o'clock; and she would be obliged to rise while it was still dark, at six o'clock, after five hours and a half of sleep, in order to be at her counter punctually at eight. by walking from the store to the ferry she saved cents a week. still, fares cost her $ . a week. this $ . a week carfare (which was still not enough to convey her the whole distance from her aunt's to the store) and the $ . a week for board (which still did not really pay the aunt for her niece's food and lodging) consumed all her earnings except cents a week. alice was eager to become more genuinely self-dependent. she left the establishment of her first employment and entered another store on fourteenth street, as cash girl, at $ a week. the hours in the second store were very long, from eight to twelve in the morning and from a quarter to one till a quarter past six in the afternoon on all days except saturday, when the closing hour was half past nine. after she had $ a week instead of $ . - / , alice abandoned her daily trip to west hoboken and came to live in new york. here she paid cents a night in a dormitory of a charitably supported home for girls. she ate no breakfast. her luncheon consisted of coffee and rolls for cents. her dinner at night was a repetition of coffee and rolls for cents. as she had no convenient place for doing her own laundry, she paid cents a week to have it done. her regular weekly expenditure was as follows: lodging, cents; board, $ . ; washing, cents; clothing and all other expenses, $ . ; total, $ . of course, living in this manner was quite beyond her strength. she was pale, ill, and making the severest inroads upon her present and future health. her experience illustrates the narrow prospect of promotion in some of the department stores. iii it is significant in this point to compare the annals of this growing girl with those of a saleswoman of thirty-five, grace carr, who had been at work for twelve years. in her first employment in a knitting mill she had remained for five years, and had been promoted rapidly to a weekly wage of $ . the hours, however, were very long, from ten to thirteen hours a day. the lint in the air she breathed so filled her lungs that she was unable, in her short daily leisure, to counteract its effect. at the end of five years, as she was coughing and raising particles of lint, she was obliged to rest for a year. not strong enough to undertake factory work again, she obtained a position in the shoe department in one of the large stores, where she was not "speeded up," and her daily working time of nine hours was less severe than that of the knitting mill. in summer she had a saturday half-holiday. there was a system of fines for lateness; but on the rare occasions of her own tardiness it had not been enforced. the company was also generous in grafting five-o'clock passes, which permitted a girl to leave at five in the afternoon, with no deduction from her wage for the free hour. she had been with this establishment for six years, earning $ a week; and she had given up hope of advancing. miss carr said that her work in the shoe department was exhausting, because of the stooping, the frequent sitting down and rising, and the effort of pulling shoes on and off. in the summer preceding the fall when she told of her experience in the store, she had, in reaching for a box of shoes, strained her heart in some way, so that she lost consciousness immediately, and was ill for seven weeks. she failed to recuperate as rapidly as she should have done, because she was so completely devitalized by overwork. the firm was very good to her at this time, sending a doctor daily until she was in condition to go to the country. it then paid her expenses for two weeks in a country home of the young women's christian association, and during the three remaining weeks of her stay paid her full wage. miss carr praised this company's general care of the employees. a doctor and nurse were available without charge if a girl were ill in the store. a social secretary was employed. miss carr lived in a furnished room with two other women, each paying a dollar a week rent. she cared nothing for her fellow-lodgers; her only reason for spending her time with them in such close quarters was her need of living cheaply. she cooked her breakfast and supper in the crowded room, at an expense of $ . a week. she said that her "hearty" meal was a noon dinner, for which she paid in a restaurant cents a day. after her experience in the summer, she realized that she should assure herself of income in case of illness. she joined a benefit society, to which she paid cents a month. this promised a weekly benefit of $ a week for thirteen weeks, and $ at death. she paid also cents a week for insurance in another company. the room was within walking distance of the store, so that she spent nothing for carfare. the services and social life of a church were her chief happiness. besides her contributions to its support, she had spent only $ a year on "good times." she did her own washing. her outlay in health in these years had been extreme. she was very worn, thin, and wrinkled with hard work, severe economies, and anxiety, although she was still in what should have been the prime of life. her weekly budget was: lodging, $ ; board, $ . ; luncheons, $ . ; insurance, cents; clothing, contributions to church, occasional carfare, and other expenses, $ . ; total, $ . miss carr said that her firm was generous in many of its policies, but she felt it profoundly discouraging not to advance to a wage that would permit decent living. in connection with miss carr's budget the benefit system of new york stores should be mentioned. in many of the large department stores, monthly dues, varying with the wage of the employee, are deducted from the pay of each, although in many cases she does not know what the return for the dues is to be. these dues assure to her, while she remains in the store's employ, a weekly benefit in case of illness, and a death benefit. but if she leaves the store, or is discharged, the management retains the amount she has been forced to pay to it, and gives no return whatever in case of her subsequent sickness or death. while she is in the store's employ, the sick benefit varies from one-half the girl's wage to a regular payment of $ a week for from five to thirteen weeks, according to the particular rules in each store. the employee must be ill five days or a week in order to draw it. otherwise she is docked for absence. the mutual benefit fund of the new york association of working girls' societies has in this respect a better policy than the stores. members of the clubs pay cents a month for a benefit of $ for six weeks in any one year, and cents a month for a benefit of $ . cessation of membership in a club does not terminate connection with the benefit fund, unless the reason for leaving is unsatisfactory to the board. women not members of clubs may, under certain conditions, join the benefit fund as associate members, and pay cents a month for a benefit of $ a week, cents for a benefit of $ a week, or cents for a benefit of $ a week. these amounts are severally payable for six weeks in any one year. a number of the stores have trained nurses and doctors in their employ, to whom the girls may go if they are ill. several of the stores have recreation rooms; several have summer homes; several have employees' restaurants, where a really nourishing meal can be obtained for cents. miss carr, struggling against overwhelming odds, lived within $ without charitable aid. with her experience may be compared those of two other older saleswomen, who were wholly self-supporting. mrs. green, a shrewd-appearing woman of thirty-five, had been wage-earning only two years. she began work in philadelphia in a commission house as a saleswoman and corset fitter. here she was able to save from her salary. she also saved very carefully the wardrobe she had before she entered business. with these reserves, she came to new york to work in department stores for the purpose of gaining experience in salesmanship and a more thorough knowledge of corsets. she expected to be able to command a high salary as soon as she had thus increased her competence. she went at first to a new and attractive sixth avenue store, where, working eight hours and a quarter a day, she earned $ a week. laid off at the end of five months, she was idle a month before finding employment at another sixth avenue store. in applying here she told the employer that she would not work for less than $ a week. he offered her $ , and a commission on all sales beyond $ a week. she refused, and the firm finally gave her what she asked. it proved that her choice was wise, for she found that in her very busiest week, when she was exhausted from the day's rush, her sales never reached $ a week, so that she would have received no income at all from the proffered commission. she had a small room alone in an attractive hotel for working girls. for this and breakfasts and dinners she paid $ . a week. luncheons cost, in addition, about $ . a week. she paid cents a week for washing, besides doing some herself. riding to and from work nearly every day increased her weekly expense cents. this left her $ . a week for clothing and sundries. mrs. green seemed extravagantly dressed; she said, however, that she contrived to have effective waists and hats by making and trimming them herself, and by purchasing materials with care at sales. in dressing economically without sacrificing effect she was aided palpably by skill and deftness. she was in good health; and, though she did not save, she had not spent, even in her idle month, any of the reserve fund she had accumulated before she began to work. another self-supporting saleswoman aided by her experience in domestic economy was zetta weyman, a young woman of twenty-eight, who had begun to work for wages at the age of eleven; at this time she still attended school, but did housework out of school hours. when she was older, she was employed as a maid in the house of a very kind and responsive couple, who gave her free access to their interesting library, where she read eagerly. a trip to europe had been especially stimulating. her employer was considerate, and tried to make it possible for her to benefit by the experience. throughout this period she had been observant of dress and manner among the cultured people she saw, and had applied what she learned to her own dress and conduct. at twenty-six, wishing for larger opportunities than those she could have in personal service, she obtained work in a department store at $ a week. here she soon advanced to $ in a department requiring more than average intelligence. at the end of two years she was very much interested in her work. it made demands upon her judgment, and offered opportunity for increasing knowledge and heightening her value to the company. she expected soon to receive a larger wage, as she considered her work worth at least $ a week. aside from underpay, she thought she was fairly treated. she greatly appreciated two weeks' vacation with full wages. zetta gave $ . a week for a furnished hall bedroom and the use of a bath-room. the warmth from the single gas-jet was the sole heat. she made coffee in her room for breakfast; a light luncheon sufficed; and dinner in a restaurant cost to cents a day. she was often entertained at dinner, by friends. she usually rode to work, and walked home, eight blocks, spending thus cents a week carfare. all living expenses for the week came to about $ . she paid for six years $ a year on an insurance policy which promised her $ a week in case of illness, and was cumulative, making a return during the life of the holder; $ would be due from it in about a year. zetta said that she was extravagant in her expense for clothing, but she considered that her social position depended upon her appearance. she was very attractive looking. her manner had quiet and grace, and there was something touching, even moving, in the dignity of her pure, clear english, acquired in the teeth of a fortune that forced her to be a little scullion and cook at the age of eleven. she was dressed with taste and care at the time of the interview. through watching sales and through information obtained from heads of departments, she contrived to buy clothing of excellent quality, silk stockings, and well-cut suits comparatively cheaply. by waiting until the end of the season, she had paid $ , the winter before, for a suit originally costing $ ; $ was more than she had intended to spend, but the suit was becoming and she could not resist the purchase. she managed to have pretty and well-designed hats for from $ to $ , because a friend trimmed them. she spent her vacation with relatives on a farm in the country. railroad fares and the occasional purchase of a magazine were her only expenditures for pleasure. but she had many "good times" going to the beaches in the summer with friends who paid her way. she considered that with careful planning a girl could live in fair comfort for $ a week. but she saved nothing. the drawback she mentioned in her own arrangements--the best she could obtain for her present wage--was not the cold of her hall bedroom, warmed only by the gas-jet, but that she had no suitable place for receiving men friends. she was obliged to turn to trolley rides and walks and various kinds of excursions,--literally to the streets,--for hospitality, when she received a man's visit. she spoke frequently of one man with whom she had many "good times." she could not take him to her room. trolley rides, and walks in winter, would pall. she hated park benches as a resort for quiet conversation. where, then, was she to see him? although she disapproved of it, she and another girl who had a larger and more attractive room than her own had received men there. zetta's income for the year had been $ . she had spent $ for rent; $ for dinners; $ for breakfasts, luncheons, and washing; $ for clothing, summer railway fares, and incidentals; $ for carfare; and $ for insurance. iv zetta's interest in her daily occupation is somewhat unusual in the trade chronicles of the shop-girls. one frequently hears complaint of the inefficiency and inattention of new york saleswomen and their rudeness to plainly dressed customers. while this criticism contains a certain truth, it is, of course, unreasonable to expect excellence from service frequently ill paid, often unevenly and unfairly promoted, and, except with respect to dress, quite unstandardized. further, it must be remembered that the world in which the shop-girl follows her occupation is a world of externals. the fortunes, talents, tastes, eager human effort spent in shop-window displays on fifth avenue, the shimmer and sparkle of beautiful silks and jewels, the prestige of "carriage trade," the distinction of presence of some of the customers and their wealth and their freedom in buying--all the worldliness of the most moneyed city of the united states here perpetually passes before the eyes of zettas in their $ . muslin waists so carefully scrubbed the midnight before, and of alices who have had breakfasts for cents. is it surprising that they should adopt the new york shop-window-display ideal of life manifested everywhere around them? the saleswomen themselves are the worst victims of their unstandardized employment; and the fact that they spend long years of youth in work involving a serious outlay of their strength, without training them in concentration or individual responsibility or resourcefulness, but apparently dissipating these powers, seems one of the gravest aspects of their occupation. a proud and very pretty pink-cheeked little english shop-girl, with clear hazel eyes, laid special stress upon unevenness of promotion, in telling of her fortunes in this country. she was sitting, as she spoke, in the parlor of a christian "home," which, like that of many others where shop-girls live, was light and clean, but had that unmistakably excellent and chilling air so subtly imparted by the altruistic act of furnishing for others--the air that characterizes spare rooms, hotel parlors, and great numbers of settlement receiving rooms. "i had always wanted to come to america," she said in her quick english enunciation. "and i saved something and borrowed ten pounds of my brother, and came. oh, it was hard the first part of the time i was here. i remember, when i first came in at the door of this house, and registered, one of the other shop-girls here was standing at the desk. i had on a heavy winter coat, just a plain, rough-looking coat, but it's warm. that girl gave me such a look, a sort of sneering look--oh, it made me hot! but that's the way american shop-girls are. i never have spoken to that girl. "i got down to cents before i had a job. there was one store i didn't want to go to. it was cheap, and had a mean name. one afternoon, when it was cold and dark, i walked up to it at last; and it looked so horrid i couldn't go in. there was another cheap store just beyond it, and another. all the shoppers were hurrying along. oh, it was a terrible time that afternoon, terrible, standing there, looking at those big, cheap new york stores all around me. "but at last i went in, and they took me on. it wasn't so bad, after all. in about two months i had a chance to go to a better store. i like it pretty well. but i can't save anything. i had $ a week. now i have $ . i pay $ . a week here for board and lodging, but i always live up to my salary, spending it for clothes and washing. oh, i worry and worry about money. but i've paid back my $ . i have a nice silk dress now, and a new hat. and now i've got them," she added, with a laugh, "i haven't got anywhere to wear them to. i look forward to sunday through the week days; but when sunday comes, i like monday best. "though i think it doesn't make much difference how you do in the store about being promoted. a girl next me who doesn't sell half as much as i do gets $ where i have $ ; and the commission we have on sales in christmas week wasn't given to me fairly. the store is kind in many ways, and lets the girls sit down every minute when customers aren't there, and has evening classes and club-rooms. but yet the girls are discouraged about not having promotions fairly and not having commissions straight. right is right."[ ] the charmlessness of existence noticeable in most of the working girls' homes was emphasized by a saleswoman in the china department of a broadway department store, kate mccray, a pretty young irishwoman of about twenty-three, who was visited in a hotel she said she didn't like to mention to people, for fear they would think it was queer. "you see, it's a boat, a liner that a gentleman that has a large plantation gave for a hotel for working girls. it seems peculiar to some people for a girl to be living on the river." miss mccray paid $ . a week board at the maverick deep-sea hotel. her salary was $ a week. she had been in the same department for four years, and considered it wrong that she received no promotion. she could save nothing, as she did none of her own washing on account of its inroads of fatigue, and she was obliged to dress well. she was, however, in excellent health and especially praised the store's policy of advising the girls to sit down and to rest whenever no customers were present. it was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the maverick deep-sea hotel, a liner anchored in the east river; and miss mccray conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "you'll come back and hang around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano. "about seventy girls board on this boat. that young lady going into the pantry now is a stenographer--such a bright girl." absorbed in the spectacle of a hotel freedom which permitted a guest to go to a pantry at will, whatever the force of her brightness, i followed miss mccray about the boat. it was as if the hotel belonged to the girls, while in the christian homes it had been as if everything belonged, not to the girls, but to benevolent though carefully possessive christians. miss mccray praised highly the manager and his wife. "about twenty men and boys stay on a yacht anchored right out here. they board on this boat, and go to their own boat when the whistle blows at ten o'clock," she continued, leading me to the smoking-room, where she introduced a number of very young gentlemen reading magazines and knocking about gutturally together. they, too, seemed proud of their position as boarders, proud of the maverick deep-sea hotel. they were nice, boyish young fellows, who might have been young mechanicians. she showed me the top deck with especial satisfaction as we came out into the fresh, rainy air. the east river shipping and an empty recreation pier rose black on one side, with the water sparkling in jetted reflection between; and on the other quivered all the violet and silver lights of the city. there were perhaps half a dozen tents pitched on deck. "some of the girls sleep outdoors up here," said miss mccray in her gentle voice. "they like it so, they do it all winter long. have plenty of cover, and just sleep here in the tents. oh, we all like it! some of the men that were here first have married; and they like it so well, they keep coming back here with their wives to see us. it's so friendly," said the girl, quietly; "and no matter how tired i am when i come here in the evening, i sit out on the deck, and i look at the water and the lights, and it seems as if all my cares float away." the good humor of the maverick deep-sea hotel, its rag-time, its boarders from the yacht, the charm of the row of tents with the girls in them sleeping their healthful sleep out in the midst of the river wind, the masts, the chimneys, stars, and city lights, all served to deepen the impression of the lack of normal pleasure in most of the shop-girls' lives. this starvation in pleasure, as well as low wages and overwork, subjects the women in the stores to a temptation readily conceivable. the girls in the stores are importuned, not only by men from without these establishments, but also, to the shame of the managements, by men employed within the stores. the constant close presence of this gulf has more than one painful aspect. on account of it, not only the poor girls who fall suffer, but also the girls who have the constant sense of being "on guard," and find it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures. many girls said, "i keep myself to myself"; "i don't make friends in the stores very fast, because you can't be sure what any one is like." this fear of friendship among contemporaries sharing the same fortune, fear, indeed, of the whole world, seemed the most cruel comment possible on the atmosphere of the girls' lives in their occupation. another kind of meanness in human relations was abundantly witnessed by miss johnson, the league's inquirer, who worked in one of the stores during the week of christmas good-will. the "rush" had begun when miss johnson was transferred in this christmas week from the neckwear to the muffler department on the first floor of one of the cheaper stores. all the girls stood all day long--from eight to twelve and from one to eight at night on the first days; from one at noon to ten and eleven at night, as the season progressed; and, on the last dreadful nights, from noon to the following midnight. the girls had cents supper money. except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid for. the work was incessant. the girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with one another. the manager, a beautiful and extremely rough girl of nineteen, swore constantly at all of them. the customers were grabbing, insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to midnight. behind the counter, with the advance of the day, the place became an inferno of nervous exhaustion and exasperation. in the two weeks of miss johnson's service one customer once thanked her; and one tipped her cents for the rapid return of a parcel. both these acts of consideration took place in the morning. miss johnson said that this was fortunate for her, as, at one word of ordinary consideration toward the end of her long day's work, she thought she must have burst into tears. there was a little bundler in the department, catriona malatesta, a white, hungry-looking little north italian of fourteen with a thin chin and a dark-shadowed, worried face. she had an adored sick sister of four, besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a worshipped mother, to whom she gave every cent of her wages of three dollars and a half a week. an older brother, a day laborer, paid the rent and provided food for all of them. every other family expense was met by catriona's three dollars and a half, so that she was in the habit of spending only five cents for her own lunch, and, on the nights of overtime, five cents for her own dinner, in order to take home the extra thirty cents; and every day she looked whiter and older. at the beginning of the week before christmas, the store raised catriona's wage to four dollars. her mother told her she might have the extra half dollar for herself for christmas. though catriona had worked for some months, this was the first money of her own she had ever had. with pride she told the department how it was to be spent. she was going to surprise her mother with a new waist for christmas, a waist catriona had seen in the store marked down to forty-nine cents. a ten per cent discount was allowed to employees, so that the waist would cost forty-five cents. with the remaining five cents catriona would buy her sick rosa a doll. all her life rosa had wanted a doll. now, at last, she could have one. on the day when she received the money, catriona kept it close at hand, in a little worn black leather purse, in a shabby bag hanging from her arm, and not out of sight for an instant. her purchases were to be made in the three-quarters of an hour allowed for supper. the time catriona consumed in eating her five-cent meal was never long, so that, even allowing for prolonged purchasing, her absence of an hour was strange. "d---- your soul, where in hell have you been all this time, catie?" the manager screamed at her, angrily, without glancing at her, when she came back at last. catriona looked more anxious and white than ever before. her face was stained with weeping. "i lost my purse," she said in a dazed, unsteady voice. "it was gone when i opened my bag in the lunch-room. i've looked for it everywhere." there was a sudden breathless change in the air of the department. you could have heard a pin drop. "better go down to the basement and wash your face," said the manager, awkwardly, with unbelievable gentleness. "well," she continued suddenly, the minute catriona was out of ear-shot, "i'm not so poor but i can help to make _that_ up." she took a dollar bill from her pocket-book. every one contributed something, though several girls went without their supper for this purpose, and one girl walked home four miles after midnight. altogether they could give nearly ten dollars. the manager sidled awkwardly toward catriona, when she came back from washing her face. "here, kid," she muttered sheepishly, pushing the money into the little girl's hand. catriona, pale and dazed, looked up at her--looked at the money, with a shy excitement and happiness dawning in her eyes. then she cried again with excitement and joy, and every one laughed, and sent her off again to wash her face. that night everything was different in the department. there had been a real miracle of transfiguration. the whole air of intercourse was changed. all the girls were gentle and dignified with each other. catriona's eyes sparkled with pleasure. her careworn air was gone. she was a child again. she had never had any physical loveliness before; but on that night hundreds of passing shoppers looked with attention at the delight and beauty of her face. on the next day everything went on as before. the girls snapped at each other and jostled each other. the beautiful manager swore. one girl came, looking so ill that miss johnson was terrified. "can't you stop, kitty? you look so sick. for heaven's sake, go home and rest." "i can't afford to go home." cross and snappish as the girls were, they managed to spare kitty, and to stand in front of her to conceal her idleness from the floor-walker, and give her a few minutes' occasional rest sitting down. she went through the first hours of the morning as best she might, though clearly under pressure of sharp suffering. but at about ten the floor-walker, for whom it must be said that he was responsible for the sales and general presentability of the department, saw her sitting down. "why aren't you busy?" he called. "get up." at midnight on christmas eve, as the still crowd of girls walked wanly out of the great store into the brilliant new york street, some one said, "how are you, kitty?" she made no reply for a minute. then she said wretchedly, "oh--i hope i'll be dead before the next christmas." v the sheer and causeless misery this girl endured was, of course, attributable, not only to the long hours and to the standing demanded by her occupation, but to the fact that this occupation was continued at a period when the normal health of great numbers of women demands reasonable quiet and rest. with a few honorable exceptions[ ] it may be said to be the immemorial custom of department stores in this country to treat women employees, in so far as ability to stand and to stand at all seasons goes, exactly as if they were men. the expert testimony collected by the publication secretary of the national consumers' league, miss josephine goldmark, for the brief which obtained the illinois ten-hour law, gives the clearest possible record of the outlay of communal strength involved in these long hours of standing for women. _report of "lancet" sanitary commission on sanitation in the shop_. without entering upon the vexed question of women's rights, we may nevertheless urge it as an indisputable physiological fact that, when compelled to stand for long hours, women, especially young women, are exposed to greater injury and greater suffering than men. _british sessional papers_. vol. xii. . report from select committee on shop hours regulation bill witness, w. abbott, m.d. "does their employment injuriously affect them, as child-bearing women in after years?" "according to all scientific facts, it would do so." "and you, as a medical man of a considerable number of years' experience, would not look to girls who have been worked so many hours in one position as the bearers of healthy, strong children?" "i should not." "then it naturally follows, does it not, that this is a very serious matter in the interest of the nation as a whole, apart from the immediate injury to the person concerned?" "yes. as regards the physical condition of the future race." _british sessional papers_. vol. xii, . report from the select committee on shops. early closing bill witness, dr. percy kidd, m.d., of the university of oxford, fellow of the college of physicians and member of the college of surgeons, attached to london hospital and brompton, hospital. "would this be a fair way of putting it: it is not the actual work of people in shops, but having to be there and standing about in bad air; it is the long hours which is the injurious part of it?" "quite so; the prolonged tension." _official information from the reports of the [german] factory inspectors_. berlin, bruer, the inspector in hesse regards a reduction of working hours to ten for women in textile mills as "absolutely imperative," as the continuous standing is very injurious to the female organism. _fourteenth international congress of hygiene and demography_. berlin, september, . vol. ii, sec. iv. fatigue resulting from occupation. berlin, hirschwald, doctor emil roth: "my experience and observations do not permit me to feel any uncertainty in believing that the injury to health inflicted upon even fully capable workers by the special demands of a periodically heightened rush of work is never compensated for. under this head we may consider the demands of all seasonal work, ... as also the special rush season in shops before christmas." _night work of women in industry. reports on its importance and legal regulation_. preface by etienne bauer. night work of women in industry in austria. ilse von arlt. jena, fischer, the suitable limits of working time vary with individuals, but it is acknowledged that not only is a regularly long day of work injurious, but also that a single isolated instance of overstrain may be harmful to a woman all the rest of her life. _proceedings of the french senate_, july , . report on the industrial employment of children, young girls, and women. when i ask, when we ask, for a lessening of the daily toil of women, it is not only of the women that we think, it is not principally of the women, it is of the whole human race. it is of the father, it is of the child, it is of society, which we wish to reëstablish on its foundation, from which we believe it has perhaps swerved a little. in new york state, the hours of labor of adult women (women over twenty-one) in mercantile establishments are not limited in any way by law. the law concerning seats in stores is as follows:-- seats for women in mercantile establishments chairs, stools, or other suitable seats shall be maintained in mercantile establishments for the use of female employees therein, to the number of at least one seat for every three females employed, and the use thereof by such employees shall be allowed at such times and to such extent as may be necessary for the preservation of their health. the enforcement of this law is very difficult. the mercantile inspectors can compel the requisite number of seats. they have successfully issued one hundred and fourteen orders on this point[ ] to the stores within the year . but the use of these seats to such extent as may be necessary for the preservation of the health of the women employees is another matter. for fear of being blacklisted by the merchants, the saleswomen will not testify in court in those cases where employers practically forbid the use of seats, by requesting the employees to do something requiring a standing position whenever they sit down. so that in these cases the inspectors cannot bring prosecution successfully, on account of lack of sufficient evidence. further, in one store the management especially advises the saleswomen to be seated at every moment when the presence of a customer does not require her to stand. but the saleswoman's inability to attract possible customers while she is seated still keeps her standing, in order not to diminish her sales. curiously enough, it would seem that the shopping public of a nation professedly democratic will not buy so much as a spool of thread from a seated woman. there is, of course, much work for women[ ]--such as ironing for instance--in which standing is generally considered absolutely necessary. salesmanship is not work of this character. it is primarily custom that demands the constant standing seen in the stores; and, until shoppers establish a habit of buying of shop-girls who are seated, and the stores provide enough seats for all saleswomen and permit them to sell when seated, the present system of undermining the normal health of women clerks will continue unchecked. the new york state law in regard to the work of the younger women (minors)--in mercantile establishments is as follows:-- hours of labor of minors[ ] no female employee between sixteen and twenty-one years of age shall be required, permitted, or suffered to work in or in connection with any mercantile establishment more than sixty hours in any one week; or more than ten hours in any one day, unless for the purpose of making a shorter work day of some one day of the week; or before seven o'clock in the morning or after ten o'clock in the evening of any day. _this section does not apply to the employment of persons sixteen years of age or upward, between the eighteenth day of december and the following twenty-fourth day of december, both inclusive_.[ ] that is to say, that, for the holiday season, the time of all others when it might seem wise and natural to protect the health of the younger women working in the great metropolitan markets, for that season, of all others, the state specifically provides that the strength of its youth is to have no legal safeguard and may be subjected to labor without limit. substantially, all the present legal protection for workers in the stores was obtained in , after the investigation of mercantile establishments conducted in by the rinehart commission.[ ] ever since, an annual attempt has been made to perfect the present law and to secure its enforcement, which had been left in the hands of the local boards of health, and was practically inoperative until . enforcement was then transferred to the labor commissioner, and has since that time been actively maintained. the hearings on the law relative to mercantile establishments are held in albany in a small room in the capitol before the judiciary committee of the senate and the assembly commission on labor. these hearings are very fiery. the support is represented by attorney mornay williams, and mrs. nathan, mrs. kelley, miss stokes, miss sanford, and miss goldmark of the new york and national consumers' leagues, and delegates from the child labor committee, the working-girls' clubs, and the woman's trade-union league. both men and women speak fox the amendment.[ ] the support's effort for legislation limiting hours has regularly been opposed by the retail dry-goods merchants' association, which yearly sends an influential delegation to albany. "these ladies have been coming here for sixteen years," said one of the merchants, resentfully, last spring. looking around, and observing changes in the faces watching him among adherents of the support, he added: "well, perhaps not the _same_ ladies. but they have come." "these ladies are professional agitators," said another merchant at another hearing. "why, they even misled mr. roosevelt, when he was governor, into recommending the passage of their bill." such are some of the reasons offered by the opposition for not limiting women's hours of labor in mercantile establishments. among the several common features of the experiences of these new york saleswomen, low wages, casual employment, heavy required expense in laundry and dress, semidependence, uneven promotion, lack of training, absence of normal pleasure, long hours of standing, and an excess of seasonal work, the consideration of this last common condition is placed last because its consequences seem the most far-reaching. looking back at these common features in the lives of these average american working girls, one has a sudden sense that the phenomenon of the new york department stores represents a painful failure in democracy. what will the aspect of the new york department stores be in the future? for new york doubtless will long remain a port of merchandise, one of the most picturesque and most frequented harbors of the seven seas. doubtless many women still will work in its markets. what will their chances in life be? first, it may be trusted that the state law will not forever refuse to protect these women and their future, which is also the future of the community, from the danger of unlimited hours of labor. then, the fact that in a store in cincinnati the efficiency of the saleswomen has been standardized and their wages raised, the fact that in a store in boston the employees have become responsible factors in the business, and the fact that a school of salesmanship has been opened in new york seem to indicate the possibility of a day when salesmanship will become standardized and professional, as nursing has within the last century. further, it may be believed that saleswomen will not forever acquiesce in pursuing their trade in utterly machinal activity, without any common expression of their common position. very arresting is the fact that, year after year, the union women go to albany to struggle for better chances in life for the shop-women who cannot at present wisely make this struggle for themselves. the fact that the union women fail is of less moment than that they continue to go. but what have the organized women workers, the factory girls who so steadfastly make this stand for justice for the shop-girls, attained for themselves in their fortunes by their union? it was for an answer to this question that we turned to the new york shirt-waist makers, whose income and outlay will be next considered in this little chronicle of women's wages. footnotes: [footnote : in the last six months further accounts from working women in the trades mentioned in new york have been received by miss edith wyatt, vice-president of the consumers' league of illinois. aside from the facts ascertained through the schedules filled by the workers, and through mrs. clark's and miss wyatt's visits to them, information has been obtained through miss helen marot, secretary of the new york woman's trade-union league, miss marion maclean, director of the sociological investigation committee of the young women's christian association of the united states, miss may matthews, head worker of hartley house, miss hall, head worker of the riverside association, miss rosenfeld, head worker of the clara de hirsch home, the clinton street headquarters of the union, the st. george working girls' clubs, the consumers' league of the city of new york, and the offices or files of the _survey_, the _independent_, the _call_, and the _international socialist review_.] [footnote : it remains to be said that there are both among saleswomen and among women in business for the department stores, buyers, assistant buyers, receivers of special orders, advertisers, and heads of departments, earning salaries of from twenty dollars to two hundred dollars a week. but this experience does not represent the average fortune the league was interested in learning.] [footnote : here are the estimates made by the st. george's working girls' club of the smallest practicable expenditure for self-supporting girls in new york: general expense per week: room, $ ; meals, $ ; clothes, $ . ; washing, cents; carfare, cents; pleasures, cents; church, cents; club, cents: total $ . itemized account of clothing for the year at $ . a week, or $ a year: pair of shoes at $ , and mending at $ . , $ . ; hats at $ . , $ ; pair of stockings at - / cents, $ ; combination suits at cents, $ ; shirts at - / cents, cents; pairs of drawers at cents, $ ; corset covers at cents, $ ; flannel petticoat, cents; white petticoats at cents, $ . ; shirt-waists at $ . , $ ; net waist, $ . ; corsets at $ , $ ; gloves, $ ; pairs rubbers at cents, $ . ; dozen handkerchiefs at cents, cents; nightgowns at cents, $ . ; sweater, $ ; suits at $ , $ : total, $ . .] [footnote : this worker later, however, in the winter of , considered she had been paid and promoted fairly.] [footnote : macy and company of new york give to those of their permanent women employees who desire it a monthly day of rest with pay. the daniels and fisher company of denver refund to any woman employee who requests it the amount deducted for a monthly day of absence for illness. this excellent rule is, however, said to represent here rather a privilege than a practice, and not to be generally taken advantage of, because not generally understood. the present writer has not been able to learn of other exceptions.] [footnote : ninth annual report of the commissioner of labor, p. .] [footnote : see page (foot-note), "scientific management as applied to women's work."] [footnote : this statement does not include the excellent new york child labor law for children under sixteen, which allows of no exception at christmas time.] [footnote : italics ours.] [footnote : a new york state commission, appointed for this purpose in the year , through the efforts of the consumers' league of the city of new york.] [footnote : for fear of a permanent loss of position the saleswomen themselves have never been urged to appear in support of this legislation, nor, except in a few instances where this difficulty has been nullified, have they been present at these hearings.] chapter ii the shirt-waist makers' strike i among the active members of the ladies waist makers' union in new york, there is a young russian jewess of sixteen, who may be called natalya urusova. she is little, looking hardly more than twelve years old, with a pale, sensitive face, clear dark eyes, very soft, smooth black hair, parted and twisted in braids at the nape of her neck, and the gentlest voice in the world, a voice still thrilled with the light inflections of a child. she is the daughter of a russian teacher of hebrew, who lived about three years ago in a beech-wooded village on the steppes of central russia. here a neighbor of natalya's family, a jewish farmer, misunderstanding that manifesto of the czar which proclaimed free speech, and misunderstanding socialism, had printed and scattered through the neighborhood an edition of hand-bills stating that the czar had proclaimed socialism, and that the populace must rise and divide among themselves a rich farm two miles away. almost instantly on the appearance of these bills, this unhappy man and a young jewish friend who chanced to be with him at the time of his arrest were seized and murdered by the government officers--the friend drowned, the farmer struck dead with the blow of a cudgel. a christian mob formed, and the officers and the mob ravaged every jewish house in the little town. thirty innocent jews were clubbed to death, and then literally cut to pieces. natalya and her family, who occupied the last house on the street, crept unnoticed to the shack of a roman catholic friend, a woman who hid sixteen jewish people under the straw of the hut in the fields where she lived, in one room, with eight children and some pigs and chickens. hastily taking from a drawer a little bright-painted plaster image of a wounded saint, this woman placed it over the door as a means of averting suspicion. her ruse was successful. "are there jews here?" the officer called to her, half an hour afterward, as the mob came over the fields to her house. "no," said the woman. "open the door and let me see." the woman flung open the door. but, as he was quite unsuspecting, the officer glanced in only very casually; and it was in utter ignorance that the rage of the mob went on over the fields, past the jammed little room of breathless jews. as soon as the army withdrew from the town, natalya and her family made their way to america, where, they had been told, one had the right of free belief and of free speech. here they settled on the sixth floor of a tenement on monroe street, on the east side of new york. nothing more different from the open, silent country of the steppes could be conceived than the place around them. the vista of the new york street is flanked by high rows of dingy brick tenements, fringed with jutting white iron fire-escapes, and hung with bulging feather-beds and pillows, puffing from the windows. by day and by night the sidewalks and roads are crowded with people,--bearded old men with caps, bare-headed wigged women, beautiful young girls, half-dressed babies swarming in the gutters, playing jacks. push carts, lit at night with flaring torches, line the pavements and make the whole thronged, talking place an open market, stuck with signs and filled with merchandise and barter. everybody stays out of doors as much as possible. in summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken coops along the sidewalk; for, inside, the rooms are too often small and stifling, some on inner courts close-hung with washing, some of them practically closets, without any opening whatever to the outer air. many, many of natalya's neighbors here are occupied in the garment trade. according to the united states census of , the men's clothing made in factories in new york city amounted to nearly three times as much as that manufactured in any other city in the united states. the women's clothing made in factories in new york city amounted to more than ten times that made in any other city; the manufacture of women's ready-made clothing in this country is, indeed, almost completely in the hands of new york's immense jewish population.[ ] as soon after her arrival as her age permitted, natalya entered the employment of a shirt-waist factory as an unskilled worker, at a salary of $ a week. mounting the stairs of the waist factory, one is aware of heavy vibrations. the roar and whir of the machines increase as the door opens, and one sees in a long loft, which is usually fairly light and clean, though sometimes neither, rows and rows of girls with heads bent and eyes intent upon the flashing needles. they are all intensely absorbed; for if they be paid by the piece, they hurry from ambition, and if they be paid by the week, they are "speeded up" by the foreman to a pace set by the swiftest workers. in the broadway establishment, which may be called the bruch shirt-waist factory, where natalya worked, there were four hundred girls--six hundred in the busy season. the hours were long--from eight till half past twelve, a half hour for lunch, and then from one till half past six. sometimes the girls worked until half past eight, until nine. there were only two elevators in the building, which contained other factories. there were two thousand working people to be accommodated by these elevators, all of whom began work at eight o'clock in the morning; so that, even if natalya reached the foot of the shaft at half past seven, it was sometimes half past eight before she reached the shirt-waist factory on the twelfth floor. she was docked for this inevitable tardiness so often that frequently she had only five dollars a week instead of six. this injustice, and the fact that sometimes the foreman kept them waiting needlessly for several hours before telling them that he had no work for them, was particularly wearing to the girls. natalya was a "trimmer" in the factory. she cut the threads of the waists after they were finished--a task requiring very little skill. but the work of shirt-waist workers is of many grades. the earnings of makers of "imported" lingerie waists sometimes rise as high as $ a week. such a wage, however, is very exceptional, and, even so, is less high than might appear, on account of the seasonal character of the work. the average skilled waist worker, when very busy, sometimes earns from $ to $ a week. here are the yearly budgets of some of the better paid workers, more skilled than natalya--operatives receiving from $ to $ a week. rachael, a shirt-waist operative of eighteen, had been at work three years. she had begun at $ a week and her skill had increased until in a very busy week she could earn from $ to $ by piece-work. "but," she said, "i was earning too much, so i was put back at week's work, at $ a week. the foreman is a bad, driving man. ugh! he makes us work fast--especially the young beginners." rachael, too, had been driven out of russia by christian persecution. her little sister had been killed in a massacre. her parents had gone in one direction, and she and her two other sisters had fled in another to america. here in new york she lived in a tenement, sharing a room with two other girls, and, besides working in the shirt-waist factory, did her own washing, made her own waists, and went to night school. her income was seriously depleted by the seasonal character of her work. out of the twelve months of the year, for one month she was idle, for four months she had only three or four days' work a week, for three months she had five days' work a week, and for four months only did she have work for all six days. unhappily, during these months she developed a severe cough, which lost her seven weeks of work, and gave her during these weeks the expense of medicine, a doctor, and another boarding place, as she could not in her illness sleep with her two friends. her income for the year had been $ . . her expenses had been as follows: rent for one-third of room at $ . a month, $ ; suppers with landlady at cents each, $ ; other meals, approximately, $ ; board while ill, seven weeks at $ , $ ; doctor and medicine (about) $ ; clothing, $ . ; club, cents a week, $ . ; total, $ . , thus leaving a balance of $ . . shoes alone consumed over one-half of the money used for clothing. they wore out with such amazing rapidity that she had needed a new pair once a month. at $ each, except a best pair, costing $ . , their price in a year amounted to $ . .[ ] in regard to rachael's expenditure and conservation in strength, she had drawn heavily upon her health and energy. her cough continued to exhaust her. she was worn and frail, and at eighteen her health was breaking. anna klotin, another older skilled worker, an able and clever russian girl of twenty-one, an operative and trimmer, earned $ a week. she had been idle twelve weeks on account of slack work. for four weeks she had night work for three nights a week, and payment for this extra time had brought her income up to $ for the year. of this sum she paid $ ($ a week) for board and lodging alone in a large, pleasant room with a friendly family on the east side. to her family in russia she had sent $ , and she had somehow contrived, by doing her own washing, making her own waists and skirts, and repairing garments left from the previous year, to buy shoes and to pay carfare and all her other expenses from the remaining $ . she had bought five pairs of shoes at $ each, and a suit for $ . fanny wardoff, a shirt-waist worker of twenty, who had been in the united states only a year, helped her family by supporting her younger brother. for some time after her arrival in this country the ill effects of her steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. she then obtained employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $ . but her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks. at the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $ to $ a week, working nine and a half hours a day. her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $ . a week. she paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended school. the weekly expense was palpably increased by cents a week for luncheon and cents for carfare to ride to work. she walked home, fifteen blocks. her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $ . of this, $ had been spent for four pairs of shoes. two ready-made skirts had cost $ , and a jacket $ . her expense for waists was only the cost of material, as she had made them herself. she spent cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her own washing. here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $ to $ a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more skilled than natalya. irena kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage of $ a week. she was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built, with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and responsible than that of many women of forty. irena kovalova had not been out of work for one whole week in the year she described. she had never done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on sunday--except in slack weeks. she was not certain how many of these there had been; but there had been enough slack time to reduce her income for her family for the year to $ . they had paid $ rent for four rooms on the east side, and had lived on the remaining $ , all of which irena had given to her mother. her mother helped her with her washing, and she had worn the clothes she had the year before, with the exception of shoes. she had been forced to buy four pairs of these at $ a pair. they all realized that if irena could spend a little more for her shoes they would wear longer. "but for shoes," she said, with a little laugh, "two dollars--it is the most i ever could pay." she was a girl of unusual health and strength, and though sometimes very weary at night and troubled with eye strain from watching the needle, it was a different drain of her vitality that she mentioned as alarming. she was obliged to work at a time of the month when she normally needed rest, and endured anguish at her machine at this season. she had thought, she said gravely, that if she ever had any money ahead, she would try to use it to have a little rest then. molly zaplasky, a little russian shirt-waist worker of fifteen, operated a machine for fifty-six hours a week, did her own washing, and even went to evening school. she had worked for five months, earning $ a week for five weeks of this time, and sometimes $ , sometimes $ , for the remainder. she and her sister dora, of seventeen, also a shirt-waist maker, had a room with a cousin's family on the east side. dora had worked a year and a half. she, too, earned $ a week in full weeks. but there had been only twenty-two such weeks in that period. for seventeen weeks she had earned $ a week. for four weeks she had been idle because of slackness of work, and for nine weeks recently she had been too ill to work, having developed tuberculosis. dora, too, did her own washing. she made her own waists, and went to evening school. she had paid $ . a week for partial board and for lodging. the food, not included in her board, cost about $ a week. the little molly had paid for dora's board and lodging in her nine weeks' illness. dora, who had worked so valiantly, was quietly expecting just as valiantly her turn in the long waiting list of applicants for the montefiore home for consumptives. she knew that the chance of her return to molly was very slight. her expenditure for food, shelter, and clothing for the year had been as follows: room and board (exclusive of nine weeks' illness), $ . ; clothing, $ . ; total, $ . . as her income for the year had been $ . , this left a balance of $ . for all other expenses. items for clothing had been: suit, $ ; jacket, $ . ; a hat, $ . ; shoes (two pairs), $ . ; stockings (two pairs a week at cents), $ . ; underwear, $ ; total, $ . . one point should be accentuated in this budget--the striking cost of stockings, due to the daily walk to and from work and the ill little worker's lack of strength and time for darning. the outlay for footwear in all the budgets of the operators is heavy, in spite of the fact that much of their work is done sitting. here are the budgets of some of the shirt-waist makers who were earning natalya's wage of $ a week, or less than this wage. rea lupatkin, a shirt-waist maker of nineteen, had been in new york only ten months, and was at first a finisher in a cloak factory. afterward, obtaining work as operator in a waist factory, she could get $ in fifty-six hours on a time basis. she had been in this factory six weeks. rea was paying $ a month for lodging in two rooms of a tenement-house with a man and his wife and baby and little boy. she saved carfare by a walk of three-quarters of an hour, adding daily one and a half hours to the nine and a half already spent in operating. her food cost $ . a week so that, with cents a week for lodging, her regular weekly cost of living was $ . , leaving her cents for every other expense. in spite of this, and although she had been forced to spend $ for examination of her eyes and for eyeglasses, rea contrived to send an occasional $ back to her family in europe. ida bergeson, a little girl of fifteen, was visited at half past eight o'clock one evening, in a tenement on the lower east side. the gas was burning brightly in the room; several people were talking; and this frail-looking little ida lay on a couch in their midst, sleeping, in all the noise and light, in complete exhaustion. her sister said that every night the child returned from the factory utterly worn out, she was obliged to work so hard and so fast. ida received the same wage as natalya--$ a week. she worked fifty-six hours a week--eight more than the law allows for minors. she paid $ a week for board and a room shared with the anxious older sister, who told about her experience. ida needed all the rest of her $ for her clothing. she did her own washing. as the inquirer came away, leaving the worn little girl sleeping in her utter fatigue, she wondered with what strength ida could enter upon her possible marriage and motherhood--whether, indeed, she would struggle through to maturity. katia halperian, a shirt-waist worker of fifteen, had been in new york only six months. during twenty-one weeks of this time she was employed in a wooster street factory, earning for a week of nine-and-a-half-hour days only $ . . katia, like natalya, was a "trimmer." after paying $ a week board to an aunt, she had a surplus of cents for all clothing, recreation, doctor's bills, and incidentals. to save carfare she walked to her work--about forty minutes' distance. her aunt lived on the fourth floor of a tenement. after working nine and a half hours and walking an hour and twenty minutes daily, katia climbed four flights of stairs and then helped with the housework. sonia lavretsky, a girl of twenty, had been self-supporting for four years. she lived in a most wretched, ill-kept tenement, with a family who made artificial flowers. she had been totally unable to find work for the last five months, but this family, though very poor, had kept her with them without payment through all this time. she had been three months an operative, putting cuffs on waists. working on a time basis, she earned $ the first week and $ the second. she was then put on piece-work, and in fifty-four hours and a half could earn only $ . laid off, she found employment at felling cloaks, earning from $ to $ a week. but after twelve weeks, trade in this place also had grown dull. during her idle time she became "run down" and was ill three weeks. fortunately, a brother was able to pay her doctor's bills, until he also was laid off during part of her idle time. when sonia had any money she gave her landlady, for part of a room in the poor tenement with the flower-makers, $ . a month, and about $ . a week for food. before her dull season and slack work began, she had paid cents a week dues to a self-education society and social club. her brother had given her all the clothing she had. the burden of her support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken family of her hostess. and sonia was in deep discouragement. she was about to go away from new york in hopes of finding work in syracuse. getta bursova, an attractive russian girl of twenty, had worked for eight years--ever since she was twelve. she had been employed as a waist operative for six years in london and for two in new york. here she worked nine and a half hours daily in a factory on nineteenth street, earning $ to $ a week. of this wage she paid her sister $ a week for food and lodging in an inside tenement room in very poor east side quarters, so far from her work that she was obliged to spend cents a week for carfare. in her busy weeks she had never more than $ . a week left, and often only cents, for her clothing and every other expense. getta had been idle, moreover, for nearly six months. during this time she had been supported by her sister's family. in spite of this defeat in her fortunes, her presence had a lovely brightness and initiative, and her inexpensive dress had a certain daintiness. she was eager for knowledge, and through all her busy weeks had paid cents dues to a self-education society. nevertheless, her long dull season was a harassing burden and disappointment both for herself and her sister's struggling family. betty lukin, a shirt-waist maker of twenty, had been making sleeves for two years. for nine months of the year she earned from $ to $ a week; for the remaining three months only $ a week. her average weekly wage for the year would be about $ . of this she spent $ a week for suppers and a place in a tenement to sleep, and about cents a week for breakfast and luncheon--a roll and a bit of fruit or candy from a push cart. her father was in new york, doing little to support himself, so that many weeks she deprived herself to give him $ or $ . she spent cents a week to go to the theatre and cents for club dues. she had, of course, very little left for dress. she looked ill clad, and she was, naturally, improperly nourished and very delicate. two points in betty's little account are suggestive: one is that she could always help her father. in listening to the account of an organizer of the shirt-waist makers' union, a man who had known some , garment workers, i exclaimed on the hardships of the trade for the number of married men it contained, and was about to make a note of this item when he eagerly stopped me. "wait, wait, please," he cried generously. "when you put it down, then put this down, too. it is just the same for the girls. the most of them are married to a family. they, too, take care of others." to this truth, betty's expense of $ to $ for her father from her average wage of $ , and little molly's item of nine weeks' board and lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. on the girls' part they were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic. the other fact to be remarked in betty's account is that she spent cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only cents for all her casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. such an eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in themselves a true romance. nearly all the russian shirt-waist makers visit the theatre and attend clubs and night classes, whatever their wage or their hours of labor. most of them contribute to the support of a family. these shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all--with the exception of irena kovalova, who supported a family of four--living away from home. natalya lived with her mother and father. she did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother. but her story is given because in other ways--in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to obtain juster and better terms of living--her experience has seemed characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers employed in new york for the last two years. in conditions such as described above, natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist. "if you don't like it," said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters' out on the street, then?" natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. on making inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their trade. the factories had continued work with strike breakers. some of the companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of the shops to insult and attack the union members whenever they came to speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling their work on unfair terms. some had employed special police protection and thugs against the pickets. there is, of course, no law against picketing. every one in the united states has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his belief in the tariff. but on the th of october ten girls belonging to the union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the jefferson market court, and fined $ each. the chairman of the strikers from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for weeks. a girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in the side and broke one of her ribs. she was in bed for four weeks, and will always be somewhat disabled by her injury. these and other illegal oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the woman's trade-union league to assist the girls in peaceful picketing. early in november, a policeman arrested miss mary e. dreier, the president of the woman's trade-union league, because she entered into a quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers. miss dreier is a woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout new york and brooklyn. when the sergeant recognized her as she came into the station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and assured miss dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had known who she was. this flat instance of discrimination inspired the officers of the woman's trade-union league to protest to police commissioner baker against the arbitrary oppression of the strikers by the policemen. he was asked to investigate the action of the police. he replied that the pickets would in future receive as much consideration as other people. the attitude of the police did not, however, change. it was to these events, as natalya urusova found, that the foreman of the bruch factory had referred when he asked the girls, with a sneer, why they didn't join their "sisters." going to the union headquarters on clinton street, she learned all she could about the union. afterward, in the bruch factory, whenever any complaints arose, she would say casually, in pretended helplessness, "but what can we do? is there any way to change this?" vague suggestions of the union headquarters would arise, and she would inquire into this eagerly and would pretend to allow herself to be led to clinton street. so, little by little, as the long hours and low wages and impudence from the foreman continued, she induced about sixty girls to understand about organization and to consider it favorably. on the evening of the d of november, natalya, and how many others from the factory she could not tell, attended a mass meeting at cooper union, of which they had been informed by hand-bills. it was called for the purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in new york city. the hall was packed. overflow meetings were held at beethoven hall, manhattan lyceum, and astoria hall. in the cooper union addresses were delivered by samuel gompers, by miss dreier, and by many others. finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor. she said: "i have listened to all the speeches. i am one who thinks and feels from the things they describe. i, too, have worked and suffered. i am tired of the talking. i move that we go on a general strike." the meeting broke into wild applause. the motion was unanimously indorsed. the chairman, mr. feigenbaum, a union officer, rapped on the table. "do you mean faith?" he called to the workers. "will you take the old jewish oath?" thousands of right hands were held up and the whole audience repeated in yiddish:[ ] "if i turn traitor to the cause i now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm i now raise." this was the beginning of the general shirt-waist strike. a committee of fifteen girls and one boy was appointed at the cooper union meeting, and went from one to the other of the overflow meetings, where the same motion was offered and unanimously indorsed. ii "but i did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at that meeting. i could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory the next day," said natalya, afterward. "when we came back the next morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. we all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. the foreman had no work for us when we got there. but, just as always, he did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all that day. and there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines: 'shall we wait like this?' 'there is a general strike,' 'who will get up first?' 'it would be better to be the last to get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do well for you,' but i told them," observed natalya, with a little shrug, "'what difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?' well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would do, not making up our minds, for two hours. then i started to get up." her lips trembled. "and at just the same minute all--we all got up together, in one second. no one after the other; no one before. and when i saw it--that time--oh, it excites me so yet, i can hardly talk about it. so we all stood up, and all walked out together. and already out on the sidewalk in front the policemen stood with the clubs. one of them said, 'if you don't behave, you'll get this on your head.' and he shook his club at me. "we hardly knew where to go--what to do next. but one of the american girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the woman's trade-union league, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away. after we were there, we wrote out on paper what terms we wanted: not any night work, except as it would be arranged for in some special need for it for the trade; and shorter hours; and to have wages arranged by a committee to arbitrate the price for every one fairly; and to have better treatment from the bosses. "then a leader spoke to us and told us about picketing quietly, and the law.[ ] "our factory had begun to work with a few italian strike breakers.[ ] the next day we went back to the factory, and saw five italian girls taken in to work, and then taken away afterward in an automobile. i was with an older girl from our shop, anna lunska. the next morning in front of the factory, anna lunska and i met a tall italian man going into the factory with some girls. so i said to her: 'these girls fear us in some way. they do not understand, and i will speak to them, and ask them why they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all--only to speak about our work.' "i moved toward them to say this to them. then the tall man struck anna lunska in the breast so hard, he nearly knocked her down. she couldn't get her breath. and i went to a policeman standing right there and said, 'why do you not arrest this man for striking my friend? why do you let him do it? look at her. she cannot speak; she is crying. she did nothing at all,' then he arrested the man; and he said, 'but you must come, too, to make a charge against him.' the tall italian called a man out of the factory, and went with me and anna lunska and the three girls to the court." but when natalya and anna reached the court, and had made their charge against the tall italian, to their bewilderment not only he, but they, too, were conducted downstairs to the cells. he had charged them with attacking the girls he was escorting into the factory. "they made me go into a cell," said natalya, "and suddenly they locked us in. then i was frightened, and i said to the policeman there, 'why do you do this? i have done nothing at all. the man struck my friend. i must send for somebody.' "he said, 'you cannot send for any one at all. you are a prisoner.' "we cried then. we were frightened. we did not know what to do. "after about an hour and a half he came and said some one was asking for us. we looked out. it was miss violet pike. a boy i knew had seen us go into the prison with the italian, and not come out, and so he thought something was wrong and he had gone to the league and told them. "so miss pike had come from the league; and she bailed us out; and she came back with us on the next day for our trial." on the next morning the case against the tall italian was rapidly examined, and the italian discharged. he was then summoned back in rebuttal, and natalya and anna's case was called. four witnesses, one of them being the proprietor of the factory, were produced against them, and stated that natalya and anna had struck one of the girls the italian was escorting. at the close of the case against natalya and anna, judge cornell said:[ ] "i find the girls guilty. it would be perfectly futile for me to fine them. some charitable women would pay their fines or they could get a bond. i am going to commit them to the workhouse under the cumulative sentence act, and there they will have an opportunity of thinking over what they have done." "miss violet pike came forward then," said natalya, "and said, 'cannot this sentence be mollified?' "and he said it could not be mollified. "they took us away in a patrol to the tombs. "we waited in the waiting-room there. the matron looked at us and said, 'you are not bad girls. i will not send you down to the cells. you can do some sewing for me here.' but i could not sew. i felt so bad, because i could not eat the food they gave us at noon for dinner in the long hall with all the other prisoners. it was coffee with molasses in it, and oatmeal and bread so bad that after one taste we could not swallow it down. then, for supper, we had the same, but soup, too, with some meat bones in it. and even before you sat down at the table these bones smelled so it made you very sick. but they forced you to sit down at the table before it, whether you ate or drank anything or not. and the prisoners walked by in a long line afterward and put their spoons in a pail of hot water, just the same whether they had eaten anything with the spoons or not. "then we walked to our cells. it was night, and it was dark--oh, so dark in there it was dreadful! there were three other women in the cell--some of them were horrid women that came off the street. the beds were one over the other, like on the boats--iron beds, with a quilt and a blanket. but it was so cold you had to put both over you; and the iron springs underneath were bare, and they were dreadful to lie on. there was no air; you could hardly breathe. the horrid women laughed and screamed and said terrible words. "anna lunska felt so sick and was so very faint, i thought what should we do if she was so much worse in the night in this terrible darkness, where you could see nothing at all. then i called through the little grating to a woman who was a sentinel that went by in the hall all through the night, 'my friend is sick. can you get me something if i call you in the night?' "the woman just laughed and said, 'where do you think you are? but if you pay me, i will come and see what i can do.' "in a few minutes she came back with a candle, and shuffled some cards under the candlelight, and called to us, 'here, put your hand through the grate and give me a quarter and i'll tell you who your fellows are by the cards.' then anna lunska said, 'we do not care to hear talk like that,' and the woman went away. "all that night it was dreadful. in the morning we could not eat any of the breakfast. they took us in a wagon like a prison with a little grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating. as we got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women prisoners. she cried and cried. and i saw she was a working girl. i managed to speak to her and say, 'who are you?' she said, 'i am a striker. i cannot speak any english.' that was all. they did not wish me to speak to her, and i had to go on. "from the boat they made us go into the prison they call blackwell's island. here they made us put on other clothes. all the clothes they had were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty. they had dresses in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women. they almost drag you down to the ground. everything was so very much too big for me, the sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far, they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins. "then we had the same kind of food i could not eat; and they put us to work sewing gloves. but i could not sew, i was so faint and sick. at night there was the same kind of food i could not eat, and all the time i wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of english, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways. when we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she started to send anna lunska and me to different cells. she would have made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street. but i was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let anna lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could. "just after that i saw that other girl, away down the line, so white, she must have cried and cried, and looking so frightened. i thought, 'oh, i ought to ask for her to come with us, too' but i did not dare. i thought, 'i will make that matron so mad that she will not even let anna lunska and me stay together,' so i got almost to our cell before i went out of the line and across the hall and went back to the matron and said: 'oh, there is another russian girl here. she is all alone. she cannot speak one word of english. please, please couldn't that girl come with my friend and me?' "she said, 'well, for goodness' sake! so you want to band all the strikers together here, do you? how long have you known her?' "i said, 'i never saw her until to-day.' "the matron said, 'for the land's sake, what do you expect here?' but she did not say anything else. so i went off, just as though she wasn't going to let that girl come with us; for i knew she would not want to seem as though she would do it, at any rate. "but, after we were in the cell with an irish woman and another woman, the door opened, and that russian girl came in with us. oh, she was so glad! "after that it was the same as the night before, except that we could see the light of the boats passing. but it was dark and cold, and we had to put both the quilt and the blanket over us and lie on the springs, and you must keep all of your clothes on to try to be warm. but the air and the smells are so bad. i think if it were any warmer, you would almost faint there. i could not sleep. "the next day they made me scrub. but i did not know how to scrub. and, for anna lunska, she wet herself all over from head to foot. so they said, very cross, 'it seems to us you do not know how to scrub a bit. you can go back to the sewing department.' on the way i went through a room filled with negresses, and they called out, 'look, look at the little kid,' and they took hold of me, and turned me around, and all laughed and sang and danced all around me. these women, they do not seem to mind at all that they are in prison. "in the sewing room the next two days i was so sick i could hardly sew. the women often said horrid things to each other, and i sat on the bench with them. there was one woman over us at sewing that argued with me so much, and told me how much better it was for me here than in russian prisons, and how grateful i should be. "i said, 'how is that, then? isn't there the same kind of food in those prisons and in these prisons? and i think there is just as much liberty.'" on the last day of natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most repellent women of the street said to her, "i am staying in here and you're going out. give me a kiss for good-by." natalya said that this woman was a horror to her. "but i thought it was not very nice to refuse this; so i kissed her a good-by kiss and came away." the officers guarded the girls to the prison boat for their return to new york. there, at the ferry, stood a delegation of the members of the woman's trade-union league and the union waiting to receive them. such is the account of one of the seven hundred arrests made during the shirt-waist strike, the chronicle of a peaceful striker. as the weeks went on, however, in spite of the advice of the union officers, there were a few instances of violence on the part of the union members. among thirty thousand girls it could not be expected that every single person should maintain the struggle in justice and temperance with perfect self-control. in two or three cases the union members struck back when they were attacked. in a few cases they became excited and attacked strike breakers. in one factory, although there was no violence, the workers conducted their negotiations in an unfair and unfortunate manner. they had felt that all their conditions except the amount of wages were just, and they admired and were even remarkably proud of the management, a firm of young and well-intentioned manufacturers. early in the general strike, however, they went out without a word to the management, without even signifying to it in any way the point they considered unjust. the management did not send to inquire. after a few days it resumed work with strike breakers. the former employees began picketing. the management sent word to them that it would not employ against them, so long as they were peaceful and within the law, any of the means of intimidation that numbers of the other firms were using--special police and thugs. the girls sent word back that they would picket peacefully and quietly. but afterward, on their own admission, which was most disarming in its candor, they became careless and "too gay." they went picketing in too large numbers and were too noisy. instantly the firm employed police. before this, however, the girls had begun to discuss and to realize the unintelligence of their behavior in failing to send a committee to the management to describe their position clearly and to obtain terms. they now appointed and instructed such a committee, came rapidly to terms with the management, and have been working for them in friendly relations ever since. while in general the strike was both peaceful in conduct and just in demand and methods of demand on the part of the strikers, these exceptions must, of course, be mentioned in the interests of truth. further, it would convey a false impression to imply that every striker arrested had as much sense and force of character as natalya urusova. natalya was especially protected in her ordeal by a vital love of observation and a sense of humor, charmingly frequent in the present writer's experience of young russian girls and women. with these qualities she could spend night after night locked up with the women of the street, in her funny, enormous prison clothes, and remain as uninfluenced by her companions as if she had been some blossoming geranium or mignonette set inside a filthy cellar as a convenience for a few minutes, and then carried out again to her native fresh air. but such qualities as hers cannot be demanded of all very young and unprotected girls, and to place them wantonly with women of the streets has in general an outrageous irresponsibility and folly quite insufficiently implied by the experience of a girl of natalya's individual penetration and self-reliance. iii in the period since the strike began many factories had been settling upon union terms. but many factories were still on strike, and picketing on the part of the union was continuing, as well as unwarranted arrests, like natalya's, on the part of the employers and the police. the few exceptions to the general rule of peaceful picketing have been stated. over two hundred arrests were made within three days early in december. on the d of december a procession of ten thousand women marched to the city hall, accompanying delegates from the union and the woman's trade-union league, and visited mayor mcclellan in his office and gave him this letter:-- honorable george b. mcclellan, mayor of the city of new york. we, the members of the ladies' shirt-waist makers' union, a body of thirty thousand women, appeal to you to put an immediate stop to the insults and intimidations and to the abuses to which the police have subjected us while we have been picketing. this is our lawful right. we protest to you against the flagrant discrimination of the police department in favor of the employers, who are using every method to incite us to violence. we appeal to you directly in this instance, instead of to your police commissioner. we do this because our requests during the past six months have had no effect in decreasing the outrages perpetrated upon our members, nor have our requests been granted a fair hearing. yours respectfully, s. shindler, secretary. the mayor thanked the committee for bringing the matter to his attention, and promised to take up the complaint with the police commissioner. but the arrests and violence of the police continued unchecked. on the th of december the political equality league, at the instigation of mrs. o.h.p. belmont, held a packed meeting for the benefit of the shirt-waist makers' union. many imprisoned girls were present, and gave to the public clear, straightforward stories of the treatment they had received at the hands of the city. the committee of the meeting had offered the mayor and other city officials a box, but they refused to be present. again the arrests and violence continued without protection for the workers. nevertheless their cause was constantly gaining, and although all attempts at general arbitration were unsuccessful, more and more employers settled with the operatives. they continued to settle during december and january until the middle of february. all but thirteen of the shops in new york had then made satisfactory terms with the union workers. it was officially declared that the strike was over. natalya's shop had settled with the operatives on the d of january, and she went back to work on the next day. she had an increase of $ a week in wages--$ a week instead of $ . her hours were now fifty-two a week instead of sixty--that is to say, nine and one-half hours a day, with a saturday half-holiday. but she has since then been obliged to enter another factory on account of slack work. among the more skilled workers than natalya in new york to-day, irena kovalova, who supports her mother and her younger brother and sister, has $ a week instead of $ . she is not obliged to work on sunday, and her factory closes at five o'clock instead of six on saturday. "i have four hours less a week," she said with satisfaction. the family have felt able to afford for her a new dress costing $ , and material for a suit, costing $ . a friend, a neighbor, made this for irena as a present. among the older workers of more skill than irena, anna klotin, who sent $ home to her family last year, has now, however, only $ , $ , and $ a week, and very poor and uncertain work, instead of her former $ a week. hers was one of the thirteen factories that did not settle. of their one hundred and fifty girls, they wished about twenty of their more skilled operators to return to them under union conditions, leaving the rest under the old long hours of overtime and indeterminate, unregulated wages. anna was one of the workers the firm wished to retain on union terms, but she felt she could not separate her chances in her trade from the fortunes of her one hundred and thirty companions. she refused to return under conditions so unjust for them. she has stayed on in her boarding place, as her landlady, realizing anna's responsible character, is always willing to wait for money when work is slack. she has bought this year only two pairs of shoes, a hat for cents, and one or two muslin waists, which she made herself. she has lived on such work as she could find from time to time in different factories. anna did not grudge in any way her sacrifice for the less skilled workers. "in time," she said, "we will have things better for all of us." and the chief regret she mentioned was that she had been unable to send any money home since the strike. the staunchest allies of the shirt-waist makers in their attempt to obtain wiser trade conditions were the members and officers of the woman's trade-union league, whose response and generosity were constant from the beginning to the end of the strike. the chronicle of the largest woman's strike in this country is not yet complete. a suit is now pending against the woman's trade-union league and the union for conspiracy in restraint of trade, brought by the sittomer shirt-waist co. a test suit is pending against judge cornell for false imprisonment, brought by one of the shirt-waist strikers. the whole outcome of the strike in its effect on women's wages in the shirt-waist trade, their income and outlay in their work, both financially and in vitality, cannot, of course, yet be fully known. the statement that there has been a general rise of wages must be modified in other ways than that suggested by the depletion of anna klotin's income in the year since the strike. in factories where price on piece-work is subject to arbitration between a union committee of the workers and the firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor. one of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe union conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its word. it discriminates against union members, and it insists on sunday work and on night work for more than two nights a week. further, during the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily filled in new york were placed with new jersey and pennsylvania firms. the present new york season has been unusually dull, and now, on this writing, early in august, many girls are discouraged on account of the slight amounts they earn through slack work. "but that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers. "you must be reasonable for them. you cannot ask them for work they are not able to obtain to give you." her remark is quoted both from its wisdom and for another purpose. she was the girl who will always be disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. her quiet and instinctive mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious generosity and nobility. looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be its spirit. something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit, manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of life. "the most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the _call_,[ ] "is the absence of leaders. all the girls seem to be imbued with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial uprisings. one like all are ready to take the chairmanship, secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison." there has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers' strike. perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. when every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have all been admitted, the fact remains that the new york strike said, "all for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country--perhaps new in the voice of the world. wonderful it is to know that in that world to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who, in the meanest quarter of new york, on stinted food, in scanty clothes, drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life, giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. wonderful it is to know that when natalya urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and cold on blackwell's island, she still could be responsibly concerned for the fortunes of a stranger and had something she could offer to her nobly. wonderful to know that, after her very bones had been broken by the violence of a thug of an employer, one of these girls could still speak for perfect fairness for him with an instinct for justice truly large and thrilling. such women as that ennoble life and give to the world a richer and altered conception of justice--a justice of imagination and the heart, concerned not at all with vengeance, but simply with the beauty of the perfect truth for the fortunes of all mortal creatures. besides the value to the workers of the spirit of the shirt-waist strike, they gained another advantage. this was of graver moment even than an advance in wages and of deeper consequences for their future. they gained shorter hours. what, then, are the trade fortunes of some of those thousands of other women, other machine operatives whose hours and wages are now as the shirt-waist makers' were before the shirt-waist strike? what do some of these other women factory workers, unorganized and entirely dependent upon legislation for conserving their strength by shorter working hours, give in their industry? what do they get from it? for an answer to these questions, we turn to some of the white goods sewers, belt makers, and stitchers on children's dresses, for the annals of their income and outlay in their work away from home in new york. footnotes: [footnote : _union label bulletin_, vol. , no. i, p. .] [footnote : this expense would at this date probably be heavier, as the working girls at one of the st. george's working girls' clubs estimated early this summer that shoes of a quality purchasable two years ago at $ would now cost $ . .] [footnote : constance leupp, in the _survey_.] [footnote : the circular of advice issued a little later by the union reads as follows:-- rules for pickets don't walk in groups of more than two or three. don't stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block. don't stop the person you wish to talk to; walk along side of him. don't get excited and shout when you are talking. don't put your hand on the person you are speaking to. don't touch his sleeve or button. this may be construed as a "technical assault." don't call any one "scab" or use abusive language of any kind. plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten. if a policeman arrest you and you are sure that you have committed no offense, take down his number and give it to your union officers.] [footnote : in the factories where the russian and italian girls worked side by side, their feeling for each other seems generally to have been friendly. after the beginning of the strike an attempt was made to antagonize them against each other by religious and nationalistic appeals. it met with little success. italian headquarters for italian workers wishing organizations were soon established. little by little the italian garment workers are entering the union.] [footnote : extract from the court stenographer's minutes of the proceedings in the per trial.] [footnote : therese malkiel, december .] chapter iii the income and outlay of some new york factory workers [unskilled and seasonal factory work] i besides the accounts of the waist makers, the national consumers' league received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine operatives--among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives, cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers, fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses. as will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some other worker. so that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade, but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance passing factory workers. for the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their tasks. this division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression. for the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries. discouragement at the lack of opportunity to advance was expressed by almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled factory work. among them, emily clement, an american girl, was one of the first workers who gave the league an account of her experience. emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $ a week. she was about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house for a sister and an aunt living in an east side tenement. she still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $ a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. she did the rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her own. this skill had enabled her to have for $ . , the cost of the material, the pretty spring suit she wore--a coat, skirt, and jumper, of cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but stylishly cut and becoming. in idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income had been quite inadequate. during the twenty-two weeks she had been in the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $ ; half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $ ; and two weeks of slack work, in each of which she earned only $ . . she had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted it from chance men acquaintances met on the street. another unskilled worker of twenty, sarina bashkitseff, intended to escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a private evening school. for this she contrived to save $ a month out of her income of $ a week. sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch. she was a beautiful and brilliant girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the american girls. sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "othello" and "king lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in russia. in the drug factory, and in her east side hall bedroom, she lived in a world of her own--a splendid, generous world of the english tragedies she studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments of the russian revolution. she had been in new york a year. in this time she had worked in an artificial flower factory, earning from $ to $ . a week; then as a cutter in a box factory, where she had $ a week at first, and then $ , for ten hours' work a day. she left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts. she then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $ a week and severe exhaustion.[ ] from her present wage of $ she spent cents a week for carfare and $ . a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in new york, and she had her dinners with them, free of cost. her luncheon cost her from to cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of - / cents' worth of rolls. all that made sarina bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating herself. her fate might be expressed in whitman's words, "henceforth i ask not good fortune, i myself am good fortune." whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a position to pity her. marta neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an austrian girl of nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness. marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,--four years in new york,--in factory work, without the slightest prospect of advancement. her work was of the least skilled kind--cutting off the ends of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes. she earned at first $ a week, and had been advanced to $ by a -cent rise at every one of the last four christmases since she had left her mother and father. but she knew she would not be advanced beyond this last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had kept her health, she was not at all strong. she worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. on saturday the factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. her income for the year had been $ . . she had spent $ . for carfare; $ for a suit; $ for a hat; and $ for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. her board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $ . a week, less in one way than with strangers. but she slept with part of her sister's family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her luncheon before starting for the factory at seven. marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to make her deeply desired journey back to austria to see her mother and father. although both their children were in the new country, her mother and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her father was blind. the lack of opportunity to rise, among older unskilled factory workers, may be illustrated by the experience of mrs. hallett, an american woman of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years. in this time she had advanced from a wage of $ a week to a wage of $ , earned by a week of nine-hour days, with a saturday half-holiday. however, as with marta, this had represented payment from the company for length of service, and not an advance to more skilled or responsible labor with more outlook. in mrs. hallett's case this was partly because the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's retail stores, and she was not strong enough to endure the all-day standing which this would require. mrs. hallett liked this company. the foreman was considerate, and a week's vacation with pay was given to the employees. mrs. hallett lived in an excessively small, unheated hall bedroom, on the fourth floor of an enormous old house filled with the clatter of the elevated railroad. on the night of the inquirer's call, she was pathetically concerned lest her visitor should catch cold because "she wasn't used to it." she lighted a small candle to show her the room, furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for mrs. clark and her kind, public-spirited little hostess. they sat, drowned at times in the noise of the elevated, in almost complete darkness, as mrs. hallett insisted on making a vain effort to extract some heat for her guest from the single gas-jet, by attaching to it an extremely small gas-stove. for this room, which was within walking distance of the candy factory, mrs. hallett paid $ . a week. her breakfast of coffee and rolls in a bakery near by cost her cents daily. she apportioned or cents each for her luncheon or dinner at restaurants. in her hungriest and most extravagant moments she lunched for cents. her allowance for food had to be meagre, because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged to have her washing done outside. sometimes she contrived to save a dollar a week toward buying clothing. but this meant living less tidily by having less washing done, or going hungrier. during the last year her expense for clothing had been a little more than $ : summer hat, $ ; winter hat, $ . ; best hat, $ ; shoes ( pairs at $ . , pairs rubbers), $ . ; wrap (long coat), $ . ; skirt (a best black brilliantine, worn two years), at $ . , $ . ; underskirt (black sateen), cents; shirtwaist (black cotton, worn every day in the year), cents; black tights, cents; union suits at $ . (one every other year), $ . ; pairs stockings at cents, $ . ; total, $ . . she said with deprecation that she sometimes went to the theatre with some young girl friends, paying cents for a seat, "because i like a good time now and then." these trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in new york. ii the chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features most common to the trade fortunes the workers described--uncertain and seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and fatigue from speeding. because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the new york sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another. this had been the experience of yeddie bruker, a young hungarian white-goods worker living in the bronx. the tenements of the bronx appear as crowded as those of the longer-settled neighborhoods of manhattan, the lower east side, harlem, chelsea, and the cross streets off the bowery, where so many self-supporting factory workers live. these newer-built lodgings, too, have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing. here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with hungarian and german signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess dresses. these blocks of rumanian and hungarian tenement districts, their fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and several patches of indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots--small, strange heights of old new york country, still unsubmerged by the wide tide of slav and austrian immigration. in this curious and bizarre neighborhood, yeddie bruker and her sister lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean little flat owned by a family of their own nationality. yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn looking and white. at work for six years in new york, she had at first been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers are attached. then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker. in the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. the jar of the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. she earned only $ a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the machinery. in the collar factory she again earned $ a week, stitching between five and six dozen collars a day. the stitch on men's collars is extremely small, almost invisible. it strained her eyes so painfully that she was obliged to change her occupation again. as an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out of work by the trade seasons. these still leave her idle, in her present occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every year. in the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower east side, she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months, employment for all the working days in the week for another three months, and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional half day on sunday, for between two and three months. legal holidays and a few days of illness made up the year. in full weeks her wage is $ . her income for the year had been $ , and she had been able to save nothing. she had paid $ for her board and lodging, at the rate of $ a week; a little more than $ for clothing; $ for carfare, necessitated by living in the bronx; $ for a doctor; $ . to a benefit association, which assures her $ a week in case of illness; $ for the theatre; and $ for union dues. her work was very exhausting. evenly spaced machine ruffling on petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do. she sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and was hard to thread. it may be said here that the number of needles does not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines; two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under the needle-point. it was not her eyes, yeddie said, that were tired by the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the machines. every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was open. one of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades, is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen, frequently mentioned by other workers besides yeddie. two years ago, in a waist and dress factory where operatives--more than girls and about men--were employed for the company by a well-known subcontractor, jake klein, a foreman asked mr. klein to beset some of the girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand. the manager discharged him. he asked to speak to the girls before he went away. the manager refused his request. as mr. klein turned to the girls, his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized klein's collar, overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the stairs. "brothers and sisters," klein called to the operatives, "will you sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?" in one impulse of clear justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with jake klein, and stayed out till the company made overtures of peace. this adventure, widely related on the east side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in many sewing shops. the uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell heavily on sarah silberman, a delicate little austrian jewish girl of seventeen, who finished and felled women's cloaks. she had always lived in poverty. she had worked in a stocking factory in austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in vienna and london and new york. she had been in new york for about a year, lodging, or rather sleeping at night, in the tenement kitchen of some distant cousins of hers, practically strangers. the kitchen opened on an air-shaft, and it was used, not only as a kitchen, but as a dining room and living-room. for the first four months after her arrival sarah earned about $ a week, working from nine and one-half to ten hours a day as a finisher of boys' trousers. from this wage she paid $ a week for her kitchen sleeping space and breakfast and supper. luncheon cost her cents a day. she had been able to buy so very little clothing that she had kept no account of it. she did her own washing, and walked to work. she had never had any education until she came to america, and she now attended a night school, in which she was keenly interested. she was living in this way when her factory closed. she then searched desperately for employment for two weeks, finding it at last in a cloak factory[ ] where she was employed from half past seven in the morning until half past six or seven in the evening, with a respite of only a few minutes at noon for a hasty luncheon. her wage was $ a week. working her hardest, she could not keep the wolf from the door, and was obliged to go hungry at luncheon time or fail to pay the full rent for her place to sleep in the kitchen. sarah was very naturally unstrung and nervous in this hardness of circumstance and her terror of destitution. as she told her story, she sobbed and wrung her hands. in the next six months she had better occupation, however, in spasmodically busy shops, where the hours were shorter than in the cloak factory, and she managed to earn an average wage of $ a week. she was then more serene; she said she had "made out good." during her six weeks of better pay at $ a week, however, which so few people would consider "making out good," she had suffered an especially mean exploitation. she applied at an underwear factory which constantly advertises, in an east side jewish paper, for operatives. the management told her they would teach her to operate if she would work for them two weeks for nothing and would give them a dollar. she gave them the dollar; but on the first day in the place, as she received no instructions, and learned through another worker that after her two weeks of work for nothing were over she would not be employed, she came away, losing the dollar she had given to the firm. another worker who was distressed by the dull season, and had witnessed unjust impositions, was katia markelov, a young operative on corsets. she was a tiny, grave-looking girl of nineteen, very frail, with smooth black hair, a lovely refinement of manner, and a very sweet smile. like many other operatives, she wore glasses. katia was a good manager, and an industrious and clever student, a constant attendant at night school. in the factory where she was employed she earned about $ a week as a week worker, a skilled worker making an entire corset, after it was cut and before it was trimmed. but she had only twelve full weeks' work in the year; for two and a half months she was entirely idle, and for the remaining six and a half months she worked from two to five days a week. her income for the year had been about $ . katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower broadway. before that she had been employed as a week worker in a fifth avenue corset factory, which may be called madame cora's. shortly before katia left this establishment, madame cora changed her basis of payment from week work to piece-work. the girls' speed increased. some of the more rapid workers who had before made $ were able to make $ . on discovering this, madame cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for thread and needles. she made them pay her cents for every needle. thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the needles, stitches up very rapidly. the girls were frequently obliged to pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed into madame cora's corsets, and for needles. they rebelled when madame cora refused to pay for these materials herself. from among the three hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to union headquarters, and asked to be organized. but madame cora simply filled their places with other girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and refused to take them back. katia did not respect madame cora's methods, and had left before the strike. katia spent $ . a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a room with a congenial friend, another russian girl, in harlem. the room was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant. she paid from $ . to $ . for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $ for books and magazines, $ for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $ for an outing. on account of her cleverness katia was less at the mercy of unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls. among these, molly davousta, another young machine operative, was struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket. when molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger children, had sent her abroad out of russia, with the remarkable intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in some other country. like dick whittington, the little girl went to london, though to seek, not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. after she had been in london for four years, her father died. she and her next younger sister, bertha, working in russia, became the sole support of the family; and now, learning that wages were better in america, molly, like whittington, turned again and came to new york. here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $ to $ a week. she lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $ a month. for supper and saturday meals she paid $ . a week. other food she bought from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $ a week. as she did her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses, except for shoes. once in every two months these wore to pieces and she was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast. in this way she lived in new york for a year, during which time she managed to send $ home, for the others. her sister bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to new york, and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $ a week. between them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage ticket from russia to new york for $ , and to send home $ . this, with the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $ , brought all the rest of the family into new york harbor--the girls' mother, their three younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of seven. five months afterward molly and bertha were still making payments for these extortionate tickets. in new york, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons into corset covers, earning from $ to $ . a week. the fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. the family of seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $ . a month; their food cost $ or $ a week; shoes came to at least $ a week; the girls made most of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $ a month for a sewing-machine; and they gave $ a month for the little brother's hebrew schooling. molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. she wept because the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. she said she suffered from headache and from backache. every month she lost a day's work through illness. she was only nineteen years old. by working every hour she could make a fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work, she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair standard of living. a point that should be accentuated in molly davousta's account is the price of shoes. no one item of expense among working girls is more suggestive. the cost of shoes is unescapable. a girl may make over an old hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes she must pay at least $ ; and no sooner has she bought them than she must begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another pair. the hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves these shoes. long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. the stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out even more quickly than the shoes. it is practically impossible to mend stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's washing. all molly davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family responsibility. in the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family responsibility pressed on rita karpovna. she was a girl of nineteen, who had come to america a few years before with her older brother, nikolai. together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or two younger than rita. soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men's vests, at $ or $ a week, for ten hours' work a day. living and saving with her brother, she contrived to send home $ a month. between them, nikolai and rita brought over their mother and the little brother. but, very soon after they were all settled together, their mother died. they were obliged to put the little brother into an institution. then nikolai fell from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his work. rita now lived alone, spending $ . a month for a sleeping place in a tenement, and for suppers $ . a week. her luncheons and breakfasts, picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was working, to about cents a day. at other times she often went without both meals. for in the last year her average wage had been reduced to $ . a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness. through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and for nine weeks none at all. when she was working, she paid cents a week carfare, cents a month to the union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and cents a month to a "woman's self-education society." the union and this club meant more to rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with, and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $ in a year and a half. some months afterward, mrs. clark received word that rita had solved many of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her domestic anxieties were relieved. the chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still in russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a friend, another girl, working in the same shop--a tragedy told here because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work. rita's younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl, alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate that it was doubtful whether her admission to the united states could be secured, even if rita could possibly save enough for her passage money. the friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the birth of their child, when he left her resourceless. slack and dull seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations.[ ] especially at the mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers, and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops. helena hardman, an austrian girl, a fur sewer, had been employed for only twenty weeks in the year. she sewed by hand on fur garments in a twelfth street shop, for $ a week, working nine hours a day, with a saturday half-holiday. the air and odors in the fur shop were very disagreeable, but had not affected her health. at the end of the twenty weeks she had been laid off, and had looked unsuccessfully for work for seventeen weeks, before she found employment as an operative in an apron factory. here, however, in this unaccustomed industry, by working as an operative nine hours a day for five days a week, and six hours on saturday, she could earn only $ or $ . she paid $ a week for board and a tenement room shared with another girl. she had been obliged to go in debt to her landlady for part of her long idle time, after her savings had been exhausted. during this time she had been unable to buy any clothing, though her expense for this before had been slender: a suit, $ ; a hat, $ ; shoes, $ ; waists, $ ; and underwear, $ . . she looked very well, however, in spite of the struggle and low wages necessitated by learning a secondary trade. the dull season is tided over in various ways. a few fortunate girls go home and live without expense. many live partly at the expense of philanthropic persons, in subsidized homes. in these ways they save a little money for the dull time, and also store more energy from their more comfortable living. on the horizon of the milliner the dull season looms black. all the world wants a new hat, gets it, and thinks no more of hats or the makers of hats. on this account a fast and feverish making and trimming of hats, an exhausting drain of the energy of milliners for a few weeks, is followed by weeks of no demand upon their skill. girl after girl told the investigator that the busy season more than wore her out, but that the worry and lower standard of living of the dull season were worse. the hardship is the greater because the skilled milliner has had to spend time and money for her training. many of these girls try to find supplementary work, as waitresses in summer hotels, or in some other trade. a great difficulty here is the overlapping of seasons. the summer hotel waitress is needed until september, at least, but the milliner must begin work in august. to obtain employment in a non-seasonal industry, it is often necessary to lie. in each new occupation it is necessary to accept a beginner's wage. regina siegerson had come alone, at the age of fifteen, from russia to new york, where she had been for seven years. the first winter was cruel. she supported herself on $ a week. she had been forced to live in the most miserable of tenements with "ignorant" people. she had subsisted mainly by eating bananas, and had worn a spring jacket through the cold winter. it seemed, however, that no hardship had ever prevented her from attending evening school, where her persistence had taken her to the fourth year of high school. she was thinking of college at the time of the interview. regina was a russian revolutionist, and keenly thirsting for knowledge. she talked eagerly to the inquirer about victor hugo, gorky, tolstoy, and bernard shaw. with no less interest she spoke of the trade fortunes of milliners in new york, and her own last year's experience. she had worked through may, june, and july as a trimmer, making $ in a week of nine hours a day, with saturday closing at five. during august and september and the first weeks in october she had only six weeks' work, as a maker in a ready-to-wear hat factory, situated on the lower west side over a stable, where she made $ in a week of nine hours a day. regina and a girl friend had managed to furnish a two-room tenement apartment with very simple conveniences, and there they kept house. rent was $ . a month; gas for heating and cooking, $ . ; and food for the two, about $ a week. as regina did her own washing, the weekly expense for each was but $ . , less than many lodgers pay for very much less comfort. the greatest pleasure the girls had in their little establishment was the opportunity it gave them for entertaining friends. before, it had been impossible for them to see any one, except in other people's crowded living-rooms, or on the street. regina was engaged to a young apothecary student, whom she expected to marry in the spring. like her, he was in new york without his family, and he took his meals at the two girls' little flat with them. regina's father, who was living in russia with a second wife, had sent her $ when she wrote him of her intended marriage. this, and about $ saved in the six weeks of earning $ , were her reserve fund in the long dull season. the inquirer saw regina again a few days before thanksgiving. she was still out of work, but was learning at home to do some mechanical china decorating for the christmas trade. among the milliners, several girls were studying to acquire, not only a training in a secondary trade, but the better general education which frances ashton, a young american girl of twenty, had obtained through better fortunes. her father, a professional man, had been comfortably situated. without anticipating the necessity of supporting herself, she had studied millinery at pratt institute for half a year. then, because it was rather a lark, she had gone to work in new york. most of her wage was spent for board and recreation, her father sending her an allowance for clothes. after a year, his sudden death made it necessary for her to live more economically, as her inheritance was not large. the expenses of an attack of typhoid one summer, and of an operation the next year, entirely consumed it. in the year she described, she had been a copyist in one of the most exclusive shops on fifth avenue. the woman in charge was exceptionally considerate, keeping the girls as long as possible. she used to weep when she was obliged to dismiss them, for she realized the suffering and the temptation of the long idle period. however, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a time, from february to may , and from august to december . during the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. the working day lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon. many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $ , besides cents supper money, for overtime. but by six o'clock frances was so exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that hour. in addition to her thirty weeks in the fifth avenue order establishment, frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year, and idle for twenty. she was a piece-worker and she had earned from $ to $ a week. the twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to find anything to do. application at department stores had been ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. she said she had lost all scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all. frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room shared with two other girls, $ . a week. although she walked sometimes from work, carfare usually amounted to cents a week. laundering two sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost cents. thus, for a reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by philanthropic persons, she spent $ . a week aside from the cost of clothing. she dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. she said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. she was, at the time she gave her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to pay another week's board. yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the circumstances. something, then, must be said about these circumstances--this widespread precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. where industry acts the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant. among the factory workers, the waist makers' admirable efforts for juster wages were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence employers are as powerless as employees to forestall. these chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work on the fortunes of some self-supporting operatives and hand workers in new york factories and workshops, concern only one corner of american industry, in which, as every observer must realize, there are many other enormous fields of seasonal work. these histories are nevertheless clear and authentic instances of a strange and widespread social waste. neither trade organization nor state legislation for shorter hours is primarily directed toward a more general regular and foresighted distribution of work among all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers. until some focussed, specific attempt is made to secure such a distribution, it seems impossible but that extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness, will be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime or exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner apparently arranged by fortune to devastate human energy in the least intelligent manner possible. further effects of speeding and of monotony in this labor were described by other self-supporting factory workers whose chronicles, being also concerned with industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed next. [illustration: photograph by lewis hine "inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound;-- but where is what i started for so long ago, and why is it still unfound?" --walt whitman.] footnotes: [footnote : see report on condition of woman and child wage-earners in the united states. volume ii, men's ready-made clothing, pages - ; - ; - .] [footnote : the income and outlay of other cloak makers will be separately presented.] [footnote : in the first report of the new york probation association the statement is made that out of girls committed by the courts during the year to the charge of waverley house, had been engaged in factory work. of these many had been at one time or other employed as operatives. on questioning the probation worker, miss stella miner, who had lived with them and knew their stories most fully, it was learned, however, that almost every one of these girls had gone astray while they were little children, had been remanded by courts to the house of the good shepherd, where they had learned machine operating, and on going out of its protection to factories had drifted back again to their old ways of life. how far their early habit and experience had dragged these young girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known. the truth remains that factory work, when it is seasonal, must increase temptation by its economic pressure.] chapter iv the income and outlay of some new york factory-workers [monotony and fatigue in speeding] one of the strangest effects of the introduction of machinery into industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines.[ ] this stupefying and wearying effect of machine-work from concentration and intensity of application and attention was frequently mentioned by the factory workers in their accounts. tina levin, a young girl eighteen years old, had worked two years in an underwear factory in new york; and before her arrival in america, six years in an underwear factory in russia. she had come from abroad to her fiancé, ivan levin, whom she had recently married. she still worked in the underwear factory, although she was not entirely self-supporting. she and her young husband met the league's inquirer at a jewish girls' self-education club, where they gave between them the account of tina's self-supporting years. before her marriage, tina had worked at a machine ten hours a day for an underwear manufacturer on canal street. in the height of the season the shop often worked overtime until o'clock, two or three nights a week. besides this, many of the girls took hand work home, where they sewed till eleven or twelve o'clock. but tina was so exhausted by her long day that she never did this. working as hard as possible, she earned $ , and sometimes $ a week, during the six busy months. for part of this time she lived a full hour-and-a-half's car ride from the factory. so that with dressing, and eating two meals at her lodging, when she was at the machine twelve hours a day, she had only about six hours sleep. at least half the year was so dull that she could earn only $ or $ . a week; and she was so worn out that every month she was utterly unable to work for three or four days. this loss had reduced her income by $ . she had been obliged to pay $ for medicine. her income for the year had been about $ . for board and lodging in a tenement she had paid $ . a week; for carfare cents a week; and she had sent $ home in the year; and given $ for medicine; $ for the dentist; and $ a month to the jewish girls' self-education society. she had less than $ left for dress for the year. but her lover had helped her with many presents; and had given her many good times and pleasures, besides those obtainable at the jewish girls' self-education society. tina had the advantage of a knowledge of english. this lack of opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was poignantly regretted by another machine operative, fanny leysher, a white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in america four years. she lived in one room of a tenement off the bowery, where she boarded and lodged for $ a week. she worked in a factory within walking distance, earning $ a week in the busy season. fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile, and the charm peculiar to blond russians with long gray eyes. she looked, however, painfully frail and white. in the factory she had worked for four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. she could earn $ a week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of corset covers-- dozen a day. this was the most she could possibly complete. the unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to attend night school, or to learn english. she suffered greatly from headache and from backache. fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. for six weeks she worked three days in the week. for two weeks the factory closed. for three weeks she had been ill. she was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a nice sense of quality. when she talked of her inability to go to night school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes. her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of sudermann's and a little book of rosenthal's sweat shop verses. everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. her dress showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every advantage." it was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white piqué collar and a loose blue tie. she had tan stockings and low russet shoes. fanny belonged to the working-man's circle. she said she went as often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. and when she was asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness and eagerness, "oh, i want nothing but the best. only what will tell me about real life." she said she had spent too much money for dress last year; but she had been able to buy clothing of a quality which she thought would last her for a long time. the little plain gold watch in her list she had partly needed and partly had been unable to resist. one of the three summer dresses costing $ was her blue linen dress, for which she had given $ . she expected to wear it for two summers with alterations. last year's suit cleaned $ shoes hat dresses ( winter, $ ; summer, $ ) coat every-day hat . muslin (for white waists and corset covers made by herself) umbrella gloves pocket-book watch ______ $ . painful as it was in some ways to see fanny leysher, who liked "nothing but the best," pouring her life force into stitching corset covers a day, she yet seemed less helpless than some still younger workers. minna waldemar, a girl of sixteen, an operative in an umbrella factory, had been in the united states for six months. for five months of this time she had been stitching the seams and hems of umbrella covers for cents a hundred. her usual output was about a day. by working very fast, she could in a full day make , but when she did, it left her thumb very sore. minna paid $ a month for sleeping space in a tenement; $ . a week for suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from to cents a day. she wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $ . a suit had cost $ ; a hat, $ ; and a pair of shoes, $ . working her hardest and fastest, she had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings, and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in new york. every line of minna's little figure looked overworked. this was true, too, of sadie, a little underfed, grayish austrian girl of seventeen, who had come to new york as the advance guard of her family. in the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she earned from $ . a week to $ and $ on piece-work. in two very busy weeks she had earned $ a week. after the slack season, the factory closed. hunting desperately for a way to make money, sadie found employment as an operative on children's dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $ . a week. in the second week her wage was advanced to $ and continued at this for the next three or four months. after this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. she had returned to the neckwear factory, and was earning $ a week. her busiest days were eleven hours long, and her others nine. she spent nothing for pleasure. she could send nothing to her family. in the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $ and a suit for $ . she went to night school, but was generally so weary that she could learn really nothing. she did her own washing, and for $ a month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded east side tenement. it was the living-room of her poverty-stricken landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. supper with the landlady cost her cents a night. sadie's breakfasts and dinners depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. as in the weeks when she was earning $ she had only cents for fourteen meals a week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $ . , only cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is easily understood. sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of east side tenements. she paid $ a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could. if she had attempted to find a better and less expensive place for sleeping, in a less congested quarter of the city, she would have been obliged to pay, besides her rent, a sum at least half as large, for transportation. in the same way, for this really very large sum of $ or $ paid yearly to the city railroads, she would not have received in their cars any definite place at all, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply a chance of getting a foothold when she could on a cross-town car or the bronx elevated during the rush hours. the yearly sums paid to the car companies by factory workers too exhausted to walk home are very striking in these budgets. tina levin had paid nearly $ --more than she had spent for her clothing during the year. this expense of carfare and the wretched conditions in transportation which most of the car companies supply to the workers compelled to use their lines in rush hours is a difficulty scarcely less than that of new york rents and congestion, and inseparably connected with them. anna flodin, a girl of eighteen, forced by illness to leave the congested quarters of new york for the bronx, did not attempt to return to work until she was able to live again within walking distance of the factory. anna flodin was a pale, quiet girl with smooth black hair and a serious, almost poignant expression. all her life had been one of poverty, a sheer struggle to keep the wolf from the door. she spoke no english, though she could understand a little. she stitched regularly in the busy season yards of machine sewing daily in fastening belts to cheap corset covers. the forewoman gave her in the course of the day bundles, each containing corset covers with the belts basted to the waist lines and the loose ends of the belts basted ready to finish. the instant anna failed to complete this amount, or seemed to drop behind in the course of the day, the forewoman blamed her, and threatened to reduce her wage. anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $ a week. if she were five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. she was docked for every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then been only $ a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she stitched into the white-goods company's output. in order to complete yards of belting a day--over yards of stitching, for she fastened both edges of the belt--she was forced, of course, to work as fast as she could feed and guide belts under the needle. she had strong eyes. but her back ached from the stooping to guide the material, and she suffered cruelly from pain in her shoulders. there had been seventeen weeks of this work. then there had been ten weeks of two or three days' work a week, when it seemed impossible to earn enough to live on. then, ten weeks when the factory closed. then she had an illness lasting over two months, which began a few weeks after the factory closed. she said the doctor had told her that her illness was consumption and that he had cured it. it must have been, of course, not consumption or not arrested in that space of time. but, during it, she had paid him $ . and given $ . for her board and lodging, with an uncle in the bronx, and for milk and eggs. almost as soon as she was declared able to return to stitching seven hundred belts a day, she hurried back to work. but within a few days the girls struck against the company's practice of making them buy thread, and were out for five weeks. at the end of this time they won their point. altogether her income for the year had been about $ ; and the severity and amount of labor she had given in earning it had left her cruelly spent. she could not possibly live on this amount, as board and lodging alone had cost her $ a week--$ for the year. she had been obliged to borrow $ for her treatment in her illness; and she had not yet paid back this sum. besides, her landlady had trusted her for some board bills she had not yet paid. for clothing she had spent $ . ,--one dress for $ ; one hat for $ ; one jacket for $ ; two pairs of shoes at $ ; a pair for $ ; pairs of stockings at cents a pair for $ . ; three waists at cents each for $ . ; and three suits of winter underwear for $ . . but she said winter underwear of this quality failed to keep her really warm. in the evening she was too tired to leave the tenement for night school or for anything else. she did her own washing. in the course of a year her only pleasure had been a trip to the theatre for cents. anna flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the bowery; and she told her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost ambassadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching. that spirit--a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and expenditure of strength--was evinced by countless girls. none, indeed, were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless they wished to help in the inquiry. but perhaps because it arose from such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of anna flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling. she told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy, ill-smelling inner court. the only brightening of her grave, young face throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about thread. she was a member of the union. in the shop there were girls not members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread indefinitely. anna flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that she would never have anything to do with such girls. her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions. she was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing eyes imparted. there is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness of dissipation in youth. too little is said of the fact that such an enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as anna flodin's is in youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the painful sense of wreck. all tragedies are not those of violence, but of depletion, too, and of starvation. the drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind, who afterwards found more attractive employment. she said that in her factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine o'clock, after her work was done, with a cousin. the cousin was another clever and spirited russian girl of the same age. they had a hundred things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost always say to the other: "please do not speak to me on my way home. i am so tired i can scarcely answer." instantly after supper they went to bed. in the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at eight, to go through the round of the day before. "we only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they were talking about. and still, although there was nothing for us but bed and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through the slack season." it is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in a belt-factory, theresa luther, earning $ a week. she was a young german-american protestant woman of , born in new york. after her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable and adventurous boy. strong, competent, and high-spirited, miss luther was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful direct glance. her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the most interesting work in his craft done in new york. theresa, too, had dexterity with her hands. at the age of fifteen she entered a leather belt factory as a "trimmer." she was so quick that she earned almost immediately $ a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. soon she was permitted to fold and pack. not long afterwards, overhearing a forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that she could run a sewing-machine at home. the forewoman, amused, placed her at the machine. after that she had stitched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory. leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. the row of stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. the slightest deviation from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work. running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather, necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men. theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day. she and other americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some russian girls, who could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous stitches and loose threads. when the forewoman blamed theresa for finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt for their slovenly belts. she had a strong handicraft pride, and it was pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman's reply that "none of them (the badly made belts) ever came back"--as though their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship. she had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork. in one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks. after this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable to do anything for months. on her recovery she entered another factory, where the hours are not so excessive, the treatment is fair, and she has now an excellent position as forewoman at $ a week. theresa was a very earnest, clear-minded girl, with strong convictions concerning the bad effect of excessive hours for working women. at the time when the hearing on the new york state labor law was held at albany last spring, she had been active in obtaining a petition, signed by a body of new york working girls and placed in the hands of labor commissioner williams, to aid in securing a shortening of their present legal hours. theresa had advanced beyond the drudgery of her trade to one of its better positions by extraordinary ability. some of the skilled machine operatives, like some of the unskilled factory workers, were buoyed through the monotony of their present calling by the hope of leaving it for another occupation. alta semenova, a polish glove maker, twenty years old, worked nine hours a day at a machine for $ a week, and studied five evenings a week in a private evening school, for which she paid $ a month tuition. she lived in a small hall bedroom with an admired girl friend. each paid $ . a month rent. her food amounted to $ . a week. saturday evening she spent in doing her washing. she lived near enough to the factory to walk to work in five or ten minutes. she paid cents a month for union dues. alta was working for "counts" toward entering college or cooper union. in spare moments she read the modern russians. during her year in new york she has mastered sufficient english to read shakespeare in the original. in a few years she will be a teacher. alta was an eager russian revolutionist. she had the student's passion, and her head was full of plans for a life of intellectual work. these chronicles of the income and outlay of some new york factory workers have described monotony and speeding in machine-work. the annals of the new york factory workers presented below describe monotony and speeding in hand-work. yetta sigurdin, an austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in new york three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a tobacco factory, a union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work. her hours were eight a day. in a full day, yetta could roll cigarettes. so her best wage was about $ a week. the average was, however, not more than $ , as the factory had been idle four weeks, and very dull for five months, though busy for the remaining six. yetta looked very robust and happy. she seemed comfortable in her work and with her income, in spite of the extra labor of washing some of her own clothes and making her own waists. this, no doubt, was due largely to her sane and reasonable working hours, and partly to the fact that her work did not require the intensity of watching and application demanded by rapid machine-work. indeed in some union tobacco factories the rollers sometimes make up a sum among themselves to pay a reader by the hour to read aloud to them while they are at work. yetta paid $ a week for room, breakfast, and supper in a tenement. it was in an extremely poor neighborhood, but was fresh, pleasant, and well aired. her dinners cost about $ . a week. she did part of her washing and part was included in the charge for board. her union fee was cents a week. the members of the cigarette makers' union pay a weekly due of cents for the support of a sanatorium in colorado for tubercular tobacco workers. yetta contributed to this sanatorium and gave a -cent monthly fee for union agitation. she estimated the cost of her clothing at about $ for the year. a winter suit cost $ ; a spring suit, $ ; a summer dress, $ ; and a winter dress, $ . six pairs of shoes cost $ . she could not remember the items of the rest of her expenditure for dress. part of it was for underwear and part of it for material for waists she had made herself. in spite of the monotony and speed of yetta's work, it did not exhaust her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours. barbara cotton, an american woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment. in the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was split into the thinnest possible sheets. she was paid by the number she succeeded in splitting. the constant repetition of an act of such accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made her extremely nervous. for six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $ or $ . a week. during the other six months there was no work on saturdays, and she earned about $ a week. she had a week's vacation with pay. she had lost during the year she described two months' work from illness, due to her run-down condition. this she said, however, was not caused by her work, but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a sister, who had been sick. miss cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she had received an allowance of $ a week. her income for the year had been about $ , an average of $ . a week. miss cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and although the expense was about the same, the places were much less attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was staying at the time of the interview. for half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for breakfasts and dinners, she paid $ . a week. luncheons in addition cost her $ a week. as she was within walking distance of work, she had no other expense but cents for part of her washing. the rest she did herself. she bought very little clothing, as out of the $ . a week she had left after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a sick sister and niece. after eighteen years of hard, steady work--nine years of it skilled work--she had saved nothing except in the form of benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving. although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was less exhausted by her industrial experience than katherine ryan, an irish worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing trimmings for six years in an appliqué factory. eight and a quarter hours of this work a day exhausted her. she received $ a week. her eyes were fast failing her from the close watch she had to keep on her scissors to guard against cutting too far. she often went to bed at eight or half past eight o'clock, worn out by one day's task and eager to be fresh for the next, for she was hard pressed by the competition of young eyes and quick fingers. newer workers were given finer and more profitable work to do. in spite of her faithfulness, and straining for speed, she was laid off two months earlier in the last season than in any previous year, and newer helpers were retained. she thought the forewoman was prejudiced against her, and naturally could not understand the truth that from the standpoint of modern industry she was aged at forty-five. she had been paying $ a week for board in a philanthropic home, and there she was permitted to stay and to pay for her board and lodging when she had no money by helping with the housework. miss ryan, however, had exhausted herself less rapidly than elena and gerda nakov, two young polish women of thirty-three and twenty-nine, skilled hand-workers on children's dresses. elena had come from south russia to seek her fortunes when she was sixteen years old. her mother and father were dead. she had been educated by an uncle, with whom her younger sister, gerda, remained. according to the testimony of elena's brother-in-law, the kind-hearted husband of a married sister living in new york, and also according to the testimony of gerda, elena at sixteen was a very beautiful girl. she was small, but very strong and well knit, with a fresh, glowing color, deep gray eyes, and heavy reddish gold hair, growing low upon her forehead in a widow's peak. elena first found work as a cigarette roller, earning $ a week. here she was subjected to constant insolence and scurrilous language from the foreman and the men working with her. her eyes turned black with contempt when she spoke of this offence--"oh" she exclaimed, "i thought, 'i am poor, but i will never in my life be so poor as to stand things like that.'" she left the tobacco factory and found employment as a neckwear worker. here, too, she earned $ , but the season grew dull, and she entered a small factory, where she worked on children's dresses, embroidering, buttonholing, faggoting, and feather-stitching. in this craft she proved to have such deftness, nicety of touch, and speed that she could do in an hour twice as much as most of the other girls and women in the factory. she sewed from eight to six, with half an hour for lunch. she always took work home and sometimes she sewed for half of sunday, for living expenses consumed all of her $ a week. her stomach had failed her in the intensity of her occupation and from the insufficient food she was able to purchase, and she needed all the extra money she could earn for doctor's bills and medicine. she was thin, spent, worn, and pale, when gerda came over from russia, four years after elena had arrived. gerda was a strong, attractive girl, with good health, dark curling hair, and a lovely color. entering the same factory with elena, she soon became almost as able as her sister in fine sewing, and almost as ill. she earned $ a week. the factory was owned by a young german widow, mrs. mendell, an extremely attractive, pretty, and skilful person, appearing in her office an agreeable and well-educated young woman, and able to produce the most engaging little dresses, caps, and undermuslins for children, at a high profit, by paying extremely small wages to skilled immigrant seamstresses. in her workroom, mrs. mendell alternately terrorized and flattered the girls. she speeded them constantly. unless they had done as much work as she wished to accomplish through the day, she refused to speak to them. she made the younger girls put on her boots, and dress her when she changed her office frock for the clothes in which she motored home at night. and in the morning she punished girls who had not finished as much work as she wished over night by giving them the worst paid and hardest sewing in the factory. one night she sent elena and gerda home with two great bundles of infants' bands--shoulder-straps and waistbands--to be made ready to be fastened to long skirts the next morning. they were all to be feather-stitched around the shoulder-bands and upper edges of the waist-bands, three buttons sewed on, and three buttonholes made in each. this was to be done for - / cents a piece--a quarter a dozen. in the morning after she had completed this work, elena felt so nervous and ill when she went to the factory, that as she handed mrs. mendell back the bundle and received the quarter, she burst into tears. she told mrs. mendell she was sick. she could not live and work as she was working. gerda's eyes were always strained. their wages must be raised. mrs. mendell replied with calm and self-approbation, that she herself stayed in the factory all day, but she never complained in any such way. however, she raised elena's wages cents. at this time the two girls lived in a tiny, inner room with one window, on an air-shaft in an east side tenement. for this they paid $ a month. it was scarcely more than a closet, holding one chair, one table, and a bed; and so small that elena and gerda could scarcely squeeze in between their meagre furnishings. they did their own washing, cooked their own breakfasts on the landlady's stove, prepared a lunch they took with them to the factory, and paid cents a night apiece for dinner. almost all the money they had left, after their lodging and board and the barest necessities for clothing were paid for, went for medicines and doctors. their clothing was so poor that they were ashamed to go out on sunday--when everybody else put on "best dresses"--and would sit in their room all day. however, in the evenings they sometimes went to see relatives in the bronx, and on one of these occasions they had a piece of good fortune of the oddest character. on the elevated road on which they happened to be riding there was an accident--a collision. they were neither of them injured; but they saw the collision, and were summoned as witnesses for the road. they were obliged to spend several mornings away from making children's dresses, waiting to give their testimony in the criminal court, which they found highly pleasant and recreative. however, after all, the road settled with the prosecutors before the girls were ever called on for their testimony, and the case never came to trial. but the railroad gave elena and gerda for the time they had spent on its behalf a check for $ . at this they determined to move to better quarters. the factory, besides, had grown and moved into larger rooms farther up-town (though its workrooms had always been well lighted and ventilated), so that the girls were obliged to spend more than they could afford for carfare. with the $ they furnished their room in harlem. they were in a wild, disreputable neighborhood, of which the girls remained quite independent. but the rooms were airy and attractive. having now their own furnishings, they paid only $ a month for all this added space and comfort, so that they could continue to live in these accommodations, but only with severe effort and industry on elena's part. for gerda's optic nerve was now so affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and illness, that she was unable to go to the factory. she kept the house, doing some sewing at home. elena's wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with mrs. mendell, were raised to $ a week after her thirteen years of service. but she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health. she was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis. at last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she would die. her stomach was almost completely worn out. this doctor sent her to a hospital, and visited gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital. this was four years ago. but both the young women are so broken down that no efforts of public or private philanthropic medical care in the state and the city have been able to restore their health. the doctors in whose charge they have been say that these young women's strength is simply worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty food, and that they can never again be really well. they leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning, six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all. their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various forms of charitable cure and the great charitable institutions of the community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they have lost in its industries. it may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory management, which has been obliged to employ in elena's place two other less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists of new york who support charity hospitals and vacation homes. these chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed, monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women, operatives and hand-workers. while one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange that it cannot seem inevitable. speeding for long hours at machines, rather than machine labor itself, appears most widely responsible for the fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been narrated. further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers encountered--the experience of elena and gerda nikov, who were employed not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy be called a handicraft. the exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable to their custom of pursuing their trade not only in factory hours, but outside the factory, at home. within the last year, the most widely constructive effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle trades ever undertaken in this country has been initiated by the new york cloak makers, to whom we next turned for an account of their industrial fortunes. footnotes: [footnote : these testimonies are cited from the brief for the illinois ten-hour law, prepared by louis d. brandeis and josephine goldmark. _investigations into the conditions of health of the swiss factory workers._ dr. fridlion schuler, swiss factory inspector, and dr. a. e. burckhardt, professor of hygiene. "instead of becoming wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the worker." _dangerous trades._ thomas oliver, m.a., m.d., f.r.c.p. london. . "the introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... while machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has not diminished fatigue in man. while the machinery pursues its relentless course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious, especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal, for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. present-day factory labor is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive iron." _fourteenth international congress of hygiene and demography_, berlin, september, . fatigue resulting from occupation. dr. emil roth, regierungsrat, potsdam. "with the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more mechanical. a definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony--to the absence of spontaneity or joy in work." _proceedings of the first international convention on industrial diseases_, milan, . imbecility and criminality in relation to certain forms of labor. professor crisafuli. "when only one brain-centre works, it becomes overfatigued much more easily than if the functions were alternately performed by the various centres. "here, then, is another factor in overfatigue due to the _monotony_ of work, interrupted only at long intervals. "this monotony is the determining cause of local disturbances and endangers the entire organism."] chapter v the cloak makers' strike and the preferential union shop forty million dollars are invested in new york in the making of women's cloaks, skirts, and suits. one hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of these garments are produced in new york in a year.[ ] between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city are employed in these industries. the union members constitute ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten thousand of these members are women.[ ] it seems at first strange to find that the multitudinous fields of the metropolitan needle trades,--industries traditionally occupied by sewing women,--are, in fact, far more heavily crowded with sewing men. there is, however, a division of labor, the men doing practically all the cutting, machine sewing, and pressing, and in many cases working at hand-finishing; the women practically never cutting, machine sewing, or pressing, and in all cases working at hand-finishing. a general strike involving all these men and women in the cloak making trade was declared on the th of july, . the industry had for years burdened both its men and women workers with certain grave difficulties--an unstandardized wage, the subcontracting system, competition with home work, and long seasonal hours. the subcontracting system bore most severely on the women in the trade, as the greater proportion of the finishers were women, and before the strike nearly every finisher was employed by a subcontractor. the wages paid to finishers in the same shop, whether they were girls or men, were the same. but as compared with cutters, basters, and operators the finishers both before and since the strike had always been paid relatively below their deserts. wages were lowered, not only by the unstandardized rates prevalent through the sub-subcontracting system, but also by the practice of sending hand-finishing out of the factories and shops to be done at home. when inquiry was made of numerous self-supporting girls employed as cloak finishers, most of them said that at the end of the working day they were too exhausted to carry any sewing home. but work had been carried away by various strong girls in the trade, and by old men, and by young men to their families. among the women cloak finishers, rose halowitch, a delicate little russian girl of seventeen, a helper in a cloak factory, who gave her account to the consumers' league, about two years and a half ago received a wage of from $ . to $ a week. in busy weeks she would work from eight in the morning till eight at night, with only one stop of an hour for her insufficient noon lunch, for which she could afford to spend only or cents. among the home workers rhetta salmonsen, a russian woman of forty, the mother of four children, used to finish at night the cloaks brought to her by her husband, who worked through the day as an operator in a cloak factory. between them they would earn $ and $ in busy weeks. in these weeks there were some occasions when mrs. salmonsen would do the housework till her husband came home late at night. after clearing away his supper and putting the children to bed, she would start felling seams at midnight; and in order to complete the cloaks he had brought before he returned to the shop in the morning, she would sew until she saw the white daylight coming in at the tenement window, and it was time for her to prepare breakfast again. with all this industry, as her husband had been ill and there had been three months of either slack work or idleness, the family had fallen in debt. rent, food, and shoes alone had cost them $ . this left less than $ a year for all the other clothing and expenses of six people in new york. against such a standard of living as this, then, cloak finishers were obliged to compete as long as they attempted to underbid the hours and prices of home work. among the stronger girls who had taken work home, ermengard freiburg, a powerful young galician woman of twenty-eight, who had been finishing cloaks ever since she was eleven, had earned $ in the first week and had advanced rapidly to $ a week. in the last years, however, she had not carried any work home. she had sewed on piece-work from eight in the morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or overtime. she had earned from $ to $ a week in the busy weeks when the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $ and $ . ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade fortunes. all her concern and conversation were for the numbers of women cloak makers who lacked her own wonderful strength. successful without education, she was astonishingly destitute of the wearisome fallacy of complacent self-reference characteristic of many people of uncommon ability. during the past year she had twice been discharged for organizing the workers in cloak factories where she was employed. in the first establishment subcontracting had made conditions too hard for most of the women; and in the second, wages were too low for a decent livelihood for most of the workers. these instances serve to express in the industry and lives of women cloak workers the subcontracting system, long seasonal hours, home work, and an unstandardized wage--the features under discussion in the cloak making trade in the spring of . the whole cloak making trade of new york presents, for an outside observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static. the cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade. in the general strike of the cloakmakers in nearly all the manufacturers were german. in the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were galician and russian. this aspect of the new york needle trades must be borne in mind in realizing those occurrences in the last strike which led to the present joint effort of both manufacturers and workers to standardize the wage scale, to regulate seasonal hours, to abolish the subcontracting system and home work, and to establish the preferential union shop throughout the metropolitan industry. dr. henry moskowitz, an effective non-partisan leader in achieving the settlement of the strike, was an eye-witness and student of all its crises, and the outline of its history below is mainly drawn from his chronicle and observation. between the cloak makers and the manufacturers of new york a contest waged in numerous strikes had continued for twenty-five years. the agreements reached at the close of these strikes had been only temporary, because the cloak makers were never able to maintain a union strong enough to hold the points won at the close of the struggle. the cloak makers had always proved themselves heroic strikers, but feeble unionists, lacking sustained power. again and again, men and women who had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend union meetings, fail to pay union dues; and the organization, strong in the time of defeat through the members' zeal, would weaken through their negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success. the main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the cloak and suit manufacturers' protective association. the majority of the manufacturers in the association are men of standing in the trade, controlling large west side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the new york output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses of new york. these cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and fourteen hundred, most of them on the east side and the lower west side, manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing. such smaller houses had frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers. many small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests. on this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers' agreements. on the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms which enabled them to undersell their competitors. for this reason the manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers' agreements. with this mutual suspicion, the strike of began in june in two houses, an east side and a west side house. from the first house the workers went out because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on account of lockout. on the d of july, a mass meeting of , cloakmakers gathered in madison square garden. it was decided that the question of a general strike should be put to the vote of the , union members. balloting continued at the three polls of the three union offices for two succeeding days. of these , , all but about voted in favor of the strike, and of these the majority afterward declared that they, too, were in sympathy with the action. the wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the , workers assembled at madison square garden was evinced by the fact that within the next week an army of over , men and women in the new york garment trade joined the cloak and suit makers' union. these crowds poured into the three union offices, filled the building entries, the streets before them, reached sometimes around the block--great processions of rumanians, hungarians, poles, germans, italians, galicians, and russians, the last two nationalities in the greatest numbers, men and women who had been driven out of europe by military conscription, by persecution and pillage, literally by fire and sword, bearded patriarchs, nicely dressed young girls with copies of sudermann and gorky under their arms, shawled, wigged women with children clinging to their skirts, handsome young jews who might have stood as models for clothiers' advertisements--cutters, pressers, operators, finishers, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors; for these, too, struck with all the rest. in watching these sewing men and sewing women streaming through the union office on tenth street--an office hastily improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds--it seemed to an onlooker that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised elements so very catholic and various. who could lead such a body? how could the position of their great opponents, from day to day, be made known to them? as a matter of fact, no one man can be said to have led the , new york cloak makers. in the absence of such control, the corps of more prominent union officers and their attorney, meyer london, and through these men the multitudes of the union members, were virtually guided by an east side yiddish paper, the _vorwärts_. in the meantime, while these multitudes were flocking into the union early in july, the cloak manufacturers' association, representing beforehand about seventy-five houses, had by the inclusion of many smaller firms extended its membership to twelve hundred establishments.[ ] soon after the formation of the alliance, it became apparent to the smaller firms that the larger ones were not in any haste for settlement. the latter felt that they could beat their opponents by a waiting game; while the smaller firms, with their lesser capital, scarcely more able than their workers to exist through a prolonged beleaguering of the cloak makers, felt that the present stand of the larger manufacturers involved, not only beating the unionists, but driving themselves, the weaker manufacturers, out of the industry. one by one, they left the association, sought the union headquarters, and settled with the cloak makers. the profit reaped by these firms starting to work induced others to meet the workers' demands. by the end of july and the first week in august, six hundred smaller firms, employing altogether , cloakmakers, had settled.[ ] in many instances the men and women marched back to their work with bands of music playing and with flying flags and banners. in july two attempts were made, on behalf of the cloak makers, by the state board of arbitration to induce the manufacturers to meet the union members and to arbitrate with them. these attempts failed because the union insisted on the question of the closed shop as essential. the manufacturers refused to arbitrate the question of the closed shop. at this juncture a public-spirited retailer of boston, mr. lincoln filene, entered the controversy. mr. filene resolved that, as a large consumer, he and his class had no right to shirk their responsibility by passively acquiescing in sweat-shop conditions. as an intermediary between the wholesaler and the public, the retailer had an important part in the conflict, not only because he suffered directly from the temporary paralysis of the industry, but also because his indifference to the claims of the worker for a just wage, sanitary factory conditions, abolition of home work, and for a decent working-day was equivalent to an active complicity in the guilt of the manufacturer. through mr. filene's intervention, the manufacturers and the union officials agreed to confer, and to request mr. louis brandeis of boston to act as chairman. mr. brandeis had, at the outset, the confidence of both parties. each side recognized in him that combination of wide legal learning and a social economic sense which had made him an effective participant in the development of the progressive political and industrial policies of the nation. the employers welcomed mr. brandeis because they had faith in his sense of fairness. the cloak makers welcomed him because of his brilliant and signal service to the entire trade-union movement and to american working women in securing from the united states supreme court the decision which declared constitutional the ten-hour law for the women laundry workers of oregon. the conference that was to have determined the industrial fortunes of more than , new york workers for the following year opened on thursday morning, july , in a small room in the metropolitan life building. mr. brandeis was in the chair. on one side of a long table sat the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a member of the _vorwärts_ staff, and the secretary of the international garment workers' union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly americanized; and three older men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to "scabs," a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop--a subject which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed in the conference. all these men, with the exception of their attorney, mr. london, had cut and sewed on the benches of the garment trade. on the other side of the table sat the ten representatives of the manufacturers, some of them men of wide culture and learning, versed in philosophies, and prominent members of the ethical society, some of them new york financiers who had come from east side sweat shops. perhaps the most eager opponent of the closed shop in their body was a cosmopolitan young manufacturer, a linguist and "literary" man, interested in "style" from every point of view, who had introduced into the new york trade from abroad a considerable number of the cloak designs now widely worn throughout america. this man felt the keenest personal pride in his output. he is said at one time to have remarked, _"le cloak c'est moi"_ and, bizarre as it may seem to an outsider, a really sincere reason of his against accepting workmen on the recommendation of the union was that the cloak manufacturer as an artist should adopt toward his workers "the attitude of hammerstein to his orchestra." one of the manufacturers had been a strike leader in . "your bitterest opponent of fourteen years ago sits on the same side of the table with you now," said one of the older cloak makers, in a deep, intense voice, as the men took their places. mr. brandeis opened the conference with these words: "gentlemen, we have come together in a matter which we must all recognize is a very serious and an important business--not only to settle this strike, but to create a relation which will prevent similar strikes in the future. that work is one which, it seems to me, is approached in a spirit that makes the situation a very hopeful one, and i am sure, from my conferences with counsel of both parties[ ] and with individual members whom they represent, that those who are here are all here with that desire." up to a certain point in the conference, which lasted for three days, this seemed to be true. the manufacturers agreed to abolish home work, to abolish subcontracting, to give a weekly half-holiday, besides the jewish sabbath, during june, july, and august, and to limit overtime work to two hours and a half a day during the busy season, with no work permitted after half past eight at night, or before eight in the morning. beyond this, the question of hours was left to arbitration. also, the question of wages was left to arbitration. the last subject to be dealt with at the brandeis conference was the general method of enforcing agreements between the manufacturers' association and the union. it was in this discussion that the question of the closed shop and the open shop came before the conference. though the union leaders had agreed to eliminate the discussion of the closed shop before they entered into negotiations, it was almost impossible for them to refrain from suggesting it as a means of enforcing agreements. as one of the cloak makers, one of the old leaders of the labor movement in america, said: "this organization of cloak makers in the city of new york can only control the situation where union people are employed. they have absolutely no control of the situation where non-union people are employed. they cannot enforce any rules, nor any discipline of any kind, shape, or description, and if we are to coöperate in any way that will be absolutely effective, then the ... manufacturers' association, ... it seems to me, should see that the necessary first step is that they shall run union shops."[ ] the union shop the speaker had in mind, the union shop advocated by the _vorwärts_ and desired, as it proved, by a majority of the workers, was a different matter from the closed shop, which constitutes a trade monopoly by limiting the membership of a trade to a certain comparatively small number of workers. the institution of the closed shop is by intention autocratic and exclusive. the institution of the union shop is by intention democratic and inclusive. with the cloak makers' organization, entrance into the union was almost a matter of form. there were no prohibitive initiation fees, or dues, as in other unions. they offered every non-union man and woman an opportunity to join their ranks. the manufacturers contended that they had no objection to the voluntary enlistment of non-union men in union ranks; but they would not insist that all their workers belong to the union. this deadlock was reached on the third day of the conference. at this point mr. brandeis brought before the meeting the opinion that "an effective coöperation between the manufacturers and the union ... would involve, ... of necessity, a strong union." "i realize," he said, ... "from a consideration of ... general union questions, that in the ordinary open shop, where that prevails, there is great difficulty in building up the union. i felt, therefore, particularly in view of the fact that so many of the members of the garment workers' union are recent members, that to make an effective union it was necessary that you should be aided ... by the manufacturers, ... and that aid could be effectively ... given by providing that the manufacturers should, in the employment of labor hereafter, give preference to union men, where the union men were equal in efficiency to any non-union applicants.... that presented in the rough what seemed to me a proper basis for coming together.... i think, if such an arrangement as we have discussed can be accomplished, it will be the greatest advance, not only that unionism has made in this country, but it would be one of the greatest advances that has generally been made in improving the condition of the working-man, for which unionism is merely an instrument." this, then, was the first public presentation of the idea of the preferential shop. mr. brandeis, as a result of close study of labor disputes and a rich experience in settling strikes, had reached the conclusion that the position of the adherents of the closed as well as those of the open shop was economically and socially untenable. the inherent objection to the closed shop, he contends, is that it creates an uncontrolled and irresponsible monopoly of labor. on the other hand, the so-called open shop, even if conducted with fairness and honesty on the part of the employer, is apt to result in a disintegration of the union. it has been a frequent experience of organized labor that, even after a strike has been won, men drop out of the union and leave the burden of union obligation to the loyal minority, who, weakened in numbers, face not only a loss of what the strike has gained, but a retrogression of those union standards that have been the result of past struggles and sacrifices. by the preferential union plan, when an employer obliges himself to prefer union to non-union men, a union man in good standing, that is, a union man who has paid his dues and met his union obligations, is insured employment to a limited extent, and the dues represent a premium paid by him for such employment. it was not an easy task to secure assent to this idea from the manufacturers, for mr. brandeis made it clear that, while the plan did not oblige the manufacturers to coerce men into joining the union, it clearly placed them on record in favor of a trade-union, and obliged them to do nothing, directly or indirectly, to injure the union, and positively to do everything in their power, outside of coercion, to strengthen the union. in mr. brandeis' appeal to the union representatives he referred to the history of the cloak makers' union as a telling illustration of the futility of their past policy. he pointed out that the membership of the union during a strike was no test of its strength--a union's solidity rested upon its membership in time of peace. were they not justified in assuming that what had occurred in the past of the cloak makers' union would occur in the future, and that its membership would dwindle to a small number of the faithful? how could their organization be permanently strengthened? cloak making, as a seasonal trade, offered a fair field for proving the efficiency of the preferential plan, for in the slack season the manufacturers must, by its terms, prefer union men. the industrial situation provided a test of this good faith. the union leaders could then effectively show the non-union worker the advantage of the union membership. the final formation of the preferential union shop as presented to both sides by mr. brandeis, mr. london, and mr. cohen, in the brandeis conference, was this: "the manufacturers can and will declare in appropriate terms their sympathy with the union, their desire to aid and strengthen the union, and their agreement that, as between union and non-union men of equal ability to do the job, the union men shall be given the preference." the manufacturers were willing to make this agreement. but the representatives of the union received it with a natural suspicion bred by years of oppression. "can the man who has ground us down year after year suddenly be held by a sentiment for the organization he has fought for a quarter of a century?" they asked. "between union and non-union men, will he candidly give the preference to union men of equal ability? will he not rather, since the question of ability is a matter of personal judgment and is left to his judgment, prefer the non-union man, and justify his preference by a pretence, in each case, that he considers the skill of the non-union man superior?" nevertheless, a majority of the leaders of the cloak makers were willing to try the plan.... a minority refused. this minority was influenced partly by its certain knowledge that the , cloak makers would never accept an agreement based on the idea of the preferential union shop, and partly by its complete distrust of the good will of the manufacturers. the minority was trusted and powerful. it won. the conference broke. the _vorwärts_ printed a statement that the preferential shop was the "open shop with honey." the news of the brandeis conference reached the cloak makers through the bulletins of this paper; and during its progress and after its close, frantic crowds stood before the office on the lower east side, waiting for these bulletins, eager for the victory of the closed shop, the panacea for all industrial evils. after the decision of the leaders, after the breaking of the conference, the cloak makers who had settled gave fifteen per cent of their wages to support those standing out for the closed shop, and volunteered to give fifty per cent. the _vorwärts_ headed a subscription list with $ for the strikers, and collected $ , . a furore for the closed shop arose. young boys and bearded old men and young women came to the office and offered half their wages, three-quarters of their wages. one boy offered to give all his wages and sell papers for his living. every day the office was besieged by committees, appointed by the men and women in the settled shops, asking to contribute to the cause more than the percentage determined by the union. these were men and women accustomed to enduring hardships for a principle, men and women who had fought in russia, who were revolutionists, willing to make sacrifices, eager to make sacrifices. their blind faith was the backbone of the strike. this furore was continuing when, in the third week in august, the loss of contracts by the manufacturers and the general stagnation of business due to the idleness of , men and women, normally wage-earners, induced a number of bankers and merchants of the east side to bring pressure for a settlement of the strike. louis marshall, an attorney well known in new york in jewish charities, assembled the lawyers of both sides. they drew up an agreement in which the preferential union shop again appeared as the basis of future operations, formulated as in the brandeis conference. the _vorwärts_ printed the result of the marshall conference with deep concern. it maintained a neutral attitude. the editorials urged that the readers consider the whole document soberly, discuss it freely in local meetings, and vote for themselves, on their own full understanding, after mature conviction on each point. tremendous crowds surged around the _vorwärts_ office. they almost mobbed the east side leaders, with their voluble questioning about the preferential union shop. thousands of men and women and children called out pleas and reproaches and recriminations in an avid personal demonstration possible only to their race. "oh, you wouldn't sell us out?" they cried desperately. "you wouldn't sell us out? you are our hope." imagine what these days of doubt, of an attempt to understand, meant to these multitudes, knowing no industrial faith but that of the closed shop which had failed them absolutely, wanderers from a strange country, turning wildly to their leaders, who could only tell them that they must determine their own fates, they must decide for themselves. these leaders have been blamed at once for their autocracy and for not mobilizing and informing and directing these multitudes more clearly and firmly. their critics failed to conceive the remarkably various economic and political histories of the enormous concourse of human beings engaged in the needle trades of new york. however that may be, when the workers and their families surged around the _vorwärts_ office and asked the leaders if they had betrayed them, schlesinger, the business manager, and the old strike leaders addressed them from the windows, and said to the people, with painful emotion: "you are our masters. what you decide we will report back to the association lawyers. what you decide shall be done." terrible was the position of these men. well they knew that the winter was approaching; that the closed shop could not win; that the workers could not hear the truth about the preferential union shop, and that the man who stood avowedly for the preferential shop, now the best hope of victory for the union, would be called a traitor to the union. in great anxiety, the meetings assembled. the workers had all come to the same conclusion. they all rejected the marshall agreement. soon after this, the tide of loyalty to the closed shop was incited to its high-water mark by the action of judge goff, who, as a result of a suit of one of the firms of the manufacturers' association, issued an injunction against peaceful picketing, on the part of the strikers, on the ground that picketing for the closed shop was an action of conspiracy in constraint of trade, and therefore unlawful. the manufacturers were now, naturally, more deeply distrusted than ever on the east side.[ ] the doctrine of the closed shop became almost ritualistic. early in september, one of the labor day parades was headed by an aged jew, white-bearded and fierce-eyed,--a cloak maker who knew no other words of english than those he uttered,--who waved a purple banner and shouted at regular intervals: "closed shop! closed shop!" that man represented the spirit of thousands of immigrants who have recently become trade-unionists in america. impossible to say to such a man that the idea of the closed shop had been an enemy to the spread of trade-unionism in this country by its implication of monopolistic tyranny. impossible, indeed, to say anything to unionists whose reply to every just representation is, "closed shop"; or to employers whose reply to every just representation is, "we do not wish other people to run our business." this reply the marshall conference still had to hear for some days. it was now the first week in september. there was great suffering among the cloak makers. on the manufacturers' side, contracts heretofore always filled by certain new york houses, in this prolonged stoppage of their factories were finally lost to them and placed with establishments in other important cloak making centres--cleveland, philadelphia, chicago, and even abroad. two or three large union houses settled for terms, in hours and wages, which were satisfactory to every one concerned, though lower than the demands on these points listed in the cloak makers' first letter. curiously enough, wages and hours had been left to arbitration, had never been thoroughly considered in the whole situation before. neither the workers nor the employers had clearly stated what they really would stand for on these vital points. no one, not even the most wildly partisan figures on either side, supposed that the first demands as to wages and hours represented an ultimatum. the debaters in the marshall conference now agreed on feasible terms on these points,[ ] though, curiously enough, the rates for piece-work were left to the arbitration of individual shops. in spite of this fact, the majority of the workers are paid by piece-work. the former clauses of the agreement relating to the abolition of home work and of subcontracting remained practically as they had stood before.[ ] as for the idea of the preferential union shop, it had undoubtedly been gaining ground. naturally, at first, appearing to the _vorwärts'_ staff and to many ardent unionists as opposed to unionism, it had now assumed a different aspect. this was the final formulation of the preferential union shop in the marshall agreement: "each member of the manufacturers' association is to maintain a union shop, a 'union shop' being understood to refer to a shop where union standards as to working conditions prevail, and where, when hiring help, union men are preferred, it being recognized that, since there are differences of skill among those employed in the trade, employers shall have freedom of selection between one union man and another, and shall not be confined to any list nor bound to follow any prescribed order whatsoever. "it is further understood that all existing agreements and obligations of the employer, including those to present employees, shall be respected. the manufacturers, however, declare their belief in the union, and that all who desire its benefits should share in its burdens." as will be seen, this formulation signified that the union men available for a special kind of work in a factory must be sought before any other men. the words "non-union man," the words arousing the antagonism of the east side, are not mentioned. but whether the preference of union men is or is not insisted on as strongly as in the brandeis agreement must remain a matter of open opinion. this formulation was referred to the strike committee. it was accepted by the strike committee, and went into force on september . the _vorwärts_ posted the news as a great union victory. at the first bulletin, the news ran like wildfire over the east side. multitudes assembled; men, women, and children ran around rutgers square, in tumult and rejoicing. the workers seized london, the unionists' lawyer, and carried him around the square on their shoulders, and they even made him stand on their shoulders and address the crowd from them. people sobbed and wept and laughed and cheered; and roman catholic italians and russian jews, who had before sneered at each other as "dagoes" and "sheenies," seized each other in their arms and called each other brother. now that the men and women have returned to their shops, it remains for all the people involved--the manufacturers, the workers, the retailers, and the interested public--to make a dispassionate estimate of this new arrangement. is the preferential shop so delicate a fabric as to prove futile? has it sustaining power? will the final agreement prove, at last, to be a union victory? will both sides act in good faith--the manufacturers always honestly preferring union men, the union leaders always maintaining a democratic and an inclusive union, without autocracy or bureaucratic exclusion? undoubtedly there will be failures on both sides. but the new york cloak makers' strike may be historical, not only for its results in the cloak industry, but for its contribution to the industrial problems of the country. no outsider can read the statement of the terms of the manufacturers' preference without feeling that a joint agreement committee should have been established to consider cases of alleged unfair discrimination against union workers. on the other hand, no outsider can hear without a feeling of uneasiness such an assertion as was made to one of the writers--that strike breakers had been obliged to pay an initiation fee of one hundred dollars to enter the cloak makers' union. there is undoubtedly, on both sides, need of patience and a long educational process to change the attitude of hostility and bitterness engendered by over twenty years of a false policy of antagonism. but never before, in the cloak makers' history, have the men and women gone back to work after a strike holding their heads as high as they do to-day.[ ] it can be reasonably believed that their last summer's struggle will achieve a permanent gain for the workers' industrial future. this narrative of the industrial fortunes of the women cloak makers in new york in the last year is given for its statement of the effects of the struggle for the preferential union shop on their trade histories, and for its account of their gains as workers in the same trade with men. these cloak makers' gains were local. what national gains have american working women been able to obtain? for an answer to this question we turned to the results of the national consumers' league inquiry concerning the fortunes of women workers in laundries and its chronicle of the decision of the federal supreme court on the point of their hours of labor. footnotes: [footnote : printed statement of the cloak, skirt, and suit manufacturers' protective association, july , .] [footnote : estimate of the waverly place office of the international ladies' garment workers' union, november to .] [footnote : for this account of the position of different cloak manufacturers the writers wish to acknowledge the kindness of miss mary brown sumner of the _survey_.] [footnote : these were the most important clauses of these early settlements as regards women workers:-- i. the said firm hereby engages the union to perform all the tailoring, operating, pressing, finishing, cutting, and buttonhole-making work to be done by the firm in the cloak and suit business during one year ... from date; and the union agrees to perform said work in a good and workmanlike manner. ii. during the continuance of this agreement, operators shall be paid in accordance with the annexed price list. the following is the scale of wages for week hands: ... skirt makers, not less than $ per week; skirt basters, not less than $ per week; skirt finishers, not less than $ per week; buttonhole makers, not less than $ . per hundred buttonholes. iii. a working week shall consist of forty-eight hours in six working-days. iv. no overtime work shall be permitted between the fifteenth day of november and the fifteenth day of january and during the months of june and july. during the rest of the year employees may be required to work overtime, provided all the employees of the firm, as well as all the employees of the outside contractors of the firm, are engaged to the full capacity of the factories. no overtime shall be permitted on saturday nor on any day for more than two and a half hours, nor before a.m. or after p.m. for overtime work the employees shall receive double the usual pay. no contracting or subcontracting shall be permitted by the firm inside its factory, and no operator or finisher shall be permitted more than one helper. xiii. no work shall be given employees to be done at their homes. xv. only members of respective locals above named shall be employed by the firm to do the said work.] [footnote : mr. london for the cloak makers, and mr. cohen for the manufacturers.] [footnote : stenographic minutes of the brandeis conference.] [footnote : this decision met with disapproval, not only on the east side. the new york _evening post_ said: "justice goff's decision embodies rather strange law and certainly very poor policy. one need not be a sympathizer with trade-union policy, as it reveals itself to-day, in order to see that the latest injunction, if generally upheld, would seriously cripple such defensive powers as legitimately belong to organized labor." and the _times_: "this is the strongest decision ever handed down against labor."] [footnote : these are the clauses of the marshall agreement on wage scale and hours of labor which affect women workers. the term "sample makers" includes, of course, sample makers of cloaks. the week workers among the cloak makers are principally the sample makers. but the greater proportion of the workers in the cloak factories are piece-workers. this explains why there is no definite weekly wage schedule listed for cloak workers as such. sample makers, $ ; sample skirt makers, $ ; skirt basters, $ ; skirt finishers, $ ; buttonhole makers, class a, a minimum of $ . per buttonholes; class b a minimum of cents per buttonholes. as to piece-work, the price to be paid is to be agreed upon by a committee of the employees in each shop and their employer. the chairman of said price committee of the employees shall act as the representative of the employees in their dealings with the employer. the weekly hours of labor shall consist of hours in working days, to wit, nine hours on all days except the sixth day, which shall consist of five hours only. no overtime work shall be permitted between the fifteenth day of november and the fifteenth day of january, or during the months of june and july, except upon samples. no overtime work shall be permitted on saturdays, except to workers not working on saturdays, nor on any day or more than two and one-half hours, nor before a.m., nor after . p.m. for overtime work all week workers shall receive double the usual pay.] [footnote : there has been practically no complaint on the part of the workers or the public concerning the sanitary conditions of the larger houses. at present the strike settlement has established a joint board of sanitary control, composed of three representatives of the public, dr. w.j. scheffelin, chairman, miss wald of the nurses' settlement, and dr. henry moskowitz of the down-town ethical society; two representatives of the workers, dr. george price, medical sanitary inspector of the new york department of health, - , and mr. schlesinger, business manager of the _vorwärts_; and two representatives of the manufacturers, mr. max meier and mr. silver. the work of this committee will be the enforcement of uniform sanitary conditions in all shops, including the more obscure and smaller establishments.] [footnote : this statement is written in the last week of september, .] chapter vi women laundry workers in new york (this article is composed of the reports of miss carola woerishofer, miss elizabeth howard westwood, and miss mary alden hopkins, supplemented with an account of the federal supreme court's decision on the constitutionality of the oregon ten-hour law for laundry workers.) what do self-supporting women away from home in new york give in their work, and what do they get from it, when their industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength? for a reply to this question the national consumers' league turned to the reports of women's work as machine ironers and hand ironers, workers at mangles, folders, and shakers of sheets and napkins from wringers in the steam laundries of new york. for, although the labor at the machines in the laundry wash-rooms is done by men, and all work in laundries consists largely of machine tending, still women's part in the industry can be performed only by unusually strong women.[ ] in the winter of - the national consumers' league had received from different parts of new york a series of letters filled with various complaints against specified laundries in this city--complaints stating that hours were long and irregular, wages unfair, the laundries dirty, and the girls seldom allowed to sit down, and containing urgent pleas to the women of the consumers' league to help the women laundry workers. after consulting some of the laundry women, the league determined to secure through a special inquiry a well-ascertained statement of conditions as a basis for state factory legislation for uniform improvements. a few months before, the constitutionality of the present new york legislation, as well as of almost all of the state legislation concerning the hours of work of adult women in this country, had been virtually determined by the decision of the federal supreme court in regard to the ten-hour law for women laundry workers in oregon. the opinion of the national supreme court, which practically confirmed the passed new york laundry laws and made future laws for fair regulation for the women workers seem practicable, will be given after the account of women's work in laundries in new york. miss carola woerishofer conducted the inquiry, which was confined to steam laundries, as hand laundries were more favorably described by many reliable authorities. among these, the large laundries were commercial laundries, such as we all patronize, and hotel and hospital laundries. the features chiefly observed in all these establishments were sanitation, the danger of injury, and wages and hours of labor. for the account of the hospital and hotel laundries the consumers' league of the city of new york obtained the services of miss elizabeth howard westwood of smith college and miss mary alden hopkins of wellesley college. as a means of investigating commercial laundries, miss woerishofer, answering advertisements as they came, worked in laundries in trade employed in nearly every branch of the industry in which women are engaged throughout the borough of manhattan. her report follows. i "naturally, the first question which faced me was that of finding a job. for this i turned to the laundry want 'ads' in the newspapers. to my surprise, as my investigation was made in the summer, which is, curiously enough, by far the slackest season in new york commercial laundries, i was never without work for more than a day at a time, although i changed continually, for the sake of experience, averaging about a week in a place. "the first establishment to which i went was known as a model laundry. it was large and well ventilated and had a dry floor. these sanitary conditions may be said to be fairly typical. in only one laundry did i find a girl who was compelled to stand in a wet place, though water overflowed sometimes into the girls' quarters from the wash-rooms, where the men worked. in some of these wash-rooms the water is at times ankle-deep, a condition due only to bad drainage, as other wash-rooms are absolutely dry. whatever the condition of the work-rooms, the women's dressing-rooms frequently had insanitary plumbing, and were verminous and unhealthful. in one laundry the water supply was contaminated, smelling and tasting offensively when it came from the faucet, and worse after it had passed through the cooler. the women here at first kept bottles of soda-water. some old women had beer. but on a series of hot days, with hours from half past seven to twelve, and from one till any time up to ten at night, cents' worth of beer or soda-water a day did not go far to alleviate thirst, and soon drank a big hole in a wage of $ a week. a complaint was sent to the board of health. after nearly three weeks, the board of health replied that the complaint must be sent to the water department. from the water department no reply could possibly come for several weeks more. and in the meantime, all the women workers in the laundry, impelled by intolerable thirst, drank the contaminated water. "the work-room where i was employed had, on the whole, plenty of windows. these were left open. but when a room is large and full of machinery, artificial light is needed all day, and the outside air does not come in very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. on going out at noon from a laundry where i had dipped shirts in hot starch all the morning at a breakneck pace, i was struck by the coolness of the day. that night i discovered that the thermometer had been registering ° in the shade. a few fans should be put in each laundry. they could be run by the power that runs the machines. "in the 'model laundry,' i worked at first at a mangle, running spreads and sheets and towels between two revolving cylinders. here i found there was danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders in the process of feeding. the mangle had a guard, to be sure,--a flexible metal bar about three-quarters of an inch above the feeding-apron in front of the cylinder. but i learned that this acted as a warning rather than a protection. 'once you get your fingers in, you never get them out,' jenny, the italian girl beside me, said repeatedly. the italian girls anglicized their names, and jenny had probably been giovanna at home. "at the collar machine, at which i was stationed after lunch, there was an adequate guard where the collars were slipped in. where they came out, however, they had to be pushed in rapid succession under the farther side of a burning hot cylinder with no guard at all. to avoid touching the cylinder with my arm in this process, i was obliged either to raise it unnaturally high, or to stand on tiptoe. 'you didn't get burned to-day or yesterday,' said jenny, 'but you sure will sometime. everybody does on that machine.' "in the ironing of collars and cuffs by machinery, there is continual risk of burns on hands and arms. at a sleeve-ironing machine, in another place i received some slight burn every day. and when i asked the girls if this were because i was 'green,' they replied that every one got burned at that machine all the time. each burn is due to 'carelessness,' but if the girls were to be careful, they would have to focus their minds on self-protection instead of the proper accomplishment of their task, and would also have to work at a lower rate of speed than the usual output of the laundries demands. a graver danger than that from hot surfaces and from slightly protected gas flames is from unguarded belts and gears. "at mangles, too, the danger is grave. what the girls call 'millionaire work'--work that has to come out straight--in contrast with 'boarding-house work," must be shoved up to within a quarter of an inch of the cylinder. fingers once caught in such mangles are crushed. consider, in connection with these two facts, the high rate of speed at which the girls feed the work into the machine, and the precarious character of their task will be realized. however, in many laundries, good mangles for table and bed linen are in use, which either have a stationary bar in front of the first cylinder, or else have the first roll, whether connected or not with the power, attached to a lever, and so constructed as to lift the pressure immediately from the finger, should it be slipped underneath.[ ] "for the purpose of inspecting the machinery i visited with different factory inspectors, through the courtesy extended by the department of labor, all, so far as i was able to determine, of the commercial steam laundries in the borough of manhattan. out of sixty laundries inspected, i found that twenty-six had either unguarded or inadequately guarded mangles, collar presses, and collar dampeners, or else unguarded or inadequately guarded gears and belts. in a laundry visited when the boss was out, we conferred with the engineer about one particularly bad mangle. "'what's this machine for? to cut girls' hands off?' asked the inspector. "'well,', said the engineer, 'it came pretty near finishing up the last girl we had here--caught her arm in an apron-string and got both hands under the roll--happened over two months ago. fingers cut off one hand, and all twisted and useless on the other.' "instead of having the machine guarded, after this mutilation, the owner had employed a man to take chances here, instead of a girl. "this and all the illegal defects discovered were ordered remedied by the factory inspectors. but new york labor legislation, no matter how excellent, cannot be enforced, with the present number of inspectors. an inspector will arrive on one day; will discover that rules are violated; will impose a fine; will return in the next week and discover that rules are not violated; will, perforce, return to another part of the field; and after that the violation will continue as if he had never observed it. "further, it is difficult for the inspector to discover, through employees, violations of the state laws enacted in their interest, as they risk being discharged for complaints. in addition, moreover, to this danger, bringing a charge means that the complainant must go to court, thus losing both time and money. a union organization would be the only possible means of settling the matter. made up of the workers themselves, it is always present to observe violations; and it offers to the workers the advantage of reporting to the state, not as individuals, but as a body. the coöperative spirit present among almost all of the laundry workers should make organization entirely feasible.[ ] "on entering a new situation i found, as a rule, cordiality and friendly interest. on several occasions it was expressed by this social form:-- "'say, you got a feller?' "'sure. ain't you got one?' "'sure.' "the girls are really very kind to one another, helping one another in their work, and by loans of lunch and money. "in one place a woman with a baby to support--a shaker earning $ . a week, and heavily in debt--used to borrow weekly a few pennies apiece from all the girls around her to pay her rent. and the pennies were always forthcoming, although the girls had hardly more than she had, and knew quite well that they were seldom returned. there was a great deal of swearing among the women in almost all of the laundries, but it was of an entirely good-natured character. "while there was a natural division of labor, there was also an artificial one, created during lunch hours. a deep-rooted feeling of antagonism and suspicion exists between the irish and the italians, each race clubbing together from the different departments in separate bands. "aside from this distinction, there is another social cleavage--the high-wage earners sitting apart from the low-wage earners, through natural snobbishness. in one laundry, the high-wage earners, though they often treated the $ girls to stray sardines, cake, etc., were in the habit of sending young girls to the delicatessen shop to get their lunches, and also to the saloon for beer. then the girl had to hurry out on the street in her petticoat and little light dressing-sack that she wore for work, for they gave her no time to change. for this service the girl would get cents a week from each of the women she did errands for. they did not--the boss starcher explained to me with quiet elegance--think of such a thing as drinking beer behind the boss's back, but they 'just didn't want him to know.' "the same difficulties in enforcing the law about protected machinery in laundries exist in the enforcing of the law requiring that adult women in laundries shall not work more than sixty hours in a week. just as in the case of protected machinery, these difficulties might be partly removed through trade organization. "nearly all laundry work is performed standing, and on heavy days, when the work is steady, except at lunch time, very few women get a chance to sit down during any part of the day. the chief difference between laundry work and that of other factories is in the irregularity of the hours. a manufacturer knows more or less at the beginning of the week how much work his factory will have to do, and can usually distribute overtime, or engage or lay off extra girls, according to his knowledge. the laundryman can never estimate the amount of work to be done until the laundry bundles are actually on the premises. he can never tell when the hotels, restaurants, steamboats, and all the small 'hand' laundries, whose family laundries he rough-dries, and whose collars and table and bed linen he finishes, will want their washing back. hard as this is for the employer, it is still harder for the workers. the small hand laundry can seldom keep customers waiting longer than from monday till saturday. on this account, the steam laundry will be obliged to rush all of its work for the 'hand' laundry through in one or two days. i found some steam laundries in which no work at all is done on monday or saturday, but in the busy season the place keeps running regularly on the other four days from seven in the morning till half past eleven and twelve at night. very seldom is there any compensation for these long hours. few of the laundries pay overtime. of these, some dock the girls proportionately for every hour less than sixty a week they work. no laundries in which i worked, except one, give supper money. a piece-worker at least gets some advantage to counterbalance long hours. but the week worker not only lacks recompense for actual labor, but is often put to greater expense. "she does not know when her long day is coming, so she must buy her supper, when supper is waiting for her at home. she is often so tired that she must spend cents for carfare, instead of walking. seven cents is a fair average spent upon supper-- cents for bread and cents for sausage, cheese, or meat. if overtime is worked three nights a week, the girl is out of pocket cents--not a small item in wages of $ . and $ a week, where every penny counts. often, also, she either has not extra money or she forgets to bring it. then she has to share some one else's lunch. the girls are always willing to divide, however slight their own provisions. i once saw a -cent piece of cake shared by four girls. "there are two kinds of long hours: those due to bad systematizing of laundry work, creating long waits between lots; and those due to very heavy work. in regard to the first kind, it must be said that the shirt starchers, who are the main sufferers from waiting for work, are the best paid, and hence are not as indignant at frequent overtime as the week workers are. besides, though obliged to stay in the work-room, they are frequently seated throughout their waiting time, which sometimes lasts for four or five hours. i saw one woman about to be confined, who sometimes starched shirts until two in the morning, after arriving at the laundry at half past seven on the morning before. "the other kind of long hours involves constant standing, and is most apt to occur in laundries where only mangle work is done. these laundries do not tend to work late at night, but they more frequently violate the sixty-hour law than the others do. work is almost absolutely steady. the women stand on their feet ten and twelve hours, with just half an hour or an hour for lunch, and work with extreme speed. "if your job is shaking the wrinkles out of towels and sheets, this in itself is violent exercise. the air is hot and damp because you stand near the washers. you are hurried at a furious rate. when you finish one lot, you have to roll heavy baskets, and dump them upon your table, and then go on shaking and shaking again, only to do more heavy loading and dumping. one girl always had a headache late in the afternoon. after standing ten or twelve hours, there are few whose feet or backs do not ache. the effect on the feet is perhaps the chief ground of complaint. some merely wear rags about their feet, others put on old shoes or slippers, which they slit up in front and at the sides. the girls who press skirts by machine and those who do the body ironing have to press down on pedals in order to accomplish their tasks, and find this, as a rule, harder than standing still. an occasional worker, however, pronounces it a relief. but several i met had serious internal trouble which they claimed began after they had started laundry work. few laundries give holidays with pay. some give half a day on the legal holidays. in the others, 'shaking' and 'body ironing' and all the hard, heavy processes of laundry work continue straight through christmas day, straight through new year's day, straight through the fourth of july, just as at other times. "in recompense for these long hours of standing, the piece-worker often has fairly high payment financially. but the opposite is true of the week worker. in the down-town laundries, where the wage scale runs lower, the amount is usually inadequate for the barest need. "the payment in laundries is extremely varied. the wages of the majority of women i talked to in laundries amounted to between $ and $ . a week. but wages ranged from the highest exceptional instances in piece-work, in hand starching and in hand ironing, at $ a week, for a few weeks in the year, down to $ a week. "high wages generally involved long hours. for instance, in one laundry, young american women between twenty and thirty were employed as hand starchers at piece-work. they made $ a week, when times were slack, by working once or twice a week, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. in busy times they sometimes made $ a week by working occasionally from seven o'clock one morn till two o'clock the following morning.[ ] "although italians, russians, irish, polish, germans, americans, and swedes are employed in new york laundries, the greater part of the work is done by irish and italians. the irish receive the higher prices, the italians the lower prices. the best-paid work, the hand starching of shirts and collars and the hand ironing, is done by irish women, by colored women, and by italian and jewish men. the actual process of hand starching may be learned in less than one hour. speed in the work may be acquired in about ten days. on the other hand, to learn the nicer processes of the ill-paid work of feeding and folding at the mangle--the passing of towels and napkins through the machine without turning in or wrinkling the edges, the passing of table-covers between cylinders in such a way that the work will never come out in a shape other than square--to learn these nicer processes requires from thirteen to fifteen days. the reason for the low wages listed for mangle work seems to lie only in nationality. mangle work, as a rule, is done by italians. in two laundries i found, working side by side with american and irish girls, italians, who were doing exactly the same work, and were paid less, solely because they were italians. the employer said he never paid the italians more than $ a week. "in the next best-paid work after hand starching, the work of hand ironing, paying roughly from $ to $ a week, italian women are practically never employed. "the worst part of mangle work, the shaking, is done by young girls and by incapable older women of many nationalities. one of the ill-paid girls, who had $ . a week, gave $ . a week board to an aunt, who never let her delay payment a day. she had only $ a week left for every other expense. this girl was 'keeping company' with a longshoreman, who had as much as $ in good weeks. she had been engaged to him, and had broken her engagement because he drank--'he got so terribly drunk.' but when i saw her she was in such despair with her low wage, her hard hours of standing, and only $ a week ahead of her, that she was considering whether she should not swallow her well-founded terror of the misery his dissipation might bring upon them, and marry him, after all. "the shakers are the worst paid and the hardest worked employees. the young girls expect to become folders and feeders. the older women are widows with children, or women with husbands sick or out of work or in some way incapacitated. indeed, many of all these laundry workers, probably a larger proportion than in any other trade, are widows with children to support. 'the laundry is the place,' said one of the women, 'for women with bum husbands, sick, drunk, or lazy.' the lower the pay and the damper and darker the laundry, the older and worse off these women seem to be. "the low wages and long hours of the great majority of the women workers, the gradual breaking and loss of the normal health of many lives through undernourishment and physical strain, are, in my judgment, the most serious danger in the laundries. the loss of a finger, the maiming of a hand, even the mutilation of the poor girl who lost the use of both of her hands--the occasional casualties for a few girls in the laundries--are, though so much more salient, far less grave than the exhaustion and underpayment of the many. "this, then, is the situation in general for women workers in the commercial laundries. with respect to sanitation, the heat is excessive wherever ironing is done by machinery. many of the rooms are full of steam. some of the laundries have insanitary toilet and cloak rooms. with respect to danger of injury, in a large proportion of places there is unguarded or inadequately guarded machinery. in respect to hours of labor, these often extend over the sixty-hour limit in rush seasons. the hours are not only long, but irregular. a twelve to fourteen-hour working-day is not infrequent. in a few places closing on mondays and saturdays, or open for short hours on mondays, the working-day runs up on occasions to seventeen hours. almost all the laundry work is done standing. wages for the majority of the workers are low." the league's conclusions in regard to legislation will be placed at the close of the following accounts of the laundries of the large new york hospitals and hotels, the first report being written by miss elizabeth howard westwood, the second report by miss mary alden hopkins. ii "by a decision of the district attorney, hotel and hospital laundries, provided they do no outside work, do not come under the jurisdiction of the department of labor. women may work far beyond the sixty-hour limit on seven days of the week without any interference on the part of the government. nor is there any authority that can force hospitals and hotel keepers to guard their machinery. "while the hospitals did not, as a rule, exceed legal hours, were excellent as a rule in point of sanitation, and paid better wages than the commercial laundries to all but the more skilled workers, the machinery was adequately guarded in only one of the eight hospital laundries where i worked. "in some, the belt that transfers the power was left unscreened, to the danger of passing workers. in others the mangle guard was insufficient. in all the hospitals i heard of casualties. fingers had been mashed. a hand had been mashed. an arm had been dragged out. unguarded machinery was, of course, a striking inconsistency, more inexcusable in the hospitals than in hotels or in commercial laundries. for hospitals are not engaged in a gainful pursuit, regardless of all humanitarian considerations. on the contrary, they are not only avowedly philanthropic in aim, but are carried on solely in the cause of health. "the living-in system prevails in the hospitals, and wages are paid partly in board and lodging. the laundry workers share the dormitories and dining rooms of the other hospital employees. the dormitories were in every case furnished with comfortable beds, and chiffonniers or bureaus and adequate closet space were provided. miss hopkins and i did not sleep in, but had our beds assigned us, and used our dormitory rights merely for a cloak room. here we lingered after hours to gossip, and here we often retired at noon to stretch out for a few minutes' relaxation of our aching muscles. the dormitories varied in size. each hospital had several large and several small ones. in most cases these dormitories were on upper floors. in one they occupied the basement. here, however, a wide sunken alley skirted the house wall and gave the windows a fairly good access to the air. "in all but two hospitals the food was excellent and the meals decently served. there were eggs and milk in abundance. the soups were delicious, the meats of fair quality and well cooked. there were plenty of vegetables, and the desserts were appetizing. we sat, as a rule, at long tables accommodating from ten to twenty. sometimes we had table-cloths and napkins; sometimes a white oil-cloth sufficed. we were waited on by maids. "in most of the hospitals there is a fifteen or twenty-minute rest in the morning and in the afternoon, when milk, tea, and bread and butter are served. these oases of rest and nourishment were of extraordinary value to us in resisting fatigue. their efficiency in keeping workers in condition is a humane and practical feature of the laundries which should be sharply emphasized. "there was little variation in wages between the different grades of workers. as a rule, only two prices obtained--one for all the manglers and plain ironers, another for the starchers and shirt and fancy ironers. in one laundry the wage fell as low as $ a month. in the others it was $ and $ for the lower grade of work, and $ and $ for the higher. one of the laundries gave board, but no room, and here the universal price was $ a month. "as to hours, three of the hospitals had an eight-hour day; four had a nine-and-a-half-hour day. in one of these there was no work on saturday afternoon, so that the weekly hours were forty-four. another hospital worked seventy-two hours a week, with no recompense in the form of overtime pay. generally the catchers at the mangles sat at their work. in one hospital the feeders also sat, using high stools. we wondered why this was not more often the custom. the difference in vigor in our own cases when we worked sitting was marked. sitting, we escaped unwearied; standing all day left us numb with fatigue. in only one hospital was artificial light necessary in the work-room. the rooms, as a rule, were well ventilated and the air fresh when one came into them. "we often noticed that the workers in the hospital laundries were far less contented than those in the other classes of laundries. it was not surprising that they lacked enthusiasm for their work, for laundering is not an interesting task; but, with conditions far beyond any other type of laundry, it was strange that the hospital workers should be the most shifting, faultfinding, and dispirited laundresses we encountered. part of this we attributed to the depressing effect of an atmosphere of sickness, part to the fact that workers living out are doubtless stimulated by the diversion of having a change of scene--of seeing at least two sets of people, and, above all, generally by some special sympathy and concern for their individual fortunes. in the last hospital laundry where we worked, one conducted by the sisters of charity, though the hours were long and the wages were only $ a month, there was an exceptional air of cheerfulness and interest among the workers. this was due to no special privileges of theirs, but to the contagious spirit of personal interest and kindness inherent in all the sisters in charge. "the bitterness that characterized workers living in the hospitals was observed by miss hopkins among the laundry workers living in the hotels." iii "the twenty-one hotels where we conducted our inquiry were extremely varied, ranging from a yellow brick house near the haymarket, with red and blue ingrain carpets and old-fashioned bells that rang a gong when one twisted a knob, to the mosaic floors and the pale, shaded electric lights of the most costly establishments in new york. "as to the sanitation of the twenty hotels visited, only six had their laundries above ground. all the others were in basements or in cellars. in most of these the ventilation was faulty and the air at times intolerably hot. it is a striking fact--showing what intelligent modern regulation can accomplish--that one laundry two stories underground in new york was so high-ceiled and the summer cold-air apparatus so complete that it was comfortable even in the hot months. in most of the hotel laundries there were seats for the takers-off. only three of the laundries had wet floors; only three were dirty; only one had an insanitary lavatory and toilet room. "in regard to the danger of injury, of the nineteen mangles that i inspected for dangerous conditions, six were insufficiently protected. it is the custom in most hotels, when an article winds around the cylinder of the mangle, to pluck it off while the mangle is in motion. the women sometimes climb up on the mangle and reach over, in imminent danger of becoming entangled either by their dresses catching or by pitching forward. the machinery of hotel laundries is even less carefully guarded than is that of a commercial laundry, and in some establishments is, besides, dangerously crowded. this was the case in one laundry in a hotel cellar. i worked here at the ironing-table on a consignment of suits from the navy-yard. as work came in from outside the hotel, the establishment should have been under the state inspection. the rooms were narrow. there was a ventilating fan, placed very low, near where the girls hung their wraps, and as soon as i came in, they warned me that it caught up in its blades and destroyed anything that came near it. the belting of the machines was unboxed. a blue flame used sometimes to blow out four inches beyond the body-ironer, directly into the narrow space where the girls had to pass before it. in connection with the danger from machinery, danger from employees' elevators should be noted. in one hotel i rode forty-four times on an elevator where the guard door was closed only once, though the car was often crowded, and twice i saw girls narrowly escape injury from catching their skirts on the landing doors and the latches. in another hotel, inexperienced elevator boys were broken in on dangerous cars containing signs that read: 'this elevator shall not carry more than fifteen persons.' the cars were used, not only for people, but for trunks and heavy trucks of soiled linen. on one trip a car carried one of these enormous trucks, two trunks, and twelve girls; on another trip there were twenty-two people. "at eight of the hotels wages were paid partly in board and lodging. the money wages are given below:-- workers living in per month ironers on flannels, stockings, and plain work $ ironers--skilled workers on family wash - shakers - all beginners - workers living out per week ironers $ and upward shakers and upward feeders and upward folders and upward starchers (shirt), piece-work wages, average. starchers (collars and cuffs) and upward "the eight hotels varied widely in living conditions. the food was reasonably well cooked, but, like most hotel fare, monotonous, and destitute of fresh vegetables and of sweets. one of the results of this is that the women spend a large part of their wages for fruit and other food to supplement their unsatisfactory meals. only two hotels planned meals intelligently. "the dining rooms were usually below the street-level, and varied in ventilation, crowding, and disorder. in one the waiters were greek immigrants, who were in their shirt-sleeves, wore ticking aprons and no collars, and were frequently dirty and unshaved. in the fourteen meals i had there, i sat down only once to a clean table. the coffee boilers along the side of the room would be boiling over and sending streams of water over the charwomen. the dirty dishes would be piled into large tin tubs with a clatter, and pulled out rasping over the floor. the charwomen would beg the waiters to clear the tables, which looked as if garbage-cans had been emptied upon them. the steward could not enforce his authority. there was constant noise and disorder in the room. in another dining room, that of a pleasant, ramshackle old hotel near the river, where a breeze came into our laundry through sixteen windows, the employees were seated in one of the restaurant dining rooms after the noon rush hour was over, served by the regular waiters, and given attractive and varied fare and meat from the same cuts as the guests. 'they have respect for the help here,' said one of the women. "the dormitories were, with one exception, on upper stories. one room in an expensive modern hotel, where there were twenty-seven beds, in tiers, was aired only by three windows on an inner court. the room looked fresh and pleasant because of its white paint and blue bedspreads; but it was badly ventilated, both by condition and because the girls would keep the windows closed for warmth. this was a frequent cause of poor ventilation in other dormitories and in work-rooms. "the hours of work were irregular, and varied in different places. in one large laundry i worked over ten hours for seven days in the week--more than seventy-two hours. about nine and a half hours seemed to be the usual day. four hotels gave fifteen-minute rest pauses for tea, morning and afternoon; two gave them once a day. these rests are of incalculable relief. one hotel gave twenty-minute pauses, so that the hours were: . to ; . to . ; . to ; . to closing time. this arrangement gave very short work periods, but during them the women were able to work vigorously; and they accomplished an astounding amount. "however, in most of the hotel laundries the women were tired all the time. they dragged themselves out of bed at the last possible minute. they lay in their beds at noon; they crawled into them again as soon as the work was over in the evening. some did not go out into the air for days at a time. the greatest suffering from any one physical cause came from feet. 'feet' was the constant subject of conversation. but the women had no idea what was the trouble with their feet, and, in many cases, accepted as inevitable discomfort that could have been alleviated by foot-baths, care, plates, and proper shoes. colds hung on endlessly. sore throats were common. a girl who fed doilies into a mangle complained that constantly watching a moving apron made her eyes 'sore,' so that she could not see distinctly and sometimes fed in several doilies at a time without noticing it. the lack of air undoubtedly had a profound influence on the women's vigor. in the old hotel near the river, where the laundry had sixteen windows, the women were in capital health. "in general, the older hotels, in spite of their more insanitary dressing-rooms and less well-guarded machines, were more considerate of their workers. but in one of the newer, more expensive hotels a sick girl is attended by the hotel physician, and is provided with soup, milk, etc. her pay is not docked. she is treated with genuine sympathy. here i once overheard a woman telling the boss that she was ill and asking permission to go to the dormitory. he gave the permission without question. none of the women ever abused his kindness. the women here were in fairly good shape, except, it must be admitted, for the extreme fatigue which seems to sweep over almost all the laundry women, and which arises from their hours of standing. "i used to notice one girl who was as light on her feet as a kitten, and who seemed tireless; but every noon, as soon as she had finished her lunch, she would wrap herself up in a blanket and lie motionless for the whole period. one evening a woman stumbled into a dormitory, sat down on a trunk, pulled off her shoes and stockings, and, as she rubbed her swollen foot, cursed long and methodically all her circumstances--cursed the other workers who had held back work by their slowness; cursed the manager, who had asked of her extra work; cursed the dormitory and the laundry; cursed the whole world. at the first word of sympathy i offered her, she paused, and said with quiet truth, 'dear heart, we're all tired.' "here are my notes for one day:-- when i went into the dormitory a little before half past seven, several of the girls were dragging themselves out of bed to dress. these went to work without breakfast, needing an extra half hour of rest more than they craved food. two stayed in bed. one had an ulcerated tooth extracted the night before. i asked the other if she were sick. she groaned. "i'll get up just as soon as the pains are gone out of my stomach." within an hour she was in the laundry, carrying armfuls of men's working-suits to the drying-closet. she worked until half past eight that night. all the morning i stood beside old sallie, who kept asking, "what time is it now, dear?" because she could not see the clock. at noon, as we sat or lay on the beds in the dormitory, one of the girls said, "my god! i wish i could stay in bed this afternoon." in the afternoon i stood beside theresa, who kept repeating: "it is so long to work until half past five! if i could only go to bed at half past five!" i walked out to supper with a girl named kate, who had sprained her ankle a week ago. i said, "hasn't the doctor seen it?" she turned on me. "my god! when do i get time to see a doctor?" she has a bad humor on her face, which is scarlet, and sometimes, in the morning, covered with fine white scale. she obtains relief by wiping her cheeks with the damp napkins she shakes. after supper i went up to the dormitory for a minute. here i found a cousin of theresa's giving her some tea in bed, where i urged her to stay. the cousin shook her head. "ah, na," she said, "she must na' give up; she's new yet at the job--they wou'na like her to be sick." theresa arose and crawled back to the shaking-table, to work until seven o'clock. throughout the evening i stood beside a girl, whose foot, when she walked, hurt her "'way to the top of her head." she said, "i've been on it ever since half past seven." on my way back to the dormitory at half past eight, one of the girls told me how her arms ached and her legs ached. in the dormitory, the girl who had been in bed all day was sobbing and feverish. she had a sore throat, and was spitting blood. she had been lying there all day, with no care, except to have tea and toast brought to her by a maid. in looking back on this past week, it seems impossible it could have been true. watching these women has been like seeing animals tortured. "such a day of long hours as this generally follows some large festivity. the hudson-fulton celebration, or the automobile show, or a great charity ball, or the dinner of an excellent sociological society are the occasions of increased hotel entertainment and a lavish use of beautiful table linen, to be dried and mangled and folded next day by the laundry girls underground. "all this pressure of extra work in the hotels here is produced, not by ill-willed persons who are consciously oppressive,--indeed, as will be seen, much of it was produced by sheer social good will and persons of most progessive intent,--but simply by the unregulated conditions of the laundries." iv such, then, is the account of what women workers give and what they receive in their industry in the commercial, hotel, and hospital laundries of new york. it cannot be said that the unfortunate features of the laundry conditions observed are due to the greed of employers. these features seem to be due rather to lack of system and regulation. financial failures in the new york laundry business are frequent. even in the short time elapsing between the department of labor's inspection of laundry machinery, early in february, and a reinspection of the twenty-six establishments that had improperly guarded machinery, made in august by miss westwood, two out of these twenty-six firms had collapsed. miss westwood found some of the same unfortunate features that characterized commercial and hotel laundries in existence in hospital laundries, which are quite outside trade. after the new york city consumers' league had received the inquirers' report, it determined that the wisest and most effective course it could take for securing fairer terms for the laundry workers would be an effort for the passage of the following legislation:[ ]-- first: that an appropriation be made for additional factory inspectors. second: that no woman be employed in any mechanical establishment, or factory, or laundry in this state for more than ten hours during any one day. third: that the laundries of hotels and hospitals be placed under the jurisdiction of the department of labor. a new york state law now exists providing for proper sanitation and plumbing and clean drinking water for employees in factories and laundries.[ ] a law exists requiring that work-rooms where steam is generated be so ventilated as to render the steam harmless, so far as is practicable.[ ] a law exists requiring the provision of suitable seats for the use of female employees in factories and laundries; and this law should cover the installation of seats for great numbers of workers now standing.[ ] the establishment of juster wages, as well as the observance of all these laws, and of the sixty-hour-a-week law, might be most practically furthered by the existence of a trade-union in the laundries, backed by stronger governmental provision for inspection. v it has been said that the unfortunate features observed in the laundry business in new york seemed to be due primarily to lack of general regulation. in february , the laundrymen's association of new york state (president, mr. j.a. beatty), the manhattan laundrymen's association (president, mr. j.a. wallach), and the brooklyn laundrymen's association (president, mr. thomas locken) conferred with the consumers' league, and asked to coöperate with it in obtaining additional factory inspection, the legal establishment of a ten-hour day in the trade, and the placing of hotel and hospital laundries under the jurisdiction of the state labor laws. the league agreed to print on a published white list the names of the laundries conforming within a year to a common standard determined on at the conference. these are the main points agreed upon and endorsed. white list standard for laundries physical conditions . wash rooms are either separated from other work-rooms or else adequately ventilated so that the presence of steam throughout the laundry is prevented. . work, lunch, and retiring rooms are apart from each other and conform in all respects to the present sanitary laws. . all machinery is guarded. . proper drains under washing and starching machines, so that there are no wet floors. . seats adjusted to the machines are provided for at the a. collar ironer feeder. b. collar ironer catcher. c. collar dampener feeder. d. collar dampener catcher. e. collar straightener. f. collar starcher feeder. g. collar starcher catcher. h. handkerchief flat-work feeder and catcher. i. folders on small work. j. collar shaper. k. collar seam-dampener. l. straight collar shaper. . the ordinances of the city and laws of the state are obeyed in all particulars. wages . equal pay is given for equal work irrespective of sex, and no woman who is eighteen years of age or over and who has had one year's experience receives less than $ a week. this standard includes piece-workers. hours . the normal working week does not exceed hours, and on no day shall work continue after p.m. . when work is continued after p.m. minutes is allowed for supper and supper money is given. . half holidays in each week during two summer months. . a vacation of not less than one week with pay is given during the summer season. . all overtime work, beyond the hours a week standard, is paid for. . wages paid and premises closed on the six legal holidays, viz: thanksgiving day, christmas and new year's day, the fourth of july, decoration day and labor day. the laundrymen's association of new york state appeared with the consumers' league at albany at the last legislative session, and repeatedly sent counsel to the capitol in support of a bill defining as a factory any place where laundry work is done by mechanical power. the association's support was able and determined. the bill has now passed both houses. such responsible action as this on the part of the commercial laundry employers of the state of new york, brooklyn, and manhattan is in striking contrast with the stand taken by the oregon commercial laundry employers in the matter of laundry employees' legal hours of industry. vi the constitutionality of the present new york law concerning the hours of labor of adult women in factories, laundries, and mechanical establishments was virtually determined by the federal decision in regard to the oregon ten-hour day law for working-women. about three years ago the state of oregon enacted a law of practically the same bearing as the new york law on the same subject, though superior in that it limited the hours of labor of adult women in mechanical establishments, factories, and laundries to ten hours during the twenty-four hours of any one day, where the new york law, of the same provision in other respects, limits the hours of labor of adult women to sixty in a week. the laundries and the state of oregon agreed to carry a test case to the federal supreme court to determine the new law's constitutionality. mr. curt muller of oregon employed a working woman in his laundry for more than ten hours. information was filed against him by an inspector. mr. muller's trial resulted in a verdict against him, and a sentence of a ten-dollar fine. he appealed the case to the state supreme court of oregon, which affirmed his conviction. mr. muller then appealed the case to the federal supreme court. in the defence of the law before the federal supreme court, the national consumers' league had the good fortune to obtain, in coöperation with the state of oregon, the services of louis d. brandeis, the most distinguished services that could have been received, generously rendered as a gift. this fact alone may serve to indicate the vital character of the case, and the importance, for industrial justice in the future, of securing a favorable verdict for the laundry workers. the argument of mr. muller was that the oregon ten-hour law was unconstitutional: first, because the statute attempted to prevent persons from making their own contracts, and thus violated the provisions of the fourteenth amendment.[ ] next, because the statute did not apply equally to all persons similarly situated and was class legislation. and, finally, because the statute was not a valid exercise of the police power; that is to say, there was no necessary or reasonable connection between the limitations described by the act and the public health and welfare. mr. brandeis' brief replied that, first, the guaranty of freedom of contract was legally subject to such reasonable restraint of action as the state may impose in the exercise of the police power for the protection of the general health and welfare. it submitted that certain facts of common knowledge established conclusively that there was reasonable ground for holding that to permit women in oregon to work in a mechanical establishment or factory or laundry more than ten hours in one day was dangerous to public welfare. these facts of common knowledge, collected by miss josephine goldmark, the publication secretary of the national consumers' league, were considered under two heads: first, that of american and foreign legislation restricting the hours of labor for women; and, second, the world's experience, upon which the legislation limiting the hours of labor for women is based. these facts comprised the governmental restrictions of the number of hours employers may require women to labor, from twenty states of the united states, and from great britain, france, switzerland, austria, holland, italy, and germany. the laws were followed by authoritative statements from over ninety reports of committees, bureaus of statistics, commissioners of hygiene, and government inspectors, both in this country and in all the civilized countries of europe, asseverating that long hours of labor are dangerous for women, primarily because of their special physical organization. in reply to the second allegation,--that the act in question was class legislation, as it did not apply equally to all persons similarly situated,--the plaintiff answered that the specific prohibition of more than ten hours' work in a laundry was not an arbitrary discrimination against that trade; because the present character of the business and its special dangers of long hours afford strong reasons for providing a legal limitation of the hours of work in that industry as well as in manufacturing and mechanical establishments. statements from industrial and medical authorities described conclusively the present character of the laundry business. mr. brandeis finally submitted that, in view of all these facts, the present oregon statute was within oregon's police power, as its public health and welfare did require a legal limitation of the hours of women's work in manufacturing and mechanical establishments and in laundries. justice brewer delivered the opinion of the supreme court of the united states. the case was won. here are, in part, the words of the decision:-- it may not be amiss in the present case, before examining the constitutional question, to notice the course of legislation as well as expressions of opinion from other judicial sources. in the brief filed by mr. brandeis ... is a copious collection of all these matters. the ... legislation and opinions referred to ... are significant of a widespread belief that woman's physical structure and the special functions she performs in consequence thereof, justify special legislation restricting or qualifying the conditions under which she should be permitted to toil. constitutional questions, it is true, are not settled by even a consensus of present public opinion.... at the same time, when a question of fact is debated and debatable, and the extent to which a special constitutional limitation goes is affected by the truth in respect to the fact, a widespread and long-continued belief concerning it is worthy of consideration. we take judicial cognizance of all matters of general knowledge.... that woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. this is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity, continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon her body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race. nobody knowing the actual strain upon women laundry workers, no one who had seen them lying motionless and numb with fatigue at the end of a long day, or foregoing food itself for the sake of rest, could listen unmoved to these thrilling words of the greatest court of our country. the most eloquent characteristic of the supreme court's affirmation was the fact that it was essentially founded simply upon clear, human truth, firmly and widely ascertained, founded on a respect, not only for the past, but for the future of the whole nation. too often does one hear that "law has nothing to do with equity," till one might believe that law was made for law's sake, and not as a means of deliverance from injustice. "the end of litigation is justice. we believe that truth and justice are more sacred than any personal consideration." such was the conception of the office of the law expressed by justice brewer twenty years before, on his appointment to the supreme bench. it was this conception of law that made the determination of the oregon case a great decision in our country's history. from time immemorial, women as well as men have been workers of the world. the vital feature of the statement that six million women are now gainfully employed in this country is not the "entrance" of multitudinous women into industry, but the fact that their industry, being now carried on in public instead of private, has been acknowledged and paid. this acknowledgment has led to the establishment of juster terms for women's labor by the federal supreme court. such an establishment, as the opinion of the court affirmed, is surely a distinct gain, not only for women, but for children, for men, for the race. when the preparation of food and clothing, the traditional household labor of women, passed in large measure from household fires and spinning-wheels into the canning factories and garment trades with the invention of machinery, women simply continued their traditional labor outside their houses instead of inside them.[ ] the accounts of the laundry, the shirt-waist and the cloak making trades in new york seem to show that, where men and women engage in the same field of activity, their work is, by a natural division, not competitive or antagonistic, but complementary. indeed, so little is it antagonistic that the very first spark that lit the fire of the largest strike of women that ever occurred in this country, the shirt-waist makers' strike, was kindled by an offensive injustice to a man. the chronicles of what self-supporting women have given and received in their work in wage and in vitality, these working girls' budgets obtained by the consumers' league, will not have told their story truly unless they have evoked with their narrative the presence of that impersonal sense of right instinctive in the factory girls who go year after year to albany to fight against the long christmas season hours for the shop-girls, in the cloak makers in their effort to stop sweated home work, in the responsible common-sense of countless working women. so that the fact that six million women are now gainfully employed in this country may finally tend to secure wiser adjustments and fairer returns for the labor, not only of women, but of all the workers of the world. footnotes: [footnote : its severity may be indicated by an account of the work a machine ironer in illinois regularly performed before the passage of the illinois ten-hour law, when conditions in that state were as they now are in the hotel and hospital laundries of new york. miss radway used to iron five hundred shirt bosoms a day. holding the loose part of the shirt up above her head to prevent the muslin from being caught in the iron, she pressed the bosom in a machine manipulated by three heavy treads--by bearing all of her weight on her right foot stamping down on a pedal to the right; then by bearing all her weight on her left foot, stamping down a pedal to the left; then by pressing down both pedals with a jump. to iron five hundred shirt bosoms required three thousand treads a day.] [footnote : state labor law, paragraph .--protection of employees operating machinery: "... if a machine or any part thereof is in a dangerous condition or is not properly guarded, the use thereof may be prohibited by the commissioner of labor, and a notice to that effect shall be attached thereto. such notice shall not be removed until the machine is made safe and the required safeguards are provided, and in the meantime such unsafe or dangerous machinery shall not be used."] [footnote : here is a letter from the secretary of the women's trade-union league, stating the results of organization in the west in the laundry trade: "the laundry workers in san francisco eight years ago were competing with the chinese laundries. the girls working in the laundries there received about $ a month, with the privilege of 'living in.' three days in the week they began work at a.m. and worked until a.m. the next morning. the other three days they worked from a.m. to p.m. since organization, they have established the nine-hour day and the minimum wage of $ . they have extended their organization almost the entire length of the pacific coast."] [footnote : perhaps a better survey of the standard of wages for all departments of laundry work in which women are employed can be given by the table below. by the word "standard" i mean the usual wage of a worker of average skill who has been at work in a laundry for a period of at least one year. hand starching (shirts) $ hand ironing hand starching (collars) hand washing machine ironing feeders folders catchers machine starching (shirts) collar ironing machine starching (collars) . shakers . ] [footnote : one of the suggestions the inquirers had made, in regard to danger of injury, was the recommendation of the passage of the state compensation act, drafted by the joint conference of the central labor bodies of the city of new york. this act became a law in september, , but has since then (july , ) been declared unconstitutional.] [footnote : laws of new york, chapter , section , paragraph . became a law may , .] [footnote : laws of new york, chapter of the consolidated laws, as amended to july , , paragraph . inquirers' suggestion: this law would be simpler to enforce if an amending clause required that, in laundries, washing be done in a separate room from the rest of the work.] [footnote : laws of new york, chapter of the consolidated laws, as amended to july , , paragraph .] [footnote : "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states: nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."] [footnote : jane addams, "democracy and social ethics."] chapter vii scientific management as applied to women's work within the last thirty years a new method of conducting work, called scientific management, has been established in various businesses in the united states, including "machine shops and factories, steel work and paper mills, cotton mills and shoe shops, in bleacheries and dye works, in printing and bookbinding, in lithographing establishments, in the manufacture of type-writers and optical instruments, in constructing and engineering work--and to some extent--the manufacturing departments of the army and navy."[ ] three of the enterprises to a greater or less degree reorganized by this new system in this country employ women workers. these establishments are a new jersey cotton mill, a bleachery in delaware, and a cloth finishing factory in new england. the reduction of costs for the owning firms inaugurating scientific management has already received a wide publicity. it is the object of this account to present as clear a chronicle as has been obtainable of the effect the methods of scientific management have had on the fortunes of the workers--more especially on the hours, the wages, and the general health of the women workers in these houses who have so far experienced its training.[ ] what, then, are the new principles of management which have been inaugurated? what is scientific management? the expression may perhaps best be defined to lay readers by a lay writer by means of an outline of the growth of its working principles in this company--an outline traced as far as possible in the words of the engineers creating the system, whose courtesy in the matter is here gratefully acknowledged. i in , mr. frederick w. taylor, the widely reverenced author of "the art of cutting metals" and of "shop management," then a young man of , closed, in grave discouragement, a long, hard, and victorious contest of his conducted as gang boss of the machinists of the midvale steel company in pennsylvania. in the course of the last three years, as he narrates in his book "academic and industrial efficiency":[ ]-- by discharging workers, lowering the wages of the more stubborn men who refused to make any improvement, lowering the piece-work rate, and by other such methods, he (the writer) succeeded in very materially increasing the output of the machines, in some cases doubling the output, and had been promoted from one gang boss-ship to another until he became the foreman of the shop.... for any right-minded man, however, this success is in no sense a recompense for the bitter relations which he is forced to maintain with all those around him. life which is one continuous struggle with other men is hardly worth living.... soon after being made foreman, therefore, he decided to make a determined effort in some way to change the system of management so that the interests of the workmen and the management should become the same instead of antagonistic.... he therefore obtained the permission from mr. william sellers, the president of the midvale steel company, to spend some money in a careful scientific study of the time required to do various kinds of work. lack of information on the part of both workers and the management as to the quickest time in which a piece of work can be done constitutes what has been the most formidable obstacle in the path of all progress toward improved industrial conditions.... every wasteful operation, every mistake, every useless move has to be paid for by somebody, and in the long run both the employer and the employee have to bear a proportionate share.... for each job there is the quickest time in which it can be done by a first-class man; this time may be called the "standard time," for the job.... under all the ordinary systems this quickest time is more or less completely shrouded in mist. through a period of about twelve years the simplest operations in the shop were now timed, observed, and studied by graduates from science courses, different university men, engaged by mr. taylor, until a general law had been discovered regarding the exertion of physical energy a first-class worker could employ "and thrive under." it was found that the worker's resistance of fatigue in lifting and carrying the load depended, not on the amount of strength in terms of horse-power which he was obliged to exert to elevate and sustain the load, but on the proportion of his day spent in rest. for instance, a pig-iron handler, lifting and carrying pigs weighing pounds each, could lift and carry tons of iron in a day without undue fatigue if fifty-seven per cent of his working hours were spent in rest, and forty-three per cent were spent in work. if he lifted and put in place a number of pigs amounting to half that tonnage, he might work without undue fatigue for a greater part of the day. under a certain far lighter load he could work without fatigue all day long, with no rest whatever. with accurate time-study as a basis, the "quickest time" for each job is at all times in plain sight of both employers and workmen, and is reached with accuracy, precision, and speed.[ ] operation--wheelbarrow excavation. date, march , __ key: a: op. b: time c: av. d: no. shov. e: total time min. f: total picking min. g: total shoveling and wheeling min. h: times per barrow min. i: no obs j: times per barrow min. k: time per pc. per shovel min. l: no. shovels per barrow min. m: time wheeling ft. min. |a| b | c | d |a| b | c | d |a | b |c | d |a |b |c --------------------+-+----+----+---+-+-----+-----+---+--+----+--+---+--+--+- department-- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | construction |a| . | . | |a| . | . | |a'| . | | | | | men--mike flaherty |b| . | . | |b| . | . | |a'| . | | | | | |c| . | . | |c| . | . | |a'| . | | | | | materials--sand | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | requiring no pick |d| . | . | |d| . | . | |a'| . | | | | | materials--hard | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | clay in bank |e| . | . | |e| . | . | | | | | | | | implements--no. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | shovel; | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | contractors' | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | wooden | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | wheelbarrow |f| . | . | |f| . | . | | | | | | | | conditions--day-work| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | for a contractor. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | by previous | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | observation |a| . | . | |a| . | . | | | | | | | | an average barrow | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | load of sand is | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . cu. ft. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | measured in cut |b| . | . | |b| . | . | | | | | | | | an average barrow | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | load of clay is | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . cu. ft. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | measured in cut |c| . | . | |c| . | . | | | | | | | | |d| . | . | |d| . | . | | | | | | | | |e| . | . | |e| . | . | | | | | | | | |f| . | . | |f| . | . | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- time | complete | | | | | detail | | | | | | operations | e | f | g | h | operations |i | j | k | l | m ------+-------------+---+---+---+----+-------------+--+-----+-----+----+----- a.m.|commenced | | | | | | | | | | |loading sand | | | | | | | | | | . | loads | | | | . |a--filling | | . | . | . | |wheeled to a | | | | | barrow with | | | | | |distance of | | | | | sand | | | | | | ft. | | | | | | | | | | . |picking | | | | |b--starting | | . | | | |hard clay | | | | | | | | | | . | loads clay| | | | |c--wheeling | | . | | | . |wheeled to a | | | | | full-- ft.| | | | | |distance of | | | | | | | | | | | ft. | | | | | | | | | | . |picking clay | | | | . |d--dumping | | . | | | |again | | | | | & turning | | | | | . | loads clay | | | | . |e--returning | | . | | | . |wheeled to a | | | | | empty-- | | | | | |distance of | | | | | ft. | | | | | | ft. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |f--dropping | | . | | | | | | | | | barrow & | | | | | | | | | | | starting | | | | | | | | | | | to shovel | | | | | | | | | | |g-- | | . | | | | | | | | |h-- | | | | | | | | | | |i-- | | | | | | | | | | |j-- | | | | | | | | | | |k-- | | | | | | | | | | |l-- | | | | | | | | | | |m-- | | | | | | | | | | |a'--filling | | | | | | | | | | | barrow with | | | | | | | | | | | clay | | . | . | . | ------+-------------+---+---+---+----+-------------+--+-----+-----+----+---- note.--comparison of "detail" with "complete" operations shows that about per cent of the total time was taken in rest and other necessary delays. about the same quantity loose as at the start. observer: james monroe. here is an account of the effect the result of this time-study and these tests in strength produced on the output and wage of a group of men at the bethlehem steel co., whose work mr. taylor reorganized after that of the midvale steel company:-- the opening of the spanish war found some , tons of pig-iron piled in small piles in an open field adjoining the bethlehem steel company's works. prices for pig-iron had been so low that it could not be sold at a profit, and was therefore stored. with the opening of the spanish war the price of the pig-iron rose, and this large accumulation of iron was sold. the ...steel company's ...pig-iron gang ...consisted of about men ...good average pig-iron handlers, under an excellent foreman ...a railroad switch was run out into the field, right along the edge of the piles of pig-iron. an inclined plane was placed against the side of a car, and each man picked up from his pile a pig of iron weighing about pounds, walked up the inclined plank, and dropped it on the end of the car. we found that this gang were loading on the average of about - / tons per man per day in this manner. we were surprised to find, after studying the matter, that a first-class pig-iron handler ought to handle between and tons per day, instead of - / tons, which were being handled. this task seemed so very large that we were obliged to go over our work several times before we were sure we were absolutely right.... the task which faced us as managers under the modern scientific plan ...was ...to see that the , tons of pig-iron were loaded on the cars at the rate of tons per man per day in place of - / tons.... it was further our duty to see that this work was done without bringing on a strike among the men, without any quarrel with the men, and to see that the men were happier and better contented with loading at the new rate of tons than they were when loading at the old rate of - / tons. the first step was the scientific selection of the workmen.... under ...scientific management ...it is an inflexible rule to talk to and deal with only one man at a time, since we are not dealing with men in masses, but are trying to develop each individual man to his highest state of efficiency and prosperity. the men in the gang were carefully watched and studied for three or four days, at the end of which time we had picked out four men who were believed to be physically able to handle pig-iron at the rate of tons per day. a careful study was then made of each of these men.... finally one man was selected from among the four as the most likely man to start with. this man, who had been receiving $ . a day, agreed to follow for $ . a day the directions of the time-student, who had determined the proportion and intervals of rest necessary for the regular accomplishment of the task, without overstrain or undue fatigue. the worker started to carry his accustomed load and at regular intervals was told by the time-student, observing the proper period for rest and work with a watch: "now pick up a pig and walk. now sit down and rest. now, walk--now, rest, etc." [illustration: courtesy of _industrial engineering_ the new method of providing the bricklayer with material] he walked when he was told to walk and rested when he was told to rest, and at half past five in the afternoon had his - / tons loaded on the car. and he practically never failed to work at this pace and to do the task that was set him during the three years that the writer was at bethlehem.... throughout this time, he averaged a little more than $ . a day; whereas he had never received more than $ . a day, which was the ruling wage at that time in bethlehem.... one man after another was picked out and trained to handle pig-iron at the rate of - / tons a day, until all of the pig-iron was handled at this rate, and all of this gang were receiving sixty per cent more wages than other men around them. a very brilliant and extended investigation concerning the elimination of waste of human energy and labor by motion-study has been made independently of mr. taylor by mr. frank gilbreth, whose discoveries in the field have already cut down the effort of the labor of bricklaying two-thirds. the two accompanying photographs show what scientific management and motion-study did in one case to serve the worker by an orderly and convenient arrangement of his material. these extremely simple processes of bricklaying and carrying pig-iron have been selected as instances of the procedure of scientific management, because they reveal one of its most illuminating qualities. scientific management makes an art of all work. it gives the most primitive manual task its right dignity, and turns knowledge, science, and the powers of direction from the position of tyrants of labor to that of its servitors. scientific management, then, besides eliminating waste in human energy, or rather by way of eliminating this waste, eliminates waste in equipment, waste in machine power, and evolves through an extended planning department such better appliances, such an improved programme of work and recording of individual work as has been only very imperfectly indicated here. for an instance of the elimination of waste in equipment the account of the saving effected for one establishment by an efficient use of its belting may be narrated. this was the work of mr. harrington emerson, widely known as a counselling engineer. in the ' 's mr. emerson had become interested in the subject of efficiency engineering by his study of the successful conduct of the german army during the franco-prussian war; and he has since then reorganized numerous large enterprises in accordance with the principles derived from his inquiry. among these establishments was a machine shop where the belting[ ] "had cost (for maintenance and renewals) at one of the main shops about $ , a year--or $ a month--and it was so poorly installed and supervised that there was an average of breakdowns every working-day, each involving more or less disorganization of the plant in its part or as a whole." the workmen in charge of the belts now received directions as to their charge from a general foreman, who received directions from an efficiency engineer. this engineer had derived his general information on the subject from a man who had made a special study of belts for nine years. he laid down a few general rules, requiring accurate records of breakdown, repair, and installation, full authority and responsibility for the special worker on belts, a better grade of work in installation and better operation of the belts. under this method "the number of breakdowns declined from each working-day to an average of a day, not one of them serious ...and due to original defective installation, which it was impossible to remedy without unjustifiable expense.... the cost of maintaining belts fell from $ a month to $ a month." this elimination of waste of human power, and in connection with it the elimination of waste of equipment and of machine power, have, then, in the course of the last thirty years, been studied and applied in this country in the way roughly outlined by mr. taylor, mr. gilbreth, mr. gantt, mr. sanford thompson, mr. barth, mr. cook, and mr. hathaway; and in somewhat the same manner by mr. harrington emerson, mr. edward emerson, mr. w.j. power, mr. arion, mr. playfair, and mr. chipman. these engineers have developed methods which have made it possible for them to reorganize the various businesses mentioned which have consulted them, and to decrease their costs and increase their profits. it will be seen at once that the procedure of scientific management in determining by scientific analysis the rate of speed and the working conditions under which machine power and human energy can be at once most productively and continuously employed, is really new, and differs radically from former business management, however ably systematized. "but these," said mr. taylor, in speaking of the methods of scientific management, "are incidents in the course of scientific management. its great underlying purpose is the achievement of prosperity for the workers and for the employers." mr. taylor's definition of prosperity, given on another occasion, is one of the finest the present writer has ever heard. "by a man's prosperity, i mean his best use of his highest powers." it may be asked, after the efficiency of workers has been increased by scientific study, what provision is made by scientific study for their increased compensation. while mr. taylor was at the bethlehem steel company, mr. henry l. gantt, then engaged with him in reorganizing the bethlehem steel works, first applied the bonus and task system of compensation, which may be described loosely as a premium paid if a certain predetermined amount be accomplished in a certain time. its general principles are these:[ ]-- . "a scientific investigation in detail of each piece of work and the determination of the best method and the shortest time in which the work can be done." . "a teacher capable of teaching the best methods and shortest time." . "reward for both teacher and pupil, when the latter is successful."[ ] ii about five years ago mr. gantt was consulted concerning the application of scientific management in a new england cloth finishing house. the installation of the new system here began on the eve of a strike which the workers lost. the history of this strike and its causes is not a part of this account. only these facts concerning it bear upon the present subject. the strike started among the men folders, then folding pieces of cloth a day for $ a week on week wages, and asking for ten per cent increase of wage without increase of output. the women folders' wage on lighter work was $ . . as will be seen, this request was met by scientific management. the wage was increased far beyond ten per cent. the output was increased, both by improved mechanical methods, and by a standard of more expert work, to from to pieces a day. the engineers of scientific management had not on either one side or the other any part whatever in the strike. but undoubtedly one of its contributing causes was a distrust aroused by the rumor that a new system of work was to be inaugurated. the cloth finishing establishment bleaches, starches, and calenders dimities, muslins, percales, and shirtings, and folds and wraps them for shipping. the factory has good light and good air and an excellent situation in open, lightly rolling country. about two hundred young women, americans, scotch, english, and french-canadians are now employed here on the bonus and task system, most of them whom i saw living with their families in very attractive houses in pleasant villages near. one or two were on the gloomy, muddy little streets of a french-canadian mill town. these girls, too, were in well-built houses and not living in crowded conditions. but all their surroundings were dingy and disagreeable. at the cloth finishing factory and both the other establishments, every opportunity for the fullest inquiry among workers as to the result of the system for them was offered by the owning companies. difficulties in the industry for the workers were frequently pointed out by managers; and the addresses and names of the less well-paid workers and those in the harder positions were supplied as freely as information about the more fortunate effects of the system. both this firm and that of the cotton mill are anxious to obtain first-class work through first-class working conditions as rapidly as trade conditions will allow. the first process at which women are employed is that of keeping cloth running evenly through a tentering machine. the machine holds on tenter hooks--the hooks of the metaphorical reference--the damp cloth brought from the process of bleaching, and rolls it through evenly into a drier, where it slips off. there are two kinds of tentering machines. at one kind two girls sit, each watching an edge of the cloth and keeping it straight on the tenter hooks, so it will feed evenly. the newer machines run in such a manner that one girl who may either stand or sit can watch both edges. because of the nearness of the drying closet, the air would be hot and dry here but that outside air is driven in constantly by fans through pipes with vents opening close to the workers. the tentering machines used to run slowly. this slowness enhanced the natural monotony and wearisomeness of the work. the girls used to receive wages of $ a week, and to rest three-quarters of an hour in the morning and three-quarters of an hour in the afternoon, with the same period for dinner at noon in the middle of a ten-and-one-half hour day. after scientific management was introduced, the girls sat at the machine only an hour and twenty minutes at a time. they then had a twenty-minute rest, and these intervals of work and rest were continued throughout the day by an arrangement of spelling with "spare hands." the machines were run at a more rapid rate than before. the girl's task was set at watching , yards in a day; and if she achieved the bonus, as she did without any difficulty, she could earn $ a week. the output of the tentering machines was increased about sixty per cent. the girls at the tentering machines praised the bonus system eagerly. they said they could not bear to return to the former method of work; that now the work was easier and more interesting than before, and the payment and the hours were better. one of the "spare hands" showed me, as a memento of a new era at tenter-hooking machines, the written slip of paper the efficiency engineer had given to her, explaining to her how to arrange the intervals of rest, and to start the "rest" with a different girl on each saturday--a five-hour day--so that the same girls would not have three intervals of rest every saturday. but in another part of the factory the girls at the tentering machines had wished to lump their rest intervals and to take them altogether in fifty-minute periods in the middle of the morning and of the afternoon. here the "spare hands" intervals at the machines fell awkwardly, and they were obliged to work for an unduly long time. the girls became exhausted with the monotony in these longer stretches of work; and further wearied themselves by embroidering and sewing on fancy work in the long rest periods. here the girls were much less contented than in the other departments.[ ] after the cloth is dry and passed through calendering machines where men are employed, it is run into yard lengths by a yarding machine or "hooker." at the yarding machines the girls stand under the frame holding the wooden arms that measure off the cloth back and forth. the workers here used to earn $ . a week. they watch the machine, mark defects in some kinds of cloth, by inserting slips of paper, stop the machine when the material runs out, and lift the pile of measured cloth to a table where it is taken up by the cutters and folders and inspectors. after the bonus system was introduced at the machines where the heavier material is measured, the yarding machines were all elevated to small platforms, so that the pile when finished would be on a level with an adjacent table, and the worker need not lift and carry the heavy weight of cloth to the table, but could slide the work. the machine was run more rapidly. the task was increased to about , yards, or from about pieces to about . the wage with the bonus was now about $ on full time, and the hours were lessened minutes, as at the tentering machines. the worker stops the yarding machine by throwing her weight on her right foot, on a pedal to the right. the girls interviewed said they did not feel this as a strain, as there was a knack in doing it easily. on consulting a neighborhood physician it was found that within the last ten years, however, several women, both at the yarding and tentering machines, had strained themselves, probably by the tread at the yarding machine and by the slightly twisted seated position the older tentering machines necessitated. the number of these cases traceable to any one process of work had not increased under the new system. the whole number of these cases in the factory had, on the other hand, either decreased under the new system, or else had not come under this doctor's care. he believed, however, that there was a reduction of the cases, and that this reduction was attributable to the better general health achieved by shorter hours, better ventilation, and better working conditions and appliances. [illustration: courtesy of _industrial engineering_ the usual method of providing the bricklayer with material] the increased task at the yarding machine seems to have increased the danger of accidents. a knife extends from the side of the machine; and when the girl's attention is concentrated on her work, she sometimes puts her fingers too near the blade, and cuts them, though no instance was known here of the loss of a finger or of serious injury. the girls stand all day at the yarding machine and at most of the succeeding processes of preparation. these are various arrangements of inspecting, counting yards, folding in "book folds," of doubled-over material, or "long folds" of the full width, ticketing and stamping, tying selvages together with silk thread, or tying them to wrapping paper by means of a little instrument called a knot-tier--this process is called knotting--tying with ribbons, pasting on strips of silver tissue ribbon, further ticketing and stamping, and running the sets of tickets indicating the several yards in each piece through an adding machine, which then produces on a stamped card the total number of yards in each consignment, before it is finally rushed away for shipment. the process of inspection is different for different qualities of material. before the material is bleached, the number of yards and the character of treatment for each piece are specified on stamped orders issued from the planning room and sent with the cloth through the processes of production. it may as well be said here, that several girls have been promoted from manual work to work in this planning room, where they stamp orders, on a bonus at different rates, giving them a wage of about $ a week in full time on office hours of hours a day.[ ] the inspector receiving the bales from the yarding machines now counts off the number of yards and cuts the bale in accordance with these directions. some material she inspects yard by yard for imperfections and dirt. after marking the yards on the cut piece, she sends it on to the folder if it is clean, and if it is spotted, to girls who wash out the spots and press the cloth.[ ] on other material, imperfections are marked by the girl at the yarding machine, by the insertion of slips of paper. as the inspector has less to do on these pieces, she not only counts and cuts, but folds them. before the introduction of the bonus system, one girl used to fold, inspect, and ticket. she used also to carry her material from a table near the yarding machine. boys now bring the material except where at the yarding machines for heavier stuffs it is pushed along the table. the hours, as for almost all of the bonus workers, have been shortened by minutes. the wages which were $ . a week are now between $ and $ on full time. almost all the workers here said they greatly preferred the bonus system and would greatly dislike to return to other work. but in dealing with the heavier materials the work was tiring, and more tiring under the new system than before, as the number of pieces lifted had been increased. it was said while there was every intention of fairness on the part of the management in arranging the work; it was sometimes not evenly distributed in slack times, the same girls being laid off repeatedly and the same girls chosen to work repeatedly instead of in alternation. in the further processes of folding, some of the work and the lifting to the piles of the sheer, book-folded stuff is light, but requires great deftness; other parts of the work and the lifting to the piles are heavier.[ ] the wage before the bonus was introduced was $ . a week, and with the bonus rose to $ a week, in full time. as with the inspectors, the work was now brought to the folders, and the hours were shortened by minutes. here there was great variation in the account of the system. one of the folders on light work, a wonderfully skilful young woman, who had folded pieces a day before, and now folded , could run far beyond her task without exhaustion and earn as much as $ a week. she and some of the expert workers paused in the middle of the morning for or minutes' rest and ate some fruit or other light refreshment, and sometimes took another such rest in the afternoon. another strong worker, employed on heavy material, though she liked the bonus system, and said "it couldn't be better," had remained at work at about the same wages as before, because she was a little ahead of the others before and earned $ a week; and now, as there was hardly more than enough of her kind of work to occupy her for more than four days a week, she still earned about $ . one folder was made very nervous by a constant fear that she would not earn her bonus. she always did complete the necessary amount; but when the system was first introduced, she had been sleepless night after night. though this sleeplessness had passed away, she still took a nerve tonic to brace her through her work; and this was the case with another folder. the mothers of both these girls urged them to return to week work. but this was of poor quality--odds and ends--and the girls disliked it, and persisted in the new system. in tying ribbons around the bolts of material, the girls sit at work. their wages had been $ a day for tying ribbons around pieces; and now, on a bonus for pieces, is at times for quick workers, as high as $ . but the ribbon tying was not steady work. it is applied to only some of the material, and the task and bonus here are intermittent. the girls who knot, or run silk threads through the selvages, paste on tinsel ribbon, and wrap are younger than the other workers. their wages before had been from $ . to $ a week. now they are in some cases over $ ; in others about $ ; in others about $ . the work reaches them in better condition than before. they said it was more interesting, and the chief difficulty was in lifting occasionally a greater number of heavy pieces in piling. seats were provided for these workers except for those at tinselling; and if they found they were able to complete the task easily, they sat at the work. at the heavier work, the girl at yarding, the folder, knotter, and ticketer, all worked tandem, and if the girl at yarding loses her bonus, all the girls lose the bonus. in the last process of stamping tickets and ticketing, the girls work without one superfluous motion, with a deftness very attractive to see; and both here and at book folding justify the claim made by scientific management that speed is a function of quality. the wages here had been $ before, and were now in full time from $ to $ . as the task before had been combined with various other processes, it was, as in other cases, impossible to determine how much the work of each worker had been increased. the present task was that of ticketing bundles of pieces each hourly, with different rates for different amounts of tickets, and was not considered at all a strain. but at the ticketing connected with the adding machines the work was not differentiated so carefully. more of the heavy work came to these ticketers, and the lifting was sometimes too exhausting. but the work was better than in former times, and the wages of from $ to $ were thought just, if a higher rate had been added for the heavier work here. iii all this work described at the tenter hooking, the yarding, the folding, inspection, and ticketing, was of a different character from that carried on under the bonus and task system in a large room where sheets and pillowcases were manufactured. this work afforded the only instance of an application of scientific management to the processes involved in the great needle trades and was, on that account, of special interest. the white cloth is brought on trucks to the girls, who tear it into lengths, in accordance with written orders received with each consignment. they snip the cloth with scissors, place the cut against the edge of an upright knife, set at a convenient height on a bench, and pull the two sides of the cloth so that the knife tears through evenly to the end; then they stamp the material, fold it over, and place it on a truck to be carried to the machine sewer. the weekly wages before the bonus was introduced had been $ . and were now with the bonus $ . , though workers sometimes tore more than the sheets required by the task and made from $ to $ . by a week's work. the quick workers occasionally stopped for or minutes in the morning and ate a light lunch. the task was severe for the muscles of the hand and forearm, and apt to cause swollen fingers and strained wrists, though the girls bound their wrists to prevent this. all the work was done standing. the loosened starch flying here was annoying, both to the tearers and the girls at the sewing-machines. since the time of the inquiry, all the girls engaged in tearing have been relieved and transferred to other positions, and the work of tearing has been done by men. here the sheets are turned back and hemmed by workers who sew tandem, one girl finishing the broader hem and the other the narrower one, their task being sheets a day. the girls at the machines formerly earned $ . , and now earn with the machine set at the higher rate of speed from $ to $ . they stop for minutes in the morning, and clean the machines and clear away the litter around them. the sewing and stooping are monotonous, and the work on bonus here is apt to cause nervousness, because of uncertainty occasioned by frequent breakages in the machines.[ ] there is a room at one side of the department, where the girls were to rest when they had completed their tasks. but the present foreman, not understanding the system, comes to the rest room and hurries them out again, even after the sheets are finished.[ ] one of the girls in the department, an italian girl, who used to run far beyond the task at the machine, had fallen ill under the strain of the work, or at least left the factory looking extremely ill and saying that she had broken down and could not remain. another unfortunate result of the speed at the sewing-machines is that the girls are more apt than before to run the needles through their fingers. the folding in this department is also exhausting, and the management is trying to find a better system of conducting this process than that now employed. the folders here stoop and pick up the sheets and fold them lengthwise and crosswise. the task is a day; and the wage with the bonus comes to between $ and $ a week. but after the bonus is earned, payment is, for some reason, not suitably provided on work beyond the task. one worker said she used to fold one or two pieces above the amount without any objection, but lately she had folded as many as beyond, without payment. from the folders the sheets are carried away to a mangle, where they are folded over again by young girls. the work is light, but the payment of $ . to $ for pieces an hour is low. the mangle is well guarded. by an excellent arrangement here, the material is piled on a small elevator, so that the girl at the mangle does not have to stoop or lift, but easily adjusts the elevator, so that she can feed the mangle from the pile at her convenience. the girl at a mangle can earn from $ to $ and is not tired in any way by her work. the final stamping and wrapping in paper and tying with cord are done at a rate of pieces an hour, for a wage coming to $ a week, by young girls; and the situation is otherwise about the same as with the other wrappers. except at the mangle, the operation of the sheet and pillow-case factory was unsatisfactory to the management, who had begun to study the department for reorganization just before the time of the inquiry. competition had so depressed the price of the manufacture of sheets that the commission men, for whom these processes described were executed, paid cents a dozen sheets for the work. this does not, of course, include the initial cost of the material. it means, however, that all of the following kinds of machine tending and manual labor on a sheet were to be done for - / cents:-- tearing; (men workers) hemming; (women workers) folding; (women workers) mangling; (women workers) book-folding; (women workers) wrapping; (women workers) ticketing; (women workers) the management lost in its payment for labor here, and yet felt the work was too hard for its workers, and should be changed. alterations in the rest periods are now being introduced. for the girls the system of operation at the time of the inquiry in the sheet and pillow-case factory, except on the mangle, was undoubtedly more exhausting than the old method, though their wages had been increased and their hours shortened. in general in the cloth finishing establishment scientific management had increased wages. it had shortened hours. in regard to health and fatigue, outside the sheet factory, when the general vague impression that the new system was more exhausting than the other was sifted down, the grist of fact remaining was small, and consisted of the instances mentioned. about forty young women told me their experience of the work. sometimes their mothers and their fathers talked with me about it. every one whose health had suffered under the new task had been exhausted by some old difficulty which had remained unremedied. this point will be considered in relation to the industry of the other women workers in the other houses after the accounts of their experience of scientific management. iv there are over workers in the new jersey cotton mill. of these are women. one hundred and ten of the women workers are at present engaged under the bonus and task system, though the management expects to employ eventually under this system all of its workers, and is in this establishment markedly in sympathy with scientific management. the mill is a large, well-lighted brick structure, with fields around it, and another factory on one side, on the outskirts of a factory town. the establishment is composed of a larger and newer well-ventilated building, with washed air blown through the work-rooms; and an older building, where the part of the work is carried on which necessitates both heat and dampness to prevent the threads from breaking. the cotton, which is of extremely fine quality, comes into the picker building in great bales from our southern sea-coast and from egypt. it is fed into the first of a series of cleaners, from the last of which it issues in a long, flat sheet, to go through the processes of carding, combing, drawing, and making into roving. the carding product consists of a very delicate web, which, after being run through a trumpet and between rollers, forms a "sliver" of the size of two of one's fingers, from which it issues in a long strand. this strand or sliver is threaded into a machine with other ends of slivers and rolled out again in one stronger strand; and this doubling and drawing process is innumerably repeated, till the final roving is fed into a machine that gives it a twist once in an inch and winds it on a bobbin. there are three kinds or stages of twisting and winding roving on these machines, and at the last, the "speeders," women are employed. up to this point all the workers have been men. these speeders are in the carding rooms, which are large and high, filled with great belts geared from above, and machines placed in long lanes, where the operatives stand and walk at their work. humidifying pipes pass along the room, with spray issuing from their vents. the lint fibres are constantly brushed and wiped up by the workers, but there is still considerable lint in the air. the heat, the whir of the machines, the heaviness of the atmosphere, and the lint are at first overpowering to a visitor. while many of the girls say that they grow accustomed to these conditions, others cannot work under them, and go away after a few days' or sometimes a few hours' trial.[ ] the speeders stand at one end of a long row of bobbins and watch for a break in the parallel lines of threads, and twist the two ends together when this occurs. the greater number of the speeders used to earn $ a week. but two or three women, on piece-work, earned about $ and did nearly twice as much as the other workers. the speeders had helpers who used to assist them to thread the back of the machine and to remove and place the bobbins in front. the change or "doff" occupied about minutes. it generally occurred five times in the day of the better worker and thus consumed an hour and forty minutes of her working time. the hours in the cotton mill are ten and a half a day with five and a half on saturday,-- hours a week. in order to ascertain the proper task for the speeders, a time-study was made of the work of one of the abler workers, who may be called mrs. macdermott, a strong and skilful scotch woman, who had been employed at speeding in the mill for years. mrs. macdermott was employed to teach the other speeders how to accomplish the same amount in the same time. the girls now thread the back of the machines with her help. mrs. macdermott, the speeder tender herself, and the doff boys, all working together, remove the bobbins and fill the frame, thus accomplishing the change in minutes instead of minutes. the girls are paid, while learning better methods from mrs. macdermott, at their old rate of a dollar a day. if they accomplish the task allotted, they receive a dollar a week more flat-rate, a bonus equivalent to a few cents a pound on each pound received by the management; and this brings the wage to $ . a day, or between $ and $ a week. the work tires the girls no more than it did before. they receive about thirty per cent more wages, and the management receives from the speeders nearly twice as great an output as before. mrs. macdermott's wage as a teacher has been raised to $ . from the speeders, the doff boys send the roving--called fine roving in the mill, because the other rovings in preceding operations are coarser--upstairs in the older building to the spinners. spinning is a more difficult task than speeding. two rovings are here twisted together by the machines. the spinners have bobbins on one side of a frame, and watch for breakage, and change the bobbins on three frames, or six "sides." spinners formerly worked at piece-work rates and by watching eight sides, and frequently doing the work very imperfectly, would earn about $ . after a time-study was taken, the task was set at six sides, and doffs as called for by a schedule. with the bonus the girls' weekly wage comes to about $ . in the spinning department there is a school for spinners. the heads receive a dollar for every graduate who learns to achieve the task and bonus. the yarn is carried from the spinners to the spoolers, and wound from bobbins to spools for convenience in handling. the work of the spool tenders seemed to the present writer to be the severest work for women in this cotton mill. the bobbins run out very rapidly, and require constant change. the girls watch the thread for breakages just as at the other machines. in replacing the bobbins and fastening the broken threads with a knot tier, the girls have to stoop down almost to the floor. before the time-study was taken, the girls were watching bobbins, hurrying up and down the sides, bending up and down perpetually at this work. some of the spool tenders had $ a week on piece-work; others, more experienced workers, were able to earn $ . at piece-work, although the work was frequently unsatisfactory and had loose ends. a little italian girl, who may be called lucia, an extremely rapid worker, used to run wildly from one end of the frame to the other, and in the summer-time fainted several times at her work from exhaustion. a time-study was taken from the work of a very deft young polish girl, and from lucia. the other spoolers were taught to work with the same rapidity, and were soon able to earn with the bonus and the work done beyond the task a sum which brought their wage up to nearly $ a week. this lasted for about two months. but the work was so improperly done and the spools were so full of loose and untied ends, etc., that the number of spindles to be tended was reduced from to , and the machines were run at a lower rate of speed. the task was changed accordingly so that the worker's wage, simply with the bonus, was as it had been before. but she was unable to overrun the task as far as she had, formerly. by the workers' constant attention, the work now improved in quality, but the limit of quantity, was, of course, lower. the wages with the bonus dropped back to a smaller excess, or $ . a day. this was, of course, disheartening, though lucia said it was better, she was so much less tired by the work than she had been before. but the work is still undoubtedly very wearying and difficult. the spoolers still give incessant attention to their work, still do their best, and yet make by close application far less than they had grown accustomed to expect whether justly or unjustly.[ ] the task is now doffs a day--each doff requiring a change of bobbins. so that in changing bobbins alone the girls have to stoop down over times a day, without counting all the stooping for knot tying, which the forewoman said would about equal the labor of bending and working at bobbin changing. she had talked with the management about having the frames raised, so as to eliminate this exhausting process of stooping to work for the spoolers. this change had been made in two machines and will doubtless be extended.[ ] at the further twisting and plying of the cotton, the processes succeeding the spooling, men are employed. from these the yarn goes to the winding room in the newer building, where better air and temperature are possible than in the carding and spinning rooms. the winding room is large and light. at one side stand the warps, very tall and interesting to see, with their lines of delicate filament and high tiers of bobbins. in the winding room girls are engaged at machines which wind the yarn from spools back to bobbins for filling in the looms and also for the warp. in winding the filling bobbins the girls watch the thread from eighteen bobbins, and replace and stop bobbins by pressing on foot pedals. the worker had made from $ to $ . a week before a time-study was taken and the task increased. she can now make from $ to $ . a week. the work is lightened for her by the fact that whereas she formerly placed the bobbins on the warp, doffers now do this for her. but the increased stamping of the pedals made necessary by the larger task is very tiring. there are no women on bonus in the weave room, where the warp and the filling are now carried. after the woven product comes from the weaving room--an extremely heavy, strong stuff of the highest grade, used for filter cloth and automobile tires--it is hung in a large finishing room in the newer building over a glass screen lighted with sixteen electric lights which shine through the texture of the material and reveal its slightest defect. after it has been rolled over the screen, it is sent to girls who remedy these defects by needlework. it is again run over the lighted screen by the inspectors and returned to the girls if there are still defects. before the bonus system was applied, the girls had made $ . a week, and finished about rolls a day. after the system was applied, they made from $ to $ and did sometimes and sometimes rolls a day. but, in spite of the greatest care on mr. gantt's part in standardizing the quality in this department, here, as with the spool tenders, requirement as to quality had recently caused a temporary drop in wages. this change in requirement was occasioned, not as at the spool tending by the negligence of the workers, but by the somewhat unreasonable caprice of a customer. knots in the texture, formerly sewed down as they were, are now cut and fastened differently. to learn this process meant just as hard work for the girls, and put them back temporarily to their old day rate,[ ] though they were recently becoming sufficiently quick in the new process to earn the bonus as well as before. by and large, the wages of the women workers in the cotton mill had been increased by scientific management. their hours had not been affected. these were in all instances - / a day and - / on saturday. there was no overtime. but on five nights in the week, women preparing yarn for the following day worked at speeding and spinning from six at night until six in the morning, with half an hour for lunch at midnight. this arrangement had always been the custom of the mill. the girls go home at six for breakfast, sleep until about half past four, rise, dress, and have supper, and go to work in the mill again at six. the night workers i visited had worked at night in other mills in new england before they worked in new jersey. their sole idea of work, indeed, was night work; and if it were closed in one mill, they sought it in another. one of the youngest girls, a clever little hungarian of , who had been only years in this country and could barely speak english, knew america simply as a land of night work and of sundays, and had spent her whole life here like a little mole. the present owner, the superintendent, and the head of the planning department all seriously disliked night work for women, and said they were anxious to dispense with it. but they had not been able to arrange their output so as to make this change, though they intended to inaugurate it as rapidly as possible. concerning the health and conservation of the strength of the women workers in the mill under scientific management, the task of the speeders and of the women at cloth inspection tired the girls no more than it had before. in the spool tending and the winding, as the two most exhausting operations in each process, the stooping and the stamping of the pedals, had been increased by the heightened task, the exhaustion of the workers was heightened. but the work of the excitable little spool tender mentioned was finally so arranged as to leave her in better health than in the days when she was employed on piece-work, and the management was now endeavoring to eliminate the stooping at the bobbins. at spinning almost all the spinners found the work easier than before, probably because scientific management demands that machine supervision and assistance shall be the best possible. it must be remembered that the adjustment of conditions in the mill here is comparatively new. almost all the girls said: "they don't drive you at the mill. they make it as easy for you as they can." it was of special value to observe the operation of scientific management in an establishment where all the industrial conditions are difficult for women. as in the white goods sewing for the cloth finishing establishment, these industrial conditions are unfortunately controlled to a great extent by competition and by custom for both the employer and the employees. the best omen for the conservation of the health of the women workers under scientific management in the cotton mill was the entire equity and candor shown by the management in facing situations unfavorable for the women workers' health and their sincere intention of the best practicable readjustments. v the application of scientific management to women's work in the delaware bleachery was very limited, extending only to about girls, all employed in folding and wrapping cloth.[ ] the factory, on the outskirts of a charming old city in delaware, is an enormous, picturesque cement pile, reaching like a bastion along the brandywine river, with its windows overlooking the wooded bank of the stream. the girls stand in a large room, before tables piled with great bolts of material, and stamp tickets and style cards, fasten them to the roll, fold over the raw edges of the material in a lap, tie two pieces of ribbon around the bolt, wrap it in paper, stamp and attach other tickets, and tie it up with cord to be shipped. here, after a time-study was made of the quicker girls in all the operations, different tasks were set for different weights of material; and if the task was accomplished, a bonus was paid, amounting, roughly speaking, to a quarter of the worker's hourly wage. the arrangement of the different processes was so different for each worker, after and before the system was installed, that none of the girls could compare the different amounts of work she completed at the different times. but the whole output, partly through a better routing of the work to the tables, and by paying the boys who brought it a bonus of cents for each worker who made her bonus, was increased from twenty-five to fifty per cent. the girls' hours were decreased from - / a day with frequent overtime up to nine at night to - / a day with no overtime, the saturday half-holiday remaining unchanged. here is a list of the changes in the week wages. the work at the time of the inquiry was slack. sometimes there were only a few hours in the day of wrapping of a kind on which the task and bonus was applied. besides, these workers were in the midst of an establishment managed by another system. the bonus was given on the basis of the former wage. and this remained lower in the case of workers employed fewer years by the firm, though sometimes their task was the same as that of workers employed longer. where the girls wrapped both the heavier and the lighter materials, the allotment of these was in the hands of a sub-foreman, who, instead of being in the new position of a teacher rewarded for helping each worker to make her bonus, was in the old position of a distributor of favors. the slackness of the work had led the management, in a good-willed attempt to provide as well as possible for the employees, to place several girls from other departments under this sub-foreman. one of these less strong and experienced girls, at the time of the inquiry, was receiving such an amount of heavy work that she could wrap only enough of the task to enable her to earn from $ to $ a week. the firm's policy was paternalistic, and while in many ways it had a genuine kindness, it was not in general sympathy with scientific management, though the superintendent is a thorough and consistent supporter of the new system. but he had not been able, single handed, to achieve all the necessary adjustments, in spite of the decided increase of output the new methods had already obtained for the company. | per week | formerly ----------------------------------------+-------------+--------- folding and ticketing on light material | $ to | $ . folding and ticketing on light material | to | . wrapping light material | to | . wrapping light material | to | . wrapping light and heavy material | to . | . wrapping light and heavy material | | combined with napkin tying | to | . folding and ticketing both light and | | heavy material | to | . folding and ticketing both light and | | heavy material (unaccustomed to the | . | . work) | (once . ) | folding and ticketing both light and | | heavy material (unaccustomed to the | | work) | | . folding and ticketing both light and | | heavy material (unaccustomed to the | | work) | to | |(in another department) ----------------------------------------+-------------+--------- even considering slackness, these increases per week for first-rate speed and work, though in many cases the work was light, cannot but seem small. all the girls lived in attractive houses and pleasant places. all but one were with their families. the city has an open market. people of all grades of income go to market properly with market-baskets, choose food of excellent quality, and have fresh vegetables through the winter. the ladies of the house, the girls' mothers, preserve fruit from june strawberries to autumn apple-butter, and exhibit it proudly in row after row of glass jars. but the girls' wages could not pay for such living conditions. the girl who was boarding, and whose wages were sometimes $ a week, could not always pay her board bill and had almost nothing left for other expenses.[ ] in regard to health and fatigue the main difficulty here, as at the cloth finishing factory, was in the lifting of heavier pieces of cloth. two of the girls had suffered, since the introduction of the bonus and task, by straining themselves in this way. one of them was at home ill for a week, and is now quite well again. the other girl was away for two months, and though she is now at work, had not fully regained her health. the company had at once obtained employment less straining for the first of these girls, and the second said that the firm had always been fair with her in arranging the work. it was said that it had been mr. gantt's intention to have the heavier lifting done by men and boys, instead of combining it with the larger tasks the girls now accomplished under the new system. but the department had never fully carried out its intention, and unfortunately since mr. gantt's departure rather more of the heavy material had been ordered from the house than before. the general good will of the firm, the picturesque factory site, the pleasant work-rooms, and the attractive living conditions of the delaware workers gave them an extraordinary opportunity to pursue their labor healthfully. but because of its incomplete adoption, scientific management, though it had shortened hours, and in most cases had raised wages, had proven of less potential value to the workers than to those in the more difficult industrial situation obtaining in the cotton mill. vi in general, then, scientific management for women workers in this country may be said as far as it has been applied to have increased wages, to have shortened hours, and to have resulted fortunately for the health of women workers in some instances and unfortunately in others. wherever a process presented a difficulty which remained unremedied, if the task were multiplied, the difficulty, of course, was multiplied. no matter how greatly the weight of a wagon is lightened, if there is a hole in the road of its passage, and the road is now to be travelled sixty times a day, instead of twenty times, as before, the physical difficulty from this hole is not only trebled, but while it may be endured with patience twenty times, is not only a muscular, but a nervous strain at the sixtieth. this was the situation in regard to all unrelieved heavy lifting wherever cloth was manipulated, the situation in regard to the stooping for the spool tenders, the stamping at the winding machine, and the stooping and breakages at the sewing-machine. but these points, instead of being ignored by the management, were seriously regarded by the employers as inimical to their own best interests in combination with those of their employees, and in all the establishments were in process of adjustment. in the present writer's judgment this adjustment would have been inaugurated earlier in several processes and would have been more rapid and effective for both the employer's interest and that of the women workers if the women workers' difficulties had been fairly and clearly specified through trade organization. such an organization would also be of value in preventing danger of injury for workers whose attention under scientific management should be concentrated on their tasks, and of value in supporting the tendency of scientific management to pay work absolutely according to the amount accomplished by the worker, and not under a certain specified rate for this amount. scientific management as applied to women's work in this country is, of course, very recent. this synthesis of its short history is collected from the statements made by about eighty of the women workers, by mr. gantt, and by the owner, superintendent, and head of the planning department of the cotton mill, by the superintendent and one of the owners of the cloth finishing factory, and the superintendent and one of the owners of the bleachery. the account should be supplemented by several general observations. the first is that it is difficult to determine where the health of a worker has been strained by industry and where by other causes. quite outside any of the narratives mentioned were those of two young women employed under scientific management whose health was hopelessly broken. both of these poor girls were subject to wrong and oppressive maltreatment at home. indeed, from oppression at home, one of the girls had repeatedly found refuge and protection in the consideration shown to her by the establishment where she worked. it was not she who blamed the new way of management for her breakdown, but people whose impression of her situation was vague and lacked knowledge. the whole tendency of scientific management toward truth about industry, toward justice, toward a clear personal record of work, established without fear or favor, had inspired something really new and revolutionary in the minds of both the managers and the women workers where the system had been inaugurated. nearly all of them wished to tell and to obtain, as far as they could, the actual truth about the experiment everywhere. almost no one wished to "make out a case." this expressed sense of candor and coöperation on both sides seemed to the present writer more stirring and vital than the gains in wages and hours, far more serious even than the occasional strain on health which the imperfect installation of scientific management had sometimes caused. these strains on women's health in industry in america--stooping and monotony in all the needle trades, jumping on pedals in machine tending, dampness and heat in cotton production, the standing without pause for many hours a day throughout the month, the lifting of heavy weights in packing and in distribution--all these industrial strains for women constitute grave public questions affecting the good fortune of the whole nation and not to be answered in four years, nor by one firm. it is undoubtedly the tendency of scientific management to relieve all these strains. no one can see even in part the complications of contemporary factory work, the hundred operations of human hands and muscles required for placing a single yard of cotton cloth on the market, the thousand threads spinning and twisting, the thousand shuttles flying, the manifold folding and refolding and wrapping and tying, the innumerable girls working, standing, walking by these whirring wheels and twisting threads and high piled folding tables, without feeling strongly that ours is indeed an industrial civilization, and that the conditions of industry not only completely control the lives of uncounted multitudes, but affect in some measure every life in this country to-day. no finer dream was ever dreamed than that the industry by which the nation lives should be so managed as to secure for the men and women engaged in it their real prosperity, their best use of their highest powers. by and large, the great task of common daily work our country does to-day is surely not so managed, either by intent or by result, either for the workers or for the most "successful" owners of dividends. how far scientific management will go toward realizing its magnificent dream in the future will be determined by the greatness of spirit and the executive genius with which its principles are sustained by all the people interested in its inauguration, the employers, the workers, and the engineers. footnotes: [footnote : brief on behalf of traffic committee of commercial organizations of atlantic seaboard, p. . louis d. brandeis.] [footnote : fourteen years ago scientific management was applied to women's work in a rolling machine company in massachusetts. here the women's hours were reduced from - / day to - / ; their wages were increased about per cent; and their output about per cent. all the women had two days' rest a month with pay. the work consisted in inspecting ball-bearings for bicycles. their department of the business, however, closed twelve years ago. accurate facts other than those listed concerning the workers' experience as to hours, wages, and general health under scientific management are at this date too few to be valuable.] [footnote : "academic and industrial efficiency," by f.w. taylor and morris llewellyn cook.] [footnote : the specialistic and detailed care necessary for practical and exact time-study may be indicated by the reproduction below of a method of record used by mr. sanford e. thompson in timing wheelbarrow excavations. (explanation. the letters _a_, _b_, _c_, etc., indicate elementary units of the operation: "filling barrow" = (_a_); "starting" = (_b_); "wheeling full" = (_c_), etc.)] [footnote : "efficiency." harrington emerson.] [footnote : "work, wages and profits," pp. to . h.l. gantt.] [footnote : while the bonus system as a means of compensation has been used very often in connection with the scientific management, it must not, however, be supposed that this method of compensation is alone and in itself scientific management. in fact, as employed without scientific management, it is to be regarded with some apprehension.] [footnote : the work in this department was, besides, rather slack at the time of year when i visited the factory, and wages for some of these workers were $ a week, as low as they had been before the bonus was introduced.] [footnote : the girl who directs them and issues the orders receives a bonus for every stamper earning a bonus and earns on full time from $ to $ .] [footnote : these girls are not employed under the bonus and task system. but it is interesting to observe that they may either sit or stand to iron, as they prefer.] [footnote : the men folders at the heaviest work here now receive with the bonus from $ to $ a week.] [footnote : a worker does not lose her regular wage if she is stopped by a breakage. her time-card is altered. and she has credit on a time basis for the period while the machine is not running. a breakage in the first machine of a tandem pair stops both sewers. but a breakage in the second means that work piles up for the second sewer, and unless she makes it up, she will prevent her companion from earning a bonus, though not a time wage.] [footnote : the management, on learning of this, said the practice would be stopped at once.] [footnote : "the cotton as it grows in the field becomes more or less filled with blown dust.... lint is given off in all processes up to and including spinning.... the only practical way to keep down the dust in all of these operations is by frequent sweeping and mopping the floor and wiping off the machinery." report on condition of women and child wage-earners in the united states. vol. i, p. . "what degree of moisture is safely permissible from the standpoint of the operatives' health is an unsettled question.... when the operative after a day's work in a humid and relaxing atmosphere goes into one relatively drier, the assault on the delicate membrane of the air-passages is sharp. the effect of these changes is greatly to lower the vital resistance and make the worker especially susceptible to pulmonary, bronchial, or catarrhal affections. it is very possible that the dust and lint present in the mill have been credited with effects which are due in part to these atmospheric conditions." report on condition of women and child wage-earners in the united states. vol. i, p. .] [footnote : besides, work had lately been slack, and this had further decreased the wages.] [footnote : since visiting the new jersey cotton mill, the present writer has seen spool tenders at work at a machine requiring no stooping, and provided with a board below the bobbins, placed at such a height, that the worker can relieve her position while standing by resting her weight against the board, above one knee and then above the other.] [footnote : at the same time work was slack so that week wages had dropped to $ and $ .] [footnote : one of the girls issues batches of tickets. another girl unfolds one end of certain of the packages, and inserts a ticket and stamps an outside label, to accord with the invoice system of some of the purchasers. these girls had received before $ . and $ . a week, respectively, and now receive, the one $ . , and the other between $ and $ .] [footnote : all the firms have rest rooms for the girls. the delaware firm and the new jersey cotton mill have pleasant lunch-rooms, where an excellent lunch is provided at cost.] * * * * * +--------------------------------------------------------+ | the following pages contain advertisements of a few of | | the macmillan books on kindred subjects | +--------------------------------------------------------+ _some ethical gains through legislation_ by florence kelley, secretary of the national consumers' league this interesting volume has grown out of the author's experience in philanthropic work in chicago and new york, and her service for the state of illinois and for the federal government in investigating the circumstances of the poorer classes, and conditions in various trades. the value of the work lies in information gathered at close range in a long association with, and effort to improve the condition of, the very poor. cloth, leather back, mo, $ . net; 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"much food is in the tillage of the poor, but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment."--prov. : . "of all arts, tillage or agriculture is doubtless the most useful and necessary, as being the source whence the nation derives its subsistence. the cultivation of the soil causes it to produce an infinite increase. it forms the surest resource and the most solid fund of riches and commerce for a nation that enjoys a happy climate.... the cultivation of the soil deserves the attention of the government, not only on account of the invaluable advantages that flow from it, but from its being an obligation imposed by nature on mankind."--vattel. introduction. this work is an expansion of a paper read at the meeting of the royal historical society in may, , and will be published in the volume of the transactions of that body. but as it is an expensive work, and only accessible to the fellows of that society, and as the subject is one which is now engaging a good deal of public consideration, i have thought it desirable to place it within the reach of those who may not have access to the larger and more expensive work. i am aware that much might be added to the information it contains, and i possess materials which would have more than doubled its size, but i have endeavored to seize upon the salient points, and to express my views as concisely as possible. i have also preferred giving the exact words of important acts of parliament to any description of their objects. if this little essay adds any information upon a subject of much public interest, and contributes to the just settlement of a very important question, i shall consider my labor has not been in vain. joseph fisher. waterford, november , . i do not propose to enter upon the system of landholding in scotland or ireland, which appears to me to bear the stamp of the celtic origin of the people, and which was preserved in ireland long after it had disappeared in other european countries formerly inhabited by the celts. that ancient race may be regarded as the original settlers of a large portion of the european continent, and its land system possesses a remarkable affinity to that of the slavonic, the hindoo, and even the new zealand races. it was originally patriarchal, and then tribal, and was communistic in its character. i do not pretend to great originality in my views. my efforts have been to collect the scattered rays of light, and to bring them to bear upon one interesting topic. the present is the child of the past. the ideas of bygone races affect the practices of living people. we form but parts of a whole; we are influenced by those who preceded us, and we shall influence those who come after us. men cannot disassociate themselves either from the past or the future. in looking at this question there is, i think, a vast difference which has not been sufficiently recognized. it is the broad distinction between the system arising out of the original occupation of land, and that proceeding out of the necessities of conquest; perhaps i should add a third--the complex system proceeding from an amalgamation, or from the existence of both systems in the same nation. some countries have been so repeatedly swept over by the tide of conquest that but little of the aboriginal ideas or systems have survived the flood. others have submitted to a change of governors and preserved their customary laws; while in some there has been such a fusion of the two systems that we cannot decide which of the ingredients was the older, except by a process of analysis and a comparison of the several products of the alembic with the recognized institutions of the class of original or of invading peoples. efforts have been made, and not with very great success, to define the principle which governed the more ancient races with regard to the possession of land. while unoccupied or unappropriated, it was common to every settler. it existed for the use of the whole human race. the process by which that which was common to all became the possession of the individual has not been clearly stated. the earlier settlers were either individuals, families, tribes, or nations. in some cases they were nomadic, and used the natural products without taking possession of the land; in others they occupied districts differently defined. the individual was the unit of the family, the patriarch of the tribe. the commune was formed to afford mutual protection. each sept or tribe in the early enjoyment of the products of the district it selected was governed by its own customary laws. the cohesion of these tribes into states was a slow process; the adoption of a general system of government still slower. the disintegration of the tribal system, and dissolution of the commune, was not evolved out of the original elements of the system itself, but was the effect of conquest; and, as far as i can discover, the appropriation to individuals of land which was common to all, was mainly brought about by conquest, and was guided by impulse rather than regulated by principle. mr. locke thinks that an individual became sole owner of a part of the common heritage by mixing his labor with the land, in fencing it, making wells, or building; and he illustrates his position by the appropriation of wild animals, which are common to all sportsmen, but become the property of him who captures or kills them. this acute thinker seems to me to have fallen into a mistake by confounding land with labor. the improvements were the property of the man who made them, but it by no means follows that the expenditure of labor on land gave any greater right than to the labor itself or its representative. it may not be out of place here to allude to the use of the word property with reference to land; property--from proprium, my own--is something pertaining to man. i have a property in myself. i have the right to be free. all that proceeds from myself, my thoughts, my writings, my works, are property; but no man made land, and therefore it is not property. this incorrect application of the word is the more striking in england, where the largest title a man can have is "tenancy in fee," and a tenant holds but does not own. sir william blackstone places the possession of land upon a different principle. he says that, as society became formed, its instinct was to preserve the peace; and as a man who had taken possession of land could not be disturbed without using force, each man continued to enjoy the use of that which he had taken out of the common stock; but, he adds, that right only lasted as long as the man lived. death put him out of possession, and he could not give to another that which he ceased to possess himself. vattel (book i., chap, vii.) tells us that "the whole earth is destined to feed its inhabitants; but this it would be incapable of doing if it were uncultivated. every nation is then obliged by the law of nature to cultivate the land that has fallen to its share, and it has no right to enlarge its boundaries or have recourse to the assistance of other nations, but in proportion as the land in its possession is incapable of furnishing it with necessaries." he adds (chap. xx.), "when a nation in a body takes possession of a country, everything that is not divided among its members remains common to the whole nation, and is called public property." an ancient irish tract, which forms part of the senchus mor, and is supposed to be a portion of the brehon code, and traceable to the time of st. patrick, speaks of land in a poetically symbolic, but actually realistic manner, and says, "land is perpetual man." all the ingredients of our physical frame come from the soil. the food we require and enjoy, the clothing which enwraps us, the fire which warms us, all save the vital spark that constitutes life, is of the land, hence it is "perpetual man." selden ("titles of honor," p. ), when treating of the title "king of kings," refers to the eastern custom of homage, which consisted not in offering the person, but the elements which composed the person, earth and water--"the perpetual man" of the brehons--to the conqueror. he says: "so that both titles, those of king of kings and great king, were common to those emperors of the two first empires; as also (if we believe the story of judith) that ceremonies of receiving an acknowledgment of regal supremacy (which, by the way, i note here, because it was as homage received by kings in that time from such princes or people as should acknowledge themselves under their subjection) by acceptance upon their demand of earth and water. this demand is often spoken of as used by the persian, and a special example of it is in darius' letters to induthyr, king of the scythians, when he first invites him to the field; but if he would not, then bringing to your sovereign as gifts earth and water, come to a parley. and one of xerxes' ambassadors that came to demand earth and water from the state of lacedaemon, to satisfy him, was thrust into a well and earth cast upon him." the earlier races seem to me, either by reasoning or by instinct, to have arrived at the conclusion that every man was, in right of his being, entitled to food; that food was a product of the land, and therefore every man was entitled to the possession of land, otherwise his life depended upon the will of another. the romans acted on a different principle, which was "the spoil to the victors." he who could not defend and retain his possessions became the slave of the conqueror, all the rights of the vanquished passed to the victor, who took and enjoyed as ample rights to land as those naturally possessed by the aborigines. the system of landholding varies in different countries, and we cannot discover any idea of abstract right underlying the various differing systems; they are the outcome of law, the will of the sovereign power, which is liable to change with circumstances. the word law appears to be used to express two distinct sentiments; one, the will of the sovereign power, which being accompanied with a penalty, bears on its face the idea that it may be broken by the individual who pays the penalty: "thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the tree, for on the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt die," was a law. all laws, whether emanating from an absolute monarch or from the representatives of the majority of a state, are mere expressions of the will of the sovereign power, which may be exacted by force. the second use of the word law is a record of our experience--e.g., we see the tides ebb and flow, and conclude it is done in obedience to the will of a sovereign power; but the word in that sense does not imply any violation or any punishment. a distinction must also be drawn between laws and codes; the former existed before the latter. the lex non scripta prevailed before letters were invented. every command of the decalogue was issued, and punishment followed for its breach, before the existence of the engraved tables. the brehon code, the justinian code, the draconian code, were compilations of existing laws; and the same may be said of the common or customary law of england, of france, and of germany. i am aware that recent analytical writers have sought to associate law with force, and to hold that law is a command, and must have behind it sufficient force to compel submission. these writers find at the outset of their examination, that customary law, the "lex non scripta," existed before force, and that the nomination to sovereign power was the outcome of the more ancient customary law. these laws appear based upon the idea of common good, and to have been supported by the "posse comitatus" before standing armies or state constabularies were formed. vattel says (book i., chap. ii.), "it is evident that men form a political society, and submit to laws solely for their own advantage and safety. the sovereign authority is then established only for the common good of all the citizens. the sovereign thus clothed with the public authority, with everything that constitutes the moral personality of the nation, of course becomes bound by the moral obligations of that nation and invested with its rights." it appears evident, that customary law was the will of small communities, when they were sovereign; that the cohesion of such communities was a confirmation of such customs of each, that the election of a monarch or a parliament was a recognition of these customs, and that the moral and material force or power of the sovereign was the outcome of existing laws, and a confirmation thereof. the application of the united force of the nation could be rightfully directed to the requirements of ancient, though unwritten customary law, and it could only be displaced by legislation, in which those concerned took part. the duty of the sovereign (which in the united kingdom means the crown and the two branches of the legislature) with regard to land, is thus described by vattel: "of all arts, tillage or agriculture is doubtless the most useful and necessary, as being the source whence the nation derives its subsistence. the cultivation of the soil causes it to produce an infinite increase. it forms the surest resource, and the most solid fund of riches and commerce for a nation that enjoys a happy climate. the sovereign ought to neglect no means of rendering the land under his jurisdiction as well cultivated as possible.... notwithstanding the introduction of private property among the citizens, the nation has still the right to take the most effectual measures to cause the aggregate soil of the country to produce the greatest and most advantageous revenue possible. the cultivation of the soil deserves the attention of the government, not only on account of the invaluable advantages that flow from it, but from its being an obligation imposed by nature on mankind." sir henry maine thinks that there are traces in england of the commune or mark system in the village communities which are believed to have existed, but these traces are very faint. the subsequent changes were inherent in, and developed by, the various conquests that swept over england; even that ancient class of holdings called "borough english," are a development of a war-like system, under which each son, as he came to manhood, entered upon the wars, and left the patrimonial lands to the youngest son. the system of gavel-kind which prevailed in the kingdom of kent, survived the accession of william of normandy, and was partially effaced in the reign of henry vii. it was not the aboriginal or communistic system, but one of its many successors. the various systems may have run one into the other, but i think there are sufficiently distinct features to place them in the following order: st. the aboriginal. d. the roman, population about , , . d. the scandinavian under the anglo-saxon and danish kings--a.d. to a.d. . the population in was , , . th. the norman, from a.d. to a.d. . the population in the latter year was , , . th. the plantagenet, from to ; in the latter the population was , , . th. the tudor, to , when the population was , , . th. the stuarts, to , the population having risen to , , . th. the present, from . down to the soil supported the population; now about one half lives upon food produced in other countries. in the population was , , . each of these periods has its own characteristic, but as i must compress my remarks, you must excuse my passing rapidly from one to the other. i. the aborigines. the aboriginal period is wrapped in darkness, and i cannot with certainty say whether the system that prevailed was celtic and tribal. an old french customary, in a ms. treating upon the antiquity of tenures, says: "the first english king divided the land into four parts. he gave one part to the arch flamens to pray for him and his posterity. a second part he gave to the earls and nobility, to do him knight's service. a third part he divided among husbandmen, to hold of him in socage. the fourth he gave to mechanical persons to hold in burgage." the terms used apply to a much more recent period and more modern ideas. caesar tells us "that the island of britain abounds in cattle, and the greatest part of those within the country never sow their land, but live on flesh and milk. the sea-coasts are inhabited by colonies from belgium, which, having established themselves in britain, began to cultivate the soil." diodorus siculus says, "the britons, when they have reaped their corn, by cutting the ears from the stubble, lay them up for preservation in subterranean caves or granaries. from thence, they say, in very ancient times, they used to take a certain quantity of ears out every day, and having dried and bruised the grains, made a kind of food for their immediate use." jeffrey of monmouth relates that one of the laws of dunwalls molnutus, who is said to have reigned b.c. , enacted that the ploughs of the husbandmen, as well as the temples of the gods, should be sanctuaries to such criminals as fled to them for protection. tacitus states that the britons were not a free people, but were under subjection to many different kings. dr. henry, quoting tacitus, says, "in the ancient german and british nation the whole riches of the people consisted in their flocks and herds; the laws of succession were few and simple: a man's cattle, at death, were equally divided among his sons; or, if he had no sons, his daughters; or if he had no children, among his nearest relations. these nations seem to have had no idea of the rights of primogeniture, or that the eldest son had any title to a larger share of his father's effects than the youngest." the population of england was scanty, and did not probably exceed a million of inhabitants. they were split up into a vast number of petty chieftainries or kingdoms; there was no cohesion, no means of communication between them; there was no sovereign power which could call out and combine the whole strength of the nation. no single chieftain could oppose to the romans a greater force than that of one of its legions, and when a footing was obtained in the island, the war became one of detail; it was a provincial rather that a national contest. the brave, though untrained and ill-disciplined warriors, fell before the romans, just as the red man of north america was vanquished by the english settlers. ii. the roman. the romans acted with regard to all conquered nations upon the maxim, "to the victors the spoils." britain was no exception. the romans were the first to discover or create an estate of uses in land, as distinct from an estate of possession. the more ancient nations, the jews and the greeks, never recognized the estate of uses, though there is some indication of it in the relation established by joseph in egypt, when, during the years of famine, he purchased for pharaoh the lands of the people. the romans having seized upon lands in italy belonging to conquered nations, considered them public lands, and rented them to the soldiery, thus retaining for the state the estate in the lands, but giving the occupier an estate of uses. the rent of these public lands was fixed at one tenth of the produce, and this was termed usufruct--the use of the fruits. the british chiefs, who submitted to the romans, were subjected to a tribute or rent in corn; it varied, according to circumstances, from one fifth to one twentieth of the produce. the grower was bound to deliver it at the prescribed places. this was felt to be a great hardship, as they were often obliged to carry the grain great distances, or pay a bribe to be excused. this oppressive law was altered by julius agricola. the romans patronized agriculture--cato says, "when the romans designed to bestow the highest praise on a good man, they used to say he understood agriculture well, and is an excellent husbandman, for this was esteemed the greatest and most honorable character." their system produced a great alteration in britain, and converted it into the most plentiful province of the empire; it produced sufficient corn for its own inhabitants, for the roman legions, and also afforded a great surplus, which was sent up the rhine. the emperor julian built new granaries in germany, in which he stored the corn brought from britain. agriculture had greatly improved in england under the romans. the romans do not appear to have established in england any military tenures of land, such as those they created along the danube and the rhine; nor do they appear to have taken possession of the land; the tax they imposed upon it, though paid in kind, was more of the nature of a tribute than a rent. though some of the best of the soldiers in the roman legions were britons, yet their rule completely enervated the aboriginal inhabitants--they were left without leaders, without cohesion. their land was held by permission of the conquerors. the wall erected at so much labor in the north of england proved a less effectual barrier against the incursions of the picts and scots than the living barrier of armed men which, at a later period, successfully repelled their invasions. the roman rule affords another example that material prosperity cannot secure the liberties of a people, that they must be armed and prepared to repel by force any aggression upon their liberty or their estates. "who will be free, themselves must strike the blow." the prosperous "britons," who were left by the romans in possession of the island, were but feeble representatives of those who, under caractacus and boadicea, did not shrink from combat with the legions of caesar. uninured to arms, and accustomed to obedience, they looked for a fresh master, and sunk into servitude and serfdom, from which they never emerged. yet under the romans they had thriven and increased in material wealth; the island abounded in numerous flocks and herds; and agriculture, which was encouraged by the romans, flourished. this wealth was by one of the temptations to the invaders, who seized not only upon the movable wealth of the natives, but also upon the land, and divided it among themselves. the warlike portion of the aboriginal inhabitants appear to have joined the cymri and retired westward. their system of landholding was non-feudal, inasmuch as each man's land was divided among all his sons. one of the laws of hoel dha, king of wales in the tenth century, decreed "that the youngest son shall have an equal share of the estate with the eldest son, and that when the brothers have divided their father's estate among them, the youngest son shall have the best house with all the office houses; the implements of husbandry, his father's kettle, his axe for cutting wood, and his knife; these three last things the father cannot give away by gift, nor leave by his last will to any but his youngest son, and if they are pledged they shall be redeemed." it may not be out of place here to say that this custom continued to exist in wales; and on its conquest edward i. ordained, "whereas the custom is otherwise in wales than england concerning succession to an inheritance, inasmuch as the inheritance is partible among the heirs-male, and from time whereof the memory of man is not to the contrary hath been partible, our lord the king will not have such custom abrogated, but willeth that inheritance shall remain partible among like heirs as it was wont to be, with this exception that bastards shall from henceforth not inherit, and also have portions with the lawful heirs; and if it shall happen that any inheritance should hereafter, upon failure of heirs-male, descend to females, the lawful heirs of their ancestors last served thereof. we will, of our especial grace, that the same women shall have their portions thereof, although this be contrary to the custom of wales before used." the land system of wales, so recognized and regulated by edward i., remained unchanged until the reign of the first tudor monarch. its existence raises the presumption that the aboriginal system of landholding in england gave each son a share of his father's land, and if so, it did not correspond with the germanic system described by caesar, nor with the tribal system of the celts in ireland, nor with the feudal system subsequently introduced. the polity of the romans, which endured in gaul, spain, and italy, and tinged the laws and usages of these countries after they had been occupied by the goths, totally disappeared in england; and even christianity, which partially prevailed under the romans, was submerged beneath the flood of invasion. save the material evidence of the footprints of "the masters of the world" in the roman roads, roman wall, and some other structures, there is no trace of the romans in england. their polity, laws, and language alike vanished, and did not reappear for centuries, when their laws and language were reimported. i should not be disposed to estimate the population of england and wales, at the retirement of the romans, at more than , , . they were like a flock of sheep without masters, and, deprived of the watch-dogs which over-awed and protected them, fell an easy prey to the invaders. iii. the scandinavians. the roman legions and the outlying semi-military settlements along the rhine and the danube, forming a cordon reaching from the german ocean to the black sea, kept back the tide of barbarians, but the volume of force accumulated behind the barrier, and at length it poured in an overwhelming and destructive tide over the fair and fertile provinces whose weak and effeminate people offered but a feeble resistance to the robust armies of the north. the romans, under the instruction of caesar and tacitus, had a faint idea of the usages of the people inhabiting the verge that lay around the roman dominions, but they had no knowledge of the influences that prevailed in "the womb of nations," as central europe appeared to the latins, who saw emerging therefrom hosts of warriors, bearing with them their wives, their children, and their portable effects, determined to win a settlement amid the fertile regions owned and improved by the romans. these incursions were not colonization in the sense in which rome understood it; they were the migrations of a people, and were as full, as complete, and as extensive as the israelitish invasion of canaan--they were more destructive of property, but less fatal to life. these migratory hosts left a desert behind them, and they either gained a settlement or perished. the roman colonies preserved their connection with the parent stem, and invoked aid when in need; but the barbarian hosts had no home, no reserves. other races, moving with similar intent, settled on the land they had vacated. these brought their own social arrangements, and it is very difficult to connect the land system established by the aborigines with the system which, after a lapse of some hundreds of years, was found to prevail in another tribe or nation which had occupied the region that had been vacated. neither caesar nor tacitus gives us any idea of the habits or usages of the people who lived north of the belgae. they had no notion of scandinavia nor of sclavonia. the walhalla of the north, with its terrific deities, was unknown to them; and i am disposed to think that we shall look in vain among the customs of the teutons for the basis from whence came the polity established in england by the invaders of the fifth century. the anglo-saxons came from a region north of the elbe, which we call schleswig--holstein. they were kindred to the norwegians and the danes, and of the family of the sea robbers; they were not teutons, for the teutons were not and are not sailors. the belgae colonized part of the coast--i.e., the settlers maintained a connection with the mainland; but the angles, the saxons, and the jutes did not colonize, they migrated; they left no trace of their occupancy in the lands they vacated. each separate invasion was the settlement of a district; each leader aspired to sovereignty, and was supreme in his own domains; each claimed descent from woden, and, like romulus or alexander, sought affinity with the gods. each member of the heptarchy was independent of, and owed no allegiance to, the other members; and marriage or conquest united them ultimately into one kingdom. the primary institutions were moulded by time and circumstance, and the state of things in the eleventh century was as different from that of the fifth as those of our own time differ from the rule of richard ii. yet one was as much an outgrowth of its predecessor as the other. attempts have been made, with considerable ingenuity, to connect races with each other by peculiar characteristics, but human society has the same necessities, and we find great similarity in various divisions of society. at all times, and in all nations, society resolved itself into the upper, middle, and lower classes. rome had its nobles, plebeians, and slaves; germany its edhilingi, frilingi, and lazzi; england its eaorls, thanes, and ceorls. it would be equally cogent to argue that, because rome had three classes and england had three classes, the latter was derived from the former, as to conclude that, because germany had three classes, therefore english institutions were teutonic. if the invasion of the fifth century were teutonic we should look for similar nomenclature, but there is as great a dissimilarity between the english and german names of the classes as between the former and those of rome. the germanic mark system has no counterpart in the land system introduced into england by the anglo-saxons. if village communities existed in england, it must have been before the invasion of the romans. the german system, as described by caesar, was suited to nomads--to races on the wing, who gave to no individual possession for more than a year, that there might be no home ties. the mark system is of a later date, and was evidently the arrangement of other races who permanently settled themselves upon the lands vacated by the older nations. and i may suggest whether, as these lands were originally inhabited by the celts, the conquerors did not adopt the system of the conquered. even in the nomenclature of feudalism, introduced into england in the fifth century, we are driven back to scandinavia for an explanation. the word feudal as applied to land has a norwegian origin, from which country came rollo, the progenitor of william the norman. pontoppidan ("history of norway," p. ) says "the odhall, right of norway, and the udall, right of finland, came from the words 'odh,' which signifies proprietors, and 'all,' which means totum. a transposition of these syllables makes all odh, or allodium, which means absolute property. fee, which means stipend or pay, united with oth, thus forming fee-oth or feodum, denoting stipendiary property. wacterus states that the word allode, allodium, which applies to land in germany, is composed of an and lot--i.e., land obtained by lot. i therefore venture the opinion that the settlement of england in the fifth and sixth centuries was not teutonic or germanic, but scandinavian. the lands won by the swords of all were the common property of all; they were the lands of the people, folc-land; they were distributed by lot at the folc-gemot; they were odh-all lands; they were not held of any superior nor was there any service save that imposed by the common danger. the chieftains were elected and obeyed, because they represented the entire people. hereditary right seems to have been unknown. the essence of feudalism was a life estate, the land reverted either to the sovereign or to the people upon the death of the occupant. at a later period the monarch claimed the power of confiscating land, and of giving it away by charter or deed; and hence arose the distinction between folc-land and boc-land (the land of the book or charter), a distinction somewhat similar to the freehold and copyhold tenures of the present day. king alfred the great bequeathed "his boc-land to his nearest relative; and if any of them have children it is more agreeable to me that it go to those born on the male side." he adds, "my grandfather bequeathed his land on the spear side, not on the spindle side; therefore if i have given what he acquired to any on the female side, let my kinsman make compensation." the several ranks were thus defined by athelstane: " st. it was whilom in the laws of the english that the people went by ranks, and these were the counsellors of the nation, of worship worthy each according to his condition--'eorl,' 'ceorl,' 'thegur,' and 'theodia.' " d. if a ceorl thrived, so that he had fully five hides ( acres) of land, church and kitchen, bell-house and back gatescal, and special duty in the king's hall, then he was thenceforth of thane-right worthy. " d. and if a thane thrived so that he served the king, and on his summons rode among his household, if he then had a thane who him followed, who to the king utward five hides, had, and in the king's hall served his lord, and thence, with his errand, went to the king, he might thenceforth, with his fore oath, his lord represent at various needs, and his and his plant lawfully conduct wheresoever he ought. " th. and he who so prosperous a vicegerent had not, swore for himself according to his right or it forfeited. " th. and if a 'thane' thrived so that he became an eorl, then was he thenceforth of eorl-right worthy. " th. and if a merchant thrived so that he fared thrice over the wide sea by his own means (or vessels), then was he thenceforth of thane-right worthy." the oath of fealty, as prescribed by the law of edward and guthrum, was very similar to that used at a later period, and ran thus: "thus shall a man swear fealty: by the lord, before whom this relic is holy, i will be faithful and true, and love all that he loves, and shun all that he shuns, according to god's law, and according to the world's principles, and never by will nor by force, by word nor by work, do aught of what is loathful to him, on condition that he me keep, as i am willing to deserve, and all that fulfil, that our agreement was, when i to him submitted and chose his will." the odh-all (noble) land was divided into two classes: the in-lands, which were farmed by slaves under bailiffs, and the out-lands, which were let to ceorls either for one year or for a term. the rents were usually paid in kind, and were a fixed proportion of the produce. ina, king of the west saxons, fixed the rent of ten hides ( acres), in the beginning of the eighth century, as follows: casks honey, casks strong ale, casks small ale, loaves bread, oxen, wedders, geese, hens, chickens, cheeses, cask butter, salmon, lbs. forage, and eels. in the reign of edgar the peaceable (tenth century), land was sold for about four shillings of the then currency per acre. the abbot of ely bought an estate about this time, which was paid for at the rate of four sheep or one horse for each acre. the freemen (liberi homines) were a very numerous class, and all were trained in the use of arms. their folc-land was held under the penalty of forfeiture if they did not take the field, whenever required for the defence of the country. in addition, a tax, called danegeld, was levied at a rate varying from two shillings to seven shillings per hide of land ( acres); and in , each owner of a large estate, hides, was called on to furnish a ship for the navy. selden ("laws and government of england," p. ) thus describes the freemen among the saxons, previous to the conquest: "the next and most considerable degree of all the people is that of the freemen, anciently called frilingi, [footnote: this is a teutonic, not an anglo-saxon term; the anglo-saxon word is thane.] or free-born, or such as are born free from all yoke of arbitrary power, and from all law of compulsion, other than what is made by their voluntary consent, for all freemen have votes in the making and executing of the general laws of the kingdom. in the first, they differed from the gauls, of whom it is noted that the commons are never called to council, nor are much better than servants. in the second, they differ from many free people, and are a degree more excellent, being adjoined to the lords in judicature, both by advice and power (consilium et authoritates adsunt), and therefore those that were elected to that work were called comites ex plebe, and made one rank of freemen for wisdom superior to the rest. another degree of these were beholden for their riches, and were called custodes pagani, an honorable title belonging to military service, and these were such as had obtained an estate of such value as that their ordinary arms were a helmet, a coat of mail, and a gilt sword. the rest of the freemen were contented with the name of ceorls, and had as sure a title to their own liberties as the custodes pagani or the country gentlemen had." land was liable to be seized upon for treason and forfeited; but even after the monarchs had assumed the functions of the folc-gemot, they were not allowed to give land away without the approval of the great men; charters were consented to and witnessed in council. "there is scarcely a charter extant," says chief baron gilbert, "that is not proof of this right." the grant of baldred, king of kent, of the manor of malling, in sussex, was annulled because it was given without the consent of the council. the subsequent gift thereof, by egbert and athelwolf, was made with the concurrence and assent of the great men. the kings' charters of escheated lands, to which they had succeeded by a personal right, usually declared "that it might be known that what they gave was their own." discussions have at various times taken place upon the question, "was the land-system of this period feudal?" it engaged the attention of the irish court of king's bench, in the reign of charles i., and was raised in this way: james i. had issued "a commission of defective titles." any irish owner, upon surrendering his land to the king, got a patent which reconvened it on him. wentworth (lord stafford) wished to settle connaught, as ulster had been settled in the preceding reign, and, to accomplish it, tried to break the titles granted under "the commission of defective titles." lord dillon's case, which is still quoted as an authority, was tried. the plea for the crown alleged that the honor of the monarch stood before his profit, and as the commissioners were only authorized to issue patents to hold in capite, whereas they had given title "to hold in capite, by knights' service out of dublin castle," the grant was bad. in the course of the argument, the existence of feudal tenures, before the landing of william of normandy, was discussed, and sir henry spelman's views, as expressed in the glossary, were considered. the court unanimously decided that feudalism existed in england under the anglo-saxons, and it affirmed that sir henry spelman was wrong. this decision led sir henry spelman to write his "treatise on feuds," which was published after his death, in which he reasserted the opinion that feudalism was introduced into england at the norman invasion. this decision must, however, be accepted with a limitation; i think there was no separate order of nobility under the anglo-saxon rule. the king had his councillors, but there appears to have been no order between him and the folc-gemot. the earls and the thanes met with the people, but did not form a separate body. the thanes were country gentleman, not senators. the outcome of the heptarchy was the earls or ealdermen; this was the only order of nobility among the saxons; they corresponded to the position of lieutenants of counties, and were appointed for life. in there were nine such officers; in there were but six. harold's earldom, at the former date, comprised norfolk, suffolk, essex, and middlesex; and godwin's took in the whole south coast from sandwich to the land's end, and included kent, sussex, hampshire, wilts, devonshire, and cornwall. upon the death of godwin, harold resigned his earldom, and took that of godwin, the bounds being slightly varied. harold retained his earldom after he became king, but on his death it was seized upon by the conqueror, and divided among his followers. the crown relied upon the liberi homines or freemen. the country was not studded with castles filled with armed men. the house of the thane was an unfortified structure, and while the laws relating to land were, in my view, essentially feudal, the government was different from that to which we apply the term feudalism, which appears to imply baronial castles, armed men, and an oppressed people. i venture to suggest to some modern writers that further inquiry will show them that folc-land was not confined to commonages, or unallotted portions, but that at the beginning it comprised all the land of the kingdom, and that the occupant did not enjoy it as owner-in-severalty; he had a good title against his fellow subjects, but he held under the folc-gemot, and was subject to conditions. the consolidation of the sovereignty, the extension of laws of forfeiture, the assumption by the kings of the rights of the popular assemblies, all tended to the formation of a second set of titles, and boc-land became an object of ambition. the same individual appears to have held land by both titles, and to have had greater powers over the latter than over the former. many of those who have written on the subject seem to me to have failed to grasp either the object or the genius of feudalism. it was the device of conquerors to maintain their possessions, and is not to be found among nations, the original occupiers of the land, nor in the conquests of states which maintained standing armies. the invading hosts elected their chieftain, they and he had only a life use of the conquests. upon the death of one leader another was elected, so upon the death of the allottee of a piece of land it reverted to the state. the genius of feudalism was life ownership and non-partition. hence the oath of fealty was a personal obligation, and investiture was needful before the new feudee took possession. the state, as represented by the king or chieftain, while allowing the claim of the family, exercised its right to select the individual. all the lands were considered beneficia, a word which now means a charge upon land, to compensate for duties rendered to the state. under this system, the feudatory was a commander, his residence a barrack, his tenants soldiers; it was his duty to keep down the aborigines, and to prevent invasion. he could neither sell, give, nor bequeath his land. he received the surplus revenue as payment for personal service, and thus enjoyed his benefice. judged in this way, i think the feudal system existed before the norman conquest. slavery and serfdom undoubtedly prevailed. the country prospered under the scandinavians; and, from the great abundance of corn, william of poitiers calls england "the store-house of ceres." iv. the normans. the invasion of william of normandy led to results which have been represented by some writers as having been the most momentous in english history. i do not wish in any way to depreciate their views, but it seems to me not to have been so disastrous to existing institutions, as the scandinavian invasion, which completely submerged all former usages. no trace of roman occupation survived the advent of the anglo-saxons; the population was reduced to and remained in the position of serfs, whereas the norman invasion preserved the existing institutions of the nation, and subsequent changes were an outgrowth thereof. when edward the confessor, the last descendant of cedric, was on his deathbed, he declared harold to be his successor, but william of normandy claimed the throne under a previous will of the same monarch. he asked for the assistance of his own nobles and people in the enterprise, but they refused at first, on the ground that their feudal compact only required them to join in the defence of their country, and did not coerce them into affording him aid in a completely new enterprise; and it was only by promising to compensate them out of the spoils that he could secure their co-operation. a list of the number of ships supplied by each norman chieftain appears in lord lyttleton's "history of henry iii." vol. i., appendix. i need hardly remind you that the settlers in normandy were from norway, or that they had been expelled from their native land in consequence of their efforts to subvert its institutions, and to make the descent of land hereditary, instead of being divisible among all the sons of the former owner. nor need i relate how they won and held the fair provinces of northern france--whether as a fief of the french crown or not, is an open question. but i should wish you to bear in mind their affinity to the anglo-saxons, to the danes, and to the norwegians, the family of sea robbers, whose ravages extended along the coasts of europe as far south as gibraltar, and, as some allege, along the mediterranean. some questions have been raised as to the means of transport of the saxons, the jutes, and the angles, but they were fully as extensive as those by which rollo invaded france or william invaded england. william strengthened his claim to the throne by his military success, and by a form of election, for which there were many previous precedents. those who called upon him to ascend it alleged "that they had always been ruled by legal power, and desired to follow in that respect the example of their ancestors, and they knew of no one more worthy than himself to hold the reins of government." his alleged title to the crown, sanctioned by success and confirmed by election, enabled him, in conformity with existing institutions, to seize upon the lands of harold and his adherents, and to grant them as rewards to his followers. such confiscation and gifts were entirely in accord with existing usages, and the great alteration which took place in the principal fiefs was more a change of persons than of law. a large body of the aboriginal people had been, and continued to be, serfs or villeins; while the mass of the freemen (liberi homines) remained in possession of their holdings. it may not be out of place here to say a few words about this important class, which is in reality the backbone of the british constitution; it was the mainstay of the anglo-saxon monarchy; it lost its influence during the civil wars of the plantagenets, but reasserted its power under cromwell. dr. robertson thus draws the line between them and the vassals: "in the same manner liber homo is commonly opposed to vassus or vassalus, the former denoting an allodial proprietor, the latter one who held of a superior. these freemen were under an obligation to serve the state, and this duty was considered so sacred that freemen were prohibited from entering into holy orders, unless they obtained the consent of the sovereign." de lolme, chap. i., sec. , says: "the liber homo, or freeman, has existed in this country from the earliest periods, as well as of authentic as of traditionary history, entitled to that station in society as one of his constitutional rights, as being descended from free parents in contradistinction to 'villains,' which should be borne in remembrance, because the term 'freeman' has been, in modern times, perverted from its constitutional signification without any statutable authority." the liberi homines are so described in the doomsday book. they were the only men of honor, faith, trust, and reputation in the kingdom; and from among such of these as were not barons, the knights did choose jurymen, served on juries themselves, bare offices, and dispatched country business. many of the liberi homines held of the king in capite, and several were freeholders of other persons in military service. their rights were recognized and guarded by the th william i.; [footnote: "lv.--de chartilari seu feudorum jure et ingenuorum immunitate. volumus etiam ac firmiter praecipimus et concedimus ut omnes liberi homines totius monarchiae regni nostri praedicti habeant et teneant terras suas et possessiones suas bene et in pace, liberi ab omni, exactione iniusta et ab omni tallagio: ita quod nihil ab eis exigatur vel capiatur nisi servicium suum liberum quod de iure nobis facere debent et facere tenentur et prout statutum est eis et illis a nobis datum et concessum iure haereditario imperpetuum per commune consilium totius regni nostri praeicti."] it is entitled: "concerning cheutilar or feudal rights, and the immunity of freemen. "we will also, and strictly, enjoin and concede that all freemen (liberi homines) of our whole kingdom aforesaid, have and hold their land and possessions well and in peace, free from every unjust exaction and from tallage, so that nothing be exacted or taken from them except their free service, which of right they ought to do to us and are bound to do, and according as it was appointed (statutum) to them, and given to them by us, and conceded by hereditary right for ever, by the common council (folc-gemot} of our whole realm aforesaid." these freemen were not created by the norman conquest, they existed prior thereto; and the laws, of which this is one, are declared to be the laws of edward the confessor, which william re-enacted. selden, in "the laws and government of england," p. , speaks of this law as the first magna charta. he says: "lastly, the one law of the kings, which may be called the first magna charta in the norman times ( william i.), by which the king reserved to himself, from the freemen of this kingdom, nothing but their free service, in the conclusion saith that their lands were thus granted to them in inheritance of the king by the common council (folc-gemot) of the whole kingdom; and so asserts, in one sentence, the liberty of the freemen, and of the representative body of the kingdom." he further adds: "the freedom of an englishman consisteth of three particulars: first, in ownership; second, in voting any law, whereby ownership is maintained; and, thirdly, in having an influence upon the judiciary power that must apply the law. now the english, under the normans, enjoyed all this freedom with each man's own particular, besides what they had in bodies aggregate. this was the meaning of the normans, and they published the same to the world in a fundamental law, whereby is granted that all freemen shall have and hold their lands and possessions in hereditary right for ever; and by this they being secured from forfeiture, they are further saved from all wrong by the same law, which provideth that they shall hold them well or quietly, and in peace, free from all unjust tax, and from all tallage, so as nothing shall be exacted nor taken but their free service, which, by right, they are bound to perform." this is expounded in the law of henry i., cap. , to mean that no tribute or tax shall be taken but what was due in the confessor's time, and edward ii. was sworn to observe the laws of the confessor. the nation was not immediately settled. rebellions arose either from the oppression of the invaders or the restlessness of the conquered; and, as each outburst was put down by force, there were new lands to be distributed among the adherents of the monarch; ultimately there were about chief tenants holding in capite, but the nation was divided into , knights' fees, of which the church held , . the king retained in his own hands manors, besides a great number of forests, parks, chases, farms, and houses, in all parts of the kingdom; and his followers received very large holdings. among the saxon families who retained their land was one named shobington in bucks. hearing that the norman lord was coming to whom the estate had been gifted by the king, the head of the house armed his servants and tenants, preparing to do battle for his rights; he cast up works, which remain to this day in grassy mounds, marking the sward of the park, and established himself behind them to await the despoiler's onset. it was the period when hundreds of herds of wild cattle roamed the forest lands of britain, and, failing horses, the shobingtons collected a number of bulls, rode forth on them, and routed the normans, unused to such cavalry. william heard of the defeat, and conceived a respect for the brave man who had caused it; he sent a herald with a safe conduct to the chief, shobington, desiring to speak with him. not many days after, came to court eight stalwart men riding upon bulls, the father and seven sons. "if thou wilt leave me my lands, o king," said the old man, "i will serve thee faithfully as i did the dead harold." whereupon the conqueror confirmed him in his ownership, and named the family bullstrode, instead of shobington. sir martin wright, in his "treatise on tenures," published in , p. , remarks: "though it is true that the possessions of the normans were of a sudden very great, and that they received most of them from the hands of william i., yet it does not follow that the king took all the lands of england out of the hands of their several owners, claiming them as his spoils of war, or as a parcel of a conquered country; but, on the contrary, it appears pretty plain from the history of those times that the king either had or pretended title to the crown, and that his title, real or pretended, was established by the death of harold, which amounted to an unquestionable judgment in his favor. he did not therefore treat his opposers as enemies, but as traitors, agreeably to the known laws of the kingdom which subjected traitors not only to the loss of life but of all their possessions." he adds (p. ): "as william i. did not claim to possess himself of the lands of england as the spoils of conquest, so neither did he tyrannically and arbitrarily subject them to feudal dependence; but, as the fedual law was at that time the prevailing law of europe, william i., who had always governed by this policy, might probably recommend it to our ancestors as the most obvious and ready way to put them upon a footing with their neighbors, and to secure the nation against any future attempts from them. we accordingly find among the laws of william i. a law enacting feudal law itself, not eo nomine, but in effect, inasmuch as it requires from all persons the same engagements to, and introduces the same dependence upon, the king as supreme lord of all the lands of england, as were supposed to be due to a supreme lord by the feudal law. the law i mean is the lii. law of william i." this view is adopted by sir william blackstone, who writes (vol. ii., p. ): "from the prodicious slaughter of the english nobility at the battle of hastings, and the fruitless insurrection of those who survived, such numerous forfeitures had accrued that he (william) was able to reward his norman followers with very large and extensive possessions, which gave a handle to monkish historians, and such as have implicitly followed them to represent him as having by the right of the sword, seized upon all the lands of england, and dealt them out again to his own favorites--a supposition grounded upon a mistaken sense of the word conquest, which in its feudal acceptation signifies no more than acquisition, and this has led many hasty writers into a strange historical mistake, and one which, upon the slightest examination, will be found to be most untrue. "we learn from a saxon chronicle (a.d. ), that in the nineteenth year of king william's reign, an invasion was apprehended from denmark; and the military constitution of the saxons being then laid aside, and no other introduced in its stead, the kingdom was wholly defenceless; which occasioned the king to bring over a large army of normans and britons who were quartered upon, and greatly oppressed, the people. this apparent weakness, together with the grievances occasioned by a foreign force, might co-operate with the king's remonstrance, and better incline the nobility to listen to his proposals for putting them in a position of defence. for, as soon as the danger was over, the king held a great council to inquire into the state of the nation, the immediate consequence of which was the compiling of the great survey called the doomsday book, which was finished the next year; and in the end of that very year ( ) the king was attended by all his nobility at sarum, where the principal landholders submitted their lands to the yoke of military tenure, and became the king's vassals, and did homage and fealty to his person." mr. henry hallam writes: "one innovation made by william upon the feudal law is very deserving of attention. by the leading principle of feuds, an oath of fealty was due from the vassal to the lord of whom he immediately held the land, and no other. the king of france long after this period had no feudal, and scarcely any royal, authority over the tenants of his own vassals; but william received at salisbury, in , the fealty of all landholders in england, both those who held in chief and their tenants, thus breaking in upon the feudal compact in its most essential attribute--the exclusive dependence of a vassal upon his lord; and this may be reckoned among the several causes which prevented the continental notions of independence upon the crown from ever taking root among the english aristocracy." a more recent writer, mr. freeman ("history of the norman conquest," published in , vol. iv., p. ), repeats the same idea, though not exactly in the same words. after describing the assemblage which encamped in the plains around salisbury, he says: "in this great meeting a decree was passed, which is one of the most memorable pieces of legislation in the whole history of england. in other lands where military tenure existed, it was beginning to be held that he who plighted his faith to a lord, who was the man of the king, was the man of that lord only, and did not become the man of the king himself. it was beginning to be held that if such a man followed his immediate lord to battle against the common sovereign, the lord might draw on himself the guilt of treason, but the men that followed him would be guiltless. william himself would have been amazed if any vassal of his had refused to draw his sword in a war with france on the score of duty toward an over-lord. but in england, at all events, william was determined to be full king over the whole land, to be immediate sovereign and immediate lord of every man. a statute was passed that every freeman in the realm should take the oath of fealty to king william." mr. freeman quotes stubbs's "select charters," p. , as his authority. stubbs gives the text of that charter, with ten others. he says: "these charters are from 'textus roffensis,' a manuscript written during the reign of henry i.; it contains the sum and substance of all the legal enactments made by the conqueror independent of his confirmation of the earlier laws." it is as follows: "statuimus etiam ut omnis liber homo feodere et sacramento affirmet, quod intra et extra angliam willelmo regi fideles esse volunt, terras et honorem illius omni fidelitate cum eo servare et eum contra inimicos defendere." it will be perceived that mr. hallam reads liber homo as "vassal." mr. freeman reads them as "freeman," while the older authority, sir martin wright, says: "i have translated the words liberi homines, 'owners of land,' because the sense agrees best with the tenor of the law." the views of writers of so much eminence as sir martin wright, sir william blackstone, mr. henry hallam, and mr. freeman, are entitled to the greatest respect and consideration, and it is with much diffidence i venture to differ from them. the three older writers appear to have had before them the lii of william i., the latter the alleged charter found in the "textus roffensis;" but as they are almost identical in expression, i treat the latter as a copy of the former, and i do not think it bears out the interpretation sought to be put upon it--that it altered either the feudalism of england, or the relation of the vassal to his lord; and it must be borne in mind that not only did william derive his title to the crown from edward the confessor, but he preserved the apparent continuity, and re-enacted the laws of his predecessor. wilkins' "laws of the anglo-saxons and normans," republished in by the record commissioners, gives the following introduction: "here begin the laws of edward, the glorious king of england. "after the fourth year of the succession to the kingdom of william of this land, that is england, he ordered all the english noble and wise men and acquainted with the law, through the whole country, to be summoned before his council of barons, in order to be acquainted with their customs, having therefore selected from all the counties twelve, they were sworn solemnly to proceed as diligently as they might to write their laws and customs, nothing omitting, nothing adding, and nothing changing." then follow the laws, thirty-nine in number, thus showing the continuity of system, and proving that william imposed upon his norman followers the laws of the anglo-saxons. they do not include the lii. william i., to which i shall refer hereafter. i may, however, observe that the demonstration at salisbury was not of a legislative character; and that it was held in conformity with anglo-saxon usages. if, according to stubbs, the ordinance was a charter, it would proceed from the king alone. the idea involved in the statements of sir martin wright, mr. hallam, and mr. freeman, that the vassal of a lord was then called on to swear allegiance to the king, and that it altered the feudal bond in england, is not supported by the oath of vassalage. in swearing fealty, the vassal knelt, placed his hands between those of his lord's, and swore: "i become your man from this day forward, of life and limb, and of earthly worship, and unto you shall be true and faithful, and bear you faith for the tenements at that i claim to hold of you, saving the faith that i owe unto our sovereign lord the king." this shows that it was unnecessary to call vassals to salisbury to swear allegiance. the assemblage was of the same nature and character as previous meetings. it was composed of the liberi homines, the freemen, described by the learned john selden (ante, p. ), and by dr. robertson and de lolme (ante, pp. , ). but there is evidence of a much stronger character, which of itself refutes the views of these writers, and shows that the norman system, at least during the reign of william i., was a continuation of that existing previous to his succession to the throne; and that the meeting at salisbury, so graphically portrayed, did not effect that radical change in the position of english landholders which has been stated. i refer to the works of eadmerus; he was a monk of canterbury who was appointed bishop of st. andrews, and declined or resigned the appointment because the king of scotland refused to allow his consecration by the archbishop of canterbury. his history includes the reigns of william i., william ii., and henry i., from to , and he gives, at page , the laws of edward the confessor, which william i. gave to england; they number seventy-one, including the lii. law quoted by sir martin wright. the introduction to these laws is in latin and norman-french, and is as follows: "these are the laws and customs which king william granted to the whole people of england after he had conquered the land, and they are those which king edward his predecessor observed before him." [footnote: the laws of william are given in a work entitled "eadmeri monachi cantuariensis historia novorum," etc. it includes the reigns of william i. and ii., and henry i., from to , and is edited by john selden. page has the following: "hae sunt leges et consuetudines quas willielmus rex concessit universo populo angliae post subactam terram. eaedum sunt quas edwardus rex cognatus ejus obscruauit ante eum. "ces sont les leis et les custums que le rui people de engleterre apres le conquest de le terre. ice les meismes que le rui edward sun cosin tuit devant lui. "lii. "de fide et obsequio erga regnum. "statuimus etiam ut omnes liiben homines foedere et sacramento affirment quod intra et extra universum regnum anglias (quod olim vocabatur regnum britanniae) willielmo suo domino fideles esse volunt, terras et honores illins fidelitate ubique servare cum eo et contra inimicos et alienigonas defendere."] this simple statement gets rid of the theory of sir martin wright, of sir william blackstone, of mr. hallam, and of mr. freeman, that william introduced a new system, and that he did so either as a new feudal law or as an amendment upon the existing feudalism. the lii. law, quoted by wright, is as follows: "we have decreed that all free men should affirm on oath, that both within and without the whole kingdom of england (which is called britain) they desire to be faithful to william their lord, and everywhere preserve unto him his land and honors with fidelity, and defend them against all enemies and strangers." eadmerus, who wrote in the reign of henry i., gives the lii. william i. as a confirmatory law. the charter given by stubbs is a contraction of the law given by eadmerus. the former uses the words omnes liberi homines; the latter, the words omnis liberi homo. those interested can compare them, as i shall give the text of each side by side. since the paper was read, i have met with the following passage in stubbs's "constitutional history of england," vol. i., p. : "it has been maintained that a formal and definitive act, forming the initial point of the feudalization of england, is to be found in a clause of the laws, as they are called, of the conqueror, which directs that every freeman shall affirm, by covenant and oath, that 'he will be faithful to king william within england and without, will join him in preserving his land with all fidelity, and defend him against his enemies.' but this injunction is little more than the demand of the oath of allegiance taken to the anglo-saxon kings, and is here required not of every feudal dependant of the king, but of every freeman or freeholder whatsoever. in that famous council of salisbury, a. d, , which was summoned immediately after the making of the doomsday survey, we learn, from the 'chronicle,' that there came to the king 'all his witan and all the landholders of substance in england, whose vassals soever they were, and they all submitted to him and became his men, and swore oaths of allegiance that they would be faithful to him against all others.' in the act has been seen the formal acceptance and date of the introduction of feudalism, but it has a very different meaning. the oath described is the oath of allegiance, combined with the act of homage, and obtained from all landowners whoever their feudal lord might be. it is a measure of precaution taken against the disintegrating power of feudalism, providing a direct tie between the sovereign and all freeholders which no inferior relations existing between them and the mesne lords would justify them in breaking." i have already quoted from another of stubbs's works, "select charters," the charter which he appears to have discovered bearing upon this transaction, and now copy the note, giving the authorities quoted by stubbs, with reference to the above passage. he appears to have overlooked the complete narration of the alleged laws of william i., given by eadmerus, to which i have referred. the note is as follows: "ll. william i., , below note; see hovenden, ii., pref. p. , seq., where i have attempted to prove the spuriousness of the document called the charter of william i., printed in the ancient 'laws' ed. thorpe, p. . the way in which the regulation of the conqueror here referred to has been misunderstood and misused is curious. lambarde, in the 'archaionomia,' p. , printed the false charter in which this genuine article is incorporated as an appendiz to the french version of the conqueror's laws, numbering the clauses to ; from lambarde, the whole thing was transferred by wilkins into his collection of anglo-saxon laws. blackstone's 'commentary,' ii. , suggested that perhaps the very law (which introduced feudal tenures) thus made at the council of salisbury is that which is still extant and couched in these remarkable words, i. e., the injunction in question referred to by wilkins, p. ellis, in the introduction to 'doomsday,' i. , quotes blackstone, but adds a reference to wilkins without verifying blackstone's quotation from his collection of laws, substituting for that work the concilia, in which the law does not occur. many modern writers have followed him in referring the enactment of the article to the council of salisbury. it is well to give here the text of both passages; that in the laws runs thus: 'statuimus etiam ut omnis liber homo foedere et sacremento affirmet, quod intra et extra angliam willelmo regi fideles esse volunt, terras et honorem illius omni fidelitate eum eo servare et ante eum contra inimicos defendere' (select charters, p. ). the homage done at salisbury is described by florence thus: 'nec multo post mandavit ut archiepiscopi episcopi, abbates, comitas et barones et vicecomitas cum suis militibus die kalendarum augustarem sibi occurent saresberiae quo cum venissent milites eorem sibi fidelitatem contra omnes homines jurare coegit.' the 'chronicle' is a little more full: 'thaee him comon to his witan and ealle tha landsittende men the ahtes waeron ofer eall engleland waeron thaes mannes men the hi waeron and ealle hi bugon to him and waeron his men, and him hold athas sworon thaet he woldon ongean ealle other men him holde beon.'" mr. stubbs had, in degree, adopted the view at which i had arrived, that the law or charter of william i. was an injunction to enforce the oath of allegiance, previously ordered by the laws of edward the confessor, to be taken by all freemen, and that it did not relate to vassals, or alter the existing feudalism. as the subject possesses considerable interest for the general reader as well as the learned historian, i think it well to place the two authorities side by side, that the text may be compared: lii. william i., as given by eadments. "de fide et obsequio erga regnum. "statuimus etiam ut omnes liberi homines foedere et sacramento affirment quod intra et extra univereum regnum anglise (quod olim vocabatur regnum britanniae) wilhielmo suo domino fideles ease volunt, terras et honores ilius fidelitate ubique servare cum eo et contra inimicos et alienigenas defendere." charter from textus roffensis, given by mr. stubbs. "statuimus etiam ut omnis liber homo feodere et sacramento affirmet, quod intra et extra angliam. willelmo regi fideles ease volunt, terras et honorem illius omni fidelitate cum eo servare et ante eum contra inimicos defendere." i think the documents i have quoted show that sir martin wright, sir william blackstone, and messrs. hallam and freeman, labored under a mistake in supposing that william had introduced or imposed a new feudal law, or that the vassals of a lord swore allegiance to the king. the introduction to the laws of william i. shows that it was not a new enactment, or a norman custom introduced into england, and the law itself proves that it relates to freemen, and not to vassals. the misapprehension of these authors may have arisen in this way: william i. had two distinct sets of subjects. the normans, who had taken the oath of allegiance on obtaining investiture, and whose retinue included vassals; and the anglo-saxons, among whom vassalage was unknown, who were freeman (liberi homines) as distinguished from serfs. the former comprised those in possesion of odhal (noble) land, whether held from the crown or its tenants. it was quite unnecessary to convoke the normans and their vassals, while the assemblage of the saxons--omnes liberi homines--was not only to conformity with the laws of edward the confessor, but was specially needful when a foreigner had possesed himself of the throne. i have perhaps dwelt to long upon this point, but the error to which i have referred has been adopted as if it was an unquestioned fact, and has passed into our school-books and become part of the education given to the young, and therefore it required some examination. i believe that a very large portion of the land in england did not change hands at that period, nor was the position of either serfs or villeins changed. the great alteration lay in the increase in the quantity of boc-land. much of the folc-land was forfeited and seized upon, and as the king claimed the right to give it away, it was called terra regis. the charter granted by king william to alan fergent, duke of bretagne, of the lands and towns, and the rest of the inheritance of edwin, earl of yorkshire, runs thus: "ego guilielmus cognomine bastardus, rex anglise do et concede tibi nepoti meo alano brittanias comiti et hseredibus tuis imperpetuum omnes villas et terras qua nuper fuerent comitis edwini in eborashina cum feodis militise et aliis libertatibus et consuetudinibus ita libere et honorifice sicut idem edwinus eadem tenuit. "data obsidione coram civitate eboraci." this charter does not create a different title, but gives the lands as held by the former possessor. the monarch assumed the function of the fole-gemot, but the principle remained--the feudee only became tenant for life. each estate reverted to the crown on the death of him who held it; but, previous to acquiring possession, the new tenant had to cease to be his own "man," and became the "man" of his superior. this act was called "homage," and was followed by "investiture." in a.d. , prince henry refused to trust himself with his father till his homage had been renewed and accepted, for it bound the superior to protect the inferior. the process is thus described by de lolme (chap, ii., sec. ): "on the death of the ancestor, lands holden by 'knight's service' and by 'grand sergeantcy' were, upon inquisition finding the tenure and the death of the ancestor, seized into the king's hands. if the heir appeared by the inquisition to be within the age of twenty-one years, the king retained the lands till the heir attained the age of twenty-one, for his own profit, maintaining and educating the heir according to his rank. if the heir appeared by the inquisition to have attained twenty-one, he was entitled to demand livery of the lands by the king's officers on paying a relief and doing fealty and homage. the minor heir attaining twenty-one, and proving his age, was entitled to livery of his lands, on doing fealty and homage, without paying any relief." the idea involved is, that the lands were held, and not owned, and that the proprietary right lay in the nation, as represented by the king. if we adopt the poetic idea of the brehon code, that "land is perpetual man," then homage for land was not a degrading institution. but it is repugnant to our ideas to think that any man can, on any ground, or for any consideration, part with his manhood, and become by homage the "man" of another. the norman chieftains claimed to be peers of the monarch, and to sit in the councils of the nation, as barons-by-tenure and not by patent. this was a decided innovation upon the usages of the anglo-saxons, and ultimately converted the parliament, the folc-gemot, into two branches. those who accompanied the king stood in the same position as the companions of romulus, they were the patricians; those subsequently called to the councils of the sovereign by patent corresponded with the roman nobiles. no such patents were issued by any of the norman monarchs. but the insolence of the norman nobles led to the attempt made by the successors of the conqueror to revive the saxon earldoms as a counterpoise. the weakness of stephen enabled the greater fudges to fortify their castles, and they set up claims against the crown, which aggravated the discord that arose in subsequent reigns. the "saxon chronicles," p. , thus describes the oppressions of the nobles, and the state of england in the reign of stephen: "they grievously oppressed the poor people with building castles, and when they were built, filled them with wicked men, or rather devils, who seized both men and women who they imagined had any money, threw them into prison, and put them to more cruel tortures than the martyrs ever endured; they suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet, or the head, or the thumbs, kindling fires below them. they squeezed the heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and toads." the nation was mapped out, and the owners' names inscribed in the doomsday book. there were no unoccupied lands, and had the possessors been loyal and prudent, the sovereign would have had no lands, save his own private domains, to give away, nor would the industrious have been able to become tenants-in-fee. the alterations which have taken place in the possession of land since the composition of the book of doom, have been owing to the disloyalty or extravagance of the descendants of those then found in possession. notwithstanding the vast loss of life in the contests following upon the invasion, the population of england increased from , , in , when william landed, to , , in , when the great-grandson of the conqueror ascended the throne, and the first of the plantagenets ruled in england. v. the plantagenets. whatever doubts may exist as to the influence of the norman conquest upon the mass of the people--the freemen, the ceorls, and the serfs--there can be no doubt that its effect upon the higher classes was very great. it added to the existing feudalism--the system of baronage, with its concomitants of castellated residences filled with armed men. it led to frequent contests between neighboring lords, in which the liberty and rights of the freemen were imperilled. it also eventuated in the formation of a distinct order-the peerage--and for a time the constitutional influence of the assembled people, the folc-gemot, was overborne. the principal norman chieftains were barons in their own country, and they retained that position in england, but their holdings in both were feudal, not hereditary. when the crown, originally elective, became hereditary, the barons sought to have their possessions governed by the same rule, to remove them from the class of terraregis (folc-land), and to convert them into chartered land. being gifts from the monarch, he had the right to direct the descent, and all charters which gave land to a man and his heirs, made each of them only a tenant for life; the possessor was bound to hand over the estate undivided to the heir, and he could neither give, sell, nor bequeath it. the land was beneficia, just as appointments in the church, and reverted, as they do, to the patron to be re-granted. they were held upon military service, and the major barons, adopting the saxon title earl, claimed to be peers of the monarch, and were called to the councils of the state as barons-by-tenure. in reply to a quo warranto, issued to the earl of surrey, in the reign of edward i., he asserted that his ancestors had assisted william in gaining england, and were equally entitled to a share of the spoils. "it was," said he, "by their swords that his ancestors had obtained their lands, and that by his he would maintain his rights." the same monarch required the earls of hereford and norfolk to go over with his army to guienne, and they replied, "the tenure of our lands does not require us to do so, unless the king went in person." the king insisted; the earls were firm. "by god, sir earl," said edward to hereford, "you shall go or hang." "by god, sir king," replied the earl, "i will neither go nor hang." the king submitted and forgave his warmth. the struggle between the nobles and the crown commenced, and was continued, under varying circumstances. each of the barons had a large retinue of armed men under his own command, and the crown was liable to be overborne by a union of ambitious nobles. at one time the monarch had to face them at runnymede and yield to their demands; at another he was able to restrain them with a strong hand. the church and the barons, when acting in union, proved too strong for the sovereign, and he had to secure the alliance of one of these parties to defeat the views of the other. the barons abused their power over the freemen, and sought to establish the rule "that every man must have a lord," thus reducing them to a state of vassalage. king john separated the barons into two classes--major and minor; the former should have at least thirteen knights' fees and a third part; the latter remained country gentlemen. the th henry iii., cap. and , was passed to secure the rights of freemen, who were disturbed by the great lords, and gave them an appeal to the king's courts of assize. bracton, an eminent lawyer who wrote in the time of henry iii., says: "the king hath superiors--viz., god and the law by which he is made king; also his court--viz., his earls and barons. earls are the king's associates, and he that hath an associate hath a master; and therefore, if the king be unbridled, or (which is all one) without law, they ought to bridle him, unless they will be unbridled as the king, and then the commons may cry, lord jesus, pity us," etc. an eminent lawyer, time of edward i., writes: "although the king ought to have no equal in the land, yet because the king and his commissioners can be both judge and party, the king ought by right to have companions, to hear and determine in parliament all writs and plaints of wrongs done by the king, the queen, or their children." these views found expression in the coronation oath. edward ii. was forced to swear: "will you grant and keep, and by your oath confirm to the people of england the laws and customs to them, granted by the ancient kings of england, your righteous and godly predecessors; and especially to the clergy and people, by the glorious king st. edward, your predecessor?" the king's answer--"i do them grant and promise." "do you grant to hold and keep the laws and rightful customs which the commonalty of your realm shall have chosen, and to maintain and enforce them to the honor of god after your power?" the king's answer--"i this do grant and promise." i shall not dwell upon the event most frequently quoted with reference to the era of the plantagenets--i mean king john's "magna charta." it was more social than territorial, and tended to limit the power of the crown, and to increase that of the barons. the plantagenets had not begun to call commons to the house of lords. the issue of writs was confined to those who were barons-by-tenure, the patricians of the norman period. the creation of nobles was the invention of a later age. the baron feasted in his hall, while the slave grovelled in his cabin. bracton, the famous lawyer of the time of henry iii., says: "all the goods a slave acquired belonged to his master, who could take them from him whenever he pleased," therefore a man could not purchase his own freedom. "in the same year, ," says the annals of dunstable, "we sold our slave by birth, william fyke, and all his family, and received one mark from the buyer." the only hope for the slave was, to try and get into one of the walled towns, when he became free. until the wars of the roses, these serfs were greatly harassed by their owners. in the reign of edward i., efforts were made to prevent the alienation of land by those who received it from the norman sovereigns. the statute of mortmain was passed to restrain the giving of lands to the church, the statute de donis to prevent alienation to laymen. the former declares: "that whereas religious men had entered into the fees of other men, without license and will of the chief lord, and sometimes appropriating and buying, and sometimes receiving them of gift of others, whereby the services that are due of such fee, and which, in the beginning, were provided for the defence of the realm, are wrongfully withdrawn, and the chief lord do lose the escheats of the same (the primer seizin on each life that dropped); it therefore enacts: that any such lands were forfeited to the lord of the fee; and if he did not take it within twelve months, it should be forfeited to the king, who shall enfeoff other therein by certain services to be done for us for the defence of the realm." another act, the th edward i., cap. , provides: "that alienation by the tenant in courtesy was void, and the heir was entitled to succeed to his mother's property, notwithstanding the act of his father." the th edward i., cap. , enacts: "that if the abbot, priors, and keepers of hospitals, and other religious houses, aliened their land they should be seized upon by the king." the th edward i., cap. , de donis conditionalitiis, provided: "that tenements given to a man, and the heirs of his body, should, at all events, go to the issue, if there were any; or, if there were none, should revert to the donor." but while the fiefs of the crown were forbidden to alien their lands, the freemen, whose lands were odhal (noble) and of saxon descent, the inheritance of which was guaranteed to them by william i. (ante, p. ), were empowered to sell their estates by the statute called quia emptores ( edward i.). it enacts: "that from henceforth it shall be lawful to every freemen to sell, at his own pleasure, his lands and tenements, or part of them: so that the feoffee shall hold the same lands and tenements of the chief lord of the fee by such customs as his feoffee held before." the scope of these laws was altered in the reign of edward iii. that monarch, in view of his intended invasion of france, secured the adhesion of the landowners, by giving them power to raise money upon and alien their estates. the permission was as follows, edward iii., cap. : "whereas divers people of the realm complain themselves to be grieved because that lands and tenements which be holden of the king in chief, and aliened without license, have been seized into the king's hand, and holden as forfeit: ( .) the king shall not hold them as forfeit in such case, but will and grant from henceforth of such lands and tenements so aliened, there shall be reasonable fine taken in chancery by due process." edward iii., cap. : "whereas divers have complained that they be grieved by reason of purchasing of lands and tenements, which have been holden of the king's progenitors that now is, as of honors; and the same lands have been taken into the king's hands, as though they had been holden in chief of the king as of his crown: ( .) the king will that from henceforth no man be grieved by any such purchase." de lolme, chap. iii., sec. , remarks on these laws that they took from the king all power of preventing alienation or of purchase. they left him the reversionary right on the failure of heirs. these changes in the relative power of the sovereign and the nobles took place to enable edward to enter upon the conquest of france; but that monarch, conferred a power upon the barons, which was used to the detriment of his descendants, and led to the dethronement of the plantagenets. the line of demarcation between the two sets of titles, those derived through the anglo-saxon laws and those derived through the grants of the norman sovereigns, was gradually being effaced. the people looked back to the laws of edward the confessor, and forced them upon edward ii. but after passing the laws which prevented nobles from selling, and empowering freemen to do so, edward iii. found it needful to assert his claims to the entire land of england, and enacted in the twenty-fourth year of his reign: "that the king is the universal lord and original proprietor of all land in his kingdom; that no man doth or can possess, any part of it but what has mediately or immediately been derived as a gift from him to be held on feodal service." those who obtained gifts of land, only held or had the use of them; the ownership rested in the crown. feodal service, the maintenance of armed men, and the bringing them into the field, was the rent paid. the wealth which came into england after the conquest of france influenced all classes, but none more than the family of the king. his own example seems to have affected his descendants. the invasion of france and the captivity of its king reappear in the invasion of england by henry iv., and the capture and dethronement of richard ii. the prosperity of england during the reign of edward had passed away in that of his grandson. very great distress pervaded the land, and it led to efforts to get rid of villeinage. the st richard ii. recites: "that grievous complaints had been made to the lords and commons, that villeins and land tenants daily withdraw into cities and towns, and a special commission was appointed to hear the case, and decide thereon." the complaint was renewed, and appears in act richard ii., cap. : "whereas divers villeins and serfs, as well of the great lords as of other people, as well spiritual as temporal, do fly within the cities, towns, and places entfranched, as the city of london, and other like, and do feign divers suits against their lords, to the intent to make them free by the answer of the lords, it is accorded and assented that the lords and others shall not be forebound of their villeins, because of the answer of the lords." serfdom or slavery may have existed previous to the anglo-saxon invasion, but i am disposed to think that the saxon, the jutes, and the angles reduced the inhabitants of the lands which they conquered, into serfdom. the history of that period shows that men, women, and children were constantly sold, and that there were established markets. one at bristol, which was frequented by irish buyers, was put down, owing to the remonstrance of the bishop. after the norman invasion the name of villein, a person attached to the villa, was given to the serfs. the village was their residence. occasional instances of enfranchisement took place; the word signified being made free, and at that time every freeman was entitled to a vote. the word enfranchise has latterly come to bear a different meaning, and to apply solely to the possession of a vote, but it originally meant the elevation of a serf into the condition of a freeman. the act of enfranchisement was a public ceremony usually performed at the church door. the last act of ownership performed by the master was the piercing of the right ear with an awl. many serfs fled into the towns, where they were enfranchised and became freemen. the disaffection of the common people increased; they were borne down with oppression. they struggled against their masters, and tried to secure their personal liberty, and the freedom of their land. the population rose in masses in the reign of richard ii., and demanded-- st. the total abolition of slavery for themselves and their children forever; d. the reduction of the rent of good land to d. per acre; d. the right of buying and selling, like other men, in markets and fairs; th. the pardon of all offences. the monarch acted upon insidious advice; he spoke them fair at first, to gain time, but did not fulfil his promises. ultimately the people gained part of their demands. to limit or defeat them, an act was passed, fixing the wages of laborers to d. per day, with meat and drink, or d. per day, without meat and drink, and others in proportion; but with the proviso, that if any one refused to serve or labor on these terms, every justice was at liberty to send him to jail, there to remain until he gave security to serve and labor as by law required. a subsequent act prevents their being employed by the week, or paid for holidays. previous to this period, the major barons and great lords tilled their land by serfs, and had very large flocks and herds of cattle. on the death of the bishop of winchester, , his executors delivered to bishop wykeham, his successor in the see, the following: draught horses, head of cattle, wedders, ewes, and lambs. tillage was neglected; and in there was a severe dearth; wheat sold at a price equal to l per quarter, the brewing of ale was discontinued by proclamation, in order "to prevent those of middle rank from perishing for want of food." the dissensions among the descendants of edward iii. as to the right to the crown aided the nobles in their efforts to make their estates hereditary, and the civil wars which afflicted the nation tended to promote that object. kings were crowned and discrowned at the will of the nobles, who compelled the freemen to part with their small estates. the oligarchy dictated to the crown, and oppressed and kept down the freemen. the nobles allied themselves with the serfs, who were manumitted that they might serve as soldiers in the conflicting armies. from the conquest to the time of richard ii., only barons-by-tenure, the descendants of the companions of the conqueror, were invited by writ to parliament. that monarch made an innovation, and invited others who were not barons-by-tenure. the first dukedom was created the th of edward iii., and the first viscount the th henry vi. edward iv. seized upon the lands granted by former kings, and gave them to his own followers, and thus created a feeling of uneasiness in the minds of the nobility, and paved the way for the events which were accomplished by a succeeding dynasty. the decision in the taltarum case opened the question of succession; and edward's efforts to put down retainers was the precursor of the tudor policy. we have a picture of the state of society in the reign of edward iv. in the paston memoirs, written by margaret paston. her husband, john paston, was heir to sir john fastolf. he was bound by the will to establish in caister castle, fastolf s own mansion, a college of religious men to pray for his benefactor's soul. but in those days might was right, and the duke of norfolk, fancying that he should like the house for himself, quietly took possession of it. at that time, edward was just seated on the throne, and edward had just been reported to paston to have said in reference to another suit, that "he would be your good lord therein as he would to the poorest man in england. he would hold with you in your right; and as for favor, he will not be understood that he shall show favor more to one man to another, not to one in england." this was a true expression of the king's intentions. but either he was changeable in his moods, or during these early years he was hardly settled enough on the throne always to be able to carry out his wishes. this time, however, in some way or another, the great duke was reduced to submission, and caister was restored to paston. in a new claimant appeared; and claimants, though as troublesome in the fifteenth as the nineteenth century, proceeded in a different fashion. this time it was the duke of suffolk, who asserted a right to the manor of drayton in his own name, and who had bought up the assumed rights of another person to the manor of hellesdon. john paston was away, and his wife had to bear the brunt. an attempt to levy rent at drayton was followed by a threat from the duke's men, that if her servants "ventured to take any further distresses at drayton, even if it were but of the value of a pin, they would take the value of an ox in hellesdon." paston and the duke alike professed to be under the law. but each was anxious to retain that possession which in those days seems really to have been nine points of the law. the duke got hold of drayton, while hellesdon was held for paston. one day paston's men made a raid upon drayton, and carried off seventy-seven head of cattle. another day the duke's bailiff came to hellesdon with men to see if the place were assailable. two servants of paston, attempting to keep a court at drayton in their master's name, were carried off by force. at last the duke mustered his retainers and marched against hellesdon. the garrison, too weak to resist, at once surrendered. "the duke's men took possession, and set john paston's own tenants to work, very much against their wills, to destroy the mansion and break down the walls of the lodge, while they themselves ransacked the church, turned out the parson, and spoiled the images. they also pillaged very completely every house in the village. as for john paston's own place, they stripped it completely bare; and whatever there was of lead, brass, pewter, iron, doors or gates, or other things that they could not conveniently carry off, they hacked and hewed them to pieces. the duke rode through hellesdon to drayton the following day, while his men were still busy completing the wreck of destruction by the demolition of the lodge. the wreck of the building, with the rents they made in its walls, is visible even now" (introd. xxxv.). the meaning of all this is evident. we have before us a state of society in which the anarchical element is predominant. but it is not pure anarchy. the nobles were determined to reduce the middle classes to vassalage. the reign of the plantagenets witnessed the elevation of the nobility. the descendants of the norman barons menaced, and sometimes proved too powerful for the crown. in such reigns as those of edward i., edward iii., and henry vi., the barons triumphed. the power wielded by the first edward fell from the feeble grasp of his son and successor. the beneficent rule of edward iii. was followed by the anarchy of richard ii. success led to excess. the triumphant party thinned the ranks of its opponents, and in turn experienced the same fate. the fierce struggle of the red and white roses weakened each. guy, earl of warwick, "the king-maker," sank overpowered on the field of tewkesbury, and with him perished many of the most powerful of the nobles. the jealousy of richard iii. swept away his own friends, and the bloody contest on bosworth field destroyed the flower of the nobility. the sun of the plantagenets went down, leaving the country weak and impoverished, from a contest in which the barons sought to establish their own power, to the detriment alike of the crown and the freemen. the latter might have exclaimed: "till half a patriot, half a coward, grown, we fly from meaner tyrants to the throne." the long contest terminated in the defeat alike of the crown and the nobles, but the nation suffered severely from the struggle. the rule of this family proved fatal to the interest of a most important class, whose rights were jealously guarded by the normans. the liberi homines, the freemen, who were odhal occupiers, holding in capite from the sovereign, nearly disappeared in the wars of the roses. monarchs who owed their crown to the favor of the nobles were too weak to uphold the rights of those who held directly from the crown, and who, in their isolation, were almost powerless. the term freeman, originally one of the noblest in the land, disappeared in relation to urban tenures, and was applied solely to the personal rights of civic burghers; instead thereof arose the term freeholder from free hold, which was originally a grant free from all rent, and only burdened with military service. the term was subsequently applied to land held for leases for lives as contradistinguished from leases for years, the latter being deemed base tenures, and insufficient to qualify a man to vote; the theory being that no man was free whose tenure could be disturbed during his life. though the liberi homines or freemen were, as a class, overborne in this struggle, and reduced to vassalage, yet their descendants were able, under the leadership of cromwell, to regain some of the rights and influence of which they had been despoiled under the plantagenets. fortescue, lord chief-justice to henry vi., thus describes the condition of the english people: "they drunk no water, unless it be that some for devotion, and upon a rule of penance, do abstain from other drink. they eat plentifully of all kinds of flesh and fish. they wear woollen cloth in all their apparel. they have abundance of bed covering in their houses, and all other woollen stuff. they have great store of all implements of household. they are plentifully furnished with all instruments of husbandry, and all other things that are requisite to the accomplishment of a great and wealthy life, according to their estates and degrees." this flattering picture is not supported by the existing disaffection and the repeated applications for redress from the serfs and the smaller farmers, and the simple fact that the population had increased under the normans--a period of years--from , , to , , , while under the plantagenets--a period of years--it only increased to , , , the addition to the population in that period being only , . the average increase in the former period was nearly , per annum, while in the latter it did not much exceed per annum. this goes far to prove the evil from civil wars, and the oppression of the oligarchy. vi. the tudors the protracted struggle of the plantagenets left the nation in a state of exhaustion. the nobles had absorbed the lands of the freemen, and had thus broken the backbone of society. they had then entered upon a contest with the crown to increase their own power; and to effect their selfish objects, setup puppets, and ranged under conflicting banners, but the nemesis followed. the wars of the roses destroyed their own power, and weakened their influence, by sweeping away the heads of the principal families. the ambition of the nobles failed of its object, when "the last of the barons" lay gory in his blood on the field of tewkesbury. the wars were, however, productive of one national benefit, in virtually ending the state of serfdom to which the aborigines were reduced by the scandinavian invasion. the exhaustion of the nation prepared the way to changes of a most radical character, and the reigns of the tudors are characterized by greater innovations and more striking alterations than even those which followed the accession of the normans. henry of richmond came out of the field of bostworth a vistor, and ascended the throne of a nation whose leading nobles had been swept away. the sword had vied with the axe. henry vii. was prudent and cunning; and in the absence of any preponderating oligarchical influence, planted the heel of the sovereign upon the necks of the nobles. he succeeded where the plantagenets had failed. his accession became the advent of a series of measures which altered most materially the system of landholding. the wars of the roses showed that the power of the nobles was too great for the comfort of the monarch. the decision in taltarum's case, in the reign of edward iv., affected the entire system of entail. land, partly freed from restrictions, passed into other hands. but henry went further. he destroyed their physical influence by ridigly putting down retainer; and in one of his tours, while partaking of the hospitality of the earl of oxford, he fined him l , for having greeted him with of his tenants in livery. the rigid enforcement of the laws passed against retainers in former reigns, but now made more penal, strengthened the king and reduced the power of the nobles. their estates were relieved of a most onerous charge, and the lands freed from the burden of supporting the army of the state. henry vii. had thus a large fund to give away; the rent of the land granted in knights' service virtually consisted of two separate funds--one part went to the feudee, as officer or commmandant, the other to the soldiery or vassals. the latter part belonged to the state. had henry applied it to the reestablishment of the class of freemen (liberi homines), as was recently done by the emperor of russia when he abolished serfdom, he would have created a power on which the crown and the constitution could rely. this might have been done by converting the holdings of the men-at-arms into allodial estates, held direct from the crown. such an arrangement would have left the income of the feudee unimpaired, as it would only have applied the fund that had been paid to the men-at-arms to this purpose; and by creating out of that land a number of small estates held direct from the crown, the misery that arose from the eviction and destruction of a most meritorious class, would have been avoided. vagrancy, with its great evils, would have been prevented, and the passing of the poor laws would have been unnecessary. unfortunately henry and his counsellors did not appreciate the consequence of the suppression of retainers and liveries. by the course he adopted to secure the influence of the crown, he compensated the nobles, but destroyed the agricultural middle class. this change had an important and, in some respects, a most injurious effect upon the condition of the nation, and led to enactments of a very extraordinary character, which i must submit in detail, inasmuch as i prefer giving the ipsissima verba of the statute-book to any statement of my own. to make the laws intelligible, i would remind you that the successful efforts of the nobles had, during the three centuries of plantagenet rule, nearly obliterated the liberi homines (whose rights the norman conqueror had sedulously guarded), and had reduced them to a state of vassalage. they held the lands of their lord at his will, and paid their rent by military service. when retainers were put down, and rent or knights' service was no longer paid with armed men, their occupation was gone. they were unfit for the mere routine of husbandry, and unprovided with funds for working their farms. the policy of the nobles was changed. it was no longer their object to maintain small farmsteads, each supplying its quota of armed men to the retinue of the lord; and it was their interest to obtain money rents. then commenced a struggle of the most fearful character. the nobles cleared their lands, pulled down the houses, and displaced the people. vagrancy, on a most unparalleled scale, took place. henry vii., to check this cruel, unexpected, and harsh outcome of his own policy, resorted to legislation, which proved nearly ineffectual. as early as the fourth year of his reign these efforts commenced with an enactment (cap. ) for keeping up houses and encouraging husbandry; it is very quaint, and is as follows: "the king, our sovereign lord, having singular pleasure above all things to avoid such enormities and mischiefs as be hurtful and prejudicial to the commonwealth of this his land and his subjects of the same, remembereth that, among other things, great inconvenience daily doth increase by dissolution, and pulling down, and wilful waste of houses and towns within this his realm, and laying to pasture lands, which continually have been in tilth, whereby idleness, the ground and beginning of all mischief, daily do increase; for where, in some towns persons were occupied, and lived by those lawful labors, now there be occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue full of idleness. the husbandry, which is one of the greatest commodities of the realm, is greatly decayed. churches destroyed, the service of god withdrawn, the bodies there buried not prayed for, the patrons and curates wronged, the defence of the land against outward enemies feebled and impaired, to the great displeasure of god, the subversion of the policy and good rule of this land, if remedy be not hastily therefor purveyed: wherefore, the king, our sovereign lord, by the assent and advice, etc., etc., ordereth, enacteth, and establisheth that no person, what estate, degree, or condition he be, that hath any house or houses, that at any time within the past three years hath been, or that now is, or heretofore shall be, let to farm with twenty acres of land at least, or more, laying in tillage or husbandry; that the owners of any such house shall be bound to keep, sustain, and maintain houses and buildings, upon the said grounds and land, convenient and necessary for maintaining and upholding said tillage and husbandry; and if any such owner or owners of house or house and land take, keep, and occupy any such house or house and land in his or their own hands, that the owner of the said authority be bound in likewise to maintain houses and buildings upon the said ground and land, convenient and necessary for maintaining and upholding the said tillage and husbandry. on their default, the king, or the other lord of the fee, shall receive half of the profits, and apply the same in repairing the houses; but shall not gain the freehold thereby." this act was preceded by one with reference to the isle of wight, henry vii., cap. , passed the same session, which recites that it is so near france that it is desirable to keep it in a state of defence. it provides that no person shall have more than one farm, and enacts: "for remedy, it is ordered and enacted that no manner of person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever, shall take any farm more than one, whereof the yearly rent shall not exceed ten marks; and if any several leases afore this time have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person or persons shall choose one farm, hold at his pleasure, and the remnant of the leases shall be void." mr. froude remarks (history, p. ), "an act, tyrannical in form, was singularly justified by its consequences. the farm-houses were rebuilt, the land reploughed, the island repeopled; and in , when the french army of , men attempted to effect a landing at st. helens, they were defeated and driven back by the militia, and a few levies transported from hampshire and the surrounding counties." lord bacon, in his "history of the reign of henry vii., says: "enclosures, at that time, began to be more frequent, whereby arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. this bred a decay of people and (by consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like. the king, likewise, knew full well, and in nowise forgot, that there ensued withal upon this a decay and diminution of subsidies and taxes; for the more gentlemen, ever the lower books of subsidies. in remedying of this inconvenience, the king's wisdom was admirable, and the parliaments at that time. enclosures they would not forbid, for that had been to forbid the improvement of the patrimony of the kingdom; nor tillage they would not compel, for that was to strive with nature and utility; but they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures and depopulating pasturage, and yet not by that name, or by any imperious express prohibition, but by consequence. the ordinance was, that all houses of husbandry, that were used with twenty acres of ground and upward, should be maintained and kept up for ever, together with a competent proportion of land to be used and occupied with them; and in nowise to be severed from them, as by another statute made afterward in his successor's time, was more fully declared: this, upon forfeiture to be taken, not by way of popular action, but by seizure of the land itself, by the king and lords of the fee, as to half the profits, till the houses and land were restored. by this means the houses being kept up, did of necessity enforce a dweller; and the proportion of the land for occupation being kept up, did of necessity enforce that dweller not to be a beggar or cottager, but a man of some substance, that might keep hinds and servants, and set the plough a-going. this did wonderfully concern the might and mannerhood of the kingdom, to have farms, as it were, of a standard sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury, and did, in effect, amortise a great part of the lands of the kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers or peasants. now, how much this did advance the military power of the kingdom, is apparent by the true principles of war, and the examples of other kingdoms. for it hath been held by the general opinion of men of best judgment in the wars (howsoever some few have varied, and that it may receive some distinction of case), that the principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry or foot. and to make good infantry, it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner. therefore, if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughman be but as their workfolks and laborers, or else mere cottagers (which are but housed beggars), you may have a good cavalry, but never good stable bands of foot; like to coppice woods, that if you leave in them standing too thick, they will run to bushes and briars, and have little clean underwood. and this is to be seen in france and italy, and some other parts abroad, where in effect all is nobles or peasantry. i speak of people out of towns, and no middle people; and therefore no good forces of foot: insomuch as they are enforced to employ mercenary bands of switzers and the like for their battalions of foot, whereby also it comes to pass, that those nations have much people and few soldiers. whereas the king saw that contrariwise it would follow, that england, though much less in territory, yet should have infinitely more soldiers of their native forces than those other nations have. thus did the king secretly sow hydra's teeth; whereupon (according to the poet's fiction) should rise up armed men for the service of this kingdom." the enactment above quoted was followed by others in that reign of a similar character, but it would appear they were not successful. the evil grew apace. houses were pulled down, farms went out of tillage. the people, evicted from their farms, and having neither occupation nor means of living, were idle, and suffering. succeeding sovereigns strove also to check this disorder? and statute after statute was passed. among them are the th henry viii., cap. . it recites: "that great inconveniency did daily increase by dissolution, pulling down, and destruction of houses, and laying to pasture, lands which customarily had been manured and occupied with tillage and husbandry, whereby idleness doth increase; for where, in some town-lands, hundreds of persons and their ancestors, time out of mind, were daily occupied with sowing of corn and graynes, breeding of cattle, and other increase of husbandry, that now the said persons and their progeny are disunited and decreased. it further recites the evil consequences resulting from this state of things, and provides that all these buildings and habitations shall be re-edificed and repaired within one year; and all tillage lands turned into pasture shall be again restored into tillage; and in default, half the value of the lands and houses forfeited to the king, or lord of the fee, until they were re-edificed. on failure of the next lord, the lord above him might seize." this act did not produce that increased tilth which was anticipated. farmers' attention was turned to sheepbreeding; and in order to supply the deficiency of cattle, an act was passed in the st henry viii., to enforce the rearing of calves; and every farmer was, under a penalty of s. d. (about l of our currency), compelled to rear all his calves for a period of three years; and in the th henry viii. the act was further continued for two years. the culture of flax and hemp was also encouraged by legislation. the th henry viii., cap. , requires every person occupying land apt for tillage, to sow a quarter of an acre of flax or hemp for every sixty acres of land, under a penalty of s. d. the profit which arose from sheep-farming led to the depasturage of the land; and in order to check it, an act, henry viii., cap. , was passed. it commences thus: "forasmuch as divers and sundry persons of the king's subjects of this realm, to whom god of his goodness hath disposed great plenty and abundance of movable substance, now of late, within few years, have daily studied, practised, and invented ways and means how they might gather and accumulate together into few hands, as well great multitude of farms, as great plenty of cattle and in especial sheep, putting such lands as they can get to pasture and not to tillage: whereby they have not only pulled down churches and towns, and enhanced the old rates of the rents of possessions of this realm, or else brought it to such excessive fines that no poor man is able to meddle with it, but have also raised and enhanced the prices of all manner of corn, cattle, wool, pigs, geese, hens, chickens, eggs, and such commodities almost double above the prices which hath been accustomed, by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the poor people of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink, and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty, that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other inconveniences, or pitifully die for hunger and cold; and it is thought by the king's humble and loving subjects, that one of the greatest occasions that moveth those greedy and covetous people so to accumulate and keep in their hands such great portions and parts of the lands of this realm from the occupying of the poor husbandmen, and so use it in pasture and not in tillage, is the great profit that cometh of sheep, which be now come into a few persons' hands, in respect of the whole number of the king's subjects, so that some have , , some , , some , , some , some , and some more or less, by which a good sheep for victual, which was accustomed to be sold for s. d. or s. at most, is now sold for s., s., or s. at the least; and a stone of clothing wool, that in some shire of this realm was accustomed to be sold from d. to d, is now sold for s. or s. d. at the least; and in some counties, where it has been sold for s. d. to s. d., or s. at the most, it is now s. or s. d. at the least, and so arreysed in every part of the realm, which things thus used to be principally to the high displeasure of almighty god, to the decay of the hospitality of this realm, to the diminishing king's people, and the let of the cloth making, whereby many poor people hath been accustomed to be set on work; and in conclusion, if remedy be not found, it may turn to the utter destruction and dissolution of this realm which god defend." it was enacted that no person shall have or keep on lands not their own inheritance more than sheep, under a penalty of s. d. per annum for each sheep; lambs under a year old not to be counted; and that no person shall occupy two farms. further measures appeared needful to prevent the evil; and the th henry viii., cap. , states that the th henry vii., cap. , for keeping houses in repair, and for the tillage of the land, had been enforced on lands holden of the king, but neglected by other lords. it, therefore, enacted that the king shall have the moiety of the profits of lands converted from tillage to pasture, since the passing of the th henry vii., until a proper house is built, and the land returned to tillage; and in default of the immediate lord taking the profits as under that act, the king might take the same. this act extended to the counties of lincoln, nottingham, leicester, warwick, rutland, northampton, bedford, buckingham, oxford, berkshire, isle of wight, hertford, and cambridge. the simple fact was, that those who had formerly paid the rent of their land by service as soldiers were without the capital or means of paying rent in money; they were evicted and became vagrants. henry viii. took a short course with these vagrants, and it is asserted upon apparently good authority that in the course of his reign, thirty-six years, he hanged no less than , persons for vagrancy, or at the rate of per annum. the executions in the reign of his daughter, queen elizabeth, had fallen to from to per annum. henry viii., cap. , gave powers of bequest with regard to land; as it explains the change it effected, i quote it: "that all persons holding land in socage not having any lands holden by knight service of the king in chief, be empowered to devise and dispose of all such socage lands, and in like case, persons holding socage lands of the king in chief, and also of others, and not having the lands holden by knight service, saving to the king, all his right, title, and interest for primer seizin, reliefs, fines for alienations, etc. persons holding lands of the king by knight's service in chief were authorized to devise two third parts thereof, saving to the king wardship, primer seizin, of the third paid, and fines for alienation of the whole lands. persons holding lands by knight's service in chief, and also other lands by knight's service, or otherwise may in like manner devise two third part thereof, saving to the king wardship of the third, and fines for alienation of the whole. persons holding land of others than the king by knight's service, and also holding socage lands, may devise two third parts of the former and the whole of the latter, saving to the lord his wardship of the third part. persons holding lands of the king by knight's service but not in chief, or so holding of the king and others, and also holding socage lands, may in like manner devise two thirds of the former and the whole of the latter, saving to the king the wardship of the third part, and also to the lords; and the king or the other lords were empowered to seize the one third part in case of any deficiency." the th and th henry viii., cap. , was passed to remove some doubts which had arisen as to the former statute; it enacts: "that the words estates of inheritance should only mean estates in fee-simple only, and empowers persons seized of any lands, etc., in fee-simple solely, or in co-partnery (not having any lands holden of knight's service), to devise the whole, except corporations. persons seized in fee-simple of land holden of the king by knight's service may give or devise two thirds thereof, and of his other lands, except corporation, such two thirds to be ascertained by the divisor or by commission out of the court of ward and liveries. the king was empowered to take his third land descended to the heir in the first place, the devise in gift remaining good for the two thirds; and if the land described were insufficient to answer such third, the deficiency should be made up out of the two thirds." "the next attack," remarks sir william blackstone, vol. ii., p. , "which they suffered in order of time was by the statute henry viii., c. , whereby certain leases made by tenants in tail, which do not tend to prejudice the issue, were allowed to be good in law and to bind the issue in tail. but they received a more violent blow the same session of parliament by the construction put upon the statute of fines by the statute henry viii., cap. , which declares a fine duly levied by tenant in tail to be a complete bar to him and his heirs and all other persons claiming under such entail. this was evidently agreeable to the intention of henry vii., whose policy was (before common recovery had obtained their full strength and authority) to lay the road as open as possible to the alienation of landed property, in order to weaken the overgrown power of his nobles. but as they, from the opposite reasons, were not easily brought to consent to such a provision, it was therefore couched in his act under covert and obscure expressions; and the judges, though willing to construe that statute as favorably as possible for the defeating of entailed estates, yet hesitated at giving fines so extensive a power by mere implication when the statute de donis had expressly declared that they should not be a bar to estates-tail. but the statute of henry viii., when the doctrine of alienation was better received, and the will of the prince more implicitly obeyed than before, avowed and established that intention." fitzherbert, one of the judges of the common pleas in the reign of henry viii., wrote a work on surveying and husbandry. it contains directions for draining, clearing, and inclosing a farm, and for enriching the soil and reducing it to tillage. fallowing before wheat was practised, and when a field was exhausted by grain it was allowed to rest. hollingshed estimated the usual return as to bushels of wheat per acre; prices varied very greatly, and famine was of frequent recurrence. leases began to be granted, but they were not effectual to protect the tenant from the entry of purchasers nor against the operation of fictitious recoveries. in the succeeding reigns the efforts to encourage tillage and prevent the clearing of the farms were renewed, and among the enactments passed were the following: edward vi., cap. , for the better maintenance of tillage and increase of corn within the realm, enacts: "that there should be, in the year , as much land, or more, put wholly in tillage as had been at any time since the st henry viii., under a penalty of s. per acre to the king; and in order to secure this, it appoints commissioners, who were bound to ascertain by inquests what land was in tillage and had been converted from tillage into pasture. the commission issued precepts to the sheriffs, who summoned jurors, and the inquests were to be returned, certified, to the court of exchequer. any prosecution for penalties should take place within three years, and the act continues for ten years." and philip and mary, cap. , recites the former acts of henry vii., cap. , etc,, which it enforces. it enacts: "that as some doubts had arisen as to the interpretation of the words twenty acres of land, the act should apply to houses with twenty acres of land, according to the measurement of the ancient statute; and it appoints commissioners to inquire as to all houses pulled down and all land converted from pasture into tillage since the th henry vii. the commissioners were to take security by recognizance from offenders, and to re-edify the houses and re-convert the land into tillage, and to assess the tenants for life toward the repairs. the amount expended under order of the commissioners was made recoverable against the estate, and the occupiers were made liable to their orders; and they had power to commit persons refusing to give security to carry out the act." and philip and mary, cap. , was passed to provide for the increase of milch cattle, and it enacts: "that one milch-cow shall be kept and calf reared for every sixty sheep and ten oxen during the following seven years." the d elizabeth, cap. , confirms the previously quoted acts of henry vii., cap. ; henry viii., cap. ; henry viii., cap. ; henry viii., cap. ; and it enacts: "that all farm-houses belonging to suppressed monasteries should be kept up, and that all lands which had been in tillage for four years successively at any time since the th henry viii., should be kept in tillage under a penalty of s. per acre, which was payable to the heir in reversion, or in case he did not levy it, to the crown." elizabeth, cap. , went further; and in order to provide allotments for the cottagers, many of whom were dispossessed from their land, it provided: "for avoiding the great inconvenience which is found by experience to grow by the erecting and building of great number of cottages, which daily more and more increased in many parts of the realm, it was enacted that no person should build a cottage for habitation or dwelling, nor convert any building into a cottage, without assigning and laying thereto four acres of land, being his own freehold and inheritance, lying near the cottage, under a penalty of l ; and for upholding any such cottages, there was a penalty imposed of s. a month, exception being made as to any city, town, corporation, ancient borough, or market town; and no person was permitted to allow more than one family to reside in each cottage, under a penalty of s. per month." the th elizabeth, cap. , was passed to enforce the observance of these conditions. it provides: "that all lands which had been in tillage shall be restored thereto within three years, except in cases where they were worn out by too much tillage, in which case they might be grazed with sheep; but in order to prevent the deterioriation of the land, it was enacted that the quantity of beeves or muttons sold off the land should not exceed that which was consumed in the mansion-house." in these various enactments of the tudor monarchs we may trace the anxious desire of these sovereigns to repair the mistake of henry vii., and to prevent the depopulation of england. a similar mistake has been made in ireland since , under which the homes of the peasantry have been prostrated, the land thrown out of tillage, and the people driven from their native land. mr. froude has the following remarks upon this legislation: "statesmen (temp. elizabeth) did not care for the accumulation of capital. they desired to see the physical well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained in the highest degree which the producing power of the country admitted. this was their object, and they were supported in it by a powerful and efficient majority of the nation. at one time parliament interfered to protect employers against laborers, but it was equally determined that employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities; and this directly appears from the th and th elizabeth, by which, on the most trifling appearance of a diminution of the currency, it was declared that the laboring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by the act of henry viii.; and a sliding scale was instituted, by which, for the future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food. the same conclusion may be gathered also indirectly fom the acts interfering imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition showed itself to exercise them selfishly. "the city merchants, as i have said, were becoming landowners, and some of them attempted to apply their rules of trade to the management of landed estates. while wages were rated so high, it answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into pasture, but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which it regarded as petty treason to the state. self-protection is the first law of life, and the country, relying for its defence on an able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment to be called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance, it could not permit the owners of land to pursue, for their own benefit, a course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. it is not often that we are able to test the wisdom of legislation by specific results so clearly as in the present instance. the first attempts of the kind which i have described were made in the isle of wight early in the reign of henry vii. lying so directly exposed to attacks by france, the isle of wight was a place which it was peculiarly important to keep in a state of defence, and the th henry vii., cap. , was passed to prevent the depopulation of the isle of wight, occasioned by the system of large farms." the city merchants alluded to by froude seem to have remembered that from the times of athelwolf, the possession of a certain quantity of land, with gatehouse, church, and kitchen, converted the ceorl (churl) into a thane. it is difficult to estimate the effect which the tudor policy had upon the landholding of england. under the feudal system, the land was held in trust and burdened with the support of the soldiery. henry vii., in order to weaken the power of the nobles, put an end to their maintaining independent soldiery. thus landlords' incomes increased, though their material power was curtailed. it would not have been difficult at this time to have loaded these properties with annual payments equal to the cost of the soldiers which they were bound to maintain, or to have given each of them a farm under the crown, and strict justice would have prevented the landowners from putting into their pockets those revenues which, according to the grants and patents of the conqueror and his successors, were specially devoted to the maintenance of the army. land was released from the conditions with which it was burdened when granted. this was not done by direct legislation but by its being the policy of the crown to prevent "king-makers" arising from among the nobility. the dread of warwick influenced henry. he inaugurated a policy which transferred the support of the army from the lands, which should solely have borne it, to the general revenue of the country. thus he relieved one class at the expense of the nation. yet, when henry was about to wage war on the continent, he called all his subjects to accompany him, under pain of forfeiture of their lands; and he did not omit levying the accustomed feudal charge for knighting his eldest son and for marrying his eldest daughter. the acts to prevent the landholder from oppressing the occupier, and those for the encouragement of tillage, failed. the new idea of property in land, which then obtained, proved too powerful to be altered by legislation. another change in the system of landholding took place in those reigns. lord cromwell, who succeeded cardinal wolsey as minister to henry viii., had land in kent, and he obtained the passing of an act ( henry viii., cap. ) which took his land and that of other owners therein named, out of the custom of gavelkind (gave-all-kind), which had existed in kent from before the norman conquest, and enacted that they should descend according to common law in like manner as lands held by knight's service. the suppression of the religious houses gave the crown the control of a vast quantity of land. it had, with the consent of the crown, been devoted to religion by former owners. the descendants of the donors were equitably entitled to the land, as it ceased to be applied to the trust for which it was given, but the power of the crown was too great, and their claims were refused. had these estates been applied to purposes of religion or education they would have formed a valuable fund for the improvement of the people; but the land itself, as well as the portion of tithes belonging to the religious houses, was conferred upon favorites, and some of the wealthiest nobles of the present day trace their rise and importance to the rewards obtained by their ancestors out of the spoils of these charities. the importance of the measures of the tudors upon the system of land-holding can hardly be exaggerated. an impulse of self-defence led them to lessen the physical force of the oligarchy by relieving the land from the support of the army, and enabling them to convert to their own use the income previously applied to the defence of the realm. this was a bribe, but it brought its own punishment. the eviction of the working farmers, the demolition of their dwellings, the depopulation of the country, were evils of most serious magnitude; and the supplement of the measures which produced such deplorable results was found in the permanent establishment of a taxation for the support of the poor. yet the nation reeled under the depletion produced by previous mistaken legislation, and all classes have been injured by the transfer of the support of the army from the land held by the nobles to the income of the people. side by side, with the measures passed, to prevent the clearing of the land, arose the system of poor laws. previous to the reformation the poor were principally relieved at the religious houses. the destruction of small farms, and the eviction of such masses of the people, which commenced in the reign of henry vii., overpowered the resources of these establishments; their suppression in the reigns of henry viii. and elizabeth aggravated the evil. the indiscriminate and wholesale execution of the poor vagrants by the former monarch only partially removed the evil, and the statute-book is loaded with acts for the relief of the destitute poor. the first efforts were collections in the churches; but voluntary alms proving insufficient, the powers of the churchwardens were extended, and they were directed and authorized to assess the parishioners according to their means, and thus arose a system which, though benevolent in its object, is a slur upon our social arrangements. land, the only source of food, is rightly charged with the support of the destitute. the necessity for such aid arose originally from their being evicted therefrom. the charge should fall exclusively upon the rent receivers, and in no case should the tiller of the soil have to pay this charge either directly or indirectly. it is continued by the inadequacy of wages, and the improvidence engendered by a social system which arose out of injustice, and produced its own penalty. legislation with regard to the poor commenced contemporaneous with the laws against the eviction of the small farmers. i have already recited some of the laws to preserve small holdings; i now pass to the acts meant to compel landholders to provide for those whom they had dispossessed. in the act henry viii., cap. , was passed; it recites: "whereas in all places through the realm of england, vagabonds and beggars have of long time increased, and daily do increase, in great and excessive numbers by the occasion of idleness, the mother and root of all vices, [footnote: see henry vii., cap, , ante, p. , where the same expression occurs, showing that it was throwing the land out of tilth that occasioned pauperism.] whereby hath insurged and sprung, and daily insurgeth and springeth, continual thefts, murders, and other heinous offences and great enormities, to the high displeasure of god, the inquietation and damage of the king and people, and to the marvellous disturbance of the commonweal of the realm." it enacts that justices may give license to impotent persons to beg within certain limits, and, if found begging out of their limits, they shall be set in the stocks. beggars without license to be whipped or set in the stocks. all persons able to labor, who shall beg or be vagrant, shall be whipped and sent to the place of their birth. parishes to be fined for neglect of the constables. henry viii., cap. , continued this act to the end of the ensuing parliament. edward vi., cap. , recites the increase of idle vagabonds, and enacts that all persons loitering or wandering shall be marked with a v, and adjudged a slave for two years, and afterward running away shall become a felon. impotent persons were to be removed to the place where they had resided for three years, and allowed to beg. a weekly collection was to be made in the churches every sunday and holiday after reading the gospel of the day, the amount to be applied to the relief of bedridden poor. and edward vi., cap. , directs the parson, vicar, curate, and church-wardens, to appoint two collectors to distribute weekly to the poor. the people were exhorted by the clergy to contribute; and, if they refuse, then, upon the certificate of the parson, vicar, or curate, to the bishop of the diocese, he shall send for them and induce him or them to charitable ways. and philip and mary, cap. , re-enacts the former, and requires the collectors to account quarterly; and where the poor are too numerous for relief, they were licensed by a justice of the peace to beg. elizabeth, cap. , confirms and renews the former acts, and compels collectors to serve under a penalty of l . persons refusing to contribute their alms shall be exhorted, and, if they obstinately refuse, shall be bound by the bishop to appear at the next general quarter session, and they may be imprisoned if they refuse to be bound. the th elizabeth, cap. , requires the justices of the peace to register all aged and impotent poor born or for three years resident in the parish, and to settle them in convenient habitations, and ascertain the weekly charge, and assess the amount on the inhabitants, and yearly appoint collectors to receive and distribute the assessment, and also an overseer of the poor. this act was to continue for seven years. the th elizabeth, cap. , provides for the employment of the poor. stores of wool, hemp, flax, iron, etc., to be provided in cities and towns, and the poor set to work. it empowered persons possessed of land in free socage to give or devise same for the maintenance of the poor. the th elizabeth, cap. , and the d elizabeth, cap. , extended these acts, and made the assessment compulsory. i shall ask you to compare the date of these several laws for the relief of the destitute poor with the dates of the enactments against evictions. you will find they run side by side. [footnote: the following tables of the acts passed against eviction, and enacting the support of the poor, show that they were contemporaneous: against evictions. henry vii., cap. . henry viii, cap. . henry viii, henry viii, cap. . henry viii, cap. . henry viii, cap. . edward vi., cap. . and philip and mary, cap. . and philip and mary, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . enacting poor laws. henry viii., cap. . henry viii., cap. . edward vi., cap. . and edward vi., cap. . and philip and mary, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. . elizabeth, cap. .] i have perhaps gone at too great length into detail; but i think i could not give a proper picture of the alteration in the system of landholding or its effects without tracing from the statute-book the black records of these important changes. the suppression of monasteries tended greatly to increase the sufferings of the poor, but i doubt if even these institutions could have met the enormous pressure which arose from the wholesale evictions of the people. the laws of henry vii and henry viii., enforcing the tillage of the land, preceded the suppression of religious houses, and the act of the latter monarch allowing the poor to beg was passed before any steps were taken to close the convents. that measure was no doubt injurious to the poor, but the main evil arose from other causes. the lands of these houses, when no longer applicable to the purpose for which they were given, should have reverted to the heirs of the donors, or have been applied to other religious or educational purposes. the bestowal of them upon favorites, to the detriment alike of the state, the church, the poor, and the ignorant, was an abuse of great magnitude, the effect of which is still felt. the reigns of the tudors are marked with three events affecting the land--viz.: st. relieving it of the support of the army; d. burdening of it with the support of the poor; d. applying the monastic lands to private uses. the abolition of retainers, while it relieved the land of the nobles from the principal charge thereon, did not entirely abolish knight's service. the monarch was entitled to the care of all minors, to aids on the marriage or knighthood of the eldest son, to primerseizin or a year's rent upon the death of each tenant of the crown. these fees were considerable, and were under the care of the court of ward and liveries. the artisan class had, however, grown in wealth, and they were greatly strengthened by the removal from france of large numbers of workmen in consequence of the revocation of the edict of nantes. these prosperous tradespeople became landowners by purchase, and thus tended to replace the liberi homines, or freemen, who had been destroyed under the wars of the nobles, which effaced the landmarks of english society. the liberated serfs attained the position of paid farm-laborers; had the policy of elizabeth, who enacted that each of their cottages should have an allotment of four acres of land, been carried out, it would have been most beneficial to the state. the reign of this family embraced one hundred and eighteen years, during which the increase of the population was about twenty-five per cent. when henry vii. ascended the throne in it was , , , and on the death of queen elizabeth in it had reached , , , the average increase being about per annum. the changes effected in the condition of the farmers' class left the mass of the people in a far worse state at the close than at the commencement of their rule. vii. the stuarts. the accession of the stuarts to the throne of england took place under peculiar circumstances. the nation had just passed through two very serious struggles--one political, the other religious. the land which had been in the possession of religious communities, instead of being retained by the state for educational or religious purposes, had been given to favorites. a new class of ownership had been created--the lay impropriators of tithes. the suppression of retainers converted land into a quasi property. the extension to land of the powers of bequest gave the possessors greater facilities for disposing thereof. it was relieved from the principal feudal burden, military service, but remained essentially feudal as far as tenure was concerned. men were no longer furnished to the state as payment of the knight's fee; they were cleared off the land, to make room for sheep and oxen, england being in that respect about two hundred years in advance of ireland, though without the outlet of emigration. vagrancy and its attendant evils led to the poor law. james i. and his ministers tried to grapple with the altered circumstances, and strove to substitute and equitable crown rent or money payment for the existing and variable claims which were collected by the court of ward and livery. the knight's fee then consisted of twelve plough-lands, a more modern name for "a hide of land." the class burdened with knight's service, or payments in lieu thereof, comprised temporal and spiritual lords, barons, knights, and esquires. the knight's fee was subject to aids, which were paid to the crown upon the marriage of the king's son or daughter. upon the death of the possessor, the crown received primer-seizen a year's rent. if the successor was an infant, the crown under the name of wardship, took the rents of the estates. if the ward was a female, a fine was levied if she did not accept the husband chosen by the crown. fines on alienation were also levied, and the estates, though sold, became escheated, and reverted to the crown upon the failure of issue. these various fines kept alive the principle that the lands belonged to the crown as representative of the nation; but, as they varied in amount, james i. proposed to compound with the tenants-in-fee, and to convert them into fixed annual payments. the nobles refused, and the scheme was abandoned. in the succeeding reign, the attempt to stretch royal power beyond its due limits led to resistance by force, but it was no longer a mere war of nobles; their power had been destroyed by henry vii. the stuarts had to fight the people, with a paid army, and the commons, having the purse of the nation, opposed force to force. the contest eventuated in a military protectorship. many of the principal tenants-in-fee fled the country to save their lives. their lands were confiscated and given away; thus the crown rights were weakened, and charles ii. was forced to recognize many of the titles given by cromwell; he did not dare to face the convulsion which must follow an expulsion of the novo homo in posession of the estates of more ancient families; but legislation went further--it abolished all the remaining feudal charges. the commons appear to have assented to this change, from a desire to lessen the private income of the sovereign, and thus to make him more dependent upon parliament, this was done by the th charles ii., cap. . it enacts: "that the court of ward and liveries, primer seizin, etc., and all fines for alienation, tenures by knight's service, and tenures in capite, be done away with and turned into fee and common socage, and discharged of homage, escuage, aids, and reliefs. all future tenures created by the king to be in free and common socage, reserving rents to the crown and also fines on alienation. it enables fathers to dispose of their children's share during their minority, and gives the custody of the personal estate to the guardians of such child, and imposes in lieu of the revenues raised in the court of ward and liveries, duties upon beer and ale." the land was relieved of its legitimate charge, and a tax on beer and ale imposed instead! the landlords were relieved at the expense of the people. the statute which accomplished this change is described by blackstone as "a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even magna charta itself, since that only pruned the luxuriances that had grown out of military tenures, and thereby preserved them in vigor; but the statute of king charles extirpated the whole, and demolished both root and branches." the efforts of james ii. to rule contrary to the wish of the nation, led to his expulsion from the throne, and showed that, in case of future disputes as to the succession, the army, like the praetorian guards of rome, had the election of the monarch. the red and white roses of the plantagenets reappeared under the altered names of whig and tory; but it was proved that the decision of a leading soldier like the duke of marlborough would decide the army, and that it would govern the nation; fortunately the decision was a wise one, and was ratified by parliament: thus force governed law, and the decision of the army influenced the senate. william iii. succeeded, as an elected monarch, under the bill of rights. this remarkable document contains no provision, securing the tenants-in-fee in their estates; and i have not met with any treatise dealing with the legal effects of the eviction of james ii. all patents were covenants between the king and his heirs, and the patentees and their heirs. the expulsion of the sovereign virtually destroyed the title; and an elected king, who did not succeed as heir, was not bound by the patents of his predecessors, nor was william asked, by the bill of rights, to recognize any of the existing titles. this anomalous state of things was met in degree by the statute of prescriptions, but even this did not entirely cure the defect in the titles to the principal estates in the kingdom. the english tenants in decapitating one landlord and expelling another, appear to have destroyed their titles, and then endeavored to renew them by prescriptive right; but i shall not pursue this topic further, though it may have a very definite bearing upon the question of landholding. it may not be uninteresting to allude rather briefly to the state of england at the close of the seventeenth century. geoffrey king, who wrote in , gives the first reliable statistics about the state of the country. he estimated the number of houses at , , , and the average at four to each house, making the population , , . he says there was but seven acres of land for each person, but that england was six times better peopled than the known world, and twice better than europe. he calculated the total income at l , , , of which the yearly rent of land was l , , . the income was equal to l , s. d. per head, and the expense l , s. d.; the yearly increase, s. d. per head, or l , , per annum. he estimated the annual income of temporal peers at l per annum, spiritual peers at l , of baronets at l , and of knights at l . he estimated the area at , , acres (recent surveys make it , , ). he estimated the arable land at , , acres, and pasture and meadow at , , , a total of , , . the area under all kinds of crops and permanent pasture was, in , , , acres; therefore about five and a half million acres have been reclaimed and added to the arable land. as the particulars of his estimate may prove interesting, i append them in a note. [footnote--geoffrey king thus classifies the land of england and wales: acres. value/acre rent arable land, , , l l , , pasture and meadow, , , , , woods and coppices, , , , forests, parks, and covers, , , , moors, mountains, and barren lands, , , , houses, homesteads, gardens, orchards,) , , (the land, , churches, and churchyards, ) (the buildings, , , rivers, lakes, meres, and ponds, , , roadways and waste lands, , ---------- ------- ---------- , , l l , , he estimates the live stock thus: value without the skin beeves, stirks, and calves, , , l l , , sheep and lambs, , , , , swine and pigs, , , , , deer, fawns, goats and kids, , , , horses, , , , , value of skins, , , ----------- l , , the annual produce he estimated as follows: acres rent produce grain, , , l , , l , , hemp, flax, etc., , , , , , butter, cheese, and milk, ) ( , , wool, ) ( , , horses bred, ) ( , flesh meat, )- , , , , -( , , tallow and hides, ) ( , hay consumed, ) ( , , timber, ) ( , , ---------- ----------- ----------- total , , l , , l , , ] he places the rent of the corn land at about one third of the produce, and that of pasture land at rather more. the price of meat per lb. was: beef and / d.; mutton, and / d.; pork, d.; venison, d.; hares, d.; rabbits, d. the weight of flesh-meat consumed was , , lbs., it being lbs. oz. for each person, or and / oz. daily. i shall have occasion to contrast these figures with those lately published when i come to deal with the present; but a great difference has arisen from the alteration in price, which is owing to the increase in the quantity of the precious metals. the reign of the last sovereign of this unfortunate race was distinguished by the first measures to inclose the commons and convert them into private property, with which i shall deal hereafter. the changes effected in the land laws of england during the reigns of the stuarts, a period of years, were very important. the act of charles ii. which abolished the court of ward and liveries, appeared to be an abandonment of the rights of the people, as asserted in the person of the crown; and this alteration also seemed to give color of right to the claim which is set up of property in land, but the following law of edward iii. never was repealed: "that the king is the universal lord and original proprietor of all land in his kingdom, and that no man doth or can possess any part of it but what has mediately or immediately been derived as a gift from him to be held on feodal service." no lawyer will assert for any english subject a higher title than tenancy-in-fee, which bears the impress of holding and denies the assertion of ownership. the power of the nobles, the tenants-in-fee, was strengthened by an act passed in the reign of william and mary, which altered the relation of landlord and tenant. previous thereto, the landlord had the power of distraint, but he merely held the goods he seized to compel the tenant to perform personal service. it would be impossible for a tenant to pay his rent if his stock or implements were sold off the land. as the tudor policy of money payments extended, the greed for pelf led to an alteration in the law, and the act of william and mary allowed the landlord to sell the goods he had distrained. the tenant remained in possession of the land without the means of tilling it, which was opposed to public policy. this power of distraint was, however, confined to holdings in which there were leases by which the tenant covenanted to allow the landlord to distrain his stock and goods in default of payment of rent. the legislation of the stuarts was invariably favorable to the possessor of land and adverse to the rights of the people. the government during the closing reigns was oligarchical, so much so, that william iii., annoyed at the restriction put upon his kingly power, threatened to resign the crown and retire to holland; but the aristocracy were unwilling to relax their claims, and they secured by legislation the rights they appeared to have lost by the deposition of the sovereign. the population had increased from , , in to , , in , being an average increase of less than per annum. viii. the house of hanover. the first sovereign of the house of hanover ascended the throne not by right of descent but by election; the legitimate heir was set aside, and a distant branch of the family was chosen, and the succession fixed by act of parliament; but it is held by jurists that every parliament is sovereign and has the power of repealing any act of any former parliament. the beneficial rule of some of the latter monarchs of this family has endeared them to the people, but the doctrine of reigning by divine right, the favorite idea of the stuarts, is nullified, when the monarch ascends the throne by statute law and not by succession or descent. the age of chivalry passed away when the puritans defeated the cavaliers. the establishment of standing armies and the creation of a national debt, went to show that money, not knighthood or knight's service, gave force to law. the possession of wealth and of rent gave back to their possessors even larger powers than those wrested from them by the first tudor king. the maxim that "what was attached to the freehold belonged to the freehold," gave the landlords even greater powers than those held by the sword, and of which they were despoiled. though nominally forbidden to take part in the election of the representatives of the commons, yet they virtually had the power, the creation of freehold, the substance and material of electoral right; and consequently both houses of parliament were essentially landlord, and the laws, for the century which succeeded the ascension of george i., are marked with the assertion of landlord right which is tenant wrong. among the exhibitions of this influence is an act passed in the reign of george ii., which extended the power of distraint for rent, and the right to sell the goods seized--to all tenancies. previous legislation confined this privilege solely to cases in which there were leases, wherein the tenant, by written contract, gave the landlord power to seize in case of non-payment of rent, but there was no legal authority to sell until it was given by an act passed in the reign of william iii. the act of george ii. presumed that there was such a contract in all cases of parole letting or tenancy-at-will, and extended the landlord's powers to such tenancies. it is an anomaly to find that in the freest country in the world such an arbitrary power is confided to individuals, or that the landlord-creditor has the precedence over all other creditors, and can, by his own act, and without either trial or evidence, issue a warrant that has all the force of the solemn judgment of a court of law; and it certainly appears unjust to seize a crop, the seed for which is due to one man, and the manure to another, and apply it to pay the rent. but landlordism, intrusted with legislative power, took effectual means to preserve its own prerogative, and the form of law was used by parliaments, in which landlord influence was paramount, to pass enactments which were enforced by the whole power of the state, and sustained individual or class rights. the effect of this measure was most unfortunate; it encouraged the letting of lands to tenants-at-will or tenants from year to year, who could not, under existing laws, obtain the franchise or power to vote--they were not freemen, they were little better than serfs. they were tillers of the soil, rent-payers who could be removed at the will of another. they were not even freeholders, and had no political power--no voice in the affairs of the nation. the landlords in parliament gave themselves, individually by law, all the powers which a tenant gave them by contract, while they had no corresponding liability, and, therefore, it was their interest to refrain from giving leases, and to make their tenantry as dependent on them as if they were mere serfs. this law was especially unfortunate, and had a positive and very great effect upon the condition of the farming class and upon the nation, and people came to think that landlords could do as they liked with their land, and that the tenants must be creeping, humble, and servile. an effort to remedy this evil was made in , when the occupiers, if rented or rated at the small amount named, became voters. this gave the power to the holding, not to the man, and the landlord could by simple eviction deprive the man of his vote; hence the tenants-at-will were driven to the hustings like sheep--they could not, and dare not, refuse to vote as the landlord ordered. the lords of the manor, with a landlord parliament, asserted their claims to the commonages, and these lands belonging to the people, were gradually inclosed, and became the possession of individuals. the inclosing of commonages commenced in the reign of queen anne, and was continued in the reigns of all the sovereigns of the house of hanover. the first inclosure act was passed in ; in the following thirty years the average number of inclosure bills was about three each year; in the following fifty years there were nearly forty each year; and in the forty years of the nineteenth century it was nearly fifty per annum. the inclosures in each reign were as follows: acts. acres. queen anne, , george i., , george ii., , george iii., , , george iv., , william iv., , ---- --------- total, , , these lands belonged to the people, and might have been applied to relieve the poor. had they been allotted in small farms, they might have been made the means of support of from , to , , families, and they would have afforded employment and sustenance to all the poor, and thus rendered compulsory taxation under the poor-law system unnecessary; but the landlords seized on them and made the tenantry pay the poor-rate. the british poor law is a slur upon its boasted civilization. the unequal distribution of land and of wealth leads to great riches and great poverty. intense light produces deep shade. nowhere else but in wealthy england do god's creatures die of starvation, wanting food, while others are rich beyond comparison. the soil which affords sustenance for the people is rightly charged with the cost of feeding those who lack the necessaries of life, but the same object would be better achieved in a different way. poor-rates are now a charge upon a man's entire estate, and it would be much better for society if land to an amount equivalent to the charge were taken from the estate and assigned to the poor. if a man is charged with l a year poor-rate, it would make no real difference to him, while it would make a vast difference to the poor to take land to that value, put the poor to work tilling it, allowing them to enjoy the produce. any expense should be paid direct by the landlord, which would leave the charge upon the land, and exempt the improvements of the tenant, which represent his labor, free. the evil has intensified in magnitude, and a permanent army of paupers numbering at the minimum , persons, but increasing at some periods to upward of , , , has to be provided for; the cost, about l , , a year, is paid, not by landlords but by tenants, in addition to the various charities founded by benevolent persons. there are two classes relieved under this system, and which ought to be differently dealt with--the sick and the young. hospitals for the former and schools for the latter ought to take the place of the workhouse. it is difficult to fancy a worse place for educating the young than the workhouse, and it would tend to lessen the evil were the children of the poor trained and educated in separate establishments from those for the reception of paupers. pauperism is the concomitant of large holdings of land and insecurity of tenure. the necessity of such a provision arose, as i have previously shown, from the wholesale eviction of large numbers of the occupiers of land; and, as the means of supplying the need came from the land, the expense should, like tithes, have fallen exclusively upon land. the poor-rates are, however, also levied upon houses and buildings, which represent labor. the owner of land is the people, as represented by the crown, and the charges thereon next in succession to the claims of the state are the church and the poor. the continental wars at the close of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century had some effect upon the system of tillage; they materially enhanced the price of agricultural produce--rents were raised, and the national debt was contracted, which remains a burden on the nation. the most important change, however, arose from scientific and mechanical discoveries--the application of heat to the production of motive power. as long as water, which is a non-exhaustive source of motion, was used, the people were scattered over the land; or if segregation took place, it was in the neighborhood of running streams. the application of steam to the propulsion of machinery, and the discovery of engines capable of competing with the human hand, led to the substitution of machine-made fabrics for clothing, in place of homespun articles of domestic manufacture. this led to the employment of farm-laborers in procuring coals, to the removal of many from the rural into the urban districts, to the destruction of the principal employment of the family during the winter evenings, and consequently effected a great revolution in the social system. many small freeholds were sold, the owners thinking they could more rapidly acquire wealth by using the money representing their occupancy, in trade. thus the large estates became larger, and the smaller ones were absorbed, while the appearance of greater wealth from exchanging subterranean substances for money, or its representative, gave rise to ostentatious display. the rural population gradually diminished, while the civic population increased. the effect upon the system of landholding was triplicate. first, there was a diminution in the amount of labor applicable to the cultivation of land; second, there was a decrease in the amount of manure applied to the production of food; and lastly, there was an increase in the demand for land as a source of investment, by those who, having made money in trade, sought that social position which follows the possession of broad acres. thus the descendants of the feudal aristocracy were pushed aside by the modern plutocracy. this state of things had a double effect. food is the result of two essential ingredients--land and labor. the diminution in the amount of labor applied to the soil, consequent upon the removal of the laborers from the land, lessened the quantity of food; while the consumption of that food in cities and towns, and the waste of the fertile ingredients which should be restored to the soil, tended to exhaust the land, and led to vast importations of foreign and the manufacture of mineral manures. i shall not detain you by a discussion of this aspect of the question, which is of very great moment, consequent upon the removal of large numbers of people from rural to urban districts; but i may be excused in saying that agricultural chemistry shows that the soil--"perpetual man"--contains the ingredients needful to support human life, and feeding those animals meant for man's use. these ingredients are seized upon by the roots of plants and converted into aliment. if they are consumed where grown, and the refuse restored to the soil, its fertility is preserved; nay, more, the effect of tillage is to increase its productive power. it is impossible to exhaust land, no matter how heavy the crops that are grown, if the produce is, after consumption, restored to the soil. i have shown you how, in the reign of queen elizabeth, a man was not allowed to sell meat off his land unless he brought to, and consumed on it, the same weight of other meat. this was true agricultural and chemical economy. but when the people were removed from country to town, when the produce grown in the former was consumed in the latter, and the refuse which contained the elements of fertility was not restored to the soil, but swept away by the river, a process of exhaustion took place, which has been met in degree by the use of imported and artificial manures. the sewage question is taken up mainly with reference to the health of towns, but it deserves consideration in another aspect--its influence upon the production of food in the nation. an exhaustive process upon the fertility of the globe has been set on foot. the accumulations of vegetable mould in the primeval forests have been converted into grain, and sent to england, leaving permanent barrenness in what should be prolific plains; and the deposits of the chincha and ichaboe islands have been imported in myriads of tons, to replace in our own land the resources of which it is bereft by the civic consumption of rural produce. these conjoined operations were accelerated by the alteration in the british corn laws in , which placed the english farmer, who tried to preserve his land in a state of fertility, in competition with foreign grain--growers, who, having access to boundless fields of virgin soil, grow grain year after year until, having exhausted the fertile element, they leave it in a barren condition, and resort to other parts. a competition under such circumstances resembles that of two men of equal income, one of who appears wealthy by spending a portion of his capital, the other parsimonious by living within his means. of course, the latter has to debar himself of many enjoyments. the british farmer has lessened the produce of grain, and consequently of meat; and the nation has become dependent upon foreigners for meat, cheese, and butter, as well as for bread. this is hardly the place to discuss a question of agriculture, but scientific farmers know that there is a rotation of crops, [footnote: the agricultural returns of the united kingdom show that and / per cent of the arable land was under pasture, per cent under grain, per cent under green crops and bare fallow, and per cent under clover. the rotation would, therefore, be somewhat in this fashion: nearly one fourth of the land in tillage is under a manured crop or fallow, one fourth under wheat, one fourth under clover, and one fourth under barley, oats, etc., the succession being, first year, the manured crop; next year, wheat; third year, clover; fourth, barley or oats; and so on.] and that as one is diminished the others lessen. the quantity under tillage is a multiple of the area under grain. a diminution in corn is followed by a decrease of the extent under turnips and under clover; the former directly affects man, the latter the meat-affording animals. a decrease in the breadth under tillage means an addition to the pasture land, which in this climate only produces meat during the warm portions of the year. i must, however, not dwell upon this topic, but whatever leads to a diminution in the labor applied to the land lessens the production of food, and dear meat may only be the supplement to cheap corn. i shall probably be met with the hackneyed cry, the question is entirely one of price. each farmer and each landlord will ask himself, does it pay to grow grain? and in reply to any such inquiry, i would refer to the annual returns. i find that in the five years, to , wheat ranged from s. d. to s. d.; the average for the entire period being s. d. per quarter. in the five years from to it ranged from s. d. to s. d., the average for the five years being s. d. per quarter. the reduction in price has only been d. per quarter, or less than one half per cent. i venture to think that there are higher considerations than mere profit to individuals, and that, as the lands belong to the whole state as represented by the crown, and as they are held in trust to produce food for the people, that trust should be enforced. the average consumption of grain by each person is about a quarter (eight bushels) per annum. in the population of the united kingdom was , , . the average import of foreign grain was about , , quarters, therefore twenty-four millions were fed on the domestic produce. in the population was , , , and the average importation of grain , , quarters; therefore only eleven and a half millions were supported by home produce. here we are met with the startling fact that our own soil is not now supplying grain to even one half the number of people to whom it gave bread in . this is a serious aspect of the question, and one that should lead to examination, whether the development of the system of landholding, the absorptions of small farms and the creation of large ones, is really beneficial to the state, or tends to increase the supply of food. the area under grain in england in was , , . in it was , , acres, the diminution having been , , acres. the average yield would probably be four quarters per acre, and therefore the decrease amounted to the enormous quantity of eight million quarters, worth l , , , which had to be imported from other countries, to fill up the void, and feed , , of the population; and if a war took place, england may, like rome, be starved into peace. an idea prevails that a diminution in the extent under grain implies an increase in the production of meat. the best answer to that fallacy lies in the great increase in the price of meat. if the supply had increased the price would fall, but the converse has taken place. a comparison of the figures given by geoffrey king, in the reign of william iii., with those supplied by the board of trade in the reign of queen victoria, illustrates this phase of the landholding question, and shows whether the "enlightened policy" of the nineteenth century tends to encourage the fulfilment of the trust which applies to land--the production of food. the land of england and wales in and was classified as follows: . . acres. acres. under grain, , , , , pastures and meadows, , , , , flax, hemp, and madder, , , --------- green crops, --------- , , bare fallow, --------- , clover --------- , , orchards, , , , woods, coppices, etc, , , , , forests, parks, and commons, , , | moors, mountains, and bare land, , , |- , , waste, water, and road, , , | ----------- ----------- , , , , the estimate of may be corrected by lessing the quantity of waste land, and thus bringing the total to correspond with the extent ascertained by actual survey, but it shows a decrease in the extent under grain of nearly two million acres, and an increase in the area applicable to cattle of nearly , , acres; yet there is a decrease in the number of cattle, though an increase in sheep. the returns are as follows: . . . cattle , , , . , , sheep , , , , , , pigs , , (not given) , , the former shows that in there were ten million acres under grain, the latter only eight million acres. two million acres were added for cattle feeding. the former shows that the pasture land was ten million acres, and that green crops and clover were unknown. the latter that there were twelve million acres under pasture, and, in addition, that there were nearly three million acres of green crop and three million acres of clover. the addition to the cattle-feeding land was eight million acres; yet the number of cattle in was , , , and in , , , . of sheep, in , there were , , , and in , , , . the population had increased fourfold, and it is no marvel that meat is dear. it is the interest of agriculturists to keep down the quantity and keep up the price. the diminution in the area under corn was not met by a corresponding increase in live stock--in other words, the decrease of land under grain is not, per se, followed by an increase of meat. if the area under grain were increased, it would be preceded by an increase in the growth of turnips, and followed by a greater growth of clover; and these cattle-feeding products would materially add to the meat supply. a most important change in the system of landholding was effected by the spread of railways. it was brought about by the influence of the trading as opposed to the landlord class. in their inception they did not appear likely to effect any great alteration in the land laws. the shareholders had no compulsory power of purchase, hence enormous sums were paid for the land required; but as the system extended, parliament asserted the ownership of the nation, over land in the possession of the individual. acting on the idea that no man was more than a tenant, the state took the land from the occupier, as well as the tenant-in-fee, and gave it, not at their own price, but an assessed value, to the partners in a railway who traded for their mutual benefit, yet as they offered to convey travellers and goods at a quicker rate than on the ordinary roads, the state enabled them to acquire land by compulsion. a general act, the land clauses act, was passed in , which gives privileges with regard to the acquisition of land to the promoters of such works as railways, docks, canals, etc. numbers of acts are passed every session which assert the right of the state over the land, and transfer it from one man, or set of men, to another. it seems to me that the principle is clear, and rests upon the assertion of the state's ownership of the land; but it has often struck me to ask, why is this application of state rights limited to land required for these objects? why not apply to the land at each side of the railway, the principle which governs that under the railway itself? i consider the production of food the primary trust upon the land, that rapid transit over it is a secondary object; and as all experience shows that the division of land into small estates leads to a more perfect system of tillage, i think it would be of vast importance to the entire nation if all tenants who were, say, five years in possession were made "promoters" under the land clauses act, and thus be enabled to purchase the fee of their holdings in the same manner as a body of railway proprietors. it would be most useful to the state to increase the number of tenants-in-fee--to re-create the ancient freemen, the liberi homines--and i think it can be done without requiring the aid either of a new principle or new machinery, by simply placing the farmer-in-possession on the same footing as the railway shareholder. i give at foot the draft of a bill i prepared in for this object. [footnote: a bill to encourage the outlay of money upon land fob agricultural purposes. whereas it is expedient to encourage the occupiers of land to expend money thereon, in building, drainage, and other similar improvements; and whereas the existing laws do not give the tenants or occupiers any sufficient security for such outlay: be it enacted by the queen's most excellent majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons in parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same: . that all outlay upon land for the purpose of rendering it more productive, and all outlay upon buildings for the accommodation of those engaged in tilling or working the same, or for domestic animals of any sort, be, and the same is hereby deemed to be, an outlay of a public nature. . that the clauses of "the land clauses consolidation act ," "with respect to the purchase of lands by agreement," and "with respect to the purchase and taking of lands otherwise than by agreement," and "with respect to the purchase money or compensation coming to parties having limited interests, or prevented from treating or not making title," shall be, and they are hereby incorporated with this act. . that every tenant or occupier who has for the past five years been in possession of any land, tenements, or hereditaments, shall be considered "a promoter of the undertaking within the meaning of the said recited act, and shall be entitled to purchase the lands which he has so occupied, 'either by agreement' 'or otherwise than by agreement,' as provided in the said recited act." then follow some details which it is unnecessary to recite here.] the th william i. secured to freemen the inheritance of their lands, and they were not able to sell them until the act quia emptores of edward i. was passed. the tendency of persons to spend the representative value of their lands and sell them was checked by the mosaic law, which did not allow any man to despoil his children of their inheritance. the possessor could only mortgage them until the year of jubilee--the fiftieth year. in switzerland and belgium, where the nobles did not entirely get rid of the freemen, the lands continued to be held in small estates. in switzerland there are seventy-four proprietors for every hundred families, and in belgium the average size of the estate is three and a half hectares--about eight acres. these small ownerships are not detrimental to the state. on the contrary, they tend to its security and well-being. i have treated on this subject in my work, "the food supplies of western europe." these small estates existed in england at the norman conquest, and their perpetual continuance was the object of the law of william i., to which i have referred. their disappearance was due to the greed of the nobles during the reign of the plantagenets, and they were not replaced by the tudors, who neglected to restore the men-at-arms to the position they occupied under the laws of edward the confessor and william i. the establishment of two estates in land; one the ownership, the other the use, may be traced to the payment of rent, to the roman commonwealth, for the ager publicus. under the feudal system the rent was of two classes--personal service or money; the latter was considered base tenure. the legislation of the tudors abolished the payment of rent by personal service, and made all rent payable in money or in kind. the land had been burdened with the sole support of the army. it was then freed from this charge, and a tax was levied upon the community. some writers have sought to define rent as the difference between fertile lands and those that are so unproductive as barely to pay the cost of tillage. this far-fetched idea is contradicted by the circumstance that for centuries rent was paid by labor--the personal service of the vassal--and it is now part of the annual produce of the soil inasmuch as land will be unproductive without seed and labor, or being pastured by tame animals, the representative of labor in taming and tending them. rent is usually the labor or the fruits of the labor of the occupant. in some cases it is income derived from the labors of others. a broad distinction exists between the rent of land, which is a portion of the fruits or its equivalent in money, and that of improvements and houses, which is an exchange of the labor of the occupant given as payment for that employed in effecting improvements or erecting houses. the latter described as messuages were valued in at six millions per annum; in they were nearly fifeteen millions; now they are valued at eighty millions. [footnote--a parliamentary return gives the following information as to the value of lands and messuages in and : - . - . lands, l , , l , , messuages, , , , , the increase in the value of land is hardly equal to the reduction in the value of gold, while the increase in messuages shows the enormous expenditure of labor.] the increase represents a sum considerably more than double the national debt of great britain, and under the system of leases the improvements will pass from the industrial to the landlord class. it seems to me to be a mistake in legislation to encourage a system by which these two funds merge into one, and that hands the income arising from the expenditure of the working classes over to the tenants-in-fee without an equivalent. this proceeds from a straining of the maxim that "what is attached to the freehold belongs to the freehold," and was made law when both houses of parliament were essentially landlord. that maxim is only partially true: corn is as much attached to the freehold as a tree; yet one is cut without hindrance and the other is prevented. potatoes, turnips, and such tubers, are only obtained by disturbing the freehold. this maxim was at one time so strained that it applied to fixtures, but recent legislation and modern discussions have limited the rights of the landlord class and been favorable to the occupier, and i look forward to such alterations in our laws as will secure to the man who expends his labor or earnings in improvements, an estate in perpetuo therein, as i think no length of user of that which is a man's own--his labor or earnings--should hand over his representative improvements to any other person. i agree with those writers who maintain that it is prejudicial to the state that the rent fund should be enjoyed by a comparatively small number of persons, and think it would be advantageous to distribute it, by increasing the number of tenants-in-fee. natural laws forbid middlemen, who do nothing to make the land productive, and yet subsist upon the labor of the farmer, and receive as rent part of the produce of his toil. the land belongs to the state, and should only be subject to taxes, either by personal service, such as serving in the militia or yeomanry, or by money payments to the state. land does not represent capital, but the improvements upon it do. a man does not purchase land. he buys the right of possession. in any transfer of land there is no locking up of capital, because one man receives exactly the amount the other expends. the individual may lock up his funds, but the nation does not. capital is not money. i quote a definition from a previous work of mine, "the case of ireland," p. : "capital stock properly signifies the means of subsistence for man, and for the animals subservient to his use while engaged in the process of production. the jurisconsults of former times expressed the idea by the words res fungibiles, by which they meant consumable commodities, or those things which are consumed in their use for the supply of man's animal wants, as contradistinguished from unconsumable commodities, which latter writers, by an extension of the term, in a figurative sense, have called fixed capital." all the money in the bank of england will not make a single four-pound loaf. capital, as represented by consumable commodities, is the product of labor applied to land, or the natural fruits of the land itself. the land does not become either more or less productive by reason of the transfer from one person to another; it is the withdrawal of labor that affects its productiveness. wages are a portion of the value of the products of a joint combination of employer and employed. the former advances from time to time as wages to the latter, the estimated portion of the increase arising from their combined operations to which he may be entitled. this may be either in food or in money. the food of the world for one year is the yield at harvest; it is the capital stock upon which mankind exist while engaged in the operations for producing food, clothing, and other requisites for the use of mankind, until nature again replenishes this store. money cannot produce food; it is useful in measuring the distribution of that which already exists. the grants of the crown were a fee or reward for service rendered; the donee became tenant-in-fee; being a reward, it was restricted to a man and his heirs-male or his heirs-general; in default of heirs-male or heirs-general, the land reverted to the crown, which was the donor. a sale to third parties does not affect this phase of the question, inasmuch as it is a principle of british law that no man can convey to another a greater estate in land than that which he possesses himself; and if the seller only held the land as tenant-in-fee for his own life and that of his heirs, he could not give a purchaser that which belonged to the crown, the reversion on default of heirs (see statute de donis, edward i., ante, p. ). this right of the sovereign, or rather of the people, has not been asserted to the full extent. many noble families have become extinct, yet the lands have not been claimed, as they should have been, for the nation. i should not complete my review of the subject without referring to what are called the laws of primogeniture. i fail to discover any such law. on the contrary, i find that the descent of most of the land of england is under the law of contract--by deed or bequest--and that it is only in case of intestacy that the courts intervene to give it to the next heir. this arises more from the construction the judges put upon the wishes of the deceased, than upon positive enactment. when a man who has the right of bequeathing his estate among his descendants does not exercise that power, it is considered that he wishes the estate to go undivided to the next heir. in america the converse takes place: a man can leave all his land to one; and, if he fails to do so, it is divided. the laws relating to contracts or settlements allow land to be settled by deed upon the children of a living person, but it is more frequently upon the grandchildren. they acquire the power of sale, which is by the contract denied to their parents. a man gives to his grandchild that which he denies to his son. this cumbrous process works disadvantageously, and it might very properly be altered by restricting the power of settlement or bequest to living persons, and not allowing it to extend to those who are unborn. it is not a little curious to note how the ideas of mankind, after having been diverted for centuries, return to their original channels. the system of landholding in the most ancient races was communal. that word, and its derivative, communism, has latterly had a bad odor. yet all the most important public works are communal. all joint-stock companies, whether for banking, trading, or extensive works, are communes. they hold property in common, and merge individual in general rights. the possession of land by communes or companies is gradually extending, and it is by no means improbable that the ideas which governed very remote times may, like the communal joint-stock system, be applied more extensively to landholding. it may not be unwise to review the grounds that we have been going over, and to glance at the salient points. the aboriginal inhabitants of this island enjoyed the same rights as those in other countries, of possessing themselves of land unowned and unoccupied. the romans conquered, and claimed all the rights the natives possessed, and levied a tribute for the use of the lands. upon the retirement of the romans, after an occupancy of about six hundred years, the lands reverted to the aborigines, but they, being unable to defend themselves, invited the saxons, the jutes, and the angles, who reduced them to serfdom, and seized upon the land; they acted as if it belonged to the body of the conquerors, it was allotted to individuals by the folc-gemot or assembly of the people, and a race of liberi homines or freemen arose, who paid no rent, but performed service to the state; during their sway of about six hundred years the institutions changed, and the monarch, as representing the people, claimed the right of granting the possession of land seized for treason by boc or charter. the norman invasion found a large body of the saxon landholders in armed opposition to william, and when they were defeated, he seized upon their land and gave it to his followers, and then arose the term terra regis, "the land of the king," instead of the term folc-land, "the land of the people;" but a large portion of the realm remained in the hands of the liberi homines or freemen. the norman barons gave possession of part of their lands to their followers, hence arose the vassals who paid rent to their lord by personal service, while the freemen held by service to the crown. in the wars of the plantagenets the freemen seem to have disappeared, and vassalage was substituted, the principal vassals being freeholders. the descendants of the aborigines regained their freedom. the possession of land was only given for life, and it was preceded by homage to the crown, or fealty to the lord, investiture following the ceremony. the tudor sovereigns abolished livery and retainers, but did not secure the rights of the men-at-arms or replace them in their position of freemen. the chief lords converted the payment of rent by service into payment in money; this led to wholesale evictions, and necessitated the establishment of the poor laws, the stuarts surrendered the remaining charges upon land: but on the death of one sovereign, and the expulsion of another, the validity of patents from the crown became doubtful. the present system of landholding is the outcome of the tudor ideas. but the crown has never abandoned the claim asserted in the statute of edward i., that all land belongs to the sovereign as representing the people, and that individuals hold but do not own it; and upon this sound and legal principle the state takes land from one and gives it to another, compensating for the loss arising from being dispossessed. i have now concluded my brief sketch of the facts which seemed to me most important in tracing the history of landholding in england, and laid before you not only the most vital changes, but also the principles which underlay them; and i shall have failed in conveying the ideas of my own mind if i have not shown you that at least from the scandinavian or anglo-saxon invasion, the ownership of land rested either in the people, or the crown as representing the people: that individual proprietorship of land is not only unknown, but repugnant to the principles of the british constitution; that the largest estate a subject can have is tenancy-in-fee, and that it is a holding and not an owning of the soil; and i cannot conceal from you the conviction which has impressed my mind, after much study and some personal examination of the state of proprietary occupants on the continent, that the best interests of the nation, both socially, morally, and materially, will be promoted by a very large increase in the number of tenants-in-fee; which can be attained by the extension of principles of legistration now in active operation. all that is necessary is to extend the provisions of the land clauses act, which apply to railways and such objects, to tenants in possession; to make them "promoters" under that act; to treat their outlay for the improvement of the soil and the greater production of food as a public outlay; and thus to restore to england a class which corresponds with the peasent proprietors of the continent--the freeman or liberi homines of anglo-saxon times, whose rights were solemnly guaranteed by the th william i., and whose existence would be the glory of the country and the safeguard of its institution. business*** transcribed from the george bell & sons edition by david price, email ccx @coventry.ac.uk everybody's business is nobody's business or, private abuses, public grievances: exemplified in the pride, insolence, and exorbitant wages of our women, servants, footmen, &c. with a proposal for amendment of the same; as also for clearing the streets of those vermin called shoe-cleaners, and substituting in their stead many thousands of industrious poor, now ready to starve. with divers other hints of great use to the public. humbly submitted the consideration of our legislature, and the careful perusal of all masters and mistresses of families. by andrew moreton, esq. the fifth edition, with the addition of a preface. london: printed for w. meadows, in cornhill; and sold by t. warner, at the black boy in pater-noster row; a. dodd, without temple bar; and e. nutt, at the royal exchange. . price six pence.] the preface since this little book appeared in print, it has had no less than three answers, and fresh attacks are daily expected from the powers of grub- street; but should threescore antagonists more arise, unless they say more to the purpose than the forementioned, they shall not tempt me to reply. nor shall i engage in a paper war, but leave my book to answer for itself, having advanced nothing therein but evident truths, and incontestible matters of fact. the general objection is against my style; i do not set up for an author, but write only to be understood, no matter how plain. as my intentions are good, so have they had the good fortune to meet with approbation from the sober and substantial part of mankind; as for the vicious and vagabond, their ill-will is my ambition. it is with uncommon satisfaction i see the magistracy begin to put the laws against vagabonds in force with the utmost vigour, a great many of those vermin, the japanners, having lately been taken up and sent to the several work-houses in and about this city; and indeed high time, for they grow every day more and more pernicious. my project for putting watchmen under commissioners, will, i hope, be put in practice; for it is scarce safe to go by water unless you know your man. as for the maid-servants, if i undervalue myself to take notice of them, as they are pleased to say, it is because they overvalue themselves so much they ought to be taken notice of. this makes the guilty take my subject by the wrong end, but any impartial reader may find, i write not against servants, but bad servants; not against wages, but exorbitant wages, and am entirely of the poet's opinion, the good should meet with favour and applause, the wicked be restrain'd by wholesome laws. the reason why i did not publish this book till the end of the last sessions of parliament was, because i did not care to interfere with more momentous affairs; but leave it to the consideration of that august body during this recess, against the next sessions, when i shall exhibit another complaint against a growing abuse, for which i doubt not but to receive their approbation and the thanks of all honest men. everybody's business is nobody's business this is a proverb so common in everybody's mouth, that i wonder nobody has yet thought it worth while to draw proper inferences from it, and expose those little abuses, which, though they seem trifling, and as it were scarce worth consideration, yet, by insensible degrees, they may become of injurious consequence to the public; like some diseases, whose first symptoms are only trifling disorders, but by continuance and progression, their last periods terminate in the destruction of the whole human fabric. in contradiction therefore to this general rule, and out of sincere love and well meaning to the public, give me leave to enumerate the abuses insensibly crept in among us, and the inconveniences daily arising from the insolence and intrigues of our servant-wenches, who, by their caballing together, have made their party so considerable, that everybody cries out against them; and yet, to verify the proverb, nobody has thought of, or at least proposed a remedy, although such an undertaking, mean as it seems to be, i hope will one day be thought worthy the consideration of our king, lords, and commons. women servants are now so scarce, that from thirty and forty shillings a year, their wages are increased of late to six, seven, nay, eight pounds per annum, and upwards; insomuch that an ordinary tradesman cannot well keep one; but his wife, who might be useful in his shop or business, must do the drudgery of household affairs; and all this because our servant- wenches are so puffed up with pride nowadays, that they never think they go fine enough: it is a hard matter to know the mistress from the maid by their dress; nay, very often the maid shall be much the finer of the two. our woollen manufacture suffers much by this, for nothing but silks and satins will go down with our kitchen-wenches; to support which intolerable pride, they have insensibly raised their wages to such a height as was never known in any age or nation but this. let us trace this from the beginning, and suppose a person has a servant- maid sent him out of the country, at fifty shillings, or three pounds a year. the girl has scarce been a week, nay, a day in her service, but a committee of servant-wenches are appointed to examine her, who advise her to raise her wages, or give warning; to encourage her to which, the herb- woman, or chandler-woman, or some other old intelligencer, provides her a place of four or five pounds a year; this sets madam cock-a-hoop, and she thinks of nothing now but vails and high wages, and so gives warning from place to place, till she has got her wages up to the tip-top. her neat's leathern shoes are now transformed into laced ones with high heels; her yarn stockings are turned into fine woollen ones, with silk clocks; and her high wooden pattens are kicked away for leathern clogs; she must have a hoop too, as well as her mistress; and her poor scanty linsey-woolsey petticoat is changed into a good silk one, for four or five yards wide at the least. not to carry the description farther, in short, plain country joan is now turned into a fine london madam, can drink tea, take snuff, and carry herself as high as the best. if she be tolerably handsome, and has any share of cunning, the apprentice or her master's son is enticed away and ruined by her. thus many good families are impoverished and disgraced by these pert sluts, who, taking the advantage of a young man's simplicity and unruly desires, draw many heedless youths, nay, some of good estates, into their snares; and of this we have but too many instances. some more artful shall conceal their condition, and palm themselves off on young fellows for gentlewomen and great fortunes. how many families have been ruined by these ladies? when the father or master of the family, preferring the flirting airs of a young prinked up strumpet, to the artless sincerity of a plain, grave, and good wife, has given his desires aloose, and destroyed soul, body, family, and estate. but they are very favourable if they wheedle nobody into matrimony, but only make a present of a small live creature, no bigger than a bastard, to some of the family, no matter who gets it; when a child is born it must be kept. our sessions' papers of late are crowded with instances of servant-maids robbing their places, this can be only attributed to their devilish pride; for their whole inquiry nowadays is, how little they shall do, how much they shall have. but all this while they make so little reserve, that if they fall sick the parish must keep them, if they are out of place, they must prostitute their bodies, or starve; so that from clopping and changing, they generally proceed to whoring and thieving, and this is the reason why our streets swarm with strumpets. thus many of them rove from place to place, from bawdy-house to service, and from service to bawdy-house again, ever unsettled and never easy, nothing being more common than to find these creatures one week in a good family, and the next in a brothel. this amphibious life makes them fit for neither, for if the bawd uses them ill, away they trip to service, and if the mistress gives them a wry word, whip they are at a bawdy-house again, so that in effect they neither make good whores nor good servants. those who are not thus slippery in the tail, are light of finger; and of these the most pernicious are those who beggar you inchmeal. if a maid is a downright thief she strips you, it once, and you know your loss; but these retail pilferers waste you insensibly, and though you hardly miss it, yet your substance shall decay to such a degree, that you must have a very good bottom indeed not to feel the ill effects of such moths in your family. tea, sugar, wine, &c., or any such trifling commodities, are reckoned no thefts, if they do not directly take your pewter from your shelf, or your linen from your drawers, they are very honest: what harm is there, say they, in cribbing a little matter for a junket, a merry bout or so? nay, there are those that when they are sent to market for one joint of meat, shall take up two on their master's account, and leave one by the way, for some of these maids are mighty charitable, and can make a shift to maintain a small family with what they can purloin from their masters and mistresses. if you send them with ready money, they turn factors, and take threepence or fourpence in the shilling brokerage. and here let me take notice of one very heinous abuse, not to say petty felony, which is practised in most of the great families about town, which is, when the tradesman gives the house-keeper or other commanding servant a penny or twopence in the shilling, or so much in the pound, for everything they send in, and which, from thence, is called poundage. this, in my opinion, is the greatest of villanies, and ought to incur some punishment, yet nothing is more common, and our topping tradesmen, who seem otherwise to stand mightily on their credit, make this but a matter of course and custom. if i do not, says one, another will (for the servant is sure to pick a hole in the person's coat who shall not pay contribution). thus this wicked practice is carried on and winked at, while receiving of stolen goods, and confederating with felons, which is not a jot worse, is so openly cried out against, and severely punished, witness jonathan wild. and yet if a master or mistress inquire after anything missing, they must be sure to place their words in due form, or madam huffs and flings about at a strange rate, what, would you make a thief of her? who would live with such mistrustful folks? thus you are obliged to hold your tongue, and sit down quietly by your loss, for fear of offending your maid, forsooth! again, if your maid shall maintain one, two, or more persons from your table, whether they are her poor relations, countryfolk, servants out of place, shoe-cleaners, charwomen, porters, or any other of her menial servants, who do her ladyship's drudgery and go of her errands, you must not complain at your expense, or ask what has become of such a thing, or such a thing; although it might never so reasonably be supposed that it was altogether impossible to have so much expended in your family; but hold your tongue for peace sake, or madam will say, you grudge her victuals; and expose you to the last degree all over the neighbourhood. thus have they a salve for every sore, cheat you to your face, and insult you into the bargain; nor can you help yourself without exposing yourself, or putting yourself into a passion. another great abuse crept in among us, is the giving of veils to servants; this was intended originally as an encouragement to such as were willing and handy, but by custom and corruption it is now grown to be a thorn in our sides, and, like other good things, abused, does more harm than good; for now they make it a perquisite, a material part of their wages, nor must their master give a supper, but the maid expects the guests should pay for it, nay, sometimes through the nose. thus have they spirited people up to this unnecessary and burthensome piece of generosity unknown to our forefathers, who only gave gifts to servants at christmas-tide, which custom is yet kept into the bargain; insomuch that a maid shall have eight pounds per annum in a gentleman's or merchant's family. and if her master is a man of free spirit, who receives much company, she very often doubles her wages by her veils; thus having meat, drink, washing, and lodging for her labour, she throws her whole income upon her back, and by this means looks more like the mistress of the family than the servant-wench. and now we have mentioned washing, i would ask some good housewifely gentlewoman, if servant-maids wearing printed linens, cottons, and other things of that nature, which require frequent washing, do not, by enhancing the article of soap, add more to housekeeping than the generality of people would imagine? and yet these wretches cry out against great washes, when their own unnecessary dabs are very often the occasion. but the greatest abuse of all is, that these creatures are become their own lawgivers; nay, i think they are ours too, though nobody would imagine that such a set of slatterns should bamboozle a whole nation; but it is neither better nor worse, they hire themselves to you by their own rule. that is, a month's wages, or a month's warning; if they don't like you they will go away the next day, help yourself how you can; if you don't like them, you must give them a month's wages to get rid of them. this custom of warning, as practised by our maid-servants, is now become a great inconvenience to masters and mistresses. you must carry your dish very upright, or miss, forsooth, gives you warning, and you are either left destitute, or to seek for a servant; so that, generally speaking, you are seldom or never fixed, but always at the mercy of every new comer to divulge your family affairs, to inspect your private life, and treasure up the sayings of yourself and friends. a very great confinement, and much complained of in most families. thus have these wenches, by their continual plotting and cabals, united themselves into a formidable body, and got the whip hand of their betters; they make their own terms with us; and two servants now, will scarce undertake the work which one might perform with ease; notwithstanding which, they have raised their wages to a most exorbitant pitch; and, i doubt not, if there be not a stop put to their career, but they will bring wages up to . per annum in time, for they are much about half way already. it is by these means they run away with a great part of our money, which might be better employed in trade, and what is worse, by their insolent behaviour, their pride in dress, and their exorbitant wages, they give birth to the following inconveniences. first, they set an ill example to our children, our apprentices, our covenant servants, and other dependants, by their saucy and insolent behaviour, their pert, and sometimes abusive answers, their daring defiance of correction, and many other insolences which youth are but too apt to imitate. secondly, by their extravagance in dress, they put our wives and daughters upon yet greater excesses, because they will, as indeed they ought, go finer than the maid; thus the maid striving to outdo the mistress, the tradesman's wife to outdo the gentleman's wife, the gentleman's wife emulating the lady, and the ladies one another; it seems as if the whole business of the female sex were nothing but an excess of pride, and extravagance in dress. thirdly, the great height to which women-servants have brought their wages, makes a mutiny among the men-servants, and puts them upon raising their wages too; so that in a little time our servants will become our partners; nay, probably, run away with the better part of our profits, and make servants of us _vice versa_. but yet with all these inconveniences, we cannot possibly do without these creatures; let us therefore cease to talk of the abuses arising from them, and begin to think of redressing them. i do not set up for a lawgiver, and therefore shall lay down no certain rules, humbly submitting in all things to the wisdom of our legislature. what i offer shall be under correction; and upon conjecture, my utmost ambition being but to give some hints to remedy this growing evil, and leave the prosecution to abler hands. and first it would be necessary to settle and limit their wages, from forty and fifty shillings to four and five pounds per annum, that is to say, according to their merits and capacities; for example, a young unexperienced servant should have forty shillings per annum, till she qualifies herself for a larger sum; a servant who can do all household work, or, as the good women term it, can take her work and leave her work, should have four pounds per annum; and those who have lived seven years in one service, should ever after demand five pounds per annum, for i would very fain have some particular encouragements and privileges given to such servants who should continue long in a place; it would incite a desire to please, and cause an emulation very beneficial to the public. i have heard of an ancient charity in the parish of st. clement's danes, where a sum of money, or estate, is left, out of the interest or income of which such maid-servants, who have lived in that parish seven years in one service, receive a reward of ten pounds apiece, if they please to demand it. this is a noble benefaction, and shows the public spirit of the donor; but everybody's business is nobody's; nor have i heard that such reward has been paid to any servant of late years. a thousand pities a gift of that nature should sink into oblivion, and not be kept up as an example to incite all parishes to do the like. the romans had a law called _jus trium liberorum_, by which every man who had been a father of three children, had particular honours and privileges. this incited the youth to quit a dissolute single life and become fathers of families, to the support and glory of the empire. in imitation of this most excellent law, i would have such servants, who should continue many years in one service, meet with singular esteem and reward. the apparel of our women-servants should be next regulated, that we may know the mistress from the maid. i remember i was once put very much to the blush, being at a friend's house, and by him required to salute the ladies, i kissed the chamber-jade into the bargain, for she was as well dressed as the best. but i was soon undeceived by a general titter, which gave me the utmost confusion; nor can i believe myself the only person who has made such a mistake. things of this nature would be easily avoided, if servant-maids were to wear liveries, as our footmen do; or obliged to go in a dress suitable to their station. what should ail them, but a jacket and petticoat of good yard-wide stuff, or calimanco, might keep them decent and warm. our charity children are distinguished by their dress, why then may not our women-servants? why may they not be made frugal per force, and not suffered to put all on their backs, but obliged to save something against a rainy day? i am, therefore, entirely against servants wearing of silks, laces, and other superfluous finery; it sets them above themselves, and makes their mistresses contemptible in their eyes. i am handsomer than my mistress, says a young prinked up baggage, what pity it is i should be her servant, i go as well dressed, or better than she. this makes the girl take the first offer to be made a whore, and there is a good servant spoiled; whereas, were her dress suitable to her condition, it would teach her humility, and put her in mind of her duty. besides the fear of spoiling their clothes makes them afraid of household- work; so that in a little time we shall have none but chambermaids and nurserymaids; and of this let me give one instance; my family is composed of myself and sister, a man and a maid; and, being without the last, a young wench came to hire herself. the man was gone out, and my sister above stairs, so i opened the door myself; and this person presented herself to my view, dressed completely, more like a visitor than a servant-maid; she, not knowing me, asked for my sister; pray, madam, said i, be pleased to walk into the parlour, she shall wait on you presently. accordingly i handed madam in, who took it very cordially. after some apology, i left her alone for a minute or two; while i, stupid wretch! ran up to my sister, and told her there was a gentlewoman below come to visit her. dear brother, said she, don't leave her alone, go down and entertain her while i dress myself. accordingly, down i went, and talked of indifferent affairs; meanwhile my sister dressed herself all over again, not being willing to be seen in an undress. at last she came down dressed as clean as her visitor; but how great was my surprise when i found my fine lady a common servant-wench. my sister understanding what she was, began to inquire what wages she expected? she modestly asked but eight pounds a year. the next question was, what work she could do to deserve such wages? to which she answered, she could clean a house, or dress a common family dinner. but cannot you wash, replied my sister, or get up linen? she answered in the negative, and said, she would undertake neither, nor would she go into a family that did not put out their linen to wash, and hire a charwoman to scour. she desired to see the house, and having carefully surveyed it, said, the work was too hard for her, nor could she undertake it. this put my sister beyond all patience, and me into the greatest admiration. young woman, said she, you have made a mistake, i want a housemaid, and you are a chambermaid. no, madam, replied she, i am not needlewoman enough for that. and yet you ask eight pounds a year, replied my sister. yes, madam, said she, nor shall i bate a farthing. then get you gone for a lazy impudent baggage, said i, you want to be a boarder not a servant; have you a fortune or estate that you dress at that rate? no, sir, said she, but i hope i may wear what i work for without offence. what you work, interrupted my sister, why you do not seem willing to undertake any work; you will not wash nor scour; you cannot dress a dinner for company; you are no needlewoman; and our little house of two rooms on a floor, is too much for you. for god's sake what can you do? madam, replied she pertly; i know my business; and do not fear a service; there are more places than parish churches; if you wash at home, you should have a laundrymaid; if you give entertainments, you must have a cookmaid; if you have any needlework, you should have a chambermaid; and such a house as this is enough for a housemaid in all conscience. i was pleased at the wit, and astonished at the impudence of the girl, so dismissed her with thanks for her instructions, assuring her that when i kept four maids she should be housemaid if she pleased. were a servant to do my business with cheerfulness, i should not grudge at five or six pounds per annum; nor would i be so unchristian to put more upon any one than they can bear; but to pray and pay too is the devil. it is very hard, that i must keep four servants or none. in great families, indeed, where many servants are required, those distinctions of chambermaid, housemaid, cookmaid, laundrymaid, nurserymaid, &c., are requisite, to the end that each may take her particular business, and many hands may make the work light; but for a private gentleman, of a small fortune, to be obliged to keep so many idle jades, when one might do the business, is intolerable, and matter of great grievance. i cannot close this discourse without a gentle admonition and reproof to some of my own sex, i mean those gentlemen who give themselves unnecessary airs, and cannot go to see a friend, but they must kiss and slop the maid; and all this is done with an air of gallantry, and must not be resented. nay, some gentlemen are so silly, that they shall carry on an underhand affair with their friend's servant-maid, to their own disgrace, and the ruin of many a young creature. nothing is more base and ungenerous, yet nothing more common, and withal so little taken notice of. d-n me, jack, says one friend to another, this maid of yours is a pretty girl, you do so and so to her, by g-d. this makes the creature pert, vain, and impudent, and spoils many a good servant. what gentleman will descend to this low way of intrigue, when he shall consider that he has a footboy or an apprentice for his rival, and that he is seldom or never admitted, but when they have been his tasters; and the fool of fortune, though he comes at the latter end of the feast, yet pays the whole reckoning; and so indeed would i have all such silly cullies served. if i must have an intrigue, let it be with a woman that shall not shame me. i would never go into the kitchen, when the parlour door was open. we are forbidden at highgate, to kiss the maid when we may kiss the mistress; why then will gentlemen descend so low, by too much familiarity with these creatures, to bring themselves into contempt? i have been at places where the maid has been so dizzied with these idle compliments that she has mistook one thing for another, and not regarded her mistress in the least; but put on all the flirting airs imaginable. this behaviour is nowhere so much complained of as in taverns, coffeehouses, and places of public resort, where there are handsome bar- keepers, &c. these creatures being puffed up with the fulsome flattery of a set of flesh-flies, which are continually buzzing about them, carry themselves with the utmost insolence imaginable; insomuch, that you must speak to them with a great deal of deference, or you are sure to be affronted. being at a coffeehouse the other day, where one of these ladies kept the bar, i had bespoke a dish of rice tea; but madam was so taken up with her sparks, she had quite forgot it. i spake for it again, and with some temper, but was answered after a most taunting manner, not without a toss of the head, a contraction of the nostrils, and other impertinences, too many to enumerate. seeing myself thus publicly insulted by such an animal, i could not choose but show my resentment. woman, said i, sternly, i want a dish of rice tea, and not what your vanity and impudence may imagine; therefore treat me as a gentleman and a customer, and serve me with what i call for: keep your impertinent repartees and impudent behaviour for the coxcombs that swarm round your bar, and make you so vain of your blown carcase. and indeed i believe the insolence of this creature will ruin her master at last, by driving away men of sobriety and business, and making the place a den of vagabonds and rakehells. gentlemen, therefore, ought to be very circumspect in their behaviour, and not undervalue themselves to servant-wenches, who are but too apt to treat a gentleman ill whenever he puts himself into their power. let me now beg pardon for this digression, and return to my subject by proposing some practicable methods for regulating of servants, which, whether they are followed or not, yet, if they afford matter of improvement and speculation, will answer the height of my expectation, and i will be the first who shall approve of whatever improvements are made from this small beginning. the first abuse i would have reformed is, that servants should be restrained from throwing themselves out of place on every idle vagary. this might be remedied were all contracts between master and servant made before a justice of peace, or other proper officer, and a memorandum thereof taken in writing. nor should such servant leave his or her place (for men and maids might come under the same regulation) till the time agreed on be expired, unless such servant be misused or denied necessaries, or show some other reasonable cause for their discharge. in that case, the master or mistress should be reprimanded or fined. but if servants misbehave themselves, or leave their places, not being regularly discharged, they ought to be amerced or punished. but all those idle, ridiculous customs, and laws of their own making, as a month's wages, or a month's warning, and suchlike, should be entirely set aside and abolished. when a servant has served the limited time duly and faithfully, they should be entitled to a certificate, as is practised at present in the wool-combing trade; nor should any person hire a servant without a certificate or other proper security. a servant without a certificate should be deemed a vagrant; and a master or mistress ought to assign very good reasons indeed when they object against giving a servant his or her certificate. and though, to avoid prolixity, i have not mentioned footmen particularly in the foregoing discourse, yet the complaints alleged against the maids are as well masculine as feminine, and very applicable to our gentlemen's gentlemen; i would, therefore, have them under the very same regulations, and, as they are fellow-servants, would not make fish of one and flesh of the other, since daily experience teaches us, that "never a barrel the better herring." the next great abuse among us is, that under the notion of cleaning our shoes, above ten thousand wicked, idle, pilfering vagrants are permitted to patrol about our city and suburbs. these are called the black-guard, who black your honour's shoes, and incorporate themselves under the title of the worshipful company of japanners. were this all, there were no hurt in it, and the whole might terminate in a jest; but the mischief ends not here, they corrupt our youth, especially our men-servants; oaths and impudence are their only flowers of rhetoric; gaming and thieving are the principal parts of their profession; japanning but the pretence. for example, a gentleman keeps a servant, who among other things is to clean his master's shoes; but our gentlemen's gentlemen are above it nowadays, and your man's man performs the office, for which piece of service you pay double and treble, especially if you keep a table, nay, you are well off if the japanner has no more than his own diet from it. i have often observed these rascals sneaking from gentlemen's doors with wallets or hats' full of good victuals, which they either carry to their trulls, or sell for a trifle. by this means, our butcher's, our baker's, our poulterer's, and cheesemonger's bills are monstrously exaggerated; not to mention candles just lighted, which sell for fivepence a pound, and many other perquisites best known to themselves and the pilfering villains their confederates. add to this, that their continual gaming sets servants upon their wits to supply this extravagance, though at the same time the master's pocket pays for it, and the time which should be spent in a gentleman's service is loitered away among these rakehells, insomuch that half our messages are ineffectual, the time intended being often expired before the message is delivered. how many frequent robberies are committed by these japanners? and to how many more are they confederates? silver spoons, spurs, and other small pieces of plate, are every day missing, and very often found upon these sort of gentlemen; yet are they permitted, to the shame of all our good laws, and the scandal of our most excellent government, to lurk about our streets, to debauch our servants and apprentices, and support an infinite number of scandalous, shameless trulls, yet more wicked than themselves, for not a jack among them but must have his gill. by whom such indecencies are daily acted, even in our open streets, as are very offensive to the eyes and ears of all sober persons, and even abominable in a christian country. in any riot, or other disturbance, these sparks are always the foremost; for most among them can turn their hands to picking of pockets, to run away with goods from a fire, or other public confusion, to snatch anything from a woman or child, to strip a house when the door is open, or any other branch of a thief's profession. in short, it is a nursery for thieves and villains; modest women are every day insulted by them and their strumpets; and such children who run about the streets, or those servants who go on errands, do but too frequently bring home some scraps of their beastly profane wit; insomuch, that the conversation of our lower rank of people runs only upon bawdy and blasphemy, notwithstanding our societies for reformation, and our laws in force against profaneness; for this lazy life gets them many proselytes, their numbers daily increasing from runaway apprentices and footboys, insomuch that it is a very hard matter for a gentleman to get him a servant, or for a tradesman to find an apprentice. innumerable other mischiefs accrue, and others will spring up from this race of caterpillars, who must be swept from out our streets, or we shall be overrun with all manner of wickedness. but the subject is so low, it becomes disagreeable even to myself; give me leave, therefore, to propose a way to clear the streets of these vermin, and to substitute as many honest industrious persons in their stead, who are now starving for want of bread, while these execrable villains live, though in rags and nastiness, yet in plenty and luxury. i, therefore, humbly propose that these vagabonds be put immediately under the command of such taskmasters as the government shall appoint, and that they be employed, punished, or rewarded, according to their capacities and demerits; that is to say, the industrious and docible to wool-combing, and other parts of the woollen manufacture, where hands are wanted, as also to husbandry and other parts of agriculture. for it is evident that there are scarce hands enow in the country to carry on either of these affairs. now, these vagabonds might not only by this means be kept out of harm's way, but be rendered serviceable to the nation. nor is there any need of transporting them beyond seas, for if any are refractory they should be sent to our stannaries and other mines, to our coal works and other places where hard labour is required. and here i must offer one thing never yet thought of, or proposed by any, and that is, the keeping in due repair the navigation of the river thames, so useful to our trade in general; and yet of late years such vast hills of sand are gathered together in several parts of the river, as are very prejudicial to its navigation, one which is near london bridge, another near whitehall, a third near battersea, and a fourth near fulham. these are of very great hindrance to the navigation; and indeed the removal of them ought to be a national concern, which i humbly propose may be thus effected. the rebellious part of these vagabonds, as also other thieves and offenders, should be formed into bodies under the command of proper officers, and under the guard and awe of our soldiery. these should every day at low water carry away these sandhills, and remove every other obstruction to the navigation of this most excellent and useful river. it may be objected that the ballast men might do this; that as fast as the hills are taken away they would gather together again, or that the watermen might do it. to the first, i answer, that ballast men, instead of taking away from these hills, make holes in other places of the river, which is the reason so many young persons are drowned when swimming or bathing in the river. besides, it is a work for many hands, and of long continuance; so that ballast men do more harm than good. the second objection is as silly; as if i should never wash myself, because i shall be dirty again, and i think needs no other answer. and as to the third objection, the watermen are not so public-spirited, they live only from hand to mouth, though not one of them but finds the inconvenience of these hills, every day being obliged to go a great way round about for fear of running aground; insomuch that in a few years the navigation of that part of the river will be entirely obstructed. nevertheless, every one of these gentlemen- watermen hopes it will last his time, and so they all cry, the devil take the hindmost. but yet i judge it highly necessary that this be made a national concern, like dagenham breach, and that these hills be removed by some means or other. and now i have mentioned watermen, give me leave to complain of the insolences and exactions they daily commit on the river thames, and in particular this one instance, which cries aloud for justice. a young lady of distinction, in company with her brother, a little youth, took a pair of oars at or near the temple, on april day last, and ordered the men to carry them to pepper alley stairs. one of the fellows, according to their usual impertinence, asked the lady where she was going? she answered, near st. olave's church. upon which he said, she had better go through the bridge. the lady replied she had never gone through the bridge in her life, nor would she venture for a hundred guineas; so commanded him once more to land her at pepper alley stairs. notwithstanding which, in spite of her fears, threats, and commands; nay, in spite of the persuasion of his fellow, he forced her through london bridge, which frightened her beyond expression. and to mend the matter, he obliged her to pay double fare, and mobbed her into the bargain. to resent which abuse, application was made to the hall, the fellow summoned, and the lady ordered to attend, which she did, waiting there all the morning, and was appointed to call again in the afternoon. she came accordingly, they told her the fellow had been there, but was gone, and that she must attend another friday. she attended again and again, but to the same purpose. nor have they yet produced the man, but tired out the lady, who has spent above ten shillings in coach-hire, been abused and baffled into the bargain. it is pity, therefore, there are not commissioners for watermen, as there are for hackney coachmen; or that justices of the peace might not inflict bodily penalties on watermen thus offending. but while watermen are watermen's judges, i shall laugh at those who carry their complaints to the hall. the usual plea in behalf of abusive watermen is, that they are drunk, ignorant, or poor; but will that satisfy the party aggrieved, or deter the offender from reoffending? whereas were the offenders sent to the house of correction, and there punished, or sentenced to work at the sandhills aforementioned, for a time suitable to the nature of their crimes, terror of such punishments would make them fearful of offending, to the great quiet of the subject. now, it maybe asked, how shall we have our shoes cleaned, or how are these industrious poor to be maintained? to this i answer that the places of these vagabonds may be very well supplied by great numbers of ancient persons, poor widows, and others, who have not enough from their respective parishes to maintain them. these poor people i would have authorised and stationed by the justices of the peace or other magistrates. each of these should have a particular walk or stand, and no other shoe-cleaner should come into that walk, unless the person misbehave and be removed. nor should any person clean shoes in the streets, but these authorised shoe-cleaners, who should have some mark of distinction, and be under the immediate government of the justices of the peace. thus would many thousands of poor people be provided for, without burthening their parishes. some of these may earn a shilling or two in the day, and none less than sixpence, or thereabouts. and lest the old japanners should appear again, in the shape of linkboys, and knock down gentlemen in drink, or lead others out of the way into dark remote places, where they either put out their lights, and rob them themselves, or run away and leave them to be pillaged by others, as is daily practised, i would have no person carry a link for hire but some of these industrious poor, and even such, not without some ticket or badge, to let people know whom they trust. thus would the streets be cleared night and day of these vermin; nor would oaths, skirmishes, blasphemy, obscene talk, or other wicked examples, be so public and frequent. all gaming at orange and gingerbread barrows should be abolished, as also all penny and halfpenny lotteries, thimbles and balls, &c., so frequent in moorfields, lincoln's-inn-fields, &c., where idle fellows resort, to play with children and apprentices, and tempt them to steal their parents' or master's money. there is one admirable custom in the city of london, which i could wish were imitated in the city and liberties of westminster, and bills of mortality, which is, no porter can carry a burthen or letter in the city, unless he be a ticket porter; whereas, out of the freedom part of london, any person may take a knot and turn porter, till he be entrusted with something of value, and then you never hear of him more. this is very common, and ought to be amended. i would, therefore, have all porters under some such regulation as coachmen, chairmen, carmen, &c.; a man may then know whom he entrusts, and not run the risk of losing his goods, &c. nay, i would not have a person carry a basket in the markets, who is not subject to some such regulation; for very many persons oftentimes lose their dinners in sending their meat home by persons they know nothing of. thus would all our poor be stationed, and a man or woman able to perform any of these offices, must either comply or be termed an idle vagrant, and sent to a place where they shall be forced to work. by this means industry will be encouraged, idleness punished, and we shall be famed, as well as happy for our tranquillity and decorum. university, alev akman, david widger, and robert homa. the armies of labor by samuel p. orth a chronicle of the organized wage-earners volume of the chronicles of america series ? allen johnson, editor assistant editors gerhard r. lomer charles w. jefferys textbook edition new haven: yale university press toronto: glasgow, brook & co. london: humphrey milford oxford university press copyright, by yale university press printed in the united states of america contents the armies of labor chapter chapter title page i. the background ii. formative years iii. transition years iv. amalgamation v. federation vi. the trade union vii. the railway brotherhoods viii. issues and warfare ix. the new terrorism: the i. w. w. x. labor and politics bibliographical note index the armies of labor ? chapter i the background three momentous things symbolize the era that begins its cycle with the memorable year of : the declaration of independence, the steam engine, and adam smith's book, the wealth of nations. the declaration gave birth to a new nation, whose millions of acres of free land were to shift the economic equilibrium of the world; the engine multiplied man's productivity a thousandfold and uprooted in a generation the customs of centuries; the book gave to statesmen a new view of economic affairs and profoundly influenced the course of international trade relations. the american people, as they faced the approaching age with the experiences of the race behind them, fashioned many of their institutions and laws on british models. this is true to such an extent that the subject of this book, the rise of labor in america, cannot be understood without a preliminary survey of the british industrial system nor even without some reference to the feudal system, of which english society for many centuries bore the marks and to which many relics of tenure and of class and governmental responsibility may be traced. feudalism was a society in which the status of an individual was fixed: he was underman or overman in a rigid social scale according as he considered his relation to his superiors or to his inferiors. whatever movement there was took place horizontally, in the same class or on the same social level. the movement was not vertical, as it so frequently is today, and men did not ordinarily rise above the social level of their birth, never by design, and only perhaps by rare accident or genius. it was a little world of lords and serfs: of knights who graced court and castle, jousted at tournaments, or fought upon the field of battle; and of serfs who toiled in the fields, served in the castle, or, as the retainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval days. for their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed and fed. yet though there were feast days gay with the color of pageantry and procession, the worker was always in a servile state, an underman dependent upon his master, and sometimes looking upon his condition as little better than slavery. with the break-up of this rigid system came in england the emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the beginnings of peasant agriculture. that personal gravitation which always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks now began to work significant changes in the economic order. the peasantry, more or less scattered in the country, found it difficult to unite their powers for redressing their grievances, although there were some peasant revolts of no mean proportions. but the artisans of the towns were soon grouped into powerful organizations, called guilds, so carefully managed and so well disciplined that they dominated every craft and controlled every detail in every trade. the relation of master to journeyman and apprentice, the wages, hours, quantity, and quality of the output, were all minutely regulated. merchant guilds, similarly constituted, also prospered. the magnificent guild halls that remain in our day are monuments of the power and splendor of these organizations that made the towns of the later middle ages flourishing centers of trade, of handicrafts, and of art. as towns developed, they dealt the final blow to an agricultural system based on feudalism: they became cities of refuge for the runaway serfs, and their charters, insuring political and economic freedom, gave them superior advantages for trading. the guild system of manufacture was gradually replaced by the domestic system. the workman's cottage, standing in its garden, housed the loom and the spinning wheel, and the entire family was engaged in labor at home. but the workman, thus apparently independent, was not the owner of either the raw material or the finished product. a middleman or agent brought him the wool, carried away the cloth, and paid him his hire. daniel defoe, who made a tour of britain in - , left a picture of rural england in this period, often called the golden age of labor. the land, he says, "was divided into small inclosures from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more: every three or four pieces of land had an house belonging to them, . . . hardly an house standing out of a speaking distance from another. . . . we could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of cloth or kersie or shalloon. . . . at every considerable house was a manufactory. . . . every clothier keeps one horse, at least, to carry his manufactures to the market and every one generally keeps a cow or two or more for his family. by this means the small pieces of inclosed land about each house are occupied, for they scarce sow corn enough to feed their poultry. . . . the houses are full of lusty fellows, some at the dye vat, some at the looms, others dressing the clothes; the women or children carding or spinning, being all employed, from the youngest to the oldest." but more significant than these changes was the rise of the so-called mercantile system, in which the state took under its care industrial details that were formerly regulated by the town or guild. this system, beginning in the sixteenth century and lasting through the eighteenth, had for its prime object the upbuilding of national trade. the state, in order to insure the homogeneous development of trade and industry, dictated the prices of commodities. it prescribed the laws of apprenticeship and the rules of master and servant. it provided inspectors for passing on the quality of goods offered for sale. it weighed the loaves, measured the cloth, and tested the silverware. it prescribed wages, rural and urban, and bade the local justice act as a sort of guardian over the laborers in his district. to relieve poverty poor laws were passed; to prevent the decline of productivity corn laws were passed fixing arbitrary prices for grain. for a time monopolies creating artificial prosperity were granted to individuals and to corporations for the manufacture, sale, or exploitation of certain articles, such as matches, gunpowder, and playing-cards. this highly artificial and paternalistic state was not content with regulating all these internal matters but spread its protection over foreign commerce. navigation acts attempted to monopolize the trade of the colonies and especially the trade in the products needed by the mother country. england encouraged shipping and during this period achieved that dominance of the sea which has been the mainstay of her vast empire. she fostered plantations and colonies not for their own sake but that they might be tributaries to the wealth of the nation. an absurd importance was attached to the possession of gold and silver, and the ingenuity of statesmen was exhausted in designing lures to entice these metals to london. banking and insurance began to assume prime importance. by england had sent ships into every sea and had planted colonies around the globe. but while the mechanism of trade and of government made surprising progress during the mercantile period, the mechanism of production remained in the slow handicraft stage. this was now to change. in kay invented the flying shuttle, multiplying the capacity of the loom. in hargreaves completed the spinning-jenny, and in arkwright perfected his roller spinning machine. a few years later crompton combined the roller and the jenny, and after the application of steam to spinning in the power loom replaced the hand loom. the manufacture of woolen cloth being the principal industry of england, it was natural that machinery should first be invented for the spinning and weaving of wool. new processes in the manufacture of iron and steel and the development of steam transportation soon followed. within the course of a few decades the whole economic order was changed. whereas many centuries had been required for the slow development of the medieval system of feudalism, the guild system, and the handicrafts, now, like a series of earthquake shocks, came changes so sudden and profound that even today society has not yet learned to adjust itself to the myriads of needs and possibilities which the union of man's mind with nature's forces has produced. the industrial revolution took the workman from the land and crowded him into the towns. it took the loom from his cottage and placed it in the factory. it took the tool from his hand and harnessed it to a shaft. it robbed him of his personal skill and joined his arm of flesh to an arm of iron. it reduced him from a craftsman to a specialist, from a maker of shoes to a mere stitcher of soles. it took from him, at a single blow, his interest in the workmanship of his task, his ownership of the tools, his garden, his wholesome environment, and even his family. all were swallowed by the black maw of the ugly new mill town. the hardships of the old days were soon forgotten in the horrors of the new. for the transition was rapid enough to make the contrast striking. indeed it was so rapid that the new class of employers, the capitalists, found little time to think of anything but increasing their profits, and the new class of employees, now merely wage-earners, found that their long hours of monotonous toil gave them little leisure and no interest. the transition from the age of handicrafts to the era of machines presents a picture of greed that tempts one to bitter invective. its details are dispassionately catalogued by the royal commissions that finally towards the middle of the nineteenth century inquired into industrial conditions. from these reports karl marx drew inspiration for his social philosophy, and in them his friend engles found the facts that he retold so vividly, for the purpose of arousing his fellow workmen. and carlyle and ruskin, reading this official record of selfishness, and knowing its truth, drew their powerful indictments against a society which would permit its eight-year-old daughters, its mothers, and its grandmothers, to be locked up for fourteen hours a day in dirty, ill-smelling factories, to release them at night only to find more misery in the hovels they pitifully called home. the introduction of machinery into manufacturing wrought vast changes also in the organization of business. the unit of industry greatly increased in size. the economies of organized wholesale production were soon made apparent; and the tendency to increase the size of the factory and to amalgamate the various branches of industry under corporate control has continued to the present. the complexity of business operations also increased with the development of transportation and the expansion of the empire of trade. a world market took the place of the old town market, and the world market necessitated credit on a new and infinitely larger scale. no less important than the revolution in industry was the revolution in economic theory which accompanied it. unlimited competition replaced the state paternalism of the mercantilists. adam smith in espoused the cause of economic liberty, believing that if business and industry were unhampered by artificial restrictions they would work out their own salvation. his pronouncement was scarcely uttered before it became the shibboleth of statesmen and business men. the revolt of the american colonies hastened the general acceptance of this doctrine, and england soon found herself committed to the practice of every man looking after his own interests. freedom of contract, freedom of trade, and freedom of thought were vigorous and inspiring but often misleading phrases. the processes of specialization and centralization that were at work portended the growing power of those who possessed the means to build factories and ships and railways but not necessarily the freedom of the many. the doctrine of laissez faire assumed that power would bring with it a sense of responsibility. for centuries, the old-country gentry and governing class of england had shown an appreciation of their duties, as a class, to those dependent upon them. but now another class with no benevolent traditions of responsibility came into power--the capitalist, a parvenu whose ambition was profit, not equity, and whose dealings with other men were not tempered by the amenities of the gentleman but were sharpened by the necessities of gain. it was upon such a class, new in the economic world and endowed with astounding power, that adam smith's new formularies of freedom were let loose. during all these changes in the economic order, the interest of the laborer centered in one question: what return would he receive for his toil? with the increasing complexity of society, many other problems presented themselves to the worker, but for the most part they were subsidiary to the main question of wages. as long as man's place was fixed by law or custom, a customary wage left small margin for controversy. but when fixed status gave way to voluntary contract, when payment was made in money, when workmen were free to journey from town to town, labor became both free and fluid, bargaining took the place of custom, and the wage controversy began to assume definite proportions. as early as the great plague became a landmark in the field of wage disputes. so scarce had laborers become through the ravages of the black death, that wages rose rapidly, to the alarm of the employers, who prevailed upon king edward iii to issue the historic proclamation of , directing that no laborer should demand and no employer should pay greater wages than those customary before the plague. this early attempt to outmaneuver an economic law by a legal device was only the prelude to a long series of labor laws which may be said to have culminated in the great statute of laborers of , regulating the relations of wage-earner and employer and empowering justices of the peace to fix the wages in their districts. wages steadily decreased during the two hundred years in which this statute remained in force, and poor laws were passed to bring the succor which artificial wages made necessary. thus two rules of arbitrary government were meant to neutralize each other. it is the usual verdict of historians that the estate of labor in england declined from a flourishing condition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to one of great distress by the time of the industrial revolution. this unhappy decline was probably due to several causes, among which the most important were the arbitrary and artificial attempts of the government to keep down wages, the heavy taxation caused by wars of expansion, and the want of coercive power on the part of labor. from the decline of the guild system, which had placed labor and its products so completely in the hands of the master craftsman, the workman had assumed no controlling part in the labor bargain. such guilds and such journeyman's fraternities as may have survived were practically helpless against parliamentary rigor and state benevolence. in the domestic stage of production, cohesion among workers was not so necessary. but when the factory system was substituted for the handicraft system and workers with common interests were thrown together in the towns, they had every impulsion towards organization. they not only felt the need of sociability after long hours spent in spiritless toil but they were impelled by a new consciousness--the realization that an inevitable and profound change had come over their condition. they had ceased to be journeymen controlling in some measure their activities: they were now merely wage-earners. as the realization of this adverse change came over them, they began to resent the unsanitary and burdensome conditions under which they were compelled to live and to work. so actual grievances were added to fear of what might happen, and in their common cause experience soon taught them unity of action. parliament was petitioned, agitations were organized, sick-benefits were inaugurated, and when these methods failed, machinery was destroyed, factories were burned, and the strike became a common weapon of self-defense. though a few labor organizations can be traced as far back as , their growth during the eighteenth century was slow and irregular. there was no unity in their methods, and they were known by many names, such as associations, unions, union societies, trade clubs, and trade societies. these societies had no legal status and their meetings were usually held in secret. and the webbs in their history of trade unionism allude to the traditions of "the midnight meeting of patriots in the corner of the field, the buried box of records, the secret oath, the long terms of imprisonment of the leading officials." some of these tales were unquestionably apocryphal, others were exaggerated by feverish repetition. but they indicate the aversion with which the authorities looked upon these combinations. there were two legal doctrines long invoked by the english courts against combined action--doctrines that became a heritage of the united states and have had a profound effect upon the labor movements in america. the first of these was the doctrine of conspiracy, a doctrine so ancient that its sources are obscure. it was the natural product of a government and of a time that looked askance at all combined action, fearing sedition, intrigue, and revolution. as far back as there was enacted a statute defining conspiracy and outlining the offense. it did not aim at any definite social class but embraced all persons who combined for a "malicious enterprise." such an enterprise was the breaking of a law. so when parliament passed acts regulating wages, conditions of employment, or prices of commodities, those who combined secretly or openly to circumvent the act, to raise wages or lower them, or to raise prices and curtail markets, at once fell under the ban of conspiracy. the law operated alike on conspiring employers and conniving employees. the new class of employers during the early years of the machine age eagerly embraced the doctrine of conspiracy. they readily brought under the legal definition the secret connivings of the wage-earners. political conditions now also worked against the laboring class. the unrest in the colonies that culminated in the independence of america and the fury of the french revolution combined to make kings and aristocracies wary of all organizations and associations of plain folk. and when we add to this the favor which the new employing class, the industrial masters, were able to extort from the governing class, because of their power over foreign trade and domestic finance, we can understand the compulsory laws at length declaring against all combinations of working men. the second legal doctrine which americans have inherited from england and which has played a leading role in labor controversies is the doctrine that declares unlawful all combinations in restraint of trade. like its twin doctrine of conspiracy, it is of remote historical origin. one of the earliest uses, perhaps the first use, of the term by parliament was in the statute of forbidding guilds and trading companies from adopting by-laws "in restraint of trade," and forbidding practices in price manipulations "for their own profit and to the common hurt of the people." this doctrine thus early invoked, and repeatedly reasserted against combinations of traders and masters, was incorporated in the general statute of which declared all combinations of journeymen illegal. but in spite of legal doctrines, of innumerable laws and court decisions, strikes and combinations multiplied, and devices were found for evading statutory wages. in an act of parliament removed the general prohibition of combinations and accorded to workingmen the right to bargain collectively. three men were responsible for this noteworthy reform, each one a new type in british politics. the first was francis place, a tailor who had taken active part in various strikes. he was secretary of the london corresponding society, a powerful labor union, which in had twenty branches in london. most of the officers of this organization were at one time or another arrested, and some were kept in prison three years without a trial. place, schooled in such experience, became a radical politician of great influence, a friend of bentham, owen, and the elder mill. the second type of new reformer was represented by joseph hume, a physician who had accumulated wealth in the india service, who had returned home to enter public life, and who was converted from toryism to radicalism by a careful study of financial, political, and industrial problems. a great number of reform laws can be traced directly to his incredible activity during his thirty years in parliament. the third leader was john r. mcculloch, an orthodox economist, a disciple of adam smith, for some years editor of the scotsman, which was then a violently radical journal coöperating with the newly established edinburgh review in advocating sociological and political reforms. thus great britain, the mother country from which americans have inherited so many institutions, laws, and traditions, passed in turn through the periods of extreme paternalism, glorified competition, and governmental antagonism to labor combinations, into what may be called the age of conciliation. and today the labour party in the house of commons has shown itself strong enough to impose its programme upon the liberals and, through this radical coalition, has achieved a power for the working man greater than even francis place or thomas carlyle ever hoped for. chapter ii formative years america did not become a cisatlantic britain, as some of the colonial adventurers had hoped. a wider destiny awaited her. here were economic conditions which upset all notions of the fixity of class distinctions. here was a continent of free land, luring the disaffected or disappointed artisan and enabling him to achieve economic independence. hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from europe, constantly shifting the social equilibrium. here the demand for labor was constant, except during the rare intervals of financial stagnation, and here the door of opportunity swung wide to the energetic and able artisan. the records of american industry are replete with names of prominent leaders who began at the apprentice's bench. the old class distinctions brought from the home country, however, had survived for many years in the primeval forests of virginia and maryland and even among the hills of new england. indeed, until the revolution and for some time thereafter, a man's clothes were the badge of his calling. the gentleman wore powdered queue and ruffled shirt; the workman, coarse buckskin breeches, ponderous shoes with brass buckles, and usually a leather apron, well greased to keep it pliable. just before the revolution the lot of the common laborer was not an enviable one. his house was rude and barren of comforts; his fare was coarse and without variety. his wage was two shillings a day, and prison--usually an indescribably filthy hole--awaited him the moment he ran into debt. the artisan fared somewhat better. he had spent, as a rule, seven years learning his trade, and his skill and energy demanded and generally received a reasonable return. the account books that have come down to us from colonial days show that his handiwork earned him a fair living. this, however, was before machinery had made inroads upon the product of cabinetmaker, tailor, shoemaker, locksmith, and silversmith, and when the main street of every village was picturesque with the signs of the crafts that maintained the decent independence of the community. such labor organizations as existed before the revolution were limited to the skilled trades. in the coopers and the shoemakers of boston were granted permission to organize guilds, which embraced both master and journeyman, and there were a few similar organizations in new york, philadelphia, and baltimore. but these were not unions like those of today. "there are," says richard t. ely, "no traces of anything like a modern trades union in the colonial period of american history, and it is evident on reflection that there was little need, if any, of organization on the part of labor, at that time." ¹ ¹ the labor movement in america, by richard t. ely ( ), p. . a new epoch for labor came in with the revolution. within a decade wages rose fifty per cent, and john jay in writes of the "wages of mechanics and laborers" as "very extravagant." though the industries were small and depended on a local market within a circumscribed area of communication, they grew rapidly. the period following the revolution is marked by considerable industrial restiveness and by the formation of many labor organizations, which were, however, benevolent or friendly societies rather than unions and were often incorporated by an act of the legislature. in new york, between and , twenty-four such societies were incorporated. only in the larger cities were they composed of artisans of one trade, such as the new york masons society ( ) or the new york society of journeymen shipwrights ( ). elsewhere they included artisans of many trades, such as the albany mechanical society ( ). in philadelphia the cordwainers, printers, and hatters had societies. in baltimore the tailors were the first to organize, and they conducted in one of the first strikes in america. ten years later they struck again, and succeeded in raising their pay from seven shillings sixpence the job to eight shillings ninepence and "extras." at the same time the pay of unskilled labor was rising rapidly, for workers were scarce owing to the call of the merchant marine in those years of the rising splendor of the american sailing ship, and the lure of western lands. the wages of common laborers rose to a dollar and more a day. there occurred in an important strike of the philadelphia cordwainers. theirs was one of the oldest labor organizations in the country, and it had conducted several successful strikes. this particular occasion, however, is significant, because the strikers were tried for conspiracy in the mayor's court, with the result that they were found guilty and fined eight dollars each, with costs. as the court permitted both sides to tell their story in detail, a full report of the proceedings survives to give us, as it were, a photograph of the labor conditions of that time. the trial kindled a great deal of local animosity. a newspaper called the aurora contained inflammatory accounts of the proceedings, and a pamphlet giving the records of the court was widely circulated. this pamphlet bore the significant legend, "it is better that the law be known and certain, than that it be right," and was dedicated to the governor and general assembly "with the hope of attracting their particular attention, at the next meeting of the legislature." another early instance of a strike occurred in new york city in , when the cordwainers struck for higher wages and were hauled before the mayor's court on the charge of conspiracy. the trial was postponed by mayor dewitt clinton until after the pending municipal elections to avoid the risk of offending either side. when at length the strikers were brought to trial, the court-house was crowded with spectators, showing how keen was the public interest in the case. the jury's verdict of "guilty," and the imposition of a fine of one dollar each and costs upon the defendants served but as a stimulus to the friends of the strikers to gather in a great mass meeting and protest against the verdict and the law that made it possible. in the new york typographical society, which had been organized four years earlier by peter force, a labor leader of unusual energy, set a precedent for the vigorous and fearless career of its modern successor by calling a strike in the printing office of thurlow weed, the powerful politician, himself a member of the society, because he employed a "rat," as a nonunion worker was called. it should be noted, however, that the organizations of this early period were of a loose structure and scarcely comparable to the labor unions of today. sidney smith, the brilliant contributor to the edinburgh review, propounded in certain questions which sum up the general conditions of american industry and art after nearly a half century of independence: "in the four quarters of the globe," he asked, "who reads an american book? or goes to an american play? or looks at an american picture or statue? what does the world yet owe to american physicians or surgeons? what new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? what new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of americans? what have they done in mathematics? who drinks out of american glasses? or eats from american plates? or wears american coats or gowns? or sleeps in american blankets?" these questions, which were quite pertinent, though conceived in an impertinent spirit, were being answered in america even while the witty englishman was framing them. the water power of new england was being harnessed to cotton mills, woolen mills, and tanneries. massachusetts in reported one hundred and sixty-one factories. new york had begun that marvelous growth which made the city, in the course of a few decades, the financial capital of a hemisphere. so rapidly were people flocking to new york, that houses had tenants long before they had windows and doors, and streets were lined with buildings before they had sewers, sidewalks, or pavements. new jersey had well under way those manufactories of glassware, porcelains, carpets, and textiles which have since brought her great prosperity. philadelphia was the country's greatest weaving center, boasting four thousand craftsmen engaged in that industry. even on the frontier, pittsburgh and cincinnati were emerging from "settlements" into manufacturing towns of importance. mcmaster concludes his graphic summary of these years as follows: "in it was estimated that , persons and a capital of $ , , were employed in manufacturing. in the capital used had been expanded to $ , , and the number of workers to , , ." ¹ ¹ history of the people of the united states ( ), vol. v, p. . the industrial revolution had set in. these new millions who hastened to answer the call of industry in the new land were largely composed of the poor of other lands. thousands of them were paupers when they landed in america, their passage having been paid by those at home who wanted to get rid of them. vast numbers settled down in the cities, in spite of the lure of the land. it was at this period that universal manhood suffrage was written into the constitutions of the older states, and a new electorate assumed the reins of power. now the first labor representatives were sent to the legislatures and to congress, and the older parties began eagerly bidding for the votes of the humble. the decision of great questions fell to this new electorate. with the rise of industry came the demand for a protective tariff and for better transportation. state governments vied with each other, in thoughtless haste, in lending their credit to new turnpike and canal construction. and above all political issues loomed the bank, the monopoly that became the laborer's bugaboo and andrew jackson's opportunity to rally to his side the newly enfranchised mechanics. so the old days of semi-colonial composure were succeeded by the thrilling experiences that a new industrial prosperity thrusts upon a really democratic electorate. little wonder that the labor union movement took the political by-path, seeking salvation in the promise of the politician and in the panacea of fatuous laws. now there were to be discerned the beginnings of class solidarity among the working people. but the individual's chances to improve his situation were still very great and opportunity was still a golden word. the harsh facts of the hour, however, soon began to call for united action. the cities were expanding with such eager haste that proper housing conditions were overlooked. workingmen were obliged to live in wretched structures. moreover, human beings were still levied on for debt and imprisoned for default of payment. children of less than sixteen years of age were working twelve or more hours a day, and if they received an education at all, it was usually in schools charitably called "ragged schools" or "poor schools," or "pauper schools." there was no adequate redress for the mechanic if his wages were in default, for lien laws had not yet found their way into the statute books. militia service was oppressive, permitting only the rich to buy exemption. it was still considered an unlawful conspiracy to act in unison for an increase in pay or a lessening of working hours. by the pay of unskilled labor had dropped to about seventy-five cents a day in the overcrowded cities, and in the winter, in either city or country, many unskilled workers were glad to work for merely their board. the lot of women workers was especially pitiful. a seamstress by hard toil, working fifteen hours a day might stitch enough shirts to earn from seventy-two cents to a dollar and twelve cents a week. skilled labor, while faring better in wages, shared with the unskilled in the universal working day which lasted from sun to sun. such in brief were the conditions that brought home to the laboring masses that homogeneous consciousness which alone makes a group powerful in a democracy. the movement can most clearly be discerned in the cities. philadelphia claims precedence as the home of the first trades' union. the master cordwainers had organized a society in , and their journeymen had followed suit two years later. the experiences and vicissitudes of these shoemakers furnished a useful lesson to other tradesmen, many of whom were organized into unions. but they were isolated organizations, each one fighting its own battles. in the mechanics' union of trade associations was formed. of its significance john r. commons says: england is considered the home of trade-unionism, but the distinction belongs to philadelphia. . . . the first trades' union in england was that of manchester, organized in , although there seems to have been an attempt to organize one in . but the first one in america was the "mechanics' union of trade associations," organized in philadelphia in , two years earlier. the name came from manchester, but the thing from philadelphia. neither union lasted long. the manchester union lived two years, and the philadelphia union one year. but the manchester union died and the philadelphia union metamorphosed into politics. here again philadelphia was the pioneer, for it called into being the first labor party. not only this, but through the mechanics' union philadelphia started probably the first wage-earners' paper ever published--the mechanics free press--antedating, in january, , the first similar journal in england by two years. ¹ ¹ labor organization and labor politics, - ; in the quarterly journal of economics, february, . the union had its inception in the first general building strike called in america. in the summer of the carpenters struck for a ten-hour day. they were soon joined by the bricklayers, painters, and glaziers, and members of other trades. but the strike failed of its immediate object. a second effort to combine the various trades into one organization was made in , when the trades' union of the city and county of philadelphia, was formed. three years later this union embraced some fifty societies with over ten thousand members. in june, , this organization undertook what was probably the first successful general strike in america. it began among the cordwainers, spread to the workers in the building trades, and was presently joined in by cigarmakers, carters, saddlers and harness makers, smiths, plumbers, bakers, printers, and even by the unskilled workers on the docks. the strikers' demand for a ten-hour day received a great deal of support from the influential men in the community. after a mass meeting of citizens had adopted resolutions endorsing the demands of the union, the city council agreed to a ten-hour day for all municipal employees. in the carpenters of new york city struck for an increase in wages. they were receiving a dollar thirty-seven and a half cents a day; they asked for a dollar and a half. they obtained the support of other workers, notably the tailors, printers, brushmakers, tobacconists, and masons, and succeeded in winning their strike in one month. the printers, who have always been alert and active in new york city, elated by the success of this coördinate effort, sent out a circular calling for a general convention of all the trades societies of the city. after a preliminary meeting in july, a mass meeting was held in december, at which there were present about four thousand persons representing twenty-one societies. the outcome of the meeting was the organization of the general trades' union of new york city. it happened in the following year that ely moore of the typographical association and the first president of the new union, a powerful orator and a sagacious organizer, was elected to congress on the jackson ticket. he was backed by tammany hall, always on the alert for winners, and was supported by the mechanics, artisans, and workingmen. he was the first man to take his seat in washington as the avowed representative of labor. the movement for a ten-hour day was now in full swing, and the years - were full of strikes. the most spectacular of these struggles was the strike of the tailors of new york in , in the course of which twenty strikers were arrested for conspiracy. after a spirited trial attended by throngs of spectators, the men were found guilty by a jury which took only thirty minutes for deliberation. the strikers were fined $ each, except the president of the society, who was fined $ . after the trial there was held a mass meeting which was attended, according to the evening post, by twenty-seven thousand persons. resolutions were passed declaring that "to all acts of tyranny and injustice, resistance is just and therefore necessary," and "that the construction given to the law in the case of the journeymen tailors is not only ridiculous and weak in practice but unjust in principle and subversive of the rights and liberties of american citizens." the town was placarded with "coffin" handbills, a practice not uncommon in those days. enclosed in a device representing a coffin were these words: the rich against the poor! twenty of your brethren have been found guilty for presuming to resist a reduction in their wages! . . . judge edwards has charged . . . the rich are the only judges of the wants of the poor. on monday, june , , the freemen are to receive their sentence, to gratify the hellish appetites of aristocracy! . . . go! go! go! every freeman, every workingman, and hear the melancholy sound of the earth on the coffin of equality. let the court room, the city-hall--yea, the whole park, be filled with mourners! but remember, offer no violence to judge edwards! bend meekly and receive the chains wherewith you are to be bound! keep the peace! above all things, keep the peace! the evening post concludes a long account of the affair by calling attention to the fact that the trades union was not composed of "only foreigners." "it is a low calculation when we estimate that two-thirds of the workingmen of the city, numbering several thousand persons, belong to it," and that "it is controlled and supported by the great majority of our native born." the boston trades union was organized in and started out with a great labor parade on the fourth of july, followed by a dinner served to a thousand persons in faneuil hall. this union was formed primarily to fight for the ten-hour day, and the leading crusaders were the house carpenters, the ship carpenters, and the masons. similar unions presently sprang up in other cities, including baltimore, albany, troy, washington, newark, schenectady, new brunswick, pittsburgh, cincinnati, and st. louis. by all the larger centers of industry were familiar with the idea, and most of them with the practice, of the trades organizations of a community uniting for action. the local unions were not unmindful of the need for wider action, either through a national union of all the organizations of a single trade, or through a union of all the different trades unions. both courses of action were attempted. in the national trades union came into being and from that date held annual national conventions of all the trades until the panic of obliterated the movement. when the first convention was called, it was estimated that there were some , members of trades unions then in the united states. of these , were in new york and its vicinity, in philadelphia, in boston, and in baltimore. meanwhile a movement was under way to federate the unions of a single trade. in the cordwainers attending the national trades union formed a preliminary organization and called a national cordwainers' convention. this met in new york in march, , and included forty-five delegates from new york, new jersey, delaware, and connecticut. in the fall of the comb-makers, the carpenters, the hand-loom weavers, and the printers likewise organized separate national unions or alliances, and several other trades made tentative efforts by correspondence to organize themselves in the same manner. before the dire year of , there are, then, to be found the beginnings of most of the elements of modern labor organizations--benevolent societies and militant orders; political activities and trades activities; amalgamations of local societies of the same trades and of all trades; attempts at national organization on the part of both the local trades unions and of the local trade unions; a labor press to keep alive the interest of the workman; mass meetings, circulars, conventions, and appeals to arouse the interest of the public in the issues of the hour. the persistent demand of the workingmen was for a ten-hour day. harriet martineau, who traveled extensively through the united states, remarked that all the strikes she heard of were on the question of hours, not wages. but there were nevertheless abundant strikes either to raise wages or to maintain them. there were, also, other fundamental questions in controversy which could not be settled by strikes, such as imprisonment for debt, lien and exemption and homestead laws, convict labor and slave labor, and universal education. most of these issues have since that time been decided in favor of labor, and a new series of demands takes their place today. yet as one reads the records of the early conspiracy cases or thumbs through the files of old periodicals, he learns that there is indeed nothing new under the sun and that, while perhaps the particular issues have changed, the general methods and the spirit of the contest remain the same. the laborer believed then, as he does now, that his organization must be all-embracing. in those days also there were "scabs," often called "rats" or "dung." places under ban were systematically picketed, and warnings like the following were sent out: "we would caution all strangers and others who profess the art of horseshoeing, that if they go to work for any employer under the above prices, they must abide by the consequences." usually the consequences were a fine imposed by the union, but sometimes they were more severe. coercion by the union did not cease with the strike. journeymen who were not members were pursued with assiduity and energy as soon as they entered a town and found work. the boycott was a method early used against prison labor. new york stonecutters agreed that they would not "either collectively or individually purchase any goods manufactured" by convicts and that they would not "countenance" any merchants who dealt in them; and employers who incurred the displeasure of organized labor were "nullified." the use of the militia during strikes presented the same difficulties then as now. during the general strike in philadelphia in there was considerable rowdyism, and michel chevalier, a keen observer of american life, wrote that "the militia looks on; the sheriff stands with folded hands." nor was there any difference in the attitude of the laboring man towards unfavorable court decisions. in the tailors' strike in new york in , for instance, twenty-seven thousand sympathizers assembled with bands and banners to protest against the jury's verdict, and after sentence had been imposed upon the defendants, the lusty throng burned the judge in effigy. sabotage is a new word, but the practice itself is old. in the striking cabinet-makers in new york smashed thousands of dollars' worth of chairs, tables, and sofas that had been imported from france, and the newspapers observed the significant fact that the destroyers boasted in a foreign language that only american-made furniture should be sold in america. houses were burned in philadelphia because the contractors erecting them refused to grant the wages that were demanded. vengeance was sometimes sought against new machinery that displaced hand labor. in june, , a new york paper remarked that "it is well known that many of the most obstinate turn-outs among workingmen and many of the most violent and lawless proceedings have been excited for the purpose of destroying newly invented machinery." such acts of wantonness, however, were few, even in those first tumultuous days of the thirties. striking became in those days a sort of mania, and not a town that had a mill or shop was exempt. men struck for "grog or death," for "liberty, equality, and the rights of man," and even for the right to smoke their pipes at work. strike benefits, too, were known in this early period. strikers in new york received assistance from philadelphia, and boston strikers were similarly aided by both new york and philadelphia. when the high cost of living threatened to deprive the wage-earner of half his income, bread riots occurred in the cities, and handbills circulated in new york bore the legend: bread, meat, rent, fuel their prices must come down chapter iii transition years with the panic of the mills were closed, thousands of unemployed workers were thrown upon private charity, and, in the long years of depression which followed, trade unionism suffered a temporary eclipse. it was a period of social unrest in which all sorts of philanthropic reforms were suggested and tried out. measured by later events, it was a period of transition, of social awakening, of aspiration tempered by the bitter experience of failure. in the previous decade robert owen, the distinguished english social reformer and philanthropist, had visited america and had begun in his famous colony at new harmony, indiana. his experiments at new lanark, in england, had already made him known to working people the world over. whatever may be said of his quaint attempts to reduce society to a common denominator, it is certain that his arrival in america, at a time when people's minds were open to all sorts of economic suggestions, had a stimulating effect upon labor reforms and led, in the course of time, to the founding of some forty communistic colonies, most of them in new york, pennsylvania, and ohio. "we are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform," wrote emerson to thomas carlyle; "not a reading man but has the draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." one of these experiments, at red bank, new jersey, lasted for thirteen years, and another, in wisconsin, for six years. but most of them after a year or two gave up the struggle. of these failures, the best known is brook farm, an intellectual community founded in by george ripley at west roxbury, massachusetts. six years later the project was abandoned and is now remembered as an example of the futility of trying to leaven a world of realism by means of an atom of transcendental idealism. in a sense, however, brook farm typifies this period of transition. it was a time of vagaries and longings. people seemed to be conscious of the fact that a new social solidarity was dawning. it is not strange, therefore, that--while the railroads were feeling their way from town to town and across the prairies, while water-power and steam-power were multiplying man's productivity, indicating that the old days were gone forever--many curious dreams of a new order of things should be dreamed, nor that among them some should be ridiculous, some fantastic, and some unworthy, nor that, as the futility of a universal social reform forced itself upon the dreamers, they merged the greater in the lesser, the general in the particular, and sought an outlet in espousing some specific cause or attacking some particular evil. those movements which had their inspiration in a genuine humanitarianism achieved great good. now for the first time the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and the insane were made the object of social solicitude and communal care. the criminal, too, and the jail in which he was confined remained no longer utterly neglected. men of the debtor class were freed from that medieval barbarism which gave the creditor the right to levy on the person of his debtor. even the public schools were dragged out of their lethargy. when horace mann was appointed secretary of the newly created massachusetts board of education in , a new day dawned for american public schools. while these and other substantial improvements were under way, the charlatan and the faddist were not without their opportunities or their votaries. spirit rappings beguiled or awed the villagers; thousands of religious zealots in abandoned their vocations and, drawing on white robes, awaited expectantly the second coming of christ: every cult from free love to celibate austerity found zealous followers; the "new woman" declared her independence in short hair and bloomers; people sought social salvation in new health codes, in vegetarian boarding-houses, and in physical culture clubs; and some pursued the way to perfection through sensual religious exercises. in this seething milieu, this medley of practical humanitarianism and social fantasies, the labor movement was revived. in the forties, thomas mooney, an observant irish traveler who had spent several years in the united states wrote as follows ¹: the average value of a common uneducated labourer is eighty cents a day. of educated or mechanical labour, one hundred twenty-five and two hundred cents a day; of female labour forty cents a day. against meat, flour, vegetables, and groceries at one-third less than they rate in great britain and ireland; against clothing, house rent and fuel at about equal; against public taxes at about three-fourths less; and a certainty of employment, and a facility of acquiring homes and lands, and education for children, a hundred to one greater. the further you penetrate into the country, patrick, the higher in general will you find the value of labour, and the cheaper the price of all kinds of living. . . . the food of the american farmer, mechanic or labourer is the best i believe enjoyed by any similar classes in the whole world. at every meal there is meat or fish or both; indeed i think the women, children, and sedentary classes eat too much meat for their own good health. ¹ nine years in america ( ), p. . this highly optimistic picture, written by a sanguine observer from the land of greatest agrarian oppression, must be shaded by contrasting details. the truck system of payment, prevalent in mining regions and many factory towns, reduced the actual wage by almost one-half. in the cities, unskilled immigrants had so overcrowded the common labor market that competition had reduced them to a pitiable state. hours of labor were generally long in the factories. as a rule only the skilled artisan had achieved the ten-hour day, and then only in isolated instances. woman's labor was the poorest paid, and her condition was the most neglected. a visitor to lowell in thus describes the conditions in an average factory of that town: in lowell live between seven and eight thousand young women, who are generally daughters of farmers of the different states of new england. some of them are members of families that were rich the generation before. . . . the operatives work thirteen hours a day in the summer time, and from daylight to dark in the winter. at half-past four in the morning the factory bell rings and at five the girls must be in the mills. a clerk, placed as a watch, observes those who are a few minutes behind the time, and effectual means are taken to stimulate punctuality. . . . at seven the girls are allowed thirty minutes for breakfast, and at noon thirty minutes more for dinner, except during the first quarter of the year, when the time is extended to forty-five minutes. but within this time they must hurry to their boarding-houses and return to the factory. . . . at seven o'clock in the evening the factory bell sounds the close of the day's work. it was under these conditions that the coöperative movement had its brief day of experiment. as early as the workmen of philadelphia and cincinnati had begun coöperative stores. the philadelphia group were "fully persuaded," according to their constitution, "that nothing short of an entire change in the present regulation of trade and commerce will ever be permanently beneficial to the productive part of the community." but their little shop survived competition for only a few months. the cincinnati "coöperative magazine" was a sort of combination of store and shop, where various trades were taught, but it also soon disappeared. in the new england workingmen's association organized a protective union for the purpose of obtaining for its members "steady and profitable employment" and of saving the retailer's profit for the purchaser. this movement had a high moral flavor. "the dollar was to us of minor importance; humanitary and not mercenary were our motives," reported their committee on organization of industry. "we must proceed from combined stores to combined shops, from combined shops to combined homes, to joint ownership in god's earth, the foundation that our edifice must stand upon." in this ambitious spirit "they commenced business with a box of soap and half a chest of tea." in they had branches, a capital of $ , . , and a business of nearly $ , , a year. in the meantime similar coöperative movements began elsewhere. the tailors of boston struck for higher wages in and, after fourteen weeks of futile struggle, decided that their salvation lay in coöperation rather than in trade unionism, which at best afforded only temporary relief. about seventy of them raised $ as a coöperative nest egg and netted a profit of $ . the first year. in the same year the philadelphia printers, disappointed at their failure to force a higher wage, organized a coöperative printing press. the movement spread to new york, where a strike of the tailors was in progress. the strikers were addressed at a great mass meeting by albert brisbane, an ardent disciple of fourier, the french social economist, and were told that they must do away with servitude to capital. "what we want to know," said brisbane, "is how to change, peacefully, the system of today. the first great principle is combination." another meeting was addressed by a german, a follower of karl marx, who uttered in his native tongue these words that sound like a modern i. w. w. prophet: "many of us have fought for liberty in the fatherland. we came here because we were opposed, and what have we gained? nothing but misery, hunger, and treading down. but we are in a free country and it is our fault if we do not get our rights. . . . let those who strike eat; the rest starve. butchers and bakers must withhold supplies. yes, they must all strike, and then the aristocrat will starve. we must have a revolution. we cannot submit any longer." the cry of "revolution! revolution!" was taken up by the throng. in the midst of this agitation a new york branch of the new england protective union was organized as an attempt at peaceful revolution by coöperation. the new york protective union went a step farther than the new england union. its members established their own shops and so became their own employers. and in many other cities striking workmen and eager reformers joined hands in modest endeavors to change the face of things. the revolutionary movements of europe at this period were having a seismic effect upon american labor. but all these attempts of the workingmen to tourney a rough world with a needle were foredoomed to failure. lacking the essential business experience and the ability to coöperate, they were soon undone, and after a few years little more was heard of coöperation. in the meantime another economic movement gained momentum under the leadership of george henry evans, who was a land reformer and may be called a precursor of henry george. evans inaugurated a campaign for free farms to entice to the land the unprosperous toilers of the city. in spite of the vast areas of the public domain still unoccupied, the cities were growing denser and larger and filthier by reason of the multitudes from ireland and other countries who preferred to cast themselves into the eager maw of factory towns rather than go out as agrarian pioneers. to such evans and other agrarian reformers made their appeal. for example, a handbill distributed everywhere in asked: are you an american citizen? then you are a joint owner of the public lands. why not take enough of your property to provide yourself a home? why not vote yourself a farm? are you a party follower? then you have long enough employed your vote to benefit scheming office seekers. use it for once to benefit yourself: vote yourself a farm. are you tired of slavery--of drudging for others--of poverty and its attendant miseries? then, vote yourself a farm. would you free your country and the sons of toil everywhere from the heartless, irresponsible mastery of the aristocracy of avarice? . . . then join with your neighbors to form a true american party . . . whose chief measures will be first to limit the quantity of land that any one may henceforth monopolize or inherit: and second to make the public lands free to actual settlers only, each having the right to sell his improvements to any man not possessed of other lands. "vote yourself a farm" became a popular shibboleth and a part of the standard programme of organized labor. the donation of public lands to heads of families, on condition of occupancy and cultivation for a term of years, was proposed in bills repeatedly introduced in congress. but the cry of opposition went up from the older states that they would be bled for the sake of the newer, that giving land to the landless was encouraging idleness and wantonness and spreading demoralization, and that congress had no more power to give away land than it had to give away money. these arguments had their effect at the capitol, and it was not until the new republican party came into power pledged to "a complete and satisfactory homestead measure" that the homestead act of was placed on the statute books. a characteristic manifestation of the humanitarian impulse of the forties was the support given to labor in its renewed demand for a ten-hour day. it has already been indicated how this movement started in the thirties, how its object was achieved by a few highly organized trades, and how it was interrupted in its progress by the panic of . the agitation, however, to make the ten-hour day customary throughout the country was not long in coming back to life. in march, , an executive order of president van buren declaring ten hours to be the working day for laborers and mechanics in government employ forced the issue upon private employers. the earliest concerted action, it would seem, arose in new england, where the new england workingmen's association, later called the labor reform league, carried on the crusade. in a committee appointed by the massachusetts legislature to investigate labor conditions affords the first instance on record of an american legislature concerning itself with the affairs of the labor world to the extent of ordering an official investigation. the committee examined a number of factory operatives, both men and women, visited a few of the mills, gathered some statistics, and made certain neutral and specious suggestions. they believed the remedy for such evils as they discovered lay not in legislation but "in the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man's destiny, in a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority." the first ten-hour law was passed in by the new hampshire legislature. it provided that "ten hours of actual labor shall be taken to be a day's work, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties," and that no minor under fifteen years of age should be employed more than ten hours a day without the consent of parent or guardian. this was the unassuming beginning of a movement to have the hours of toil fixed by society rather than by contract. this law of new hampshire, which was destined to have a widespread influence, was hailed by the workmen everywhere with delight; mass meetings and processions proclaimed it as a great victory; and only the conservatives prophesied the worthlessness of such legislation. horace greeley sympathetically dissected the bill. he had little faith, it is true, in legislative interference with private contracts. "but," he asks, "who can seriously doubt that it is the duty of the commonwealth to see that the tender frames of its youth are not shattered by excessively protracted toil? . . . will any one pretend that ten hours per day, especially at confining and monotonous avocations which tax at once the brain and the sinews are not quite enough for any child to labor statedly and steadily?" the consent of guardian or parent he thought a fraud against the child that could be averted only by the positive command of the state specifically limiting the hours of child labor. in the following year pennsylvania enacted a law declaring ten hours a legal day in certain industries and forbidding children under twelve from working in cotton, woolen, silk, or flax mills. children over fourteen, however, could, by special arrangement with parents or guardians, be compelled to work more than ten hours a day. "this act is very much of a humbug," commented greeley, "but it will serve a good end. those whom it was intended to put asleep will come back again before long, and, like oliver twist, 'want some more.'" the ten-hour movement had thus achieved social recognition. it had the staunch support of such men as wendell phillips, edward everett, horace greeley, and other distinguished publicists and philanthropists. public opinion was becoming so strong that both the whigs and democrats in their party platforms declared themselves in favor of the ten-hour day. when, in the summer of , the british parliament passed a ten-hour law, american unions sent congratulatory messages to the british workmen. gradually the various states followed the example of new hampshire and pennsylvania--new jersey in , ohio in , and rhode island in --and the "ten-hour system" was legally established. but it was one thing to write a statute and another to enforce it. american laws were, after all, based upon the ancient anglo-saxon principle of private contract. a man could agree to work for as many hours as he chose, and each employer could drive his own bargain. the cotton mill owners of allegheny city, for example, declared that they would be compelled to run their mills twelve hours a day. they would not, of course, employ children under twelve, although they felt deeply concerned for the widows who would thereby lose the wages of their children. but they must run on a twelve-hour schedule to meet competition from other states. so they attempted to make special contracts with each employee. the workmen objected to this and struck. finally they compromised on a ten-hour day and a sixteen per cent reduction in wages. such an arrangement became a common occurrence in the industrial world of the middle of the century. in the meantime the factory system was rapidly recruiting women workers, especially in the new england textile mills. indeed, as early as "tailoresses" of new york and other cities had formed protective societies. in the mill girls of dover, new hampshire, caused a sensation by striking. several hundred of them paraded the streets and, according to accounts, "fired off a lot of gunpowder." in the women workers in the lowell factories struck for higher wages and later organized a factory girls' association which included more than , members. it was aimed against the strict regimen of the boarding houses, which were owned and managed by the mills. "as our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the british ministry," cried the strikers, "so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has been prepared for us." in this vibrant atmosphere was born the powerful woman's labor union, the female labor reform association, later called the lowell female industrial reform and mutual aid society. lowell became the center of a far-reaching propaganda characterized by energy and a definite conception of what was wanted. the women joined in strikes, carried banners, sent delegates to the labor conventions, and were zealous in propaganda. it was the women workers of massachusetts who first forced the legislature to investigate labor conditions and who aroused public sentiment to a pitch that finally compelled the enactment of laws for the bettering of their conditions. when the mill owners in massachusetts demanded in that their weavers tend four looms instead of three, the women promptly resolved that "we will not tend a fourth loom unless we receive the same pay per piece as on three. . . . this we most solemnly pledge ourselves to obtain." in new york, in , the female industry association was organized at a large meeting held in the court house. it included "tailoresses, plain and coarse sewing, shirt makers, book-folders and stickers, capmakers, straw-workers, dressmakers, crimpers, fringe and lacemakers," and other trades open to women "who were like oppressed." the new york herald reported "about females generally of the most interesting age and appearance" in attendance. the president of the meeting unfolded a pitiable condition of affairs. she mentioned several employers by name who paid only from ten to eighteen cents a day, and she stated that, after acquiring skill in some of the trades and by working twelve to fourteen hours a day, a woman might earn twenty-five cents a day! "how is it possible," she exclaimed, "that at such an income we can support ourselves decently and honestly?" so we come to the fifties, when the rapid rise in the cost of living due to the influx of gold from the newly discovered california mines created new economic conditions. by , the cost of living had risen so high that the length of the working day was quite forgotten because of the utter inadequacy of the wage to meet the new altitude of prices. hotels issued statements that they were compelled to raise their rates for board from a dollar and a half to two dollars a day. newspapers raised their advertising rates. drinks went up from six cents to ten and twelve and a half cents. in baltimore, the men in the baltimore and ohio railway shops struck. they were followed by all the conductors, brakemen, and locomotive engineers. machinists employed in other shops soon joined them, and the city's industries were virtually paralyzed. in new york nearly every industry was stopped by strikes. in philadelphia, boston, pittsburgh, in cities large and small, the striking workmen made their demands known. by this time thoughtful laborers had learned the futility of programmes that attempted to reform society. they had watched the birth and death of many experiments. they had participated in short-lived coöperative stores and shops; they had listened to owen's alluring words and had seen his world convention meet and adjourn; had witnessed national reform associations, leagues, and industrial congresses issue their high-pitched resolutions; and had united on legislative candidates. and yet the old world wagged on in the old way. wages and hours and working conditions could be changed, they had learned, only by coercion. this coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society, by stress of public opinion. but in concrete cases, in their own personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by themselves. they had learned the lesson of letting the world in general go its way while they attended to their own business. in the early fifties, then, a new species of union appears. it discards lofty phraseology and the attempt at world-reform and it becomes simply a trade union. it restricts its house-cleaning to its own shop, limits its demands to its trade, asks for a minimum wage and minimum hours, and lays out with considerable detail the conditions under which its members will work. the weapons in its arsenal are not new--the strike and the boycott. now that he has learned to distinguish essentials, the new trade unionist can bargain with his employer, and as a result trade agreements stipulating hours, wages, and conditions, take the place of the desultory and ineffective settlements which had hitherto issued from labor disputes. but it was not without foreboding that this development was witnessed by the adherents of the status quo. according to a magazine writer of : after prescribing the rate of remuneration many of the trades' unions go to enact laws for the government of the respective departments, to all of which the employer must assent. . . . the result even thus far is that there is found no limit to this species of encroachment. if workmen may dictate the hours and mode of service, and the number and description of hands to be employed, they may also regulate other items of the business with which their labor is connected. thus we find that within a few days, in the city of new york, the longshoremen have taken by force from their several stations the horses and labor-saving gear used for delivering cargoes, it being part of their regulations not to allow of such competition. the gravitation towards common action was felt over a wide area during this period. some trades met in national convention to lay down rules for their craft. one of the earliest national meetings was that of the carpet-weavers ( ) in new york city, when thirty-four delegates, representing over a thousand operatives, adopted rules and took steps to prevent a reduction in wages. the national convention of journeymen printers met in , and out of this emerged two years later an organization called the national typographical union, which ten years later still, on the admission of some canadian unions, became the international typographical union of north america; and as such it flourishes today. in the journeymen stone cutters' association of north america was organized and in the following year the national trade association of hat finishers, the forerunner of the united hatters of north america. in the iron molders' union of north america began its aggressive career. the conception of a national trade unity was now well formed; compactly organized national and local trade unions with very definite industrial aims were soon to take the place of ephemeral, loose-jointed associations with vast and vague ambitions. early in this period a new impetus was given to organized labor by the historic decision of chief justice shaw of massachusetts in a case ¹ brought against seven bootmakers charged with conspiracy. their offense consisted in attempting to induce all the workmen of a given shop to join the union and compel the master to employ only union men. the trial court found them guilty; but the chief justice decided that he did not "perceive that it is criminal for men to agree together to exercise their own acknowledged rights in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests." in order to show criminal conspiracy, therefore, on the part of a labor union, it was necessary to prove that either the intent or the method was criminal, for it was not a criminal offense to combine for the purpose of raising wages or bettering conditions or seeking to have all laborers join the union. the liberalizing influence of this decision upon labor law can hardly be over-estimated. ¹ commonwealth vs. hunt. the period closed amidst general disturbances and forebodings, political and economic. in occurred a panic which thrust the problem of unemployment, on a vast scale, before the american consciousness. instead of demanding higher wages, multitudes now cried for work. the marching masses, in new york, carried banners asking for bread, while soldiers from governor's island and marines from the navy yard guarded the custom house and the sub-treasury. from philadelphia to new orleans, from boston to chicago, came the same story of banks failing, railroads in bankruptcy, factories closing, idle and hungry throngs moving restlessly through the streets. in new york , , in lawrence , in philadelphia , , were estimated to be out of work. labor learned anew that its prosperity was inalienably identified with the well-being of industry and commerce; and society learned that hunger and idleness are the golden opportunity of the demagogue and agitator. the word "socialism" now appears more and more frequently in the daily press and always a synonym of destruction or of something to be feared. no sooner had business revived than the great shadow of internal strife was cast over the land, and for the duration of the civil war the peril of the nation absorbed all the energies of the people. chapter iv amalgamation after appomattox, every one seemed bent on finding a short cut to opulence. to foreign observers, the united states was then simply a scrambling mass of selfish units, for there seemed to be among the american people no disinterested group to balance accounts between the competing elements--no leisure class, living on secured incomes, mellowed by generations of travel, education, and reflection; no bureaucracy arbitrarily guiding the details of governmental routine; no aristocracy, born umpires of the doings of their underlings. all the manifold currents of life seemed swallowed up in the commercial maelstrom. by the standards of what happened in this season of exuberance and intense materialism, the american people were hastily judged by critics who failed to see that the period was but the prelude to a maturer national life. it was a period of a remarkable industrial expansion. then "plant" became a new word in the phraseology of the market place, denoting the enlarged factory or mill and suggesting the hardy perennial, each succeeding year putting forth new shoots from its side. the products of this seedtime are seen in the colossal industrial growths of today. then it was that short railway lines began to be welded into "systems," that the railway builders began to strike out into the prairies and mountains of the west, and that partnerships began to be merged into corporations and corporations into trusts, ever reaching out for the greater markets. meanwhile the inventive genius of america was responding to the call of the time. in bell telephoned from boston to salem; two years later, brush lighted by electricity the streets of san francisco. in edison was making incandescent electric lights for new york and operating his first electric car in menlo park, new jersey. all these developments created a new demand for capital. where formerly a manufacturer had made products to order or for a small number of known customers, now he made on speculation, for a great number of unknown customers, taking his risks in distant markets. where formerly the banker had lent money on local security, now he gave credit to vast enterprises far away. new inventions or industrial processes brought on new speculations. this new demand for capital made necessary a new system of credits, which was erected at first, as the recurring panics disclosed, on sand, but gradually, through costly experience, on a more stable foundation. the economic and industrial development of the time demanded not only new money and credit but new men. a new type of executive was wanted, and he soon appeared to satisfy the need. neither a capitalist nor a merchant, he combined in some degree the functions of both, added to them the greater function of industrial manager, and received from great business concerns a high premium for his talent and foresight. this captain of industry, as he has been called, is the foremost figure of the period, the hero of the industrial drama. but much of what is admirable in that generation of nation builders is obscured by the industrial anarchy which prevailed. everybody was for himself--and the devil was busy harvesting the hindmost. there were "rate-wars," "cut-rate sales," secret intrigues, and rebates; and there were subterranean passages--some, indeed, scarcely under the surface--to council chambers, executive mansions, and congress. there were extreme fluctuations of industry: prosperity was either at a very high level or depression at a very low one. prosperity would bring on an expansion of credits, a rise in prices, higher cost of living, strikes and boycotts for higher wages; then depression would follow with the shutdown and that most distressing of social diseases, unemployment. during the panic of - many thousands of men marched the streets crying earnestly for work. between the panics, strikes became a part of the economic routine of the country. they were expected, just as pay days and legal holidays are expected. now for the first time came strikes that can only be characterized as stupendous. they were not mere slight economic disturbances; they were veritable industrial earthquakes. in the coal miners of pennsylvania, resenting the truck system and the miserable housing which the mine owners forced upon them, struck by the tens of thousands. in illinois, indiana, missouri, maryland, ohio, and new york strikes occurred in all sorts of industries. there were the usual parades and banners, some appealing, some insulting, and all the while the militia guarded property. in july, , the men of the baltimore and ohio railroad refused to submit to a fourth reduction in wages in seven years and struck. from baltimore the resentment spread to pennsylvania and culminated with riots in pittsburgh. all the anthracite coal miners struck, followed by most of the bituminous miners of ohio, indiana, and illinois. the militia were impotent to subdue the mobs; federal troops had to be sent by president hayes into many of the states; and a proclamation by the president commanded all citizens to keep the peace. thus was federal authority introduced to bolster up the administrative weakness of the states, and the first step was taken on the road to industrial nationalization. the turmoil had hardly subsided when, in , new strikes broke out. in the long catalogue of the strikers of that year are found the ribbon weavers of philadelphia, paterson, and new york, the stablemen of new york, new jersey, and san francisco, the cotton yard workers of new orleans, the cotton weavers of new england and new york, the stockyard employees of chicago and omaha, the potters of green point, long island, the puddlers of johnstown and columbia, pennsylvania, the machinists of buffalo, the tailors of new york, and the shoemakers of indiana. the year was scarcely less restive. but is marked in labor annals as "the year of the great uprising," when twice as many strikes as in any previous year were reported by the united states commissioner of labor, and when these strikes reached a tragic climax in the chicago haymarket riots. it was during this feverish epoch that organized labor first entered the arena of national politics. when the policy as to the national currency became an issue, the lure of cheap money drew labor into an alliance in with the greenbackers, whose mad cry added to the general unrest. in this, as in other fatuous pursuits, labor was only responding to the forces and the spirit of the hour. these have been called the years of amalgamation, but they were also the years of tumult, for, while amalgamation was achieved, discipline was not. authority imposed from within was not sufficient to overcome the decentralizing forces, and just as big business had yet to learn by self-imposed discipline how to overcome the extremely individualistic tendencies which resulted in trade anarchy, so labor had yet to learn through discipline the lessons of self-restraint. moreover, in the sudden expansion and great enterprises of these days, labor even more than capital lost in stability. one great steadying influence, the old personal relation between master and servant, which prevailed during the days of handicraft and even of the small factory, had disappeared almost completely. now labor was put up on the market--a heartless term descriptive of a condition from which human beings might be expected to react violently--and they did, for human nature refused to be an inert, marketable thing. the labor market must expand with the trader's market. in there were about one and a third million wage-earners in the united states; in well over two million; in nearly two and three-quarters million; and in over four and a quarter million. the city sucked them in from the country; but by far the larger augmentation came from europe; and the immigrant, normally optimistic, often untaught, sometimes sullen and filled with a destructive resentment, and always accustomed to low standards of living, added to the armies of labor his vast and complex bulk. there were two paramount issues--wages and the hours of labor--to which all other issues were and always have been secondary. wages tend constantly to become inadequate when the standard of living is steadily rising, and they consequently require periodical readjustment. hours of labor, of course, are not subject in the same degree to external conditions. but the tendency has always been toward a shorter day. in a previous chapter, the inception of the ten-hour movement was outlined. presently there began the eight-hour movement. as early as the carpenters and caulkers of the charleston navy yard achieved an eight-hour day; but may more properly be taken as the beginning of the movement. in this year societies were organized in boston and its vicinity for the precise purpose of winning the eight-hour day, and soon afterwards a national eight-hour league was established with local leagues extending from new england to san francisco and new orleans. this movement received an intelligible philosophy, and so a new vitality, from ira steward, a member of the boston machinists' and blacksmiths' union. writing as a workingman for workingmen, steward found in the standard of living the true reason for a shorter workday. with beautiful simplicity he pointed out to the laboring man that the shorter period of labor would not mean smaller pay, and to the employer that it would not mean a diminished output. on the contrary, it would be mutually beneficial, for the unwearied workman could produce as much in the shorter day as the wearied workman in the longer. "as long," steward wrote, "as tired human hands do most of the world's hard work, the sentimental pretense of honoring and respecting the horny-handed toiler is as false and absurd as the idea that a solid foundation for a house can be made out of soap bubbles." in steward's pamphlet, a reduction of hours and increase of wages, was widely circulated by the boston labor reform association. it emphasized the value of leisure and its beneficial reflex effect upon both production and consumption. gradually these well reasoned and conservatively expressed doctrines found champions such as wendell phillips, henry ward beecher, and horace greeley to give them wider publicity and to impress them upon the public consciousness. in illinois, missouri, and new york passed eight-hour laws and wisconsin declared eight hours a day's work for women and children. in congress established an eight-hour day for public work. these were promising signs, though the battle was still far from being won. the eight-hour day has at last received "the sanction of society"--to use the words of president wilson in his message to congress in , when he called for action to avert a great railway strike. but to win that sanction required over half a century of popular agitation, discussion, and economic and political evolution. such, in brief, were the general business conditions of the country and the issues which engaged the energies of labor reformers during the period following the civil war. meanwhile great changes were made in labor organizations. many of the old unions were reorganized, and numerous local amalgamations took place. most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naïve formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. the societies adopted fantastic names such as "the supreme mechanical order of the sun," "the knights of st. crispin," and "the noble order of the knights of labor," of which more presently. meanwhile, too, there was a growing desire to unify the workers of the country by some sort of national organization. the outcome was a notable labor congress held at baltimore in august, , which included all kinds of labor organizations and was attended by seventy-seven delegates from thirteen states. in the light of subsequent events its resolutions now seem conservative and constructive. this congress believed that, "all reforms in the labor movement can only be effected by an intelligent, systematic effort of the industrial classes . . . through the trades organizations." of strikes it declared that "they have been injudicious and ill-advised, the result of impulse rather than principle, . . . and we would therefore discountenance them except as a dernier ressort, and when all means for an amicable and honorable adjustment has been abandoned." it issued a cautious and carefully phrased address to the workmen throughout the country, urging them to organize and assuring them that "the first thing to be accomplished before we can hope for any great results is the thorough organization of all the departments of labor." the national labor union which resulted from this convention held seven annual congresses, and its proceedings show a statesmanlike conservatism and avoid extreme radicalism. this organization, which at its high tide represented a membership of , , in its brief existence was influential in three important matters: first, it pointed the way to national amalgamation and was thus a forerunner of more lasting efforts in this direction; secondly, it had a powerful influence in the eight-hour movement; and, thirdly, it was largely instrumental in establishing labor bureaus and in gathering statistics for the scientific study of labor questions. but the national labor union unfortunately went into politics; and politics proved its undoing. upon affiliating with the labor reform party it dwindled rapidly, and after it disappeared entirely. one of the typical organizations of the time was the order of the knights of st. crispin, so named after the patron saint of the shoemakers, and accessible only to members of that craft. it was first conceived in by newell daniels, a shoemaker in milford, massachusetts, but no organization was effected until , when the founder had moved to milwaukee. the ritual and constitution he had prepared was accepted then by a group of seven shoemakers, and in four years this insignificant mustard seed had grown into a great tree. the story is told by frank k. foster, ¹ who says, speaking of the order in : "it made and unmade politicians; it established a monthly journal; it started coöperative stores; it fought, often successfully, against threatened reductions of wages . . .; it became the undoubted foremost trade organization of the world." but within five years the order was rent by factionalism and in was acknowledged to be dead. it perished from various causes--partly because it failed to assimilate or imbue with its doctrines the thousands of workmen who subscribed to its rules and ritual, partly because of the jealousy and treachery which is the fruitage of sudden prosperity, partly because of failure to fulfill the fervent hopes of thousands who joined it as a prelude to the industrial millennium; but especially it failed to endure because it was founded on an economic principle which could not be imposed upon society. the rule which embraced this principle reads as follows: "no member of this order shall teach, or aid in teaching, any fact or facts of boot or shoemaking, unless the lodge shall give permission by a three-fourths vote . . . provided that this article shall not be so construed as to prevent a father from teaching his own son. provided also, that this article shall not be so construed as to hinder any member of this organization from learning any or all parts of the trade." the medieval craft guild could not so easily be revived in these days of rapid changes, when a new stitching machine replaced in a day a hundred workmen. and so the knights of st. crispin fell a victim to their own greed. ¹ the labor movement, the problem of today, edited by george e. mcneill, chapter viii. the noble order of the knights of labor, another of those societies of workingmen, was organized in november, , by uriah s. stephens, a philadelphia garment cutter, with the assistance of six fellow craftsmen. it has been said of stephens that he was "a man of great force of character, a skilled mechanic, with the love of books which enabled him to pursue his studies during his apprenticeship, and feeling withal a strong affection for secret organizations, having been for many years connected with the masonic order." he was to have been educated for the ministry but, owing to financial reverses in his family, was obliged instead to learn a trade. later he taught school for a few years, traveled extensively in the west indies, south america, and california, and became an accomplished public speaker and a diligent observer of social conditions. stephens and his six associates had witnessed the dissolution of the local garment cutters' union. they resolved that the new society should not be limited by the lines of their own trade but should embrace "all branches of honorable toil." subsequently a rule was adopted stipulating that at least three-fourths of the membership of lodges must be wage-earners eighteen years of age. moreover, "no one who either sells or makes a living, or any part of it, by the sale of intoxicating drinks either as manufacturer, dealer, or agent, or through any member of his family, can be admitted to membership in this order; and no lawyer, banker, professional gambler, or stock broker can be admitted." they chose their motto from solon, the wisest of lawgivers: "that is the most perfect government in which an injury to one is the concern of all"; and they took their preamble from burke, the most philosophical of statesmen: "when bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." the order was a secret society and for years kept its name from the public. it was generally known as the "five stars," because of the five asterisks that represented its name in all public notices. while mysterious initials and secret ceremonies gratified the members, they aroused a corresponding antagonism, even fear, among the public, especially as the order grew to giant size. what were the potencies of a secret organization that had only to post a few mysterious words and symbols to gather hundreds of workingmen in their halls? and what plottings went on behind those locked and guarded doors? to allay public hostility secrecy was gradually removed and in was entirely abolished--not, however, without serious opposition from the older members. the atmosphere of high idealism in which the order had been conceived continued to be fostered by stephens, its founder and its first grand master workman. he extolled justice, discountenanced violence, and pleaded for "the mutual development and moral elevation of mankind." his exhortations were free from that narrow class antagonism which frequently characterizes the utterances of labor. one of his associates, too, invoked the spirit of chivalry, of true knighthood, when he said that the old trade union had failed because "it had failed to recognize the rights of man and looked only to the rights of tradesmen," that the labor movement needed "something that will develop more of charity, less of selfishness, more of generosity, less of stinginess and nearness, than the average society has yet disclosed to its members." nor were these ideas and principles betrayed by stephens's successor, terence v. powderly, who became grand master in and served during the years when the order attained its greatest power. powderly, also, was a conservative idealist. his career may be regarded as a good example of the rise of many an american labor leader. he had been a poor boy. at thirteen he began work as a switchtender; at seventeen he was apprenticed as machinist; at nineteen he was active in a machinists' and blacksmiths' union. after working at his trade in various places, he at length settled in scranton, pennsylvania, and became one of the organizers of the greenback labor party. he was twice elected mayor of scranton, and might have been elected for a third term had he not declined to serve, preferring to devote all his time to the society of which he was grand master. the obligations laid upon every member of the knights of labor were impressive: labor is noble and holy. to defend it from degradation; to divest it of the evils to body, mind and estate which ignorance and greed have imposed; to rescue the toiler from the grasp of the selfish--is a work worthy of the noblest and best of our race. in all the multifarious branches of trade capital has its combinations; and, whether intended or not, it crushes the manly hopes of labor and tramples poor humanity in the dust. we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital; but men in their haste and greed, blinded by self-interests, overlook the interests of others and sometimes violate the rights of those they deem helpless. we mean to uphold the dignity of labor, to affirm the nobility of all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. we mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created. we shall, with all our strength, support laws made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to lighten the exhaustiveness of toil. to pause in his toil, to devote himself to his own interests, to gather a knowledge of the world's commerce, to unite, combine and coöperate in the great army of peace and industry, to nourish and cherish, build and develop the temple he lives in is the highest and noblest duty of man to himself, to his fellow men and to his creator. the phenomenal growth and collapse of the knights of labor is one of the outstanding events in american economic history. the membership in consisted of eleven tailors. this small beginning grew into the famous assembly no. . soon the ship carpenters wanted to join, and assembly no. was organized. the shawl-weavers formed another assembly, the carpet-weavers another, and so on, until over twenty assemblies, covering almost every trade, had been organized in philadelphia alone. by there were eighty assemblies in the city and its vicinity. as the number of lodges multiplied, it became necessary to establish a common agency or authority, and a committee on the good of the order was constituted to represent all the local units, but this committee was soon superseded by a delegate body known as the district assembly. as the movement spread from city to city and from state to state, a general assembly was created in to hold annual conventions and to be the supreme authority of the order. in the membership of the order was , ; within three years, it had mounted to over , ; and at the climax of its career the society boasted over , , workmen in the united states and canada who had vowed fealty to its knighthood. it is not to be imagined that every member of this vast horde so suddenly brought together understood the obligations of the workman's chivalry. the selfish and the lawless rushed in with the prudent and sincere. but a resolution of the executive board to stop the initiation of new members came too late. the undesirable and radical element in many communities gained control of local assemblies, and the conservatism and intelligence of the national leaders became merely a shield for the rowdy and the ignorant who brought the entire order into popular disfavor. the crisis came in . in the early months of this turbulent year there were nearly five hundred labor disputes, most of them involving an advance in wages. an epidemic of strikes then spread over the country, many of them actually conducted by the knights of labor and all of them associated in the public mind with that order. one of the most important of these occurred on the southwestern railroad. in the preceding year, the knights had increased their lodges in st. louis from five to thirty, and these were under the domination of a coarse and ruthless district leader. when in february, , a mechanic, working in the shops of the texas and pacific railroad at marshall, texas, was discharged for cause and the road refused to reinstate him, a strike ensued which spread over the entire six thousand miles of the gould system; and st. louis became the center of the tumult. after nearly two months of violence, the outbreak ended in the complete collapse of the strikers. this result was doubly damaging to the knights of labor, for they had officially taken charge of the strike and were censured on the one hand for their conduct of the struggle and on the other for the defeat which they had sustained. in the same year, against the earnest advice of the national leaders of the knights of labor, the employees of the third avenue railway in new york began a strike which lasted many months and which was characterized by such violence that policemen were detailed to guard every car leaving the barns. in chicago the freight handlers struck, and some , workmen stopped work in sympathy. on the d of may, at the mccormick harvester works, several strikers were wounded in a tussle with the police. on the following day a mass meeting held in haymarket square, chicago, was harangued by a number of anarchists. when the police attempted to disperse the mob, guns were fired at the officers of the law and a bomb was hurled into their throng, killing seven and wounding sixty. for this crime seven anarchists were indicted, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. the knights of labor passed resolutions asking clemency for these murderers and thereby grossly offended public opinion, and that at a time when public opinion was frightened by these outrages, angered by the disclosures of brazen plotting, and upset by the sudden consciousness that the immunity of the united states from the red terror of europe was at an end. powderly and the more conservative national officers who were opposed to these radical machinations were strong enough in the grand lodge in the following year to suppress a vote of sympathy for the condemned anarchists. the radicals thereupon seceded from the organization. this outcome, however, did not restore the order to the confidence of the public, and its strength now rapidly declined. a loss of , members for the year was reported. early in the nineties, financial troubles compelled the sale of the philadelphia headquarters of the knights of labor and the removal to more modest quarters in washington. a remnant of members still retain an organization, but it is barely a shadow of the vast army of knights who at one time so hopefully carried on a crusade in every center of industry. it was not merely the excesses of the lawless but the multiplicity of strikes which alienated public sympathy. powderly's repeated warnings that strikes, in and of themselves, were destructive of the stable position of labor were shown to be prophetic. these excesses, however, were forcing upon the public the idea that it too had not only an interest but a right and a duty in labor disputes. methods of arbitration and conciliation were now discussed in every legislature. in the house of representatives established a standing committee on labor. in a national bureau of labor was created to gather statistical information. in president cleveland sent to congress a message which has become historic as the first presidential message devoted to labor. in this he proposed the creation of a board of labor commissioners who should act as official arbiters in labor disputes, but congress was unwilling at that time to take so advanced a step. in , however, it enacted a law providing for the settlement of railway labor disputes by arbitration, upon agreement of both parties. arbitration signifies a judicial attitude of mind, a judgment based on facts. these facts are derived from specific conditions and do not grow out of broad generalizations. arbitral tribunals are created to decide points in dispute, not philosophies of human action. the businesslike organization of the new trade union could as readily adapt itself to arbitration as it had already adapted itself, in isolated instances, to collective bargaining. a new stage had therefore been reached in the labor movement. chapter v federation experience and events had now paved the way for that vast centralization of industry which characterizes the business world of the present era. the terms sugar, coffee, steel, tobacco, oil, acquire on the stock exchange a new and precise meaning. seventy-five per cent of steel, eighty-three per cent of petroleum, ninety per cent of sugar production are brought under the control of industrial combinations. nearly one-fourth of the wage-earners of america are employed by great corporations. but while financiers are talking only in terms of millions, while super-organization is reaching its eager fingers into every industry, and while the units of business are becoming national in scope, the workingman himself is being taught at last to rely more and more upon group action in his endeavor to obtain better wages and working conditions. he is taught also to widen the area of his organization and to intensify its efforts. so, while the public reads in the daily and periodical press about the oil trust and the coffee trust, it is also being admonished against a labor trust and against two personages, both symbols of colossal economic unrest--the promoter, or the stalking horse of financial enterprise, and the walking delegate, or the labor union representative and only too frequently the advance agent of bitterness and revenge. in response to the call of the hour there appeared the american federation of labor, frequently called in these later days the labor trust. the federation was first suggested at terre haute, indiana, on august , , at a convention called by the knights of industry and the amalgamated labor union, two secret societies patterned after the model common at that period. the amalgamated union was composed largely of disaffected knights of labor, and the avowed purpose of the convention was to organize a new secret society to supplant the knights. but the trades union element predominated and held up the british trades union and its powerful annual congress as a model. at this meeting the needs of intensive local organization, of trades autonomy, and of comprehensive team work were foreseen, and from the discussion there grew a plan for a second convention. with this meeting, which was held at pittsburgh in november, , the actual work of the new association began under the name, "the federation of organized trades and labor unions of the united states of america and canada." when this federation learned that a convention representing independent trade unions was called to meet in columbus, ohio, in december, , it promptly altered its arrangements for its own annual session so that it, too, met at the same time and place. thereupon the federation effected a union with this independent body, which represented twenty-five organizations. the new organization was called the american federation of labor. until , this was considered as the first annual meeting of the new organization, but in that year the federation resolved that its "continuity . . . be recognized and dated from the year ." for some years the membership increased slowly; but in over , new members were reported, in over , , and from that time the federation has given evidence of such growth and prosperity that it easily is the most powerful labor organization america has known, and it takes its place by the side of the british trades union congress as "the sovereign organization in the trade union world." in its membership reached , , , with affiliated national unions, representing virtually every element of american industry excepting the railway brotherhoods and a dissenting group of electrical workers. the foundation of this vast organization was the interest of particular trades rather than the interests of labor in general. its membership is made up "of such trade and labor unions as shall conform to its rules and regulations." the preamble of the constitution states: "we therefore declare ourselves in favor of the formation of a thorough federation, embracing every trade and labor organization in america under the trade union system of organization." the knights of labor had endeavored to subordinate the parts to the whole; the american federation is willing to bend the whole to the needs of the unit. it zealously sends out its organizers to form local unions and has made provision that "any seven wage workers of good character following any trade or calling" can establish a local union with federal affiliations. this vast and potent organization is based upon the principle of trade homogeneity--namely, that each trade is primarily interested in its own particular affairs but that all trades are interested in those general matters which affect all laboring men as a class. to combine effectually these dual interests, the federation espouses the principle of home rule in purely local matters and of federal supervision in all general matters. it combines, with a great singleness of purpose, so diverse a variety of details that it touches the minutiæ of every trade and places at the disposal of the humblest craftsman or laborer the tremendous powers of its national influence. while highly centralized in organization, it is nevertheless democratic in operation, depending generally upon the referendum for its sanctions. it is flexible in its parts and can mobilize both its heavy artillery and its cavalry with equal readiness. it has from the first been managed with skill, energy, and great adroitness. the supreme authority of the american federation is its annual convention composed of delegates chosen from national and international unions, from state, central, and local trade unions, and from fraternal organizations. experience has evolved a few simple rules by which the convention is safeguarded against political and factional debate and against the interruptions of "soreheads." besides attending to the necessary routine, the convention elects the eleven national officers who form the executive council which guides the administrative details of the organization. the funds of the federation are derived from a per capita tax on the membership. the official organ is the american federationist. it is interesting to note in passing that over two hundred and forty labor periodicals together with a continual stream of circulars and pamphlets issue from the trades union press. the federation is divided into five departments, representing the most important groups of labor: the building trades, the metal trades, mining, railroad employees, and the union label trades. ¹ each of these departments has its own autonomous sphere of action, its own set of officers, its own financial arrangements, its own administrative details. each holds an annual convention, in the same place and week, as the federation. each is made up of affiliated unions only and confines itself solely to the interest of its own trades. this suborganization serves as an admirable clearing house and shock-absorber and succeeds in eliminating much of the friction which occurs between the several unions. ¹ there is in the federation, however, a group of unions not affiliated with any of these departments. there are also forty-three state branches of the federation, each with its own separate organization. there are annual state conventions whose membership, however, is not always restricted to unions affiliated with the american federation. some of these state organizations antedate the federation. there remain the local unions, into personal touch with which each member comes. there were in as many as "city centrals," the term used to designate the affiliation of the unions of a city. the city centrals are smaller replicas of the state federations and are made up of delegates elected by the individual unions. they meet at stated intervals and freely discuss questions relating to the welfare of organized labor in general as well as to local labor conditions in every trade. indeed, vigilance seems to be the watchword of the central. organization, wages, trade agreements, and the attitude of public officials and city councils which even remotely might affect labor rarely escape their scrutiny. this oldest of all the groups of labor organizations remains the most vital part of the federation. the success of the american federation of labor is due in large measure to the crafty generalship of its president, samuel gompers, one of the most astute labor leaders developed by american economic conditions. he helped organize the federation, carefully nursed it through its tender years, and boldly and unhesitatingly used its great power in the days of its maturity. in fact, in a very real sense the federation is gompers, and gompers is the federation. born in london of dutch-jewish lineage, on january , , the son of a cigar-maker, samuel gompers was early apprenticed to that craft. at the age of thirteen he went to new york city, where in the following year he joined the first cigar-makers' union organized in that city. he enlisted all his boyish ardor in the cause of the trade union and, after he arrived at maturity, was elected successively secretary and president of his union. the local unions were, at that time, gingerly feeling their way towards state and national organization, and in these early attempts young gompers was active. in , he was one of the delegates to a national meeting which constituted the nucleus of what is now the cigar-makers' international union. the local cigar-makers' union in which gompers received his necessary preliminary training was one of the most enlightened and compactly organized groups of american labor. it was one of the first american unions to adopt in an efficient manner the british system of benefits in the case of sickness, death, or unemployment. it is one of the few american unions that persistently encourages skill in its craft and intelligence in its membership. it has been a pioneer in collective bargaining and in arbitration. it has been conservatively and yet enthusiastically led and has generally succeeded in enlisting the respect and coöperation of employers. this union has been the kindergarten and preparatory school of samuel gompers, who, during all the years of his wide activities as the head of the federation of labor, has retained his membership in his old local and has acted as first vice-president of the cigar-makers' international. these early experiences, precedents, and enthusiasms gompers carried with him into the federation of labor. he was one of the original group of trade union representatives who organized the federation in . in the following year he was its president. since he has, with the exception of a single year, been annually chosen as president. during the first years the federation was very weak, and it was even doubtful if the organization could survive the bitter hostility of the powerful knights of labor. it could pay its president no salary and could barely meet his expense account. ¹ gompers played a large part in the complete reorganization of the federation in . he subsequently received a yearly salary of $ so that he could devote all of his time to the cause. from this year forward the growth of the federation was steady and healthy. in the last decade it has been phenomenal. the earlier policy of caution has, however, not been discarded--for caution is the word that most aptly describes the methods of gompers. from the first, he tested every step carefully, like a wary mountaineer, before he urged his organization to follow. from the beginning gompers has followed three general lines of policy. first, he has built the imposing structure of his federation upon the autonomy of the constituent unions. this is the secret of the united enthusiasm of the federation. it is the anglo-saxon instinct for home rule applied to trade union politics. in the tentative years of its early struggles, the federation could hope for survival only upon the suffrance of the trade union, and today, when the federation has become powerful, its potencies rest upon the same foundation. ¹ in one of the early years this was $ . secondly, gompers has always advocated frugality in money matters. his federation is powerful but not rich. its demands upon the resources of the trade unions have always been moderate, and the salaries paid have been modest. ² when the federation erected a new building for its headquarters in washington a few years ago, it symbolized in its architecture and equipment this modest yet adequate and substantial financial policy. american labor unions have not yet achieved the opulence, ambitions, and splendors of the guilds of the middle ages and do not yet direct their activities from splendid guild halls. ² before the annual income of the federation was less than $ , ; in it reached the $ , mark; and since it has exceeded $ , . in the third place, gompers has always insisted upon the democratic methods of debate and referendum in reaching important decisions. however arbitrary and intolerant his impulses may have been, and however dogmatic and narrow his conclusions in regard to the relation of labor to society and towards the employer (and his dutch inheritance gives him great obstinacy), he has astutely refrained from too obviously bossing his own organization. with this sagacity of leadership gompers has combined a fearlessness that sometimes verges on brazenness. he has never hesitated to enter a contest when it seemed prudent to him to do so. he crossed swords with theodore roosevelt on more than one occasion and with president eliot of harvard in a historic newspaper controversy over trade union exclusiveness. he has not been daunted by conventions, commissions, courts, congresses, or public opinion. during the long term of his federation presidency, which is unparalleled in labor history and alone is conclusive evidence of his executive skill, scarcely a year has passed without some dramatic incident to cast the searchlight of publicity upon him--a court decision, a congressional inquiry, a grand jury inquisition, a great strike, a nation-wide boycott, a debate with noted public men, a political maneuver, or a foreign pilgrimage. whenever a constituent union in the federation has been the object of attack, he has jumped into the fray and has rarely emerged humiliated from the encounter. this is the more surprising when one recalls that he possesses the limitations of the zealot and the dogmatism of the partisan. one of the most important functions of gompers has been that of national lobbyist for the federation. he was one of the earliest champions of the eight-hour day and the saturday half-holiday. he has energetically espoused federal child labor legislation, the restriction of immigration, alien contract labor laws, and employers' liability laws. he advocated the creation of a federal department of labor which has recently developed into a cabinet secretariat. his legal bête noire, however, was the sherman anti-trust law as applied to labor unions. for many years he fought vehemently for an amending act exempting the laboring class from the rigors of that famous statute. president roosevelt with characteristic candor told a delegation of federation officials who called on him to enlist his sympathy in their attempt, that he would enforce the law impartially against lawbreakers, rich and poor alike. roosevelt recommended to congress the passage of an amendment exempting "combinations existing for and engaged in the promotion of innocent and proper purposes." an exempting bill was passed by congress but was vetoed by president taft on the ground that it was class legislation. finally, during president wilson's administration, the federation accomplished its purpose, first indirectly by a rider on an appropriation bill, then directly by the clayton act, which specifically declared labor combinations, instituted for the "purpose of mutual help and . . . not conducted for profit," not to be in restraint of trade. both measures were signed by the president. encouraged by their success, the federation leaders have moved with a renewed energy against the other legal citadel of their antagonists, the use of the injunction in strike cases. gompers has thus been the political watchman of the labor interests. nothing pertaining, even remotely, to labor conditions escapes the vigilance of his washington office. during president wilson's administration, gompers's influence achieved a power second to none in the political field, owing partly to the political power of the labor vote which he ingeniously marshalled, partly to the natural inclination of the dominant political party, and partly to the strategic position of labor in the war industries. the great war put an unprecedented strain upon the american federation of labor. in every center of industry laborers of foreign birth early showed their racial sympathies, and under the stimuli of the intriguing german and austrian ambassadors sinister plots for crippling munitions plants and the shipping industries were hatched everywhere. moreover, workingmen became restive under the burden of increasing prices, and strikes for higher wages occurred almost daily. at the beginning of the war, the officers of the federation maintained a calm and neutral attitude which increased in vigilance as the strain upon american patience and credulity increased. as soon as the united states declared war, the whole energies of the officials of the federation were cast into the national cause. in , under the leadership of gompers, and as a practical antidote to the i. w. w. and the foreign labor and pacifist organization known as the people's council, there was organized the american alliance for labor and democracy in order "to americanize the labor movement." its campaign at once became nation wide. enthusiastic meetings were held in the great manufacturing centers, stimulated to enthusiasm by the incisive eloquence of gompers. at the annual convention of the federation held in buffalo in november, , full endorsement was given to the alliance by a vote of , to . in its formal statement the alliance declared: "it is our purpose to try, by educational methods, to bring about a more american spirit in the labor movement, so that what is now the clear expression of the vast majority may become the conviction of all. where we find ignorance, we shall educate. where we find something worse, we shall have to deal as the situation demands. but we are going to leave no stone unturned to put a stop to anti-american activities among workers." and in this patriotic effort the alliance was successful. this was the first great step taken by gompers and the federation. the second was equally important. with characteristic energy the organization put forward a programme for the readjustment of labor to war conditions. "this is labor's war" declared the manifesto issued by the federation. "it must be won by labor, and every stage in the fighting and the final victory must be made to count for humanity." these aims were embodied in constructive suggestions adopted by the council of national defense appointed by president wilson. this programme was in a large measure the work of gompers, who was a member of the council. the following outline shows the comprehensive nature of the view which the laborer took of the relation between task and the war. the plan embraced: . means for furnishing an adequate supply of labor to war industries. this included: (a) a system of labor exchanges. (b) the training of workers. (c) agencies for determining priorities in labor demands. (d) agencies for the dilution of skilled labor. . machinery for adjusting disputes between capital and labor, without stoppage of work. . machinery for safeguarding conditions of labor, including industrial hygiene, safety appliances, etc. . machinery for safeguarding conditions of living, including housing, etc. . machinery for gathering data necessary for effective executive action. . machinery for developing sound public sentiment and an exchange of information between the various departments of labor administration, the numerous industrial plants, and the public, so as to facilitate the carrying out of a national labor programme. having thus first laid the foundations of a national labor policy and having, in the second place, developed an effective means of americanizing, as far as possible, the various labor groups, the federation took another step. as a third essential element in uniting labor to help to win the war, it turned its attention to the inter-allied solidarity of workingmen. in the late summer and autumn of , gompers headed an american labor mission to europe and visited england, belgium, france, and italy. his frequent public utterances in numerous cities received particular attention in the leading european newspapers and were eagerly read in the allied countries. the pacifist group of the british labour party did not relish his outspokenness on the necessity of completely defeating the teutons before peace overtures could be made. on the other hand, some of the ultraconservative papers misconstrued his sentiments on the terms which should be exacted from the enemy when victory was assured. this misunderstanding led to an acrid international newspaper controversy, to which gompers finally replied: "i uttered no sentence or word which by the wildest imagination could be interpreted as advocating the formula 'no annexations, and no indemnities.' on the contrary, i have declared, both in the united states and in conferences and public meetings while abroad, that the german forces must be driven back from the invaded territory before even peace terms could be discussed, that alsace-lorraine should be returned to france, that the 'irredente' should be returned to italy, and that the imperialistic militarist machine which has so outraged the conscience of the world must be made to feel the indignation and righteous wrath of all liberty and peace loving peoples." this mission had a deep effect in uniting the labor populations of the allied countries and especially in cheering the over-wrought workers of britain and france, and it succeeded in laying the foundation for a more lasting international labor solidarity. this considerable achievement was recognized when the peace conference at paris formed a commission on international labor legislation. gompers was selected as one of the american representatives and was chosen chairman. while the commission was busy with its tasks, an international labor conference was held at berne. gompers and his colleagues, however, refused to attend this conference. they gave as their reasons for this aloofness the facts that delegates from the central powers, with whom the united states was still at war, were in attendance; that the meeting was held "for the purpose of arranging socialist procedure of an international character"; and that the convention was irregularly called, for it had been announced as an inter-allied conference but had been surreptitiously converted into an international pacifist gathering, conniving with german and austrian socialists. probably the most far-reaching achievement of gompers is the by no means inconsiderable contribution he has made to that portion of the treaty of peace with germany relating to the international organization of labor. this is an entirely new departure in the history of labor, for it attempts to provide international machinery for stabilizing conditions of labor in the various signatory countries. on the ground that "the well-being, physical and moral, of the industrial wage-earners is of supreme international importance," the treaty lays down guiding principles to be followed by the various countries, subject to such changes as variations in climate, customs, and economic conditions dictate. these principles are as follows: labor shall not be regarded merely as a commodity or an article of commerce; employers and employees shall have the right of forming associations; a wage adequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living shall be paid; an eight-hour day shall be adopted; a weekly day of rest shall be allowed; child labor shall be abolished and provision shall be made for the education of youth; men and women shall receive equal pay for equal work; equitable treatment shall be accorded to all workers, including aliens resident in foreign lands; and an adequate system of inspection shall be provided in which women should take part. while these international adjustments were taking place, the american federation began to anticipate the problems of the inevitable national labor readjustment after the war. through a committee appointed for that purpose, it prepared an ample programme of reconstruction in which the basic features are the greater participation of labor in shaping its environment, both in the factory and in the community, the development of coöperative enterprise, public ownership or regulation of public utilities, strict supervision of corporations, restriction of immigration, and the development of public education. the programme ends by declaring that "the trade union movement is unalterably and emphatically opposed . . . to a large standing army." during the entire period of the war, both at home and abroad, gompers fought the pacifist and the socialist elements in the labor movement. at the same time he was ever vigilant in pushing forward the claims of trade unionism and was always beforehand in constructive suggestions. his life has spanned the period of great industrial expansion in america. he has had the satisfaction of seeing his federation grow under his leadership at first into a national and then into an international force. gompers is an orthodox trade unionist of the british school. bolshevism is to him a synonym for social ruin. he believes that capital and labor should coöperate but that capital should cease to be the predominant factor in the equation. in order to secure this balance he believes labor must unite and fight, and to this end he has devoted himself to the federation of american trade unions and to their battle. he has steadfastly refused political preferment and has declined many alluring offers to enter private business. in action he is an opportunist--a shrewd, calculating captain, whose knowledge of human frailties stands him in good stead, and whose personal acquaintance with hundreds of leaders of labor, of finance, and of politics, all over the country, has given him an unusual opportunity to use his influence for the advancement of the cause of labor in the turbulent field of economic warfare. the american federation of labor has been forced by the increasing complexity of modern industrial life to recede somewhat from its early trade union isolation. this broadening point of view is shown first in the recognition of the man of no trade, the unskilled worker. for years the skilled trades monopolized the federation and would not condescend to interest themselves in their humble brethren. the whole mechanism of the federation in the earlier period revolved around the organization of the skilled laborers. in england the great dockers' strike of and in america the lurid flare of the i. w. w. activities forced the labor aristocrat to abandon his pharisaic attitude and to take an interest in the welfare of the unskilled. the future will test the stability of the federation, for it is among the unskilled that radical and revolutionary movements find their first recruits. a further change in the internal policy of the federation is indicated by the present tendency towards amalgamating the various allied trades into one union. for instance, the united brotherhood of carpenters and the amalgamated wood workers' association, composed largely of furniture makers and machine wood workers, combined a few years ago and then proceeded to absorb the wooden box makers, and the wood workers in the shipbuilding industry. the general secretary of the new amalgamation said that the organization looked "forward with pleasurable anticipations to the day when it can truly be said that all men of the wood-working craft on this continent hold allegiance to the united brotherhood of carpenters and joiners of america." a similar unification has taken place in the lumbering industry. when the shingle weavers formed an international union some fifteen years ago, they limited the membership "to the men employed in skilled departments of the shingle trade." in the american federation of labor sanctioned a plan for including in one organization all the workers in the lumber industry, both skilled and unskilled. this is a far cry from the minute trade autocracy taught by the orthodox unionist thirty years ago. today the federation of labor is one of the most imposing organizations in the social system of america. it reaches the workers in every trade. every contributor to the physical necessities of our materialistic civilization has felt the far-reaching influence of confederated power. a sense of its strength pervades the federation. like a healthy, self-conscious giant, it stalks apace among our national organizations. through its cautious yet pronounced policy, through its seeking after definite results and excluding all economic vagaries, it bids fair to overcome the disputes that disturb it from within and the onslaughts of socialism and of bolshevism that threaten it from without. chapter vi the trade union the trade union ¹ forms the foundation upon which the whole edifice of the american federation of labor is built. like the federation, each particular trade union has a tripartite structure: there is first the national body called the union, the international, the general union, or the grand lodge; there is secondly the district division or council, which is merely a convenient general union in miniature; and finally there is the local individual union, usually called "the local." some unions, such as the united mine workers, have a fourth division or subdistrict, but this is not the general practice. ¹ the term "trade union" is used here in its popular sense, embracing labor, trade, and industrial unions, unless otherwise specified. the sovereign authority of a trade union is its general convention, a delegate body meeting at stated times. some unions meet annually, some biennially, some triennially, and a few determine by referendum when the convention is to meet. sometimes a long interval elapses: the granite cutters, for instance, held no convention between and , and the cigar-makers, after a convention in , did not meet for sixteen years. the initiative and referendum are, in some of the more compact unions, taking the place of the general convention, while the small executive council insures promptness of administrative action. the convention elects the general officers. of these the president is the most conspicuous, for he is the field marshal of the forces and fills a large place in the public eye when a great strike is called. it was in this capacity that john mitchell rose to sudden eminence during the historic anthracite strike in , and george w. perkins of the cigar-makers' union achieved his remarkable hold upon the laboring people. as the duties of the president of a union have increased, it has become the custom to elect numerous vice-presidents to relieve him. each of these has certain specific functions to perform, but all remain the president's aides. one, for instance, may be the financier, another the strike agent, another the organizer, another the agitator. with such a group of virtual specialists around a chieftain, a union has the immense advantage of centralized command and of highly organized leadership. the tendency, especially among the more conservative unions, is to reëlect these officers year after year. the president of the carpenters' union held his office for twenty years, and john mitchell served the miners as president ten years. under the immediate supervision of the president, an executive board composed of all the officers guides the destinies of the union. when this board is not occupied with the relations of the men to their employers, it gives its judicial consideration to the more delicate and more difficult questions of inter-union comity and of local differences. the local union is the oldest labor organization, and a few existing locals can trace their origin as far back as the decade preceding the civil war. many more antedate the organization of the federation. not a few of these almost historic local unions have refused to surrender their complete independence by affiliating with those of recent origin, but they have remained merely isolated independent locals with very little general influence. the vast majority of local unions are members of the national trades union and of the federation. the local union is the place where the laborer comes into direct personal contact with this powerful entity that has become such a factor in his daily life. here he can satisfy that longing for the recognition of his point of view denied him in the great factory and here he can meet men of similar condition, on terms of equality, to discuss freely and without fear the topics that interest him most. there is an immense psychic potency in this intimate association of fellow workers, especially in some of the older unions which have accumulated a tradition. it is in the local union that the real life of the labor organization must be nourished, and the statesmanship of the national leaders is directed to maintaining the greatest degree of local autonomy consistent with the interests of national homogeneity. the individual laborer thus finds himself a member of a group of his fellows with whom he is personally acquainted, who elect their own officers, to a large measure fix their own dues, transact their own routine business, discipline their own members, and whenever possible make their own terms of employment with their employers. the local unions are obliged to pay their tithe into the greater treasury, to make stated reports, to appoint a certain roster of committees, and in certain small matters to conform to the requirements of the national union. on the whole, however, they are independent little democracies confederated, with others of their kind, by means of district and national organizations. the unions representing the different trades vary in structure and spirit. there is an immense difference between the temper of the tumultuous structural iron workers and the contemplative cigar-makers, who often hire one of their number to read to them while engaged in their work, the favorite authors being in many instances ruskin and carlyle. some unions are more successful than others in collective bargaining. martin fox, the able leader of the iron moulders, signed one of the first trade agreements in america and fixed the tradition for his union; and the shoemakers, as well as most of the older unions are fairly well accustomed to collective bargaining. in matters of discipline, too, the unions vary. printers and certain of the more skilled trades find it easier to enforce their regulations than do the longshoremen and unions composed of casual foreign laborers. in size also the unions of the different trades vary. in three had a membership of over , each. of these the united mine workers reached a total of , , probably the largest trades union in the world. the majority of the unions have a membership between and , , the average for the entire number being ; but the membership fluctuates from year to year, according to the conditions of labor, and is usually larger in seasons of contest. fluctuation in membership is most evident in the newer unions and in the unskilled trades. the various unions differ also in resources. in some, especially those composed largely of foreigners, the treasury is chronically empty; yet at the other extreme the mine workers distributed $ , , in strike benefits in and had $ , left when the board of arbitration sent the workers back into the mines. the efforts of the unions to adjust themselves to the quickly changing conditions of modern industry are not always successful. old trade lines are instantly shifting, creating the most perplexing problem of inter-union amity. over two score jurisdictional controversies appear for settlement at each annual convention of the american federation. the association of longshoremen and the seamen's union, for example, both claim jurisdiction over employees in marine warehouses. the cigar-makers and the stogie-makers have also long been at swords' points. who shall have control over the coopers who work in breweries--the brewery workers or the coopers' union? who shall adjust the machinery in elevators--the machinists or elevator constructors? is the operator of a linotype machine a typesetter? so plasterers and carpenters, blacksmiths and structural iron workers, printing pressmen and plate engravers, hod carriers and cement workers, are at loggerheads; the electrification of a railway creates a jurisdictional problem between the electrical railway employees and the locomotive engineers; and the marble workers and the plasterers quarrel as to the setting of imitation marble. these quarrels regarding the claims of rival unions reveal the weakness of the federation as an arbitral body. there is no centralized authority to impose a standard or principle which could lead to the settlement of such disputes. trade jealousy has overcome the suggestions of the peacemakers that either the nature of the tools used, or the nature of the operation, or the character of the establishment be taken as the basis of settlement. when the federation itself fails as a peacemaker, it cannot be expected that locals will escape these controversies. there are many examples, often ludicrous, of petty jealousies and trade rivalries. the man who tried to build a brick house, employing union bricklayers to lay the brick and union painters to paint the brick walls, found to his loss that such painting was considered a bricklayer's job by the bricklayers' union, who charged a higher wage than the painters would have done. it would have relieved him to have the two unions amalgamate. and this in general has become a real way out of the difficulty. for instance, a dispute between the steam and hot water fitters and the plumbers was settled by an amalgamation called the united association of journeymen plumbers, gas fitters, steam fitters, and steam fitters' helpers, which is now affiliated with the federation. but the international association of steam, hot water, and power pipe fitters and helpers is not affiliated, and inter-union war results. the older unions, however, have a stabilizing influence upon the newer, and a genuine conservatism such as characterizes the british unions is becoming more apparent as age solidifies custom and lends respect to by-laws and constitutions. but even time cannot obviate the seismic effects of new inventions, and shifts in jurisdictional matters are always imminent. the dominant policy of the trade union is to keep its feet on the earth, no matter where its head may be, to take one step at a time, and not to trouble about the future of society. this purpose, which has from the first been the prompter of union activity, was clearly enunciated in the testimony of adolph strasser, a converted socialist, one of the leading trade unionists, and president of the cigar-makers' union, before a senate committee in : chairman: you are seeking to improve home matters first? witness: yes sir, i look first to the trade i represent: i look first to cigars, to the interests of men, who employ me to represent their interests. chairman: i was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends. witness: we have no ultimate ends. we are going on from day to day. we are fighting only for immediate objects--objects that can be realized in a few years. chairman: you want something better to eat and to wear, and better houses to live in? witness: yes, we want to dress better and to live better, and become better citizens generally. chairman: i see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theorizer. i do not look upon you in that light at all. witness: well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and i have to represent the organization here. we are all practical men. this remains substantially the trade union platform today. trade unionists all aim to be "practical men." the trade union has been the training school for the labor leader, that comparatively new and increasingly important personage who is a product of modern industrial society. possessed of natural aptitudes, he usually passes by a process of logical evolution, through the important committees and offices of his local into the wider sphere of the national union, where as president or secretary, he assumes the leadership of his group. circumstances and conditions impose a heavy burden upon him, and his tasks call for a variety of gifts. because some particular leader lacked tact or a sense of justice or some similar quality, many a labor maneuver has failed, and many a labor organization has suffered in the public esteem. no other class relies so much upon wise leadership as does the laboring class. the average wage-earner is without experience in confronting a new situation or trained and superior minds. from his tasks he has learned only the routine of his craft. when he is faced with the necessity of prompt action, he is therefore obliged to depend upon his chosen captains for results. in america these leaders have risen from the rank and file of labor. their education is limited. the great majority have only a primary schooling. many have supplemented this meager stock of learning by rather wide but desultory reading and by keen observation. a few have read law, and some have attended night schools. but all have graduated from the university of life. many of them have passed through the bitterest poverty, and all have been raised among toilers and from infancy have learned to sympathize with the toiler's point of view. ¹ they are therefore by training and origin distinctly leaders of a class, with the outlook upon life, the prejudices, the limitations, and the fervent hopes of that class. ¹ a well-known labor leader once said to the writer: "no matter how much you go around among laboring people, you will never really understand us unless you were brought up among us. there is a real gulf between your way of looking on life and ours. you can be only an investigator or an intellectual sympathizer with my people. but you cannot really understand our viewpoint." whatever of misconception there may be in this attitude, it nevertheless marks the actual temper of the average wage-earner, in spite of the fact that in america many employers have risen from the ranks of labor. in a very real sense the american labor leader is the counterpart of the american business man--intensively trained, averse to vagaries, knowing thoroughly one thing and only one thing, and caring very little for anything else. this comparative restriction of outlook marks a sharp distinction between american and british labor leaders. in britain such leadership is a distinct career for which a young man prepares himself. he is usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity. a few have come into the field from journalism. as a result, the british labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the american. for example, britain has produced ramsey macdonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace: john burns, who quotes shakespeare or recites history with wonderful fluency: keir hardie, a miner from the ranks, who was possessed of a charming poetic fancy: philip snowden, who displays the spiritual qualities of a seer; and john henderson, who combines philosophical power with skill in dialectics. on the other hand, the rank and file of american labor is more intelligent and alert than that of british labor, and the american labor leader possesses a greater capacity for intensive growth and is perhaps a better specialist at rough and tumble fighting and bargaining than his british colleague. ¹ ¹ the writer recalls spending a day in one of the midland manufacturing towns with the secretary of a local coöperative society, a man who was steeped in bergson's philosophy and talked on local botany and geology as fluently as on local labor conditions. it would be difficult to duplicate this experience in america. in a very real sense every trade union is typified by some aggressive personality. the granite cutters' national union was brought into active being in largely through the instrumentality of james duncan, a rugged fighter who, having federated the locals, set out to establish an eight-hour day through collective bargaining and to settle disputes by arbitration. he succeeded in forming a well-disciplined force out of the members of his craft, and even the employers did not escape the touch of his rod. the glassblowers' union was saved from disruption by dennis hayes, who, as president of the national union, reorganized the entire force in the years - , unionized a dozen of the largest glass producing plants in the united states and succeeded in raising the wages fifteen per cent. he introduced methods of arbitration and collective agreements and established a successful system of insurance. james o'connell, the president of the international association of machinists, led his organization safely through the panic of , reorganized it upon a broader basis, and introduced sick benefits. in after a long and wearisome dickering with the national metal trades association, a shorter day was agreed upon, but, as the employers would not agree to a ten-hour wage for a nine-hour day, o'connell led his men out on a general strike and won. thomas kidd, secretary of the wood-workers' international union, was largely responsible for the agreement made with the manufacturers in for the establishment of a minimum wage of fifteen cents an hour for a ten-hour day, a considerable advance over the average wage paid up to that time. kidd was the object of severe attacks in various localities, and in oshkosh, wisconsin, where labor riots took place for the enforcement of the union demands, he was arrested for conspiracy but acquitted by the trial jury. when the amalgamated association of iron and steel workers lost their strike at homestead, pennsylvania, in , the union was thought to be dead. it was quietly regalvanized into activity, however, by theodore schaffer, who has displayed adroitness in managing its affairs in the face of tremendous opposition from the great steel manufacturers who refuse to permit their shops to be unionized. the international typographical union, composed of an unusually intelligent body of men, owes its singular success in collective contracting largely to james m. lynch, its national president. the great newspapers did not give in to the demands of the union without a series of struggles in which lynch manipulated his forces with skill and tact. today this is one of the most powerful unions in the country. entirely different was the material out of which d. j. keefe formed his union of longshoremen, marine and transport workers. his was a mass of unskilled workers, composed of many nationalities accustomed to rough conditions, and not easily led. keefe, as president of their international union, has had more difficulty in restraining his men and in teaching them the obligations of a contract than any other leader. at least on one occasion he employed non-union men to carry out the agreement which his recalcitrant following had made and broken. the evolution of an american labor leader is shown at its best in the career of john mitchell, easily the most influential trade unionist of this generation. he was born on february , , on an illinois farm, but at two years of age he lost his mother and at four his father. with other lads of his neighborhood he shared the meager privileges of the school terms that did not interfere with farm work. at thirteen he was in the coal mines in braidwood, illinois, and at sixteen he was the outer doorkeeper in the local lodge of the knights of labor. eager to see the world, he now began a period of wandering, working his way from state to state. so he traversed the far west and the southwest, alert in observing social conditions and coming in contact with many types of men. these wanderings stood him in lieu of an academic course, and when he returned to the coal fields of illinois he was ready to settle down. from his irish parentage he inherited a genial personality and a gift of speech. these traits, combined with his continual reading on economic and sociological subjects, soon lifted him into local leadership. he became president of the village school board and of the local lodge of the knights of labor. he joined the united mine workers of america upon its organization in . he rose rapidly in its ranks, was a delegate to the district and sub-district conventions, secretary-treasurer of the illinois district, chairman of the illinois legislative committee, member of the executive board, and national organizer. in january, , he was elected national vice-president, and in the following autumn, upon the resignation of the president, he became acting president. the national convention in chose him as president, a position which he held for ten years. he has served as one of the vice-presidents of the american federation of labor since , was for some years chairman of the trade agreement department of the national civic federation and has held the position of chairman of the new york state industrial commission. when he rose to the leadership of the united mine workers, this union had only , members, confined almost exclusively to the bituminous regions of the west. ¹ within the decade of his presidency he brought virtually all the miners of the united states under his leadership. wherever his union went, there followed sooner or later the eight-hour day, raises in wages of from thirteen to twenty-five per cent, periodical joint conventions with the operators for settling wage scales and other points in dispute, and a spirit of prosperity that theretofore was unknown among the miners. ¹ less than , out of , anthracite miners were members of the union. in unionizing the anthracite miners, mitchell had his historic fight with the group of powerful corporations that owned the mines and the railways which fed them. this great strike, one of the most significant in our history, attracted universal attention because of the issues involved, because a coal shortage threatened many eastern cities, and because of the direct intervention of president roosevelt. the central figure of this gigantic struggle was the miners' young leader, barely thirty years old, with the features of a scholar and the demeanor of an ascetic, marshaling his forces with the strategic skill of a veteran general. at the beginning of the strike mitchell, as president of the union, announced that the miners were eager to submit all their grievances to an impartial arbitral tribunal and to abide by its decisions. the ruthless and prompt refusal of the mine owners to consider this proposal reacted powerfully in the strikers' favor among the public. as the long weeks of the struggle wore on, increasing daily in bitterness, multiplying the apprehension of the strikers and the restiveness of the coal consumers, mitchell bore the increasing strain with his customary calmness and self-control. after the parties had been deadlocked for many weeks, president roosevelt called the mine owners and the union leaders to a conference in the white house. of mitchell's bearing, the president afterwards remarked: "there was only one man in the room who behaved like a gentleman, and that man was not i." the board of arbitration eventually laid the blame on both sides but gave the miners the bulk of their demands. the public regarded the victory as a mitchell victory, and the unions adored the leader who had won their first strike in a quarter of a century, and who had won universal confidence by his ability and demeanor in the midst of the most harassing tensions of a class war. ¹ ¹ mitchell was cross-examined for three days when he was testifying before the anthracite coal strike commission. every weapon which craft, prejudice, and skill could marshal against him failed to rule his temper or to lead him into damaging admissions or contradictions. john mitchell's powerful hold upon public opinion today is not alone due to his superior intelligence, his self-possession, his business skill, nor his irish gift of human accommodation, but to the greater facts that he was always aware of the grave responsibilities of leadership, that he realized the stern obligation of a business contract, and that he always followed the trade union policy of asking only for that which was attainable. soon after the anthracite strike he wrote: i am opposed to strikes as i am opposed to war. as yet, however, the world with all its progress has not made war impossible: neither, i fear, considering the nature of men and their institutions, will the strike entirely disappear for years to come. . . . this strike has taught both capital and labor that they owe certain obligations to society and that their obligations must be discharged in good faith. if both are fair and conciliatory, if both recognize the moral restraint of the state of society by which they are surrounded, there need be few strikes. they can, and it is better that they should, settle their differences between themselves. . . . since labor organizations are here, and here to stay, the managers of employing corporations must choose what they are to do with them. they may have the union as a present, active, and unrecognized force, possessing influence for good or evil, but without direct responsibility; or they may deal with it, give it responsibility as well as power, define and regulate that power, and make the union an auxiliary in the promotion of stability and discipline and the amicable adjustment of all local disputes. chapter vii the railway brotherhoods the solidarity and statesmanship of the trade unions reached perfection in the railway "brotherhoods." of these the brotherhood of locomotive engineers ¹ is the oldest and most powerful. it grew out of the union of several early associations; one of these was the national protective association formed after the great baltimore and ohio strike in ; another was the brotherhood of the footboard, organized in detroit after the bitter strike on the michigan central in . though born thus of industrial strife, this railroad union has nevertheless developed a poise and a conservatism which have been its greatest assets in the numerous controversies engaging its energies. no other union has had a more continuous and hardheaded leadership, and no other has won more universal respect both from the public and from the employer. ¹ up to this time the brotherhoods have not affiliated with the knights of labor nor with the american federation of labor. after the passage of the eight-hour law by congress in , definite steps were taken towards affiliating the railway brotherhoods with the federation, and at its annual convention in the federation voted to grant them a charter. this high position is largely due, no doubt, to the fact that the brotherhood of locomotive engineers is composed of a very select and intelligent class of men. every engineer must first serve an apprenticeship as a fireman, which usually lasts from four to twelve years. very few are advanced to the rank of engineer in less than four years. the firemen themselves are selected men who must pass several physical examinations and then submit to the test of as arduous an apprenticeship as modern industrialism affords. in the course of an eight- to twelve-hour run firemen must shovel from fifteen to twenty-five tons of coal into the blazing fire box of a locomotive. in winter they are constantly subjected to hot blasts from the furnace and freezing drafts from the wind. records show that out of every hundred who begin as firemen only seventeen become engineers and of these only six ever become passenger engineers. the mere strain on the eyes caused by looking into the coal blaze eliminates per cent. those who eventually become engineers are therefore a select group as far as physique is concerned. the constant dangers accompanying their daily work require railroad engineers to be no less dependable from the moral point of view. the history of railroading is as replete with heroism as is the story of any war. a coward cannot long survive at the throttle. the process of natural selection which the daily labor of an engineer involves the brotherhood has supplemented by most rigid moral tests. the character of every applicant for membership is thoroughly scrutinized and must be vouched for by three members. he must demonstrate his skill and prove his character by a year's probation before his application is finally voted upon. once within the fold, the rules governing his conduct are inexorable. if he shuns his financial obligations or is guilty of a moral lapse, he is summarily expelled. in , thirty-six members were expelled for "unbecoming conduct." drunkards are particularly dangerous in railroading. when the order was only five years old and still struggling for its life, it nevertheless expelled members for drunkenness. in proven cases of this sort the railway authorities are notified, the offending engineer is dismissed from the service, and the shame of these culprits is published to the world in the locomotive engineers' journal, which reaches every member of the order. there is probably no other club or professional organization so exacting in its demands that its members be self-respecting, faithful, law-abiding, and capable; and surely no other is so summary and far-reaching in its punishments. today ninety per cent of all the locomotive engineers in the united states and canada belong to this union. but the brotherhood early learned the lesson of exclusion. in after very annoying experiences with firemen and other railway employees on the pittsburgh, fort wayne and chicago railroad, it amended its constitution and excluded firemen and machinists from the order. this exclusive policy, however, is based upon the stern requirements of professional excellence and is not displayed towards engineers who are not members of the brotherhood. towards them there is displayed the greatest toleration and none of the narrow spirit of the "closed shop." the nonunion engineer is not only tolerated but is even on occasion made the beneficiary of the activities of the union. he shares, for example, in the rise of wages and readjustment of runs. there are even cases on record where the railroad unions have taken up a specific grievance between a nonunion man and his employer and have attempted a readjustment. from the inception of the brotherhood, the policy of the order towards the employing railroad company has been one of business and not of sentiment. the brotherhood has held that the relation between the employer and employee concerning wages, hours, conditions of labor, and settlement of difficulties should be on the basis of a written contract; that the engineer as an individual was at a manifest disadvantage in making such a contract with a railway company; that he therefore had a right to join with his fellow engineers in pressing his demands and therefore had the right to a collective contract. though for over a decade the railways fought stubbornly against this policy, in the end every important railroad of this country and canada gave way. it is doubtful, indeed, if any of them would today be willing to go back to the old method of individual bargaining, for the brotherhood has insisted upon the inviolability of a contract once entered into. it has consistently held that "a bargain is a bargain, even if it is a poor bargain." members who violate an agreement are expelled, and any local lodge which is guilty of such an offense has its charter revoked. ¹ ¹ in in new york city members were expelled and their charter was revoked for violation of their contract of employment by taking part in a sympathetic strike of the subway and elevated roads. once the practice of collective contract was fixed, it naturally followed that some mechanism for adjusting differences would be devised. the brotherhood and the various roads now maintain a general board of adjustment for each railway system. the brotherhood is strict in insisting that the action of this board is binding on all its members. this method of bargaining and of settling disputes has been so successful that since the brotherhood has not engaged in an important strike. there have been minor disturbances, it is true, and several nation-wide threats, but no serious strikes inaugurated by the engineers. this great achievement of the brotherhood could not have been possible without keen ability in the leaders and splendid solidarity among the men. the individual is carefully looked after by the brotherhood. the locomotive engineers' mutual life and accident insurance association is an integral part of the brotherhood, though it maintains a separate legal existence in order to comply with the statutory requirements of many states. ¹ every member must carry an insurance policy in this association for not less than $ , though he cannot take more than $ . the policy is carried by the order if the engineer becomes sick or is otherwise disabled, but if he fails to pay assessments when he is in full health, he gives grounds for expulsion. there is a pension roll of three hundred disabled engineers, each of whom receives $ a month; and the four railroad brotherhoods together maintain a home for disabled railroad men at highland park, illinois. ¹ the following figures show the status of the insurance association in . the total amount of life insurance in force was $ , , . . the total amount of claims paid from to was $ , , . . the claims paid in amounted to $ , , . . the total amount of indemnity insurance in force in was $ , , . . the total claims paid up to were $ , , . ; and during , $ , . . the technical side of engine driving is emphasized by the locomotive engineers' journal, which goes to every member, and in discussions in the stated meetings of the brotherhood. intellectual and social interests are maintained also by lecture courses, study clubs, and women's auxiliaries. attendance upon the lodge meetings has been made compulsory with the intention of insuring the order from falling prey to a designing minority--a condition which has proved the cause of the downfall of more than one labor union. the brotherhood of engineers is virtually a large and prosperous business concern. its management has been enterprising and provident; its treasury is full; its insurance policies aggregate many millions; it owns a modern skyscraper in cleveland which cost $ , , and which yields a substantial revenue besides housing the brotherhood offices. the engineers have, indeed, succeeded in forming a real brotherhood--a "feudal" brotherhood an opposing lawyer once called them--reëstablishing the medieval guild-paternalism so that each member is responsible for every other and all are responsible for each. they therefore merge themselves through self-discipline into a powerful unity for enforcing their demands and fulfilling their obligations. the supreme authority of the brotherhood is the convention, which is composed of delegates from the local subdivisions. in the interim between conventions, the authorized leader of the organization is the grand chief engineer, whose decrees are final unless reversed by the convention. this authority places a heavy responsibility upon him, but the brotherhood has been singularly fortunate in its choice of chiefs. since there have been only two. the first of these was p. m. arthur, a sturdy scot, born in and brought to america in boyhood. he learned the blacksmith and machinist trades but soon took to railroading, in which he rose rapidly from the humblest place to the position of engineer on the new york central lines. he became one of the charter members of the brotherhood in and was active in its affairs from the first. in the union became involved in a bitter dispute with the pennsylvania railroad, and arthur, whose prompt and energetic action had already designated him as the natural leader of the brotherhood, was elected to the chieftainship. for thirty years he maintained his prestige and became a national figure in the labor world. he died suddenly at winnipeg in while speaking at the dinner which closed the general convention of the brotherhood. when p. m. arthur joined the engineers' union, the condition of locomotive engineers was unsatisfactory. wages were unstable; working conditions were hard and, in the freight service, intolerable. for the first decade of the existence of the brotherhood, strike after strike took place in the effort to establish the right of organizing and the principle of the collective contract. arthur became head of the order at the beginning of the period of great financial depression which followed the first civil war boom and which for six years threatened wages in all trades. but arthur succeeded, by shrewd and careful bargaining, in keeping the pay of engineers from slipping down and in some instances he even advanced them. gradually strikes became more and more infrequent; and the railways learned to rely upon his integrity, and the engineers to respect his skill as a negotiator. he proved to the first that he was not a labor agitator and to the others that he was not a visionary. year by year, arthur accumulated prestige and power for his union by practical methods and by being content with a step at a time. this success, however, cost him the enmity of virtually all the other trades unionists. to them the men of his order were aristocrats, and he was lord over the aristocrats. he is said to have "had rare skill in formulating reasonable demands, and by consistently putting moderate demands strongly instead of immoderate demands weakly he kept the good will of railroad managers, while steadily obtaining better terms for his men." in this practice, he could not succeed without the solid good will of the members of the brotherhood; and this good will was possible only in an order which insisted upon that high standard of personal skill and integrity essential to a first-class engineer. arthur possessed a genial, fatherly personality. his scotch shrewdness was seen in his own real estate investments, which formed the foundation of an independent fortune. he lived in an imposing stone mansion in cleveland; he was a director in a leading bank; and he identified himself with the public affairs of the city. when chief arthur died, the assistant grand chief engineer, a. b. youngson, who would otherwise have assumed the leadership for the unexpired term, was mortally ill and recommended the advisory board to telegraph warren s. stone an offer of the chieftainship. thus events brought to the fore a man of marked executive talent who had hitherto been unknown but who was to play a tremendous rôle in later labor politics. stone was little known east of the mississippi. he had spent most of his life on the rock island system, had visited the east only once, and had attended but one meeting of the general convention. in the west, however, he had a wide reputation for sound sense, and, as chairman of the general committee of adjustment of the rock island system, he had made a deep impression on his union and his employers. born in ainsworth, iowa, in , stone had received a high school education and had begun his railroading career as fireman on the rock island when he was nineteen years old. at twenty-four he became an engineer. in this capacity he spent the following nineteen years on the rock island road and then accepted the chieftainship of the brotherhood. stone followed the general policy of his predecessor, and brought to his tasks the energy of youth and the optimism of the west. when he assumed the leadership, the cost of living was rising rapidly and he addressed himself to the adjustment of wages. he divided the country into three sections in which conditions were similar. he began in the western section, as he was most familiar with that field, and asked all the general managers of that section to meet the brotherhood for a wage conference. the roads did not accept his invitation until it was reënforced by the threat of a western strike. the conference was a memorable one. for nearly three weeks the grand officers of the brotherhood wrangled and wrought with the managers of the western roads, who yielded ground slowly, a few pennies' increase at a time, until a satisfactory wage scale was reached. similarly the southern section was conquered by the inexorable hard sense and perseverance of this new chieftain. the dispute with the fifty-two leading roads in the so-called eastern district, east of the mississippi and north of the norfolk and western railroad, came to a head in . the engineers demanded that their wages should be "standardized" on a basis that one hundred miles or less, or ten hours or less, constitute a day's work; that is, the inequalities among the different roads should be leveled and similar service on the various roads be similarly rewarded. they also asked that their wages be made equal to the wages on the western roads and presented several minor demands. all the roads concerned flatly refused to grant the demand for a standardized and increased wage, on the ground that it would involve an increased expenditure of $ , , a year. this amount could be made up only by increased rates, which the interstate commerce commission must sanction, or by decreased dividends, which would bring a real hardship to thousands of stockholders. the unions were fully prepared for a strike which would paralyze the essential traffic supplying approximately , , people. through the agency of judge knapp of the united states commerce court and dr. neill of the united states department of labor, and under the authority of the erdman act, there was appointed a board of arbitration composed of men whose distinction commanded national attention. p. h. morrissey, a former chief of the conductors' and trainmen's union, was named by the engineers. president daniel willard of the baltimore and ohio railroad, known for his fair treatment of his employees, was chosen by the roads. the chief justice of the united states supreme court, the commissioner of labor, and the presiding judge of the united states commerce court designated the following members of the tribunal: oscar s. straus, former secretary of commerce and labor, chairman; albert shaw, editor of the review of reviews; otto m. eidlitz, former president of the building trades association; charles r. van hise, president of the university of wisconsin; and frederick n. judson, of the st. louis bar. after five months of hearing testimony and deliberation, this distinguished board brought in a report that marked, it was hoped, a new epoch in railway labor disputes, for it recognized the rights of the public, the great third party to such disputes. it granted the principle of standardization and minimum wage asked for by the engineers, but it allowed an increase in pay which was less by one-half than that demanded. in order to prevent similar discord in the future, the board recommended the establishment of federal and state wage commissions with functions pertaining to wage disputes analogous to those of the public service commissions in regard to rates and capitalization. the report stated that, "while the railway employees feel that they cannot surrender their right to strike, if there were a wage commission which would secure them just wages the necessity would no longer exist for the exercise of their power. it is believed that, in the last analysis, the only solution--unless we are to rely solely upon the restraining power of public opinion--is to qualify the principle of free contract in the railroad service." ¹ ¹ the board recognized the great obstacles in the way of such a solution but went on to say: "the suggestion, however, grows out of a profound conviction that the food and clothing of our people, the industries and the general welfare of our nation, cannot be permitted to depend upon the policies and dictates of any particular group of men, whether employers or employees." and this conviction has grown apace with the years until it stands today as the most potent check to aggression by either trade unions or capital. while yielding to the wage findings of the board, p. h. morrissey vigorously dissented from the principle of the supremacy of public interest in these matters. he made clear his position in an able minority report: "i wish to emphasize my dissent from that recommendation of the board which in its effect virtually means compulsory arbitration for the railroads and their employees. regardless of any probable constitutional prohibition which might operate against its being adopted, it is wholly impracticable. the progress towards the settlement of disputes between the railways and their employees without recourse to industrial warfare has been marked. there is nothing under present conditions to prevent its continuance. we will never be perfect, but even so, it will be immeasurably better than it will be under conditions such as the board proposes." the significance of these words was brought out four years later when the united railway brotherhoods made their famous coup in congress. for the time being, however, the public with its usual self-assurance thought the railway employee question was solved, though the findings were for one year only. ¹ ¹ the award dated back to may , , and was valid only one year from that date. daniel willard speaking for the railroads, said: "my acceptance of the award as a whole does not signify my approval of all the findings in detail. it is intended, however, to indicate clearly that, although the award is not such as the railroads had hoped for, nor is it such as they felt would be justified by a full consideration of all the facts, yet having decided to submit this case to arbitration and having been given ample opportunity to present the facts and arguments in support of their position, they now accept without question the conclusion which was reached by the board appointed to pass upon the matter at issue." a comparison of these statements shows how the balance of power had shifted, since the days when railway policies reigned supreme, from the corporation to the union. the change was amply demonstrated by the next grand entrance of the railway brotherhoods upon the public stage. after his victory in the western territory, chief stone remarked: "most labor troubles are the result of one of two things, misrepresentation or misunderstanding. unfortunately, negotiations are sometimes entrusted to men who were never intended by nature for this mission, since they cannot discuss a question without losing their temper. . . . it may be laid down as a fundamental principle without which no labor organization can hope to exist, that it must carry out its contracts. no employer can be expected to live up to a contract that is not regarded binding by the union." the other railway brotherhoods to a considerable degree follow the model set by the engineers. the order of railway conductors developed rapidly from the conductors' union which was organized by the conductors of the illinois central railroad at amboy, illinois, in the spring of . in the following july this union was extended to include all the lines in the state. in november of the same year a call to conductors on all the roads in the united states and the british provinces was issued to meet at columbus, ohio, in december, to organize a general brotherhood. ten years later the union adopted its present name. it has an ample insurance fund ¹ based upon the principle that policies are not matured but members arriving at the age of seventy years are relieved from further payments. about thirty members are thus annually retired. at cedar rapids, iowa, the national headquarters, the order publishes the railway conductor, a journal which aims not only at the solidarity of the membership but at increasing their practical efficiency. ¹ in the total amount of outstanding insurance was somewhat over $ , , . the conductors are a conservative and carefully selected group of men. each must pass through a long term of apprenticeship and must possess ability and personality. the order has been carefully and skillfully led and in recent years has had but few differences with the railways which have not been amicably settled. edgar e. clark was chosen president in and served until , when he became a member of the interstate commerce commission. he was born in , received a public school education, and studied for some time in an academy at lima, new york. at the age of seventeen, he began railroading and served as conductor on the northern pacific and other western lines. he held numerous subordinate positions in the brotherhood and in became its vice-president. he was appointed by president roosevelt as a member of the anthracite coal strike commission in and is generally recognized as one of the most judicial heads in the labor world. he was succeeded as president of the order by austin b. garretson, who was born in winterset, iowa, in . he began his railroad career at nineteen years of age, became a conductor on the burlington system, and had a varied experience on several western lines, including the mexican national and mexican central railways. his rise in the order was rapid and in he became vice-president. one of his intimate friends wrote that "in his capacity as vice-president and president of the order he has written more schedules and successfully negotiated more wage settlements, including the eight-hour day settlement in , under the method of collective bargaining than any other labor leader on the american continent." garretson has long served as a member of the executive committee of the national civic federation and in was appointed by president wilson a member of the federal commission on industrial relations. a man of great energy and force of character, he has recently assumed a leading place in labor union activities. in addition to the locomotive engineers and the conductors, the firemen also have their union. eleven firemen of the erie railroad organized a brotherhood at port jervis, new york, in december, , but it was a fraternal order rather than a trade union. in , the year of the great railway strike, it was joined by the international firemen's union, an organization without any fraternal or insurance features. in spite of this amalgamation, however, the growth of the brotherhood was very slow. indeed, so unsatisfactory was the condition of affairs that in the order took an unusual step. "so bitter was the continued opposition of railroad officials at this time," relates the chronicler of the brotherhood (in some sections of the country it resulted in the disbandment of the lodges and the depletion of membership) "that it was decided, in order to remove the cause of such opposition, to eliminate the protective feature of the organization. with a view to this end a resolution was adopted ignoring strikes." this is one of the few recorded retreats of militant trade unionism. the treasury of the brotherhood was so depleted that it was obliged to call upon local lodges for donations. by , however, the order had sufficiently recovered to assume again the functions of a labor union in addition to its fraternal and beneficiary obligations. the days of its greatest hardships were over, although the historic strike on the burlington lines that lasted virtually throughout the year and the pullman strike in wrought a severe strain upon its staying powers. in the enginemen were incorporated into the order, and thenceforth the membership grew rapidly. in a joint agreement was effected with the brotherhood of locomotive engineers whereby the two organizations could work together "on a labor union basis." today men operating electric engines or motor or gas cars on lines using electricity are eligible for membership, if they are otherwise qualified. this arrangement does not interfere with unions already established on interurban lines. the leadership of this order of firemen has been less continuous, though scarcely less conspicuous, than that of the other brotherhoods. before the grand secretary and treasurer was invested with greater authority than the grand master, and in this position eugene v. debs, who served from to , and frank w. arnold, who served from to , were potent in shaping the policies of the union. there have been seven grand masters and one president (the name now used to designate the chief officer) since . of these leaders frank p. sargent served from until , when he was appointed commissioner general of immigration by president roosevelt. since , william s. carter has been president of the brotherhood. born in texas in , he began railroading at nineteen years of age and served in turn as fireman, baggageman, and engineer. before his election to the editorship of the firemen's magazine, he held various minor offices in local lodges. since he has served the order successively as editor, grand secretary and treasurer, and president. to his position he has brought an intimate knowledge of the affairs of the union as well as a varied experience in practical railroading. upon the entrance of america into the great war, president wilson appointed him director of the division of labor of the united states railway administration. of the government and policy of the firemen's union president carter remarked: this brotherhood may be compared to a state in a republic of railway unions, maintaining almost complete autonomy in its own affairs yet uniting with other railway brotherhoods in matters of mutual concern and in common defense. it is true that these railway brotherhoods carry the principle of home rule to great lengths and have acknowledged no common head, and by this have invited the criticism from those who believe . . . that only in one "big" union can railway employees hope for improved working condition. . . . that in union there is strength, no one will deny, but in any confederation of forces there must be an exchange of individual rights for this collective power. there is a point in the combining of working people in labor unions where the loss of individual rights is not compensated by the increased power of the masses of workers. in the cautious working out of this principle, the firemen have prospered after the manner of their colleagues in the other brotherhoods. their membership embraces the large majority of their craft. from the date of the establishment of their beneficiary fund to a total of $ , , . has been paid in death and disability claims and in the amount so paid was $ , , . . the firemen's magazine, established in and now published from headquarters in cleveland, is indicative of the ambitions of the membership, for its avowed aim is to "make a specialty of educational matter for locomotive enginemen and other railroad employees." an attempt was even made in to conduct a correspondence school, under the supervision of the editor and manager of the magazine, but after three years this project was discontinued because it could not be made self-supporting. the youngest of the railway labor organizations is the brotherhood of trainmen, organized in september, , at oneonta, new york. its early years were lean and filled with bickerings and doubts, and it was not until s. e. wilkinson was elected grand master in that it assumed an important rôle in labor organizations. wilkinson was one of those big, rough and ready men, with a natural aptitude for leadership, who occasionally emerge from the mass. he preferred railroading to schooling and spent more time in the train sheds of his native town of monroeville, ohio, than he did at school. at twelve years of age he ran away to join the union army, in which he served as an orderly until the end of the war. he then followed his natural bent, became a switchman and later a brakeman, was a charter member of the brotherhood, and, when its outlook was least encouraging, became its grand master. at once under his leadership the organization became aggressive. the conditions under which trainmen worked were far from satisfactory. at that time, in the eastern field, the pay of a brakeman was between $ . and $ a day in the freight service, $ a month in the passenger service, and $ a month for yard service. in the southern territory, the wages were very much lower and in the western about $ per month higher. the runs in the different sections of the country were not equalized; there was no limit to the number of hours called a day's work; overtime and preparatory time were not counted in; and there were many complaints of arbitrary treatment of trainmen by their superiors. wilkinson set to work to remedy the wage situation first. almost at once he brought about the adoption of the principle of collective bargaining for trainmen and yardmen. by , when he relinquished his office, the majority of the railways in the united states and canada had working agreements with their train and yard service men. wages had been raised, twelve hours or less and one hundred miles or less became recognized as a daily measure of service, and overtime was paid extra. the panic of hit the railway service very hard. there followed many strikes engineered by the american railway union, a radical organization which carried its ideas of violence so far that it wrecked not only itself but brought the newer and conservative brotherhoods to the verge of ruin. it was during this period of strain that, in , p. h. morrissey was chosen grand master of the trainmen. with a varied training in railroading, in insurance, and in labor organization work, morrissey was in many ways the antithesis of his predecessors who had, in a powerful and brusque way, prepared the ground for his analytical and judicial leadership. he was unusually well informed on all matters pertaining to railroad operations, earnings, and conditions of employment, and on general economic conditions. this knowledge, together with his forcefulness, tact, parliamentary ability, and rare good judgment, soon made him the spokesman of all the railway brotherhoods in their joint conferences and their leader before the public. he was not afraid to take the unpopular side of a cause, cared nothing for mere temporary advantages, and had the gift of inspiring confidence. when morrissey assumed the leadership of the trainmen, their order had lost , members in two years and was about $ , in debt. the panic had produced unemployment and distrust, and the violent reprisals of the american railway union had reaped a harvest of bitterness and disloyalty. during his fifteen years of service until he retired in , morrissey saw his order rejuvenated and virtually reconstructed, the work of the men standardized in the greater part of the country, slight increases of pay given to the freight and passenger men, and very substantial increases granted to the yard men. but his greatest service to his order was in thoroughly establishing it in the public confidence. he was succeeded by william g. lee, who had served in many subordinate offices in local lodges before he had been chosen first vice-grand master in . for fifteen years he was a faithful understudy to morrissey whose policy he has continued in a characteristically fearless and thoroughgoing manner. when he assumed the presidency of the order, he obtained a ten-hour day in the eastern territory for all train and yard men, together with a slight increase in pay for all classes fixed on the ten-hour basis. the ten-hour day was now adopted in western territory where it had not already been put into effect. the southern territory, however, held out until , when a general advance on all southern railroads, with one exception, brought the freight and passenger men to a somewhat higher level of wages than existed in other parts of the country. in the following year the east and the west raised their wages so that finally a fairly level rate prevailed throughout the united states. in the movement for the eight-hour day which culminated in the passage of the adamson law by congress, lee and his order took a prominent part. in the trainmen had $ , , insurance in force, and up to that year had paid out $ , , in claims. of this latter amount $ , , was paid out in , one-half of which was attributed to the influenza epidemic. much of the success and power of the railroad brotherhoods is due to the character of their members as well as to able leadership. the editor of a leading newspaper has recently written: "the impelling power behind every one of these organizations is the membership. i say this without detracting from the executive or administrative abilities of the men who have been at the head of these organizations, for their influence has been most potent in carrying out the will of their several organizations. but whatever is done is first decided upon by the men and it is then put up to their chief executive officers for their direction." with a membership of , uniformly clean and competent, so well captained and so well fortified financially by insurance, benefit, and other funds, it is little wonder that the brotherhoods have reached a permanent place in the railroad industry. their progressive power can be discerned in federal legislation pertaining to arbitration and labor conditions in interstate carriers. in an act was passed providing that, in cases of railway labor disputes, the president might appoint two investigators who, with the united states commission of labor, should form a board to investigate the controversy and recommend "the best means for adjusting it." but as they were empowered to produce only findings and not to render decisions, the law remained a dead letter, without having a single case brought up under it. it was superseded in by the erdman act, which provided that certain federal officials should act as mediators and that, in case they failed, a board of arbitrators was to be appointed whose word should be binding for a certain period of time and from whose decisions appeal could be taken to the federal courts. of the hundreds of disputes which occurred during the first eight years of the existence of this statute, only one was brought under the mechanism of the law. federal arbitration was not popular. in , however, a rather sudden change came over the situation. over sixty cases were brought under the erdman act in about eight years. in the newlands law was passed providing for a permanent board of mediation and conciliation, by which over sixty controversies have been adjusted. the increase of brotherhood influence which such legislation represents was accompanied by a consolidation in power. at first the brotherhoods operated by railway systems or as individual orders. later on they united into districts, all the brotherhoods of a given district coöperating in their demands. finally the coöperation of all the brotherhoods in the united states on all the railway systems was effected. this larger organization came clearly to light in , when the brotherhoods submitted their disputes to the board of arbitration. this step was hailed by the public as going a long way towards the settlement of labor disputes by arbitral boards. the latest victory of the brotherhoods, however, has shaken public confidence and has ushered in a new era of brotherhood influence and federal interference in railroad matters. in , the four brotherhoods threatened to strike. the mode of reckoning pay--whether upon an eight-hour or a longer day--was the subject of contention. the department of labor, through the federal conciliation board, tried in vain to bring the opponents together. even president wilson's efforts to bring about an agreement proved futile. the roads agreed to arbitrate all the points, allowing the president to name the arbitrators; but the brotherhoods, probably realizing their temporary strategic advantage, refused point-blank to arbitrate. when the president tried to persuade the roads to yield the eight-hour day, they replied that it was a proper subject for arbitration. instead of standing firmly on the principle of arbitration, the president chose to go before congress, on the afternoon of the th of august, and ask, first, for a reorganization of the interstate commerce commission; second, for legal recognition of the eight-hour day for interstate carriers; third, for power to appoint a commission to observe the operation of the eight-hour day for a stated time; fourth, for reopening the question of an increase in freight rates to meet the enlarged cost of operation; fifth, for a law declaring railway strikes and lockouts unlawful until a public investigation could be made; sixth, for authorization to operate the roads in case of military necessity. the strike was planned to fall on the expectant populace, scurrying home from their vacations, on the th of september. on the st of september an eight-hour bill, providing also for the appointment of a board of observation, was rushed through the house; on the following day it was hastened through the staid senate; and on the third it received the president's signature. ¹ the other recommendations of the president were made to await the pleasure of congress and the unions. to the suggestion that railway strikes be made unlawful until their causes are disclosed the brotherhoods were absolutely opposed. ¹ this was on sunday. in order to obviate any objection as to the legality of the signature the president signed the bill again on the following tuesday, the intervening monday being labor day. many readjustments were involved in launching the eight-hour law, and in march, , the brotherhoods again threatened to strike. the president sent a committee, including the secretary of the interior and the secretary of labor, to urge the parties to come to an agreement. on the th of march, the supreme court upheld the validity of the law, and the trouble subsided. but in the following november, after the declaration of war, clouds reappeared on the horizon, and again the unions refused the government's suggestion of arbitration. under war pressure, however, the brotherhoods finally consented to hold their grievance in abeyance. the haste with which the eight-hour law was enacted, and the omission of the vital balance suggested by the president appeared to many citizens to be a holdup of congress, and the nearness of the presidential election suggested that a political motive was not absent. the fact that in the ensuing presidential election, ohio, the home of the brotherhoods, swung from the republican to the democratic column, did not dispel this suspicion from the public mind. throughout this maneuver it was apparent that the unions were very confident, but whether because of a prearranged pact, or because of a full treasury, or because of a feeling that the public was with them, or because of the opposite belief that the public feared them, must be left to individual conjecture. none the less, the public realized that the principle of arbitration had given way to the principle of coercion. soon after the united states had entered the great war, the government, under authority of an act of congress, took over the management of all the interstate railroads, and the nation was launched upon a vast experiment destined to test the capacities of all the parties concerned. the dispute over wages that had been temporarily quieted by the adamson law broke out afresh until settled by the famous order no. , issued by william g. mcadoo, the director general of railroads, and providing a substantial readjustment of wages and hours. in the spring of another large wage increase was granted to the men by director general hines, who succeeded mcadoo. meanwhile the brotherhoods, through their counsel, laid before the congressional committee a plan for the government ownership and joint operation of the roads, known as the plumb plan, and the american people are now face to face with an issue which will bring to a head the paramount question of the relation of employees on government works to the government and to the general public. chapter viii issues and warfare there has been an enormous expansion in the demands of the unions since the early days of the philadelphia cordwainers; yet these demands involve the same fundamental issues regarding hours, wages, and the closed shop. most unions, when all persiflage is set aside, are primarily organized for business--the business of looking after their own interests. their treasury is a war chest rather than an insurance fund. as a benevolent organization, the american union is far behind the british union with its highly developed friendly societies. the establishment of a standard rate of wages is perhaps, as the united states industrial commission reported in , "the primary object of trade union policy." the most promising method of adjusting the wage contract is by the collective trade agreement. the mechanism of the union has made possible collective bargaining, and in numerous trades wages and other conditions are now adjusted by this method. one of the earliest of these agreements was effected by the iron molders' union in and has been annually renewed. the coal operatives, too, for a number of years have signed a wage agreement with their miners, and the many local difficulties and differences have been ingeniously and successfully met. the great railroads have, likewise, for many years made periodical contracts with the railway brotherhoods. the glove-makers, cigar-makers, and, in many localities, workers in the building trades and on street-railway systems have the advantage of similar collective agreements. in the american newspaper publishers association and the international typographical union, after many years of stubborn fighting merged their numerous differences in a trade contract to be in effect for one year. this experiment proved so successful that the agreement has since then been renewed for five year periods. in a bitter strike of the garment makers in new york city was ended by a "protocol." the principle of collective agreement has become so prevalent that the massachusetts bureau of labor believes that it "is being accepted with increasing favor by both employers and employees," and john mitchell, speaking from wide experience and an intimate knowledge of conditions, says that "the hope of future peace in the industrial world lies in the trade agreement." these agreements are growing in complexity, and today they embrace not only questions of wages and hours but also methods for adjusting all the differences which may arise between the parties to the bargain. the very success of collective bargaining hinges upon the solidarity and integrity of the union which makes the bargain. a union capable of enforcing an agreement is a necessary antecedent condition to such a contract. with this fact in mind, one can believe that john mitchell was not unduly sanguine in stating that "the tendency is toward the growth of compulsory membership . . . and the time will doubtless come when this compulsion will be as general and will be considered as little of a grievance as the compulsory attendance of children at school." there are certain industries so well centralized, however, that their coercive power is greater than that of the labor union, and these have maintained a consistent hostility to the closed shop. the question of the closed shop is, indeed, the most stubborn issue confronting the union. the principle involves the employment of only union men in a shop; it means a monopoly of jobs by members of the union. the issue is as old as the unions themselves and as perplexing as human nature. as early as it was contended for by the philadelphia cordwainers and by it had become an established union policy. while wages and hours are now, in the greater industrial fields, the subject of a collective contract, this question of union monopoly is still open, though there has been some progress towards an adjustment. wherever the trade agreement provides for a closed shop, the union, through its proper committees and officers, assumes at least part of the responsibility of the discipline. the agreement also includes methods for arbitrating differences. the acid test of the union is its capacity to live up to this trade agreement. for the purpose of forcing its policies upon its employers and society the unions have resorted to the strike and picketing, the boycott, and the union label. when violence occurs, it usually is the concomitant of a strike; but violence unaccompanied by a strike is sometimes used as a union weapon. the strike is the oldest and most spectacular weapon in the hands of labor. for many years it was thought a necessary concomitant of machine industry. the strike, however, antedates machinery and was a practical method of protest long before there were unions. men in a shop simply agreed not to work further and walked out. the earliest strike in the united states, as disclosed by the united states department of labor occurred in among the journeymen bakers in new york city. in the cordwainers of philadelphia struck. by strikes were so prevalent that the new york daily advertiser declared them to be "all the fashion." these demonstrations were all small affairs compared with the strikes that disorganized industry after the civil war or those that swept the country in successive waves in the late seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. the united states bureau of labor has tabulated the strike statistics for the twenty-five year period from to . this list discloses the fact that , strikes and lockouts occurred, involving , establishments and , , employees. about , , other employees were thrown out of work as an indirect result. in , the year of the great pullman strike, , men were out of work at one time; and , in . how much time and money these ten million wage-earners lost, and their employers lost, and society lost, can never be computed, nor how much nervous energy was wasted, good will thrown to the winds, and mutual suspicion created. the increase of union influence is apparent, for recognition of the union has become more frequently a cause for strikes. ¹ moreover, while the unions were responsible for about per cent of the strikes in , they had originated, directly or indirectly, per cent in . more significant, indeed, is the fact that striking is a growing habit. in , for instance, there were strikes, an average of about ten a day. ¹ the cause of the strikes tabulated by the bureau of labor is shown in the following table of percentages: for increase of wages: against reduction of wages: for reduction in hours: recognition of union: preparedness is the watchword of the unions in this warfare. they have generals and captains, a war chest and relief committees, as well as publicity agents and sympathy scouts whose duty it is to enlist the interest of the public. usually the leaders of the unions are conservative and deprecate violence. but a strike by its very nature offers an opportunity to the lawless. the destruction of property and the coercion of workmen have been so prevalent in the past that, in the public mind, violence has become universally associated with strikes. judge jenkins, of the united states circuit court, declared, in a leading case, that "a strike without violence would equal the representation of hamlet with the part of hamlet omitted." justice brewer of the united states supreme court said that "the common rule as to strikes" is not only for the workers to quit but to "forcibly prevent others from taking their place." historic examples involving violence of this sort are the great railway strikes of , when pittsburgh, reading, cincinnati, chicago, and buffalo were mob-ridden; the strike of the steel-workers at homestead, pennsylvania, in ; the pullman strike of , when president cleveland sent federal troops to chicago; the great anthracite strike of , which the federal commission characterized as "stained with a record of riot and bloodshed"; the civil war in the colorado and idaho mining regions, where the western federation of miners battled with the militia and federal troops; the dynamite outrages, perpetrated by the structural iron workers, stretching across the entire country, and reaching a dastardly climax in the dynamiting of the los angeles times building on october , , in which some twenty men were killed. the recoil from this outrage was the severest blow which organized labor has received in america. john j. mcnamara, secretary of the structural iron workers' association, and his brother james were indicted for murder. after the trial was staged and the eyes of the nation were upon it, the public was shocked and the hopes of labor unionists were shattered by the confessions of the principals. in march, , a federal grand jury at indianapolis returned fifty-four indictments against officers and members of the same union for participation in dynamite outrages that had occurred during the six years in many parts of the country, with a toll of over one hundred lives and the destruction of property valued at many millions of dollars. among those indicted was the president of the international association of bridge and structural iron workers. most of the defendants were sentenced to various terms in the penitentiary. the records of this industrial warfare are replete with lesser battles where thuggery joined hands with desperation in the struggle for wages. evidence is not wanting that local leaders have frequently incited their men to commit acts of violence in order to impress the public with their earnestness. it is not an inviting picture, this matching of the sullen violence of the mob against the sullen vigilance of the corporation. yet such methods have not always been used, for the union has done much to systematize this guerrilla warfare. it has matched the ingenuity and the resolution of the employer, backed by his detectives and professional strike-breakers; it has perfected its organization so that the blow of a whistle or the mere uplifting of a hand can silence a great mill. some of the notable strikes have been managed with rare skill and diplomacy. some careful observers, indeed, are inclined to the opinion that the amount of violence that takes place in the average strike has been grossly exaggerated. they maintain that, considering the great number of strikes, the earnestness with which they are fought, the opportunity they offer to the lawless, and the vast range of territory they cover, the amount of damage to property and person is unusually small and that the public, through sensational newspaper reports of one or two acts of violence, is led to an exaggerated opinion of its prevalence. it must be admitted, however, that the wisdom and conservatism of the national labor leaders is neutralized by their lack of authority in their particular organization. a large price is paid for the autonomy that permits the local unions to declare strikes without the sanction of the general officers. there are only a few unions, perhaps half a dozen, in which a local can be expelled for striking contrary to the wish of the national officers. in the united mine workers' union, for example, the local must secure the consent of the district officers and national president, or, if these disagree, of the executive board, before it can declare a strike. the tendency to strike on the spur of the moment is much more marked among the newer unions than among the older ones, which have perfected their strike machinery through much experience and have learned the cost of hasty and unjustified action. a less conspicuous but none the less effective weapon in the hands of labor is the boycott, ¹ which is carried by some of the unions to a terrible perfection. it reached its greatest power in the decade between and . though it was aimed at a great variety of industries, it seemed to be peculiarly effective in the theater, hotel, restaurant, and publishing business, and in the clothing and cigar trades. for sheer arbitrary coerciveness, nothing in the armory of the union is so effective as the boycott. a flourishing business finds its trade gone overnight. leading customers withdraw their patronage at the union's threat. the alert picket is the harbinger of ruin, and the union black list is as fraught with threat as the black hand. ¹ in , lord erne, an absentee irish landlord, sent captain boycott to connemara to subdue his irate tenants. the people of the region refused to have any intercourse whatever with the agent or his family. and social and business ostracism has since been known as the boycott. the new york bureau of statistics of labor has shown that during the period of eight years between and there were boycotts in new york state alone. a sort of terrorism spread among the tradespeople of the cities. but the unions went too far. instances of gross unfairness aroused public sympathy against the boycotters. in new york city, for instance, a mrs. grey operated a small bakery with nonunion help. upon her refusal to unionize her shop at the command of the walking delegate, her customers were sent the usual boycott notice, and pickets were posted. her delivery wagons were followed, and her customers were threatened. grocers selling her bread were systematically boycotted. all this persecution merely aroused public sympathy for mrs. grey, and she found her bread becoming immensely popular. the boycotters then demanded $ for paying their boycott expenses. when news of this attempt at extortion was made public, it heightened the tide of sympathy, the courts took up the matter, and the boycott failed. the new york boycotter, a journal devoted to this form of coercion, declared: "in boycotting we believe it to be legitimate to strike a man financially, socially, or politically. we believe in hitting him where it will hurt the most; we believe in remorselessly crowding him to the wall; but when he is down, instead of striking him, we would lift him up and stand him once more on his feet." when the boycott thus enlisted the aid of blackmail, it was doomed in the public esteem. boycott indictments multiplied, and in one year in new york city alone, over one hundred leaders of such attempts at coercion were sentenced to imprisonment. the boycott, however, was not laid aside as a necessary weapon of organized labor because it had been abused by corrupt or overzealous unionists, nor because it had been declared illegal by the courts. all the resources of the more conservative unions and of the american federation of labor have been enlisted to make it effective in extreme instances where the strike has failed. this application of the method can best be illustrated by the two most important cases of boycott in our history, the buck's stove and range case and the danbury hatters' case. both were fought through the federal courts, with the defendants backed by the american federation and opposed by the anti-boycott association, a federation of employers. the buck's stove and range company of st. louis incurred the displeasure of the metal polishers' union by insisting upon a ten-hour day. on august , , at five o'clock in the afternoon, on a prearranged signal, the employees walked out. they returned to work the next morning and all were permitted to take their accustomed places except those who had given the signal. they were discharged. at five o'clock that afternoon the men put aside their work, and the following morning reappeared. again the men who had given the signal were discharged, and the rest went to work. the union then sent notice to the foreman that the discharged men must be reinstated or that all would quit. a strike ensued which soon led to a boycott of national proportions. it spread from the local to the st. louis central trades and labor union and to the metal polishers' union. in the executive council of the american federation of labor officially placed the buck's stove and range company on the unfair list and gave this action wide and conspicuous circulation in the federationist. this boycott received further impetus from the action of the mine workers, who in their annual convention resolved that the buck's stove and range company be put on the unfair list and that "any member of the united mine workers of america purchasing a stove of above make be fined $ . and failing to pay the same be expelled from the organization." espionage became so efficient and letters from old customers withdrawing patronage became so numerous and came from so wide a range of territory that the company found itself rapidly nearing ruin. an injunction was secured, enjoining the american federation from blacklisting the company. the labor journals circumvented this mandate by publishing in display type the statement that "it is unlawful for the american federation of labor to boycott buck's stoves and ranges," and then in small type adroitly recited the news of the court's decision in such a way that the reader would see at a glance that the company was under union ban. these evasions of the court's order were interpreted as contempt, and in punishment the officers of the federation were sentenced to imprisonment--frank morrison for six months, john mitchell for nine months, samuel gompers for twelve months. but a technicality intervened between the leaders and the cells awaiting them. the public throughout the country had followed the course of this case with mingled feelings of sympathy and disfavor, and though the boycott had never met with popular approval, on the whole the public was relieved to learn that the jail-sentences were not to be served. the danbury hatters' boycott was brought on in by the attempt of the hatters' union to make a closed shop of a manufacturing concern in danbury, connecticut. the unions moved upon danbury, flushed with two recent victories--one in philadelphia, where an important hat factory had agreed to the closed shop after spending some $ , in fighting, and another at orange, new jersey, where a manufacturer had spent $ , . but as the danbury concern was determined to fight the union, in a nationwide boycott was declared. the company then brought suit against members of the union in the united states district court. injunction proceedings reached the supreme court of the united states on a demurrer, and in february, , the court declared that the sherman anti-trust law forbade interstate boycotts. the case then returned to the original court for trial. testimony was taken in many states, and after a trial lasting twelve weeks the jury assessed the damages to the plaintiff at $ , . on account of error, the case was remanded for re-trial in . at the second trial the jury gave the plaintiff a verdict for $ , , the full amount asked. according to the law, this amount was trebled, leaving the judgment, with costs added, at $ , . the supreme court having sustained the verdict, the puzzling question of how to collect it arose. as such funds as the union had were invulnerable to process, the savings bank accounts of the individual defendants were attached. the union insisted that the defendants were not taxable for accrued interest, and the united states supreme court, now appealed to for a third time, sustained the plaintiff's contention. in this manner $ , were obtained. foreclosure proceedings were then begun against one hundred and forty homes belonging to union men in the towns of danbury, norwalk, and bethel. the union boasted that this sale would prove only an incubus to the purchasers, for no one would dare occupy the houses sold under such circumstances. in the meantime the american federation, which had financed the litigation, undertook to raise the needed sum by voluntary collection and made gompers's birthday the occasion for a gift to the danbury local. the federation insisted that the houses be sold on foreclosure and that the collected money be used not as a prior settlement but as an indemnity to the individuals thus deprived of their homes. rancor gave way to reason, however, and just before the day fixed for the foreclosure sale the matter was settled. in all, $ , was paid in damages by the union to the company. in the fourteen years during which this contest was waged, about forty defendants, one of the plaintiffs, and eight judges who had passed on the controversy, died. the outcome served as a spur to the federation in hastening through congress the clayton bill of , designed to place labor unions beyond the reach of the anti-trust laws. the union label has in more recent years achieved importance as a weapon in union warfare. this is a mark or device denoting a union-made article. it might be termed a sort of labor union trade-mark. union men are admonished to favor the goods so marked, but it was not until national organizations were highly perfected that the label could become of much practical value. it is a device of american invention and was first used by the cigar makers in . in their national body adopted the now familiar blue label and, with great skill and perseverance and at a considerable outlay of money, has pushed its union-made ware, in the face of sweat-shop competition, of the introduction of cigar making machinery, and of fraudulent imitation. gradually other unions making products of common consumption adopted labels. conspicuous among these were the garment makers, the hat makers, the shoe makers, and the brewery workers. as the value of the label manifestly depends upon the trade it entices, the unions are careful to emphasize the sanitary conditions and good workmanship which a label represents. the application of the label is being rapidly extended. building materials are now in many large cities under label domination. in chicago the bricklayers have for over fifteen years been able to force the builders to use only union-label brick, and the carpenters have forced the contractors to use only material from union mills. there is practically no limit to this form of mandatory boycott. the barbers, retail clerks, hotel employees, and butcher workmen hang union cards in their places of employment or wear badges as insignia of union loyalty. as these labels do not come under the protection of the united states trade-mark laws, the unions have not infrequently been forced to bring suits against counterfeiters. finally, in their efforts to fortify themselves against undue increase in the rate of production or "speeding up," against the inrush of new machinery, and against the debilitating alternation of rush work and no work, the unions have attempted to restrict the output. the united states industrial commission reported in that "there has always been a strong tendency among labor organizations to discourage exertion beyond a certain limit. the tendency does not express itself in formal rules. on the contrary, it appears chiefly in the silent, or at least informal pressure of working class opinion." some unions have rules, others a distinct understanding, on the subject of a normal day's work, and some discourage piecework. but it is difficult to determine how far this policy has been carried in application. carroll d. wright, in a special report as united states commissioner of labor in , said that "unions in some cases fix a limit to the amount of work a workman may perform a day. usually it is a secret understanding, but sometimes, when the union is strong, no concealment is made." his report mentioned several trades, including the building trades, in which this curtailment is prevalent. the course of this industrial warfare between the unions and the employers has been replete with sordid details of selfishness, corruption, hatred, suspicion, and malice. in every community the strike or the boycott has been an ominous visitant, leaving in its trail a social bitterness which even time finds it difficult to efface. in the great cities and the factory towns, the constant repetition of labor struggles has created centers of perennial discontent which are sources of never-ending reprisals. in spite of individual injustice, however, one can discern in the larger movements a current setting towards a collective justice and a communal ideal which society in self-defense is imposing upon the combatants. chapter ix the new terrorism: the i. w. w. it was not to be expected that the field of organized labor would be left undisputed to the moderation of the trade union after its triumph over the extreme methods of the knights of labor. the public, however, did not anticipate the revolutionary ideal which again sought to inflame industrial unionism. after the decadence of the older type of the industrial union several conditions manifested themselves which now, in retrospect, appear to have encouraged the violent militants who call themselves the industrial workers of the world. first of all, there took place in europe the rise of syndicalism with its adoption of sympathetic strikes as one of its methods. syndicalism flourished especially in france, where from its inception the alert french mind had shaped for it a philosophy of violence, whose subtlest exponent was georges sorel. the socialist future of trade unions, which he published in , was an early exposition of his views, but his reflections upon violence in is the best known of his contributions to this newer doctrine. with true gallic fervor, the french workingman had sought to translate his philosophy into action, and in undertook, with the aid of a revolutionary organization known as the confédération général du travail, a series of strikes which culminated in the railroad and post office strike of . all these uprisings--for they were in reality more than strikes--were characterized by extreme language, by violent action, and by impressive public demonstrations. in italy, spain, norway, and belgium, the syndicalists were also active. their partiality to violent methods attracted general attention in europe and appealed to that small group of american labor leaders whose experience in the western federation of miners had taught them the value of dynamite as a press agent. in the meantime material was being gathered for a new outbreak in the united states. the casual laborers had greatly increased in numbers, especially in the west. these migratory workingmen--the "hobo miners," the "hobo lumberjacks," the "blanket stiffs," of colloquial speech--wander about the country in search of work. they rarely have ties of family and seldom ties of locality. about one-half of these wanderers are american born. they are to be described with precision as "floaters." their range of operations includes the wheat regions west of the mississippi, the iron mines of michigan and minnesota, the mines and forests of idaho, montana, colorado, washington, and oregon, and the fields of california and arizona. they prefer to winter in the cities, but, as their only refuge is the bunk lodging house, they increase the social problem in new york, chicago, san francisco, and other centers of the unemployed. many of these migrants never were skilled workers; but a considerable portion of them have been forced down into the ranks of the unskilled by the inevitable tragedies of prolonged unemployment. such men lend a willing ear to the labor agitator. the exact number in this wandering class is not known. the railroad companies have estimated that at a given time there have been , hobos trying to beat their way from place to place. unquestionably a large percentage of the , trespassers killed and of the , injured on railway rights of way from to belonged to this class. it is not alone these drifters, however, who because of their irresponsibility and their hostility toward society became easy victims to the industrial organizer. the great mass of unskilled workers in the factory towns proved quite as tempting to the propagandist. among laborers of this class, wages are the lowest and living conditions the most uninviting. moreover, this group forms the industrial reservoir which receives the settlings of the most recent european and asiatic immigration. these people have a standard of living and conceptions of political and individual freedom which are at variance with american traditions. though their employment is steadier than that of the migratory laborer, and though they often have ties of family and other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate restlessness. they are, in quite the literal sense of the word, american proletarians. they are more volatile than any european proletarian, for they have learned the lesson of migration, and they retain the socialistic and anarchistic philosophy of their european fellow-workers. there were several attempts to organize casual labor after the decline of the knights of labor. but it is difficult to arouse any sustained interest in industrial organizations among workingmen of this class. they lack the motive of members of a trade union, and the migratory character of such workers deprives their organization of stability. one industrial organization, however, has been of the greatest encouragement to the i. w. w. the western federation of miners, which was organized at butte, montana, on may , , has enjoyed a more turbulent history than any other american labor union. it was conceived in that spirit of rough resistance which local unions of miners, for some years before the amalgamation of the unions, had opposed to the ruthless and firm determination of the mine owners. in , the president of the miners, after quoting the words of the constitution of the united states giving citizens the right to bear arms, said: "this you should comply with immediately. every union should have a rifle club. i strongly advise you to provide every member with the latest improved rifle which can be obtained from the factory at a nominal price. i entreat you to take action on this important question, so that in two years we can hear the inspiring music of the martial tread of , armed men in the ranks of labor." this militant vision was fortunately never quite fulfilled. but armed strikers there were, by the thousands, and the gruesome details of their fight with mine owners in colorado are set forth in a special report of the united states commissioner of labor in . the use of dynamite became early associated with this warfare in colorado. in a fatal explosion occurred in the vindicator mine in teller county, and serious disorders broke out in telluride, the county seat of san miguel county. in a cage lifting miners from the shaft in the independence mine at victor was dropped and fifteen men were killed. there were many minor outrages, isolated murders, "white cap" raids, infernal machines, deportations, black lists, and so on. in montana and idaho similar scenes were enacted and reached a climax in the murder of governor steunenberg of idaho. yet the union officers indicted for this murder were released by the trial jury. such was the preparatory school of the new unionism, which had its inception in several informal conferences held in chicago. the first, attended by only six radical leaders, met in the autumn of . the second, held in january, , issued a manifesto attacking the trade unions, calling for a "new departure" in the labor movement, and inviting those who desired to join in organizing such a movement to "meet in convention in chicago the th day of june, ." about two hundred persons responded to this appeal and organized the industrial workers of the world, almost unnoticed by the press of the day and scorned by the american federation of labor, whose official organ had called those in attendance at the second conference "engaged in the delectable work of trying to divert, pervert, and disrupt the labor movement of the country." an overwhelming influence in this convention was wielded by the western federation of miners and the socialistic american labor union, two radical labor bodies which looked upon the trade unions as "union snobbery" and the "aristocracy of labor," and upon the american federation as "the consummate flower of craft unionism" and "a combination of job trusts." they believed trade unionism wrong in principle. they discarded the principle of trade autonomy for the principle of laboring class solidarity, for, as one of their spokesmen said, "the industrial union, in contradistinction to the craft union, is that organization through which all its members in one industry, or in all industries if necessary, can act as a unit." while this convention was united in denouncing the trade unions, it was not so unanimous in other matters, for the leaders were all veterans in those factional quarrels which characterize socialists the world over. eugene v. debs, for example, was the hero of the knights of labor and had achieved wide notoriety during the pullman strike by being imprisoned for contempt of court. william d. haywood, popularly known as "big bill," received a rigorous training in the western federation of miners. daniel deleon, whose right name, the american federationist alleged, was daniel loeb, was a university graduate and a vehement revolutionary, the leader of the socialistic labor party, and the editor of the daily people. a. m. simons, the leader of the socialist party and the editor of the coming nation, was at swords' points with deleon. william e. trautmann was the fluent spokesman of the anti-political faction. these men dominated the convention. after some twelve days of discussion, they agreed upon a constitution which established six departments, ¹ provided for a general executive board with centralized powers, and at the same time left to the local and department organizations complete industrial autonomy. the i. w. w. in "the first constitution, crude and provisional as it was, made room for all the world's workers." ² this was, indeed, the great object of the organization. ¹ . agriculture, land, fisheries, and water products. . mining. . transportation and communication. . manufacturing and general production. . construction. . public service. ² j. g. brissenden, the launching of the industrial workers of the world, page . whatever visions of world conquest the militants may at first have fostered were soon shattered by internal strife. there were unreconcilable elements in the body: those who regarded the political aspect as paramount and industrial unions as allies of socialism; those who regarded the forming of unions as paramount and politics as secondary; and those who regarded all forms of political activity as mere waste of energy. the first two groups were tucked under the wings of the socialist party and the socialist labor party. the third group was frankly anarchistic and revolutionary. in the fourth annual convention the socialist factions withdrew, established headquarters at detroit, organized what is called the detroit branch, and left the chicago field to the revolutionists. so socialism "pure and simple," and what amounts to anarchism "pure and simple," fell out, after they had both agreed to disdain trade unionism "pure and simple." this shift proved the great opportunity for haywood and his disciples. feeling himself now free of all political encumbrances, he gathered around him a small group of enthusiastic leaders, some of whom had a gift of diabolical intrigue, and with indomitable perseverance and zeal he set himself to seeking out the neglected, unskilled, and casual laborer. within a few years he so dominated the movement that, in the public mind, the i. w. w. is associated with the chicago branch and the detroit faction is well-nigh forgotten. as a preliminary to a survey of some of the battles that made the i. w. w. a symbol of terror in many communities it will be well to glance for a moment at the underlying doctrines of the organization. in a preamble now notorious it declared that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. there can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world as a class take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system." this thesis is a declaration of war as well as a declaration of principles. the i. w. w. aims at nothing less than the complete overthrow of modern capitalism and the political structure which accompanies it. emma goldman, who prides herself on having received her knowledge of syndicalism "from actual contact" and not from books, says that "syndicalism repudiates and condemns the present industrial arrangement as unjust and criminal." edward hamond calls the labor contract "the sacred cow" of industrial idolatry and says that the aim of the i. w. w. is "the abolition of the wage system." and w. e. trautmann affirms that "the industrial unionist holds that there can be no agreement with the employers of labor which the workers have to consider sacred and inviolable." in place of what they consider an unjust and universal capitalistic order they would establish a new society in which "the unions of the workers will own and manage all industries, regulate consumption, and administer the general social interests." how is this contemplated revolution to be achieved? by the working classes themselves and not through political activity, for "one of the first principles of the i. w. w. is that political power rests on economic power. . . . it must gain control of the shops, ships, railways, mines, mills." and how is it to gain this all-embracing control? by persuading every worker to join the union, the "one great organization" which, according to haywood, is to be "big enough to take in the black man, the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries. . . . we, the i. w. w., stand on our two feet, the class struggle and industrial unionism, and coolly say we want the whole earth." when the great union has become universal, it will simply take possession of its own, will "lock the employers out for good as owners and parasites, and give them a chance to become useful toilers." the resistance that will assuredly be made to this process of absorption is to be met by direct action, the general strike, and sabotage--a trinity of phrases imported from europe, each one of special significance. "the general strike means a stoppage of work," says emma goldman with naïve brevity. it was thought of long before the i. w. w. existed, but it has become the most valuable weapon in their arsenal. their pamphlets contain many allusions to the great strikes in belgium, russia, italy, france, scandinavia, and other european countries, that were so widespread as to merit being called general. if all the workers can be induced to stop work, even for a very brief interval, such action would be regarded as the greatest possible manifestation of the "collective power of the producers." direct action, a term translated directly from the french, is more difficult to define. this method sets itself in opposition to the methods of the capitalist in retaining control of industry, which is spoken of as indirect action. laws, machinery, credits, courts, and constabulary are indirect methods whereby the capitalist keeps possession of his property. the industrialist matches this with a direct method. for example, he engages in a passive strike, obeying rules so literally as to destroy both their utility and his work; or in an opportune strike, ceasing work suddenly when he knows his employer has orders that must be immediately filled; or in a temporary strike, quitting work one day and coming back the next. his weapon is organized opportunism, wielding an unexpected blow, and keeping the employer in a frenzy of fearful anticipation. finally, sabotage is a word that expresses the whole philosophy and practice of revolutionary labor. john spargo, in his syndicalism, industrial unionism and socialism, traces the origin of the word to the dockers' union in london. attempt after attempt had proved futile to win by strikes the demands of these unskilled workers. the men were quite at the end of their resources, when finally they hit upon the plan of "lying down on the job" or "soldiering." as a catchword they adopted the scotch phrase ca'canny, to go slow or be careful not to do too much. as an example they pointed to the chinese coolies who met a refusal of increased wages by cutting off a few inches from their shovels on the principle of "small pay, small work." he then goes on to say that "the idea was very easily extended. from the slowing up of the human worker to the slowing up of the iron worker, the machine, was an easy transition. judiciously planned 'accidents' might easily create confusion for which no one could be blamed. a few 'mistakes' in handling cargoes might easily cost the employers far more than a small increase in wages would." some french syndicalists, visiting london, were greatly impressed with this new cunning. but as they had no ready translation for the scottish ca'canny, they ingeniously abstracted the same idea from the old french saying travailler à coups de sabots--to work as if one had on wooden shoes--and sabotage thus became a new and expressive phrase in the labor war. armed with these weapons, haywood and his henchmen moved forward. not long after the first convention in , they made their presence known at goldfield, nevada. then they struck simultaneously at youngstown, ohio, and portland, oregon. the first battle, however, to attract general notice was at mckees rocks, pennsylvania, in . in this warfare between the recently organized unskilled workers and the efficient state constabulary, the i. w. w. sent notice "that for every striker killed or injured by the cossacks, the life of a cossack will be exacted in return." and they collected their gruesome toll. in occurred the historic strike in the mill town of lawrence, massachusetts. this affair was so adroitly managed by the organizers of the workers that within a few weeks every newspaper of importance in america was publishing long descriptions of the new anarchism. magazine writers, self-appointed reformers, delegations representing various organizations, three committees of the state legislature, the governor's personal emissary, the united states attorney, the united states commissioner of labor, and a congressional committee devoted their time to numerous investigations, thereby giving immense satisfaction to those obscure agitators who were lifted suddenly into the glare of universal notoriety, to the disgust of the town thus dragged into unenviable publicity, and to the discomfiture of the employers. the legislature of massachusetts had reduced the hours of work of women and children from fifty-six to fifty-four hours a week. without making adequate announcement, the employers withheld two hours' pay from the weekly stipend. a large portion of the workers were foreigners, representing eighteen different nationalities, most of them with a wholly inadequate knowledge of english, and all of an inflammable temperament. when they found their pay short, a group marched through the mills, inciting others to join them, and the strike was on. the american federation of labor had paid little attention to these workers. there were some trade unions in the mills, but most of the workers were unorganized except for the fact that the i. w. w. had, about eight months before, gathered several hundred into an industrial union. yet it does not appear that this union started the strike. it was a case of spontaneous combustion. no sooner had it begun, however, than joseph j. ettor, an i. w. w. organizer, hastened to take charge, and succeeded so well that within a few weeks he claimed members in his union. ettor proved a crafty, resourceful general, quick in action, magnetic in personality, a linguist who could command his polyglot mob. he was also a successful press agent who exploited fully the unpalatable drinking water provided by the companies, the inadequate sewerage, the unpaved streets, and the practical destitution of many of the workers. the strikers made an attempt to send children to other towns so that they might be better cared for. after several groups had thus been taken away, the city of lawrence interfered, claiming that many children had been sent without their parents' consent. on the th of february, when a group of forty children and their mothers gathered at the railway station to take a train for philadelphia, the police after due warning refused to let them depart. it was then that the federal government was called upon to take action. the strike committee telegraphed congress: "twenty-five thousand striking textile workers and citizens of lawrence protest against the hideous brutality with which the police handled the women and children of lawrence this morning. carrying out the illegal and original orders of the city marshal to prevent free citizens from sending their children out of the city, striking men were knocked down, women and mothers who were trying to protect their children from the onslaught of the police were attacked and clubbed." so widespread was the opinion that unnecessary brutality had taken place that petitions for an investigation poured in upon congress from many states and numerous organizations. the whole country was watching the situation. the hearings held by a congressional committee emphasized the stupidity of the employers in arbitrarily curtailing the wage, the inadequacy of the town government in handling the situation, and the cupidity of the i. w. w. leaders in taking advantage of the fears, the ignorance, the inflammability of the workers, and in creating a "terrorism which impregnated the whole city for days." lawrence became a symbol. it stood for the american factory town; for municipal indifference and social neglect, for heterogeneity in population, for the tinder pile awaiting the incendiary match. at little falls, new york, a strike occurred in the textile mills in october, , as a result of a reduction of wages due to a fifty-four hour law. no organization was responsible for the strike, but no sooner had the operatives walked out than here also the i. w. w. appeared. the leaders ordered every striker to do something which would involve arrest in order to choke the local jail and the courts. the state authorities investigating the situation reported that "all of those on strike were foreigners and few, if any, could speak or understand the english language, complete control of the strike being in the hands of the i. w. w." in february, , about , employees in the rubber works at akron, ohio, struck. the introduction of machinery into the manufacture of automobile tires caused a reduction in the piecework rate in certain shops. one of the companies posted a notice on the th of february that this reduction would take effect immediately. no time was given for conference, and it was this sudden arbitrary act which precipitated all the discontent lurking for a long time in the background; and the employees walked out. the legislative investigating committee reported "there was practically no organization existing among the rubber employees when the strike began. a small local of the industrial workers of the world comprised of between fifteen and fifty members had been formed. . . . simultaneously with the beginning of the strike, organizers of the i. w. w. appeared on the ground inviting and urging the striking employees to unite with their organization." many of these testified before the public authorities that they had not joined because they believed in the preachings of the organization but because "they hoped through collective action to increase their wages and improve their conditions of employment." the tactics of the strike leaders soon alienated the public, which had at first been inclined towards the strikers, and acts of violence led to the organization of a vigilance committee of one thousand citizens which warned the leaders to leave town. in february, , some , workers in the silk mills of paterson, new jersey, struck, and here again the i. w. w. repeated its maneuvers. sympathetic meetings took place in new york and other cities. daily "experience meetings" were held in paterson and all sorts of devices were invented to maintain the fervor of the strikers. the leaders threatened to make paterson a "howling wilderness," an "industrial graveyard," and "to wipe it off the map." this threat naturally arrayed the citizens against the strikers, over one thousand of whom were lodged in jail before the outbreak was over. among the five ringleaders arrested and held for the grand jury were elizabeth gurley flynn and patrick quinlan, whose trials attracted wide attention. elizabeth flynn, an appealing young widow scarcely over twenty-one, testified that she had begun her work as an organizer at the age of sixteen, that she had not incited strikers to violence but had only advised them to picket and to keep their hands in their pockets, "so that detectives could not put stones in them as they had done in other strikes." the jury disagreed and she was discharged. quinlan, an unusually attractive young man, also a professional i. w. w. agitator, was found guilty of inciting to violence and was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. after serving nine months he was freed because of a monster petition signed by some , sympathetic persons all over the united states. clergymen, philanthropists, and prominent public men, were among the signers, as well as the jurors who convicted and the sheriff who locked up the defendant. these cases served to fix further public attention upon the nature of the new movement and the sort of revivalists its evangel of violence was producing. employers steadfastly refused to deal with the i. w. w., although they repeatedly asserted they were willing to negotiate with their employees themselves. after three months of strike and turmoil the mayor of paterson had said: "the fight which paterson is making is the fight of the nation. their agitation has no other object in view but to establish a reign of terror throughout the united states." a large number of thoughtful people all over the land were beginning to share this view. in new york city a new sort of agitation was devised in the winter of - under the captaincy of a young man who quite suddenly found himself widely advertised. frank tannenbaum organized an "army of the unemployed," commandeered rutgers square as a rendezvous, fifth avenue as a parade ground, and churches and parish houses as forts and commissaries. several of the churches were voluntarily opened to them, but other churches they attempted to enter by storm. in march, , tannenbaum led several score into the church of st. alphonsus while mass was being celebrated. many arrests followed this bold attempt to emulate the french revolutionists. though sympathizers raised $ bail for the ringleader, tannenbaum loyally refused to accept it as long as any of his "army" remained in jail. squads of his men entered restaurants, ate their fill, refused to pay, and then found their way to the workhouse. so for several months a handful of unemployed, some of them professional unemployed, held the headlines of the metropolitan papers, rallied to their defense sentimental social sympathizers, and succeeded in calling the attention of the public to a serious industrial condition. at granite city, illinois, another instance of unrest occurred when several thousand laborers in the steel mills, mostly roumanians and bulgarians, demanded an increase in wages. when the whistle blew on the appointed morning, they gathered at the gates, refused to enter, and continued to shout "two dollars a day!" though the manager feared violence and posted guards, no violence was offered. suddenly at the end of two hours the men quietly resumed their work, and the management believed the trouble was over. but for several successive mornings this maneuver was repeated. strike breakers were then sent for. for a week, however, the work went forward as usual. the order for strike breakers was countermanded. then came a continued repetition of the early morning strikes until the company gave way. nor were the subtler methods of sabotage forgotten in these demonstrations. from many places came reports of emery dust in the gearings of expensive machines. men boasted of powdered soap emptied into water tanks that fed boilers, of kerosene applied to belting, of railroad switches that had been tampered with. with these and many similar examples before them, the public became convinced that the mere arresting of a few leaders was futile. a mass meeting at ipswich, massachusetts, in , declared, as its principle of action, "we have got to meet force with force," and then threatened to run the entire local i. w. w. group out of town. in many towns vigilance committees acted as eyes, ears, and hands for the community. when the community refused to remain neutral, the contest assumed a different aspect and easily became a feud between a small group of militants and the general public. in the west this contest assumed its most aggressive form. at spokane, in , the jail was soon filled, and sixty prisoners went on a hunger strike which cost several lives. in the lumber mills of aberdeen, south dakota, explosions and riots occurred. in hoquiam, washington, a twelve-foot stockade surmounted by barbed wire entanglements failed to protect the mills from the assaults of strikers. at gray's harbor, washington, a citizens' committee cut the electric light wires to darken the meeting place of the i. w. w. and then used axe handles and wagon spokes to drive the members out of town. at everett, washington, a strike in the shingle mills led to the expulsion of the i. w. w. the leaders then called for volunteers to invade everett, and several hundred members sailed from seattle. they were met at the dock, however, by a large committee of citizens and were informed by the sheriff that they would not be allowed to land. after some parley, the invaders opened fire, and in the course of the shooting that followed the sheriff was seriously wounded, five persons were killed, and many were injured. the boat and its small invading army then returned to seattle without making a landing at everett. the i. w. w. found an excuse for their riotous action in the refusal of communities to permit them to speak in the streets and public places. this, they claimed, was an invasion of their constitutional right of free speech. the experience of san diego serves as an example of their "free speech" campaigns. in , i. w. w. agitators began to hold public meetings in the streets, in the course of which their language increased in ferocity until the indignation of the community was aroused. an ordinance was then passed by the city council prohibiting street speaking within the congested portions of the city, but allowing street meetings in other parts of the city if a permit from the police department were first obtained. there was, however, no law requiring the issue of such a permit, and none was granted to the agitators. this restriction of their liberties greatly incensed the agitators, who at once raised the cry of "free speech" and began to hold meetings in defiance of the ordinance. the jail was soon glutted with these apostles of riotous speaking. in order to delay the dispatch of the court's overcrowded calendar, every one demanded a jury trial. the mayor of the town then received a telegram from the general secretary of the organization which disclosed their tactics: "this fight will be continued until free speech is established in san diego if it takes twenty thousand members and twenty years to do so." the national membership of the i. w. w. had been drafted as an invading army, to be a constant irritation to the city until it surrendered. the police asserted that "there are bodies of men leaving all parts of the country for san diego" for the purpose of defying the city authorities and overwhelming its municipal machinery. a committee of vigilantes armed with "revolvers, knives, night-sticks, black jacks, and black snakes," supported by the local press and commercial bodies, undertook to run the unwelcome guests out of town. that this was not done gently is clearly disclosed by subsequent official evidence. culprits were loaded into auto trucks at night, taken to the county line, made to kiss the flag, sing the national anthem, run the gauntlet between rows of vigilantes provided with cudgels and, after thus proving their patriotism under duress, were told never to return. "there is an unwritten law," one of the local papers at this time remarked, "that permits a citizen to avenge his outraged honor. there is an unwritten law that permits a community to defend itself by any means in its power, lawful or unlawful, against any evil which the operation of the written law is inadequate to oppose or must oppose by slow, tedious, and unnecessarily expensive proceeding." so this municipal homeopathy of curing lawlessness with lawlessness received public sanction. with the declaration of war against germany in april, , hostility to the i. w. w. on the part of the american public was intensified. the members of the organization opposed war. their leaflet war and the workers, bore this legend: general sherman said "war is hell" don't go to hell in order to give a bunch of piratical plutocratic parasites a bigger slice of heaven soon rumors abounded that german money was being used to aid the i. w. w. in their plots. in oklahoma, texas, illinois, kansas, and other states, members of the organization were arrested for failure to comply with the draft law. the governors of oregon, washington, montana, idaho, and nevada met to plan laws for suppressing the i. w. w. similar legislation was urged upon congress. senator thomas, in a report to the senate, accused the i. w. w. of coöperating with german agents in the copper mines and harvest fields of the west by inciting the laborers to strikes and to the destruction of food and material. popular opinion in the west inclined to the view of senator poindexter of washington when he said that "most of the i. w. w. leaders are outlaws or ought to be made outlaws because of their official utterances, inflammatory literature and acts of violence." indeed, scores of communities in took matters into their own hands. over a thousand i. w. w. strikers in the copper mines of bisbee, arizona, were loaded into freight cars and shipped over the state line. in billings, montana, one leader was horsewhipped, and two others were hanged until they were unconscious. in tulsa, oklahoma, a group of seventeen members were taken from policemen, thoroughly flogged, tarred, feathered, and driven out of town by vigilantes. the federal government, after an extended inquiry through the secret service, raided the detroit headquarters of the i. w. w., where a plot to tie up lake traffic was brewing. the chicago offices were raided some time later; over one hundred and sixty leaders of the organization from all parts of the country were indicted as a result of the examination of the wagon-load of papers and documents seized. as a result, indictments were returned. of these defendants were found guilty by the trial jury, were dismissed during the trial, and were dismissed before the trial. in cleveland, buffalo, and other lake ports similar disclosures were made, and everywhere the organization fell under popular and official suspicion. in many other portions of the country members of the i. w. w. were tried for conspiracy under the federal espionage act. in january, , a trial jury in sacramento found defendants guilty. the offense in the majority of these cases consisted in opposing military service rather than in overt acts against the government. but in may and june, , the country was startled by a series of bomb outrages aimed at the united states attorney-general, certain federal district judges, and other leading public personages, which were evidently the result of centralized planning and were executed by members of the i. w. w., aided very considerably by foreign bolshevists. in spite of its spectacular warfare and its monopoly of newspaper headlines, the i. w. w. has never been numerically strong. the first convention claimed a membership of , . all told, the organization has issued over , cards since its inception, but this total never constituted its membership at any given time, for no more fluctuating group ever existed. when the i. w. w. fosters a strike of considerable proportions, the membership rapidly swells, only to shrink again when the strike is over. this temporary membership consists mostly of foreign workmen who are recent immigrants. what may be termed the permanent membership is difficult to estimate. in there were about , members. in the membership was estimated at , . though this is probably a maximum rather than an average, nevertheless the members are mostly young men whose revolutionary ardor counterbalances their want in numbers. it is, moreover, an organization that has a wide penumbra. it readily attracts the discontented, the unemployed, the man without a horizon. in an instant it can lay a fire and put an entire police force on the qui vive. the organization has always been in financial straits. the source of its power is to be sought elsewhere. financially bankrupt and numerically unstable, the i. w. w. relies upon the brazen cupidity of its stratagems and the habitual timorousness of society for its power. it is this self-seeking disregard of constituted authority that has given a handful of bold and crafty leaders such prominence in the recent literature of fear. and the members of this industrial ku klux klan, these american bolsheviki, assume to be the "conscious minority" which is to lead the ranks of labor into the canaan of industrial bliss. chapter x labor and politics in a democracy it is possible for organized labor to extend its influence far beyond the confines of a mere trade policy. it can move the political mechanism directly in proportion to its capacity to enlist public opinion. it is not surprising, therefore, to find that labor is eager to take part in politics or that labor parties were early organized. they were, however, doomed to failure, for no workingman's party can succeed, except in isolated localities, without the coöperation of other social and political forces. standing alone as a political entity, labor has met only rebuff and defeat at the hands of the american voter. the earlier attempts at direct political action were local. in philadelphia a workingman's party was organized in as a result of the disappointment of the mechanics' union at its failure to achieve its ambitions by strikes. at a public meeting it was resolved to support only such candidates for the legislature and city council as would pledge themselves to the interests of "the working classes." the city was organized, and a delegate convention was called which nominated a ticket of thirty candidates for city and county offices. but nineteen of these nominees were also on the jackson ticket, and ten on the adams ticket; and both of these parties used the legend "working man's ticket," professing to favor a shorter working day. the isolated labor candidates received only from to votes, while the jackson party vote ranged from to and the adams party vote from to . so that labor's first excursion into politics revealed the eagerness of the older parties to win the labor vote, and the futility of relying on a separate organization, except for propaganda purposes. preparatory to their next campaign, the workingmen organized political clubs in all the wards of philadelphia. in they nominated thirty-two candidates for local offices, of whom nine received the endorsement of the federalists and three that of the democrats. the workingmen fared better in this election, polling nearly votes in the county and electing sixteen candidates. so encouraged were they by this success that they attempted to nominate a state ticket, but the dominant parties were too strong. in the workingmen's candidates, who were not endorsed by the older parties, received less than votes in philadelphia. after this year the party vanished. new york also early had an illuminating experience in labor politics. in the workingmen of the city launched a political venture under the immediate leadership of an agitator by the name of thomas skidmore. skidmore set forth his social panacea in a book whose elongated title betrays his secret: the rights of man to property! being a proposition to make it equal among the adults of the present generation; and to provide for its equal transmission to every individual of each succeeding generation, on arriving at the age of maturity. the party manifesto began with the startling declaration that "all human society, our own as well as every other, is constructed radically wrong." the new party proposed to right this defect by an equal distribution of the land and by an elaborate system of public education. associated with skidmore were robert dale owen and frances wright of the free enquirer, a paper advocating all sorts of extreme social and economic doctrines. it was not strange, therefore, that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind, with all the erratic vagaries of these apostles of change. it was called the "fanny wright ticket" and the "infidel ticket." every one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. the movement, however, was supported by the working man's advocate, a new journal that soon reached a wide influence. there now appeared an eccentric quaker, russell comstock by name, to center public attention still more upon the new party. as a candidate for the legislature, he professed an alarmingly advanced position, for he believed that the state ought to establish free schools where handicrafts and morals, but not religion, should be taught; that husband and wife should be equals before the law; that a mechanics' lien and bankruptcy law should be passed; and that by wise graduations all laws for the collection of debts should be repealed. at a meeting held at the city hall, for the further elucidation of his "pure republicanism," he was greeted by a great throng but was arrested for disturbing the peace. he received less than one hundred and fifty votes, but his words went far to excite, on the one hand, the interest of the laboring classes in reform, and, on the other hand, the determination of the conservative classes to defeat "a ticket got up openly and avowedly," as one newspaper said, "in opposition to all banks, in opposition to social order, in opposition to rights of property." elections at this time lasted three days. on the first day there was genuine alarm at the large vote cast for "the infidels." thoughtful citizens were importuned to go to the polls, and on the second and third days they responded in sufficient numbers to compass the defeat of the entire ticket, excepting only one candidate for the legislature. the workingman's party contained too many zealots to hold together. after the election of a meeting was called to revise the party platform. the more conservative element prevailed and omitted the agrarian portions of the platform. skidmore, who was present, attempted to protest, but his voice was drowned by the clamor of the audience. he then started a party of his own, which he called the original workingman's party but which became known as the agrarian party. the majority endeavored to rectify their position in the community by an address to the people. "we take this opportunity," they said, "to aver, whatever may be said to the contrary by ignorant or designing individuals or biased presses, that we have no desire or intention of disturbing the rights of property in individuals or the public." in the meantime robert dale owen and fanny wright organized a party of their own, endorsing an extreme form of state paternalism over children. this state guardianship plan, as it was called, aimed to "regenerate america in a generation" and to "make but one class out of the many that now envy and despise each other." there were, then, three workingmen's parties in new york, none of which, however, succeeded in gaining an influential position in state politics. after all these parties disappeared, but not without leaving a legacy of valuable experience. the working man's advocate discovered political wisdom when it confessed that "whether these measures are carried by the formation of a new party, by the reform of an old one, or by the abolishment of party altogether, is of comparative unimportance." in new england, the workingmen's political endeavors were joined with those of the farmers under the agency of the new england association of farmers, mechanics, and workingmen. this organization was initiated in by the workingmen of woodstock, vermont, and their journal, the working man's gazette, became a medium of agitation which affected all the new england manufacturing towns as well as many farming communities. "woodstock meetings," as they were called, were held everywhere and aroused both workingmen and farmers to form a new political party. the springfield republican summarized the demands of the new party thus: the avowed objects generally seem to be to abolish imprisonment for debt, the abolishment of litigation, and in lieu thereof the settlement of disputes by reference to neighbors; to establish some more equal and universal system of public education; to diminish the salaries and extravagance of public officers; to support no men for offices of public trust, but farmers, mechanics, and what the party call "working men"; and to elevate the character of this class by mental instruction and mental improvement. . . . much is said against the wealth and aristocracy of the land, their influence, and the undue influence of lawyers and other professional men. . . . the most of these objects appear very well on paper and we believe they are already sustained by the good sense of the people. . . . what is most ridiculous about this party is, that in many places where the greatest noise is made about it, the most indolent and most worthless persons, men of no trade or useful occupation have taken the lead. we cannot of course answer for the character for industry of many places where this party is agitated: but we believe the great body of our own community, embracing every class and profession, may justly be called workingmen: nor do we believe enough can be found who are not such, to make even a decent party of drones. in the early thirties many towns and cities in massachusetts, vermont, maine, connecticut, and rhode island elected workingmen's candidates to local offices, usually with the help of small tradespeople. in and the workingmen of massachusetts put a state ticket in the field which polled about votes, and in boston a workingman's party was organized, but it did not gather much momentum and soon disappeared. these local and desultory attempts at forming a separate labor party failed as partisan movements. the labor leader proved an inefficient amateur when matched against the shrewd and experienced party manipulator; nor was there a sufficient class homogeneity to keep the labor vote together; and, even if it had so been united, there were not enough labor votes to make a majority. so the labor candidate had to rely on the good will of other classes in order to win his election. and this support was not forthcoming. americans have, thus far, always looked with suspicion upon a party that represented primarily the interests of only one class. this tendency shows a healthy instinct founded upon the fundamental conception of society as a great unity whose life and progress depend upon the freedom of all its diverse parts. it is not necessary to assume, as some observers have done, that these petty political excursions wrecked the labor movement of that day. it was perfectly natural that the laborer, when he awoke to the possibilities of organization and found himself possessed of unlimited political rights, should seek a speedy salvation in the ballot box. he took, by impulse, the partisan shortcut and soon found himself lost in the slough of party intrigue. on the other hand, it should not be concluded that these intermittent attempts to form labor parties were without political significance. the politician is usually blind to every need except the need of his party; and the one permanent need of his party is votes. a demand backed by reason will usually find him inert; a demand backed by votes galvanizes him into nervous attention. when, therefore, it was apparent that there was a labor vote, even though a small one, the demands of this vote were not to be ignored, especially in states where the parties were well balanced and the scale was tipped by a few hundred votes. within a few decades after the political movement began, many states had passed lien laws, had taken active measures to establish efficient free schools, had abolished imprisonment for debt, had legislative inquiry into factory conditions, and had recognized the ten-hour day. these had been the leading demands of organized labor, and they had been brought home to the public conscience, in part at least, by the influence of the workingmen's votes. it was not until after the civil war that labor achieved sufficient national homogeneity to attempt seriously the formation of a national party. in the light of later events it is interesting to sketch briefly the development of the political power of the workingman. the national labor union at its congress of resolved "that, so far as political action is concerned, each locality should be governed by its own policy, whether to run an independent ticket of workingmen, or to use political parties already existing, but at all events to cast no vote except for men pledged to the interests of labor." the issue then seemed clear enough. but six years later the labor reform party struck out on an independent course and held its first and only national convention. seventeen states were represented. ¹ the labor party, however, had yet to learn how hardly won are independence and unity in any political organization. rumors of pernicious intermeddling by the democratic and republican politicians were afloat, and it was charged that the pennsylvania delegates had come on passes issued by the president of the pennsylvania railroad. judge david davis of illinois, then a member of the united states supreme court, was nominated for president and governor joel parker of new jersey for vice-president. both declined, however, and charles o'conor of new york, the candidate of "the straight-out democrats," was named for president, but no nomination was made for vice-president. considering the subsequent phenomenal growth of the labor vote, it is worth noting in passing that o'conor received only , votes and that these embraced both the labor and the so-called "straight" democratic strength. ¹ it is interesting to note that in this first national labor party convention a motion favoring government ownership and the referendum was voted down. for some years the political labor movement lost its independent character and was absorbed by the greenback party which offered a meeting-ground for discontented farmers and restless workingmen. in the party nominated for president the venerable peter cooper, who received about eighty thousand votes--most of them probably cast by farmers. during this time the leaders of the labor movement were serving a political apprenticeship and were learning the value of coöperation. on february , , a conference held at toledo, ohio, including eight hundred delegates from twenty-eight states, perfected an alliance between the labor reform and greenback parties and invited all "patriotic citizens to unite in an effort to secure financial reform and industrial emancipation." financial reform meant the adoption of the well-known greenback free silver policy. industrial emancipation involved the enactment of an eight-hour law; the inspection of workshops, factories, and mines; the regulation of interstate commerce; a graduated federal income tax; the prohibition of the importation of alien contract labor; the forfeiture of the unused portion of the princely land grants to railroads; and the direct participation of the people in government. these fundamental issues were included in the demands of subsequent labor and populist parties, and some of them were bequeathed to the progressive party of a later date. the convention was thus a forerunner of genuine reform, for its demands were based upon industrial needs. for the moment it made a wide popular appeal. in the state elections of about a million votes were polled by the party candidates. the bulk of these were farmers' votes cast in the middle and far west, though in the east, massachusetts, pennsylvania, new york, maine, and new jersey cast a considerable vote for the party. with high expectations the new party entered the campaign of . it had over a dozen members in congress, active organizations in nearly every state, and ten thousand local clubs. general james b. weaver, the presidential nominee of the party, was the first candidate to make extensive campaign journeys into distant sections of the country. his energetic canvass netted him only , votes, most of which came from the west. the party was distinctly a farmers' party. in , it nominated the lurid ben butler who had been, according to report, "ejected from the democratic party and booted out of the republican." his demagogic appeals, however, brought him not much more than half as many votes as the party received at the preceding election, and helped to end the political career of the greenbackers. with the power of the farmers on the wane, the balance began to shift. there now followed a number of attempts to organize labor in the union labor party, the united labor party, the progressive labor party, the american reform party, and the tax reformers. there were still numerous farmers' organizations such as the farmers' alliance, the anti-monopolists, the homesteaders, and others, but they were no longer the dominant force. under the stimulus of the labor unions, delegates representing the knights of labor, the grangers, the anti-monopolists, and other farmers' organizations, met in cincinnati on february , , and organized the national union labor party. ¹ the following may the party held its only nominating convention. alson j. streeter of illinois was named for president and samuel evans of texas for vice-president. the platform of the party was based upon the prevalent economic and political discontent. farmers were overmortgaged, laborers were underpaid, and the poor were growing poorer, while the rich were daily growing richer. "the paramount issues," the new party declared, "are the abolition of usury, monopoly, and trusts, and we denounce the republican and democratic parties for creating and perpetuating these monstrous evils." ¹ mckee, national conventions and platforms, p. . in the meantime henry george, whose progress and poverty had made a profound impression upon public thought, had become in a candidate for mayor of new york city, and polled the phenomenal total of , votes, while theodore roosevelt, the republican candidate, received , , and abram s. hewitt, the successful democratic candidate, polled , . the evidence of popular support which attended henry george's brief political career was the prelude to a national effort which culminated in the formation of the united labor party. its platform was similar to that of the union party, except that the single tax now made its appearance. this method contemplated the "taxation of land according to its value and not according to its area, to devote to common use and benefit those values which arise, not from the exertion of the individual, but from the growth of society," and the abolition of all taxes on industry and its products. but it was apparent from the similarity of their platforms and the geographical distribution of their candidates that the two labor parties were competing for the same vote. at a conference held in chicago to effect a union, however, the union labor party insisted on the complete effacement of the other ticket and the single taxers refused to submit. in the election which followed, the union labor party received about , votes, largely from the south and west and evidently the old greenback vote, while the united party polled almost no votes outside of illinois and new york. neither party survived the result of this election. in december, , committees representing the knights of labor and the farmers' alliance met in st. louis to come to some agreement on political policies. owing to the single tax predilection of the knights, the two organizations were unable to enter into a close union, but they nevertheless did agree that "the legislative committees of both organizations [would] act in concert before congress for the purpose of securing the enactment of laws in harmony with their demands." this coöperation was a forerunner of the people's party or, as it was commonly called, the populist party, the largest third party that had taken the field since the civil war. throughout the west and the south political conditions now were feverish. old party majorities were overturned, and a new type of congressman invaded washington. when the first national convention of the people's party met in omaha on july , , the outlook was bright. general weaver was nominated for president and james g. field of virginia for vice-president. the platform rehabilitated greenbackism in cogent phrases, demanded government control of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, the reclamation of land held by corporations, an income tax, the free coinage of silver and gold "at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and postal savings banks. in a series of resolutions which were not a part of the platform but were nevertheless "expressive of the sentiment of this convention," the party declared itself in sympathy "with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor"; it condemned "the fallacy of protecting american labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners"; and it opposed the pinkerton system of capitalistic espionage as "a menace to our liberties." the party formally declared itself to be a "union of the labor forces of the united states," for "the interests of rural and city labor are the same; their enemies identical." these national movements prior to are not, however, an adequate index of the political strength of labor in partisan endeavor. organized labor was more of a power in local and state elections, perhaps because in these cases its pressure was more direct, perhaps because it was unable to cope with the great national organization of the older parties. during these years of effort to gain a footing in the federal government, there are numerous examples of the success of the labor party in state elections. as early as the labor reformers nominated state tickets in pennsylvania and connecticut. in they nominated wendell phillips for governor of massachusetts. in , in coalition with the greenbackers, they elected many state officers throughout the west. ten years later, when the union labor party was at its height, labor candidates were successful in several municipalities. in labor tickets were nominated in many western states, including colorado, indiana, kansas, minnesota, michigan, missouri, nebraska, ohio, and wisconsin. of these kansas cast the largest labor vote, with nearly , , and missouri came next with , . in the east, however, the showing of the party in state elections was far less impressive. in california the political labor movement achieved a singular prominence. in the labor situation in san francisco became acute because of the prevalence of unemployment. grumblings of dissatisfaction soon gave way to parades and informal meetings at which imported chinese labor and the rich "nobs," the supposed dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language. the agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader appeared in dennis kearney, a native of cork county, ireland. for fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled in san francisco as a drayman. he was temperate and industrious in his personal life, and possessed a clear eye, a penetrating voice, the vocabulary of one versed in the crude socialistic pamphlets of his day, and, in spite of certain domineering habits bred in the sailor, the winning graces of his nationality. kearney appeared at meetings on the vacant lots known as the "sand lots," in front of the city hall of san francisco, and advised the discontented ones to "wrest the government from the hands of the rich and place it in those of the people." on september , , he rallied a group of unemployed around him and organized the workingman's trade and labor union of san francisco. on the th of october, at a great public meeting, the workingman's party of california was formed and kearney was elected president. the platform adopted by the party proposed to place the government in the hands of the people, to get rid of the chinese, to destroy the money power, to "provide decently for the poor and unfortunate, the weak and the helpless," and "to elect none but competent workingmen and their friends to any office whatever. . . . when we have , members we shall have the sympathy and support of , other workingmen. this party," concluded the pronouncement, "will exhaust all peaceable means of attaining its ends, but it will not be denied justice, when it has the power to enforce it. it will encourage no riot or outrage, but it will not volunteer to repress or put down or arrest or prosecute the hungry and impatient, who manifest their hatred of the chinamen by a crusade against 'john,' or those who employ him. let those who raise the storm by their selfishness, suppress it themselves. if they dare raise the devil, let them meet him face to face. we will not help them." in advocating these views, kearney held meeting after meeting, each rhetorically more violent than the last, until on the d of november he was arrested. this martyrdom in the cause of labor increased his power, and when he was released he was drawn by his followers in triumph through the streets on one of his own drays. his language became more and more extreme. he bludgeoned the "thieving politicians" and the "bloodsucking capitalists," and he advocated "judicious hanging" and "discretionary shooting." the city council passed an ordinance intended to gag him; the legislature enacted an extremely harsh riot act; a body of volunteers patrolled the streets of the city; a committee of safety was organized. on january , , kearney and a number of associates were indicted, arrested, and released on bail. when the trial jury acquitted kearney, what may be called the terrorism of the movement attained its height, but it fortunately spent itself in violent adjectives. the workingman's party, however, elected a workingman mayor of san francisco, joined forces with the grangers, and elected a majority of the members of the state constitutional convention which met in sacramento on september , . this was a notable triumph for a third party. the framing of a new constitution gave this coalition of farmers and workingmen an unusual opportunity to assail the evils which they declared infested the state. the instrument which they drafted bound the state legislature with numerous restrictions and made lobbying a felony; it reorganized the courts, placed innumerable limitations upon corporations, forbade the loaning of the credit or property of the state to corporations, and placed a state commission in charge of the railroads, which had been perniciously active in state politics. alas for these visions of reform! a few years after the adoption of this new constitution by california, hubert h. bancroft wrote: those objects which it particularly aimed at, it failed to achieve. the effect upon corporations disappointed its authors and supporters. many of them were strong enough still to defy state power and evade state laws, in protecting their interests, and this they did without scruple. the relation of capital and labor is even more strained than before the constitution was adopted. capital soon recovered from a temporary intimidation . . . labor still uneasy was still subject to the inexorable law of supply and demand. legislatures were still to be approached by agents . . . chinese were still employed in digging and grading. the state board of railroad commissioners was a useless expense, . . . being as wax in the hands of the companies it was set to watch. ¹ ¹ works (vol. xxiv): history of california, vol. vii, p. . after the collapse of the populist party, there is to be discerned in labor politics a new departure, due primarily to the attitude of the american federation of labor in partisan matters, and secondarily to the rise of political socialism. a socialistic party deriving its support almost wholly from foreign-born workmen had appeared in a few of the large cities in , but it was not until that a national party was organized, and not until after the collapse of populism that it assumed some political importance. in august, , a socialist-labor convention which was held in new york city nominated candidates for president and vice-president and adopted a platform that contained, besides the familiar economic demands of socialism, the rather unusual suggestion that the presidency, vice-presidency, and senate of the united states be abolished and that an executive board be established "whose members are to be elected, and may at any time be recalled, by the house of representatives, as the only legislative body, the states and municipalities to adopt corresponding amendments to their constitutions and statutes." under the title of the socialist-labor party, this ticket polled , votes in , and in , , votes. in the inevitable split occurred in the socialist ranks. eugene v. debs, the radical labor leader, who, as president of the american railway union, had directed the pullman strike and had become a martyr to the radical cause through his imprisonment for violating the orders of a federal court, organized the social-democratic party. in debs was nominated for president, and job harriman, representing the older wing, for vice-president. the ticket polled , votes. the socialist-labor party nominated a ticket of their own which received only , votes. eventually this party shrank to a mere remnant, while the social democratic party became generally known as the socialist party. debs became their candidate in three successive elections. in and his vote hovered around , . in congressional and local elections spurred the socialists to hope for a million votes in but they fell somewhat short of this mark. debs received , votes, the largest number which a socialist candidate has ever yet received. benson, the presidential candidate in , received , votes. ¹ ¹ the socialist vote is stated differently by mckee, national conventions and platforms. the above figures, to , are taken from stanwood's history of the presidency, and for and from the world almanac. in the meantime, the influence of the socialist labor vote in particular localities vastly increased. in milwaukee elected a socialist mayor by a plurality of seven thousand, sent victor berger to washington as the first socialist congressman, and elected labor-union members as five of the twelve socialist councilmen, thus revealing the sympathy of the working class for the cause. on january , , over three hundred towns and cities had one or more socialist officers. the estimated socialist vote of these localities was , , . the socialist officers included mayors, aldermen and councilmen, and school officers. this was not a sectional vote but represented new england and the far west, the oldest commonwealths and the newest, the north and the south, and cities filled with foreign workingmen as well as staid towns controlled by retired farmers and shopkeepers. when the united states entered the great war, the socialist party became a reservoir for all the unsavory disloyalties loosened by the shock of the great conflict. pacifists and pro-germans found a common refuge under its red banner. in the new york mayoralty elections in these socialists cast nearly one-fourth of the votes, and in the wisconsin senatorial election in victor berger, their standard-bearer, swept milwaukee, carried seven counties, and polled over one hundred thousand votes. on the other hand, a large number of american socialists, under the leadership of william english walling and john spargo, vigorously espoused the national cause and subordinated their economic and political theories to their loyalty. the socialists have repeatedly attempted to make official inroads upon organized labor. they have the sympathy of the i. w. w., the remnant of the knights of labor, and the more radical trades unions, but from the american federation of labor they have met only rebuff. a number of state federations, especially in the middle west, not a few city centrals, and some sixteen national unions, have officially approved of the socialist programme, but the federation has consistently refused such an endorsement. the political tactics assumed by the federation discountenance a distinct labor party movement, as long as the old parties are willing to subserve the ends of the unions. this self-restraint does not mean that the federation is not "in politics." on the contrary, it is constantly vigilant and aggressive and it engages every year in political maneuvers without, however, having a partisan organization of its own. at its annual conventions it has time and again urged local and state branches to scrutinize the records of legislative candidates and to see that only friends of union labor receive the union laborer's ballot. in it "firmly and unequivocally" favored "the independent use of the ballot by trade unionists and workmen united regardless of party, that we may elect men from our own ranks to write new laws and administer them along lines laid down in the legislative demands of the american federation of labor and at the same time secure an impartial judiciary that will not govern us by arbitrary injunctions of the courts, nor act as the pliant tool of corporate wealth." and in it determined, first, to defeat all candidates who are either hostile or indifferent to labor's demands; second, if neither party names such candidates, then to make independent labor nominations; third, in every instance to support "the men who have shown themselves to be friendly to labor." with great astuteness, perseverance, and alertness, the federation has pursued this method to its uttermost possibilities. in washington it has met with singular success, reaching a high-water mark in the first wilson administration, with the passage of the clayton bill and the eight-hour railroad bill. after this action, a great new york daily lamented that "congress is a subordinate branch of the american federation of labor . . . the unsleeping watchmen of organized labor know how intrepid most congressmen are when threatened with the 'labor vote.' the american laborites don't have to send men to congress as their british brethren do to the house of commons. from the galleries they watch the proceedings. they are mighty in committee rooms. they reason with the recalcitrant. they fight opponents in their congress districts. there are no abler or more potent politicians than the labor leaders out of congress. why should rulers like mr. gompers and mr. furuseth ¹ go to congress? they are a super-congress." ¹ andrew furuseth, the president of the seamen's union and reputed author of the seaman's act of . many congressmen have felt the retaliatory power of the federation. even such powerful leaders as congressman littlefield of maine and speaker cannon were compelled to exert their utmost to overcome union opposition. the federation has been active in seating union men in congress. in there were six union members in the house; in there were ten; in there were seventeen. the secretary of labor himself holds a union card. nor has the federation shrunk from active participation in the presidential lists. it bitterly opposed president roosevelt when he espoused the open shop in the government printing office; and in it openly espoused the democratic ticket. in thus maintaining a sort of grand partisan neutrality, the federation not only holds in numerous instances the balance of power but it makes party fealty its slave and avoids the costly luxury of maintaining a separate national organization of its own. the all-seeing lobby which it maintains at washington is a prototype of what one may discern in most state capitals when the legislature is in session. the legislative programmes adopted by the various state labor bodies are metamorphosed into demands, and well organized committees are present to coöperate with the labor members who sit in the legislature. the unions, through their steering committee, select with caution the members who are to introduce the labor bills and watch paternally over every stage in the progress of a measure. most of this legislative output has been strictly protective of union interests. labor, like all other interests that aim to use the power of government, has not been wholly altruistic in its motives, especially since in recent years it has found itself matched against such powerful organizations of employers as the manufacturers' association, the national erectors' association, and the metal trades association. in fact, in nearly every important industry the employers have organized for defensive and offensive purposes. these organizations match committee with committee, lobby with lobby, add espionage to open warfare, and issue effective literature in behalf of their open shop propaganda. the voluminous labor codes of such great manufacturing communities as massachusetts, new york, pennsylvania, and illinois, reflect a new and enlarged conception of the modern state. labor has generally favored measures that extend the inquisitional and regulative functions of the state, excepting where this extension seemed to interfere with the autonomy of labor itself. workshops, mines, factories, and other places of employment are now minutely inspected, and innumerable sanitary and safety provisions are enforced. a workman's compensation law removes from the employee's mind his anxiety for the fate of his family if he should be disabled. the labor contract, long extolled as the ægis of economic liberty, is no longer free from state vigilance. the time and method of paying wages are ordered by the state, and in certain industries the hours of labor are fixed by law. women and children are the special protégés of this new state, and great care is taken that they shall be engaged only in employment suitable to their strength and under an environment that will not ruin their health. the growing social control of the individual is significant, for it is not only the immediate conditions of labor that have come under public surveillance. where and how the workman lives is no longer a matter of indifference to the public, nor what sort of schooling his children get, what games they play, and what motion pictures they see. the city, in coöperation with the state, now provides nurses, dentists, oculists, and surgeons, as well as teachers for the children. this local paternalism increases yearly in its solicitude and receives the eager sanction of the labor members of city councils. the state has also set up elaborate machinery for observing all phases of the labor situation and for gathering statistics and other information that should be helpful in framing labor laws, and has also established state employment agencies and boards of conciliation and arbitration. this machinery of mediation is significant not because of what it has already accomplished but as evidence of the realization on the part of the state that labor disputes are not merely the concern of the two parties to the labor contract. society has finally come to realize that, in the complex of the modern state, it also is vitally concerned, and, in despair at thousands of strikes every year, with their wastage and their aftermath of bitterness, it has attempted to interpose its good offices as mediator. the modern labor laws cannot be credited, however, to labor activity alone. the new social atmosphere has provided a congenial milieu for this vast extension of state functions. the philanthropist, the statistician, and the sociologist have become potent allies of the labor-legislator; and such non-labor organizations, as the american association for labor legislation, have added their momentum to the movement. new ideals of social coöperation have been established, and new conceptions of the responsibilities of private ownership have been evolved. while labor organizations have succeeded rather readily in bending the legislative power to their wishes, the military arm of the executive and the judiciary which ultimately enforce the command of the state have been beyond their reach. to bend these branches of the government to its will, organized labor has fought a persistent and aggressive warfare. decisions of the courts which do not sustain union contentions are received with great disfavor. the open shop decisions of the united states supreme court are characterized as unfair and partisan and are vigorously opposed in all the labor journals. it is not, however, until the sanction of public opinion eventually backs the attitude of the unions that the laws and their interpretation can conform entirely to the desires of labor. the chief grievance of organized labor against the courts is their use of the injunction to prevent boycotts and strikes. "government by injunction" is the complaint of the unions and it is based upon the common, even reckless, use of a writ which was in origin and intent a high and rarely used prerogative of the court of chancery. what was in early times a powerful weapon in the hands of the crown against riotous assemblies and threatened lawlessness was invoked in by an english court as a remedy against industrial disturbances. ¹ since the civil war the american courts in rapidly increasing numbers have used this weapon, and the damascus blade of equity has been transformed into a bludgeon in the hands even of magistrates of inferior courts. ¹ springfield spinning company vs. riley, l. r. eq. . the prime objection which labor urges against this use of the injunction is that it deprives the defendant of a jury trial when his liberty is at stake. the unions have always insisted that the law should be so modified that this right would accompany all injunctions growing out of labor disputes. such a denatured injunction, however, would defeat the purpose of the writ; but the union leader maintains, on the other hand, that he is placed unfairly at a disadvantage, when an employer can command for his own aid in an industrial dispute the swift and sure arm of a law originally intended for a very different purpose. the imprisonment of debs during the pullman strike for disobeying a federal injunction brought the issue vividly before the public; and the sentencing of gompers, mitchell, and morrison to prison terms for violating the buck's stove injunction produced new waves of popular protest. occasional dissenting opinions by judges and the gradual conviction of lawyers and of society that some other tribunal than a court of equity or even a court of law would be more suitable for the settling of labor disputes is indicative of the change ultimately to be wrought in practice. the unions are also violently opposed to the use of military power by the state during strikes. not only can the militia be called out to enforce the mandates of the state but whenever federal interference is justified the united states troops may be sent to the scene of turmoil. after the period of great labor troubles culminating in the pullman strike, many states reorganized their militia into national guards. the armories built for the accommodation of the guard were called by the unions "plutocracy's bastiles," and the mounted state constabulary organized in by pennsylvania were at once dubbed "american cossacks." several states following the example of pennsylvania have encountered the bitterest hostility on the part of the labor unions. already opposition to the militia has proceeded so far that some unions have forbidden their members to perform militia service when called to do strike duty, and the military readjustments involved in the great war have profoundly affected the relation of the state to organized labor. following the signing of the armistice, a movement for the organization of an american labor party patterned after the british labour party gained rapid momentum, especially in new york and chicago. a platform of fourteen points was formulated at a general conference of the leaders, and provisional organizations were perfected in a number of cities. what power this latest attempt to enlist labor in partisan politics will assume is problematical. it is obviously inspired by european experiences and promulgated by socialistic propaganda. it has not succeeded in invading the american federation of labor, which did not formally endorse the movement at its annual convention in . gompers, in an intimate and moving speech, told a group of labor leaders gathered in new york on december , , that "the organization of a political party would simply mean the dividing of the activities and allegiance of the men and women of labor between two bodies, such as would often come in conflict." under present conditions, it would appear that no labor party could succeed in the united states without the coöperation of the american federation of labor. the relation between the american federation of labor and the socialistic and political labor movements, as well as the monopolistic eagerness of the socialists to absorb these activities, is clearly indicated in gompers's narrative of his experiences as an american labor representative at the london conference of . the following paragraphs are significant: when the inter-allied labor conference opened in london, on september th, early in the morning, there were sent over to my room at the hotel cards which were intended to be the credential cards for our delegation to sign and hand in as our credentials. the card read something like this: "the undersigned is a duly accredited delegate to the inter-allied socialist conference to be held at london," etc., and giving the dates. i refused to sign my name, or permit my name to be put upon any card of that character. my associates were as indignant as i was and refused to sign any such credential. we went to the hall where the conference was to be held. there was a young lady at the door. when we made an effort to enter she asked for our cards. we said we had no cards to present. "well," the answer came, "you cannot be admitted." we replied, "that may be true--we cannot be admitted--but we will not sign any such card. we have our credentials written out, signed, and sealed and will present them to any committee of the conference for scrutiny and recommendation, but we are not going to sign such a card." mr. charles bowerman, secretary of the parliamentary committee of the british trade union congress, at that moment emerged from the door. he asked why we had not entered. i told him the situation, and he persuaded the young lady to permit us to pass in. we entered the hall and presented our credentials. mr. james sexton, officer and representative of the docker's union of liverpool, arose and called the attention of the conference to this situation, and declared that the american federation of labor delegates refused to sign any such document. he said it was not an inter-allied socialist conference, but an inter-allied socialist and labor conference. mr. arthur henderson, of the labor party, made an explanation something to this effect, if my memory serves me: "it is really regrettable that such an error should have been made. it was due to the fact that the old card of credentials which has been used in former conferences was sent to the printer, no one paying any attention to it, thinking it was all right." i want to call your attention to the significance of that explanation, that is, that the trade union movement of great britain was represented at these former conferences, but at this conference the importance of labor was regarded as so insignificant that everybody took it for granted that it was perfectly all right to have the credential card read "inter-allied socialist conference" and with the omission of this more important term, "labor." ¹ ¹ american federationist, january, , pp. - . as one looks back upon the history of the workingman, one finds something impressive, even majestic, in the rise of the fourth estate from a humble place to one of power in this democratic nation. in this rise of fortune the laborer's union has unquestionably been a moving force, perhaps even the leading cause. at least this homogeneous mass of workingmen, guided by self-developed leadership, has aroused society to safeguard more carefully the individual needs of all its parts. labor has awakened the state to a sense of responsibility for its great sins of neglect and has made it conscious of its social duties. labor, like other elements of society, has often been selfish, narrow, vindictive; but it has also shown itself earnest and constructive. the conservative trades union, at the hour of this writing, stands as a bulwark between that amorphous, inefficient, irresponsible socialism which has made russia a lurid warning and prussia a word of scorn, and that rational social ideal which is founded upon the conviction that society is ultimately an organic spiritual unity, the blending of a thousand diverse interests whose justly combined labors and harmonized talents create civilization and develop culture. bibliographical note while there is a vast amount of writing on the labor problem, there are very few works on the history of labor organizations in the united states. the main reliance for the earlier period, in the foregoing pages, has been the documentary history of american industrial society, edited by john r. commons, vols. ( ). the history of labour in the united states, vols. ( ), which he published with associates, is the most convenient and complete compilation that has yet appeared and contains a large mass of historical material on the labor question. the following works are devoted to discussions of various phases of the history of american labor and industry: t. s. adams and helen l. sumner, labor problems ( ). contains several refreshing chapters on labor organizations. f. t. carlton, the history and problem of organized labor ( ). a succinct discussion of union problems. r. t. ely, the labor movement in america ( ). though one of the earliest american works on the subject, it remains indispensable. g. g. groat, an introduction to the study of organized labor in america ( ). a useful and up-to-date compendium. r. f. hoxie, trade unionism in the united states ( ). a suggestive study of the philosophy of unionism. j. r. commons (ed.), trade unionism and labor problems ( ). j. h. hollander and g. e. barnett (eds.), studies in american trade unionism ( ). these two volumes are collections of contemporary studies of many phases of organized labor by numerous scholars. they are not historical. the report of the industrial commission, vol. xvii ( ) provides the most complete analysis of trade-union policies and also contains valuable historical summaries of many unions. g. e. mcneill (ed.), the labor movement: the problem of today ( ). this collection contains historical sketches of the organizations of the greater labor groups and of the development of the more important issues espoused by them. for many years it was the most comprehensive historical work on american unionism, and it remains a necessary source of information to the student of trades union history. j. g. brissenden, the launching of the industrial workers of the world ( ). an account of the origin of the i. w. w. j. g. brooks, american syndicalism: the i. w. w. ( ). john mitchell, organized labor ( ). a suggestive exposition of the principles of unionism by a distinguished labor leader. it contains only a limited amount of historical matter. t. v. powderly, thirty years of labor ( ). a history of the knights of labor from a personal viewpoint. e. l. bogart, the economic history of the united states (rev. ed., ). a concise and clear account of our economic development. r. t. ely, evolution of industrial society ( ). carroll d. wright, the industrial evolution of the united states ( ). g. s. callender, selections from the economic history of the united states ( ). a collection of readings. the brief introductory essays to each chapter give a succinct account of american industrial development to . index a aberdeen (s. d.), i. w. w. in, . adamson law (eight-hour railroad law), (note), , - , . agrarian party, . akron (o.), strike in rubber works, - . albany, trade unions in, . albany mechanical society ( ), . allegheny city, ten-hour controversy in cotton mills, . amalgamated association of iron and steel workers, . amalgamated labor union, . amalgamated wood workers' association, . amboy (ill.), conductors' union organized ( ), . american alliance for labor and democracy, - . american association for labor legislation, . "american cossacks", . american federation of labor, suggested at terre haute ( ), ; established ( ), ; growth, - , organization, - , ; gompers and, et seq.; financial policy, ; and great war, et seq.; and labor readjustment, ; attitude toward socialism, , , , ; tendency toward amalgamating allied trades, - ; and unskilled labor, ; importance, - ; mitchell and, ; and brotherhood of locomotive engineers, (note); and buck's stove and range company boycott, ; and danbury hatters' case, ; and i. w. w., ; and lawrence mill workers, ; and politics, , - , ; influences legislation, - ; and american labor party movement, - . american federationist, organ of american federation of labor, , , . american labor party, movement for forming, . america newspaper publishers association, . american railway union, and strikes, , ; debs president of, . anthracite coal strike ( ), , - , ; commission cross-examines mitchell, (note). anti-boycott association, . anti-monopolist party, . arbitration, - ; law providing for settlement of railway disputes ( ), ; in anthracite coal strike, - ; board to deal with railway problems ( ), - ; erdman act ( ), , ; federal legislation ( ), - ; newlands law ( ), ; brotherhoods refuse ( ), - . arizona, "hobo" labor in, . arkwright, sir richard, invents roller spinning machine, . arnold, f. w., . arthur, p. m., - . association of longshoremen, . aurora, philadelphia newspaper, . b baltimore, guilds before revolution in, ; tailors' strike ( ), ; early unions in, ; baltimore and ohio strikes, , ; labor congress ( ), . bancroft, h. h., quoted, - . bank, united states, as political issue, . beecher, h. w., and eight-hour day, . belgium, syndicalism in, ; general strikes, . bell, a. g., and the telephone, . benson, a. l., presidential candidate ( ), - . bentham, jeremy, place and, . berger, victor, , . berne (switzerland), labor conference at, - . billings (mont.), treatment of i. w. w. leaders in, . bisbee (ariz.), i. w. w. strikers in, . bolshevists, gompers's attitude toward, ; and i. w. w., . boston, early trade unions in, ; strike benefits in, ; coöperative movement, - ; strikes because of cost of living ( ), ; eight-hour societies, ; workingman's party, . boston labor reform association circulates steward's pamphlet, . boston trades union, . bowerman, charles, . boycott, captain, (note). boycott, et seq.; used against convict labor, ; union label as weapon, - ; court injunction to prevent, . braidwood (ill.), mitchell at, - . brewer, justice d. j., on strike violence, . brewery workers and control of coopers, . brisbane, albert, . brissenden, j. g., the launching of the industrial workers of the world, cited, (note). brook farm experiment, . brotherhood of locomotive engineers, origin, ; and american federation of labor, (note); character, ; supervision of members, - ; excludes firemen, ; attitude toward nonmembers, - ; business policy, - ; activities, - ; organization, ; and firemen's brotherhood, . brotherhood of the footboard, . brotherhood of trainmen, . brush, c. f., and electric lighting, . buck's stove and range company of st. louis, boycott case, - , . buffalo, machinists' strike ( ), - ; annual convention of federation of labor ( ), ; railway strike ( ), ; i. w. w. disclosures, . burns, john, . butler, general b. f., - . butte (mont.), western federation of miners organized at, . c california, effect of discovery of gold on cost of living, ; "hobo" labor in, ; political labor movement, - ; workingman's party, ; new constitution, . cannon, j. g., . carlyle, thomas, ; and british industrial conditions, ; emerson writes to, . carter, w. s., - . cedar rapids (ia.), headquarters of order of railway conductors, . charleston navy yard, eight-hour day in ( ), . chevalier, michael, quoted, . chicago, stockyards' strike ( ), ; haymarket riots, , - ; railway strike ( ), ; "floaters" winter in, ; conferences organize i. w. w., - ; revolutionary branch of i. w. w. in, ; i. w. w. offices raided, ; labor party conference, ; movement to form american labor party, . child labor, ; in england, ; greeley and, - ; paris peace treaty and, ; state regulation, . chinese denounced in california, , . cigar-makers' international union, gompers and, . cincinnati, becomes manufacturing town ( ), ; early unions in, ; coöperative movement in, , ; railway strike ( ), ; national union party organized ( ), . civil war, condition of the united states after, - . clark, e. e., . clayton act, , , . cleveland, grover, message ( ), ; and pullman strike, . cleveland, brotherhood of locomotive engineers own building in, ; firemen's magazine published in, ; i. w. w. disclosures, . clinton, de witt, . collective bargaining, trade unions and, - . colorado, miners' strikes, , ; "hobo" labor in, ; labor ticket ( ), . columbia, puddlers' strike ( ), . columbus, american federation of labor established ( ), ; order of conductors organized ( ), . combinations in restraint of trade, origin of doctrine, ; in england, . coming nation, a. h. simons editor of, . commerce of great britain, . commons, j.r., - . communistic colonies, owen's attempts, - ; brook farm, . comstock, russell, . confédération général du travail, . congress, homestead act ( ), ; establishes eight-hour day for public work, ; clayton bill ( ), , , ; eight-hour railroad law, (note), , - , , ; wilson and, ; and i. w. w., ; american federation of labor, . connecticut, delegates to the national cordwainers' convention ( ), ; labor politics, , labor ticket ( ), . conspiracy, legal doctrine in england, - ; strikers tried for, ; trials in new york city, - , ; acting in unison considered, . convict labor, ; boycott used against, . cooper, peter, . coöperative movement, - ; . corn laws, . cost of living, bread riots caused by high, ; mooney on ( ), - ; in , ; stone's attempt to adjust wages to meet, . council of national defense, - . crompton, samuel, and spinning machine, . d daily advertiser, new york, on strikes ( ), . daily people, deleon editor of, . danbury hatters' boycott, , - . daniels, newell, . davis, judge david, . debs, e. v., , , , . debt, imprisonment for, . declaration of independence, . defoe, daniel, on domestic system of manufacture, - . delaware, delegates to national cordwainers' convention ( ), . deleon, daniel, . democratic party and ten-hour day, . detroit, headquarters for socialist factions of i. w. w., ; i. w. w. offices raided, . direct action, - . dover, (n. h.), mill girls' strike ( ), . duncan, james, . e edison, t. a., . education, condition before , ; issue with labor, , public school improvement, ; paris peace treaty and, . edward iii, proclamation of , . eidlitz, o. m., . eight-hour league, ; see also hours of labor. elevator constructors' union, eliot, c. w., and gompers, . ely, r. t., quoted, . emerson, r. w., on communistic experiments, . employers' organizations, . erdman act, , . erie railroad, firemen organize brotherhood, . erne, lord, irish landlord, (note). ettor, j. j., . evans, g. h., - . evans, samuel, . evening post, account of mass meeting in new york, ; quoted, . everett, edward, . everett (wash.), and i. w. w., . f factory girls' association (lowell), . factory inspection, paris peace treaty and, ; as political issue, ; provided by law, - . farmers' alliance, ; and knights of labor at st. louis, . federation of organized trades and labor unions of the united states and canada, . female industry association, . female labor reform association, . field, j. g., . finance, demand for capital after civil war, - ; reform as a political issue, ; people's party platform, ; see also panics, taxation. firemen's magazine, , . "five stars," see knights of labor. flynn, e. g., . force, peter, . foster, f. k., the labor movement, the problem of today, quoted, - . fox, martin, . france, syndicalism in, ; general strikes, . free enquirer, . friendly societies, . furuseth, andrew, . g garretson, a. b., , . general trades' union of new york city, . george, henry, ; evans precursor of, . glassblowers' union, . goldfield (nev.), i. w. w. at, . goldman, emma, on syndicalism, ; on general strikes, . gompers, samuel, president of american federation of labor, et seq.; early life, ; national lobbyist for federation, , ; organizes american alliance for labor and democracy, ; on council of defense, ; heads american labor mission to europe ( ), - ; and berne labor conference, - ; contribution to paris treaty of peace, - ; and socialism, - ; personal characteristics, ; sentenced to imprisonment, , ; birthday occasion of gift to danbury union, ; on american labor party, ; experience at london conference ( ), - . government control of public utilities, people's party demands, . government operation of railroads, brotherhoods' plan for ( ), . government ownership, national labor party on, (note). government printing office, roosevelt espouses open shop in, . grangers, help organize national union party, ; join workingman's party in california, . granite city (ill.), early morning strikes in steel mills, - . granite cutters' national union, . gray's harbor (wash.), i. w. w. in, . great britain, american institutions modeled after those of, - ; survey of industrial system, et seq.; ten-hour law in, ; british trades union as model for american federation, ; labor leaders in, ; labor compared with that in america, . great war, american federation of labor and, et seq.; and railroads, - ; i. w. w. and, ; and socialist party, - . greeley, horace, and ten-hour bill, ; on child labor law, ; and eight-hour day, . green point (l. i.), potters' strike ( ), . greenback party, , , . guild system, - , . h hamond, edward, on i. w. w., . hardie, keir, . hargreaves, james, invents spinning-jenny, . harriman, job, . hayes, dennis, - . hayes, r. b., proclamation, . haywood, w. d., , , ; quoted, . henderson, arthur, . henderson, john, . herald, new york, quoted, . hewitt, a. s., . highland park (ill.), home for disabled railroad men, . hines, w. d., director-general of railroads, . homestead act ( ), . homestead strike ( ), , . homesteaders, . hoqiam (wash.), sabotage in, . hours of labor, long hours, , ; ten-hour day, - , , , , , - , ; first ten-hour law ( ), ; as issue, - ; eight-hour day, - , , , ; paris peace treaty and eight-hour day, ; eight-hour railroad law, (note), , - , ; eight-hour law as political issue, ; state regulation, . housing conditions about , . hume, joseph, - . i i. w. w., see industrial workers of the world. idaho, miners' strike, ; "hobo" labor in, ; violence in, ; and i. w. w., . illinois, strikes, , ; eight-hour law ( ), ; i. w. w. and draft in, ; united labor party in, ; labor code, . illinois central railroad, conductors organize union, . immigration, character of immigrants, ; adds to armies of labor, ; i. w. w. and, ; people's party on, . indiana, strikes, , ; shoemakers' strike ( ), ; labor ticket ( ), . indianapolis, mcnamara trial at, . industrial commission, united states, ; report quoted, ; on union restriction of output, . industrial revolution, . industrial workers of the world, american alliance for labor and democracy as an anecdote for, ; and american federation of labor, ; history of movement, et seq.; factions, ; and direct action, - ; and socialist party, . industry, centralization of, - . "infidel" party, , . inspection, see factory inspection. insurance, locomotive engineers' mutual life and accident insurance association, - ; order of railway conductors, ; brotherhood of trainmen, - . inter-allied labor conference, london ( ), - . international association of machinists, . international association of steam, hot water and power pipe fitters and helpers, . international firemen's union, - . international typographical union of north america, , , . interstate commerce, regulation as political issue, . interstate commerce commission, and wage increases, ; clark on, ; wilson asks for reorganization of, . ipswich (mass.), meeting against i. w. w., . iron molders' union of north america, , . italy, syndicalism in, ; general strikes, . j jackson, andrew, and mechanics, . jay, john, on wages ( ), . jenkins, judge j. g., of united states circuit court, on strike violence, . johnstown, puddlers' strike ( ), . journeymen, stone cutters' association of north america, . judson, f. k., . k kansas, i. w. w. and draft, ; labor ticket ( ), . kay, john, invents flying shuttle, . kearney, dennis, . keefe, d. j., - . kidd, thomas, . knapp, judge, of united states commerce court, . knights of industry, . knights of labor, ; history of, - ; contrasted to american federation of labor, ; mitchell and, , ; and brotherhood of locomotive engineers, (note); help organize national union party, ; and farmers' alliance at st. louis, ; and socialist party, . "knights of st. crispin," , - . l labor, organizations in eighteenth century, - ; organizations in american before revolution, ; and politics, , , et seq.; relations with capital, ; number of wage-earners in united states ( - ), ; congress at baltimore ( ), ; bureau of, established ( ), ; and corporations, ; and paris peace treaty, - ; leaders, - ; department of, and brotherhoods, ; "floaters," - ; special report of united states commissioners of ( ), ; contract labor as political issue, ; legislation, - ; see also hours of labor; and the courts, - ; bibliography, ; see also child labor, convict labor, hours of labor, strikes, trade unions, wages. labor reform league, . labor reform party, , - . labour party in england, . land, evans and, - ; homestead act ( ), ; forfeiture of grants as political issue, . lawrence (mass.), unemployment ( ), ; strike ( ), - . lee. w. g., . lima (n. y.), clark at, . little falls (n. y.), strike in textile mills ( ), . littlefield, congressman from maine, - . locomotive engineers' journal, , . locomotive engineers' mutual life and accident insurance association, - . loeb, daniel, alias daniel deleon, . london, inter-allied labor conference ( ), - . london corresponding society, . los angeles, dynamiting of times building, . lowell (mass.), condition of women factory workers ( ), - ; women strike in ( ), . lowell female industrial reform and mutual aid society, . lynch, j. m., . m mcadoo, w. g., . mcculloch, j. r., . macdonald, ramsey, . machinists' union, . mckee, national conventions and platforms, cited, (note), (note). mckees rocks (penn.), i. w. w. at, . mcmaster, j. b., quoted, . mcnamara, james, . mcnamara, j. j., . maine, labor politics, , labor party ( ), . mann, horace, . manufacturers' association, . manufacturing, guild system replaced by domestic, ; introduction of machinery, - ; in united states, - . martineau, harriet, cited, - . marx, karl, ; follower addresses meeting in new york, . maryland, class distinctions, ; strikes, . massachusetts, factories in , ; first labor investigation, ; women factory workers, ; bureau of labor and collective bargaining, - ; labor politics, ; labor party ( ), ; labor code, . mechanics' union of trade associations, . menlo park, (n. j.), electric car in, . mercantile system, - . metal polishers' union and buck's stove and range case, . metal trades association, . mexican central railway, garretson on, . michigan, "hobo" labor in, ; labor ticket ( ), . militia, use during strikes, , - . mill, james, place and, . milwaukee, knights of st. crispin in, ; and socialism, , . minnesota, "hobo" labor in, ; labor ticket ( ), . missouri, strikes, ; eight-hour law ( ), ; labor ticket ( ), . mitchell, john, president of united mine workers, , , - ; his life and character, - ; and anthracite coal strike, - ; quoted, - ; on compulsory membership in unions, ; on collective bargaining, ; sentenced to imprisonment, , . montana, "hobo" labor in, ; violence in, ; and i. w. w., . mooney, thomas, nine years in america ( ), quoted, - . moore, ely, . morrison, frank, , . morrissey, p. h., , , - . n national civic federation, . national convention of journeymen printers ( ), . national erectors' association, . national labor party, convention, (note); see also labor reform party. national labor union, - , . national metal trade association, . national protective association, . national trade association of hat finishers, . national trades union, . national typographical union, . national union party, . navigation laws, , . nebraska, labor ticket ( ), . nevada, and i. w. w., . new brunswick, union in, . new england, class distinctions, ; manufacture in, ; women in textile mills, ; cotton weavers' strike ( ), ; labor politics, - . new england association of farmers, mechanics, and workingmen, . new england protective union, . new england workingmen's association, , . new hampshire, first ten-hour law, . new jersey, manufacturing in, ; delegates to national cordwainers' convention ( ), ; ten-hour law ( ), ; stablemen's strike ( ), ; labor party, . new york (state), delegates to national cordwainers' convention ( ), ; communistic colonies, ; cotton weavers' strike ( ), ; eight-hour law ( ), ; boycotts, ; labor party ( ), ; united labor party in, ; labor code, . new york boycotter quoted, . new york bureau of statistics and labor, on boycotts, . new york central railroad, arthur as engineer on, . new york city, early labor organizations, , ; cordwainers' strike ( ), - ; growth, ; strikes ( ), ; general trades' union organized, ; tailors' strike ( ), ; union in, ; boycott of convict labor, ; sabotage in ( ), ; strike benefits, ; coöperative movement, - ; women's organizations ( ), ; female industry association organized ( ), ; strikes ( ), ; national meeting of carpet-weavers ( ), ; demonstration in , - ; unemployment, ; ribbon weaver' strike ( ), ; stablemen's strike ( ), ; tailors' strike ( ), ; third avenue railway strike ( ), ; brotherhood of locomotive engineers expels members ( ), (note); garment makers' strike ( ), ; bakers strike ( ), ; mrs. grey boycotted, - ; "floaters" winter in, ; "army of the unemployed" ( - ), ; labor politics, ; election ( ), ; socialist-labor convention ( ), ; movement to form american labor party, . new york masons society ( ), . new york protective union, . new york society of journeymen shipwrights ( ), . new york typographical society, . newark (n. j.), union in, . newlands law, . noble order of the knights of labor, see knights of labor. northern pacific railroad, clark on, . norway, syndicalism in, . o o'connell, james, . o'conor, charles, of new york, . ohio, communistic colonies in, ; ten-hour law ( ), ; strikes, , ; in election of , ; labor ticket ( ), . oklahoma, i. w. w. and draft, . omaha, stockyards strike ( ), ; people's party convention ( ), . oneonta (n. y.), brotherhood of the trainmen organized at ( ), . orange (n. j.), hatters' union victory in, . order of railway conductors, - . oregon, "hobo" labor in, ; and i. w. w., . original working man's party, . osceola (ia.), garretson born in, . oshkosh (wis.), kidd arrested in, . owen, robert, place and, ; in america, - , . owens, r. d., , . p panics ( ), , , , - ; ( ), - ; ( - ), ; ( ), . paris peace conference, commission on international labor legislation, ; gompers and the treaty, - . parker, joel, governor of new jersey, . paterson (n. j.), ribbon weavers' strike ( ), ; silk mills strike ( ), - . pennsylvania, communistic colonies in, ; ten-hour law, ; child labor law, ; coal miners ( ), ; strikes, ; labor party ( ), ; labor ticket ( ), ; labor code, ; mounted constabulary, . pennsylvania railroad, brotherhood and, . people's council, . people's party, , ; see also populist party. philadelphia, early labor organizations, , ; weaving center, ; first trades' union in, ; trades' union of the city and county of, ; number of union members ( ), ; strike ( ), ; sabotage in, ; strike benefits, ; coöperative movement, - , ; strikes, ; unemployment ( ), ; ribbon weavers' strike ( ), ; knights of labor in, ; cordwainers ( ), ; cordwainers' strike ( ), ; hatters' union victory, ; lawrence strikers start for, ; workingman's party, - ; workingmen's political clubs, - . phillips, wendell, and ten-hour movement, ; and eight-hour day, ; nominated governor of massachusetts, . pinkerton detectives opposed by people's party, . pittsburgh, becomes manufacturing town, ; union in, ; strikes, ; riots, ; federation of organized trades established ( ), ; railway strikes ( ), . pittsburgh, fort wayne and chicago railroad, brotherhood and, ; place, francis, , . plumb plan of railroad operations, see government operation of railroads. poindexter, miles, senator, and i. w. w., . politics, labor and, , , et seq.. populist party, , ; see also people's party. port jervis (n. y.), firemen's brotherhood organized at, . portland (ore.), i. w. w. at, . postal savings banks, advocated by people's party, . powderly, t. v., grand master of knights of labor, - , . prison reform, . progressive party, . progressive labor party, . pullman strike, , , , , . q quinlan, patrick, . r railway brotherhoods, et seq. railway conductor, the, - . reading, railway strike ( ), . red bank (n. j.), communistic experiment at, . referendum, national labor party on, (note). revolutionary war, new epoch for labor begins with, . rhode island, ten-hour law ( ), ; labor politics, . ripley, george, and brook farm experiment, . rock island railroad, stone on, - . roosevelt, theodore, and gompers, , ; intervention in coal miners' strike, , ; and clark, ; and sargent, ; defeated as mayor of new york city, ; federation of labor opposes, . ruskin, john, and labor conditions, . russia, general strikes, . s sabotage, , et seq., . sacramento (cal.), i. w. w. trials ( ), ; workingman's party convention ( ), . st. louis, union in, ; knights of labor in, , ; meeting of knights of labor and farmers' alliance, . st. louis central trades and labor union, . san diego, i. w. w. in, - . san francisco, stablemen's strike ( ), ; "floaters" winter in, ; labor situation ( ), ; workingman's trade and labor union of, . sargent, f. p., . scandinavia, general strikes in, . schaffer, theodore, . schenectady, union in, . scranton (penn.), powderly at, . seaman's act ( ), (note). seamen's union, . sexton, james, . shaw, albert, . shaw, chief justice of massachusetts, opinion in commonwealth vs. hunt, - . sherman anti-trust law, gompers and, ; and boycott, . silver, free coinage, . simons, a. m., . skidmore, thomas, ; the rights of man to property . . ., . smith, adam, , ; the wealth of nations, . smith, sidney, quoted, - . snowden, phillip, . social democratic party, . socialism, synonym of destruction, ; organized labor and, , . socialist labor party, , . socialist party, ; social democratic party becomes known as, ; in milwaukee, ; progress ( ), ; and great war, - . socialist american labor union, . sorel, georges, the socialist future of the trade unions, - ; reflections upon violence, . spain, syndicalism in, . spargo, john, ; syndicalism, industrial unionism and socialism, . spokane, i. w. w. in, . springfield republican, on labor party, - . stanwood, history of the presidency, cited, (note). state guardianship plan, . statute of laborers ( ), . stephens, u. s., founder of knights of labor, - , , . steunenberg, frank, governor of idaho, murdered, . steward, ira, and eight-hour day, - ; a reduction of hours and increase of wages, . stone, w. s., - , - . strasser, adolph, testimony before senate committee ( ), - . strauss, o. s., . streeter, a. j., . strikes, weapon of self-defense, ; tailors' strike in baltimore ( ), ; cordwainers in philadelphia ( ), - ; cordwainers in new york city ( ), ; first general building strike ( ), ; first general strike in america ( ), - ; ( - ), ; issues not to be settled by, ; use of militia, , - ; sabotage, , et seq.; benefits, ; boston tailors ( ), - ; new york tailors, - ; dover mill girls ( ), ; lowell womens factory workers ( ), ; in , ; baltimore and ohio, , , ; become part of economic routine, ; increase in number and importance, - ; in , - ; of , , - ; anthracite coal strike, , - , ; o'connell leads, ; new york city railway ( ), (note); railroad, , , , , , ; brotherhood threatens ( ), , ; new york city garment makers, ; history in united states, - ; strike statistics of united states bureau of labor, , ; violence, - ; lawrence mill strike ( ), - ; little falls textile strike, ; akron rubber works, - ; granite city (ill.), steel mills, - ; court prevention, - . supreme court, danbury hatters' case, ; open shop decision, . "supreme mechanical order of the sun," . syndicalism, in europe, ; i. w. w. and, . t taft, w. h., vetoes exemption bill for anti-trust law, . tammany hall, . tannenbaum, frank, - . tariff, demand for protective, . tax reformers, . taxation, single tax, , ; income tax, , . terre haute (ind.), convention ( ), - . texas, i. w. w. and draft, . thomas, c. s., senator, report on i. w. w., . times, los angeles, dynamiting of building, . toledo, (o.), conference of labor reform and greenback parties, . trade unions, beginnings, - ; temporary eclipse, ; new species in the early fifties, - ; organization of special trades, ; organization, ; conventions, - ; local unions, - ; characterization of different trades, - ; disputes as to authority, - ; adjustment to changing conditions, - ; advantages of amalgamation, ; and labor leaders, et seq.; purpose, ; and collective bargaining, - ; question of monopoly, - ; and strikes, - ; local autonomy, ; union label, - ; restriction of output, - ; oppose use of military, ; bibliography, . trades' union of the city and county of philadelphia, . transportation, demand for better, . trautmann, w. e., ; quoted, . troy (n. y.), union in, . tulsa (okla.), treatment of i. w. w. in, . u unemployment, in , - ; in - , ; "floaters," ; among immigrants, ; in san francisco ( ), . union labor party, , ; see also national union labor party. union of longshoremen, marine and transport workers, . united association of journeymen plumbers, gas fitters, steam fitters and steam fitters' helpers, . united brotherhood of carpenters, . united brotherhood of carpenters and joiners of america, . united hatters of north america, . united labor party, , . united mine workers, , , - , , . v van buren, martin, executive order for ten-hour day, . van hise, c. r., . vermont, labor politics, . virginia, class distinction in, . w wages, beginning of controversy, - ; in , ; result of tailors' strike, ; rise of, ; in , ; carpenters', ; strikes to raise, ; mooney on ( ), ; issue, - ; paris peace treaty and, ; united mine workers and, ; arthur and engineers', ; stone and, ; eastern engineers demand standardization of, ; garretson and, ; brakemen's, ; wilkins and, ; adamson law and, ; further increase for railroad employees, ; trade unions and, - ; state regulation, . walling, w. e., . washington (state), "hobo" labor in, , and i. w. w., . washington, (d. c.), union in, ; knights of labor, ; headquarters of american federation of labor in, . weaver, general j. b., , . webb, sidney and beatrice, history of trade unionism, . weed, thurlow, . west roxbury (mass.), brook farm experiment at, . western federation of miners, , , , . whig party and ten-hour day, . wilkinson, s. e., . willard, daniel, , . wilson, woodrow, quoted, ; and clayton act, ; and garretson, ; and threatened strike of brotherhoods ( ), - ; and eight-hour railroad law, - . wisconsin, communistic experiment in, ; eight-hour law for women and children ( ), ; labor ticket ( ), ; socialist party ( ), . women, wages in , ; "new woman" movement, ; conditions of labor, - ; in factories, - ; organizations, - ; paris peace treaty and equal pay for, ; state regulation of labor, . wood workers in shipbuilding industry, . wood-workers international union, . wooden box makers, . "woodstock meetings," . working man's advocate, the, , . working man's gazette, . workingman's party, - . workingman's party of california, , . workingman's trade and labor union of san francisco, . workingmen's compensation, . wright, c. d., report quoted, . wright, frances, , . y youngson, a. b., . youngstown (o.), i. w. w. at, . the chronicles of america series the red man's continent by ellsworth huntington the spanish conquerors by irving berdine richman elizabethan sea-dogs by william charles henry wood the crusaders of new france by william bennett munro pioneers of the old south by mary johnson the fathers of new england by charles mclean andrews dutch and english on the hudson by maud wilder goodwin the quaker colonies by sydney george fisher colonial folkways by charles mclean andrews the conquest of new france by george mckinnon wrong the eve of the revolution by carl lotus becker washington and his comrades in arms by george mckinnon wrong the fathers of the constitution by max farrand washington and his colleagues by henry jones ford jefferson and his colleagues by allen johnson john marshall and the constitution by edward samuel corwin the fight for a free sea by ralph delahaye paine pioneers of the old southwest by constance lindsay skinner the old northwest by frederic austin ogg the reign of andrew jackson by frederic austin ogg the paths of inland commerce by archer butler hulbert adventurers of oregon by constance lindsay skinner the spanish borderlands by herbert e. bolton texas and the mexican war by nathaniel wright stephenson the forty-niners by stewart edward white the passing of the frontier by emerson hough the cotton kingdom by william e. dodd the anti-slavery crusade by jesse macy abraham lincoln and the union by nathaniel wright stephenson the day of the confederacy by nathaniel wright stephenson captains of the civil war by william charles henry wood the sequel of appomattox by walter lynwood fleming the american spirit in education by edwin e. slosson the american spirit in literature by bliss perry our foreigners by samuel peter orth the old merchant marine by ralph delahaye paine the age of invention by holland thompson the railroad builders by john moody the age of big business by burton jesse hendrick the armies of labor by samuel peter orth the masters of capital by john moody the new south by holland thompson the boss and the machine by samuel peter orth the cleveland era by henry jones ford the agrarian crusade by solon justus buck the path of empire by carl russell fish theodore roosevelt and his times by harold howland woodrow wilson and the world war by charles seymour the canadian dominion by oscar d. skelton the hispanic nations of the new world by william r. shepherd transcriber's note this e-book is a direct transcription of the textbook edition of the armies of labor by samuel p. orth. there were three instances where changes were made to correct an error: one in the bibliography, one in the index, and one on page . also, footnotes were changed in two instances due to the way we transcribe footnotes. there were some inconsistencies in hyphenating words, and these posed dilemmas in deciding how to transcribe a few words in the text. those decisions appear below with the emendations to the text. page : the phrase, "the son of a cigar-maker" hyphenated cigar-maker for spacing between two lines. we could transcribe the word two ways. there are multiple uses of "cigar-maker" (see page , page , and page for a few examples). there is one lone usage of "cigarmaker" on page . since usage in this book tended toward the hyphen, cigar-maker on page was transcribed with the hyphen. page and page : non-union is broken into two lines by a hyphen in two places in the same paragraph. we could transcribe the word two ways. the hyphen was employed on page , but nonunion was used on page and page . by a vote of - , nonunion prevailed. page : trade-mark was split between two lines and hyphenated for spacing, thus giving the transcriber a choice. only one other usage of the word was found in the text: trade-mark was hyphenated on page . we therefore used the hyphen on page and transcribed the word "trade-mark." page : on page the book was inconsistent by using a hyphen in the "social-democratic party," only to omit the hyphen a few sentences later, on the same page. the hyphen was also not used in the index. here, the inconsistency was retained. page : in transcribing a book, we place footnotes after the paragraph where the footnote belongs. the paragraph beginning on page and ending on page , contains footnotes. in the book, ¹ appears on page and ² appears on page , but both footnotes must be placed after the paragraph on page due to the way that we transcribe the book. therefore, footnote on page in the paper book is ¹ on page of the e-book; and footnote of page in the paper book is ² on page in the e-book. the same changes were made to the footnotes on page and page . the paragraph beginning on page and ending on page had a footnote, and a second paragraph on page had a footnote. in the book, ¹ appears on page and ² appears on page , but both footnotes must be placed on page due to the way that we transcribe the book. we changed the latter footnote on page to ² to reduce confusion. the paper book abbreviates the wobblies as i. w. w., which could cause the text formatter to break up the letters over two lines. one solution to overcome the text formatter is to write "i.w.w.", but the cramped phrase reads awkwardly. modern history books use "iww". i used the convention adopted by the paper book and hope that the reader is not too inconvenienced by the possible break of i. w. w. across two lines. page : changed "cooperation" to "coöperation" because every other spelling of that word and derivations had an oomlat. there were thirty-three occurrences of cöperation or coöperate or coöperate and even coördinate. the six occurrences of "coop" were either the name cooper or the profession. my guess is that the publisher left out the oomlat here by mistake when hyphenating the word into two lines for spacing. page : every other item in the bibliography has the date of the book in parenthesis with a period after the right parenthesis when the period is used. i have changed ( .) after terence powderly's book to ( ). page : insert a comma in the index after "industrial workers of the world" and before "american alliance . . .". copyright (c) by lidija rangelovska. please see the corresponding rtf file for this ebook. rtf is rich text format, and is readable in nearly any modern word processing program. charles franks, and the dp team my life and work by henry ford in collaboration with samuel crowther contents introduction--what is the idea? i. the beginning ii. what i learned about business iii. starting the real business iv. the secret of manufacturing and serving v. getting into production vi. machines and men vii. the terror of the machine. viii. wages ix. why not always have good business? x. how cheaply can things be made? xi. money and goods xii. money--master or servant? xiii. why be poor? xiv. the tractor and power farming xv. why charity? xvi. the railroads xvii. things in general xviii. democracy and industry xix. what we may expect. index introduction what is the idea? we have only started on our development of our country--we have not as yet, with all our talk of wonderful progress, done more than scratch the surface. the progress has been wonderful enough--but when we compare what we have done with what there is to do, then our past accomplishments are as nothing. when we consider that more power is used merely in ploughing the soil than is used in all the industrial establishments of the country put together, an inkling comes of how much opportunity there is ahead. and now, with so many countries of the world in ferment and with so much unrest every where, is an excellent time to suggest something of the things that may be done in the light of what has been done. when one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. and that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. with all of that i do not agree. i think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields. i think that we have already done too much toward banishing the pleasant things from life by thinking that there is some opposition between living and providing the means of living. we waste so much time and energy that we have little left over in which to enjoy ourselves. power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. they are but means to an end. for instance, i do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. if that was all there was to it i would do something else. i take them as concrete evidence of the working out of a theory of business, which i hope is something more than a theory of business--a theory that looks toward making this world a better place in which to live. the fact that the commercial success of the ford motor company has been most unusual is important only because it serves to demonstrate, in a way which no one can fail to understand, that the theory to date is right. considered solely in this light i can criticize the prevailing system of industry and the organization of money and society from the standpoint of one who has not been beaten by them. as things are now organized, i could, were i thinking only selfishly, ask for no change. if i merely want money the present system is all right; it gives money in plenty to me. but i am thinking of service. the present system does not permit of the best service because it encourages every kind of waste--it keeps many men from getting the full return from service. and it is going nowhere. it is all a matter of better planning and adjustment. i have no quarrel with the general attitude of scoffing at new ideas. it is better to be skeptical of all new ideas and to insist upon being shown rather than to rush around in a continuous brainstorm after every new idea. skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. an idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. almost any one can think up an idea. the thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. i am now most interested in fully demonstrating that the ideas we have put into practice are capable of the largest application--that they have nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something in the nature of a universal code. i am quite certain that it is the natural code and i want to demonstrate it so thoroughly that it will be accepted, not as a new idea, but as a natural code. the natural thing to do is to work--to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. human ills flow largely from attempting to escape from this natural course. i have no suggestion which goes beyond accepting in its fullest this principle of nature. i take it for granted that we must work. all that we have done comes as the result of a certain insistence that since we must work it is better to work intelligently and forehandedly; that the better we do our work the better off we shall be. all of which i conceive to be merely elemental common sense. i am not a reformer. i think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. we have two kinds of reformers. both are nuisances. the man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. he is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. it would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. this sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. experience and reform do not go together. a reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. he must discard all facts. since a great many persons have received brand-new intellectual outfits. many are beginning to think for the first time. they opened their eyes and realized that they were in the world. then, with a thrill of independence, they realized that they could look at the world critically. they did so and found it faulty. the intoxication of assuming the masterful position of a critic of the social system--which it is every man's right to assume--is unbalancing at first. the very young critic is very much unbalanced. he is strongly in favor of wiping out the old order and starting a new one. they actually managed to start a new world in russia. it is there that the work of the world makers can best be studied. we learn from russia that it is the minority and not the majority who determine destructive action. we learn also that while men may decree social laws in conflict with natural laws, nature vetoes those laws more ruthlessly than did the czars. nature has vetoed the whole soviet republic. for it sought to deny nature. it denied above all else the right to the fruits of labour. some people say, "russia will have to go to work," but that does not describe the case. the fact is that poor russia is at work, but her work counts for nothing. it is not free work. in the united states a workman works eight hours a day; in russia, he works twelve to fourteen. in the united states, if a workman wishes to lay off a day or a week, and is able to afford it, there is nothing to prevent him. in russia, under sovietism, the workman goes to work whether he wants to or not. the freedom of the citizen has disappeared in the discipline of a prison-like monotony in which all are treated alike. that is slavery. freedom is the right to work a decent length of time and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to arrange the little personal details of one's own life. it is the aggregate of these and many other items of freedom which makes up the great idealistic freedom. the minor forms of freedom lubricate the everyday life of all of us. russia could not get along without intelligence and experience. as soon as she began to run her factories by committees, they went to rack and ruin; there was more debate than production. as soon as they threw out the skilled man, thousands of tons of precious materials were spoiled. the fanatics talked the people into starvation. the soviets are now offering the engineers, the administrators, the foremen and superintendents, whom at first they drove out, large sums of money if only they will come back. bolshevism is now crying for the brains and experience which it yesterday treated so ruthlessly. all that "reform" did to russia was to block production. there is in this country a sinister element that desires to creep in between the men who work with their hands and the men who think and plan for the men who work with their hands. the same influence that drove the brains, experience, and ability out of russia is busily engaged in raising prejudice here. we must not suffer the stranger, the destroyer, the hater of happy humanity, to divide our people. in unity is american strength--and freedom. on the other hand, we have a different kind of reformer who never calls himself one. he is singularly like the radical reformer. the radical has had no experience and does not want it. the other class of reformer has had plenty of experience but it does him no good. i refer to the reactionary--who will be surprised to find himself put in exactly the same class as the bolshevist. he wants to go back to some previous condition, not because it was the best condition, but because he thinks he knows about that condition. the one crowd wants to smash up the whole world in order to make a better one. the other holds the world as so good that it might well be let stand as it is--and decay. the second notion arises as does the first--out of not using the eyes to see with. it is perfectly possible to smash this world, but it is not possible to build a new one. it is possible to prevent the world from going forward, but it is not possible then to prevent it from going back--from decaying. it is foolish to expect that, if everything be overturned, everyone will thereby get three meals a day. or, should everything be petrified, that thereby six per cent, interest may be paid. the trouble is that reformers and reactionaries alike get away from the realities--from the primary functions. one of the counsels of caution is to be very certain that we do not mistake a reactionary turn for a return of common sense. we have passed through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a great many idealistic maps of progress. we did not get anywhere. it was a convention, not a march. lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out. reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old times"--which usually means the bad old abuses--and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men." their return to power is often hailed as the return of common sense. the primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation. community life is impossible without them. they hold the world together. raising things, making things, and earning things are as primitive as human need and yet as modern as anything can be. they are of the essence of physical life. when they cease, community life ceases. things do get out of shape in this present world under the present system, but we may hope for a betterment if the foundations stand sure. the great delusion is that one may change the foundation--usurp the part of destiny in the social process. the foundations of society are the men and means to _grow_ things, to _make_ things, and to _carry_ things. as long as agriculture, manufacture, and transportation survive, the world can survive any economic or social change. as we serve our jobs we serve the world. there is plenty of work to do. business is merely work. speculation in things already produced--that is not business. it is just more or less respectable graft. but it cannot be legislated out of existence. laws can do very little. law never does anything constructive. it can never be more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our state capitals or to washington to do that which law was not designed to do. as long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow. we have had enough of looking to washington and we have had enough of legislators--not so much, however, in this as in other countries--promising laws to do that which laws cannot do. when you get a whole country--as did ours--thinking that washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augurs ill for the future. our help does not come from washington, but from ourselves; our help may, however, go to washington as a sort of central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the general good. we may help the government; the government cannot help us. the slogan of "less government in business and more business in government" is a very good one, not mainly on account of business or government, but on account of the people. business is not the reason why the united states was founded. the declaration of independence is not a business charter, nor is the constitution of the united states a commercial schedule. the united states--its land, people, government, and business--are but methods by which the life of the people is made worth while. the government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant. the moment the people become adjuncts to government, then the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural, immoral, and inhuman. we cannot live without business and we cannot live without government. business and government are necessary as servants, like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order. the welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. that is where it should be and that is where it is safest. governments can promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. they can juggle the currencies as they did in europe (and as bankers the world over do, as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of solemn nonsense. but it is work and work alone that can continue to deliver the goods--and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows. there is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining the fundamental processes of economic life. most men know they cannot get something for nothing. most men feel--even if they do not know--that money is not wealth. the ordinary theories which promise everything to everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons against them. he _knows_ they are wrong. that is enough. the present order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this advantage over any other--it works. doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one will also work--but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of what men will bring into it. the reason why bolshevism did not work, and cannot work, is not economic. it does not matter whether industry is privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you call the workers' share "wages" or "dividends"; it does not matter whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and shelter, or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like. those are mere matters of detail. the incapacity of the bolshevist leaders is indicated by the fuss they made over such details. bolshevism failed because it was both unnatural and immoral. our system stands. is it wrong? of course it is wrong, at a thousand points! is it clumsy? of course it is clumsy. by all right and reason it ought to break down. but it does not--because it is instinct with certain economic and moral fundamentals. the economic fundamental is labour. labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. it is men's labour that makes the harvest what it is. that is the economic fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not and could not create, but which was presented to us by nature. the moral fundamental is man's right in his labour. this is variously stated. it is sometimes called "the right of property." it is sometimes masked in the command, "thou shalt not steal." it is the other man's right in his property that makes stealing a crime. when a man has earned his bread, he has a right to that bread. if another steals it, he does more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. if we cannot produce we cannot have--but some say if we produce it is only for the capitalists. capitalists who become such because they provide better means of production are of the foundation of society. they have really nothing of their own. they merely manage property for the benefit of others. capitalists who become such through trading in money are a temporarily necessary evil. they may not be evil at all if their money goes to production. if their money goes to complicating distribution--to raising barriers between the producer and the consumer--then they are evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted to work; and money will become better adjusted to work when it is fully realized that through work and work alone may health, wealth, and happiness inevitably be secured. there is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be able to work and to receive the full value of his work. there is equally no reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the full value of his services to the community. he should most certainly be permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he contributes to it. if he contributes nothing he should take away nothing. he should have the freedom of starvation. we are not getting anywhere when we insist that every man ought to have more than he deserves to have--just because some do get more than they deserve to have. there can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal. most certainly all men are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress. men cannot be of equal service. the men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of smaller ability; it is possible for a mass of the smaller men to pull the larger ones down--but in so doing they pull themselves down. it is the larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the smaller men to live with less effort. the conception of democracy which names a leveling-down of ability makes for waste. no two things in nature are alike. we build our cars absolutely interchangeable. all parts are as nearly alike as chemical analysis, the finest machinery, and the finest workmanship can make them. no fitting of any kind is required, and it would certainly seem that two fords standing side by side, looking exactly alike and made so exactly alike that any part could be taken out of one and put into the other, would be alike. but they are not. they will have different road habits. we have men who have driven hundreds, and in some cases thousands of fords and they say that no two ever act precisely the same--that, if they should drive a new car for an hour or even less and then the car were mixed with a bunch of other new ones, also each driven for a single hour and under the same conditions, that although they could not recognize the car they had been driving merely by looking at it, they could do so by driving it. i have been speaking in general terms. let us be more concrete. a man ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that he renders. this is rather a good time to talk about this point, for we have recently been through a period when the rendering of service was the last thing that most people thought of. we were getting to a place where no one cared about costs or service. orders came without effort. whereas once it was the customer who favored the merchant by dealing with him, conditions changed until it was the merchant who favored the customer by selling to him. that is bad for business. monopoly is bad for business. profiteering is bad for business. the lack of necessity to hustle is bad for business. business is never as healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets. things were coming too easily. there was a let-down of the principle that an honest relation ought to obtain between values and prices. the public no longer had to be "catered to." there was even a "public be damned" attitude in many places. it was intensely bad for business. some men called that abnormal condition "prosperity." it was not prosperity-- it was just a needless money chase. money chasing is not business. it is very easy, unless one keeps a plan thoroughly in mind, to get burdened with money and then, in an effort to make more money, to forget all about selling to the people what they want. business on a money-making basis is most insecure. it is a touch-and-go affair, moving irregularly and rarely over a term of years amounting to much. it is the function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or speculation. producing for consumption implies that the quality of the article produced will be high and that the price will be low--that the article be one which serves the people and not merely the producer. if the money feature is twisted out of its proper perspective, then the production will be twisted to serve the producer. the producer depends for his prosperity upon serving the people. he may get by for a while serving himself, but if he does, it will be purely accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not being served, the end of that producer is in sight. during the boom period the larger effort of production was to serve itself and hence, the moment the people woke up, many producers went to smash. they said that they had entered into a "period of depression." really they had not. they were simply trying to pit nonsense against sense which is something that cannot successfully be done. being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of service--for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be right--then money abundantly takes care of itself. money comes naturally as the result of service. and it is absolutely necessary to have money. but we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service. in my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. none of us has any right to ease. there is no place in civilization for the idler. any scheme looking to abolishing money is only making affairs more complex, for we must have a measure. that our present system of money is a satisfactory basis for exchange is a matter of grave doubt. that is a question which i shall talk of in a subsequent chapter. the gist of my objection to the present monetary system is that it tends to become a thing of itself and to block instead of facilitate production. my effort is in the direction of simplicity. people in general have so little and it costs so much to buy even the barest necessities (let alone that share of the luxuries to which i think everyone is entitled) because nearly everything that we make is much more complex than it needs to be. our clothing, our food, our household furnishings--all could be much simpler than they now are and at the same time be better looking. things in past ages were made in certain ways and makers since then have just followed. i do not mean that we should adopt freak styles. there is no necessity for that clothing need not be a bag with a hole cut in it. that might be easy to make but it would be inconvenient to wear. a blanket does not require much tailoring, but none of us could get much work done if we went around indian-fashion in blankets. real simplicity means that which gives the very best service and is the most convenient in use. the trouble with drastic reforms is they always insist that a man be made over in order to use certain designed articles. i think that dress reform for women--which seems to mean ugly clothes--must always originate with plain women who want to make everyone else look plain. that is not the right process. start with an article that suits and then study to find some way of eliminating the entirely useless parts. this applies to everything--a shoe, a dress, a house, a piece of machinery, a railroad, a steamship, an airplane. as we cut out useless parts and simplify necessary ones we also cut down the cost of making. this is simple logic, but oddly enough the ordinary process starts with a cheapening of the manufacturing instead of with a simplifying of the article. the start ought to be with the article. first we ought to find whether it is as well made as it should be--does it give the best possible service? then--are the materials the best or merely the most expensive? then--can its complexity and weight be cut down? and so on. there is no more sense in having extra weight in an article than there is in the cockade on a coachman's hat. in fact, there is not as much. for the cockade may help the coachman to identify his hat while the extra weight means only a waste of strength. i cannot imagine where the delusion that weight means strength came from. it is all well enough in a pile-driver, but why move a heavy weight if we are not going to hit anything with it? in transportation why put extra weight in a machine? why not add it to the load that the machine is designed to carry? fat men cannot run as fast as thin men but we build most of our vehicles as though dead-weight fat increased speed! a deal of poverty grows out of the carriage of excess weight. some day we shall discover how further to eliminate weight. take wood, for example. for certain purposes wood is now the best substance we know, but wood is extremely wasteful. the wood in a ford car contains thirty pounds of water. there must be some way of doing better than that. there must be some method by which we can gain the same strength and elasticity without having to lug useless weight. and so through a thousand processes. the farmer makes too complex an affair out of his daily work. i believe that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about per cent of the energy that he spends. if any one ever equipped a factory in the style, say, the average farm is fitted out, the place would be cluttered with men. the worst factory in europe is hardly as bad as the average farm barn. power is utilized to the least possible degree. not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to logical arrangement. a farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. he will carry water for years instead of putting in a few lengths of pipe. his whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. he thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense. farm products at their lowest prices are dearer than they ought to be. farm profits at their highest are lower than they ought to be. it is waste motion--waste effort--that makes farm prices high and profits low. on my own farm at dearborn we do everything by machinery. we have eliminated a great number of wastes, but we have not as yet touched on real economy. we have not yet been able to put in five or ten years of intense night-and-day study to discover what really ought to be done. we have left more undone than we have done. yet at no time--no matter what the value of crops--have we failed to turn a first-class profit. we are not farmers--we are industrialists on the farm. the moment the farmer considers himself as an industrialist, with a horror of waste either in material or in men, then we are going to have farm products so low-priced that all will have enough to eat, and the profits will be so satisfactory that farming will be considered as among the least hazardous and most profitable of occupations. lack of knowledge of what is going on and lack of knowledge of what the job really is and the best way of doing it are the reasons why farming is thought not to pay. nothing could pay the way farming is conducted. the farmer follows luck and his forefathers. he does not know how economically to produce, and he does not know how to market. a manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to market would not long stay in business. that the farmer can stay on shows how wonderfully profitable farming can be. the way to attain low-priced, high-volume production in the factory or on the farm--and low-priced, high-volume production means plenty for everyone--is quite simple. the trouble is that the general tendency is to complicate very simple affairs. take, for an instance, an "improvement." when we talk about improvements usually we have in mind some change in a product. an "improved" product is one that has been changed. that is not my idea. i do not believe in starting to make until i have discovered the best possible thing. this, of course, does not mean that a product should never be changed, but i think that it will be found more economical in the end not even to try to produce an article until you have fully satisfied yourself that utility, design, and material are the best. if your researches do not give you that confidence, then keep right on searching until you find confidence. the place to start manufacturing is with the article. the factory, the organization, the selling, and the financial plans will shape themselves to the article. you will have a cutting, edge on your business chisel and in the end you will save time. rushing into manufacturing without being certain of the product is the unrecognized cause of many business failures. people seem to think that the big thing is the factory or the store or the financial backing or the management. the big thing is the product, and any hurry in getting into fabrication before designs are completed is just so much waste time. i spent twelve years before i had a model t--which is what is known to-day as the ford car--that suited me. we did not attempt to go into real production until we had a real product. that product has not been essentially changed. we are constantly experimenting with new ideas. if you travel the roads in the neighbourhood of dearborn you can find all sorts of models of ford cars. they are experimental cars--they are not new models. i do not believe in letting any good idea get by me, but i will not quickly decide whether an idea is good or bad. if an idea seems good or seems even to have possibilities, i believe in doing whatever is necessary to test out the idea from every angle. but testing out the idea is something very different from making a change in the car. where most manufacturers find themselves quicker to make a change in the product than in the method of manufacturing--we follow exactly the opposite course. our big changes have been in methods of manufacturing. they never stand still. i believe that there is hardly a single operation in the making of our car that is the same as when we made our first car of the present model. that is why we make them so cheaply. the few changes that have been made in the car have been in the direction of convenience in use or where we found that a change in design might give added strength. the materials in the car change as we learn more and more about materials. also we do not want to be held up in production or have the expense of production increased by any possible shortage in a particular material, so we have for most parts worked out substitute materials. vanadium steel, for instance, is our principal steel. with it we can get the greatest strength with the least weight, but it would not be good business to let our whole future depend upon being able to get vanadium steel. we have worked out a substitute. all our steels are special, but for every one of them we have at least one, and sometimes several, fully proved and tested substitutes. and so on through all of our materials and likewise with our parts. in the beginning we made very few of our parts and none of our motors. now we make all our motors and most of our parts because we find it cheaper to do so. but also we aim to make some of every part so that we cannot be caught in any market emergency or be crippled by some outside manufacturer being unable to fill his orders. the prices on glass were run up outrageously high during the war; we are among the largest users of glass in the country. now we are putting up our own glass factory. if we had devoted all of this energy to making changes in the product we should be nowhere; but by not changing the product we are able to give our energy to the improvement of the making. the principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge. if there is a single principle on which our business rests it is that. it makes no difference how finely made a chisel is or what splendid steel it has in it or how well it is forged--if it has no cutting edge it is not a chisel. it is just a piece of metal. all of which being translated means that it is what a thing does--not what it is supposed to do--that matters. what is the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light blow on a sharp chisel will do the work? the chisel is there to cut, not to be hammered. the hammering is only incidental to the job. so if we want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest possible fashion? the cutting edge of merchandising is the point where the product touches the consumer. an unsatisfactory product is one that has a dull cutting edge. a lot of waste effort is needed to put it through. the cutting edge of a factory is the man and the machine on the job. if the man is not right the machine cannot be; if the machine is not right the man cannot be. for any one to be required to use more force than is absolutely necessary for the job in hand is waste. the essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery of true service. both waste and greed are unnecessary. waste is due largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing of it. greed is merely a species of nearsightedness. i have striven toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit, depending for the total profit upon the volume of distribution. in the process of manufacturing i want to distribute the maximum of wage--that is, the maximum of buying power. since also this makes for a minimum cost and we sell at a minimum profit, we can distribute a product in consonance with buying power. thus everyone who is connected with us--either as a manager, worker, or purchaser--is the better for our existence. the institution that we have erected is performing a service. that is the only reason i have for talking about it. the principles of that service are these: . an absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. one who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. there is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. what is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress. . a disregard of competition. whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. it is criminal to try to get business away from another man--criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the condition of one's fellow man--to rule by force instead of by intelligence. . the putting of service before profit. without a profit, business cannot extend. there is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. it cannot be the basis--it must be the result of service. . manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. it is the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving it to the consumer. gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only to clog this progression. how all of this arose, how it has worked out, and how it applies generally are the subjects of these chapters. chapter i the beginning of business on may , , the ford motor company turned out car no. , , . it is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that i began work on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring of . i was running it when the bobolinks came to dearborn and they always come on april nd. there is all the difference in the world in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously alike--except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have not yet quite adopted in our modern car. for that first car or buggy, even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built. the development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. the whole design has been refined; the present ford car, which is the "model t," has four cylinders and a self starter--it is in every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. it is simpler than the first car. but almost every point in it may be found also in the first car. the changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not through any change in the basic principle--which i take to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. one idea at a time is about as much as any one can handle. it was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to better transportation. i was born on july , , on a farm at dearborn, michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place. that is the way i still feel about farming. there is a legend that my parents were very poor and that the early days were hard ones. certainly they were not rich, but neither were they poor. as michigan farmers went, we were prosperous. the house in which i was born is still standing, and it and the farm are part of my present holding. there was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of the time. even when very young i suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. that is what took me into mechanics--although my mother always said that i was born a mechanic. i had a kind of workshop with odds and ends of metal for tools before i had anything else. in those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home made. my toys were all tools--they still are! and every fragment of machinery was a treasure. the biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine about eight miles out of detroit one day when we were driving to town. i was then twelve years old. the second biggest event was getting a watch--which happened in the same year. i remember that engine as though i had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than horse-drawn that i had ever seen. it was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank and coal cart trailing behind. i had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the rear wheels of the wagon-like frame on which the boiler was mounted. the engine was placed over the boiler and one man standing on the platform behind the boiler shoveled coal, managed the throttle, and did the steering. it had been made by nichols, shepard & company of battle creek. i found that out at once. the engine had stopped to let us pass with our horses and i was off the wagon and talking to the engineer before my father, who was driving, knew what i was up to. the engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair. he was proud of it. he showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt put on to drive other machinery. he told me that the engine made two hundred revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. this last is a feature which, although in different fashion, is incorporated into modern automobiles. it was not important with steam engines, which are easily stopped and started, but it became very important with the gasoline engine. it was that engine which took me into automotive transportation. i tried to make models of it, and some years later i did make one that ran very well, but from the time i saw that road engine as a boy of twelve right forward to to-day, my great interest has been in making a machine that would travel the roads. driving to town i always had a pocket full of trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of machinery. often i took a broken watch and tried to put it together. when i was thirteen i managed for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. by the time i was fifteen i could do almost anything in watch repairing--although my tools were of the crudest. there is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. it is not possible to learn from books how everything is made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. he gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas. from the beginning i never could work up much interest in the labour of farming. i wanted to have something to do with machinery. my father was not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. he thought that i ought to be a farmer. when i left school at seventeen and became an apprentice in the machine shop of the drydock engine works i was all but given up for lost. i passed my apprenticeship without trouble--that is, i was qualified to be a machinist long before my three-year term had expired--and having a liking for fine work and a leaning toward watches i worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. at one period of those early days i think that i must have had fully three hundred watches. i thought that i could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents and nearly started in the business. but i did not because i figured out that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people generally would not buy them. just how i reached that surprising conclusion i am unable to state. i did not like the ordinary jewelry and watch making work excepting where the job was hard to do. even then i wanted to make something in quantity. it was just about the time when the standard railroad time was being arranged. we had formerly been on sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving days, the railroad time differed from the local time. that bothered me a good deal and so i succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. it had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighbourhood. in --that is, about four years after i first saw that nichols-shepard machine--i managed to get a chance to run one and when my apprenticeship was over i worked with a local representative of the westinghouse company of schenectady as an expert in the setting up and repair of their road engines. the engine they put out was much the same as the nichols-shepard engine excepting that the engine was up in front, the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied to the back wheels by a belt. they could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. they were sometimes used as tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner also happened to be in the threshing-machine business, he hitched his threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from farm to farm. what bothered me was the weight and the cost. they weighed a couple of tons and were far too expensive to be owned by other than a farmer with a great deal of land. they were mostly employed by people who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some other line that required portable power. even before that time i had the idea of making some kind of a light steam car that would take the place of horses--more especially, however, as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of ploughing. it occurred to me, as i remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. a horseless carriage was a common idea. people had been talking about carriages without horses for many years back--in fact, ever since the steam engine was invented--but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. our roads were poor and we had not the habit of getting around. one of the most remarkable features of the automobile on the farm is the way that it has broadened the farmer's life. we simply took for granted that unless the errand were urgent we would not go to town, and i think we rarely made more than a trip a week. in bad weather we did not go even that often. being a full-fledged machinist and with a very fair workshop on the farm it was not difficult for me to build a steam wagon or tractor. in the building of it came the idea that perhaps it might be made for road use. i felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all the bother of attending them and the expense of feeding, did not earn their keep. the obvious thing to do was to design and build a steam engine that would be light enough to run an ordinary wagon or to pull a plough. i thought it more important first to develop the tractor. to lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition. it was circumstances that took me first into the actual manufacture of road cars. i found eventually that people were more interested in something that would travel on the road than in something that would do the work on the farms. in fact, i doubt that the light farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm had not the farmer had his eyes opened slowly but surely by the automobile. but that is getting ahead of the story. i thought the farmer would be more interested in the tractor. i built a steam car that ran. it had a kerosene-heated boiler and it developed plenty of power and a neat control--which is so easy with a steam throttle. but the boiler was dangerous. to get the requisite power without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not altogether pleasant. to make it even reasonably safe required an excess of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. for two years i kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers--the engine and control problems were simple enough--and then i definitely abandoned the whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. i knew that in england they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam tractor for use on a large farm. but ours were not then english roads; they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest road tractor. and anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while. but i did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. the work with the westinghouse representative only served to confirm the opinion i had formed that steam was not suitable for light vehicles. that is why i stayed only a year with that company. there was nothing more that the big steam tractors and engines could teach me and i did not want to waste time on something that would lead nowhere. a few years before--it was while i was an apprentice--i read in the _world of science_, an english publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming out in england. i think it was the otto engine. it ran with illuminating gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. as far as weight was concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as even a possibility for road use. it was interesting to me only as all machinery was interesting. i followed in the english and american magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline. the idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. they were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and i do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. all the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. they never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. that is the way with wise people--they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. that is why i never employ an expert in full bloom. if ever i wanted to kill opposition by unfair means i would endow the opposition with experts. they would have so much good advice that i could be sure they would do little work. the gas engine interested me and i followed its progress, but only from curiosity, until about or when, the steam engine being discarded as the motive power for the carriage that i intended some day to build, i had to look around for another sort of motive power. in i repaired an otto engine at the eagle iron works in detroit. no one in town knew anything about them. there was a rumour that i did and, although i had never before been in contact with one, i undertook and carried through the job. that gave me a chance to study the new engine at first hand and in i built one on the otto four-cycle model just to see if i understood the principles. "four cycle" means that the piston traverses the cylinder four times to get one power impulse. the first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the third is the explosion or power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the waste gas. the little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch bore and a three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did not develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the engines being offered commercially. i gave it away later to a young man who wanted it for something or other and whose name i have forgotten; it was eventually destroyed. that was the beginning of the work with the internal combustion engine. i was then on the farm to which i had returned, more because i wanted to experiment than because i wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, i had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days. my father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided i gave up being a machinist. i agreed in a provisional way, for cutting the timber gave me a chance to get married. i fitted out a sawmill and a portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the tract. some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new farm and in it we began our married life. it was not a big house--thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high--but it was a comfortable place. i added to it my workshop, and when i was not cutting timber i was working on the gas engines--learning what they were and how they acted. i read everything i could find, but the greatest knowledge came from the work. a gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing--it will not always go the way it should. you can imagine how those first engines acted! it was in that i began on a double-cylinder engine. it was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes--the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. between making the first four-cycle engine of the otto type and the start on a double cylinder i had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. i fairly knew my way about. the double cylinder i thought could be applied to a road vehicle and my original idea was to put it on a bicycle with a direct connection to the crankshaft and allowing for the rear wheel of the bicycle to act as the balance wheel. the speed was going to be varied only by the throttle. i never carried out this plan because it soon became apparent that the engine, gasoline tank, and the various necessary controls would be entirely too heavy for a bicycle. the plan of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering power the other would be exhausting. this naturally would not require so heavy a fly-wheel to even the application of power. the work started in my shop on the farm. then i was offered a job with the detroit electric company as an engineer and machinist at forty-five dollars a month. i took it because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and i had decided to get away from farm life anyway. the timber had all been cut. we rented a house on bagley avenue, detroit. the workshop came along and i set it up in a brick shed at the back of the house. during the first several months i was in the night shift at the electric-light plant--which gave me very little time for experimenting--but after that i was in the day shift and every night and all of every saturday night i worked on the new motor. i cannot say that it was hard work. no work with interest is ever hard. i always am certain of results. they always come if you work hard enough. but it was a very great thing to have my wife even more confident than i was. she has always been that way. i had to work from the ground up--that is, although i knew that a number of people were working on horseless carriages, i could not know what they were doing. the hardest problems to overcome were in the making and breaking of the spark and in the avoidance of excess weight. for the transmission, the steering gear, and the general construction, i could draw on my experience with the steam tractors. in i completed my first motor car, but it was not until the spring of the following year that it ran to my satisfaction. this first car had something of the appearance of a buggy. there were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. i made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that i had bought. they developed about four horsepower. the power was transmitted from the motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a chain. the car would hold two people, the seat being suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. there were two speeds--one of ten and the other of twenty miles per hour--obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in front of the driving seat. thrown forward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown back, the low speed; with the lever upright the engine could run free. to start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with the clutch free. to stop the car one simply released the clutch and applied the foot brake. there was no reverse, and speeds other than those of the belt were obtained by the throttle. i bought the iron work for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. the wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. the balance wheel i had cast from a pattern that i made and all of the more delicate mechanism i made myself. one of the features that i discovered necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. the machine altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. a tank under the seat held three gallons of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small pipe and a mixing valve. the ignition was by electric spark. the original machine was air-cooled--or to be more accurate, the motor simply was not cooled at all. i found that on a run of an hour or more the motor heated up, and so i very shortly put a water jacket around the cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car over the cylinders. nearly all of these various features had been planned in advance. that is the way i have always worked. i draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before starting to build. for otherwise one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. it will not be rightly proportioned. many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting. the largest building difficulties that i had were in obtaining the proper materials. the next were with tools. there had to be some adjustments and changes in details of the design, but what held me up most was that i had neither the time nor the money to search for the best material for each part. but in the spring of the machine was running to my partial satisfaction and giving an opportunity further to test out the design and material on the road. chapter ii what i learned about business my "gasoline buggy" was the first and for a long time the only automobile in detroit. it was considered to be something of a nuisance, for it made a racket and it scared horses. also it blocked traffic. for if i stopped my machine anywhere in town a crowd was around it before i could start up again. if i left it alone even for a minute some inquisitive person always tried to run it. finally, i had to carry a chain and chain it to a lamp post whenever i left it anywhere. and then there was trouble with the police. i do not know quite why, for my impression is that there were no speed-limit laws in those days. anyway, i had to get a special permit from the mayor and thus for a time enjoyed the distinction of being the only licensed chauffeur in america. i ran that machine about one thousand miles through and and then sold it to charles ainsley of detroit for two hundred dollars. that was my first sale. i had built the car not to sell but only to experiment with. i wanted to start another car. ainsley wanted to buy. i could use the money and we had no trouble in agreeing upon a price. it was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty fashion. i was looking ahead to production, but before that could come i had to have something to produce. it does not pay to hurry. i started a second car in ; it was much like the first but a little lighter. it also had the belt drive which i did not give up until some time later; the belts were all right excepting in hot weather. that is why i later adopted gears. i learned a great deal from that car. others in this country and abroad were building cars by that time, and in i heard that a benz car from germany was on exhibition in macy's store in new york. i traveled down to look at it but it had no features that seemed worth while. it also had the belt drive, but it was much heavier than my car. i was working for lightness; the foreign makers have never seemed to appreciate what light weight means. i built three cars in all in my home shop and all of them ran for years in detroit. i still have the first car; i bought it back a few years later from a man to whom mr. ainsley had sold it. i paid one hundred dollars for it. during all this time i kept my position with the electric company and gradually advanced to chief engineer at a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. but my gas-engine experiments were no more popular with the president of the company than my first mechanical leanings were with my father. it was not that my employer objected to experiments--only to experiments with a gas engine. i can still hear him say: "electricity, yes, that's the coming thing. but gas--no." he had ample grounds for his skepticism--to use the mildest terms. practically no one had the remotest notion of the future of the internal combustion engine, while we were just on the edge of the great electrical development. as with every comparatively new idea, electricity was expected to do much more than we even now have any indication that it can do. i did not see the use of experimenting with electricity for my purposes. a road car could not run on a trolley even if trolley wires had been less expensive; no storage battery was in sight of a weight that was practical. an electrical car had of necessity to be limited in radius and to contain a large amount of motive machinery in proportion to the power exerted. that is not to say that i held or now hold electricity cheaply; we have not yet begun to use electricity. but it has its place, and the internal combustion engine has its place. neither can substitute for the other--which is exceedingly fortunate. i have the dynamo that i first had charge of at the detroit edison company. when i started our canadian plant i bought it from an office building to which it had been sold by the electric company, had it revamped a little, and for several years it gave excellent service in the canadian plant. when we had to build a new power plant, owing to the increase in business, i had the old motor taken out to my museum--a room out at dearborn that holds a great number of my mechanical treasures. the edison company offered me the general superintendency of the company but only on condition that i would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful. i had to choose between my job and my automobile. i chose the automobile, or rather i gave up the job--there was really nothing in the way of a choice. for already i knew that the car was bound to be a success. i quit my job on august , , and went into the automobile business. it might be thought something of a step, for i had no personal funds. what money was left over from living was all used in experimenting. but my wife agreed that the automobile could not be given up--that we had to make or break. there was no "demand" for automobiles--there never is for a new article. they were accepted in much the fashion as was more recently the airplane. at first the "horseless carriage" was considered merely a freak notion and many wise people explained with particularity why it could never be more than a toy. no man of money even thought of it as a commercial possibility. i cannot imagine why each new means of transportation meets with such opposition. there are even those to-day who shake their heads and talk about the luxury of the automobile and only grudgingly admit that perhaps the motor truck is of some use. but in the beginning there was hardly any one who sensed that the automobile could be a large factor in industry. the most optimistic hoped only for a development akin to that of the bicycle. when it was found that an automobile really could go and several makers started to put out cars, the immediate query was as to which would go fastest. it was a curious but natural development--that racing idea. i never thought anything of racing, but the public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than as a fast toy. therefore later we had to race. the industry was held back by this initial racing slant, for the attention of the makers was diverted to making fast rather than good cars. it was a business for speculators. a group of men of speculative turn of mind organized, as soon as i left the electric company, the detroit automobile company to exploit my car. i was the chief engineer and held a small amount of the stock. for three years we continued making cars more or less on the model of my first car. we sold very few of them; i could get no support at all toward making better cars to be sold to the public at large. the whole thought was to make to order and to get the largest price possible for each car. the main idea seemed to be to get the money. and being without authority other than my engineering position gave me, i found that the new company was not a vehicle for realizing my ideas but merely a money-making concern--that did not make much money. in march, , i resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders. the detroit automobile company later became the cadillac company under the ownership of the lelands, who came in subsequently. i rented a shop--a one-story brick shed--at park place to continue my experiments and to find out what business really was. i thought that it must be something different from what it had proved to be in my first adventure. the year from until the formation of the ford motor company was practically one of investigation. in my little one-room brick shop i worked on the development of a four-cylinder motor and on the outside i tried to find out what business really was and whether it needed to be quite so selfish a scramble for money as it seemed to be from my first short experience. from the period of the first car, which i have described, until the formation of my present company i built in all about twenty-five cars, of which nineteen or twenty were built with the detroit automobile company. the automobile had passed from the initial stage where the fact that it could run at all was enough, to the stage where it had to show speed. alexander winton of cleveland, the founder of the winton car, was then the track champion of the country and willing to meet all comers. i designed a two-cylinder enclosed engine of a more compact type than i had before used, fitted it into a skeleton chassis, found that i could make speed, and arranged a race with winton. we met on the grosse point track at detroit. i beat him. that was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read. the public thought nothing of a car unless it made speed--unless it beat other racing cars. my ambition to build the fastest car in the world led me to plan a four-cylinder motor. but of that more later. the most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the large attention given to finance and the small attention to service. that seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the money should come as the result of work and not before the work. the second feature was the general indifference to better methods of manufacture as long as whatever was done got by and took the money. in other words, an article apparently was not built with reference to how greatly it could serve the public but with reference solely to how much money could be had for it--and that without any particular care whether the customer was satisfied. to sell him was enough. a dissatisfied customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up the work which ought to have been done correctly in the first place. for instance, in automobiles there was not much concern as to what happened to the car once it had been sold. how much gasoline it used per mile was of no great moment; how much service it actually gave did not matter; and if it broke down and had to have parts replaced, then that was just hard luck for the owner. it was considered good business to sell parts at the highest possible price on the theory that, since the man had already bought the car, he simply had to have the part and would be willing to pay for it. the automobile business was not on what i would call an honest basis, to say nothing of being, from a manufacturing standpoint, on a scientific basis, but it was no worse than business in general. that was the period, it may be remembered, in which many corporations were being floated and financed. the bankers, who before then had confined themselves to the railroads, got into industry. my idea was then and still is that if a man did his work well, the price he would get for that work, the profits and all financial matters, would care for themselves and that a business ought to start small and build itself up and out of its earnings. if there are no earnings then that is a signal to the owner that he is wasting his time and does not belong in that business. i have never found it necessary to change those ideas, but i discovered that this simple formula of doing good work and getting paid for it was supposed to be slow for modern business. the plan at that time most in favor was to start off with the largest possible capitalization and then sell all the stock and all the bonds that could be sold. whatever money happened to be left over after all the stock and bond-selling expenses and promoters, charges and all that, went grudgingly into the foundation of the business. a good business was not one that did good work and earned a fair profit. a good business was one that would give the opportunity for the floating of a large amount of stocks and bonds at high prices. it was the stocks and bonds, not the work, that mattered. i could not see how a new business or an old business could be expected to be able to charge into its product a great big bond interest and then sell the product at a fair price. i have never been able to see that. i have never been able to understand on what theory the original investment of money can be charged against a business. those men in business who call themselves financiers say that money is "worth" per cent, or per cent, or some other per cent, and that if a business has one hundred thousand dollars invested in it, the man who made the investment is entitled to charge an interest payment on the money, because, if instead of putting that money into the business he had put it into a savings bank or into certain securities, he could have a certain fixed return. therefore they say that a proper charge against the operating expenses of a business is the interest on this money. this idea is at the root of many business failures and most service failures. money is not worth a particular amount. as money it is not worth anything, for it will do nothing of itself. the only use of money is to buy tools to work with or the product of tools. therefore money is worth what it will help you to produce or buy and no more. if a man thinks that his money will earn per cent, or per cent, he ought to place it where he can get that return, but money placed in a business is not a charge on the business--or, rather, should not be. it ceases to be money and becomes, or should become, an engine of production, and it is therefore worth what it produces--and not a fixed sum according to some scale that has no bearing upon the particular business in which the money has been placed. any return should come after it has produced, not before. business men believed that you could do anything by "financing" it. if it did not go through on the first financing then the idea was to "refinance." the process of "refinancing" was simply the game of sending good money after bad. in the majority of cases the need of refinancing arises from bad management, and the effect of refinancing is simply to pay the poor managers to keep up their bad management a little longer. it is merely a postponement of the day of judgment. this makeshift of refinancing is a device of speculative financiers. their money is no good to them unless they can connect it up with a place where real work is being done, and that they cannot do unless, somehow, that place is poorly managed. thus, the speculative financiers delude themselves that they are putting their money out to use. they are not; they are putting it out to waste. i determined absolutely that never would i join a company in which finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a part. and further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind of business that i thought could be managed in the interest of the public, then i simply would not get started at all. for my own short experience, together with what i saw going on around me, was quite enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted to accomplish anything. also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. i have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. for the only foundation of real business is service. a manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. he has then only started with his customer. in the case of an automobile the sale of the machine is only something in the nature of an introduction. if the machine does not give service, then it is better for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have the worst of all advertisements--a dissatisfied customer. there was something more than a tendency in the early days of the automobile to regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. that is the shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. if a salesman is paid only for what he sells, it is not to be expected that he is going to exert any great effort on a customer out of whom no more commission is to be made. and it is right on this point that we later made the largest selling argument for the ford. the price and the quality of the car would undoubtedly have made a market, and a large market. we went beyond that. a man who bought one of our cars was in my opinion entitled to continuous use of that car, and therefore if he had a breakdown of any kind it was our duty to see that his machine was put into shape again at the earliest possible moment. in the success of the ford car the early provision of service was an outstanding element. most of the expensive cars of that period were ill provided with service stations. if your car broke down you had to depend on the local repair man--when you were entitled to depend upon the manufacturer. if the local repair man were a forehanded sort of a person, keeping on hand a good stock of parts (although on many of the cars the parts were not interchangeable), the owner was lucky. but if the repair man were a shiftless person, with an adequate knowledge of automobiles and an inordinate desire to make a good thing out of every car that came into his place for repairs, then even a slight breakdown meant weeks of laying up and a whopping big repair bill that had to be paid before the car could be taken away. the repair men were for a time the largest menace to the automobile industry. even as late as and the owner of an automobile was regarded as essentially a rich man whose money ought to be taken away from him. we met that situation squarely and at the very beginning. we would not have our distribution blocked by stupid, greedy men. that is getting some years ahead of the story, but it is control by finance that breaks up service because it looks to the immediate dollar. if the first consideration is to earn a certain amount of money, then, unless by some stroke of luck matters are going especially well and there is a surplus over for service so that the operating men may have a chance, future business has to be sacrificed for the dollar of to-day. and also i noticed a tendency among many men in business to feel that their lot was hard--they worked against a day when they might retire and live on an income--get out of the strife. life to them was a battle to be ended as soon as possible. that was another point i could not understand, for as i reasoned, life is not a battle except with our own tendency to sag with the downpull of "getting settled." if to petrify is success all one has to do is to humour the lazy side of the mind but if to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep awake all day. i saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays. life, as i see it, is not a location, but a journey. even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled--he is probably sagging back. everything is in flux, and was meant to be. life flows. we may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there. and out of the delusion that life is a battle that may be lost by a false move grows, i have noticed, a great love for regularity. men fall into the half-alive habit. seldom does the cobbler take up with the new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly take up with new methods in his trade. habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. it will be recalled that when a study was made of shop methods, so that the workmen might be taught to produce with less useless motion and fatigue, it was most opposed by the workmen themselves. though they suspected that it was simply a game to get more out of them, what most irked them was that it interfered with the well-worn grooves in which they had become accustomed to move. business men go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. one sees them all about--men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year's ideas. it could almost be written down as a formula that when a man begins to think that he has at last found his method he had better begin a most searching examination of himself to see whether some part of his brain has not gone to sleep. there is a subtle danger in a man thinking that he is "fixed" for life. it indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off. there is also the great fear of being thought a fool. so many men are afraid of being considered fools. i grant that public opinion is a powerful police influence for those who need it. perhaps it is true that the majority of men need the restraint of public opinion. public opinion may keep a man better than he would otherwise be--if not better morally, at least better as far as his social desirability is concerned. but it is not a bad thing to be a fool for righteousness' sake. the best of it is that such fools usually live long enough to prove that they were not fools--or the work they have begun lives long enough to prove they were not foolish. the money influence--the pressing to make a profit on an "investment"--and its consequent neglect of or skimping of work and hence of service showed itself to me in many ways. it seemed to be at the bottom of most troubles. it was the cause of low wages--for without well-directed work high wages cannot be paid. and if the whole attention is not given to the work it cannot be well directed. most men want to be free to work; under the system in use they could not be free to work. during my first experience i was not free--i could not give full play to my ideas. everything had to be planned to make money; the last consideration was the work. and the most curious part of it all was the insistence that it was the money and not the work that counted. it did not seem to strike any one as illogical that money should be put ahead of work--even though everyone had to admit that the profit had to come from the work. the desire seemed to be to find a short cut to money and to pass over the obvious short cut--which is through the work. take competition; i found that competition was supposed to be a menace and that a good manager circumvented his competitors by getting a monopoly through artificial means. the idea was that there were only a certain number of people who could buy and that it was necessary to get their trade ahead of someone else. some will remember that later many of the automobile manufacturers entered into an association under the selden patent just so that it might be legally possible to control the price and the output of automobiles. they had the same idea that so many trades unions have--the ridiculous notion that more profit can be had doing less work than more. the plan, i believe, is a very antiquated one. i could not see then and am still unable to see that there is not always enough for the man who does his work; time spent in fighting competition is wasted; it had better be spent in doing the work. there are always enough people ready and anxious to buy, provided you supply what they want and at the proper price--and this applies to personal services as well as to goods. during this time of reflection i was far from idle. we were going ahead with a four-cylinder motor and the building of a pair of big racing cars. i had plenty of time, for i never left my business. i do not believe a man can ever leave his business. he ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night. it is nice to plan to do one's work in office hours, to take up the work in the morning, to drop it in the evening--and not have a care until the next morning. it is perfectly possible to do that if one is so constituted as to be willing through all of his life to accept direction, to be an employee, possibly a responsible employee, but not a director or manager of anything. a manual labourer must have a limit on his hours, otherwise he will wear himself out. if he intends to remain always a manual labourer, then he should forget about his work when the whistle blows, but if he intends to go forward and do anything, the whistle is only a signal to start thinking over the day's work in order to discover how it might be done better. the man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed. i cannot pretend to say, because i do not know, whether the man who works always, who never leaves his business, who is absolutely intent upon getting ahead, and who therefore does get ahead--is happier than the man who keeps office hours, both for his brain and his hands. it is not necessary for any one to decide the question. a ten-horsepower engine will not pull as much as a twenty. the man who keeps brain office hours limits his horsepower. if he is satisfied to pull only the load that he has, well and good, that is his affair--but he must not complain if another who has increased his horsepower pulls more than he does. leisure and work bring different results. if a man wants leisure and gets it--then he has no cause to complain. but he cannot have both leisure and the results of work. concretely, what i most realized about business in that year--and i have been learning more each year without finding it necessary to change my first conclusions--is this: ( ) that finance is given a place ahead of work and therefore tends to kill the work and destroy the fundamental of service. ( ) that thinking first of money instead of work brings on fear of failure and this fear blocks every avenue of business--it makes a man afraid of competition, of changing his methods, or of doing anything which might change his condition. ( ) that the way is clear for any one who thinks first of service--of doing the work in the best possible way. chapter iii starting the real business in the little brick shop at park place i had ample opportunity to work out the design and some of the methods of manufacture of a new car. even if it were possible to organize the exact kind of corporation that i wanted--one in which doing the work well and suiting the public would be controlling factors--it became apparent that i never could produce a thoroughly good motor car that might be sold at a low price under the existing cut-and-try manufacturing methods. everybody knows that it is always possible to do a thing better the second time. i do not know why manufacturing should not at that time have generally recognized this as a basic fact--unless it might be that the manufacturers were in such a hurry to obtain something to sell that they did not take time for adequate preparation. making "to order" instead of making in volume is, i suppose, a habit, a tradition, that has descended from the old handicraft days. ask a hundred people how they want a particular article made. about eighty will not know; they will leave it to you. fifteen will think that they must say something, while five will really have preferences and reasons. the ninety-five, made up of those who do not know and admit it and the fifteen who do not know but do not admit it, constitute the real market for any product. the five who want something special may or may not be able to pay the price for special work. if they have the price, they can get the work, but they constitute a special and limited market. of the ninety-five perhaps ten or fifteen will pay a price for quality. of those remaining, a number will buy solely on price and without regard to quality. their numbers are thinning with each day. buyers are learning how to buy. the majority will consider quality and buy the biggest dollar's worth of quality. if, therefore, you discover what will give this per cent. of people the best all-round service and then arrange to manufacture at the very highest quality and sell at the very lowest price, you will be meeting a demand which is so large that it may be called universal. this is not standardizing. the use of the word "standardizing" is very apt to lead one into trouble, for it implies a certain freezing of design and method and usually works out so that the manufacturer selects whatever article he can the most easily make and sell at the highest profit. the public is not considered either in the design or in the price. the thought behind most standardization is to be able to make a larger profit. the result is that with the economies which are inevitable if you make only one thing, a larger and larger profit is continually being had by the manufacturer. his output also becomes larger--his facilities produce more--and before he knows it his markets are overflowing with goods which will not sell. these goods would sell if the manufacturer would take a lower price for them. there is always buying power present--but that buying power will not always respond to reductions in price. if an article has been sold at too high a price and then, because of stagnant business, the price is suddenly cut, the response is sometimes most disappointing. and for a very good reason. the public is wary. it thinks that the price-cut is a fake and it sits around waiting for a real cut. we saw much of that last year. if, on the contrary, the economies of making are transferred at once to the price and if it is well known that such is the policy of the manufacturer, the public will have confidence in him and will respond. they will trust him to give honest value. so standardization may seem bad business unless it carries with it the plan of constantly reducing the price at which the article is sold. and the price has to be reduced (this is very important) because of the manufacturing economies that have come about and not because the falling demand by the public indicates that it is not satisfied with the price. the public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money. standardization (to use the word as i understand it) is not just taking one's best selling article and concentrating on it. it is planning day and night and probably for years, first on something which will best suit the public and then on how it should be made. the exact processes of manufacturing will develop of themselves. then, if we shift the manufacturing from the profit to the service basis, we shall have a real business in which the profits will be all that any one could desire. all of this seems self-evident to me. it is the logical basis of any business that wants to serve per cent. of the community. it is the logical way in which the community can serve itself. i cannot comprehend why all business does not go on this basis. all that has to be done in order to adopt it is to overcome the habit of grabbing at the nearest dollar as though it were the only dollar in the world. the habit has already to an extent been overcome. all the large and successful retail stores in this country are on the one-price basis. the only further step required is to throw overboard the idea of pricing on what the traffic will bear and instead go to the common-sense basis of pricing on what it costs to manufacture and then reducing the cost of manufacture. if the design of the product has been sufficiently studied, then changes in it will come very slowly. but changes in manufacturing processes will come very rapidly and wholly naturally. that has been our experience in everything we have undertaken. how naturally it has all come about, i shall later outline. the point that i wish to impress here is that it is impossible to get a product on which one may concentrate unless an unlimited amount of study is given beforehand. it is not just an afternoon's work. these ideas were forming with me during this year of experimenting. most of the experimenting went into the building of racing cars. the idea in those days was that a first-class car ought to be a racer. i never really thought much of racing, but following the bicycle idea, the manufacturers had the notion that winning a race on a track told the public something about the merits of an automobile--although i can hardly imagine any test that would tell less. but, as the others were doing it, i, too, had to do it. in , with tom cooper, i built two cars solely for speed. they were quite alike. one we named the " " and the other the "arrow." if an automobile were going to be known for speed, then i was going to make an automobile that would be known wherever speed was known. these were. i put in four great big cylinders giving h.p.--which up to that time had been unheard of. the roar of those cylinders alone was enough to half kill a man. there was only one seat. one life to a car was enough. i tried out the cars. cooper tried out the cars. we let them out at full speed. i cannot quite describe the sensation. going over niagara falls would have been but a pastime after a ride in one of them. i did not want to take the responsibility of racing the " " which we put up first, neither did cooper. cooper said he knew a man who lived on speed, that nothing could go too fast for him. he wired to salt lake city and on came a professional bicycle rider named barney oldfield. he had never driven a motor car, but he liked the idea of trying it. he said he would try anything once. it took us only a week to teach him how to drive. the man did not know what fear was. all that he had to learn was how to control the monster. controlling the fastest car of to-day was nothing as compared to controlling that car. the steering wheel had not yet been thought of. all the previous cars that i had built simply had tillers. on this one i put a two-handed tiller, for holding the car in line required all the strength of a strong man. the race for which we were working was at three miles on the grosse point track. we kept our cars as a dark horse. we left the predictions to the others. the tracks then were not scientifically banked. it was not known how much speed a motor car could develop. no one knew better than oldfield what the turns meant and as he took his seat, while i was cranking the car for the start, he remarked cheerily: "well, this chariot may kill me, but they will say afterward that i was going like hell when she took me over the bank." and he did go.... he never dared to look around. he did not shut off on the curves. he simply let that car go--and go it did. he was about half a mile ahead of the next man at the end of the race! the " " did what it was intended to do: it advertised the fact that i could build a fast motorcar. a week after the race i formed the ford motor company. i was vice-president, designer, master mechanic, superintendent, and general manager. the capitalization of the company was one hundred thousand dollars, and of this i owned / per cent. the total amount subscribed in cash was about twenty-eight thousand dollars--which is the only money that the company has ever received for the capital fund from other than operations. in the beginning i thought that it was possible, notwithstanding my former experience, to go forward with a company in which i owned less than the controlling share. i very shortly found i had to have control and therefore in , with funds that i had earned in the company, i bought enough stock to bring my holdings up to per cent, and a little later bought enough more to give me - / per cent. the new equipment and the whole progress of the company have always been financed out of earnings. in my son edsel purchased the remaining - / per cent of the stock because certain of the minority stockholders disagreed with my policies. for these shares he paid at the rate of $ , for each $ par and in all paid about seventy-five millions. the original company and its equipment, as may be gathered, were not elaborate. we rented strelow's carpenter shop on mack avenue. in making my designs i had also worked out the methods of making, but, since at that time we could not afford to buy machinery, the entire car was made according to my designs, but by various manufacturers, and about all we did, even in the way of assembling, was to put on the wheels, the tires, and the body. that would really be the most economical method of manufacturing if only one could be certain that all of the various parts would be made on the manufacturing plan that i have above outlined. the most economical manufacturing of the future will be that in which the whole of an article is not made under one roof--unless, of course, it be a very simple article. the modern--or better, the future--method is to have each part made where it may best be made and then assemble the parts into a complete unit at the points of consumption. that is the method we are now following and expect to extend. it would make no difference whether one company or one individual owned all the factories fabricating the component parts of a single product, or whether such part were made in our independently owned factory, _if only all adopted the same service methods_. if we can buy as good a part as we can make ourselves and the supply is ample and the price right, we do not attempt to make it ourselves--or, at any rate, to make more than an emergency supply. in fact, it might be better to have the ownership widely scattered. i had been experimenting principally upon the cutting down of weight. excess weight kills any self-propelled vehicle. there are a lot of fool ideas about weight. it is queer, when you come to think of it, how some fool terms get into current use. there is the phrase "heavyweight" as applied to a man's mental apparatus! what does it mean? no one wants to be fat and heavy of body--then why of head? for some clumsy reason we have come to confuse strength with weight. the crude methods of early building undoubtedly had much to do with this. the old ox-cart weighed a ton--and it had so much weight that it was weak! to carry a few tons of humanity from new york to chicago, the railroad builds a train that weighs many hundred tons, and the result is an absolute loss of real strength and the extravagant waste of untold millions in the form of power. the law of diminishing returns begins to operate at the point where strength becomes weight. weight may be desirable in a steam roller but nowhere else. strength has nothing to do with weight. the mentality of the man who does things in the world is agile, light, and strong. the most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated. strength is never just weight--either in men or things. whenever any one suggests to me that i might increase weight or add a part, i look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part! the car that i designed was lighter than any car that had yet been made. it would have been lighter if i had known how to make it so--later i got the materials to make the lighter car. in our first year we built "model a," selling the runabout for eight hundred and fifty dollars and the tonneau for one hundred dollars more. this model had a two-cylinder opposed motor developing eight horsepower. it had a chain drive, a seventy-two inch wheel base--which was supposed to be long--and a fuel capacity of five gallons. we made and sold , cars in the first year. that is how well the public responded. every one of these "model a's" has a history. take no. . colonel d. c. collier of california bought it in . he used it for a couple of years, sold it, and bought a new ford. no. changed hands frequently until when it was bought by one edmund jacobs living near ramona in the heart of the mountains. he drove it for several years in the roughest kind of work. then he bought a new ford and sold his old one. by no. had passed into the hands of a man named cantello who took out the motor, hitched it to a water pump, rigged up shafts on the chassis and now, while the motor chugs away at the pumping of water, the chassis drawn by a burro acts as a buggy. the moral, of course, is that you can dissect a ford but you cannot kill it. in our first advertisement we said: our purpose is to construct and market an automobile specially designed for everyday wear and tear--business, professional, and family use; an automobile which will attain to a sufficient speed to satisfy the average person without acquiring any of those breakneck velocities which are so universally condemned; a machine which will be admired by man, woman, and child alike for its compactness, its simplicity, its safety, its all-around convenience, and--last but not least--its exceedingly reasonable price, which places it within the reach of many thousands who could not think of paying the comparatively fabulous prices asked for most machines. and these are the points we emphasized: good material. simplicity--most of the cars at that time required considerable skill in their management. the engine. the ignition--which was furnished by two sets of six dry cell batteries. the automatic oiling. the simplicity and the ease of control of the transmission, which was of the planetary type. the workmanship. we did not make the pleasure appeal. we never have. in its first advertising we showed that a motor car was a utility. we said: we often hear quoted the old proverb, "time is money"--and yet how few business and professional men act as if they really believed its truth. men who are constantly complaining of shortage of time and lamenting the fewness of days in the week--men to whom every five minutes wasted means a dollar thrown away--men to whom five minutes' delay sometimes means the loss of many dollars--will yet depend on the haphazard, uncomfortable, and limited means of transportation afforded by street cars, etc., when the investment of an exceedingly moderate sum in the purchase of a perfected, efficient, high-grade automobile would cut out anxiety and unpunctuality and provide a luxurious means of travel ever at your beck and call. always ready, always sure. built to save you time and consequent money. built to take you anywhere you want to go and bring you back again on time. built to add to your reputation for punctuality; to keep your customers good-humoured and in a buying mood. built for business or pleasure--just as you say. built also for the good of your health--to carry you "jarlessly" over any kind of half decent roads, to refresh your brain with the luxury of much "out-doorness" and your lungs with the "tonic of tonics"--the right kind of atmosphere. it is your say, too, when it comes to speed. you can--if you choose--loiter lingeringly through shady avenues or you can press down on the foot-lever until all the scenery looks alike to you and you have to keep your eyes skinned to count the milestones as they pass. i am giving the gist of this advertisement to show that, from the beginning, we were looking to providing service--we never bothered with a "sporting car." the business went along almost as by magic. the cars gained a reputation for standing up. they were tough, they were simple, and they were well made. i was working on my design for a universal single model but i had not settled the designs nor had we the money to build and equip the proper kind of plant for manufacturing. i had not the money to discover the very best and lightest materials. we still had to accept the materials that the market offered--we got the best to be had but we had no facilities for the scientific investigation of materials or for original research. my associates were not convinced that it was possible to restrict our cars to a single model. the automobile trade was following the old bicycle trade, in which every manufacturer thought it necessary to bring out a new model each year and to make it so unlike all previous models that those who had bought the former models would want to get rid of the old and buy the new. that was supposed to be good business. it is the same idea that women submit to in their clothing and hats. that is not service--it seeks only to provide something new, not something better. it is extraordinary how firmly rooted is the notion that business--continuous selling--depends not on satisfying the customer once and for all, but on first getting his money for one article and then persuading him he ought to buy a new and different one. the plan which i then had in the back of my head but to which we were not then sufficiently advanced to give expression, was that, when a model was settled upon then every improvement on that model should be interchangeable with the old model, so that a car should never get out of date. it is my ambition to have every piece of machinery, or other non-consumable product that i turn out, so strong and so well made that no one ought ever to have to buy a second one. a good machine of any kind ought to last as long as a good watch. in the second year we scattered our energies among three models. we made a four-cylinder touring car, "model b," which sold for two thousand dollars; "model c," which was a slightly improved "model a" and sold at fifty dollars more than the former price; and "model f," a touring car which sold for a thousand dollars. that is, we scattered our energy and increased prices--and therefore we sold fewer cars than in the first year. the sales were , cars. that "model b"--the first four-cylinder car for general road use--had to be advertised. winning a race or making a record was then the best kind of advertising. so i fixed up the "arrow," the twin of the old " "--in fact practically remade it--and a week before the new york automobile show i drove it myself over a surveyed mile straightaway on the ice. i shall never forget that race. the ice seemed smooth enough, so smooth that if i had called off the trial we should have secured an immense amount of the wrong kind of advertising, but instead of being smooth, that ice was seamed with fissures which i knew were going to mean trouble the moment i got up speed. but there was nothing to do but go through with the trial, and i let the old "arrow" out. at every fissure the car leaped into the air. i never knew how it was coming down. when i wasn't in the air, i was skidding, but somehow i stayed top side up and on the course, making a record that went all over the world! that put "model b" on the map--but not enough on to overcome the price advances. no stunt and no advertising will sell an article for any length of time. business is not a game. the moral is coming. our little wooden shop had, with the business we were doing, become totally inadequate, and in we took out of our working capital sufficient funds to build a three-story plant at the corner of piquette and beaubien streets--which for the first time gave us real manufacturing facilities. we began to make and to assemble quite a number of the parts, although still we were principally an assembling shop. in - we made only two models--one the four-cylinder car at $ , and another touring car at $ , , both being the models of the previous year--and our sales dropped to , cars. some said it was because we had not brought out new models. i thought it was because our cars were too expensive--they did not appeal to the per cent. i changed the policy in the next year--having first acquired stock control. for - we entirely left off making touring cars and made three models of runabouts and roadsters, none of which differed materially from the other in manufacturing process or in component parts, but were somewhat different in appearance. the big thing was that the cheapest car sold for $ and the most expensive for only $ , and right there came the complete demonstration of what price meant. we sold , cars--nearly five times as many as in our biggest previous year. our banner week was that of may , , when we assembled cars in six working days. it almost swamped our facilities. the foreman had a tallyboard on which he chalked up each car as it was finished and turned over to the testers. the tallyboard was hardly equal to the task. on one day in the following june we assembled an even one hundred cars. in the next year we departed from the programme that had been so successful and i designed a big car--fifty horsepower, six cylinder--that would burn up the roads. we continued making our small cars, but the panic and the diversion to the more expensive model cut down the sales to , cars. we had been through an experimenting period of five years. the cars were beginning to be sold in europe. the business, as an automobile business then went, was considered extraordinarily prosperous. we had plenty of money. since the first year we have practically always had plenty of money. we sold for cash, we did not borrow money, and we sold directly to the purchaser. we had no bad debts and we kept within ourselves on every move. i have always kept well within my resources. i have never found it necessary to strain them, because, inevitably, if you give attention to work and service, the resources will increase more rapidly than you can devise ways and means of disposing of them. we were careful in the selection of our salesmen. at first there was great difficulty in getting good salesmen because the automobile trade was not supposed to be stable. it was supposed to be dealing in a luxury--in pleasure vehicles. we eventually appointed agents, selecting the very best men we could find, and then paying to them a salary larger than they could possibly earn in business for themselves. in the beginning we had not paid much in the way of salaries. we were feeling our way, but when we knew what our way was, we adopted the policy of paying the very highest reward for service and then insisting upon getting the highest service. among the requirements for an agent we laid down the following: ( ) a progressive, up-to-date man keenly alive to the possibilities of business. ( ) a suitable place of business clean and dignified in appearance. ( ) a stock of parts sufficient to make prompt replacements and keep in active service every ford car in his territory. ( ) an adequately equipped repair shop which has in it the right machinery for every necessary repair and adjustment. ( ) mechanics who are thoroughly familiar with the construction and operation of ford cars. ( ) a comprehensive bookkeeping system and a follow-up sales system, so that it may be instantly apparent what is the financial status of the various departments of his business, the condition and size of his stock, the present owners of cars, and the future prospects. ( ) absolute cleanliness throughout every department. there must be no unwashed windows, dusty furniture, dirty floors. ( ) a suitable display sign. ( ) the adoption of policies which will ensure absolutely square dealing and the highest character of business ethics. and this is the general instruction that was issued: a dealer or a salesman ought to have the name of every possible automobile buyer in his territory, including all those who have never given the matter a thought. he should then personally solicit by visitation if possible--by correspondence at the least--every man on that list and then making necessary memoranda, know the automobile situation as related to every resident so solicited. if your territory is too large to permit this, you have too much territory. the way was not easy. we were harried by a big suit brought against the company to try to force us into line with an association of automobile manufacturers, who were operating under the false principle that there was only a limited market for automobiles and that a monopoly of that market was essential. this was the famous selden patent suit. at times the support of our defense severely strained our resources. mr. selden, who has but recently died, had little to do with the suit. it was the association which sought a monopoly under the patent. the situation was this: george b. selden, a patent attorney, filed an application as far back as for a patent the object of which was stated to be "the production of a safe, simple, and cheap road locomotive, light in weight, easy to control, possessed of sufficient power to overcome an ordinary inclination." this application was kept alive in the patent office, by methods which are perfectly legal, until , when the patent was granted. in , when the application was filed, the automobile was practically unknown to the general public, but by the time the patent was issued everybody was familiar with self-propelled vehicles, and most of the men, including myself, who had been for years working on motor propulsion, were surprised to learn that what we had made practicable was covered by an application of years before, although the applicant had kept his idea merely as an idea. he had done nothing to put it into practice. the specific claims under the patent were divided into six groups and i think that not a single one of them was a really new idea even in when the application was filed. the patent office allowed a combination and issued a so-called "combination patent" deciding that the combination (a) of a carriage with its body machinery and steering wheel, with the (b) propelling mechanism clutch and gear, and finally (c) the engine, made a valid patent. with all of that we were not concerned. i believed that my engine had nothing whatsoever in common with what selden had in mind. the powerful combination of manufacturers who called themselves the "licensed manufacturers" because they operated under licenses from the patentee, brought suit against us as soon as we began to be a factor in motor production. the suit dragged on. it was intended to scare us out of business. we took volumes of testimony, and the blow came on september , , when judge hough rendered an opinion in the united states district court finding against us. immediately that licensed association began to advertise, warning prospective purchasers against our cars. they had done the same thing in at the start of the suit, when it was thought that we could be put out of business. i had implicit confidence that eventually we should win our suit. i simply knew that we were right, but it was a considerable blow to get the first decision against us, for we believed that many buyers--even though no injunction was issued against us--would be frightened away from buying because of the threats of court action against individual owners. the idea was spread that if the suit finally went against me, every man who owned a ford car would be prosecuted. some of my more enthusiastic opponents, i understand, gave it out privately that there would be criminal as well as civil suits and that a man buying a ford car might as well be buying a ticket to jail. we answered with an advertisement for which we took four pages in the principal newspapers all over the country. we set out our case--we set out our confidence in victory--and in conclusion said: in conclusion we beg to state if there are any prospective automobile buyers who are at all intimidated by the claims made by our adversaries that we will give them, in addition to the protection of the ford motor company with its some $ , , . of assets, an individual bond backed by a company of more than $ , , . more of assets, so that each and every individual owner of a ford car will be protected until at least $ , , . of assets have been wiped out by those who desire to control and monopolize this wonderful industry. the bond is yours for the asking, so do not allow yourself to be sold inferior cars at extravagant prices because of any statement made by this "divine" body. n. b.--this fight is not being waged by the ford motor company without the advice and counsel of the ablest patent attorneys of the east and west. we thought that the bond would give assurance to the buyers--that they needed confidence. they did not. we sold more than eighteen thousand cars--nearly double the output of the previous year--and i think about fifty buyers asked for bonds--perhaps it was less than that. as a matter of fact, probably nothing so well advertised the ford car and the ford motor company as did this suit. it appeared that we were the under dog and we had the public's sympathy. the association had seventy million dollars--we at the beginning had not half that number of thousands. i never had a doubt as to the outcome, but nevertheless it was a sword hanging over our heads that we could as well do without. prosecuting that suit was probably one of the most shortsighted acts that any group of american business men has ever combined to commit. taken in all its sidelights, it forms the best possible example of joining unwittingly to kill a trade. i regard it as most fortunate for the automobile makers of the country that we eventually won, and the association ceased to be a serious factor in the business. by , however, in spite of this suit, we had come to a point where it was possible to announce and put into fabrication the kind of car that i wanted to build. chapter iv the secret of manufacturing and serving now i am not outlining the career of the ford motor company for any personal reason. i am not saying: "go thou and do likewise." what i am trying to emphasize is that the ordinary way of doing business is not the best way. i am coming to the point of my entire departure from the ordinary methods. from this point dates the extraordinary success of the company. we had been fairly following the custom of the trade. our automobile was less complex than any other. we had no outside money in the concern. but aside from these two points we did not differ materially from the other automobile companies, excepting that we had been somewhat more successful and had rigidly pursued the policy of taking all cash discounts, putting our profits back into the business, and maintaining a large cash balance. we entered cars in all of the races. we advertised and we pushed our sales. outside of the simplicity of the construction of the car, our main difference in design was that we made no provision for the purely "pleasure car." we were just as much a pleasure car as any other car on the market, but we gave no attention to purely luxury features. we would do special work for a buyer, and i suppose that we would have made a special car at a price. we were a prosperous company. we might easily have sat down and said: "now we have arrived. let us hold what we have got." indeed, there was some disposition to take this stand. some of the stockholders were seriously alarmed when our production reached one hundred cars a day. they wanted to do something to stop me from ruining the company, and when i replied to the effect that one hundred cars a day was only a trifle and that i hoped before long to make a thousand a day, they were inexpressibly shocked and i understand seriously contemplated court action. if i had followed the general opinion of my associates i should have kept the business about as it was, put our funds into a fine administration building, tried to make bargains with such competitors as seemed too active, made new designs from time to time to catch the fancy of the public, and generally have passed on into the position of a quiet, respectable citizen with a quiet, respectable business. the temptation to stop and hang on to what one has is quite natural. i can entirely sympathize with the desire to quit a life of activity and retire to a life of ease. i have never felt the urge myself but i can comprehend what it is--although i think that a man who retires ought entirely to get out of a business. there is a disposition to retire and retain control. it was, however, no part of my plan to do anything of that sort. i regarded our progress merely as an invitation to do more--as an indication that we had reached a place where we might begin to perform a real service. i had been planning every day through these years toward a universal car. the public had given its reactions to the various models. the cars in service, the racing, and the road tests gave excellent guides as to the changes that ought to be made, and even by i had fairly in mind the specifications of the kind of car i wanted to build. but i lacked the material to give strength without weight. i came across that material almost by accident. in i was at a motor race at palm beach. there was a big smash-up and a french car was wrecked. we had entered our "model k"--the high-powered six. i thought the foreign cars had smaller and better parts than we knew anything about. after the wreck i picked up a little valve strip stem. it was very light and very strong. i asked what it was made of. nobody knew. i gave the stem to my assistant. "find out all about this," i told him. "that is the kind of material we ought to have in our cars." he found eventually that it was a french steel and that there was vanadium in it. we tried every steel maker in america--not one could make vanadium steel. i sent to england for a man who understood how to make the steel commercially. the next thing was to get a plant to turn it out. that was another problem. vanadium requires , degrees fahrenheit. the ordinary furnace could not go beyond , degrees. i found a small steel company in canton, ohio. i offered to guarantee them against loss if they would run a heat for us. they agreed. the first heat was a failure. very little vanadium remained in the steel. i had them try again, and the second time the steel came through. until then we had been forced to be satisfied with steel running between , and , pounds tensile strength. with vanadium, the strength went up to , pounds. having vanadium in hand i pulled apart our models and tested in detail to determine what kind of steel was best for every part--whether we wanted a hard steel, a tough steel, or an elastic steel. we, for the first time i think, in the history of any large construction, determined scientifically the exact quality of the steel. as a result we then selected twenty different types of steel for the various steel parts. about ten of these were vanadium. vanadium was used wherever strength and lightness were required. of course they are not all the same kind of vanadium steel. the other elements vary according to whether the part is to stand hard wear or whether it needs spring--in short, according to what it needs. before these experiments i believe that not more than four different grades of steel had ever been used in automobile construction. by further experimenting, especially in the direction of heat treating, we have been able still further to increase the strength of the steel and therefore to reduce the weight of the car. in the french department of commerce and industry took one of our steering spindle connecting rod yokes--selecting it as a vital unit--and tried it against a similar part from what they considered the best french car, and in every test our steel proved the stronger. the vanadium steel disposed of much of the weight. the other requisites of a universal car i had already worked out and many of them were in practice. the design had to balance. men die because a part gives out. machines wreck themselves because some parts are weaker than others. therefore, a part of the problem in designing a universal car was to have as nearly as possible all parts of equal strength considering their purpose--to put a motor in a one-horse shay. also it had to be fool proof. this was difficult because a gasoline motor is essentially a delicate instrument and there is a wonderful opportunity for any one who has a mind that way to mess it up. i adopted this slogan: "when one of my cars breaks down i know i am to blame." from the day the first motor car appeared on the streets it had to me appeared to be a necessity. it was this knowledge and assurance that led me to build to the one end--a car that would meet the wants of the multitudes. all my efforts were then and still are turned to the production of one car--one model. and, year following year, the pressure was, and still is, to improve and refine and make better, with an increasing reduction in price. the universal car had to have these attributes: ( ) quality in material to give service in use. vanadium steel is the strongest, toughest, and most lasting of steels. it forms the foundation and super-structure of the cars. it is the highest quality steel in this respect in the world, regardless of price. ( ) simplicity in operation--because the masses are not mechanics. ( ) power in sufficient quantity. ( ) absolute reliability--because of the varied uses to which the cars would be put and the variety of roads over which they would travel. ( ) lightness. with the ford there are only . pounds to be carried by each cubic inch of piston displacement. this is one of the reasons why ford cars are "always going," wherever and whenever you see them--through sand and mud, through slush, snow, and water, up hills, across fields and roadless plains. ( ) control--to hold its speed always in hand, calmly and safely meeting every emergency and contingency either in the crowded streets of the city or on dangerous roads. the planetary transmission of the ford gave this control and anybody could work it. that is the "why" of the saying: "anybody can drive a ford." it can turn around almost anywhere. ( ) the more a motor car weighs, naturally the more fuel and lubricants are used in the driving; the lighter the weight, the lighter the expense of operation. the light weight of the ford car in its early years was used as an argument against it. now that is all changed. the design which i settled upon was called "model t." the important feature of the new model--which, if it were accepted, as i thought it would be, i intended to make the only model and then start into real production--was its simplicity. there were but four constructional units in the car--the power plant, the frame, the front axle, and the rear axle. all of these were easily accessible and they were designed so that no special skill would be required for their repair or replacement. i believed then, although i said very little about it because of the novelty of the idea, that it ought to be possible to have parts so simple and so inexpensive that the menace of expensive hand repair work would be entirely eliminated. the parts could be made so cheaply that it would be less expensive to buy new ones than to have old ones repaired. they could be carried in hardware shops just as nails or bolts are carried. i thought that it was up to me as the designer to make the car so completely simple that no one could fail to understand it. that works both ways and applies to everything. the less complex an article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and therefore the greater number may be sold. it is not necessary to go into the technical details of the construction but perhaps this is as good a place as any to review the various models, because "model t" was the last of the models and the policy which it brought about took this business out of the ordinary line of business. application of the same idea would take any business out of the ordinary run. i designed eight models in all before "model t." they were: "model a," "model b," "model c," "model f," "model n," "model r," "model s," and "model k." of these, models "a," "c," and "f" had two-cylinder opposed horizontal motors. in "model a" the motor was at the rear of the driver's seat. in all of the other models it was in a hood in front. models "b," "n," "r," and "s" had motors of the four-cylinder vertical type. "model k" had six cylinders. "model a" developed eight horsepower. "model b" developed twenty-four horsepower with a - / -inch cylinder and a -inch stroke. the highest horsepower was in "model k," the six-cylinder car, which developed forty horsepower. the largest cylinders were those of "model b." the smallest were in models "n," "r," and "s" which were - / inches in diameter with a - / -inch stroke. "model t" has a - / -inch cylinder with a -inch stroke. the ignition was by dry batteries in all excepting "model b," which had storage batteries, and in "model k" which had both battery and magneto. in the present model, the magneto is a part of the power plant and is built in. the clutch in the first four models was of the cone type; in the last four and in the present model, of the multiple disc type. the transmission in all of the cars has been planetary. "model a" had a chain drive. "model b" had a shaft drive. the next two models had chain drives. since then all of the cars have had shaft drives. "model a" had a -inch wheel base. model "b," which was an extremely good car, had inches. "model k" had inches. "model c" had inches. the others had inches, and the present car has inches. in the first five models all of the equipment was extra. the next three were sold with a partial equipment. the present car is sold with full equipment. model "a" weighed , pounds. the lightest cars were models "n" and "r." they weighed , pounds, but they were both runabouts. the heaviest car was the six-cylinder, which weighed , pounds. the present car weighs , lbs. the "model t" had practically no features which were not contained in some one or other of the previous models. every detail had been fully tested in practice. there was no guessing as to whether or not it would be a successful model. it had to be. there was no way it could escape being so, for it had not been made in a day. it contained all that i was then able to put into a motor car plus the material, which for the first time i was able to obtain. we put out "model t" for the season - . the company was then five years old. the original factory space had been . acre. we had employed an average of people in the first year, built , cars, and had one branch house. in , the factory space had increased to . acres and we owned the building. the average number of employees had increased to , . we built , cars and had fourteen branch houses. it was a prosperous business. during the season - we continued to make models "r" and "s," four-cylinder runabouts and roadsters, the models that had previously been so successful, and which sold at $ and $ . but "model t" swept them right out. we sold , cars--a larger number than any manufacturer had ever sold. the price for the touring car was $ . on the same chassis we mounted a town car at $ , , a roadster at $ , a coupe at $ , and a landaulet at $ . this season demonstrated conclusively to me that it was time to put the new policy in force. the salesmen, before i had announced the policy, were spurred by the great sales to think that even greater sales might be had if only we had more models. it is strange how, just as soon as an article becomes successful, somebody starts to think that it would be more successful if only it were different. there is a tendency to keep monkeying with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it. the salesmen were insistent on increasing the line. they listened to the per cent., the special customers who could say what they wanted, and forgot all about the per cent. who just bought without making any fuss. no business can improve unless it pays the closest possible attention to complaints and suggestions. if there is any defect in service then that must be instantly and rigorously investigated, but when the suggestion is only as to style, one has to make sure whether it is not merely a personal whim that is being voiced. salesmen always want to cater to whims instead of acquiring sufficient knowledge of their product to be able to explain to the customer with the whim that what they have will satisfy his every requirement--that is, of course, provided what they have does satisfy these requirements. therefore in i announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to be "model t," and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and i remarked: "any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." i cannot say that any one agreed with me. the selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production. more than that, they did not particularly care. they thought that our production was good enough as it was and there was a very decided opinion that lowering the sales price would hurt sales, that the people who wanted quality would be driven away and that there would be none to replace them. there was very little conception of the motor industry. a motor car was still regarded as something in the way of a luxury. the manufacturers did a good deal to spread this idea. some clever persons invented the name "pleasure car" and the advertising emphasized the pleasure features. the sales people had ground for their objections and particularly when i made the following announcement: "i will build a motor car for the great multitude. it will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. it will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. but it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one--and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in god's great open spaces." this announcement was received not without pleasure. the general comment was: "if ford does that he will be out of business in six months." the impression was that a good car could not be built at a low price, and that, anyhow, there was no use in building a low-priced car because only wealthy people were in the market for cars. the - sales of more than ten thousand cars had convinced me that we needed a new factory. we already had a big modern factory--the piquette street plant. it was as good as, perhaps a little better than, any automobile factory in the country. but i did not see how it was going to care for the sales and production that were inevitable. so i bought sixty acres at highland park, which was then considered away out in the country from detroit. the amount of ground bought and the plans for a bigger factory than the world has ever seen were opposed. the question was already being asked: "how soon will ford blow up?" nobody knows how many thousand times it has been asked since. it is asked only because of the failure to grasp that a principle rather than an individual is at work, and the principle is so simple that it seems mysterious. for - , in order to pay for the new land and buildings, i slightly raised the prices. this is perfectly justifiable and results in a benefit, not an injury, to the purchaser. i did exactly the same thing a few years ago--or rather, in that case i did not lower the price as is my annual custom, in order to build the river rouge plant. the extra money might in each case have been had by borrowing, but then we should have had a continuing charge upon the business and all subsequent cars would have had to bear this charge. the price of all the models was increased $ , with the exception of the roadster, which was increased only $ and of the landaulet and town car, which were increased $ and $ respectively. we sold , cars, and then for - , with the new facilities, i cut the touring car from $ to $ and we sold , cars. that is the beginning of the steady reduction in the price of the cars in the face of ever-increasing cost of materials and ever-higher wages. contrast the year with the year . the factory space increased from . to acres. the average number of employees from , to , , and the cars built from a little over six thousand to nearly thirty-five thousand. you will note that men were not employed in proportion to the output. we were, almost overnight it seems, in great production. how did all this come about? simply through the application of an inevitable principle. by the application of intelligently directed power and machinery. in a little dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. carefully was each handle weighed and balanced. no two of them were alike. the curve must exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. from dawn until dark the old man laboured. his average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. and often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true. to-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few cents. and you need not worry about the balance. they are all alike--and every one is perfect. modern methods applied in a big way have not only brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost--but they have immensely improved the product. it was the application of these same methods to the making of the ford car that at the very start lowered the price and heightened the quality. we just developed an idea. the nucleus of a business may be an idea. that is, an inventor or a thoughtful workman works out a new and better way to serve some established human need; the idea commends itself, and people want to avail themselves of it. in this way a single individual may prove, through his idea or discovery, the nucleus of a business. but the creation of the body and bulk of that business is shared by everyone who has anything to do with it. no manufacturer can say: "i built this business"--if he has required the help of thousands of men in building it. it is a joint production. everyone employed in it has contributed something to it. by working and producing they make it possible for the purchasing world to keep coming to that business for the type of service it provides, and thus they help establish a custom, a trade, a habit which supplies them with a livelihood. that is the way our company grew and just how i shall start explaining in the next chapter. in the meantime, the company had become world-wide. we had branches in london and in australia. we were shipping to every part of the world, and in england particularly we were beginning to be as well known as in america. the introduction of the car in england was somewhat difficult on account of the failure of the american bicycle. because the american bicycle had not been suited to english uses it was taken for granted and made a point of by the distributors that no american vehicle could appeal to the british market. two "model a's" found their way to england in . the newspapers refused to notice them. the automobile agents refused to take the slightest interest. it was rumoured that the principal components of its manufacture were string and hoop wire and that a buyer would be lucky if it held together for a fortnight! in the first year about a dozen cars in all were used; the second was only a little better. and i may say as to the reliability of that "model a" that most of them after nearly twenty years are still in some kind of service in england. in our agent entered a "model c" in the scottish reliability trials. in those days reliability runs were more popular in england than motor races. perhaps there was no inkling that after all an automobile was not merely a toy. the scottish trials was over eight hundred miles of hilly, heavy roads. the ford came through with only one involuntary stop against it. that started the ford sales in england. in that same year ford taxicabs were placed in london for the first time. in the next several years the sales began to pick up. the cars went into every endurance and reliability test and won every one of them. the brighton dealer had ten fords driven over the south downs for two days in a kind of steeplechase and every one of them came through. as a result six hundred cars were sold that year. in henry alexander drove a "model t" to the top of ben nevis, , feet. that year , cars were sold in england, and it has never since been necessary to stage any kind of a stunt. we eventually opened our own factory at manchester; at first it was purely an assembling plant. but as the years have gone by we have progressively made more and more of the car. chapter v getting into production if a device would save in time just per cent. or increase results per cent., then its absence is always a per cent. tax. if the time of a person is worth fifty cents an hour, a per cent. saving is worth five cents an hour. if the owner of a skyscraper could increase his income per cent., he would willingly pay half the increase just to know how. the reason why he owns a skyscraper is that science has proved that certain materials, used in a given way, can save space and increase rental incomes. a building thirty stories high needs no more ground space than one five stories high. getting along with the old-style architecture costs the five-story man the income of twenty-five floors. save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy. those are the principles on which the production of my plant was built up. they all come practically as of course. in the beginning we tried to get machinists. as the necessity for production increased it became apparent not only that enough machinists were not to be had, but also that skilled men were not necessary in production, and out of this grew a principle that i later want to present in full. it is self-evident that a majority of the people in the world are not mentally--even if they are physically--capable of making a good living. that is, they are not capable of furnishing with their own hands a sufficient quantity of the goods which this world needs to be able to exchange their unaided product for the goods which they need. i have heard it said, in fact i believe it is quite a current thought, that we have taken skill out of work. we have not. we have put in skill. we have put a higher skill into planning, management, and tool building, and the results of that skill are enjoyed by the man who is not skilled. this i shall later enlarge on. we have to recognize the unevenness in human mental equipments. if every job in our place required skill the place would never have existed. sufficiently skilled men to the number needed could not have been trained in a hundred years. a million men working by hand could not even approximate our present daily output. no one could manage a million men. but more important than that, the product of the unaided hands of those million men could not be sold at a price in consonance with buying power. and even if it were possible to imagine such an aggregation and imagine its management and correlation, just think of the area that it would have to occupy! how many of the men would be engaged, not in producing, but in merely carrying from place to place what the other men had produced? i cannot see how under such conditions the men could possibly be paid more than ten or twenty cents a day--for of course it is not the employer who pays wages. he only handles the money. it is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages. the more economical methods of production did not begin all at once. they began gradually--just as we began gradually to make our own parts. "model t" was the first motor that we made ourselves. the great economies began in assembling and then extended to other sections so that, while to-day we have skilled mechanics in plenty, they do not produce automobiles--they make it easy for others to produce them. our skilled men are the tool makers, the experimental workmen, the machinists, and the pattern makers. they are as good as any men in the world--so good, indeed, that they should not be wasted in doing that which the machines they contrive can do better. the rank and file of men come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few days. if they do not learn within that time they will never be of any use to us. these men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space they occupy. they do not have to be able-bodied men. we have jobs that require great physical strength--although they are rapidly lessening; we have other jobs that require no strength whatsoever--jobs which, as far as strength is concerned, might be attended to by a child of three. it is not possible, without going deeply into technical processes, to present the whole development of manufacturing, step by step, in the order in which each thing came about. i do not know that this could be done, because something has been happening nearly every day and nobody can keep track. take at random a number of the changes. from them it is possible not only to gain some idea of what will happen when this world is put on a production basis, but also to see how much more we pay for things than we ought to, and how much lower wages are than they ought to be, and what a vast field remains to be explored. the ford company is only a little way along on the journey. a ford car contains about five thousand parts--that is counting screws, nuts, and all. some of the parts are fairly bulky and others are almost the size of watch parts. in our first assembling we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house. when we started to make parts it was natural to create a single department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman performed all of the operations necessary on a small part. the rapid press of production made it necessary to devise plans of production that would avoid having the workers falling over one another. the undirected worker spends more of his time walking about for materials and tools than he does in working; he gets small pay because pedestrianism is not a highly paid line. the first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work. we now have two general principles in all operations--that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over. the principles of assembly are these: ( ) place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in the process of finishing. ( ) use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman completes his operation, he drops the part always in the same place--which place must always be the most convenient place to his hand--and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman for his operation. ( ) use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are delivered at convenient distances. the net result of the application of these principles is the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. he does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement. the assembling of the chassis is, from the point of view of the non-mechanical mind, our most interesting and perhaps best known operation, and at one time it was an exceedingly important operation. we now ship out the parts for assembly at the point of distribution. along about april , , we first tried the experiment of an assembly line. we tried it on assembling the flywheel magneto. we try everything in a little way first--we will rip out anything once we discover a better way, but we have to know absolutely that the new way is going to be better than the old before we do anything drastic. i believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. the idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the chicago packers use in dressing beef. we had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto in the usual method. with one workman doing a complete job he could turn out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or about twenty minutes to an assembly. what he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations; that cut down the assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds. then we raised the height of the line eight inches--this was in --and cut the time to seven minutes. further experimenting with the speed that the work should move at cut the time down to five minutes. in short, the result is this: by the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did only a comparatively few years ago. that line established the efficiency of the method and we now use it everywhere. the assembling of the motor, formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four operations--those men do the work that three times their number formerly did. in a short time we tried out the plan on the chassis. about the best we had done in stationary chassis assembling was an average of twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes per chassis. we tried the experiment of drawing the chassis with a rope and windlass down a line two hundred fifty feet long. six assemblers traveled with the chassis and picked up the parts from piles placed along the line. this rough experiment reduced the time to five hours fifty minutes per chassis. in the early part of we elevated the assembly line. we had adopted the policy of "man-high" work; we had one line twenty-six and three quarter inches and another twenty-four and one half inches from the floor--to suit squads of different heights. the waist-high arrangement and a further subdivision of work so that each man had fewer movements cut down the labour time per chassis to one hour thirty-three minutes. only the chassis was then assembled in the line. the body was placed on in "john r. street"--the famous street that runs through our highland park factories. now the line assembles the whole car. it must not be imagined, however, that all this worked out as quickly as it sounds. the speed of the moving work had to be carefully tried out; in the fly-wheel magneto we first had a speed of sixty inches per minute. that was too fast. then we tried eighteen inches per minute. that was too slow. finally we settled on forty-four inches per minute. the idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work--he must have every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second. we have worked out speeds for each assembly, for the success of the chassis assembly caused us gradually to overhaul our entire method of manufacturing and to put all assembling in mechanically driven lines. the chassis assembling line, for instance, goes at a pace of six feet per minute; the front axle assembly line goes at one hundred eighty-nine inches per minute. in the chassis assembling are forty-five separate operations or stations. the first men fasten four mud-guard brackets to the chassis frame; the motor arrives on the tenth operation and so on in detail. some men do only one or two small operations, others do more. the man who places a part does not fasten it--the part may not be fully in place until after several operations later. the man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. on operation number thirty-four the budding motor gets its gasoline; it has previously received lubrication; on operation number forty-four the radiator is filled with water, and on operation number forty-five the car drives out onto john r. street. essentially the same ideas have been applied to the assembling of the motor. in october, , it required nine hours and fifty-four minutes of labour time to assemble one motor; six months later, by the moving assembly method, this time had been reduced to five hours and fifty-six minutes. every piece of work in the shops moves; it may move on hooks on overhead chains going to assembly in the exact order in which the parts are required; it may travel on a moving platform, or it may go by gravity, but the point is that there is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials. materials are brought in on small trucks or trailers operated by cut-down ford chassis, which are sufficiently mobile and quick to get in and out of any aisle where they may be required to go. no workman has anything to do with moving or lifting anything. that is all in a separate department--the department of transportation. we started assembling a motor car in a single factory. then as we began to make parts, we began to departmentalize so that each department would do only one thing. as the factory is now organized each department makes only a single part or assembles a part. a department is a little factory in itself. the part comes into it as raw material or as a casting, goes through the sequence of machines and heat treatments, or whatever may be required, and leaves that department finished. it was only because of transport ease that the departments were grouped together when we started to manufacture. i did not know that such minute divisions would be possible; but as our production grew and departments multiplied, we actually changed from making automobiles to making parts. then we found that we had made another new discovery, which was that by no means all of the parts had to be made in one factory. it was not really a discovery--it was something in the nature of going around in a circle to my first manufacturing when i bought the motors and probably ninety per cent. of the parts. when we began to make our own parts we practically took for granted that they all had to be made in the one factory--that there was some special virtue in having a single roof over the manufacture of the entire car. we have now developed away from this. if we build any more large factories, it will be only because the making of a single part must be in such tremendous volume as to require a large unit. i hope that in the course of time the big highland park plant will be doing only one or two things. the casting has already been taken away from it and has gone to the river rouge plant. so now we are on our way back to where we started from--excepting that, instead of buying our parts on the outside, we are beginning to make them in our own factories on the outside. this is a development which holds exceptional consequences, for it means, as i shall enlarge in a later chapter, that highly standardized, highly subdivided industry need no longer become concentrated in large plants with all the inconveniences of transportation and housing that hamper large plants. a thousand or five hundred men ought to be enough in a single factory; then there would be no problem of transporting them to work or away from work and there would be no slums or any of the other unnatural ways of living incident to the overcrowding that must take place if the workmen are to live within reasonable distances of a very large plant. highland park now has five hundred departments. down at our piquette plant we had only eighteen departments, and formerly at highland park we had only one hundred and fifty departments. this illustrates how far we are going in the manufacture of parts. hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called "the best shop practice." i recall that a machine manufacturer was once called into conference on the building of a special machine. the specifications called for an output of two hundred per hour. "this is a mistake," said the manufacturer, "you mean two hundred a day--no machine can be forced to two hundred an hour." the company officer sent for the man who had designed the machine and they called his attention to the specification. he said: "yes, what about it?" "it can't be done," said the manufacturer positively, "no machine built will do that--it is out of the question." "out of the question!" exclaimed the engineer, "if you will come down to the main floor you will see one doing it; we built one to see if it could be done and now we want more like it." the factory keeps no record of experiments. the foremen and superintendents remember what has been done. if a certain method has formerly been tried and failed, somebody will remember it--but i am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done. that is one of the troubles with extensive records. if you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try--whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed. they told us we could not cast gray iron by our endless chain method and i believe there is a record of failures. but we are doing it. the man who carried through our work either did not know or paid no attention to the previous figures. likewise we were told that it was out of the question to pour the hot iron directly from the blast furnace into mould. the usual method is to run the iron into pigs, let them season for a time, and then remelt them for casting. but at the river rouge plant we are casting directly from cupolas that are filled from the blast furnaces. then, too, a record of failures--particularly if it is a dignified and well-authenticated record--deters a young man from trying. we get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread. none of our men are "experts." we have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert--because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. a man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. the moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible. i refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. i cannot discover that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible. the right kind of experience, the right kind of technical training, ought to enlarge the mind and reduce the number of impossibilities. it unfortunately does nothing of the kind. most technical training and the average of that which we call experience, provide a record of previous failures and, instead of these failures being taken for what they are worth, they are taken as absolute bars to progress. if some man, calling himself an authority, says that this or that cannot be done, then a horde of unthinking followers start the chorus: "it can't be done." take castings. castings has always been a wasteful process and is so old that it has accumulated many traditions which make improvements extraordinarily difficult to bring about. i believe one authority on moulding declared--before we started our experiments--that any man who said he could reduce costs within half a year wrote himself down as a fraud. our foundry used to be much like other foundries. when we cast the first "model t" cylinders in , everything in the place was done by hand; shovels and wheelbarrows abounded. the work was then either skilled or unskilled; we had moulders and we had labourers. now we have about five per cent. of thoroughly skilled moulders and core setters, but the remaining per cent. are unskilled, or to put it more accurately, must be skilled in exactly one operation which the most stupid man can learn within two days. the moulding is all done by machinery. each part which we have to cast has a unit or units of its own--according to the number required in the plan of production. the machinery of the unit is adapted to the single casting; thus the men in the unit each perform a single operation that is always the same. a unit consists of an overhead railway to which at intervals are hung little platforms for the moulds. without going into technical details, let me say the making of the moulds and the cores, and the packing of the cores, are done with the work in motion on the platforms. the metal is poured at another point as the work moves, and by the time the mould in which the metal has been poured reaches the terminal, it is cool enough to start on its automatic way to cleaning, machining, and assembling. and the platform is moving around for a new load. take the development of the piston-rod assembly. even under the old plan, this operation took only three minutes and did not seem to be one to bother about. there were two benches and twenty-eight men in all; they assembled one hundred seventy-five pistons and rods in a nine-hour day--which means just five seconds over three minutes each. there was no inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the motor assembling line as defective. it is a very simple operation. the workman pushed the pin out of the piston, oiled the pin, slipped the rod in place, put the pin through the rod and piston, tightened one screw, and opened another screw. that was the whole operation. the foreman, examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much as three minutes. he analyzed the motions with a stop-watch. he found that four hours out of a nine-hour day were spent in walking. the assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. in the whole task, each man performed six operations. the foreman devised a new plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end. instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then performed only one third of the operation--he performed only as much as he could do without shifting his feet. they cut down the squad from twenty-eight to fourteen men. the former record for twenty-eight men was one hundred seventy-five assemblies a day. now seven men turn out twenty-six hundred assemblies in eight hours. it is not necessary to calculate the savings there! painting the rear axle assembly once gave some trouble. it used to be dipped by hand into a tank of enamel. this required several handlings and the services of two men. now one man takes care of it all on a special machine, designed and built in the factory. the man now merely hangs the assembly on a moving chain which carries it up over the enamel tank, two levers then thrust thimbles over the ends of the ladle shaft, the paint tank rises six feet, immerses the axle, returns to position, and the axle goes on to the drying oven. the whole cycle of operations now takes just thirteen seconds. the radiator is a complex affair and soldering it used to be a matter of skill. there are ninety-five tubes in a radiator. fitting and soldering these tubes in place is by hand a long operation, requiring both skill and patience. now it is all done by a machine which will make twelve hundred radiator cores in eight hours; then they are soldered in place by being carried through a furnace by a conveyor. no tinsmith work and so no skill are required. we used to rivet the crank-case arms to the crank-case, using pneumatic hammers which were supposed to be the latest development. it took six men to hold the hammers and six men to hold the casings, and the din was terrific. now an automatic press operated by one man, who does nothing else, gets through five times as much work in a day as those twelve men did. in the piquette plant the cylinder casting traveled four thousand feet in the course of finishing; now it travels only slightly over three hundred feet. there is no manual handling of material. there is not a single hand operation. if a machine can be made automatic, it is made automatic. not a single operation is ever considered as being done in the best or cheapest way. at that, only about ten per cent. of our tools are special; the others are regular machines adjusted to the particular job. and they are placed almost side by side. we put more machinery per square foot of floor space than any other factory in the world--every foot of space not used carries an overhead expense. we want none of that waste. yet there is all the room needed--no man has too much room and no man has too little room. dividing and subdividing operations, keeping the work in motion--those are the keynotes of production. but also it is to be remembered that all the parts are designed so that they can be most easily made. and the saving? although the comparison is not quite fair, it is startling. if at our present rate of production we employed the same number of men per car that we did when we began in --and those men were only for assembly--we should to-day require a force of more than two hundred thousand. we have less than fifty thousand men on automobile production at our highest point of around four thousand cars a day! chapter vi machines and men that which one has to fight hardest against in bringing together a large number of people to do work is excess organization and consequent red tape. to my mind there is no bent of mind more dangerous than that which is sometimes described as the "genius for organization." this usually results in the birth of a great big chart showing, after the fashion of a family tree, how authority ramifies. the tree is heavy with nice round berries, each of which bears the name of a man or of an office. every man has a title and certain duties which are strictly limited by the circumference of his berry. if a straw boss wants to say something to the general superintendent, his message has to go through the sub-foreman, the foreman, the department head, and all the assistant superintendents, before, in the course of time, it reaches the general superintendent. probably by that time what he wanted to talk about is already history. it takes about six weeks for the message of a man living in a berry on the lower left-hand corner of the chart to reach the president or chairman of the board, and if it ever does reach one of these august officials, it has by that time gathered to itself about a pound of criticisms, suggestions, and comments. very few things are ever taken under "official consideration" until long after the time when they actually ought to have been done. the buck is passed to and fro and all responsibility is dodged by individuals--following the lazy notion that two heads are better than one. now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine. it is a collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to write letters to one another. it is not necessary for any one department to know what any other department is doing. if a man is doing his work he will not have time to take up any other work. it is the business of those who plan the entire work to see that all of the departments are working properly toward the same end. it is not necessary to have meetings to establish good feeling between individuals or departments. it is not necessary for people to love each other in order to work together. too much good fellowship may indeed be a very bad thing, for it may lead to one man trying to cover up the faults of another. that is bad for both men. when we are at work we ought to be at work. when we are at play we ought to be at play. there is no use trying to mix the two. the sole object ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. when the work is done, then the play can come, but not before. and so the ford factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. we have only the clerical help that is absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and consequently no red tape. we make the individual responsibility complete. the workman is absolutely responsible for his work. the straw boss is responsible for the workmen under him. the foreman is responsible for his group. the department head is responsible for the department. the general superintendent is responsible for the whole factory. every man has to know what is going on in his sphere. i say "general superintendent." there is no such formal title. one man is in charge of the factory and has been for years. he has two men with him, who, without in any way having their duties defined, have taken particular sections of the work to themselves. with them are about half a dozen other men in the nature of assistants, but without specific duties. they have all made jobs for themselves--but there are no limits to their jobs. they just work in where they best fit. one man chases stock and shortages. another has grabbed inspection, and so on. this may seem haphazard, but it is not. a group of men, wholly intent upon getting work done, have no difficulty in seeing that the work is done. they do not get into trouble about the limits of authority, because they are not thinking of titles. if they had offices and all that, they would shortly be giving up their time to office work and to wondering why did they not have a better office than some other fellow. because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no question of red tape or going over a man's head. any workman can go to anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the factory. the workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. one of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. the moment a man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or goes back to a machine. a large amount of labour unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and i am afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not possible for a workman to get a square deal. the work and the work alone controls us. that is one of the reasons why we have no titles. most men can swing a job, but they are floored by a title. the effect of a title is very peculiar. it has been used too much as a sign of emancipation from work. it is almost equivalent to a badge bearing the legend: "this man has nothing to do but regard himself as important and all others as inferior." not only is a title often injurious to the wearer, but it has its effect on others as well. there is perhaps no greater single source of personal dissatisfaction among men than the fact that the title-bearers are not always the real leaders. everybody acknowledges a real leader--a man who is fit to plan and command. and when you find a real leader who bears a title, you will have to inquire of someone else what his title is. he doesn't boast about it. titles in business have been greatly overdone and business has suffered. one of the bad features is the division of responsibility according to titles, which goes so far as to amount to a removal altogether of responsibility. where responsibility is broken up into many small bits and divided among many departments, each department under its own titular head, who in turn is surrounded by a group bearing their nice sub-titles, it is difficult to find any one who really feels responsible. everyone knows what "passing the buck" means. the game must have originated in industrial organizations where the departments simply shove responsibility along. the health of every organization depends on every member--whatever his place--feeling that everything that happens to come to his notice relating to the welfare of the business is his own job. railroads have gone to the devil under the eyes of departments that say: "oh, that doesn't come under our department. department x, miles away, has that in charge." there used to be a lot of advice given to officials not to hide behind their titles. the very necessity for the advice showed a condition that needed more than advice to correct it. and the correction is just this--abolish the titles. a few may be legally necessary; a few may be useful in directing the public how to do business with the concern, but for the rest the best rule is simple: "get rid of them." as a matter of fact, the record of business in general just now is such as to detract very much from the value of titles. no one would boast of being president of a bankrupt bank. business on the whole has not been so skillfully steered as to leave much margin for pride in the steersmen. the men who bear titles now and are worth anything are forgetting their titles and are down in the foundation of business looking for the weak spots. they are back again in the places from which they rose--trying to reconstruct from the bottom up. and when a man is really at work, he needs no title. his work honours him. all of our people come into the factory or the offices through the employment departments. as i have said, we do not hire experts--neither do we hire men on past experiences or for any position other than the lowest. since we do not take a man on his past history, we do not refuse him because of his past history. i never met a man who was thoroughly bad. there is always some good in him--if he gets a chance. that is the reason we do not care in the least about a man's antecedents--we do not hire a man's history, we hire the man. if he has been in jail, that is no reason to say that he will be in jail again. i think, on the contrary, he is, if given a chance, very likely to make a special effort to keep out of jail. our employment office does not bar a man for anything he has previously done--he is equally acceptable whether he has been in sing sing or at harvard and we do not even inquire from which place he has graduated. all that he needs is the desire to work. if he does not desire to work, it is very unlikely that he will apply for a position, for it is pretty well understood that a man in the ford plant works. we do not, to repeat, care what a man has been. if he has gone to college he ought to be able to go ahead faster, but he has to start at the bottom and prove his ability. every man's future rests solely with himself. there is far too much loose talk about men being unable to obtain recognition. with us every man is fairly certain to get the exact recognition he deserves. of course, there are certain factors in the desire for recognition which must be reckoned with. the whole modern industrial system has warped the desire so out of shape that it is now almost an obsession. there was a time when a man's personal advancement depended entirely and immediately upon his work, and not upon any one's favor; but nowadays it often depends far too much upon the individual's good fortune in catching some influential eye. that is what we have successfully fought against. men will work with the idea of catching somebody's eye; they will work with the idea that if they fail to get credit for what they have done, they might as well have done it badly or not have done it at all. thus the work sometimes becomes a secondary consideration. the job in hand--the article in hand, the special kind of service in hand--turns out to be not the principal job. the main work becomes personal advancement--a platform from which to catch somebody's eye. this habit of making the work secondary and the recognition primary is unfair to the work. it makes recognition and credit the real job. and this also has an unfortunate effect on the worker. it encourages a peculiar kind of ambition which is neither lovely nor productive. it produces the kind of man who imagines that by "standing in with the boss" he will get ahead. every shop knows this kind of man. and the worst of it is there are some things in the present industrial system which make it appear that the game really pays. foremen are only human. it is natural that they should be flattered by being made to believe that they hold the weal or woe of workmen in their hands. it is natural, also, that being open to flattery, their self-seeking subordinates should flatter them still more to obtain and profit by their favor. that is why i want as little as possible of the personal element. it is particularly easy for any man who never knows it all to go forward to a higher position with us. some men will work hard but they do not possess the capacity to think and especially to think quickly. such men get as far as their ability deserves. a man may, by his industry, deserve advancement, but it cannot be possibly given him unless he also has a certain element of leadership. this is not a dream world we are living in. i think that every man in the shaking-down process of our factory eventually lands about where he belongs. we are never satisfied with the way that everything is done in any part of the organization; we always think it ought to be done better and that eventually it will be done better. the spirit of crowding forces the man who has the qualities for a higher place eventually to get it. he perhaps would not get the place if at any time the organization--which is a word i do not like to use--became fixed, so that there would be routine steps and dead men's shoes. but we have so few titles that a man who ought to be doing something better than he is doing, very soon gets to doing it--he is not restrained by the fact that there is no position ahead of him "open"--for there are no "positions." we have no cut-and-dried places--our best men make their places. this is easy enough to do, for there is always work, and when you think of getting the work done instead of finding a title to fit a man who wants to be promoted, then there is no difficulty about promotion. the promotion itself is not formal; the man simply finds himself doing something other than what he was doing and getting more money. all of our people have thus come up from the bottom. the head of the factory started as a machinist. the man in charge of the big river rouge plant began as a patternmaker. another man overseeing one of the principal departments started as a sweeper. there is not a single man anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street. everything that we have developed has been done by men who have qualified themselves with us. we fortunately did not inherit any traditions and we are not founding any. if we have a tradition it is this: everything can always be done better than it is being done. that pressing always to do work better and faster solves nearly every factory problem. a department gets its standing on its rate of production. the rate of production and the cost of production are distinct elements. the foremen and superintendents would only be wasting time were they to keep a check on the costs in their departments. there are certain costs--such as the rate of wages, the overhead, the price of materials, and the like, which they could not in any way control, so they do not bother about them. what they can control is the rate of production in their own departments. the rating of a department is gained by dividing the number of parts produced by the number of hands working. every foreman checks his own department daily--he carries the figures always with him. the superintendent has a tabulation of all the scores; if there is something wrong in a department the output score shows it at once, the superintendent makes inquiries and the foreman looks alive. a considerable part of the incentive to better methods is directly traceable to this simple rule-of-thumb method of rating production. the foreman need not be a cost accountant--he is no better a foreman for being one. his charges are the machines and the human beings in his department. when they are working at their best he has performed his service. the rate of his production is his guide. there is no reason for him to scatter his energies over collateral subjects. this rating system simply forces a foreman to forget personalities--to forget everything other than the work in hand. if he should select the people he likes instead of the people who can best do the work, his department record will quickly show up that fact. there is no difficulty in picking out men. they pick themselves out because--although one hears a great deal about the lack of opportunity for advancement--the average workman is more interested in a steady job than he is in advancement. scarcely more than five per cent, of those who work for wages, while they have the desire to receive more money, have also the willingness to accept the additional responsibility and the additional work which goes with the higher places. only about twenty-five per cent. are even willing to be straw bosses, and most of them take that position because it carries with it more pay than working on a machine. men of a more mechanical turn of mind, but with no desire for responsibility, go into the tool-making departments where they receive considerably more pay than in production proper. but the vast majority of men want to stay put. they want to be led. they want to have everything done for them and to have no responsibility. therefore, in spite of the great mass of men, the difficulty is not to discover men to advance, but men who are willing to be advanced. the accepted theory is that all people are anxious for advancement, and a great many pretty plans have been built up from that. i can only say that we do not find that to be the case. the americans in our employ do want to go ahead, but they by no means do always want to go clear through to the top. the foreigners, generally speaking, are content to stay as straw bosses. why all of this is, i do not know. i am giving the facts. as i have said, everyone in the place reserves an open mind as to the way in which every job is being done. if there is any fixed theory--any fixed rule--it is that no job is being done well enough. the whole factory management is always open to suggestion, and we have an informal suggestion system by which any workman can communicate any idea that comes to him and get action on it. the saving of a cent per piece may be distinctly worth while. a saving of one cent on a part at our present rate of production represents twelve thousand dollars a year. one cent saved on each part would amount to millions a year. therefore, in comparing savings, the calculations are carried out to the thousandth part of a cent. if the new way suggested shows a saving and the cost of making the change will pay for itself within a reasonable time--say within three months--the change is made practically as of course. these changes are by no means limited to improvements which will increase production or decrease cost. a great many--perhaps most of them--are in the line of making the work easier. we do not want any hard, man-killing work about the place, and there is now very little of it. and usually it so works out that adopting the way which is easier on the men also decreases the cost. there is most intimate connection between decency and good business. we also investigate down to the last decimal whether it is cheaper to make or to buy a part. the suggestions come from everywhere. the polish workmen seem to be the cleverest of all of the foreigners in making them. one, who could not speak english, indicated that if the tool in his machine were set at a different angle it might wear longer. as it was it lasted only four or five cuts. he was right, and a lot of money was saved in grinding. another pole, running a drill press, rigged up a little fixture to save handling the part after drilling. that was adopted generally and a considerable saving resulted. the men often try out little attachments of their own because, concentrating on one thing, they can, if they have a mind that way, usually devise some improvement. the cleanliness of a man's machine also--although cleaning a machine is no part of his duty--is usually an indication of his intelligence. here are some of the suggestions: a proposal that castings be taken from the foundry to the machine shop on an overhead conveyor saved seventy men in the transport division. there used to be seventeen men--and this was when production was smaller--taking the burrs off gears, and it was a hard, nasty job. a man roughly sketched a special machine. his idea was worked out and the machine built. now four men have several times the output of the seventeen men--and have no hard work at all to do. changing from a solid to a welded rod in one part of the chassis effected an immediate saving of about one half million a year on a smaller than the present-day production. making certain tubes out of flat sheets instead of drawing them in the usual way effected another enormous saving. the old method of making a certain gear comprised four operations and per cent. of the steel went into scrap. we use most of our scrap and eventually we will use it all, but that is no reason for not cutting down on scrap--the mere fact that all waste is not a dead loss is no excuse for permitting waste. one of the workmen devised a very simple new method for making this gear in which the scrap was only one per cent. again, the camshaft has to have heat treatment in order to make the surface hard; the cam shafts always came out of the heat-treat oven somewhat warped, and even back in , we employed men just to straighten the shafts. several of our men experimented for about a year and finally worked out a new form of oven in which the shafts could not warp. in , with the production much larger than in , we employed only eight men in the whole operation. and then there is the pressing to take away the necessity for skill in any job done by any one. the old-time tool hardener was an expert. he had to judge the heating temperatures. it was a hit-or-miss operation. the wonder is that he hit so often. the heat treatment in the hardening of steel is highly important--providing one knows exactly the right heat to apply. that cannot be known by rule-of-thumb. it has to be measured. we introduced a system by which the man at the furnace has nothing at all to do with the heat. he does not see the pyrometer--the instrument which registers the temperature. coloured electric lights give him his signals. none of our machines is ever built haphazardly. the idea is investigated in detail before a move is made. sometimes wooden models are constructed or again the parts are drawn to full size on a blackboard. we are not bound by precedent but we leave nothing to luck, and we have yet to build a machine that will not do the work for which it was designed. about ninety per cent. of all experiments have been successful. whatever expertness in fabrication that has developed has been due to men. i think that if men are unhampered and they know that they are serving, they will always put all of mind and will into even the most trivial of tasks. chapter vii the terror of the machine repetitive labour--the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. it is terrifying to me. i could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps i might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. in fact, to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling. to them the ideal job is one where the creative instinct need not be expressed. the jobs where it is necessary to put in mind as well as muscle have very few takers--we always need men who like a job because it is difficult. the average worker, i am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion--above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think. those who have what might be called the creative type of mind and who thoroughly abhor monotony are apt to imagine that all other minds are similarly restless and therefore to extend quite unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs almost exactly the same operation. when you come right down to it, most jobs are repetitive. a business man has a routine that he follows with great exactness; the work of a bank president is nearly all routine; the work of under officers and clerks in a bank is purely routine. indeed, for most purposes and most people, it is necessary to establish something in the way of a routine and to make most motions purely repetitive--otherwise the individual will not get enough done to be able to live off his own exertions. there is no reason why any one with a creative mind should be at a monotonous job, for everywhere the need for creative men is pressing. there will never be a dearth of places for skilled people, but we have to recognize that the will to be skilled is not general. and even if the will be present, then the courage to go through with the training is absent. one cannot become skilled by mere wishing. there are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be and not enough research into what it is. take the assumption that creative work can be undertaken only in the realm of vision. we speak of creative "artists" in music, painting, and the other arts. we seemingly limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and fastidious people gather to admire each other's culture. but if a man wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or colour; let him come where he may deal with the laws of personality. we want artists in industrial relationship. we want masters in industrial method--both from the standpoint of the producer and the product. we want those who can mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole. we have limited the creative faculty too much and have used it for too trivial ends. we want men who can create the working design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. good intentions plus well-thought-out working designs can be put into practice and can be made to succeed. it is possible to increase the well-being of the workingman--not by having him do less work, but by aiding him to do more. if the world will give its attention and interest and energy to the making of plans that will profit the other fellow as he is, then such plans can be established on a practical working basis. such plans will endure--and they will be far the most profitable both in human and financial values. what this generation needs is a deep faith, a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice, and humanity in industry. if we cannot have these qualities, then we were better off without industry. indeed, if we cannot get those qualities, the days of industry are numbered. but we can get them. we are getting them. if a man cannot earn his keep without the aid of machinery, is it benefiting him to withhold that machinery because attendance upon it may be monotonous? and let him starve? or is it better to put him in the way of a good living? is a man the happier for starving? if he is the happier for using a machine to less than its capacity, is he happier for producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his share of the world's goods in exchange? i have not been able to discover that repetitive labour injures a man in any way. i have been told by parlour experts that repetitive labour is soul--as well as body--destroying, but that has not been the result of our investigations. there was one case of a man who all day long did little but step on a treadle release. he thought that the motion was making him one-sided; the medical examination did not show that he had been affected but, of course, he was changed to another job that used a different set of muscles. in a few weeks he asked for his old job again. it would seem reasonable to imagine that going through the same set of motions daily for eight hours would produce an abnormal body, but we have never had a case of it. we shift men whenever they ask to be shifted and we should like regularly to change them--that would be entirely feasible if only the men would have it that way. they do not like changes which they do not themselves suggest. some of the operations are undoubtedly monotonous--so monotonous that it seems scarcely possible that any man would care to continue long at the same job. probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of oil, then turns it into a basket. the motion never varies. the gears come to him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the same place. no muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required. he does little more than wave his hands gently to and fro--the steel rod is so light. yet the man on that job has been doing it for eight solid years. he has saved and invested his money until now he has about forty thousand dollars--and he stubbornly resists every attempt to force him into a better job! the most thorough research has not brought out a single case of a man's mind being twisted or deadened by the work. the kind of mind that does not like repetitive work does not have to stay in it. the work in each department is classified according to its desirability and skill into classes "a," "b," and "c," each class having anywhere from ten to thirty different operations. a man comes directly from the employment office to "class c." as he gets better he goes into "class b," and so on into "class a," and out of "class a" into tool making or some supervisory capacity. it is up to him to place himself. if he stays in production it is because he likes it. in a previous chapter i noted that no one applying for work is refused on account of physical condition. this policy went into effect on january , , at the time of setting the minimum wage at five dollars a day and the working day at eight hours. it carried with it the further condition that no one should be discharged on account of physical condition, except, of course, in the case of contagious disease. i think that if an industrial institution is to fill its whole role, it ought to be possible for a cross-section of its employees to show about the same proportions as a cross-section of a society in general. we have always with us the maimed and the halt. there is a most generous disposition to regard all of these people who are physically incapacitated for labour as a charge on society and to support them by charity. there are cases where i imagine that the support must be by charity--as, for instance, an idiot. but those cases are extraordinarily rare, and we have found it possible, among the great number of different tasks that must be performed somewhere in the company, to find an opening for almost any one and on the basis of production. the blind man or cripple can, in the particular place to which he is assigned, perform just as much work and receive exactly the same pay as a wholly able-bodied man would. we do not prefer cripples--but we have demonstrated that they can earn full wages. it would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage, and be content with a lower output. that might be directly helping the men but it would not be helping them in the best way. the best way is always the way by which they can be put on a productive par with able-bodied men. i believe that there is very little occasion for charity in this world--that is, charity in the sense of making gifts. most certainly business and charity cannot be combined; the purpose of a factory is to produce, and it ill serves the community in general unless it does produce to the utmost of its capacity. we are too ready to assume without investigation that the full possession of faculties is a condition requisite to the best performance of all jobs. to discover just what was the real situation, i had all of the different jobs in the factory classified to the kind of machine and work--whether the physical labour involved was light, medium, or heavy; whether it were a wet or a dry job, and if not, with what kind of fluid; whether it were clean or dirty; near an oven or a furnace; the condition of the air; whether one or both hands had to be used; whether the employee stood or sat down at his work; whether it was noisy or quiet; whether it required accuracy; whether the light was natural or artificial; the number of pieces that had to be handled per hour; the weight of the material handled; and the description of the strain upon the worker. it turned out at the time of the inquiry that there were then , different jobs in the factory. of these, were classified as heavy work requiring strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men; , required men of ordinary physical development and strength. the remaining , jobs were disclosed as requiring no physical exertion and could be performed by the slightest, weakest sort of men. in fact, most of them could be satisfactorily filled by women or older children. the lightest jobs were again classified to discover how many of them required the use of full faculties, and we found that could be filled by legless men, , by one-legged men, by armless men, by one-armed men, and by blind men. therefore, out of , kinds of jobs, , --although some of them required strength--did not require full physical capacity. that is, developed industry can provide wage work for a higher average of standard men than are ordinarily included in any normal community. if the jobs in any one industry or, say, any one factory, were analyzed as ours have been analyzed, the proportion might be very different, yet i am quite sure that if work is sufficiently subdivided--subdivided to the point of highest economy--there will be no dearth of places in which the physically incapacitated can do a man's job and get a man's wage. it is economically most wasteful to accept crippled men as charges and then to teach them trivial tasks like the weaving of baskets or some other form of unremunerative hand labour, in the hope, not of aiding them to make a living, but of preventing despondency. when a man is taken on by the employment department, the theory is to put him into a job suited to his condition. if he is already at work and he does not seem able to perform the work, or if he does not like his work, he is given a transfer card, which he takes up to the transfer department, and after an examination he is tried out in some other work more suited to his condition or disposition. those who are below the ordinary physical standards are just as good workers, rightly placed, as those who are above. for instance, a blind man was assigned to the stock department to count bolts and nuts for shipment to branch establishments. two other able-bodied men were already employed on this work. in two days the foreman sent a note to the transfer department releasing the able-bodied men because the blind man was able to do not only his own work but also the work that had formerly been done by the sound men. this salvage can be carried further. it is usually taken for granted that when a man is injured he is simply out of the running and should be paid an allowance. but there is always a period of convalescence, especially in fracture cases, where the man is strong enough to work, and, indeed, by that time usually anxious to work, for the largest possible accident allowance can never be as great as a man's wage. if it were, then a business would simply have an additional tax put upon it, and that tax would show up in the cost of the product. there would be less buying of the product and therefore less work for somebody. that is an inevitable sequence that must always be borne in mind. we have experimented with bedridden men--men who were able to sit up. we put black oilcloth covers or aprons over the beds and set the men to work screwing nuts on small bolts. this is a job that has to be done by hand and on which fifteen or twenty men are kept busy in the magneto department. the men in the hospital could do it just as well as the men in the shop and they were able to receive their regular wages. in fact, their production was about per cent., i believe, above the usual shop production. no man had to do the work unless he wanted to. but they all wanted to. it kept time from hanging on their hands. they slept and ate better and recovered more rapidly. no particular consideration has to be given to deaf-and-dumb employees. they do their work one hundred per cent. the tubercular employees--and there are usually about a thousand of them--mostly work in the material salvage department. those cases which are considered contagious work together in an especially constructed shed. the work of all of them is largely out of doors. at the time of the last analysis of employed, there were , sub-standard men. of these, had crippled or amputated arms, forearms, or hands. one had both hands off. there were totally blind men, blind in one eye, with one eye nearly blind, deaf and dumb, epileptics, with both legs or feet missing, with one foot or leg missing. the others had minor impediments. the length of time required to become proficient in the various occupations is about as follows: per cent. of all the jobs require not over one day of training; per cent. require from one day to one week; per cent. require from one to two weeks; per cent. require from one month to one year; one per cent. require from one to six years. the last jobs require great skill--as in tool making and die sinking. the discipline throughout the plant is rigid. there are no petty rules, and no rules the justice of which can reasonably be disputed. the injustice of arbitrary discharge is avoided by confining the right of discharge to the employment manager, and he rarely exercises it. the year is the last on which statistics were kept. in that year , changes occurred. of those , were absent more than ten days without notice and therefore dropped. because they refused the job assigned or, without giving cause, demanded a transfer, , were let go. a refusal to learn english in the school provided accounted for more; enlisted; about , were transferred to other plants. going home, going into farming or business accounted for about the same number. eighty-two women were discharged because their husbands were working--we do not employ married women whose husbands have jobs. out of the whole lot only were flatly discharged and the causes were: misrepresentation, ; by order of educational department, ; and undesirable, . we expect the men to do what they are told. the organization is so highly specialized and one part is so dependent upon another that we could not for a moment consider allowing men to have their own way. without the most rigid discipline we would have the utmost confusion. i think it should not be otherwise in industry. the men are there to get the greatest possible amount of work done and to receive the highest possible pay. if each man were permitted to act in his own way, production would suffer and therefore pay would suffer. any one who does not like to work in our way may always leave. the company's conduct toward the men is meant to be exact and impartial. it is naturally to the interest both of the foremen and of the department heads that the releases from their departments should be few. the workman has a full chance to tell his story if he has been unjustly treated--he has full recourse. of course, it is inevitable that injustices occur. men are not always fair with their fellow workmen. defective human nature obstructs our good intentions now and then. the foreman does not always get the idea, or misapplies it--but the company's intentions are as i have stated, and we use every means to have them understood. it is necessary to be most insistent in the matter of absences. a man may not come or go as he pleases; he may always apply for leave to the foreman, but if he leaves without notice, then, on his return, the reasons for his absence are carefully investigated and are sometimes referred to the medical department. if his reasons are good, he is permitted to resume work. if they are not good he may be discharged. in hiring a man the only data taken concerns his name, his address, his age, whether he is married or single, the number of his dependents, whether he has ever worked for the ford motor company, and the condition of his sight and his hearing. no questions are asked concerning what the man has previously done, but we have what we call the "better advantage notice," by which a man who has had a trade before he came to us files a notice with the employment department stating what the trade was. in this way, when we need specialists of any kind, we can get them right out of production. this is also one of the avenues by which tool makers and moulders quickly reach the higher positions. i once wanted a swiss watch maker. the cards turned one up--he was running a drill press. the heat treat department wanted a skilled firebrick layer. he also was found on a drill press--he is now a general inspector. there is not much personal contact--the men do their work and go home--a factory is not a drawing room. but we try to have justice and, while there may be little in the way of hand shaking--we have no professional hand shakers--also we try to prevent opportunity for petty personalities. we have so many departments that the place is almost a world in itself--every kind of man can find a place somewhere in it. take fighting between men. men will fight, and usually fighting is a cause for discharge on the spot. we find that does not help the fighters--it merely gets them out of our sight. so the foremen have become rather ingenious in devising punishments that will not take anything away from the man's family and which require no time at all to administer. one point that is absolutely essential to high capacity, as well as to humane production, is a clean, well-lighted and well-ventilated factory. our machines are placed very close together--every foot of floor space in the factory carries, of course, the same overhead charge. the consumer must pay the extra overhead and the extra transportation involved in having machines even six inches farther apart than they have to be. we measure on each job the exact amount of room that a man needs; he must not be cramped--that would be waste. but if he and his machine occupy more space than is required, that also is waste. this brings our machines closer together than in probably any other factory in the world. to a stranger they may seem piled right on top of one another, but they are scientifically arranged, not only in the sequence of operations, but to give every man and every machine every square inch that he requires and, if possible, not a square inch, and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires. our factory buildings are not intended to be used as parks. the close placing requires a maximum of safeguards and ventilation. machine safeguarding is a subject all of itself. we do not consider any machine--no matter how efficiently it may turn out its work--as a proper machine unless it is absolutely safe. we have no machines that we consider unsafe, but even at that a few accidents will happen. every accident, no matter how trivial, is traced back by a skilled man employed solely for that purpose, and a study is made of the machine to make that same accident in the future impossible. when we put up the older buildings, we did not understand so much about ventilation as we do to-day. in all the later buildings, the supporting columns are made hollow and through them the bad air is pumped out and the good air introduced. a nearly even temperature is kept everywhere the year round and, during daylight, there is nowhere the necessity for artificial light. something like seven hundred men are detailed exclusively to keeping the shops clean, the windows washed, and all of the paint fresh. the dark corners which invite expectoration are painted white. one cannot have morale without cleanliness. we tolerate makeshift cleanliness no more than makeshift methods. no reason exists why factory work should be dangerous. if a man has worked too hard or through too long hours he gets into a mental state that invites accidents. part of the work of preventing accidents is to avoid this mental state; part is to prevent carelessness, and part is to make machinery absolutely fool-proof. the principal causes of accidents as they are grouped by the experts are: ( ) defective structures; ( ) defective machines; ( ) insufficient room; ( ) absence of safeguards; ( ) unclean conditions; ( ) bad lights; ( ) bad air; ( ) unsuitable clothing; ( ) carelessness; ( ) ignorance; ( ) mental condition; ( ) lack of cooperation. the questions of defective structures, defective machinery, insufficient room, unclean conditions, bad light, bad air, the wrong mental condition, and the lack of cooperation are easily disposed of. none of the men work too hard. the wages settle nine tenths of the mental problems and construction gets rid of the others. we have then to guard against unsuitable clothing, carelessness, and ignorance, and to make everything we have fool-proof. this is more difficult where we have belts. in all of our new construction, each machine has its individual electric motor, but in the older construction we had to use belts. every belt is guarded. over the automatic conveyors are placed bridges so that no man has to cross at a dangerous point. wherever there is a possibility of flying metal, the workman is required to wear goggles and the chances are further reduced by surrounding the machine with netting. around hot furnaces we have railings. there is nowhere an open part of a machine in which clothing can be caught. all the aisles are kept clear. the starting switches of draw presses are protected by big red tags which have to be removed before the switch can be turned--this prevents the machine being started thoughtlessly. workmen will wear unsuitable clothing--ties that may be caught in a pulley, flowing sleeves, and all manner of unsuitable articles. the bosses have to watch for that, and they catch most of the offenders. new machines are tested in every way before they are permitted to be installed. as a result we have practically no serious accidents. industry needs not exact a human toll. chapter viii wages there is nothing to running a business by custom--to saying: "i pay the going rate of wages." the same man would not so easily say: "i have nothing better or cheaper to sell than any one has." no manufacturer in his right mind would contend that buying only the cheapest materials is the way to make certain of manufacturing the best article. then why do we hear so much talk about the "liquidation of labour" and the benefits that will flow to the country from cutting wages--which means only the cutting of buying power and the curtailing of the home market? what good is industry if it be so unskillfully managed as not to return a living to everyone concerned? no question is more important than that of wages--most of the people of the country live on wages. the scale of their living--the rate of their wages--determines the prosperity of the country. throughout all the ford industries we now have a minimum wage of six dollars a day; we used to have a minimum of five dollars; before that we paid whatever it was necessary to pay. it would be bad morals to go back to the old market rate of paying--but also it would be the worst sort of bad business. first get at the relationships. it is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he? whenever a man finds the management of a business too much for his own time or strength, he calls in assistants to share the management with him. why, then, if a man finds the production part of a business too much for his own two hands should he deny the title of "partner" to those who come in and help him produce? every business that employs more than one man is a kind of partnership. the moment a man calls for assistance in his business--even though the assistant be but a boy--that moment he has taken a partner. he may himself be sole owner of the resources of the business and sole director of its operations, but only while he remains sole manager and sole producer can he claim complete independence. no man is independent as long as he has to depend on another man to help him. it is a reciprocal relation--the boss is the partner of his worker, the worker is partner of his boss. and such being the case, it is useless for one group or the other to assume that it is the one indispensable unit. both are indispensable. the one can become unduly assertive only at the expense of the other--and eventually at its own expense as well. it is utterly foolish for capital or for labour to think of themselves as groups. they are partners. when they pull and haul against each other--they simply injure the organization in which they are partners and from which both draw support. it ought to be the employer's ambition, as leader, to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman's ambition to make this possible. of course there are men in all shops who seem to believe that if they do their best, it will be only for the employer's benefit--and not at all for their own. it is a pity that such a feeling should exist. but it does exist and perhaps it has some justification. if an employer urges men to do their best, and the men learn after a while that their best does not bring any reward, then they naturally drop back into "getting by." but if they see the fruits of hard work in their pay envelope--proof that harder work means higher pay--then also they begin to learn that they are a part of the business, and that its success depends on them and their success depends on it. "what ought the employer to pay?"--"what ought the employee to receive?" these are but minor questions. the basic question is "what can the business stand?" certainly no business can stand outgo that exceeds its income. when you pump water out of a well at a faster rate than the water flows in, the well goes dry. and when the well runs dry, those who depend on it go thirsty. and if, perchance, they imagine they can pump one well dry and then jump to some other well, it is only a matter of time when all the wells will be dry. there is now a widespread demand for more justly divided rewards, but it must be recognized that there are limits to rewards. the business itself sets the limits. you cannot distribute $ , out of a business that brings in only $ , . the business limits the wages, but does anything limit the business? the business limits itself by following bad precedents. if men, instead of saying "the employer ought to do thus-and-so," would say, "the business ought to be so stimulated and managed that it can do thus-and-so," they would get somewhere. because only the business can pay wages. certainly the employer cannot, unless the business warrants. but if that business does warrant higher wages and the employer refuses, what is to be done? as a rule a business means the livelihood of too many men, to be tampered with. it is criminal to assassinate a business to which large numbers of men have given their labours and to which they have learned to look as their field of usefulness and their source of livelihood. killing the business by a strike or a lockout does not help. the employer can gain nothing by looking over the employees and asking himself, "how little can i get them to take?" nor the employee by glaring back and asking, "how much can i force him to give?" eventually both will have to turn to the business and ask, "how can this industry be made safe and profitable, so that it will be able to provide a sure and comfortable living for all of us?" but by no means all employers or all employees will think straight. the habit of acting shortsightedly is a hard one to break. what can be done? nothing. no rules or laws will effect the changes. but enlightened self-interest will. it takes a little while for enlightenment to spread. but spread it must, for the concern in which both employer and employees work to the same end of service is bound to forge ahead in business. what do we mean by high wages, anyway? we mean a higher wage than was paid ten months or ten years ago. we do not mean a higher wage than ought to be paid. our high wages of to-day may be low wages ten years from now. if it is right for the manager of a business to try to make it pay larger dividends, it is quite as right that he should try to make it pay higher wages. but it is not the manager of the business who pays the high wages. of course, if he can and will not, then the blame is on him. but he alone can never make high wages possible. high wages cannot be paid unless the workmen earn them. their labour is the productive factor. it is not the only productive factor--poor management can waste labour and material and nullify the efforts of labour. labour can nullify the results of good management. but in a partnership of skilled management and honest labour, it is the workman who makes high wages possible. he invests his energy and skill, and if he makes an honest, wholehearted investment, high wages ought to be his reward. not only has he earned them, but he has had a big part in creating them. it ought to be clear, however, that the high wage begins down in the shop. if it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. there will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. nature has seen to that. idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. so far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing. exact social justice flows only out of honest work. the man who contributes much should take away much. therefore no element of charity is present in the paying of wages. the kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. and he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition of his contribution. the man who comes to the day's job feeling that no matter how much he may give, it will not yield him enough of a return to keep him beyond want, is not in shape to do his day's work. he is anxious and worried, and it all reacts to the detriment of his work. but if a man feels that his day's work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best. this is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business. the man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day's work is losing the best part of his pay. for the day's work is a great thing--a very great thing! it is at the very foundation of the world; it is the basis of our self-respect. and the employer ought constantly to put in a harder day's work than any of his men. the employer who is seriously trying to do his duty in the world must be a hard worker. he cannot say, "i have so many thousand men working for me." the fact of the matter is that so many thousand men have him working for them--and the better they work the busier they keep him disposing of their products. wages and salaries are in fixed amounts, and this must be so, in order to have a basis to figure on. wages and salaries are a sort of profit-sharing fixed in advance, but it often happens that when the business of the year is closed, it is discovered that more can be paid. and then more ought to be paid. when we are all in the business working together, we all ought to have some share in the profits--by way of a good wage, or salary, or added compensation. and that is beginning now quite generally to be recognized. there is now a definite demand that the human side of business be elevated to a position of equal importance with the material side. and that is going to come about. it is just a question whether it is going to be brought about wisely--in a way that will conserve the material side which now sustains us, or unwisely and in such a way as shall take from us all the benefit of the work of the past years. business represents our national livelihood, it reflects our economic progress, and gives us our place among other nations. we do not want to jeopardize that. what we want is a better recognition of the human element in business. and surely it can be achieved without dislocation, without loss to any one, indeed with an increase of benefit to every human being. and the secret of it all is in a recognition of human partnership. until each man is absolutely sufficient unto himself, needing the services of no other human being in any capacity whatever, we shall never get beyond the need of partnership. such are the fundamental truths of wages. they are partnership distributions. when can a wage be considered adequate? how much of a living is reasonably to be expected from work? have you ever considered what a wage does or ought to do? to say that it should pay the cost of living is to say almost nothing. the cost of living depends largely upon the efficiency of production and transportation; and the efficiency of these is the sum of the efficiencies of the management and the workers. good work, well managed, ought to result in high wages and low living costs. if we attempt to regulate wages on living costs, we get nowhere. the cost of living is a result and we cannot expect to keep a result constant if we keep altering the factors which produce the result. when we try to regulate wages according to the cost of living, we are imitating a dog chasing his tail. and, anyhow, who is competent to say just what kind of living we shall base the costs on? let us broaden our view and see what a wage is to the workmen--and what it ought to be. the wage carries all the worker's obligations outside the shop; it carries all that is necessary in the way of service and management inside the shop. the day's productive work is the most valuable mine of wealth that has ever been opened. certainly it ought to bear not less than all the worker's outside obligations. and certainly it ought to be made to take care of the worker's sunset days when labour is no longer possible to him--and should be no longer necessary. and if it is made to do even these, industry will have to be adjusted to a schedule of production, distribution, and reward, which will stop the leaks into the pockets of men who do not assist in production. in order to create a system which shall be as independent of the good-will of benevolent employers as of the ill-will of selfish ones, we shall have to find a basis in the actual facts of life itself. it costs just as much physical strength to turn out a day's work when wheat is $ a bushel, as when wheat is $ . a bushel. eggs may be cents a dozen or cents a dozen. what difference does it make in the units of energy a man uses in a productive day's work? if only the man himself were concerned, the cost of his maintenance and the profit he ought to have would be a simple matter. but he is not just an individual. he is a citizen, contributing to the welfare of the nation. he is a householder. he is perhaps a father with children who must be reared to usefulness on what he is able to earn. we must reckon with all these facts. how are you going to figure the contribution of the home to the day's work? you pay the man for his work, but how much does that work owe to his home? how much to his position as a citizen? how much to his position as a father? the man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. the shop must pay them both. on what system of figuring is the home going to find its place on the cost sheets of the day's work? is the man's own livelihood to be regarded as the "cost"? and is his ability to have a home and family the "profit"? is the profit on a day's work to be computed on a cash basis only, measured by the amount a man has left over after his own and his family's wants are all supplied? or are all these relationships to be considered strictly under head of cost, and the profit to be computed entirely outside of them? that is, after having supported himself and family, clothed them, housed them, educated them, given them the privileges incident to their standard of living, ought there to be provision made for still something more in the way of savings profit? and are all properly chargeable to the day's work? i think they are. otherwise, we have the hideous prospect of little children and their mothers being forced out to work. these are questions which call for accurate observation and computation. perhaps there is no one item connected with our economic life that would surprise us more than a knowledge of just what burdens the day's work. it is perhaps possible accurately to determine--albeit with considerable interference with the day's work itself--how much energy the day's work takes out of a man. but it is not at all possible accurately to determine how much it will require to put back that energy into him against the next day's demands. nor is it possible to determine how much of that expended energy he will never be able to get back at all. economics has never yet devised a sinking fund for the replacement of the strength of a worker. it is possible to set up a kind of sinking fund in the form of old-age pensions. but pensions do not attend to the profit which each day's labour ought to yield in order to take care of all of life's overhead, of all physical losses, and of the inevitable deterioration of the manual worker. the best wages that have up to date ever been paid are not nearly as high as they ought to be. business is not yet sufficiently well organized and its objectives are not yet sufficiently clear to make it possible to pay more than a fraction of the wages that ought to be paid. that is part of the work we have before us. it does not help toward a solution to talk about abolishing the wage system and substituting communal ownership. the wage system is the only one that we have, under which contributions to production can be rewarded according to their worth. take away the wage measure and we shall have universal injustice. perfect the system and we may have universal justice. i have learned through the years a good deal about wages. i believe in the first place that, all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay. if we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales. country-wide high wages spell country-wide prosperity, provided, however, the higher wages are paid for higher production. paying high wages and lowering production is starting down the incline toward dull business. it took us some time to get our bearings on wages, and it was not until we had gone thoroughly into production on "model t," that it was possible to figure out what wages ought to be. before then we had had some profit sharing. we had at the end of each year, for some years past, divided a percentage of our earnings with the employees. for instance, as long ago as we distributed eighty thousand dollars on the basis of years of service. a one-year man received per cent. of his year's wages; a two-year man, - / per cent., and a three-year man, per cent. the objection to that plan was that it had no direct connection with the day's work. a man did not get his share until long after his work was done and then it came to him almost in the way of a present. it is always unfortunate to have wages tinged with charity. and then, too, the wages were not scientifically adjusted to the jobs. the man in job "a" might get one rate and the man in job "b" a higher rate, while as a matter of fact job "a" might require more skill or exertion than job "b." a great deal of inequity creeps into wage rates unless both the employer and the employee know that the rate paid has been arrived at by something better than a guess. therefore, starting about we had time studies made of all the thousands of operations in the shops. by a time study it is possible theoretically to determine what a man's output should be. then, making large allowances, it is further possible to get at a satisfactory standard output for a day, and, taking into consideration the skill, to arrive at a rate which will express with fair accuracy the amount of skill and exertion that goes into a job--and how much is to be expected from the man in the job in return for the wage. without scientific study the employer does not know why he is paying a wage and the worker does not know why he is getting it. on the time figures all of the jobs in our factory were standardized and rates set. we do not have piece work. some of the men are paid by the day and some are paid by the hour, but in practically every case there is a required standard output below which a man is not expected to fall. were it otherwise, neither the workman nor ourselves would know whether or not wages were being earned. there must be a fixed day's work before a real wage can be paid. watchmen are paid for presence. workmen are paid for work. having these facts in hand we announced and put into operation in january, , a kind of profit-sharing plan in which the minimum wage for any class of work and under certain conditions was five dollars a day. at the same time we reduced the working day to eight hours--it had been nine--and the week to forty-eight hours. this was entirely a voluntary act. all of our wage rates have been voluntary. it was to our way of thinking an act of social justice, and in the last analysis we did it for our own satisfaction of mind. there is a pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy--that you have lessened in some degree the burdens of your fellow-men--that you have provided a margin out of which may be had pleasure and saving. good-will is one of the few really important assets of life. a determined man can win almost anything that he goes after, but unless, in his getting, he gains good will he has not profited much. there was, however, no charity in any way involved. that was not generally understood. many employers thought we were just making the announcement because we were prosperous and wanted advertising and they condemned us because we were upsetting standards--violating the custom of paying a man the smallest amount he would take. there is nothing to such standards and customs. they have to be wiped out. some day they will be. otherwise, we cannot abolish poverty. we made the change not merely because we wanted to pay higher wages and thought we could pay them. we wanted to pay these wages so that the business would be on a lasting foundation. we were not distributing anything--we were building for the future. a low wage business is always insecure. probably few industrial announcements have created a more world-wide comment than did this one, and hardly any one got the facts quite right. workmen quite generally believed that they were going to get five dollars a day, regardless of what work they did. the facts were somewhat different from the general impression. the plan was to distribute profits, but instead of waiting until the profits had been earned--to approximate them in advance and to add them, under certain conditions, to the wages of those persons who had been in the employ of the company for six months or more. it was classified participation among three classes of employees: ( ) married men living with and taking good care of their families. ( ) single men over twenty-two years of age who are of proved thrifty habits. ( ) young men under twenty-two years of age, and women who are the sole support of some next of kin. a man was first to be paid his just wages--which were then on an average of about fifteen per cent. above the usual market wage. he was then eligible to a certain profit. his wages plus his profit were calculated to give a minimum daily income of five dollars. the profit sharing rate was divided on an hour basis and was credited to the hourly wage rate, so as to give those receiving the lowest hourly rate the largest proportion of profits. it was paid every two weeks with the wages. for example, a man who received thirty-four cents an hour had a profit rate of twenty-eight and one half cents an hour--which would give him a daily income of five dollars. a man receiving fifty-four cents an hour would have a profit rate of twenty-one cents an hour--which would give him a daily income of six dollars. it was a sort of prosperity-sharing plan. but on conditions. the man and his home had to come up to certain standards of cleanliness and citizenship. nothing paternal was intended!--a certain amount of paternalism did develop, and that is one reason why the whole plan and the social welfare department were readjusted. but in the beginning the idea was that there should be a very definite incentive to better living and that the very best incentive was a money premium on proper living. a man who is living aright will do his work aright. and then, too, we wanted to avoid the possibility of lowering the standard of work through an increased wage. it was demonstrated in war time that too quickly increasing a man's pay sometimes increases only his cupidity and therefore decreases his earning power. if, in the beginning, we had simply put the increase in the pay envelopes, then very likely the work standards would have broken down. the pay of about half the men was doubled in the new plan; it might have been taken as "easy money." the thought of easy money breaks down work. there is a danger in too rapidly raising the pay of any man--whether he previously received one dollar or one hundred dollars a day. in fact, if the salary of a hundred-dollar-a-day man were increased overnight to three hundred dollars a day he would probably make a bigger fool of himself than the working man whose pay is increased from one dollar to three dollars an hour. the man with the larger amount of money has larger opportunity to make a fool of himself. in this first plan the standards insisted upon were not petty--although sometimes they may have been administered in a petty fashion. we had about fifty investigators in the social department; the standard of common sense among them was very high indeed, but it is impossible to assemble fifty men equally endowed with common sense. they erred at times--one always hears about the errors. it was expected that in order to receive the bonus married men should live with and take proper care of their families. we had to break up the evil custom among many of the foreign workers of taking in boarders--of regarding their homes as something to make money out of rather than as a place to live in. boys under eighteen received a bonus if they supported the next of kin. single men who lived wholesomely shared. the best evidence that the plan was essentially beneficial is the record. when the plan went into effect, per cent. of the workers immediately qualified to share; at the end of six months per cent. were sharing, and at the end of one year per cent. within a year and one half only a fraction of one per cent. failed to share. the large wage had other results. in , when the first plan went into effect, we had , employees and it had been necessary to hire at the rate of about , a year in order to keep a constant force of , . in we had to hire only , men and the majority of these new men were taken on because of the growth of the business. with the old turnover of labour and our present force we should have to hire at the rate of nearly , men a year--which would be pretty nearly an impossible proposition. even with the minimum of instruction that is required to master almost any job in our place, we cannot take on a new staff each morning, or each week, or each month; for, although a man may qualify for acceptable work at an acceptable rate of speed within two or three days, he will be able to do more after a year's experience than he did at the beginning. the matter of labour turnover has not since bothered us; it is rather hard to give exact figures because when we are not running to capacity, we rotate some of the men in order to distribute the work among greatest number. this makes it hard to distinguish between the voluntary and involuntary exits. to-day we keep no figures; we now think so little of our turnover that we do not bother to keep records. as far as we know the turnover is somewhere between per cent. and per cent. a month. we have made changes in the system, but we have not deviated from this principle: if you expect a man to give his time and energy, fix his wages so that he will have no financial worries. it pays. our profits, after paying good wages and a bonus--which bonus used to run around ten millions a year before we changed the system--show that paying good wages is the most profitable way of doing business. there were objections to the bonus-on-conduct method of paying wages. it tended toward paternalism. paternalism has no place in industry. welfare work that consists in prying into employees' private concerns is out of date. men need counsel and men need help, oftentimes special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency's sake. but the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment. chapter ix why not always have good business? the employer has to live by the year. the workman has to live by the year. but both of them, as a rule, work by the week. they get an order or a job when they can and at the price they can. during what is called a prosperous time, orders and jobs are plentiful. during a "dull" season they are scarce. business is always either feasting or fasting and is always either "good" or "bad." although there is never a time when everyone has too much of this world's goods--when everyone is too comfortable or too happy--there come periods when we have the astounding spectacle of a world hungry for goods and an industrial machine hungry for work and the two--the demand and the means of satisfying it--held apart by a money barrier. both manufacturing and employment are in-and-out affairs. instead of a steady progression we go ahead by fits and starts--now going too fast, now stopping altogether. when a great many people want to buy, there is said to be a shortage of goods. when nobody wants to buy, there is said to be an overproduction of goods. i know that we have always had a shortage of goods, but i do not believe we have ever had an overproduction. we may have, at a particular time, too much of the wrong kind of goods. that is not overproduction--that is merely headless production. we may also have great stocks of goods at too high prices. that is not overproduction--it is either bad manufacturing or bad financing. is business good or bad according to the dictates of fate? must we accept the conditions as inevitable? business is good or bad as we make it so. the only reason for growing crops, for mining, or for manufacturing, is that people may eat, keep warm, have clothing to wear, and articles to use. there is no other possible reason, yet that reason is forced into the background and instead we have operations carried on, not to the end of service, but to the end of making money--and this because we have evolved a system of money that instead of being a convenient medium of exchange, is at times a barrier to exchange. of this more later. we suffer frequent periods of so-called bad luck only because we manage so badly. if we had a vast crop failure, i can imagine the country going hungry, but i cannot conceive how it is that we tolerate hunger and poverty, when they grow solely out of bad management, and especially out of the bad management that is implicit in an unreasoned financial structure. of course the war upset affairs in this country. it upset the whole world. there would have been no war had management been better. but the war alone is not to blame. the war showed up a great number of the defects of the financial system, but more than anything else it showed how insecure is business supported only by a money foundation. i do not know whether bad business is the result of bad financial methods or whether the wrong motive in business created bad financial methods, but i do know that, while it would be wholly undesirable to try to overturn the present financial system, it is wholly desirable to reshape business on the basis of service. then a better financial system will have to come. the present system will drop out because it will have no reason for being. the process will have to be a gradual one. the start toward the stabilization of his own affairs may be made by any one. one cannot achieve perfect results acting alone, but as the example begins to sink in there will be followers, and thus in the course of time we can hope to put inflated business and its fellow, depressed business, into a class with small-pox--that is, into the class of preventable diseases. it is perfectly possible, with the reorganization of business and finance that is bound to come about, to take the ill effect of seasons, if not the seasons, out of industry, and also the periodic depressions. farming is already in process of reorganization. when industry and farming are fully reorganized they will be complementary; they belong together, not apart. as an indication, take our valve plant. we established it eighteen miles out in the country so that the workers could also be farmers. by the use of machinery farming need not consume more than a fraction of the time it now consumes; the time nature requires to produce is much larger than that required for the human contribution of seeding, cultivating, and harvesting; in many industries where the parts are not bulky it does not make much difference where they are made. by the aid of water power they can well be made out in farming country. thus we can, to a much larger degree than is commonly known, have farmer-industrialists who both farm and work under the most scientific and healthful conditions. that arrangement will care for some seasonal industries; others can arrange a succession of products according to the seasons and the equipment, and still others can, with more careful management, iron out their seasons. a complete study of any specific problem will show the way. the periodic depressions are more serious because they seem so vast as to be uncontrollable. until the whole reorganization is brought about, they cannot be wholly controlled, but each man in business can easily do something for himself and while benefiting his own organization in a very material way, also help others. the ford production has not reflected good times or bad times; it has kept right on regardless of conditions excepting from to , when the factory was turned over to war work. the year - was supposed to be a dull one; although now some call it "normal"; we all but doubled our sales; - was dull; we increased our sales by more than a third. the year - is supposed to have been one of the most depressed in history; we sold a million and a quarter cars, or about five times as many as in - --the "normal year." there is no particular secret in it. it is, as is everything else in our business, the inevitable result of the application of a principle which can be applied to any business. we now have a minimum wage of six dollars a day paid without reservation. the people are sufficiently used to high wages to make supervision unnecessary. the minimum wage is paid just as soon as a worker has qualified in his production--which is a matter that depends upon his own desire to work. we have put our estimate of profits into the wage and are now paying higher wages than during the boom times after the war. but we are, as always, paying them on the basis of work. and that the men do work is evidenced by the fact that although six dollars a day is the minimum wage, about per cent. of the workers receive above the minimum. the six dollars is not a flat but a minimum wage. consider first the fundamentals of prosperity. progress is not made by pulling off a series of stunts. each step has to be regulated. a man cannot expect to progress without thinking. take prosperity. a truly prosperous time is when the largest number of people are getting all they can legitimately eat and wear, and are in every sense of the word comfortable. it is the degree of the comfort of the people at large--not the size of the manufacturer's bank balance--that evidences prosperity. the function of the manufacturer is to contribute to this comfort. he is an instrument of society and he can serve society only as he manages his enterprises so as to turn over to the public an increasingly better product at an ever-decreasing price, and at the same time to pay to all those who have a hand in his business an ever-increasing wage, based upon the work they do. in this way and in this way alone can a manufacturer or any one in business justify his existence. we are not much concerned with the statistics and the theories of the economists on the recurring cycles of prosperity and depression. they call the periods when prices are high "prosperous." a really prosperous period is not to be judged on the prices that manufacturers are quoting for articles. we are not concerned with combinations of words. if the prices of goods are above the incomes of the people, then get the prices down to the incomes. ordinarily, business is conceived as starting with a manufacturing process and ending with a consumer. if that consumer does not want to buy what the manufacturer has to sell him and has not the money to buy it, then the manufacturer blames the consumer and says that business is bad, and thus, hitching the cart before the horse, he goes on his way lamenting. isn't that nonsense? does the manufacturer exist for the consumer or does the consumer exist for the manufacturer? if the consumer will not--says he cannot--buy what the manufacturer has to offer, is that the fault of the manufacturer or the consumer? or is nobody at fault? if nobody is at fault then the manufacturer must go out of business. but what business ever started with the manufacturer and ended with the consumer? where does the money to make the wheels go round come from? from the consumer, of course. and success in manufacture is based solely upon an ability to serve that consumer to his liking. he may be served by quality or he may be served by price. he is best served by the highest quality at the lowest price, and any man who can give to the consumer the highest quality at the lowest price is bound to be a leader in business, whatever the kind of an article he makes. there is no getting away from this. then why flounder around waiting for good business? get the costs down by better management. get the prices down to the buying power. cutting wages is the easiest and most slovenly way to handle the situation, not to speak of its being an inhuman way. it is, in effect, throwing upon labour the incompetency of the managers of the business. if we only knew it, every depression is a challenge to every manufacturer to put more brains into his business--to overcome by management what other people try to overcome by wage reduction. to tamper with wages before all else is changed, is to evade the real issue. and if the real issue is tackled first, no reduction of wages may be necessary. that has been my experience. the immediate practical point is that, in the process of adjustment, someone will have to take a loss. and who can take a loss except those who have something which they can afford to lose? but the expression, "take a loss," is rather misleading. really no loss is taken at all. it is only a giving up of a certain part of the past profits in order to gain more in the future. i was talking not long since with a hardware merchant in a small town. he said: "i expect to take a loss of $ , on my stock. but of course, you know, it isn't really like losing that much. we hardware men have had pretty good times. most of my stock was bought at high prices, but i have already sold several stocks and had the benefit of them. besides, the ten thousand dollars which i say i will lose are not the same kind of dollars that i used to have. they are, in a way, speculative dollars. they are not the good dollars that bought cents' worth. so, though my loss may sound big, it is not big. and at the same time i am making it possible for the people in my town to go on building their houses without being discouraged by the size of the hardware item." he is a wise merchant. he would rather take less profit and keep business moving than keep his stock at high prices and bar the progress of his community. a man like that is an asset to a town. he has a clear head. he is better able to swing the adjustment through his inventory than through cutting down the wages of his delivery men--through cutting down their ability to buy. he did not sit around holding on to his prices and waiting for something to turn up. he realized what seems to have been quite generally forgotten--that it is part of proprietorship every now and again to lose money. we had to take our loss. our sales eventually fell off as all other sales fell off. we had a large inventory and, taking the materials and parts in that inventory at their cost price, we could not turn out a car at a price lower than we were asking, but that was a price which on the turn of business was higher than people could or wanted to pay. we closed down to get our bearings. we were faced with making a cut of $ , , in the inventory or taking a much larger loss than that by not doing business. so there was no choice at all. that is always the choice that a man in business has. he can take the direct loss on his books and go ahead and do business or he can stop doing business and take the loss of idleness. the loss of not doing business is commonly a loss greater than the actual money involved, for during the period of idleness fear will consume initiative and, if the shutdown is long enough, there will be no energy left over to start up with again. there is no use waiting around for business to improve. if a manufacturer wants to perform his function, he must get his price down to what people will pay. there is always, no matter what the condition, a price that people can and will pay for a necessity, and always, if the will is there, that price can be met. it cannot be met by lowering quality or by shortsighted economy, which results only in a dissatisfied working force. it cannot be met by fussing or buzzing around. it can be met only by increasing the efficiency of production and, viewed in this fashion, each business depression, so-called, ought to be regarded as a challenge to the brains of the business community. concentrating on prices instead of on service is a sure indication of the kind of business man who can give no justification for his existence as a proprietor. this is only another way of saying that sales should be made on the natural basis of real value, which is the cost of transmuting human energy into articles of trade and commerce. but that simple formula is not considered business-like. it is not complex enough. we have "business" which takes the most honest of all human activities and makes them subject to the speculative shrewdness of men who can produce false shortages of food and other commodities, and thus excite in society anxiety of demand. we have false stimulation and then false numbness. economic justice is being constantly and quite often innocently violated. you may say that it is the economic condition which makes mankind what it is; or you may say that it is mankind that makes the economic condition what it is. you will find many claiming that it is the economic system which makes men what they are. they blame our industrial system for all the faults which we behold in mankind generally. and you will find other men who say that man creates his own conditions; that if the economic, industrial, or social system is bad, it is but a reflection of what man himself is. what is wrong in our industrial system is a reflection of what is wrong in man himself. manufacturers hesitate to admit that the mistakes of the present industrial methods are, in part at least, their own mistakes, systematized and extended. but take the question outside of a man's immediate concerns, and he sees the point readily enough. no doubt, with a less faulty human nature a less faulty social system would have grown up. or, if human nature were worse than it is, a worse system would have grown up--though probably a worse system would not have lasted as long as the present one has. but few will claim that mankind deliberately set out to create a faulty social system. granting without reserve that all faults of the social system are in man himself, it does not follow that he deliberately organized his imperfections and established them. we shall have to charge a great deal up to ignorance. we shall have to charge a great deal up to innocence. take the beginnings of our present industrial system. there was no indication of how it would grow. every new advance was hailed with joy. no one ever thought of "capital" and "labour" as hostile interests. no one ever dreamed that the very fact of success would bring insidious dangers with it. and yet with growth every imperfection latent in the system came out. a man's business grew to such proportions that he had to have more helpers than he knew by their first names; but that fact was not regretted; it was rather hailed with joy. and yet it has since led to an impersonal system wherein the workman has become something less than a person--a mere part of the system. no one believes, of course, that this dehumanizing process was deliberately invented. it just grew. it was latent in the whole early system, but no one saw it and no one could foresee it. only prodigious and unheard-of development could bring it to light. take the industrial idea; what is it? the true industrial idea is not to make money. the industrial idea is to express a serviceable idea, to duplicate a useful idea, by as many thousands as there are people who need it. to produce, produce; to get a system that will reduce production to a fine art; to put production on such a basis as will provide means for expansion and the building of still more shops, the production of still more thousands of useful things--that is the real industrial idea. the negation of the industrial idea is the effort to make a profit out of speculation instead of out of work. there are short-sighted men who cannot see that business is bigger than any one man's interests. business is a process of give and take, live and let live. it is cooperation among many forces and interests. whenever you find a man who believes that business is a river whose beneficial flow ought to stop as soon as it reaches him you find a man who thinks he can keep business alive by stopping its circulation. he would produce wealth by this stopping of the production of wealth. the principles of service cannot fail to cure bad business. which leads us into the practical application of the principles of service and finance. chapter x how cheaply can things be made? no one will deny that if prices are sufficiently low, buyers will always be found, no matter what are supposed to be the business conditions. that is one of the elemental facts of business. sometimes raw materials will not move, no matter how low the price. we have seen something of that during the last year, but that is because the manufacturers and the distributors were trying to dispose of high-cost stocks before making new engagements. the markets were stagnant, but not "saturated" with goods. what is called a "saturated" market is only one in which the prices are above the purchasing power. unduly high prices are always a sign of unsound business, because they are always due to some abnormal condition. a healthy patient has a normal temperature; a healthy market has normal prices. high prices come about commonly by reason of speculation following the report of a shortage. although there is never a shortage in everything, a shortage in just a few important commodities, or even in one, serves to start speculation. or again, goods may not be short at all. an inflation of currency or credit will cause a quick bulge in apparent buying power and the consequent opportunity to speculate. there may be a combination of actual shortages and a currency inflation--as frequently happens during war. but in any condition of unduly high prices, no matter what the real cause, the people pay the high prices because they think there is going to be a shortage. they may buy bread ahead of their own needs, so as not to be left later in the lurch, or they may buy in the hope of reselling at a profit. when there was talk of a sugar shortage, housewives who had never in their lives bought more than ten pounds of sugar at once tried to get stocks of one hundred or two hundred pounds, and while they were doing this, speculators were buying sugar to store in warehouses. nearly all our war shortages were caused by speculation or buying ahead of need. no matter how short the supply of an article is supposed to be, no matter if the government takes control and seizes every ounce of that article, a man who is willing to pay the money can always get whatever supply he is willing to pay for. no one ever knows actually how great or how small is the national stock of any commodity. the very best figures are not more than guesses; estimates of the world's stock of a commodity are still wilder. we may think we know how much of a commodity is produced on a certain day or in a certain month, but that does not tell us how much will be produced the next day or the next month. likewise we do not know how much is consumed. by spending a great deal of money we might, in the course of time, get at fairly accurate figures on how much of a particular commodity was consumed over a period, but by the time those figures were compiled they would be utterly useless except for historical purposes, because in the next period the consumption might be double or half as much. people do not stay put. that is the trouble with all the framers of socialistic and communistic, and of all other plans for the ideal regulation of society. they all presume that people will stay put. the reactionary has the same idea. he insists that everyone ought to stay put. nobody does, and for that i am thankful. consumption varies according to the price and the quality, and nobody knows or can figure out what future consumption will amount to, because every time a price is lowered a new stratum of buying power is reached. everyone knows that, but many refuse to recognize it by their acts. when a storekeeper buys goods at a wrong price and finds they will not move, he reduces the price by degrees until they do move. if he is wise, instead of nibbling at the price and encouraging in his customers the hope of even lower prices, he takes a great big bite out of the price and gets the stuff out of his place. everyone takes a loss on some proposition of sales. the common hope is that after the loss there may be a big profit to make up for the loss. that is usually a delusion. the profit out of which the loss has to be taken must be found in the business preceding the cut. any one who was foolish enough to regard the high profits of the boom period as permanent profits got into financial trouble when the drop came. however, there is a belief, and a very strong one, that business consists of a series of profits and losses, and good business is one in which the profits exceed the losses. therefore some men reason that the best price to sell at is the highest price which may be had. that is supposed to be good business practice. is it? we have not found it so. we have found in buying materials that it is not worth while to buy for other than immediate needs. we buy only enough to fit into the plan of production, taking into consideration the state of transportation at the time. if transportation were perfect and an even flow of materials could be assured, it would not be necessary to carry any stock whatsoever. the carloads of raw materials would arrive on schedule and in the planned order and amounts, and go from the railway cars into production. that would save a great deal of money, for it would give a very rapid turnover and thus decrease the amount of money tied up in materials. with bad transportation one has to carry larger stocks. at the time of revaluing the inventory in the stock was unduly high because transportation had been so bad. but we learned long ago never to buy ahead for speculative purposes. when prices are going up it is considered good business to buy far ahead, and when prices are up to buy as little as possible. it needs no argument to demonstrate that, if you buy materials at ten cents a pound and the material goes later to twenty cents a pound you will have a distinct advantage over the man who is compelled to buy at twenty cents. but we have found that thus buying ahead does not pay. it is entering into a guessing contest. it is not business. if a man buys a large stock at ten cents, he is in a fine position as long as the other man is paying twenty cents. then he later gets a chance to buy more of the material at twenty cents, and it seems to be a good buy because everything points to the price going to thirty cents. having great satisfaction in his previous judgment, on which he made money, he of course makes the new purchase. then the price drops and he is just where he started. we have carefully figured, over the years, that buying ahead of requirements does not pay--that the gains on one purchase will be offset by the losses on another, and in the end we have gone to a great deal of trouble without any corresponding benefit. therefore in our buying we simply get the best price we can for the quantity that we require. we do not buy less if the price be high and we do not buy more if the price be low. we carefully avoid bargain lots in excess of requirements. it was not easy to reach that decision. but in the end speculation will kill any manufacturer. give him a couple of good purchases on which he makes money and before long he will be thinking more about making money out of buying and selling than out of his legitimate business, and he will smash. the only way to keep out of trouble is to buy what one needs--no more and no less. that course removes one hazard from business. this buying experience is given at length because it explains our selling policy. instead of giving attention to competitors or to demand, our prices are based on an estimate of what the largest possible number of people will want to pay, or can pay, for what we have to sell. and what has resulted from that policy is best evidenced by comparing the price of the touring car and the production. year price production - $ , cars - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " - $ , " (the above two years were war years and the factory was in war work). - $ to $ , " - $ to $ , , " the high prices of were, considering the financial inflation, not really high. at the time of writing the price is $ . these prices are actually lower than they appear to be, because improvements in quality are being steadily made. we study every car in order to discover if it has features that might be developed and adapted. if any one has anything better than we have we want to know it, and for that reason we buy one of every new car that comes out. usually the car is used for a while, put through a road test, taken apart, and studied as to how and of what everything is made. scattered about dearborn there is probably one of nearly every make of car on earth. every little while when we buy a new car it gets into the newspapers and somebody remarks that ford doesn't use the ford. last year we ordered a big lanchester--which is supposed to be the best car in england. it lay in our long island factory for several months and then i decided to drive it to detroit. there were several of us and we had a little caravan--the lanchester, a packard, and a ford or two. i happened to be riding in the lanchester passing through a new york town and when the reporters came up they wanted to know right away why i was not riding in a ford. "well, you see, it is this way," i answered. "i am on a vacation now; i am in no hurry, we do not care much when we get home. that is the reason i am not in the ford." you know, we also have a line of "ford stories"! our policy is to reduce the price, extend the operations, and improve the article. you will notice that the reduction of price comes first. we have never considered any costs as fixed. therefore we first reduce the price to a point where we believe more sales will result. then we go ahead and try to make the price. we do not bother about the costs. the new price forces the costs down. the more usual way is to take the costs and then determine the price, and although that method may be scientific in the narrow sense, it is not scientific in the broad sense, because what earthly use is it to know the cost if it tells you you cannot manufacture at a price at which the article can be sold? but more to the point is the fact that, although one may calculate what a cost is, and of course all of our costs are carefully calculated, no one knows what a cost ought to be. one of the ways of discovering what a cost ought to be is to name a price so low as to force everybody in the place to the highest point of efficiency. the low price makes everybody dig for profits. we make more discoveries concerning manufacturing and selling under this forced method than by any method of leisurely investigation. the payment of high wages fortunately contributes to the low costs because the men become steadily more efficient on account of being relieved of outside worries. the payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made, and the six-dollar day wage is cheaper than the five. how far this will go, we do not know. we have always made a profit at the prices we have fixed and, just as we have no idea how high wages will go, we also have no idea how low prices will go, but there is no particular use in bothering on that point. the tractor, for instance, was first sold for $ , then at $ , then at $ , and the other day we cut it per cent, to $ . the tractor is not made in connection with the automobiles. no plant is large enough to make two articles. a shop has to be devoted to exactly one product in order to get the real economies. for most purposes a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine. by the ordering of design of product and of manufacturing process we are able to provide that kind of a machine which most multiplies the power of the hand, and therefore we give to that man a larger role of service, which means that he is entitled to a larger share of comfort. keeping that principle in mind we can attack waste with a definite objective. we will not put into our establishment anything that is useless. we will not put up elaborate buildings as monuments to our success. the interest on the investment and the cost of their upkeep only serve to add uselessly to the cost of what is produced--so these monuments of success are apt to end as tombs. a great administration building may be necessary. in me it arouses a suspicion that perhaps there is too much administration. we have never found a need for elaborate administration and would prefer to be advertised by our product than by where we make our product. the standardization that effects large economies for the consumer results in profits of such gross magnitude to the producer that he can scarcely know what to do with his money. but his effort must be sincere, painstaking, and fearless. cutting out a half-a-dozen models is not standardizing. it may be, and usually is, only the limiting of business, for if one is selling on the ordinary basis of profit--that is, on the basis of taking as much money away from the consumer as he will give up--then surely the consumer ought to have a wide range of choice. standardization, then, is the final stage of the process. we start with consumer, work back through the design, and finally arrive at manufacturing. the manufacturing becomes a means to the end of service. it is important to bear this order in mind. as yet, the order is not thoroughly understood. the price relation is not understood. the notion persists that prices ought to be kept up. on the contrary, good business--large consumption--depends on their going down. and here is another point. the service must be the best you can give. it is considered good manufacturing practice, and not bad ethics, occasionally to change designs so that old models will become obsolete and new ones will have to be bought either because repair parts for the old cannot be had, or because the new model offers a new sales argument which can be used to persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and buy something new. we have been told that this is good business, that it is clever business, that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that it is bad business to try to make anything that will last forever, because when once a man is sold he will not buy again. our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. we cannot conceive how to serve the consumer unless we make for him something that, as far as we can provide, will last forever. we want to construct some kind of a machine that will last forever. it does not please us to have a buyer's car wear out or become obsolete. we want the man who buys one of our products never to have to buy another. we never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete. the parts of a specific model are not only interchangeable with all other cars of that model, but they are interchangeable with similar parts on all the cars that we have turned out. you can take a car of ten years ago and, buying to-day's parts, make it with very little expense into a car of to-day. having these objectives the costs always come down under pressure. and since we have the firm policy of steady price reduction, there is always pressure. sometimes it is just harder! take a few more instances of saving. the sweepings net six hundred thousand dollars a year. experiments are constantly going on in the utilization of scrap. in one of the stamping operations six-inch circles of sheet metal are cut out. these formerly went into scrap. the waste worried the men. they worked to find uses for the discs. they found that the plates were just the right size and shape to stamp into radiator caps but the metal was not thick enough. they tried a double thickness of plates, with the result that they made a cap which tests proved to be stronger than one made out of a single sheet of metal. we get , of those discs a day. we have now found a use for about , a day and expect to find further uses for the remainder. we saved about ten dollars each by making transmissions instead of buying them. we experimented with bolts and produced a special bolt made on what is called an "upsetting machine" with a rolled thread that was stronger than any bolt we could buy, although in its making was used only about one third of the material that the outside manufacturers used. the saving on one style of bolt alone amounted to half a million dollars a year. we used to assemble our cars at detroit, and although by special packing we managed to get five or six into a freight car, we needed many hundreds of freight cars a day. trains were moving in and out all the time. once a thousand freight cars were packed in a single day. a certain amount of congestion was inevitable. it is very expensive to knock down machines and crate them so that they cannot be injured in transit--to say nothing of the transportation charges. now, we assemble only three or four hundred cars a day at detroit--just enough for local needs. we now ship the parts to our assembling stations all over the united states and in fact pretty much all over the world, and the machines are put together there. wherever it is possible for a branch to make a part more cheaply than we can make it in detroit and ship it to them, then the branch makes the part. the plant at manchester, england, is making nearly an entire car. the tractor plant at cork, ireland, is making almost a complete tractor. this is an enormous saving of expense and is only an indication of what may be done throughout industry generally, when each part of a composite article is made at the exact point where it may be made most economically. we are constantly experimenting with every material that enters into the car. we cut most of our own lumber from our own forests. we are experimenting in the manufacture of artificial leather because we use about forty thousand yards of artificial leather a day. a penny here and a penny there runs into large amounts in the course of a year. the greatest development of all, however, is the river rouge plant, which, when it is running to its full capacity, will cut deeply and in many directions into the price of everything we make. the whole tractor plant is now there. this plant is located on the river on the outskirts of detroit and the property covers six hundred and sixty-five acres--enough for future development. it has a large slip and a turning basin capable of accommodating any lake steamship; a short-cut canal and some dredging will give a direct lake connection by way of the detroit river. we use a great deal of coal. this coal comes directly from our mines over the detroit, toledo and ironton railway, which we control, to the highland park plant and the river rouge plant. part of it goes for steam purposes. another part goes to the by-product coke ovens which we have established at the river rouge plant. coke moves on from the ovens by mechanical transmission to the blast furnaces. the low volatile gases from the blast furnaces are piped to the power plant boilers where they are joined by the sawdust and the shavings from the body plant--the making of all our bodies has been shifted to this plant--and in addition the coke "breeze" (the dust in the making of coke) is now also being utilized for stoking. the steam power plant is thus fired almost exclusively from what would otherwise be waste products. immense steam turbines directly coupled with dynamos transform this power into electricity, and all of the machinery in the tractor and the body plants is run by individual motors from this electricity. in the course of time it is expected that there will be sufficient electricity to run practically the whole highland park plant, and we shall then have cut out our coal bill. among the by-products of the coke ovens is a gas. it is piped both to the rouge and highland park plants where it is used for heat-treat purposes, for the enamelling ovens, for the car ovens, and the like. we formerly had to buy this gas. the ammonium sulphate is used for fertilizer. the benzol is a motor fuel. the small sizes of coke, not suitable for the blast furnaces, are sold to the employees--delivered free into their homes at much less than the ordinary market price. the large-sized coke goes to the blast furnaces. there is no manual handling. we run the melted iron directly from the blast furnaces into great ladles. these ladles travel into the shops and the iron is poured directly into the moulds without another heating. we thus not only get a uniform quality of iron according to our own specifications and directly under our control, but we save a melting of pig iron and in fact cut out a whole process in manufacturing as well as making available all our own scrap. what all this will amount to in point of savings we do not know--that is, we do not know how great will be the saving, because the plant has not been running long enough to give more than an indication of what is ahead, and we save in so many directions--in transportation, in the generation of our power, in the generation of gas, in the expense in casting, and then over and above that is the revenue from the by-products and from the smaller sizes of coke. the investment to accomplish these objects to date amounts to something over forty million dollars. how far we shall thus reach back to sources depends entirely on circumstances. nobody anywhere can really do more than guess about the future costs of production. it is wiser to recognize that the future holds more than the past--that every day holds within it an improvement on the methods of the day before. but how about production? if every necessary of life were produced so cheaply and in such quantities, would not the world shortly be surfeited with goods? will there not come a point when, regardless of price, people simply will not want anything more than what they already have? and if in the process of manufacturing fewer and fewer men are used, what is going to become of these men--how are they going to find jobs and live? take the second point first. we mentioned many machines and many methods that displaced great numbers of men and then someone asks: "yes, that is a very fine idea from the standpoint of the proprietor, but how about these poor fellows whose jobs are taken away from them?" the question is entirely reasonable, but it is a little curious that it should be asked. for when were men ever really put out of work by the bettering of industrial processes? the stage-coach drivers lost their jobs with the coming of the railways. should we have prohibited the railways and kept the stage-coach drivers? were there more men working with the stage-coaches than are working on the railways? should we have prevented the taxicab because its coming took the bread out of the mouths of the horse-cab drivers? how does the number of taxicabs compare with the number of horse-cabs when the latter were in their prime? the coming of shoe machinery closed most of the shops of those who made shoes by hand. when shoes were made by hand, only the very well-to-do could own more than a single pair of shoes, and most working people went barefooted in summer. now, hardly any one has only one pair of shoes, and shoe making is a great industry. no, every time you can so arrange that one man will do the work of two, you so add to the wealth of the country that there will be a new and better job for the man who is displaced. if whole industries changed overnight, then disposing of the surplus men would be a problem, but these changes do not occur as rapidly as that. they come gradually. in our own experience a new place always opens for a man as soon as better processes have taken his old job. and what happens in my shops happens everywhere in industry. there are many times more men to-day employed in the steel industries than there were in the days when every operation was by hand. it has to be so. it always is so and always will be so. and if any man cannot see it, it is because he will not look beyond his own nose. now as to saturation. we are continually asked: "when will you get to the point of overproduction? when will there be more cars than people to use them?" we believe it is possible some day to reach the point where all goods are produced so cheaply and in such quantities that overproduction will be a reality. but as far as we are concerned, we do not look forward to that condition with fear--we look forward to it with great satisfaction. nothing could be more splendid than a world in which everybody has all that he wants. our fear is that this condition will be too long postponed. as to our own products, that condition is very far away. we do not know how many motor cars a family will desire to use of the particular kind that we make. we know that, as the price has come down, the farmer, who at first used one car (and it must be remembered that it is not so very long ago that the farm market for motor cars was absolutely unknown--the limit of sales was at that time fixed by all the wise statistical sharps at somewhere near the number of millionaires in the country) now often uses two, and also he buys a truck. perhaps, instead of sending workmen out to scattered jobs in a single car, it will be cheaper to send each worker out in a car of his own. that is happening with salesmen. the public finds its own consumptive needs with unerring accuracy, and since we no longer make motor cars or tractors, but merely the parts which when assembled become motor cars and tractors, the facilities as now provided would hardly be sufficient to provide replacements for ten million cars. and it would be quite the same with any business. we do not have to bother about overproduction for some years to come, provided the prices are right. it is the refusal of people to buy on account of price that really stimulates real business. then if we want to do business we have to get the prices down without hurting the quality. thus price reduction forces us to learn improved and less wasteful methods of production. one big part of the discovery of what is "normal" in industry depends on managerial genius discovering better ways of doing things. if a man reduces his selling price to a point where he is making no profit or incurring a loss, then he simply is forced to discover how to make as good an article by a better method--making his new method produce the profit, and not producing a profit out of reduced wages or increased prices to the public. it is not good management to take profits out of the workers or the buyers; make management produce the profits. don't cheapen the product; don't cheapen the wage; don't overcharge the public. put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains--do things better than ever before; and by this means all parties to business are served and benefited. and all of this can always be done. chapter xi money and goods the primary object of a manufacturing business is to produce, and if that objective is always kept, finance becomes a wholly secondary matter that has largely to do with bookkeeping. my own financial operations have been very simple. i started with the policy of buying and selling for cash, keeping a large fund of cash always on hand, taking full advantage of all discounts, and collecting interest on bank balances. i regard a bank principally as a place in which it is safe and convenient to keep money. the minutes we spend on a competitor's business we lose on our own. the minutes we spend in becoming expert in finance we lose in production. the place to finance a manufacturing business is the shop, and not the bank. i would not say that a man in business needs to know nothing at all about finance, but he is better off knowing too little than too much, for if he becomes too expert he will get into the way of thinking that he can borrow money instead of earning it and then he will borrow more money to pay back what he has borrowed, and instead of being a business man he will be a note juggler, trying to keep in the air a regular flock of bonds and notes. if he is a really expert juggler, he may keep going quite a long time in this fashion, but some day he is bound to make a miss and the whole collection will come tumbling down around him. manufacturing is not to be confused with banking, and i think that there is a tendency for too many business men to mix up in banking and for too many bankers to mix up in business. the tendency is to distort the true purposes of both business and banking and that hurts both of them. the money has to come out of the shop, not out of the bank, and i have found that the shop will answer every possible requirement, and in one case, when it was believed that the company was rather seriously in need of funds, the shop when called on raised a larger sum than any bank in this country could loan. we have been thrown into finance mostly in the way of denial. some years back we had to keep standing a denial that the ford motor company was owned by the standard oil company and with that denial, for convenience's sake, we coupled a denial that we were connected with any other concern or that we intended to sell cars by mail. last year the best-liked rumour was that we were down in wall street hunting for money. i did not bother to deny that. it takes too much time to deny everything. instead, we demonstrated that we did not need any money. since then i have heard nothing more about being financed by wall street. we are not against borrowing money and we are not against bankers. we are against trying to make borrowed money take the place of work. we are against the kind of banker who regards a business as a melon to be cut. the thing is to keep money and borrowing and finance generally in their proper place, and in order to do that one has to consider exactly for what the money is needed and how it is going to be paid off. money is only a tool in business. it is just a part of the machinery. you might as well borrow , lathes as $ , if the trouble is inside your business. more lathes will not cure it; neither will more money. only heavier doses of brains and thought and wise courage can cure. a business that misuses what it has will continue to misuse what it can get. the point is--cure the misuse. when that is done, the business will begin to make its own money, just as a repaired human body begins to make sufficient pure blood. borrowing may easily become an excuse for not boring into the trouble. borrowing may easily become a sop for laziness and pride. some business men are too lazy to get into overalls and go down to see what is the matter. or they are too proud to permit the thought that anything they have originated could go wrong. but the laws of business are like the law of gravity, and the man who opposes them feels their power. borrowing for expansion is one thing; borrowing to make up for mismanagement and waste is quite another. you do not want money for the latter--for the reason that money cannot do the job. waste is corrected by economy; mismanagement is corrected by brains. neither of these correctives has anything to do with money. indeed, money under certain circumstances is their enemy. and many a business man thanks his stars for the pinch which showed him that his best capital was in his own brains and not in bank loans. borrowing under certain circumstances is just like a drunkard taking another drink to cure the effect of the last one. it does not do what it is expected to do. it simply increases the difficulty. tightening up the loose places in a business is much more profitable than any amount of new capital at per cent. the internal ailments of business are the ones that require most attention. "business" in the sense of trading with the people is largely a matter of filling the wants of the people. if you make what they need, and sell it at a price which makes possession a help and not a hardship, then you will do business as long as there is business to do. people buy what helps them just as naturally as they drink water. but the process of making the article will require constant care. machinery wears out and needs to be restored. men grow uppish, lazy, or careless. a business is men and machines united in the production of a commodity, and both the man and the machines need repairs and replacements. sometimes it is the men "higher up" who most need revamping--and they themselves are always the last to recognize it. when a business becomes congested with bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work which one has to do--then you may expect trouble. you will wake up some fine morning and find yourself doing more business than you have ever done before--and getting less out of it. you find yourself short of money. you can borrow money. and you can do it, oh, so easily. people will crowd money on you. it is the most subtle temptation the young business man has. but if you do borrow money you are simply giving a stimulant to whatever may be wrong. you feed the disease. is a man more wise with borrowed money than he is with his own? not as a usual thing. to borrow under such conditions is to mortgage a declining property. the time for a business man to borrow money, if ever, is when he does not need it. that is, when he does not need it as a substitute for the things he ought himself to do. if a man's business is in excellent condition and in need of expansion, it is comparatively safe to borrow. but if a business is in need of money through mismanagement, then the thing to do is to get into the business and correct the trouble from the inside--not poultice it with loans from the outside. my financial policy is the result of my sales policy. i hold that it is better to sell a large number of articles at a small profit than to sell a few at a large profit. this enables a larger number of people to buy and it gives a larger number of men employment at good wages. it permits the planning of production, the elimination of dull seasons, and the waste of carrying an idle plant. thus results a suitable, continuous business, and if you will think it over, you will discover that most so-called urgent financing is made necessary because of a lack of planned, continuous business. reducing prices is taken by the short-sighted to be the same as reducing the income of a business. it is very difficult to deal with that sort of a mind because it is so totally lacking in even the background knowledge of what business is. for instance, i was once asked, when contemplating a reduction of eighty dollars a car, whether on a production of five hundred thousand cars this would not reduce the income of the company by forty million dollars. of course if one sold only five hundred thousand cars at the new price, the income would be reduced forty million dollars--which is an interesting mathematical calculation that has nothing whatsoever to do with business, because unless you reduce the price of an article the sales do not continuously increase and therefore the business has no stability. if a business is not increasing, it is bound to be decreasing, and a decreasing business always needs a lot of financing. old-time business went on the doctrine that prices should always be kept up to the highest point at which people will buy. really modern business has to take the opposite view. bankers and lawyers can rarely appreciate this fact. they confuse inertia with stability. it is perfectly beyond their comprehension that the price should ever voluntarily be reduced. that is why putting the usual type of banker or lawyer into the management of a business is courting disaster. reducing prices increases the volume and disposes of finance, provided one regards the inevitable profit as a trust fund with which to conduct more and better business. our profit, because of the rapidity of the turnover in the business and the great volume of sales, has, no matter what the price at which the product was sold, always been large. we have had a small profit per article but a large aggregate profit. the profit is not constant. after cutting the prices, the profits for a time run low, but then the inevitable economies begin to get in their work and the profits go high again. but they are not distributed as dividends. i have always insisted on the payment of small dividends and the company has to-day no stockholders who wanted a different policy. i regard business profits above a small percentage as belonging more to the business than to the stockholders. the stockholders, to my way of thinking, ought to be only those who are active in the business and who will regard the company as an instrument of service rather than as a machine for making money. if large profits are made--and working to serve forces them to be large--then they should be in part turned back into the business so that it may be still better fitted to serve, and in part passed on to the purchaser. during one year our profits were so much larger than we expected them to be that we voluntarily returned fifty dollars to each purchaser of a car. we felt that unwittingly we had overcharged the purchaser by that much. my price policy and hence my financial policy came up in a suit brought against the company several years ago to compel the payment of larger dividends. on the witness stand i gave the policy then in force and which is still in force. it is this: in the first place, i hold that it is better to sell a large number of cars at a reasonably small margin than to sell fewer cars at a large margin of profit. i hold this because it enables a large number of people to buy and enjoy the use of a car and because it gives a larger number of men employment at good wages. those are aims i have in life. but i would not be counted a success; i would be, in fact, a flat failure if i could not accomplish that and at the same time make a fair amount of profit for myself and the men associated with me in business. this policy i hold is good business policy because it works--because with each succeeding year we have been able to put our car within the reach of greater and greater numbers, give employment to more and more men, and, at the same time, through the volume of business, increase our own profits beyond anything we had hoped for or even dreamed of when we started. bear in mind, every time you reduce the price of the car without reducing the quality, you increase the possible number of purchasers. there are many men who will pay $ for a car who would not pay $ . we had in round numbers , buyers of cars on the $ basis, and i figure that on the $ basis we can increase the sales to possibly , cars for the year--less profit on each car, but more cars, more employment of labour, and in the end we shall get all the total profit we ought to make. and let me say right here, that i do not believe that we should make such an awful profit on our cars. a reasonable profit is right, but not too much. so it has been my policy to force the price of the car down as fast as production would permit, and give the benefits to users and labourers--with resulting surprisingly enormous benefits to ourselves. this policy does not agree with the general opinion that a business is to be managed to the end that the stockholders can take out the largest possible amount of cash. therefore i do not want stockholders in the ordinary sense of the term--they do not help forward the ability to serve. my ambition is to employ more and more men and to spread, in so far as i am able, the benefits of the industrial system that we are working to found; we want to help build lives and homes. this requires that the largest share of the profits be put back into productive enterprise. hence we have no place for the non-working stockholders. the working stockholder is more anxious to increase his opportunity to serve than to bank dividends. if it at any time became a question between lowering wages or abolishing dividends, i would abolish dividends. that time is not apt to come, for, as i have pointed out, there is no economy in low wages. it is bad financial policy to reduce wages because it also reduces buying power. if one believes that leadership brings responsibility, then a part of that responsibility is in seeing that those whom one leads shall have an adequate opportunity to earn a living. finance concerns not merely the profit or solvency of a company; it also comprehends the amount of money that the company turns back to the community through wages. there is no charity in this. there is no charity in proper wages. it is simply that no company can be said to be stable which is not so well managed that it can afford a man an opportunity to do a great deal of work and therefore to earn a good wage. there is something sacred about wages--they represent homes and families and domestic destinies. people ought to tread very carefully when approaching wages. on the cost sheet, wages are mere figures; out in the world, wages are bread boxes and coal bins, babies' cradles and children's education--family comforts and contentment. on the other hand, there is something just as sacred about capital which is used to provide the means by which work can be made productive. nobody is helped if our industries are sucked dry of their life-blood. there is something just as sacred about a shop that employs thousands of men as there is about a home. the shop is the mainstay of all the finer things which the home represents. if we want the home to be happy, we must contrive to keep the shop busy. the whole justification of the profits made by the shop is that they are used to make doubly secure the homes dependent on that shop, and to create more jobs for other men. if profits go to swell a personal fortune, that is one thing; if they go to provide a sounder basis for business, better working conditions, better wages, more extended employment--that is quite another thing. capital thus employed should not be carelessly tampered with. it is for the service of all, though it may be under the direction of one. profits belong in three places: they belong to the business--to keep it steady, progressive, and sound. they belong to the men who helped produce them. and they belong also, in part, to the public. a successful business is profitable to all three of these interests--planner, producer, and purchaser. people whose profits are excessive when measured by any sound standard should be the first to cut prices. but they never are. they pass all their extra costs down the line until the whole burden is borne by the consumer; and besides doing that, they charge the consumer a percentage on the increased charges. their whole business philosophy is: "get while the getting is good." they are the speculators, the exploiters, the no-good element that is always injuring legitimate business. there is nothing to be expected from them. they have no vision. they cannot see beyond their own cash registers. these people can talk more easily about a or per cent. cut in wages than they can about a or per cent. cut in profits. but a business man, surveying the whole community in all its interests and wishing to serve that community, ought to be able to make his contribution to stability. it has been our policy always to keep on hand a large amount of cash--the cash balance in recent years has usually been in excess of fifty million dollars. this is deposited in banks all over the country, we do not borrow but we have established lines of credit, so that if we so cared we might raise a very large amount of money by bank borrowing. but keeping the cash reserve makes borrowing unnecessary--our provision is only to be prepared to meet an emergency. i have no prejudice against proper borrowing. it is merely that i do not want to run the danger of having the control of the business and hence the particular idea of service to which i am devoted taken into other hands. a considerable part of finance is in the overcoming of seasonal operation. the flow of money ought to be nearly continuous. one must work steadily in order to work profitably. shutting down involves great waste. it brings the waste of unemployment of men, the waste of unemployment of equipment, and the waste of restricted future sales through the higher prices of interrupted production. that has been one of the problems we had to meet. we could not manufacture cars to stock during the winter months when purchases are less than in spring or summer. where or how could any one store half a million cars? and if stored, how could they be shipped in the rush season? and who would find the money to carry such a stock of cars even if they could be stored? seasonal work is hard on the working force. good mechanics will not accept jobs that are good for only part of the year. to work in full force twelve months of the year guarantees workmen of ability, builds up a permanent manufacturing organization, and continually improves the product--the men in the factory, through uninterrupted service, become more familiar with the operations. the factory must build, the sales department must sell, and the dealer must buy cars all the year through, if each would enjoy the maximum profit to be derived from the business. if the retail buyer will not consider purchasing except in "seasons," a campaign of education needs to be waged, proving the all-the-year-around value of a car rather than the limited-season value. and while the educating is being done, the manufacturer must build, and the dealer must buy, in anticipation of business. we were the first to meet the problem in the automobile business. the selling of ford cars is a merchandising proposition. in the days when every car was built to order and cars a month a big output, it was reasonable to wait for the sale before ordering. the manufacturer waited for the order before building. we very shortly found that we could not do business on order. the factory could not be built large enough--even were it desirable--to make between march and august all the cars that were ordered during those months. therefore, years ago began the campaign of education to demonstrate that a ford was not a summer luxury but a year-round necessity. coupled with that came the education of the dealer into the knowledge that even if he could not sell so many cars in winter as in summer it would pay him to stock in winter for the summer and thus be able to make instant delivery. both plans have worked out; in most parts of the country cars are used almost as much in winter as in summer. it has been found that they will run in snow, ice, or mud--in anything. hence the winter sales are constantly growing larger and the seasonal demand is in part lifted from the dealer. and he finds it profitable to buy ahead in anticipation of needs. thus we have no seasons in the plant; the production, up until the last couple of years, has been continuous excepting for the annual shut downs for inventory. we have had an interruption during the period of extreme depression but it was an interruption made necessary in the process of readjusting ourselves to the market conditions. in order to attain continuous production and hence a continuous turning over of money we have had to plan our operations with extreme care. the plan of production is worked out very carefully each month between the sales and production departments, with the object of producing enough cars so that those in transit will take care of the orders in hand. formerly, when we assembled and shipped cars, this was of the highest importance because we had no place in which to store finished cars. now we ship parts instead of cars and assemble only those required for the detroit district. that makes the planning no less important, for if the production stream and the order stream are not approximately equal we should be either jammed with unsold parts or behind in our orders. when you are turning out the parts to make , cars a day, just a very little carelessness in overestimating orders will pile up a finished inventory running into the millions. that makes the balancing of operations an exceedingly delicate matter. in order to earn the proper profit on our narrow margin we must have a rapid turnover. we make cars to sell, not to store, and a month's unsold production would turn into a sum the interest on which alone would be enormous. the production is planned a year ahead and the number of cars to be made in each month of the year is scheduled, for of course it is a big problem to have the raw materials and such parts as we still buy from the outside flowing in consonance with production. we can no more afford to carry large stocks of finished than we can of raw material. everything has to move in and move out. and we have had some narrow escapes. some years ago the plant of the diamond manufacturing company burned down. they were making radiator parts for us and the brass parts--tubings and castings. we had to move quickly or take a big loss. we got together the heads of all our departments, the pattern-makers and the draughtsmen. they worked from twenty-four to forty-eight hours on a stretch. they made new patterns; the diamond company leased a plant and got some machinery in by express. we furnished the other equipment for them and in twenty days they were shipping again. we had enough stock on hand to carry us over, say, for seven or eight days, but that fire prevented us shipping cars for ten or fifteen days. except for our having stock ahead it would have held us up for twenty days--and our expenses would have gone right on. to repeat. the place in which to finance is the shop. it has never failed us, and once, when it was thought that we were hard up for money, it served rather conclusively to demonstrate how much better finance can be conducted from the inside than from the outside. chapter xii money--master or servant? in december, , business the country over was marking time. more automobile plants were closed than were open and quite a number of those which were closed were completely in the charge of bankers. rumours of bad financial condition were afloat concerning nearly every industrial company, and i became interested when the reports persisted that the ford motor company not only needed money but could not get it. i have become accustomed to all kinds of rumours about our company--so much so, that nowadays i rarely deny any sort of rumour. but these reports differed from all previous ones. they were so exact and circumstantial. i learned that i had overcome my prejudice against borrowing and that i might be found almost any day down in wall street, hat in hand, asking for money. and rumour went even further and said that no one would give me money and that i might have to break up and go out of business. it is true that we did have a problem. in we had borrowed $ , , on notes to buy the full stock interest in the ford motor company. on this we had $ , , left to pay. we had $ , , in income taxes due or shortly to become due to the government, and also we intended to pay our usual bonus for the year to the workmen, which amounted to $ , , . altogether, between january st and april , , we had payments ahead totaling $ , , . we had only $ , , in bank. our balance sheet was more or less common knowledge and i suppose it was taken for granted that we could not raise the $ , , needed without borrowing. for that is quite a large sum of money. without the aid of wall street such a sum could not easily and quickly be raised. we were perfectly good for the money. two years before we had borrowed $ , , . and since our whole property was unencumbered and we had no commercial debts, the matter of lending a large sum to us would not ordinarily have been a matter of moment. in fact, it would have been good banking business. however, i began to see that our need for money was being industriously circulated as an evidence of impending failure. then i began to suspect that, although the rumours came in news dispatches from all over the country, they might perhaps be traced to a single source. this belief was further strengthened when we were informed that a very fat financial editor was at battle creek sending out bulletins concerning the acuteness of our financial condition. therefore, i took care not to deny a single rumour. we had made our financial plans and they did not include borrowing money. i cannot too greatly emphasize that the very worst time to borrow money is when the banking people think that you need money. in the last chapter i outlined our financial principles. we simply applied those principles. we planned a thorough house-cleaning. go back a bit and see what the conditions were. along in the early part of came the first indications that the feverish speculative business engendered by the war was not going to continue. a few concerns that had sprung out of the war and had no real reason for existence failed. people slowed down in their buying. our own sales kept right along, but we knew that sooner or later they would drop off. i thought seriously of cutting prices, but the costs of manufacturing everywhere were out of control. labour gave less and less in return for high wages. the suppliers of raw material refused even to think of coming back to earth. the very plain warnings of the storm went quite unheeded. in june our own sales began to be affected. they grew less and less each month from june on until september. we had to do something to bring our product within the purchasing power of the public, and not only that, we had to do something drastic enough to demonstrate to the public that we were actually playing the game and not just shamming. therefore in september we cut the price of the touring car from $ to $ . we cut the price far below the cost of production, for we were still making from stock bought at boom prices. the cut created a considerable sensation. we received a deal of criticism. it was said that we were disturbing conditions. that is exactly what we were trying to do. we wanted to do our part in bringing prices from an artificial to a natural level. i am firmly of the opinion that if at this time or earlier manufacturers and distributors had all made drastic cuts in their prices and had put through thorough house-cleanings we should not have so long a business depression. hanging on in the hope of getting higher prices simply delayed adjustment. nobody got the higher prices they hoped for, and if the losses had been taken all at once, not only would the productive and the buying powers of the country have become harmonized, but we should have been saved this long period of general idleness. hanging on in the hope of higher prices merely made the losses greater, because those who hung on had to pay interest on their high-priced stocks and also lost the profits they might have made by working on a sensible basis. unemployment cut down wage distribution and thus the buyer and the seller became more and more separated. there was a lot of flurried talk of arranging to give vast credits to europe--the idea being that thereby the high-priced stocks might be palmed off. of course the proposals were not put in any such crude fashion, and i think that quite a lot of people sincerely believed that if large credits were extended abroad even without a hope of the payment of either principal or interest, american business would somehow be benefited. it is true that if these credits were taken by american banks, those who had high-priced stocks might have gotten rid of them at a profit, but the banks would have acquired so much frozen credit that they would have more nearly resembled ice houses than banks. i suppose it is natural to hang on to the possibility of profits until the very last moment, but it is not good business. our own sales, after the cut, increased, but soon they began to fall off again. we were not sufficiently within the purchasing power of the country to make buying easy. retail prices generally had not touched bottom. the public distrusted all prices. we laid our plans for another cut and we kept our production around one hundred thousand cars a month. this production was not justified by our sales but we wanted to have as much as possible of our raw material transformed into finished product before we shut down. we knew that we would have to shut down in order to take an inventory and clean house. we wanted to open with another big cut and to have cars on hand to supply the demand. then the new cars could be built out of material bought at lower prices. we determined that we were going to get lower prices. we shut down in december with the intention of opening again in about two weeks. we found so much to do that actually we did not open for nearly six weeks. the moment that we shut down the rumours concerning our financial condition became more and more active. i know that a great many people hoped that we should have to go out after money--for, were we seeking money, then we should have to come to terms. we did not ask for money. we did not want money. we had one offer of money. an officer of a new york bank called on me with a financial plan which included a large loan and in which also was an arrangement by which a representative of the bankers would act as treasurer and take charge of the finance of the company. those people meant well enough, i am quite sure. we did not want to borrow money but it so happened that at the moment we were without a treasurer. to that extent the bankers had envisaged our condition correctly. i asked my son edsel to be treasurer as well as president of the company. that fixed us up as to a treasurer, so there was really nothing at all that the bankers could do for us. then we began our house-cleaning. during the war we had gone into many kinds of war work and had thus been forced to depart from our principle of a single product. this had caused many new departments to be added. the office force had expanded and much of the wastefulness of scattered production had crept in. war work is rush work and is wasteful work. we began throwing out everything that did not contribute to the production of cars. the only immediate payment scheduled was the purely voluntary one of a seven-million-dollar bonus to our workmen. there was no obligation to pay, but we wanted to pay on the first of january. that we paid out of our cash on hand. throughout the country we have thirty-five branches. these are all assembling plants, but in twenty-two of them parts are also manufactured. they had stopped the making of parts but they went on assembling cars. at the time of shutting down we had practically no cars in detroit. we had shipped out all the parts, and during january the detroit dealers actually had to go as far a field as chicago and columbus to get cars for local needs. the branches shipped to each dealer, under his yearly quota, enough cars to cover about a month's sales. the dealers worked hard on sales. during the latter part of january we called in a skeleton organization of about ten thousand men, mostly foremen, sub-foremen, and straw bosses, and we started highland park into production. we collected our foreign accounts and sold our by-products. then we were ready for full production. and gradually into full production we went--on a profitable basis. the house-cleaning swept out the waste that had both made the prices high and absorbed the profit. we sold off the useless stuff. before we had employed fifteen men per car per day. afterward we employed nine per car per day. this did not mean that six out of fifteen men lost their jobs. they only ceased being unproductive. we made that cut by applying the rule that everything and everybody must produce or get out. we cut our office forces in halves and offered the office workers better jobs in the shops. most of them took the jobs. we abolished every order blank and every form of statistics that did not directly aid in the production of a car. we had been collecting tons of statistics because they were interesting. but statistics will not construct automobiles--so out they went. we took out per cent. of our telephone extensions. only a comparatively few men in any organization need telephones. we formerly had a foreman for every five men; now we have a foreman for every twenty men. the other foremen are working on machines. we cut the overhead charge from $ a car to $ a car, and when you realize what this means on more than four thousand cars a day you will have an idea how, not by economy, not by wage-cutting, but by the elimination of waste, it is possible to make an "impossible" price. most important of all, we found out how to use less money in our business by speeding up the turnover. and in increasing the turnover rate, one of the most important factors was the detroit, toledo, & ironton railroad--which we purchased. the railroad took a large place in the scheme of economy. to the road itself i have given another chapter. we discovered, after a little experimenting, that freight service could be improved sufficiently to reduce the cycle of manufacture from twenty-two to fourteen days. that is, raw material could be bought, manufactured, and the finished product put into the hands of the distributor in (roughly) per cent. less time than before. we had been carrying an inventory of around $ , , to insure uninterrupted production. cutting down the time one third released $ , , , or $ , , a year in interest. counting the finished inventory, we saved approximately $ , , more--that is, we were able to release $ , , in capital and save the interest on that sum. on january st we had $ , , . on april st we had $ , , , or $ , , more than we needed to wipe out all our indebtedness. that is what boring into the business did for us! this amount came to us in these items: cash on hand, january $ , , stock on hand turned into cash, january to april , , speeding up transit of goods released , , collected from agents in foreign countries , , sale of by-products , , sale of liberty bonds , , total $ , , now i have told about all this not in the way of an exploit, but to point out how a business may find resources within itself instead of borrowing, and also to start a little thinking as to whether the form of our money may not put a premium on borrowing and thus give far too great a place in life to the bankers. we could have borrowed $ , , --more had we wanted to. suppose we had borrowed, what would have happened? should we have been better fitted to go on with our business? or worse fitted? if we had borrowed we should not have been under the necessity of finding methods to cheapen production. had we been able to obtain the money at per cent. flat--and we should in commissions and the like have had to pay more than that--the interest charge alone on a yearly production of , cars would have amounted to about four dollars a car. therefore we should now be without the benefit of better production and loaded with a heavy debt. our cars would probably cost about one hundred dollars more than they do; hence we should have a smaller production, for we could not have so many buyers; we should employ fewer men, and in short, should not be able to serve to the utmost. you will note that the financiers proposed to cure by lending money and not by bettering methods. they did not suggest putting in an engineer; they wanted to put in a treasurer. and that is the danger of having bankers in business. they think solely in terms of money. they think of a factory as making money, not goods. they want to watch the money, not the efficiency of production. they cannot comprehend that a business never stands still, it must go forward or go back. they regard a reduction in prices as a throwing away of profit instead of as a building of business. bankers play far too great a part in the conduct of industry. most business men will privately admit that fact. they will seldom publicly admit it because they are afraid of their bankers. it required less skill to make a fortune dealing in money than dealing in production. the average successful banker is by no means so intelligent and resourceful a man as is the average successful business man. yet the banker through his control of credit practically controls the average business man. there has been a great reaching out by bankers in the last fifteen or twenty years--and especially since the war--and the federal reserve system for a time put into their hands an almost limitless supply of credit. the banker is, as i have noted, by training and because of his position, totally unsuited to the conduct of industry. if, therefore, the controllers of credit have lately acquired this very large power, is it not to be taken as a sign that there is something wrong with the financial system that gives to finance instead of to service the predominant power in industry? it was not the industrial acumen of the bankers that brought them into the management of industry. everyone will admit that. they were pushed there, willy-nilly, by the system itself. therefore, i personally want to discover whether we are operating under the best financial system. now, let me say at once that my objection to bankers has nothing to do with personalities. i am not against bankers as such. we stand very much in need of thoughtful men, skilled in finance. the world cannot go on without banking facilities. we have to have money. we have to have credit. otherwise the fruits of production could not be exchanged. we have to have capital. without it there could be no production. but whether we have based our banking and our credit on the right foundation is quite another matter. it is no part of my thought to attack our financial system. i am not in the position of one who has been beaten by the system and wants revenge. it does not make the least difference to me personally what bankers do because we have been able to manage our affairs without outside financial aid. my inquiry is prompted by no personal motive whatsoever. i only want to know whether the greatest good is being rendered to the greatest number. no financial system is good which favors one class of producers over another. we want to discover whether it is not possible to take away power which is not based on wealth creation. any sort of class legislation is pernicious. i think that the country's production has become so changed in its methods that gold is not the best medium with which it may be measured, and that the gold standard as a control of credit gives, as it is now (and i believe inevitably) administered, class advantage. the ultimate check on credit is the amount of gold in the country, regardless of the amount of wealth in the country. i am not prepared to dogmatize on the subject of money or credit. as far as money and credit are concerned, no one as yet knows enough about them to dogmatize. the whole question will have to be settled as all other questions of real importance have to be settled, and that is by cautious, well-founded experiment. and i am not inclined to go beyond cautious experiments. we have to proceed step by step and very carefully. the question is not political, it is economic, and i am perfectly certain that helping the people to think on the question is wholly advantageous. they will not act without adequate knowledge, and thus cause disaster, if a sincere effort is made to provide them with knowledge. the money question has first place in multitudes of minds of all degrees or power. but a glance at most of the cure-all systems shows how contradictory they are. the majority of them make the assumption of honesty among mankind, to begin with, and that, of course, is a prime defect. even our present system would work splendidly if all men were honest. as a matter of fact, the whole money question is per cent. human nature; and your successful system must check human nature, not depend upon it. the people are thinking about the money question; and if the money masters have any information which they think the people ought to have to prevent them going astray, now is the time to give it. the days are fast slipping away when the fear of credit curtailment will avail, or when wordy slogans will affright. the people are naturally conservative. they are more conservative than the financiers. those who believe that the people are so easily led that they would permit printing presses to run off money like milk tickets do not understand them. it is the innate conservation of the people that has kept our money good in spite of the fantastic tricks which the financiers play--and which they cover up with high technical terms. the people are on the side of sound money. they are so unalterably on the side of sound money that it is a serious question how they would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiated can do with it. the present money system is not going to be changed by speech-making or political sensationalism or economic experiment. it is going to change under the pressure of conditions--conditions that we cannot control and pressure that we cannot control. these conditions are now with us; that pressure is now upon us. the people must be helped to think naturally about money. they must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few. money, after all, is extremely simple. it is a part of our transportation system. it is a simple and direct method of conveying goods from one person to another. money is in itself most admirable. it is essential. it is not intrinsically evil. it is one of the most useful devices in social life. and when it does what it was intended to do, it is all help and no hindrance. but money should always be money. a foot is always twelve inches, but when is a dollar a dollar? if ton weights changed in the coal yard, and peck measures changed in the grocery, and yard sticks were to-day inches and to-morrow inches (by some occult process called "exchange") the people would mighty soon remedy that. when a dollar is not always a dollar, when the -cent dollar becomes the -cent dollar, and then the -cent dollar, and then the -cent dollar, as the good old american gold and silver dollars did, what is the use of yelling about "cheap money," "depreciated money"? a dollar that stays cents is as necessary as a pound that stays ounces and a yard that stays inches. the bankers who do straight banking should regard themselves as naturally the first men to probe and understand our monetary system--instead of being content with the mastery of local banking-house methods; and if they would deprive the gamblers in bank balances of the name of "banker" and oust them once for all from the place of influence which that name gives them, banking would be restored and established as the public service it ought to be, and the iniquities of the present monetary system and financial devices would be lifted from the shoulders of the people. there is an "if" here, of course. but it is not insurmountable. affairs are coming to a jam as it is, and if those who possess technical facility do not engage to remedy the case, those who lack that facility may attempt it. nothing is more foolish than for any class to assume that progress is an attack upon it. progress is only a call made upon it to lend its experience for the general advancement. it is only those who are unwise who will attempt to obstruct progress and thereby become its victims. all of us are here together, all of us must go forward together; it is perfectly silly for any man or class to take umbrage at the stirring of progress. if financiers feel that progress is only the restlessness of weak-minded persons, if they regard all suggestions of betterment as a personal slap, then they are taking the part which proves more than anything else could their unfitness to continue in their leadership. if the present faulty system is more profitable to a financier than a more perfect system would be, and if that financier values his few remaining years of personal profits more highly than he would value the honour of making a contribution to the life of the world by helping to erect a better system, then there is no way of preventing a clash of interests. but it is fair to say to the selfish financial interests that, if their fight is waged to perpetuate a system just because it profits them, then their fight is already lost. why should finance fear? the world will still be here. men will do business with one another. there will be money and there will be need of masters of the mechanism of money. nothing is going to depart but the knots and tangles. there will be some readjustments, of course. banks will no longer be the masters of industry. they will be the servants of industry. business will control money instead of money controlling business. the ruinous interest system will be greatly modified. banking will not be a risk, but a service. banks will begin to do much more for the people than they do now, and instead of being the most expensive businesses in the world to manage, and the most highly profitable in the matter of dividends, they will become less costly, and the profits of their operation will go to the community which they serve. two facts of the old order are fundamental. first: that within the nation itself the tendency of financial control is toward its largest centralized banking institutions--either a government bank or a closely allied group of private financiers. there is always in every nation a definite control of credit by private or semi-public interests. second: in the world as a whole the same centralizing tendency is operative. an american credit is under control of new york interests, as before the war world credit was controlled in london--the british pound sterling was the standard of exchange for the world's trade. two methods of reform are open to us, one beginning at the bottom and one beginning at the top. the latter is the more orderly way, the former is being tried in russia. if our reform should begin at the top it will require a social vision and an altruistic fervour of a sincerity and intensity which is wholly inconsistent with selfish shrewdness. the wealth of the world neither consists in nor is adequately represented by the money of the world. gold itself is not a valuable commodity. it is no more wealth than hat checks are hats. but it can be so manipulated, as the sign of wealth, as to give its owners or controllers the whip-hand over the credit which producers of real wealth require. dealing in money, the commodity of exchange, is a very lucrative business. when money itself becomes an article of commerce to be bought and sold before real wealth can be moved or exchanged, the usurers and speculators are thereby permitted to lay a tax on production. the hold which controllers of money are able to maintain on productive forces is seen to be more powerful when it is remembered that, although money is supposed to represent the real wealth of the world, there is always much more wealth than there is money, and real wealth is often compelled to wait upon money, thus leading to that most paradoxical situation--a world filled with wealth but suffering want. these facts are not merely fiscal, to be cast into figures and left there. they are instinct with human destiny and they bleed. the poverty of the world is seldom caused by lack of goods but by a "money stringency." commercial competition between nations, which leads to international rivalry and ill-will, which in their turn breed wars-- these are some of the human significations of these facts. thus poverty and war, two great preventable evils, grow on a single stem. let us see if a beginning toward a better method cannot be made. chapter xiii why be poor? poverty springs from a number of sources, the more important of which are controllable. so does special privilege. i think it is entirely feasible to abolish both poverty and special privilege--and there can be no question but that their abolition is desirable. both are unnatural, but it is work, not law, to which we must look for results. by poverty i mean the lack of reasonably sufficient food, housing, and clothing for an individual or a family. there will have to be differences in the grades of sustenance. men are not equal in mentality or in physique. any plan which starts with the assumption that men are or ought to be equal is unnatural and therefore unworkable. there can be no feasible or desirable process of leveling down. such a course only promotes poverty by making it universal instead of exceptional. forcing the efficient producer to become inefficient does not make the inefficient producer more efficient. poverty can be done away with only by plenty, and we have now gone far enough along in the science of production to be able to see, as a natural development, the day when production and distribution will be so scientific that all may have according to ability and industry. the extreme socialists went wide of the mark in their reasoning that industry would inevitably crush the worker. modern industry is gradually lifting the worker and the world. we only need to know more about planning and methods. the best results can and will be brought about by individual initiative and ingenuity--by intelligent individual leadership. the government, because it is essentially negative, cannot give positive aid to any really constructive programme. it can give negative aid--by removing obstructions to progress and by ceasing to be a burden upon the community. the underlying causes of poverty, as i can see them, are essentially due to the bad adjustment between production and distribution, in both industry and agriculture--between the source of power and its application. the wastes due to lack of adjustment are stupendous. all of these wastes must fall before intelligent leadership consecrated to service. so long as leadership thinks more of money than it does of service, the wastes will continue. waste is prevented by far-sighted not by short-sighted men. short-sighted men think first of money. they cannot see waste. they think of service as altruistic instead of as the most practical thing in the world. they cannot get far enough away from the little things to see the big things--to see the biggest thing of all, which is that opportunist production from a purely money standpoint is the least profitable. service can be based upon altruism, but that sort of service is not usually the best. the sentimental trips up the practical. it is not that the industrial enterprises are unable fairly to distribute a share of the wealth which they create. it is simply that the waste is so great that there is not a sufficient share for everyone engaged, notwithstanding the fact that the product is usually sold at so high a price as to restrict its fullest consumption. take some of the wastes. take the wastes of power. the mississippi valley is without coal. through its centre pour many millions of potential horsepower--the mississippi river. but if the people by its banks want power or heat they buy coal that has been hauled hundreds of miles and consequently has to be sold at far above its worth as heat or power. or if they cannot afford to buy this expensive coal, they go out and cut down trees, thereby depriving themselves of one of the great conservers of water power. until recently they never thought of the power at hand which, at next to nothing beyond the initial cost, could heat, light, cook, and work for the huge population which that valley is destined to support. the cure of poverty is not in personal economy but in better production. the "thrift" and "economy" ideas have been overworked. the word "economy" represents a fear. the great and tragic fact of waste is impressed on a mind by some circumstance, usually of a most materialistic kind. there comes a violent reaction against extravagance--the mind catches hold of the idea of "economy." but it only flies from a greater to a lesser evil; it does not make the full journey from error to truth. economy is the rule of half-alive minds. there can be no doubt that it is better than waste; neither can there be any doubt that it is not as good as use. people who pride themselves on their economy take it as a virtue. but what is more pitiable than a poor, pinched mind spending the rich days and years clutching a few bits of metal? what can be fine about paring the necessities of life to the very quick? we all know "economical people" who seem to be niggardly even about the amount of air they breathe and the amount of appreciation they will allow themselves to give to anything. they shrivel--body and soul. economy is waste: it is waste of the juices of life, the sap of living. for there are two kinds of waste--that of the prodigal who throws his substance away in riotous living, and that of the sluggard who allows his substance to rot from non-use. the rigid economizer is in danger of being classed with the sluggard. extravagance is usually a reaction from suppression of expenditure. economy is likely to be a reaction from extravagance. everything was given us to use. there is no evil from which we suffer that did not come about through misuse. the worst sin we can commit against the things of our common life is to misuse them. "misuse" is the wider term. we like to say "waste," but waste is only one phase of misuse. all waste is misuse; all misuse is waste. it is possible even to overemphasize the saving habit. it is proper and desirable that everyone have a margin; it is really wasteful not to have one--if you can have one. but it can be overdone. we teach children to save their money. as an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has a value. but it is not positive; it does not lead the child out into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. to teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save. most men who are laboriously saving a few dollars would do better to invest those few dollars--first in themselves, and then in some useful work. eventually they would have more to save. young men ought to invest rather than save. they ought to invest in themselves to increase creative value; after they have taken themselves to the peak of usefulness, then will be time enough to think of laying aside, as a fixed policy, a certain substantial share of income. you are not "saving" when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive. you are really taking away from your ultimate capital; you are reducing the value of one of nature's investments. the principle of use is the true guide. use is positive, active, life-giving. use is alive. use adds to the sum of good. personal want may be avoided without changing the general condition. wage increases, price increases, profit increases, other kinds of increases designed to bring more money here or money there, are only attempts of this or that class to get out of the fire--regardless of what may happen to everyone else. there is a foolish belief that if only the money can be gotten, somehow the storm can be weathered. labour believes that if it can get more wages, it can weather the storm. capital thinks that if it can get more profits, it can weather the storm. there is a pathetic faith in what money can do. money is very useful in normal times, but money has no more value than the people put into it by production, and it can be so misused. it can be so superstitiously worshipped as a substitute for real wealth as to destroy its value altogether. the idea persists that there exists an essential conflict between industry and the farm. there is no such conflict. it is nonsense to say that because the cities are overcrowded everybody ought to go back to the farm. if everybody did so farming would soon decline as a satisfactory occupation. it is not more sensible for everyone to flock to the manufacturing towns. if the farms be deserted, of what use are manufacturers? a reciprocity can exist between farming and manufacturing. the manufacturer can give the farmer what he needs to be a good farmer, and the farmer and other producers of raw materials can give the manufacturer what he needs to be a good manufacturer. then with transportation as a messenger, we shall have a stable and a sound system built on service. if we live in smaller communities where the tension of living is not so high, and where the products of the fields and gardens can be had without the interference of so many profiteers, there will be little poverty or unrest. look at this whole matter of seasonal work. take building as an example of a seasonal trade. what a waste of power it is to allow builders to hibernate through the winter, waiting for the building season to come around! and what an equal waste of skill it is to force experienced artisans who have gone into factories to escape the loss of the winter season to stay in the factory jobs through the building season because they are afraid they may not get their factory places back in the winter. what a waste this all-year system has been! if the farmer could get away from the shop to till his farm in the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons (they are only a small part of the year, after all), and if the builder could get away from the shop to ply his useful trade in its season, how much better they would be, and how much more smoothly the world would proceed. suppose we all moved outdoors every spring and summer and lived the wholesome life of the outdoors for three or four months! we could not have "slack times." the farm has its dull season. that is the time for the farmer to come into the factory and help produce the things he needs to till the farm. the factory also has its dull season. that is the time for the workmen to go out to the land to help produce food. thus we might take the slack out of work and restore the balance between the artificial and the natural. but not the least benefit would be the more balanced view of life we should thus obtain. the mixing of the arts is not only beneficial in a material way, but it makes for breadth of mind and fairness of judgment. a great deal of our unrest to-day is the result of narrow, prejudiced judgment. if our work were more diversified, if we saw more sides of life, if we saw how necessary was one factor to another, we should be more balanced. every man is better for a period of work under the open sky. it is not at all impossible. what is desirable and right is never impossible. it would only mean a little teamwork--a little less attention to greedy ambition and a little more attention to life. those who are rich find it desirable to go away for three or four months a year and dawdle in idleness around some fancy winter or summer resort. the rank and file of the american people would not waste their time that way even if they could. but they would provide the team-work necessary for an outdoor, seasonal employment. it is hardly possible to doubt that much of the unrest we see about us is the result of unnatural modes of life. men who do the same thing continuously the year around and are shut away from the health of the sun and the spaciousness of the great out of doors are hardly to be blamed if they see matters in a distorted light. and that applies equally to the capitalist and the worker. what is there in life that should hamper normal and wholesome modes of living? and what is there in industry incompatible with all the arts receiving in their turn the attention of those qualified to serve in them? it may be objected that if the forces of industry were withdrawn from the shops every summer it would impede production. but we must look at the matter from a universal point of view. we must consider the increased energy of the industrial forces after three or four months in outdoor work. we must also consider the effect on the cost of living which would result from a general return to the fields. we have, as i indicated in a previous chapter, been working toward this combination of farm and factory and with entirely satisfactory results. at northville, not far from detroit, we have a little factory making valves. it is a little factory, but it makes a great many valves. both the management and the mechanism of the plant are comparatively simple because it makes but one thing. we do not have to search for skilled employees. the skill is in the machine. the people of the countryside can work in the plant part of the time and on the farm part of the time, for mechanical farming is not very laborious. the plant power is derived from water. another plant on a somewhat larger scale is in building at flat rock, about fifteen miles from detroit. we have dammed the river. the dam also serves as a bridge for the detroit, toledo & ironton railway, which was in need of a new bridge at that point, and a road for the public--all in one construction. we are going to make our glass at this point. the damming of the river gives sufficient water for the floating to us of most of our raw material. it also gives us our power through a hydroelectric plant. and, being well out in the midst of the farming country, there can be no possibility of crowding or any of the ills incident to too great a concentration of population. the men will have plots of ground or farms as well as their jobs in the factory, and these can be scattered over fifteen or twenty miles surrounding--for of course nowadays the workingman can come to the shop in an automobile. there we shall have the combination of agriculture and industrialism and the entire absence of all the evils of concentration. the belief that an industrial country has to concentrate its industries is not, in my opinion, well-founded. that is only a stage in industrial development. as we learn more about manufacturing and learn to make articles with interchangeable parts, then those parts can be made under the best possible conditions. and these best possible conditions, as far as the employees are concerned, are also the best possible conditions from the manufacturing standpoint. one could not put a great plant on a little stream. one can put a small plant on a little stream, and the combination of little plants, each making a single part, will make the whole cheaper than a vast factory would. there are exceptions, as where casting has to be done. in such case, as at river rouge, we want to combine the making of the metal and the casting of it and also we want to use all of the waste power. this requires a large investment and a considerable force of men in one place. but such combinations are the exception rather than the rule, and there would not be enough of them seriously to interfere with the process of breaking down the concentration of industry. industry will decentralize. there is no city that would be rebuilt as it is, were it destroyed--which fact is in itself a confession of our real estimate of our cities. the city had a place to fill, a work to do. doubtless the country places would not have approximated their livableness had it not been for the cities. by crowding together, men have learned some secrets. they would never have learned them alone in the country. sanitation, lighting, social organization--all these are products of men's experience in the city. but also every social ailment from which we to-day suffer originated and centres in the big cities. you will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth--none of the violent plagues of upheave and unrest which afflict our great populations. there is something about a city of a million people which is untamed and threatening. thirty miles away, happy and contented villages read of the ravings of the city! a great city is really a helpless mass. everything it uses is carried to it. stop transport and the city stops. it lives off the shelves of stores. the shelves produce nothing. the city cannot feed, clothe, warm, or house itself. city conditions of work and living are so artificial that instincts sometimes rebel against their unnaturalness. and finally, the overhead expense of living or doing business in the great cities is becoming so large as to be unbearable. it places so great a tax upon life that there is no surplus over to live on. the politicians have found it easy to borrow money and they have borrowed to the limit. within the last decade the expense of running every city in the country has tremendously increased. a good part of that expense is for interest upon money borrowed; the money has gone either into non-productive brick, stone, and mortar, or into necessities of city life, such as water supplies and sewage systems at far above a reasonable cost. the cost of maintaining these works, the cost of keeping in order great masses of people and traffic is greater than the advantages derived from community life. the modern city has been prodigal, it is to-day bankrupt, and to-morrow it will cease to be. the provision of a great amount of cheap and convenient power--not all at once, but as it may be used--will do more than anything else to bring about the balancing of life and the cutting of the waste which breeds poverty. there is no single source of power. it may be that generating electricity by a steam plant at the mine mouth will be the most economical method for one community. hydro-electric power may be best for another community. but certainly in every community there ought to be a central station to furnish cheap power--it ought to be held as essential as a railway or a water supply. and we could have every great source of power harnessed and working for the common good were it not that the expense of obtaining capital stands in the way. i think that we shall have to revise some of our notions about capital. capital that a business makes for itself, that is employed to expand the workman's opportunity and increase his comfort and prosperity, and that is used to give more and more men work, at the same time reducing the cost of service to the public--that sort of capital, even though it be under single control, is not a menace to humanity. it is a working surplus held in trust and daily use for the benefit of all. the holder of such capital can scarcely regard it as a personal reward. no man can view such a surplus as his own, for he did not create it alone. it is the joint product of his whole organization. the owner's idea may have released all the energy and direction, but certainly it did not supply all the energy and direction. every workman was a partner in the creation. no business can possibly be considered only with reference to to-day and to the individuals engaged in it. it must have the means to carry on. the best wages ought to be paid. a proper living ought to be assured every participant in the business--no matter what his part. but, for the sake of that business's ability to support those who work in it, a surplus has to be held somewhere. the truly honest manufacturer holds his surplus profits in that trust. ultimately it does not matter where this surplus be held nor who controls it; it is its use that matters. capital that is not constantly creating more and better jobs is more useless than sand. capital that is not constantly making conditions of daily labour better and the reward of daily labour more just, is not fulfilling its highest function. the highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more service for the betterment of life. unless we in our industries are helping to solve the social problem, we are not doing our principal work. we are not fully serving. chapter xiv the tractor and power farming it is not generally known that our tractor, which we call the "fordson," was put into production about a year before we had intended, because of the allies' war-time food emergency, and that all of our early production (aside, of course, from the trial and experimental machines) went directly to england. we sent in all five thousand tractors across the sea in the critical - period when the submarines were busiest. every one of them arrived safely, and officers of the british government have been good enough to say that without their aid england could scarcely have met its food crisis. it was these tractors, run mostly by women, that ploughed up the old estates and golf courses and let all england be planted and cultivated without taking away from the fighting man power or crippling the forces in the munitions factories. it came about in this way: the english food administration, about the time that we entered the war in , saw that, with the german submarines torpedoing a freighter almost every day, the already low supply of shipping was going to be totally inadequate to carry the american troops across the seas, to carry the essential munitions for these troops and the allies, to carry the food for the fighting forces, and at the same time carry enough food for the home population of england. it was then that they began shipping out of england the wives and families of the colonials and made plans for the growing of crops at home. the situation was a grave one. there were not enough draft animals in all england to plough and cultivate land to raise crops in sufficient volume to make even a dent in the food imports. power farming was scarcely known, for the english farms were not, before the war, big enough to warrant the purchase of heavy, expensive farm machinery, and especially with agricultural labour so cheap and plentiful. various concerns in england made tractors, but they were heavy affairs and mostly run by steam. there were not enough of them to go around. more could not easily be made, for all the factories were working on munitions, and even if they had been made they were too big and clumsy for the average field and in addition required the management of engineers. we had put together several tractors at our manchester plant for demonstration purposes. they had been made in the united states and merely assembled in england. the board of agriculture requested the royal agricultural society to make a test of these tractors and report. this is what they reported: at the request of the royal agricultural society of england, we have examined two ford tractors, rated at h. p., at work ploughing: first, cross-ploughing a fallow of strong land in a dirty condition, and subsequently in a field of lighter land which had seeded itself down into rough grass, and which afforded every opportunity of testing the motor on the level and on a steep hill. in the first trial, a -furrow oliver plough was used, ploughing on an average inches deep with a -inch wide furrow; a -furrow cockshutt plough was also used at the same depth with the breast pitched inches. in the second trial, the -furrow plough was used, ploughing an average of inches deep. in both cases the motor did its work with ease, and on a measured acre the time occupied was hour minutes, with a consumption of gallons of paraffin per acre. these results we consider very satisfactory. the ploughs were not quite suitable to the land, and the tractors, consequently, were working at some disadvantage. the total weight of the tractor fully loaded with fuel and water, as weighed by us, was / cwts. the tractor is light for its power, and, consequently, light on the land, is easily handled, turns in a small circle, and leaves a very narrow headland. the motor is quickly started up from cold on a small supply of petrol. after these trials we proceeded to messrs. ford's works at trafford park, manchester, where one of the motors had been sent to be dismantled and inspected in detail. we find the design of ample strength, and the work of first-rate quality. we consider the driving-wheels rather light, and we understand that a new and stronger pattern is to be supplied in future. the tractor is designed purely for working on the land, and the wheels, which are fitted with spuds, should be provided with some protection to enable them to travel on the road when moving from farm to farm. bearing the above points in mind, we recommend, under existing circumstances, that steps be taken to construct immediately as many of these tractors as possible. the report was signed by prof. w. e. dalby and f. s. courtney, engineering; r. n. greaves, engineering and agriculture; robert w. hobbs and henry overman, agriculture; gilbert greenall, honorary directors, and john e. cross, steward. almost immediately after the filing of that report we received the following wire: have not received anything definite concerning shipment necessary steel and plant for cork factory. under best circumstances however cork factory production could not be available before next spring. the need for food production in england is imperative and large quantity of tractors must be available at earliest possible date for purpose breaking up existing grass land and ploughing for fall wheat. am requested by high authorities to appeal to mr. ford for help. would you be willing to send sorensen and others with drawings of everything necessary, loaning them to british government so that parts can be manufactured over here and assembled in government factories under sorensen's guidance? can assure you positively this suggestion is made in national interest and if carried out will be done by the government for the people with no manufacturing or capitalist interest invested and no profit being made by any interests whatever. the matter is very urgent. impossible to ship anything adequate from america because many thousand tractors must be provided. ford tractor considered best and only suitable design. consequently national necessity entirely dependent mr. ford's design. my work prevents me coming america to present the proposal personally. urge favorable consideration and immediate decision because every day is of vital importance. you may rely on manufacturing facility for production here under strictest impartial government control. would welcome sorensen and any and every other assistance and guidance you can furnish from america. cable reply, perry, care of harding "prodome," london. prodome. i understand that its sending was directed by the british cabinet. we at once cabled our entire willingness to lend the drawings, the benefit of what experience we had to date, and whatever men might be necessary to get production under way, and on the next ship sent charles e. sorensen with full drawings. mr. sorensen had opened the manchester plant and was familiar with english conditions. he was in charge of the manufacture of tractors in this country. mr. sorensen started at work with the british officials to the end of having the parts made and assembled in england. many of the materials which we used were special and could not be obtained in england. all of their factories equipped for doing casting and machine work were filled with munition orders. it proved to be exceedingly difficult for the ministry to get tenders of any kind. then came june and a series of destructive air raids on london. there was a crisis. something had to be done, and finally, after passing to and fro among half the factories of england, our men succeeded in getting the tenders lodged with the ministry. lord milner exhibited these tenders to mr. sorensen. taking the best of them the price per tractor came to about $ , without any guarantee of delivery. "that price is out of all reason," said mr. sorensen, "these should not cost more than $ apiece." "can you make five thousand at that price?" asked lord milner. "yes," answered mr. sorensen. "how long will it take you to deliver them?" "we will start shipping within sixty days." they signed a contract on the spot, which, among other things, provided for an advance payment of per cent. of the total sum. mr. sorensen cabled us what he had done and took the next boat home. the five per cent. payment was, by the way, not touched by us until after the entire contract was completed: we deposited it in a kind of trust fund. the tractor works was not ready to go into production. the highland park plant might have been adapted, but every machine in it was going day and night on essential war work. there was only one thing to do. we ran up an emergency extension to our plant at dearborn, equipped it with machinery that was ordered by telegraph and mostly came by express, and in less than sixty days the first tractors were on the docks in new york in the hands of the british authorities. they delayed in getting cargo space, but on december , , we received this cable: london, december , . sorensen, fordson, f. r. dearborn. first tractors arrived, when will smith and others leave? cable. perry. the entire shipment of five thousand tractors went through within three months and that is why the tractors were being used in england long before they were really known in the united states. the planning of the tractor really antedated that of the motor car. out on the farm my first experiments were with tractors, and it will be remembered that i was employed for some time by a manufacturer of steam tractors--the big heavy road and thresher engines. but i did not see any future for the large tractors. they were too expensive for the small farm, required too much skill to operate, and were much too heavy as compared with the pull they exerted. and anyway, the public was more interested in being carried than in being pulled; the horseless carriage made a greater appeal to the imagination. and so it was that i practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile was in production. with the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a necessity. for then the farmers had been introduced to power. the farmer does not stand so much in need of new tools as of power to run the tools that he has. i have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and i know all the drudgery of it. what a waste it is for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work! it is no wonder that, doing everything slowly and by hand, the average farmer has not been able to earn more than a bare living while farm products are never as plentiful and cheap as they ought to be. as in the automobile, we wanted power--not weight. the weight idea was firmly fixed in the minds of tractor makers. it was thought that excess weight meant excess pulling power--that the machine could not grip unless it were heavy. and this in spite of the fact that a cat has not much weight and is a pretty good climber. i have already set out my ideas on weight. the only kind of tractor that i thought worth working on was one that would be light, strong, and so simple that any one could run it. also it had to be so cheap that any one could buy it. with these ends in view, we worked for nearly fifteen years on a design and spent some millions of dollars in experiments. we followed exactly the same course as with the automobile. each part had to be as strong as it was possible to make it, the parts had to be few in number, and the whole had to admit of quantity production. we had some thought that perhaps the automobile engine might be used and we conducted a few experiments with it. but finally we became convinced that the kind of tractor we wanted and the automobile had practically nothing in common. it was the intention from the beginning that the tractor should be made as a separate undertaking from the automobile and in a distinct plant. no plant is big enough to make two articles. the automobile is designed to carry; the tractor is designed to pull--to climb. and that difference in function made all the difference in the world in construction. the hard problem was to get bearings that would stand up against the heavy pull. we finally got them and a construction which seems to give the best average performance under all conditions. we fixed upon a four-cylinder engine that is started by gasoline but runs thereafter on kerosene. the lightest weight that we could attain with strength was , pounds. the grip is in the lugs on the driving wheels--as in the claws of the cat. in addition to its strictly pulling functions, the tractor, to be of the greatest service, had also to be designed for work as a stationary engine so that when it was not out on the road or in the fields it might be hitched up with a belt to run machinery. in short, it had to be a compact, versatile power plant. and that it has been. it has not only ploughed, harrowed, cultivated, and reaped, but it has also threshed, run grist mills, saw mills, and various other sorts of mills, pulled stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a plant of moderate power could do from sheep-shearing to printing a newspaper. it has been fitted with heavy tires to haul on roads, with sledge runners for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. when the shops in detroit were shut down by coal shortage, we got out the _dearborn independent_ by sending a tractor to the electro-typing factory--stationing the tractor in the alley, sending up a belt four stories, and making the plates by tractor power. its use in ninety-five distinct lines of service has been called to our attention, and probably we know only a fraction of the uses. the mechanism of the tractor is even more simple than that of the automobile and it is manufactured in exactly the same fashion. until the present year, the production has been held back by the lack of a suitable factory. the first tractors had been made in the plant at dearborn which is now used as an experimental station. that was not large enough to affect the economies of large-scale production and it could not well be enlarged because the design was to make the tractors at the river rouge plant, and that, until this year, was not in full operation. now that plant is completed for the making of tractors. the work flows exactly as with the automobiles. each part is a separate departmental undertaking and each part as it is finished joins the conveyor system which leads it to its proper initial assembly and eventually into the final assembly. everything moves and there is no skilled work. the capacity of the present plant is one million tractors a year. that is the number we expect to make--for the world needs inexpensive, general-utility power plants more now than ever before--and also it now knows enough about machinery to want such plants. the first tractors, as i have said, went to england. they were first offered in the united states in at $ . in the next year, with the higher costs, the price had to be made $ ; in the middle of the year it was possible again to make the introductory price of $ . in we charged $ ; in the next year we were sufficiently familiar with the production to begin cutting. the price came down to $ and then in with the river rouge plant functioning we were able to cut to $ . all of which shows what getting into scientific production will do to a price. just as i have no idea how cheaply the ford automobile can eventually be made, i have no idea how cheaply the tractor can eventually be made. it is important that it shall be cheap. otherwise power will not go to all the farms. and they must all of them have power. within a few years a farm depending solely on horse and hand power will be as much of a curiosity as a factory run by a treadmill. the farmer must either take up power or go out of business. the cost figures make this inevitable. during the war the government made a test of a fordson tractor to see how its costs compared with doing the work with horses. the figures on the tractor were taken at the high price plus freight. the depreciation and repair items are not so great as the report sets them forth, and even if they were, the prices are cut in halves which would therefore cut the depreciation and repair charge in halves. these are the figures: cost, fordson, $ . wearing life, , hours at / acres per hour, , acres , acres at $ ; depreciation per acre . repairs for , acres, $ ; per acre . fuel cost, kerosene at cents; gal. per acre . gal. oil per acres; per acre . driver, $ per day, acres; per acre . --- cost of ploughing with fordson; per acre. . horses cost, $ , . working life, , hours at / acre per hour, , acres , acres at $ , , depreciation of horses, per acre. . . . feed per horse, cents ( working days) per acre . . . . . feed per horse, cents a day ( idle days) per acre. . . . two drivers, two gang ploughs, at $ each per day, per acre. . ---- cost of ploughing with horses; per acre. . . . . . . . . . . . at present costs, an acre would run about cents only two cents representing depreciation and repairs. but this does not take account of the time element. the ploughing is done in about one fourth the time, with only the physical energy used to steer the tractor. ploughing has become a matter of motoring across a field. farming in the old style is rapidly fading into a picturesque memory. this does not mean that work is going to remove from the farm. work cannot be removed from any life that is productive. but power-farming does mean this--drudgery is going to be removed from the farm. power-farming is simply taking the burden from flesh and blood and putting it on steel. we are in the opening years of power-farming. the motor car wrought a revolution in modern farm life, not because it was a vehicle, but because it had power. farming ought to be something more than a rural occupation. it ought to be the business of raising food. and when it does become a business the actual work of farming the average sort of farm can be done in twenty-four days a year. the other days can be given over to other kinds of business. farming is too seasonal an occupation to engage all of a man's time. as a food business, farming will justify itself as a business if it raises food in sufficient quantity and distributes it under such conditions as will enable every family to have enough food for its reasonable needs. there could not be a food trust if we were to raise such overwhelming quantities of all kinds of food as to make manipulation and exploitation impossible. the farmer who limits his planting plays into the hands of the speculators. and then, perhaps, we shall witness a revival of the small flour-milling business. it was an evil day when the village flour mill disappeared. cooperative farming will become so developed that we shall see associations of farmers with their own packing houses in which their own hogs will be turned into ham and bacon, and with their own flour mills in which their grain will be turned into commercial foodstuffs. why a steer raised in texas should be brought to chicago and then served in boston is a question that cannot be answered as long as all the steers the city needs could be raised near boston. the centralization of food manufacturing industries, entailing enormous costs for transportation and organization, is too wasteful long to continue in a developed community. we shall have as great a development in farming during the next twenty years as we have had in manufacturing during the last twenty. chapter xv why charity? why should there by any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized community? it is not the charitable mind to which i object. heaven forbid that we should ever grow cold toward a fellow creature in need. human sympathy is too fine for the cool, calculating attitude to take its place. one can name very few great advances that did not have human sympathy behind them. it is in order to help people that every notable service is undertaken. the trouble is that we have been using this great, fine motive force for ends too small. if human sympathy prompts us to feed the hungry, why should it not give the larger desire--to make hunger in our midst impossible? if we have sympathy enough for people to help them out of their troubles, surely we ought to have sympathy enough to keep them out. it is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary. to make the giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery--not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime, but not stopping with mere temporary relief. the difficulty seems to be in getting to look beyond to the causes. more people can be moved to help a poor family than can be moved to give their minds toward the removal of poverty altogether. i have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of commercialized humanitarianism. the moment human helpfulness is systematized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart of it is extinguished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing. real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. there are more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who love them than in the institutions. there are more old people being sheltered by friends than you can find in the old people's homes. there is more aid by loans from family to family than by the loan societies. that is, human society on a humane basis looks out for itself. it is a grave question how far we ought to countenance the commercialization of the natural instinct of charity. professional charity is not only cold but it hurts more than it helps. it degrades the recipients and drugs their self-respect. akin to it is sentimental idealism. the idea went abroad not so many years ago that "service" was something that we should expect to have done for us. untold numbers of people became the recipients of well-meant "social service." whole sections of our population were coddled into a state of expectant, child-like helplessness. there grew up a regular profession of doing things for people, which gave an outlet for a laudable desire for service, but which contributed nothing whatever to the self-reliance of the people nor to the correction of the conditions out of which the supposed need for such service grew. worse than this encouragement of childish wistfulness, instead of training for self-reliance and self-sufficiency, was the creation of a feeling of resentment which nearly always overtakes the objects of charity. people often complain of the "ingratitude" of those whom they help. nothing is more natural. in the first place, precious little of our so-called charity is ever real charity, offered out of a heart full of interest and sympathy. in the second place, no person ever relishes being in a position where he is forced to take favors. such "social work" creates a strained relation--the recipient of bounty feels that he has been belittled in the taking, and it is a question whether the giver should not also feel that he has been belittled in the giving. charity never led to a settled state of affairs. the charitable system that does not aim to make itself unnecessary is not performing service. it is simply making a job for itself and is an added item to the record of non-production. charity becomes unnecessary as those who seem to be unable to earn livings are taken out of the non-productive class and put into the productive. in a previous chapter i have set out how experiments in our shops have demonstrated that in sufficiently subdivided industry there are places which can be filled by the maimed, the halt, and the blind. scientific industry need not be a monster devouring all who come near it. when it is, then it is not fulfilling its place in life. in and out of industry there must be jobs that take the full strength of a powerful man; there are other jobs, and plenty of them, that require more skill than the artisans of the middle ages ever had. the minute subdivision of industry permits a strong man or a skilled man always to use his strength or skill. in the old hand industry, a skilled man spent a good part of his time at unskilled work. that was a waste. but since in those days every task required both skilled and unskilled labour to be performed by the one man, there was little room for either the man who was too stupid ever to be skilled or the man who did not have the opportunity to learn a trade. no mechanic working with only his hands can earn more than a bare sustenance. he cannot have a surplus. it has been taken for granted that, coming into old age, a mechanic must be supported by his children or, if he has no children, that he will be a public charge. all of that is quite unnecessary. the subdivision of industry opens places that can be filled by practically any one. there are more places in subdivision industry that can be filled by blind men than there are blind men. there are more places that can be filled by cripples than there are cripples. and in each of these places the man who short-sightedly might be considered as an object of charity can earn just as adequate a living as the keenest and most able-bodied. it is waste to put an able-bodied man in a job that might be just as well cared for by a cripple. it is a frightful waste to put the blind at weaving baskets. it is waste to have convicts breaking stone or picking hemp or doing any sort of petty, useless task. a well-conducted jail should not only be self-supporting, but a man in jail ought to be able to support his family or, if he has no family, he should be able to accumulate a sum of money sufficient to put him on his feet when he gets out of jail. i am not advocating convict labour or the farming out of men practically as slaves. such a plan is too detestable for words. we have greatly overdone the prison business, anyway; we begin at the wrong end. but as long as we have prisons they can be fitted into the general scheme of production so neatly that a prison may become a productive unit working for the relief of the public and the benefit of the prisoners. i know that there are laws--foolish laws passed by unthinking men--that restrict the industrial activities of prisons. those laws were passed mostly at the behest of what is called labour. they are not for the benefit of the workingman. increasing the charges upon a community does not benefit any one in the community. if the idea of service be kept in mind, then there is always in every community more work to do than there are men who can do it. industry organized for service removes the need for philanthropy. philanthropy, no matter how noble its motive, does not make for self-reliance. we must have self-reliance. a community is the better for being discontented, for being dissatisfied with what it has. i do not mean the petty, daily, nagging, gnawing sort of discontent, but a broad, courageous sort of discontent which believes that everything which is done can and ought to be eventually done better. industry organized for service--and the workingman as well as the leader must serve--can pay wages sufficiently large to permit every family to be both self-reliant and self-supporting. a philanthropy that spends its time and money in helping the world to do more for itself is far better than the sort which merely gives and thus encourages idleness. philanthropy, like everything else, ought to be productive, and i believe that it can be. i have personally been experimenting with a trade school and a hospital to discover if such institutions, which are commonly regarded as benevolent, cannot be made to stand on their own feet. i have found that they can be. i am not in sympathy with the trade school as it is commonly organized--the boys get only a smattering of knowledge and they do not learn how to use that knowledge. the trade school should not be a cross between a technical college and a school; it should be a means of teaching boys to be productive. if they are put at useless tasks--at making articles and then throwing them away--they cannot have the interest or acquire the knowledge which is their right. and during the period of schooling the boy is not productive; the schools--unless by charity--make no provision for the support of the boy. many boys need support; they must work at the first thing which comes to hand. they have no chance to pick and choose. when the boy thus enters life untrained, he but adds to the already great scarcity of competent labour. modern industry requires a degree of ability and skill which neither early quitting of school nor long continuance at school provides. it is true that, in order to retain the interest of the boy and train him in handicraft, manual training departments have been introduced in the more progressive school systems, but even these are confessedly makeshifts because they only cater to, without satisfying, the normal boy's creative instincts. to meet this condition--to fulfill the boy's educational possibilities and at the same time begin his industrial training along constructive lines--the henry ford trade school was incorporated in . we do not use the word philanthropy in connection with this effort. it grew out of a desire to aid the boy whose circumstances compelled him to leave school early. this desire to aid fitted in conveniently with the necessity of providing trained tool-makers in the shops. from the beginning we have held to three cardinal principles: first, that the boy was to be kept a boy and not changed into a premature working-man; second, that the academic training was to go hand in hand with the industrial instruction; third, that the boy was to be given a sense of pride and responsibility in his work by being trained on articles which were to be used. he works on objects of recognized industrial worth. the school is incorporated as a private school and is open to boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. it is organized on the basis of scholarships and each boy is awarded an annual cash scholarship of four hundred dollars at his entrance. this is gradually increased to a maximum of six hundred dollars if his record is satisfactory. a record of the class and shop work is kept and also of the industry the boy displays in each. it is the marks in industry which are used in making subsequent adjustments of his scholarship. in addition to his scholarship each boy is given a small amount each month which must be deposited in his savings account. this thrift fund must be left in the bank as long as the boy remains in the school unless he is given permission by the authorities to use it for an emergency. one by one the problems of managing the school are being solved and better ways of accomplishing its objects are being discovered. at the beginning it was the custom to give the boy one third of the day in class work and two thirds in shop work. this daily adjustment was found to be a hindrance to progress, and now the boy takes his training in blocks of weeks--one week in the class and two weeks in the shop. classes are continuous, the various groups taking their weeks in turn. the best instructors obtainable are on the staff, and the text-book is the ford plant. it offers more resources for practical education than most universities. the arithmetic lessons come in concrete shop problems. no longer is the boy's mind tortured with the mysterious a who can row four miles while b is rowing two. the actual processes and actual conditions are exhibited to him--he is taught to observe. cities are no longer black specks on maps and continents are not just pages of a book. the shop shipments to singapore, the shop receipts of material from africa and south america are shown to him, and the world becomes an inhabited planet instead of a coloured globe on the teacher's desk. in physics and chemistry the industrial plant provides a laboratory in which theory becomes practice and the lesson becomes actual experience. suppose the action of a pump is being taught. the teacher explains the parts and their functions, answers questions, and then they all troop away to the engine rooms to see a great pump. the school has a regular factory workshop with the finest equipment. the boys work up from one machine to the next. they work solely on parts or articles needed by the company, but our needs are so vast that this list comprehends nearly everything. the inspected work is purchased by the ford motor company, and, of course, the work that does not pass inspection is a loss to the school. the boys who have progressed furthest do fine micrometer work, and they do every operation with a clear understanding of the purposes and principles involved. they repair their own machines; they learn how to take care of themselves around machinery; they study pattern-making and in clean, well-lighted rooms with their instructors they lay the foundation for successful careers. when they graduate, places are always open for them in the shops at good wages. the social and moral well-being of the boys is given an unobtrusive care. the supervision is not of authority but of friendly interest. the home conditions of every boy are pretty well known, and his tendencies are observed. and no attempt is made to coddle him. no attempt is made to render him namby-pamby. one day when two boys came to the point of a fight, they were not lectured on the wickedness of fighting. they were counseled to make up their differences in a better way, but when, boy-like, they preferred the more primitive mode of settlement, they were given gloves and made to fight it out in a corner of the shop. the only prohibition laid upon them was that they were to finish it there, and not to be caught fighting outside the shop. the result was a short encounter and--friendship. they are handled as boys; their better boyish instincts are encouraged; and when one sees them in the shops and classes one cannot easily miss the light of dawning mastery in their eyes. they have a sense of "belonging." they feel they are doing something worth while. they learn readily and eagerly because they are learning the things which every active boy wants to learn and about which he is constantly asking questions that none of his home-folks can answer. beginning with six boys the school now has two hundred and is possessed of so practical a system that it may expand to seven hundred. it began with a deficit, but as it is one of my basic ideas that anything worth while in itself can be made self-sustaining, it has so developed its processes that it is now paying its way. we have been able to let the boy have his boyhood. these boys learn to be workmen but they do not forget how to be boys. that is of the first importance. they earn from to cents an hour--which is more than they could earn as boys in the sort of job open to a youngster. they can better help support their families by staying in school than by going out to work. when they are through, they have a good general education, the beginning of a technical education, and they are so skilled as workmen that they can earn wages which will give them the liberty to continue their education if they like. if they do not want more education, they have at least the skill to command high wages anywhere. they do not have to go into our factories; most of them do because they do not know where better jobs are to be had--we want all our jobs to be good for the men who take them. but there is no string tied to the boys. they have earned their own way and are under obligations to no one. there is no charity. the place pays for itself. the ford hospital is being worked out on somewhat similar lines, but because of the interruption of the war--when it was given to the government and became general hospital no. , housing some fifteen hundred patients--the work has not yet advanced to the point of absolutely definite results. i did not deliberately set out to build this hospital. it began in as the detroit general hospital and was designed to be erected by popular subscription. with others, i made a subscription, and the building began. long before the first buildings were done, the funds became exhausted and i was asked to make another subscription. i refused because i thought that the managers should have known how much the building was going to cost before they started. and that sort of a beginning did not give great confidence as to how the place would be managed after it was finished. however, i did offer to take the whole hospital, paying back all the subscriptions that had been made. this was accomplished, and we were going forward with the work when, on august , , the whole institution was turned over to the government. it was returned to us in october, , and on the tenth day of november of the same year the first private patient was admitted. the hospital is on west grand boulevard in detroit and the plot embraces twenty acres, so that there will be ample room for expansion. it is our thought to extend the facilities as they justify themselves. the original design of the hospital has been quite abandoned and we have endeavoured to work out a new kind of hospital, both in design and management. there are plenty of hospitals for the rich. there are plenty of hospitals for the poor. there are no hospitals for those who can afford to pay only a moderate amount and yet desire to pay without a feeling that they are recipients of charity. it has been taken for granted that a hospital cannot both serve and be self-supporting--that it has to be either an institution kept going by private contributions or pass into the class of private sanitariums managed for profit. this hospital is designed to be self-supporting--to give a maximum of service at a minimum of cost and without the slightest colouring of charity. in the new buildings that we have erected there are no wards. all of the rooms are private and each one is provided with a bath. the rooms--which are in groups of twenty-four--are all identical in size, in fittings, and in furnishings. there is no choice of rooms. it is planned that there shall be no choice of anything within the hospital. every patient is on an equal footing with every other patient. it is not at all certain whether hospitals as they are now managed exist for patients or for doctors. i am not unmindful of the large amount of time which a capable physician or surgeon gives to charity, but also i am not convinced that the fees of surgeons should be regulated according to the wealth of the patient, and i am entirely convinced that what is known as "professional etiquette" is a curse to mankind and to the development of medicine. diagnosis is not very much developed. i should not care to be among the proprietors of a hospital in which every step had not been taken to insure that the patients were being treated for what actually was the matter with them, instead of for something that one doctor had decided they had. professional etiquette makes it very difficult for a wrong diagnosis to be corrected. the consulting physician, unless he be a man of great tact, will not change a diagnosis or a treatment unless the physician who has called him in is in thorough agreement, and then if a change be made, it is usually without the knowledge of the patient. there seems to be a notion that a patient, and especially when in a hospital, becomes the property of the doctor. a conscientious practitioner does not exploit the patient. a less conscientious one does. many physicians seem to regard the sustaining of their own diagnoses as of as great moment as the recovery of the patient. it has been an aim of our hospital to cut away from all of these practices and to put the interest of the patient first. therefore, it is what is known as a "closed" hospital. all of the physicians and all of the nurses are employed by the year and they can have no practice outside of the hospital. including the interns, twenty-one physicians and surgeons are on the staff. these men have been selected with great care and they are paid salaries that amount to at least as much as they would ordinarily earn in successful private practice. they have, none of them, any financial interest whatsoever in any patient, and a patient may not be treated by a doctor from the outside. we gladly acknowledge the place and the use of the family physician. we do not seek to supplant him. we take the case where he leaves off, and return the patient as quickly as possible. our system makes it undesirable for us to keep patients longer than necessary--we do not need that kind of business. and we will share with the family physician our knowledge of the case, but while the patient is in the hospital we assume full responsibility. it is "closed" to outside physicians' practice, though it is not closed to our cooperation with any family physician who desires it. the admission of a patient is interesting. the incoming patient is first examined by the senior physician and then is routed for examination through three, four, or whatever number of doctors seems necessary. this routing takes place regardless of what the patient came to the hospital for, because, as we are gradually learning, it is the complete health rather than a single ailment which is important. each of the doctors makes a complete examination, and each sends in his written findings to the head physician without any opportunity whatsoever to consult with any of the other examining physicians. at least three, and sometimes six or seven, absolutely complete and absolutely independent diagnoses are thus in the hands of the head of the hospital. they constitute a complete record of the case. these precautions are taken in order to insure, within the limits of present-day knowledge, a correct diagnosis. at the present time, there are about six hundred beds available. every patient pays according to a fixed schedule that includes the hospital room, board, medical and surgical attendance, and nursing. there are no extras. there are no private nurses. if a case requires more attention than the nurses assigned to the wing can give, then another nurse is put on, but without any additional expense to the patient. this, however, is rarely necessary because the patients are grouped according to the amount of nursing that they will need. there may be one nurse for two patients, or one nurse for five patients, as the type of cases may require. no one nurse ever has more than seven patients to care for, and because of the arrangements it is easily possible for a nurse to care for seven patients who are not desperately ill. in the ordinary hospital the nurses must make many useless steps. more of their time is spent in walking than in caring for the patient. this hospital is designed to save steps. each floor is complete in itself, and just as in the factories we have tried to eliminate the necessity for waste motion, so have we also tried to eliminate waste motion in the hospital. the charge to patients for a room, nursing, and medical attendance is $ . a day. this will be lowered as the size of the hospital increases. the charge for a major operation is $ . the charge for minor operations is according to a fixed scale. all of the charges are tentative. the hospital has a cost system just like a factory. the charges will be regulated to make ends just meet. there seems to be no good reason why the experiment should not be successful. its success is purely a matter of management and mathematics. the same kind of management which permits a factory to give the fullest service will permit a hospital to give the fullest service, and at a price so low as to be within the reach of everyone. the only difference between hospital and factory accounting is that i do not expect the hospital to return a profit; we do expect it to cover depreciation. the investment in this hospital to date is about $ , , . if we can get away from charity, the funds that now go into charitable enterprises can be turned to furthering production--to making goods cheaply and in great plenty. and then we shall not only be removing the burden of taxes from the community and freeing men but also we can be adding to the general wealth. we leave for private interest too many things we ought to do for ourselves as a collective interest. we need more constructive thinking in public service. we need a kind of "universal training" in economic facts. the over-reaching ambitions of speculative capital, as well as the unreasonable demands of irresponsible labour, are due to ignorance of the economic basis of life. nobody can get more out of life than life can produce--yet nearly everybody thinks he can. speculative capital wants more; labour wants more; the source of raw material wants more; and the purchasing public wants more. a family knows that it cannot live beyond its income; even the children know that. but the public never seems to learn that it cannot live beyond its income--have more than it produces. in clearing out the need for charity we must keep in mind not only the economic facts of existence, but also that lack of knowledge of these facts encourages fear. banish fear and we can have self-reliance. charity is not present where self-reliance dwells. fear is the offspring of a reliance placed on something outside--on a foreman's good-will, perhaps, on a shop's prosperity, on a market's steadiness. that is just another way of saying that fear is the portion of the man who acknowledges his career to be in the keeping of earthly circumstances. fear is the result of the body assuming ascendancy over the soul. the habit of failure is purely mental and is the mother of fear. this habit gets itself fixed on men because they lack vision. they start out to do something that reaches from a to z. at a they fail, at b they stumble, and at c they meet with what seems to be an insuperable difficulty. they then cry "beaten" and throw the whole task down. they have not even given themselves a chance really to fail; they have not given their vision a chance to be proved or disproved. they have simply let themselves be beaten by the natural difficulties that attend every kind of effort. more men are beaten than fail. it is not wisdom they need or money, or brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone. this rude, simple, primitive power which we call "stick-to-it-iveness" is the uncrowned king of the world of endeavour. people are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. they see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. but that is a world away from the facts. it is failure that is easy. success is always hard. a man can fail in ease; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is. it is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are not useful and uplifting. if a man is in constant fear of the industrial situation he ought to change his life so as not to be dependent upon it. there is always the land, and fewer people are on the land now than ever before. if a man lives in fear of an employer's favor changing toward him, he ought to extricate himself from dependence on any employer. he can become his own boss. it may be that he will be a poorer boss than the one he leaves, and that his returns will be much less, but at least he will have rid himself of the shadow of his pet fear, and that is worth a great deal in money and position. better still is for the man to come through himself and exceed himself by getting rid of his fears in the midst of the circumstances where his daily lot is cast. become a freeman in the place where you first surrendered your freedom. win your battle where you lost it. and you will come to see that, although there was much outside of you that was not right, there was more inside of you that was not right. thus you will learn that the wrong inside of you spoils even the right that is outside of you. a man is still the superior being of the earth. whatever happens, he is still a man. business may slacken tomorrow--he is still a man. he goes through the changes of circumstances, as he goes through the variations of temperature--still a man. if he can only get this thought reborn in him, it opens new wells and mines in his own being. there is no security outside of himself. there is no wealth outside of himself. the elimination of fear is the bringing in of security and supply. let every american become steeled against coddling. americans ought to resent coddling. it is a drug. stand up and stand out; let weaklings take charity. chapter xvi the railroads nothing in this country furnishes a better example of how a business may be turned from its function of service than do the railroads. we have a railroad problem, and much learned thought and discussion have been devoted to the solution of that problem. everyone is dissatisfied with the railways. the public is dissatisfied because both the passenger and freight rates are too high. the railroad employees are dissatisfied because they say their wages are too low and their hours too long. the owners of the railways are dissatisfied because it is claimed that no adequate return is realized upon the money invested. all of the contacts of a properly managed undertaking ought to be satisfactory. if the public, the employees, and the owners do not find themselves better off because of the undertaking, then there must be something very wrong indeed with the manner in which the undertaking is carried through. i am entirely without any disposition to pose as a railroad authority. there may be railroad authorities, but if the service as rendered by the american railroad to-day is the result of accumulated railway knowledge, then i cannot say that my respect for the usefulness of that knowledge is at all profound. i have not the slightest doubt in the world that the active managers of the railways, the men who really do the work, are entirely capable of conducting the railways of the country to the satisfaction of every one, and i have equally no doubt that these active managers have, by force of a chain of circumstances, all but ceased to manage. and right there is the source of most of the trouble. the men who know railroading have not been allowed to manage railroads. in a previous chapter on finance were set forth the dangers attendant upon the indiscriminate borrowing of money. it is inevitable that any one who can borrow freely to cover errors of management will borrow rather than correct the errors. our railway managers have been practically forced to borrow, for since the very inception of the railways they have not been free agents. the guiding hand of the railway has been, not the railroad man, but the banker. when railroad credit was high, more money was to be made out of floating bond issues and speculating in the securities than out of service to the public. a very small fraction of the money earned by the railways has gone back into the rehabilitation of the properties. when by skilled management the net revenue became large enough to pay a considerable dividend upon the stock, then that dividend was used first by the speculators on the inside and controlling the railroad fiscal policy to boom the stock and unload their holdings, and then to float a bond issue on the strength of the credit gained through the earnings. when the earnings dropped or were artificially depressed, then the speculators bought back the stock and in the course of time staged another advance and unloading. there is scarcely a railroad in the united states that has not been through one or more receiverships, due to the fact that the financial interests piled on load after load of securities until the structures grew topheavy and fell over. then they got in on the receiverships, made money at the expense of gullible security holders, and started the same old pyramiding game all over again. the natural ally of the banker is the lawyer. such games as have been played on the railroads have needed expert legal advice. lawyers, like bankers, know absolutely nothing about business. they imagine that a business is properly conducted if it keeps within the law or if the law can be altered or interpreted to suit the purpose in hand. they live on rules. the bankers took finance out of the hands of the managers. they put in lawyers to see that the railroads violated the law only in legal fashion, and thus grew up immense legal departments. instead of operating under the rules of common sense and according to circumstances, every railroad had to operate on the advice of counsel. rules spread through every part of the organization. then came the avalanche of state and federal regulations, until to-day we find the railways hog-tied in a mass of rules and regulations. with the lawyers and the financiers on the inside and various state commissions on the outside, the railway manager has little chance. that is the trouble with the railways. business cannot be conducted by law. we have had the opportunity of demonstrating to ourselves what a freedom from the banker-legal mortmain means, in our experience with the detroit, toledo & ironton railway. we bought the railway because its right of way interfered with some of our improvements on the river rouge. we did not buy it as an investment, or as an adjunct to our industries, or because of its strategic position. the extraordinarily good situation of the railway seems to have become universally apparent only since we bought it. that, however, is beside the point. we bought the railway because it interfered with our plans. then we had to do something with it. the only thing to do was to run it as a productive enterprise, applying to it exactly the same principles as are applied in every department of our industries. we have as yet made no special efforts of any kind and the railway has not been set up as a demonstration of how every railway should be run. it is true that applying the rule of maximum service at minimum cost has caused the income of the road to exceed the outgo--which, for that road, represents a most unusual condition. it has been represented that the changes we have made--and remember they have been made simply as part of the day's work--are peculiarly revolutionary and quite without application to railway management in general. personally, it would seem to me that our little line does not differ much from the big lines. in our own work we have always found that, if our principles were right, the area over which they were applied did not matter. the principles that we use in the big highland park plant seem to work equally well in every plant that we establish. it has never made any difference with us whether we multiplied what we were doing by five or five hundred. size is only a matter of the multiplication table, anyway. the detroit, toledo & ironton railway was organized some twenty-odd years ago and has been reorganized every few years since then. the last reorganization was in . the war and the federal control of the railways interrupted the cycle of reorganization. the road owns miles of track, has miles of branches, and miles of trackage rights over other roads. it goes from detroit almost due south to ironton on the ohio river, thus tapping the west virginia coal deposits. it crosses most of the large trunk lines and it is a road which, from a general business standpoint, ought to pay. it has paid. it seems to have paid the bankers. in the net capitalization per mile of road was $ , . in the next receivership this was cut down to $ , per mile. i do not know how much money in all has been raised on the strength of the road. i do know that in the reorganization of the bondholders were assessed and forced to turn into the treasury nearly five million dollars--which is the amount that we paid for the entire road. we paid sixty cents on the dollar for the outstanding mortgage bonds, although the ruling price just before the time of purchase was between thirty and forty cents on the dollar. we paid a dollar a share for the common stock and five dollars a share for the preferred stock--which seemed to be a fair price considering that no interest had ever been paid upon the bonds and a dividend on the stock was a most remote possibility. the rolling stock of the road consisted of about seventy locomotives, twenty-seven passenger cars, and around twenty-eight hundred freight cars. all of the rolling stock was in extremely bad condition and a good part of it would not run at all. all of the buildings were dirty, unpainted, and generally run down. the roadbed was something more than a streak of rust and something less than a railway. the repair shops were over-manned and under-machined. practically everything connected with operation was conducted with a maximum of waste. there was, however, an exceedingly ample executive and administration department, and of course a legal department. the legal department alone cost in one month nearly $ , . we took over the road in march, . we began to apply industrial principles. there had been an executive office in detroit. we closed that up and put the administration into the charge of one man and gave him half of the flat-topped desk out in the freight office. the legal department went with the executive offices. there is no reason for so much litigation in connection with railroading. our people quickly settled all the mass of outstanding claims, some of which had been hanging on for years. as new claims arise, they are settled at once and on the facts, so that the legal expense seldom exceeds $ a month. all of the unnecessary accounting and red tape were thrown out and the payroll of the road was reduced from , to , men. following our general policy, all titles and offices other than those required by law were abolished. the ordinary railway organization is rigid; a message has to go up through a certain line of authority and no man is expected to do anything without explicit orders from his superior. one morning i went out to the road very early and found a wrecking train with steam up, a crew aboard and all ready to start. it had been "awaiting orders" for half an hour. we went down and cleared the wreck before the orders came through; that was before the idea of personal responsibility had soaked in. it was a little hard to break the "orders" habit; the men at first were afraid to take responsibility. but as we went on, they seemed to like the plan more and more and now no man limits his duties. a man is paid for a day's work of eight hours and he is expected to work during those eight hours. if he is an engineer and finishes a run in four hours then he works at whatever else may be in demand for the next four hours. if a man works more than eight hours he is not paid for overtime--he deducts his overtime from the next working day or saves it up and gets a whole day off with pay. our eight-hour day is a day of eight hours and not a basis for computing pay. the minimum wage is six dollars a day. there are no extra men. we have cut down in the offices, in the shops, and on the roads. in one shop men are now doing more work than did before. not long ago one of our track gangs, consisting of a foreman and men, was working beside a parallel road on which was a gang of men doing exactly the same sort of track repairing and ballasting. in five days our gang did two telegraph poles more than the competing gang! the road is being rehabilitated; nearly the whole track has been reballasted and many miles of new rails have been laid. the locomotives and rolling stock are being overhauled in our own shops and at a very slight expense. we found that the supplies bought previously were of poor quality or unfitted for the use; we are saving money on supplies by buying better qualities and seeing that nothing is wasted. the men seem entirely willing to cooperate in saving. they do not discard that which might be used. we ask a man, "what can you get out of an engine?" and he answers with an economy record. and we are not pouring in great amounts of money. everything is being done out of earnings. that is our policy. the trains must go through and on time. the time of freight movements has been cut down about two thirds. a car on a siding is not just a car on a siding. it is a great big question mark. someone has to know why it is there. it used to take or days to get freight through to philadelphia or new york; now it takes three and a half days. the organization is serving. all sorts of explanations are put forward, of why a deficit was turned into a surplus. i am told that it is all due to diverting the freight of the ford industries. if we had diverted all of our business to this road, that would not explain why we manage at so much lower an operating cost than before. we are routing as much as we can of our own business over the road, but only because we there get the best service. for years past we had been trying to send freight over this road because it was conveniently located, but we had never been able to use it to any extent because of the delayed deliveries. we could not count on a shipment to within five or six weeks; that tied up too much money and also broke into our production schedule. there was no reason why the road should not have had a schedule; but it did not. the delays became legal matters to be taken up in due legal course; that is not the way of business. we think that a delay is a criticism of our work and is something at once to be investigated. that is business. the railroads in general have broken down, and if the former conduct of the detroit, toledo & ironton is any criterion of management in general there is no reason in the world why they should not have broken down. too many railroads are run, not from the offices of practical men, but from banking offices, and the principles of procedure, the whole outlook, are financial--not transportational, but financial. there has been a breakdown simply because more attention has been paid to railroads as factors in the stock market than as servants of the people. outworn ideas have been retained, development has been practically stopped, and railroad men with vision have not been set free to grow. will a billion dollars solve that sort of trouble? no, a billion dollars will only make the difficulty one billion dollars worse. the purpose of the billion is simply to continue the present methods of railroad management, and it is because of the present methods that we have any railroad difficulties at all. the mistaken and foolish things we did years ago are just overtaking us. at the beginning of railway transportation in the united states, the people had to be taught its use, just as they had to be taught the use of the telephone. also, the new railroads had to make business in order to keep themselves solvent. and because railway financing began in one of the rottenest periods of our business history, a number of practices were established as precedents which have influenced railway work ever since. one of the first things the railways did was to throttle all other methods of transportation. there was the beginning of a splendid canal system in this country and a great movement for canalization was at its height. the railroad companies bought out the canal companies and let the canals fill up and choke with weeds and refuse. all over the eastern and in parts of the middle western states are the remains of this network of internal waterways. they are being restored now as rapidly as possible; they are being linked together; various commissions, public and private, have seen the vision of a complete system of waterways serving all parts of the country, and thanks to their efforts, persistence, and faith, progress is being made. but there was another. this was the system of making the haul as long as possible. any one who is familiar with the exposures which resulted in the formation of the interstate commerce commission knows what is meant by this. there was a period when rail transport was not regarded as the servant of the traveling, manufacturing, and commercial publics. business was treated as if it existed for the benefit of the railways. during this period of folly, it was not good railroading to get goods from their shipping point to their destination by the most direct line possible, but to keep them on the road as long as possible, send them around the longest way, give as many connecting lines as possible a piece of the profit, and let the public stand the resulting loss of time and money. that was once counted good railroading. it has not entirely passed out of practice to-day. one of the great changes in our economic life to which this railroad policy contributed was the centralization of certain activities, not because centralization was necessary, nor because it contributed to the well-being of the people, but because, among other things, it made double business for the railroads. take two staples--meat and grain. if you look at the maps which the packing houses put out, and see where the cattle are drawn from; and then if you consider that the cattle, when converted into food, are hauled again by the same railways right back to the place where they came from, you will get some sidelight on the transportation problem and the price of meat. take also grain. every reader of advertisements knows where the great flour mills of the country are located. and they probably know also that these great mills are not located in the sections where the grain of the united states is raised. there are staggering quantities of grain, thousands of trainloads, hauled uselessly long distances, and then in the form of flour hauled back again long distances to the states and sections where the grain was raised--a burdening of the railroads which is of no benefit to the communities where the grain originated, nor to any one else except the monopolistic mills and the railroads. the railroads can always do a big business without helping the business of the country at all; they can always be engaged in just such useless hauling. on meat and grain and perhaps on cotton, too, the transportation burden could be reduced by more than half, by the preparation of the product for use before it is shipped. if a coal community mined coal in pennsylvania, and then sent it by railway to michigan or wisconsin to be screened, and then hauled it back again to pennsylvania for use, it would not be much sillier than the hauling of texas beef alive to chicago, there to be killed, and then shipped back dead to texas; or the hauling of kansas grain to minnesota, there to be ground in the mills and hauled back again as flour. it is good business for the railroads, but it is bad business for business. one angle of the transportation problem to which too few men are paying attention is this useless hauling of material. if the problem were tackled from the point of ridding the railroads of their useless hauls, we might discover that we are in better shape than we think to take care of the legitimate transportation business of the country. in commodities like coal it is necessary that they be hauled from where they are to where they are needed. the same is true of the raw materials of industry--they must be hauled from the place where nature has stored them to the place where there are people ready to work them. and as these raw materials are not often found assembled in one section, a considerable amount of transportation to a central assembling place is necessary. the coal comes from one section, the copper from another, the iron from another, the wood from another--they must all be brought together. but wherever it is possible a policy of decentralization ought to be adopted. we need, instead of mammoth flour mills, a multitude of smaller mills distributed through all the sections where grain is grown. wherever it is possible, the section that produces the raw material ought to produce also the finished product. grain should be ground to flour where it is grown. a hog-growing country should not export hogs, but pork, hams, and bacon. the cotton mills ought to be near the cotton fields. this is not a revolutionary idea. in a sense it is a reactionary one. it does not suggest anything new; it suggests something that is very old. this is the way the country did things before we fell into the habit of carting everything around a few thousand miles and adding the cartage to the consumer's bill. our communities ought to be more complete in themselves. they ought not to be unnecessarily dependent on railway transportation. out of what they produce they should supply their own needs and ship the surplus. and how can they do this unless they have the means of taking their raw materials, like grain and cattle, and changing them into finished products? if private enterprise does not yield these means, the cooperation of farmers can. the chief injustice sustained by the farmer to-day is that, being the greatest producer, he is prevented from being also the greatest merchandiser, because he is compelled to sell to those who put his products into merchantable form. if he could change his grain into flour, his cattle into beef, and his hogs into hams and bacon, not only would he receive the fuller profit of his product, but he would render his near-by communities more independent of railway exigencies, and thereby improve the transportation system by relieving it of the burden of his unfinished product. the thing is not only reasonable and practicable, but it is becoming absolutely necessary. more than that, it is being done in many places. but it will not register its full effect on the transportation situation and upon the cost of living until it is done more widely and in more kinds of materials. it is one of nature's compensations to withdraw prosperity from the business which does not serve. we have found that on the detroit, toledo & ironton we could, following our universal policy, reduce our rates and get more business. we made some cuts, but the interstate commerce commission refused to allow them! under such conditions why discuss the railroads as a business? or as a service? chapter xvii things in general no man exceeds thomas a. edison in broad vision and understanding. i met him first many years ago when i was with the detroit edison company--probably about or thereabouts. the electrical men held a convention at atlantic city, and edison, as the leader in electrical science, made an address. i was then working on my gasoline engine, and most people, including all of my associates in the electrical company, had taken pains to tell me that time spent on a gasoline engine was time wasted--that the power of the future was to be electricity. these criticisms had not made any impression on me. i was working ahead with all my might. but being in the same room with edison suggested to me that it would be a good idea to find out if the master of electricity thought it was going to be the only power in the future. so, after mr. edison had finished his address, i managed to catch him alone for a moment. i told him what i was working on. at once he was interested. he is interested in every search for new knowledge. and then i asked him if he thought that there was a future for the internal combustion engine. he answered something in this fashion: yes, there is a big future for any light-weight engine that can develop a high horsepower and be self-contained. no one kind of motive power is ever going to do all the work of the country. we do not know what electricity can do, but i take for granted that it cannot do everything. keep on with your engine. if you can get what you are after, i can see a great future. that is characteristic of edison. he was the central figure in the electrical industry, which was then young and enthusiastic. the rank and file of the electrical men could see nothing ahead but electricity, but their leader could see with crystal clearness that no one power could do all the work of the country. i suppose that is why he was the leader. such was my first meeting with edison. i did not see him again until many years after--until our motor had been developed and was in production. he remembered perfectly our first meeting. since then we have seen each other often. he is one of my closest friends, and we together have swapped many an idea. his knowledge is almost universal. he is interested in every conceivable subject and he recognizes no limitations. he believes that all things are possible. at the same time he keeps his feet on the ground. he goes forward step by step. he regards "impossible" as a description for that which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. he knows that as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible. that is the rational way of doing the "impossible." the irrational way is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge. mr. edison is only approaching the height of his power. he is the man who is going to show us what chemistry really can do. for he is a real scientist who regards the knowledge for which he is always searching as a tool to shape the progress of the world. he is not the type of scientist who merely stores up knowledge and turns his head into a museum. edison is easily the world's greatest scientist. i am not sure that he is not also the world's worst business man. he knows almost nothing of business. john burroughs was another of those who honoured me with their friendship. i, too, like birds. i like the outdoors. i like to walk across country and jump fences. we have five hundred bird houses on the farm. we call them our bird hotels, and one of them, the hotel pontchartrain--a martin house--has seventy-six apartments. all winter long we have wire baskets of food hanging about on the trees and then there is a big basin in which the water is kept from freezing by an electric heater. summer and winter, food, drink, and shelter are on hand for the birds. we have hatched pheasants and quail in incubators and then turned them over to electric brooders. we have all kinds of bird houses and nests. the sparrows, who are great abusers of hospitality, insist that their nests be immovable--that they do not sway in the wind; the wrens like swaying nests. so we mounted a number of wren boxes on strips of spring steel so that they would sway in the wind. the wrens liked the idea and the sparrows did not, so we have been able to have the wrens nest in peace. in summer we leave cherries on the trees and strawberries open in the beds, and i think that we have not only more but also more different kinds of bird callers than anywhere else in the northern states. john burroughs said he thought we had, and one day when he was staying at our place he came across a bird that he had never seen before. about ten years ago we imported a great number of birds from abroad--yellow-hammers, chaffinches, green finches, red pales, twites, bullfinches, jays, linnets, larks--some five hundred of them. they stayed around a while, but where they are now i do not know. i shall not import any more. birds are entitled to live where they want to live. birds are the best of companions. we need them for their beauty and their companionship, and also we need them for the strictly economic reason that they destroy harmful insects. the only time i ever used the ford organization to influence legislation was on behalf of the birds, and i think the end justified the means. the weeks-mclean bird bill, providing for bird sanctuaries for our migratory birds, had been hanging in congress with every likelihood of dying a natural death. its immediate sponsors could not arouse much interest among the congressmen. birds do not vote. we got behind that bill and we asked each of our six thousand dealers to wire to his representative in congress. it began to become apparent that birds might have votes; the bill went through. our organization has never been used for any political purpose and never will be. we assume that our people have a right to their own preferences. to get back to john burroughs. of course i knew who he was and i had read nearly everything he had written, but i had never thought of meeting him until some years ago when he developed a grudge against modern progress. he detested money and especially he detested the power which money gives to vulgar people to despoil the lovely countryside. he grew to dislike the industry out of which money is made. he disliked the noise of factories and railways. he criticized industrial progress, and he declared that the automobile was going to kill the appreciation of nature. i fundamentally disagreed with him. i thought that his emotions had taken him on the wrong tack and so i sent him an automobile with the request that he try it out and discover for himself whether it would not help him to know nature better. that automobile--and it took him some time to learn how to manage it himself--completely changed his point of view. he found that it helped him to see more, and from the time of getting it, he made nearly all of his bird-hunting expeditions behind the steering wheel. he learned that instead of having to confine himself to a few miles around slabsides, the whole countryside was open to him. out of that automobile grew our friendship, and it was a fine one. no man could help being the better for knowing john burroughs. he was not a professional naturalist, nor did he make sentiment do for hard research. it is easy to grow sentimental out of doors; it is hard to pursue the truth about a bird as one would pursue a mechanical principle. but john burroughs did that, and as a result the observations he set down were very largely accurate. he was impatient with men who were not accurate in their observations of natural life. john burroughs first loved nature for its own sake; it was not merely his stock of material as a professional writer. he loved it before he wrote about it. late in life he turned philosopher. his philosophy was not so much a philosophy of nature as it was a natural philosophy--the long, serene thoughts of a man who had lived in the tranquil spirit of the trees. he was not pagan; he was not pantheist; but he did not much divide between nature and human nature, nor between human nature and divine. john burroughs lived a wholesome life. he was fortunate to have as his home the farm on which he was born. through long years his surroundings were those which made for quietness of mind. he loved the woods and he made dusty-minded city people love them, too--he helped them see what he saw. he did not make much beyond a living. he could have done so, perhaps, but that was not his aim. like another american naturalist, his occupation could have been described as inspector of birds' nests and hillside paths. of course, that does not pay in dollars and cents. when he had passed the three score and ten he changed his views on industry. perhaps i had something to do with that. he came to see that the whole world could not live by hunting birds' nests. at one time in his life, he had a grudge against all modern progress, especially where it was associated with the burning of coal and the noise of traffic. perhaps that was as near to literary affectation as he ever came. wordsworth disliked railways too, and thoreau said that he could see more of the country by walking. perhaps it was influences such as these which bent john burroughs for a time against industrial progress. but only for a time. he came to see that it was fortunate for him that others' tastes ran in other channels, just as it was fortunate for the world that his taste ran in its own channel. there has been no observable development in the method of making birds' nests since the beginning of recorded observation, but that was hardly a reason why human beings should not prefer modern sanitary homes to cave dwellings. this was a part of john burroughs's sanity--he was not afraid to change his views. he was a lover of nature, not her dupe. in the course of time he came to value and approve modern devices, and though this by itself is an interesting fact, it is not so interesting as the fact that he made this change after he was seventy years old. john burroughs was never too old to change. he kept growing to the last. the man who is too set to change is dead already. the funeral is a mere detail. if he talked more of one person than another, it was emerson. not only did he know emerson by heart as an author, but he knew him by heart as a spirit. he taught me to know emerson. he had so saturated himself with emerson that at one time he thought as he did and even fell into his mode of expression. but afterward he found his own way--which for him was better. there was no sadness in john burroughs's death. when the grain lies brown and ripe under the harvest sun, and the harvesters are busy binding it into sheaves, there is no sadness for the grain. it has ripened and has fulfilled its term, and so had john burroughs. with him it was full ripeness and harvest, not decay. he worked almost to the end. his plans ran beyond the end. they buried him amid the scenes he loved, and it was his eighty-fourth birthday. those scenes will be preserved as he loved them. john burroughs, edison, and i with harvey s. firestone made several vagabond trips together. we went in motor caravans and slept under canvas. once we gypsied through the adirondacks and again through the alleghenies, heading southward. the trips were good fun--except that they began to attract too much attention. * * * * * to-day i am more opposed to war than ever i was, and i think the people of the world know--even if the politicians do not--that war never settles anything. it was war that made the orderly and profitable processes of the world what they are to-day--a loose, disjointed mass. of course, some men get rich out of war; others get poor. but the men who get rich are not those who fought or who really helped behind the lines. no patriot makes money out of war. no man with true patriotism could make money out of war--out of the sacrifice of other men's lives. until the soldier makes money by fighting, until mothers make money by giving their sons to death--not until then should any citizen make money out of providing his country with the means to preserve its life. if wars are to continue, it will be harder and harder for the upright business man to regard war as a legitimate means of high and speedy profits. war fortunes are losing caste every day. even greed will some day hesitate before the overwhelming unpopularity and opposition which will meet the war profiteer. business should be on the side of peace, because peace is business's best asset. and, by the way, was inventive genius ever so sterile as it was during the war? an impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international--a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. an old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry "police!" when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. there is a power within the world which cries "war!" and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils of the panic. the point to keep in mind is that, though we won the military contest, the world has not yet quite succeeded in winning a complete victory over the promoters of war. we ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. a campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. first, the people are worked upon. by clever tales the people's suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired. make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious. all you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefited by war. then the "overt act" will soon appear. it is no trick at all to get an "overt act" once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch. there were men in every country who were glad to see the world war begin and sorry to see it stop. hundreds of american fortunes date from the civil war; thousands of new fortunes date from the world war. nobody can deny that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of money. war is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood. and we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is that makes a nation really great. it is not the amount of trade that makes a nation great. the creation of private fortunes, like the creation of an autocracy, does not make any country great. nor does the mere change of an agricultural population into a factory population. a country becomes great when, by the wise development of its resources and the skill of its people, property is widely and fairly distributed. foreign trade is full of delusions. we ought to wish for every nation as large a degree of self-support as possible. instead of wishing to keep them dependent on us for what we manufacture, we should wish them to learn to manufacture themselves and build up a solidly founded civilization. when every nation learns to produce the things which it can produce, we shall be able to get down to a basis of serving each other along those special lines in which there can be no competition. the north temperate zone will never be able to compete with the tropics in the special products of the tropics. our country will never be a competitor with the orient in the production of tea, nor with the south in the production of rubber. a large proportion of our foreign trade is based on the backwardness of our foreign customers. selfishness is a motive that would preserve that backwardness. humanity is a motive that would help the backward nations to a self-supporting basis. take mexico, for example. we have heard a great deal about the "development" of mexico. exploitation is the word that ought instead to be used. when its rich natural resources are exploited for the increase of the private fortunes of foreign capitalists, that is not development, it is ravishment. you can never develop mexico until you develop the mexican. and yet how much of the "development" of mexico by foreign exploiters ever took account of the development of its people? the mexican peon has been regarded as mere fuel for the foreign money-makers. foreign trade has been his degradation. short-sighted people are afraid of such counsel. they say: "what would become of our foreign trade?" when the natives of africa begin raising their own cotton and the natives of russia begin making their own farming implements and the natives of china begin supplying their own wants, it will make a difference, to be sure, but does any thoughtful man imagine that the world can long continue on the present basis of a few nations supplying the needs of the world? we must think in terms of what the world will be when civilization becomes general, when all the peoples have learned to help themselves. when a country goes mad about foreign trade it usually depends on other countries for its raw material, turns its population into factory fodder, creates a private rich class, and lets its own immediate interest lie neglected. here in the united states we have enough work to do developing our own country to relieve us of the necessity of looking for foreign trade for a long time. we have agriculture enough to feed us while we are doing it, and money enough to carry the job through. is there anything more stupid than the united states standing idle because japan or france or any other country has not sent us an order when there is a hundred-year job awaiting us in developing our own country? commerce began in service. men carried off their surplus to people who had none. the country that raised corn carried it to the country that could raise no corn. the lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. the vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. the pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. it was all service. when all the peoples of the world become developed in the art of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. business will once more become service. there will be no competition, because the basis of competition will have vanished. the varied peoples will develop skills which will be in the nature of monopolies and not competitive. from the beginning, the races have exhibited distinct strains of genius: this one for government; another for colonization; another for the sea; another for art and music; another for agriculture; another for business, and so on. lincoln said that this nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. the human race cannot forever exist half-exploiter and half-exploited. until we become buyers and sellers alike, producers and consumers alike, keeping the balance not for profit but for service, we are going to have topsy-turvy conditions. france has something to give the world of which no competition can cheat her. so has italy. so has russia. so have the countries of south america. so has japan. so has britain. so has the united states. the sooner we get back to a basis of natural specialties and drop this free-for-all system of grab, the sooner we shall be sure of international self-respect--and international peace. trying to take the trade of the world can promote war. it cannot promote prosperity. some day even the international bankers will learn this. i have never been able to discover any honourable reasons for the beginning of the world war. it seems to have grown out of a very complicated situation created largely by those who thought they could profit by war. i believed, on the information that was given to me in , that some of the nations were anxious for peace and would welcome a demonstration for peace. it was in the hope that this was true that i financed the expedition to stockholm in what has since been called the "peace ship." i do not regret the attempt. the mere fact that it failed is not, to me, conclusive proof that it was not worth trying. we learn more from our failures than from our successes. what i learned on that trip was worth the time and the money expended. i do not now know whether the information as conveyed to me was true or false. i do not care. but i think everyone will agree that if it had been possible to end the war in the world would be better off than it is to-day. for the victors wasted themselves in winning, and the vanquished in resisting. nobody got an advantage, honourable or dishonourable, out of that war. i had hoped, finally, when the united states entered the war, that it might be a war to end wars, but now i know that wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard. when our country entered the war, it became the duty of every citizen to do his utmost toward seeing through to the end that which we had undertaken. i believe that it is the duty of the man who opposes war to oppose going to war up until the time of its actual declaration. my opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. it may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. but the fighting never settles the question. it only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about. once we were in the war, every facility of the ford industries was put at the disposal of the government. we had, up to the time of the declaration of war, absolutely refused to take war orders from the foreign belligerents. it is entirely out of keeping with the principles of our business to disturb the routine of our production unless in an emergency. it is at variance with our human principles to aid either side in a war in which our country was not involved. these principles had no application, once the united states entered the war. from april, , until november, , our factory worked practically exclusively for the government. of course we made cars and parts and special delivery trucks and ambulances as a part of our general production, but we also made many other articles that were more or less new to us. we made / -ton and -ton trucks. we made liberty motors in great quantities, aero cylinders, . mm. and . mm. caissons. we made listening devices, steel helmets (both at highland park and philadelphia), and eagle boats, and we did a large amount of experimental work on armour plate, compensators, and body armour. for the eagle boats we put up a special plant on the river rouge site. these boats were designed to combat the submarines. they were feet long, made of steel, and one of the conditions precedent to their building was that their construction should not interfere with any other line of war production and also that they be delivered quickly. the design was worked out by the navy department. on december , , i offered to build the boats for the navy. the discussion terminated on january , , when the navy department awarded the contract to the ford company. on july th, the first completed boat was launched. we made both the hulls and the engines, and not a forging or a rolled beam entered into the construction of other than the engine. we stamped the hulls entirely out of sheet steel. they were built indoors. in four months we ran up a building at the river rouge a third of a mile long, feet wide, and feet high, covering more than thirteen acres. these boats were not built by marine engineers. they were built simply by applying our production principles to a new product. with the armistice, we at once dropped the war and went back to peace. * * * * * an able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is dependent on what he has in him. what he has in him depends on what he started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it. an educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history--he is one who can accomplish things. a man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. thinking is the hardest work any one can do--which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. there are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. you cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and where it failed and where it succeeded. if education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be unquestioned. an education which consists of signposts indicating the failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless would be very useful. it is not education just to possess the theories of a lot of professors. speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but it is not education. to be learned in science to-day is merely to be aware of a hundred theories that have not been proved. and not to know what those theories are is to be "uneducated," "ignorant," and so forth. if knowledge of guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the simple expedient of making his own guesses. and by the same token he can dub the rest of the world "ignorant" because it does not know what his guesses are. but the best that education can do for a man is to put him in possession of his powers, give him control of the tools with which destiny has endowed him, and teach him how to think. the college renders its best service as an intellectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is developed and the student strengthened to do what he can. to say, however, that mental gymnastics can be had only in college is not true, as every educator knows. a man's real education begins after he has left school. true education is gained through the discipline of life. there are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd you happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. there are fashions in knowledge, just as there are in everything else. when some of us were lads, knowledge used to be limited to the bible. there were certain men in the neighbourhood who knew the book thoroughly, and they were looked up to and respected. biblical knowledge was highly valued then. but nowadays it is doubtful whether deep acquaintance with the bible would be sufficient to win a man a name for learning. knowledge, to my mind, is something that in the past somebody knew and left in a form which enables all who will to obtain it. if a man is born with normal human faculties, if he is equipped with enough ability to use the tools which we call "letters" in reading or writing, there is no knowledge within the possession of the race that he cannot have--if he wants it! the only reason why every man does not know everything that the human mind has ever learned is that no one has ever yet found it worth while to know that much. men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which somebody else has found out. you can go out and gather knowledge all your life, and with all your gathering you will not catch up even with your own times. you may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through. the point is this: great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. a man may be very learned and very useless. and then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful. the object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. and it often happens that a man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past. it is a very human tendency to think that what mankind does not yet know no one can learn. and yet it must be perfectly clear to everyone that the past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future learning. mankind has not gone so very far when you measure its progress against the knowledge that is yet to be gained--the secrets that are yet to be learned. one good way to hinder progress is to fill a man's head with all the learning of the past; it makes him feel that because his head is full, there is nothing more to learn. merely gathering knowledge may become the most useless work a man can do. what can you do to help and heal the world? that is the educational test. if a man can hold up his own end, he counts for one. if he can help ten or a hundred or a thousand other men hold up their ends, he counts for more. he may be quite rusty on many things that inhabit the realm of print, but he is a learned man just the same. when a man is master of his own sphere, whatever it may be, he has won his degree--he has entered the realm of wisdom. * * * * * the work which we describe as studies in the jewish question, and which is variously described by antagonists as "the jewish campaign," "the attack on the jews," "the anti-semitic pogrom," and so forth, needs no explanation to those who have followed it. its motives and purposes must be judged by the work itself. it is offered as a contribution to a question which deeply affects the country, a question which is racial at its source, and which concerns influences and ideals rather than persons. our statements must be judged by candid readers who are intelligent enough to lay our words alongside life as they are able to observe it. if our word and their observation agree, the case is made. it is perfectly silly to begin to damn us before it has been shown that our statements are baseless or reckless. the first item to be considered is the truth of what we have set forth. and that is precisely the item which our critics choose to evade. readers of our articles will see at once that we are not actuated by any kind of prejudice, except it may be a prejudice in favor of the principles which have made our civilization. there had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its old-time substantial soundness; a general letting down of standards was felt everywhere. it was not the robust coarseness of the white man, the rude indelicacy, say, of shakespeare's characters, but a nasty orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression--and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it. the fact that these influences are all traceable to one racial source is a fact to be reckoned with, not by us only, but by the intelligent people of the race in question. it is entirely creditable to them that steps have been taken by them to remove their protection from the more flagrant violators of american hospitality, but there is still room to discard outworn ideas of racial superiority maintained by economic or intellectually subversive warfare upon christian society. our work does not pretend to say the last word on the jew in america. it says only the word which describes his obvious present impress on the country. when that impress is changed, the report of it can be changed. for the present, then, the question is wholly in the jews' hands. if they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labour to make jews american, instead of labouring to make america jewish. the genius of the united states of america is christian in the broadest sense, and its destiny is to remain christian. this carries no sectarian meaning with it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a code of relations based on fundamental christian conceptions of human rights and duties. as for prejudice or hatred against persons, that is neither american nor christian. our opposition is only to ideas, false ideas, which are sapping the moral stamina of the people. these ideas proceed from easily identified sources, they are promulgated by easily discoverable methods; and they are controlled by mere exposure. we have simply used the method of exposure. when people learn to identify the source and nature of the influence swirling around them, it is sufficient. let the american people once understand that it is not natural degeneracy, but calculated subversion that afflicts us, and they are safe. the explanation is the cure. this work was taken up without personal motives. when it reached a stage where we believed the american people could grasp the key, we let it rest for the time. our enemies say that we began it for revenge and that we laid it down in fear. time will show that our critics are merely dealing in evasion because they dare not tackle the main question. time will also show that we are better friends to the jews' best interests than are those who praise them to their faces and criticize them behind their backs. chapter xviii democracy and industry perhaps no word is more overworked nowadays than the word "democracy," and those who shout loudest about it, i think, as a rule, want it least. i am always suspicious of men who speak glibly of democracy. i wonder if they want to set up some kind of a despotism or if they want to have somebody do for them what they ought to do for themselves. i am for the kind of democracy that gives to each an equal chance according to his ability. i think if we give more attention to serving our fellows we shall have less concern with the empty forms of government and more concern with the things to be done. thinking of service, we shall not bother about good feeling in industry or life; we shall not bother about masses and classes, or closed and open shops, and such matters as have nothing at all to do with the real business of living. we can get down to facts. we stand in need of facts. it is a shock when the mind awakens to the fact that not all of humanity is human--that whole groups of people do not regard others with humane feelings. great efforts have been made to have this appear as the attitude of a class, but it is really the attitude of all "classes," in so far as they are swayed by the false notion of "classes." before, when it was the constant effort of propaganda to make the people believe that it was only the "rich" who were without humane feelings, the opinion became general that among the "poor" the humane virtues flourished. but the "rich" and the "poor" are both very small minorities, and you cannot classify society under such heads. there are not enough "rich" and there are not enough "poor" to serve the purpose of such classification. rich men have become poor without changing their natures, and poor men have become rich, and the problem has not been affected by it. between the rich and the poor is the great mass of the people who are neither rich nor poor. a society made up exclusively of millionaires would not be different from our present society; some of the millionaires would have to raise wheat and bake bread and make machinery and run trains--else they would all starve to death. someone must do the work. really we have no fixed classes. we have men who will work and men who will not. most of the "classes" that one reads about are purely fictional. take certain capitalist papers. you will be amazed by some of the statements about the labouring class. we who have been and still are a part of the labouring class know that the statements are untrue. take certain of the labour papers. you are equally amazed by some of the statements they make about "capitalists." and yet on both sides there is a grain of truth. the man who is a capitalist and nothing else, who gambles with the fruits of other men's labours, deserves all that is said against him. he is in precisely the same class as the cheap gambler who cheats workingmen out of their wages. the statements we read about the labouring class in the capitalistic press are seldom written by managers of great industries, but by a class of writers who are writing what they think will please their employers. they write what they imagine will please. examine the labour press and you will find another class of writers who similarly seek to tickle the prejudices which they conceive the labouring man to have. both kinds of writers are mere propagandists. and propaganda that does not spread facts is self-destructive. and it should be. you cannot preach patriotism to men for the purpose of getting them to stand still while you rob them--and get away with that kind of preaching very long. you cannot preach the duty of working hard and producing plentifully, and make that a screen for an additional profit to yourself. and neither can the worker conceal the lack of a day's work by a phrase. undoubtedly the employing class possesses facts which the employed ought to have in order to construct sound opinions and pass fair judgments. undoubtedly the employed possess facts which are equally important to the employer. it is extremely doubtful, however, if either side has all the facts. and this is where propaganda, even if it were possible for it to be entirely successful, is defective. it is not desirable that one set of ideas be "put over" on a class holding another set of ideas. what we really need is to get all the ideas together and construct from them. take, for instance, this whole matter of union labour and the right to strike. the only strong group of union men in the country is the group that draws salaries from the unions. some of them are very rich. some of them are interested in influencing the affairs of our large institutions of finance. others are so extreme in their so-called socialism that they border on bolshevism and anarchism--their union salaries liberating them from the necessity of work so that they can devote their energies to subversive propaganda. all of them enjoy a certain prestige and power which, in the natural course of competition, they could not otherwise have won. if the official personnel of the labour unions were as strong, as honest, as decent, and as plainly wise as the bulk of the men who make up the membership, the whole movement would have taken on a different complexion these last few years. but this official personnel, in the main--there are notable exceptions--has not devoted itself to an alliance with the naturally strong qualities of the workingman; it has rather devoted itself to playing upon his weaknesses, principally upon the weaknesses of that newly arrived portion of the population which does not yet know what americanism is, and which never will know if left to the tutelage of their local union leaders. the workingmen, except those few who have been inoculated with the fallacious doctrine of "the class war" and who have accepted the philosophy that progress consists in fomenting discord in industry ("when you get your $ a day, don't stop at that. agitate for $ . when you get your eight hours a day, don't be a fool and grow contented; agitate for six hours. start something! always start something!"), have the plain sense which enables them to recognize that with principles accepted and observed, conditions change. the union leaders have never seen that. they wish conditions to remain as they are, conditions of injustice, provocation, strikes, bad feeling, and crippled national life. else where would be the need for union officers? every strike is a new argument for them; they point to it and say, "you see! you still need us." the only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and starvation. the union of labour which is coming to the fore in this country is the union of all whose interests are interdependent--whose interests are altogether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of the service they render. there is a change coming. when the union of "union leaders" disappears, with it will go the union of blind bosses--bosses who never did a decent thing for their employees until they were compelled. if the blind boss was a disease, the selfish union leader was the antidote. when the union leader became the disease, the blind boss became the antidote. both are misfits, both are out of place in well-organized society. and they are both disappearing together. it is the blind boss whose voice is heard to-day saying, "now is the time to smash labour, we've got them on the run." that voice is going down to silence with the voice that preaches "class war." the producers--from the men at the drawing board to the men on the moulding floor--have gotten together in a real union, and they will handle their own affairs henceforth. the exploitation of dissatisfaction is an established business to-day. its object is not to settle anything, nor to get anything done, but to keep dissatisfaction in existence. and the instruments used to do this are a whole set of false theories and promises which can never be fulfilled as long as the earth remains what it is. i am not opposed to labour organization. i am not opposed to any sort of organization that makes for progress. it is organizing to limit production--whether by employers or by workers--that matters. the workingman himself must be on guard against some very dangerous notions--dangerous to himself and to the welfare of the country. it is sometimes said that the less a worker does, the more jobs he creates for other men. this fallacy assumes that idleness is creative. idleness never created a job. it creates only burdens. the industrious man never runs his fellow worker out of a job; indeed, it is the industrious man who is the partner of the industrious manager--who creates more and more business and therefore more and more jobs. it is a great pity that the idea should ever have gone abroad among sensible men that by "soldiering" on the job they help someone else. a moment's thought will show the weakness of such an idea. the healthy business, the business that is always making more and more opportunities for men to earn an honourable and ample living, is the business in which every man does a day's work of which he is proud. and the country that stands most securely is the country in which men work honestly and do not play tricks with the means of production. we cannot play fast and loose with economic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways. the fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. he is merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the burden of his support by paying more than it ought on that work--for after all, it is the public that pays! an industrial concern which is wide enough awake to reorganize for efficiency, and honest enough with the public to charge it necessary costs and no more, is usually such an enterprising concern that it has plenty of jobs at which to employ the tenth man. it is bound to grow, and growth means jobs. a well-managed concern is always seeking to lower the labour cost to the public; and it is certain to employ more men than the concern which loafs along and makes the public pay the cost of its mismanagement. the tenth man was an unnecessary cost. the ultimate consumer was paying him. but the fact that he was unnecessary on that particular job does not mean that he is unnecessary in the work of the world, or even in the work of his particular shop. the public pays for all mismanagement. more than half the trouble with the world to-day is the "soldiering" and dilution and cheapness and inefficiency for which the people are paying their good money. wherever two men are being paid for what one can do, the people are paying double what they ought. and it is a fact that only a little while ago in the united states, man for man, we were not producing what we did for several years previous to the war. a day's work means more than merely being "on duty" at the shop for the required number of hours. it means giving an equivalent in service for the wage drawn. and when that equivalent is tampered with either way--when the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than he gives--it is not long before serious dislocation will be manifest. extend that condition throughout the country, and you have a complete upset of business. all that industrial difficulty means is the destruction of basic equivalents in the shop. management must share the blame with labour. management has been lazy, too. management has found it easier to hire an additional five hundred men than to so improve its methods that one hundred men of the old force could be released to other work. the public was paying, and business was booming, and management didn't care a pin. it was no different in the office from what it was in the shop. the law of equivalents was broken just as much by managers as by workmen. practically nothing of importance is secured by mere demand. that is why strikes always fail--even though they may seem to succeed. a strike which brings higher wages or shorter hours and passes on the burden to the community is really unsuccessful. it only makes the industry less able to serve--and decreases the number of jobs that it can support. this is not to say that no strike is justified--it may draw attention to an evil. men can strike with justice--that they will thereby get justice is another question. the strike for proper conditions and just rewards is justifiable. the pity is that men should be compelled to use the strike to get what is theirs by right. no american ought to be compelled to strike for his rights. he ought to receive them naturally, easily, as a matter of course. these justifiable strikes are usually the employer's fault. some employers are not fit for their jobs. the employment of men--the direction of their energies, the arranging of their rewards in honest ratio to their production and to the prosperity of the business--is no small job. an employer may be unfit for his job, just as a man at the lathe may be unfit. justifiable strikes are a sign that the boss needs another job--one that he can handle. the unfit employer causes more trouble than the unfit employee. you can change the latter to another more suitable job. but the former must usually be left to the law of compensation. the justified strike, then, is one that need never have been called if the employer had done his work. there is a second kind of strike--the strike with a concealed design. in this kind of strike the workingmen are made the tools of some manipulator who seeks his own ends through them. to illustrate: here is a great industry whose success is due to having met a public need with efficient and skillful production. it has a record for justice. such an industry presents a great temptation to speculators. if they can only gain control of it they can reap rich benefit from all the honest effort that has been put into it. they can destroy its beneficiary wage and profit-sharing, squeeze every last dollar out of the public, the product, and the workingman, and reduce it to the plight of other business concerns which are run on low principles. the motive may be the personal greed of the speculators or they may want to change the policy of a business because its example is embarrassing to other employers who do not want to do what is right. the industry cannot be touched from within, because its men have no reason to strike. so another method is adopted. the business may keep many outside shops busy supplying it with material. if these outside shops can be tied up, then that great industry may be crippled. so strikes are fomented in the outside industries. every attempt is made to curtail the factory's source of supplies. if the workingmen in the outside shops knew what the game was, they would refuse to play it, but they don't know; they serve as the tools of designing capitalists without knowing it. there is one point, however, that ought to rouse the suspicions of workingmen engaged in this kind of strike. if the strike cannot get itself settled, no matter what either side offers to do, it is almost positive proof that there is a third party interested in having the strike continue. that hidden influence does not want a settlement on any terms. if such a strike is won by the strikers, is the lot of the workingman improved? after throwing the industry into the hands of outside speculators, are the workmen given any better treatment or wages? there is a third kind of strike--the strike that is provoked by the money interests for the purpose of giving labour a bad name. the american workman has always had a reputation for sound judgment. he has not allowed himself to be led away by every shouter who promised to create the millennium out of thin air. he has had a mind of his own and has used it. he has always recognized the fundamental truth that the absence of reason was never made good by the presence of violence. in his way the american workingman has won a certain prestige with his own people and throughout the world. public opinion has been inclined to regard with respect his opinions and desires. but there seems to be a determined effort to fasten the bolshevik stain on american labour by inciting it to such impossible attitudes and such wholly unheard-of actions as shall change public sentiment from respect to criticism. merely avoiding strikes, however, does not promote industry. we may say to the workingman: "you have a grievance, but the strike is no remedy--it only makes the situation worse whether you win or lose." then the workingman may admit this to be true and refrain from striking. does that settle anything? no! if the worker abandons strikes as an unworthy means of bringing about desirable conditions, it simply means that employers must get busy on their own initiative and correct defective conditions. the experience of the ford industries with the workingman has been entirely satisfactory, both in the united states and abroad. we have no antagonism to unions, but we participate in no arrangements with either employee or employer organizations. the wages paid are always higher than any reasonable union could think of demanding and the hours of work are always shorter. there is nothing that a union membership could do for our people. some of them may belong to unions, probably the majority do not. we do not know and make no attempt to find out, for it is a matter of not the slightest concern to us. we respect the unions, sympathize with their good aims and denounce their bad ones. in turn i think that they give us respect, for there has never been any authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our plants. of course radical agitators have tried to stir up trouble now and again, but the men have mostly regarded them simply as human oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest that they would have in a four-legged man. in england we did meet the trades union question squarely in our manchester plant. the workmen of manchester are mostly unionized, and the usual english union restrictions upon output prevail. we took over a body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. at once the union officers asked to see our executives and arrange terms. we deal only with our own employees and never with outside representatives, so our people refused to see the union officials. thereupon they called the carpenters out on strike. the carpenters would not strike and were expelled from the union. then the expelled men brought suit against the union for their share of the benefit fund. i do not know how the litigation turned out, but that was the end of interference by trades union officers with our operations in england. we make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. it is absolutely a give-and-take relation. during the period in which we largely increased wages we did have a considerable supervisory force. the home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find out what they did with their wages. perhaps at the time it was necessary; it gave us valuable information. but it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned. we do not believe in the "glad hand," or the professionalized "personal touch," or "human element." it is too late in the day for that sort of thing. men want something more than a worthy sentiment. social conditions are not made out of words. they are the net result of the daily relations between man and man. the best social spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all. that is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect. propaganda, bulletins, lectures--they are nothing. it is the right act sincerely done that counts. a great business is really too big to be human. it grows so large as to supplant the personality of the man. in a big business the employer, like the employee, is lost in the mass. together they have created a great productive organization which sends out articles that the world buys and pays for in return money that provides a livelihood for everyone in the business. the business itself becomes the big thing. there is something sacred about a big business which provides a living for hundreds and thousands of families. when one looks about at the babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being paid for on installments out of the earnings of men--when one looks at a great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be done, then the continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. it becomes greater and more important than the individuals. the employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the limitations of humanity. he is justified in holding his job only as he can fill it. if he can steer the business straight, if his men can trust him to run his end of the work properly and without endangering their security, then he is filling his place. otherwise he is no more fit for his position than would be an infant. the employer, like everyone else, is to be judged solely by his ability. he may be but a name to the men--a name on a signboard. but there is the business--it is more than a name. it produces the living--and a living is a pretty tangible thing. the business is a reality. it does things. it is a going concern. the evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming. you can hardly have too much harmony in business. but you can go too far in picking men because they harmonize. you can have so much harmony that there will not be enough of the thrust and counterthrust which is life--enough of the competition which means effort and progress. it is one thing for an organization to be working harmoniously toward one object, but it is another thing for an organization to work harmoniously with each individual unit of itself. some organizations use up so much energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force left to work for the object for which the organization was created. the organization is secondary to the object. the only harmonious organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose--to get along toward the objective. a common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired--that is the great harmonizing principle. i pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work. there are such men. and in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures. not only are they business failures; they are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet. there is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business organizations. people have too great a fondness for working with the people they like. in the end it spoils a good many valuable qualities. do not misunderstand me; when i use the term "good feeling" i mean that habit of making one's personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of judgment. suppose you do not like a man. is that anything against him? it may be something against you. what have your likes or dislikes to do with the facts? every man of common sense knows that there are men whom he dislikes, who are really more capable than he is himself. and taking all this out of the shop and into the broader fields, it is not necessary for the rich to love the poor or the poor to love the rich. it is not necessary for the employer to love the employee or for the employee to love the employer. what is necessary is that each should try to do justice to the other according to his deserts. that is real democracy and not the question of who ought to own the bricks and the mortar and the furnaces and the mills. and democracy has nothing to do with the question, "who ought to be boss?" that is very much like asking: "who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?" obviously, the man who can sing tenor. you could not have deposed caruso. suppose some theory of musical democracy had consigned caruso to the musical proletariat. would that have reared another tenor to take his place? or would caruso's gifts have still remained his own? chapter xix what we may expect we are--unless i do not read the signs aright--in the midst of a change. it is going on all about us, slowly and scarcely observed, but with a firm surety. we are gradually learning to relate cause and effect. a great deal of that which we call disturbance--a great deal of the upset in what have seemed to be established institutions--is really but the surface indication of something approaching a regeneration. the public point of view is changing, and we really need only a somewhat different point of view to make the very bad system of the past into a very good system of the future. we are displacing that peculiar virtue which used to be admired as hard-headedness, and which was really only wooden-headedness, with intelligence, and also we are getting rid of mushy sentimentalism. the first confused hardness with progress; the second confused softness with progress. we are getting a better view of the realities and are beginning to know that we have already in the world all things needful for the fullest kind of a life and that we shall use them better once we learn what they are and what they mean. whatever is wrong--and we all know that much is wrong--can be righted by a clear definition of the wrongness. we have been looking so much at one another, at what one has and another lacks, that we have made a personal affair out of something that is too big for personalities. to be sure, human nature enters largely into our economic problems. selfishness exists, and doubtless it colours all the competitive activities of life. if selfishness were the characteristic of any one class it might be easily dealt with, but it is in human fibre everywhere. and greed exists. and envy exists. and jealousy exists. but as the struggle for mere existence grows less--and it is less than it used to be, although the sense of uncertainty may have increased--we have an opportunity to release some of the finer motives. we think less of the frills of civilization as we grow used to them. progress, as the world has thus far known it, is accompanied by a great increase in the things of life. there is more gear, more wrought material, in the average american backyard than in the whole domain of an african king. the average american boy has more paraphernalia around him than a whole eskimo community. the utensils of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and coal cellar make a list that would have staggered the most luxurious potentate of five hundred years ago. the increase in the impedimenta of life only marks a stage. we are like the indian who comes into town with all his money and buys everything he sees. there is no adequate realization of the large proportion of the labour and material of industry that is used in furnishing the world with its trumpery and trinkets, which are made only to be sold, and are bought merely to be owned--that perform no service in the world and are at last mere rubbish as at first they were mere waste. humanity is advancing out of its trinket-making stage, and industry is coming down to meet the world's needs, and thus we may expect further advancement toward that life which many now see, but which the present "good enough" stage hinders our attaining. and we are growing out of this worship of material possessions. it is no longer a distinction to be rich. as a matter of fact, to be rich is no longer a common ambition. people do not care for money as money, as they once did. certainly they do not stand in awe of it, nor of him who possesses it. what we accumulate by way of useless surplus does us no honour. it takes only a moment's thought to see that as far as individual personal advantage is concerned, vast accumulations of money mean nothing. a human being is a human being and is nourished by the same amount and quality of food, is warmed by the same weight of clothing, whether he be rich or poor. and no one can inhabit more than one room at a time. but if one has visions of service, if one has vast plans which no ordinary resources could possibly realize, if one has a life ambition to make the industrial desert bloom like the rose, and the work-a-day life suddenly blossom into fresh and enthusiastic human motives of higher character and efficiency, then one sees in large sums of money what the farmer sees in his seed corn--the beginning of new and richer harvests whose benefits can no more be selfishly confined than can the sun's rays. there are two fools in this world. one is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ills will be cured. they are both on the wrong track. they might as well try to corner all the checkers or all the dominoes of the world under the delusion that they are thereby cornering great quantities of skill. some of the most successful money-makers of our times have never added one pennyworth to the wealth of men. does a card player add to the wealth of the world? if we all created wealth up to the limits, the easy limits, of our creative capacity, then it would simply be a case of there being enough for everybody, and everybody getting enough. any real scarcity of the necessaries of life in the world--not a fictitious scarcity caused by the lack of clinking metallic disks in one's purse--is due only to lack of production. and lack of production is due only too often to lack of knowledge of how and what to produce. * * * * * this much we must believe as a starting point: that the earth produces, or is capable of producing, enough to give decent sustenance to everyone--not of food alone, but of everything else we need. for everything is produced from the earth. that it is possible for labour, production, distribution, and reward to be so organized as to make certain that those who contribute shall receive shares determined by an exact justice. that regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can be robbed of power to work serious economic injustice. * * * * * the business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill displayed in production and distribution. it has been thought that business existed for profit. that is wrong. business exists for service. it is a profession, and must have recognized professional ethics, to violate which declasses a man. business needs more of the professional spirit. the professional spirit seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. the professional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them. business will some day become clean. a machine that stops every little while is an imperfect machine, and its imperfection is within itself. a body that falls sick every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself. so with business. its faults, many of them purely the faults of the moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every little while. some day the ethics of business will be universally recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and most useful of all the professions. * * * * * all that the ford industries have done--all that i have done--is to endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a noble profession. often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises--i will not say "success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting--is due to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any products or personalities other than our own. it used to be taken for granted that our theories and our methods were fundamentally unsound. that is because they were not understood. events have killed that kind of comment, but there remains a wholly sincere belief that what we have done could not be done by any other company--that we have been touched by a wand, that neither we nor any one else could make shoes, or hats, or sewing machines, or watches, or typewriters, or any other necessity after the manner in which we make automobiles and tractors. and that if only we ventured into other fields we should right quickly discover our errors. i do not agree with any of this. nothing has come out of the air. the foregoing pages should prove that. we have nothing that others might not have. we have had no good fortune except that which always attends any one who puts his best into his work. there was nothing that could be called "favorable" about our beginning. we began with almost nothing. what we have, we earned, and we earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle. we took what was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or subterfuge. when we began to make our present motor car the country had few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted in the public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man's toy. our only advantage was lack of precedent. we began to manufacture according to a creed--a creed which was at that time unknown in business. the new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be odd and probably queer. the mechanical working out of our creed is constantly changing. we are continually finding new and better ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter the principles, and i cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary to alter them, because i hold that they are absolutely universal and must lead to a better and wider life for all. if i did not think so i would not keep working--for the money that i make is inconsequent. money is useful only as it serves to forward by practical example the principle that business is justified only as it serves, that it must always give more to the community than it takes away, and that unless everybody benefits by the existence of a business then that business should not exist. i have proved this with automobiles and tractors. i intend to prove it with railways and public-service corporations--not for my personal satisfaction and not for the money that may be earned. (it is perfectly impossible, applying these principles, to avoid making a much larger profit than if profit were the main object.) i want to prove it so that all of us may have more, and that all of us may live better by increasing the service rendered by all businesses. poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by hard and intelligent work. we are, in effect, an experimental station to prove a principle. that we do make money is only further proof that we are right. for that is a species of argument that establishes itself without words. in the first chapter was set forth the creed. let me repeat it in the light of the work that has been done under it--for it is at the basis of all our work: ( ) an absence of fear of the future or of veneration for the past. one who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. there is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. what is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress. ( ) a disregard of competition. whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. it is criminal to try to get business away from another man--criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the condition of one's fellow-men, to rule by force instead of by intelligence. ( ) the putting of service before profit. without a profit, business cannot extend. there is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. well-conducted business enterprises cannot fail to return a profit but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. it cannot be the basis--it must be the result of service. ( ) manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. it is the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and distributing it to the consumer. gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing tend only to clog this progression. * * * * * we must have production, but it is the spirit behind it that counts most. that kind of production which is a service inevitably follows a real desire to be of service. the various wholly artificial rules set up for finance and industry and which pass as "laws" break down with such frequency as to prove that they are not even good guesses. the basis of all economic reasoning is the earth and its products. to make the yield of the earth, in all its forms, large enough and dependable enough to serve as the basis for real life--the life which is more than eating and sleeping--is the highest service. that is the real foundation for an economic system. we can make things--the problem of production has been solved brilliantly. we can make any number of different sort of things by the millions. the material mode of our life is splendidly provided for. there are enough processes and improvements now pigeonholed and awaiting application to bring the physical side of life to almost millennial completeness. but we are too wrapped up in the things we are doing--we are not enough concerned with the reasons why we do them. our whole competitive system, our whole creative expression, all the play of our faculties seem to be centred around material production and its by-products of success and wealth. there is, for instance, a feeling that personal or group benefit can be had at the expense of other persons or groups. there is nothing to be gained by crushing any one. if the farmer's bloc should crush the manufacturers would the farmers be better off? if the manufacturer's bloc should crush the farmers, would the manufacturers be better off? could capital gain by crushing labour? or labour by crushing capital? or does a man in business gain by crushing a competitor? no, destructive competition benefits no one. the kind of competition which results in the defeat of the many and the overlordship of the ruthless few must go. destructive competition lacks the qualities out of which progress comes. progress comes from a generous form of rivalry. bad competition is personal. it works for the aggrandizement of some individual or group. it is a sort of warfare. it is inspired by a desire to "get" someone. it is wholly selfish. that is to say, its motive is not pride in the product, nor a desire to excel in service, nor yet a wholesome ambition to approach to scientific methods of production. it is moved simply by the desire to crowd out others and monopolize the market for the sake of the money returns. that being accomplished, it always substitutes a product of inferior quality. * * * * * freeing ourselves from the petty sort of destructive competition frees us from many set notions. we are too closely tied to old methods and single, one-way uses. we need more mobility. we have been using certain things just one way, we have been sending certain goods through only one channel--and when that use is slack, or that channel is stopped, business stops, too, and all the sorry consequences of "depression" set in. take corn, for example. there are millions upon millions of bushels of corn stored in the united states with no visible outlet. a certain amount of corn is used as food for man and beast, but not all of it. in pre-prohibition days a certain amount of corn went into the making of liquor, which was not a very good use for good corn. but through a long course of years corn followed those two channels, and when one of them stopped the stocks of corn began to pile up. it is the money fiction that usually retards the movement of stocks, but even if money were plentiful we could not possibly consume the stores of food which we sometimes possess. if foodstuffs become too plentiful to be consumed as food, why not find other uses for them? why use corn only for hogs and distilleries? why sit down and bemoan the terrible disaster that has befallen the corn market? is there no use for corn besides the making of pork or the making of whisky? surely there must be. there should be so many uses for corn that only the important uses could ever be fully served; there ought always be enough channels open to permit corn to be used without waste. once upon a time the farmers burned corn as fuel--corn was plentiful and coal was scarce. that was a crude way to dispose of corn, but it contained the germ of an idea. there is fuel in corn; oil and fuel alcohol are obtainable from corn, and it is high time that someone was opening up this new use so that the stored-up corn crops may be moved. why have only one string to our bow? why not two? if one breaks, there is the other. if the hog business slackens, why should not the farmer turn his corn into tractor fuel? we need more diversity all round. the four-track system everywhere would not be a bad idea. we have a single-track money system. it is a mighty fine system for those who own it. it is a perfect system for the interest-collecting, credit-controlling financiers who literally own the commodity called money and who literally own the machinery by which money is made and used. let them keep their system if they like it. but the people are finding out that it is a poor system for what we call "hard times" because it ties up the line and stops traffic. if there are special protections for the interests, there ought also to be special protections for the plain people. diversity of outlet, of use, and of financial enablement, are the strongest defenses we can have against economic emergencies. it is likewise with labour. there surely ought to be flying squadrons of young men who would be available for emergency conditions in harvest field, mine, shop, or railroad. if the fires of a hundred industries threaten to go out for lack of coal, and one million men are menaced by unemployment, it would seem both good business and good humanity for a sufficient number of men to volunteer for the mines and the railroads. there is always something to be done in this world, and only ourselves to do it. the whole world may be idle, and in the factory sense there may be "nothing to do." there may be nothing to do in this place or that, but there is always something to do. it is this fact which should urge us to such an organization of ourselves that this "something to be done" may get done, and unemployment reduced to a minimum. * * * * * every advance begins in a small way and with the individual. the mass can be no better than the sum of the individuals. advancement begins within the man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from apprenticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere _dilettante_ at labour to a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and without prodding--why, then the world advances! the advance is not easy. we live in flabby times when men are being taught that everything ought to be easy. work that amounts to anything will never be easy. and the higher you go in the scale of responsibility, the harder becomes the job. ease has its place, of course. every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. the man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings. these are his by right. but no one deserves ease until after his work is done. it will never be possible to put upholstered ease into work. some work is needlessly hard. it can be lightened by proper management. every device ought to be employed to leave a man free to do a man's work. flesh and blood should not be made to bear burdens that steel can bear. but even when the best is done, work still remains work, and any man who puts himself into his job will feel that it is work. and there cannot be much picking and choosing. the appointed task may be less than was expected. a man's real work is not always what he would have chosen to do. a man's real work is what he is chosen to do. just now there are more menial jobs than there will be in the future; and as long as there are menial jobs, someone will have to do them; but there is no reason why a man should be penalized because his job is menial. there is one thing that can be said about menial jobs that cannot be said about a great many so-called more responsible jobs, and that is, they are useful and they are respectable and they are honest. the time has come when drudgery must be taken out of labour. it is not work that men object to, but the element of drudgery. we must drive out drudgery wherever we find it. we shall never be wholly civilized until we remove the treadmill from the daily job. invention is doing this in some degree now. we have succeeded to a very great extent in relieving men of the heavier and more onerous jobs that used to sap their strength, but even when lightening the heavier labour we have not yet succeeded in removing monotony. that is another field that beckons us--the abolition of monotony, and in trying to accomplish that we shall doubtless discover other changes that will have to be made in our system. * * * * * the opportunity to work is now greater than ever it was. the opportunity to advance is greater. it is true that the young man who enters industry to-day enters a very different system from that in which the young man of twenty-five years ago began his career. the system has been tightened up; there is less play or friction in it; fewer matters are left to the haphazard will of the individual; the modern worker finds himself part of an organization which apparently leaves him little initiative. yet, with all this, it is not true that "men are mere machines." it is not true that opportunity has been lost in organization. if the young man will liberate himself from these ideas and regard the system as it is, he will find that what he thought was a barrier is really an aid. factory organization is not a device to prevent the expansion of ability, but a device to reduce the waste and losses due to mediocrity. it is not a device to hinder the ambitious, clear-headed man from doing his best, but a device to prevent the don't-care sort of individual from doing his worst. that is to say, when laziness, carelessness, slothfulness, and lack-interest are allowed to have their own way, everybody suffers. the factory cannot prosper and therefore cannot pay living wages. when an organization makes it necessary for the don't-care class to do better than they naturally would, it is for their benefit--they are better physically, mentally, and financially. what wages should we be able to pay if we trusted a large don't-care class to their own methods and gait of production? if the factory system which brought mediocrity up to a higher standard operated also to keep ability down to a lower standard--it would be a very bad system, a very bad system indeed. but a system, even a perfect one, must have able individuals to operate it. no system operates itself. and the modern system needs more brains for its operation than did the old. more brains are needed to-day than ever before, although perhaps they are not needed in the same place as they once were. it is just like power: formerly every machine was run by foot power; the power was right at the machine. but nowadays we have moved the power back--concentrated it in the power-house. thus also we have made it unnecessary for the highest types of mental ability to be engaged in every operation in the factory. the better brains are in the mental power-plant. every business that is growing is at the same time creating new places for capable men. it cannot help but do so. this does not mean that new openings come every day and in groups. not at all. they come only after hard work; it is the fellow who can stand the gaff of routine and still keep himself alive and alert who finally gets into direction. it is not sensational brilliance that one seeks in business, but sound, substantial dependability. big enterprises of necessity move slowly and cautiously. the young man with ambition ought to take a long look ahead and leave an ample margin of time for things to happen. * * * * * a great many things are going to change. we shall learn to be masters rather than servants of nature. with all our fancied skill we still depend largely on natural resources and think that they cannot be displaced. we dig coal and ore and cut down trees. we use the coal and the ore and they are gone; the trees cannot be replaced within a lifetime. we shall some day harness the heat that is all about us and no longer depend on coal--we may now create heat through electricity generated by water power. we shall improve on that method. as chemistry advances i feel quite certain that a method will be found to transform growing things into substances that will endure better than the metals--we have scarcely touched the uses of cotton. better wood can be made than is grown. the spirit of true service will create for us. we have only each of us to do our parts sincerely. * * * * * everything is possible ... "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." the book ends index absentees discharged, accidents, safeguarding against; causes of advancement, personal advertisement, first, of ford motor co. agents, agriculture, a primary function ainsley, charles alexander, henry, drives ford car to top of ben nevis, , feet, in antecedents, a man's, of no interest in hiring at ford factory assembly of a ford car; first experiment in a moving assembly line, april , ; results of the experiment automobile, public's first attitude toward automobile business, bad methods of; in its beginnings bankers play too great a part in business; in railroads banking, bedridden men at work, benz car on exhibition at macy's in , birds, mr. ford's fondness for blind men can work, bolshevism, bonuses--_see_ "profit-sharing" borrowing money; what it would have meant to ford motor co. in british board of agriculture, british cabinet and fordson tractors, burroughs, john business, monopoly and profiteering bad for; function of buying for immediate needs only, cadillac company, capital, capitalist newspapers, capitalists, cash balance, large charity, professional city life, "classes" mostly fictional, classification of work at ford plants, cleanliness of factory, coal used in ford plants from ford mines, coke ovens at river rouge plant, collier, colonel d. c. competition, consumption varies according to price and quality, convict labour, cooper, tom cooperative farming, cork, ireland, fordson tractor plant corn, potential uses of costs of production, records of; prices force down; high wages contribute to low country, living in courtney, f. s. creative work, creed, industrial, mr. ford's cripples can work, cross, john e. dalby, prof. w. e., deaf and dumb men at work, _dearborn independent_, dearborn plant, democracy, detroit automobile co., detroit general hospital, now ford hospital, detroit, toledo and ironton railway, purchased by ford motor co., in march, , development, opportunity for, in u. s., diamond manufacturing co. fire, discipline at ford plants, "dividends, abolish, rather than lower wages," dividends, small, ford policy of, doctors, dollar, the fluctuating, drudgery, eagle boats, economy, edison, thomas a., educated man, an; definition of, education, mr. ford's ideas on, educational department, electricity generated at ford plants, "employees, all, are really partners," employment department, equal, all men are not, experience, lack of, no bar to employment, experiments, no record of, kept at ford factories, "experts," no, at ford plants, factory, ford, growth of, factory organization, function of, failure, habit of, farming, lack of knowledge in, no conflict between, and industry, future development in, farming with tractors, fear, federal reserve system, fighting, a cause for immediate discharge, finance, financial crisis in , how ford motor co. met, financial system at present inadequate, firestone, harvey s., flat rock plant, floor space for workers, flour-milling, foodstuffs, potential uses of, ford car-- the first, no. , , , the second, introduction of, in england in , about , parts in, sales and production--_see_ "sales" ford, henry-- born at dearborn, mich., july , , mechanically inclined, leaves school at seventeen, becomes apprentice at drydock engine works, watch repairer, works with local representative of westinghouse co. as expert in setting up and repairing road engines, builds a steam tractor in his workshop, reads of the "silent gas engine" in the _world of science_, in builds one on the otto four-cycle model, father gives him forty acres of timber land, marriage, in begins work on double-cylinder engine, leaves farm and works as engineer and machinist with the detroit electric co., rents house in detroit and sets up workshop in back yard, in completes first motor car, first road test in , builds second motor car, quits job with electric co. august , , and goes into automobile business, organization of detroit automobile co., resigns from, in , rents shop to continue experiments at park place, detroit, beats alexander winton in race, early reflections on business, in builds, with tom cooper, two cars, the " " and the "arrow" for speed, forms the ford motor co., buys controlling share in , builds "model a," builds "model b" and "model c," makes a record in race over ice in the "arrow," builds first real manufacturing plant, in may, , assembles cars in six workings days, in june, , assembles one hundred cars in one day, in , decides to manufacture only "model t," painted black, buys sixty acres of land for plant at highland park, outside of detroit, how he met the financial crises of , buys detroit, toledo & ironton ry., march, , "ford doesn't use the ford," ford, edsel, ford hospital, ford motor co., organized , henry ford buys controlling share in , how it met financial crisis in , thirty-five branches of, in u. s. "ford, you can dissect it, but you cannot kill it," fordson tractor, prices, genesis and development of, cost of farming with, , sent to england in - , foreign trade, gas from coke ovens at river rouge plant utilized, "gold is not wealth," "good feeling" in working not essential, though desirable, government, the function of, greaves, r. n., greed vs. service, greenhall, gilbert, grosse point track, "habit conduces to a certain inertia," highland park plant, hobbs, robert w., hospital, ford, hough, judge, renders decision against ford motor co. in selden patent suit, hours of labour per day reduced from nine to eight in january, , "human, a great business is too big to be," human element in business, ideas, old and new, improvements in products, interstate commerce commission, inventory, cutting down, by improved freight service, investment, interest on, not properly chargeable to operating expenses, jacobs, edmund, "jail, men in, ought to be able to support their families," jewish question, studies in the, jobs, menial, "john r. street," labour, the economic fundamental, and capital, potential uses of, labour leaders, labour newspapers, labour turnover, "lawyers, like bankers, know absolutely nothing about business," legislation, the function of, licensed association, "life is not a location, but a journey," light for working, loss, taking a; in times of business depression, manchester, eng., ford plant at, strike at, machinery, its place in life, manufacture, a primary function, medical department, mexico, milner, lord, models-- "a," "b," "c," "f," "k," "n," "r," "s," "t," changing, not a ford policy, money, chasing, present system of, what it is worth, invested in a business not chargeable to it, fluctuating value of, is not wealth, monopoly, bad for business, monotonous work, motion, waste, eliminating, northville, mich., plant, combination farm and factory, oldfteld, barney, opportunity for young men of today, organization, excess, and red tape, overman, henry, otto engine, overhead charge per car, cut from $ to $ , parts, about , , in a ford car, paternalism has no place in industry, "peace ship" philanthropy, physical incapacity not necessarily a hindrance to working, physicians, piquette plant, poverty, power-farming, price policy, mr. ford's, producer depends upon service, production, principles of ford plant, plan of, worked out carefully, (for production of ford cars, _see_ "sales" and table of production on p. ) professional charity, profiteering, bad for business, profit-sharing, property, the right of, profit, small per article, large aggregate, profits belong to planner, producer, and purchaser, price raising, reducing, "prices, if, of goods are above the incomes of the people, then get the prices down to the incomes," "prices, unduly high, always a sign of unsound business," prices of ford touring cars since , prison laws, "prisoners ought to be able to support their families," railroads, active managers have ceased to manage, suffering from bankers and lawyers, folly of long hauls, reactionaries, red tape, "refinancing," reformers, repetitive labour, "rich, it is no longer a distinction to be," right of property, river rouge plant, routine work, royal agricultural society, rumours in that ford motor co. was in a bad financial condition, russia, under sovietism, safeguarding machines, "sales depend upon wages," sales of ford cars in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, in - , , cars, see also table of production since , saturation, point of, saving habit, schools, trade, henry ford trade school, scottish reliability trials, test of ford car in scrap, utilization of, seasonal unemployment, selden, george b., selden patent, famous suit against ford motor co., in , service, principles of, "the foundation of real business," "comes before profit," simplicity, philosophy of, social department, sorensen, charles e., standard oil co., standardization, statistics abolished in , steel, vanadium, strelow's carpenter shop, strike, the right to, strikes, why, fail, suggestions from employees, surgeons' fees, sweepings, saving, nets $ , a year, titles, no, to jobs at ford factory, tractor--_see_ "fordson" trade, foreign, trade schools, henry ford trade school training, little, required for jobs at ford plants, transportation, a primary function, turnover of goods, union labour, universal car, essential attributes of, vanadium steel, ventilation of factory, wages, minimum of $ a day at all ford plants, are partnership distributions, fallacy of regulating, on basis of cost of, living, sales depend upon, minimum of $ a day introduced in january, , danger in rapidly raising, cutting, a slovenly way to meet business depression, high, contribute to low cost, abolish dividends rather than lower, war, opposition to, ford industries in the, waste, vs. service, eliminating, weeks-mclean bird bill, weight, excess, in an automobile, welfare work--_see_ "social department," "medical department," and "educational department." winton, alexander, women, married, whose husbands have jobs, not employed at ford plants, work, its place in life, the right to consumers' cooperative societies in new york state _published april _ _by_ the consumers' league of new york fourth avenue new york city * * * * * this study was originally prepared for the consumers' league of new york in by mr. cedric long. it has been revised by the league in april, . the consumers' league wishes to express its appreciation of the valuable advice and assistance given by mr. louis b. blachly of the bureau of cooperative associations of the state department of farms and markets both in the original preparation of the material and in its revision. * * * * * cooperative principles the principles established by the rochdale pioneers in england in and observed consistently by successful societies since that time are as follows: . earnings of capital stock limited to legal or current rate of interest. . surplus earnings to be returned to members in proportion to patronage. . one vote for each member regardless of amount of stock owned. no proxy voting permitted. in addition, the majority of societies adhere to the following principles: . business to be done for cash. . goods to be sold at current market prices. . education given in the principles and aims of cooperation. consumers' cooperative societies in new york state the extent of consumers' cooperation. the tenth international cooperative congress, held in switzerland in , disclosed the fact that since the last congress, in , the number of cooperators in the twenty-five countries represented had increased from approximately eight million to thirty million and that cooperative trade had increased correspondingly. today in great britain the cooperative societies number more than four million members, nearly one-third of the entire population being represented in these societies. switzerland, in , boasted three hundred and sixty-two thousand members and a third of the swiss people bought goods through their own societies. cooperation is still alive in russia in spite of its unsettled economic conditions. in there were twenty-five thousand societies with twelve million heads of families. in the same year the german cooperative societies were two million seven hundred thousand members strong. in the united states cooperation has had an erratic development. within the past seven years, however, there has been a rapid increase in new societies until today it is estimated that there are about three thousand with a membership of half a million. in number of societies new york is far behind most of its sister states. it has one hundred and twenty-five genuine consumers' cooperative associations, seventy-five of which are among farmer groups and the remaining fifty among city consumers. there are in addition some twenty cooperative buying groups connected with large commercial organizations. no complete tabulation has been made of the total business of all these cooperative groups, but in the five largest cooperative societies among the city consumers, with an average membership of , persons, all located in new york city, did a total business of approximately one million dollars. these societies and many others are prospering. on the other hand there are many cooperatives which have failed. whether they have failed or succeeded more knowledge of practical cooperation can be gained from their experience than can ever be learned from books. the consumers' league feels that the experience of these societies should not be wasted. for this reason it is telling the stories of several cooperatives in new york, some of which are successfully established and some of which have fallen by the roadside. in these brief stories are written a hundred lessons that cooperatives should heed. successful cooperation the utica cooperative society. at the corner of court and schuyler streets in utica stands a grocery store which is different from an ordinary store. it is different because it is a cooperative store and it belongs to those who buy as well as to those who serve. there is no need for the purchaser to be on guard lest the bargain be to his disadvantage, for he is dealing with friendly clerks who are there to help him find what he wants, not to sell him something he cannot use. in this store the purchaser can find all the articles carried by a first-class grocer, canned goods, green goods, dairy products and, in addition, a complete supply of baked goods, baked by the cooperative society itself. the bakery is to be found behind the grocery. large, high windows throw a flood of light into the mixing room. the oven is of a modern type, large, easily controlled and economical. five men work at the baking and a boy wraps bread in waxed paper with a mechanical device which automatically folds and seals. the three delivery wagons bear the cooperative motto, "each for all, and all for each." they are used in the morning for the delivery of baked goods and in the afternoon for the delivery of groceries. it keeps three boys busy all day covering the territory between the cooperators' homes. the delivery system is essential because the membership is scattered throughout the entire city. there are fourteen employees in the grocery and bakery. hitherto they have received wages higher than those generally prevailing throughout the city for the same kind of work, but recently on their own initiative they voted themselves a ten per cent decrease. in a cooperative all members may know the financial status of the business and the employees found that, due to the diminishing margin of profit, the business could not support such a high scale of wages. their wage cut followed because as members of the cooperative they were interested not only in their own wages but in the good of the society as a whole. the utica cooperative society was organized in by a group of germans. half a dozen nationalities are now represented, although americans predominate. although they had only ninety-two members and $ , to start, they bought out a private store and began cooperative business. their bakery was originally in the cellar under the store. the former owner was employed as manager. for three or four years they experienced many difficulties. within two years two managers proved inefficient and had to be replaced. only the tenacious loyalty of a few kept the society alive. but they had the foresight and determination to fight through those lean years. now for five years they have had the same manager. he insists upon scrupulous bookkeeping methods, careful buying, close supervision of his work by the board of fifteen directors, strict regard for the needs and desires of the membership, and exceptional precautions against waste and leakage. the president, a man having a private business of his, own, has an idealism almost religious in quality. these two men cooperate closely on matters of policy and provide much of the leadership which has brought success. the membership is now . the capital stock has increased from $ , to $ , . the business in amounted to $ , , forty per cent of which was done by the bakery. since the rebates to members on patronage have totaled $ , , fluctuating from nothing at all in some years to eight per cent and ten per cent in other years. during this period the lump sum saved to purchasers, including rebates, the earnings on stock shares, and reserve fund, amounted to $ , . this sum would have gone into the pockets of private storekeepers except for the cooperative store. the utica society has succeeded because it has met the prime requirements for effective cooperation. the greater part of the membership was loyal during critical times when the easy way would have been to withdraw and trade at chain stores. the management worked unceasingly to put the business on an economical basis. finally they won out because they put service over profit and carried out that rule in the most practical and businesslike way they could find. * * * * * our cooperative cafeteria. if you should drop in for lunch at any one of the three branches of our cooperative cafeteria in new york city the first thing that would strike you would be the friendly spirit of those back of the serving tables. before you paid your check you would observe further that the food had a variety and flavor not found in the ordinary restaurant. if you were discerning you would detect that a complex machinery was at work which had nearly escaped you because of its smooth operation. that genial spirit which infects the whole place and those subtle things which appeal to your eye and palate explain the success of the cafeteria. but there are some underlying causes for these things that we must get hold of and to do that we must go back to the year . in october of that year a private cafeteria was started by two women with a record of successful cafeteria experience behind them. the experiment proved successful and the following april a momentous step was taken. it was proposed that the persons who ate there become the owners. a cooperative society was formed and in two weeks shares were sold to the value of two thousand dollars. the new owners took over the cafeteria and the former owners became their hired employees. this was the beginning of our cooperative cafeteria. the cafeteria had from the outset advantages which are gained by many cooperatives only after bitter and costly experience. they had skillful and experienced management to which they immediately gave over all technical control, holding them responsible through an active board of directors and an accounting system devised by experts. the management justified the confidence of the shareholders. on april , , after one year of operation they had outgrown the first plant and a new branch had been running for two months. there were in all members. the year's business had been $ , , of which $ , were net earnings. the stockholders had received six per cent on their investment, a reserve fund had been laid aside, and every month the member-patrons had received rebates on the food eaten of from six per cent to sixteen per cent. at the end of the second year the third branch, larger than either of the others, located in the wall street business section, had been in operation for three months. the membership of the society had increased to . the business for the year had been $ , and the net earnings were $ , . the cafeteria now employs sixty-eight workers, most of whom are shareholders and vote as such in membership meetings. the worker receives the same food as the patrons, served at the same counter. against all restaurant traditions the worker is served before the meal so that she may have the best there is and have it before she is too tired to eat it. the minimum wage is higher than the customary rate for restaurant workers in new york. the forty-eight hour week is the standard, although as yet some of the help work over that time. overtime is one thing that the management has not yet been able wholly to eliminate. it has been found that the policy determining function of the stockholders and board of directors cannot operate independently of the plans of the management. the two in a business organization must be closely inter-related. the stockholders have not tried to supervise the details of the business, as has sometimes been done to the disaster of cooperatives. the general manager instead has gone to the board of directors and sits there practically as a full member. as a result the policy function of the board and the management function are closely linked together as they must be in a business that is to be permanent. the stockholders are not idle, however. through their committees, they have amended the by-laws. they have recently called a general meeting for the consideration of labor policy, and they publish monthly a little paper known as "the cooperative crier." the average attendance at the shareholders' monthly meetings is sixty or sixty-five. to an unusual degree the success of our cooperative cafeteria is bound up with its management, not only because it is technically expert, but because it is thoroughly imbued with the cooperative spirit. around the first nucleus has grown a staff of intelligent young men and women, usually college bred, who are devoting all their brains and energy to see that this cooperative cafeteria succeeds. they seem to find a peculiar satisfaction in knowing that their efforts will not enrich a few individuals at the expense of patron and employee alike, but will increase the common welfare of the community itself. like other cooperatives, the cafeteria has found the need for expert and trained workers in place of the hard-pressed volunteer. much of the work on education and cooperative organization is carried on by trained members of the staff. this interest of the paid employees in things other than mere technical efficiency contributes much to that friendly spirit which makes our cooperative cafeteria unique among the restaurants of new york. * * * * * the village cooperative society, inc. after nearly two years of discussion and meetings and after long consultation with experts a group composed largely of the housewives in greenwich village in the heart of new york city started in january, , a cooperative laundry. the second-hand machinery which they purchased was not a laundry unit, the capacity of the washer being one-fourth that of the ironer; they had insufficient capital, half of it borrowed; they employed an inexperienced manager and a green bookkeeper; and for the first eight months the supervision was almost entirely carried on by volunteers, hard working, but without the foresight and power of control so essential to a new organization. under these handicaps the cooperative laundry lost money every month. it existed through those months due largely to two things. first, they were forced almost immediately to employ a new manager who consistently turned out high grade work, and secondly, a small group of volunteers put all their energy into making the thing a success. then the causes of the continued failure were one by one eliminated. a business manager who had an intense interest in cooperation was hired to supervise general operations. he took over much of the work of the volunteers and for the first time the laundry developed a well thought out policy. the inexperienced bookkeeper was eliminated and all supervision headed up in the new manager. better service brought more work, and new machinery made greater output possible without additional labor. the manager found labor cost too high and introduced methods which saved both labor and money. he found the machinery badly arranged. when the plumber told him it would cost twenty-five dollars to rearrange it he spent a dollar and forty cents and did it himself. after a discussion in the board of directors which nearly wrecked the organization, a board policy of leaving all details of management to the manager and chairman of a managing committee was determined upon, while the board devoted itself to the determination of general policies. the results of these changes were soon apparent. for the first time the dead line between losses and earnings was crossed and net earnings gradually began to mount. in september, , the amount of business wavered around a hundred dollars a week. in march, , it averaged about $ per week, and net earnings have run as high as $ per week. the laundry is still small and is located in quarters for which it pays a regular commercial rent. it has expanded several times and now has three power washers, an ironer or mangle, a dry room and other equipment. it employs a business manager, who supervises the plant and does everything from keeping the books to collecting the laundry in a pinch, a work manager, a washer, a sorter and marker, four ironers and a delivery boy. it still holds hard to the policy of putting out the very best kind of work and economizing in every particular. its very success has in a way embarrassed the laundry. the manager has been offered special inducements to leave. the delivery system has been tampered with. there has even been acid thrown on the clothes by outsiders jealous of its business. but this has only stimulated the whole membership to fight harder to realize their aim of getting their own laundry work done the way they want it, and without profit. * * * * * the finnish cooperative societies of brooklyn. what is it that makes the finns so successful at cooperation? industry and cleanliness. at any rate those are the striking characteristics of the finns of brooklyn. up to the present time they have never paid any dividends. it has been explained to them, as their manager says, that if the business is to serve them properly it must grow, and in order to grow it needs all the surplus earnings for expansion. and so, because the members are industrious and far-sighted, they have foregone their dividends. the cleanliness of their stores, too, is an inspiration not only to their membership but to hundreds of others who have visited their plant. this is one of the biggest business assets they possess. these virtues have enabled the finnish group in brooklyn to build cooperatively a three-story modern business block, to run therein a wholesale bakery, a retail bakery, a meat shop and grocery store, a cooperative restaurant and a cooperative pool room, to build adjacent to this two modern cooperative apartment houses and to lay the foundations for a third now under construction. outside of the housing venture the business done last year was $ , and today there are nearly two thousand members. although these undertakings are practically a part of the same group there are three separate corporations. the largest of these is the finnish cooperative trading association, inc. the restaurant is operated as the workers' cooperative restaurant, inc., and the housing association as the finnish homebuilders' association, inc. the restaurant is the oldest. seven years ago a group of finns in this locality boarded together. their capital was a hundred dollars which some one had loaned to them. they ran their little business on a cooperative basis, paying for the meals and putting back any surplus into a reserve. no one contributed anything, but before long they paid back the one hundred dollars. early in they incorporated. they then owned a fine modern restaurant, had done $ , worth of business in , and had three thousand dollars in the bank. and no one had ever paid a cent into the business. with all this they sell their food at unusually low prices, well cooked, wholesome, and clean. in a larger group determined to have a bakery which came up to their standards. in they had raised enough money to start construction. then they faced their first test their money gave out. undaunted they organized a money raising "army," as they called it, of thirty or forty men. the money was raised. by the time the new bakery was opened they had fourteen hundred members and had raised $ , . the total organization expenses for three years came to $ , less than three-tenths of one per cent for promotion expenses. the new business block was opened in may, . all but the restaurant was under one general manager. he was bonded for $ , . he had had business experience in running a cooperative bank in wisconsin. to him was delegated a large degree of freedom, but he was held strictly accountable to the board of directors. a thorough and comprehensive system of bookkeeping and accounting was installed. each separate business, the bakeries, the pool room, the meat shop, was put on a cost accounting basis and the manager knew just which one was making or losing money. all the branches of the business, however, have made money. over $ , in net earnings, after allowing for interest on the investment, have been made since the business started. last year the bakery did business to the extent of $ , , the meat market and grocery $ , , and the pool room $ , . already the business has outgrown its quarters. a new oven has been added to the bakery. the third floor, which was used exclusively as a pool room, has been invaded and the thirteen pool tables rearranged and put closer together so that more room may be had for bakery products. adjacent land has been purchased so that the building itself may be added to. the membership of the trading association alone is eighteen hundred and forty. the employees of the association work among almost ideal conditions. the twelve bakers are all union men and members of the cooperative association as well. they work seven and one-half hours a day and are paid from forty-five to fifty dollars per week. the light, airy bakery is always kept spotless. adjacent to it is a commodious room with lockers for each man and two shower baths make it easy to keep clean. down on the first floor the retail bakery is so immaculately clean that you would be willing to defy anyone to find one speck of dust in the place. every article of food is under shining glass. the floor is white tiled. but the food is what attracts one. the pies swell out as if about to burst. to look at the bread and rolls makes one hungry and to smell them hungrier still. this, you are told, is because only the purest ingredients are used. many bakers use powdered eggs for baking, commonly imported from china; this cooperative uses only fresh eggs. they buy a better grade of flour than their competitors do. the same thing is true of the meat shop next door. they do not aim to make money on their meat. their sole aim is to sell only the best. this policy has been so popular that the quantity sold the first three months of was almost treble that for the same months in . and the meat store, too, has made substantial net earnings. the two cooperative apartments which lie adjacent to the business block house thirty-two families. the apartments contain five rooms and bath and are thoroughly modern. they are light and airy with high ceilings and hardwood floors. needless to say their tenant-owners keep them in the most immaculate condition. recently a group of business men, several of them builders, went through the buildings and many expressed the wish that they could get similar apartments for three times the money that these cooperators were paying. for the best apartments the rent has recently been raised to $ . per month. but out of this amount the tenant-owner is not only paying all upkeep but is paying off the mortgage at the rate of $ , per year. similar apartments in the locality rent from $ to $ per month. the tenant-owners, of course, run their apartments on the cooperative plan of one vote per member. the members of the finnish cooperative societies of brooklyn are fast becoming independent of the middlemen, for cooperation touches them on many sides. they have learned to serve themselves and they get what they want, honest goods--and clean. cooperatives that failed when one has made mistakes the importance which is attached to them depends upon the gravity of the consequences. this being the case, the stones of cooperatives which follow are worth attention, for, as a result of their mistakes, they are now dead. one of the most pitiful aspects of cooperative failures is that one group after another will go on making the identical mistakes that have brought ruin to others. sometimes it is the result of sheer ignorance, and sometimes of shameful negligence. in either case the result is the same--the stockholders lose their savings and cooperation feels the blow. two years ago the state authorities were called upon to investigate a cooperative that was about to fail. several members made the claim that the officers had defaulted with property of the association. an accountant was called in to examine the books. after considerable coaxing the secretary-treasurer unearthed them and turned them over. they consisted of an old black bag full of all the bills, vouchers and other scrap paper for the previous six months! those were his books. he had sold the store without taking an inventory. when an inventory was finally made it was found that some of the stock had not turned over for a year. on one top shelf two hundred pepper shakers full of pepper stretched half the length of the room. full value had been paid for this dead stock and several hundred dollars to boot for "good will." from the cooperative standpoint the most dangerous thing was that half the directors had become disgruntled and, though remaining on the board, refused to attend meetings. a quorum could not be obtained and for months the president and treasurer had run the business without reference to directors or stockholders. the cooperative society failed and every cent of the four thousand dollars of the cooperators was lost. another cooperative store, this time in the bronx, was taken over by the manager within one year. upon inquiry its directors proudly exhibited its books. it was a beautiful set costing, they said, nearly seventy-five dollars. the store had started in november. for november and the first three days of december everything was kept in good shape. but during the entire next year not an entry had been made. the directors had the books, but the manager had the store. the stockholders lost all their capital. a thriving business was being done by still another cooperative store in new york. at the outset the directors had voted to bond the manager. but the matter was put off and put off. one day the manager disappeared and with him two thousand dollars belonging to the cooperative. after a few months the manager was found, but the money was gone. the loss of the total sum was more than the cooperative could stand, however, and after struggling along for a few months, it closed its doors. a clever organizer two years ago started organizing a cooperative store in new york. on the society's letter heads he had printed a picture of the world and across the world the word "big." he was going to start a whole chain of stores. in three months the first and only store was put into the hands of an assignee and the man left the city. an audit of his accounts showed that he had collected $ , . one-fourth of this had gone for promotion expenses, $ , for rental, fixtures, etc., leaving only $ for operating expenses. where the finns spent three-tenths of one per cent for promotion he had spent twenty-five per cent. this had forced the association to start with so small an operating capital that it was soon badly embarrassed for lack of funds and could do nothing but close its doors. it would be possible to go on with many other illustrations. such failures as these are not really a test of genuine cooperation. any ordinary business with such management would also have failed. but it is significant that most of the recent cooperative failures have been among grocery stores. in this particular business the margin of profit is so small that only the most skillful and economical management can bring success. a recent survey of all the private grocery stores in one city showed that the average annual profit was only $ per grocer. there is no longer any excuse for cooperatives to follow the blind into the pit. there are many sources of information and advice available to cooperatives that should be fully utilized before any money is spent in a cooperative enterprise that promises only failure. false cooperatives the impractical cooperative which fails is bad enough, for it discourages many people from making a second attempt, but the false cooperative is a greater menace to the cooperative movement. the private promoter with his selfish interests rigs up a scheme to look like cooperation, but the actual purpose is to provide a channel whereby thousands of dollars will flow from the pockets of the working people into those of the promoter. inasmuch as new york state has a law which forbids the use of the word cooperation by any concern which is not organized under the cooperative law, such promoters have to be uncommonly shrewd. * * * * * the glynn system. early in a group of three or four private business men in buffalo established a promoting corporation and then set out to organize a cooperative wholesale which was to be a separate concern from their promoting enterprise but was to be controlled by it. the promoters sold shares in the buffalo wholesale to individuals in fifteen or twenty cities and towns all the way across the central part of the state. they opened up six or seven stores and handled goods in large quantities through their wholesale plant. the capital was solicited chiefly through labor unions. elaborate promises were made to prospective shareholders: they were to have a local store in their neighborhood, dividends were to be paid regularly, goods could be bought at prices below those prevailing at the chain stores and the local group was to have local autonomy. as a matter of fact the ultimate control was always in the hands of the few promoters in buffalo. these men had two large sources of revenue from the many transactions carried on. they exacted from each member five dollars "for organizing expenses," and they took a commission on all the business handled through the wholesale. by the spring of some of the members in one or two centers became suspicious, and began an investigation. they found that stores were in many cases grossly mismanaged. one manager had absconded with $ . organizing or promoting expenses in some places were as high as thirty-three per cent. the weekly newspaper was discontinued for lack of funds. some wholesale merchants finally refused to give further credit to the buffalo headquarters and at the end of the first year of operation one of the office force confided to a friend that there was a ten thousand dollar deficit. when bankruptcy was finally declared in midsummer, the promoters were not to be found. the principal organizer, an ardent friend of labor for many years, had been completely duped by these promoters and was left penniless and alone to face hundreds of investors. cooperation was put in disrepute for thousands of men and women in dozens of cities and towns throughout the state. cooperation cannot be developed downward from a central wholesale organization with a corps of organizers, nor will it grow when built upon mercenary motives. in this case organized labor in the state was partly to blame for not heeding the warning of a few groups of cooperators who were aware of the nature of the concern early in its history. but the ultimate blame lies with the individual men and women who joined the corporation without looking carefully into its organization. * * * * * the cooperative society of america. in the cooperative society of america was doing a flourishing business in chicago and vicinity. one of the leaders of the enterprise went to europe in and convinced most of the leading cooperators of those countries that he was the greatest power in the cooperative movement in the united states. by the summer of , the agents of the principal promoter of this scheme, harrison parker, were operating in new york city, and scores of salesmen were covering the various boroughs selling stock. within two weeks all the agencies interested in protecting cooperation were organized to fight this fraud. the matter was placed in the hands of the attorney general and a special deputy appointed to prosecute. the leading newspapers ran an expose of its operations. at this juncture, the chicago headquarters suddenly went into the hands of a receiver and the new york office closed its doors. late in the year federal action was instituted against harrison parker in chicago. the entire business of the so-called cooperative was disclosed to the courts. it was found that , people had invested fifteen millions in this gigantic fraud. here in new york there were many hundreds, if not several thousands, of men and women who lost large sums of money in the ensuing bankruptcy. these people were taken in by the dramatic appeal to their selfish interests. the chicago organization showed them photographs of the "massive buildings" in chicago in which it was doing business, spoke glibly of its banking and insurance departments, and then promised them a share in the spoils if they would pay $ for their certificates which were worth only $ or $ at their face value. that so many people could be duped by these "get-rich-quick" methods is an indication of the amazing lack of cooperative understanding which prevails in the united states. it is a part of the purpose of this bulletin to correct the misunderstanding which prevails because of the fraudulent use of the word cooperation. in the case of a suspected false cooperative, test it by the rochdale principles. if it fails to measure up to them take the matter up directly with the state authorities or the cooperative league of america. how to start a cooperative enterprise in new york state in starting a cooperative enterprise two things must be considered: first, the kind of business to go into and, second, the method of organization. any group desiring to engage in a cooperative venture should first of all, through a committee and by consultation with experts, determine what type of enterprise will serve them most effectively. where competition is unusually keen and profit margins are low, cooperation is less likely to be of service than where the opposite is the case. whatever enterprise is started men experienced in that business should be consulted as to the location of the business, the stock and equipment needed, the operating capital necessary, etc. preliminary organization should likewise be handled by a committee which might estimate the number of persons who would become members, the service each could contribute to the society, etc. meetings should be held to educate the group in both cooperation and the special need of the undertaking. for this purpose many educational bulletins may be obtained from the cooperative league of america and other reliable sources. actual organization of the society consists of incorporation, election of officers, the adoption of by-laws, and the immediate adoption of a sound system of bookkeeping. no action undertaken before incorporation has any legal effect on an incorporated body, so early incorporation is desirable. the new york state law requires that all firms using the word "cooperation" incorporate under one of the three state cooperative laws. outside of farmers' cooperatives practically all cooperative societies are incorporated under the stock law known as article iii. copies of these laws may be obtained from the state department of farms and markets. the department has prepared simple forms for incorporation under this law. when these are filled out and sworn to and the papers filed with the secretary of state and the county clerk, the society may legally begin business. the fee of the secretary of state is $ . a board of directors is named in the incorporation papers and this board, through a paid manager, will transact the society's business. model by-laws, upon which the by-laws controlling the organization may be based, may be obtained from the state department of farms and markets or from the cooperative league of america. the present trend of cooperation there have been significant developments in the cooperative enterprise in new york in the last two years. in the first place while a number of small groceries closed their doors, the larger cooperatives have grown larger and more prosperous. at last there appear to have developed cooperatives which have passed that critical stage connected with the life of a newly-organized business. one of these larger cooperatives, which did over $ , worth of business in , has turned its surplus into its business ever since it started and is now buying more land to erect a second business block in order to take care of expansion which is forced upon it by the growing trade. another cooperative has established two prosperous branches and is now doing a business of a quarter of a million dollars a year. a third, following a profitable year in which its business amounted to $ , , is likewise building a new plant. the balance sheets of each of these associations would be the envy of most business undertakings. a second development is the appearance of a new type of management. a group of younger men and women with a broad background, an intense interest in cooperation and a capacity of growing up with the business is working now to make these cooperatives even more successful. the cooperative movement is likely to grow in pretty close proportion to the ability of these leaders and the men and women they can attach to themselves. heretofore the greatest handicap of the cooperative movement in this country has been the lack of trained and able leaders. a third significant development is the adoption by cooperatives of the best methods of management and accounting. until this had been done the cooperatives had small chance of succeeding. it is probable that cooperatives which lack some of the incentives of the ordinary commercial business will be compelled constantly to adopt the most efficient and advanced type of machinery. in setting this up as a definite standard they will escape the inertia and conservatism that ordinarily characterize large groups, a condition which at the present time is retarding the british cooperative movement. two years ago accurate accounting was an unusual thing among cooperatives. at the present time practically all the cooperatives in the state have their books gone over periodically by trained public accountants. a still further trend in the cooperative development is the extension of the movement into new lines of business. to this extent the failure of cooperative grocery stores has had a beneficial effect since it has forced groups to undertake different kinds of cooperative business. in new york city at the present time cooperatives are engaged in such diverse business as that of restaurants, cafeterias, bakeries, coal associations, pool rooms, printing establishments, meat stores and laundries. this means that the cooperatives are not following tradition but are thinking for themselves and are selecting that enterprise which will serve them most effectively. in going into these businesses where profits are greatest they are not only prospering themselves but they are performing one of their most legitimate functions, that of protecting the consumer from extortionate profits. bibliography books bubnoff, j.v. the cooperative movement in russia. p. manchester, . faber, harold. cooperation in danish agriculture. p. london, . gebhard, hannes. cooperation in finland. p. london, . [a] gide, charles. consumers' cooperative societies (trans. from the french). p. manchester, . [a] harris, emerson p. cooperation, the hope of the consumer. p. new york, macmillan company, . howe, frederick c. denmark, a cooperative commonwealth. p. new york, harcourt, brace and company, . johns hopkins university studies, vol. vi. history of cooperation in the united states. p. baltimore, . nicholson, isa. our story. p. manchester, . powell, g. harold. cooperation in agriculture. p. new york, macmillan company, . redfern, percy. the story of the cooperative wholesale society. p. manchester, . redfern, percy. the consumer's place in society. p. manchester, . smith-gordon and staples. rural reconstruction in ireland. p. london, . [a] sonnischsen, albert. consumers' cooperation. p. new york, macmillan company, . [a] webb, catherine. industrial cooperation. p. manchester, . [a] webb, beatrice and sidney. the consumers' cooperative movement. p. london, . [a] woolf, leonard. cooperation and the future of industry. p. london, . woolf, leonard. socialism and cooperation. p. london, . transactions of american cooperative convention. new york, cooperative league of america, and . people's year book, annual of the english and scottish wholesale societies. london, . [footnote a: best books on the subject.] magazines cooperation. the cooperative league of america, new york, n.y. the canadian cooperator. brantford, ontario, canada. the international cooperative bulletin. great smith street, westminster, london, england. pamphlets historical consumers' cooperation in new york city. bulletin of the division of foods and markets for may, . prepared in cooperation with the consumers' league of new york city. an idea that grew. genevieve m. fox. national board, young women's christian association, lexington avenue, new york city. the following are pamphlets of the cooperative league of america: story of cooperation. british cooperative movement. a baker and what he baked. the control of industry by the people through the cooperative movement. cooperative consumers' movement in the united states. cooperative movement (yiddish). technical. credit union and cooperative store. arthur ham. the russell sage foundation, east nd street, new york city. the following are pamphlets of the department of farms and markets: cooperative housing. article , stock cooperative law. by-laws for cooperative associations organized under article , stock cooperative law. article , membership cooperative law. by-laws for cooperative associations organized under article , membership cooperative law. article a, farmers' cooperative law. by-laws for cooperative associations organized under article a, farmers' cooperative law. the following are pamphlets of the cooperative league of america: how to start and run a rochdale cooperative store. system of store records and accounts. a model constitution and by-laws for a cooperative society. cooperative education. duties of educational committee defined. how to start a cooperative wholesale. why cooperative stores fail. cooperative housebuilding. cooperative housing for europe's homeless. factory folk during the cotton famine*** many thanks to peter moulding who transcribed this etext. email: p e t e r @ m o u l d i n g n a m e . i n f o http://www.mouldingname.info/ .html home-life of the lancashire factory folk during the cotton famine by edwin waugh author of "lancashire sketches", "poems and lancashire songs", "tufts of heather from the northern moors", etc, etc. "hopdance cries in poor tom's belly for two white herrings. croak not, black angel: i have no food for thee." --king lear. contents chap. page i among the blackburn operatives ii " " iii among the preston operatives iv " " v " " vi " " vii " " viii " " ix " " x " " xi " " xii " " xiii " " xiv " " xv among the wigan operatives xvi " " xvii " " xviii " " xix " " xx " " xxi " " xxii an incident by the wayside xxiii wandering minstrels; or, wails of the workless poor letters and speeches upon the cotton famine letters of a lancashire lad mr cobden's speech speech of the earl of derby songs of distress chiefly written during the cotton famine preface the following chapters are reprinted from the columns of the manchester examiner and times, to which paper they were contributed by the author during the year . home life of the lancashire factory folk during the cotton famine. (reprinted from the manchester examiner and times of ) chapter i. among the blackburn operatives "poor tom's a-cold. who gives anything to poor tom?" --king lear. blackburn is one of the towns which has suffered more than the rest in the present crisis, and yet a stranger to the place would not see anything in its outward appearance indicative of this adverse nip of the times. but to any one familiar with the town in its prosperity, the first glance shows that there is now something different on foot there, as it did to me on friday last. the morning was wet and raw, a state of weather in which blackburn does not wear an arcadian aspect, when trade is good. looking round from the front of the railway station, the first thing which struck me was the great number of tall chimneys which were smokeless, and the unusual clearness of the air. compared with the appearance of the town when in full activity, there is now a look of doleful holiday, an unnatural fast-day quietness about everything. there were few carts astir, and not so many people in the streets as usual, although so many are out of work there. several, in the garb of factory operatives, were leaning upon the bridge, and others were trailing along in twos and threes, looking listless and cold; but nobody seemed in a hurry. very little of the old briskness was visible. when the mills are in full work, the streets are busy with heavy loads of twist and cloth; and the workpeople hurry in blithe crowds to and from the factories, full of life and glee, for factory labour is not so hurtful to healthy life as it was thirty years ago, nor as some people think it now, who don't know much about it. there were few people at the shop windows, and fewer inside. i went into some of the shops to buy trifling things of different kinds, making inquiries about the state of trade meanwhile, and, wherever i went, i met with the same gloomy answers. they were doing nothing, taking nothing; and they didn't know how things would end. they had the usual expenses going on, with increasing rates, and a fearfully lessened income, still growing less. and yet they durst not complain; but had to contribute towards the relief of their starving neighbours, sometimes even when they themselves ought to be receiving relief, if their true condition was known. i heard of several shopkeepers who had not taken more across their counters for weeks past than would pay their rents, and some were not doing even so much as that. this is one painful bit of the kernel of life in blackburn just now, which is concealed by the quiet shell of outward appearance. beyond this unusual quietness, a stranger will not see much of the pinch of the times, unless he goes deeper; for the people of lancashire never were remarkable for hawking their troubles much about the world. in the present untoward pass, their deportment, as a whole, has been worthy of themselves, and their wants have been worthily met by their own neighbours. what it may become necessary to do hereafter, does not yet appear. it is a calamity arising, partly from a wise national forbearance, which will repay itself richly in the long run. but, apart from that wide- spread poverty which is already known and relieved, there is, in times like the present, always a certain small proportion, even of the poorest, who will "eat their cake to th' edge," and then starve bitterly before they will complain. these are the flower of our working population; they are of finer stuff than the common staple of human nature. amongst such there must be many touching cases of distress which do not come to light, even by accident. if they did, nobody can doubt the existence of a generous will to relieve them generously. to meet such cases, it is pleasant to learn, however, as i did, that there is a large amount of private benevolence at work in blackburn, industriously searching out the most deserving cases of distress. of course, this kind of benevolence never gets into the statistics of relief, but it will not the less meet with its reward. i heard also of one or two wealthy men whose names do not appear as contributors to the public relief fund, who have preferred to spend considerable sums of money in this private way. in my wanderings about the town i heard also of several instances of poor people holding relief tickets, who, upon meeting with some temporary employment, have returned their tickets to the committee for the benefit of those less fortunate than themselves. waiving for the present all mention of the opposite picture; these things are alike honourable to both rich and poor. a little past noon, on friday, i set out to visit the great stone quarries on the southern edge of the town, where upwards of six hundred of the more robust factory operatives are employed in the lighter work of the quarries. this labour consists principally of breaking up the small stone found in the facings of the solid rock, for the purpose of road-mending and the like. some, also, are employed in agricultural work, on the ground belonging to the fine new workhouse there. these factory operatives, at the workhouse grounds, and in the quarries, are paid one shilling a day--not much, but much better than the bread of idleness; and for the most part, the men like it better, i am told. the first quarry i walked into was the one known by the name of "hacking's shorrock delph." there i sauntered about, looking at the scene. it was not difficult to distinguish the trained quarrymen from the rest. the latter did not seem to be working very hard at their new employment, and it can hardly be expected that they should, considering the great difference between it and their usual labour. leaning on their spades and hammers, they watched me with a natural curiosity, as if wondering whether i was a new ganger, or a contractor come to buy stone. there were men of all ages amongst them, from about eighteen years old to white-headed men past sixty. most of them looked healthy and a little embrowned by recent exposure to the weather; and here and there was a pinched face which told its own tale. i got into talk with a quiet, hardy-looking man, dressed in soil-stained corduroy. he was a kind of overlooker. he told me that there were from eighty to ninety factory hands employed in that quarry. "but," said he, "it varies a bit, yo known. some on 'em gets knocked up neaw an' then, an' they han to stop a-whoam a day or two; an' some on 'em connot ston gettin' weet through--it mays 'em ill; an' here an' theer one turns up at doesn't like the job at o'--they'd rayther clem. there is at's both willin' an' able; thoose are likely to get a better job, somewheer. there's othersome at's willin' enough, but connot ston th' racket. they dun middlin', tak 'em one wi' another, an' considerin' that they're noan use't to th' wark. th' hommer fo's leet wi' 'em; but we dunnot like to push 'em so mich, yo known--for what's a shillin' a day? aw know some odd uns i' this delph at never tastes fro mornin' till they'n done at neet,--an' says nought abeawt it, noather. but they'n families. beside, fro wake lads, sick as yon, at's bin train't to nought but leet wark, an' a warm place to wortch in, what con yo expect? we'n had a deeal o' bother wi 'em abeawt bein' paid for weet days, when they couldn't wortch. they wur not paid for weet days at th' furst; an' they geet it into their yeds at shorrock were to blame. shorrock's th' paymaister, under th' guardians, but, then, he nobbut went accordin' to orders, yo known. at last, th' board sattle't that they mut be paid for weet and dry,- -an' there's bin quietness sin'. they wortchen fro eight till five; an', sometimes, when they'n done, they drilln o' together i'th road yon--just like sodiurs--an' then they walken away i' procession. but stop a bit;--just go in yon, an' aw'll come to yo in a two-thre minutes." he returned, accompanied by the paymaster, who offered to conduct me through the other delphs. running over his pay-book, he showed me, by figures opposite each man's name, that, with not more than a dozen exceptions, they had all families of children, ranging in number from two to nine. he then pointed out the way over a knoll, to the next quarry, which is called "hacking's gillies' delph," saying that he would follow me thither. i walked on, stopping for him on the nearest edge of the quarry, which commanded a full view of the men below. they seemed to be waiting very hard for something just then, and they stared at me, as the rest had done; but in a few minutes, just as i began to hear the paymaster's footsteps behind me, the man at the nearest end of the quarry called "shorrock!" and a sudden activity woke up along the line. shorrock then pointed to a corner of the delph where two of these poor fellows had been killed the week before, by stones thrown out from a fall of earth. we went down through the delph, and up the slope, by the place where the older men were at work in the poorhouse grounds. crossing the darwen road, we passed the other delphs, where the scene was much the same as in the rest, except that more men were employed there. as we went on, one poor fellow was trolling a snatch of song, as he hammered away at the stones. "thir't merry, owd mon," said i, in passing. "well," replied he, "cryin' 'll do nought, wilt?" and then, as i walked away, he shouted after me, with a sort of sad smile, "it's a poor heart at never rejoices, maister." leaving the quarries, we waited below, until the men had struck work for the day, and the whole six hundred came trooping down the road, looking hard at me as they went by, and stopping here and there, in whispering groups. the paymaster told me that one-half of the men's wages was paid to them in tickets for bread--in each case given to the shopkeeper to whom the receiver of the ticket owed most money-- the other half was paid to them in money every saturday. before returning to town i learnt that twenty of the more robust men, who had worked well for their shilling a day in the quarries, had been picked out by order of the board of guardians, to be sent to the scene of the late disaster, in lincolnshire, where employment had been obtained for them, at the rate of s. d. per day. they were to muster at six o'clock next morning to breakfast at the soup kitchen, after which they were to leave town by the seven o'clock train. i resolved to be up and see them off. on retiring to bed at the "old bull," a good-tempered fellow, known by the name of "stockings," from the fact of his being "under-boots," promised to waken me by six o'clock; and so i ended the day, after watching "stockings" write " " on the soles of my boots, with a lump of chalk. "stockings" might as well have kept his bed on saturday morning. my room was close to the ancient tower, left standing in the parish churchyard; and, at five o'clock, the beautiful bells of st marie's struck up, filling my little chamber with that heart-stirring music, which, as somebody has well said, "sounds like a voice from the middle ages." i could not make out what all this early melody meant; for i had forgotten that it was the queen's birthday. the old tower was in full view from my bed, and i lay there a while looking at it, and listening to the bells, and dreaming of whalley abbey, and of old features of life in picturesque blackburnshire, now passed away. i felt no more inclination for sleep; and when the knock came to my door, i was dressed and ready. there were more people in the streets than i expected, and the bells were still ringing merrily. i found the soup kitchen a lively scene. the twenty men were busy at breakfast, and there was a crowd waiting outside to see them off. there were several members of the committee in the kitchen, and amongst them the rev. joseph v. meaney, catholic priest, went to and fro in cheerful chat. after breakfast, each man received four pounds of bread and one pound of cheese for the day's consumption. in addition to this, each man received one shilling; to which a certain active member of the committee added threepence in each case. another member of the committee then handed a letter to each of the only three or four out of the twenty who were able to write, desiring each man to write back to the committee,--not all at once, but on different days, after their arrival. after this, he addressed them in the following words:--"now, i hope that every man will conduct himself so as to be a credit to himself and an honour to blackburn. this work may not prove to be such as you will like, and you must not expect it to be so. but, do your best; and, if you find that there is any chance of employment for more men of the same class as yourselves, you must write and let us know, so as to relieve the distress of others who are left behind you. there will be people waiting to meet you before you get to your journey's end; and, i have no doubt, you will meet with every fair encouragement. one-half of your wages will be paid over to each man there; the other half will be forwarded here, for the benefit of your families, as you all know. now go, and do your duty to the best of your power, and you will never regret it. i wish you all success." at half-past six the men left the kitchen for the station. i lingered behind to get a basin of the soup, which i relished mightily. at the station i found a crowd of wives, children, and friends of those who were going away. amongst the rest, dr rushton, the vicar of blackburn, and his lady, had come to see them off. here a sweet little young wife stood on the edge of the platform, with a pretty bareheaded child in her arms, crying as if her heart would break. her husband now and then spoke a consoling word to her from the carriage window. they had been noticed sharing their breakfast together at the kitchen. a little farther on, a poor old irishwoman was weeping bitterly. the rev. mr meaney went up to her, and said, "now, mrs davis, i thought you had more sense than to cry." "oh," said a young irishwoman, standing beside her, "sure, she's losin' her son from her." "well," said the clergyman, cheeringly, "it's not your husband, woman." "ah, thin," replied the young woman, "sure, it's all she has left of him." on the door of one compartment of the carriage there was the following written label:--"fragile, with care." " how's this, dennis?" said the catholic priest to a young fellow nearest the door; "i suppose it's because you're all irishmen inside there." in another compartment the lads kept popping their heads out, one after another, shouting farewells to their relatives and friends, after which they struck up, "there's a good time coming!" one wag of a fellow suddenly called out to his wife on the platform, "aw say, molly, just run for thoose tother breeches o' mine. they'n come in rarely for weet weather." one of his companions replied, "thae knows hoo cannot get 'em, jack. th' pop-shops are noan oppen yet." one hearty cheer arose as the train started, after which the crowd dribbled away from the platform. i returned to the soup kitchen, where the wives, children, and mothers of the men who had gone were at breakfast in the inner compartment of the kitchen. on the outer side of the partition five or six pinched-looking men had straggled in to get their morning meal. when they had all done but one, who was left reared against the wooden partition finishing his soup, the last of those going away turned round and said, "sam, theaw'rt noan as tickle abeawt thi mate as thae use't to be." "naw," replied the other, "it'll not do to be nice these times, owd mon. but, thae use't to think thisel' aboon porritch, too, jone. aw'll shake honds wi' tho i' thae's a mind, owd dog." "get forrud wi' that stuff, an' say nought," answered jone. i left sam at his soup, and went up into the town. in the course of the day i sat some hours in the boardroom, listening to the relief cases; but of this, and other things, i will say more in my next. chapter ii. a little after ten o'clock on saturday forenoon, i went into the boardroom, in the hope of catching there some glimpses of the real state of the poor in blackburn just now, and i was not disappointed; for amongst the short, sad complainings of those who may always be heard of in such a place, there was many a case presented itself which gave affecting proof of the pressure of the times. although it is not here where one must look for the most enduring and unobtrusive of those who suffer; nor for the poor traders, who cannot afford to wear their distress upon their sleeves, so long as things will hold together with them at all; nor for that rare class which is now living upon the savings of past labour--yet, there were many persons, belonging to one or other of these classes, who applied for relief evidently because they had been driven unwillingly to this last bitter haven by a stress of weather which they could not bide any longer. there was a large attendance of the guardians; and they certainly evinced a strong wish to inquire carefully into each case, and to relieve every case of real need. the rate of relief given is this (as you will have seen stated by mr farnall elsewhere):--"to single able bodied men, s. for three days' work. to the man who had a wife and two children, s. for six days' work, and he would have s. d. added to the s., and perhaps a pair of clogs for one of his children. to a man who had a wife and four children, s. was paid for six days' labour, and in addition s., and sometimes s. d., was given to him, and also bits of clothing and other things which he absolutely wanted." sitting at that board i saw some curious--some painful things. it was, as one of the board said to me, "hard work being there." in one case, a poor, pale, clean-looking, and almost speechless woman presented herself. her thin and sunken eyes, as well as her known circumstances, explained her want sufficiently, and i heard one of the guardians whisper to another, "that's a bad case. if it wasn't for private charity they'd die of starvation." "yes," replied another; "that woman's punished, i can see." now and then a case came on in which the guardians were surprised to see a man ask for relief whom everybody had supposed to be in good circumstances. the first applicant, after i entered the room, was a man apparently under forty years of age, a beerhouse keeper, who had been comparatively well off until lately. the tide of trouble had whelmed him over. his children were all factory operatives, and all out of work; and his wife was ill. "what; are you here, john?" said the chairman to a decent-looking man who stepped up in answer to his name. the poor fellow blushed with evident pain, and faltered out his story in few and simple words, as if ashamed that anything on earth should have driven him at last to such an extremity as this. in another case, a clean old decrepid man presented himself. "what's brought you here, joseph?" said the chairman. "why; aw've nought to do,--nor nought to tak to." "what's your daughter, ellen, doing, joseph?" "hoo's eawt o' wark." "and what's your wife doing?" "hoo's bin bed-fast aboon five year." the old man was relieved at once; but, as he walked away, he looked hard at his ticket, as if it wasn't exactly the kind of thing; and, turning round, he said, "couldn't yo let me be a sweeper i'th streets, istid, mr eccles?" a clean old woman came up, with a snow- white nightcap on her head. "well, mary; what do you want?" "aw could like yo to gi mo a bit o' summat, mr eccles,--for aw need it" "well, but you've some lodgers, haven't you, mary?" "yigh; aw've three." "well; what do they pay you?" "they pay'n mo nought. they'n no wark,--an' one connot turn 'em eawt." this was all quite true. "well, but you live with your son; don't you?" continued the chairman. "nay," replied the old woman, "he lives wi' me; an' he's eawt o' wark, too. aw could like yo to do a bit o' summat for us. we're hard put to 't." "don't you think she would be better in the workhouse?" said one of the guardians. "oh, no," replied another; "don't send th' owd woman there. let her keep her own little place together, if she can." another old woman presented herself, with a threadbare shawl drawn closely round her gray head. "well, ann," said the chairman, "there's nobody but yourself and your john, is there?" "nawe." "what age are you?" "aw'm seventy." "seventy!" "aye, i am." "well, and what age is your john?" "he's gooin' i' seventy-four." "where is he, ann ?" "well, aw laft him deawn i' th' street yon; gettin' a load o' coals in." there was a murmur of approbation around the board; and the old woman was sent away relieved and thankful. there were many other affecting cases of genuine distress arising from the present temporary severity of the times. several applicants were refused relief on its being proved that they were already in receipt of considerably more income than the usual amount allowed by the board to those who have nothing to depend upon. of course there are always some who, having lost that fine edge of feeling to which this kind of relief is revolting, are not unwilling to live idly upon the rates as much and as long as possible at any time, and who will even descend to pitiful schemes to wring from this source whatever miserable income they can get. there are some, even, with whom this state of mind seems almost hereditary; and these will not be slow to take advantage of the present state of affairs. such cases, however, are not numerous among the people of lancashire. it was a curious thing to see the different demeanours and appearances of the applicants--curious to hear the little stories of their different troubles. there were three or four women whose husbands were away in the militia; others whose husbands had wandered away in search of work weeks ago, and had never been heard of, since. there were a few very fine, intelligent countenances among them. there were many of all ages, clean in person, and bashful in manner, with their poor clothing put into the tidiest possible trim; others were dirty, and sluttish, and noisy of speech, as in the case of one woman, who, after receiving her ticket for relief, partly in money and partly in kind, whipped a pair of worn clogs from under her shawl, and cried out, "aw mun ha' some clogs afore aw go, too; look at thoose! they're a shame to be sin!" clogs were freely given; and, in several cases, they were all that were asked for. in three or four instances, the applicants said, after receiving other relief, "aw wish yo'd gi' me a pair o' clogs, mr eccles. aw've had to borrow these to come in." one woman pleaded hard for two pair, saying, "yon chylt's bar-fuut; an' he's witchod (wet-shod), an' as ill as he con be." "who's witchod?" asked the chairman. "my husban' is," replied the woman; "an' he connot ston it just neaw, yo mun let him have a pair iv yo con." "give her two pairs of clogs," said the chairman. another woman took her clog off, and held it up, saying, "look at that. we're o' walkin' o'th floor; an' smoor't wi' cowds." one decent-looking old body, with a starved face, applied. the chairman said, "why, what's your son doing now? has he catched no rabbits lately?" "nay, aw dunnot know 'at he does. aw get nought; an' it's me at wants summat, mr eccles," replied the old woman, in a tremulous tone, with the water rising in her eyes. "well, come; we mustn't punish th' owd woman for her son," said one of the guardians. various forms of the feebleness of age appeared before the board that day. "what's your son john getting, mary?" said the chairman to one old woman. "whor?" replied she. "what's your son john getting?" the old woman put her hand up to her ear, and answered, "aw'm rayther deaf. what say'n yo?" it turned out that her son was taken ill, and they were relieved. in the course of inquiries i found that the working people of blackburn, as elsewhere in lancashire, nickname their workshops as well as themselves. the chairman asked a girl where she worked at last, and the girl replied, "at th' 'puff-an'-dart.'" "and what made you leave there?" "whau, they were woven up." one poor, pale fellow, a widower, said he had "worched" a bit at "bang-the-nation," till he was taken ill, and then they had "shopped his place," that is, they had given his work to somebody else. another, when asked where he had been working, replied, "at se'nacre bruck (seven-acre brook), wheer th' wild monkey were catched." it seems that an ourang-outang which once escaped from some travelling menagerie, was re-taken at this place. i sat until the last application had been disposed of, which was about half-past two in the afternoon. the business had taken up nearly four hours and a half. i had a good deal of conversation with people who were intimately acquainted with the town and its people; and i was informed that, in spite of the struggle for existence which is now going on, and not unlikely to continue for some time, there are things happening amongst the working people there, which do not seem wise, under existing circumstances. the people are much better informed now than they were twenty years ago; but, still, something of the old blindness lingers amongst them, here and there. for instance, at one mill, in blackburn, where the operatives were receiving s. a week for two looms, the proprietor offered to give his workpeople three looms each, with a guarantee for constant employment until the end of next august, if they would accept one and a quarter pence less for the weaving of each piece. this offer, if taken, would have raised their wages to an average of s. d. a week. it was declined, however, and they are now working, as before, only on two looms each, with uncertainty of employment, at lls. a week. perhaps it is too much to expect that such things should die out all at once. but i heard also that the bricklayers' labourers at blackburn struck work last week for an advance of wages from s. d. a day to s. a day. this seems very untimely, to say the least of it. apart from these things, there is, amongst all classes, a kind of cheery faith in the return of good times, although nobody can see what they may have to go through yet, before the clouds break. it is a fact that there are more than forty new places ready, or nearly ready, for starting, in and about blackburn, when trade revives. after dinner, i walked down darwen street. stopping to look at a music-seller's window, a rough-looking fellow, bareheaded and without coat, came sauntering across the road from a shop opposite. as he came near he shouted out, "nea then heaw go!" i turned round; and, seeing that i was a stranger, he said, "oh; aw thought it had bin another chap." "well," said i, "heaw are yo gettin' on, these times?" "divulish ill," replied he. "th' little maisters are runnin' a bit, some three, some four days. t'other are stopt o' together, welly. . . . it's thin pikein' for poor folk just neaw. but th' shopkeepers an' th' ale-heawses are in for it as ill as ony mak. there'll be crashin' amung some on 'em afore lung." after this, i spent a few minutes in the market-place, which was "slacker" than usual, as might be expected, for, as the scotch proverb says, "sillerless folk gang fast through the market." later on, i went up to bank top, on the eastern edge of the town, where many factory operatives reside. of course, there is not any special quarter where they are clustered in such a manner as to show their condition as a whole. they are scattered all round the town, living as near as possible to the mills in which they are employed. here i talked with some of the small shopkeepers, and found them all more or less troubled with the same complaint. one owner of a provision shop said to me, "wi'n a deeal o' brass owin'; but it's mostly owin' by folk at'll pay sometime. an' then, th' part on 'em are doin' a bit yo known; an' they bring'n their trifle o' ready brass to us; an' so we're trailin' on. but folk han to trust us a bit for their stuff, dunnot yo see,--or else it would be 'wo-up!' soon." i heard of one beerhouse, the owner of which had only drawn ls. d. during a whole week. his children were all factory operatives, and all out of work. they were very badly off, and would have been very glad of a few soup tickets; but, as the man said, "who'd believe me if aw were to go an' ax for relief?" i was told of two young fellows, unemployed factory hands, meeting one day, when one said to the other, "thae favvurs hungry, jone." "nay, aw's do yet, for that," replied jone. "well," continued the other; "keep thi heart eawt of thi clogs, iv thi breeches dun eawt-thrive thi carcass a bit, owd lad." "aye," said jone, "but what mun i do when my clogs gi'n way?" "whaw, thae mun go to th' guardians; they'n gi tho a pair in a minute." "nay, by __," replied jone, "aw'll dee furst!" in the evening, i ran down to the beautiful suburb called pleasington, in the hope of meeting a friend of mine there; not finding him, i came away by the eight o'clock train. the evening was splendid, and it was cheering to see the old bounty of nature gushing forth again in such unusual profusion and beauty, as if in pitiful charity for the troubles of mankind. i never saw the country look so rich in its spring robes as it does now. chapter iii. among the preston operatives. proud preston, or priest-town, on the banks of the beautiful ribble, is a place of many quaint customs, and of great historic fame. its character for pride is said to come from the fact of its having been, in the old time, a favourite residence of the local nobles and gentry, and of many penniless folk with long pedigrees. it was here that richard arkwright shaved chins at a halfpenny each, in the meantime working out his bold and ingenious schemes, with patient faith in their ultimate success. it was here, too, that the teetotal movement first began, with anderson for its rhyme-smith. preston has had its full share of the changeful fortunes of england, and, like our motherland, it has risen strongly out of them all. war's mad havoc has swept over it in many a troubled period of our history. plague, pestilence, and famine have afflicted it sorely; and it has suffered from trade riots, "plug-drawings," panics, and strikes of most disastrous kinds. proud preston--the town of the stanleys and the hoghtons, and of "many a crest that is famous in story"--the town where silly king jamie disported himself a little, with his knights and nobles, during the time of his ruinous visit to hoghton tower,--proud preston has seen many a black day. but, from the time when roman sentinels kept watch and ward in their old camp at walton, down by the ribble side, it has never seen so much wealth and so much bitter poverty together as now. the streets do not show this poverty; but it is there. looking from avenham walks, that glorious landscape smiles in all the splendour of a rich spring- tide. in those walks the nursemaids and children, and dainty folk, are wandering as usual airing their curls in the fresh breeze; and only now and then a workless operative trails by with chastened look. the wail of sorrow is not heard in preston market-place; but destitution may be found almost anywhere there just now, cowering in squalid corners, within a few yards of plenty--as i have seen it many a time this week. the courts and alleys behind even some of the main streets swarm with people who have hardly a whole nail left to scratch themselves with. before attempting to tell something of what i saw whilst wandering amongst the poor operatives of preston, i will say at once, that i do not intend to meddle with statistics. they have been carefully gathered, and often given elsewhere, and there is no need for me to repeat them. but, apart from these, the theme is endless, and full of painful interest. i hear on all hands that there is hardly any town in lancashire suffering so much as preston. the reason why the stroke has fallen so heavily here, lies in the nature of the trade. in the first place, preston is almost purely a cotton town. there are two or three flax mills, and two or three ironworks, of no great extent; but, upon the whole, there is hardly any variety of employment there to lighten the disaster which has befallen its one absorbing occupation. there is comparatively little weaving in preston; it is a town mostly engaged in spinning. the cotton used there is nearly all what is called "middling american," the very kind which is now most scarce and dear. the yarns of preston are known by the name of "blackburn counts." they range from 's up to 's, and they enter largely into the manufacture of goods for the india market. these things partly explain why preston is more deeply overshadowed by the particular gloom of the times than many other places in lancashire. about half-past nine on tuesday morning last, i set out with an old acquaintance to call upon a certain member of the relief committee, in george's ward. he is the manager of a cotton mill in that quarter, and he is well known and much respected among the working people. when we entered the mill-yard, all was quiet there, and the factory was still and silent. but through the office window we could see the man we wanted. he was accompanied by one of the proprietors of the mill, turning over the relief books of the ward. i soon found that he had a strong sense of humour, as well as a heart welling over with tenderness. he pointed to some of the cases in his books. the first was that of an old man, an overlooker of a cotton mill. his family was thirteen in number; three of the children were under ten years of age; seven of the rest were factory operatives; but the whole family had been out of work for several months. when in full employment the joint earnings of the family amounted to s. a week; but, after struggling on in the hope of better times, and exhausting the savings of past labour, they had been brought down to the receipt of charity at last, and for sixteen weeks gone by the whole thirteen had been living upon s. a week from the relief fund. they had no other resource. i went to see them at their own house afterwards, and it certainly was a pattern of cleanliness, with the little household gods there still. seeing that house, a stranger would never dream that the family was living on an average income of less than sixpence a head per week. but i know how hard some decent folk will struggle with the bitterest poverty before they will give in to it. the old man came in whilst i was there. he sat down in one corner, quietly tinkering away at something he had in his hands. his old corduroy trousers were well patched, and just new washed. he had very little to say to us, except that "he could like to get summat to do; for he wur tired o' walkin' abeawt." another case was that of a poor widow woman, with five young children. this family had been driven from house to house, by increasing necessity, till they had sunk at last into a dingy little hovel, up a dark court, in one of the poorest parts of the town, where they huddled together about a fireless grate to keep one another warm. they had nothing left of the wreck of their home but two rickety chairs, and a little deal table reared against the wall, because one of the legs was gone. in this miserable hole-- which i saw afterwards--her husband died of sheer starvation, as was declared by the jury on the inquest. the dark, damp hovel where they had crept to was scarcely four yards square; and the poor woman pointed to one corner of the floor, saying, "he dee'd i' that nook." he died there, with nothing to lie upon but the ground, and nothing to cover him, in that fireless hovel. his wife and children crept about him, there, to watch him die; and to keep him as warm as they could. when the relief committee first found this family out, the entire clothing of the family of seven persons weighed eight pounds, and sold for fivepence, as rags. i saw the family afterwards, at their poor place; and will say more about them hereafter. he told me of many other cases of a similar kind. but, after agreeing to a time when we should visit them personally, we set out together to see the "stone yard," where there are many factory hands at work under the board of guardians. the "stone yard" is close by the preston and lancaster canal. here there are from one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty, principally young men, employed in breaking, weighing, and wheeling stone, for road mending. the stones are of a hard kind of blue boulder, gathered from the land between kendal and lancaster. the "labour master" told me that there were thousands of tons of these boulders upon the land between kendal and lancaster. a great deal of them are brought from a place called "tewhitt field," about seven mile on "t' other side o' lancaster." at the "stone yard" it is all piece-work, and the men can come and go when they like. as one of the guardians told me, "they can oather sit an' break 'em, or kneel an' break 'em, or lie deawn to it, iv they'n a mind." the men can choose whether they will fill three tons of the broken stone, and wheel it to the central heap, for a shilling, or break one ton for a shilling. the persons employed here are mostly "lads an' leet- timber't chaps." the stronger men are sent to work upon preston moor. there are great varieties of health and strength amongst them. "beside," as the labour master said, "yo'd hardly believe what a difference there it i'th wark o' two men wortchin' at the same heap, sometimes. there's a great deal i'th breaker, neaw; some on 'em's more artful nor others. they finden out that they can break 'em as fast again at after they'n getten to th' wick i'th inside. i have known an' odd un or two, here, that could break four ton a day,--an' many that couldn't break one,--but then, yo' know, th' men can only do accordin' to their ability. there is these differences, and there always will be." as we stood talking together, one of my friends said that he wished "radical jack" had been there. the latter gentleman is one of the guardians of the poor, and superintendent of the "stone yard." the men are naturally jealous of misrepresentation; and, the other day, as "radical jack" was describing the working of the yard to a gentleman who had come to look at the scene, some of the men overheard his words, and, misconceiving their meaning, gathered around the superintendent, clamorously protesting against what he had been saying. "he's lying!" said one. "look at these honds!" cried another; "wi'n they ever be fit to go to th' factory wi' again?" others turned up the soles of their battered shoon, to show their cut and stockingless feet. they were pacified at last; but, after the superintendent had gone away, some of the men said much and more, and "if ever he towd ony moor lies abeawt 'em, they'd fling him into th' cut." the "labour master" told me there was a large wood shed for the men to shelter in when rain came on. as we were conversing, one of my friends exclaimed, "he's here now!" "who's here?" "radical jack." the superintendent was coming down the road. he told me some interesting things, which i will return to on another occasion. but our time was up. we had other places to see. as we came away, three old irishwomen leaned against the wall at the corner of the yard, watching the men at work inside. one of them was saying, "thim guardians is the awfullest set o' min in the world! a man had better be transpoorted than come under 'em. an' thin, they'll try you, an' try you, as if you was goin' to be hanged." the poor old soul had evidently only a narrow view of the necessities and difficulties which beset the labours of the board of guardians at a time like this. on our way back to town one of my friends told me that he "had met a sexton the day before, and had asked him how trade was with him. the sexton replied that it was "varra bad--nowt doin', hardly." "well, how's that?" asked the other. "well, thae sees," answered the sexton, "poverty seldom dees. there's far more kilt wi' o'er-heytin' an' o'er-drinkin' nor there is wi' bein' pinched." chapter iv. leaving the "stone yard," to fulfil an engagement in another part of the town, we agreed to call upon three or four poor folk, who lived by the way; and i don't know that i could do better than say something about what i saw of them. as we walked along, one of my companions told me of an incident which happened to one of the visitors in another ward, a few days before. in the course of his round, this visitor called upon a certain destitute family which was under his care, and he found the husband sitting alone in the house, pale and silent. his wife had been "brought to bed" two or three days before; and the visitor inquired how she was getting on. "hoo's very ill," said the husband. "and the child," continued the visitor, "how is it?" "it's deeod," replied the man; "it dee'd yesterday." he then rose, and walked slowly into the next room, returning with a basket in his hands, in which the dead child was decently laid out. "that's o' that's laft on it neaw," said the poor fellow. then, putting the basket upon the floor, he sat down in front of it, with his head between his hands, looking silently at the corpse. such things as these were the theme of our conversation as we went along, and i found afterwards that every visitor whom it was my privilege to meet, had some special story of distress to relate, which came within his own appointed range of action. in my first flying visit to that great melancholy field, i could only glean such things as lay nearest to my hand, just then; but wherever i went, i heard and saw things which touchingly testify what noble stuff the working population of lancashire, as a whole, is made of. one of the first cases we called upon, after leaving the "stone yard," was that of a family of ten--man and wife, and eight children. four of the children were under ten years of age,--five were capable of working; and, when the working part of the family was in full employment, their joint earnings amounted to s. per week. but, in this case, the mother's habitual ill-health had been a great expense in the household for several years. this family belonged to a class of operatives--a much larger class than people unacquainted with the factory districts are likely to suppose--a class of operatives which will struggle, in a dumb, enduring way, to the death, sometimes, before they will sacrifice that "immediate jewel of their souls"-- their old independence, and will keep up a decent appearance to the very last. these suffer more than the rest; for, in addition to the pains of bitter starvation, they feel a loss which is more afflicting to them even than the loss of food and furniture ; and their sufferings are less heard of than the rest, because they do not like to complain. this family of ten persons had been living, during the last nine weeks, upon relief amounting to s. a week. when we called, the mother and one or two of her daughters were busy in the next room, washing their poor bits of well-kept clothing. the daughters kept out of sight, as if ashamed. it was a good kind of cottage, in a clean street, called "maudland bank," and the whole place had a tidy, sweet look, though it was washing-day. the mother told me that she had been severely afflicted with seven successive attacks of inflammation, and yet, in spite of her long-continued ill-health, and in spite of the iron teeth of poverty which had been gnawing at them so long, for the first time, i have rarely seen a more frank and cheerful countenance than that thin matron's, as she stood there, wringing her clothes, and telling her little story. the house they lived in belonged to their late employer, whose mill stopped some time ago. we asked her how they managed to pay the rent, and she said, "why, we dunnot pay it; we cannot pay it, an' he doesn't push us for it. aw guess he knows he'll get it sometime. but we owe'd a deal o' brass beside that. just look at this shop book. aw'm noan freetend ov onybody seein' my acceawnts. an' then, there's a great lot o' doctor's-bills i' that pot, theer. thoose are o' for me. there'll ha' to be some wark done afore things can be fotched up again. . . . eh; aw'll tell yo what, william, (this was addressed to the visitor,) it went ill again th' grain wi' my husband to goo afore th' board. an' when he did goo, he wouldn't say so mich. yo known, folk doesn't like brastin' off abeawt theirsel' o' at once, at a shop like that. . . . aw think sometimes it's very weel that four ov eawrs are i' heaven,--we'n sich hard tewin' (toiling), to poo through wi' tother, just neaw. but, aw guess it'll not last for ever." as we came away, talking of the reluctance shown by the better sort of working people to ask for relief, or even sometimes to accept it when offered to them, until thoroughly starved to it, i was told of a visitor calling upon a poor woman in another ward; no application had been made for relief, but some kind neighbour had told the committee that the woman and her husband were "ill off." the visitor, finding that they were perishing for want, offered the woman some relief tickets for food; but the poor soul began to cry, and said; "eh, aw dar not touch 'em; my husban' would sauce me so! aw dar not take 'em; aw should never yer the last on't!" when we got to the lower end of hope street, my guide stopped suddenly, and said, "oh, this is close to where that woman lives whose husband died of starvation. "leading a few yards up the by-street, he turned into a low, narrow entry, very dark and damp. two turns more brought us to a dirty, pent-up corner, where a low door stood open. we entered there. it was a cold, gloomy-looking little hovel. in my allusion to the place last week i said it was "scarcely four yards square." it is not more than three yards square. there was no fire in the little rusty grate. the day was sunny, but no sunshine could ever reach that nook, nor any fresh breezes disturb the pestilent vapours that harboured there, festering in the sluggish gloom. in one corner of the place a little worn and broken stair led up to a room of the same size above, where, i was told, there was now some straw for the family to sleep upon. but the only furniture in the house, of any kind, was two rickety chairs and a little broken deal table, reared against the stairs, because one leg was gone. a quiet- looking, thin woman, seemingly about fifty years of age, sat there, when we went in. she told us that she had buried five of her children, and that she had six yet alive, all living with her in that poor place. they had no work, no income whatever, save what came from the relief committee. five of the children were playing in and out, bare-footed, and, like the mother, miserably clad; but they seemed quite unconscious that anything ailed them. i never saw finer children anywhere. the eldest girl, about fourteen, came in whilst we were there, and she leaned herself bashfully against the wall for a minute or two, and then slunk slyly out again, as if ashamed of our presence. the poor widow pointed to the cold corner where her husband died lately. she said that "his name was tim pedder. his fadder name was timothy, an' his mudder name was mary. he was a driver (a driver of boat-horses on the canal); but he had bin oot o' wark a lang time afore he dee'd." i found in this case, as in some others, that the poor body had not much to say about her distress; but she did not need to say much. my guide told me that when he first called upon the family, in the depth of last winter, he found the children all clinging round about their mother in the cold hovel, trying in that way to keep one another warm. the time for my next appointment was now hard on, and we hurried towards the shop in fishergate, kept by the gentleman i had promised to meet. he is an active member of the relief committee, and a visitor in george's ward. we found him in. he had just returned from the "cheese fair," at lancaster. my purpose was to find out what time on the morrow we could go together to see some of the cases he was best acquainted with. but, as the evening was not far spent, he proposed that we should go at once to see a few of those which were nearest. we set out together to walker's court, in friargate. the first place we entered was at the top of the little narrow court. there we found a good-tempered irish-woman sitting without fire, in her feverish hovel. "well, missis," said the visitor, "how is your husband getting on?" "ah, well, now, mr. t----," replied she, "you know, he's only a delicate little man, an' a tailor; an' he wint to work on the moor, an' he couldn't stand it. sure, it was draggin' the bare life out of him. so, he says to me, one morning, "catharine," says he, "i'll lave off this a little while, till i see will i be able to get a job o' work at my own trade; an' maybe god will rise up some thin' to put a dud o' clothes on us all, an' help us to pull through till the black time is over us." so, i told him to try his luck, any way; for he was killin' himself entirely on the moor. an' so he did try; for there's not an idle bone in that same boy's skin. but, see this, now; there's nothin' in the world to be had to do just now--an' a dale too many waitin' to do it--so all he got by the change was losin' his work on the moor. there is himself, an' me, an' the seven childer. five o' the childer is under tin year old. we are all naked; an' the house is bare; an' our health is gone wi' the want o' mate. sure it wasn't in the likes o' this we wor livin' when times was good." three of the youngest children were playing about on the floor. "that's a very fine lad," said i, pointing to one of them. the little fellow blushed, and smiled, and then became very still and attentive. "ah, thin," said his mother, "that villain's the boy for tuckin' up soup! the lord be about him, an' save him alive to me,--the crayter ! . . . an' there's little curly there,-- the rogue! sure he'll take as much soup as any wan o' them. maybe he wouldn't laugh to see a big bowl forninst him this day." "it's very well they have such good spirits," said the visitor. "so it is," replies the woman, "so it is, for god knows it's little else they have to keep them warm thim bad times." chapter v. the next house we called at in walker's court was much like the first in appearance--very little left but the walls, and that little, such as none but the neediest would pick up, if it was thrown out to the streets. the only person in the place was a pale, crippled woman; her sick head, lapped in a poor white clout, swayed languidly to and fro. besides being a cripple, she had been ill six years, and now her husband, also, was taken ill. he had just crept off to fetch medicine for the two. we did not stop here long. the hand of the ancient master was visible in that pallid face; those sunken eyes, so full of deathly langour, seemed to be wandering about in dim, flickering gazes, upon the confines of an unknown world. i think that woman will soon be "where the weary are at rest." as we came out, she said, slowly, and in broken, painful utterances, that "she hoped the lord would open the heavens for those who had helped them." a little lower down the court, we peeped in at two other doorways. the people were well known to my companion, who has the charge of visiting this part of the ward. leaning against the door-cheek of one of these dim, unwholesome hovels, he said, "well, missis; how are you getting on?" there was a tall, thin woman inside. she seemed to be far gone in some exhausting illness. with slow difficulty she rose to her feet, and, setting her hands to her sides, gasped out, "my coals are done." he made a note, and said, i'll send you some more." her other wants were regularly seen to on a certain day every week. ours was an accidental visit. we now turned up to another nook of the court, where my companion told me there was a very bad case. he found the door fast. we looked through the window into that miserable man- nest. it was cold, gloomy, and bare. as corrigan says, in the "colleen bawn," "there was nobody in--but the fire--and that was gone out." as we came away, a stalwart irishman met us at a turn of the court, and said to my companion, "sure, ye didn't visit this house." " not to-day;" replied the visitor. "i'll come and see you at the usual time." the people in this house were not so badly off as some others. we came down the steps of the court into the fresher air of friargate again. our next walk was to heatley street. as we passed by a cluster of starved loungers, we overheard one of them saying to another, "sitho, yon's th' soup-maister, gooin' a-seein' somebry." our time was getting short, so we only called at one house in heatley street, where there was a family of eleven--a decent family, a well-kept and orderly household, though now stript almost to the bare ground of all worldly possession, sold, bitterly, piecemeal, to help to keep the bare life together, as sweetly as possible, till better days. the eldest son is twenty-seven years of age. the whole family has been out of work for the last seventeen weeks, and before that, they had been working only short time for seven months. for thirteen weeks they had lived upon less than one shilling a head per week, and i am not sure that they did not pay the rent out of that; and now the income of the whole eleven is under s., with rent to pay. in this house they hold weekly prayer-meetings. thin picking--one shilling a week, or less--for all expenses, for one person. it is easier to write about it than to feel what it means, unless one has tried it for three or four months. just round the corner from heatley street, we stopped at the open door of a very little cottage. a good-looking young irishwoman sat there, upon a three- legged stool, suckling her child. she was clean; and had an intelligent look. "let's see, missis," said the visitor, "what do you pay for this nook?" "we pay eighteenpence a week--and they will have it--my word." "well, an' what income have you now?" "we have eighteenpence a head in the week, an' the rent to pay out o' that, or else they'll turn us out." of course, the visitor knew that this was true; but he wanted me to hear the people speak for themselves. "let's see, missis burns, your husband's name is patrick, isn't it?" " yes, sir; patrick burns." "what! patrick burns, the famous foot- racer?" the little woman smiled bashfully, and replied, "yes, sir; i suppose it is." with respect to what the woman said about having to pay her rent or turn out, i may remark, in passing, that i have not hitherto met with an instance in which any millowner, or wealthy man, having cottage property, has pressed the unemployed poor for rent. but it is well to remember that there is a great amount of cottage property in preston, as in other manufacturing towns, which belongs to the more provident class of working men. these working men, now hard pressed by the general distress, have been compelled to fall back upon their little rentals, clinging to them as their last independent means of existence. they are compelled to this, for, if they cannot get work, they cannot get anything else, having property. these are becoming fewer, however, from day to day. the poorest are hanging a good deal upon those a little less poor than themselves; and every link in the lengthening chain of neediness is helping to pull down the one immediately above it. there is, also, a considerable amount of cottage property in preston, belonging to building societies, which have enough to do to hold their own just now. and then there is always some cottage property in the hands of agents. leaving heatley street, we went to a place called "seed's yard." here we called upon a clean old stately widow, with a calm, sad face. she had been long known, and highly respected, in a good street, not far off, where she had lived for twenty-four years, in fair circumstances, until lately. she had always owned a good houseful of furniture; but, after making bitter meals upon the gradual wreck of it, she had been compelled to break up that house, and retire with her five children to lodge with a lone widow in this little cot, not over three yards square, in "seed's yard," one of those dark corners into which decent poverty is so often found now, creeping unwillingly away from the public eye, in the hope of weathering the storm of adversity, in penurious independence. the old woman never would accept relief from the parish, although the whole family had been out of work for many months. one of the daughters, a clean, intelligent-looking young woman, about eighteen, sat at the table, eating a little bread and treacle to a cup of light-coloured tea, when we went in; but she blushed, and left off until we had gone--which was not long after. it felt almost like sacrilege to peer thus into the privacies of such people; but i hope they did not feel as if it had been done offensively. we called next at the cottage of a hand-loom weaver--a poor trade now in the best of times--a very poor trade--since the days when tattered old "jem ceawp" sung his pathetic song of "jone o' greenfeelt"-- "aw'm a poor cotton weighver, as ony one knows; we'n no meight i'th heawse, an' we'n worn eawt er clothes; we'n live't upo nettles, while nettles were good; an' wayterloo porritch is th' most of er food; this clemmin' and starvin', wi' never a farthin'-- it's enough to drive ony mon mad." this family was four in number--man, wife, and two children. they had always lived near to the ground, for the husband's earnings at the loom were seldom more than s. for a full week. the wife told us that they were not receiving any relief, for she said that when her husband "had bin eawt o' wark a good while he turn't his hond to shaving;" and in this way the ingenious struggling fellow had scraped a thin living for them during many months. "but," said she, " it brings varra little in, we hev to trust so much. he shaves four on 'em for a haw-penny, an' there's a deal on 'em connot pay that. yo know, they're badly off--(the woman seemed to think her circumstances rather above the common kind); an' then," continued she, "when they'n run up a shot for three-hawpence or twopence or so, they cannot pay it o' no shap, an' so they stoppen away fro th' shop. they cannot for shame come, that's heaw it is; so we lose'n their custom till sich times as summat turns up at they can raise a trifle to pay up wi'. . . . he has nobbut one razzor, but it'll be like to do." hearken this, oh, ye spruce figaros of the city, who trim the clean, crisp whiskers of the well-to-do! hearken this, ye dainty perruquiers, "who look so brisk, and smell so sweet," and have such an exquisite knack of chirruping, and lisping, and sliding over the smooth edge of the under lip,--and, sometimes, agreeably too,--"an infinite deal of nothing,"--ye who clip and anoint the hair of old england's curled darlings! eight chins a penny; and three months' credit! a bodle a piece for mowing chins overgrown with hair like pin-wire, and thick with dust; how would you like that? how would you get through it all, with a family of four, and only one razor? the next place we called at was what my friend described, in words that sounded to me, somehow, like melancholy irony,--as "a poor provision shop." it was, indeed, a poor shop for provender. in the window, it is true, there were four or five empty glasses, where children's spice had once been. there was a little deal shelf here and there; but there were neither sand, salt, whitening, nor pipes. there was not the ghost of a farthing candle, nor a herring, nor a marble, nor a match, nor of any other thing, sour or sweet, eatable or saleable for other uses, except one small mug full of buttermilk up in a corner--the last relic of a departed trade, like the "one rose of the wilderness, left on its stalk to mark where a garden has been." but i will say more about this in the next chapter. chapter vi. returning to the little shop mentioned in my last--the "little provision shop," where there was nothing left to eat--nothing, indeed, of any kind, except one mug of buttermilk, and a miserable remnant of little empty things, which nobody would buy; four or five glass bottles in the window, two or three poor deal shelves, and a doleful little counter, rudely put together, and looking as if it felt, now, that there was nothing in the world left for it but to become chips at no distant date. everything in the place had a sad, subdued look, and seemed conscious of having come down in the world, without hope of ever rising again; even the stript walls appeared to look at one another with a stony gaze of settled despair. but there was a clean, matronly woman in the place, gliding about from side to side with a cloth in her hands, and wiping first one, then another, of these poor little relics of better days in a caressing way. the shop had been her special care when times were good, and she clung affectionately to its ruins still. besides, going about cleaning and arranging the little empty things in this way looked almost like doing business. but, nevertheless, the woman had a cheerful, good- humoured countenance. the sunshine of hope was still warm in her heart; though there was a touch of pathos in the way she gave the little rough counter another kindly wipe now and then, as if she wished to keep its spirits up; and in the way she looked, now at the buttermilk mug, then at the open door, and then at the four glass bottles in the window, which had been gazed at so oft and so eagerly by little children outside, in the days when spice was in them. . . . the husband came in from the little back room. he was a hardy, frank-looking man, and, like his wife, a trifle past middle age, i thought; but he had nothing to say, as he stood there with his wife, by the counter side. she answered our questions freely and simply, and in an uncomplaining way, not making any attempt to awaken sympathy by enlarging upon the facts of their condition. theirs was a family of seven--man, wife, and five children. the man was a spinner; and his thrifty wife had managed the little shop, whilst he worked at the mill. there are many striving people among the factory operatives, who help up the family earnings by keeping a little shop in this way. but this family was another of those instances in which working people have been pulled down by misfortune before the present crisis came on. just previous to the mills beginning to work short time, four of their five children had been lying ill, all at once, for five months; and, before that trouble befell them, one of the lads had two of his fingers taken off, whilst working at the factory, and so was disabled a good while. it takes little additional weight to sink those whose chins are only just above water; and these untoward circumstances oiled the way of this struggling family to the ground, before the mills stopped. a few months' want of work, with their little stock of shop stuff oozing away--partly on credit to their poor neighbours, and partly to live upon themselves --and they become destitute of all, except a few beggarly remnants of empty shop furniture. looking round the place, i said," well, missis, how's trade?" "oh, brisk," said she; and then the man and his wife smiled at one another. "well," said i, "yo'n sowd up, i see, heawever." "ay," answered she, "we'n sowd up, for sure--a good while sin';" and then she smiled again, as if she thought she had said a clever thing. they had been receiving relief from the parish several weeks; but she told me that some ill-natured neighbour had "set it eawt," that they had sold off their stock out of the shop, and put the money into the bank. through this report, the board of guardians had "knocked off" their relief for a fortnight, until the falsity of the report was made clear. after that, the board gave orders for the man and his wife and three of the children to be admitted to the workhouse, leaving the other two lads, who were working at the "stone yard," to "fend for theirsels," and find new nests wherever they could. this, however, was overruled afterwards; and the family is still holding together in the empty shop,--receiving from all sources, work and relief, about s. a week for the seven,--not bad, compared with the income of very many others. it is sad to think how many poor families get sundered and scattered about the world in a time like this, never to meet again. and the false report respecting this family in the little shop, reminds me that the poor are not always kind to the poor. i learnt, from a gentleman who is secretary to the relief committee of one of the wards, that it is not uncommon for the committees to receive anonymous letters, saying that so and so is unworthy of relief, on some ground or other. these complaints were generally found to be either wholly false, or founded upon some mistake. i have three such letters now before me. the first, written on a torn scrap of ruled paper, runs thus:--"may th, .--if you please be so kind as to look after __ back newton street formerly a resident of __ as i think he is not deserving relief.--a ratepayer." in each case i give the spelling, and everything else, exactly as in the originals before me, except the names. the next of these epistles says:-- "preston, may th.--sir, i beg to inform you that __, of park road, in receipt from the relief fund, is a very unworthy person, having worked two days since the and drunk the remainder and his wife also; for the most part, he has plenty of work for himself his wife and a journeyman but that is their regular course of life. and the s___s have all their family working full time. yours respectfully." these last two are anonymous. the next is written in a very good hand, upon a square piece of very blue writing paper. it has a name attached, but no address:--"preston, june nd, .--mr. dunn,-- dear sir, would you please to inquire into the case of __, of __. the are a family of the man work four or more days per week on the moor the woman works days per week at messrs simpsons north road the third is a daughter or should be a weaver but to lasey she has good places such as mr. hollins and horrocks and millers as been sent a way for being to lasey. the man and woman very fond of drink. i as a nabour and a subscriber do not think this a proper case for your charity. yours truly, __." the committee could not find out the writer of this, although a name is given. such things as these need no comment. the next house we called at was inhabited by an old widow and her only daughter. the daughter had been grievously afflicted with disease of the heart, and quite incapable of helping herself during the last eleven years. the poor worn girl sat upon an old tattered kind of sofa, near the fire, panting for breath in the close atmosphere. she sat there in feverish helplessness, sallow and shrunken, and unable to bear up her head. it was a painful thing to look at her. she had great difficulty in uttering a few words. i can hardly guess what her age may be now; i should think about twenty- five. mr toulmin, one of the visitors who accompanied me to the place, reminded the young woman of his having called upon them there more than four years ago, to leave some bedding which had been bestowed upon an old woman by a certain charity in the town. he saw no more of them after that, until the present hard times began, when he was deputed by the relief committee to call at that distressed corner amongst others in his own neighbourhood; and when he first opened the door, after a lapse of four years, he was surprised to find the same young woman, sitting in the same place, gasping painfully for breath, as he had last seen her. the old widow had just been able to earn what kept soul and body together in her sick girl and herself, during the last eleven years, by washing and such like work. but even this resource had fallen away a good deal during these bad times; there are so many poor creatures like herself, driven to extremity, and glad to grasp at any little bit of employment which can be had. in addition to what the old woman could get by a day's washing now and then, she received s. d. a week from the parish. think of the poor old soul trailing about the world, trying to "scratch a living" for herself and her daughter by washing; and having to hurry home from her labour to attend to that sick girl through eleven long years. such a life is a good deal like a slow funeral. it is struggling for a few breaths more, with the worms crawling over you. and yet i am told that the old woman was not accustomed to "make a poor mouth," as the saying goes. how true it is that "a great many people in this world have only one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences, namely--to waste away and die." our next visit was to an irish family. there was an old woman in, and a flaxen-headed lad about ten years of age. she was sitting upon a low chair,--the only seat in the place,--and the tattered lad was kneeling on the ground before her, whilst she combed his hair out. "well, missis, how are you getting on amongst it?" "oh, well, then, just middlin', mr t. ye see, i am busy combin' this boy's hair a bit, for 'tis gettin' like a wisp o' hay." there was not a vestige of furniture in the cottage, except the chair the old woman sat on. she said, "i did sell the childer's bedstead for s. d.; an' after that i sold the bed from under them for s. d., just to keep them from starvin' to death. the childer had been two days without mate then, an' faith i couldn't bear it any longer. after that i did sell the big pan, an' then the new rockin' chair, an' so on, one thing after another, till all wint entirely, barrin' this i am sittin' on, an' they wint for next to nothin' too. sure, i paid s. d. for the bed itself, which was sold for s. d. we all sleep on straw now." this family was seven in number. the mill at which they used to work had been stopped about ten months. one of the family had found employment at another mill, three months out of the ten, and the old man himself had got a few days' work in that time. the rest of the family had been wholly unemployed, during the ten months. except the little money this work brought in, and a trifle raised now and then by the sale of a bit of furniture when hunger and cold pressed them hard, the whole family had been living upon s. a week for the last ten months. the rent was running on. the eldest daughter was twenty- eight years of age. as we came away mr toulmin said to me, "well, i have called at that house regularly for the last sixteen weeks, and this is the first time i ever saw a fire in the place. but the old man has got two days' work this week--that may account for the fire." it was now close upon half-past seven in the evening, at which time i had promised to call upon the secretary of the trinity ward relief committee, whose admirable letter in the london times, attracted so much attention about a month ago. i met several members of the committee at his lodgings, and we had an hour's interesting conversation. i learnt that, in cases of sickness arising from mere weakness, from poorness of diet, or from unsuitableness of the food commonly provided by the committee, orders were now issued for such kind of "kitchen physic" as was recommended by the doctors. the committee had many cases of this kind. one instance was mentioned, in which, by the doctor's advice, four ounces of mutton chop daily had been ordered to be given to a certain sick man, until further notice. the thing went on and was forgotten, until one day, when the distributor of food said to the committeeman who had issued the order, "i suppose i must continue that daily mutton chop to so-and- so?" "eh, no; he's been quite well two months?" the chop had been going on for ninety-five days. we had some talk with that class of operatives who are both clean, provident, and "heawse-preawd," as lancashire folk call it. the secretary told me that he was averse to such people living upon the sale of their furniture; and the committee had generally relieved the distress of such people, just as if they had no furniture, at all. he mentioned the case of a family of factory operatives, who were all fervent lovers of music, as so many of the working people of lancashire are. whilst in full work, they had scraped up money to buy a piano; and, long after the ploughshare of ruin had begun to drive over the little household, they clung to the darling instrument, which was such a source of pure pleasure to them, and they were advised to keep it by the committee which relieved them. "yes," said another member of the committee," but i called there lately, and the piano's gone at last." many interesting things came out in the course of our conversation. one mentioned a house he had called at, where there was neither chair, table, nor bed; and one of the little lads had to hold up a piece of board for him to write upon. another spoke of the difficulties which "lone women" have to encounter in these hard times. "i knocked so-and-so off my list," said one of the committee, "till i had inquired into an ill report i heard of her. but she came crying to me; and i found out that the woman had been grossly belied." another (mr nowell) told of a house on his list, where they had no less than one hundred and fifty pawn tickets. he told, also, of a moulder's family, who had been all out of work and starving so long, that their poor neighbours came at last and recommended the committee to relieve them, as they would not apply for relief themselves. they accepted relief just one week, and then the man came and said that he had a prospect of work; and he shouldn't need relief tickets any longer. it was here that i heard so much about anonymous letters, of which i have given you three samples. having said that i should like to see the soup kitchen, one of the committee offered to go with me thither at six o'clock the next morning; and so i came away from the meeting in the cool twilight. old preston looked fine to me in the clear air of that declining day. i stood a while at the end of the "bull" gateway. there was a comical-looking little knock-kneed fellow in the middle of the street --a wandering minstrel, well known in preston by the name of "whistling jack." there he stood, warbling and waving his band, and looking from side to side,--in vain. at last i got him to whistle the "flowers of edinburgh." he did it, vigorously; and earned his penny well. but even "whistling jack" complained of the times. he said preston folk had "no taste for music." but he assured me the time would come when there would be a monument to him in that town. chapter vii. about half-past six i found my friend waiting at the end of the "bull" gateway. it was a lovely morning. the air was cool and clear, and the sky was bright. it was easy to see which was the way to the soup kitchen, by the stragglers going and coming. we passed the famous "orchard," now a kind of fairground, which has been the scene of so many popular excitements in troubled times. all was quiet in the "orchard" that morning, except that, here, a starved-looking woman, with a bit of old shawl tucked round her head, and a pitcher in her hand, and there, a bare-footed lass, carrying a tin can, hurried across the sunny space towards the soup kitchen. we passed a new inn, called "the port admiral." on the top of the building there were three life-sized statues--wellington and nelson, with the greek slave between them--a curious companionship. these statues reminded me of a certain englishman riding through dublin, for the first time, upon an irish car. "what are the three figures yonder?" said he to the car-boy, pointing to the top of some public building. "thim three is the twelve apostles, your honour," answered the driver. "nay, nay," said the traveller,"that'll not do. how do you make twelve out of three?" "bedad," replied the driver, "your honour couldn't expect the whole twelve to be out at once such a murtherin' wet day as this." but we had other things than these to think of that day. as we drew near the baths and washhouses, where the soup kitchen is, the stream of people increased. about the gate there was a cluster of melancholy loungers, looking cold and hungry. they were neither going in nor going away. i was told afterwards that many of these were people who had neither money nor tickets for food--some of them wanderers from town to town; anybody may meet them limping, footsore and forlorn, upon the roads in lancashire, just now-- houseless wanderers, who had made their way to the soup kitchen to beg a mouthful from those who were themselves at death's door. in the best of times there are such wanderers; and, in spite of the generous provision made for the relief of the poor, there must be, in a time like the present, a great number who let go their hold of home (if they have any), and drift away in search of better fortune, and, sometimes, into irregular courses of life, never to settle more. entering the yard, we found the wooden sheds crowded with people at breakfast--all ages, from white-haired men, bent with years, to eager childhood, yammering over its morning meal, and careless till the next nip of hunger came. here and there a bonny lass had crept into the shade with her basin; and there was many a brown-faced man, who had been hardened by working upon the moor or at the "stone-yard." "theer, thae's shap't that at last, as how?" said one of these to his friend, who had just finished and stood wiping his mouth complacently. "shap't that," replied the other, "ay, lad, aw can do a ticket and a hafe (three pints of soup) every morning." five hundred people breakfast in the sheds alone, every day. the soup kitchen opens at five in the morning, and there is always a crowd waiting to get in. this looks like the eagerness of hunger. i was told that they often deliver quarts of soup at this kitchen in two hours. the superintendent of the bread department informed me that, on that morning, he had served out two thousand loaves, of lb. oz. each. there was a window at one end, where soup was delivered to such as brought money for it instead of tickets. those who came with tickets--by far the greatest number-- had to pass in single file through a strong wooden maze, which restrained their eagerness, and compelled them to order. i noticed that only a small proportion of men went through the maze; they were mostly women and children. there was many a fine, intelligent young face hurried blushing through that maze--many a bonny lad and lass who will be heard of honourably hereafter. the variety of utensils presented showed that some of the poor souls had been hard put to it for things to fetch their soup in. one brought a pitcher; another a bowl; and another a tin can, a world too big for what it had to hold. "yo mun mind th' jug," said one old woman; "it's cracked, an' it's noan o' mine." "will ye bring me some?" said a little, light- haired lass, holding up her rosy neb to the soupmaster. "aw want a ha'poth," said a lad with a three-quart can in his hand. the benevolent-looking old gentleman who had taken the superintendence of the soup department as a labour of love, told me that there had been a woman there by half-past five that morning, who had come four miles for some coffee. there was a poor fellow breakfasting in the shed at the same time; and he gave the woman a thick shive of his bread as she went away. he mentioned other instances of the same humane feeling; and he said, "after what i have seen of them here, i say, 'let me fall into the hands of the poor.'" "they who, half-fed, feed the breadless, in the travail of distress; they who, taking from a little, give to those who still have less; they who, needy, yet can pity when they look on greater need; these are charity's disciples,--these are mercy's sons indeed." we returned to the middle of the town just as the shopkeepers in friargate were beginning to take their shutters down. i had another engagement at half-past nine. a member of the trinity ward relief committee, who is master of the catholic school in that ward, had offered to go with me to visit some distressed people who were under his care in that part of the town. we left friargate at the appointed time. as we came along there was a crowd in front of messrs wards', the fishmongers. a fine sturgeon had just been brought in. it had been caught in the ribble that morning. we went in to look at the royal fish. it was six feet long, and weighed above a hundred pounds. i don't know that i ever saw a sturgeon before. but we had other fish to fry; and so we went on. the first place we called at was a cellar in nile street. "here," said my companion, "let us have a look at old john." a gray-headed little man, of seventy, lived down in this one room, sunken from the street. he had been married forty years, and if i remember aright, he lost his wife about four years ago. since that time, he had lived in this cellar, all alone, washing and cooking for himself. but i think the last would not trouble him much, for "they have no need for fine cooks who have only one potato to their dinner." when a lad, he had been apprenticed to a bobbin turner. afterwards he picked up some knowledge of engineering; and he had been "well off in his day." he now got a few coppers occasionally from the poor folk about, by grinding knives, and doing little tinkering jobs. under the window he had a rude bench, with a few rusty tools upon it, and in one corner there was a low, miserable bedstead, without clothing upon it. there was one cratchinly chair in the place, too; but hardly anything else. he had no fire; be generally went into neighbours' houses to warm himself. he was not short of such food as the relief committees bestow. there was a piece of bread upon the bench, left from his morning meal; and the old fellow chirruped about, and looked as blithe as if he was up to the middle in clover. he showed us a little thing which he had done "for a bit ov a prank." the number of his cellar was , and he had cut out a large tin figure of , a foot long, and nailed it upon his door, for the benefit of some of his friends that were getting bad in their eyesight, and "couldn't read smo' print so low deawn as that." "well, john," said my companion, when we went in, "how are you getting on?" "oh, bravely," replied he, handing a piece of blue paper to the inquirer, "bravely; look at that!" why, this is a summons," said my companion. "ay, bigad is't, too," answered the old man. "never had sich a thing i' my life afore! think o' me gettin' a summons for breakin' windows at seventy year owd. a bonny warlock, that, isn't it? why, th' whole street went afore th' magistrates to get mo off." "then you did get off, john?" "get off! sure, aw did. it wur noan o' me. it wur a keaw jobber, at did it. . . . aw'll tell yo what, for two pins aw'd frame that summons, an' hang it eawt o' th' window; but it would look so impudent." old john's wants were inquired into, and we left him fiddling among his rusty tools. we next went to a place called hammond's row--thirteen poor cottages, side by side. twelve of the thirteen were inhabited by people living, almost entirely, upon relief, either from the parish or from the relief committee. there was only one house where no relief was needed. as we passed by, the doors were nearly all open, and the interiors all presented the same monotonous phase of destitution. they looked as if they had been sacked by bum-bailiffs. the topmost house was the only place where i saw a fire. a family of eight lived there. they were irish people. the wife, a tall, cheerful woman, sat suckling her child, and giving a helping hand now and then to her husband's work. he was a little, pale fellow, with only one arm, and he had an impediment in his speech. he had taken to making cheap boxes of thin, rough deal, afterwards covered with paper. with the help of his wife he could make one in a day, and he got ninepence profit out of it--when the box was sold. he was working at one when we went in, and he twirled it proudly about with his one arm, and stammered out a long explanation about the way it had been made; and then he got upon the lid, and sprang about a little, to let us see how much it would bear. as the brave little tattered man stood there upon the box-lid, springing, and sputtering, and waving his one arm, his wife looked up at him with a smile, as if she thought him "the greatest wight on ground." there was a little curly-headed child standing by, quietly taking in all that was going on. i laid my hand upon her head; and asked her what her name was. she popped her thumb into her mouth, and looked shyly about from one to another, but never a word could i get her to say. "that's lizzy," said the woman; "she is a little visitor belongin' to one o' the neighbours. they are badly off, and she often comes in. sure, our childer is very fond of her, an' so she is of them. she is fine company wid ourselves, but always very shy wid strangers. come now, lizzy, darlin'; tell us your name, love, won't you, now?" but it was no use; we couldn't get her to speak. in the next cottage where we called, in this row, there was a woman washing. her mug was standing upon a stool in the middle of the floor; and there was not any other thing in the place in the shape of furniture or household utensil. the walls were bare of everything, except a printed paper, bearing these words: "the wages of sin is death. but the gift of god is eternal life, through jesus christ our lord." we now went to another street, and visited the cottage of a blind chairmaker, called john singleton. he was a kind of oracle among the poor folk of the neighbourhood. the old chairmaker was sitting by the fire when we went in; and opposite to him sat "old john," the hero of the broken windows in nile street. he had come up to have a crack with his blind crony. the chairmaker was seventy years of age, and he had benefited by the advantage of good fundamental instruction in his youth. he was very communicative. he said he should have been educated for the priesthood, at stonyhurst college. "my clothes were made, an' everything was ready for me to start to stonyhurst. there was a stagecoach load of us going; but i failed th' heart, an' wouldn't go--an' i've forethought ever sin'. mr newby said to my friends at the same time, he said, 'you don't need to be frightened of him; he'll make the brightest priest of all the lot--an' i should, too. . . . i consider mysel' a young man yet, i' everything, except it be somethin' at's uncuth to me." and now, old john, the grinder, began to complain again of how badly he had been used about the broken windows in nile street. but the old chairmaker stopped him; and, turning up his blind eyes, he said, "john, don't you be foolish. bother no moor abeawt it. all things has but a time." chapter viii. a man cannot go wrong in trinity ward just now, if he wants to see poor folk. he may find them there at any time, but now he cannot help but meet them; and nobody can imagine how badly off they are, unless he goes amongst them. they are biding the hard time out wonderfully well, and they will do so to the end. they certainly have not more than a common share of human frailty. there are those who seem to think that when people are suddenly reduced to poverty, they should become suddenly endowed with the rarest virtues; but it never was so, and, perhaps, never will be so long as the world rolls. in my rambles about this ward, i was astonished at the dismal succession of destitute homes, and the number of struggling owners of little shops, who were watching their stocks sink gradually down to nothing, and looking despondingly at the cold approach of pauperism. i was astonished at the strings of dwellings, side by side, stript, more or less, of the commonest household utensils--the poor little bare houses, often crowded with lodgers, whose homes had been broken up elsewhere; sometimes crowded, three or four families of decent working people in a cottage of half-a-crown a-week rental; sleeping anywhere, on benches or on straw, and afraid to doff their clothes at night time because they had no other covering. now and then the weekly visitor comes to the door of a house where he has regularly called. he lifts the latch, and finds the door locked. he looks in at the window. the house is empty, and the people are gone- -the lord knows where. who can tell what tales of sorrow will have their rise in the pressure of a time like this--tales that will never be written, and that no statistics will reveal. trinity ward swarms with factory operatives; and, after our chat with blind john, the chairmaker, and his ancient crony the grinder from nile street, we set off again to see something more of them. fitful showers came down through the day, and we had to shelter now and then. in one cottage, where we stopped a few minutes, the old woman told us that, in addition to their own family, they had three young women living with them--the orphan daughters of her husband's brother. they had been out of work thirty-four weeks, and their uncle--a very poor man--had been obliged to take them into his house, "till sich times as they could afford to pay for lodgin's somewheer else." my companion asked whether they were all out of work still. "naw," replied the old woman, "one on 'em has getten on to wortch a few days for t' sick (that is, in the place of some sick person). hoo's wortchin' i' th' cardreawn at 'th' big-un.'" (this is the name they give to messrs swainson and birley's mill.) the next place we called at was the house of an old joiner. he was lying very ill upstairs. as we drew up to the door, my companion said, "now, this is a clean, respectable family. they have struggled hard and suffered a great deal, before they would ask for relief." when we went in, the wife was cleaning her well-nigh empty house. "eh," said she," i thought it wur th' clubman comin', an' i wur just goin' to tell him that i had nothin' for him." the family was seven in number--man, wife, and five children. the husband, as i have said, was lying ill. the wife told me that they had only s. a-week coming in for the seven to live upon. my companion was the weekly visitor who relieved them. she told me that her husband was sixty- eight years old; she was not forty. she said that her husband was not strong, and he had been going nearly barefoot and "clemmed" all through last winter, and she was afraid he had got his death of cold. they had not a bed left to lie upon. "my husband," said she,"was a master joiner once, an' was doin' very well. but you see how we are now." there were two portraits--oil paintings--hanging against the wall. "whose portraits are these?" said i. "well; that's my master--an' this is me," replied she. "he would have 'em taken some time since. i couldn't think o' sellin' 'em; or else, yo see, we've sold nearly everything we had. i did try to pawn 'em, too, thinkin' we could get 'em back again when things came round; but, i can assure yo, i couldn't find a broker anywhere that would tak' 'em in." "well, missis," said my companion, "yo have one comfort; you are always clean." "eh, bless yo!" replied she, "i couldn't live among dirt! my husban' tells me that i clean all the luck away; but aw'm sure there's no luck i' filth; if there is, anybody may tak' it for me." the rain had stopt again; and after my friend had made a note respecting some additional relief for the family, we bade the woman good day. we had not gone far before a little ragged lass looked up admiringly at two pinks i had stuck in my buttonhole, and holding up her hand, said, "eh, gi' me a posy!" my friend pointed to one of the cottages we passed, and said that the last time he called there, he found the family all seated round a large bowl of porridge, made of indian meal. this meal is sold at a penny a pound. he stopped at another cottage and said, "here's a house where i always find them reading when i call. i know the people very well." he knocked and tried the latch, but there was nobody in. as we passed an open door, the pleasant smell of oatcake baking came suddenly upon me. it woke up many memories of days gone by. i saw through the window a stout, meal-dusted old woman, busy with her wooden ladle and baking-shovel at a brisk oven. "now, i should like to look in there for a minute or two, if it can be done," said i. "well," replied my friend, "this woman is not on our books; she gets her own living in the way you see. but come in; it will be all right; i know her very well." i was glad of that, for i wanted to have a chat with her, and to peep at the baking. "good morning, missis," said he; "how are you?" "why, just in a middlin' way." "how long is this wet weather going to last, think you?" "nay, there ye hev me fast;--but what brings ye here this mornin'?" said the old woman, resting the end of her ladle on the little counter; "i never trouble sic like chaps as ye." "no, no," replied my friend; "we have not called about anything of that kind." "what, then, pray ye?" "well, my friend, here, is almost a stranger in preston; and as soon as ever he smelt the baking, he said he should like to see it, so i took the liberty of bringing him in." "oh, ay; come in, an' welcome. ye're just i' time, too; for i've bin sat at t' back to sarra (serve) t' pigs." "you're not a native of lancashire, missis," said i. "why, wheer then? come, now; let's be knowin', as ye're so sharp." "cumberland," said i. "well, now; ye're reight, sewer enough. but how did ye find it out, now?" "why, you said that you had been out to sarra t' pigs. a native of lancashire would have said 'serve' instead of 'sarra.'" "well, that's varra queer; for i've bin a lang time away from my awn country. but, whereivver do ye belang to, as ye're so bowd wi' me?" said she, smiling, and turning over a cake which was baking upon the oven. i told her that i was born a few miles from manchester. "manchester! never, sewer;" said she, resting her ladle again; "why, i lived ever so long i' manchester when i was young. i was cook at th' swan i' shudehill, aboon forty year sin." she said that, in those days, the swan, in shudehill, was much frequented by the commercial men of manchester. it was a favourite dining house for them. many of them even brought their own beefsteak on a skewer; and paid a penny for the cooking of it. she said she always liked manchester very well; but she had not been there for a good while. "but," said she, "ye'll hev plenty o' oatcake theer--sartin." "not much, now," replied i; "it's getting out o' fashion." i told her that we had to get it once a week from a man who came all the way from stretford into manchester, with a large basketful upon his head, crying "woat cakes, two a penny!" "two a penny!" said she; "why, they'll not be near as big as these, belike." "not quite," replied i. "not quite! naw; not hauf t' size, aw warnd! why, th' poor fellow desarves his brass iv he niver gev a farthin' for th' stuff to mak 'eni on. what! i knaw what oatcake bakin' is." leaving the canny old cumberland woman at her baking, we called at a cottage in everton gardens. it was as clean as a gentleman's parlour; but there was no furniture in sight except a table, and, upon the table, a fine bush of fresh hawthorn blossom, stuck in a pint jug full of water. here, i heard again the common story--they had been several months out of work; their household goods had dribbled away in ruinous sales, for something to live upon; and now, they had very little left but the walls. the little woman said to me, "bless yo, there is at thinks we need'n nought, becose we keepen a daycent eawtside. but, i know my own know abeawt that. beside, one doesn't like to fill folk's meawths, iv one is ill off." it was now a little past noon, and we spent a few minutes looking through the catholic schoolhouse, in trinity ward--a spacious brick building. the scholars were away at dinner. my friend is master of the school. his assistant offered to go with us to one or two irish families in a close wynd, hard by, called wilkie's court. in every case i had the great advantage of being thus accompanied by gentlemen who were friendly and familiar with the poor we visited. this was a great facility to me. wilkie's court is a little cul de sac, with about half-a-dozen wretched cottages in it, fronted by a dead wall. the inhabitants of the place are all irish. they were nearly all kept alive by relief from one source or other; but their poverty was not relieved by that cleanliness which i had witnessed in so many equally poor houses, making the best use of those simple means of comfort which are invaluable, although they cost little or nothing. in the first house we called at, a middle-aged woman was pacing slowly about the unwholesome house with a child in her arms. my friend inquired where the children were. "they are in the houses about; all but the one poor boy." "and where is he?" said i. "well, he comes home now an' agin; he comes an' goes; sure, we don't know how. . . . ah, thin, sir," continued she, beginning to cry, "i'll tell ye the rale truth, now. he was drawn away by some bad lads, an' he got three months in the new bailey; that's god's truth. . . . ah, what'll i do wid him," said she, bursting into tears afresh; "what'll i do wid him? sure, he is my own!" we did not stop long to intrude upon such trouble as this. she called out as we came away to tell us that the poor crayter next door was quite helpless. the next house was, in some respects, more comfortable than the last, though it was quite as poor in household goods. there was one flimsy deal table, one little chair, and two half-penny pictures of catholic saints pinned against the wall. "sure, i sold the other table since you wor here before," said the woman to my friend; "i sold it for two-an'-aightpence, an' bought this one for sixpence." at the house of another irish family, my friend inquired where all the chairs were gone. "oh," said a young woman," the baillies did fetch uvverything away, barrin' the one sate, when we were livin' in lancaster street." "where do you all sit now, then?" "my mother sits there," replied she, "an' we sit upon the flure." "i heard they were goin' to sell these heawses," said one of the lads, "but, begorra," continued he, with a laugh, "i wouldn't wonder did they sell the ground from under us next." in the course of our visitation a thunder storm came on, during which we took shelter with a poor widow woman, who had a plateful of steeped peas for sale, in the window. she also dealt in rags and bones in a small way, and so managed to get a living, as she said, "beawt troublin' onybody for charity." she said it was a thing that folk had to wait a good deal out in the cold for. it was market-day, and there were many country people in preston. on my way back to the middle of the town, i called at an old inn, in friargate, where i listened with pleasure a few minutes to the old- fashioned talk of three farmers from the fylde country. their conversation was principally upon cow-drinks. one of them said there was nothing in the world like "peppermint tay an' new butter" for cows that had the belly-ache. "they'll be reet in a varra few minutes at after yo gotten that into 'em," said he. as evening came on the weather settled into one continuous shower, and i left preston in the heavy rain, weary, and thinking of what i had seen during the day. since then i have visited the town again, and i shall say something about that visit hereafter. chapter ix. the rain had been falling heavily through the night. it was raw and gusty, and thick clouds were sailing wildly overhead, as i went to the first train for preston. it was that time of morning when there is a lull in the streets of manchester, between six and eight. the "knocker-up" had shouldered his long wand, and paddled home to bed again; and the little stalls, at which the early workman stops for his half-penny cup of coffee, were packing up. a cheerless morning, and the few people that were about looked damp and low spirited. i bought the day's paper, and tried to read it, as we flitted by the glimpses of dirty garret-life, through the forest of chimneys, gushing forth their thick morning fumes into the drizzly air, and over the dingy web of salford streets. we rolled on through pendleton, where the country is still trying to look green here and there, under increasing difficulties; but it was not till we came to where the green vale of clifton open out, that i became quite reconciled to the weather. before we were well out of sight of the ancient tower of prestwich church, the day brightened a little. the shifting folds of gloomy cloud began to glide asunder, and through the gauzy veils which lingered in the interspaces, there came a dim radiance which lighted up the rain-drops "lingering on the pointed thorns;" and the tall meadow grasses were swaying to and fro with their loads of liquid pearls, in courtesies full of exquisite grace, as we whirled along. i enjoyed the ride that raw morning, although the sky was all gloom again long before we came in sight of the ribble. i met my friend, in preston, at half-past nine; and we started at once for another ramble amongst the poor, in a different part of trinity ward. we went first to a little court, behind bell street. there is only one house in the court, and it is known as "th' back heawse." in this cottage the little house-things had escaped the ruin which i had witnessed in so many other places. there were two small tables, and three chairs; and there were a few pots and a pan or two. upon the cornice there were two pot spaniels, and two painted stone apples; and, between them, there was a sailor waving a union jack, and a little pudgy pot man, for holding tobacco. on the windowsill there was a musk-plant; and, upon the table by the staircase, there was a rude cage, containing three young throstles. the place was tidy; and there was a kind-looking old couple inside. the old man stood at the table in the middle of the floor, washing the pots, and the old woman was wiping them, and putting them away. a little lad sat by the fire, thwittling at a piece of stick. the old man spoke very few words the whole time we were there, but he kept smiling and going on with his washing. the old woman was very civil, and rather shy at first; but we soon got into free talk together. she told me that she had borne thirteen children. seven of them were dead; and the other six were all married, and all poor. "i have one son," said she; "he's a sailmaker. he's th' best off of any of 'em. but, lord bless yo; he's not able to help us. he gets very little, and he has to pay a woman to nurse his sick wife. . . . this lad that's here,--he's a little grandson o' mine; he's one of my dowter's childer. he brings his meight with him every day, an' sleeps with us. they han bod one bed, yo see. his father hasn't had a stroke o' work sin christmas. they're badly off. as for us--my husband has four days a week on th' moor,--that's s., an' we've s. a week to pay out o' that for rent. yo may guess fro that, heaw we are. he should ha' been workin' on the moor today, but they've bin rain't off. we've no kind o' meight i' this house bod three-ha'poth o' peas; an' we've no firin'. he's just brokken up an owd cheer to heat th' watter wi'. (the old man smiled at this, as if he thought it was a good joke.) he helps me to wesh, an' sick like; an' yo' know, it's a good deal better than gooin' into bad company, isn't it? (here the old man gave her a quiet, approving look, like a good little lad taking notice of his mother's advice.) aw'm very glad of a bit o' help," continued she,"for aw'm not so terrible mich use, mysel'. yo see; aw had a paralytic stroke seven year sin, an' we've not getten ower it. for two year aw hadn't a smite o' use all deawn this side. one arm an' one leg trail't quite helpless. aw drunk for ever o' stuff for it. at last aw gat somethin' ov a yarb doctor. he said that he could cure me for a very trifle, an' he did me a deal o' good, sure enough. he nobbut charged me hauve-a-creawn. . . . we never knowed what it was to want a meal's meight till lately. we never had a penny off th' parish, nor never trouble't anybody till neaw. aw wish times would mend, please god! . . . we once had a pig, an' was in a nice way o' gettin' a livin'. . . . when things began o' gooin' worse an' worse with us, we went to live in a cellar, at sixpence a week rent; and we made it very comfortable, too. we didn't go there because we liked th' place; but we thought nobody would know; an, we didn't care, so as we could put on till times mended, an' keep aat o' debt. but th' inspectors turned us out, an' we had to come here, an' pay s. a week. . . . aw do not like to ask for charity, iv one could help it. they were givin' clothin' up at th' church a while sin', an' some o' th' neighbours wanted me to go an' ax for some singlets, ye see aw cannot do without flannels,--but aw couldn't put th' face on." now, the young throstles in the cage by the staircase began to chirp one after another. "yer yo at that! "said the old man, turning round to the cage; "yer yo at that! nobbut three week owd!" "yes," replied the old woman; "they belong to my grandson theer. he brought 'em in one day --neest an' all; an' poor nake't crayters they were. he's a great lad for birds." "he's no worse nor me for that," answered the old man; "aw use't to be terrible fond o' brids when aw wur yung." after a little more talk, we bade the old couple good day, and went to peep at the cellar where they had crept stealthily away, for the sake of keeping their expenses close to their lessening income. the place was empty, and the door was open. it was a damp and cheerless little hole, down in the corner of a dirty court. we went next into pole street, and tried the door of a cottage where a widow woman lived with her children less than a week before. they were gone, and the house was cleared out. "they have had neither fire nor candle in that house for weeks past," said my companion. we then turned up a narrow entry, which was so dark and low overhead that my companion only told me just in time to "mind my hat!" there are several such entries leading out of pole street to little courts behind. here we turned into a cold and nearly empty cottage, where a middle-aged woman sat nursing a sick child. she looked worn and ill herself, and she had sore eyes. she told me that the child was her daughter's. her daughter's husband had died of asthma in the workhouse, about six weeks before. he had not "addled" a penny for twelve months before he died. she said, "we hed a varra good heawse i' stanley street once; but we hed to sell up an' creep hitherto. this heawse is s. d. a week; an' we mun pay it, or go into th' street. aw nobbut owed him for one week, an' he said, 'iv yo connot pay yo mun turn eawt for thoose 'at will do.' aw did think o' gooin' to th' board," continued she, "for a pair o' clogs. my een are bad; an' awm ill all o'er, an' it's wi' nought but gooin' weet o' my feet. my daughter's wortchin'. hoo gets s. d. a week. we han to live an' pay th' rent, too, eawt o' that." i guessed, from the little paper pictures on the wall, that they were catholics. in another corner behind pole street, we called at a cottage of two rooms, each about three yards square. a brother and sister lived together here. they were each about fifty years of age. they had three female lodgers, factory operatives, out of work. the sister said that her brother had been round to the factories that morning, "thinking that as it wur a pastime, there would haply be somebody off; but he couldn't yer o' nought." she said she got a trifle by charing, but not much now; for folks were "beginnin' to do it for theirsels." we now turned into cunliffe street, and called upon an irish family there. it was a family of seven--an old tailor, and his wife and children. they had "dismissed the relief," as he expressed it, "because they got a bit o' work." the family was making a little living by ripping up old clothes, and turning the cloth to make it up afresh into lads' caps and other cheap things. the old man had had a great deal of trouble with his family. "i have one girl," said he, "who has bothered my mind a dale. she is under the influence o' bad advice. i had her on my hands for many months; an', after that, the furst week's wages she got, she up, an' cut stick, an' left me. i have another daughter, now nigh nineteen years of age. the trouble i have with her i am content with; because it can't be helped. the poor crayter hasn't the use of all her faculties. i have taken no end o' pains with her, but i can't get her to count twenty on her finger ends wid a whole life's tachein'. fortune has turned her dark side to me this long time, now; and, bedad, iv it wasn't for contrivin', an' workin' hard to boot, i wouldn't be able to keep above the flood. i assure ye it goes agin me to trouble the gentlemen o' the board; an' so long as i am able, i will not. i was born in king's county; an' i was once well off in the city of waterford i once had pounds in the bank. i seen the time i didn't drame of a cloudy day; but things take quare turns in this world. how-an-ever, since it's no better, thank god it's no worse. sure, it's a long lane that has never a turn in it." chapter x. "there's nob'dy but the lord an' me that knows what i've to bide." --natterin nan. the slipshod old tailor shuffled after us to the door, talking about the signs of the times. his frame was bowed with age and labour, and his shoulders drooped away. it was drawing near the time when the grasshopper would be a burden to him. a hard life had silently engraved its faithful records upon that furrowed face; but there was a cheerful ring in his voice which told of a hopeful spirit within him still. the old man's nostrils were dusty with snuff, and his poor garments hung about his shrunken form in the careless ease which is common to the tailor's shopboard. i could not help admiring the brave old wrinkled workman as he stood in the doorway talking about his secondhand trade, whilst the gusty wind fondled about in his thin gray hair. i took a friendly pinch from his little wooden box at parting, and left him to go on struggling with his troublesome family to "keep above the flood," by translating old clothes into new. we called at some other houses, where the features of life were so much the same that it is not necessary to say more than that the inhabitants were all workless, or nearly so, and all living upon the charitable provision which is the only thin plank between so many people and death, just now. in one house, where the furniture had been sold, the poor souls had brought a great stone into the place, and this was their only seat. in cunliffe street, we passed the cottage of a boilermaker, whom i had heard of before. his family was four in number. this was one of those cases of wholesome pride in which the family had struggled with extreme penury, seeking for work in vain, but never asking for charity, until their own poor neighbours were at last so moved with pity for their condition, that they drew the attention of the relief committee to it. the man accepted relief for one week, but after that, he declined receiving it any longer, because he had met with a promise of employment. but the promise failed him when the time came. the employer, who had promised, was himself disappointed of the expected work. after this; the boilermaker's family was compelled to fall back upon the relief committee's allowance. he who has never gone hungry about the world, with a strong love of independence in his heart, seeking eagerly for work from day to day, and coming home night after night to a foodless, fireless house, and a starving family, disappointed and desponding, with the gloom of destitution deepening around him, can never fully realise what the feelings of such a man may be from anything that mere words can tell. in park road, we called at the house of a hand-loom weaver. i learnt, before we went in, that two families lived here, numbering together eight persons; and, though it was well known to the committee that they had suffered as severely as any on the relief list, yet their sufferings had been increased by the anonymous slanders of some ill-disposed neighbours. they were quiet, well- conducted working people; and these slanders had grieved them very much. i found the poor weaver's wife very sensitive on this subject. man's inhumanity to man may be found among the poor sometimes. it is not every one who suffers that learns mercy from that suffering. as i have said before, the husband was a calico weaver on the hand- loom. he had to weave about seventy-three yards of a kind of check for s., and a full week's work rarely brought him more than s. it seems astonishing that a man should stick year after year to such labour as this. but there is a strong adhesiveness, mingled with timidity, in some men, which helps to keep them down. in the front room of the cottage there was not a single article of furniture left, so far as i can remember. the weaver's wife was in the little kitchen, and, knowing the gentleman who was with me, she invited us forward. she was a wan woman, with sunken eyes, and she was not much under fifty years of age. her scanty clothing was whole and clean. she must have been a very good-looking woman sometime, though she seemed to me as if long years of hard work and poor diet had sapped the foundations of her constitution; and there was a curious changeful blending of pallor and feverish flush upon that worn face. but, even in the physical ruins of her countenance, a pleasing expression lingered still. she was timid and quiet in her manner at first, as if wondering what we had come for; but she asked me to sit down. there was no seat for my friend, and he stood leaning against the wall, trying to get her into easy conversation. the little kitchen looked so cheerless and bare that dull morning that it reminded me again of a passage in that rude, racy song of the lancashire weaver, "jone o' greenfeelt"-- "owd bill o' dan's sent us th' baillies one day, for a shop-score aw owed him, at aw couldn't pay; but, he were too lat, for owd billy at th' bent had sent th' tit an' cart, an' taen th' goods off for rent,-- they laft nought but th' owd stoo; it were seats for us two, an' on it keawr't margit an' me. "then, th' baillies looked reawnd 'em as sly as a meawse, when they see'd at o'th goods had bin taen eawt o' th' heawse; says tone chap to tother, 'o's gone,--thae may see,'-- says aw, 'lads, ne'er fret, for yo're welcome to me!' then they made no moor do, but nipt up wi' owd stoo, an' we both letten thwack upo' th' flags. "then aw said to eawr margit, while we're upo' the floor, 'we's never be lower i' this world, aw'm sure; iv ever things awtern they're likely to mend, for aw think i' my heart that we're both at th' fur end; for meight we ban noan, nor no looms to weighve on, an' egad, they're as good lost as fund.'" we had something to do to get the weaver's wife to talk to us freely, and i believe the reason was, that, after the slanders they had been subject to, she harboured a sensitive fear lest anything like doubt should be cast upon her story. "well, mrs," said my friend, "let's see; how many are you altogether in this house?" "we're two families, yo know," replied she; "there's eight on us all altogether." "well," continued he,"and how much have you coming in, now?" he had asked this question so oft before, and had so often received the same answer, that the poor soul began to wonder what was the meaning of it all. she looked at us silently, her wan face flushed, and then, with tears rising in her eyes, she said, tremulously, "well, iv yo' cannot believe folk--" my friend stopped her at once, and said, "nay, mrs_, you must not think that i doubt your story. i know all about it; but my friend wanted me to let you tell it your own way. we have come here to do you good, if possible, and no harm. you don't need to fear that." "oh, well," said she, slowly wiping her moist forehead, and looking relieved," but yo know, aw was very much put about o'er th' ill-natur't talk as somebody set eawt." "take no notice of them," said my friend; "take no notice. i meet with such things every day." "well," continued she," yo know heaw we're situated. we were nine months an' hesn't a stroke o' wark. eawr wenches are gettin' a day for t' sick, neaw and then, but that's all. there's a brother o' mine lives with us,--he'd a been clemmed into th' grave but for th' relief; an' aw've been many a time an' hesn't put a bit i' my meawth fro mornin' to mornin' again. we've bin married twenty-four year; an' aw don't think at him an' me together has spent a shillin' i' drink all that time. why, to tell yo truth, we never had nought to stir on. my husband does bod get varra little upo th' hand-loom i' th' best o' times-- s. a week or so. he weighves a sort o' check--seventy-three yards for s." the back door opened into a little damp yard, hemmed in by brick walls. over in the next yard we could see a man bustling about, and singing in a loud voice, "hard times come again no more." "yon fellow doesn't care much about th' hard times, i think," said i. "eh, naw," replied she. "he'll live where mony a one would dee, will yon. he has that little shop, next dur; an' he keeps sellin' a bit o' toffy, an' then singin' a bit, an' then sellin' a bit moor toffy,--an' he's as happy as a pig amung slutch." leaving the weaver's cottage, the rain came on, and we sat a few minutes with a young shoemaker, who was busy at his bench, doing a cobbling job. his wife was lying ill upstairs. he had been so short of work for some time past that he had been compelled to apply for relief. he complained that the cheap gutta percha shoes were hurting his trade. he said a pair of men's gutta percha shoes could be bought for s. d., whilst it would cost him s. d. for the materials alone to make a pair of men's shoes of. when the rain was over, we left his house, and as we went along i saw in a cottage window a printed paper containing these words, "bitter beer. this beer is made of herbs and roots of the native country." i know that there are many poor people yet in lancashire who use decoctions of herbs instead of tea--mint and balm are the favourite herbs for this purpose; but i could not imagine what this herb beer could be, at a halfpenny a bottle, unless it was made of nettles. at the cottage door there was about four-pennyworth of mauled garden stuff upon an old tray. there was nobody inside but a little ragged lass, who could not tell us what the beer was made of. she had only one drinking glass in the place, and that had a snip out of the rim. the beer was exceedingly bitter. we drank as we could, and then went into pump street, to the house of a "core-maker," a kind of labourer for moulders. the core-maker's wife was in. they had four children. the whole six had lived for thirteen weeks on s. d. a week. when work first began to fall off, the husband told the visitors who came to inquire into their condition, that he had a little money saved up, and he could manage a while. the family lived upon their savings as long as they lasted, and then were compelled to apply for relief, or "clem." it was not quite noon when we left this house, and my friend proposed that before we went farther we should call upon mrs g_, an interesting old woman, in cunliffe street. we turned back to the place, and there we found "in lowly shed, and mean attire, a matron old, whom we schoolmistress name, who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame." in a small room fronting the street, the mild old woman sat, with her bed in one corner, and her simple vassals ranged upon the forms around. here, "with quaint arts," she swayed the giddy crowd of little imprisoned elves, whilst they fretted away their irksome schooltime, and unconsciously played their innocent prelude to the serious drama of life. as we approach the open door-- "the noises intermix'd, which thence resound, do learning's little tenement betray; where sits the dame disguised in look profound, and eyes her fairy throng, and turns her wheel around." the venerable little woman had lived in this house fourteen years. she was seventy-three years of age, and a native of limerick. she was educated at st ann's school, in dublin, and she had lived fourteen years in the service of a lady in that city. the old dame made an effort to raise her feeble form when we entered, and she received us as courteously as the finest lady in the land could have done. she told us that she charged only a penny a-week for her teaching; but, said she, "some of them can't pay it." "there's a poor child," continued she, "his father has been out of work eleven months, and they are starving but for the relief. still, i do get a little, and i like to have the children about me. oh, my case is not the worst, i know. i have people lodging in the house who are not so well off as me. i have three families living here. one is a family of four; they have only s. a-week to live upon. another is a family of three; they have s. a-week from a club, but they pay me s. a- week. for rent out of that. . . . . i am very much troubled with my eyes; my sight is failing fast. if i drop a stitch when i'm knitting, i can't see to take it up again. if i could buy a pair of spectacles, they would help me a good dale; but i cannot afford till times are better." i could not help thinking how many kind souls there are in the world who would be glad to give the old woman a pair of spectacles, if they knew her. chapter xi. we talked with the old schoolmistress in cunliffe street till it was "high twelve" at noon, and then the kind jailer of learning's little prison-house let all her fretful captives go. the clamorous elves rushed through the doorway into the street, like a stream too big for its vent, rejoicing in their new-found freedom and the open face of day. the buzz of the little teaching mill was hushed once more, and the old dame laid her knitting down, and quietly wiped her weak and weary eyes. the daughters of music were brought low with her, but, in the last thin treble of second childhood, she trembled forth mild complaints of her neighbours' troubles, but very little of her own. we left her to enjoy her frugal meal and her noontide reprieve in peace, and came back to the middle of the town. on our way i noticed again some features of street life which are more common in manufacturing towns just now than when times are good. now and then one meets with a man in the dress of a factory worker selling newspapers, or religious tracts, or back numbers of the penny periodicals, which do not cost much. it is easy to see, from their shy and awkward manner, that they are new to the trade, and do not like it. they are far less dexterous, and much more easily "said," than the brisk young salesmen who hawk newspapers in the streets of manchester. i know that many of these are unemployed operatives trying to make an honest penny in this manner till better days return. now and then, too, a grown-up girl trails along the street, "with wandering steps and slow," ragged, and soiled, and starved, and looking as if she had travelled far in the rainy weather, houseless and forlorn. i know that such sights may be seen at any time, but not near so often as just now; and i cannot help thinking that many of these are poor sheep which have strayed away from the broken folds of labour. sometimes it is an older woman that goes by, with a child at the breast, and one or two holding by the skirt of her tattered gown, and perhaps one or two more limping after, as she crawls along the pavement, gazing languidly from side to side among the heedless crowd, as if giving her last look round the world for help, without knowing where to get it, and without heart to ask for it. it is easy to give wholesale reasons why nobody needs to be in such a condition as this; but it is not improbable that there are some poor souls who, from no fault of their own, drop through the great sieve of charity into utter destitution. "they are well kept that god keeps." may the continual dew of heaven's blessing gladden the hearts of those who deal kindly with them! after dinner i fell into company with some gentlemen who were talking about the coming guild--that ancient local festival, which is so clear to the people of preston, that they are not likely to allow it to go by wholly unhonoured, however severe the times may be. amongst them was a gray-haired friend of mine, who is a genuine humorist. he told us many quaint anecdotes. one of them was of a man who went to inquire the price of graves in a certain cemetery. the sexton told him that they were pound on this side, and pounds on the other side of the knoll. "how is it that they are pounds on the other side?" inquired the man. "well, becose there's a better view there," replied the sexton. there were three or four millowners in the company, and, when the conversation turned upon the state of trade, one of them said, "i admit that there is a great deal of distress, but we are not so badly off yet as to drive the operatives to work for reasonable wages. for instance, i had a labourer working for me at s. a-week; he threw up my employ, and went to work upon the moor for s. a-day. how do you account for that? and then, again, i had another man employed as a watchman and roller coverer, at s. a-week. i found that i couldn't afford to keep him on at s., so i offered him s. a-week; but he left it, and went to work on the moor at s. a-day; and, just now, i want a man to take his place, and cannot get one." another said, "i am only giving low wages to my workpeople, but they get more with me than they can make on the moor, and yet i cannot keep them." i heard some other things of the same kind, for which there might be special reasons; but these gentlemen admitted the general prevalence of severe distress, and the likelihood of its becoming much worse. at two o'clock i sallied forth again, under convoy of another member of the relief committee, into the neighbourhood of messrs horrocks, miller, and co.'s works. their mill is known as "th' yard factory." hereabouts the people generally are not so much reduced as in some parts of the town, because they have had more employment, until lately, than has been common elsewhere. but our business lay with those distressed families who were in receipt of relief, and, even here, they were very easy to find. the first house we called at was inhabited by a family of five--man and wife and three children. the man was working on the moor at one shilling a-day. the wife was unwell, but she was moving about the house. they had buried one girl three weeks before; and one of the three remaining children lay ill of the measles. they had suffered a great deal from sickness. the wife said, "my husband is a peawer-loom weighver. he had to come whoam ill fro' his wark; an' then they shopped his looms, (gave his work to somebody else,) an' he couldn't get 'em back again. he'll get 'em back as soon as he con, yo may depend; for we don't want to bother folk for no mak o' relief no lunger than we can help." in addition to the husband's pay upon the moor, they were receiving s. a week from the committee, making altogether s. a week for the five, with s. d. to pay out of it for rent. she said, "we would rayther ha' soup than coffee, becose there's moor heytin' in it." my friend looked in at the door of a cottage in barton street. there was a sickly-looking woman inside. "well, missis," said my friend, jocularly, "how are you? because, if you're ill, i've brought a doctor here." "eh," replied she, "aw could be ill in a minute, if aw could afford, but these times winnot ston doctors' bills. besides, aw never were partial to doctors' physic; it's kitchen physic at aw want. han yo ony o' that mak' wi' yo?" she said," my husban' were th' o'erlooker o' th'weighvers at "owd tom's.' they stopt to fettle th' engine a while back, an' they'n never started sin'. but aw guess they wi'n do some day." we had not many yards to go to the next place, which was a poor cottage in fletcher's row, where a family of eight persons resided. there was very little furniture in the place, but i noticed a small shelf of books in a corner by the window. a feeble woman, upwards of seventy years old, sat upon a stool tending the cradle of a sleeping infant. this infant was the youngest of five children, the oldest of the five was seven years of age. the mother of the three-weeks-old infant had just gone out to the mill to claim her work from the person who had been filling her place during her confinement. the old woman said that the husband was "a grinder in a card-room when they geet wed, an' he addled about s. a week; but, after they geet wed, his wife larn't him to weighve upo' th' peawer-looms." she said that she was no relation to them, but she nursed, and looked after the house for them. "they connot afford to pay mo nought," continued she, "but aw fare as they fare'n, an' they dunnot want to part wi' me. aw'm not good to mich, but aw can manage what they wanten, yo see'n. aw never trouble't noather teawn nor country i' my life, an' aw hope aw never shall for the bit o' time aw have to do on." she said that the board of guardians had allowed the family s. a week for the two first weeks of the wife's confinement, but now their income amounted to a little less than one shilling a head per week. leaving this house, we turned round the corner into st mary's street north. here we found a clean-looking young working man standing shivering by a cottage door, with his hands in his pockets. he was dressed in well-mended fustian, and he had a cloth cap on his head. his face had a healthy hunger-nipt look. "hollo," said my friend, "i thought you was working on the moor." "ay," replied the young man, "aw have bin, but we'n bin rain't off this afternoon." "is there nobody in?" said my friend. "naw, my wife's gone eawt; hoo'll not be mony minutes. hoo's here neaw." a clean little pale woman came up, with a child in her arms, and we went in. they had not much furniture in the small kitchen, which was the only place we saw, but everything was sweet and orderly. their income was, as usual in relief cases, about one shilling a head per week. "you had some lodgers," said my friend. "ay," said she,"but they're gone." "how's that?" "we had a few words. their little lad was makin' a great noise i' the passage theer, an' aw were very ill o' my yed, an' aw towd him to go an' play him at tother side o' th' street,--so, they took it amiss, an' went to lodge wi' some folk i' ribbleton lone." we called at another house in this street. a family of six lived there. the only furniture i saw in the place was two chairs, a table, a large stool, a cheap clock, and a few pots. the man and his wife were in. she was washing. the man was a stiff built, shock- headed little fellow, with a squint in his eye that seemed to enrich the good-humoured expression of his countenance. sitting smiling by the window, he looked as if he had lots of fun in him, if he only had a fair chance of letting it off. he told us that he was a "tackler" by trade. a tackler is one who fettles looms when they get out of order. "couldn't you get on at horrocks's?" said my friend. "naw," replied he; "they'n not ha' men-weighvers theer." the wife said," we're a deal better off than some. he has six days a week upo th' moor, an' we'n s. a week fro th' relief committee. we'n s. d. a week to pay eawt on it for rent; but then, we'n a lad that gets d. a day neaw an' then for puttin' bobbins on; an' every little makes a mickle, yo known." "how is it that your clock's stopt?" said i. "nay," said the little fellow; "aw don't know. want o' cotton, happen,--same as everything else is stopt for." leaving this house we met with another member of the relief committee, who was overlooker of a mill a little way off. i parted here with the gentleman who had accompanied me hitherto, and the overlooker went on with me. in newton street he stopped, and said, "let's look in here." we went up two steps, and met a young woman coming out at the cottage door. "how's ruth?" said my friend. "well, hoo is here. hoo's busy bakin' for betty." we went in. "you're not bakin' for yourselves, then?" said he. "eh, naw," replied the young woman," it's mony a year sin' we had a bakin' o' fleawr, isn't it, ruth?" the old woman who was baking turned round and said, "ay; an' it'll be mony another afore we han one aw deawt." there were three dirty-looking hens picking and croodling about the cottage floor. "how is it you don't sell these, or else eat 'em?" said he. "eh, dear," replied the old woman, "dun yo want mo kilt? he's had thoose hens mony a year; an' they rooten abeawt th' heawse just th' same as greadley christians. he did gi' consent for one on 'em to be kilt yesterday; but aw'll be hanged iv th' owd cracky didn't cry like a chylt when he see'd it beawt yed. he'd as soon part wi' one o'th childer as one o'th hens. he says they're so mich like owd friends, neaw. he's as quare as dick's hat-bant 'at went nine times reawnd an' wouldn't tee. . . . we thought we'd getten a shop for yon lad o' mine t'other day. we yerd ov a chap at lytham at wanted a lad to tak care o' six jackasses an' a pony. th' pony were to tak th' quality to blackpool, and such like. so we fettled th' lad's bits o' clooas up and made him ever so daycent, and set him off to try to get on wi' th' chap at lytham. well, th' lad were i' good heart abeawt it; an' when he geet theer th' chap towd him at he thought he wur very likely for th' job, so that made it better,--an' th' lad begun o' wearin' his bit o' brass o' summat to eat, an' sich like, thinkin' he're sure o' th' shop. well, they kept him there, dallyin', aw tell yo, an' never tellin' him a greadley tale, fro sunday till monday o' th' neet, an' then,--lo an' behold,--th' mon towd him that he'd hire't another; and th' lad had to come trailin' whoam again, quite deawn i'th' meawth. eh, aw wur some mad! iv aw'd been at th' back o' that chap, aw could ha' punce't him, see yo!" "well," said my friend, "there's no work yet, ruth, is there?" "wark! naw; nor never will be no moor, aw believe." "hello, ruth!" said the young woman, pointing through the window, "dun yo know who yon is?" "know? ay," replied the old woman; "he's getten aboon porritch neaw, has yon. he walks by me i'th street, as peart as a pynot, an' never cheeps. but, he's no 'casion. aw know'd him when his yure stickt out at top ov his hat; and his shurt would ha' hanged eawt beheend, too,--like a wigan lantron,--iv he'd had a shurt." chapter xii. "oh, reason not the deed; our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous: allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beast's." --king lear. a short fit of rain came on whilst we were in the cottage in newton street, so we sat a little while with ruth, listening to her quaint tattle about the old man and his feathered pets; about the children, the hard times, and her own personal ailments;--for, though i could not help thinking her a very good-hearted, humorous old woman, bravely disposed to fight it out with the troubles of her humble lot, yet it was clear that she was inclined to ease her harassed mind now and then by a little wholesome grumbling; and i dare say that sometimes she might lose her balance so far as to think, like "natterin' nan," "no livin' soul atop o't earth's bin tried as i've bin tried: there's nob'dy but the lord an' me that knows what i've to bide." old age and infirmity, too, had found ruth out, in her penurious obscurity; and she was disposed to complain a little, like nan, sometimes, of "the ills that flesh is heir to:"- "fro' t' wind i't stomach, rheumatism, tengin pains i't gooms, an' coughs, an' cowds, an' t' spine o't back, i suffer martyrdom. "yet nob'dy pities mo, or thinks i'm ailin' owt at all; t' poor slave mun tug an' tew wi't wark, wolivver shoo can crawl." old ruth was far from being as nattle and querulous as the famous ill-natured grumbler so racily pictured by benjamin preston, of bradford; but, like most of the dwellers upon earth, she was a little bit touched with the same complaint. when the rain was over, we came away. i cannot say that the weather ever "cleared up" that day; for, at the end of every shower, the dark, slow-moving clouds always seemed to be mustering for another downfall. we came away, and left the "cant" old body "busy bakin' for betty," and "shooing" the hens away from her feet, and she shuffled about the house. a few yards lower in newton street, we turned up a low, dark entry, which led to a gloomy little court behind. this was one of those unhealthy, pent-up cloisters, where misery stagnates and broods among the "foul congregation of pestilential vapours" which haunt the backdoor life of the poorest parts of great towns. here, those viewless ministers of health--the fresh winds of heaven--had no free play; and poor human nature inhaled destruction from the poisonous effluvia that festered there. and, in such nooks as this, there may be found many decent working people, who have been accustomed to live a cleanly life in their humble way in healthy quarters, now reduced to extreme penury, pinching, and pining, and nursing the flickering hope of better days, which may enable them to flee from the foul harbour which strong necessity has driven them to. the dark aspect of the day filled the court with a tomb-like gloom. if i remember aright, there were only three or four cottages in it. we called at two of them. before we entered the first, my friend said, "a young couple lives here. they are very decent people. they have not been here long; and they have gone through a great deal before they came here." there were two or three pot ornaments on the cornice; but there was no furniture in the place, save one chair, which was occupied by a pale young woman, nursing her child. her thin, intelligent face looked very sad. her clothing, though poor, was remarkably clean; and, as she sat there, in the gloomy, fireless house, she said very little, and what she said she said very quietly, as if she had hardly strength to complain, and was even half-ashamed to do so. she told us, however, that her husband had been out of work six months. "he didn't know what to turn to after we sowd th' things," said she; "but he's takken to cheer-bottomin', for he doesn't want to lie upo' folk for relief, if he can help it. he doesn't get much above a cheer, or happen two in a week, one week wi' another, an' even then he doesn't olez get paid, for folks ha' not brass. it runs very hard with us, an' i'm nobbut sickly." the poor soul did not need to say much; her own person, which evinced such a touching struggle to keep up a decent appearance to the last, and everything about her, as she sat there in the gloomy place, trying to keep the child warm upon her cold breast, told eloquently what her tongue faltered at and failed to express. the next place we called at in this court was a cottage kept by a withered old woman, with one foot in the grave. we found her in the house, sallow, and shrivelled, and panting for breath. she had three young women, out of work, lodging with her; and, in addition to these, a widow with her two children lived there. one of these children, a girl, was earning s. d. a week for working short time at a mill; the other, a lad, was earning s. a week. the rest were all unemployed, and had been so for several months past. this s. d. a week was all the seven people had to live upon, with the exception of a trifle the sickly old woman received from the board of guardians. as we left the court, two young fellows were lounging at the entry end, as if waiting for us. one of them stepped up to my friend, and whispered something plaintively, pointing to his feet. i did not catch the reply; but my friend made a note, and we went on. before we had gone many yards down the street a storm of rain and thunder came on, and we hurried into the house of an old irishwoman close by. my friend knew the old woman. she was on his list of relief cases. "will you let us shelter a few minutes, mrs _?" said he. "i will, an' thank ye," replied she. "come in an' sit down. sure, it's not fit to turn out a dog. faith, that's a great storm. oh, see the rain! thank god it's not him that made the house that made the pot! dear, dear; did ye see the awful flash that time? i don't like to be by myself, i am so terrified wi' the thunder. there has been a great dale o' wet this long time." "there, has," replied my friend; "but how have ye been getting on since i called before?" "well," said the old woman, sitting down, "things is quare with us as ever they can be, an' that you know very well." there was a young woman reared against the table by the window. my friend turned towards her, and said, "well, and how does the indian meal agree with you?" the young woman blushed, and smiled, but said nothing; but the old woman turned sharply round and replied, "well, now, it is better nor starvation; it is chape, an' it fills up--an' that's all." "is your son working?" inquired my friend. "troth, he is," replied she. "he does be gettin' a day now an' again at the breek- croft in ribbleton lone. faith, it is time he did somethin', too, for he was nine months out o' work entirely. i am got greatly into debt, an' i don't think i'll ever be able to get over it any more. i don't know how does poor folk be able to spind money on drink such times as thim; bedad, i cannot do it. it is bard enough to get mate of any kind to keep the bare life in a body. oh, see now; but for the relief, the half o' the country would die out." "you're a native of ireland, missis," said i. "troth, i am," replied she; "an' had a good farm o' greawnd in it too, one time. ah! many's the dark day i went through between that an' this. before thim bad times came on, long ago, people were well off in ould ireland. i seen them wid as many as tin cows standin' at the door at one time. . . . ah, then! but the irish people is greatly scattered now! . . . but, for the matter of that, folk are as badly off here as anywhere in the world, i think. i dunno know how does poor folk be able to spind money for dhrink. i am a widow this seventeen year now, an' the divle a man or woman uvver seen me goin' to a public-house. i seen women goin' a drinkin' widout a shift to their backs. i dunno how the divvle they done it. begorra, i think, if i drunk a glass of ale just now, my two legs would fail from under me immadiately--i am that wake." the old woman was a little too censorious, i think. there is no doubt that even people who are starving do drink a little sometimes. the wonder would be if they did not, in some degree, share the follies of the rest of the world. besides, it is a well-known fact, that those who are in employ, are apt, from a feeling of misdirected kindness, to treat those who are out of work to a glass of ale or two, now and then; and it is very natural, too, that those who have been but ill-fed for a long time are not able to stand it well. after leaving the old irishwoman's house, we called upon a man who had got his living by the sale of newspapers. there was nothing specially worthy of remark in this case, except that he complained of his trade having fallen away a good deal. "i used to sell three papers where i now sell one," said he. this may not arise from there being fewer papers sold, but from there being more people selling them than when times were good. i came back to manchester in the evening. i have visited preston again since then, and have spent some time upon preston moor, where there are nearly fifteen hundred men, principally factory operatives, at work. of this i shall have something to say in my next paper. chapter xiii. "the rose of lancaster for lack of nurture pales." --blackburn bard. it was early on a fine morning in july when i next set off to see preston again; the long-continued rains seemed to be ended, and the unclouded sun flooded all the landscape with splendour. all nature rejoiced in the change, and the heart of man was glad. in clifton vale, the white-sleeved mowers were at work among the rich grass, and the scent of new hay came sweetly through our carriage windows. in the leafy cloughs and hedges, the small birds were wild with joy, and every garden sent forth a goodly smell. along its romantic vale the glittering irwell meandered, here, through nooks, "o'erhung wi' wildwoods, thickening green;" and there, among lush unshaded pastures; gathering on its way many a mild whispering brook, whose sunlit waters laced the green land with freakish lines of trembling gold. to me this ride is always interesting, so many points of historic interest line the way; but it was doubly delightful on that glorious july morning. and i never saw fishergate, in preston, look better than it did then. on my arrival there i called upon the secretary of the trinity ward relief committee. in a quiet bye- street, where there are four pleasant cottages, with little gardens in front of them, i found him in his studious nook, among books, relief tickets, and correspondence. we had a few minutes' talk about the increasing distress of the town; and he gave me a short account of the workroom which has been opened in knowsley street, for the employment of female factory operatives out of work. this workroom is managed by a committee of ladies, some of whom are in attendance every day. the young women are employed upon plain sewing. they have two days' work a week, at one shilling a day, and the relief committee adds sixpence to this s. in each case. most of them are merely learning to sew. many of them prove to be wholly untrained to this simple domestic accomplishment. the work is not remunerative, nor is it expected to be so; but the benefit which may grow out of the teaching which these young women get here--and the evil their employment here may prevent, cannot be calculated. i find that such workrooms are established in some of the other towns now suffering from the depression of trade. some of these i intend to visit hereafter. i spent an interesting half-hour with the secretary, after which i went to see the factory operatives at work upon preston moor. preston moor is a tract of waste land on the western edge of the town. it belongs to the corporation. a little vale runs through a great part of this moor, from south-east to north-west; and the ground was, until lately, altogether uneven. on the town side of the little dividing vale the land is a light, sandy soil; on the other side, there is abundance of clay for brickmaking. upon this moor there are now fifteen hundred men, chiefly factory operatives, at work, levelling the land for building purposes, and making a great main sewer for the drainage of future streets. the men, being almost all unused to this kind of labour, are paid only one shilling per day; and the whole scheme has been devised for the employment of those who are suffering from the present depression of trade. the work had been going on several months before i saw it, and a great part of the land was levelled. when i came in sight of the men, working in scattered gangs that fine morning, there was, as might be expected, a visible difference between their motions and those of trained "navvies" engaged upon the same kind of labour. there were also very great differences of age and physical condition amongst them--old men and consumptive-looking lads, hardly out of their teens. they looked hard at me as i walked down the central line, but they were not anyway uncivil. "what time is 't, maister?" asked a middle-aged man, with gray hair, as he wiped his forehead. "hauve- past ten," said i. "what time says he?" inquired a feeble young fellow, who was resting upon his barrow. "hauve-past ten, he says," replied the other. "eh; it's warm!" said the tired lad, lying down upon his barrow again. one thing i noticed amongst these men, with very rare exceptions, their apparel, however poor, evinced that wholesome english love of order and cleanliness which generally indicates something of self-respect in the wearer--especially among poor folk. there is something touching in the whiteness of a well- worn shirt, and the careful patches of a poor man's old fustian coat. as i lounged about amongst the men, a mild-eyed policeman came up, and offered to conduct me to jackson, the labour-master, who had gone down to the other end of the moor, to look after the men at work at the great sewer--a wet clay cutting--the heaviest bit of work on the ground. we passed some busy brickmakers, all plastered and splashed with wet clay --of the earth, earthy. unlike the factory operatives around them, these men clashed, and kneaded, and sliced among the clay, as if they were working for a wager. but they were used to the job, and working piece-work. a little further on, we came to an unbroken bit of the moor. here, on a green slope we saw a poor lad sitting chirruping upon the grass, with a little cloutful of groundsel for bird meat in his hand, watching another, who was on his knees, delving for earth-nuts with an old knife. lower down the slope there were three other lads plaguing a young jackass colt; and further off, on the town edge of the moor, several children from the streets hard by, were wandering about the green hollow, picking daisies, and playing together in the sunshine. there are several cotton factories close to the moor, but they were quiet enough. whilst i looked about me here, the policeman pointed to the distance and said, "jackson's comin' up, i see. yon's him, wi' th' white lin' jacket on." jackson seems to have won the esteem of the men upon the moor by his judicious management and calm determination. i have heard that he had a little trouble at first, through an injurious report spread amongst the men immediately before he undertook the management. some person previously employed upon the ground had "set it eawt that there wur a chap comin' that would make 'em addle a hauve-a-creawn a day for their shillin'." of course this increased the difficulty of his position; but he seems to have fought handsomely through all that sort of thing. i had met him for a few minutes once before, so there was no difficulty between us. "well, jackson," said i, "heaw are yo gettin' on among it?" "oh, very well, very well," said he," we'n more men at work than we had, an' we shall happen have more yet. but we'n getten things into something like system, an' then tak 'em one with another th' chaps are willin' enough. you see they're not men that have getten a livin' by idling aforetime; they're workin' men, but they're strange to this job, an' one cannot expect 'em to work like trained honds, no moor than one could expect a lot o' navvies to work weel at factory wark. oh, they done middlin', tak 'em one with another." i now asked him if he had not had some trouble with the men at first. "well," said he, "i had at first, an' that's the truth. i remember th' first day that i came to th' job. as i walked on to th' ground there was a great lump o' clay coom bang into my earhole th' first thing; but i walked on, an' took no notice, no moor than if it had bin a midge flyin' again my face. well, that kind o' thing took place, now an' then, for two or three days, but i kept agate o' never mindin'; till i fund there were some things that i thought could be managed a deal better in a different way; so i gav' th' men notice that i would have 'em altered. for instance, now, when i coom here at first, there was a great shed in yon hollow; an' every mornin' th' men had to pass through that shed one after another, an' have their names booked for th' day. the result wur, that after they'd walked through th' shed, there was many on 'em walked out at t'other end o' th' moor straight into teawn a-playin' 'em. well, i was determined to have that system done away with. an', when th' men fund that i was gooin' to make these alterations, they growled a good deal, you may depend, an' two or three on 'em coom up an' spoke to me abeawt th' matter, while tother stood clustered a bit off. well; i was beginnin' to tell 'em plain an' straight-forrud what i would have done, when one o' these three sheawted out to th' whole lot, "here, chaps, come an' gether reawnd th' devil. let's yer what he's for!" 'well,' said i, 'come on, an' you shall yer,' for aw felt cawmer just then, than i did when it were o'er. there they were, gethered reawnd me in a minute,--th' whole lot,--i were fair hemmed in. but i geet atop ov a bit ov a knowe, an' towd 'em a fair tale,-- what i wanted, an' what i would have, an' i put it to 'em whether they didn't consider it reet. an' i believe they see'd th' thing in a reet leet, but they said nought about it, but went back to their wark, lookin' sulky. but i've had very little bother with 'em sin'. i never see'd a lot o' chaps so altered sin' th' last february, as they are. at that time no mortal mon hardly could walk through 'em 'beawt havin' a bit o' slack-jaw, or a lump o' clay or summat flung a-him. but it isn't so, neaw. i consider th' men are doin' very weel. but, come; yo mun go deawn wi' me a-lookin' at yon main sewer." chapter xiv. "oh, let us bear the present as we may, nor let the golden past be all forgot; hope lifts the curtain of the future day, where peace and plenty smile without a spot on their white garments; where the human lot looks lovelier and less removed from heaven; where want, and war, and discord enter not, but that for which the wise have hoped and striven-- the wealth of happiness, to humble worth is given. "the time will come, as come again it must, when lancashire shall lift her head once more; her suffering sons, now down amid the dust of indigence, shall pass through plenty's door; her commerce cover seas from shore to shore; her arts arise to highest eminence; her products prove unrivall'd, as of yore; her valour and her virtue--men of sense and blue-eyed beauties--england's pride and her defence." --blackburn bard. jackson's office as labour-master kept him constantly tramping about the sandy moor from one point to another. he was forced to be in sight, and on the move, during working hours, amongst his fifteen hundred scattered workmen. it was heavy walking, even in dry weather; and as we kneaded through the loose soil that hot forenoon, we wiped our foreheads now and then. "ay," said he, halting, and looking round upon the scene, "i can assure you, that when i first took howd o' this job, i fund my honds full, as quiet as it looks now. i was laid up for nearly a week, an' i had to have two doctors. but, as i'd undertakken the thing, i was determined to go through with it to th' best o' my ability; an' i have confidence now that we shall be able to feight through th' bad time wi' summat like satisfaction, so far as this job's consarned, though it's next to impossible to please everybody, do what one will. but come wi' me down this road. i've some men agate o' cuttin' a main sewer. it's very little farther than where th' cattle pens are i' th' hollow yonder; and it's different wark to what you see here. th' main sewer will have to be brought clean across i' this direction, an' it'll be a stiffish job. th' cattle market's goin' to be shifted out o' yon hollow, an' in another year or two th' whole scene about here will be changed." jackson and i both remembered something of the troubles of the cotton manufacture in past times. we had seen something of the "shuttle gatherings," the "plug-drawings," the wild starvation riots, and strikes of days gone by; and he agreed with me that one reason for the difference of their demeanour during the present trying circumstances lies in their increasing intelligence. the great growth of free discussion through the cheap press has done no little to work out this salutary change. there is more of human sympathy, and of a perception of the union of interests between employers and employed than ever existed before in the history of the cotton trade. employers know that their workpeople are human beings, of like feelings and passions with themselves, and like themselves, endowed with no mean degree of independent spirit and natural intelligence; and working men know better than beforetime that their employers are not all the heartless tyrants which it has been too fashionable to encourage them to believe. the working men have a better insight into the real causes of trade panics than they used to have; and both masters and men feel more every day that their fortunes are naturally bound together for good or evil; and if the working men of lancashire continue to struggle through the present trying pass of their lives with the brave patience which they have shown hitherto, they will have done more to defeat the arguments of those who hold them to be unfit for political power than the finest eloquence of their best friends could have done in the same time. the labour master and i had a little talk about these things as we went towards the lower end of the moor. a few minutes' slow walk brought us to the spot, where some twenty of the hardier sort of operatives were at work in a damp clay cutting. "this is heavy work for sich chaps as these," said jackson; "but i let 'em work bi'th lump here. i give'em so much clay apiece to shift, and they can begin when they like, an' drop it th' same. th' men seem satisfied wi' that arrangement, an' they done wonders, considerin' th' nature o'th job. there's many o'th men that come on to this moor are badly off for suitable things for their feet. i've had to give lots o' clogs away among'em. you see men cannot work with ony comfort among stuff o' this sort without summat substantial on. it rives poor shoon to pieces i' no time. beside, they're not men that can ston bein' witchod (wetshod) like some. they haven't been used to it as a rule. now, this is one o'th' finest days we've had this year; an' you haven't sin what th' ground is like in bad weather. but you'd be astonished what a difference wet makes on this moor. when it's bin rain for a day or two th' wark's as heavy again. th' stuff's heavier to lift, an' worse to wheel; an' th' ground is slutchy. that tries 'em up, an' poo's their shoon to pieces; an' men that are wakely get knocked out o' time with it. but thoose that can stand it get hardened by it. there's a great difference; what would do one man's constitution good will kill another. winter time 'll try 'em up tightly. . . wait there a bit," continued he, "i'll be with you again directly." he then went down into the cutting to speak to some of his men, whilst i walked about the edge of the bank. from a distant part of the moor, the bray of a jackass came faint upon the sleepy wind. "yer tho', jone," said one of the men, resting upon his spade; "another cally-weighver gone!" " ay," replied jone, "th' owd lad's deawn't his cut. he'll want no more tickets, yon mon!" the country folk of lancashire say that a weaver dies every time a jackass brays. jackson came up from the cutting, and we walked back to where the greatest number of men were at work. "you should ha' bin here last saturday," said he; "we'd rather a curious scene. one o' the men coom to me an' axed if i'd allow 'em hauve-an-hour to howd a meetin' about havin' a procession i' th' guild week. i gav' 'em consent, on condition that they'd conduct their meetin' in an orderly way. well, they gethered together upo' that level theer; an' th' speakers stood upo' th' edge o' that cuttin', close to charnock fowd. th' meetin' lasted abeawt a quarter ov an hour longer than i bargained for; but they lost no time wi' what they had to do. o' went off quietly; an' they finished with 'rule britannia,' i' full chorus, an' then went back to their wark. you'll see th' report in today's paper." this meeting was so curious, and so characteristic of the men, that i think the report is worth repeating here:--"on saturday afternoon, a meeting of the parish labourers was held on the moor, to consider the propriety of having a demonstration of their numbers on one day in the guild week. there were upwards of a thousand present. an operative, named john houlker, was elected to conduct the proceedings. after stating the object of the assembly, a series of propositions were read to the meeting by william gillow, to the effect that a procession take place of the parish labourers in the guild week; that no person be allowed to join in it except those whose names were on the books of the timekeepers; that no one should receive any of the benefits which might accrue who did not conduct himself in an orderly manner; that all persons joining the procession should be required to appear on the ground washed and shaven, and their clogs, shoes, and other clothes cleaned; that they were not expected to purchase or redeem any articles of clothing in order to take part in the demonstration; and that any one absenting himself from the procession should be expelled from any participation in the advantages which might arise from the subscriptions to be collected by their fellow-labourers. these were all agreed to, and a committee of twelve was appointed to collect subscriptions and donations. a president, secretary, and treasurer were also elected, and a number of resolutions agreed to in reference to the carrying out of the details of their scheme. the managing committee consist of messrs w. gillow, robert upton, thomas greenwood riley, john houlker, john taylor, james ray, james whalley, wm. banks, joseph redhead, james clayton, and james mcdermot. the men agreed to subscribe a penny per week to form a fund out of which a dinner should be provided, and they expressed themselves confident that they could secure the gratuitous services of a band of music. during the meeting there was great order. at the conclusion, a vote of thanks was accorded to the chairman, to the labour master for granting them three-quarters of an hour for the purpose of holding the meeting, and to william gillow for drawing up the resolutions. three times three then followed; after which, george dewhurst mounted a hillock, and, by desire, sang 'rule britannia,' the chorus being taken up by the whole crowd, and the whole being wound up with a hearty cheer." there are various schemes devised in preston for regaling the poor during the guild; and not the worst of them is the proposal to give them a little extra money for that week, so as to enable them to enjoy the holiday with their families at home. it was now about half-past eleven. "it's getting on for dinner time," said jackson, looking at his watch. "let's have a look at th' opposite side yonder; an' then we'll come back, an' you'll see th' men drop work when the five minutes' bell rings. there's many of 'em live so far off that they couldn't well get whoam an' back in an hour; so, we give'em an hour an' a half to their dinner, now, an' they work half an' hour longer i'th afternoon." we crossed the hollow which divides the moor, and went to the top of a sandy cutting at the rear of the workhouse. this eminence commanded a full view of the men at work on different parts of the ground, with the time-keepers going to and fro amongst them, book in hand. here were men at work with picks and spades; there, a slow-moving train of full barrows came along; and, yonder, a train of empty barrows stood, with the men sitting upon them, waiting. jackson pointed out some of his most remarkable men to me; after which we went up to a little plot of ground behind the workhouse, where we found a few apparently older or weaker men, riddling pebbly stuff, brought from the bed of the ribble. the smaller pebbles were thrown into heaps, to make a hard floor for the workhouse schoolyard. the master of the workhouse said that the others were too big for this purpose--the lads would break the windows with them. the largest pebbles were cast aside to be broken up, for the making of garden walks. whilst the master of the workhouse was showing us round the building, jackson looked at his watch again, and said, "come, we've just time to get across again. th' bell will ring in two or three minutes, an' i should like yo to see 'em knock off." we hurried over to the other side, and, before we had been a minute there, the bell rung. at the first toll, down dropt the barrows, the half-flung shovelfuls fell to the ground, and all labour stopt as suddenly as if the men had been moved by the pull of one string. in two minutes preston moor was nearly deserted, and, like the rest, we were on our way to dinner. chapter xv. among the wigan operatives "there'll be some on us missin', aw deawt, iv there isn't some help for us soon." --samuel laycock. the next scene of my observations is the town of wigan. the temporary troubles now affecting the working people of lancashire wear a different aspect there on account of such a large proportion of the population being employed in the coal mines. the "way of life" and the characteristics of the people are marked by strong peculiarities. but, apart from these things, wigan is an interesting place. the towns of lancashire have undergone so much change during the last fifty years that their old features are mostly either swept away entirely, or are drowned in a great overgrowth of modern buildings. yet coaly wigan retains visible relics of its ancient character still; and there is something striking in its situation. it is associated with some of the most stirring events of our history, and it is the scene of many an interesting old story, such as the legend of mabel of haigh hall, the crusader's dame. the remnant of "mab's cross" still stands in wigan lane. some of the finest old halls of lancashire are now, and have been, in its neighbourhood, such as ince hall and crooke hall. it must have been a picturesque town in the time of the commonwealth, when cavaliers and roundheads met there in deadly contention. wigan saw a great deal of the troubles of that time. the ancient monument, erected to the memory of colonel tyldesley, upon the ground where he fell at the battle of wigan lane, only tells a little of the story of longfellow's puritan hero, miles standish, who belonged to the chorley branch of the family of standish of standish, near this town. the ingenious john roby, author of the "traditions of lancashire," was born here. round about the old market-place, and the fine parish church of st wilfred, there are many quaint nooks still left to tell the tale of centuries gone by. these remarks, however, by the way. it is almost impossible to sunder any place entirely from the interest which such things lend to it. our present business is with the share which wigan feels of the troubles of our own time, and in this respect it is affected by some conditions peculiar to the place. i am told that wigan was one of the first--if not the very first--of the towns of lancashire to feel the nip of our present distress. i am told, also, that it was the first town in which a relief committee was organised. the cotton consumed here is almost entirely of the kind from ordinary to middling american, which is now the scarcest and dearest of any. preston is almost wholly a spinning town. in wigan there is a considerable amount of weaving as well as spinning. the counts spun in wigan are lower than those in preston; they range from 's up to 's. there is also, as i have said before, another peculiar element of labour, which tends to give a strong flavour to the conditions of life in wigan, that is, the great number of people employed in the coal mines. this, however, does not much lighten the distress which has fallen upon the spinners and weavers, for the colliers are also working short time--an average of four days a week. i am told, also, that the coal miners have been subject to so many disasters of various kinds during past years, that there is now hardly a collier's family which has not lost one or more of its most active members by accidents in the pits. about six years ago, the river douglas broke into one of the ince mines, and nearly two hundred people were drowned thereby. these were almost all buried on one day, and it was a very distressing scene. everywhere in wigan one may meet with the widows and orphans of men who have been killed in the mines; and there are no few men more or less disabled by colliery accidents, and, therefore, dependent either upon the kindness of their employers, or upon the labour of their families in the cotton factories. this last failing them, the result may be easily guessed. the widows and orphans of coal miners almost always fall back upon factory labour for a living; and, in the present state of things, this class of people forms a very helpless element of the general distress. these things i learnt during my brief visit to the town a few days ago. hereafter, i shall try to acquaint myself more deeply and widely with the relations of life amongst the working people there. i had not seen wigan during many years before that fine august afternoon. in the main street and market place there is no striking outward sign of distress, and yet here, as in other lancashire towns, any careful eye may see that there is a visible increase of mendicant stragglers, whose awkward plaintiveness, whose helpless restraint and hesitancy of manner, and whose general appearance, tell at once that they belong to the operative classes now suffering in lancashire. beyond this, the sights i first noticed upon the streets, as peculiar to the place, were, here, two "sisters of mercy," wending along, in their black cloaks and hoods, with their foreheads and cheeks swathed in ghastly white bands, and with strong rough shoes upon their feet; and, there, passed by a knot of the women employed in the coal mines. the singular appearance of these women has puzzled many a southern stranger. all grimed with coaldust, they swing along the street with their dinner baskets and cans in their hands, chattering merrily. to the waist they are dressed like men, in strong trousers and wooden clogs. their gowns, tucked clean up, before, to the middle, hang down behind them in a peaked tail. a limp bonnet, tied under the chin, makes up the head- dress. their curious garb, though soiled, is almost always sound; and one can see that the wash-tub will reveal many a comely face amongst them. the dusky damsels are "to the manner born," and as they walk about the streets, thoughtless of singularity, the wigan people let them go unheeded by. before i had been two hours in the town, i was put into communication with one of the active members of the relief committee, who offered to devote a few hours of the following day to visitation with me, amongst the poor of a district called "scholes," on the eastern edge of the town. scholes is the "little ireland" of wigan, the poorest quarter of the town. the colliers and factory operatives chiefly live there. there is a saying in wigan --that, no man's education is finished until he has been through scholes. having made my arrangements for the next day, i went to stay for the night with a friend who lives in the green country near orrell, three miles west of wigan. early next morning, we rode over to see the quaint town of upholland, and its fine old church, with the little ivied monastic ruin close by. we returned thence, by way of "orrell pow," to wigan, to meet my engagement at ten in the forenoon. on our way, we could not help noticing the unusual number of foot-sore, travel-soiled people, many of them evidently factory operatives, limping away from the town upon their melancholy wanderings. we could see, also, by the number of decrepid old women, creeping towards wigan, and now and then stopping to rest by the wayside, that it was relief day at the board of guardians. at ten, i met the gentleman who had kindly offered to guide me for the day; and we set off together. there are three excellent rooms engaged by the good people of wigan for the employment and teaching of the young women thrown out of work at the cotton mills. the most central of the three is the lecture theatre of the mechanics' institution. this room was the first place we visited. ten o'clock is the time appointed for the young women to assemble. it was a few minutes past ten when we got to the place; and there were some twenty of the girls waiting about the door. they were barred out, on account of being behind time. the lasses seemed very anxious to get in; but they were kept there a few minutes till the kind old superintendent, mr fisher, made his appearance. after giving the foolish virgins a gentle lecture upon the value of punctuality, he admitted them to the room. inside, there were about three hundred and fifty girls mustered that morning. they are required to attend four hours a day on four days of the week, and they are paid d. a day for their attendance. they are divided into classes, each class being watched over by some lady of the committee. part of the time each day is set apart for reading and writing; the rest of the day is devoted to knitting and plain sewing. the business of each day begins with the reading of the rules, after which, the names are called over. a girl in a white pinafore, upon the platform, was calling over the names when we entered. i never saw a more comely, clean, and orderly assembly anywhere. i never saw more modest demeanour, nor a greater proportion of healthy, intelligent faces in any company of equal numbers. chapter xvi. "hopdance cries in tom's belly for two white herrings. croak not, black angel; i have no food for thee." --king lear. i lingered a little while in the work-room, at the mechanics' institution, interested in the scene. a stout young woman came in at a side door, and hurried up to the centre of the room with a great roll of coarse gray cloth, and lin check, to be cut up for the stitchers. one or two of the classes were busy with books and slates; the remainder of the girls were sewing and knitting; and the ladies of the committee were moving about, each in quiet superintendence of her own class. the room was comfortably full, even on the platform; but there was very little noise, and no disorder at all. i say again that i never saw a more comely, clean, and well conducted assembly than this of three hundred and fifty factory lasses. i was told, however, that even these girls show a kind of pride of caste amongst one another. the human heart is much the same in all conditions of life. i did not stay long enough to be able to say more about this place; but one of the most active and intelligent ladies connected with the management said to me afterwards, "your wealthy manufacturers and merchants must leave a great deal of common stuff lying in their warehouses, and perhaps not very saleable just now, which would be much more valuable to us here than ever it will be to them. do you think they would like to give us a little of it if we were to ask them nicely?" i said i thought there were many of them who would do so; and i think i said right. after a little talk with the benevolent old superintendent, whose heart, i am sure, is devoted to the business for the sake of the good it will do, and the evil it will prevent, i set off with my friend to see some of the poor folk who live in the quarter called "scholes." it is not more than five hundred yards from the mechanics' institution to scholes bridge, which crosses the little river douglas, down in a valley in the eastern part of the town. as soon as we were at the other end of the bridge, we turned off at the right hand corner into a street of the poorest sort--a narrow old street, called "amy lane." a few yards on the street we came to a few steps, which led up, on the right hand side, to a little terrace of poor cottages, overlooking the river douglas. we called at one of these cottages. though rather disorderly just then, it was not an uncomfortable place. it was evidently looked after by some homely dame. a clean old cat dosed upon a chair by the fireside. the bits of cottage furniture, though cheap, and well worn, were all there; and the simple household gods, in the shape of pictures and ornaments, were in their places still. a hardy-looking, brown-faced man, with close-cropped black hair, and a mild countenance, sat on a table by the window, making artificial flies, for fishing. in the corner over his head a cheap, dingy picture of the trial of queen catherine, hung against the wall. i could just make out the tall figure of the indignant queen, in the well-known theatrical attitude, with her right arm uplifted, and her sad, proud face turned away from the judgment-seat, where henry sits, evidently uncomfortable in mind, as she gushes forth that bold address to her priestly foes and accusers. the man sitting beneath the picture, told us that he was a throstle-overlooker by trade; and that he had been nine months out of work. he said, "there's five on us here when we're i'th heawse. when th' wark fell off i had a bit o' brass save't up, so we were forced to start o' usin' that. but month after month went by, an' th' brass kept gettin' less, do what we would; an' th' times geet wur, till at last we fund ersels fair stagged up. at after that, my mother helped us as weel as hoo could,--why, hoo does neaw, for th' matter o' that, an' then aw've three brothers, colliers; they've done their best to poo us through. but they're nobbut wortchin' four days a week, neaw; besides they'n enough to do for their own. aw make no acceawnt o' slotchin' up an' deawn o' this shap, like a foo. it would sicken a dog, it would for sure. aw go a fishin' a bit neaw an' then; an' aw cotter abeawt wi' first one thing an' then another; but it comes to no sense. its noan like gradely wark. it makes me maunder up an' deawn, like a gonnor wi' a nail in it's yed. aw wish to god yon chaps in amerikey would play th' upstroke, an' get done wi' their bother, so as folk could start o' their wark again." this was evidently a provident man, who had striven hard to get through his troubles decently. his position as overlooker, too, made him dislike the thoughts of receiving relief amongst the operatives whom he might some day be called upon to superintend again. a little higher up in amy lane we came to a kind of square. on the side where the lane continues there is a dead brick wall; on the other side, bounding a little space of unpaved ground, rather higher than the lane, there are a few old brick cottages, of very mean and dirty appearance. at the doors of some of the cottages squalid, untidy women were lounging; some of them sitting upon the doorstep, with their elbows on their knees, smoking, and looking stolidly miserable. we were now getting near where the cholera made such havoc during its last visit,--a pestilent jungle, where disease is always prowling about, "seeking whom it can devour." a few sallow, dirty children were playing listlessly about the space, in a melancholy way, looking as if their young minds were already "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and unconsciously oppressed with wonder why they should be born to such a miserable share of human life as this. a tall, gaunt woman, with pale face, and thinly clad in a worn and much-patched calico gown, and with a pair of "trashes" upon her stockingless feet, sat on the step of the cottage nearest the lane. the woman rose when she saw my friend. "come in," said she; and we followed her into the house. it was a wretched place; and the smell inside was sickly. i should think a broker would not give half-a-crown for all the furniture we saw. the woman seemed simple-minded and very illiterate; and as she stood in the middle of the floor, looking vaguely round she said, "aw can hardly ax yo to sit deawn, for we'n sowd o' th' things eawt o'th heawse for a bit o' meight; but there is a cheer theer, sich as it is; see yo; tak' that." when she found that i wished to know something of her condition--although this was already well known to the gentleman who accompanied me--she began to tell her story in a simple, off-hand way. "aw've had nine childer," said she; "we'n buried six, an' we'n three alive, an' aw expect another every day." in one corner there was a rickety little low bedstead. there was no bedding upon it but a ragged kind of quilt, which covered the ticking. upon this quilt something lay, like a bundle of rags, covered with a dirty cloth. "there's one o' th' childer, lies here, ill," said she. "it's getten' th' worm fayver." when she uncovered that little emaciated face, the sick child gazed at me with wild, burning eyes, and began to whine pitifully. "husht, my love," said the poor woman; "he'll not hurt tho'! husht, now; he's noan beawn to touch tho'! he's noan o'th doctor, love. come, neaw, husht; that's a good lass!" i gave the little thing a penny, and one way and another we soothed her fears, and she became silent; but the child still gazed at me with wild eyes, and the forecast of death on its thin face. the mother began again, "eh, that little thing has suffered summat," said she, wiping her eyes; "an', as aw towd yo before, aw expect another every day. they're born nake't, an' th' next'll ha' to remain so, for aught that aw con see. but, aw dar not begin o' thinkin' abeawt it. it would drive me crazy. we han a little lad o' mi sister's livin' wi' us. aw had to tak' him when his mother deed. th' little thing's noather feyther nor mother, neaw. it's gwon eawt a beggin' this morning wi' my two childer. my mother lives with us, too," continued she; "hoo's gooin' i' eighty-four, an' hoo's eighteen pence a week off th' teawn. there's seven on us, o'together, an' we'n had eawr share o' trouble, one way an' another, or else aw'm chetted. well, aw'll tell yo' what happened to my husban' o' i' two years' time. my husban's a collier. well, first he wur brought whoam wi' three ribs broken--aw wur lyin' in when they brought him whoam. an' then, at after that, he geet his arm broken; an' soon after he'd getten o'er that, he wur nearly brunt to deeath i' one o'th pits at ratcliffe; an' aw haven't quite done yet, for, after that, he lee ill o'th rheumatic fayver sixteen week. that o' happen't i' two years' time. it's god's truth, maister. mr lea knows summat abeawt it--an' he stons theer. yo may have a like aim what we'n had to go through. an' that wur when times were'n good; but then, everything o' that sort helps to poo folk deawn, yo known. we'n had very hard deed, maister--aw consider we'n had as hard deed as anybody livin', takkin' o' together." this case was an instance of the peculiar troubles to which colliers and their families are liable; a little representative bit of life among the poor of wigan. from this place we went further up into scholes, to a dirty square, called the "coal yard." here we called at the house of peter y_, a man of fifty-one, and a weaver of a kind of stuff called, "broad cross-over," at which work he earned about six shillings a week, when in full employ. his wife was a cripple, unable to help herself; and, therefore, necessarily a burden. their children were two girls, and one boy. the old woman said, "aw'm always forced to keep one o'th lasses a-whoam, for aw connot do a hond's turn." the children had been brought up to factory labour; but both they and their father had been out of work nearly twelve months. during that time the family had received relief tickets, amounting to the value of four shillings a week. speaking of the old man, the mother said, "peter has just getten a bit o' wark again, thank god. he's hardly fit for it; but he'll do it as lung as he can keep ov his feet." chapter xvii. "lord! how the people suffer day by day a lingering death, through lack of honest bread; and yet are gentle on their starving way, by faith in future good and justice led." --blackburn bard. it is a curious thing to note the various combinations of circumstance which exist among the families of the poor. on the surface they seem much the same; and they are reckoned up according to number, income, and the like. but there are great differences of feeling and cultivation amongst them; and then, every household has a story of its own, which no statistics can tell. there is hardly a family which has not had some sickness, some stroke of disaster, some peculiar sorrow, or crippling hindrance, arising within itself, which makes its condition unlike the rest. in this respect each family is one string in the great harp of humanity--a string which, touched by the finger of heaven, contributes a special utterance to that universal harmony which is too fine for mortal ears. from the old weaver's house in "coal yard" we went to a place close by, called "castle yard," one of the most unwholesome nooks i have seen in wigan yet, though there are many such in that part of the town. it was a close, pestilent, little cul de sac, shut in by a dead brick wall at the far end. here we called upon an irish family, seven in number. the mother and two of her daughters were in. the mother had sore eyes. the place was dirty, and the air inside was close and foul. the miserable bits of furniture left were fit for nothing but a bonfire. "good morning, mrs k_," said my friend, as we entered the stifling house; "how are you geting on?" the mother stood in the middle of the floor, wiping her sore eyes, and then folding her hands in a tattered apron; whilst her daughters gazed upon us vacantly from the background. "oh, then," replied the woman, "things is worse wid us entirely, sir, than whenever ye wor here before. i dunno what will we do whin the winter comes." in reply to me, she said, "we are seven altogether, wid my husband an' myself. i have one lad was ill o' the yallow jaundice this many months, an' there is somethin' quare hangin' over that boy this day; i dunno whatever shall we do wid him. i was thinkin' this long time could i get a ricommind to see would the doctor give him anythin' to rise an appetite in him at all. by the same token, i know it is not a convanient time for makin' appetites in poor folk just now. but perhaps the doctor might be able to do him some good, by the way he would be ready when times mind. faith, my hands is full wid one thing an' another. ah, thin; but god is good, after all. we dunno what is he goin' to do through the dark stroke is an' us this day." here my friend interrupted her, saying, "don't you think, mrs k_, that you would be more comfortable if you were to keep your house cleaner? it costs nothing, you know, but a little labour; and you have nothing else to do just now." "ah, then," replied she; "see here, now. i was just gettin' the mug ready for that same, whenever ye wor comin' into the yard, i was. "here she turned sharply round, and said to one of the girls, who was standing in the background, "go on, wid ye, now; and clane the flure. didn't i tell ye many a time this day?" the girl smiled, and shuffled away into a dingy little room at the rear of the cottage. "faith, sir," continued the woman, beating time with her hand in the air; "faith, sir, it is not aisy for a poor woman to manage unbiddable childer." "what part of ireland do you come from, mrs k_?" said i. she hesitated a second or two, and played with her chin; then, blushing slightly, she replied in a subdued tone, "county galway, sir." "well," said i, "you've no need to be ashamed of that." the woman seemed reassured, and answered at once, "oh, indeed then, sir, i am not ashamed--why would i? i am more nor seventeen year now in england, an' i never disguised my speech, nor disowned my country--nor i never will, aither, plase god." she had said before that her husband was forty- five years of age; and now i inquired what age she was. "i am the same age as my husband," replied she. "forty-five," said i. "no, indeed, i am not forty-five," answered she; "nor forty naither." "are you thirty-eight?" "may be i am; i dunno. i don't think i am thirty-eight naither; i am the same age as my husband." it was no use talking, so the subject was dropped. as we came away, the woman followed my friend to the door, earnestly pleading the cause of some family in the neighbourhood, who were in great distress. "see now," said she, "they are a large family, and the poor crayters are starvin'. he is a shoemaker, an' he doesn't be gettin' any work this longtime. oh, indeed, then, mr lea, god knows thim people is badly off." my friend promised to visit the family she had spoken of, and we came away. the smell of the house, and of the court altogether, was so sickening that we were glad to get into the air of the open street again. it was now about half-past eleven, and my friend said, "we have another workroom for young women in the schoolroom of st catherine's church. it is about five minutes' walk from here; we have just time to see it before they break up for dinner." it was a large, square, brick building, standing by the road side, upon high ground, at the upper end of scholes. the church is about fifty yards east of the schoolhouse. this workroom was more airy, and better lighted than the one at the mechanics' institution. the floor was flagged, which will make it colder than the other in winter time. there were four hundred girls in this room, some engaged in sewing and knitting, others in reading and writing. they are employed four days in the week, and they are paid ninepence a day, as at the other two rooms in the town. it really was a pleasant thing to see their clear, healthy, blond complexions; their clothing, so clean and whole, however poor; and their orderly deportment. but they had been accustomed to work, and their work had given them a discipline which is not sufficiently valued. there are people who have written a great deal, and know very little about the influence of factory labour upon health,--it would be worth their while to see some of these workrooms. i think it would sweep cobwebs away from the corners of their minds. the clothing made up in these workrooms is of a kind suitable for the wear of working people, and is intended to be given away to the neediest among them, in the coming winter. i noticed a feature here which escaped me in the room at the mechanics' institution. on one side of the room there was a flight of wooden stairs, about six yards wide. upon these steps were seated a number of children, with books in their hands. these youngsters were evidently restless, though not noisy; and they were not very attentive to their books. these children were the worst clad and least clean part of the assembly; and it was natural that they should be so, for they were habitual beggars, gathered from the streets, and brought there to be taught and fed. when they were pointed out to me, i could not help thinking that the money which has been spent upon ragged schools is an excellent investment in the sense of world-wide good. i remarked to one of the ladies teaching there, how very clean and healthy the young women looked. she said that the girls had lately been more in the open air than usual. "and," said she, speaking of the class she was superintending, "i find these poor girls as apt learners as any other class of young people i ever knew." we left the room just before they were dismissed to dinner. a few yards from the school, and by the same roadside, we came to a little cottage at the end of a row. "we will call here," said my friend; "i know the people very well. "a little, tidy, good-looking woman sat by the fire, nursing an infant at the breast. the house was clean, and all the humble furniture of the poor man's cottage seemed to be still in its place. there were two shelves of books hanging against the walls, and a pile of tracts and pamphlets, a foot deep, on a small table at the back of the room. i soon found, however, that these people were going through their share of the prevalent suffering. the family was six in number. the comely little woman said that her husband was a weaver of "cross-over;" and i suppose he would earn about six or seven shillings a week at that kind of work; but he had been long out of work. his wife said, "i've had to pop my husban's trousers an' waistcoat many a time to pay th' rent o' this house." she then began to talk about her first-born, and the theme was too much for her. "my owdest child was thirteen when he died," said she. "eh, he was a fine child. we lost him about two years sin'. he was killed. he fell down that little pit o' wright's, mr lea, he did." then the little woman began to cry, "eh, my poor lad! eh, my fine little lad! oh dear,--oh dear o' me!" what better thing could we have done than to say nothing at such a moment. we waited a few minutes until she became calm, and then she began to talk about a benevolent young governess who used to live in that quarter, and who had gone about doing good there, amongst "all sorts and conditions of men," especially the poorest. "eh," said she; "that was a good woman, if ever there was one. hoo teached a class o' fifty at church school here, though hoo wur a dissenter. an' hoo used to come to this house every sunday neet, an' read th' scripturs; an' th' place wur olez crammed--th' stairs an o'. up-groon fellows used to come an' larn fro her, just same as childer--they did for sure--great rough colliers, an' o' mak's. hoo used to warn 'em again drinkin', an' get 'em to promise that they wouldn't taste for sich a time. an' if ever they broke their promise, they olez towd her th' truth, and owned to it at once. they like as iv they couldn't for shame tell her a lie. there's one of her scholars, a blacksmith--he's above fifty year owd--iv yo were to mention her name to him just now, he'd begin a-cryin', an' he'd ha' to walk eawt o'th heause afore he could sattle hissel'. eh, hoo wur a fine woman; an' everything that hoo said wur so striking. hoo writes to her scholars here, once a week; an' hoo wants 'em to write back to her, as mony on 'em as con do. see yo; that's one ov her letters!" chapter xviii. "come, child of misfortune, come hither! i'll weep with thee, tear for tear." --tom moore. the weaver's wife spoke very feelingly of the young governess who had been so good to the family. her voice trembled with emotion as she told of her kindnesses, which had so won the hearts of the poor folk thereabouts, that whenever they hear her name now, their tongues leap at once into heart-warm praise of her. it seems to have been her daily pleasure to go about helping those who needed help most, without any narrowness of distinction; in the spirit of that "prime wisdom" which works with all its might among such elements as lie nearest to the hand. children and gray-haired working men crowded into the poor cottages to hear her read, and to learn the first elements of education at her free classes. she left the town, some time ago, to live in the south of england; but the blessings of many who were ready to perish in wigan will follow her all her days, and her memory will long remain a garden of good thoughts and feelings to those she has left behind. the eyes of the weaver's wife grew moist as she told of the old blacksmith, who could not bear to hear her name mentioned without tears. on certain nights of the week he used to come regularly with the rest to learn to read, like a little child, from that young teacher. as i said in my last, she still sends a weekly letter to her poor scholars in wigan to encourage them in their struggles, and to induce as many of them as are able to write to her in return. "this is one of her letters," said the poor woman, handing a paper to me. the manner of the handwriting was itself characteristic of kind consideration for her untrained readers. the words stood well apart. the letters were clearly divided, and carefully and distinctly written, in roman characters, a quarter of an inch long; and there was about three- quarters of an inch of space between each line, so as to make the whole easier to read by those not used to manuscript. the letter ran as follows:--"dear friends,--i send you with this some little books, which i hope you will like to try to read; soon, i hope, i shall be able to help you with those texts you cannot make out by yourselves. i often think of you, dear friends, and wish that i could sometimes take a walk to scholefield's lane. this wish only makes me feel how far i am from you, but then i remember with gladness that i may mention you all by name to our one father, and ask him to bless you. very often i do ask him, and one of my strongest wishes is that we, who have so often read his message of love together, may all of us love the saviour, and, through him, be saved from sin. dear friends, do pray to him. with kind love and best wishes to each one of you, believe me always, your sincere friend, __." i have dwelt a little upon this instance of unassuming beneficence, to show that there is a great deal of good being done in this world, which is not much heard of, except by accident. one meets with it, here and there, as a thirsty traveller meets with an unexpected spring in the wilderness, refreshing its own plot of earth, without noise or ostentation. my friend and i left the weaver's cottage, and came down again into a part of scholes where huddled squalor and filth is to be found on all sides. on our way we passed an old tattered irishwoman, who was hurrying along, with two large cabbages clipt tight in her withered arms. "you're doin' well, old lady," said i. "faith," replied she, "if i had a big lump ov a ham bone, now, wouldn't we get over this day in glory, anyhow. but no matter. there's not wan lafe o' them two fellows but will be clane out o' sight before the clock strikes again." the first place we called at in this quarter was a poor half-empty cottage, inhabited by an old widow and her sick daughter. the girl sat there pale and panting, and wearing away to skin and bone. she was far gone in consumption. their only source of maintenance was the usual grant of relief from the committee, but this girl's condition needed further consideration. the old widow said to my friend, "aw wish yo could get me some sort o' nourishment for this lass, mr lea; aw cannot get it mysel', an' yo see'n heaw hoo is." my friend took a note of the case, and promised to see to it at once. when great weltering populations, like that of lancashire, are thrown suddenly into such a helpless state as now, it is almost impossible to lay hold at once of every nice distinction of circumstances that gives a speciality of suffering to the different households of the poor. but i believe, as this time of trouble goes on, the relief committees are giving a more careful and delicate consideration to the respective conditions of poor families. after leaving the old widow's house, as we went farther down into the sickly hive of penury and dirt, called "scholes," my friend told me of an intelligent young woman, a factory operative and a sunday- school teacher, who had struggled against starvation, till she could bear it no longer; and, even after she had accepted the grant of relief, she "couldn't for shame" fetch the tickets herself, but waited outside whilst a friend of hers went in for them. the next house we visited was a comfortable cottage. the simple furniture was abundant, and good of its kind, and the whole was remarkably clean. amongst the wretched dwellings in its neighbourhood, it shone "like a good deed in a naughty world." on the walls there were several catholic pictures, neatly framed; and a large old-fashioned wooden wheel stood in the middle of the floor, with a quantity of linen yarn upon it. old stephen i__ and his cosy goodwife lived there. the old woman was "putting the place to rights" after their noontide meal; and stephen was "cottering" about the head of the cellar steps when we went in. there were a few healthy plants in the windows, and everything gave evidence of industry and care. the good-tempered old couple were very communicative. old stephen was a weaver of diaper; and, when he had anything to do, he could earn about eight shillings a week. "some can get more than that at the same work," said he; "but i am gettin' an old man, ye see. i shall be seventy-three on the th of next october, and, beside that, i have a very bad arm, which is a great hindrance to me." "he has had very little work for months, now," said his wife; "an' what makes us feel it more, just now, is that my son is over here on a visit to us, from oscott college. he is studying for the priesthood. he went to st john's, here, in wigan, for five years, as a pupil teacher; an' he took good ways, so the principals of the college proposed to educate him for the church of rome. he was always a good boy, an' a bright one, too. i wish we had been able to entertain him better. but he knows that the times are again us. he is twenty-four years of age; an' i often think it strange that his father's birthday and his own fall on the same day of the month--the th of october. i hope we'll both live to see him an ornament to his profession yet. there is only the girl, an' stephen, an' myself left at home now, an' we have hard work to pull through, i can assure ye; though there are many people a dale worse off than we are." from this place we went up to a street called "vauxhall road." in the first cottage we called at here the inmates were all out of work, as usual, and living upon relief. there happened to be a poor old white-haired weaver sitting in the house,--an aged neighbour out of work, who had come in to chat with my friend a bit. my friend asked how he was getting on. "yo mun speak up," said the woman of the house, "he's very deaf." "what age are yo, maister?" said i. "what?" "how old are yo?" "aw'm a beamer," replied the old man, "a twister-in,--when there's ought doin'. but it's nowt ov a trade neaw. aw'll tell yo what ruins me; it's these lung warps. they maken 'em seven an' eight cuts in, neaw an' then. there's so mony 'fancies' an' things i' these days; it makes my job good to nought at o' for sich like chaps as me. when one gets sixty year owd, they needen to go to schoo again neaw; they getten o'erta'en wi' so many kerly-berlies o' one mak and another. mon, owd folk at has to wortch for a livin' cannot keep up wi' sich times as these,--nought o'th sort." "well, but how do you manage to live?" "well, aw can hardly tell,--aw'll be sunken iv aw can tell. it's very thin pikein'; but very little does for me, an' aw've nought but mysel'. yo see'n, aw get a bit ov a job neaw an' then, an' a scrat amung th' rook, like an owd hen. but aw'll tell yo one thing; aw'll not go up yon, iv aw can help it,--aw'll not." ("up yon" meant to the board of guardians.) "eh, now," said the woman of the house, "aw never see'd sich a man as him i' my life. see yo, he'll sit an' clem fro mornin' to neet afore he'll ax oather relief folk or onybody else for a bite." in the same street we called at a house where there was a tall, pale old man, sitting sadly in an old arm-chair, by the fireside. the little cottage was very sweet and orderly. every window was cleaned to its utmost nook of glass, and every bit of metal was brightened up to the height. the flagged floor was new washed; and everything was in its own place. there were a few books on little shelves, and a bible lay on the window-sill; and there was a sad, chapel-like stillness in the house. a clean, staid-looking girl stood at a table, peeling potatoes for dinner. the old man said, "we are five, altogether, in this house. this lass is a reeler. i am a weighver; but we'n bin out o' wark nine months, now. we'n bin force't to tak to relief at last; an' we'n getten five tickets. we could happen ha' manage't better,--but aw'm sore wi' rheumatism, yo see'n. aw've had a bit o' weighvin' i'th heawse mony a day, but aw've th' rheumatic so bad i' this hond--it's hond that aw pick wi'--that aw couldn't bide to touch a fither with it, bless yo. aw have th' rheumatic all o'er mo, nearly; an' it leads one a feaw life. yo happen never had a touch on it, had yo?" "never." "well; yo're weel off. when is this war to end, thinken yo?" "nay; that's a very hard thing to tell." " well, we mun grin an' abide till it's o'er, aw guess. it's a mad mak o' wark. but it'll happen turn up for best i'th end ov o'." chapter xix. "mother, heaw leets we han no brade,-- heawever con it be? iv aw don't get some brade to eat, aw think 'at aw mun dee." --hungry child. it was about noon when we left the old weaver, nursing his rheumatic limbs by the side of a dim fire, in his chapel-like little house. his daughter, a tall, clean, shy girl, began to peel a few potatoes just before we came away. it is a touching thing, just now, to see so many decent cottages of thrifty working men brought low by the strange events of these days; cottages in which everything betokens the care of well-conducted lives, and where the sacred fire of independent feeling is struggling through the long frost of misfortune with patient dignity. it is a touching thing to see the simple joys of life, in homes like these, crushed into a speechless endurance of penury, and the native spirit of self-reliance writhing in unavoidable prostration, and hoping on from day to day for better times. i have seen many such places in my wanderings during these hard days--cottages where all was so sweet and orderly, both in person and habitation, that, but for the funereal stillness which sat upon hunger-nipt faces, a stranger would hardly have dreamt that the people dwelling there were undergoing any uncommon privation. i have often met with such people in my rambles,--i have often found them suffering pangs more keen than hunger alone could inflict, because they arose from the loss of those sweet relations of independence which are dear to many of them as life itself. with such as these--the shy, the proud, the intelligent and uncomplaining endurers--hunger is not the hardest thing that befalls:- "when the mind's free, the body's delicate; the tempest in their minds doth from their senses take all else, save what beats there." people of this temper are more numerous amongst our working population than the world believes, because they are exactly of the kind least likely to be heard of. they will fight their share of the battle of this time out as nobly as they have begun it; and it will be an ill thing for the land that owns them if full justice is not done to their worth, both now and hereafter. in the same street where the old weaver lived, we called upon a collier's family--a family of ten in number. the colliers of wigan have been suffering a good deal lately, among the rest of the community, from shortness of labour. it was dinner-time when we entered the house, and the children were all swarming about the little place clamouring for their noontide meal. with such a rough young brood, i do not wonder that the house was not so tidy as some that i had seen. the collier's wife was a decent, good-tempered- looking woman, though her face was pale and worn, and bore evidence of the truth of her words, when she said, "bless your life, aw'm poo'd to pieces wi' these childer!" she sat upon a stool, nursing a child at the breast, and doing her best to still the tumult of the others, who were fluttering about noisily. "neaw, sammul," said she, "theaw'll ha' that pot upo th' floor in now,--thae little pousement thae! do keep eawt o' mischief,--an' make a less din, childer, win yo: for my yed's fair maddle't wi' one thing an' another . . . mary, tak' th' pon off th' fire, an' reach me yon hippin' off th' oondur; an' then sit tho deawn somewheer, do,--thae'll be less bi th' legs." the children ranged seemingly from about two months up to fourteen years of age. two of the youngest were sitting upon the bottom step of the stairs, eating off one plate. four rough lads were gathered round a brown dish, which stood upon a little deal table in the middle of the floor. these four were round-headed little fellows, all teeming with life. "yon catched us eawt o'flunters, (out of order,)" said the poor woman when we entered; "but what con a body do?" we were begging that she would not disturb herself, when one of the lads at the table called out, "mother; look at eawr john. he keeps pushin' me off th' cheer!" "eh, john," replied she; "i wish thy feyther were here! thae'rt olez tormentin' that lad. do let him alone, wilto--or else aw'll poo that toppin' o' thine, smartly--aw will! an' do see iv yo connot behave yorsels!" "well," said john; "he keeps takkin' my puddin'!" "eh, what a story," replied the other little fellow; "it wur thee, neaw!" " aw'll tell yo what it is," said the mother, "iv yo two connot agree, an' get your dinner quietly, aw'll tak that dish away; an' yo'st not have another bite this day. heaw con yo for shame!" this quietened the lads a little, and they went on with their dinner. at another little table under the back window, two girls stood, dining off one plate. the children were all eating a kind of light pudding, known in lancashire by the name of "berm-bo," or, "berm-dumplin'," made of flour and yeast, mixed with a little suet. the poor woman said that her children were all "hearty-etten," (all hearty eaters,) especially the lads; and she hardly knew what to make for them, so as to have enough for the whole. "berm-dumplin'," was as satisfying as anything that she could get, and it would "stick to their ribs" better than "ony mak o' swill;" besides, the children liked it. speaking of her husband, she said, "he were eawt o' wark a good while; but he geet a shop at last, at blackrod, abeawt four mile off wigan. when he went a-wortchin' to blackrod, at first, nought would sarve but he would walk theer an' back every day, so as to save lodgin' brass,--an sich like. aw shouldn't ha' care't iv it had nobbut bin a mile, or two even; for aw'd far rayther that he had his meals comfortable awhoam, an' his bits o' clooas put reet; but lord bless yo,--eight mile a day, beside a hard day's wark,--it knocked him up at last,--it were so like. he kept sayin', 'oh, he could do it,' an' sich like; but aw could see that he were fair killin' hissel', just for the sake o' comin' to his own whoam ov a neet; an' for th' sake o' savin' two or three shillin'; so at last aw turned turk, an' made him tak lodgin's theer. aw'd summut to do to persuade him at first, an' aw know that he's as whoam-sick as a chylt that's lost its mother, just this minute; but then, what's th' matter o' that,--it wouldn't do for mo to have him laid up, yo known. . . . oh, he's a very feelin' mon. aw've sin him when he couldn't finish his bit o' dinner for thinkin' o' somebody that were clemmin'." speaking of the hardships the family had experienced, she said, "eh, bless yo! there's some folk can sit i'th heawse an' send their childer to prow eawt a-beggin' in a mornin', regilar,--but eawr childer wouldn't do it,--an', iv they would, aw wouldn' let 'em,-- naw, not iv we were clemmin' to deeoth,--to my thinkin'." the woman was quite right. among the hard-tried operatives of lancashire i have seen several instances in which they have gone out daily to beg; and some rare cases, even, in which they have stayed moodily at home themselves and sent their children forth to beg; and anybody living in this county will have noticed the increase of mendicancy there, during the last few months. no doubt professional beggars have taken large advantage of this unhappy time to work upon the sympathies of those easy givers who cannot bear to hear the wail of distress, however simulated--who prefer giving at once, because it "does their own hearts good," to the trouble of inquiring or the pain of refusing,--who would rather relieve twenty rogues than miss the blessing of one honest soul who was ready to perish,--those kind-hearted, free-handed scatterers of indiscriminate benevolence who are the keen-eyed, whining cadger's chief support, his standing joke, and favourite prey; and who are more than ever disposed to give to whomsoever shall ask of them in such a season as this. all the mendicancy which appears on our streets does not belong to the suffering operatives of lancashire. but, apart from those poor, miserable crawlers in the gutters of life, who live by habitual and unnecessary beggary, great and continued adversity is a strong test of the moral tone of any people. extreme poverty, and the painful things which follow in its train--these are "bad to bide" with the best of mankind. besides, there are always some people who, from causes within themselves, are continually at their wits' end to keep the wolf from the door, even when employment is plentiful with them; and there are some natures too weak to bear any long strain of unusual poverty without falling back upon means of living which, in easy circumstances, they would have avoided, if not despised. it is one evil of the heavy pressure of the times; for there is fear that among such as these, especially the young and plastic, some may become so familiar with that beggarly element which was offensive to their minds at first--may so lose the tone of independent pride, and become "subdued to what they work in, like the dyer's hand,"--that they may learn to look upon mendicancy as an easy source of support hereafter, even in times of less difficulty than the present. happily, such weakness as this is not characteristic of the english people; but "they are well kept that god keeps," and perhaps it would not be wise to cramp the hand of relief too much at a time like this, to a people who have been, and will be yet, the hope and glory of the land. chapter xx. "poor tom's a-cold! who gives anything to poor tom?" --king lear. one sometimes meets with remarkable differences of condition in the households of poor folk, which stand side by side in the same street. i am not speaking of the uncertain shelters of those who struggle upon the skirts of civilisation, in careless, uncared-for wretchedness, without settled homes, or regular occupation,--the miserable camp followers of life's warfare,--living habitually from hand to mouth, in a reckless wrestle with the world, for mere existence. i do not mean these, but the households of our common working people. amongst the latter one sometimes meets with striking differences, in cleanliness, furniture, manners, intellectual acquirements, and that delicate compound of mental elements called taste. even in families whose earnings have been equal in the past, and who are just now subject alike to the same pinch of adversity, these disparities are sometimes very great. and, although there are cases in which the immediate causes of these differences are evident enough in the habits of the people, yet, in others, the causes are so obscure, that the wisest observer would be most careful in judging respecting them. i saw an example of this in a little bye- street, at the upper end of scholes--a quarter of wigan where the poorest of the poor reside, and where many decent working people have lately been driven for cheap shelter by the stress of the times. scholes is one of those ash-pits of human life which may be found in almost any great town; where, among a good deal of despised stuff, which by wise treatment might possibly be made useful to the world, many a jewel gets accidentally thrown away, and lost. this bye-street of mean brick cottages had an unwholesome, outcast look; and the sallow, tattered women, lounging about the doorways, and listlessly watching the sickly children in the street, evinced the prevalence of squalor and want there. the very children seemed joyless at their play; and everything that met the eye foretold that there was little chance of finding anything in that street but poverty in its most prostrate forms. but, even in this unpromising spot, i met with an agreeable surprise. the first house we entered reminded me of those clean, lone dwellings, up in the moorland nooks of lancashire, where the sweet influences of nature have free play; where the people have a hereditary hatred of dirt and disorder; and where, even now, many of the hardy mountain folk are half farmers, half woollen weavers, doing their weaving in their own quiet houses, where the smell of the heather and the song of the wild bird floats in at the workman's window, blent with the sounds of rindling waters,--doing their weaving in green sequestered nooks, where the low of kine, and the cry of the moorfowl can be heard; and bearing the finished "cuts" home upon their backs to the distant town. all was so bright in this little cottage,--so tidy and serene,--that the very air seemed clearer there than in the open street. the humble furniture, good of its kind, was all shiny with "elbow grease," and some parts of it looked quaint and well-preserved, like the heirlooms of a careful cottage ancestry. the well polished fire-irons, and other metal things, seemed to gather up the diffuse daylight and fling it back in concentrated radiances that illuminated the shady cottage with cheerful beauty. the little shelf of books, the gleaming window, with its healthy pot flowers, the perfect order, and the trim sweetness of everything, reminded me, as i have said, of the better sort of houses where simple livers dwell, up among the free air of the green hills--those green hills of lancashire, the remembrance of which will always stir my heart as long as it can stir to anything. this cottage, in comparison with most of those which i had seen in scholes, looked like a glimpse of the star-lit blue peeping through the clouds on a gloomy night. i found that it was the house of a widower, a weaver of diaper, who was left with a family of eight children to look after. two little girls were in the house, and they were humbly but cleanly clad. one of them called her father up from the cellar, where he was working at his looms. he was a mild, thoughtful-looking man, something past middle age. i could not help admiring him as he stood in the middle of the floor with his unsleeved arms folded, uttering quiet jets of simple speech to my friend, who had known him before. he said that he hardly ever got anything to do now, but when he was at work he could make about s. d. a week by weaving two cuts. he was receiving six tickets weekly from the relief committee, which, except the proceeds of a little employment now and then, was all that the family of nine had to depend upon for food, firing, clothes, and rent. he said that he was forced to make every little spin out as far as it would; but it kept him bare and busy, and held his nose "everlastingly deawn to th' grindlestone." but he didn't know that it was any use complaining about a thing that neither master nor man could help. he durst say that he could manage to grin and bide till things came round, th' same as other folk had to do. grumbling, in a case like this, was like "fo'in eawt wi' th' elements," (quarrelling with a storm.) one of his little girls was on her knees, cleaning the floor. she stopped a minute, to look at my friend and me. "come, my lass," said her father, "get on wi' thi weshin'." "i made application for th' watchman's place at leyland mill," continued he, "but i wur to lat. . . . there's nought for it," continued he, as we came out of the house, "there's nought for it but to keep one's een oppen, an' do as weel as they con, till it blows o'er." a few yards from this house, we looked in at a slip of a cottage, at the corner of the row. it was like a slice off some other cottage, stuck on at the end of the rest, to make up the measure of the street; for it was less than two yards wide, by about four yards long. there was only one small window, close to the door, and it was shrouded by a dingy cotton blind. when we first entered, i could hardly see what there was in that gloomy cell; but when the eyes became acquainted with the dimness within, we found that there was neither fire nor furniture in the place, except at the far end, where an old sick woman lay gasping upon three chairs, thinly covered from the cold. she was dying of asthma. at her right hand there was another rickety chair, by the help of which she raised herself up from her hard bed. she said that she had never been up stairs during the previous twelve months, but had lain there, at the foot of the stairs, all that time. she had two daughters. they were both out of the house; and they had been out of work a long time. one of them had gone to miss b_'s to learn to sew. "she gets her breakfast before she starts," said the old woman, "an' she takes a piece o' bread with her, to last for th' day." it was a trouble to her to talk much, so we did not stop long; but i could not help feeling sorry that the poor old soul had not a little more comfort to smooth her painful passage to the grave. on our way from this place, we went into a cottage near the "coal yard," where a tall, thin irishwoman was washing some tattered clothes, whilst her children played about the gutter outside. this was a family of seven, and they were all out of work, except the father, who was away, trying to make a trifle by hawking writing-paper and envelopes. this woman told us that she was in great trouble about one of her children--the eldest daughter, now grown up to womanhood. "she got married to a sailor about two year ago," said she, "an' he wint away a fortnit after, an' never was heard of since. she never got the scrape ov a pen from him to say was he alive or dead. she never heard top nor tail of him since he wint from her; an' the girl is just pinin' away." poor folk have their full share of the common troubles of life, apart from the present distress. the next place we visited was the "fleece yard," another of those unhealthy courts, of which there are so many in scholes--where poverty and dirt unite to make life doubly miserable. in this yard we went up three or four steps into a little disorderly house, where a family of eleven was crowded. not one of the eleven was earning anything except the father, who was working for ls. d. a day. in addition to this the family received four tickets weekly from the relief committee. there were several of the children in, and they looked brisk and healthy, in spite of the dirt and discomfort of the place; but the mother was sadly "torn down" by the cares of her large family. the house had a sickly smell. close to the window, a little, stiff built, bullet-headed lad stood, stript to the waist, sputtering and splashing as he washed himself in a large bowl of water, placed upon a stool. by his side there was another lad three or four years older, and the two were having a bit of famous fun together, quite heedless of all else. the elder kept ducking the little fellow's head into the water, upon which the one who was washing himself sobbed, and spat, and cried out in great glee, "do it again, jack!" the mother, seeing us laugh at the lads, said, "that big un's been powin' tother, an' th' little monkey's gone an' cut every smite o' th' lad's toppin' off. "" well," said the elder lad, "aw did it so as nobody can lug him. "and it certainly was a close clip. we could see to the roots of the little fellow's hair all over his round, hard head. "come," said the mother, "yo two are makin' a nice floor for mo. thae'll do, mon; arto beawn to lother o' th' bit o' swoap away that one has to wash wi'; gi's howd on't this minute, an' go thi ways an' dry thisel', thae little pouse, thae." we visited several other places in scholes that day, but of these i will say something hereafter. in the evening i returned home, and the thing that i best remember hearing on the way was an anecdote of two lancashire men, who had been disputing a long time about something that one of them knew little of. at last the other turned to him, and said, "jem; does thae know what it is that makes me like thee so weel, owd brid?" "naw; what is it?" "why; it's becose thae'rt sich a ___ foo!" "well," replied the other, "never thee mind that;" and then, alluding to the subject they had been disputing about, he said, "thae knows, joe, aw know thae'rt reet enough; but, by th' men, aw'll not give in till mornin'." chapter xxi. "here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues have humbled to all strokes." --king lear. in the afternoon of the last day i spent in wigan, as i wandered with my friend from one cottage to another, in the long suburban lane called "hardy butts," i bethought me how oft i had met with this name of "butts "connected with places in or close to the towns of lancashire. to me the original application of the name seems plain, and not uninteresting. in the old days, when archery was common in england, the bowmen of lancashire were famous; and it is more than likely that these yet so-called "butts" are the places where archery was then publicly practised. when sir edward stanley led the war-smiths of lancashire and cheshire to flodden field, the men of wigan are mentioned as going with the rest. and among those "fellows fearce and freshe for feight," of whom the quaint old alliterative ballad describes the array:- "a stock of striplings strong of heart, brought up from babes with beef and bread, from warton unto warrington from wigan unto wiresdale--" and, from a long list of the hills, and cloughs, and old towns of the county--the bowmen of lancashire did their share of work upon that field. the use of the bow lingered longer in lancashire than in some parts of the kingdom--longer in england generally than many people suppose. sir walter scott says, in a note to his "legend of montrose:" "not only many of the highlanders in montrose's army used these antique missiles, but even in england the bow and quiver, once the glory of the bold yeomen of that land, were occasionally used during the great civil wars." but i have said enough upon this subject in this place. my friend's business, and mine, in wigan, that day, was connected with other things. he was specially wishful that i should call upon an acquaintance of his, who lived in "hardy butts," an old man and very poor; a man heavily stricken by fortune's blows, yet not much tamed thereby; a man "steeped to the lips" in poverty, yet of a jocund spirit; a humorist and a politician, among his humble companions. i felt curious to see this "old john," of whom i heard so much. we went to the cottage where he lived. there was very little furniture in the place, and, like the house itself, it was neither good nor clean; but then the poverty-stricken pair were very old, and, so far as household comfort went, they had to look after themselves. when we entered, the little wrinkled woman sat with her back to us, smoking, and gazing at the dirty grate, where a few hot cinders glowed dimly in the lowmost bars. "where's john?" said my friend. "he hasn't bin gone eawt aboon five minutes," said she, turning round to look at us, "wur yo wantin' him?" "yes, i should like to see him." she looked hard at my friend again, and then cried out, "eh, is it yo? come, an' sit yo deawn! aw'll go an' see iv aw can root him up for yo!" but we thought it as well to visit some other houses in the neighbourhood, calling at old john's again afterwards; so we told the old woman, and came away. my friend was well known to the poor people of that neighbourhood as a member of the relief committee, and we had not gone many yards down "hardy butts" before we drew near where three irishwomen were sitting upon the doorsteps of a miserable cottage, chattering, and looking vacantly up and down the slutchy street. as soon as they caught sight of my friend, one of the women called out, "eh, here's mr lea! come here, now, mr lea, till i spake to ye. ah, now; couldn't ye do somethin' for old mary beyant there? sure the colour of hunger's in that woman's face. faith, it's a pity to see the way she is,--neither husband nor son, nor chick nor child, nor bit nor sup, barrin' what folk that has nothin' can give to her,--the crayter." " oh, indeed, then, sir," said another, "i'll lave it to god; but that woman is starvin'. she is little more nor skin an' bone,--and that's goin' less. faith, she's not long for this world, any how. . . . bridget, ye might run an' see can she come here a minute. . . . but there she is, standin' at the corner. mary! come here, now, woman, till ye see the gentleman." she was a miserable- looking creature; old, and ill, and thinly-clothed in rags, with a dirty cloth tied round her head. my friend asked her some questions, which she answered slowly, in a low voice that trembled with more than the weakness of old age. he promised to see to the relief of her condition immediately-- and she thanked him, but so feebly, that it seemed to me as if she had not strength enough left to care much whether she was relieved or not. but, as we came away, the three irishwomen, sitting upon the door- steps, burst forth into characteristic expressions of gratitude. "ah! long life to ye, mr lea! the prayer o' the poor is wid ye for evermore. if there was ony two people goin' to heaven alive, you'll be wan o' them. . . that ye may never know want nor scant,--for the good heart that's batein' in ye, mr lea." we now went through some of the filthy alleys behind "hardy butts," till we came to the cottage of a poor widow and her two daughters. the three were entirely dependent upon the usual grant of relief from the committee. my friend called here to inquire why the two girls had not been to school during the previous few days; and whilst their mother was explaining the reason, a neighbour woman who had seen us enter, looked in at the door, and said, "hey! aw say, mr lea!" "well, what's the matter?" " whaw, there's a woman i'th next street at's gettin' four tickets fro th' relief folk, reggilar, an' her husban's addlin' thirty shillin' a week o' t' time, as a sinker--he is for sure. aw 'm noan tellin' yo a wort ov a lie. aw consider sick wark as that's noan reet--an' so mony folk clemmin' as there is i' wigan." he made a note of the matter; but he told me afterwards that such reports were often found to be untrue, having their origin sometimes in private spite or personal contention of some kind. in the next house we called at, a widow woman lived, with her married daughter, who had a child at the breast. the old woman told her story herself; the daughter never spoke a word, so far as i remember, but sat there, nursing, silent and sad, with half-averted face, and stealing a shy glance at us now and then, when she thought we were not looking at her. it was a clean cottage, though it was scantily furnished with poor things; and they were both neat and clean in person, though their clothing was meagre and far worn. i thought, also, that the old woman's language, and the countenances of both of them, indicated more natural delicacy of feeling, and more cultivation, than is common amongst people of their condition. the old woman said, "my daughter has been eawt o' work a long time. i can make about two shillings and sixpence a-week, an' we've a lodger that pays us two shillings a week; but we've three shillings a-week to pay for rent, an' we must pay it, too, or else turn out. but i'm lookin' for a less heawse; for we cannot afford to stop here any longer, wi' what we have comin' in, --that is, if we're to live at o'." i thought the house they were in was small enough and mean enough for the poorest creature, and, though it was kept clean, the neighbourhood was very unwholesome. but this was another instance of how the unemployed operatives of lancashire are being driven down from day to day deeper into the pestilent sinks of life in these hard times. "this child of my daughter's," continued the old woman, in a low tone, "this child was born just as they were puttin' my husband into his coffin, an' wi' one thing an' another, we've had a deal o' trouble. but one half o'th world doesn't know how tother lives. my husban' lay ill i' bed three year; an' he suffered to that degree that he was weary o' life long before it were o'er. at after we lost him, these bad times coom on, an' neaw, aw think we're poo'd deawn as nee to th' greawnd as ony body can be. my daughter's husband went off a-seekin' work just afore that child was born,--an' we haven't heard from him yet." my friend took care that his visit should result in lightening the weight of the old woman's troubles a little. as we passed the doors of a row of new cottages at the top end of "hardy butts," a respectable old man looked out at one of the doorways, and said to my friend, "could aw spake to yo a minute?" we went in, and found the house remarkably clean, with good cottage furniture in it. two neighbour children were peeping in at the open door. the old man first sent them away, and then, after closing the door, he pointed to a good-looking young woman who stood blushing at the entrance of the inner room, with a wet cloth in her hands, and he said, "could yo do a bit o' summat to help this lass till sich times as hoo can get wark again? hoo's noather feyther nor mother, nor nought i'th world to tak to, but what aw can spare for her, an' this is a poor shop to come to for help. aw'm uncle to her." "well," said my friend, "and cannot you manage to keep her?" "god bless yo!" replied the old man, getting warm, "aw cannot keep mysel'. aw will howd eawt as lung as aw can; but, yo know, what'll barely keep one alive 'll clem two. aw should be thankful iv yo could give her a bit o' help whol things are as they are." before the old man had done talking, his niece had crept away into the back room, as if ashamed of being the subject of such a conversation. this case was soon disposed of to the satisfaction of the old man; after which we visited three other houses in the same block, of which i have nothing special to say, except that they were all inhabited by people brought down to destitution by long want of work, and living solely upon the relief fund, and upon the private charity of their old employers. upon this last source of relief too little has been said, because it has not paraded itself before the public eye; but i have had opportunities for seeing how wide and generous it is, and i shall have abundant occasion for speaking of it hereafter. on our way back, we looked in at "old john's" again, to see if he had returned home. he had been in, and he had gone out again, so we came away, and saw nothing of him. farther down towards the town, we passed through acton square, which is a cleaner place than some of the abominable nooks of scholes, though i can well believe that there is many a miserable dwelling in it, from what i saw of the interiors and about the doorways, in passing. the last house we called at was in this square, and it was a pleasing exception to the general dirt of the neighbourhood. it was the cottage of a stout old collier, who lost his right leg in one of wright's pits some years ago. my friend knew the family, and we called there more for the purpose of resting ourselves and having a chat than anything else. the old man was gray-haired, but he looked very hale and hearty--save the lack of his leg. his countenance was expressive of intelligence and good humour; and there was a touch of quiet majesty about his massive features. there was, to me, a kind of rude hint of christopher north in the old collier's appearance. his wife, too, was a tall, strong-built woman, with a comely and a gentle face --a fit mate for such a man as he. i thought, as she moved about, her grand bulk seemed to outface the narrow limits of the cottage. the tiny house was exceedingly clean, and comfortably furnished. everything seemed to be in its appointed place, even to the sleek cat sleeping on the hearth. there were a few books on a shelf, and a concertina upon a little table in the corner. when we entered, the old collier was busy with the slate and pencil, and an arithmetic before him; but he laid them aside, and, doffing his spectacles, began to talk with us. he said that they were a family of six, and all out of work; but he said that, ever since he lost his leg, the proprietors of the pit in which the accident happened (wright's) had allowed him a pension of six shillings a week, which he considered very handsome. this allowance just kept the wolf from their little door in these hard times. in the course of our conversation i found that the old man read the papers frequently, and that he was a man of more than common information in his class. i should have been glad to stay longer with him, but my time was up; so i came away from the town, thus ending my last ramble amongst the unemployed operatives of wigan. since then the condition of the poor there has been steadily growing worse, which is sure to be heard of in the papers. chapter xxii. an incident by the wayside. "take physic, pomp! expose thyself to feel what wretches feel; that thou mayst shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just." --king lear. on the saturday after my return from wigan, a little incident fell in my way, which i thought worth taking note of at the time; and perhaps it may not be uninteresting to your readers. on that day i went up to levenshulme, to spend the afternoon with an old friend of mine, a man of studious habits, living in a retired part of that green suburb. the time went pleasantly by whilst i was with the calm old student, conversing upon the state of lancashire, and the strange events which are upheaving the civilised world in great billows of change,--and drinking in the peaceful charm which pervaded everything about the man and his house and the scene which it stood in. after tea, he came with me across the fields to the "midway inn," on stockport road, where the omnibuses call on their way to manchester. it was a lovely evening, very clear and cool, and twilight was sinking upon the scene. waiting for the next omnibus, we leaned against the long wooden watering-trough in front of the inn. the irregular old building looked picturesque in the soft light of declining day, and all around was so still that we could hear the voices of bowlers who were lingering upon the green, off at the north side of the house, and retired from the highway by an intervening garden. the varied tones of animation, and the phrases uttered by the players, on different parts of the green, came through the quiet air with a cheery ring. the language of the bowling-green sounds very quaint to people unused to the game. "too much land, james!" cries one. "bravo, bully-bowl! that's th' first wood! come again for more!" cries another. "th' wrong bias, john!" "how's that?" "a good road; but it wants legs! narrow; narrow, o' to pieces!" these, and such like phrases of the game, came distinctly from the green into the highway that quiet evening. and here i am reminded, as i write, that the philosophic doctor dalton was a regular bowler upon tattersall's green, at old trafford. these things, however, are all aside from the little matters which i wish to tell. as we stood by the watering-trough, listening to the voices of the bowlers, and to the occasional ringing of bells mingled with a low buzz of merriment inside the house, there were many travellers went by. they came, nearly all of them, from the manchester side; sometimes three or four in company, and sometimes a lonely straggler. some of them had poor-looking little bundles in their hands; and, with a few exceptions, their dress, their weary gait, and dispirited looks led me to think that many of them were unemployed factory operatives, who had been wandering away to beg where they would not be known. i have met so many shame-faced, melancholy people in that condition during the last few months, that, perhaps, i may have somewhat over judged the number of these that belongs to that class. but, in two or three cases, little snatches of conversation, uttered by them as they went by, plainly told that, so far as the speakers went, it was so; and, at last, a little thing befell, which, i am sure, represented the condition of many a thousand more in lancashire just now. three young women stopped on the footpath in front of the inn, close to the place where we stood, and began to talk together in a very free, open way, quite careless of being overheard. one of them was a stout, handsome young woman, about twenty-three. her dress was of light printed stuff, clean and good. her round, ruddy arms, her clear blond complexion, and the bright expression of her full open countenance, all indicated health and good-nature. i guessed from her conversation, as well as from her general appearance, that she was a factory operative in full employ--though that is such a rare thing in these parts now. the other two looked very poor and downhearted. one was a short, thick-set girl, seemingly not twenty years of age; her face was sad, and she had very little to say. the other was a thin, dark-haired, cadaverous woman, above thirty years of age, as i supposed; her shrunk visage was the picture of want, and her frank, child-like talk showed great simplicity of character. the weather had been wet for some days previous; and the clothing of the two looked thin, and shower-stained. it had evidently been worn a good while; and the colours were faded. each of them wore a shivery bit of shawl, in which their hands were folded, as if to keep them warm. the handsome lass, who seemed to be in good employ, knew them both; but she showed an especial kindness towards the eldest of them. as these two stood talking to their friend, we did not take much notice of what they were saying until two other young women came slowly from townwards, looking poor, and tired, and ill, like the first. these last comers instantly recognised two of those who stood talking together in front of the inn, and one of them said to the other, "eh, sitho; there's sarah an' martha here! . . . eh, lasses; han yo bin a-beggin' too?" "ay, lass; we han;" replied the thin, dark complexioned woman; "ay, lass; we han. aw've just bin tellin' ann, here. aw never did sich a thing i' my life afore--never! but it's th' first time and th' last for me,--it is that! aw'll go whoam; an' aw'll dee theer, afore aw'll go a-beggin' ony moor, aw will for sure! mon, it's sich a nasty, dirty job; aw'd as soon clem! . . . see yo, lasses; we set off this mornin'--martha an' me, we set eawt this mornin' to go to gorton tank, becose we yerd that it wur sich a good place. but one doesn't know wheer to go these times; an' one doesn't like to go a-beggin' among folk at they known. well, when we coom to gorton we geet twopence-hawpenny theer; an' that wur o'. neaw, there's plenty moor beggin' besides us. well, at after that twopence-hawpenny, we geet twopence moor, an' that's o' at we'n getten. but, eh, lasses, when aw coom to do it, aw hadn't th' heart to as for nought; aw hadn't for sure. . . . martha an' me's walked aboon ten mile iv we'n walked a yard; an' we geet weet through th' first thing; an' aw wur ill when we set off, an' so wur martha, too; aw know hoo wur, though hoo says nought. well; we coom back through t' teawn; an' we were both on us fair stagged up. aw never were so done o'er i' my life, wi' one thing an' another. so we co'de a- seein' ann here; an' hoo made us a rare good baggin'--th' lass did. see yo; aw wur fit to drop o'th flags afore aw geet that saup o' warm tay into mo--aw wur for sure! an' neaw, hoo's come'd a gate wi' us hitherto, an' hoo would have us to have a glass o' warm ale a- piece at yon heawse lower deawn a bit; an' aw dar say it'll do mo good, aw getten sich a cowd; but, eh dear, it's made mo as mazy as a tup; an' neaw, hoo wants us to have another afore we starten off whoam. but it's no use; we mun' be gooin' on. aw'm noan used to it, an' aw connot ston it. aw'm as wake as a kittlin' this minute." ann, who had befriended them in this manner, was the handsome young woman who seemed to be in work; and now, the poor woman who had been telling the story, laid her hand upon her friend's shoulder and said, "ann, thae's behaved very weel to us o' roads; an' neaw, lass, go thi ways whoam, an' dunnut fret abeawt us, mon. aw feel better neaw, aw do for sure. we's be reet enough to-morn, lass. mon, there's awlus some way shap't. that tay's done me a deeol o' good. . . . go thi ways whoam, ann; neaw do; or else aw shan't be yezzy abeawt tho!" but ann, who was wiping her eyes with her apron, replied, "naw, naw; aw will not go yet, sarah!" . . . and then she began to cry, "eh, lasses; aw dunnot like to see yo o' this shap--aw dunnot for sure! besides, yo'n bin far enough today. come back wi' me. aw connot find reawm for both on yo; but thee come back wi' me, sarah. aw'll find thee a good bed: an' thae'rt welcome to a share o' what there is--as welcome as th' fleawers i may--thae knows that. thae'rt th' owdest o' th' two; an thae'rt noan fit to trawnce up an' deawn o' this shap. come back to eawr heawse; an' martha'll go forrud to stopput, (stockport,)--winnot tho, martha! . . . thae knows, martha," continued she, "thae knows, martha, thae munnot think nought at me axin' sarah, an' noan o' thee. yo should both on yo go back iv aw'd reawm,--but aw haven't. beside, thae'rt younger an' strunger than hoo is." " eh, god bless tho, lass," replied martha, "aw know o' abeawt it. aw'd rayther sarah would stop, for hoo'll be ill. aw can go forrud by mysel', weel enough. it's noan so fur, neaw." but, here, sarah, the eldest of the three, laid her hand once more upon the shoulder of her friend, and said in an earnest tone, "ann! it will not do, my lass! go aw mun! i never wur away fro whoam o' neet i my life,--never! aw connot do it, mon! beside, thae knows, aw've laft yon lad, an' never a wick soul wi' him! he'd fret hissel' to deoth this neet, mon, if aw didn't go whoam! aw couldn't sleep a wink for thinkin' abeawt him! th' child would be fit to start eawt o'th heawse i'th deead time o'th neet a-seechin' mo,--aw know he would! . . . aw mun go, mon: god bless tho, ann; aw'm obleeged to thee o' th' same. but, thae knows heaw it is. aw mun goo!" here the omnibus came up, and i rode back to manchester. the whole conversation took up very little more time than it will take to read it; but i thought it worth recording, as characteristic of the people now suffering in lancashire from no fault of their own. i know the people well. the greatest number of them would starve themselves to that degree that they would not be of much more physical use in this world, before they would condescend to beg. but starving to death is hard work. what will winter bring to them when severe weather begins to tell upon constitutions lowered in tone by a starvation diet--a diet so different to what they have been used to when in work? what will the s. d. a-head weekly do for them in that hard time? if something more than this is not done for them, when more food, clothing, and fire are necessary to everybody, calamities may arise which will cost england a hundred times more than a sufficient relief--a relief worthy of those who are suffering, and of the nation they belong to--would have cost. in the meantime the cold wings of winter already begin to overshadow the land; and every day lost involves the lives, or the future usefulness, of thousands of our best population. chapter xxiii. wandering minstrels; or, wails of the workless poor. "for whom the heart of man shuts out, straightway the heart of god takes in, and fences them all round about with silence, 'mid the world's loud din. and one of his great charities is music; and it doth not scorn to close the lids upon the eyes of the weary and forlorn." --james russel lowell. there is one feature of the distress in lancashire which was seen strikingly upon the streets of our large towns during some months of . i allude to the wandering minstrelsy of the unemployed. swarms of strange, shy, sad-looking singers and instrumental performers, in the work-worn clothing of factory operatives, went about the busy city, pleading for help in touching wails of simple song--like so many wild birds driven by hard weather to the haunts of man. there is something instructive, as well as affecting, in this feature of the troubled time. these wanderers are only a kind of representative overflow of a vast number whom our streets will never see. any one well acquainted with lancashire, will know how widespread the study of music is among its working population. even the inhabitants of our large towns know something more about this now than they knew a few months ago. i believe there is no part of england in which the practice of sacred music is so widely and lovingly pursued amongst the working people as in the counties of lancashire and yorkshire. there is no part of england where, until lately, there have been so many poor men's pianos, which have been purchased by a long course of careful savings from the workman's wages. these, of course, have mostly been sold during the hard times to keep life in the owner and his family. the great works of handel, haydn, beethoven, and mozart have solaced the toil of thousands of the poorest working people of lancashire. anybody accustomed to wander among the moorlands of the country will remember how common it is to hear the people practising sacred music in their lonely cottages. it is not uncommon to meet working men wandering over the wild hills, "where whip and heather grow," with their musical instruments, to take part in some village oratorio many miles away. "that reminds me," as tale-tellers say, of an incident among the hills, which was interesting, though far from singular in my experience. up in the forest of rosendale, between derply moor and the wild bill called swinshaw, there is a little lone valley, a green cup in the mountains, called "dean." the inhabitants of this valley are so notable for their love of music, that they are known all through the vales of rosendale as "th' deighn layrocks," or "the larks of dean." in the twilight of a glorious sunday evening, in the height of summer, i was roaming over the heathery waste of swinshaw, towards dean, in company with a musical friend of mine, who lived in the neighbouring clough, when we saw a little crowd of people coming down a moorland slope, far away in front of us. as they drew nearer, we found that many of them had musical instruments, and when we met, my friend recognised them as working people living in the district, and mostly well known to him. he inquired where they had been; and they told him that they had "bin to a bit ov a sing deawn i'th deighn." "well," said he, "can't we have a tune here?" "sure, yo con, wi' o' th' plezzur i'th world," replied he who acted as spokesman; and a low buzz of delighted consent ran through the rest of the company. they then ranged themselves in a circle around their conductor, and they played and sang several fine pieces of psalmody upon the heather-scented mountain top. as those solemn strains floated over the wild landscape, startling the moorfowl untimely in his nest, i could not help thinking of the hunted covenanters of scotland. the all-together of that scene upon the mountains, "between the gloaming and the mirk," made an impression upon me which i shall not easily forget. long after we parted from them we could hear their voices, softening in sound as the distance grew, chanting on their way down the echoing glen, and the effect was wonderfully fine. this little incident upon the top of swinshaw is representative of things which often occur in the country parts of lancashire, showing how widespread the love of music is among the working classes there. even in great manufacturing towns, it is very common, when passing cotton mills at work, to hear some fine psalm tune streaming in chorus from female voices, and mingling with the spoom of thousands of spindles. the "larks of dean," like the rest of lancashire operatives, must have suffered in this melancholy time; but i hope that the humble musicians of our county will never have occasion to hang their harps upon the willows. now, when fortune has laid such a load of sorrow upon the working people of lancashire, it is a sad thing to see so many workless minstrels of humble life "chanting their artless notes in simple guise" upon the streets of great towns, amongst a kind of life they are little used to. there is something very touching, too, in their manner and appearance. they may be ill-shod and footsore; they may be hungry, and sick at heart, and forlorn in countenance, but they are almost always clean and wholesome-looking in person. they come singing in twos and threes, and sometimes in more numerous bands, as if to keep one another in countenance. sometimes they come in a large family all together, the females with their hymn-books, and the men with their different musical instruments,--bits of pet salvage from the wrecks of cottage homes. the women have sometimes children in their arms, or led by the hand; and they sometimes carry music-books for the men. i have seen them, too, with little handkerchiefs of rude provender for the day. as i said before, they are almost invariably clean in person, and their clothing is almost always sound and seemly in appearance, however poor and scanty. amongst these poor wanderers there is none of the reckless personal negligence and filth of hopeless reprobacy; neither is there a shadow of the professional ostentation of poverty amongst them. their faces are sad, and their manners very often singularly shame- faced and awkward; and any careful observer would see at a glance that these people were altogether unused to the craft of the trained minstrel of the streets. their clear, healthy complexion, though often touched with pallor, their simple, unimportunate demeanour, and the general rusticity of their appearance, shows them to be "suppliants who would blush to wear a tatter'd garb, however coarse; whom famine cannot reconcile to filth; who ask with painful shyness, and refused, because deserving, silently retire." the females, especially the younger ones, generally walk behind, blushing and hiding themselves as much as possible. i have seen the men sometimes walk backwards, with their faces towards those who were advancing, as if ashamed of what they were doing. and thus they went wailing through the busy streets, whilst the listening crowd looks on them pityingly and wonderingly, as if they were so many hungry shepherds from the mountains of calabria. this flood of strange minstrels partly drowned the slang melodies and the monotonous strains of ordinary street musicians for a while. the professional gleeman "paled his ineffectual fire" before these mournful songsters. i think there never was so much sacred music heard upon the streets of manchester before. with the exception of a favourite glee now and then, their music consisted chiefly of fine psalm tunes--often plaintive old strains, known and welcome to all, because they awaken tender and elevating remembrances of life. "burton," "french," "kilmarnock," "luther's hymn," the grand "old hundred," and many other fine tunes of similar character, have floated daily in the air of our city, for months together. i am sure that this choice does not arise from the minstrels themselves having craft enough to select "a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse." it is the kind of music which has been the practice and pleasure of their lives, and it is a fortuitous thing that now, in addition to its natural plaintiveness, the sad necessity of the times lends a tender accompaniment to their simplest melody. i doubt very much whether leech's minor tunes were ever heard upon our streets till lately. leech was a working man, born near the hills, in lancashire; and his anthems and psalm tunes are great favourites among the musical population, especially in the country districts. leech's harp was tuned by the genius of sorrow. several times lately i have heard the tender complaining notes of his psalmody upon the streets of the city. about three months ago i heard one of his most pathetic tunes sung in the market-place by an old man and two young women. the old man's dress had the peculiar hue and fray of factory work upon it, and he had a pair of clogs upon his stockingless feet. they were singing one of leech's finest minor tunes to wesley's hymn:- "and am i born to die, to lay this body down? and must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown? a land of deepest shade, unpierced by human thought; the dreary country of the dead where all things are forgot." it is a tune often sung by country people in lancashire at funerals; and, if i remember right, the same melody is cut upon leech's gravestone in the old wesleyan chapel-yard, at rochdale. i saw a company of minstrels of the same class going through brown street, the other day, playing and singing, "in darkest shades, if thou appear, my dawning is begun." the company consisted of an old man, two young men, and three young women. two of the women had children in their arms. after i had listened to them a little while, thinking the time and the words a little appropriate to their condition, i beckoned to one of the young men, who came "sidling" slowly up to me. i asked him where they came from, and he said, "ash'n." in answer to another question, he said, "we're o' one family. me an' yon tother's wed. that's his wife wi' th' chylt in her arms, an' hur wi' th' plod shawl on's mine." i asked if the old man was his father. "ay," replied he, "we're o' here, nobbut two. my mother's ill i' bed, an' one o' my sisters is lookin' after her." " well, an' heaw han yo getten on?" said i. "oh, we'n done weel; but we's come no moor," replied he. another day, there was an instrumental band of these operatives playing sacred music close to the exchange lamp. amongst the crowd around, i met with a friend of mine. he told me that the players were from staleybridge. they played some fine old tunes, by desire, and, among the rest, they played one called "warrington. "when they had played it several times over, my friend turned to me and said, "that tune was composed by a rev. mr harrison, who was once minister of cross street unitarian chapel, in manchester; and, one day, an old weaver, who had come down from the hills, many miles, staff in hand, knocked at the minister's door, and asked if there was 'a gentleman co'de' harrison lived theer?' 'yes.' 'could aw see him?' 'yes.' when the minister came to the door, the old weaver looked hard at him, for a minute, and said, 'are yo th' mon 'at composed that tune co'de worrington?' 'yes,' replied the minister, 'i believe i am.' 'well,' said the old weaver, 'give me your hond! it's a good un!' he then shook hands with him heartily again, and saying, 'well, good day to yo,' he went his way home again, before the old minister could fairly collect his scattered thoughts." i do not know how it is that these workless minstrels are gradually becoming rarer upon the streets than they were a few months ago. perhaps it is because the unemployed are more liberally relieved now than they were at first. i know that now many who have concealed their starving condition are ferreted out and relieved as far as possible. many of these street wanderers have gone home again disgusted, to pinch out the hard time in proud obscurity; and there are some, no doubt, who have wandered away to other parts of england. of these last, we may naturally expect that a few may become so reconciled to a life of wandering minstrelsy that they may probably never return to settled labour again. but "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." let us trust that the great creator may comfort and relieve them, "according to their several necessities, giving them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue out of all their afflictions." letter and speeches upon the cotton famine letters of a lancashire lad on the cotton famine. the following extracts are from the letters of mr. john whittaker, "a lancashire lad," one of the first writers whose appeals through the press drew serious attention to the great distress in lancashire during the cotton famine. there is no doubt that his letters in the times, and to the lord mayor of london, led to the mansion house fund. in the times of april , , appeared the first of a series of letters, pleading the cause of the distressed operatives. he said:- "i am living in the centre of a vast district where there are many cotton mills, which in ordinary times afford employment to many thousands of 'hands,' and food to many more thousands of mouths. with rare exceptions, quietness reigns at all those mills. . . . it may be that our material atmosphere is somewhat brighter than it was, but our social atmosphere is much darker and denser. hard times have come; and we have had them sufficiently long to know what they mean. we have fathers sitting in the house at mid-day, silent and glum, while children look wistfully about, and sometimes whimper for bread which they cannot have. we have the same fathers who, before hard times came, were proud men, who would have thought 'beggar' the most opprobrious epithet you could have hit them with; but who now are made humble by the sight of wife and children almost starving, and who go before 'relief committees,' and submit to be questioned about their wants with a patience and humility which it is painful, almost schocking, to witness, and some others of these fathers turn out in the morning with long besoms as street-sweepers, while others again go to breaking stones in the town's yard or open road-side, where they are unprotected from the keen east winds, which add a little more to the burden of misery which they have to bear just now. but, harder even than this, our factory-women and girls have had to turn out; and, plodding a weary way from door to door, beg a bit of bread or a stray copper, that they may eke out the scanty supply at home. only the other day, while taking a long stroll in the country lying about the town in which i live, i met a few of these factory-girls, and was stopped by their not very beggar-like question of 'con yo help us a bit?' they were just such as my own sisters; and as i saw and heard them, i was almost choked as i fancied my sisters come to such a pass as that. 'con yo help us a bit?' asked these factory girls. . . . i have heard of ladies whose whole lives seem to be but a changing from one kind of pleasure to another; who suffer chiefly from what they call ennui, (a kind of disease from which my sisters are not likely to suffer at all,) and to whom a new pleasure to enjoy would be something like what a new world to conquer would be to alexander. why should they not hear our lancashire girls' cry of 'con yo help us a bit?' why should not they be reminded that these girls in cotton gowns and wooden clogs are wending their way towards the same heaven--or, alas, towards the same hell--whither wend all the daughters of eve, no matter what their outer condition and dress? why should not they be asked to think how these striving girls have to pray daily, 'lead us not into temptation,' while temptations innumerable stand everywhere about them? those of us who are men would rather do much than let our sisters go begging. may not some of us take to doing more to prevent it? i remember some poetry about the 'sister bloodhounds, want and sin,' and know that they hunt oftener together than singly. we have felt the fangs of the first: upon how many of us will the second pounce?" in a second letter, inserted in the times of april , , the same writer says:--"even during the short time which has elapsed since i wrote last week, many things have combined to show that the distress is rapidly increasing, and that there is a pressing need that we should go beyond the borders of our own county for help. . . . i remember what i have read of the godlike in man, and i look with a strange feeling upon the half-famished creatures i see hourly about me. i cannot pass through a street but i see evidences of deep distress. i cannot sit at home half-an-hour without having one or more coming to ask for bread to eat. but what comes casually before me is as nothing when compared with that deeper distress which can only be seen by those who seek it. . . . there have been families who have been so reduced that the only food they have had has been a porridge made of indian meal. they could not afford oatmeal, and even of their indian meal porridge they could only afford to have two meals a day. they have been so ashamed of their coarser food that they have done all that was possible to hide their desperate state from those about them. it has only been by accident that it has been found out, and then they have been caught hurriedly putting away the dishes that contained their loathsome food. a woman, whose name i could give, and whose dwelling i could point to, was said not only to be in deep distress, but to be also ill of fever. she was visited. on entering the lower room of the house, the visitors saw that there was not a scrap of furniture; the woman, fever-stricken, sat on an orange-box before a low fire; and to prevent the fire from going quite out, she was pulling her seat to pieces for fuel bit by bit. the visitors looked upstairs. there was no furniture there-- only a bit of straw in a corner, which served as the bed of the woman's four children. in another case a woman, who was said to be too weak to apply for relief, was visited. her husband had been out of work a long time by reason of his illness; he was now of a fashion recovered, and had gone off to seek for work. he left his wife and three children in their cellar-home. the wife was very near her confinement, and had not tasted food for two or three days. . . . there are in this town some hundreds of young single women who have been self-dependent, but who are now entirely without means. nearly all of these are good english girls, who have quietly fought their own life-battle, but who now have hard work to withstand the attacks this grim poverty is making. i am told of a case in which one of these girls was forced to become one of that class of whom poor hood sang in his 'bridge of sighs.' she was an orphan, had no relations here, and was tossed about from place to place till she found her way to a brothel. thank god, she has been rescued. our relief fund has been the means of relieving her from that degradation; but cannot those who read my letter see how strong are the temptations which their want places in the way of these poor girls!" on th april a number of city merchants, most of whom were interested in the cotton manufacture, waited upon the lord mayor of london, with a view to interest him, and through him the public at large, in the increasing distress among the operative population in the manufacturing districts of lancashire. previous to this, the "lancashire lad" had made a private appeal, by letter, to the lord mayor, in which he said:- "local means are nearly exhausted, and i am convinced that if we have not help from without, our condition will soon be more desperate than i or any one else who possesses human feelings can wish it to become. to see the homes of those whom we know and respect, though they are but working men, stripped of every bit of furniture--to see long-cherished books and pictures sent one by one to the pawn-shop, that food may be had--and to see that food almost loathsome in kind, and insufficient in quantity,--are hard, very hard things to bear. but those are not the worst things. in many of our cottage homes there is now nothing left by the pawning of which a few pence may be raised, and the mothers and sisters of we 'lancashire lads' have turned out to beg, and ofttimes knock at the doors of houses in which there is as much destitution as there is in our own; while the fathers and the lads themselves think they are very fortunate if they can earn a shilling or two by street-sweeping or stone breaking. . . . will you not do for us what you have done for others--become the recipient of whatever moneys those who are inclined to help us may send to you?" the lord mayor, having listened to the deputation, read them the personal appeal, and, "before separating, the deputation engaged to form themselves into a provisional committee, to correspond with any local one which circumstances might render it desirable to set on foot in some central part of the distressed districts." immediately afterwards, the lord mayor, on taking his seat in the justice-room, stated that "he was ready, with the assistance of the gentlemen of the deputation, to act in the way desired. . . . he could not himself take any part in the distribution. all he could do was to be the medium of transmission; and as soon as he knew that some organisation had been formed, either in the great city of manchester, or in some other part of lancashire, in which the public might feel confidence, he should be ready to send the small sums he had already received, and any others that might be intrusted to him from time to time." and thus originated the first general subscription for the cotton operatives, and which, before it closed, reached the magnificent sum of pounds, , s. d. mr cobden's speech on the cotton famine. on the th of april , a meeting of gentlemen residents, called by thomas goadsby, esq., mayor of manchester, was held in the town hall of that city, to consider the propriety of forming a relief committee. '"the late mr richard cobden, m.p., attended, and recommended a bold appeal to the whole country, declaring with prophetic keenness of vision that not less than , , pounds would be required to carry the suffering operatives through the crisis, whilst the subscriptions up to that date amounted only to , pounds." on the motion of a vote of thanks to the mayor of manchester, who was retiring from the mayoralty, mr cobden said:- "before that resolution is passed, i will take the opportunity of making an observation. i have had the honour of having my name added to this committee, and the first thing i asked of my neighbour here was--'what are the functions of the general committee?' and i have heard that they amount to nothing more than to attend here once a month, and receive the report of the executive committee as to the business done and the distribution of the funds. i was going to suggest to you whether the duties of the general committee might not be very much enlarged--whether it might not be employed very usefully in increasing the amount of subscriptions. i think all our experience must have taught us that, with the very best cause in the world in hand, the success of a public subscription depends very much upon the amount of activity in those who solicit it; and i think, in order to induce us to make a general and national effort to raise additional funds in this great emergency, it is only necessary to refer to and repeat one or two facts that have been stated in this report just read to us. i find it stated that it is estimated that the loss of wages at present is at the rate of , pounds per week, and there is no doubt that the savings of the working classes are almost exhausted. now, , pounds per week represents upwards of , , pounds sterling per annum, and that is the rate at which the deduction is now being made from the wages of labour in this district. i see it stated in this report that the resources which this committee can at present foresee that it will possess to relieve this amount of distress are , pounds a month for the next five months, which is at the rate of , pounds per annum; so that we foresee at present the means of affording a relief of something less than five per cent upon the actual amount of the loss of wages at present incurred by the working classes of this country. but i need not tell honourable gentlemen present, who are so practically acquainted with this district, that that loss of seven millions in wages per annum is a very imperfect measure of the amount of suffering and loss which will be inflicted on this community three or four months hence. it may be taken to be , , pounds; and that , , pounds of loss of wages before the next spring is by no means a measure of the loss this district will incur; for you must take it that the capitalists will be incurring also a loss on their fixed machinery and buildings; and though perhaps not so much as that of the labourer, it will be a very large amount, and possibly, in the opinion of some people, will very nearly approach it. that is not all: mr farnall has told us that at present the increase of the rates in this district is at the rate of , pounds per week. that will be at the rate of half a million per annum, and, of course, if this distress goes on, that rate must be largely increased, perhaps doubled. this shows the amount of pressure which is threatening this immediate district. i have always been of opinion that this distress and suffering must be cumulative to a degree which few people have ever foreseen, because your means of meeting the difficulty will diminish just in proportion as the difficulty will increase. mr farnall has told us that one-third of the rateable property will fall out of existence, as it were, and future rates must be levied upon two-thirds. but that will be by no means the measure of the condition of things two or three months hence, because every additional rate forces out of existence a large amount of saleable property; and the more you increase your rates the more you diminish the area over which those rates are to be productive. this view of the case has a very important bearing, also, upon the condition of the shop-keeping class as well as the classes of mill-owners and manufacturers who have not a large amount of floating capital. there is no doubt but a very large amount of the shopkeeping class are rapidly falling into the condition of the unemployed labourers. when i was at rochdale the other day, i heard a very sorrowful example of it. there was a poor woman who kept a shop, and she was threatened with a distraint for her poor-rate. she sold the sunday clothes of her son to pay the poor-rate, and she received a relief- ticket when she went to leave her rate. that is a sad and sorrowful example, but i am afraid it will not be a solitary one for a long time. then you have the shopkeeping class descending to the rank of the operatives. it must be so. withdraw the custom of , , pounds per annum, which has ceased to be paid in wages, from the shopkeepers, and the consequence must present itself to any rational mind. we have then another class--the young men of superior education employed in warehouses and counting-houses. a great number of these will rapidly sink to the condition in which you find the operative classes. all this will add to the distress and the embarrassment of this part of the kingdom. now, to meet this state of things you have the poor-law relief, which is the only relief we can rely upon, except that which comes from our own voluntary exertions. well, but any one who has read over this report of mr farnall, just laid before us, must see how inadequate this relief must be. it runs up from one shilling and a half-penny in the pound to one shilling and fourpence or one shilling and fivepence; there is hardly one case in which the allowance is as much as two shillings per week for each individual--i won't call them paupers-- each distressed individual. now, there is one point to which i would wish to bring the attention of the committee in reference to this subject--it is a most important one, in my appreciation. in ordinary times, when you give relief to the poor, that relief being given when the great mass of workpeople are in full employment, the measure of your relief to an isolated family or two that may be in distress is by no means the measure of the amount of their subsistence, because we all know that in prosperous times, when the bulk of the working people are employed, they are always kind to each other. the poor, in fact, do more to relieve the poor than any other class. a working man and his family out of employment in prosperous times could get a meal at a neighbour's house, just as we, in our class, could get a meal at a neighbour's house if it was a convenience to us in making a journey. but recollect, now the whole mass of the labouring and working population is brought down to one sad level of destitution, and what you allow them from the poor-rates, and what you allow them from these voluntary subscriptions, are actually the measure of all that they will obtain for their subsistence. and that being so general, producing a great depression of spirits, as well as physical prostration, you are in great danger of the health and strength of this community suffering, unless something more be done to meet the case than i fear is yet provided for it. all this brings me to this conclusion--that something more must be done by this general committee than has been done, to awaken the attention of the public generally to the condition of this part of the country. it is totally exceptional. the state of things has no parallel in all history. it is impossible you could point out to me another case, in which, in a limited sphere, such as we have in lancashire, and in the course of a few months, there has been a cessation of employment at the rate of , , pounds sterling per annum in wages. there has been nothing like it in the history of the world for its suddenness, for the impossibility of dealing with it, or managing it in the way of an effective remedy. well, the country at large must be made acquainted with these facts. how is that to be done? it can only be by the diffusion of information from this central committee. an appeal must be made to the whole country, if this great destitution is to be met in any part by voluntary aid. the nation at large must be made fully acquainted with the exigency of the case, and we must be reminded that a national responsibility rests upon us. i will, therefore, suggest that this general committee should be made a national committee, and we shall then get rid of this little difficulty with the lord mayor. we shall want all the co-operation of the lord mayor and the city of london; and i say that this committee, instead of being a manchester or lancashire central committee, should be made a national committee; that from this should go forth invitations to all parts of the country, beginning with the lords-lieutenant, inviting them to be vice-presidents of this committee. let the noble lord continue to be at the head of the general committee--the national committee--and invite every mayor to take part. we are going to have new mayors in the course of the week, and, though i am sorry to lose our present one, yet when new mayors come in, they may be probably more ready to take up a new undertaking than if they had just been exhausted with a years labour. let every mayor in the kingdom be invited to become a member of this committee. let subscription-circulars be despatched to them asking them to organise a committee in every borough; and let there be a secretary and honorary secretary employed. through these bodies you might communicate information, and counteract those misrepresentations that have been made with regard to the condition of this district. you might, if necessary, send an ambassador to some of those more important places; but better still, if you could induce them to send some one here to look into the state of things for themselves; because i am sure if they did, so far from finding the calumnies that have been uttered against the propertied classes in this county being well founded, they would find instances--and not a few--of great liberality and generosity, such as i think would surprise any one who visited this district from the southern part of the kingdom. this would only be done by an active effort from the centre here, and i submit that we shall not be doing justice to this effort unless we give to the whole country an opportunity of co-operating in that way, and throw upon every part of the kingdom a share of the responsibility of this great crisis and emergency. i submit that there is every motive why this community, as well as the whole kingdom, should wish to preserve this industrious population in health and in the possession of their energies. there is every motive why we should endeavour to keep this working population here rather than drive them away from here, as you will do if they are not sufficiently fed and clothed during the next winter. they will be wanted again if this district is to revive, as we all hope and believe it will revive. your fixed capital here is of no use without the population. it is of no use without your raw material. lancashire is the richest county in the kingdom when its machinery is employed; it is the poorest county in the kingdom when its machinery and fixed capital are paralysed, as at present. therefore, i say it is the interest, not only of this community, but of the kingdom, that this population should be preserved for the time--i hope not a distant time--when the raw material of their industry will be supplied to this region. i submit; then, to the whole kingdom--this district as well as the rest--that it will be advisable, until parliament meets, that such an effort should be made as will make a national subscription amount probably to , , pounds. short of that, it would be utterly insufficient for the case; and i believe that, with an energetic appeal made to the whole country, and an effort organised such as i have indicated, such an amount might be raised." speech of the earl of derby at the county meeting, on the d december . the earl of sefton in the chair. the thirteen hundred circulars issued by the earl of sefton, lord- lieutenant of lancashire, "brought together such a gathering of rank, and wealth, and influence, as is not often to be witnessed; and the eloquent advocate of class distinctions and aristocratic privileges (the earl of derby) became on that day the powerful and successful representative of the poor and helpless." called upon by the chairman, the earl of derby said:- "my lord sefton, my lords and gentlemen,--we are met together upon an occasion which must call forth the most painful, and at the same time ought to excite, and i am sure will excite, the most kindly feelings of our human nature. we are met to consider the best means of palliating--would to god that i could say removing!--a great national calamity, the like whereof in modern times has never been witnessed in this favoured land--a calamity which it was impossible for those who are the chief sufferers by it to foresee, or, if they had foreseen, to have taken any steps to avoid--a calamity which, though shared by the nation at large, falls more peculiarly and with the heaviest weight upon this hitherto prosperous and wealthy district--a calamity which has converted this teeming hive of industry into a stagnant desert of compulsory inaction and idleness- -a calamity which has converted that which was the source of our greatest wealth into the deepest abyss of impoverishment--a calamity which has impoverished the wealthy, which has reduced men of easy fortunes to the greatest straits, which has brought distress upon those who have hitherto been somewhat above the world by the exercise of frugal industry, and which has reduced honest and struggling poverty to a state of absolute and humiliating destitution. gentlemen, it is to meet this calamity that we are met together this day, to add our means and our assistance to those efforts which have been so nobly made throughout the country generally, and, i am bound to say, in this county also, as i shall prove to you before i conclude my remarks. gentlemen, i know how impossible it is by any figures to convey an idea of the extent of the destitution which now prevails, and i know also how impatient large assemblies are of any extensive use of figures, or even of figures at all; but at the same time, it is impossible for me to lay before you the whole state of the case, in opening this resolution, and asking you to resolve with regard to the extent of the distress which now prevails, without trespassing on your attention by a few, and they shall be a very few, figures, which shall show the extent, if not the pressure, throughout this district, of the present distress. and, gentlemen, i think i shall best give you an idea of the amount of distress and destitution which prevails, by very shortly comparing the state of things which existed in the districts to which i refer in the month of september , as compared with the month of september , and with that again only about two weeks ago, which is the latest information we have--up to the d of last month. i find then, gentlemen, that in a district comprising, in round numbers, two million inhabitants--for that is about the number in that district--in the fourth week of september , there were forty-three thousand five hundred persons receiving parochial relief; in the fourth week of september , there were one hundred and sixty-three thousand four hundred and ninety-eight persons receiving parochial relief; and in the short space which elapsed between the last week of september and the third week of november the number of one hundred and sixty-three thousand four hundred and ninety-eight had increased to two hundred and fifty-nine thousand three hundred and eighty-five persons. now, gentlemen, let us in the same periods compare the amount which was applied from the parochial funds to the relief of pauperism. in september , the amount so applied was pounds; in september , it was pounds. that is by the week. what is now the amount? in november it was , pounds for the week. the proportion of those receiving parochial relief to the total population was two and three-tenths per cent in september , and eight and five-tenths per cent in september , and that had become thirteen and five-tenths percent in the population in november . here, therefore, is thirteen per cent of the whole population at the present moment depending for their subsistence upon parochial relief alone. of these two hundred and fifty-nine thousand--i give only round numbers--there were thirty-six thousand eight hundred old or infirm; there were nearly ninety-eight thousand able-bodied adults receiving parochial relief, and there were under sixteen years of age nearly twenty-four thousand persons. but it would be very far from giving you an estimate of the extent of the distress if we were to confine our observations to those who are dependent upon parochial relief alone. we have evidence from the local committees, whom we have extensively employed, and whose services have been invaluable to us, that of persons not relieved from the poor-rates there are relieved also by local committees no fewer in this district than one hundred and seventy-two thousand persons--making a total of four hundred and thirty-one thousand three hundred and ninety-five persons out of two millions, or twenty-one and seven-tenths per cent on the whole population--that is, more than one in every five persons depend for their daily existence either upon parochial relief or public charity. gentlemen, i have said that figures will not show sufficiently the amount of distress; nor, in the same manner, will figures show, i am happy to say, the amount that has been contributed for the relief of that distress. but let us take another test; let us examine what has been the result, not upon the poor who are dependent for their daily bread upon their daily labour, and many of whom are upon the very verge of pauperism, from day to day, but let us take a test of what has been the effect upon the well-to- do artisan, upon the frugal, industrious, saving men, who have been hitherto somewhat above the world, and i have here but an imperfect test, because i am unable to obtain the whole amount of deposits withdrawn from the savings banks, the best of all possible tests, if we could carry the account up to the present day; but i have only been able to obtain it to the middle of june last, when the distress could hardly be said to have begun, and yet i find from seven savings banks alone in this county in six months--and those months in which the distress had not reached its present height, or anything like it--there was an excess of withdrawals of deposits over the ordinary average to the amount of , pounds. this was up to june last, when, as i have said, the pressure had hardly commenced, and from that time it as been found impossible to obtain from the savings banks, who are themselves naturally unwilling to disclose this state of affairs--it has been found impossible to obtain such further returns as would enable us to present to you any proper estimate of the excess of withdrawals at present; but that they have been very large must necessarily be inferred from the great increase of distress which has taken place since the large sum i have mentioned was obtained from the banks, as representing the excess of ordinary withdrawals in june last. now, gentlemen, figure to yourselves, i beg of you, what a state of things that sum of , pounds, as the excess of the average withdrawals from the savings banks represents; what an amount of suffering does it picture; what disappointed hopes; what a prospect of future distress does it not bring before you for the working and industrious classes? why, gentlemen, it represents the blighted hopes for life of many a family. it represents the small sum set apart by honest, frugal, persevering industry, won by years of toil and self-denial, in the hope of its being, as it has been in many cases before, the foundation even of colossal fortunes which have been made from smaller sums. it represents the gradual decay of the hopes for his family of many an industrious artisan. the first step in that downward progress which has led to destitution and pauperism is the withdrawal of the savings of honest industry, and that is represented in the return which i have quoted to you. then comes the sacrifice of some little cherished article of furniture--the cutting off of some little indulgence--the sacrifice of that which gave his home an appearance of additional comfort and happiness--the sacrifice gradually, one by one, of the principal articles of furniture, till at last the well-conducted, honest, frugal, saving working man finds himself on a level with the idle, the dissipated, and the improvident--obliged to pawn the very clothes of his family- -nay, the very bedding on which he lies, to obtain the simple means of subsistence from day to day, and encountering all that difficulty and all that distress with the noble independence that would do anything rather than depend upon public or even on private charity, and in his own simple but emphatic language declaring, 'nay, but we'll clem first.' and, gentlemen, this leads me to observe upon a more gratifying point of view, that is, the noble manner, a manner beyond all praise, in which this destitution has been borne by the population of this great county. it is not the case of ordinary labourers who find themselves reduced a trifle below their former means of subsistence, but it is a reduction in the pecuniary comfort, and almost necessaries, of men who have been in the habit of living, if not in luxury, at least in the extreme of comfort--a reduction to two shillings and three shillings a week from sums which had usually amounted to twenty-five shillings, or thirty shillings, or forty shillings; a cutting off of all their comforts, cutting off all their hopes of future additional comfort, or of rising in life-- aggravated by a feeling, an honourable, an honest, but at the same time a morbid feeling, of repugnance to the idea of being indebted under these circumstances to relief of any kind or description. and i may say that, among the difficulties which have been encountered by the local relief committees--no doubt there have been many of those not among the most deserving who have been clamorous for the aid held out to them--but one of the great difficulties of local relief committees has been to find out and relieve struggling and really-distressed merit, and to overcome that feeling of independence which, even under circumstances like these, leads them to shrink from being relieved by private charity. i know that instances of this kind have happened; i know that cases have occurred where it has been necessary to press upon individuals, themselves upon the point of starvation, the necessity of accepting this relief; and from this place i take the opportunity of saying, and i hope it will go far and wide, that in circumstances like the present, discreditable as habitual dependence upon parochial relief may be, it is no degradation, it is no censure, it is no possible cause of blame, that any man, however great his industry, however high his character, however noble his feeling of self-dependence, should feel himself obliged to have recourse to that christian charity which i am sure we are all prepared to give. gentlemen, i might perhaps here, as far as my resolution goes, close the observations i have to make to you. the resolution i have to move, indeed, is one which calls for no extensive argument; and a plain statement of facts, such as that i have laid before you, is sufficient to obtain for it your unanimous assent. the resolution is:- "'that the manufacturing districts of lancashire and the adjoining counties are suffering from an extent of destitution happily hitherto unknown, which has been borne by the working classes with a patient submission and resolution entitling them to the warmest sympathy of their fellow-countrymen.' "but, gentlemen, i cannot, in the first place, lose the opportunity of asking this great assembly with what feelings this state of things should be contemplated by us who are in happier circumstances. let me say with all reverence that it is a subject for deep national humiliation, and, above all, for deep humiliation for this great county. we have been accustomed for years to look with pride and complacency upon the enormous growth of that manufacture which has conferred wealth upon so many thousands, and which has so largely increased the manufacturing population and industry of this country. we have seen within the last twelve or fourteen years the consumption of cotton in europe increase from fifty thousand to ninety thousand bales a week; we have seen the weight of cotton goods exported from this country in the shape of yarn and manufactured goods amount to no less than nine hundred and eighty-three million pounds in a single year. we have seen, in spite of all opposing circumstances, this trade constantly and rapidly extending; we have seen colossal fortunes made; and we have as a county, perhaps, been accustomed to look down on those less fortunate districts whose wealth and fortunes were built upon a less secure foundation; we have reckoned upon this great manufacture as the pride of our country, and as the best security against the possibility of war, in consequence of the mutual interest between us and the cotton-producing districts. we have held that in the cotton manufacture was the pride, the strength, and the certainty of our future national prosperity and peace. i am afraid we have looked upon this trade too much in the spirit of the assyrian monarch of old. we have said to ourselves:-- 'is not this great babylon, that i have built for the house of my kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?' but in the hour in which the monarch used these words the word came forth, 'thy kingdom is departed from thee!' that which was his pride became his humiliation; that which was our pride has become our humiliation and our punishment. that which was the source of our wealth--the sure foundation on which we built--has become itself the instrument of our humiliating poverty, which compels us to appeal to the charity of other counties. the reed upon which we leaned has gone through the hand that reposed on it, and has pierced us to the heart. but, gentlemen, we have happier and more gratifying subjects of contemplation. i have pointed to the noble conduct which must make us proud of our countrymen in the mmiufacturing districts; i have pointed to the noble and heroic submission to difficulties they could never foresee, and privations they never expected to encounter; but again, we have another feeling which i am sure will not be disappointed, which the country has nobly met--that this is an opportunity providentially given to those who are blessed with wealth and fortune to show their sympathy--their practical, active, earnest sympathy--with the sufferings of their poorer brethren, and, with god's blessing, used as i trust by god's blessing it will be, it may be a link to bind together more closely than ever the various classes in this great community, to satisfy the wealthy that the poor have a claim, not only to their money, but to their sympathy-- to satisfy the poor also that the rich are not overbearing, grinding tyrants, but men like themselves, who have hearts to feel for suffering, and are prompt to use the means god has given to them for the relief of that suffering. gentlemen, a few words more, and i will not further trespass on your attention. but i feel myself called on, as chairman of that executive committee to which my noble friend in the chair has paid so just a compliment, to lay before you some answer to objections which have been made, and which in other counties, if not in this, may have a tendency to check the contributions which have hitherto so freely flowed in. before doing so, allow me to say (and i can do it with more freedom, because in the, earlier stages of its organisation i was not a member of that committee) it is bare justice to them to say that there never was an occasion on which greater or more earnest efforts were made to secure that the distribution of those funds intrusted to them should be guarded against all possibility of abuse, and be distributed without the slightest reference to political or religious opinions; distributed with the most perfect impartiality, and in every locality, through the instrumentality of persons in whom the neighbourhood might repose entire confidence. such has been our endeavour, and i think to a great extent we have been successful. i may say that, although the central executive committee is composed of men of most discordant opinions in politics and religion, nothing for a single moment has interfered with the harmony--i had almost said with the unanimity--of our proceedings. there has been nothing to produce any painful feelings among us, nor any desire on the part of the representatives of different districts to obtain an undue share for the districts they represented from the common fund. but there are three points on which objection has being taken to the course we have adopted. one has been, that the relief we have given has not been given with a sufficiently liberal hand; the next--and i think i shall show you that these two are inconsistent, the one answering the other--is, that there has not been a sufficient pressure on the local rates; and the third is, that lancashire has not hitherto done its duty with reference to the subscriptions from other parts of the country. allow me a few words on each of these subjects. first, the amount to which we have endeavoured to raise our subscriptions has been to the extent of from two shillings to two shillings and sixpence weekly per head; in this late cold weather an additional sixpence has been provided, mainly for coal and clothing. our endeavour has been to raise the total income of each individual to at least two shillings or two shillings and sixpence a week. now, i am told that this is a very inadequate amount, and no doubt it is an amount very far below that which many of the recipients were in the habit of obtaining. but in the first place, i think there is some misapprehension when we speak of the sum of two shillings a week. if anybody supposes that two shillings a week is the maximum to each individual, he will be greatly mistaken. two shillings a head per week is the sum we endeavoured to arrive at as the average receipt of every man, woman, and child receiving assistance; consequently, a man and his wife with a family of three or four small children would receive, not two shillings, but ten or twelve shillings from the fund--an amount not far short of that which in prosperous times an honest and industrious labourer in other parts of the country would obtain for the maintenance of his family. i am not in the least afraid that, if we had fixed the amount at four shillings or five shillings per head, such is the liberality of the country, we should not have had sufficient means of doing so. but were we justified in doing that? if we had raised their income beyond that of the labouring man in ordinary times, we should have gone far to destroy the most valuable feeling of the manufacturing population--namely, that of honest self-reliance, and we should have done our best, to a great extent, to demoralise a large portion of the population, and induce them to prefer the wages of charitable relief to the return of honest industry. but then we are told that the rates are not sufficiently high in the distressed districts, and that we ought to raise them before we come on the fund. in the first place, we have no power to compel the guardians to raise the rates beyond that which they think sufficient for the maintenance of those to be relieved, and, naturally considering themselves the trustees of the ratepayers, they are unwilling, and, indeed, ought not to raise the amount beyond that which is called for by absolute necessity. but suppose we had raised the relief from our committee very far beyond the amount thought sufficient by the guardians, what would have been the inevitable result? why, that the rates which it is desired to charge more heavily would have been relieved, because persons would have taken themselves off the poor-rates, and placed themselves on the charitable committee, and therefore the very object theso objectors have in view in calling for an increase of our donations would have been defeated by their own measure. i must say, however, honestly speaking all i feel, that, with regard to the amount of rates, there are some districts which have applied to us for assistance which i think have not sufficient pressure on their rates. where i find, for example, that the total assessment on the nett rateable value does not exceed ninepence or tenpence in the pound, i really think such districts ought to be called upon to increase their rates before applying for extraneous help. but we have urged as far as we could urge--we have no power to command the guardians to be more liberal in the rate of relief, and to that extent to raise the rates in their districts. and now a word on the subject of raising rates, because i have received many letters in which it has been said that the rates are nothing--'they are only three shillings or four shillings in the pound, while we in the agricultural districts are used to six shillings in the pound. we consider that no extraordinary rate, and it is monstrous,' they say, 'that the accumulated wealth of years in the county of lancashire should not more largely contribute to the relief of its own distress.' i will not enter into an argument as to how far the larger amount of wages in the manufacturing districts may balance the smaller--amount of wages and the larger amount of poor-rates in the agricultural districts. i don't wish to enter into any comparison; i have seen many comparisons of this kind made, but they were full of fallacies from one end to the other. i will not waste your time by discussing them; but i ask you to consider the effect of a sudden rise of rates as a charge upon the accumulated wealth of a district. it is not the actual amount of the rates, but it is the sudden and rapid increase of the usual rate of the rates that presses most heavily on the ratepayers. in the long run, the rates must fall on real property, because all bargains between owner and occupier are made with reference to the amount of rates to be paid, and in all calculations between them, that is an element which enters into the first agreement. but when the rate is suddenly increased from one shilling to four shillings, it does not fall on the accumulated wealth or on the real property, but it falls on the occupier, the ratepayer--men, the great bulk of whom are at the present moment themselves struggling upon the verge of pauperism. therefore, if in those districts it should appear to persons accustomed to agricultural districts that the amount of our rates was very small, i would say to them that any attempt to increase those rates would only increase the pauperism, diminish the number of solvent ratepayers, and greatly aggravate the distress. in some of the districts i think the amount of the rates quite sufficient to satisfy the most ardent advocate of high rates. for example, in the town of ashton they have raised in the course of the year one rate of one shilling and sixpence, another of one shilling and six-pence, and a third of four shillings and sixpence, which it is hoped will carry them over the year. they have also, in addition to these rates, drawn largely on previous balances, and i am afraid have largely added to their debt. the total of what has been or will be expended, with a prospect of even a great increase, in that borough exceeds eleven shillings and elevenpence in the pound for the relief of the poor alone. and, gentlemen, this rate of four shillings and sixpence about to be levied, which ought to yield about , pounds, it is calculated will not yield , pounds. in stockport the rate is even higher, being twelve shillings or more per pound, and there it is calculated that at the next levy the defalcations will be at least forty per cent, according to the calculation of the poor-law commissioner himself. to talk, then, of raising rates in such districts as these would be absolute insanity; and even in districts less heavily rated, any sudden attempt considerably to increase the rate would have the effect of pauperising those who are now solvent, and to augment rather than diminish the distress of the district. the last point on which i would make an observation relates to the objection which has been taken to our proceedings, on the ground that lancashire has not done its duty in this distress, and that consequently other parts of the country have been unduly called on to contribute to that which i don't deny properly and primarily belongs to lancashire. gentlemen, it is very hard to ascertain with any certainty what has been done by lancashire, because, in the first place, the amount of local subscriptions and the amount of public contributions by themselves give no fair indication of that which really has been done by public or private charity. i don't mean to say that there are not individuals who have grossly neglected their duty in lancashire. on the other hand, we know there are many, though i am not about to name them, who have acted with the most princely munificence, liberality, and generous feeling, involving an amount of sacrifice of which no persons out of this county can possibly have the slightest conception. i am not saying there are not instances of niggard feeling, though i am not about to name them, which really it was hardly possible to believe could exist. will you forgive me if i trespass for a few moments by reading two or three extracts from confidential reports made to us every week from the different districts by a gentleman whose services were placed at our disposal by the government? these reports being, as i have said, confidential, i will not mention the names of the persons, firms, or localities alluded to, though in some instances they may be guessed at. this report was made to us on the th of november, and i will quote some of the remarks made in it. the writer observes:--'it must not be inferred when such remarks are absent from the reports that nothing is done. i have great difficulty sometimes in overcoming the feeling that my questions on these points are a meddlesome interference in private matters.' bearing that remark in mind, i say here are instances which i am sure reflect as much credit on the individuals as on the interest they represent and the county to which they belong. i am sure i shall be excused for trespassing on your patience by reading a few examples. he says, under no. ,--'nearly three thousand operatives out of the whole, most of them the hands of messrs __ and mr __, at his own cost, employs five hundred and fifty-five girls in sewing five days a week, paying them eightpence a day; sends seventy-six youths from thirteen to fourteen years old, and three hundred and thirty-two adults above fifteen, five days a week to school, paying them from fourpence to eightpence per day, according to age. he also pays the school pence of all the children. mr __ has hitherto paid his people two days' wages a week, but he is now preparing to adopt a scheme like mr __ to a great extent. i would add that, in addition to wages, mr __ gives bread, soup, socks, and clogs. . mr __ has at his own expense caused fifty to sixty dinners to be provided for sick persons every day. these consist of roast beef or mutton, soup, beef-tea, rice-puddings, wine, and porter, as ordered; and the forty visitors distribute orders as they find it necessary. ostensibly all is done in the name of the committee; but mr __ pays all the cost. an admirable soup kitchen is being fitted up, where the poor man may purchase a good hot meal for one penny, and either carry it away or consume it on the premises. . messrs __ are giving to their hands three days' wages (about pounds a week.) messrs __ and __ are giving their one hundred and twenty hands, and messrs their two hundred and thirty hands, two days' wages a week. i may mention that messrs __ are providing for all their one thousand seven hundred hands. . a great deal of private charity exists, one firm having spent pounds in money, exclusive of weekly doles of bread. . messrs __ are providing all their old hands with sufficient clothing and bedding to supply every want, so that their subscription of pounds is merely nominal. . the ladies of the village visit and relieve privately with money, food, or clothing, or all, if needed urgently. in a few cases distraint has been threatened, but generally the poor are living rent free. . payment of rent is almost unknown. the agent for several landlords assures me he could not from his receipts pay the property-tax, but no distraints are made. . the bulk of the rents are not collected, and distraints are unknown. . the millowners are chiefly cottage-owners, and are asking for no rents.' that leads me to call your attention to the fact that, in addition to the sacrifices they are making, the millowners are themselves to a large extent the owners of cottages, and i believe, without exception, they are at the present moment receiving no rent, thereby losing a large amount of income they had a right to count upon. i know one case which is curious as showing how great is the difficulty of ascertaining what is really done. it is required in the executive committee that every committee should send in an account of the local subscriptions. we received an application from a small district where there was one mill, occupied by some young men who had just entered into the business. we returned a refusal, inasmuch as there was no local subscription; but when we came to inquire, we found that from last february, when the mill closed, these young men had maintained the whole of their hands, that they paid one-third of the rates of the whole district, and that they were at that moment suffering a yearly loss of pounds in the rent of cottages for which they were not drawing a single halfpenny. that was a case in which we thought it right in the first instance to withhold any assistance, because there appeared to be no local subscription, and it shows how persons at a distance may be deceived by the want apparently of any local subscription. but i will throw out of consideration the whole of those amounts--the whole of this unparalleled munificence on the part of many manufacturers which never appears in any account whatever--i will throw out everything done in private and unostentatious charity--the supplies of bedding, clothing, food, necessaries of every description, which do not appear as public subscriptions, and will appeal to public subscriptions alone; and i will appeal to an authority which cannot, i think, be disputed--the authority of the commissioner, mr farnall himself, whose services the government kindly placed at our disposal, and of whose activity, industry, and readiness to assist us, it is difficult to speak in too high terms of praise. a better authority could not be quoted on the subject of the comparative support given in aid of this distress in lancashire and other districts. i find that, excluding altogether the subscriptions in the lord mayor's mansion house list--of which we know the general amount, but not the sources from which it is derived, or how it is expended--but excluding it from consideration, and dealing only with the funds which have been given or promised to be administered through the central executive committee, i find that, including some of the subscriptions which we know are coming in this day, the total amount which has been contributed is about , pounds. of that amount we received--and it is a most gratifying fact-- , pounds from the colonies; we received from the rest of the united kingdom , pounds; and from the county of lancaster itself, in round numbers, , pounds out of , pounds. now, i hope that these figures, upon the estimate and authority of the government poor-law commissioner, will be sufficient, at all events, to do away with the imputation that lancashire, at this crisis, is not doing its duty. but if lancashire has been doing its duty--if it is doing its duty--that is no reason why lancashire should relax its efforts; and of that i trust the result of this day's proceedings will afford a sufficient testimony. we are not yet at the height of the distress. it is estimated that at the present moment there are three hundred and fifty-five thousand persons engaged in the different manufactories. of these forty thousand only are in full work; one hundred and thirty-five thousand are at short work, and one hundred and eighty thousand are out of work altogether. in the course of the next six weeks this number is likely to be greatly increased; and the loss of wages is not less than , pounds a week. this, i say then, is a state of things that calls for the most active exertions of all classes of the community, who, i am happy to say, have responded to the call which has been made upon them most nobly, from the queen down to the lowest individual in the community. at the commencement of the distress, the queen, with her usual munificence, sent us a donation of pounds. the first act of his royal highness the prince of wales, upon attaining his majority, was to write from rome, and to request that his name should be put down for pounds. and to go to the other end of the scale, i received two days ago, from lord shaftesbury, a donation of pounds from some thousands of working men, readers of a particular periodical which he mentioned, the british workman. to that sum lord shaftesbury stated many thousands of persons had subscribed, and it embraced contributions even from the brigade of shoe-black boys. on the part of all classes there has been the greatest liberality displayed; and i should be unjust to the working men, i should be unjust to the poor in every district, if i did not say that in proportion to their means they have contributed more than their share. in no case hardly which has come to my knowledge has there been any grudging, and in many cases i know that poor persons have contributed more than common prudence would have dictated. these observations have run to a greater extent than i had intended; but i thought it desirable that the whole case, as far as possible, should be brought before you, and i have only now earnestly to request that you will this day do your part towards the furtherance of the good work. i have no apprehension, if the distress should not last over five or six months more, that the spontaneous efforts of individuals and public bodies, and contributions received in every part of the country, will fall short of that which is needed for enabling the population to tide over this deep distress; and i earnestly hope that, if it be necessary to apply to parliament, as a last resource, the representatives of the country will not grudge their aid; yet i do fervently hope and believe that, with the assistance of the machinery of that bill passed in parliament last session, (the rate in aid act,) which will come into operation shortly after christmas, but could not possibly be brought into operation sooner, i do fervently hope and believe that this great manufacturing district will be spared the further humiliation of coming before parliament, which ought to be the last resource, as a claimant, a suppliant for the bounty of the nation at large. i don't apprehend that there will be a single dissentient voice raised against the resolution which i have now the honour to move." songs of distress, chiefly written during the cotton famine. stanzas to my starving kin in the north. by eliza cook. sad are the sounds that are breaking forth from the women and men of the brave old north! sad are the sights for human eyes, in fireless homes, 'neath wintry skies; where wrinkles gather on childhood's skin, and youth's "clemm'd" cheek is pallid and thin; where the good, the honest--unclothed, unfed, child, mother, and father, are craving for bread! but faint not, fear not--still have trust; your voices are heard, and your claims are just. england to england's self is true, and "god and the people" will help you through. brothers and sisters! full well ye have stood, while the gripe of gaunt famine has curdled your blood! no murmur, no threat on your lips have place, though ye look on the hunger-fiend face to face; but haggard and worn ye silently bear, dragging your death-chains with patience and prayer; with your hearts as loyal, your deeds as right, as when plenty and sleep blest your day and your night, brothers and sisters! oh! do not believe it is charity's gold alone ye receive. ah, no! it is sympathy, feeling, and hope, that pull out in the life-boat to fling ye a rope. fondly i've lauded your wealth-winning hands, planting commerce and fame throughout measureless lands; and my patriot-love, and my patriot-song, to the children of labour will ever belong. women and men of this brave old soil! i weep that starvation should guerdon your toil; but i glory to see ye--proudly mute-- showing souls like the hero, not fangs like the brute. oh! keep courage within; be the britons ye are; he, who driveth the storm hath his hand on the star! england to england's sons shall be true, and "god and the people" will carry ye through! the smokeless chimney by a lancashire lady { } (e.j.b.) stranger! who to buy art willing, seek not here for talent rare; mine's no song of love or beauty, but a tale of want and care. traveller on the northern railway! look and learn, as on you speed; see the hundred smokeless chimneys, learn their tale of cheerless need. ah! perchance the landscape fairer charms your taste, your artist-eye; little do you guess how dearly costs that now unclouded sky. "how much prettier is this county!" says the careless passer-by; "clouds of smoke we see no longer, what's the reason?--tell me why. "better far it were, most surely, never more such clouds to see, bringing taint o'er nature's beauty, with their foul obscurity." thoughtless fair one! from yon chimney floats the golden breath of life; stop that current at your pleasure! stop! and starve the child--the wife. ah! to them each smokeless chimney is a signal of despair; they see hunger, sickness, ruin, written in that pure, bright air. "mother! mother! see! 'twas truly said last week the mill would stop; mark yon chimney, nought is going, there's no smoke from 'out o'th top!' "father! father! what's the reason that the chimneys smokeless stand? is it true that all through strangers, we must starve in our own land?" low upon her chair that mother droops, and sighs with tearful eye; at the hearthstone lags the father, musing o'er the days gone by. days which saw him glad and hearty, punctual at his work of love; when the week's end brought him plenty, and he thanked the lord above. when his wages, earned so justly, gave him clothing, home, and food; when his wife, with fond caresses, blessed his heart, so kind and good. neat and clean each sunday saw them, in their place of prayer and praise, little dreaming that the morrow piteous cries for help would raise. weeks roll on, and still yon chimney gives of better times no sign; men by thousands cry for labour, daily cry, and daily pine. now the things, so long and dearly prized before, are pledged away; clock and bible, marriage-presents, both must go--how sad to say! charley trots to school no longer, nelly grows more pale each day; nay, the baby's shoes, so tiny, must be sold, for bread to pay. they who loathe to be dependent now for alms are forced to ask hard is mill-work, but, believe me, begging is the bitterest task. soon will come the doom most dreaded, with a horror that appals; lo! before their downcast faces grimly stare the workhouse walls. stranger, if these sorrows touch you, widely bid your bounty flow; and assist my poor endeavours to relieve this load of woe. let no more the smokeless chimneys draw from you one word of praise; think, oh, think upon the thousands who are moaning out their days. rather pray that peace, soon bringing work and plenty in her train, we may see these smokeless chimneys blackening all the land again. . the mill-hand's petition. the following verses are copied from "lancashire lyrics," edited by john harland, esq., f.s.a. they are extracted from a song "by some 'w.c.,' printed as a street broadside, at ashton-under-lyne, and sung in most towns of south lancashire." we have come to ask for assistance; at home we've been starving too long; an' our children are wanting subsistence; kindly aid us to help them along. chorus. for humanity is calling; don't let the call be in vain; but help us; we're needy and falling; and god will return it again. war's clamour and civil commotion has stagnation brought in its train; and stoppage bring with it starvation, so help us some bread to obtain. for humanity is calling. the american war is still lasting; like a terrible nightmare it leans on the breast of a country, now fasting for cotton, for work, and for means. and humanity is calling. cheer up a bit longer. { } by samuel laycock. cheer up a bit longer, mi brothers i' want, there's breeter days for us i' store; there'll be plenty o' tommy an' wark for us o' when this 'merica bother gets o'er. yo'n struggled reet nobly, an' battled reet hard, while things han bin lookin' so feaw; yo'n borne wi' yo're troubles and trials so long, it's no use o' givin' up neaw. feight on, as yo' han done, an' victory's sure, for th' battle seems very nee won, be firm i' yo're sufferin', an' dunno give way; they're nowt nobbut ceawards'at run. yo' know heaw they'n praised us for stondin' so firm, an' shall we neaw stagger an' fo? nowt o'th soart;--iv we nobbut brace up an' be hard, we can stond a bit longer, aw know. it's hard to keep clemmin' an' starvin' so long; an' one's hurt to see th' little things fret, becose there's no buttercakes for 'em to eat; but we'n allus kept pooin' thro' yet. as bad as toimes are, an' as feaw as things look, we're certain they met ha' bin worse; we'n had tommy to eat, an' clooas to put on; they'n only bin roughish, aw know. aw've begged on yo' to keep up yo're courage afore, an' neaw let me ax yo' once moor; let's noan get disheartened, there's hope for us yet, we needn't dispair tho' we're poor. we cannot expect it'll allus be foine; it's dark for a while, an' then clear; we'n mirth mixed wi' sadness, an' pleasure wi' pain, an' shall have as long as we're here. this world's full o' changes for better an' wur, an' this is one change among th' ruck; we'n a toime o' prosperity,--toime o' success, an' then we'n a reawnd o' bad luck. we're baskin' i' sunshine, at one toime o'th day, at other toimes ceawerin' i'th dark; we're sometoimes as hearty an' busy as owt, at other toimes ill, an' beawt wark. good bless yo'! mi brothers, we're nobbut on th' tramp, we never stay long at one spot; an' while we keep knockin' abeawt i' this world, disappointments will fall to eawer lot: so th' best thing we can do, iv we meon to get thro', is to wrastle wi' cares as they come; we shall feel rayther tired,--but let's never heed that,-- we can rest us weel when we get whoam. cheer up, then, aw say, an' keep hopin' for th' best, an' things 'll soon awter, yo'll see; there'll be oceans o' butties for tommy an' fred, an' th' little un perched on yo're knee. bide on a bit longer, tak' heart once ogen, an' do give o'er lookin' so feaw; as we'n battled, an' struggled, an' suffered so long, it's no use o' givin' up neaw. frettin'. (from "phases of distress--lancashire rhymes.") by joseph ramsbottom. fro' heawrs to days--a dhreary length-- fro' days to weeks one idle stons, an' slowly sinks fro' pride an' strength to weeny heart an' wakely honds; an' still one hopes, an' ever tries to think 'at better days mun come; bo' th' sun may set, an' th' sun may rise,-- no sthreak o' leet one finds a-whoam. aw want to see thoose days again, when folk can win whate'er they need; o god! to think 'at wortchin' men should be poor things to pet an' feed! there's some to th' bastile han to goo, to live o'th rates they'n help'd to pay; an' some get "dow" { } to help 'em through; an' some are taen or sent away. what is there here, 'at one should live, or wish to live, weigh'd deawn wi' grief, through weary weeks an' months, 'at give not one short heawr o' sweet relief? a sudden plunge, a little blow, would end at once mi' care an' pain! an' why noa do't?--for weel aw know aw's lose bo' ills, if nowt aw gain. an' why noa do't? it ill 'ud tell o' thoose wur laft beheend, aw fear; it's wring, at fust, to kill mysel', it's wring to lyev mi childer here. one's like to tak' some thowt for them-- some sort o' comfort one should give; so one mun bide, an' starve, an' clem, an' pine, an' mope, an' fret, an' live. th' shurat weaver's song. { } by samuel laycock. tune--"rory o'more." confound it! aw ne'er wur so woven afore; my back's welly brocken, mi fingers are sore; aw've been starin' an' rootin' amung this shurat, till aw'm very near getten as bloint as a bat. aw wish aw wur fur enough off, eawt o'th road, for o' weavin' this rubbitch aw'm getten reet sto'd; aw've nowt i' this world to lie deawn on but straw, for aw've nobbut eight shillin' this fortnit to draw. neaw, aw haven't mi family under mi hat; aw've a woife and six childer to keep eawt o' that; so aw'm rayther amung it just neaw, yo may see-- iv ever a fellow wur puzzle't, it's me! iv aw turn eawt to steal, folk'll co' me a thief; an' aw conno' put th' cheek on to ax for relief; as aw said i' eawr heawse t'other neet to mi wife, aw never did nowt o' this mak' i' my life. o dear! iv yon yankees could nobbut just see, heaw they're clemmin' an' starvin' poor weavers loike me, aw think they'd soon sattle their bother, an' strive to send us some cotton to keep us alive. there's theawsan's o' folk, just i'th best o' their days, wi' traces o' want plainly sin i' their faze; an' a futur afore 'em as dreary an' dark; for, when th' cotton gets done, we's be o' eawt o' wark. we'n bin patient an' quiet as lung as we con; th' bits o' things we had by us are welly o' gone; mi clogs an' mi shoon are both gettin' worn eawt, an' my halliday clooas are o' gone "up th' speawt!" mony a time i' my days aw've sin things lookin' feaw, but never as awkard as what they are neaw; iv there isn't some help for us factory folk soon, aw'm sure 'at we's o' be knock'd reet eawt o' tune. god help the poor. { } by samuel bamford. god help the poor, who in this wintry morn, come forth of alleys dim and courts obscure; god help yon poor, pale girl, who droops forlorn, and meekly her affliction doth endure! god help the outcast lamb! she trembling stands, all wan her lips, and frozen red her hands; her mournful eyes are modestly down cast, her night-black hair streams on the fitful blast; her bosom, passing fair, is half reveal'd, and oh! so cold the snow lies there congeal'd; her feet benumb'd, her shoes all rent and worn;-- god help thee, outcast lamb, who stand'st forlorn! god help the poor! god help the poor! an infant's feeble wail comes from yon narrow gate-way! and behold a female crouching there, so deathly pale, huddling her child, to screen it from the cold!-- her vesture scant, her bonnet crush'd and torn; a thin shawl doth her baby dear enfold. and there she bides the ruthless gale of morn, which almost to her heart hath sent its cold! and now she sudden darts a ravening look, as one with new hot bread comes past the nook; and, as the tempting load is onward borne, she weeps. god help thee, hapless one forlorn! god help the poor! god help the poor! behold yon famish'd lad no shoes, no hose, his wounded feet protect; with limping gait, and looks so dreamy-sad, he wanders onward, stopping to inspect each window, stored with articles of food; he yearns but to enjoy one cheering meal. oh! to his hungry palate, viands rude would yield a zest the famish'd only feel! he now devours a crust of mouldy bread-- with teeth and hands the precious boon is torn, unmindful of the storm which round his head impetuous sweeps. god help thee, child forlorn god help the poor! god help the poor! another have i found a bow'd and venerable man is he; his slouched hat with faded crape is bound, his coat is gray, and threadbare, too, i see; "the rude winds" seem to "mock his hoary hair;" his shirtless bosom to the blast is bare. anon he turns, and casts a wistful eye, and with scant napkin wipes the blinding spray; and looks again, as if he fain would spy friends he hath feasted in his better day ah! some are dead, and some have long forborne to know the poor; and he is left forlorn! god help the poor! god help the poor who in lone valleys dwell, or by far hills, where whin and heather grow theirs is a story sad indeed to tell! yet little cares the world, nor seeks to know the toil and want poor weavers undergo. the irksome loom must have them up at morn; they work till worn-out nature will have sleep; they taste, but are not fed. cold snow drifts deep around the fireless cot, and blocks the door; the night-storm howls a dirge o'er moss and moor! and shall they perish thus, oppress'd and lorn? shall toil and famine hopeless still be borne!-- no! god will yet arise, and help the poor! tickle times. by edwin waugh. neaw times are so tickle, no wonder one's heart should be deawn i' his shoon, but, dang it, we munnot knock under to th' freawn o' misfortin to soon; though robin looks fearfully gloomy, an' jamie keeps starin' at th' greawnd, an' thinkin' o'th table 'at's empty, an' th' little things yammerin' reawnd. iv a mon be both honest an' willin', an' never a stroke to be had, an' clemmin' for want ov a shillin',-- it's likely to make him feel sad; it troubles his heart to keep seein' his little brids feedin' o'th air; an' it feels very hard to be deein', an' never a mortal to care. but life's sich a quare bit o' travel,-- a warlock wi' sun an' wi' shade,-- an' then, on a bowster o' gravel, they lay'n us i' bed wi' a spade; it's no use o' peawtin' an' fratchin'; as th' whirligig's twirlin' areawn'd, have at it again; an' keep scratehin', as lung as your yed's upo' greawnd. iv one could but feel i'th inside on't, there's trouble i' every heart; an' thoose that'n th' biggest o'th pride on't, oft leeten o'th keenest o'th smart. whatever may chance to come to us, let's patiently hondle er share,-- for there's mony a fine suit o' clooas that covers a murderin' care. there's danger i' every station, i'th palace, as weel as i'th cot; there's hanker i' every condition, an' canker i' every lot; there's folk that are weary o' livin', that never fear't hunger nor cowd; an' there's mony a miserly crayter 'at's deed ov a surfeit o' gowd. one feels, neaw 'at times are so nippin', a mon's at a troublesome schoo', that slaves like a horse for a livin', an, flings it away like a foo; but, as pleasur's sometimes a misfortin, an' trouble sometimes a good thing,-- though we liv'n o'th floor, same as layrocks, we'n go up, like layrocks, to sing. the end john heywood, printer, manchester. waugh's poems and lancashire songs. s. contents. poems. the moorland flower--to the rose-tree on my window sill--keen blows the north wind--now summer's sunlight glowing--the moorland witch-- the church clock--god bless thee, old england--all on a rosy morn of june--glad welcome to morn's dewy hours--alas, how hard it is to smile--ye gallant men of england--here's to my native land--what makes your leaves fall down--oh, had she been a lowly maid--the old bard's welcome home--oh, come across the fields--oh, weave a garland for my brow--the wanderer's hymn--alone upon the flowery plain-- life's twilight--time is flying--the moorlands--the captain's friends--the world--to a married lady--cultivate your men--old man's song--bide on--christmas song--love and gold--when drowsy daylight-- mary--to the spring wind--nightfall--to a young lady--poor travellers all--the dying rose--lines--the man of the time-- christmas morning. songs in the dialect. come whoam to thi childer an' me--what ails thee, my son robin--god bless these poor folk--come, mary, link thi arm i mine--chirrup -- the dule's i' this bonnet o' mine--tickle times--jamie's frolic--owd pinder--come, jamie, let's undo thi shoon--the goblin parson--while takin' a wift o' my pipe--god bless thi silver yure--margit's coming. waugh's lancashire songs. cloth, neat, s. contents. come whoam to thi childer an' me--what ails thee, my son robin--god bless these poor folk--come, mary, link thi arm i' mine--the dule's i' this bonnet o' mine--come, jamie, let's undo thi shoon--aw've worn my bits o' shoon away--chirrup--bonny nan--tum rindle--tickle times--jamie's frolic--owd pinder--the goblin parson--while takin' a wift o' my pipe--yesterneet--god bless thi silver yure--margit's coming--eawr folk--th' sweetheart gate--gentle jone--neet fo'--a lift on th' way. waugh's lancashire songs. in sheets, d. each. contents. come whoam to thi childer an' me--what ails thee, my son robin--god bless these poor folk--come, mary, link thi arm i' mine--the dule's i' this bonnet o' mine--come, jamie, let's undo thi shoon--while takin' a wift o' my pipe--god bless thi silver yure--aw've worn my bits o' shoon away --yesterneet--owd enoch--chirrup --tickle times-- jamie's frolic--owd pinder--th' goblin parson--margit's coming--eawr folk--th' sweetheart gate--gentle jone--neet fo'--bonnie nan--a lift on th' way--tum rindle--buckle to. waugh's. the birtle carter's tale about owd bodle. d. waugh's. the goblin's grave. d. waugh's. chapel island: an adventure on the ulverstone sands. d. waugh's. norbreck: a sketch on the lancashire coast. d. waugh's. birth-place of tim bobbin. d. waugh's. rambles in the lake country and its borders. cloth, neat. s. d. waugh's. sketches of lancashire life and localities. s. waugh's. fourteen days in scotland. s. waugh's. wandering minstrels; or, wails of the workless poor. d. waugh's. the barrel organ. with illustrations. d. waugh's. tattlin matty. d. waugh's. the dead man's dinner. d. waugh's. over sands to the lakes. d. waugh's. sea-side lakes and mountains of cumberland. d. waugh's. home-life of the lancashire factory folk during the cotton famine. s. d. waugh's. tufts of heather from the northern moors. s. footnotes: { } these stanzas are extracted, by permission, from the second volume of "lancashire lyrics," edited by john harland, esq., f.s.a. "they were written by a lady in aid of the relief fund. they were printed on a card, and sold, principally at the railway stations. their sale there, and elsewhere, is known to have realised the sum of pounds. their authoress is the wife of mr serjeant bellasis, and the only daughter of the late william garnett, esq. of quernmore park and bleasdale, lancashire."--notes in "lancashire lyrics." { } from "lancashire lyrics," edited by john harland, esq., f.s.a. { } dole; relief from charity. { } "during what has been well named 'the cotton famine,' amongst the imports of cotton from india, perhaps the worst was that denominated 'surat,' from the city of that name in the province of guzerat, a great cotton district. short in staple, and often rotten, bad in quality, and dirty in condition, (the result too often of dishonest packers,) it was found to be exceedingly difficult to work up; and from its various defects, it involved considerable deductions, or 'batings,' for bad work, from the spinners' and weavers' wages. this naturally led to a general dislike of the surat cotton, and to the application of the word 'surat' to designate any inferior article. one action was tried at the assizes, the offence being the applying to the beverage of a particular brewer the term of 'surat beer.' besides the song given above, several others were written on the subject. one called 'surat warps,' and said to be the production of a rossendale rhymester, (t. n., of bacup,) appeared in notes and queries of june , , (third series, vol. vii., p. ,) and is there stated to be a great favourite amongst the old 'deyghn layrocks,' (anglice, the 'larks of dean,' in the forest of rossendale,) 'who sing it to one of the easy-going psalm-tunes with much gusto.' one verse runs thus:- " 'i look at th' yealds, and there they stick; i ne'er seen the like sin' i wur wick! what pity could befall a heart, to think about these hard-sized warps!' another song, called 'the surat weyver,' was written by william billington of blackburn. it is in the form of a lament by a body of lancashire weavers, who declare that they had " 'borne what mortal man could bear, affoore they'd weave surat.' but they had been compelled to weave it, though " 'stransportashun's not as ill as weyvin rotten su'.' the song concludes with the emphatic execration, " 'to hell wi' o' surat!'" --note in "lancashire lyrics," vol. ii., edited by john harland, esq., f.s.a. { } these beautiful lines, by the veteran samuel bamford, of harperhey, near manchester, author of "passages in the life of a radical," &c., are copied from the new and complete edition of his poems, entitled "homely rhymes, poems, and reminiscences," published by alexander ireland & co., examiner and times office, pall mall, manchester. price s. d., with a portrait of the author. proofreaders hodge and his masters by richard jefferies author of 'the gamekeeper at home,' 'wild life in a southern county,' 'the amateur poacher,' 'round about a great estate,' etc. preface the papers of which this volume is composed originally appeared in the _standard_, and are now republished by permission of the editor. in manners, mode of thought, and way of life, there is perhaps no class of the community less uniform than the agricultural. the diversities are so great as to amount to contradictions. individuality of character is most marked, and, varying an old saw, it might be said, so many farmers so many minds. next to the tenants the landowners have felt the depression, to such a degree, in fact, that they should perhaps take the first place, having no one to allow them in turn a per cent, reduction of their liabilities. it must be remembered that the landowner will not receive the fruits of returning prosperity when it comes for some time after they have reached the farmer. two good seasons will be needed before the landowner begins to recoup. country towns are now so closely connected with agriculture that a description of the one would be incomplete without some mention of the other. the aggregate capital employed by the business men of these small towns must amount to an immense sum, and the depreciation of their investments is of more than local concern. although the labourer at the present moment is a little in the background, and has the best of the bargain, since wages have not much fallen, if at all; yet he will doubtless come to the front again. for as agriculture revives, and the sun shines, the organisations by which he is represented will naturally display fresh vigour. but the rapid progress of education in the villages and outlying districts is the element which is most worthy of thoughtful consideration. on the one hand, it may perhaps cause a powerful demand for corresponding privileges; and on the other, counteract the tendency to unreasonable expectations. in any case, it is a fact that cannot be ignored. meantime, all i claim for the following sketches is that they are written in a fair and impartial spirit. richard jefferies. contents chapter i. the farmers' parliament ii. leaving his farm iii. a man of progress iv. going downhill v. the borrower and the gambler vi. an agricultural genius--old style vii. the gig and the four-in-hand. a bicycle farmer viii. haymaking. 'the juke's country' ix. the fine lady farmer. country girls x. mademoiselle, the governess xi. fleeceborough. a 'despot' xii. the squire's 'round robin' xiii. an ambitious squire xiv. the parson's wife xv. a modern country curate xvi. the solicitor xvii. 'county court day' xviii. the bank. the old newspaper xix. the village factory. village visitors. willow-work xx. hodge's fields xxi. a winter's morning xxii. the labourer's children, cottage girls xxiii. the low 'public' idlers xxiv. the cottage charter, four-acre farmers xxv. landlords' difficulties, the labourer as a power. modern clergy xxvi. a wheat country xxvii. grass countries xxviii. hodge's last masters, conclusion chapter i the farmers' parliament the doorway of the jason inn at woolbury had nothing particular to distinguish it from the other doorways of the same extremely narrow street. there was no porch, nor could there possibly be one, for an ordinary porch would reach half across the roadway. there were no steps to go up, there was no entrance hall, no space specially provided for crowds of visitors; simply nothing but an ordinary street-door opening directly on the street, and very little, if any, broader or higher than those of the private houses adjacent. there was not even the usual covered way or archway leading into the courtyard behind, so often found at old country inns; the approach to the stables and coach-houses was through a separate and even more narrow and winding street, necessitating a detour of some quarter of a mile. the dead, dull wall was worn smooth in places by the involuntary rubbings it had received from the shoulders of foot-passengers thrust rudely against it as the market-people came pouring in or out, or both together. had the spot been in the most crowded district of the busiest part of the metropolis, where every inch of ground is worth an enormous sum, the buildings could not have been more jammed together, nor the inconvenience greater. yet the little town was in the very midst of one of the most purely agricultural counties, where land, to all appearance, was plentiful, and where there was ample room and 'verge enough' to build fifty such places. the pavement in front of the inn was barely eighteen inches wide; two persons could not pass each other on it, nor walk abreast. if a cart came along the roadway, and a trap had to go by it, the foot-passengers had to squeeze up against the wall, lest the box of the wheel projecting over the kerb should push them down. if a great waggon came loaded with wool, the chances were whether a carriage could pass it or not; as for a waggon-load of straw that projected from the sides, nothing could get by, but all must wait--coroneted panel or plain four-wheel--till the huge mass had rumbled and jolted into the more open market-place. but hard, indeed, must have been the flag-stones to withstand the wear and tear of the endless iron-shod shoes that tramped to and fro these mere ribbons of pavements. for, besides the through traffic out from the market-place to the broad macadamised road that had taken the place and the route of an ancient roman road, there were the customers to the shops that lined each side of the street. into some of these you stepped from the pavement down, as it were, into a cave, the level of the shop being eight or ten inches below the street, while the first floor projected over the pavement quite to the edge of the kerb. to enter these shops it was necessary to stoop, and when you were inside there was barely room to turn round. other shops were, indeed, level with the street; but you had to be careful, because the threshold was not flush with the pavement, but rose a couple of inches and then fell again, a very trap to the toe of the unwary. many had no glass at all, but were open, like a butcher's or fishmonger's. those that had glass were so restricted for space that, rich as they might be within in the good things of the earth, they could make no 'display.' all the genius of a west-end shopman could not have made an artistic arrangement in that narrow space and in that bad light; for, though so small below, the houses rose high, and the street being so narrow the sunshine rarely penetrated into it. but mean as a metropolitan shopman might have thought the spot, the business done there was large, and, more than that, it was genuine. the trade of a country market-town, especially when that market-town, like woolbury, dates from the earliest days of english history, is hereditary. it flows to the same store and to the same shop year after year, generation after generation, century after century. the farmer who walks into the saddler's here goes in because his father went there before him. his father went in because his father dealt there, and so on farther back than memory can trace. it might almost be said that whole villages go to particular shops. you may see the agricultural labourers' wives, for instance, on a saturday leave the village in a bevy of ten or a dozen, and all march in to the same tradesman. of course in these latter days speculative men and 'co-operative' prices, industriously placarded, have sapped and undermined this old-fashioned system. yet even now it retains sufficient hold to be a marked feature of country life. to the through traffic, therefore, had to be added the steady flow of customers to the shops. on a market-day like this there is, of course, the incessant entry and exit of carts, waggons, traps, gigs, four-wheels, and a large number of private carriages. the number of private carriages is, indeed, very remarkable, as also the succession of gentlemen on thoroughbred horses--a proof of the number of resident gentry in the neighbourhood, and of its general prosperity. cart-horses furbished up for sale, with straw-bound tails and glistening skins; 'baaing' flocks of sheep; squeaking pigs; bullocks with their heads held ominously low, some going, some returning, from the auction yard; shouting drovers; lads rushing hither and thither; dogs barking; everything and everybody crushing, jostling, pushing through the narrow street. an old shepherd, who has done his master's business, comes along the pavement, trudging thoughtful and slow, with ashen staff. one hand is in his pocket, the elbow of the arm projecting; he is feeling a fourpenny-piece, and deliberating at which 'tap' he shall spend it. he fills up the entire pavement, and stolidly plods on, turning ladies and all into the roadway; not from intentional rudeness, but from sheer inability to perceive that he is causing inconvenience. unless you know the exact spot it is difficult in all this crowd and pushing, with a nervous dread of being gored from behind by a bull, or thrown off your feet by a sudden charge of sheep, to discover the door of the jason inn. that door has been open every legitimate and lawful hour this hundred years; but you will very likely be carried past it and have to struggle back. then it is not easy to enter, for half a dozen stalwart farmers and farmers' sons are coming out; while two young fellows stand just inside, close to the sliding bar-window, blocking up the passage, to exchange occasional nods and smiles with the barmaid. however, by degrees you shuffle along the sanded passage, and past the door of the bar, which is full of farmers as thick as they can stand, or sit. the rattle of glasses, the chink of spoons, the hum of voices, the stamping of feet, the calls and orders, and sounds of laughter, mingle in confusion. cigar-smoke and the steam from the glasses fill the room--all too small--with a thick white mist, through which rubicund faces dimly shine like the red sun through a fog. some at the tables are struggling to write cheques, with continual jogs at the elbow, with ink that will not flow, pens that scratch and splutter, blotting-paper that smudges and blots. some are examining cards of an auction, and discussing the prices which they have marked in the margin in pencil. the good-humoured uproar is beyond description, and is increased by more farmers forcing their way in from the rear, where are their horses or traps--by farmers eagerly inquiring for dealers or friends, and by messengers from the shops loaded with parcels to place in the customer's vehicle. at last you get beyond the bar-room door and reach the end of the passage, where is a wide staircase, and at the foot a tall eight-day clock. a maid-servant comes tripping down, and in answer to inquiry replies that that is the way up, and the room is ready, but she adds with a smile that there is no one there yet. it is three-quarters of an hour after the time fixed for the reading of a most important paper before a meeting specially convened, before the assembled parliament of hodge's masters, and you thought you would be too late. a glance at the staircase proves the truth of the maid's story. it has no carpet, but it is white as well-scrubbed wood could well be. there is no stain, no dust, no foot-mark on it; no heavy shoe that has been tramping about in the mud has been up there. but it is necessary to go on or go back, and of the two the first is the lesser evil. the staircase is guarded by carved banisters, and after going up two flights you enter a large and vacant apartment prepared for the meeting of the farmers' club. at the farther end is a small mahogany table, with an armchair for the president, paper, pens, ink, blotting-paper, and a wax candle and matches, in case he should want a light. two less dignified chairs are for the secretary (whose box, containing the club records, books of reference, &c., is on the table), and for the secretary's clerk. rows of plain chairs stretch across the room, rank after rank; these are for the audience. and last of all are two long forms, as if for hodge, if hodge chooses to come. a gleam of the afternoon sun--as the clouds part awhile--attracts one naturally to the window. the thickness of the wall in which it is placed must be some two or three feet, so that there is a recess on which to put your arms, if you do not mind the dust, and look out. the window is half open, and the sounds of the street come up, 'baaing' and bellowing and squeaking, the roll of wheels, the tramp of feet, and, more distant, the shouting of an auctioneer in the market-place, whose stentorian tones come round the corner as he puts up rickcloths for sale. noise of man and animal below; above, here in the chamber of science, vacancy and silence. looking upwards, a narrow streak of blue sky can be seen above the ancient house across the way. after awhile there comes the mellow sound of bells from the church which is near by, though out of sight; bells with a soft, old-world tone; bells that chime slowly and succeed each other without haste, ringing forth a holy melody composed centuries ago. it is as well to pause a minute and listen to their voice, even in this railroad age of hurry. over the busy market-place the notes go forth, and presently the hum comes back and dwells in the recess of the window. it is a full hour after the time fixed, and now at last, as the carillon finishes, there are sounds of heavy boots upon the staircase. three or four farmers gather on the landing; they converse together just outside. the secretary's clerk comes, and walks to the table; more farmers, who, now they have company, boldly enter and take seats; still more farmers; the secretary arrives; finally the president appears, and with him the lecturer. there is a hum of greeting; the minutes are read; the president introduces the professor, and the latter stands forth to read his paper--'science, the remedy for agricultural depression.' farmers, he pointed out, had themselves only to blame for the present period of distress. for many years past science had been like the voice crying in the wilderness, and few, a very few only, had listened. men had, indeed, come to the clubs; but they had gone away home again, and, as the swine of the proverb, returned to their wallowing in the mire. one blade of grass still grew where two or even three might be grown; he questioned whether farmers had any real desire to grow the extra blades. if they did, they had merely to employ the means provided for them. everything had been literally put into their hands; but what was the result? why, nothing--in point of fact, nothing. the country at large was still undrained. the very a b c of progress had been neglected. he should be afraid to say what proportion of the land was yet undrained, for he should be contradicted, called ill names, and cried down. but if they would look around them they could see for themselves. they would see meadows full of rank, coarse grass in the furrows, which neither horse nor cattle would touch. they would see in the wheat-fields patches of the crop sickly, weak, feeble, and altogether poor; that was where the water had stood and destroyed the natural power of the seed. the same cause gave origin to that mass of weeds which was the standing disgrace of arable districts. but men shut their eyes wilfully to these plain facts, and cried out that the rain had ruined them. it was not the rain--it was their own intense dislike of making any improvement. the _vis inertiae_ of the agricultural class was beyond the limit of language to describe. why, if the land had been drained the rain would have done comparatively little damage, and thus they would have been independent of the seasons. look, again, at the hay crop; how many thousand tons of hay had been wasted because men would not believe that anything would answer which had not been done by their forefathers! the hay might have been saved by three distinct methods. the grass might have been piled against hurdles or light frame-work and so dried by the wind; it might have been pitted in the earth and preserved still green; or it might have been dried by machinery and the hot blast. a gentleman had invented a machine, the utility of which had been demonstrated beyond all doubt. but no; farmers folded their hands and watched their hay rotting. as for the wheat crop, how could they expect a wheat crop? they had not cleaned the soil--there were horse-hoes, and every species of contrivances for the purpose; but they would not use them. they had not ploughed deeply: they had merely scratched the surface as if with a pin. how could the thin upper crust of the earth--the mere rind three inches thick--be expected to yield crop after crop for a hundred years? deep ploughing could only be done by steam: now how many farmers possessed or used steam-ploughs? why, there were whole districts where such a thing was unknown. they had neglected to manure the soil; to restore to it the chemical constituents of the crops. but to speak upon artificial manure was enough to drive any man who had the power of thought into temporary insanity. it was so utterly dispiriting to see men positively turning away from the means of obtaining good crops, and then crying out that they were ruined. with drains, steam-ploughs, and artificial manure, a farmer might defy the weather. of course, continued the professor, it was assumed that the farmer had good substantial buildings and sufficient capital. the first he could get if he chose; and without the second, without capital, he had no business to be farming at all. he was simply stopping the road of a better man, and the sooner he was driven out of the way the better. the neglect of machinery was most disheartening. a farmer bought one machine, perhaps a reaping-machine, and then because that solitary article did not immediately make his fortune he declared that machinery was useless. could the force of folly farther go? with machinery they could do just as they liked. they could compel the earth to yield, and smile at the most tropical rain, or the most continuous drought. if only the voice of science had been listened to, there would have been no depression at all. even now it was not too late. those who were wise would at once set to work to drain, to purchase artificial manure, and set up steam power, and thereby to provide themselves with the means of stemming the tide of depression. by these means they could maintain a head of stock that would be more than double what was now kept upon equal acreage. he knew full well one of the objections that would be made against these statements. it would be said that certain individuals had done all this, had deep ploughed, had manured, had kept a great head of valuable stock, had used every resource, and yet had suffered. this was true. he deeply regretted to say it was true. but why had they suffered? not because of the steam, the machinery, the artificial manure, the improvements they had set on foot; but because of the folly of their neighbours, of the agricultural class generally. the great mass of farmers had made no improvements; and, when the time of distress came, they were beaten down at every point. it was through these men and their failures that the price of stock and of produce fell, and that so much stress was put upon the said individuals through no fault of their own. he would go further, and he would say that had it not been for the noble efforts of such individuals--the pioneers of agriculture and its main props and stays--the condition of farming would have been simply fifty times worse than it was. they, and they alone, had enabled it to bear up so long against calamity. they had resources; the agricultural class, as a rule, had none. those resources were the manure they had put into the soil, the deep ploughing they had accomplished, the great head of stock they had got together, and so on. these enabled them to weather the storm. the cry for a reduction of rent was an irresistible proof of what he had put forth--that it was the farmers themselves who were to blame. this cry was a confession of their own incompetency. if you analysed it--if you traced the general cry home to particular people--you always found that those people were incapables. the fact was, farming, as a rule, was conducted on the hand-to-mouth principle, and the least stress or strain caused an outcry. he must be forgiven if he seemed to speak with unusual acerbity. he intended no offence. but it was his duty. in such a condition of things it would be folly to mince matters, to speak softly while everything was going to pieces. he repeated, once for all, it was their own fault. science could supply the remedy, and science alone; if they would not call in the aid of science they must suffer, and their privations must be upon their own heads. science said, drain, use artificial manure, plough deeply, keep the best breed of stock, put capital into the soil. call science to their aid, and they might defy the seasons. the professor sat down and thrust his hand through his hair. the president invited discussion. for some few minutes no one rose; presently, after a whispered conversation with his friend, an elderly farmer stood up from the forms at the very back of the room. he made no pretence to rounded periods, but spoke much better than might have been expected; he had a small piece of paper in his hand, on which he had made notes as the lecture proceeded. he said that the lecturer had made out a very good case. he had proved to demonstration, in the most logical manner, that farmers were fools. well, no doubt, all the world agreed with him, for everybody thought he could teach the farmer. the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the banker, the wine merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, the clerk, the mechanic, the merchant, the editor, the printer, the stockbroker, the colliery owner, the ironmaster, the clergyman, and the methodist preacher, the very cabmen and railway porters, policemen, and no doubt the crossing-sweepers--to use an expressive americanism, all the whole "jing-bang"--could teach the ignorant jackass of a farmer. some few years ago he went into a draper's shop to bring home a parcel for his wife, and happened to enter into conversation with the draper himself. the draper said he was just going to sell off the business and go into dairy farming, which was the most paying thing out. that was just when there came over from america a patent machine for milking cows. the draper's idea was to milk all his cows by one of these articles, and so dispense with labour. he saw no more of him for a long time, but had heard that morning that he went into a dairy farm, got rid of all his money, and was now tramping the country as a pedlar with a pack at his back. everybody thought he could teach the farmer till he tried farming himself, and then he found his mistake. one remark of the lecturer, if he might venture to say so, seemed to him, a poor ignorant farmer of sixty years' standing, not only uncalled-for and priggish, but downright brutal. it was that the man with little capital ought to be driven out of farming, and the sooner he went to the wall the better. now, how would all the grocers and other tradesmen whom he had just enumerated like to be told that if they had not got , _l_. each they ought to go at once to the workhouse! that would be a fine remedy for the depression of trade. he always thought it was considered rather meritorious if a man with small capital, by hard work, honest dealing, and self-denial, managed to raise himself and get up in the world. but, oh no; nothing of the kind; the small man was the greatest sinner, and must be eradicated. well, he did not hesitate to say that he had been a small man himself, and began in a very small way. perhaps the lecturer would think him a small man still, as he was not a millionaire; but he could pay his way, which went for something in the eyes of old-fashioned people, and perhaps he had a pound or two over. he should say but one word more, for he was aware that there was a thunderstorm rapidly coming up, and he supposed science would not prevent him from getting a wet jacket. he should like to ask the lecturer if he could give the name of one single scientific farmer who had prospered? having said this much, the old gentleman put on his overcoat and busted out of the room, and several others followed him, for the rain was already splashing against the window-panes. others looked at their watches, and, seeing it was late, rose one by one and slipped off. the president asked if any one would continue the discussion, and, as no one rose, invited the professor to reply. the professor gathered his papers and stood up. then there came a heavy rolling sound--the unmistakable boom of distant thunder. he said that the gentleman who had left so abruptly had quite misconstrued the tenour of his paper. so far from intending to describe farmers as lacking in intelligence, all he wished to show was that they did not use their natural abilities, from a certain traditionary bowing to custom. they did not like their neighbours to think that they were doing anything novel. no one respected the feelings that had grown up and strengthened from childhood, no one respected the habits of our ancestors, more than he did; no one knew better the solid virtues that adorned the homes of agriculturists. far, indeed, be it from him to say aught--[boom! and the rattling of rain against the window]--aught that could--but he saw that gentlemen were anxious to get home, and would conclude. a vote of thanks was hurriedly got over, and the assembly broke up and hastened down the staircase. they found the passage below so blocked with farmers who had crowded in out of the storm that movement was impossible. the place was darkened by the overhanging clouds, the atmosphere thick and close with the smoke and the crush. flashes of brilliant lightning seemed to sweep down the narrow street, which ran like a brook with the storm-water; the thunder seemed to descend and shake the solid walls. 'it's rather hard on the professor,' said one farmer to another. 'what would science do in a thunderstorm?' he had hardly spoken when the hail suddenly came down, and the round white globules, rebounding from the pavement, rolled in at the open door. each paused as he lifted his glass and thought of the harvest. as for hodge, who was reaping, he had to take shelter how he might in the open fields. boom! flash! boom!--splash and hiss, as the hail rushed along the narrow street. chapter ii leaving his farm a large white poster, fresh and glaring, is pasted on the wall of a barn that stands beside a narrow country lane. so plain an advertisement, without any colour or attempt at 'display,' would be passed unnoticed among the endless devices on a town hoarding. there nothing can be hoped to be looked at unless novel and strange, or even incomprehensible. but here the oblong piece of black and white contrasts sufficiently in itself with red brick and dull brown wooden framing, with tall shadowy elms, and the glint of sunshine on the streamlet that flows with a ceaseless murmur across the hollow of the lane. every man that comes along stays to read it. the dealer in his trap--his name painted in white letters on the shaft--pulls up his quick pony, and sits askew on his seat to read. he has probably seen it before in the bar of the wayside inn, roughly hung on a nail, and swaying to and fro with the draught along the passage. he may have seen it, too, on the handing-post at the lonely cross-roads, stuck on in such a manner that, in order to peruse it, it is necessary to walk round the post. the same formal announcement appears also in the local weekly papers--there are at least two now in the smallest place--and he has read it there. yet he pauses to glance at it again, for the country mind requires reiteration before it can thoroughly grasp and realise the simplest fact. the poster must be read and re-read, and the printer's name observed and commented on, or, if handled, the thickness of the paper felt between thumb and finger. after a month or two of this process people at last begin to accept it as a reality, like cattle or trees--something substantial, and not mere words. the carter, with his waggon, if he be an elderly man, cries 'whoa!' and, standing close to the wall, points to each letter with the top of his whip--where it bends--and so spells out 'sale by auction.' if he be a young man he looks up at it as the heavy waggon rumbles by, turns his back, and goes on with utter indifference. the old men, working so many years on a single farm, and whose minds were formed in days when a change of tenancy happened once in half a century, have so identified themselves with the order of things in the parish that it seems to personally affect them when a farmer leaves his place. but young hodge cares nothing about his master, or his fellow's master. whether they go or stay, prosperous or decaying, it matters nothing to him. he takes good wages, and can jingle some small silver in his pocket when he comes to the tavern a mile or so ahead; so 'gee-up' and let us get there as rapidly as possible. an hour later a farmer passes on horseback; his horse all too broad for his short legs that stick out at the side and show some inches of stocking between the bottom of his trousers and his boots. a sturdy, thick-set man, with a wide face, brickdust colour, fringed with close-cut red whiskers, and a chest so broad he seems compelled to wear his coat unbuttoned. he pulls off his hat and wipes his partly bald head with a coloured handkerchief, stares at the poster a few minutes, and walks his horse away, evidently in deep thought. two boys--cottagers' children--come home from school; they look round to see that no one observes, and then throw flints at the paper till the sound of footsteps alarms them. towards the evening a gentleman and lady, the first middle-aged, the latter very young--father and daughter--approach, their horses seeming to linger as they walk through the shallow stream, and the cool water splashes above their fetlocks. the shooting season is near at hand, parliament has risen, and the landlords have returned home. instead of the row, papa must take his darling a ride through the lanes, a little dusty as the autumn comes on, and pauses to read the notice on the wall. it is his neighbour's tenant, not his, but it comes home to him here. it is the real thing--the fact--not the mere seeing it in the papers, or the warning hints in the letters of his own steward. 'papa,' is rather quiet for the rest of the ride. ever since he was a lad--how many years ago is that?--he has shot with his neighbour's party over this farm, and recollects the tenant well, and with that friendly feeling that grows up towards what we see year after year. in a day or two the clergyman drives by with his low four-wheel and fat pony, notes the poster as the pony slackens at the descent to the water, and tells himself to remember and get the tithe. some few sundays, and farmer smith will appear in church no more. farmer smith this beautiful morning is looking at the wheat, which is, and is not, his. it would have been cut in an ordinary season, but the rains have delayed the ripening. he wonders how the crop ever came up at all through the mass of weeds that choked it, the spurrey that filled the spaces between the stalks below, the bindweed that climbed up them, the wild camomile flowering and flourishing at the edge, the tall thistles lifting their heads above it in bunches, and the great docks whose red seeds showed at a distance. he sent in some men, as much to give them something to do as for any real good, one day, who in a few hours pulled up enough docks to fill a cart. they came across a number of snakes, and decapitated the reptiles with their hoes, and afterwards hung them all up--tied together by the tail--to a bough. the bunch of headless snakes hangs there still, swinging to and fro as the wind plays through the oak. vermin, too, revel in weeds, which encourage the mice and rats, and are, perhaps, quite as much a cause of their increase as any acts of the gamekeeper. farmer smith a few years since was very anxious for the renewal of his lease, just as those about to enter on tenancies desired leases above everything. all the agricultural world agreed that a lease was the best thing possible--the clubs discussed it, the papers preached it. it was a safeguard; it allowed the tenant to develop his energies, and to put his capital into the soil without fear. he had no dread of being turned out before he could get it back. nothing like a lease--the certain preventative of all agricultural ills. there was, to appearance, a great deal of truth in these arguments, which in their day made much impression, and caused a movement in that direction. who could foresee that in a few short years men would be eager to get rid of their leases on any terms? yet such was the fact. the very men who had longed so eagerly for the blessing of security of tenure found it the worst thing possible for their interest. mr. smith got his lease, and paid for it tolerably stiffly, for at that period all agricultural prices were inflated--from the price of a lease to that of a calf. he covenanted to pay a certain fixed rental for so many acres of arable and a small proportion of grass for a fixed time. he covenanted to cultivate the soil by a fixed rotation; not to sow this nor that, nor to be guided by the change of the markets, or the character of the seasons, or the appearance of powerful foreign competitors. there was the parchment prepared with all the niceties of wording that so many generations of lawyers had polished to the highest pitch; not a loophole, not so much as a _t_ left uncrossed, or a doubtful interlineation. but although the parchment did not alter a jot, the times and seasons did. wheat fell in price, vast shipments came even from india, cattle and sheep from america, wool from australia, horses from france; tinned provisions and meats poured in by the ton, and cheese, and butter, and bacon by the thousand tons. labour at the same time rose. his expenditure increased, his income decreased; his rent remained the same, and rent audit came round with the utmost regularity. mr. smith began to think about his lease, and question whether it was such an unmixed blessing. there was no getting out of it, that was certain. the seasons grew worse and worse. smith asked for a reduction of rent. he got, like others, ten per cent, returned, which, he said looked very liberal to those who knew nothing of farming, and was in reality about as useful as a dry biscuit flung at a man who has eaten nothing for a week. besides which, it was only a gracious condescension, and might not be repeated next year, unless he kept on his good behaviour, and paid court to the clergyman and the steward. unable to get at what he wanted in a direct way, smith tried an indirect one. he went at game, and insisted on its being reduced in number. this he could do according to the usual terms of agreement; but when it came to the point he found that the person called in to assess the damage put it at a much lower figure than he had himself; and who was to decide what was or was not a reasonable head of game? this attack of his on the game did him no good whatever, and was not unnaturally borne in mind--let us not say resented. he next tried to get permission to sell straw--a permission that he saw granted to others in moderation. but he was then reminded of a speech he had made at a club, when, in a moment of temper (and sherry), he had let out a piece of his mind, which piece of his mind was duly published in the local papers, and caused a sensation. somebody called the landlord's attention to it, and he did not like it. nor can he be blamed; we none of us like to be abused in public, the more especially when, looking at precedents, we do not deserve it. smith next went to the assessment committee to get his taxes reduced, on the ground of a loss of revenue. the committee sympathised with him, but found that they must assess him according to his rent. at least so they were then advised, and only did their duty. by this time the local bankers had scented a time of trouble approaching in the commercial and agricultural world; they began to draw in their more doubtful advances, or to refuse to renew them. as a matter of fact, smith was a perfectly sound man, but he had so persistently complained that people began to suspect there really was something wrong with his finances. he endeavoured to explain, but was met with the tale that he had himself started. he then honestly produced his books, and laid his position bare to the last penny. the banker believed him, and renewed part of the advance for a short period; but he began, to cogitate in this wise: 'here is a farmer of long experience, born of a farming family, and a hardworking fellow, and, more than that, honest. if this man, who has hitherto had the command of a fair amount of capital, cannot make his books balance better than this, what must be the case with some of our customers? there are many who ride about on hunters, and have a bin of decent wine. how much of all this is genuine? we must be careful; these are hard times.' in short, smith, without meaning it, did his neighbours an immense deal of harm. his very honesty injured them. by slow degrees the bank got 'tighter' with its customers. it leaked out--all things leak out--that smith had said too much, and he became unpopular, which did not increase his contentment. finally he gave notice that unless the rent was reduced he should not apply to renew the lease, which would soon expire. he had not the least intention in his secret mind of leaving the farm; he never dreamed that his notice would be accepted. he and his had dwelt there for a hundred years, and were as much part and parcel of the place as the elm-trees in the hedges. so many farms were in the market going a-begging for tenants, it was not probable a landlord would let a good man go for the sake of a few shillings an acre. but the months went by and the landlord's agents gave no sign, and at last smith realised that he was really going to leave. though he had so long talked of going, it came upon him like a thunderbolt. it was like an attack of some violent fever that shakes a strong man and leaves him as weak as a child. the farmer, whose meals had been so hearty, could not relish his food. his breakfast dwindled to a pretence; his lunch fell off; his dinner grew less; his supper faded; his spirits and water, the old familiar 'nightcap,' did him no good. his jolly ringing laugh was heard no more; from a thorough gossip he became taciturn, and barely opened his lips. his clothes began to hang about him, instead of fitting him all too tight; his complexion lost the red colour and became sallow; his eyes had a furtive look in them, so different to the old straightforward glance. some said he would take to his bed and die; some said he would jump into the pond one night, to be known no more in this world. but he neither jumped into the pond nor took to his bed. he went round his fields just the same as before--perhaps a little more mechanically; but still the old routine of daily work was gone through. leases, though for a short period, do not expire in a day; after awhile time began to produce its usual effect. the sharpness of the pain wore off, and he set to work to make the best of matters. he understood the capacity of each field as well as others understand the yielding power of a little garden. his former study had been to preserve something like a balance between what he put in and what he took out of the soil. now it became the subject of consideration how to get the most out without putting anything in. artificial manures were reduced to the lowest quantity and of the cheapest quality, such as was used being, in fact, nothing but to throw dust, literally, in the eyes of other people. times were so bad that he could not be expected, under the most favourable circumstances, to consume much cake in the stalls or make much manure in that way. one by one extra expenditures were cut off. gates, instead of being repaired, were propped up by running a pole across. labour was eschewed in every possible way. hedges were left uncut; ditches were left uncleaned. the team of horses was reduced, and the ploughing done next to nothing. cleaning and weeding were gradually abandoned. several fields were allowed to become overrun with grass, not the least attention being paid to them; the weeds sprang up, and the grass ran over from the hedges. the wheat crop was kept to the smallest area. wheat requires more previous labour and care as to soil than any other crop. labour and preparation cost money, and he was determined not to spend a shilling more than he was absolutely compelled. he contrived to escape the sowing, of wheat altogether on some part of the farm, leaving it out of the rotation. that was a direct infringement of the letter of the agreement; but who was to prove that he had evaded it? the steward could not recollect the crops on several hundred acres; the neighbouring tenants, of course, knew very well; but although smith had become unpopular, they were not going to tell tales of him. he sold everything he dared off the farm, and many things that he did not dare. he took everything out of the soil that it was possible to take out. the last michaelmas was approaching, and he walked round in the warm august sunshine to look at the wheat. he sat down on an old roller that lay in the corner of the field, and thought over the position of things. he calculated that it would cost the incoming tenant an expenditure of from one thousand two hundred pounds to one thousand five hundred pounds to put the farm, which was a large one, into proper condition. it could not be got into such condition under three years of labour. the new tenant must therefore be prepared to lay out a heavy sum of money, to wait while the improvement went on, must live how he could meanwhile, and look forward some three years for the commencement of his profit. to such a state had the farm been brought in a brief time. and how would the landlord come off? the new tenant would certainly make his bargain in accordance with the state of the land. for the first year the rent paid would be nominal; for the second, perhaps a third or half the usual sum; not till the third year could the landlord hope to get his full rental. that full rental, too, would be lower than previously, because the general depression had sent down arable rents everywhere, and no one would pay on the old scale. smith thought very hard things of the landlord, and felt that he should have his revenge. on the other hand, the landlord thought very hard things of smith, and not without reason. that an old tenant, the descendant of one of the oldest tenant-farmer families, should exhaust the soil in this way seemed the blackest return for the good feeling that had existed for several generations. there was great irritation on both sides. smith had, however, to face one difficulty. he must either take another farm at once, or live on his capital. the interest of his capital--if invested temporarily in government securities--would hardly suffice to maintain the comfortable style of living he and his rather large family of grown-up sons and daughters had been accustomed to. he sometimes heard a faint, far off 'still small voice,' that seemed to say it would have been wiser to stay on, and wait till the reaction took place and farming recovered. the loss he would have sustained by staying on would, perhaps, not have been larger than the loss he must now sustain by living on capital till such time as he saw something to suit him. and had he been altogether wise in omitting all endeavours to gain his end by conciliatory means? might not gentle persuasion and courteous language have ultimately produced an impression? might not terms have been arranged had he not been so vehement? the new tenant, notwithstanding that he would have to contend with the shocking state of the farm, had such favourable terms that if he only stayed long enough to let the soil recover, smith knew he must make a good thing of it. but as he sat on the wooden roller under the shade of a tree and thought these things, listening to the rustle of the golden wheat as it moved in the breeze, he pulled a newspaper out of his pocket, and glanced down a long, long list of farms to let. then he remembered that his pass-book at the bank showed a very respectable row of figures, buttoned up his coat, and strolled homeward with a smile on his features. the date fixed for the sale, as announced by the poster on the barn, came round, and a crowd gathered to see the last of the old tenant. old hodge viewed the scene from a distance, resting against a gate, with his chin on his hand. he was thinking of the days when he first went to plough, years ago, under smith's father. if smith had been about to enter on another farm old hodge would have girded up his loins, packed his worldly goods in a waggon, and followed his master's fortunes thither. but smith was going to live on his capital awhile; and old hodge had already had notice to quit his cottage. in his latter days he must work for a new master. down at the sale young hodge was lounging round, hands in pocket, whistling--for there was some beer going about. the excitement of the day was a pleasurable sensation, and as for his master he might go to kansas or hong-kong. chapter iii a man of progress the sweet sound of rustling leaves, as soothing as the rush of falling water, made a gentle music over a group of three persons sitting at the extremity of a lawn. upon their right was a plantation or belt of trees, which sheltered them from the noonday sun; on the left the green sward reached to the house; from the open window came the rippling notes of a piano, and now and again the soft accents of the italian tongue. the walls of the garden shut out the world and the wind--the blue sky stretched above from one tree-top to another, and in those tree-tops the cool breeze, grateful to the reapers in the fields, played with bough and leaf. in the centre of the group was a small table, and on it some tall glasses of antique make, and a flask of wine. by the lady lay a japanese parasol, carelessly dropped on the grass. she was handsome, and elegantly dressed; her long drooping eyelashes fringed eyes that were almost closed in luxurious enjoyment; her slender hand beat time to the distant song. of the two gentlemen one was her brother--the other, a farmer, her husband. the brother wore a pith helmet, and his bronzed cheek told of service under tropical suns. the husband was scarcely less brown; still young, and very active-looking, you might guess his age at forty; but his bare forehead (he had thrown his hat on the ground) was marked with the line caused by involuntary contraction of the muscles when thinking. there was an air of anxiety, of restless feverish energy, about him. but just for the moment he was calm and happy, turning over the pages of a book. suddenly he looked up, and began to declaim, in a clear, sweet voice: 'he's speaking now, or murmuring, "where's my serpent of old nile?" for so he calls me. now i feed myself with most delicious poison!' just then there came the sharp rattle of machinery borne on the wind; he recollected himself, shut the volume, and rose from his seat. 'the men have finished luncheon,' he said; 'i must go and see how things are getting on.' the indian officer, after one glance back at the house, went with him. there was a private footpath through the plantation of trees, and down this the two disappeared. soon afterwards the piano ceased, and a lady came slowly across the lawn, still humming the air she had been playing. she was the farmer's sister, and was engaged to the officer. the wife looked up from the book which she had taken from the table, with a smile of welcome. but the smile faded as she said--'they have gone out to the reapers. oh, this farm will worry him out of his life! how i wish he had never bought it! don't let alick have anything to do with farms or land, dear, when you are married.' the girl laughed, sat down, took her hand, and asked if matters were really so serious. 'it is not so much the money i trouble about,' said the wife. 'it is cecil himself. his nature is too fine for these dull clods. you know him, dear; his mind is full of art--look at these glasses--of music and pictures. why, he has just been reading "antony and cleopatra," and now he's gone to look after reapers. then, he is so fiery and quick, and wants everything done in a minute, like the men of business in the "city." he keeps his watch timed to a second, and expects the men to be there. they are so slow. everything agricultural is so slow. they say we shall have fine seasons in two or three years; only think, _years_. this is what weighs on cecil.' by this time the two men had walked through the plantation, and paused at a small gate that opened on the fields. the ground fell rapidly away, sloping down for half a mile, so that every portion of the fields below was visible at once. the house and gardens were situate on the hill; the farmer had only to stand on the edge to overlook half his place. 'what a splendid view!' said the officer. the entire slope was yellow with wheat--on either hand, and in front the surface of the crop extended unbroken by hedge, tree, or apparent division. two reaping-machines were being driven rapidly round and round, cutting as they went; one was a self-binder and threw the sheaves off already bound; the other only laid the corn low, and it had afterwards to be gathered up and bound by hand-labour. there was really a small army of labourers in the field; but it was so large they made but little show. 'you have a first-rate crop,' said the visitor; 'i see no weeds, or not more than usual; it is a capital crop.' 'yes,' replied the farmer, 'it is a fine crop; but just think what it cost me to produce it, and bear in mind, too, the price i shall get for it.' he took out his pocket-book, and began to explain. while thus occupied he looked anything but a farmer. his dress was indeed light and careless, but it was the carelessness of breeding, not slovenliness. his hands were brown, but there were clean white cuffs on his wrist and gold studs; his neck was brown, but his linen spotless. the face was too delicate, too refined with all its bronze; the frame was well developed, but too active; it lacked the heavy thickness and the lumbering gait of the farmer bred to the plough. he might have conducted a great financial operation; he might have been the head of a great mercantile house; he might have been on 'change; but that stiff clay there, stubborn and unimpressionable, was not in his style. cecil had gone into farming, in fact, as a 'commercial speculation,' with the view of realising cent. per cent. he began at the time when it was daily announced that old-fashioned farming was a thing of the past. business maxims and business practice were to be the rule of the future. farming was not to be farming; it was to be emphatically 'business,' the same as iron, coal, or cotton. thus managed, with steam as the motive power, a fortune might be made out of the land, in the same way as out of a colliery or a mine. but it must be done in a commercial manner; there must be no restrictions upon the employment of capital, no fixed rotation of crops, no clauses forbidding the sale of any products. cecil found, however, that the possessors of large estates would not let him a farm on these conditions. these ignorant people (as he thought them) insisted upon keeping up the traditionary customs; they would not contract themselves out of the ancient form of lease. but cecil was a man of capital. he really had a large sum of money, and this short-sighted policy (as he termed it) of the landlords only made him the more eager to convince them how mistaken they were to refuse anything to a man who could put capital into the soil. he resolved to be his own landlord, and ordered his agents to find him a small estate and to purchase it outright. there was not much difficulty in finding an estate, and cecil bought it. but he was even then annoyed and disgusted with the formalities, the investigation of title, the completion of deeds, and astounded at the length of a lawyer's bill. being at last established in possession cecil set to work, and at the same time set every agricultural tongue wagging within a radius of twenty miles. he grubbed up all the hedges, and threw the whole of his arable land into one vast field, and had it levelled with the theodolite. he drained it six feet deep at an enormous cost. he built an engine-shed with a centrifugal pump, which forced water from the stream that ran through the lower ground over the entire property, and even to the topmost storey of his house. he laid a light tramway across the widest part of his estate, and sent the labourers to and fro their work in trucks. the chaff-cutters, root-pulpers, the winnowing-machine--everything was driven by steam. teams of horses and waggons seemed to be always going to the canal wharf for coal, which he ordered from the pit wholesale. a fine set of steam-ploughing tackle was put to work, and, having once commenced, the beat of the engines never seemed to cease. they were for ever at work tearing up the subsoil and bringing it to the surface. if he could have done it, he would have ploughed ten feet deep. tons of artificial manure came by canal boat--positively boat loads--and were stored in the warehouse. for he put up a regular warehouse for the storage of materials; the heavy articles on the ground floor, the lighter above, hoisted up by a small crane. there was, too, an office, where the 'engineer' attended every morning to take his orders, as the bailiff might at the back-door of an old farmhouse. substantial buildings were erected for the shorthorn cattle. the meadows upon the estate, like the corn-fields, were all thrown together, such divisions as were necessary being made by iron railings. machines of every class and character were provided--reaping-machines, mowing-machines, horse-hoes, horse-rakes, elevators--everything was to be done by machinery. that nothing might be incomplete, some new and well-designed cottages were erected for the skilled artisans--they could scarcely be called labourers--who were engaged to work these engines. the estate had previously consisted of several small farms: these were now thrown all into one, otherwise there would not have been room for this great enterprise. a complete system of booking was organised. from the sale of a bullock to the skin of a calf, everything was put down on paper. all these entries, made in books specially prepared and conveniently ruled for the purpose, came under cecil's eye weekly, and were by him re-entered in his ledgers. this writing took up a large part of his time, and the labour was sometimes so severe that he could barely get through it; yet he would not allow himself a clerk, being economical in that one thing only. it was a saying in the place that not a speck of dust could be blown on to the estate by the wind, or a straw blown off, without it being duly entered in the master's books. cecil's idea was to excel in all things. some had been famous for shorthorns before him, others for sheep, and others again for wheat. he would be celebrated for all. his shorthorns should fetch fabulous prices; his sheep should be known all over the world; his wheat should be the crop of the season. in this way he invested his capital in the soil with a thoroughness unsurpassed. as if to prove that he was right, the success of his enterprise seemed from the first assured. his crops of wheat, in which he especially put faith, and which he grew year after year upon the same land, totally ignoring the ancient rotations, were the wonder of the neighbourhood. men came from far and near to see them. such was the effect of draining, turning up the subsoil, continual ploughing, and the consequent atmospheric action upon the exposed earth, and of liberal manure, that here stood such crops of wheat as had never previously been seen. these he sold, as they stood, by auction; and no sooner had the purchasers cleared the ground than the engines went to work again, tearing up the earth. his meadow lands were irrigated by the centrifugal pump, and yielded three crops instead of one. his shorthorns began to get known--for he spared no expense upon them--and already one or two profitable sales had been held. his sheep prospered; there was not so much noise made about them, but, perhaps, they really paid better than anything. meantime, cecil kept open house, with wine and refreshments, and even beds for everybody who chose to come and inspect his place. nothing gave him such delight as to conduct visitors over the estate and to enter into minute details of his system. as for the neighbouring farmers they were only too welcome. these things became noised abroad, and people arrived from strange and far-off places, and were shown over this pioneer's farm, as cecil loved to call it. his example was triumphantly quoted by every one who spoke on agricultural progress. cecil himself was the life and soul of the farmers' club in the adjacent market town. it was not so much the speeches he made as his manner. his enthusiasm was contagious. if a scheme was started, if an experiment was suggested, cecil's cheque-book came out directly, and the thing was set on foot without delay. his easy, elastic step, his bright eye, his warm, hearty handshake, seemed to electrify people--to put some of his own spirit into them. the circle of his influence was ever increasing--the very oldest fogeys, who had prophesied every kind of failure, were being gradually won over. cecil himself was transcendently happy in his work; his mind was in it; no exertion, no care or trouble, was too much. he worked harder than any navvy, and never felt fatigue. people said of him--'what a wonderful man!' he was so genuine, so earnest, so thorough, men could not choose but believe in him. the sun shone brightly, the crops ripened, the hum of the threshing-machine droned on the wind--all was life and happiness. in the summer evenings pleasant groups met upon the lawn; the song, the jest went round; now and then an informal dance, arranged with much laughter, whiled away the merry hours till the stars appeared above the trees and the dew descended. yet to-day, as the two leaned over the little gate in the plantation and looked down upon the reapers, the deep groove which continual thought causes was all too visible on cecil's forehead. he explained to the officer how his difficulties had come about. his first years upon the farm or estate--it was really rather an estate than a farm--had been fairly prosperous, notwithstanding the immense outlay of capital. a good percentage, in some cases a high-rate of percentage, had been returned upon the money put into the soil. the seasons were good, the crops large and superabundant. men's minds were full of confidence, they bought freely, and were launching out in all directions. they wanted good shorthorn cattle--he sold them cattle; they wanted sheep--he sold them sheep. they wanted wheat, and he sold them the standing crops, took the money, and so cleared his profit and saved himself trouble. it was, in fact, a period of inflation. like stocks and shares, everything was going up; everybody hastening to get rich. shorthorns with a strain of blue blood fetched fancy prices; corn crops ruled high; every single thing sold well. the dry seasons suited the soil of the estate, and the machinery he had purchased was rapidly repaying its first cost in the saving of labour. his whole system was succeeding, and he saw his way to realise his cent. per cent. but by degrees the dream faded. he attributed it in the first place to the stagnation, the almost extinction, of the iron trade, the blowing out of furnaces, and the consequent cessation of the demand for the best class of food on the part of thousands of operatives and mechanics, who had hitherto been the farmers' best customers. they would have the best of everything when their wages were high; as their wages declined their purchases declined. in a brief period, far briefer than would be imagined, this shrinking of demand reacted upon agriculture. the english farmer made his profit upon superior articles--the cheaper class came from abroad so copiously that he could not compete against so vast a supply. when the demand for high-class products fell, the english farmer felt it directly. cecil considered that it was the dire distress in the manufacturing districts, the stagnation of trade and commerce and the great failures in business centres, that were the chief causes of low prices and falling agricultural markets. the rise of labour was but a trifling item. he had always paid good wages to good men, and always meant to. the succession of wet seasons was more serious, of course; it lowered the actual yield, and increased the cost of procuring the yield; but as his lands were well drained, and had been kept clean he believed he could have withstood the seasons for awhile. the one heavy cloud that overhung agriculture, in his opinion was the extraordinary and almost world-spread depression of trade, and his argument was very simple. when men prospered they bought freely, indulged in luxurious living, kept horses, servants, gave parties, and consumed indirectly large quantities of food. as they made fortunes they bought estates and lived half the year like country gentlemen--that competition sent up the price of land. the converse was equally true. in times of pressure households were reduced, servants dismissed, horses sold, carriages suppressed. rich and poor acted alike in different degrees but as the working population was so much more numerous it was through the low wages of the working population in cities and manufacturing districts that the farmers suffered most. it was a period of depression--there was no confidence, no speculation. for instance a year or two since the crop of standing wheat then growing on the very field before their eyes was sold by auction, and several lots brought from _l_. to _l_. per acre. this year the same wheat would not fetch _l_. per acre; and, not satisfied with that price, he had determined to reap and thresh it himself. it was the same with the shorthorns, with the hay, and indeed with everything except sheep, which had been a mainstay and support to him. 'yet even now,' concluded cecil, shutting his pocket-book, 'i feel convinced that my plan and my system will be a success. i can see that i committed one great mistake--i made all my improvements at once, laid out all my capital, and crippled my self. i should have done one thing at a time. i should, as it were, have grown my improvements--one this year, one next. as it was, i denuded myself of capital. had the times continued favourable it would not have mattered, as my income would have been large. but the times became adverse before i was firmly settled, and, to be plain, i can but just keep things going without a loan--dear bella will not be able to go to the sea this year; but we are both determined not to borrow.' 'in a year or two i am convinced we shall flourish again; but the waiting, alick, the waiting, is the trial. you know i am impatient. of course, the old-fashioned people, the farmers, all expect me to go through the bankruptcy court. they always said these new-fangled plans would not answer, and now they are sure they were right. well, i forgive them their croaking, though most of them have dined at my table and drank my wine. i forgive them their croaking, for so they were bred up from childhood. were i ill-natured, i might even smile at them, for they are failing and leaving their farms by the dozen, which seems a pretty good proof that their antiquated system is at best no better than mine. but i can see what they cannot see--signs of improvement. the steel industry is giving men work; the iron industry is reviving; the mines are slowly coming into work again; america is purchasing of us largely; and when other nations purchase of us, part, at least, of the money always finds its way to the farmer. next season, too, the weather may be more propitious. 'i shall hold on, alick--a depression is certain to be followed by a rise. that has been the history of trade and agriculture for generations. nothing will ever convince me that it was intended for english agriculturists to go on using wooden ploughs, to wear smock-frocks, and plod round and round in the same old track for ever. in no other way but by science, by steam, by machinery, by artificial manure, and, in one word, by the exercise of intelligence, can we compete with the world. it is ridiculous to suppose we can do so by returning to the ignorance and prejudice of our ancestors. no; we must beat the world by superior intelligence and superior energy. but intelligence, mind, has ever had every obstacle to contend against. look at m. lesseps and his wonderful suez canal. i tell you that to introduce scientific farming into england, in the face of tradition, custom, and prejudice, is a far harder task than overcoming the desert sand.' chapter iv going downhill an aged man, coming out of an arable field into the lane, pauses to look back. he is shabbily clad, and there is more than one rent in his coat; yet it is a coat that has once been a good one, and of a superior cut to what a labourer would purchase. in the field the ploughman to whom he has been speaking has started his team again. a lad walks beside the horses, the iron creaks, and the ploughman holding the handles seems now to press upon them with his weight, and now to be himself bodily pulled along. a dull november cloud overspreads the sky, and misty skits of small rain sweep across the landscape. as the old man looks back from the gate, the chill breeze whistles through the boughs of the oak above him, tearing off the brown dry leaves, and shaking out the acorns to fall at his feet. it lifts his grey hair, and penetrates the threadbare coat. as he turns to go, something catches his eye on the ground, and from the mud in the gateway he picks up a cast horse-shoe. with the rusty iron in his hand he passes slowly down the lane, and, as he goes, the bitter wind drives the fallen leaves that have been lying beside the way rustling and dancing after him. from a farmer occupying a good-sized farm he had descended to be a farmer's bailiff in the same locality. but a few months since he was himself a tenant, and now he is a bailiff at _s_. a week and a cottage. there is nothing dramatic, nothing sensational, in the history of his descent; but it is, perhaps, all the more full of bitter human experiences. as a man going down a steep hill, after a long while finds himself on the edge of a precipitous chalk pit, and topples in one fall to the bottom, so, though the process of going downhill occupied so long, the actual finish came almost suddenly. thus it was that from being a master he found himself a servant. he does not complain, nor appeal for pity. his back is a little more bowed, he feels the cold a little more, his step is yet more spiritless. but all he says about it is that 'hard work never made any money yet.' he has worked exceedingly hard all his lifetime. in his youth, though the family were then well-to-do, he was not permitted to lounge about in idleness, but had to work with the rest in the fields. he dragged his heavy nailed shoes over the furrows with the plough; he reaped and loaded in harvest time; in winter he trimmed the hedgerows, split logs, and looked after the cattle. he enjoyed no luxurious education--luxurious in the sense of scientifically arranged dormitories, ample meals, and vacations to be spent on horseback, or with the breechloader. trudging to and fro the neighbouring country town, in wind, and wet, and snow, to school, his letters were thrashed into him. in holiday time he went to work--his holidays, in fact, were so arranged as to fall at the time when the lad could be of most use in the field. if an occasion arose when a lad was wanted, his lessons had to wait while he lent a hand. he had his play, of course, as boys in all ages have had; but it was play of a rude character with the plough lads, and the almost equally rough sons of farmers, who worked like ploughmen. in those days the strong made no pretence to protect the weak, or to abnegate their natural power. the biggest lad used his thews and sinews to knock over the lesser without mercy, till the lesser by degrees grew strong enough to retaliate. to be thrashed, beaten, and kicked was so universal an experience that no one ever imagined it was not correct, or thought of complaining. they accepted it as a matter of course. as he grew older his work simply grew harder, and in no respect differed from that of the labourers, except that he directed what should be done next, but none the less assisted to do it. thus the days went on, the weeks, and months, and years. he was close upon forty years old before he had his own will for a single day. up to almost that age he worked on his father's farm as a labourer among the labourers, as much under parental authority as when he was a boy of ten. when the old man died it was not surprising that the son, so long held down in bondage--bondage from which he had not the spirit to escape--gave way for a short period to riotous living. there was hard drinking, horse-racing, and card-playing, and waste of substance generally. but it was not for long, for several reasons. in the first place, the lad of forty years, suddenly broken forth as it were from school, had gone past the age when youth plunges beyond recall. he was a grown man, neither wise nor clever; but with a man's sedateness of spirit and a man's hopes. there was no innate evil in his nature to lead him into unrighteous courses. perhaps his fault rather lay in his inoffensive disposition--he submitted too easily. then, in the second place, there was not much money, and what there was had to meet many calls. the son found that the father, though reputed a substantial man, and a man among farmers of high esteem and good family, had been anything but rich. first there were secret debts that had run on for fully thirty years--sums of from fifty to one hundred pounds--borrowed in the days of his youth, when he, too, had at last been released in a similar manner from similar bondage, to meet the riotous living in which he also had indulged. in those earlier days there had been more substance in cattle and corn, and he had had no difficulty in borrowing ready money from adjoining farmers, who afterwards helped him to drink it away. these boon companions had now grown old. they had never pressed their ancient comrade for the principal, the interest being paid regularly. but now their ancient comrade was dead they wanted their money, especially when they saw the son indulging himself, and did not know how far he might go. their money was paid, and reduced the balance in hand materially. now came a still more serious matter. the old man, years ago, when corn farming paid so handsomely, had been induced by the prospect of profit to take a second and yet larger farm, nearly all arable. to do this he was obliged, in farming phrase, to 'take up'--_i.e._ to borrow--a thousand pounds, which was advanced to him by the bank. being a man of substance, well reputed, and at that date with many friends, the thousand pounds was forthcoming readily, and on favourable terms. the enterprise, however, did not prosper; times changed, and wheat was not so profitable. in the end he had the wisdom to accept his losses and relinquish the second farm before it ate him up. had he only carried his wisdom a little farther and repaid the whole of the bank's advance, all might yet have been well. but he only repaid five hundred pounds, leaving five hundred pounds still owing. the bank having regularly received the interest, and believing the old gentleman upright--as he was--was not at all anxious to have the money back, as it was earning fair interest. so the five hundred remained on loan, and, as it seemed, for no very definite purpose. whether the old gentleman liked to feel that he had so much money at command (a weakness of human nature common enough), or whether he thought he could increase the produce of his farm by putting it in the soil, it is not possible to say. he certainly put the five hundred out of sight somewhere, for when his son succeeded him it was nowhere to be found. after repaying the small loans to his father's old friends, upon looking round the son saw cattle, corn, hay, and furniture, but no five hundred pounds in ready money. the ready money had been muddled away--simply muddled away, for the old man had worked hard, and was not at all extravagant. the bank asked for the five hundred, but not in a pressing manner, for the belief still existed that there was money in the family. that belief was still further fostered because the old friends whose loans had been repaid talked about that repayment, and so gave a colour to the idea. the heir, in his slow way, thought the matter over and decided to continue the loan. he could only repay it by instalments--a mode which, to a farmer brought up in the old style, is almost impossible, for though he might meet one he would be sure to put off the next--or by selling stock (equivalent to giving up his place), or by borrowing afresh. so he asked and obtained a continuation of the loan of the five hundred, and was accommodated, on condition that some one 'backed' him. some one in the family did back him, and the fatal mistake was committed of perpetuating this burden. a loan never remains at the same sum; it increases if it is not reduced. in itself the five hundred was not at all a heavy amount for the farm to carry, but it was the nucleus around which additional burdens piled themselves up. by a species of gravitation such a burden attracts others, till the last straw breaks the camel's back. this, however, was not all. the heir discovered another secret which likewise contributed to sober him. it appeared that the farm, or rather the stock and so on, was really not all his father's. his father's brother had a share in it--a share of which even the most inquisitive gossips of the place were ignorant. the brother being the eldest (himself in business as a farmer at some distance) had the most money, and had advanced a certain sum to the younger to enable him to start his farm, more than a generation since. from that day to this not one shilling of the principal had been repaid, and the interest only partially and at long intervals. if the interest were all claimed it would now amount to nearly as much as the principal. the brother--or, rather, the uncle--did not make himself at all unpleasant in the matter. he only asked for about half the interest due to him, and at the same time gave the heir a severe caution not to continue the aforesaid riotous living. the heir, now quite brought down to earth after his momentary exaltation, saw the absolute necessity of acquiescence. with a little management he paid the interest--leaving himself with barely enough to work the farm. the uncle, on his part, did not act unkindly; it was he who 'backed' the heir up at the bank in the matter of the continuation of the loan of the five hundred pounds. this five hundred pounds the heir had never seen and never would see: so far as he was concerned it did not exist; it was a mere figure, but a figure for which he must pay. in all these circumstances there was nothing at all exceptional. at this hour throughout the width and breadth of the country there are doubtless many farmers' heirs stepping into their fathers' shoes, and at this very moment looking into their affairs. it may be safely said that few indeed are those fortunate individuals who find themselves clear of similar embarrassments. in this particular case detailed above, if the heir's circumstances had been rigidly reduced to figures--if a professional accountant had examined them--it would have been found that, although in possession of a large farm, he had not got one scrap of capital. but he was in possession of the farm, and upon that simple fact of possession he henceforth lived, like so many, many more of his class. he returned to the routine of labour, which was a part of his life. after awhile he married, as a man of forty might naturally wish to, and without any imputation of imprudence so far as his own age was concerned. the wife he chose was one from his own class, a good woman, but, as is said to be often the case, she reflected the weakness of her husband's character. he now worked harder than ever--a labourer with the labourers. he thus saved himself the weekly expense of the wages of a labourer--perhaps, as labourers do not greatly exert themselves, of a man and a boy. but while thus slaving with his hands and saving this small sum in wages, he could not walk round and have an eye upon the other men. they could therefore waste a large amount of time, and thus he lost twice what he saved. still, his intention was commendable, and his persistent, unvarying labour really wonderful. had he but been sharper with his men he might still have got a fair day's work out of them while working himself. from the habit of associating with them from boyhood he had fallen somewhat into their own loose, indefinite manner, and had lost the prestige which attaches to a master. to them he seemed like one of themselves, and they were as much inclined to argue with him as to obey. when he met them in the morning he would say, 'perhaps we had better do so and so,' or 'suppose we go and do this or that.' they often thought otherwise; and it usually ended in a compromise, the master having his way in part, and the men in part. this lack of decision ran through all, and undid all that his hard work achieved. everything was muddled from morn till night, from year's end to year's end. as children came the living indoors became harder, and the work out of doors still more laborious. if a farmer can put away fifty pounds a year, after paying his rent and expenses, if he can lay by a clear fifty pounds of profit, he thinks himself a prosperous man. if this farmer, after forty years of saving, should chance to be succeeded by a son as thrifty, when, he too has carried on the same process for another twenty years, then the family may be, for village society, wealthy, with three or even four thousand pounds, besides goods and gear. this is supposing all things favourable, and men of some ability, making the most of their opportunities. now reverse the process. when children came, as said before, our hard-working farmer found the living indoors harder, and the labour without heavier. instead of saving fifty pounds a year, at first the two sides of the account (not that he ever kept any books) about balanced. then, by degrees, the balance dropped the wrong way. there was a loss, of twenty or thirty pounds on the year, and presently of forty or fifty pounds, which could only be made good by borrowing, and so increasing the payment of interest. although it takes sixty years--two generations--to accumulate a village fortune by saving fifty pounds a year, it does not occupy so long to reduce a farmer to poverty when half that sum is annually lost. there was no strongly marked and radical defect in his system of farming to amount for it; it was the muddling, and the muddling only, that did it. his work was blind. he would never miss giving the pigs their dinner, he rose at half-past three in the morning, and foddered the cattle in the grey dawn, or milked a certain number of cows, with unvarying regularity. but he had no foresight, and no observation whatever. if you saw him crossing a field, and went after him, you might walk close behind, placing your foot in the mark just left by his shoe, and he would never know it. with his hands behind his back, and his eyes upon the ground, he would plod across the field, perfectly unconscious that any one was following him. he carried on the old rotation of cropping in the piece of arable land belonging to the farm, but in total oblivion of any advantage to be obtained by local change of treatment. he could plan nothing out for next year. he spent nothing, or next to nothing, on improved implements; but, on the other hand, he saved nothing, from a lack of resource and contrivance. as the years went by he fell out of the social life of the times; that is, out of the social life of his own circle. he regularly fed the pigs; but when he heard that the neighbours, were all going in to the town to attend some important agricultural meeting, or to start some useful movement, he put his hands behind his back and said that he should not go; he did not understand anything about it. there never used to be anything of that sort. so he went in to luncheon on bread and cheese and small ale. such a course could only bring him into the contempt of his fellow-men. he became a nonentity. no one had any respect for or confidence in him. otherwise, possibly, he might have obtained powerful help, for the memory of what his family had been had not yet died out. men saw that he lived and worked as a labourer; they gave him no credit for the work, but they despised him for the meanness and churlishness of his life. there was neither a piano nor a decanter of sherry in his house. he was utterly out of accord with the times. by degrees, after many years, it became apparent to all that he was going downhill. the stock upon the farm was not so large nor of so good a character as had been the case. the manner of men visibly changed towards him. the small dealers, even the very carriers along the road, the higglers, and other persons who call at a farm on petty business, gave him clearly to know in their own coarse way that they despised him. they flatly contradicted him, and bore him down with loud tongues. he stood it all meekly, without showing any spirit; but, on the other hand, without resentment, for he never said ill of any man behind his back. it was put about now that he drank, because some busybody had seen a jar of spirits carried into the house from the wine merchant's cart. a jar of spirits had been delivered at the house at intervals for years and years, far back into his father's time, and every one of those who now expressed their disgust at his supposed drinking habits had sipped their tumblers in that house without stint. he did not drink--he did not take one-half at home what his neighbours imbibed without injury at markets and auctions every week of their lives. but he was growing poor, and they called to mind that brief spell of extravagance years ago, and pointed out to their acquaintances how the sin of the prodigal was coming home to him. no man drinks the bitter cup of poverty to the dregs like the declining farmer. the descent is so slow; there is time to drain every drop, and to linger over the flavour. it may be eight, or ten, or fifteen years about. he cannot, like the bankrupt tradesman, even when the fatal notice comes, put up his shutters at once and retire from view. even at the end, after the notice, six months at least elapse before all is over--before the farm is surrendered, and the sale of household furniture and effects takes place. he is full in public view all that time. so far as his neighbours are concerned he is in public view for years previously. he has to rise in the morning and meet them in the fields. he sees them in the road; he passes through groups of them in the market-place. as he goes by they look after him, and perhaps audibly wonder how long he will last. these people all knew him from a lad, and can trace every inch of his descent. the labourers in the field know it, and by their manner show that they know it. his wife--his wife who worked so hard for so many, many years--is made to know it too. she is conspicuously omitted from the social gatherings that occur from time to time. the neighbours' wives do not call; their well-dressed daughters, as they rattle by to the town in basket-carriage or dog-cart, look askance at the shabby figure walking slowly on the path beside the road. they criticise the shabby shawl; they sneer at the slow step which is the inevitable result of hard work, the cares of maternity, and of age. so they flaunt past with an odour of perfume, and leave the 'old lady' to plod unrecognised. the end came at last. all this blind work of his was of no avail against the ocean steamer and her cargo of wheat and meat from the teeming regions of the west. nor was it of avail against the fall of prices, and the decreased yield consequent upon a succession of bad seasons. the general lack of confidence pressed heavily upon a man who did not even attempt to take his natural place among his fellow-men. the loan from the bank had gradually grown from five to seven or eight hundred by thirties, and forties, and fifties added to it by degrees; and the bank--informed, perhaps, by the same busybodies who had discovered that he drank--declined further assistance, and notified that part, at least, of the principal must be repaid. the landlord had long been well aware of the state of affairs, but refrained from action out of a feeling for the old family. but the land, from the farmer's utter lack of capital, was now going from bad to worse. the bank having declined to advance further, the rent began to fall into arrear. the landlord caused it to be conveyed to his tenant that if he would quit the farm, which was a large one, he could go into a smaller, and his affairs might perhaps be arranged. the old man--for he was now growing old--put his hands behind his back and said nothing, but went on with his usual routine of work. whether he had become dulled and deadened and cared nothing, whether hope was extinct, or he could not wrench himself from the old place, he said nothing. even then some further time elapsed--so slow is the farmer's fall that he might almost be excused for thinking that it would never come. but now came the news that the old uncle who had 'backed' him at the bank had been found dead in bed of sheer old age. then the long-kept secret came out at last. the dead man's executors claimed the money advanced so many, many years ago. this discovery finished it. the neighbours soon had food for gossip in the fact that a load of hay which he had sold was met in the road by the landlord's agent and turned back. by the strict letter of his agreement he could not sell hay off the farm; but it had been permitted for years. when they heard this they knew it was all over. the landlord, of course, put in his claim; the bank theirs. in a few months the household furniture and effects were sold, and the farmer and his aged wife stepped into the highway in their shabby clothes. he did not, however, starve; he passed to a cottage on the outskirts of the village, and became bailiff for the tenant of that very arable farm to work which years ago his father had borrowed the thousand pounds that ultimately proved their ruin. he made a better bailiff than a farmer, being at home with every detail of practice, but incapable of general treatment. his wife does a little washing and charing; not much, for she is old and feeble. no charity is offered to them--they have outlived old friends--nor do they appeal for any. the people of the village do not heed them, nor reflect upon the spectacle in their midst. they are merged and lost in the vast multitude of the agricultural poor. only two of their children survive; but these, having early left the farm and gone into a city, are fairly well-to-do. that, at least, is a comfort to the old folk. it is, however, doubtful whether the old man, as he walks down the lane with his hands behind his back and the dead leaves driven by the november breeze rustling after, has much feeling of any kind left. hard work and adversity have probably deadened his finer senses. else one would think he could never endure to work as a servant upon that farm of all others, nor to daily pass the scenes of his youth. for yonder, well in sight as he turns a corner of the lane, stands the house where he dwelt so many, many years; where the events of his life came slowly to pass; where he was born; where his bride came home; where his children were born, and from whose door he went forth penniless. seeing this every day, surely that old man, if he have but one spark of feeling left, must drink the lees of poverty to the last final doubly bitter dregs. chapter v the borrower and the gambler 'where do he get the money from, you?' 'it be curious, bean't it; i minds when his father drove folks' pigs to market.' these remarks passed between two old farmers, one standing on the sward by the roadside, and the other talking to him over the low ledge, as a gentleman drove by in a whitechapel dog-cart, groom behind. the gentleman glanced at the two farmers, and just acknowledged their existence with a careless nod, looking at the moment over their heads and far away. there is no class so jealous of a rapid rise as old-fashioned farming people. they seem to think that if a man once drove pigs to market he should always continue to do so, and all his descendants likewise. their ideas in a measure approximate to those of caste among the hindoos. it is a crime to move out of the original groove; if a man be lowly he must remain lowly, or never be forgiven. the lapse of time makes not the least difference. if it takes the man thirty years to get into a fair position he is none the less guilty. a period equal to the existence of a generation is not sufficient excuse for him. he is not one whit better than if he had made his money by a lucky bet on a racehorse. nor can he ever hope to live down this terrible social misdemeanour, especially if it is accompanied by the least ostentation. now, in the present day a man who gets money shows off more than ever was the case. in the olden time the means of luxury were limited, and the fortunate could do little more than drink, and tempt others to drink. but to-day the fortunate farmer in the dog-cart, dressed like a gentleman, drove his thorough-bred, and carried his groom behind. frank d----, esq., in the slang of the time, 'did the thing grand!' the dog-cart was a first-rate article. the horse was a high-stepper, such as are not to be bought for a song; the turn-out was at the first glance perfect. but if you looked keenly at the groom, there was a suspicion of the plough in his face and attitude. he did not sit like a man to the manner born. he was lumpy; he lacked the light, active style characteristic of the thoroughbred groom, who is as distinct a breed as the thoroughbred horse. the man looked as if he had been taken from the plough and was conscious of it. his feet were in top-boots, but he could not forget the heavy action induced by a long course of walking in wet furrows. the critics by the hedge were not capable of detecting these niceties. the broad facts were enough for them. there was the gentleman in his ulster, there was the resplendent turn-out, there was the groom, and there was the thoroughbred horse. the man's father drove their pigs to market, and they wanted to know where he got the money from. meantime mr. d----, having carelessly nodded, had gone on. half a mile farther some of his own fields were contiguous to the road, yet he did not, after the fashion of the farmer generally, pause to gaze at them searchingly; he went on with the same careless glance. this fact, which the old-fashioned folk had often observed, troubled them greatly. it seemed so unnatural, so opposite to the old ideas and ways, that a man should take no apparent interest in his own farm. they said that frank was nothing of a farmer; he knew nothing of farming. they looked at his ricks; they were badly built, and still worse thatched. they examined his meadows, and saw wisps of hay lying about, evidence of neglect; the fields had not been properly raked. his ploughed fields were full of weeds, and not half worked enough. his labourers had acquired a happy-go-lucky style, and did their work anyhow or not at all, having no one to look after them. so, clearly, it was not frank's good farming that made him so rich, and enabled him to take so high and leading a position. nor was it his education or his 'company' manners. the old folk noted his boorishness and lack of the little refinements which mark the gentleman. his very voice was rude and hoarse, and seemed either to grumble or to roar forth his meaning. they had frequently heard him speak in public--he was generally on the platform when any local movement was in progress--and could not understand why he was put up there to address the audience, unless it was for his infinite brass. the language he employed was rude, his sentences disjointed, his meaning incoherent; but he had a knack of an _apropos_ jest, not always altogether savoury, but which made a mixed assembly laugh. as his public speeches did not seem very brilliant, they supposed he must have the gift of persuasion, in private. he did not even ride well to hounds--an accomplishment that has proved a passport to a great landlord's favour before now--for he had an awkward, and, to the eye, not too secure a seat in the saddle. nor was it his personal appearance. he was very tall and ungainly, with a long neck and a small round head on the top of it. his features were flat, and the skin much wrinkled; there seemed nothing in his countenance to recommend him to the notice of the other sex. yet he had been twice married; the last time to a comparatively young lady with some money, who dressed in the height of fashion. frank had two families--one, grown up, by his first wife, the second in the nursery--but it made no difference to him. all were well dressed and well educated; the nursery maids and the infants went out for their airings in a carriage and pair. mrs. d----, gay as a parisian belle, and not without pretensions to beauty, was seen at balls, parties, and every other social amusement. she seemed to have the _entrée_ everywhere in the county. all this greatly upset and troubled the old folk, whose heads frank looked over as he carelessly nodded them good-morning driving by. the cottage people from whose ranks his family had so lately risen, however, had a very decided opinion upon the subject, and expressed it forcibly. "'pend upon it," they said, "'pend upon it, he have zucked zumbody in zumhow." this unkind conclusion was perhaps not quite true. the fact was, that frank, aided by circumstances, had discovered the ease with which a man can borrow. that was his secret--his philosopher's stone. to a certain extent, and in certain ways, he really was a clever man, and he had the luck to begin many years ago when farming was on the ascending side of the cycle. the single solid basis of his success was his thorough knowledge of cattle--his proficiency in dealership. perhaps this was learnt while assisting his father to drive other folks' pigs to market. at all events, there was no man in the county who so completely understood cattle and sheep, for buying and selling purposes, as frank. at first he gained his reputation by advising others what and when to buy; by degrees, as people began to see that he was always right, they felt confidence in him, and assisted him to make small investments on his own account. there were then few auctioneers, and cattle were sold in open market. if a man really was a judge, it was as good to him as a reputation for good ale is to an innkeeper. men flock to a barrel of good ale no matter whether the inn be low class or high class. men gather about a good judge of cattle, and will back him up. by degrees d---- managed to rent a small farm, more for the purpose of having a place to turn his cattle into than for farming proper--he was, in fact, a small dealer. soon afterwards there was an election. during the election, frank gained the good-will of a local solicitor and political agent. he proved himself an active and perhaps a discreetly unscrupulous assistant. the solicitor thought he saw in frank talent of a certain order--a talent through which he (the solicitor) might draw unto himself a share of other people's money. the lawyer's judgment of men was as keen as frank's judgment of cattle. he helped frank to get into a large farm, advancing the money with which to work it. he ran no risk; for, of course, he had frank tight in the grasp of his legal fist, and he was the agent for the landlord. the secret was this--the lawyer paid his clients four per cent, for the safe investment of their money. frank had the money, worked a large farm with it, and speculated in the cattle markets, and realised some fifteen or perhaps twenty per cent., of which the lawyer took the larger share. something of this sort has been done in other businesses besides farming. frank, however, was not the man to remain in a state of tutelage, working for another. his forte was not saving--simple accumulation was not for him; but he looked round the district to discover those who had saved. now, it is a fact that no man is so foolish with his money as the working farmer in a small way, who has put by a little coin. he is extremely careful about a fourpenny piece, and will wrap a sovereign up in several scraps of paper lest he should lose it; but with his hundred or two hundred pounds he is quite helpless. it has very likely occupied him the best part of his lifetime to add one five-pound note to another, money most literally earned in the sweat of his brow; and at last he lends it to a man like frank, who has the wit to drive a carriage and ride a thoroughbred. with the strange inconsistency so characteristic of human nature, a half-educated, working farmer of this sort will sneer in his rude way at the pretensions of such a man, and at the same time bow down before him. frank knew this instinctively, and, as soon as ever he began to get on, set up a blood-horse and a turn-out. by dint of such vulgar show and his own plausible tongue he persuaded more than one such old fellow to advance him money. mayhap these confiding persons, like a certain shallow, j.p., have since earnestly besought him in vain to return them five hundred of their thousand. in like manner one or two elderly ladies--cunning as magpies in their own conceit--let him have a few spare hundreds. they thought they could lay out this money to better advantage than the safe family adviser 'uncle john,' with his talk of the indian railways and a guaranteed five per cent. they thought (for awhile) that they had done a very clever thing on the sly in lending their spare hundreds to the great mr. frank d---- at a high rate of interest, and by this time would perhaps be glad to get the money back again in the tea-caddy. but frank was not the man to be satisfied with such small game. after a time he succeeded in getting at the 'squire.' the squire had nothing but the rents of his farms to live upon, and was naturally anxious for an improving tenant who would lay out money and put capital into the soil. he was not so foolish as to think that frank was a safe man, and of course he had legal advice upon the matter. the squire thought, in fact, that although frank himself had no money, frank could get it out of others, and spend it upon his place. it did not concern the squire where or how frank got his money, provided he had it--he as landlord was secure in case of a crash, because the law gave him precedence over all other creditors. so frank ultimately stepped into one of the squire's largest farms and cut a finer dash than ever. there are distinct social degrees in agriculture. the man who occupies a great farm under a squire is a person of much more importance than he who holds a little tenancy of a small proprietor. frank began to take the lead among the farmers of the neighbourhood, to make his appearance at public meetings, and to become a recognised politician--of course upon the side most powerful in that locality, and most likely to serve his own interest. his assurance, and, it must be owned, his ready wit, helped him in coming to the front. when at the front, he was invited to the houses of really well-to-do country people. they condoned his bluff manners--they were the mark of the true, solid british agriculturist. some perhaps in their hearts thought that another day they might want a tenant, and this man would serve their turn. as a matter of fact, frank took every unoccupied farm which he could get at a tolerably reasonable rent. he never seemed satisfied with the acreage he held, but was ever desirous of extending it. he took farm after farm, till at last he held an area equal to a fine estate. for some years there has been a disposition on the part of landlords to throw farms together, making many small ones into one large one. for the time, at all events, frank seemed to do very well with all these farms to look after. of course the same old-fashioned folk made ill-natured remarks, and insisted upon it that he merely got what he could out of the soil, and did not care in the least how the farming was done. nevertheless, he flourished--the high prices and general inflation of the period playing into his hand. frank was now a very big man, the biggest man thereabout. and it was now that he began to tap another source of supply--to, as it were, open a fresh cask--_i.e._ the local bank. at first he only asked for a hundred or so, a mere bagatelle, for a few days--only temporary convenience. the bank was glad to get hold of what really looked like legitimate business, and he obtained the bagatelle in the easiest manner--so easily that it surprised him. he did not himself yet quite know how completely his showy style of life, his large acreage, his speeches, and politics, and familiarity with great people, had imposed upon the world in which he lived. he now began to realise that he was somebody. he repaid the loan to the day, waited awhile and took a larger one, and from that time the frequency and the amount of his loans went on increasing. we have seen in these latter days bank directors bitterly complaining that they could not lend money at more than / or even / per cent., so little demand was there for accommodation. they positively could not lend their money; they had millions in their tills unemployed, and practically going a-begging. but here was frank paying seven per cent, for short loans, and upon a continually enlarging amount. his system, so far as the seasons were concerned, was something like this. he took a loan (or renewed an old one) at the bank on the security of the first draught of lambs for sale, say, in june. this paid the labourers and the working expenses of the hay harvest, and of preparing for the corn. he took the next upon the second draught of lambs in august, which paid the reapers. he took a third on the security of the crops, partly cut, or in process of cutting, for his michaelmas rent. then for the fall of the year he kept on threshing out and selling as he required money, and had enough left to pay for the winter's work. this was frank's system--the system of too many farmers, far more than would be believed. details of course vary, and not all, like frank, need three loans at least in the season to keep them going. it is not every man who mortgages his lambs, his ewes (the draught from a flock for sale), and the standing crops in succession. but of late years farming has been carried on in such an atmosphere of loans, and credit, and percentage, and so forth, that no one knows what is or what is not mortgaged. you see a flock of sheep on a farm, but you do not know to whom they belong. you see the cattle in the meadow, but you do not know who has a lien upon them. you see the farmer upon his thoroughbred, but you do not know to whom in reality the horse belongs. it is all loans and debt. the vendors of artificial manure are said not to be averse sometimes to make an advance on reasonable terms to those enterprising and deserving farmers who grow so many tons of roots, and win the silver cups, and so on, for the hugest mangold grown with their particular manure. the proprietors of the milk-walks in london are said to advance money to the struggling dairymen who send them their milk. and latterly the worst of usurers have found out the farmers--_i.e._ the men who advance on bills of sale of furniture, and sell up the wretched client who does not pay to the hour. upon such bills of sale english farmers have been borrowing money, and with the usual disastrous results. in fact, till the disastrous results became so conspicuous, no one guessed that the farmer had descended so far. yet, it is a fact, and a sad one. all the while the tradespeople of the market-towns--the very people who have made the loudest outcry about the depression and the losses they have sustained--these very people have been pressing their goods upon the farmers, whom they must have known were many of them hardly able to pay their rents. those who have not seen it cannot imagine what a struggle and competition has been going on in little places where one would think the very word was unknown, just to persuade the farmer and the farmer's family to accept credit. but there is another side to it. the same tradesman who to-day begs--positively begs--the farmer to take his goods on any terms, in six months' time sends his bill, and, if it be not paid immediately, puts the county court machinery in motion. now this to the old-fashioned farmer is a very bitter thing. he has never had the least experience of the county court; his family never were sued for debt since they can remember. they have always been used to a year's credit at least--often two, and even three. to be threatened with public exposure in the county court because a little matter of five pounds ten is not settled instantly is bitter indeed. and to be sued so arbitrarily by the very tradesman who almost stuffed his goods down their throats is more bitter still. frank d----, esq.'s coarse grandeur answered very well indeed so long as prices were high. while the harvests were large and the markets inflated; while cattle fetched good money; while men's hearts were full of mirth--all went well. it is whispered now that the grand frank has secretly borrowed _l_. of a little cottage shopkeeper in the adjacent village--a man who sells farthing candles and ounces of tea--to pay his reapers. it is also currently whispered that frank is the only man really safe, for the following reason--they are all 'in' so deep they find it necessary to keep him going. the squire is 'in,' the bank is 'in,' the lawyer is 'in,' the small farmers with two hundred pounds capital are 'in,' and the elderly ladies who took their bank-notes out of their tea-caddies are 'in.' that is to say, mr. frank owes them so much money that, rather than he should come to grief (when, they must lose pretty well all), they prefer to keep him afloat. it is a noticeable fact that frank is the only man who has not raised his voice and shouted 'depression.' perhaps the squire thinks that so repellent a note, if struck by a leading man like frank, might not be to his interest, and has conveyed that thought to the gentleman in the dog-cart with the groom behind. there are, however, various species of the façade farmer. 'what kind of agriculture is practised here?' the visitor from town naturally asks his host, as they stroll towards the turnips (in another district), with shouldered guns. 'oh, you had better see mr. x----,' is the reply, 'he is our leading agriculturist; he'll tell you all about it.' everybody repeats the same story, and once mr. x----'s name is started everybody talks of him. the squire, the clergyman--even in casually calling at a shop in the market town, or at the hotel (there are few inns now)--wherever he goes the visitor hears from all of mr. x----. a successful man--most successful, progressive, scientific, intellectual. 'like to see him? nothing easier. introduction? nonsense. why, he'd be delighted to see you. come with me.' protesting feebly against intruding on privacy, the visitor is hurried away, and expecting to meet a solid, sturdy, and somewhat gruff old gentleman of the john hull type, endeavors to hunt up some ideas about shorthorns and bacon pigs. he is a little astonished upon entering the pleasure grounds to see one or more gardeners busy among the parterres and shrubberies, the rhododendrons, the cedar deodaras, the laurels, the pampas grass, the 'carpet gardening' beds, and the glass of distant hothouses glittering in the sun. a carriage and pair, being slowly driven by a man in livery from the door down to the extensive stabling, passes--clearly some of the family have just returned. on ringing, the callers are shown through a spacious hall with a bronze or two on the marble table, into a drawing-room, elegantly furnished. there is a short iron grand open with a score carelessly left by the last player, a harp in the corner, half hidden by the curtains, some pieces of nankin china on the side tables. where are the cow-sheds? looking out of window a level lawn extends, and on it two young gentlemen are playing tennis, in appropriate costume. the laboured platitudes that had been prepared about shorthorns and bacon pigs are quite forgotten, and the visitor is just about to ask the question if his guide has not missed the farm-house and called at the squire's, when mr. x---- comes briskly in, and laughs all apology about intrusion to the winds in his genial manner. he insists on his friends taking some refreshment, will not take refusal; and such is the power of his vivacity, that they find themselves sipping madeira and are pressed to come and dine in the evening, before one at least knows exactly where he is. 'just a homely spread, you know; pot-luck; a bit of fish and a glass of moet; now _do_ come.' this curious mixture of bluff cordiality, with unexpected snatches of refinement, is mr. x----'s great charm. 'style of farming; tell you with pleasure.' [rings the bell.] 'john' (to the manservant), 'take this key and bring me account book no. b, copse farm; that will be the best way to begin.' if the visitor knows anything of country life, he cannot help recollecting that, if the old type of farmer was close and mysterious about anything, it was his accounts. not a word could be got out of him of profit or loss, or revenue: he would barely tell you his rent per acre, and it was doubtful if his very wife ever saw his pass-book. opening account book no. b, the explanation proceeds. 'my system of agriculture is simplicity itself, sir. it is all founded on one beautiful commercial precept. our friends round about here [with a wave of the hand, indicating the country side]--our old folks--whenever they got a guinea put it out of sight, made a hoard, hid it in a stocking, or behind a brick in the chimney. ha! ha! consequently their operations were always restricted to the same identical locality--no scope, sir, no expansion. now my plan is--invest every penny. make every shilling pay for the use of half a crown, and turn the half-crown into seven and sixpence. credit is the soul of business. there you have it. simplicity itself. here are the books; see for yourself. i publish my balance half-yearly--like a company. then the public see what you are doing. the earth, sir, as i said at the dinner the other day (the idea was much applauded), the earth is like the bank of england--you may draw on it to any extent; there's always a reserve to meet you. you positively can't overdraw the account. you see there's such a solid security behind you. the fact is, i bring commercial principles into agriculture; the result is, grand success. however, here's the book; just glance over the figures.' the said figures utterly bewilder the visitor, who in courtesy runs his eye from top to bottom of the long columns--farming accounts are really the most complicated that can be imagined--so he, meantime, while turning over the pages, mentally absorbs the personality of the commercial agriculturist. he sees a tall, thin farmer, a brown face and neck, long restless sinewy hands, perpetually twiddling with a cigar or a gold pencil-case--generally the cigar, or rather the extinct stump of it, which he every now and then sucks abstractedly, in total oblivion as to its condition. his dress would pass muster in towns--well cut, and probably from bond street. he affects a frock and high hat one day, and knickerbockers and sun helmet the next. his pockets are full of papers, letters, etc., and as he searches amid the mass for some memorandum to show, glimpses may be seen of certain oblong strips of blue paper with an impressed stamp. 'very satisfactory,' says the visitor, handing back no b; 'may i inquire how many acres you occupy?' out comes a note-book. 'hum! there's a thousand down in the vale, and fifteen hundred upland, and the new place is about nine hundred, and the meadows--i've mislaid the meadows--but it's near about four thousand. different holdings, of course. great nuisance that, sir; transit, you see, costs money. city gentlemen know that. absurd system in this country--the land parcelled out in little allotment gardens of two or three hundred acres. why, there's a little paltry hundred and twenty acre freehold dairy farm lies between my vale and upland, and the fellow won't let my waggons or ploughing-tackle take the short cut, ridiculous. time it was altered, sir. shooting? why, yes; i have the shooting. glad if you'd come over.' then more madeira, and after it a stroll through the gardens and shrubberies and down to the sheds, a mile, or nearly, distant. there, a somewhat confused vision of 'grand shorthorns,' and an inexplicable jumble of pedigrees, grand-dams, and 'g-g-g-g-g-g-dams,' as the catalogues have it; handsome hunters paraded, steam-engines pumping water, steam-engines slicing up roots, distant columns of smoke where steam-engines are tearing up the soil. all the while a scientific disquisition on ammonia and the constituent parts and probable value of town sewage as compared with guano. and at intervals, and at parting, a pressing invitation to dinner [when pineapples or hot-house grapes are certain to make their appearance at dessert]--such a flow of genial eloquence surely was never heard before! it requires a week at least of calm reflection, and many questions to his host, before the visitor--quite carried away--can begin to arrange his ideas, and to come slowly to the opinion that though mr. x---- is as open as the day and frank to a fault, it will take him a precious long time to get to the bottom of mr. x----'s system; that is to say, if there is any bottom at all to it. mr. x---- is, in brief, a gambler. not in a dishonest, or even suspicious sense, but a pure gambler. he is a gigantic agricultural speculator; his system is, as he candidly told you, credit. credit not only with the bank, but with everybody. he has actually been making use of you, his casual and unexpected visitor, as an instrument. you are certain to talk about him; the more he is talked of the better, it gives him a reputation, which is beginning to mean a great deal in agriculture as it has so long in other pursuits. you are sure to tell everybody who ever chooses to converse with you about the country of mr. x----, and mr. x----'s engines, cattle, horses, profuse hospitality, and progressive science. to be socially popular is a part of his system; he sows corn among society as freely as over his land, and looks to some grains to take root, and bring him increase a hundred fold, as indeed they do. whatever movement is originated in the neighbourhood finds him occupying a prominent position. he goes to london as the representative of the local agricultural chamber; perhaps waits upon a cabinet minister as one of the deputation. he speaks regularly at the local chamber meetings; his name is ever in the papers. the press are invited to inspect his farms, and are furnished with minute details. every now and then a sketch of his life and doings, perhaps illustrated with a portrait, appears in some agricultural periodical. at certain seasons of the year parties of gentlemen are conducted over his place. in parochial or district matters he is a leading man. is it a cottage flower-show, a penny reading, a cricket club, a benefit society--it does not matter what, his subscriptions, his name, and his voice are heard in it. he is the life and soul of it; the energy comes from him, though others higher in the scale may be the nominal heads. and the nominal heads, knowing that he can be relied upon politically, are grateful, and give him their good word freely. he hunts, and is a welcome companion--the meet frequently takes place at his house, or some of the huntsmen call for lunch; in fact, the latter is an invariable thing. everybody calls for lunch who happens to pass near any day; the house has a reputation for hospitality. he is the clergyman's right hand--as in managing the school committee. when the bishop comes to the confirmation, he is introduced as 'my chief lay supporter.' at the rural diaconal conference, 'my chief supporter' is one of the lay speakers. thus he obtains every man's good word whose good word is worth anything. social credit means commercial credit. yet he is not altogether acting a part--he really likes taking the lead and pushing forward, and means a good deal of what he says. he is especially quite honest in his hospitality. all the same, so far as business is concerned, it is pure gambling, which may answer very well in favourable times, but is not unlikely to end in failure should the strain of depression become too severe. personal popularity, however, will tide him over a great deal. when a man is spoken highly of by gentry, clergy, literally everybody, the bank is remarkably accommodating. such a man may get for his bare signature--almost pressed on him, as if his acceptance of it were a favour--what another would have to deposit solid security for. in plain language, he borrows money and invests it in every possible way. his farms are simply the basis of his credit. he buys blood shorthorns, he buys blood horses, and he sells them again. he buys wheat, hay, &c., to dispose of them at a profit. if he chose, he could explain to you the meaning of contango, and even of that mysterious term to the uninitiated, 'backwardation.' his speculations for the 'account' are sometimes heavy. so much so, that occasionally, with thousands invested, he has hardly any ready money. but, then, there are the crops; he can get money on the coming crops. there is, too, the live stock money can be borrowed on the stock. here lies the secret reason of the dread of foreign cattle disease. the increase of our flocks and herds is, of course, a patriotic cry (and founded on fact); but the secret pinch is this--if foot-and-mouth, pleuro-pneumonia, or rinderpest threaten the stock, the tenant-farmer cannot borrow on that security. the local bankers shake their heads--three cases of rinderpest are equivalent to a reduction of per cent. in the borrowing power of the agriculturist. the auctioneers and our friends have large transactions--'paper' here again. with certain members of the hunt he books bets to a high amount; his face is not unknown at tattersall's or at the race meetings. but he does not flourish the betting-book in the face of society. he bets--and holds his tongue. some folks have an ancient and foolish prejudice against betting; he respects sincere convictions. far and away he is the best fellow, the most pleasant company in the shire, always welcome everywhere. he has read widely, is well educated; but, above all, he is ever jolly, and his jollity is contagious. despite his investments and speculations, his brow never wears that sombre aspect of gloomy care, that knitted concentration of wrinkles seen on the face of the city man, who goes daily to his 'office.' the out-of-door bluffness, the cheery ringing voice, and the upright form only to be gained in the saddle over the breezy uplands, cling to him still. he wakes everybody up, and, risky as perhaps some of his speculations are, is socially enlivening. the two young gentlemen, by-the-by, observed playing lawn-tennis from the drawing-room window, are two of his pupils, whose high premiums and payments assist to keep up the free and generous table, and who find farming a very pleasant profession. the most striking characteristic of their tutor is his yankee-like fertility of resource and bold innovations--the very antipodes of the old style of 'clod-compeller.' chapter vi an agricultural genius-old style towards the hour of noon harry hodson, of upcourt farm, was slowly ascending the long slope that led to his dwelling. in his left hand he carried a hare, which swung slightly to and fro as he stepped out, and the black-tipped ears rubbed now and then against a bunch of grass. his double-barrel was under his right arm. every day at the same hour harry turned towards home, for he adhered to the ways of his fathers and dined at half-past twelve, except when the stress of harvest, or some important agricultural operation, disturbed the usual household arrangements. it was a beautiful october day, sunny and almost still, and, as he got on the high ground, he paused and looked round. the stubbles stretched far away on one side, where the country rose and fell in undulations. on the distant horizon a column of smoke, broadening at the top, lifted itself into the sky; he knew it was from the funnel of a steam-plough, whose furnace had just been replenished with coal. the appearance of the smoke somewhat resembled that left by a steamer at sea when the vessel is just below the horizon. on the other hand were wooded meadows, where the rooks were cawing--some in the oaks, some as they wheeled round in the air. just beneath him stood a row of wheat ricks--his own. his gaze finally rested upon their conical roofs with satisfaction, and he then resumed his walk. even as he moved he seemed to bask in the sunshine; the sunshine pouring down from the sky above, the material sunshine of the goodly wheat ricks, and the physical sunshine of personal health and vigour. his walk was the walk of a strong, prosperous man--each step long, steady, and firm, but quite devoid of haste. he was, perhaps, forty years of age, in the very prime of life, and though stooping a little, like so many countrymen, very tall, and built proportionately broad across the shoulders and chest. his features were handsome--perhaps there was a trace of indolence in their good-humoured expression--and he had a thick black beard just marked with one thin wavy line of grey. that trace of snow, if anything, rather added to the manliness of his aspect, and conveyed the impression that he was at the fulness of life when youth and experience meet. if anything, indeed, he looked too comfortable, too placid. a little ambition, a little restlessness, would perhaps have been good for him. by degrees he got nearer to the house; but it was by degrees only, for he stayed to look over every gate, and up into almost every tree. he stopped to listen as his ear caught the sound of hoofs on the distant road, and again at the faint noise of a gun fired a mile away. at the corner of a field a team of horses--his own--were resting awhile as the carter and his lad ate their luncheon. harry stayed to talk to the man, and yet again at the barn door to speak to his men at work within with the winnowing machine. the homestead stood on an eminence, but was hidden by elms and sycamores, so that it was possible to pass at a distance without observing it. on entering the sitting-room harry leaned his gun against the wall in the angle between it and the bureau, from which action alone it might have been known that he was a bachelor, and that there were no children about the house to get into danger with fire-arms. his elderly aunt, who acted as housekeeper, was already at table waiting for him. it was spread with a snow-white cloth, and almost equally snow-white platter for bread--so much and so well was it cleaned. they ate home-baked bread; they were so many miles from a town or baker that it was difficult to get served regularly, a circumstance which preserved that wholesome institution. there was a chine of bacon, small ale, and a plentiful supply of good potatoes. the farmer did full justice to the sweet picking off the chine, and then lingered over an old cheese. very few words were spoken. then, after his dinner, he sat in his arm-chair--the same that he had used for many years--and took a book. for harry rather enjoyed a book, provided it was not too new. he read works of science, thirty years old, solid and correct, but somewhat behind the age; he read histories, such as were current in the early part of the present century, but none of a later date than the end of the wars of the first napoleon. the only thing modern he cared for in literature was a 'society' journal, sent weekly from london. these publications are widely read in the better class of farmsteads now. harry knew something of most things, even of geology. he could show you the huge vertebrae of some extinct saurian, found while draining was being done. he knew enough of archaeology to be able to tell any enthusiastic student who chanced to come along where to find the tumuli and the earthworks on the downs. he had several roman coins, and a fine bronze spearhead, which had been found upon the farm. these were kept with care, and produced to visitors with pride. harry really did possess a wide fund of solid, if quiet, knowledge. presently, after reading a chapter or two, he would drop off into a siesta, till some message came from the men or the bailiff, asking for instructions. the farmstead was, in fact, a mansion of large size, an old manor-house, and had it been situate near a fashionable suburb and been placed in repair would have been worth to let as much per annum as the rent of a small farm. but it stood in a singularly lonely and outlying position, far from any village of size, much less a town, and the very highway even was so distant that you could only hear the horse's hoofs when the current of air came from that direction. this was his aunt's--the housekeeper's--great complaint, the distance to the highway. she grumbled because she could not see the carriers' carts and the teams go by; she wanted to know what was going on. harry, however, seemed contented with the placid calm of the vast house that was practically empty, and rarely left it, except for his regular weekly visit to market. after the fashion of a thoroughbred farmer he was often rather late home on market nights. there were three brothers, all in farms, and all well to do; the other two were married, and harry was finely plagued about being a bachelor. but the placid life at the old place--he had succeeded to his father--somehow seemed to content him. he had visitors at christmas, he read his books of winter evenings and after dinner; in autumn he strolled round with his double-barrel and knocked over a hare or so, and so slumbered away the days. but he never neglected the farming-everything was done almost exactly as it had been done by his father. old harry hodson was in his time one of the characters of that country side. he was the true founder of the hodson family. they had been yeomen in a small way for generations, farming little holdings, and working like labourers, plodding on, and never heard of outside their fifty-acre farms. so they might have continued till this day had not old harry hodson arose to be the genius--the very napoleon--of farming in that district. when the present harry, the younger, had a visitor to his taste--_i.e._ one who was not in a hurry--he would, in the evening, pull out the books and papers and letters of his late father from the bureau (beside which stood the gun), and explain how the money was made. the logs crackled and sparkled on the hearth, the lamp burnt clear and bright; there was a low singing sound in the chimney; the elderly aunt nodded and worked in her arm-chair, and woke up and mixed fresh spirits and water, and went off to sleep again; and still harry would sit and smoke and sip and talk. by-and-by the aunt would wish the visitor good-night, draw up the clock, and depart, after mixing fresh tumblers and casting more logs upon the fire, for well she knew her nephew's ways. harry was no tippler, he never got intoxicated; but he would sit and smoke and sip and talk with a friend, and tell him all about it till the white daylight came peeping through the chinks in the shutters. old harry hodson, then, made the money, and put two of his sons in large farms, and paid all their expenses, so that they started fair, besides leaving his own farm to the third. old harry hodson made the money, yet he could not have done it had he not married the exact woman. women have made the fortunes of emperors by their advice and assistance, and the greatest men the world has seen have owned that their success was owing to feminine counsel. in like manner a woman made the policy of an obscure farmer a success. when the old gentleman began to get well to do, and when he found his teeth not so strong as of yore, and his palate less able to face the coarse, fat, yellowy bacon that then formed the staple of the household fare, he actually ventured so far as to have one joint of butcher's meat, generally a leg of mutton, once a week. it was cooked for sunday, and, so far as that kind of meat was concerned, lasted till the next sunday. but his wife met this extravagant innovation with furious opposition. it was sheer waste; it was something almost unpardonably prodigal. they had eaten bacon all their lives, often bacon with the bristles thick upon it, and to throw away money like this was positively wicked. however, the-old gentleman, being stubborn as a horse-nail, persisted; the wife, still grumbling, calmed down; and the one joint of meat became an institution. harry, the younger, still kept it up; but it had lost its significance in his day, for he had a fowl or two in the week, and a hare or a partridge, and, besides, had the choicest hams. now, this dispute between the old gentleman and his wife--this dispute as to which should be most parsimonious--was typical of their whole course of life. if one saved cheese-parings, the other would go without cheese at all, and be content with dry bread. they lived--indeed, harder than their own labourers, and it sometimes happened that the food they thought good enough was refused by a cottager. when a strange carter, or shepherd, or other labourer came to the house from a distance, perhaps with a waggon for a load of produce or with some sheep, it was the custom to give them some lunch. these men, unaccustomed even in their own cottages to such coarse food, often declined to eat it, and went away empty, but not before delivering their opinion of the fare, expressed in language of the rudest kind. no economy was too small for old hodson; in the house his wife did almost all the work. nowadays a farmer's house alone keeps the women of one, or even two, cottages fully employed. the washing is sent out, and occupies one cottage woman the best part of her spare time. other women come in to do the extra work, the cleaning up and scouring, and so on. the expense of employing these women is not great; but still it is an expense. old mrs. hodson did everything herself, and the children roughed it how they could, playing in the mire with the pigs and geese. afterwards, when old hodson began to get a little money, they were sent to a school in a market town. there they certainly did pick up the rudiments, but lived almost as hard as at home. old hodson, to give an instance of his method, would not even fatten a pig, because it cost a trifle of ready money for 'toppings,' or meal, and nothing on earth could induce him to part with a coin that he had once grasped. he never fattened a pig (meaning for sale), but sold the young porkers directly they were large enough to fetch a sovereign a-piece, and kept the money. the same system was carried on throughout the farm. the one he then occupied was of small extent, and he did a very large proportion of the work himself. he did not purchase stock at all in the modern sense; he grew them. if he went to a sale he bought one or two despicable-looking cattle at the lowest price, drove them home, and let them gradually gather condition. the grass they ate grew almost as they ate it--in his own words, 'they cut their own victuals'--_i.e._ with their teeth. he did not miss the grass blades, but had he paid a high price then he would have missed the money. here he was in direct conflict with modern farming. the theory of the farming of the present day is that time is money, and, according to this, hodson made a great mistake. he should have given a high price for his stock, have paid for cake, &c., and fattened them up as fast as possible, and then realised. the logic is correct, and in any business or manufacture could not be gainsaid. but hodson did just the reverse. he did not mind his cattle taking a little time to get into condition, provided they cost him no ready money. theoretically, the grass they ate represented money, and might have been converted to a better use. but in practice the reverse came true. he succeeded, and other men failed. his cattle and his sheep, which he bought cheap and out of condition, quietly improved (time being no object), and he sold them at a profit, from which there were no long bills to deduct for cake. he purchased no machinery whilst in this small place--which was chiefly grass land--with the exception of a second-hand haymaking machine. the money he made he put out at interest on mortgage of real property, and it brought in about per cent. it was said that in some few cases where the security was good he lent it at a much higher rate to other farmers of twenty times his outward show. after awhile he went into the great farm now occupied by his son harry, and commenced operations without borrowing a single shilling. the reason was because he was in no hurry. he slowly grew his money in the little farm, and then, and not till then, essayed the greater. even then he would not have ventured had not the circumstances been peculiarly favourable. like the present, it was a time of depression generally, and in this particular case the former tenant had lived high and farmed bad. the land was in the worst possible state, the landlord could not let it, and hodson was given to understand that he could have it for next to nothing at first. now it was at this crisis of his life that he showed that in his own sphere he possessed the true attribute of genius. most men who had practised rigid economy for twenty years, whose hours, and days, and weeks had been occupied with little petty details, how to save a penny here and a fourpenny bit yonder, would have become fossilised in the process. their minds would have become as narrow as their ways. they would have shrunk from any venture, and continued in the old course to the end of their time. old hodson, mean to the last degree in his way of living, narrow to the narrowest point where sixpence could be got, nevertheless had a mind. he saw that his opportunity had come, and he struck. he took the great corn farm, and left his little place. the whole country side at once pronounced him mad, and naturally anticipated his failure. the country side did not yet understand two things. they did not know how much money he had saved, and they did not know the capacity of his mind. he had not only saved money, and judiciously invested it, but he had kept it a profound secret, because he feared if his landlord learnt that he was saving money so fast the rent of the little farm would have been speedily raised. here, again, he was in direct conflict with the modern farmer. the modern man, if he has a good harvest or makes a profit, at once buys a 'turn-out,' and grand furniture, and in every way 'exalts his gate,' when landlords saw their tenants living in a style but little inferior to that they themselves kept up, it was not really very surprising that the rents a few years back began to rise so rapidly. in a measure tenants had themselves to blame for that upward movement. old hodson carried his money to a long distance from home to invest, so anxious was he that neither his landlord nor any one else should know how quickly he was getting rich. so he entered upon his new venture--the great upland farm, with its broad cornfields, its expanse of sheep walk and down, its meadows in the hollow, its copses (the copses alone almost as big as his original holding), with plenty of money in his pocket, and without being beholden to bank or lawyer for a single groat. men thought that the size of the place, the big manor-house, and so on, would turn his head. nothing of the kind; he proceeded as cautiously and prudently as previously. he began by degrees. instead of investing some thousand pounds in implements and machinery at a single swoop, instead of purchasing three hundred sheep right off with a single cheque, he commenced with one thing at a time. in this course he was favoured by the condition of the land, and by the conditions of the agreement. he got it, as it were, gradually into cultivation, not all at once; he got his stock together, a score or two at a time, as he felt they would answer. by the year the landlord was to have the full rent: the new tenant was quite able to pay it, and did pay it without hesitation at the very hour it was due. he bought very little machinery, nothing but what was absolutely necessary--no expensive steam-plough. his one great idea was still the same, _i.e._ spend no money. yet he was not bigoted or prejudiced to the customs of his ancestors--another proof that he was a man of mind. hodson foresaw, before he had been long at upcourt farm, that corn was not going in future to be so all in all important as it had been. as he said himself, 'we must go to our flocks now for our rent, and not to our barn doors.' his aim, therefore, became to farm into and through his flock, and it paid him well. here was a man at once economical to the verge of meanness, prudent to the edge of timidity, yet capable of venturing when he saw his chance; and above all, when that venture succeeded, capable of still living on bacon and bread and cheese, and putting the money by. in his earlier days hodson was as close of speech as of expenditure, and kept his proceedings a profound secret. as he grew older and took less active exercise--the son resident at home carrying out his instructions--he became more garrulous and liked to talk about his system. the chief topic of his discourse was that a farmer in his day paid but one rent, to the landlord, whereas now, on the modern plan, he paid eight rents, and sometimes nine. first, of course, the modern farmer paid his landlord ( ); next he paid the seedsman ( ); then the manure manufacturer ( ); the implement manufacturer ( ); the auctioneer ( ); the railroad, for transit ( ); the banker, for short loans ( ); the lawyer or whoever advanced half his original capital ( ); the schoolmaster ( ). to begin at the end, the rent paid by the modern farmer to the schoolmaster included the payment for the parish school; and, secondly, and far more important, the sum paid for the education of his own children. hodson maintained that many farmers paid as much hard cash for the education of their children, and for the necessary social surroundings incident to that education, as men used to pay for the entire sustenance of their households. then there was the borrowed capital, and the short loans from the banker; the interest on these two made two more rents. farmers paid rent to the railroad for the transit of their goods. the auctioneer, whether he sold cattle and sheep, or whether he had a depôt for horses, was a new man whose profits were derived from the farmers. there were few or no auctioneers or horse depositories when he began business; now the auctioneer was everywhere, and every country town of any consequence had its establishment for the reception and sale of horses. farmers sunk enough capital in steam-ploughs and machinery to stock a small farm on the old system, and the interest on this sunk capital represented another rent. it was the same with the artificial manure merchant and with the seedsman. farmers used to grow their own seed, or, at most, bought from the corn dealers or a neighbour if by chance they were out. now the seedsman was an important person, and a grand shop might be found, often several shops, in every market town, the owners of which shops must likewise live upon the farmer. here were eight or nine people to pay rent to instead of one. no wonder farming nowadays was not profitable. no wonder farmers could not put their sons into farms. let any one look round their own neighbourhood and count up how many farmers had managed to do that. why, they were hardly to be found. farmers' sons had to go into the towns to get a livelihood now. farming was too expensive a business on the modern system--it was a luxury for a rich man, who could afford to pay eight or nine landlords at once. the way he had got on was by paying one landlord only. old hodson always finished his lecture by thrusting both hands into his breeches pockets, and whispering to you confidentially that it was not the least use for a man to go into farming now unless he had got ten thousand pounds. it was through the genius of this man that his three sons were doing so well. at the present day, harry, the younger, took his ease in his arm-chair after his substantial but plain dinner, with little care about the markets or the general depression. for much of the land was on high ground and dry, and the soil there benefited by the wet. at the same time sheep sold well, and harry's flocks were large and noted. so he sauntered round with his gun, and knocked over a hare, and came comfortably home to dinner, easy in his mind, body, and pocket. harry was not a man of energy and intense concentrated purpose like his father. he could never have built up a fortune, but, the money being there, harry was just the man to keep it. he was sufficiently prudent to run no risk and to avoid speculation. he was sufficiently frugal not to waste his substance on riotous living, and he was naturally of a placid temperament, so that he was satisfied to silently and gradually accumulate little by little. his knowledge of farming, imbibed from his father, extended into every detail. if he seldom touched an implement now, he had in his youth worked like the labourers, and literally followed the plough. he was constantly about on the place, and his eye, by keeping the men employed, earned far more money than his single arm could have done. thus he dwelt in the lonely manor-house, a living proof of the wisdom of his father's system. harry is now looking, in his slow complacent way, for a wife. being forty years of age, he is not in a great hurry, and is not at all inclined to make a present of himself to the first pretty face he meets. he does not like the girl of the period; he fears she would spend too much money. nor, on the other hand, does he care for the country hoyden, whose mind and person have never risen above the cheese-tub, with red hands, awkward gait, loud voice, and limited conversation. he has read too much, in his quiet way, and observed too much, in his quiet way, also, for that. he wants a girl well educated, but not above her station, unaffected and yet comely, fond of home and home duties, and yet not homely. and it would be well if she had a few hundreds--a very small sum would do--for her dower. it is not that he wants the money, which can be settled on herself; but there is a vein of the old, prudent common sense running through harry's character. he is in no hurry; in time he will meet with her somewhere. chapter vii the gig and the four-in-hand. a bicycle farmer two vehicles were gradually approaching each other from opposite directions on a long, straight stretch of country road, which, at the first glance, appeared level. the glare of the august sunshine reflected from the white dust, the intense heat that caused a flickering motion of the air like that which may be seen over a flue, the monotonous low cropped hedges, the scarcity of trees, and boundless plain of cornfields, all tended to deceive the eye. the road was not really level, but rose and fell in narrow, steep valleys, that crossed it at right angles--the glance saw across these valleys without recognising their existence. it was curious to observe how first one and then the other vehicle suddenly disappeared, as if they had sunk into the ground, and remained hidden for some time. during the disappearance the vehicle was occupied in cautiously going down one steep slope and slowly ascending the other. it then seemed to rapidly come nearer till another hollow intervened, and it was abruptly checked. the people who were driving could observe each other from a long distance, and might naturally think that they should pass directly, instead of which they did not seem to get much nearer. some miles away, where the same road crossed the downs, it looked from afar like a white line drawn perpendicularly up the hill. the road itself was narrow, hardly wider than a lane, but on either side was a broad strip of turf, each strip quite twice the width of the metalled portion. on the verge of the dust the red pimpernel opened its flowers to the bright blue cloudless sky, and the lowly convolvulus grew thickly among the tall dusty bennets. sweet short clover flowers stood but a little way back; still nearer the hedges the grass was coarser, long, and wire-like. tall thistles stood beside the water furrows and beside the ditch, and round the hawthorn bushes that grew at intervals on the sward isolated from the hedge. loose flints of great size lay here and there among the grass, perhaps rolled aside surreptitiously by the stone-breakers to save themselves trouble. everything hot and dusty. the clover dusty, the convolvulus dusty, the brambles and hawthorn, the small scattered elms all dusty, all longing for a shower or for a cool breeze. the reapers were at work in the wheat, but the plain was so level that it was not possible to see them without mounting upon a flint heap. then their heads were just visible as they stood upright, but when they stooped to use the hook they disappeared. yonder, however, a solitary man in his shirt-sleeves perched up above the corn went round and round the field, and beside him strange awkward arms seemed to beat down the wheat. he was driving a reaping machine, to which the windmill-like arms belonged. beside the road a shepherd lingered, leaning on a gate, while his flock, which he was driving just as fast and no faster than they cared to eat their way along the sward, fed part on one side and part on the other. now and then two or three sheep crossed over with the tinkling of a bell. in the silence and stillness and brooding heat, the larks came and dusted themselves in the white impalpable powder of the road. farther away the partridges stole quietly to an anthill at the edge of some barley. by the white road, a white milestone, chipped and defaced, stood almost hidden among thistles and brambles. some white railings guarded the sides of a bridge, or rather a low arch over a dry watercourse. heat, dust, a glaring whiteness, and a boundless expanse of golden wheat on either hand. after awhile a towering four-in-hand coach rose out of the hollow where it had been hidden, and came bowling along the level. the rapid hoofs beat the dust, which sprang up and followed behind in a cloud, stretching far in the rear, for in so still an atmosphere the particles were long before they settled again. white parasols and light dust coats--everything that could be contrived for coolness--gay feathers and fluttering fringes, whose wearers sat in easy attitudes enjoying the breeze created by the swift motion. upon such a day the roof of a coach is more pleasant than the thickest shade, because of that current of air, for the same leaves that keep off the sun also prevent a passing zephyr from refreshing the forehead. but the swifter the horses the sweeter the fresh wind to fan the delicate cheek and drooping eyelid of indolent beauty. so idle were they all that they barely spoke, and could only smile instead of laugh if one exerted himself to utter a good jest. the gentleman who handled the ribbons was the only one thoroughly awake. his eyes were downcast, indeed, because they never left his horses, but his ears were sharply alive to the rhythmic beat of the hoofs and the faint creak and occasional jingle of the harness. had a single shoe failed to send forth the proper sound as it struck the hard dry road, had there been a creak or a jingle too many, or too few, those ears would instantly have detected it. the downcast eyes that looked neither to the right nor left--at the golden wheat or the broad fields of barley--were keenly watching the ears of the team, and noting how one of the leaders lathered and flung white froth upon the dust. from that height the bowed backs of the reapers were visible in the corn. the reapers caught sight of the coach, and stood up to look, and wiped their brows, and a distant hurrah came from the boys among them. in all the pomp and glory of paint and varnish the tall coach rolled on, gently swaying from side to side as the springs yielded to the irregularities of the road. it came with a heavy rumble like far-away thunder over the low arch that spanned the dry water-course. meantime the vehicle approaching from the opposite direction had also appeared out of a hollow. it was a high, narrow gig of ancient make, drawn by a horse too low for the shafts and too fat for work. in the gig sat two people closely pressed together by reason of its narrow dimensions. the lady wore a black silk dress, of good and indeed costly material, but white with the dust that had settled upon it. her hands were covered with black cotton gloves, and she held a black umbrella. her face was hidden by a black veil; thin corkscrew curls fringed the back of her head. she was stout, and sat heavily in the gig. the man wore a grey suit, too short in the trousers--at least they appeared so as he sat with his knees wide apart, and the toe of one heavy boot partly projecting at the side of the dash-board. a much-worn straw hat was drawn over his eyes, and he held a short whip in his red hand. he did not press his horse, but allowed the lazy animal to go jog-trot at his own pace. the panels of the gig had lost their original shining polish; the varnish had cracked and worn, till the surface was rough and grey. the harness was equally bare and worn, the reins mended more than once. the whole ramshackle concern looked as if it would presently fall to pieces, but the horse was in much too good a condition. when the four-in-hand had come within about a hundred yards, the farmer pulled his left rein hard, and drew his gig right out of the road on to the sward, and then stopped dead, to give the coach the full use of the way. as it passed he took off his straw hat, and his wife stooped low as a makeshift for bowing. an outsider might have thought that the aristocratic coach would have gone by this extremely humble couple without so much as noticing it. but the gentleman who was driving lifted his hat to the dowdy lady, with a gesture of marked politeness, and a young and elegantly-dressed lady, his sister, nodded and smiled, and waved her hand to her. after the coach had rolled some fifty yards away, the farmer pulled into the road, and went on through the cloud of dust it had left behind it, with a complacent smile upon his hard and weather-worn features. 'a' be a nice young gentleman, the honourable be,' said he presently. 'so be lady blanche,' replied his wife, lifting her veil and looking back after the four-in-hand. 'i'm sure her smile's that sweet it be a pleasure for to see her.' half a mile farther the farmer drew out of the road again, drove close to the hedge, stopped, and stood up to look over. a strongly-built young man, who had been driving the reaping machine in his shirt-sleeves, alighted from his seat and came across to the hedge. 'goes very well to-day,' he said, meaning that the machine answered. 'you be got into a good upstanding piece, john,' replied the old man sharply in his thin jerky voice, which curiously contrasted with his still powerful frame. 'you take un in there and try un'--pointing to a piece where the crop had been beaten down by a storm, and where the reapers were at work. 'you had better put the rattletrap thing away, john, and go in and help they. never wasted money in all my life over such a thing as that before. what be he going to do all the winter? bide and rust, i 'spose. can you put un to cut off they nettles along the ditch among they stones?' 'it would break the knives,' said the son. 'but you could cut um with a hook, couldn't you?' asked the old man, in a tone that was meant to convey withering contempt of a machine that could only do one thing, and must perforce lie idle ten months of the year. 'that's hardly a fair way of looking at it,' the son ventured. 'john,' said his mother, severely, 'i can't think how you young men can contradict your father. i'm sure young men never spoke so in my time; and i'm sure your father has been prospered in his farming' (she felt her silk dress), 'and has done very well without any machines, which cost a deal of money--and heaven knows there's a vast amount going out every day.' a gruff voice interrupted her--one of the reapers had advanced along the hedge, with a large earthenware jar in his hand. 'measter,' he shouted to the farmer in the gig, 'can't you send us out some better tackle than this yer stuff?' he poured some ale out of the jar on the stubble with an expression of utter disgust. 'it be the same as i drink myself,' said the farmer, sharply, and immediately sat down, struck the horse, and drove off. his son and the labourer--who could hardly have been distinguished apart so far as their dress went--stood gazing after him for a few minutes. they then turned, and each went back to his work without a word. the farmer drove on steadily homewards at the same jog-trot pace that had been his wont these forty years. the house stood a considerable distance back from the road: it was a gabled building of large size, and not without interest. it was approached by a drive that crossed a green, where some ducks were waddling about, and entered the front garden, which was surrounded by a low wall. within was a lawn and an ancient yew tree. the porch was overgrown with ivy, and the trees that rose behind the grey tiles of the roof set the old house in a frame of foliage. a fine old english homestead, where any man might be proud to dwell. but the farmer did not turn up the drive. he followed the road till he came to a gate leading into the rickyard, and, there getting out of the gig, held the gate open while the horse walked through. he never used the drive or the front door, but always came in and went out at the back, through the rickyard. the front garden and lawn were kept in good order, but no one belonging to the house ever frequented it. had any stranger driven up to the front door, he might have hammered away with the narrow knocker--there was no bell--for half an hour before making any one hear, and then probably it would have been by the accident of the servant going by the passage, and not by dint of noise. the household lived in the back part of the house. there was a parlour well furnished, sweet with flowers placed there fresh daily, and with the odour of those in the garden, whose scent came in at the ever open window; but no one sat in it from week's end to week's end. the whole life of the inmates passed in two back rooms--a sitting-room and kitchen. with some slight concessions to the times only, farmer m---- led the life his fathers led before him, and farmed his tenancy upon the same principles. he did not, indeed, dine with the labourers, but he ate very much the same food as they did. some said he would eat what no labourer or servant would touch; and, as he had stated, drank the same smallest of small beer. his wife made a large quantity of home-made wine every year, of which she partook in a moderate degree, and which was the liquor usually set before visitors. they rose early, and at once went about their work. he saw his men, and then got on his horse and rode round the farm. he returned to luncheon, saw the men again, and again went out and took a turn of work with them. he rode a horse because of the distance--the farm being large--not for pleasure. without it he could not have visited his fields often enough to satisfy himself that the labourers were going on with their work. he did not hunt, nor shoot--he had the right, but never exercised it; though occasionally he was seen about the newly-sown fields with a single-barrel gun, firing at the birds that congregated in crowds. neither would he allow his sons to shoot or hunt. one worked with the labourers, acting as working bailiff--it was he who drove the reaping machine, which, after long argument and much persuasion the farmer bought, only to grumble at and abuse every day afterwards. the other was apprenticed as a lad to a builder and carpenter of the market town, and learned the trade exactly as the rest of the men did there. he lodged in the town in the cheapest of houses, ate hard bread and cheese with the carpenters and masons and bricklayers, and was glad when the pittance he received was raised a shilling a week. once now and then he walked over to the farm on sundays or holidays--he was not allowed to come too often. they did not even send him in a basket of apples from the great orchard; all the apples were carefully gathered and sold. these two sons were now grown men, strong and robust, and better educated than would have been imagined--thanks to their own industry and good sense, and not to any schooling they received. two finer specimens of physical manhood it would have been difficult to find, yet their wages were no more than those of ordinary labourers and workmen. the bailiff, the eldest, had a pound a week, out of which he had to purchase every necessary, and from which five shillings were deducted for lodgings. it may be that he helped himself to various little perquisites, but his income from every source was not equal to that of a junior clerk. the other nominally received more, being now a skilled workman; but as he had to pay for his lodgings and food in town, he was really hardly so well off. neither of these young men had the least chance of marrying till their father should die; nothing on earth would induce him to part with the money required to set the one in business up or the other in a separate farm. he had worked all his time under his father, and it seemed to him perfectly natural that his sons should work all their time under him. there was one daughter, and she, too, was out at work. she was housekeeper to an infirm old farmer; that is to say, she superintended the dairy and the kitchen, and received hardly as much as a cook in a london establishment. like the sons, she was finely developed physically, and had more of the manners of a lady than seemed possible under the circumstances. her father's principles of farming were much the same as his plan of housekeeping and family government. it consisted of never spending any money. he bought no machines. the reaping machine was the one exception, and a bitter point with the old man. he entered on no extensive draining works, nor worried his landlord to begin them. he was content with the tumble-down sheds till it was possible to shelter cattle in them no longer. sometimes he was compelled to purchase a small quantity of artificial manure, but it was with extreme reluctance. he calculated to produce sufficient manure in the stalls, for he kept a large head of fattening cattle, and sheep to the greatest extent possible. he would rather let a field lie fallow, and go without the crop from it, till nature had restored the exhausted fertility, than supply that fertility at the cost of spending money. the one guiding motto of his life was 'save, not invest.' when once he got hold of a sovereign he parted with it no more; not though all the scientific professors in the world came to him with their analyses, and statistics, and discoveries. he put it in the bank, just as his father would have put it into a strong box under his bed. there it remained, and the interest that accrued, small as it was, was added to it. yet it was his pride to do his land well. he manured it well, because he kept cattle and sheep, especially the latter, to the fullest capacity of his acreage; and because, as said before, he could and did afford to let land lie fallow when necessary. he was in no hurry. he was not anxious for so much immediate percentage upon an investment in artificial manure or steam-plough. he might have said, with a greater man, 'time and i are two.' it was time, the slow passage of the years, that gave him his profit. he was always providing for the future; he was never out of anything, because he was never obliged to force a sale of produce in order to get the ready cash to pay the bank its interest upon borrowed money. he never borrowed; neither did he ever make a speech, or even so much as attend a farmers' club, to listen to a scientific lecture. but his teams of horses were the admiration of the country side--no such horses came into the market town. his rent was paid punctually, and always with country bank-notes--none of your clean, newfangled cheques, or bank of england crisp paper, but soiled, greasy country notes of small denomination. farmer m---- never asked for a return or reduction of his rent. the neighbours said that he was cheaply rented: that was not true in regard to the land itself. but he certainly was cheaply rented if the condition of the farm was looked at. in the course of so many long years of careful farming he had got his place into such a state of cultivation that it could stand two or three bad seasons without much deterioration. the same bad seasons quite spoiled the land of such of his neighbours as had relied upon a constant application of stimulants to the soil. the stimulating substances being no longer applied, as they could not afford to buy them, the land fell back and appeared poor. farmer m---, of course, grumbled at the weather, but the crops belied his lips. he was, in fact, wealthy--not the wealth that is seen in cities, but rich for a countryman. he could have started both his sons in business with solid capital. yet he drank small beer which the reapers despised, and drove about in a rusty old gig, with thousands to his credit at that old country bank. when he got home that afternoon, he carefully put away some bags of coin for the wages of the men, which he had been to fetch, and at once started out for the rickyard, to see how things were progressing. so the honourable on the tall four-in-hand saluted with marked emphasis the humble gig that pulled right out of the road to give him the way, and the lady blanche waved her hand to the dowdy in the dusty black silk with her sweetest smile. the honourable, when he went over the farm with his breechloader, invariably came in and drank a glass of the small beer. the lady blanche, at least once in the autumn, rode up, alighted, and drank one glass of the home-made wine with the dowdy. her papa, the landlord, was an invalid, but he as invariably sent a splendid basket of hot-house grapes. but farmer m---- was behind the age. had he looked over the hedge in the evening, he might have seen a row of reapers walking down the road at the sudden sound of a jingling bell behind them, open their line, and wheel like a squad, part to the right and part to the left, to let the bicycle pass. after it had gone by they closed their rank, and trudged on toward the village. they had been at work all day in the uplands among the corn, cutting away with their hooks low down the yellow straw. they began in the early morning, and had first to walk two miles or more up to the harvest field. stooping, as they worked, to strike low enough, the hot sun poured his fierce rays upon their shoulders and the backs of their necks. the sinews of the right arm had continually to drive the steel through straw and tough weeds entangled in the wheat. there was no shadow to sit under for luncheon, save that at the side of the shocks, where the sheaves radiated heat and interrupted the light air, so that the shadow was warmer than the sunshine. coarse cold bacon and bread, cheese, and a jar of small beer, or a tin can of weak cold tea, were all they had to supply them with fresh strength for further labour. at last the evening came, the jackets so long thrown aside were resumed, and the walk home began. after so many hours of wearisome labour it was hardly strange that their natural senses were dulled--that they did not look about them, nor converse gaily. by mutual, if unexpressed consent, they intended to call at the wayside inn when they reached it, to rest on the hard bench outside, and take a quart of stronger ale. thus trudging homewards after that exhausting day, they did not hear the almost silent approach of the bicycle behind till the rider rang his bell. when he had passed, the rider worked his feet faster, and swiftly sped away along the dry and dusty road. he was a tall young gentleman, whose form was well set off and shown by the tight-fitting bicycle costume. he rode well and with perfect command--the track left in the dust was straight, there was no wobbling or uncertainty. 'that be a better job than ourn, you,' said one of the men, as they watched the bicycle rapidly proceeding ahead. 'ay,' replied his mate, 'he be a vine varmer, he be.' master phillip, having a clear stretch of road, put on his utmost speed, and neither heard the comments made upon him, nor would ha e cared if he had. he was in haste, for he was late, and feared every minute to hear the distant dinner bell. it was his vacation, and master phillip, having temporarily left his studies, was visiting a gentleman who had taken a country mansion and shooting for the season. his host had accumulated wealth in the 'city,' and naturally considered himself an authority on country matters. master phillip's 'governor' was likewise in a large way of business, and possessed of wealth, and thought it the correct thing for one of his sons to 'go in' for agriculture--a highly genteel occupation, if rightly followed, with capital and intelligence. phillip liked to ride his bicycle in the cool of the evening, and was supposed in these excursions to be taking a survey of the soil and the crops, and to be comparing the style of agriculture in the district to that to which he had been trained while pursuing his studies. he slipped past the wayside inn; he glided by the cottages and gardens at the outskirts of the village; and then, leaving the more thickly inhabited part on one side, went by a rickyard. men were busy in the yard putting up the last load of the evening, and the farmer in his shirt-sleeves was working among and directing the rest. the bicyclist without a glance rode on, and shortly after reached the lodge gates. they were open, in anticipation of his arrival. he rode up the long drive, across the park, under the old elms, and alighted at the mansion before the dinner bell rang, much to his relief; for his host had more than one daughter, and phillip liked to arrange his toilet to perfection before he joined their society. his twenty-five-guinea dressing-case, elaborately fitted up--too completely indeed, for he had no use for the razor--soon enabled him to trim and prepare for the dining-room. his five-guinea coat, elegant studs, spotless shirt and wristbands, valuable seal ring on one finger, patent leather boots, keyless watch, eyeglass, gold toothpick in one pocket, were all carefully selected, and in the best possible style. mr. phillip--he would have scorned the boyish 'master'--was a gentleman, from the perfumed locks above to the polished patent leather below. there was _ton_ in his very air, in the 'ah, ah,' of his treble london tone of voice, the antithesis of the broad country bass. he had a firm belief in the fitness of things--in the unities, so to speak, of suit, action, and time. when his team were struggling to force the ball by kick, or other permitted means, across the tented field, phillip was arrayed in accurate football costume. when he stood on the close-mown lawn within the white-marked square of tennis and faced the net, his jacket was barred or striped with scarlet. then there was the bicycle dress, the morning coat, the shooting jacket, and the dinner coat, not to mention the ulster or connaught overcoat, the dust coat, and minor items innumerable. whether phillip rolled in the mire at football, or bestrode a bicycle, or sat down to snow-white tablecloth and napkin, he conscientiously dressed the part. the very completeness of his prescribed studies--the exhaustive character of the curriculum-naturally induced a frame of mind not to be satisfied with anything short of absolute precision, and perhaps even apt to extend itself into dilettanteism. like geology, the science of agriculture is so vast, it embraces so wide a range, that one really hardly knows where it begins or ends. phillip's knowledge was universal. he understood all about astronomy, and had prepared an abstract of figures proving the connection of sun-spots, rainfall, and the price of wheat. algebra was the easiest and at the same time the most accurate mode of conducting the intricate calculations arising out of the complicated question of food--of flesh formers and heat generators--that is to say, how much a sheep increased in weight by gnawing a turnip. nothing could be more useful than botany-those who could not distinguish between a dicotyledon and a monocotyledon could certainly never rightly grasp the nature of a hedgerow. _bellis perennis_ and _sinapis arvensis_ were not to be confounded, and _triticum repens_ was a sure sign of a bad farmer. chemistry proved that too small a quantity of silicate made john barleycorn weak in the knee; ammonia, animal phosphates, nitrogen, and so on, were mere names to many ignorant folk. the various stages and the different developments of insect life were next to be considered. as to the soil and strata--the very groundwork of a farm--geology was the true guide to the proper selection of suitable seed. crops had been garnered by the aid of the electric light, the plough had been driven by the gramme machine; electricity, then, would play a foremost part in future farming, and should be studied with enthusiasm. without mathematics nothing could be done; without ornithological study, how know which bird revelled on grain and which destroyed injurious insects? spectrum analysis detected the adulteration of valuable compounds; the photographer recorded the exact action of the trotting horse; the telephone might convey orders from one end of an estate to the other; and thus you might go through the whole alphabet, the whole cyclopaedia of science, and apply every single branch to agriculture. it is to be hoped that phillip's conversational account of his studies has been correctly reproduced here. the chemical terms look rather weak, but the memory of an ordinary listener can hardly be expected to retain such a mass of technicalities. he had piles of strongly-bound books, the reward of successful examinations, besides diplomas and certificates of proficiency. these subjects could be pursued under cover, but there was besides the field work, which had a more practical sound; model farms to be visited; steam-engines to be seen at work; lectures to be listened to on the spot; deep-drainage operations, a new drill, or a new sheaf-binder to be looked at. then there were the experimental plots--something like the little _parterres_ seen at the edge of lawns. one plot was sown without manure, another was sown with manure, a third had a different kind of manure. the dozen mangolds grown in one patch were pulled up and carefully weighed. the grains of wheat in an ear standing in an adjacent patch were counted and recorded. as these plots were about a yard wide, and could be kept clean, no matter what the weather; and as a wheelbarrow load of clay, or chalk, or sand thrown down would alter the geological formation, the results obtained from them were certainly instructive, and would be very useful as a guide to the cultivation of a thousand acres. there was also a large, heavy iron roller, which the scholars could if they chose drag round and round the gravel path. architecture, again, touches the agriculturist nearly. he requires buildings for the pigs, cattle, horses, labourers, engine and machinery, lastly, for himself. out of doors almost any farmhouse that could be visited might be made by a lecturer an illustrative example of what ought to be avoided. scarcely one could be found that was not full of mistakes--utterly wrong, and erected regardless of design and utility. within doors, with ink, tracing paper, compasses, straight-edge and ruler, really valuable ground plans, front elevations, and so on, could be laid down. altogether, with this circle of science to study, the future farmer had very hard work to face. such exhaustive mental labour induced a certain nervousness that could only be allayed by relaxation. the bicycle afforded a grateful change. mounted upon the slender, swift-revolving wheel, mr. phillip in the cool of the evening, after the long day of study, sometimes proceeded to stretch his limbs. the light cigar soothed his weary and overstrained mind. the bicycle by-and-by, as if drawn by the power of gravitation, approached more and more nearly to the distant town. it threaded the streets, and finally stopped in the archway of an inn. there, leaned against the wall, under the eye of the respectful ostler, the bicycle reposed. the owner strolled upstairs, and in the company of choice spirits studied the laws of right angles, of motion, and retarding friction, upon the level surface of the billiard table. somewhere in a not much frequented street there could be seen a small window in which a coloured plate of fashions was always displayed. there were also some bonnets, trimming, and tasteful feathers. nothing could be more attractive than this window. the milliner was young and pretty, and seemed to have a cousin equally young and pretty. poor, lonely, friendless creatures, it was not surprising they should welcome a little flirtation. the bicycle which so swiftly carries the young man of the present day beyond the penetrating vision of his aunt or tutor has much to answer for. but, as pointed out previously, such exhaustive scientific training naturally tends to make the mind mathematical. it cannot be satisfied unless its surroundings--the substantial realisation of the concrete-are perfect. so mr. phillip had a suit for every purpose--for football, cricket, tennis, bicycle, shooting, dining, and strolling about. in the same way he possessed a perfect armoury of athletic and other useful implements. there were fine bats by the best makers for cricket, rods for trout fishing, splendid modified choke-bores, saddles, jockey caps, and so on. a gentleman like this could hardly long remain in the solitary halls of learning--society must claim him for parties, balls, dinners, and the usual round. it was understood that his 'governor' was a man of substantial wealth; that phillip would certainly be placed in an extensive farm, to play the pleasant part of a gentleman farmer. people with marriageable daughters looked upon the clever scholar as a desirable addition to their drawing-rooms. phillip, in short, found himself by degrees involved in a whirl of festivities, and was never at a loss where to go for amusement when he could obtain leave to seek relaxation. if such social adulation made him a little vain, if it led to the purchase of a twenty-five-guinea dressing-case, and to frequent consultations with the tailor, it really was not phillip's fault. he felt himself popular, and accepted the position. when the vacation came, gathering up a fresh pile of grandly-bound prize books, broad sheets of diplomas, and certificates, phillip departed to his friend's mansion for the partridge shooting. coming down the road on the bicycle he overtook the reapers, and sprang his bell to warn them. the reapers thought phillip's job better than theirs. at dinner, while sipping his claret, phillip delivered his opinion upon the agriculture of the district, which he had surveyed from his bicycle. it was incomplete, stationary, or retrograde. the form of the fields alone was an index to the character of the farmers who cultivated them. not one had a regular shape. the fields were neither circles, squares, parallelograms, nor triangles. one side, perhaps, might be straight; the hedgerow on the other had a dozen curves, and came up to a point. with such irregular enclosures it was impossible that the farmer could plan out his course with the necessary accuracy. the same incompleteness ran through everything--one field was well tilled, the next indifferently, the third full of weeds. here was a good modern cattle-shed, well-designed for the purpose; yonder was a tumble-down building, with holes in the roof and walls. so, too, with the implements--a farmer never seemed to have a complete set. one farmer had, perhaps, a reaping machine, but he had not got an elevator; another had an elevator, but no steam-plough. no one had a full set of machinery. if they drained, they only drained one field; the entire farm was never by any possibility finished straight off. if the farmer had two new light carts of approved construction, he was sure to have three old rumbling waggons, in drawing which there was a great waste of power. why not have all light carts? there was no uniformity. the farming mind lacked breadth of view, and dwelt too much on detail. it was not, of course, the fault of the tenants of the present day, but the very houses they inhabited were always put in the wrong place. where the ground was low, flat, and liable to be flooded, the farmhouse was always built by a brook. when the storms of winter came the brook overflowed, and the place was almost inaccessible. in hilly districts, where there was not much water, the farmhouse was situate on the slope, or perhaps on the plateau above, and in summer very likely every drop of water used had to be drawn up there from a distance in tanks. the whole of rural england, in short, wanted rearranging upon mathematical principles. to begin at the smallest divisions, the fields should be mapped out like the squares of a chessboard; next, the parishes; and, lastly, the counties. you ought to be able to work steam-ploughing tackle across a whole parish, if the rope could be made strong enough. if you talked with a farmer, you found him somehow or other quite incapable of following a logical sequence of argument. he got on very well for a few sentences, but, just as one was going to come to the conclusion, his mind seized on some little paltry detail, and refused to move any farther. he positively could not follow you to a logical conclusion. if you, for instance, tried to show him that a certain course of cropping was the correct one for certain fields, he would listen for awhile, and then suddenly declare that the turnips in one of the said fields last year were a failure. that particular crop of turnips had nothing at all to do with the system at large, but the farmer could see nothing else. what had struck him most, however, in that particular district, as he traversed it on the bicycle, was the great loss of time that must result from the absence of rapid means of communication on large farms. the distance across a large farm might, perhaps, be a mile. some farms were not very broad, but extended in a narrow strip for a great way. hours were occupied in riding round such farms, hours which might be saved by simple means. suppose, for example, that a gang of labourers were at work in the harvest-field, three-quarters of a mile from the farmhouse. now, why not have a field telegraph, like that employed in military operations? the cable or wire was rolled on a drum like those used for watering a lawn. all that was needed was to harness a pony, and the drum would unroll and lay the wire as it revolved. the farmer could then sit in his office and telegraph his instructions without a moment's delay. he could tap the barometer, and wire to the bailiff in the field to be expeditious, for the mercury was falling. practically, there was no more necessity for the farmer to go outside his office than for a merchant in mincing lane. the merchant did not sail in every ship whose cargo was consigned to him: why should the farmer watch every waggon loaded? steam could drive the farmer's plough, cut the chaff, pump the water, and, in short, do everything. the field telegraph could be laid down to any required spot with the greatest ease, and thus, sitting in his office chair, the farmer could control the operations of the farm without once soiling his hands. mr. phillip, as he concluded his remarks, reached his glass of claret, and thus incidentally exhibited his own hand, which was as white as a lady's. chapter viii haymaking. 'the juke's country' a rattling, thumping, booming noise, like the beating of their war drums by savages, comes over the hedge where the bees are busy at the bramble flowers. the bees take no heed, they pass from flower to flower, seeking the sweet honey to store at home in the hive, as their bee ancestors did before the roman legions marched to cowey stakes. their habits have not changed; their 'social' relations are the same; they have not called in the aid of machinery to enlarge their liquid, wealth, or to increase the facility of collecting it. there is a low murmur rather than a buzz along the hedgerow; but over it the hot summer breeze brings the thumping, rattling, booming sound of hollow metal striking against the ground or in contact with other metal. these ringing noises, which so little accord with the sweet-scented hay and green hedgerows, are caused by the careless handling of milk tins dragged hither and thither by the men who are getting the afternoon milk ready for transit to the railway station miles away. each tin bears a brazen badge engraved with the name of the milkman who will retail its contents in distant london. it may be delivered to the countess in belgravia, and reach her dainty lip in the morning chocolate, or it may be eagerly swallowed up by the half-starved children of some back court in the purlieus of the seven dials. sturdy milkmaids may still be seen in london, sweeping the crowded pavement clear before them as they walk with swinging tread, a yoke on their shoulders, from door to door. some remnant of the traditional dairy thus survives in the stony streets that are separated so widely from the country. but here, beside the hay, the hedgerows, the bees, the flowers that precede the blackberries--here in the heart of the meadows the romance has departed. everything is mechanical or scientific. from the refrigerator that cools the milk, the thermometer that tests its temperature, the lactometer that proves its quality, all is mechanical precision. the tins themselves are metal--wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed--and they are swung up into a waggon specially built for the purpose. it is the very antithesis of the jolting and cumbrous waggon used for generations in the hay-fields and among the corn. it is light, elegantly proportioned, painted, varnished--the work rather of a coachbuilder than a cartwright. the horse harnessed in it is equally unlike the cart-horse. a quick, wiry horse, that may be driven in a trap or gig, is the style--one that will rattle along and catch the train. the driver takes his seat and handles the reins with the air of a man driving a tradesman's van, instead of walking, like the true old carter, or sitting on the shaft. the vehicle rattles off to the station, where ten, fifteen, or perhaps twenty such converge at the same hour, and then ensues a scene of bustle, chaff, and rough language. the tins are placed in the van specially reserved for them, the whistle sounds, the passengers--who have been wondering why on earth there was all this noise and delay at a little roadside station without so much as a visible steeple--withdraw their heads from the windows; the wheels revolve, and, gathering speed, the train disappears round the curve, hastening to the metropolis. then the empty tins returned from town have to be conveyed home with more rattling, thumping and booming of hollow tin--there to be carefully cleansed, for which purpose vast quantities of hot water must be ready, and coal, of course, must be consumed in proportion. this beautiful afternoon the booming seems to sound more than usual; it may perhaps be the wind that carries the noise along. but mr. george, the farmer, who has been working among the haymakers, steps out from the rank, and going some way aside pauses awhile to consider. you should not address him as farmer george. farmer as an affix is not the thing now; farmers are 'mr. so-and-so.' not that there is any false pride about the present individual; his memory goes back too far, and he has had too much experience of the world. he leans on his prong--the sharp forks worn bright as silver from use--stuck in the sward, and his chest pressing on the top of the handle, or rather on both hands, with which he holds it. the handle makes an angle of forty-five degrees with his body, and thus gives considerable support and relief while he reflects. he leans on his prong, facing to windward, and gazing straight into the teeth of the light breeze, as he has done these forty and odd summers past. like the captain of a sailing ship, the eye of the master haymaker must be always watching the horizon to windward. he depends on the sky, like the mariner, and spreads his canvas and shapes his course by the clouds. he must note their varying form and drift; the height and thickness and hue; whether there is a dew in the evenings; whether the distant hills are clearly defined or misty; and what the sunset portends. from the signs of the sunset he learns, like the antique roman husbandman-- 'when the south projects a stormy day, and when the clearing north will puff the clouds away.' according as the interpretation of the signs be favourable, adverse, or doubtful, so he gives his orders. this afternoon, as he stands leaning on the prong, he marks the soft air which seems itself to be heated, and renders the shade, if you seek it for coolness, as sultry as the open field. the flies are numerous and busy--the horses can barely stand still, and nod their heads to shake them off. the hills seem near, and the trees on the summit are distinctly visible. such noises as are heard seem exaggerated and hollow. there is but little cloud, mere thin flecks; but the horizon has a brassy look, and the blue of the sky is hard and opaque. farmer george recollects that the barometer he tapped before coming out showed a falling mercury; he does not like these appearances, more especially the heated breeze. there is a large quantity of hay in the meadow, much of it quite ready for carting, indeed, the waggons are picking it up as fast as they can, and the rest, if left spread about through next day--sunday--would be fit on monday. on sunday there are no wages to pay to the labourers; but the sun, if it shines, works as hard and effectually as ever. it is always a temptation to the haymaker to leave his half-made hay spread about for sunday, so that on monday morning he may find it made. another reason why he hesitates is because he knows he will have trouble with the labourers, who will want to be off early as it is saturday. they are not so ready to work an hour or two overtime as when he was a boy. on the other hand, he recollects that the weather cablegrams from america foretell the arrival of a depression. what would his grandfather have thought of adjusting the work in an english meadow to the tenour of news from the other side of the atlantic? suddenly, while he ponders, there arises a shout from the labourers. the hay in one spot, as if seized by an invisible force, lifts itself up and revolves round and round, rising higher every turn. a miniature cyclone is whirling it up--a column of hay twisting in a circle and rising above the trees. then the force of the whirlwind spends itself; some of the hay falls on the oaks, and some drifts with the breeze across the field before it sinks. this decides him at once. he resolves to have all the hay carted that he can, and the remainder put up into haycocks. the men grumble when they hear it; perhaps a year ago they would have openly mutinied, and refused to work beyond the usual hour. but, though wages are still high, the labourers feel that they are not so much the masters as they were--they grumble, but obey. the haycocks are put up, and the rick-cloth unfolded over the partly made rick. farmer george himself sees to it that the cloth does not touch the rick at the edges, or the rain, if it comes, will go through instead of shooting off, and that the ropes are taut and firmly belayed. his caution is justified in the night by a violent thunderstorm, and in the morning it is raining steadily. it rains again on monday, tuesday, and wednesday. thursday it does not rain, but the hedges are wet, the ground is soaked, the grass hung with raindrops, the sky heavy with masses of drifting cloud. the hay cannot be touched; it must lie a day till sufficiently dry. friday is more hopeful. he walks out into the fields, and kicks a haycock half over. the hay is still wet, but he congratulates himself that not much damage is done. saturday is warm and fine--work goes on again. but sunday is near. sunday is fiery hot. monday, the rain pours down with tropical vehemence. thus the monotonous, heart-breaking days go by and lengthen into weeks, and the weeks extend into months. the wheat is turning colour, and still the hay lies about, and the farmer has ceased even to tap the barometer. those fields that are not cut are brown as brown can be--the grass has seeded and is over ripe. the labourers come every day, and some trifling job is found for them--the garden path is weeded, the nettles cut, and such little matters done. their wages are paid every week in silver and gold--harvest wages, for which no stroke of harvest work has been done. he must keep them on, because any day the weather may brighten, and then they will be wanted. but the weather does not brighten, and the drain of ready cash continues. besides the men, the mowing machine is idle in the shed. even if the rain ceases, the crops are so laid that it is doubtful if it can be employed. the horse-rake is idle, the elevator is idle, the haymaking machine is idle, and these represent capital, if not to a large amount. he notes the price of hay at the market. for months past it has been low--so low that it has hardly paid him to sell that portion of old hay which he felt he could spare. from october of last year to june of this [ ] the price remained about the same. it is now rising, but he has no more old hay to part with, and the new is not yet made. he has to bear in mind that his herd of cows has to be kept in high feed all the winter, to supply an unvarying quantity of milk to the london purchaser. these wet days, forcing him unwillingly to stay within doors, send him to his books and accounts, and they tell a story somewhat at variance with the prevalent belief that dairy-farming is the only branch of farming that is still profitable. first, as to the milk-selling. cows naturally yield a larger supply in the summer than in winter, but by the provisions of the contract between the farmer and the milkman the quantity sent in summer is not to exceed, and the quantity in winter not to fall short of, a stipulated amount.[footnote: an improvement upon this system has been introduced by the leading metropolitan dairy company. the farmer is asked to fix a minimum quantity which he will engage to supply daily, but he can send as much more as he likes. this permits of economical and natural management in a dairy, which was very difficult under the rigid rule mentioned above.] the price received in summer is about fivepence or fivepence-halfpenny per imperial gallon, afterwards retailed in london at about one shilling and eightpence. when the cost of conveyance to the station, of the horses, of the wear and tear, of the men who have to be paid for doing nothing else but look after the milk, is deducted, the profit to the farmer is but small. he thinks, too, that he notices a decided falling-off in the demand for milk even at this price. some dairies find a difficulty in disposing of the milk--they cannot find a purchaser. he has himself a considerable surplus over and above what the contract allows him to send. this must either be wasted entirely or made into butter and cheese. in order to make cheese, the plant, the tubs, vats, presses, and so on, must be kept in readiness, and there must be an experienced person to superintend the work. this person must be paid a salary, and lodge and board in the house, representing therefore a considerable outlay. the cheese, when made and sent to market, fluctuates of course in price: it may be as low as fourpence a pound wholesale; it may go as high as sixpence. fourpence a pound wholesale will not pay for the making; sixpence will leave a profit; but of late the price has gone rather to the lower than the higher figure. a few years since, when the iron industries flourished, this kind of cheese had a good and ready sale, and there was a profit belonging to it; but since the iron trade has been in so depressed a condition this cheese has sold badly. the surplus milk consequently brings no profit, and is only made into cheese because it shall not be wasted, and in the hope that possibly a favourable turn of the cheese market may happen. neither the summer cheese nor the summer milk is bringing him in a fortune. meantime the hay is spoiling in the fields. but a few years ago, when agricultural prices were inflated, and men's minds were full of confidence, he recollects seeing standing grass crops sold by auction for _l_. the acre, and in some cases even higher prices were realised. this year similar auctions of standing grass crops hardly realised _s_. an acre, and in some instances a purchaser could not be found even at that price. the difference in the value of grass represented by these prices is very great. he has no pigs to sell, because, for a long while past, he has had nothing upon which to feed them, the milk being sold. the pigsties are full of weeds; he can hardly fatten one for his own use, and has scarcely better facilities for keeping pigs than an agricultural labourer. the carriage of the milk to the station requires at least two quick horses, and perhaps more; one cannot do it twice a day, even with a very moderate load. the hard highway and the incessant work would soon knock a single horse up. the mowing machine and the horse-rake must be drawn by a similar horse, so that the dairy farm may be said to require a style of horse like that employed by omnibus proprietors. the acreage being limited, he can only keep a certain number of horses, and, therefore, has no room for a brood mare. farmer george is aware that nothing now pays like a brood cart mare with fair good luck. the colt born in april is often sold six months afterwards, in september, for _l_. or _l_., and even up to _l_., according to excellence. the value of cart-horse colts has risen greatly, and those who are fortunately able to maintain a brood mare have reaped the profit. but mr. george, selling the milk, and keeping a whole stud of nags for the milk cart, the mowing machine, the horse-rake, and so forth, cannot maintain a brood mare as well. in the winter, it is true, the milk may sell for as high a price as tenpence per gallon of four quarts, but then he has a difficulty in procuring the quantity contracted for, and may perhaps have to buy of neighbours to keep up the precise supply. his herd must also be managed for the purpose, and must be well fed, and he will probably have to buy food for them in addition to his hay. the nag horses, too, that draw the milk waggon, have to be fed during the winter, and are no slight expense. as for fattening a beast in a stall, with a view to take the prize at christmas at the local show, he has abandoned that, finding that it costs more to bring the animal up to the condition required than he can afterwards sell it for. there is no profit in that. america presses upon him hard, too--as hard, or harder, than on the wheat-grower. cases have been known of american cheese being sold in manufacturing towns as low as twopence per pound retail--given away by despairing competition. how, then, is the dairyman to succeed when he cannot, positively cannot, make cheese to sell at less than fourpence per pound wholesale? of course such instances are exceptional, but american cheese is usually sold a penny or more a pound below the english ordinary, and this cuts the ground from under the dairyman's feet; and the american cheese too is acquiring a reputation for richness, and, price for price, surpasses the english in quality. some people who have long cherished a prejudice against the american have found, upon at last being induced to try the two, that the canadian cheddar is actually superior to the english cheddar, the english selling at tenpence per pound and the canadian at sevenpence. mr. george finds he pays a very high rent for his grass land--some _s_. per acre--and upon reckoning up the figures in his account-books heaves a sigh. his neighbours perchance may be making fortunes, though they tell quite a different tale, but he feels that he is not growing rich. the work is hard, or rather it is continuous. no one has to attend to his duties so regularly all the year round as the man who looks after cows. they cannot be left a single day from the st of january to the st of december. nor is the social state of things altogether pleasant to reflect on. his sons and daughters have all left home; not one would stay and take to the dairy work. they have gone into the towns, and found more congenial employment there. he is himself growing in years. his wife, having once left off making cheese when the milk selling commenced, and having tasted the sweets of rest, is unwilling to return to that hard labour. when it is done he must pay some one to do it. in every way ready money is going out of the house. cash to pay the haymakers idling about in the sheds out of the rain; cash to pay the men who manage the milk; cash to pay the woman who makes the cheese out of the surplus milk; cash to pay the blacksmith for continually re-shoeing the milk cart nags and for mending machines; cash to pay the brewer and the butcher and the baker, neither of whom took a sovereign here when he was a lad, for his father ate his own bacon, brewed his own beer, and baked his own bread; cash to pay for the education of the cottagers' children; cash, a great deal of cash, to pay the landlord. mr. george, having had enough of his accounts, rises and goes to the window. a rain cloud sweeping along the distant hills has hidden them from sight, and the rack hurries overhead driven before the stormy wind. there comes a knock at the door. it is the collector calling the second time for the poor rates, which have grown heavier of late. but, however delayed, the haymaking is finished at last, and by-and-by, when the leaves have fallen and the hunting commences, a good run drives away for the time at least the memory of so unpropitious a season. then mr. george some mild morning forms one of a little group of well-mounted farmers waiting at a quiet corner while the hounds draw a great wood. two of them are men long past middle age, whose once tawny beards are grizzled, but who are still game, perhaps more so than the rising generation. the rest have followed them here, aware that these old hands know every inch of the country, and are certain to be in the right place. the spot is not far from the park wall, where the wood runs up into a wedge-shaped point, and ends in a low mound and hedge. most of the company at the meet in the park have naturally cantered across the level sward, scattering the sheep as they go, and are now assembled along the side of the wood, near where a green 'drive' goes through it, and apparently gives direct access to the fields beyond. from thence they can see the huntsman in the wood occasionally, and trace the exact course the hounds are taking in their search. a gallant show it is by the wood! horsemen and horsewomen, late comers hastening up, restless horses, a throng for ever in motion, and every now and then the blast of a horn rising up from the trees beneath. a gallant show indeed, but two old cunning ones and their followers have slipped away down to this obscure corner where they can see nothing of it, and are themselves hidden. they know that the wood is triangular in shape, and that from this, the apex, they have merely to pass the low hedge in front, and, turning to the left, ride along the lower side, and so bisect the course the fox will probably take. they know that the 'drive,' which offers so straight and easy a descent through the wood from the park, is pleasant enough till the lower ground is reached. there the soft, oozy earth, which can never dry under the trees, is poached into a slough through which even timber carriages cannot be drawn. nor can a horseman slip aside, because of the ash poles and thorn thickets. those who are trapped there must return to the park and gallop all round the wood outside, unless they like to venture a roll in that liquid mud. any one can go to a meet, but to know all the peculiarities of the covers is only given to those who have ridden over the country these forty years. in this corner a detached copse of spruce fir keeps off the wind--the direction of which they have noted--and in this shelter it is almost warm. the distant crack of a whip, the solitary cry of a hound, a hollow shout, and similar sounds, come frequently, and now and then there is an irrepressible stir in the little group as they hear one of the many false alarms that always occur in drawing a great wood. to these noises they are keenly sensitive, but utterly ignore the signs of other life around them. a pheasant, alarmed by the hounds, comes running quietly, thinking to escape into the line of isolated copses that commences here; but, suddenly confronted by the horsemen just outside, rises with an uproar, and goes sailing down over the fields. two squirrels, happy in the mild weather, frisk out of the copse into the dank grass, till a curvet of one of the horses frightens them up into the firs again. horses and men are becoming impatient. 'that dalled keeper has left an earth open,' remarks one of the riders. his companion points with his whip at the hedge just where it joins the wood. a long slender muzzle is thrust for a moment cautiously over the bare sandy mound under cover of a thorn stole. one sniff, and it is withdrawn. the fox thought also to steal away along the copses, the worst and most baffling course he could choose. five minutes afterwards, and there is this time no mistake. there comes from the park above the low, dull, rushing roar of hundreds of hoofs, that strike the sward together, and force by sheer weight the reluctant earth to resound. the two old hands lead over the hedge, and the little company, slipping along below the wood, find themselves well on the track, far in front of the main body. there is a block in the treacherous 'drive,' those who where foremost struggling to get back, and those behind struggling to come down. the rest at last, learning the truth, are galloping round the outside, and taking it out of their horses before they get on the course at all. it is a splendid burst, and the pace is terrible. the farmers' powerful horses find it heavy going across the fresh ploughed furrows and the wet 'squishey' meadows, where the double mounds cannot be shirked. now a lull, and the two old hands, a little at fault, make for the rising ground, where are some ricks, and a threshing machine at work, thinking from thence to see over the tall hedgerows. upon the rick the labourers have stopped work, and are eagerly watching the chase, for from that height they can see the whole field. yonder the main body have found a succession of fields with the gates all open: some carting is in progress, and the gates have been left open for the carter's convenience. a hundred horsemen and eight or ten ladies are galloping in an extended line along this route, riding hardest, as often happens, when the hounds are quiet, that they may be ready when the chiding commences. suddenly the labourers exclaim and point, the hounds open, and the farmers, knowing from the direction they point where to ride, are off. but this time the fox has doubled, so that the squadrons hitherto behind are now closest up, and the farmers in the rear: thus the fortune of war changes, and the race is not to the swift. the labourers on the rick, which stands on the side of a hill, are fully as excited as the riders, and they can see what the hunter himself rarely views, _i.e._ the fox slipping ahead before the hounds. then they turn to alternately laugh at, and shout directions to a disconsolate gentleman, who, ignorant of the district, is pounded in a small meadow. he is riding frantically round and round, afraid to risk the broad brook which encircles it, because of the treacherous bank, and maddened by the receding sound of the chase. a boy gets off the rick and runs to earn sixpence by showing a way out. so from the rick hodge has his share of the sport, and at that elevation can see over a wide stretch of what he--changing the 'd' into a 'j'--calls 'the juke's country.' it is a famous land. there are spaces, which on the map look large, and yet have no distinctive character, no individuality as it were. such broad expanses of plain and vale are usefully employed in the production of cattle and corn. villages, hamlets, even towns are dotted about them, but a list of such places would not contain a single name that would catch the eye. though occupying so many square miles, the district, so far as the world is concerned, is non-existent. it is socially a blank. but 'the juke's country' is a well-known land. there are names connected with it which are familiar not only in england, but all the world over, where men--and where do they not?--converse of sport. something beyond mere utility, beyond ploughing and sowing, has given it within its bounds a species of separate nationality. the personal influence of an acknowledged leader has organised society and impressed it with a quiet enthusiasm. even the bitterest radical forgives the patrician who shoots or rides exceptionally well, and hunting is a pursuit which brings the peer and the commoner side by side. the agricultural population speak as one man upon the subject. the old farmer will tell you with pride how his advice was sought when disease entered the kennels, and how his remedy saved the lives of valuable hounds. the farmer's son, a mere lad, whose head barely rises to his saddle, talks of 'the duke' as his hero. this boy knows the country, and can ride straight, better than many a gentleman with groom and second horse behind. already, like his elders, he looks forward impatiently to the fall of the leaf. the tenants' wives and daughters allude with pleasure to the annual social gatherings at the mansion, and it is apparent that something like a real bond exists between landlord and tenant. no false pride separates the one from the other--intercourse is easy, for a man of high and ancient lineage can speak freely to the humblest labourer without endangering his precedence. it needs none of the parvenu's _hauteur_ and pomp to support his dignity. every tenant is treated alike. on small estates there is sometimes a complaint that the largest tenant is petted while the lesser are harshly treated. nothing of that is known here. the tenants are as well content as it is possible for men to be who are passing under the universal depression. _noblesse oblige_--it would be impossible for that ancient house to stoop to meanness. the head rides to the hunt, as his ancestors rode to battle, with a hundred horsemen behind him. his colours are like the cockades of olden times. once now and then even royalty honours the meet with its presence. round that ancient house the goodwill of the county gathers; and when any family event--as a marriage--takes place, the hearty congratulations offered come from far beyond the actual property. his pastime is not without its use--all are agreed that hunting really does improve the breed of horses. certainly it gives a life, a go, a social movement to the country which nothing else imparts. it is a pleasant land withal--a land of hill and vale, of wood and copse. how well remembered are the copses on the hills, and the steeples, those time-honoured landmarks to wandering riders! the small meadows with double mounds have held captive many a stranger. the river that winds through them enters by-and-by a small but ancient town, with its memories of the fierce danes, and its present talk of the hunt. about five o'clock on winter afternoons there is a clank of spurs in the courtyard of the old inn, and the bar is crowded with men in breeches and top-boots. as they refresh themselves there is a ceaseless hum of conversation, how so-and-so came a cropper, how another went at the brook in style, or how some poor horse got staked and was mercifully shot. a talk, in short, like that in camp after a battle, of wounds and glory. most of these men are tenant farmers, and reference is sure to be made to the price of cheese, and the forthcoming local agricultural show. this old market town has been noted for generations as a great cheese centre. it is not, perhaps, the most convenient situation for such a market, and its population is inconsiderable; but the trade is, somehow or other, a tradition of the place, and traditions are hard to shake. efforts have been made to establish rival markets in towns nearer to the modern resorts of commerce, but in vain. the attempt has always proved a failure, and to this day the prices quoted at this place rule those of the adjoining counties, and are watched in distant cities. the depression made itself felt here in a very practical manner, for prices fell to such an extent that the manufacture of the old style of cheese became almost a dead loss. some farmers abandoned it, and at much trouble and expense changed their system, and began to produce cheddar and stilton. but when the stilton was at last ready, there was no demand for it. almost suddenly, however, and quite recently, a demand sprang up, and the price of that cheese rose. they say here in the bar that this probably saved many from difficulties; large stocks that had been lying on hand unsaleable for months going off at a good price. they hope that it is an omen of returning prosperity, and do not fail to observe the remarkable illustration it affords of the close connection between trade and agriculture. for no sooner did the iron trade revive than the price of cheese responded. the elder men cannot refrain from chuckling over the altered tone of the inhabitants of cities towards the farmers. 'years ago,' they say, 'we were held up to scorn, and told that we were quite useless; there was nothing so contemptible as the british farmer. now they have discovered that, after all, we are some good, and even manchester sympathises with us.' it is now hoped that the forthcoming local show--largely patronised and promoted by the chief of the hunting field--will be better than was at one time anticipated. those who would like to see the real working of an agricultural show such as this should contrive to visit the yard early in the morning of the opening day, some few hours before the public are admitted. the bustle, the crash of excited exhibitors, the cries of men in charge of cattle, the apparently inextricable confusion, as if everything had been put off to the last moment--the whole scene is intensely agricultural. every one is calling for the secretary. a drover wants to know where to put his fat cattle; a carter wants to ask where a great cart-horse is to stand--he and his horse together are hopelessly floundering about in the crowd. the agent of a firm of implement manufacturers has a telegram that another machine is coming, and is anxious for extra space; the representative of an artificial manure factory is vainly seeking a parcel that has got mislaid. the seedsman requires permission to somewhat shift his stall; wherever is the secretary? when he appears, a clergyman at once pounces on him to apply for tickets for the dinner, and is followed by a farmer, who must have a form and an explanation how to fill it up. one of his labourers has decided at the last minute to enter for a prize--he has had a year to make up his mind in. a crowd of members of the society are pushing round for a private view, and watching the judges at their work. they all turn to the secretary to ask where such and such an exhibit may be found, and demand why on earth the catalogues are not ready? mr. secretary, a stout tenant farmer, in breeches and top-boots, whose broad face beams with good nature (selected, perhaps, for that very quality), pants and wipes his forehead, for, despite the cold, the exertion and the universal flurry have made him quiet hot. he gives every inquirer a civil answer, and affably begs the eager folk that press upon him to come up into the committee-room. at this a satisfied smile replaces the troubled expression upon their faces. they feel that their difficulties are at an end; they have got hold of the right man at last--there is something soothing in the very sound of the committee-room. when they get up into this important apartment they find it quite empty. there is a blazing fire in the grate, and littered on the long table is a mass of forms, letters, lists, and proofs of the catalogue waiting for the judges' decision to be entered. after half an hour or so their hopes begin to fall, and possibly some one goes down to try and haul the secretary up into his office. the messenger finds that much-desired man in the midst of an excited group; one has him by the arm pulling him forward, another by the coat dragging him back, a third is bawling at him at the top of a powerful voice. by-and-by, however, the secretary comes panting up into the committee-room with a letter in his hand and a pleased expression on his features. he announces that he has just had a note from his grace, who, with his party, will be here early, and who hopes that all is going on well. then to business, and it is surprising how quickly he disposes of it. a farmer himself, he knows exactly what is wanted, and gives the right order without a moment's hesitation. it is no new experience to him, and despite all this apparent confusion, everything presently falls into its place. after the opening of the show there is a meeting, at which certain prizes are distributed, among them rewards to the best ploughman in 'the juke's country,' and to those labourers who have remained longest in the service of one master. for the graceful duty of presentation a marchioness has been selected, who, with other visitors of high social rank, has come over from that famous hunting mansion. to meet that brilliant party the whole agricultural interest has assembled. the room is crowded with tenant farmers, the entire hunting field is present. every clergyman in the district is here, together with the gentry, and many visitors for the hunting season. among them, shoulder to shoulder, are numbers of agricultural labourers, their wives, and daughters, dressed in their best for the occasion. after some speeches, a name is called, and an aged labourer steps forward. his grandchildren are behind him; two of his sons, quite elderly themselves, attend him almost to the front, so that he may have to make but a few steps unsupported. the old man is frosted with age, and moves stiffly, like a piece of mechanism rather than a living creature, nor is there any expression--neither smile nor interest--upon his absolutely immobile features. he wears breeches and gaiters, and a blue coat cut in the style of two generations since. there is a small clear space in the midst of the well-dressed throng. there he stands, and for the moment the hum is hushed. for sixty years that old man laboured upon one farm; sixty years of ploughing and sowing, sixty harvests. what excitement, what discoveries and inventions--with what giant strides the world has progressed while he quietly followed the plough! an acknowledgment has been publicly awarded to him for that long and faithful service. he puts forth his arm; his dry, horny fingers are crooked, and he can neither straighten nor bend them. not the least sign appears upon his countenance that he is even conscious of what is passing. there is a quick flash of jewelled rings ungloved to the light, and the reward is placed in that claw-like grasp by the white hand of the marchioness. not all the gallant cavalry of the land fearlessly charging hedge and brook can, however, repel the invasion of a foe mightier than their chief. frost sometimes comes and checks their gaiety. snow falls, and levels every furrow, and then hodge going to his work in the morning can clearly trace the track of one of his most powerful masters, squire reynard, who has been abroad in the night, and, likely enough, throttled the traditional grey goose. the farmer watches for the frozen thatch to drip; the gentleman visiting the stable looks up disconsolately at the icicles dependent from the slated eave with the same hope. the sight of a stray seagull wandering inland is gladly welcomed, as the harbinger of drenching clouds sweeping up on soft south-westerly gales from the nearest coast. the hunt is up once more, and so short are the hours of the day in the dead of the year, that early night often closes round the chase. from out of the gloom and the mist comes the distant note of the horn, with a weird and old-world sound. by-and-by the labourer, trudging homeward, is overtaken by a hunter whose horse's neck droops with weariness. his boots are splashed with mud, his coat torn by the thorns. he is a visitor, vainly trying to find his way home, having come some ten or fifteen miles across country since the morning. the labourer shows the route--the longest way round is the shortest at night--and as they go listens eagerly to the hunter's tale of the run. at the cross roads they part with mutual goodwill towards each other, and a shilling, easily earned, pays that night for the cottager's pipe and glass of ale. chapter ix the fine lady farmer. country girls a pair of well-matched bays in silver-plated harness, and driven by a coachman in livery, turn an easy curve round a corner of the narrow country road, forcing you to step on the sward by the crimson-leaved bramble bushes, and sprinkling the dust over the previously glossy surface of the newly fallen horse chestnuts. two ladies, elegantly dressed, lounge in the carriage with that graceful idleness--that indifferent indolence--only to be acquired in an atmosphere of luxury. before they pass out of sight round another turn of the road it is possible to observe that one at least possesses hair of the fashionable hue, and a complexion delicately brilliant--whether wholly natural or partly aided by art. the other must be pronounced a shade less rich in the colours of youth, but is perhaps even more expensively dressed. an experienced observer would at once put them down as mother and daughter, as, indeed, they are. the polished spokes of the wheels glitter in the sun, the hoofs of the high-stepping pair beat the firm road in regular cadence, and smoothly the carriage rolls on till the brown beech at the corner hides it. but a sense of wealth, of social station, and refinement--strange and in strong contrast to the rustic scene--lingers behind, like a faint odour of perfume. there are the slow teams pulling stolidly at the ploughs--they were stopped, of course, for the carters to stare at the equipage; there are the wheat ricks; yonder a lone farmstead, and black cattle grazing in the pasture. surely the costly bays, whose hoofs may even now be heard, must belong to the lordly owner of these broad acres--this undulating landscape of grass and stubble, which is not beautiful but evidently fertile! a very brief inquiry at the adjacent market town disposes of this natural conclusion. it is the carriage of a tenant farmer--but what a tenant! the shopkeepers here are eloquent, positively gratefully eloquent, in the praise of his wife and daughter. customers!--no such customers had been known in the old borough from time immemorial. the tradesman as he speaks involuntarily pulls out his till, glances in, and shuts it up with a satisfied bang. the old style of farmer, solid and substantial enough, fumbling at the bottom of his canvas bag for silver and gold, was a crusty curmudgeon where silk and satin, kid gloves, and so forth were concerned. his wife had to look sharp after her poultry, geese and turkeys, and such similar perquisites, in order to indulge in any innocent vanity, notwithstanding that the rent was paid and a heavy balance at the bank. then he would have such a length of credit--a year at least--and nowadays a shopkeeper, though sure of his money, cannot wait long for it. but to ask for the account was to give mortal offence. the bill would be paid with the remark, intended to be intensely sarcastic, 'suppose you thought we was a-going to run away--eh?' and the door would never again be darkened by those antique breeches and gaiters. as for the common run of ordinary farmers, their wives bought a good deal, but wanted it cheap and, looking at the low price of corn and the 'paper' there was floating about, it did not do to allow a long bill to be run up. but the grange people--ah! the grange people put some life into the place. 'money! they must have heaps of money' (lowering his voice to a whisper). 'why, mrs. ---- brought him a fortune, sir; why, she's got a larger income than our squire' (as if it were, rank treason to say so). 'mr. ---- has got money too, and bless you, they holds their heads as high as their landlord's, and good reason they should. they spend as much in a week as the squire do in a month, and don't cheapen nothing, and your cheque just whenever you like to ask for it. that's what i calls gentlefolks.' for till and counter gauge long descent, and heraldic quarterings, and ancestral crusaders, far below the chink of ready money, that synonym for all the virtues. the grange people, indeed, are so conspicuous, that there is little secrecy about them or their affairs. the house they reside in--it cannot be called a farmstead--is a large villa-like mansion of recent erection, and fitted with every modern convenience. the real farmstead which it supplanted lies in a hollow at some distance, and is occupied by the head bailiff, for there are several employed. as the architecture of the villa is consonant with modern 'taste,' so too the inferior is furnished in the 'best style,' of course under the supervision of the mistress. mrs. ---- has filled it with rosewood and ormolu, with chairs completely gilt, legs, back, seat, and all, with luxurious ottomans, 'occasional' tables inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, soft carpets, polished brazen grate-fittings, semi-ecclesiastical, semi-mediaeval, and so forth. everywhere the glitter of glass, mirrors over the mantelpieces, mirrors let into panels, glass chiffoniers, and pendent prisms of glass round the ornamental candlesticks. mixed with this some of the latest productions of the new english renaissance--stiff, straight-back, plain oak chairs, such as men in armour may have used--together with japanese screens. in short, just such a medley of artistic styles as may be seen in scores of suburban villas where money is of little account, and even in houses of higher social pretensions. there is the usual illustrated dining-room literature, the usual _bric-à -brac_, the usual cabinet series of poets. there are oil paintings on the walls; there is an immense amount of the most expensive electroplate on the dinner table; the toilet accessories in the guest chambers are 'elegant' and _recherché_. the upholsterer has not been grudged. for mrs. ---- is the daughter of a commercial man, one of the principals of a great firm, and has been accustomed to these things from her youth upwards. she has no sympathies with the past, that even yet is loth to quit its hold of the soil and of those who are bred upon it. the ancient simplicity and plainness of country life are positively repulsive to her; she associates them with poverty. her sympathies are with warm, well-lighted rooms, full of comfort, shadowless because of the glare of much gas. she is not vulgar, just the reverse--she is a thorough lady, but she is not of the country and its traditions. she is the city and the suburb transplanted to the midst of corn, and grass, and cattle. she has her maid, skilled in the toilet, her carriage and pair and pony carriage, grooms, footmen, just exactly as she would have done had she brought her magnificent dowry to a villa at sydenham. in the season, with her daughter, she goes to town, and drives daily in the park, just the same as to-day she has driven through the leaf-strewn country-lane to the market town. they go also to the sea-side, and now and then to the continent. they are, of course, invited to the local balls, and to many of the best houses on more private occasions. the ramifications of finance do not except the proudest descendants of the crusaders, and the 'firm' has its clients even among them. bonnets come down from madame louise, boxes of novels from mudie's; 'le follet' is read in the original, and many a parisian romance as well. visitors are continually coming and going--the carriage is perpetually backwards and forwards to the distant railway station. friends come to the shooting, the hunting, the fishing; there is never any lack of society. the house is full of servants, and need be, to wait upon these people. now, in former days, and not such a great while since, the best of servants came from the country. mistresses sought for them, and mourned when, having imbibed town ways and town independence, they took their departure to 'better' themselves. but that is a thing of the past; it is gone with the disappearance of the old style of country life. servant girls in farmhouses when young used to have a terribly hard life: hard work, hard fare, up early of a morning, stone flags under foot by day, bare boards under foot upstairs, small pay, and hard words too often. but they turned out the best of women, the healthiest and strongest, the most sought after. now they learn a great deal about timbuctoo, and will soon, no doubt, about cyprus; but the 'servant from the country' is no more. nothing less will suit them to begin with than the service of the parish clergyman, then they aspire to the grange, get there, and receive a finishing education, and can never afterwards condescend to go where a footman is not kept. they become, in short, fine ladies, whose fathers are still at the plough--ladies who at home have been glad of bread and bacon, and now cannot possibly survive without hot butcher's meat every day, and game and fish in their seasons. but to return. mrs. ---- and her daughter have also their saddle horses. they do not often hunt, but frequently go to the meet. they have, it is true, an acceptable excuse for preferring riding to walking--the fashion of tying the dress back so tightly makes it extremely difficult for a lady to get over a country stile. the rigours of winter only enable them to appear even yet more charming in furs and sealskin. in all this the grange people have not laid themselves open to any reproach as to the extravagance or pretension of their doings. with them it is genuine, real, unaffected: in brief, they have money, and have a right to what it can purchase. mr. ---- is not a tenant farmer from necessity; personally he is not a farmer at all, and knows no more of shorthorns than the veriest 'city' man. he has a certain taste for country life, and this is his way of enjoying it--and a very acute way, too, when you come to analyse it. the major portion of his capital is, with his wife's, in the 'firm'; it is administered and employed for him by men whose family interests and his are identical, whose knowledge of business is profound, whose own capital is there too. it is a fortunate state of things, not brought about in a day, but the growth of more than one generation. now this man, as has been remarked, has a taste for country life--that is to say, he is an enthusiast over horses--not betting, but horses in their best form. he likes to ride and drive about, to shoot, and fish, and hunt. there is nothing despicable in this, but, after the manner of men, of course he must find an excuse. he found it in the children when they were young--two boys and one girl. it was better for them to have country air, to ride about the country lanes, and over the hills. the atmosphere altogether was more healthy, more manly than in the suburbs of a city. the excuse is a good one. now come the means; two plans are open to him. he can buy an estate, or he can rent a large farm, or rather series of farms. if he purchases a fine estate he must withdraw his capital from business. in the first place, that would be inconvenient to old friends, and even unjust to them; in the second place, it would reduce his income most materially. suppose we say, not for absolute exactness, but for the sake of present contrast, that capital well invested in business brings in ten per cent. the same capital invested in land brings in, say, three per cent. nominally; but is it as much in reality if you deduct those expensive improvements upon which tenants insist nowadays, and the five per cents, and ten per cents, allowed off the rent in bad years? at all events, it is certain that landlords, as a class, are investing more and more every year in business, which looks as if they did not consider land itself sufficiently remunerative. in addition, when you have bought your estate, should you subsequently wish to realise, the difficulties and delays are very trying. you cannot go down to your broker and say, 'sell me a thousand acres this morning.' capital in land is locked up. mr. ----, having been trained in traditions of ready money and easy transfer, does not like this prospect. but as the tenant of a great farm it is quite another matter. the larger part of his capital still remains in the 'firm,' and earns him a handsome income. that which is invested in stock, cattle, horses, implements, &c., is in a sense readily negotiable if ever he should desire to leave. instead of having to pet and pamper discontented tenants, his landlord has to pet and pamper him. he has, in fact, got the upper hand. there are plenty of landlords who would be only too glad to get the rich mr. ---- to manure and deep-plough their lands; but there are comparatively few mr. ----'s whose rent-day payments can be implicitly relied on. mr. ----, in point of fact, gets all the sweets of the country gentleman's life, and leaves the owner all the sour. he has no heir presumptive to check his proceedings; no law of entail to restrain him; no old settlements to bind him hand and foot; none of those hundred and one family interests to consult which accumulate in the course of years around a landed estate, and so seriously curtail the freedom of the man in possession, the head of the family. so far as liberty and financial considerations go, he is much better off than his landlord, who perhaps has a title. though he knows nothing of farming, he has the family instinct of accounts and figures; he audits the balance-sheets and books of his bailiff personally, and is not easily cheated. small peculations of course go on, but nothing serious. the farms pay their way, and contribute a trifle towards the household expenses. for the rest, it is taken out in liberty, out-of-door life, field sports, and unlimited horses. his wife and daughter mix in the best society the county affords, besides their annual visits to town and the sea-side: they probably enjoy thrice the liberty and pleasure they would elsewhere. certainly they are in blooming health. the eldest son is studying for the law, the younger has the commercial instinct more strongly developed, and is already with the 'firm.' both of them get the full benefit of country life whenever they wish; both of them feel that there is plenty of capital behind them, and not the slightest jealousy exists on account of primogeniture. of course they have their troubles--what family has not its troubles?--but on the whole their position is an enviable one. when mrs. ---- and her daughter rustle into their pew at church--placed next in honour to that of the proprietor of the soil--all eyes are turned upon them. the old-fashioned farmer's wife, who until her years pressed heavily upon her made the cheese and butter in her husband's dairy, is not so old but that her eyes can distinguish the colour of a ribbon. she may talk of such things as vanities, and unknown in her day, but for all that a pair of keen eyes criticise skirt, and trimmings, and braidings, and so forth, as displayed up in the grange pew. her daughter, who is quite young--for in her mother's time farming people did not marry till late in life--brings a still keener pair of eyes to bear in the same direction. the bonnets from regent street are things to think over and talk of. the old lady disinters her ancient finery; the girl, by hook or crook, is determined to dress in t